Month: November 2012

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Paradigms Shifting

(This article appeared in the Anderson Valley Advertiser November 2012)

“I believe that there is a subtle magnetism in Nature, which, if we unconsciously yield to it, will direct us aright.” Henry David Thoreau

I am writing the first draft of this essay with pen on paper and using a big hardback copy of Buckminster Fuller’s Tetrascroll as my portable desk. I am sitting on a rug a few feet from our woodstove, the fire therein making our living room the most appealing room in our otherwise chilly house. Should I create an essay I want to keep, I will venture into my chilly office, ignite the electric space heater adjacent to my desk, and type these words into my computer to ready them for sending to Bruce and Mark at the Anderson Valley Advertiser. Marcia is in her office, a world apart just fifteen feet away, and I am thinking about several events and ideas and technological changes that have commandeered my consciousness and are asking me to write about them.

Yes, I believe that ideas and stories from sources outside our individual consciousnesses, perhaps propelled by unseen spirits or equally fantastic invisible forces of Universe, are constantly seeking willing portals (creative beings) for expression in our dimension. I know that sounds like hackneyed spiritual crap to some of you, but it rings true to me.

For the past week, Europe has been gripped by enormous simultaneous protests involving millions and millions of people in several countries, though the American media has barely covered these historic events, and we know why. Our overlords don’t want us getting any ideas about imitating our European brethren who are rising up against their governments to say: We will not allow you to keep punishing us in order to benefit the bankers and swindlers who created this economic mess.

Of course the economic mess is Europe is intrinsically connected to the economic mess in America, and messes made by the bankers and swindlers and governments here and abroad are now so huge that nothing short of near total (or total) collapse and reconstruction using new operating paradigms will improve the situation. And new operating paradigms will not be allowed to take hold until the crooks and swindlers are replaced by highly intelligent people working for the greater good.

Meanwhile, as a kind of case in point, the company that has for too long made Hostess Twinkies is going out of business, which means 20,000 American will lose their meaningless jobs along with their deeply meaningful salaries and retirement benefits, and some other company, very possibly a Chinese company, will become the new manufacturer of those nutritionally worthless and physically harmful gobs of refined white flour and refined sugar and refined chemicals. Hostess went bankrupt shortly after being bought by a group of hedge fund swindlers who ran the company into the ground in no time, crooks who will no doubt profit from their crimes and use a portion of those profits to enter politics or elect other crooks and swindlers. Is this a great economic system, or what?

Meanwhile, through a series of what I consider miracles and what those who don’t believe in miracles might call a series of astonishing coincidences, all of my long out-of-print novels are now available as e-books—kindles, nooks, apples, googles, etc.—and I may be on the verge of benefiting (we hope) from a technology I don’t use and am not attracted to but that will nevertheless bring my stories back to public life after decades of unavailability following their very brief lives in-print.

And at the very moment of the birth of the kindle nook apple versions of Forgotten Impulses, Louie & Women, Night Train, and Ruby & Spear (joining Buddha In A Teacup and Under the Table Books as e-books) not one but three well-meaning people sent me articles detailing the evils of e-books and how these downloadable digital editions not only deprive readers of the sensual delight and healing power of reading and fondling real live books, but e-books (these articles contend) are doing terrible damage to the market for real live books. To which I say: given a choice between people reading my books as e-books or not at all, I’ll go with the e-books and trust that the sensual healing power of my stories will get through to readers regardless of delivery mode.

Meanwhile yet again, there come more dire reports of the ongoing environmental holocaust underway on planet earth that will soon dwarf and exacerbate the current global economic turmoil and make the demise of Twinkies and the coming of e-books seem like nothing of much consequence, though all these things are related and intertwined. How so? Well, I would say that the gestalt of the events and ideas and technological changes engulfing us today suggests we are in the midst of several major turning points adding up to a global turning point that rivals the Industrial Revolution in scope and impact.

As I sit on this rug (made in India) writing longhand on 100% recycled paper (made in Canada) with a pen (made in China) by the light of a lamp (made in Indonesia) and lit by energy made from oil (pumped out of Alaska or Texas or Saudi Arabia) while keeping warm by a woodstove (made in Norway) burning wood (trucked from Boonville to Mendocino), I am keenly aware that the earth cannot sustain for much longer my level of material ease and affluence for billions of people unless everything manufactured henceforth on earth is entirely and efficiently recyclable and produces zero pollution before, during and after manufacture while employing 100% renewable energy sources in the manufacturing and shipping processes. Now there’s a paradigm shift that only a few nations have embraced and are beginning to implement, while the rest of us earthlings continue our suicidal coal burning gas burning nuclear power burning ways.

Add to this mix of ideas and events the amazing (to me) news that Nigeria is one of the largest markets in the world for mobile phones, especially the Blackberry mobile phone. Selling for two hundred dollars in Nigeria, a country where sixty per cent of the population lives in dire poverty, the demand for Blackberry phones even among Nigeria’s poor far outstrips supply and…

I suddenly had a vision of a future world wherein Americans and Europeans and people all over the world have voluntarily given up many of the creature comforts that are, through their manufacture and deployment, the causes of global warming and global pollution, in exchange for being able to have cell phones and computers and a fast and exciting global internet system. In this future world, most people walk and bicycle and take electric shuttle buses and drive groovy ultra-light electric vehicles for local travel rather than driving cars running on gasoline, and capitalism as we know it today is a thing of the past replaced by millions of worker-owned cooperatives and organic farms and splendiferous public transportation systems; and we have this vivacious absolutely free computer interweb global infrastructure. Most people live materially minimalist yet comfortable lives, jet travel is an extreme rarity, international trade happens on slow boats and solar electric gravity powered trains, superb healthcare is absolutely free, and we have a super cool internet and world wide web providing everyone with marvelous cross-cultural connectivity, information, and culture.

At present I don’t own a cell phone or any sort of portable computer pad thingy and I don’t plan to own them, but could it be possible (imaginable?) that billions of people would be willing to dramatically reduce their energy consumption and assume the carbon footprints of the average Nigerian of 2012 in exchange for an ever improving lightning fast, mind-expanding, earth-saving interweb accessible through phones and pads and computers? Might we not harness this powerful desire for wide-reaching interconnectivity as a bridge to the wholly regenerative and undeniably socialist (in the best sense of the word) future?

So there I’ll be sitting on my rug (woven by weavers of the village weaving cooperative) writing longhand by the light of a solar-powered lamp I brought back on my bicycle from the village solar power collective store. The solar electric heater and the fire in the woodstove keep me warm while the six trees I planted for every cord of wood we burn are growing fast in the nearby recovering woods. When I get a draft I like, I will type the words into my computer and send the essay forth to Bruce and Mark at the Anderson Valley Advertiser and to those dozens of folks who enjoy me on the worldwide interweb.

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What’s New?

Hungry For Color note card by Todd Walton

(This article appeared in the Anderson Valley Advertiser November 2012)

“Life is full of obstacle illusions.” Grant Frazier

A recent San Francisco 49ers game ended in a tie with the St. Louis Rams, the first professional football game to end in a tie in four years. I’m still not used to the Rams being the St. Louis Rams because they were the Los Angeles Rams for all of my youth and for decades thereafter, which made them our dread rivals along with the Los Angeles Dodgers and the Los Angeles Lakers and all things Los Angeles. The Lakers, by the way, are called the Lakers because they were originally the Minneapolis Lakers, Minnesota having lakes whereas Los Angeles has viaducts; but the Los Angeles Viaducts would have been a silly name for a basketball team, so…the Dodgers were originally the Brooklyn Dodgers, and the Golden State (Oakland) Warriors were originally the Philadelphia Warriors, and soon the San Francisco 49ers will be playing their games in Santa Clara and…nowadays professional sports franchises move ever more frequently from city-state to city-state at the whim of their billionaire owners.

This year, for instance, the Brooklyn Nets played their first games with that moniker having been moved to Brooklyn from New Jersey by their new multi-billionaire Russian owner who just built a billion-dollar sports complex in Brooklyn to house his new team. The Nets are the first professional sports franchise to call Brooklyn home since the Brooklyn Dodgers fled to Los Angeles in the 1950’s, and now New Jersey is without a professional basketball or football or baseball franchise. Oh well.

Anyway, that 49er’s game ending in a tie took me back to my senior year of high school when I was the goalie of the Woodside High soccer team and we were playing Sequoia High for the league championship. The year was 1967 and a long time before soccer would become the major American institution it is today. There were no such things as soccer moms in those days because there were no soccer leagues for children to be driven to. In fact, very few American high schools in 1967 had soccer teams, soccer being of such little interest to most Americans that we never had more than a handful of spectators at our games, and most of those were girlfriends of the players.

When we played for the league championship against the perennial champion Sequoia, there were perhaps fifty people in the stands, most of them the fathers and mothers and siblings of Sequoia’s many Mexican players, the large Mexican population of Redwood City being the basis for Sequoia’s perennial dominance of a soccer league otherwise composed of white kids, most of whom had played soccer for a few years at most, while the Mexican kids had been kicking balls around since they began to walk.

Miracle of miracles, and largely due to our stifling defensive play, that championship game ended in a 1-1 tie, and in those days penalty kick shootouts were a thing of the future. Ties happened and that’s just the way it was. I do remember that most of my teammates and all the Sequoia players were angry that the coaches wouldn’t let us play on until one team or the other scored a winning goal, but our anger quickly morphed into relief. After all, we probably would have lost had the game continued, and what was wrong with being co-champions? Nothing. Nowadays every sport from the peewee leagues to the pros has elaborate protocols for coming up with a winner in the event of a tie at the end of regulation, and I’ll wager this latest 49ers tie will set off a flurry of demands for rule changes to eradicate tie games in professional football forever.

“It is never too late to be who you might have been.” George Eliot

As I was musing about why tie games have become so unacceptable in America, I happened to catch a few minutes of a radio program featuring the president of the California Teachers’ Association and two other well-informed educators talking about the educational holocaust created by Bush’s No Child Left Behind, a program Obama has continued under the new name Race To The Top. This asinine system has severely damaged an entire generation of students (and teachers) by teaching the kids absolutely nothing while insisting they memorize and regurgitate masses of useless information in order to be tested on how much useless information they can memorize and regurgitate. These millions and millions of brilliant young people were not taught to write well or how to think critically or how to create art or how to invent things or how to solve problems or how to play musical instruments, and most importantly, as far as I’m concerned—and this relates to our new cultural taboo against games ending in ties—students were not taught to work together, to help each other, to cooperate, to share, and to undertake group projects that end in ties with everyone winning.

Race to the top? The top of what? The societal pyramid, right? And doesn’t that imply that if a tiny percentage of the people race to the top of the pyramid (or more likely are born there and jealously guard their lofty domain) that many more people will be on the bottom of the pyramid or near the bottom? Most people? Of course it does. We have the newest fangled gadgets and phones and computers and cars, but we have a fundamental design flaw in the organization of our society, a flaw we teach and preach as the law of the land. Race to the top, sucker, and you’d better get to the top or you will lose, no tie games allowed.

“Our inventions are wont to be pretty toys, which distract our attention from serious things. They are but improved means to an unimproved end.” Henry David Thoreau

One of the things I greatly appreciate about living in Mendocino is that most of the full time residents I’ve gotten to know could care less about racing to the top of any sort of social or economic pyramid or heap, and that’s one of the reasons they’ve chosen to live here. After abiding for eleven years in Berkeley where such racing and clawing and competing is endemic and exhausting, I am greatly relieved to live somewhere where I am liked or disliked for who I am rather than for who I know or where I live or how much money I have or don’t have. That racing clawing competing energy visits Mendocino on weekends and during the summer months when folks from the Bay Area come up to recreate or occupy their second (or third) homes; and whenever I find myself in the line of such unfriendly psychic fire, I escape post haste and thank my lucky stars I don’t live in Berkeley anymore.

“When I see an adult on a bicycle, I do not despair for the future of the human race.” H.G. Wells

Speaking of what’s new, one of the best things to become established in America in my lifetime is the popularity of bicycles and bicycling. When I moved to Sacramento in 1980, my main means of transportation was a bicycle, and so few people rode bicycles in those days that I was soon known in midtown and downtown as “the guy who rides a bike.” Seriously. I’m not kidding. I walked all over town, too, and dozens of times I was greeted by complete strangers with, “Hey, where’s your bike?” or “Hey, it’s the bike guy.”

“You know what I always dreamed of? That with the greenhouse effect, one day Estonia can be what Los Angeles is right now. I always thought when the end of the world comes, I want to be in Estonia. I think then I’d survive.” Carmen Kass

Speaking of bicycles, things, as in the projected changes in the earth’s climate, based on actual measurable data, are not looking good for the survival of humanity beyond another couple of generations unless we dramatically fantastically and heroically shrink our carbon footprints to almost nothing, and soon. “Oh, dear,” we Americans collectively respond to the irrefutable information about what’s happening on earth at this very moment, “but how can we reduce our carbon footprints even a little if the powers that be won’t provide us with groovalicious mass transit and spacious sturdy solar electric cars made from recycled plastic and inexpensive renewable energy and stuff like that? How can we change the way we live if someone else doesn’t provide convenient and excellent alternatives to the way we’re living now?”

The answer is that we, you and I, are extremely intelligent and resourceful people, and there is no doubt whatsoever that we can figure out myriads ways to dramatically fantastically and heroically shrink our individual and collective carbon footprints to a perfectly reasonable level if we set our minds and hearts to the task. Not only that, but we are so resourceful and creative that we can dramatically reduce our carbon footprints and have fun at the same time. To get your imaginative juices flowing in that direction, think about walking, bicycles, insulation, potluck dinners, ride sharing, solar power, wind power, buying local, thermal underwear, driving less, candlelight, darkness, vegetable gardens…

And think about what Thomas Hedges just reported for Truthdig:

Since 2000, Germany has converted 25 percent of its power grid to renewable energy sources such as solar, wind and biomass. The architects of the clean energy movement Energiewende, which translates to “energy transformation,” estimate that from 80 percent to 100 percent of Germany’s electricity will come from renewable sources by 2050.

Germans are baffled that the United States has not taken the same path. Not only is the U.S. the wealthiest nation in the world, but it’s also credited with jump-starting Germany’s green movement 40 years ago.

“This is a very American idea,” Arne Jungjohann, a director at the Heinrich Boll Stiftung Foundation (HBSF), said at a news conference Tuesday morning in Washington, D.C. “We got this from Jimmy Carter.”

Indeed, the only thing stopping Americans from inventing and implementing wonderful new carbon-lite lives is our unwillingness to believe that such changes are truly necessary.

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Nature Bats Last

(This article appeared in the Anderson Valley Advertiser November 2012)

“Deer have been around for five million years and must know what they’re doing.” Elizabeth Marshall Thomas

Our new home turns out to be a deer park, the resident deer so numerous and hungry that only rhododendrons and redwoods and ferns and huckleberries (the bushes not the berries) and a few other large trees can hope to survive the ravenous hordes. A crumbling wooden fence surrounds our property, and here and there remnant strands of barbed wire speak of a time when the previous owners may have experienced a modicum of deer-free living. I am a vegetable and herb gardener and hope to have a large garden growing soon, as well as berries and fruit trees and flowers, with a few raised beds off the deck outside the kitchen, none of which I can have until we transmogrify the deer situation.

To that end we have engaged the services of a deer fence installer, and at the moment he arrived last week to give us a bid, there were not four or five deer, but seventeen of those hungry animals browsing the shrubs and lower branches of trees and vacuuming up the golden leaves fallen from a very tall plum tree and devouring lilies and daisies, and shitting profusely everywhere around our house. And the deer fence guy, scanning the assembly of does and bucks and fast-growing fawns, quipped, “I see the problem.”

We have decided to bequeath the northern half our property to the deer and other wild things while fortifying the smaller southern portion of our humble homestead. The deer fence fellow is booked several weeks in advance and can’t start working on our property until December, so I might not get my garlic in this year, though I may plant a small bed and surround it with land mines or a more humane equivalent.

“There’s no place on Earth that’s changing faster—and no place where that change matters more—than Greenland.” Bill McKibben

Having recently read a number of fascinating and frightening articles about the sudden disappearance of the Greenland ice sheet, I was not surprised to hear that the super storm Sandy caused upwards of eighty billion dollars of damage. Such awesome storms are precisely what numerous new weather models predict will be the direct consequence of the vanishing ice sheets combined with warmer ocean temperatures, rising moisture content in the atmosphere, rising sea levels, and myriad other factors related to global warming. In other words, though Sandy has been called the storm of the century, she may very well be the first of many such super storms to frequently pummel North America in the foreseeable future. Even as I write this, another massive storm is swirling through New York and New Jersey and Pennsylvania, with winter barely begun. Yikes.

Humans cannot construct storm fences around their big cities, though there is serious talk of building a gigantic sea wall around the island of Manhattan in anticipation of rapidly rising sea levels. (You gotta be kidding!) I wonder who will pay for the construction and upkeep of such a gargantuan wall? And how will such a wall keep hurricanes from toppling skyscrapers? Then, too, the eastern seaboard is rife with crappy old nuclear power plants full of plutonium ready to start melting down, several of those junky old plants identical to the crappy ones currently melting down at the Fukushima nuclear facility in Japan and radiating the entire Pacific Ocean. How many super storms will come and go before one or another of those nuclear power plant time bombs goes off? Not to be an alarmist, but we may very well be on the verge of millions of Americans and tens of millions of people in other countries being displaced annually by super storms and super droughts and super famines and super nuclear disasters; and I wonder where all those displaced people will go.

“He knows nothing; and he thinks he knows everything. That points clearly to a political career.” George Bernard Shaw

Election night, as Marcia and I took turns monitoring the voting results on our computers, I suddenly found myself hoping fervently that Obama would win, though I did not vote for him and I think he is a supreme poophead regarding most of the tremendous challenges confronting humanity today. What, I wondered, was behind this sudden hope that Obama and not Romney would be President for the next four years? And as I wondered, my mind filled with visions of being part of a band of ancient hunter-gatherers watching two alpha males fight to the death for control of the band. Both alphas were cunning and violent, but one of them was vastly more intelligent and resourceful than the other and would be much more likely to act to insure the survival of the entire band when we were down to our last few pieces of deer jerky and giant tigers were pawing at the walls of our hut—or so I felt in that moment of their mortal combat.

“America makes prodigious mistakes, America has colossal faults, but one thing cannot be denied: America is always on the move. She may be going to Hell, of course, but at least she isn’t standing still.” e.e. cummings

When my sister Kathy lived in Los Angeles, she rented the ground floor of a two-story house at the end of a little canyon road at the base of a steep hillside composed of wholly unstable soil and stone, a formation geologists call a junk pile. In the winter of 1979 torrential rains caused massive mudslides, one of which obliterated Kathy’s home and smashed her car to smithereens with a boulder the size of an elephant. Having lost most of her possessions to that torrent of mud and rocks, my sister moved out of the hills and settled in the flatlands. And less than half a year later, her former abode had been rebuilt and leased again (with an exorbitant increase in rent) to a couple newly arrived in Los Angeles who had no idea they were pitching their tipi, so to speak, in the line of inevitable disaster.

In that same year, while visiting my sister in the aftermath of the mudslide and her relocation to level ground, I dined with a movie producer whose home was built at the top of another massive junk pile of soil and rock very much like the one that had shed part of its mass and obliterated my sister’s place.

“Amazing view,” I said, gazing out on the smog-cloaked city. “I’ll bet it’s really something on a clear day.”

“Don’t be sarcastic,” said my host, joining me on her deck. “The air is getting better. It really is.”

“Do you ever worry about losing the house to a landslide?” I asked, noticing several ominous cracks in her patio.

“I’ve been told this place has gone down twice in the last twenty years,” she confided with a shrug. “And they are forever shoring up the foundation and sinking piers and doing whatever to keep it from going again.”

“So…”

“So that’s why I’m leasing instead of buying,” she said, nodding confidently, “and why I’ve got the best renters’ insurance money can buy and why I stay in my townhouse in Santa Monica when the rains get crazy.”

“All great change in America begins at the dinner table.” Ronald Reagan

One young left-of-the-mythic-center pundit we listened to in the wake of Obama’s victory over Romney opined that henceforth the only way the Republican Party would ever be anything more than an obstructionist gang of amoral dinosaurs, and a shrinking gang at that, was if they could find a charismatic leader, a latter day Ronald Reagan, to take the helm and mesmerize the masses as old Ronnie did.

Now I was never for a minute mesmerized by Reagan. On the contrary, I found him repulsive and so obviously the puppet of George Herbert Bush and his cronies that I couldn’t for the life of me figure out why anyone found him attractive, let alone likeable and trustworthy. He knew almost nothing about anything, said only what he was told to say, and did such serious damage to our country and the world that we are still suffering from the impact of his policies. And yet he was the most popular President since Franklin Roosevelt. Why? I dunno.

“It’s too bad that stupidity isn’t painful.” Anton LaVey

From all I’ve read about the evolution of humans and human society, it is clear that we would not have survived as a species for long had it not been for our ability and willingness to cooperate with each other for the greater good, the good of the group transcendent of the selfish desires of individuals. And in thinking about the recent election and the San Francisco Giants winning the World Series and how people voted on the various state propositions and our wanting to install a deer fence around part of our property and the dawning of the age of rampant super storms and super calamities, it occurs to me that stupidity should henceforth be defined as the unwillingness to do what is best for the greater good.

After the Giants won the World Series, I read several articles by baseball writers and so-called baseball experts who were all baffled as to how the Giants could have possibly beaten the Reds, the Cards, and ultimately the Tigers, when the Giants, according to these experts, were so clearly the inferior collection of individual players. What a bunch of shortsighted knuckleheads! We, the Giants, were clearly the superior team and that’s why we kept on winning—because a great team is always far more than the sum of its parts and is invariably a highly cooperative community intolerant of selfishness. Or put another way, a great team is a collective dedicated to the success and well being of the entire group, and not just the enrichment of a few jerks who don’t care about anybody else. 

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Holiday Shopping Reminder

Dear Friends,

December approaches! We have much good news to go along with our annual reminder: Don’t Forget UnderTheTableBooks.com when shopping for holiday gifts for friends and loved ones—home to signed copies of Buddha In A Teacup, Under the Table Books, and Open Body: creating your own yoga.

Where to begin? Well…my newest CD of piano and bass duets Mystery Inventions got a bit of airplay around the country and on the syndicated radio show Echoes. And this airplay has inspired DJs to play cuts from our other CDs, too! You can listen to clips from all our recordings on our web site and purchase actual CDs from us or download the albums and individual tunes from CD Baby, Itunes, Amazon, etc.

http://underthetablebooks.com/music/mysteryinventions.php

Meanwhile, my collection of colorful note cards has grown to a robust thirteen, and not one but two people have ordered bunches of them to send as Christmas cards. Who knew? Check them out. Just click on the little pictures to see them large.

http://underthetablebooks.com/drawings/paintings.php

In more good news, the renowned author Sherman Alexie selected my novel Inside Moves to be reissued as a quality paperback by Pharos Editions in June 2013, prefaced by a super-flattering introduction by Monsieur Alexie. (I’ll let you know when that book comes out.) Dark Coast Press, the parent of Pharos Editions, is also right this minute releasing e-book versions of Forgotten Impulses, Louie & Women, Night Train, and Ruby & Spear to join Buddha In A Teacup and Under the Table Books in all the various e-book formats. The e-version of Inside Moves will be released at the same time the paperback comes out.

And most recently, the talented actress Beth Richmond narrated the audio edition of Louie & Women wherein she brings the story to life through her wonderful portrayals of the four leading ladies. Louie & Women will soon (any day now) join Ruby & Spear, Inside Moves, Under the Table Books, and Buddha In A Teacup as an audio book available from the Audio Bookstore, Audible, Amazon, Itunes, etc.

Here is the link to the Site Map of UnderTheTableBooks.com where you can see all the goodies we have for sale on one page—a kind of little store.

http://underthetablebooks.com/sitemap.php

On a more personal note, Marcia and I are renters no more, having just bought a little house walking distance from the village of Mendocino.

Happy Holidays from Todd at Under The Table Books

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Precious Dream

Marcia and Stella at the Mendocino Coast Hospital

(This article appeared in the Anderson Valley Advertiser November 2012)

Last night I had a precious dream,

dreamt I woke into the dawn,

walked out of my little cottage,

found a newspaper on the lawn

When I picked up that morning tribune,

and it opened to the very front page,

the headlines they told me

it was the dawning of a brand new age

Several years ago, I wrote the song Precious Dream, and three years ago when Marcia and I recorded So Not Jazz, our CD of cello/piano/guitar/vocal duets we included the song on the album. A few months after the CD was released, a DJ in Astoria, Oregon used Precious Dream as her theme song for several weeks, and that about sums up the commercial life of the song.

I wrote Precious Dream to elucidate my hopes for the world and human society, and I like to think of the tune as a campaign song in search of a candidate. I have yet to find such a candidate, though the Greens come closest to embodying the gist of my reverie; and since we are about to find out who our next President is and how far to the right of the mythic center our Congress and state houses will be, I thought this would be a good time to share the lyrics with you.

Yeah, the rich folks had all decided

to share their money with the poor

The movie that most influenced my thinking about the human world when I was a little boy was The Adventures of Robin Hood starring Errol Flynn, Olivia de Havilland, and Basil Rathbone. Marcia and I recently watched that old movie again and I loved it as much as I did when I was a child. The most powerful scene in the entire film for me was (and still is) when Robin takes Maid Marion to meet a group of poor people who have been savaged by the amoral rich. Robin is helping these people with money and food he steals from wealthy villains, feeding and sheltering and protecting these innocents who have nowhere else to turn for safety and sustenance. Meeting the victims of the rapacious overlords, Maid Marion has one of those great cinematic aha moments wherein she really gets that her life of privilege and luxury is built entirely on the backs of the poor.

I was an avid archer from age six to twelve, and many of the countless arrows I let fly in those years were loosed while imagining I was Robin Hood stealing from the rich so my band of merry men and I could give to the poor.

 and the leaders had disbanded all the armies,

not another dollar spent on war

Another hugely important movie in my life was King of Hearts, a gorgeous bittersweet movie that came out in 1966 when I was seventeen and the war in Vietnam was escalating. As my age peers and I lived in daily terror of being drafted to fight in that senseless war, along came this sexy, sad, funny movie about a soldier, played with comic innocence by Alan Bates, who ultimately chooses to hide away among the officially insane rather than spend another minute aiding and abetting the senseless slaughter of and by the so-called sane people of the world.

Let us never forget that the lion’s share of the income taxes we pay go to fund the creation and deployment of deadly armies and weaponry, money that might otherwise be used to make the world into a life-affirming utopia.

 and they’d stopped building prisons,

put that money in our schools and neighborhoods

Many comprehensive studies have proven conclusively that the healthier and safer and better-educated people are, the less likely they are to commit crimes. So why do we spend so little on vitalizing our communities and truly educating our children, while spending so many billions building prisons and locking people up for crimes committed out of economic necessity? Our justice and prison systems are nothing less than ongoing crimes against humanity.

and instead of making bombs and guns and things we do not need

we were all of us working for the greater good

Frank Capra was in love with the idea of people working for the greater good, an archaic-sounding concept involving people subsuming their selfish tendencies in order to help others—the greater community—and through helping others finding happiness and meaning. It’s A Wonderful Life, You Can’t Take It With You, and Mr. Smith Goes To Washington tug at our heartstrings, I believe, because they resonate with our inherent nature, which is to share what we have with others.

 Yes, they’d stopped clear-cutting the forests

and killing all the animals,

stopped dumping poison in the ground and the rivers and the sea,

When I was thirteen I went on a high Sierra backpack trip with two good friends and our three fathers to the Cathedral Lakes out of Tuolumne Meadows. On our second night at Upper Cathedral Lake, we shared that holy place with a big troop of Boy Scouts who made their camp on the opposite side of the lake from us. The scouts had a huge bonfire, though wood was scarce, and they even chopped down some small living trees (highly illegal) to fuel their fire. When we woke the next morning, we discovered that the scouts had festooned the trees and bushes and granite all around the lake with toilet paper; and when they hiked away they left garbage everywhere.

We spent that day and the next cleaning up the enormous mess as best we could and wondering what could possibly have inspired those young men to wreak such havoc on that pristine place. Fifty years later, I still sometimes think of that sickening mess as I read of manufacturers dumping poison into rivers to save a few dollars and when I study the latest reports on the ongoing meltdowns at Fukushima nuclear power plant and the resultant poisoning of the Pacific Ocean. What happened to these people to render them so drastically and ruinously disconnected from the very source of our lives? Such behavior is not natural. Someone or something is teaching human beings to poison our own nests.

the cars ran clean, trains ran smooth and fast, the air was clear,

food and shelter, health-care guaranteed

I have friends in Canada and Ireland and England and Denmark and Germany who have been emboldened to start interesting businesses and launch new careers and undertake exciting creative projects largely because they live in countries that provide free and excellent healthcare for their citizens. As long as we don’t have free and excellent healthcare in America, we are not a free people.

and the movies were about fascinating people

with real problems, you know, the real stuff

and our heroes were bright and generous,

pioneers of truth and love

My brother just sent me the last words of advice Kurt Vonnegut wrote for an audience: “And how should we behave during this Apocalypse? We should be unusually kind to one another, certainly. But we should also stop being so serious. Jokes help a lot. And get a dog, if you don’t already have one. I’m out of here.”

 When I woke up, my heart was pounding,

and I prayed my dream had all come true,

but I knew as well as you do

that that’s really up to me and you

Yes, we have it in our power to change the way we live

we have it in our power to take no more than we give

we have it in our power to love instead of hate

we have it in our power to make these changes

before it’s all too late

If you would like to hear Precious Dream in its entirety (absolutely gratis) with Marcia’s gorgeous cello and my guitar and mellifluous tenor, go to UnderTheTableBooks.com and click on Listen. If you enjoy the song, we hope you will share the link with your friends.