Dr. Vandana Shiva is a physicist, ecologist, activist, and author of hundreds of papers and articles and more than 15 books.

“I really hope that living democracy, articulated as the broader democracy of all life, will help us transcend these polarizations and work to protect all species while defending every human right of every excluded community.”

[From the online release of Tipping the Sacred Cow - The Best of LiP: Informed Revolt.] 

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by Stephen Bender and Brian Awehali
(from the online release of Tipping the Sacred Cow-The Best of LiP: Informed Revolt)

Edward L. Bernays birthed the public relations industry in the United States. His clients included General Motors, United Fruit, Thomas Edison, Henry Ford, the U.S. Department of State, Health, and Commerce, Samuel Goldwyn, Eleanor Roosevelt, the American Tobacco Company, and Proctor & Gamble. He directed public relations campaigns for every president from Calvin Coolidge in 1925, to Dwight Eisenhower in the late 1950s. He was, in the estimation of cultural historian Ann Douglas, the man “who orchestrated the commercialization of a culture.”

READ THE FULL ARTICLE (PDF; 6 pages)

Brian Awehali interviews Dr. Bruce Levine

Author and clinical psychologist Bruce E. Levine wants to tell you that many forms of depression, discontent, and a whole raft of diagnosed mental illness are nothing more than natural responses to the oppression of institutional society. In his book, Commonsense Rebellion, Levine contends that the vast majority of mental disorders are, to put it simply, profit-driven fabrications with no established biochemical or genetic causes. This interview with Dr. Levine was conducted several years ago for publication in LiP: Informed Revolt, but the growth of corporate pharmaceutical “solutions” to deviant behaviors has only grown since then. Dr. Levine’s newest book, Get Up, Stand Up: Uniting Populists, Energizing the Defeating, and Battling the Corporate Elite, (Chelsea Green, 2011) is an exploration of the political psychology of demoralization and the strategies and tactics used by oppressed peoples to gain power in the United States.

Awehali: Bruce, you’re a critic of both psychiatry—the medical science of identifying and treating mental illness with drugs—and psychology—the study of human behavior, thought, and development. Are there substantial differences between the two?

Bruce Levine: When I first started out as a psychologist in the late ’70s and early ’80s, it was fairly commonplace to dissent from psychiatry—that’s why people became psychologists. They saw the pseudo-science of not only the treatments but of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM) itself. Unfortunately, over the years, psychology itself has slowly aped psychiatry, and there isn’t that sharp a distinction between the two anymore. The American Psychological Association (APA)—the professional group for psychologists—now fights for prescription rights for psychologists. So I guess any psychologist who maintains a position that depression isn’t primarily an innate biochemical disease, and that the DSM is a nonscientific instrument of diagnosis, is a dissident!

I should say that back in the 1970s and 1980s, before psychiatrists had the backing of the drug companies, they had very little power. In fact, they were falling apart, as evidenced by so many movies that were making fun of them, like One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest—which could never come out today. But back in those days, when [psychiatrists] weren’t in bed with the drug companies and didn’t have much political power, you saw movies like that come out. Now, psychiatrists have the media power; they’re able to describe the playing field of the controversy.

Let me ask you a blunt question, first: Do you think there’s ever any basis for diagnosing someone as mentally ill?

Well, certainly there are things that can happen in your brain to make you feel crazy. If you go on an acid trip and fill your brain with a bunch of foreign chemicals, and you act crazy—there’s something going on there. But when we’re talking about things like, for example, attention deficit disorder [ADD], or depression, most of these behaviors are problematic to society. And they’re too easily being classified in the same category as cancer and diabetes. It becomes a complicated semantic discussion of what an illness is.

Let’s just take one of the more obviously comical diagnoses, something fairly recent, like oppositional defiance disorder [ODD] —that one really makes a whole lot of things really clear.

[Interviewer convulses with knowing laughter.]

I mean, oppositional defiance disorder is a “disease” in the DSM, and it’s not something that’s arcane; it’s something that’s being used frequently. It’s a diagnosis given to kids whose symptoms are often arguing with adults, refusing to comply with adults, and basically being a pain in the ass with adults. And once you declare it a disease, of course, you move into chemical treatments or behavioral manipulations. I think for the majority of folks out there, not just anti-authoritarian types, they have the same reaction you did: You’ve got to be kidding. Don’t [they] realize that kids rebel against authority? So there you have an obvious example.

And then you move over to something like attention deficit hyperactivity disorder [ADHD] or ADD, for which there are no biochemical markers, of any kind. None. If you have any doubts about that, just go to your doctor and say you think your kid has ADD, and ask her about the biochemical markers—she’ll say that there are none. It’s all behavioral symptoms that are used to diagnose it.

In the 1970s and early 1980s, a lot of people were looking for other explanations for why people were having problems, or creating problems for others. And in that era, prior to the drug company takeover, there were a lot more intelligent ideas. ADD/ADHD didn’t exist in the first DSM that came out in 1952, but I’m sure if it had been around, folks like Eric Fromm would have been talking about it as a form of passive rebellion. Oppositional defiance disorder is an obvious active rebellion, but most kids don’t have the courage, or they’re in situations where for them to actively rebel means they’ll get crushed—so they rebel passively. They go to a classroom and they stop paying attention; they just blow things off. Is it because they have no capacity to pay attention? No. And the research even shows that when you put these same kids in a situation where they’re either interested in the material or they’ve chosen the material, or it’s novel to them, all of a sudden these so-called ADHD kids can pay attentionn!

And that’s what I try to explain to folks: If you have diabetes or cancer, and all of a sudden you’re having a good time, the disease doesn’t go away. How can something be a disease when you put somebody in a different situation, and the “disease” goes away? That should tell you something.

But it’s in the interest, obviously, of drug companies—and psychiatry, because all they do is prescribe drugs pretty much nowadays—to view everything as a disease that needs drugs. It’s also in the interest of a society that doesn’t want to spend much money or resources on populations that aren’t fitting into the standardized order of things. One interesting aspect of this is that, more and more, it’s not just kids of color, but even suburban white Anglo-Saxon Protestant kids who can’t fit into the standardized order.

I was going to ask you if you think the net for mental illness has gotten wider.

Absolutely. There’s a certain karma in this for the dominant culture. For years they’ve tried to make all kinds of people in non-dominant cultures fit into a rigged, standardized system, and all kinds of rebellion went on. Rebellion through truancy, or substance abuse—and they pathologized this, criminalized that. But once that net was cast, it eventually starting catching lots of their kids. They narrowed and narrowed the standards, and made it more and more impossible for certain kinds of kids to fit into society.

It’s interesting. It’s like, you built the machine, and then the machine has to feed itself. It seems like it’s sort of a runaway institutional process—

Yeah, that’s a good metaphor. A lot of folks like Lewis Mumford and Kirkpatrick Sale have talked a lot about our machine-worshipping culture, and once you understand that our society does worship the machine and technology more than it does life and diversity, then you understand that the goal of that society is to become more machine-like, more standardized. Which means you’re trying to create a society in which everyone fits into the same box. And once you do that, you’re going to find more people not fitting in, and then you have—and this is a real problem of psychiatry, as far as I’m concerned—then you have these psychiatrists who come along and, instead of saying there’s a problem with this kind of machine-worshipping society, they say that there’s a problem with all these people not fitting in. They’ve got this disease, or this disorder.

In your book, Commonsense Rebellion, you have a whole chapter devoted to mass society and mass living. I wonder if you could talk a little about that.

Well, it’s important for folks to have a historical perspective on the way human beings have lived for the vast majority of our history, and to think of how differently we’ve been living since the Industrial Revolution. For 99% of human history, people were living in non-mass societies—we were living in small groups. We were living in situations where, for the most part, we knew everybody around us. We had bands within tribes, less than 500 or 1,000 folks, and people had a greater sense of autonomy, because what they said and what they cared about actually had some political impact.

Whereas, today—here in the US, for example—what the hell does your average person do? Every four years they get to vote between two people they have no respect for? At some level, you may want to wave the flag and convince yourself you’re living in a democracy because you get to vote, but on a more core psychological level, you’re one of 300 million who are voting for [one of] two people who are decided for you by corporate society! So on some level, you know you have no impact; you know you have no power. It’s just common sense that in a more humanly scaled society [Kirkpatrick Sale’s term, from his book On a Human Scale] you‘re going to have a sense of greater potency, of greater power. And a sense of empowerment is a huge antidote to almost any emotional problem. That’s common sense!

Another huge antidote to emotional difficulty is community. People who have a genuine community have fewer emotional difficulties. And “genuine community” is an important term. Oakland, for example, is not a community—it’s a location. Real community means face-to-face emotional and economic interdependence. In a real community, people decide for themselves what their problems are, and they themselves implement solutions, as opposed to handing them over to distant authorities.

A mass society like ours is good for producing more material goods. A standardized, commercialized, industrialized society certainly has more teevees, more washing machines—and this is very attractive to a lot of people. And there are certain advantages to standardized society in terms of, you know, physical health. But mass society destroys things like autonomy and community.

In realistic terms, what do you think people might do to try and build real community?

Well, a lot of people are isolated, and they have all kinds of emotional difficulties, whether it’s depression or substance abuse. They obsess on their disconnectedness, or they don’t even get that far, they’re just getting drunk all the time. In the face of this mass society, people feel powerless. What’s the point of trying to get this guy you think is innocent out of jail; what’s the point of doing anything? You’re dealing with such a power that it feels impossible to accomplish anything. And under that rationale, [people] just say, the heck with it—I’m just going to get drunk and have a good time. One of the things I try to tell folks is that even if you don’t succeed, when you have a cause you believe in, and you act on it, and you try to connect with other folks, at least that cause itself becomes a fuel for people to meet one another and have friendships. That happened in the 1960s and 70s to some extent, and it certainly happened in the 1880s and 1890s when you saw these idealistic people who maybe didn’t ultimately accomplish a lot, but at least they kept themselves out of having emotional difficulties by acting on their cause and meeting some people.

When you have a cause, you get obsessed with what you’re trying to accomplish—and even if you don’t succeed, you’re mutually supporting each other emotionally, possibly even economically. And you keep yourself sane.

Earlier you mentioned psychiatry’s merger with Big Pharma. Can you say more about that?

The merger continues between psychiatry and big pharmaceutical: Big Pharma contributes money to their journals; they contribute money to the continuing education of psychiatrists.

There was a story recently in the Boston Globe about how Big Pharma—not just psychiatric drug companies, but all pharmaceutical companies—was contributing a significant amount of money to Harvard Medical School. If you go around medical schools, these drug rep people are hovering around mailboxes there. Now, if you were in marketing and sales, you would ask: Who do we want to feel great about us and our product? You want the general public, but you definitely want all these doctors to feel really great about you. You’re going to do everything you can possibly get away with legally—and sometimes they do things that are actually illegal.

They’re very aggressive. Every once in a while they go over the top, like Prozac maker Eli Lilly did in Florida, where they actually mailed out free samples of their products, including to one 16-year-old boy who had never been on any kind of a drug or antidepressant.

All of that said, I think it would be a mistake for folks to view pharmaceutical companies as being any different from any other companies. They’re all boringly the same: Their goal is to do whatever they can to increase market share, and make money. Right now, Big Pharma is contributing about 80% to Republicans and about 20% to Democrats—they’re just sort of covering their bets. They’re basically seeking control over government agencies that are critical of their goals, like the FDA or the National Institute of Mental Health.

For example, the Bush family has a long connection to one drug company in particular, Eli Lilly, but they’re actually connected to a lot of drug companies. Down there in Texas, they started this program for mental health screening, and you’re going to hear more and more about that as a national issue.

It’s schools screening for mental illness the same way they do for vision or hearing, right?

Yeah. Once you buy the idea that mental illness is an illness like any other, then it makes a certain sense—it’s just like a kid with bad eyesight who can’t see the blackboard, or a kid with bad hearing. The next step is, why don’t we have this in all the schools? At a very early age, we could get that ADD or ODD or depressive kid, before it gets out of hand. For a lot of the general public, that sounds reasonable, because they don’t know that unlike problems with vision or hearing, which are very reliably scientifically diagnosed, these things are very subjective—and they lead to treatments that are ineffective and dangerous.

Of course, the pharmaceutical companies are throwing money at mental health screening. This would be a dream come true for them, if everybody was being screened for it, because the more you’re getting screened for it, the more folks are getting diagnosed with diseases, and they’re going to be put on drugs. So it’s more money for Big Pharma. They want the whole world to get screened. And if the world gets crazier, there are going to be more and more people with problematic behaviors. There will be more and more depressed kids, kids who aren’t paying attention, et cetera, and that’s a larger and larger consumer base for Big Pharma.

You’ve written about some World Health Organization findings comparing the treatment and prognoses for recovery in so-called underdeveloped nations to those in the US and other “first world” countries.

Yes, this is a hugely important story. In two different studies, the WHO decided to take a look at psychoses and recovery rates in “underdeveloped” societies—India, Colombia, and Nigeria were three of the countries classified as underdeveloped—and compared them to “developed” societies. What they discovered was that the recovery rates in “underdeveloped” countries were twice as high as in the US.

The obvious areas of speculation for me are in the two big differences between the countries studied. One: They’re not drugging everybody there on a long-term basis. In the US, when somebody is classified with a psychosis like schizophrenia, for example, that’s considered an incurable disease. You have to be on medication for life. At least, that’s more or less the party line of the American Psychiatric Association. And that’s not true in the other countries the WHO studied.

But the other huge factor that seems obvious to me is that in those other societies, there’s much more direct community support, and there’s more family involvement. One person from Colombia was telling me this story about a relative who “flipped out.” When this relative came out of the hospital, instead of going back to their family, with whom they had flipped out, they went to another relative’s home.

For organizations like the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill, that solution would be heresy, because a lot of what they’re all about is: It’s not the family’s or parents’ fault. And that helps them team with the drug companies. They’d have you believe it’s all a biochemical imbalance.

You’ve also written about “psychiatric survivors.” What does that term mean?

“Psychiatric survivors” is a term used by a lot of people who have received psychiatric treatment—especially drug and electroshock treatment, [that was] often forced upon them—who are angry about it, and who want to inform the public about the dangers of such treatment. One of their major organizations is called Support Coalition International, which is an umbrella group of perhaps 100 smaller organizations. They have their own journal called MindFreedom.

So is the logical endpoint of your positions that society is bad for people’s mental health?

Our current atomized society is definitely bad for quite a lot of people. There are many pro-depression, and pro-psychosis aspects of our culture, but the breakdown of extended families and the relative lack of community are probably the two greatest factors.

What are you working on now?

With a lot of talks I gave about Commonsense Rebellion, I felt myself needing to cheerlead more than to inform. So over the last year or two I’ve been working on a book about depression. And the specific components of how you can get your act together: generally, issues of how you build up morale and heal your wounds so you don’t engage in compulsive behaviors. That’s what I’ve been doing: trying to give an alternative to depressed and anti-authoritarian people who don’t believe in the mumbo-jumbo of psychiatry, but who also realize that [psychology’s] cognitive-behavior therapy is a generally weak alternative.

What are the solutions? You’ve talked about people increasing their participation in “real” community, but what does that look like?

Part of what you’re trying to do, on as many levels as possible, is reconnect yourself to yourself and to life around you. That’s what mass industrial society has disintegrated. It’s hugely important for folks to recognize that there’s some degree of autonomy that they need to have in their lives, some kind of control.

I think a lot of what gets people really down are economics. The jobs that they work. The struggle to make money in this culture—let’s face it, most of American society is working meaningless, crap jobs. I think part of what people have to do is forgive themselves for being in jobs that are meaningless, and not making much money, and think slowly about how they can move towards finding some meaning, finding some community, and doing something they really care about. As they move into that process, they might be surprised that, along with some other folks, they might be able to make enough money to survive. Then you’ve really beaten the system. Not many pull it off, but it’s something to aspire to.

º º º º º

With one book written on cadavers (Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers) and another on ghosts (Spook: Science Tackles the Afterlife), you might expect Mary Roach to be a pretty disturbed individual. She’s not. While her subject matter tends towards the macabre, Roach is simply one of those writers who’s fascinated by the unusual, the unlikely, and the more-than-a-little-disturbing.

Whether she’s writing about post-death opportunities for employment or the origins of ectoplasm, she has the uncanny ability to satisfy the morbid curiosity you never knew you had…

Q: In Stiff, you talk about cadavers being used for the benefit of humankind, whether as test subjects for seat belts or body armor, or in medical schools. Did you come across any practices that seemed a little dubious?

Surprisingly few. Historically, there were a lot more of them, because there really wasn’t any regulation, or anyone watching out for the dead—and the dead don’t make very effective lobbying groups. They don’t stand up for themselves very well. I feel that something like cosmetic surgery practice is a gray area—it’s important for surgeons to be able to practice and get things right, but certainly I think that when people donate themselves to science and the betterment of [humanity], that’s not what they had in mind.

A lot of it is really misunderstood, though. There’s a lot of media coverage of something like this study of footwear for teams that clear land mines overseas, and they use cadavers [in their testing]. What that translated to, in the media, was, “Cadavers Used in Land Mine Test!” Which is ridiculous—nobody is blowing up cadavers to make a more lethal land mine, but that’s how it came across. Initially it sounds not justifiable because, well, just build a stronger boot, right? Why do you need to blow up a leg? In fact, what happens with land mines is that the footwear actually becomes like shrapnel, and sometimes a stiffer boot causes more damage—you’re launching pieces of the boot deeper into the foot and the leg, and then you get infections, and the leg ends up being amputated above the knee instead of below. So the more you understand about what they’re doing and why they’re doing it, the more justifiable it becomes. I found that usually, the things that initially struck me as a little iffy were, in fact, fairly worthwhile.

(This interview first appeared in LiP: Informed Revolt and was also included in the magazine’s anthology, Tipping the Sacred Cow, available for free online as of May 2011.)

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Photo (c) 2011 by Howard French

In the imagination of many who look primarily to their nightly news, daily papers, or any other corporate US media to inform them, Africa is a disease-ridden hell cursed by a seemingly endless succession of murderous despots. The first two things likely to spring to many Westerner’s minds when they think about the continent, based largely on media coverage, are “aid” and “AIDS.” By contrast, an increasing tide of Chinese immigrants and businesspeople to Africa think: “opportunity.”

Journalist Howard French was recently interviewed on Radio Open Source, and his insights into differences between Western and Chinese attitudes and approaches toward Africa are fascinating and enlightening. Below is some of the introductory text for the interview from Radio Open Source, with a link to the full interview below:

Fifty years almost to the day after the catastrophic assassination of Patrice Lumumba in the Congo — a Cold War murder by Belgium with help from “our” CIA — the journalist Howard French is sketching an alternative path ahead for African development today. China is the big investor in 21st Century Africa. China sees Africa as yet another “natural-resource play” but also as a partner in growth — not a basket-case but a billion customers who’ll be two billion by mid-century. With the West and Japan deep in a post-industrial funk, China is keeping its focus on manufacturing, exports and markets, “and we’ll have them largely to ourselves,” China calculates, “because the West doesn’t make the stuff middle-class Africans are buying — cars and houses and shopping malls and airports and all the things associated with a rise to affluence. Those are the things that China makes.”

For the New York Times Howard French covered Africa and then China, where he learned Mandarin. He returns to Africa now on a book project, observing and overhearing Chinese migrants to places like Ethiopia, Mozambique, South Africa, Namibia and Liberia.

HF: I was struck every time I got on a plane: the Westerners tend to be rich American tourists on their way to seeing lions and giraffes; or aid workers and NGO people — coming with a mission to minister to Africans about capacity-building or democracy and what my father used to do: public health. I say none of this with scorn, but the Chinese have a very different mission. The Chinese that I saw on the planes — and by the way, ten years ago I saw no Chinese; now they’re maybe a fifth of all the passengers — are all, almost to a person, business people. They’ve pulled up their stakes wherever they lived — in Szechuan province or Hunan province — and they have come to make it in Africa. And they’re not leaving until they do. Whatever it takes for them to make a breakthrough in farming or in small industry, they’re going to work 20 hours a day till they make it. They see Africa as a place of extraordinary growth opportunity, a place to make a fortune, to throw down some roots. These are not people who’re there for a couple of years. They’re thinking about building new lives for themselves in Africa. So you have this totally different perspective between the Westerners and the newcomers. One sees Africa as a patient essentially, to be lectured to, to be ministered to, to be cared for. The other sees Africa and Africans as a place of doing business and as partners. There’s no looking down one’s nose or pretending to superiority. It’s all how I can make something work here.

CL: I just wonder: among those development geniuses who argue about Trade vs. Aid as America’s next gift to Africa, in the face of all the Chinese activity buying forests, or building railroads, or planning the sale of billions of cellphones, what is the West’s better bet? Do we have one, or are we still asleep?

HF: I think we’re still asleep.

Listen to the full interview here.

Mongolia today is the least densely populated country in the world (Antarctica doesn’t count; it’s “just” a continent). It is home to a staggering array of largely untouched natural splendors, as well as some of the last traditional nomadic peoples and wild horses on earth. It’s also home to the largest mining boom in history, and despite projections that the boom is expected to triple or quadruple the size of Mongolia’s economy in the next five years, times are tough for most Mongolians, and the relationship between the country’s great natural resources and the wealth of its people is still to be determined. What’s clear is that the actual land and 3 million people of Mongolia will never be the same.

READ ON >>

On Thanksgiving Day all over America, families sit down to dinner at the same moment—halftime.

—Unknown

Every year, as Thanksgiving approaches, I am filled with profound ambivalence. Even as a child, the standard Thanksgiving story always seemed too simple, too wholesome, and too peaceful to be true or truly American. Finally, past the faux-historicism of school textbook-styled Pilgrims and Indians, I was able to delve into the actual construction of the story of Thanksgiving. And, in this way, I learned just how fabricated and utterly bizarre this American “holiday” really is.

In 1621, at Plymouth Plantation on Massachusetts Bay, 50 Pilgrim settlers joined with at least 90 Native guests in a three-day feast which is now traditionally cited as the “First Thanksgiving.” In reality, this seasonal, quasi-secular New England harvest celebration was not repeated in Plymouth and was in fact forgotten until a reference to it was discovered almost 200 years later, in a contemporary book known as Mourt’s Relation. Contrary to the widely accepted, idyllic account of two cultures sitting down to share a meal in harmony, most 17th-century colonial images relating to Native Americans depict violent confrontation. It was only around 1900, when the western Indian wars had largely subsided due to a shortage of Indians left to kill—and when it was safe for Euroamericans to supplant fear with nostalgia—that the romantic Thanksgiving narrative most Americans today are familiar with took hold.

Thanksgiving Day provides an ideal opportunity to consider the formation of national identity and the concept of a civil religion. It’s also a living metaphor of the prevailing American model for immigrant assimilation and the ways in which history can be reinterpreted, and indeed wholly reinvented, to serve competing ethnic, patriotic, religious, and commercial ends.

A Host of Victory Thanksgivings

An overview of historical documents reveals the many uses to which various thanksgivings have been put. The Continental Congress declared the first national day of thanksgiving on November 1, 1777, to celebrate an American victory over British general John Burgoyne:

Forasmuch as it is the indispensable Duty of all Men to adore the superintending providence of Almighty God; to acknowledge with Gratitude their Obligation to him for benefits received, and to implore such further Blessings as they stand in Need of: And it having pleased him in his abundant Mercy, not only to continue to us the innumerable Bounties of his common providence; but also to smile upon us in the Prosecution of a just and necessary War, for the Defence and Establishment of our inalienable Rights and Liberties… It is therefore recommended to the legislative or executive Powers of these UNITED STATES, to set apart THURSDAY, the eighteenth Day of December next, for the Solemn Thanksgiving and Praise: That at one Time and with one voice, the good People may express themselves to the Service of their Divine Benefactor.

Did such a weighty declaration to the Divine Benefactor cement the basic contours of the holiday? Hardly. Then as now, political struggles (electoral and military) were often interpreted as theaters for the enactment of divine will, and so victories great and small led to a rush of thanksgiving declarations. The Confederate Congress proclaimed separate thanksgiving observations in July 1861 and again in September 1862, after the First and Second Battles of Bull Run. And it wasn’t just the South. President Lincoln similarly set aside days of thanksgiving in April 1862 and August 1863 to commemorate the important Union victories at Shiloh and Gettysburg. These ad hoc decrees fell in some cases on Sundays (a common day for religious observance) and in other cases on Thursdays. Lincoln declared yet another Thanksgiving Day in 1863, for the last Thursday in November—and it has been celebrated annually in late November ever since. In his proclamation he drew attention to affairs both national and international:

In the midst of a civil war of unequaled magnitude and severity, which has sometimes seemed to foreign states to invite and to provoke their aggression, peace has been preserved with all nations, order has been maintained, the laws have been respected and obeyed, and harmony has prevailed everywhere, except in the theater of military conflict, while that theater has been greatly contracted by the advancing armies and navies of the Union.

It was not until 1931, when President Herbert Hoover made his proclamation, that any of the presidential declarations of thanksgiving mentioned the Plymouth Pilgrims and the 1621 harvest festival as a precursor to the modern holiday. By this time, yet another willfully amnesiac reinvention of Thanksgiving was under way.

Industrialization, Commercialization, Assimilation

The general anxieties of the 1920s and 1930s provide telling insights into the creation of Thanksgiving Day as it is generally practiced and taught in the present-day United States. Elizabeth Pleck, writing in the Journal of Social History, asks why it’s historically important that “domestic occasions” like Thanksgiving be old-fashioned:

Thanksgiving eased the social dislocations of the industrial and commercial revolutions… The growth of commerce, industry, and urban life created a radical break between past and present, a gap that could be bridged by threshold reunions at the family manse. Nostalgia at Thanksgiving was a yearning for a simpler, more virtuous, more public-spirited and wholesome past, located in the countryside, not the city. In gaining wealth, the family and nation, it was believed, had lost its sense of spiritual mission. Perhaps celebrating one special day might help restore the religious morality of an earlier generation.

In the aftermath of World War I, at a time when many Americans were concerned both with preserving and promoting (in Pleck’s words) a “close-knit, religiously inspired [Protestant] community,” and, not coincidentally, with the “Americanization” of Northern and Eastern European immigrants, Thanksgiving Day provided a compelling occasion for emphasizing civil religion—the quasi-religious belief in national institutions, purposes, and destiny. Furthermore, the model of the Pilgrim as the archetypal “good” immigrant, peacefully coexisting in prosperity with other ethnic communities, proved all but irresistible. The ideal of the “melting pot” in the United States—often less about relishing a diverse mix of ethnic elements than about reducing ethnic culture to an assimilated national identity—also exerted a powerful influence.

By the time of Hoover’s 1931 proclamation, the codification of Thanksgiving as the fundamental American holiday was essentially complete. Which is not to say that Americans were done tinkering. One noteworthy and almost quintessentially American reformulation was ushered in by the Macy’s Thanksgiving Parade. This commercial pageant began in 1924 as the Macy’s Christmas Parade because, as Elizabeth Pleck observes, “the department store wanted to stage a parade as a prelude to the Christmas shopping season.” Pleck also notes that even in the 1920s, the parade did not exist in the shadow of the family feast or the church service, but in very real competition with another Thanksgiving tradition: the afternoon football game. Football was clearly the more significant of the two forms of out-of-home entertainment, as changes in the timing of Macy’s parade in the 1920s indicate. Initially, Macy’s parade offended patriotic groups, who decried a spectacle on “a national and essentially religious holiday.” Macy’s hired a public relations man, who decided the critics could be placated if the parade in the morning was postponed until at least after church services had ended. The parade, pushed to the afternoon, began at the same time as the kickoff for most football games. Customers and football fans complained. By the late 1920s, Macy’s had returned to an early morning parade, presumably so as not to compete with afternoon football games. The parade featured different groups of immigrants demonstrating their American cultural fluency with floats that echoed and reinforced the core Thanksgiving origin myth. At about the same time, schoolchildren were being exposed to similar ideas about celebration, national history, customs, and cultural symbols, all of which came together to form the narrative that persists more or less intact to this day.

Lies, Half-Truths, and What a Nation Will Tell Itself

Perhaps, given the patent falsehood of the Story of Thanksgiving, one of the better questions to ask as the holiday approaches is what, in fact, it really stands for. My family on my mother’s side is Cherokee, and I have never felt much like celebrating an event that essentially commemorates one of several stages in the genocide of Native Americans by European settlers, a process which continues to this day. Native Americans rank dead last in every significant socioeconomic category in America (despite what some people think, based on the garish pox of Indian casinos), and the life expectancy of Native Americans is about 25 years less than it is for Euroamericans.

There were times, to be sure, when I appreciated sitting with my family and devouring an embarrassment of culinary riches. But those I hold separate from the holiday itself. For me, this now agreed upon Thanksgiving symbolizes first and foremost the alarmingly subjective nature of history, which is almost always written by the winners. It symbolizes the triumph of football over religion, and of American commercialism over virtually everything standing in its wasteful path. And perhaps most importantly, it symbolizes the lies and half-truths on which a profoundly diverse country must depend in order to prop up the specious concept of a broadly shared civil religion or national identity.

Thanksgiving, then, symbolizes that there is still great work to be done before a nation that readily prides itself in its goodness, honesty, and wholesome relationship with Divine Grace will actually resemble the stories it tells itself.

“I love the trite mythos of the outlaw,” wrote Tom Robbins, in his comic novel, Still Life with Woodpecker. “I love the self-conscious romanticism of the outlaw. I love the black wardrobe of the outlaw…The outlaw boat sails against the flow, and I love it. Outlaws toilet where badgers toilet, and I love it. All outlaws are photogenic, and I love that…There are outlaw maps that lead to outlaw treasures, and I love those maps especially. Unwilling to wait for mankind to improve, the outlaw lives as if that day were here, and I love that most of all.“

Great outlaws should be better known! Consider these three: Elmyr de Hory, Alves Reis, and Scott Scurlock. It should be noted that all three are dead, and that two of them died in poverty. Two also committed suicide, though one, an art forger, is rumored to have faked his death in order to escape actual death. Peaceful old age is a jewel rarely found cleaving to the heels of outlaws and, as with many famous painters, outlaws usually die penniless after a series of unfortunate events.

Elmyr de Hory, by far the greatest art forger the world has ever seen, successfully painted and sold as originals his counterfeit renditions of paintings by Picasso, Renoir, Monet, Toulouse-Lautrec, Matisse and Modigliani, among many others. Born to a rich Hungarian family in 1906, Elmyr went to art school in Budapest before moving to Paris, where he seems to have squandered some of his artistic acclaim and momentum for amusement and sexual experimentation.

This is one key aspect of the great outlaw: a certain shiftlessness, not exactly idleness or laziness, but awaiting the right stimulation or opportunity. It also helps a great outlaw’s stature to spend some time in a prison of particularly “nightmarish” reputation, as Elmyr did after being arrested for ties to his lover, a British journalist and alleged spy. The prison was Transylvanian and, of course, nothing but bats, castles, foreboding mountains, creepy royalty, bloodsucking, and other gothic nightmares come from there.

Elmyr survived his imprisonment in part by painting portraits of some guards and thereby currying favor. Yet soon after his release, de Hory was re-imprisoned in a German concentration camp, where he was badly beaten and had one of his legs broken. Elmyr claims to have escaped from the camp infirmary on a still-broken leg, though he is also a well-established fabulist, as was his official biographer, Clifford Irving (famous for his fake autobiography of Howard Hughes).

After escaping, he eventually returned to Paris and set about creating a new life. He most likely couldn’t have known that he was about to earn a reputation as one of the most talented criminals in history.

In 1974, Orson Welles released “F for Fake,” his final major film, which cast de Hory in the main role, playing himself. The film goes into detail about much of de Hory’s life, while also unspooling a fascinating prismatic essay on authenticity, identity and the basis of value for art.

And, thanks to this glorious age of free internet video, you can check out Welles’ sometimes hard-to-find gem right here.

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I’d originally planned for this post to include excursions into the lives of de Hory, Reis and Scurlock, but realize now that blog posts are made for more brevity. One’s enough for today.

Why?

Mostly because the EPA performs a cost-benefit analysis when evaluating and creating policy and regulation. To do this, they have to agree on the value of a human life and weigh that value against the cost of regulation. The less a life is worth, the less statistical need exists for regulation.

This and other Bush administration EPA calculations have rubbed some people the wrong way before. Like in 2002, when the EPA decided the value of people over 70 was worth 38% less than those under 70.

The application of seemingly logical economic principles can often make patently absurd or offensive ideas seem, well, logical. Take, for example, an infamous (and shockingly guileless) memo from former chief economist for the World Bank (and current economic adviser to President Obama), Lawrence Summers, in which he says:

“I think the economic logic behind dumping a load of toxic waste in the lowest wage country is impeccable and we should face up to that”

(It’s an aside to the topic of the value of life, but in 2005, Summers went on to display more of his mastery of impeccable logic when, as President of Harvard University, speaking at a conference on Diversifying The Science and Engineering Workforce, he suggested that “men’s higher variance in relevant innate abilities” might be a partial explanation for why there were more men than women in high-end science and engineering fields. Outrage ensued, and Summers was forced to step down as President.)

Ill-conceived, false, and harmful suppositions riddle the history of economic theory. Go back to Friedrich August von Hayek, an Austrian-British economist and major influence on free market ideology in the 20th century who was formative for John Maynard Keynes, Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan, and most of the modern neoconservative movement.

Hayek developed a philosophical defense of free market capitalism based purely on individual expressions of self-interest, and with no mechanism or place for altruism or collective problem solving. Hayek’s theories have been used for many things, including the framing of government and “public interest” programs as merely the selfish machinations of governing bureaucrats. Thatcher’s “public choice theory” in England, and later Reagan’s economic policies in the U.S. both relied heavily on Hayek’s rationale.

Nobel Prize-winning economist Amartya Sen explains the pathology of Hayek’s ideas in the form of the following scenario:

“Can you direct me to the railway station?” asks the stranger.

“Certainly,” says the local, pointing in the opposite direction, towards the post office, “and would you post this letter for me on your way?”

“Certainly,” says the stranger, resolving to open it to see if it contains anything worth stealing.

Everyone acting selfishly in order to establish a harmonious social equilibrium. That’s the kernel of Hayek’s thinking. Once considered ludicrous and imbalanced, it won influence in the climate of the Cold War era, alongside other paranoid formulations of human nature and strategems for manipulating it.

Game Theory, developed by clinically certified paranoid schizophrenic mathematician John Nash, is most easily exemplified by a logic problem called The Prisoner’s Dilemma. The game basically demonstrates that selfishness and betrayal, rather than cooperation, are always winning strategies for self-advancement.

Nash won a Nobel Prize for his development of Game Theory and the benefits of a perfectly selfish social equilibrium. Problematically, the theory did not work when tested on real people. In one superb example of this, when the RAND Corporation (a think tank, where much of this was developed) ran several game theory scenarios with the company’s own secretaries, the secretary’s tendency to cooperate with each other, rather than acting selfishly, made results wildly unpredictable and destroyed Nash’s theoretical “equilibrium.”

Of course, you can trace wrongheaded economic logic all the way back to the world’s first actual economist, Thomas Malthus.

Iain Boal, an author and social critic, describes Malthusian logic thusly:

“It’s to subscribe to the view that the fundamental problems humanity faces have their roots in the scarcity of the resources that sustain life, because the world is finite and we are exhausting those resources…Notice how this mirrors the basic assumption of modern economics – choice under scarcity. In his notorious essay “On the Principle of Population,” published in 1798, Malthus asserted that population growth, especially of poor bastards, would inevitably outrun food supply, unless the propertyless were restrained from breeding. He advocated that poor people be crowded together in unhealthy housing, as a way of checking the growth of population. Remember, this is the world’s very first economist we’re talking about here…”

In the linked interview above (on Counterpunch, but originally published in LiP magazine), Boal explains that the scarcities asserted as natural law by Malthus (and many environmentalists today) are, in fact, artificial scarcities created by capitalism. The logic introduced by Malthus formed the basis for a move from a world of common land to an absolutization of private property during the expansion of the British Empire in the 1800s. [That's a lot in one sentence; don't take my word for it, tho': read the link above.]

Malthus’s essay was a direct counter-revolutionary response to an essay by William Godwin entitled “An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice.” The essay was an early anarchist critique of the state and an exploration of viable alternatives to competitive, coercive state power. Malthus, who would eventually become the world’s first paid economist, had apparently once been part of the same radical circles as Godwin. However, Malthus the “disillusioned disciple,” predicted impending doom because of a geometrically rising world-wide population and arithmetically increasing food supply. State economic power, control, and regulation were necessary to stave off disaster for the working and monied classes.

As Godwin pointed out in an eventual rebuttal, for Malthus’s figures to be true, it would require every family to produce an unlikely eight children…

My point with this scattershot exploration of low points in economic theory and practice is to demonstrate how egregiously wrong and abstracted economic theories and valuations can often be. I suppose I also want to illustrate how such theories, sallied forth as theories to describe existing phenomena or so-called “human nature” are often used in a generative fashion, to actually shape and manufacture human thought and behavior.

Thomas Malthus’s theories provided a framework and justification for the global enclosure of the commons based on the seemingly rational idea that there simply wasn’t enough to go around, and that the ever-breeding poor, left unrestrained, would devour us all, and that this was only a rational response to the excesses of “human nature.” Further economic rationales for selfishness were advanced by theorists like Hayek and Nash, despite the fact that their theories did not correlate to actual observable, measurable human nature. (Recall the example of the RAND secretaries.)

Accurately correlating to observable behavior is supposed to be one of the truer measures of the validity of any scientific theory. Yet in the case of Nash’s Nobel prize-winning work with game theory, this basic measure was apparently not necessary. Nor was such a basic measure of validity needed, by extension, for an entire way of thinking about and conceiving of so-called “human nature” to be used as the justification for an entire raft of economic policies.

Thus, manifest illogic can seem impeccably logical to the likes of economic policy-setters like Lawrence Summers, trapped as they are within abstracted market-defined notions of value. It must seem only logical to some people in the Bush Administration and the EPA that a human life has a certain measurable monetary value, and that certain policy implications unfold from that value.

John Maynard Keynes, the founder of modern macroeconomics (and a big advocate of eugenics), got to the heart of the matter with a telling statement about the logic of capitalism, which is essentially what we’re talking about in all of this:

“Capitalism,” Keynes wrote, “is the astounding belief that the wickedest of men will do the wickedest of things for the greatest good of everyone.”

When Jennifer Pritchett, Jesse Jacobsen, and Jessica Giordani opened up their Minneapolis-based sex toy store, The Smitten Kitten, in August 2003, they wanted to open a fun, sex-positive feminist business while saving fellow Minneapolites the slight inconvenience of having to drive eight and a half hours to Chicago just to buy a leather harness or sparkly purple butt plug. However, their entry into the sex toy business [online at smittenkittenonline .com] quickly brought them face-to-face with some unpleasant health- and ethics-related realities of the industry. Most major sex toy vendors, they discovered, were selling highly toxic products to customers—including porous “jelly” toys, which are susceptible to mildew and mold.

READ THE INTERVIEW (PDF)