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February 4, 2019
The Circle Over the Triangle - A Collectivism and Cyclic-Belief Change Comes Around
By Paul Haeder
Book review on America and capitalism. Gary Brumback's works have been published widely, and this new book, Life's Triangles and America's Power Elites: Can the Living Field be Leveled?, covers a lot of ground.
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Book review of Gary Brumback, Life's Triangles and America's Power Elites (2019)
To see a world in a grain of sand,
And a heaven in a wild flower,
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand,
And eternity in an hour.
-Auguries of Innocence, by William Blake
There is an American Native game, counting coup, which is both rarefied and possibly the answer to the male testosterone/female co-opting of testosterone that has given rise to civilizational humanity since the so-called fertile crescent gestated the evil arts of subjugating man, woman, child and ecosystems to a small cabal of landowners (sic) who got humanity to work for food.
I always go to Daniel Quinn and other neotribalists to look at the long-range, way back, to give some justification to a tribal and hunter-gatherer past that for many of us is locked in our genes, accessible to fewer and fewer people daily as the world becomes a landmine of DNA-warping, cell-depleting, culture-sapping madness orchestrated by white men (mostly).
In our cultural mythology we see ourselves as having left tribalism behind the way modern medicine left the leech and the bleeding bowl behind, and we did so decisively and irrevocably. This is why it's so difficult for us to acknowledge that tribalism is not only the preeminently human social organization, it's also the only unequivocally successful social organization in human history. Thus, when even so wise and thoughtful a statesman as Mikhail Gorbachev calls for "a new beginning" and "a new civilization," he doesn't doubt for a single moment that the pattern for it lies in the social organization that has introduced humanity to oppression, injustice, poverty, chronic famine, incessant violence, genocide, global warfare, crime, corruption, and wholesale environmental destruction. To consult, in our time of deepest crisis, with the unqualified success that humanity enjoyed here for more than three million years is quite simply and utterly unthinkable.
- Daniel Quinn, Beyond Civilization: Humanity's Next Adventure
What's lovely about my own intersection with Gary Brumback - the author of the book this review-dash-screed is enveloping: Life's Triangles and America's Power Elites: Can the Living Field be Leveled? - is that Gary reached out to me and solicited my comments and possible endorsement of this book (he's a regular contributor to Dissident Voice), through the auspices of one of modern civilization's double-edged swords - the world-wide internet.
I think it's both unreal and uniquely human to reach out across the digital universe, and when someone who is connected to me through my words, and finds some linkage, then I believe that's sign enough to make some connection deeper, or revealing.
It's gutsy for this 84-year-old former organizational psychologist to have reached out to me (I'm not now your typical thinker and writer), and the proof is in the pudding when it comes to his writing and then how the diner/reader of those ideas, through the grist of his words and grammar (courses), gets the true taste (or terroir) of the author's (chef's) orchestration of ideas and composition.
As many readers of my work know, I am captivated by holism and systems thinking, and many times I am looking at life - universalities - through my own optics. I understand the drive to want to understand how tidal wetlands work and how elephant seals can go down 7,770 feet for up to two hours without succumbing to the bends or nitrogen narcosis.
But inherent in that learning and yearning, I understand the power of attracting forces, both physics and metaphysics, and the value in coincidences, both mathematical and magical, and more and more, daily, I am grasping the reasoning for my own living and thinking and breathing. Here I am on the Oregon Coast (central) just having done my first day's class to be a certified marine mammal (and to help tourists/visitors understand the other zoological and ecological concerns) naturalist. I was about to fiddle with my short-story collection which is coming out in several months from Cirque Press, and I was also prepped to blog from my post here in Otis, Oregon.
Instead, I answered the email call from Gary to take a look at his book and write up something. What interests me most about fellows like Brumback is his tenacity to not only understand the world around him using a variety of tools from his 84 years on the planet, but also his desire to be one among us as writers - anti-authoritarian thinkers who deeply question the role of this country in the upsetting of people and cultures throughout the globe.
"Call of Duty" is what I see my role now turning 62 next week. I have engendered good will and hard learning in thousands of students, at public gatherings where I "ran the show" (a hat off to Ed Sullivan) and in my writing, big and small. I've written three parts to my hell-hole experience working with homeless veterans at the Starvation Army in Oregon. But in reality, the linchpin for me is my call of duty, call and answer, to carry forth in any way possible, the message of revolt. Speaking of revolt, I remember hanging out with Robert Bly on two occasions - one time in El Paso as we made it over to Juarez for tequila, and another time 23 years later in Spokane with bourbon and quietude. I wrote a promo article for his appearance in Spokane as part of Get Lit!. His poem, "Call and Answer," is powerful, even at 17 years old.
I bring this up as a tangent to describe some of what I interpret as the core value in Gary's new book:
Call and Answer
Tell me why it is we don't lift our voices these days
And cry over what is happening. Have you noticed
The plans are made for Iraq and the ice cap is melting?
I say to myself: "Go on, cry. What's the sense
Of being an adult and having no voice? Cry out!
See who will answer! This is Call and Answer!"
We will have to call especially loud to reach
Our angels, who are hard of hearing; they are hiding
In the jugs of silence filled during our wars.
Have we agreed to so many wars that we can't
Escape from silence? If we don't lift our voices, we allow
Others (who are ourselves) to rob the house.
How come we've listened to the great criers--Neruda,
Akhmatova, Thoreau, Frederick Douglass--and now
We're silent as sparrows in the little bushes?
Some masters say our life lasts only seven days.
Where are we in the week? Is it Thursday yet?
Hurry, cry now! Soon Sunday night will come.
It is the Saturday of my life, most likely, as I just spent sometime at Cascadia Head, where the Salmon River and the Pacific Ocean battle it out during the various tides ebbing and flowing. Alone, with harbor seals popping their heads up, and their partner, a river otter, watching me look at two bald eagles looking for seal placenta to gobble up.
Here, visiting Canadian photographer Isabelle Hayeur, who is on a residency at Sitka Center for Art and Ecology, is shooting the Oregon Coast. The Canadian is here on the Pacific Coast of Oregon for first time, and her residency continues her exploration of water and land, people and ecosystems - to show the changes to the ecosystems caused by humans. Here, that Cascadia Head shot and the salmon hitting the Pacific near Lincoln City, Oregon.
That's the crux of the book, really: Brumback is asking the reader to judge for ourselves the depth of the conspiracy of the rich toward absolute control of the majority. Is there true evil in the world, or are all children borne of original sin?
Those toxins and carcinogenics and structural-violence systems were created, marketed, sold, defended, patented by men/women, in corporations. The sociopathic definition of a corporation is the same as the person, but can we give a free ride to the majority of people in the corporation who are just, to recoin my favorite phrase, Little Eichmanns?
In any sense, the embodiment of the Hudson Bay Company is the message in the Heart of Darkness, which reflects the individual as sociopath and the LLC as sociopathic, as the amorality of corporations is obvious from a million cases we all can tap into from the written record. That these companies - polluters - have gained personhood is compelling, from the start of this country's slide deeper and deeper into the morass of capitalism - set forth 133 years ago in 1886 in the Supreme Court case Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad, This obscure case set the precedent that corporations have some rights under the 14th Amendment and were given de-facto personhood.
So, then, we have given corporations even higher status in this personhood allusion/legal definition in the Citizens United Case. What sort of person is a corporation?
Are they philanthropic and kind to their neighbors or are they the kind of people who will slit your throat to take your wallet?
For most of us in the Brumback class, we see the very nature of the corporation as both amoral and sociopathic.
They exist to make money, regardless of the social consequences. And they have gotten legal protections from the consequences of their crimes - a true Mafioso or cartel paying off the politicians and the cops and judges to gain unimaginable wealth and power over us, the 90 percent.
A sociopath and a corporation have identical incentive structures and motivations:
Both sociopaths and corporations exist for the sole purpose of self-centered goals - sociopaths want a variety of things (money, power, sex, etc.) while corporations are solely focused upon making money.
Neither has an internal sense of morality and, barring intervention from a more powerful authority, both are willing to exploit others in service of their goal; just as how a sociopath may be willing to lie, cheat and steal their way through life, a corporation is willing to use child-sweatshop labor to depress costs.
Both sociopaths and corporations are constrained through risk/reward analysis - sociopaths weigh the value or pleasure of doing something immoral against the legal/social risks, while corporations weigh the profit of their actions against the cost of legal/social actions against their agenda.
In the end, we have to develop both sensitivities and thick skins in this gambit called This American Life. Brumback makes his claim to some of those contradictions and dichotomies in his book. He can be contacted by the reader here for more information on ordering the book. Gary Brumback.
I sign off with the words of Eduardo Galeano whose Memory of Fire trilogy sets deep in my soul. From an interview:
"I want to be an honest man and a good writer, as James Baldwin was. I greatly admired him. He once told a story that I used in the third volume of Memory of Fire. He was very young, and he was walking down the street with a friend, a painter. They stop at a red light. 'Look,' says the friend. Baldwin sees nothing, except a dirty pool of water. The friend insisted: 'Look at it, really.' So Baldwin takes a good look and sees a spot of oil spreading in the puddle. In the spot of oil, he sees a rainbow, and the street moving, and people moving in the street; and he sees madmen and magicians and the whole world moving. The universe was there in that little pool. On that day, Baldwin said, he learned to see. For me, that's an important lesson. I am always trying to look at the universe through the little puddles in the streets."