Press Watch for 06.12.03

Road to Revolution

Automobiles seem so much a fact of life in the U.S. that it is commonly believed that they evolved naturally from earlier modes of
transportation. But the car has been thrust upon the public, along with the pollution of the internal combustion engine.
Not long after the turn of the twentieth century, urban areas were served by extensive and efficient trolleys. In Portland, the buried
trolley tracks may be seen in places, emerging from the asphalt which was laid for cars. During the
heyday of this mode of transportation, urban centers were dense with living quarters, and most people living
in-town could just hop on a trolley to get where they wanted. In comparison to car commuting, these trolleys were clean indeed, and
quite efficient. Their perfection greatly galled the automobile industry and its related suppliers, and in fact the car, oil and
rubber industries began buying up the trolley systems nationwide, with the express purpose of changing public perception of them. They
neglected the systems so that they became unreliable and dangerous, and then they scrapped them. More room for cars.

Real estate speculators were also active in supporting car culture. They were eager to promote the idea of the suburb, a nice clean conformist
place away form the den of sin in the city. What could be more convenient than a car
for going from suburb to city center, where the jobs were?

In 1973, car culture received its first real shock, when gasoline supplies dried up suddenly, due to a decision by OPEC to lower
production. The whole idea of hopping into a car for every transportation need came under scrutiny, so much so that new
pollution controls and new mileage constraints were demanded by national legislation. The titanic amount of pollution caused by automobile
traffic, and the dependency on foreigners who put their own profits first, actually produced an Act of Congress which
demanded that by the distant year 1993, 20% of the US new car fleet was to be electric or other non-emitting type vehicles. The magazines
Popular Science and Popular Mechanics ran eager articles about what those cars might look like, how they might run, et cetera.

Of course, the automobile industry quietly had the law killed, probably by adding a repeal on to an appropriations rider. And then came Reagan, who
danced hand-in-hand with war profiteers and industrial greedmongers, spewing happy lies about the nonexistence of global warming and the moral weakness of liberals and
nontraditional types, so that the U.S. vehicular profile once again began to swell to the size of 1950s sedans, and even further?a nation of polluting pashas
riding our great elephants through Destiny. And though a few muscular types have returned to downtown loft living, the suburbs still
reign as the preferred destination for those who have made it.

What to do?

I have picked the automobile as an example, to discuss revolution. It would take quite a revolution to get rid of the thing as it currently exists. As I have
pointed out, its possession and usage have as much to do with land usage patterns and historically vast manipulations by the elite classes, as with the
pitiful advertising-induced delusion that one?s inner worth is represented by one?s automobile. How can we destroy its hold over us? How can we destroy
capitalism from within?

I would start with land distribution. This will come as a shock to people who might have expected me to start with bicycles. You cannot deliver your children
to school, pick up the groceries for several persons, and commute across several miles in all weather to show up at your workplace on time, with a bicycle.
For those who try, I feel admiration. But bicycle trekking of that magnitude is dependent on thumping good health, which is something a great many of us do
not have.

Our manner of land distribution is shortsighted, outdated, illogical, and counter to human needs and human health. The tyranny of rents and mortgages (and
of course, car payments) force many families into a weary and alienated pattern, both marriage partners working two jobs at least, and the kids left to stare
at a television screen. This is the wealth and prosperity that we are told to strive for. It is misery.

Land rights are not something that Americans are told to think about. Most people don?t know what it means.
It means this: you have a right to exist, therefore you have a right to a place to exist; there is no paucity of wealth in this society, therefore there is
no reason your house cannot exist, for you and your loved ones, near your workplaces, and further, since this is a right and not a privilege, no one should be
allowed to profit from your housing; no one should be allowed to collect rents and mortgages, no one should ever be evicted for nonpayment of rents or mortgages.


Imagine that. We could, as so many indigenous cultures have successfully done, create or alter housing as it is needed for new families. The skills
for making such houses are easily within the learning capacity of most persons. Materials should be appropriate to local conditions and supplies.

This, in fact, is how housing used to be supplied in Bali. The local population passed on the appropriate technology from elder to younger through generations,
so that whenever it was time for a new house to be built for a new arrival or an expanding family, the entire village would turn out, make it into a terrific weeks-long party, everyone would get to know everyone else through the thrill of building the house, and voila! --It would be beautifully and appropriately
done, with no payment due except to, of course, participate in whatever manner in the next house-building.

If we thought of land rights in this way, cars would swiftly become irrelevant, because it would be most natural to have a local committee that decided, on an
egalitarian basis, to distribute housing to those who need it, where it is needed.

Now, by this point, some of you no doubt smell a whiff of socialism, and I make no apology for that. Totalitarian socialism was a flop, but no social
system has ever collapsed with a more resounding corpse-thump than has capitalism. Has capitalism failed? Of course it has! What could be more
obvious? The world teeters on the brink of nuclear war, the environment is so polluted that every human being can produce a list of assayed contaminants as
long as their legs, the forests and even the oceans are tattered remnants of their former glory, and here in the US we live in fear of each other, and throw two
million people into our infamously filthy jails.

Capitalism has failed! It is time to kill capitalism. It is a thing that must be done on a collective scale, a thing that can only be done if we remember
reverence for each other, the sort of reverence that the Balinesians used to have. To have reverence for the world itself, for each of its forms of life, to
have reverence for each other?s human rights?that is what we should strive for. It is irreverent to have a society in which housing and land rights are denied.
Capitalism is irreverence itself.

And how to do this thing? That is not my specialty. It is my place to look, and use my powers of gestalt, and see that revolution must come. Can we bring about
revolution by seizing the public debate with pirate radio and TV, with underground daily newspapers, with weekly mass postering campaigns, with one-on-one or
three-on-three discussions of the urgent need and responsibility for revolution? I hope that we can. But I do know that there is no real revolution without
reverence?for the environment, for each other. I remember that one of the most powerful elements of the Sandinist and the Castroite revolutions was
reverence?so much so that garrisons that Castro attacked with guns would provide more men and guns, so much so that Sandinistas would write poems explaining,
with reverence, to their defeated opponents, that it was necessary to pull the trigger. Maybe we can expand on that, to the point that no one actually has
to fire a gun. But the revolution must come; let us put the face of human dignity on it.