• We can handle complex ideas.

• We can handle complex ideas.
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“‘. . . . I will tell you what has carried me to the position I have reached. Our political problems appeared complicated. The German people could make nothing of them. In these circumstances they preferred to leave it to the professional politicians to get them out of this confused mess. I, on the other hand, simplified the problems and reduced them to the simplest terms. The masses realized this and followed me’”
-- Adolf Hitler (Bullock 222).
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Actually, though it takes hard work, big ideas don’t have to be over-simplified to be coherent. It would be nice, for instance, to know that the Deciders craft their deadly plans out of pure malevolence, twisting their mustachios all the while. But it helps us more to have realistic ideas just how they operate.

After seeing Moore’s Fahrenheit 911, several of us went for pizza and talked about what worked best. The waiter heard the conversation, and having just seen the film, joined in. A Republican, he wasn’t too impressed, but as our waiter he didn’t criticize the film much. I asked him if he’d known all that about Cheney’s Halliburton ties, but he shrugged that off and zoomed in on the Bush family ties to the Saudi princes. Certainly that is much more prominent in this film than Halliburton, but I wondered if the waiter felt the links to Arabs were much more damning than the links to simply rich people. To me, the economic argument, narrated through the twin stories of Lila and Flint MI, was much the most convincing.

I said to my friends, I don’t understand why all the war-profiteering doesn’t just incense folks. RH said, even low income folks identify with the rich and think they can get rich too. I think that’s true, judging millions of eyeballs glued to celebrity TV shows, or the admiring way some of my GED students talked about millionaire musicians. But I think there’s also a reasonable skepticism about the Blood for Oil scenario as we usually are constrained to depict it. Folks know that some Halliburton exec didn’t call up the White House one day and say, “Gee, profits are down 1.4% this quarter, could you invade Iraq for us?” They know that Bush didn’t invade so some oil corp. would buy him another helicopter or vacation home. They know that U.S. - Saudi ties don’t explain U.S. - Israel ties.

That this is a war over oil is absolutely true in the sense of how institutions develop and carry out policy in the long term. But as my neighbor CT points out, most of us think in terms of single decisions made by individuals. Despite the celebrity shows, we don’t see the real world of the ruling class, where luxury and old boy networks foster decisions that are so incremental or even unspoken as to seem no decision at all, simply an acceptance of the way things must be. I don’t know if Cheney’s cash register rings every time he sends another man or woman into harm’s way, but I don’t reckon money is the first thing on his mind when he decides to kill people. Rather, it’s so much embedded in his environment that he and his pals will get vastly rich just by the nature of things, and by looking out for each other, that they don’t have to specify it or perhaps even think about it much, any more than I think about breathing.

The question is similar to a discussion in the local liberal weekly. The paper had done a piece on Bill Frist, then our Senator from Hospital Corporation of America, concluding that Frist put several layers of legality between himself and his family’s vast HCA holdings. To me, they missed the point; even if the Senator didn’t make a dime from his Senate votes about health care, having grown up in the business, hanging out with the investors and executives, there’s little chance he would ever take the side of sick people over that of the HMOs. Politicians need to pretend they take no account of their interests and upbringing when they make decisions, even if they know we know better; which is why they so fiercely attacked Obama's Supreme Court nominee Sotomayor for suggesting otherwise.

I think many of us also tend to see a continuum of experience where none really exists. After all, we pay soldiers, why shouldn’t we pay Halliburton’s mercenaries? Many people don’t fully see the disjuncture between soldiers’ wages and contractors’ profits. (Moore’s film has a good line about this, from a soldier serving in Iraq.) We all expected Saddam to have piles of WMD, why should we blame the president’s team for making the same mistake?-- (because, of course, it was those very folks who manufactured the evidence in the first place). How about a big idea that paying a living wage to soldiers (or any employees) is not the moral equivalent of shoveling billions at billionaires? And another, that people who order others to their deaths must take responsibility for their mistakes?

Our world is complex and coherent; our big ideas have to be, too. So it's hard to get them right, and communicate them fully. On the other hand, I'm perfectly capable of understanding whatever big theory you come up with, and vice versa. We don't need to dumb down for each other.


• Connect the dots.
I’ve argued that the most useful unit of our understanding is the story --narrative, paradigm, schema, script, model, there are lots of names for this and related knowledge structures-- because it brings together lots of information about the world in coherent but flexible networks that help us make decisions, take action, and learn from the results. Stories connect the sights and sounds, memories and calculations that we experience into explanations of the world and guides for what we should do next. And connection is the heart of the work of building better stories.

Being such relentless connection machines, our minds are constantly looking for relationships among all the information we experience-- in some cases drawing lines where none exist in the real world. Who’s really to blame for the Iraq wars: the Trilateral Commission, Jewish bankers, scheming Venusians, or God Almighty? While many of us see the same crimes and have the same hopes, and we are already trying to connect the dots, we don’t always do it accurately. It doesn’t help us that the whole thrust of corporate culture is to chop our lives into pieces and put price tags on them, while creating elaborate fantasy worlds to keep our attention off the only real one.

So a big reason to help each other connect the dots is that we’re do it anyway, not always with great results. I think a big part of this broad collective learning process I’m trying to describe is to emerge the links among Family Values and family violence; violence against women and gay men; immigration and U.S. trade policy; religion, militarism and capitalism; Fortune 500 corporations and organized crime; Christianity and Islam; and many other features of our lives. We seek to understand immediate problems in the context of large systems and long-term trends. And we want to build strategies that tie our daily work to our long-term goals.

It’s especially important to help each other reconstruct links among many ideas after we’ve set aside earlier contradictory stories. After we’ve scrubbed out the lies and dog obedience training (well, we can’t ever fully scrub that out, it’s like dead tissue from a stroke, but we can build new neural pathways around it), we’re left with important insights and experiences, but only flimsy, incomplete frameworks to hold them together. We’ve got to re-sort and relabel our experiences, look at them from every angle, to help us see how they fit into a coherent model of the world, and where the gaps are. Theory-making is both a puzzle and a construction project.
Linking issues is not the same as what I called earlier the big tent approach, by which some people try to legitimate pleas for reform by appeal to corrupt authority-- educating children, for instance, to make them more competitive in the global economy, or tolerating Latinos because they, too, have sent sons and daughters to fight Halliburton’s wars. That's making false connections. A more truthful project is to understand how the same structures of control hurt different groups in specific ways, and how our various struggles for justice require and reinforce each other.

The most effective political workers I know have a good sense of how the pieces fit together; how racism, crime, war, and waste reinforce each other, how the would-be masters have their fists in many pies, and how democratic movements can bring together people with very diverse experience. Environmentalists have been especially good at fitting economy / ecology pieces together; you might say it’s their stock in trade. Groups like Southerners on New Ground have done great work moving us on race, gender and economic issues all at once.

I remember hearing a caller to Rush Limbaugh (3-16-07) complain about all this. Liberals are collectivists, he said; so naturally labor union members work on environmental issues, and abortion rights folk on labor issues. Whereas rightists are more individualistic. Be nice to think he was right, but I've seen too many instances where we drop the ball. It's a pain to keep drawing the big picture, and risky, too, when we're trying to hold together a tactical coalition for tomorrow's battle; we might stumble over cherished beliefs of our partners or constituents.

During the '08 election campaigns, the GOP nominee got some "traction" at long last with a prescription for offshore oil drilling as a way to brake gas price rises. Now, the idea is nonsense, even on its own terms. Still, polls showed 70% of voters in favor of it. The Democrat decided not to fight that battle. Instead, he conceded as how he might be willing to allow more drilling as part of comprehensive energy plan.

I know it's not what politicians do, but Obama could have pointed out the huge environmental costs of undersea drilling. After all, most people also have a great interest in preserving what's left of our natural environment. Especially in periods of crisis we need to make the extra effort to keep our heads up enough to see the big picture.

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“All in all, the arguments advanced by the CTW [Change to Win union coalition] . . . are a twenty-first century version of the vision advanced by Samuel Gompers . . . . because of the absence of a transformative project; the absence of a true master narrative to link the economic struggle with other struggles for social justice; and, fundamentally, explicit acceptance of the role of the union movement as a junior partner of capital” (Fletcher and Gaspasin 41).
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As we try to emerge these connections (we’re not making them; they already exist), we really have to know what we’re doing. It would be easy to broadcast our suppositions as fact --let’s say, the reasons immigrants leave their homes, or the causes of terrorism/”terrorism”-- without backing them up. We challenge corporate propagandists when they do this, and we can do better ourselves. So when Obama’s one-time pastor Jeremiah Wright compared the World Trade Center murders to the U.S. obliteration of Nagasaki (9-16-01, cited http://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/DemocraticDebate/story?id=4443788&page=1), he needed to do more than fulminate. I haven't seen the whole speech, but I'm pretty sure he did not explain how the earlier murders came about, and how the comparison can guide our policy. He must have assumed his listeners were familiar with decision processes in Truman's White House and Al-Qaeda camps in Afghanistan-- or would take his word without question. He wasn't looking for solutions or prompting a discussion, just basking in self-righteousness. He was practically smacking his lips in satisfaction.

Now, maybe that's the right business model for his industry. But democratic educators have different goals. If you're trying to solve problems, one-way rants are just bad practice. Since we want to talk with people who don’t already share our ideas, who may have very different assumptions and experience, we’ve got to be really disciplined about explaining and documenting our claims. That is, if we're actually interested in changing the outcomes.

We also need to do this work in a context where we don’t feel overwhelmed or patronized. I seriously don’t want to think about how polluting the oil economy is; my job is just too far to take a bike. I don’t want to have to consider how much of my tax money killed how many children. So even as I think we don’t always see the links, I realize sometimes we see them very well, and would prefer not to.

We’ve got to be careful not to talk down to each other, announcing as revelations what others know painfully well. I remember reminding a class of young and middle aged mothers that U.S. presidents have all been men, thinking, I guess, to provoke them. They knew that already, and took my remark to mean that I didn’t believe women were qualified. I remember telling other students, in reference to Jefferson’s lover Sally Hemings, that slaves don’t have a choice when their owners demand sex, and being backed up right quick by the women who insisted, pretty angrily, We do have choices.

So maintaining our sense of agency is quite crucial. If you tell me I kill people just by buying bananas or driving a car, I’m liable to just stop paying attention. There’s nothing I can do on my own that will save the workers sick with pesticides poisoning. So just as we draw the connections among the problems we face, we also underline the ways each of us can contribute to eventual solutions. Peace and justice are not just slogans; they have to be actionable.

As we sort through themes and ideas we can focus on the people who control policies and institutions. Drawing up dream budgets for government spending is a classic way to show the relationships among many issues. Another useful exercise is role-playing a strategy session among the Decider types, about how to lower costs, grab resources or defuse community resistance. It helps us see how the parasites use a wide range of tactics to weaken, divide and control us.

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"I have struggled to find a voice to bring you back these stories [of racism and fighting racism]. . . . in the face of evil, good people do not respond because they can pretend they do not know. This denial is the metaphysic of genocide. Thus, in the face of enforced ignorance, I struggled to shape an 'objective' language . . . . Could I turn bits and pieces of a large, bloody, violent puzzle into a coherent story that would move both ordinary and powerful people? I became a pack rat, a collector of verified details, my files stuffed with
authenticated facts . . . . but I was choking on the stories" (Segrest 1-2).
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• Cut some doors in the walls; let the light in. There is another kind of connect-the-dots that takes an especially careful hand. I mentioned above our ability to compartmentalize ideas and experience, to avoid the stresses of self-contradiction or ongoing pain. The disadvantages of compartmentalizing is that we don’t let ourselves tell the full story. Thus, for instance, we might forget our own struggles on the job or in the family, and so more easily dismiss others’. Friends of mine won’t talk about their own sex and drug experiences, leaving their kids with wildly incomplete ideas about how people live. We might be so cut off from our own feelings that we demand our neighbors do similar surgery.

Or, as Clinchy et al point out (1986, 134), some groups have been so systematically silenced (they write about women) that it’s a struggle for them to hear their own voices amidst the noise generated by authority figures at home, in school, and in politics. They have to reconnect with their own experience, and trust it enough to share.

A GED student, probably in her 30s, chose from a list the essay question, “Should people who use illegal drugs be put in jail?” Her answer was an emphatic yes. I asked her to describe how such a policy works in detail. As we worked on her essay, she began to describe her own extensive drug use, and her daughter’s. Eventually she decided it wouldn’t help to put her daughter in jail (2-25-03).

These little compartments are perfect playgrounds for the slicers and dicers in the board rooms, campaign headquarters and interrogation cells. Politically, it’s just vastly easier to build walls between us when we’ve built such strong walls within us. It’s easier to commit crimes when we’re just doing our little paper-shuffling jobs in Murder, Inc.; we may not even see the bodies. And because we build the boxes for good reasons, it takes a lot of knowledge and trust to lend each other sledge hammers.


• Painting the big picture together.
As I noted above, all sorts of people kiss ass or resist for all sorts of reasons, conscious or otherwise. Even in the time of serfs and slaves, structures of dominance affected different groups with different intensities and outcomes, making it very hard for people at the low end to band together. But they did-- the history of lords and ladies is punctuated with mass uprisings, and made precarious by less visible ongoing resistance. And as Scott describes it, that resistance has always been sustained by the “hidden transcript” of folklore, conversation, and grassroots technology (e.g. how to survive prison, how to steal from the rich) to sustain hope, a sense of justice, and some sort of group identity in the face of daily violence and humiliation.

In our own complicated society, we, too, rely on our stories to bring together many perspectives into a coherent understanding and readiness to act. If our stories help us see the world more truly, we should be able to identify the critical structures and policies that hold up the control system at any given time-- so that, even if the house servants eat better than the folks chopping cotton, even if U.S. workers lead more comfortable lives because of products made by Chinese or Guatemalan workers, we can see the threats that face us all, make common cause to combat them, and adopt common strategies. Flexibly concentrating power and resources, while dispersing and exhausting the enemies’, has always been the key to winning battles, wars and revolutions. We need ongoing conversation, a serial Story, to help us decide where to direct our efforts, and how each of us can contribute.

At the same time, let’s avoid essentialism, shall we? By that I mean the idea that any one structure or feature of the gangster regime is so important we must ignore all the others. You may have heard activists say, Sure, we see discrimination against women and people of color, but those are just expressions of the underlying class structure. Or that patriarchy is the original sin, or our exploitative attitudes toward nature. Recently we’ve been instructed by certain white anti-racists that it’s off-limits to criticize the new president-- that the racial symbolism of his election renders his actual policies irrelevant. But our world is more complicated. We’ve got to work on all these issues. They’re all intertwined, and they erupt separately as well, with their own internal dynamic.

This is not to deny that any given point some battles are more urgent than others, or that we don’t need to coordinate to focus democratic power on critical policies and structures. We surely do, and coordination is a huge task in itself. Think how Iranians of many classes and institutions mobilized in June '09, and had to decide how to respond to the extreme violence of the religious regime.

But these focal points change over time. Sometimes gender is the front line of the struggle for justice, sometimes it’s immigration, sometimes the banks. As I write, corporate strategists are busy devising new ways to rip us off.

While different gangs may favor particular weapons, in fact they all depend on the full arsenal of control and robbery. The pirate chiefs routinely seize public resources to spoil and sell back to us; pit men and women against each other, and U.S.-born workers against others; use religion and other mass media to sabotage grassroots resistance; start wars to suppress dissent and metastasize the legal and technical infrastructure of the surveillance state; create and equip terrorist gangs to fight their proxy wars off the books; expand the money laundering systems also favored by drug lords and religious terrorists; employ murderous dictatorships to protect their overseas holdings; and so forth.

We have to fight on every front. We can debate the best ways to resist right now without undermining each other. Democratic groups can choose to focus on particular issues without losing sight of the whole. The main thing is to see and express that these injustices are all connected; that our struggles should reinforce one other.

Clarity may be especially difficult in the big tent climate of the born-again Democratic coalition, as little-d democrats focus on solving the very urgent problems and cast about for any allies to help. Whatever tactics we adopt to survive for the moment, and however determined we must be to make lasting allies of all our neighbors who don’t kill for a living, we cannot lose sight of the institutional changes we need. And we can’t expect to build something better when we leave it to bigots and billionaires to draw up the blueprints. It’s not a little quirk or compromise we should overlook, for instance, when the new president chooses as his spokesperson a man who builds his career by campaigning against gay people. It’s not just a straightforward, practical decision to hand over economic policy to the financial brains who brought us the crashes of 1982 and 1987 and 1997 and 2000 and 2008, and base it on the premise that all we want is to go back to the good times of 1999.

Finally, let me insist again that we don’t have to have complete theories, the Manifesto of Everything, to push useful discussion. In fact, we’re not in the business of selling ideologies at all, as if someone among us has all the answers we need. Rather, we can help pool what we know with what other folks know to come up with ever more effective approaches and solutions. Everyone has big ideas, some more or less elaborate. The clearer we are about the foundations of our own ideas, the more effectively we can help each other develop more accurate and useful shared understandings -- and toss the poisonous ones.

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It feels like life flows like a song. A lot of times I hear the song developing. I'll be looking at something, and in my mind I'll be trying to shape it into a lyric. Then I say to myself, 'No, Jane, that's not a lyric, that's just a theoretical reflection on the world. That is all it is. You are not going to be able to shape it into a song.' But I think I'm always going for the song. But I don't always need to be singing, per se, because the song-- it's here. I mean it's happening now. Life is the song.
-- Jane Sapp in Belenky 1997, pp. 235-9
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Expand the spaces and opportunities for talk.
We have pretty strict rules about when it's OK to talk money, religion, and politics, because it's hard work to talk about important topics. We sway next to strangers on the subway, people very different from ourselves, exchanging nary a word; or when we chat with the neighbors over the back fence, we talk about the weather, and those awful gas prices, and the grandkids’ birthdays, and carefully avoid topics that might rudely expose our different perspectives. I should say, I avoid touchy subjects; I don't like to get in arguments, especially when it's not clear there's enough time for more than sloganeering.

On the other hand, we have much looser permission to exchange stories about authority, identity, responsibility, and the great range of "personal" issues that are at heart political. We are limited mostly by our creativity and skill-- and the skill comes from practice. Let's practice!