My letter to the president

June 11, 2012

President Barack Obama

The White House

1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW

Washington, D.C.   20500

Dear Mr. President,

As one of your biggest fans, I’m hoping you take my best advice.  I am probably your biggest fan in Seattle, and let me tell you, as a member of Occupy Seattle, being a fan of yours is tough business, even in this town.  Aside from that,

I heard your radio address last weekend courtesy of Randi Rhodes’s show (she is your biggest fan on the radio), and your address was ambitious and righteous, and I loved it, but as too often happens, it was delivered too mildly.  I’m writing to suggest, in the most urgent terms possible, that you get angry, and share it.  You need to take the fight to the righties and insist on what you know is right.  We’re with you.  This congress is about as do-nothing as they come, and reporters have forgotten how to do their jobs: being the essential fourth branch of our government, and they’re corrupted by the same systems that corrupt so much of our society.

If you don’t insist on your positions and your proposals, you will not be respected.  You will be seen as milquetoast.  To my mind, many of your deliveries are FAR TOO MILD, too professorial and calm, even as brilliant and ambitious as they are.  That won’t go over well with this crowd, and by “this crowd,” I mean fickle Americans who might well vote for Mitt (R)money, who epitomizes the worst of what America is.

There is lots to get angry about.  Here are a couple of things that come to my mind:

I’m __  years old [J] and I don’t have health coverage; 

According to UNICEF, the US ranks last or near last in every important measure;

I don’t have a pension;

I believe my mother died of her cancer because she had only Medicare, and they didn’t operate;

My 26-year-old son, who is quite brilliant and talented, cannot afford school, not even community college;

I have no safety net of any kind;

My son, who has asthma, has no health coverage;

I’m a self-employed court reporter and independent contractor and have no benefits;

The USSC has lost its legitimacy, an institution I grew up respecting and trusting;

Shell Oil gets tax breaks while thousands and thousands of teachers are being laid off;

The misery index is rising, and I’m looking for a way to get out of here if you’re not re-elected;

And the treasonous republicans hate you.

All that is plenty enough to get angry about, so don’t hesitate.  TR got angry and so did LBJ.  Find your inner FDR and come out swinging.  You could energize and inspire the whole of the country.  Find your inner Obama, fix your message, stick to it, and take it to them.

Otherwise, I fear we have no chance.  But I believe you have the opportunity to become a great president, as difficult as it may be :)  Sincerely,

If feels like he might have gotten the message...

Meeting Chris Hedges

Friday, June 29, 2012:

I went on a mission tonight (June 29) to Town Hall to listen to and try to meet Chris Hedges so that I could give him a couple of chapters of a manuscript written by a new and dear friend of mine, a man who thinks much like Hedges, one whose writing is brilliant, who writes about the imperative and urgency of reshaping our consciousness, collectively and individually; changing that we’re doing; looking honestly at how we’re harming ourselves and our planet; and moving to fix it NOW, evolving our consciousnesses NOW.  We don’t have any more time to waste. 

( some of John’s work: http://www.earthkeepforum.com/transformation.php )

So I was thrilled to be able to pass on two of his chapters to Hedges.  I hope he has time to read them. Even if nothing comes of that connection, Hedges will know that somebody else get it and is thinking much like himself, and when you’re Chris Hedges, that’s not always easy to say.  My friend will be pleased.  If Chris reads his work, I believe he’ll like it.  My attending Hedges’s book reading was coincidental and propitiously timed. And astutely, John assumed I was attending, and he was right.

Mark Taylor-Canfield, Hedges, Joshua Farris

So tonight after the talk and reading, and after running into Josh Farris as he walked up to the microphone to ask Hedges an interesting question about the dysfunction in most or all of the centers of power and how that may relate to the likelihood that a coup d’etat might result, the real fun began.  (Hedges’s reading and some of the question-and-answer session will be attached shortly.  It was, happily for us, a lengthy session.  His reading was fascinating and moving, and Q&A patient and insightful, and his letter read from a jail cell when he was arrested with OWS was poignant and philosophical, so overall, he shared quite a bit of time with a few hundred of us in the town hall.



Joshlyn and Josh with Hedges



He was generous with his time during the reading and afterwards, signing as many books as he was asked to and chatting patiently, listening carefully, pontificating and challenging.  He graciously took many pictures with many people and accepted a letter, my package, and a jar of homemade jelly, and stayed and chatted until the last person left.   Then he tiredly gathered up his things and walked outside, without a handler or assistant, and it was then that Josh said, “Hey, man,” as he likes to do, “Why don’t you come have a beer with us?”  And he did.  It’s hard not to get excited when Chris Hedges wants to hang out with you and walking down the street that lovely evening and talking his ear off and peppering him with questions was memorable.

So Josh and Joshlyn happened to be there that night, two of my all-time favorite activitsts in the world and colleagues, along with my journalist friend Mark Taylor-Canfield.  As politely pushy as I am – I call it enthusiasm -- not only did we get to chat with Chris during his book signing, and not only did he take pictures with us, when it was all over we happened to run into him out front, and he was happy to accept Josh’s invitation to come have pizza and beer with us. 

So we took him to my all-time favorite place downtown, Hotel Monaco, and had some of the best pizza ever, his generous treat, along with a beer.  It was quite an evening.  I wanted to take more pictures, but I didn’t want to impose, and we were just happy to talk with him, and we wanted him to feel like a regular person, which he is, of course, but one of the more brilliant variety.

So we all got to bend his ear, and we showed him some good old-fashioned Seattle hospitality.  I bent his ear a little bit about the imperative of reelecting the president, and he pretended like it didn’t matter.  smile.   My argument was partly that the fate of the USSC hangs in the balance and that has enormous consequences, and I reiterated that again when he mentioned his recent case before the Court, successfully argued.    

His reading at Town Hall he moved me to tears a couple of times when he talked about the revolutions in East Germany (1989), Former Yugoslavia (’92-’95), and Latin America, and then about our own Occupy. 

He told us stories, shared his views, and shared some of his life, and we talked to him about the activism we’re doing.  He has four children ages (as I recall) 22, 17, 4, and 1. 

Some of what he shared with us and in his discussion that stands out to me is that reality is never an impediment to what you want.  We (Americans) are often juvenile in our thinking, preferring magical thinking to do hard work.  When we are unprepared mentally and emotionally, our response to challenge is often vengeance.  Hedges, as you may know, has witnessed and studied many revolutions over the years, and he referenced “Anatomy of a Revolution,” by Crane Brinton.

Hedges warned that reckless abandonment of our children’s future by forces that don’t think beyond quarterly profits will doom us.  Our prioritizing business rights over people’s rights are the same forces that gave rise to nazi dominance.  Corporate control of the government is fascism. 

I was gratified to hear that he mistrusts and worries about the Christian right whom he believes hates the world as it is.  Their righteousness and anger and the influence they wield are dangerous to our democracy.  To that, I said Amen!

We exchanged cards and emails, undoubtedly thousands of which he receives each year.  He was kind and generous to us all, impressed with Josh’s Iraq War service and subsequent protest of that war after he returned home.  We talked a bit about my work and told me he’d had a five-hour deposition a couple of weeks ago.

I sat next to him at the restaurant, and it was a thrill.  We all wanted to hear his stories and his opinions about our opinions.  It was lively and fascinating (sorry to use that word again, but it was).  He wrote down a couple of documentaries that I recommended (“The Last Mountain” and “The Wild & Wonderful Whytes of West Virginia”), and we eagerly wrote down books he recommended.  Well, Joshlyn did; which I must remember to get from her.

I had the opportunity to tell Chris Hedges that one of the most impactful books I’ve ever read was “The Jungle,” which I read when I was 21, which he was, of course, well familiar with.

He signed my “Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle,” which has got to be the BEST title of a book, ever.  Hedges has four new friends in Seattle.