This is about how I am feeling this week.  Cartoon from Funny Times.

At this point, I come down on the side of  Ellsberg, Snowden, and Manning–people who acted on their beliefs and conscience, even if those actions caused them to violate specific orders of the government forbidding that  behavior. Whistleblowers at all levels are rarely popular. We know that they act for a variety of reasons–some less than altruistic, e.g., motivations of revenge or jealousy. I know that I personally have to be careful to discriminate among those differences in motivation as well as the intended and unintended results of actions.

In this current case, as Snowden’s and Manning’s leaked material continues to become public, we learn that our government has apparently exceeded its Constitutional and legislated powers and violated a number of individual liberties, along with the sovereignty of many nations abroad.

The good that came from Daniel Ellsberg’s revelations during the Vietnam catastrophe is still vivid in my memory, as is the disclosure of which public officials, in fact, were betraying the country by covering up, using warrantless wiretaps, actively surveilling private communications, and outright lying about the scope of what they were doing.   Sounds very familiar.

Our Government was caught napping by the September 11 attacks, but its response, understandably –but not acceptably–appears to me to be an over reaction.  The Patriot Act is loaded with good intentions–and I certainly affirm the Government’s necessary role in protecting the Nation. However, as we all know, “the devil is in the details” of choosing what methods are going to be employed, and by whom,  in carrying out that obligation to “protect and defend.” Ironically, we appear to be being violated and attacked by the very Government that is ostensibly trying to fulfill its obligation to protect and defend us.

Having learned from what went on in the response to the disclosures and brouhaha surrounding the Pentagon Papers years ago, I’m going to be very slow to judge or condemn Snowden,  Manning or the Government out of hand on the evidence I have seen thus far. I do lean in the direction of supporting the whistleblowers again in this case since my critical cynicism has increased with my age.

As I do my pondering, however,  I was pleased to run across Backderf’s new political cartoon and Sheer’s article which I will use as I work my way through the complexity of the interplay of ethics,  morality and legality in this situation.

The City by John Backderf

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
The Good Germans in Government http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/the_good_germans_in_government_20130625/

Posted on Jun 25, 2013

By Robert Scheer

What a disgrace. The U.S. government, cheered on by much of the media, launches an international manhunt to capture a young American whose crime is that he dared challenge the excess of state power. Read the Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution and tell me that Edward Snowden is not a hero in the mold of those who founded this republic. Check out the Nuremberg war crime trials and ponder our current contempt for the importance of individual conscience as a civic obligation.
Yes, Snowden has admitted that he violated the terms of his employment at Booz Allen Hamilton, which has the power to grant security clearances as well as profiting mightily from spying on the American taxpayers who pay to be spied on without ever being told that is where their tax dollars are going. Snowden violated the law in the same way that Daniel Ellsberg did when, as a RAND Corporation employee, he leaked the damning Pentagon Papers study of the Vietnam War that the taxpayers had paid for but were not allowed to read.
In both instances, violating a government order was mandated by the principle that the United States trumpeted before the world in the Nuremberg war crime trials of German officers and officials. As Principle IV of what came to be known as the Nuremberg Code states: “The fact that a person acted pursuant to order of his government or of a superior does not relieve him from responsibility under international law, provided a moral choice was in fact possible to him.”
That is a heavy obligation, and the question we should be asking is not why do folks like Ellsberg, Snowden and Bradley Manning do the right thing, but rather why aren’t we bringing charges against the many others with access to such damning data of government malfeasance who remain silent?
Is there an international manhunt being organized to bring to justice Dick Cheney, the then-vice president who seized upon the pain and fear of 9/11 to make lying to the public the bedrock of American foreign policy? This traitor to the central integrity of a representative democracy dares condemn Snowden as a “traitor” and suggest that he is a spy for China because he took temporary refuge in Hong Kong.
The Chinese government, which incidentally does much to finance our massive military budget, was embarrassed by the example of Snowden and was quick to send him on his way. Not so ordinary folk in Hong Kong, who clearly demonstrated their support of the man as an exponent of individual conscience.
So too did Albert Ho, who volunteered his considerable legal skills in support of Snowden, risking the ire of Hong Kong officials. Ho, whom The New York Times describes as “a longtime campaigner for full democracy [in Hong Kong], to the irritation of government leaders of the territory,” is an example of the true democrats around the world who support Snowden, contradicting Cheney’s smear.
But U.S. Democrats have also been quick to join the shoot-the-messenger craze, ignoring the immense significance of Snowden’s revelations. Take Sen. Dianne Feinstein of California. Fool me once and shame on her, fool me dozens of times, as Feinstein has, and I feel like a blithering idiot having voted for her. After years of covering up for the intelligence bureaucracy, Feinstein is now chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, and clearly for some time has been in a position to know the inconvenient truths that Snowden and others before him have revealed.
Did she know that the NSA had granted Booz Allen Hamilton such extensive access to our telephone and Internet records? Did she grasp that the revolving door between Booz Allen and the NSA meant that this was a double-dealing process involving high officials swapping out between the government and the war profiteers? Did she know that the security system administered by Booz Allen was so lax that young Snowden was given vast access to what she now feels was very sensitive data? Or that private companies like Booz Allen were able to hand out “top security” clearances to their employees, and that there now are 1.4 million Americans with that status?
As with her past cover-ups of government lying going back to the phony weapons of mass destruction claims made to justify the Iraq War, Feinstein, like so many in the government, specializes in plausible deniability. She smugly assumes the stance of the all-knowing expert on claimed intelligence success while pretending to be shocked at the egregious failures. She claims not to have known of the extent of the invasion of our privacy and at the same time says she is assured that the information gained “has disrupted plots, prevented terrorist attacks. …” If so, why did she not come clean with the American public and say this is what we are doing to you and why?
Instead, Feinstein failed horribly in the central obligation of a public servant to inform the public and now serves as prosecutor, judge and jury in convicting Snowden hours after his name was in the news: “He violated the oath, he violated the law. It’s treason,” she said.
Treason is a word that dictators love to hurl at dissidents, and when both Cheney and Feinstein bring it back into favor, you know that courageous whistle-blowers like Snowden are not the enemy.
AP/Jacquelyn Martin
Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, speaks to the media.

The following video is Bill Moyers at his best, and I couldn’t agree more with his point of view. I share it with you–my readers and students–so that there will be no doubt in your minds about where I stand on this issue.

The power of the top economic 1% and of corporations is formidable indeed.  Look how much money was poured into the last election, and by whom. Look at the number of millionaires in the Congress. The world appears more and more to be run on “greased palms” and making “The Deal.” Gauge the impact on a world where all transactions are zero sum games, and where quid pro quo dominates political as well as economic interactions.

Note that compromise has become as much an accepted way of life as outright lying, even when it is moral principles or the health and safety of other people–indeed of the planet itself–that get compromised. Self-advancement and getting “ME” ahead–at any cost–appears to be the goal of increasing numbers of my countrymen, especially those who share with me a history of being more or less privileged members of the American economic and social order.

So, you’ve been warned and, I hope, are in the process of becoming forearmed. Keeping yourself vigilant and well educated about public issues is a first step. Next, it is imperative to dig out the alliances as well as the vocalized beliefs of our political candidates. Who’s really in bed with whom?

Finally, in a democracy, we all have a responsibility to defend ourselves against those who are trying to take advantage of us, put us down, take our vote, rule over us or enslave us in any way, and we also have an obligation to help defend and protect our less fortunate neighbors–irrespective of how they came to be less fortunate. Like it or not, we’re all in this together.

Copy and paste if need be.

http://www.nationofchange.org/must-see-video-bill-moyers-slams-rule-1-plutocracy-and-democracy-don-t-mix-1321809065

A hundred years from now, it will not matter what kind of car I drove, what kind of house I lived in, how much money I had in the bank…but the world may be a better place because I made a difference in the life of a child

– Forest Witcraft –

First, in case you are not acquainted with Orion magazine, allow me to introduce you. If you enjoy reading high quality essays and viewing excellent photographs with no advertising interruptions, and exploring relevant information about our natural world, then I urge you to subscribe to Orion or find it in your local library. If you subscribe, then pass it on to friends or leave it in your favorite coffee shop to enlighten your fellow latte drinkers. This is a thoughtful and high quality publication worthy of your attention and support. I don’t find many of this calibre available for public consumption these days.

This 2001 article by Barry Lopez, a naturalist  who lives in Oregon and who has penned many worthy books and essays, draws an interesting distinction between religion and spirituality as he discusses his role as participant in Nature rather than mere observer. I think you’ll like this.

• »

The Naturalist

BY BARRY LOPEZ

Published in the Autumn 2001 issue of Orion magazine

Photograph by Scott Erickson, used with permission

MY HOME STANDS ON A WOODED BENCH, set back about two hundred feet from the north bank of the McKenzie River in western Oregon. Almost every day I go down to the river with no intention but to sit and watch. I have been watching the river for thirty years, just the three or four hundred yards of it I can see from the forested bank, a run of clear, quick water about 350 feet wide. If I have learned anything here, it’s that each time I come down, something I don’t know yet will reveal itself.

If it’s a man’s intent to spend thirty years staring at a river’s environs in order to arrive at an explanation of the river, he should find some other way to spend his time. To assert this, that a river can’t be known, does not to my way of thinking denigrate science, any more than saying a brown bear can’t be completely known. The reason this is true is because the river is not a thing, in the way a Saturn V rocket engine is a thing. It is an expression of biological life, in dynamic relation to everything around it—the salmon within, the violet-green swallow swooping its surface, alder twigs floating its current, a mountain lion sipping its bank water, the configurations of basalt that break its flow and give it timbre and tone.

In my experience with field biologists, those fresh to a task—say, caracara research—are the ones most likely to give themselves a deadline—ten years, say—against which they will challenge themselves to know all there is to know about that falcon. It never works. More seasoned field biologists, not as driven by a need to prove themselves, are content to concentrate on smaller arenas of knowledge. Instead of speaking definitively of coyote, armadillo, or wigeon, they tend to say, “This one animal, that one time, did this in that place.” It’s the approach to nature many hunting and gathering peoples take, to this day. The view suggests a horizon rather than a boundary for knowing, toward which we are always walking.

A great shift in the Western naturalist’s frame of mind over the past fifty years, it seems to me, has been the growth of this awareness: to get anywhere deep with a species, you must immerse yourself in its milieu. You must study its ecology. If you wish to understand the caracara, you need to know a great deal about exactly where the caracara lives when; and what the caracara’s relationships are with each of the many components of that place, including its weathers, its elevations, its seasonal light.

A modern naturalist, then, is no longer someone who goes no further than a stamp collector, mastering nomenclature and field marks. She or he knows a local flora and fauna as pieces of an inscrutable mystery, increasingly deep, a unity of organisms Western culture has been trying to elevate itself above since at least Mesopotamian times. The modern naturalist, in fact, has now become a kind of emissary in this, working to reestablish good relations with all the biological components humanity has excluded from its moral universe.

SITTING BY THE RIVER, following mergansers hurtling past a few inches off its surface or eyeing an otter hauled out on a boulder with (in my binoculars) the scales of a trout glistening on its face, I ask myself not: What do I know?—that Canada geese have begun to occupy the nests of osprey here in recent springs, that harlequin ducks are now expanding their range to include this stretch of the river—but: Can I put this together? Can I imagine the river as a definable entity, evolving in time?

How is a naturalist today supposed to imagine the place between nature and culture? How is he or she to act, believing as many do that Western civilization is compromising its own biology by investing so heavily in material progress? And knowing that many in positions of corporate and political power regard nature as inconvenient, an inefficiency in their plans for a smoothly running future?

The question of how to behave, it seems to me, is nervewracking to contemplate because it is related to two areas of particular discomfort for naturalists. One is how to keep the issue of spirituality free of religious commentary; the other is how to manage emotional grief and moral indignation in pursuits so closely tied to science, with its historical claim to objectivity.

One response to the first concern is that the naturalist’s spirituality is one with no icons (unlike religion’s), and it is also one that enforces no particular morality. In fact, for many it is not much more than the residue of awe which modern life has not (yet) erased, a sensitivity to the realms of life which are not yet corraled by dogma. The second concern, how a person with a high regard for objectivity deals with emotions like grief and outrage, like so many questions about the trajectory of modern culture, is only a request to express love without being punished. It is, more deeply, an expression of the desire that love be on an equal footing with power when it comes to social change.

It is of some help here, I think, to consider where the modern naturalist has come from, to trace her or his ancestry. Since the era of Gilbert White in eighteenth-century England, by some reckonings, we have had a recognizable cohort of people who study the natural world and write about it from personal experience. White and his allies wrote respectfully about nature, and their treatments were meant to be edifying for the upper classes. Often, the writer’s intent was merely to remind the reader not to overlook natural wonders, which were the evidence of Divine creation. Darwin, in his turn, brought unprecedented depth to this kind of work. He accentuated the need for scientific rigor in the naturalist’s inquiries, but he also suggested that certain far-reaching implications existed. Entanglements. People, too, he said, were biological, subject to the same forces of mutation as the finch. A hundred years further on, a man like Aldo Leopold could be characterized as a keen observer, a field biologist who understood a deeper connection (or reconnection) with nature, but also as someone aware of the role wildlife science had begun to play in politics. With Rachel Carson, the artificial but sometimes dramatic divide that can separate the scientist, with her allegiance to objective, peer-reviewed data, from the naturalist, for whom biology always raises issues of propriety, becomes apparent.

Following Leopold’s and Carson’s generations came a generation of naturalists that combined White’s enthusiasm and sense of the nonmaterial world; Leopold’s political consciousness and feelings of shared fate; and Carson’s sense of rectitude and citizenship. For the first time, however, the humanists among this cadre of naturalists were broadly educated in the sciences. They had grown up with Watson and Crick, not to mention sodium fluoroacetate, Ebola virus ecology, melting ice shelves, and the California condor.

The modern naturalist, acutely even depressingly aware of the planet’s shrinking and eviscerated habitats, often feels compelled to do more than merely register the damage. The impulse to protest, however, is often stifled by feelings of defensiveness, a fear of being misread. Years of firsthand field observation can be successfully challenged in court today by a computer modeler with not an hour’s experience in the field. A carefully prepared analysis of stream flow, migration corridors, and long-term soil stability in a threatened watershed can be written off by the press (with some assistance from the opposition) as a hatred of mankind.

At the opening of the twenty-first century the naturalist, then, knows an urgency White did not foresee and a political scariness Leopold might actually have imagined in his worst moments. Further, in the light of the still-unfolding lessons of Charles Darwin’s work, he or she knows that a cultural exemption from biological imperatives remains in the realm of science fiction.

IN CONTEMPORARY native villages, one might posit today that all people actively engaged in the land—hunting, fishing, gathering, traveling, camping—are naturalists, and say that some are better than others according to their gifts of observation. Native peoples differ here, however, from the Gilbert Whites, the Darwins, the Leopolds, and the Rachel Carsons in that accumulating and maintaining this sort of information is neither avocation nor profession. It is more comparable to religious activity, behavior steeped in tradition and considered essential for the maintenance of good living. It is a moral and an inculcated stance, a way of being. While White and others, by contrast, were searching for a way back in to nature, native peoples (down to the present in some instances), for what-ever reason, have been at pains not to leave. The distinction is important because “looking for a way back in” is a striking characteristic of the modern naturalist’s frame of mind.

Gilbert White stood out among his social peers because what he pursued—a concrete knowledge of the natural world around Selbourne in Hampshire—was unrelated to politics or progress. As such, it could be dismissed politically. Fascinating stuff, but inconsequential. Since then, almost every naturalist has borne the supercilious judgments of various sophisticates who thought the naturalist a romantic, a sentimentalist, a bucolic—or worse; and more latterly, the condescension of some scientists who thought the naturalist not rigorous, not analytic, not detached enough.

A naturalist of the modern era—an experientially based, well-versed devotee of natural ecosystems—is ideally among the best informed of the American electorate when it comes to the potentially catastrophic environmental effects of political decisions. The contemporary naturalist, it has turned out—again, scientifically grounded, politically attuned, field experienced, library enriched—is no custodian of irrelevant knowledge, no mere adept differentiating among Empidonax flycatchers on the wing, but a kind of citizen whose involvement in the political process, in the debates of public life, in the evolution of literature and the arts, has become crucial.

The bugbear in all of this—and there is one—is the role of field experience, the degree to which the naturalist’s assessments are empirically grounded in firsthand knowledge. How much of what the contemporary naturalist claims to know about animals and the ecosystems they share with humans derives from what he has read, what he has heard, what he has seen televised? What part of what the naturalist has sworn his or her life to comes from firsthand experience, from what the body knows?

One of the reasons native people still living in some sort of close, daily association with their ancestral lands are so fascinating to those who arrive from the rural, urban, and suburban districts of civilization is because they are so possessed of authority. They radiate the authority of firsthand encounters. They are storehouses of it. They have not read about it, they have not compiled notebooks and assembled documentary photographs. It is so important that they remember it. When you ask them for specifics, the depth of what they can offer is scary. It’s scary because it’s not tidy, it doesn’t lend itself to summation. By the very way that they say that they know, they suggest they are still learning something that cannot, in the end, be known.

It is instructive to consider how terrifying certain inter-lopers—rural developers, government planners, and other apostles of change—can seem to such people when, on the basis of a couple of books the interloper has read or a few (usually summer) weeks in the field with a pair of binoculars and some radio collars, he suggests a new direction for the local ecosystem and says he can’t envision any difficulties.

IN ALL THE YEARS I have spent standing or sitting on the banks of this river, I have learned this: the more knowledge I have, the greater becomes the mystery of what holds that knowledge together, this reticulated miracle called an ecosystem. The longer I watch the river, the more amazed I become (afraid, actually, sometimes) at the confidence of those people who after a few summer seasons here are ready to tell the county commissioners, emphatically, what the river is, to scribe its meaning for the outlander.

Firsthand knowledge is enormously time consuming to acquire; with its dallying and lack of end points, it is also out of phase with the short-term demands of modern life. It teaches humility and fallibility, and so represents an antithesis to progress. It makes a stance of awe in the witness of natural process seem appropriate, and attempts at summary knowledge naïve. Historically, tyrants have sought selectively to eliminate firsthand knowledge when its sources lay outside their control. By silencing those with problematic firsthand experiences, they reduced the number of potential contradictions in their political or social designs, and so they felt safer. It is because natural process—how a mountain range disintegrates or how nitrogen cycles through a forest—is beyond the influence of the visionaries of globalization that firsthand knowledge of a country’s ecosystems, a rapidly diminishing pool of expertise and awareness, lies at the radical edge of any country’s political thought.

OVER THE YEARS I have become a kind of naturalist, although I previously rejected the term because I felt I did not know enough, that my knowledge was far too incomplete. I never saw myself in the guise of Gilbert White, but I respected his work enough to have sought out his grave in Selbourne and expressed there my gratitude for his life. I never took a course in biology, not even in high school, and so it seemed to me that I couldn’t really be any sort of authentic naturalist. What biology I was able to learn I took from books, from veterinary clinics, from an apprenticeship to my homeland in the Cascades, from field work with Western biologists, and from traveling with hunters and gatherers. As a naturalist, I have taken the lead of native tutors, who urged me to participate in the natural world, not hold it before me as an object of scrutiny.

When I am by the river, therefore, I am simply there. I watch it closely, repeatedly, and feel myself not apart from it. I do not feel compelled to explain it. I wonder sometimes, though, whether I am responding to the wrong question when it comes to speaking “for nature.” Perhaps the issue is not whether one has the authority to claim to be a naturalist, but whether those who see themselves as naturalists believe they have the authority to help shape the world. What the naturalist-as-emissary intuits, I think, is that if he or she doesn’t speak out, the political debate will be left instead to those seeking to benefit their various constituencies. Strictly speaking, a naturalist has no constituency.

To read the newspapers today, to merely answer the phone, is to know the world is in flames. People do not have time for the sort of empirical immersion I believe crucial to any sort of wisdom. This terrifies me, but I, too, see the developers’ bulldozers arrayed at the mouth of every canyon, poised at the edge of every plain. And the elimination of these lands, I know, will further reduce the extent of the blueprints for undamaged life. After the last undomesticated stretch of land is brought to heel, there will be only records—strips of film and recording tape, computer printouts, magazine articles, books, laser-beam surveys—of these immensities. And then any tyrant can tell us what it meant, and in which direction we should now go. In this scenario, the authority of the grizzly bear will be replaced by the authority of a charismatic who says he represents the bear. And the naturalist—the ancient emissary to a world civilization wished to be rid of, a world it hoped to transform into a chemical warehouse, the same uneasy emissary who intuited that to separate nature from culture wouldn’t finally work—will be an orphan. He will become a dealer in myths.

What being a naturalist has come to mean to me, sitting my mornings and evenings by the river, hearing the clack of herons through the creak of swallows over the screams of osprey under the purl of fox sparrows, so far removed from White and Darwin and Leopold and even Carson, is this: Pay attention to the mystery. Apprentice to the best apprentices. Rediscover in nature your own biology. Write and speak with appreciation for all you have been gifted. Recognize that a politics with no biology, or a politics without field biology, or a political platform in which human biological requirements form but one plank, is a vision of the gates of Hell.

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Barry Lopez is the author of Arctic Dreams, for which he received the National Book Award, two collections of essays,Crossing Open Ground and About This Life, and eight works of fiction, including Winter Count and Field Notes. He is known for his 2001 book Light Action in the Caribbean (Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.) and his most recent publication entitled Home Ground: Language for an American Landscape .

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As an “old guy,”I am absolutely blown away by magnitude of the changes I see around me when I compare American life and culture in 2013 with what I remember of say, 1958, the year of my college graduation. Never mind contemplating life in 1776 which I only experienced as a historian through diaries and other primary sources.

In this NY Times op-ed piece, Krugman has put his finger on several of the most obvious differences, and they are certainly notable.  It’s hard for me as a semi-aware and mostly “with it”  Senior not to feel increasingly out of date and irrelevant. I wonder which, if any, of my ancestors might have felt this way.

I’m going to try and think seriously about that question in the weeks ahead as I make use of my Apple devices to explore the universe through the orbiting Hubble telescope controlled from Baltimore and Munich, appreciate art in the Louvre, listen to original concerts by Dylan and the Beetles on YouTube, do research in the Smithsonian, learn how to make Lemon Tarts from culinary experts in Scotland, watch House of Cards and the 2012 Broncos at Sports Authority Field, keep my ancient mind flexible by trying to solve the puzzles on Lumosity, check on the weather in New England where my daughters live, investigate what might have caused the train wreck in Spain or what color little Prince George’s hair will be, find out what my friends are eating and reading, and even locate and see a photograph of the grave site of a distant ancestor in a cemetery in Royal Tunbridge Wells south of London.

And all this while not moving more than my fingers to stroke the alphabetical keys on a composite keyboard (made of rare metals from all over the world), designed by adolescents in California, assembled in China, and shipped in a Japanese container ship powered by shale oil from Canada.

And that’s but a microdot of the change that’s around me. No wonder I’m feeling out of it!

• 

OP-ED COLUMNIST

E Pluribus Unum

By PAUL KRUGMAN Published: July 4, 2013 449 Comments

Enlarge This Image
It’s that time of year — the long weekend when we gather with friends and family to celebrate hot dogs, potato salad and, yes, the founding of our nation. And it’s also a time for some of us to wax a bit philosophical, to wonder what, exactly, we’re celebrating. Is America in 2013, in any meaningful sense, the same country that declared independence in 1776?

Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times

Paul Krugman

The answer, I’d suggest, is yes. Despite everything, there is a thread of continuity in our national identity — reflected in institutions, ideas and, especially, in attitude — that remains unbroken. Above all, we are still, at root, a nation that believes in democracy, even if we don’t always act on that belief.

And that’s a remarkable thing when you bear in mind just how much the country has changed.

America in 1776 was a rural land, mainly composed of small farmers and, in the South, somewhat bigger farmers with slaves. And the free population consisted of, well, WASPs: almost all came from northwestern Europe, 65 percent came from Britain, and 98 percent were Protestants.

America today is nothing like that, even though some politicians — think Sarah Palin — like to talk as if the “real America” is still white, Protestant, and rural or small-town.

But the real America is, in fact, a nation of metropolitan areas, not small towns. Tellingly, even when Ms. Palin made her infamous remarks in 2008 she did so in Greensboro, N.C., which may not be in the Northeast Corridor but — with a metropolitan population of more than 700,000 — is hardly Mayberry. In fact, two-thirds of Americans live in metro areas with half-a-million or more residents.

Nor, by the way, are most of us living in leafy suburbs. America as a whole has only 87 people per square mile, but the average American, according to the Census Bureau, lives in a census tract with more than 5,000 people per square mile. For all the bashing of the Northeast Corridor as being somehow un-American, this means that the typical American lives in an environment that resembles greater Boston or greater Philadelphia more than it resembles Greensboro, let alone true small towns.

What do we do in these dense metropolitan areas? Almost none of us are farmers; few of us hunt; by and large, we sit in cubicles on weekdays and visit shopping malls on our days off.

And ethnically we are, of course, very different from the founders. Only a minority of today’s Americans are descended from the WASPs and slaves of 1776. The rest are the descendants of successive waves of immigration: first from Ireland and Germany, then from Southern and Eastern Europe, now from Latin America and Asia. We’re no longer an Anglo-Saxon nation; we’re only around half-Protestant; and we’re increasingly nonwhite.

Yet I would maintain that we are still the same country that declared independence all those years ago.

It’s not just that we have maintained continuity of legal government, although that’s not a small thing. The current government of France is, strictly speaking, the Fifth Republic; we had our anti-monarchical revolution first, yet we’re still on Republic No. 1, which actually makes our government one of the oldest in the world.

More important, however, is the enduring hold on our nation of the democratic ideal, the notion that “all men are created equal” — all men, not just men from certain ethnic groups or from aristocratic families. And to this day — or so it seems to me, and I’ve done a lot of traveling in my time — America remains uniquely democratic in its mannerisms, in the way people from different classes interact.

Of course, our democratic ideal has always been accompanied by enormous hypocrisy, starting with the many founding fathers who espoused the rights of man, then went back to enjoying the fruits of slave labor. Today’s America is a place where everyone claims to support equality of opportunity, yet we are, objectively, the most class-ridden nation in the Western world — the country where children of the wealthy are most likely to inherit their parents’ status. It’s also a place where everyone celebrates the right to vote, yet many politicians work hard to disenfranchise the poor and nonwhite.

But that very hypocrisy is, in a way, a good sign. The wealthy may defend their privileges, but given the temper of America, they have to pretend that they’re doing no such thing. The block-the-vote people know what they’re doing, but they also know that they mustn’t say it in so many words. In effect, both groups know that the nation will view them as un-American unless they pay at least lip service to democratic ideals — and in that fact lies the hope of redemption.

So, yes, we are still, in a deep sense, the nation that declared independence and, more important, declared that all men have rights. Let’s all raise our hot dogs in salute.

A version of this op-ed appeared in print on July 5, 2013, on page A19 of the New York edition with the headline: E Pluribus Unum.

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INSIDE NYTIMES.COM

Here are a couple of words that cause me to grit my teeth and mutter under my breath.  So please add them to my previous post on this topic.

Rock used as a transitive verb, as in “you really rock that sweater” or “I rocked the SAT’s” or “I sure rocked that pizza.”

Channel is often used as a verb that apparently draws on its roots in the psychic or fortune teller world. “Obama is channeling Bill Clinton” or “Def Leppard is trying to channel the Rolling Stones.”

Chops appears to be something you earn, not eat or demand from your barber, or do to liver. Rather it appears to refer to technical expertise, particularly (not always) in music, as in “he doesn’t have the chops to try that solo” or “she earned her chops while working as the baker’s assistant.”

Even writing this blog is giving me a headache, so before I start down that slippery slope, please pass me an Advil or pain reliever substitute.

This is an incredible piece of interpretive writing by Chris Hedges who, in the recent past, has spoken more consistently, bravely, honestly, and articulately about the greatness and ills of America than any other observer of the contemporary scene.  Here, Hedges uses Melville’s classic story of the great white whale pursued relentlessly the obsessive captain Ahab to provide us some insights into the character of America and Americans today. Through Hedges eyes, the American “voyage” is plagued by Ahab’s character faults, suggesting that the end of the “hunt”may, like the Pequod,  not be a pleasant one for our country. Everything in me resonates with Hedges’ interpretation. This makes me deeply sad because I see the symptoms of our malaise all around me every day–as well as ever-present in myself.

As you read, I hope that you will stay open to the insights contained in this article. I only wish that I could be sitting around a seminar table with you using this piece as the source material for a discussion class in American History.

We Are All Aboard the Pequod

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/we_are_all_aboard_the_pequod_20130707/

Posted on Jul 7, 2013

This essay was shared with me a few weeks ago by Treva Oocha, a resident of my apartment building who is adding to her education by taking classes from time to time. Professionally she’s a successful telecommunications saleswoman, but in her “spare time” she has been working on her writing. Now and then she asks me to help her with her compositions.

Treva wrote the following piece to fulfill an assignment for a writing class she’s taking. The assignment required her to use the alphabet as a structure for an essay on any topic. I’ll let you make your own decision about the writing’s merits, but I was deeply moved. I asked Treva if I could publish her work in my blog, and she reluctantly agreed because she didn’t feel her efforts merited sharing with the public. She also reminded me that this is a draft and not a finished product.

Tom West would have appreciated this. I do too…. a lot!

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A BOSTON MARATHON PRIMER