Henry Ford, Socialist

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Ford workers on the line assemble engines in a public domain photo from Henry Ford’s 1922 memoir, "My Life and Work." A caption reads, “Henry Ford turned the thinking of employers to reduction of unit costs—not wages—and helped them to see that it is bad business to destroy customers by reducing their purchasing power.”

Henry Ford, Socialist
By John Unger Zussman

Detroit was a great town for labor when I grew up there in the ‘50s and ‘60s. While I never worked on the assembly lines—my uncle’s steel warehouse had first dibs on my summer labor—I had friends who did. The work was stultifying, but the pay was good, and they socked away money for college.

The high pay was because of Henry Ford, and it was not an accident. Ford had no love of labor unions (or Jews, for that matter, but that’s another story)—quite the opposite. Yet in 1914, he stunned the business world by offering a wage of $5 a day—more than double the prevailing rate.

Ford’s bold move did more than attract skilled mechanics and workers to Detroit and reduce Ford Motor Company’s heavy employee turnover. It spearheaded the creation of a vast middle class, including blue- as well as white-collar workers. The canny Ford realized that, if he was going to sell his mass-produced cars, his own workers (and those of other companies) had to make enough money to afford them. “I believe in the first place,” he wrote in his memoir, “that, all other considerations aside, our own sales depend in a measure upon the wages we pay.” For seventy years, American industry and the American middle class grew in tandem.

That link has now been strained to the breaking point. For the last thirty years, the American middle class has been under assault. It started with the right’s beloved Saint Reagan, whose orgy of tax cuts and deregulation spawned not only the savings and loan crisis but also a massive transfer of wealth from workers to the rich. Real middle-class incomes have stagnated since Reagan. “Morning in America”—to the extent it was ever more than a campaign slogan—was confined to the wealthy.

Corporations—no longer American but global—can afford to underpay or lay off American workers because they are no longer dependent on them either as labor or as consumers. Automation and robotics have reduced the proportion of labor costs in manufacturing. Advances in telecommunications and transportation allow corporations to relocate operations to locations where wages are lowest. And a growing global middle class provides a market of eager customers with money to spend.

All this represents capitalism in the 21st century, as companies find new ways to compete and find their market. But satisfying the market becomes almost irrelevant when big corporations can lobby the government to keep themselves solvent. Automakers make SUVs that become impossible to sell when gas prices rise, so they run to the government for bailouts. Oil companies reap generous tax breaks even when they make record profits. Food conglomerates collect extravagant farm subsidies even when their factory farming practices endanger the environment and produce food that makes us obese and sick. This is corporate socialism, showering benefits on people who decry socialism.

Nowhere has the link between wealthy corporations and the struggling middle class been severed more completely than in the financial industry. In the wake of the financial meltdown, the big banks have eliminated the need to have markets at all. Matt Taibbi’s recent exposé of the financial bailouts in Rolling Stone describes the feeding frenzy of free money and guaranteed profits that followed the financial meltdown of 2008.

In one of Taibbi’s classic examples of corporate welfare to the financial industry—though by no means the most egregious—the Fed offered loans to banks at near-zero interest rates, intending to buoy up their balance sheets and encourage lending to businesses and consumers. But because the Bush (and later Obama) administrations attached few strings to those loans, the banks simply took the money and bought Treasury bills, realizing a 2% risk-free profit for essentially lending the government back its own—that is to say, our own—money!

The strained link between corporate and middle-class prosperity is why we have another jobless recovery, why corporate profits and GDP and the stock market have been on a tear for two years while the middle class struggles. It is class warfare and we ought to call it that. Unfortunately, right-wing politicians and media—who somehow still dominate political discourse in this country despite the debacle of the Bush administration—have co-opted the term, crying “class warfare” whenever someone proposes that tax rates be returned to those of the “oppressive” ‘90s. They have somehow convinced the American middle class that their interests, as Bill Maher likes to point out, are the same as Steve Forbes’.

We need to take the term back. Class warfare is what we need to wage, and it ought to be our battle cry as we tell the American people who’s been waging war on whom.

No, Henry Ford was not a socialist. But he felt a responsibility to American workers. If he were alive today, he just might be on our side.

Additional links:

It’s telling that some of the best reporting on the financial meltdown has come from Taibbi’s groundbreaking reports in Rolling Stone, Planet Money and Pulitzer Prize-winning ProPublica’s features on public radio’s This American Life, and Charles Ferguson’s Oscar-winning documentary, Inside Job. Why have their startling revelations found so little resonance in the supposedly liberal mainstream media? Because mainstream media are big corporations too.

Update 4/21/11:

Astute reader Robert Mayer, professor of consumer studies at the University of Utah, observes that former secretary of labor Robert Reich makes similar points in his recent book, Aftershock. Reich has spoken out strongly to decry the right’s attack on the middle class. “After 1980,” he writes, “the pendulum swung backward.” Indeed.

Update 4/27/11:

A new study by the Congressional Research Office now confirms the extent to which the big banks borrowed at low interest rates from the Fed and then, instead of lending to consumers or businesses, simply turned around and bought Treasury bills. The report was requested by Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT), who has taken a lead role in exposing such practices.

Copyright © 2011, John Unger Zussman. All rights reserved.

SATURDAY POETRY SERIES PRESENTS: JAMES VALVIS

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THE LINES AT ST. PAUL’S
by James Valvis

The nuns lined up the boys on one side, girls on the other.
We lined up knowing God loved us and Jesus was God.
We lined up understanding our place in heaven was arranged.
We lined up as boys and girls, but that was all that separated us.
Not once did we line up according to appearance or wealth,
or according to size of our breasts, or the strength of our biceps.
We didn’t line up as Democrats and Republicans, blacks and whites.
Never lined up as fats and thins, prudes and sluts, gays and straights,
We didn’t line up as believers and doubters, saints and sinners.
To the nuns, we were all sinners who were trying to become saints.
To ourselves, we were all saints who would like to one day be sinners.
They lined us up and marched us to recess, lunch, the bathrooms.
They lined us up, all the girls pretty and smiling,
all the boys tough and smirking, like it would always be that way,
like those perfect rows would go on forever and ever and ever,
like if you simply followed the person in front of you
you would get to the place you needed to be,
and for a while you dreamed it possible,
maybe you all did, even the nuns,
until one kid stopped suddenly
and the pushing started.


(“The Lines at St. Paul’s” was originally published in First Class and is reprinted here today with permission from the poet.)

James Valvis lives in Washington State with his wife, daughter, and cat. His poems or stories have recently appeared in Arts & Letters, Atlanta Review, Crab Creek Review, Hanging Loose, LA Review, Nimrod, Pank, Rattle, River Styx, and are forthcoming in Daily Science Fiction, Fractured West, Kill Author, Midwest Quarterly, Night Train, New York Quarterly, Pinyon, Sierra Nevada Review, Verdad, and many others. In addition to being a multiple Pushcart and Best of the Web nominee, a novelette was a storySouth Million Writers Notable Story. A poetry collection, How to Say Goodbye, is due in 2011.

Editor’s Note: Ah, the allure of order! The ease of being just another member of the flock! When we have no choice, when we are told what to do, life is simpler. But the easy road is more often than not the wrong road. Today’s piece functions as a philosophical commentary as much as a poem. With brilliant moments like “To the nuns, we were all sinners who were trying to become saints. / To ourselves, we were all saints who would like to one day be sinners,” and “like if you simply followed the person in front of you / you would get to the place you needed to be,” this poem contemplates the human condition in modern times, within the framework built around us by religion and society. A huge topic deftly considered in a few swift clean lines.

Want to read more by and about James Valvis?
Poets & Writers
NYQ Poets

SATURDAY POETRY SERIES PRESENTS: LISA ZARAN

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By Lisa Zaran:

RETICENCE

Never
does the world
not fall into my lap.

And if God
Himself
were to send me
a private message,
would I react?

Knowing,
possibly not knowing,
reluctant in every passing
thought.

Nor trusting,
holding the weight
of every word spoken
in the palm of my hand,
looking into the not-so-distant
future of every gesture
as if behind each
was a guise
or a secret.

There’s always
the thought
that something
might go terribly wrong.

Every day
the world falls
into my lap
and every day
I’m afraid to touch it
frightened of what it might bring.


FROM BRIDE TO BURIED

It is a chorus, her mother thought
when she was born, a fragile lilt
of voices singing rise rise rise
as if her daughter were already a myth.

She was a knowledgeable child,
too trusting perhaps but never flighty,
no never that. Her center could always
grasp what her mind could not.

She learned very early to trust
her body, its rhythms and advice.
She being an only child, grew with the speed
of those shown to know everything

in corresponding order.
This is your nose, see, touch it.
These are your feet. Soon you will walk.
Out there, beyond this window, is the world.

Which is also a perception.
See that tree over there? Could be
a madman standing in utter stillness
in the breach of night. Shhhhh.

The earth is tired now. The moon is up.
Lock the door, fasten the windows.
Sleep and dream of every possibility.
For beyond this childhood you will meet

a man and fall in love. He will ring you out
of yourself. He will convince you that
you are not yours but his and at the apex
of your dependency where hands and hammers

become one in the same blunt instrument,
he will strike you again and again and again.
To seek your remains, I will pass my fingertips
over your picture. I will try to remember

the scent of your breath, your intangible life.


(“Reticence” and “From Bride to Buried” were originally published in A Little Poetry. Both poems are reprinted here today with permission from the poet.)

Lisa Zaran was born in 1969 in Los Angeles, California. She is an American poet, essayist and the author of six collections including The Blondes Lay Content and the sometimes girl, the latter of which was the focus of a year long translation course in Germany. Subsequently published to German in 2006 under the title: das manchmal mädchen. Selections from her other books have been translated to Bangla, Hindi, Arabic, Chinese, German, Dutch, Persian and Serbian. Her poems have appeared in hundreds of literary journals, magazines, broadsides, anthologies and e-zines including: Juked, Ramshackle Review, Apparatus Magazine, Hudson Review, Black Dirt, Other Voices, Kritya, The Dande Review, Soul to Soul, Nomad’s Choir Poetry Journal, Not a Muse Anthology, Best of the Web 2010, Literature: an intro to Reading and Writing by Pearson as well as being performed in Glasgow’s Radio Theater Group and displayed in SONS, a museum in Kruishoutem, Belgium. Lisa is founder and editor of Contemporary American Voices, an online collection of poetry by American poets. She is also the author of Dear Bob Dylan, a collection of letters to her muse. She lives and writes in Arizona.

Editor’s Note: Today’s poems give the reader food for thought. The first is, in my reading, a contemplation of the idea of outside forces, who or what is in control of our lives, and the responsibility we as humans have to do what we can with the opportunities and responsibilities laid in our laps. The second is a darker piece, almost cryptic, following the life of a woman from girlhood and the protection of her family home to adulthood and the abusive relationship that ends her life. Both poems are highly successful in their ability to make the reader think, perhaps outside the box of the reader’s normal thinking, and contemplate ideas and worlds that may or may not be their own.

Want to read more by and about Lisa Zaran?
Lisa Zaran Official Website
Contemporary American Voices

http://contemporaryamericanvoices.com/

Book Review

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Sloth by Mark Goldblatt (Greenpoint Press, 2010)
reviewed by Duff Brenna

Air the color of khaki, soot on windows prismed with sunlight, neon-skewed dust, the smell of engine fluid and pralines, steam rising from the hood of a truck, a cluster of taxis. Throw into this assortment of images an unnamed narrator trying to prove he isn’t crazy: “Despite appearances, sir, I am not out of my mind. Quite the reverse, it is sanity itself which moves me to this exercise. Sanity itself which moves me to accost you … “

Dostoevsky permeates Goldblatt’s Sloth, especially Notes from Underground with its duality and layers of unreliable realities. Add a large lump of adoration for a TV aerobics instructor named Holly Servant worshipped and wooed from afar by the love-struck diarist of this story and you have what amounts to a word-rich ride, rollickingly inventive.

Will Holly ever respond to the letters of the man who gives himself the pseudonym Mark Goldblatt, whose Medieval beliefs rely, in part, on the notion that beauty of flesh testifies to higher virtues of the soul, the inside reflecting the outside? Truth is beauty, beauty is truth, that’s all ye know on earth and all ye need to know. The nameless narrator a.k.a. Mark Goldblatt builds his dizzying “metronomic dance” around Keats’ famous insight into what makes males tick, especially horny young males transfixed by “areolae shining like tulips through her leotard … pixied blond hair clinging to her moist back and shoulders.” Goldblatt, the real one, the author self-reflexively observing the fictional one, could easily (if he wanted to) write literary pornography that would rival (possibly surpass) anything Robert Cleland wrote when he was obsessed with Fanny’s fanny. But though Sloth doesn’t shy away from things sexual, titillating sex is not its primary purpose, which is rather a somewhat philosophical search for identity.

Who is a.k.a. Goldblatt? And who is Zezel (also known as Mark Goldblatt) who dips in and out of the narrative, playing the role of “best friend” and perhaps in the past a.k.a.’s lover, a great perhaps that a.k.a. denies. No: “He is my dearest friend, yes, but an odd case.”

Who is Mrs. Zezel? Mrs. Zezel is “a Vassar girl … summa cum sassy.
She is, in sum, the very locus of reason, a geometric proof of the soul …” And also trickster devil-may-care “cross between Lauren Bacall and Leo Gorcey.” Mrs. Zezel gets a.k.a. a date with Allison Molho, but he stands her up, an insult for which Mrs. Zezel will never forgive him, even after she finds out her husband Zezel has taken a.k.a.’s place and is in full-blown adultery mode. Mrs. Zezel’s revenge falls on a.k.a. This comes later in the book and is aided by a kitchen counter. Let your imagination loose, Goldblatt certainly does.

Into the author’s cheerful tongue-in-cheek muddle concerning the vicissitudes of love comes a.k.a.’s desperate need to make enough money to buy a VCR, so that he can rent Holly Servant’s Sunrise cassettes and watch her aerobic gyrations, until he is sweat-soaked and satisfied—at least for a few moments.

His main source of income comes from being a waiter. Not a waiter who waits on tables, but a waiter who waits in line, standing in for those who don’t want to show up too early and wait for doors to open for shows and/or events to begin. But the meager income a.k.a. earns from waiting is not enough to afford the coveted VCR. He reads an advertisement asking for volunteers for a scientific experiment. He signs up and is given some green pills, which might or might not contain a new psychotropic drug. His instructions are to take the pills and record his moods or behavior and return to the office every two weeks to have his finger pricked. Each time he is pricked he also receives one hundred dollars. What a deal! He’ll have that VCR in no time and will be able to spend his days and nights wallowing in Holly’s mesmerizing pulchritude.

The plot thickens when a young gay man is murdered and a.k.a. becomes a person of interest. At this point Zezel has already fallen for Allison Molho. The woman who pricks a.k.a.’s finger has also fallen for Allison Molho. Then Mrs. Zezel has that encounter with a.k.a. on the kitchen counter. But even before such a frightening event, Holly starts answering a.k.a.’s letters at last. Their correspondence moves them ever so slowly closer. Maybe he’s her soul-mate. He tells her he is a writer and sends her some of his stories. Problem is: Zezel wrote the stories. Zezel wrote them under the pseudonym Mark Goldblatt. So right away a.k.a. is misrepresenting himself. He’s already lying to the woman he loves more than anyone else in the world.

And then they talk about meeting.

And the detectives keep questioning him.

And a menacing-looking man is spying on a.k.a.

When Zezel breaks into the apartment and reads a.k.a.’s journal, what he finds there makes him want revenge for the kitchen counter incident with Mrs. Zezel.

Will he do something desperate? Will he hurt a.k.a.? Will the spy kidnap him? Will Holly really show up for the rendezvous? Will the detectives try to pin the murder of the gay man on a.k.a.?

Well, it just gets curiouser and curiouser.

Sloth is a work full of artistic flavor and Rabelaisian slumming. It is funny, serious, insightful and as unique in style and substance as any seriocomic novel I’ve read since Steven Gillis penned The Consequence of Skating or Junot Diaz wrote The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. Some novels leave you with a smile. Some leave you thoroughly satisfied. Sloth does both.

***

DUFF BRENNA is the author of six novels. He is the recipient of an AWP Award for Best Novel, a National Endowment for the Arts Award, a South Florida Sun-Sentinel Award for Favorite Book of the year, a Milwaukee Magazine Best Short Story of the Year Award, and a Pushcart Honorable Mention. His work has been translated into six languages.

Hopeful Mushroom or Lonely Arugula?

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©MAYA HAYUK, Mushrooms 1 – 6, 2009  http://mayahayuk.com/

One of the first things I do every day is delete stuff out of my email inbox: heartlessly I trash LAST CHANCE TO SAVE POLAR BEARS along with many other invited entreaties from MoveOn.org, Greenpeace, Alvarez, WWF Canada etc. When I’m feeling particularly buoyant I choose one petition to sign and sometimes I’ll even post it to fakecrack. If I fail to cull these worthy invitations I start to feel symptoms of my (self-diagnosed) 21st century malaise — Systems Overload Disorder ( SOD for short) which manifests as a feeling of being helplessly over-informed and correspondingly unhappy about heavy shit I can’t do much about. My email deleting ritual is one of my many coping mechanisms, devised, I might add, without the advice or support of either a health care professional or a second-hand self-help manual. I have also made a habit of drinking an early cup of strong coffee, which generally propels me first to the bathroom and then to a high-speed writing jag which may or may not yield useful material. Then I look online for jobs: after the exhausting process of variously imagining myself working as a receptionist for a holistic veterinarian in the Outer Sunset, telemarketing for a dubious outfit in the Financial District or answering phones for a gay porn studio in the TL  I apply to a couple of vacancies and then turn swiftly to my Hopeful Mushroom project to jolly myself up.

I spend the next hour researching my ambitious idea for a slow food co-op which is also a storefront ambient café incorporating  gallery space, a weekly flea market, monthly underground party venue, possibly therapy rooms and a modest on-site mushroom farm. My research runs along the lines of legal requirements, organizational features of co-ops, possible funding and vacant commercial properties. I call this pipe dream project The Hopeful Mushroom because mycelia seems to me more optimistic than mostly everything else on the planet.

There are literally millions of species of fungi on this planet, around 150,000 of these are specifically identified as mushrooms , so far we’ve documented around 50,000 of them and managed to give around 14,000 their own names. Paul Stamets is probably the greatest living authority and advocate of mushroom-kind  and he believes that mushrooms suffer from a kind of ‘biological racism’ where many cultures regard mycelia as dangerous, ugly and potentially poisonous, while others have nurtured a love and respect for them and an awareness of the very positive benefits they give us. Stamets thinks that this biological racism might have grown from our ignorance at how mushrooms live and grow: contrary to popular belief, mushrooms don’t grow at night, its just that we notice where they have popped up in daylight. Mushrooms are everywhere, mycelia cover most of the landmass on the planet and some individual fungal mats cover thousands of acres and are hundreds of years old. Mycological research tells us that fungi are smart: the way that fungi react to sudden environmental changes is a testimony to their intelligence and awareness. When mycelia detect the bacteria E Coli in the soil the crystalline entities which live on the edge of the fungal mat send a chemical signal back to the mother mycelium that, in turn, generates a customized macro-crystal which attracts the motile bacteria by the thousands,  — the advancing mycelium then consume the dastardly E. coli, effectively eliminating them from the environment. Bioremediation techniques using mushrooms are just beginning to be utilized in human orchestrated ecological rehabilitation – take the phenomenal success of oyster mushrooms being employed to “eat” heavy oil – they do it and then internally neutralize the toxicity!

Mushrooms, in the form of saprophytic and parasitic fungi help create the organic components of topsoil and mushroom composting yields not just excellent dirt but will generate free tasty nutritional mushrooms, good to eat and to use medicinally. Stamets believes that the way mushrooms communicate with each other reveals them as a kind of Gaian Internet, and says that our current computer technology mimics their biological model of network integration. What more might this incredible life form be capable of ?  Maybe they can negate radioactivity as well as petroleum contamination.

Then of course there is the psychedelic dimension to consider: the far out fungi that McKenna and Wasson championed and believed had profoundly affected the development of consciousness in us precociously curious  humans. I am just a neophyte in the study of mycology and untrained in scientific thought it takes me a while to comprehend this kind of meaty discourse. Always ready to expand my scant knowledge I happily purchased Andy Letcher’s Shroom: A Cultural History of Magic Mushrooms ( Harper Perennial, 2007) last Christmas Eve. The colorful psychedelic cover led me to believe I’d scored the perfect gift for our friend Clancy, who likes a good read, but as he forgot to take it home with him after Christmas dinner I started to read it myself. Before I’d even finished Chapter One I realized that Letcher was on a mission to discredit the existence of a historic relationship between mushrooms and humans. Blatantly on page five he writes that “most all others before us have regarded them [magic mushrooms] as worthless”  and this is what the ensuing three hundred odd pages are dedicated to proving- that we contemporary psychonauts constitute the first “Mushroom People” and this amounts to nothing significant. What “we” believe or achieve never gets discussed but the midriff chapters wade through Letcher’s anti-psychedelic thesis which sets out to discredit the major psychedelic theories of the twentieth century. Gordon Wasson, the self-funded and published author who documented the pre-christian use of psilocybin by the cunanderos of Huatla, Mexico gets a vote of no confidence from Letcher. Wasson’s theories about psychedelic mushrooms being part of human’s religious consciousness are dismissed as Wasson’s lack of academic rigor are highlighted. Letcher manages to overlook that for Maria Sabina and her contemporaries to have been practicing pre-christian mushroom rituals in the 1950s the logical inference is that those rituals pre-date the Spanish conquest of Mexico in the 16th century. Because Wasson wasn’t an academic by profession doesn’t preclude him from having a good idea or two and as a wealthy banker he was able to fund research which otherwise might not have happened. Wasson was not summarily despised by all social and scientific theorists of the day, Claude Levi-Strauss was a supporter and so was Albert Hoffman. Terence McKenna was inspired by Wasson’s idea of early religious use of mushrooms and developed it further, continuing to research in the field and theorizing even more adventurously about the interrelationship of mycelia and men. Letcher doesn’t get deeply into McKenna’s many theories but he does rubbish his Timewave Zero algorithm which for him justifies writing McKenna off as little more than a talented “senarchie” a rather patronizing way of calling him a “storyteller”. Robert Graves, whose The White Goddess ( Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1948) attempted to grasp the origins of poetic expression and considers Druidic and other ancient belief systems is written off in academic terms entirely.

Letcher’s tone is politely apologetic as he breaks it to his readers that their mushroom experiences have no historic validity or corollaries. While he is obviously fascinated and even personally experienced in psychedelic research he cannot accommodate any kind of meaningful historic context, consoling us with many  amusing anecdotes of historic textual references to accidental ingestions. This doesn’t fly for me as Letcher’s own methodology is as flawed as the theorists he condemns as determinist: he accuses Wasson, McKenna, Graves et al for simply fitting their data to their pre-concieved ideas about human/mushroom history, he even accuses McKenna of enhancing the mushroom-like aspects of ancient cave art. However Letcher chooses to totally disregard existing archeological evidence and makes nothing meaningful of the continuing religious practices of indigenous cultures which use natural psychedelics. The archeological record continues to expand and advances in technology mean we can now retrieve more meaning from the data. Just a few weeks ago I read about the discovery of cave art near the Spanish town of Villar del Humo ( New Scientist, 6 March 2011) which shows a bull and a row of thirteen psilocybin mushrooms, carefully painted to show the species’ distinctive caps and characteristically twisted stems. It is not only actual evidence that Letcher ignores but current trends in archeology which acknowledge that our conception of history is colored by our own self-created human ethnology. Take for example  long-held ideas about the Roman conquest of Britain: native Britons have long been considered as having a much less developed civilization that their dominators who supposedly modernized the territory with innovations like their superior road-building skills. A recent archeological investigation in northern England exploring a stretch of Roman Road dug down and discovered that the road had actually existed several hundred years before the Romans arrived- thus the incursionists had merely resurfaced the highway. This new data reinterprets our view of history, now we regard the fact that many ancient pre-roman sites are found on pre-Roman routes differently and see that the Romans were working with existing structures. Similarly a recent excavation of an ancient British pre-Roman cemetery yielded funerary goods which demonstrate the technological sophistication of indigenous craftsmen as well as the far-reaching trade routes which imported Phoenician glassware and Italian pottery to these supposed barbarians. We have relied on the opinions expressed in the Roman texts to inform our own ideas about history which are now being challenged. Unfortunately new interpretations of  ancient history do not filter into mainstream consciousness quickly which is why the suppositions of  disenchanted hippies like Letcher are all the more problematic: we don’t need pseudo-intellectuals shutting doors that really original thinkers are nudging open for us. John W. Allen, author of the oldest guide to magic mushrooms, Magic Mushrooms of the Pacific Northwest ( Psilly Publications, 1976) which has sold over 100,000 copies  writes disparagingly of Letcher’s research:  Allen debunks the author’s unsubstantiated claims (eg. That English shroomers predated a modern North American tradition) and draws attention to many inaccuracies in Letcher’s 20th century timeline.

Personally, I keep an open mind to what may or mayn’t have transpired in the past, I believe humans will only survive if we are open-minded and do not cling sentimentally to ideas which may be irrelevant to us now. Our linear and human-centric apprehension  of world history needs close examination by vigorous thinkers ( not any chancer with a couple of doctorates, a word processor and the green light from a publisher fixated on potential best-seller material).

More useful ideas are voiced in  The TIME BEFORE History (Scribner, 1997) by Colin Tudge, a biologist who proposes we need to take a very long view of history to understand our human impact on the planet’s ecology over the last five million years. As Tudge points out, those civilizations which we consider ancient — the Assyrians, Eygptians etc are actually ‘modern civilizations’ coming along after our human trajectory of many thousands of years of existence on the planet.

There can be no justification for shutting down the creative suggestions of those who seek to understand our long-forgotten origins, our past which reveals itself in muddled mythological fragments. More thought-provoking than Letcher’s  revisionist denial of a psychedelic component in human history  is Alan Garner’s powerfully imagined novel Thursbitch (Vintage Books, 2007) a story about a remote English eighteenth century rural community which still uses standing stones as a seasonal almanac and pays respect to the unfathomable forces of nature through ingesting psilocybin.

And so to my lonely arugula, the sole occupant of my vegetable patch. When I’m feeling down I relate to it’s isolation, it’s bitter flavor, the unlikeliness of it ever becoming part of a tasty salad. Luckily I’m more of a hopeful mushroom type and just yesterday I planted two kale starts next to the lonely one. Underneath these three photosynthesizers the  dark earth teems with filaments of fungal mats: I was mistaken, that arugula was never lonely.

P.S. Clancy I have a copy of Thursbitch for you – merry chrimbo!

Art :

Maya Hayuk,  Mushrooms I-IV acrylic on paper   view more at  http://mayahayuk.com/

Books:

Andy Letcher,  Shroom: A Cultural History of the Magic Mushroom (Faber & Faber [U.K.] 2006 HarperPerennial/Ecco [U.S.] 2007)

Colin Tudge, The TIME BEFORE History: 5 Million Years of Human Impact ( Scribner, 1996)

Alan Garner, Thursbitch ( Vintage Books, 2007)

John W. Allen, Magic Mushrooms of the Pacific Northwest ( Psilly Publications, 1976, repub. Raver Books, 1997)

Robert Graves, The White Goddess ( Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1948)

Online sources:

Paul Stamets website MYCOVA

http://www.fungi.com/mycotech/mycova.html

“Earliest Evidence for Magic Mushroom use in Europe” 6 March, New Scientist

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20928025.400-earliest-evidence-for-magic-mushroom-use-in-europe.html

“What the Romans didn’t do for us” Mike Pitts, 16 March 2011

http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2011/mar/16/roman-road-made-by-britons?INTCMP=SRCH

SATURDAY POETRY SERIES PRESENTS: RUMJHUM BISWAS

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MARCH
by Rumjhum Biswas

This is not the season to be alone.
Elements in the air react against skin and heart.
Those soft inner parts that you hid all winter.
It is dangerous to be alone in March.
You can never tell what your eyes will reveal
to a complete stranger at the bus stop or bazaar. Or up the stairs
on your way to the solicitors’ office – what were you doing there
in the first place? This is not the season for lawsuits.
March is not even a season.

March is a licentious beast.
A surreptitious and stealthy time
in the name of such wild feasts
of colours and scents that within your heart
a frantic dove beats its wings and outside
the boney serrated walls, unchained ones caterwaul
calling out to all the unclenched spirits
rising up to kiss the full March Moon.

Intellect is brought down to its knobby knees.
Sagacity, caught brooding
between newly un-muffed ears, is doused.
There is much mischief afoot.

For who really knows what spirits will rule
over this flesh that lies fallen, like an over-ripe autumnal fruit?
Madness marches on scattering tidings as yellow as pollen.

Beware! Should you sniff that heady snuff, you will go
wandering. That timid dove within you will
to your surprise, let out a lusty cry.
Satin sheens of sunlit air will tear
scattering lucent dementia everywhere,
beating wild bacchanalian rhythm. Oh no!
Nothing does or ever will makes sense, in March!

Nothing at all, except the moth balls
that you have begun to tuck
inside quilts still smelling of eggnog and cake crumbs
and a whiff of that something that you
had promised yourself at the end of the year.
But, even that is not enough for March
in whose unrelenting grasp
your body becomes a chalice, overflowing.
Oh, so sweetly overflowing, in March!


(“March” was originally published in A Little Poetry and is reprinted here today with permission from the poet.)

Rumjhum Biswas has been published in countries in all the five continents in both online and print journals and anthologies. One of her poems was long listed in the Bridport Poetry Prize 2006 and is also a finalist in the 2010 Aesthetica Creative Arts Contest. She has won prizes in poetry contests in India. Her poem “March” was commended in the Writelinks’ Spring Fever Competition, 2008. Her story “Ahalya’s Valhalla” was among Story South’s Million Writers’ notable stories of 2007. Her poem “Bones” has been nominated for a 2010 Pushcart by Cha: An Asian Literary Journal. She was a participating poet in the 2008 Prakriti Foundation Poetry Festival in Chennai. She was a featured poet during the Poetry Slam organized jointly by the US Consul General, Chennai and The Prakriti Foundation in December 2009. In December 2010 she was a participating poet at the first Hyderabad Literary Festival organized by Osmania University and Muse India.

Editor’s Note: “March is not even a season. / March is a licentious beast.” It is evident to me that Rumjhum Biswas resides in a place that has seasons. Living out my first full year in New York, I am for the first time aware of the painful end of winter that is March. Here it is, officially spring, but the wind does not listen, the rain does not listen, the snow, sometimes, even, does not listen. There is no longer month than March; its 31 days dragging on achingly, the promise of warmth around a corner that is perpetually out of reach. Today’s poem caught my eye and my heart because the poet has captured the spirit of this dreadful month in the way only a poet can. This is the anthem of March! March, a month-long “unrelenting grasp” harsh against the “soft inner parts that you hid all winter.” Today, for Rumjhum Biswas and for my fellow New Yorkers I say Farewell March! Welcome April, welcome warmth and sun and life!

Want to read more by and about Rumjhum Biswas?
Rumjhum blogs at Writers & Writerisms (her official blog), Polyphagous, and has a monthly column (Rumjhum’s Ruminations) at Flash Fiction Chronicles.

Short Fiction Series: “Red State Blues” by E.M. Schorb

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Red State Blues

by E.M. Schorb

Enola Gay opened the doors of the Battle Flag at nine, but now, near noon, I’m still perched on a cushioned stool in an empty roadhouse in a nowhere crossroads named Downy, outside Atlanta, waiting for a fat wallet to walk in. Enola’s left my Coors and me to dream while she counts cash or something down the other end of nowhere, and I dream of everything I had that mattered, make wishes on Battle Flag matches to get it all back, and blow them out.

I can see you, Maw-Maw, in a movie in my mind, waving two little stick flags on a Fourth of July, the Reb battle flag and the Stars-and-Stripes-Forever, your mouth stuffed with barbeque and slaw, beer suds on your nose, your round face flushed and happy, your white hair wavy as the snow on the ski-slope at Sky Valley where David took me and little Lee the winter before to teach us how to ski. Sometimes with my time-warp Star Trek X-ray vision I can see you when I wasn’t there at all, taking a piss, sitting in that hot port-a-potty at the carnival that set up in that field of Queen-Anne’s Lace and sneeze-making ragweed outside Downy last summer, white as blackboard chalk, but scarce able to sweat even in that boxed-in heat and with one evil fly buzzed down and landed on your pink putty nose which kids used to point at when you were younger and it was that port-a-potty like the Orgone Box cure-all I saw a picture of in my psych textbook when I still had educational ambitions, see you as if the door stood open, but the waiting crowd could only see it shut too long. Hodgkin’s or loss of life force finally killed your body, if not your unkillable spirit of troublesome fun. That lives on in my heart. You were boozing with Bubba, Uncle Bubba, and he was blamed, unfairly, for once, and driven from the pack, eventually, sick of hearing how he took you out and killed you in the most embarrassing public way possible.

But somebody would have surrendered to your wish. It was your life’s blood, the spirit of it, the laughing in the juke joints and calling young studs “sonny boy,” the Nascar video games, the mechanical bulls, the pool tables, the pickled eggs, pale in their jars of anemic beet blood—two of them and a beer made my birthday breakfast this morning—the honky-tonk jukeboxes banging out country music, and all the rest of that laughing life before death.

Hey, Uncle Bubba, how many banks have you robbed? Maw-maw told me once that you’d wasted most of your life behind bars, but the family always stuck by you, leastways until you took your sweet sister out that night to die. Shit, I might as well be with you, wherever you are, as here in the same town with them sin-spitting Bible-thumpers who started driving me out at fifteen, when I had little Lee by someone I couldn’t name for shame, just the way they Bible-thumped Mama out when she popped me, and she’s as gone as you are, Uncle Bubba, leaving me for Maw-Maw to defend, me some kind of bastard halfbreed bitch Mama got from one of her Cherokee boyfriends she liked to run with up in the Smokies, a bastard and breed bitch left for Maw-Maw, who done her duty, then Mama’s too.

“It’s a bitch!” I tell Enola Gay, when she comes my way, about today, tomorrow, and yesterday—about anytime since God’s marble blew up.

“Girl, you got Red State Blues,” says Enola Gay. But what I got now is a coziness around me, like an Indian blanket, not the heat, just that sweet beer safety. Fact is, it’s getting kind of hot in here, with the sun climbing. Enola plugs in the juke box and it lights up like Christmas. That’s cool! I go over and slug it and come back to listen. It’s Patsy Cline—“I Fall to Pieces.” I look in the mirror and see a cowgirl sip at a Coors behind a cancer-stick cloud. That’s me. That is I. See? The little whore knows better. She’s not just trailer trash. She’s been to community college. Thought I’d become a teacher or maybe a nurse, do some good in this good-for-nothing world. If it weren’t for Lee, having to feed Lee after Maw-Maw got her Hodgkin’s and anyway got too old to care for the sweet little brat, maybe I’d be saving lives instead of infecting them.

After I did David he came back like a persistent beau, and even brought me candy and flowers, Whitman’s and roses, and I began to forget that he was a trick and we began to talk because he was a teacher and I still had some of my ambition for learning, and he had this nice patient nature, too, not like the slope-headed, hairy-assed truckers and rednecks and servicemen who come in here looking for sex and trouble. You could ask Enola Gay if David wasn’t a gentleman and a kind of poet with his song lyrics he wrote himself and some of them were about me, too—eventually.

I’m gonna have another cold Coors.

It’s summer out there, and none too cool in here, but shady dark toward the back, where I am, sunny toward the door, with a big splash of sun wavering on the floor like gold water on the yellow wood. The Battle Flag’s got a good dance floor, big enough for shagging, or even line dancing. I just told Enola if she don’t turn up the air-conditioning, I’m taking my beer back into the fridge.

Thinking back, I suppose the best thing was that David liked Lee, showed him magic tricks with cards and chemistry—he taught chemistry—and I stopped turning my own tricks, and signed up for courses, and we began to make a family. David always had money, an “ample sufficiency,” he’d say, but that was what worried me, because he wasn’t teaching; he’d just go off and never say where, what he was doing, and come back and be good as gold to us, and I would tell Enola Gay, who had troubles of her own. I could tell Enola Gay that I was in love, but, black-eyed, she’d only laugh, or, maybe worse, try to wink that black eye.

Then one day David and Lee took off and never came back. David’s meth lab, that he kept secret from me, blew up. I had to go to the Sheriff to find out, nobody came to me. David’s dead and Lee’s dead, too, gone with him to pieces. Every blessed thing I care about is gone, like with the wind. All this shit happened before I was twenty-one, which is to say, that is the yesterday I’ve got to celebrate today. Today! Today’s my birthday, but I got nobody to spend it with. Well, maybe not! Here comes somebody walking on water.

***

E.M. Schorb is a poet and novelist. His work has appeared in 5 AM, Rattle, Quick Fiction, The Haight Ashbury Literary Review, Best American Fantasy, and Camera Obscura (where the above piece originally appeared), among many others. His first novel, Paradise Square, was the winner of the International eBook Award Foundation’s grand prize for fiction at the Frankfurt Book Fair in 2000, and later, A Portable Chaos won the Writers Notes Magazine Book Award for Fiction in 2004. His most recent novel, Fortune Island, was published last year. See more of his work at www.emschorb.com

What You Ought To Know

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The Coming Crisis of Future Food Prices: “Food Interviews, Food Interviews, Food Interviews”

By Liam Hysjulien

In a new series, As It Ought To Be will be providing semimonthly updates on different topics ranging from literature to food policies. This week provided us with a number of interesting interviews with various food experts.

− Interviews –

SATURDAY POETRY SERIES PRESENTS: AMORAK HUEY

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DOROTHY VISITS THE CYCLONE IN THE CONVALESCENCE HOME FOR NATURAL DISASTERS
by Amorak Huey

“The cyclone had set the house down
very gently – for a cyclone – in the midst
of a country of marvelous beauty.”
– L. Frank Baum

I know you seek scarlet-toed memories,
small dogs, doorbell songs, but my stories
these days happen outside my apartment window:

rock quarry sparks & flares all night,
I watch dusk-smeared men holding hands,
if there’s no wind I hear them singing.

Our lives are littered with what we do not say,
unkempt promises. Do you ever
think things should have been different READ MORE

Capital Crime

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Judge Lance Ito (left) presides over the murder trial of Juan Chavez (right), while the victim, Risa Bejarano, appears on screen in a scene from Aging Out. Image from the documentary film No Tomorrow, by Roger Weisberg and Vanessa Roth.

Capital Crime
By John Unger Zussman

Last month, I posted an inside view of the American corrections system by Mark Unger. Today, I examine another aspect of our criminal justice system—the death penalty—with a preview of the documentary, No Tomorrow. The film premieres on PBS this Friday, March 25.

Think of the issues you’re most passionate about. If you’re reading this blog, they might include universal health care, our social safety net, climate change, civil rights, feminism, reproductive rights, gay marriage, war, nuclear proliferation, or capital punishment.

Now imagine that someone uses two years of your most intensive, committed work to argue, eloquently and effectively, against that issue.

That’s what happened to filmmakers Roger Weisberg and Vanessa Roth, veteran documentarians whose films air regularly on PBS. Their work has won numerous awards, including two Oscar nominations for Weisberg and one Oscar win for Roth. (Full disclosure: Weisberg is a long-time family friend.) READ MORE