Our power failure

Sam Smith – The moral, political and ecological collapse of elite power is increasingly part of the global story. Whether thanks to politics, corporatism, criminality or media manipulation we now have an elite that threatens us far more than gives us hope. And it’s not just Donald Trump, who is more a grim product than a creator of the problem. After all, Trump is primarily a media image, the collapse of our environment was created in part by an intellectual elite that did not give enough attention to things like the effects of human overpopulation, our elite colleges taught students how to rise to the top rather than share the world with others, and our businesses increasingly were prized by their size rather than their actual services.

The value of the individual, of communities and their non-profits has dramatically declined, symbolized in no small part by the downturn in local newspapers. We have put our faith in a self centered approach to achievement and are no longer able to even discuss it rationally or to find many to talk about it with.

I sense this increasingly because in two months I will become 87 years old. Increasingly, I look back over my life as being in part a clinging to behavior and places where humans might still make a difference – a concept that the intellectual, business and media elite increasingly reject in favor of increasing power.

Even the numbers of such an effort don’t work out that well. For example, if one is president of the United States, you have been assigned power over only 4% of the global population.

Starting in the mid Sixties, I was part of what was known as the underground press, beginning a neighborhood paper on Capitol Hill in DC. With our circulation area being one of the worst hit communities of the 1968 riots, we expanded our coverage citywide with the DC Gazette. We covered the local as well as the national, seeing them as deeply intertwined. For example, I helped start the DC statehood movement and became one of the city’s first elected advisory neighborhood commissioners.

Now continuing to publish Undernews online since moving to Maine, I remain close to the community side of humanity. I started a community online newsletter and with no effort found myself Facebook friends with a quarter of my town. The town is pleasantly devoid of Trump like characters. It would be a lousy way to impress anyone here.

When I look back over my life I find that the figures who remain largest in my mind and enthusiasm were strikingly absent in the pursuit of power. Improving things was far more important than controlling them. Among those I recall were teachers at my Quaker high school, the manager of my parents’ farm for whom I worked a number of summers, the staff of a radio station where I worked as a newsman, the crew of a Coast Guard cutter aboard which I was the navigator and operations officer, and the organizers of activist community groups. It was not their power that influenced me but their skill, values and character. As I tell folks, the only bullshit I found useful on the farm was that on a field or in barn, not from somebody’s mouth.

When I ask myself what powerful people had a similar impact on me, I come up with few answers, one being Eugene McCarthy of whom I once wrote:

- For a quarter century or so, Mark Plotkin and I would have occasional lunches with McCarthy. Plotkin had been McCarthy's campaign manager when he ran as an independent for president in 1976. The lunches were at such places as Duke Zeibert's - a haven for the untight powerful - and later at the Review conference room at La Tomate Restaurant - aka the table just southwest of the bar. Between lunches, Gene McCarthy would write poetry, books of essays, columns (which I happily published in my journal), drink coffee at the H&J Grocery in Sperryville, Virginia, and, when the mood struck him, run for president. During or after lunch I would invariably find myself scribbling a few words on a napkin or in my butt pilot, the small note pad I keep in my back pocket. Here are some the things these notes recall. . .

- On another occasion former Indiana Senator Vance Hartke sat down with us. and told us of visiting Governor Roger Branigan. The governor was on his second whiskey and said to Hartke, "You know, I never wanted to be governor, I just wanted to be elected governor."

- Gene took tennis lessons from Allie Ritzenberg at St. Alban's School in the shadow of the National Cathedral. Ritzenberg, when he wasn't winning titles himself, coached people like Jackie Kennedy, Katherine Graham and Robert McNamara. Gene told Ritzenberg that he was responsible for the Vietnam War because he kept hitting to McNamara's strength thereby boosting his ego. Then McNamara would go to the Pentagon and escalate the real battle.

- Someone asked what Gene would do if he were to become pope. He replied that he would cut the Ten Commandments down to four and reorder them.

- Gene and I both owned property in Rappahannock County, Virginia, about two hours away. If DC had the population density of Rappahannock, it would have only 2,000 people living in it. I bought the place in the early 1970s from G. Brown Miller, who once told me, "You know, partner, your friend Erbin is a mighty fine fellow." I agreed. "He gave me one of them marijuwana cigarettes the other day." "How'd you like it, Brown?" I asked. "Well, it seems like to me, for a man who's lived on moonshine all your life, it don't do much."

- I once went entered the H&J Grocery store and found a group of men drinking coffee, including a fully uniformed and armed game warden holding his coffee in one hand and a copy of Foreign Affairs in the other. It was explained to me that Gene McCarthy had been in earlier.

I am now at an age when most of what I lived through, even at the US Capitol, doesn’t matter much anymore, while the pleasure and appreciation of good people and their useful groups helping others remains strong as does having coffee at places like the H&J Grocery.