2005 – Jonathan Rowe

Open Source Celebration

I’ve never been one for revelry, and I have a dislike of journalistic clichés to begin with. (Does anyone besides a journalist say “revelry”?) But I did go out on First Night in Boston once or twice, and if you’ll forgive me for saying so, it was neat. The strange part is, the whole thing is illegal. Not according to the laws of Boston; the mayor started it. Rather it is against the laws of economics, as conventionally propounded at least.

Those so-called laws say that what belongs to everyone belongs to no one, and therefore is sentenced to neglect and decay. No one will invest in that which they do not own. Hence the extension of “intellectual property” rights to practically any notion that passes through the pecuniarily disposed mind. Well, no one owns New Years Eve. Yet hotels, restaurants, places of entertainment – whole cities – are investing like crazy. Back in 1997, Rudolph Giuliani, then-mayor of New York City, proclaimed that New Year’s Eve brought an extra $57 million in economic benefits to the Times Square area alone.

How They Broke the Peace

Probably most of us have heard about the informal truces that broke out along the front during the trench warfare of World War I. The story is extraordinary in one respect, and yet utterly normal in another. Here they were, young men huddled in miserable trenches, the “enemy” in the same circumstance just 50 yards away. Shelling from one side would be returned promptly by the other. There was no gain, and yet men might die. The stalemate continued day after day, week after week. What would sane people do?

At these remote outposts, far from the high commands, rituals of cooperation emerged. The sides would shell at the same time each day, and to the same exact spots, so that the other could stay out of the way. If there was a mistake – the artillerymen far behind the lines couldn’t always be trusted – a soldier at the front would shout out an apology. “These people evidently did not know there was a war on,” one British officer reported with indignation and astonishment. “Both sides apparently believed in the policy of ‘live and let live.’”

Land Grab at Amtrak

If you want to kill a railroad, one of the first things you’ll do is split the tracks from the operating line and put them into a separate corporate entity. Riders on Amtrak’s Coastal Starlight between Los Angeles and Seattle know this. Trains on this otherwise scenic route are chronically late – often by hours – because they operate on tracks owned by the Union Pacific. Amtrak trains must stop at sidings to let the UP freight trains pass.

David Gunn, until recently the president of Amtrak, knows it too. Gunn has run the transit systems in New York City, Philadelphia, and Washington D.C. He resuscitated the New York City subways to great acclaim back in the 1980’s. When the Bush appointees to the Amtrak board moved to split off the maintenance of the tracks and stations on Amtrak’s Northeast Corridor into a separate entity – which could be a first step towards privatizing them – Gunn resisted. The Bush board fired him partly as a result.

Creationism, Evolution and “Metaphysical Repression”

It seems to me that the most casual survey of the current White House, or of commercial television, or of development patterns around, say, Houston, Texas, would cast doubt upon the theory of intelligent design. But then, the smug certitude of the evolutionists is off-putting as well. Creationism, which is intelligent design without the secular costuming, may be literal-minded – and not, I would argue, what the Judeo-Christian Scripture actually means.

But at least, in its own ignorant way, it broaches a kind of question that many of us brooded over as children but then buried in what we euphemistically call our “adult minds.” Where does it all come from? How could something come from nothing? How could time have a beginning? If something came before time, then wouldn’t that be time too? Beneath the pseudo-science is an inkling of things beyond ordinary cognition that even Einstein took seriously.

The Vise Tightens

I was in Washington this week and Capitol Hill feels like a state of siege. The place is saturated with police – not friendly cops walking the beat, but police cars, often two or three at an intersection, faceless and grim. Fences and concrete barricades are everywhere. You used to be able to walk through the tunnels under the Capital to get from the House to the Senate office buildings. Now a staffer has to escort you.

You feel like an intruder in your own government, and in the buildings you yourself pay for. The lobbyists still are there. They exit from cabs in their tailored gaggles, crowd the couches in reception areas. What’s missing is a sense that anyone else belongs.

Market Boundaries and the Commons of a Conservative

For people whose work is the written word, reporters can be stunningly indifferent to what words actually mean. The word “conservative” is a prime example. We have today a President who thinks the federal government is going to bring democracy to the Arab world. He has intruded that government into the affairs of ordinary Americans to a degree not seen before, and he has run up staggering deficits to boot. Yet this is a “conservative” President, for no apparent reason other than that he says he is.

Usually, when reporters use the word “conservative,” they actually are referring to a cynical Right wing politics that is closer to corporate Jacobinism. It is the belief in the use of the corporate market to bring about radical upheavals in American values and mores, all the while preaching the sanctity of those values and mores, and blaming people they call “liberals” for the upheavals. Few things would so clarify American political debate, as to begin to get a grip on the term “conservative”. It also would help to understand why the commons will be central to the next big turn of the ideological wheel.

Subsistence and the Commons

Southern planters faced a major dilemma after the Civil War. Not only had they lost their slaves; now many former slaves refused to work on the terms the planters offered. … More

Clark, Texas Has a New Name

In Scripture, the bestowal of a name was an event of great importance. A name was an expression of character; and humans earned new ones in accordance with their inner growth. Jacob, after he spent an entire night wrestling with his demons, and finally prevailed over them, became Israel. His old name meant “to seize by the heel.” His new one, “God will rule.”

The places where such events occurred acquired new names as well. Jacob called the place of his new insight Peniel, which meant the “face of God.” Before that, when he had set his head down on a pillow of “stones” – that is, hard tormenting thoughts – and had dreamed of a ladder connecting him to the Highest, he called that place Bethel, which meant the “house of God.

Charles and the Commons

There was a lot of eye-rolling during the week, and cracks about a media hoard that was rumored to exceed 400. Still, on Saturday, people came out anyway, lined up along Main Street two hours before Charles and Camilla were due. Charles was here at the invitation of local organic farmers. The couple would visit the farmer’s market at Toby’s Feed Barn, and then go to an organic farm. But why were we there, lined up behind the barriers, waiting for a glimpse?

This part of Northern California is not given to celebrity worship. Sure, it’s hard not to be curious when the Prince comes to town But there was more to it than that. My sense was – and others agreed – that the excitement was less about seeing Charles and Camilla, than about being part of the seeing of them. It was a community occasion, a chance to share an experience that soon would become part of something that still exists out here – local memory.

Out of Time

If you have lived in a Third World village, then you probably have experienced a strange — to us Americans — absence of time. There is a rhythm to daily life. People rise early to beat the sun. They prepare meals, wash clothes, visit, rest. All this proceeds at its own pace. In my wife’s village in the Philippines, I do not recall ever having seen a clock.

Nor do I recall a lack of time. To the contrary there is an abundance. The less time is measured and packaged, it seems, the more of it there is. To which a skeptic might reply, “Well of course. These people are poor. They don’t have anything else to do.” But that’s the point. They are poor in one sense and yet rich in another. That other sense happens to be the one that we Americans increasingly lack.