Interview by Elkit

Posted on August 17, 2003 in Interviews

I’m obligated to do this because in a moment of weakness, I typed “interview me” in one of Elkit’s comments. She responded with these five questions:

Will you vote in the recall? Why or why not?

Of course I will vote in the recall. I am registered to vote and I always make a point to use my franchise. Voting in the recall is especially important as a block to a power grab by a pack of San Diego/Orange County Republicans who want to loot the till.

The irony of this present affair is that the recall provision in the California State Constitution was put there by a progressive named Hiram Johnson as a check against the machinations of the Southern Pacific Railroad. The price of recall has put it well beyond the effort of the average citizen: we could have nailed Pete Wilson if it weren’t for the money involved.

So what’s happened? Recalls turn out to be yet another tool for the rich to upset things when the man in charge doesn’t want to play their game. Gray Davis stood up against the Bush Administration, alone, a few years back. We’re still not sure what went on in those secret energy meetings that Cheney held or even who was there. Maybe Arnold? I’m sure when we do find out, it won’t surprise us to see that upsetting the good thing we have here in California was a key item on their agenda. They want to gouge us, humiliate us. Why? I’ve never understood hatred for California.

If you could set up the perfect summer camp (even for yourself, you may go back to childhood if you wish), what would it be like?

Good lord! Clean for one thing! A place where Boy Scouts weren’t tramping up dust.

Summer camps begin to run into similar problems as prisons. You have the problem of kids attacking other kids, stealing, trying to work the system for their personal advantage, running away. I don’t know that I’d want to be involved in something as horrible as that. Except perhaps as a licensing board member to keep the pedophiles and sadists out of the profession.

When I think of my happiest moments in childhood, they were mostly unguided, childish, clumsy. John Ruskin said “Only what is bad is perfect in its own bad way.” Most camps are some adult’s idea of childhood perfection. Me, I’d sit down at the beginning of each session and ask the kids what they wanted to do. Work something out and include them in the planning.

If I felt I had the strength.

You’re an American citizen, right? Are you proud to be an American? (If you’re not an American citizen, are you proud to be a citizen of your country?)

I am happy being who I am and living where I live. I like my neighbors and wouldn’t want to see a single one of them harmed.

Last year, I was at a festival where the Nuns for Fun started to sing “I’m proud to be an American, living in a land that’s free”. It wasn’t the proud part that bothered me, so much, as the lies attached to it. We weren’t free. We did as our leaders told us. Not one of those people did what I think good citizens must do, which is think past the propaganda and demand to see honest reports.

I grew up during the Vietnam era, you see, watching the reports on television getting more and more horrible. I remember watching Kim run out of the village where she’d been napalmed. We got out of there and folks said, at first, “We found Peace with Honor”. I was dubious, but as the Wrong has seized on Vietnam and made our “losing” it an issue, I’ve realized that “Peace with Honor” is a good thing. We did the smart thing. We got the hell out of a situation where we had no business being in the first place.

At first, we stayed out of wars. But then, step by step, we inched back in. We spent the eighties worrying that the world was going to be incinerated and then frozen in a nuclear winter. That and protests about El Salvador and Nicaraugua were what absorbed the peace movement. We either showed each other endless repetitions of Testament and The Day After or sent peace delegations to Central America. In the meantime, our military was busy developing even more lethal conventional weapons. The lesson they seemed to have learned from Vietnam (remember Ollie North complaining how the war was “lost” at home?) was that we needed enough to toast the country.

At first, I think we did win the war in Vietnam. We got smart, we saw the futility and the immorality of fighting against a people who wanted a different kind of government. We got out. Then we tossed our wisdom back into the jaws of defeat and watched the likes of the extreme Wrong in this country propel us into new Vietnams, small ones like Grenada, but escalating through the years until we found ourselves in two messes, one in Afghanistan and one in Iraq.

Does being proud mean that I have to go along with that? If it does, then I am not proud. I’m not pleased that we’ve started doing the Vietnam thing again. I’m not pleased that we’re even now designing even more devastating weapons of war. I’m not pleased that we haven’t signed on to the international bans against landmines and Napalm, both of which are being used in Iraq and possibly in Afghanistan. I’m upset that we’ve become more and more like the old Soviet Union where the press is controlled by a limited elite and there are no checks and balances between newspapers because there are no real opposing views. If proud means accepting capitalist style Stalinism and Brezshnevism, no, I am not proud. But I remain an American.

You may found a new religion. What will it be like?

You must have read where Camassia called me the world’s only “evangelical agnostic”.

Seriously, I wouldn’t found a new religion. I’m like Brian when he goes out to find half of Jerusalem at his door wanting answers. I don’t mind when people reading my blog find resonance with issues in their own lives, but I don’t pretend to have a final answer. I wouldn’t want any temples being built to me. I wouldn’t want people kissing their computer screens when my name appears on it. I wouldn’t want them viewing me as the alpha and omega.

One figure I admire intensely for a single act (if not for his philosophy) is Krishnamurti. This boy, who’d been groomed by the Theosophical Society as a kind of prophet — a new messiah who would lead the people into a new consciousness — realized the harm he was doing by attempting to answer every unique life question brought to him. So he threw up his hands and said “Wait! I am not God. I am not a guru. I cannot lead you. You must seek the answers for yourself.”

He continued to share his concept of “god in yourself” with others throughout his life. But no religion sprang up around him.

I am free with my advice; I am a dedicated agnostic who holds that we can neither prove or disprove the existence of God; I continue to exchange views with Christians, Jews, Muslims, and anyone else who wants to sincerely talk about how certain key people in history have expanded our compassion. I like that freedom. I like it for me and I like it for others. No religion for sale here. And my advice is Think Twice Before You Buy.


My favorite quote on the issue: “One man practicing kindness in the wilderness is worth all the temples this world pulls.” Jack Keruoac said that in The Dharma Bums. Remember that “Beat” is short for “Beatitude”.

What is your most precious possession, and what is its significance?

I hope you weren’t trying to trap me into describing either my wife or my cats as properties. No, you wouldn’t do that. You’re too nice.

So let’s answer the question as if all these things were safe and I could run back in to save one thing. It would have to be the boxes where I have stored my notebooks. The significance, as anyone who writes knows, is obvious.

And that concludes the interview. If you’d like to be interviewed, scroll down or click on MORE to read the rules.

I’ll be at least as nice as Elkit was.

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Official Rules

1. If you want to participate, leave a comment saying “interview me.”
   
2. I will respond by asking you five questions – each person’s will be different.
   
3. You will update your journal with the answers to the questions.
   
4. You will include this explanation and an offer to interview others in the same post.
   
5. When others comment asking to be interviewed, you will ask them five questions

And, sure, I will answer reasonable follow up questions if you leave them in my comments.