The chanting wasn’t coming from a church, and it wasn’t for William Butler Yeats, although that statement applied to him was in fact true.

William Butler Yeats was sitting on a park outside, relatively innocently, thinking that he had always believed that every two thousand years things came around again, which is what he meant about all those gyres, but he was wrong about that. It was every three thousand two hundred. He had forgotten to carry the two.

This was the second time WBY had gotten reincarnated, which is pretty good for a guy who only died in the forties (commemorated in Auden’s famous poem which concludes, “Earth receive an honored guest/ William Yeats is laid to rest/ let the Irish vessel lie/emptied of its poetry/but then let him get resurrected a couple of times/ for fun or whatever.”)

The first time was narrated in Little Gidding, that hilarious poem by the comic author T.S. Eliot, who meeting what he thought was the ghost of Yeats said: “The wonder that I feel is easy/ Yet ease is cause of wonder. Therefore speak: I may not comprehend, may not remember.”

And Yeats, supposedly replied “I am not eager to rehearse/ My thoughts and theories which you have forgotten/ These things have served their purpose: let them be./ So with your own, and they be forgiven/ By others, as I pray you to forgive/ Both bad and good.”

Which was a massive improvement on what Yeats, who was not dead, actually said, which was “have you managed to get laid yet, you ponce?”

But these are private matters.

“So I find words I never thought to speak,/ in streets I never thought I should revisit/ when I left my body on a distant shore.”

Anyway.

Yeats, because he technically studied Latin and Greek, as he was abominably bombing high school, knew that the Trojan War had begun this way:

Eris, the goddess of Discord threw a golden apple into a party and said to Paris to grant it to whoever was most beautiful. Three goddesses offered him many bribes, not figure that that would cheapen the prize at all, but Paris gave it to Aphrodite because she offered him the most beautiful girl in the world, Helen, who had so far only been raped once, by Theseus.

And it turned out there was some assembly required, and here we are.

And then….

Well, then Eris had stolen Pluto, hadn’t she?

“Eris,” classified as a dwarf planet, had been discovered in 2005 by the good folks at the Palomar observatory and enjoyed a brief life as the solar system’s 10^th planet[1]. But then they decided that it wasn’t really big enough to be a planet.

Since it is probably 10 km larger than Pluto, that meant Pluto wasn’t a planet.

Just like she’d planned it all along.

People were upset—oh yes, they were. It had touched a chord in a lot of people that they had no idea they had, just like an apple with a bit of glitter and somebody else taking someone else’s wife from across the ocean had 3,200 years ago.

People were really upset. They were too upset to take the time to imagine why anyone would give a rat’s ass in a snowstorm, then to think that maybe something was going on here from the other side of reality. They had begun doing things like wilderness survival training, and going to Renaissance faires. It was like they didn’t know they had no control over themselves any more.

People were upset. And not just people. The great dark god had rather liked being a planet, and good things do not happen to people who fall afoul of him.

“He that was dead lives again.”

It was chanting, that sound. It was coming from a Physics convention in the great building behind the bench that looked like a carbon atom mounting an oxygen atom with amorous intent (so Yeats thought). A flag was waving, proudly, over the convention center. A red flag, red like blood or ketchup. On it, emblazoned boldly, was a simple box.

“He that is dead lives again.”

The chanting was directed at (the godhead of) Schrodinger’s cat, a Jesus for the modern world if ever there was (and if it wasn’t Jesus, which, to some people, it were). The box on the flag represented him (or her, or whatever).

And over the box, on the ketchup-red field, rose a pale white dot, with a red X through it.

That was Pluto.

And it was up to William Butler Yeats—who had once kept himself from leaving his wife on their honeymoon night, for the woman he’d been proposing to for over two decades[2], only because she had “spontaneously” displayed a “talent” for “spirit-writing”, and who had later convinced that same wife that, to keep his poetic vitality into his old age, it was necessary for him to bang whoever he wanted—to save the world.

Again.

The slick rushes down by the lake cut at his ankles as he runs, young and free. He’s young and he’s running, and he’s just done something bad.

The moon fat as a orange air balloon grins in the sky, the chickens are in bed and he is not, and the night is deep. The stars, like teeth, grin down at him. The barn is on fire.

Oh, the cows are long gone. Maybe a one-eyed tomcat or two, wild as a bobcat, still lived in its creaky rafters but they were smart enough to get out. He couldn’t imagine anything killing those old bastards.

He runs, and even as he runs, he knows it’s a dream. It’s a dream he’s had before, almost a memory. He knows the next part by heart.

He runs and runs. He knows in real life, the forest was barely 50 yards from the house, and the curve of the lake was mostly on the other side of where the trees started, but in the dream, the forest is some ways up ahead when he sees a light flashing in it, and instinctively slows.

From a distance he admires his own young body, moving into the trees, the natural feralness of his wild youth adapting itself easily into a stalking creature. Then, voices. Unnaturally loud.

He feels the surprise, though there’s no surprise left. There shouldn’t be voices out here, not in the night, near the lake, after having set the barn on fire. There shouldn’t be…

Another voice, light, feminine. Is that…

A shape in the forest ahead, and a voice he recognized, and it couldn’t be…

John woke up, in a hotel in Providence, RI shaking himself from his dreams. The phone was ringing.

“Hello? Yes, I just woke up. Yes. Okay. Laugh all you want, I didn’t get in until midnight last night, I… could you…okay… okay, I’ll be there in thirty. Just…okay.”

John put down the phone and rubbed the heels of his hands against his eyes. At last he got up.

Walking to the bathroom, he relieved himself, then took a long, searching look at his pale, unwashed face in the mirror. Same thatch of brown hair as everyone in his family, more or less hanging on. Same dark circles under his eyes that his dad always had, as long as he could remember. He was 31 years old, and he’d recently been told by a dental hygienist that the quantity of saliva he produced was abnormal.

“This is why your wife left you,” he said to his reflection. “It’s because you have too much saliva. At her age, she realized, time is too short not to be with a man whose saliva is appropriate and inexcessive.”

He splashed water on his face, but unfortunately it didn’t turn into anyone else’s. Walking back to the bed, he popped a mini-whiskey out of the mini-fridge and threw it back. He sat down.

He still found it hard to believe the old man had finally passed on. It seemed like he’d go forever. Then again, he thought, he’d fought in World War 2. There couldn’t be too many of those left.

At the last family gathering, he’d noticed babies, something he’d never noticed before. He had the uncanny feeling that the room he was in was the ghost of another room, thirty years ago, when his parents were having them. In all likelihood that room was the ghost of another one thirty years older, when is parents had been children, but that was a room he couldn’t imagine.

And before that, he pronounced dramatically in his head, another room one can’t imagine, forever.

Well, it would be nice to see the rest of the family again.

Would it? Right now?

He thought about showering, remembered that he’d rinsed when he’d finally gotten in last night—getting a direct flight to Boston, then taking the bus, had seemed easier than a long connecting flight until he’d found himself crammed between two large women with two large suitcases on an 11 pm Greyhound—and figured, good enough.

He threw on some clothes and walked out the door.

An extended family of four, on the way to the airport, pops a tire going seventy on the highway. They survive, but they’re going to miss their flight. The first place they find to pull over is a leukemia/lymphoma clinic, which means nearly everyone there is having a worse day than they are.

But they’re just pilgrims, trying to find their way home for the holidays. They didn’t do anything to deserve a near-death experience, a missed flight. God doesn’t make tires. But does He make chance? Luck? If He doesn’t, what’s He doing?

God loves you. Satan hates you. Who’s winning?

They’re just pilgrims on the way. One has fatty deposits hardening in his heart.

When they finally get to the airport, Grandpa pitches over. His ticker had tocked. He’d yawped his last yawp.

Who’s winning?

Underneath the Earth, the shrine of pilgrimage heaves once and switches poles. The death of a patriarch holds precedence over an annual holiday, though in this world, as, as far as we know, in all worlds, there are many more dead patriarchs a year than Christmases.

Like Mohammed going to Jerusalem in a dream, like the mosque over the rock where his dream-foot touched, home is a place from which we leap upwards.

That sound you hear is the pilgrims turning around, reversing course towards the center.

What’s a flat tire that everyone survives? There’d be war in Rwanda, if Rwanda was even a place any more. God didn’t know Adam and Eve were eating, till he saw them with His own eyes. God did not appear to Elijah in the fire or the wind.

Tick. Tick. Tick.

The Emperor has clothes, after all, really expensive ones. That’s sort of the thing about being an Emperor. Who’s winning? Well he is, for now. Just look at all his cool stuff. You don’t have, as the saying goes, a pot to piss in. Or maybe you do, but it’s not platinum coated. And it does NOT have a seat-warmer.

Flights are changed and cancelled. Arrangements are made.

If there’s no reward in heaven, are you going to be pissed about how things went down here?

The pilgrims are coming home.

“Wow.”

The man behind them, getting up from where he’d been strapped to the table just smiled, The device had, shockingly, worked perfectly. He stepped in between to get a closer look at the picture.

“That’s amazing,” he said. “That’s exactly what…wait a minute.”

The other saw it, too.

“Oh,” said one.

“Well that’s not unusual, is it? I mean she was quite attractive before….” He broke off. “We’ll just leave that out of the report,” he said.

“Although,” said the other, “it’s pretty… strange to think so now, actually.”

“Guys,” he said, “You don’t understand. I didn’t…I mean, she wasn’t there.”

“Well surely you don’t remember,” said the first. “I mean, I barely remember mine at all, and….”

Just then, on the monitor, which was supposed to be a still image, she waved.

“Oh,” said one.

“Oh,” said the other.

“Shit,” said the third.

The dream scope was a device for which the technology had actually, more or less, long existed. The technology to render waves visually is standard TV technology, the components of brain waves were standard cognitive science, the technology to turn brain impulses into kinetic energy or other kinds of electrical impulse had been in use to make the lives of the handicapped better for half a decade.

Maybe, nobody had put it all together before just because it WAS too creepy.  So this recent manifestation of creepiness was, maybe, to be expected.

It wouldn’t even have been all that creepy for Edward to have dreamt about Joanne, the attractive weathergirl from the channel 6 news, for all that she was married to Hector Morales, the financier of their project. People don’t get choices about who they dream about, and it gets much worse than that.

It wouldn’t have been all that creepy, in short, except for two factors:

1)      She shouldn’t have been literally IN the dream, in the sense that she could wave from a mere frame of the dream, as if not having gotten the news that it was a still picture and

2)      She had been murdered about a week and a half ago.

The house was empty now. His wife and kids would be happier, he supposed. He hadn’t been unaware of what this last year had been like for them, with his unemployment, and his subsequent anger and frustration. His daughter…

It was funny, he felt he almost couldn’t remember her face though she had just left a few hours ago. It’d been so long since he’d looked at her and felt like a father, like somebody worth being a father. Everything of the past year seemed like a haze.

He sat completely still for a long moment, staring at nothing. Then he stood up.

“I declare,” he said in a quavering voice, “that I am unhappy.”

Then, as the light covered him, he smiled.

In a moment he was gone.

It could be. The national average family income is just under 45,000 dollars. You could earn twice that, so twice what the average FAMILY pulls in, and still not be able to send one of your (on average) 2.5 kids to college, for two years, with a whole year’s salary.

And yes, it’s sort of a problem that you didn’t go to Harvard. All of the Supreme Court Justices are Harvard or Yale grads. Most of the high-powered wall street folks went to somewhere like Penn’s Wharton school of business. It closes a lot of the doors to the most powerful places. That’s a real issue, that’s why you’re in this situation, because no one who’s you is there to make sure you’re doing okay.

Let’s be honest though:

One, if your problem is that you didn’t go to Harvard, don’t go near an Occupy protest, they’ll eat you. It’s not that big a deal.

Two, those doors were closed to you anyway. You know what kind of money you need to make to be in one of the top legislative bodies in this country? You don’t have it. Joe Biden, famously our nation’s poorest senator, makes over 200k.

And three?

It turns out the list of the 100 most expensive colleges ends significantly BEFORE tuition and fees, for one year, come to less than that 45,000, less than the annual average salary of a family of four.

Now, you don’t need to go to one of the top hundred most expensive colleges any more than you need to go to Harvard, nor does the price tag guarantee the education, there are cheaper options that are just as good, better, etc. But this isn’t a story about Harvard or the top one hundred most expensive schools. This is a story about power.

Because why would the price of college go down if a hundred colleges can find enough people who can pay that much money to get that education, even though it’s pretty clear that nearly everyone can’t?

The only reason that it WOULD go down is that it should go down. A college education does matter in general, in terms of finding a job, and where you went to college often matters a depressing amount. But you make much more money leaving prices as they are, and you aren’t missing butts to put in seats.

The question is, then, why would the price of anything go down?

I can’t speak for Occupy protestors everywhere—one of the great annoyances for the Right is that no one can—but that’s what gets me.  College is just one limb of the phenomenon.

The thing is, when you have a society with huge income disparity it would actually be insane for these schools not to charge these prices, since there are plenty of people who are still rich enough. These are hard times for the middle and lower class, not the highest. The point of corporations–and corporations run private universities–is to make money. Clearly the price of Harvard is not above the market value for the degree, it’s just above what basically anyone can pay. That’s income inequality for you.

The fundamental fact of capitalism is that it’s about competition. That’s not in itself a bad thing. For years it drove innovation, improved productivity, ushered in thousands of inventions. But this is new, this is global capitalism. Thanks to the internet, the accessibility of world markets and all kinds of other things, EVERYBODY on Earth is competing with just about everybody else.

Is that good? It’s good for some people. The top of the pile has never been hire, and if you get there it’s never been better. On the other hand, there’s an obvious problem.

The reason companies don’t have to make things more cheaply is exactly the same as the reason these colleges don’t need to charge less. You make as much money selling five things for twenty bucks each as you do selling twenty things for five bucks each, so long as you find five people willing to pay twenty bucks.

Because this is not a depression but a recession, because those who managed to keep their wealth intact beyond the crash are not hurting at all, the ability of some people to pay that twenty bucks has not changed. So long as the thing is desirable there is no good reason ANYWHERE to worry about making something accessible when the profit margin can be met either way.  When the math works out equivalently, there will be some select corporations who, out of the goodness of their hearts, are willing to keep their products accessible. More often, however, you can make MORE money selling a few things to very rich people than lots of things to everybody else.

It’s not a problem that people are rich.  It’s not even a problem that so many people are rich while so many people are poor. The problem is that enough people are rich that it drives the whole economy to be something that is only affordable to rich people, so even people earning at a level which would have been considered more than fine ten years are getting priced out of the kinds of things that used to be thought of as hallmarks of a fairly normal American life, and college is one of those.

There are, as you all know, plenty of people in this country who think the middle and lower classes don’t get taxed enough, for fairness’s sake. If I could convince these people of one thing, it would be this: Consider percentages. If you, like the average family (not person, family) in this country make 40,000 dollars a year, then a 20 percent tax would be 8,000 dollars. If someone taxed you 10 percent on a million dollars that would be 100,000 bucks.

There is one obvious tragedy to that conceptual idea– that feeding a family on 32k is really hard and feeding a family on 900k is not. But the less obvious tragedy is that 8,000 dollars doesn’t do crap in the government’s coffers. Which means you’re hurting a family, for the sake of something called “fairness,” to the point of struggling to meet ends meet– for a sum that will make no dent on any government program.

And even if there are a hundred families paying , that’s a hundred families trying to make on 32k, and you’re still only netting 800,000 dollars, or 100,000 dollars less than our hypothetical millionaire still PERSONALLY takes home each year, if he were taxed HALF as much.

And if you want to talk about fairness of the tax burden, please realize what that kind of scale of power means, because every corridor of American power runs on the same model. If one hundred average families poured in 20% of their annual salary to a political campaign, they also wouldn’t make the dent of a single millionaire’s single-year salary by 200,000 bucks, let alone what could be easily offered by billionaires like the Koch brothers.

If one hundred average families donated twenty-percent of their salaries  donated twenty percent of their salaries to a cause, a coalition, a public information campaign, they wouldn’t make the dent of a single millionaire’s single-year salary.

In reality, the highest tax bracket is 35%. Again, we’re taking just a lonely millionaire, not a multi-millionaire and not a billionaire, but—and I’m aware that income tax isn’t the only tax that gets paid—that would be 350 k which, while a huge chunk of change, still leaves your millionaire with nearly SEVENTEEN times the annual income of an average family and all the corresponding political power that comes with it.

If that kind of power—the power to get your voice heard over literally a hundred other people, and so shape policy—doesn’t make it up to you for the unfairness of a tax burden which still leaves you with more than enough to buy a new house every year, or pay a whole four years of Harvard with a single check from a  single year of income, I don’t know what to tell you.

What’s scary is not that the system is broken, but that the system isn’t actually broken at all.  The system is a perfectly sustainable system, raking in record profits for those on the right side of things. It can go on forever without change and leave the vast majority of Americans out of the loop. The buying power of a small percentage of people is so much that businesses not only run perfectly well catering only to what they can afford, but have to, to compete with each other.

This is why America needs regulation, and price controls–because without them America’s march towards a true noble class has no reason not to continue, because there’s really no downside to it to the people involved.  A CEO of any company might personally deplore that fact, but if he or she doesn’t maximize their profits by exploiting it, they’ll just be replaced by someone who will, and that’s as true for pay-to-play as it is for the environmental health of the world, for the production of sustainable technologies, for America’s ability to respond to real problems when they are counter to profit motive.

And this is why America needs fundamental change—because nothing else will make America something in which the majority of its citizens have any say at all.

First of all, a lot of really inspiring stories. Do they, whoever they are,  think we, whoever we are, don’t think it’s inspiring that someone from a poor or difficult background worked their way through college and made a big success, persevering for obstacles?

Second of all, you’ll meet people like the girl whose dad has thyroid cancer but went back to work working twelve hours a day, six days a week, despite his still-growing cancer.

Or like the girl who says that she chose to go to an in-state public school for economic reasons, worked hard in high school to earn a 90% scholarship to said public school, and so long as she works 30 hours a week and doesn’t go to eat every week, or even every month, she’s just fine.

Or the ex-marine who worked 60-70 hours a week to pay his way through college (in 8 years), now works two jobs, hasn’t had a vacation in four years, and can’t afford health insurance.

The general sentiment is “my life is pretty tough, but I will keep above water so long as nothing terrible happens like getting laid off or some major health issue, since I can’t afford health insurance.”

It makes me sad, because that doesn’t seem to me to be the American dream, which they are nevertheless justifiably proud of having lived.  I mean, would even those people disagree that working ANY job 60-70 hours a week should afford , I don’t know—college? Health insurance? Basic things you need to survive, and thrive, in American society?

It’s the very fact that these people ARE so talented and plucky that it makes me sad. It doesn’t seem like there should be a disagreement between these two groups on this score. ‘

Hell, half of all the Right has talked about for the last year is the fact that there aren’t any jobs. 14 million people in this country are out of work, nearly ten percent of the work force. How can the same people that are so upset about that believe that these people protesting for jobs are just whiny hippies who need to go out and get a job? Do we have 14 million unemployed, entitled liberal arts majors in this country? Is that what John Boehner was doing, fighting for their rights and their rights alone? That seems charitable.

But really, no. And no on other levels, too. It’s not the Tea Party posting on the 53%, right? Because they hate the bank bailouts and Wall Street as much as these guys do, don’t they? Or do they only hate it on their own time?

So, I don’t know. What has stirred up whatever thing thing is?

To me, the basic place this comes from—other than a very understandable urge, if you have made your way in American society to success, not to want to hear someone telling you you’re lucky–is, very simply, that there is something unmanly and un-American about asking for help.

That quintessentially American hero Snake Plissken didn’t ask for help when the guys with the machine guns told him they’d kill him if he didn’t score 8 points on two different backboards within a minute, or whatever it was, even though he’d never played basketball before. He just sacked up and hit a 75-foot three-pointer at the last second.

We see it in sports all the time. As a Dallas Mavericks fan, I saw it first hand. It didn’t matter how terrible Dirk’s supporting cast was over the years, a real man would have found a way to win–until he did, at which point everything is fine. Ryan Braun’s probably going to win the NL MVP over Matt Kemp, even though Matt Kemp led everyone in everything, because Braun’s team made the playoffs. If Kemp, who was .13 batting average points from  the Triple Crown, wanted that award,  he should have led everyone in everything even more.

God, do I understand that. After all, I was born and raised a Texan. But it’s just not RIGHT in this case, and I mean that in the sense  of justice—it breaks my heart.

Persevering through great obstacles when you HAVE to—that’s heroic. And I have little doubt that most of the people who posted on the 53%, or the family members they discuss, are the kind of people who would rise to that occasion and there’s not a thing that I want to take away from that. I’m legitimately proud that they’re my countrymen.

But when you don’t have to?

There seems to be this idea that the salary that you get paid for work is something that God built into the fabric of the universe. Like Jesus came down and said, listen buddy, that 60 hour a week job you’re working? My Father says it shall not pay you enough to afford health care. Try not to get sick.

But it’s not. Not even close. That’s what the protestors are protesting about, and that’s what’s changed in American society. Those jobs–the kinds of jobs available to average Americans– don’t pay you enough to live. And they used to. That’s what the Wall Street protestors want.

People tell me it’s supply and demand. It isn’t. I should know, I was working a private tutoring job while dating an elementary school teacher. I saw way less students, who needed my help way less (if I weren’t there for my students, they’d only have their grades and slightly less high SAT scores to go on, if she wasn’t, they wouldn’t have made it through high school) and got paid way more per hour.

And you’re working 60 hours a week—it sounds to me like your time is in pretty high demand.  But it’s not demanded by the rich, and so you don’t get paid enough to live.  What you do is presumably very much demanded, but not demanded by the rich. That’s the real supply and demand.

Many more of us need elementary school teachers than will ever need stockbrokers. There’s just not much a stockbroker can do with my income. And just for the record, private schools—those schools where you get to send your kids if YOU’RE rich—pay their teachers much worse, on average, than public. That’s not supply and demand.

I mean seriously—seriously, seriously, seriously—the American dream is only needing to work 30 additional hours a week to be able to attend a public, in-state university, the cheapest kind of university they make, at a NINETY PERCENT DISCOUNT as long as you make some sacrifices?

The American dream is, after serving your country, AND getting a college degree , to come back to work a 60-70 hour job and not be able to afford health care, which is a ticking time bomb if ever there was one?

That’s what drives me nuts about this counter-protest, if that’s what it is. One guy says he’s upset because there aren’t jobs for regular people that pay a living wage, and he’s at Occupy Wall Street. The other guy says that he’s managed to get two jobs for regular people and almost gets a living wage and that’s a good thing because That’s What You Have to Do, and he’s at the 53% protest. All the first guys want is for the second guys not to have to do that. And why the hell shouldn’t an honest day’s work yield an honest day’s salary?

Remember, Snake Plissken can’t say no to the guys with guns, so he’s a hero for getting it done. But Superman was invented by two Jews on the eve of World War II. It is possible, you know, really actually possible, for the costs of things no longer to measure up to the salaries of people and for that to be a solveable problem.

These protests are directed at Wall Street for one simple reason. The people who control the money and set the prices have rigged this game so that THEY are compensated way more than supply and demand requires—what else do you call 15 million to get fired, the ultimate in lack of demand—and YOU are compensated way less than a fair market price. They have set up the basketball game where you have to make 8 points in one minute on two hoops. Life is amazing for them.

You say times are tough, and they are, but not for them. That’s why this isn’t a Great Depress-sack-up-and-do-what-you-have-to moment. NO ONE in the upper financial class is suffering. In fact, every study has shown they’ve never had it better.

That’s why you and I, even when we can find jobs, can’t find jobs that pay for what we need, not for things like new cars and iphones and cushy lifestyles where we don’t have to do anything, but for things like education, health care, or even a nice meal out with your family.

If you have made it in American society, be proud. My family is very comfortable, and that’s because my grandfather, the second to last of twelve kids, became a doctor and his son became a doctor, and their money comes from saving lives. I have no debt to my name because of the generosity of my parents, one, and because rather than choosing to pay for an extremely expensive American masters, I got a pretty cheap one overseas, and now they pay ME to go to school. A little choice, and mostly luck.

If you are a doctor, a computer scientist, an engineer or a financier, you might easily think that everyone who didn’t find  a way to being as comfortable as you are made bad decisions. The problem is, in American society, there are way, way too many bad decisions.  Almost any normal job is a “bad decision” these days because it doesn’t result in the ability to pay for a decent lifestyle.

That is all they’re saying. The want more good decisions, more options that afford a decent, not extravagant lifestyle.  It sounds to me like a lot of the 53% DESERVE the same whether or not they think they should agitate for it.

if you didn’t think that the unemployed were all liberal arts grads who went into debt for useless masters there months ago, you’ve got no right to think it now.  And if there’s no hope for the middle class, then there really is no hope for the 99%–whether they want any help or not.

When the guns  are pointed at Snake Plissken, he has to do what he has to do. You don’t have to do this, and that’s because this IS America, not a third world country where there is no infrastructure and no ability to change, because this is a recession, not a depression, and because it’s just prices and salaries–which God didn’t write any where in the Bible, I promise–and jobs. Everybody needs jobs. Even liberals.

In other words, no way.

The shocking thing, I suppose, is that this doesn’t seem to have happened before. I think part of that is that we’ve never had, as far as I can remember, this level of interest on such minor things. Fox News and CNN are carrying front page news on things like Secretary of Education appointments, House elections, things I can’t remember hearing about before.  Republicans voted seven times to raise the debt ceiling under Bush, and I don’t recall it ever hitting a news cycle before now.

Which makes everything a battleground. Probably, fifteen years ago you could go to your constituents and give them  just the kind of rhetoric they like, lower taxes, less government spending and involvement, and then go back to Washington and do the right thing—and without Glenn Beck yelling about it the next day nobody would even know.

But the real problem and the real question is why the right thing and the unpopular thing are so often the same thing these days? The debt ceiling debate is the obvious example. The day after the S & P downgraded the US credit rating, Michele Bachmann was on a debate saying that the downgrade proved she was right, that the US should never have raised the debt limit.

I would put it at 60-40 that Bachmann actually believed she was saying, but it would be hard for  to be true for anyone willing to read words or know facts. I’m not being rude. The credit downgrade was entirely based, as the S & P made a point of saying, on fears that the US would not be willing to raise the credit ceiling in the future.

Saying that a credit agency downgrading the US’s credit over fear that the US will be unwilling to raise the debt limit in the future is proof that you shouldn’t raise the debt limit is like saying that the doctor being afraid you’ll keep eating cheeseburgers after your heart attack means that you should go directly to McDonald’s.

And that’s not a hard thing to figure out, it’s not a hard thing to prove, it’s not a hard thing to see that it’s true.

The issue is that you can approach the problem by saying exactly that as many times as you want, but if that worked it would work.

There’s a lot to be said about policy,  lot of nuanced points to make, lot of factors to consider. But bottom line:

Republicans are fucking fantastic at getting a clear message at, strong enough that people believe the message and don’t feel like they’re getting overloaded with one guy saying one thing, one guy saying another, and who do you believe?

If the Huff Po falls in the liberal forest, believe me, the Republican trees don’t hear it and if they do hear it they think it’s propaganda. Michele Bachmann can say something that 5 seconds on google, or just looking up an actual news story, can show you is the exact opposite of what is true, and a large part of this country is right behind it.

There’s no use complaining about it, there really isn’t.  There’s no use getting upset about it. What matters is results and Republicans get them and Liberals don’t.

A lot of this is because dissatisfaction is much easier to create than the kind of stalwart political faith that is able to brave numerous setbacks. Both sides can agree that things aren’t going well even if they can’t agree on anything else.  It’s the easiest tool in the world for an opposition party too.

Another big part is the delivery of the message. The Republican propaganda machine knows that the point of their communiqués  isn’t attempting to convince the populace, who doesn’t get a vote in the Senate, of the wisdom of various policies, but to gain control of the process. Mitch McConnell has made no bones about the fact that it is his prime legislative goal is to make Obama a one-term president.  The Republicans spend their time, wisely, convincing people that the other guys are bad and wrong and skimp on the specifics.

The major issue, though, is that liberals and especially progressive liberals are just going to be on the unpopular side of debates. Even if someone was interested in doing something for the less fortunate, they wouldn’t necessarily want to pay taxes to do so.

And that’s true before Republicans invented a quack economic system that says the best way to help the less fortunate is to help the most fortunate, so they can be “job creators”. If you were only half-heartedly committed to paying taxes for things like food stamps and other social programs, how could you resist the idea that actually, not paying those taxes, and not making other people do it, has the same effect?

Even when it demonstrably doesn’t.

How could you resist somebody telling you that it’s okay not to want your kids to be educated by or be around gay people,  or “alternative” types. It doesn’t mean you hate them, it just has sociological effects.

Even when it demonstrably doesn’t.

How could you resist the idea that you can keep your kids protected from sex by not letting them learn about it, or that an easy solution to the issue of evolution v. creationism is just to teach both? It’s not like they’re saying evolution is WRONG per se….

At base, it’s easy to be a Republican because it’s policies tell you that a world exists in which not paying taxes does as much good as paying taxes, that no one needs to make hard choices between religion and science, that it’s not prejudice to feel uncomfortable,  and that not talking about difficult topics with your kids is better for them.

It’s not easy to be a liberal democrat. Once again, no use complaining about it, it’s just true and that’s why you have to work twice as hard to convince anybody, and so you get up, and if you want to convince anybody, you work twice as hard. It’s not anyone’s fault that if two people come to them and one says the best thing for the economy is to pay more taxes and the other one says the best thing is to pay less taxes, they’re going to go with the second guy, and that’s not going to change.

Right now, at this juncture in American history, Republicans both have the easier message AND are the warriors, the one fighting tooth and nail for their message.

Unless Democrats find ways to make their message clear, urgent, something people can identify with, and out there, there’s no real hope for the liberal agenda.

To be honest, I feel pretty good about it. I will miss the community, and being part of this thing for sure, but my back feels like it’s been used for spare parts, I’ve got a hacking cough I can’t do anything about (because it’s Friday evening and nothing will be open till Saturday morning), my camera’s lens is stuck, my glasses are broke, and I certainly won’t mind sleeping past 4:45 and not endangering myself by lifting 50 pound rocks out of six feet deep holes. Which is not to say that there is any part—any part that I regret. There’s just a whole lot about people that goes on in digging.

One of the things that’s weird about me, I think , is that I really really believe in the power of experience to teach. A lot of the time, before I decide I’m good at anything, even, I use experience to see what’s happened when I’ve done that thing. Am I a good b-baller? Not really, but I’d still say that in 70% of the games I’ve played I was one of the best jumpshooters. For example. And whatever team I’m on, I put some points on the board, for all that I have the athleticism of a particularly drowsy mule. So probably net positive.

The director of the excavation asked me today how I liked it this time, and I looked around and what I saw was 25 or so people doing extremely difficult things from a godawful hour in the morning, eating the same breakfast as a break each day (eggs, peppers, various kinds of cheeses, pudding), for absolutely no pay and in many cases a substantial financial hardship. So what are people about? This is one of the things. It’s not saving the world, but it’s hard work for, mostly, its own sake. Okay. Proven: people are sometimes willing to do this kind of thing.

This week, I got to spend the last four days “recording”, which was great, although when I describe it, it won’t sound like that.  It works like this. Imagine the hole we dug as a square. It’s supposed to be one. Imagine the area we’re in as having four squares. We’re in area F, and for whatever reason the four squares we’re digging are F5, F6, F7, F8.

Each square is initially assigned what’s called it a locus, which, of course, just means place. The locuses are assigned sequentially, starting with whatever number they start with by a mysterious process I don’t understand. So, say area G’s initial four locuses are 305-309, then our locuses would start out as 310-313.

Then you start digging.  History deposits soil over time, so you can tell that if you dig through one color of soil and come to another kind of soil what you’ve got is soil that was deposited at an earlier time. That layer is older than the layer you were digging. So that’s a new locus, number 314 or so. And the other thing is, maybe the new soil is only on one side of the square, and you have a different new soil on the other side of the square which is 315. By the end of a week, maybe any one square has three different locuses, 314, 315, 316 or whatever.

Everything that is found in any of these locuses that’s not just plants and dirts needs to be recorded.   That’s what the recorder does. Here in Israel, there’s tons of pottery everywhere, so first I write down pottery bucket numbers for all of the loci of that day. Then every time something else comes up, a bone, a piece of flint, today an ancient needle, I jump out of my hole and write down what locus it was found in and find a little bag for it. Eventually, when they take all the junk to the archaeology hideout, or whatever, they’ll have a written record of where everything was found, with everything that was found, that they can use to reconstruct the picture of the site.

Practically, it works like this. This morning the folks in charge came over and told me that what I was looking at in my square was probably a wall collapse, but there’s only one stone square enough to represent a likely third course to the wall. But they can’t get a look at it because there are four other big stones around it. Could I remove those stones.

This happened at 8. Breakfast is at 9. As I pulled my pickaxe back to give the rocks hell, someone found some flint in F7 and I had to record it and make them a bag for it. As I crawled back in and grabbed my tools, someone found a bone. Then someone found a shell. At 855 I removed one rock, they called breakfast time, and I yanked out a second one.

In this business it all depends how you define productivity.

The part about being able to reconstruct where everything was found–which levels, once we cross-check with what pottery is found there and maybe get some scientific dates from radiocarbon or whatever can tell us just when taht piece of flint was used–probably doesn’t sound all that interesting, and I’m really, really glad that that part is not my job. But it was actually extremely interesting to get a window into it. And, you know, gave me some breaks from moving huge stones which is not something I regret.

I guess my last reflection about the dig, about maybe digs in general, in my experience, is they show you in surprising ways how addictive capitalism is.

This is what I mean:

My dig is not what anyone would call isolated, compared to many another dig. It is, for example, right next to, more or less, the Jerusalem zoo. It still technically is Jerusalem. But the closest commercial enterprise besides the zoo is the Malha mall, a 25 minute walk. This may not seem like a big deal, and it’s really not, but here’s the thing. There’s not even a kiosk between here and there. So, for example there’s the coke issue which is this: the school we’re staying at serves two meals a day (except over the weekends), but they have only water in their cafeteria. They do have a coke machine upstairs. But if you want to get a coke you need small change.

It’s not like it’s the biggest deal to drink only water for an entire week, but there was really no way for me to spend money, the kind of activity that would cause me to receive small change, for that entire week. It’s not that there was only water, it’s that there was nothing I could do, which is the anti-capitalism, basically. There was no way for me to get change because I couldn’t buy anything, ergo it was all water all the time. It was sort of amazing. Until I managed to get some change over the weekend, of course.

The other thing is that in Jerusalem, and in most parts of Israel (not most parts of Tel Aviv, but everywhere else), basically everything is closed. So, for now, I got me a hacking cough but I can’t do a thing about it until Saturday evening.  Also, since this place doesn’t serve meals and nowhere is open tonight or tomorrow I had to buy food for the weekend, but there are no ovens or toasters or pots anywhere around here, so it’ll be like pita and hummus and cheese. Which sounds delicious. But I GOTTA do it, too.

So it goes. Sunday it’s back to America (arrival Monday morning), where I can buy anything I want whenever I want. Tired of the meals I can make at home? I’ll go out and get something else. When my glasses break, or I get a cough, I will drive to an optometrist or CVS and get patched up. And I can always stock up on whatever beverages I might choose to imbibe, and put them in my fridge.

I know that that’s all pretty good, and I’m not a hater, but I hope it’s also not such a bad thing for my soul to have life a little (okay, a lot) more on demand for a while. Don’t want to be soft when the apocalypse comes, you know.

Last night, the Germans threw a party for the group. We all had to bring three socks, for some reason, and that’s all we knew about it. There was alcoholic punch, a bbq, a pinecone lit on fire and games like lining up in a row and running a spoon through each person’s clothes in a row, which was weird, but team-building.

Today, my jeans that had had a small rip in the seat for a week decided to have what some might call an actual fault line.  Naturally I spent the day accusing the ladies of checking me out, or alternatively claiming that it was my way of saying my ass is outta here. I asked the site director whether anyone important enough was coming to visit us that it wouldn’t be okay for them to see the contours of my butt, but he didn’t think so.

As my jeans struggled to stay on–hopping up onto a bulk from the hole produced a matching rip in the front, around 12:15–I too struggled, one last time, to give it my all. I don’t know that I’ll do this again. I like archaeology, I don’t absolutely love it, and contrary to popular belief PhD students have LOTS to do in summer. It’s just that, you know, no one’s watching to make sure we do. As much as money, these digs have been investments in time that maybe I can’t afford to do again. If so, if this is my last dig–at least for a bit–could hardly be better.

It’s not ice road truckers dangerous. I’ve never heard of an archaeology related death and while the incidence of scrapes and food poisoning are pretty high, besides that you’re probably okay. But, in general, there’s a lot to be careful about here. First of all, with the greatest will in the world, hygiene is terrible. However your accommodations are, and the two years I’ve done this mine have been nice, the site is far away from there and, literally, what archaeology is, is going meters down into dirt. There is dust everywhere—if you sneeze afterward, and this is shocking the first time, the tissue will be jet black, I’m not kidding. You’ll develop a cough. Your nails will be black, your pants and shirts coated. And then you’ll go eat breakfast, probably without a place to wash your hands. When you get back to where you live, you may not have a place to wash your clothes.

The sun is dangerous. We’re out there from 5 am to 1 pm because the sun isn’t godawful then, but we are in the Judean desert, still. The terrain is dangerous. As the pits get deeper, and that’s the only thing those damn pits do as the weeks go on, the walkways you leave between place to place don’t get any wider. Imagine a checkers board where the lines between squares are where you can walk and the squares themselves are 10 feet deep. That’s what an archaeological site is like after three weeks.

And that’s not even to mention all the other things that go on that are hazardous to your health. When you run into a huge rock, while digging, and it’s not a structural element, what you do is you get four guys (or whoever) together, you roll the rock onto a special sheet with four handles, each person grabs a handle, and you haul it out of there. And while you’re making it over mountainous terrain, you hope the bag doesn’t rip, you hope the rock doesn’t fall out on the incline, and you hope nobody trips or drops their end. When the bucket chains happen—a mechanism which is put into play when all the buckets we have are filled with dirt, that involves everyone getting in a line and handing or throwing buckets to be dumped a good distance from the site, so we have more buckets—these are heavy bastards, often with rocks on top which can, take it from me, spring out in the process of being swung and hit you in, say, the crotch.

The point is, it’s the third week, and that’s when it all starts catching up to you. You’re tired, but you’re confident, because you’ve been doing everything for two weeks and you forget that it’s dangerous. We had our first sprained ankle yesterday, and twice falling stones (one from a ripped carry bag, one simply excavated from a higher location on the site) came a bit too close to people. I was sick yesterday, though luckily I was able to dig both days, and there are two more who couldn’t make it out today for illness.

I think, though, that part of the fun comes from how hard the work can be. It gives many of us who otherwise spend our days in chairs reading books an opportunity to come out and see how strong we are, so how we face unusual challenges. It’s not exactly—can I pass this Akkadian test? Of course I can, I dug five meters through dirt and rocks and carried every pound of it away—but it’s not so far from that either.

So, we just be careful!