SENTIENT TIMES April/May 2006

Book Reviews

John Darling

Ultimate Sacrifice
Lamar Waldron, with Thom Hartmann
Carroll & Graf Publishers 2005, $33, 904 pages

Using a lot of CIA and other government documents declassified in the nineties this book firms up long-established theories that John F. Kennedy was the victim of a cabal of operatives he helped create—in the CIA, Mafia and Cuban exile community.

What’s new here is that the authors posit that JFK was ready to overthrow Castro on Dec. 1, 1963 by supporting a coup and backing it up, if needed, with an invasion. But Mafia dons Marcello, Trafficante and Roselli, tired of being hounded by Bobby Kennedy, and wanting to regain casino profits they once had in Havana, penetrated the CIA plan and used it as a cover to take out JFK, with Oswald as patsy—knowing it wouldn’t be investigated because to do so would uncover the CIA’s (and the Kennedy’s) complicity in the planned Cuban coup. The president was targeted in Chicago Nov. 1, 1963 and Tampa Nov. 18, 1963 but the pieces didn’t fall into place till Nov. 22, 1963 in Dallas.

The book pulls in all the players of previous conspiracy theories, including Marilyn Monroe, who was tied into the Mob through the Hollywood-Las Vegas Rat Pack—Sinatra, Martin, Lawford, the latter being the husband of JFK’s sister. After all the horrendous CIA stories we’ve become so familiar with in the intervening years, from Watergate, Iran-Contra, the Colombian drug cartel and the Mideast oil wars—even sketched out in the recent movie Syriana—this dirty business has become familiar and the conspiracies around the deaths of the Kennedys seem almost tame. You think, well, of course they were all in it and how could we be expected in this day and age, to believe a lone nut took out Kennedy or any of the other heroes of the Left?

We’ve heard most of these charges over a long period and, hearing them one by one, it’s easy to dismiss or deny them as the ranting of paranoid nuts. However, if you start Googling the names in this book and follow the links hour after hour, you get the big picture, that these are the same people with the same money, reaching for the same goals and profits as they were in the fifties, when the Cold War got raging, the Bay of Pigs was being planned, the first massive defense profits were being reaped and Ike warned darkly of the military-industrial complex. And you see that 99 percent of researchers on the internet or in books abandoned any lone nut assassination theory and accept the sobering realities that there indeed is a vast Right Wing Conspiracy, one that is powerful, vicious and determined, as we still see, in everything from salvage logging to torture, wiretapping, stealing the 2000 election and going to war for oil.

Sustainable Community: Learning from the Cohousing Model
Graham Meltzer, PhD
Trafford Publishing, 2005, $22.50, 179 pages

Thirteen cohousing communities are profiled in this book, most of them in the Northwest, a few in Australia and one in Japan. Of value to architects and planners this book is also a useful tool for local authorities and developers who are concerned with genuinely sustainable urban development. Included are a plethora of tables based on a 10-year study to help the reader understand the costs and benefits of this alluring lifestyle. The mean cost is $2.8 million a project, the average project has 18 dwellings with an average cost of $171,587 each, the average size of each dwelling is 100 square meters. Many cohousing communities have a commons house that amounts to 15 percent of the total individual dwelling space. The author makes the point that cohousing is not necessarily a means to affordable housing but aims at sustainability, which is supported by its three E’s—Equity (of treatment), Environment and Economics. You get lots of support, like someone to care for your pets when you go away, kids can play safely outside, babysitting is easy and surrogate parents abound. Residents report lots of sharing and caring. While exploring the link between sustainability and community this book provides in-depth information for those considering alternatives to the current housing model.

Our favorite witch of many decades shows how to establish a daily spiritual life grounded in nature-as-divine. These simple, lovely and mindful practices, tied into the elements of Air, Fire, Water, Earth and Spirit will be familiar to Wiccans—and will enhance calmness, awareness and connection for anyone. Starhawk, a big force in the reintroduction of neopaganism and Earth religion in the eighties, folds in many stories and much philosophy as we try to work with an earth under siege from the ethic that sees her only as resources to be exploited.

For example, under Fire, Starhawk uses that energy to teach meditations and rituals about nonattachment, that fire eventually burns everything, yet it teaches us community, too, the warmth of gathering together, meeting, cooking, creating and loving. She offers ritual actions to deal with the fire of anger we must feel at global events, yet we know we must somehow ground this anger and engage it, without letting it destroy or drain us, so that we may have and use our creative fires.

A citizen of our Ecotopia region, Starhawk lives in San Francisco and also a “little hut” in the woods of coastal Sonoma County, where she gardens and writes. She has become a true saint of her faith and throughout her book, keeps reminding us that, through this good and wise Earth, we will prevail and once again live in balance with Creation.

Primal Tears
Kelpie Wilson
Frog Ltd., 2005, $13.95, 309 pages

You’ve heard of bonobos? They look like chimps, but they’re a matriarchal society, dominated by females—and when confronted with conflict, or just about anything else, they resolve it by having sex. In every way, with everyone, often. In Wilson’s novel, which takes place in the Siskiyous, where Wilson lives, Sarah gets fired from her teaching job by the redneck, fundamentalist principal because Sarah disses creationism, so she joins a research project, getting pregnant with a bonobo. The hybrid daughter, Sage, is full of animal instincts, with a human mind—and like a bonobo, has a lot of sex with the members of Tree Nation, a tribe of enviro-pagans who live in high platforms in the forests. As Christ was a hybrid of God and man, Sage is a hybrid in the other direction, proclaiming the divinity of animal-and-human—and the human duty to wake up and learn to live with the other creatures and love them.

The book is powerful, easy reading with a terse flow of declarative sentences that waste no space. Critics, however, have given it demerits for stereotypical characters, saying the rednecks are all fundamentalist, pickup-driving earth-rapists and the protagonists are all wise, gentle, tolerant and sexy. It’s a good read and Wilson, a writer with truthout.org, Earth First! Journal and The Progressive uses the book as a platform to espouse, through her vivid characters, a spectrum of understandings about nature—much as why menstrual cycles are in tune with the moon and why women living together tend to cycle together.

Wilson’s intent—and she achieves it—is to attune us self-absorbed humans to the realities of what we’re losing as we pave the earth. Like the bonobos, we evolved out of Africa and still possess a great reservoir of instincts that can save us, especially the much-sidelined instinct for the pleasures of warmth and intimacy, which Sage can’t help but bring out in her human tribe. What bonobos have to teach us, and what Sage brings us, is community, cooperation, peace and the capacity to live in harmony with all other creatures. As the East Bay Express puts it, Sage would rather boink than fight. At that deep level of cooperation, empathy and reciprocity, hey, boinking is not “sex,” it’s the foundation of community-building.

Earth Democracy: Justice, Sustainability and Peace
Vandana Shiva
South End Press, 2005, $15, 205 pages

Vandana Shiva, winner of the Alternative Nobel Peace Prize in 1993, opposes genetic engineering, the patenting of seeds and the privatization of natural resources, including water. Human communities lived for centuries in balance with nature, but since the start of colonialism in 1800, she says, the labor market has encouraged excess population—disposable “economic refugees,” who will work cheaply. These forces drive “the rising tide of fundamentalisms, violence against women and planetary death.”

The corporate model was designed to create “virtual wealth” for the top 20 percent, but that security is proving an illusory construct for them, and certainly for the serfs who lived on “natural wealth” for so long, Shiva says, because it’s destroying nature that supports us all. She connects globalization with concentration of power and decision-making in a small number of corporate and governmental hands, understandably leading to much frustration and powerlessness among regular folks, making them ripe for exploitation by scapegoating ethnic or religious groups. With corporate-driven scarcity, right-wing demagogues emerge to direct rage elsewhere.

Shiva lives in India, but readily makes the parallels to American culture, where the same things are happening. For democracy to thrive, she says, there must be economic democracy—connected to the Earth. In her Declaration of Interdependence, Shiva says we are members of distinct communities and also responsible to the common goods and liberties of humankind. Specifically, she asks that we pledge to work for justice, equality, democracy—goods, health and education for all children, freedom where all religions and cultures can thrive and sustainable environment as the condition for survival of all.

You might not think that when you see fundamentalist hatreds and uprisings, that they’re connected to food, water and seed, but Shiva convincingly connects the dots. In India, the suffering is greater and the connection more clear. It’s a link, she says, that will soon become apparent in America. Much of what we need to change may seem obvious, but Shiva’s clearly reasoned flow chart—about who’s doing what to whom and why—supplies the rationale so often missing in American accounts.

Dharma Moments
Danai Chanchaochai
Nicholas Brealey Publishing, 2006
$15.95, 232 pages

A wise, sweet tome this book illustrates tangled dilemmas at home and at work with anecdotes and personal stories, while explaining how to put simple Buddhist teachings into practice in ordinary life—making every moment a Dharma moment. Chanchaochai reminds us, like sun bouncing on the facets of a diamond, of the many lovely ways that we are already “home.” It comes from the point of view of insight meditation and the teachings of Buddha, beckoning us to look at the many opportunities we have to free our minds from craving—and wishing things were different than they actually are. The book examines many sticky, modern questions and conundrums: Why do we reject older workers in the workplace? Why do we imagine we can’t meditate when they’re noisily building a big hi-rise next door? And explores everyday aggravations and humiliations, like the charming story about hip, young techno-geeks taking pity on an old geezer who seems dumbfounded by the video games they’re playing—but as it turned out, he invented them. The Dalai Lama introduces the book. It’s nice. Just remember, one of the chapter titles reminds us, millionaires seldom smile.

Perfect Love, Imperfect Relationships
John Welwood
Trumpeter Books, 2006
$19.95, 205 pages

It’s a paradox—love is supposed to be the greatest of all things and the meaning of life. That understanding is universal. But just as universal are the problems we have with relationships, so the result is that, in daily life we rarely get that great miracle of love. Welwood confronts this conundrum head-on, showing that all our relationship baggage happens, not because we chose the wrong person, but because there’s a universal, core wounding that shows up everywhere as a “mood of unlove.” Sounds true. What is it?

This may seem too simple, but it shows up as a really stuck feeling that we are unloveable just as we are, says Welwood. From here, we submerge our huge, natural longing for love and project that we just can’t trust the partner or anyone, not really. We hold “grievances” against others for not loving us right or enough and against ourselves for needing and not being worthy of their love. How to fix? The book is about a journey toward healing by appreciating what’s not perfect in self and others, because, hey, no one’s perfect—and that’s perfect.

This philosophy is a bit of a shock—realizing “it’s not just me, we’re all doing this” and it’s compassionate, soothing and healing in how it gives us room to be so flawed. Too, he reminds us that learning to allow and accept the beloved is not going to do the trick. We have to do that with self, too. “The perfect lover of our dreams—the one who could lead us into a space of endless beauty and delight—can only be found, in truth, when we surrender to the very heart of life, the open expanse of being, hidden within this and every moment.” It’s really a spiritual unfolding.

Crashing the Gates
Jerome Armstrong & Markos Zuniga
Chelsea Green Publishing
2006, $25

How has the Republican Party, which serves so few of the people, increases national debt, trashes environmental regulation, does nothing about health care, wants to end Social Security and doesn’t know what to do when Katrina hits—how does this gang keep winning at the polls and now hold power in Congress, White House and Supreme Court?

A lot of it, the authors say, is that the old Democrats are a clueless coalition committed to one or two niche issues and they stand by waiting for the GOP to implode, which may work eventually, but isn’t much of a vision. The Left has to forge an encompassing plan for society—not a clump of issues about which it has a lot of passion and which are clearly divisive.
The book is a dreary but necessary retelling of travesties by the Right and failings of the Left, but does ultimately paint a vision that has slowly and surely gotten underway in the last few years—one that uses blogs and the internet as its net roots organizing tool and is really about sensible, mainstream people acting in a patriotic way to take back the country and make it work for everyone.

To accomplish this, the Left has started, barely, to undergo a death-rebirth process, submerging the emotionally-charged splinter issues that invite the GOP to demonize the old Democratic party and make it anathema at the polls. We are moving into new territory here—a sane country beyond the politics of fear and polarization and, Armstrong and Zuniga say, it’s up to us to figure out how to take the power back.

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