My life has been lived to a soundtrack. Growing up in an age of ubiquitous car radios, restaurant juke boxes, record players and later stereos, it seems like the popular songs of the day were always playing in the background, over and over. Music affects us emotionally and can evoke strong feelings of all sorts in the listener. In my case it also became a sort of storage mechanism for a lot of those strong feelings.

Forty years later I can hear a pretty mundane pop song like Tommy Rowe’s “Dizzy”, which I heard constantly when I was in my junior high years and I can be overcome with the feelings of being that young teenage boy with a crush on a girl but afraid to tell her or even talk to her. Those sort of emotional memories stay with you and I believe shape you subconsciously.

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Competing with Japan’s earthquake tsunami nuclear crisis, Libya has jumped back to the top of CNN’s “breaking news” with the beginnings of implementation of a UN approved no-fly zone (plus more) authorization. The UN resolution came not that long after the Arab League had agreed to support that no-fly zone, apparently giving Russia and China the diplomatic cover to merely abstain and not veto the UN Security Council resolution. Surely this was the culmination of a great deal of collaboration, coordination and compromise between the administrations of key countries around the world.

But it was also a source of significant criticism from both progressives and conservatives in this country that were hoping the US would have acted more quickly and decisively. I find it interesting what may lie behind those criticisms, and what the more cautious and deliberate action by the US may be indicating in terms of the greater human transition from patriarchy to partnership, from hierarchies of control to more of a circle of equals.

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A piece on Yahoo, “Hyphenated married name fight heats up on Facebook” by Janelle Harris for CafeMom’s blog The Stir, caught my partner Sally’s attention. The piece invokes feminist principles including calling out patriarchy as the problem, but the political act that the author is marshaling her arguments for is in my world view a pretty tepid one, though in the author’s it may seem pretty radical. The other aspect of this piece that caught Sally’s attention were the 2000 plus comments at the time (now more than 3100) that in engendered, with a wide spectrum of opinions.

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In my previous piece, “Got Mythos?”, inspired by Karen Armstrong’s book, The Case for God, I concluded that…

Our country has a great principle of separation of Church and State, which acknowledges a role for both. How about agreeing as well on some sort of principle of the separation of logos and mythos, and acknowledging the value of both as well? If religion stayed in what [Karen] Armstrong describes as its original realm of a vibrant and non-discredited mythos, would people be expressing so much hate and acting with such violence in the name of religious “truth”.

Months later now and finally getting back to Armstrong’s book, I finished reading chapter 3, “Reason”, where she talks about the origins of the kind of principled thought, discourse and learning, developed in Classical Greece between 600 and 300 BCE, that became the foundation of the principles and methods of science.

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In everything I write and everything I do I am all about calling out and promoting our societal transition from hierarchical to more egalitarian institutions and practices. I do not stop in these efforts at my workplace, and am pleased to report that my work environment has a lot of egalitarian features, thanks to the efforts of my boss, many of my co-workers and myself. Following up on my piece from back in July, “Much More and Much Less than a Boss”, I want to call out some of the aspects of that effort.

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In the profile section of my Facebook page and increasingly in conversation when asked, I’m describing my political orientation as “left-libertarian” rather than “progressive” or “liberal”. I kind of feel like an adolescent experimenting with or trying on for size a persona that they are intrigued with but may not yet be fully comfortable with. Perhaps in wrestling with principles built around the primacy of liberty, I’m trying to rationalize some sort of continuity with ideas that I inherited from my parents. My mom always saying that in terms of parenting principles, that “kids will tell you what they need”, and when it came to education, “teachers should run the schools”. My father (though never explicitly stated as far as I can recall) believing that life at its best is an adventure, with twists and turns and outcomes always in doubt.

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My eye caught the above title in an Education Week magazine on-line teaser and couldn’t resist reading the article, by Joseph Gauld, the founder of the Hyde Schools. I certainly wasn’t comfortable with his Cold War “us and them” framing of the need for good parenting…

Not so long ago, we vigorously opposed Russian Communism’s threat to our American beliefs. Now China is projected to replace us as the world’s economic leader… To reaffirm democratic principles for ourselves and other nations, we must meet China’s economic challenge to our leadership… Today, we need the leadership of American mothers, fathers, and all surrogate parents. We need them to begin to develop a standard of excellence in parenting and family, now and for future generations.

Classic hierarchical patriarchal stuff here, framing everything in terms of a high stakes competition between adversaries to determine superiors and inferiors, good and evil, within the pecking order. That rather than a more egalitarian view of China as a problematic peer and partner.

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George Will’s piece, “A Recoil Against Liberalism”, from the November 4 Washington Post seems to me mostly an attempt to add insult to injury to progressives, now that conservatives are in political ascendancy (at least for the moment) based on our recent election. But when Will gets beyond his own “your mother wears army boots” rant and quotes maybe a more thoughtful conservative, now we’re talking some real ideas worth wrestling with. Will quotes George Mason University economist Don Boudreaux who is reacting to Obama’s quote that progressives failed to successfully communicate their ideas in the recent election… (more…)

I can’t say I was one of those prescient people who saw the Great Recession coming, but I will tell you that ever since the 1980s, whenever I walked into a mall or shared the freeway with a zillion other cars with just a driver in them (and no passengers), I felt like our culture (at least the urban version in Los Angeles) was profoundly out of balance. It seemed like in the mall ninety percent of the money being spent was for stuff that the buyers did not really need, and on the freeway the same percentage of the gasoline being consumed was beyond what was needed to move all these people from their points A to points B. We were like addicts trying to maintain a high, taking yet another dose at the expense of our health, ever pushing back and even attempting to deny any day of reckoning.

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Just finished reading the second chapter of Karen Armstrong’s new book, The Case for God. This chapter looks at the historical development of the first five books of the Bible (constituting the Jewish Torah) where Armstrong presents her premise that this document is perhaps the first great compendium of mythology and historical fiction, drawing its content from the history of the tribes of Israel and their relationship with their God. Far from being either factual history or a consistent theological treatise, Armstrong (based on reference to archeology and biblical scholarship) sees this work as a set of stories that were told and retold over hundreds of years and compiled in written form by four groups of “editors”, each in succession adding to and reworking the various stories.

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