Nowtopian

Invisible Revolution in Plain View

Well worth checking out is today’s post at Narco News from Al Giordano about a new “bomb” being armed by the Zapatistas in Chiapas. Hundreds of delegates are meeting down there, the Zaps are listening, and planning their promised emergence from the jungle. It’s a remarkable and eloquent description of a social revolution in formation.

We tend to see revolution in the bold terms of armed rebellion, states falling, factories seized, and all that old-style iconography. But here’s the real McCoy gestating invisibly in plain view. I’m finally finishing reading Jonathan Schell’s The Unconquerable World, and it fits together nicely. His book examines the history of war and the war system, its co-evolution with industrialization and democracy to the semi-paralytic state it reached at the end of the Cold War. But his real contribution is to highlight the relatively invisible (and nonviolent) history of the changes in hearts and minds that made possible the American, French and Russian revolutions, and how the rise of cooperative power from below has grown strong enough to really confront us–historically–with the possibility of writing a whole new chapter in human civilization… if we don’t get blown to bits or killed by avian flu or drowned by rising oceans first! I’ll have more to say about The Unconquerable World in a later post.

Avian flu and thinking Networkly

My pal Jon Christensen over at The Uneasy Chair has picked up on a new blog campaign to promote awareness and networked creativity in the face of the impending Avian Flu epidemic. So here’s a couple of links to get yourself up to speed if this hasn’t entered your awareness yet. I really don’t like catastrophist prognostications, but the more I’ve read about this the harder it is to resist the sense that yes, a calm and reasonable appraisal would indicate that it’s quite likely that the earth is due for a major flu episode. Mike Davis, who has a new book out on the topic (which seems to have delayed his new book Planet of Slums that I’m REALLY looking forward to), has an excellent column on this too.

I sure don’t know what the best response to all this should be, but I do like the basic idea of taking advantage of our growing ability to think “networkly”… maybe one of you will have a brilliant idea… And let’s refuse the silly “gaia’s wrath” or other religious explanations and try to confront our woeful public health capabilities…

UPDATE, Sunday, August 21: Here’s another blog I just discovered that purports to keep us abreast of developments. Fittingly it’s called Avian Flu! I was also sharing some skeptical thoughts with a pal on the street yesterday. He asked me, having read this post, what I thought he or I as individuals could actually do? And I don’t know. We both agreed that calling for a more robust governmental response was weirdly contradictory to our politics and in any case, VERY unlikely to lead to anything good. As is too often the case, the problem far outstrips our capacity to deal, since an “adequate” response would probably involve a major reconfiguration (and reconceptualization) of our sense of the public sphere, public goods, and human rights to public health care… still, maybe all the blogging and worrying will generate the kind of grassroots pressure that might start such a reconfiguration. We can at least try…

Natural and Unnatural Envelopment

It’s August in San Francisco and the fog has been unrelenting. If you live in the westernmost neighborhoods I doubt if you’ve seen sunshine for weeks. Here in the banana belt (the Mission) we have been socked in most of the past two weeks too, though late afternoons often give us a few hours of sweet sunshine before the howling, bitter cold fog wind comes roaring back over the hills, eventually swallowing even our bucolic urban tropicalia… It’s the best thing about San Francisco, and maybe the worst thing too… Fog, beautiful cool fog, the best built-in air conditioner one could hope for… but the same frigid grayness also makes the city’s streets weirdly desolate and cold most evenings during the summer.

A lot of us have to get away each summer, to soak up some real heat, to remember how to sweat in the humidity, and to feel like it was really summer! We went off to Montreal and the New England in late June, so that was enough for me to come home and feel deeply gratified by the fog. And it’s been intensely beautiful to watch it spill over Twin Peaks every afternoon and slowly meander towards us as the sun sets–every so often actually peaking through the layers of fog to illuminate a bright orange or purple streak of sunset above and behind it all (I suppose the East Bay hill dwellers are enjoying the beautiful sunsets over the cotton-covered San Francisco).

Fog envelopes us and it cools and calms. It also blocks the warmth and sunshine. I’ve been pondering for a while the role of air conditioning in destroying street life, the kind of daily existence where you had to go on to your front stairs to get respite from the stifling heat… but here in SF where it’s cool most of the time, it’s usually too cold to have anything like a real street life anyway. But I’ll be working that up into a more thoughtful essay one of these days.

Meanwhile, a less natural form of envelopment is all around us, and a whole new augmentation of it might be forthcoming soon. I speak of the tangled web of electronic waves engulfing our shared urban spaces. Yesterday’s interesting announcement came from the Mayor’s office, a plan being floated to provide free, citywide WiFi connectivity with free internet access.

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