Bruce Wilson

Name:	Bruce Wilson
Location:	Millbury, MA
Where I blog:	Talk To Action Alternet The Daily Kos The Huffington Post

My Experience in progressive politics:

Mainly, I write. Here's a link to my posts, in consecutive order. Some are toss-offs, some merited significant media treatment (and still do).

http://www.talk2action.org/user/Bruce%20Wilson/stories

This Spring I learned to use the iMovie program that came with my 1st generation MacBook. Thus, the "God sent Hitler" video was born and John McCain at last persuaded to renounce John Hagee. Since I started, my videos have been viewed by over 206,000 people on my YouTube spot though countless millions saw the McCain/Hagee/Hitler video on TV or heard it on th radio.

More recently, as a result of reflecting and analyzing the dynamics of the Hagee-McCain media breakout so they be applied in future experiments. Joe Lieberman's association with John Hagee is currently on my "to do" list.

My political interests and sensibilities lie in the realm of "movement politics" - generally, I've found, there's lots of awareness now of electoral politics (and the need for literacy in that area) but not much concern for movement politics even when the relevance of that to electoral politics gets demonstrated, quite sharply even as with my viral video on McCain/Hagee/"God sent Hitler".

I used to keep a running list of areas where relatively small efforts could exert a major or significant impact, where the battlefield is usually the intersection of political ideology and religious belief but sometimes just political ideology alone. The power of ideas to move politics has been long understood on the American right but only recently, I would say, on the left and not yet deeply enough.

For example, the Institute on Religion and Democracy is a right wing nonprofit, secular actually, funded by Scaife, Bradley and other far-right funders and dedicated to taking down, splitting apart and gutting the big mainline Protestant denominations in America. Over the last 2-3 years a handful of activists, brought loosely together under the auspices of the blog Frederick Clarkson and I started in late 2005, appear to have more or less stopped the IRD, at least for the time being, or substantially thwarted the venture.

In terms of land, endowments, property and so on tens or even hundreds of billions of dollars in assets were at stake, and the US right has been very successfully destabilizing the big mainline Christian denominations, in some cases using covert social tactics developed by the CIA to take down 3rd World nations, for several decades now. The IRD's funding has never been at the most more than several million dollars a year but it's been gradually eroding the "Social Gospel" tradition that forms part of the core of the American liberal tradition.

Talk To Action has no budget at all, but it's helped stop, or at least blunt, an ongoing push that's been forcing a little noticed tectonic shift, rightwards, in the American political landscape.

My personal volunteering highlight:

I made a viral video that just shifted the course of the 2008 election, by forcing John McCain to renounce Pastor John Hagee.
Studies have shown the evangelical right to be the core base, now, of the GOP. [ see: http://religiondispatches.org/Gui/Content.aspx?Page=AR&Id=273 ]

That video was far from accidental though its success was serendipitous, sure. But prior to the video breakout I'd been studying and writing on John Hagee, and his CUFI, for about a year and a half, and with considerable intensity. I was interested in this area for strategic reasons : CUFI and Christian Zionists are gradually peeling off one of the Democratic Party's core constituencies, Jewish Americans. And, CUFI - along with its American Jewish allies and group such as AIPAC, helps form a powerful bloc militating towards war with Iran.

So to the extent I can demonstrate the political extremism of the type of Christianity John Hagee represents, and if I can demonstrate convincingly that Hagee and other Christian Zionists actively promote anti-Jewish memes, slurs, stereotypes and conspiracy theories I may be able to, working in concert with only a handful of others, exert a significant impact not only on the US political landscape but potentially, to some extent, on the Israeli political landscape as well and that's sorely needed :

To the extent that Israelis come to realize that their tactical, provisional alliance of Christian Zionism is counterproduction and even possibly disastrous I feel the likelihood of an Israeli attack on Iran will be reduced - exposing the deeply anti-Semitic and even eliminationalist character of Christian Zionism will help, I hope, function to discredit its close allies in the Likud Party.

Steps I've taken to combine on-line and off-line action:

In terms of the way I work, and because I work to change beliefs, ideas and ideology I've mainly worked online though I think I've had an impact doing so. If I could however, I've conceived many projects that would integrate the two spheres, but so far I've lacked the resources or time to launch those though I'm hoping to run across some people at Netroots Nation who might be able to cut through some of my mental snarls to point out practical ways that some of those ideas could be implemented.

Why I want to attend Netroots Nation:

Despite the fact that my research over the past year has generated a slew of national media stories (references available) and that Wolf Blitzer just credited my blog with forcing John McCain to renounce John Hagee (true enough - I did make the notorious "Hagee: 'God Sent Hitler' " video) I've never been invited to any significant blogger or political activist conference.

That's not exactly the world's fault - I've never applied to any.

What I want to get out of Netroots Nation:

I need to network, and it's always better to meet people in person.

The political leverage I'm trying to exert (and occasionally succeeding) seems to most effective when projected through Internet news-promotion models that I believe can be better explored in the progressive political blogosphere ( see: http://www.techpresident.com/blog/entry/25955/the_making_of_the_god_sent_hitler_viral_video_and_mccain_s_break_from_hagee
). And, since trust, friendship and shared interests and goals are what in the end makes such collective efforts work, I'd like to be able to personally meet, if at all possible, people who might be interested in exploring such approaches.

There are a number of new theoretical models I've explored, in the last year or two, for new types of political campaigns that exert political power, in ways that sometimes address electoral politics and sometimes address long term, depth or "movement" politics and in this application I've outlined a number of the campaigns I've led or been a part of in the past several years.

I'd hope to encounter at least a few people, at Netroots Nation, who have an appreciation for the novel methods I've helped pioneer and who would be willing to entertain the notion that beyond the conceptual realms of the new orthodoxy on the left (and in my experience there is a new orthodox which, loosely speaking, might be gestured at via the questions - "What is politics?", What is possible?" and "What is doable ?") there may actually exist possibilities, waiting to be discovered, invented and pioneered, which can move politics in new and sometimes even more effective ways than currently favored methods or which augment existing methods. I wish I had time to write up a White Paper on some of the approaches I'm alluding to. If I go to Netroots Nation maybe I can bang out a preliminary draft on the plane.

But, above all, I'd simply like to meet people.

What is a progressive activist:

Broadly speaking, I can't answer that but for me, my expression of progressive activism involves depth politics, movement politics and the identification and areas of political conflict where progressives have been losing, sometimes badly, for not fully grasping the nature of the battle or, at times, not noticing there's a battle going on at all.

Which is to say that I think there are countless, valid, idiosyncratic answers to this question but there are some generalities I could draw - activists share a common language and goals, and common values. They work together, hopefully better and not worse, fractiously that is, towards those goals and they develop a loose currency of exchange, the exchange of favors, which allows many to, in certain cases, entrain in common projects. Activists understand reciprocity, and they understand altruism - in fact, that drives them. But, good activists learn to get exercise, eat well, and take time off, occasionally at least, to play.

Activists can express their activism in countless ways. I express mine through the field of beliefs, ideology and ideas.

In late 2006 I rewrote Paul Weyrich's "Training Manual" (my re-write for the left) : it was an intellectual experiment and I would not necessarily agree with all I write at that time, for ethical reasons, but here it is :

http://www.talk2action.org/story/2006/9/9/13473/53538

I generally had given up writing manifestos as of the time I rewrote the Paul Weyrich/Eric Huebeck "Training Manual" and I didn't mean for it to be taken literally (and said as much in my introduction and forward to the piece). Rather, I wanted to shake up existing conceptual patterns & beliefs about what politics was or was not.

I don't always write in such a wonkish and hard-boiled fashion. In 2001, shortly after I watched the World trade Centers come down I wrote a utopian, hopeful tract that began:

"
INTERCONNECTION - a meditation and call for nonviolence and dialog

All life on earth is interconnected and interdependent. On all levels. biological , emotional, political, spiritual. Please reflect on this, for there are very, very few living who understand the deep of ramifications of this. I do not count myself among them. And those who act on that understanding are fewer still.

Life on Earth is now viewed by modern biology as heavily symbiotic - from the cellular level to to the macrocosm some have taken to calling Gaia which somehow maintains stable parameters of those things we take for granted -
oxygen and nitrogen levels, temperature levels, rainfall patterns. At the global level, nutrients are cycled and wastes removed. We are provided for. There is a delicate balance between competition and cooperation. But it is
cooperation and interdependence - and even compromise - among and between organisms and species which allows for the current density of life on Earth. The regions of greatest species diversity on earth are the great rainforests which also have the most complex webs of interreliance.

The time has come for us to all learn the deep lessons of interconnection. We can no longer deny connection between the personal and the global.

Violence, destruction and killing for no purpose whatsoever, and in the service of ideology, is a denial of interdependence and interconnection. Those who chose to destroy the World Trade Center chose, in their anger and pain, to deny interconnection. We are now called to prevent our responses to this terrible act of anger from stoking further cycles of revenge and retaliation.

The grief, the anger over the loss of our loved ones can be addressed through revenge, perhaps. But there is another way, a better way. A miracle which we can allow to happen in our hearts by which those feelings of loss, and rage can turn to sympathy and compassion for all victims of violence wherever they are. In New York City, at the Pentagon, in Israel and on the West Bank. In African and the developing world. Everywhere. Human suffering wears no national flag.

In our hearts, can we change this anger into love and compassion?......."

(It went on like that for quite a bit longer)

Needless to say, the answer them proved to be "no", but "I'm hoping that, long term, our efforts can change that to a "yes".

****

A few years later, before I'd yet gotten the political bug (or before politics became to me an unavoidable personal, moral imperative) I'd gotten the urge to launch a career writing fiction. I'd started to emit entire short stories online that masqueraded as "comments", such as the short story "Gandhi's Gas Station" - which led one amateur Gandhi historian from Texas, who thought my story was true (in the historical sense) to email me for further details. It started this way:

"
A little known fact : Gandhi actually did work as a gas station attendant, but for the Crown Petroleum Corporation, in Baltimore, MD. It was to promote Indian gasoline self-reliance. In between pumping gas, he would work at his spinning wheel and and weave cloth. The gas station owner, who let Gandhi sleep in a run-down little room in the second floor of the gas station building (it actually was an old converted fire station) thought Gandhi both weird, suspect, cool, and somewhat unnerving - less for Gandhi's preferred personal garment (which seemed to be some kind of strange loincloth) which the frail looking Indian wore in his free time, than for the trio of young, nubile sari wrapped Hindu women, slender and graceful, who came in tow with Gandhi - as part of the package it seemed - their dark, soft eyes shyly demurring, amidst richly shimmering hair, itself the flower of youth, and a delicately frangrant musk which seemed to waft off their saris and stroke the senses with a beckoning promise of fertility.

From across the cluttered gas station room, as the tired shafts of sunlight struggled through dusty windows to droop over the fan belts, quarts of oil, the old stacks of invoices, as the gas station man and Gandhi haggled over terms of employment, Gandhi's women sent the pulse of the Crown station owner racing. Hot.....Hot.... He was fifty, and overweight but still very much a man. So he began to perspire, quite profusely, and asked Gandhi to step outside with him, for air, to conclude the agreement in private.

Those women were too hot.

"Please understand," explained Gandhi - as he addressed the other man's obvious agitation, "I do not myself engage in the procreative act with these beautiful young women who assault your senses, though we do all share one small bed. I sleep with the women that I might better develop my discipline and my resolve, so as to be able to prevail in my nonviolent struggle to liberate my beloved India from the British colonial occupiers.....

...Not all is as it seems."

[ for the rest, see: http://www.metafilter.com/30587/Hillary-Inserts-Foot-In-Mouth#609045 ]

As it turned out though, I came to feel, sometime in 2004 and moving towards 2005, that even though I deeply wanted to spend my time as a creative writer, and though I suppose that technically speaking the option was open to me, in moral terms it really wasn't. Things were far, far too messed up in the American political scene for me to consider an Ostrich lifestyle, head in the sand and all while the world burned around me.

******

From the late 1990's through early 2000 I was studying, writing on and trying to be an activist fighting Global Warming. In retrospect I was not bad as a writer on the subject but atrocious as an activist. Here's a Unitarian Church talk on the subject I gave in 2000:

"A child shames us all"
-Reading given at the Andover, Mass. Unitarian Church, 10/15/2000, by Bruce Wilson

The historical Buddha died with these last words to his disciples ; "do your best". And I am trying to do my best here, gesturing at some things which disturb me, - things both vague and shifting and as obvious as the side of a cow.

Everything is connected to everything else. Once, this was an insight rare, hard fought and granted to only the spiritually brilliant - The Meister Eckharts, the Boddidharmas, the Sufis, the blessed. Now, to teach us all this insight, the world threatens to rear up to smash us about the head as does a Zen master smite a recalcitrant pupil for stubborn confusion. We will learn, sooner I hope rather than later, that all systems are parts of larger wholes which in turn are pieces of still greater wholes.

As De Morgan paraphrased Jonathan Swift;

"Great fleas have little fleas upon their backs to bite 'em,
And little fleas have lesser fleas, and so ad infinitum."

We all are pieces of greater wholes - families, local communities, cities, nations. But we are also fleas and the earth teems with us and begins to shiver feverishly with our load.

Much is made about the human economy, of our fears at erratic lunges of the stock market, and the need for continual increase in the gross national product. It is only vaguely recognized and then quickly forgotten that we live in a larger economy, that of the biological world. But the study of this larger economy which some has taken to calling Gaia - for the Greek goddess who drew the world forth from chaos - has gained the momentum of a quiet revolution in many of the biological sciences, for this system provides the oxygen we breathe, cycles the nitrogen which fertilizes plant growth, and somehow regulates global temperature and ocean salinity levels. Everything that we take for granted is given.

Have we proven ourselves wiser than fleas? We take and take from that larger economy and never acknowledge the debt. Someday I feel that we will do so and I hope that this day comes soon.

But our understanding is dim and our vision is narrowed, in turn, by aches and pains, by the sorrows of life, by the chattering of the television and the screeching of tires, and by the growling of our stomachs.

When I try to peer back down through the mists of memory at my childhood I seem to recall a sense I once had that there were adults - whom I suppose I identified by the gray hairs on their heads - who were wise and in control of things. But over the years, as I learned more about the world, this faith of mine that someone, somewhere, was in control ebbed away and was replaced by a view of humans on the earth as an uncontrolled and untamed process.

As individuals, we all lead our lives with intelligence and some even manage with grace. It is difficult enough to deal with the immediate sphere; our individual decisions and tragedies seem insurmountable enough and to even drive a car every day, through rush hour traffic, is a daily flirtation with death.

But as species we resemble nothing as much as a collective process. Loren Eiseley likened us, at times, to beavers with mechanical contrivances gnawing and damming our way through through the world's biota -- and in his darker visions he likened us to the slime molds which gather together, as individual amoebae, to coalesce into a larger bodies to propel spores upward and outward as Eiseley feared that Humans might project themselves upward and outward into space. "Perhaps", he wrote, "Homo Sapiens the wise, is himself only the mechanism in a parasitic cycle, an instrument for the transference, ultimately, of a more invulnerable and heartless version of himself."

I worry that as we lust after the conquest of the universe, and as we dream of a future in which we create intelligent machines to do our bidding and transform our world into an earthly paradise, we neglect developments which are happening under our very noses. The transcendence of the physical world which we seem to seek has not yet arrived and, meanwhile, we are rapidly transforming our planet. It is a race, it seems to me. Will our dreamed of utopian technologies arrive before we lay waste to the earth and thus to ourselves?

We humans once looked to shamans to foretell the future in signs read in entrails and in sticks cast upon the ground. Later, we chose priests and, later still, scientists. Now, I think, we choose no one at all to predict our future for we no longer listen to the scientists when they tell us that our pollution is heating up the earth's atmosphere or that we will soon be responsible for the elimination of half of the number species which currently live on this earth. I think that we do not look anywhere for guidance as much as we wallow in a cynical and relativistic skepticism which holds that all knowledge is suspect. I think that, in the face of disturbing truths, we retreat from the notion of truth itself.

"Ignoring climate change will surely be the most costly of all possible choices, for us and our children.....Our climate is now changing rapidly....Our new data and understanding now point to a critical situation we face." This quote comes from a joint letter written last February to the London Observer by James Baker, the Undersecretary of the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), and Peter Ewins, head of the British meteorological office. When our leading climatologists take the career risks of issuing such bold pronouncements about our changing climate, we ignore them.

And when agencies which seek to mitigate the suffering of human conflict - such as the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies - state that "The explosive combination of human-driven climate change and rapidly changing socio- economic conditions will set off chain reactions of devastation leading to super-disasters" we merely shrug.

When we hear that the heat of 1998, which seems to have been the hottest year on the planet in at least the last thousand, caused as much as 5% of the world's population became environmental refugees, we shrug some more. What can be done? There are bills to pay, and our house needs a new roof.

As as we drive on, with fingers clenched on our steering wheels, headlong into the future, we sow the seeds of future conflict. The principle is simple; when besieged by heat, thirst, and hunger, humans fight.

I once saw this demonstrated, during a month long heat wave, in Baltimore Md., when a friend of mine made a cross comment to a local landlords' employee - who was throwing trash into a collapsing alley garage where rats bred in profusion. The employee ran into his apartment to come out waving, of all things, a scimitar - which he tried to taunt my friend into charging at. Presumably, he meant to lop off my friend's head. Fortunately, calmer natures prevailed and no blood was shed.

But blood will be shed and weapons of mass destruction will be employed unless we stop our collective project of destabilizing the Earth's environment. We can hope that, even though world oil production is now projected to begin declining within 5 to 12 years, that current supplies will allow those adults here today to drive comfortably into the grave. But today's children will witness the aftermath as the world fights over the last of the oil. And we can hope that we do not see what happens when the ice cap covering our north pole disappears, as some have predicted will happen within this century. But today's children will see the results.

We are now laying a grim legacy, of a destabilized climate and a biologically impoverished world, of human conflicts and wars.

And I think that the children and young people of today have the right to be angry at our passivity and the right to demand action. All here who have at least three or four decades behind them are well into that process of entrancement and accommodation to the ways things are which is required to successfully function in human society. But the young can expect to live to see, at least, the middle of the next century and so have a right to be concerned, to be angry even, and to scold us.

They have the right to demand that we plan for them a viable future, that we begin the transition now to cleaner energy sources, that we address the poverty of the world if only to prevent the destruction of the world's remaining forests, and that we relinquish our weapons of mass destruction...."

*******

Basically, I stopped trying to work in the realm of fighting climate change or educating people about it because I perceived there were other things blocking such efforts - the NeoCon and Christian right push towards war (and more war) was, I came to understand, a nearly (or fully) apocalyptic roadblock.

So, I moved on and here I am now.

Anyway, my forte lies in the realm of ideas - of which I had huge stacks, heaps and heaps squirreled away. This year I'm working, amidst lost and lots of other writing projects, on the thesis that the central animating narrative of the modern American religious right which came about in response to changes in violent crime, murder, divorce and other traditional indexes of social pathology that began to rise around 1963 was a magical narrative involving a lack of Bibles in public schools and a lack of sufficient displays of Christian civic religion when, as has recently been demonstrated, those mass human behavioral changes were driven by industrial pollution.

I've got a rap, to go along with the narrative, by which activists can unpack and demolish - but nicely - the religious right's narrative of cultural complaint that's lodged, as far as I can tell, of just about every dedicated activist in the movement I've ever encountered. Take apart the narrative driving the movement (and, even better, suggest a new, better and nontoxic narrative) and you fundamentally change the movement, for the better, or neutralize it altogether.

How I think blogs fit into the progressive movement:

Blogs are a maximally cost-effective (close to free in a sense, but for time and the support infrastructure that enables bloggers to spend their time blogging) method of political organizing which have have incredible demonstrated potential for fund raising, the creation of activist networks, the creation on on-the-fly targeted political/issue campaigns and, my own favorite, the ability to project new ideas or challenge old ideas.

I've used blogs to effect the national political landscape. And, I've spent far too much time typing over the past 5 years, so I would really enjoy talking to live humans for a bit (hence my Netroots Nation application). One way of getting at the inherent limitations of blogs lies in my sense that the stickiest, the tightest bonds between activists, the bonds which in reality determine the political economy of the emerging progressive movement, are developed not online but in person and that's perfectly understandable - textual communication is very thin, good for ideas but awful for the sort of information that leads to productive working relationships. Text communication plus phone conversations or even tele-conferencing is vastly better, because to see someone and hear their voice provides a whole new sort of information that can facilitate the working relationship. But in the end face to face interaction, even once, can be considered indispensible.

That is to say that blogs are not all powerful. But, in terms of my recent experiences I have become convinced that blogs can wield far more power than they now do, and my thesis is that the sort of breakout, from the blogoshpere into the mainstream media which occurred with my Magee/McCain/"God Sent Hitler" video can and must be replicated.

As models such as Craigslist (especially Craigslist) continue to eat into the advertising base that mainstream media traditionally has derived from paid advertising the MSM will continue to grow ever more reliant on the Blogosphere and so to the extent that progressive political blogs study the dynamics of that transition they will be able to take advantage of the changing media landscape so as to better project neglected stories from the Blogosphere into the MSM.

How I think Democracy For America fits into the progressive movement:

Well and productively.

In 10 words or less, create a bumper-sticker slogan against John McCain:

"God Didn't Send Hitler, Mr. McCain"