The Thom Hartmann Reader
Page 1
More Praise for Thom Hartmann
“Thom is a national treasure. Read him, embrace him, learn from him, and follow him as we all work for social change.”
—Robert Greenwald, political activist and founder and president of Brave New Films
“Right through the worst of the Bush years and into the present, Thom Hartmann has been one of the very few voices constantly willing to tell the truth. Rank him up there with Jon Stewart, Bill Moyers, and Paul Krugman for having the sheer persistent courage of his convictions.”
—Bill McKibben, author of Eaarth
“With the ever-growing influence of corporate CEOs and their right-wing allies in all aspects of American life, Hartmann’s work is more relevant than ever. Throughout his career, Hartmann has spoken compellingly about the value of people-centered democracy and the challenges that millions of ordinary Americans face today as a result of a dogma dedicated to putting profit above all else. This collection is a rousing call for Americans to work together and put people first again.”
—Richard Trumka, President, AFL-CIO
“Through compelling personal stories, Hartmann presents a dramatic and deeply disturbing picture of humans as a profoundly troubled species. Hope lies in his inspiring vision of our enormous unrealized potential and his description of the path to its realization.”
—David Korten, author of Agenda for a New Economy, The Great Turning, and When Corporations Rule the World
“Thom Hartmann is a creative thinker and committed small-d democrat. He has dealt with a wide range of topics throughout his life, and this book provides an excellent cross section. The Thom Hartmann Reader will make people both angry and motivated to act.”
—Dean Baker, economist and author of Plunder and Blunder, False Profits, and Taking Economics Seriously
“In an age rife with media-inspired confusion and political cowardice, we yearn for a decent, caring, deeply human soul whose grasp of the problems confronting us provides a light by which we can make our way through the quagmire of lies, distortions, pandering, and hollow self-puffery that strips the American Dream of its promise. How lucky we are, then, to have access to the wit, wisdom, and willingness of Thom Hartmann, who shares with us here that very light, grown out of his own life experience.”
—Mike Farrell, actor, political activist, and author of Just Call Me Mike and Of Mule and Man
The Thom Hartmann Reader
The Thom Hartmann Reader
Thom Hartmann
Edited by Tai Moses
The Thom Hartmann Reader
Copyright © 2011 by Thom Hartmann and Mythical Research, Inc.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law. For permission requests, write to the publisher, addressed “Attention: Permissions Coordinator,” at the address below.
The editor and the publisher are grateful to include the following copyrighted material in this collection.
“The Edison Gene,” “How to Raise a Fully Human Child” from The Edison Gene by Thom Hartmann, copyright © 2003 by Thom Hartmann, published by Inner Traditions International, www.innertraditions.com.
“Older and Younger Cultures,” “Life in a Tipi,” “Starting Salem in New Hampshire,” “Uganda Sojourn,” “Russia: A New Seed Planted among Thorns” from The Prophet’s Way by Thom Hartmann, copyright © 1997, 2004 by Thom Hartmann, published by Inner Traditions International, www.innertraditions.com.
“Walking the Blues Away” from Walking Your Blues Away by Thom Hartmann, copyright © 2006 by Thom Hartmann, published by Inner Traditions International, www.innertraditions.com.
“Younger-Culture Drugs of Control,” “The Secret of ‘Enough,’” “The Death of the Trees,” “Something Will Save Us” from The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight by Thom Hartmann, copyright © 1998, 1999, 2004 by Mythical Research, Inc. Used by permission of Harmony Books, a division of Random House, Inc.
“Democracy Is Inevitable” from What Would Jefferson Do?: A Return to Democracy by Thom Hartmann, copyright © 2004 by Mythical Research, Inc. Used by permission of Harmony Books, a division of Random House, Inc.
“The Atmosphere,” “Caral, Peru: A Thousand Years of Peace,” “Sociopathic Paychecks” from Threshold: The Crisis of Western Culture by Thom Hartmann, copyright © 2009 by Thom Hartmann. Used by permission of Viking Penguin, a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc. For on-line information about other Penguin Group (USA) books and authors, see the Internet website at http://www.penguin.com
“After the Crash” reprinted from Imagine, edited by Marianne Williamson. Copyright © 2000 by Global Renaissance Alliance. Permission granted by Rodale, Inc., Emmaus, PA 18098.
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First Edition
Paperback print edition ISBN 978-1-57675-761-1
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2011-1
Cover photo by Kindra Scanlon. Cover design by Richard Wilson. Interior design and composition by Gary Palmatier, Ideas to Images. Elizabeth von Radics, copyeditor; Mike Mollett, proofreader; Medea Minnich, indexer.
To Louise, forever
Contents
Editor’s Note
Introduction: The Stories of Our Times
Part I We the People
The Radical Middle
The Story of Carl
Democracy Is Inevitable
An Informed and Educated Electorate
Whatever Happened to Cannery Row?
Part II Brainstorms
The Edison Gene
Older and Younger Cultures
Framing
Walking the Blues Away
Part III Visions and Visionaries
Life in a Tipi
How to Raise a Fully Human Child
Starting Salem in New Hampshire
Younger-Culture Drugs of Control
The Secret of “Enough”
Part IV Earth and Edges
The Atmosphere
The Death of the Trees
Cool Our Fever
Something Will Save Us
Part V Journeys
Uganda Sojourn
Russia: A New Seed Planted among Thorns
Caral, Peru: A Thousand Years of Peace
After the Crash
Part VI America the Corporatocracy
The True Story of the Boston Tea Party
Wal-Mart Is Not a Person
Medicine for Health, Not for Profit
Privatizing the Commons
Sociopathic Paychecks
Acknowledgments
Notes
Index
About the Author
About the Editor
Editor’s Note
THE CHAPTERS, ESSAYS, AND ARTICLES IN THIS VOLUME REPREsent the best, most revealing, and accessible examples of Thom Hartmann’s writing. I don’t pretend neutrality; my first criterion for shaping the book was to select the chapters I loved the most, the ones I returned to again and again while reading Hartmann’s work. They are also the pieces I believe most relevant to people’s lives today, pieces that will make you thi
nk and feel, that you may want to discuss and share. The subject matter is various, the ideas provocative, the opinions spirited. Taken all at once, it’s a heady brew, so this is a book to savor, to dip in and out of at will.
The Reader is arranged thematically, divided into six sections inspired by Hartmann’s chief preoccupations. The brief essays that introduce each section provide some context and background for what follows. Some pieces have been edited for clarity and flow and to enhance the reading experience. In some cases slight excisions have been made, and some chapters appear in a shorter form than in the original source material.
Those who are familiar with Thom Hartmann will find some surprises here. For those just discovering him, this sampler will be the ideal introduction. One of Hartmann’s gifts is that he makes his readers and listeners feel that they are a part of the conversation. This book is a conversation in progress—we invite you to join in.
Tai Moses
Introduction:
The Stories of Our Times
MY WIFE, LOUISE, AND I CAME OF AGE IN A WORLD THAT WAS fundamentally different from the world in which today’s young people are growing up. We both left home around the age of 16, with no support, inheritance, or stipend, and yet we were still able to make it in the world.
We raised three children, our greatest legacy, and started a series of successful businesses, either from scratch or with money I borrowed first from a credit card and later, when we had a bit of a track record, from local, community banks. Most of those businesses still exist; we long ago sold our shares and moved on, taking our retirement “in installments,” in the model of John D. MacDonald’s Travis McGee (we lived at slip 18 in a houseboat community in Portland, Oregon).
Louise and I were fortunate to have come of age in the 1960s in America. We had a quarter-century of incredible opportunity before the ideologies and the policies of political and economic predators began dismantling the American Dream for all but those Thomas Jefferson referred to as “the well born and the well bred.”
Our parents remembered World War II (Louise’s dad was in the US Navy, mine in the US Army), and both her dad and mine used the GI Bill and the Federal Housing Administration and other “big government” programs to leverage themselves into the middle class. Her father went through law school on the GI Bill and ended up an assistant attorney general for the state of Michigan, after coming from a home of poverty in Detroit. My father’s story is told in this book. Our parents also remembered the Republican Great Depression of the 1930s, albeit as children, and our grandparents told us both many stories of life in those days and the lessons they learned from it.
Just 40 years ago, Louise worked her way through college as a waitress at a Howard Johnson’s and I as a minimum-wage DJ (neither of us graduated, but that’s another story unrelated to economics). I picked apples in White Cloud, Michigan, with migrant workers one summer; worked in a gas station; and washed dishes at Bob’s Big Boy while I was spinning records at WITL and WVIC. That was enough to cover the cost of higher education in the late sixties. My friends who moved to pre-Reagan California were able to attend the University of California system—one of the world’s best—for free.
Student debt? The idea was alien to Americans for most of our history, until the predators got into the system, for-profit colleges began to proliferate (their students are about twice as likely to default as students of nonprofit and state institutions), and banksters decided to get into the education business. Last year student loan debt in America exceeded credit card debt for the first time in history—more than $1 trillion. It’s creating a generation of serfs for the multinational corporations—kids so afraid to challenge or leave their employers that they are little better off than the indentured workers who came here in the nineteenth century from Europe and lived lives of near-poverty and insecurity.
When Louise and I began our family, we were debt-free—broke, but debt-free. Today the system’s rigged so that young people can’t even imagine such a thing, and banksters are making billions on student loans.
* * *
I remember sitting with Louise and our son almost two decades ago, as a psychologist ticked off the symptoms of attention-deficit disorder (ADD). With each one I thought, That’s me, too! And then he told my son, who was just hitting his teenage years, that ADD was such a serious mental problem—a “disorder” and a “deficiency”—that instead of pursuing his passion, a career in science, he should consider car mechanics.
“Be sure to work on foreign-made, high-end cars,” the well-meaning doc said. “That’s where the money is. You wouldn’t believe how much they charge to fix my Mercedes!”
My son was in tears, and I was outraged.
This experience led to several years of intense research. I took with me the background of having been executive director for five years of a residential treatment facility for emotionally disturbed and abused children, most of whom had some sort of “hyperactive” or ADD-like diagnosis. I developed the firm conviction and gathered some solid evidence suggesting that ADD wasn’t a disorder at all—a hypothesis that has now been well corroborated. It led to my writing seven books on ADD, most about kids but one—Focus Your Energy: Hunting for Success in Business with Attention Deficit Disorder—specifically about how adults with ADD could be more successful than their “nonafflicted” peers.
As for our son, he recently graduated with a master’s degree in the biological sciences.
Realizing the power that came from simply reframing a story, I moved my attention to the stories we all tell ourselves about the world and our relationship to it. That led to my book The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight: Waking Up to Personal and Global Transformation, in which I come to the conclusion that it’s not our behavior that’s killing us and so much life on the planet; it’s not our technology or even our wasteful ways of living. All of these are just symptoms that derive from our stories, which over the millennia have become, in many cases, highly dysfunctional. Only by changing our stories—our understanding of our relationship to everyone and everything else—can we stop the destruction and begin the process of healing our planet and ourselves.
The biggest collection of controlling stories, of course, comes from religion and politics. The former has been a lifelong fascination that led to my writing The Prophet’s Way: A Guide to Living in the Now, a book chiefly about my spiritual mentor, Gottfried Müller, who passed away a few years ago at the age of 93, leaving behind the international Salem work.
I’d largely ignored the political stories for most of my adult life, outside of my Students for a Democratic Society years in the sixties and lengthy discussions/debates with my Republican father. But after Louise and I sold our last business in Atlanta and moved to rural Vermont, we drove to Michigan to visit family for Thanksgiving. All the way there, we searched the radio dial for an intelligent conversation to listen to, but city after city all we found was Sean Hannity at a Habitat for Humanity site (he called it “Hannity for Humanity”), telling us that no “liberal” was ever going to live in the house they were helping build.
It was a bizarre experience. Having worked in radio back in the sixties and seventies, I wrote an article, “Talking Back to Talk Radio,” about how liberal talk radio might succeed, if done right. Sheldon and Anita Drobney read my article online, and as Sheldon noted in his book The Road to Air America: Breaking the Right Wing Stranglehold on Our Nation’s Airwaves (in which he reprints the article), it became the first template for a business plan for that ultimately ill-fated network.
But rather than wait the almost two years it took the Drobneys to launch Air America, Louise and I, with the help of a local radio guy and friend, Rama Schneider, looked around the state and found a station in Burlington, Vermont, that was willing to put us on the air. The slot was Saturday mornings at 10 a.m., right after the swap-and-shop, so many of our callers, instead of discussing politics, wanted to know, “Is that John Deere still available?”
Ed Asner wa
s kind enough to come on as a guest, helping us make a tape that caught the interest of the i.e. America Radio Network run out of Detroit by the United Auto Workers. Suddenly, broadcasting from our living room in Montpelier, Vermont, with a studio I’d thrown together mostly from parts bought on eBay, we were on the air nationally, including Sirius, taking on Rush Limbaugh (and beating him in some markets) in the noon–to–3 p.m. slot ever since.
When we bought our house in Montpelier, we found in the attic a 20-volume set of the collected writings of Thomas Jefferson, published in 1909 and badly water damaged but still quite readable. I spent almost two years immersed in that incredible man’s brain, from his autobiography to his letters to his work as president. Inspired, I wrote two books: What Would Jefferson Do?: A Return to Democracy and Unequal Protection: How Corporations Became “People”—and How You Can Fight Back.