No Time to Spare

by Ursula K. Le Guin

  I can’t say that that was true for the uniforms women got handed in WWII. They imitated the men’s, of course, with skirts instead of pants, but were poorly designed, the taut, snappy look becoming tight and stiff on women; even granted the severe rationing of cloth, the uniforms were unnecessarily skimpy, prim, and awkward. I certainly wouldn’t have joined the WAVES or the WAC for the uniform, only in spite of it. Fortunately for the WAVES, the WAC, and me, I was fifteen when the war ended.

  During the next several American wars, the whole concept of the uniform evolved away from good fit and good looks toward a kind of aggressively practical informality, or sloppiness, or slobbishness. By now our soldiers are mostly seen in shapeless, muddy-looking spotted pajamas.

  This uniform may be useful and comfortable in the jungles of Vietnam or the deserts of Afghanistan. But do men need camouflage when flying from Reno to Cincinnati, or combat boots on Fifth Avenue? I guess soldiers still have dress uniforms—I know the Marines do, they seem to put them on way more often than the other services, maybe because they get so many photo ops in D.C.—but I can’t remember when I last saw an army private on the street looking sharp.

  I know that for many boys and men, camo has taken on the glamour that a handsome uniform once had. Grotesque as it appears to me, it looks manly and fine to them. So I guess the uniform still serves as an aid to recruitment, luring the boy who wants to wear it, look like that, be that soldier. And I don’t doubt that young men wear it with pride.

  But I wonder very much about the effect of the camo-pajama uniform on most civilians. I find it not only degrading but disturbing that we dress up our soldiers in clothes suitable to jail or the loony bin, setting them apart not by looking good, looking sharp, but by looking like clowns from a broken-down circus.

  This whole change in style of uniforms may be part of a change in our style of war, and with it a changed attitude toward service in the military. Possibly it reflects a newly realistic opinion of war, a refusal to glamorize it. If we cease to see war as an inherently noble and ennobling thing, we cease to put the warrior on a pedestal. Handsome uniforms then seem a mere parade, a false front for the senseless brutality of behavior in war. So “fatigues” can be grossly utilitarian, with no thought for the appearance or self-esteem of the wearer. Anyhow, now that most war is waged not between armies but by machines killing civilians, what’s the meaning of a military uniform at all? Didn’t the child dead in the ruins of a bombed village die for her country just as any soldier does?

  But I can’t believe the army thinks that way, that it’s making uniforms ugly in order to encourage us to think war is ugly. Perhaps the fatigue uniform reflects an attitude they aren’t conscious of and would never admit, a change less in the nature of war than in our national attitude to it, which is neither glamorizing nor realistic but simply uncaring. We pay very little attention to our wars or to the people fighting them.

  Right or wrong, in the 1940s we honored our servicemen. We were in that war with them. Most of them were draftees, some quite unwilling ones, but they were our soldiers and we were proud of them. Right or wrong, since the 1950s and particularly since the 1970s, we began putting whichever war was on at the moment out of sight and out of mind, and with it the men and women fighting it. These days they’re all volunteers. Yet—or therefore?—we disown them. We give them pro forma praise as our brave defenders, send them over to whichever country we’re fighting in now, keep sending them back over, and don’t think about them. They aren’t us. They aren’t people we really want to see. Like the people in jails, the people in loony bins. Like clowns that aren’t funny, from a third-rate circus we wouldn’t think of going to.

  Now shall we talk about how much we pay, how we are bankrupting our future, to keep that circus going?

  No. That’s not something we talk about. Not in Congress. Not in the White House. Not anywhere.

  Clinging Desperately to a Metaphor

  September 2011

  Unless the people benefit, economic growth is a subsidy for the rich.

  —Richard Falk, “Post-Mubarak Revolutionary Chances,”

  Al Jazeera, 22 February 2011

  IT’S AS SILLY for me to write about economics as it would be for most economists to write about the use of enjambment in iambic pentameter. But they don’t live in a library, and I do live in an economy. Their life can be perfectly poetry-free if they like, but my life is controlled by their stuff whether I like it or not.

  So: I want to ask how economists can continue to speak of growth as a positive economic goal.

  I understand why we’re in a panic when our business or our whole economy goes into a decline or a recession: because the whole system is based on keeping up with/outgrowing the competition, and if we fail to do that, we face hard times, collapse, crash.

  But why do we never question the system itself, so as to find ways to get around it or out of it?

  Up to a point, growth is a plausible metaphor. Living things need to grow, first to their optimum size, and then to keep replacing what wears out, annually (as with many plants) or continually (as with mammalian skin). A baby grows to adult size, after which growth goes to maintaining stability, homeostasis, balance. Growth much beyond that leads to obesity. For a baby to grow endlessly bigger would be first monstrous, then fatal.

  In taking uncontrolled, unlimited, unceasing growth as the only recipe for economic health, we’ve dismissed the ideas of optimum size and keeping the organism in balance.

  Maybe there are organisms that have no optimum size, like the enormous fungal network one hears about that underlies the whole Middle West, or is it just Wisconsin? But I wonder if a fungus wandering around thousands of square miles underground is the most promising model for a human economy.

  Some economists prefer to use mechanical terms, but I believe machines have an optimum size much as living organisms do. A big machine can do more work than a small one, up to a point, beyond which things like weight and friction begin to ruin its efficiency. The metaphor comes up against the same limit.

  Then there’s social Darwinism—bankers red in tooth and claw, surviving fitly, while small vermin live on the blood that trickles down . . . This metaphor, based on a vast misunderstanding of evolutionary process, hits its limit almost at once. In predatory competition, bigness is useful, but there are endless ways to get your dinner besides being bigger than it is. You can be smaller but smarter, smaller but faster, tiny but poisonous, winged . . . you can live inside it while you eat it . . . As for getting a mate, if combat were the only way to score, large size would help, but (despite our battle fixation) most competition doesn’t involve combat. You can win the reproductive race by dancing gracefully, by having a blue-green tail decorated with eyes, by building a lovely bower for your bride, by knowing how to tell a joke . . . As for living space, you can crowd out your neighbors by outgrowing them, but it’s cheaper and just as effective to corner all the water in the vicinity, like a juniper tree, or to be toxic to sea anemones who aren’t closely related to you . . . The competitive techniques of plants and animals are endless in variety and ingenuity. So why are we, clever we, stuck on one and one only?

  An organism that settles on a single survival stratagem and ceases to seek and find others—ceases to adapt—is at high risk. And adaptability is our principle and most reliable gift. As a species we are almost endlessly, almost appallingly adaptable. Capitalism thinks it’s adaptable, but if it only has one stratagem, endless growth, the limit of its adaptability is irrevocably set. And we have reached that limit. We are therefore at very high risk.

  Capitalist growth, probably for at least a century and certainly from the turn of the millennium on, has been growth in the wrong sense. Not only endless but uncontrolled—random. Growth as in tumor. Growth as in cancer.

  Our economy isn’t just in a recession. It is sick. As a result of uncontrolled economic (and population) growth, our ecology is sick, and getting sicker every day. We have disturbed the
homeostasis of the earth, the ocean, and the atmosphere—not fatally to life on the planet; the bacteria will survive the corporation. But perhaps fatally to ourselves.

  We have been in denial about this for decades. By now the denials are hysterical in every sense of the word—What do you mean, climate instability? What do you mean, overpopulation? What do you mean, reactors are toxic? What do you mean, you can’t live on corn syrup?

  We go on mechanically repeating the behaviors that caused the sickness: we bail out the bankers, we resume offshore drilling, we pay polluters to pollute, because without them how is our economy to grow? Yet increasingly, all economic growth benefits only the rich, while most people grow poorer. The Economic Policy Institute reports:

  From 2000 to 2007 (the last period of economic growth before the current recession) the richest 10% of Americans received 100% (one hundred percent—all) the average growth of income. The other 90% received none.

  At this rate, by the time we admit that cancer is not health, that we’re sick, any cure must be so radical as almost certainly to require dictatorial rule, and to destroy more—physically and morally—than it can save.

  Nobody in any government seems able even to imagine alternatives, and people who talk about them get little attention. Some of the alternatives that existed in the past had promise; I think socialism did, and still does, but it was run off the rails by ambitious men using it as a means to power, and by the infection of capitalism—the obsession with growing bigger at all cost in order to defeat rivals and dominate the world. The example of the larger socialist states is about as heartening as that of the giant underground fungus.

  So what is our new metaphor to be? It might be the difference between life and death to find the right one.

  Lying It All Away

  October 2012

  I’M FASCINATED BY this historical snippet from the New York Times’s “On This Day” feature:

  On October 5, 1947, in the first televised White House address, President Truman asked Americans to refrain from eating meat on Tuesdays and poultry on Thursdays to help stockpile grain for starving people in Europe.

  The first televised White House address—that’s interesting. Imagine a world in which a president speaks to the people on the radio, or can speak only to a physically present audience, like Lincoln at Gettysburg. How quaint, how primitive, how different from us, were those simple folk of olden days!

  But that’s not what fascinates me in this item. What I’m working hard to imagine or remember is a country whose president asked his people not to eat beef on Tuesdays or chicken on Thursdays because there were people starving in Europe. The Second World War had left the European economy as well as its cities pretty much in ruins, and this president thought Americans would a) see the connection between meat and grain, and b) be willing to forgo a luxury element of their diet in order to give away a more essential food to hungry foreigners on another continent, some of whom we’d been killing, and some of whom had been killing us, two years earlier.

  At the time, the request was laughed or sneered at by some and ignored by most. But still: can you imagine any president, now, asking the American people to deprive themselves of meat once or twice a week in order to stockpile grain to ship to hungry foreigners on another continent, some of them no doubt terrorists?

  Or asking us to refrain from meat now and then to provide more grain to programs and food banks for the 20,000,000 Americans living in “extreme poverty” (which means malnutrition and hunger) right now?

  Or, actually, asking us to do without anything for any reason?

  Something has changed.

  Since our betrayed public schools can no longer teach much history or reading, people may find everyone and everything before about twenty-five years ago unimaginably remote and incomprehensibly different from themselves. They defend their discomfort by dismissing people before their time as simple, quaint, naive, etc. I know Americans sixty-five years ago were nothing of the sort. Still, that speech of Harry Truman’s tells me something has indeed changed.

  Being very old, I remember a little about the Depression, and a lot about the Second World War and its aftermath, and some things about Lyndon Johnson’s “war on poverty,” and so on. This experience doesn’t allow me to ever take prosperity for all as a fact—only an ideal. But the success of the New Deal and the socioeconomic network set in place after 1945 allowed a lot of people to assume almost unthinkingly that the American Dream had come to pass and would go on forever. Only now is a whole generation maturing that didn’t grow up in the alluring stability of steady inflation, but has seen growth capitalism return to its origins, providing security for none but the strongest profiteers. In this respect, the experience of my grandchildren is and will be very different from that of their parents, or mine. I wish I could live to see what they’re going to do about it.

  But this still doesn’t quite take me to whatever it is about that request of old Harry’s that intrigues me so, and that, when I think about it, makes me feel as if the America I’m living in is somebody else’s country.

  An education that gave me a sense of the continuity of human life and thought keeps me from dividing time into Now (Us—the last few years) and Then (Them—history). A glimmer of the anthropological outlook keeps me from believing that life was ever simple for anybody, anywhere, at any time. All old people are nostalgic for certain things they knew that are gone, but I live in the past very little. So why am I feeling like an exile?

  I have watched my country accept, mostly quite complacently, along with a lower living standard for more and more people, a lower moral standard. A moral standard based on advertising. That hard-minded man Saul Bellow wrote that democracy is propaganda. It gets harder to deny that when, for instance, during a campaign, not only aspirants to the presidency but the president himself hides or misrepresents known facts, lies deliberately and repeatedly. And only the opposition objects.

  Sure, politicians always lied, but Adolf Hitler was the first one who made it into a policy. American politicians didn’t use to lie as if they knew that nobody cared whether they lied or not, though Nixon and Reagan began testing those waters of moral indifference. Now we’re deep in them. What was appalling to me about Obama’s false figures and false promises in the first debate was that they were unnecessary. If he’d told the truth, he would have supported his candidacy better, as well as putting Romney’s faked figures and evasive vagueness to shame. He would have given us a moral choice instead of a fudge-throwing match.

  Can America go on living on spin and illusion, hot air and hogwash, and still be my country? I don’t know.

  I guess it’s become improbable even to me that a president should ever have asked Americans not to eat chicken on Thursdays. Maybe it is quaint, after all. “My fellow Americans, ask not what your country can do for you—ask what you can do for your country.” Yeah, uh-huh. Oh boy! That one did some fancy lying too. Still, he talked to us as adults, citizens capable of asking difficult questions and deciding what to do about them—not as mere consumers capable of hearing only what we want to hear, incapable of judgment, indifferent to fact.

  What if some president asked those of us who can afford to eat chicken not to eat chicken on Thursdays so the government could distribute more food to those 20,000,000 hungry members of our community? Come off it. Goody-goody stuff. Anyhow, no president could get that past the corporations of which Congress is an almost wholly owned subsidiary.

  What if some president asked us (one did, once) to accept a 55 mph speed limit in order to save fuel, roads, and lives? Chorus of derisive laughter.

  When did it become impossible for our government to ask its citizens to refrain from short-term gratification in order to serve a greater good? Was it around the time we first began hearing about how no red-blooded freedom-loving American should have to pay taxes?

  I was certainly never in love with the mere idea of “doing without,” as Puritans are. But I admit I’m depresse
d by the idea that we can’t even be asked to consider doing without in order to give or leave enough for people who need it or will need it, including, possibly, ourselves. Is the red-blooded freedom-loving American so infantile that he has to be promised whatever he wants right now this moment? Or, to put it less fancifully, if citizens can’t be asked to refrain from steak on Tuesdays, how can industries and corporations be asked to refrain from the vast and immediate profits they make from destabilizing the climate and destroying the environment?

  It appears that we’ve given up on the long-range view. That we’ve decided not to think about consequences—about cause and effect. Maybe that’s why I feel that I live in exile. I used to live in a country that had a future.

  If and when we finish degrading the environment till we run out of meat and the rest of the luxury foods, we’ll learn to do without them. People do. The president won’t even need to ask. But if and when we run out of things that are not a luxury, like water, will we be able to use less, to do without, to ration, to share?

  I wish we were getting a little practice in such things. I wish our president would respect us enough to give us a chance to practice at least thinking about them.

  I wish the ideals of respecting truth and sharing the goods hadn’t become so foreign to my country that my country begins to seem foreign to me.

  The Inner Child and the Nude Politician

  October 2014

  LAST SUMMER A COMPANY that makes literary T-shirts asked me for permission to use a quote:

  “The creative adult is the child who survived.”

  I looked at the sentence and thought, Did I write that sentence? I think I wrote something like it. But I hope not that sentence. Creative is not a word I use much since it was taken over by corporationthink. And isn’t any adult a child who survived?