Note, this piece appeared late last week. I am reposting it because it’s just so excellent and I want more people to read it. — efc

Judith Gayle | Political Waves

The American oligarchy spares no pains in promoting the belief that it does not exist, but the success of its disappearing act depends on equally strenuous efforts on the part of an American public anxious to believe in egalitarian fictions and unwilling to see what is hidden in plain sight. — Michael Lind, To Have and to Have Not

I know what drives the Teabagger movement. I get their anxiety and despair, their outrage and desire to turn back the clock to easier times. Both of my talented sons are unemployed — one with kids and an exhausted wife hustling two little jobs; one out of work for over two years, picking up an occasional buck as a handyman.

Here in the Patch, the leaks in the roof that escalated to full-blown waterfalls in October took on dire overtones with the snow load. I now have a lodge pole in the living room, wedged to keep the roof in place — since I won’t be addressing that challenge anytime soon, I haven’t decided whether to hang things on it or carve it as a totem. It will be interesting to see what new decorating options the Spring rains bring.

I know what drives the anger. Within the Bagger movement, many are old enough to have heard about the Great Depression and some even lived through it as kids, telling tales of meager meals and shabby clothes. The ripple effect drove the generation that produced the Boomers to strive for stability, security, and resulted in stuff. Remember “Two cars in every garage and a chicken in every pot?” Continue Reading »

I just met my cosmic twin, a young rock star.

Somewhere in the midst of Comic Confidential, a letter and a CD arrived and were left on my studio desk; I didn’t look at it till more than a month later, and I was amazed — at her personal message to me, and to the world via her music.

Daily Mirror, 1-28-10

I started playing the CD she sent, quite a few times, listening deeper in — I prefer to listen to the same music over and over again till I become it — her magnificent vocals and compositions that sound and feel thousands of years old.

I had never heard of this band; Chelsea and Sarah (who help me run Planet Waves every day) were big fans. We corresponded a little, and then I got an email one day that said she noticed I was on the program for Poly Living 2010 and that tipped the balance — she and her girlfriend were flying from far away to be here.

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I managed to get myself up and going in time for the second round of workshops, which included a section on “Polyamory in the Media’s Spotlight.” This was presented by Anita Wagner and Alan M., who edits the Poly in the News blog (and who recently reminded me that he got his start writing about polyamory on Planet Waves). Now he is the leading expert on how alternate relationship and household ideas are presented in the news.

Once again, this was one of the most practical, well informed discussions I’ve ever heard at a polyamory conference. Apparently, polyamory is suddenly enjoying an excellent reputation in the news media. It’s been covered everywhere from the Washington Post to the New York Post to the New York Times to the Seattle Times to WebMD — not as a freak show but as a real subject.

The Newsweek reporter is here, doing research for a second article. This workshop documented the scope of that press and was a public relations coaching session for poly activists and participants in how to handle the reporters when they get the opportunity to give an interview.

Why exactly is polyamory so popular with the press all of a sudden? There are a few theories going around; one is that alt relationship advocates are doing their job presenting themselves as an ethics and honesty movement. Alan pointed out that “everyone loves a lover.” When any reporter interviews a person about polyamory, they get an interview with someone who is positive about relationships; positive about their partners; and expressing a position that many people feel the need to talk about and moreover to be — but don’t have the voice, the language or the guts to express. Personally, I think that the Internet is starting to show some results. Type in the word polyamory and you get 477,000 results. It’s ridiculous to claim that this is some kind of weirdo underground thing that nobody has heard of; the press is picking up the beat.

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Note, here is a link to today’s Daily Oracle.
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Yesterday passing through New Paltz on the way out of town, I ran into an old friend who asked me where I was going. I told him I was presenting my theory of ‘The One and the Many‘ at a conference called Poly Living 2010 in Philadelphia. The theory challenges both conventional monogamous and polyamorous thinking. It describes how there’s not really such a split between this thing called ‘polyamory’ and this other seemingly totally different thing called ‘monogamy’.

He’s happily married, though I was happy to hear him open up and say that if he could, he would have two wives with totally different interests. He felt he could handle that, and maintain both relationships just fine. It seemed perfectly logical to him.

I asked him the next logical question, whether he would be into his wife having a boyfriend — which to his credit, he said he would not be able to handle; the jealousy would be too much. This supports my theory that the real issue behind the obsession with monogamy is really the fear of jealousy. I believe that most people would openly have multiple relationships, if they wouldn’t go into total reaction when their partner did the same thing. Most of us are slaves to jealousy, without understanding what jealousy really is, or what to do with it. [Here is an article that presents a theory.]

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Reid knocked it out of the park. I’ve never seen him present before; this is a guy whose friends estimate he’s had more than 150,000 conversations with people about sex and relationships. It started when he was working as a bartender while attending Brown. He was the guy who would always start the conversation; and then people started seeking him out. That’s how be got his initial training as a ‘sex expert’. The perfect way.

Listening to him I was having a difficult time putting my finger through the gold ring of what he was saying in his keynote presentation. His many stories were weaving a theme, but I couldn’t see the pattern. Usually I’m good at summing up the ideas of others in a way they agree is valid.

I’ll try again. I think he was saying that now that polyamory has reached a level of cultural acknowledgment (at least in many places), we need to put the struggle for acceptance down (and it has been significant for many poly people, who have had the shadow material of others blown back in their faces constantly), and ease into being a legitimate part of society: not one of its problems. Not some other form of cheating, but people who are entitled to love the way that we love and organize our households the way that we want.

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Goood eeeevning, from Ft. Washington, PA, where George Washington was born. I’m at the Poly Living 2010 conference (briefly described in this link), and I’ll be doing some live blogging of different workshops.

I’m currently at the opening presentation, listening away, and it seems that: polyamory had become a friend. Oops I meant a trend. That’s the talking point, and it seems to be valid: mainstream media coverage is picking up and much of it’s been favorable the past 18 months. Those who have multiple relationships have gone from being explorers/freaks to trailblazers and activists trying to get the message out, unto the present moment where the trend is starting to pick up.

Well, maybe not in your town; maybe not in my town (Kingston, NY), but definitely in big cities (where there are well established social networks). Multiple relationships have been a reality forever, but the conversation is starting to happen. A recent article in Newsweek (Polyamory: The Next Sexual Revolution?) is some evidence of that

Reid Mihalko, a sex and relationship educator, is telling the story. He’s suggested that his raging activist polyamorous friends relax and take a bath; the war for acceptance is over and the trend setting phase has begun. Facebook now has an option — ‘open relationship’, and another option, ‘it’s complicated’. For kids who grow up with the Internet, polyamory (by one name or another) is not the new normal but as far as they’re concerned, what’s always been normal.

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Hello Subscribers — We are having a bulk mail server technical issue. Here is today’s edition of Planet Waves Astrology News.

That was a bit weird — either some settings changed, or one of our mail servers’ protocols changed; we got today’s issue out by about noon, though I’ll leave this edition available as a sample.

Note to readers: This is the introduction to the lead article from today’s Planet Waves Astrology News, also cross-posted to Cosmic Confidential. While this article does not mention astrology, it’s based on Mars retrograde in Leo, opposite a lot of interesting recent activity in Aquarius. The full text of the article was mailed Friday morning, along with today’s full premium edition, including Political Waves by Judith Gayle and the Planet Waves weekly horoscope by Eric Francis

Dear Friend and Reader:

The other day, an email came floating into my inbox from a website called Care2, claiming 12.5 million subscribers. The subject header of the email read, “Monogamy vs. Polyamory: Do Open Relationships Work?”

View from train bridge, Rosendale, NY. Photo by Eric Francis.

Naturally, I thought: this ought to be pretty interesting.

The writer gave her analysis a title like a boxing match or a legal case. Mono versus Poly is now in session! All Rise! The article commenced as such (literally, its first words): “Non-monogamy is about one thing — sex. And sex is good.”

(You can tell she learned her writing style from The Bible.)

It went downhill from there, fast. Faster than I ever thought possible without jet propulsion and a lot of lube. “And sex with different people — either concurrently or over the course of a lifetime — is good too. Sex is so good that some people are addicted to it. Sex makes people do crazy things and it makes people feel amazing things. I love it just as much as anyone else, but there is more to life than sex.”

When you see the word ‘but’ you can usually tell how things are going to go. Her premise is that since polyamory is about sex, and since sex isn’t everything, polyamory is nothing special to concern oneself with. The author, whose name is Polly, continues: “I am pretty sure that the words on your deathbed won’t be, ‘I wish I had had more sex with more people’. Maybe if you’re a pervert, or if you didn’t get much action in your life, you would say that, but most people wouldn’t.”

I will spare you any more. This article, while one of the less eloquent and less favorable recent mainstream reviews of polyamory, shares one thing in common with every other article on the topic that I’ve ever seen: it sets polyamory and monogamy against one another as irreconcilable opposites.

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Weekly Horoscope for Friday, February 19, 2010, #805 – BY ERIC FRANCIS

Pisces Confidential

Know good times when you’re in them — and you are. These are not the kind of good times that melt into the background of history, forgotten because of their comfort. Rather, this is a moment that stands out rather than stands back, and which you may consciously, willingly and lovingly use to enter a new phase of your life. I trust that you feel a certain energetic relief, the ability to relax and the growing sense not that you have enough, but that you are enough. Keep that feeling, and remember the idea, if you lose contact with the inner orientation. It is fair to say that everything is about to change — in ways you would have wished for, if you could have ever predicted what is possible.

Today’s Oracle takes us back to the Libra monthly of June 1, 1999

Slowly, as the years progress, we forge an identity out of the chaos of our psychology and the confusion of our past. Often, we do this through exploring polarities, for example, in our relationships. Many men exalt as their ideal partner the woman they feel they are within, and many women seek outwardly their own inner man. Or, conversely, hating our opposite inner identity, unable to bear the fact that within a big, macho guy may live a gentle, soft woman, we can manifest violence and rejection in our partnerships. Now, this whole process stops long enough for you to really see and feel what is happening. Indeed, everything you experience in these weeks, down to the slightest detail, may vibrate with deep knowledge of life and death, of the cycles of time, and the profound inner mystery that both unites and divides Self and Other.

(The Daily Oracle is a random selection from one of 10,000 Eric Francis horoscopes. The Oracle is a divination tool like tarot cards, and also can be used to research any horoscope for the past 10 years. It is available to subscribers of Planet Waves Astrology News in all its working glory. This is a brilliant piece of programming combined with a full decade of Eric’s writing — when you have a question, it really works (as long as you’re sincere), and we know that you’ll love it. Sign up to discover how and why. Or enjoy one selection free here every day.)

From The New York Times Magazine

Albrecht’s philosophical attempt to trace a direct line between the health of the natural world and the health of the mind has a growing partner in a subfield of psychology. Last August, the American Psychological Association released a 230-page report titled “Interface Between Psychology and Global Climate Change.” News-media coverage of the report concentrated on the habits of human behavior and the habits of thought that contribute to global warming. This emphasis reflected the intellectual dispositions of the task-force members who wrote the document — seven out of eight were scientists who specialize in decision research and environmental-risk management — as well as the document’s stated purpose. “We must look at the reasons people are not acting,” Janet Swim, a Penn State psychologist and the chairwoman of the task force, said, “in order to understand how to get people to act.”

Yet all the attention paid to the behavioral and cognitive barriers to safeguarding the environment — topics of acute interest to policy makers and activists — disguised the fact that a significant portion of the document addressed the supposed emotional costs of ecological decline: anxiety, despair, numbness, “a sense of being overwhelmed or powerless,” grief. It also disguised the unusual background of the eighth member of the task force, Thomas Doherty, a clinical psychologist in Portland, Ore. Doherty runs a private therapeutic practice called Sustainable Self and is the most prominent American advocate of a growing discipline known as “ecopsychology.”

There are numerous psychological subfields that, to one degree or another, look at the interplay between human beings and their natural environment. But ecopsychology embraces a more revolutionary paradigm: just as Freud believed that neuroses were the consequences of dismissing our deep-rooted sexual and aggressive instincts, ecopsychologists believe that grief, despair and anxiety are the consequences of dismissing equally deep-rooted ecological instincts.