The approach of Hurricane Irene, which is supposed to hit the New York area in less than 12 hours, has led to an unprecedented evacuation of New Yorkers from low-lying shore areas. If the storm causes the kind of damage that experts are predicting, it could cause more than 500 million dollars in damages to homes located in oceanfront communities.

Now all of us who live on Long Island knew that it was only a matter of time before the next big one hit our area. And yet in the past forty years the number of homes built on the South Shore has doubled. I’ll pass over the fact that these homes are being built on one of nature’s most fragile ecosystem, because quiet frankly this fact is obviously lost on the kind of people who feel compelled to live on the beach. I’ll also pass over the fact that, in many cases, the often opulent homes of selfish individuals who live on beaches or barrier islands only continue to exist at all because of the millions of dollars that taxpayers like myself are contributing for “beach front restoration” (aka, keeping rich idiot’s homes from washing away into the sea).

The question now is what becomes of the homes that are damaged or destroyed as a result of this hurricane? Perhaps it’s time to realize that the very idea that people can “own” a piece of the shoreline is foolish and naïve. Shore erosion—particularly on barrier islands—is a fact of nature, and can’t be stopped no matter how many tons of sand the Army Corps of Engineers plops down. If climatologists predictions are true—and there’s no reason for me to think they’re not—then global warming trends will probably lead to even more severe hurricanes in the future along the East Coast, and will further accelerate beach erosion. These beachfront homes, then, will inevitably be destroyed by nature no matter what we do or how much money we spend to protect them.

So why exactly are we protecting them? Perhaps it is time to heed the warnings of Mother Nature and allow the entire Atlantic shoreline to be returned to its natural state—or at least as much as is possible at this point. The worst thing we could do is to allow people to rebuild in costal areas after their homes have been destroyed. That’s just prolonging the inevitable.

I know that there are those who would argue that it is unfair to make people abandon the wonderful lives that they have created for themselves in beachfront communities. My argument would be that they shouldn’t have been living there in the first place. Anyone with the smallest shred of common sense knows that it is foolish to build a palace on shifting sand. If people choose to ignore this time-tested proverb, then that is entirely their problem. The rest of us certainly shouldn’t be forced to subsidize their foolishness.

I can imagine a time when, after all the ugly seaside mcmansions and mcbungalos have been torn down, we will be left with 2,069 miles of reclaimed coastline, running all the way from Maine to Florida. People will be able to swim, bask in the sun, play in the sand, but they won’t ever again be allowed to build on our beaches. And this, I believe, is a dream that is well worth fighting for.

DEFINITION: Corporatocracy – a system of government run by corporations and which exists solely to serve the needs of those corporations.

When I was much younger—and much more naïve—I bought into the  popular liberal idea that the United States was essentially a democracy that had  gone slightly off-track since the election of Richard Nixon. According to this  line of thinking (which is often espoused by those in the Democratic Party  establishment), if we could just elect a progressive to the White House, many of  the problems currently facing the poor and middle class in this country could be corrected and we would once again be an  example of justice and liberty for the rest of the world.

The problem  with this myth—and I now believe that it is indeed a myth—is that we have had  three so-called progressives in the White House since the 70s, and, if anything,  the situation of the working classes in this country has deteriorated more than  ever. The richest 10% of Americans now control 2/3s of the wealth in this  country (see article in Mother  Jones). While the “Great Recession” that hit the United States has  decimated the poor and middle classes, the wealthy in this country are doing  better than ever with corporate profits at all-time highs.

Three years  ago, in a return to the silly idealism of my youth, I voted for Obama, assuming  that anyone who had been a community organizer in his past, would work  tirelessly to correct the economic imbalances inherent in our system. What I  forgot is that Democrats—and this includes President Obama, I’m afraid—are as  much beholden to The Corporatocracy as the Republicans are. When the economic  crisis hit, Obama, like Bush, did all he could to protect banks and Wall Street,  but very little at all to help the 25 million Americans who are either  unemployed or underemployed.

So, if our two political parties are  basically two branches of the same corporatist party that runs our country, what  are we to do to wrest control back from the power elites? One positive solution  that many are discussing is to take corporate money out of politics by having public funding of all campaigns. While I think that this  idea is quite admirable, I doubt that Republicans, Democrats, or their corporate  sponsors  will ever support the idea, because there is too much money to be made  from the current system.

Recently, however, a group called American’s Elect 2012 has proposed an  idea that could potentially shake up the strangle-hold that the two parties have  on American politics (see  article in The Daily Beast). Their idea was to create a completely open  on-line nominating system for the 2012 Presidential election. The candidate that is chosen—by  the people instead of by party elites—will then supposedly run in all 50 states  for President.

My Democrat friends have already told me that they think  this is a terrible idea. Republicans, they maintain, will march in lock step and  nominate a reactionary that they will, as usual, all rally behind.  Progressives,  on the other hand, will be split between those who think that Obama at least is  the lesser of two evils and therefore should be supported and those silly  idealists who support the third party candidate nominated by the Americans Elect  process. The result will be a President Perry or Bachmann, who will cause much  more harm to the working classes than any Democrat would ever do.

While I  think that the dangers involved in splitting the progressive vote in the United  States are worth considering, I for one am tired of always supporting the “lesser of two evils” and finding my heart broken time and again. Besides, if it  is indeed true that we really only have one corporate party with two branches,  then voting for any Democrat is simply voting for a perpetuation of the whole,  damned corrupt system whereby a small percentage of wealthy individuals control  almost every aspect of the life of this country.

So I plan to support  Americans Elect and whatever candidate comes out of their—I mean our—nominating  process. And, if by doing so, the Republicans win the White House, then at least  progressives will have a clear enemy to fight, rather than being deceived--yet  again--by a supposed friend who in the end is probably no real friend at all.

Autocratic regimes throughout the Middle East have been falling one after the other--first in Tunisia, then in Egypt, and now it appears in Lybia as well.  The Arab Spring gives us hope for a world completely free of petty tyrants and  vicious dictators, regardless of whether they rule over occupied Tibet or the  boardrooms of Wall Street. It is this dream of a world in which the masses  control their own destinies that underlies the political vision of that  poet-sage and neo-beatnik from Brooklyn, Alcibiades J. Grunthaler. Here's what  Grunthaler has to say about the psychological make-up of the autocrat that all  but insures his or her ultimate downfall:

"The capricious autocrat  is incapable of compromise even on the most insignificant of matters, because  she necessarily views herself as being all-knowing and completely infallible. To admit  that anyone else has the slightest amount of expertise to offer on any matter is  to admit that she is something less than omnipotent. And this is one thing that  the capricious autocrat can never willingly acknowledge to herself  or to anyone  else.

Because she and she alone knows what is best for all, she can  tolerate no disagreement, no alternative perspectives, and, above all else,  absolutely no dissenting viewpoints. Thus she surrounds herself with  those who  are temperamentally and intellectually most  like herself -- yes-women who will always agree with whatever dictates flow from  her divinely inspired lips -- and those eunuchs who daily sing hosannas to her  eternal glory.

Because the capricious autocrat views her wisdom as divinely inspired, those who dare challenge her mandates -- no matter how erratic and destructive these  mandates might be -- must be treated as infidels. And infidels must be crushed  at all costs. For the mere existence of those who dissent is enough to throw  into question her so-called omnipotence and shows the autocrat up for what she  truly is: an insecure, intellectually barren parasite feeding off the industry  and creativity of those she seeks to dominate.

Although the  capricious autocrat may  do considerable harm to the polis she seeks to control, in the end  she must inevitably fail in her quest at total domination. She must fail,  because each act of domination engenders greater and greater resentment, and  resentment leads to resistance, and resistance to outright  revolution. In fact, the autocrat cannot withstand the people's revolution,  because she has no real power-base or support other than in her own mind. When  the end of her reign comes, all of her self-proclaimed accomplishments will be  swept away on the garbage heap of oblivion and her very name will become infamous with future generations.

And thus it is for all those  who dare violate the sovereign will of the people...." 

From Sic Semper: The Political Writing of A.J. Grunthaler

I came across an interesting editorial in the August 14th New York Times  Sunday Review, entitled, "The  Elusive Big Idea." The gist is that there are no more big theories, big  ideas, or big visions, because we are living in a "post idea" world. In the age  of Twitter and Facebook -- the so-called  "Information Age" -- people are looking for small bits of titillating  information, not nasty, messy, complex, abstract ideas. In short, the  enlightenment is dead and buried, and with it the appreciation for man's ability  to use reason to make sense of his world. 

This may not mean very much to  some people -- no-nothing Presidential candidates, for example -- but it should  trouble those of us who care about the future of the planet. Rarely before in  human history has our species been confronted by so many interconnected global  problems that threaten our continued existence on Mother Earth: climate change,  peak oil, a global economic meltdown, species extinction, political and  religious extremism, and the prospect of Michelle Bachman as a presidential  candidate, to name but a few. These issues are difficult to solve precisely because they are the result  of our human and planetary interconnectedness--something that is a  relatively new phenomenon in human history. The global nature of these problems  also means that we either solve them together or we go down in  flames together.

But to solve problems like these, you need people trained to think  critically, rationally, and conceptually. We need people, in other words, who  know how to do THE BIG IDEA thing. And that's something we  don't have any  longer. Sure, we all know everything about Lady Gaga's latest fashion  escapades, but that sort of information is not going to prevent sea levels from  rising and swamping countries like Bangladesh.

Now higher education has  failed completely to help train a future generation of big thinkers. During the   past thirty years, we've abandoned the liberal arts in favor of vocational and technical educational models that do little more than reinforce student's  fixation on information over ideas. The marginalization -- or wholesale elimination -- of  philosophy from most many college's requirements, in particular, means that the  next generation of movers and shakers won't be provided with the intellectual  tools they need to engage in the sort of rational thinking that can help solve  some of our most pressing global problems.

Do I have hopes that this  situation will change any time soon? Probably not. The Information Age is here  to stay and with it social networking programs that are rewiring our brains for  the worse. And, given the  sort of people who are in charge of our education  system in this country, it seems unlikely that solutions will be coming out of  higher education. The only solution that I can conceive -- if, indeed, there  even is a solution at this point -- is for individual human beings, alone  or in small groups with other like-minded individuals, to commit themselves to  lives of intellectual engagement. Here are my recommendations for those who are  interested in  maintaining their capacity for rational thought at a time when  most human  beings seem to be losing theirs:

1) Delete your Facebook and  Twitter accounts and limit your cellphone use. 

2) Learn how to be lazy.  Spend a minimum of 1 hour a day engaged in idle day-dreaming. It sure worked  like a charm for Einstein and Edison!

3) Read great works all the time  (start with Homer and work your way to a Confederacy of Dunces) .

3) Write  something every day. Keep a journal, maintain a blog like this one, or write  your own book. It doesn't matter about the quality of what you write or who  appreciates it or not. Just keep writing.

4) Major in philosophy, or at  least dual major in it, or at least take some classes in the subject.

If  you do  all this, when the Long  Emergency that James Howard Kunstler prophesizes about happens, you  will be in a position to offer the kind of visionary leadership that the world  will sorely need. And, even if we don't have a kind of nasty planetary  cataclysm, you will certainly be much better off than those  sorry individuals who think  that the quality of a person's life is measured by the number of their tweets.

I disgusted a  friend recently when I suggested that human beings might be better off if we  adopted the moral stance of my Italian ancestors—what I call the ethics of quid  pro quo. Now, my grandmother, my aunts and uncles, and my parents probably wouldn’t use that particular expression to describe their unique moral outlook on life, but that is precisely what they always advocated as the only decent  form of moral behavior that a person could adopt.

Quid pro quo. You take  care of me and I take care of you. I come to your assistance when you are in  need and you do the same for me when I’m in trouble. I don’t ask of you anything  more than I’d be willing to give and expect you to provide me with the same  courtesy. There’s an exquisite harmony involved in this sort of exchange. It’s  the way good friends almost automatically operate, and, when the delicate balance between the “quid” and the “quo” is maintained, both parties feel enriched, and neither is diminished morally or spiritually.

When I was  growing up in Queens, my parents instilled the idea in me that we had a duty to  give just as much as we have received from others—whether these others were  family, friends, neighbors or members of the larger community. If a family  member had us over to celebrate Thanksgiving at their house, we’d always have  them to ours for Easter. If an aunt gave my sister or me a gift worth $10 for our birthdays, you can bet your bottom dollar that my cousins would receive a  gift worth at least that much from my parents on their birthdays. If a neighbor  was generous with food or time, you could automatically assume that my parents  would make sure to take care of them in some equally beneficial way. The formula  for reciprocity was never exact, but it always worked out in a way that seemed  to satisfy everyone.

The reason my friend, who is an incredibly spiritual  person, was horrified by this position was because he thought that the proper  moral stance should be one of Christian altruism. In other words, we should give  to those who are in need with no thought at all to being paid back for our  efforts. My friend certainly understands the spirit that animates the  Gospels—unlike those hypocrites who call themselves Christians, but whose true  gospel is that of crass, unfettered Capitalism—and I respect him for his consistency. My problem with this moral position, however, is precisely that it expects little or nothing from those whom we serve. In the end, it treats the recipients of our largesse like moral inferiors who are incapable of authentic human relationships (since true relationships between individuals always involve  at least some degree of reciprocity) and renders them impotent as moral beings  (since they have no incentive to act on their own behalf).

Despite my  reservations with Christian altruism as a moral system, it certainly is  preferable to the kind of egoistic ethics that most Americans seem to practice.  We’ve raised generation after generation of men and women who assume that  everyone—their parents, their teachers, the State—should take care them, but  that they have no obligation to care for anyone else. Americans have no problem  cutting essential programs for the poor or sending Blacks and Latinos off to  fight their wars, but don’t ask them to give up any of their cherished  entitlements, pay a bit more in taxes for the social goods they receive, or send  their own sons or daughters off to fight our absurd wars. America, by and large,  has become a nation of all quo and no quid.

Restoring the proper balance  in our relationships with our fellow human beings, I believe, is the first step  in getting our country back on the right track. A quid pro quo approach to  ethics automatically assumes that we are all equal, all in this together, and  have an obligation to provide reciprocal care for one another. Naturally, there  will be those in our society who, for one reason or another, cannot reciprocate  for the goods that they’ve received (infants, children up to a certain age, the  seriously mentally ill or physically disabled). But we can ask a bit more even  of those who, on the surface of it, might seem to have less to give, and we can  ask a heck-of-a-lot  more from those who have been blessed with  abundance.

You take care of me and I’ll take care of you. It sounds like  a petty approach to life, but just imagine if everyone—you, me, members of  Congress, CEOs of large corporations—tried to live according to this dictum  every day. Is there really any doubt that we’d be in much better shape as a  society than where we are right now?

As part of my on-going effort to streamline my web profile--for better or worse,  I now have over 15 years of web resources that I've created--I recently did a  search to see what came up under my name, and much to my surprise, I found a  critique of a short piece I did in the 90s to introduce students to the  philosophy of Socrates. It wasn't supposed to be a scholarly article, but a  general overview of Socrates' thought for undergraduate students who knew  absolutely nothing about the great philosopher.

The critique was written  by a fellow named Norman L.  Livergood, who apparently was less than smitten by what I had  written:

"Mr. Russo is not particularly any worse (or better) than  most academics, but his unenlightened misunderstanding
of Plato is typical of  scholastic 'professors.' Academic 'professors' are the modern equivalent of the  charlatans Plato opposed, the sophists. 

What is especially  perplexing is how a scholastic so-called 'Plato expert' (self-appointed) can  comprehend certain elements of Plato's philosophy and yet--in the next paragraph  sometimes--totally misrepresent what Plato is saying. This kind of selective,  limited understanding is particularly true of such scholars as Russo."  (from: http://www.hermes-press.com/russo.htm)

I'll  pass over Mr. Livergood's ad hominum attacks on me, except to point out that I  certainly would never claim to be an "expert" on Plato's thought. I'm just a   simple teacher of philosophy who tries to the best of his ability to make  complex thought accessible to the average college student.

Concerning  the content of what I wrote, the basic insight that I had expressed in the  original piece would certainly be accepted as true by most well-informed  Socrates scholars. Socrates' goal in cross-examining the young men of Athens  undoubtedly had both a negative as well as a positive function. The negative
  function is obvious: it is to show the arrogant individuals with whom he is  debating that they really don't know that which they profess to know. But, if  this was Socrates' sole philosophical purpose, then he would have been little  better than any Sophist. No, Socrates' ultimate purpose was a positive one: his method aimed at leading himself and those with who he was debating to a higher,  universal truth about the right way to live.

I don't know what Mr.  Livegood's own position on Socrates is because I haven't read his book (since it's only $10 I probably will check it  out at some point just to see  what his beef with me actually is). I would
strongly encourage him, however, to  cite the text version of this piece, which will be coming out in my new  anthology, Ancient Wisdom for  Modern Minds. I don't think that's much to ask...especially  coming from a modern "Sophist" like myself

From the Writing of Alcibiades J. Grunthaler:

There are those who believe that there is an unlimited amount of mojo in the universe and  therefore mojo depletion is of no concern. They could not be further from the  truth.

When the Fontalis Plentitudo of Universal Mojo (FPUM) created the  current reality in which we are so blessed to inhibit, he shed his own mojo  reserves so that all who are able may partake of it. But the great Fontalis is  by no means infinite in mojosity, and therefore the sum total of all mojo in the  universe is of limited quantity.

Mojo can be measured in human beings  according to the Mojo Indicator Scale (MIS), created by the illustrious  philosopher, Rocco Capamezzo, who himself was bursting at the seams with  mojosity. The scale ranks mojo levels from 1 (total mojo depletion) to 10 (an  incarnation of the FPUM). The average male has a mojo level of approximately  3.2. Here's how certain luminaries throughout history rank on the Mojo Indicator  Scale:

George Patton (warrior) - 9.9
Pablo Picasso (artist) -  9.4
Jim Morrison (aka, Mr. Mojo Risin) - 9.3
Don Hazlitt (artist) -  9.2
Theodore Roosevelt - 8.7
Bernie Sanders (politician) - 8.6
Snookie  (personality) - 8.4
Hillary Clinton (politician) - 8.2
Sara Silverman  (commedian) -7.4
Barak Obama (politician) - 2.1
Rush Limbaugh  (entertainer) - 1.3

Now, although mojo is limited in human beings, this  in no way means that mojo is static. It can be increased or diminished based on several factors, the most important of which is the other people with who we  choose to interact. There are those individuals who can be called mojo enhancers  (ME*), since interaction with such individuals almost always lead to an increase  in mojo levels. Mojo enhancers are rare, and, when you find one, make him or her  your dearest friend immediately. Such individuals can often be found in divey  bars, drinking cheep beer during happy hour and chatting with an assortment of  colorful low-lifes.

Mojo depleters (MD*), on the other hand, are fairly  common. They sap your vital energy, leaving you in such a constant state of  enervation and psychic enervation that true creativity becomes impossible. The  petty bureaucrat, the sterile administrator, the shriveled up has-been, and the  shrill know-it-all are all almost always mojo depleters. Stay far away from  them, shun them like the plague...for they will be your destruction!

Alcibides J.  Gruntaler. On the Philosophy of Mojo. 2 Vols.