Going deep green means more than fueling giant SUVs with biodiesel. It means tempering our appetites for the wasteful mobility most of us practice without thought. Use biodiesel, as my friend does, but use less of it ... less of everything.

Weaning ourselves from excessive material and technological luxuries is, however, antithetical to current American societal norms. Amory Lovins of the Rocky Mountain Institute in Old Snowmass knows this full well.

Lovins reasons that advocating sweeping lifestyle changes in America is ineffective when addressing natural resources and environmental quality. The key is efficiency, says Lovins, not the "crimping of lifestyles."

Lovins' efficiency efforts are gradually winning converts, which is hopeful, but something must be added to the efficiency prescription. If we ever are to evolve beyond bondage to base material values, then a little lifestyle crimping is just what we need.   more »

Right-wing Republicans are weird. When gays and lesbians want to marry and raise kids in the suburbs, the right-wingers freak out.

"Perverts!" they scream at these bland strivers. But when supposedly straight soldiers in the army, marines and CIA engage in male-on-male rape and other acts of homosexual sadism so bizarre and extreme they turn off the average, gay-marriage-craving civilian, Republican legislators think it's the best thing ever.

No one talked about it much at the time, but those now-forgotten photos of torture and humiliation at Abu Ghraib were the kind of extreme homoerotic kink your local porn vendor keeps hidden under the counter.

Iraqi inmates of mental asylums led around like dogs on leashes. Iraqi prisoners, almost all later released as innocent, stripped of their clothes and forced to pile on top of each other naked.   more »

One would think that the biggest problem women face is whether to run a corporation. As Pollitt points out, “What's painful about the way the Times frames work-family issues is partly its obsessive focus on the most privileged as bellwethers of American womanhood--you'd never know that most mothers who work need the money.”

Dwelling on those few women who have succeeded in Corporate America and ignoring the rest, some commentators would rather shift the debate elsewhere--to fashion, dating and the definition of femininity. “It's annoying to read pronouncements about feminism based mostly on chats with her friends in the media about men, clothes, TV shows and Botox,” comments Pollitt, writing about New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd’s book Are Men Necessary?

As Pollitt points out, “Dowd is such a credulous audience for backlash propaganda it doesn't occur to her that she is promoting, not reporting, the problem she describes. I'm amazed, actually, that feminism is still around, given the press it gets. Dowd, for example, thinks feminism may be a ‘cruel hoax’ because it keeps women single--men are scared of spunky, successful women.”

As Pollitt writes in an earlier column, “These days, feminism is all sexy uplift, a cross between a workout and a makeover. Go for it, girls--breast implants, botox, face-lifts, corsets, knitting, boxing, prostitution...   more »

During the last hundred years, outsized expectations for democratization and social change were projected onto radio -- then broadcast television, cable TV, email and the Web -- and now podcasts, online video and various other permutations of digital deliverance.

But the realities of economic class and the leverage of concentrated capital cannot be swept aside -- or even seriously disrupted -- by any technology.

Every gee-whiz digital breakthrough happens in a social and political context. And the tremendous gaps of power among Americans, in large measure corresponding to financial resources, will not be closed by digital means.

Though usually expressed in indirect ways, idolatry of affluence has been a common theme in mass media, paralleled by the adulation heaped on pricey consumer goods -- most flagrant in advertisements but also noticeable in quite a lot of news coverage.

The great enthusiasm that’s expressed toward digital products often fits right into the common media reverence for what only money can buy.   more »

The act of being in perpetual flight from reality requires a great amount of energy; it's quite a workout pushing down dread.

We’ve been faking it for a while now. Over the years, our relentless selling of ourselves to the world became about as genuine as Bush's forced smile when he's in the presence of cameras or African Americans.

Baffled, mortified, by what we’ve witnessed during these Bush-afflicted years, we ask ourselves: How did this come to be?

We may be unable to answer this question -- because we cannot lay all the blame upon Bush. Our nation’s aura of insularity and hysteria was present long before Bush.

Bush is merely emblematic of the depth of our collective denial regarding how cheaply we have sold ourselves to the exploitive corporate order and the concomitant unease engendered by this Faustian bargain.   more »