Voices of a People's History of the United States

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Eating a Tangerine

Eating a Tangerine
Thich Nhat Hanh


The Buddha's first teaching was given to a group of children from a
small village near the tree of his enlightenment. As Thich Nhat Hanh
describes, the Buddha made his teachings accessible to them through
the experience of eating a tangerine.


SIDDHARTHA [THE BUDDHA] quietly gestured for the children to
sit back up and he said, "You are all intelligent children and I am sure
you will be able to understand and practice the things I will share with
you. The Great Path I have discovered is deep and subtle, but anyone
willing to apply his or her heart and mind can understand and follow it.

"When you children peel a tangerine, you can eat it with awareness or
without awareness. What does it mean to eat a tangerine in awareness?
When you are eating the tangerine, you are aware that you are eating
the tangerine. You fully experience its lovely fragrance and sweet taste.
When you peel the tangerine, you know that you are peeling the
tangerine; when you remove a slice and put it in your mouth, you know
that you are removing a slice and putting it in your mouth; when you
experience the lovely fragrance and sweet taste of the tangerine, you are
aware that you are experiencing the lovely fragrance and sweet taste of
the tangerine. The tangerine Nandabala offered me had nine sections. I
ate each morsel in awareness and saw how precious and wonderful it
was. I did not forget the tangerine and thus the tangerine became
something very real to me If the tangerine is real, the person eating it is
real. That is what it means to eat a tangerine in awareness.

"Children, what does it mean to eat a tangerine without awareness?
When you are eating the tangerine, you do not know that you are eating
the tangerine. You do not experience the lovely fragrance and sweet
taste of the tangerine. When you peel the tangerine, you do not know
that you are peeling the tangerine; when you remove a slice and put it in
your mouth, you do not know that you are removing a slice and putting
it in your mouth; when you smell the fragrance or taste the tangerine,
you do not know that you are smelling the fragrance and tasting the
tangerine. Eating a tangerine in such a way, you cannot appreciate its
precious and wonderful nature. If you are not aware that you are eating
the tangerine, the tangerine is not real. If the tangerine is not real, the
person eating it is not real either. Children, that is eating a tangerine
without awareness.

"Children, eating the tangerine in mindfulness means that while eating
the tangerine you are truly in touch with it. Your mind is not chasing
after thoughts of yesterday or tomorrow, but is dwelling fully in the
present moment. The tangerine is truly present. Living in mindful
awareness means to live in the present moment, your mind and body
dwelling in the very here and now.

"A person who practices mindfulness can see things in the tangerine
that others are unable to see. An aware person can see the tangerine tree,
the tangerine blossom in the spring, the sunlight and rain which
nourished the tangerine. Looking deeply, one can see ten thousand
things which have made the tangerine possible. Looking at a tangerine,
a person who practices awareness can see all the wonders of the
universe and how all things interact with one another. Children, our
daily life is just like a tangerine. Just as a tangerine is comprised of
sections, each day is comprised of twenty four hours. One hour is like
one section of tangerine. Living all twenty-four hours of a day is like
eating all the sections of a tangerine. The path I have found is the path
of living each hour of the day in awareness, mind and body always
dwelling in the present moment. The opposite is to live in forgetfulness.
If we live in forgetfulness, we do not know that we are alive. We do not
fully experience life because our mind and body are not dwelling in the
here and now.'

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"This Land is Their Land: Reports from a Divided Nation"

(View Original)

Kathleen Dunn's guest says America is in trouble... the poor are getting poorer, and the middle class is an endangered species. Guest: Barbara Ehrenreich, author, "This Land is Their Land: Reports from a Divided Nation" (Metropolitan Books).

Listen: "This Land is Their Land: Reports from a Divided Nation"

Acclaimed as an instant classic upon publication, Nickel and Dimed has sold more than 1.5 million copies and become a staple of classroom reading. Chosen for “one book” initiatives across the country, it has fueled nationwide campaigns for a living wage. Funny, poignant, and passionate, this revelatory firsthand account of life in low-wage America—the story of Barbara Ehrenreich’s attempts to eke out a living while working as a waitress, hotel maid, house cleaner, nursing-home aide, and Wal-Mart associate—has become an essential part of the nation’s political discourse.

Now, in a new afterword, Ehrenreich shows that the plight of the underpaid has in no way eased: with fewer jobs available, deteriorating work conditions, and no pay increase in sight, Nickel and Dimed is more relevant than ever.

"Nickel and Dimed" by Barbara Ehrenreich

The Bin Man (Garbage Collector)

'Who will do the dirty work?'

(Socialist Standard March 2002)

What would you do if you grew tired of a successful career as a salesman, earning lots of money as you persuade people to part with their readies for things they probably didn't want? Would you fake a smile and carry on, hating every minute of it but realising your suffering puts bread on your kids' table? Probably. One man in my home town did something else. He quit that job and became a dustbin man.

He is quite an energetic guy. He doesn't walk at all, he runs with the bins. Danish labour legislation has thankfully forbidden the old-style bins, without wheels, and law requires easy access to them for the binmen. No more busted backs or falling over gnomes. He and his fellow refuse workers get their job done in next to no time, which means our hero gets lots of hours for canoeing, his favourite hobby. He likes the outdoor life, the pace of the job, feels much happier, and is not concerned that his wage packet is smaller. Whilst it is a physically demanding job, he claimed the sales job was pretty demanding due to the mental tedium of waiting about for the next hard sell.

This little news story was one of those light relief space fillers we have grown accustomed to. However, it was by far the most interesting thing on the news that evening. It raises some intriguing points.

The reporter couldn't understand why someone would turn their back on a big wage placket and become, "of all things" a binman. Why should refuse work be deemed less worthy than salesmanship? Why should anyone have to be asked, and justify, why they want to be a binman? A bin in summer can have a nasty, ripe smell, and it is obvious that public health requires, amongst other things, a clean environment – nothing could be worse than your Nan being plagued by rats, after all. What useful social function does a salesman have? None really, if you think about it. Salesmen are out to sell a product. Once the product is sold, the outlays are paid for and a tidy, little sum is netted in profit for the product's pre-sale owner, who is probably wise enough to use another brand and who isn't the salesman. Salesmen are only necessary in capitalism.

A salesman is, or so it goes, more educated than a binman. There is a social stigma attached. Only Dumbo empties bins. (Our hero is not a Dumbo of course.) It is a rotten snobbishness that overlooks a variety of things. The unemployed watching the news that night would jump at the chance to get a job. Perhaps some of them might be inspired to try a refuse job, even though the thought of rotting chicken and cat crap turns their stomachs. But then they could always change their job to salesmanship if they grow tired of bins, right? You see, what we want to do is pretty much irrelevant. You are employed only if you are exploitable. Jobs are plentiful in booms but come a slump you are put on the dole. You might get tons of papers from school, but does that mean you will get the job you want (and if you do, will the work conditions rapidly change your expectations); or even get educated? In any case schooling does not equate with education.

Hopefully our hero will continue to enjoy his job. Of course the Aarhus refuse workers' strike some five years ago reveals the true nature of work in capitalism. There is a ceaseless struggle between capitalists seeking to up the tempo of work and reduce wages (in these days of permanent inflation, all they need do is freeze wages and workers will feel the pinch) and workers seeking to get their own back (by smoking on the WC and stealing the toilet roll) or organising to improve conditions and pay.

Work should not really be equated with employment. Work will be an essential part of life in socialism; it will be a part of the individual's development and a necessary, healthy expenditure of energy. Employment is wage labour (the ability to work is a commodity the workers are forced to sell – we are all "salesmen" in reality), commodity production instead of production solely for use. As such it has alienating factors associated with it; e.g. Monday to Friday is "their" time, whilst the weekend is your time, where you can enjoy working in the garden or painting. Employment is based on the division of labour. The upshot being workers are tied to one job for years on end, instead of being people able to do all kinds of things, which socialist society – run by conscious decisions instead of blind forces – will allow. (Of course it is a moot point as to how far the division of labour can be removed from socialism; not every one can have the steady hand and requisite knowledge of a surgeon.)

One of the strangest objections to socialism is "who will do the dirty work?" The man of this piece was not entirely motivated by cash. His sales job made him miserable; he loves his new job. We can speculate that there will be people willing to do dirty work in socialism. The hours required will be considerably reduced as the waste of unemployment and salesmanship, amongst many other occupations, will not exist in the moneyless, free access society of socialism; there will simply be more hands to do the unpleasant but necessary stuff. The objector is always a bit strange: "I don't want to live in a world without war and starvation, and where my needs are satisfied, if it means I have to do dirty work once a week." ?! Socialism can do lots of things, but not make crap smell of roses; that is one little fact of life we'll have to put up with.

The Hidden History of US Broadcasting

The Hidden History of US Broadcasting

by Bruce Dixon
(View Original)

Most Americans, right up to and including doctorate-level media scholars don’t know that as late as the mid 1920’s over forty percent of the more than 500 radio stations across the US were in the hands of not for profit, noncommercial broadcasters. For starters, corporations were generally slow to see the profit potential of broadcast radio. But public opinion was a much larger barrier. Most Ameicans believed that commercial broadcasting, owned and operated by greedy and amoral corporations, was inimical to the public interest, and should be balanced by an extremely strong noncommercial broadcast sector, or banned outright. NBC and CBS were founded in 1926 and 1927, and till the end of the decade, the very notion of commercial advertising on the radio remained so unpopular and abhorrent that

“Throughout the late 1920s, NBC presented itself not as a traditional for-profit corporation, but as a public service corporation that would sell advertising only as necessary to subsidize high-quality noncommercial fare…”

According to “The Battle For the US Airwaves, 1928-1935″ one of 23 penetrating essays on the history and present state of media and democracy in Dr. Robert McChesney’s latest work, The Political Economy of Media. He recounts that when commercial interests undertook the seizure of the broadcast spectrum from the not for profit and noncommercial station operators, they were faced with three tasks.

• They had to oust the entrenched noncommercial and not for profit pioneers of radio broadcasting from their stations, their frequencies and their audiences;

• They had to circumvent the will of the American people, which lopsidedly favored the not for profit broadcasters and opposed corporate domination of the airwaves, and carry out their processes in a manner that avoided public scrutiny or debate;

• They had to rewrite the history of broadcasting to conceal their handiwork and present it as “the American Way”, the only sensible, possible and natural outcome.

The first step in the process came in 1926, when a federal judge ruled that the Department of Commerce’s system for licensing radio broadcasters was illegal. This resulted in a few brief months of free-for-all in which the number of broadcasters radically increased again, with many stepping on each other’s frequencies. The on-the-air chaos created a shock-doctrine kind of opportunity, the ideal excuse for a new federal intervention that would radically restructure radio broadcasting in the interest of for-profit corporations.

Since public opinion overwhelmingly rejected the notion of for-profit commercial broadcasting, every round in the restructuring of radio broadcasting would have to be conducted as far outside the public view as possible. By the 1920s the traditions of corporate welfare and “regulation” through government agencies staffed with executives of the same industry that was being regulated were well entrenched. The Federal Radio Commission or FRC, established in 1926 to bring order to the airwaves, was quickly captured by a majority of off-duty broadcast execs and their sympathizers. The fix was in. Meetings and proceedings of the Federal Radio Commission were publicized selectively or not at all by newspapers, the other corporate mass media of that era.

Ignoring the pleas of congressmen and senators who wrote the Federal Radio Act to prevent the monopolization of the spectrum by commercial interests, the FRC swiftly passed rules that awarded all the choice frequencies and wattage to commercial broadcasters, mostly NBC and CBS. Noncommercial broadcasters were confined to dodgy frequencies at the edge of the dial. Chains of NBC and CBS stations were allowed to broadcast around the clock at 50,000 watts apiece, making them instant national powerhouses, while the noncommercial stations were limited to 5,000 or 1,000 watts or less and their broadcast hours limited. The licenses of not for profit broadcasters were not revoked, but they were forced to share the same frequencies and to split times with each other in a single market, making it difficult or impossible for them to generate funds from advertising, and to find or maintain their audiences. Again, according to McChesney,

“The networks were the big winners. In 1927 NBC had 28 affiliates, and CBS 16, for a combined 6.4% of the broadcast stations; within four years they accounted for 30% of the stations. And this alone vastly understates their new role, as all but three of the 40 clear channel stations were owned by or affiliated with one of the two networks… NBC and CBS accounted for nearly 70% of US broadcasting by 1931. By 1935 only four of the 62 stations that broadcast at 5,000 or more watts did not have a network affiliation…”

The sudden decline in the fortunes of not for profit and noncommercial broadcasters sparked widespread and energetic opposition that continued for several more years, but the lack of news coverage by the new lords of the broadcast spectrum, and the newspapers, who allied themselves with big broadcast media, kept this reargurad action from the public eye, and doomed it to failure. Without coverage in the mass media, the broad civic involvement that might have allowed popular sentiment against the commercialization of radio to make itself felt went unheard.

The advocates of noncommercial broadcasting were also divided. One group wanted to fund noncommercial radio with a small tax on radio receivers, in the same way that the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC), and the high-quality national broadcast services of dozens of nations are financed. Another group believed that noncommercial broadcasting should be financed either by ads or more discreet “sponsorships” which would be called ads if they appeared on a commercial station.

The BBC and CBC models guaranteed a substantial revenue stream and up to a point, insulated the broadcaster both from commercial and political pressures. The “sponsorship” driven model of noncommercial broadcasting was more problematic because it forced noncommercial stations into direct competition for ad revenue with commercial stations. When the latter model won out, it made noncommercial stations even weaker compared to their for-profit counterparts. To please advertisers, they had to refrain from competing for audience share with commercial stations, and limit themselves to the kinds of material for-profit broadcasters would not touch, like what McChesney calls “elite cultural programming”. This is neatly explains how, eighty years later, you can have cases like the noncommercial station owned by the Atlanta public school system, in a city that’s been majority black city for more than a generation broadcasting nothing but NPR news and classical music 24 hours a day.

The Federal Radio Commission was a temporary measure. In 1934, Congress passed the Federal Communications Act, which created today’s Federal Communications Commission, the FCC. This legislation made its way through Congress during the same weeks as the major bills which constituted the New Deal. In the course of pushing the New Deal through Congress, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt made himself the blood enemies of almost every newspaper publisher in the nation. The president calculated that he could not afford to antagonize the all-powerful commercial broadcasters too. So the White House failed to weigh in, either before its passage with useful amendments, or afterward with mechanisms to enforce the few positive provisions of the law.

The Federal Communications Act of 1934 enshrined into statute the notions that the airwaves are scarce public property, and that broadcasters hold their licenses only on condition that they serve the public interest. But the law provides no schedules, procedures or other specific means to enforce the obligations of public service upon broadcasters. In the years since, an enormous weight of judicial precedent, administrative law and more statues have been built up which in effect recognize a license holders, not the public, as real owners of the broadcast airwaves, in stark contradiction to the provisions of the 1934 law.

To this day, more than seventy years later, no more than three successful challenges have ever been mounted to the renewal of broadcast licenses, despite scores or hundreds of attempts. And a radio or TV station licensee pays less for an extraordinarily lucrative radio or TV station license than a human citizen pays to license a used car.

McChesney concludes that

“…whereas many other democratic nations had extensive public hearings and debates before determining the types of broadcasting systems they eventually established, in the United States, these decisions were made quietly, behind closed doors, by self-interested elites with minimal public participation.”

Competition and the “free market” had nothing to do with it. Democracy had nothing to do with it.

By 1938, its hostile takeover of the broadcast spectrum complete, Big Media was rewriting its own history, declaring its rule the only sensible outcome. McChesney recounts RCA president David Sarnoff telling a nationwide NBC audience that

“…’Our American system of broadcasting is what it is because it operates in an American democracy. It’s a free system because this is a free country.’ CBS president William S. Paley informed a group of educators in 1937 that ‘he who attacks the American system of broadcasting attacks democracy itself.’”

And thus the conventional lore of how the broadcast regime came to be has been handed down to us. In the 1980s, the Reagan administration insulated broadcasters further against public interest challenges to their licenses by lengthening the period between license renewals from three to eight years, and shortening the number of questions asked to that the renewal form could fit on a postcard. And the Clinton-Gore administration passed the Federal Communications Act of 1995, which permit almost unlimited consolidation of radio stations, cable TV networks, newspapers and broadcast TV stations nationwide and in individual markets, leading directly to the rise of Clear Channel and Radio One, among other atrocities.

Sports and Mass Media

“Media Made Sport: A History of Sports Coverage in the United States” is another essay in The Political Economy of Media dissecting the central role of sports coverage in mass media. Inasmuch as mass media determine the stuff of public consciousness and public conversation, sports coverage, containing as it does the drama of conflict in a trivial context that offends or threatens nobody, makes ideal content in commercial mass media. Nineteenth century magazines carried extensive baseball coverage, and played an important role in publishing and standardizing the rules of the game. When daily newspapers too over much of their trade, they continued these practices, and often organized baseball teams and leagues.

Mass circulation newspapers invented spectator sports as we know them, with the extensive coverage that enables one who is not an actual participant to follow the games and the careers of those who are. Newspapers gave birth to sports sections, and sports writing as a branch of journalism.

Sportswriters and daily newspapers across the country made baseball “the national pastime”, the World Series a national event, and Babe Ruth and Jack Dempsey into folk heroes. When broadcast radio came along, it picked up the baton from the daily newspapers. The emergence of college football as a mass attraction was entirely due to many thousands of breathless pages of newspaper, and later, radio coverage. Sports coverage played a major role, McChesney asserts, in legitimizing early commercial radio.

“When the Dempsey-Tunney championship bout was broadcast in 1927, it was estimated that it generated sales of over $90,000 worth of radio receivers I one New York department store alone.”

When television came along, it picked up where radio left off. Early TV popularized boxing and wrestling, since it required only a single camera trained on the two participants, along with baseball and college football. With the 1960s advent of slow-motion, color TV and instant-replay technologies, and the lifting of anti-trust regulation that allowed entire leagues like the NFL to negotiate with broadcasters, professional football grew from almost nothing in the early 1950s to a multibillion dollar industry.

TV made the Olympic Games a marketable brand, and the explosive growth of basketball didn’t happen because it was just time for people to pick up the round ball. College basketball came into its own with the popularity of cable TV, which needed more material to broadcast. ESPN singlehandedly put “March Madness” into the national vocabulary, and did more than any other force to grow college and professional basketball.

McChesney’s Political Economy of Media contains other essays on the present and future of public broadcasting, the internet, and many more valuable insights and bits of history which are essential if we are to understand how the mass media shape the society we live in, with little or no democratic input and even less “free market” competition.

Bruce Dixon is based in Atlanta and is Managing Editor at Black Agenda Report. He can be reached at bruce.dixon(at)blackagendareport.com.

Steven Lendman also has a long and informative review of some of the key points of Dr. McChesney’s “Political Economy of Media”, in two installments, parts one and two.

© Black Agenda Report

NOVA | Lord of the Ants | The Ant Whisperer | PBS

NOVA | Lord of the Ants | The Ant Whisperer | PBS