The novel, now being rediscovered, speaks to our ecological present: in the flush of a financial crisis, the Pacific Northwest secedes from the United States, and its citizens establish a sustainable economy, a cross between Scandinavian socialism and Northern California back-to-the-landism, with the custom — years before the environmental writer Michael Pollan began his campaign — to eat local.
White bicycles sit in public places, to be borrowed at will. A creek runs down Market Street in San Francisco. Strange receptacles called 'recycle bins' sit on trains, along with 'hanging ferns and small plants.'
A female president, more Hillary Clinton than Sarah Palin, rules this nation, from Northern California up through Oregon and Washington.
...Its characters are flat; its prose — well, call it utilitarian.
...'Ecotopia' has its critics. Feminists attacked it for its ritual war games, in which men don spears to work off their 'natural' aggression, dragging women into the woods to celebrate. (Mr. Callenbach said he was influenced by the anthropologist Margaret Mead, and her idea that the sexes express aggression differently.)
Most live in Soul City, which is less affluent and green than the rest of Mr. Callenbach’s world.
Over the years, Mr. Callenbach’s readership has changed, as hippies and New Agers have been joined by churchgoers. The author often visits St. Mary’s College of California, a Catholic school near Oakland. 'Ecotopia' is required freshman reading at the Presbyterian-affiliated Muskingum College in rural Ohio. And it’s part of the curriculum at the University of San Francisco, a Jesuit institution.
Mr. Callenbach hopes the book will resonate among the greening edges of an evangelical movement. But the novel’s relatively free sex and liberal politics may limit that readership.
“ ‘Walden’ is very Protestant,” she said. 'This is pagan, with a Zen relationship to nature.'But to Mr. Callenbach and many of his fans, 'Ecotopia' is a blueprint for the future.'It is so hard to imagine anything fundamentally different from what we have now,' he said. 'But without these alternate visions, we get stuck on dead center.'
'And we’d better get ready,' he added. 'We need to know where we’d like to go.'"
"Ms. Smith rightly protests the feminization of contemporary culture, and she rightly urges men—who, after all, built the civilization onto which feminism has latched itself—to start fighting back. But to win such battles she will need to construct arguments likely to persuade others besides the angry, alienated men who click onto her blog and mourn that their 'soul mate' turned out to be not much of a mate."
Offit says it infuriates him to see not only ordinary citizens buy into the claims of homeopaths, naturopaths and the vitamin industry, but doctors and hospitals. He calls out Dr. Andrew Weil, Dr. Deepak Chopra and others, saying they have abandoned science for the thrill of celebrity that goes with evangelizing alternative medicine.
“They have this almost guru-like stature that you should listen to them,” Offit says. “It is the surety of their statements that draw you to them. They make you think they are someone who just knows. But it should be the strength of data, the strength of science, rather than personality, that decide what it is true.”
Weil, for instance, has promoted the plant kava as a non-addictive relaxant. “Seven years later, when kava was shown to cause severe liver damage, the FDA issued a warning against its use,” Offit writes. But few consumers are aware. Weil sells his own line of supplements.
Chopra sells a line of supplements, oils, books and even jewelry. “Chopra has helped wealthy businessmen, celebrities and politicians like Michael Jackson, Elizabeth Taylor, Winona Ryder, Debra Winger, Madonna, Mikhail Gorbachev. Michael Milken and Hillary Clinton find their inner space without feeling bad about being rich,” Offit writes.
My 1970s California childhood was filled with violent faiths and death cults in a decade feeling the hangover of the Summer of Love and suffering the fallout of the nuclear family. I was five when Charles Manson was sentenced to life for the murders committed by his Family of former hippies, pretty girls whose minds had been opened and broken. I was in Junior High when the bodies were discovered in Jonestown, the jungle commune in Guyana where Reverend Jim Jones had hoped to build a new Eden. I will never forget the shape of them, lying flat and embracing, all having drunk poison punch at his command. I wondered how it was possible to have such faith, such all-consuming, passionate awful faith that you would follow such a leader, however charismatic he was.
The history of American faith is filled with charismatic leaders, eager to change the world and to destroy it. In a nation founded by religious radicals in search of freedom, we are raised to believe and raised to protect the right to believe at all costs. The faithful pushed their wagons into the empty west, missionaries and prophets spreading the word, building utopian societies with a violent certainty. The Mormon pioneers irrigated and settled an uninhabitable land of salt lakes. Their communal, utopian church would split over the practice of polygamy, which stood in opposition to the government and statehood. The recent raids on the fundamentalist Mormon Yearning for Zion Ranch of Warren Jeffs in Texas reminds us of the history of secret societies, with young women in pioneer dresses, trapped in cycles generations old, of men who must have multiple wives to attain the highest levels of heaven, a tenet of faith revealed by the founder of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, Joseph Smith.
In a post-war world, our faiths have turned darker and deadlier. We have grabbed hold of our freedom with both hands. Urbanization has led to isolation, to a rootless people in search of connection, estranged from the families that might have cautioned them or saved them. New cults formed in cities with followers drawn to a range of new gurus, Sun Myung Moon, Mahareshi Mahesh Yogi, “Fathers” Yod and David “Moses” Berg, Werner Erhard and his Est. All have been accused of a range of abuses, sexual, physical, mental, financial. Groups were made through abduction and maintained through brainwashing. New Age communes developed on the fringes, where charismatic men gathered harems and drugs provided the only escape.
"Just as fire seeks oxygen, Democrats seek power, which is why they will always be found championing the mob whether the mob consists of Democrats lynching blacks or Democrats slandering the critics of ObamaCare as racists."Nazis. What's to like? Coulter's book is called Demonic and it'll be out on Tuesday. I'm here, even when I'm away from it, practically every day.
I've had a problem with The New York Times' David Brooks for quite a while. 
Now comes a Sp!ked review of Brooks' latest book, The Social Animal: The Hidden Sources of Love, Character, and Achievement, where they, too, catch his NewAge tendencies in full flight:Brooks’ argument against reason culminates in an attack on the Enlightenment. Following Gertrude Himmelfarb (The Roads to Modernity), he writes of a ‘French Enlightenment’ that is overly rationalist and violent and a ‘British Enlightenment’ that emphasises sentiments and is moderate. Three hundred years later, the research finds, ‘the British Enlightenment wins’.
But this is a thoroughly flawed understanding: Enlightenment thinkers on both sides of the English Channel were defenders of reason, from science to politics. Brooks quotes Edmund Burke approvingly, and cites him as a leading member of the British Enlightenment – even though Burke became the leading opponent of the Enlightenment. The concept of reason was central to the American and French revolutions: it provided the basis for widespread social cooperation and was inherently democratic, because it was considered that everyone had the capacity to act rationally and play a role as a citizen.
The implications of Brooks’ anti-rationalist views are drawn out in his recommendations for social policy. He believes that the state can mould emotions and culture for positive ends. What this means in practice is the state intruding into the most personal aspects of people’s lives. Schools need to take over from families that don’t instil the right values to learn; state policies need to inculcate ‘the habits, knowledge and mental traits’ for success. He wants to take the latest findings about the brain and use them to control people’s behaviour.
But, all this said, the problem with The Social Animal is not just that Brooks simply elevates emotions and denigrates reason. It is that (despite protests to the contrary) he sets up a false dualism between the two.
You can read the rest for yourself, but I will point out that, not only have I been reminding you of the NewAge concept - and threat - of "duality" since I started this blog, but that I choose my topics carefully. 
You see, having been schooled in the NewAge belief system, I don't need to have the word "NewAge" mentioned, or the landscape explained - I spotted David Brooks as having gone over to The Dark Side a long time ago, and without him having said much - just as I know Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and all the others I cover are NewAgers. 
Just as I knew with Jared Lee Laughner, their associates, behaviors, words (evasions, really, which are another tip-off) and political positions, say far more about their occult beliefs than they ever imagine.
But, then, it's a lack of imagination that gets people into NewAge in the first place - and why the rest of you keep listening to them.
I got it already - you're not going to listen to the angry black man. Fine - don't listen to the angry black man. Listen to the snarky gay guys at Gawker:Forget about the elixir recipe that grandma's great-great grandma passed down, and toss out that new age baby therapy book that suggests you feed your newborn fennel and teach it yoga or whatever, and brace yourself for a hellish introduction to parenthood. Because, according to the researchers, "the notion that any form of complementary and alternative medicine is effective for infantile colic is currently not supported from the evidence." In other words, you're screwed.Gay guys. They've always got to put screwing in there,...
I really like reading your blog, though I'm still trying to keep up the same level of harsh that you do. It wears me out, man. You are an inspiration, but an exhausting one.--Anga2010
The history of French collaboration with Nazi Germany during World War II is still a very sensitive subject in Gallic literary and political circles. Bestselling novelist Alexandre Jardin has learned this the hard way with the publication of "Des Gens Très Bien" (or "Very Nice People"), a startling exposé of his famous family's association with Nazism under the Vichy government of Marshal Philippe Pétain.Mr. Jardin's new book, published in January by Grasset and available only in French, mixes the confessional genre with biography, history and narrative, and has sold hundreds of thousands of copies since its release. The author now finds himself accosted daily by perturbed readers desperate to unburden themselves about their own "collabos" ancestors. Yet critical reactions in the Parisian press have veered from occasional plaudits to often vicious attacks from across the ideological spectrum. The trouble for these academics and baby boomers alike is that in his work, Mr. Jardin not only denounces his respected paternal grandfather, but by extension all the other "very nice people" of wartime France.
NewAgers are proponents of the concept of "duality", where there is no right or wrong (as long as they're happy!) and they maintain this through delusion, or an escape from reality - but there is no escape:
"After 70 years I thought we could start to recognize the reality of our families and how they behaved during the war," Mr. Jardin tells me in an interview from Paris. "The core of the problem is that I have not spoken about monsters. My grandfather was not a monster. I have spoken about what 'very nice people' did in France when they accepted collaboration with Nazism. I did not realize I would provoke such anger. So long as we were putting authentic monsters on trial—like Maurice Papon for example—no one was worried. But to lift the lid on the question of the responsibility of people who were 'moral' during the collaboration has totally panicked French society."The reaction to Mr. Jardin's book tells us as much about France as does the work itself. As Mr. Jardin observes, "It expressed something very powerful inside French society: the desire to protect the honor of our families, while in reality the large majority in France were behind Pétain during the Second World War. . . . With the liberation, France threw herself behind Gaullism with such fervor because we were ashamed of our behavior. He [de Gaulle] offered us his glory. . . it seemed to me that 70 years on we could tear up this pact and come to terms with reality. But this has provoked incredible emotion."
Most historians, and renowned Nazi hunter Serge Klarsfeld, remain unmoved, pointing to Mr. Jardin's lack of archival proof. But Mr. Jardin has at least one powerful supporter for his claim that Jean was fully aware of the atrocity of July 1942.
"A few weeks ago I found myself around a table at the Elysée with [French President Nicolas] Sarkozy, at a lunch with three writers and a journalist and a historian," Mr. Jardin recounts. "The historian suddenly said to me: 'But you don't have a lot of proof against your grandfather; [Mr.] Sarkozy got up out of his chair, cut her off and said 'Madame, I have had a lot of chiefs of staff.' He gave her a lesson explaining that a chief of staff was nothing like a government departmental head. It was evident listening to [Mr.] Sarkozy that the prime minister's chief of staff could not but be intimately associated with the decision.
All the same, in Mr. Jardin's telling, the historian insisted that "'that did not constitute proof.'" Then, "[Mr.] Sarkozy's temperature rose and he said something incredible which came from his gut: 'Madame if I asked [French Interior Minister and Mr. Sarkozy's former chief of staff] Claude Guéant to organize a round-up of 13,000 Jews next week in Paris, whatever the circumstances, I know Claude would resign. His [Mr. Jardin's] grandfather did not resign.' Then [Mr.] Sarkozy turned to me and said: 'I don't understand why there is a polemic.'"
As Mr. Jardin sees it, a certain moral code, exemplified by his "loyal" grandfather, was crucial to the Vichy machine. "In the end it was not at all necessary to be a monster to participate in the worst. There was an anti-Semitism of the state. Men like my grandfather were prepared to do absolutely anything to preserve a little fragment of national sovereignty," Mr. Jardin observes. "They preferred that the French police came to arrest Jewish families rather than let the German police do it. It is disturbing. In any case in my family there has not been any [feeling of] guilt after the war. My grandfather had the feeling of having done good. It is incredible."
Incredible, indeed. And this is what we live with today - with the Oprah's and the Ellen's, Huffington's and Knight's, the Deepak's and Hay's and the Ray's and Maclaine's - the unending idea that, no matter what harm they and their "beliefs" have brought to other's lives, they are somehow doing good. Hell, even psychics who are busted in crimes, red handed, claim as much. But, one day, this, too, will all be exposed as a lie.
So enjoy it while it lasts, people - smile! These are the good times!
