Citizen/Philosophe Phil, the editor of Journal Of The American Revolution 2 and the author of many of its essays on substack.com is Philip Kosdan of Carrboro, North Carolina.
Professionally, Philip Kosdan is a licensed acupuncturist and Chinese herbalist who has practiced this profession for 40 years, first in Vermont for 13 years and now in North Carolina for 27, currently in a home office.
Educationally, Phil has a B.A. from New York University in Sociology, a Master's Degree from New England School of Acupuncture in Traditional Chinese Medicine and a Master's Degree from Vermont College in Psychology. Besides being a fairly constant book reader; he also takes college courses from The Great Courses online; and, he has taken three times as many college courses that way as he ever took in college.
Phil has a loving and wonderful wife of 32 years, two daughters and three granddaughters who are always adding joy to his life. He lost his loving and magical son, Gabriel Merlin Kosdan, to cystic fibrosis at 28 years old. (I still mourn daily.)
Phil grew up in the Bronx, Chicago, and then Brooklyn before moving to Vermont where he lived for 17 years with an interruption of 3 years living in the Boston area and learning TCM.
Along the way, Phil has also learned and practices a form of shamanism and reads astrology charts.
Citizen/Philosophe Phil has always been interested in, has always studied and always thought about politics and society. He grew up in a very political family and from that family understood that there were different ways of looking at society and its organization. The product of all that interest, studying, thinking and family influence produced a book titled SOLUTION, A Wiseacre's Guide For Cleaning Up The New World Odor, self-published several years ago. The essays in this journal are from the ideas taken from that book.
Bio More Complete
It would not be fair to just outline my autobiography and not include a bit of academic attitude as well as shamanic fantasy along the way. Whether the shamanic past life version of Mr. Phil is true or not — I really cannot tell you the truth and accuracy of all that as I just do not know. I have seen in what they — my original teachers of how to do this — call "journeys" to the spirit world what happened to me in this actual earthly world before this birth. Yet, it is conscious dreaming and how down to earth it is, I will leave that to someone else to figure out. I just do not know for sure. Nonetheless, for me, it does create a multi-life context for who I am and is informative emotionally.
Reading friends books and essays who are certified professional academics and being a reader and student always, it does occur to me that what you are about to read does not exactly follow the collegiate rules of the road complete with historical and contemporary references to other academics, philosophers, economists, political scientists, etc. You might then believe in the university that it is only university professors who are the ones who dictate the intellectual field of the world. Not that they do all that bad a job at it in the fields of Physics and Astronomy; but, on the other hand, I am not all that impressed with their control of what they call "social sciences" and their semi-abandonment of philosophy. And as brilliant and knowledgeable as many of them are, still, most of the time it is a closed and closeted environment. Does it have that much to say to ordinary citizens? I am not so sure.
Nor did I like the rules of that game when I was a student in college. In fact, in graduate school at Vermont College my first professor habitually scolded me for not having enough footnotes per page in my graduate papers. When I read a friend's paper who had the same professor and who followed her rules, there were lots and lots of references and footnotes. Yet, to my mind, that was all the paper was, a bunch of footnotes and references and I could not make hide nor hair of what he was talking about. We laughed it about when I told him my impression. He agreed. He was writing his papers to graduate, not because he wanted to make a point. We are friends to this day and after teaching writing in high school, he wrote a couple of excellent novels of his own, just not in the graduate academic style that that professor insisted upon.
I was fortunate enough, when complaining to the Dean about this professor — who was generally insulting to me, too — that I had my professor switched. The new professor loved my work and read it to her class as an example of original and creative work. She cared not for the officious style of academia. She cared for what I said. Yes, and by the way, this latter professor eventually left that University and became a famous mystery fiction writer in Italy.
For me, this is all not at all a problem really; although I must say that at the time, I was not at all happy about being dissed by that first professor for all the wrong reasons.
Yet, here is The Thing. As my old friend from junior and senior high school said of me, "Phil, you always were a rebel; you will always be a rebel." He first noticed my rebellious streak at George Gershwin Junior High School when after becoming President of our 9th grade class, I made a poetic and firey speech highly critical of our Principal and his ridiculous school rules about talking as we passed between classes. "Silent Passing," they called it. And I did that in front of a full auditorium of students and teachers and a very distinguished guest. I, of course, was forced to resign my position as 9th grade Pres., but my friend Marc caught on to my personality trend.
I do not like uptight authority, never have and I suspect, never will. Always wanted and now do, work for myself. In fact, this journal is really an exercise in replacing irrational and detrimental authority with a better way of doing things. In a sense, it is perfectly adolescent rebellious. Yet, I believe, it is the best of adolescent rebelliousness not flailing about immaturity, but focused rational adolescent best for the future. Teenagers some time have good ideas.
Yes, there are some mature academic references in the essays, too. I happen to very much like Robert Reich and Jeffrey Sachs and William Greider, the best of contemporary economists and many others, like Bill McGibben on climate change. How about the genius, Malcolm Gladwell?
Yet, I think I am not confined to the same old same old solutions to the world's social, economic and political problems; and, therefore, there are few references to new ideas — as they rarely exist — even as there are some references to analysis of present conditions. Even the smartest, the best, the most mature, the ones who I endorse wholeheartedly, still and all, we are still in the early part of an Hegelian trap: thesis, antithesis and we never quite get beyond to a new synthesis.
Here I am with my adolescent rebellious Hegelian synthesis.
So, here is someone who never precisely fit in to school society and its at times irrational demands, nor the workaholic Capitalist world and its exploitative hierarchies. Not that I did not succeed, in a conventional way, at both. Yet, the fit is not there. Always and forever skeptical and at times openly rebellious is this citizen-philosophe — not unlike the philosophes of the European Enlightenments.
In immediate past lives, I was myself a tribal shaman, a medicine man of the Cherokees. I walked unhappily and traumatically on the path of the ethnic cleansing march out of Georgia and North Carolina, the Trail of Tears. I became a Cherokee rancher in Oklahoma — if still a medicine man. As a visiting spiritual leader, I participated in The Little Big Horn and shot some American soldiers.
Yet, I was not happy for the victory. And I certainly did not like the idea of killing anyone however much they may have deserved it. And, I saw what was really coming. One victory does not a war make. I saw that Native Americans, Sioux, Cherokee, Cheyenne, whoever, were done for. A few might survive, but not many, men, women, children. And who survived would be forced to give up all their lands and most of their culture. I stood in place the next day on the plain above the river and did not move. Where to go with such a vision?
Eventually I left, apocalyptic heavy of heart. I was shot and killed soon after with others at Wounded Knee.
I was reborn much later in the Bronx, New York to a radical leftist Jewish family. I was, as they say, a "red diaper baby." And, of course, besides being born into a family with rebellious politics; being born as a Jew, I was born into an ethnic group that had experienced ethnic cleansing and genocide recently, too.
Yet, I always felt, even recently, that I was that Cherokee shaman on the shores of the river at Little Big Horn not knowing where to go and what to do in an empty future.
When I turned 60 years old, on a cross country trip to see the middle of America, I insisted that we end that westward car ride at the monument park at Little Big Horn. My helper spirits had told me to go and that I had been there for Custer's last stand. I stood at the cemetery for the American soldiers and then went up to the cemetery for the Native Americans a bit up the hill. If there were not other tourists around, I would have rolled around on the ground and cried and cried and cried. I did not, but went back to our car hating every white person in America — even being a white person now.
As emotional as I had ever been in my life, I started driving out of the parking lot of the national monument site. I stopped. I could not go on feeling like this and hating everyone. How could I go back to my home in North Carolina and live?
I turned the car around and parked again. I then sat on a bench a bit up from the river across a field. I sat and pondered and meditated for a long time, I know not how long. I calmed down. I no longer hated everyone in America alive now. I realized they were not the same people now who did what Americans in the past had done. In fact, as with me, white Americans could easily have been Native Americans in their past lives.
Yet, too, I realized my "purpose" in life and perhaps the responsibility of all those who were and are Native Americans. Clearly, to me, Americans are screwing up this continent. They do not know what they are doing. In "the Ghost Dance" of the Plains Indians that the U.S. government outlawed after their conquest of the tribes, there was the surmise that as the white Europeans were so incompetent as well as mean, that while they had taken over America, they would eventually die off from their mistakes and Natives could retake the continent. Might still happen.
However, sitting there at the river on the plains above it, it seemed to me that what I was here to do — what Natives are here to do if they so choose — is to teach everyone in America how to live on this continent in peace and harmony and make the better of it all. For us all, Native and immigrant.
That is why I have written these essays; to show a way to how to live on this continent for the better, for the best — before it all goes kaput.
Me Rebooting America
I am as confident a social planner and political philosopher as can be.
When I was a young teenager I remember a family dinner at a local diner at the far end of Brooklyn off Linden Boulevard where my parents thought that the owner of the diner should do this and that — I cannot remember what exactly — to improve the place. I thought that arrogant on my parent's part; what did they really know about organizing and running a diner after all? They were not in the food service industry although my mother did shop and prepare us meals very regularly except when we went out to eat at an imperfect diner for dinner. So ever after when I have given advice to friends I know or even diner owners I do not, I do so with a bit of nostalgic hesitation.
Yet, here I am decades and a lifetime later giving advice about how to reorganize the whole shebang of American society. It has been a little difficult for me to get over my own arrogance, even if I have gotten over it for the most part. I know the ideas contained within are really good and extremely helpful; and, that makes it easier. Reluctant, yet confident, I am — even if I would never try, heaven help me, to organize a restaurant.
"Something," as Shakespeare had his character Marcellus opine to Horatio, "is rotten in the state of Denmark." Well, actually, Denmark is doing pretty fine right now and its people among the happiest in the world, but in the nation of the United States, something is wrong and the Danes know it; as does most of Europe and Scandinavia.
It is not too difficult to see that American politics is going through some hard times, to say the least. Right, Left, Democrat, Republican, Centrists, Extremists, nouveau Socialists or born again Fascists, Trumpsters, anti-Trumpsters, White Nationalists, Biden bros and everyone is pointing a finger or raising the middle one at the other. A media circus it is with the media itself in the center ring pooped on by elephantine Retrumplicans.
The cause though is not only Donald the Duck, tweeting and quacking his way to fame and certain infamy, but more importantly and causally the vacuum of really good ideas at the heart of politics and society. Since it is more difficult to shout across a vacuum, as any vacuum will tell you, everyone is shouting hysterically louder and louder and nothing is getting across. And then it gets louder and more hysterical still; while nothing gets done or what gets done we all do not like at all. And any plans and ideas out there — Elizabeth Warren having a plan for everything under the sun and moon, most of which I like along with Bernie's Green New Deal — get buried in a media avalanche of gotcha quotes and suggested and real corruption.
That said, I am under no illusion either that what I am about to show you should ever be considered the last word in social revolution. That would be too Stalin-esque. I want many and more of us to speak and write and think and bang our heads against the wall until ideas come along. I know you are like me and shy about your great new thoughts but the times really do practically demand, practically scream, practically flip out that we get off my and your mental asses and make things right before the catastrophes that await human beings overtake us even more than they already have. Dystopia is here already and playing itself out bit by bit in global warming and pandemic and Ukrainian war. What are we going to do about it? Think any of the current crop of think tank mavens and their politicians know what to do? Same old ideas; same old, same old.
Donald Trump thinks he is a "stable genius" and has great ideas to make America great. What exactly are those? To my mind he is an unhinged malevolent moron who one way or another is going to sink Titanic America. The ghost dancers knew it. And the ideas coming from the Republican Party appear to me more and more nasty and irrational and exist only to oppose to what they believe are the evil plans of the Liberal Democrats plotting to take away your guns and liberty and coddle the poor and unworthy on your increasing tax dollar.
Democrats at their best on the other hand appear to be trying to resurrect FDR — plans I appreciate even if I think them now inadequate. The Democratic Party, I think, is at its worst when they play the game of we must be moderates to win and defeat the evil Trump and Republicans. And, then they do precious little when in office: trickle down politics, although maybe not Warren and Sanders, but the corporate elite rest of them.
As you will see, I think it is necessary to push the political and social game right along and resurrect not just The New Deal as good a deal as it was, albeit a bit long ago now; but, we need to get more in the spirit of the Enlightenment itself and push the ideals of "Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness." Thence we can inform and reform a society rotten as Shakespeare's olden Denmark. What would Hamlet do today? To do or not to do? Now, that is a question!
Will the people ever agree to what I will here and now propose? How can you get it accepted? Look at all the forces that would be arrayed against, especially big money interests of billionaires that own our politics? And wouldn't it cause massive disruption and be self-defeating? Totally impractical, you may think once you have gone through all the essays. Yet here is the ultimate irony: if you think anything like this is impractical it will be. If you think anything like this can be done, it can be done.
Yet, too, there are those who are invested, literally invested and big time and big money, in keeping The System the way it is. This is neither a democratic country nor a democratic world in which the citizenry is well informed, thinks about what might work better and can vote for a better world order. For the most part, this is a Corporatocracy (see Jeffrey Sachs and Robert Reich) and a rich man’s world. (“The rich men make the rules for the wise men and the fools.” Bob Dylan). Want to just give up and let them rule over the sinking ship with you in the lower deck? Where do we go and on what life raft? They are all out in the New York Hamptons while the pandemic passes over them. Police knees will not be on their necks; they will be on yours.
In other words, the thrust of my essays, the purpose of my ideas, is to radically and properly and democratically and with kindness and compassion, change the whole system: of politics, of economics, of society. And save us from what looks like the destruction of civilization and all its people. Phew! Really? And my parents only wanted to help a small diner in the far reaches of Brooklyn be better. I just want to save the human world from itself. My parents, political and compassionate as they were, would appreciate it, I am sure. Even if they thought I was the daft one.
We need to begin to think how we can change course and how and now. It is only a matter of getting beyond the old rhetoric and especially the old assumptions that are making asses out of you and me and everyone else. So, have no illusions. Creating a social structure that works is not impossible nor is it at all easy. Yet, if any world is on the cusp of disaster, it is ours. We had better move our collective butts and fast though or it will be certain curtains for us as a species. Would Greta agree? I think so. Would Mr. Floyd agree? I would hope so.
In terms of conventional mainstream politics, I am a nobody — if not for long if you like these ideas. I vote every two or four years and that is about it, except I do pay attention to the news and what is going on. Yet, I am not in a political office, nor in government. I hardly make financial contributions to candidates as I am not wealthy.
There was that one time a neighbor invited me to a local Democratic Party gathering in town because that neighbor knew I was very interested in politics and had some ideas and proposals to share. You see, I had just written and self-published a book called: SOLUTIONS, A Wiseacre's Guide For Cleaning Up The New World Odor and thought I might be able to contribute some new and worthy ideas. (You can still find it at Amazon, although I think it a bit outdated by now; although the basic ideas are not. They are going to be in these essays and journal.)
Yet, since this was a general gathering and not oriented to discuss policy issues, the head of the local Democratic Party chapter recommend that I attend a Policy Committee meeting. Little did I know that the Policy Committee did not debate policies at all either and only gathered and shuffled old already agreed upon policies and approved other ones that were the usual old boilerplate kind of thing anyway, testimonials to this office holder and that party helper. A couple of members were actually perturbed that I was wasting the committee's time with new real proposals. My proposals could not even be gathered and sorted because the members did not take then at all seriously and I would have to present them independently at a more general session of the Party. So much for new ideas!
Instead of being encouraged to bring proposals to that general session, especially after these two meetings in which I was basically cast aside — I think they thought I was a bit daft — I saw that the Democratic Party of North Carolina was not for me. I am very sure my ideas would have gone nowhere at a Convention meeting. You will see why if you read these essays with some of those ideas in them.
I was not at all surprised really, given what I knew of the agenda of the Democratic Party in North Carolina, wimpy at best and empty at worst: mainstream nothingness. There simply is not much there, there, other than not being the retrograde N.C. Republican Party whose only interest seems to be to gerrymander the state so they could retain power and then deny what human rights they could to whomever they could who was not them, all the while sucking up to the rich and shameless in the state by reducing income taxes and underfunding education.
There is still shock and awe nationally, by the way, in the Democratic Party when Democratic Party candidates, usually those labeled "Progressives," actually make substantive proposals. There are candidates, like Biden, but others as well, who are just anti-Trump and that seems to be sufficient to get you elected perhaps. I do understand that Trump needed to be gone. Yet, as in North Carolina, why should anyone really care nationally, if all you are is against the other party's foolishness and cannot think of anything much at all? The vast majority of citizens are fed up with both parties, by the way. Check the poll numbers sometime. Ask your friends.
I really am in an awkward position and outside the mainstream of what passes for the American political system. As you might notice if you read on, the proposals presented could seem sometimes conventionally Right and sometimes conventionally Left, but I think in the end not really easily classifiable in that outdated system. Perhaps these proposals are: above or, if you do not like them: below the horizontal of Left-Right. That is, up or down, not side to side. Whether one way or the other does not really matter to me. It is the ideas that count not some political litmus test categorization of their acidity or baseness. Libertarian? Closer, but not completely. Capitalist apologist? Socialist apologist? Sometimes yes, sometimes no for each. Huh? Bigger government? No. Smaller government? Maybe. More freedom: most markedly yes. More regulation: actually yes, too. Huh? And more huh huhs along the way. It is all outside the mainstream, but still flows with the current, if a bit eccentrically. But there is a far better float on this boat than zipping along with the present hole in the side of the big steam ship.
Try this for an opening idea: end all taxes and yet free cradle to grave education and medical care for all. The extreme Right might like no taxes, eh? The extreme Left likes free cradle to grave education and health care, eh? But, here is the real kicker,: it is really easy to do and you are not required to do all kind of mental and economic flips and gyrations and contortions and freaky budget analyses to get there. IT IS ALL TOO EASY!!! Trust me? Maybe you do not, but read on! You may see the light that I see.
Well, to be perfectly honest, it does surprise me a bit too. Why is it so easy? Why is it so simple to solve the world's problems? I have been thinking about these issues for a good deal of my life and now that I am getting older, that adds up to decades of thinking. But really, I am not alone in spending many hours thinking about political, social and economic issues. Why me, why these? And why so easy? I think in part it has something to do with being away from the center of politics in the U.S. as such and not being swayed by the momentary issues and elections this way and that. I could just think about it and not have to worry about winning the next election for myself or a politician I favored and how to appeal to the snarky media and wealthy corporate interest. I really do not need all those footnotes and references!
Is all this the very last word in solutions to current dilemmas? Well, it might be, but I doubt it. Still and all, I think it is a very good start and far better than what passes along as wonk think tank politics, voodoo economics and anti-social Trump policy. And maybe, just maybe, with your help and your ideas and my help and my ideas, we can change the disastrous direction that human beings are headed in their politics, their economics, their societies and their relationship to plants and animals, oceans and volcanoes. Shall we prove the ghost dancers wrong? Can we?
I have three values that inform these proposals: democracy, human rights and non-violence. Power to all the people, everyone! Right on! A really real new Enlightenment world vision! Sound pretentious or inspirational? Read on reader, read on!