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Road to Contentment

March 10, 2026
art, chauvinism, democracy
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I want to tell you why you are discontent. I want to tell you how to overcome your discontent every day.

The reason for your unhappiness is that you aren’t being yourself. If you were being yourself as you were created by millions of years of evolution, you would settle into a life of caring for others.

As evolution shaped us, we are herd animals. We care for one another the way a herd animal protects its members. When they are aware of an attack, for example, bison form a circle with the calves and weaker members at the center. It is natural for them, and it is natural for us to take care of one another.

Left to themselves, children are the same way. They strive for fairness among themselves. I know this because I had a private school where children were largely left to their natural inclinations rather than being pitted against one another for grades and encouragement as they are in other schools.

But the children in most schools and the adults in capitalist society are pitted against one another. The only way for anybody to advance under capitalism is to climb over others. Alienation is forced on us, and alienation is the source of our discontent.

We know about this alienation. We usually experience it as guilt. Every day in every city, we walk by or drive by the suffering victims at the bottom of our capitalist fight among ourselves. Sometimes we give them a dime or a dollar, but it doesn’t seem enough.

What About Your Exes?

Alienation makes us desperate, and that is why we cling to the one person that capitalist society allows us to have – our spouse or significant other. It’s also the reason that so many of our relationships fail. We cling too hard, or maybe the other person clings too hard.

We cling desperately to that one person because we are alienated from virtually everybody else, and we doom the relationship because no one person can fill our void of alienation.

Some people try to fill the void with their children. These are the stage mothers and helicopter parents who, again, are often undone in their ambitions because they tried too desperately.

We Need to Do More

Recognizing your true need to care for other humans is the way to overcome your alienation and your discontent. We aren’t bisons, of course, so we are called upon to do considerably more than form circles around our calves.

Knee-jerk charity is also insufficient. Should you stop every time you see a homeless person and try to meet their true needs? Should you buy them new clothes, find them a job, or rent an apartment for them? How many could you help? Should you aspire to religious poverty and try to become the next Buddha? A few people try that, but more of them try it for only a while.

Strive to Care Effectively

We are herd animals like bison, but we are also thinking animals. If we seriously and honestly want to stop human suffering, then we have to think about the reasons for it. After that, we have to apply ourselves to resolving those reasons. That is the road to contentment and the way to stop being simply a victim of alienation.

It may be simple, but it’s not easy.  It doesn’t take a lot of thought to realize that the people at the bottom of this alienated heap have counterparts at the top. Elon Musk, for example, has more wealth than 53% of American households! They are the ones benefiting from this awful system and the ones who will fight you to continue it.

Follow the Good Examples

Look among your friends and acquaintances for those who are older and have maintained their sense of humanity. I don’t mean the churlish and cruel older people who make up stereotypes of discontent. I mean the older people who are still smiling at life.

You will find them among the activist population. The happiest old people I ever met were those who were still in the struggle. I never met an unhappy old communist.

It’s a Fight, but It’s Worth It

You can’t be content while you’re being oppressed.

It was really hard for me to accept a life of struggle. I think I tried everything that looked easier before I gave in to the obvious.

During the “Pop Psychology” days of the 1960s and 1970s, the key word for everybody was “adjust.” “I’ve adjusted” generally meant the same thing as “I’m happy” or “I’m content.” A “well-adjusted” person was someone who had it made. If someone (me) wasn’t happy, he/she wasn’t fully “in sync with his/herself” and needed to “adjust.” There were all kinds of elaborate ways to help people get adjusted, and most of them involved long expensive therapy sessions. Some involved massage, some involved heavy sedation, some involved electric shock, some involved brain surgery.

I never met a therapist who didn’t subscribe to this “adjustment” business. To that extent, they are agents of the status quo. Maybe all of them aren’t, but then I’ve not met them all.

Why Adjust?

But why should we adjust to an unfair world? Why should we adjust when we ourselves are being oppressed, and we can see a lot more oppression on other people? Why should we adjust when we could make things better?

There is precious little peace for anyone in our society. “Getting and spending, we lay waste our lives,” said Ralph Waldo Emerson. Actually, most of the world’s population doesn’t have enough for the bare necessities and spend their days searching for subsistence. Half the world’s children don’t have enough to eat. People are currently being incinerated by bombs paid for by American taxes.

Most of the people who do have enough can’t stop driving to accumulate more. Their children often become degenerate spendthrifts. Are any of them content?

The Only Possible Peace Comes from Fighting

Countless religions and motivational speakers promise that you can adjust to the present society and find contentment, but you can’t. The only contentment within a contentious society comes from striving to improve it. Figuring out how to do that doesn’t take a lot of brain power. It might take a little courage.

Understanding Where We are Grows From Where We’ve Been

December 26, 2025
art, history, strategy
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By Gene Lantz

Dallas activists had spoonfuls of ice cream and local history on December 21. A group of us gathered at a Dairy Queen just 2 miles uphill and west from downtown Dallas. At that site in 1854, socialists from Europe established their communal farm and changed North Texas forever. We talked about them and then walked together to see a stone monument nearby.

A French socialist named Victor Considerant rented horses in St Louis in 1850 or so. Then he rode to an open hillside outside the grubby little town of Dallas. The town was established only a couple of years earlier and was just beginning its first main industry, tanning stinky buffalo hides.

Considerant thought the area looked like his homeland and should, he figured, be good land for grapevines and a wine industry. Back in Europe, he was able to raise money for a stock corporation to start sending European socialists to Texas. They named their commune “La Reunion.”

They were literate people. Unlike the rough-hewn Scots-Irish frontiersmen tanning hides nearby, they were cultured, artistic, musical, and far-thinking people. Like the other socialist settlements in Texas from the time, they were “freethinkers” on religious questions and had no churches. What really set them apart was that they didn’t enslave other human beings.

“History Is Bunk”

The official story of Dallas, told in almost all the books, is that the only reason it became a great city and cultural center was because of the genius and foresight of the early capitalists who created it “out of nothing.” In truth, it was a crossroads long before the first trading post was set up. It was a shallow place in the Trinity river where natives and early Spanish explorers could cross.

Dallas was also a crossroad when the first transcontinental highway went through the middle of town and then came out toward Fort Worth on the very street that now passes in front of our Dairy Queen. The Dixie Overland Highway ran from Savannah Georgia to San Diego California.

The genius capitalists didn’t make Dallas a cultural center either. It was the socialists from La Reunion. The official story about all the socialist communards in Texas is that they failed because they weren’t good farmers and socialism just doesn’t work. But that doesn’t explain why they all went out of business at practically the same time, in 1860.

When the Confederacy established its wartime draft, soldiers went after the free thinking socialist communities. One of them, Comfort, near San Antonio, tried to send its menfolk to the Mexican border, but they were hunted down and massacred. At La Reunion, a shootout with the Confederates was their last page in history as a communal farm.

But it wasn’t their last contribution to Dallas and North Texas. The population of Dallas was about 1,000. There were 500 or so communards. Most of them moved to the eastern part of town and established East Dallas, where their descendants still hold La Reunion celebrations. They contributed to the arts and even in politics. One of them became Mayor of Dallas and has a park, Reverchon, named after him today. They were the people who made grubby little Dallas a cultural center.

You can learn a lot at the Dairy Queen.

Poor Us!

December 27, 2023
art, chauvinism, women
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Movie Review: “Poor Things,” Directed by Yorgos Lanthimos, 141 minutes

My movie buddy had to drag me away from the lobby outside the entrance to “Poor Things.” I wanted to stay and warn everybody to stay away. It’s over 2 hours of pretentious nonsense about a baby girl growing within a woman’s body. It’s a misogynist fantasy wasting $35 million worth of the latest technology, technique, and style.

There! Now I know you won’t be able to resist going. I saw a couple of outright rave reviews before I started mine. I found a major reviewer who calls “Poor Things” “best movie of the year.” https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/poor-things-movie-review-2023. Another joins in praising its technical accomplishments, both in film and in storytelling: https://www.vox.com/culture/23992608/poor-things-review. Reviewers, apparently, loved it.

The movie really does have a lot going for it. Everything about it is quirky and over-the-top. Mark Ruffalo, as a Casanova cad, is hilarious, especially in the scene where the child/woman enthusiastically dances jerkily in the middle of a prim ballroom dance and Ruffalo tries to cover for her with impromptu twirls and dips. I could cut that 4 minute scene out and watch it every now and then, but not anything else.

On the way home, my movie buddy analyzed the title. “Poor Things” doesn’t refer to anybody in the movie. It’s the audience, us.

–genelantz

Secret Police Hate Folk Singers!

June 10, 2023
art, civil rights, democracy, history
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Book Review:

Leonard, Aaron, “The Folk Singers and the Bureau: The FBI, the Folk Artists and the Suppression of the Communist Party, USA-1939-1956.” Repeater, 2020

Some of the first songs I ever learned were “Good Night, Irene” and “On Top of Old Smokey.” I still sing them. They were top-of-the-chart popular songs by The Weavers in the late 1940s. Then the Weavers disappeared and I didn’t hear anything about any of them until the late 1960s, when everybody knew and loved Pete Seeger, Lee Hayes, and Ronnie Gilbert. I didn’t know much about how J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI secret police hounded and threatened them and everybody who listened to them until I ran across this book.

Thanks to the young man who joined our “flying pickets” action for telling me about it. I think his name was Gregory something or something Gregory. He said I could get it through the public library, but I failed at that and bought it for Kindle from Amazon for $8.95. Good investment.

Attacking artists like the Weavers, Woody Guthrie, Paul Robeson, Sisco Houston, Hudie Ledbetter and others was supposedly justified by Hoover as part of his lifelong campaign against communists. The funny thing is, it’s kind of hard to call these artists reds. Sure, they were in and out of the CPUSA, but so were thousands of progressive and liberal-minded people in those days. I think what really pulled Hoover’s chain was the plain fact that they sang the truth, and fascists hate truth passionately.

I appreciate the author’s speculations, near the end of the book, as to just how much the world might have benefitted if these artists had been allowed access to audiences, recording studios, TV, and movies during those dreadful anti-communist witch hunt years.

Also, I appreciated the way the author gave the background of America’s witch hunt. Like most historians, he makes sure that the readers know that he doesn’t agree with nor approve of communists. People are still too afraid to say anything positive in print, but he does tell the truth about why CPUSA fell from a very large political force down to a miniscule one: government persecution. Not that they didn’t make some mistakes.

Leonard’s criticisms of CPUSA errors during the period ring true to me, because I have talked to old reds who lived through it. Their errors in dealing with the witch hunt came directly from misunderstanding the economic and political situation at the end of World War II. I can see why they would think that American fascism was imminent, but they were wrong and it led them to make unnecessary mistakes.

The folk singers didn’t make any of the decisions nor any of the mistakes. They just sang the truth and sang it well. That was plenty of reason for J.Edgar Hoover!

–-Gene Lantz

I’m on KNON’s “Workers Beat” talk show every Saturday at 9AM. They usually post my weekly podcast on KNON and on Soundcloud during Wednesdays. If you are curious about what I really think, you might look at my old personal web site.

Dubious Battle Tactics

December 21, 2022
art, history, strategy, unions
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Film Review: “In Dubious Battle,” Directed by James Franco, 1917

Movie Review

“In Dubious Battle,” directed by James Franco, 1917

Prime video still has “In Dubious Battle” for a few more days. It’s an interesting and progressive film with a strong pro-worker attitude.

Jim and Mac are farm worker organizers of the Industrial Workers of the World in 1933. Even though the fighting Wobblies were largely crushed in most industries by the red scare during and after World War I, their Agricultural Department outlasted all their other fine efforts. Pulitzer winner John Steinbeck wrote the book around 1937 based on strikes and labor battles in California. It isn’t as well known as his “Of Mice and Men,” nor “Grapes of Wrath,” but it’s about the same people: itinerant farm workers of the Great Depression.

Mac is the old hand. He’s rather cynical as he teaches the neophyte Jim how to focus on agitating a battle to the exclusion of any other considerations. They take jobs as apple pickers in order to encourage the downtrodden workers to rise up and fight their exploiting bosses. In that regard, the film is quite inspirational and really sounds close to what really happened.

Actually, I kind of hope it isn’t what really happened, because the bosses and their hired terrorists seem to get and keep the upper hand. I watched the film with a genuine union organizer with real experience, and she had severe criticisms of the way the strike was begun and handled.

As art, though, the film is pretty good. I don’t know how the producers were able to do it, but they assembled quite an assortment of headliners in the main speaking parts. We spotted Selena Gomez, Vincent D’Onofrio, Robert Duvall, Sam Shepard, Ed Harris and Bryan Cranston. James Franco directed himself in the main role.

The result is a film that is fine for inspiration, but not for learning organizing tactics. If there were real people like Mac and Jim, they should have learned this: it is not sufficient to fight. It is also necessary to win!

–Gene Lantz

I’m on KNON.org’s “Workers Beat” radio talk show every Saturday at 9 Central Time. If you are curious about what I really think, check out my personal web site

See “Painted Bird”

December 13, 2020
art, history, politics
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Film review:

“The Painted Bird,” Directed by Václav Marhoul, 2 hours 49 minutes

My movie buddy and I watched this film streamed from HULU in our comfortable living room. If we had seen it in a theater, I don’t know if we could have stayed through it. I understand that many other moviegoers have walked out, not because they didn’t appreciate the film, but because they appreciated it too much!

You can tell it’s a novel. Too much happens with too many characters for an original screenplay. Also, it’s really long. It’s in the starkest black and white. The main character is mute, most of the characters are too miserable to talk, so it’s almost a silent movie.

The story, briefly, is about an Eastern European boy who suffers through the period coincident with World War II. He wanders from one miserable hovel to the next and suffers amazing, disgusting, depredations from backward and somewhat insane perpetrators. They don’t limit themselves to persecuting the boy. Some of the things they do to one another are extremely difficult to watch and almost impossible to put into words.

On the technical side of the production, any one of several amazing accomplishments would make this art movie worth watching. I don’t see how they managed to assemble such an array of international movie stars. I can’t begin to explain how they managed to train the animals to portray such wild extremes of behavior. The cinematography is breathtaking. The props include authentic German and Russian war machines. All the settings are either gorgeous or grotesque. In short, the movie is done well.

And finally, what does it all mean? Does it mean that many humans, perhaps a majority, are cruel and perverted? Does it mean that humans, even an unprotected little boy, can endure almost anything? Or is it just a statement about certain people in a certain place and a certain period of time? Probably, it will mean different things to different people, but I can almost guarantee that the effect will be on a grand scale and this movie will be talked about for some time to come.

–Gene Lantz

I’m on KNON’s “Workers Beat” radio talk show every Saturday at 9AM Central Time. We podcast the program and “Workers Beat Extra” on Wednesdays. If you are curious about what I really think, check out my personal web site.

Anti-War Strategies

October 20, 2020
art, democracy, history, politics, strategy
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Movie Review:

“The Trial of the Chicago 7,” written and directed by Aaron Sorkin. 140 minutes on Netflix

What makes this movie so relevant for today is the contrasting strategies portrayed. The movie makes the different ideologies clear. There were a lot of approaches to the Anti-War movement during the Vietnam invasion and not all of them are in this movie, but some critical ones were. With historical hindsight, we can evaluate them.

In 1969 leaders of the Black Panthers, Students for a Democratic Society, the newly formed Yippie Party, and one pacifist associated with the War Resisters League were put on trial for having crossed state lines in order to “incite a riot” at the Democratic Party National Convention. It was a political show trial staged by the Nixon Administration in hopes of dampening the anti-war fervor of the time.

We can dispense with Nixon’s nasty strategy easily: it failed. The anti-war movement did not diminish during or after the trial. What is much more interesting is the contrasting approaches of the defendants.

The strategy of the protagonist with the pacifist view was to appeal to people’s better nature and provide a good example of anti-war intelligence. He was the most reasonable of the bunch, or at least he seemed so until he slugged one of the bailiffs.

Bobby Seale of the Black Panthers was not involved in organizing the demonstrations. The Nixon “Justice” department apparently indicted him, as the script explains, just to scare the jurors. Seale doesn’t talk strategies with the other defendants, but his interactions with the judge showed his defiant attitude. During the trial, the Chicago Police murdered Fred Hampton, Chicago leader of the Panthers. The judge in the trial infamously had Bobby Seale bound and gagged in the courtroom.

The two “Yippies,” Abie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin, steal the movie, as they did the publicity around the long trial, by joking and mocking the judicial system. Their goal, as gleefully explained in the movie, was to create a “cultural revolution.” Their antics were supposed to reveal the fundamental injustice of the war, the trial, and the entire American way of life. That would somehow lead to fundamental changes, but they were accused in the movie of being simple opportunists aggrandizing their own reputations and book sales.

Students for a Democratic Society was a mass movement. It didn’t last very long, but it had a tremendous impact on society and on the war in Vietnam while it lasted. Its main spokesperson in the movie was Tom Hayden who used his anti-war fame to gain a very successful career in California politics. Hayden explains that his movement’s goal was to win power through elections.

All of the defendants agreed on one thing: they wanted to end the war in Vietnam. In that regard, history explains to us that they were on the right track. The war in Vietnam is probably the only U.S. war whose extent was severely limited by popular dissent.

They also agreed that demonstrating at the Democratic Party Convention was a good tactic. The Democrats, after all, had started the war under the Kennedy Administration and carried it to fabulous extremes under Johnson. One could argue that the Chicago demonstrations helped defeat Hubert Humphrey and put Richard Nixon into the White House. Nixon then carried the war even further, but we have no historical way of evaluating what “Happy Warrior” Humphrey would have done.

The characters in the movie, especially Hayden and Hoffman, argue strategies. Viewers like you and I get to decide who was the most effective.

Gene Lantz

I’m on KNON’s “Workers Beat” talk show every Saturday at 9 AM Central Time. I also podcast “Workers Beat Extra” on Soundcloud every Wednesday.  If you are curious about what I really think, check out my personal web site.

You can learn all the technicalities of the movie with the Wikipedia article. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Trial_of_the_Chicago_7

For a rave review of the movie’s artistic aspects, see https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/the-trial-of-the-chicago-7-movie-review-2020

More Than a Dollar’s Worth

August 30, 2020
art, economy
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TV Review: “One Dollar” Ten chapters of a TV series on CBS All Access.

“One Dollar” is a modern film noir. It’s also a lot of other things that make it really worthwhile.

It’s social commentary about life in America’s Rust Belt as the jobs disappear and the people sink into despondency. It’s uplifting vignettes about people caring for one another during hard times. Its an exploration of the lives of working families in crisis. It’s a tribute. It’s one damn fine piece of artistry.

In a small town near Pittsburg, the first men to come to work at the town’s steel mill discover pools of blood. There are no bodies, and apparently no one is missing. Competence is not one of the characteristics of the local police force. Only one tired and cynical ex-police detective has the interest and the ability to figure out what happened. He can’t sleep. He can’t express himself. He’s a perfectly jaded film noir detective. He can’t stop inquiring.

Not all of the excellently portrayed characters in the small town have anything at all to do with the blood crime. Some of them just briefly carry around the one dollar bill that circulates around town and gives the series its name and motif. But they all explain the town and the times.

It’s a darned good story well told. But that’s not why I raised my opinion several notches before I got to Chapter 10. It was when I realized that Robert Altman, the great American film director who died in 2006, was still alive through the works of present-day directors. I have always thought that Altman’s “Nashville” represented the highest order of film technique, and I saw a lot of it in “One Dollar.”

Remember Altman’s great transitions from one vaguely related part of the story to another? Remember how he could juggle a dozen different stories and keep them all interesting even though they seemed unrelated? “One Dollar” does that. It works and I am grateful.

–-Gene Lantz

I’m on KNON’s “Workers Beat” talk show every Saturday at 9AM Central Time. They podcast the program and “Workers Beat Extra” on Soundcloud. If you are curious about what I actually think, check out my personal web site

Watch “Stateless!”

July 23, 2020
art, civil rights, politics, women
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TV Review

“Stateless” streaming on Netflix. The first three episodes are directed by Emma Freeman; the other three by Jocelyn Moorhouse.

Please don’t miss this great Australian series.

STATELESS (L to R) FAYSSAL BAZZI as AMEER and SORAYA HEIDARI as MINA in episode 102 of STATELESS Cr. BEN KING/NETFLIX © 2020

The series examines what happens to the lives of those associated with an immigrant detention center that is operated for profit. This one is in Australia, where they unfailingly make great dramas, but the ones in the Rio Grande Valley are also run for profit.

Two of the main characters are inmates: an Afghani trying to save his daughters from the Taliban and an Australian citizen who is trying to hide her identity. The other two administrate the place: an immigration specialist and an ordinary working dude trying out a new job as a prison guard. The place works its wonders on them. Even more, the world system that creates 70 million dislocated asylum seekers and then mistreats them miserably works its wonders on us, the audience.

Part of the story, Wikipedia says, is directly true. All of it sounds true, seems true, hurts truly.

A word about the quality of the presentation: the penetrating insight into every character could only have been revealed by women. Both directors and both writers were women. Their sensitivity is a marvel.

By way of explaining how good the acting is, let me ask you if you’ve ever seen a Cate Blanchett picture where her acting didn’t overshadow everybody else? Cate Blanchett is very good in “Stateless,” but her role is limited. She is listed as one of several Executive Directors. If you’re a fan of Australian TV, let me ask if you’ve ever seen Marta Dusseldorp in anything in which her skill didn’t dominate everybody else? In this series, Ms Dusseldorp and Ms Blanchett are just part of a wonderful ensemble of players. Everybody is excellent. The actors for the four main characters are beyond excellent.

Top acting kudos has to go to Yvonne Strahovski. Her role is the most demanding, and she pushes each of her emotional portrayals beyond limits. After the first few scenes, you may recognize her as the cold hearted Commander’s wife in “The Handmaid’s Tale,” or maybe you won’t recognize her, but you won’t forget her again after you see her in “Stateless!”

Yvonne Strahovski

The Australian immigration/detention system takes a beating in “Stateless,” but several characters, including some administrators, give the impression that they are doing the best that they can in a rotten situation. At least they are trying. My movie buddy and I agreed, several times as we watched the series over a few nights, that the worst of the miseries “Stateless” encountered must be far worse here at home in the United States, where what they are trying to do with the immigration situation isn’t just rotten.

–Gene Lantz

I’m still on KNON’s “Workers Beat” radio talk show at 9AM Central Time every Saturday. We podcast the program and “Workers Beat Extra” on Soundcloud. If you are interested in what I really think, check out my personal web site