IF YOU WATCHED television at any point in the seventies, you saw him: America's most famous Indian. Star of perhaps the best-known public service announcement ever, he was a black-braided, buckskinned, cigar-store native come to life, complete with single feather and stoic frown. In the spot's original version, launched by Keep America Beautiful on Earth Day 1971, he paddles his canoe down a pristine river to booming drumbeats. He glides past flotsam and jetsam. The music grows bombastic, wailing up a movie-soundtrack build. He rows into a city harbor: ship, crane, a scrim of smog. The Indian pulls his boat onto a bank strewn with litter and gazes upon a freeway.

"Some people have a deep, abiding respect for the natural beauty that was once this country," intones a basso profundo voice, "and some people don't." On those words, someone flings a bag of trash from a passing car. It scatters at the Indian's feet. He looks into the camera for the money shot. A single tear rolls down his cheek.

"People start pollution. People can stop it," declares the narrator.

Rewind. Replay. Thanks to YouTube, you can watch this ad over and over, framed by excited viewer comments: "A classic!!" "Very powerful." "Best PSA ever made." Most YouTubers agree with the trade journal Ad Age, which included the campaign in the century's top hundred. Some netizens even claim the ad motivated them to pick up trash or chide litterers. The Advertising Educational Foundation declares the spot "synonymous with environmental concern." Wikipedia says it "has been widely credited with inspiring America's fledgling environmental movement." The crying Indian wept for our sins, and from his tears sprang forth a new Green Age.

This is remarkable, since the ad was a fraud. It's no big secret that the crying Indian was neither crying nor Indian. Even some YouTubers point out that he was played by character actor Iron Eyes Cody, whose specialty was playing Indians in Hollywood westerns. The Italian-American Cody-his real name was Espera Oscar DeCorti-"passed" as a Cherokee-Cree Indian on and off camera. His long black braids were a wig, his dark complexion deepened with makeup. His fraud was not ill-willed: he also supported Indian rights, married an Indian, and adopted Indian children.

The fraudulence of Keep America Beautiful is less well known. In a recent survey, respondents were given a list of "environmental groups" and asked "Which organization do you believe is most believable?" Thirty-six percent chose Keep America Beautiful-it beat out the Nature Conservancy (29 percent), the Sierra Club (17 percent), Greenpeace (15 percent), and the Environmental Defense Fund (3 percent). Over two million Americans acted on that belief in 2006, volunteering for Keep America Beautiful activities: picking up litter, removing graffiti, painting buildings, and planting greenery. Many may not have realized they were handing their free time to a front group for the beer bottlers, can companies, and soda makers who crank out the containers that constitute half of America's litter. Or that this front group opposes the reuse and recycling legislation that might better address the problem. The information is not hard to find. Ted Williams wrote about it in 1990 for Audubon. Online, you can find many more narratives of KAB's real motives, including a summary by the Container Recycling Institute.

And yet, even with Cody outed as Italian and KAB unmasked as a trade group, the crying Indian remains a beloved environmental icon. Why did he touch such a chord? One day in June, while visiting family in Michigan, I decide to find out.

TO GET TO Illinois from western Michigan, you ease round the bottom of what Michiganians call "the Lake," then drop down into Indiana. Almost immediately, the landscape becomes classic heartland: seemingly endless, flat cornfields like the one where Cary Grant flees a crop-dusting plane in North by Northwest. Each small town pivots on a grain elevator, the horizon's only transect. I stick to blue highways, remarkably free of generic sprawl, and head west. I think, Indiana.

As a child, I had a puzzle of the United States, each state a separate wooden piece. I liked stacking them in two piles: Indian names, European names. I was always fascinated by place names, especially Indian ones. Even as a kid, I found it odd that pioneers should name their homes after the people they had displaced to build them.

But that's frequently the role Native Americans are given by American culture: marker of loss. Early American landscape paintings often included a token Indian: America was the new Eden, complete with mournful, expelled Adam. In the early nineteenth century, as "Indian removal" became federal policy, artists like George Catlin traveled the West, painting Plains Indians in war paint or ceremonial dress. Their still, solemn faces have a funerary tone. At the same time, hugely popular "Indian dramas" swept stages, almost always ending with an Indian character's noble death. Yet even as these stage natives reassured audiences with their disappearing act, they embodied the young nation's ideals: sacrifice, nobility, and honor. Depicting Indians as a "vanishing race," these works registered an odd anxiety about their vanishing. What if in building our new world, they asked, we actually destroy its founding values?

At nine a.m. I arrive at my destination, the Advertising Council Archives at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. The UIUC library is classic land-grant college architecture, monumental yet homespun: huge hallways with soaring ceilings, wide staircases with thick wooden railings. The Advertising Council Archives are in the basement, down a long, tunnel-like hallway. Before going in, I stop to examine a glass display case outside the door. It celebrates "the Advertising Council's commitment to the environment." Typical is an ad from a 1994 "Clean Water" campaign. "There are toxic chemicals in our water," it declares. "Such as oil. And pesticides. You might think industry is to blame. But they're only part of the problem. You and I, in our everyday lives, are also responsible for a tremendous amount of water pollution." _People start pollution. People can stop it.

KEEP AMERICA BEAUTIFUL first came to the Advertising Council for support in 1960. An advertising trade group, the Ad Council recruits and oversees ad agencies as they create pro-bono public service ads for nonprofits and government. The Council then coordinates donations of media for the ads. They are famously successful. Working with the Council, volunteer agencies have churned out loads of catchy taglines for righteous causes: "Buckle up for safety"; "A mind is a terrible thing to waste"; "Friends don't let friends drive drunk." They created Smokey the Bear, McGruff the Crime Dog, and Vince and Larry, the Crash Test Dummies.

Perhaps even more famous are the Council's World War II campaigns: "Loose lips sink ships" and Rosie the Riveter's "We can do it!" Formed in 1941, the Council was originally intended to mitigate the antibusiness, collectivist side of the New Deal. Its founding mission was defined as "reteaching a belief in a dynamic economy." But after Pearl Harbor, the ad men teamed up with the Office of War Information to crank out propaganda, encouraging Americans to buy war bonds, enlist, work in factories, and save tin cans, scrap rubber, and waste fats. At war's end, however, the Ad Council happily returned to its true role: prophet of endless growth.

Looking back from America's current position as global missionary of free-market gospel, it's easy to forget that enterprise American-style-dedicated to the proposition that consuming equals happiness-once needed the hard sell here, too. But the ad men knew it. In 1945, the Council issued a pamphlet outlining its new purpose. The war was over, but a new battle was on: the "battle for markets." Europe, they declared, was in ruins. State socialism was creeping through the Old World. America, too, would move left, unless advertising could "resume its star role as a profitable seller of goods." This meant recasting the American Dream as the endless pursuit of plenty.

"Only if we have large demands can we expect large production," wrote economist Robert Nathan in 1944. "Therefore, it is important that in planning for the postwar period, we give adequate consideration to the need for ever-increasing consumption on the part of our people as one of the prime requisites for prosperity." This was more than economics: it was politics. An ongoing cycle of "mass employment, mass production, mass advertising, mass distribution and mass ownership of the products of industry," wrote the Saturday Evening Post, would make the U.S. "the last bulwark" of democracy. Consuming became national policy: the 1946 Employment Act named "purchasing power" as one of the things government was meant to promote.

Thus prompted, Americans of the late 1940s got down to the business of buying things. In the first five years of peace, consumer spending increased by 60 percent. People bought cars and boats and clothing. They bought furniture and appliances. They bought Tupperware. Most of all, they bought houses. Housing starts went from 142,000 in 1944 to 2 million in 1950. The Ad Council cheered them on, casting consumption as what distinguished happy capitalists from those poor benighted souls living under the communist boot.

A 1948 Ad Council pamphlet, "The Miracle of America," is typical. In it, Uncle Sam-shown striding across the cover with a toolkit and rolled-up sleeves-explains American free enterprise to an average family. The key, Uncle says, is ever-more-efficient production: "The mainspring of the American standard of living is High and Increasing Productivity!" America's high rate of consumption-"We take abundance for granted"-is a sign of superiority. The U.S. has only one-fifteenth of the world's population, the booklet explains, but consumes "more than half of the world's coffee and rubber, almost half of the steel, a quarter of the coal and nearly two-thirds of the crude oil." This, the Ad Council assured the nation, was Success.

"I HAVE OBSERVED that they will not be troubled with superfluous commodities," wrote Thomas Morton about New England's Indians in 1637. Arriving in the Plymouth colony in 1623, Morton, a freethinking Anglican who'd hung out with a group of libertines (including William Shakespeare) in law school, quickly grew tired of Pilgrim prissiness. He set up a rival trading post called Mare Mount, where he commenced retail and revelry with the natives. His paganish Mayday beer bash particularly outraged the Pilgrims; they chopped down his maypole-twice. (The episode became a famous Nathaniel Hawthorne story.) Finally, Miles Standish-"Captain Shrimp," the reprobate Morton called him-was sent to arrest him. Standish cleverly arrived when Morton and his band were drunk, and the New World's first frat party summarily ended. Back in England, Morton wrote a book about his experiences, New English Canaan. In it, he gives an atypically glowing early account of native ways. "According to human reason, guided only by the light of nature," he declares, "these people lead the more happy and freer life, being void of care, which torments so many minds of so many Christians: they are not delighted in baubles, but in useful things."

Morton kicked off an American stereotype, one all the more powerful for having some basis in truth: the ideal of the "noble savage" who rejects European commodity culture. The reality is more complicated: the natives, of course, were savvy traders. But Morton highlights an essential contrast between Native American markets and those of the colonists: Indians valued acquisition for use, not for its own sake. "They love not to be cumbered with many utensils," as Morton puts it. They knew the word "enough." Their markets weren't based on an ideology of infinite expansion.

Markets tend to get saturated. Even with planned obsolescence-another postwar innovation-people's needs eventually level off. After the initial postwar exuberance, American consumption slowed. That fact alarmed the captains of industry. In 1953, economist and Lehman Brothers banker Paul Mazur fretted that "it is absolutely necessary that the products that roll from the assembly lines of mass production be consumed at an equally rapid rate." Throughout the fifties, the Ad Council tried to jump-start consumption with ad campaigns like 1954's "The Future of America" and 1956's "People's Capitalism," all of which equated American freedom with mass consumption. Nevertheless, in 1958, people bought even less stuff. The Council launched "Confidence in a Growing America," designed to "encourage consumer spending." Supported by forty-one companies, it was nicknamed the "Buy Campaign."

But how do you get people to buy if their demands are sated? That's where the folks of Keep America Beautiful-rejecters of reusability-come in. Things that last forever you only buy once. But something you use once and throw away: that's the perfect product.

"THEIR NATURAL DRINK is of the crystal fountain," Morton wrote of the natives, "and this they take up in their hands, by joining them close together." He was fibbing a bit-he himself sold the Indians spirits-but he was making a point. Hydration, too, has its politics.

After the hand-cupping came the pewter mug, the canteen, and then eureka! the glass bottle. Before the 1950s, most beverage bottles were refillable. As late as 1960, refillables still delivered 95 percent of the nation's soft drinks. But the beer industry, shifting from local small brewers to large, centrally located corporate producers, was finding transporting all those empties increasingly expensive. They began turning to new "one-way" or disposable bottles. By the end of the 1950s, half the nation's beer would be in throwaway containers. Many of them were ending up as roadside trash.

In 1953, Vermont's state legislature had a brain wave: beer companies start pollution, legislation can stop it. They passed a statute banning the sale of beer and ale in one-way bottles. It wasn't a deposit law-it declared that beer could only be sold in returnable, reusable bottles. Anchor-Hocking, a glass manufacturer, immediately filed suit, calling the law unconstitutional. The Vermont Supreme Court disagreed in May 1954, and the law took effect. That October, Keep America Beautiful was born, declaring its intention to "break Americans of the habit of tossing litter into streets and out of car windows." The New York Times noted that the group's leaders included "executives of concerns manufacturing beer, beer cans, bottles, soft drinks, chewing gum, candy, cigarettes and other products." These disciples of disposability, led by William C. Stolk, president of the American Can Company, set about changing the terms in the conversation about litter.

The packaging industry justifies disposables as a response to consumer demand: buyers wanted convenience; packagers simply provided it. But that's not exactly true. Consumers had to be trained to be wasteful. Part of this re-education involved forestalling any debate over the wisdom of creating disposables in the first place, replacing it with an emphasis on "proper" disposal. Keep America Beautiful led this refocusing on the symptoms rather than the system. The trouble was not their industry's promulgation of throwaway stuff; the trouble was those oafs who threw it away.

At the same time, the container industry lobbied hard behind the scenes. In 1957, with little fanfare, Vermont's senate caved to the pressure and declined to renew its reusable bottle law.

In 1960, the year Keep America Beautiful teamed up with the Ad Council, disposables delivered just 3 percent of the soft-drink market. By 1966, it was 12 percent, and growing fast. As was the Ad Council. By then it was the world's biggest advertiser.

WHEN ASKED if their family tree contains any Indian branches, most Americans will say yes. In my own family, the putative native progenitor was said to be a great-grandfather some times removed. Cherokee is what we were told as kids. Given the family's deep Michigan roots this doesn't seem likely, unless someone took a serious wrong turn on the Trail of Tears. As an adult I learned that this family mythology was common-though its most common manifestation is a mythic Cherokee matriarch. Considering this syndrome-you might call it delusions of Pocahontas-only fuels my obsession with the crying Indian. Keep America Beautiful tapped into something very deep in the American psyche. But it took them a decade to figure out how to do it.

In 1962, Michigan considered a ban on no-return bottles. Keep America Beautiful openly opposed it. Throughout the sixties, Keep America Beautiful and the Ad Council battled a growing demand for legislation with an increasing vilification of the individual. They spawned the slogan "Every litter bit hurts" and popularized the term "litterbug." In 1967, meeting at the Yale Club, they decided to go negative. "There seemed to be mutual agreement," wrote campaign coordinator David Hart, "that our 'soft sell' used in previous years could now be replaced by a more emphatic approach to the problem by saying that those who litter are 'slobs.'" The next year, planners upped the ante, calling litterers "pigs." The South Texas Pork Producers Council wrote in to complain.

At the same time, KAB's corporate sponsors made sure their own glass containers and cans never appeared as litter in the ads. This hypocrisy did not go entirely unnoticed. In the late 1960s, a noncorporate faction within the Ad Council, led by Dartmouth president John Sloan Dickey, began to call for Keep America Beautiful to move from litter to the larger problem of environmental pollution. They threatened to scuttle Ad Council support for further antilitter campaigns. Backed into a corner, KAB directors agreed to expand their work to address "the serious menace of all pollutants to the nation's health and welfare."

Clearly a more subtle approach was necessary. The Ad Council's volunteer coordinator for the Keep America Beautiful campaign was an executive from the American Can Company. With him at the helm, a new ad agency was brought in-Marsteller, who happened to be American Can's own ad agency. The visual arm of Burson-Marsteller, the global public relations firm famous for its list of clients with environment-related publicity problems,* Marsteller crafted the new approach. The crying Indian campaign, premiering on Earth Day 1971, had it all: a heart-wrenching central figure, an appeal to mythic America, and a catchy slogan. There was a pro forma gesture in the direction of ecology-the Indian paddles by some belching smokestacks, after all-and the language had shifted from "littering" to "pollution." But the message was the same: quit tossing coffee cups out of the window of your Chevy Chevelle, you pig, and America's environmental problems will end.

IN 1970, as Marsteller hatched the ad that would seal his fame, Iron Eyes Cody was busy making film westerns. He played a medicine man in A Man Called Horse, Apache chief Santana in El Condor, and a character named Crazy Foot in a comedy called Cockeyed Cowboys of Calico County. As in the earlier Indian plays, Indians in westerns are usually allied with nature, wilderness, old codes of vengeance and honor-the vanishing past that civilization must replace.

But in the questioning sixties, the inevitable march of manifest destiny began to be examined for its dark side. As social unrest accelerated, the counterculture began taking up Indian-ness to express a rejection of the status quo. In 1969, Native American Vine Deloria published Custer Died for Your Sins, a scathingly hilarious manifesto diagnosing the epidemic of bad faith in Indian-white relations, and advocating a new "tribalism" bent on "rejection of the consumer mania which plagues society as a whole." In 1970, Dee Brown published his influential Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, a history of U.S. government treachery toward natives that questioned the inevitability of empire. The same year, the tragicomic epic Little Big Man played Custer's last stand as an analogue for the moral morass unfolding in Vietnam. Anti-war protesters adopted fringed jackets, beads, and braids. The Indian was still a symbol of America's lost principles. But, in a Mortonesque revival, he was also becoming a living alternative to the postwar culture of consumption.

In adopting the Indian as a symbol but turning his rejection of consumerism into a rebuke to individual laziness, Marsteller and Keep America Beautiful-underwritten by the Ad Council-struck greenwash gold. Their Indian evoked the deep discontents afoot in the culture. But they co-opted the icon of resistance and made him support the interests of the very consumer culture he appeared to protest. There he stood, stoic and sad, a rebuke to individuals rather than a rejection of the ideology of waste. But then, that was the very ideology the Ad Council had promoted all along.

It was an elegantly closed circle. The titans of packaging pushed throwaways into production. The Ad Council preached the creed of consumption, assuring Americans that the road to prosperity was paved with trash. The people bought; the people threw away. Then, the same industries and advertisers turned around and called them pigs. The people shamefacedly cleaned up the trash. And the packagers, pointing to the cleaned-up landscape, just went on making more of it.

ON MY WAY HOME from central Illinois, I stop to get a sandwich at the only place I can find: Subway. It's just off a highway exit, and I can hear the gears shifting on trucks as they accelerate up the on-ramp next door. I stand in front of the fridge staring at my options. Soda, water, energy drinks, juice. Plastic, aluminum, plastic. At Subway even apples-one of nature's most perfectly packaged fruits-come presliced in plastic bags. I ask the clerk for a paper cup of tap water. She eyes me as if suspecting I'm the Unabomber's unknown accomplice. I feel like the Unabomber's unknown accomplice, because this small act, I know, is ridiculous. It's not enough.

Symbolic protest rarely is. In 1976, after KAB testified against a proposed California bottle deposit law, the EPA and seven environmental groups, including the Sierra Club and The Wilderness Society, resigned from its advisory board. Activists declared KAB a "front group." But by then, being outed didn't matter. The group's work was largely done. In 1976, two-thirds of America's soft drinks and nearly four-fifths of its beer came in disposables. Today, every American throws away about three hundred pounds of solid waste a year, about one-third of it packaging. Sixty percent of that comes from food and beverages.

Eleven states have succeeded in passing bottle bills. Beverage container recycling rates in those states are roughly double rates in nondeposit states. But in shifting the debate to bottle deposit legislation-which it opposed-KAB still won, because it shut down debate over whether disposable beverage containers were a good idea in the first place. Vermont's original 1953 law would have required manufacturers to accept and refill their empties. No one's talking about that now.

ENVIRONMENTALISM URGES us to consider the consequences of our actions. But what if by focusing on our individual actions-what we can do-we lose sight of the larger issue of what we can't do-what has been made impossible by the way the world now works? I leave Illinois with a nagging feeling that I'm missing a piece of the puzzle. I find it in an unexpected place: about sixty miles east of Portland, Oregon, on the banks of the Columbia River.

The Dalles, Oregon, is the site of one of the Pacific Northwest's most longstanding and cherished Native American trading sites: Celilo Falls. Once a waterfall with a peak flow about ten times that of Niagara, today Celilo has vanished. It lies at the bottom of the reservoir behind The Dalles Dam, a mile-and-a-half-long concrete mouth, gates lined up like teeth, that has swallowed this stretch of the Columbia. At a Citgo station near the dam, a few Indians are parked in lawn chairs by a cooler with a hand-lettered sign: SALMON. The red plastic box sweats in the sun, entombing the sorry remnants of Celilo's once-famous salmon runs. At the dam visitors center, on the Oregon side, talk quickly turns to Google. The sachems of search have built a giant data center about five miles downstream, in The Dalles industrial park. "I hear they're running an extension cord over there from here," jokes the Army Corps of Engineers docent. Outside, the reservoir glints flinty blue in the sun.

I drive to the data center and park in order to circumnavigate it on foot. The facility sprawls across the riverfront, the size of a shopping mall. Its chillers, humming like a Dreamliner on takeoff, cast waves of heat across the Columbia in an effort to keep the thousands of servers inside from melting. Across the street, a silent, cold blast furnace looms in stark contrast. It's an idled aluminum smelter. Both industries-aluminum and information-came to this spot for the same reason: cheap electricity from the government-built dam. The smelter used about 85 megawatts. Based on projected square footage, the Google data center can be expected to use about 100-enough to power a small city. I scramble onto a dirt hill and gaze at the data center's private substation-two 100-megawatt transformers-until a guard dog chases me away.

The federal government began damming the Columbia in the 1930s, but things really got going in the forties. With the advent of World War II, Uncle Sam needed aluminum-more than Alcoa, a near-monopoly up until then-could make. The War Production Board hired Alcoa to help Uncle Sam build twenty new aluminum plants between 1941 and 1943. Many were sited near government-built dams, especially on the Columbia River. In fact, beefing up aluminum production was used as a reason to build new electricity-producing dams.

The result-especially after the war, when the government sold off its wartime plants to Alcoa competitors-was a glut of aluminum. Even as Cold War fears were used to justify building more dams, the aluminum industry scrambled to find new, peacetime uses for its product. The tail of production began to wag the dog of demand: Alcoa and their new competitors began inventing scads of new uses for aluminum: toys, boats, appliances, golf clubs, cookware. But the real breakthrough was the aluminum can. John D. Harper, Alcoa's young and innovative president, boldly led the company into the production of rigid container sheet for can companies, gambling that the disposable market could use up his excess aluminum. The first aluminum beverage can was introduced in 1958. The aluminum industry never looked back.

In 1960, the year Keep America Beautiful and the Ad Council joined forces, containers and packaging composed just over 7 percent of the U.S. aluminum market. But Harper's gamble paid off. Within twenty years, aluminum containers would produce more revenue for Alcoa than its second-, third-, and fourth-largest markets combined. John D. Harper spent much of that time as a member of the Ad Council's Industry Advisory Committee.

WE'VE COME a long way from our crying Indian. Or have we? The day the waters rose at Celilo Falls, the town's tribal elders looked on in tears. It wasn't the first such event. In June of 1940, Colville, Tulalip, Blackfoot, Nez Perce, Yakima, Flathead, and Coeur d'Alene Indians gathered at Kettle Falls, another beloved trading and fishing spot that was soon to be ninety feet beneath the reservoir of Grand Coulee Dam. For three days, elders spoke, fishermen recalled fantastic salmon runs, children played games, and the community mourned the end of an ancient way of life. It was called the "ceremony of tears." When the reservoir was filled, more than two thousand Indians were displaced from their homes.

The federal government built thirteen more Columbia River basin dams in the 1950s, another seven in the 1960s, and six in the 1970s. Many destroyed Native American towns and fishing sites. But this didn't just happen in the Pacific Northwest. It went on all across America. After World War II, the Bureau of Reclamation and the Army Corps of Engineers built scores of dams, a shocking number of them on tribal land. The result was always misery for Native Americans. Kinzua Dam on Seneca land in Pennsylvania. The Moses-Saunders Power Dam on Mohawk land in New York. Tellico Dam, drowning Cherokee towns in Tennessee. Oahe, Fort Randall, and Big Bend Dams inundating Sioux land in South Dakota. The larger, hydroelectric dams quickly attracted power-intensive industries, often aluminum plants.

In 1948, a deal was reached for the Three Affiliated Tribes (Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara) in North Dakota to sell thousands of acres-at thirty-three dollars each-to the federal government for its new Garrison Dam. Three Tribes' Council Chairman George Gillette reluctantly went to Washington to sign the contract. In a widely published picture of the event, the secretary of the interior signs the document, his face impassive. Flanking him, several suited bureaucrats look anywhere but at George Gillette, rakishly handsome in his double-breasted, pinstriped suit. Gillette has taken off his glasses, put his face in one hand, and begun to weep.

Ironically, perhaps unwittingly, the Ad Council and Keep America Beautiful got it right. The crying Indian hints at the root cause of the problem he mourns: it's not just roadside trash. It's the culture of consumption that created that trash-with government subsidized power-and sold it to the public as the American Dream, when in fact it was that very dream's death. Iron Eyes Cody may have wept on cue, but George Gillette wept for the land.

IS THE CRYING INDIAN the root of environmentalism, as Wikipedia would have it? Or is he its sole mourner, weeping its silent dirge? In the thirty years following his debut, Americans landfilled or incinerated more than a trillion aluminum cans-enough to encircle the Earth 3,048 times.

I watch the crying Indian again on YouTube. Here's the genius of it: the ad appeals to a vague feeling of national guilt that-following in a long iconic tradition-is associated with Native Americans. What we've done to this land is not right, and the Indians know it, because we did it to them, too. As the Indian contemplates the trashed landscape and car-choked freeway, a dark possibility opens up: our way of life is destructive. The cars, the pollution, the factories: it's not, despite what we've been told, the best of all possible worlds. Something must change. And then that bag of trash arcs out the window and explodes like a revelation at his feet. Oh, we think, relaxing, so that's it. That's what we've done wrong. We can stop doing that. It's the same move by which we're told to buy local food-that buying local will make things change-as if the government were not providing farm subsidies to agribusiness and highway subsidies to the trucking industry and zoning incentives to chain stores, thus shifting the costs of bad environmental choices invisibly to the taxpayer and making "buy local"-the best choice-often the most difficult and expensive one. How can we expect individual choice to right the wrongs of collective decisions?

Tracing the crying Indian to his real-life counterpart reminds us to focus not just on symptoms, but on the system. Keep America Beautiful and the Ad Council planted the seeds of a feel-good "shop for change" form of environmentalism that urges us to forgo regulation in favor of personal choice. We can do it! But in a world where federal funds continue to subsidize energy squandering, individual action is important, but it's not enough. In today's disposable market, aluminum is being edged out by resource-intensive plastics that are even harder to recycle. The aluminum industry has gone abroad in search of cheaper power, and their subsidized hydropower is being taken over by energy-guzzling data centers. Microsoft, Ask.com, and Yahoo have all joined Google on the harnessed Columbia's banks.

It's another elegant circle: Whenever you want to see "the best PSA ever made," you can go to YouTube and search for "crying Indian." Bytes will stream to your computer from a shiny digital factory, perhaps one sitting on the Columbia. The ancestral fishing grounds mourned by crying Indians will thus generate the electricity that activates Iron Eyes Cody's tear, falling once more for a trashed world.

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* In more recent years, Burson-Marsteller performed crisis management for Union Carbide after the Bhopal disaster, for reactor builders Babcock & Wilcox after Three Mile Island, for British Petroleum after their Torrey Canyon oil spill, for Dow-Corning after silicone-breast-implant lawsuits, and for the government of Saudi Arabia after thirteen of its citizens helped carry out the attacks of September 11. One of Burson-Marsteller's key accomplishments was helping to invent the concept of astroturf. Corporate-sponsored groups designed to look grassroots, astroturf organizations are able to reach the media, and in many cases, the hearts of the public, in ways that corporate flaks never could. Their particular specialty was astroturf environmental groups: they helped spawn the Coalition for Clean and Renewable Energy, bankrolled by Hydro Quebec; the Foundation for Clean Air Progress, a consortium of energy, industry, and agricultural companies formed to fight clean air legislation; and the American Energy Alliance, which lobbied to defeat President Bill Clinton's proposed Btu tax. Until his April 2008 ouster, Burson-Marsteller CEO Mark Penn was also a chief strategist for the Hillary Clinton presidential campaign.
(c) 2008 Ginger Strand is the author of Inventing Niagara: Beauty, Power, and Lies and a novel, Flight. She lives in New York City.

THE DAY before yesterday, two documents appeared side by side in Haaretz: a giant advertisement from the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) and the results of a public opinion poll.

The proximity was accidental, but to the point. The PLO ad sets out the details of the 2002 Saudi peace offer, decorated with the colorful flags of the 22 Arab and the 35 other Muslim countries which have endorsed the offer.

The public opinion poll predicts a landslide victory for Likud, which opposes every single word of the Saudi proposal.

THE PLO ad is a first of its kind. At long last, the PLO leaders have decided to address the Israeli people directly.

The ad discloses to the Israeli population the exact terms of the all-Arab peace offer: full recognition of the State of Israel by all Arab and Muslim countries, full normalization of relations - in return for Israeli withdrawal to the pre-1967 borders and the establishment of the Palestinian state, with East Jerusalem as its capital, in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. The refugee problem would be solved by mutual agreement - meaning that Israel could veto any solution it considered unacceptable.

I have said it before: if this offer had been made on June 4, 1967, the day before the Six Day War, Israelis would have felt as if the Messiah had arrived. But when it was published in 2002, many Israelis saw it as a cunning Arab ploy to rob Israel of the fruits of its 1967 victory.

The Israeli government has never officially reacted to this historic offer. Public opinion and the media ignored it almost completely, walled in by the national consensus that there is no chance for peace.

Recently, the old offer woke up to new life. Shimon Peres and Ehud Barak discovered it suddenly, as if they had found a treasure in a hidden cave. Tzipi Livni discovered that it has some interesting points. That is the background to the blessed initiative of Saeb Erekat's "PLO Negotiation Department" to publish the ad.

Israeli public reaction: nil.

THE PUBLIC opinion poll, on the other hand, made a deep impression. It cast its shadow over the entire political arena.

True, there are still 80 days to go before election day, and in Israel 80 days is a very, very long time. Moreover, unlike American polls, Israeli polls conducted for the media are notoriously unreliable. Nonetheless, the poll caused a shock.

It says that if the elections were held this week, the Likud would have 34 seats in the 120-seat Knesset, three times more than it has now, and become the largest faction. Kadima would get only 28 seats, one less than in the present Knesset. (Explanation: Kadima would lose many voters, who would return to Likud, but gain almost the same number from Labor.) The Labor party would come down to 10 seats, half of their present miserable number. Shas would get the same number, as would the ultra-right Liberman. Meretz would rise from 5 to 7. (In Yediot Aharonot's competing poll, Likud got 32, Kadima 26 and Labor 8.)

THE DAZZLING ascent of Likud is an ominous phenomenon by itself, but even more important is the general picture: the bloc of all the parties that support peace, whether by paying lip service or sincerely (called "the Left") will have, according to the polls, 56 seats at most, as against the 64 seats of all the anti-peace parties combined (called "the Right").

Meaning: if the election had taken place this week, the outcome would have been a Knesset devoted to the continuation of the occupation, the settlements and the annexation. Binyamin Netanyahu would be Prime Minister and would be able to choose freely between a dozen possible compositions of the next government coalition.

How did Netanyahu achieve such a status? After all, 10 years ago he was shamefully thrown out of the Prime Minister's office by a public that had decided that they could not stand him for one more day. No other previous prime minister has attracted so much opposition, disgust and even loathing.

For several months now Netanyahu has been behaving like a model pupil. He kept silent when it was right to keep silent. He acted in a statesman-like manner. And then, like a magician at a children's birthday party, he pulled one rabbit after another from his top hat. Every few days another personality joined Likud with much fanfare, in a well controlled selection and dosage: Binyamin Begin, a man of the extreme right and Dan Meridor, of the moderate right, Assaf Hefetz, former police chief and Moshe ("Bogi") Yaalon, former army chief, and more and more. Big and small stars, who gave the impression that Likud is now regarded by everybody as the coming governing party. A multicolored party, a party of renewal, headed by an experienced and responsible leader. A party in which there are many shades of opinion, but which is united by a platform that says no to withdrawal, no to a Palestinian state, no to any compromise on Jerusalem, no to any meaningful peace negotiation. And, of course: no to the Arab peace offer.

Is there a yes? I almost forgot: Netanyahu proposes an "economic peace" - to ameliorate the situation of the Palestinians in the West Bank, so that some day in the future, before or after the coming of the Messiah, Israel could perhaps reach an accommodation - and perhaps not. But economic amelioration under an occupation regime is, of course, an oxymoron. Occupation arouses resistance, resistance arouses repression, repression means economic punishment. Nobody is going to invest money in an occupied territory.

If Netanyahu is elected, we must expect four years in which we shall not only not advance toward peace by one single inch, but, on the contrary, the ongoing thrust of the settlement enterprise will push peace ever further away.

THE FLIGHT of Tzipi Livni, on the other hand, is not gaining any height. That is another clear conclusion of the polls.

She has had a few months of grace. When the whole country was mesmerized by the corruption affairs of Ehud Olmert, Livni looked, in comparison, like a shining white dove. An ideal candidate: also a woman, also honest, also speaking the language of ordinary human beings, also one who believes what she says.

But after Olmert's resignation, corruption disappeared as a central theme of the elections. So what does Tzipi have to offer?

She has no overpowering charisma. She is no orator (and that is perhaps to the good). She does not excite. She does not appeal to the emotions. She does not touch the heart of people. She is compelled to rely on rational arguments.

But what is her rationale? She is a great believer in "peace negotiations." But "peace negotiations," like the "political process," can easily become a substitute for peace itself.

Livni does not offer an exciting peace message. She does not draw up a peace proposal of her own. She is "diplomatic" and keeps her cards close to her chest. No clear solution for Jerusalem (Don't even mention it! It may provide ammunition for Bibi!), nor for the refugee problem (God forbid!). She has promised the No. 2 spot on her list to Shaul Mofaz, who could easily find his place between Bibi, Begin and Bogi. This is not the way to change the hearts of the hundreds of thousands of indifferent and/or tired citizens, who believe that "there is no partner for peace.".Neither are there any new acquisitions: no new personalities are joining Kadima. There is no sense of an approaching victory. The chances don't look good.

THE SITUATION of the Labor party is even worse. Much worse. The polls give Labor 10 seats at most, perhaps only 8. The party that in its former incarnations kept absolute control over the Yishuv and the new state for 44 consecutive years may shrivel in the next Knesset to the status of fifth largest faction (after Likud, Kadima, Shas and Liberman.)

No wonder. Like an aging strip-teaser, the party has dropped all its garments. It has embraced "swinish capitalism" (a Peres coinage) like the other parties. As far as peace is concerned, it limps behind Kadima, and sometimes even tries to outflank Likud on the right. It seems that its real platform is down to one single clause: Ehud Barak must remain Minister of Defense under whoever will be the next Prime Minister, Netanyahu or Livni.

It is not an attractive sight: not only the rats are leaving the sinking ship, but also the admiral himself: Ami Ayalon, former commander of the Israeli navy, announced this week that he is leaving the party. The incumbent 19 Knesset members are squaring up for a fight to the death over the few remaining "real" seats, competing with each other and with the handful of new joiners (including the director of "Peace Now," Yariv Oppenheimer, and the journalist Daniel Ben-Simon).

Ehud Barak is a walking disaster. But he cannot be removed from the leadership of Labor before the elections. The party is crawling towards its rout with eyes wide shut.

SEVERAL MEN OF LETTERS, professors and political consultants, some of them refugees from Labor, have done something: they got together and announced that they would ally themselves to Meretz, in order to create a kind of super-Meretz.

They did raise an echo, but the recent polls still give the reinforced Meretz no more than 7 seats (compared to the present 5). Not quite a revolution.

Why? The initiators are well known. They are members of the Ashkenazi elite, like all of Meretz. The public got the impression that instead of the past and far-past leaders who have left the Meretz leadership one after another (Shulamit Aloni, Yossi Sarid, Yossi Beilin, Ran Cohen, all of them with positive credentials), other people are coming in, good people but not really different, with the same good but failed slogans. They have no new message for the new generation, for the Oriental Jews, for the Arab citizens, for Russian immigrants, for the secular people who want to fight against religious encroachment.

The active peace groups, with their young and enthusiastic members, were not invited, so as not to give the party a "radical" look. In the best case, the renewed party might take a few seats from Labor. As far as the general picture is concerned, that would be quite unimportant, since only changes in the balance between the two large blocs have any real effect. Many new voters must be mobilized.

There is a place for a new Left party, with a new name, a new spirit and a message of hope, that will do an Obama: arouse the masses of the young generation, infect them with enthusiasm, promise real change.

Such an experiment was conducted just now in the Tel-Aviv municipal elections with astonishing results. A new election list appeared out of nowhere, the young generation of Tel-Avivians joined it with gusto. It attracted the new voters, as well as voters who are disgusted with all politicians, people with a green agenda, people with a social conscience, gays and lesbians, and many others. Hundreds volunteered for it, their candidate attracted a third of the votes against a popular incumbent mayor.

Meaning: yes, it is possible. But it will not happen this time.

BARACK OBAMA will enter the Oval Office twenty days before the Israeli elections. He has still got a chance to have a decisive impact on the outcome. Nobody in Israel wants to quarrel with the United States.

If the new President announces immediately after taking office that he is determined to achieve peace between Israel and the Arabs in the spirit of the Saudi peace initiative, before the end of 2009, this will influence many voters.

If Netanyahu is elected, President Obama will be faced with a dilemma: either to enter into a serious conflict with the Government of Israel, with all the American domestic implications, or to leave peace in the freezer, like his predecessors.

The American elections were important for Israel. The Israeli elections will be important for America, too.
(c) 2008 Uri Avnery ~~~ Gush Shalom

Here, according to the USDA website, is how SNAP judgments are made:

"The amount of benefits the household gets is called an allotment. The net monthly income of the household is multiplied by .3, and the result is subtracted from the maximum allotment for the household size to find the household's allotment. This is because SNAP households are expected to spend about 30 percent of their resources on food. "

In addition to the 30% requirement, the government places restrictions on things like bank balances, number and value of vehicles and income and the website explains in some detail the screening process and benefits calculation formulae. The maximum allotment for the government's fiscal year (10/01/08-9/30/09) for two people is $323.00 per month. It is $588.00 for a family of four. SNAP benefits cannot be used for non-food items like toilet paper, toothpaste or laundry detergent nor can they be used to purchase tobacco or alcoholic beverages.

The USDA, ever helpful and informative, also publishes a chart detailing four levels of food costs. The lowest cost plan, "Thrifty Plan," allows $606.20 for a family of four. The "Moderate Cost Plan" jumps that number up to $975.60.

Obviously the participants in the conversation I overheard had not visited this website and they certainly had not known anyone who had received food stamps. They were puzzled and outraged and somehow convinced that their friends were not getting the same consideration as "others."

Richard Nixon wasn't big on helping poor people as is evidenced by his request that Johnny Cash sing Guy Drake's derisive "Welfare Cadillac" at a White House performance in 1972 but it was the iconic Republican, Ronald Reagan, who molded the worst aspects of bigotry and stinginess into the myth of the welfare queen. With that ugly and hateful depiction Reagan helped set the stage for decades of self-righteous political posturing and a most un-Christian attitude toward poverty. In an act calculated to play upon racial fear and gender bias Reagan solidified an image that has damaged untold numbers of the poor in this country. This man (whom, I remind you, Barack Obama quotes and apparently admires) perpetrated a lie that furthered victimized the least among us.

As our economy moves inexorably toward collapse even main stream commentators have broached comparisons with the Great Depression. And as 10% of our population receives SNAP allotments, it is appropriate and timely to remember that the food stamp program came out of the economic disaster of the 1930s. After America entered WWII, the food stamp program was abandoned (1943) and was not reinstated until 1961. It was another 13 years before the program was extended nationwide and only under President Jimmy Carter that a structure was implemented with the goal of "alleviating hunger and malnutrition."

It is also important to remember that the Food Stamp Program came under attack in the early 1980's and suffered cutbacks and additional restrictions on benefits. Hunger, however, doesn't care about political agendas and by the late 1980s even the first Bush administration had to admit hunger was a problem and there was a gradual increase in benefits. Bill Clinton and the Republican Congress changed all of that, however, and gave us "The Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunities Reconciliation Act of 1996," a perfect partner for the nightmare of NAFTA.

Too much history? Perhaps but it seems that a lot of people are suddenly expecting help from their government and are surprised when what they get is less than they need. Is, in fact, not nearly enough to support a welfare queen or buy that new Cadillac. But it is, unfortunately and shamefully, what our middle and upper classes have expected the poor and working poor to get by on and gratefully.

The myths about the easy living provided by "welfare," the stigma attached to poverty and the race, ethnic and class hatred promoted by our politicians and clergy have contributed to an appalling ignorance about services available to the poor. And not only are the majority of Americans ignorant about the programs, they have also been grossly uncharitable in their perceptions about people who need assistance. Few voices have been raised in defense of the poor. It is better to fund war than feed our people and, make no mistake, that is the choice Americans have made.

So what happens now?

The USDA has a handy guide to help figure out how to eat on the budget they give you. It's interesting reading, revealing much about the government's attitude toward nutrition for the poor. (If you think food assistance might be in your future it would be wise to look over these pages. Get an idea of what is in store.) Congress is considering increasing SNAP allotments by 10-20% to help the "newly poor" cope with their reduced circumstances. As anyone who is currently using this allotment to buy food knows, 10-20% is not going to be enough so we will soon face yet another crisis-how to pay for food for tens of millions of un- and under-employed citizens.

The history of the food stamp program and the swelling ranks of those who need assistance create an opportunity. For the first time in decades, Americans have a chance to reevaluate what is truly important and force our government to respond to human need rather than corporate greed. We can insist that priority be given to addressing hunger, health care, sustainable agriculture, adequate housing, education, the environment. We can take the enlightenment that comes from upheaval and change and decide what is best for life rather than profit. These are not impossible dreams or unrealistic goals.

Family tradition and life experience, however, have taught me to hope for the best and prepare for the worst. With that in mind, work for social change and justice but buy some seeds, learn how to grow your own food, become as self-sufficient as possible, stay informed and make plans. We can change the world but the world can also change us. Know where your boundaries lie.