A person believes: I will do this, I will not do that. I have my limits, I have my needs, but I am also the things I must do, or won't do; I will accomplish and I will avoid.
We believe these assertions, a faith common to our humanity. We are certain, and sure, that what makes the mirror of self in our memory unique is nothing short of a devotion to this faith in the obedience of the future to our flesh-wracked now. We devote ourselves to a future we insist will obey.
A person promises a meaning to life, and recalls that promise to fickle memory: this is how I will live my life. This is the story they will tell of me. This is the path, and I am who I am by sticking to it. You are who you are because I see you near to it.
We tell ourselves how will we live our lives. We tell each other. How much of our culture is the telling and retelling? More than we expect.
These tales are mostly lies. Our beliefs are, when examined, a catalog of self-deceptions.
I am an anarchist because I have evidence of the truth of these lies.
Crow's Eye: Maintaining a commitment to Pointless Acrimony™ and Hate Filled Invective™! Also available in corvid mischief and traditional sly dog's mistrust.
Feb 15, 2012
Feb 14, 2012
Smear the Queer
When I was young, boys played a game. It was called "Smear the Queer," or alternately, "Kill The Man With the Ball." The objet de jeu was simple, compared to baseball or lacrosse: do violence to the "Queer" with the ball. If you are wondering if the Queer was just an odd fellow, within game play, ponder no further. The Queer was certainly the Fag. And he had a handicap, which was the ball. The Queer had to have two hands on the ball, unless he was throwing it away. The point of the game, from the vantage point of the ball clasping Queer, was to get rid of the ball and become not-Queer. Because the only person who could be struck, tackled, knocked down or done violence to was the Queer with the ball.
The Queer was not allowed to just get rid of the ball. There were rules, sort of like with dodgeball. The Queer had to throw the ball to a team mate. Who then became the Queer who tried to get rid of the ball while all the members of the opposing team either attempted to tackle, trip, punch and smear him, or block passes to the new Queer's team mates. Team mates who were not the current Queer could not be hit, struck or touched. Violence was reserved for the Queer. And only the Queer.
Smear the Queer was a rugged game. We all had to take a knee, once, when a Queer was driven to the ground so hard one of his lungs was collapsed. Sometimes players took the Smear part literally. By "sometimes," I mean "regularly." We should perhaps remember that the game was also called "Kill the Man with the Ball." During the course of play, I had a dislocated shoulder, and there were a few broken wrists, noses, fingers and what not.
Smear the Queer was a Boy's Game. Girls never played it. They weren't allowed. Well, publicly that is. We had a few tough chicks who played. They were often the most aggressive players. Something about compensation to male-consistent behaviors in a male dominated environment, and conditioning, I image.
Smear the Queer could be played impromptu, but in my youthful experience, it was nonetheless organized. The game had rules. If the rules weren't followed, it wasn't a game. And most often, it was not only organized, it was sanctioned. I learned to play Smear the Queer in the Cub Scouts. With the Cubmasters as referees. It was more popular than Capture the Flag. It was even more popular than Capture the Flag (with Prisons*). It was surely preferable to Flag Football, which game provides no opportunities for the smearing of Queers, and has the distinct disadvantage of being free of tackling, tripping, nose breaking, lung collapsing and other boyish delights.
We also played a version (sans collapsed lungs or leaping tackles) on school grounds. The nuns, as referees. Girls excluded, of course. They had their own side of the playground. Literally. There was a line painted in the middle. We boys had football, StQ, dodgeball, tag and smash the faggots through the chain link fence, on our side. We also had marbles, jacks, baseball card trading and kickball. The girls had hopscotch. Once, the girls, led by the firebrands M---- S. and one of the many Michelles, organized a soccer game. The nuns were not pleased with this collapse of decorum. For a week, the girls has to spend recesses walking around the perimeter of their side of the playground. Doing the rosary. We boys were not discouraged from watching them. Object lessons need objects of condemnation, and all.
I'm told that if there were no giant leviathan, or world full of competing giant leviathans, society, such as it exists, would devolve overnight into one massive free for all of Smear the Queer.
I imagine that the exemplars, shapers of boys into men, pillars of the community, gum-hating nuns and bastions of rectitude - who organized and sanctioned Smear the Queer, as well as boy and girl divided playgrounds - would agree.
That no anarchist ever taught us to play Smear the Queer is entirely besides the point. And the one boy who was (in hindsight, and who is now Out) obviously gay was, I imagine out of self-protection, one of the game's most brutal participants. But, it's not like we learned the game from adult homosexuals. Or from the long-hairs who occasionally passed into the area to pick apples and berries alongside the Mexican, Cape Verdean and Brazilian migrant workers. The potheads couldn't be bothered, and the deadheads wouldn't have tried, and nary a Red could be found to teach us to hunt down the Other and smash him into the ground. Perhaps they were too busy being Others themselves.
Huh.
We learned that game from the same sort of people who are now telling us that, without them, the game itself would spread all of the planet as if by moral infection, and would no longer worry mere Queers. It will even trouble hitherto comfortable white people.
I should note, in conclusion, that the present campaign against Bashar Assad looks like international Kill the Man with the Ball. In Libya, it was definitely more a version of Smear the Queer.
Of course, when exemplary, organized, decent people play it with guns and moral sanction, it's called government. When anarchists try to imagine a world where kids aren't taught to play the game at all, well, obviously the correct response to that What If is that everyone will learn it as if by magic, and also everyone will be a Smear-worthy Queer...
* - CtF(wP) inevitably led to the abuse of the prisoners. This came as a surprise to our elders. It was eventually banned. Prisoners were no longer allowed to be taken. Captured players were instead assigned to a neutral zone, where they could be liberated by a team mate, according to varying rules. Smear the Queer was never banned, at least not when I was a minor.
The Queer was not allowed to just get rid of the ball. There were rules, sort of like with dodgeball. The Queer had to throw the ball to a team mate. Who then became the Queer who tried to get rid of the ball while all the members of the opposing team either attempted to tackle, trip, punch and smear him, or block passes to the new Queer's team mates. Team mates who were not the current Queer could not be hit, struck or touched. Violence was reserved for the Queer. And only the Queer.
Smear the Queer was a rugged game. We all had to take a knee, once, when a Queer was driven to the ground so hard one of his lungs was collapsed. Sometimes players took the Smear part literally. By "sometimes," I mean "regularly." We should perhaps remember that the game was also called "Kill the Man with the Ball." During the course of play, I had a dislocated shoulder, and there were a few broken wrists, noses, fingers and what not.
Smear the Queer was a Boy's Game. Girls never played it. They weren't allowed. Well, publicly that is. We had a few tough chicks who played. They were often the most aggressive players. Something about compensation to male-consistent behaviors in a male dominated environment, and conditioning, I image.
Smear the Queer could be played impromptu, but in my youthful experience, it was nonetheless organized. The game had rules. If the rules weren't followed, it wasn't a game. And most often, it was not only organized, it was sanctioned. I learned to play Smear the Queer in the Cub Scouts. With the Cubmasters as referees. It was more popular than Capture the Flag. It was even more popular than Capture the Flag (with Prisons*). It was surely preferable to Flag Football, which game provides no opportunities for the smearing of Queers, and has the distinct disadvantage of being free of tackling, tripping, nose breaking, lung collapsing and other boyish delights.
We also played a version (sans collapsed lungs or leaping tackles) on school grounds. The nuns, as referees. Girls excluded, of course. They had their own side of the playground. Literally. There was a line painted in the middle. We boys had football, StQ, dodgeball, tag and smash the faggots through the chain link fence, on our side. We also had marbles, jacks, baseball card trading and kickball. The girls had hopscotch. Once, the girls, led by the firebrands M---- S. and one of the many Michelles, organized a soccer game. The nuns were not pleased with this collapse of decorum. For a week, the girls has to spend recesses walking around the perimeter of their side of the playground. Doing the rosary. We boys were not discouraged from watching them. Object lessons need objects of condemnation, and all.
I'm told that if there were no giant leviathan, or world full of competing giant leviathans, society, such as it exists, would devolve overnight into one massive free for all of Smear the Queer.
I imagine that the exemplars, shapers of boys into men, pillars of the community, gum-hating nuns and bastions of rectitude - who organized and sanctioned Smear the Queer, as well as boy and girl divided playgrounds - would agree.
That no anarchist ever taught us to play Smear the Queer is entirely besides the point. And the one boy who was (in hindsight, and who is now Out) obviously gay was, I imagine out of self-protection, one of the game's most brutal participants. But, it's not like we learned the game from adult homosexuals. Or from the long-hairs who occasionally passed into the area to pick apples and berries alongside the Mexican, Cape Verdean and Brazilian migrant workers. The potheads couldn't be bothered, and the deadheads wouldn't have tried, and nary a Red could be found to teach us to hunt down the Other and smash him into the ground. Perhaps they were too busy being Others themselves.
Huh.
We learned that game from the same sort of people who are now telling us that, without them, the game itself would spread all of the planet as if by moral infection, and would no longer worry mere Queers. It will even trouble hitherto comfortable white people.
I should note, in conclusion, that the present campaign against Bashar Assad looks like international Kill the Man with the Ball. In Libya, it was definitely more a version of Smear the Queer.
Of course, when exemplary, organized, decent people play it with guns and moral sanction, it's called government. When anarchists try to imagine a world where kids aren't taught to play the game at all, well, obviously the correct response to that What If is that everyone will learn it as if by magic, and also everyone will be a Smear-worthy Queer...
* - CtF(wP) inevitably led to the abuse of the prisoners. This came as a surprise to our elders. It was eventually banned. Prisoners were no longer allowed to be taken. Captured players were instead assigned to a neutral zone, where they could be liberated by a team mate, according to varying rules. Smear the Queer was never banned, at least not when I was a minor.
Feb 12, 2012
How to ask superior questions...
Here:
Is there some serious projection being done by anarchists? Are folks considering their own habits, desires, values, etc.; and the roles that government does and does not play in their own lives; and concluding from this that we’d all be better off without government—but failing to adequately consider the full diversity of people being governed? Are violent criminals and street thugs, for example, out of sight and out of mind?
A couple qualifications are immediately necessary. I readily grant that there is a ton of unreasonable fear of violent crime, and that such fear can be easily exploited by people in power. I also readily grant, more parenthetically, that anarchism can draw on very important considerations of what government does to directly serve corporate interests, to wage war, etc.—and I have no intention of contesting or minimizing such things.
I’m just thinking about how violent crime is, in fact, a reality. And some violent criminals can only be stopped by force. And I’m glad that I don’t have to try to marshal that force myself.
I’m very grateful for the armed security guard at my school. And given the hell that the inner city can be, I’m very grateful for the armed police, and perhaps even the armed prison guards, who help to at least keep it contained in the inner city. (Not that letting it rage there is a good thing, obviously…)
I have seen up close and personal, and for a sustained period of time, a ghetto subculture that places a premium on toughness, violence, and taking what you want; and seldom seems to be given any pause by considerations like empathy, pity, or remorse. I’ve seen a steady stream of theft, robbery, and intimidation. I’ve heard and seen students’ readiness to fight at the slightest provocation, and to mercilessly beat a fallen opponent if given the chance. I’ve heard excited and admiring talk about countless shootings.
Near the beginning of this school year, two college students were walking in a park in my city when two young men robbed them, made them kneel down, and shot them both in the head. The next day three of my students were talking about this—bragging and comparing notes about how they would have done the same.
Can anarchism deal with such realities?
Or might anarchism be under some charitable illusion that cold-blooded violence doesn’t really exist? That the injustices and oppressions and privations of the current social order are wholly responsible for inner city violence, perhaps?
Such systemic issues play an enormous role, no doubt. There is an unbroken chain of oppression and discrimination stretching back to kidnapping and chattel slavery. And those born into urban poverty today have the deck stacked against them—all the more if they are also born into brown skin.
But even seeing these realities clearly, and even assigning most or all fault or blame to those in power rather than those in poverty—present realities still are what they are. And part of the present reality is cold-blooded violence. There are hardened killers in the world, and especially on the streets of the ghetto. These folks didn’t create the war zones they were raised in, and in that sense they are clearly not to blame. But they have nonetheless become what they have become.
And they’re not prepared to tend your community garden. They are prepared to shoot you and take your stereo.
http://fromwinetowater.wordpress.com/2012/02/12/anarchism-and-teaching/
Feb 11, 2012
The School Man
I read a School Man today. Lecturing with his gnomic-stupid voice. Abashed, faux bashful. Contemptuous, as only School Men can manage. A misplaced contempt, the cross-eyed staring down of self-conceived inferiors, inventing lowly adversaries to justify its essential cowardice, to salve itself in the recognition that its slippery comforts, its personal history of compromises and surrender are really an ascent towards truth, and wisdom, and sensibility. A naked act of shamed concealment, this - captured in relief, cold water dripping down a too-scrubbed brow that hovers over a face composed of sly glances and self-loathing.
Fiddling with the numbers, pretending to a grand narrative of history, as if his version of the whole story could account for the termites eating through the wood, or the making-do of broken mothers. All pretense, this School Man, even his contempt. A flaccid little soul, convinced that its wet slobber is a passionate kiss. Persuaded to believe in itself as a pyre, when it never manages to spark.
Missing the entire point. Missing the point of pointed things, all things being equal.
Covered in the dust of academia. Not noticing that his beloved history has moved on to other lovers. That time itself has drawn up its skirts and kicked the dust of its shoes at him. So he sneers instead. He conjures the loathing of the satisfied and the self-assuaged in defeat. A transubstantiation of its bundled small selves into the outward projected great Self inhabiting the nexus of history. Failed magic, and all the more embarrassing for the continued insistence on the publicity of its self-denied deficiency.
That other age, the one the School Man imagines as his gift to the lesser lights, the fantastic era he has peopled with Great Men and prophetic voices?
It's gone.
And it never was. We are venal creatures. Rooting around in the rotten roots of our perfidy, we discover the partial truths which liberate, and succeeding in a fleeting emancipation, chain us once again.
There's nothing wrong with that.
But the School Men can't admit it. So they fabulate. Nicomachean ethics, angels on a pin head, the weight of a soul, being-otherness, alchemical metanoias, the laws of economy, forever fighting rebels and fixed anarchies in their own minds, casting out the bad demons of the wrong uncertainty. Rational to a fault, blind to their monomanias and an obsession with order that reveals not reason, but a faith in the assertion as magic. They are always God Men, these School Men. Fucking priests, the lot of 'em.
And where there's a priest, there's a proctor, and a tithe and inevitably catechisms and sacerdotal vestments and the flagellant's whip. The School man mortifies. He makes dead the ineluctabilty of living.
He hates, and calls his hatred love, or knowledge, or faith.
There's nothing wrong with hate. Hate is a human good. But the school man gets his wet slobber and his dusty fingers all over even the beauty of hatred, and he makes it academic. He's the reducer, and his reduction is always a kind of violation. The shame-faced uncle with his roving hands and the explanations that follow. You know the kind: a careful word, well thought and pre-conceived, to distance his own inviolate self from the violations he commits with fingers and tongue.
He hates futurity. That's why he's always trying to plan it. He hates the now, which is why he must attempt to husband it, to beat it into the submission of a grand order, of a history what behaves.
But it doesn't behave, for all that history really does work, and explain and describe.
So here we are in the now. The School Men are the enemy to the side of our next tomorrow. An immediate one, because they announce themselves as friends. They have no amity to give. The proctor cannot love his ward, and the School Man has, does and will continue to insist on being a warden to time and human frailty.
Frailty colors our immediacy. The democratic age - a gentle fiction - has reached its terminus. We are done with human rights and the pretense of consensus. That's not daybreak's light dawning over the painted stones of the privately held terrariums deeded over from forgotten former Commons. It's twilight. That silvered horizon is the setting sun. Night comes. And the brutality is already cleaner, and more honest.
The Brutal Age begins again, because it has never ended.
The School Men won't brave that night. They've chosen their lot. They already have the company mark. It's self-preservation. No shame in it, but it belies the falsehood of their economies of symbolic motion. It negates their claims.
All they have left now is their shame. And they've earned it. They merit the widening chasm between their modes of existence and their message of history. They deserve the rewards of an enumerated hypocrisy, and the dubious acclaim of the annotated history of their betrayals.
They'll prattle on. That's their mettle, or its antithesis. And they'll probably get louder, and more strident, the closer it comes to the flux-tormented break between the false prophecy of justice and the reality of an enduring and pagan barbarity. See the evidence: their church has no keystone. It has no firm foundation. Do they smash the icons? Do they come out into the street and revel with the upside-downers of the unkinging Misrule? No, they hie closer to the throne, aiming instead to crown a new master, one with proconsular imperium, certain that if only their will is made manifest, and believed, if the prophets are heeded, if the secret keys are turned, if history behaves, this time their golem too will do the noble bidding.
While outside, where life counts, where safety is known for a lie, and security for a miserable deception, the School Men's objects of contempt piece their lives together in spite of insecurity, weaving through the ruins and remains of a dozen dozens of golem projects gone before. Where theory and the plan of the School Man's history dissolves at first contact with the heat death of a immediacy, crumbling into cold ash amid the ruins of a succession of Alesias.
The School Man draws closed his blinds, pulls the shade, opens his desk, retrieves his ink and pen. He scribbles on the fabric of the shade, scratching out elaborate, euclidian landscapes and peopling them with stick figure denizens.
Finished with his doodling, he announces with a flourish, "See! See, ye of little faith! Look out my window. It all fits, the shapes make sense! How bright the future! How rational!"
Absorbed by his creation, praying cruciform to the god in his head, he does not notice, he cannot see, or smell, or hear, the passing of another army on the way to its next Alesia, obedient to another's ranked and ordered reasons.
Outside, casting a shadow like a bird of prey, the next chief dreams of profit, glory and decimation, and his School Men get ready their histories, and the latest set of reasons why the rest of us have to suffer...
Fiddling with the numbers, pretending to a grand narrative of history, as if his version of the whole story could account for the termites eating through the wood, or the making-do of broken mothers. All pretense, this School Man, even his contempt. A flaccid little soul, convinced that its wet slobber is a passionate kiss. Persuaded to believe in itself as a pyre, when it never manages to spark.
Missing the entire point. Missing the point of pointed things, all things being equal.
Covered in the dust of academia. Not noticing that his beloved history has moved on to other lovers. That time itself has drawn up its skirts and kicked the dust of its shoes at him. So he sneers instead. He conjures the loathing of the satisfied and the self-assuaged in defeat. A transubstantiation of its bundled small selves into the outward projected great Self inhabiting the nexus of history. Failed magic, and all the more embarrassing for the continued insistence on the publicity of its self-denied deficiency.
That other age, the one the School Man imagines as his gift to the lesser lights, the fantastic era he has peopled with Great Men and prophetic voices?
It's gone.
And it never was. We are venal creatures. Rooting around in the rotten roots of our perfidy, we discover the partial truths which liberate, and succeeding in a fleeting emancipation, chain us once again.
There's nothing wrong with that.
But the School Men can't admit it. So they fabulate. Nicomachean ethics, angels on a pin head, the weight of a soul, being-otherness, alchemical metanoias, the laws of economy, forever fighting rebels and fixed anarchies in their own minds, casting out the bad demons of the wrong uncertainty. Rational to a fault, blind to their monomanias and an obsession with order that reveals not reason, but a faith in the assertion as magic. They are always God Men, these School Men. Fucking priests, the lot of 'em.
And where there's a priest, there's a proctor, and a tithe and inevitably catechisms and sacerdotal vestments and the flagellant's whip. The School man mortifies. He makes dead the ineluctabilty of living.
He hates, and calls his hatred love, or knowledge, or faith.
There's nothing wrong with hate. Hate is a human good. But the school man gets his wet slobber and his dusty fingers all over even the beauty of hatred, and he makes it academic. He's the reducer, and his reduction is always a kind of violation. The shame-faced uncle with his roving hands and the explanations that follow. You know the kind: a careful word, well thought and pre-conceived, to distance his own inviolate self from the violations he commits with fingers and tongue.
He hates futurity. That's why he's always trying to plan it. He hates the now, which is why he must attempt to husband it, to beat it into the submission of a grand order, of a history what behaves.
But it doesn't behave, for all that history really does work, and explain and describe.
So here we are in the now. The School Men are the enemy to the side of our next tomorrow. An immediate one, because they announce themselves as friends. They have no amity to give. The proctor cannot love his ward, and the School Man has, does and will continue to insist on being a warden to time and human frailty.
Frailty colors our immediacy. The democratic age - a gentle fiction - has reached its terminus. We are done with human rights and the pretense of consensus. That's not daybreak's light dawning over the painted stones of the privately held terrariums deeded over from forgotten former Commons. It's twilight. That silvered horizon is the setting sun. Night comes. And the brutality is already cleaner, and more honest.
The Brutal Age begins again, because it has never ended.
The School Men won't brave that night. They've chosen their lot. They already have the company mark. It's self-preservation. No shame in it, but it belies the falsehood of their economies of symbolic motion. It negates their claims.
All they have left now is their shame. And they've earned it. They merit the widening chasm between their modes of existence and their message of history. They deserve the rewards of an enumerated hypocrisy, and the dubious acclaim of the annotated history of their betrayals.
They'll prattle on. That's their mettle, or its antithesis. And they'll probably get louder, and more strident, the closer it comes to the flux-tormented break between the false prophecy of justice and the reality of an enduring and pagan barbarity. See the evidence: their church has no keystone. It has no firm foundation. Do they smash the icons? Do they come out into the street and revel with the upside-downers of the unkinging Misrule? No, they hie closer to the throne, aiming instead to crown a new master, one with proconsular imperium, certain that if only their will is made manifest, and believed, if the prophets are heeded, if the secret keys are turned, if history behaves, this time their golem too will do the noble bidding.
While outside, where life counts, where safety is known for a lie, and security for a miserable deception, the School Men's objects of contempt piece their lives together in spite of insecurity, weaving through the ruins and remains of a dozen dozens of golem projects gone before. Where theory and the plan of the School Man's history dissolves at first contact with the heat death of a immediacy, crumbling into cold ash amid the ruins of a succession of Alesias.
The School Man draws closed his blinds, pulls the shade, opens his desk, retrieves his ink and pen. He scribbles on the fabric of the shade, scratching out elaborate, euclidian landscapes and peopling them with stick figure denizens.
Finished with his doodling, he announces with a flourish, "See! See, ye of little faith! Look out my window. It all fits, the shapes make sense! How bright the future! How rational!"
Absorbed by his creation, praying cruciform to the god in his head, he does not notice, he cannot see, or smell, or hear, the passing of another army on the way to its next Alesia, obedient to another's ranked and ordered reasons.
Outside, casting a shadow like a bird of prey, the next chief dreams of profit, glory and decimation, and his School Men get ready their histories, and the latest set of reasons why the rest of us have to suffer...
Feb 8, 2012
In Case of Sobriety
The official from the State Department told The Daily Telegraph that while the White House wants to exhaust all its diplomatic options, the debate in Washington has shifted away from diplomacy and towards more robust action since Russia and China blocked a United Nations resolution condemning Syria.
The Pentagon’s Central Command has begun a preliminary internal review of US military capabilities in the region, which one senior official called a “scoping exercise” that would provide options for the president if and when they were requested.
The White House said it was talking to allies about holding a “Friends of Syria” meeting in the near future and was considering delivering humanitarian aid to affected areas in the country.Source.
Y'know, in case the Israeli bat shit crazy fucks sober up and realize that attacking Iran is asking for too many domestic deaths.
Iran is committed to the territorial defense and integrity of Syria.
So, over/under on which anti-BushWar liberal will be the first to give a first-bombs defense of ObamaWar in Iran?
Feb 7, 2012
Whiskey Courage
Shorter Barack Obama: "It's like wicked risky, dudes, to bomb Iran, wink, wink..."
Shorter Netanyahu: "C'mon, dullards, that schwartze...burp...in Wash...Wash...ing...Wash...ton...in't fuckin' gon' risk the Jew money. Let's roll!"
Sure, it could all be brinksmanship. And on the tevye hand, it could be that Netanyahu and the Likud have their asses planted on the sweating dynamite of a sabra population which can still recall with fondness the myth of the golden flower a'bloom in the desert. The kibbutzim may have lost out to the corporate raiders and a wave of privatization, but their children and grandchildren haven't yet forgotten the promise of a socialist homeland.
So, war. Against dirty bird Persians, this time...
Shorter Netanyahu: "C'mon, dullards, that schwartze...burp...in Wash...Wash...ing...Wash...ton...in't fuckin' gon' risk the Jew money. Let's roll!"
Sure, it could all be brinksmanship. And on the tevye hand, it could be that Netanyahu and the Likud have their asses planted on the sweating dynamite of a sabra population which can still recall with fondness the myth of the golden flower a'bloom in the desert. The kibbutzim may have lost out to the corporate raiders and a wave of privatization, but their children and grandchildren haven't yet forgotten the promise of a socialist homeland.
So, war. Against dirty bird Persians, this time...
Feb 3, 2012
Courts Martialed
After nearly two years in isolation and captivity, Bradly Manning has been ordered to face a court martial. The million or so words soon to be written about Manning and his order to court martial have about as much relevance to the conclusion of the affair as your next exhalation does to the luminosity of Betelgeuse. You already know the outcome. Goat, scaped. Every last bit of commentary, including this stupid blog blurgh, is already wasted. If Manning doesn't get the needle, he'll probably never see the outside of Leavenworth again.
Remember that the next time you're compelled to martial your own court of judgment in favor of a misplaced faith in "good law."
Remember that the next time you're compelled to martial your own court of judgment in favor of a misplaced faith in "good law."
Jan 26, 2012
Compromise
I'm not grateful for new employment. The money is terrible, but it's nice to be doing something, and to have a little extra for, I dunno, groceries. There's only so many times you can feed two growing children pasta or chicken thighs before you find yourself face down in a muddy pool of teenaged rebellion. Not that I'm against teenaged rebellion. I just prefer it directed...elsewhere.
The grocery money is nice, all things being equal, which they are not. But I'm far too old to have any gratitude for work, or for being directed around the stock room by a child. Work blows hot dog chunks. Orange-pink flecked half digested kibbles of mechanically separated trademarked meat substance.
Even more especially when what's playing on the overhead is country music. I'm not suggesting to you, by way of vicarious memory, the dulcet melancholy of a blue grass which gets low to the ground and stays there, or the dusty and dirty back shack moonshine fiddling of Appalachia and the bayou. I mean what was coming out of the speakers, all fucking day, was New Country.
If you want a reliable formula for cracking the code of New Country, I'll give it to you.
Aaah, that's a lie. I'm going to type it whether you want it or not. So...
Start with today's date. Dial your mental clock and calendar back twenty years. Try to recall whatever was topping the charts as mainstream pop-rock those long, lost twenty years ago. Remove any bass lines which groove. Add a steel guitar. Stir in one or more white people willing to confuse nasal warbling for singing, and have them improvise a "story" based in dialogue written by George Lucas or Michael Bay.
New Country.
And I could almost ignore it, by hour three, except that it seemed like every twenty damned minutes the station was airing this nasty little gem:
I'm not surprised the god goons of NHforMarriage and the NOFM finished up their moral figuring and settled on a New Country station as the best outlet for the melted butter bigotry of, ahem, compromise. And I'm probably the second or third last person who thinks that a law is the way to keep Teh Gays from being discriminated against, or from being married in the naves of Christ-moldy church-holes.
But fucking aye, you'd think the shitclowns at NHforMarriage - and in all their brother organizations - would have kenned by now that pretty much the only people in New England who give a fuck about the cohabitating and vow-making of homosexuals are the kind of people who also think it's a good gods-be-damned idea to drop tonnage on Iran and send das troops into Syria.
If you're looking for what degrades or corrupts the, heh, marriage bond, you ain't ever going to find it the affections and affectations of homosexuals. But, you will find a whole lot of sundered wedded union in the wake of deployment, military industrial centralization and the austerity which follows war upon war. That shit is disruptive. The gays, not so much.
Not that any of it matters. The same fucking lackwits who can reconcile their affirmations with endless war, and who can even come to believe in it, are certainly capable of scapegoating dykes and queers for their own broken marriages.
Still, by the sixth or seventh time I'd heard it, I wanted to crawl up into the rafters and shake loose the speakers. There's only so much ign'ant a person should allow through the sensory filters on any given day. And then you just got to go find a motherfucker what needs some punching...
The grocery money is nice, all things being equal, which they are not. But I'm far too old to have any gratitude for work, or for being directed around the stock room by a child. Work blows hot dog chunks. Orange-pink flecked half digested kibbles of mechanically separated trademarked meat substance.
Even more especially when what's playing on the overhead is country music. I'm not suggesting to you, by way of vicarious memory, the dulcet melancholy of a blue grass which gets low to the ground and stays there, or the dusty and dirty back shack moonshine fiddling of Appalachia and the bayou. I mean what was coming out of the speakers, all fucking day, was New Country.
If you want a reliable formula for cracking the code of New Country, I'll give it to you.
Aaah, that's a lie. I'm going to type it whether you want it or not. So...
Start with today's date. Dial your mental clock and calendar back twenty years. Try to recall whatever was topping the charts as mainstream pop-rock those long, lost twenty years ago. Remove any bass lines which groove. Add a steel guitar. Stir in one or more white people willing to confuse nasal warbling for singing, and have them improvise a "story" based in dialogue written by George Lucas or Michael Bay.
New Country.
And I could almost ignore it, by hour three, except that it seemed like every twenty damned minutes the station was airing this nasty little gem:
I'm not surprised the god goons of NHforMarriage and the NOFM finished up their moral figuring and settled on a New Country station as the best outlet for the melted butter bigotry of, ahem, compromise. And I'm probably the second or third last person who thinks that a law is the way to keep Teh Gays from being discriminated against, or from being married in the naves of Christ-moldy church-holes.
But fucking aye, you'd think the shitclowns at NHforMarriage - and in all their brother organizations - would have kenned by now that pretty much the only people in New England who give a fuck about the cohabitating and vow-making of homosexuals are the kind of people who also think it's a good gods-be-damned idea to drop tonnage on Iran and send das troops into Syria.
If you're looking for what degrades or corrupts the, heh, marriage bond, you ain't ever going to find it the affections and affectations of homosexuals. But, you will find a whole lot of sundered wedded union in the wake of deployment, military industrial centralization and the austerity which follows war upon war. That shit is disruptive. The gays, not so much.
Not that any of it matters. The same fucking lackwits who can reconcile their affirmations with endless war, and who can even come to believe in it, are certainly capable of scapegoating dykes and queers for their own broken marriages.
Still, by the sixth or seventh time I'd heard it, I wanted to crawl up into the rafters and shake loose the speakers. There's only so much ign'ant a person should allow through the sensory filters on any given day. And then you just got to go find a motherfucker what needs some punching...
Jan 25, 2012
Cat's Paw Choosing
My cats sit at their food bowls off feeding times, certain in the magic efficacy of their own corporeal presences. Looking up with expectant eyes, as if to suggest to me by mystical notions that, yes, their being at the bowl is all the sign I need that they too have a vested interest in the outcome of my actions.
And when I do not feed them directly, even if only an hour after their last feeding, they yet persist. Eyes to empty bowl, and then to me. And back to the bowls again. Doing their cat sorcery.
I do not feed them. Not until it's the time arbitrarily set by the human gods who occupy these rooms.
But they insist on making the show anyway, convinced of their magic prowess. Certain that they have moved me to pity. Sure that their arrival at the place is all they need to achieve their ends.
It reminds me, most of all, of Americans queuing up at the polls on voting day.
And when I do not feed them directly, even if only an hour after their last feeding, they yet persist. Eyes to empty bowl, and then to me. And back to the bowls again. Doing their cat sorcery.
I do not feed them. Not until it's the time arbitrarily set by the human gods who occupy these rooms.
But they insist on making the show anyway, convinced of their magic prowess. Certain that they have moved me to pity. Sure that their arrival at the place is all they need to achieve their ends.
It reminds me, most of all, of Americans queuing up at the polls on voting day.
Jan 19, 2012
Wasted sentiments
I don't understand the outrage over laws. Laws follow power. They do not create it. Everything you need to know about a law comes down to this: can it be enforced?
If yes, then the law is clown paint. If no, an invitation to disrespect.
If the power exists to enforce the law, then the outcome is already given. If the power does not exist to enforce the wasted sentiments on a legal page, those sentiments are as wasted as any written about law.
SOPA, NDAA, AUMF, Resolution 1929 - they mean nothing. If the power exists, the law follows it. If it does not, it's about as useful as Bob Avakian's wishful thinking.
If yes, then the law is clown paint. If no, an invitation to disrespect.
If the power exists to enforce the law, then the outcome is already given. If the power does not exist to enforce the wasted sentiments on a legal page, those sentiments are as wasted as any written about law.
SOPA, NDAA, AUMF, Resolution 1929 - they mean nothing. If the power exists, the law follows it. If it does not, it's about as useful as Bob Avakian's wishful thinking.
Jan 12, 2012
Sacred Monsters
Ours is a peculiar age.
Judging from the mediated outrage attendant upon the revelation that American soldiers lack the proper respect for their recently corpsified prey humans, there seems to be a notion, prevalent at least in the commentariat and corporate media, that soldiers don't behave that way.
I don't know what herbs the outraged have been smoking, or how deep their cynicism actually runs, but I think perhaps that what they are, in the end, is victims of their own propaganda.
We live during a period of history in which populations and their gatekeepers are so medicated with symbolic anodynes that it's quite possible those selling their outrage feel some semblance of it, and genuinely.
But, ours is a peculiar age.
If history can be trusted - and some measure of it reflects old truths, despite the visible hand of the victors in writing it - there are a few constants to civilization:
1. Large populations are ruled through religion, law and force of arms.
2. Usually, the religion and the law are imposed by force of arms, until such time as subsequent generations learn to adhere to the beliefs and attitudes of their masters, and the long sleep of self-policing takes hold upon the somnolent body politic. For any polity or civilization durable enough to last beyond its own founding epoch, an internal enemy is required. This enemy is the social whipping boy. This enemy symbolizes the failures which follow from disobedience, faithlessness or an incomplete absorption of the prevailing moral norm: licentiousness, wanton sexuality, illicit esoteric acts, the stealing or corrupting of youth and perhaps most egregious of all, the formation over time of defensive sodalities. See, Jews in Christendom. Women, in Greece. The capite censi and Phrygian mystery cults, in Rome. Palestinians, in Israel. Et cetera ad nauseam ad infinitum.
In the US of A, the whipping boy has historically been black people. They endure the physical and moral nightmares of the long sleep of peace; they are the receivers of its transference and the scapegoats for the frictions and problems which tend to arise and accumulate in memory, whenever humans pretend that living together in large hive like structures is somehow native to the hominid condition.
And, to do unto whipping boys, a society will need to produce people who want to wield the whip.
3. Whenever a polity, society, region or civilization enters a period of flux, doubt or insurrection, it produces not only discontent, but those who try re-established lost faith by attacking the visible symbols of its decline.
4. This insecure type is already drawn towards enforcement, even during eras of relative quiet. In fact, soldiery and policing depend upon the twin attractions of sanctioned violence and permissible punishment. Whether during flux, when all discontent tends to be folded into the category of internal enemy and scribbled over with the attributes of the whipping boy, or during the decades of peace which punctuate the more common human tendency towards irascibility, those willing to do violence against doubt are made sacred by the uniform. The uniform hides. The uniform reveals. But most importantly of all, the uniform permits.
5. Not surprisingly at some point a population usually develops a healthy and rational disregard for cops and soldiers. Men with permission to do violence and a reward at the end of it will act violently. They are already temperamentally suited to it by a disposition towards acting out their insecurity on the heads and bodies of weaker persons. And they are paid to stay insecure while wrapped in moral and physical armor.
The soldier, like the cop, has not been well received for much of recorded human history. The soldier means death. The soldier, like the cop, is a reminder that this life is lived for the enjoyment of those people who can afford to pay the soldier. The soldier is an ill omen. If you can see him on the streets, somebody in power is feeling dicey. Throughout much of history, the soldier was set apart in barracks and special colonies, for his own good. Quarter the soldier with the people, and the people will eventually cultivate a taste for killing him.
But, ours is a peculiar age. We wouldn't dare...
Because, we are reminded daily, "we" love our soldiers. They are the best of us. The brightest. The backbone of the nation. A soldier is God's special angel with a backpack and a rifle. "We" invent and repeat whole cloth fictions about how the disobedient routinely mistreat soldiers, spitting on them and refusing to celebrate their glorious return, at airports. The soldier, like the cop, is a well armed victim. He is surrounded by lesser men, jealous enemies who would degrade his spiritual orgone and unman his virtues with negative vacuum vices.
It's a liturgy in its own right, this Mass of the universal golden soldier.
It's also background. So look at the foreground. Look at what the be-rifled soldier does. Examine this cult of the noble warrior not for its conceits or its maudlin sales pitch for jingo tchotchkes. Take a long hard gaze at what the showmen are working hard to conceal.
Which is everything that soldiers exists to do.
But, we are a peculiar people living in a peculiar age.
So, instead of taking comfort in the reminder that soldiers are by and large the sacred monsters of this final Americanist age, we get sophomoric sentiment instead. And are expected to mumble it into our own cups, as well. We are told, all over the print, the display and the telly screen, that our soldiers are and ought to be better. That we have to need them to be better.
We are instructed in image and text to need them to be elevated. To perform their wars and occupations as if they were less and more than the human, and anything but the sort of men drawn to blood sport and sanctioned degradation.
The real worry, though, would be angelic soldiers. What we who are ruled should fear perhaps most of all is an age of war and occupation where soldiers did not act like soldiers, in which there is no corpse mutilation, cruelty, disrespect for the dearly departed, cultural ignorance, anomie, adrenaline thrill murder and the disregard for the feelings of the natives sufficient to provide for the dehumanizing distractions warriors and soldiers are wont to seek when in need of provisional entertainment.
I know there's a whole lot of shocked sentiment or bored cynicism about the subject, but truthfully if our lords and masters ever manage to breed and train up a perfectly behaved, respectful, culturally sensitive and gentlemanly species or type of solider, we are well and truly fucked.
Our governing caste of powerful families serves a ruling class armed with imperfect instruments. If they ever manage to produce a well behaved and moral soldier, we can kiss dislodging them from power and from their colonial redoubts within history and memory, for a very, very long time to come...
*
h/ts to:
Rob Payne
Justin
IOZ
Al Schumann
Judging from the mediated outrage attendant upon the revelation that American soldiers lack the proper respect for their recently corpsified prey humans, there seems to be a notion, prevalent at least in the commentariat and corporate media, that soldiers don't behave that way.
I don't know what herbs the outraged have been smoking, or how deep their cynicism actually runs, but I think perhaps that what they are, in the end, is victims of their own propaganda.
We live during a period of history in which populations and their gatekeepers are so medicated with symbolic anodynes that it's quite possible those selling their outrage feel some semblance of it, and genuinely.
But, ours is a peculiar age.
If history can be trusted - and some measure of it reflects old truths, despite the visible hand of the victors in writing it - there are a few constants to civilization:
1. Large populations are ruled through religion, law and force of arms.
2. Usually, the religion and the law are imposed by force of arms, until such time as subsequent generations learn to adhere to the beliefs and attitudes of their masters, and the long sleep of self-policing takes hold upon the somnolent body politic. For any polity or civilization durable enough to last beyond its own founding epoch, an internal enemy is required. This enemy is the social whipping boy. This enemy symbolizes the failures which follow from disobedience, faithlessness or an incomplete absorption of the prevailing moral norm: licentiousness, wanton sexuality, illicit esoteric acts, the stealing or corrupting of youth and perhaps most egregious of all, the formation over time of defensive sodalities. See, Jews in Christendom. Women, in Greece. The capite censi and Phrygian mystery cults, in Rome. Palestinians, in Israel. Et cetera ad nauseam ad infinitum.
In the US of A, the whipping boy has historically been black people. They endure the physical and moral nightmares of the long sleep of peace; they are the receivers of its transference and the scapegoats for the frictions and problems which tend to arise and accumulate in memory, whenever humans pretend that living together in large hive like structures is somehow native to the hominid condition.
And, to do unto whipping boys, a society will need to produce people who want to wield the whip.
3. Whenever a polity, society, region or civilization enters a period of flux, doubt or insurrection, it produces not only discontent, but those who try re-established lost faith by attacking the visible symbols of its decline.
4. This insecure type is already drawn towards enforcement, even during eras of relative quiet. In fact, soldiery and policing depend upon the twin attractions of sanctioned violence and permissible punishment. Whether during flux, when all discontent tends to be folded into the category of internal enemy and scribbled over with the attributes of the whipping boy, or during the decades of peace which punctuate the more common human tendency towards irascibility, those willing to do violence against doubt are made sacred by the uniform. The uniform hides. The uniform reveals. But most importantly of all, the uniform permits.
5. Not surprisingly at some point a population usually develops a healthy and rational disregard for cops and soldiers. Men with permission to do violence and a reward at the end of it will act violently. They are already temperamentally suited to it by a disposition towards acting out their insecurity on the heads and bodies of weaker persons. And they are paid to stay insecure while wrapped in moral and physical armor.
The soldier, like the cop, has not been well received for much of recorded human history. The soldier means death. The soldier, like the cop, is a reminder that this life is lived for the enjoyment of those people who can afford to pay the soldier. The soldier is an ill omen. If you can see him on the streets, somebody in power is feeling dicey. Throughout much of history, the soldier was set apart in barracks and special colonies, for his own good. Quarter the soldier with the people, and the people will eventually cultivate a taste for killing him.
But, ours is a peculiar age. We wouldn't dare...
Because, we are reminded daily, "we" love our soldiers. They are the best of us. The brightest. The backbone of the nation. A soldier is God's special angel with a backpack and a rifle. "We" invent and repeat whole cloth fictions about how the disobedient routinely mistreat soldiers, spitting on them and refusing to celebrate their glorious return, at airports. The soldier, like the cop, is a well armed victim. He is surrounded by lesser men, jealous enemies who would degrade his spiritual orgone and unman his virtues with negative vacuum vices.
It's a liturgy in its own right, this Mass of the universal golden soldier.
It's also background. So look at the foreground. Look at what the be-rifled soldier does. Examine this cult of the noble warrior not for its conceits or its maudlin sales pitch for jingo tchotchkes. Take a long hard gaze at what the showmen are working hard to conceal.
Which is everything that soldiers exists to do.
But, we are a peculiar people living in a peculiar age.
So, instead of taking comfort in the reminder that soldiers are by and large the sacred monsters of this final Americanist age, we get sophomoric sentiment instead. And are expected to mumble it into our own cups, as well. We are told, all over the print, the display and the telly screen, that our soldiers are and ought to be better. That we have to need them to be better.
We are instructed in image and text to need them to be elevated. To perform their wars and occupations as if they were less and more than the human, and anything but the sort of men drawn to blood sport and sanctioned degradation.
The real worry, though, would be angelic soldiers. What we who are ruled should fear perhaps most of all is an age of war and occupation where soldiers did not act like soldiers, in which there is no corpse mutilation, cruelty, disrespect for the dearly departed, cultural ignorance, anomie, adrenaline thrill murder and the disregard for the feelings of the natives sufficient to provide for the dehumanizing distractions warriors and soldiers are wont to seek when in need of provisional entertainment.
I know there's a whole lot of shocked sentiment or bored cynicism about the subject, but truthfully if our lords and masters ever manage to breed and train up a perfectly behaved, respectful, culturally sensitive and gentlemanly species or type of solider, we are well and truly fucked.
Our governing caste of powerful families serves a ruling class armed with imperfect instruments. If they ever manage to produce a well behaved and moral soldier, we can kiss dislodging them from power and from their colonial redoubts within history and memory, for a very, very long time to come...
*
h/ts to:
Rob Payne
Justin
IOZ
Al Schumann
Jan 10, 2012
New Hampshire
Romney: I will give you austerity and war and you will thank me for my lily white face and my squeaky shoe Mormonism.
Obama, from the White House shadows: Yeah, but I'll give you austerity and war and someone to blame for it.
Goldman Sachs: Meh. It's all good for us.
Obama, from the White House shadows: Yeah, but I'll give you austerity and war and someone to blame for it.
Goldman Sachs: Meh. It's all good for us.
Jan 6, 2012
Petty Squabbles
I guess a certain blogger needs occasional reminding that an attempt at an inversion - and one which is admittedly undertaken with a decent chance of failure in mind - is not the same thing as a "rehabilitation."
Jan 3, 2012
Guffaw
"American women face a stark choice in the Iowa caucuses: re-elect feminist President Barack Obama who has advanced equality or caucus for a Republican who pledges to roll back generations of progress."~ The Younger Pelosi
Dec 26, 2011
Law has no power
If laws were routinely passed, but no loot was set aside to enforce them, so that they were effectively nothing more than suggestions for conduct which the average resident could adhere to or ignore at leisure, we would have a far different understanding of law the currently we do.
What we have - and what has been our occidental tradition, harkening back all the way to the first glimmer of supposed civilization in Egypt, the Fertile Crescent, the Levant and polities of Hellas and Megale Hellas - is quite different from all that.
We have the passage of laws, statutes, codes and decrees - and the apportioning of weapons, wealth and armed staffers to enforce them. Our tradition of legislation comes with punishment, and the threat of punishment. We have gods who punish, and fat old men who refuse to disperse slave-made toys, as a punishment. We are threatened with discipline at every turn, and we are raised from toddler until retirement age, and beyond, to believe deeply and with an unshakable certainty that actions not only have human consequences, in the form of violence, imprisonment and the loss of status, but divine ones, in the form of self-destruction, bad luck, heavenly corrective scourges and everlasting damnation.
Our predecessors have produced variations of culture and credulity ranging from the fantastical to the nightmarishly bureaucratic. Our history records the numinous spirits of forest and riverside, a thousand divines in olympic contention, pantheons of bickering child-gods, and the current all-seeing monster who populates the brain spaces of most Muslims, Christians and Jews. We have had decades of doubt, and ages of faith. We can look back, as well as looking back allows, and scan the flowering of the Provence, and the explosion of regimental Prussian might, separated by less than a thousand miles, and fewer than a thousand years.
And despite the seeming limitlessness of our cultural variations, and individual perspectives, we have as a constant the passage of laws, and the enforcement of laws.
We have learned to impose, and to be imposed upon.
And it's all a set of fictions.
Really, it is.
The law is powerless. It does nothing. It achieves no end. It accomplishes no outcome. No law on the planet binds you, because no law can bind you.
Look instead to the weapon in the hand of the enforcer. To the threat of the slap from mommy, or the loss of her love. Watch the teacher's ostracism of the troubled child, how a little boy is slowly set aside from his peers, is isolated, is twisted and warped into a young man who has turned self-defense into a protective cruelty. See the priest poisoning the minds of the young, encouraging the madness of faith in the pettiest, most vicious, most hateful god built up into a sky daddy monster yet. Know that the good reverend, the pillar of the community, encourages mass delusion and a lifetime of self-betrayal, every time he casts aspersions at the harlot, condemns the godlessness of the teenager who flushes at his first boy-crush, or rails at the sinfulness of a nation which dares to allow women the freedom of their own bodies. Hear them teach about hell, and a concentration camp in the afterlife from which there is no escape.
See the cop with his gun, the soldier at attention, the jailer with his grin and the judge who sits above the mere humans arranged in rows for his judicial enjoyment.
It's punishment.
It's punishment.
The thing which which twists us up, which teaches us to police ourselves and neighbors, which faces us with a daily set of choices, all of them bad, and most of them worse, is punishment.
It's our lives - our labor, the wealth we create, the sacrifices we must endure - turned against us. That's what punishment is - the capture of the output of our work, its conversion into weapons and wages for armed staffers, and the threat and use of those weapons, against us.
The law achieves nothing. The outcome of its enforcement is everything.
We don't need to fear the law.
And its more than possible to lose the fear of enforcement. There's an emotional terminus to obedience. You can arrive, there. We can.
Our earthly masters have a lot of weapons, and a lot of leeway to use them. That I grant.
But we know where they build those weapons. And we know where they train their users. We know how they feed themselves, and we know where they sleep. We know - and we can know - how they get from home to work. We know where they work. We have every capacity needed to study them further. We are makers and watchers, because that's how we've been trained. We are observant of power, because that's how they shaped us. Every aspect of their lives is discoverable, and their behaviors are discernible. We already have the tools necessary to ending their reign of power and punishment.
And there just aren't all that many of them.
But there sure are fucking multitudes of us.
What we have - and what has been our occidental tradition, harkening back all the way to the first glimmer of supposed civilization in Egypt, the Fertile Crescent, the Levant and polities of Hellas and Megale Hellas - is quite different from all that.
We have the passage of laws, statutes, codes and decrees - and the apportioning of weapons, wealth and armed staffers to enforce them. Our tradition of legislation comes with punishment, and the threat of punishment. We have gods who punish, and fat old men who refuse to disperse slave-made toys, as a punishment. We are threatened with discipline at every turn, and we are raised from toddler until retirement age, and beyond, to believe deeply and with an unshakable certainty that actions not only have human consequences, in the form of violence, imprisonment and the loss of status, but divine ones, in the form of self-destruction, bad luck, heavenly corrective scourges and everlasting damnation.
Our predecessors have produced variations of culture and credulity ranging from the fantastical to the nightmarishly bureaucratic. Our history records the numinous spirits of forest and riverside, a thousand divines in olympic contention, pantheons of bickering child-gods, and the current all-seeing monster who populates the brain spaces of most Muslims, Christians and Jews. We have had decades of doubt, and ages of faith. We can look back, as well as looking back allows, and scan the flowering of the Provence, and the explosion of regimental Prussian might, separated by less than a thousand miles, and fewer than a thousand years.
And despite the seeming limitlessness of our cultural variations, and individual perspectives, we have as a constant the passage of laws, and the enforcement of laws.
We have learned to impose, and to be imposed upon.
And it's all a set of fictions.
Really, it is.
The law is powerless. It does nothing. It achieves no end. It accomplishes no outcome. No law on the planet binds you, because no law can bind you.
Look instead to the weapon in the hand of the enforcer. To the threat of the slap from mommy, or the loss of her love. Watch the teacher's ostracism of the troubled child, how a little boy is slowly set aside from his peers, is isolated, is twisted and warped into a young man who has turned self-defense into a protective cruelty. See the priest poisoning the minds of the young, encouraging the madness of faith in the pettiest, most vicious, most hateful god built up into a sky daddy monster yet. Know that the good reverend, the pillar of the community, encourages mass delusion and a lifetime of self-betrayal, every time he casts aspersions at the harlot, condemns the godlessness of the teenager who flushes at his first boy-crush, or rails at the sinfulness of a nation which dares to allow women the freedom of their own bodies. Hear them teach about hell, and a concentration camp in the afterlife from which there is no escape.
See the cop with his gun, the soldier at attention, the jailer with his grin and the judge who sits above the mere humans arranged in rows for his judicial enjoyment.
It's punishment.
It's punishment.
The thing which which twists us up, which teaches us to police ourselves and neighbors, which faces us with a daily set of choices, all of them bad, and most of them worse, is punishment.
It's our lives - our labor, the wealth we create, the sacrifices we must endure - turned against us. That's what punishment is - the capture of the output of our work, its conversion into weapons and wages for armed staffers, and the threat and use of those weapons, against us.
The law achieves nothing. The outcome of its enforcement is everything.
We don't need to fear the law.
And its more than possible to lose the fear of enforcement. There's an emotional terminus to obedience. You can arrive, there. We can.
Our earthly masters have a lot of weapons, and a lot of leeway to use them. That I grant.
But we know where they build those weapons. And we know where they train their users. We know how they feed themselves, and we know where they sleep. We know - and we can know - how they get from home to work. We know where they work. We have every capacity needed to study them further. We are makers and watchers, because that's how we've been trained. We are observant of power, because that's how they shaped us. Every aspect of their lives is discoverable, and their behaviors are discernible. We already have the tools necessary to ending their reign of power and punishment.
And there just aren't all that many of them.
But there sure are fucking multitudes of us.
Dec 21, 2011
Natural Defecation Authorization
According to a number of blogs and websites, ranging from the Bircher to the Beech Street Choir Boys, we're all supposed to be like wicked upset about an acronym.
Specifically, the NDAA, which from what I gather is this totally nefarious parcel of freedom destroying paragraphs, subsections, clauses and dispositions which wipe away our ability to resist the police and shit. Oh, and it prevents people from doing dissenty stuff that Uncle Sam might treat as terrorism, or the corporate press will escalate into a story about public safety and the public good, about keeping the children protected from the monsters under their beds.
Not for nothing, the people really upset and pissed about this de jure restatement of de facto policy are white. And law abiding.
I wonder if these white people are like all in the doldrums because now there's some legislation which allows the cops and the Feds to get away with acting as if white people were black, hispanic or "illegal", or some shit like that.
Because the last time I checked, it's already fairly routine for people to be rounded up, held on trumped up charges, and shuffled into indefinite detention (or sent to the death house) with little or no evidence, or on executive say-so. Because they're not-white. Because they make unapproved social choices. Because they don't toe the line. Because society doesn't prize their obedience enough to spend loot teaching them how to police themselves.
And I'm frankly as tired of white people complaining about suddenly becoming the nigger and the Other as I am of Canadians who get themselves into a miff-midden because Americans are shitty voters who are at least smart enough to realize that voting doesn't make a difference.
People eschew voting for the same reason that people steal: it makes sense, if you can get away with it. Too many people vote, and not enough shit gets stolen, if you ask me. Not that you're asking. But whatever.
Laws aren't real, like money isn't absolute value. Laws are as unreal, and unrealistic, as paper currency. If you take a handful of dollars and wipe your ass with them, you've got some pretty - and pretty well used - toilet paper. The same applies to laws. Or vote ballots.
Only thing which gives them power is faith. What allows the law any power over your conduct is confidence. Sometimes that faith serves your survival needs, especially when there's a policeman two feet away, brandishing his aerosolized poison in a can, his right hand clutching at a tool designed to punch fatal holes into human bodies.
Sometimes it just doesn't, as in often. Because there just aren't enough cops in the world, or laws on the books, to tame an unruly people.
I'm not saying you're obligated to go out your front door and get all unruly. Your thing is your thing, and it isn't easy to jettison a life time of obedience training, socialization and faith in civilization. Most of what makes an individual feel individuated is in fact quite commonplace: mammalian needs, cultural conditioning, dependence upon arbitrary rule-making parents, abuse and desires thwarted. We are, I imagine, less individuated than we tell ourselves.
Think about it: what makes the rich contemptible is their freedom from the commonplace, isn't it? Not that they've managed to inherit or steal lives which allow them to satisfy their desires and escape the punishments which discipline lesser mortals - but that to keep their lifestyles, the rest of us have to be disciplined into wage-slaves, to be bound up in restrictive norms, imprisoned in self-betrayals and programmed deficiencies, shackled with bad morals and bad consciences and otherwise made into instruments and tool-people. We get squandered, so they can squander. We're interchangeable, and we were shaped that way.
I'm not talking mere metaphor, here. Go on, quit your job. Break the rules. Walk up to a cop and punch him in the face. Throw a bouquet of harmless flowers into your Senator's face. Get close enough to the President to call him names, and then curse at him.
You will be replaced. By someone who has the same basic pre-programmed moral and social template that each of us believes is special and unique. Sure, I've got a picture of my wife and kids on my moral cubicle, while you've got your calendar open to the photo of a beach in the Caribbean, or if you're more of a dork, to some fantasy rendition of a dragon slash muscle car slash airbrushed approximation of a supposedly desirable woman-as-toy.
We're replaceable. And we fucking know it. It's why people develop pathologies, pursue obsessions, get depressed, masturbate like zoo caged orangutans, fiddle with religion, aim a gun/bow/magic spell at a digital demon, gossip about the office "whore," discuss films like they're personal adventures, read novels, cultivate hobbies, yell at the kids as if their futures are important, and do all the things that replaceable people do to distract themselves from their fundamental instrumentality.
It's why, I think, we haven't killed the fucking rich pricks dead, yet. The laws certainly aren't keeping us in place. Because laws don't work like that. And there aren't enough cops or soldiers on the planet, to keep people obedient.
It's that we know, because we were trained to know, that we aren't really fully human. We are, morally, intellectually and emotionally, machined parts.
The NDAA wasn't written to provide a sea change to public policy. It doesn't really change anything, because even without its passage, you, I and most everyone else can already be taken into custody, processed through the system, and incarcerated until the end of our days. With little cost to our earthly masters. And on the flimsiest of pretexts.
Don't take my word on it. Go ask a black American. Or an "illegal" Mexican. Or the eighteen year old just busted for "distribution" because her tail light was out and she had enough herb in the car to get herself and a couple of her friends stoned for the night.
If you quit your job, you will be replaced, and the machine will operate without you. If you go to jail, someone else will take over your daily functions. If you go to jail for long enough, someone else will slot his or her self into your family or role, and one day "your" kids won't even be yours anymore.
The NDAA wasn't written for you. It isn't a threat to the average American's life. It's not a law to get upset about. It's like fretting a law requiring you to take a shit. Don't goddamned worry it.
Unless you're ready to make the leap from machine part, to monkey wrench, that is. And then, it ain't nothing at all. It's less than nothing. It has no power. That's the fucking beauty of the de-moralization of your head space. Once you become an actual threat to lawn order, the worst they can do is cage or kill you. The laws don't fix themselves in your head, anymore. They become scenery. They stop being plot. By the time you're free, you're already free. And the game begins in truth, then, doesn't it?...
Specifically, the NDAA, which from what I gather is this totally nefarious parcel of freedom destroying paragraphs, subsections, clauses and dispositions which wipe away our ability to resist the police and shit. Oh, and it prevents people from doing dissenty stuff that Uncle Sam might treat as terrorism, or the corporate press will escalate into a story about public safety and the public good, about keeping the children protected from the monsters under their beds.
Not for nothing, the people really upset and pissed about this de jure restatement of de facto policy are white. And law abiding.
I wonder if these white people are like all in the doldrums because now there's some legislation which allows the cops and the Feds to get away with acting as if white people were black, hispanic or "illegal", or some shit like that.
Because the last time I checked, it's already fairly routine for people to be rounded up, held on trumped up charges, and shuffled into indefinite detention (or sent to the death house) with little or no evidence, or on executive say-so. Because they're not-white. Because they make unapproved social choices. Because they don't toe the line. Because society doesn't prize their obedience enough to spend loot teaching them how to police themselves.
And I'm frankly as tired of white people complaining about suddenly becoming the nigger and the Other as I am of Canadians who get themselves into a miff-midden because Americans are shitty voters who are at least smart enough to realize that voting doesn't make a difference.
People eschew voting for the same reason that people steal: it makes sense, if you can get away with it. Too many people vote, and not enough shit gets stolen, if you ask me. Not that you're asking. But whatever.
Laws aren't real, like money isn't absolute value. Laws are as unreal, and unrealistic, as paper currency. If you take a handful of dollars and wipe your ass with them, you've got some pretty - and pretty well used - toilet paper. The same applies to laws. Or vote ballots.
Only thing which gives them power is faith. What allows the law any power over your conduct is confidence. Sometimes that faith serves your survival needs, especially when there's a policeman two feet away, brandishing his aerosolized poison in a can, his right hand clutching at a tool designed to punch fatal holes into human bodies.
Sometimes it just doesn't, as in often. Because there just aren't enough cops in the world, or laws on the books, to tame an unruly people.
I'm not saying you're obligated to go out your front door and get all unruly. Your thing is your thing, and it isn't easy to jettison a life time of obedience training, socialization and faith in civilization. Most of what makes an individual feel individuated is in fact quite commonplace: mammalian needs, cultural conditioning, dependence upon arbitrary rule-making parents, abuse and desires thwarted. We are, I imagine, less individuated than we tell ourselves.
Think about it: what makes the rich contemptible is their freedom from the commonplace, isn't it? Not that they've managed to inherit or steal lives which allow them to satisfy their desires and escape the punishments which discipline lesser mortals - but that to keep their lifestyles, the rest of us have to be disciplined into wage-slaves, to be bound up in restrictive norms, imprisoned in self-betrayals and programmed deficiencies, shackled with bad morals and bad consciences and otherwise made into instruments and tool-people. We get squandered, so they can squander. We're interchangeable, and we were shaped that way.
I'm not talking mere metaphor, here. Go on, quit your job. Break the rules. Walk up to a cop and punch him in the face. Throw a bouquet of harmless flowers into your Senator's face. Get close enough to the President to call him names, and then curse at him.
You will be replaced. By someone who has the same basic pre-programmed moral and social template that each of us believes is special and unique. Sure, I've got a picture of my wife and kids on my moral cubicle, while you've got your calendar open to the photo of a beach in the Caribbean, or if you're more of a dork, to some fantasy rendition of a dragon slash muscle car slash airbrushed approximation of a supposedly desirable woman-as-toy.
We're replaceable. And we fucking know it. It's why people develop pathologies, pursue obsessions, get depressed, masturbate like zoo caged orangutans, fiddle with religion, aim a gun/bow/magic spell at a digital demon, gossip about the office "whore," discuss films like they're personal adventures, read novels, cultivate hobbies, yell at the kids as if their futures are important, and do all the things that replaceable people do to distract themselves from their fundamental instrumentality.
It's why, I think, we haven't killed the fucking rich pricks dead, yet. The laws certainly aren't keeping us in place. Because laws don't work like that. And there aren't enough cops or soldiers on the planet, to keep people obedient.
It's that we know, because we were trained to know, that we aren't really fully human. We are, morally, intellectually and emotionally, machined parts.
The NDAA wasn't written to provide a sea change to public policy. It doesn't really change anything, because even without its passage, you, I and most everyone else can already be taken into custody, processed through the system, and incarcerated until the end of our days. With little cost to our earthly masters. And on the flimsiest of pretexts.
Don't take my word on it. Go ask a black American. Or an "illegal" Mexican. Or the eighteen year old just busted for "distribution" because her tail light was out and she had enough herb in the car to get herself and a couple of her friends stoned for the night.
If you quit your job, you will be replaced, and the machine will operate without you. If you go to jail, someone else will take over your daily functions. If you go to jail for long enough, someone else will slot his or her self into your family or role, and one day "your" kids won't even be yours anymore.
The NDAA wasn't written for you. It isn't a threat to the average American's life. It's not a law to get upset about. It's like fretting a law requiring you to take a shit. Don't goddamned worry it.
Unless you're ready to make the leap from machine part, to monkey wrench, that is. And then, it ain't nothing at all. It's less than nothing. It has no power. That's the fucking beauty of the de-moralization of your head space. Once you become an actual threat to lawn order, the worst they can do is cage or kill you. The laws don't fix themselves in your head, anymore. They become scenery. They stop being plot. By the time you're free, you're already free. And the game begins in truth, then, doesn't it?...
Dec 15, 2011
Getting Creamy
Robert Creamer, of the Huffington Post, has written a whopper. Let's just get right into it:
Of course, that really depends on what you mean by "war." If you intend a nineteenth or twentieth century definition, there was never a war in Iraq, for Obama to be able to end it. Congress declared no commencement of hostilities. The government of the nation of Iraq did not surrender. Instead, the US, along with Britain and a bunch of throwaway client countries, murdered off anywhere between one hundred thousand and one and half million Iraqis in order to establish a weak central government with a reduced power to develop the hydrocarbon and mineral resources under its nominal control. This was accomplished by isolating the somewhat more centralized predecessor state with ten years of crippling sanctions and a cease-fire violating regime of air terror, maliciously and unironically referred to as a "No Fly Zone." When its leader failed to yield, the country was invaded, occupied and bombed with millions upon millions of pounds of explosives. As of 2005, a mere two years into this occupation, the 3rd Marine Aircraft Wing had dropped more than 500,000 tons of ordnance alone, in Iraq. That was six years ago. From a single Marine aircraft wing.
Over that nearly decade long adventure, the US and Britain conducted untold numbers of checkpoint kills, dragnets and night raids, disappearing tens of thousands of Iraqis into a global gulag. Coalition forces twice destroyed the city of Fallujah, leveled portions of Baghdad, Mosul, Basra and other cities, dismantled or destroyed the water, educational, health and transportation infrastructures, covered the countryside and the cities in uranium dust from the use and detonation of "depleted uranium" munitions, forced more than a million Iraqis (one out of every twenty persons) to flee their homes, built a network of crusader fortresses, and secured for their governments SOFA and "Strategic Framework" agreements to make the most hardened imperialist proud, giving the US near carte blanche to conduct raids, air missions and anti-terror campaigns in and over Iraq. The US and Britain also leave behind, in Iraq, a privately managed army of mercenaries, contracted to the departments of State and Defense, the Ministry of Defense, and their putative client, the Iraqi central government.
This was not a war. This was a conquest. It's still a conquest. As in, ongoing.
If you're working within the neoconservative/neoliberal war powers framework, it's even simpler. "The War" is not ending in Iraq. It's just entering a new, privatized phase, one which still guarantees profits to defense contractors and munitions manufacturers, but which leaves the current and subsequent presidential administrations the leeway to pretend they care about the concerns and sovereignty of the Iraqi client state and the citizens it claims to represent.
This is demonstrably false. The Strategic Framework Agreement foisted upon the government of Iraq not only allows US based companies to colonize the Iraqi economy, but it grants explicit permission to the government of the United States to redeploy soldiers and personnel within Iraq, with the flimsiest of "security" pretexts. US armed forces will still occupy a number of bases constructed over the last ten years, positioning them as a forward projection force for any current or future conflicts in Pakistan, Iran, Syria, Jordan, Lebanon or Afghanistan.
Which generation would that be? The one currently facing permanent structural disemployment, austerity and social triage? Or the one getting stoned, fucked up and pharmakon'd into oblivion in perhaps the only genuinely rational response to austerity, declining prospects and a governing generation self-obsessed enough to call their parents "the Greatest" and themselves the "end of history"?
No, it has not. And how do you minimize the non-existent?
That's a nifty trick, there. A little clumsy, but neat all the same. You see, progressives should celebrate that fact that they not only failed to prevent "the War," but that pretending to end it symbolically is a "critical, historic" victory. That's some funny shit.
You have to appreciate the pedestrian effort to define cynicism in puerile terms, as if Americans are somehow incapable of understanding the sentiment which is most fundamental to American politics, entertainment, education, war-making, marriage and child-rearing. And it doesn't stop there. Creamer actually proposes, one imagines with a straight face and his tongue kept between his palates, that the progressive failure to prevent or end a war is a refutation of cynicism itself, demonstrating that "ordinary people" factor into the decisions of our ruling class and its factions of elites. I don't even fucking know what to write about this, except that Creamer is a terrible propagandist, unless he's the subtlest ironic artist this side of Russell Brand's puckering starfish.
Alright, Creamer. It's just not fun, or funny, anymore. Not only has the political landscape remained a constant, despite economic flux and social disruption, but the very last movement with the potential to change that landscape with the anti-war one. Millions took to the streets, and Bush invaded Iraq anyway. Then, Americans chose Bush over Kerry. The war continued, got worse. Thousands of Iraqis died. Then tens of thousands of them. Bush, with Democratic approval, escalated US actions in Iraq and Afghanistan. Then Americans voted for Obama, who was utterly silent as Israel murdered Palestinians in Gaza with impunity. Obama took office, and almost immediately committed to dumping tens of thousands more soldiers into Afghanistan, under the command of two of the most brutal generals in the last fifty years (McChrystal and Petraeus). He forced the Iraqis to accept a humiliating framework for future economic colonization, spread the drone war to Yemen, expanded it in Pakistan and Afghanistan, gave Israel cover to prepare for renewed attacks on Iran and Lebanon and reconfirmed funding to the military junta which replaced Mubarak. He has continued his predecessor's policy of funding and arming terrorists in Iran. And he carpet bombed Libya, while providing tactical support, funding and air superiority for a cabal of women-hating racists who gun-raped Qadaffi right before they gave concessions to England, France and US based companies which will follow a fire sale of Libya's mineral, transportation, water and petroleum infrastructure to European and American firms. This is the same Obama, we should remember, whose smouldering contempt for women and their self-possession is without modern parallel in a President. The same Obama, it's worth noting, who has endorsed harsh austerity measures to compliment his Administration's efforts to force Americans into even more restrictive client to patron relationships with insurance companies, auto manufacturers, banks, prison complexes and privatized educational rackets. He is completely dedicated to not only preserving the Drug War, but expanding it and the prison industry - and he has recently promised to refrain from vetoing legislation which will put the stamp of law on the de facto militarization of law enforcement and local government.
I mean, come the fuck on, Creamer.
Or, whatever. I'm going to scrounge up some booze and celebrate the fact that it only took me three years to find a job. Which starts...
...in February.
(You can read the rest, at AOLHuffington, if you want. It's progressive dogwhistling, blaming Republicans for policies that have full Democratic support, and lionizing Obama for "fixing" Bush's mistakes. I don't have the stomach for any more of it. If you are healthy, sane, self-possessed or smart, you won't have the stomach for it either.
My apologies for the republish. Hated the original title.
Anyway, thanks for you time. Or not, ya fucking fucks.)
"Sometime in the next 15 days, the last American troops will leave Iraq -- and the War that began almost nine years ago will finally come to an end."
Of course, that really depends on what you mean by "war." If you intend a nineteenth or twentieth century definition, there was never a war in Iraq, for Obama to be able to end it. Congress declared no commencement of hostilities. The government of the nation of Iraq did not surrender. Instead, the US, along with Britain and a bunch of throwaway client countries, murdered off anywhere between one hundred thousand and one and half million Iraqis in order to establish a weak central government with a reduced power to develop the hydrocarbon and mineral resources under its nominal control. This was accomplished by isolating the somewhat more centralized predecessor state with ten years of crippling sanctions and a cease-fire violating regime of air terror, maliciously and unironically referred to as a "No Fly Zone." When its leader failed to yield, the country was invaded, occupied and bombed with millions upon millions of pounds of explosives. As of 2005, a mere two years into this occupation, the 3rd Marine Aircraft Wing had dropped more than 500,000 tons of ordnance alone, in Iraq. That was six years ago. From a single Marine aircraft wing.
Over that nearly decade long adventure, the US and Britain conducted untold numbers of checkpoint kills, dragnets and night raids, disappearing tens of thousands of Iraqis into a global gulag. Coalition forces twice destroyed the city of Fallujah, leveled portions of Baghdad, Mosul, Basra and other cities, dismantled or destroyed the water, educational, health and transportation infrastructures, covered the countryside and the cities in uranium dust from the use and detonation of "depleted uranium" munitions, forced more than a million Iraqis (one out of every twenty persons) to flee their homes, built a network of crusader fortresses, and secured for their governments SOFA and "Strategic Framework" agreements to make the most hardened imperialist proud, giving the US near carte blanche to conduct raids, air missions and anti-terror campaigns in and over Iraq. The US and Britain also leave behind, in Iraq, a privately managed army of mercenaries, contracted to the departments of State and Defense, the Ministry of Defense, and their putative client, the Iraqi central government.
This was not a war. This was a conquest. It's still a conquest. As in, ongoing.
If you're working within the neoconservative/neoliberal war powers framework, it's even simpler. "The War" is not ending in Iraq. It's just entering a new, privatized phase, one which still guarantees profits to defense contractors and munitions manufacturers, but which leaves the current and subsequent presidential administrations the leeway to pretend they care about the concerns and sovereignty of the Iraqi client state and the citizens it claims to represent.
"Today, President Obama addresses some of those returning troops at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. The big difference between those troops and many others who have returned from the War in Iraq, is that none of them will be deployed on yet another tour to Mosul or Kirkuk or Baghdad -- or any of the other Iraqi cities that became so familiar to Americans over the last decade."
This is demonstrably false. The Strategic Framework Agreement foisted upon the government of Iraq not only allows US based companies to colonize the Iraqi economy, but it grants explicit permission to the government of the United States to redeploy soldiers and personnel within Iraq, with the flimsiest of "security" pretexts. US armed forces will still occupy a number of bases constructed over the last ten years, positioning them as a forward projection force for any current or future conflicts in Pakistan, Iran, Syria, Jordan, Lebanon or Afghanistan.
"The end of the War in Iraq is a major event in American history, since in many ways, that War was the defining historic event for an entire generation of Americans."
Which generation would that be? The one currently facing permanent structural disemployment, austerity and social triage? Or the one getting stoned, fucked up and pharmakon'd into oblivion in perhaps the only genuinely rational response to austerity, declining prospects and a governing generation self-obsessed enough to call their parents "the Greatest" and themselves the "end of history"?
"There are those who would minimize the importance of the final withdrawal of our troops from Iraq by pointing to the unfinished business of the War in Afghanistan, or the use of civilian contractors. Those are important issues, but they should not diminish the extraordinary significance of the fact that the Iraq War has come to an end."
No, it has not. And how do you minimize the non-existent?
"Most importantly, Progressives -- and all of those who fought for a decade to prevent and then to end the Iraq War -- should take a moment to celebrate the fact that they have won a critical, historic battle."
That's a nifty trick, there. A little clumsy, but neat all the same. You see, progressives should celebrate that fact that they not only failed to prevent "the War," but that pretending to end it symbolically is a "critical, historic" victory. That's some funny shit.
"There is a lot of cynicism in America -- a sense that it doesn't matter what you do -- that ordinary people can't really have an impact on the big decisions and big institutions of our society. The end of the War in Iraq shows that the cynics are wrong. "
You have to appreciate the pedestrian effort to define cynicism in puerile terms, as if Americans are somehow incapable of understanding the sentiment which is most fundamental to American politics, entertainment, education, war-making, marriage and child-rearing. And it doesn't stop there. Creamer actually proposes, one imagines with a straight face and his tongue kept between his palates, that the progressive failure to prevent or end a war is a refutation of cynicism itself, demonstrating that "ordinary people" factor into the decisions of our ruling class and its factions of elites. I don't even fucking know what to write about this, except that Creamer is a terrible propagandist, unless he's the subtlest ironic artist this side of Russell Brand's puckering starfish.
"What began in 2002 as an effort to avert the war in Iraq, grew to a chorus of millions who changed the political landscape and who kept fighting until all of our troops came home. That movement elected a president who promised to end the war -- a president who this week has kept that promise."
Alright, Creamer. It's just not fun, or funny, anymore. Not only has the political landscape remained a constant, despite economic flux and social disruption, but the very last movement with the potential to change that landscape with the anti-war one. Millions took to the streets, and Bush invaded Iraq anyway. Then, Americans chose Bush over Kerry. The war continued, got worse. Thousands of Iraqis died. Then tens of thousands of them. Bush, with Democratic approval, escalated US actions in Iraq and Afghanistan. Then Americans voted for Obama, who was utterly silent as Israel murdered Palestinians in Gaza with impunity. Obama took office, and almost immediately committed to dumping tens of thousands more soldiers into Afghanistan, under the command of two of the most brutal generals in the last fifty years (McChrystal and Petraeus). He forced the Iraqis to accept a humiliating framework for future economic colonization, spread the drone war to Yemen, expanded it in Pakistan and Afghanistan, gave Israel cover to prepare for renewed attacks on Iran and Lebanon and reconfirmed funding to the military junta which replaced Mubarak. He has continued his predecessor's policy of funding and arming terrorists in Iran. And he carpet bombed Libya, while providing tactical support, funding and air superiority for a cabal of women-hating racists who gun-raped Qadaffi right before they gave concessions to England, France and US based companies which will follow a fire sale of Libya's mineral, transportation, water and petroleum infrastructure to European and American firms. This is the same Obama, we should remember, whose smouldering contempt for women and their self-possession is without modern parallel in a President. The same Obama, it's worth noting, who has endorsed harsh austerity measures to compliment his Administration's efforts to force Americans into even more restrictive client to patron relationships with insurance companies, auto manufacturers, banks, prison complexes and privatized educational rackets. He is completely dedicated to not only preserving the Drug War, but expanding it and the prison industry - and he has recently promised to refrain from vetoing legislation which will put the stamp of law on the de facto militarization of law enforcement and local government.
I mean, come the fuck on, Creamer.
Or, whatever. I'm going to scrounge up some booze and celebrate the fact that it only took me three years to find a job. Which starts...
...in February.
(You can read the rest, at AOLHuffington, if you want. It's progressive dogwhistling, blaming Republicans for policies that have full Democratic support, and lionizing Obama for "fixing" Bush's mistakes. I don't have the stomach for any more of it. If you are healthy, sane, self-possessed or smart, you won't have the stomach for it either.
My apologies for the republish. Hated the original title.
Anyway, thanks for you time. Or not, ya fucking fucks.)
Dec 12, 2011
Kayfabe
When members of the middle class protest and tamely express dissatisfaction within the bounds of polite society, it’s munificently treated as discontent, for a while. When the poor and working poor do it*, it gets added to the FBI’s database of statistics about crime.
(vainly quoting my own self)
* - more practically and with a better attempts to results ratio, I might add...
(vainly quoting my own self)
* - more practically and with a better attempts to results ratio, I might add...
Dec 11, 2011
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