"...it's not the training to be mean but the training to be kind that is used to keep us leashed best." ~ Black Dog Red

"In case you haven't recognized the trend: it proceeds action, dissent, speech." ~ davidly, on how wars get done

"...What sort of meager, unerotic existence must a man live to find himself moved to such ecstatic heights by the mundane sniping of a congressional budget fight. The fate of human existence does not hang in the balance. The gods are not arrayed on either side. Poseiden, earth-shaker, has regrettably set his sights on the poor fishermen of northern Japan and not on Washington, D.C. where his ire might do some good--I can think of no better spot for a little wetland reclamation project, if you know what I mean. The fight is neither revolution nor apocalypse; it is hardly even a fight. A lot of apparatchiks are moving a lot of phony numbers with more zeros than a century of soccer scores around, weaving a brittle chrysalis around a gross worm that, some time hence, will emerge, untransformed, still a worm." ~ IOZ

Jan 27, 2011

Again, we who have too much have been shamed by those who have next to nothing. A people, we have been told for decades, who "cannot handle" self-reliance and liberty have shown us once more and yet again that in the face of real and actual repressive violence, against the interests of their own states, against the military interest of the American imperium which funds their repressive governments, against the mediation and degradation of global capital, with a hunger that indicts us for the fat of the land we wear beneath our dress, they have the quality and caliber of spirit and courage to resist in the flesh that which we can barely consume in image.

And any one of us who cannot be overcome by these facts, and laid low in the right judgment of self, deserves to bear alone the full onus of the great dying we have inflicted upon the world. A world order of death we do not resist. A world order we make, in our complacency and subservience.

A world fought, yet again, by our victims - and against the weight of an order which struggles to abandon them, to make permanent their obsolescence, to starve them into submission before it bombs them into oblivion, they have risen up. While we wait, the lot of us, to watch the images of their defeat, before we return to our sovereign, isolated petty kingdoms of excess and gluttony.

While we no longer even know how to ask, "What is to be done?..."