"...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

Sep 11, 2011

Commemoration


...on the day in question, I was a member of the New England Confederation. Three days later, we no longer existed as an active organization. No one thought our non-violence manifesto - the Lowell Declaration - would protect us against the assumed coming dragnet. Non-violence didn't protect New York cabbies, or anti-war grannies. It didn't take a genius to foresee how the federal State would use the toppled towers to get itself some more "sweeping powers." So we rolled up shop, in spite of growing interest in our aims (the secession of the six New England States), especially in New Hampshire, Vermont, Western Massachusetts, Adirondack New York and Maine. Since then, the rump of the NEC has been given a half undeath by glibertarians and free-staters, but the original NEC had a strong leftist contingent, to which tendency I was drawn, in spite of just wrapping up my last major Republican campaign.

It would be untrue to say that I miss the NEC. We really didn't have the cache, organization, popular support or loot necessary to make real our secessionist fantasies.  But, we were always getting inquiries. Even from Massachusetts. We were a barometer placed in a neglected field, or some shit.

I don't recall any of the NEC members who wanted to be part of that barometer when it was stepped on and broken up into little bits. The fear was appropriate. Osama bin Laden wasn't turning airplanes into piloted missiles on account of us, but the federal police weren't known for caring, or for making the sort of distinctions which separate pacifist separatists from Salafi suicide kings.

Nein Eleven didn't change human behaviors. It didn't alter American discontent with the feds, or American naivete with regard to the suffering of the billions of people who aren't Americans. It didn't kill the bootstrapper mythos, or provoke a crisis in labor. It didn't create unity ponies, or expose new divides in the so-called body politic. It was just a grand scale murder used as a pretext for a war that both Republicans and Democrats were already in agreement upon, anyway.

The best way to commemorate that, in my humble estimation, is to recognize, in body and voice, that the time for fear and a rational cowardice has passed. The pretext was given. The advantages taken. Our lords and masters have spent a decade accelerating their theft of the Commons we made, doing murder in our names, and much worse, under the cover of a false explanation, and a reasonable fear of their power. It has to stop.

It's time to give Republicans, Democrats, rich people, federal cops, local poombahs, and anyone else who knowingly benefits from imperial machine a reason to lose sleep at night.

Well, maybe not just a single reason.

More like - millions of them...

10 comments:

JM said...

Why exactly would you want secession?

Jack Crow said...

I'm sort of baffled by the question, JM. Why wouldn't I?

Randal Graves said...

I hope the giant flags for the 20th anniversary don't just cover the field, but the entire stadium, really show 'em who's boss.

Jack Crow said...

Right at to the edges of the parking lots, Randal. Anything short of that would be promoting Shariah.

fish said...

A whole stadium chanting USA USA was not enough for me to want the Jets to win. Which put me in the very odd position of wanting to root for the Cowboys. I am pretty sure I don't ever want to hear that New York song again though.

Jack Crow said...

You didn't enjoy the little kids being manipulated into marching under flags so that Verizon could "memorialize" Nein Eleven, fish? S'wrong with you?

fish said...

By Spike Lee of all people. Do the Right Thing just a distant memory.

Devin Lenda said...

I live in Japan so only had to deal with it via internet, so this was my nine eleven:

I posted lowkey's Cradle of Civilization (on Iraqi suffering) with the tag, "beautiful homage to the victims of terror" or something, 0 likes, 0 comments.

A facebook friend wrote this:

"i find it crazy that horses can be trained to bow ....yet people still do not take off their hats/ or stand for our national anthem...WTF?!?!?!? I'd rather sit next to horse than a JACKASS!!!! just sayin'"

9 likes.

Jack Crow said...

Christ, Spike Lee directed that, fish? Mincia.

Devin,

I would like to be surprised, but I'm not. We were at one of those dollar store bargain outlets yesterday and I muttered under my breath "oh, fuck, shut up already" in response to a mealy platitude muttered by the radio DJ being piped into the store, between soft rock suicide songs.

An older woman shot me eyeball death daggers, then followed me around for about ten minutes, clucking her tongue, until reunited with a man I'm assuming was her husband. She said something to him, and then the two of them shot me eyeball death daggers in tandem for another minute or so.

Devin Lenda said...

It's a rare, excellent person who chooses that path where he knows the eyeball death daggers fly. Interestingly, he may choose it because the other path is too humiliating.