Faithless Mosquitoes Fail To Answer Prayer

Seems that a certain prayer to the Furies has come up short, and Georgio le Clooney is still using his acting talents to shill (perhaps inadvertently) for the eventual NATO militarization of the Sudan.

I won't dispute for a moment that Georgio is a fine actor with a repertoire of decent to good films behind him and to his credit. He may even mean well.

But.

And it's a big "but."

The whole damned point of the Darfur/Sudan Crisis/Humanitarian Problem narrative is to fuck up the Sudan, bad, in order to fuck up Chinese state oil concessions in that country. Like nearly every other "humanitarian" dog whistle currently piercing ear drums and agitating loyal puppies - and you should check out For Want of A Nail on a related issue - what's going down in the Sudan was (a) manufactured by England, Israel and the US for (b) the sake of destabilizing the government* in Khartoum.

Let's revisit the background, again:

"...With foreign exchange reserves exceeding $1.3 trillion in the Peoples' National Bank of China , Beijing has begun engaging in active petroleum geopolitics with Africa as its main target and the Sudan-Chad region as its highest priority region on the continent. There appeared the line "a new front in the cold war" for possession of the main oil reserves—a war begun between the United States and China right after the American invasion of Iraq in 2003. So far, Beijing has played its cards more effectively than Washington . It is possible that Darfur will soon become the main field of battle for oil between the two giants.

Over the past few months, China has made a series of initiatives aimed at retaining control of the oil fields, even those that will be developed in the distant future, in one of the richest "black gold" regions in the world—the African continent.

China currently imports 30% of its crude oil from Africa . This explains the jump in Chinese foreign policy initiatives, which cannot fail to displease Washington . China provides interest-free loans to African nations, including Sudan , and uses its own funds to build roads, schools and hospitals, while the United States attempts to control the African economy through the World Bank and the IMF by setting harsh economic and political conditions. Not surprisingly, the Africans prefer to cooperate with China . In addition, whereas any American project in the field of construction, mining or production involves a long preparatory stage for infrastructure development to build restaurants and bars, schools and hospitals, hair salons and fitness centers for American workers, specialists and their family members, the unpretentious Chinese put up tents when they arrive and set to work the next day while establishing everything they need concurrently—barracks with showers and canteens..."

'The Chinese got an oil concession from the degraded Sudanese state, which state desperately needed the dough after it was drawn to a standstill in a ten year religious-civil war with UK-US backed rebels ruled by a vicious dictator.

Then, new rebels based in Tchad, using (surprise, surprise) US-EU backing, kicked up a fight right in the heart of the territory in which Khartoum had recently granted concessions to Beijing.'

So, when Georgio gets himself arrested to draw attention to the so-called plight of the Sudan, he's not doing the Sudanese people any favors. And assuming that he means well, which he probably does so in the same way that all square jawed handsome hams do, with their eyes on a lady prize, he still went and said this following that arrest:

"The goal for today is the same goal its been all along and will continue to be and not be accomplished today or anytime in the near future, but it's a job that we have to continually do which is raise attention; protest the idea of a government attacking and killing its own innocent men, women and children and allowing aid to get in now because in the next few months it could be the greatest humanitarian crisis in the world and thats the important thing."

Which, if it is really his concern to point out, I mean - c'mon Georgio, there are hundreds of prisons in the US where a government eats its own for profit and fun.

That's the point of government, Georgie Boy - to fuck people up long and hard enough that they think twice about complaining or making trouble for the dudes who've got the lawyers, guns and money. Governments eat their own. Capitalist ones. Marxist ones. Fabian socialist states. Corporate boards. All hierarchies. They exists to facilitate the consumption of the raw material of human lives in order to produce from those expended existences the limited issue, artificially rare luxury and enjoyment of the wealthy and their staffers.

And you should know that by now, Georgio.  Really, you should.


* - as a rule, destabilized governments serve human liberty; in the particular, not when its the great powers doing it to small powers in order to get at their stuff with greater future ease...

Broadcast Cares

Wife puts on the telly to catch the weather in the morning. That means a local ABC affiliate bleats its mindless blather into our otherwise...familial haven. We all have our vices. I read science fiction and fantasy, she cares about the weather.

Yesterday, unfortunately, we also ended up having this inflicted upon us, after the local weather flipped back over to the cow-farting noises which comprise the majority of Good Morning America's version of asinine badinage:



In case you were smart or clever enough to resist the lure of the merely foolish, and restrained yourself from clicking the "play" tab, the above is two minutes and fifty-two seconds of strained verbiage and breathless warning. GMA is worried for you, and for your children, and for the health problems caused by your endless capacity for stupidity.

A great danger has gone viral into the world.

No, it's not one of the biological nightmares cooked up by the Army at Fort Detrick. And it's not a video of Obammy getting a well earned strychnine pie in the eye, damn it.

It's the "cinnamon challenge." If you're wondering what that is - and you're not, because you're reading this blog, and clearly do not have better things to do with your time - watch the video. It's frightening. Shocking. Unseemly, even.

Youngish humans are filming themselves attempting to hold a spoonful of cinnamon in their mouths, for some number of seconds. It's turrible, I know. Dangerous. Stupid. The folly of the human condition, and all that.

Thankfully, we've got the balloon heads at GMA on the look out.

It almost reminds me of the time and effort they took to produce this segment on the dangers attendant upon signing the dotted line on the recruitment papers for the Army, the Air Force, the Navy or the Marines:

Arizona is where the batshit crazy takes a policy form

"A proposed new law in Arizona would give employers the power to request that women being prescribed birth control pills provide proof that they're using it for non-sexual reasons. And because Arizona's an at-will employment state, that means that bosses critical of their female employees' sex lives could fire them as a result."

Read the rest at Jezebel.

And by the by, this is what happens when "religious freedom" and "freedom of worship" become "freedom to impose god-sot Christianity on everyone"...again.

Problem with Christianity - and this is same as it ever was - is that it's got the original corporate poison pill embedded in its dogma and body politic: persecution. Tell a member of that cult of the sacred execution, "no," and he's got a new mission from Bog and his creepy, lurking motherfucker sidekick, the Holy Smoke.

Toxin and Antidote

Being raised as an ordinary working American is like being slipped a powerful but slow acting toxin, to which there is a common antidote. Sadly for the ordinary American, that antidote is a controlled substance, and is maintained in artificially short supply. And there are rules attached to its distribution, chief among them that an ordinary person must put in four to six decades of work in order to prove worthy to receive it. By the end of that period of time, the regular ills associated with staying in place, overworking a body evolved to wander, eating poorly, caring for one's own toxified children and taking meager entertainment have caught up with all but the worst of the allegedly best and brightest. And the distributors of the antidote, being frugal sorts when it comes to other people's existences, decide instead to find worthier recipients, leaving the strugglers and just barely survivors to find less effective amelioration for their poisoning.

The blind-violence of pacifism

I survived child molestation, severe and seemingly unending abuse, rape, being locked in closets and tied to ground for days on end, group homes, youth detention centers, involuntary commitment, foster care and being a ward of the State. I came out with strong views about what being passive, peaceful, pacifist and non-violent will get a person.

The first time I listened to a rape from across the group home sleeping hall, I had to choose between helping a person whose face I couldn't see, and getting a beating so bad I'd not only get punished for bringing attention to the house, but for costing the budget for my hospital care. I didn't exactly see it in those terms, at age fourteen, but I knew getting heroic wasn't going to earn the affection of the house staff. Or the raping rapist fuckers.

So, I chose to turn over and "ignore it," like all the other small kids who hadn't fully learned what it meant to be mean, self-reliant and vicious-as-a-defense. (I got there quick enough.) That was hard to abide in one's own self. The memory still cuts, and I'm not that boy anymore. Turning the other cheek was rational. It preserved my relative well being. But, it perpetuated the local system. Fucking hell, it did.

Anyway, I came up with a clear enough view of human depravity, cowardice and self-preservation. And of what and how much it takes to make the depraved suffer enough that they re-learn their essential cowardice. Those who've formalized their cruelty panic when it becomes personal, again. They lose their grip, because the grip has got them in its embrace. It's civilization itself, and it soothes and coaxes and coddles those who enforce its dicta.

The minority* of white, comfortable motherfuckers with vacation homes and private land lecturing the victims, the poor, the damaged, the abused, the raped, the herded, the harassed, the imprisoned, the exploited, the evicted, the institutionalized, the penalized and the discarded on what are and are not appropriate responses to victimization - that shit is rich. Literally. It takes a comparatively rich motherfucker to confuse the play-acting, submission rituals and lying of "civilized" society with any end to institutional depravity, inequity and the hierarchies which profit from the same.

You stop it by finishing off the people doing it and living off the proceeds of human suffering. You do the work, and leave it done and behind you.

And I say it's blind-violent to suggest otherwise. Pacifism is violence, itself. It's violence maintained by the posture of self-congratulation and ostrich avoidance, leaving the actual labor of resistance to people who can stand the smell of shit, usually because they've had their whole lives rubbed into the sewage of human cruelty. It's the privilege of the over spiritualized and the self-absorbed, lording over the victims of the system itself; a system which produces the safe protest as a distraction. A system which breaks a body down into persona and parts, and leaves the ghost of passion's disappearance behind as added insult, as the reminder of defeat.

It's the screechy embarrassment, this cluck-clucking faith of the fattened calf, at the refusal of the damned to learn its strictures and superstitions, to accommodate themselves to the small comfort of a moral superiority, in lieu of the materiality of a satisfying vengeance.

It's a preservative, this pacifism. It guarantees that those who feel strongly act weakly. That they codify cowardice into a prescription for self-regard. It negates rage. It mollifies hatred.

And leaves certain that those who do the worst suffer the least.


* - globally; most people lack the "civilized" self-deceptions about "civilized" goodness, talky-preachy pacifism, or the effectiveness of "witnessing for the truth" and other sentimental pap

Not 'blind violent,' but somewhere the other side of arson...

"Genuine Negro Jig," The Carolina Chocolate Drops



"Violence of the Sun," Wolfmother



"Folklore," Opeth



"Huma Bird," The Buffalo Killers



"Warpainting," The Myrrors



"Burning Mirrors," Lumerians



"Nothing Like You," Spiders



"White Hidden Fire," Weird Owl



"Let It Ride," The Buffalo Killers

Burn 'em all...

...every college, university, prep school, public school, voc-tech and kaplan learning center. All of 'em. To the ground. Or, more. And, worse. Then, remove any remaining top soil or greenery and give it to whoever wants it, so long as they have neither property and deed nor claim to any private land.

After, salt the ground what remains.

If you're interested in liberty, and freedom and the end of larger hierarchies, that is. Because school is Enclosure. It's literally enclosed space, from which the majority are excluded, regardless of rhetoric to the contrary. And as with other common human endeavors, discoveries and creations taken and captured into the folds of merit society, learning and education have been lifted up and out of the body of people and set aside as private enclaves or bureaucratic fiefdoms. School is how cruelty is commoditized in the flesh of its victims.

School is also where the tyrannies of the family are expanded and reinforced into the obedience routines of the citizen, soldier, shop-keep and employee.

It's how we are trained to separate into leaders and led. It's how the form of power perpetuates.

And don't get all nit-fucking-picky about your corner of academia, or cry "anti-intellectualism" or the rest of that wasted breath and finger clacking. The flame ain't intended for learning and figuring things out. It doesn't burn knowledge, or prevent its diffusion;  it doesn't obstruct the joy of a new thing, newly discovered.

It ought burn for the Enclosure itself, for the Enclosed space, where the mind is monetized and curiosity comes with a price tag.

If you don't like it, you know how your bread is buttered. And that you're an adversary and enemy of human freedom, of an easier life for everyone, of any honest effort to counter-act the vile things that men do and teach to their children.  Any of the other notions you've got in your head about how you're on the side of the good guys, angels and white witches of a better tomorrow are lies if you "but, but.." the prospect of the torch put to academia. To the entirety of it, from the shittiest community college to the lab rooms of Johns Hopkins and the whole of fucking Yale.

And you can finally dispense with the self-deception about what kind of people you produce and who they'll end up serving. You can get on with your other compromises. You can mutter, "fuck it, I'm one of the bad guys," with good conscience and a surety of reward for taking your place and rank in the merit world. You can congratulate yourself that you don't hate the gays out loud or think "fucking nigger" the next time a black kid cuts you off on the way to work. You can give yourself a medal for not making a crude remark to the receptionist. Because that'll be all you've got: a veneer of toleration with which to comfort your guileless guilt, while you take a paycheck to break children and teenagers down further into objects and their future owners.

Otherwise, there's so much that is flammable.

Tornadoes in the Holy Land

Of course Putin rigged the elections. He's just more forthright about his shenanigans than the Republican-Democrats, who rig elections with "viability" and money, and all towards the same end, but haven't the decency to be equal to their actions.

Of course, Netanyahu's government is going to wait until the Obama Administration signs off on air strikes. There is so little difference between Israeli and American policy, you couldn't squeeze a molecule's width of ass gas between them. Tuesday's meeting has fuck all to do with restraining Israel. It's a matter of the kayfabe.

Of course, Rush Limbaugh is a misogynist pig-fucking geek hopped up on the power of self-regard and opportunist advertising. And? How is he different from Anthony Weiner, exactly?

Of course, the Shawnee, the Tsalagi, the Fox, the Chickasaw, the Choctaw, the Caddo, Kiowa, Osage and Pawnee peoples built scores upon scores of prefab housing towns on the open plains with no expectation that tornadoes might despoil the sky god's virgin paradise...

The dead have no victories and the hangman is a friend.

The dead have no victories. The dead do not triumph: not in war, not in resistance, not in peace, not in memory.

First, our memories are lies. Memory is, itself, the first ground of deception. Think of all the times you were wrong about what you remember. You saw a red shirt in your mind, draped over the frame of a friend, cast in the light of a treasured recollection. You know it to be true. You remember it. And then, maybe only days later, you hold a photo in your hand. In it, she wears green.

Or - in the passing of breath and conversation, each person captured in the amber of her own memory retells a shared experience, differently. The details emerge, and they do not agree.

How memory flatters, or torments, or tempts us to believe what we cannot verify.

Second, our memories are truths. They are the truth not of fact, but of our faith in tomorrows. This isn't a fault. Only a fool would lay blame, here. We are formed by others, by pains and pleasures, by fears and desires, many years before memory bubbles up and percolates into the illusions of self. We are made long before we become makers. The self, caged as it is always in memory's prison, is first and last a tall tale. A story. We suffer this disorder. We revel in it. It defines even our boredom. The range of possibilities, the shapes of selfhood, cannot be cataloged. Self varies, with mood, with digestion, with shitting and farting and sleep; but character, that vicious slaver, conceals this variance in the habits of obedience and belief. We are never constant. But memory, and its capo, character, would have their prisoner believe otherwise. They trick awareness into breaking with its senses, inventing a self who lasts. The experience of self is the story of an escape which will never happen. It is the flight into an ever receding tomorrow. Like other lies - history, religion, law.

The living victors would have us believe otherwise, of course. They would have us believe in our selves to the point of obsession, cultivating a society wide disorder of the single personality. A plague, an affliction, and thing which has no age, and is always aging.

Epoch and place vary, and our million million selves come and go. Most of us know nothing of the soil beneath our feet, the lifetime of an ant or worm, or the history of a square foot of air. We know nothing, and that leaves us free to observe. That could be enough, but it's not. A people without the curse of character and obedience - how do you rule them? How do you raise a child into a boy into a man who will congratulate himself as he takes a voluntary step towards his own planned participation in the mass execution of war?  How do you thwart a child into being a girl into becoming a woman who knows by twenty that she has a place, and a thousand reasons to trust her fears, and a hundred times as many shapes she should never, ever be?

How do rule? You deny. You forbid. And then you punish. After punishment, not being punished is as good as a reward. It works on those who are clever or stupid enough to avoid the whip. It works, eventually, on the whipped themselves.

And in being ruled in the petty tyrannies of family, in the school house and the workplace, we are shaped into singular and collective acts of deception; into pack animals with a faith in the tomorrow told tales of our invented pasts.

The human is inconstancy and inconsistency. Our obedience is not. Obedience follows the infliction of harm upon memory, until memory lies and its invention, the self, believes it.

The cults of the sacrificed dead are not inconstant. They are firm faiths, clear in doctrine, deliberate in worship, unflinching in punishment, generous in the promise of reward. Consistency is their hallmark. It is their brand mark, as well.

The dead lose everything. They lose even the scars burned into memory. They become, instead, glyphs and cyphers for the living. And the living victors make use.

The living victors - you know them because victory habituates them to the giving of orders and the taking of spoils, because they rule you in small and large ways - enshrine the dead: as reminders, as testaments to their control of shared memory, as icons for adoration and obstructions to liberation.

It isn't nothing that across time and place, spanning the palimpsest sprawl of history's scribbles, those who rule depend upon death, and upon the memory of the dead. Death, as defeat. Death, as surrender. Dying, as the fearful passage into oblivion. Oblivion, as punishment, the black shrouded scourge who hounds the self into its final corner.

The body dies, and for the foreseeable future, all bodies perish. But death also kills the fiction, the self-affliction. And in that awareness, a liberation which is neither flight nor the maddened rush into the walls of our cages. This single personality, this cultivated disorder, this colonization of the accident of memory which believes, and obeys, and marches off to war, and tortures itself into clothing, and approved shapes, and behaviors - it can die at any time, and the body can go on living, aware, enjoying, suffering and shitting and fucking and getting through the day and into tomorrow.

And then, well, the living have no victories. And those who would rule will find they can only order their own twisted husks of memory around, or march off into battles with the ghosts of heroes who never were, never are, and never could be again.

That doesn't stave off dying, prevent illness, negate dread. Shrugging off the single personality disorder doesn't make the nerves immune to pain, or the heart to longing. It won't erase jealousy or any other venality which keeps us interesting. But, it's a first step among many towards a world that's not just easy for everyone, but maybe even half the time, one worth inhabiting.

And all we have to do, in our own individual moments, is walk up the gallows step, greet the hangman with a smile, slip into the noose...and leap. After that, nothing. And everything.

And the world to take back...

Reich's Fail

Robert Reich: "A party of birthers, creationists, theocrats, climate-change deniers, nativists, gay-bashers, anti-abortionists, media paranoids, anti-intellectuals, and out-of-touch country clubbers cannot govern America."

Me: When haven't they?

Translation

"Israeli officials say they won't warn the U.S. if they decide to launch a pre-emptive strike against Iranian nuclear facilities, according to one U.S. intelligence official familiar with the discussions. The pronouncement, delivered in a series of private, top-level conversations, sets a tense tone ahead of meetings in the coming days at the White House and Capitol Hill.

Israeli officials said that if they eventually decide a strike is necessary, they would keep the Americans in the dark to decrease the likelihood that the U.S. would be held responsible for failing to stop Israel's potential attack. The U.S. has been working with the Israelis for months to persuade them that an attack would be only a temporary setback to Iran's nuclear program."

Source.

Translation:

"Bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit.

Bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit."

The "US" is responsible for every decision made by Israeli leaders, in the same way that the head of an organized crime family is responsible for the orders given to his underbosses. Without the head of the racket, there is no underling whose actions can "distance" the boss from the deed itself.

If the leadership of the Israeli suicide cult state starts a war with Iran, wager every dollar you have on the solid bet that Washington has given its approval, its marching orders and its imprimatur to the wholly owned subsidiary that is Israel.

Program Note

If you are kind enough to read me from time to time, I'm all sorts of appreciative. That I'm not the most original, best educated, or thorough thinker should go without note, but I have the vanity of a self-deprecating nature, and would like to note it anyway. Which is kind of a segue towards a complaint with Blogger. I like blogrolls. Diverse, unwieldy lists of people who have more interesting things to write than I, and who do it with less bravado and fewer instances of cultivated ignorance. Unfortunately, Blogger no longer allows me to update or add to the roll to the right of this page. So, I've been adding new blogs to the "Read" column to the left, where I've traditionally placed blogs that Blogger refuses to recognize as self-updating. There are any number of writers, observers and thinkers there worth your while. Please give them a look.

Thanks,

Jack

Monsieur

IOZ hardly needs a link from me, but I'm compelled to nod it off anyway:

http://whoisioz.blogspot.com/2012/02/diving-into-dreck.html

Added in Edit:

Commenting upon IOZ's post linked above is Philboyd, who has a corollary formula which really resonates, and which I believe states with elegant brevity a position which is often difficult to understand, especially for those of us with the imperium and auctoritas of acculturated dudeliness:

Every piece of subtle macho posturing, every little joking intimidation would not work without the accepted social position of men as powerful studs who take what they want. Likewise, that accepted social position would not make sense without the awful prevalence of men raping women. Here, maybe, is a radfem twist: even if you don't posture, even if you try to repudiate the idea of a strong, rape-y man, your interactions with women still rest on a foundation of rape - just as a policeman who tries really hard not to use his nightstick still interacts with people on a foundation of violence.  In our society, that's what a policeman is.

Source.

I don't believe this is easy for most of us men to understand. I certainly have had difficulty appreciating what it means to live as woman within the confines of a society which authorizes abuse of women as a norm, sexualizes it as entertainment, and politicizes it as a natural order of things.

Trinities

So Jesus and his self-brother, the Spirit, don't give Catholics glossolalia and the shivvy-shakes. Neither do they do the crackers into flesh and cooking sherry into blood magic for Assembly of God pentecostals. God is not an ecumenicist.

Neither is the State. Or the Market.

All three are royal fictions. And each, despite the rhetoric of universalism and transcendence offered by their devotees, is employed to sunder.

Anarchist

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.

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.

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/

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...

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?

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...

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."