Feast Day

Was going to write another one of those serious posts. Will later. Let my inner discordian out, instead. Because I just finished reading another screechy foray into lightworker heroism.

Fucking heroes.

Does anyone, anywhere, anywhen actually enjoy the company of a fucking hero? (And by "anyone," I don't mean the rest of yon lightworking, do-gooding, democratizing tetchers busy grumbling about the kids on the lawn.) Fucking reflected glory all getting in your eyes. Who needs that shit?

Anyway.

I'd like to introduce you to a not-hero of mine. Today is his feast day, though you probably didn't know it until right now. Today, the ninth of November, we commemorate - nay, we celebrate - the memory of an accidental friend of human liberty.

He was not, in keeping with the theme of things, a good man. But you can't trust good men. They're always trying to fix people. And, their loathing for dark corners, cobwebs, dust bunnies and frailty is frightening, when you really get down to it. Scratch away at the chrome what coats a good man's life, and underneath you'll almost always discover a violator.

Not the window breaking teenager who scares good capitalists pretending to be radicals because she rejects their greedy ownership of consensus. I mean, the maximalist kind. The totalizers. The fuckers with systems, a list of proscriptions, a book of prescriptions, and a sippy cup of moraline always in grasping, clutching hand.

A good man is always a rapist in the waiting. He wants penetrating insights. He wants you to have 'em as well. He wants to penetrate your life and fill you up with the holy semen of his enlightenment. He wants to spear you with the truth. He wants to lance the very flesh of history with his righteousness.

No. You can't really trust good men, can you? Especially the ones with who come with tablets of the law and other systems.

Hmph.

Today is not the feast day of a good man. He was better than that, though we should be clear that he was not an improvement.

Today, we commemorate a friend of the despised, the trod upon and the forgotten. It's just too bad that there weren't more of him. One of them might have got to Johnson, as well. Or Kissinger. It's all good. We don't have to be choosy. We can indulge ourselves with an expansive amenability.

It's a feast day, don't you know?

And since this is not a day dedicated to one of the thousand and one faces of sky-god, cattle king, serpent* killing Dyeus Piter - lord of the holy rape and the lightning penetration - you can do whatever you want. Whatever. As in, anything. Your level worst, if you've got it in you. I recommend the strategic placement of aerosol dispersing canisters of sheep urine in your local financial district, timed to produce maximum mist during the lunch hour. Or, lacking that concentration of brokers and bankers, there's always the option of redecorating an executive's prized automobile with a mixture of bovine placental ejecta and gumdrops. There are so many possibilities, we're dealing with chaos here.

It's up to you.

If you can spare a moment, maybe during a sales projections meeting, or when the drive through car line is at it's noontime longest, or at the exact moment your boss is about to ask you to stay on after your scheduled shift ends, or whilst being lectured on productivity goals, or as your human resources rep is about to have you sign off on the latest revised conduct policy, remember to say, in whatever tone, and with whatever volume suits you and the moment best, "Thank Oswald!"

Because, really, thank Oswald. A truer friend of the dispossessed than a hundred hundred workers in light...

* - woman, natch

Gate, Kept

It's healthy, I think, to resist the urge to prescribe for the various "Occupy" groups a formal or universal method in dealing with their circumstances, especially when done from a distance, or remove.

It is perhaps as vital to avoid treating the various Occupations as if they were related expressions of a coherent, organized, national movement.

In Oakland, the people associated with the "Occupy" name have coordinated with local longshoremen to call for and attempt to organize strikes, port shutdowns, obstructions of shipping and work stoppages. Others in the Oakland group have helped a homeless assistance organization in occupying vacant tenements, as well as come to the aid of a local homeless squat which was under police assault.

In New York, where it all started, but where there is also an extraordinary concentration of wealth, media influence and attention, they have drumming circles and visits from famous people alongside efforts to hold Zuccotti park, resist pressure from the city and police, and avoid co-option.

Occupy is, significantly, an urban phenomenon, and its various groups respond differently to their local circumstances, and to constraints of official austerity and economic contraction. In New York, where the national news organizations are headquartered, Occupy Wall Street's participants' methods reflect both the scrutiny of that media, and the response to its ubiquity. New York City is a metropolis in the camera's eye. And for all that is the center of the media and banking universe, the original Occupy group's main function is largely to symbolize a refusal to adhere to the financial order which has impoverished not only North America, but the world. New York's Occupiers are reduced, if you will, to making their case to hostile cameras, and the cold concrete and steel curtain of Manhattan's financial district. Tucked in an obscure park, largely unknown to the world until early autumn of 2011, Occupy Wall Street's basic mode of resistance is persistence.

Any plan to organize for or attempt sabotage, violent resistance or spontaneous strikes, there at the beating poisoned heart of the world's financial leviathan, would condemn the New York Occupiers to summary judgment, and along with them, most of the others around the country associated in name. It would, from a tactical perspective, give New York City's police and government, the State of New York and the Obama Justice Department the pretext for treating with Occupy as if it were the New Black Panthers.

But, these same conditions do not automatically obtain for the Occupants in Oakland, Atlanta, Detroit, Chicago or the smaller cities which have manifested visible resistance to austerity, financial abuses and state policy. And they certainly do not apply to those regions where Occupy groups can not take hold, especially in small communities and rural environments dominated by strong county and municipal structures, lower population concentration and police who are generally unsullied by the taint of abuse common to larger urban police forces.

There are, for example, only about three hundred police officers in my own home city of Manchester, NH. But they have a more effective control of the local population (about 100k) than the many thousands of police in New York City have over the five boroughs. There are no unions to speak of in Manchester (one of the largest having been effectively broken by Verizon early in the last decade), and the small growing immigrant community is without any heft of note. The city is business friendly, NH is a "right to work" state, and law enforcement enjoys respect, traditional welcome and even acclaim.  The few ongoing attempts to "Occupy Manchester" have met with ridicule, scorn and a large and immediate police presence. Few people have the leisure or spare change to engage in any Occupy efforts, and those with the time and money (especially in the surrounding and far more affluent bedroom communities of Bedford, Hooksett, Amherst, New Boston, Goffstown, Londonderry, Derry and Litchfield) more often than not identify with NH's flavor of bourgeois libertarianism, or a stricter party adherence to the business and banking favorable GOP.

Occupy is a metropolitan reaction to urban conditions, and to the media and corporate environments which provide metropoles with culture, identity, wealth and cohesion.

It will not take root, in this form, in those social and material environments which lack the clustering of wealth, power, mediation and leisure common to cities.

That doesn't mean the Occupy name, or its general message of dissatisfaction with banks and state policy, is lost on those who live in smaller or rural polities.

As a heading, as a means of expressing discontent, as a way of relating individual resistances to a larger, visible and communicable trend, Occupy is perhaps the most noteworthy and compelling development in conscious and unconscious anti-capitalism since the 1960s. People identify with Occupy.

And while it's not a coordinated and deliberately anti-capitalist movement, Occupy is versatile enough to encompass the direct action, labor and housing oriented agitation in Oakland and the original and perhaps less coherent or results oriented Occupy Wall Street. And we should do well to remember that it has spread to other countries, including but not limited to England, New Zealand and Australia.

Which is why there have been repeated efforts to bundle up the fervor, discontent and unrest associated with the various manifestations of Occupy and channel it toward electoral politics or reformism. This might also explain the efforts of conservative gatekeepers, notably Sean Hannity, Michelle Malkin and Rush Limbaugh, to regale their listening audience of dissatisfied working conservatives with stories of perversion, filth, venality, criminality and the specter of Bolshevism, all conveniently associated with not only the Occupy groups, but with Barack Obama as their class warrior figurehead.

As importantly, Occupy's broad appeal has motivated powerful liberals to attempt to constrict its scope as part of their broader bid to hijack the label towards Democratic Party "optics," "framing" and ends.

Chief among these turnpike guards are Michael Moore - a famous and fabulously wealthy 1%er himself, but one prone to use the word "we" to describe OWS - and Rachel Maddow, as best illustrated by the following exchange (reported lovingly and approvingly by Crooks and Liars):

MADDOW: Aside from the common issues, the common complaints that you are describing, that our systems ought to work for somebody other than just the richest Americans; both our political system and our economic system. Aside from that issue, it seems like there are some tactical things that are in common here, even if there isn't a big top down organizing movement. There's people using, the people's microphone when they have a large crowd.

There's people doing... making decisions and meeting by general assembly, which is a basically consensus based discussion where everybody gets together and comes to a decision that everybody can live with. I wonder if you're seeing that, a) if you're seeing those tactics everywhere and b) if there are splits emerging?

I mean as you know in Oakland yesterday there was a very successful general strike, a very successful all day long basically peaceful until after midnight when there was basically rioting and the Occupy Oakland people essentially disavowing the people who were rioting. Are you seeing difficult discussions about non-violence and about potential splits and differences and tactics?

MOORE: Well, yes and no. Everyone I've spoken to is committed 100 percent to non-violence, that this is the only way that this is going to work. In fact we don't need violence because we're not in the minority here. This is the majority. This is a majority movement. If this country is of, by and for the people if it's to run by the will of the majority, there's no need for violence, because the majority have already said, “We're sick and tired of this and we expect some changes.”

I think in Oakland there's a very specific, in terms of the violence there, Oakland has a long history of police abuse, of how the black community has been treated... they just have one of the worst... I mean, literally, it's almost in the DNA of how Oakland is structured in their City Hall and their police and it doesn't seem to matter who the mayor is, they just can't deal with its basic problems. I think that has a lot to do with it.
But you're also going to have groups who come in wanting to co-opt this movement, whether it's slick politicians that want the endorsement of what they think is a liberal “tea party”, or anarchists or others who don't like the non-violence approach and want some form or violence. But my experience, and I've been around since the anti-Vietnam War days, is that generally... and I told the crowd this over at Denver here just an hour ago... if you see someone trying to incite violence, start with the assumption that that person is an undercover Homeland Security or cop or whatever, because this is the history of America where those in charge have tried to ignite people, incite them to commit acts of violence; and I tell them, don't be incited. Just assume right away that person is not part of the Occupied movement if that's what they're calling on people to do.

(emphasis original)

What Moore is doing is neither particularly clever, nor original. It is in fact the bluntness of his appeal to pacifism, reform, and toothlessness which deserves our attention. He is admirably assisted by Maddow in this effort, as she frames her question as an either/or which can only allow for one acceptable response. For Maddow, those who have attempted actions which are not wholly symbolic have "split" away from the right and true message. It should not surprise us that Moore sticks to the script, obliging her in his reply by characterizing violence, active resistance, direct action and deeds which are not wholly symbolic as untrustworthy examples of police provocation.* Moore doesn't just assert this, he states it plainly: any act which is not "non-violent" has been undertaken by the police to embarrass the real Occupy Wall Street, which conveniently mirrors the meliorism of rich, comfortable men like Moore. Moore, who's as slick a political operator as Bill Clinton, warns Maddow and her listeners against the twin bete noirs of the modern liberal, anarchists and slick politicians.

Yes, that Michael Moore. The one who campaigned for warmongering Wesley Clark and the Lord of Sky Death Robots himself, Barack Obama. The man who is still in Obama's camp. A cheer leader for Obama and the Democrats. Michael Moore, the guy who wants to co-opt the Occupy message towards regulatory tinkering ("some change"), electoralism and ultimately the same captive institutional liberalism which has already been bought up, lock stock and barrel, by the bankers and capitalists Moore purports to oppose only as long as he's making movies which have earned him millions of dollars in capital and a capitalist's lifestyle.

Moore declares that violence itself violates the so-called will of the majority, a will he asserts but conveniently fails to demonstrate. This is to be expected from a social-compacter. He treats with riots as events which must be disavowed, and he waggles his finger at the very notion that those who are not toothlessly pacific could ever represent a valid approach to the depredations of the powerful. For Moore, Maddow and other progressive gatekeepers, the majority exist to give their consent to the social contract. For liberals like Moore, "the people" and "the majority" serve a sacramental function. They give their holy, collective blessing to the state of society. When the rich and powerful become "corrupted," the people exist to signal to their leaders that a period of renewal and purification should be observed until the body politic has been restored to its true and blessed estate, reforms have been discussed and occasionally implemented, and a sacred balance has been struck between the consent vesting majority and those who have been given the holy duty of leading and shepherding them.

That is why, for liberals like Moore and Maddow (and especially those who serve as gatekeepers), the only appropriate action for the people, the only unfolding of events to which they ascribe any merit, is that which is symbolic. For Moore, standing at the gate with his hand on the handle, violence threatens that sacramental relationship between shepherd and sheep.

Violence on its own right is neither moral nor immoral, just or unjust. Nor is every instance of violence identical to every other. Violence is not fungible. It is not always aggression. It's not even always clearly defined as such.

When a man strikes a woman across the face, he's done violence to her. When she stabs him in the chest, she has returned violence. When a parent refuses to feed a child - even if he never strikes her - he has done violence to her. When she breaks a window to escape, she has responded with violence.

It serves our earthly rulers to differentiate between "violence," which they criminalize, and all the other acts of violence which are their ordinary methods of accumulating wealth and power, and enforcing it. That they call these violent deeds by such names as policing, policy, law enforcement, education, politics, business practice, rent, insurance or treatment is no small matter.  It serves their purposes to have us believe that our violence is criminal, but theirs is the natural and inexorable order of the world.

And it serves the purposes of a man like Michael Moore to internalize that ruling class false dichotomy and demand that those who are discontented with the system abide by its rules and jurisdictions as well. Because, frankly, Michael Moore is the ruling class, as much so as Barack Obama or Georgie Boy Bush.

So much so, perhaps, that when you hear a man tell you that active resistance, sabotage, rioting, violence and actions which break with the sacramental canon of empty gestures and impotent symbolism are inherently wrong, you can assume he's working the gate and he isn't looking to let you get free.

h/t Red Queen (for the inspiration)

h/t Singularity ("a valid assumption")

h/t American Leftist (for the squat info)


* - as the history of COINTELPRO and the police infiltration of the SDS, the Black Panthers and more recently the Seattle Anti-WTO groups can attest, the police obviously do provoke. That alone is no reason to immediately eschew violence. Violence is not always tactically applicable. But, as the span of history's record reveals, the ruling class doesn't give ground unless frightened. They should therefore never, ever have a moment's respite. Unless it's to lull them into false confidence and passivity...

Recipe

Recipe:

5 - 1000+ people
1 shared space or project
Competing needs and desires
Ego
$500, 000 (or more)

Mix together in a privately owned park. Heat at ambient temperature. Plate cold.

Serves six.

*

Once a group begins to define its actions by the limited resource of consensus money, once currency recreates the conditions of scarcity in the distribution of those resources, you also get scarcity in the redistribution of influence and social relations. Scarcity makes power. The people with the power to distribute the money, the resources, the satisfaction of needs, the security - they band together. And then they use some of the take to protect their ability to control it. The replication, again and again, of the stable form of power.

Introduce money* (which is formalized scarcity), get a hierarchy.

Want a human community in resistance to end up looking like the society or group it opposes?

Send 'em money.


* - credit is money, see Graeber ("What is debt?") in links to the right

Food

You want a revolution to succeed, over the long term? Or to at least have a fighting chance?

Worry less about "voluntarism" or the proper moral context for sabotage, obstruction and strikes. Care not one wit about what actions will or will not anger the police, unless and only as a matter of tactics. Eschew the philosophy of the right historical moment. Abandon any hope of salvaging academia, or the liberal vanguard.

Get a hold of food. Good, healthy food. And learn how to store it, to move it, to get it to hungry people.

Strikes, sabotage, obstruction matter. Tactics matter. Surveying the landscape - economic and actual - matters. But it's all shit if you ain't got food you can count on.

And right now, the rest of us don't have any that's ours, that we can really count on. Do we?

Listen

[If you don't want to read about the evil that men do to women, please stop reading.]

Close to thirteen years ago, I took a transfer from one retail location to another. The transfer was itself a promotion, and for the first time in several years, I was back to managing an operation for people who were considerably higher on the food chain than my own self.

After wearing myself ragged in a prolonged custody dispute the effects of which can still be felt today, I was in debt to the tune of two hundred dollars an hour to my esteemed attorney. Don't get me wrong, she was, using currency as a replacement value, worth every penny, nickel, dime, quarter, dollar, fin, sawbuck and franklin spent on her. She wasn't the first feminist I'd ever met, but she was the first one who was neither twenty, nor affiliated with a university. She was also the first lawyer with whom I spoke who was willing and able to conduct the case without drawing my ex's sexual character into question. Let's just say, the dudes wanted to make a mash of her sex. My attorney, who'd spent most of her life prior to getting her permission to practice law doing juvenile intervention as a JSO case officer, wanted us to stay out of court except to present the judge with a done deal. So, we went for a stipulated agreement, shared custody, with a presentation on my part to pay child support directly to my ex- for every week in which she had physical custody. I also agreed to provide insurance, and we hashed out religious, extended familial, educational and medical agreements.

It looked like we're about to put to rest a year of animosity, bad blood, flights from the area, improper custodial departure and the residue of a horrendous break up, in which no parties were without fault; a conflict which made none of us the better, nor the wiser.

Then my ex- did something very stupid in a very public way on a very busy street and found herself a guest of the authorities. And I was, by order of the judge, now a full custodial parent. My ex-, and rightfully, tried to fight the judge's order. The judge didn't budge, so we came back with another stipulated agreement which recognized the custodial order, but which still provided my ex- with a three and half consecutive days of every week visitation, and equal say in medical, moral, religious and educational decisions. It recognized the prior agreement in all but letter, but which now established me as the parent with physical custody in accord with the judge's intent.

All of which cost me the pretty pennies, nickels, dimes, et cetera, mentioned above. I needed more money, so I took the training, the promotion, and three months later, the new location.

What I inherited with the bump in pay, and (finally!) full medical, were two ladies in their seventies, a drunk, a boyfriend and a girlfriend team, and a satanist. The drunk kept it off hours, the satanist was a fantastic third shifter, and the ladies rocked; both of them stayed with me for years, one later eventually (after much overcoming of her objections) agreeing to become the AM, and eventually assume management of her own location.

The couple, though...

The couple provided me with my first abject failure as a "manager." And I blew it. I mean, it's still legendary. Years later, at a sexual harassment and conflict management seminar provided in house, I got to hear the story again, this time told as teaching example. I was being used to teach new recruits, "anonymously" of course.

When I took over the location, the couple - let's call them Ned and Karen - worked all the same hours together. They had exactly identical shifts. I thought it inconvenient, but being a stupid man, this set off none of the red flags it would have in perhaps 95% of the women who find themselves in similar positions.

Like I said, it was just inconvenient. So after a few weeks, I rewrote the schedule. They had a few shifts together, but I also gave them different hours. And Sundays off, for church.

Karen pleaded with me to put it back the way it was before. Pleaded. I, again being a truly stupid man, mistook her desperation for something else. Selfishness. Young love. Immaturity. I explained, in what I'm now sure was a condescending tone, but which at the time seemed like good paternal concern, that the schedule wasn't written just for her benefit.

Again, stupidity was strong in the younger Jack.

She broke down, physically, visibly, emotionally. I think about it now as I type, and I recall it like she folded in upon herself, making of her skin a mobius strip. Her presence seemed to shrink, to recede.

I tell you now, I had no clue what I'd done. Objectively, I'd made the schedule fairer. Realistically, I had put Karen's life in real and immediate danger.

Because Ned was, to put it bluntly, always on the verge of killing Karen. And Karen's method of staying out of the way of Ned's fists, and the other things he did with his large body when he was angry - vile, terrible things - was to always, always be with Ned. To keep him soothed, negated, placated and sexually satisfied. Karen was also pregnant, a fact she'd discovered to her horror and her bewildered joy not long before young, idiot Jack became her boss and the man who placed her closer to death than anyone but big man Ned.

Ned did not handle the scheduling change with anything approaching grace, aplomb or good will. He threatened me. He literally puffed out his chest, and tried to back me into a corner. I - altogether now, because young Jack Was A Very Stupid Man - did not make the connection between Ned's willingness to loom over and threaten me with Karen's desperation.

I thought Ned was just being a dick for not getting to work all the same shifts with his girlfriend.

I thought wrong. You see, I was the same guy who thought that he was being noble and just for not letting a lawyer say bad things about his ex's sexual peccadilloes. I thought I was a good man. I mean I had my flaws. I could yell and fume, when it suited me. I was known to stand up to the provocation of bullies with my own escalation. I'd been in my share of scraps. I'd stolen, burgled and dealt. I'd done bad things, but I'd always had a reason. That reason is important, you know. It gets you through the night. And often enough, it really is legitimate.

But I was a good guy. You know, like give me a medal, man, for never being a raping raper. Or for not caring about who gave whom else what orgasm.

Anyway, I'm sure 99% of all women could have predicted what came next. As I could barely see the problem before me, I was ill equipped to envision what was about to happen.

Ned turned Karen into his fist receptacle. Ned was sure Karen was fucking...me. Ned was sure Karen was fucking the Satanist. Ned was sure Karen was giving blow jobs to every male customer. Ned was sure about a lot of things. Ned was scary when he was certain.

But, I didn't know this yet.

Karen and Ned didn't come to work for a couple of days. Which was very inconvenient for me. Because I ended up working their shifts. On the second day, I called them more than once to remind them. On the third I threatened their jobs. On the fourth, Ned came to work. But, not Karen.

I was happy to have a day off.

I don't know if Karen was still happy to be alive. I've been on the receiving end of beatings, and I couldn't tell you with any honesty that I was happy they were finished. Or that I was relieved. Or possessed of any other emotion requiring the release of serotonin or endorphins.

I'm not going to tell you that I can imagine what Karen felt. I can't. I don't. I won't. I left home to stop the abuse. Karen had no where to go. Her parents weren't going to let "that whore" back in their home. But that comes later.

Karen did return to work. Because she needed the money. Because she could walk from her apartment to our location. Because Ned wanted it that way.

Karen did something brave. And courageous. And bold. She told me what Ned had done to her. She told me that Ned had done worse. She begged me to put the schedule back the way it was. I - do we really need another reminder of my stupidity? - asked her if she wanted to call the cops. If she wanted to go to a shelter. Remember, I was the good guy in my own head. Which made me even more stupid.

Because I didn't hear her. I didn't listen. I was already doing the dudely, and offering to rescue her. I was, because I'm an idiot, or at least was once the signature example of one, inviting her to take a way out I had no ability to actually deliver. I was saying, "hey, you've got options" in my own head. But I was telling her, "hey, you can count on me to be there when you really need it."

It was an implied promise I could not keep.

And I did not keep it, because the next time Ned and Karen were together at work, he backed her up against the wall, in a fit of complete self-absorption and rage. He did it right there, in front of a co-worker (one of the old ladies). She was actually brave enough to put her body between Ned and Karen, and talk him out of the store. Then she made the mistake of calling me. She had no choice but to tell the boss man, but it was still a mistake.

Because I fired Ned. I called him at their apartment and I told him never to come back. I told him that we (yes, the royal fucking we) would call the police if he ever showed up at work again, or if he ever touched Karen in any way in the future.

I heard myself saying, "Fucker, stop it, already."

He heard me saying, "Neener, neener, neener, I'm fucking your girlfriend."

Karen heard the coffin seal tight around her.

While I was filing the paperwork for Ned's termination, and while Karen was still trembling in the older lady's arms, Ned was destroying their apartment, and almost everything Karen owned. Ned also called her parents and told them that Karen was pregnant, he wasn't sure it was his at all, and that she planned to get an abortion. Sealing shut her only way home. Because Ned was good at being the good Christian, when Karen's parents were around. Ned never missed church. Ned, I would learn later, prayed for hours to save Karen from her sinfulness.

So now, because I didn't fucking know how to listen, or observe, or understand what it means to be an abused woman, or any of the damned signs most women can recognize as if by instinct, Karen had no place to go, almost no money with which to go, Ned's handprints on her body, and his baby in her belly. Her parents wanted her to apologize to Ned and make it up to him, to atone for her sinfulness. And to keep her whore body away from the only other place she might go.

I had committed her. I had, by being an average male fool, set her upon a course which was certain to endanger her, and which promised to expose her to the killing result of Ned's unrestrained and jealous rage.

So Karen married Ned. She married him.

And I gave her the weekend off for their "honeymoon." Then Ned filed with the company to get his job back, for wrongful termination. And Karen backed up his story. So we took him back on, and transferred him one store over. Karen put in for the transfer to go with him.

I wish I could tell you that Karen was able to "fix" what I had made so demonstrably worse. Within six months, they'd both gotten themselves fired, the baby was born shortly thereafter, and Ned figured that his girl being a "stupid whore" was reason enough to bugger off and get himself a newer model. Leaving her with a baby, no job and no where to go.

A year or so later, I ran into her cashiering at a local health food store. She looked better. We made polite conversation. She told me about Ned leaving.

I didn't know what to say. I'd been to a few really good sexual harassment seminars, as a matter of corporate penance. (Later, they'd put me charge of teaching them. No. I'm not kidding.) I was still worth the investment, and besides, I was going to be a teaching moment for years to come. Yes, the corporation rolled that episode into its sexual harassment presentations. Not workplace violence. Not sexual assault. Not hostile working environments. Sexual harassment and conflict management. It would be a few more years before they draft working papers for workplace violence education. And a few more before they settled a pattern of conduct lawsuit.

But I still didn't know what to say to Karen. I had a bit more a clue, and I tried to apologize. To her credit, she didn't accept it. I told her about a friend who was hiring, probably for more money than the health food store was paying her. She was smart enough not to make my guilt her problem.

"You didn't listen," she said. And I didn't. I didn't fucking listen. I didn't pay attention.

And I didn't the pay the piper for my failure.

She did.

And that's not the exception, is it?

It's the rule.

It's not going to get better because we men do anything about it. It's not going to get better for women just because some of us figure out how to listen.

It's not going to get better because of us, because of anything we do. We fucked it up. We're still fucking it up.

Listening is what we have to do, just because.

Because we owe.

And we don't get to set terms to how and when we do it.

We just need to listen.

Intransigence

Intransigence is not a contemptible trait.  

The middle class, and its college educated managerial all stars, would do well to remember who paid the price for their captive commons, their enduring institutions, and their wholly owned regulatory agencies. They would do well to remember who the various iterations of the state work so hard to contain - hint, they almost never look like the face a middler sees in his Tarjay mirror -, and who they buy up with goodies, tax write offs and public services. They would do well to remember to which class's support staff they actually belong. And why it is the actually poor mistrust them.

Intransigence is not a contemptible trait.

It was intransigent people who bought the middle class its breathing space, though they were aiming for something else. They were people who were willing to go up against their class enemies. Red Emma Goldman, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, Joe Ettore, Johann Most, Mother Mary Harris Jones, Big Bill Haywood and the countless workers, strikers and saboteurs who have no names recorded in the history books  - these were intransigent people. They were, for the most part, without the sanction of credentials. They were unsafe. They knew the score, and who was always winning.

Intransigence is not a contemptible trait.

Just ask the Black Panthers, what's left of them. Intransigence cost them, surely. The response to the Panthers, by those with political and economic power, should tell all you need to know about the potency of intransigence. To this day, the idea that they might re-form and rise up again is enough to send the middlings into shivers.

Intransigence is not a contemptible trait.

The Fabian experiment failed. Because the state always belongs to those with the wealth. The ruled don't get the government they deserve. The wealthy get the state they've purchased, a state which exists to protect their...property. Because those who own the world are, surprise fucking surprise, intransigent about relinquishing it. They aren't going to be persuaded with polite laws and peaceful protest. These they tolerate, because every fool with a placard or a hotline to the next election is already half in the bag for another set of compromises...

If you're worried about what happens when people think in terms of class enmity, about what happens to all the middling managers, the clerks, the professors of ruling class literature, the people with debt-homes and the lifestyle to which service to the wealthy has made you accustomed - perhaps you know in your heart what side you're really on. Perhaps your liberalism, your adherence to progressive "reform" and your willingness to submit go hand in hand. No doubt you might even accompany your good liberalism with a sneer for those who haven't been so lucky. All under the guise of saving them, of course. That's why you teach the destitute and poor -er, whoops. You don't. You're a more than comfortable professor, or an administrator. You don't understand why the stupidheads aren't agitating for universal university education. I mean like, isn't that just the pinnacle of good living - the security-prurity of academia? It must be because they're all too dumb and ill-fashioned to have your taste in books and the good life. They lack your cultivated aloofness, the silly dears. They have strong needs, instead of a lifestyle.

Perhaps this is all too unforgiving, harsh and intransigent of me. You love the poor and the dirty, surely - from a safe distance. You don't really have a problem with soup kitchens. You might even volunteer at one.

But, doing what it takes to make sure there's no need for soup kitchens? That smells of violence, risk, and the opportunity to lose your good liberal life, doesn't it? And besides, what would you do if you didn't have good little middle class students to teach?

Because, maybe, you're not intransigent. This is your life, right? It's your set of compromises. Nobody should fault you for sticking to them. Honestly. Sincerely. But you're not an improvement upon the human norm. You're just compromised. And being less-compromised isn't an improvement either, for what it's worth. It just sucks more. Poverty sucks. That's why people stress it. It's why we suffer it. It's killing us. It's killing those of us who are actually poor.

It makes you intransigent, living from hand to mouth. It rends you, and renders you.

The problem with the compromisers isn't that they've compromised. It's that their view of the end game is insufficient. It ends up with everyone complicit.

Because...

Taking a knee to avoid the ramifications of actual resistance, safely ensconced in academia, prideful of the number of books about which opinions have been offered, dripping with scorn for those who don't embody or need to apologize for a gambler's debt of affiliations to the status quo, wagging an unscarred, unburned, uncalloused finger at the first indication that actually poor people might visit the middle class with the hatred and disregard due the clerks and condottieri of the too-distant lords of all creation - those are contemptible traits.

Intransigence is not contemptible.

It's what's going to get the rest of us through.

If you don't like that, kindly pick your side already. And stick to it.


* - and before another fuckwit argues that the possession of internet access makes a person an inhabitant of the compromised middle class, we live on less than $23k a year. It's been a decade since we made anything approaching the money which might allow us to do more than just survive. And it's worth mentioning that once a man has been out of work for more than a year, he becomes less and less "viable" as an employee. There are so many others, especially the shits with useless degrees, vying for the same jobs...and they don't have children's schedules around which work time must be fit.

Chomsky's Agonistes

Some people, apparently, take criticism of Chomsky personally. It's like he's a prophet, or something. It's like criticizing the Chompers is criticizing their own awakening to the banal venality of human endeavors.

This may come as a surprise, but it doesn't take ruling class terminology to figure out that rich people with lots of guns suck.

I know it seems like an epiphany to comfortable, well off technicians plodding along in academia and the suburbs, but it's really not. I don't recommend getting pistol whipped by a cop with a grudge, but it doesn't take a credentialing mill to figure our that the cop is manhandling your carcass because he's got the gun and the backing of the people with the money. It does, on the other hand, help to have comfortable white male skin, a suburban existence, and a college degree to treat with the proposition that "rich people suck hard, which is how they get rich, and then they hire a few poor people to fuck up the rest of the poor to protect their property" as some kind of world-shaking revelation.

Anyhow, I don't understand the impulse to personalize a defense of famous and wealthy people. They are famous and wealthy precisely because they're willing to make the compromises which most of us do not make. Men like Noam may understand the contradiction between writing about bad capitalists and doing so for profit. He may even feel a wee bit of the angst when it comes to staking out an anarchist position from the safety of a military-industrial institute with longstanding ties to the professional torture community. A man like Chomsky may harbor a little shame for regularly outlining the evils of the world order in the driest, most distancing, most academic, and elitist language possible, while routinely using resonant and ordinary idiom to persuade his alleged allies to end actions which might obstruct Israeli crimes against Palestinians.

Here's all you need to know about that man Chomsky, so-called anarchist, so-called radical:

"When teaching at MIT, he often receives undercover police protection."

Now I'm sure Chomsky's Internet Defense Brigade will argue something along the lines of, "But hey, dude, he's like been threatened with death."

To which one might reasonably reply, "And that's nothing like actually dying from an Israeli sniper's bullet, while attempting to cross the street on the way to buying basic foodstuffs at siege and sanctions prices. And besides, there's a fairly clear demarcation between anarchist and comfortable fucking academic who takes death money to teach dolled up Kant-on-the-Brain, all the while writing for-profit tomes about the evils of the profit system. On one side of that line are anarchists, who can be annoying and purist and all sorts of odd and corrosive. On the other side, there are wealthy professors who own more than one home, have investment portfolios and inheritance plans for their children, belong to the ruling class, and accept undercover police protection."

If you're on the side with the undercover police protection, your claims to "anarchism" and opposition to the concentration of power are suspect, at best.

So, what is Chomsky, then?

Chomsky is a gatekeeper. 

Like Elizabeth "I laid the foundation for OWS" Warren, Michael "OWS happened because of my movies" Moore or that  posturing fascist assclown, Zizek. Their purpose (and there's no coordinated conspiracy here; it's just what they do) is to misdirect outrage into runnels of sophistry and philosophizing, or into party politics. 

On the way to burning out the toll stations, perhaps it might be worth showing these gatekeepers the appropriate lengths of rope. Metaphorically, of course...

Safe For Business

The Huffington Post's front page, as of 9:53 pm, October 27, 2011 EST:

From the Linkins opinion piece:

"...Over at The New York Times, Nicholas Kristof has enunciated an excellent defense of the Occupy Wall Street demonstrators, aimed at dispelling the notion that the Occupiers are some single-minded mass movement targeting the capitalist system for destruction. In fact, Kristof says, 'while alarmists seem to think that the movement is a 'mob' trying to overthrow capitalism, one can make a case that, on the contrary, it highlights the need to restore basic capitalist principles like accountability.'
 
Kristof says that what Occupy Wall Street represents is 'a chance to save capitalism from crony capitalists' and an entrenched system of 'government-backed featherbed[ding]' that amounts to 'socialism for tycoons and capitalism for the rest of us.' As Kristof notes, he's seen this before: Years of covering the '90s-era Asian financial crisis brought Kristof face-to-face with the same critique. It's now unspooling in the United States and having its own deleterious effects, such as the near-intractable income inequality that was, at long last, reported on fully this week (perhaps thanks to the presence of the Occupiers themselves).

Kristof's right to suggest that the Occupiers aren't 'half-naked Communists aiming to bring down the American economic system.' This isn't the 'Project Mayhem' of Chuck Palahniuk novels -- we're talking about a movement that's spurring people to move their money from 'too big to fail' banks into credit unions. That's not exactly 'smash the system.' That's more like a group of people seeking out a means to maximize their power within the system, or using consumer choice to preserve, enhance and improve the best parts of the system. As Matt Taibbi notes in a fitting companion piece to Kristof's, 'These people aren't protesting money. They're not protesting banking. They're protesting corruption on Wall Street.'..."

(internal links, excepting the Kristof original, removed; italics mine)

Note to self: this is why formlessness is a virtue. Here, this right here explains the demand for shadows and black hands. This Kristof clownshit is what you get out of democratism, consensus building and reformism. You get to the gate, and the keeper is all like, "Hey fuckfaces, you can't look like radicals. So, let's get you some public relations and a press agent. And like, no way dudes, that's what I went to college for..." 

You get a "defense" of your sweat and blood and the gift of your permanently irredeemable time that makes a mockery of your suffering and insecurity at the same time as it re-frames your rebellion, your unrest, your protest as a confirmation of the goodness and rightness of the status quo. Sure, sure, there are some problems with bad actors and wormy apples. But, the mediators and gatekeepers are eager to tell you, "...what you're really pissed about is the fact that the big bad baddies are acting like, um, bad guys. Now, if only there was a way to make power safe for everyone, then we could get back to the business of doing business, which is like never about sucking people's life and labor and turning it into toys that rich pricks forgot they even bought..."

Fuck. You get "dissent" that is safe for business.

Tomorrow, some rich bastard will shit out more expensive feces, as valued by the price of the food that went into his mouth hole, than something like four fifths of all people on the planet will spend on feed for their families for a month.

Tonight, some wealthy fuck will get into a car the monthly payment for which will equal your total food, rent and transportation needs for the next two months.

Right now, one of the bankers who do "good capitalism" on a regular basis, in contravention of the claims of do-gooder reformists like Linkins and Kristof, will be earning in a single commission, after taxes, what it will take you and your lover two years to make, before taxes, expenses and fees are deducted.

We don't fucking need reform.

What's needed are the Brigate Rosse, dillingers, robin hoods, diggers, levelers, Rebeccas, Munster rebels and red emmas with their whips.

What we need are bankers who've forgotten how to sleep.

Against the light; or, physician give thyself an iatrogenic disease and die already...

The reformist operates from a peculiar vantage; he has the light to his back, haloing him with his own contempt. He is learned, enlightened. He hangs out his shingle, he gives it illumination.He tacks his degree to the wall, and he wants you to see it. He's got a license to have this mission. He's got a geas. A need. To bring the light. To deliver the world into it.

The reformist is a good servant: he fancies himself a physician, a bringer of cures, an apothecary of bright tomorrows. He's a shopkeep for sickness' sake, and it's illness what keeps him in silks. He has a bag of purgatives, a schedule of drugs, a timetable for treatment by which to beat back the disease. Like a physician, he keeps a little hatred for his patient in reserve. And he's got a patient in mind, right from the start:  sick and corrupted society, a sorry little whore suffering from self-inflicted social infections; she's mostly unlettered, bold in her stupidity, resistant to his cures, and a beastly thing better suited to the yoke than to honesty company. It's a rough trade, healing this whore, but the doctor is not above a little leeching.

But that's alright. He came for the fight.

The reformer needs the world sickened, and in darkness, else he cannot save it.

He's going to do battle with corruption, and he's got the light at his back.

In that he's like any other son of the light. He wants to shine it on you, on us. And that ain't even the scary part, his need to illuminate every darkness, to cast out shadow and doubt, to have the whole score of life written up in a well lit ledger, showcased in a hall of mirrors and bright lanterns. To take the credit for his cure, and to be celebrated for it in the light of day.

No, that's not the worst.

What ought to give us pause is the light, itself. 

Maybe you have a moment to ponder it: the reformer, the would be king, the general, the academic with a system, the social diagnostician, the guardian of women's honor, the prince of art or industry, the salvificating preacher and enemy of sin, the witch hunters and vice squaddies, the therapist who will cure you of your own self - how is that they style themselves, er, as a rule?

Let the shadowed silence hold you for a minute.

Dispel the light.

All those once and future redeemers arrive first as heralds of a new day, a new dawn, an enlightenment, the bright future, the well lit path towards a better tomorrow. They offer cleanliness, and a lighted walkway to improvement.

Because.

It's a good bet that a man at the head of an invasion, or about to steal other people's children and remake them, save them, or offering a cure to society's ills, or with a plan to root out the sicknesses of crime and criminality, or with a mission to elevate women towards the perfect, to cure faggots of their gay, to rescue the mudders from their low and crowded living - he comes in the name of the light.

Because.

Every godsbedamned time someone kicks off a war, or a crusade, he calls on the name of the same god, over and over and fucking over again.

His god is a god of light. His cure is enlightenment, knowledge, purity and purification, the facts in the light of day, a cold coruscation, a revelation, a banishing of darkness, ignorance, shadows, doubt and the improper conduct which beggars the fools who live a bit to the left of the rays of the sun, who linger in shadows, or hold their hearts back from the unforgiving gaze of an eye that never closes.

He would deliver...

...salvation, redemption, enlightenment:

The fire glow from an auto-da-fé.

An interrogation lamp, anywhere.

An army psychologist's field notes, spotlighting breakdowns, radiant with insight into the deconstruction of women and men.

A mayor, by press conference camera light, brandishing enemies: low women and black gangs with mind darkening drugs. The police chief to the left of him, the prosecutor to his right.

The preacher man, highlights in his hair, fulminating against the music of the devil.

And the reformer, jaw taut with righteousness, half hovering over his seat, his mouth white with the tension and urgency of his salvific cause, suffused with the fluorescence, with the afterglow of his purpose.

The reformer would cure you. He would enlighten you. He would save you from yourself, from your habits, afflictions and addictions. From your base behaviors. He would elevate you, lifting you up closer to the cleansing sun.

Clean and light, that's the reformer's endgame. A world scrubbed and illuminated, a succession of bright days, alternating between classwork, intestinal cleanses, consensus exercises and moral edification. Wholesomeness, in a word.

A clinic.

And a clinical outcome.

So it's best, I guess, to keep this in shadowed mind when you meet one on the wayside. Maybe you don't have to take one of his needles out of that bag of cures and tricks and stick him with it. But maybe you do. You never can tell, really.

Massachusetts Delenda Est

“...'I created much of the intellectual foundation for what they do. … I support what they do,' Ms. Warren said of Occupy Wall Street..."

That's some mighty exaggerated ego, Madame Candidate.

Then again, the same candidate, on Iran:

 “...'Our number one responsibility is to protect Americans from terrorism, that’s our job, so being tough on terrorism is enormously important,' said Warren yesterday at a campaign stop in Gloucester...We should take nothing off the table, but the facts are still emerging,' the Senate candidate said when asked if she would support military action against Iran..."

And on OWS, earlier this fall:



When asked about the OWS protesters, Warren answered (question begins at approx. 50:00):

"Everyone has to follow the law. That has to be the starting place. But no one understands better what the frustration is right now. The people on Wall Street broke this country and they did it one lousy mortgage at a time. It happened more than three years ago and there still has been no basic accountability and no real effort to fix it. That’s why I want to run for the United States Senate. That’s what I want to do to change the system.”

*

So...plus ça change plus c'est la même chose, and shit, eh?

(h/t commenter Frederick, chez IOZ- and Ian Welsh, for the earlier Warren quote on OWS)

Empowers

"Empowers" is a term which traps its users. It gets you thinking that power is a possession, an item which can be packed away and employed later as needed.

Power cannot be owned.

It is not a trait which can be made use of, or a reserve of strength which can be tapped at a crucial moment.

Power is a relation.

It requires, at a minimum, one who submits or surrenders, and one who controls.

Yes, we have power lines and electrical power, and you can as easily speak of motive power as you can political power, but these usages of the word as not as divisible as might be cavalierly assumed. They are contextual, as with all language.

There is nothing particularly free, horizontal and liberating about the control an electric company has over its monopolized and captive consumers. And the car which you might drive from debt-house or rent-rooms to your box-of-labor-suffering is a tether attached from your needs to your death, and to all of the commodities you produce and consume on your way from one dark to the other.

And so on.

Like that.

Until you die.

Women

I don't know why or how you put up with men.

I really don't.

It's like putting up with a skin rash, or a persistent cough, maybe? You may not want it, but it's part of being alive?

I don't know. Running a one in six chance of being raped is no doubt worse than living with a risk of pneumonia.

I'm pretty sure I wouldn't be able to do it.

If men were groped, leered at, pawed upon, demeaned, had their generative organs legislated and regulated, paid less than women, excluded from conversations as a matter of custom, raped at rate of one out of every six of us, abused, beaten, expected to be fuck-ready at the drop of the drawers, used as a symbol of wickedness, employed as a cause of social decay, held up as an impossible standard of beauty, castigated as the cause of criminality, excluded from vital decisions, blamed for moral failures, incriminated for how female children turn out as adults, standardized as the set of traits which define weakness and vulnerability, chided as vehicles of sin, idealized as unobtainable prizes, and all as a matter of tradition, culture, law and religion...

...we probably would have torched the world with nuclear death in a pique of self pity by now. Hell, we've already brought the human race to the brink more than once, without being treated like women.

So...

...there's that.

Withdrawal

The "complete withdrawal" from Iraq is a pretext to re-invade. White hats can't ride in and save the day if they're already sitting in the saloon.

Just ask the Lebanese, the Gazans, the Burmese, the Persians, the Algerians, the Irish and the Iraqis themselves.

But, the really great thing about Obama's "end to the Iraq War" is good liberals getting all party loyalist because Mittens thinks it's a bad idea...

Dancing With the Stars and Stripes

You should read Justin's Dancing With the Stars and Stripes.

(But I'd put my un-money on Chavez. It's been weeks since an MSNBC retired brasser or Foxpundit used the words "Monroe Doctrine". Plus, there's a king's levy of nativists just waiting to get breathless about the connections between Iran, Venezuela and Mexico...)

Obama's Victory

Libya, in chaos.

A new "breeding ground for terrorists," which should cover at least two decades of discretionary spending and security centralization.

*

Bush did not handle Iraq with incompetence, as liberals have argued, in defense of good war doctrine. Obama has not poorly managed the NATO destruction of Libya, a position around which famous national conservatives have begun to coalesce.

The endgame was always the creation-by-destruction of permanent police zones.

Done in Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen, Somalia, Libya (and if the war gods' blessing holds, Syria and Iran) with a combination of bombs, bribes, wetwork and the blockades called sanctions.

*

Done at home with the great theft known as austerity.

But don't worry.

Soon enough, they'll grow comfortable with the idea of bombs-for-domestic-security. Whole neighborhoods, predominantly black and hispanic, are already under blockade. The local cops and the national police routinely run special ops style wetwork missions in poor neighborhoods. Our political machine is a bribery cartel.

So, why not reaper bombs in defense of the homeland, against its internal enemies?

The sky death robots are currently deployed against the invasion of the Golden Mexican Horde.

It won't take much - maybe just a single catalyzing event - to bring the victory all the way home...

Maxim

If you kill him*, they** will come.

* - Saddam, Bin Ladin, Qaddafi, Al Awlaki, Al Zarqawi, Al Masri, and for coming attractions, see Nasrallah, al Assad and Ahmadinejad

** - extraction, asset management, defense, security, finance and investment companies

Decrepitude, Breakdowns, Landslides

Reading Monsieur, this song came immediately to un-mind:



...and from the tendrils of sound tickled out from those notes, to these:

War Pig Not

Qualifiers: I don't care who is President. I don't trust anyone who actually wants the job. The earnestness in this video reaches beyond melodrama, and grasps at florid and purple pathos. It's a campaign ad, so, you know...



When it comes to war and the projection of power, Ron Paul is the only fucking candidate who has even half a clue.

Don't vote for him. Don't vote at all. Voting is stupid. Voting puts the stamp of your life on the power of those who want to use your life up. Get all up in a tizzy about Ron Paul's goldbugging, his abortion opinions and his standard Republican lip service to capital. He's still better on this subject than Elizabeth Middle Class and her "progressive fighter" drumbeat for Iranwar.

a title would only conceal the intent

Late in the night, or just as I'm awakening, I think nonsense words.

The thinking of words is already foreign to me. I don't do it very often. Perhaps it was the drugs. Might have been the beatings about my head and face. But, I cannot remember ever thinking many words in my head.

My wife and I spoke of it once, and we ended that conversation frustrated, and further from comprehensibility than before. I have to think about thinking words. I have to plan them. I don't hear my voice in my head, and I have extraordinary difficulty picturing images. I can draw, but I cannot picture. When people suggest* that I "visualize" I find myself at a loss. I can conceptualize, which is something akin to imagining a series of interlocking x-y-z axis graphs, with a-vocal meanings, syntactically and contextually dependent, running between chart points and charts, where the connections can become words once I age my hands or voice in the process of giving structure to them. But I do not have much native skill with translating these graphical interrelations into actual graphics, or sounds, in my head. My wife and I happened to be discussing this just yesterday. It is still foreign to her that I am empty-headed and capable of quick argument and planning. I still think it must be nightmarish and burdensome to travel through one's day with nothing but one's own voice rattling around up in there, fucking up the world with its monotonous and relentless commentary. I quite like the lack of noticeable translation software doing its business of meaning-making, between the reports filed by the parts of me which are senses and the parts of me which are reflection, collation and recollection of sensory input.

(Writing is especially difficult to explain, since I have a full map of what I mean, but almost no directly remembered word arrangements, before I put pen to page or digits to keyboard.)

So the nonsense words are odd. Perhaps troubling, as in a puzzle, but without the emotional coloring of trepidation and worry. Yet. Odd, because I can hear myself hearing them, in my own voice. I'm not subvocalizing them, I don't think. I've spent several days now quietly sitting, especially when I feel the creep of sleep, keeping my voice box under attention. These nonsense words still seem to form, on occasion, right on the edge of the slip between conscious awareness and the self-containment of sleep.

It happened again, today.

I had to elevate my legs, earlier this afternoon, and after an hour of tedious television, and the inability to get past a sentence in the book I'm re-reading, I started to drift off.

It was at this moment, on the cusp of sleep, that I heard myself think what I now remember as trappinec dogannly. (traa pinn eck daw gann lee).

I couldn't tell you what it means. It's nonsense. I don't think it has meaning. It has the feeling of a dream wisp, a babble of sounds that the mind ought to be trying to force into symbols and value shapes, but which end it does not accomplish, perhaps from failure or lack of care.

I believe I should worry about this, given the other shit happening to my body and nerves, but I don't. I'm resigned to it, and that's also a new thing. I expected, I think, a fear response and was surprised not to have experienced one.

I keep searching myself for the usual signs of fear. Also, for the fascination and obsession which tend to accompany a new plight.

Nothing. This is just me now, I guess.

I couldn't even adequately explain to you why I'm about to hit the "publish post" button and vomit this wholly uninteresting swill onto the screen. It's intriguing to me, I guess. And perhaps I'm about to toy with the madness I've long expected, which claimed my grandmother for almost twenty years, and which may have owned a great aunt. Or maybe it's part of the same seeming** degeneration which has claimed the right side of my mouth, the two right most toes on my right foot, a portion of my left foot, and the inside of my left pinky finger and sometimes for hours at a time, the index finger and thumb of my left hand as well as the right side of my face and every now and again my left eye, eyelid, eyebrow and cheek.

Madness could liberate. Or I could suffer it deeply. Maybe it will skip me. Or maybe I'm finally just starting to really die.

Not the short, quick death of my now distant youth, where I was certain I wanted to die right up until I actually did perish - and can I tell you, that many sleeping pills will parch not only your mouth, but your anus.

Heh.

I pissed myself. I saw nothing, no loved ones, no bright lights. I needed water. My mouth would not moisten. I signed myself into rehab, but I didn't want to improve anything. I wanted to get in touch with Krishna, Shiva, Jesus, Buddha, Allah, the spirit of the raven - anything, because that fucking darkness was long and wide and deep and it didn't know my name. I didn't want to hunger and thirst anymore. I wanted to drink and gorge and wallow in revelation, faith, spirit and that most evil of fictions, capitalized Love.

I did acid and angel dust, magic caps and mescalin instead. Detox is a good place to discover all the drugs you have not done yet.

I  played with my brain, trying to find God and gods and godhood in chemicals and then when I stopped pretending that I was consolable, that I could actually live with any sort of salvation and redemption, I gave myself to a cynical excess. Followed by a minimalist skepticism.

Eventually, the hallucinations faded to silence, and quiet, and I learned to make do. To work. To crawl up and out. To give my word and keep it.*** And then, because contending with assholes will make you one, I began a long course in hatred. And contempt.

I was my own subject, is what I'm trying to say. That's the mercenary life. And the mercantile one. To cultivate a contempt for your own self and turn it to profit. To have, but not to enjoy.

All and all, a wasted life, but eminently worth living. I've really done my life. I've had three terrible, great loves. I'm lucky enough to still have that third and best of them, to have it by not ever possessing her. She is grace, without consolation. She is love, without redemption. She is.

I've made awful, crazy and unreasonable choices. I have been faithless and too loyal. I have refused to be what I was expected to be. But I've also murdered the man the me-boy once thought he could become. That fucker had to die, but I'm not sure this one ever really deserved to live.

So now maybe this is the real thing: the full dying death.

I don't know if I'm ready.

I also don't know if I even want the choice.


* - when I suggest that someone "picture" or "imagine," I have to do so with the awareness that I'm using those words within a poesis of sorts whereas the person with whom I'm speaking or communicating can probably just conjure up an image...

** - neurologically inconclusive; the MRIs and CATs and neuro-ophthalmology have shown nothing, except more payments to be made on the installment plan...I have migraines, visual artifacts, vertigo and intermittent dizziness and there is blood collecting in my legs, especially around my ankles, calves and heels, suggesting a circulatory problem about which my physician, two dermatologists, a neurologist and two separate eye doctors have consulted and shared information, but for which I have no other corroborating symptoms, and no diagnosis.

*** - fools give their word, idiots break it.

War Pig(s)

"Two days ago President Obama authorized the deployment to Uganda of approximately 100 combat-equipped U.S. forces to help regional forces 'remove from the battlefield' – meaning capture or kill – Lord’s Resistance Army leader Joseph Kony and senior leaders of the LRA.

The forces will deploy beginning with a small group and grow over the next  month to 100. They will ultimately go to Uganda, South Sudan, the Central African Republic, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, with the permission of those countries.

The president made this announcement in a letter to House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, Friday afternoon, saying that 'deploying these U.S. Armed Forces furthers U.S. national security interests and foreign policy and will be a significant contribution toward counter-LRA efforts in central Africa.'

He said that 'although the U.S. forces are combat-equipped, they will only be providing information, advice, and assistance to partner nation forces, and they will not themselves engage LRA forces unless necessary for self-defense'...”

ABC News

Not that I'd wager money I don't have, but it would be nice to have some spare change for an over/under bet on how long it takes our good liberal pundits to mount a Responsibility to Protect defense of the latest move from our Nobel Laureate War President.

I'm going with six hours.

As for their conservative brethren, I figure it'll take them at least eight hours to figure out how to criticize the Preznit for his application of the Clinton-Bush-Obama Doctrine while still singing paeans to the Noble Troops and their struggle to improve the lives of all the women they themselves are currently not occupying and raping...

*

That fucking shit is depressing. I'm not a pacifist, by any stretch, but the brazenness of the Laureate's dedication to the expansion of permanent war leaves me wondering if those of us bound by the homeland's borders have any capacity to stop this shit anymore. I mean, I wouldn't exactly applaud the shooting of Senators and other imperial functionaries, but I don't think I could bring myself to condemn it, either.

In lieu of getting myself watch-listed for advocating domestic terrorism, here's some Azam Ali to sing us through to a better tomorrow, even if it's only imaginary:


(Lasse Pour Quoi)


(Ben Pode Santa Maria)

Fifty three multiplied by zero equals zero...

When I suggested, mostly to myself, that the self-styled "53%" might be worth some attention, it was neither to promote their claim to be the authentic America, nor to disparage their perceptions of actual suffering. Since then, others have broached the subject, more or less in keeping with ticks and temperament.

It is this assumption of authenticity - and it is not confined only to bootstrap believers - which I personally find most interesting, predicated as it upon a cultural hegemony and a political superstructure which exists precisely for the so-called 53%.

Typing very broadly, they rightly perceive the end of their order, because demographics are in fact a kind of political fate.

Ruling factions need governed populations. They need people who serve as extraction points, who are roughly equivalent to raw materials in an unprocessed state. Historically, the form varies: slaves, the corvee, peasants, proletarians, the permanently indebted; their chief function is the production of labor. In our own age, that is labor sold, and excess labor consumed, or distracted. The factions of the ruling class contend with each other for control of these laboring populations, seeking them out wherever conditions provide for the cheapest purchase and the most flexible interface. The factions compete for control of divisions in memory: cultural, tribal, religious, ethnic and national boundaries which are drawn and redrawn in order to lay claim to labor. These laboring populations have a relationship to the states which claim possession of them, one which takes shape according to the needs of state and the strengths of competitors: they are bound by a rough and one-way rule of custom, tradition, religion, crude history and the threat of force - whatever it takes to produce a minimum fealty to those who own and rule.

The ruling class, and its factions, need to possess them. Which means, management.

States have an interest in producing client populations who buffer and manage the pool of labor and its extraction of resources. Who absorb discontent. Who are vested in their own separation from it. States encourage their existence with investment in the infrastructure and institutions which produce them, and to which these technicians and professionals will later on profess considerable devotion.

These technicians don't only serve as the ruling class support staff. They are equally its clients. They are the protected.

The point of running a protection racket is to have someone to protect. And to have enemies against which they must be protected.  The ruling class needs clients who also double as consumers of excess, as buffers against disorder and decay, and as absorbers of discontent. Most actual and historical states preserve this client population more or less with predictability. The state and its ruling factions don't need the buffer, exactly, but it makes the business of being wealthy and powerful a whole lot easier. It is from this client pool that the ruling class and its various factions draw their technicians, their management, their support staff, their caregivers, professionals, systems operators - and their officers. Client populations derive some benefit from the relationship. They are not merely human resources. And these client groups vest themselves in response. They buy in. They belong. They are not possessed. They serve, and this requires a less immediate, less visceral and less visible set of bindings: a tradition and mythos of self-reliance, self-creation and voluntary existence. This might explain the long-standing project to develop, shield and promote the nuclear family. Nuclear families are protected by the state. This kind of family produces isolates and managerial personalities; and they are governed by an urge to succeed, to merit, to deserve, to keep faith with the expectations of those who rule. It demands the repeatable formation of a specific self, a narrow and truncated type conceived and formed to treat with itself first as an independent ego ensconced in purpose and convinced of its own self-causation, and secondly as a truth unto itself.It is a type which places a high value on faith and loyalty: in marriage, in law, in custom, in deed, in debt. Its gods are debt-managers. Its heroes pay their dues, pay off the loan, pay the ultimate sacrifice. Its villains are oathbreakers, layabouts, cheaters, scoundrels, vagrants and the corrupt.

The recurring theme of corruption crosses political, moral and religious divisions - for the technicians and professionals. It animates their righteousness. It is perhaps the defining characteristic of this type - a deep rooted, material, mnemonic fascination with and recoiling from corruption. It is their awe; it is what they desire and shun, in identical alternating moments. Their politics and their morality reflect this fact. Corruption is, for them, the antithesis of the good faith to which they been bred. It is sickness, a contagion. It is failure. It is, in short, the failure to deserve.

It is no surprise that they see in the Other a source of corruption. For liberals, for the good fight progressives, that corruption wears the face of wanton power. It is power which negates the liberal noblesse oblige. Raw power. Power which does not improve. The Other is a man on a mythical horse who should have known better, a potential knight, but one who corrupted himself instead in the base pleasures of brigandage and rapine. For conservatives, that Other bears the sins of Eve, and the traditional mark of Cain - she is an outcast before she is ever born. The Other's depravity is its natural condition. God, nature, fate, history, breding, evolution* are vehicles for the confirmation of this depravity. The poor are moral failures. Suffering is self-created, it is a falling away from the hegemony of the norm, a norm which peers out from under its limitations and withdraws back inward if it does not see itself looking back in upon it.

This is the historical moment in which we find ourselves: that norm no longer functions. The built in limitations, the constraints, the self-disciplining customs are all less useful. The faces have changed. Lifestyles have taken hold of a media saturated culture, and permissible conduct has expanded in response. The ruling class has adapted to demographic fate. It has co-opted some of its former excluded identities. It has become, in a word, tolerant - to the degree that these tolerances preserve its power, and aid in the contest between its factions.

For liberals, this is no real problem. Their Other is the other half of the managerial sub-class. They are in conflict at their own level. It is a horizontal dispute. It is a political fight, between class equals. They are fighting corruption in their own ranks.

For conservatives and nativists, this ruling class tolerance is far more troublesome. It is a corruption from above and below. Their relation to new lifestyles, populations and pressures is reaction. They imagine themselves as conservators; against corruption, they see themselves as both the protectors of order and as clients of its protection, struggling with an Other that not only threatens to end the cultural hegemony to which they belong, but which is in a devil's compact with corrupt leaders who are shockingly willing to reward laziness, sloth, racial inadequacy, sexual deviancy, gender disloyalty, role and rule breaking, and a host of other sins, all in trade for unjust and unearned power.

It is a threat to their authenticity, to their rightful, faithful, loyal claim to the nation and its culture. But it does not bring them, as a rule, to a breaking point, to severance. They retreat backwards. They take refuge in their myths. They double down on loyalty to the very people who not only rule them but who will gladly slot them down into poverty for a cheaper client and a campaign ad with brown faces in it.

I kid you not. This is no jest:

"...I totally DON'T hate wealthy Americans. No wealthy American stood up and embarrassed me at an event I thought was supposed to be fun for all. No wealthy American insulted my then toddler daughter and refused to give me any strategies to try with her instead. No wealthy American imposed language barriers on me except when they had such unconstructive criticism. Even those I would think would identify with the wealthy, like unionized public sector employees, and those with science educations who could easily qualify for any number of technical jobs, hate them. One has a two income one grown child household and has the most hateful things to say about them.I don't get it. Some of the nicest people I've met have been wealthy medical, dental, legal professionals. The medical director at our lab in another state was the most down to earth person who treated everyone the same, entry level, admint, technical, white, black, Indian whatever.These people donate as a rule much more to private charity than the less wealthy. They tend to have jobs to give people in need.I babysat for wealthy divorced parents in my college years. These folks had older kids and typically just needed someone to give their kids rides home, either see 'em safely in the front door, or even sit with 'em for a few hours in one instance until dad got home. A girlfriend, having a student only visa and thinking she'd be waiting until retirement for her Green Card, noted "These people aren't looking for a green card. They're looking for someone with patience to sit with their six and three year old for 3 hours in the afternoon." She...and this is someone from a well to do family, but she wanted money of her own...had a part time babysitting job from these supposedly evil people.Why the hatred of the wealthy? Do some really want to see charitable contributions to private charity dry up, or employment opportunities go down further in the event of increased personal or corporate taxes? I simply don't understand this mindset." 

You know the reason....Some people have a lot, some don't.The idiot left sees this imbalance as 'unfair' and therefore must re-distribute some of that wealth to those poor unfortunate souls who aren't 'winners of life's lottery.'" 

"because the politicians know that the people they appeal to cannot work out that without the so called rich none of them would be employed if they are, none of them would get entitlements if that is how they live with no rich to tax to acquire the moneys to fund those entitlements, nor would they have any modern luxury or convenience because it is the rich that produce them. without the rich these people would be eating grass to survive just like the north koreans. but the political hacks that play this class warfare thing is safe because enough of the masses are not only ignorant of these facts but are incapable of comprehending it even if given a picture book laying these facts out in simple form. it is amplified intentionally by politicians who view it as their ticket to perpetual office and power. they have not the ethics to ever correct the ignorant nor resolve not to take advantage of it.however this is a dangerous game as many other regimes have learned to their sorrow. when the revolution does inevitably come it is always beyond the control of the political class that fomented it and it always executes them in the end."

"Wealthy people get in the way of total government control of the people. It will be a truly classless society with no one having more than the least ambitious among us. That's what the liberals are telling me and what I hear here and from those practicing their religion down in Wall Street parks."

"The wealthy, many of whom have built their riches through hard work and blood and sweat of their brow show that it can be done. They are jealous and also angry that someone lights up their drab lives of non-achievement and shows how their lack of effort is the only thing keeping them from achieving the same thing. They are afraid to take a chance and risk other than the weekly $250 purchase of lottery tickets to get rich."

 "Animosity and Jealousy. I'm not rich, far from it. But I don't dislike the rich, in fact, I respect them, and use them as examples of where I want to be. Instead of sitting around all day feeling sorry for myself and wishing I could get lucky, I went after what I wanted. I did the things it takes to have a comfortable life. Could I have been rich? I doubt it, not really that smart and I have a bit of an attitude problem, especially with dumb asses. But I'm smart enough to know that I need to be responsible for myself and my family, and not rely on someone else, because every time I did I got screwed. Even simple things like relying on someone to pick you up if your car is broke down. Forget it. Easier to just rent a car or walk."

"just look at Greece. Young people throwing a hissy fit because they might have to wait to 55 to retire (on the g'mint dole) instead of 50. Really? Sadly it reminds me of the OWS people. You know what is sad and encouraging at the same time? We have a country that for the past 200+ years encouraged FREEDOM with RESPONSIBILITY. We've had people from all around the world literally DIE to get here. These folks, whether from Ireland, Asia, South America, Central America, Poland, etc etc, came here to be free.....to either be 'safe' or have a chance at becoming 'rich'...........Many of these same people are shouting from the rooftops as to where we are heading. They escaped tyranny and now find themselves in a similar position.....but we don't hear from them (at least on the MSM).......I cautiously await legal immigrants (especially the hispanics) to wake up to the the fallacy of what the D party is selling. Just like I'm cautiously awaiting the blacks to wake up to the same fallacy. From my personal experience, blacks and hispanics have roots in Christianity.....yet their 'party of choice' has made a pointed effort to kill their religion, all the while sucking them into thinking only the federal g'mint can take care of them...............if/when they wake up, we will see a true revival of this country.Rights aren't granted by government.........we are born with them...... (until the fed g'mint grew and infested the schools, we all knew that). Sadly, the progressives have mal-educated people from all over the world that their 'rights' come from a big-bloated-government"

"I am puzzled by this sudden phenomenon that makes it fashionable to hate rich people. I thought in America everyone aspired to be rich. I think if given the choice of who to hate, it is much easier to hate poor people. They are society's losers, and I was always taught that America loves a winner and hates losers. My take on the Wall Street occupiers is that they are mostly either college drop outs or college graduates with degrees in meaningless subjects that have given them no job skills. For example, International Relations. Now there is a real know nothing subject. "

"greed is wanting what you have not labored for... the desire to take that which one has NOT EARNED.. greed can also be the desire to not give from what you labored for..... it is not the governments job to determine what the level is or what i must be forced to give.."

"Pure, unadultered envy "

That, strangers and friends, is the 53%. That's the Tea Party, right there. Them's the fiscal and social conservatives. The values voters. The glibertarians.

Sure, they aren't merit liberals and institutionalists who will bomb Yemenis into dust in the name of a forward progress and the responsibility to protect.

They'll bomb them in the name of Jesus and his Parable of the Holy Job Creator, instead.

(quotations compressed by Google, damn it)


* - the mechanism has become irrelevant; the message is its medium...