Found Wisdom

My nine year old left a notebook on our bedroom reading chair.

At the top of the page, a title: "COMic BOy," underlined.

"Whoa nelly," I thought, "little man has a grasp of the generic."

Opening text: " Hi I am COMic boy as you can See. Or can you."

Following it, an image: a stick figure, long of leg, arms dangling downward from below the chin of the head circle. Unadorned, unvarnished. As simple a comic representation of a person, as it gets. Stripped of features, empty face. Standing on a lined page, without environment.

Generic?

I think not. As you can see. Or can you?

Identity Captured by the Liberal State

It saddens me that the liberal state has captured most of the elements of society best suited to changing its structure, to striking at its root because they live outside of it. Women, minorities, homosexuals, proletarians - competing for pieces of the identity pie, competing for access to a state whose operators serve the interests of capital, which means exploitation. Which means suffering.

The American liberal state depends upon the destruction of the human ecosystem, in all its manifestations. It has a purpose: the protection of the persons and property of the wealthy, and those who serve them. It will protect social tolerances only so long as it can afford to do so.

When it no longer can, it no longer will.

Full stop.

And where it never has had to, its managers always back repressive regimes. Wash, rinse, repeat: the liberal state can afford to extend a few chairs of power to domestic women, gays, blacks, latinos because its war machine grinds up the bodies of women, gays, blacks, latinos and proletarians outside its borders, using proxy native tyrannies to do so.

Elena Kagan will sit on the Supreme Court because the repressive Saudi Arabia guarantees relatively cheap oil to and for the preservation of the liberal American State which protects its power.

Condie Rice sits on corporate boards, and ran the Secretariat of the State Department, because she helped Chevron/Texaco break the backs and livelihoods of Nigerian women.

John Berry holds office in a state that gives material support to the murderers of homosexuals in Uganda, Saudi Arabia and Indonesia...


...back to finding ways to mitigate this bone crusher of a headache.

UPDATE:

"A man whose same-sex 'marriage' has become a symbol of the struggle for gay rights in Africa has vowed to become a martyr rather than give in to homophobia, campaigners say. Tiwonge Chimbalanga and his partner Steven Monjeza are facing a possible 14 years in prison with hard labour after becoming the first gay couple in Malawi to declare their commitment in a public ceremony .

Peter Tatchell, the veteran British gay rights campaigner, has maintained contact with the pair at the maximum security Chichiri prison in Blantyre as they prepare to stand trial next week.

Tatchell told the Guardian he received a defiant message from Chimbalanga that said: 'I love Steven so much. If people or the world cannot give me the chance and freedom to continue living with him as my lover, then I am better off to die here in prison. Freedom without him is useless and meaningless.'

Tatchell, of the rights group Outrage!, also quoted Monjeza – who is described as thin and weak with jaundiced eyes – as saying: 'We have come a long way and even if our family relatives are not happy, I will never stop loving Tiwonge.'

Chimbalanga, 20, and Monjeza, 26, made history when they committed to marriage at a symbolic ceremony last December – the first same-sex couple to do so in the southern African state, where homosexual acts are illegal.

Two days later, the couple were arrested at their home. Facing taunts and jeers, Chimbalanga, wearing a woman's blouse, and Monjeza appeared in court to answer three charges of unnatural practices between males and gross indecency. They were denied bail, supposedly for their own safety, and have been forced to endure dire conditions in jail.

The couple are due back in court on Tuesday, when magistrate Nyakwawa Usiwa Usiwa will deliver his verdict. Angry residents and relatives from Machinjiri township, on the outskirts of Blantyre, say they will not allow them to return home if they are set free.

'They have given this township a bad name,' said Maikolo Phiri, a local vendor.

Zione Monjeza, an aunt of Monjeza, said: 'We as a family have been terribly embarrassed to be associated with this gay thing. It's a curse and a big shame. We will chase them away if they are freed.'

Nchiteni Monjeza, Monjeza's uncle, said: 'I won't drop a tear if they are jailed – they deserve it.'

But for others, the couple are social revolutionaries in this impoverished, landlocked nation that usually makes headlines only when someone like Madonna flies in..."

*

Scroll down to the sections entitled "Foreign Relations," "US-Malawian Relations" and "USAID" at the State Department link, here. I cannot copy and paste the relevant text, for some reason.

See also:

Military Police Training in Malawi

and

US report on the same

h/t Update HuffPo

Hope As Hypocrisy

President Obama, 2009:

"...So today, I state clearly and with conviction America’s commitment to seek the peace and security of a world without nuclear weapons. (Applause.) I’m not naive. This goal will not be reached quickly –- perhaps not in my lifetime. It will take patience and persistence. But now we, too, must ignore the voices who tell us that the world cannot change. We have to insist, “Yes, we can.” (Applause.)

Now, let me describe to you the trajectory we need to be on. First, the United States will take concrete steps towards a world without nuclear weapons. To put an end to Cold War thinking, we will reduce the role of nuclear weapons in our national security strategy, and urge others to do the same. Make no mistake: As long as these weapons exist, the United States will maintain a safe, secure and effective arsenal to deter any adversary, and guarantee that defense to our allies –- including the Czech Republic. But we will begin the work of reducing our arsenal.

To reduce our warheads and stockpiles, we will negotiate a new Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty with the Russians this year. (Applause.) President Medvedev and I began this process in London, and will seek a new agreement by the end of this year that is legally binding and sufficiently bold. And this will set the stage for further cuts, and we will seek to include all nuclear weapons states in this endeavor.

To achieve a global ban on nuclear testing, my administration will immediately and aggressively pursue U.S. ratification of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. (Applause.) After more than five decades of talks, it is time for the testing of nuclear weapons to finally be banned.

And to cut off the building blocks needed for a bomb, the United States will seek a new treaty that verifiably ends the production of fissile materials intended for use in state nuclear weapons. If we are serious about stopping the spread of these weapons, then we should put an end to the dedicated production of weapons-grade materials that create them. That’s the first step. Second, together we will strengthen the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty as a basis for cooperation.

The basic bargain is sound: Countries with nuclear weapons will move towards disarmament, countries without nuclear weapons will not acquire them, and all countries can access peaceful nuclear energy. To strengthen the treaty, we should embrace several principles. We need more resources and authority to strengthen international inspections. We need real and immediate consequences for countries caught breaking the rules or trying to leave the treaty without cause..."

President Obama, 2010:

KROFT: Would you advocate the use of military force to keep Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons?

OBAMA: I think we should keep all options on the table, but I think that our first step should be a much more aggressive approach to diplomacy than we've displayed thus far. And I think this is an example of where our blundering in Iraq has cost us dearly. Iran's the big winner from the Iraq War. They have gained immeasurable strength in the Middle East, and because of the strains that it's placed on our alliances and our leverage with other countries around the world, it's made it more difficult for us to be able to mobilize international pressure to get them to stand down from what I believe is a process of developing nuclear weapons.

(emphasis mine)

The Obama Administration, 2010:

Obama wants $80 billion to upgrade nuclear arms

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President Barack Obama sent a landmark arms-reduction treaty with Russia to the Senate on Thursday for ratification and called for $80 billion in nuclear funding, which could help win opposition support.

Defense Secretary Robert Gates said the funds, which would be spent over a decade, were needed to "rebuild and sustain America's aging nuclear stockpile..."

(snip)

The White House noted the $80 billion in funding for the nuclear stockpile came on top of more than $100 billion in additional investments in nuclear delivery systems, like nuclear submarines...

Sometimes It Gets Too Heavy

Hard on my oldest tonight. Too hard on him. He made a stupid mistake, and it cost (in actual dollars) us a chunk of our weekly budget. He trusts, and I hate to even think of pushing him towards mistrust, but he trusts too easily, too openly.

I just want him to know how to protect himself.

I hate that we live in a world where I have to choose some degree, some melange, of innocence killing skepticism and brutal life lessons. He trusted, and some kids stole his fundraiser money. He left it out like easy pickings. Vultures picked it, and didn't look back. He didn't want us to know he fucked up. He wanted us proud, not disappointed.

So, I get a call from a teacher, instead of hearing it from him.

He has such goodness. He didn't lie. He chose silence so he wouldn't lie. And I took too long to see that, lecturing, raising my voice, berating him him instead about growing up, about getting tough - as if I can temper his sweetness without ruining his capacious generosity.

Me, fucking jaded - I come from hard lessons, from state homes and the foster system bounce, from childhood violence, and much, much worse. "Ward of the state," the way I endured it, sharpens your instincts or makes of you the sort of victim predators single out.

Makes you capable of shit you don't want to admit in the light of day.

I learned young to offset size with dexterity and a fierce, cultivated dangerousness. A bully will stop fucking with the scrawny kid if the scrawny kid has no compunction against jamming a number two pencil into his tormentor's forehead, or going all crazy and turning his face into bruised flesh tapioca.

I come from violence, so much of it.

An explanation for my commitment to political non-violence?

Sometimes, I don't know. Sometimes, as I mentioned early, I really do understand the satiation of retribution.

We raised our kids right. We overcame ourselves, sublimating isolation and lovelessness to bring up two boys who exceed their parents.

I'll tell you a story, taking no credit for the outcome: my youngest transferred schools mid-year. Introverted and sure of his own self, he has a hard time subsuming himself to social dynamics, especially on the playground. He plays alone, mostly happily but sometimes with a crushing sadness. Becoming the new kid didn't make it easier, for shit sure.

But, against our worries and our sad expectations, he came home talking of a friend. Happy, really happy. Another new kid, newly transferred. Two months we heard of their exploits, their secret name for a stingy teacher, of how they traded lunches, and remembered snacks for each other. Finally, outside school one day, I met this perfect sounding friend.

A black boy. Which doesn't matter, of course.

So, the point?

Not once, not ever, not for a single instance did it ever occur to our son to mention that his best friend was black. We heard dozens of reports about what they discussed, about their playground games, about how they each take an extra snack to school, in case the other forgets. And at no point did he think it important to tell us about the color of his best friend's flesh.

I could have wept at the awesomeness of it, that small, human victory. Ah, fuck it. I did get a little misty.

I remember growing up. Skin color, gender roles, rank, class - that shit really fucking mattered. A childhood friend, some time shortly after graduation, tattooed a swastika, an iron cross and a celtic cross on his body. He joined up with skins. He would rant the most racist shit, heading south to stomp in Boston, Jamaica Plain, Dorchester and Roxbury.

T's father was black. T was black, light skinned enough to become something of a totem for the skins, but a black man nonetheless, nappy fro floating in the wind. Until he shaved it off.

Until he embraced self hatred so deeply that he became a neo-Nazi.

What kind of social pressures do you have to endure daily to see your own skin, your own gender, your own sexuality, your own persona as a parasite on your chance at happiness?

We swore we'd raise our kids better than that. Mostly, we've succeeded - and they've exceeded us. My father in law, approaching triple digits, can say the most reprehensible shit. Climbing mountains into his eighties, handy with every tool in the Yankee's kit, generous to his neighbors, loyal to his wife, a working man provider. A foul mouthed throwback to attitudes and beliefs which have no place in our lives. My own mother...well, some other day. I have a few tattoos to cover childhood wounds, and I still know that she loved us in her own way, not that it makes any of it any better.

We did a little better than our parents.

But our kids have truly exceeded us, and I know the rightness of it.

Then, I look out the window and I know what shit fuck world they'll inherit and sometimes it's really fucking difficult to resist making them hard men, survivors, able and capable operators, men who will right wrongs and deal retribution to those who deserve it.

But damn - I don't want them to resemble their father. I don't want them growing up into the shape of me.

Unreal fates and uncaring gods, no.

Sometimes it just gets so heavy.

Pope Song

This one's for my lovely, terribly patient, fiercely excellent, beautiful wife:

(if you don't like cursing, don't hit play)


Tim Minchin - Pope Song from Fraser Davidson on Vimeo.

h/t Echidne

They Need Us Until They Don't...

Joe Bageant captures the Spectacle (without having to call it such):

"...This great loom of media images, and images of images, is so many layers deep that it has replaced reality. No one can remember the original imprint. If there was one. The hologram is a hermetic snow globe, a self-referential circuitry of images, and a Möbius loop from which there is no logical escape. Logic has zilch to do with what is going on. The smallest part holographically recapitulates the whole, and vice versa. No thinking required, we just cycle and recycle through an aural dimension. Not all that bad, I guess, if it were not generated by forces out to fuck every last pair of eyeballs and mind plugged into it.

The investing class has put thousands of billions into movies, TV and other media to keep the hologram lit up over the past six decades. Which is to say, keep the public in an entertained stupor, awed, mislead, and most importantly, distracted. But the payoff probably runs in the trillions.

For the clear-eyed citizen, there is a growing inner horror and despair in all this, with nowhere to turn but the Internet. The Net is a cyber reality, no more real than the hologram, and indeed a part of the hologram, though not quite yet absorbed and co-opted by capitalism. We take what relief we can find.

However, for the unquestioning rest, the hologram, taken in its entirety, constitutes the American collective consciousness. Awareness. It enshrouds every citizen, defining through its permeation the daily world in which we all operate. Whether we love or hate it, there is no escape. Go live in a shack in the woods. Call that escape. But everything in the outside world continues to run in accordance with the humming energy of the hologram. There is no cutting our umbilical link to the womb of this illusion, this mass hallucination. There is only getting a longer umbilical cord, closing your eyes, and pretending that what the rest of the nation does has no effect on you. We were all born and raised in that womb. We can no more divorce the neurochemistry and consciousness it shaped in us, than we can deny that we had an earthly mother and are of her tissue. Our consciousness is born of the hologram's connective neural and electrical tissue..."

When I wrote,

"At some point after the nth restructuring of economic exchange, will workers finally liberate their owners and appropriators from the need for workers, rendering themselves so much excess flesh?

Will they recognize that finality of their condition, and fight it, or will the surviving laboring class, employed in such extraction and production techniques as result in cornucopia for the few no longer recognize themselves as laborers?

Would such a transition cross a clear threshold, or would it only appear comprehensible in reverse, scouring the past (our present?) for the signs of the series of moments when labor's extractive power had provided enough material and authority to those who ruled and governed them that they no longer served any purpose as laborers?

Would this condition emerge first in developed, capitalized nations where the capitalist class had already largely emancipated itself from the restrictions of labor, utilizing surplus populations instead as consumers, unskilled service workers and armed staffers?

Would it unfold differently in those former colonial nation states where the comprehensive colonization of common space known to the developed world proceeded instead in fits and starts, interrupted by interventions and ungoverned crisis, resulting in an uneven patchwork of authority, fealty and resistance?

Would this disparity between the Euro-American dominions, the territorially expansive but unevenly developed nations such as Russia, Turkey, Brazil, China and Iran, and the "underdeveloped" peripheries compel the several factions and combinations of capital and control to vie for access to remaining convertible resources, by simultaneously withdrawing public commitments to superfluous domestic populations and extending armed authority over regions ripe for extraction?

Would this accelerated contest for access to extraction zones replace the former competition for productive labor, especially as labor itself produces the systems and machinery which reduces the import of its class?

Would this hasten the deconstruction of the welfare state, its public educational apparatuses, and the minimum safeguards of the regulatory regime - since labor, now working to survive while creating the conditions of its abolition, can no longer bring even electoral and political pressure to bear on the disciplinary functions of the state?

Would political activity, under such circumstances, only serve to further alienate laborers from the fruits of their own labor, directing their productive efforts into a system which cannot serve their interests and retain coherence and authority over them, at the same time?"

...I had no idea that Joe would, in his own way, answer some of those questions to such satisfaction, and in such a timely fashion:

"...Meanwhile, gangster capitalism needs that hologram to maintain the illusion that life is not cheap, and that Jennifer Anniston's ass can be yours in mind and dream (Personally, I'm a Julianna Margulies fan -- The Good Wife"). And most of all, "The Gram" is required to keep its captives deluded and sated enough to remain productive and consuming -- not to mention hating the right people -- right up to the last moment before total collapse, and they are no longer needed. The higher owning/investing class is safe, no matter what happens. Oh sure, as Edward Bellamy wrote, a few of them topple from their high perch on humanity's coach during the hell bent journey, but their class remains..."

When You Let Someone Brand You

...eventually he will act as if he owns you:

"WASHINGTON — The Gulf of Mexico oil spill hasn't stained President Barack Obama nor dimmed the public's desire for offshore energy drilling, according to a new Associated Press-GfK Poll.

(snip)

The poll found that 42 percent approve of Obama's actions, 33 percent disapprove and 21 percent say they have neutral feelings about his response.

The reaction is strongly along partisan lines. Democrats lean toward favoring Obama's actions, 58 percent to 19 percent, with 17 percent expressing neither approval nor disapproval. By 47 percent to 27 percent, Republicans disapprove of Obama's reaction, with 23 percent saying neither. Independents are about evenly split between approval and disapproval.

(snip)

The poll also found that the public still supports the idea of drilling offshore for oil and gas. By 50 percent to 38 percent, more people favor increased coastal drilling for oil and gas than oppose it.

While Republicans favor it by a 3-to-1 margin, Democrats lean toward opposing it, 52 percent to 36 percent. Independents are about evenly split. Groups giving drilling the strongest support include men, middle-aged and older people, whites and residents of rural and suburban areas.

The country is split about evenly over which priority is more important in considering drilling, with 49 percent choosing the need for the U.S. to provide its own energy and 47 percent picking protection of the environment."

*

Hmmm. I wonder how come the alleged watch dogs in the press almost never explain fungibility when they discuss drilling, public attitudes towards drilling, or government policy.

Could it...nah, it couldn't...

Media corporations owned by energy, real estate and defense combines couldn't possibly censor out data, could they?

They couldn't possibly want to retain ideological branding of the populace?

*

As a massive disaster spreads throughout the Gulf of Mexico, a representative sample of the population prefers continued off shore oil drilling, in the expectant, pregnant hope that more drilling will ease the burdens of their debt soaked middle class existences. Never really understanding the fungibility of oil, they cast their ballots for assholes who've laid down their ideological brands in the minds of captive populations, assholes who benefit personally from the arrangement.

The what-for of political ideology, in capitalist America, folks...

"We Have Fed You All For A Thousand Years"

WE HAVE FED YOU ALL FOR A THOUSAND YEARS

We have fed you all for a thousand years
And you hail us still unfed
Though there's never a dollar of all your wealth
But marks the workers dead
We have yielded our best to give you rest
And you lie on crimson wool
But if blood be the price of all your wealth
Good God we have paid in full

There is never a mine blown skyward now
But we're buried alive for you
There's never a wreck drifts shoreward now
But we are its ghastly crew
Go reckon our dead by the forges red
And the factories where we spin
If blood be the price of your cursed wealth
Good God we have paid it in
We have fed you all for a thousand years
For that was our doom, you know
From the days when you chained us in your fields
To the strike a week ago
You have taken our lives, and our babies and wives
And we're told it's your legal share
But if blood be the price of your lawful wealth
Good God we bought it fair


(anonymous, 1908, copyrighted by Industrial Workers of the World)

Untitled Commentary or Somesuch

J.R. Boyd from the inestimable ladypoverty writes,

"It is significant that a country which makes so much of its independence from an 18th century monarchy today finds the great mass of its populace signing a "declaration of dependence" on a boss who lords over them for the better part of their waking hours, and for whom the sidelining of every other obligation is required for this privilege. Such is the drawback of retaining only those notions of "freedom" that pertain to 18th century aristocrats, while abandoning any adaptation of Enlightenment principles to Shit That Actually Matters Today."

Added commentary, a la moi:

Significant also that this same populace confuses freedom from constraints with political liberty, so much so that the people end up with wee bits of dwindling liberty and the corporations end up with all the freedom.

If persons understood better how to combine their urge to freedom with the need for liberty, perhaps we could develop and even sustain a long term project of resistance to bosses and the building of a more just replacement.

Feminist Essentialism

...is a goddamned trap, folks. Getting more women into positions of authority in the corporate-state death racket isn't going to come up roses, the end of discrimination or the undoing of oppression.

It's going to mean that more women end up brutalizers.

Elena Kagan has overnight revealed the paucity of long term thinking, or the consideration of the systemic problems which don't directly relate to gender, in the ranks of middle and upper class white feminists.

Oh, for a hundred more Audre Lordes, a thousand, a thousand thousands...

Update: Well, I've waded into it, so I guess I get what I get. Apparently structural critiques of class are unwelcome at several forums for feminist discussion. I'm honestly having a difficult time understanding how I earned the label "concerned misogynist" for questioning the wisdom of associating feminist gains with getting more women into exploitative hierarchies.

It makes no damned sense to me, this sectarian division of "the left" into mobbed up turf fighting for ideological control of issues, with so much emphasis placed on conformity to a very narrow set of definitions of acceptable argument.

We have the same damned set of adversaries. And while we certainly have tons of room for disagreement about how to achieve goals and what to do with those gains if we ever get it together enough to have a few, our differences don't erase those adversaries from consideration This reflexive retreat into trigger warnings, and protected corners of belief, and the frankly malign incapacity to see the overlap of categories (such as gender and class) seems like a way of avoiding doing anything.

While feeling good about one's own intellectual castle and how well the small sectarian clan has defended it.

Jeebus, this reminds me of a "feminist' argument about the failure of Lost to incorporate more women as leaders and less as girlfriends. So passive and defeatist, this approach, waiting for a creative oracle with an English Lit. degree and a $5k a week salary to glom on to your ideological triggers and tell you the stories you want to hear, in a language that appeases you.

On corporate managed, funded, underwritten and advertised television. 

Instead of taking a pen, a piece of paper and your own wit to write the fucking stories you want to hear, and want to tell others, your own damned self.

And the fucking arguing about right arguments - instead of coordinating all the ways we can work together - gets us more corporate control of the commons, more expansion of the military-police state, and less shared memory of a cooperative past that saw the ruling class pushed back far enough to flinch, and flinch hard.

Gawfuckingdamn it...

Inadvertent Funny

Yes, Veep Biden really has "pushed back" against leftist critics of Kagan by comparing her to Rehnquist. You gotta love Joe Biden.

On a related note - who cares?

Whomever Obama nominates and the Senate signs off on will likely represent the trend towards centralization of powers in the Presidency, the permanent warfare economy - and probably one day down the rabbit hole of stupid, the annexation of Northern Mexico, the occupation of Colombia and/or Venezuela and the economic reconquista of Cuba.

Trying to reform this beast = giant damned waste of human effort and energy.

Fight it, resist it, run for the hills, whatever - but don't try to throw a saddle on this monster and tame it. You'll just get yourself and a whole bunch of other people you love and respect killed.

Broad Wording

"Thousands of Palestinians could be deported under a new and highly controversial order put in place in April by the Israeli army, human rights groups in Israel say.

The new rule defines anyone not holding an Israeli-issued permit to reside in the West Bank as an "infiltrator." Violators could face up to seven years in prison or deportation.

Human rights groups say they are worried about the broad wording of the new order. They say it could be used to target three groups: Palestinians who have residency papers from the Gaza Strip but who live in the West Bank; foreigners working in or visiting the Palestinian territories who overstay their visas; and the foreign-born spouses of Palestinians..."

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=126514029

You know one of the reasons the Israelis can get away with this?

Because "human rights groups" worry about broad wording.

And not about the order in the first place.

Way to go, fearless opponents of power...


h/t FDL

Going After Kagan

Without endorsing the glib-prog love for the Supreme Court, I can write with a giant smile on my face, "Uygur nails it."  Obama wants lefties to go after Kagan. Attacking Kagan from the left, they give Obama cache with his centrist chappies:

"Obama (and Rahm Emanuel) are going to love it if progressives attack Kagan. They will brandish that as a signal that they are soooo centrist. They will crow to their Washington reporter friends that they are being attacked from the left and brag about how much credibility that gives them. And when they win this nomination (non)fight, they will declare victory again, as if they accomplished some major objective. No one loves beating up progressives and winning easy battles in DC more than this administration."

Love, and More Love

Work As Alienation

Most often, the people I meet do not see themselves as laborers.

Even more rarely have I met a person who produces the satisfaction of his own needs and desires.

In contrast, most of the folks I meet identify themselves as consumers. They treat their work as the (sometimes intolerable) access key to a paycheck, which they can then use as a means of getting stuff, some of it necessary. They may not use the phrase "I, as a consumer..." but their attitude towards human effort depends upon treating their own labor as a wrong they must endure so that they can get scheduled permission to acquire goods.

Not a new or unique observation, I understand.

And I cannot even find this commonplace attitude all that objectionable. In everyday usage and everyday language, capitalism works like that. A person might fill bins at a feed lot, or chop up chickens for piecework payment, or turn over a fried chicken sandwich in a taylorized grilling regime, or mop restaurant floors, or pick up the trash and waste food for disposal, or work the incinerator at the land fill.

None of this work, of itself and on its own terms, promises to satisfy the need of the person doing it. A person might do it well, and even come to enjoy some aspect of employment, but the worker (in my experience) rarely labors at the task for the immediacy of her own needs and desires.

In the creative fields, in science, in medicine, in politics and law enforcement (well, sadists have bills too y'know...), in sport - I suspect that an observer can discern a difference. The work itself satisfies, or has at least the promise of satisfaction.

Not for nothing do these fields tend to belong to middle, upper middle and upper class participants - or to people who enter the upper class soon after mastering them. Performing those tasks provides the potential for enjoyment and acquisition, for the satisfaction of need and desire, in the immediate moments of labor.

This labor produces an outcome which they laborer can enjoy in the very doing of it. It has, if you will, the quality of play, because the person turning food into effort can enjoy her "act of creation," can transform the raw material of existence into both the expression of desire, and its fulfillment.

I don't mean to suggest that a farm worker, for example, cannot enjoy the harvesting of produce, or the tending of animals; within the economic environment which currently exists, this experience of satisfaction has no chance for expression, because the workers themselves cannot both enjoy the fruits of their own labor and serve the needs of those who own that labor, and exchange for it a scheduled permission slip to consume some small amount of necessity, entertainment, sanitation and shelter.

Further, even those who identify emotionally or symbolically with "the working class" tend to do so in reference not to the working satisfaction of their needs, or even as unstructured cooperative play. They don't, in my experience, identify themselves as "working class" because they enjoy their own labor, but as a dual marker, one of status, the other as cultural membership.

By identifying himself as working class, today, a person establishes that he possesses a certain level of average consumption. By that identification, she compares her self as caught between those who sustain higher levels of consumption, and those who cannot. Understood this way, "working class" has come to mean "able to buy more than the really poor, but no where near as much as the comfortable." Secondly, the "working class" marker provides a cultural label. A person who sees himself as "working class" often does so as an assumption of membership and participation in a group of people united by what social access they do not have, and therefore by what forms of entertainment, worship, association and fun they can take compared to those who can and will do more. Used thus, it becomes a way of accepting that the wealthy can do more while still rejecting how they use their leisure.

I think this method of identification has become so widespread precisely because class divisions set real boundaries to enjoyment, to play, and to how a person feels his own labor, in the doing of it.

When your work amounts to doing what someone else tells you to do so that you can keep your permission to buy a small number of cheap goods used to ease your boredom, wash your skin, feed your hunger, cover your rest and dumb your pain, it probably follows that you stop treating your effort as meaningful on its own, and learn to see it as a barely tolerable burden which one part of you performs so that the rest of you can get to tomorrow, later...

Or, I just wasted forty five minutes type-scribbling a few paragraphs of unvarnished error...

Qualifications for having and holding power...

Brief useless thought:

At FDL, unfolds a discussion of Kagan's qualifications for the job of High Church Black Robed Adjudicator.

It does not matter if Elena Kagan qualifies for the nomination to SCOTUS, on the grounds of her publication history, her legal opinions, or lack thereof. "Qualified" and "unqualified" (in these terms) don't provide any insight, I believe, into understanding the Supreme Court, or who possesses some "right" or right quality, to sit on it.

The people who sit there do so because a very small number of folks rule over a very large, very governable, very obedient bunch of the rest of us.

From that perspective, one qualification matters more than any other: Will the rest of us obey?

If so, whomever Obama nominates holds as much "right" to the job as any other person interested in ruling over some portion of three hundred million taxpaying subjects of the national-myth corvée...

So You Still Trust Obama?

"WASHINGTON — Since the Deepwater Horizon oil drilling rig exploded on April 20, the Obama administration has granted oil and gas companies at least 27 exemptions from doing in-depth environmental studies of oil exploration and production in the Gulf of Mexico.

The waivers were granted despite President Barack Obama’s vow that his administration would launch a “relentless response effort” to stop the leak and prevent more damage to the gulf. One of them was dated Friday — the day after Interior Secretary Ken Salazar said he was temporarily halting offshore drilling.

The exemptions, known as “categorical exclusions,” were granted by the Interior Department’s Minerals Management Service (MMS) and included waiving detailed environmental studies for a BP exploration plan to be conducted at a depth of more than 4,000 feet and an Anadarko Petroleum Corp. exploration plan at more 9,000 feet..."

http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2010/05/07/93761/despite-spill-feds-still-giving.html

h/t FDL

Wash, rinse, repeat: Barack Obama will order a fiat execution on the legality of his own say so, will nominate an advocate of further expansion of the Unitary Executive to the Supremes, wants to interrogate "terror" suspects without notifying them of their rights, has a SecState who likes Lieberman's inquistionary proposal, has sent tens of thousands of working class young women and men into Afghanistan, has quietly disabled historically black opposition to power and the abuses of power, and in the face of one of the worst man made environmental disasters in US history, approved twenty-seven exemptions from environmental impact studies, for the same sort of explorations, since that disaster occurred.

For a cogent review of Obama's expansion of Bush doctrine, see Chris Floyd's latest:

http://www.chris-floyd.com/articles/1-latest-news/1967-the-poetry-of-death-patterns-of-state-terror.html
 

Not A Throwaway Post

While attempting to connect with other lefties in my area, a few years back, I came across the tremendously gifted Rosa Lichtenstein, using RevLeft. Rosa has set herself the project (and I consider it vital) of methodically challenging the ruling class mystifications inherent in socialist and communist theory.

Rosa does not parse words, and she appears to know exactly what she believes, as well as the limits of those beliefs. I find that refreshing.

Her writing is extraordinarily accessible, even if her focus can at times seems pointillist. I assure you, it serves a worthwhile purpose.

But, I don't recommend Rosa's site because she makes one of the best cases for a position - any position - I've ever read.

I recommend it because she does so with a wit I appreciate with naked awe and admiration. When she savages her philosophical opponents, she doesn't just damned skewer them. She does so with humor and an elan that few can translate to the page.

I have fun, reading Rosa - all the better, I guess, that I agree with her.

Either way, enjoy (or not):

Anti-Dialectics

Or, Because You Cover For Him...

"...Now, I hold no brief for George Bush, and I have no desire to launch a screed against the home-field advantage that Obama still gets in the non-Murdoch media. But I do marvel at how Obama has become the hallucinatory Escher drawing of our politics. It's hard to decide which way the stairs are built, whether they will lead to the roof or basement, and there is no flat middle floor to stand on. To those on the right, he's evil incarnate, but on the left, he still can do no wrong, or at least nothing so wrong that they are willing to take him on. That "blowout preventer" is still working..."
http://www.newsweek.com/id/237644

First, this only works if by "on the left" you mean "everyone not to the right of Dick Cheney, but excluding any and all vocal leftists."

"...Yet in many ways, and on many issues, Obama is pursuing, for want of a better term, Bushian policies, and in ways that would have brought the world down on W's head. Offshore drilling is a special example, given the Bush family's history in the business. But there are others. One is Guantánamo, which remains open; another is the Patriot Act, most of which the president supported when it was recently reauthorized. He has doubled down on Afghanistan, and there are still nearly 100,000 troops in Iraq. Despite the advent of Arizona's anti-immigration law, Obama says that this year he will not push Congress for federal reform (which Bush, to his credit, did). Fearful of the gun lobby, the White House is even shying away from a bill, proposed by New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, to take guns away from persons on the terror watch list. Imagine if Bush had done that!

Then there is the Democrats' "financial reform" bill. Yes, the banks are squalling about all the new regulations it would impose, but the Obama administration is opposed to a whole series of amendments that would actually restructure the world of financial services. One proposal would have restored the old Glass-Steagall Act, which prohibited banks from being stockbrokers. Another, proposed by Sen. Ted Kaufman of Delaware, would have taken the simple approach of limiting the size of the big banks. But the Obama administration, full of Goldman Sachs alums, didn't support the Kaufman bill, which was defeated last week. "Put it this way," Kaufman told me before the vote. "I'm not calling the White House for help." Of course not. There's a Bushian socialist usurper there...."

(ibid.)

Second, perhaps because the Fourth Estate's paragons of self-policing conceive of themselves as trusted watchdogs of public order, on the terms of their class, and not as hounds hunting the abusive former master?

Throwaway Post

Since I'm still trying to find some credible data for FWOAN, and still thinking about ASP's questions, a random list of books I've enjoyed, most of which someone, somewhere will hate:

Shantaram (please read this before Depp makes it into a movie, if you do), by Gregory David Roberts.

Q, by the collective Luther Blissett (now the Wu Ming Foundation)

Athens, by Christian Meier

Salt: A World History, by Mark Kurlansky

River of Gods, by Ian McDonald

Grass, by Sherri Tepper

To Reign in Hell, Steven Brust

Salammbo, Gustave Flaubert

To a God Unknown, John Steinbeck

Finite and Infinite Games, James P. Carse

Power or Liberation (Part Three)

Part One
Part Two

Power or Liberation (Part Three)

"...Computerized clinic
For superior cynics
Who dance to a synthetic band

In their own image
Their world is fashioned ---
No wonder they don't understand..."

Neil Peart (Rush), "Natural Science," from Permanent Waves

A few days back I wrote The Temptation Towards Punitive Asceticism, wherein I argued that opposition to power contains within it the seeds of new forms of power, especially within a set of persons perhaps best described as revolutionary ascetics, people who combine a withdrawal from the bad behaviors of others ("the sins of the world") with a desire to prevent future harm with punishment.

Responding to that premise ASP (Blog of a Sane Person) and Ethan of 6th or 7th, each offered a timely, considered and well stated critique.

Sane Person wrote:

"...I don't think freedom can exist without repression. In order to ensure everyone has freedom, we must also repress the impulses of those (of us) who would do things that limit or impinge on other people's freedom. Our freedom is necessarily shaped by the community which we are a part of, it is shaped by the constraints that are placed upon us, which are meant to ensure freedom for all and not just for those who might be superior or more powerful in some respect. So I don't think freedom can exist without some form or some quantity of repression. The question then becomes what is repressed, how much freedom is allowed and what possible consequences can result in excessive freedom or in too much repression..."

She proceeded to outline the suppression of pro-Nazi organizations and sentiment, in her native Croatia, where the local adopters of fascism had set themselves upon a program of genocide and consolidation.

Ethan, following that, wrote:

"...Particularly in reference to the part of this discussion that ASP points out, I have to say that deep down I'm always kind of secretly ambivalent about "the individual" and individual liberty. It certainly sounds appealing, but I fear that focusing on it too heavily interferes with thinking about humanity--and the world, and the universe--as a totality.

I tend, or maybe the more accurate verb is "try," to subscribe to a David Bohmian view of all-as-one, and as a result I'm tempted sometimes to think that subsuming the self to the totality is the way to go. Of course, that way lies the potential for fascism..."

Having spent several days trying to work my thoughts around these replies, I realized that I'd already begun to fashion the outline of a previously intended essay, which now took shape in a form colored by those thoughtful responses.

Driving my youngest to the physician, seeking treatment for an eye infection, I had one of those supra-immediate flashes of insight, where a problem resolves itself into a simple grammatical expression. One eye on the road, a blind hand scrambling for a pen, and the scrap of paper earlier co-opted as a bookmark, I lucked upon a red light, furiously scribbling:

"Capitalists can plan for what they will do. Resisters plan for what they refuse, for what they will not allow, for what they want to prevent."

I have struggled of late to understand why so many resistance movements, at the hint of insurrection or success, devolve so surely into totalizing and repressive attempts at the creation of a social perfection. I think, following the insight above, that we must look to our epistemology, specifically the episteme of justice.

Which of course, entrenched in the ambivalence of thought, leads to any number of new questions.

How do we know how to identify justice? How do we know what it looks like, in the actions of others? How do we know that we enact it? How do we identify just consequences, and unjust ones? What of the ramifications of our choices which we cannot so neatly codify?

I don't agree with Sane Person, and I find myself resolutely uncomfortable with Ethan's "subsuming the self," admitting as he does that down that way seems the temptation to fascism.

So what, then?

When Sane Person argues for repression, she creates the conditions of a new power arrangement which, at some point, some one or many will themselves form in groups, against. Questioning her argument, I also had to question my own premises. I have, to this point, operated on the assumption of a basic unit, the person. Short of collective and shared consciousness, each person remains a "heterotropy," a unit of action and awareness which can, past a certain point of physiological development, remain fundamentally isolated from all others and still exist, still know itself alone in the difference it demonstrates by changing its environment, its own self in relation to that environment, its own memory.

Comparatively, Sane Person's premise seems to rest on "isotropy," that of a common moral, human identity, where an existential and authoritative standard can and does provide (even if unstated in logic or symbol) a manner by which people can judge conduct.

As I argued earlier, I reject the reality, or the accessibility, of such a standard:

"...Coming at this another way, to have "right and wrong" you also have to have a perfect standard by which to judge what events and people fall on one side, and what events and people fall on the other. Picture that standard as a membrane, a division which sorts the myriad events and choices of any persons, or set of persons, in any place, during any time, into one of two categories. For the standard to work, it has to fulfill an absolute, unchanging, irreversible, untouchable and perfect function. It cannot fall to persons to decide it. If people have a hand in deciding the standard of right and wrong, it no longer works as a standard.

But, for any person to know that a particular example of conduct falls into one of the two categories, that standard must also remain intelligible, accessible and communicable within the contingent events of human action. People must have the capacity to decide their choices according to that standard, communicate them and then follow through. They must retain the capacity to interpret it, and apply it to changing times, or it becomes first opaque, and then inapplicable.

A standard of right and wrong, to work as a standard, must embody in each and every person, at each and every point in human space and time, both rigid perfection (to identify right and wrong, while excluding personal bias) and fluid contingency (that people might choose their conduct, and conform to it).

An imperfect perfection. A black whiteness.

A chimaera..."

Rendering that as briefly as possible, I mean to suggest that we cannot know absolutely if an action conforms perfectly to arbitrary categories, such as right, wrong, just or unjust. We can intimate. We can guess, but we cannot do so with a defensible certainty, because the categories themselves we cannot treat as perfect.

I believe Ethan recognizes this, since he moves immediately from subsumation to doubts about the consequences of it. If we subsume ourselves, we trust that the totality to which we adhere cannot do wrong, cannot embody injustice, or we trust ourselves to it knowing that this new creation exceeds us, and can still do wrong to others.

Assuming that people can come together in absolutely just associations depends first, I believe, upon the assumption of an absolute standard which persons can create, discover and most importantly, reveal to any and all others without the intrusion of human error.

Further, it assumes that people can create error-free organizations of shared effort, in the first place, towards which they can devote themselves in the abolition of known existing harm and error.

Understanding this, I think, might provide a lens through which we can see the tendency of resistance and revolution to transform, in the process of formation and coming into some authority, into repression.

Marx understood (and without falling prey to the mysticism of Heraclitus, Hegel and Engels) that opposition shapes all parties involved within its agonic field of contest. When he conceived of his materialist dialectic (and we must separate this from the idiocy of Lenin, Trotsky and New Left economic-astrologers, who took Hegel's Hermetic mysticism and made something worse of it), Marx provided a deft analysis of how contradictions shape the parties bound by them. A class of people suppressed in their creative capacity and serving the interests of others develop a shared experience, because they share similar material constraints upon their actions. They develop those conditions, then, in opposition to and because of the people who rule over them.

When a capitalist does such and such, deriving the majority of his own authority from the exploitation of those who labor for him, or suffer such consequences which reduce their alternatives (even to the point of death), he does not need take into consideration the possibility of error, because he does not have to. His enjoyment of life, his power, provides its own justification. The capitalist (like the aristocrat, the high priest and the ritual king before him) can plan for what he does, because he does not have to worry his own field of operation.

Those who labor beneath him, on the contrary, do not and cannot come to conceive of their lives as independent of his power, unless they never become aware of the immediacy of that authority. Some people, we can see, never arrive at the point of resistance.

But, those who do resist do so because they at some point understand themselves as subjected, because their conditions themselves provide them with a discernible contradiction. They conceive of their condition in opposition, in contest, in agonic resistance to those who deprive them of the fullness of life.

In other words, their resistance takes its very shape from the crucible of experience, from their subservience. They conceive of their existences as a wrong, and as an opposition to that wrongness.

Shaped by the authority used against them, by the power faction which need not question itself because its own power provides justification, the oppressed instead begin with a rejection. Their first response, "No!" Without that refusal, even only in the mind - no resistance.

This rejection establishes the ones with power as wrongdoers, as people who commit acts which themselves result in the suffering of others.

Herein lies the problem, I believe. The moral component which allows a woman to reject the pornographer, the abusive spouse, the culture of patriarchy; the moral recognition of one's own suffering at the hands of another which compels a man to develop a practice of resistance, even revolution, becomes through its repetition a standard which he treats as absolute, as a permanent justification.

Instead of understanding normalcy and the conditions of everyday life as an uncertainty, the rebel seeks by her resistance the permanent resolution of a problem. The problem of her own condition. In rejecting a conformity to a platform of experience determined by others, some who cry, "No!" into the heat of their own internal silences fashion a new identity which depends not only on the resolution of the problem presented by living as another's instrument, but which sets itself a teleology, an expansion of personal suffering outward, encompassing the scope of everyone else's existence - a drive towards a goal where no one can ever again use another, torture another, dominate another.

A goal which, it seems, rests on a the acceptance of a perfect justice, a perfect balancing of accounts, an appropriation not only of misbegotten goods, but also of moral value. No longer simply identifying the feeling of "I" as a perspective one has alone, this sort of rebel divides others into competing categories, surrounding himself with impostor selves and real persons, symbols of rightness, and symbols of wrongness.

Instead of experiencing her selfhood as a temporary community of incidences, as a series of leaps from platform to platform, as a process of unfolding, as a "movable feast" of alterable continuity, the absolutist rebel fixes herself into the confines of a single personality which must prevent harm, which must punish.

In this, the absolutist becomes like his oppressor, not as a victim freed or a prisoner escaped, but as a hostile instrument, one which still belongs to its owner but has turned against it. As he commodifies his needs and desires within a hostile marketplace of emotions and identity, the absolutist gives up liberation in favor of judgment.

In the same way that a consumer reduces her own awareness, boiling down identity to an artificially stabilized sense of self bound by the acquisition of one's own needs in the form of commodities, the absolutist shaves away experiences which no longer conforms to his needs, which now mimic commodities in the form of semi-permanent consumable possessions of justice, revenge and punishment - ones which he must replace, upon consuming them.

A person must fix the wanting self, accepting identity as a trap, or as a high banked river which ceases to flow if it loses its edges. This artificial fixity (whether encultured in consumers, propagandized as doctrine and education, or developed as a method of rejecting one's own condition) does not abolish the needs or wants around which it organizes.

It cannot abolish those needs - as the satisfaction of revenge, or the purchase of diapers - because it no longer has any shape, function or form without them. It depends upon a permanent series of needs.

Take a person, now, who has transformed her rejection of injustice into a search for permanent resolution. Not satisfied with escaping the direct experience of another's oppression, or with recreating new and separate conditions of greater liberty, responsibility and mutuality, this rebel develops a standard of judgment that depends upon the treatment of justice as the satisfaction of relatively enduring needs. Justice as the acquisition of a commodity, often in the form of revenge and punishment.

Such a person must consume the punishment of others, or he cannot retain his fixed experience of self in any coherence. This person must see the world as a stage of adversaries, and enemies, who he can judge against a standard of truth and error which rarely - if ever - brooks opposition, because it fixes his own identity and satisfies the understandable urge to avoid conditions he can no longer accept.

So long as she can judge, and therefore punish, her identity feels complete. She feels satiated. What began as a rejection of oppression becomes its satisfaction, as she represses others. Since she conceives as justice as a consumer understands commodities, as a means to complete needs, she can no longer trust or accept it.

And he finds himself a power, against whom others seek liberation...