One has to wonder how much money Wisconsin unions spent to make themselves look like idiots?
If it was a single penny more than nothing, it was too much.
Electoralism is a path to defeat. Electoral victories are defeats for those who do not own the means of production. And before someone comes up with some claptrap about "solidarity building," "progressive electoral gains" or "developing future leaders," just pipe down and think those thoughts out to their conclusions. Think about all the electoral gains which were demolished with a governor's signature, or by a Democrat who spoke the language of Reagan. Think about what had to be conceded to the system in order to get minor recognition from it.
Every moment devoted to getting a Democrat elected or a Republican unseated is a moment devoted to shoring up a system which exists to extract as much of a worker's health, wealth and labor for as little compensation as possible. I'm not writing anything particularly new or insightful here, but: the political system operates as a sanctifier of the economic understructure in which its foundations are rather deeply laid.
And there's a neat little parallel to the Tea Party here. Their mindless, mean and niggardly agitation results in the election of Republicans who will raise taxes, start more wars and concentrate power while pretending to be radically different from Democrats. The Teaps get Republicans elected. That's their purpose. They could serve a different end, but they don't and they won't. And when push comes to shove, they'll pull the lever for Romney or Perry.
The traditional unions serve exactly the same purpose, for the Democrats. All of that time, loot and organization in Wisconsin was about getting Democrats elected. Democrats who will almost invariably cut programs, trade away the Commons and start wars. Unions now exist as an auxiliary of the Democratic Party. They could work for different goals, but they don't and they won't, because they know who pays the bills.
Crow's Eye: Maintaining a commitment to Pointless Acrimony™ and Hate Filled Invective™! Also available in corvid mischief and traditional sly dog's mistrust.
Aug 8, 2011
Humiliation
You want to know what makes the Teap Artiers tick?
They don't like being treated like bitches, faggots and niggers.
And they certainly don't like going through it with bitches, faggots and niggers in charge.
Obviously, they're not being treated that way. They're not going through anything. Their taxes aren't going up, and nobody is stupid enough to take away their monthly largesse. That burden is being shifted elsewhere. You know, onto the poor. And the melanin superfluous.
There is no more coddled a federal dependent than middle class whitey. The roads are paved for him. The ports and airports and train hubs are built to deposit fat around his waste line; the stadiums and teevee stations are built to entertain him. The telly tells him the lies he wants to hear. The subsidies flow in order to guarantee the inevitable expulsion of beef waste products from his Christ clenched and puckered asshole. Toxic assets are bundled and sold so that a Teap type can buy a house and then turn around to milk himself and his fat little children into generational debt. A debt he'll never have to pay, because he's not good for it and never will be.
And wars. The fucking wars. The joystick warriors have killed thousands in Southwestern Asia for him just this year alone.
And you know who has a million dead Iraqis pinned to his chest?
The Teap. He was cheer leading foreign wars and the death of brown people right up until a black man got into the game. And once whitey gets the White House back, he'll be cheering those wars again.
The whole fucking federal edifice is run to keep the Teap demographic in cheap sugar, cheap oil, cheap corn and a cheap bootstrapper mythology scribbled on the back of the rough equivalent of a yeoman's snotty handkerchief.
It's the Teaps who cough up rankers, middle managers, small holders and cops. It's the Teaps who lobby for prison construction. It's the Teaps who've got wood for a Crusade against Islam. The Teaps are Christianized and militarized, and that makes them the perfect narrative foil to the faggot loving liberals, those feminized nazis who keep taking from whitey to give to shiftless niggers, and who don't know how to raise boys to be men.
The Teap is white, mostly Protestant (although a third are Catholic) and more well off than close to two thirds of the subjects of our bureaucratic empire. And he is pissed: the radio has him convinced that it's all going to hell - because black folk won't behave, because the gays are getting uppity and spoiling marriage, because women have the audacity to refuse to be mandate incubators for future Christian warriors.
Perhaps even more tellingly, he is pissed off enough to pack heat in public and brag about it because the government has finally got around - at least, in his fevered, ignorant imagination - to treating him like it has been treating women, gays and black people for the majority of its existence. Like he and his forebears have always treated the lower orders.
The Teap is one half of White America, and he knows his deviled half when he sees it. The Teap doesn't fear roving black mobs in Wisconsin, or the thought of Greece coming home, or the end of foreign wars and the coming closure of bases in a vacuum. He hates all that shit because liberals says they're for it. Or more precisely, because that's what he thinks liberals are saying.
The Teap ain't all that smart. Liberals are his best friends. Liberals and Teaps need each other. The Teap needs to blame the liberal for niggers on welfare, Jew York and Jewlifornia's sewer of liberal programming, and the decline of the Once Great Republic. The Teap needs to take back the country from liberals, in order to prepare for the Great Restoration.
And liberals? Well, we've covered them already.
The Teap ain't gonna take it anymore. He's had enough of those liberal socialists and their hatred of red apple, red blooded Amurrica. He's the rightful heir. He's We The People. And he's a bootstrapper, you know. He made himself all by his fucking lonesome. He built this fucking God kissed white nation. And he did it in spite of all the muckraking and fifth column agitation of socialist bugbears and bogeymen.
He* is through with compromise. How dare they take his hard earned bribe and blood money and give even a dime of it tofilthy fucking niggers poor people, or to dirty bitches who get what they deserve women seeking STD testing, or to godless ass fuckers who spit on Christ the gays looking for a piece of the marriage pie.
See, that's the beating heart of Teap Arty rage - it's that they imagine someone now dares treat them like they've been treating everyone else for as long as their values voter, warriors for Jesus, backbone of the nation demographic has been in existence.
It's rage and angst at being treated like poor people, black people, women and homosexuals. At being humiliated. Don't for a moment doubt that the Teap's most fundamental standard is a social order of a Golden Age that never was - one where the lessers kept their peace, the places and their hats in hand.
And lest we form the wrong picture: no one is actually humiliating the values voters, fundamentalists and Catholic maximalists who have re-branded themselves as the "Tea Party."
It's just that they think not getting exactly the country imagined in a fictional Golden Age is a humiliation. A country where they are on top and no one treats them like people ought to treat women, or homosexuals, black people and other outward expressions of an interior lack of worth.
The Teap imagines himself humiliated. Humiliated for the sake of women, homosexuals and black people.
And it's not for nothing that these are also exactly who the Teap blames for his wholly imaginary and completely invented condition.
* - he, of that most compromised and bought off of all American demographics...
[On a lighter note, it amuses to no end to discover that someone found this blog by way of a search for "peruvian bear fucker." Delightful.]
They don't like being treated like bitches, faggots and niggers.
And they certainly don't like going through it with bitches, faggots and niggers in charge.
Obviously, they're not being treated that way. They're not going through anything. Their taxes aren't going up, and nobody is stupid enough to take away their monthly largesse. That burden is being shifted elsewhere. You know, onto the poor. And the melanin superfluous.
There is no more coddled a federal dependent than middle class whitey. The roads are paved for him. The ports and airports and train hubs are built to deposit fat around his waste line; the stadiums and teevee stations are built to entertain him. The telly tells him the lies he wants to hear. The subsidies flow in order to guarantee the inevitable expulsion of beef waste products from his Christ clenched and puckered asshole. Toxic assets are bundled and sold so that a Teap type can buy a house and then turn around to milk himself and his fat little children into generational debt. A debt he'll never have to pay, because he's not good for it and never will be.
And wars. The fucking wars. The joystick warriors have killed thousands in Southwestern Asia for him just this year alone.
And you know who has a million dead Iraqis pinned to his chest?
The Teap. He was cheer leading foreign wars and the death of brown people right up until a black man got into the game. And once whitey gets the White House back, he'll be cheering those wars again.
The whole fucking federal edifice is run to keep the Teap demographic in cheap sugar, cheap oil, cheap corn and a cheap bootstrapper mythology scribbled on the back of the rough equivalent of a yeoman's snotty handkerchief.
It's the Teaps who cough up rankers, middle managers, small holders and cops. It's the Teaps who lobby for prison construction. It's the Teaps who've got wood for a Crusade against Islam. The Teaps are Christianized and militarized, and that makes them the perfect narrative foil to the faggot loving liberals, those feminized nazis who keep taking from whitey to give to shiftless niggers, and who don't know how to raise boys to be men.
The Teap is white, mostly Protestant (although a third are Catholic) and more well off than close to two thirds of the subjects of our bureaucratic empire. And he is pissed: the radio has him convinced that it's all going to hell - because black folk won't behave, because the gays are getting uppity and spoiling marriage, because women have the audacity to refuse to be mandate incubators for future Christian warriors.
Perhaps even more tellingly, he is pissed off enough to pack heat in public and brag about it because the government has finally got around - at least, in his fevered, ignorant imagination - to treating him like it has been treating women, gays and black people for the majority of its existence. Like he and his forebears have always treated the lower orders.
The Teap is one half of White America, and he knows his deviled half when he sees it. The Teap doesn't fear roving black mobs in Wisconsin, or the thought of Greece coming home, or the end of foreign wars and the coming closure of bases in a vacuum. He hates all that shit because liberals says they're for it. Or more precisely, because that's what he thinks liberals are saying.
The Teap ain't all that smart. Liberals are his best friends. Liberals and Teaps need each other. The Teap needs to blame the liberal for niggers on welfare, Jew York and Jewlifornia's sewer of liberal programming, and the decline of the Once Great Republic. The Teap needs to take back the country from liberals, in order to prepare for the Great Restoration.
And liberals? Well, we've covered them already.
The Teap ain't gonna take it anymore. He's had enough of those liberal socialists and their hatred of red apple, red blooded Amurrica. He's the rightful heir. He's We The People. And he's a bootstrapper, you know. He made himself all by his fucking lonesome. He built this fucking God kissed white nation. And he did it in spite of all the muckraking and fifth column agitation of socialist bugbears and bogeymen.
He* is through with compromise. How dare they take his hard earned bribe and blood money and give even a dime of it to
See, that's the beating heart of Teap Arty rage - it's that they imagine someone now dares treat them like they've been treating everyone else for as long as their values voter, warriors for Jesus, backbone of the nation demographic has been in existence.
It's rage and angst at being treated like poor people, black people, women and homosexuals. At being humiliated. Don't for a moment doubt that the Teap's most fundamental standard is a social order of a Golden Age that never was - one where the lessers kept their peace, the places and their hats in hand.
And lest we form the wrong picture: no one is actually humiliating the values voters, fundamentalists and Catholic maximalists who have re-branded themselves as the "Tea Party."
It's just that they think not getting exactly the country imagined in a fictional Golden Age is a humiliation. A country where they are on top and no one treats them like people ought to treat women, or homosexuals, black people and other outward expressions of an interior lack of worth.
The Teap imagines himself humiliated. Humiliated for the sake of women, homosexuals and black people.
And it's not for nothing that these are also exactly who the Teap blames for his wholly imaginary and completely invented condition.
* - he, of that most compromised and bought off of all American demographics...
[On a lighter note, it amuses to no end to discover that someone found this blog by way of a search for "peruvian bear fucker." Delightful.]
Aug 2, 2011
As Thunder Rumbles, From An Undetermined Distance
The contemporary likelihood of an event or set of events communicates little to nothing about the comparative value of an outcome one might prefer.
A Matter of Taste and Faith
In reading the comments here and here, and encountering yet again the conceit that people must be led for their own good, it occurred unkindly to me to try to understand why, or at least what for, that belief has such stock, and precedence.
So:
Must there be a chain of command in order for people to get fed, housed, clothed and ultimately make it through the day in such a way as to enjoy existence at least some of the time?
Or:
Does the chain of command exist in order to pilfer, beg, borrow and steal from the people who are just trying to feed, house, clothe and enjoy themselves?
I think how you answer is a matter of taste, temperament and faith. Further, I think how you answer (and the either/or ought to be preserved, for this thought experiment) illustrates the degree to which you've already made a decision about how much of your happiness and survival exceeds in importance that of others, and at what point you're willing to calculate the extent to which other people will be footing the bill, by surcharge or deprivation, for your continued and usually middle class existence.
I'm really not surprised when credentialed home owners make the argument that we need a hierarchy. Their continued relative ease depends on hierarchies, and while I don't agree with them or care to endorse their willingness to eat the poor for a Sunday ball game and boutique beer, I can empathize with their conditioning. Still, I do wonder what a formal study of the demographics and their correlation with one of the two sentiments above would show.
*
I was also asked, in comments below, if I think it's a function of guilt to use as a starting line the idea that those who opt out of the system are serving the system. En bref, not at all. This is an observation of a mechanism: by force, by law and by custom, there is never enough work to go around. Any time a person opts out, his or her job can be replaced by someone who will take a lower wage and do more work for it. I have run multi-million dollar operations, and posted record profits by counting upon this mechanism. It was also matter of deliberated policy to "clear the dross" from time to time, in order to ensure that the baseline of workers never saw a collective increase in wages which outpaced the company's reduction of cost, or increase in profit, productivity and EBITDA metrics.
This isn't an argument against opting out of the system. Some people will break if they don't. You have to live the life which suits you.
I just think it borders on falsehood and willful self-deception to argue or insist that opting out of the system will break it, degrade it or obstruct its operation. The system operates best when fewer jobs than employees exist.
If it were the case that opting out could disrupt our economy, or draw the political sphere into overreaction, we would see the degradation of its functions precisely during times like these (summer of 2011), when the system has shed tens of thousands of employees, while adding to the burdens of those workers and professionals who are retained.
And it's not happening.
So:
Must there be a chain of command in order for people to get fed, housed, clothed and ultimately make it through the day in such a way as to enjoy existence at least some of the time?
Or:
Does the chain of command exist in order to pilfer, beg, borrow and steal from the people who are just trying to feed, house, clothe and enjoy themselves?
I think how you answer is a matter of taste, temperament and faith. Further, I think how you answer (and the either/or ought to be preserved, for this thought experiment) illustrates the degree to which you've already made a decision about how much of your happiness and survival exceeds in importance that of others, and at what point you're willing to calculate the extent to which other people will be footing the bill, by surcharge or deprivation, for your continued and usually middle class existence.
I'm really not surprised when credentialed home owners make the argument that we need a hierarchy. Their continued relative ease depends on hierarchies, and while I don't agree with them or care to endorse their willingness to eat the poor for a Sunday ball game and boutique beer, I can empathize with their conditioning. Still, I do wonder what a formal study of the demographics and their correlation with one of the two sentiments above would show.
*
I was also asked, in comments below, if I think it's a function of guilt to use as a starting line the idea that those who opt out of the system are serving the system. En bref, not at all. This is an observation of a mechanism: by force, by law and by custom, there is never enough work to go around. Any time a person opts out, his or her job can be replaced by someone who will take a lower wage and do more work for it. I have run multi-million dollar operations, and posted record profits by counting upon this mechanism. It was also matter of deliberated policy to "clear the dross" from time to time, in order to ensure that the baseline of workers never saw a collective increase in wages which outpaced the company's reduction of cost, or increase in profit, productivity and EBITDA metrics.
This isn't an argument against opting out of the system. Some people will break if they don't. You have to live the life which suits you.
I just think it borders on falsehood and willful self-deception to argue or insist that opting out of the system will break it, degrade it or obstruct its operation. The system operates best when fewer jobs than employees exist.
If it were the case that opting out could disrupt our economy, or draw the political sphere into overreaction, we would see the degradation of its functions precisely during times like these (summer of 2011), when the system has shed tens of thousands of employees, while adding to the burdens of those workers and professionals who are retained.
And it's not happening.
Jul 26, 2011
If Only
I set myself a quest. I sought high and low for the object of a pretty faith, and a lovely sentiment. I set out, with the worst of intentions, and I discovered myself vain and even vainglorious enough to seek a distillation of it.
Despite that alarming vanity, or perhaps because of it, I bumbled across wordy glen, and falling sideways for what seemed a day longer than forever, fell upwards into a madman's cavern. What a treasure was held within. A glass vial - and no ordinary one, no, this was done in etch and filigree - within which was contained this most potent elixir, a magical essence, and even an animated one.
Fortuitous accident, in deed. So goes the reward of a hopeless self-regard, and a mindless vanity.
Having been led across that verbal field into the secret lair of a mad scientist by the good fish and a vast conspiracy, and stumbling drunk with my own mirrored self, the test tube nearly fell of its own accord, leaping - I swear it - from off its perch upon a dusty shelf, and into my grubby, grimy tramper's fingers.
Much amused, I thought to sniff the scent of it.
Surprised, instead, by an earnest, endearing whispered voice, all disembodied, coming up and upwards, from out of within it.
Like a captured soul, or bottled saint, that voice came unto me: "...Lock arms! And let's get this unprincipled ego-maniacal sell-out out [Obama] of office! "
Replying, slighting and slightly, I, an evil man and often proudly, said back to he: "...to be replaced by a clone of him."
Incredulous, and tinny with despair, came that voice back out to air, "Nope. Not if we ditch this party completely, and support the independent candidacy of someone with actual principles.... rather than just marketing gimmicks..."
And I know what elixir, what power, what magic mystery was now revealed to worthless, goblin me.
The secret of a secret faith.
"If only..."
"In principle..."
" And if..."
Refrains from the mass of a high church faith, choruses of magical incantation, and the bottle-bodied dreams of a future already written in the believers' pluperfect.
Despite that alarming vanity, or perhaps because of it, I bumbled across wordy glen, and falling sideways for what seemed a day longer than forever, fell upwards into a madman's cavern. What a treasure was held within. A glass vial - and no ordinary one, no, this was done in etch and filigree - within which was contained this most potent elixir, a magical essence, and even an animated one.
Fortuitous accident, in deed. So goes the reward of a hopeless self-regard, and a mindless vanity.
Having been led across that verbal field into the secret lair of a mad scientist by the good fish and a vast conspiracy, and stumbling drunk with my own mirrored self, the test tube nearly fell of its own accord, leaping - I swear it - from off its perch upon a dusty shelf, and into my grubby, grimy tramper's fingers.
Much amused, I thought to sniff the scent of it.
Surprised, instead, by an earnest, endearing whispered voice, all disembodied, coming up and upwards, from out of within it.
Like a captured soul, or bottled saint, that voice came unto me: "...Lock arms! And let's get this unprincipled ego-maniacal sell-out out [Obama] of office! "
Replying, slighting and slightly, I, an evil man and often proudly, said back to he: "...to be replaced by a clone of him."
Incredulous, and tinny with despair, came that voice back out to air, "Nope. Not if we ditch this party completely, and support the independent candidacy of someone with actual principles.... rather than just marketing gimmicks..."
And I know what elixir, what power, what magic mystery was now revealed to worthless, goblin me.
The secret of a secret faith.
"If only..."
"In principle..."
" And if..."
Refrains from the mass of a high church faith, choruses of magical incantation, and the bottle-bodied dreams of a future already written in the believers' pluperfect.
Jul 24, 2011
Open Letter to A Registered Democrat
1. Your party hasn't changed. It isn't betraying you. That you ever believed otherwise is entirely to your discredit. The onus isn't on you to figure this out. The onus is you. We've been carrying your credulousness for so long now, you don't realize that you're a burden.
Anyway...
Your party hasn't rediscovered Reagan in the guise of Barack fucking Obama. It's still the same committee of vultures, with the same set of goals. They're just as content to dismantle the res publica now as they were two years after it looked like black people and the womenfolk might really want a piece of it. They're committed to a complete Enclosure of the remaining commons. Nothing is new except your whiny "disillusionment."
2. It's the messaging which has changed. That is all. The media environment is different because the media consumer no longer looks like your working class ward boss grandfather. It's a media market, represented by the credentialed middle manager, the professional and the sub-class of creative mercenaries. They're wholly invested in the meritocracy. They've bought in. The Ratchet moves with the medium.
3. They'll still take your loyalty, when you're ready to give in and give it back to them. They might even make useful noises about homosexuality and domestic terrorism. Ungod knows you're scared silly of god-sots with a microphone. And that's nothing new, is it? The Republicans have been willing to play bogey for seven decades now.
4. Everything you hate about today's Democrats was already in evidence during FDR's Administration. Everything. The compromises, the marginalization of population groups, the handing over of the Commons to private control, the transfer of public equity to corporate holding, the obsession with currency stability, oil supply, hegemony, central banking and European economic liabilities already obtained with Roosevelt and Truman. And the wars, the wars, the corporate bottom lining wars? C'mon now. War was as good for Democrat donors then as it is now.
The problem isn't a change in real relations. No matter what you tell yourself.
The problem is that you were never attentive enough to notice a change in perceptions.
The New Deal Democrats didn't have to worry about how to appease women and black people. That's the unspoken secret to FDR's success. His environment allowed him to appear as a patriarch - a precursor avatar of Rockefeller's bomfoggy united white Republic. The nationalist and universalist language was exclusive. The New Deal had no room for the Negro. It was a deal for the disciplined laborer, for the nationalist who was willing to do what he was told. It was a deal for the company man, not for the undesirables.
5. The Democrats still hate the undesirables. They still want a nation of property "owning" employees. Just like the Republicans do, of course. The Republicans are honest about it. They talk up their merit and bootstrapper rhetoric right out in public. They blame the poor, the Mexicans, the uppity women and the "urban welfare leeches." And they campaign on it. The Democrats treat with the poor dishonestly - as problems to be fixed, as people to be saved from themselves, elevated by Democratic grace into membership in the property "owning" class of behaving minions. The Democrat doesn't want shared responsibility. He isn't interested in cornucopia and the redirection of labor towards the enjoyment of life and the living of it. He wants more people disciplined by crippling debt, thirty year mortgages and student loans with compounded interest.
6. The fault is you. You've been a consumer of propaganda and your own stupidity for so long that you had yourself persuaded by delusions. Your heroes were bought men. Made men; they were obvious stooges of the real victors of World War Two (transnational corporations). They were never in fact crusaders for the commonweal. FDR wasn't fighting for the little man. He was keeping his ruling class friends from facing down revolution. FDR was first and foremost good for business. Carter was a voice of austerity. Clinton, a remarkably forthright enemy of the little people.
And Obama?
Fucking Obama. It's not his fault you believed in him. He was preaching the Gospels of Austerity, War and the Bootstrap from the first day of his rise into prominence.
So, fuck you, registered Democrat. Fuck you and your self-deceptions. You have been neutering, negating and compromising genuine labor agitation, unrest and revolutionary impulses for so long we're past measuring in decades, and we're on to counts in centuries.
You know what you can do with your disillusionment and disbelief?
You can fucking choke on it.
Anyway...
Your party hasn't rediscovered Reagan in the guise of Barack fucking Obama. It's still the same committee of vultures, with the same set of goals. They're just as content to dismantle the res publica now as they were two years after it looked like black people and the womenfolk might really want a piece of it. They're committed to a complete Enclosure of the remaining commons. Nothing is new except your whiny "disillusionment."
2. It's the messaging which has changed. That is all. The media environment is different because the media consumer no longer looks like your working class ward boss grandfather. It's a media market, represented by the credentialed middle manager, the professional and the sub-class of creative mercenaries. They're wholly invested in the meritocracy. They've bought in. The Ratchet moves with the medium.
3. They'll still take your loyalty, when you're ready to give in and give it back to them. They might even make useful noises about homosexuality and domestic terrorism. Ungod knows you're scared silly of god-sots with a microphone. And that's nothing new, is it? The Republicans have been willing to play bogey for seven decades now.
4. Everything you hate about today's Democrats was already in evidence during FDR's Administration. Everything. The compromises, the marginalization of population groups, the handing over of the Commons to private control, the transfer of public equity to corporate holding, the obsession with currency stability, oil supply, hegemony, central banking and European economic liabilities already obtained with Roosevelt and Truman. And the wars, the wars, the corporate bottom lining wars? C'mon now. War was as good for Democrat donors then as it is now.
The problem isn't a change in real relations. No matter what you tell yourself.
The problem is that you were never attentive enough to notice a change in perceptions.
The New Deal Democrats didn't have to worry about how to appease women and black people. That's the unspoken secret to FDR's success. His environment allowed him to appear as a patriarch - a precursor avatar of Rockefeller's bomfoggy united white Republic. The nationalist and universalist language was exclusive. The New Deal had no room for the Negro. It was a deal for the disciplined laborer, for the nationalist who was willing to do what he was told. It was a deal for the company man, not for the undesirables.
5. The Democrats still hate the undesirables. They still want a nation of property "owning" employees. Just like the Republicans do, of course. The Republicans are honest about it. They talk up their merit and bootstrapper rhetoric right out in public. They blame the poor, the Mexicans, the uppity women and the "urban welfare leeches." And they campaign on it. The Democrats treat with the poor dishonestly - as problems to be fixed, as people to be saved from themselves, elevated by Democratic grace into membership in the property "owning" class of behaving minions. The Democrat doesn't want shared responsibility. He isn't interested in cornucopia and the redirection of labor towards the enjoyment of life and the living of it. He wants more people disciplined by crippling debt, thirty year mortgages and student loans with compounded interest.
6. The fault is you. You've been a consumer of propaganda and your own stupidity for so long that you had yourself persuaded by delusions. Your heroes were bought men. Made men; they were obvious stooges of the real victors of World War Two (transnational corporations). They were never in fact crusaders for the commonweal. FDR wasn't fighting for the little man. He was keeping his ruling class friends from facing down revolution. FDR was first and foremost good for business. Carter was a voice of austerity. Clinton, a remarkably forthright enemy of the little people.
And Obama?
Fucking Obama. It's not his fault you believed in him. He was preaching the Gospels of Austerity, War and the Bootstrap from the first day of his rise into prominence.
So, fuck you, registered Democrat. Fuck you and your self-deceptions. You have been neutering, negating and compromising genuine labor agitation, unrest and revolutionary impulses for so long we're past measuring in decades, and we're on to counts in centuries.
You know what you can do with your disillusionment and disbelief?
You can fucking choke on it.
Resistance
However we can, whenever we can, to the best of our ability, to whatever limit we can tolerate, for as long as we can hold out, so long as we do not betray, and can continue to bear the weight and the burdens of any friend, comrade or stranger.
That's how we resist.
What we resist is not simple, nor simple to describe. In fact, its greatest virtue (for those who rule and benefit from it) is its appearance of compounded complexity.
It's part of who we are. We are raised to belong to the thing which consumes us, to experience doubt as a double bind, to labor to overcome our own resistances as a matter of responsibility, pride, membership, morality, self-respect, vanity or honor. We have our personalities organized for us, to collapse under the weight of that bind made obvious. We are organized towards self-betrayal at the first hint of obstruction, or realization.
The essential point, if there can be one, is that the whole of society is organized to consume us. I don't mean that as a statement in the abstract. I mean it literally. When your boss's boss orders a thirty dollar glass of wine, it is your suffering he drinks. It's our suffering.
Our private agonies and alienation are not in competition. Some obviously have it worse than others. I know my own good fortune in escaping Lawrence, or not being born in Burkina Faso. I also know that there are days that Burkina Faso and a childhood without abuse would seem like a temporary paradise.
At the point of resistance, where we meet others who want to struggle, who want to fight, who have reached the apex of a necessary question, our origins matter less than our aims.
"What is that question? " you might wonder.
I'll gladly tell you. The question is, "Why shouldn't everyone have it easy?"
I mean, everyone. If you can ask this question, I kindly submit to you that you are all the way there.
So why not take the next step?
Why not resist?
Perhaps your involvement will not resemble my own. I am comfortable with hatred. I'm good at it, and I know that there are plenty of people whose only merit is that they are on the receiving end of my practiced enmity and life-affirming malevolence. I cannot look at my oldest child without knowing this for an exact truth. I cannot wake up in my own poisoned body and foreshortened life without reminding myself that an entire catalog of persons live their lives with greater ease because I broke myself to feed my children, according to a set of enforcements which guaranteed either compliance, or criminality. And I was long a criminal. It's rewarding, in so much as disobedience is its own end. It's also the sort of life which selects for the worst, and the hardest. I have kicked a man's nose almost completely off his face because, in the end, he had the audacity to sneer at the obvious poverty of my friends and I. We nearly killed that man, because we lived lives which demanded a terrible hardness.
Perhaps you also live that life, but call your hardness "career" or "family" or "self-preservation." It probably does preserve you. That's the price of entry to our collective existence. We select for cruelty, or for an involved detachment. We learn to blame victims for their conditions, turning against those honest enough to break with sanity, or sobriety. Villains we might honor, if only from afar, but everyone hates the drug addict and the welfare mother. Especially those who turn their self-preservation into charity, or worse, the plastic hatred of a comfortable pity.
You may not obtain the same hatreds as I. I suggest that this is no obstacle.
We have a common enemy.
It has thousands and thousands of faces. Yours might even be among them.
I know mine once was.
Let's agree to be honest about our complicity. All those points of connection with the machinery of our degradation are points of entry, as well. It's a trick of self-deception to believe that disengagement will stop its operation. It won't, because every slot one of us vacates will be occupied by an equally, or even more desperately desperate party.
The machinery is organized to consume us, to break us down, to constrain our thoughts towards a narrow focus and to run us as separate and isolated platforms, using whatever operating systems keep us divided, which keep each of us from turning our positions into loci of resistance, sabotage and revolution.
The trick isn't to escape. The needful thing is to capture the machinery, the tools, the wealth of our oppressors and turn it against them. There are so many of us, friends, comrades and strangers.
We are legion. We are the many.
And we can do it.
I'm willing to stake my life on that.
[If you have any doubt that our lords and masters understand the stakes, see the post directly below this one.]
(It's impossible to spell out how many people owe to this stupidly simple expression of a thought. But, most every one of you who have been generous enough to comment over the last year or so, and especially this week. Thank you.
The stupid simplicity is my own. The credit and inspiration, due to each and all of you.)
That's how we resist.
What we resist is not simple, nor simple to describe. In fact, its greatest virtue (for those who rule and benefit from it) is its appearance of compounded complexity.
It's part of who we are. We are raised to belong to the thing which consumes us, to experience doubt as a double bind, to labor to overcome our own resistances as a matter of responsibility, pride, membership, morality, self-respect, vanity or honor. We have our personalities organized for us, to collapse under the weight of that bind made obvious. We are organized towards self-betrayal at the first hint of obstruction, or realization.
The essential point, if there can be one, is that the whole of society is organized to consume us. I don't mean that as a statement in the abstract. I mean it literally. When your boss's boss orders a thirty dollar glass of wine, it is your suffering he drinks. It's our suffering.
Our private agonies and alienation are not in competition. Some obviously have it worse than others. I know my own good fortune in escaping Lawrence, or not being born in Burkina Faso. I also know that there are days that Burkina Faso and a childhood without abuse would seem like a temporary paradise.
At the point of resistance, where we meet others who want to struggle, who want to fight, who have reached the apex of a necessary question, our origins matter less than our aims.
"What is that question? " you might wonder.
I'll gladly tell you. The question is, "Why shouldn't everyone have it easy?"
I mean, everyone. If you can ask this question, I kindly submit to you that you are all the way there.
So why not take the next step?
Why not resist?
Perhaps your involvement will not resemble my own. I am comfortable with hatred. I'm good at it, and I know that there are plenty of people whose only merit is that they are on the receiving end of my practiced enmity and life-affirming malevolence. I cannot look at my oldest child without knowing this for an exact truth. I cannot wake up in my own poisoned body and foreshortened life without reminding myself that an entire catalog of persons live their lives with greater ease because I broke myself to feed my children, according to a set of enforcements which guaranteed either compliance, or criminality. And I was long a criminal. It's rewarding, in so much as disobedience is its own end. It's also the sort of life which selects for the worst, and the hardest. I have kicked a man's nose almost completely off his face because, in the end, he had the audacity to sneer at the obvious poverty of my friends and I. We nearly killed that man, because we lived lives which demanded a terrible hardness.
Perhaps you also live that life, but call your hardness "career" or "family" or "self-preservation." It probably does preserve you. That's the price of entry to our collective existence. We select for cruelty, or for an involved detachment. We learn to blame victims for their conditions, turning against those honest enough to break with sanity, or sobriety. Villains we might honor, if only from afar, but everyone hates the drug addict and the welfare mother. Especially those who turn their self-preservation into charity, or worse, the plastic hatred of a comfortable pity.
You may not obtain the same hatreds as I. I suggest that this is no obstacle.
We have a common enemy.
It has thousands and thousands of faces. Yours might even be among them.
I know mine once was.
Let's agree to be honest about our complicity. All those points of connection with the machinery of our degradation are points of entry, as well. It's a trick of self-deception to believe that disengagement will stop its operation. It won't, because every slot one of us vacates will be occupied by an equally, or even more desperately desperate party.
The machinery is organized to consume us, to break us down, to constrain our thoughts towards a narrow focus and to run us as separate and isolated platforms, using whatever operating systems keep us divided, which keep each of us from turning our positions into loci of resistance, sabotage and revolution.
The trick isn't to escape. The needful thing is to capture the machinery, the tools, the wealth of our oppressors and turn it against them. There are so many of us, friends, comrades and strangers.
We are legion. We are the many.
And we can do it.
I'm willing to stake my life on that.
[If you have any doubt that our lords and masters understand the stakes, see the post directly below this one.]
(It's impossible to spell out how many people owe to this stupidly simple expression of a thought. But, most every one of you who have been generous enough to comment over the last year or so, and especially this week. Thank you.
The stupid simplicity is my own. The credit and inspiration, due to each and all of you.)
Revisiting the Enormity: "Super Congress"
When I wrote "The Enormity of It All" and attempted to paint a portrait of the crisis facing the ruling class, I had no idea that their Congressional stooges would be so overt about the solution.
Here, anyways, is the boldness of their solution:
"WASHINGTON -- Debt ceiling negotiators think they've hit on a solution to address the debt ceiling impasse and the public's unwillingness to let go of benefits such as Medicare and Social Security that have been earned over a lifetime of work: Create a new Congress.
This 'Super Congress,' composed of members of both chambers and both parties, isn't mentioned anywhere in the Constitution, but would be granted extraordinary new powers. Under a plan put forth by Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and his counterpart Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.), legislation to lift the debt ceiling would be accompanied by the creation of a 12-member panel made up of 12 lawmakers -- six from each chamber and six from each party.
Legislation approved by the Super Congress -- which some on Capitol Hill are calling the "super committee" -- would then be fast-tracked through both chambers, where it couldn't be amended by simple, regular lawmakers, who'd have the ability only to cast an up or down vote. With the weight of both leaderships behind it, a product originated by the Super Congress would have a strong chance of moving through the little Congress and quickly becoming law. A Super Congress would be less accountable than the system that exists today, and would find it easier to strip the public of popular benefits. Negotiators are currently considering cutting the mortgage deduction and tax credits for retirement savings, for instance, extremely popular policies that would be difficult to slice up using the traditional legislative process.
House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) has made a Super Congress a central part of his last-minute proposal, multiple news reports and people familiar with his plan say. A picture of Boehner's proposal began to come into focus Saturday evening: The debt ceiling would be raised for a short-term period and coupled with an equal dollar figure of cuts, somewhere in the vicinity of a trillion dollars over ten years. A second increase in the debt ceiling would be tied to the creation of a Super Congress that would be required to find a minimum amount of spending cuts..."
I have no doubt that Boehner wants this.
I also have no doubt that Obama would love to find a way for him to get it.
That golf game is paying dividends for Corporate, eh?
Here, anyways, is the boldness of their solution:
"WASHINGTON -- Debt ceiling negotiators think they've hit on a solution to address the debt ceiling impasse and the public's unwillingness to let go of benefits such as Medicare and Social Security that have been earned over a lifetime of work: Create a new Congress.
This 'Super Congress,' composed of members of both chambers and both parties, isn't mentioned anywhere in the Constitution, but would be granted extraordinary new powers. Under a plan put forth by Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and his counterpart Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.), legislation to lift the debt ceiling would be accompanied by the creation of a 12-member panel made up of 12 lawmakers -- six from each chamber and six from each party.
Legislation approved by the Super Congress -- which some on Capitol Hill are calling the "super committee" -- would then be fast-tracked through both chambers, where it couldn't be amended by simple, regular lawmakers, who'd have the ability only to cast an up or down vote. With the weight of both leaderships behind it, a product originated by the Super Congress would have a strong chance of moving through the little Congress and quickly becoming law. A Super Congress would be less accountable than the system that exists today, and would find it easier to strip the public of popular benefits. Negotiators are currently considering cutting the mortgage deduction and tax credits for retirement savings, for instance, extremely popular policies that would be difficult to slice up using the traditional legislative process.
House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) has made a Super Congress a central part of his last-minute proposal, multiple news reports and people familiar with his plan say. A picture of Boehner's proposal began to come into focus Saturday evening: The debt ceiling would be raised for a short-term period and coupled with an equal dollar figure of cuts, somewhere in the vicinity of a trillion dollars over ten years. A second increase in the debt ceiling would be tied to the creation of a Super Congress that would be required to find a minimum amount of spending cuts..."
I have no doubt that Boehner wants this.
I also have no doubt that Obama would love to find a way for him to get it.
That golf game is paying dividends for Corporate, eh?
Jul 19, 2011
Dear Progressives
I was going to be nice. But, alas, you merit it not.
You are nice people. And you are dumb. And I don't mean C minus average, but can fix a motor, run a team of oxen and whip up a meal for twenty on a budget "dumb."
I mean, actually dumb. You're mute about all the wrong things. Because, well, you're compromised people. And I don't mean, "ah fuck, I shouldn't have taken that job, but I have to feed my kids" compromised.
I mean, actually compromised. You chose your insipid, unrealistic, wrong-sided beliefs. You choose to believe that the federal death state can do good, if only given over to the right people, who being noble and pure white of heart, will of course transform it into an angelic instrument of human progress.
You've pinned your hopes on good persons and bad, on scoundrels and almost saints, but you've never figured out a simple truth available to every American smart enough not to care about the ballot box.
No politics matters. Because there is no "the People." They aren't out there, waiting to give their holy Consent to the men in white hats. Or to the ladies in white hats, if that's your primary criteria.
The State - and let's just flash back to Kropotkin - exists to protect property and to kill, hurt, maim and break the ruled classes who must not be allowed control of that property. The state exists to control populations so that class which controls the state can have its preferred forms of property. No matter how many times men have tried to capture it and use it towards a different end, the state returns again and again to its stable form of power, and its stable function.
And you, dear progressives, aren't willing to let go of property. You're still trying to figure out ways to protect it. To make the state which guarantees it solvent. To get more people tied up in it. To shore up the lending power of the government.
Never mind your love for the state's nastier functions. You might want the prisons to be prettier, and the schools greener, but you still want them to discipline and punish. Or, worse, to reform and redeem.
But, really, you love that private property and the gummint that protects it.
So, let's get back to property. You know what you mean by property. And so do the rest of us. Sure, you want a slightly larger Commons than the more cartoonish conservatives. Yeah, yeah - they're astroturfed into stupidity and they worship an angry Yahwehian Jesus. They like to pretend you are all socialists, and you like to get indignant about that.
The cartoons are wrong. You loves you some property. You know, land ownership, traded shares, accumulated wealth, cleaned up neighborhoods, community gardens for Bedford housewives, gentrification as long as its "green". And the American Dream. Oh, the American Dream.
Proggies love the American Dream, dontcha?
If I had a nickel for every time I heard a progressive prattle on about the American Dream, I'd have enough money to arm a whole army of Lucy Parson's grifters, grimers and tramps. Oh, happy day...
Anyway.
It's just that you can't have it that way. The American Dream is all tangled up with a real, actual, specific set of events. Let's call it, hmmm, history. What actually happened. And the American dream is inseparable from slavery, the Indian Wars, land grabs, Manifest Destiny, corporate finance, debt, war economies and the pillaging of native, tribal, indigenous and "third world" peoples the world over.
The American Dream is purchased with the blood of poor white folk from the Appalachians to the Ozarks, and all across the dying rust belt. It is cheap corn, sugar and wheat dumped into African and South American markets in order to destroy the ability of Africans and South Americans to produce their own consumables for local - wow, what a concept - consumption. It's shareholder meetings and school bonds and coolie built railroads. It's fungible oil. It's coal fired power plants. And the next twenty years of nuclear plant construction.
It's the Gulf Oil Spill, and all the spills that don't make national news.
It's the prison industrial complex, and the Drug War.
All of that shit goes into the federal stew and is produced to make sure that the middle class - that most persistent of useful fictions - is placated with cheap roads, petroleum fertilized lettuce, public stadium football and perpetual warfare.
Your ideal America depends on the outsourcing of death, and the in-sourcing of stable middle class homes, high wages, low costs, jobs guarantees for voters and cheap healthcare. It's paid for by the poor, everywhere.
You, you fucking ass clowns, are the eaters of the dead.
Their lives ring your stomachs as fatty deposits and the excreta of poorly digested comfort food. Their stolen rubber sponges the soles of your feet when you get it through your death riddled heads to treadmill all that fat off. It's the shit food the poor eat, so you can shop organic.
You eat the poor and you eat the dead. You drink in their stolen lives, and livelihoods. Their lost lives, their very body fluids soak through every word you write, type or whisper in collaboration with your own imagined genius. It's their water in that plastic bottle next to your desk.
While the rest of the world starves, you congratulate yourselves on a new/old theory to print money and secure for yourselves an American Dream without any history attached to it. Or with the bad history of Good Presidents and Golden Ages. You know, the ones where FDR didn't sell out the muddles in order to get New York, Chicago and Boston chained to a disciplinary economy. In your history, he saved free exchange. For the rest of us, he stopped a revolution in the making.
Ah, fuck. We're almost through this...
While the prisons fill up, you pretend that access to the Presidency will allow your White Hats to tame the hydra and make it a treasured pet. You're fine with the new Enclosure, as long as it gets you healthcare.
You are, in a word, fools.
And you are also the enemy.
The federal death state's operators aren't going to print up a whole bunch of money because you have noble intentions towards the creation of a new fiat money regime which magically manages to be immune from runs on currency, depreciation, inflation or foreign trading. They are going to print or coin money if and when they can get away with it, in order to drive down even further the real value of wages, while encouraging the rise of prices to as high as tolerable levels. They'll do it when it's time to "rescue" Mexico or Colombia or Venezuela from its rising poor people. Or when the Chinese death state has finally converted Africa into a giant death state dependent market and no longer needs the US worker drone to absorb excess production.
You cannot tame this beast.
You kill it. And you do that by, I dunno, killing it. Not by feeding it tasty human treats until it learns to behave.
Fuckers.
Figure it out already, or get out of the way. Because, come reckoning, if you're apologizing for evil as long as it wears your color halo, you get what the peasants got to give.
And I for one will be applauding them.
(thanks to good sir Shetterly for the inspiration)
You are nice people. And you are dumb. And I don't mean C minus average, but can fix a motor, run a team of oxen and whip up a meal for twenty on a budget "dumb."
I mean, actually dumb. You're mute about all the wrong things. Because, well, you're compromised people. And I don't mean, "ah fuck, I shouldn't have taken that job, but I have to feed my kids" compromised.
I mean, actually compromised. You chose your insipid, unrealistic, wrong-sided beliefs. You choose to believe that the federal death state can do good, if only given over to the right people, who being noble and pure white of heart, will of course transform it into an angelic instrument of human progress.
You've pinned your hopes on good persons and bad, on scoundrels and almost saints, but you've never figured out a simple truth available to every American smart enough not to care about the ballot box.
No politics matters. Because there is no "the People." They aren't out there, waiting to give their holy Consent to the men in white hats. Or to the ladies in white hats, if that's your primary criteria.
The State - and let's just flash back to Kropotkin - exists to protect property and to kill, hurt, maim and break the ruled classes who must not be allowed control of that property. The state exists to control populations so that class which controls the state can have its preferred forms of property. No matter how many times men have tried to capture it and use it towards a different end, the state returns again and again to its stable form of power, and its stable function.
And you, dear progressives, aren't willing to let go of property. You're still trying to figure out ways to protect it. To make the state which guarantees it solvent. To get more people tied up in it. To shore up the lending power of the government.
Never mind your love for the state's nastier functions. You might want the prisons to be prettier, and the schools greener, but you still want them to discipline and punish. Or, worse, to reform and redeem.
But, really, you love that private property and the gummint that protects it.
So, let's get back to property. You know what you mean by property. And so do the rest of us. Sure, you want a slightly larger Commons than the more cartoonish conservatives. Yeah, yeah - they're astroturfed into stupidity and they worship an angry Yahwehian Jesus. They like to pretend you are all socialists, and you like to get indignant about that.
The cartoons are wrong. You loves you some property. You know, land ownership, traded shares, accumulated wealth, cleaned up neighborhoods, community gardens for Bedford housewives, gentrification as long as its "green". And the American Dream. Oh, the American Dream.
Proggies love the American Dream, dontcha?
If I had a nickel for every time I heard a progressive prattle on about the American Dream, I'd have enough money to arm a whole army of Lucy Parson's grifters, grimers and tramps. Oh, happy day...
Anyway.
It's just that you can't have it that way. The American Dream is all tangled up with a real, actual, specific set of events. Let's call it, hmmm, history. What actually happened. And the American dream is inseparable from slavery, the Indian Wars, land grabs, Manifest Destiny, corporate finance, debt, war economies and the pillaging of native, tribal, indigenous and "third world" peoples the world over.
The American Dream is purchased with the blood of poor white folk from the Appalachians to the Ozarks, and all across the dying rust belt. It is cheap corn, sugar and wheat dumped into African and South American markets in order to destroy the ability of Africans and South Americans to produce their own consumables for local - wow, what a concept - consumption. It's shareholder meetings and school bonds and coolie built railroads. It's fungible oil. It's coal fired power plants. And the next twenty years of nuclear plant construction.
It's the Gulf Oil Spill, and all the spills that don't make national news.
It's the prison industrial complex, and the Drug War.
All of that shit goes into the federal stew and is produced to make sure that the middle class - that most persistent of useful fictions - is placated with cheap roads, petroleum fertilized lettuce, public stadium football and perpetual warfare.
Your ideal America depends on the outsourcing of death, and the in-sourcing of stable middle class homes, high wages, low costs, jobs guarantees for voters and cheap healthcare. It's paid for by the poor, everywhere.
You, you fucking ass clowns, are the eaters of the dead.
Their lives ring your stomachs as fatty deposits and the excreta of poorly digested comfort food. Their stolen rubber sponges the soles of your feet when you get it through your death riddled heads to treadmill all that fat off. It's the shit food the poor eat, so you can shop organic.
You eat the poor and you eat the dead. You drink in their stolen lives, and livelihoods. Their lost lives, their very body fluids soak through every word you write, type or whisper in collaboration with your own imagined genius. It's their water in that plastic bottle next to your desk.
While the rest of the world starves, you congratulate yourselves on a new/old theory to print money and secure for yourselves an American Dream without any history attached to it. Or with the bad history of Good Presidents and Golden Ages. You know, the ones where FDR didn't sell out the muddles in order to get New York, Chicago and Boston chained to a disciplinary economy. In your history, he saved free exchange. For the rest of us, he stopped a revolution in the making.
Ah, fuck. We're almost through this...
While the prisons fill up, you pretend that access to the Presidency will allow your White Hats to tame the hydra and make it a treasured pet. You're fine with the new Enclosure, as long as it gets you healthcare.
You are, in a word, fools.
And you are also the enemy.
The federal death state's operators aren't going to print up a whole bunch of money because you have noble intentions towards the creation of a new fiat money regime which magically manages to be immune from runs on currency, depreciation, inflation or foreign trading. They are going to print or coin money if and when they can get away with it, in order to drive down even further the real value of wages, while encouraging the rise of prices to as high as tolerable levels. They'll do it when it's time to "rescue" Mexico or Colombia or Venezuela from its rising poor people. Or when the Chinese death state has finally converted Africa into a giant death state dependent market and no longer needs the US worker drone to absorb excess production.
You cannot tame this beast.
You kill it. And you do that by, I dunno, killing it. Not by feeding it tasty human treats until it learns to behave.
Fuckers.
Figure it out already, or get out of the way. Because, come reckoning, if you're apologizing for evil as long as it wears your color halo, you get what the peasants got to give.
And I for one will be applauding them.
(thanks to good sir Shetterly for the inspiration)
Jul 18, 2011
A Reply to Believers in Good Government
If the state is run by people who are effectively oligarchs and timocrats, if it is operated for the emolument of oligarchs and timocrats, and if it is organized for the protection and promotion of the concentration of wealth - you introduce its beneficiaries to the French Doctor's Remedy.
You do not beg it to be gentle and and loving and kind. Only a willing slave begs his master for kindness. And such a person is not fit company for free women and men. He may merit pity, but never trust or companionship. Such a man will turn you in when the master comes a' calling. If he can ignore what the state we have does in order to dream of what it might do in a world which will never exist, he is one platonic ideal or smarmy election away from handing you over.
No - you only trust people who want the master to get his just deserts. They deserve loyalty. They have earned a true friendship.
You do not, with all the self-degradation of a court sycophant or a house slave, prithee and plead for it to do right by the peasants, peons, hoi polloi and rough folk it is organized to control, capture, repress, oppress and imprison whenever feasible.
You introduce its managing partners and beneficiaries to the French Doctor's Remedy.
Or you are complicit in its offenses.
Still...
The naivete is adorable.
Jul 17, 2011
About Soccer
The Women's World Cup has been worth watching. All of it.
Right down to this penalty shoot out wire finish. Thoroughly enjoyed the Japanese play, today.
Truly shiny tending, by the Japenese goal tender, when it mattered.
Right down to this penalty shoot out wire finish. Thoroughly enjoyed the Japanese play, today.
Truly shiny tending, by the Japenese goal tender, when it mattered.
Jul 16, 2011
Ursine ears and the remembrance of future events...
I have an appreciation for Robert Baer. As far as thoroughly compromised individuals go, he's a decent read, and his observations and insights are not without merit. I prefer him to Chomsky, who is equally compromised (though I tend to agree with the Chompers more).
That written, his latest prediction has all the ring of truth one might associate with a Sy Hirsch narrative foreboding - that is, nil; they're good analysts and Hirsch has managed more than one surprising "scoop," but prescient Cassandras they are not.
Anyway, Baer's casting of the bones:
"...There is almost 'near certainty' that Netanyahu is 'planning an attack [on Iran] ... and it will probably be in September before the vote on a Palestinian state. And he's also hoping to draw the United States into the conflict,' Baer explained..."
Netanyahu is a venal, stupid, clownishly evil man. I have no doubt that for all the praise heaped on him by Obama, and in spite of the cover the last nine US Administrations have given Bibi and his predecessors, Netanyahu in fact despises Obama and would love nothing more than to actually be the tail that wags the American dog. (Any suggestion that Israel acts militarily without some US support and encouragement is risible, at best.)
Let's go on record, here: Bibi Netanyahu would love to force Obama to make a Hobson's choice - one which would likely cost him an election if he didn't support Israel, the other costing the US government even considerably more in credibility and cache if he did not.
The US military is fully committed to the defense of Israel.
Let's have no doubts on that.
But, is Netanyahu actually, certifiably insane?
Would he precipitate a global war (see Chinese and Russian security arrangements with Iran) in order to prevent the recognition of a laughably containable, easily conquered, utterly corrupt and compromised future Palestinian state.
I don't know. Seems to me, all things being equal, that this is what Baer thinks, in making such a bold prediction.
What say you, intrepid readers, friends and newly met strangers?
That written, his latest prediction has all the ring of truth one might associate with a Sy Hirsch narrative foreboding - that is, nil; they're good analysts and Hirsch has managed more than one surprising "scoop," but prescient Cassandras they are not.
Anyway, Baer's casting of the bones:
"...There is almost 'near certainty' that Netanyahu is 'planning an attack [on Iran] ... and it will probably be in September before the vote on a Palestinian state. And he's also hoping to draw the United States into the conflict,' Baer explained..."
Netanyahu is a venal, stupid, clownishly evil man. I have no doubt that for all the praise heaped on him by Obama, and in spite of the cover the last nine US Administrations have given Bibi and his predecessors, Netanyahu in fact despises Obama and would love nothing more than to actually be the tail that wags the American dog. (Any suggestion that Israel acts militarily without some US support and encouragement is risible, at best.)
Let's go on record, here: Bibi Netanyahu would love to force Obama to make a Hobson's choice - one which would likely cost him an election if he didn't support Israel, the other costing the US government even considerably more in credibility and cache if he did not.
The US military is fully committed to the defense of Israel.
Let's have no doubts on that.
But, is Netanyahu actually, certifiably insane?
Would he precipitate a global war (see Chinese and Russian security arrangements with Iran) in order to prevent the recognition of a laughably containable, easily conquered, utterly corrupt and compromised future Palestinian state.
I don't know. Seems to me, all things being equal, that this is what Baer thinks, in making such a bold prediction.
What say you, intrepid readers, friends and newly met strangers?
Jul 15, 2011
How To Do A Coup
1. Under the cover of regional unrest, encourage bankers with ties to the US security establishment to declare themselves the legitimate government of a country.
2. Make humanist noises about the terrible conditions for the oppressed people of that country.
3. Pretend very loudly that the leader of said country plans to massacre or slaughter thousands of his poor citizens.
4. Get the UN and NATO to rubberstamp, yet again, a "no fly zone" and limited defensive operations. For the good of the people about to have their lives massacred by the newest Next Worst Dude Since Hitler. Remember to remind the American public that "no boots [will be] on the ground." Make noises about not intending to do regime change.
5. Bomb the bejesus out of said country. Indiscriminately. If possible, bring to bear your infamous sky death robots.
6. Continue bombing.
7. Wait for the Fourth Estate to discover a missing white woman. Or a Princess's penchant for snazzy dress.
8. Recognize said bankers as the one, true, only legitimate government of poor, benighted nation suffering in the clutches of the Bad Dude Who Reminds Reasonable People Of Hitler. Free up Bad Dude's seized assets and hand them over to the new "legitimate government." Make no mention of Bad Dude's copious supplies of gold, the country's strict policy of preventing capital flight, or its relatively stable currency. Neglect all reference to its vasty vast catalog of natural resources.
9. Sign trade deal, concessions agreements and military pact with new "Legitimate Government."
2. Make humanist noises about the terrible conditions for the oppressed people of that country.
3. Pretend very loudly that the leader of said country plans to massacre or slaughter thousands of his poor citizens.
4. Get the UN and NATO to rubberstamp, yet again, a "no fly zone" and limited defensive operations. For the good of the people about to have their lives massacred by the newest Next Worst Dude Since Hitler. Remember to remind the American public that "no boots [will be] on the ground." Make noises about not intending to do regime change.
5. Bomb the bejesus out of said country. Indiscriminately. If possible, bring to bear your infamous sky death robots.
6. Continue bombing.
7. Wait for the Fourth Estate to discover a missing white woman. Or a Princess's penchant for snazzy dress.
8. Recognize said bankers as the one, true, only legitimate government of poor, benighted nation suffering in the clutches of the Bad Dude Who Reminds Reasonable People Of Hitler. Free up Bad Dude's seized assets and hand them over to the new "legitimate government." Make no mention of Bad Dude's copious supplies of gold, the country's strict policy of preventing capital flight, or its relatively stable currency. Neglect all reference to its vasty vast catalog of natural resources.
9. Sign trade deal, concessions agreements and military pact with new "Legitimate Government."
Jul 12, 2011
More Funny. Or not.
h/t Flagrancy
Doubling down on the funny:
"Oh, the irony! Target Corp., long locked in a battle with labor organizers, filmed a notorious internal anti-union video with union actors and under the jurisdiction of one of the biggest unions in the entertainment business.
The 13-minute film, posted by Gawker this week, was designed to dissuade workers from signing up to be represented by unions. A pair of smiling spokespeople dressed like Target employees -- 'Maria' and 'Doug' -- warn workers that, despite what they may have heard, a union is a 'business,' one that is greedy for dues and will not be able to deliver on promises of higher wages. As it turns out, the video was filmed under the jurisdiction of the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (AFTRA), according to actor (and union member) Ric Reitz, who plays Target spokesman "Doug" in the film..."
It seems, already, that folks have picked up on the banality and "cheese" factor of the video, some (see Gawker) even arguing that its low production value works against Target's anti-union aims.
I think they're missing the point.
This is a perfect sell because it's so cheese-funny, piss poor and laughable. It sends up no easily identified warning signals, no prosecutable red flags and no overt or ominous indications of planned hostility.
Which is why it's so effective. Because, for all that it works hard to be banal and harmless and crayon colored in pastels and smiling stupidity, it is clearly a threat. If you've ever worked a stretch at any box outlet, chain or fast food joint, you'll probably recognize immediately that all the stuff you'd better remember was in the cheesy orientation videos. And they are always followed just as immediately by a raft of papers to which you fix your binding signature and, as likely as not, your commitment to non-disclosure.
This is a threat. An effective one.
Delivered from beneath the painted smile of a grinning clown...
Egalia
When I first read this article, I was all like omigodwhatthefuck, and shit. My reaction was, to put it lightly, negative. But, I also almost immediately distrusted my own emotional resistance to it. I could see the outlines of my own defensiveness, and those ramparts I've built up in my life, most often just to preserve that life.
I wouldn't call it crippling, but I found myself unable to write about it, or anything else. It helped that I've been ill and have paid more in co-pays and percentages, over the last three weeks, than I did over the last triplet of three year durations. If I'd been hit by a bus, say two weeks ago, I think my last emotional flurry before my brain went dark would have been one of gratitude.
All the same, this story has been on my mind the whole time. And I don't know what I think or feel about it, which is in and of itself unique.
I don't have an angry Crowvian rant, or anything.
Just, mayhap, some hope for an interesting discussion.
Anyway - here it is:
Egalia.
Thoughts?
I wouldn't call it crippling, but I found myself unable to write about it, or anything else. It helped that I've been ill and have paid more in co-pays and percentages, over the last three weeks, than I did over the last triplet of three year durations. If I'd been hit by a bus, say two weeks ago, I think my last emotional flurry before my brain went dark would have been one of gratitude.
All the same, this story has been on my mind the whole time. And I don't know what I think or feel about it, which is in and of itself unique.
I don't have an angry Crowvian rant, or anything.
Just, mayhap, some hope for an interesting discussion.
Anyway - here it is:
Egalia.
Thoughts?
Jul 11, 2011
Funny
Ray Wieczorek never had any moral quandaries taking payola from the city of Manchester's illegal gambling concerns, while he pushed to keep video gambling - get this - illegal. And he can sue me for hitting the publish button if he wants. I watched him take that payout. I know the people who paid him. I know the rackets they worked for. The Greek mob doesn't have as many cops on its payroll as it used to have, and it's having a hard time competing with its Hispanic replacements, but those gambling concerns still exist and everyone knows where they are.
Everyone, Ray. Even your proteges, the current and former mayors. Everyone in Shit Town knows how the shake down works.
He never had a problem insuring mill buildings owned by political allies. Especially when those buildings burned and improper entry and assessment required him to make full payment.
But, he sure seems to have a problem with poor women getting STD treatments, birth control and routine exams at slightly reduced rates:
"...Another executive councilor who opposed the contract, Raymond Wieczorek of Manchester, said he had asked if the contract could exclude the issuance of condoms. Wieczorek said he supports paying to test for sexually transmitted diseases but does not believe the state should subsidize contraception.
'If they want to have a good time, why not let them pay for it?' he said..."
Funny, Ray. Here's to hoping you get syphilis right up to your eye sockets, you fucking contemptible piece of shit.
Everyone, Ray. Even your proteges, the current and former mayors. Everyone in Shit Town knows how the shake down works.
He never had a problem insuring mill buildings owned by political allies. Especially when those buildings burned and improper entry and assessment required him to make full payment.
But, he sure seems to have a problem with poor women getting STD treatments, birth control and routine exams at slightly reduced rates:
"...Another executive councilor who opposed the contract, Raymond Wieczorek of Manchester, said he had asked if the contract could exclude the issuance of condoms. Wieczorek said he supports paying to test for sexually transmitted diseases but does not believe the state should subsidize contraception.
'If they want to have a good time, why not let them pay for it?' he said..."
Funny, Ray. Here's to hoping you get syphilis right up to your eye sockets, you fucking contemptible piece of shit.
Jun 22, 2011
Apropos
...of the rant below, I invite you to read this:
You can go fuck yourselves. It's what they really think.
" 'We have 20 nuclear cores exposed, the fuel pools have several cores each, that is 20 times the potential to be released than Chernobyl,' said Gundersen. 'The data I'm seeing shows that we are finding hot spots further away than we had from Chernobyl, and the amount of radiation in many of them was the amount that caused areas to be declared no-man's-land for Chernobyl. We are seeing square kilometres being found 60 to 70 kilometres away from the reactor. You can't clean all this up. We still have radioactive wild boar in Germany, 30 years after Chernobyl.'
Japan's Nuclear Emergency Response Headquarters finally admitted earlier this month that reactors 1, 2, and 3 at the Fukushima plant experienced full meltdowns.
TEPCO announced that the accident probably released more radioactive material into the environment than Chernobyl, making it the worst nuclear accident on record.
Meanwhile, a nuclear waste advisor to the Japanese government reported that about 966 square kilometres near the power station - an area roughly 17 times the size of Manhattan - is now likely uninhabitable..."
The immediate managerial response to crisis, demonstrated again and again and again, is to lie about it. These are the people with the lawyers, guns and money. And their first instinct is to tell you that a catastrophe is no big thing. They've spent their formal educations and their careers accumulating power, influence, wealth and position. And they use it to lie to you. Not some of the time. Not over minor shit.
When it matters most. When it's about your health, your survival and the quality of you ridiculously brief mortal existence.
Because you don't matter to them.
Nuclear meltdowns? Inundated cities? Man-made flooding from reservoir releases? Toxic beef? Dying oceans? Rising seas?
And remember when "well, at least it's not worse than Chernobyl" was like part of the by line?
Yeah, me too.
So, the next time someone tells you that you have to vote or die, or sign a petition to persuade Congress to do the right thing, or organize a free speech zone posing party for the local police, or get some mo'betta Democrats, or trust the Teap Arty to conjure an honest Republican, remember Fukushima. Or Katrina. Those motherfuckers have a first instinct. And it's to lie to you.
Let him make his appeal to your good citizenship. Let him finish massaging the soft pelt of the better and angelic natures the schools spent twelve years indoctrinating you to believe you possess. Let him wrap up and settle on his hind legs, confident that the colonization is going to do the trick.
And when the first turn of the self-satisfied smirk starts to pucker up those lying lips, punch that motherfucker right in the face.
Jun 21, 2011
A Nugget of Unavoidable Truth
There is this really simple explanation for why the ruling factions in the capitalized world don't do anything about pollution, food shortages, infrastructural decay, looming oceanic extinction, niche collapse or the human crises which follow upon environmental degradation. They don't have confused priorities. They're not backwards. It's not about balancing budgets or redirecting energies towards job creation and a revitalized manufacturing sector. They're not misguided. It's not because they're liberals, or conservatives.
It's just that...
...they don't care.
They don't care.
They don't care.
They don't fucking care.
I'd even wager that they're banking on surviving as they reshape economies to triage the rest of us. Austerity is triage.
Austerity and militarization are about heading off our numbers before we really, truly believe we've got 'em going for us.
In the face of this observable condition, pacifism is moral abnegation. I'm not suggesting that non-violence is always useless. But, as Arundhati Roy sagely observed,
"Non-violence is a piece of theatre. You need an audience. What can you do when you have no audience? People have the right to resist annihilation.”
The people against whom non-violence would be waged, in the "developed world," won't be moved by it. The non-participants who might change their minds won't be allowed to see it happening. Or, worse, when a successful and largely non-violent movement does succeed in effecting a change in politicians or ruling factions, it will be diverted away from social and economic alteration.
The produce of our collective labor is already being diverted from human welfare towards the dronification of the "homeland" because the people who write the laws and pay the bills intend to more directly police both their captive populations and the growing numbers they're already excluding. Labor works more for less, the rich get richer and their uniformed protectors receive larger budgets every year. It's naked expropriation, and they're getting away with it like never before.
Let's beat this fucking horse corpse to glue already: our earthly masters won't cut the war and police budgets because they need a corps of men with a proven ability to ignore their own humanity, who are receptive to belief systems which allow them to kill on command, and who have developed the capacity to harm others and justify it according to prevailing mythologies.
They need sanctioned killers because we are no longer essential but haven't the decency to just fucking die already. They need armed staffers because they don't need our mouths or our superfluous flesh and extraneous labor.
We aren't necessary anymore.
We aren't necessary anymore.
We aren't necessary anymore.
The last six generations of our labor have allowed them to construct a production, exchange and distribution system which will enable them to liberate themselves from our hungering stomachs, unskilled labor, the legions of urban poor and any lingering moral obligation to remedy the suffering of a burgeoning population of waste peoples.
This is war. It's war. It's a goddamned fucking war.
We have always had this war.
It's only now that they can really win it.
Please, please understand that if we fail to respond collectively, and soon, they will hand manage our annihilation. Or let the collapse of entire ecosystems do it for them.
They aren't dealing with the material and environmental consequences of the expanding capitalist closed system because they don't have to. We are the price they are willing to pay to negotiate their survival of their own onslaught against nature and humanity.
We are the bride price. We are the fucking dowry.
And they are going to pay it.
I swear to you, they'll fucking do it.
So what are we going to gods-be-damned do about that?
Some fucking protest theater? Some electioneering? Maybe a vote recall or a puppet parade? Pose for the police portrait takers? Beg for time on the teevee?
Or are we going to wake up before it's too late and treat our mortal enemies in a manner befitting...
...mortal fucking enemies?
Because they will triage the lot of us. And worse.
They really fucking will.
It's just that...
...they don't care.
They don't care.
They don't care.
They don't fucking care.
I'd even wager that they're banking on surviving as they reshape economies to triage the rest of us. Austerity is triage.
Austerity and militarization are about heading off our numbers before we really, truly believe we've got 'em going for us.
In the face of this observable condition, pacifism is moral abnegation. I'm not suggesting that non-violence is always useless. But, as Arundhati Roy sagely observed,
"Non-violence is a piece of theatre. You need an audience. What can you do when you have no audience? People have the right to resist annihilation.”
The people against whom non-violence would be waged, in the "developed world," won't be moved by it. The non-participants who might change their minds won't be allowed to see it happening. Or, worse, when a successful and largely non-violent movement does succeed in effecting a change in politicians or ruling factions, it will be diverted away from social and economic alteration.
The produce of our collective labor is already being diverted from human welfare towards the dronification of the "homeland" because the people who write the laws and pay the bills intend to more directly police both their captive populations and the growing numbers they're already excluding. Labor works more for less, the rich get richer and their uniformed protectors receive larger budgets every year. It's naked expropriation, and they're getting away with it like never before.
Let's beat this fucking horse corpse to glue already: our earthly masters won't cut the war and police budgets because they need a corps of men with a proven ability to ignore their own humanity, who are receptive to belief systems which allow them to kill on command, and who have developed the capacity to harm others and justify it according to prevailing mythologies.
They need sanctioned killers because we are no longer essential but haven't the decency to just fucking die already. They need armed staffers because they don't need our mouths or our superfluous flesh and extraneous labor.
We aren't necessary anymore.
We aren't necessary anymore.
We aren't necessary anymore.
The last six generations of our labor have allowed them to construct a production, exchange and distribution system which will enable them to liberate themselves from our hungering stomachs, unskilled labor, the legions of urban poor and any lingering moral obligation to remedy the suffering of a burgeoning population of waste peoples.
This is war. It's war. It's a goddamned fucking war.
We have always had this war.
It's only now that they can really win it.
Please, please understand that if we fail to respond collectively, and soon, they will hand manage our annihilation. Or let the collapse of entire ecosystems do it for them.
They aren't dealing with the material and environmental consequences of the expanding capitalist closed system because they don't have to. We are the price they are willing to pay to negotiate their survival of their own onslaught against nature and humanity.
We are the bride price. We are the fucking dowry.
And they are going to pay it.
I swear to you, they'll fucking do it.
So what are we going to gods-be-damned do about that?
Some fucking protest theater? Some electioneering? Maybe a vote recall or a puppet parade? Pose for the police portrait takers? Beg for time on the teevee?
Or are we going to wake up before it's too late and treat our mortal enemies in a manner befitting...
...mortal fucking enemies?
Because they will triage the lot of us. And worse.
They really fucking will.
You Decide...
This:
"Louis Farrakhan, speaking at the American Clergy Leadership Conference on May 28, lambasted President Barack Obama over the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and U.S. military intervention in Libya, calling him an 'assassin' and a 'murderer.'
'We voted for our brother Barack, a beautiful human being with a sweet heart,' Farrakhan said, in a video making the rounds on the internet. But he has turned into someone else, Farrakhan told the crowd. 'Now he's an assassin.'
Or this:
"President Barack Obama told Democratic Party donors tonight that the bond between the U.S. and Israel is 'unbreakable.'
'The United States and Israel will always be stalwart allies and friends,' the president told about 80 people at a dinner for Americans in Support of a Strong U.S.-Israel Relationship. 'That bond is unbreakable and Israel’s security will always be at the top tier of considerations of how America manages its foreign policy.'..."
I don't know why men such as Cornell West and Louis Farrakhan have to preface their condemnations with assertions about Obama's former goodness. I don't find it particularly credible. People who seek the Presidency and who have any chance of achieving that office probably have a good idea what it is they want and how they're going to get it. They know what the job entails, which is why a candidate with any chance of obtaining the position will so often run on his ability to be a good, dependable, patriotic Commander in Chief.
It's what Hillary Clinton did. It's what John McCain did. It's what Barack Obama did. I mean, this is a guy who literally practiced the role on his way to the office, and continued to perfect its outward appearances once he achieved it:
"Never a soldier himself, but suddenly their commander-in-chief, President Barack Obama wanted to learn the job from the ground up.
Including the salute.
Under the guidance of an expert, aides say Obama privately repeated his salute over and over again until he got it down. In a testament to how sensitive the White House is about the commander in chief practicing this basic military gesture, aides would not say who taught Obama how to salute. But every time he uses it, Obama is trying to convey an insider’s respect for the armed forces without saying a word.
'That attention to detail, that focus on the outward manifestation of what we expect, is compelling,' said retired Gen. Paul Eaton, who advised Obama during the presidential campaign. 'Whoever worked with him on that did a pretty good job.'
Obama’s evolution as commander-in-chief during his first year in office largely involved proving that he was up to the job – that a 48-year-old former law professor and one-term U.S. senator who campaigned on ending the Iraq war had the resolve to lead the military through some of its toughest years in recent history..."
The guy didn't just want the job. He wanted the soldiers who would in turn take his orders to believe he was equal to the task of giving them. He wanted to simulate, and have them give their faith in return. He wanted - and it's no stretch to assume he still wants it - Uncle Sam's professional murder squad to read his gestures and bearing and believe deeply that he deserved the job of sending them off to smash, rape and kill.
I find that difficult to reconcile with a man of sweet and innocent heart.
But that's just me.
Also...
I'm not black. I don't know what it's like to have to convey to a domestically captured and oppressed nation forged and shaped by slavery, poverty, Jim Crow and the war on drugs how it is that the first Commander in Chief who looks like them is in fact just another Great White Father in all but appearance.
I can look from my relatively isolated position on the hybrid border between minority and parochial school cautionary tale and just come to the conclusion that Barack Obama made his peace with murder, war and oppression a long, long time ago. I can write something that flirts with insensitivity - perhaps, that he is Bill Clinton in black face - and put it down and move on because I don't have any history which defines my ratio of melanin per square inch of skin as a moral dilemma and a sign that I belong at the bottom of the heap. I belong instead to the tribes of the Noble Defeated, like Gaul under Rome, mythic Israel in Bondage, or the rump remnant of the Tsalagi.
Soon, I hear, we will be taking applications from among the leftover Palestinians.
Maybe it's necessary to argue that Barack Obama could have been a good man if only he'd been stronger, thereby placing his potential in competition with his kinesis in order to illustrate, by the very contrast in motion, that he's not a good man and therefore loses claim to the loyalty of a people.
I don't know.
On the one hand, we have Farrakhan's willingness to move from an imaginary Obama to the real one who so willingly murders the enemies of the monstrous American machine. On the other, we have Obama, who could if he wanted to say seven words and change the world:
"The Israeli occupation of Palestine is wrong."
I know he won't. People who want the job he has don't say those words. And they probably never will. Not even in the silence of their waking dreams.
Which leaves us, I guess, with wondering how an imaginary good man became the very real murderer we get to see on the teevee. If we're lucky, it might have us asking, perhaps, how we've never evolved beyond the belief that power corrupts.
Power doesn't corrupt. It's an attractor. It draws out those who want it, and maybe more than a few who need it.
You know how I know this?
Barack Obama could have won the job to lose it. He could have spent four years guaranteeing that no one would bundle him a hundred dollars, never mind ten thousand, ever again. He could have called the prison system what it is: a continuation of Jim Crow and a sustained, organized, over budgeted and increasingly privatized criminalization of poverty. He could have scheduled fourteen hundred and sixty separate press conferences, and devoted each one to a different discussion of the sad record of American history. The drug war. The fire sale of the Commons. The perils of regulatory capture. The militarization of education. Predatory insurance practices. The systemic and relentless religious, institutional and industry betrayal of women. Neoliberal structural adjustment as privateering. Environmental niche collapse. The dying oceans. The connection between markets and the death of the bees. What that means for hungry people everywhere. High sugar, low nutrient "affordable" foods and the sacrifice of two generations of children. Race. Gender. Class.
You get the picture.
He didn't do that, did he?
So.
You decide.
Was he a good man who should have known better, but was corrupted by power, or did he long ago make the choice to become the kind of man who could whitewash the brutal Israeli occupation and the American funding of it on his way to a thousand dollar a plate dinner and the dreams of untroubled sleep?
"Louis Farrakhan, speaking at the American Clergy Leadership Conference on May 28, lambasted President Barack Obama over the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and U.S. military intervention in Libya, calling him an 'assassin' and a 'murderer.'
'We voted for our brother Barack, a beautiful human being with a sweet heart,' Farrakhan said, in a video making the rounds on the internet. But he has turned into someone else, Farrakhan told the crowd. 'Now he's an assassin.'
Or this:
"President Barack Obama told Democratic Party donors tonight that the bond between the U.S. and Israel is 'unbreakable.'
'The United States and Israel will always be stalwart allies and friends,' the president told about 80 people at a dinner for Americans in Support of a Strong U.S.-Israel Relationship. 'That bond is unbreakable and Israel’s security will always be at the top tier of considerations of how America manages its foreign policy.'..."
I don't know why men such as Cornell West and Louis Farrakhan have to preface their condemnations with assertions about Obama's former goodness. I don't find it particularly credible. People who seek the Presidency and who have any chance of achieving that office probably have a good idea what it is they want and how they're going to get it. They know what the job entails, which is why a candidate with any chance of obtaining the position will so often run on his ability to be a good, dependable, patriotic Commander in Chief.
It's what Hillary Clinton did. It's what John McCain did. It's what Barack Obama did. I mean, this is a guy who literally practiced the role on his way to the office, and continued to perfect its outward appearances once he achieved it:
"Never a soldier himself, but suddenly their commander-in-chief, President Barack Obama wanted to learn the job from the ground up.
Including the salute.
Under the guidance of an expert, aides say Obama privately repeated his salute over and over again until he got it down. In a testament to how sensitive the White House is about the commander in chief practicing this basic military gesture, aides would not say who taught Obama how to salute. But every time he uses it, Obama is trying to convey an insider’s respect for the armed forces without saying a word.
'That attention to detail, that focus on the outward manifestation of what we expect, is compelling,' said retired Gen. Paul Eaton, who advised Obama during the presidential campaign. 'Whoever worked with him on that did a pretty good job.'
Obama’s evolution as commander-in-chief during his first year in office largely involved proving that he was up to the job – that a 48-year-old former law professor and one-term U.S. senator who campaigned on ending the Iraq war had the resolve to lead the military through some of its toughest years in recent history..."
The guy didn't just want the job. He wanted the soldiers who would in turn take his orders to believe he was equal to the task of giving them. He wanted to simulate, and have them give their faith in return. He wanted - and it's no stretch to assume he still wants it - Uncle Sam's professional murder squad to read his gestures and bearing and believe deeply that he deserved the job of sending them off to smash, rape and kill.
I find that difficult to reconcile with a man of sweet and innocent heart.
But that's just me.
Also...
I'm not black. I don't know what it's like to have to convey to a domestically captured and oppressed nation forged and shaped by slavery, poverty, Jim Crow and the war on drugs how it is that the first Commander in Chief who looks like them is in fact just another Great White Father in all but appearance.
I can look from my relatively isolated position on the hybrid border between minority and parochial school cautionary tale and just come to the conclusion that Barack Obama made his peace with murder, war and oppression a long, long time ago. I can write something that flirts with insensitivity - perhaps, that he is Bill Clinton in black face - and put it down and move on because I don't have any history which defines my ratio of melanin per square inch of skin as a moral dilemma and a sign that I belong at the bottom of the heap. I belong instead to the tribes of the Noble Defeated, like Gaul under Rome, mythic Israel in Bondage, or the rump remnant of the Tsalagi.
Soon, I hear, we will be taking applications from among the leftover Palestinians.
Maybe it's necessary to argue that Barack Obama could have been a good man if only he'd been stronger, thereby placing his potential in competition with his kinesis in order to illustrate, by the very contrast in motion, that he's not a good man and therefore loses claim to the loyalty of a people.
I don't know.
On the one hand, we have Farrakhan's willingness to move from an imaginary Obama to the real one who so willingly murders the enemies of the monstrous American machine. On the other, we have Obama, who could if he wanted to say seven words and change the world:
"The Israeli occupation of Palestine is wrong."
I know he won't. People who want the job he has don't say those words. And they probably never will. Not even in the silence of their waking dreams.
Which leaves us, I guess, with wondering how an imaginary good man became the very real murderer we get to see on the teevee. If we're lucky, it might have us asking, perhaps, how we've never evolved beyond the belief that power corrupts.
Power doesn't corrupt. It's an attractor. It draws out those who want it, and maybe more than a few who need it.
You know how I know this?
Barack Obama could have won the job to lose it. He could have spent four years guaranteeing that no one would bundle him a hundred dollars, never mind ten thousand, ever again. He could have called the prison system what it is: a continuation of Jim Crow and a sustained, organized, over budgeted and increasingly privatized criminalization of poverty. He could have scheduled fourteen hundred and sixty separate press conferences, and devoted each one to a different discussion of the sad record of American history. The drug war. The fire sale of the Commons. The perils of regulatory capture. The militarization of education. Predatory insurance practices. The systemic and relentless religious, institutional and industry betrayal of women. Neoliberal structural adjustment as privateering. Environmental niche collapse. The dying oceans. The connection between markets and the death of the bees. What that means for hungry people everywhere. High sugar, low nutrient "affordable" foods and the sacrifice of two generations of children. Race. Gender. Class.
You get the picture.
He didn't do that, did he?
So.
You decide.
Was he a good man who should have known better, but was corrupted by power, or did he long ago make the choice to become the kind of man who could whitewash the brutal Israeli occupation and the American funding of it on his way to a thousand dollar a plate dinner and the dreams of untroubled sleep?
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