Between the Lines

Dashiell

I’m writing something positive today. Usually I write about the myriad ways in which we are just totally screwed. Admittedly, it’s hard to be positive and honest at the same time. I do not wax rhapsodic about unicorns, rainbows, furry bunnies, or the coming of the New Age. What I’ve got is a little bit more down-to-earth.

Since the media is reactionary, and the majority of what we see through the media consists of right-wingers being reactionary about one thing or another, we need to practice the fine art of inference in order to chart actual progress in our society.

What I’m trying to say is that the degree of hysterical, fear-mongering reaction to any given social phenomenon is, in a curiously backhanded way, a direct measure of the progress of whatever is being reacted against.

Feminism, then, continues to gain ground in the consciousness of women and men worldwide, precisely because the public reaction against feminism remains intense. The sexist statements coming from the mouths of wingnuts seem more primitive than usual, which means they’re afraid. And that’s good news.

There is also a gradual but steady lessening of racial prejudice in this country. Why do I say this? Because the fear and race-baiting from white supremacists in this country have sharply risen since Obama became President. The behavior of the racist yahoos has been much less sophisticated, i.e. cruder and more obvious, which indicates that they’re losing. The younger segments of the population increasingly don’t give a shit about race, and are in fact more and more openly hostile to racism. So, paradoxically, the bigots scream louder than ever, trying to convince someone, anyone, that there’s something very scary about racial equality. This is desperation on their part.

Fundamentalists are fighting rear-guard actions against gay rights, and the struggle is difficult. In this area there’s still a lot of prejudice to overcome, but the gains made in the last few years alone are amazing. Less than ten years ago, gay marriage seemed like an impossible goal. Now the rightists have to keep putting up referendum blockades in order to stop it. The blockades, however, will not stand for long. People are turning against the ugly pseudo-Christian haters because they have nothing hopeful to offer people—all they’ve got is anger and repression, which won’t sustain them in the long run.

There’s a lot more awareness in general of the predatory nature of Wall Street, and the servile nature of the media. People are actually questioning the idea of free market capitalism. The massive looting by the banks is a big wake-up call. On the media front, more and more people get informed through blogs or Twitter rather than relying on TV news with its “village” mentality. The morons are still watching Fox, but a majority of Americans are not being fooled by that blatant propaganda tool.

There was a time when progressives felt permanently isolated. The Bush regime woke us up, and now there is a much larger and diverse progressive community. We’re still very weak in funds, especially compared to the rightists with their corporate cash flow. But we’re a hell of a lot more vocal than we were even just five or six years ago.

What I see is a gradual and steady awakening of a lot of people from the self-satisfied apathy that has plagued us since the 1970s. There still remains the challenge of concerted action against imperialism and for peace. But never before in my lifetime have I seen the right-wing so desperate, fearful, incoherent, and self-destructive. And that’s good news.

butterFly caught

i am tired-

of

Politics.

the Incessant(ly) pandering, yammering, “dithering”

withers me til i Am nothing but skin

and

Bone.

i no longer find entertainment or Humor

in a Rigged Game,

and
wish

ONLY

to Live outside this world created by, and For

the

Intellectually Feeble

and

Morally Fabled.

each time i hit a  key
on my electric typewriter,
speaking of peaceful trees-
another village explodes
(Margaret Atwood)

modern “LIbEralism” is a complete and Utter failure.

turns my stomach listening to that

Disingenuous bullshit

“Non-violence?”

Bitch, please.

people in Chinese made glass houses shouldn’t claim

to be above

Throwing stones.

your entire existence depends on the

the Perpetuation of

Tyranny-

your homes are founded in

Blood.

and

your every step exudes-

Death

it’s far too late to chicken shit out now.

your platitudes cannot/will not

save

Them

I drink to our ruined house,
to the dolor of my life,
to our loneliness together;
and to you I raise my glass,
to lying lips that have betrayed us,
to dead-cold, pitiless eyes,
and to the hard realities:
that the world is brutal and coarse,
that God in fact has not saved us.
(Anna Akhmatova)

i could reach inside

and tear

you

a

p

a

r

t

only-

my broken fingers prevent me from doing

s

o

i find

nothing

erotic

in

masochism.

after all-

it is you

who

lusts

after

nightmares

When roses cease to bloom, dear,
and violets are done,
When bumble-bees in solemn flight
Have passed beyond the sun,

The hand that paused to gather
Upon this summer’s day
Will idle lie, in Auburn-
Then take my flower, pray!
(Emily Dickinson)

there is

Splendor

<-loistokkuudessaan->

in this

wOrld

but it cannot be

Found

within

the vacant Hearts

of the

Sloganed

AnD

Scriptured

who

wield

their

Book

of

Haughty

Parables

as

the

Slave Master

Did

His

Lash

tongues

Blissfully

Fluttering

as their

Eyes

Drown

in

Hell Fire

My darling, the wind falls in like stones
from the whitehearted water and when we touch
we enter touch entirely. No one’s alone.
Men kill for this…
(Anne Sexton)

there is

NO

Future

Here-

IT
IS

Suffocating

Beneath

the

Din

of the

Sacrosanct Sentimentality

of

the

Greatest Generation

their

Alzheimered Memories

archived alpahbetically

recounted

Metaphorically

sans even the slightest hint of  Irony

Long

for the Day

When Time

Finally Sews

their

Fucking Mouths

closed.

While dreams decay and lifetime idols shatter
What in the world can you be thinking of?
Among the other things that do not matter
I hear you boasting of your unending love.
(Amy Jo Schoonover)

I am tired of politics.

Rakkaus on lepo.
Oikeastaan ainoa lepo mitä ihmisellä on.
Eikä mikään ole niin rasittavaa.
Ja se on vapautta.
Eikä kuitenkaan mikään sido niin paljon.
Siinä on rakkauden paradoksi.
Ilman rakkautta ihminen kantaa kuin taakkaa
koko ajan ja on yksinäisyytensä vanki,
niin vapaa kuin yksin ollessaan onkin.
(Eeva Kilpi)

The Bad News

Dashiell

I actually like Barack Obama. I think he’s a great improvement on the gangster Republican rule of Cheney/Bush. But here’s the bad news: Obama still represents the moneyed establishment in this country. This was not news to me. I knew this when I voted for him. I just think it’s easy to lose perspective when watching the political spectacle in Washington. The right wing in this country is so rabid, dangerous, and delusional that it tends to distort one’s awareness of the big picture.

In the economic crisis, Obama has chosen to prop up the Wall Street bankers. He’s also made some steps to stimulate the economy, but the attempt to keep the bankers alive will be a major failure. I don’t know how long it will take for this failure to fully manifest, it could even be delayed until after Obama’s second term. But these people don’t know any other principle than greed and piracy, and they will drive us all into a ditch again.

Obama has also rolled over to the military industrial complex. The policies are imperialistic in the old style, as opposed to the scarier crypto-fascist Cheney approach. But they’re still imperialistic, so we’re still being the cop of the world and the guardian of multinational corporations as opposed to the oppressed millions on this earth. Obama also flinched on Israel—there will be no serious stand against expansion of illegal settlements. The situation in foreign affairs is back to the status quo, which was never a healthy thing. The United States will apparently have to keep learning the hard way that world hegemony is untenable.

Even the arrogance of Bush’s “unitary executive” initiatives has not been repudiated in full. Obama has not renounced the criminal and unconscionable policies of CIA “rendition.” The same specious arguments are made by Obama’s Justice Dept. in favor of so-called preventive detention and other unconstitutional means in the bogus “war on terror.”

Being a moderate on social issues means that Obama doesn’t go to the mat for gay rights, but gives them lip service instead. He is not pro-active on equality, civil rights, labor rights, or human rights abroad—and sometimes actively ignores these issues in order to curry favor with more conservative members of his own party. Time and again he takes the support of progressives and liberals, who were responsible for getting him elected, for granted, while pursuing a naïve and unattainable ideal of bipartisanship.

My purpose is not to discourage aspirations to change, but to emphasize that real change only comes from the bottom up. The establishment elects its own to run its business—they will preserve and promote the status quo as long as the American people tolerate the status quo. The mass of American citizens will continue to passively observe their own exploitation as long as they identify their interests with the rich. When they stop doing that, what follows is committed action on the local level. When progressive-minded people serve their communities instead of living passive lives of consumption, change will accelerate.

The New Religion

Dashiell

The next time you mute the television during a commercial, examine the silent language of an advertisement. It’s more obvious with the sound off. The human drama is centered on a non-human object, an object of attraction, even of obsession or worship. The satiated stare of the actors, whether speaking directly to you or in some concocted interaction, rests on the commodity. Whatever social milieu may be depicted, whatever situation presents itself as self-consciously typical of “us,” the viewer, is completed and fulfilled only by the commodity. Although life is portrayed as if it were something else, something existing outside of the commercial, the product being sold is manifestly the meaning of life.

Here is the real American religion, indeed the religion of “Western civilization.” The religion of prayer and sermons and churches is only a sideshow, a feature in the cultural landscape. There is no adoration in mass culture, the culture of day-to-day life in the “developed” countries, that can compare to the adoration of the car, the appliance, the light beer, the prescription drug. In fact it is not the specific commodity in itself that is significant, but our relationship with any product, the relationship of the consumer with any desired object, that constitutes our way of life.

To understand this fully it is necessary to clear away all illusions about the “means of existence.” Some commodities are necessary to us in terms of food, shelter, health, or future security. Many of them are unnecessary. But the cult of the commodity creates the same mental outlook in either case. You can be poor as dirt and still be hypnotized by a sense of dependency on products as such, a mental and emotional dependency that molds one’s entire attitude towards life.

When people talk disparagingly about “material things” as if an attachment to the physical world was a problem, it only obscures the issue. The object of worship in this religion is not really material at all. It represents a way of living that is purposely alienated from interpersonal relations. Our attention in the deepest sense, the locus of our daily awareness, is trained to turn away from ourselves as a human community and towards the product, which becomes a replacement for meaning. When the shiny car drives up in the commercial, the people turn towards it as if it were a god or a holy grail. It has been invested with a kind of magic, a meaning that has no meaning other than the turning of attention itself. The market, through the sheer mechanical logic of its operation, has colonized the human mind, turning society into a group of atomized individuals bonding with their commodities.

The effect on the world is disastrous, but it is difficult to realize what the problem is as long as one is under the spell of this new religion. If one has no experience with culture based on relationships between people, if all one knows is consumer culture, there is only a nagging sense of unease, a premonition of emptiness. It has become difficult to experience the natural world without the intrusion of commodities, but glimpses can be had if you are lucky. In the midst of the nonjudgmental and non-manipulative environment of the wilderness, gratitude can suddenly arise. There are people who can look at a forest or a canyon and only see the potential for some kind of use, something to grasp, something to consume. Humanity pays a steep price for ignoring its dependence on nature.

In architecture, too, we can tell when something has been built with an attention based on a relationship with nature, and on the sense of human community. Such places inspire an inner sense of freedom and contentment, and a connection with other people. The architecture of the consumer religion is only designed to showcase the commodity. People are always visitors in these environments. There is nowhere to rest, nowhere to interact meaningfully with anybody. We are impelled, rather, to interact with products. Such places foster a sense of inner constraint and dissatisfaction. Nothing can satisfy the restless seeking. No object is ever enough.

The U.S. is covered with strip malls now, from coast to coast. The strip mall is the perfect church for the new religion. They are alike in their ugliness. We park our cars in the parking lots and enter the strip malls looking for a promised fulfillment. Whatever conversations we may have with each other are only incidental to the drama of the capitalist economy. It is the epic drama of perfect boredom.

To break away from the new religion is to experience a wrenching of the psyche. There is no easy way for a free spirit to make his escape. An attitude of sheer negation is in itself a mere reaction, a symptom of malaise. Those of use who see a different reality are called also to make it visible. We find ourselves blending the unrelenting vigor of a satirist with the tenderness of a grieving lover. Shaking free of the common stupor is not something achieved once and for all, but must be practiced every day, with varying success, while at the same time we strive to meet the eyes of others without dishonesty or shame. At this time we are still spraying graffiti on the walls. By the time we tear down the walls, will we have learned how to grow gardens instead?

Special Victim Status

Dashiell

I know people who are unwilling to express an opinion on Arab-Israeli issues because the political atmosphere is so charged with animosity. The decades-long conflict has the nature of ancient tribal hatred and vendetta. And it seems that nothing will ever solve the problem except a willingness by all parties to let go of this tribal hatred for a greater good.

But there’s also the peculiar nature of the debate as it manifests in the United States. One might more accurately say “lack of debate,” because in mainstream American politics there is a general taboo against criticizing the government of Israel.

It’s not my intention to analyze the immensely complex and entangled history around this issue. I only want to make one important point about nations and their governments. To consider any country as simply a nation among nations, with the same powers, rights and responsibilities as any other nation, is a sign of respect. When Israel was founded, as much as that event was marked by conflict and injustice, the true intent was to create a new nation that would be equal to other nations in the sense that I have just stated, a country that a long-suffering and persecuted people could call their own.

It seems more than evident to me that there is always a difference between the people of a given country—the country per se—and whatever government that country may have at a given time. I am opposed, for instance, to the repressive and inhumane policies of the current Iranian government, but I do not hate Iranians as people. Even more to the point, I have strongly opposed the policies of my own government, yet I myself am an American and do not hate Americans.

Equating opposition to a government’s policies with hating the country itself, is a common rhetorical trick. It is nothing more than a way of silencing dissent without having to argue effectively with it. In fact, it exemplifies what I would call totalitarian thinking, since it identifies the people of a country with the state.

In the case of Israel, this rhetorical trick has the added potency of race and religion. If you publicly criticize the government of Israel in the U.S., I can guarantee that you will be accused of anti-Semitism. Keeping in mind the long and shameful history of Jewish persecution, culminating in the horrific genocide in Europe, this is a very serious accusation indeed. Although “anti-Semitism” is the common term, I will use the more explicit phrase “Jew hatred” here to avoid confusion, since the Arabs are a Semitic people as well.

Jew hatred has not gone away. It exists on the extreme right and extreme left. Because it has finally become generally unacceptable in society, it is usually disguised. We find it frequently on the “conspiratorial” fringes, by which I mean those groups that interpret world power relations in terms of certain groups of people that secretly control institutions. Recently someone told me that the Jews controlled most of the American media, and he named the heads of some of the networks and movie studios, as if this Jewish element somehow explained everything. Countering this argument with the names of numerous Gentiles wielding enormous power is only partially effective as an answer. The point is that ethnicity and religion are nothing more than lightning rods for scapegoating behavior. To believe in their significance is to claim an essentialist meaning for these categories, the same way a white supremacist believes that Africans are “inferior.”

Of course there is Jew hatred among Arabs and Muslims as well. And there is hatred of Arabs and Muslims among Jews, Christians, Europeans and Americans. The latter has been greatly encouraged recently within mainstream discourse in America, without the contradiction being widely noted.

Relying then on the power of all this history, and of the persistence of Jew-hatred in the world, the defenders of Israeli government policy routinely accuse those of us who criticize said policy of being Jew haters. If the dissenters are themselves Jewish, we hear the label “self-hating Jews.”

Returning to my original point, then, concerning the correct and respectful attitude towards nations, I contend that this defensive stance, taken by a large portion of the dogmatic pro-Israel forces and lobbyists in the U.S., is an infantile and disrespectful stance to take regarding the nation of Israel. They are claiming a special victim status for this particular country—rather than a nation among nations, they see Israel as an exception to the rules, a privileged nation whose government is exempt from criticism. For if you cannot criticize the policies and actions of Israel without therefore being a Jew-hater, any such criticism must be automatically invalid. This is totalitarian thinking.

I have had enough of this. What I see is a long-standing militaristic, anti-democratic faction within Israel dominating its political life and implementing policies that are profoundly inhumane and destructive. And if I oppose the aggressive expansion of settlements, the constriction of Palestinians within a system of virtual serfdom, and the killing of innocent people, including many children, in Gaza and the West Bank, I know there are those who will say I am unfair, pro-terrorist, anti-Israel, anti-Semitic. It’s a lie. And it is a transparent technique for avoiding responsibility. Using Jew hatred and the Holocaust as an excuse to justify whatever the Israeli government does is a strategy of cowardice. If Israel is the free and proud democracy that it claims to be, then it doesn’t need to hide behind a special victim status in order to function as a nation on the world stage. The United States continues to enable this blind dogmatism by writing the Israeli government a blank check for whatever it does, and then vetoing whatever actions the UN tries to take. I don’t hold a brief for Arab governments, which are by and large corrupt autocracies that do not serve their own people. But it does not aid the security of America, or indeed the world, for Israel to avoid making peace with the Palestinians, using the fear of terrorism to put off taking any action that would aid the progress of peace in the region. If Israel wants to claim moral superiority over their opponents, then it’s high time for them to show leadership in the cause of peace. The world sees the emptiness of official Israeli rhetoric. Fewer people in the United States are being fooled. And those who accuse critics and dissenters of Jew-hatred are actually hurting Israel more than any critic ever could. Blurring the distinction between actual anti-Semitism and honest criticism is bad for everyone.