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.

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)

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.

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?

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.

Dashiell

If I’m asked to name the biggest problems facing the world today, my answer is “arrogance and greed.” People tend to shrug at that answer. I understand. These things are just aspects of human nature, and seemingly intractable. When they’re asking this question, they’re thinking of objective conditions such as war, environmental degradation, poverty, and so forth. I don’t expect the mass of humanity to undergo a spiritual transformation. But I do think that in order for problems to be solved, there has to be a change in the social ethos—that which is generally considered desirable in our social attitudes and behavior. Arrogance and greed won’t disappear, but there needs to be a general recognition that these traits are destructive and inappropriate for the conduct of social institutions and government. Instead, they are either tacitly accepted as “the way things are,” or in the case of capitalist economics and right-wing ideology, actively encouraged.

The opposites of arrogance and greed are humility and compassion. Both tend to be ridiculed nowadays, at least in the political arena. They are associated with a sort of airy and unrealistic idealism that is practically unworkable. Politicians of all stripes tend to adhere to self-interest as a guiding principle. This has the effect of enslaving us to short-term goals. It may be ultimately in our self-interest to solve the environmental crisis, for instance, but this kind of self-interest implies a wider conception of “self” that is outside the orthodox view.

Humility involves the simple realization that we are limited and mortal creatures; that we don’t know everything, and therefore must adopt uncertainty and open-mindedness as guiding attitudes if we are to succeed in governing ourselves well. Nothing could be more opposed to the way nations have conducted themselves until now. In the last sixty years, we have possessed nuclear weapons, for instance. These weapons are capable of incinerating millions of people in a matter of minutes. Yet governments have persisted in the illusion that human beings can possess such godlike powers indefinitely; that our wisdom and abilities can be trusted in such a matter. Nothing in the history of humankind confirms this as valid. Arrogance alone, the refusal to practice humility, justifies it.

In daily political life, arrogance is rampant. Politicians and their owners operate from a stance of close-mindedness and certainty, based on their ideologies. You might think that religion would encourage humble attitudes, but the religious groups that have wielded the greatest power have also demonstrated the most unbridled arrogance. Fundamentalists who trust that their sacred book (and their own narrow understanding of that book) is beyond criticism, give themselves permission to be absolutely right about anything they think. The notion of human beings humbling themselves before the wisdom of a higher power has proven ineffective. The zealots, armed with their infallible book, presume to speak for God. They think God needs their help. The self-righteousness of dogma poisons the social atmosphere, while the zealot accuses everyone who disagrees with him while failing to examine his own limitations.

Arrogance has reached a stage in which facts no longer stand in the way. Our political discourse is clogged with pundits and demagogues who make reckless claims and accusations every day, statements that have no basis in reality, but are born wholly from the ideological certainty of the closed-minded bigot.

Compassion in its political form involves the simple realization that all human beings are connected; that there is such a thing as the common welfare. Governments operating from such an ethical standard would seek to foster the basic health and well-being of the community, and not simply be the tools of private gain. On the international level, there has to be an effort at cooperation and the empowerment of all people and countries. Such is the stated purpose of the United Nations, undermined as it is by the hegemony of the richest countries. Mike Huckabee, who calls himself a Christian, recently said that we should cut the UN loose and let it float away into the East River. For such people, there is no value in listening to any other points of view (arrogance) or aiding anyone outside of our nation or tribe (greed).

Even if President Obama had the wisdom of a Martin Luther King, which he doesn’t, it would be impossible for one politician to transform the ethical culture which keeps us bound to narrow and self-defeating behavior. It is up to those people who have realized the inescapable necessity to practice humility and passion to continually express their values publicly, while denouncing arrogance and greed as wrong and destructive. It’s not enough to attack certain persons, as if the problem were simply that the wrong people were in charge. It’s not enough to express positive values without calling out the negative ones, or vice versa. Arrogance and greed have to be named for what they are, over and over, and their opposites affirmed as necessary, over and over. If only one half of this action is performed, there is no choice presented. It hardly needs to be said that humility and compassion need to be practiced to the best of our ability as well, otherwise our insistence on their value is empty posturing.

This is not to deny the necessity for taking practical steps to solve problems. But as long as the sociopolitical ethos is based on arrogance and greed, the practical solutions will be stopgap measures that only gain us a little time, while narrow self-interest labors continually to negate them. Compassion, which recognizes the connection of all life, is actually a form of self-interest, but one in which a long-term and universal sense of self, namely a sense of community, takes precedence over the short-sighted self-interest of “us versus them.” When anti-environmentalists, for instance, ridicule efforts to save a species of bird or fish, they simply fail to see that the extinction of a species ends up damaging our chances of survival. They seem to think it’s just some disinterested love of the animals, unconnected to our own interests as human beings. An awakening of a general ethos of connectedness would gradually obviate this point of view in public policy.

It’s a measure of how cynical and degraded our social conceptions have become that the ideas I’ve presented here probably seem impossible to many readers. The influence of life-affirming values is slow, and often escapes wide notice. But culture does change, and as the conditions around us become more threatening, we are seeing more and more people rejecting the suicidal values that are driving us towards a cliff. Necessity, I believe, is forcing us to access values that have always been within us, both as individuals and communities. But in order for humility and compassion to become more consciously valued as a social ideal, and not just a private belief, we need a third virtue: courage.

Dashiell

There was a police riot in Pittsburgh on Friday, during the protests at the G20 economic summit. The cops deployed a sonic cannon that emits shattering high-frequency sound waves, OC gas (pepper spray), rubber bullets and beanbags, all against a few thousand unarmed protesters and local students. They attacked bystanders, people with cameras, anyone in the area, running after them and beating them, invading student dorms and gassing people who weren’t even protesting.

Americans stand by, mostly indifferent or tacitly approving of these police tactics. The excuse is that a few anarchists broke some windows and threw stones at cops. So heinous is the crime of harming property in our society that we give the green light for cops to break people’s heads open, most of them peaceful demonstrators or innocent bystanders. Few question why the police don’t focus on arresting just those who are doing damage, but instead go on a rampage against hundreds of people, even bursting into dorms in their enthusiasm for violence.

I had a brief exchange with a liberal blogger who wrote that the “anti-globalization nutters are whining again.” I responded that the people breaking windows were a tiny minority, and that the increasing militarization of police forces in this country is a legitimate issue. He answered that if the anti-globalists want to be taken seriously, they shouldn’t damage property. Later he said that he doesn’t like demonstrations—they don’t work and they only set back the cause of change. He never addressed the police issue.

My basic position can be expressed in visceral terms. I’m a lot more afraid of hundreds of black-clad riot police with their cannons and gas and rubber bullets, and their military mind-set, than I am of a few anarchists. The police are supposed to be held to a higher standard, but over the years the ideologues of law and order have turned the police into a sacred cow while using paramilitary tactics to suppress all dissent under the pretext of being provoked by anarchists or other “dangerous” elements.

Nowadays you need a permit to demonstrate, or else the cops have carte blanche to commit any kind of brutality they want. The right of the people peaceably to assemble is declared in the First Amendment to our Constitution, but in modern America it’s more important to keep us docile in front of our TVs, so peaceful assembly is now a privilege granted by permit. If some hack politician doesn’t want your group to assemble, he’ll find some phony reason to deny you a permit.

I expect the right wing to promote such policies. But it’s amazing how many liberals and Obama supporters will take the same position. The liberal blogger who characterized the anti-globalization as “nutters” is not unique. They are either unable to see, or refuse to see, the connection between the globalizing of corporate capital and the world economic meltdown. The push for corporate hegemony through war in the Middle East and elsewhere is directly linked to globalization and so-called “free trade.” NAFTA and other globalizing treaties aim precisely at the domination of poor people throughout the world in the interest of corporate profit. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are part of that. But to the complacent liberal, protesting this relentless aggression can only be the work of “nutters.”

The attitude towards police forces in this country is so infantile as to defy belief. Human beings wearing cop uniforms are treated as if they were sacred holy creatures that can do no wrong. Urban police departments lobby against civilian oversight. When a cop shoots an unarmed black man, the politicians rush to the microphones to exonerate the cop. Those who protest are demonized by the media. Now we see our police adopting the SWAT-team model for demonstrations. One can’t help think of fascism when one looks at these anonymous men in black outfits running at people en masse with shields and clubs, and ordinary people, our neighbors and kids, fleeing from them in fear.

Many ex-cops have testified how a culture of “us vs. them” is fostered within police departments. The behavior of the police in Pittsburgh is an example of a group of authoritarian men who have been given permission to act out their violent urges on people with impunity. There are no standards or ethics within the law enforcement community to prevent these shameful actions. Usually they are rewarded by cynical politicians who want to appear tough at the next election.

The question of how effective demonstrations are any more is a separate issue. I don’t think smashing windows is right, and those who do so should be arrested. How demonstrations composed of various groups can control or prevent such things is also a separate issue. Governments use these incidents as excuses to try to scare us into submission. They refuse to be accountable to the citizens whom the police are supposed to protect. It’s clear to me that the police are used to protect property and the property classes, while the masses of people who wish to have some power over how their world is governed are considered to be devoid of rights and only deserving of being beaten or having some chemical weapon sprayed in their faces.

There is a lot of talk about freedom and courage in this country. Most of it is bullshit. Americans allow their government to commit thuggery in the name of order because they’re docile and cowardly. If your own police treat you like cattle, you’re a long way from free.

This post/quasi-poem began its life as a comment on Facebook (God Almighty, how the FUCK did I end up on Facebook?!!!)

anyWaY.

I was debating with your Typical Run of the Mill Hyper Religious Right Wing Loon, and this post/quasi poem was my Answer to her Ultra-Lame Ass Attempt to Diagnose Me ( i will Give her Credit for one thing. She told me i was the MOST AWFUL PERSON she ever Encountered on facebook. That made me Smile

Onward-

Ladies, and Gentlemen, sometimes Anger is the Reason in and of Itself.

If I kick you in the Balls, you’re going to Get Pissed Off.

Your Anger is in NO Way related to Childhood.

Please, all Dimestore Psychologists, do us a Favor-

Attach 50 Road Flares to your body with DUct TapE. Find a nearby Bridge. Stand atop Bridge. Ignite Flares-

JUMP!!!

It will be the Brightest Thing yoU Ever Did (Get it?)

without further adieu or Sadistic Humor-

My Anger Has Nothing to Do with Some Nebulous “Heartache,” You Fucking DIPSHIT!!!

I …

Wingnuts

For-

Wingnuttery is more damaging to the brain

than blows from a

Hammer.

in Wingnuttia they embrace, celebrate, exude

MEDIOCRITY.

ship them to Atlantis,

i say.

have no desire to be polite or

“friends.”

because of yoU suffered for 8 years with a Mildly Retarded Drunk in the wHitE HousE who almost Single Handedly Drove this CoUNtry uDER.

and yoU want to Lecture me about “values,” “morals,” “Responsibility,” and

“SOunD Policy?”

oh, hell, no.

as far as i’m concerned, yoU

can go

Fuck

yoUrself

Ah, Sarah Palin (Narcissist Extraordinaire, and Twitterly Literate Half Life-d Governor)  finally found a medium more suited to her Personality (Disorder)-

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Better than any Old Run of the Mill Enchanted Mirror™

Where thousands, Nay, hundreds of thousands of Vociferous Proselytizing (Political Ploy) Palin Parroting Sycophants Sappily Supplicate at Sarah’s Supercilious Soles.

“Amazing, I feel like we’ve hitched our wagon onto a shooting star.”

Is there an Image more Apropos to Palinmania than one that evokes a 19th century means of transportation, typically constructed from a common fuel source, attached to a hurtling out of control burning hunk of space debris?

No “Nuance” here, you Betcha

Oh, you poor, Poor Lost souls .

May God Hisself Bless Your Wooden Heads (Wheels?) as You Traverse the Great Expanse of the Universe-

To Insipidity, and Beyond!!!

Dashiell

I’m not often inspired by the speeches of politicians, and I can measure the gap between idealistic phrases and actual policy. Nonetheless, there was something about President Obama’s Sept. 9 health care speech that still resonates with me: his invocation of Senator Kennedy’s letter in which he said that, “At stake are not just the details of policy, but fundamental principles of social justice and the character of our country.”

It’s important, in other words, that we ask what kind of country we are, and what kind we want to be. This question doesn’t get asked in public very often, at least not in the mainstream, not in Washington. Whatever core beliefs are at work in the echelons of American power are revealed through actions that often belie official rhetoric. The central one, it seems to me, is to make money, and make as much of it as possible all the time. Politics is simply a way of aiding the “economy,” the modern term for business interests. On the face of it, this is a legitimate purpose or value, if you look at in the most simplistic terms: people need food, housing, the ability to fulfill various other needs and wants, and the means to raise and educate children. These are just the terms that are emphasized because they are at the end of the chain of power. Voters can understand that. But those aren’t the operative terms. Capitalism functions through the self-interest of the capitalist, not because of a socially desirable result.

Ask any CEO if there is any other motive that takes precedence over the profit motive in the operation of a company. If he’s honest, he’ll say no. That’s how it works, and within those terms, there’s nothing wrong with it. The problem is that this motive, this sole overriding principle in the operation of a business, became identified with the ultimate value of society. The “free market” ideologies, identified most purely with Republicans but permeating the thought of members from both major parties, are hostile to any principle that places itself above the profit motive. Politicians may say something different, but in practice the core value is profit above all else. And there are consequences to this regarding other human values—there are effects on our character.

The logic of “free market” values leads to deregulation, removing effective oversight from business, and to so-called “privatization,” the handing over of traditionally public functions to business. It also leads to the dismantling of social programs, which have no profit-centered logic, and therefore no reason for being. From the victory of the right wing under Reagan until now, the effect on the economic condition of the masses has been quite clear. The middle class has become increasingly less affluent, with wages stagnating and families forced to take two or more jobs in order to get by. At the same time, the poor became poorer, and more numerous with the addition of people falling from the middle into the lower class.

I never saw masses of homeless people on the streets before Reagan was President. Almost immediately after he took office, they became a permanent presence in our cities. The ideologues mounted a campaign to explain this fact away. The homeless deserved their plight: they were lazy, irresponsible people who often chose to be homeless. The same kinds of campaigns were waged against welfare and food stamp recipients. This wasn’t just a practical move on the part of the right—it was a conscious attempt to define the American character in a new, non-liberal way.

Which brings me back to Obama’s speech. Kennedy’s notion of “social justice and the character of our country” has its roots in the epochal founding events of modern American liberalism, the Depression and the New Deal. Such ideas had of course existed long before, but they gained power under FDR. Essentially what the New Deal said is that we as a nation have a stake in caring for the basic needs of people, and that this “caring” is in itself a principle independent of the profit motive. It was never that the profit motive should go away, or that there is something inherently wrong with making a profit—although the free marketers would always try to paint liberal thought in those terms. It was only that there were other worthy principles and values that people need to live by, besides making a profit. And that all these principles must be honored in order for a country to be well and justly governed.

Schooling children doesn’t really make a profit. People try to couch it in terms of the country needing to have well-educated children in order to be “competitive” in the world economy and so forth, which only goes to show how much the profit motive dominates the public discourse. But really, most parents don’t seek to educate their children for business reasons.

The same is true for having a police force, a fire department, public transport, traffic lights, driver’s licenses, and a host of other public institutions and functions. Communities have needs, and the need for businesses to make money is only one of those needs, not the only one or even the primary one. So when the “free market” ends up denying basic needs to people, such as food, shelter, and health care, the contradiction between the belief in the sacredness of the profit motive and the reality of most people’s lives becomes evident. In the case of health care, it has become insupportable, and yet the disciples of making the most money possible all of the time will fight tooth and nail to prevent health care from being recognized as a right, since they recognize no other good but profit.

The world in which profit has been elevated above compassion, caring, family, neighborhood, and friendship is very much like the world depicted in Charles Dickens’ novels, the world of predatory capitalism before regulation. If we can accept people living on the streets, ultimately we accept them dying from cold or starvation on the streets. From there, we can accept people dying because they can’t afford treatment for their health problems. If it weren’t for labor laws that were pushed through by liberals, we would be accepting children being worked to death in factories. In fact, corporations still accept it when they use sweatshops in other countries.

The point is, there is no possible moral or principled objection to such things in terms of the “free market.” In philosophical terms, human beings are replaceable objects in the profit system; if profit is the one organizing social principle, then there is no crime that is not excusable in the name of business. I’m not speaking of the future here, but of the present. The prisons are packed with poor, working class, and minority criminals. The so-called “white collar” criminals are, more often than not, given a slap on the wrist, or even acquitted, if they’re ever charged at all. This is an open secret in our society, and it follows from the valuing of profits over people.

What then is the character of our country? There is no simple answer. The masses of ordinary people, working day by day to get by, possess whatever variety and degree of character they have been able to cultivate. People still love their families and help out their neighbors. It’s a fact that the lower middle class gives proportionally more to charity than the rich or upper middle class. I don’t believe that self-centeredness is the only distinguishing trait of our society. I don’t think we could have survived this far if it were. But as a country, we are split. The economic system, and the government, is aligned with a callous and anti-humanist philosophy. By no means is there agreement on fundamental principles of social justice, or even that social justice is a good to be aimed at. For the country to realize a character greater than the examples of greed and power-seeking we have been shown so far will involve relegating the profit-motive to its proper place in society. It will always participate, but it can no longer run the show.