Monthly Archives: August 2013

All Atwitter Over The ‘Barefoot Pope’

29 Thursday Aug 2013

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Pope Francis

Pope Francis

Introduction

I am not a believer in Catholicism; I’m not even Christian. Nor am I in any sense religious. But I have always been interested in, and strive to be open to, those who are. In my youthful days as a rabble-rouser I learned to hold in high regard the great currents of social change rooted in religious traditions–Latin American liberation theology such as that practiced by Paulo Freire, Adolfo Perez Esquivel and Leonardo Boff; Christian anti-Apartheid activism in South Africa, in particular that practiced by Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Rev. Allan Boesak and Rev. Dr. Colin Jones; the social gospel and civil disobedience of the American civil rights movement; Buddhist and Islamic anti-colonialism, the Jewish anti-fascist tradition, and so on.

I still do.

In the 1980s I was fortunate to have first-hand experiences with Christian ‘base-communities’ in Nicaragua, El Salvador, Guatemala and Mexico. I joined a United States Delegation to Central America sponsored by Witness For Peace in 1985 (I was 19 years old then) and later volunteered with Peace Brigades International in Guatemala. Both of these programs were (are) rooted in the social justice traditions of Christianity represented by the interdenominational journal Sojourners and the dissident National Catholic Reporter.

As a student radical during the 1980s I helped raise money and awareness to sponsor the Reverend Dr. Colin Jones, then an assistant to Bishop Desmond Tutu of South Africa and the Anglican church, for a post in Portland, Oregon. In this endeavor I was influenced by a New Zealand Church of Christ pastor, Jim Stuart, who helped guide my understanding of faith and social justice.

In the 1990s I would have the opportunity to meet with such American civil rights champions as Rev. Joseph Lowery of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, Presidential Medal of Freedom honoree Rev. C.T. Vivian, and the legendary Georgia Representative John Lewis.

I evaluate any religious tradition by its dogma (what it asserts, or says) and acts (what it actually does), the two together forming what liberation theologians refer to as ‘praxis’, the ongoing reflective process of combining theory and practice. What the praxis is of a given religion in relation to social inequality–and secular ideologies should be subjected to this same rigorous treatment—-constitutes my litmus test.

To this end I offer my impressions of the unfolding Papacy of Pope Francis.

All Atwitter Over The ‘Barefoot Pope’

The earthly ascension of Jorge Mario Bergoglio, now known as Pope Francis, to lead the Catholic Church has been heralded as both ground-breaking and a significant rupture with the past. He is the first non-European pope in 1300 years, the first pope from the Americas (Argentina) and the first pope who hails from the Society of Jesus (the Jesuits). Even his chosen name, ‘Pope Francis’, in honor of Saint Francis of Assisi, the much beloved spiritual icon for the poor and dispossessed, is unorthodox.

Within days of his election, the Argentinian iconoclast initiated his first Twitter account: @Pontifex.

The very act of electing Pope Francis while the outgoing head of the church, Pope Benedict, was not yet dead, was also out of the ordinary–the office has not changed hands from one living pope to another in six hundred years. Reflecting the world’s most entrenched and enduring patriarchal institution, a sitting pope is always ‘Supreme Pontiff of the Universal Church’ for life. He never resigns, nor is ever removed, for any reason, while living. That pope Benedict resigned and has been supplanted while still in earthly form undoubtedly reflects an institution attempting to contain, and thereby ameliorate, what are several, often interlocking, scandals.

Any early assessment of Pope Francis must take into account these trends.

Schisms and Scandals

First, there are the persistent and very widespread incidents of child sexual abuse that have been alternately ignored, tolerated, occasionally encouraged and often covered up. Secrecy has been at the core of this drama and will remain at the forefront of Vatican troubles. Criminal convictions of church officials and accompanying secret settlements intended to silence victims appear to continue apace with no sign of a break with church dogma or practice in the offing. Without a change in the culture and practices of the church–in particular some rather 19th century views on gender–we are likely to see recurrences.

The so-called ‘Vatileaks scandal’ that erupted in 2012 has centered on Vatican financial and moral corruption. Then Pope Benedict’s butler compiled and later released secret accounts of a ‘gay lobby’ active within the Vatican hierarchy together with other salacious material. Some of those reputedly gay church officials were being blackmailed for financial gain; there was rampant embezzlement and corruption ‘discovered’ within the Vatican Bank as well. All this was taking place within a Vatican culture of other-wordly exceptionalism anchored within the real-world of all-too human desires and failings.

It seems disingenuous not to refer to the church’s policies of priestly celibacy and opposition to birth control and abortion in this regard; but we rarely hear these items linked in reporting or analysis.

Three longer-term trends bode ill for the Vatican.

Protestant Evangelicals–pentecostalists in particular–have been outflanking the Catholic church in Latin America for decades through an aggressive theology of ‘prosperity through piety’ (The Economist August 3, 2013) and partnerships with the region’s most repressive political movements and governments. (I will not cite The Economist for that second point; that’s my own).

Free Market Capitalism (Neo-Liberalism)–free-wheeling consumer capitalism undermines the church through its emphasis on faithless individualism and acquisitiveness. While such ideology obviously does not prohibit the coexistence of Catholicism and capitalism–they often go quite well together–they remain in competition with one another in a ruthless, winner-take-all system.

South/North. A continuing rift between the church of the South (third world) and the church of the North (first world) perhaps goes to the heart of the identity of the Catholic church. Much has been made of cultural splits, especially along gender lines, but the deeper, more significant divide is around issues of inequality.

So this pope has a great deal on his plate.

We might speak of two contradictory currents within the Catholic Church: that of the followers of St. Francis of Assisi (but not necessarily Pope Francis) and the Saint’s commitment to the poor; and, those who uphold a dictatorship of privilege, deception and inequality.

Much of the sparkle, excitement and easily digestible ‘talking points’ reflected in mainstream press coverage of Pope Francis reflect the tension between these two currents; if only unconsciously.

Pope Francis and his Social Manifesto.

On his trip to Brazil Pope Francis issued his first social manifesto, telling politicians that more was needed to be done to wipe out social inequalities and a “culture of selfishness and individualism.” (Catholic News Service, July 25, 2013). “No one can remain insensitive to the inequalities that persist in the world” he said, and “no amount of peace-building will be able to last, nor will harmony and happiness be attained in a society that ignores, pushes to the margins or excludes a part of itself.” (Vatican Radio, July 25, 2013).

During a mass in Brazil he urged Catholics to “resist the ‘ephemeral idols’ of money, power, success and pleasure.” (The Guardian, July 25, 2013). Earlier in his papacy Pope Francis used the terms “savage capitalism” and the “dictatorship of the economy.” (Reuters, May 21, 2013). His visit to Brazil came on the heels of massive, populist protests throughout the country, many centered in Brazils ‘favelas’, or slums, and aimed at opposing lavish funding for the upcoming Olympics and Soccer World Cup, as well as pricing for public transportation, among other pocket-book issues. Pope Francis’ tour also included a stop in a ‘pacified’ favela.

In Italy the new pope highlighted the plight of refugees who died fleeing poverty.

An Al Jazeera column described him as a “humble son of a railwayman.” His populist bonafides are reinforced when we consider that he was not on anyone’s short list to be elected pope prior to the cardinal conclave this past March.

We continue to be transfixed by media reports of Pope Francis washing the feet of the downtrodden all the while scolding political and economic elites for their callousness.

Finally, this pope has refused to be housed in that cradle of opulence known as the apostolic apartments within Vatican City and has chosen more modest accommodations nearby; he eschews the fashionista trappings of his predecessors, preferring simple robes to lavish vestments, and is an outspoken proponent of public transportation–no pope-mobile here.

The Vatican Press Corps was all atwitter as the new Pope inaugurated an open-ended, free-wheeling chat session aboard his private jet en route to the Vatican, fresh from his wildly successful World Youth Day in Brazil. Previous popes had been exclusive and restrained with the press, hastily announcing press conferences that were scripted with pre-planned questions and short, controlled exchanges. This Pope fielded twenty-one questions over a period of more than one hour and addressed, at least in part, and in some respects ‘off the cuff’, the most serious issues facing the church.

The most covered segment of his chat concerned his response to a question about the ‘gay lobby’ within the Vatican and the church’s policy on homosexuality. His response is deliciously clever, and worth quoting in full, so I’m going to reprint conservative New York Times columnist Ross Douthat’s summary of the exchange (July 30, 2013); Douthat in turn relies on a transcript from the Catholic News Service (July 29, 2013).

“… Pope Francis said it was important to ‘distinguish between a person who is gay and someone who makes a gay lobby,’ he said. ‘A gay lobby isn’t good.’

‘A gay person who is seeking God, who is of good will — well, who am I to judge him?’ the pope said. ‘The Catechism of the Catholic Church explains this very well. It says one must not marginalize these persons, they must be integrated into society. The problem isn’t this (homosexual) orientation — we must be like brothers and sisters. The problem is something else, the problem is lobbying either for this orientation or a political lobby or a Masonic lobby.’

Three items jump out here.

First, the pope’s “…who am I to judge…” response suggests an opening on the subject; but it is an opening that can be slammed shut by the simple answer “Well, you’re the Pope!” According to church dogma, in the final instance, the Pope is perhaps the only one who can judge.

So he invites an opening by saying, in effect, “gay Catholics are fine, so long as they don’t organize for their rights.” Pope Francis also suggests an acceptance of gays and lesbians seeking salvation in the Catholic church, but says nothing about gay people seeking it elsewhere, or not at all. An economical position, if there ever was one.

Second, the distinction between ‘sinful’ acts and ‘the sinner’ smacks of a familiar, and disingenuous, parsing of language meant to deflect charges of homophobia and, at a deeper level, misogyny.

Third, by closing his remarks on this subject with a reference to a ‘Masonic lobby’, Pope Francis gives an undeniable shout-out to the reactionary wing of the Catholic church, Masons being a familiar bogeyman of the Catholic right.

Is Pope Francis signaling that he is navigating a treacherous path between reform and reaction?

The Dirty War

This triangulating, or balancing act, may be the most salient character trait of this pope. His legacy could be undermined by the historical pope Francis–the actual past of the flesh and blood Jorge Mario Bergoglio–and what he did, or did not do, during a blood-stained period of his country’s history.

I don’t know if Pope Francis has something to confess regarding his time as a Catholic cleric and leader of Argentina’s Jesuits during the military dictatorship (1976-1983), but the terms ‘collude’ and ‘collaborate’ offer up a rich catalog of sins–of omission, of commission, from ignorance, in word, and in deed, such that I have to wonder: did Pope Francis do all he could to protect human life during those terrible years? Is there, or should there be, a ‘mea culpa’ forthcoming? What was it like meeting with officials of the dictatorship knowing the counterinsurgency war underway against ‘subversives’ was devolving into a murderous urban pacification program so despicable as to force us to rewrite our vocabulary of repression?

Any list of the morbid neologisms contributed to the world by the Argentinian dictatorship would include, but not be limited to, the following:

  • ‘Los Desaparecidos’ (The Disappeared)–Victims of the dictatorship made to vanish through anonymous torture and murder. The term is a nod to Hitler’s ‘Nacht und Nebel’, (‘Night and Fog’) policy of vanishing all human resistance to the Nazi regime, even down to the sites of graves of its victims.
  • ‘Operacion Condor’ (Operation Condor)–a regional strategy of repression aimed at the left, pursued by southern cone nations with help from the United States, that culminated in tens of thousands dead in half a dozen South American countries.
  • ‘La Guerra Sucia’ (The Dirty War)–self-named by the dictatorial generals who led it. A war of urban counterinsurgency warfare that left perhaps 30,000 dead; the term was echoed by Vice President Dick Cheney when he referenced torture and assassination as the necessary ‘dark side’ of U.S. foreign policy.
  • ‘La Parilla’, (BBQ Grill)–“By gruesome analogy, the metal frame used in the torture was given the same name because of its appearance and because the victim was placed on top of it like the meat on a barbecue. The parrilla is both the metal frame and the method of torture that uses it.” (Wikipedia “Parrilla-torture”)
  • ‘Escuadrones de la Muerte’ (death squads), secret, state-sponsored groups of assassins who target ‘subversives’ for elimination.
  • “Secuestro Bebes”: (Baby Kidnapping)–The pregnant kidnapping/murder/adoption program where female prisoners were forced to bring pregnancies to term, the mothers subsequently murdered and, with the collusion of elements of the Catholic church, the babies bundled off to be adopted by elite military families–a secret ‘baby rat line’.

I have not found a word or phrase that quite captures the horror of that last contribution, “secuestro bebes” is my own rendering.

Even with the successful conviction of the Argentinian dictator Jorge Rafael Videla in 2011 the implications of this policy continue to be debated, as does the role of the Catholic church. The Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo have discovered the identities of at least 100 of the stolen babies; there remain hundreds more as yet unidentified.

I have not read a definitive account of the role of the Catholic church in this diabolical program. It seems likely there was an organic connection between this policy of selective murder of pregnant subversives (who were, in the eyes of certain Catholic priests, presumed guilty of crimes punishable by death) and the sparing of their offspring. In other words, this policy has a distinctly religious, and in this context, Catholic, character. It’s hard to imagine such a policy in another situation of state-sponsored eliminationism–in Nazi Germany, for instance. In fact, given the church’s positions on abortion and birth control, it’s possible the policy is uniquely Catholic.

There are many forms of collaboration, and this word, when unpacked, can carry with it a truck-load of negative connotations. As some Christians often refer to levels of sin, we can think of degrees of collusion, or collaboration. It is important to know who Jorge Mario Bergoglio was then, and what he did or didn’t do during the executions, disappearances, illegal adoptions, torture sessions and murders.

What’s Next

The two general issues this Pope seeks to ameliorate are the charges from Argentina (that originate from the left) of his collaboration with the dictatorship; and, the more general issue of clerical pedophilia. Some of the reporting on these issues has been largely supportive of these efforts, e.g., The Economist, no friend of the poor, is only too happy to bury the first and perhaps display a certain deference to power through its omission of the second (August 3, 2013).

So is this pope different?

Yes and no.

My sense is that Pope Francis may be able to use a more populist theology of the poor to overcome the various scandals that have rocked the Vatican of late, and that progressives should be both encouraged by and wary of this.

Will Pope Francis seize the opportunity for an historic dialogue on issues of economic inequality in the Americas? Any discussion between Pope Francis and President Obama in this regard would have to take into account the region’s left-of-center governments–from Cuba through Venezuela, Bolivia, Brazil, Equador, Argentina, and Chile. The very fact that the Pope is so engaged on issues of economic inequality suggests that the fulcrum of debate could move more to the left. The very act of having the discussion seems promising.

Anyone for a Third Vatican Council?

END

America’s Playground

17 Saturday Aug 2013

Posted by in Rant

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America’s Playground

August 2013 (Rant)

One crisp winter morning, after Santa Claus left his presents under the tree, the Pillars of the Community announce another miracle: the sudden appearance of some one-thousand Eastern European student worker bees.

Bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, some of the Polish girls were hot.

South Lake Tahoe, California, with 22,000 residents, 30% of whom are Latinos, faced a demographic conundrum. While almost completely invisible (except in transit to work at the Casinos, restaurants and ski resorts) Latinos were becoming, well, more visible. Sometime in the mid-1990s the Pillars of the Community had a meeting about this, although the issue was subsumed within a more general topic, such as ‘labor force needs’, or ‘gangs’ or some such nonsense. As with most cities in America, there is a nagging pattern of de facto segregation in schools, work and housing, but this is not the South, nor the 1950s.

The lake had a dwindling population–no doubt because every year fewer workers could afford to live there. Those who could not afford to live in town, but must work there, are reduced to a brutal mountain-pass commute in order to make a living. Rising property values, single and multi-family structures undergoing full-scale conversions into time-share and vacation rentals–all help this trend toward population reduction.

The rich with their second or third vacation homes must like that.

A powerful, abiding myth helps to both bind together and segregate these communities. The myth rests on a lie that needs constant tending, feeding and massaging. How to break free? Cut it off at the knees with a simple, pointed question–the kind of question that poses its answer in the asking.

Why does Lake Tahoe import a thousand student workers from Eastern Europe every year, and not from somewhere nearby?

The answer is in the asking: Because they are from Eastern Europe; they are white, temporary workers with limited rights; and, what is more important, they are not black or brown. Added bonus: they are mostly women.

Americans won’t work those jobs because they are too busy spreading their generosity around the world, so the reasoning goes. With the continued expansion of global markets it appears as though labor is traipsing around the globe, as capital does, free to find its natural station in life, at times beyond national borders.

Opportunity is available to all!

But these kids are the poisoned fruit of globalization, because labor is not free to go wherever it wants. It is free to go where capital wants, and allows it to go, and under conditions it controls; and then no farther.

A labor force imported from overseas: one-thousand students a year in a city of 22,000 people. This importation carries a trace amount of cultural diversity necessary to contribute to a menagerie effect in a hospitality resort setting, but without the racial diversity so problematic for Americans since, well, Plymouth Rock, I suppose.

The fundamental challenge: How to get more Mexican workers in town without…Mexico!

The Pillars decided they couldn’t have some pasty snow baller on a chair lift seeing one too many ‘tiendas’ around. What was needed is a kind of invisible worker who embodies all of the positive attributes ascribed Mexican ‘illegals’: they’re poor with a language barrier effectively preventing their easy assimilation and they have a precarious legal status, making them ripe for super exploitation in low-wage jobs; they’ll need low or no benefits and will be crowded into slum-like housing conditions with a virtually invisible social and cultural life.

Oh, and they aren’t black.

But they can’t have too many of their bad points: they’re illegal, brown (almost black) burdened with families that have to be housed somewhere; and, one must consider the flip-side of the language barrier, their tendency to nod in agreement with whatever is being said by terrifying tourists asking for directions, often unintentionally sending said tourists somewhere other than their desired destination. Doctrinaire libertarians could construe this unfortunate bi-cultural interaction as criminal–because it interferes with commerce—that flip-side of the language barrier. Well, there’s no other group that so embodies all those positive labor attributes without many of the negative attributes.

Eastern Europeans are Wetbacks, but not Mexicans. They’re White wetbacks.

Who doesn’t love student work visas? Good old state-subsidized overseas rites of passage. If the Pillars are fortunate, some of those Eastern European women can subsidize their income with sex work and/or marriage to local men.

The Tahoe Dream does need a few of the real Latinos in town to keep the beds made, the dishes washed, and the chairlifts and pleasure boats operating. There is also the undeniable attraction of the cocaine trade, while marijuana is handled by legions of slacker snowboarders tending dozens of indoor hydroponic grows that count for, well, a  truck-load of the area economy.

But the city fathers and their corporate masters need Mexicans for the other stuff–just not too many of them. At a conservative estimate, Latinos in South Lake Tahoe were approaching 30% of the overall population. Rut Row! That’s too many! An imported white worker solves this problem, because Lake Tahoe isn’t 1950s Selma, Alabama. You can’t have a police chief standing in the casino door of history spraying down people with hoses. But you can raise rents, prevent multi-family housing from being built, convert a bunch of modest working-class homes and other inferior dwellings into vacation rentals and then ship in a bunch of white college kids from overseas.

Yes, I know, the market did all this. Adam Smith’s Invisible Claw reached out and scooped up all those overseas students then looked inward and squished some 30 small businesses in the downtown core to make room for a mega time share development; except the development ran smack into the global financial meltdown of 2008 and was transformed instead, into a giant hole.

Bad timing, that one.

But that’s just the market culling the herd. Everything is great. Play some Blackjack.

South Lake Tahoe congregants mostly appear prostrate before Mamon: An ironic contrast considering how this small city, seemingly so close to God at 6200 feet, could embrace such a crassly materialist ethos. Set as it is on a political fault line between a ruthlessly libertarian Northern Nevada, with it’s open defiance of any social protections whatsoever and a concomitant subservience to a casino/misogyny/real estate economy that produces the social dislocation and economic hardship that plutocrats feed off of; and that of Northern California, that bastion of pot-smoking, eco-socialism, the town could not be more unlike a ‘mountain hamlet’.

The congregation only ever gathers en-masse to celebrate their conspicuous and entitled indolence, itself consecrated through empty rituals performed for the pleasure of their god: The Eternal Real Estate King. The irony is the one we are all too familiar with: the lake is ‘saved’ just in time for the recreating pleasure of the elites who despoiled it in the first place. Here the term ‘manufactured crisis’ comes to mind. Deliberately screw something up, blame it on someone else, step in to fix it, and be the hero.

Rinse.

Repeat.

I shudder, recollecting the televised dog-and-pony show that is the Resort Sports Network, a cable television program that lodges itself within a host ‘recreational community’ and proceeds to infect the broader community with its endless amateur freak parade of blonde bobble heads going on ad nausea about their recreating, the station serving as the perfect travel agent for a trip to Hell, accommodating the legions of wasted youth busy flying down the slopes, their pointless lives dissolving in a cloud of bong smoke as the snowboard tracks they leave in the snow.

I guess there is something beautiful about tens of thousands of assholes in SUVs ascending a mountain to a lake in the sky, their orgies of consumption producing the toxic runoff that besots a lake so thoroughly that it continues to lose one foot of water clarity each year, as it has for the past 30 years. Upon arriving in Lake Tahoe these militant, class conscious tourists feel free to express the worst of their inclinations—their petty, degrading demands, public tantrums and obscene displays of wealth and bad taste offered up in grotesque fashion—all of which are suddenly unleashed upon resort workers who are virtually powerless to defend themselves. I am sure there is a beautiful aspect to this that I am missing. Perhaps the enriching multicultural experience of an English wanker stiffing you on a restaurant bill because he does not ‘believe’ in tipping is of some aesthetic value. Cheers, mate! You go ahead and fill in the beautiful stuff I have neglected to include.

As most everywhere, there are pockets of civility and organic community that have not succumbed to the grinding, seemingly inexorable forces of metastasizing corporate development. A small farmers market, erected on a tiny VFW parking lot every Tuesday in spring and summer; a smattering of cafes, coffee shops, taquerias, boutique restaurants and consignment stores; a women’s center and, until recently, a bookstore. As of 2010 the bookstore is gone, having been situated too close to a black hole otherwise known as Starbucks. There are ample parks and national forests, the lake (of course), a small public library and an ice skating rink, good public schooling, a Catholic Church that hasn’t, apparently, had a pedophile scandal, a Montessori school, etc. Increasingly these valuable public/private spaces are under assault.

And such amenities are under attack from unexpected quarters: The Legions of the Clean and Green. Uttering frightful incantations evoking mutually contradictory codes and regulations that magically apply to ‘scenic corridors,’ ‘Lake Zones’ and ‘accessory uses’ the eco-brats make way for the gigantism of corporate restaurant and retail chains with all the charm of concentration camps. Think Applebees, with all those pre-fabricated walls of ‘local’ deteriorata–the framed baseball team pictures, fire station benefits, etc., produced in a remote cubicle by a techno-serf thousands of miles away.

In the neighborhood!

On the one side: weak, disorganized and distracted citizens so rooted in the grass as to be incapable of even the empty, peripatetic ritual of a street demonstration. On the other side: Free market environmentalists skilled in the Byzantine arts of deception called ‘best management practices’, ‘green spaces’ or ‘historical preservation’ administered by federally sponsored, quasi-governmental juggernauts incapable of hearing anyone other than $500.00 per-hour consultants who speak in the murky idiom insisted upon by their resident priests of preservation.

One of my favorite schadenfreude-laced memories involves a public meeting held at the local middle school following the Angora Fire of 2007. The fire, the origins of which were probably accidental, began at the south end of town and obliterated some 200+ structures, including many homes and businesses. This public meeting, held while the fire was still active, featured  then executive director of the Tahoe Regional Planning Authority (TRPA), John Singlaub (no relation to the Iran-Contra scumbag of the same name) the very embodiment of the Clean and Green/Metastasizing Corporate Development wing of the Lake Tahoe Pillars of the Community.

One middle-aged home owner who had just lost his domicile to the raging fire began blasting the TRPA for not having allowed him to clear some trees near his home prior to the fire, a problem often associated with the agency. Some of these complaints are undoubtedly self-serving, made by people who want to cash in on environmental destruction, but others are legitimate. The speaker was clearly upset–just alternately fuming and despondent–and in need of comfort. So Singlaub stepped up to the microphone and, if I remember correctly, interrupted the guy, called him a liar, belittled his loss, and defended his massive federal agency by hacking away at a guy who just lost his home.

Masterful.

Meanwhile, a murmur spread through the crowd and a lynch mob began to form. Local police and sheriffs had to surround the stage where Singlaub was in order to protect him from what could have been exciting vigilante violence.

On the other hand, there are plenty of voracious corporate types–free market zealots–who salivate at the notion of paving over Lake Tahoe (and its workers) to make way for a gigantic theme park or some other such monstrosity. In cases such as these, the zealot doth protest too much, methinks.

I fondly recall misbehaving at Harveys Casino with the voice of Bill Cosby rising above machine and man alike with its reassuring, familiar tone and cadence. Cosby, itinerant peddler of parental advice and trusted icon of pop child psychology, the supplicating genius behind the Fat Albert Show and the later, thoroughly domesticated Cosby Show, prodding the listener in that snide and snarky manner common with advertising that playfully preys on your insecurities: ‘Whatcha doin’ there? Got some bonus points yet? No? You haven’t signed up for Reel Rewards? You haven’t yet? What’s that? Wazza matter? You mean you don’t like FREE? You don’t like getting something for free? Ha! Ha! I knew ya did! Get on over to the VIP booth and get some FREE coupons! Sign up for Reel Rewards. Ya like free, don’t cha?’ Cosby’s disembodied voice, ubiquitous visage emblazoned on thousands of poker chips, and marquee name collectively eating away at what had long been rumored to be a gambling debt owed Harveys Casino.

However much money Cosby may have owed Harvey’s Casino was more than compensated for with that routine.

A history illiterate but acutely image conscious public relations engine churns out myths of pulp fiction; the halcyon days of the gold rush of yesteryear gently giving way to the gold mines of today, the casinos. Mark Twain is exhumed and repackaged as a grandfatherly icon of Leisure Culture, his trademark white linen suit and panama hat re-contextualized as ‘leisure wear’. I can picture him screaming, turning over in his grave, straining to throw a molotov cocktail at a casino, time share, vacation rental or Hummer.

Oh…that’s my fantasy. I’d like to think I would be by his side as we stormed the ramparts of…well, you get it.

Seeing Mark Twain, who was a brilliant satirist and anti-imperialist conjured up by some artless twit–sometimes a pair of twits in two different lakeside locations during the same day–always made me want to start burning tourist brochures.

Here’s a better allusion. Is the effect produced by the four high-rise casinos that dominate the main drag of South Lake Tahoe that of a ‘Donner Party Drive’? Is this an unintended homage to those misguided pioneers of an earlier century? Ah, the parallel is delicious and devastating.

Picture a family on their way to visit their precious childhood heroes Hoss, Lil’ Joe, Ben and the other white settlers at the Ponderosa Ranch theme park of Bonanza fame. Their SUV stalls in the Canyon of Casinos. Overstaying their welcome, they are forced to resort to cannibalism in order to survive. ‘Stay too long in this theme park, and you will eat your young’, they should have been warned.

This imagery sparks a memory from the early 2000s when I was managing a restaurant in South Lake Tahoe. I had been away from the restaurant for a few hours and when I returned at 11pm or so I discovered some ‘parents’ had left their two young children at a table and proceeded to go to the casinos. They told the server they would be back in awhile. The waiter demurred and kept an eye on the kids. That was five hours ago.

I called Child Protective Services.

Lake Tahoe, as most American cities, is a cultural desert whose only sources of water are crass American white settler mythology and vacuous civic boosterism fermenting within a repressive laboratory of corporate casino, hospitality and leisure culture.

If you are looking for the corpse of the American dream, you can find it in a casino that was built next to a pristine lake at 6200 feet elevation in the mountains. I’ve been to the mountain top and…there’s a casino.

Spend your last dime to feel that momentary warmth, that space-cadet glow. The rush of the endorphins, the clanging of coins, the blinkering of multi-colored lights, the swell of breasts and the smell of money—a timeless synesthesia where you are only vaguely aware of your future slipping away into your past, a primordial, perpetual present.

The steady obliteration of civic life in America produces the effluvia upon which Casinos thrive, filling that hole in your heart while emptying out your wallet.

Earth Day is celebrated in a casino parking lot.

There is only one industry that really competes with the casinos. The competition between these two industries is a mutually beneficial, interdependent embrace built on decades of that all-too-human truism: ‘misery loves company’.

The drug trade is where everything comes together: It is arguably the only remaining vestige of democracy left in a place like Lake Tahoe, or anywhere else, for that matter. There are no longer public squares or areas to congregate freely without consuming something in a conspicuous manner, which means you need ample ducats.  Civic traditions are limited to gargantuan, environmentally devastating orgies of consumption: The Fourth of July, New Years (when the town’s population swells to something on the order of 100,000), Labor Day (that’s just brutally ironic), Cinco de Mayo, and Saint Patrick’s Day, all of which amount to all-day, city-wide drunk-fests, the latter two without even a feint to Mexico or Mexicans, Ireland or the Irish.

Alternatively, and more disturbingly, one could consider the annual Renaissance Faire as a form of civic bonding. But this is another excuse for public drunkenness and loitering, but one that involves only white people inebriated on a bizarre, fabricated pastiche of swords and beer, heraldry and wenches, vassals and titles of nobility; peasants without peonage, parties without the plague.

Tribalism is what this place celebrates; the tribe of the white leisure class.

The town’s newspaper, The Lake Tahoe Tribune, has printed on its masthead, (without a trace of irony) “The Voice of America’s Playground”, neatly implying its residents are children. This fits seamlessly into the cult of the perpetual adolescent so essential for the reproduction of social inequality and a pervasive presentism. The town is a monument to a militantly ephemeral leisure culture. In a city with no history, on streets with meaningless names, next to a lake choking on its last dying effort to accommodate millions of tons of human pollution, the only quasi public places left where the life blood of democracy—the free association of opposites, especially rich and poor, black and white—only really occurs is around the drug trade.

No drugs, no democracy.

After all, most work is so poorly remunerated, so crushes the spirit, and leaves one so empty of meaning and humiliated as to demand a shot, a spliff, or a snort just to enable one to get up again the next morning–only to have to do it all over again.

The social stigma attached to drug use is conveniently bifurcated into ‘recreational,’  and ‘abusive’. Both are illegal, and begin classified in an identical fashion, then, through the magic of legal sophistry one becomes a substance that can send you to prison for 25-life (crack cocaine) while the other (powder cocaine) will get you a stint at a Betty Ford clinic, a job in entertainment, a rehab book contract or perhaps a vapid reality program.

While this may be depraved, it is not accidental.

The opportunity to rub shoulders with the other and rediscover, in a voyeuristic way, the polis, is real and serves a valuable public function. South Shore residents would like to emulate the peculiar social isolation that goes with having the power to live in your own gated community. And they will have it, just as soon as the ‘illegals’ have been relocated–far enough to be out of sight, but close enough to do the dirty work needed to clean up the playground.

There is one undeniable benefit of living in a casino town: it is thoroughly secular. No morally righteous arbiters of virtue–no Pat Robertson, Joe Lieberman or Osama Bin Laden, here. If they are in Lake Tahoe, they are passing through, incognito, throwing their money around like William Bennett, peddling their Little Book of Virtues to cover their roulette debt.

They are too busy cocooning with a one-arm-bandit or in awe of the lake’s crepuscular entertainment to organize politically.

END

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Racism and Rugby

09 Friday Aug 2013

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August 9, 2013

Racism and Rugby

An open letter to the Board of the Marin Highlanders RFC

After an exciting first year of rugby my 10-year-old is chomping at the bit to play again. While he loves sports–skateboarding, basketball and soccer, he really, really took to rugby. I was pleasantly surprised and up until recently knew very little about rugby. My son thrived I was, and remain, very happy for him. Throughout the 2012-2013 season I was favorably impressed by his team’s organization, discipline, teamwork and team spirit. My favorable impression was, in no small part, due to the coaching staff, led by Paul Cingolani. ‘Coach Paul’ inspired my son and gently helped him adjust to a large group of diverse kids and a strange new sport with seemingly arcane references–‘props’, ‘scrums’ and ‘rucks’ were new terms for us.

It was with great disappointment that I learned ‘Coach Paul’ would be leaving the Highlanders this coming season.

A July 22nd Board vote led to a public memo the next day from the President of Marin Highlanders RFC citing a decision to “terminate the services” of the varsity head coach, David Cingolani, Paul’s brother. A public meeting to inform interested parents as to the reasons behind this decision was scheduled.

The next day, the formation of a ‘North Bay Rugby Club’ was announced. Paul’s brother was listed as Director of Rugby and the new head coach of the varsity team. A long list of other coaches and parents, presumably in support of the move, was included with the announcement; Paul’s name was on the list.

My son was so taken with ‘Coach Paul’ that he took it upon himself to write him a letter expressing his thanks and admiration. I made many, many visits to practices and games. ‘Coach Paul’ always conducted himself with a coaching professionalism and regard for children that I think is unique, and laudable.

I think it is fair to say that many parents share this opinion of ‘Coach Paul’ and while I don’t know him socially, his reputation as a coach is untarnished.

I do not know, nor have I had any contact with, his brother.

This all feels like a family break-up; but if there is any chance of our leaving the Highlanders and joining ‘Coach Paul’ and the new league, that decision would face a daunting obstacle.

The Highlanders president announced the time and place of the Board meeting (August 5) and that the board would: explain why it terminated the head coach and why it had refrained from making any public statements; give a run down on the history, philosophy and principles of Highlander rugby; and, set out plans for the upcoming season.

I thought the order of events made sense and that clearly something had transpired that could well have legal implications. The Highlanders Board was behaving in a transparent, responsible fashion designed to protect a 33-year-old league with a solid, venerable reputation.

I didn’t attend the Board Meeting on August 5, but I have spoken with numerous parents who did. Also, the Board issued a “Rugby Parent/Coach Meeting Summary” of the meeting from which we can distill the following points:

The Board set out a “clear chronology of recent events” involving the former varsity head coach that included complaints of “verbal abuse, intimidation, and humiliation of players and condoning of alcohol consumption by the team.”

That wording is from the written summary of the meeting. Some parents and coaches, however, made it clear that there were verifiable instances of racial abuse, racist taunts and a frat culture (drinking, hazing) tolerated, condoned and perhaps encouraged by the varsity coach. There were numerous personal, written testimonies to this effect.

Are these complaints justified?

Were the testimonies read to the Board accurate and truthful?

The evidence strongly suggests that they are. These complaints, as documented and recounted at the very public Highlander Board meeting, demonstrate a long-established pattern of abuse. It appears as though this was tolerated, for many years. It is less clear why (a winning record trumps civility? The threat of social ostracism? Scholarships would be jeopardized?). The accusations have an aura of authenticity; some of them were made by people who themselves were enmeshed within what sounds like a culture of conflict avoidance, of looking the other way.

Everything I have heard from the meeting strongly suggests that the Board has taken the correct course of action. It is equally clear that more should have been done by the Board, earlier, and that still more needs to be done.

The Highlander Board wrote that an honorable sports program should “transcend the cult of an individual coach.” It should also transcend the ‘cult of the perpetual adolescent’. In other words, when our children are found to be drinking or doing drugs, hazing other kids, and hurling racist insults, this is regrettable behavior that requires intervention. When adults engage in racist, bigoted behavior it is deeply disturbing–more than just regrettable–and requires active opposition.

The Highlander Board should consider adopting a stronger policy on bigoted behavior when it occurs on the part of players and/or coaches. The day my son witnesses, or, god forbid, is involved with racist abuse is the day that program becomes dangerous for my child. I feel fortunate he is only ten, and thus far mostly shielded from it.

It appears as though the Highlander Board has limited this issue to a problem centered on the varsity head coach. Or does it have deeper roots?

If this behavior has been as egregious as claimed, as persistent over time as the Board itself has alleged, (seven years?) then what is the proximate cause of the failure to intervene sooner?

If the Highlander Rugby RFC “expects all coaches to demonstrate civility, decency, maturity and respect in all coaching activities” how is it that this was allowed to go on as long as it did?

What are the safeguards you have in place to ensure it doesn’t happen again?

When responding to racism one should always make an assessment as to whether the behavior is organized or sporadic; whether the issue involves an organized hate group or perhaps is isolated to the malevolence of an individual–which can be bad enough–but not the same.

Lastly, racism in rugby is not new; do a google search on “racism and rugby” and you will find a university rugby team in the UK that was recently banned from competitions for 18 months after players dressed up in Ku Klux Klan outfits at a party, among other despicable behavior.

Perhaps there is a need for a full-throated policy of zero tolerance of racism?

Do we need to “show racism the red card” as FIFA Soccer does?

The problem of organized hate groups and football hooligans in Europe is an ongoing, serious issue about which I have absolutely no sense of humor.

In the 1990s I was a contributor to a community-based manual called When Hate Groups Come to Town. One of my core areas of responsibility were youth-based hate groups. The first, most important lesson I would teach parents was that racist behavior needed to be stopped early; that interrupting and halting hate-based behavior helps prevent it from metastasizing into full-blown organized bigotry–a hate group.

If you think this kind of stuff doesn’t happen in Marin County, think again. It happens everywhere–from board rooms to break rooms, schools to prisons–and it must be stopped. Passivity in the face of racial hatred signals acquiescence. Emmett Till, Mathew Shephard and other civil rights martyrs were slain as a result of this.

As an aside: It has been my profoundly disturbing experience that different forms of bigotry tend to coagulate: racist taunts invite homophobic slurs; anti-gay violence is a close cousin to misogyny.

It might be a good idea for the Highlander Board to invest in an anti-racist/anti-bias curriculum for players and perhaps look into the availability of such resources in area schools and places of worship.

I applaud the efforts of the Marin Highlander Rugby Club to confront these issues and look forward to their continuing, pro-active response.

My son and I will miss ‘Coach Paul’. I hope that some form of reconciliation is not out of reach, but it should not be at the expense of the Highlander program and should be within the context of a meaningful accounting for what has happened and the initiation of a program that can help us stop it from happening again.

Regards,

Jonathan Mozzochi

War Crimes, Lady Liberty and Values Voters

05 Monday Aug 2013

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War Crimes, Lady Liberty, and Values Voters 

2005 (re-edited August 2013)

When the muse of history looks back on the American invasion and occupation of Iraq, her countenance frozen in shock and awe at the sheer audacity of the lies, the tragicomic credulity of the American public and the utter absence of reason in any of it, she will write of the moment an American GI refused to drive a Hummer without armor as the beginning of the end of this sordid affair.

Ma History will note the courage another soldier displayed in choosing conscientious objection over a second tour of duty in Iraq. And then she will weep for the 100,000 bombed into oblivion because of an illegal, immoral and criminally stupid invasion of the land of Eden. She will not write of the 3,000 murdered in New York, Washington D.C., and Philadelphia some three years ago. Why? Because that act of monstrous evil had nothing at all to do with this carnage, and has its own, separate volume.

It’s also true enough what they say: power yields not to facts, nor reason, nor right, nor the public good. And while it remains to be seen whether ‘W’ will have to pay the piper for stuffing the square peg that is Saddam Hussein into the round hole that is the so-called ‘war on terror,’  for now might makes right.

But we will all pay for this one.

This is a morose habit of mine–watching the spectacle unfold with unbridled disgust and fury. The response I often receive is the cooing of the pendulum theory of history. You know, history repeats itself, endlessly swinging to and fro, in comforting, concentric circles. Somehow, I am supposed to take comfort in the idea that soon the pendulum will swing back.

Everything balances out.

But even if one were to accept this notion of plus ca change, it deliberately misrepresents the idea that while the pendulum does swing two and fro, it’s fulcrum may move to the right or to the left, leaving the path of the pendulum swinging over different terrain. Besides, the pendulum notion suggests another classical allusion that has also long since been shorn of any meaning through over- and mis-use: that of Lady Liberty holding the scales of justice, keeping in balance the counterweights of American jurisprudence: presumption of innocence, weighing of evidence, the dispensing of justice, and, of course, vengeance.

But I don’t take comfort in the pendulum swinging back because I no longer recognize the terrain over which the pendulum of history swings. That landscape has become increasingly barren and bereft of hope such that the part of history endlessly repeating itself seems to be the murderous and cruel part.

Lady liberty remains blind, but that just means she is unaware her scale is corrupted. She is now incapable of weighing in a fair manner the souls in the balance; her gaze is now permanently fixed on tabulating and re-tabulating the 3,000 or so Americans murdered on September 11, 2001. She considers the 100,000 (or so) dead in Iraq, [2005]–a result of the most egregious war crime one can commit, that of one sovereign nation invading another without just cause–to weigh less than those 3,000 lives lost in spectacular, jumbo jet-cum-missile fashion. If she was actually weighing anything of any consequence to humanity, if whatever she has been doing with those scales had anything at all to do with justice, the President of the United States would be tried as a war criminal. That’s the hard truth of the matter.

Some lives, then, are worth more than other lives. That principle is alive and well in American jurisprudence. You can see it at Abu Ghraib in the now infamous photo of the Iraqi prisoner standing on a crate, his arms out crucifixion style, hooked by wires at the fingertips to an electrical shock machine, his head covered by the capuche, or hood, so popular throughout Latin America for the past four decades. All this is instantly recognizable the world over as the dress code and pantomime of Imperial torturers.

The reverse is true as well: the United States policy of not allowing photographs of dead American soldiers, in or out of coffins, is to deny that American soldiers die at all, their lives so precious that we cannot even be allowed to see their lifeless bodies. So you can show an Iraqi being urinated on, hooked up to a torture machine, but you won’t show an American soldier in his coffin.

What do you glean from this?

This principle, that American lives are worth more than others, that we are an exceptional country, is a principle absolutely anathema to a functioning democracy. It is toxic to core values of justice and equality and it follows from a relativistic notion of ethics in the world: you know, we can do whatever the hell we want because they suck worse than we do.

America, love it or leave it.

But you can accept this from a realist (relativistic) manner; or you can continue drinking the Koolaid–actually believing in the content of the fabrication. Either way, we have become incapable of recognizing the unique humanity of other peoples.

I am not undergoing that classic American epiphany; the one where the man of conscience wakes up in the middle of the night with the terrible recognition that their government tells lies. I am no apostate from the American Dream; I never believed in it to begin with. I am a heretic. So I don’t experience that disorienting sensation of a fall from grace.

What gets me, what seems new this time around, is the utter oblivion that one is consigned to when you point out these seemingly irrefutable, common sense truths. That seems to be novel. That’s my epiphany. I mean, I never felt entirely in the wilderness in the 1980s and 1990s. But now? Trees are falling in the woods, I hear them, I even see them falling; but seemingly no-one else does. They didn’t fall, I guess. What’s left of the left is as irrelevant as it has ever been in the history of this nation. I know, there is Michael Moore with his jocular and populist anti-corporatism. But really, he is going to lead us in storming the Winter Palace? Will he provide the rope to the plutocrats with which they can hang themselves?

I don’t think so.

The pendulum pushers are those people who believe that when things get worse it just means they are about to get better. Meh. I’ve always thought this position, so popular among American progressives, reflects as much analytical subtlety and wisdom as the rallying cry of those German Communists who, just prior to Hitler being named Chancellor, took to the streets shouting “After Hitler, Our Turn!”

We know where they ended up.

Democrats may yet find a way back to power, but I am reminded of a mirthful query I occasionally toss up to my meat-eating compatriots: If, after decades of interbreeding and biological engineering the gene pool of the modern chicken is so fucked up that the fight or flight instinct has been bred out of the animal and it greets foxes with a merriment previously reserved for roosters; if, after so many generations of existence in a tiny cage it can no longer fly; if, after so many lives lived in complete darkness it can no longer see; and, if the thing increasingly eats its own young, then tell me, is that thing you eat, that thing you call a chicken, really a chicken? Or is it something else, something that requires a new name?

The battle cry for Democrats to ‘reconnect’ with values voters sounds like the feeble cackle of the modern ‘chicken’ embracing its natural predator.

A mobilized and active population will characterize the early phase of all fascist movements. Authoritarian regimes, Caudillo-style plutocracies, European monarchies and other dictatorships of all stripes do not, as a general rule, like excitable, mobilized populations. They may fight a war—as did Argentina against Britain, Iran against Iraq, etc., but these ventures are a sign of weakness, and it seems to me such activities usually  involve the undoing of such regimes. One has to consider how much worse racist attacks could have been in the United States post-September 11 with a mobilized population, rather than a nation of ‘reality television’-watching, McDonald’s eating, Hummer-driving, xenophobes.

I guess I should be thankful.

The current trend towards an electorate evenly divided and deeply polarized could very well portend the early stages of just such a population ‘waking up.’ Fascism, in its fetal stage, is dynamic and requires an active, autonomous, mobilized segment of society. It must have an alchemical, volatile mixture of ideas and activity on which to feed. The Republicans do not yet have a grip on such ideas, trapped as they are with the mutually exclusive goals of maintaining, extending and deepening their institutional power but also mobilizing a constituency that is increasingly hostile to such a project–their elitist leadership vs their base.

Ironically, it is within pluralist democracies that one will find the most fertile ground for the development of a full-blown fascist movement. This resolves the seeming conundrum of why Weimar Germany, the polestar of western, democratic societies of its time, would descend into fascist barbarism. The liberalism of the Republic provided the necessary, if not sufficient, groundwork for the incubation of the Nazi movement.

One could argue that there would be no need for fascism in America—liberal economic policies and an individualist moralism at home and abroad provide a modicum of stability; the siphoning off of profits from the third world channeled into stabilizing the social contract at home. While this may be true, it misses the point. It’s not whether America ‘needs’ fascism or not. The question is under what conditions does it becomes possible, plausible, likely or even inevitable?

How about under the current conditions within which we live? I think it is about time that progressives began to seriously ask the question: what is coming down the pike? If you think that we already live with a fascist government, then you and I have nothing to say to one another–because it isn’t. Assuming then, that whatever is coming is taking shape as I type, and it probably won’t be good, we should discuss how to stop it.

One could argue that the time to snuff out an incipient fascist movement is right then, in its infancy, right now. However, even this is probably too late. The better allegory is that of an abortion because in all likelihood fascism only becomes possible, its infant stage only realizable, after opposition movements have already been defeated. In other words, it wouldn’t be conceived at all if opposition had been strong enough to begin with. It’s necessary to turn the old (disastrous and wrong) leftist diagnosis of fascism on its head. Instead of fascism born as a reaction to the threat of progressive victory (the most common variant of this argument is that a segment of the ruling class will turn to fascists to protect itself against the threat of the left or, in its most infantile formulation, fascist movements are considered to be headless aggregates of disgruntled criminals fighting and dying for their capitalist masters, the latter secretly pulling the strings to achieve higher rates of profit) fascism is born in the ashes of the failed revolutions of the left.

In America, was the birth of fascism in the early 1970s when the civil rights movement and all the other progressive movements formed around it, lost? I know that’s counterintuitive, because most people, even progressives, are accustomed to speaking of the triumph of the civil rights movement. But I disagree. What, really has changed in Black America? When you break that down it all looks like the failure that it really is–most specifically for Black people, but also for most everyone else. No, the specter of American fascism feeds, and grows stronger, on the desiccated corpse of a union movement that today represents all of 13% of non-public workers. It grows stronger because the most promising civil rights and liberation leaders were assassinated in the 60s and 70s, the remainder of the movement jailed and beaten, commodified and gentrified into leisure rebellion and pseudo integration, into a retreat deep within the urban enclaves of crushing poverty, social Darwinist triage care, de facto disenfranchisement and a reactionary right wing business class.

The vultures of fascism are getting fat on the carrion. If anyone had bothered to hazard a passing glance at the mad copulating going on over the past 30 years between Christian conservatives, free market parasites, militia types and national security state operatives–a perverted union, the kind that can produce a fascist baby–if someone had seen this act of brutal, loveless fucking for what it was, then perhaps the parents could have been dispensed with. But alas, I fear we already have the prodigal son running around among us. And now he may be too strong to kill. Perhaps it’s time to run to the hills. I’ve heard Canada has mountains.

Fascism feeds on feeling states. It is always tribal and will concoct an imaginary heroic history from which to project an hallucinatory moving picture of the future. Fascism is the quintessential celluloid creation. This is why arguably the two most influential films in the history of cinema are both (proto)fascist films: Birth of a Nation and Triumph of the Will. Fascism in its movement stage seeks to supply an answer for that deep, collective yearning we all feel (some of us more than others) for community. In this age of digital anomie and multiple identities fascism supplies an answer to the question, ‘who am I?’ Fascism offers itself as profoundly solid and compact in contrast to rapid and inexplicable economic and cultural change (globalization, etc.) and demands that people be willing to fight for an alternative vision of the future. In fact, the very act of fighting is how the collective identity of a fascist movement is forged.

The esprit de corps of fascism is forged in the flames of war.

With the ‘War on Terror’ this country is now permanently at war. And now we have a demographic—the values voters—that wants a new beginning. These largely white voters constitute a self-aware group of people who want to be ‘born-again’ in the dung heap of its national mythology; a group of people whose own religious experience dovetails in a remarkable manner with that of classic fascist activists; a population that is ready to fight against the elites who have betrayed them (wait for this crop of ‘War on Terror’ veterans to come back home from Iraq, as my friend remarked, “they’ve already begun killing their wives”) and against the subversives (insert long list here) who assail the morality of their mission, subvert their manhood and impugn their honor.

The mark of an American fascist movement will be its ability to alchemically represent the battleground where racism and religion intersect. Pat Buchanan’s key supporters offer us a fabulous taxonomical specimen of this phenomenon (if only it were dead, stuffed and mounted on a wall by a political taxidermist). These voters, who make up the hard, fascist nut of the ‘values voters,’ but who are not synonymous with them, are ideologically defined. Don’t bother with the demographic profiling. It will tell you less than nothing–you will be misled.

Call them Middle American Radicals or ‘MARs’. What’s critical to the MARs is not their education, income level or propensity to watch Fox News. What is central to the concept of a MARs constituency is their worldview: the notion that post Civil Rights era white Americans are a dispossessed majority forced to contend for political power as a new white minority competing with other ethnic and religious groups within an increasingly balkanized set of American identities. And they are trapped between opposing groups: exploited from above by a deracinated, cosmopolitan, urban elite associated with the ‘blue states’ of the democratic west and east coasts and politicians such as John Kerry, they also consider themselves squeezed from below by poor people, minorities and especially immigrants of color. Anti-immigrant organizing is now their central issue. Corporate elites, by supporting programs such as outsourcing and immigration, conspire with the poor to undermine America’s unique place among nations: as that of God’s chosen vessel wherein all riches are divided among the chosen; or, in the secular, colloquial MARs version, the greatest ass-kickin’ country ever, dude!

Why did Kerry lose? Malaise. His ideas merely reflected Republican hegemony, rather than an alternative. Democrats were mobilized pretty narrowly to defeat Bush, rather than for anything. It’s as though the War in Iraq has somehow made the left within the democratic party irrelevant again, rather than insurgent force.

Where’s my peace dividend?

Where’s my peace movement?

“Oh no, we can’t win with those issues,” I am told. Much better to continue endlessly triangulating towards the goal of political power, sacrificing people and ideals along the way. As the sailboat shifts to and fro, tacking from left to right, plotting the most inefficient, confused and confusing course, everyone becomes too sick to guide the boat anywhere, and, most importantly, everyone on board fails to keep their eyes on the prize.

Perhaps you disagree?

Perhaps you really think that John Kerry’s duck hunting so as not to be pigeonholed as a girly-man was effective, but wasn’t taken far enough? Perhaps you think his manly threat to “hunt down, capture and kill the terrorists”, amounted to something other than a murderous mantra? Perhaps you think such xenophobic frothing at the mouth somehow subverted the deadly logic of Bush’s ‘War on Terror’. Perhaps you think Kerry’s “Reporting for Duty!” al la Gomer Pyle routine moved anyone but the hapless veterans busy trying to shore up his sinking swift boat routine. Maybe you flushed with pride when John Kerry adopted the schizophrenic position that [paraphrasing] “had he known then what he knows now he still would have voted for the war.” Maybe you believe all that, and you think Kerry lost the election because he failed to appeal to the faith-based constituency (I just made up that term, because I’m sure someone is going to use it as a weighty synonym for ‘values voter’). Maybe you think he lost because Johnny NASCAR and his big-hair Security Wife and linebacker kids didn’t feel safe enough with Kerry?

Nah.

Kerry lost because although people hated Bush in droves, Kerry failed to energize core Democrats, which would have required doing something other than betraying them, yet again. Kerry betrayed them when he took the nomination for president from the Democratic Party, simultaneously running away from Howard Dean’s mobilized anti-war constituency. Just as the Republicans were getting geared up to kick gays and lesbians off the steps of city hall in eleven states, the democrats demobilized around the War in Iraq. Go ahead. Tell me I’m wrong. But that seems to be the order of events.

To win, Kerry would have had to be for something. What he was for was not really clear, as various pundits have correctly argued. The election was his to win. The war was going badly, the economy sucked and all historical indicators favored a Democratic win. And while I think Kerry is a putz, I didn’t take him to the wall for being out of touch with values voters. Various pundits, including a gaggle cloistered around the Democratic Leadership Council argued for him to chase the proverbial, independent ‘undecided’ vote. Just weeks away from election day the Gallup Polling organization identified this august constituency as having become, for the first time in American election history, statistically immeasurable.

Nice going guys. Help the candidate tailor a message to a phantom voter that some wanker pollster identified in a focus group. Then off they go, looking for the phantom voter rumored to exist in habitat somewhere adjacent the yellow lines of some small town highway, right in the middle of the road then…Bam! Kerry gets run over by a confederate flag waving, white evangelical, in a NASCAR vehicle who never intended to vote for him anyhow. And the guy was dragging an authentic African-American values voter behind him–someone Kerry should have been courting. How long will the democrats be able to take for granted their base before the GOP or some other party cannibalizes the remains? Perhaps it’s already too late. Perhaps the feast has already begun.

By the way, the GOP didn’t have to suppress the African-American vote. The Democrats did that for them. The Democrats don’t just take for granted African Americans, they aggressively undermined their influence. Up until Barack Obama, there wasn’t a single Black Senator in the Senate. Forty-eight Democratic Senators and not one is black? That’s a stunning statistic. A real humdinger. I mean, the democrats were in danger of having the Republicans get a black senator before they did?

Super.

White people seem to be able to invent excuses not to vote for black people. My favorite anecdotal example was the white, normally Democrat-voting, gay guy—openly gay guy—who insisted on voting for the multi-millionaire Republican heiress, a first time congressional candidate with no public service experience whatsoever, as opposed to the eminently qualified and cool candidate, the black guy. That white gay guy supported the heiress right up to—and past—the point where the woman sent him a pre-recorded phone message accusing the black guy of supporting the homosexual agenda. Ugh. Oh, no that couldn’t possibly be about race…This explains why white people, as a matter of routine, vote against their own interests. Because they would rather be relatively poor among their ‘tribe’ than rich among the undeserving. One prejudice can undermine, or in this case, reinforce, another.

Only a few weeks before the presidential election I went to see Jesse Jackson preach some truth to power at a large African-American church in Kansas City, Missouri. A huge choir rocked the house with gospel singing, much crooning and crying, blues-based rock and roll, soul and R&B. There were 700 people there; ten of them white people. And me. There was no article in the local daily, the Kansas City Star, before or after the event. Not even a peep from the alternative weekly. White candidates like Kerry go to Black churches, at election time, but not white people. When Jerry Falwell dragged his meat sack to some mega-church in a Kansas suburb, the newspapers couldn’t give the huckster enough ink. Fifty people showed up.

That’s a heartland without a heart.

Sometimes I wonder about those clichés we like to use as metaphors on the road to ruin: Was the 2000 election, stolen by the Republicans with the complicity of the democrats themselves the canary in the coal mine? Was it the signal that democracy is dead, an elaborate game of three card monty, the rank vestiges of a revolution defeated 30 years ago? Are we the frog in the skillet, with the heat on low? Is there a scorpion on our back, and as we cross the river on our way out of Egypt? When it stings us, will we ask why? Will it respond that our deal was to get out of Egypt, but that no deal was cut about getting to the Promised Land?

I believe the time is past for dispassionate analyses of ‘the fascist aesthetic’ drawn, as blood from a dying patient, from sociological data present in the behavior of pedestrians at intersections or fashion models on cat walks. I think the time for post-modern identity politics that descend into lurid digressions on alienated otherness, is over. Or should be over.

Stick a fork in it, already.

To those who lost it all in the 1960s: You lost. Get over it, and try again. You didn’t lose because you were too radical; you lost because, well, revolutions always lose. What’s important is that you move the pendulum–the whole thing–off its fulcrum.  Two rather fanciful theorists of social movements–Daniel Foss and Ralph Larkin–once called this inevitable period of post revolutionary malaise the re-imposition of social reality with an accompanying state of quiescence.

Ouch.

Get up, dust yourself off, and do it again. Perhaps, this time, with a little more panache. Or at least get out of the way. What is important is that somehow we not allow the passivity and fuzzy logic endemic to the institutionalized Democratic Party chain all of our passions; all of the truths as we know them.

I want a prophet, someone to lead, not follow the shiny bauble of American myth-making. I want some new, American insurgents to give me hope.

Where are you?

END

On Values Voters

05 Monday Aug 2013

Posted by in Rant

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February 2005 (re-edited September 2013)

The fact that 11 American states passed initiatives opposed to Gay Marriage makes my stomach turn. It screws up into little knots and I want to throw up. The thought of 86% of the voters of any state (even Mississippi) voting to ‘defend heterosexual marriage’ makes me want to get on the first bus to Canada.

But I’m here for the duration.

When you think about it, the effort to legalize same-sex marriage is as much about freedom from violence as it is anything else. That’s just the bare minimum any human being can demand. Freedom from violence posits equal access to those institutions available to others. Even if those institutions are kinda screwed up. Furthermore, one could argue that insofar as same sex relationships are not legally recognized, there will be a persistent context for gays and lesbians to continue suffering high levels of vigilante violence and institutional discrimination. In other words, if the state doesn’t recognize the fundamental right of gays and lesbians to live openly and legally in love, why should some peckerhead?

So, even though the institution of marriage is screwy, and I respect the argument by some radical gay and lesbian activists that one should not be in the business of joining an institution that enshrines inequality, I have to respect the audacity of San Francisco et. al., in carrying out those very public ceremonies last summer. The power of the state is awesome, and having it on the side of gay and lesbian marriage—regardless of the baggage that goes with the institution of marriage—is a good thing. That said, I do not agree with the notion that gay and lesbian marriage is ‘just like’ heterosexual marriage and therefore innocuous. On the contrary. I think gay marriage does undermine the sanctity of heterosexual marriage.

Only I like the idea!

People hate gays not because God tells them so, not because gays are wrongly stereotyped as pedophiles and not because they undermine Christian values. People hate homosexuality first because gay and lesbian relationships challenge male supremacy. And this goes way back to the former status of women as property of men.

Now I know, in today’s modern world there is no consignment of women to the property of men consecrated in the civil act of marriage. But have you been to a wedding lately? It’s not just that gender stereotypes have made a comeback since the glory days of the failed 60s sexual revolutions, it is that they are newly triumphant in their reclaimed central role. The world view of the typical homophobe is the world view of the predominant American male: an attic full of GI Joes and Barbie dolls. This is the first cause here, the first principle from which everything else flows. Clinging tightly to their dolls, and the dolls clinging tightly to them, these people then go looking around for reasons to support their world view. Facts that don’t fit in are cast aside, irrelevant. That’s not a misunderstanding, and it’s not, primarily about projection or denial or scapegoating. That’s a defense of a way of life. And that’s why Pat Buchanan calls this a culture war.

And he’s right; only I’m on the other side.

Here’s what’s implicitly understood whenever a man directs his loathing at gay sex: homosexual relations of any form directly challenge male control over female sexual power. The superglue that exists among men to control women’s reproductive and labor power is directly challenged by other men and women who opt out of this arrangement (Except, perhaps, in the case of Roy Cohn, but let’s set that aside for now).  Is it any wonder that the response is a visceral as it often is? That’s why, fundamentally, gay marriage is opposed. It’s not about any opposition rooted in a primordial need to reproduce the species, and it’s not about a gene that ‘causes’ heterosexuality (genetic destiny, hardwired heterosexuality), and it’s certainly not about God ‘cleaving’ a man and a woman and writing his instructions on some tablets (religious justification). All of this comes second. No amount of evidence to the contrary will change the minds of these people. And no amount of ‘mainstreaming’ will ever win gays a victory at the ballot box. No, we are definitely moving away from challenging core myths about gender relations. And because this is what comes first, we can expect more of the worst.

Ultimately, however, my opinion about this is that any consensual arrangements between living, sentient, thinking people are good in my book. And the state and Dr. Dobson should keep their grubby hands off those lovers. And because I’ve seen more love between two queens in a disco than I ever have at a breeder wedding ceremony, I support gay marriage. And I won’t give up promoting it for the support of ‘values voters.’

END