My latest empirical research supports a strong correlation between good taste and high income levels. I just killed and ate a Facebook executive—he tasted delicious.

I wrote the following, last May, as part of a speculative fiction piece.

“June 1, 2018–The Summer of The Dancing Exodus

The Summer of 2018 begins with blistering heat waves and thousands of refugees forcibly reopening the land route through the Balkans and Greece; the restart of the migrant caravans on both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border; and, a deepening of militant memorials to the Nakba. With these signature developments the three great movements of people in the global south begin to coalesce.

June 5, 2018–Discourse

Slogans of ‘Family Reunification First’, ‘We Are All Refugees’, ‘On Demand Housing’ and ‘No More Work, So You Can Play’ begin to be shouted by wild-eyed subversives from makeshift pulpits.”

“Here, it seems, framing the right of movement in terms of fundamental human rights and survival begins to outstrip notions of charity, for which one is expected to be grateful, and access, which must be earned.”

“June 25, 2018–The Worm Turns

ICE raids in the U.S. begin to be met by unruly crowds of mothers and children. Street gangs begin targeting enforcement agents. An ICE picnic in a Texas park, replete with silhouettes of sprinting ‘illegals’ that participants shoot with paint guns, is demolished by protesters.

Thousands willfully obstruct ICE raids on meat packing plants in Illinois, Tennessee and Ohio, blocking armed raiders access to their targets.”

While my timeline may be a bit off, such fervid speculation has not been entirely off base.

From the New York Post November 25, 2018

“US Border Patrol agents fired tear gas to repel rock-throwing migrants who tried to storm through a border fence separating California and Mexico Sunday…”

The confrontation came after a caravan of several hundred Central American migrants — including women pushing kids in strollers — overwhelmed Mexican cops standing guard near the San Ysidro crossing that links San Diego with Tijuana, Mexico.

The group breezed by the blockade, carrying hand-painted Honduran and American flags and chanting, “We are not criminals! We are international workers!”

“Singing ‘Amazing Grace,’ a church surrounded an ICE van to stop an arrest. 27 were jailed.

“Border attacks need manse occupations. The next complimentary phase will be housing and rent protests–mass non violent direct action aimed at palatial estates, penthouses, resorts, yacht and golf clubs. Anywhere the elite live, reproduce and recreate.

Finally, from the NYT

“But Mr. Trump’s dystopian imagery has clearly left an impression with some. Carol Shields, 75, a Republican in northern Minnesota, said she was afraid that migrant gangs could take over people’s summer lake homes in the state.

“What’s to stop them?” said Ms. Shields, a retired accountant. “We have a lot of people who live on lakes in the summer and winter someplace else. When they come back in the spring, their house would be occupied.”

Oct. 22, 2018

My response, from the film Almost Mercy:

Exactly…

One day we will look upon these fortresses as so much concrete and steel that had to yield to the far more powerful force of human freedom. Walls are never a guarantor of freedom, but a singular impediment to that freedom.

Ok. You don’t like that picture. Sorry, but I do. That grin is from our kitchen sink, where I am bathing you, and we are both ecstatically happy. And I want more of those moments, together.

Please come home.

You are truly a force of nature. Your will is indomitable. You have proven, once again, that you will not be denied. Rather than endure another group meeting, you fled through a bathroom window, out into a hellscape with freezing temperatures and a massive toxic cloud of smoke from the Camp Fire–only a few miles north of you, with no money and a location you were totally unfamiliar with. After 24 hours on the run, I hope you have reached a safe haven.

Time to come home.

You have a wonderful character trait I lack: physical bravery. I am brave with my thoughts, in speech and writing, but a coward in body.

But you are so powerful and beautiful that sometimes we just hold you in awe. And that can be frightening, because that same unbounded courage can lead you to act without self regard. You hurt yourself. And we need to work on that–you and I–because I do that, too.

Time to get home.

You are loved. We miss you. Please come home. Your extended family is here for you.

Stay away from the shit. You know what I mean. Have your fun–you have earned it, in a peculiar sort of way. But go easy on your mind and body–chill, but don’t turn to the shit. If you have already, make the call. Right now.

I love your fierce loyalty and incipient anarchist contempt for authority (ask me what I mean by that later). But your loyalty to family and friends means listening to them. And all of your most important family is saying,

Get your ass home.

Make the call, soon. Or at least let me know you are ok, and we can negotiate a pick up.

We can add this to your roll call of shenanigans.

Another bed time story you can tell your children, when they are home with you, safe and warm.

I love you more than life itself.

Please come home.

Pops.

P.S. It’s Sunday, I won’t be working. I’ll be watching my version of the Super Bowl–match seven for a stake of the World Chess Championship. It will be a six hour thrill ride for me. But it could never compare to a call from you. Call me, come home.

Love you more.

Pops.

Scot Nakagawa posted on Facebook a moving commemoration of the 30th anniversary of the racist murder of Mulugeta Seraw. And he was correct in highlighting the deep reservoir of racism that existed then and continues today. While I agree with his stated aim, I take issue with the term “Mississippi of the North” in his post.

I don’t recall Portland, Oregon ever being labeled as such–notwithstanding that the murder of Mulugeta Seraw alone could prove strong evidence that it has earned it. But something seems off with this designation. I did a quick search, and nothing. Perhaps you can find something I missed. But even if you find something in ‘the national media’, the phrase just doesn’t work. Boston or Chicago are far better suited for such a moniker. And there is the part about Portland being, well, west of Mississippi–way west of Mississippi, and somewhat North. And that Mississippi is a state, Portland a city.

Call me tone deaf, tactless, irascible or just get right to it–an asshole. I’m all that. But I’m also right. And, while it is undoubtedly true that in the world of politics one has to be ‘more than just right’, it also helps to be mindful of history and language. For instance, I have a long-standing aversion to the term ‘populism’, especially when it is used within a framework that equivocates all radical politics–extremism of the left and right are both the problem. Fuck that. From the left and below is the solution, not the problem. And that solution must extend beyond resistance to rebellion.

So part of the history of Oregon I uphold is that history of rebellion, reflected in another nickname for Portland, Oregon, ‘Little Beirut’.

Therefore I also stand with, and raise a toast to, the Portland, Oregon that is ‘Little Beirut’. If you don’t know what that nickname means, read this.

“Big Trouble In Little Beirut”, by John Locanthi, Willamette Week, May 4, 2016.

https://www.wweek.com/culture/2016/05/04/big-trouble-in-little-beirut/

And this from The Oregonian http://www.oregonlive.com/living/index.ssf/2016/04/little_beirut_legacy_20_of_the.html

It sucks to cite two print papers that got so much wrong back then, before and after the murder of Mulugeta, and I’m sure get so much wrong now. But I don’t have an alternative at hand. Both articles will give you a flavor of the protests and acts of militant anti-racism and resistance that preceded and followed the murder of Mulugeta Seraw.

I want that history–a history of militant resistance and rebellion–to be remembered and continued. Many of you on this thread (see Scot Nakagawa’s Facebook page) will remember because, like me, you were there.

And while it may be presumptuous of me to point this out a few days after the anniversary, I also believe that a dash of rebellion with our resistance is also a fitting tribute. Here’s to making the Mississippi of the West (if you must) Little Beirut (again).

END

“The Lesser Evil? The Left And The Democratic Party” New Left Review No. 155 January-February 1986.

I first read Mike Davis’ City Of Quartz: Excavating The Future In Los Angeles in 1990 when it was first published. While I was born in Los Angeles, I have never called it home. All the same, whenever I feel adrift politically, I can always regain my moorings through Mike Davis. Perhaps someone in Democratic Socialists of America, around the time Bernie Sanders was sandbagged on stage in Seattle by Black Lives Matter activists, could have benefitted from a close reading of the above. Perhaps someone still could.

“Although its significance was only vaguely grasped at the time, this increasing polarization between workerism and electoralism coincided with, and was immediately conditioned by, the decline of the Black liberation movement that had been the chief social motor of post-war radicalism. A dismaying, inverse law seemed to prevail between the collapse of grassroots mobilization in the ghettoes and the rise of the first wave of Black political patronage in the inner cities. While Black revolutionaries and nationalists were being decimated by J. Edgar Hoover’s cointelpro  programme of preemptive repression and infiltration, Black community organization was being reshaped into a passive clientelism manipulated by the human-services bureaucracy and the Democratic Party. Although the civil rights movement remained an unfinished revolution with an urgent agenda of economic and political demands, its centrality to the project of a popular American left was tragically, and irresponsibly, obscured in the late 1970s. The ranks of the white, ex-student left, preoccupied with academic outposts and intellectual celebrities, showed a profound inability to understand the strategic implications of the halting of the civil rights movement. For all the theoretical white smoke of the 1970s, including the endless debates on crisis theory and the nature of the state, the decisive problem of the fate of the Second Reconstruction was displaced beyond the field of vision. With minimal challenge or debate, leading journals like Socialist Review and Dissent tacitly demoted Black liberation—the critical democratic issue in American history—to the status of another progressive ‘interest’, coeval with sexual freedom or ecology.”

And,

“But it is unlikely that the transition towards the orbit of the Democratic Party could have occurred so rapidly without the intervention and coordination undertaken by the Harrington–Howe group, now reorganized as the Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee (dsoc). The charter concept of dsoc, according to a Harrington editorial written in the wake of the McGovern defeat, was the belief that ‘the left wing of realism is found today in the Democratic Party. It is there that the mass forces for social change are assembled; it is there that the possibility exists for creating a new first party in America.”

I think that’s what Bernie Sanders has been saying for almost fifty years. As the tide that carried the ‘blue ripple’ this past November 6, 2018 recedes, a critical challenge revolutionaries face is whether that project of a ‘party within a party’ is viable and can accomplish anything of lasting value. Certainly a failure to address the unfinished Second Reconstruction will guarantee its defeat.

END

They are murdering the future.

Audio Essay

got und uber 2018 part 1

The title highlights two developments with origins in the wreckage of the Great Recession. Game of Thrones and Uber prefigured the rise of Donald Trump. The touchstone cultural phenomenon of Game of Thrones explores new ways to express old ideas about blood and soil, power and authority, within a terrifying world that appears on the brink of collapse. GOT affirms the central role of nationalism in containing the threat of a world outside of capitalist market relations. Remember, it’s only the zombies who exist outside the ‘throne system’. And we are those zombies.

Uber, the corporate economic juggernaut is the tip of the spear of the Gig economy, always and everywhere a dissolving of the bonds of solidarity between workers and a rejection of whatever remains of a social contract represented by the so-called welfare state. Uber is making America move again, if only on a digital treadmill.

GOT

In approaching Game of Thrones it is useful to start at the beginning. Lest we forget, the opening scene is set at the base of the giant wall that is meant to keep out all those who refuse to accept the authority of the Throne System–most pointedly wildlings and the white walkers with their army of the dead. So there is, from the opening seconds, the wall and a zombie attack on the defenders of the wall. Together with the Throne System, this is all you need to understand in order to get caught up with the past seven years of the series. Nothing else matters.

The MacGuffin in GOT is not the throne, nor the ceaseless struggle between houses and realms for control of the throne, nor the ‘Revolution’ initiated by Denerys Stormborn and her dragons, nor the secret primeval magic hidden in the forest, nor the assassination fetishists in the money temple, nor the inter-generational conflict within houses. What moves the plot forward is the threat the dead pose to the power of the Throne System by breach of the wall. What I will argue is that we are the army of the dead; they are the overlords who rule principally because they have always ruled, by right of ancestry, family, blood, and thereby ‘race’. Don’t bother pointing out that GOT takes place in a fictional world of feudal relations–what’s important is that it recycles the ‘ancient prejudices’ of that era for modern tastes and serves as an allegory for the imperative of crushing everything outside of our modern throne system.

But what is the throne, other than the power to rule? It is control of the magic associated with blood, and bloodlines; it is the pseudoscience of ‘race’ projected forward in faux medieval terms in the only dramatic sense that has any power left: the zombie sub genre of horror.

This is why GOT should properly be classified as a blood and soil zombie soap opera that utilizes medieval fantasy conventions.

The creators of GOT know what the MacGuffin of their creation is: its resolution will come about through its diametric opposite: the super hero or the only collective action allowed by this structure, a fascist mobilization of humunculi.

GOT is a zombie series that utilizes medieval fantasy conventions. The immense popularity of the zombie horror genre is a reflection of fears about the people rebelling–when there was little chance of this, the fetid imagination of ‘a man and his castle’ could turn elsewhere–aliens, environmental apocalypse, plagues… But in a sense the fears of the ruling class always settle on zombies, because this fear represents the only real, and entirely possible, end of their world–the end of capitalism and capitalists that can only come about through a social revolution led by and composed of zombies. The only apocalypse that threatens elite rule is us; we are their end. “Everything I want is in the end of you”.

The explosion of super heroes throughout popular culture is the perfect analog to zombie fears: you know that the possibility of a mass uprising is increasing not least because the political hegemony that has been the basis for their rule is strained to the breaking point, and there is as yet no alternative in sight. But each and every infantile expression of this conundrum issued forth from the DC or Marvel ‘universe’ is a signal of weakness and anxiety, rather than a celebration of strength and assurance. It is also an expression of fears on the part of elites of an excess of democracy, of any form of collective action.

The film World War Z is the most complete and sophisticated contemporary expression of this current to date.

No surprise that the next project of the GOT creators is a fantasy where the Confederacy won the civil war, a riff on Birth Of A Nation. Fucking repugnant. More drenching in blood and race, war and nationalism. Look at the nexus of race and blood in GOT–an unleashing of reactionary themes in a war of all against all until the specter of the army of the dead appears. A thousand years in this soft porn of fascism is clearly the analog of thirty years to an amnesiac and presentist culture.

9:00

George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead.

Central take away is a racism so pathological it would rather be consumed by cannibals than saved by black people. Effective use of irony. Assault on the bourgeois family.

11:25

The zombies are us.

Allegory or parable of the Cold War. Threat of the masses.

World War Z

Shambling and running zombies.

Neo-liberalism. Liberal super hero in Brad Pitt.

The Wall. Zombies as the masses.

15:40

Twin totalitarian threats.

Camouflage is social democracy, liberalism. Genocide is the final solution.

20:00

Man In the High Castle–unwatchable train wreck on the question of what is fascism.

23:00

Drenched in blood; and there is no substance known to human beings that denotes ‘race’ quite like ‘blood’.

Blood and family 
Bloodlines
Blood for Blood
By right of birth and blood
Low born, high born

Rightful King by blood
Traitor‘s blood
Wildling blood in my veins
Lord of Light magic requires a King’s blood
There is power in a king’s blood
To defend my blood

Blood right to the throne
Blood ties

In season five, the opening scene has a witch taste a young Cersei’s blood to tell her future. 

Season 4, episode 6 “the laws of god and men.” A representative from the Iron Bank says, “across the narrow sea your books are filled with words like ‘usurper’ and ‘madman’ and ‘blood right’. Here our books are filled with numbers. We prefer the stories they tell.” 

This book, that book, they all work together. 

25:25

Soap operas are structured as a form of voyeurism wherein we watch the naval gazing of the ruling class and derive a guilty pleasure when they act badly. What’s important is that they act, we passively watch.

END