Category Archives: Rant

If You Insist on Driving in San Francisco

Featured

Posted by in Essay, Rant

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , , , , , , , ,

OccupyICE_Gehrke_ICE2June_28_2018_web

If you are a tourist, just don’t drive in the city. Don’t even consider it. This is the most unforgiving and forbidding, bat shit crazy city to drive in throughout the entire United States. Oakland is a close second, with the crappiest roads in the country, but nothing beats San Francisco’s hybrid transportation hell with its one-way, dilapidated streets, steep, winding hills, constant construction, horrific traffic and the most aggressive pedestrians and bicycle riders on the planet.  If you must travel to San Francisco–and we prefer you did not–don’t drive a car. If, however you insist on doing so, here are some vehicular pastimes that beat the crushing stupidity and corporate mendacity of those tourist traps like Fisherman’s Wharf and The Embarcadero. You might as well learn something from your intransigence.

If you are not above indulging in a bit of schadenfreude proceed to Washington and Jefferson streets where they cross Snob Hill east-west and west-east. Both streets are one way and are cable car equipped. The cable cars, long since abandoned as a means of proletarian conveyance, now cater exclusively to that most despicable of social creatures, the tourist.  Get your video ready. Note that in place of four-stop-sign intersections the cable car is granted the right-of-way, making for two-stop-sign intersections, something unexpected and counterintuitive to anyone unfamiliar with San Franscisco’s insane transportation environment. You will watch as driver after driver stops when they ought not to stop, and do not stop when they should. This, despite the prominently posted signs north and south that read Cross Traffic Does Not Stop. It makes no difference, as no-one reads a sign posted below a stop sign, unless it is for a yard sale; but it does make for constant near catastrophes, and the occasional full-on crash. Hours of enjoyment here, much superior to those creepy mobs lined up outside the Full House house, which is not the house at all, merely the exterior that formed a shot for the show. Besides, sitcoms with laugh tracks are the television equivalent of easy listening muzak.

Americans are congenitally allergic to Round-a-bouts. San Francisco is no exception. The Round-a-bout at 8th and Townsend is a shit show worthy of a Three Stooges skit. The physical comedy of vehicles, bicycles, scoots and scooters, skateboarders and pedestrians all aggressively competing for the right-of-way through a circle whose logic escapes everyone is perfectly emblematic of the future Big Tech has in store for us. And this is ground zero of Big Tech in San Francisco, with the offices of Adobe and Air BnB yards from the chaos. They have figured it all out, you see, because an algorithm can never be wrong (only the person who programmed it) therefore everything that derives from the algorithm is right and good. Now comes the pesky Round-a-bout and the many nuanced social cues and codes and all that other stuff that escapes the ironclad logic of the Bit. The logic of the Round-a-bout is straight forward and simple, yet flouted by practically everyone: if you are in, you have the right of way. If you are out, watch out. Exceptions, as always, are pedestrians and bicycles. The point system is always in effect, which is my way of saying Big Tech is Big Stupid.

Set aside time in your itinerary for the onramp to the Bay Bridge at 1st and Harrison and the neighborhood known as SoMa (South of Market). Deeply ensconced within this cradle of plutocracy is the leaning Millennium Tower (fall over already) and the worlds most posh freeway entrance. While you are there let them know we are coming with pitchforks and molotov cocktails, and a particular emphasis on those $5,000-a-month doggy day cares. During rush hour (5am-10pm everyday) watch for Lamborghinis with a right-of-way my Toyota just doesn’t have. They will cheat through that bike lane while pretending to ignore horns blaring around them then park right in the middle of the fucking intersection, stopping traffic in all directions. Taking their time, they will pretend to have misinterpreted the giant sign that reads “Do Not Block Intersection” and the civil code cited below it. Milkshakes are in order.

While not particular to San Francisco, the mantra Look, Signal, (then) Pull out should always apply. Don’t do the opposite–pull out, signal and look as an after thought. Doing the opposite means you will ram your vehicle into mine and I will be forced to exit my vehicle and beat you about the head with a copy of Das Kapital. This elementary principle, so simple and unambiguous, so very difficult to misinterpret, is unobserved everywhere. There is a phrase for doing otherwise: aggressive stupidity.

Don’t stick your phone, much less your iPad, into the middle of your front windshield. Are you daft? You will not be able to take out that Salesforce executive without backing up to finish the job. Furthermore, while you may be able to track your progress through that gps navigation program, you won’t get wherever it is you are going because you will have hit something you ought not to have hit along the way. Those large spaces at the front and sides of your vehicle called windows are transparent for a reason–so you can see through them.

Autonomous vehicles in training are legitimate targets for milkshaking and the old Issac Asimov I Robot conundrum: roll a baby carriage from one direction and an elderly person from another directly in front of the Waymo vehicle and force it to make a decision, thereby exposing bias at work in the algorithm. If it chooses to run over the baby, autonomous vehicles are baby killers; if it chooses the elderly person, it is guilty of geronticide. If it stops altogether, get your milkshake ready.

Two noteworthy tidbits of trivia to keep in mind about the Golden Gate Bridge. First, is that it was Iron workers who died building it and should be honored for it. Architects and engineers can fuck off. Second, the suicide deterrent system currently being installed on both sides of the bridge to the tune of $240 million is emblematic of the priorities of San Francisco’s city leaders. It is far more important to obstruct people trying to die with dignity, and perhaps a bit of notoriety, than do anything about the homeless crisis–which is not a crisis of too few homes available for too many people, but that of the 100,000 empty homes that the wealthy indolent and real estate industry purposefully leave uninhabited. That’s right 100,000 empty fucking homes. Occupation and expropriation are the only solution here.

The Tenderloin District is the last bastion of lumpen proletariat resistance in the entire city. Drive careful through there because God’s children are selling the dope all those Big Tech twits need to make it through their twenty-hour work days while they pray to the crack in the wallet of a Tech billionaire. That’s right, San Francisco’s African-American population has contracted by almost half in the past twenty years, which makes driving through The Tenderloin, Bayview and Hunter’s Point neighborhoods the rough equivalent of visiting a concentration camp or Indian reservation. You are witnessing a program of urban genocide carried out under the banner of Big Tech. So remember, with every  floor of a shiny new office building, a tent city is erected in its shadow.

Welcome to the City on the Hill.

END

Occam’s Razor Applied

Featured

Posted by in Rant

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , , ,

willem-van-spronsen-rest-in-power

 

Here’s something you have probably heard before: As we grow older we become more conservative in our politics because maturation implies moderation. Within every young anarchist or communist is a reactionary just waiting to emerge.

This assertion is often presented as a value-neutral descriptive that merely reflects a principle of human sociality beyond all politics. Quite the opposite is true, as the assertion contains within it a hidden prescriptive: implied is that one should become more reasonable with advanced age and ‘grow up’ by tossing aside youthful excesses, like political radicalism, in favor of capital accumulation, the responsibilities of ‘raising’ a family, and the moderation in all things that this apparently entails. This is often framed as natural, something that just happens because that’s just the way the world is. This is almost always the way this concept is wielded. There are endless variations of this meaningless mantra and they often begin with a red diaper baby and end up with someone like Norman Podhoretz. The trajectory is everything–one doesn’t ever go from right to left, always from left to right.

Together with that other old canard, history repeats itself, these two maxims serve to paralyze thought and action.

Using Occam’s Razor we can make a very different assertion: Older people appear more conservative not because they mature in their beliefs, nor because reactionary values are ‘natural’ or inevitable, but because rich assholes live longer–much longer–than the rest of us.

Furthermore most rich people have more conservative values than the rest of us because they began with wealth and power they want to conserve; then, when they get older, they are proportionately more of any given population than when they began their incessant exploitation of us. As inequality kills us quicker, their social footprint–financial, electoral, golf–becomes that much greater. As we die in greater numbers more quickly than they do, they accumulate more wealth and power as they grow older. They don’t become wise with old age; they defend that which they have stolen with greater zeal. It just appears to be the case that the older people get the more right wing they become, when in fact there are just more right wing assholes because they live longer.

What a shame.

It would seem a simple corrective to begin reversing this trend; if need be by taking some of them with us.

Willem Van Spronsen, the 69-year young anarchist who went down fighting ICE with firearms and molotov cocktails is living proof of my argument. Honor his contribution accordingly.

 

The Tyranny of Adverbs and Twits.

Featured

Posted by in Essay, Rant

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , , , , , , , , , ,

 

Literally used now more than ever.

4130c931b9b46b611e2f876a70b1b1c8ac06ba6b.png

 

Joe Biden was criticized way back in 2012 for using the adverb ‘literally’ nine times in one speech. How quaint. I recently listened to a level 5 Google engineer use it nine times in the space of two minutes.

This particular soulless quant had another annoying habit: He would begin every other sentence by restating my name, “Jonathan, I understand what you are saying…” If such feigned familiarity is coupled with a light touch on the arm, I feel free to reach for a knife. Most people who do this are trying to overcome skepticism and inculcate credulity. As a mnemonic device it is annoying at best; more often it is cloying and insincere and is a sure sign of someone to distrust, even despise.

Honestly? Like. Literally. Actually.

While I don’t miss Obama much, I do miss his particular elocution, that patient, preternaturally calm, baritone voice and the halting ‘ums’ and ‘uhs’ that stitched together his verbal output. By today’s standards those pauses are pleasant by comparison. They don’t have any pretense; they are space fillers that allow him to think. While I have many disagreements with what he said, I could always understand it. He was thoughtful and nuanced to a fault; dithering on the golf course while fascism made a comeback. But in this he was not alone, nor particularly exceptional. Plenty of socialists, for instance practically the entire seven hear history of Jacobin Magazine and Blog, join him in this regard. But back to those adverbs.

With Trump it is as though every wealthy, entitled and neurotic teenager has suddenly been given carte blanche to release their own unfiltered insanity. While I think the parallels here can be overstated (Trump as a teenager) there is still something to it. Will Trump bomb Iran or just berate the housekeeper? Will he begin in earnest the rounding up of undocumented families or just do a stint in rehab?

His verbal diarrhea is pockmarked with superlatives such as ‘winner’, ‘terrific’, ‘tremendous’ and of course, ‘great’ and ‘greatest’. It’s as though his mother, or au pair, never stopped telling him how special he was, even when he was caught eviscerating the neighbor’s cat. Good boy.

If Trump were a pornography category it would be ass-to-mouth, mouth-to-ass, with all those A-list ruling class enablers from both political parties, across every imaginable capitalist enterprise, sucking and fucking to form one giant, unending, gangrenous human centipede, just like the horror film. Jeffrey Epstein is in there somewhere.

Today it seems that adverbs, and certain nasty ones in particular, have mounted an attack upon the nonviolence of ums and ahs, completing a scorched earth assault on the quiet dignity of anodyne place fillers so as to replace them with crutch words that, whether used correctly or incorrectly, amount to obfuscation and disorganization–i.e., bullshit. These lexical tics impulsively resorted to by the verbally disabled add emphasis where none is needed, assert drama where there is only triviality, state the obvious rather than the nuanced and (my favorite) suggest strongly that everything said beforehand was a lie (honestly?…). The standard Trump teenage verbal diarrhea disaster asserts a recklessness with meaning that can only be regarded as aggressive stupidity. This is the hallmark of the powerful, the invulnerable, the masters of the universe who say and do as they please without repercussions, and is the hidden in plain view secret behind Trump’s attraction to some people. We have heard it again and again: Trump ‘says out loud what we can only think to ourselves’. My own take on this is that Trump says out loud, in ways some people would never even hazard, the despicable ideas that belong in the basement. They generally stay there because someone will kick your fucking ass if you say them out loud elsewhere, which is as it should be, but, alas is no longer.

The terrifying ephemeral nature of Twitter is the dominant mode of communication for this viral and noxious hate speech. But together with the sheer hatred and assault of such verbiage there is something else underway: where everything is equally dramatic, nothing is important. Aside from links to longer written work, this platform, like instagag and snapcrap is useless for leftists. The ‘twit’ in Twitter is there for a reason. Those who are prolific in these mediums are the same shallow dipshits who prosecute juvenile intra-leftist fights. Tankies vs. insurrectionists, statists vs. anarchists, etc.

No complex thoughts or arguments are possible here, only half-ass hash tags, silly memes, and depraved gossip. Chomsky once remarked that in order to engage an audience about ideas which break with orthodoxy one must spend some time setting the groundwork to do so–you need at least 15-30 minutes to tear down presumptions that prohibit ‘out of the box’ thinking. If you are not afforded the opportunity to do this you sound insane. This fact alone means the instant ambush culture of social media and the talking heads that wallow in cultish Marxisant Zizekian nonsense ensures no such thinking is possible within such a format. Zizek and his ilk thrive there because they are full of shit. That’s why Chomsky didn’t go on cable news programs or engage in celebrity debates. Chomsky has all the more integrity because of that. More leftists, certain antifascists in particular, need a reminder on this point. Otherwise you are just engaging a debate on their terms. The only corrective to this sorry state of affairs is aptly provided in the wonderful allegory of revolution that is the film Snowpiercer, by Bong Joon-Ho. If you get to the front of the train, don’t listen to the conductor, don’t even allow him to talk–cut his tongue out and remember: Kronole is a bomb, you idiot!

This is why it is largely pointless to troll celebrities and engage in the shadow boxing preferred liberals and conservatives. The questions determine the parameters of possible answers. Liberals and conservatives, establishment types and pols consumed with issues and policies are congenitally allergic to our thinking and action. Are they concentration camps? Is Jeremy Corbyn an anti-semite? Was Brett Kavanaugh qualified for the Supreme Court? Is there a U.S. presidential candidate other than Bernie Sanders worth two shits? Did Jeffrey Epstein receive preferential treatment for his predations? If you debate these questions, you have lost before you begin because there is no debate. To debate what is obvious is the death of debate. It is to die a dithering death, full of thoughtfulness and nuance, that amounts to nothing. It won’t stop fascism or overcome capitalism. Enough already. Try a long form essay, ffs, and mind your adverbs

END

Here Fascism, There Fascism, Everywhere Fascism

Featured

Posted by in Book Review, Rant

≈ Leave a comment

To Fight Against This Age: On Fascism and Humanism. By Rob Riemen. W.W. Norton and Company. 2018

Just because a verbose twit decries ‘fascism’ doesn’t mean said scribbler is onto something. If, while pointing at a chair, someone screams ‘fascism!’ we would look askance and wonder about their mental state.

So it is with this pulp fiction.

The problem appears immediately, in the opening sentences. Having ‘courageously’ announced the return of fascism way back in 2010, Riemen, all too comfortable writing about himself, assumes the role of reluctant soothsayer, only to be dismissed by his fellow patrician academics.

He told you, but you refused to listen. ‘You’ are that most reasonable and cautious of thinkers, steeped in the eternal values of liberal democracy, perhaps a fellow at The Nexus Institute or the Templeton Foundation, which seems to mine similar philosophical terrain. A liberal, a conservative, a neo-this or neo-that, perhaps even a ‘progressive’.

Of course what Reimen considers to be fascism is so elastic and untethered from reality as to be an hallucination. If a brute of any political persuasion were to vomit in his precious ivory tower, staining the parchment rolls of wisdom poured over by so many serious thinkers, the sulphur pits could not be far behind. But he was ignored not because his colleagues failed to grasp the reemergence of fascism in the 21st century–an indisputable fact about which there is now little argument–but because they didn’t give a shit. Riemen’s account of fascism is so preposterous as to lend credence to their dismissal, which says a lot, I suppose.

This bit of nauseating self congratulation is quickly followed by laughable cautionary tales about why ‘civilizations’ self destruct. In short: Elites fall prey to their own hubris, their aggressive stupidity opening the door to the passions and naïveté of the masses, which is the real problem here, and far worse than ruling class shortsightedness.

Ruling elites get too greedy and self absorbed–go all Caligula–mindlessly following the pagan shock and awe of an amoral capitalism, and thereby undermine the natural order of things, which depends upon the endless interpretations of philosophers such as Reimen. Not change that order of things, mind you, but explain it. The problem is in the style of elite rule, rather than the rule itself. Here fascism is just another variant of anything that challenges the status quo, which is eternal.

Artists and philosophers are seen as repositories of the values that humanize capitalism, and are counterposed to technocrats and economists.

But capitalism cannot be humanized, only overthrown.

Besides, the fight against fascism proceeds not through the words and ideas of so many scholars and celebrities, but through the class struggle, the true motive force of history.

Elite rule, in today’s world, as that of old, involves brutal and unrelenting exploitation and domination. This is the hidden source of the reappearance of fascism as an exit strategy from the contradictions of capitalism. To ignore this means misunderstanding fascism and thereby being helpless to thwart it.

This is why the philosopher above, and many of his colleagues alike, will end up aiding it. Most of these sophisticates will find their way back to supporting this 21st century fascism (still in early development) precisely because they cannot see their own ideas and the institutions that sustain them as enablers of that same actually existing fascism–to use a turn of phrase. They are faux antifascists, their ideas, floating in a rarified atmosphere of abstract metaphysical absurdity, should be ridiculed, their institutions allowed to rot from within so we can immolate their edifices and warm ourselves by the embers. If your idea of a popular front is so anemic as to include such monstrous stupidities in its theoretical formulation, you have already surrendered.

What’s at stake here is, again, the definition of fascism, so important to the task of defeating it.

I haven’t included any direct quotes from To Fight Against…I don’t want to imply that there is something there with which one should engage. There isn’t.

END

Trump and the Ruling Class

Featured

Posted by in Essay, Fiction, Rant

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Marx and Trump

 

The election of Donald Trump to the presidency of the United States was an epic shitting-of-the-bed with no parallel in American election history. The first, most important point to be made about this is that our corporate and political elites made that bed; we need to make sure they must now lie in it. When they blather about Russians stealing the election or the deplorable nature of the white working class, force feed them the truth. It was their hubris that fertilized a garden overrun with weeds that produced the super bug that is Trump.

According to virtually all prognosticators, once the Sanders ‘political revolution’ was dispatched the Unfiltered Orange Sociopath would surely lose, and the ship of state, with another captain Clinton at the helm, would continue on course. Only two newspapers with circulations above 100,000 endorsed Trump for President, while all other major media formats, excluding Fox News, and only after the primaries, either dismissed his candidacy with a shrug or actively campaigned against him. He was not from the establishment. He was not the first choice of the ‘smart money’. He wasn’t their 20th choice. He was not one of them. Trump arose from a social movement he did not create within conditions not of his making. He is more an expression of those developments–riding the wave, so to speak–rather than the wave itself. What produced that wave is most certainly a generalized crisis within capitalism and its ruling ideology, neoliberalism. But the wave is now large enough that it drives that crisis as much as it is a product of it. It’s important to call that wave what it is: white nationalism, or the American form of fascism.

If what happened on November 8, 2016 is best understood as a sharp departure from an otherwise healthy and democratic political culture, then the solution might plausibly be a restoration of democratic norms. But what took place was not a departure from the norm, but a logical outcome of that norm. What they call ‘progress’ will always invite the eternal return of fascism. What transpired was not a coup, a ‘stolen’ election, or an excess of American democracy that, if you listen closely, certain bloodless technocrats now argue requires an enlightened despotism as a corrective. This is, of course, how everyone from conservatives to progressives view things: Everything was more or less fine until–WHAM!–the impossible came to pass. The solution is to boot the bigot out of office, fix the damage and move on. But the problem is much more than that and much worse. Even Bernie Sanders can’t fix it now.

On this question of fascism and Trump much of the socialist left is mistaken in other ways. For instance, a rendering of Trump’s triumph as the ‘rotten fruit of the ruling class’ correctly locates the general responsibility for the world of shit that we live in with the rich and powerful, but it cannot explain two things about that world: first, Trump’s contradictory relationship to that ruling class and, second, his ability to command support from millions of (white) people manifestly not from that ruling class.

To understand how what happened came about and what, more than two harrowing years later, can be done in response, requires an understanding of Trump’s appeal, especially that ‘authenticity’ so often associated with his “saying out loud what some people only dare to think”. Part of what that something amounts to is the genuinely contradictory relationship he has with established centers of economic and political power–what we anarchists and communists call the ruling class. He is from their family but in their eyes he has always been and will always be something of an embarassment. They will never fully accept him, something that is, oddly enough, part of his strength. Trump was always invited to the party, but the hosts secretly hoped he wouldn’t show up. If he did appear, everyone would cringe, but they would not kick him out. Why is that?What is it about Trump that makes him a social outcast, yet a fixture at the same time? And why do certain people turn to a billionaire in order to punish a ruling class?

Sometimes wisdom can be found in unlikely places. The nooks and crannies of oppositional subcultures sometimes become the interstices that make history. It took Marx’s body of work decades to marinate before becoming a set of ideas followed by millions across the planet; but those ideas started on the fringe, within spaces in between what is and what could be. If we want to understand Trump and fascism here’s a source from the recent past that sheds important light on a particular dynamic of Trump’s ascendency and its relationship to fascism. Set aside that academic article, that peer-reviewed journal, the latest tweet from that celebrity intellectual. For the moment dispense with those shop worn terms: ‘populism’, ‘authoritarianism’, ‘monopoly capital’, and ‘privilege’.

Listen to some rap and read the lyrics.

The Oakland-based Hip Hop band The Coup released an album in 1994 called Genocide and Juice. It is my favorite work of art in that musical genre and is to hip hop what Alan Ginsberg’s Howl is to poetry, Miles Davis’ Kind of Blue is to Jazz, or Marx’s Das Kapital is to socialist theory. It is remarkable in many ways and anticipates band member Boots Riley’s film, Sorry to Bother You, released to critical acclaim last year. I will focus on two songs, “Fat Cats, Bigga Fish” and “Free Stylin at the Fortune 500 Club”. If you can, listen to these two songs and follow along with the lyrics. And remember, all of this was created prior 1994. Apologies in advance for any lyrics that are incorrect.

“Fat Cats, Bigga Fish”

Well, now haha, what have we here?

Come with it
Get down, get down, get down 2ce
Come with it
Get down, get down, get down 2ce

It’s almost ten o clock, see I got a ball of lint for property
So I slide my beenie hat on sloppily
And promenade out to take up a collection
I got game like I read the directions
I’m wishing that I had an automobile
As I feel the cold wind rush past
But let me state that I am a hustler for real
So you know I got the stolen bus pass

Just as the bus pulls up and I step to the rear
This ole lady looks like she drank a forty of fear
I see my old-school partner, said his brother got popped                                       pay my respects, “Can you ring the bell?” We came to my stop
The street light reflects off the piss on the ground
Which reflects off the hamburger sign as it turns round
Which reflects off the chrome of the BMW
Which reflects off the fact that I’m broke
Now, what the fuck is new?
I need loot, I spot the motherfucka in the tweed suit
And I’m on his ass quicker than a kick from a grease boot
Eased up slow and discreet
Could tell he was suspicious by the way he slid his feet
Didn’t wanna fuck up, the come on,
So I smiled with my eyes, said “Hey, how’s it hanging guy?”
Bumped into his shoulder, but he passed with no reaction
Damn this motherfucka had hella of Andrew Jacksons!
I’m a thief or pickpocket, give a fuck what you call it
Used to call ’em fat cats, now I just call them wallets                                        Getting federal, ain’t just a klepto
Master card or visa? I gladly accept those
Sneaky motherfucka with a scam, know how to pull it
Got a mirror in my pocket but that won’t stop no bullets
Story just begun but you already know
Ain’t no need to get down, shit, I’m already low

Come with it
Get down, get down, get down 2ce
Come with it
Get down, get down, get down 2ce

My footsteps echo in the darkness
My teeth clenched tight like a fist in the cold sharp mist
I look down and I hear my stomach growling
Step to Burger King to attack it like a Shaolin
I never pay for shit that I can get by doing dirt
Linger up to the girl cashier and start to flirt
All up in her face and her breath was like murder
Damn the shit I do for a free hamburger

“Well, you got my number, you gonna call me tonight?”
“It depends…is them burgers attached to a price?”                                                “Sorry, sorry, I’m just kidding, I’m a call you, write you love letters…”
“It’s all good…”                                                                                                           “Thanks for the burgers…um, hook me up with a Dr. Pepper?”
“That’s cool you want some ice?”
“Yeah, and some fries will be hella nice!”
“Damn, my manager’s coming, play it off, okay? Have a nice day!”
“I’m up outta here anyway”

I use peoples before they use me
‘Cuz you could get got by an Uzi over an OZ.
That’s what an OG told me
Gots to find someplace warm and cozy to eat the vittles that I just got
Came to an underground parking lot
This place is good as any, fuck, it’s all good
Walked in, found a car, hopped up on the hood

Ate my burger, threw back my cola
Somebody said, “Hey!” It was a rent-a-pig, I thought it was a roller
“Want me to call the cops?” I don’t want them to see me
Looked down and saw that I was sitting on a Lamborghini
It was Rolls, Ferraris and Jags by the dozen
A building door opened…Damn, it was my cousin!
Getting off a work, dressed up, no lie                                                     Tux, cumberbund and a black bow tie
I was like hey, “Who is it?” “Me”
“Oh, what’s up man, I just quit this company
They hella racist and the pay was too low ”
I said, “Right, what’s was up in there though?”
“A party with rich motherfuckas, I don’t know the situation
I know they got cabbage, owning corporations
IBM, Chrysler and shit, is what they said”

Just then a light bulb went off in my head
They be thinking all black folks is resembling
“Gimme your tux and I’ll do some pocket swindling”
Fit to change in the bathroom and I freeze off my nuts
Let’s take a short break while I get into this tux
Alright, I’m ready

Come with it
Get down, get down, get down 2ce
Come with it
Get down, get down, get down 2ce

Fresh dressed like a million bucks
I be the fliest muthafucka in an afro and a tux
My arm is at a right angle, up, silver tray in my hand
“May I interest you in some caviar, maam?”
My eyes shoot ’round the room there and here
Noticing the diamonds in the chandelier
Background Barry Manilow, Copacabana
And a strong-ass scent of stogies from Havana

Wasn’t no place where a brother might’ve been
Snobby ole ladies drinking champagne with rich white men
All right, then let’s begin this
Nights like this is good for business
Five minutes in the mix, noticed several different cliques
Talking, giggling and shit
With one mother fucka in betwixt
And everybody else jacking it, throttling

Found out later he owns Coca Cola bottling
Talking to a black man whose confused
Looking hella bougie, ass all tight and seditty
Recognized him as the mayor of my city
Who treats young black man like frank nitty
Mr. Coke said to Mr. Mayor, “You know we got a process like
Ice T’s hair, we put up the funds for your election campaign
And oh, um, waiter can you bring the champagne?”

“Our real estate firm says opportunity is arising
To make some condos out of low income housing
Immediately, we need some media heat
To say the gangs run the street and then we bring in the police
Harrass and beat everybody till they look inebriated
When we buy the land, motherfuckas will appreciate it
Don’t worry about the Urban League or Jesse Jackson
My man that owns Marlboro, donated a fat sum”

That’s when I step back some to contemplate what few know
Sat down, wrestled with my thoughts like a Sumo
Ain’t no one player that could beat this lunacy
Ain’t no hustler on the street could do a whole community
This is how deep shit can get
It reads macaroni on my birth certificate
Puddin-Tang is my middle name but I can’t hang
I’m getting hustled only knowing half the game
Shit how the fuck do I get out of this place?

——

Our protagonist is broke, hungry, and without transportation, while also a poet, a pickpocket, a thief and a flirt. He’s also not a worker, at least not in the formal economy but his epiphany is dependent on posing as a worker. In other words, understanding the deus ex machina of capitalism requires the vantage point of a worker. And yet when he poses as a worker he doesn’t so much as to gain access to a point of production, as to a locus of social reproduction, the leisure activities of the ruling class, where the ‘art of the deal’ really takes place out of the prying eyes of the public.

To rich white people all Black people look the same (“resembling”) which gives our protagonist the opportunity to infiltrate their posh gathering so as to pick some pockets. But what he overhears is shocking, and I don’t think this guy is shocked by much. The hustler, knowing but “half the game” is being hustled. The analogy here, between the hustle of the street and the hustle of capitalist exploitation and domination, posits a world where there is no in-between–you are either a pimp, a John or a ho. There is no way to act ethically within a capitalist system short of overthrowing that system; no way to be right with the world until those categories are utterly obliterated.

That’s as profound and accurate a portrayal of the exploitation and domination of capitalism as I have ever read. Here, in searing terms is the carceral state and gentrification, racism and urban pacification, the two-party system and elite command and control together with a breathtaking cynicism. It also upholds the humanity of a petty thief without romanticizing it and demonstrates how it is possible, and desireable, for that person to become a radical. There is no direct or easy path from “using people before they use me” to “from each according to ability, to each according to need”. But the possibility is there, it just needs a kickstart and guidance.

The revelation that corporate and political power are a hustle, but on a scale so vast as to be hidden in plain sight, forces us to “wrestle” with our thoughts. It challenges seemingly sacred convictions about the meritocratic principle, that competition leads to opportunity and the common good. But the reality is that a fair playing field is nowhere, to climb the ladder is to place one’s foot on a rung that is someone’s head. The song’s emphasis on an epiphany experienced by a member of the so-called ‘lumpen proletariat’, or Black underclass, challenges those sneering socialists who consider this consciousness raising on the part of ‘criminal classes’ virtually impossible. I don’t. I think it’s essential to our collective struggle. In a world increasingly characterized by the deterritorilized nature of the gig economy we need to theorize a terrain of rupture with capitalism at points other than those, strictly speaking, of production.

“Free Stylin at the Fortune 500 Club”

The first line of the next song is our protagonist leaving the party:
“Fuck no, I ain’t got no Grey Poupon!”
Our hero is replaced by the patter of a socialite in conversation with David Rockefeller.
[Socialite] Well anyway, I said, “That’s no burglar! That’s my butler!”
Mr. Rockefeller, let me in on the gossip
I heard you and Mr. Getty are getting into rap music or something?
[Rockefeller] Yes, we have this thing we do with our voices
We sing like authentic rappers.
[Socialite] Oh! David, you must do it for us!

[Rockefeller] Well if they could make this music more funky…
Let me see if I can get my voice like those rappers. Ahem. Ahem
Here we go.

“Well, if you’re blind as Helen Keller
You could see I’m David Rockefeller
So much cash up in my bathroom it’s a Ready-Teller
I’m outrageous, I work in stages, like syphillis
But no need for prophylactics
I’ma up you on some mean old mac shit
Ain’t buff, but my green gots amino acid
Keep my hoes in check, no rebellions
If your ass occur, shit
It wouldn’t be the first time I done made a massacre
Nigga please, how you figure these
Motherfuckers like me got stocks bonds and securities
No impurities, straight Anglo-Saxon
When my family got they sex on
Don’t let me get my flex on, do some gangster shit
Make the army go to war for Exxon
Long as the money flow, I be making dough
Welcome to my little pimp school
How you gonna beat me at this game? I make the rules
Flash a little cash, make you think you got class
But you really selling ass and ho keep off my grass
Less you cutting it, see I’m running shit
Trick all y’all motherfuckas is simps
I’m just a pimp”
Chorus
[Socialite] That is so cute! John Paul, why don’t you entertain us with something as well?
[Getty] Well, what should I do?
[Socialite] Why don’t you rap for us?
[Getty] No, I…
[Rockefeller] Come on, old boy, I did mine!
[Socialite] It’s so, tribal!
[Getty] Very well, then.
[Socialite] Oh goody!
[Getty] But, hold my martini, I have to do those hand gestures.
We will begin at the commencement of the next measure.
Now get ready, I’m J.P. Getty
I am tearing shit up like confetti
My money last longer than Eveready
Ain’t nothing petty about cash I never lose
This is just like the stroll
But the hoes don’t choose, I choose you
No voodoo can hoo-doo you
From getting treated like a piece of ol’ booboo who
Do you think want those niggas that don’t turn tricks?
The loco ho in ’94 is getting 86ed
And all about those rebellions, and riots and mishaps
I got the po po’s for their daily pimp slap
The motherfucker gangsta, rolling Fleetwood Caddy
I’m that mack ass already pimped his daddy
Lay you out like linoleum floors
I’m getting rich off petroleum wars
Controlling you whores, making you eat Top Ramen
While I eat shrimp, y’all motherfuckas is simps
I’m just a pimp
Chorus
[Socialite] Oh no, here he comes! Oh, don’t look at him!
[Trump] Are you fellows rapping? I can do that reggie, uh, ah reggae type of thing…You know, one, two, three…
[Socialite] Well actually, we were just leaving…
[Trump] I am Trump, Trump check out the cash in my trunk
Trump, Trump check out the cash in my trunk
I am Donald Trump me think you mighta heard about me
How me last wife Ivana come and catch me money
She want all, she want this, she want that, of fun
X amount of this like just like the gap hear me
Hol’ up your hand if you love the money
Hol’ up your hand if you love punanny
Gun pon mi side mi afi kill somebody
Because the money inna mi trunk dem wan fi come tek see.

Trump’s inside/outside status is captured perfectly by Riley through his representation as a reggae-rapper, something I gather was anathema to hip hop during the 1990s. The first two rappers in the song were meant to represent the then emerging feud between east coast and west coast rap traditions,  memorialized through the mortal conflict between Notorious B.I.G. and Tupac Shakur. Rockefeller is east coast, J.P. Getty west coast. Trump is the outlier. There was no reggae-rap. That just wasn’t done. Perhaps this is still so today, I’m not an expert on hip-hop.

In any case the rendering of corporate bosses and their political lackeys as pimps playing a cynical and profitable game is brilliant. ‘Punnany’, by the way, is slang for vagina, a further foreshadowing of Trump’s misogynistic ‘pussy grabbing’.

Trump is clearly an embarrassment but he’s still at the party. Begrudging acceptance is still acceptance. We are never at the party, unless we have a tray in our hand. At that time Trump was a millionaire, but not a member of the ruling class in good standing, just as the interloper in the song above is at the party, but not entirely welcome. So it is today. This dynamic, captured so well in the song above, also highlights a facet of fascism that is essential to understanding it and therefore fighting it effectively. Fascism, in its classical, Cold War and 21st century versions always theorizes a fight above and below and involves a relatively independent, or semi autonomous, racist and nationalist mobilization of large segments of a population. A fascist movement in formation cannot be understood primarily, much less exclusively through the prism of class, although it cannot be apprehended without it, either. Fascists fight ungrateful elites above and unworthy black and brown hordes below. That fight above is not disingenuous, either. All so-called ‘issues’ and ‘policies’ (trade wars, immigration, Supreme Court nominees, corporate power, etc.) need a theoretical framework that includes this element within the definition of fascism. Otherwise it is lost.

Fascism is not a product of capitalist crisis; it is the crisis.

The (often) missing element of socialist analyses of fascism is precisely a recognition of the relatively independent nature of fascism as a social movement. The second missing element is an understanding of an eliminationist form of racism that undergirds and binds together otherwise disparate factions into a social movement.

Trump follows, he doesn’t lead. Another way of stating this is that he is a symptom of a much deeper and entrenched problem: the slow, long term yet quickening growth of fascism throughout North America and Europe. Here, where I live, its particular expression is American white nationalism. It takes other forms elsewhere, but the family tree from which all variations descend can be identified and then fought.

The nature of fascism cannot be captured through attitudinal surveys, marketing pitches and polling preferences. Therefore, fascism can never be substantively defeated at the ballot box alone. Emasculate him through constitutional checks and balances, harass him with deep state democrats, impeach him, or defeat him during the 2020 elections–it will not be enough and will only serve to deepen the rot. Fascism is more than a form of authoritarianism counterposed to liberal democracy. If your frame of reference for fascism is bookended by these two concepts–authoritarianism and liberal democracy–as most conventional frameworks are, you will misunderstand it and be hapless to stop it. Only leftists have the theoretical framework to understand this, if only they would use it.

A defeat as epic as that of 2016 has produced precious little soul searching or self reflection. Instead, the tenuous and brittle state of neoliberal ideology has produced a default explanation for defeat that has settled on theft. Liberals and (neo) conservatives were predictably apoplectic about the Orange sociopath ‘stealing’ their election. Their wrath was directed outward, toward a mostly imagined conspiracy of a resurrected KGB that, whatever its influence on the 2016 Presidential election in no way whatsoever represented a significant deviation from the constant interference practiced by all states against one another as a matter of bourgeois routine since time immemorial. Besides, the United States is the undisputed world heavy weight grand champion of sovereign interference. Regime change is, after all, a particularly aggressive form of electoral interference that both Russia and the U.S. practice practically everywhere. The wrath of disenfranchised elites was directed internally, as well, at those ungrateful ‘deplorables’, a handful of utopian Jill Stein supporters and of course the millions of us who said ‘fuck you’ to both parties. Their own complicity–either through deliberate policy, as with Obama’s deportation of 2.5 million souls and Clinton’s reminder that Honduran children may have crossed our border but they didn’t get to stay, or a whoopsie such as neglecting to campaign in Wisconsin–is always rendered as a mistake to be corrected, a flaw to be remedied, a wrinkle to be ironed out, rather than something irredeemable at the core of their rule and the values that justify it. But their rule is irredeemable. This ruling class sips champagne while gazing over infinity pools of conspicuous consumption. When they fuck up, it is by definition our fault. Everything is our fault. They are gods. We are mortals. And what do we do with gods? Hold their heads under water until the bubbles stop and be sure that there are fascists at the bottom of that pool drowning with them.

END

Gutmensch

01 Thursday Nov 2018

Posted by in Essay, Rant

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , , , , , , , ,

Audio Essay

gutmensch

00:00

Gutmensch–‘good human’ in German. Not to be confused with ‘good German’, a term for those banal enablers of classical Nazism who would later, after the fall of Nazism, suffer from bouts of selective amnesia. Gutmensch, since 1968, at least, has been rebranded as a snarky term of disdain by right wing lexicographers for the global uprisings of that year. The point was to taint left politics as politically correct, bleeding-heart, attitudinal kitsch, supported by do-gooder, hypocrites. I bring it up to reference the Die Linke split and the turn to the so-called ‘social national’ underway everywhere.

‘Open’ vs ‘closed’ borders is a false binary.

Gutmensch as a straw man argument.

6:20

Left and Right.

AFD and the ‘moralizing left’.

Split from Die Linke.

Sarah Wagenecht

Wolfgang Streeck

“The materialist left, not the moralist left.”

8:40

Fortress Europe is being defended by lapsed leftists who use the charge of ‘Gutmensch’ as a cudgel to beat the bourgeoisified left and revolutionary socialists alike.

9:30

Rich people are more likely to act generously toward the poor.?!?

10:20

‘Fairland’ just means lebensraum or heimat.

MARS Motor is engaged.

13:50

Aufstehen–‘Get Up’.

The Red-Brown Alliance from Hell.

15:46

Melanchon On “stealing the bread from French workers” and “no freedom of arrival”.

16:52

A Corrective

Socialist Internationalism and Solidarity.

Our political philosophy is grounded in something quite different from such ideas. Socialist internationalism and the principle of solidarity that informs it is not a bleeding heart moralistic melodrama, it is a pillar of our ethics and a central strategic doctrine, a principle necessary for the success of our struggle that is also first in order of battle.

Socialist internationalism is the inviolable, essential principle that workers within states have more in common with workers in other states than with any national interest. They are linked together in a common struggle that overrides any national interest, especially as articulated by their national elites. This principle is most important in the core of capitalism, where fascism lives. We call it solidarity. It is inseparable from our larger identity, its importance so sacred that its violation is universally recognized as the most important failure of the left that led to World War I, its further debasement a central factor in the beginning of World War II, its importance today a bulwark against the spread of fascism.

This principle of solidarity is inviolable–never to be broken, infringed upon or dishonored.

If socialist internationalism was a religion, we could say to break this would be a heresy; its abridgment that which makes possible our evil doppelgänger in ‘national socialism’, which is where violating that principle leads. In the core countries within which fascism organizes, the abandonment of this principle can only result in the still-birth of the revolutionary movement and the opening of the door to fascism.

Solidarity is non negotiable–it shall not be bought, sold, exchanged or transferred.

Solidarity is fundamental to our revolutionary strategy.

It is a central doctrine.

When even ravers battle fascists on the streets, Michael Hardt is organizing a ship to rescue refugees in the Mediterranean, Portland, Oregon antifascists blockade ICE facilities, another caravan has departed from harsh environs to breach the northern wall and Philadelphia activists have established ‘resistance zones’; while all this is underway, the lapsed leftists of Aufagwegnacht want to debate the ‘social national’ by outflanking the AFD on pensions for workers who have lived in country for 35 years. That’s not a ‘class based proposal’ nor a turn to the ‘social’, that’s a national socialist proposal. To engage with it is to accept it as an argument, rather than an assault.

The principle of solidarity is not only essential, but first.

The Four Loci of Attack upend Marxist categories, but uphold them as well. The workers struggle is essential, but not the only struggle and rather than first, it is third in the order of battle. The other loci must shape the workers struggle, and channel it towards liberation.

This turn to the ‘social national’ is not only a failure of solidarity, but a strategic failure, too. In other words, it is a ‘moral’ failure, but worse, it concedes to neoliberals and fascists alike terrain that if given up fatally compromises the socialist revolution. That’s a strategic failure, not only a moral one, not only a violation of principle, but a departure from good politics. When you violate this principle, you abandon the revolution.

The turn to the social national is a violation of principle and therefore our ethics, our creed and above all strategy. This failure to theorize a way out of this false binary too often results in a conception of ‘the national’ not so much as a terrain of conflict that we contest but as the only terrain to contest anything. From this position comes the obliteration of the first necessary spark of a 21st century international revolution: The borders of the capitalist core.

To argue otherwise is to begin a discourse with fascism within a deranged framework of ‘immigration realism’ which is really nothing other than ‘race realism’ practiced by lapsed leftists. This is the sickening nonsense of the so-called moderate center of American politics that animates practically all discussion of borders: that this or that border is necessary and how to regulate the flow the only ‘issue’. Within this framework anti immigrant activism is ‘xenophobia’, an irrational fear of an other, rather than first and foremost institutional racism; Islamophobia is ‘religious bigotry’ rather than first and foremost an expression of racism leavened with Christian triumphalism imbedded within the very concept of the American nation.

Socialist solidarity is a principle held in perpetuity. What’s that mean? Forever.

END

“They Bring That Desert Stuff To Our World”–Bill Maher and Islamophobia

09 Sunday Nov 2014

Posted by in Essay, Rant

≈ Leave a comment

“They Bring That Desert Stuff To Our World”
Bill Maher and Islamophobia

In case you missed it, Bill Maher has been at it again with religion. Which is nothing new–after all he did make a movie called Religulous. But he is not just grinding his religion axe, which I have been known to swing; he’s been dragging Muslims through the mud in a way that is, well, getting unseemly and personal. In the process he’s managed to exhibit the same loathsome character traits he assigns the religious “whackos” he is so fond of excoriating. At one point in this ongoing, disgraceful rehashing of the ‘Clash of Civilizations’ thesis Maher, exasperated at all the ‘hate’ he’s stirred up, suggested he might shut up on the topic.

Please do. It’s getting to the point I want to throw a shoe at you.

Maher and his sidekicks Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins–those instant atheists ever at the ready to demolish whatever straw man caricature of organized religion is offered up for sacrifice–are playing an odious game. It is really difficult to watch the three of them play shills to political forces eager to have an expanded war in the Middle East. They serve at the pleasure of war mongers, all sniggling aside, as their signature adulation of a virtuous ‘West’ is counterposed to a malevolent ‘Orient’. This reeks of intellectual dishonesty and a noxious repackaging of neo-colonialism and xenophobia, albeit with all the trappings of postmodern irony on offer for a forthcoming retreat behind plausible deniability–”we were just joking.” And while it’s painfully familiar, it still sucks because, well, he’s kind of one of us, like Christopher Hitchens. Or Alexander Cockburn.

Such an old ploy, this brutal cleaving of the world into two irreducible and distinct, warring civilizations. Their framework for discussion (if one can call it that) studiously ignores what most liberals and anyone who can legitimately be called a leftist knows to be necessary when addressing this subject: power relations between peoples within and among nation states. As in what forces are arrayed against the democratic aspirations of Muslims? Ah. But therein lies the rub. Maher doesn’t have this problem, as by definition a ‘Muslim’ is anti-democratic. So no need to discuss what role the 21s Century Leviathan plays in this drama. How about in Egypt? Was that a Coup d’etat, Bill? Or perhaps a conscientious, independent, and benevolent military gracefully sidelining a nasty, backwards, Islamic dictatorship intent on murdering those precious standard bearers of Western culture, the cartoonists behind Southpark? How is it that Maher can be a trenchant critic of American influence both at home and abroad but shit the bed when it comes to Islam and Muslims? Answer: He succumbs to classic Islamophobia. But this is nothing new for him in kind; only perhaps in degree. Which raises the question as to how this jackass can pass himself off as a leftist.

But before we get to that, let’s get a working definition for the inelegant but necessary term ‘Islamophobia’. How about unfounded hostility towards and fear of Muslims. Unfounded is the operative term here; and in Bill Maher’s case that will be abundantly clear–no mean Muslims at his door calling for his head.

What would we look for among Maher’s comments that might conform to the defining elements of Islamophobia? How about the following definitive exchange between Maher and Anderson Cooper. In it, Maher manages to hit on all cylinders when responding to a characteristically sophomoric question from Cooper, who has never encountered an unstated assumption he could articulate nor one he would shy away from to please a guest: “Why is Islam the one religion about which so many in America–and the West–censor themselves…? Is it just fear?”

Maher responds: “Absolutely. Because they’re violent. Because they threaten us. And they are threatening. They bring that desert stuff to our world …We don’t threaten each other, we sue each other. That’s the sign of civilized people. And they don’t … People who want to gloss over the difference between western culture and Islamic culture and forget about the fact that the Islamic culture is 600 years younger and that they are going through the equivalent of what the west went through with our middle ages, our dark ages when religion had way too much power … do so at their peril.”

Elsewhere Maher has added:

“New Rule: Although America likes to think it’s number one, we have to admit we’re behind the developing world in at least one thing. Their religious whackos are a lot more whacko than ours! [Laughter]…Our culture isn’t just different than one that makes death threats to cartoonists. It’s better. [Applause]” –Real Time with Bill Maher 2011.
Let’s unpack that load.

Islam is archaic and backwards (‘desert stuff’, ‘dark ages’). Check.

‘Islamic Culture’ is inferior to ‘Western Culture’. Check.

Muslims lag behind more advanced peoples (600 years!). Check.

Islam is uncivilized (lacking the signs of ‘civilized people’). Check.

Muslims are inherently violent (we sue, they fight). Check.

Islam is a religion of violence and supports terrorism (Fatwas against cartoonists). Check.

Elsewhere Maher and his cohorts Harris and Dawkins peddle other stereotypes.

Muslims reject democratic values (otherwise they would have democratic states! Ignore Indonesia. Ignore Egypt before the Coup. etc.). Check.

Islam does not share common values with other major faiths (Even the Pope won’t send his “Swiss Guards” to hunt apostates down). Check.

Islam is monolithic and cannot adapt to new realities. Check.

What’s perhaps more chilling than Maher’s ranting is the disposition of his audience. Was there no one in his studio audience with a conscience? Couldn’t someone even cough to signal opposition?

Maher at once cuts too broad a swath with his biting humor and yet displays an obsession with the flesh and blood particulars of his subject matter that is worrisome: he’s always returning to graphic images of heads being lopped off, suicide bombers and all the rest. Maher would be better off examining the tomfoolery of religion across cultural boundaries than allowing his pathology full bloom in regards Islam.

It’s indicative of his neo-liberal moorings, laden with a culturally permissive patina, that Maher doesn’t bother with the messy notion of a North-South split. That would involve too much heavy lifting and unpacking of his heroic notion of the ‘West’ and the so very unheroic effects of Western imperialism in the third world. Such a different perspective wouldn’t help him render an ‘other’ so different from ‘us’–a rhetorical operation absolutely necessary for demonization–which is what Maher is doing.

All of this reminds me of another American popular culture expression of Islamophobia, the 2007 film 300, described as a ‘porno-military fantasy’ by one reviewer and as a film that trafficked in neo-fascist aesthetics by myself where “so completely is the ‘other’ rendered different that it is difficult to conceive of them as human.”

Coming from national security state war boosters this kind of jingoism is not surprising; but it shouldn’t be welcomed within the liberal left, where Maher moors his ship of fools. I am at a loss as to how any decent person would ever forgive or forget these transgressions. They are despicable.

What’s at play here is a familiar Western superiority complex that needs dismantling. I’m particularly fond of a quote by the late Uruguayan novelist Eduardo Galeano from his book Open Veins of Latin America: “Underdevelopment isn’t a stage of development, but its consequence.” Just that one sentence explodes Maher and company’s narrow, moralistic and ahistorical stance. As in who carved out all those ridiculous state borders from the Ottoman Empire and what effect has that had on the subsequent development of civic society there? How about all those so-called ‘Banana Republics’?

Must we continue with the likes of Ben Affleck as the standard bearer of reason in opposition to Maher and company? Meh. What Affleck lacks in erudition he makes up for in enthusiasm; but sometimes you’ve got to be more than just right, sometimes you need to drop the etiquette and just slap the smile off his face.

Besides, if you must divide the world into the West vs. Islam, secular rationalism vs. religious superstition, how about this: The thoroughly religious injunction against financial interest and debt at the center of Islamic economics is far more rational than the fairy tale of Adam Smith’s ‘Invisible Hand’ or Alan Greenspan’s modern rendition spun from algorithms. How difficult would it be to make that argument for a more just and equitable world?

Although after having suffered through the ignorant ramblings of these Three Wizened Blowhards (Maher, Harris and Dawkins) you wouldn’t think so, I still maintain it is possible to be an atheist without being an asshole.

Jonathan Mozzochi
November, 2014

America’s Playground

17 Saturday Aug 2013

Posted by in Rant

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , , , , , , , , ,

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

pastedGraphic.pdf

On Values Voters

05 Monday Aug 2013

Posted by in Rant

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , , , , , ,

 

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