Category Archives: Rant

Gutmensch

01 Thursday Nov 2018

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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

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“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

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America’s Playground

August 2013 (Rant)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Opportunity is available to all!

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

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

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

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

Oh, and they aren’t black.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bad timing, that one.

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

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

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

Rinse.

Repeat.

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

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

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

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

In the neighborhood!

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

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

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

Masterful.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I called Child Protective Services.

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

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

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

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

Earth Day is celebrated in a casino parking lot.

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

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

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

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

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

No drugs, no democracy.

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

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

While this may be depraved, it is not accidental.

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

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

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

END

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On Values Voters

05 Monday Aug 2013

Posted by in Rant

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February 2005 (re-edited September 2013)

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

But I’m here for the duration.

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

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

Only I like the idea!

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

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

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

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

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

END