Tag Archives: United States

The Internet Is Dead

14 Saturday Dec 2013

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The Internet Is Dead

(Essay)

I’ve always wanted to write something so counterintuitive, something so ‘whacked‘ it probably shouldn’t even be set to print. Then I remember that nothing I write is set to print–writing is now just streams of light sent out using TCP/IP network protocols and reassembled elsewhere. Any apprehension I may have had about being ‘published‘ evaporates. There, I feel better. So here goes.

There is little doubt smart phones have made us more productive and efficient creatures. As entertainment and work aides our wonderfully pixelated digital devices are gently making us over into cyborgs, with few complaints and fewer protests. The burgeoning ‘social connectedness’ offered us through Facebook and Twitter, however, come at the expense of ‘social caregiving’: that all-so-important human warmth we all need to thrive cannot be provided by a cell phone, no matter how often you Skype your estranged loved one. It can only be facilitated, or impeded, by the device. Strange, how as screens proliferate and we become more ‘connected’ we are also more socially detached from one another. But that is the flexible ethical dimension inherent to all technology, none more so than ‘dual-use’ technology. And nothing is so emblematic of that dimension than the internet, originally a project of the Pentagon, or so the story goes.

A signature genius of the internet is its ability to reproduce the entirety of its network within any given node, sort of like a fractal in geometry or a rhizome in biology. A fractal is a ‘self-same’ pattern repeated at different scales, while a rhizome functions such that if any piece of a root system is cut from the whole, each piece may give rise to a new plant which will reproduce the organism from whence it came. Contrast this network model (can you imagine the hand wringing that must have gone on within the Pentagon over early versions of the internet?) with that of broadcast television, print media or radio–you can take out a station or tower and the whole network goes down. The internet is horizontal and reflexive; old media unidirectional and vertical. Any unit of the internet is self-sufficient and can exist independently, although full expression is only achieved through connection–being a part of the network. That’s the original genius of the internet preserved in such projects as Wikipedia, WikiLeaks and Open Source Software. It does not reside in Facebook, Google, Microsoft or Apple.

The freedom of the internet has been under constant attack since its inception. We have lost too many battles, perhaps the war. Metastasizing corporations have largely won out, with the Citizens United ruling enshrining the concept of a corporation with all the rights of a person, but none of the responsibilities. The hierarchy so anathema to the genius of the internet has triumphed through pricing people out of the market, political censorship, and monopoly of content. There is a certain poetic injustice in the iconic image of a slum dweller with nothing to eat, clutching a cell phone. The very spread of an inegalitarian internet and its offspring (cell phones) requires the immiseration of human beings.

Recently I picked up my 10-year-old from middle school. As we were making our way home with hundreds of other guardians and their charges, slowly snaking our way through mid-day traffic, I had Max note how many people were ‘dumb driving’ with their ‘smart phones’. The anecdotal evidence suggests that, at least in Marin County, California, we have reached the tipping point. The majority of drivers appeared to be ‘texting while driving’. The use of this technology is now impinging upon our ability to safely conduct our children to and from school.

There they were, heads down squinting into their screens, one hand up on the steering wheel, the other hunting and pecking, all the while operating a ‘loaded weapon’. Something has to give here–and it won’t be our screen time. Perhaps you sit up, excited and ask, does this behavior prefigure coming driverless cars? The Cult of Innovation says we will have such futuristic and cool stuff soon enough and that the rough edges of inequality will be smoothed over. I say we should be mindful not to drive right into such logical cul-de-sacs where we end up forgetting that all technological inventions and innovations are not just defined by their usefulness, but by an ethical dimension that is constantly in flux. When we uncritically celebrate an invention or innovation, an inventor or innovator, we become incapable of evaluating the role such technology plays in our lives. And that suits those among us who thrive on hierarchy, inequality, monopoly and violence.

The shorthand story of the rivalry between Thomas Edison and Nicolai Tesla is also instructive here. Edison, whose name is synonymous with American ingenuity, was also a ruthless businessman. He developed Direct Current (DC) electricity, but because of the nature of DC power a labor and capital intensive system of sub-stations had to be built every few hundred yards in order to deliver the electricity to paying customers. Moreover, DC, on it’s own, was more dangerous than AC. There was, of course, an alternative. Edison deliberately thwarted the development of Alternating Current (AC) so as to undermine his main business rival, Westinghouse and AC’s inventor, Nicolai Tesla. Tesla, as the story goes, tried to bring to market AC current but was met by an early negative publicity campaign where Edison arranged for the public electrocution of animals–a carnival show bait and switch melodrama–which he blamed on AC power. Aside from being an early example of public relations, Edison’s obsession with profit would extend the life of his ‘steampunk’ industrial substation network far beyond its usefulness, an effort to preserve profit that actually thwarted technological progress and extended and deepened inequality.

A contemporary example of corporate maldevelopment is the well-documented FUD (Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt) campaigns waged against Open Source Software, Wikipedia and Wikileaks. These ventures are collaborative, not-for-profit ventures that contain within them a more egalitarian, and dare I say so, efficient means of organizing information.

When most people think of Apple, Microsoft and Google, they think of 21st Century paragons of innovation. I think of what damage has come with that innovation, and what’s to come.

END

America’s Playground

17 Saturday Aug 2013

Posted by in Rant

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America’s Playground

August 2013 (Rant)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Opportunity is available to all!

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

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

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

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

Oh, and they aren’t black.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bad timing, that one.

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

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

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

Rinse.

Repeat.

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

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

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

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

In the neighborhood!

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

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

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

Masterful.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I called Child Protective Services.

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

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

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

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

Earth Day is celebrated in a casino parking lot.

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

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

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

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

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

No drugs, no democracy.

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

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

While this may be depraved, it is not accidental.

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

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

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

END

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War Crimes, Lady Liberty and Values Voters

05 Monday Aug 2013

Posted by in Memoir

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War Crimes, Lady Liberty, and Values Voters 

2005 (re-edited August 2013)

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

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

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

But we will all pay for this one.

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

Everything balances out.

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

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

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

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

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

What do you glean from this?

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

America, love it or leave it.

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

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

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

I don’t think so.

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

We know where they ended up.

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

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

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

I guess I should be thankful.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Where’s my peace dividend?

Where’s my peace movement?

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

Perhaps you disagree?

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

Nah.

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

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

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

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

Super.

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

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

That’s a heartland without a heart.

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

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

Stick a fork in it, already.

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

Ouch.

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

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

Where are you?

END

On Values Voters

05 Monday Aug 2013

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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

Revolutionary vs Traditional Autocracy: No Choice At All. The Egyptian Uprising Redux

17 Wednesday Jul 2013

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ImageMy post on the Egyptian Coup (‘Egyptian Coup Coverage Execrable‘ July 7) focused on the dissembling and hand wringing displayed by some over the term ‘Coup d’etat’ used by others to describe the Egyptian military’s overthrow of the Muhammed Morsi government. Since my post there has been a massacre–some 50 dead outside the Republican Guard complex where the deposed president was thought to be held–and a further deepening of the Egyptian crisis. Two columns by American ‘old media’ stalwarts, George Will and Eugene Robinson, both writing for the Washington Post, are considered here while some contributions from the old lefty New Left Review echo my earlier effort.

George Will first.

In my blog I made a reference to George Orwell’s ‘boot stamping on your face–forever” quote to illustrate two possible outcomes of the Egyptian Coup–both undesirable: continued military dictatorship or civil war. While Orwell’s quote from his novel 1984 describes a fictional totalitarian society and was pointed at then-existing Soviet totalitarianism, I used it in a manner meant to highlight the brutality of all dictatorships, rather than only that of the Soviet Union. Will’s ‘Egypt’s preferable tyranny’ column in the Washington Post of July 10 also uses Orwell’s quote, but in a disingenuous manner, wherein he tries to deflect attention from the fact that he doesn’t call the overthrow a coup d’etat.

In his opening paragraph Will piously cites Thomas Jefferson and Martin Van Buren in order to chastise Mohammed Morsi for ruling “noisily and imprudently (the tone Will strikes here smacks of paternalism).” He then writes that it’s  “difficult to welcome a military overthrow of democratic results.”

Difficult, but necessary.

Wiping a salty tear away, he then breaks out the cake and confetti.

To George Will, the Morsi government represented a ‘revolutionary autocracy’ rather than a tried-and-true ‘traditional autocracy’. Although in power for only about a year, the Morsi government might well have become worse than the status quo, and that risk was too great to justify leaving the future of Egypt in the hands of the Egyptian people. That’s pretty much the construction of the argument as Will has laid it out.

Lacking a credible charge of repression against the Morsi government, Will constructs a ‘what if’ argument that is fallacious on its face. Elided from consideration by Will is any other option that may have been available other than a coup d’etat. In setting up his argument this way, Will is playing coy. His elegant construction will come to rest in a cul-de-sac of nostalgia wherein he and his compatriots can break out the bottle rockets to go with their cake and confetti.

Will describe’s Morsi’s Muslim Brotherhood government as “tyranny portended” while actually existing, reinstated military tyranny is “preferable to Morsi’s because it is more mundane.”

The masses in the streets were revolting for banality?

Will’s argument is redolent of Bush-era preventive war massacre making, but it has deeper roots; besides, not even Will would make the argument that Morsi’s government presented an imminent threat to the United States and therefore could be justifiably overthrown using the doctrine of preemptive war.

So he needs to look elsewhere.

At this point in his article Will decides to pantomime heavy lifting, lest his frequent sprinklings of neo-liberal thought-stopping bromides end up as so much claptrap, undermining his own argument. The “economic dynamism,” “liberalization” and “modernization” he associates with preferable tyrannies come with necessary evils. That’s just ‘reality’, you can hear him saying. Thus “Egypt’s best hope is authoritarianism amenable to amelioration” (and lame alliteration) and is contrasted to the Morsi government’s “democratic coloration, however superficial and evanescent.”

Now we are getting somewhere.

The Morsi government wasn’t actually democratic, just tinted that way? Really? Morsi was elected by 52% of voters last year, an election victory followed by a 64% nationwide voter approval of a new constitution proposed by the government. And however much I, or anyone else, may disagree with the Egyptian Brotherhood, isn’t it a rather inept leap of logic to describe the last year as just window dressing for a potentially brutal theologized autarchy?  Here Will effects a lecture-from-on-high tone using Great White Men from the Western Canon quotes to hopefully conceal what is at heart a heartless and thoroughly contemptible apologia for dictatorship.

That’s what his argument amounts to.

Will then reaches into his bag of tricks and dusts off an ossified Cold War doctrine that rests on a tortured logic (pun intended) in the ‘Kirkpatrick Doctrine’. That doctrine–which I remember vividly from it’s application throughout the 1980s in Latin America–retroactively justified the overthrow of left-leaning nations and proactively supported the propping up of some of the hemisphere’s most brutal dictatorships.

Beginning with the Chilean Coup of 1972 and proceeding onwards through collaboration with the neo-Nazi generals of Argentina, the genocidal regimes of Guatemala and the training, equipping and deployment of an illegal army intent on overthrowing the Sandinista government in Nicaragua, the Kirkpatrick Doctrine posed itself as the only real alternative to Soviet tyranny, or so it was postulated. Of course, this was total bullshit then, and 25 years later only smells worse.

In turn, the Kirkpatrick Doctrine relied on the ‘He’s a son-of-a-bitch, but our son-of-a-bitch‘ argument as first articulated by President Franklin Roosevelt to describe Nicaragua’s then dictator, Anastasio Somoza Garcia and his brutal dictatorship. The needs of us empire to secure developing third world peripheries for us business were, and appear to continue to be, the overriding priority that shapes us foreign policy.

Will ends his column by cracking open the us constitution and instructing Egypt’s revolutionaries on the benefits of compromise. A final stomach-churning leap into the refuge of an oversimplification located in the American Civil War wraps it up: Abraham Lincoln was actually a “traditional autocrat” who had to reject “popular sovereignty” in border states that supported slavery in order to uphold higher values (preservation of the union, equality, etc.).

Yuck.

Someone should poke George Will–preferably with a sharp stick–and remind him that it’s 2013 and we live in a multipolar world now. He should consider re-shelving this shopworn, sorry-assed excuse for intelligent political analysis for something more nuanced and modern.

Then again, perhaps he shouldn’t be disturbed.

It was always the overarching framework of us empire to bifurcate all conflicts into the Evil Empire v.s. the Great Democracy, no matter how mendacious one had to be to stuff all the heterogeneity of regional and local conflicts into that filter. The beneficiaries of this cleaving have always been the plutocrats. But as with Will’s use of an empty metaphor to help us understand the crisis in Egypt–or justify the military’s solution to that crisis–the Kirkpatrick Doctrine cannot account for all of the changes in the world that have happened over the past 25 years that alter fundamentally the global context within which those changes have occurred: the rise of China–a one party state apparatus in charge of key industries and institutions necessary for state control, but with a limited private sector; the collapse of state socialist regimes but the rise of the Bolivarian Revolutions of the 2000s and the endurance of Cuba; the triumph of neo-liberal economic models together with the 2008 cratering of the global financial system, etc.

Will’s reduction of the Arab Spring uprising forces to those of an amorphous mass of ‘democratic’ and vaguely ‘secular’ forces set in opposition to a potential theocratic tyranny strikes me as hopelessly out of date, and suggests the potential bankruptcy of his ideology.

Perhaps there is a silver lining here.

If you have any doubt as to the us government’s posture toward the Morsi government, read the documents secured through Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests made by the Investigative Reporting Program at UC Berkeley and Al Jazeera, distilled into an article entitled “US bankrolled anti-Morsi activists” (Al Jazeera, July 10 2013). So long as Will is pulling out foreign policy doctrine from the 1980s, I’ll do him one better by locating Al Jazeera’s report within the context of us counterinsurgency warfare; the ‘democracy assistance’ programs (funding murderers, political charlatans, dirty cops, and other un-sundry characters) run by the National Endowment for Democracy and USAID as described in the Al Jazeera article, sound as if they were taken from the pages of David Petreaus’ fabulous ‘civic’ programs used in Iraq or those I personally witnessed in Nicaragua in the 1980s: destabilization under the guise of democracy (now NGO) support and so on. The Al Jazeera report is informative and holds up well to the poorly articulated, non-documented blather of bullshit that constitutes the national security establishment’s dismissal of it to date.

I salivate thinking what Wikileaks will unearth here.

We now turn to Eugene Robinson, another Washington Post columnist who recently weighed in on the Egyptian Coup, but one who represents the outer limits of loyal dissent with us empire.

No hand wringing here.

Robinson’s column, “Egypt’s dark future” (Washington Post, July 8 2013) calls the overthrow a coup d’etat that “puts the military as firmly in command as it was during the autocratic reign of Hosni Mubarak.” He suggests Morsi tried to assert civilian control over the military; but I’m not sure they even went that far. Morsi’s government also upheld both the prerogatives of the Egyptian military caste as well as those of the multi-national corporations; in short, continued capital accumulation as per usual.

So why was the Morsi government considered such a threat?

Robinson’s best section is worth quoting in full:

“Under Morsi, an elected Islamist-led government honored the terms of a peace treaty with Israel. It was an extraordinary example for the rest of the Muslim world. Now, alas, we have an example of what happens when an elected Islamist-led government gets too big for its britches.”

Robinson ends by urging the Tahrir Square multitudes to “try ousting the generals next time.”

Sometimes I just love reading Eugene Robinson; this is one of those times.

He just cut right through Will’s elegant, but ultimately defenseless, apologia and calls a spade a spade.

Thanks for that, Mr. Robinson.

The most informative coverage of the Arab Spring I’ve found anywhere has been with the New Left Review, in particular articles by Tariq Ali, Hamzen Kandil, and Perry Anderson. Points made by these social theorists are worth exploring further, and both intersect the aforementioned columns and bring me to the last theme of this essay: What about those multitudes? Why did they explode in 2011; why again, now?

On the 2011 uprising, Perry Anderson asserts, “The single spark that started the prairie fire suggests the answer. Everything began with the death in despair of a pauperized vegetable vendor, in a small provincial town in the hinterland of Tunisia. Beneath the commotion now shaking the Arab world have been volcanic social pressures: polarization of incomes, rising food prices, lack of dwellings, massive unemployment of educated—and uneducated—youth, amid a demographic pyramid without parallel in the world.” (New Left Review, “On the Concatenation in the Arab world” No. 68 March-April 2011.)

That sounds about right.

Elsewhere New Left Review notes that the failure of the Egyptian masses to target, and potentially split, the Egyptian military during the 2011 uprising was a tactical mistake that has contributed to the present impasse. If the Egyptian military had been split perhaps a faction amenable to a revolutionary program more in the mold of what happened in Venezuela could have been possible; leftist Islamists? Instead, Egyptians elected the Brotherhood–who managed to piss everybody off–and in stepped the West and the military.

A last permutation on this question appears in the same issue of New Left Review (No. 68 March-April 2011) in an interview with Hazem Kandil, a political sociologist with Cambridge University. Coming so soon on the heels of the February popular uprising, the exchange is timely, informative and, in at least one spot, a bit awkward.  Kandil is asked by NLR about “the sub-proletariat of the slums in Cairo and the other big cities.” He puts their numbers at a staggering five to six million people “…contingent human beings for those with a settled life, whom they terrify, as people possessing nothing, descending from their sinister habitats on the ordered city, speaking a strangely distorted Arabic, desperately looking for jobs, stealing goods and harassing citizens before retreating to their dark world. Might they not one day ransack the city and burn it down? Fortunately, this menacing human mass was entirely absent from the revolt, which probably contributed to its civilized and peaceful character. A day before Mubarak stepped down, activists in Alexandria were planning to summon it into the city, to swell the numbers of the movement even more.”

Might I suggest that the very absence of these slum dwellers may have contributed to the ultimate failure of the uprising? Perhaps the secular left balked at turning the slum dwellers against the military, and ended up with the Muslim Brotherhood as the best organized opposition ready to capitalize on a democratic process?

The NLR interviewer seems a bit stunned by Kandil’s response, and follows up not once, but twice, asking whether a statistically significant portion of these people are educated and organized and have any human agency at all, finishing with the obvious: “How could there be any hope of an Egyptian democracy if they were excluded from political mobilization in advance, as liabilities for any demonstration?”

Unfortunately Kandil’s attitude towards the Cairo slum dwellers sounds an awful lot like those doctrinaire leftists of another era railing against this social class or the other as insufficiently revolutionary to carry forward revolt, or act as the vanguard, or harboring character defects, criminal elements (ghetto revolts) or whatever.

In any case, it is interesting to consider: just the specter of slum dwellers flooding Cairo and Alexandria sent the Mubarak regime packing…

END

Egyptian Coup Coverage Execrable

07 Sunday Jul 2013

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Egyptian Coup Coverage Execrable

I have indigestion from consuming the execrable media coverage of the Egyptian Coup d’etat. Yes, I called it that. I used that word: Coup d’etat. Any semi-lucid, partially sane observer–regardless of one’s political stripes–would use that term without hesitation. Otherwise we may as well just use whatever neologisms we prefer to describe anything we want. Why not use the softer and seemingly seamless term ‘regime change’?  Because while a regime did change, that term fails to carry any explanatory power. Might as well call it an ‘orange’ or ‘Egyptian Spring 2.0’

We need to call it what it actually is in order for any rational discussion about its likely consequences to proceed. For instance, in the very first paragraph of the Wikipedia definition of Coup d’etat there is this edifying notation: “When the coup neither fails completely nor succeeds, a civil war is a likely consequence.” If you need to look up “civil war” just picture an army boot stamping on your face. Forever. Oh, sorry; that’s probably a better definition for a ‘military dictatorship’–which is what is now in place in Egypt. A civil war is when all manner of footwear is employed to stamp on your face.

When we allow people to casually disregard basic word definitions for obvious political purposes–in this case it appears as though the United States government is legislatively bound to withhold military aid from any government that has seized power through a Coup d’etat, meaning the teat that supplies some $1.2 billion dollars in ‘aid’ for the Egyptian military would dry up–we encourage mendacity and the elevation of the worst among us.

Common referents between peoples become impossible. We remain in our own hermetically sealed realities with our own individualized delusions–as a U-haul full of baggage that will need to be unpacked before any discussion can even begin. Such a world of free floating word-salad is fine when it’s transgressive–ala Family Guy, but perverse and disheartening when it has as its subject people dying in the streets. Cavalier cheerleading for the overthrow of a democratically elected government that displays elements of a despotic theocracy is regrettable; callous disregard for what may be the consequences of that violent overthrow–years of murder and mayhem–is just despicable.

That’s the surreality I’ve been experiencing after some three days of international coverage of the Egyptian Coup d’etat. I’ve been reading what amounts to largely interchangeable ‘news’ and ‘opinion‘ coverage of events there–and it just makes me sick. The sorry-assed word salads assembled by the likes of Politico, Real Clear Politics, Time, and even Al Jazeera inevitably repeat the same tortured logic: The violent overthrow of the democratically elected government of Mohammed Morsi carried out by elements of that country’s military-industrial-complex is not a coup d’etat, because, ipso facto, that’s a bad word that describes bad things and although it’s awkward and unseemly for a nation’s military to overthrow it’s government, in this case it just can’t be bad. Therefore it cannot be a coup. But what is it? A continuation of the 2011 Arab Spring? Well it could be, but it would still be a Coup d’etat, albeit one that could provide a democratic opening for a broader, more representative government. Well, that’s possible, if not quite plausible. But how about a fucking mention of the possibility that overthrowing the Muslim Brotherhood–which waited in the wings some eighty years for their turn and, like it or not, have real, deep social roots in Egyptian Society–may force them back underground and initiate a civil war. One could easily make the argument that this worst possible outcome is not only plausible, but likely.

Watching all of the cringe-worthy dissembling, hand-wringing and parsing of language surrounding just the use of the word Coup d’etat has been painful. It is also instructive, as this pantomime points us to the domestic and international actors involved in the coup and the interests they represent.

New media = plus ca change. We may as well define a book as the internet made out of trees and succumb to the end of all language.

Aside

Shaming a Klansman: A Review of the Film 300

11 Tuesday Jun 2013

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Written circa 2007 [Re-edited June 2013]

If right-wingers deluded with dreams of global empire can’t win their endless War Against Terror in the actual world, they can be consoled through victory on the silver screen. Adapted from a Frank Miller graphic novel, 300 is an epic clash of civilizations blood bath set during the 480 BC Battle of Thermopylae, (Greece) where a group of 300 or so Spartans battle a much larger army of the Persian Empire; although they lose the battle, they win the war for God and Country.

The film traffics in such bigoted stereotypes as to shame a Klansman.

Our hero, King Leonidas, must protect his family as the Eternal Aryan Father, forever and everywhere at war against swarthy enemies above and below, outside and in. The antagonist, the Persian King, Xerxes, with his modern piercings and tattoos comes off as a swarthy, southern gender bending Other. A childlike hunchback volunteers to fight beside Leonidas, but is rejected by the Nietzschean warrior. The hunchback suggests a backstabbing internal (Jewish?) enemy.  A scheming member of the Senate blackmails the hero’s wife into copulation so as to sabotage the heroic defense of the Fatherland–a feckless politician in need of a Coup d’etat if there ever was one.

It is the only War Against Terror anyone will ever win.

As if directly out of a propaganda film from World War II, all Persians in this film are depicted as sub-human monsters. So completely is the “other” rendered different that it is difficult to conceive of the them as human. The Spartans are all-to-human–scrubbed and clipped, clean and bright, and democratic. While I understand this exaggeration to be a staple device of cinematic fiction—this movie drenches moviegoers in enough blood to blot out the sun–real political ramifications come into play. Consider the broader geo-political context where nuclear option scenarios are planned for Iran by the Pentagon and the ongoing carnage in Iraq.

The swarthy hordes are death riders with mystical powers as out of a Lord of the Rings movie and Xerxes stands about 9 feet tall, his soldiers often hideously deformed. His entire army has only the most tangential connection to homo sapiens. Just when you are about to argue that this exaggeration for effect helps distance the moviegoer from identifying these Persians as actually existing Iranians and thereby completing the circle of bigotry, the film does just that: the Warrior King describes his fight as against “Asian hordes,” and “mysticism and the East” (or was it “Orient?”), leaving little room for ambiguity.

I have to ask, jokingly: Was Samuel Huntington an adviser for this film?

After Leonidas rejects the hunchback’s offer of service, Xerxes entices the hunchback with flesh pots so as to discover a Spartan military weakness. In a clever twist, this rejection of the hunchback will come back to haunt Leonidas–illustrating the Achilles’ heel of the Spartans: Their pride and purity is both their strength and their undoing. But this is largely lost on an American audience enthralled with the spectacle, and besides, we know who eventually wins this battle.

Sex in the Spartan camp is shown once, between husband and wife, in the one scene of soft glowing light, ensconced within the loving romantic embrace of a nuclear family. Sex for Spartans is all love, God and Country. Sex among the others is lust, death, and betrayal.

Protagonists are Aryanized and the evil others black, deformed and monstrous.

David Denby of The New Yorker (April 2 2007, “Men Gone Wild”) describes 300 as a “porno-military curiosity—a muscle-magazine fantasy crossed with a video game and an Army recruiting film” and elsewhere, the product “of a culture slowly and painfully going mad.”

While Denby gets much right about what is so wrong with this film, he doesn’t get how race is crucial to the development of a fascist worldview–how in American popular culture the swarthy hordes are simultaneously black, Arab(?!), Iraqi, gay and Jewish. This “other” can only be completed by an opposite “us.”

Much has been made of the Spartan men in tights in this film, as if ham-handed homoeroticism gives the film a camp quality and inures it to serious criticism. But this film wallows with pleasure in the extermination of gays. I think Mick LaSalle in his review of 300 (San Francisco Chronicle, March 9, 2007) misunderstands the bonds that form between men when they commit mass murder, an essential element to all fascist men of action since Mussolini’s Black Shirts in the 1920s. To add insult to injury, LaSalle doesn’t even suss out how the Spartans so clearly represent an idealized American Heartland and the Persians a dusky, Sodom and Gomorrah.

I mean, you missed that? What the fuck were you watching?

The transmogrification of the Other in 300 suggests a fear of multiracial, pluralistic, urban America.

Having allowed the creators of this film their day in the court of aesthetic opinion we can now render judgment: 300 is a film that shamelessly traffics in fascist aesthetics and values. It thereby joins D.W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation as a place marker delineating an American popular culture in the throes of yet another inept, murderous and unjust war abroad, and a casino economy propping up a corrupt political elite at home.

Compare 300 to the other cinematic adaptation of a Frank Miller graphic novel, Sin City. Here corrupt Catholics,  a depraved serial killer and dirty cops are opposed by—get this—virtuous prostitutes and classic noir anti-heroes. If Sin City embraces a culturally progressive, if somewhat ambivalent, multi-racial urban populism, 300 gets down with the extermination. 300 smacks Quentin Tarentino’s hip, hyper violent moral relativism around like a rag doll, politicizing what had thus far been relatively apolitical. In this respect 300 breaks new ground

I’m going to pick on Mick LaSalle again. Elsewhere, in a response to a letter to the editor taking him to task for a movie review of 300 not suited for CNN Student News, LaSalle manages to miss everything noteworthy and instead, through a Herculean contortion of logic, actually argues (kind of half-assed, a bit self-consciously as though he is dimly aware he’s full of shit) that Xerxes could be said to represent George W. Bush and Leonidas the oppressed Middle Easterners.

Wow. I must admit, I hadn’t thought of that.

300 unintentionally suggests the real roots of so-called “Western” democracies are in the ashes of a society so militaristic and devoid of pity as to ritually dispose of new born babies by tossing them into pits. Now there might be an interesting parallel to be made here between ritual sacrifice and the ideology of the War Against Terror–after all, 300 does consecrate the still birth of democracy in a frenzy of bloodletting. More to the point, it is obviously not the intention of the film-maker. One needs to watch this film in a movie theater with a mess of middle Americans to get the full xenophobic, misogynist slobbering it inspires. After all, in America, with infotainment reining supreme, it’s not really the opinions of Denby, LaSalle or, much less, my own that make a difference. It’s the fourteen-year-old with a historically unparalleled power to influence commerce who increasingly determines the meaning of culture.

Contemporary political reality raises the question of artistic values and responsibility: If Iran is invaded in the near future, should the creators of this film be subjected to war crimes prosecution?

Yeah, dude.

I am reminded of that stirring scene in the film version of Tony Kushner’s play Angels in America where Al Pacino, playing Roy Cohn, hears a dark, yet beautiful poetic ode to gay San Francisco that he takes for a description of Hell, only to be told by his interlocutor that it is a vision of Heaven. The irreducible gulf here is between the values of empire and domination and those of pluralism and multiculturalism; this conflict is not fundamentally about East vs West.

300 also brings to mind my experience in the early 1990s in Portland, Oregon viewing the film Patty Rocks. The movie was difficult to watch, but some (male) members of the audience made it more so—their reactions to what can only be described as cringe inducing, excruciatingly sexist scenes were despicable. They were laughing when I was appalled; their crass merriment coming at the expense of another’s suffering. The irony and schadenfreude that are revealed at the end of this film were completely lost on these moviegoers.

I cannot recall a film so utterly opposite my political and aesthetic sensibilities as that of 300.

Jonathan Mozzochi