tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-77786770645476611492024-02-20T17:18:23.756-08:00One World GhettoNo exile is possible in a unified worldUnknownnoreply@blogger.comBlogger15125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7778677064547661149.post-15886303534124708772014-07-01T01:30:00.000-07:002014-07-01T08:46:37.384-07:00Symbol-Minded Politics<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
by Anthony Schiappa<br />
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt;">Social
media users are in a colitic fit over the name “Washington Redskins.” <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt;">It’s
racist as hell. Everyone knows that, even the “get over it” crowd, which
refuses to take its own advice. As a few <a href="http://www.eastofehlo.com/#!Changing-the-Chief-Wahoo-Question/c16ee/6E99F718-2D53-48B7-8600-4EC34FB6501B" target="_blank">bloggers</a> have pointed out, the mascot
would be racist even if no American Indian found it offensive, though this
point itself smacks of white liberal paternalism.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt;">On
the other hand, 90,000 mostly white sports fans aping the tribes that their
country eradicated is exactly the kind of grotesque image that neatly captures
contemporary American culture. Naturally, its sublime truth must be hidden from
view. Sweeping under the rug any honest depiction of our grim history—that’s
one thing that liberals and conservatives can agree upon. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt;">In
fact, if it weren’t for the outrage at racist team mascots, most people, except
perhaps gamblers, would never give a second thought to the plight of the
American Indian. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt;">So
the zeal with which name-changing efforts have been supported by non-Indians
makes me wonder about the underlying motivations of these do-gooders. Why the
sudden concern for a group that is usually forgotten? Partially, it seems as
though nerds are getting some revenge against the suffocating jock culture they
grew up in; others seem to get their kicks harassing a sleazy one-percenter
like Dan Snyder. Much of it is simply the knee-jerk outrage of the Internet.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt;">There
is, of course, more to it. A name change for the Redskins, the third most
valuable franchise in the NFL, would indeed be symbolically powerful, but
there’s the rub. It would do nothing to address the daily realities of racism,
manifested in the universal horror of poverty. Those realities would only be
further obscured by a strictly symbolic political victory, because things
really aren’t getting better. They’re getting worse.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt;">And
to those who would counter that a name change would “send a message” or “raise
consciousness,” I challenge you to explain what that means in concrete terms
without sounding like an imbecile. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt;">Because
the far more destructive consequences of racism can be found in economic
<a href="http://www.spotlightonpoverty.org/ExclusiveCommentary.aspx?id=0fe5c04e-fdbf-4718-980c-0373ba823da7" target="_blank">statistics</a> on the majority of American Indians who don’t, incidentally, own
casinos. Twenty-five percent of Native Americans live in poverty; in non-urban
counties, the number jumps to 60%. Reservations, many of which are on isolated
sites chosen by the federal government as part of its program of extermination,
are among the poorest places in the country, no different than what we
euphemistically call “the developing world.” On the Blackfoot reservation in
Montana, unemployment hovers at 69%, three times as high as the national rate
at the height of the Great Depression. Of America’s high-poverty communities,
American Indians have the lowest rate of full-time job holders, at 36%. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt;">This
means little or no access to healthcare, education, infrastructure, and other
basic services. It also means poverty’s daily indignities and ceaseless toil,
born of “crushing necessity,” as Céline put it. Yes, there is the melodrama of
the poor’s suffering, but there are also the petty hardships and bad trade-offs
that comprise everyday life.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt;">And
here we come to the limits of multicultural liberalism, which cannot confront the animating matrix of all forms of social domination, the capitalist
economy. It is the economic hierarchy—of the robbers and the robbed—that
sustains all other social hierarchies. Equality will not be achieved without a direct
confrontation with the objective force of capital. This means a total and unequivocal
rejection of capitalism and the formulation of something like an explicitly
socialist framework. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt;">This
is why the multicultural liberal ethic, of “realizing the possibilities of here
and now” and the dismissal of any subjects like economic exploitation as
“flattening,” is a dead end. Whatever its alleged good intentions, a strategy
of “making do” will never ameliorate the coercive violence of our economic
system, nor can it ever fundamentally alter it. It can only democratize access
to its bankrupt channels, redistributing poverty more evenly among all demographics,
joining exploiters and exploited in shared intersectional identities. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt;">Unable
to address capitalism’s structuring of all social experience, liberalism fights
its empty battles within the spectacle of symbolism and representation. As a
result, nothing is accomplished. And it never will be. Its activity,
masquerading as political action, unconcerned with challenging the established order,
can only reinforce it. "Multiculturalism" emerges as jargon for
academic careerists, whose trash remedies legitimize our current sordid
social conditions and freeze them into permanence. </span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt;">In
the case of the Redskins controversy, their approach could have unintended
consequences. Such symbolic victories slyly provide cover for continued
economic exclusion. Triumph in the realm of appearances means defeat in lived
experience. While it may be morally right for these mascots to be abolished,
lifting that fight out of the context of poverty and its attendant miseries
could cause the plight of the American Indian to further rece<a href="https://www.blogger.com/null" name="_GoBack"></a>de
into the multicultural fog. They may, in fact, become even more invisible. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt;">It’s
yet another trade-off that the wretched continually confront. For the
symbol-minded, it’s a trade worth making.</span><o:p></o:p></div>
</div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7778677064547661149.post-14117256580013377512013-05-19T14:07:00.001-07:002013-05-19T14:13:56.522-07:00Jack London's Crucified Mind<br />
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, serif;">by Mike Ferraro</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, serif;"> The
primary objective of mechanical labor is to make the laborer an
unfeeling, unthinking instrument of capital. This is done in order to
achieve capital's chief aim—namely, the endless pursuit and
accumulation of wealth for the ruling class. The definition of
mechanical labor here includes both white and blue-collar work, any
type of mind-numbing, repetitious labor, that is, where the outcome
of enforced docility and alienation is achieved.</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: 0in; text-indent: 0.49in;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, serif;">The task of mechanical labor, then, is to
rend and dull the senses, to degrade the worker into a state of
permanent docility and vegetative dependency. This debasement has two
main components: physical exhaustion and cognitive debilitation. In
both, the desired effect is foremost a functional dehumanization. In
this way, the underclass of mechanical laborers is reduced and
alienated. For the vast majority in a control society, this defiled
existence is the summation of life. So much for maximizing human
potentials, that great fairytale, and purported goal, of liberalism.</span></div>
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: 0in; text-indent: 0.49in;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, serif;"> Unfortunately, I know this torment
firsthand, as does anyone who has had the misfortune to work for a
living. In this dehumanized state produced by enforced mechanical
labor, as Jack London observed in his “alcoholic memoir” </span><span style="font-family: Georgia, serif;"><i>John
Barleycorn</i></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, serif;">, the active or
awakened mind suffers most acutely. In relating his time at a steam
laundry, London deftly delineates “the misery of stagnancy and
inaction” of the active mind in harness. From Chapter XXIV:</span></div>
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, serif;"> At
the laundry, I was suffering physical exhaustion again...But </span>
</div>
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: 0.49in; text-indent: 0.49in;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, serif;">there was a difference. When I went
coal-shoveling, my mind </span>
</div>
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: 0.98in;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, serif;">had not yet awakened. Between that time
and the laundry my </span>
</div>
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: 0.98in;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, serif;">mind had found the kingdom of the mind.
While shoveling coal, </span>
</div>
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: 0.98in;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, serif;">my mind was somnolent. While toiling in
the laundry, my mind, </span>
</div>
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: 0.98in;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, serif;">informed and eager to do and be, was
crucified. (1053)</span></div>
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, serif;">Here
London succinctly articulates the effects of toil on the awakened
mind with lyrical precision and blunt force. As noted earlier in the
steam-laundry chapter, London accessed “the kingdom of the mind”
through his acquaintance with books, and this acquaintance triggered
his “informed and eager” mind “to do and be.” But this
awakening is short-lived, immediately thwarted by toil. As the
passage indicates, under the conditions of mechanical labor, physical
exhaustion is customary and expected. Far worse and unexpected,
however, is the new torment the awakened mind experiences and
endures. In fact, where the somnolent mind merely endures physical
exhaustion as a result of enforced toil, the awakened mind, in
addition to experiencing physical deprivation is, according to
London, “crucified.” In this way, a new state of persecution and
torment, previously unimagined and unknown, is introduced. Further,
the vacillation between these two states—the elation of awakening
and the torment of persecution—is embedded in the syntax where this
awakening occurs, specifically the involution of the last line of
text: “While toiling in the laundry, my mind, informed and eager to
do and be, was crucified.” </span>
</div>
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: 0in; text-indent: 0.49in;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: 0in; text-indent: 0.49in;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, serif;">Notice, too, the subjective and stylistic
shift from “I” to “my mind” above. Here London writes of his
mind as a distinct entity, the anthropomorphized object and vehicle
for both his enlightenment and eventual torment. This anthropomorphic
shift is crucial, precisely locating the intensity of the joy of the
mind's awakening. In rhapsodizing his awakening in this way, London
magnifies the intensity of joy experienced. Conversely, the intensity
of the tragedy of his suffering is also located and amplified by this
technique. </span>
</div>
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: 0in; text-indent: 0.49in;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: 0in; text-indent: 0.49in;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, serif;">London’s anthropomorphized and
crucified mind, then, is an apt metaphor for registering the
intensity of this crisis experienced by the awakened mind forced to
toil. Yet the metaphor implies an end. A crucifixion can’t last
forever after all, eventually the degraded object, mercifully,
expires. And that is where the metaphor falls short. In reality, the
alienated worker is afforded no such luxury. What she knows, instead,
is more, and increasingly bitter, toil.</span></div>
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: 0in; text-indent: 0.49in;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: 0in; text-indent: 0.49in;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, serif;">A life of toil then lasts interminably
and obscenely long, much longer than the verb “crucify” implies
or allows. Thus, the extremity of emotional suffering conveyed by the
verb is accurate, as is the degradation produced by such toil, but
the articulation of the temporality of everyday suffering is off.
Again, this condition—the pervasive alienation felt—is closer to
prolonged vegetation—the byproduct of senses dulled and coarsened
through years of mind-numbing, repetitious servitude. This, then, is
the essence of enforced mechanical labor: it is a unique type of
perpetual degradation, an unending crucifixion onto itself. </span>
</div>
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: 0in; text-indent: 0.49in;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: 0in; text-indent: 0.49in;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, serif;">And that, too, is exactly London’s
point. In describing the condition of the awakened mind in this
barbarous way the image of that most famous crucifixion is, of
course, evoked. In appropriating this imagery, London imbues the
plight of all awakened minds caught in mechanical labor with the
mythic status and weight of Christ’s end, and by extension this
allusion situates and enfolds the plight of such workers into this
shared, aggrandized suffering. And this is as it should be. For in
the old ancient moral sense, whose mind was more awake, and as
consequence, more persecuted than the Christ’s? And, as retribution
for this corrupted grace, has a harsher punishment been met, or a
higher price paid or exacted?</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, serif;"> After
all, persecution of the strong by the weak is a timeless practice.
And vanity orders and misshapes the world. Everyone implicitly
understands this and is complicit in this knowledge. Yet, for reasons
known and unknown, we cling to our imprisonment, and imagine
ourselves safe, rather than buried, by our chains.</span></div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7778677064547661149.post-31244672957474430532013-05-08T02:43:00.000-07:002013-05-08T12:08:43.962-07:00The Irresistible Parallels: DSK, Diallo, and the IMF<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
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<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">by Anthony Schiappa</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;"><i>An entry written in August 2011, posted for the first time on OWG.</i> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">This week, prosecutors
dropped the case against Dominique Strauss-Kahn, former managing director of
the IMF and French Socialist Party member, who in May was accused of sexually
assaulting Nafissatou Diallo, a maid working in his hotel. With an irony usually
reserved for satirists, District Attorney Cyrus Vance said, “Our job is to seek
justice, not convictions at any cost.” While in many cases lack of evidence
hardly prevents the prosecution from “seeking convictions at any cost,” this
case would be a “classic he said-she said” scenario, thus difficult to
prosecute. Others in the DA’s office insisted they were dropping the
case due to lack of evidence, stopping short of saying they believed he is
guilty.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">DSK is
rich and therefore likely to walk from any charges, and Diallo has what has
been quaintly termed “credibility problems.” There is evidence that she lied on
her application for political asylum, claiming she was gang-raped in
her native Guinea. Her family in New York implied that she was a victim of
sexual violence before immigrating but had exaggerated the
circumstances—apparently she was only “regular” raped.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">The prosecution,
as well as few columnists, rushed to insist that the dropping of the case did
not mean that women who have lied in the past have no recourse to the courts if
they are raped. Perhaps they were compelled to reassure us in this way because many women do not, in fact, have recourse to a legal system that
accepts the “once a lying bitch, always a lying bitch” defense. It's used all the time.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">Furthermore
cases like this further legitimize the entirely justified mistrust of the legal
system held by many non-whites. The fraud should be obvious, from the lower
criminal courts, where the state strong-arms money from poor people who have committed meaningless offenses, to the endless stories of black and Latino men essentially
held in storage in the federal prisons—doubly dehumanized, first as superfluous labor, then as commodities in the for-profit penal system.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">In
the meantime, for bravely stepping forward to face down her attacker, who
happened to be one of the most powerful men in the world, Diallo will not only
face perjury charges, but will also likely have her asylum application reviewed
and may be deported.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">It’s a predictable end to this battle and its irresistible parallels: a woman from
Guinea, a country metaphorically raped by the IMF, came to the US in an attempt
to improve her lot in life, only to be sexually assaulted by IMF’s managing
director. She escaped the unbearable hell of everyday life endured by millions
of forgotten people under the world’s economic arrangements, only to be
personally, directly assaulted by one of the men who manage these arrangements.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">No, she didn’t
get justice. But was that ever really in the cards? She may win her civil
trial, in which case DSK will have one of his accountants fetch her a shovelful
of cash out of his giant stash —chump change for him, more money than any of us
will ever see in our lifetime. And she’ll need it simply to stay in the
country, in much the same way that countries beholden to the IMF must do anything just to stay in the global economic game.</span></div>
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<![endif]-->Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7778677064547661149.post-26780876711363004682013-04-29T08:17:00.003-07:002013-04-29T08:28:39.235-07:00Libertarianism and The Great American Scam<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">by Anthony
Schiappa</span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">For a long time,
I took the Libertarian party line at face value. Though they seemed to have
respectable views on social issues, they also seemed to be true believers in
the myth of the free market. I couldn’t figure out why it never dawned on them
that when the investment class—mainly banks and insurance companies—runs the
economy into the ground, the government must resuscitate it with public
funds, lest the country finally keel over for good. I was convinced that Libertarians
just don’t realize that if they eliminated the stabilizing role of the state in this
dynamic, the whole Ponzi scheme of the American economy would devour itself in
no time. </span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">Chalk up my
misunderstanding to some vestigial Lefty haughtiness; they know full well what
they’re doing. The Libertarian program is a classic <a href="http://exiledonline.com/from-the-lost-file-libertarian-party-vice-presidential-nominee-james-gray-is-a-closetcase-republican-and-a-private-kangaroo-court-judge-for-hire/" target="_blank">bait-and-switch</a>.</span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">Whatever its
roots, the modern Libertarian party is in practice an attempt by a right-wing
that has lost the “culture wars” to re-brand itself as a group of laid-back,
gay-friendly ganja hounds in order to drain the youth vote from Democrats and to
convert those who profess to be “thoroughly disgusted” with party
politics—conservative-minded people too hip for the GOP’s morbid Calvinist
positions on social issues. After poaching enough of these people by leaning
left socially, they can push even harder right on economics, dismantling
what few barriers remain preventing Wall Street from gobbling up absolutely
everything. </span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">And that’s it. Like
any group of elites, all they really want is more for themselves and less for
everybody else. The song-and-dance about liberty and freedom only provides
ideological cover for a ramped-up program of legalized theft. They will get
right to work on the agenda that the far right has been pushing for years:
dismantling Social Security, Medicaid, and Medicare, keeping that cash for themselves, and then slapping a price tag
on every aspect of social life. Those galvanizing moral and social issues will
be left to the states, where they can be quietly ignored. </span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">But this kind of
scam—hawking “freedom” to convince people to willingly
participate in their own exploitation—is hardly new. It is, in fact,
quintessentially American. Just take a close look at those heroes always evoked
by Libertarians, the Founding Fathers. </span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">And make no mistake, those stodgy old WASPs
do indeed represent perfectly the Libertarian philosophy, the real one. </span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">The Founders
were for the most part an elite class of businessmen born or married into the
colonial aristocracy, who expanded their fortunes and thus their political
power by the sweat of their slaves’ brows. In a scheme to get out of paying their
taxes to the Crown, they convinced the landless peasants to fight their war for
them by feeding them a line of shit about the struggle for liberty against
tyranny, co-opting the revolutionary propaganda of proto-socialist radical
Thomas Paine. They then created on the one hand an American ideology in which
people were convinced it was their duty as citizens to participate in civic
life, and on the other, a political system into which they placed as many
barriers as possible to truly democratic governance, thereby consolidating and
protecting their class power. </span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">It's ingenious in its own way. And like saps, we fell for it. Hard.</span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">Thus the fantasy
of Libertarianism is part and parcel of the American fantasy. Over 200 years
later, most of us are still true believers in an American Dream that was never
meant to be taken literally, but forever chased like a rabbit at the economic
dog track. We were never intended to have equal opportunity this Grand Republic; it has
always been by and for the owners. The inspiring moments in American history
have been those attempts to force this country make good on its false promises,
and the price for those meager concessions has always been paid in blood. </span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">The Libertarian project is but
another attempt to roll back those hard-won privileges,
preparing us for a more complete takeover.</span></div>
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<![endif]-->Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7778677064547661149.post-26341937208344185382013-04-21T12:28:00.001-07:002013-04-22T09:17:52.094-07:00An Unremarkable Massacre<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
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<br />
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">What else can be
said about the attack on Boston? For all its carnage, it just confirmed what
we already knew.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">It reminded us
that real legacy of the Bush years is very much alive, namely that the
distinction between war and peace has disintegrated and will eventually become
meaningless. For over eleven years now we’ve been fighting a war with no clearly
defined enemies or objectives or battlefields. In many cases there are no obvious
weapons—instead, we now have pressure cookers, ball bearings, and airliners. War is always
happening and it is everywhere, a fact we are continuously absorbing into our
everyday lives. And we’ll keep on getting used to it. Eventually it will become
mundane. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">Within twenty
years, Boston-like massacres followed by a martial lockdown will become little
more than a nuisance, slightly more inconvenient than a traffic jam. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">Of course, this
kind of violence has been a fact of life for millions of people for decades on
end; the only thing new is that this violence is now happening in America. The history of the global role of the United States in the postwar years is
well-known and no longer controversial. Even the most reactionary right-wingers
accept these bland truths. The Long War, to borrow Rumsfeld’s ingenious phrase,
has been raging on the periphery for years. On 9/11 it came home, becoming visible
on our turf. Nothing more, nothing less. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span> </span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">And it’s here to stay.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">Without a strong,
organized, and truly unapologetic Left, there is no reason to expect things to
ever be different. What we have instead is more pleading from liberals for tolerance of
Muslims and immigrants, and reminders of continuing horrors abroad.
Many find it impossible to critique such a sentiment that on its face seems
like a well-meaning message of understanding, but we must do so, because ultimately these sentiments miss the
point. They reveal a tacit acceptance of an intolerable
situation—namely the infinite violence engendered by the exercise and expansion
of power through the marketplace—simply wishing to manage this repugnant,
unholy state of affairs in a more human, multicultural way. We’re not exhorted
to resist but admonished into superficial empathy.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">It is easy
enough to discern the familiar motivation behind the liberal reminders of the world’s ongoing horrors. It seems to come not from a genuine solidarity with
the victims but from a desire to shame our fellow Big Dumb Americans for their
narcissistic compassion. It’s a group surely worthy of scorn, but I have my
doubts that anyone <i>really</i> cares about
the Syrians, the Afghans, the Iraqis, or any of the other groups routinely
blown to bloody smithereens, either by us or our donated weapons, but plenty of
people are happy to use those same victims to embarrass Uncle Sam, the fat,
ignorant maroon that he is, and the Diet Coke-guzzling, church-going,
gun-fanatic proles that love him. This is not radical emancipatory politics, it
is snobbery. The rancid class-prejudice <a href="http://www.limpidsoft.com/A5/wiganpier.pdf" target="_blank">Orwell</a> identified way back in the 1930s
still permeates the coddled and comfortable Left, a whole generation that has
never had to put anything on the line for its alleged ideals.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">This is why I
harp so much on Left. It’s not around when we need it the most.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">So it continues:
a fearful and vain population more completely subsumed into the world of
postmodern, everyday warfare of the “network,” endless power games waged across
our bodies in ball bearings and shrapnel, on and on, until there's no more money to burn.</span></div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7778677064547661149.post-46489564789641336222013-02-18T15:50:00.000-08:002013-02-20T04:14:45.860-08:00Uncle Cracker's Ethical Fantasyby Mike Ferraro<br />
<br />
<div style="line-height: 26px;">
As is customary in our age of disposable trash culture and celebrity
expert opinions, people fell all over themselves to laud Cracker-man
David Lowery’s response to some NPR intern regarding the alleged ethics
of file-sharing and the cost of “free culture,” whatever the fuck that
is. Myself, I couldn’t get through the thing. Lowery commits the only
unpardonable sin for a writer: boring the reader. I did, however, skim
enough of it to get the gist of his position. After all, as he is quick
to point out, he is an Important Artist, a producer of vital cultural
artifacts, so his words matter deeply. As a self-proclaimed progenitor
of “first-generation Indie Rock,” they must. Or so he desperately wants
us to believe.</div>
<div style="line-height: 26px;">
How exactly Lowery figures
this distinction I leave up to the reader’s imagination. I mean, by the
time Cracker rolled-up “indie rock” was in its third or fourth
iteration, at least. This would be akin to Mark Hoppus anointing
Blink-182 the godfathers of punk. More importantly, the fact remains
that when Cracker’s one-hit pop triumph landed, all meaning beyond
anything but the vaguely stylistic had been evacuated from the term
“Indie Rock.” Whatever vestiges of useful classification or description the designation
once held or implied—principally, signaling a state of “independence,”
as in an act not signed to a major label—were long gone.</div>
<div style="line-height: 26px;">
“It’s so overblown,” Mudhoney’s Mark Arm sang about Seattle on the <i>Singles</i> soundtrack.
That was in 1992, at the height of the “grunge” explosion, which would,
temporarily at least, catapult underground indie losers into the strata
of bona fide music stars, foisting yet another dose of rabid youth
culture onto the hapless masses. Yet the seismic cultural shift grunge
purportedly heralded was just another shuck and jive, little more than
the next spin of the hamster wheel of popular culture. That these
fantasies of hipster rebellion promulgated and sold were of the
predominantly white, middle-class variety is of course axiomatic. These
kids, like their vapid counterculture parents before them, marshaled
their disaffection as if it meant something profound, signifying
something other than
their own vanity and endless privilege. This faux rebellion is their cultural legacy, wasted and misspent for all
time—and doomed to untold generations of continued impotence. The Occupiers of
today are their direct descendants.</div>
<div style="line-height: 26px;">
Goddamn. Had nothing changed since white negro hedonism appeared all those decades ago? </div>
<div style="line-height: 26px;">
Before you sniveling indie purists throw a fit, let me add that I know
all about Lowery’s tenure in Camper Van Beethoven. That storied history
is precisely the problem. Much as the desire for an impossible synthesis
between creative integrity and commerce plagues his overarching
argument, a similar ideological clash emerges here in
Lowery’s vaunted self-appraisal. Similar because, at bottom, they are
one and the same, and stem from an overwrought sense of entitlement and
self-aggrandizement. Let’s be clear: Lowery wants it both ways, seeking
to preserve his indie-cred while
simultaneously maintaining mainstream success and visibility. But these
things do not sit well together. In fact, in most respects, especially
economically—the central concern of Lowery’s article—they are
diametrically opposed. His real grievance then is—what else?—money,
specifically his stanched revenue-stream. Lowery sees significant
encroachments on his financial gains and “intellectual property,” with
greater losses imminent, and he’s pissed. His cultural grandstanding is a
put-on and beside the point—a smokescreen for this primary objection.
Worse, this playing of both ends reinforces his preposterous
self-mythology, namely: David Lowery, indie-folk hero. If you’re buying
into this iconographying bullshit you’re an even bigger sucker than I
thought.</div>
<div style="line-height: 26px;">
Whatever the case, such
shameless self-serving dreck is emblematic of Lowery's rhetoric and
approach here, the principal effect of which is incessant hectoring.
This is how adults behave, he admonishes throughout.</div>
<div style="line-height: 26px;">
But forget his pomposity and
ridiculously inflated sense of himself, the basics of Lowery’s argument
are what matter and they make no sense. His biggest mistake in this
regard is that he frames the “problem” of file-sharing as an ethical
one. It isn’t. But let’s pretend for a minute that it is. Let’s pretend
that if we wise-up and follow his prescriptions we will abolish all
forms of file-sharing, thereby righting the grievous “social injustice”
at the heart of the artists’ rights matter. Who knows, a more just and
democratic world might be just around the corner. We could wake-up one
morning and find ourselves free of other social blight as well, world
hunger ended, the environment saved. Listening to Lowery, the
emancipatory potential unleashed through judiciously exercised
individual ethical
responsibility is seemingly limitless. As long as that responsibility
finds expression and investment in the modes of pre-digital production
and exchange, we’re all good.</div>
<div style="line-height: 26px;">
What world is he living in?
You’re never going to eradicate piracy, neither on nor off the net. How,
under our current economic arrangement, could you? The ethical argument
Lowery posits runs counter to the very basics of capitalist relations,
which, for the brain-dead among us, are so successful precisely because
they exploit the very worst in people. Further, Lowery’s position
presupposes that the regular functioning of the system, specifically the
means of production and operating channels where everyday transactions
occur, is principled, fair in both design and practice. They are not,
nor were they intended to be. Centuries of abject exploitation instantly
confirm this. Just look outside your window if you’re not sure.</div>
<div style="line-height: 26px;">
Yet, to bolster these bad
assumptions—and his superhuman ego—Lowery provides a staggeringly facile
and myopic overview of the last couple hundred years of cultural
production. Listen to this shit:</div>
<div style="line-height: 26px;">
</div>
<div style="line-height: 26px;">
The fundamental shift in principals and morality is about who gets</div>
<div style="line-height: 26px;">
to control and exploit the work of an artist. The accepted norm for</div>
<div style="line-height: 26px;">
hundreds of years of western civilization is the artist exclusively has</div>
<div style="line-height: 26px;">
the right to exploit and control his/her work for a period of time...</div>
<div style="line-height: 26px;">
By allowing the artist to treat his/her work as actual property, the</div>
<div style="line-height: 26px;">
artist can decide how to monetize his or her work. This system has</div>
<div style="line-height: 26px;">
worked very well for fans and artists. Now we are being asked to</div>
<div style="line-height: 26px;">
undo this not because we think this is a bad or unfair way to</div>
<div style="line-height: 26px;">
compensate artists but simply because it is technologically possible</div>
<div style="line-height: 26px;">
for corporations or individuals to exploit artists work without their</div>
<div style="line-height: 26px;">
permission on a massive scale and globally. We are being asked to</div>
<div style="line-height: 26px;">
continue to let these companies violate the law without being</div>
<div style="line-height: 26px;">
punished or prosecuted. We are being asked to change our morality</div>
<div style="line-height: 26px;">
and principals to match what I think are immoral and unethical</div>
<div style="line-height: 26px;">
business models.</div>
<div style="line-height: 26px;">
</div>
<div style="line-height: 26px;">
Is
this guy for real? There’s so much wrong here, so much taken for
granted, it’s hard to know where to begin. Most egregious, however, is
his absolute faith in the system’s operations, manifest in the glib
assertion that “the system has worked very well for artists and fans.”</div>
<div style="line-height: 26px;">
As apologists for the reigning
order must, Lowery’s got the fundamentals between the relationship of
morality and commercial exchange ass-backwards. The bankrupt principles
that constitute bourgeois-morality are the cause of the current
predicament, not the other way around. The “immoral and unethical
business models” he condemns are merely an extension of this reality,
the latest wrinkle in the ongoing global capitalist nightmare, of which
music industry decline is merely one facet.</div>
<div style="line-height: 26px;">
Which brings us to the main
event: When has the music biz, or any business for that matter, been
ethically, rather than profit, driven?</div>
<div style="line-height: 26px;">
It’s no shock that the music business is a particularly
ruthless industry that eats its young. In fact, like the
Hollywood-mindset it is an outgrowth of, its business model is by
necessity predicated upon this predatory habit and exchange. But this
state of affairs simply mirrors and magnifies the intrinsic
macro-dynamics of capital where the illusion of merit-based rewards
maintains the everyday reality of exploitation. The major difference now
is the extremity of the carnage, exacerbated, in the case of the music
industry, by the advent of digital media.</div>
<div style="line-height: 26px;">
The omission of all this makes
Lowery’s veneration of the pre-digital age all the more perplexing. Yet
the truly extraordinary thing about Lowery’s assessment of music
industry decline is that such rudimentary connections to global
developments, and a critique of political economy in general, are
conspicuously absent from his appraisal—a truly astounding fact for an
economics lecturer. Instead, he readily assumes the mantle of elder
statesman of rock, alternating his barbs between playful crotchetiness
and outright hostility disguised as self-deprecation. It’s all an act, a
sideshow. No amount of false modesty or sanctimony can conceal
his supreme contempt for and condescension towards the odious
file-sharers among us.</div>
<div style="line-height: 26px;">
While beyond hackneyed, the
crotchety old guy routine he adopts is apt, the perfect
trope to express the particularity of his position, that of beleaguered
small-time capitalist, which, artistic trappings aside, he unequivocally
is. In fact, there is no screen there; he is that neighborhood grump
keeping eternal vigil against them no good kids, protecting his
hard-earned property from the vandals. </div>
<div style="line-height: 26px;">
Unsurprisingly, Lowery’s
position of relative privilege and prosperity blinds him to the
realities of the situation, particularly the plight of those lacking his
good fortune. When he extols the virtues of the “old” system, you
wonder what the hell he’s going on about, exactly who are these
beneficiaries? He means, of course, those like himself, members of that
infinitesimal percentage of artists who make it commercially, the big
winners of the music sweepstakes. But here’s the thing: the music
industry always relied on a stupid business model, unsustainable and
grossly mismanaged by intention and design. It’s only stupider now. The
advent of digital media hasn’t changed its essential character, it’s
only accelerated its cycles of obsolescence, elevating its superhuman
tastelessness to ever more ponderous
heights. In fact, with a renewed emphasis on hit singles over albums
proper, the industry’s come full-circle in at least one significant way.
It’s the same old story in any event. The relentless search for the next big thing to run a profit
on, only to discard for the subsequent abomination, animates
“industry trends.” So let’s not forget how this model actually
functions: Then, as now, a few megastars subsidize the entire industry
while everyone, in their infinite fear and folly, scrambles to find the
next hot property or bankable clones of the current hash. The focus has
always been on the superficial and disposable—the main difference is
that the overall quality of these phenomena has dipped to its current
abysmal level.</div>
<div style="line-height: 26px;">
But that’s the youth culture
business. No use lamenting its loss or dissolution since it was dead on
arrival. Same holds for the rest of the insipid dream-manufacturing
enterprises our mangy popular culture grovels before. All of which
exist, first and foremost, to support themselves in their primary
pursuit: the endless accumulation of wealth, culture be damned.</div>
<div style="line-height: 26px;">
The real ethical dilemma in
all this is the same one it’s always been, and concerns the material
conditions and attendant ideology of capitalist relations—specifically
the generally uncontested hegemony of the ruling order. At bottom, then,
the problem of file-sharing and its ethical dimension hinges upon a
critique of political economy. It is what this argument, and every one
regarding “free culture,” is fundamentally about, whether we choose to
acknowledge it or not. Typically, as it is here, this crucial component
is the missing piece to most popular critiques of the subject.</div>
<div style="line-height: 26px;">
Like it or not, the stakes are
much higher than any one group’s diminishing rights and financial
returns. The setbacks for musicians represent the new reality for
subjects under digital capital, a reality that will worsen as the global
financial crisis intensifies. A return to the halcyon days of music
industry returns is surely a fantasy. The crucial thing to remember here
is that this shift does not occur in isolation, but rather reflects a
global trend regarding the degradation of intellectual workers. Thus,
the decline of the music industry is simply one result of the disastrous
consequences of digital capitalism.</div>
<div style="line-height: 26px;">
This returns us to the
“undoing” of the old model that Lowery characterized above. Again, he’s
got it all assed-up. Not some aberration that blindsided and upended the
smooth and equitable functioning of hundreds of years of cultural
production, this critical rupture was instead precisely the
recalibration required to sustain the endless circulation and
self-reproduction that is capitalism’s goal. The breakdown of the old
model of commercial exchange that Lowery laments, is not, as he would
have us believe, some secondary, correctable development—the nefarious
work of greedy individual corporate-entities—but rather represents the
principal and essential shift of the digital capital revolution. In
fact, to the extent that it was a revolution at all, this transformation
of the distribution and commercial system is the
revolutionary aspect of digital capitalism, its worldwide explosion
marking the next step in the inexorable march of capitalist
accumulation. What Lowery does in this moment amounts to the basest
subterfuge since, while acknowledging the global scale of the problem,
he conveniently fails to locate its relation to global socioeconomic
developments.</div>
<div style="line-height: 26px;">
This is of course no accident,
but rather a calculated elision, of which the motivating self-interest
is already apparent, as is the fallacious logic that his position
implicitly demands. Again, such manipulations demonstrate how Lowery’s
sense of entitlement matches that of the petite-bourgeois. The “problem”
of file-sharing, much like the insufferable middle-class mindset that
spawned it, is a luxury we can no longer afford if our objective is to
re-imagine social relations in a truly radical way. In fact, the bulwark
of middle-class entitlements needs to go if we’re to seriously
contemplate new ethical relations of exchange and a social order based
on radical emancipatory politics in a real sense that exceeds the
lip-service Leftists pay to the idea. </div>
<div style="line-height: 26px;">
But Lowery’s not talking about
a radical transformation of any kind. Far from it. To make such demands
would require us to reorder all our priorities and commitments. And
lord knows we don’t want to do that. That would require a tremendous act
of will we simply do not possess. I mean, is an economics instructor, a
preeminent representative of reified bourgeois society, prepared to do
that? Fuck no. As long as Uncle Cracker’s fat royalty checks keep
floating in, he’s happy. Screw the suffering of the truly exploited
underclass. If only they were more talented, then maybe they, too, could
rise above the peril of their predicament.</div>
<div style="line-height: 26px;">
Right. Lurid and pandering as
they are, the dead rocker anecdotes Lowery provides make the point well
enough, underscoring, as if additional reminders were needed, the harsh
reality of life in the arts. Most artists do not see much money, nor
gain sizable recognition, from their life’s work, and they do it full
well, and in spite of this fact—if they are artists. If it’s material
riches you seek, don’t bother. There are far easier ways to make a buck,
and woe is the individual who embarks on a creative life under any
delusions of grandeur, financial or otherwise. In fact, by the fucked-up
standards of the popular imagination, these woeful examples, contrary
to Lowery’s romanticized depiction, are success stories of a certain
type. After all, people know who they are—they are written about and
listened to. Further,
they received recognition and found audiences for their efforts during
their lifetime. That’s artistic achievement of a not inconsequential
kind.</div>
<div style="line-height: 26px;">
Under our current economic
system no one is entitled a livelihood, least of all the artist. It is
the relations of capital themselves that need abolishment if things are
to improve for everyone, not just our artists. Rather than use these
music biz casualties to highlight the universal hideousness of poverty,
we get more tear-jerking moralizing regarding the erosion of artists’
rights and the alleged singularity of the individual travesty at hand,
with Lowery indulging the exact behaviors—shaming and finger-pointing—he
denies are his motivation and intention.</div>
<div style="line-height: 26px;">
If he sounds like a relic
that’s because he is. Simply put, the struggle for artists’ rights in
the digital age is a struggle for mass rights of the permanent excluded
underclass, same as it’s always been. And it is with this exploding
population that our sympathies must lie. In fact, through the
mobilization of this group, and nowhere else, does the latent potential
for a more just world reside. If the plight of musicians is not seen for
what it is, and does not work to mobilize these forces, it is a dead
issue and serves no purpose. Further, if it continues along the lines it
has—as a cause of identity politics, fragmenting the solidarity of
class-struggle and leaving the essential power-structure of the
capitalist edifice intact—it deserves abandonment.</div>
<div style="line-height: 26px;">
The point here is that under
our current economic arrangement none of this will change. The very
notion of ownership and property rights is the problem, the biggest
delusion and barrier to personal emancipation. We are slaves to this
delusion, and the bondage of its attendant ideology shapes the economy
of everyday life. To avoid this fact is to only further avoid the
obvious
fundamental realities that order our world, and to further entrench the
stranglehold of this diabolical and life-denying system.</div>
<div style="line-height: 26px;">
It is an ideological war,
first and foremost. Always has been, always will be—and you can’t afford
to cede an inch. After all, as the ongoing global catastrophe
exemplifies, everyday reality is nothing but theory put into practice,
and enshrined through the centuries. Everything follows from our
thinking. That is, in a very fundamental way, what and how we see shapes
the world. Not in theory only but for real. To think otherwise is pure
folly. But people don’t want to see the world clearly—they want <i>American Idol</i> and hope to hit the lotto. On the latter score I can’t blame them—fools’ game that it be.</div>
<div style="line-height: 26px;">
Eventually we must admit: it
is precisely these things, the things we don’t face, that constrict and
paralyze us. The thing we lack, the thing that we are most closed off
from is our irreducible nature; the pervasive alienation we all feel is a
direct result of the means of capitalist production and exchange. The
truth and clarity of this realization terrifies us, just as the denial
of its power destroys. The objective then, same as ever, is to see
clearly what is in front of your nose. In the struggle of excluded
subjects, the only question that matters is "what next?" All the rest is
child’s play.</div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7778677064547661149.post-16999333354443065092013-02-07T14:44:00.000-08:002013-02-08T14:02:07.055-08:00"Django Unchained": Tarantino's Revenge on America's Nightmare Racial Past<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="line-height: 200%;">The great thing about “Django Unchained” is that
the sickness of white America is front and center. Far from the usual
working-out of white guilt seen in other films, “Django” mercilessly ridicules
all of white America’s racial psychoses and fantasies. It shows the awful
truth, obscured by myths and lies, that white Americans have insulated
themselves from since the<span style="font-size: small;"> birth of the Republic</span>, unflinchingly showing them as they
really are: unimaginably wealthy, supremely powerful, and utterly depraved. Believing itself the
apotheosis of civilization, America is shown as the irremediably sick society
it is. Like plantation<span style="font-size: small;"> </span>owner Calvin Candie, the more civilized Americans act,
the more monstrous they become.</span></span></span></div>
<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">
</span></span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<br /></div>
<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">
</span></span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="line-height: 200%;">It is the portrayal of this lie at the very heart
of American society—the dishonest presentation of “high culture” and the
insistence on innocence while perpetrating the most heinous atrocities—that
makes “Django Unchained” so <span style="font-size: small;">trenchant</span>. It demands that Americans look at
themselves as they really are, at least for those who dare look.</span></span></span></div>
<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">
</span></span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<br /></div>
<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">
</span></span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="line-height: 200%;">As dogs rip the flesh from a runaway slave,
Django, acting as a vile black slaver, reminds Candie that the
German, Doctor Schultz, in agony over <span style="font-size: small;">their</span> ruthlessness, “isn’t used to
seeing how Americans act, but I am.” This line is not only<span style="font-size: small;"> the touchstone</span> to the film, but to the whole of American history.</span></span></span></div>
<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">
</span></span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<br /></div>
<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">
</span></span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="line-height: 200%;">The claim that this subject matter is too serious
for a ham like Quentin Tarantino is perfectly wrong. His violent, sexual style
is ideally suited to the subject of the hideous transformation of human beings
into property. Throughout the film, we witness the abjection of chattel<span style="font-size: small;"> </span>slavery
and the absurdity of racism in its brutal nakedness. Best of all, however, from
a filmgoer's standpoint, is how effectively Tarantino uses black and physical
comedy to make his points, like when the Sheriff is called in simply because
Django and Schultz have a beer together in a sal<span style="font-size: small;">oon</span>. Most impressively, Tarantino
successfully deploys virtually every white stereotype and hang-up in
this film to their fullest, most repugnant measure—chief among them the
starkest and most lurid twin titillations of white America: the fear of a black
uprising and a collective rape fantasy.</span></span></span></div>
<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">
</span></span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<br /></div>
<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">
</span></span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="line-height: 200%;">This obsessive, sexualized issue of control is well illustrated toward the film's end, when Django hangs upside-down, naked and
tormented. While inside the mansion his white captors gleefully discuss how
best to mutilate his genitals, a good ol' boy affectionately caresses his balls
minutes before preparing to castrate him. In a scene reminiscent of James
Baldwin’s “Going to Meet the Man,” a story about the horrific grandeur of white
delusions, we see here a gruesomely honest portrayal of the same white
obsession over that supreme fetishized object of terror and desire, the black
cock.</span></span></span></div>
<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">
</span></span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<br /></div>
<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">
</span></span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="line-height: 200%;">But remember, it’s just a fantasy. Whites only
masochistically play at losing their power. Actual relinquishment is
unthinkable.</span></span></span></div>
<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">
</span></span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<br /></div>
<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">
</span></span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="line-height: 200%;">In some write-ups, reviewers have complained that
Tarantino missed a golden opportunity to depict a large-scale Nat Turner-style
revolt, thus giving “Django” essentially the same ending as “Inglourious
Basterds.” On its face, this is a non-criticism that refuses to take the film
on its own terms and registers as a PC cop-out. But there is something more
disturbing beneath the surface of these claims:
just the suggestion speaks volumes about the state of our modern
understanding of what slavery was and why it was so terrible. </span></span></span></div>
<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">
</span></span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<br /></div>
<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">
</span></span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="line-height: 200%;">There never was a full-blown revolution in Dixie
as in Haiti—the two contexts are different and largely incomparable, though
film reviewers have tried. Though smaller-scale rebellions did happen, the fear
of such mass revolution was a preoccupation of the landed Southern gentry. But
this question, “Why don’t they just rise up and kill us?,” asked by Candie in
one of the film’s most chilling scenes, takes on a more sinister tone when
asked by a hack film reviewer or “legitimate” academic. It begins to feel like
a surrogate for asking the same thing about actual historical slavery. At best,
it betrays a complete ignorance of the abjection of slavery; at worst, it reeks
of the blame-the-victim mentality of the oppressors and their apologists.</span></span></span></div>
<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">
</span></span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="line-height: 200%;"> <a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=7778677064547661149" name="_GoBack"></a></span></span></span></div>
<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">
</span></span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="line-height: 200%;">But first, let's be clear about the nature and
origin of wealth and power in America, for this is precisely what the slave system,
and Tarantino's exploration of it, is about. Put simply, everything white
people have is because of black people and their enforced labor. This is an
incontestable fact of American life. With that in mind, a return to Baldwin
again proves instructive. From this understanding, it is not only logical but
right for him to conclude, as he does near the end of <i>The Fire Next Time</i>, that “The only thing white people have that
black people need, or should want, is power.” This taking back what is essentially
his is the motivation animating Django's one-man rebellion. In short, his
revenge is a mythic reversal of the entire blood-soaked history and enterprise
of American slavery. On paper, this story, told by a white man no less, is a
ham-fisted disaster; its telling, in less capable and studied hands, surely
going awry a thousand different ways. But entirely to Tarantino's credit, it
doesn't miss a beat. The fact that it is as rollickingly engaging and funny a
romp as it is makes his achievement all the more remarkable.</span></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<br /></div>
<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">
</span></span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="line-height: 200%;">But back to the working dynamics of slavery. As
already indicated, the entire social and economic edifice of the United States
was built on the degradation of human beings into chattel, not only as a legal status,
which was the historical norm, but as the constitutive element of their
identities, based solely on the color of their skin. As a result, they were
subjected to some of the worst atrocities in human history; a limitless amount
of physical and psychological violence was directed at them <i>for centuries</i>. This all-consuming power
relationship manifested even, and especially, in the most intimate everyday relations between
black and white: as Baldwin never tired of telling us, the South was
“integrated” long before the rise of the Civil Rights movement. Everything—the
entire warped and double-sided, inextricable history between black and white—is
right there in the complete dependency of Candie upon his house-negro Stephen
(expertly played by Samuel L. Jackson, who elevates what could have been a one-dimensional
character to one of the most memorable in recent cinema).</span></span></span></div>
<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">
</span></span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<br /></div>
<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">
</span></span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="line-height: 200%;">This childish notion of willy-nilly mass
slave revolt in Dixie implies that they somehow had agency, a wholly incoherent
idea in a discussion of slavery. If they had meaningful agency, they could
hardly be called slaves. It is, in fact, the wresting and loss of agency that
is the essence of slavery, and it is from whence all the other crimes derive.
Recognizing the hopelessness of the plight of the enslaved is in no way
demeaning, but the opposite: it is demeaning to diminish the historical
uniqueness of American slavery by pretending revolution was possible.</span></span></span></div>
<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">
</span></span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<br /></div>
<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">
</span></span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="line-height: 200%;">Hell, it’s been said a million times: considering
the myriad historical accounts of life on Southern plantations, the fact of the
matter is Tarantino <i>did</i> hold back. A
truly realistic portrayal of slavery would be so extremely violent that it
could never be released and in all likelihood it wouldn’t be believed by most
people anyway. It would have been labeled a snuff film—which it would be, in
every sense of the term. Indeed, American history is a 400-year-plus snuff
film, ideal material for Tarantino. If the kind of outrage reserved for his
film was directed at history textbooks, maybe Americans could begin to talk
about their history without sounding like complete fools, and maybe, <i>maybe</i>, they would not cling so tightly
to their delusions and blindness.</span></span></span></div>
<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">
</span></span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<br /></div>
<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">
</span></span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="line-height: 200%;">In America, anything's possible, right? Too bad
it will take another four-hundred years for most white Americans to reach such
an honest appraisal of their nightmare racial past. In the meantime, by some miracle, we have “Django”—that small bit of celluloid truth
adrift in the darkness and decay of cinematic blight</span></span></span><span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="line-height: 200%;"><span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="line-height: 200%;">—</span></span></span>to watch on infinite
repeat to our fiendish delight.</span></span></span></div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7778677064547661149.post-25069305992481845672013-01-24T04:23:00.000-08:002013-01-24T09:47:22.746-08:00Follow Yr Dreams: "The Hurt Locker" As War-Porn Wanderlust<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
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<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">Given the subject’s prominence over the last decade, when
considering the most influential American films of the last ten years you would
be remiss not to focus part of your selection on a film or films that depict
war in the Middle East. Of the slew of such films that have come and gone, a
worthy contender for discussion, not least of all for its raised profile as
last year’s big Oscar winner, is <i>The Hurt Locker</i>.</span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">Because of the film's documentary or embedded reporter-style
depiction of combat, and the level of purported objectivity such a style
allegedly employs, the more generous reading of the film's treatment of war is
that it depicts, like all good anti-war films, the cold and impartial carnage
and madness of combat in all its abject horror.</span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">A less generous reading would suggest that it glorifies
violence and the rush of combat to a frightening and fantastic degree. Not only
that, but more troubling, in the figure of veritable sociopath—or is it just
plain old war junkie, the film has trouble making a distinction—James, the film
glorifies the mentality that such senseless violence breeds.</span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">In fact, the overt message of the film indicates the latter,
less generous, reading.</span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">Disarming IEDs, after all, is “gangster.” And war can be
fun, advises the well-intended but preposterously fatuous officer-psychologist
who trades the cushy confines of his desk for a day in the hummer on bomb-duty.
Given the stunted trajectory and limited imagination of the film’s narrative
arc, do I even need to add that he is blown to smithereens as a result of this
stab at everyman heroism?</span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">Whatever irony and intended message underlying such subtle
filmmaking, the effect is lost on me. Simply put, moments like these come
across as pure Hollywood-schmaltz. Even more simply, the psychologist is a
straight-up dope.</span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">I mean, they're all dopes, stuck in a godforsaken
desert-hell, risking their necks for fairy-tales. But that is another discussion
altogether, I’m afraid.</span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">For the heart of the film lies in James' return home to his
humdrum suburban-existence—the staidness and uniformity of which, the film
suggests, is enough to justify his war-lust. There he confesses to his infant
son that in life you only really love one or two things. Well, one thing, it
turns out. The closing shot of the film is of James, shitkickers laced-up and
crunching that infernal desert sand as he embarks on yet another tour of duty.</span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">Sorry, kid, you gotta follow your dreams no matter how
putrid.</span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">I realize James’ confessional is supposed to be a big, brave
moment of emotional honesty and character-revelation, one that shows</span></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">—</span></span>in a
film, ostensibly, about such moments—the cyclical nature of, and our obsession
with, violent masculinity. But, because of the schmaltz and one-dimensionality
of everything that came before, it falls flat. Further, whatever the
filmmakers' intentions, in the <i>The Hurt Locker</i> the Iraq War comes across as the
pointless waste of lives and resources that it is and was engineered to be. And
such revelations do not seem to be the point of this film. The film’s
preoccupation with the glorification of war-violence, disingenuously and
irresponsibly rendered under the guise of mock-objectivity and reporting,
exacerbates this tendency in virtually every frame.</span></span>
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">Still, I would like to think that the film adopts the
attitude of say, Zola, or Brett Easton Ellis—that imitation is the most severe form of criticism, but honestly I don't think
this is so.</span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">In any event, the film taught me exactly nothing new
regarding the madness of combat. Worse, each fragmented scene, stuck in its
monotony, serves only to further desensitize the viewer to the obscene violence
onscreen. And that is perhaps the film's most disconcerting aspect.
Correlatively, the fact that the first female win for best director came under
the banner of this type of war-porn tells us much about ourselves and sick
cultural norms.</span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">Sanborn was right: they should have blown that "rowdy boy" back to hell when they had the chance. 878 bombs disarmed or not, James is a liability, and the mentality that he embodies needs permanent erasure.</span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">An impossible task, I know, but one worthy of our attention nonetheless.</span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"></span></span><br /></div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7778677064547661149.post-17433086925825127472013-01-02T17:58:00.000-08:002013-01-24T04:29:25.253-08:00Pride Goeth Before A Fall: An Open Letter to My Hometown<div class="mbl notesBlogText clearfix">
<span style="font-size: small;">Anthony Schiappa </span><br />
<div>
<span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span>
<br />
<div class="mbl notesBlogText clearfix">
<span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span>
<br />
<div>
<span style="font-size: small;">I.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;">Delhi, India. Kivu, Democratic Republic of the Congo. Steubenville, Ohio. All deeply connected previously unimaginable ways.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: small;">It must finally be faced. Our sons raped one of our daughters and
the authorities are doing as little as they can about it. For many
residents, the first reaction was to defend our precious Steubenville
pride, in ourselves, our kids, our city, our school, <i>our football team</i>. Too fearful to speak the truth, we turned the stark relief of black and white, of right and wrong, into an opaque gray.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: small;">Equivocation is spinelessness. It is high time to end the chorus of
“whatever happened to innocent until proven guilty?” This seemingly
levelheaded plea for open-mindedness only functions as an attempt to
stop the discussion dead in its tracks, and to keep us from confronting
reality. It removes power and responsibility from our hands, which is
exactly where it should be, and places in the hands of “authorities.”
The lawyers and judges will determine what is <i>legal</i>; I seek the truth.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: small;">So once and for all, let us end this horrid, transparent pretense to
impartiality and accept that a young girl was sexually assaulted
multiple times over the course of that August night—taken from party to
party while unconscious and intoxicated, and forced to endure an
endless stream of humiliations—by members of the Steubenville high
school football team. Like most sexual assaults in our morally
repugnant society, her brutalization was not at the hands of some
random psychopaths hiding in the shadows, but by people she knew and
trusted. In this case, these trusted friends meticulously and gleefully
documented their actions. Everyone present that night shares the
guilt, verdict be damned, and their crimes continue every day they
refuse to step forward and take responsibility for what they have done.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: small;">Though the details are common knowledge, most of the perpetrators
face no consequences. The two defendants are facing reduced sentences
as juveniles despite the very adult and illegal activity they engaged
in. We are frequently told the case will be difficult to prosecute: an
odd characterization given the literal stream of digital evidence
available to prosecutors and investigators. The only logical conclusion
to draw then is that authorities aren't interested in finding and
using this evidence. Despite the incessant blue-collar yapping about
self-accountability, there is a concerted effort to keep the guilty from
taking full responsibility for their actions. All of this is painfully
obvious to the casual observer and represents the source and scope of
the outrage now directed at Steubenville.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: small;">So how did this happen? Unlike a tragedy such as the Connecticut
shootings, the perpetrators in this case cannot be simply—and
falsely—labeled outsiders who went crazy and did despicable things, but
who do not represent the community as a whole. That is the usual
response: we bury our heads, and our chance of real healing, further
into the sand. In Steubenville, some of us have clung to a puerile
refrain to further insulate ourselves from this truth, hitting all the
tired old notes regarding the indomitable spirit, strength, and purpose
of vision of our good ol’ American values along the way, insisting: “we
have a lot of of good student athletes, we believe in our kids, we
have a top-notch high school, the coaches mean well but are imperfect,
and we support our students.”</span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: small;">It’s all a sham, of course. The ugliness and violence of the case
are just as much a part of us as our proudest achievements, whether or
not we choose to take responsibility for them. This attempted
reaffirmation of our quintessential “goodness” in the face of tragedy
is rotten through and through because it leaves all of the underlying
causes of these events unexamined, unchanged, and waiting to happen
again, as it inevitably will. (Ask yourself if you really think this is
the first time something like this has ever happened in Steubenville.)
No bastard children to disown this time. Big Red’s athletes carry on
our proudest traditions and represent our values. And they raped a
sixteen-year-old girl.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: small;">For a town like Steubenville, for any town across America, these are
desperately hard facts to come to grips with. But we must face them
bravely. The health and security of our nation depends on it. In order
to accomplish this task of creating new and better values—beneficent,
life-affirming values—we need to ask ourselves difficult questions.
First and foremost, where did these boys learn their attitudes towards
women? Where we all learn our attitudes: in the home, in the school, in
the locker room, in the church, from parents, siblings, teachers,
coaches, clergy, our city fathers, and one another. They are as much a
reflection of our community as the upstanding kids who stay out of
trouble and do great things, and try as we might, we cannot distance
ourselves from them now. </span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: small;">II.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;">So what is it with Steubenville?</span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: small;">Steubenville is a former booming, bustling steel town that has been
in decline for decades, completely battered and bewildered by the
indifferent forces of global economics. At the whims of Almighty
Capital, we have been bled dry and left for dead, and the cancer of
corruption feasted on whatever was left. This corruption, in many ways,
is a holdover from the Glory Days, when the mob ran things and there
was plenty of action to be had downtown. A big-city, almost East Coast
mentality is easily discernible to this day, the source of our
much-vaunted grit and toughness. The “Little Chicago” lore is well
known: nightclubs, bars, gambling, brothels, with the mob pulling the
strings of it all. A wild time, better than Vegas.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: small;">When the good times ended, the mob mentality lingered on like an
endless hangover, even though there was nothing to control. This
persistent corruption extends to the police force, one of the first in
the nation to sign a consent decree with the federal government for
excessive Civil Rights lawsuits, tampering with evidence, falsifying
reports, and sheer intimidation and brutality (and anyone who has had
spent some time around ex-cops knows the documented evidence does not
reveal the half of it). The past few years have also seen a steady rise
in gun violence, gangs and drugs, the responsibility for which is
placed on individuals from outside the area moving in. We all know the
oft-cited positives: sure, there is a wonderful effort to bring back
the Grand Theater, and yes, the elementary schools are the best in
Ohio. But on the whole, the future for Steubenville, and the Ohio
Valley as a whole, is rather grim. A glimmer of hope on the horizon
comes from the shale gas cash-in, igniting talk of a kind of
renaissance, but we are placing this hopes in a group of thirsty
businessmen who are coming to drink our blood—and we can take or leave
whatever they’re offering, but they will unquestionably keep the true
wealth for themselves.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: small;">The largest remaining shared positive experience is Big Red
football. Despite the halfhearted protestations on Facebook and the
comments sections of various articles on the case, in Steubenville, the
sun rises and sets on this program. The large and beautiful stadium is
full every Friday. The players and coaches are unquestionably among
the best at what they do and have the complete support of the city,
financially and otherwise. There is also the pure spectacle of the
games: the show put on when team enters the field, with The Best Band
in Buckeye Land, the majorettes, the cheerleaders, balloons, video
presentations, and Man O’ War sending huge plumes of fire into the sky.
A visit Harding Stadium will tell you all you need to know about what
Big Red football means to Steubenville. It’s like a Nuremberg rally.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: small;">If all that sounds a little quick and easy, and more than a little
embarrassing it, that’s because it is. The truth is, as always, very
simple and very uncomfortable.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: small;">It is within this context that the case is unfolding, and whatever
happens we can hardly blame those making accusations of a cover-up, for
such claims are entirely reasonable, if not always correct. This case
has been handed shamefully but predictably. All but two of the players
suited up to play ball this season. Most of the people who know
something do not have the courage to come forward. What they fear, we
can only speculate: intimidation, threats, violence, or that something
might actually change in Steubenville. The Police Chief says his hands
are tied, and he doesn’t know what else to do, lamenting that some
people just aren’t very nice, and he wishes he could arrest people on
that account. This does not sound like an experienced lawman who knows
how to doggedly pursue a case; it sounds like a man either cowed or
bought off. The prosecutor and judge eventually recused themselves due
to their relationship to the school and to the accused, which was the
right thing and had to be done, but this illustrates how closely
connected everyone is in the city. The local news station is doing as
much as it can to not ask difficult questions for the fear of offending
their viewers, and featured the accused on a promo for “Sports
Friday,” dedicated to high school football coverage. The coach of the
team said he didn’t think the kids had done anything. His investigation
consisted of asking the kids themselves if they felt what they had
done was wrong, and naturally, they said they didn’t think so. In terms
of real actions, he did nothing other than threaten reporters.
Anything to protect his beloved football program, since that is who he
is, and without it, he is nothing.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: small;">My own hunch is that he thinks we should be grateful that he offered
up his two top players, and that we’re crazy to ask for more when he
has his season to think about. The superintendent of the school system
said he is satisfied with the coach’s “handling” of the situation,
almost as though he was afraid of stepping overstepping his bounds. The
principal, astonishingly, said he wasn’t even aware of what was
happening until October, even though the story broke in August. School
administrators have done nothing to reassure the girls of Big Red that
they will be protected from brutalization. Clearly, they won’t be.
Whether this is gross incompetence, corruption, or just pure
chickenshit cowardice, you can decide for yourself.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: small;">And yet people bristle at the idea that Steubenville is an
economically-depressed, seedy, football-obsessed town that is circling
the wagons around its favorite sons, a place where everyone knows
everyone and a small cadre runs the town like a fiefdom, a bizarre
amalgam of the towns of “Friday Night Lights” and “In the Head of the
Night,” with a dollop of no-potatoes “GoodFellas” thrown in for good
measure.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: small;">Considering these reactions, it is not at all surprising that these
kids thought they would get away with it. And it looks like they will.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: small;">Now Anonymous is involved. It was only a matter of time before the
case caught the attention of the national media; the only surprise is
that it happened so late. There has been a resurgence of something
vaguely resembling political consciousness in the country—even if this
interest is, at bottom, only lurid sensationalism engineered to sell
more ad space—and it was inevitable that “outsiders” would get
involved. If the authorities engage in their own brand of
extra-judicial justice, as it appears they have done, they can hardly
be surprised when vigilantes arrive. However jerked-off the Occupy
movement is, however ridiculous the Guy Fawkes masks are, whatever the
deficiencies of the current state of radical politics, however many
people are really only there to lodge their thankless complaints
against the general shittiness of Steubenville, they are at present the
only strong public voices for the victim. A sexual assault crisis
organization will be at the next protest, and this will in all
likelihood be the first opportunity for Steubenville’s girls to learn
what rape is. In this alone, they are doing what we failed to do.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: small;">Does this sound unfair? Too harsh? The rush to defend ourselves as
good parents and our kids as basically good kids is understandable,
though one wonders who is trying to convince whom. Everyone loves their
children, everyone is doing the best they can for their kids. It is
because of our love for our children that we must do right by them—all
of them, without exception. We must show our love now by truly
interrogating what happened and why. The time is long past for cold,
hard introspection about ourselves and what we want for our community.
It is from our love that we must re-examine the values we are instilling
in our sons and our daughters and take the responsibility when they do
wrong. At present, the lesson we are clearly sending is that we will
not protect our daughters from rape, that our boys may do whatever
they wish to whomever they wish, that sex is violence, that its better
to keep quiet and not make a fuss rather than to hold each other
responsible for our actions, that silence is better than speaking
uncomfortable truths. A shameful state of affairs to be sure, but it is
impossible to conclude otherwise witnessing what is unfolding before
our eyes.</span></div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7778677064547661149.post-84409732456114103572012-12-16T15:18:00.001-08:002013-01-15T10:33:24.583-08:00More Death, More Bombs, More Death-In-Life<div style="text-align: center;">
Mike Ferraro</div>
<br />
The shootings of recent days are of course tragic and sad. But what can you expect when you live in a depraved, morally and spiritually bankrupt world such as ours? In fact, the truly shocking thing is that such rampages don't happen more often than they do.<br />
<br />
And so to the great liberal response.<br />
<br />
Gun control. Mental illness sensitivity and awareness. Yes and yes. Of course, yes. Cue the hand-wringing, pants-shitting pundits and harrowing statistics.<br />
<br />
Too bad everyone already knows the statistics, has felt the crushed and bruising reality of their indicies, either personally or through friends or family. That untreated schizophrenic aunt on her deathbed, crippled and long-forgotten. The never-do-well cousin serving time for armed-robbery, maybe a murderer maybe not, but surely a criminal, a miscreant-degenerate of the highest order and certainly no good. No, not a nice guy at all, someone to avoid at all costs, permanently. Someone, finally, deserving of his imprisonment and wretched fate.<br />
<br />
We've all got stories and tragedies, big and small, regarding the horrors of gun violence and mental illness. Behind them all lies the same, simple truth. Namely, that if American legislators cared about the health of the nation and its citizenry, the social landscape would look vastly different than it does presently. Education, healthcare, the so-called war on drugs, judicial and financial reform, the list goes on and on. Instead what do we get? More bombs, guns, sickness, and death. All the rancid fruit of the plutocratic cabal between political and financial interests and the exorbitant sums exchanged between them. In other words, bizness as usual, son.<br />
<br />
If legislators wanted to reform gun laws it would be done by now. Same holds for all the aforementioned ills and injustices. The only logical conclusion to draw, then, is that they in fact do not want these things, and will do whatever they can to prevent their occurrence, preferring instead the spoils of their perennial graft and the preservation of their shamefully lucrative subservience. Again, no surprise there: more business as usual.<br />
<br />
These issues of corruption and decadence are not unrelated to current events. In fact, all are inextricably woven into the sickness that is American life, past and present. For what is a healthy nation but a healthy citizenry? Judged by this simple theorem, then, America has been, and remains, the sickest of all “first-world” nations. As the shootings and the reactions remind us, such events, and their causes and consequences, are already deeply politicized. To suppress this fact, even for an instant, dishonors the memory of the slain. Further, to ask that these events not be politicized in the wake of the tragedy, as if such a thing was possible, sounds good, but is in fact deeply disingenuous, patently ludicrous, and downright cowardly. It is, in essence, bad medicine, and manifests the very opposite of the liberal avowal of alleged compassion motivating such a request. In this instance, the compassionate thing is to speak truly about the underlying causes that make such tragedies a reality, and to speak against fake and easy alms and solutions that do nothing to assess the miserable record that makes such catastrophes inevitable.<br />
<br />
To continue to mindlessly comfort ourselves with surfeited platitudes and falsehoods regarding the indefatigable will, generosity, and compassion of the American spirit may achieve its short-term narcotizing goal, providing a necessary distancing to face another round of national tragedy and mourning. But such succor is ephemeral at best. As always, the true terrors and unchecked passions linger, festering just below the surface. Yes, we may assuage our guilt for the moment but it is a shallow convalescence.<br />
<br />
Such rhetorical perversions are the transparently manipulative purview of politicians and pundits and nothing more, serving to mask the unending clamor of the American nightmare reality and its manic beat of more death, more bombs, more death-in-life. If we are to get serious about saving ourselves and this country, these aberrations, and their attendant death-march, need discarding pronto. The future of all our children, and the republic itself, depends on it.<br />
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7778677064547661149.post-61821384927347154232011-10-14T09:43:00.000-07:002013-01-15T10:34:02.623-08:00Pernicious Babble: Occupy Wall St. and the Fight to Save Capitalism<br /><br />Our celebrity radicals have been tripping over themselves to endorse the nascent Occupy Wall Street movement, and as the empty words spill from their mouths, their intellectual bad faith becomes increasingly apparent. Many of these hacks have always been mouthy Democrats, despite their half-hearted forays into radical critique. Thus, understanding their reactions to the Occupy Wall Street protest illuminates the rotten foundation of this movement and the system it allegedly opposes.<br /><br /> For instance, Naomi Klein, among the heaviest hitters in the celebrity-radical set, had this to say about Occupy Wall St.: “This is not the time to be looking for ways to dismiss a nascent movement against the power of capital, but to do the opposite: to find ways to embrace it, support it and help it grow into its enormous potential. With so much at stake, cynicism is a luxury we simply cannot afford.”<br /><br /> If a respectable journalist like Klein deems it necessary to instruct us to ignore that nagging cynicism to criticize and dismiss, this alone is proof positive that there is much to be cynical, critical and dismissive about. The more support these "radical" elites give to a movement, the more reason we have to question it. When she says that “cynicism is a luxury we simply cannot afford,” what she is really saying, in classic goose-stepping ideological fashion, is that in times of crisis, critical thinking is an indulgence. When Klein counsels that “any attempt to create a genuinely open space to share political ideas is necessarily going to be chaotic and at times embarrassing,” she is in effect preemptively admonishing us into complicity with a movement we cannot understand because we are permitted to ask only positive - that is, pre-approved and stage-managed - questions. She is instructing us to take what is in reality entirely the wrong course of action - to not ask is why it is so chaotic and embarrassing and to passively accept it for the sake of being on board with an incoherent program for no other reason than it exists, echoing the same “no alternative” script as our system's more honest and open neo-liberal defenders. There’s also an aftertaste of shame in these words. Like Dr. Frankenstein begging the townsfolk for mercy on his idiot monster, Klein defends this admittedly embarrassing movement based on many of the reformist principles gussied up as a revolution that she peddles in her books.<br /><br /> Indeed, the crypto-Stalinist message here is clear enough. Don’t criticize a movement that has been organized for you, especially if it has the blessing of your officially sanctioned “voices of opposition” - the Kliens, the Chomskys, the Moores, the Wests, the Zizeks, the Sarandons, the Goodmans, the Rushkoffs, the Ehrenreichs. Ignore that sinking feeling that this spectacle of revolt may be distracting you from actually participating in a real one. Grab a sign, get in the street, and unless you’re following the script, keep your mouth shut. This wet fart of a movement is all you’re going to get, in other words, so you all better get on board.<br /><br /> Asking honest questions might lead to some uncomfortable conclusions, not only of the true nature of this movement, but of the leadership of the Left, and what their true message and mission actually are. We might just figure out that what they really want is more capitalism.<br /><br /> And it is the all-too-quick willingness of the rest of us to comply with this injunction to be supportive of any group as long as it seems to be doing something, even if that something is nothing, that seals off the possibility of the remnants of a radical movement from engaging in critical self-reflection, a re-examination of its goals and tactics, a process without which it will be entirely ill-equipped to confront a nearly omnipotent enemy, the Holy Alliance of Wall Street and Washington, two arms of the same control apparatus. It is this intransigent unwillingness to face up to uncomfortable truths, to take a long, cold look in the mirror, that is the principal handicap of a Left that is schlepping its way into the grave, all the while going through the motions that time and again have accomplished nothing. All this as if to fulfill its pre-assigned role so faithfully, so completely, as though it had no choice but to consecrate its own demise by turning itself into a bad joke, serving up the same old punch lines that keep losing their punch. That noise wafting up from Wall Street is not the virile bellowing of a reinvigorated Left, but rather the death rattle of its last helpless gasps for air.<br /><br /> So, let’s get down to brass tacks: what is it about Occupy Wall Street that is so embarrassing, what is it that evokes such disdain among so many people, a disdain equal to or surpassing the cheap, point-and-click solidarity among others? It’s not the stupid signs, Che flags, or the “ultra-Leftist” clichés repeated ad nauseum. It’s not the morons who get on television, giddy in their millisecond of fame, nor is it the celebrities who make speeches with out the slightest trace of self-awareness. It’s not the ordering pizzas or Tweeting the revolt. It’s not the leaderlessness, nor is it the disorganization. It’s not events such as “Slut Walks” or the “General Assemblies,” nor is it the call-and-response, cult indoctrination of the speaking events.<br /><br /> No, there is only reason why Occupy Wall Street is an embarrassment, and it is from whence all these other embarrassments derive: it is not a movement against the “power of capital,” as Klein would have it, but one of capital’s chief methods of self-defense, and one of its most alluring products.<br /><br /> Despite the much-vaunted “message-less” message of the Occupy Wall Street movement, over these past few weeks, several main concerns have shaken loose that confirm the charge that what they seek is not the destruction of a system of domination or the abolition of its most degrading institutions, such as wage labor and private property, but a more “equitable” distribution of its so-called benefits. Indeed, as if to prove they conform to the logic of the media that incessantly advertises the status quo, many go out of their way to say they are explicitly not a radical movement, as if they were afraid of scaring off the timid masses, like marketing company touting the family-friendliness of their products. As the movement itself struggles to become more broad-based and inclusive, the same old watered-down demands ring in our ears: good education, good jobs, affordable housing, and access to health care. Some have even suggested Obama convene a panel to explore the influence of money in politics - as though it’s some big mystery. In point of fact, that the kids who unquestionably make up a majority of this movement are college-educated but with no hope of anything but the most menial service jobs illustrates that what they really seek is the reclamation of the privileges that have been stripped of them in the most recent economic crisis and would in all likelihood pack up and go home if they were offered jobs, perfectly content to leave the whole rotten system intact. <br /><br /> But these privileges have not evaporated due to greed and pigheadedness among the ownership/investment classes. They have evaporated as part of the normal function of the system. When capitalism got itself into one of its usual crises back in 2008, it was the majority of the population who had to make do with less in order for the system to survive - hence the “austerity measures.” Naturally, the OWSers point to this as a grave injustice, illustrating the greed and corruption of the “1%” who allowed millions to slide into poverty and misery rather than altruistically sacrifice their own position and status. This of course begs the question of just what in the hell they thought was going to happen. In the absence of a viable radical, revolutionary movement (and all actually-existing organizations that claim this mantle are in the last analysis still hitched to liberalism) there was no other course of action possible. This “injustice” is in fact part of the normal running of the system, and not the evil machinations of the “bad guys” on Wall Street. Those “bad guys” maintain power as a class through their management and administration of the economy, a rigged game that structures the world, the rules of which they have written to ensure their perpetual victory. It is entirely ludicrous to speak of “economic injustice” (a true contradiction in terms if there ever was one) or any sort of equitable social arrangement, without simultaneously rejecting existing society in its totality because those injustices are in reality merely the most visible, superficial phenomena of a system predicated on domination. We are in the midst of a power relationship that is maintained through economic management, not the victims of greedy leaders who need to be replaced or put in check. In other words, rampant poverty and crushing misery are not the result of a neutral field run badly, but the inevitable result of the social power of the ownership/investment classes, those few who organize the many. Indeed, a hierarchically structured society cannot function on any other basis. It is precisely through hard-nosed pragmatism of our economic arrangements, to which we are all beholden, that that class maintains its power, and this is the crucial point that so many fail to recognize.<br /><br /> In a word, the elites are not simply corrupt, greedy villains who treat others unjustly; they control a class relationship with the rest of us, the very existence of which ensures its power though the very act of economic management. Even “gains” of the welfare state, Western Europe's perfected failure, were in reality allowances made by the ruling classes to head off the upsurge of radical workers in their countries, a species more or less unknown on the North American continent, to ensure everyone will remain compliant and quiet without really challenging the existing power structures. This compliance and obsequity is the enduring hallmark and legacy of the cowed Middle Class. Now, as capital demolishes the welfare state brick-by-brick in order to save itself, movements like OWS and the anti-austerity protests in Britain are simply picking up the pieces and asking for a few to be put back, failing to grasp that the elites, as long as they exist, will by necessity always put their own interests first. Without acknowledging this basic power relationship, the OWSers are not challenging they way our society actually functions. Instead, despite their pseudo-militant rhetoric, they are asking our leaders to be more generous with the scraps. But Christmas Day will never come for kids camping out on Wall Street, waiting for the Scrooges in the banks to generously throw half a crown out the window so that we all might feast on the prize turkey. No, the picture of brokers sipping champagne from stock exchange balconies while the unwashed rabble writhe in their filth below is the key and instructive image to keep in mind here regarding the reality of the situation and power relation at work. Shit, you almost have to admire their arrogance and self-assurance. They know they have all the chips in hand and are in no danger of losing a single one that they don't seek to relinquish.<br /><br /> This conclusion, incidentally, is validated with each union endorsement the OWSers get. Unions, despite their occasional, cynical nod to old-school worker’s movement rhetoric have never been anything more than lubricant to ease workers into compliance with a capitalist system, winning them minor comforts in order to make their domination more palatable.<br /><br /> Meanwhile, the OWSers play dress-up as their 60s forebears, generally going through the motions of pseudo-revolt - holding up signs, marching up and down the street, playing cat-and-mouse with the police (the really hip ones sleep a night in jail before being given citations), and spout the empty, dead rhetoric of “Leftism." This charade is carefully preparing the deathbed of whatever remains of a radical movement in America by co-opting its language and discarding its critique, rechristening opposition to this miserable society as its saving grace. If the OWS movement was really seen as a threat by the state, we would really see some police brutality, as in London this past August. For now, it’s quite content to be a freak show, a carnival without the subversive inversion of social relations, and which has simply become the latest tourist attraction in Lower Manhattan.<br /><br /> We must confront the fact that the only organizations which might oppose this state-economic Holy Alliance are those that refuse this society in toto, and in the most radical possible terms. Any group that claims to be radical must be evaluated on this basis. All of them fall short of this basic requirement - from the OWSers to the Zapatistas to AdBusters to the joke of a Communist Party or the walking corpse of 60s liberalism masquerading as anarchism, to all the Hardt and Negri fans—because they ultimately seek to control and reform our miserable system, not replace it. Indeed the marketplace must be torched, not made more user-friendly. And at this point the only thing that presents a significant threat to the marketplace is the marketplace itself, currently being run so irrationally that it is falling apart. The question is whether or not its custodians will be able to save it one more time, and if so, how it continues to impose disaster upon disaster on the planet itself, the ultimate source of its wealth, to the point where it becomes uninhabitable. These are the real threats to our socio-economic system, not some college kids beating drums in the street. Not that they ever really wanted to oppose it in the first place. All they really seek is a more human face on this whole state of affairs, which would really be the most inhuman thing about it.<br /><br /> Deep down, we all know that if this or any other movement were making the “1%” shake in their shoes, they’d be in jail, not with some bullshit slap-on-the-wrist citation, but with show trials followed-up by long-term prison sentences. Even the 60s nostalgia addicts see that much. The forms of protest that won’t land you in jail don’t matter, because they have been approved by and in fact are sanctioned by elites as a means of creating the illusion of something like democracy. Despite the occasional skirmishes, the NYPD is mostly observing with disdain, like the rest of us. As for us, lauding this pseudo-activity simply because it takes on the appearance of activity is entirely the wrong approach because anything that does lot lie in direct opposition to our society ultimately reinforces its power in that we become unable to imagine anything outside of it or beyond it. Like the Tea Party movement, it becomes just another consumable political attitude, a detergent with which we wipe clean our daily compliance while the system continues along its mad way, indifferently and relentlessly replicating and expanding itself with force seemingly as inevitable as gravity. We become ingrained with the idea that we live in the best of all possible worlds, an idea that would be absurd if it wasn’t so horrifying.<br /><br /> The situation is indeed dire and very likely hopeless; though one can never rule out change in the course of history, one should certainly not count on it either. Ignoring this hopelessness simply to remain “positive” is to insist on willful blindness to the reality that is all too easy to discern for those willing to see it. It is this hopeless, horrifying reality that must be confronted, and this confrontation is a modest but crucial first step in creating a world that has never existed. It is meaningless to discuss human emancipation without explicitly working to dispel our own cherished illusions, our most pernicious babble endlessly regurgitated as if this was in itself a revolutionary act. Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7778677064547661149.post-34126305421298253062011-09-18T17:54:00.000-07:002011-09-19T08:42:47.838-07:00Clearing Up A Few Common Misconceptions About the Arab Spring<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on"><style>
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<div class="MsoNormal">Much is made, in both the media and in the halls of academia, of the so-called “Arab Spring.” As usual, most of it is self-congratulatory hot air. Let us review.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">The nations in which the Arab Spring has occurred have for decades stood in a fake opposition to the West, defined here as those states in which consumer capitalism is most highly developed. While in the West, the population has been kept under control by the latex paradise of consumer goods, the nations of the "Arab Spring," like the USSR, Maoist China, and countless miniature hellscapes run by various autocrats, have been traditionally unable to offer such indulgences to the fearful, offering instead only the comfort of sheer ideology – identification with a Leader or a religion, for instance. These states have found their role to play in the worldwide economic shit parade, usually in flipping the bird from the sidewalk while the rich kids sneer at them from the floats, each finding its own legitimacy in the false choice represented by the other. Internally, the stunted development of these economies means the state must ultimately rely on brute force to keep their populations in line. As the economy of the “First World” expands, pushing with irresistible force against the thin, porous walls on its boundaries, such “Third World” nations must either play ball with the First or shrivel up in the cold wind of total exclusion. Those that choose the former, such as Mubarak’s Egypt, find security as a client state for more powerful economies, doing their dirty work and generally serving as a bogeyman, while those of less strategic geopolitical importance are made to bed down with organizations like the IMF, that Don Fanucci of the global economy. For those that choose that latter, such as Gaddafi’s Libya, it is only a matter of time before their own backwardness transforms the hallucinatory image of economic prosperity and "freedoms" of the West into the ultimate commodity for a worn down population - revolution. Except it’s not revolution, not really, but its consumable image, and one that stirs up the passion for all the others.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">As for us, when those in the news media, those carnival barkers for the powerful, start yapping their fool heads off about the revolutionary upsurge in the Middle East, this alone should raise the suspicion of any thinking person. Like an open carbuncle on the ass of a well-dressed gentleman, the question nags: what are they fighting for, exactly?</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">We all should unconditionally support a true, radical emancipatory spirit where we see it, but it is precisely the desire to see it where it doesn’t exist that has led popular movements down the garden path time and again, as the history of the Twentieth Century illustrates. A revolution, if this is how we are to consider these events, fails as soon as it squanders its moment by agreeing to terms with the society it is attempting to dismantle. In essence, the Arab movement is a mass demand for reforms, which may or may not lead to modest improvements in the conditions of everyday life – but its ridiculous to claim there is a radical emancipatory spirit at their core. Indeed, it is entirely silly, not to mention narcissistic, to laud such events as revolutions if their desired outcome is supposedly to have a society more like “ours” – though, let’s face it, this may be the source of Western enthusiasm for the Arab Spring in the first place… and you don’t need to get too close to catch a whiff of the cow pie. (We only<i> really </i><span style="font-style: normal;">respect the “difference” if the Other is just like us.) </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Thus far, this has been the case in Egypt. And the general consensus is that the best-case scenario in that once-great civilization will be the establishment of the kind of bourgeois-liberal democracy, gussied up in empty rhetoric of “multicultural pluralism,” which in the West is crumbling so quickly under the crushing weight of economic pragmatism that it can be had dirt-cheap. Sure, basic conditions of existence are better in, say, the US than Mubarak’s Egypt, but we cannot understand a revolutionary tide in terms of what is preferable over what is desirable. Having yet to assert itself incisively, meaning a total refusal of compromise with existing authority, and without any sign of that happening in the near future, the movement of Tahrir Square has thus far been brought back under the sway the state, which endured by shedding Mubarak, remaining otherwise intact. In point of fact, has reinforced its power by incorporating the demand for “democratic reforms,” but on its own terms. Like BP ousting Tony Hayward after the Deepwater Horizon catastrophe, the Egyptian state solved its image problem by giving itself a makeover.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">The situation in Libya is somewhat different, of course, but not fundamentally. Whatever new government takes control in Tripoli will face the same choice: submit or suffer, either to the Euro-American hegemon – or, should the reining champ go down, whatever country comes closest to perfecting the Holy Alliance between state and economic power, and at this point the smart money is on China.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">These “revolutions” do not take place in a vacuum: they are outbursts within the hierarchically structured world of sanctified power-through-capital. Although currently in crisis where it has traditionally been the strongest, it is not going anywhere into the foreseeable future. Whatever governments rise to power will emerge from their revolutionary punch-drunkenness into the same old system of capital that has built the world in its image and which, as class societies based on wage labor, are <i>by necessity </i><span style="font-style: normal;">predicated on domination – and it is this world into which these new states will be integrated. Herein lies the unity between these two societies, one in revolt and in the other in crisis: both are struggling to find better ways of operating the machinery of capital. No one seriously sees in the Arab Spring a refusal of the domination and degradation of life under the integrated state-economy that has ordered the globe – rather, they seek to improve its management on the local level, to participate more “equitably,” which is to say, to get a little more back for their trouble. In this sense, it is simply a quest for modernization of an old system that faces no serious challenges. What they’re fighting for, and what they will in fact be lucky to receive considering the realistic alternatives, is a kinder, gentler form of domination – a velvet glove on the iron fist.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Meanwhile, the postmodern-liberal academics can pat themselves on the back that the poor oppressed people of whatever country they didn’t care about until a couple of months ago rose up to overthrow their governments in order to establish the system they’ve been implicitly defending. Secretly satisfied that they were on the right side of the history they had made careers questioning the existence of, the liberal bourgeois democracy they’ve legitimized by turning critical theory against itself has apparently finally won out.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">As China perfects the kind of authoritarian consumerism that will be the result in the United States and Europe of the ongoing “financial crisis,” the nations of the Arab Spring are indeed poised to reclaim their subservient role in this brave old world. </div></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7778677064547661149.post-83063846239645257472011-09-14T07:38:00.000-07:002013-01-15T10:36:34.651-08:00The Abominable Season: Remembering 9/11 Ten Years Later<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
-Mike Ferraro<br />
<br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Cambria; font-size: 12pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">And of course this week the posts come pouring in. You people make me sick with your pep talk tributes and jingoistic profile pictures commemorating those twin dildos of American enterprise that once blighted the New York City sky.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Cambria; font-size: 12pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">And forget about your tear-jerking ‘morning of’ anecdotes, full of empty slogans and Hallmark sentimentality. Is there not an ounce of imagination among you? How about a braincell? Rest assured, what you lack in imagination you make up tenfold in slavish compliance and obsequity.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Cambria; font-size: 12pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">But perhaps I am being too harsh. It is after all a sensitive subject. And besides, conformity’s the only game in town, right?</span><br />
<br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Cambria; font-size: 12pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Yet I stand firm in my pronouncements.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Cambria; font-size: 12pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Let’s get one thing clear, panegyrists: Unless you were one of the chosen stuck in an incinerator of shattering steel and exploding flesh, who the fuck cares where you were the morning of 9/11? And even then, who gives a shit anyway, really?</span><br />
<br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Cambria; font-size: 12pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">And since we’re sharing ourselves so completely this abominable season, you want to know where I was that fateful morning? In bed, dead asleep. That’s right, our great national crisis and I slept right through it. Until the phone rang that is. My mother, calling to report that the Pentagon was on fire. (Her exact words, I remember. How could I forget them?) Then: How was I? Was I OK, was I safe?</span><br />
<br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Cambria; font-size: 12pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">And how did I respond to this news? I told her not to worry, that I was fine, and put the receiver down. Then I laughed my ass off, rolled over, and went back to bed.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Cambria; font-size: 12pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">It’s OK, I can say such things. See, my father worked on the 88th floor of both towers during their construction, when they were just scaffolding swaying in the wind. He’s a plumber, and a good one too, but quit the job after a few weeks because of the height. Since then he’s always felt a connection to those buildings. Nearly thirty years later, as a plumbing supervisor for the Newark Board of Education, my father watched his beloved towers burn and eventually collapse on his way to work.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Cambria; font-size: 12pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Does this sketch lend my voice a more sympathetic note, does it somehow authenticate my perspective? Is the acerbity of my earlier remarks tempered by this knowledge that my father saw the towers go up and watched them come down, an entire landscape--both emotional and physical--displaced along the way, the measure of a man and his life hijacked in the span of a few hours?</span><br />
<br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Cambria; font-size: 12pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Yet none of this changes the fundamental reality of our situation. Let’s not mince words: Don’t cry to me about the great tragedy of 9/11, how we'll never forget the events and inestimable loss of that terrible day. Don't tell me that everything’s changed. Get the shit outta your ears: Nothing’s changed, suckers. Unless, of course, you count the endless war profiteering, unparalleled national deficit and expenditures, and erosion of civil liberties racked up since that day, all of which were on the table long before the time of great tragedy struck. 9/11 was no catalyst--it was merely the excuse proffered to implement the dirty deeds of the corporate technocrats and militarists. It was, as they say in Washington, bizness as usual.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Cambria; font-size: 12pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Such long term plans for global hegemony go back at least as far as World War II. That said, as cursorily reported by the least cowed members of the lapdog press, what we have in the latest US invasion of Iraq is something more primordial, and therefore more relatable: namely, a good old-fashioned blood feud. According to this theory, W’s ousting of our old ally Saddam was payback for Saddam’s bungled hit on pappy, itself an act of retribution for Gulf War I. Seen in this light, as flagrantly irresponsible and wrong-headed as it is, at least this war policy connects on a visceral level, which is more than can be said for the rest of W’s presidency.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Cambria; font-size: 12pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">If such tantrums seem like the pathological behavior of a spoiled, petulant child, that’s because they are. An unmitigated disaster politically and policy-wise--expanding with a vengeance Reagan’s abysmal borrow and spend legacy--W was, as far as zeitgeist barometers go, the best president around; the one we, as a nation, unequivocally deserved. The figure this president cut required no metaphoric gloss or interpretation outside the obvious--the caricatures themselves more than sufficed. Embodying in thought and action the US’s interests and stature in the world, here was a walking, talking, dick swinging horror show, a most unholy mix come terrifyingly to life: part cowboy gone off the range, part superhuman bully, rolled into one inarticulate, bumbling, coke-snortin-til-he-became-<wbr></wbr>saved trust fund baby. Shit, he’s not even a real goddamn cowboy. In short, W was the kind of incorrigible frat boy we would most like to have a beer with, to invoke some idiot pollster’s enduring election time conceit. With one glaring exception of course: this fun-lovin’ joker’s loosey-goosey antics had dire consequences for an inestimable number of people the world over, of which the final toll and magnitude of suffering have yet to be realized.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Cambria; font-size: 12pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Myself, I remember waking up the morning after the 2004 presidential election feeling violated. Not that I needed further corroboration on this front, I understood clearly, and not for the first time, that the system was hopelessly and irredeemably fucked, and that baring a full blown miracle we were all doomed. I mean, it’s not like Kerry was even warm shit in comparison to W’s cold. But what could you do?--those were the choices, little more than simple, indistinct variations on a theme. This then was the measure of our America: Elections were meaningless charades, our democracy a fraud and piss poor decoy for the thing it purported to be. Were things ever any different? If so, it’s virtually impossible to imagine that time now.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Cambria; font-size: 12pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">These were not completely demoralizing and unsatisfactory realizations however. They were, in fact, deeply liberating. For example, that morning I knew I’d never vote again. And I haven’t. Like a newly baptized AA member, I'm proud to say the urge to take another hit of the old Jesus juice never once returned--black president be damned.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Cambria; font-size: 12pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Yet such sentiments are commonplace, and the knowledge of the transgressions of government power passe, to the point of both seeming hopelessly irrelevant. What is clear, however, is that in an age where the public dwells in a ‘post-ironic’ fugue--where the incontestable assumption that the emperor has no clothes is a foregone conclusion, as the lack of surprise or even outrage over the Wiki-leaks scandal illustrates--this deep cynicism serves to further re-inscribe the values and practices of our broke and downward spiraling system. And in turn such blind acceptance and complete desensitized tolerance of the status quo work to condone these routine and egregious abuses of power and the overall functioning of a toxic and perennially mismanaged system. In this way, then, and in a manner unlike any before thanks to the over-saturation of information through digital media platforms, we are all unanimously complicit in the principal objective and operation of everyday life, namely the sanctification of power through capital.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Cambria; font-size: 12pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">In this respect no one is off the hook. Ten years ago today, for the first time in recent memory, the bully got punched back. To ignore this obvious reality embraces a total ignorance of historical fact.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Cambria; font-size: 12pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Doesn't matter if it was ten years ago or ten minutes--as long as people are fighting for basic survival under the iron-fisted rule of capital, the real tragedy is happening the same place it always has: out in the streets.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Cambria; font-size: 12pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Yes, it’s all happening right outside your window, whether you choose to admit it or not. Take a good look sometime if you don't believe me. Or better yet, go to the mirror. Open your fucking eyes and look carefully. Think about what the fuck it is that is making you so fucking miserable. Can you still see that view outside your window? Good. Look back and forth between mirror and street as needed to make the necessary connections, till it registers what the fuck the problem really is. Stare in the face, if just this once, the things that are making you so miserable and alienated and be done with it. Be honest with yourself. For once in your miserable fucking life.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Cambria; font-size: 12pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">And today instead of crying over the dead in sanctimonious and false eulogy, why don’t you go out and live a little while you still can? It’s the only honorable thing to do, the only decent commemoration of the dead to be made on this solemn day or any other.</span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Cambria; font-size: 12pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Take heed: For once I know what the fuck I’m talking about. Do you?</span></div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7778677064547661149.post-46179004286365746092011-09-10T23:20:00.000-07:002011-09-11T18:18:03.819-07:00The Reichstag Is Still Burning: 9/11 and the Conspiracy Theory of History<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on"><style>
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<div align="right" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: right;"><i>“… we live and die at the confluence of innumerable mysteries.”</i> </div><div align="right" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: right;">-Guy Debord</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">The intervening decade since 9/11 certainly lends credence to the air conspiracy surrounding those events. Before the dust had settled and dead were buried, and without any of the usual pretense to debate, the federal government, through legislation such as the Patriot Act, empowered itself to strip any person of their “civil liberties,” a quaint term indeed in these times, and invested law enforcement agencies at the federal, state and local levels with <i>Stasi</i><span style="font-style: normal;">-like authority. President Bush assumed emergency powers, declaring a permanent state of emergency that made the exception to the law the rule of law, and reserved the right to freely monitor the citizenry while stripping “detainees” from around the globe of their very status as humans beings in the grotesque carnivals of Abu Grahib and Guantánamo Bay, and in the process rendered the distinction between war and peace impossible, becoming the closest the world has seen in to a modern day sovereign. Two wars were launched in areas of the globe most hostile of American interests and which also hold the largest and most important reserves of fossil fuels, the very fuel of the economy, in what turned out to be a hare-brained attempt to control those regions and by extension the world. Of course, defense contractors and investment firms of all stripes made an absolute killing in the process. Meanwhile, we the bewildered herd clung to cheap sentiment, feigned outrage, and showed our resolve by merchandising in the face of tragedy, with all the FDNY/NYPD hats, t-shirts and bumper stickers you can imagine. The government was assured of no pesky pushback from the masses. </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">No one disputes these facts, they only attempt to apologize for or justify them to varying degrees. These explanations and justifications need not be reasonable if they are the only ones on offer. Considering these events, if you don’t view the events of 9/11 with a certain skepticism, <i>you</i> might indeed be the one who is crazy. </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">And it would be far from the first time this had happened. On February 27, 1933, four weeks after Hitler had become Chancellor, Marinus van der Lubbe, a mentally unstable bricklayer and council communist from the Netherlands, was arrested for setting fire to the Reichstag, the parliament building of the German government in Berlin. Hitler subsequently assumed emergency powers, suspended civil liberties and crushed the left opposition to the Nazis. The circumstances surrounding this event remain murky, but no one seriously believes van der Lubbe simply acted alone. </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">In 1978, Italian politician Aldo Moro was kidnapped and murdered by the Red Brigades at a time when communist and anarchist groups were gaining ground politically in Italy. After the events, as the state was able to justify stricter control measures, this radical high tide broke and receded. Years later, the findings of the Italian government itself would find that the Brigades had been manipulated in some way by a faction within the state apparatus. </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">The 1990s saw the emergence of anti-capitalist and anti-globalization movements throughout the world, culminating in the 1999 Seattle riots, which shook the assumptions of the final victory of American capitalism around the world after the fall of the USSR. In this case, the actual deficiencies of this movement are irrelevant – all that matters is how they would have been perceived by the state. Two years later, the specter of terrorism not only made the US appear as a paradise in comparison to the seeming chaos outside its borders, but it also dramatically increased the already incredible power and influence of that state. Any nascent left-wing movement was thoroughly trounced and is still <i>in absentia</i><span style="font-style: normal;">: the 2008 “financial crisis” created as ripe conditions for revolution as most of us have seen in our lifetime and without so much as a peep from any group that might seriously challenge to the normal state of affairs. And in this sense, the state capitalized on terrorism as a kind of preemptive counter-revolution. </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">The "conspiracy theory of history" may have at once been a ridiculous belief, but the times have breathed new life into it. The “9/11 Truth movement” itself, however, focuses on what we might call “Wile E. Coyote” logic in its obsession with physics: how come a plane crashing into the Pentagon doesn’t leave plane-shaped hole in the building, like a cartoon character running through a doorway? Indeed, they act like such belligerent buffoons and make such obviously spurious claims that it is impossible to take them seriously. And since anyone who questions the events associated with 9/11 is lumped in with them, its as though they themselves serve as unwitting disinformation agents. These dupes ultimately reinforce the legitimacy of the very government they allege to question, and the fantasy they cling to is one in which bad people do bad things who must be punished, just like in the movies. They see only people, not systems. But the ease with which they manipulate and conceal information ultimately demonstrates their fundamental unity with the world of the global spectacle.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Indeed, so many groups – from terrorist organizations to the most repressive regimes on the planet – took advantage of the events of 9/11 that the most basic question we could ask - “<i>cui bono?</i><span style="font-style: normal;">” - becomes utterly meaningless. Who is the prime suspect when </span><i>everyone</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> benefits? (Everyone in power, that is.)</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">As Malcolm X, that voice we so desperately need in these ominous times, would have been compelled to reiterate had he lived, 9/11 was indeed a case of the chickens coming home to roost. But the power of the state was ultimately reinforced and expanded. The American government may have had its nose bloodied, but when the bully becomes the victim, he is freer than ever to do as he pleases. And the insignificant masses of this world are ground into dust more easily and more quickly than ever before. </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7778677064547661149.post-10007729469423750902011-08-12T16:40:00.000-07:002013-01-15T10:39:22.446-08:00London Calling<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<br /><br />Earlier this month, Britain exploded. Riots started on August 6th in the London borough of Tottenham, and the rebellion soon spread to other areas of the city, then to the rest of the country. At the time of this writing, five people have died, over sixteen reported injured, and over 3,100 people have been arrested; the estimated property damage exceeds two hundred million pounds.<br /><br /><br /> Reactions to the outbursts were predictable enough. From the “right,” as the old tune goes, more law and order is needed to keep the “underclass” down in the shitpile where they belong. These poor unwanted losers of the economic game are permanently on reserve, either in the labor army or the real one. IED fodder. Cameron couldn’t undo his zipper fast enough to show off his own hard-on for violence, which he’d use as a truncheon in the streets if given half a chance. He located the cause of the riots in the “<a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/crime/8694401/London-riots-water-cannons-to-be-used-on-sick-society.html">sick society</a>,” proclaiming: “the sickness starts on welfare-addicted estates where feckless parents let children run wild.” At least he’s being honest. To be sure, this is how the managers of the state-economy view most of us. In fact, the thinking of the ruling class has never been otherwise. How could it? In effect, such logic represents the very definition of political power, and consolidates that power into an intractable political will—namely, a unilateral instrument of control. Hey, can’t trust the poor. They’re champing at the bit to run wild and will reveal their true/savage nature just as soon as the thin veneer of civilization falls off. Why can’t they just accept their station in life?<br /><br /><br /> Some on the Idiot Left condescended that the rioters simply “knock it off.” By this I suppose they mean channel their rage into the appropriate avenues, more elections or organized protest—because drums, puppets, signs, and chants have been so effective in the past. Ultimately, this position only points out their own intellectual bad faith. Others, seemingly more honest, went so far as to recognize what is always generally assumed to be the underlying cause of such outbursts: it is the UK’s austerity measures that incite revolts like this; what we need, this line of so-called thinking goes, is more social welfare programs to lift just enough people out of poverty and into the paltry privileges of the Middle Class, that most obedient of all breeds, where they will be comfortable enough to never, ever raise a fuss. This continued belief in the miraculous healing power of the evaporating middle class reveals the bad faith of the left's orthodoxy. For them, the riots are a reaction the neo-liberal policies of the day, a demand of “economic justice.” Even David Harvey—Professor Emeritus of Fake Radicalism and Chief of the Marx Recuperators—denounced the coming cliches from mealy-mouthed pundits attempting to explain the riots—<a href="http://www.blogger.com/goog_952019782">and then </a><a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-edit.g?blogID=7778677064547661149&postID=1000772946942375090"></a><a href="http://www.thenewsignificance.com/2011/08/12/david-harvey-feral-capitalism-hits-the-streets/">spat up a few of his own</a>. One can easily discern what’s behind the curtains of these snake-oil salesmen—a return to some kind of Lenin-with-a-mohawk worker’s state, resurrecting the bureaucrats of the vanquished Left, and their Western lackeys, a gaggle of liars, dogmatists, and stool-pigeons we had been all too happy to see perish. Now these zombies can return in a postmodern democracy of the network...of the “multitude.”<br /><br /><br /> To be sure, events like the London riots ring down the curtain on the whole political shit-show, forcing us observers to show our hand. Rightists calling for violent repression, though entirely on the wrong side, at least understand the terrain of the struggle—namely a clash of irreconcilable interests—while do-gooding liberals are again unmasked as the corporate dancing bears they are, trying to convince us that common ground, good will, and “economic justice” are possible in a system predicated on domination. Still others have nothing to offer but dead “leftist” rhetoric. When this happens, some even demonstrate an uncharacteristic, albeit temporary, keenness of observation. As one commentator noted, we must “reclaim the streets” because the language of the rioters is not one of manifestos and policies: “Although produced by our consumerist culture, they have no stake or identification with this society, no interests, and thus nothing to lose.” He then goes on, in a grossly inaccurate and dismissive fashion, to refer to the rioters as “boys,” and suggests that the people of Tottenham, which have a long tradition of “activism,” actually join forces with the police to take back the night or whatever. He is correct that the rioters display no identification with society, and that this isn’t about manifestos and “politics”—or rather it is political only insofar as politics is unable to address the monotony and misery of everyday life. No doubt if any orthodox Commie hacks came around thumping their copy of the Manifesto—if they could be said to have read it, let alone understand it—they would be summarily laughed out of town, as they were in Detroit back in 1967.<br /><br /><br /> The London riots are not about a society run “greed” or neo-liberal capitalism or a failure of the welfare state or any of that worn-out nonsense. Put simply, they are a reaction to the normal state of affairs. When two looted-wine sipping girls claimed in the <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-14458424">oft-repeated story</a> “We’re showing the rich people we can do what we want,” it was hardly in protest of austerity measures, or a call to reinforce social democracy, that this statement was made. Nor was it a suggestion of mere revenge. For their part, the girls weren’t even sure who is in power: “conservatives...or...I don’t even know who it is. The government.” Oh, those feral bitches! Truth is, under the current economic arrangement, it doesn’t matter who’s in power. Naturally, the girls' honest answer was spun to conform to the gentleman’s agreement between left and right, and the underlying truth of their statement remained obscured. Such sentiments, however, are not about officially sanctioned issues of bourgeois-liberal democracy like austerity measures or progressive taxation, nor are they meant to pointlessly throw light on the glaring hypocrisy of the ownership/investment classes. No, staid observations of that type are what brilliant lapdog geniuses like Harvey are paid to do. Rather, such statements address the possibilities of existence, hinting at the actualized, meaningful life—the freedom to “do what we want”—that is forever denied by the crushing necessities of basic survival under the rule of the commodity economy. And it is important to remember that this forestalling occurs regardless of whether it is the “human” face of so-called social democracy or the gas-masked face of neo-liberalism doing the soul murdering. Recent events remind us that it is humanity itself, so often misdiagnosed as nihilism in these nihilistic times, that underlies these rebellions. This was not a race revolt, nor even a class revolt in the sense of class as one of an innumerable set of identity markers, like gender, race, or sexuality. Instead, it was a revolt against the humiliating, life-denying universal of Capital and the grim reality constructed under its rule. And this is why <a href="http://www.cnn.com/2011/WORLD/europe/08/11/ukriots.accused/index.html?hpt=hp_c1">teachers, life guards, civil servants, chefs and people from all walks of life were drawn in</a> (and, incidentally, negated the assumptions of the arguments presented by alleged experts about this being a youth rebellion, as if their own embarrassingly fallacious internal logic wasn’t enough to dismiss them out-of-hand). The “carnival spirit” of the riots, so incomprehensible to those who are content in their dumb resignation to a degrading, degraded existence, is in fact an explosion of humanity in a dehumanized world. When hierarchies collapse, when the state monopoly of violence is broken, even temporarily, when human needs and desires are violently asserted in and against conditions that are meant to violently prevent it, it is hardly surprising that the life-affirming aspects of the carnival would emerge and be misunderstood. But if only for a moment, in these instances of insurrection, the sanctity of the commodity becomes profane.<br /><br /><br /> Looting is a natural reaction to these workaday horrors. Far from a desire to conspicuously participate in consumption, it is an outright rejection of consumption's dictates and seemingly implicit desirability. Once looted, the commodity is not the inevitable to-be-admired reward for our cowardice, fear, or stupidity, but an ordinary object—harmless, answerable, and under human control, rather than the other way around. In Detroit, Watts (1965), and Los Angeles (1992), looted items—other than food, alcohol, and firearms—were not generally hoarded, but were taken apart and left outside. No longer signs of status in the home, people turned stereos and televisions into playthings and let them rot in the streets. When looting occurs, the commodity emerges as just what it is: a bunch of shit that exists for our amusement and not as the unifying principle around which our entire society rests. Most intuitively grasp that this system has nearly perfected the art of self-defense. Most people realize there is no way out, that power has its bases covered. So, have a sip of wine in the streets, watch the whole prison-like edifice burn, and live like a human being, even for a little while.<br /><br /><br /> As the state eventually reasserts control, things will return to their brutal normality, ultimately re-enforcing the supremacy of the economy, though naturally enough some scraps will be given to the poor to keep them amused and sedated. Meanwhile in leveling doses, force will continue to be applied as needed to keep them frightened and in check, for a while. But a guy can dream, can't he? Perhaps the sparks of Tottenham will ignite a fire to consume this whole washed-up civilization, and the last dying embers of this world will one day remind us of the fires of London.<br /><br /><br /><br /><br />(Edited and updated on 8/22/11) <style>
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0