More Death, More Bombs, More Death-In-Life

Mike Ferraro

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.

And so to the great liberal response.

Gun control. Mental illness sensitivity and awareness. Yes and yes. Of course, yes. Cue the hand-wringing, pants-shitting pundits and harrowing statistics.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.
        

Pernicious Babble: Occupy Wall St. and the Fight to Save Capitalism

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.

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.”

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Clearing Up A Few Common Misconceptions About the Arab Spring

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.

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.

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?

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 really respect the “difference” if the Other is just like us.)

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.

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.

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 by necessity 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.

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.

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. 

The Abominable Season: Remembering 9/11 Ten Years Later

-Mike Ferraro

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.

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.

But perhaps I am being too harsh. It is after all a sensitive subject. And besides, conformity’s the only game in town, right?

Yet I stand firm in my pronouncements.

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?

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?

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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-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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.
Take heed: For once I know what the fuck I’m talking about. Do you?

The Reichstag Is Still Burning: 9/11 and the Conspiracy Theory of History

“… we live and die at the confluence of innumerable mysteries.” 

-Guy Debord

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 Stasi-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.

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, you might indeed be the one who is crazy.

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.

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.

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 in absentia: 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.

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.

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 - “cui bono?” - becomes utterly meaningless. Who is the prime suspect when everyone benefits? (Everyone in power, that is.)

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.

London Calling

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.


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 “sick society,” 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?


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—and then spat up a few of his own. 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.”


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.


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 oft-repeated story “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 teachers, life guards, civil servants, chefs and people from all walks of life were drawn in (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.


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.


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.




(Edited and updated on 8/22/11)