May 23, 2007

NOW THE END HAS TRULY BEGUN: NOTES ON THE FIRST DEATH TREMORS OF THE PETROLEUM AGE

With the nation hopelessly dependent on automobiles and runaway inflation pricing fuel ever more beyond the reach of lower-wage workers, the apocalypse is already here.

I.

DENY IT AS VEHEMENTLY as you choose, the apocalypse is upon us. I have sensed its imminence since the still-unexplained regional power outage of 9 November 1965 -- I was riding home on the Eighth Avenue Subway when the electricity failed, and I was the young man, later mentioned in a couple of news reports, who organized and led the evacuation of the A Train that had died three cars into West 14th Street station. “Join hands so nobody gets lost,” I said, “and just like we’re finding our way out of a cave, we’ll go to where the fresh air comes in.”

There was no mistaking the apocalyptic prophecy of what we all came to call “the Blackout.” Emerging from the coalmine darkness of the subway station and seeing the entire de-electrified City nearly as dark beneath an ominously smirking full moon gave me a chill more intense than anything I’d ever felt, and my hackles rose again minutes later when I learned the outage extended north from the Ohio River deep into Canada, west from the Atlantic Ocean well into Indiana and Michigan. It remains the largest such technological failure ever known. Here thanks to Life magazine photographer Bob Gomel is what Manhattan looked like.

(Click on the picture itself for maximum enlargement. GomelÂ’s view is eastward across the Hudson River; the bright lines in the foreground are the headlights of vehicles on the West Side Highway, and the greens and purples in the darker areas are due to a condition called reciprocity failure, a characteristic of the old High Speed Ektachrome under extended exposure.)

Having already thus glimpsed the future of what was then the greatest city on the planet, I merely nodded when I began reading the conclusions of the male and female environmentalist Cassandras a decade later. I am after all a Celt: I had sensed the laughter of the Crone when I emerged from the subway -- note again that grinning moon -- and now intuition was confirmed by science. Even then, though, the apocalypse remained hardly more than an abstraction, something that would occur long after I had died.

But last weekend I saw the apocalypse first-hand. I saw it in the distraught face of a young mother in a Fred Meyer parking lot telling her two elementary-school daughters that “no we can’t drive out to grandma’s tomorrow because momma has to save enough ($3.45-per-gallon) gasoline to get to work all next week.” I saw it the nearly palpable fear of a man at the gas pumps, filling his automobile with $3.45 gasoline just as I was filling my own -- “quick before the goddamn price goes up again,” he said. I saw it in the body language at the bus stops, where people forced by the price of gas to abandon their automobiles now wait patiently for buses that run far too infrequently, their archetypically American faces -- white, black, brown, Asian -- united in dull-eyed resignation.

Most of all I saw it in my own huge gas-price anger at how the politicians have betrayed us to Big Oil and Big Automotive and -- with their decades of untold graft safely pocketed and banked -- have abandoned us to the socioeconomic and cultural equivalent of an everlasting Hurricane Katrina: the price of gasoline in now obviously permanent runaway inflation, the price increasing nearly a penny a day and sometimes much as five cents a day. By Memorial Day it will be close to $4 per gallon and maybe already above that. By Labor Day it could be $5 a gallon -- possibly $6 (and maybe even $7). Though the price will occasionally drop a bit -- another Big Lie tactic to falsely reassure us all is well -- the days of affordable gasoline and diesel are ended forever.

Though the yuppie environmentalists are already applauding this latest atrocity against those of us who have to work to survive, think for a moment about the disaster $5 gasoline (or even $2 gasoline) inflicts on people who, by deliberate decades of political and economic betrayal, have been denied adequate public transport: literally all of us everywhere in the United States outside the five boroughs of New York City.

When an already bitterly exhausting day at the McJob suddenly jumps from 10 hours to 14 hours or even 16 (because now that you canÂ’t afford to drive, you have to get up two or three hours early to ride buses to the sweatshop); when now because of the cost of gasoline you have to shop by bus rather than car (and the buses run so slow and seldom it takes the entire weekend rather than just half of Saturday); when your life deteriorates into permanent exhaustion you suddenly recognize will be relieved only by death because the price of gasoline will never come down again; when you suddenly understand the politiciansÂ’ sudden promise to provide the public transport you so desperately need is just another Big Lie -- that now it will never be built because its costs are thrust ever more out of reach by fuel-price-driven inflation -- that is the apocalypse.

Its details are reflected in the fact I spent nine hours and drove 102 miles this weekend shopping for necessities. I burned 7.14 gallons of $3.45 per-gallon gas at a cost of $24.56.(With nearly 260,000 miles on its odometer, my carefully maintained 1992 Ford Tempo V6 -- a gift from a friend eight years ago -- still manages 26 miles per gallon highway but gets only 14 in town.) To accomplish these same errands here by bus would have taken a minimum of three days: one of the stores at which I shopped is seven miles away on a fairly direct line, a 20-minute drive but a bus ride of an hour and ten minutes; another is only four miles away but across town: again a 20 minute drive, but by bus, a trip of nearly three hours that includes two transfers. And these are one-way trips; the actual to-and-fro drive time is double, and the bus time -- given the unavoidable waits and the scheduled infrequency -- is at least triple and often more. By bus, the weekendÂ’s shopping chores would have required four single-bus-route journeys, 17 hours total round-trip time including shopping, plus three multi-route bus trips, total time 21 hours including shopping -- 38 hours total. My three-day estimate of how long these chores would have taken by bus is thus no exaggeration at all.

In New York City, which has the only genuinely adequate public transport in the entire United States, I could have bought these same items with a $2 subway ride to Midtown Manhattan, spent at the very most two healthy hours of walking from store to store and then boarded the subway for another $2 ride back home, after which I would have had the rest of the weekend to spend as I chose, perhaps visiting museums and galleries with the eloquent, elegant and comely woman who is my once and future wife.

But here in arrogantly sprawling Pugetopolis -- the ecofornicated region around Puget Sound, where the ruling class promises us “Sound Transit” but delivers nothing save rhetoric, frustration and ongoing enslavement by Big Oil and Big Automotive -- we are afflicted with a pair of now-obviously-terminal illnesses, conditions that turn any sort of shopping into white-knuckled confrontation with societal collapse and political betrayal: i.e. the apocalypse.

One of the apocalyptic ailments is Mad Mall Disease, which is vectored by Big Oil and Big Automotive and causes the reflexive total destruction of all central business districts. While Mad Mall Disease is epidemic throughout the entire United States outside of New York City, here in Pugetopolis it is uniquely combined with another far more insidious but equally deadly local condition: Seattle Xenophobic Transit Obstruction, the radical anti-public-transport bigotry chronically frothed up by Seattle’s “stop-Manhattanization (we-don’-wanna-be-like-Jew-York)” xenophobes and “subways-are-for-criminals” racists, with the associated hatemongering secretly encouraged by turf-protecting bureaucrats and enacted into unwritten but now irrevocable law by mercenary politicians -- again of course all vectored and financed by Big Oil and Big Automotive.

Consequently the initial tremor of the apocalypse -- the runaway inflation of petroleum prices -- is already destroying men, women and children and threatening many more people -- myself included -- with inescapable ruin. And the human destruction, though notably worse here in forcibly non-Manhattanized Pugetopolis, is to one degree or another a nationwide disaster anywhere outside the five boroughs of New York.

Cuba, a socialist state with a genuinely Marxist grassroots consciousness, has coped very successfully with the same sort of crisis by developing localized agriculture and supplemental public transport as well.

But America’s one embryonic effort at localized agriculture, the Los Angeles South Central Farm (from which an entire ideology of economic democracy and sustainable farming might have grown), has already been destroyed by the bulldozers and jackboots of the corporate state -- a bitter lesson in brutally crushed dreams and aspirations that demonstrates beyond any question that such alternatives will be summarily destroyed anywhere else they might be attempted within the United States -- and possibly (note for example the again escalating official hostility toward Cuba) anywhere else in the world too. (For additional information on this atrocity -- the story was methodically suppressed by corporate media -- Google “south central farm” and “los angeles urban farm“)

Moreover Cuba was never a nation where violently grasping consumeroids battled to the death over the newest baubles, bangles, beads and gew-gaws, nor was Cuba ever a place where most of the population -- even many of the abjectly impoverished -- had been hypnotized to cling defiantly to their ever-more-unaffordable gas-guzzling automobiles and rage in tantrums of Transit Obstructus any time someone suggested there might indeed be a better way. The Cuban solution to the petro-apocalypse -- undoubtedly the most intelligent solution humans have yet devised -- will therefore never be the U.S. solution. Most of us are far too viciously selfish, far too selfishly sociopathic -- and now after decades of methodical moronation into the ultimate Moron Nation -- we are simply too stubbornly stupid to abandon the privately owned automobile until Gaia herself pries it from our cold dead hands.

But make no mistake: the biggest obstacle to adequate public transport -- never mind the Cuban-style socioeconomic transformation that might actually let us survive what is to come -- is the U.S. ruling class: the people who keep the Transit Obstructus types agitated and inflamed. The Cuban solution demands true community and genuine sharing -- from each according to ability, to each according to need. But that sort of thing will never be allowed here. The U.S. ruling class wants everything for themselves, with just enough left over to ensure the slaves are kept alive -- and so desperately hungry weÂ’ll obey our masters without question.

The apocalyptic optimists have a somewhat more hopeful vision of course.

But the ruling class has already made it clear by its behavior in Los Angeles and New Orleans that we in the United States will never be allowed such humanitarian (and implicitly democratic) options. Thus “I can have it all” is vanquished forever, replaced by “will work for food” -- the emergence of the new American Dream.

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II.

THE TRAFFIC JAMS I see clogging the streets and highways of Pugetopolis -- increasingly the worst such congestion in North America -- are not, as the authorities constantly try to reassure us, merely temporary discomforts until technology rescues us yet again. What we are witnessing is the vehicular equivalent of the last frantic costume ball before the final debacle, not Waterloo, which merely marked a shift in power, but ArthurÂ’s last battle at Camlannis, which signaled the end of an age and a plunge into centuries of darkness.

And this time every sociological indicator I can find suggests the darkness may not never lift again: the wholesale abandonment of basic protocols of courtesy as old as civilization itself, the chronic hatefulness expressed by the ever-worsening plague of bad manners that now afflicts U.S. society from top to bottom, the increasing incidence of checkout-line scuffles and road rage and gas pump brawls -- all this is not only far more prophetic than the decaying streets and crumbling public buildings but portends a descent into social Darwinist cannibal savagery of a magnitude that surely has no precedent. Even the pampered children of the elite sense the unspeakably brutish future that awaits us: note how the neo-tribal magnetism of gang life now reaches far beyond the ghetto to recruit youth from all but the most posh Caucasian schools and neighborhoods. Like post-Katrina New Orleans, such trends and incidents are glimpses of the grim tomorrow that skyrocketing fuel prices may bring upon us much sooner than we anticipate.

Meanwhile most of us have no idea just how bad things are. Corporate media ignored the apocalypse for years and now routinely minimizes it, reducing what amounts to a deadly plague of rabid grizzly bears to nothing more than a smelly but merely bothersome infestation of incontinent house cats. Thus terminal climate change is deliberately softened to “global warming” even as petroleum exhaustion is misrepresented as “temporary price instability.” And now that these problems are begrudgingly acknowledged, the primary theme of ruling class propaganda is reassurance: “don’t worry; this sort of thing has happened many times in human history -- and we’ve not only survived, but see how we have progressed to all these material comforts we have today,” always with the strong implication that any day now things will get better. A related variant is the deification of technology: “times will be hard for a while, but technology will save us -- and then it’ll be just like Star Trek -- we’ll go on to conquer the whole galaxy.” In either case, it’s the same old “restoration of the American Dream.“

But the shibboleth of “alternative energy“ is nothing but a great pacifier, another pie-in-the-sky scam. Google “the false promise of alternative energy” without the quotation marks and scroll at will: no amount of “alternative energy” can possibly replace the declining petroleum supply, precisely because our technology is not merely dependent on petroleum, but contingent upon it. Once the petroleum runs out, there will no be technology available with which to produce alternatives -- or anything else. The awful totality of our dependence -- which we are only feeling the first pangs of in the socioeconomic consequences of runaway fuel prices -- is precisely what makes the apocalypse unavoidable.

As always when cataclysms loom, many take refuge in theological fantasy: “after we have gone through this tribulation , we will be lifted bodily into heaven” or “after we experience this time of mandatory spiritual growth, we will all achieve collective enlightenment” -- the same palliative whether expressed as Old Time Religion or New Age mysticism, though surely no more misguided than most of the common secular responses. But there are other spiritual alternatives -- some of the emergent approaches to paganism for example -- that are neither compensatory Abrahamic fanaticism nor vapid New Age tomfoolery: the stern repudiation of Abrahamic nature-hating, a centerpiece of both Wiccan/ecofeminist and Druidical viewpoints, is in fact genuinely revolutionary. Detailed and thoughtful discussion of such alternatives is already underway. The following link -- scroll down to “Religion and Peak Oil: the Next Spirituality” -- is but one example.

Thus if we are fortunate, the spiritual quest prompted by our collective anxiety will give birth to an ethos that will guarantee a sustainable human community. The quest for such an alternative actually began at least 60 years ago with publication of Robert GravesÂ’ ground-breaking work The White Goddess, which has since fostered a legacy of rediscovery and realization that will prove infinitely valuable if our species manages to survive.

Which is an ocean-sized if. The terrifying truth -- the truth the ruling class tries desperately to hide -- is that there is absolutely nothing in human experience to compare with the magnitude and totality of the disaster that has already begun.

What confronts us is in fact not one apocalypse but two: species failure -- or more accurately its consequences -- combined with terminal climate change.

Species failure is the total, self-inflicted destruction of human civilization due to the exhaustion of petroleum resources, the consequent end of technology, and the resultant political, economic and cultural collapse -- horrors substantially intensified by what I label “End Time Capitalism”: the tyrannosauric depredations of a ruling class frantic to hoard maximum wealth before Nature slams most of her doors closed forever. In other words, species failure is the complete breakdown of all human institutions, the debacle resulting from a series of suicidal errors culminating in a species hopelessly dependent on petroleum and thus unable to survive without it.

Terminal climate change -- itself largely self-inflicted -- worsens the consequences of species failure to the point the survival of H. sapiens sapiens may be impossible. It is “terminal” because, while our species has repeatedly survived cold and glaciation, there is grave doubt we can survive a global temperature increase so great the newest projections suggest it will make all but the polar regions uninhabitable by any life much more intelligent than centipedes and scorpions.

(I should point out I chose the terms “species failure” and “terminal climate change” very carefully and only after considerable reflection. But it seems nothing else adequately describes what is happening -- especially since both conditions are the cumulative and now unavoidable consequences of at least 2,000 years of increasingly ruinous decisions, each decision based on patriarchal contempt for nature. Likewise “End Time Capitalism” reflects -- correctly -- capitalism’s origin in Abrahamic doctrine, especially its overwhelming impulse toward theocracy and/or other forms of fascism.)

To elaborate:

While it is true many human societies have waxed and waned, the causes of collapse never before included the death of technology -- a cataclysmic event that itself has no human precedent. Technological failure -- by far the most terminal consequence of petroleum exhaustion -- is not only an entirely new affliction, but one for which, as we shall see, we have already moronically discarded our only possible antidote.

Though human societies are always destroyed by human folly, the previous mechanisms of such destruction were limited to economic failure (which includes the loss of the resource base essential to economic function); political failure (the inability to maintain public services and keep order); cultural collapse (the supplanting of one culture by another, often violently), or some combination of all these forces.

The Western Roman Empire died in the political upheavals of 476 CE, though its economy would continue to feed and supply Europe for another 200 years, until the first Islamic invasions wreaked such havoc the entire continent was flung into a dark age that reduced the population by as much as 75 percent (mostly by starvation) and lasted (depending on the definition) at least five centuries. The Mayan civilization cited in the link above failed economically, collapsing as it consumed its resource base.(A great deal has been written lately about the Mayans, most of it in service to reassurance campaigns.)

Destruction of the Minoan civilization centered on Knossos was inflicted suddenly and at the height of unprecedented achievement by the explosive eruption of Thera or Kallisté in approximately 1628 BCE. This civilization was at least a thousand years old (and probably much older), and the eruption that killed it was perhaps the most violent such event in human experience -- by some estimates equivalent to as many as 25 or 30 hydrogen bombs. It inflicted simultaneous political and economic collapse on the whole Mediterranean region, changed the climate of the entire world for decades and laid the notably peaceful and cooperative Minoan culture open to destruction by aggressively patriarchal Greek invaders. So perished the last matriarchal, goddess-centered civilization in Europe -- a civilization of women so breathtakingly organized for humanitarian purpose, they were able to evacuate all humans, pets, domestic animals and in fact all moveable goods from the cities within range of the eruption: a feat we could not (or would not) duplicate even today. But they had no defense against the devastating tsunami that followed the explosion -- by some estimates a wave nearly 500 feet high. Nor could they prevail against its long-term consequences -- the final extermination of an inconceivably ancient living-earth ethos that might well have saved us from the ecocidal excesses by which we have sealed our own doom.

Horrible as each of these earlier societal collapses were, basic human technology survived every one of them. Bronze gave way to iron just as flint had given way to bronze, but the tools and weapons all operated on identical principles: the blade, the hammer, the atlatl, the bow and arrow, the pulley, lever and inclined plane. Agriculture and transport remained dependent on draft animals. What complex machinery existed was driven by wind or water -- there is strongly suggestive evidence the Minoans had our speciesÂ’ first genuinely trans-oceanic sailing vessels, and there is no question the Romans built the largest, most mechanically elaborate water-powered grain-mills in history -- which does not lessen the contribution of countless enterprises in which the sole energy sources were the intellect and brawn of human workers: free women and men in Knossos and throughout the Minoan civilization, mostly slaves elsewhere and ever after.

But in the past two centuries, all of this ancient technology -- technology dating at least to the Paleolithic and existing in rudimentary form even among the earliest pre-human primates -- has been swept away by the industrial revolution and the subsequent rise and triumph of the petroleum-based technology that now provides virtually all the essentials of modern civilization: not just fuel but items as diverse as permanent-press clothing, contact lenses, vitamin capsules, hearing aids, antihistamines, roofing, computers, compact disks and cell phones. Many of these items -- for example, computers, compact disks, cell phones and contact lenses -- cannot be made without petroleum. Nor can the insulation required for the function and safety of electric wiring. A world without petroleum will thus be a world without electricity, and in a world deprived of electricity, everything we take for granted will become useless junk. The resulting collapse will be absolute: political, economic, cultural (for today our only means of cultural transmission is electronic), and technological as well -- a species-wide collapse of a magnitude and totality that has, as I already said, absolutely no precedent. In other words and also again as I said, species failure.

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III.

CONSIDER WHAT HAPPENS WHEN a group of yuppies are caught by an unseasonably early blizzard on a late-season camping trip deep in the North Cascades back country. The storm destroys the nearest cell-phone transmission towers, making calls for help impossible. Even so, they are not worried. They have expensive sleeping bags and the latest model tent, and they are certain the phone service will be restored within a few hours. But they fail to reckon with the magnitude and destructiveness of terminal climate change: the storm persists for days, and the cell phones remain dead, now reduced to useless junk. Next -- though the campers carried extra supplies “just in case,” -- their food runs out, and they use the last fuel for their backpacker stoves trying to keep warm. Since they have no wilderness survival skills -- no knowledge of edible plants that yet might be found under the premature snow and no ability to hunt or fish -- they are soon starving. Finally however they discover a huge cedar stump protruding above the snow and manage to pry off enough wood to build and light a fire. But they have never made a fire without paper or the variant of lighter fluid called charcoal-starter and it takes all the matches they have left before they succeed. Finally the person they agreed would tend the fire -- the strongest of a group sickened by hunger and half mad with hypothermia -- carelessly falls asleep and lets the fire go out in the night. Now, without the ability to melt snow, they lack even drinking water. Soon they are all dead, killed not by the unexpected blizzard, not even by the lethal technological void into which they were hurled and abandoned, but by their ignorance of traditional human technologies and their consequent inability to adapt: the entire process a microcosm of species failure.

Contrast these ill-fated yuppies -- their story is a composite of wilderness disasters that happen every year -- with hypothetical refugees from the sack of Knossos, survivors of the collapse of Rome, Mayans abandoning their cities in despair. These displaced persons suffered horrific afflictions, but their technology never failed them. The woman from Knossos, though probably homeless and no doubt broken-hearted, can still make fire with a fire drill, can garden and fish and hunt and weave and perhaps even crew or skipper a sailing vessel and thus find employment. The retired Roman centurion rousted from his home by the Visigoths can apply the outdoor skills he learned in 25 years of campaigning; his swordsmanship will guarantee his survival, his skill with a lance will keep him fed and his knowledge of warfare is highly marketable in the post-Imperial chaos. The Mayans abandoning their crumbling city not only possess all the requisite knowledge of firemaking, shelter-building, hunting and fishing but no doubt have already learned the botanical and zoological potential of the lands into which they are withdrawing. In each example the vital and basic survival crafts of firemaking, hunting, food-gathering, making clothing and finding shelter all remain intact.

Until now, none of the cataclysms that periodically afflict humanity -- political collapse or economic collapse or cultural collapse or some combination of each -- was ever accompanied by technological collapse: humanity never lost its collective ability to kindle fires or cook meals, to gather edible plants, to seed and harvest gardens, to hunt wild animals, to fish, to raise and butcher livestock, to harness draft animals for plowing fields and hauling freight, to spin thread and rig a loom, to craft tools and weapons, to sing the songs and chant the lays that preserve and teach lore and wisdom and thus transmit culture from one generation to the next.

More to the point, the technological voids such as the one in which the yuppies died are unique to the world of petroleum. Thus today some degree of technological void follows every disaster, whether it is inflicted by Nature the Impersonal or Nature the Renegade Human. If the political and economic systems continue to function, the technological void is temporary, even if it is on a regional scale. For example a huge portion of Northwestern Washington state became a technological void after a January 1989 storm brought three feet of snow with record-breaking wind and cold -- 17 degrees below zero Fahrenheit for nearly a week -- and the wind so thoroughly wrecked electrical transmission lines that parts of the region were without power for a month or more. But the disaster-preparedness that is habitual among rural peoples combined with the cooperative mores of rural living to quickly compensate for the lack of electricity. In other words, rural culture prevailed -- even as urban peoples similarly stricken, including the residents of the wealthiest neighborhoods, were reduced to abject helplessness by the lack of electricity and running water. Literally frozen out of their homes, the thousands of victims quickly became welfare dependents: in the grim equality of the technological void, even the richest survived only because of public shelters and soup kitchens. Eventually of course the continued functioning of the political and economic systems restored the supply of electricity and water, and thus the void ended.

But suppose -- just as we glimpsed in post-Katrina New Orleans -- there is no restoration of technology. As with the yuppies stranded in the back country, there is no way to call for help, no way to re-light the fire, no way to stay warm, no way to get food and water. But now -- because the government canÂ’t function and the economy is paralyzed -- the technological void becomes technological collapse, and it pulls the government and the economy down with it. And because todayÂ’s culture is dependent on technology so fragile, the culture too is dragged down to oblivion. What began as a technological void has become the socioeconomic equivalent of a black hole, pulling down a city, region -- or an entire civilization.

In local or regional variants of the technological void, the ruling class can theoretically step in at any time to rescue the victims and even prop up the failing institutions again, but in post-Katrina New Orleans it deliberately chose not to -- and it is now clear the choice was policy, not accident. What we witnessed is not merely a horrific and telling example of how the ethos of social Darwinism and the principles of Malthus provide the ruling class with the perfect rationale for doing nothing in such cases; it is also an unmistakable demonstration of how the ruling class responds (and intends to respond) to the apocalypse: the very reason (apart from greed) the ruling class is methodically destroying the social-service safety net just as it is ever more necessary for national survival. The more of us die, the fewer mouths to feed -- and the fewer voices likely to be raised in protest.

Contrast these two events, the abandonment of post-Katrina New Orleans by the most technologically advanced nation on Earth versus the Minoan rescue of all peoples within blast-range of Kallisté, a genuinely stunning truth only recently discovered by archaeology. What does that tell us about ourselves? What does it tell us about those allegedly “primitive” people who lived 3,600 years ago? Perhaps we should stop asking ourselves, “what would Jesus do,” and ask instead, “what would the Minoans do?”

We should also never forget that in the minds of the present-day ruling class, the lives that are so vital to ourselves have no more significance than the lives of cockroaches. Thus the people trapped in the technological voids of the future will predictably be abandoned to technological collapse and all that follows. As increasing men, women and children succumb to exposure, starvation, bad water, disease and myriad expressions of apocalyptic violence, their deaths return to the marketplace not only the food they would have consumed, but myriad other forms of windfall wealth -- all bounty for the hoarding and speculation by which ruling class becomes ever richer. Just as in New Orleans, the afflicted population cries out in despair, but this time there is total cooperation between capitalists and politicians, and the media is not allowed to report the carnage. Hence there are no last-minute New Orleans-style humanitarian concessions, and though troops are called in, it is merely to cordon off the death zone so that no one can escape to tell the tale. Malthusian doctrine prevails. If challenged, the ruling class responds as in Vietnam, “we had to destroy the village to save it.”

Eventually everyone trapped in the death zone dies as the yuppies died: no matches, no compensatory skills, no fire, no food: another (albeit much larger) microcosm of species failure. Such is the potential fate of nearly all the peoples of the world -- fate decreed by the fact that once the oil runs out and petro-technology no longer functions, there is absolutely nothing to take its place.

There are no replacements available now, and no replacements will be available ever again. There is simply not sufficient time for redevelopment. The basic technology itself, the skills and associated knowledge -- firemaking, toolcrafting, living off the land -- were the gift of our ancestors, the priceless legacy of 35,000 years of human experience and no one really knows how many millions of years of pre-human experience. They were skills that literally took lifetimes to master. And they are all gone, most exterminated by centuries of genocide, the remainder belittled to insignificance and thus methodically purged from human memory in our species most consummately suicidal act: slain and scorned and flung away in moronically premature celebration of petro-technological triumph, a global “Mission Accomplished,” a breathtakingly presumptuous burning of the one bridge by which we could have returned to the methods of our ancestors. Thus we have lost forever the one antidote to apocalypse by which we might have ensured our survival.

Our brainwashed resistance to this particular grim truth is itself suicidal. Explaining the fact of our technological plight to a very bright and normally well-informed colleague recently, he first tried to assure me such skills will preserved by the worlds primitive peoples. But all such folk are being methodically exterminated in the name of maximizing the profits of End Time Capitalism -- and until I pointed this out, my colleague had never connected genocide with the loss of knowledge; he was no doubt blinded by the fact that genocide -- which is always inflicted in the name of profit -- is typically either suppressed entirely by corporate media, or its reality and consequences are disguised as “progress.”

Horrible and true, he said, but information on “primitive” technology would still be no problem to obtain. “It’s been collected by anthropologists and most of it is stored in libraries -- recovering it is just a matter accessing a data bank.”

With what computer, when there is no electricity to power it?

“Well, from books then.”

From what book, when the library is 35 miles away and thereÂ’s neither gasoline nor horse to get you there? (Every estimate IÂ’ve seen says rebuilding the national herds of horses and draft animals to their pre-automobile-age size will take at least 50 years and more likely twice that.)

From what library, when the significant libraries have all been destroyed by the rising sea? From what university, when all places of learning have been burned by vengeful Abrahamic fundamentalists, and all the scholars themselves flung screaming into the flames?

And even if the information were somehow found, what of the huge difference between reading how to make fire with flint and steel or a bow-drill and actually making such a fire under field conditions?

“Oh,” he said. “I never thought of that.”

And letÂ’s not forget Gaia always bats last.

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IV.

RECOGNITION OF THE ABSOLUTE horror we are facing -- realization too that we have signed our own global death warrant by discarding beyond recovery the traditional technologies and indigenous wisdom that are the only knowledge that could ever possibly have saved us -- comes slowly, painfully and hard. It is as with any other episode of Death and Dying, precisely as described by Elisabeth Kübler-Ross: first denial, then anger, bargaining, depression and finally acceptance.

Meanwhile the transit system that might have rescued Pugetopolis will now obviously never be built.

The only adequate mass transit -- especially given the reality of petroleum exhaustion -- is mass transit that runs on rails and is powered by electricity. This not only would have insulated us from the runaway inflation and shortages that increasingly hamstring bus operations everywhere on the planet, but here in Washington state would have taken full advantage of the fact we have the second cheapest electric power in the nation.

Such a system should have been built as proposed in 1969 and 1970 and again in the late 1970s, when federal matching funds were available at up to 90 percent. But as I have already noted -- it is a point that cannot be made too often -- all such projects here in Pugetopolis were defeated by the anti-mass-transit reactionaries of Seattle and their rabble-roused supporters: Big Oil and Big Automotive make big bucks off buses but not a penny off electrically-powered rail transport, and the politicians respond accordingly.

Here of course is real reason for the deliberate destruction of the vast and effective electrical public transit system the United States once possessed: note the abandoned streetcar tracks buried under the pavement even in smaller cities. This is also why bus transport is the one mode to which the Third World -- which will soon include Pugetopolis and all the rest of the downsized, outsourced the United States -- is inescapably condemned. Bus systems enable ruling-class politicians to pretend they are serving the public while all the while slipping big bucks to the oil and automotive barons and collecting kickbacks in return.

Hence, as if we are both blind and stupid, Seattle continues to boast of its eco-consciousness, proclaiming itself the most “green” city in America -- unquestionably the greatest municipal hypocrisy in America and one of the biggest Big Lies ever told. It is also the most vivid example I have ever encountered of “adding insult to injury”: usually a cliché overused to meaninglessness but in this instance an accurate indictment.

Pugetopolis voters finally demanded a catch-up project, which was frantically cobbled together in 1991 and belatedly started in 1996. But it too has been repeatedly sabotaged by the same band of Seattle xenophobes, racists, bureaucrats and politicians -- as always with Big Oil and Big Automotive as the puppeteers -- so that the entire system, ironically named Sound Transit but hardly minimal even by the most forgiving Toonerville Trolley standards, is now nearly a decade behind schedule, its completion targeted for sometime in 2030. In other words, the saboteurs have won: long before the tracks are laid, the technological basis of the petro-culture will be dead as last winterÂ’s salmon, and the petroleum dependent economy and its associated culture will have long since begun to collapse too. Indeed the petro-lords and the automotive autocrats continue to line their pockets even now that the collapse has indisputably begun.

As further proof of ruling class Malthusian intent, there will be no relief, neither affordable fuel for the single mother whose daughters wanted to go to grandmaÂ’s house in the country, nor adequate public transport for the rest of us in the growing legion of the poor. Our betrayal is forever.

For an enlightening glimpse of what real public transport looks like, click here.

Without such a system to compensate for soaring petroleum prices, what will eventually happen is that -- just as bread shortages and hugely inflated bread prices triggered bread riots in 1917 Petrograd (the spark that lit the Russian Revolution) -- so will gas-pump violence inevitably explode into petroleum riots in the 21st Century United States.

But here -- in a classic example of how when history repeats itself, it typically does so as farce -- there will be no sudden effort to achieve economic democracy (or even an effort to restore the political democracy already swept away by capitalism’s inevitable march toward fascism). People who murder one another over trinkets are simply not capable of the requisite empathy, much less the collective mindset -- especially given the consequences of three decades of deliberate moronation. Police and perhaps soldiers will machine gun some of the rioters to death; the authorities will gun, gas or cudgel many more into permanent disability, but in the main the people will do nothing beyond a mass sighing of present-day America‘s favorite response: “whatever.” The placid conformity enforced by moronation long ago imposed an ultimate taboo on the expression or even acknowledgement of anger, and in any case the combination of forcible disarmament, judicial denial of the right to self defense and presidential denial of military training (the real purpose behind Nixon’s abolition of the draft) has robbed the population of any genuine capability to survive -- and the inclination to resist extinction has thus died accordingly: precisely why I so often proclaim, “in these times, survival is a revolutionary act.”

Not that many heed: note again the resigned helplessness characteristic of the people in the Superdome and how it is already appearing on the faces the people I saw at the bus stop, the dawning realization of the basic Third World truth: that in a world where “will work for food” is the best to which we can aspire, the only real freedom is death.

The corporate media will meanwhile spin the fuel riots as just another expression of the American penchant for fighting to the death over material goods -- another episode in the post-Roman coliseum of television -- and then Britney Spears will again flash her shaven pubes and any collective memory of the entire incident will be drowned in a sea of tranquilizers (by those who can still pay for increasingly unaffordable prescriptions) or euthanized with all the other newly slain brain cells by a cascade of binge alcohol and illegal drugs (the only mood adjustment available to those too poor to have recourse to the ever-more-exclusive privilege of health care). Lastly -- just to ensure the proletariat remains anaesthetized to maximum passivity --some reincarnation of Timothy Leary will no doubt arise to again proclaim that intoxication to the point of mindlessness is the new revolution: “Hey hey ho ho the human mind has got to go”

Republic/Ratic politics -- the politics of dismay that alienate ever more voters from the electoral process -- will continue to shrink America into one-party despotism. The Republican Party will become ever more obviously what it has been since the 1930s -- the primary vessel of U.S. fascism -- and the Democratic Party will continue to play the role of shill, agitating false hope and repaying the faithful with methodical betrayal, just as it has done since the Carter presidency marked the end of New Deal humanitarianism and the advent of a new American theocracy.

Nor will there be, even “left of center/off of the strip” (as the remarkable Suzanne Vega so aptly put it two decades ago), any effective attempt to analyze the riots and their suppression in terms of class struggle and thus mobilize resistance to the ongoing collapse. The orthodox Marxists have already discredited themselves by holding to their claim the apocalypse is impossible because capitalism will always self-renew (a breathtakingly paradoxical expression of faith in the infinite resilience of an ultimate enemy), and the eco-socialists (who are such elitists they regard class struggle as irrelevant) will see in the petro-riots merely more proof that the real struggle is man against nature, with the rioters’ refusal to “live with less” the “real problem” and thereby providing another rationale for imposition of additional tyrannies: solve the transportation problem by requiring that we sleep at our counters, desks, and machines, with permission to go to our homes only on weekends or days off. Meanwhile the self-proclaimed “progressives” will continue to content themselves with slogans: “visualize abundance” -- no doubt an especially vital technique when one’s entire life is reduced to “will work for food.”

We intellectuals will of course continue our increasingly marginalized debate, until that too is silenced, probably not by some midnight band of secret policemen -- we are already too irrelevant for that sort of drama -- but when the last electrical generators suck down the last drops of fuel and shut down the last computers and break the last strands of the once-global Web and the last living relics of this dying civilization are silenced forever.

...There are perhaps a dozen figures seated around the low fire in the boulders below the hilltop, two more as watchers hidden among the towering Douglas firs on the crest and still two more, probably the youngest and yet unfeathered, guarding the horse herd in the broad meadow beside the swift murmuring River. The fire is deliberately kept small so it cannot be seen at any distance, but now a cedar-knot pops and flares, glinting on the ringmail worn by men and women alike and briefly making demonlight in the eyes of several formidable dogs sprawled near their human partners. Human, canine and horse, these are Swift Gray Wolves -- bearded men with weatherbeaten faces, wind-bronzed women possessed of that lithe self-assurance the 21st Century glimpsed only through the lens of ancient archaeology. They are warriors of the Nooksack River People, mountain folk who supplement hunting, fishing and subsistence agriculture by scavenging ruined cities and industrial sites for iron and valuables; the Swift Gray Wolves were riding southward down the trace of a vanishing highway toward the haunted desolation that used to be the Everett-Seattle-Tacoma-Olympia metropolis, and they have camped for the night. They have already eaten their trail rations of elk jerky and smoked salmon and fresh-picked blackberries, and now as the last of the blue Northern twilight slowly dwindles to total darkness, they set aside the blades and arrowheads they had been whetting and pass a skin of raspberry wine. One of their number draws a small harp from the saddlebags beside her and chords it with great skill; her name is Chellyn, and she sings old handed-down ballads of Scotland and Camelot and Troy, then another song that tells of an age when men flew like Eagles but in their arrogance slew the Children of the Earth and trod on Mother Moon, provoking her to drown all their cities, even the one guarded by the great bronze goddess they built to placate her fury. Finally Chellyn sings a long passage from the lament for glorious Knossos, an invocatory lay called “Time before Time,” protective and soothing despite its depth of loss, a bedtime prayer to ease all but the watchers into slumber. Earth is healing; the Mabon moon is rising full and triumphant above the cloud-high peaks of the Twin Sisters Who Give Birth to the River...

Such a world -- the half-medieval/half-aboriginal level of itÂ’s primitivism is probably far too optimistic -- may seem centuries away. But most of us here in Pugetopolis where there is no public transport worthy of the name never suspected weÂ’d see $3.45 gas in 2007.

Which brings me back to last weekend and the awful truth I so suddenly understood: that the apocalypse is already here, not only in the fuel we can no longer afford but in all the associated unemployment, bankruptcy, homelessness, starvation and disease that now looms. For far too many of us -- especially the kids drawn to gang life by an omnipresent hopelessness they can hardly name -- death already seems the only possible freedom.

But now suddenly I again remember the Blackout: perhaps we can join hands so nobody gets lost, and just like weÂ’re finding our way out of a cave, go to where the fresh air comes in.

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(Written 5-13 May 2007, posted only now due to an infinitely frustrating but naggingly unavoidable series of interruptions.)

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April 29, 2007

THE GLOVES COME OFF: DEMOCRATS, BUSH COLLABORATE TO IMPOSE NEW TYRANNIES

THERE ARE TWO EXCEPTIONALLY grave dangers to American liberty arising from the present, post-Virginia-Tech forcible-disarmament frenzy. These are:

(1)-The criminalization of even the mildest forms of mental illness, as proposed by Rep. Carolyn McCarthy (D-NY), in HR 297.

(2)-The criminalization of political protest and dissent, as proposed by Sen. Frank Lautenberg, (D-NJ), in S 1237.

Each of these measures is enthusiastically supported by the Bush Regime. The Lautenberg bill was written at White House/Justice Department request -- a leading Democratic senator serving as the mouthpiece for a despised Republican administration -- an unprecedented act of collaboration with the most corrupt regime in U.S. history. Once again, opposition to the Second Amendment is being used as a diversion behind which to conceal an all-out, bipartisan attack on the entire Bill of Rights -- including, via S 1237, repeal of the presumption of innocence that is the cornerstone of all English-language jurisprudence.

Meanwhile, welcome to the New American Reich, where (if McCarthy, Lautenberg and Bush have their way), anybody deemed a mental case, an effective labor activist or a disruptive political nonconformist will soon be forcibly disarmed, denied all rational means of self defense and thereby condemned to perpetual victimhood.

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Modern efforts to criminalize mental dysfunction have a long history dating back to Adolf Hitler and Nazi Germany and are typically part of a broader right-wing agenda of oppression and euthanasia. But in the United States, the primary advocates of criminalization are the forcible disarmament cult and the Communitarian movement, members of which universally (and often vehemently) claim to be leftists and/or “progressives.”

The Communitarians have argued for at least two decades that diagnosis of mental illness should instantly terminate not only all one's civil rights but also strip one of all privileges as well, driver's licenses included, after which the victim of such determination could then theoretically earn back the abolished rights and privileges in carefully supervised increments. Toward this end the Communitarians -- who despite their leftist disguise and innocuous-sounding name are radical Skinnerian fascists of the harshest sort -- are demanding creation of a national registry of mental patients. Deliberately established and maintained as a powerfully oppressive tool of social control, this roster of official pariahdom would include the names of anyone now or ever in any form of mental health treatment, regardless of the relative mildness or severity of the condition for which they are being treated. (Google "communitarians" and scroll at will for additional information.)

Despite its huge contempt for the Constitution, the Communitarian faction is but one small portion of the forcible disarmament cult, but it is probably disproportionately powerful. Its intellectual prowess is considerable, and it often assumes a behind-the-scenes leadership role, focusing on the development of strategy, tactics and ideology. Another venue of profound Communitarian influence is the Hillary Clinton wing of the Democratic Party. It was the Communitarians who provided the Clintons and their cronies with the ideological justification for the Democratic Party’s abandonment of New Deal principles and its subsequent wholesale betrayal of the working class. The Communitarians’ grasp of Orwellian principles is also very evident in the present-day effort to redefine forcible disarmament as “gun safety” and the present tactic of concealing disarmament schemes behind apparently friendly but patently false gestures toward firearms owners.

All this dovetails neatly with the broader forcible-disarmament-cult agenda of reducing legal firearms ownership by any means possible. Since it is credibly estimated as many as 50 percent of all U.S. citizens will at some time require some form of mental health treatment (“treatment” defined in the broadest sense, to include grief counseling, post-divorce therapy and even self-esteem classes or remedial reading for dyslexics), a favorite ploy of forcible disarmament fanatics is to demand closure of "the mental health loophole" in such a way that participation in any treatment process is penalized by automatic forcible disarmament: either turn in your guns before you see the professional caregiver, or the police will soon be there to kick in your front door, shoot your dogs, wreck the interior of your house by violent search and terrorize your spouse and children into lifelong bouts of shivering catatonia. Typically -- and the forcible disarmament advocates make no secret of the fact they are obscenely aroused by the prospect of unleashing such police brutality against firearms owners -- this means criminalizing all forms of mental illness or mental dysfunction and thereby forcibly disarming anyone who is or ever has been in any sort of therapy or formalized healing, permanently abolishing their gun rights, no appeal allowed. This is already the law in New York City -- if you consult a mental health professional even once in NYC (no matter the nature of your problem), your name is reported to the police and you lose your gun rights forever. Indeed, the Democrats attempted to impose a similar restriction on Washington state residents in 1994, but it was vigorously resisted there by a coalition of mental health professionals, who recognize in such criminalization a huge disincentive to voluntary treatment.

Which brings us to the present "mental health loophole" bill pending in Congress. As originally written, it was called the “Our Lady of Peace Act" (Google for details), and it would have permanently denied firearms ownership to anyone “adjudicated as a mental defective or committed to a mental institution,” which is further defined as occurring whenever "a court, board, commission, or other lawful authority determines that an individual is mentally retarded or of marked subnormal intelligence, mentally ill, or mentally incompetent" (HR 4757, 2002, Sec. 103 and 103:c). By including the phrase “other lawful authority,“ the measure would have empowered any psychiatrist, psychologist or even guidance counselor to deny someone their gun rights forever, merely by declaring that person “mentally ill” -- a designation that covers everything from definitively murderous Andrea Yates/Cho Seung Hui psychosis to the mildest cases of neurotic nail-biting and low-self-esteem fidgets.

The generic designation “mentally ill” would also have allowed the forcible disarmament of anyone ever found to be “mentally disabled” -- never mind that “mental disability” is a very specifically focused evaluation of one’s employability or lack thereof, typically for purposes of granting welfare stipends or Social Security disability payments. Thus a finding of “mental disability” has absolutely nothing to do with one’s suitability to own firearms, vote or exercise any other Constitutional right. But the Our Lady of Peace Act, which McCarthy has introduced in every Congress since 2002, would nevertheless require the Social Security Administration and every state welfare agency to add to the federal government’s computerized catalogue of criminals the name and dossier of every individual who had ever been found to be even temporarily “mentally disabled” -- resulting in a permanent loss of Second Amendment rights against which there would be no possibility of defense or appeal. Thus criminalizing “mental disability” (or any other mental disorder in even the mildest forms) would clearly further the forcible disarmament cult’s long range objective of making the requirements for legal firearms ownership increasingly prohibitive -- ultimately reducing the number of legal firearms owners by the aforementioned 50 percent. The cult’s triumph would be all the greater for the fact the imposition of “prohibited person” status would allow disarmament by outright seizure, thereby exempting government from any compensatory (buy-back) costs.

Under extreme pressure from mental health professionals, McCarthy has slightly modified her present proposal, HR 297, so that those denied their Second Amendment rights on the basis of mental health considerations would be specifically limited to persons who have been “adjudicated as mentally defective or…committed to mental institutions.” Alas, the term “mental defective” remains undefined -- leaving unanswered whether it includes those who have been found to be “mentally disabled.” It also leaves a number of other questions as to its scope, such as whether a child diagnosed as suffering from attention deficit disorder is to be branded “mentally defective” and therefore -- after reaching adulthood -- denied firearms ownership for life.

Apparently -- though this is not clear either -- McCarthy has meanwhile broadened the term “committed” to make it as prohibitive as possible: that is, to permanently deny gun rights to anyone formally committed to a mental institution of any kind (including out-patient clinics) regardless of whether the commitment was mandatory (court ordered) or voluntary. (Present federal law allows those who undergo voluntary commitment to retain their Second Amendment rights unless other specific prohibitions apply.) Furthermore, McCarthy -- who formerly made no secret of her froth-at-the-mouth hatred of firearms and firearms owners but now (in service to the Democrats’ new deception policy) speaks much more softly -- recently told ABC News that in the wake of the Virginia Tech shootings, she would amend the bill back to its original, criminalize-all-mental-disorder wording except for the fact “the NRA…is holding everybody hostage.” Given that the National Rifle Association has supported the Our Lady of Peace Act from the very beginning, HR 297 included, McCarthy’s accusation is not only false but is an especially misleading, hypocritical and even malicious claim: no surprise given the infinite maliciousness that is the forcible disarmament hysteric’s most notorious characteristic.

But on the HR 297 issue, the NRA (to which I have belonged since 1951) is equally treacherous and hypocritical, especially given its demonstrably false claim to be a defender of the entire Bill of Rights. Indeed the NRA’s opposition to the civil rights of mental patients reveals the frustrating extent to which the organization has deteriorated into nothing more than an instrument of the Republican Party. (And the Republican Party -- especially since Big Business America’s 1930s alliance with Hitler, Mussolini and Franco -- is itself the U.S. equivalent of the fascist parties that formerly dominated Europe.) Thus the NRA implicitly embraces the right wing position that “mental defectives” should be savagely oppressed if not actually euthanized. Not that the NRA is out of step with American opinion: most U.S. citizens -- though they are loathe to admit it -- emphatically agree that “mental defectives“ deserve the harshest treatment possible. As a consequence, the U.S. has long been infamous for the industrial world’s most superstitiously ignorant fear of mental affliction and its most violent rejection of anyone so afflicted, attitudes that have been credibly traced to the enduring influence of Abrahamic religion and the grave extent to which our society remains a defacto theocracy. (Anyone who doubts this assessment of our national values need look no further than our officially murderous hatred of those who are homeless.) Meanwhile other Second Amendment advocacy groups remain stonily silent on the patient-rights implications of forcible disarmament,* understandably (given these selfsame U.S. attitudes) terrified they will be accused of supporting “guns for crazies.” Never mind that study after study proves mental patients are statistically no more dangerous than any other group of Americans -- and far less dangerous than some.
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*Gun Owners of America has vehemently opposed the Our Lady of Peace Act and HR 297, and it has done so for the very best of reasons: these measures could “bar mentally stable people from buying guns” merely because they had sought mental health treatment, and it is “morally and constitutionally wrong to require law-abiding citizens to first prove their innocence to the government before they can exercise their rights -- whether it's Second Amendment rights, First Amendment rights, or any other right.” Alas, GOA -- which based on its rhetoric seems to be very closely tied to the Christian Theocracy faction of the Republican Party -- also opposes such legislation for the very worst of reasons: it echoes the traditional Jewish/Christian/Islamic stance that the husband is god’s representative in the household and, as god’s chief enforcer, has unlimited god-given right to beat his wife and children. Thus GOA protests that denying guns to family patriarchs convicted of domestic violence is inflicting punishment for “very minor offenses that include pushing, shoving or…merely yelling at a family member” -- never mind the bloody testimony of Crystal Brame’s death and far too many other murders just as bad or worse.


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The criminalization of labor activism, political agitation and effective dissent is not the stated purpose of Lautenberg’s newly introduced S 1237, which was revealed in the Senate very late Friday 27 April 2007, the introduction obviously timed to minimize public disclosure and avoid press scrutiny. But given that the Republicans now and for a long while have condemned anyone who opposes Führer George Bush and his New American Reich, denouncing each opponent as a “terrorist” or “terrorist sympathizer,” the impact of the measure is made obvious by its stated purpose: “to increase public safety by permitting the Attorney General to deny the transfer of firearms or the issuance of firearms and explosives licenses to known or suspected dangerous terrorists.” Predictably, Bush himself has already demanded S 1237’s immediate enactment. Just as predictably, Lautenberg -- perhaps even more fanatical a forcible disarmament advocate than McCarthy -- lauds its unprecedented subversion of the Constitutionally implied principle of presumed innocence as “too long” overdue.

Absolute proof of the calculated political malevolence embodied in the Lautenberg proposal -- proof too of how the Democrats have finally abandoned any pretense of being civil libertarians and now (in the name of forcible disarmament) fully and even gleefully embrace the Bush Regime’s agenda of totally nullifying the Bill of Rights -- is found in the federal government’s post-9/11 redefinition of the term “terrorism” to include any form of political protest that is genuinely disruptive. Participants in a legitimate strike or a protest that blocks or even slows vehicular traffic could thus be persecuted as “terrorists.”

Quoth the American Civil Liberties Union in an analysis disseminated on 6 December 2002: “The definition of domestic terrorism is broad enough to encompass the activities of several prominent activist campaigns and organizations. Greenpeace, Operation Rescue, Vieques Island and World Trade Organization protesters and the Environmental Liberation Front have all recently engaged in activities that could subject them to being investigated as engaging in domestic terrorism.”

Meanwhile Reason magazine, the official journal of the Libertarian Party, has repeatedly noted that in the eyes of the Bush Regime, “terrorist” and “enemy combatant” are synonymous

In other words, any member of any labor union that participated in the Seattle WTO protests could be labeled a “terrorist“ merely based on the union’s presence there and -- under Lautenberg‘s S 1237 -- he or she could be forcibly disarmed forever. But the reality is far more chilling: given the criteria of disruptiveness, the participants in any effective strike or job action can now be subjugated as “terrorists.” And given the Third Reich cloak of secrecy that now hides all U.S. security matters from judicial scrutiny, such subjugation could never be appealed. Indeed it is conceivable a labor activist (or any other opponent of the status quo) could be disappeared forever into the gulag of Guantanamo merely on the basis of the spurious argument that the (denied) attempt to purchase a firearm is absolute proof of “enemy combatant” intent.

The law that would enable such outrages should more properly be labeled the Lautenberg/Bush/Alberto Gonzales Bill of Rights Nullification Act of 2007 because it would not only subject all future U.S. firearms ownership to the tyrannical whims of the modern-day incarnation of the dread Reich Security Service (RSHA), but it would repeal the presumption of innocence that is the great wellspring of the American legal system. Thus, with active Democratic party collaboration, at the very least the Bush Regime is laying the groundwork to forcibly disarm every labor activist in the United States -- and anyone else it chooses to put on its (secret) enemies list. Thus too another advance for the modern-day variant of fascism -- not marching forward on hobnailed jackboots but sneaking past us on politically correct rubber soles.

Note also how McCarthy’s HR 297 undeniably anticipates enactment of S 1237: “The Secretary of Homeland Security shall make available to the Attorney General…records, updated not less than quarterly, which are relevant to a determination of whether a person is disqualified from possessing or receiving a firearm…”(Sec. 101:b.1.A). Now the relationship between the two measures comes into sharp focus: Lautenberg abolishes the presumption of innocence and grants the government the unprecedented power to rule on our political reliability while McCarthy provides the infrastructure to make sure the secret police get every possible scrap of information. Suddenly I wonder if closing the alleged “mental health loophole” -- though no doubt an egregious blow to our freedom -- isn’t maybe just another red herring to distract us from the genuinely fatal wound that would be dealt our liberty by Lautenberg’s coup-de-grace against due process.

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Predictions past and future: as some of you may remember, before I was booted off Progressive Independent for speaking tactless truth to tacky tyranny, I predicted that the Democrats would take back Congress in 2006, would founder pathetically in their efforts to accomplish any meaningful socioeconomic change, and would then cut a win-win deal with the Bush Regime to impose forcible disarmament and further subvert the Bill of Rights in general, thereby enabling each side to claim accomplishments dearest to its ideologues’ alleged hearts. Though the onslaught is not developing exactly the way I imagined it would, there is no doubt such an offensive is underway. But just as I foresaw the betrayal of our electoral hopes for Medicare reform and the restoration of labor rights, I can no longer doubt this new Democrat/Republican collaboration to abolish the presumption of innocence and grant the Homeland Security apparatus the ultimate power of approval or disapproval over all individual civilian firearms purchases is (A) the beginning of the final assault on the Constitution by representatives of the corporate ruling class and (B) the beginning of a Bush Regime effort to co-opt public reaction to the Virginia Tech massacre and thus rehabilitate its public image by launching its own forcible disarmament campaign -- not out of the craven hoplophobia that so agitates the Democrats and alienates so many voters, but in the name of the same self-proclaimed robust patriotism that seduced us into cheering the (failed) conquest of Iraq. I can hear it now: “if y’all love your country, you’ll give us the common-sense power to determine who’s politically reliable enough to have a gun.” The last time the politicians said something like that, the language was German.


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NOTES:

The text of HR 297 and the unfolding details of S 1237 are available through the excellent and superbly useful Thomas legislative search engine.

A dramatic and unexpected increase in the workload generated by a longstanding editorial project will leave me little time or energy in the foreseeable future for writing in this space. Thus the above may be my last entry -- at least any entry of any significant length -- for rather a long while. As ever, thank you all for your readership.

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April 06, 2007

BACK IN TWO WEEKS: MY APOLOGY FOR THE TEMPORARY SILENCE

THE PRESS OF PROJECTS is such that until mid-April -- sometime during the week of the 16th -- I am unlikely to post here again. Believe me, this is no vacation: the demands of my normal monthly writing deadlines are vastly complicated by a number of seasonal matters piled on by the calendar, and most of the seasonal stuff is the kind of non-creative energy-draining drudgery I despise: seemingly endless tasks that leave me exhausted and feeling frustrated at the same time. However, this too shall pass. Meanwhile thank you for your interest and understanding.

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March 28, 2007

THE U.S. DOMESTIC CRISIS INTENSIFIES: THE ADVERSARIES BARE THEIR FANGS

OUR NATION IS SUNDERED by a huge and worsening schism, its two sides evident in the contrast between the DemocratsÂ’ vicious betrayal of their own tax-reform pledge and Bill MoyersÂ’ desperate plea for organization of popular resistance to the ongoing plunge into sweatshop fascism. These two concurrent developments -- or more accurately the contrast between the long term trends they represent -- vividly illustrate the parameters of the class struggle provoked by the increasingly merciless excesses of the corporate plutocracy: on one side the tiny ruling class of obscenely wealthy fat-cats and the increasingly ruthless politicians who are their protectors and enablers, and on the other side all the rest of us -- a far-too-passive citizenry that is nevertheless beginning to react in anger as we are all thrust ever deeper into inescapable poverty and servitude.

Despite the red-herring distraction of the Iraq War (could such distraction be this war’s clandestine purpose?), the intensifying class struggle was a major factor -- for some demographic groups the only factor -- in the deepening socioeconomic desperation that led to the Democrats’ landslide victory in the 2006 election. The Democrats pledged not just a symbolic hike in the minimum wage but genuine economic reforms -- substantial reductions in the deadly burdens inflicted on seniors and disabled people by the Medicare Part D Prescription Drug Lord Benefit, restoration of health care cutbacks imposed on the poor (and especially their children) -- in general a widespread rollback of the Bush Regime policies of euthanasia-by-neglect that express the attitude of the corporate ruling class toward those of us deemed “not profitable.” But to finance this rollback, it was necessary to repeal the unprecedented tax cuts by which the Bush Regime and the Republican Party so lavishly rewarded their benefactors -- a repeal the Democrats fervently promised throughout the 2006 campaign but treacherously killed in the Senate last Friday, 23 March 2007. Which killed all the promised economic reforms too -- at least until 2009 -- and proved once again the Democrats are nothing but Republicans in disguise.

Thus Moyers’ central argument -- that only a “Third American Revolution” will save our nation from a final plunge into a perpetual dark age of everlasting tyranny -- is both timely and legitimately prophetic.

Moyers’ great hope, like mine, is that our needed revolution can be accomplished peacefully, by intelligent use of the tools for change uniquely embodied in our Constitution. For if the struggle turns violent, our nation will surely be destroyed beyond any possibility of reconstruction. Never mind that in such a war there is no doubt the ruling class would win: protected as they are in their walled enclaves, their edicts enforced by mercenary armies with unlimited technologies of torture and oppression, no foe could stand against them; never mind that our only hope of “liberation” would then lie in invasion by equally vicious tyrants from without -- precisely the human condition from the advent of patriarchy onward, with the recent years of blessed liberty diminished to nothing more than a fading spark in a seemingly endless darkness. Indeed the only North American precedent for such a conflict is the Indian War, which lasted some 300 years and ended with the near-total extermination of an entire aboriginal people and the merciless subjugation of the few who survived: thus the ultimate either-or mandate for preservation of our Constitution and its mechanisms for the peaceful resolution of conflict.

To be sure, there have been other tumultuous times in our national experience -- the original Revolution and the forever unique Constitution that resulted, the end of slavery via the Civil War, and since then the Constitutionally protected near-revolutions of the trust-busting era, the New Deal, the Civil Rights Movement and the far-from-finished WomenÂ’s Movement, all of which Moyers defines as the Second American Revolution. But the consequences of each of these conflicts -- even the Civil War -- were ultimately eased by the seemingly limitless resources available to the Caucasian majority, so that what would eventually be labeled the American Dream became sufficiently real it functioned as an ultimate antidote to the sorts of class-war horrors so common everywhere else on our strife-torn planet.

But this time there can be no such salvation: terminal climate change combined with the exhaustion of petroleum supplies will inflict a double apocalypse that has no precedent in human history. While many cultures have risen and fallen, while many economies have boomed and collapsed, human technology remained constant and sustainable; for example the use of draft animals spanned the millennia from the Neolithic well into the 20th Century. But the advent of the Petroleum Age severed all such connections with the past -- and thus when the oil runs out, it will not be merely economy and culture that dies. All modern technology will also be slain. The American Dream is dead, never to be resurrected. The only question -- especially given the ruin inflicted by terminal climate change -- is how far back to basics we will be flung: to a permanent middle-19th-Century, horse-and-buggy technology, to a permanent neo-Neolithic or early Bronze Age technology, or to extinction, the record of our lost species preserved only in ruins and fossils.

Meanwhile, the politicians engage in an ever-more-deafening clash of ever-more-moronic sound-bites, debating not how the government might respond but whether any of these apocalyptic prospects are even real. Given this deliberately distracting carnival of clamor, few of us realize it is all illusion, nothing more than magic-show patter and shell-game sleight-of-hand, a calculated deception that disguses deeds already done. For the hideous truth is that the corporate fat-cats recognized the looming crisis decades ago and responded accordingly; they are now employing the hurly-burly of meaningless noise to camouflage their total assault on liberty and civilization. Thus they are concentrating their wealth and power into a modern-day equivalent of manorial despotism -- the infinitely sadistic Elizabeth Bathory absolutism that is often incorrectly labeled feudalism. They are empowering themselves as the New Aristocracy -- and they are subjugating all the rest of us to neo-serfdom: the strategic motive behind outsourcing, downsizing, pension-looting, the re-imposition of indentured servitude disguised as bankruptcy reform; the strategic motive for euthanasia via destruction of the social-service safety net, via deliberate denial of life-sustaining drugs under the Medicare Part D Prescription Drug Lord Benefit, and via the deliberate denial of health care in general; the strategic motive for the genocide by neglect in post-Katrina New Orleans and the genocide by deliberately instigated religious war in Iraq. The purpose is simple: the New Aristocrats are ensuring the post-apocalyptic survival of their own kind -- with slavery and death for all the rest of us.

Thus the challenge: if the fat cats can suppress the ideals of democracy here in the United States -- where such ideals have been institutionalized longer than anywhere on earth -- then the fat cats can easily exterminate whatever democratic yearnings might arise elsewhere. Which we already know is their sworn intent.

The ensuing class struggle is the context of the following two commentaries. The first is a revised version of a report I disseminated to everyone on my “Friends and Colleagues” e-mail list on Sunday. The second is a Moyers’ speech that -- though only if our liberty survives the forthcoming conflict -- will no doubt be included (like the works of Thomas Paine, William Lloyd Garrison and Harriet Beecher Stowe), among the basic documents of U.S. history.

How 11 Class-Traitor Democrats Preserved Bush's Billionaire Tax Cuts at Least until 2009

Eleven class-traitor Democrats -- George Bush Republicans in everything but name -- predictably betrayed the newly Democratic SenateÂ’s effort to roll back the huge tax cuts the Bush Regime granted its wealthiest beneficiaries, thereby ensuring that meaningful tax reform is impossible at least until after the 2008 elections.

The 23 March roll-call vote, on Amendment 547 (S. Amdt. 545) to Senate Congressional Resolution 21 (S. Con. Res. 21) -- the federal budget for fiscal 2008 -- failed by 58-38.

Do the math: 58 minus 11 is 47; 38 plus 11 is 49. The false-flag Democrats thus bear solitary, total and exclusive responsibility for the defeat of Amendment 547.

One of these perfidious pimps for plutocracy is Washington stateÂ’s own Sen. Maria Cantwell. The other senators who voted to defend and maintain the huge tax breaks the Bush Regime has given the ruling class are Max Baucus of Montana, Thomas R. Carper of Delaware, Mary L. Landrieu of Louisiana, Blanche L. Lincoln of Arkansas, Bill Nelson of Florida, E. Benjamin Nelson of Nebraska, Ken Salazar of Colorado, Jon Tester of Montana, Jim Webb of Virginia and Ron Wyden of Oregon.

Amendment 547’s author and original sponsor was Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont, the federal government’s only elected socialist. No doubt merely to further the Democrats’ deception of the electorate, 547 was co-sponsored by Maryland Senator Barbara Mikulski. But just as Sanders said in an impassioned speech on the Senate floor, the vote on the amendment proves beyond any doubt “which side we consider ourselves to be on.”

Precisely because the Bush RegimeÂ’s reward-the-rich/punish-the-rest-of-us tax scheme remains in effect, ALL of the social-service reforms the Democrats promised are now delayed until 2009. Indeed -- having experienced this sort of Democratic treachery too many times (I will never forget how warmonger Johnson ran as the Vietnam peace candidate and how the Clintons sabotaged health care reform) -- I cannot doubt the betrayal was not only planned long ago but is intended to be permanent: continuation of the murderous class war initiated by Nixon and escalated by every DemoPublican president since, no tax reform, no expansion of social services, no improvement in health care or public education, no prospects of betterment for anyone save the aristocracy -- not now, not ever again

That the resultant continued and worsening denial of social services is ultimately euthanasia by neglect clearly delights not only the Democrats and Republicans but especially their pluotocratic masters: there is no other explanation for the vote on 547. After all, the death of every “unprofitable” human -- those of us who are disabled or elderly and the increasing number of us who have been flung into inescapable poverty by outsourcing -- is simply more money in the pockets, offshore bank accounts and Swiss lock-boxes of the corporate ruling class: the grim reality underlying my oft-repeated statement that in this era, survival itself is a revolutionary act.

And this time -- unless the story continues to be suppressed by corporate media -- the DemocratsÂ’ treachery may be a real turning point: a genuine moment of infamy, it proves beyond any lingering doubt and for everyone to see that the Democrats are no different from the Republicans, especially in their ideological conviction that the rich should pay no taxes at all -- that the poorer we are, the more likely we are to need government services, and that the tax burden should therefore be shifted accordingly, never mind the added weight is already pressing us into our graves.

Which in turn proves -- more definitively than anything I have ever witnessed -- that restoration of the Democratic Party to its New Deal values is impossible and therefore absurd to contemplate any further: that our only hope of achieving MoyersÂ’ Third Revolution is construction of an entirely new party from the grassroots up.

The U.S. Senate roll-call vote on Amendment 547 is available here. For some reason -- apparently censorship inflicted by the MuNu site server -- I cannot post a working link to Sanders' web site, which includes the C-Span telecast of the passionate speech by which he introduced Amendment 547. Hence if you want more information about Sanders, please Google "U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders" and click on sanders.senate.gov/.

To me, Sanders typifies precisely the kind of person around whom a new party might coalesce.

But As We Dither, Moyers Warns Us Time Is Running Out: ‘America Is Melting Down’

The following are excerpts from a speech the journalist Bill Moyers gave at Occidental College last month:

Beginning a quarter of a century ago a movement of corporate, political, and religious fundamentalists gained ascendancy over politics and made inequality their goal. They launched a crusade to dismantle the political institutions, the legal and statutory canons, and the intellectual and cultural frameworks that have held private power. And they had the money to back up their ambition.

Let me read you something:

When powerful interests shower Washington with millions in campaign contributions, they often get what they want. But it is ordinary citizens and firms that pay the price and most of them never see it coming. This is what happens if you don't contribute to their campaigns or spend generously on lobbying. You pick up a disproportionate share of America's tax bill. You pay higher prices for a broad range of products from peanuts to prescriptions. You pay taxes that others in a similar situation have been excused from paying. You're compelled to abide by laws while others are granted immunity from them. You must pay debts that you incur while others do not. You're barred from writing off on your tax returns some of the money spent on necessities while others deduct the cost of their entertainment. You must run your business by one set of rules, while the government creates another set for your competitors. In contrast, the fortunate few who contribute to the right politicians and hire the right lobbyists enjoy all the benefits of their special status. Make a bad business deal; the government bails them out. If they want to hire workers at below market wages, the government provides the means to do so. If they want more time to pay their debts, the government gives them an extension. If they want immunity from certain laws, the government gives it. If they want to ignore rules their competition must comply with, the government gives its approval. If they want to kill legislation that is intended for the public, it gets killed.

I'm not quoting from Karl Marx's Das Kapital or Mao's Little Red Book. I'm quoting Time magazine. From the heart of America's media establishment comes the judgment that America now has "government for the few at the expense of the many."

We are talking about nothing less that a class war declared a generation ago, in a powerful polemic by the wealthy right-winger, William Simon, who had been Richard Nixon's Secretary of the Treasury. In it he declared that "funds generated by business... must rush by the multimillions" to conservative causes. The trumpet was sounded for the financial and business class to take back the power and privileges they had lost as a result of the Great Depression and the New Deal. They got the message and were soon waging a well-orchestrated, lavishly-financed movement. Business Week put it bluntly: "Some people will obviously have to do with less... .It will be a bitter pill for many Americans to swallow the idea of doing with less so that big business can have more." The long-range strategy was to cut workforces and their wages, scour the globe in search of cheap labor, trash the social contract and the safety net that was supposed to protect people from hardships beyond their control, deny ordinary citizens the power to sue rich corporations for malfeasance and malpractice, and eliminate the ability of government to restrain what editorialists for the Wall Street Journal admiringly call "the animal spirits of business."

Looking backwards, it all seems so clear that we wonder how we could have ignored the warning signs at the time. What has been happening to working people is not the result of Adam Smith's invisible hand but the direct consequence of corporate activism, intellectual propaganda, the rise of a religious literalism opposed to any civil and human right that threaten its paternalism, and a string of political decisions favoring the interests of wealthy elites who bought the political system right out from under us.

MoyersÂ’ full text is available here, thanks to the radical news service Truthout.


*********

Obviously I agree with MoyersÂ’ disturbing prognosis: that America is doomed unless a resistance movement with a program of an expanded New Deal arises in the near future, once again grafting the historical truth of class struggle onto the Constitutional principles of liberty and employing the democratic process to avoid the nation-destroying cycle of vengeance characteristic of violent revolution.

Yet despite Moyers’ condemnation of the ever-more-tyrannosauric savagery of post-Soviet capitalism, he fails to recognize the relentless advance of sweatshop fascism for what it is -- the ruling class response to the impending double apocalypse of terminal climate change and the concurrent exhaustion of the petroleum supply upon which the present-day economy, culture and technology are all hopelessly dependent. A practicing Christian, Moyers is also blind to how the ruling-class response embodies the innermost doctrine of Abrahamic religion and indeed of patriarchy in general: not “do unto others as you would have them do unto you,” or “share and share alike,” but the ultimate Jewish/Christian/Islamic mandate to divide all humanity into the Chosen (which is how the fat cats think of themselves) and the Damned (which is how the fat cats view all the rest of us): thus to brutalize us not only at every whim but with complete absolution from even the tiniest pangs of guilt -- exactly as the Indians were brutalized from Saint Augustine to Wounded Knee and beyond. The treachery of the Democratic senators merely exemplifies the process of our subjugation.

Because we humans are powerfully intuitive -- never mind that Judaism, Christianity and Islam all vehemently condemn such McLuhanesque insightfulness as deviltry and witchcraft -- most of us have long sensed that our infinitely wasteful world of space ships, airplanes, automobiles, shopping-malls and suburbs is doomed, whether we acknowledge it consciously or not. But nowhere is the collective perception of impending ruin more obvious than in the intensifying nihilism of our young: note how the youth-gang phenomenon, an ultimate expression of hopelessness, has spread from the ghettos (where one is born into hopelessness) even unto the posh suburbs (where not even the most gaudy excesses of trinket materialism now suffice to conceal the fact that -- unless one is born into the corporate aristocracy -- life is ultimately no less hopeless than in the ghetto). African-American, Asiatic, Hispanic, Caucasian, Aboriginal, our young people are increasingly united by the dreadful realization that unless one is born into the aristocracy (or marries into it), the only possible future is steadily worsening poverty -- and thus the young are increasingly united in ever-more-interracial gangs. No wonder too there is such an explosion of drug addiction: beyond all the psychobabble of euphemisms and false hypotheses, the hideous truth is that people become junkies simply because the capitalist world is already so wretchedly hopeless it denies them any other access to positive feelings.

Which is merely further confirmation of the desperate need for Moyers’ “Third American Revolution” -- not just in the socioeconomic and political realms, but in the psychological, environmental and metaphysical realms as well.

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March 20, 2007

PROTEST BY DISRUPTIVE INSULT: THE CULTURAL LEGACY OF BRITNEY SPEARS

IT SEEMS TO ME the Britney Spears antics by which a certain ostensibly "anti-war" cult disrupted the recent Valerie Plame Congressional hearing provide an especially instructive example of how the self-proclaimed “Left” in the United States is not only hopelessly paralyzed by faddism but -- precisely because of the savage anti-intellectuality that is faddism’s essential core -- is unable to achieve even the slightest degree of responsiveness to anyone outside the cult’s exclusive and infinitely conformist ranks. Thus the cult itself (and a cult is precisely what it is, whether exemplified by the prom-queen histrionics of Code Pink or the Mater Dolorosa persona of Cindy Sheehan) fails to address any of the broader socioeconomic grievances afflicting the American public -- much less the underlying socioeconomic causes of the war. Worse, like some spoiled child screaming "look at me" in the middle of a crowded mall or subway station, the cult notoriously favors hopelessly petulant media spectacle over reasoned opposition, thereby conveying the impression all such protest is of no more substance than a pampered two-year-old's obnoxiously disruptive tantrum.

Moreover -- precisely because its patently self-indulgent conduct alienates far more people than it radicalizes or mobilizes -- the cult provides a seemingly natural barrier against the evolution of any broader (and therefore genuine) resistance movement: no doubt the very reason its existence is tolerated by a regime that in every other possible way grows ever more brazenly tyrannical by the minute. The utter shallowness of the post-Valerie-Plame-disruption tactical debate carried on via at least one Democratic Party website -- ultimately nothing more than a sorority-house conflict over fashion (with therefore even less substance than the medieval schoolmenÂ’s arguments over how many angels might dance on the head of a pin) -- is merely another example of the behavior that defines the cult itself.

But is it accurate to label the Code Pink/Mater Dolorosa clique a cult?

Webster (10th Collegiate) describes cult initially in religious or medicine-show terms but then defines cult as “a great devotion to a person, idea, object, movement, or work (as in a film or book), especially such devotion regarded as a literary or intellectual fad; a usually small group of people characterized by such devotion.” Encarta further defines cult as “a self-identified group of people who share a narrowly defined interest or perspective.”

That these definitions apply to the Code Pink/Mater Dolorosa faction of the opposition to the Iraq War is obvious in the fact the women who became Code Pink reflexively protested not only against the Iraq War, but against the entire so-called War on Terror even before the relevant issues were accorded any significant public debate. The protestors utterly disdained the vast distinctions between Iraq and Afghanistan, thereby demonstrating their sneering contempt for the nationÂ’s post-9/11 anguish, and thus from the very beginning they alienated huge segments of the public. In addition, many people recognized in Code Pink the same aggressive pacifism (and indeed the same membership) that characterizes another cult: the fanatical hysterics who advocate forcible civilian disarmament, compulsory pacifism and mandatory victimhood. More than a few of us -- myself among them -- were thus driven to prematurely support the Iraq War (that is, to accept the Bush RegimeÂ’s lies) merely because we had already encountered the infinite hatefulness of these pre-9/11 expressions of what became the Code Pink ideology.

When Cindy Sheehan added the Mater Dolorosa element following the death of her son, it seemed to me not an expression of ethics or ideology but instead nothing more than a public act of private vengeance -- another aspect of the same vapid hypocrisy that had been the faction’s unifying characteristic from the beginning: objection to war not as (yet another) expression of capitalism’s Inner Tyrannosaur, but merely because -- though the cult members obviously thrive on capitalism's trinket materialism -- war offends Code Pink’s sense of stylistic correctness (“guns are ugly and frightening”) and also took away Cindy Sheehan’s only son.

Indeed, I maintain that the snide theatrics of Code Pink, Cindy Sheehan and all their apolitical, anti-intellectual ilk bear substantial responsibility for the publicÂ’s initial acceptance of the Iraq War. As I already noted, theirs is protest built on the most narrow (and therefore most exclusive) foundation possible: that the Code Pink/Mater Dolorosa cult is the only faction of the warÂ’s opponents given significant publicity by the corporate media is thus surely no accident. By contrast, observe how corporate media totally ignores organized laborÂ’s massive opposition to the Iraq War -- an opposition far more powerful (and more potentially revolutionary) than anything Code Pink or Cindy Sheehan could ever muster.

In this context it is significant that the sophomoronic prom-queen hissy by which Code Pink disrupted the Congressional hearing and mocked the entire legislative process is -- at least in the eyes of the vast U.S. majority -- tantamount to burning the national flag or spitting in the faces of military veterans: a huge and alienating gesture of disrespect. It surely recruited no allies to the ranks of Iraq War opponents -- or any other cause even remotely associated with socioeconomic transformation. In fact, precisely because corporate media so emphatically endorses its claim to represent “the Left,” the calculated offensiveness of the Code Pink/Mater Dolorosa cult discredits the entire cause of economic democracy. Therefore is it no exaggeration at all to say that the cult’s bottomless disrespectfulness serves the cause of class warfare -- and therefore the purposes of the ruling class itself -- every bit as effectively as any propaganda machine or secret police apparatus.

By the way, my avoidance of the term “anti-war movement” is not an accident. While there is undoubtedly huge opposition to the Iraq War -- 70 percent of the electorate by the most recent polls -- it is hardly united enough to be called a “movement.” The potentially irresolvable class division already evident in the schism between the avowedly pro-capitalist bourgeoisie represented by the Code Pink/Mater Dolorosa cult and anti-war labor (which is increasingly anti-capitalist) suggests that no genuine “movement” -- at least no sustainable movement -- will ever emerge from the present anti-war ferment. The very failure of the anti-war protest to focus on unifying socioeconomic principles is probably the precise reason the ruling class continues to tolerate it -- all the more so since the Britney Spears tactics employed by the Code Pink/Mater Dolorosa cult reliably alienate anyone who might see beyond the war itself to its origins in the tyrannosauric rampage of post-Soviet capitalism.

As for myself, I long ago repudiated my initial support for the invasion of Iraq. Like so many others, I was conned to complicity by the Bush Regime’s expert use of the Josef Goebbels tactic of the Big Lie. Nevertheless I also recognize the Iraq War as nothing exceptional -- just another one of the innumerable ways we working folk are tyrannized as capitalism marches toward its inevitable fulfillment in fascism. And knowing history as I do, I recognize the absolute reality of the Jihadist threat -- never mind how the Bush Regime has manipulated it into a latter-day Reichstag Fire. But I regard stopping the genocidal denial of life-saving prescription drugs -- denial that was deliberately imposed on the most vulnerable of the nation’s elderly and disabled peoples by the DemoPublican Part D Medicare Prescription Drug Lord Benefit -- as far more important than withdrawal from Iraq. Which of course makes me anathema not just to the Code Pink/Mater Dolorosa cult but to the entire self-proclaimed, media-anointed “Left,” whose singular focus on the war is underscored by emphatic and often antagonistic exclusion of any and all issues of broader relevance. Britney would no doubt belch in anti-intellectual agreement with my detractors.

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March 10, 2007

THE INTERNET: AN EVER MORE TREACHEROUS MIASMA OF MALICE

HATEFULNESS IS INCREASINGLY an identifying characteristic of life in the present-day United States. We see it everywhere: the political paralysis inflicted by fanatics, the skyrocketing incidence of road-rage, the spiteful arrogance of bureaucrats and elected officials, and the outrageous rudeness -- especially the defiant, trod-on-our-heels invasion of personal space -- by which the nationÂ’s young demonstrate their infinite contempt not just for their elders but for any semblance of human civilization.

It is therefore probably no coincidence that the Internet -- overwhelmingly the domain of AmericaÂ’s singularly amoral, apolitical youth -- reflects this hatefulness more vividly than any other facet of our society. Indeed it is no exaggeration at all to say that (despite the InternetÂ’s innumerable positive aspects), a rich and pampered techno-aristocracy of skillfully venomous sadists are methodically turning it into a treacherous miasma of malice.

I learned this the hard way recently when someone with whom I am exceptionally close e-mailed me with the very best of intentions a useful-looking document entitled “5 Things Your Cell Phone Can Do.” My e-correspondent had in turn received it from a friend she has known and trusted since her school days; the friend had herself sent it on in nothing less than maximum good faith. But all of our instinctive confidence in one another -- considerably bolstered by the fact we are all presumably sophisticated urbanites -- was betrayed by the malignant sadist who, tens of thousands of e-mailers ago, originated what more properly should be titled “5 False Hopes to Further Intensify Your Terror and Despair in Dire Emergencies.”

Just as most of us were, I was conned by the fact “5 Things” looked cheerily helpful -- exactly the same carefully art-directed quality possessed by a user-manual written in English rather than Nurd and therefore a rare and invaluable find. Thus after noting it was not only written in the clear language characteristic of good professional writing but apparently also had the imprimatur of a legitimate business (and had of course been thoroughly vetted by my constantly updated virus protection), I concluded it was useful information well presented, and I forwarded it without much further thought to all the people on my “friends and colleagues” list.

Most of these folks were all the more vulnerable given the fact persons of my age group would probably never have imagined the ubiquitous cell-phone as the centerpiece of a malicious scam -- its malice inherent in the disappointment and even horror that would surely result were someone to attempt, under emergency conditions, the false remedies and bogus last-ditch measures "5 Things” described.

But another friend and colleague -- a highly skilled and alert woman who is already involved with broadcast media and has several times demonstrated more than enough instinctive reportorial talent to break into serious print -- is also at least 20 years my junior and is therefore in much closer grass-roots contact with just how relentlessly vicious Americans have actually become.

Thus she reflexively submitted “5 Things” to verification by Snopes.com and quickly alerted everyone on my mailing list to the fact it is a fraud. My original correspondent was of course embarrassed because she had forwarded the material to me, I was thoroughly mortified because factual verification is one of my professional obligations, and both of us apologized accordingly

But beyond the red faces and discomfort of being caught up in a con, it seems to me there are at least three vital lessons to be learned from this episode:

(1)-That the Internet, though it contains much that is good and useful, has become a dark and perverse realm in which legions of sadists, vandals and thieves conspire to inflict loss, injury and mortification by every means possible.

(2)-That given this increasingly emergent alternate identity of the Internet, the malevolent intent of its content should be assumed: that is, any message not originating from a recognizably legitimate source should be regarded as a potential attack (whether on one's computer, one's finances or one's credibility) until proven otherwise.

(3)-That we therefore need to maintain not only the long-recognized defense of reflexive skepticism toward any and all Internet financial offers, but to aggressively develop an all-inclusive and overtly hostile suspicion toward anything and everything we encounter on the Internet.

Obviously the “5 Things” scam was furthered by the fact that cell-phone technology -- and today’s information technology in general -- is based on science totally alien to the Newtonian world of my boyhood. It is thus utterly incomprehensible to anyone save esoteric-minded specialists (the modern-day equivalent of witch-doctors) who in any case are never much older than about age 50 maximum because the requisite schooling simply did not exist until maybe 25 years ago. Which makes those of us who are more elderly all the more vulnerable -- especially since today's society of sociopathic spitefulness is such a relatively recent phenomenon.

But whatever our age or knowledge of technology, we are nearly all in absolute denial of the fact that today's Internet -- never mind its other aspects -- is the ultimate example of malice facilitated by wealth: one of the defining characteristics of capitalism. Indeed the Internet has become a virtual jungle prowled by the most scheming sociopaths in human history.

The existence of these predators is proven not only by the viruses and scams that inflict ruinous financial loss but by repeated expressions of unprovoked yet elaborate hatefulness -- “5 Things” and everything like it -- that serve no purpose beyond the sadistic gratification of their perpetrators.

For example someone went to great lengths using computer graphics equipment -- the cost of which is beyond all but the wealthy and the use of which is hopelessly mysterious to all save a college-initiated priesthood -- and deliberately made it appear "5 Things" originated from a legitimate business, its very falsehood undeniable proof of the huge malice with which it was crafted.

Thus we should all adopt as core principles the three lessons set out above, thereby providing all of us some basic protection against the ever-worsening onslaught of Internet antagonism -- sadistically calculated hurtfulness that, alas, is impossible to filter out with even the best anti-virus/anti-spam software.

Discussion of the corollary facts -- that the hatefulness running amok in our nation is a direct measurement of how deeply we are already wounded by class war and how totally the corporate fat-cats have conned us into believing we are helpless to resist -- will have to wait for another time.

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February 26, 2007

FIREARMS AND WOMENÂ’S BODIES: GUN RIGHTS AND REPRODUCTIVE CHOICE (REVISED)

(For the sake of greater clarity, I made a number of revisions to this essay about seven hours after I posted it. While the language is now a bit more precise, the underlying conclusions remain unchanged. My heartfelt thanks to Barbara M., Mike B., Gretchen, Barb G., Traci K. and Barbara B. for the conversations, online and in person, that led to the insights here expressed.)

JUST AS MOST REPUBLICAN leaders instinctively seek to criminalize those of us who oppose capitalism, fascism, theocracy or the now-ever-more-apparent triumvirate of tyranny that combines all three, so do most Democratic leaders reflexively scheme to impose forcible disarmament and thereby abolish the right to self defense and the right to keep and bear arms -- even unto outlawing, as New York City and New Jersey have already done, the civilian ownership of certain kinds of archery equipment. In either case, Republican or Democrat, the long-term intent is to reduce the United States citizenry to absolute powerlessness, the ultimate purpose of which is creation of a 21st Century equivalent of serfdom: a commonality of victimhood that mandates slavish dependence on the good will of an elite and thus unquestioning obedience to its every whim: reduction to the same degradation of subjugation no matter whether one must bow to the corporate fat-cats themselves or to the bureaucratic factotums who, under capitalism, are so often enforcers of the bosses' zero-tolerance demands.

Nevertheless, the Democratic and Republican positions on these matters are not equivalent demonstrations of some dark imperative to class warfare that -- just as a few of the more conspiracy-minded critics are now claiming -- link the two ends of the established domestic political spectrum in a collaboration for oppression that is allegedly as old as the Republic itself. Instead the Democratic and Republican positions each arise from separate sets of conditions that are related only distantly -- though there is no doubt they all fuel the ongoing subversion of the Constitution and thus lead inevitably to despotism.

The Republicans who seek to combine the tyrannies of corporation and church into a unitary patriarchal state are merely being true to their partyÂ’s ultimate function as the U.S. vessel of fascism, the counterpart of the fascist parties of Italy, Germany and Spain, a traditional Republican role at least since the Herbert Hoover years. That this is a role unbeknownst to most of us is merely another tragic example of how our public schools -- ever the obedient servants of the board-room barony -- have robbed us of the knowledge of history prerequisite to even the most minimal political understanding. But once we uncover these long-suppressed facts, it is slap-ourselves-on-the-forehead obvious the Republicans could hardly be expected to pursue any other course, especially since the death of the Soviet Union has relieved capitalism of its former competitive necessity to conceal its implacably tyrannosauric core. Indeed, the Republican intent is now demonstrated beyond a scintilla of doubt, not only by Enron and Iraq, but by the genocidal threat equally apparent in post-Katrina New Orleans, at Walter Reed Army Hospital and in the Medicare Prescription Drug Lord Benefit: the conversion of the United States into a kind of rat-maze Fourth Reich -- succeed or die -- with each and every one of us who suffers even the slightest degree of poverty damned as pariahs of failure, implicitly blamed for all the troubles of the nation and, like the Jews under Hitler, increasingly in jeopardy of being lethally scapegoated.

Even the RepublicansÂ’ apparent support for the right to keep and bear arms is tacitly in keeping with the fascist agenda of gradually restricting firearms ownership to an-ever-more-limited aristocracy. RKBA is a Grand Old Party shibboleth that -- though only after the Democrats repudiated the New Deal -- has recently seduced innumerable votes from those of us dismayed by the Democrats anti-gunowner hysteria, especially its periodic frenzies of spit-in-our-faces hatefulness. Why not? The parties are otherwise indistinguishable. But the fact remains that while the Republicans dependably go through the motions of battling new firearms legislation, in the end they almost invariably surrender to the advocates of forcible disarmament. Note for example how Republican collaboration enabled enactment of the Brady Laws during the 1990s. Note too the much more obscure fact the Republicans have never (at least to my knowledge) sought to repeal any existing firearms laws, no matter how much power they had or how hurtfully restrictive the laws themselves.

Thus, especially in the forcibly disarmed corporate-headquarters domains like New Jersey, Massachusetts and New York City (where we see today the inevitable gun laws of tomorrow), RKBA has already been abolished as a right and redefined as a privilege -- an increasingly exclusive one at that -- a privilege ultimately determined by whether one is rich enough to hire lawyers and bribe officials. Thus too these circumstances provide an instructive example of how the anti-gunowner fanaticism of the Democrats actually serves longer-range Republican causes. It reinforces the two-class system that capitalism inevitably spawns -- infinitely wealthy, absolutely powerful bosses lording it over desperately impoverished, utterly powerless workers -- and (just as I already noted) it generates huge defections from the Democratic rank-and-file. Even Bill Clinton admits the DemocratsÂ’ anti-gunowner crusade not only cost the party congressional power for an entire decade but afflicted us with George W. Bush, the worst and most tyrannical president in U.S. history.

But despite the claims of the conspiracy theorists, I doubt the DemocratsÂ’ forcible-disarmament schemes grew out of any conscious intent -- even in the clandestine sense -- to collaborate with the Republicans and the boardroom despots who finance and control them. Instead, the advent of the Democratic Party as the executive-action arm of the anti-gunowner cult was among the major expressions of the partyÂ’s transmogrification from its New Deal persona to its present-day incarnation as the voice of the mostly white and infinitely self-obsessed urban and suburban bourgeoisie.

The Democratic Party of the New Deal -- of which I was a proud and presumably lifelong member -- was not just the might of working America but an ongoing effort to guarantee the common good by acknowledging the murderous reality of the capitalist tyrannosaur and ensuring that it remained caged. Not only was the New Deal party implicitly pro-RKBA; one of the most vocal proponents of an armed citizenry was Eleanor Roosevelt herself, our nationÂ’s finest First Lady and thus the proper companion to Franklyn Delano Roosevelt, our nationÂ’s finest President. But the cumulative aftermath of the McCarthy era, the political murders of the 1960s, Lyndon JohnsonÂ’s fiasco in Vietnam and Richard NixonÂ’s criminal conspiracies all increasingly subverted the New DealÂ’s ideological self-confidence even as the unprecedentedly selfish and self-centered Baby Boom generation rejected any and all pretense of socioeconomic concern. As a consequence the Democratic Party increasingly abandoned its implicitly socialist and humanitarian values and became instead an ideological vacuum.

It was a vacuum that (as invariably happens, whether in politics or elsewhere in nature) was quickly filled by whatever was available: in this case diverse fanaticisms -- one of which was the anti-gunowner cult: in the main a coalition of aggressively militant pacifists left over from the Anti-Vietnam War Movement and a growing faction of radical feminists who viewed firearms (and weapons in general) as extensions of the hated penis. Thus when the Democratic Party became the party of feminism, it also became the party of forcible disarmament and mandatory pacifism. The partyÂ’s leadership had decided that pandering to fanatics was the new key to electoral success and -- surprise of surprises -- the corporations opened their checkbooks: the bosses were quick to recognize that self-centeredness and fanaticism combined into an ultimate psychological tool for union busting and the destruction of workplace solidarity in general. Not surprisingly -- and absolutely indicative of the emerging nature of the post-New Deal party -- one of Jimmy CarterÂ’s first official acts was to reveal his hitherto-hidden malice toward the poor by imposing savage welfare cuts including a total ban on federally funded abortions.

In this context, the Democratic opposition to RKBA is merely another example of the partyÂ’s post-New Deal opportunism and hypocrisy: the conditions that make the partyÂ’s weakness painfully obvious and demonstrate precisely how it has been reduced to permanent uselessness as a platform from which to mobilize a before-it-is-too-late defense of political and economic liberty -- the cause that should be every working AmericanÂ’s central concern.

To bring the DemocratsÂ’ hypocrisy into sharper focus, witness how they repeatedly proclaim their support for working families and RooseveltÂ’s Four Freedoms even as these same Democrats erect impossibly contorted ideological constructions to rationalize their shameless collaboration with their own ever-more-generous corporate benefactors (and thus too make common cause with the Republicans) in undermining the entire Bill of Rights: not just the Second Amendment, but the suppression of First, Fourth and Fifth Amendment rights as well, whether in the name of forcible disarmament and the carefully undeclared wars against firearms owners and the poor (especially the homeless); the only slightly less-euphemistical war against illegal drug users; the allegedly necessary (and thus more forthrightly declared) wars against spouse-beaters and sex criminals; and the undeniably vital (but unspeakably mismanaged) war against terrorists.

Also in this context -- that is, as an idiot-light on the instrument-panel of the mind, a red warning that that glares whenever hypocrisy afflicts the engine of the body politic -- the right to keep and bear arms is almost without peer. Like First, Fourth and Fifth Amendment freedoms, it is equivalent to the canary in the coal mine whose sudden death reveals the presence of toxic gas. When we hear a politician claim faithfulness to the Four Freedoms -- freedom of expression, freedom of worship, freedom from want, freedom from fear -- but then seek to forbid us not only the right of self-defense but prohibit the very tools that enable us to defend ourselves and thus live free of fear (prohibitions the entire Democratic leadership and virtually all of our nation’s self-proclaimed “Left” demand in their attempts to impose forcible disarmament and mandatory pacifism), then we know we are either dealing with hypocrites or morons.

Not that the Democrats’ (now-temporarily hidden) agenda of forcible disarmament and abolition of the right to self-defense is the party’s only jarring example of hypocrisy. There is also the Democrats’ breathtaking hostility to the First Amendment, chiefly in the name of “pornography” suppression (a cause in which feminists and Republicans -- especially Christian theocrats -- invariably unite); and the equally frenzied Democratic opposition to the Fourth and Fifth amendments, typically rationalized by an alleged need to deny judicial protections to men accused of sex crimes or wife-beating, a demand argued so convincingly by feminists that the suspects in such cases are now effectively guilty until proven innocent (and even if acquitted at trial suffer the irreparable destruction of their lives). Indeed these arguments, labeled “feminist jurisprudence” but based ultimately on the Marxist principle that “oppressors have no rights,” became the foundation for the much more devastating abrogation of Constitutional rights characteristic of all the other wars: the puritanical hysteria under which children suffer lifelong condemnation as “sex criminals” merely for studies of comparative anatomy that were hitherto considered a normal part of childhood, the presumption of guilt under which the authorities enrich themselves by confiscating personal property in drug cases, or the denial of habeas corpus under which virtually anyone can now be imprisoned for life and without trial as an “enemy combatant.”

An even more glaring example of Democratic hypocrisy is the partyÂ’s claim it defends reproductive rights despite its simultaneous support of economic policies that inflict wholesale prohibitions on reproductive freedom. This hypocrisy is facilitated by a condition unique to the United States: the fact the U.S. is the only industrial nation in the world in which health care is a privilege earned only by wealth rather than an inherent civil right guaranteed everyone. Thus access to reproductive choice in the U.S. is determined exclusively by oneÂ’s income. Which means the Democrats who voted for the permanent impoverishment inflicted on us all by job-theft via NAFTA, CAFTA and GATT were in effect voting against reproductive freedom. Yet these politicians -- a group that includes my own Washington state senators Patty Murray and Maria Cantwell -- brazenly continue to trumpet the Big Lie they are advocates of womenÂ’s rights, never mind the fact their votes for the Global Wage-Slave Economy are as demonstrably anti-choice as the doctrinal pronouncements of the Pope himself.

The Democrats’ anti-abortion policy -- and however it may be disguised, a policy it clearly is -- began with Carter’s decision to forbid abortions for the poor. While this was utterly predictable in light of Carter’s avowed (and implicitly theocratic) Christianity, the Democrats were even then in total denial about the core tyrannies of Abrahamic theology. Carter’s decision was therefore a stunning betrayal not only of the poor but of all his secular supporters, especially the feminists -- a betrayal all the more outrageous given his smugly self-righteous rationalization that “life isn’t fair”: the first modern expression of the “let-them-eat-cake” hostility to the poor that has since become the defining characteristic of all U.S. politics whether Democratic or Republican.

I remain astounded that the women’s movement refuses to utter so much as a peep of protest against such policies. Apparently the feminists are frozen, as if they were the broken-souled, mutilated wives of some Abrahamic patriarch, in perpetually silent subservience to the Democratic Party -- the party by which rural and blue-collar women, like organized labor and the nation’s socioeconomically disadvantaged minorities, have all been so shamelessly co-opted and betrayed. Worse, it is increasingly obvious the feminists’ subservience is by choice and choice alone: where once I assumed it was hold-the-noses pragmatism, I am now convinced the silence is not only voluntary but pro-active, another expression of the fact the ruling circle of the U.S. feminist movement is not radical at all but is merely another (overwhelmingly white) expression of the implicitly capitalistic yuppoid ethos: "I can have it all -- and to hell with those who fall by the wayside." Thus feminism's response to the denial of reproductive choice that is increasingly part of U.S. economic reality is accurately reflected in the repeat votes for Cantwell, Murray and all their Global Sweatshop Economy ilk: the ballot-box equivalent of chanting Barbara Bush’s “why should I waste my beautiful mind on something like that”-- the ultimate (and implicitly fascist) slogan of too many present-day Americans whatever politics they claim.

Even so, man or woman alike we should never forget that the legal process by which our Constitution has been subverted -- probably forever -- began with the Democrats’ imposition of the Gun Control Act of 1968, in which for the first time in U.S. history, the government presumed a group of citizens guilty of various specified and unspecified crimes and thus required us to declare our innocence (and sometimes to prove it judicially) before granting us permission to purchase a firearm. This is the ultimate significance of the RKBA fight: the fact all such laws assume us to be guilty subjects rather than innocent citizens. And the fight over reproductive rights is an absolutely equivalent question: whether a woman is assumed to be a subject who is somehow invariably “guilty” of sexuality (and is thus denied control of her own body) or a citizen with all rights of sexual expression protected in presumption of her ultimate innocence. Recognition of the underlying principle of human dignity common to both causes would be a great stride forward in the building of a new political party that genuinely represents all of us who are not part of the plutocracy.

As for me, I will dwell neither in a place where law-abiding citizens are denied the right to keep and bear arms, nor in a place where women are denied the right of reproductive choice.

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February 19, 2007

'NIXON LIVES': FIVE TELLING PORTRAITS OF THE REAL UNITED STATES, WITH LINKS

THANKS MOSTLY TO PRESIDENTS Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, the genocidal policies President Richard Milhous Nixon initiated 33 years ago with a curiously under-reported declaration of economic war against the American people have now escalated into a mercilessly savage crusade against each and every one of us who is not part of the increasingly omnipotent corporate plutocracy -- the fat-cat faction in whose exclusive interest the war is being waged.

Nixon issued his declaration of class-war during a 1973 post-inaugural interview by William Randolph Hearst Jr. Curiously, Nixon was at the peak of his popularity -- an apparent paradox on which Hearst himself briefly commented -- especially given the vindictive gloom inherent in the president's economic intentions. But in retrospect -- and in a decidedly eerie sense -- it was almost as if Nixon had somehow foreseen the future and was already declaring his vengeance: within slightly more than a year, Watergate would reduce him, deservedly so, to the most despised president in U.S. history -- the title for which he is now being challenged by Bush.

Hearst's 1973 interview is thus memorable for reasons both personal and political. It -- or rather its implications -- provided all-too-rare intellectual stimulation while I was suffering the brain-numbing misfortune of being a Manhattanite (as I then thought of myself) stranded in Seattle, which from almost any perspective is a startlingly small-minded town, not withstanding the fact it is cobbled together amidst huge and breathtaking physical beauty. But not even the dark loveliness of its Pacific Northwest environment is sufficient antidote for the bigotry and personalized hatefulness with which its natives habitually confront those of us who foolishly venture there from the City -- the place even the most politically “correct” of Seattle’s self-proclaimed “leftists“ secretly damn as “Jew York” -- as if it were indeed the ultimate daemonium of Planet Earth. It will therefore come as no surprise I was never an appreciative reader of either of Seattle’s two daily papers, each of which (even now) routinely reflect the fierce pride in vindictive xenophobia that is Seattle’s chief and most identifying sociological characteristic. But on this particular day the dependably mediocre Post-Intelligencer had momentarily abandoned its customary provincialism and instead was approximating serious reportage, beginning Hearst’s bylined special report atop Page One and jumping it to fill an inside page, every column inch describing the details of Nixon’s plans for his second four-year term. Having noted all this while enduring the wretched bus service that in Seattle passes for adequate public transport, I actually thought it worthwhile to walk some distance (in the omnipresent drizzle of course) to hunt up and purchase my own copy: so I remember the whole episode very well -- not just the contents of Hearst’s report (nearly as thorough as anything I might have read in The New York Times I so sorely missed), but how I came to have the report's text and the manner in which it later influenced my thinking.

To me, Nixon’s second term stands out for two reasons that put the entire aftermath of the Watergate breakin, especially the ouster of Nixon, into what I believe is its proper historical context -- a genuine counter-coup that truly saved the nation -- no matter its later betrayal by the pardon so traitorously granted Nixon by President Gerald Ford. The first of these two context-setters is Nixon’s statement that “this is the last election,” the comment with which he opened his 1973 inaugural address. (If you doubt me, listen to the tape or perhaps, if you are old enough, dig into your memory for the brief flurry of apologetics that followed: the argument -- one I believed then and now to be patently spurious -- that it was a mere slip of the tongue in which Nixon, always a deliberate and careful speaker, really meant “my last election” but somehow accidentally substituted the more implicitly tyrannical and surely more disturbing form.) The second context-setter has, unfortunately I think, remained far more obscure: Nixon’s assertion to interviewer Hearst that all but the wealthiest Americans “have it too good,” and his strong implication that for the rest of his administration (and to the greatest extent he could manage), all federal policy would henceforth be directed very specifically at re-inflicting the myriad hardships the New Deal had either abolished or substantially minimized.

Recognizing the probable (and probably dreadful) significance of Nixon’s quoted remarks -- especially in light of his “last election” term-opener -- I clipped the article (the very reason I bought my own copy of the paper), and I kept it in my reference files for the next ten years, indeed until all those vital resources (and so much else) were destroyed by the fire that was such a ruinous turning point in my own life. Assuming the clip would be relatively easy to replace, I did not seek it out for several years afterward, but then found myself in a quarrel with a perennially antagonistic relative who in effect had called me a liar and implied I had made the whole thing up. Fortunately, though I don’t have the sort of memory that is commonly described as “photographic,” I do have fairly accurate recall of historical details -- even of amusing trivia (such as the nearly forgotten fact the Norman warlord we know today as “William the Conqueror” was known in his own time and even by his own people as “William the Bastard,” not because he was bastardly in conduct -- though surely he was -- but because his mother’s conduct had led to his birth in bastardy). In any case, for reasons I already made clear (and despite my relative's intellectual bullying), I did not succumb to doubts and therefore would not relent. But when I contacted The Post-Intelligencer in an effort to prove my point by obtaining a replacement copy of the interview (presumably a Xerox made from the microfiche on which all daily newspapers of that period are archived), I was told it was no longer available. Subsequent requests have yielded the same result, which leaves me wondering if perhaps the entire story has conveniently vanished down some Orwellian memory-hole.

(If someone can steer me to an unrevised copy of this seemingly lost interview, Nixon’s first after his ‘73 re-inauguration, please do; I would be appreciative enough to thank you in print.)

But no matter if the text of the interview has vanished or not; the evidence of deliberate class-war -- class-war that includes policies expressly crafted to inflict (plausibly deniable) genocide -- is now so overwhelming, even corporate mass-media is forced to acknowledge it, no matter how euphemistical or apologetic the acknowledgement. Here, thanks to the radical news-service Truthout, are no-registration-required links to reports of five outrages that exemplify capitalismÂ’s tyrannosauric assault on all of us who are neither members of the board-room baronage nor part of the trust-fund plutocracy:

The United States has deteriorated into the most savage place in the industrial world to raise children, with the highest percentage of children living in poverty, by far the worst incidence of teenage obesity, and the deadliest records in child safety and the availability of health care for children -- all this according to a United Nations Children’s Fund study released a few days ago. Anyone who doubts this deterioration is an accident should reflect not only on Nixon’s remark that Americans “have it too good” but on the policies of every administration since Nixon’s -- especially Clinton’s, which began, via NAFTA and the outsourcing at the core of the Global (Wage-Slave) Economy, the methodical theft of jobs and demolition of opportunity that has flung so many of us (and hence our children, grandchildren and in fact all our future descendants) into inescapable and steadily worsening poverty. No wonder so many Americans are so (rightfully) hopeless they seek the seductive solace of the slow suicide that is drug addition.

Meanwhile the Bush Regime has deliberately increased the lethal hardships of poverty by knowingly (and almost certainly with what in courtrooms is called “malice aforethought”) providing Katrina refugees with house trailers that are defacto gas chambers and thus potentially deadly to inhabit. As a result, thousands of children, women and men are sick and getting sicker -- most probably terminally -- and at least one elderly person is already dead, all afflicted by formaldehyde fumes. The administration’s response? More of the hostile indifference typical of the entire post-Katrina horror: yet another example of what many African-Americans -- folks with whom in this instance I totally agree -- already believe is deliberate genocide, whether by action or neglect it matters not.

Again due largely to the destruction of the socioeconomic fabric begun by NixonÂ’s hardship plan and dutifully continued by each of his successors, U.S. military families have (of course) become as economically non-traditional as the families of all the rest of us. As a consequence, child-rearing duties are now shared by a huge number of folks who are not birth parents -- grandparents, aunts and uncles, cousins, unwed lovers -- each of whom should be entitled to the child-rearing stipends traditionally paid to the spouses of soldiers slain in battle. But instead they are methodically denied such funds -- and the problem, increasingly evident since the Gulf War, has now reached crisis proportions. Moreover, though this Washington Post report only hints at the truth, veterans' advocates tell me the federal bureaucracy flatly rejects any and all possible remedies. Thus I have little doubt the real barrier is Bush and his band of JesuNazi theocrats (many of whom do in fact infest the Pentagon), vindictively obstructing all efforts to secure such payments for non-traditional parents -- obstruction that extends even unto brazen defiance of wills written by the now-dead veterans themselves. Obviously -- beyond its expression of the malicious absolutism that is the keystone of Christianity -- here is another example of the ongoing policy of deliberately inflicted misery and methodically worsened impoverishment.

Today’s wounded soldiers fare no better. Indeed, the long-term convalescence section of Walter Reed Army Hospital is as rat-bedunged and roach-infested as 19th Century Bedlam -- and again (once more no doubt in keeping with the Nixon policy of imposed degradation), the overwhelming evidence of neglect proves beyond a scintilla of doubt the Bush Regime doesn’t give a tinker’s damn: never has, never will. That anyone would be so treated anywhere in the industrial world is an outrage; that wounded soldiers would be so treated is an atrocity: another classic example of the venomous contempt with which Bush and his entire family (“why should I waste my beautiful mind on something like that”) regard those of us who are neither corporate fat-cats nor otherwise destitution-proof plutocrats.

Finally there is the lonely struggle of union members -- we who for the last five decades were ever more cravenly abandoned by an ever-more-subjugated U.S. workforce -- our shrunken ranks bravely soldiering on (literally in service to every employee in America) -- this in the only counter-offensive ever launched against the rat politics of the Nixon/Ford/Carter/Reagan/Bush/Clinton/Bush class war. Venomously rejected by self-proclaimed “progressives” (who cannot abide the possibility our sweaty-armpit reality might even momentarily overcome their aroma-therapy trance), mostly ignored by so-called “liberals” (who hypocritically inflate their personal wealth by mouthing paid arguments that unions are now somehow “obsolete”), and repeatedly betrayed by the Democrats (who once portrayed themselves as our allies but have since been bribed into eager collaboration with the boardroom barons -- think NAFTA, CAFTA, GATT, WTO ad nauseum), we have finally in the last year or so begun see evidence of a genuine re-awakening of unionism. In the best of all possible worlds, this resurgent activism would be fueled by renewed understanding of class struggle: the fact that, under capitalism, there are only two classes -- the bosses and those of us who have to work for them -- and the corollary fact that (no matter how allegedly “cooperative” the workplace) -- the boss is always “making a list” (as another union guy I know so aptly puts it) and is therefore always the enemy. In truth however what is happening is probably a far less ideological, far more instinctively American response to the ever more undeniable horrors of the Global (Sweatshop) Economy -- that and awakening realization the Global Sweatshop with its obscene wealth and privilege for the plutocrats and its abject poverty for all the rest of us is, already and in fact, our corporate overlords’ ultimate and final response to the double apocalypse of petroleum exhaustion and terminal climate change: in essence, imposition of a new Dark Age -- this one lasting until the end of human time -- with only the fattest of the fat cats exempted from the slave-pens. As during the class conflicts of the 19th and early 20th centuries, labor is again mobilizing, and though this time the mobilization is happening little by slow, it is already obvious enough it has scared the Democrats into proposing the first pro-labor Congressional legislation in decades (maybe since the Lyndon Johnson Administration) -- a measure that would remove some of the many obstructions that now prohibit employees from organizing unions. Dream on: Vice President Dick Cheney pledges the Bush Regime will maintain the obstructions by presidential veto (never mind the fact the Employee Free Choice Act has not even been written). Moreover, Cheney’s predictably vicious reaction implies a by-whatever-means-necessary fight against any other possible union gains. Again, the policy of doing anything and everything possible to deliberately worsen our lot. Obviously, the graffito is true: “Nixon Lives” (not that there were ever many doubts).

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February 11, 2007

SORRY FOR NOT POSTING SOONER; I AM TOO BUSY HOUNDING NEWS

WITH THE LEGISLATURE IN SESSION HERE IN Washington state, my part-time job with the advocacy journal has become momentarily full-time (never mind the fact my pay remains the same miserly sum), and I have simply not had an opportunity during the past week to do any contemplative writing, for which I nevertheless apologize.

Meanwhile, though, hereÂ’s something definitely worth contemplating: an analysis by the Medicare Rights Center of how the two parties structured the Medicare Prescription Drug Lord Benefit to do just what the Democrats, the Republicans and their corporate overlords intended:

The confusing array of private plan options for drug and medical coverage can make people with Medicare vulnerable to deception and bullying by unscrupulous insurance agents. Sales reps looking to maximize the commissions they receive from insurance companies often target frail older adults, people with cognitive disabilities and the poor and sick who are worried about paying their medical bills.

It is not enough, however, just to find the bad apples among the brokers and agents. If we follow the money trail, it becomes clear that the abuses are a direct result of marketing strategies and commission structure developed by the insurance companies, the lack of adequate oversight exercised by the federal government and the rulebook rigged up by Congress.

Insurance companies typically pay brokers about $500 for every person they enroll in a Medicare Advantage plan offering both medical and drug coverage, more than five times the commission they pay for signing someone up for a plan that just covers drugs and allows the individual to stay in Original Medicare. As a result, counselors across the country last year answered thousands of calls from individuals who found themselves in a Medicare Advantage plan when they thought they were signing up just for drug coverage. These individuals were often saddled with high medical bills when they discovered their doctors would not accept their new plan, or the plan imposed high cost sharing for major medical expenses.

Each Medicare Advantage enrollee generates thousands of dollars in additional taxpayer-funded subsidies for the insurance company offering the plan. The marketing abuses continue because the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) allows the insurance companies to use higher commissions to steer people with Medicare to these plans, whether or not they are well suited to their financial or health care needs. Neither the insurance companies nor CMS ensures that brokers and agents adequately and honestly explain these plans to consumers.

Of all the Medicare Advantage plans, private fee-for-service plans are the ones most subject to aggressive and deceptive marketing. Typically, agents will tell prospective customers that “all doctors take this plan” or say it is just like Original Medicare. Neither claim is true. The reason insurance companies push private fee-for-service plans so hard is simple: they generate the largest subsidies from Medicare thanks to the payment plan devised by Congress.

In a backroom deal enacted late last year, Congress gave the insurance companies offering private fee-for-service plans another favor, allowing them to sign up any person with Medicare into these plans at any time during the year. That means millions more people with Medicare will be cajoled and hoodwinked into joining these plans, and taxpayers will shell out millions more in subsidies to these plans. The author of this provision was then-House Speaker Dennis Hastert, Republican of Illinois. He may have been repaying a favor. Aon Corporation, one of the largest purveyors of private fee-for-service plans, gave nearly $20,000 to his 2006 campaign.

It is time for the new Congress to do people with Medicare and taxpayers a favor. Congress should lift lock-in, which keeps people with Medicare stuck in a Medicare Advantage or drug plan for the whole year, even if it fails to meet their needs. It should stop overpayments to Medicare Advantage plans, and private fee-for-service plans in particular. Congress should take back the special favor it granted Aon Corporation and other companies pushing private-fee-for-service plans. Finally, Congress needs to hold hearings on these marketing abuses and enact legislation that holds both sales agents and insurance companies accountable and protects their constituents with Medicare.

And don’t let the liars tell you, “O that’s why it’s so important we elect Democrats.” In the original 2003 roll-call on the Prescription Drug Lord Benefit, only 11 of the Senate’s 48 Democrats dared vote no. Despite prophetically vehement protests from advocates for those of us who are elderly or disabled, the remainder of the Democrats -- 37 total (including two who couldn’t be bothered to vote) -- gave us all the metaphorical finger, serving the corporate fat-cats by smugly savaging anyone dependent on Medicare. And though some Democrats later changed their votes (when an amended version of the Prescription Drug Lord Benefit came up for approval a few months later), the apparent flip-flop was nothing more than an increasingly commonplace deception: the initial vote guaranteed the measure’s enactment, and thus the damage was already done.

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February 01, 2007

HOW THE DEMOCRATS GUARANTEE WAGE-SLAVERY AND SUBJUGATION

ONCE AGAIN THE DEMOCRATS are betraying working-class interests, backing forcible disarmament measures that will guarantee -- just as they did in 1994 -- another decade of Republican rule, with all its attendant outsourcing, downsizing, union-busting and Enron concentration of wealth. Thus -- in keeping with the practice John Ehrlichman acknowledged during the Watergate hearings -- Washington state is again being used as a human rat-maze in which to test techniques of oppression: this time not by Machiavellian Republicans but by fanatically anti-gun Democrats who intend to turn Washington into a national poster-state for forcible disarmament.

As I wrote on 23 December 2004:

ItÂ’s not GregoireÂ’s victory that makes me regret my vote for her. ItÂ’s the truly horrific reality implicit in the way she won -- a reality that may require further explanation: Older readers will remember how Chicago Mayor Richard J. Daley stole the 1960 presidential election from Richard Nixon by massive vote fraud and gave the presidency to John Fitzgerald Kennedy. What most people do not know is that from then until 1972, when the Daley forces were at last ousted by the coalition that (unfortunately) celebrated its triumph by nominating George McGovern, Daley and his machine ran the national Democratic Party in much the same way Hitler ran Germany: DaleyÂ’s word was law. (Hubert HumphreyÂ’s 1968 candidacy would have been impossible without DaleyÂ’s approval, and the riots at the 1968 Democratic National Convention were part of the reaction to DaleyÂ’s tyranny.) Similar tyrannical relationships, built on similar coups, were characteristic of local Democratic politics: the Haig and Kenny machines in Hudson County, New Jersey, and the Crump machine in Memphis. Because each of these county bosses delivered critical votes, they (and their local party apparatchiks) became absolute dictators. And thus it will be in Washington state now that the Seattle/King County Democratic machine has handed Gregoire the governorship.

I have already discussed what this will probably mean for Washington state gun owners, but I will say it again. The King County Democrats have sought total abolition of Second Amendment rights in this state at least since the mid-1980s. In the late 1980s, they nearly succeeded in sneaking a total semi-auto ban through the legislature, and Gov. Booth Gardner would have signed it had it not been defeated at the last minute. In 1994, Seattle/King County Democrats pushed through a state law criminalizing any mental disorder for which the outpatient treatment-period was greater than two calendar weeks, a maliciously anti-gunowner measure that Second Amendment advocates cravenly accepted with submissive silence but which was finally (and courageously) vetoed by Gov. Mike Lowry after intense lobbying by mental-health professionals and veterans’ organizations. In 1997, Seattle/King County Democrats organized Initiative 676, which under the guise of mandatory “gun safety training” would have imposed New-York-City type licensing and registration on the whole state. All of these anti-gun horrors will no doubt come back to life again in this year’s legislature. Gun shows will be prohibited. Mandatory storage will be imposed -- mandatory storage as in Canada or Washington D.C., where all firearms not only have to be locked in safes but kept disassembled (and thus rendered useless for self-defense). Concealed carry permits may well be abolished. And because of the debt she and her fellow Democrats owe the Seattle/King County party apparatus, Gregoire and her more rationally minded colleagues cannot resist the anti-Second Amendment onslaught. It is the Washington state version of the Daley/Haig/Kenny/Crump syndrome, and there is absolutely nothing anyone can do about it until 2008.

I was clearly wrong about the timing -- a few valiantly pro-gunowner Democrats kept the forcible-disarmament fanatics at bay during Washington state’s 2004-2006 legislative biennium. But now the state Senate’s Labor, Commerce, Research & Development Committee has scheduled a public hearing for 8 February (Thursday) on Senate Bill 5197, which would prohibit most private sales of firearms and would thereby end gun shows forever. Based on what I know of Washington state legislative practice -- I covered the legislature here during the late 1970s and early 1980s -- the bill would not be brought up for a hearing unless its enactment were already a sure thing, or as close to a sure thing as the always-treacherous realm of politics can produce. Thus I was obviously right about the eventual consequences of King County‘s mysterious “discovery” of the votes that gave Gregoire the election.

The legislative sleight-of-hand evident in moving the bill via the commerce committee (to avoid a pro-gunowner coalition of Democrats and Republicans on the Judiciary Committee, which normally handles such matters), is merely further proof of the Democrats' fervor. Thus the “public hearing” is likely to be nothing more than a sham: the Democratic Party’s forcible disarmament advocates are identical to all other fanatics in that no amount of logical argument can possibly sway them; if the Second Amendment community turned out 500,000 or even a million citizens to testify against SB 5197, it would make no difference at all. And once the bill reaches the Senate floor, its passage -- and eventual enactment by both houses -- is all but certain. As they say in Brooklyn, “da fix is in.”

More to the point, passage of SB 5197 will undoubtedly signal the beginning of a whole new Democratic effort to impose forcible disarmament -- most likely including the unprecedented disarm-the-public-by-criminalizing-mental-illness measure the Democrats schemed up and approved with such gleeful malice in 1994. (The rationale behind the 1994 legislation, a provision in the so-called Youth Violence Act, is the statistical fact that 50 percent of all U.S. citizens will at some time be in therapy, even if only for a few months; thus by criminalizing anyone who is in outpatient therapy for more than two weeks, half the stateÂ’s citizenry would have been permanently disarmed.) While the Democrats are no doubt counting on Washington stateÂ’s relative isolation to conceal their renewed anti-gunowner offensive -- the stateÂ’s politics are generally ignored by national media -- the fact SB 5197 has been scheduled for a hearing proves the partyÂ’s hatred, contempt and hysterical fear of firearms and firearms owners has not abated at all. And -- note again the Ehrlichman testimony -- what happens in Washington state will unquestionably determine how the Democratic Party will approach forcible disarmament in 2008: especially whether the agenda will be hidden or openly declared.

Constitutional issues aside -- a gun-show ban (whether de facto or de jure) nullifies not only the right to keep and bear arms but several First Amendment rights as well -- the most important consequence of the Democrats’ resumption of their forcible-disarmament crusade is that it guarantees (just as it did in 1994) the restoration of Republican dominance. Washington state voters, furious over the forcible disarmament measures imposed by the Democrat-dominated 1994 legislature, retaliated by giving the Republicans control of both House and Senate until 2004. Nationally, even President Bill Clinton finally admitted it was “gun control” that cost the Democrats so dearly: not just Congress, but the 2000 and 2004 presidential elections as well. Which means that the Democrats’ fanatical commitment to forcible disarmament actually protects America’s Big Business fat-cat masters: it keeps New-Deal-minded Democrats out of office and thereby guarantees that absolutely nothing will ever be done to end the downsizing, outsourcing, union-busting and employee-subjugation that have all become commonplace as capitalism gives itself ever more fully to the expression of its Inner Tyrannosaur.

Note, for example, how two of the nationÂ’s most notoriously savvy politicians -- Clinton and his wife Hillary -- sabotaged the enactment of national health care, first by conducting all the deliberations in secret (perhaps the better to let the pharmaceutical and insurance interests dominate the process), next by tying health care to forcible disarmament. At the beginning, the electorate was outraged by soaring health care costs and deeply shamed by the fact the United States was (and remains) the only industrialized nation on earth in which adequate health care is not a right but a privilege determined entirely by wealth. But by the time the Clinton wrecking crew was finished, the Big Lies told by the Harry and Louise commercials had been given the most receptive audience possible. And national health care was again doomed, this time probably indefinitely.

Byzantine notion that it may seem, I cannot but wonder if this sort of backhanded betrayal -- fostering the political conditions that guarantee the continued Enroning of America -- is indeed the only real purpose served by todayÂ’s Democratic Party.

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January 27, 2007

A TERMINAL ENCOUNTER WITH THE MINIONS OF MORON NATION

AS A POLITICALLY CONSCIOUS American, I have for as long as I can remember gleaned considerable pride from my nation’s rejection of ideology in favor of pragmatism: the belief, taken so much for granted it often goes unspoken, that the ultimate test of a policy, a law or even a principle is summed up in the question, “does it work?” Throughout most of our history (and with the very notable exceptions of slavery, the Indian Wars and Prohibition), our national pragmatism has served the greater good (as in the New Deal and its successor the Great Society). But sometimes -- typically when the public is deliberately misled (as in the genocide-by-neglect deliberately built into Clinton/Bush “welfare reform” and the DemoPublican Medicare Prescription Drug Lord Benefit) -- pragmatism is subverted, Enron-fashion, to serve only the board-room fat-cats and their Wall Street factotums.

Thus pragmatismÂ’s great strength and its great weakness: while history generally proves it to be the most reliable (and reliably democratic) path to the best solution possible, it nevertheless depends for its function on a well-informed and thoughtful electorate -- something that corporate mass media and corporate-run public education seems increasingly determined to deny us all.

Pick up a U.S. daily newspaper, and with fewer than a half-dozen exceptions (and every one of those from cities east of the Mississippi River), you will find the publication edited with a frustrating subtext of triviality, in which some local chamber-of-commerce festival -- daffodils, flapjacks, tulips -- invariably takes precedence over the Next World War brewing one continent away, the conflict that -- even as we read how Suzie Suburban is now Primrose Prom Queen -- is being brought ever closer to a boil by politicians and military/industrial profiteers in one or all of the worldÂ’s capitols. Television meanwhile is a deliberate celebration of the vacuous: for every five hours of Britney Spears, missing blonde co-eds and Hollywood sex scandals, we are doled out maybe five minutes -- if even that -- of pseudo-news, its presentation cunningly decorated by the glitter of random violence, the Shakespearean sound and fury that deliberately hides the idiotÂ’s-tale exclusion of anything that might provoke genuine contemplation or serious reflection. As to the Next World War, itÂ’s not mentioned at all.

Our schools are even worse. The individual citizenÂ’s ability to think logically is the core requirement of liberty, but with the high schools turning out graduates who can neither read nor even master the third-grade mathematics required to make change, with college ever more reduced to vocational school (and even that increasingly closed to all but the rich), no wonder Enron has become the ultimate symbol of the U.S. economy. Indeed it seems we are increasingly too dumbed-down to mount even the tiniest resistance to corporate despotism, whether at home or abroad. Thus are we all reduced by moronation into the shrunken confines of Moron Nation, the global Jurassic Park where capitalismÂ’s Inner Tyrannosaur runs amok, deliberately freed to prey on us at will -- downsizing and outsourcing to its infinitely greedy heartÂ’s content.

Another aspect of moronation is that we are seldom if ever allowed the facts that confirm observation and common sense. We see, for example, how even in the early 1990s, the presence of illegal immigrants in the economy of Whatcom County, Washington had lowered the prevailing wage of heavy equipment operators from $20-something per hour to a mere $10, but we are damned as bigots if we dare point this out, and god forbid we should be allowed to know that scabbing and union-busting by illegal immigrants is undeniably forcing U.S. wages downward nationwide -- no wonder the corporate fat cats want to open our borders to all comers. We see terminal climate change in action every minute of every day -- our own senses tell us our planet is getting warmer and wilder -- but the Bush Regime nevertheless continues its Abrahamic war on science by denying us the data that confirms what the relentless northern advance of certain subspecies of crickets has been demonstrating for years. And even those relatively few of us who give a damn about the nationÂ’s elderly have to look long and hard to discover that -- thanks to the Medicare Prescription Drug Lord Benefit -- pharmaceutical profits are up by half even as the denial of life-sustaining drugs is killing people as dead as the corpses still turning up in the ruins of post-Katrina New Orleans.

But nowhere is the Moron Nation syndrome more evident than in our declining knowledge of history. In a land where two out of three college students could not correctly identify George Washington as the general in charge of the nation-founding battle of Yorktown, itÂ’s not really surprising to read -- as I read on a certain leftist website a few months ago -- the embarrassingly ignorant claim that Islamic hostility to the West is retaliation for the Crusades. As I pointed out in response, though the Crusades (1091-1295) were instead the counterattack of Westernesse against 400 years of Islamic aggression, they ended with the destruction of the crusader-kingdom of Jerusalem and the ouster of the crusaders from all their other middle-eastern conquests. This was not just a huge victory for the forces of Islam, but a pivotal event leading to the final collapse of the Classical world -- Islamic overthrow of the Eastern Roman or Byzantine Empire via the sack of Constantinople in 1458 -- which in turn led directly to the Balkan conflicts that precipitated World War I.

Never mind these are facts most historians accept without question, including the associated sequence of cause and effect -- that the related academic argument is almost entirely an ideological clash over the assignment of blame -- I was immediately branded a “ bigot” merely for having pointed out the correct chronology of events. From then on, everything I posted there was subjected by the site’s moderators to the strictest doctrinal scrutiny, even as my personal history was deeply probed for any evidence that might be twisted into ideological damnation. Predictably, I was eventually denounced and then of course ousted: proof that not even facts are allowed to stand in the way of political “correctness.”

All of which provides a perfect example of how, once dumbing down has plunged beneath a certain depth, the process of moronation becomes self-sustaining.

Not that the Right is any more enlightened. I have been similarly denounced, on Lucianne GoldbergÂ’s News Forum, for supporting homosexual marriage; for refusing to accept the notion of Presidential Infallibility; for supporting universal health care and restoration of the New Deal; for repeatedly posting links that expose the huge threat of theocracy implicit in Christian fundamentalist political action; and for even daring to point out that Christianity in general eternally jeopardizes our freedom: that it is no accident the entire post-Roman history of Westernesse -- even after the Peace of Westphalia ended the 30 Years War -- is mostly the history of theocracy. But in deference to Ms. Goldberg and her moderators, let me also point out that neither she nor anyone else there ousted me for my ever-more-frequent unorthodoxies. Indeed she and her staff provided me with the space and opportunity that brought about my self-restoration as a writer; I left her site merely because (A), I grew tired of being attacked by other posters every time I opened my virtual mouth, and because (B), the encounter with the tyrannosauric reality of capitalism imposed by my involuntary return to urban living had shocked me into a quest for more robust alternatives to the Libertarianism I then espoused.

Alas -- perhaps incontrovertible proof I suffer from a severe learning disability of my own -- I have spent the past 18 months seeking an ideologically comfortable electronic roosting-place. But now, after yet another encounter with self-proclaimed “leftist” malice on yet another website, I have given up my quest as nothing more than a fool’s errand: a search for community that is even more impossible than finding the Fountain of Youth or the Seven Cities of Cibola. Here is what happened:

A poster flatly proclaimed, in a discussion about the site’s form and content, that America is “not in any danger” from the forces of radical Islam.

I responded in haste -- it was a working day for me -- noting that the threat was not only proven by 9/11 (never mind how the Bush Regime had manipulated it into a new Reichstag Fire), but was demonstrated also by the entire post-Roman history of Europe. Which, I added, illustrates the seemingly impossible dilemma of what we as a nation are facing today: we are assaulted, within and without, by the forces of tyranny: terrorism and Islamic theocracy on one hand; the ever-more-overtly fascist (and potentially theocratic) rule of corporate authoritarianism on the other.

Sidestepping for a moment the debate over whether there remains any genuine Left (or leftists) anywhere in the United States, both Left and Right have failed abysmally to identify the totality of the onslaught. Generally, Left emphatically denies the threat from abroad and focuses only on the despotism of the Bush Regime -- thus the underlying absolve-Islam significance of 9/11 conspiracy theory -- while Right fervently denies the domestic threat and focuses only on the depredations of the Jihadists. But in truth we are faced with a combined threat the like of which we have never before encountered: precisely why (if we are to respond with any effectiveness), we must first acknowledge its totality.

(It is an aside -- though an especially relevant one -- that the Democrats have come much closer to such acknowledgement than the Republicans: no doubt the underlying reason for their sweeping victory in the 2006 Congressional elections. But even the most allegedly “Left” Democrats still stubbornly refuse to admit the extent to which capitalism has unleashed its Inner Tyrannosaur -- not only the source of the domestic threat, but also, though often indirectly, the origin of the Islamic threat as well.)

In any case, my acknowledge-the-totality-of-the-threat argument was ignored -- in fact I might as well never have posted it -- even as the entire Islamic-threat history was furiously rejected as manifest ignorance and/or “Zionist“ propaganda. Thus, later the same day -- still (stupidly) believing some degree of rapprochement was possible (if I could but make myself heard) -- I posted a more elaborate response, “Ten points re: the chronic aggressiveness of Islam and how its recognition is an essential step in the process of building a functional political alternative (and thus relates to the totality of this discussion).” The following is revised only slightly:

{1}-The notion of Islamic aggression is not "my thesis" -- it is history and the consensus of historians as taught in the entire Western World before the suicidal dogma of moral equivalence imposed its infinitely dangerous brand of revisionism from the 1980s onward. Though my BA (1976; for which thanks to President Lyndon Johnson for the Vietnam Era GI Bill enacted in 1966) is technically in "interdisciplinary studies," about a third of the associated work was in European history, and my most influential instructors were not "Zionists" but Marxists -- with the selfsame Marxist contempt for religion that originally fueled exposure of the innate savagery in ALL the Abrahamic religions: Judaism, Christianity, Islam.

{2}-Despite politically "correct" revisionism, Christianity cannot be blamed for the Islamic invasion of post-Roman Europe in the 600s: this was Islamic aggression (urged on by Muhammed himself) pure and simple. Christians thus tasted Islamic savagery long before, via the Crusades, Muslims tasted its Christian counterpart.

{3}-Save in instances of direct reprisal (as in how the Red Army repaid the Germans for their genocidal savagery in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe) -- the savagery of one group can hardly be used to justify or even explain the savagery of another.

{4}-It is in fact historically accurate to acknowledge that the ability for savagery and sadism is part of human nature, and that the ultimate test of a given system of ideals is how well it restrains the human penchant for savagery.

{5}-By the test of savagery restrained, all the Abrahamic religions fail abysmally. The historical portions of the Old Testament prove the genocidal murderousness of the Hebrews; the histories of the Inquisition and genocidal warfare against the peoples of the Americas does likewise for Christianity; and the blood-drenched history of Muslim conquest -- including the extermination of 80 million Hindus -- does likewise for Islam. Moreover -- though Judaism and Christianity have each largely leashed their Inner Savage, the practice of suicide bombing proves that Islam has not been able to do so -- and all three religions remain implacably hostile to woman and Nature.

{6}-To argue that Torquemada doesnÂ’t represent Christianity or that the Ottomans (or Abdalla the Cruel) donÂ’t represent Islam is like arguing that Hitler doesnÂ’t represent Nazism. As I learned history, the Inquisition is the quintessence of Christianity, just as AbdallaÂ’s beheading of all Spanish Christians who refused to become Muslims is the quintessence of Islam.

{7}-I am well aware that the United States financed Islamic extremism as a means to counter the wildly growing popularity of Marxism in the Middle East during the late 1940s and early 1950s. Thus the U.S. continued a policy developed by Hitler and von Ribbentrop during the mid-1930s.

{8}-Those who acknowledge that we created the threat and then in the same breath deny that the threat is real are illustrating (by the fact they are hopelessly trapped within a contradiction), the ultimate unsustainability of the dogmas of moral equivalence.

{9}-The tyranny implicit in Islam is embodied in its very name, which means "submission." (The claim that Islam means "peace" ironically originated as a Hard Right talking point, born of the Grover Norquist scheme to build a pan-Abrahamic coalition of fundamentalists -- Christians and Muslims -- both to bolster the Republican ranks at home and, in the broader sense, to rule the planet: Christian theocracy in the West, Islamic theocracy in the Middle East and Far East. I have repeatedly posted links on this vital matter, and if anyone is interested, I will post them again here.

{10}-For a general introduction to the subject of Islamic aggression, Google "Islamic invasions of Europe" and "Islamic invasions of India." Better yet, read Paul Fregosi's violently suppressed book Jihad in the West: Muslim Conquests from the 7th to the 21st Centuries. This was finally published by Prometheus Books in 1998 after Little Brown, which had paid Fregosi a generous advance, backed out of the deal in terror of bomb threats.

My point -- which I hope is now clear -- has nothing whatsoever to do with whether Islam is better or worse than Christianity: a pagan/agnostic, I am equally hostile to all Abrahamic religion (and to patriarchal religion in general). Indeed I regard the Abrahamic credo to be the most willfully tyrannical, infinitely murderous belief system ever spawned by human consciousness -- its murderousness especially evident in capitalism and ever more undeniable as capitalism inevitably matures into fascism. Thus I am merely re-acknowledging a related truth suppressed by the political “correctness” of the past two decades: the equally undeniable fact of radical Islam's oft-demonstrated and historically proven hatred of Western Civilization, a hatred in which 9/11 -- the U.S. government’s curious obliviousness to the threat aside -- is merely another exclamation point.

But beyond that is a much broader and far more pivotal point: as I said before, our situation is historically unique -- and uniquely difficult -- in that we are equally threatened from within and without: from without by the forces of radical Islam, from within by the forces of tyranny mustered by the Republicans and their Democratic collaborators in service to corporate fascism. Moreover, each of the two threats originates ultimately from the core ethos of Abrahamic religion: the notion of a master race or ruling class of “god’s chosen people” that animates not only Islam but also capitalism and in fact fuels the capitalist transition to overt fascism as well. And until we acknowledge these facts -- which I believe the vast majority of Americans already sense at least dimly -- any solutions we might propose will be invalidated by contradictions.

Just as U.S. foreign policy deliberately inflamed Islamic extremism (ultimately to defend capitalist depredation), so does Madison Avenue deliberately inflame the frenzies of acquisition that motivate so much domestic crime. But in neither case does the cause of the assault relieve us of the necessity for self-defense: not unless we are suicidal.

However, once we have come to that realization -- and once we stop the foolish adoration of the alien implicit in the denial of Islamic history and dogma -- we are finally and at long last in a position to begin thinking about how the redistribution of wealth (both at home and abroad) might actually bring humanity not only to the threshold of world peace but to a realistic possibility of surviving the impending double apocalypse of petroleum exhaustion and terminal climate change.

Obviously I believe socioeconomic change is the key -- in fact the only key -- to all of this. I also believe the American public is ready to embrace such a change -- that what we must do is set aside the self-defeating fantasy we somehow magically have the power to “enlighten” the public but rather and instead learn how to express the public’s yearnings in a manner sufficiently dynamic to convert expression to action.

Which is, of course, the great advantage still inherent in our Constitutional system -- never mind its present-day captivity in the Avignon of corporate tyranny.

The response to these points was a rampage of denunciation, ongoing even now (five days later), in which my arguments were labeled “bullshit” and my writing attacked as “smoke puffs and loud clanging noises and other Wizard of Oz shit”; in which I was damned as “openly reactionary,” my opinion characterized as both a “Big Lie” and a “big crap you are trying to take on us about how it’s our moral duty to go kill some A-rabs”; in which everything I had written was finally dismissed once-and-for-all as the ravings of a lunatic: “hey this guy is nuts.” All this on a site presumably dedicated to the open discussion essential to arrive at some sort of meaningful socioeconomic and political statement that addresses the present crisis that afflicts the United States -- Islamic aggression from without, capitalist aggression from within -- potentially our nation’s destruction whether by way of additional suicide-bombings or the slower but equally deadly ruination of downsizing and outsourcing that is subjugating all of us into sweatshops and wage slavery.

Thus -- even on a website that vowed its dedication to transcending ideology and searching directly for pragmatic solutions to the crisis (and never mind the fact my hostility to all Abrahamic religion is well known) -- the membership required me to regard Islam as not just beyond criticism but so utterly sacrosanct, even its true history is to be suppressed. And when the site-moderator strenuously objected to the fact I was being not debated but trashed, he too was attacked, the validity of his protestations first denied, then dismissed as “over-dramatic bull shit.”

Though I had been drawn to the site by my great respect for its moderator (an admiration now further reinforced by his bold refusal to be shouted down by my detractors), and though I was genuinely smitten by the site’s unique promise of pragmatism, the astonishing venomousness of the ensuing controversy quickly convinced me my participation there was pointless, and I posted my withdrawal accordingly. Subsequent admissions of premeditated malice -- “hey this guy is nuts” (as if to say, “and therefore good riddance“) -- merely confirmed my adversaries had imported their hatefulness from elsewhere and had carefully nurtured it in anticipation of an opportunity for ambush.

It was admittedly an uncomfortable experience but it was also undeniably worthwhile.

In the first place -- slow learner that I am -- I can no longer avoid the fact the label “Left” in the United States has degenerated mostly into another fad-name (perhaps synonymous with “liberal” and “progressive”) for a vindictively conformist cult of romantic delusion. The cult is based on the reflexive deification of everything that is alien: the paradoxical notion anything foreign (or any one foreign-born) is intrinsically superior to anything (or any one) indigenous to the United States -- even if the alien ethos is defined by the practice of torturing women and children to death for the alleged crimes of adultry, fornication and homosexuality. Hence the cult’s gatekeeper-doctrine -- the test that determines whether one is admitted to the ideological inner sanctum -- is mandatory denial of the Jihadist threat. Fail this test (as I did by asserting the historical reality of Islamic aggression), and you’ll be forever excluded from the entire American leftist community, no matter your views on class struggle or terminal climate change or the ultimate slave-world that lurks within the New Order of the Global Economy. There are a few other such arbitrary tests too: support for illegal immigration, forcible disarmament, politically “correct” subversion of First, Fourth and Fifth Amendment rights. Fail any of these tests -- this is by far the most memorable lesson of my 18-month odyssey through the leftist sector of the blogosphere -- and you’ll be relentlessly hunted across electronic space by a coterie of self-appointed Robespierres, all frothing at their virtual mouths to expose your slightest deviation from political “correctness” and thus ensure you are denied any significant audience.

In the second place, now I am finally beginning to understand why it is at least arguable the current anti-war movement is merely another expression of the Left-cultÂ’s adoration of everything and anything non-American: note that its definition of peace activism never extends to demands for a moratorium on capitalÂ’s endless war against U.S. labor, or on the bourgeoisieÂ’s campaigns of contempt and belittlement perpetually waged against blue-collar and rural citizens of North America. It is not so much anti-American as it is indifferent to Americans: why else, for example, do the cultsÂ’ members -- even as they rail against battlefield deaths 12,000 miles distant -- so often ignore the domestic atrocities of deaths in the workplace and fatalities inflicted by denial of medical care?

In the third place, I realize that what my online writing has become is an expression of my political independence -- and it is in fact a huge compliment that neither it nor I have been granted any sort of ideological home. Why then should I not consciously make it also a celebration of my independence? Especially since it was out of this very independence I crafted the name Wolfgang von Skeptik.

For now I see more clearly than ever before how AmericaÂ’s one ultimately defining trait -- the hugely creative, vastly productive, intuitively democratic pragmatism I cited at the beginning of this piece -- is being undermined by moronation: another victim of the ignorance, conformity, intolerance, anti-intellectuality and self-destructiveness of the Moron Nation in which we are increasingly confined by our corporate masters, an affliction ever more obvious no matter where on the political spectrum one happens to focus.

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January 17, 2007

WOMEN ON HORSES DO WHAT MEN WITH MACHINES COULD NOT

DESPITE MY HARSH CRITICISM of the U.S. brand of feminism -- chiefly for the bourgeois bias that allowed it to be co-opted by Big Business and turned into an instrument of class warfare (note the gender quotas that literally destroyed my life) -- I nevertheless passionately support female equality, and in fact have done so for as long as I can remember: to such an extent that often during my childhood and occasionally even in manhood as well, my friendships with girls and women got me labeled a sissy or suspected of being homosexual.

Moreover (and mostly on the basis of my experience as a journalist and part-time college instructor), I long ago concluded there are some things women actually do better than men. The most significant of these is thinking outside the proverbial box -- that is, solving problems by methods to which we men are for various reasons oblivious. To exemplify what I am saying, here is a videotape of four women on horseback who accomplished -- with a great saving of equine lives -- what any number of men with machines had been unable to do no matter how hard they tried.

Normally I am unmoved by musically accompanied news footage. But what happens in these frames is so profoundly mythic, the Celto-pagan flavor of the Vangelis accompaniment merely adds another (entirely appropriate) dimension to what is taking place. Thus I would be remiss if I failed to mention that in ancient times, such rescuers would have been considered specially blessed by Epona, the Celtic horse-goddess, who by her attributes is an incarnation of the Great Mother herself.

(Many thanks to my sister Elizabeth Bliss for forwarding me the ink to the video.)

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January 12, 2007

A TRUTH SUPPRESSED, A BIG LIE PROVEN, A PETITION IN PROTEST

BECAUSE THIS IS THE deadline week of the monthly journal I write for, I won’t have a lot of time or energy to contribute much original writing to this space for another several days. Meanwhile here is a miscellany of five important links, the first of which, from The News Tribune of Tacoma, shows us how corporate-controlled public-school educators serve their murderously greedy Big Business masters by ensuring we remain ignorant of the looming environmental apocalypse. The next three links tell us all we need to know about how the dependably treacherous Democrats are already breaking their promise to raise the minimum wage -- a betrayal that provides yet another example of how utterly meaningless our elections have become: a reality clearly understood by the 50 percent of the electorate who vote “none of the above” by not voting at all. The last link accompanies a socioeconomically relevant letter I sent to Congress via an American Civil Liberties Union petition drive.

*********

Global warming, a genteel euphemism for what should more appropriately be labeled terminal climate change, will determine whether humanity survives or follows the dinosaurs into extinction. Our response to global warming should therefore be the core issue in every political ideology on the planet, for only if we respond appropriately is there even the slightest possibility we might yet save our species. Thus the deliberate obfuscation of the relevant details of terminal climate change is identical to deliberate concealment of an outbreak of terminal disease: a genocidal act in which not only are the original patients denied treatment, but the entire human community is deliberately exposed to mortal risk.

Never mind that an overwhelming majority of the world‘s most authoritative scientists have given An Inconvenient Truth the highest possible grades both for accuracy and for translating a complex subject into everyday language, the Federal Way, Washington, School Board has decided Al Gore’s movie on global warming is…

too hot for students to see without an opposing viewpoint.

It’s so hot that the board required Superintendent Tom Murphy to approve when the former vice president’s film, “An Inconvenient Truth,” can be presented. And teachers can show it only when it’s balanced with the other side of the issue.

Board President Ed Barney said Wednesday that heÂ’s received about half a dozen complaints from parents that their child was taking the film as fact after viewing it at school.

“We have to ensure that our schools are not being used to politically indoctrinate anyone,” added board member Dave Larson.

The remainder of this alarming and infuriating report, for which free registration may be required, is linked here.

Sociological note: most readers of Tacoma's TNT would know that Federal Way is one of the wealthier cities in Washington state, and that its population includes both a number of top-ranking corporate plutocrats and an unusual concentration of Christian fundamentalists: two groups united in their infinite contempt for nature and their bottomless hatred of environmental scientists and environmental science in general. Moreover, despite its wealth, Federal Way is a textbook example of how America has become a synonym for intentional ecocide: designed exclusively for the automobile, Federal Way is defiantly pedestrian-hostile, a breathtakingly ugly sprawl of garishly neon shopping malls surrounded by suburban developments that range from moderate impoverishment to high posh. Though I covered its politics, social issues and crime from 1976 through 1981, the felony that even now most aptly symbolizes the Federal Way state of mind occurred the year before my arrival, when -- just for kicks -- a couple of rich, pampered and malevolently anti-intellectual teenagers torched the local library and danced with self-congratulatory glee as it burned to the ground. Alas, such dysfunctional pseudo-communities are increasingly the norm throughout the United States: another reason for the terminal appropriateness of the label Moron Nation.

*********

More than any other campaign promise, the DemocratsÂ’ pledge to raise the federal minimum wage brought the chronically non-voting poor to the polls in greater numbers than any other such proposal in years -- a turnout perhaps without equal since Lyndon Johnson promised the Great Society would end poverty forever. But buried in one of yesterday's Associated Press reports is the embittering truth that makes it obvious the Democrats never had the slightest intention of defying their fat-cat corporate benefactors or actually giving the poorest working Americans a long-overdue raise:

The legislation, which now goes to the Senate, would raise the current $5.15 minimum to $5.85 effective 60 days after the measure became law. The minimum would go to $6.55 a year later and $7.25 a year after that.

The White House issued a statement of opposition to the legislation as drafted. It called for the increase to be accompanied by "tax and regulatory relief to help small businesses stay competitive and to help the economy keep growing."

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., has already signaled that Democrats will accept pro-business changes. Sen. Max Baucus, D-Mont., chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, told reporters that he and other lawmakers are working on between $8 billion and $10 billion in relief over 10 years.

The Democrats are thus guilty of at least four deliberate deceptions. First, throughout the 2006 campaign they gave the impression that the proposed raise -- due to corporate opposition the first such raise in a decade -- would be effective “within the first 100 days” of the new Congress. Now of course we see that’s a Big Lie: if the minimum wage is raised at all -- and the report cited above makes it obvious there’s a high probability it won’t be -- it will be raised only gradually. Secondly, Unitary Decider Bush will clearly veto any such measure -- a veto the Democrats cannot override. Thirdly, the Senate is still absolutely controlled by Big Business thanks to the fact many of the Democrats who make up the one-vote Democratic majority are in truth Republicans in disguise; therefore there is almost no chance the Senate will allow enactment of any significant minimum wage hike: never mind that a minimum-wage job is virtually slave labor -- a condemnation to inescapable poverty. Fourthly, the Democrats are already using the alleged minimum wage hike to rationalize still more looting of the federal treasury just to further fatten the bank accounts of the bosses -- yet another defacto tax cut for the rich.

With a thank-you to Truthout, the full text of the Associated Press report is linked here. Facts about the minimum wage including its history -- it originated as part of the New Deal -- are available here. And a revealing 2001 Senate vote on the re-imposition of indentured servitude via “bankruptcy reform” -- the vote provides absolute identification of the Democrats who despise working families and are thus nothing more than closet Republicans (never mind the lies these Democrats tell at election time) -- is reported here.

Though I claim no prophetic powers, what I suspect will happen (and what I believe the Democrats secretly intended all along), is that the minimum wage will remain at its present, obscenely below-the-poverty-level rate of $5.15 an hour, so that the Democrats can use it in 2008 to again bait the poor to the polls and again buy our votes -- when what we should be doing instead (and starting immediately) is begging organized labor to help us (and every other working American) unite in the solidarity of a viable third party.

*********

A longtime ACLU member, I regularly receive e-mails from that organization, one of which was yesterday’s request I sign a petition to Congress demanding the restoration of habeas corpus and due process; the end to torture in secret prisons; the end to warrantless eavesdropping on innocent Americans; and modification of the Patriot Act to bring it into compliance with the Constitution -- all of which I support. The petition, which I of course signed, also asked me to add my own “resolution for moving freedom forward in 2007.” Here is what I wrote:

“There is no freedom in the wage-slavery that is increasingly the identifying characteristic of America's working families. Thus to ‘move freedom forward in 2007’ we need not only the restoration of the First, Fourth and Fifth Amendment freedoms methodically stolen from us by a long succession of increasingly despotic Republican and Democratic administrations, but also -- because political abstractions are meaningless when one is hungry, homeless or trapped in a sweatshop -- the restoration of the equality of socioeconomic opportunity that gave our now-officially-abandoned Constitutional principles such compelling power.”

I wrote what I did not because I expect the present Congress will heed it -- IÂ’m sure it wonÂ’t -- but because the ACLU is primarily an organization of the bourgeoisie: that is, a group of yuppies. And despite their commendable commitment to defend nine of the Bill of RightsÂ’ ten amendments (the ACLU fanatically opposes the right to keep and bear arms and in fact favors forcible disarmament -- one of the reasons I also belong to the National Rifle Association), these yuppies are predictably oblivious to socioeconomic reality and how it intersects with political reality. Protected as they are by their deceptively insulated yuppoid lives, too many ACLU members not only deny the reality of class warfare but smugly refuse to acknowledge the pivotal fact -- still well know in the labor movement but otherwise methodically brainwashed from American consciousness -- that without economic democracy, there is no democracy at all.

Any readers who want to sign the ACLU’s petition -- and I urge you all to do so -- will find it here. (Click on “ACLU Calls on New Congress to Restore Civil Liberties” and please be patient as the secure link is damnably slow.)

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January 07, 2007

AMERICAÂ’S LEFT- RIGHT SUCKER-PUNCH: UNION-BASHING AND CLASS WARFARE

GEORGE ORWELL WROTE “Politics and the English Language” in 1946, but the collective degeneration that prompted him to write this provocative essay has become so widespread (and so obviously induced), the passage of 60 years has transformed the following paragraphs from protest to prophecy:

Most people who bother with the matter at all would admit that the English language is in a bad way, but it is generally assumed that we cannot by conscious action do anything about it. Our civilization is decadent and our language -- so the argument runs -- must inevitably share in the general collapse. It follows that any struggle against the abuse of language is a sentimental archaism, like preferring candles to electric lights or hansom cabs to aeroplanes. Underneath this lies the half-conscious belief that language is a natural growth and not an instrument which we shape for our own purposes.

Now, it is clear that the decline of language must ultimately have political and economic causes: it is not due simply to the bad influence of this or that individual writer. But an effect can become a cause, reinforcing the original cause and producing the same effect in an intensified form, and so on indefinitely. A man may take to drink because he feels himself a failure, and then fail all the more completely because he drinks. It is rather the same thing that is happening to the English language. It becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts. The point is that the process is reversible. Modern English, especially written English, is full of bad habits which spread by imitation and which can be avoided if one is willing to take the necessary trouble. If one gets rid of these habits one can think more clearly, and to think clearly is a necessary first step towards political regeneration...

(O)ne ought to recognize that the present political chaos is connected with the decay of language, and that one can probably bring about some improvement by starting at the verbal end. If you simplify your English, you are freed from the worst follies of orthodoxy. You cannot speak any of the necessary dialects, and when you make a stupid remark, its stupidity will be obvious, even to yourself. Political language -- and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists -- is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind. One cannot change all this in a moment, but one can at least change oneÂ’s habitsÂ…(Orwell, A Collection of Essays, A Harvest Book, Harcourt, Inc., New York: 1981; pgs. 156-157 and 170-171.)

Though Orwell would die in1950, he had already identified what by the 1960s would become the terminal affliction of the United States: the intellectual paralysis that enabled not only the slaying of the New Deal (and therefore the extinction of the American Dream) but also the assassination of the entire American experiment in constitutional democracy -- all victims of the deliberate process described today by a cunningly inoffensive and deceptively gentle label: “dumbing down.” Yet “dumbing down” is anything but gentle. Never mind how stealthy the assault or how slow the resultant death, “dumbing down” is nothing less than a murderous attack on the very skills that define our humanity -- the deliberate suppression of our individual intellects and thus our ability for collective action. “Dumbing down” is indeed the ultimate mechanism of sociopolitical control and socioeconomic predictability. It is the gradual imposition of a carefully cultivated mental retardation, a methodical zombification by which our corporate rulers (through their absolute control of public education and mass media) reduce us individually to mindless malleability and collectively to Moron Nation: this -- the process of forcible moronation -- obviously to make it that much easier to herd us all into the sweatshops of Global Capitalism. As Orwell said, “the decline of language must ultimately have political and economic causes…”

In which context compare the following two paragraphs:

A new business-backed groupÂ… mounting a highly visible attack against organized laborÂ…ran full-page advertisements in national newspapers yesterday and started a websiteÂ…asserting that many unions are corrupt and have hurt airlines, steel makers and automakers.

The worker's rights movement. I don't even want to say "labor movement" right now because that brings to mind unions and so many of them are corrupt too, doing very little to help protect worker's rights on a bigger scale.

The first paragraph is the lead of a news report, “Group Starts Anti-Union Campaign” by Steven Greenhouse, which appeared in The New York Times on 14 February 2006. The full text, for which free registration is required, is available here. The second paragraph -- identical in its condemnation of unions and unionism and rendered even more venomous by its distinctly personal tone -- appears in a 2 January 2007 moderators' post on Progressive Independent, a website that not only proclaims itself to be the cutting edge of leftist political thinking in the U.S., but anoints itself a virtual messiah, come “to shift the political center leftward to counteract the neo drift our country has been on for the last 40 years.” The post and its associated thread is linked here.

Never mind the issue of Orwellian meaninglessness evoked by the term “neo drift” (however much a “neo” -- whatever that is -- might be inclined to sink in a metaphoric sea). The point here is that the two superficially different websites -- one an unapologetic facilitator of corporate tyranny, the other a self-declared haven for those who label themselves “progressive” despite the huge contradiction of their definitively fascist attitude toward organized labor -- demonstrate identical hatred and contempt for those of us who recognize that union solidarity is our only defense against the wage-slave economy into which capitalism is undeniably transforming itself.

Thus are we led to a revealing lesson not only in the deterioration of language and the prevalence of the Big Lie, but in how the bigotry of the bourgeoisie -- the knee-jerk class-prejudice of the sneering yuppies who are the factotums of the real corporate Fat Cats -- shatters leftist solidarity even as it pretends to do the opposite. Until we in the working class recognize that affliction -- that is, until all of us who must sell our labor to survive understand not only that we are in the most merciless class war in human history but that we have been methodically denied the very language that would identify our plight (language that would also reveal rebuilding the labor movement as the logical first step toward our victory) -- we will continue to sink ever deeper into chaos and thus disempowerment. To paraphrase an old song of the coal-mine wars:

In this our stolen country
NeutralityÂ’s a lie
You either stand with working folk
Or with the thieves ally

O which side are you on
Which side are you on?

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January 04, 2007

RETITLED TO ELIMINATE WORDS THAT SEEM TO ATTRACT SPAM

THIS PAST WEEK I was beset by a worse-than-usual conjunction of the kinds of crippling disasters that typically mean financial ruin when we are impoverished -- disasters that invariably plunge us ever deeper into poverty and thus underscore the inescapable misfortune inflicted by life under capitalism. First my too-old-to-ever-again-be-reliable automobile broke down once more; next my left eye began showing symptoms suggestive of retinal detachment; then I was hammered by the emotional one-two punch of a deeply respected employer felled by a heart attack and my primary source of income suddenly threatened as a consequence; and now finally atop everything else, I have come down with a truly miserable chest cold -- all these Happy New Year presents from Jesus leaving me either terrified or depressed or both and thus utterly draining me of the emotional energy to write or indeed do anything much more productive than sullenly stare at my apartment walls.

Hence instead of writing anything original, IÂ’ll quote other writers' works in enough detail to show why I regard their particular essays as significant -- not to my personal circumstances (to which, with all the taboos on writing about poverty, virtually nothing published these days has any relevance at all), but significant in terms of shedding light on some of the greater issues by which we are now collectively confronted. As always, I have followed the excerpts with links to the complete texts.

*********

On the top of this weekÂ’s recommended-reading list is Christopher HitchensÂ’ superb Slate piece reminding us why it is entirely appropriate to be nauseated by the funereal production-numbers and general graveyard histrionics surrounding the burial of the late President Gerald Ford. (I was similarly sickened -- though at the time I chose not to say so -- by the mindless deification of Ronald Reagan, who was the most methodically vicious enemy of organized labor in U.S. presidential history.) In any case, Hitchens seems to be the only English-language journalist anywhere who dared give voice to what a lot of us were surely thinking -- that by pardoning Nixon, Ford made himself one of the greater villains in the death of American liberty.

Quoth Hitch:

One expects a certain amount of piety and hypocrisy when retired statesmen give up the ghost, but this doesn't excuse the astonishing number of omissions and misstatements that have characterized the sickly national farewell to Gerald FordÂ…Instead, there was endless talk about "healing," and of the "courage" that it had taken for Ford to excuse his former boss from the consequences of his law-breaking. You may choose, if you wish, to parrot the line that Watergate was a "long national nightmare," but some of us found it rather exhilarating to see a criminal president successfully investigated and exposed and discredited. And we do not think it in the least bit nightmarish that the Constitution says that such a man is not above the law. Ford's ignominious pardon of this felonious thug meant, first, that only the lesser fry had to go to jail. It meant, second, that we still do not even know why the burglars were originally sent into the offices of the Democratic National Committee. In this respect, the famous pardon is not unlike the Warren Commission: another establishment exercise in damage control and pseudo-reassurance (of which Ford was also a member) that actually raised more questions than it answered. The fact is that serious trials and fearless investigations often are the cause of great division, and rightly so. But by the standards of "healing" celebrated this week, one could argue that O.J. Simpson should have been spared indictment lest the vexing questions of race be unleashed to trouble us again, or that the Tower Commission did us all a favor by trying to bury the implications of the Iran-Contra scandal. Fine, if you don't mind living in a banana republic.

The remainder of HitchensÂ’ commentary is linked here.

Next is Le Monde’s thought-provoking report on Venezuela and Hugo Chávez’s new approach to socialism -- an approach that seeks to solve the structural deficiencies that became so evident in the Soviet model:

Before Chávez was elected in 1998, two parties shared power for 40 years: the Venezuelan Christian Democratic party (Copei), and the social democratic party, Democratic Action (AD). They were adept at using petrodollars to deal with problems. They handed out government posts to calm social unrest but had to comply with the neoliberal ideology of the North and the need to limit public policies. The only way to offset the bloated state apparatus was to organise its inefficiency. With Venezuela’s social divisions, skilled civil servants often come from backgrounds resistant to social change, sometimes because of ignorance of the conditions in which most Venezuelans live…

The Fifth Republic Movement that brought Chávez to power is not a political party. After 1994 (3) it grew out of a coalition of leftwing parties and former guerrilla movements disgruntled with their leaders, who some thought settled too comfortably into the society they had struggled against. Young activists trained by AD and Copei quickly realised that the Chávez candidature would open up new ways to reach power and many joined his ranks…

Now the community is the basic structural unit of government of the new state, legally defined as 200-400 families in urban areas, around 20 in the countryside and from 10 up for the indigenous population. The Spanish political analyst Juan Carlos Monedero observed that the main reason 20th-century socialism failed was a lack of participation by the people. Communal councils may be instrumental in the construction of VenezuelaÂ’s 21st-century socialism.

The full text is linked here.

Last is a Le Monde analysis of the psychodynamics of the war on terror -- the best work of its kind I have seen anywhere.

In the global war on terror…making money has been a key aim. US interest in Afghanistan is inseparable from the oil and gas fields of the Caspian, just as US interest in Iraq is linked to the oil. Beyond that, fresh legitimacy has to be found for the vast US military-industrial infrastructure that burgeoned during the cold war (another profitable war in which the enemy was rarely directly engaged). The demon-du-jour has been redefined as fundamentalism, rogue states, drugs, narcoterrorists, al-Qaida, Hizbullah. The terrorist remains elusive but the targets for retaliation — Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran or Lebanon, Iran — are readily found on a map.

As Hannah Arendt understood in relation to 1920s Germany, when a military reversal (defeat in the first world war) is combined with serious social and economic uncertainty, the search for a clearly identifiable enemy may become intense. The point is not to be right but to be certain, however flimsy the evidence. The lack of evidence linking Saddam and 9/11 is seen as an irrelevance.

Through actions that provoke the enemy, both sides may prove themselves “right.”… Today’s terrorists have turned the US into something that resembles their own propaganda: the indiscriminate nature of the US war on terror (targeting Iraq after 9/11) creates the impression that victims are targeted just because they are Arab or Muslim…If terrorists can seek to nurture the enemy’s brutality, the same may apply to counter-terrorists. Those waging a counterproductive war on terror stand to gain the perverse satisfaction of confirming that the enemy was just as dangerous, brutal, indiscriminate and pervasive as they imagined.

The imprecision of retribution may be functional, as in the ancient witch-hunt. There need be no logical connection between the crime and the chosen victim…Those who challenge the morality or efficacy of the witch-hunt may be labelled as witches, or now as anti-American…Punishment may be taken as evidence of guilt. (Arendt observed of the Holocaust: “Common sense reacted to the horrors of Buchenwald and Auschwitz with the plausible argument: ‘What crime must these people have committed that such things were done to them’.”) Many Americans, deferential to their president, took the targeting of Iraq as evidence that it must be linked to 9/11. On the eve of the war, a poll suggested that 72% of Americans believed it was likely that Saddam Hussein was personally involved in 9/11.

This disturbing analysis -- which explains why the so-called War on Terror has become self-sustaining and is therefore inescapable without outside-the-box thinking (precisely the mode of thinking our de-evolving species increasingly finds impossible) -- is linked here.

*********

As to my own circumstances:

My employerÂ’s condition has stabilized and, contrary to earlier reports, is markedly improving, and just as his original affliction caused me double grief, this new development gives me double pleasure: the pleasure of a revered colleague apparently saved from deadly danger, and the pleasure of renewed hope our work together will continue toward the mutual fruition we each envision.

Meanwhile, thanks to the intervention of my best friend, who is among other things not only a skilled mechanic but a former automotive service manager, my car is running again: this time the problem seems to have been a combination of an under-charged new battery and over-corroded old contacts (and not the total charging system failure I suspected), a diagnosis supported by voltmeter readings.

Because I am among the rapidly decreasing number of retired persons who can still afford supplemental Medicare insurance -- I belong to Group Health, a truly wonderful nonprofit healthcare cooperative that dates from the era my present home-state was damned as “the Soviet of Washington” -- I now know my eye problem is vitreous deterioration, an unavoidable consequence of aging, and not retinal detachment, which is a complication of vitreous deterioration and presents with nearly identical symptoms but, unlike vitreous deterioration, demands immediate surgical correction lest blindness ensue. As to this damn cold that has lowered my voice to a gravel-crusher bass, it feels as if my lungs are filled with wet cement -- though now at least the clean-up crew (spelled “Robitussin”) is starting to hose it away.

As to my penchant for anticipating the very worst of outcomes whenever such disasters threaten, I will make no apology for that. It is merely the voice of experience: the coldly rational response of a person who has been literally wiped out by many such episodes before, the infinitely bitter personal history of one who has always been impoverished in a land that not only criminalizes poverty but despises the poor -- and therefore the undeniable fact that under any such circumstances it is the deepest and most profound wisdom to expect nothing but ruination -- no matter how hard one struggles to achieve the opposite.

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December 27, 2006

OF CONTRADICTIONS, LONE WOLVES AND WRITERLY PURPOSE

RAPHAELLE WRITES THAT I am “too much of a lone wolf -- wolves are pack animals working together for the whole,” adds that I am “a mix of contradictions” and concludes that I “spend too much time alone and have far too much to offer to succumb to bitterness.” He thus raises issues that are vital to my decision to resume blogging. Here is my response:

Thank you, Raphaelle, for the supportiveness that is evident beyond your criticism, especially for its gentle tone. I will try to respond accordingly.

Taking the matter of alleged contradictions first because it is the easiest criticism to answer, I surely understand how my writing might convey such an impression. But I believe if you will take the time to differentiate between ideological principles and more concrete realities -- chiefly history, whether personal, political or both -- I suspect you will find the riddles of the seeming contradictions are very quickly solved.

My recent ouster from a self-proclaimed “Left” website provides a succinct example of how what might be termed “contradiction“ is in fact the result of someone else’s ideological exclusiveness. Based on what I can glean from various apres-ouster comments jeering my contributions to the site, maliciously misrepresenting my views and applauding my virtual execution, it was the self-righteous and smugly irrevocable verdict of the site’s authorities that -- merely because I am an uncompromising defender of the right to keep and bear arms -- I am not only definitively excluded from the “progressive” camp (and thereby eternally denied use of the “progressive” label), I am also forever to be damned as the Enemy. Thus was I ideologically “cleansed” from that particular electronic universe.

However this was not my first encounter with the reflexive hatefulness that proves the adjectives “hysterical” and “fanatical” to be accurate characterizations of forcible-disarmament advocates. The same conflict was in large measure the basis for my far less formal but far more emotionally wrenching divorcement from the Democratic Party 18 years earlier: my Democratic adversaries spitefully claimed my ownership of firearms not only identified me as a “Republican” but proved me to be a “closet Nazi” -- never mind the Left/liberal totality of my values or even my long Democratic political history. (The other 1988 issue was my equally unyielding support for the First, Fourth and Fifth amendment rights so many Democrats were then seeking to undermine, this in the name of censorship measures unprecedented in U.S. history -- a harsh and sweeping purge of literature and art rationalized by feminists as “pornography” suppression -- yet another example of how ideological absolutism had become, especially during those years, far more an attribute of the Democrats than of the Republicans.)

Whether over the right to keep and bear arms or the rights embodied in the First, Fourth and Fifth amendments, the ensuing clashes followed the pattern of all such campaigns of ideological exclusion. It was forcefully asserted as an unarguable truth that my support for RKBA not only contradicted but actually nullified my equally impassioned support for an entire agenda of socioeconomic betterment: universal health care, universal educational funding from kindergarten through doctorate, a national WPA-type crash program to build adequate public transport, restoration of labor rights by repeal of Taft-Hartley etc., not to mention the cause of civil rights (for which I had gone to jail) -- all this and a great deal more supposedly invalidated by my recognition of the historical fact that an armed population is ultimately the only defense against individual and collective victimhood, no matter whether the victimhood is inflicted by criminals or criminal governments.

But from my perspective there is no contradiction here at all: my support for the right to keep and bear arms does not make me any less a leftist. Neither does the ouster so inflicted. Instead the entire affair reflects the fact that the people who run the website in question define themselves as militantly pacifist and therefore -- as a major objective in the achievement of their pacifist agenda -- advocate the forcible disarmament of the civilian population in the United States: a vital prerequisite to the imposition of the mandatory (be-pacifist-or-be-jailed) pacifism that would be inflicted by their favorite Democratic presidential candidate’s proposed “Department of Peace.” Moreover the same forcible-disarmament zealotry demonstrably infects all the Democratic Party’s senior leadership and the entire urban/suburban bourgeois/feminist faction of its rank-and-file. In any case -- whether rationalized by pacifism or feminism -- it is undeniably bigotry-fueled class warfare, proof of the huge fear and contempt with which the bourgeoisie -- the yuppies -- view Americans who are rural, blue collar or simply impoverished.

Because it is the yuppies and their corporate masters who control the language of American political discourse, our stance toward forcible disarmament has been carefully positioned as the signal issue that not only determines whether we are “progressive,” but often whether we will be allowed to call ourselves “Democrats.” Not even the reproductive-rights conflict carries such significance. But then the presence or absence of reproductive rights does not determine -- as the future of the right to keep and bear arms unquestionably does -- whether we are a nation of citizens or a nation of subjects and victims.

In truth then my fervent defense of RKBA is not a contradiction but its diametrical opposite: RKBA supports the agenda of true democratic social reformation by its recognition of the distinctly American, distinctly revolutionary constitutional principle (later adopted by Marx) that an armed working class is the final defense against aristocratic tyranny (whether an aristocracy of money or an aristocracy of ideology): the same commitment to liberty that prompts my (admittedly belated) recognition of the historical truth of class struggle and the fact that political democracy is meaningless without economic democracy.

You might be more likely to consider my voting history as contradictory -- perhaps flagrantly so. But given the absolute sameness of the Republican and Democratic parties -- even the Democrats’ oft-boasted commitment to reproductive choice is proven a Big Lie by the Democrats’ knowing and deliberate support of economic policies that increasingly shrink reproductive freedom to merely another of the special privileges of wealth -- where is there any real contradiction in the fact I voted Republican from 1988 through 2004 and straight Democratic in 2006? This year (unlike the other years in question), the Democrats promised to ameliorate economic troubles the Republicans would not even acknowledge, and I took the Democrats at their word -- gambling they would keep it in a bet I have already clearly lost. Not that I am surprised; since the 1970s, both parties have methodically collaborated in the destruction of the New Deal, thereby brazenly flaunting their contempt and even hatred for the poor -- of whom I am one. As it is said often in rural Washington state: “Ain’t a rat turd’s worth of difference between the two parties any more -- but at least the Republicans will (maybe) let us keep our guns.”

Speaking of contradictions, I can think of nothing more contradictory -- absurdly contradictory at that -- than the mistaken, hypocritical and patently self-serving notion that economic security can somehow be achieved without altering the present-day reality of tyrannosauric capitalism. However the maintenance of capitalism may be rationalized -- and in the past 18 months I have been truly astonished by the number of self-proclaimed “leftists” and “progressives” who believe that capitalism represents humanity’s ultimate economic achievement -- the core purpose of this belief is clearly to ensure its proponents the uninterrupted supply of all the trinkets and gadgets essential to their yuppoid lifestyle. Never mind that capitalism is destroying the planetary ecosystem and thus bringing down on us an apocalyptic disaster without any human precedent; never mind that that since the Industrial Revolution, capitalism has been the sole source of war and by far the primary source of all less organized violence as well. The party goes on, even as the party-goers try to ease their guilt by adorning their trophy BMWs with bumper-stickers that command us all to “visualize peace” -- as if we could somehow sloganize ourselves to liberation.

*********

I am indeed a “lone wolf,” but it is because I am thrice isolated: first by the ideological exclusion imposed on me by fanatics; secondly by the alleged sin of my poverty; thirdly by what is allegedly a far greater sin: my defiant refusal to surrender to those who insist that poverty is always the fault of the impoverished and never ever the fault of capitalism itself.

But blaming the poor for poverty is a definitively fascist viewpoint; America’s headlong rush toward fascism is clearly demonstrated by the fact this notion -- now also the cornerstone of our national welfare policy -- is as commonplace amongst those who anoint themselves New Age “progressives“ as it is among the traditionally Hitler-harsh plutocracy of the capitalist ruling class. Because I will not abjure -- because I will not make the my-poverty-is-entirely-my-fault public act of contrition the United States demands of all us poor -- I am considered “uppity”: white trash who does not know his place and is never sufficiently grateful even for the begrudgingly doled-out crumbs of Social Security and Medicare Part D, the latter the DemoPublican Prescription Drug Lord benefit that more than tripled my annual prescription drug costs merely to increase the already obscene profits of the prescription drug magnates.

This -- my brazen lack of contrition for my poverty -- was almost certainly the unacknowledged, under-the-covers issue in my recent ouster from that allegedly “Left” discussion board: just as they say in the fraternity house, at the country club and in the executive suite, I am not the "right kind." And the damning "not" is not merely my support for the right to keep and bear arms (and thus for an armed working class), but the fact I make no secret of being poor white trash and thus too, in the case of the recent ejection, clearly offended not only the board-member bourgeoisie in general but especially their most aggressively authoritarian factions: the coterie of militant pacifists, forcible disarmament advocates and other would-be despots clustered around Democratic presidential candidate Dennis Kucinich, a politician who (as the mayor of Cleveland, Ohio), was very credibly accused of myriad “Nixon White House” tyrannies -- tyrannies that provide a deeply disturbing suggestion of an utter contempt for the Bill of Rights and American liberty in general -- a contempt that is unquestionably shared by the forcible-disarmament/mandatory-pacifism cult at the core of his supporters.

Finally there is that fact that we poor in the U.S. are utterly despised even if we cravenly comply with the most degrading demands of humility and shamefacedness: after all, our poverty is living proof of capitalism's tyrannosauric nature, and in the Britney Spears superficiality of Moron Nation, the great reflexive unspoken mass-mentality terror is that the mere sight of our misfortune is somehow contagious -- that our fate will magically spread to others merely by our proximity. Which is, of course, the hateful truth behind U.S. socioeconomic policy, whether Democratic or Republican, whether in post-Katrina New Orleans or in Iraq: we poor -- especially those of us who are also disabled -- are very literally not considered worthy of any “help” save extermination.

*********

Actually I am not totally alone in my isolation, though it often feels as if I am. This is because I am cut off, almost certainly for the rest of this life, from the intimacy with nature that is my sole source of spiritual sustenance; because the housing regulations under which I now live (and under which I will no doubt spend the remainder of this life) deny me the sweet blessings of canine companionship; because geographically I am so impossibly far removed from the very few surviving kinfolk who do not find me repugnant, I will probably never see any of them again; and because I am always terrified of wearing out my welcome among the few genuine friends with whom I live in geographical proximity -- faithful, longstanding and deeply close friends, but nevertheless fewer friends than I can count on a single hand, and one such friend already years dead of cancer.

Moreover my isolation, though surely not absolute, is absolutely inescapable: I never learned to be comfortable around strangers unless I was shielded by the self-assurance granted by press credentials (or bolstered by the bombast of booze), and in any case poverty now and for the rest of my years limits my socialization to the acquisition of necessities -- trips to the supermarket, the pharmacy, the clinic, sometimes to a book store or the library for source material I cannot access online, very occasionally to a neighborhood saloon frequented by collegial folk I knew in better times but whose successes in contrast to my lack thereof make genuine friendship impossible. To aspire beyond those limits -- to entertain even the faintest hope of making more friends -- is to court disappointment if not rejection: for one thing, my friendships have always taken decades to evolve, and I rather doubt I have that many years left. For another there is what I have increasingly come to recognize as an impassible class barrier: the fact that the inescapable nature of my poverty -- no matter my obvious talent (or that it was permanently thwarted by disasters completely beyond my control) -- marks me indelibly not only as white trash but as particularly worthless white trash at that.

And no friendship will ever compensate for the permanent absence of love in my life.

Though I have surely loved, and deeply, only once in all my years was I ever loved back, and I understand now I was doubly doomed, once by the personal and once by the political, doomed first by the personal fact I am hopelessly “damaged goods” (emotionally crippled by the incurable afflictions of a malevolently dysfunctional childhood -- enough emotionally disfigured I always suspected no woman could ever find me lastingly attractive); doomed next and again by the political and socioeconomic fact that hopeless poverty is synonymous with pariahdom. The latter condition is the unavoidable byproduct of another undeniable political/socioeconomic reality: the fact heterosexual American women are conditioned from birth to be the ultimate arbiters of materialism -- as Madison Avenue discovered nearly a century ago, the final decision-makers in terms of what will be accepted and what will be rejected. For that reason -- the fact that from my 23rd year on I never had any demonstrable "prospects" -- I see now in the clarity of age there was not the slightest possibility any woman would have chosen me as a long-term mate.

Nevertheless, for most of my life I remained vaguely hopeful I would someday be lastingly loved -- hopeful, that is, until a welfare bureaucracy's 1989 proclamation I was "permanently unemployable" condemned me to an even deeper kind of poverty -- poverty so ragged-sleeve, beater-car obvious, that from my 49th year onward it was quite simply unthinkable I would ever again know even the brief blessing of a womanÂ’s momentary passion, much less anything more enduring: an infinitely hurtful wound of banishment the emotional pain of which will haunt me all the way to the grave and perhaps even beyond -- never mind that its physical counterpart was long ago wiped away by the advancing infirmities of old age.

In bitter truth my life has never been more than a constant struggle against one obstacle after another -- the vast majority of its pleasures the ephemeral (i.e., “worthless”) but actually priceless gifts one is given by intimacy with Nature -- and now that I am old and resigned to the inescapable barren my life has become, I no longer feel any need to hide from its wretchedness or deny its bottomless disappointments. My hope for a successful journalism career -- in my youth, even my harshest detractors believed I was destined for The New York Times -- was destroyed by a 1963 civil rights incident in which I was arrested in the newsroom of The Knoxville Journal and charged with “disorderly conduct” for my refusal to write a racist lie: an absurd accusation -- speedily dismissed by acquittal -- that nevertheless forever afterward damned me as “insubordinate” and “untrustworthy” and thus eternally limited me to second-rate newspapers or worse: never mind the undeniable achievements of my reporting. When the 1983 house fire literally destroyed all the rest of my life’s work -- one nearly finished book, the completed research on another -- it was obvious I would never achieve even one of the goals to which, since my 16th year, I had dedicated my entire being. The 1989 blow from the welfare bureaucracy was the final nail in my metaphorical coffin: the end of any and all rational hope I would ever find even an alternative route to a minimally comfortable old age -- the terminal shove by which capitalism (in this instance with the help of its feminist class-warriors and their gender quotas) flung me into the bottomless cesspool of inescapable poverty.

Several acquaintances over the years have expressed their astonishment I am still alive, noting correctly that such unrelenting misery and hopelessness might have driven a weaker or less purposefully defiant person to suicide decades ago -- which is, of course, precisely the rationale behind how capitalist society is structured: to hide the evidence of its infinite malignance and toxicity by marginalizing, exterminating and thus eradicating its prey, whether institutionally (as by aid deliberately denied the victims of Katrina or life-sustaining drugs deliberately cut off via Medicare Part D) or psychologically (as by the despair that leads to self-destruction, slowly by drugs and alcohol or quickly by self-inflicted mortal injury) -- genocide no matter how inflicted, and always the hideous truth behind my assertion that, in this time and place, survival itself is a revolutionary act.

Survival is therefore resistance. And it is precisely by resistance I fulfill my duty as a pack animal. Never mind Marx; my totem is Wolf, and the closest companions of my life were dogs, and though I am now inescapably caged by poverty -- indeed as if I have been isolated from so much I love in what my very isolation suggests is surely to be my terminal kennel -- I am nevertheless doing my best to follow the breathtakingly pure examples set by my canine spirit guides: despite my tainted humanness, working as diligently as possible for the good of the whole. Thus -- and also because it is literally the only pleasure I have left -- do I write.

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December 22, 2006

WINTER SOLSTICE: AS THE LIGHT RETURNS, A LONG-OVERDUE CATCHING-UP

AT LEAST ONE PERSON, stumbling upon the autographical material accessed by clicking on “About the Author” (above right), seized upon my 2004-vintage self-descriptions not as evidence of how much I had changed in the intervening years and months -- how much (if I may be excused the employment of that hateful New Age usage) I had “evolved” -- but rather as the basis for denouncing me as a liar, an imposter, a false-flag operator, a genuine Typhoid Harry of in-group disharmony and perhaps even an infiltrator clandestinely dispatched by some agency of the Great Oppressor -- in any case a dark force who sought to undo all her efforts toward the propagation of enlightenment.

The truth was never so grandiose. Never mind my criticÂ’s implicit rejection of any notion that humans -- especially elderly humans like myself -- might change and grow; I had simply forgotten all about those 2004 autobiographical statements -- absolutely accurate descriptions of my state of mind at the time but utterly invalid today -- and thus, in the process of gradually and little-by-slow resurrecting this blog (which I began late last summer), I not only overlooked them entirely but (of course) also neglected to revise them.

Thus too my heartfelt apology for the part my unintentional negligence played in the unpleasantness that resulted -- a circumstance about which I shall say no more simply because those to whom it is relevant will fully understand (at least presumably they will), while those to whom it is not relevant have no reason to trouble themselves about it.

Nevertheless I urge all readers to the take time to read my new statement of purpose, and not just its summation here:

This site is a journal of political and philosophical evolution, a work-in-progress by an old, impoverished, cast-off and therefore presumably broken white-trash man: a person who nevertheless remains defiant -- a solitary human being who recognizes that, in this time and place, survival itself is a revolutionary act.

To read the full text, click on “About the Author” and then on “By Way of Introduction.”

Meanwhile, the very brightest of Winter Solstice blessings to all of you -- even the aforementioned critic.

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December 20, 2006

A BEGINNING AT THE END OF A LONG HARD JOURNEY

I AM BACK, and I am rather not quite the same person who last posted here.

For the past 18 months I have wandered in a wasteland of on-line U.S. politics, its cultoid demands for lockstep conformity befouling whatever fresh air it might formerly have offered, its once-presumably fertile realm now a toxically anti-intellectual barren, its most apt description the oft-quoted William Butler Yeats line -- the best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity -- a condition that seems at least as dreadfully true of humanity today as it was in the era of Nazi ascension Yeats so accurately described.

But my odyssey actually began not with the advent of my long silence 18 months ago but three years beforehand in 2001. A writer as much by inclination as by trade, I was looking for an on-line home, a virtual family. Instead, on both Right and Left, I found superficial acceptance that -- once the unorthodoxies of my views became clear -- was invariably followed by venomous personal attacks, deliberately hurtful rejection and, in two instances (both on the Left), the virtual execution of electronic banishment. Thus my quest has taught me that in today’s United States, my very independence of mind makes me an ideological pariah and dooms me to political homelessness -- a condition I may as well embrace, solitude and all -- because it is now obvious it will accompany me to death‘s door if not beyond.

Nevertheless, as I better absorb the lesson I learned, I will tell more about my travels -- particularly why my own former (leftist) values had by 1988 deteriorated into a (rightist) politics of retaliation (for that is precisely what happened), but then, beginning in 2004, evolved into reconciliation with those original (leftist) wellsprings. The result is a new and abiding clarity based on the historical truth of class struggle: the OccamÂ’s Razor of political analysis -- the genuine missing link in U.S. politics -- the principle that among other things explains precisely why my life was destroyed by the Washington state welfare bureaucracy 19 years ago: the victimization for which, from 1988 through 2004, I voted Republican in revenge.

Alas, though my experience is an extreme example of the contradictions woven into the devilÂ’s bargains served up by our political system -- we are allowed only the narrowest of choices, either Democrats who falsely promise they will provide us with a desperately needed socioeconomic safety net even as they forcibly deny us the right and means of self-defense, or Republicans who make no secret of their intent to reduce us to slavery but claim to preserve our right to defend ourselves against crime and apocalypse -- the same impossible dilemma ultimately confronts all of us who must sell our labor to survive. While I foresee no escape from the dilemma itself, perhaps my own struggles toward political understanding will at least help others grappling with the same crazy-making reality.

Meanwhile, to illustrate a much larger dimension of what is at stake, here is an infinitely sad and endlessly saddening report of an especially gentle species of dolphin now harried to extinction.

Dolphins are as intelligent as we are -- there are many true stories of dolphins saving sailors' lives, and there is even some suggestion the ancient Minoans regarded dolphins as uniquely symbolic of the co-mingled elements -- earth, water, fire and air -- characteristic of all earthly life. Because intelligence is also capacity for emotion, it is at least arguable that dolphins possess the same range of feeling as humans. Thus if we have ever known (as I surely have) the pangs of genuine isolation and absolute loneliness, we might be able to empathize, just a bit, with that last surviving Baiji, who no doubt spent endless hours desperately searching for kindred before finally dying in the ultimate despair of loss and abandonment.

Such is the genocide implicit not only in capitalism but in what H. sapiens sapiens attempts to rationalize as "civilization" -- an escalating atrocity for which I do not believe our planet will ever forgive us. Therefore as an Act of Contrition -- and as a small prayerful foreword to what will be another of my recurring themes -- I offer this fragment of a Cheyenne Ghost Dance chant:

The white manÂ’s god has forsaken him
Let us go and look for our Mother...

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June 23, 2005

THE SILENCE OF THE NUMB: A TURNING-POINT

NOT THAT I DON'T still bear the Democratic Party an enormous and multifaceted grudge. Once a "lifelong Democrat" -- formerly even a Democratic precinct committeeman -- the fact remains I was driven from the party not only by its fanatical opposition to the right to keep and bear arms but also by its increasingly generalized yet ever more implacable hostility to blue-collar and working-class concerns in general. The latter goes far beyond personal experience; it is a party-wide malaise first noted by the late Jack Newfield -- one of the Left's most astute political journalists -- nearly 40 years ago. And many many times worse (indeed as far as I am concerned ultimately unforgivable) is what the Democratic Party and its policies did to me personally: by facilitating the imposition of gender quotas on social services in my residential state of Washington -- quotas imposed in compliance with the radical-feminist doctrine that all social services to male Caucasians should be punitively embargoed until women and minorities have absolute economic parity -- the Democrats literally destroyed my life, their quota-mongered denial of vital treatment turning a temporary disability permanent, condemning me to spend the rest of my years in inescapable, ever-worsening poverty.

(For those of you who have followed my present-day struggles to stay afloat economically, it is increasingly apparent that nothing I do -- nothing whatsoever and no matter how diligently -- will suffice to rescue my journalism career from the abyss into which it was flung by the welfare bureaucracy 18 years ago. I have no other abilities, journalism skills do not transfer well into any other accessible realm, and in any case the requisite work is simply not available -- at least not to me, no doubt largely because of my age, my obvious talent be damned. Certain bankruptcy, probable homelessness and the terminal silence either one will impose now seem inevitable, though I will continue writing here for as long as I can -- that is, until this computer burns out, my creditors pull the plug or I drop dead, whichever happens first.)

But while I will never forgive the Democratic politicians and bureaucrats their trespasses against me and my life, I am at last willing to set aside the lingering anger that prompted me to vote Republican in revenge. The subversive dangers of radical feminism (its "freedom is slavery" attack on the Constitution and its viciously anti-intellectual war against Western Civilization), our national cowardice resulting from pacifist erosion of the right to self-defense -- these are but vernal zephyrs compared to the gathering tempest of Christianity's Dominionist onslaught. The Republicans -- now unabashedly the party of Christofascism -- have become the greatest threat to liberty in the history of the Republic.

Proof of the extent to which this is true lies only partly in the ever-more-disturbing disclosures about the horrors of Dominionism or "reconstructionist" Christianity (for which see "A New Threat to American Liberty," here, plus the several revealing reports available here). The ugly truth is even more apparent -- glaringly so -- in the evidence provided by the outcome of the recent Pentagon investigation into runaway Dominionist viciousness at the U.S. Air Force Academy. In a word, the probe was a brazen whitewash, a defiant cover-up that -- given the realities of chain-of-command -- could never have happened had the Bush Administration not specifically ordered it.

Quoth The New York Times:

A Pentagon inquiry's finding of no overt religious discrimination at the Air Force Academy strains credibility, considering the academy superintendent has already acknowledged it will take years to undo the damage from evangelical zealots on campus. Indeed, amid its thicket of bureaucratese, the report by an Air Force investigative panel goes on for page after page describing cases of obvious and overt religious bias. But it tosses all of these off as "perceived bias," as if the blame lies with the victims and not the offenders, and throws up a fog of implausible excuses, like "a lack of awareness" of what is impermissible behavior by military officers.

The Times editorial, dated today, is entitled "Obfuscating Intolerance." (It is linked here, though registration may be required.) . It continues:

This muddle stands in stark contrast to an earlier investigation by Yale Divinity School that found widespread problems with intolerance at the academy. That study described faculty members, chaplains and even the football coach as pressuring cadets toward Christian beliefs and hazing them about divergent views on religion. The Pentagon study insisted that this did not amount to a widespread problem for non-Christian cadets who complained of ranking officers encouraging an evangelical fervor.

I would have not been so cravenly deferential to the administration as The Times' editors were, and I would have given the editorial a somewhat less euphemistic head. Perhaps "Obfuscating Theocracy" or more aptly "Theocratic Cover-Up" -- for that is precisely what it is.

Nor do I doubt for an instant the "evangelical zealots" were infinitely more vicious than the Pentagon allowed to be reported. Growing up as I did mostly in the South -- my schooldays belonged mostly to a father and stepmother who lived below the Mason-Dixon Line, my summers to a mother who lived far above it -- I know all too well not only the stench of Christofascist oppression, but the bruising power of evangelical fists and the threat of Fundamentalist gun-muzzles also -- the oft-confirmed need for armed defense against the latter a primary reason I am such a staunch supporter of Second Amendment rights. As parochial school students, my schoolmates and I were frequently attacked as "idolators" who "worship an abomination," the Virgin Mary. Though our nuns forbade us fighting, the eager knuckles of the Fundamentalists left us no choice but to strike back, just as generations of Irish Catholics have had to protect themselves from equally militant Protestants, Irish and otherwise. Indeed I cannot count the number of times I had to "write lines" ("I will turn the other cheek...") as a result of after-school rumbles with Fundamentalist bigots. Later, as a young adult associated with the Civil Rights Movement, I lived under constant threat of retaliation by that singularly American death-squad known as the Ku Klux Klan: an organization so inseparably linked with Southern Protestant Christianity -- Fundamentalist and main-stream as well -- its gatherings were known colloquially as "the Saturday Night Men's Bible Study Class." And as a young newspaper reporter, one of my stories so enraged the Klan its minions deluged me with telephonic death-threats and even poisoned my dog, a black-and-tan German shepherd I had named Brunhilda, a beloved companion of memorably sweet disposition, a four-legged friend I had raised from puppyhood. In those years I never went anywhere -- not even to bed -- without a suitably large-caliber handgun, loaded and ready and always within easy reach.

Though I lived also in Florida, Virginia and West Virginia, and was stationed in South Carolina, Maryland and Georgia before the Army shipped me to Korea, I spent most of the southern part of my life in East Tennessee, the beautifully mountainous end of a state where the teaching of evolution was not only illegal (and may still be, for all I know) but was vindictively prosecuted in the infamous Scopes "Monkey Trial," for which Google. But as I have already implied, the Fundamentalist malice on exhibit in Dayton, Tenn., was only the tip of a very cold iceberg indeed: throughout the South, the Fundamentalist preachers were the defacto political commissars in a malevolently fascist system the intent of which was to shackle coal miners, agricultural laborers, textile-mill workers, all their blue-collar brothers and sisters (and even their white-collar cousins) forever in serfdom to the mine operators and the other members of the ruling oligarchy. It was Fundamentalist "gospel" (and the fire-and-brimstone "fear of the Lord" so induced) that terrorized Southern workers into permanent bondage: the plutocrats were "God's anointed leaders," the robber-barons "favored by the Lord"; everyone else was doomed to the earthly perdition of permanent impoverishment -- this in lifelong punishment for sin and sinfulness -- and not just the sins spelled out in the bible.

Among the deadliest of these extra-biblical sins in the South of my boyhood years was the sin of being "uppity" -- aspiring to rights, dignity and comforts beyond those prescribed for your class. One of the most lethal forms of "uppity" was unionism: joining a union could literally get you killed. But an even more fatal risk was being "uppity" for integration and civil rights. In fact I don't think anybody has ever calculated the combined death toll the oligarchy inflicted on both movements, all in the name of suppressing the lower classes, whether black or white. But given the dread commonplace of atrocities such as the killings of organizers Michael Schwerner, James Chaney and Andrew Goodman, or all the deaths such as those in the Coal Creek War, the dead themselves surely cannot number less than thousands.

And -- lest some Northerners become too self-righteous -- never forget such casualties aren't limited to the South. Add in horrors like the machine-gunning of striking textile workers in Massachusetts, not to mention all those industrial "accidents" that resulted from management's indifference to worker safety (like the Fraterville Mine Disaster in Tennessee or the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire in New York City) -- and the casualty list nationwide may reach to the tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands. All murdered for the "sin" of wanting better lives for themselves, their spouses, their children. With the Bible-thump preachers blessing the plutocrats as "God's elect" and the plutocracy's vigilantes as "servants of the Lord."

Sound vaguely familiar? It's American History -- the history they don't teach in school, the history you can find only in the better textbooks or on the Internet, the history of Fundamentalism the preachers like Pat Robertson don't want you to know or remember. It's history that portrays precisely the kind of society the Dominionists want to re-impose on the entire United States -- and President George W. Bush and his Republican Party are helping them do it. They may not machine-gun us in the streets any more -- at least not yet -- but downsizing, outsourcing and the loss of health insurance can kill us just as dead.

I believe the dangers of this time cannot be overstated, but I also believe that because we are Americans, we may yet awaken and avert them all: the external onslaught of jihadist Islam, the now seemingly petty domestic threat of Leftist authoritarianism, and the looming unspeakably malignant jeopardy into which every principle and institution we value has been placed by the would-be tyrants of the Christofascist Right. But we are just now too many of us still benumbed by dread and confusion -- the legitimate fear of terrorism , the equally legitimate horror of poverty, the fretful confusion inflicted by perhaps the most obfuscatory political campaign ever waged by the worst candidates ever nominated, the myriad daily worries that yammer at the edges of our minds in a constantly worsening economy that is increasingly destructive to both the family budget and the planetary environment. Just now we are numbed to silence, all the more so by the extent to which we working folk have been betrayed by the DemoPublican politicians of both parties. But I like to think that eventually realization will prevail, that little-by-slow we will begin to wake up and speak up -- and perhaps even take appropriate action. The last time there was such a needful awakening -- such a great speaking-out -- we elected Franklin Delano Roosevelt our president. May the Holy Mystery some call God grant us at least such a savior again.

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June 09, 2005

WHAT IF THE PARANOIDS ARE RIGHT (II)

I HAD LONG IGNORED the Ohio presidential election controversy as a combination of sour grapes and agitation by fruitbowls and nutcakes, and though I was surprised by the contradictions between exit-poll results and the final outcome, I did not suspect any grave election thievery beyond the suspicious circumstances that so embarrassed my home state of Washington.

To set the record straight once again, I must admit with great shame I voted for George Bush – a pro-war vote I now deplore because – though I still support what by all rights should be called the War Against Islamic Aggression – it is also obvious Bush’s domestic policies will be far harder on the poor (myself included) than ever I imagined. But I also voted for Christine Gregoire – yet I deplore too the apparent vote-thievery by the Seattle Democratic machine that gave her the governorship. But one of the lesser reasons I voted for Bush was that I believed John Kerry would probably win the election by one to three percentage points – just as the exit polls indicated – and on that basis I regarded my vote as a kind of pro-war protest. Conversely, the only reason I voted for Gregoire was that I assumed (and based on Bush’s record since the election, obviously assumed correctly) that Dino Rossi would further the Bush/Dominionist scheme for savaging the social safety net, turning poverty and the fear of poverty into a vicious flail with which to beat American working folk into ever more frenzied competition in the Rat Race. (Such are the enfeebled considerations that weigh upon the alleged mind of a genuine Independent.)

But back to the Ohio election: as I said, nutcakes and fruitbowls – until I read the Christopher Hitchens piece that ran in the March issue of Vanity Fair. I came across this vital work after a dear friend had suggested I research the ongoing controversy about the Ohio vote-count. Here is what Andrew Sullivan would call the Hitchens report’s “money paragraph”:

I am not any sort of statistician or technologist, and (like many Democrats in private) I did not think that John Kerry should have been president of any country at any time. But I have been reviewing books on history and politics all my life, making notes in the margin when I come across a wrong date, or any other factual blunder, or a missing point in the evidence. No book is ever free from this. But if all the mistakes and omissions occur in such a way as to be consistent, to support or attack only one position, then you give the author a lousy review. The Federal Election Commission, which has been a risible body for far too long, ought to make Ohio its business. The Diebold company, which also manufactures A.T.M.s, should not receive another dime until it can produce a voting system that is similarly reliable. And Americans should cease to be treated like serfs or extras when they present themselves to exercise their franchise.

The entire disturbing analysis is available here. It is long enough – and thought provoking enough – I will hold off on the other links I had intended to post tonight, perhaps saving them for some other day.

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