Why I Like Occupy Louisville

On the heels of some negative Occupy commentary … 

So, I’m listening to the radio on the way home from work, and Louisville mayor Greg Fischer is being interviewed.  He takes a call from someone who wanted to discuss Occupy Louisville.  Right now, OL’s status is in question: they were originally given a permit (after being moved site to site several times, getting permits at each site) which has now expired.  But the little square of land that OL had been shunted to apparently is operated by the board of public works instead of the parks department, which means that, technically speaking, there are no rules against overnight camping in the location.  The city is now waiting for the courts to decide what is going on before they take any kind of action, so everything is currently in a more or less benevolent holding pattern.

In the meantime, the caller (let’s call him Sir Asshat) wants to know what Fischer thinks of Occupy Louisville.  Asshat identifies himself as a “social justice” type of guy, inquires about the future of the OL site before opining that OL needs to be taken out to the East End (that’s where most of the rich people are), then proceeds to randomly drop a few liberal political signifiers totally unconnected to each other, and finally starts foaming on about his own visit to the current OL site.  He blathered on about how disappointed he was, because it seems that the OL site has more homeless people than activists. 

For shame!

Seems that said homeless people weren’t able to answer his questions about liberal political activism in any coherent manner.  According to Sir Asshat, “I asked them some questions, and they were like, ‘Huh?’”.  Asshat then went on to say that these “homeless mercenaries” where taking advantage of Occupy Louisville to get a warm place to stay, and didn’t really care about the politics of the Occupy movement.

“Homeless mercenaries”.  Is it any wonder that people fucking hate liberals?

It seems that a large portion of the Occupy Louisville encampment is indeed composed of the homeless from the streets of Louisville.  I’m not sure exactly how this evolved, but it is at very least a symbiotic relationship: OL is small in numbers, and the homeless bolster OL’s visibility.  In return, the homeless become much more of a focus for Occupy Louisville … more than, say, student loan forgiveness, or other such bourgeois concerns … and, given the concrete day to day struggles of homelessness, the grand “branding” movement to push OWS into the mainstream political market is short circuited.  The exact aspects of homelessness that push it away from Sir Asshat’s market liberalism are the things that make Occupy Louisville interesting to me. 

At the end of the day, “social justice” liberal Sir Asshat implicitly wanted Mayor Fischer to close down the Occupy Louisville site because he didn’t approve of having homeless people representing the movement, to the point that he begrudges homeless people the warmth and shelter of Occupy Louisville tents.  Sir Asshat apparently has no problem speaking for the homeless, just as long as he doesn’t have to see and hear them himself.  Or take care of them.  Kinda makes you wonder exactly for whom Asshat’s “social justice” applies.

Fischer, who is turning into a pretty astute political fellow, immediately guided the conversation away from Sir Asshat’s despicable implications, and talked about taking care of the homeless - which, for a pro-business Democrat, always turns back to jobs.   Later, when one of the leaders of Occupy Louisville called in to counter Asshat (albeit in the most wet noodle way imaginable), he called Fischer to task over the homeless problem in the city.  Fischer promised that, if (or, more accurately, when) the Occupy Louisville encampment is dismantled, he would make sure that social workers showed up first to facilitate the placement of all the homeless protesters into shelters.  Louisville is actually “good” at taking care of its homeless, much like it is “good” at recycling: the homeless are sheltered, the recycling is carried away.  Not that anyone in Metro government is getting to the core of the homeless problem, which is why a homeless presence at Occupy Louisville is so necessary; but for today, we will give Louisville a pass because it at least goes out of its way to get a roof over as many heads as possible.

Occupy Louisville is not the presentable face of Occupy.  It’s not circus hippie drum circles, it’s not articulate young activists shouting and carrying clever signs.  Like the Arab Spring, Occupy Louisville is driven by the disenfranchised themselves.  More power to Occupy Louisville.

He Went All Parnell On Us

With the pathetic revelations about Anthony Weiner’s online hobbies, we have yet another political “hero” brought down by personal failings.  I am reminded of Joyce’s fixation with charismatic Irish nationalist Charles Stewart Parnell, and how Parnell’s personal failings set back the cause of Irish independence.

  He was for Ireland and Parnell and so was his father: and so was Dante too for one night at the band on the esplanade she had hit a gentlemen on the head with her umbrella because he had taken his hat off when the band played God Save the Queen at the end.
  Mr. Dedalus gave a snort of contempt.
  — Ah, John, he said.  It is true for them.  We are an unfortunate priestridden race and always were and always will be till the end of the chapter
  Uncle Charles shook his head, saying:
  — A bad business!  A bad business!
  Mr. Dedalus repeated:
  — A priestridden, Godforsaken race!
  He pointed to a portrait of his grandfather on the wall to his right.
  — Do you see that old chap up there, John? he said.  He was a good Irishman when there was no money in the job.  He was condemned to death as a whiteboy. But he had a saying about our clerical friends, that he would never let one of them put his two feet under his mahogany.
  Dante broke in angrily:
  — If we are a priestridden race then we ought to be proud of it!  They are the apple of God’s eye.  Touch them not, says Christ, for they are the apple of my eye.
  — And can we not love our country then? asked Mr. Casey.  Are we not to follow the man who was born to lead us?
  — A traitor to his country! replied Dante.  A traitor, an adulterer!  The priests were right to abandon him.  The priests were always the true friends of Ireland.
  — Were they, faith? said Mr. Casey.
  He threw his fist on the table and, frowning angrily, protruded one finger after another.
  — Didn’t the bishops of Ireland betray us in the time of the union when bishop Lanigan presented an address of loyalty to the Marquess Cornwallis?  Didn’t the bishops and the priests sell the aspirations of their country in 1829 in return for catholic emancipation?  Didn’t they denounce the fenian movement from the pulpit and in the confessionbox?  And didn’t they dishonour the ashes of Terrence Bellew MacManus?
  His face was glowing with anger and Stephen felt the glow rise to his own cheek as the spoken words thrilled him.  Mr. Dedalus uttered a guffaw of coarse scorn.
  — O, by God, he cried, I forgot little old Paul Cullen!  Another apple of God’s eye!
  Dante bent across the table and cried to Mr. Casey:
  — Right!  Right!  They were always right!  God and morality and religion come first! 

— James Joyce, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

And so our leaders are done in by failings that have little if anything to do with their actual purpose in life.  It’s a far stretch from Parnell to Weiner, but it’s the same at its core.

I remember thinking how foolish it was for Irish Catholics to abandon Parnell just because of his affair with Kitty O’Shea.  And so, as annoying and pathetic as Weiner may be, there’s little point in turning our back on him … except, of course, besides little fits of pithiness toward his conservative colleagues, he hasn’t done anything worthy of support.  It’s not like he’s Dennis Kucinich or Bernie Sanders, after all … so it doesn’t really matter if we turn on him or not.

I am much more concerned with the “morally upright” politicians who destroy our nation (Mitch McConnell), and I reject demagogues for more than their “moral” failings (Newt Gingrich, Donald Trump).  In the end, I always considered John Edwards’s biggest failing not to be the fact that he fathered a child out of wedlock and lied about it; but rather, the fact that he concealed a secret that gave John McCain’s zombie ghost the chance to win an election that he would have no chance at winning otherwise.  Say it with me now: Sarah Palin, a heartbeat away!

[UPDATE:  This blog post (courtesy Suzy Bright's Facebook page) is hands down the best discussion of the Weiner scandal.  Please read it.]

Prelude: Plato

  "Then shall I explain first how timocracy changes into oligarchy?"
  "Yes."
  "Yet a blind man could see that," I said.
  "How?"
  "That storehouse full of gold," said I, "which every man has, destroys such a constitution.  First they invent ways of spending for themselves, and neither they nor their wives obey the laws, but they pervert them to support this."
  "That is likely," said he.
  "After that," I said, "they observe each other and rival each other, and make the whole body of the people like themselves."
  "Quite likely."
  "By and by, then," said I, "they push ahead with their moneymaking, and the more they value money the less they value virtue; in truth, we may imagine riches and virtue as always balanced in scales against each other."
  "Just so," said he.
  "And when riches are honored in a city, virtue and the good people are less honored than the rich."
  "That is clear."
  "Now what is honored anywhere is practiced, and what is dishonored is neglected."
  "Just so."
  "Thus in the end they have become lovers of money and moneymaking and no longer aim at honor and ambition; they praise the rich man and admire him and bring him into places of government, and the poor man they dishonor."
  "Certainly."
  "So then they lay down a law of limitation in the constitution; they fix a sum of money, greater or less, according as the oligarchy is more or less complete, and proclaim that no one may share in the government unless his property comes up to the assessment.  This they carry out by force of arms, or they have used terror before this to establish such a constitution. Don't you think so?"
  "Yes, I do."
  "Then that is how it is established, more or less."

-- Plato, The Republic, Book VIII
translated W. H. D. Rouse

" . . . in truth, we may imagine riches and virtue as always balanced in scales against each other."

The Free Market Ain't Free

So, Marxists are self-deluded utopians, right?   Any Objectivist uber-capitalist will tell you that they are the ones who see the world with clear eyes.

Or do they?  It seems that Objectivism relies on utopian self-delusion (or is that faith?) more than anyone is admitting.

Case in point: an open and freely competitive market will always result in the best products.

Oh really?

Three words: VHS versus Beta.

Three more words: Mac versus PC.

The only possible way you can judge VHS video systems or PC computer systems as superior products is if you consider advertising, market leverage, and distribution as part of product quality - in that sense, these products did prove superior.  A capitalist accounting always takes into consideration the excess detritus that makes up the whole of the thing as it appears in the market (the thing + its production + its marketing + its initial position in the market as determined by the market strength of the entity that owns it), not simply the thing itself.

Since capitalism deals only with the quantitative, not the qualitative, the products cited are judged superior, since they are the ones that took over the market.  This is the destructive reductive central aspect of capitalism: because it does not deal with the qualitative, it can not judge "good" in any meaningful way.

Sometimes the best product takes over the market.  Sometimes it doesn't.  That's a long way from the "cream always rising".  It's a long way from the understanding that the Objectivist publicly projects about the market.

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And what exactly is a "free market" anyway?  Is it a market which is naturally allowed to evolve on its own without interference, or is it a competitive market?

"Unencumbered" markets (markets which are allowed to evolve naturally) tend toward monopolies.  Strong corporations become stronger and more dominant in the market as markets become more complex and difficult to master.  There are, of course, some markets which don't readily lend themselves to monopolies, but wherever monopolies are possible and desirable, they will occur unless there is interference from the outside.

Monopolies per se are not the problem; rather, it is the tyranny of the bottom line that is given primary importance by the capitalist system that causes the problem. Monopolies allow corporations the ability to focus solely on their own bottom lines without having to answer to competitive challenges . . . again, the primacy of the quantitative wins out, and in the case of a monopoly, the qualitative is wholly subservient to the quantitative. Monopolies are built to control markets; the production of goods is secondary.

American professional sports leagues are shining examples of the efficacy of regulated markets.  The fact that amateur drafts are always ordered to place the worst teams first (except for the NBA, which has a [somewhat flawed] formula that theoretically orders the worst teams first without allowing teams to manipulate the system) shows how sports leagues value the outcomes of their systems over the mechanisms.

It can be argued that the competitive limitations leagues put on their teams actually hurts the quality of the product: what if the richest team, the "monopoly" team, were able to bid openly for talent instead of waiting in line for the draft, or dealing with some variation of a salary cap that allows less rich teams to bid for the best players? Theoretically they could buy the very best players at each position, and then stock their benches with the second and third tier players simply to keep them away from other teams.  This team would, by any definition, be the best team available, and it most likely would dominate its league.  In this case, the "monopoly" team would be the best not just in a quantitative sense, but in a qualitative sense.

This is an important point.  Monopolies are not necessarily bad . . . they are as good as their goals.  If your goal is to build a space program that will get you to the moon in a few short years, then a monopoly is not a bad idea.  If your goal is to pool risk to lower the costs of medical coverage for an entire population, then a monopoly is not a bad idea. If your goal is to put together the most insanely talented football team ever, then a monopoly (no draft, no salary cap, just a wide open market) would be good . . . and not just good in a quantitative sense, but in a qualitative sense as well.

But what is the ultimate goal of "quality" in professional sports?  It's not to have the best team, it is to have the best contest . . . and, to that end, the sports leagues have decided to heavily regulate their markets.  It ranges from baseball, who will theoretically let you pay as much for your roster as you wish (but try to make the balance more competitive by taxing the living hell out of you if you spend too much, thereby making it prohibitive to spend above a certain amount), to NASCAR, who essentially makes everyone drive identical cars, who will change rules as soon as one team displays even the most minute of technical advantages, and even aren't afraid of changing rules on a race to race basis*.  In this sense, the market regulations that the leagues have imposed have been successful, since they make the leagues competitive and interesting . . . and, importantly, despite the ebbs and flows of their incomes, wildly successful in the quantitative as well as the qualitative sense.

The simple fact that discussions occur on the qualitative level, whatever the final outcome may be, makes sports markets superior to financial and commercial markets. It also puts in sharp relief the question: what is a free market - the market which is most free in its mechanics, or the market which is most free in its access?

*          *          *          *          *

And, free or not, who went and made the market the final arbiter of all that is great? Oh, right.  Ayn Rand did.

Please, next time you want to include Ayn Rand and Friedrich Nietzsche in the same sentence, remember the following quote:

Far from the market place and from fame happens all that is great: far from the market place and from fame the inventors of new values have always dwelt.    -- Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra: First Part, "On the Flies of the Marketplace"

So you can just go to hell, John Galt.
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*  Does anyone else find it ironic that the sport most closely tied to the Tea Party is the most socialist of sports?

The Duty of Civil Disobedience Part 2: Governance in the Larger Sense

Thoreau wrote "Civil Disobedience" in 1848 and 1849.  One of the main roots of Thoreau's discontent, America's invasion of Mexico, ran from 1846 to 1848.  The spoils of that war were most of Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and California.

John Jacob Astor, the first American multi-millionaire, died March 29, 1848.  The first American transcontinental railroad was started in 1863, and finished in 1869.

Apropos Thoreau's other prime example of American governmental immorality, John Brown helped jump start the American Civil War with the Pottawatomie Massacre in 1856 and the Harpers Ferry raid in 1859.  In 1860, Abraham Lincoln was elected President, and on April 12, 1861, Confederate forces attacked a US military installation at Fort Sumter, South Carolina.  Lee surrendered to Grant at Appomattox on April 9, 1865.  Lincoln was assassinated five days later.

Thoreau himself died of tuberculosis in 1862.

Ireland's Great Famine, known here as the Irish Potato Famine, ran from 1845 to 1852.  This famine was probably the source of the biggest voluntary migration to the United States, though one hesitates to call escaping starvation and death completely voluntary.

In January 1848, the very same month Thoreau began delivering a series of lectures that would become the basis of "On the Duty of Civil Disobedience", Karl Marx finished the Communist Manifesto.

I don't have a blackboard, but there are some connections here.

*          *          *          *          *

Modern industry has converted the little workshop of the patriarchal master into the great factory of the industrial capitalist.  Masses of laborers, crowded into the factory, are organized like soldiers.  As privates of the industrial army they are placed under the command of a perfect hierarchy of officers and sergeants.  Not only are they the slaves of the bourgeois class, and of the bourgeois state; they are daily and hourly enslaved by the machine, by the overseer, and, above all, by the individual bourgeois manufacturer himself.  -- Karl Marx, Manifesto of the Communist Party

With Marx and Thoreau, we have historic attacks on what can be called, at their most base and simplistic level (the level on which all public political discourse takes place in this country), both the public and the private sectors.  Following the logic of current political thought, these theories are diametrically opposed, but they do have one thing in common: both are interested in attacking the structures that control and subjugate populaces.

How Marx and Thoreau came up with these ostensibly opposing positions is clear.  Thoreau was living in a brand new country with seemingly limitless land, spaces, resources, and opportunities.  America at the time was certainly capitalist, but since virtually nothing was scarce in the country, the conditions that would later foment Communist revolution worldwide were not yet obvious.  There had been various recessions and depressions, but with the exception of the 1819 depression, most economic problems had been localized and diffuse.  And while there were certainly rich (relatively speaking) men around, there was yet no super rich class (folks along the lines of the Astors), no robber baron class, no obvious gulf between the rich and poor (since most everyone still participated directly in the production of goods).  No, the gods of capital had yet to wrest control of America; rather, it was the government that stood everyone in line and set the stone tablets of moral imperative for the country.  Thoreau, finding that morality lacking, had a clear target.  That target we call today, in our pre-digested and overly simplified way, the public sector.

Marx's target was older and more evolved, but just as clear.  The morality he opposed was indeed dictated by governments, but these governments themselves are controlled by money.  Monarchical and feudal privilege had by this time mostly disappeared and evolved into the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie.  Marx's Europe was fighting with all kinds of shortages, and in the production processes of the capitalist machine he located the dehumanization of its subjects.  Marx certainly had a beef with governments, but the source of the problem was not there, but in the people who pulled the government's strings . . . and those people were very private.  Or, as we say, the private sector.

And yet, does this public/private dichotomy even make sense?  The forces of control are all public to the degree that they delimit our public sphere; and private to the degree that they are constituted at a level different than the one they occupy (here in America, by the ballot if you are an optimist, and by the checkbook if you are a realist).  Think of governance in a larger sense: who runs your life?

In the end, the whole public/private debate is a red herring: we should think of governance as the monolithic structure that runs our lives.  This structure has its public and its private aspects, and these aspects do not necessarily code out the way we normally think they do.  There is, in this country, an absolute continuum between what we normally consider public and private*, and the struggle is between various ideas of morality, not between ways of executing this morality, which is all that "public" and "private" boil down to.  It is time to dispense, once and for all, the idea that "public" sector and "private" sector oppose each other.

It is not my job here to reconcile Marx and Thoreau; rather, I think that an understanding of each can inform us on governance in the larger sense.  Both Marx and Thoreau are concerned, at their very core, with dehumanization.  And, at the end of the day, it doesn't matter how we fight against the dehumanizing forces we face: it just matters that we fight.

*          *          *          *          *

Sometimes, like I said, civil disobedience is a simple thing, if not an easy thing.  It is simple for Libyans, Egyptians, Tunisians.  Simple, but certainly not easy.  On the other hand, it is easy for Americans, but extraordinarily complex.   Is there a store that you can buy from which does not, in some way, diminish the rights of citizens somewhere?  Is there a vote for a man or woman who is truly and always just?  Can I breathe, eat, and live without diminishing the earth?  Indeed, to paraphrase Thoreau, how can I make a living without standing on another man's shoulders?

The short answer: you can't.  Failure is the end result of any action we take.  And yet, (once again) from Beckett by way of Zizek, we can fail better.  We can improve.  We can always improve.

And that is the duty of civil disobedience.

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*  Two parts of that continuum are capital (money) and the masses (people, or the efforts of the people).

The Duty of Civil Disobedience (Dedicated to Revolution in the Middle East)

It's hard.  God knows it's hard.  It's hard to do; it's hard to even know what to do, or when to do it.  It's hard to know when to take a stand, and when to let things pass.  Civil disobedience is hard.

Knowing that the time had come was the easy part for the Tunisians and the Egyptians.  The time had long passed; it was just waiting for opportunity, for critical mass.  They had seen the crackdowns in Iran, they didn't want a repeat . . . but when the rumble started in Tunisia, it wasn't going to be stopped.  Yesterday, Tunisia and Egypt, today Angola, Iran, and Libya, tomorrow . . . Saudi Arabia? Afghanistan?  Outside of Israel, is anybody safe?

Sometimes knowing is the easy part.  When things are fucked up, and I mean really fucked up (keep it to yerself, teapartier!), start throwing rocks.  Of course, when the knowing is the easy part, the doing is the hard part, 'cause that means the bosses really have things on lockdown . . . it's a perverted equilibrium: when one thing's easy, the other is hard.  Equilibrium is a funny thing.  Funny, except nobody's laughing.

*          *          *          *          *

But, to speak practically and as a citizen, unlike those who call themselves no-government men, I ask for, not at once no government, but at once a better government.  Let every man make known what kind of government would command his respect, and that will be one step toward obtaining it.  -- Henry David Thoreau, "On the Duty of Civil Disobedience"*

Sometime, somewhere, you will hear some right-wing pseudo-intellectual start dropping lines from Thoreau to buttress his angst.  Or someone from the talk-show left, for that matter.  Do yourself a favor: read the essay, know the essay.  Don't be lied to.

To start with, since I've already taken a poke at the right wing, let me be clear and unequivocal about one thing: Thoreau is a champion of exactly the kind of limited government the right wing says it desires (of course, as we have seen over and over and over again, what the populist right wing says it wants and what it really wants are two different things).

I heartily accept the motto, -- "That government is best which governs least;" and I should like to see it acted up to more rapidly and systematically.  Carried out, it finally amounts to this, which I also believe, -- "That government is best which governs not at all;" and when men are prepared for it, that will be the kind of government they will have.

Or, again:

Government is at best an expedient; but most governments are usually, and all governments are sometimes, inexpedient.  [.   .   .]  The government itself, which is the only mode which the people have chosen to execute their will, is equally liable to be abused and perverted before the people can act through it.

It is clear, in the great wide open of the rise of America, that the government (for Thoreau, anyway) is primarily an impediment.

But where exactly does this anti-government impulse originate with Thoreau?  In a word, conscience.  Thoreau believes it is impossible for a government to have a conscience:

After all, the practical reason why, when the power is once in the hands of the people, a majority are permitted, and for a long period of time continue, to rule, is not because they are most likely to be right, nor because this seems fairest to the minority, but because they are physically the strongest.  But a government in which the majority rule in all cases cannot be based on justice, even as far as men understand it  Can there not be a government in which majorities do not virtually decide right and wrong, but conscience? -- in which majorities decide only those questions to which the rule of expediency is applicable?  Must the citizen ever for a moment, or in the least degree, resign his conscience to the legislator?  Why has every man a conscience, then?  I think that we should be men first, and subjects afterward.  It is not desirable to cultivate a respect for the law, so much as for the right.  The only obligation which I have a right to assume, is to do at any time what I think right.

And, of course, conscience implies justice: for Thoreau, would-be godfather of the Tea Party, is not establishing his rights as an individual because he thinks taxes are too high**.  He has as the subtext to his entire anti-government tract a deep revulsion to slavery and the Mexican-American war, and this is the very key to the transcendent legitimacy of his rebellion.  Indeed, Thoreau-as-rugged-individualist is much more worried about the collective good than his own rights and comforts.  That is why Thoreau speaks of the DUTY of civil disobedience: it is the duty of free humans to live by their consciences.  This alone separates him from many modern champions of "rights", both liberal and conservative.

There's another thread that needs to be pulled out of the quote above: Thoreau does not equate majority opinion with greater good.  As a matter of fact, civil disobedience has, at its core, the individual conscience's stand against the tyranny of the majority.  It is the state that robs its subjects of their humanity ("The mass of men serve the state thus, not as men mainly, but as machines, with their bodies.  [. . .]   In most cases there is no free exercise whatever of the judgement or the moral sense . . . ") and distances them from their own values.  Civil disobedience is the individual's last beachhead against against the amorality of the state.

Not that Thoreau would have us all up in other people's moral business:

It is not a man's duty, as a matter of course, to devote himself to the eradication of any, even the most enormous wrong; he may still properly have other concerns engage him; but it is his duty, at least, to wash his hands of it, and, if he gives it no thought longer, not to give it practically his support.

We can't eliminate all the overt wrongs of the world, much less coerce our fellows into the life that we believe is just.  It is not even necessarily our duty to eliminate wrong.  What is our duty, however, is to make sure that we don't materially support a wrong, even if we do not actively work against it.

At the end of the day, Thoreau's concerns are moral ones, and not in the petty sense of good behavior/bad behavior that so many so easily get caught up in; but rather in the grander sense of good for all men.  Like Marx, Thoreau has at the core of his doctrines a utopian vision for all of humanity, though Thoreau's is clearly of a different kind:

I please myself imagining a State at last which can be just to all men and to treat the individual with respect as a neighbor; which even would not think it inconsistent with its own repose, if a few were to live aloof from it, not meddling with it, nor embraced by it, who fulfilled all the duties of neighbors and fellow-men.

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So, indeed, we have a duty to resist, or at least refuse material support, institutions that oppress our fellow man.  As Thoreau observed about the culture that spawned his essay to begin with:

Practically speaking, the opponents to a reform in Massachusetts are not a hundred thousand politicians at the South, but a hundred thousand merchants and farmers here, who are more interested in commerce and agriculture than they are in humanity, and are not prepared to do justice to the slave and to Mexico, cost what it may.***  I quarrel not with far-off foes, but those who, near at home, co-operate with, and do the bidding of those far away, and without whom the latter would be harmless.

Thoreau focused his considerable rhetorical skill on a United States government that allowed slavery and an imperialist war against Mexico . . . but it's not just about government, or even capitulation to the government, is it?  To put it another way, the Gaddafis and Mubaraks are clear targets, but are they the only targets?
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*  Sorry, no page numbers.  I'm working with a twenty-year-old Signet Classics paperback edition of Walden with "Civil Disobedience" thrown in like a bonus track.  I'm guessing there is no correspondence with the pagination of any current editions of Walden.
** Though Thoreau was jailed for not paying his taxes, paying taxes was not the issue he was protesting, but rather he was rebelling against the actions of the government that his taxes supported: "I have never declined paying the highway tax, because I am as desirous of being a good neighbor as I am of being a bad subject [. . .] It is for no particular item in the tax bill that I refuse to pay it.  I simply wish to refuse allegiance to the State, to withdraw and stand aloof from it effectually."  Elsewhere, he cites the bible passage where Jesus looks at a coin and, seeing Caesar's image on the coin, encourages his followers to "render therefore that which is Caesar's unto Caesar".  Expanding on the theme, Thoreau makes it clear that whoever becomes rich in the currency of the kingdom owes the kingdom its tribute (i.e., taxes).
*** By the way: shame on those who decried the overthrow of Mubarak (while admitting that he was a tyrant) because it "wasn't in our best interests".  They are the lowest form of politicians/commentators/idiots.

The Whole "Voting Thing" Redux

Yeah, it's really effed up sometimes to watch a guy on TV and say, "Jeez, I voted for him?!".  Regular readers know that I am not dissatisfied with Obama because I didn't really expect much to begin with (though Guantanamo Bay isn't closed yet, is it?). But really, it's hard to vote, because you tend to feel responsible for the person you voted for, and that never turns out for the better if you have expectations that transcend the venal nature of American culture.

Going up to the '08 election I was blogging heavily on MySpace, and my annoyance with the election is well documented there. I did the "voting/not voting" thing before that election (if you go back to it, make sure to read the comments too), so I'm not going to go into any great detail again, but I will make a few points.

1. The government in and of itself is never an active force for good.  You have to live a good life and hope that the good filters up.  How you live your life is infinitely more important than who you vote for or even voting at all.
2. Given the fact that almost all candidates are nothing more than different colors on the same wheel, voting often seems pointless.  And, in many respects, it is.  But then again, so is recycling, and yet we do it.  If there is a chance of any net good in an action, no matter how minuscule, it is worth doing.  
3. Voting does not make you any more complicit in your elected official's mistakes/bad faith/poor governance/crimes than you already are.  There are almost never any good choices even if there are less bad ones.  Just go for the less bad, and try to live to vote another day.
4. Apropos #3, you are complicit in the mistakes/bad faith/poor governance/crimes even if you do not vote.  If you buy something, if you hold down a job, if you participate in our culture, then you are part of the system. Not voting does not give you a pass on the system's karma.

We must know, always, that we are striving for good.  We must know, always, that our efforts are doomed to fail.  We must, in the words of Samuel Beckett (via Slavoj Zizek) "try again.  Fail again.  Fail better."

It's the Most Wonderful Time of the Year (1)

Ah, the smell of burning wood (2), the nip in the air (3), leaves crunching under foot, and the fall elections . . .

Pah.

I've heard several friends talk about how much they love fall, and admittedly, there is a fuzzy, livable analog quality to a nice autumn day, like a good vintage tube-driven guitar amplifier, nice and clean and clear but with a warm singing edge.  But then . . . there is this election nonsense.  There's nothing more depressing than being reminded that you are surrounded by idiots. (4)

We must, as always, soldier on.

*          *          *          *          *

There is, as always, the hand wringing over negative campaign advertising that surfaces this time of year.  And always, there follows the media analysis piece that informs us that, as much as we may claim to hate negative campaign advertising, it is by far the most effective form of political ad.

Okay, yes, we get it.  Or, wait . . . no we don't.

You see, negative campaigning is not the problem.  On one hand, just think if advertising became a dual of fools hugging their wives (husbands) and kids (pets) superimposed over gently waving American flags: no better, is it?  Think of all the ads you've seen for judgeships, which (theoretically, at least) aren't supposed to take any public positions.  Can you imagine a bigger waste of the airwaves?

Let's look at one particular "negative attack" ad that is running here, in Kentucky's 3rd.  Our beloved Chamber of Commerce (5) is running an ad against incumbent John Yarmuth, one of those cheap ads with stills of Yarmuth and Nancy Pelosi in gray scale zooming in from the background, over all kinds of damning text, the primary point (in HUGE RED BLOCK LETTERS) that Yarmuth votes with the evil witch Pelosi 91% OF THE TIME!  

An attack ad?  Sure it is.  The whole strategy of the Republican establishment this year is to paint everyone with the Pelosi/Obama brush (6).  But really, assuming the percentages are correct (I haven't done the math, but there's no reason to doubt it), it is a completely fair "attack".  Yarmuth is forthright about his support and and admiration of Pelosi.  The ad, though simplistic and jingoistic, is not inaccurate or misleading (7).  If you've got a beef, you don't have a beef with the Chamber, you've got a beef with the whole Obama/Pelosi mush-mouth syndrome.

Negative campaigning is essential when establishing a politician in the public eye. Judicious negative campaigning, combined with a positive agenda for governance, is more than okay, it is essential.  How else does one differentiate oneself?

On the other hand, there is a wrong way to do it.  For that, let's turn to Tea Party Wunderkind Rand Paul and . . . no, wait, it's not Rand Paul being the idiot here, it's his opponent Jack Conway.  Over the course of the campaign, Conway has run ads

• harping on Paul's idea that Medicare needs a $2000 deductible, which is a perfectly legitimate attack on Paul;
• claiming that Paul wants a 23% sales tax, which is most likely accurate, but then conveniently leaves out the fact that Paul wants this to replace income tax, so it is not exactly an added tax burden (8);
• chiding Paul for his non-Kentucky roots, which smells of hillbilly xenophobia;
• exploiting an anonymous and undocumented (but believable) rumor of a prank from his college years in which he supposedly abducted a woman and made here worship the "aqua buddha", which, true or not, is a totally irrelevant and bullshit move.

There is so much that Paul could be attacked on, yet Conway decided to make like the cartoon politician and drag out the most ridiculous dirt he could lay his hands on (9).  I've known right wing rich boys like Paul, and I would bet my next paycheck that he was a sanctimonious dope smoking douchebag . . . hell, I'm not so sure I didn't go to school with a couple fistfulls of his doppelgangers . . . but the idea that somehow all this equates to the idea that Rand Paul was involved in "alternative religion" (nope - he was too vacuous to even imagine it on that level) or that he was critiquing Christianity (nope - he's too cowardly, unlike his namesake) is completely ridiculous.  And, on top of that, dealing with such blatant character assassination (accurate or not) simply puts Paul into the role of victim-writ-large, which is exactly how the "dispossessed" white people that make up the Tea Party feel.

Way to go, Jack.  Make it even easier for the shouts of "Barabbas!" to rock the heavens.

See, the problem is not "negative campaigning", the problem is with manipulation, lies and distortion.  It is a very important distinction to make: we don't need a politics of politeness, where everyone avoids the obvious problems in favor of asserting that "I'm a nice guy (gal) and true American!" . . . but we do need a politics that holds politicians accountable for their words and actions and the interactions between the two.

Ah, accountability . . .

Here in the real world, the phrase "lesser of two evils" unfortunately has a disheartening relevance to it.  And so: vote for a lying asshole or vote for Rand Paul. That is the predicament in which we here in the Commonwealth find ourselves.

Oh well . . . won't be the first time I vote for an idiot, and it probably won't be the last.

Next time: your humble author STEPS to Juan Williams, to find out if he crosses to the other side of the street when he sees me coming in my Hoosier garb.

__________
(1)  I'm being all ironical and shit.  But, since I'm not a good enough writer to convey irony without the aid of an emoticon, and since I'll only use emoticons WHEN I'M DEAD, I'll just have to resort to footnotes.  Are ironic hyperlinks too esoteric?  ; )
(2)  Fort Knox is on fire.  I've heard it was someone is Muslim garb.
(3)  It was over 80 degrees today.  The 24th of October, and it was over 80 degrees.  And there was a hot wind.  Hot winds are rare enough around here during the summer, but October?  F@#k this shit, man.  And Fort Knox is on fire.  There are ashes falling down here.  It burns my throat.  And I've got a fever and a f@#king chest cold.  Just so you know (or miss my Facebook updates).
(4)  Not all of you, of course.  There are many human people.  But there are also the idiots.  Many, many, many, many, idiots.
(5)  Irony.  I don't love them.
(6)  Let's see, white woman, black man . . .
(7)  Actually, the Chamber really seems to be phoning it in on this one.  If you're going to pony up for a TV ad, make it stick . . . Yarmuth, though he votes along with the Democratic majority most of the time, is a fair pace to the left of the "liberal" Congressional Democrats.  It seems that the Chamber could have come up with an ad that announces in red block letters "EVEN MORE LIBERAL THAN OBAMA AND PELOSI!" and have plenty of sound bites to back it up.  And sure, Kentucky 3 is Louisville & Jefferson County, the only even remotely liberal area in Kentucky, but Republican toady Anne Northup managed to hold the seat for ten years before Yarmuth, so the seat is far from unassailable.
(8)  A sales tax is a big problem for the working class, but that's another discussion that has yet to take place & is a bit nuanced for a 30 second campaign spot.
(9)  Is it just me, or is that mainly a Southern thing?

Olympia Snowe, Right Wing Operative

"Can't we all just get along?"

Olympia Snowe is cast by the Right as the archetypal RINO - Republican in name only.  Yet, it's people like Snowe, and DINOs like Evan Bayh, the supposedly "sensible center", that are really cementing the gains made by the Right since the days of Ronald Reagan.

At issue is not Snowe's various political stances, and she should be commended for at least appearing to buck the party lines when she thinks it's necessary.  No, the real issue is the idea - found anywhere from Sam Waterston's Unity08 movement to the petty excuses blubbering from Bayh's lips to even The Daily Show - that somehow the polarization in American politics can be blamed on the Left as well as the Right . . . or, as Senator Snowe puts it, "the red states are getting redder and the blue states are getting bluer". 

That is simply not the case.  America is a right wing nation.

I'm not going to get into the machinations of Mitch McConnell here: politics is politics, and Mitch is a master manipulator.  The swing to the right is about more than politics, it's about culture.  McConnell represents a specific set of political skills, Rand Paul represents a world view.  And that world view is right wing.

If there really were the Right/Left equivalence in American politics suggested by the "sensible center", then where are the left-wing analogues of Paul, Palin, Angle, O'Donnell, Bachman, et. al.?  Don't talk to me about Barney Frank, Dennis Kucinich, Al Franken, Bernie Sanders, Russ Feingold, or any of the Congressional Left.  If we want true counterparts to the Tea Party patriots, then we need to be running people who not only think that "big government" has a purpose, who may even go so far as to support national health care (Kucinich; anyone else?), we need candidates who question the very value of private property and the individual versus the collective, among other things.  We need candidates who aren't afraid to quote Marx and Lenin.  We need people we can point to and say "you think Obama is a commie?  Obama's not even really a liberal; now there's a communist!"

And it's not the polarization that's killing the American dialogue.  It's not even the vitriol.  It's the stupidity.

I have theoretical problems with Libertarians, but I have very concrete problems with those who claim to be Libertarians but still want the government all up in someone else's business, just not theirs . . . for example, you can be a Libertarian and a social conservative, but you must know that any laws codifying social conservatism are anti-libertarian (Ron Paul revealed his own Libertarianism as a lie when he caved on the gay marriage issue*).  And hey, if you are hating on the bailout and stimulus package from the laissez-faire capitalist angle, then shut the hell up about the unemployment rate.  That's just the system cleaning itself out.

I could (and often do) go on.  But, even if I am arguing the point from an obvious political position, the argument I'm making is not a directly political one.

The point is that our very speech has been bent into uselessness.  Our words and phrases mean nothing because they have no fidelity to a real idea: they are masks designed to slot into public conversations in a specific way to affect a specific reaction.  Our words and phrases do not reveal, they obfuscate.  If we are getting dumber (and I believe we are), it is because language is at the core of thought, and our language has been beaten into a dull, rusty blade.

Here, again, is that anathema to thought we call "common sense": Snowe's contention that the polarization of the right and left is to blame for the devolution of discourse in this country is common, but not true.  Any phrase or masked idea becomes common simply from repetition.  At some point, depending on who's driving the train, it moves from simply being common to common sense . . . Große Lüge, Hitler's "Big Lie", or, per Goebbels, "one should lie big and stick with it", which we can modify to read  "say anything often enough and loud enough, sooner or later it becomes commonly accepted as fact."  Common sense is like that.

 Again, no specific beef with Olympia Snowe, given that even John Stewart makes concessions to the "polarization" conceit**, but it is exactly at this point where the Right has had its biggest cultural success since 1980.  In that sense, Olympia Snowe is a much more effective champion of the right than Rand Paul ever will be.

___________
*  He could have dodged the whole issue by saying that the government has no business endorsing any kind of marriage, hetero or homo, but he didn't.  He came out squarely against gay marriage.  I think at some point he tossed out some "states rights" bullshit, but decentralized government is not the same as small government (just look at California).  Libertarianism betrays itself if it cannot protect its citizens against the tyranny of the majority.  Of course, at the core of the issue is what Libertarianism can do . . . and the most convincing argument is that a Libertarian government can't do anything, and that's the way its supposed to be.  Do you think all the American Right, with all of its current angry demands, wants a government that does nothing?  Of course not.  They want a government that keeps out illegal aliens, restricts abortion, is tough on crime, keeps us safe from terrorists, cleans up our (whoops!  the petrochemical companies') spills, keeps Muslims from building, etc.  These people aren't Libertarians, they don't want small government, they want government to do what they want it to do and nothing else.
**  When trying to set a polarized equivalence, Stewart always seems to resort to 9/11 conspiracy theory for his example of left-wing extremism.  I think if he were called on it, he would probably say that 9/11 conspiracy is not a right or a left issue in the same way that Illuminati/Trilateral conspiracy is not a left or a right issue, and he would be right.  It's just a bit frustrating that he concedes to this fake parallelism when I don't think he really buys into it.

Buck the Narrative (Part One)

Left and Right, Liberals and Conservatives, Libertarians and Socialists, Republicans and Democrats, Teabaggers and Coffee achievers . . . it's all bullshit. We are bipolar nation.

Here's one that has to have occurred to you: the narrative is the problem.

For a couple weeks it was all about Rand Paul: Rand Paul is the new Republican, Rand Paul took on Washington and won, Rand Paul has energized the conservative base, and on and on and on . . .

First of all, every non-incumbent runs against the evil of Washington as they define it. Every one. What are you going to do? "The government is doing a great job." Why the hell are you running then, putz? No, this always-running-against-the-government has been going on for years - probably since the dawn of the republic - and both sides do it, no matter who is in power. Sometimes even incumbents try to do it. It's ridiculous. It's meaningless. It demonstrates a stultifying poverty of imagination. And, like nationalism (with which its opposition is only on the surface), it is often the refuge of scoundrels.

Then there is the idea that Rand Paul is somehow a "new Republican" born of the Tea Party movement. Wrong. He's the garden variety Reagan Republican. He's the male Sara Palin, less annoying, more boring. No big deal. He's not the new libertarian savior for the right, he's not the new Satan for the left. Hell, I don't know why all the left wingers are acting like he's a sign of the apocalypse - fantastic dullard though he may be, he's probably less of a whackjob than Jim Bunning, the guy he's favored to replace. He's no worse than many with whom we are dealing with now.

Then there's the idea that he "energized the base". Well, Republicans better hope that's not the case, because there wasn't a hell of a lot of energy there: there were four major candidates running in the two Kentucky primaries on May 4th, and Paul was third in the vote count. That's right, two contested primaries, and both the Democrats out polled Paul. It's not that the Republican primary was uncontested, though Paul won handily . . . as late as a week and a half before the primary, the Republican race was closer than the Democratic race. Does this mean anything? No, it doesn't. It doesn't mean that Paul energized the base, and it doesn't mean his campaign is in trouble. It doesn't mean anything . . . just facts waiting to be twisted into a narrative.

Paul did the right thing by ducking Meet the Press. He figured out his place in the landscape, even if the narrative isn't ready to let him go just yet. Meet the Press is a no-win for Paul: he would be exposed as a Palinesque lightweight or, even at best, would drop a couple sound bite bombs to cause the petit-bourgeois Republican pause. And almost nobody in Kentucky (that is, the people he has to impress to win the election) gives a shit about Meet the Press . . . me included. I've met them, and they annoy me. And I was really annoyed by the chest puffing that followed: only the third guest to cancel in 62 years!! No, Ms. Executive Producer Betsy Fischer, that is not "a big deal", because your contribution to the cultural scrap heap is not a big deal.

And now, courtesy of one of my favorite radio shows, On the Media, there's another wrinkle to the whole "outing" of Rand Paul: the idea that Paul won the primary because he was getting a "free ride" because of a "diminished local press corps". Bob Garfield called out the Courier-Journal's Keith Runyon for not giving the story its proper push, but the point of the whole interview was never clear: the CJ were the ones that teased out the whole Paul "I don't support the Civil Rights Act in its entirety" story line, and they did report it, and they did comment on it in their editorial pages. Garfield himself pointed that out, while implying that the CJ somehow soft pedaled the story. Runyon simply pointed out that the story was out there because of the CJ, not in spite of the CJ, and that if the story was under reported, that had nothing to do with the editorial department of the paper, who traditionally does not try to influence the coverage of the news.

In the whole six plus minutes of the piece, I could never figure out where Garfield was headed. Closest I can figure, he was upset that there wasn't more outrage over Paul's beliefs during the Kentucky primaries, and that somehow the professionals like Rachel Maddow and Robert Siegel were able to give the story it's proper due (even going so far to call Maddow's interview a "gentle vivesection" . . . yuck!) when the CJ dropped the ball. What that means, of course, is that according to the "liberal" media, the CJ didn't slot the story solidly enough into THE NARRATIVE.

The real story over this incident is indeed the lack of outrage over Paul's comments, but it doesn't have anything to do with the traditional way of seeing things as articulated by OTM. The fact is that this kind of speech is common in American political and cultural dialogue, and if there isn't more of an outrage, it's because people are used to it. The bigger story is that a large percentage of Kentucky's population believes as Paul does, and it doesn't break down cleanly over socio-economic, political, or even racial lines. The Tea Party had become media shorthand long before they were analyzed and understood (which has yet to happen). Garfield is right that the media isn't doing their job - he's just looking in the wrong place for the wrong reasons.

There are no good guys here: we are constantly assaulted by broad-band political vulgarity. Every media outlet from every ideological corner handicaps politics as if it were a sporting event. Now, don't get me wrong, I love the minutiae of sports: the self-referential narrative, the self-important subtext. But nobody dies when the Yankees win.* Political pundits have devolved from intellectuals (philosophers, sociologists, psychologists, etc.) to being handicappers. Forget Cornell West, you may as well have Beano Cook on your weekend news show for all the ideas that those talking heads dredge up.

If it seems that I am not properly outraged over Rand Paul, it's because I'm not. Rand Paul isn't the problem: all politicians have been focus-grouped to death, including Rand Paul. They are not guiding lights. They are never ahead of the curve. The politicians will never change. They are the symptoms of our nation, of the narrative that defines our consciousness. The very language of our political discourse is corrupt and bankrupt, devoid of any real meaning. It's time to, as they say, flip the script.

Buck the narrative.

Oh yeah, and screw the Coffee Party. I hate reactionary bullshit.
____________________
* No one dies, but every time the Yankees win, an angel loses its wings. Only the heroic efforts of the Twins have kept us from a heaven devoid of angels.

The Reset Button

Those of you who actually follow this spiel may be noticing a little difference lately (compared to last year): fewer posts, more (MUCH more) poetry. This isn't really by design, but there are a couple reasons for the current state of affairs.

First, I've been writing a lot of poetry lately. I've always scrawled lines in notebooks, and sometimes strung the lines together, but I've had the tendency to edit them into oblivion in the past. I'm making more of a commitment to my poetry these days - get the poems out into the open instead of throwing them away or deleting them like I used to do. This means that a few stinkers creep out, and a lot of stuff that is going to go through a lot of changes, but that's ok. There's some stuff here that really makes me happy as well.

Second, I was starting to descend into the lie of the dialectic, especially as it applied to American politics. I had a bunch of half-formed bullshit sitting in my "drafts" box that I finally just deleted. The crash and burn of the public political dialogue almost sucked me in, but in the end, pointing out the obvious stupidity of T-baggers who show up to protests with signs saying things such as "KEEP THE GOVERNMENT'S HANDS OFF MY MEDICARE" isn't worth the time or effort. You just get sucked into pointless conversations, and the level of discourse sinks down to the ridiculous. I'll leave that shit up to Rachel Maddow.

That doesn't mean that I'm becoming apolitical by any stretch of the imagination - it's just that I hope to rescue the political from the base "politics" dialectic that has become institutionalized in our crass culture . . . at least as far as it pertains to my writing. I'll probably still occasionally visit overtly political topics, but more of my stuff will be political in the sense that "Crescent" was political. We'll see how that works out.

And now, I hit the RESET button.

The Death of Everything

1.

Burroughs: "Tear it down, tear it down, tear it all down!"

actually it was "Take it back, take it back, take it all back!", but who's keeping track? Bogus attribution and outright lying is the chic literary device of the first quarter of the 21st century. If this seems like a week attempt then it's because I've come unstuck in time.

2.

This is the death of everything. The title reeks of berets and Sartre, of pretension so mundane it's become a Halloween costume. It's like

DEATH

"oooohhh, scary . . . who the fuck are you trying to kid and/or impress?"

There's the big death, and there's the little death. And a few deaths in between. It's virtually meaningless to talk about death, the big empty. Death is too big; death stands in for its own meaning.

Or not.

3.

I call this blog the death of everything because I want it to be, in a sense, a series of endings. I perceive life/reality as a cycle, a series of cycles, a group of cycles, whatever . . . but unlike circles, there's no smooth continuum, and unlike spirals, there's no controlled (or, sometimes, even logical) motion. As such, you can point at any moment and say "that's the end! DEATH!" and you would be right. Or, you could say "that's the beginning! BIRTH!" and be correct as well. It's all a matter of perspective, you see?

Problem is, everyone wants to be RIGHT. It doesn't work that way. The circles have flat spots, the spirals are less spirals than they are a careening about in scenery that is occasionally familiar, occasionally not.

This is life beyond mathematics, spiritual or actual . . .

4.

Everyone wants a new beginning without an ending. Birth without death.

But it doesn't work that way.

So, lacking rebirth without pain, they choose the status quo. Problem is, there is no such thing as a status quo. Everything is always changing.

You get up every morning at the same time. You eat the same thing for breakfast - say, a bowl of Cheerios. Every day. Same time.

But today, it rains. Yesterday it snowed. The sun will be out tomorrow.

The president got shot. Someone flew airplanes into a large building.

You had sex.

Nothing is ever really the same. But

5.

Somehow, it is. Sartre tries to convince us that just because the sun rose in the east yesterday, and yesterday, and yesterday ad infinitum, that doesn't necessarily mean that it will rise in the east again tomorrow.

Sure. I can buy that. But nobody ever lost money betting that the sun would rise in the east.

"The more things change, the more things stay the same."

God, how I hate the old saws, but this one's apropos. It's the spiral, the careening about in scenery familiar and unfamiliar. It's a life of deja vu.

"It takes money to make money."

Less apropos, but I was thinking of Green on Red for some reason, and that line from one of their songs just came insistently barging through. But wait: not so beside the point, it turns out. Because if you expand it to

"Power serves naught but power."

then you are getting closer to the point.

Money serves money. Power serves power. The status quo exists solely to project itself into infinity.

And that, friends, is the source of everything that is burning up our world: the enormous resource drain to power the continual return of the status quo. I don't mean that strictly in the environmental sense (though, indeed, that applies), but a macroeconomic sense, if economy here is expanded to mean the sum total of all exchange. You see, entropy is the natural tendency of the universe

(everything falls apart)

, and it takes energy (or applied energy = power) to fight against the entropy. So, the more mass a given film clip/reality attains, the more power (energy) it takes to maintain the status quo, like holding an ocean liner at anchor. Turns out the status quo is not the mundane, same-old-same-old; but rather, a raging inferno, a nuclear implosion, and energy sink that swallows up everything in its wake.

Entropy, on the other hand, is zen-like. Sometimes horrible, sometimes violent

(ultimate entropy separates atom from atom, fractures nuclei, sends electrons careening from orbit)

but always tending toward the peace of oblivion

(and [need it be said?] no energy/power drain).

The true conservationist does not preserve. The true conservationist is the death of everything.

6.

the death of everything wants to scrape the barnacles off the ocean liner of culture.

7.

Today we have hundreds, nay, thousands of people telling us what's up with this or that. The democratization of message transmission has led to (what can only with extreme charity be called) the democratization of expression. That's fine: it's not as if the voices are any more wacked out, it's just that there's more of them. And besides, some of the most wacked out voices are right there on the top of the "traditional media" pile.

the death of everything strives to break apart the control systems at the heart of the word. This is particularly tricky considering the fact that the operations take place at the level of word. the death of everything is far from pure in this sense, especially when "calmly and rationally" discussing politics

{assuming that this defective, bipolar political monstrosity is somehow a) functioning logically, and b) worthy of "serious" discussion is in and of itself dangerously faulty logic}

or appearing to align itself in the political spectrum.

"Political", here, meaning American politics.

For that reason, the death of everything needs to be taken as a whole. A defective whole, certainly, but hopefully with its moments of

8.

insight? No, death. The breaking apart, the entropy is the thing. Effective in and of itself, the aiming, the focus, the purpose tends to pollute it, but not fatally.

9.

And thus, the circle, the cycle, the . . . whatever. One thing's for sure, after you've looped around, you're not in the same place, even if the deja vu is heavy . . .

10.

Life and death. Death and life. You don't get one without the other. As the ocean liner of this reality trundles along,

11.

becoming more massive and burdened as it goes,

12.

it sinks ever more precipitously to the dark depths.

13.

Our reality is burdened to the point that it is becoming unworkable. It has to be picked apart, torn asunder, loosened up (nuclei split, electrons ejected from their orbits). Something has to die so that reality can live. And, more than just something, it has to be

14.

everything. Anything less than everything would betray an agenda. Everything dies so that all can be reborn.

15.

"Now I die and vanish," you would say, "and all at once I am nothing. The soul is as mortal as the body. But the knot of causes in which I am entangled recurs and will create me again. I myself belong to the causes of eternal recurrence. I come again, with this sun, with this earth, with this eagle, with this serpent . . . " Zarathustra's eagle and serpent

16.

"Ashes to ashes, dust to dust - Remember always: from ashes you came, to ashes you shall return." Ash Wednesday Invocation

It's About Healthcare, Stupid

The debate about healthcare isn't actually about healthcare anymore. It's amazing the lengths to which some Americans will go to further an agenda.

Of course, EVERYONE has an agenda. It just appears that the right are far more comfortable playing shell games with theirs.

The American healthcare system, like the environment, is broken, no matter what the right wing says. The ridiculous thing is that the Republicans can have their way, if they want it. The idiot Democrats want a healthcare bill, ANY healthcare bill, just so long as they can say they "fixed" healthcare (which will not happen). All the Republicans have to do is float a few token votes (from Congressmen and Senators from "safe" districts, such as Dick Lugar) on an industry-friendly bill. The representatives who need to can vote against it for the sake of their culture warrior t-bagging constituents. Viola! An industry-friendly cosmetic fix gets passed on the Democratic watch, the insurance bandits are safe, the Democrats say they "fixed" healthcare, and Republicans who need to can say they voted against it. Everybody's a winner!

Instead, the Republican party has decided to commit their future to the culture wars. The ends (political victory) justify the means (lying). They have once again, Rove-style, taken control of the debate. We're not talking about healthcare anymore: it's all code.

On second thought, maybe I'm OK with this ludicrous argument. It's looking more and more like any bill that will be passed will be worthless. It looks like a few more people will have to be arbitrarily denied coverage or drown in the bureaucracy of their private sector health plans before we really fix this thing.

In the meantime, it saddens me just how many people believe we are actually talking about healthcare.

Bill Maher Needs to Shut the F@#% Up

Democracies, even ones as homogeneous as the US Government, are like oil tankers: when one speaks of turning them, one is talking in terms of miles, not feet or yards. After years of conservative control (Nixon through Bush II, with a brief respite for the Carter administration - and yes, Bill Clinton counts as a conservative, except for maybe his first two years), to expect the government to immediately cleave to Obama's agenda is completely unrealistic . . . especially when at least half of the Congressional Democrats are more conservative than the middle-of-the-road president.

Bill Maher is hitting the publicity circuit with his complaints about the president's performance 150 days into his first term. Apparently, Maher has already grown impatient with Obama, comparing him to media creation Lindsay Lohan and repeatedly stating that he needs more of a Bush (or should that be Cheney?) fuck-you attitude toward governance. Maher (through his surrogate Obama) has won his election, now he wants his pound of flesh . . . and he's pissed he's not getting it.

Maher's main complaint is that Obama is running a media presidency - essentially all talk and no legislation. On the surface, he does seem to have a point: Obama is clearly as concerned with maintaining a public profile as he is to ramrodding his agenda through Congress. To a true believer in US democracy, a postmodern media presidency is an abberation.

But the government will never be the source of true change. This much is clear to both the left and the right, and faith is hard to come by even for the political/demographic cluster in the middle. The system is geared to inertia - sometimes for the better, sometimes for the worse.

And so, here we have Maher, pissed at Obama, all because of inertia. Maher believes that Bush II is a symbol of aggressive change, and wants Obama to be his photographic negative . . . and yet, in legislative terms, Bush's rough conservative corners will be sanded down by Obama. As surely as Reagan ran up the deficit and Clinton stripped away financial regulation, the middle will be assumed again over the course of the next 4-8 years. By then, Bush will have been for naught. And, under the traditional model, any trending to the left by Obama will be counteracted not too long after that. So the status quo, and those whom it benefits.

What Maher is missing is that the media component of the Obama presidency may be the most important part: he is bypassing the legislature and going directly to the American people. Now, in and if itself, this is not a novel gambit . . . politicians routinely run for office using the media, and most recently, Illinois's pillar of moral respectability Rod Blagojevich turned to the media when he had no other avenues left. But Obama seems to be moving in a different direction: what I took to be a fog of platitudes during the campaign may be his attempt to shape the public consciousness in his own idealistic image. As president, he has maintained this relentless idealistic campaigning while filling in the details with specific policy objectives. Where he parts from tradition is that the idealism is the point, and that policy is secondary.

And, I should add, he is still running as artful a campaign as the one that won him the presidency. The most interesting aspect of his media assualt is the way he assiduously avoids the culture wars: though he clearly delineates a progressive agenda, he approaches it from a strictly logical as opposed to moral or cultural angle. To Obama, morality supersedes all, but it is a morality based in logic, and beyond culture. This move puts him beyond the culture warriors from Sarah Palin on down through Limbaugh and Glenn Beck and their media ilk. If Obama has his way, the more time passes, the less relevant the culture wars become.

And, for his part, Maher is nothing more than a Limbaugh for the left. He is jingoistic, self-promoting, and less concerned with truth than with his place in the media landscape. Maher has a lot of nerve comparing Obama to Lindsay Lohan, since he is much more a slave to the media order than Obama - at least Obama defines his role, while Maher is an opportunist who breaches like a pimple on the face of media culture. Unlike Michael Moore, who is a gadfly with an agenda, Maher is nothing more than a media whore. It is he who is Lohanesque, not Obama.

I may be projecting my ideas onto Obama inappropriately. I gotta say, though, I like this guy. It's not that I agree with him - he's much too centrist for my tastes. His support of gay marriage is far too lukewarm, his continued support of financial bailouts is troubling, his military policy is dangerously flexible, and his health care policy is a joke. Nonetheless, Obama seems to be a small crack in the facade of things the way they are. If I'm wrong, at least it's nice to have a president who's not an idiot.

In Defense of Not Voting / In Defense of Voting

In Defense of Not Voting

"Don't forget to do your civic duty: vote Tuesday, November 4th."

No. No. Voting is not your civic duty. To the degree that you have a civic duty, it is to work to improve the situation of the collective (neighborhood, city, state, nation, world - the organized collection of people around you). Voting is not only tangential to that goal, but it could be argued that it is actually counter-productive.

The political system is corrupt - or, even if not exactly corrupt, at least unable to progress the well being of our collective (again, that can be taken at any political level you wish, but for this discussion we will be looking at national politics). Everyone, no matter what her/his political persuasion, always votes for change . . . even incumbents claim to have the "experience" to be able to affect "real change" within the political system. Political change, however, is a pipe dream. The political system functions above all else to ensure its own existence, and to do that, it must maintain status quo. One would think that serving the interests of the populace would be in the best interests of the political system, but that is demonstrably not the case a significant part of the time.

There are always tensions in a democracy: the rights of the few and the wishes of the many, the individual versus the state, the ever shifting horizon of colliding personal freedoms (my freedom to blow Motorhead as loud as I want, anytime I want, versus your freedom to live in peace and quiet). The best way to maintain the precarious balance of the system is to always have citizens who aspire to change believe that change is possible, while eternally postponing the change. Think of the alliance between neo cons and religious conservatives: what would happen if a conservative administration actually managed to get abortion outlawed? Where would that leave the alliance? No doubt many religious conservatives would still stick with the Republican party out of loyalty, but the most issue oriented leaders of the movement would be on to the next issue. What if, after the conservative view of "sanctity of life" is enacted, the religious leaders moved on to the environment, or fighting poverty? Obviously, the connections between the religious conservatives and the neo cons would be strained to the breaking point . . . and, lest you think that's a far-fetched scenario, note that the Republicans will lose some of the fundamentalist Christian vote for exactly those reasons even in this election.

The political system must provide the illusion of choice to keep the citizen invested. To do that, it promises to "change" the things which the populace asks to change, to the point when "CHANGE" itself becomes more important than any actual issues. Once the abstract idea has replaced the specific issue, then the citizen becomes invested in the system that embodies the abstract idea, which is in turn perpetually driven precisely by that which it will not achieve. Our choices, to the degree that we have them, are usually between McDonald's and Burger King.

It is no coincidence that true men of conscience and the desire to do good, such as Jimmy Carter, are often "failures" as president. I believe it is Carter's unwillingness to fully capitulate to the political system that led to his defeat in '80. I also believe that it is no coincidence that Jimmy Carter has done much more for our nation, and for the world as a whole, after he left office. The system is built to resist change.

All true change must happen outside the normalizing influence of the political system. We may oppose the fundamentalist Christian stand on abortion, but talk with a younger fundamentalist, and you may find that you agree on the environment. So, why not join forces to change environmental law? Form coalitions. Protest in the streets. Organize awareness campaigns. Take the fight to the courts. INVOLVE IN DIRECT ACTION. LEAVE THE POLITICAL SYSTEM BEHIND. Ultimately, most of us have many beliefs in common, once we get past our own selfish interests, and the culture warriors who exploit our fears and biases.

It is here where voting becomes counterproductive. If the choice is between McDonald's and Burger King, then a vote for either one is a vote that perpetuates the defective system. In Zimbabwe, when it became clear that Robert Mugabe had no intention of letting Morgan Tsvangirai win the election, citizens abandoned the government (to the degree that they could, anyway). A citizen of conscience would not vote if he/she believed that vote to perpetuate a destructive system.




In Defense of Voting

1. Sometimes, there really is a lesser of two evils. In 2000, I did not vote for Al Gore because I did not see a difference between a centrist Democrat and a centrist Republican. After all, Bill Clinton moved to the right at the speed of light as soon as it became clear that is how he could hold on to office. Clinton loosened business regulations, cut back on the government's social safety net, and bombed the hell out of a European country. By the time he was done, he was somewhere to the right of Nixon. I had no reason to believe that Gore would be any different, and given the number of Nixon people in Bush's orbit, it seemed like Nixon versus Clinton. Of course, hindsight being 20/20 . . .
2. There is, on rare occasion, the opportunity to vote for someone who clearly is better for the country, no matter how much that candidate is still (necessarily) invested in the current defective political system. It is foolhardy to expect ANYONE invested in this system (to the degree that they would actually run for office - and that includes people like Dennis Kucinich and Ralph "Don Quixote" Nader) to be able to change the system, but it is possible that people can be elected who would not stand in the way of a change from outside. It's difficult to know who these people are, because they don't align cleanly with any political philosophy: I would, for instance, vote for Dick Lugar before Hillary Clinton, for even though I agree with Clinton on more of the "issues", Lugar has proven to be a politician who looks for answers that don't necessarily come from within the political sphere (of course, it helps that Lugar is so popular in Indiana that he has run virtually unopposed for the majority of his political career). That is not necessarily a dig at Clinton (I like her much more than I like her husband); it just seems that Clinton is stuck in the American bi-partisan political rut in a way that Lugar is not.
3. Of course, always vote in local elections, if nothing else. Gotta keep those creationists off the school board and in their churches where they belong.

It is for these reasons that I will vote for Barack Obama. I have no illusions about his ability to achieve CHANGE, but I do believe that he has principles that roughly align with mine and, more importantly, he will not stand in the way of citizen-driven change for the better. And, unlike Bill Clinton, I believe he would risk his political career to stand in the way of change for the worse. He seems much more intelligent than most politicians. He also seems more thoughtful. He has hinted at a broader understanding of how to truly change the world for the better, a change that takes place outside of the political sphere. Though I am totally at a loss as to how his empty rhetoric has inspired a groundswell of enthusiasm, I am thankful, because I like him as much as anyone I have ever had a chance to vote for in a major election. And, most importantly, if he is elected and serves all eight years, he will leave office at the age of 55. That will leave him a long time to do some real good outside of the US political system (see the Jimmy Carter example above).


Well, that's it. I had planned to flesh this out and really do it right (maybe drag Badiou into it), but I shot from the hip instead. I'm tired of politics, I'm tired of writing about politics, and I'm really tired of this election. I'm dashing this off so I can stop writing stuff that annoys even me. It's about time I kicked back, took a shot of Old Fitz 90 proof, brewed myself a mug of hot tea, and played some guitar. If you have to have more, here's that notorious commie wackjob Howard Zinn touching on the same issues (thanks to Dan Willems for posting this video where I could see it):






There you have it. Now that's over. I've taken my shot, I've got my tea, I've got my resonator, I think I'll start it out with a little Son House, "Pearline"




Yeah, that's the stuff. Next post will be about Motorhead. Or not.