The Cahokian

That's What I'm Talking About!

2012-01-26T07:02:00.003-05:00

See yesterday's post.

Thanks, Jon!

The State of Obama

2012-01-25T22:50:00.005-05:00

What a difference a year makes, but I just can't join the chorus of finding anything President Obama said last night in his third State of the Union address interesting or acceptable. Why pretend you're happy with crumbs when you can see that there's a whole cake there for the taking?

After listening to Rmoney, Swingrich, the hateful Rick Santorum and the kooky racist Ron Paul for several weeks, of course at first one is struck hearing Obama's intelligent, measured words by a sense of relief. He's trying to connect with people, and mostly in a positive way. The dogwhistle of blaming poor people or black people or immigrants or gays (yes, Rick Santorum, that would be you) for the nation's woes is gone. The intentional lies are notably absent, or at least prettier. He invokes fairness. He brings up eminently reasonable proposals. He doesn't sound like a carnival barker (hi Newt!), and his emotional range usually seems genuine instead of learned in front of a mirror while listening to Ronald Reagan tapes (hi Mittens!).

But we are so numbed by the extreme-right horror show on the Republican side of the aisle that I think it's too easy to be distracted by our wishful thinking into missing what is actually going on.

Last night President Obama beat the same war drums we're used to from Republicans. That line about "all options being on the table" regarding Iran — recently echoed, by the way, by liberal darling Elizabeth Warren — is an actual threat to pre-emptively attack a foreign sovereign state. It's based on stale warmed-over hype recipes from the Bush era about Iraq. And speaking of George W. Bush, even that warmongering mass murderer called for a democratic Palestinian state in his last State of the Union address. Last night Obama mentioned only the American commitment to Israel, the country currently engaged in massive ethnic cleansing against Palestinians in both the Occupied Territories and Israel proper. Obama is actually war mongering. He is actually engaged in covert wars and assassinations. How could it get worse than that?

Obama doesn't brag about the policies of repression and the stifling of dissent that his government is deeply pursuing. But the fact that he didn't mention them in his speech doesn't mean they're not happening. We cannot just look away and pretend that these things could be worse. They're already about as worse as they can be. He signed the NDAA that potentially guts due process. He had a teen-aged American citizen assassinated along with his more notorious American citizen father. His law enforcement agents have waged campaigns of harassment against peace and international solidarity activists. Many believe the fall's national campaign of repression against Occupy encampments was coordinated from the very top halls of so-called law enforcement. When he uses the nebulous term "immigration reform," what he really means is deporting more of our neighbors.

To those of us who wished for real national healthcare in this country, in his speech last night Obama bragged about his health insurance reform being kept in the private profit-making sphere. We can't keep telling ourselves that we had to give up the so-called public option only because of congressional horse-wrangling over votes: the truth is we didn't get it because Obama didn't want it. He's not lying to us: we're lying to ourselves.

In his speech he parroted the same ridiculous small government/tax-cutting rhetorical nonsense the Republicans play. He is absolutely pandering to Republicans. And while it could be argued that mere pandering is harmless, remember how just this last year his administration abandoned environmental protections and advances in contraception. Over and over we tell ourselves that Obama is pandering to the right when it's actually the left that is being pandered and condescended to. And oh yes, that payroll tax holiday he keeps waving about: that is the death of Social Security as we know it. We won't find that out till later, of course.

He can claim that he wants "fairness" but I'm not seeing it. The deck is still stacked in favor of what we euphemistically call "Wall Street." And let's be clear: this is not because Obama is a bad person as the Republicans would have it, but because he is a creature of the 1%. He is acting in his own interests, and in the interests of his friends and colleagues. You and I are not included in that list, no matter how many folksy e-mail appeals to wish Joe, Jill & Michelle a happy birthday that you receive from the Obama reelection campaign. It's really time to stop projecting values on Obama that he just doesn't have.

Almost two weeks ago my local Brooklyn occupy group, Occupy/Ocupemos Sunset Park, had a wildly successful event for Martin Luther King's birthday (I promise a full report soon). I gave a short presentation toward the end of the program. These are from my notes for my remarks:

"2012 is an election year, and somebody is going to promise you that your life will be better if you vote for them. You're free to vote for whoever you like, but my guess is that you're going to be disappointed. Because democracy, the people exercising the right to live and work together fairly and justly, is not really about elections.
History does not remember Dr. King running for office. History does not record who Dr. King voted for. What History remembers is Dr. King leading the people to go out in the street to take what belongs to them. Dr. King showed us the links between big issues like racism and injustice, enforced poverty and the outrages of war. But he also showed us the importance of coming together right here in our own communities to fight for what is right. If you're waiting for a politician to save you you're going to be waiting a very long time. This is up to us."

Again and again we are disappointed in who we vote for. Hell, I argued for supporting Obama last time around even as I suspected this disappointment would return. For three years now I've also watched self-identified progressives struggle with Obama. Over many issues in the last three years anger welled up against him from the left. I am embarrassed that at times I argued against that anger. And yet now as the likes of Rmoney and Swingrich gather like bathroom mildew, these progressives return to the circle of wagons around Obama.

We think it will be worse under the Republicans than under Obama. But is that really true? What if the worse is already true. When Obama is looking to compare himself to... Teddy Roosevelt, this is a sign that we should heed. For people who think of themselves as 21st-century progressives that is called aiming very very low. I read a bitter comment on a blog today: Obama supporters "would defend Hitler, if he had only been a Democrat: 'He only killed 6 million Jews... hell look how many he left alive!'" A little harsh perhaps, but it makes a certain point. Where does the constant need to apologetically find Obama's silver lining come from? Weakness, I think.

I'm actually not at the point of telling anyone not to vote. I guess in some ways I still hold the position that since elections will have one of two winners, it's not more harmful voting for a lesser evil than wasting a dollar on a lottery ticket, in the off chance it winds up making a slight difference. But I am more and more convinced that as long as we devote our energy to a game that is designed to disappoint us, we will get only what we're asking for. Asking for a lesser evil is still asking for evil. Why not ask for something one actually wants? Excuse me, why not take what one is actually entitled to! In 2008 this seemed like an abstraction. In 2012, with the sea change in consciousness called Occupy Wall Street, it doesn't seem like an unimaginable goal to make the elections irrelevant. Maybe, just maybe, we're no longer weak.

I'm not going to spend the months between now and November fretting about the election. I'm going to spend it trying to organize my community, trying to spread the possibilities of the Occupy movement. Obama's not going to save us. We're going to save ourselves.

Republican Candidates Threaten Cuba

2012-01-23T23:46:00.003-05:00

I watched about half of tonight's Republican Presidential debate in Florida. I'm struck by how little these people actually talk about. The debates have been a really bad long-running reality show where they basically accuse each other of all manner of horrible things. They don't discuss their plans, they don't discuss the reasons things are the way they are, they don't discuss any real facts or issues. Except they do make a lot of threats and insinuations. Against each other. Against President Obama. Against black people. Against gay people. Against immigrants.

Tonight they threatened Iran, and, it being a debate in Florida, they threatened Cuba. There was something so visceral in their attempt to outdo each other in their bloodthirsty desire to return the laws of organized crime and plantation rule to Cuba. Well, except for poor Ron Paul, who said the U.S. should leave Cuba alone. Though today I also watched a video clip of him speaking in front of a Confederate flag in 2003 denying that the Civil War was fought over slavery which pretty much cancels out anything he says about anything else at all. The new Republican frontrunner Newt Swingrich basically said the CIA should be going to Cuba to overthrow its government. Which we presume the US has already been trying to do for over fifty years.

The government established by the Cuban Revolution in 1959 has made its share of mistakes, sure. But there is something about what Cuba has managed to do through the course of its revolution that really is meaningful, and that has to do with values and priorities. These start with healthcare and education. It really shouldn't be a surprise that someone like Gingrich, who thinks poor children should be earning their keep cleaning out bathrooms, sees the Cuban reality as a threat. American politicians have never actually cared about democracy in Cuba; they certainly didn't care about democracy when Batista was in power. What they care about is returning the rule of capitalist property relations and US dominance to a country that has dared to reject those things so close to our shores.

There's lots that could be said about the horrible things these candidates keep saying: their bigotries and their swaggering lies, their love of ruthless financial exploitation. Their charade is going to go on for a while, and I for one am not convinced that Gingrich won't be the last man standing.

It's often hard to know where to start when considering just how awful all these politicians are — from both parties. But here's another thing to add to the list. When they talk about attacking Cuba, they're talking about attacking the right of any and every social movement to break free from the clutches of corporate America.

There's only one response for the 99%: Defend Cuba!

Barbarians R Us

2012-01-21T08:00:00.005-05:00

International solidarity campaigns have long been an activist staple. Citizens of countries who think themselves above barbarism appeal to the sensibilities of people who share their values and campaign against some ugly outrage on a foreign shore. While international solidarity campaigns have applied pressure to many just causes over the years, it's safe to say that most international solidarity campaign are of course the product of a web of complex ulterior motives usually rooted in geo-political reality. I remember the massive campaign of the 1970s and 1980s, "Save Soviet Jewry," which conveniently married the Zionist and anti-Communist agendas under a little righteously humanitarian umbrella. And as actually righteous as I believe the world campaign against South African Apartheid in that same period was, there's little doubt about the role the Cold War played in that struggle since the "West" largely supported South African racism and the pro-Communist world largely opposed it.

Which brings us to this fascinating postcard from the Soviet Union, vintage 1931. With its mailing instructions printed in eight Soviet languages, this postcard mobilizes international solidarity around the murderous reality in a particularly backward, barbarian corner of the world... the American South: "долой суд линча! да здравствуют негритянские рабочие!" "Down with Lynching! Long Live the Negro Workers!" The accompanying illustration shows a mob of root-tooting gun-waving, club-wielding, stetson-wearing, flag-waving yahoos stringing up a black man on a gallows.

It's funny how in retrospect that pre-war period is remembered as a succession of outrages about which international solidarity was mobilized: the Nazification of Germany and criminalization of the Jews, the Japanese attack on China, the Italian invasion of Ethiopia, the civil war in Spain. In 1931, it seems, the barbarians were right here at home.

Why do you think there was such massive African-American migration to northern cities in the first half of this century? Here's the answer: Because the American South was the Darfur of its day. On this day of the 2012 South Carolina primary where Republican dog-whistle racism is rising to audible levels (some would say "air-raid siren levels") it's worth remembering the not-so distant past even as it conflicts with our own carefully cultivated image as a liberal-minded bastion of civilization.

Related reading: Charles Blow today in the New York Times. Chauncey DeVega at We Are Respectable Negroes.

Click on the image of this postcard to see it larger.

The Election...Eighty Years Ago

2012-01-19T23:26:00.006-05:00

I stumbled across this photo on the internet a little while back. It's election graffiti from the 1932 German elections: it reads "Wählt Thälmann," or "Vote for Ernst Thaelmann," the candidate of the KPD, the German Communist Party, that in the years following was ruthlessly crushed. Here's the amazing thing about this photo: it was taken in Marburg, Germany, in 2008. Which means not only did it survive the 1932 elections (the KPD did not win a majority, as we know), it survived the rise of the Nazis, the brutality of WWII, and all the attempts since the war to control the narratives of history.

I've written before about those 1932 elections and about Ernst Thaelmann. The last time in fact, I pondered whether this era of elections, marked by a rise of the extreme right, would be the undoing of today's civil society. Interestingly, I failed to see the possibility of the return of a mass leftwing, popular movement. I saw the main hope, inadequate as it is, as defensive voting for Democrats. I find it worthy of note that while the mainstream of the Republican party has indeed drifted right, that the people out in the streets are no longer the teabaggers of the right but the Occupy movement of the left.

Which changes everything.

Big things are being planned for May Day, even. And frankly, despite the horrible words spouted by those horrible people on the daises of the Republican debates, and despite the transparent posturing of President Obama, they all seem a little bit irrelevant to the possibilities for the future. Not that one of them won't probably win come November, but that no longer engenders such a sense of foreboding hopelessness.

This election graffiti has survived eighty years, telling all sorts of stories about the way things were. While some of those stories are sad, with tragic endings, it occurs to me that the current story is still being told.

Internet on Strike!

2012-01-17T23:12:00.004-05:00

The Cahokian will be available again on Thursday.

In solidarity with Wikipedia. Graphic via Kasama. Info: Sopastrike!

Without Comment: 1% vs. 99%

2012-01-11T22:01:00.006-05:00

"MATT LAUER: When you said that we already have a leader who divides us with the bitter politics of envy, I’m curious about the word ‘envy.’ Did you suggest that anyone who questions the policies and practices of Wall Street and financial institutions, anyone who has questions about the distribution of wealth and power in this country, is envious? Is it about jealousy, or fairness?
MITT ROMNEY: You know, I think it’s about envy. I think it’s about class warfare. When you have a president encouraging the idea of dividing America based on the 99 percent versus one percent — and those people who have been most successful will be in the one percent — you have opened up a whole new wave of approach in this country which is entirely inconsistent with the concept of one nation under God. The American people, I believe in the final analysis, will reject it.
LAUER: Yeah but envy? Are there no fair questions about the distribution of wealth without it being seen as ‘envy,’ though?
ROMNEY: I think it’s fine to talk about those things in quiet rooms and discussions about tax policy and the like. But the president has made it part of his campaign rally. Everywhere he goes we hear him talking about millionaires and billionaires and executives and Wall Street. It’s a very envy-oriented, attack-oriented approach and I think it will fail."

— from a televised Today Show interview with Republican frontrunner Mitt Romney this morning.

"I personally don’t want to have anything to do with people lobbying or running for office right now, nor do I want to focus all of my time winning small policy changes, and I don’t think that’s the role of Occupy Wall Street. But I sure as hell hope the people whose terrain that is do go and do it. I hope that they can recognize that what’s happening now is the creation of a climate where it’s possible for them to push left and win more. I’m not going to be happy with all the compromises those people have to make, and I don’t think we’re going to survive on reforms alone, but we need that too. If we want a real, meaningful social transformation, we need to win things along the way, because that’s how we provides people the foundations on top of which they can continue to struggle for the long haul, and it’s how we grow to become a critical mass that can ultimately make a fundamental break with this system.

And in the meantime, our role as Occupy Wall Street should be to dream bigger than that. I think it’s our job to look far ahead, to assert vision, to create alternatives and to intervene in the political and economic processes that govern people’s lives....

I think there is more possibility right now than I could have ever imagined. I think in the not-so-distant future, we can win a lot of things that actually improve people’s lives, we can continue to change the political landscape, and we can grow into a mass movement with the strength to propose another kind of world and also fight for it. I think we’re only in the beginning of that, and I think there is a ton of potential. And I also see that kind of possibility in the long term. I think we can win a truly free society. I think it’s totally possible to have a political and economic system that we have a genuine say in, that we democratically control, that we participate in, that is equitable and liberating, where we have autonomy for ourselves and our communities and our families, but are also in solidarity with one another. I think it’s possible, and necessary. That’s kind of the amazing thing about this moment and this movement, I guess. Right now, sitting here, I can’t even imagine the limits of possibility."

— Occupy Wall Street activist Yotam Marom interviewed by Naomi Klein

Liberate the Neighborhood!

2012-01-09T23:22:00.003-05:00

The Occupy group in my Brooklyn neighborhood is holding a community speak-out to celebrate the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s birthday this upcoming January 16. It's exciting to be doing organizing again (although it's also time-consuming, responsible for the shortness of recent posts here). The event, called Unity Day, should be pretty interesting: one of our speakers is going to be Felipe Luciano, a founder of the mythic Young Lords Party and a member of the seminal pre-rap political poetry ensemble The Last Poets. There's going to be live music, an open mic, some video, a speaker from OWS, and others. It's being held at the Trinity Lutheran Church, a neighborhood church that has been graciously donating space and resources to the Occupy movement. OSP hasn't actually occupied anything yet, but who knows what the future has in store!

One of the cool things for me is that I'm getting to exercise my graphic design skills for something I actually like rather than for work. I'm proud of the poster I designed, above. There's also a version in Spanish I'll put up here later. Occupy/Ocupemos Sunset Park!

Rise & Root

2012-01-07T22:46:00.003-05:00

This image, Rise & Root, is from The Hermitage blog, which I know nothing about, via my blog friend Annie of This & That with Artichoke Annie. Something about it really speaks to me even though as vaguely political images go it's earthier and less specific than my usual idea of good propaganda. But who hasn't pondered the magic of majestic trees rising above, their equally majestic root systems remaining secret and unseen below? As Annie says, "perhaps [it's] a symbol that this new year 2012 will be one of change, perhaps a year where fights will be won, a year where growth in the humaneness of humankind will be seen."

There's bound to be lots of ugliness this year, but this mandala-like artwork speaks to the possibilities that have been revealed for changing that ugliness. I've been continuing to work with my local Brooklyn "Occupy" chapter — a longer report here soon, I promise — and the one thing that keeps sticking with me is how what can easily be dismissed as the same old community activism is actually something profoundly deeper, like the roots on these trees, something much more sophisticated than the political activism I have witnessed before. In rejecting easy ideology in favor of a profoundly revolutionary sense of autonomous optimism and determination, the movement being created is something more organic and more radical than anything that has taken root in years. I'm meeting young people with a sophisticated grasp of, well, class warfare in a way that disarms many of the ideological arguments I've seen the left waste its time on for decades.

So yes, against blandness and conformity...otherness, black earth and imagination.

"How To Survive a Plague" Going to Sundance!

2012-01-05T20:14:00.002-05:00

My friend David France's documentary "How To Survive a Plague" is being premiered at Sundance film festival this month! In the interview above, David talks a little about why he wanted to tell this story, and how difficult it was to document a not-so-long-ago time that in many ways already feels like ancient history.

I've seen a rough cut of the film and it's really terrific. It's also really relevant: because while it tells the story of a handful of heroes trying to fight AIDS on the streets, in the halls of government and in the nation's science labs, what it really tells is a story of activism. Activism that happened, in fact, to change the world. It's fascinating to see footage of political protests in the 1980s at some of the same locations of today's Occupy Wall Street actions. When this film makes it to general distribution, as it is bound to do, it's going to be a must-see not only for people who lived through the worst of the AIDS crisis, but for activists of the present looking for inspiration.

Read about it at the Sundance website. The film has a "like" page on Facebook. Good luck, David!

Anti-Americana: Peace President

2012-01-02T19:10:00.005-05:00

Since on New Year's Eve he signed the despicable and dangerous NDAA, or National Defense Authorization Act, let's dedicate the first post of 2012 to President Obama, elected three years ago on a largely anti-war, reform platform. With his signing of NDAA — see previous posts here — Obama has in quite a real way significantly eroded the rights of American citizens to due process. He's proved that his definition of "peace" is not particularly cognizant with the one in the dictionary.

This poster is from the Cuban OSPAAAL, the Organization of Solidarity of the Peoples of Africa, Asia and Latin America, an organization with a long tradition of brilliant graphic design. While this poster isn't artistically their best, their anti-imperialist message remains sharply on point. President Obama is shown winning the Nobel Peace Prize as a warlike American eagle swoops down from behind. Captioned at the sides are the scenes of the President's "peaceful" actvities: Iraq, Afghanistan, Middle East, Honduras, Terrorism, Yemen, the blockade against Cuba, military bases in Colombia, and Pakistan. The poster pre-dates Libya, probably produced in 2009 or 2010.

I must note that this blog marked the awarding of the Peace Prize to Obama, indeed his very election, with a sense of hope. To my credit I think by the time of his actual prize acceptance speech my critique was developing. At some point this year I'm sure I will sum up my own trajectory and thinking about how all that worked out. I think it's important to take responsibility for positions I have argued in the past, and where necessary, to revisit them with a proper sense of self criticism. Let's just say that Obama has been a tremendous disappointment to those who gave him their support, even those of us who offered that support with a critical eye. This disappointment was also entirely predictable, and looking at what happened in the past four years will be important as this year's election season heats up. The question needs to be answered whether voting defensively for Obama last time around did anybody any good. It certainly didn't help an awful lot of innocent people killed by predator drones on his orders. Stay tuned.

For more examples of Anti-Americana, the regular Cahokian feature on worldwide anti-American propaganda art, click here.

Happy New Year 2012: The Beginning Is Near

2011-12-31T12:52:00.002-05:00

Happy New Year to all the readers of The Cahokian!

2011 had its ups and downs for sure, but for me it will be the year when the possibilities of the future suddenly realigned. For a long time I felt like that long-haired crazyman wearing a "The End Is Near" sandwich-board; I am happy to report that I have traded in my nay-saying, doom-saying ways for a sense of optimism, despite the challenges ahead. As #OWs people say now, "The Beginning Is Near."

For sure there's a rocky path ahead. Among other things there's an election full of crazy and or dangerous people on the way, and my own thinking doesn't have me promising a vote to anybody right about now. I'm remembering the signs I've seen round-about OWS saying "If elections could change anything they'd be illegal." There's sabre-rattling all over the place, crazy weather to be avoided, and the endless struggle to make ends meet. But I'm also remembering how surprising things seem to just happen. Did you notice how the powers that be absolutely FREAKED OUT this year at a few thousand demonstrators talking class warfare? May we live in interesting times, indeed. The last thing anybody should be doing right now is saying that radical change is impossible. It's incumbent on us to make sure the changes are good ones.

Peace, love, happiness, abundance, good health, joy, laughter. I wish these things for me, and for you.

Ron Paul Is A F*cking Nutbag... Who Cares If He Claims to Oppose War

2011-12-27T19:57:00.007-05:00

I've seen some great things attributed to the Ron Paul campaign. That sign with the reversed "LOVE" in "REVOLUTION" called out? Genius. The notion that the U.S. should not be marching around the world dictating policy? Laudable. A desire to bring troops home from Afghanistan and stop sending a fortune to Israel? I'm down with that. But you know what? It doesn't fucking matter one bit.

Because Ron Paul is a right-wing, anti-gay, anti-choice, racist, conspiracy theorist NUTBAG. This is plain to see. Obvious from hearing thirty seconds of the man speak. Clear as day from the actual historical record revealed in a simple google search.

And yet there are legions of Ron Paul supporters twisting themselves into pretzel shapes trying to excuse his disturbing history of pandering to the far-right fringe. There are armies of pseudo-intellectual morons trying to make sense of his calamitous economic ideas. And there are unfortunate crowds of young white people trying to focus on his anti-war appeal while pulling the blinders closer to avoid seeing how close this man stands to those other folks on the Republican stage like anti-gay scum Rick Santorum, deranged fantasist Michele Bachmann who actually runs a business that tortures gay people, racist narcissist Newt Gingrich, and tool of big business Mitt Romney.

I could post facts about how Ron Paul has denounced Civil Rights laws. I could link to stories about how his Iowa chief of staff is a veteran of anti-gay hate groups. I could bring up his ties to the John Birch society. I could repeat what his former staffers say about his unwillingness to use a gay man's bathroom. I could link to stories that challenge the distance Paul claims he has put between him and the scandalously racist newsletters of two decades ago. I'm not going to do any of that. These stories are not hard to find. If you are not busy pretending not to see these things you will find them in ten seconds on the internet.

The Mitt Romney machine has been very very busy demolishing each of his Republican competitors one by one, and they are surely a force behind the sudden media scrutiny of Dr. Paul. But I think given Ron Paul's ground operation he could still do quite well in the upcoming Republican Iowa caucuses. In truth I don't really care who the Republicans go with...they're all horror shows beyond the pale. But I have acquaintances (who should know better) who are actually suckered in by the bizarro-world Ron Paul delusion. I find it sad that people outside the rarified club of bigotry and hateful ignorance that is the Republican party should find themselves strolling down such a doomed path of bad thinking. Actually it doesn't make me sad; it makes me furious.

Libertarianism is a cult-like ideology that elevates selfishness into an economic and political theory. Key to Libertarianism is its omission of a class analysis (the same class analysis rudimentary to the nascent concept of the 99% expressed by the #OWS movement). And there's a good reason for that: because Libertarianism isn't egalitarianism, it's rich-ism. It's about a system where the rich and wealthy are unfettered in their exploitation of the rest of us. With impunity. It's worth repeating: If you want to visit a Libertarian paradise, visit Somalia. I am not exaggerating.

There are Libertarians and Ron Paul supporters running around in OWS, for sure. But take a deeper look. They do not actually want the same things the rest of us want. What the Libertarians are doing is filling an ideological vacuum: given the history of Democratic Party betrayals (hello, Mr. Obama) and the failure of the Marxist left to (yet) emerge from its historically discrediting Cold-War defeat, Libertarians are talking systemic changes and ideological solutions, even if the substance of what they're talking is absolute nonsense.

The 2012 election is still eleven months away. A lot will happen in that time. If I've learned anything from the last year it is that voting for President once every four years is a sad substitute for actual democracy. I think the optimism that so many felt with Obama's rise, and the subsequent reaction to the failure of that rise to actually bear the sweet fruit that many of us hoped for is one of the factors that has contributed to the Occupy Wall Street awakening. The challenge of the next period is to sustain the momentum of last year, to make an alternative to the electoral trap feasible, to show what real direct democracy is. We can aim higher than choosing the best of the worst to predictably disappoint us.

Adolph Hitler was a vegetarian who loved puppies. If you're looking in a library for books about Hitler, I'll make an educated guess that "pet care" and "cookbooks" are probably the wrong places to look. When the books are written about Ron Paul, I'm certainly not saying they will be on the shelves next to books about Hitler, but they sure won't be on filed under "anti-war" either.

If Ron Paul sometimes sounds like a fucking right-wing nutbag... it's because he is one.

Even The Longest Night Gives Birth to Dawn

2011-12-21T22:35:00.005-05:00

I took this photo a month ago, when there were still some leaves on the trees. That's the full moon above and a streetlight below, and it's right on my street. The leaves are all gone now, though it's a very un-Winter-Solstice temperature of 61 degrees outside; it's almost muggy out.

I don't see a moon outside my window in the night that has fallen today. The longest night of the year has begun, after the shortest day. I woke up in darkness and arrived home in the same inky blackness. It's no accident that so many religions have significant holidays round about now as the natural world works its predictable though still miraculous magic. Somehow even though it's about to get cold and snowy here in the northern hemisphere, climate change allowing, nature holds out an olive branch: this signal that all is not lost. The days are gonna get longer, the light is gonna come back.

It's been an interesting year. Things have happened that I didn't think could happen anymore. Even as my middle-aged joints ache and complain, my heart and mind are lightened with the promise of good news. Oh not the good news of herald angels and flaring stars and possible prophets, but the signs of awakening slumberers, the possibility that the coming Spring will bring more than just flowers and new leaves.

25 years ago in the depths of the Reaganite midnight I laid down my spears and arrows, and quenched my torch. I kindled different fires for a while, gathering embers. I walked some different paths, and visited some different worlds. I have no regrets for the years I spent doing what needed to be done. That different time that is a half of my life is as much me as what came before and what comes now, after. Older and wiser turns out to be more than just a cliché.

Tonight it's going to take a moment longer. But dawn is going to break. In glorious sun or overcast with clouds, no matter. The world turns. Stretch your arms. Take a step. Arise.

Tomorrow is going to be a good day. Walk with me: let's share it together.

Kim Jong-Il and the U.S.: Of Tyrants Great & Small

2011-12-19T20:49:00.008-05:00

As the whole world knows now, the "Dear Leader" of the self-proclaimed Democratic People's Republic of Korea, Kim Jong-Il, died this weekend.

By all accounts Kim, the son of North Korea's first leader Kim Il Sung and the father of the supposed next leader, was a dictator who didn't stint on his own luxury while his country suffered the effects of international isolation — much of it self-inflicted — in the aftermath of the fall of the Soviet Union. Starvation, malnutrition, poverty, and technologically backward conditions are said to be the rule in the northern half of the Korean peninsula.

With his chubby, gnomish build and his poofy bouffant hairdo, Kim was easily caricatured; the personality cult built on his father that was grafted onto his own relatively gloryless history seemed to outsiders as particularly bizarre and forced. The rule of Kim's Workers Party is by most reports brutal and harsh; while Kim's taste in fine liquors seems corrupt and despotic. Defended politically by a homegrown nationalist ideology with only tenuous links to the Marxist-Leninist ideology that spawned it, the DPRK is big on mass spectacle, dramatic gesture, preposterous claim, and closely guarded secrecy. Once a technological overachiever, North Korea fell behind the South in most areas excluding perhaps weapons technology: under Kim Jong-Il the DPRK seems to have developed working nuclear weapons.

I don't expect history to be particularly kind to Kim Jong-Il. But that said, I'm finding much about the blogosphere's celebration of his passing to be a self-righteous frenzy of pro-imperialist propaganda.

Even satirical website Gawker called out the internet commentariat for its widespread promotion of the song "I'm so Ronery" from the animated film "World Police: Team America" that features a puppetized Kim Jong-il character: "Twitter Relates to Death of Kim Jong-il By Endlessly Referring to Stupid Racist Song."

Amidst all the encomia for a new era in Korea and for freedom for the people of the DPRK, one must ask the question, who exactly will be bringing that freedom to the north?

Because here are truths that should not be overlooked: for the past sixty years North Korea has been parked between the three most powerful military nations in the world. The American military fully occupies South Korea with massive military might including nuclear weapons aimed right at the people of the DPRK. Goaded on by the US the South Korean military has a long history of provocation against the North.

On the radio this morning I heard a government official of the DPRK, distraught over Kim's death, defending his country against its international ill repute. One of the things he said was that the U.S. that threatens his country is one of the worst human rights violators in the world. It came across as a laugh-line, a punchline to show how removed from reality the North Koreans are. But put yourself in their shoes. There is plenty of evidence that the scale of American tyranny dwarfs anything that the DPRK is capable of, especially when you consider how the U.S. treats the world around it as its exclusive reserve.

During the American war on Korea, two million Koreans were killed; including hundreds and hundreds of thousands of civilians. While history doesn't point to any clean hands in that conflict, the U.S. is absolutely guilty of thousands of war crimes against innocent civilians, and the South Korean dictatorship propped up by the U.S. for years after the war ran death squads against suspected Communists in the south.

Consider the wave of repression in this country against #OWS encampments. Students and workers beaten and gassed with chemical weapons? That wasn't in Pyongyang.

Consider this angry OpEd piece in the New York Times this weekend, by a law-abiding, gainfully-employed young African-American man named Nicholas Peart who has been repeatedly stopped, harassed, frisked, and thrown to the ground by the NY city police as part of the "stop and frisk" campaign that sees all young black men as potential criminals: "It feels like an important thing to be part of a community of hundreds of thousands of people who are wrongfully stopped on their way to work, school, church or shopping, and are patted down or worse by the police though they carry no weapon; and searched for no reason other than the color of their skin..."

Consider this fact also reported in the New York Times: "The United States has less than 5 percent of the world's population. But it has almost a quarter of the world's prisoners....The United States has, for instance, 2.3 million criminals behind bars, more than any other nation, according to data maintained by the International Center for Prison Studies at King's College London. China, which is four times more populous than the United States, is a distant second, with 1.6 million people in prison.... "Far from serving as a model for the world, contemporary America is viewed with horror," James Whitman, a specialist in comparative law at Yale, wrote last year in Social Research. "Certainly there are no European governments sending delegations to learn from us about how to manage prisons." Prison sentences here have become "vastly harsher than in any other country to which the United States would ordinarily be compared..."

The U.S. has overthrown or helped overthrow the governments of Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya in the past decade. It attacks people with utter impunity in Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia. It supplies weapons to repressive governments around the world: weapons that are actually used, as in Egypt and Palestine. If you were in the DPRK wouldn't you feel threatened?

The U.S. has a habit of portraying the rulers of countries it doesn't like "madmen," or "insane." This as half of our own country prepares to rally around someone like Newt Gingrich? It's easy to call attention to Kim Jong-il's eccentricities. But isn't that just awfully convenient? The U.S. learned long ago that if you dehumanize your enemies you can eliminate them as carelessly as they do with stray kittens at the Humane Society.

The DPRK is a one-party state. Do you feel that our acclaimed two-party state, our supposed democracy, actually represents you? I sure don't.

Life is probably much easier in the United States than in the DPRK. The fact that this is the richest country in the world, courtesy of the exploitation of the world's resources, kind of helps make that so. It's true I can write this blog here while I couldn't in Pyongyang: But we'll see how seriously the government starts applying before the NDAA makes that no longer true. The NDAA is certainly full of repressive laws that Kim Jong-Il would love. Not sure what that makes Barack Obama...are you?

Anyway my point is not to glorify North Korea, nor to lionize the late Kim Jong-Il. He's certainly not my dear leader.

But it's not that simple. Don't believe the hype. The so-called "Free World" is about as accurately named as the "People's Democratic Republic" of Korea. This isn't the occasion for gloating. We in the U.S. have serious work to do before we can be calling the kettles of the world black.

Our enemy is here at home, first.

Image shows a sheet of stamps from the DPRK, 2011, showing achievements of Kim Jong-Il.

December 17 2010: The Man Who Changed the World

2011-12-17T01:00:00.005-05:00

What a year. Twelve months ago today, a Tunisian street vendor named Mohamed Bouazizi set himself on fire to protest his treatment by Tunisian cops. Tunisia was run by the corrupt and repressive regime of Zine El Abidine Ben Ali. Severely burned, Bouazizi died after several weeks in a coma in the hospital.

His actions set off a wave of protest in Tunisia that eventually brought down the Tunisian government, the first success of the so-called Arab spring. Ben Ali was kicked out of Tunisia. A wave of protest soon swept the entire world, opening the lid off repressive regimes and confronting the illusions of so-called Western regimes alike.

While it's too early to report the last year as an unqualified success, exactly, the world looks quite different than it did before Bouazizi's selfless and heroic act of martyrdom and resistance. Dictatorships are gone, and to be sure some have been replaced with the potential seeds of new ones, and some protests have faced the brute force of suppression.

But suddenly there is possibility like never before. Even here in the United States people out in the street are awakening to the possibility of direct democracy through direct action: by awakening to the gulf between the 99% and the 1%; by actually engaging in the class war that has up until now only been waged against us; by organizing ourselves in the Occupy Together/#Occupy Wall Street movement, now the future looks different than it did before.

Mohammed Bouazizi gave his life, but he planted a seed. It's now our responsibility, as people together, to nourish that seed and help it blossom.

(Illustration of Muhammad Bouazizi from Brazilian politican cartoonist Carlos Latuff via What If I Get Free?)

Look Who's About to Trash the Bill of RIghts (Hint: Not a Republican)

2011-12-15T23:23:00.006-05:00

I have major bones to pick with the New York Times, often. But in a series of blogposts today editorial page editor Andrew Rosenthal nails the deadly danger behind the National Defense Authorization Act, passing in stealth under cover of more visible bills on the economy:

"For a while, the administration encouraged people to think that President Obama would take a stand against the unnecessary and very dangerous provisions that Congress jammed into the annual National Defense Authorization Act. He threatened to veto the whole bill in order to block new rules that would mandate the military custody of most terrorist suspects, and officially sanction their indefinite detention, without due process. Yesterday, the president backed down, completely." — 'The Sound of One President Caving'

"The first [issue] is whether certain provisions in the law give the president and the Pentagon the power to detain American citizens in a military facility, possibly for life, without a trial. Lawyers I talked to today said that the bill is pure mush in a lot of areas, including this one. The bill does not require military custody for American citizens suspected of membership with Al Qaeda or an allied group, as it more or less does for foreigners. (Note, by the way, that this is all about suspicion, not proof.) But neither does it prohibit military trial or detention of American citizens. It’s stunning that the president is willing to sign a bill that might effectively turn the right of habeas corpus into a mere privilege — even for citizens." —'More Rubble from the Military Detention Cave-in'

When this bill is signed into law, if you don't like this blogpost, all you have to do is accuse me of being an ally of Al-Qaeda and I can be locked away, forever, with no right to defend myself or even ask why. I disappear, legally, and utterly without recourse. If you doubt whether Mr. Obama's government would do such a thing, I think you're quite possibly being very naive. Do remember the late American citizens Mr. Al-Awlaki and son. But even if you think Obama wouldn't do such a thing, what about President Gingrich? President Bachmann? President Romney?

It's been nice knowing you all.

Crunching the Numbers...of Perverts

2011-12-14T22:54:00.004-05:00

Every day I look at the stats that Skynet aka Google Blogger provides me with about my blogs. This is an interesting exercise. The first thing you learn doing this is that most people on the internet are looking to get their rocks off. Internet viewers are sex-obsessed perverts. A creepy number of my 114,000+ pageviews are people with one of their hands nowhere near the computer keyboard.

Sometime back I wrote what I thought was an interesting feminist analysis of fashion fascism as observed in Atlantic City, exploring a common thread between the enforced hypersexuality of the Jersey shore look and the repressive Burqa garment. This post consistently scores high on my most popular posts. Finally I noticed another statistic that showed why: one day the high scoring search keywords included "Atlantic City prostitutes." Thus, my legion of thoughtful feminist readers turned out to be a bunch of horny lonely men trapped at conventions and casinos looking for a little paid entertainment. Oh well.

I wrote an article about the outrageously racist teabagger candidate for New York governor, a fan of bestiality emails, with the intentionally ironic and eye-catching title "I would rather have sex with a horse than vote for Carl Paladino." Always a popular post on my stats: Yes it turns out that a whole LOT of people are hoping I posted pictures of horse sex. Sorry to disappoint. Now get out of that stable and leave the livestock alone. That's abuse, folks.

Some stats are indeed encouraging. Readers like pictures of OWS protests. Pieces I wrote that got picked up elsewhere remain popular reads: being a gay leftist and the piece I wrote on the video game Homeland both got some circulation. My music obituaries are popular.

I haven't entirely figured out why my post about the Oscars which used a picture of Oscar the Grouch snatched from Google has made it so high up in Google search results. A lot of people worldwide are looking for a picture of that grouchy puppet in a garbage can. Day after day for months this image was the top search result and top viewed post here on The Cahokian. I found this a little discouraging actually, cause this post says almost nothing.

But now here's something truly fascinating. For the past two weeks Oscar is no longer the most popular post or search: He has been supplanted by my post about Newt Gingrich and his serial adultery, "Newt Gingrich Will Always Love America. Unless it Gets Cancer," replete with an early photo of him with his first wife and former high-school teacher Jackie Battley Gingrich. It turns out America is fascinated by Newt. Does this mean America will vote for Newt? Are they laughing with him or at him? That is the eternal question. But on a blog where posts about Michele Bachmann's mental illness or the possibility that Mitt Romney participates in Mormon Human Sacrifice have not made a statistical dent, I find it really interesting that Newt is more popular than muppets, prostitutes, or sex with large farm animals.

Speaking of eternal questions: laugh or cry?

I See Dead People

2011-12-12T23:00:00.006-05:00

Dead Metal Toy Sudanese Mahdists from John Jenkins Co.

When I was growing up in Chicago in the mid-1960s my best friend was named Nancy Lee. I don't remember what her father actually did for a living, but I knew he dreamed of returning to his native Kentucky and settling into an academic career and writing about his life's fascination, the American Civil War; which at some point he actually did, ending my friendship with little Nancy Lee. Anyway in Nancy Lee's basement her father Jim had a huge collection of plastic civil war toy soldiers. They were made in pale blue and pale gray colors, thus despite the similarity of uniform and pose casting no doubt about which side they were meant to represent. He had everything spread out on a jumble of tables. There were plastic Southern mansions and plastic trees and plastic bridges and tiny cannons scattered about the clashing plastic armies. It was quite the scene, and I was quite jealous, never being invited to play with what seemed irrationally to my mind an adult man's toy. Nancy Lee, being very young and a girl to boot, was not allowed to do more than look at this awesome display. Her older brother was initiated into the mysteries of these toys, but he was much older than Nancy Lee or I, so I was never invited to watch her father at play either: I don't know if he rearranged the lines of battle by whim of mood, whether he made whooshing, booming, spitting sounds as he moved the figures about, or whether he was aiming merely for the perfect just-so arrangement of some historic moment in time.

Did I mention I was jealous? I developed quite a fascination of my own with little toy historical figures, some of which I have written about here before. In the end I eventually boxed up my own collection of little toy soldiers, giving most of them away. As I entered adulthood I occasionally and wistfully bought myself a little model soldier, evoking some childhood romance with history and adventure and lost innocence no doubt, but I never seriously contemplated becoming one of that rare and undoubtedly dying breed of gentlemen hobbyists, the adult toy soldier collector.

Metal Toy Dead Zulus from Conte Collectibles.

Which is not to say that I am not still fascinated by the idea of toy soldiers: capturing and miniaturizing historical violence without worry over the lives of real men, without the stain of blood or the curse of collateral damage. Over the years with the onset of the internet I was happy to discover that I could pursue that fascination voyeuristically, nostalgically (and economically) by window-shopping hobbyist websites; which I have done now for years.

Although I have not met such a person in my adulthood, there are apparently lots of people, presumably men, who do still engage in this time-honored hobby. Fueled in part by cheap manufacturing in China, toy soldiers aimed at adults seem to be quite a stable niche market. And unlike my youth when toy soldiers were mostly devoted to Cowboys and Indians, Civil War soldiers like my friend Nancy Lee's father had, knights in shining armor, and WWII GIs, today's toy soldiers seem to have reached all level of exotic historical subjects covering thousands of years of human history.

Plastic Toy Dead Sioux from Toy Soldiers of San Diego.

But I have noticed a trend, something that really creeps me out: toy dead people. Your plastic cowboys and plastic Custer and metal Redcoats can now be matched up with dead and dying little toy Indians in a variety of agonizing poses. Your tiny British imperialist highlanders defending your model of South Africa's Rorke's Drift can now be surrounded by "clumps" (not exaggerating, see above) and "piles" of toy dead Zulus. And your Four-Feathers-style British heroes heading off to rescue a tin version of General Charles "Chinese" Gordon in the Sudan can now avenge themselves against crumpling, dying black African Mahdist tribesmen. While as near as I can tell there is the occasional toy white corpse to be had, the overwhelming number of these toy dead people are black and brown. Indeed you can get dying toy white people being scalped by fiendish looking toy Indians, so you will need those piles of dead Indians for your act of proper revenge.

Metal Toy Dead Woodland Indians from Sierra Toy Soldier Co.

Sure, who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men and all that. Gore is a stable part of fantasy: violent movies, violent video games, plastic guns, murder mystery novels. Why shouldn't toys based in the actual violence of history add a little realism? As far as I can tell it's not like these items are aimed at children, as if in today's world one could keep images of violence from kids anyway. I played with these things and I'm a pacifist. But I remain unsettled.

Why in this virtual body count is black and brown "life" so cheap? I suppose it could be argued that an abstract hobby is coming to terms with the real, genocidal costs of the history being reenacted in miniature. For sure to reflect anything like real history you'd need to match up your pile of tin cowboys and redcoats with a mountain of dead tin Indians. But it feels so.... disrespectful.

I mean, can you imagine the outrage at little toy concentration camps with little toy skeletal Jews and miniature gas chambers? "Oh here's my little dead Great Grandmother Esther...look at the fine detail! Doesn't she look real? And see the tiny armband with its precious little star?" It's bad enough that there are indeed little tin Nazis: there is a questionable leap of taste if I've ever seen one. But isn't it damning that there aren't model "clumps" of Holocaust victims to match the molded puddle of imaginary exterminated Africans?

I'm not seeing that same nostalgia here that used to conjure up excitement in what remains of my little boy heart and imagination. It's impossible given the tenor of the times to not wonder if the nostalgia being conjured up by these "toys" isn't nostalgia for a time when white people were happily conquering the world in the name of manifest destiny, Britannia ruling the waves, and that historical favorite of white people, the noble pursuit of civilizing the "savages."

I can't look at these miniatures as toys anymore. I see dead people. Maybe time to put away childish things, eh?

An Invitation to Ethnic Cleansing

2011-12-10T18:06:00.007-05:00

“Remember there was no Palestine as a state. It was part of the Ottoman Empire. And I think that we’ve had an invented Palestinian people, who are in fact Arabs, and were historically part of the Arab community. And they had a chance to go many places.” — Republican presidential candidate, serial adulterer and alleged intellectual Newt Gingrich in an interview with The Jewish Channel.

I wish I could say I was shocked by Gingrich's comments, which have received pretty wide coverage. But I've had many many arguments over the years with supporters of Israel who have said pretty much the same thing. Forget any logical response to this outrage, like does he therefore suggest Bulgaria, Turkey, Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Yemen and Jordan are equally undeserving of statehood since they share a similar historical pedigree as Palestine? Nevermind his glossing over of the fact that whatever he chooses to call them the indigenous inhabitants of the land occupied by Israeli military force are currently violently besieged, suppressed, and deprived of their civil and human rights. Nevermind that not so long ago people of his political ilk were blaming the Jews for the evils of the world not fantasizing about the money they could earn by pantomiming prostration before the agenda of a foreign country's entirely questionable political policy.

What game are these politicians playing? Even George W. Bush, for crissake, paid lip-service to the idea that Palestinians deserved recognition of their personhood. The Republican presidential lineup have every last one of them (except far-right nutjob libertarian Ron Paul) been stumbling over each other to be the greatest supporter of Israeli Apartheid of all the rest. It's hard not to see it as a certain extension of the Republicans' formerly blatant anti-Semitism, this cartoonish courtship of a small country and a small American demographic which they imagine to require such outrageous genuflection. It's made even more odd by the fact that notwithstanding a little bit of rhetoric here or there, the Obama administration has proved itself a loyal lapdog of the rightwing Netanyahu government.

"And they had a chance to go many places." Absolutely chilling. Imagine for a moment he's talking about the Jews of prewar Europe, or the Tutsi of Rwanda. Newt Gingrich is an amoral sociopathic monster.

If you have a strong stomach here's a little reality check. Mustafa Tamimi was 28 years old; he attended a nonviolent protest in the occupied West Bank, protesting land seizures by so-called settlers. He was shot point blank in the face with a (US-made?) tear gas cannister. This is video of the aftermath of that shooting. Mondoweiss recounts, "The impact blew off half of Tamimi's face, and when his friends and family cried out in horror, Israeli soldiers laughed and said, "So?".

Musical Interlude: Smile of the Beyond

2011-12-08T22:52:00.005-05:00

Something like three years ago I waxed rapturously about my favorite "fusion" album of all time, "Apocalypse" by the second incarnation of the Mahavishnu Orchestra of John McLaughlin. When I stumbled across this video and considered posting it here I realized I had said just about all I had to say about that album back then, but I still love this music. This oddly distorted video is from a mid-1970s live performance at Montreux: it's better than the video or sound quality of a number of other youtube versions, and a bit different than the album cut. But it's cool to see the musicians play, and you get to see spacey Gayle Moran actually sing what is, I guess, an actual fusion ballad: at least it starts out that way. The lyric is vintage early 1970s Sri Chinmoy devotee melding of sacred and profane. Sort of a codependent religious hymn, near as I can tell. God, like all lovers, is difficult sometimes.

Fusion didn't age well. This song displays something of the emotional range of fusion, and the tension between controlled virtuosity and ecstatic chaos that marked the best of the music in its early days. Uncontrolled cock-stroking keyboard and guitar wankery eventually took over leaving the sound sterile and uninteresting, at least to me. By the 1980s, fascination with digital technological effects choked the life out of it. Here the mix of funk and art seems alive and promising.

As a bonus here's the album version below, for contrast, which is heavier on the string orchestra at the beginning. I do recommend the whole album.

Gay Rights ARE Human Rights.... But They're Also NOT a Weapon for Imperialism

2011-12-06T22:11:00.006-05:00

President Obama's Secretary of State Hillary Clinton made a speech today at the United Nations Human Rights Council in Geneva, Switzerland, at an event marking the anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. It was the immediate and carefully orchestrated followup to an announcement today by the President himself that the United States would use diplomacy (and foreign aid and the threatened restriction thereof) to promote rights for gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgendered people worldwide. In many ways it is a fairly remarkable speech: "Some have suggested that gay rights and human rights are separate and distinct, but in fact they are one and the same.” It's worth the thirty-minute listen. (Text link here and here).

It's hard to imagine such words being uttered from the podium on a world stage just a few years ago, and it's certainly impossible to imagine such a speech coming from a potential Republican administration in Washington. Indeed Republican presidential candidates like Rick Perry immediately went into a fury, attacking the Obama administration for "promoting the homosexual lifestyle."

While there is something to admire in Mrs. Clinton's measured, almost pedagogical delivery of the reasoned and undeniable message that gay people are entitled to the same human rights and dignity as all people, I am left unsettled by this speech, or perhaps, by what is left unsaid. Of this speech a friend of mine left this note on Facebook: "Re Obama/Clinton LGBT foreign aid restrictions. What if a country has some gay rights but denies some residents fair trails, equal education and basic citizenship and employs racial supremacy, imposes one religious paradigm and runs illegal and immoral wars? Oh wait, that's us."

And further, I'm reminded of nothing so much as President Jimmy Carter's vintage late-1970s "human rights" foreign policy campaign, which used professed defense of human rights as a cover for restoring an aggressive and even militarily interventionist foreign policy in the aftermath of defeat in the war against Vietnam. The clarion call of "human rights" was used to ratchet up support for whatever the government wanted to do internationally from a population still reeling from war fatigue. Which is of course the same place the American population is today after a decade of war in Afghanistan and Iraq. For all Carter's professed commitment to human rights at the time, under his presidency the U.S. failed to renounce the white racist Apartheid regime in South Africa, and continued to play cold-war games in Africa and elsewhere, sacrificing those same human rights on the altar of fighting communism and the Soviet Union.

Because of course there is plenty more of that same hypocrisy floating around. If the Obama administration is claiming a campaign for human rights and dignity, this apparently does not include the rights of Palestinians watching their land and homes being stolen daily, regardless of their sexual or gender identity. It does not include the rights of Arab spring protesters in countries like Bahrain and Yemen where the local repressive government and the the U.S. government are deeply engaged in washing each other's backs. It does not include the human rights of people across the Middle East and Central Asia to be safe from invisible but deadly predator drone attacks and alleged "collateral damage." And it does not include the human rights of the thousands of peaceful Occupy movement protesters who have been violently assaulted in coordinated nationwide paramilitary attacks.

And as a gay person I resent being used as an instrument of renewed American imperialism. Having robbed and exploited them for years, the nations of the "West" owe the poorer nations of the world plenty of restitution by way of foreign aid. But linking this aid to a segment of the population already viewed with suspicion by some segments of society seems shortsighted and dangerous: While I'm certainly angry at the treatment of queer or gay people by many repressive foreign governments, I'm not at all convinced that making gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgendered people into pawns of neocolonialism is doing them any kind of favor. I'm reminded of nothing so much as the Israeli policy of pinkwashing: where gay people have been recruited to whitewash Israeli's apartheid policies against the Palestinians by way of promoting relatively social liberal domestic policies. In the end pinkwashing doesn't help anybody but the repressive Israeli government: it certainly doesn't help Arab gay people in Gaza or the occupied West Bank.

Mrs. Clinton, it should be remembered, supported George Bush's brutal and unprovoked attack on Iraq; and both she and President Obama have sacrificed what most people presume is their actual support of marriage equality for American lesbians and gays in favor of the political/electoral gain of saying they remain opposed to it. History shows us that the morals of these politicians come and go with the weather. Which means of course this speech is in part meant to shore up domestic electoral support from a gay community that has been fairly quick to criticize the President.

It's a hard truth but one can't view this speech without contextualizing it. I wish this was about somebody just standing up in front of the world and saying gay people should have human rights. You can't see it in this clip, but right behind Hillary Clinton is the blood-drenched arsenal of the American war machine, a two hundred year record of violent aggression against the peoples of the world, a world economic system that sucks the world dry of resources for the benefit of American business, and the mailed fist of retaliation.

Gay people in the United States have our improved if mixed bag of legal rights because we came to consciousness and fought for those rights, and there's plenty of work still to be done. We won over the people we needed to win over, and defeated those we needed to defeat. For all those queer people who live in countries where harsh laws and cultural practices remain the norm, while we can extend a helping hand as brothers and sisters, we can't fix the problems for them. That has to be the patient and brave achievement of people in those countries themselves.

Dear American government: my hard-won rights are not a weapon for you to use.

(Thanks to JMG for finding the link to the speech.)

Keep Occupying!

2011-12-05T22:30:00.005-05:00

The #OWS movement is off the front page headlines...for the moment. The Occupy Wall Street encampment in New York City and those across the country have been mostly trashed and uprooted by a coordinated national campaign of violent repression...for the moment. But this is not over. And I'm not just saying that.

The movement is alive, and deepening all the time. There has been a sea change in political consciousness, and that continues filtering out across the roots and branches of society. As The Occupied Wall Street Journal says, "The Beginning Is Near." Protests and direct actions continue in NYC and nationally, building support for the notion of direct democracy. The words "Power to the People" have returned to life.

The movement of consciousness springing to life is not just the same old, same old. It's not just the shop-worn cliches and trite stereotypes and stale abstract ideas: it's the drive for human collective liberation returned to life, tidily encapsulated in the simple notion of the 99%.

One of the blogs I read is The Wild Hunt, a blog about the Neo-Pagan community that helps me to stay in touch with some of the ideas that have informed my own journey. Consider the editorial just published by its mainstay Jason Pitzl-Waters, "Occupying Everything" that concludes: "There have been those who’ve spent a lot of time pointing out that the Occupy movement has feet of clay, or has lost the moral high ground due to one incident or another, but I think such arguments miss the point. This isn’t about the good behavior of every Occupier, its about what needs to happen now. We need a shift in our priorities, we need the dramatic excesses of our current capitalistic system to be reigned in, and we need justice. I think modern Pagans have much to offer the Occupy movement, and that this movement has much to teach us in return. We are, after all, part of the 99% too. I know that there will be Pagans who disagree, who’ve written off the Occupy movement in one fashion or another, but I can no longer sit on the sidelines and pretend to have no opinion. For me, the Occupy movement is the movement I was waiting for during the anti-globalization protests of the 1990s, a true continuation of the work sparked by social justice pioneers like Dorothy Day, Gandhi, King, and Jane Addams. Now is the time for Pagans of a like mind to envision what our social justice looks like, to craft a theological and historical framework for a future where we have a voice, because that future is happening now. I guess what I’m saying is that we need to Occupy Paganism, and in turn, Occupy everything."

Pitzl-Waters understands, in a profoundly spiritual way, how the Occupy movement has resonated across society with a call for a world in which together we take back what is ours and then collectively share out of love, mutual respect, and responsibility.

I was at a meeting of Occupy Sunset Park, the organization that has sprung to life in my own Brooklyn neighborhood. A fellow emerging activist was saying how she felt the movement was reclaiming the notion of what is public, where parks and institutions are places that welcome and serve the communities in which they are located rather than act as fenced-off monuments to somebody's money.

I attended a terrific forum by the group Kasama which counts among its adherents one of the members of the Occupied Wall Street Journal editorial collective. Kasama is a profoundly radical communist organization but one that has approached the Occupy movement with creativity and respect. While I'm not sure they would use the word, I think they understand what a spiritual revolution OWS is engendering in peoples' consciousness. One Kasama leader described exactly how I feel: that for decades those of us who early in life awakened to consciousness as people yearning for social justice and human liberation — as revolutionaries — felt defeated; that the best we could hope for were lesser evils and retreating into living politically moral but isolated lives. And how the Occupy movement has changed everything, giving us back the hope and energy of what is possible.

We've experienced devastating one-sided class warfare for decades now, and finally the battle has been joined. People are opening their eyes and seeing. It's different now, from here on out.

For sure this has been recognized by the other side. The 1% understands what a threat looks like. The violent repression, the media manipulation, the attempts to subvert the movement, these have shocked people into paying attention to what's happening. But don't be fooled by the lack of headlines now. As the movement roots down into communities like mine we know there are plenty of obstacles in our path. But we also know what we can do, together.

#Occupy together; Spring is coming! Power to the people!

Photographs by me from the #OWS rally in New York City's Foley Square a couple days after the Zuccotti Park eviction

"Shut Up, You Don't Get A Lawyer"

2011-12-02T20:49:00.004-05:00

"To those American citizens thinking about helping al-Qaida, please know what will come your way: death, detention, prosecution. If you are thinking about plotting with the enemy inside our country to do the rest of us harm, please understand what is coming your way: the full force of the law. The law I am talking about is the law of armed conflict. You subject yourself to being held as an enemy of the people of the United States, interrogated about what you know and why you did what you did or planned to do, and you subject yourself to imprisonment and death. The reason you subject yourself to that regime is because your decision to turn on the rest of us and help a group of people who would destroy our way of life is not something we idly accept. It is not a common, everyday crime. It is a decision by you to commit an act of aggression against the rest of us....It is not unfair to make an American citizen account for the fact that they decided to help al-Qaida to kill us all and hold them as long as it takes to find intelligence about what may be coming next. And when they say 'I want my lawyer,' you tell them 'Shut up. You don't get a lawyer....You are an enemy combatant, and we are going to talk to you about why you joined al-Qaida.'"
— Republican Senator Lindsey Graham on the floor of Congress, Wed. Nov. 30

"If we can't hold an American citizen who has chosen to be a member of al-Qaida and has participated in a belligerent act against our country to ask them what other attacks they are planning and whom they are working with, how are we going to get information to make sure that--God forbid--we can prevent another 9/11 on our soil, because that is why they want to come to the United States of America. Also, how do we deal with this issue of homegrown radicals?"
— Republican Senator Kelly Ayotte in the same debate

The occasion was a debate over whether to resolve ambiguous language resulting from the heinous post-9/11 emergency laws like the Patriot Act that suggests American citizens or people inside the United States might be subject to the same extra-legal military repression now allowed by these new laws. These new laws mean that thousands of people are held in secret and no-so-secret jails outside the United States indefinitely awaiting "miltary justice," whatever that is. The Republicans want these laws to apply to American citizens as well; some Democrats are mounting not an opposition to these repressive laws but only to the notion that they should apply to U.S. citizens. According to the NY Times, the vote after this horrifying discussion was inconclusive, and the legal ambiguity stays for now, perhaps subject to future high-court resolution.

But ponder what this means. For all these politicians' talk about people choosing to join Al Qaeda and thus declaring war against the U.S. and therefore being considered combatants awaiting the end of a conflict, what they are now making perfectly clear is that they want the right to accuse anyone they want of high crimes — including American citizens — and not have to prove a thing. That means if Lindsey Graham says you or I is a terrorist, we go to jail. For as long as he wants. And you and I do not have a single solitary right to protest or defend ourselves. No evidence necessary. No right of appeal. No nothing. No rights at all. And these Senators are literally and clearly advocating that.

There is a name for the kind of society that acts like that. This is not about preventing another 911, this is about repression and stifling political dissent. A friend of mine on Facebook posted a song about the Mothers of the "Disappeared" in Argentina's dirty war of right-wing repression and asks, now, of the U.S.: "How long until our friends and neighbors begin disappearing? Will anyone write a song for their mothers?" That is what the Lindsey Grahams and Kelly Ayottes of the U.S. government are asking for: the right to disappear anyone who disagrees with them.

You owe it to yourself to hear Senator Graham say "Shut Up You Don't Get a Lawyer" in his own shrill, venomous voice. You can here a snippet of his time on the Senate floor in this report at NPR's Morning Edition. Click here.

Boom! U.S. Fails In Attempt To Legitimize Child-Murdering Weapons

2011-11-30T22:28:00.005-05:00

Anybody who has read anything about war in the last fifty years knows something about cluster bombs. They're large bombs containing hundreds of smaller bomblets: the large bomb is dropped and spreads its payload over a wide area, expanding the death-dealing capacity of airborne munitions. The bomblets can kill hundreds of human beings in a wider area than a single powerful explosive. Plus, the bomblets either don't always or are designed not to go off upon impact, but lie around waiting to explode and kill some unfortunate who stumbles upon them or picks them up. As you can imagine, said unfortunates are often children who live in an area and come out to play after a battle has moved on. Some countries have been accused of designing the bomblets in bright and shiny ways meant to actually attract children to them. The Soviet Union was heavily condemned for using them in Afghanistan as was Israel for using them in Lebanon. Cluster bombs are the deadly child-murdering gift that keeps on giving.

And so I read an article on the BBC that seemed confusing at first until I really read it. Then it becomes outrageous. It was titled "UN rejects US-backed cluster bombs regulation bid", and at first glance you would think it's the story of the nasty United Nations failing to endorse a brave American attempt to limit the use of cluster bombs: "UN member states have rejected a US-backed plan to introduce new regulations on cluster bombs - munitions which break up into hundreds of smaller bomblets. The plan would have eliminated all cluster munitions made before 1980. ... The US said that it was "deeply disappointed" by the decision..." But if that's what you thought was happening you would be wrong, dead wrong.

Because it turns out this American resolution is an age-old sleight of hand trick: by feigning moral outrage over older cluster bombs, it legitimizes the modern production of these fiendish weapons. The resolution was meant not to eliminate cluster bombs, but to undercut the Oslo Convention, signed by 111 nations, that actually prohibits the production, distribution and use of cluster bombs. Guess what countries have not signed the Oslo Convention? Here's a few: China. Russia. Belarus. Israel.... and the United States of America.

Yes, read on: "'The protocol would have led to the immediate prohibition of many millions of cluster munitions [and] placed the remaining cluster munitions under a detailed set of restrictions and regulations,' the US embassy in Geneva said in a statement.... A senior US official said the bombs were a military necessity for when targets were spread over wide areas, and that using alternative armaments would cause more collateral damage and prolong conflicts."

The world has seen through this transparent hypocrisy. The article continues: "though the proposal would have eliminated millions of ageing cluster munitions, even military allies of the US, like Britain, chose not to support it. Many UN member states felt, she says, that getting rid of some cluster weapons while officially sanctioning others would set a dangerous precedent, and might even legitimise their use in the long-term. The US move was also opposed by the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) and the top UN officials for human rights, emergency relief and development."

Thank you Ambassador Susan Rice via Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama for your strong moral stand in favor of murdering innocent children. Oh yes, did I forget to mention? The U.S. is the largest manufacturer of cluster bombs in the world.

In not unrelated news, Egyptian dock workers are protesting the shipment of tear gas shipments being unloaded in the port of Suez. The tear gas is destined for the military government's repression of demonstrations of Tahrir Square. Oh yes, where is this tear gas coming from? That would be its point of manufacture at Combined Systems Inc. in Jamestown, Pennsylvania, U.S.A. Among CSI's other leading clients are the Israeli Defense Forces.

Notice any patterns?

Those with strong stomachs may click here for a google search which shows the diversity of cluster bombs and the cold reality of what children look like after they have been murdered or maimed by them.

Ken Russell Made Me Gay

2011-11-28T13:44:00.005-05:00

Well, that's not really true. But exposure to the famous nude wrestling scene from Ken Russell's 1969 film "Women In Love" in my later teens certainly provided my developing prurient mind with much fodder for the imagination, and planted all sorts of romantic and not-so-romantic notions in my young head. This scene featuring Alan Bates and Oliver Reed is one of the most sensuously homoerotic of all-time classic cinema. Neither actor was gay, of course, and Oliver Reed seems to have been anything but a gay icon in his personal life. But the screenwriter of "Women in Love" was none other than decades-later legendary gay activist Larry Kramer, who undoubtedly crafted the slow burn of this scene with his own aesthetic bent in bringing D.H. Lawrence's novel to life. Speaking as anything but a film connoisseur, the whole film is sort of a textbook late 1960s art film: moody and striking and not really the kind of thing you want to watch for light viewing. This one scene, not exactly pornographic but not exactly in the safe for work category either, certainly pushed the edge. Even when I first saw it I appreciated how it derives its homoeroticism from two burly manly men rather than from angular elven blondes like Michael York, whom it seems was featured in every art film of that era with a male character of ambiguous sexuality, and yet who did nothing for my own developing gay identity.

Director Ken Russell has just passed on at the age of 84. On behalf of once-young gay men everywhere who grew up in a time without openly gay role models and without gay reality TV basic cable, let me say "thank you thank you thank you" for these immortal four minutes of cinema. Rest in peace.

What Is Race?

2011-11-25T21:11:00.004-05:00

Having had my umpteenth argument on another blog about how Islamophobia is a form of racism, I ran across this clip on the "We Are Respectable Negroes" blog. It's an excerpt from a talk last year by Dr. Charles W. Mills of Northwestern University at the University of King's College.

This fairly short clip is incredibly rich with ideas. I post it here because it addresses how race itself is a social construct and not a biological reality. The identities of race are determined by the lens of cultural dominance: Professor Mills gives an example of how his own mixed national heritage would be determined completely differently depending on who gets to make the rules. This is so key: when I say Islamophobia is racism, those who say "Islam is not a race" are erasing the systems that inform social dominance and prejudice. This becomes easy to see when one considers Hitler-era Germany, where racist laws and racial prejudice were applied by one group of white people sharing overwhelmingly identical genetic makeup with the white victims of their repression. Although religion was the window dressing, be sure that the holocaust was not the product of German Christian theological difference with Rabbinical interpretation of the Old Testament. Anti-Semitism is a clear example of how divorced racism is from actual human biology.

Professor Mills concludes with the idea of racism in society being a product of cultural racial dominance not just the race of individuals, another key concept in the age of our first black American president.

A Lump for Your Gravy

2011-11-24T11:20:00.003-05:00

I've referenced this piece before, but it's been reposted on Kasama by its author Mike Ely with an intro that puts it in context of today's #OWS Occupy movement. "Original Occupation: Native Blood & the Myth of Thanksgiving:"

"We are talking widely among ourselves about “occupying” Wall Street — taking the center of an empire back for the people of the world. We are talking about “Occupy Everything” — sharing our dreams of taking all society away from banks, police, and the heartless authority of money. We hope this moment marks a beginning of the end for them.

And yet, just such a moment cannot be understood without remembering that other occupation — the one that marked the beginning of their beginning.

Arrogant invaders occupied a land using the most naked forms of genocide. They invented new forms of slavery, slave trade and profit making. They arrived with their high-tech arms and bibles. They declared all was theirs by divine right, while they took it all with raw force....

Here is the true story of that Thanksgiving — a story of murder and theft, of the first “corporations” invented on North American soil, of religious fundamentalism and relentless mania for money. It is a story of the birth of capitalism.

This piece is intended to be shared at this holiday time.

Pass it on. Serve a little truth with the usual stuffing."

Read the whole article or download it as a podcast. There's nothing wrong with being together with your loved ones enjoying a break from work. But it's important to remember. Context is everything. Peace to you and yours.

"Pinkwashing" Called Out in the NY Times

2011-11-23T23:21:00.006-05:00

It's not the kind of thing you usually see in The New York Times. While the Times has a "liberal" reputation, its position on Israel is quite fundamentally compromised (see the Angry Arab for near daily demolitions of the Times's anti-Palestinian racism). But there it is, an Op-Ed piece entitled "Israel and 'Pinkwashing.'" I'm proud to say that the author of this piece, Sarah Schulman, is a friend of mine, somebody I actually went to college with many years ago. She's been active as a writer, academic, and lesbian activist for three decades, and getting this piece in the Times is a real achievement not only for defenders of Palestinians but for lesbian and gay activists in general.

Schulman skillfully ties the Israeli attempt to make gays complicit with the repressive policies of the State of Israel to the European-American Islamophobic movement that is racist to the core:

"These depictions of immigrants — usually Muslims of Arab, South Asian, Turkish or African origin — as “homophobic fanatics” opportunistically ignore the existence of Muslim gays and their allies within their communities. They also render invisible the role that fundamentalist Christians, the Roman Catholic Church and Orthodox Jews play in perpetuating fear and even hatred of gays. And that cynical message has now spread from its roots in European xenophobia to become a potent tool in the long-running Israeli-Palestinian conflict." Read the whole piece. Congrats, Sarah.

---

In related news, New York City Queers Against Israeli Apartheid (NYC QAIA) continues to be excluded from using the meeting rooms at New York City's LGBT Community Center. It's been conducting its business for months now at sit-ins in the Center's lobby. Veteran gay activist Steve Ault, both a member of QAIA and a founder of the LGBT Center, tried to meet with Center Board Members but was rudely disinvited from any board discussion. NYC QAIA has now issued an excellent identity statement:

New York City Queers Against Israeli Apartheid (NYC-
QAIA) is a group of queer activists who support Palestinians’
right to self-determination, and challenge Israel’s occupation
of the West Bank and East Jerusalem as well as the military
blockade of Gaza. We endorse Palestinian civil society’s call
for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) against Israel,
and the call by Palestinian queer groups to end the
occupation as a critical step for securing Palestinian human
rights as well as furthering the movement for Palestinian
queer rights.*

NYC-QAIA also calls for an immediate end to Israel’s siege of
Gaza and the collective punishment of its people, which are
clear and widely recognized violations of international law.
NYC-QAIA opposes the continued construction of illegal
settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem and the
demolition of Palestinian homes. NYC-QAIA calls for the
release of all political prisoners in Israeli jails. Lastly, given
that Israel’s brutal treatment of Palestinians depends so
heavily upon our own government’s support, NYC-QAIA
demands an end to U.S. military and financial aid to Israel.

PALESTINE IS A QUEER ISSUE.

As queers, NYC-QAIA recognizes the myriad ways in which
various forms of oppression — including colonialism, racism,
homophobia and transgenderphobia — are deeply entwined.
As queers, we refuse to accept state violence against
ourselves or others. As gay rights gain support in the US and
Israel, the Israeli government and its defenders have
increasingly co-opted the rhetoric of gay rights to veil Israel’s
racist, colonialist state violence—and this pinkwashing we
also adamantly refuse to accept.

To those who claim Israel is a haven for queers, NYC-QAIA
replies: queer rights in Israel have not been granted by a
benevolent government—they were demanded, fought for,
and to some extent, won. Because Apartheid Israel applies
different rules and laws to Jews, non-Jews and particularly
Palestinians, those minimal rights do not universally apply to
queer Palestinians, nor to queer Israelis of any ethnic group
who build families with Palestinians, nor to queers who
support BDS and oppose Israel’s crimes against Palestinians,
nor to many others. The presence or absence of the same
minimal rights in Palestine is not comparable; apartheid and
occupation strip Palestinian queers of the basic human rights
that have permitted queers in Israel to make their small
gains. Apartheid is the issue.

NYC-QAIA does not speak on behalf of Palestinians — we
stand in solidarity with Palestinians in their struggle. NYC-
QAIA does not support any formal political entity and we do
not all necessarily stand behind a one- or two-state solution.
We reject outright all systems of domination and hate,
including Islamophobia and anti-Semitism. Despite what our
detractors claim, we are not self-hating queers. And the
many Jewish members of NYC-QAIA are not self-loathing
Jews but rather Jews who refuse to support an apartheid
state.

NYC QAIA meets at the LGBT Community Center. We're currently forced to hold our meetings as sit-ins in the lobby: at the behest of anti-Arab and anti-Muslim hatemongers, the Center refuses to rent meeting space to anti-apartheid queers. But the Center is wrong to deny safe space to Arab queers, Muslim queers & other queers it deems “controversial.” And the Center is wrong to censor queer political organizing. So NYC QAIA is holding the space. Occupy!

*The BDS document and its original signers are posted at
www.bdsmovement.net. For more information, see the websites
of Palestinian Queers for BDS, Aswat, and al-Qaws.

NYC QAIA sits-in at the Center alternate Tuesdays, next meeting December 6. They're working on getting a blog up, I will update here when that blog is made public.

For past Cahokian articles on Pinkwashing, click here. I also recommend another activist friend's article "Scott Piro, Queer Support for Israel & the Pinkwashing Scam" by Pauline Park, at her blog on gender rights.

UPDATE: Check out Sarah's "Documentary Guide to Pinkwashing" on PrettyQueer.com. Essential!

Occupy My Life?

2011-11-21T23:24:00.005-05:00

I can't believe how busy I've been...after years of a sense of political hopelessness and activist dormancy I'm finding the #Occupy Wall Street movement is radicalizing...me. Not only is there an amazing succession of city-wide protests and events to go to, there's an Occupy Brooklyn, and shock of shocks, an "Occupy Sunset Park," named not for an encampment in my local spot of green but for the patchwork multicultural neighborhood I live in. So of course I've gotten involved. I have to keep this short because having just attended an awesome forum on the movement in Manhattan I've got to lay out two different Chinese versions of the above flyer before I call it a night....and then get up a little early for a busy work day. It's refreshing to be feeling like I'm part of something, participating in a wave of political awakening unlike anything I can remember. It feels...great!

Update: Here's one of the two Chinese language flyers we produced. This one is in the modern simplified characters developed in the PRC. The other is in the more old-fashioned traditional characters. Sunset Park is home to one of the three large "Chinatowns" in New York City.

"We Aren't Talking to Them"

2011-11-19T16:26:00.005-05:00

The following is the Editorial, "We Are Free People" from the just-printed issue #4 of the Occupied Wall Street Journal:

"Democracy is not simply speaking truth to power, to ask, politely or not, for reforms great and small. Sometimes you have to do it yourself.

The 1% is just beginning to understand that the reason Occupy Wall Street makes no demands is because we aren't talking to them. The 99% are speaking and listening to each other. 4,167 people have been arrested since the occupation began; millions more are reimagining the world we want to live in.

Police forces have been deployed by Republican and Democratic politicians alike to break a movement that was first ignored and then mocked in what passes for news. It's not just America. This is a living democratic movement that is global in scale and growing in real time. That this beautiful thing is met with state violence says everything we need to know about the perpetrators. It also means we're on to something. Their attacks are based on an understanding of power that's dying, if not already dead.

Mubarak is Berlusconi is Bloomberg is Quan is Walker is pepper spray is broken politics bound to the past and we make no demands of them because free people constitute governments, not the other way around.

We don't know how this is going to end, but the beginning is near."

(Photo is a sign at this week's 30,000+ rally at New York's Foley Square: "Not a different slice, we want a different pie!" After his cops tried their best to harass and repress the rally and march afterwards, Mayor Bloomberg said, "That's not even Occupy Wall Street...those were trade unionists." How very little he understands.)

"We Are Free People"

2011-11-17T23:30:00.002-05:00

"We Are Free People - Occupy Wall Street Now"

What an exhilarating day. I was stuck at work til late afternoon when I made it to the 30,000+ strong #OWS rally down at Foley Square. Amazing energy. Much to report later. Much to think about the foiling of the coordinated national attempt to crush the movement on Tuesday. For now the beautiful poster above says it all.

Serving and Protecting

2011-11-16T23:18:00.002-05:00

the raid on zuccotti park from Casey Neistat on Vimeo.

Watch this until the end; Footage from yesterday. This should change your associations with Frank Sinatra forever.

And pretty sure the guy getting pepper spray washed out of his eyes was in a photograph published a couple weeks ago here.

They are clearly serving and protecting somebody besides you and me.

It Ain't Over

2011-11-15T07:16:00.006-05:00

Mayor Bloomberg's shock troops have smashed the #OWS encampment at Zuccotti Park. the peaceful, nonviolent encampment was violently attacked by riot police doing the state's bidding. The media was kept away in an attempt to let the goons brutalize the Occupy Wall Street protesters without public scrutiny. According to an activist quoted on radio, the police came in with knives, shredding the tents and sleeping bags and tarps of the encampment and turning the protesters' belongings into so much garbage.

RT points out that the encampment was shut down in advance of the planned November 17 day of action.

Bloomberg and his friends in the 1% are fooling themselves if they think this means Occupy Wall Street is going away. They have revealed to the world their true face, and it's not pretty. This thing isn't going away. Even my neighborhood in Brooklyn now has an Occupy movement. We can Occupy Together!

Update: Check out this post of overheard quotes at the police raid on Gawker: "Just overheard cops talking about the losers and faggots of the Occupy movement in Zuccotti. nice. #OWS"

#OWS is meeting this morning to determine how to respond.

"We'll Occupy the Offices of YOU!"

2011-11-14T22:25:00.002-05:00

Two musical posts in a row: the above is the extraordinary song "We Are The Many" by Hawaiian singer/songwriter/slack key guitar master Makana. It's a beautiful and relevant song about the #OWS message and movement. The slideshow interspersed with Makana's song is brilliant, and as harsh to a certain party currently in the White House as that other one.

"So take heed of our notice to redress
We have little to lose we must confess
Your empty words do leave us unimpressed
The growing number join us in protest
We occupy the streets
We occupy the courts
We occupy the offices of you
Til you do
The bidding of the many not the few."

What a beautiful song, redolent of Dylan, protest folk music, even Latin American Nueva Trova. Crazily, Makana, was able to perform his song at the APEC economic summit in Hawaii in front of President Obama, who apparently didn't take note of the lyric. Not that it would have mattered if he did.

The words on Makana's website read, There is love. All else is propaganda." Occupy Together!

Anti-War Anthems: Gimme Shelter

2011-11-13T18:15:00.004-05:00

Here's one of my favorite Rolling Stone covers, from the forgotten funk-soul group Maxayn, fronted by Maxayn Lewis. It's "Gimme Shelter," from 1972. The Stones original is terrific, as is the version expanded by original backup singer Merry Clayton, and the more recent Patti Smith cover.

How close is danger.

"Oh, a storm is threat'ning
My very life today
If I don't get some shelter
Oh yeah, I'm gonna fade away

War, children, it's just a shot away
It's just a shot away
War, children, it's just a shot away
It's just a shot away

Ooh, see the fire is sweepin'
Our very street today
Burns like a red coal carpet
Mad bull lost its way

War, children, it's just a shot away
It's just a shot away
War, children, it's just a shot away
It's just a shot away

Rape, murder!
It's just a shot away
It's just a shot away

The floods is threat'ning
My very life today
Gimme, gimme shelter
Or I'm gonna fade away

War, children, it's just a shot away
It's just a shot away

I tell you love, sister, it's just a kiss away
It's just a kiss away
It's just a kiss away"

Previous Anti-War Anthems here on The Cahokian.

"The vilest thing in the world"

2011-11-10T21:46:00.005-05:00

It's been taking me quite a while, but I've finally been reading Leo Tolstoy's epic novel "War and Peace." It turns out that as thick and forbidding a volume as it is, it's witty, funny, moving, brilliant, worthy of its century-and-a-half of praise. I'm constantly surprised at how biting and passionate a polemicist Tolstoy turns out to be. The setting might be Russia during the Napoleonic wars, but his subject is the human condition.

I'm currently reading about the massive 1812 battle of Borodino at the gates of Moscow. On the eve of the battle the world-weary aristocrat Prince Andrei gives an absolutely bitter rant about war. It's worth calling out:

"If there was none of this magnanimity in war, we'd go to it only when it was worth going to certain death, as now.... War isn't courtesy, it's the vilest thing in the world, and we must understand that and not play at war. We must take this terrible necessity sternly and seriously. That's the whole point: to cast off the lie, and if it's war it's war, and not a game. As it is, war is the favorite pastime of idle and light-minded people. The military estate is the most honored. But what is war, what is needed for success in military affairs, and what are the morals of military society? The aim of war is killing, the instruments of war are espionage, treason and the encouragement of it, the ruin of the inhabitants, robbing them or stealing to supply the army; deception and lying are called military stratagems; the morals of the military estate are the absence of freedom, that is, discipline, idleness, ignorance, cruelty, depravity, and drunkenness. And in spite of that, it is the highest estate, respected by all. All kings except the Chinese wear military uniforms, and the one who has killed the most people gets the greatest reward. They come together, like tomorrow, to kill each other, they slaughter and maim tens of thousands of men, and then they say prayers of thanksgiving for having slaughtered so many people (inflating the numbers), and proclaim victory, supposing that the more people slaughtered, the greater the merit. How does God look down and listen to them!" (Volume 3, Book 2, Chapter 25)

How impossibly sad and relevant and insightful.

The illustration is 'No More War' from the German artist Käthe Kollwitz, ca. 1924.

Sabre-rattling on Iran Starting Up Again

2011-11-09T22:52:00.002-05:00

The details are as sordid and questionable as they always are, but once again the news is filled with politicians, media outlets and various government propagandists advocating for an attack on Iran.

It's all very simple: Iran is virtually encircled by the American military. The nuclear arsenals of two nations, both proven aggressors, are pointing straight at Teheran. Israel is trying very hard to dominate a losing conversation about the Middle East. War is a guaranteed distraction, and the sabre-rattling should be recognized for being something quite different than actual concern about weapons of mass destruction. The U.S. and Israel are freaked out because they don't want to lose their bullying leverage over countries with less sophisticated arsenals than they have.

It doesn't matter how repressive or allegedly undemocratic the Iranian government is, it has the right to defend its country against attack.

If there is a nuclear proliferation problem in the Middle East, the problem starts in Israel and ends in the U.S.A.

NO ATTACK ON IRAN!

Mojuba Olodumare, Mojuba Obatala

2011-11-08T22:27:00.005-05:00

Hard to believe that it was fifteen years ago that I began the week-long ceremony that marked my initiation into the religion of Santeria as a priest of Obatala. I was crowned fifteen years ago tomorrow in the Bronx: it was a moment I will never forget, frozen in time. Even those elders who were there in that moment who have since passed on (ibaye) remain sharp in my memory.

As things worked out the Santeria community wasn't to be a great fit for me as a home, but I still have this sense of cosmic gears turning in that moment that blessed me, that changed me, that altered the trajectory and path of my life, and mostly in ways I had no way of anticipating. I gave up a lot: some good, some bad, some things I miss, some things I don't, but as I felt the spiritual mantle I had assumed deepen and internalize I have felt greater inner peace and balance I wouldn't trade for anything. Maybe it's the mellowing of age, or maybe the mysterious gravity of Obatala Himself, but I've found so many of the desperate empty places in my earlier life filled with centered calmness. While I can surely report both good and bad life experiences in the past 15 years, joy and happiness mixed with pain and loss in random succession — such is anyone's life — I feel grateful for a moment of cosmic communion that had so much profound and lasting effect. Even as I find myself less and less a participant in my religion, I can still connect my spiritual being with a sort of dizzying inner bridge to the sacred. I wouldn't have predicted what I would be doing fifteen years later: I know I wouldn't have come even close to a good guess. But I knew I wouldn't be filled with regret and that was about as prescient as one could be.

And I am eternally grateful to my spiritual path for the sharpening and deepening of my creativity as I strive for clarity of expression. This blog, even when I'm writing about subjects seemingly far removed from an obscure religion carried to this continent in the infernal bellies of slave ships, is I hope witness and testament to the power of eternal spiritual truths manifesting themselves in the physical world. To my less spiritually-inclined friends and readers, I don't mean that as magic or superstition or supposed favor from invisible beings, but as a hearty endorsement of connecting with the life force that animates us, a little suspension of disbelief, and a reminder that patterns and symbolism tap the human psyche with good reason.

Anyway I'll conclude with what is an apt lesson for many of life's transformations, courtesy of those high priests of quite a different religion, The Rolling Stones. Because indeed you can't always get what you want but you do get just what you need.

Red October, 1917-2011

2011-11-07T21:58:00.004-05:00

Today is the 94th anniversary of the Russian October Revolution of 1917. If only the calendar modernization which put Red October a week into November was the last ignominy history would inflict on what was actually an amazing, transformative event. Now, twenty years after the Soviet Union birthed by that revolution bit the dust under its own corrupt, repressive weight, it might seem even less relevant to today's world. But the Russian Revolution, however wide the waters passing under the bridge of the last century, is still the story of a bunch of brave regular people bringing down one of the world's major corrupt empires under the banner of social justice, egalitarianism, human liberation, and people working together to determine our own future.

There's plenty of hairs that can be split over what happened next: I'm not even gonna try to condense the story of Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin and their heirs into a neat little summary. Like all human achievement, there's plenty of good and plenty of bad in that story. But to dismiss it all as a mistake, or merely the opening of some kind of totalitarian pandora's box, is to miss out on some really important stuff. The bathwater might be low and lukewarm, but there's still a baby in there worth saving. One day we'll make good on that momentous occasion's promise.

Tony Soprano for President?

2011-11-06T20:45:00.002-05:00

Chances are, if we have friends who consistently lie to us, we tend to wall off that relationship, finding minimal space for remnants of friendship that won't lead to danger or disappointment. A friend who steals things from us is soon to be disinvited from visiting, and one who openly commits violence against others is soon apt to be held at arm's distance lest their gaze and physicality be turned to us. We like to surround ourselves with people who make us laugh, who share the bounties of open hearts or engaged minds. We respect people who make achievement seem easy, and are glad for useful advice that is the fruit of sagely earned or learned wisdom and experience.

Isn't it amazing that so many people cast aside these logical behaviors when deciding whom to listen to in the public square? How we tell ourselves that it's okay to put time-honored strategies for self-preservation out of our heads? That we must submit to betraying our every instinct to choose not what we want but what we dislike less? And truthfully this is only half the story. For a great many people, a political system based on poisonous exploitation and oppression transforms the values that we would recognize as normal, empathetic and humane into a corrupt sociopathology dominated by heartlessness, selfishness, bigotry, anti-intellectualism, and rationalization.

Last year at the White House correspondents' Association dinner, President Obama joked about teen idols the Jonas Brothers: "Sasha and Malia are huge fans but, boys, don't be getting any ideas. I have two words for you: predator drones." A friend pointed me to this cartoon from vastleft.com:

This refers to a story mentioned on the OpEd Page of the NY Times about a community meeting in Pakistan: "During the meal, I met a boy named Tariq Aziz. He was 16. As we ate, the stern, bearded faces all around me slowly melted into smiles. Tariq smiled much sooner; he was too young to boast much facial hair, and too young to have learned to hate.... When it was my turn to speak, I mentioned the official American position: that these were precision strikes and no innocent civilian had been killed in 15 months. My comment was met with snorts of derision. ...At the end of the day, Tariq stepped forward. He volunteered to gather proof if it would help to protect his family from future harm. ... [But on] Monday, he was killed by a C.I.A. drone strike, along with his 12-year-old cousin, Waheed Khan. The two of them had been dispatched, with Tariq driving, to pick up their aunt and bring her home to the village of Norak, when their short lives were ended by a Hellfire missile."

Obama's joke isn't so funny now, is it? I voted for him: I advocated voting for him, and I thought I was keeping my eyes open. And sadly, there was never any chance that the 2008 election would lead to a less horrible moral conundrum than the one it lead to. It is probable that the election of John McCain and Sarah Palin would have been even worse. Not that it mattered so much to Tariq.

Consider Herman Cain, the right-wing Republican businessman with the unlikely honor of being somewhere near the top of the heap of the Republican presidential primary. It's been revealed that he was repeatedly accused of sexual harassment, that is, of being a sexual predator using his power as a rich businessman to make life uncomfortable for women working under him. While all the facts of this story have not yet been aired, the evidence strongly suggests not the story of a philandering politician consensually consorting with someone randomly extracurricular to the embarrassment of his spouse, but a man engaged in non-consensual harassment of his employees. Cheating on your spouse is not against the law. But sexual harassment is. And yet a portion of the Republican electorate is not shunning Cain like normal people would do, but actually rallying around him.

Or there's the Republican governor of Texas, Rick Perry, also running in the primary. A couple months ago he accused his fellow candidates of being heartless for his policy of offering some social benefits to the children of undocumented immigrants. "If you say that we should not educate children who have come into our state for no other reason than they've been brought there by no fault of their own, I don't think you have a heart." This small modicum of human decency was too much for the Republican electorate, and Perry was forced to apologize. "I was probably a bit over-passionate by using that word and it was inappropriate."

There's pseudo-intellectual Newt Gingrich who, as we've discussed before, has twice ditched ailing wives for healthier mistresses and told outrageous racist lies about Obama. There's Michele Bachmann who has told nothing but fantastic lies in her entire political career and makes government money off the discredited fake-therapy of trying to convert unhappy gay men to heterosexuality. There's Rick Santorum and his unhealthy obsession that the small percentage of gay people in society are at the cause of everything "wrong" with it. And there's poor pathetic Mitt Romney who Republicans are desperate to avoid voting for because even they can see his utter moral emptiness and total vacuity of principle.

These are people I would not invite across the threshold of my front door. Why are we in the position of thinking our only choice is to vote for one of them? Even the ones we convince ourselves are the "good guys" are narcissistic sociopaths. Earlier this year I wrote a defense of lesser-evil voting. I wrestle with this constantly. At this moment I still imagine myself voting for Obama again next year...if only because I fear how much more damage the Republicans could do to civil rights laws. This, knowing that his second term is as likely to be as full of betrayals and disappointments, and of lost children named Tariq, as his first was. Knowing it was a mistake to trust him to be different than his predecessors at the helm of the American state.

But it's why I feel such hope in #OWS: finally here is a flicker that it doesn't have to be that way. Politics isn't all about elections, and elections don't always have to be the way they are today. What if people stopped being willing to vote for sociopaths? Or for would-be child murderers or aspiring rapists? Or valued smart people instead of bigoted morons and village idiots? Or together organized and took for ourselves what is rightfully, morally, our own. The elections — the choice between evil and more evil — become less important, when we create alternatives, when we're actively engaged in changing the fundamental problems and social relations not just hoping they'll get better in time.

Because we really are all in this together. We don't have to pretend Democrats or Republicans represent us, because they obviously don't. We can find our own voice.

We know how a fairytale marriage to Kim Kardashian ends. We know what happens when you place your trust in Tony Soprano. So how come here, back in the real world, we don't know how to change the channel?

Graphic Democracy

2011-11-05T15:44:00.002-04:00

Found on facebook. I love how much these graphics that spread like wildfire around teh internets communicate. Above, a suitably totalitarian "Message from the Ministry of Homeland Security." Below, "The Tea Party vs. #occupywallstreet."

And below, new meaning to the phrase "trickle-down theory." From Unrepentant Marxist.

Déjà Vu or, Better Late than Never

2011-11-03T22:56:00.008-04:00

"[C]ivilized society is split into antagonistic, and, moreover, irreconcilably antagonistic classes. ...

In a democratic republic, Engels continues,"wealth exercises its power indirectly, but all the more surely", first, by means of the “direct corruption of officials” (America); secondly, by means of an “alliance of the government and the Stock Exchange" (France and America). At present, imperialism and the domination of the banks have “developed” into an exceptional art both these methods of upholding and giving effect to the omnipotence of wealth in democratic republics of all descriptions. ...

The exploiting classes need political rule to maintain exploitation, i.e., in the selfish interests of an insignificant minority against the vast majority of all people. The exploited classes need political rule in order to completely abolish all exploitation, i.e., in the interests of the vast majority of the people, and against the insignificant minority consisting of the modern slave-owners — the landowners and capitalists."

—V.I. Lenin, 1917, "The State and Revolution"

Today: Liberate Oakland!

2011-11-02T09:00:00.003-04:00

Occupy Oakland, part of the Occupy Together/Occupy Wall Street/#OWS movement, in the aftermath of last week's outrageous repression, has taken the unprecedented step of organizing a General Strike for today in Oakland. I can't predict at this distance what will happen, but I've seen reports that labor activists — that means working people like you and me — are taking this very seriously and that a number of one-day wildcat protest strikes are likely. So much for a bunch of privileged spoiled hippies, eh?

See the inspired collection of organizing materials at Occupy Oakland's website. If I worked in Oakland I know I sure wouldn't be heading in to the office. If successful, and I define that as having a noticeable effect on the city and the news, this could be one of the most significant actions of the Occupy Together movement so far, and in fact one of the most significant actions of mass protest in years.

Some official chants for the strike action:
“Strike, Occupy, Shut it Down! Oakland is the People’s Town”
“Every Hour, Every Day! The occupation is here to stay!”
“Occupy Everything! Liberate Oakland”
“Politicians & Bankers, Liars & Thieves, We’re taking it back! We’re not saying please!”
“No more cops, we don’t need ‘em! All we want is total freedom”

Kasama has provided a post for reports of the day's action as they come in. #OWS puts the strike in the context of a month of global action.

It's all about sticking together. Shut down the 1%...even for a day! Occupy Everywhere!

Palestine and UNESCO: Two Videos

2011-11-01T20:55:00.005-04:00

The video above actually made me tear up as Palestine is voted full state membership in the United Nations agency UNESCO. Note that, as Jews sans Frontieres blog points out, the whole world laughs at Israel as it casts its "no" vote. (Sorry about the advertisement; it's worth sitting through). The joy of the Palestinian delegation, indeed the vast majority of the room, is awesome to behold.

On the other hand, the video below is nausea-provoking as an American official defends the United States' "no" vote. (First noted on AngryArab). Note the journalist Matt Lee who doesn't let the soul-dead American bureaucrat get away with her nonsensical rationalizations and hypocrisy:

Transcript here, thanks to Mondoweiss.

It took about five minutes for the Republic of South Sudan's application for U.N. membership to be approved by the U.N. What ever could the hold-up be with the Palestinian application made a month ago?

When Zombies Walk the Earth

2011-10-31T20:18:00.003-04:00

Halloween doesn't scare me. It's not supposed to. It's supposed to be a celebration, of the sacredness of life past, of the inevitability and sacredness of death past and future. Without the ancestors whose bones we walk upon, whose dust we breathe, whose water we drink, whose ever-living spirit sustains and inspires us, we wouldn't be here. And when we end, hopefully after long happy lives, our dust, our water, our spirit, returns to the great communal life force which will sustain the future. That is awe-inspiring and mysterious: sure and yet un-knowable, not really.

There's nothing wrong with the popular Halloween masquerade: laughing at things we might not always find funny, or trying out different identities or experimenting with the absurd. Indeed in trying out the Halloween swap of identities aren't we also trying out what the world would feel like without us as we know ourselves to be?

On Halloween I try to remember the ancestors who contributed to who I am; and to the friends and loved ones who have passed over to somewhere else after sharing a moment of space and time with me. I've lit a candle and burned some sage and copal. I've shared some rum and water. I've spoken names I haven't thought much of lately. I've prayed to the spirits who guide my life with perspective and inspiration. I'm not forgetting the tasks before me, but I'm counting my blessings and offering my thanks.

None of this stuff — what an old boyfriend called heebeejeebee stuff — scares me. I like the Mexican tradition of making skulls and headstones of sugar candy, pretty, colored in bright decorations, adding sweet deliciousness to reverence: turning fearful imagery to something else that in levity brings understanding.

But I'll tell you what does scare me: the deadness of living human souls.

Consider our politicians: liars all of them, from Democrat to Republican. Dishonest, manipulative people who will say anything for votes. And how horrible that we 99% — to use this new and relevant language — have to live in a world of illusion and corruption made meaningless and hateful by these zombies filling up the halls of power despite the fact that without us, the 1% would be nothing at all.

Today UNESCO admitted Palestine as a full state member, and within moments the U.S. cancelled its funding of that important United Nations agency: the Democratic Obama administration saying recognition of Palestine was an "obstacle to peace." Consider the walking dead across the political aisle: Michele Bachmann, Herman Cain, Rick Perry, Mitt Romney, Rick Santorum: these are masked monsters without an ounce of human empathy. Consider those who cheer these politicians on: cheering on the death penalty, hooting for the deportation of people away from their homes and families and jobs, jeering people who are gay. How virulent is the zombie infection. Consider the fear that these people instill in the rest of us, clinging to the faintest of hopes that politicians like Obama might hurt us less than the ones we know will hurt us more. Because well, what could possibly be the alternative but something worse?

Perhaps it's fitting that in this painful era, where some people are finally waking up to the way things actually are, that zombie movies and zombie TV shows have so captured the popular imagination. Because that's what we've been too often, zombies feeding on each other, going nowhere fast.

Maybe the alternative to life among the zombies isn't gathering together in a boarded-up shopping mall or circling the wagons, or choosing whether to eat plain shit or shit with broken glass: Maybe the alternative is to choose something better.

Winter is almost here, it's true. This weekend's freak October snowstorm certainly reminded us of that. But winter ends. Spring is coming.

Be gone, zombies, be gone.

Starhawk: #OWS Renews Our Faith in the Human Spirit

2011-10-30T22:36:00.003-04:00

The right mix of politics and spirituality is a thorny question. I am utterly devoted to the notion of separation of church and state: it's clear to me that whatever mysterious personal beliefs people have, the law must remain absolutely secular. But at the same time I believe that the desire to fight for a better world, for social justice, comes from a profoundly spiritual place, and thus ultimately the morality informing secular law risks a slippery slope easily confused when the morality of liberation becomes blurred with the controlling dogma of a particular faith. All that said, I know that while my religious beliefs and at this point very occasional religious practices have very little to do with my politics, my spirituality is quite intertwined with a liberationist perspective in politics.

Many left-wing political activists dislike/fear/hate/oppose thinking about politics in a spiritual way, and I understand where they're coming from. But for all the social conservatism of today's evangelical Christians or the right-wing nihilism of fundamentalist political Islam, there is a long history of religious people being in the vanguard of social justice movements: a key example of which is the African-American civil rights movement which had an organic relationship with the spirituality and religious faith of African-Americans.

During my period of spiritual exploration after I withdrew form political activism, one of the most inspiring writers was the Neo-Pagan priestess Starhawk, especially her seminal work "The Spiral Dance." I was excited to read that Starhawk has been visiting a number of the Occupy Together encampments on the west coast. Some of what she's written on the subject of #OWS and this amazing movement that has materialized before our eyes I find quite inspiring:

From an article published in the Washington Post's On Faith column:

"What’s going on? Pundits splutter about the movement’s lack of ‘demands’ and coherent messaging, but sound bites and 10-point programs arise from central committees and top-down hierarchies. The Occupy movement demonstrates a very different model of organizing: emergent, decentralized, without a command and control structure. ...

[The demonstrations] all share a common heart, a revulsion against an economy and a politics that increasingly say, “You don’t count, except as something to exploit. Your voice is drowned out by money, your labor is expendable, your needs must be sacrificed to the gods of profit.”

At its essence, the message of the Occupations is simply this:

'Here in the face of power we will sit and create a new society, in which you do count. Your voice carries weight, your contributions have value, whoever you may be. We care for one another, and we say that love and care are the true foundations for the society we want to live in. We’ll stand with the poor and sleep with the homeless if that’s what it takes to get justice. We’ll build a new world.'....

The Occupy movement renews my faith in the human spirit, in our creativity, our craving for justice, our determination to root our world in love. So come on down! You are important. Your voice counts. You have a unique contribution to make. We are all the 99 percent."

And so taking a stand along with #OWS has a spiritual component: awakening our long-dormant hope and aspirations. Secular political savvy and a presence in the real world with its dangerous state repression is clearly the order of the day. But go ahead, arm yourself with spirit, too.

Starhawk has also been writing at great length in her personal blog on the Occupy movement.

News of Starhawk via The Wildhunt

Scott Olsen Found the Enemy

2011-10-28T00:10:00.002-04:00

"Joined the Marines.
Went to Iraq.
Came home.
Found the Enemy.

Is this what democracy looks like?"

The good news is that Scott Olsen's condition has been upgraded from critical. Graphic found on Facebook.

The Brute Force of the AMERICAN State Reveals Itself

2011-10-26T23:08:00.006-04:00

'In Oakland, officials initially supported the protests, with Mayor Jean Quan saying that sometimes “democracy is messy.”' — AP News release. Mayor Quan is a liberal Democrat.

"An Iraq war veteran has a fractured skull and brain swelling after allegedly being hit by a police projectile. Scott Olsen is in a "critical condition" in Highland hospital in Oakland, a hospital spokesman confirmed...."I'm just absolutely devastated that someone who did two tours of Iraq and came home safely is now lying in a US hospital because of the domestic police force," [his friend Adele] Carpenter said." — Guardian UK article reporting on the violent police attack on the peaceful Occupy Oakland encampment ordered by Mayor Quan's administration. The police used teargas, flash grenades, and rubber bullets.

"Scott is one of an increasing number of war veterans who are participating in America’s growing Occupy movement. Said Keith Shannon, who deployed with Scott to Iraq, “Scott was marching with the 99% because he felt corporations and banks had too much control over our government, and that they weren’t being held accountable for their role in the economic downturn, which caused so many people to lose their jobs and their homes.” — Iraq Veterans Against the War

'Let's be clear: Occupy Together has ended the whole sensibility of 9/11, the reverence for cop-heros of the two towers, the bullshit of "America stands together," the fog of Tea Party radicalism, the giddy illusion of "Change we can believe in" -- it's all over, and something else has started.' — Mike Ely, Kasama

"We Are All Scott Olsen." — #OWS

Anti-Americana: Don't You Have Anything in a "Love" Stamp?

2011-10-25T22:17:00.005-04:00

The United States Postal Service issued its first "Love" stamp in 1973...almost forty years ago now. I'm imagining it wasn't inspired by this stamp issued — but then withdrawn — the previous year by the Democratic People's Republic of Korea. I don't know why the North Korean government issued this stamp and then changed its mind, it's certainly no less viscerally rage-filled and violent than the dozens of other Anti-American postage stamps they'd already released. Not being able to read a word of Korean, I can't translate its clearly shouted slogan, and can't spot an error of symbolism that might have embarrassed the political monitors of the North Korean post office.

The design is boilerplate: a pair of American soldiers and a shattered stars-and-stripes are being smooshed by a giant red fist. The nuclear weapon brandished by one of the soldiers lies broken in two. Man, I hope that thing doesn't go off. Ah, 1972. I imagine it's pretty scary to live in a teeny tiny country, even a repressive one like the DPRK, knowing that a whole lot of nukes are pointed at you from right across a DMZ.

Did North Korean sweethearts use this stamp on their love letters?

(Anti-Americana is an ongoing Cahokian series: click here for almost 200 more propaganda images from around the world.)

A Cure for Mondays: Al Green

2011-10-24T23:03:00.003-04:00

I've been putting in a little overtime at work so my brain is a little fried and incapable of putting together a good juicy rant.... so two days in a row we're taking a little musical breather from the events of the world. I've been rustling through my iTunes and CD collection and this is what I came up with. Here's Al Green's hidden gem "Look What You Done For Me" from his 1972 album I'm Still in Love With You. This could be the dictionary entry for "soul music." What an arrangement!

Sunday Night Schmalz: A Taste of Honey

2011-10-23T20:00:00.004-04:00

Remember Herb Alpert doing his early-sixties signature song "A Taste of Honey"? It's the hit track from the album showing a model covered in "whipped cream" with a seductive look on her face, and it's a sort of cliche of swinging sixties pre-rock bachelor pad music. Well now forget about that. Here's a version of that song from Andy Bey and the Bey Sisters, the singing group that launched the career of the amazing honey-voiced singer Andy Bey, who is quite still around. Recorded in 1964, this version slows the tempo way down and takes the song from the height of the party to late night at the bar. What is in other hands almost cloyingly perky is transformed into something else altogether. All of a sudden it's introspective melancholia, the perfect accompaniment to a neat glass of booze, some dim lights, and, like tonight, a chilly evening with dark streets that may or may not lead you to where you expect them to.

I didn't know it before looking it up for this entry, but it's originally from a 1960 Broadway show and was also popularized by... The Beatles. When I was younger I didn't get this kind of slow, bittersweetly lush vocal music. But as a middle-aged gay man this stuff seems to get right under my skin.

"I will return...
I'll come back for the honey and you."

Is it finally over?

2011-10-21T22:08:00.003-04:00

President Obama announced today that all U.S. forces would be out of Iraq by the end of the year, more or less as planned since President Bush first negotiated a staged withdrawal with the Iraqi government before he left office. Last-minute negotiations to maintain a so-called training force in Iraq came to nothing, thankfully. I'm imagining the huge American embassy and its massive staff, not to mention thousands of armed mercenaries, er, "contractors," will of course remain.

The uncountable tens of thousands of Iraqis killed by the absolutely unprovoked American aggression could not be reached for comment; nor could the equally uncountable thousands more killed by the terrorism and civil conflict unleashed when the U.S. invasion destroyed Iraqi society. The thousands of children who died of hardship in the decade of U.S. blockade between the first and second wars with Iraq will still not be growing up.

George Bush's legacy is intact: no WMD nor links to 9/11 were ever found. But we knew that.

OK, now about Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, Libya, Uganda...?

(The photo shows a portion of President Bush's disgustingly named "shock and awe" bombing of downtown Baghdad)

The End of Qaddafi

2011-10-20T23:00:00.002-04:00

Propaganda image of Moammar al-Qaddafi dressed as an admiral among sailors of the Libyan navy, ca. 1980

It's not often one gets to watch the end of an era come to a bloody end on a tiny Youtube screen, but today I watched two videos of the death of the fugitive Libyan dictator Moammar al-Qaddafi at the hands of the NATO-backed former rebel forces. The first shows a bloodied but still alive Qaddafi being dragged off the hood of a car. He looks dazed and semi-conscious as he's manhandled into a crowd. He had apparently just been discovered in a metal culvert, and shot while trying to escape his fate. This was at the end of the merciless siege of the last Qaddafi stronghold of Sirte, a town that apparently proved the old Vietnam-war era military adage about "destroying the village in order to save it." The second video shows Qaddafi's considerably bloodier and less alive body being kicked around in the dust. A gory still photo that followed showed more of Qaddafi's bloodied head and lifeless eye sockets than I cared to ever see.

And so an oppressive dictator died, reportedly about the same time as his two sons Muatassim (definitely dead, more gory pictures) and Saif al-Islam (reportedly so or at least wounded), who had stayed with their father and refused to go into exile with other members of the family as Tripoli fell to the rebels in late summer. It was time for his dictatorship to go, and at least a whole lot of Libyan people seem pretty happy about that. But honestly, watching these gruesome videos I felt a little sad.

All the Libyan civilians and international photojournalists who lost their lives in Libya's short but brutal civil war deserve the real tears that perhaps Qaddafi does not, but it's hard not to reflect on the humanity ending so abruptly before the cameras. Oh I understand the merciless are rarely afforded mercy, but still it doesn't feel exactly like justice when those living by the sword die by it, despite what the Christian Bible says about such inevitabilities. I'm against the death penalty, even for men who have proved their moral bankruptcy many times over. I don't celebrate the brutality I witnessed today.

Stamp design showing the American assassination attempt on Qaddafi in 1986 in which his adopted daughter was killed

It's so easy to accept the media cliche that Qaddafi was a "madman." He was certainly a man of his own tastes and eccentricities, but isn't it funny how America's "enemies" are always demonized as "madmen" as though it's the requisite dehumanization required to objectify them and lust for their deaths: Iraq's Saddam, Iran's Khomeini and Ahmedinejad, Venezuela's Chavez, even Cuba's Castro. Never mind that all these leaders, rogues or heroes depending on one's perspective, all have or had plenty of solid reason to choose the side they were on. I have never believed I was better than anyone else solely because of the accidental location of my birth (which, come to think of it, wasn't the United States anyway, but I digress). That kind of us-against-the-forces-of-darkness patriotism is a sickness. Americans might want to hold our own leaders to higher account before looking to cast stones about the neighborhood. And pity the poor actual madmen among us: I saw several today on the subway. They weren't capable of running countries and I didn't want to kill them even slightly.

And I don't know about you, but somebody sending jets to try and kill me but instead killing one of my children and a few dozen neighboring civilians, well, that would sure make me mad.

Many cite the PanAm airplane explosion over Lockerbie, Scotland and grit one's teeth coldly and say Qaddafi deserved what he got. Well, if you believe that's what actually happened. I'm no scholar of that terrible destruction of innocent life, but the accounts that claim Libya had nothing to do with Lockerbie and place the blame on other rogue terrorists seem as feasible to me as the ones that claim Qaddafi somehow masterminded it. Not being a student of those facts I wouldn't get involved in a heated argument on the subject. But I know the record of spies and lies in the 1970s and 1980s and let's just say if I had lost a loved one over Lockerbie I would resent my loss being used for anyone's political justifications, and certainly wouldn't wish to spread the suffering around.

Cartoonish propaganda stamps showing Qaddafi in civilian and military guise ca. 1982

Certainly Qaddafi had a high opinion of himself, and created a classically visual personality cult around himself. He had his own ideology, contained in the incredibly boring and disingenuous Green Book (I guess my copy is now a collector's item). He had an army of women with guns around him for a while, which you would think would have made him more popular with elements of the American population who like B-movies with that plot, but oh well. He really, really wanted to be loved. He claimed the love of the Libyan people, the African people who he claimed to want to unite, and, at his last speeches to the United Nations in which he pleaded for more powerful representation for the third world, he claimed the love of the peoples of the entire planet. I'm not saying that love was actually redeemed.

There's a lesson there for all of those with money and (regional) power: those who tell you they love you might not really mean it when the money and power go away. And if you want your people to love you for giving them the pleasure of living in a socialist egalitarian paradise like the Great Socialist People's Libyan Arab Jamahiriya claimed to be (yes, that was the official name of the country), you might want to remember that a reasonable standard of living is not enough if your faux socialist paradise is also secretly a repressive police dictatorship where you can end up in jail or a mass grave for speaking your mind.

In the end Qaddafi and his sons refused an extended Saudi Arabian retirement, unlike certain other falling dictators. They were not apparently thanked for this last display of patriotism. I guess they proved they were committed to their own image. Whatever that's worth. Not much in the end, I guess.

Just a couple of world leaders shaking hands.

In the aftermath of the American toppling of Saddam Hussein, Qaddafi decided to come in from the cold. While occasionally reverting to bouts of his former rhetoric, he made nice with imperialism. He made nice with President Bush and with British Prime Minister Blair and for a while with Bush's successor Obama. He took the virtual bullet for Lockerbie more or less on the same basis as Mark Zuckerberg settled lawsuits over his social network, something you can afford to do when money is being pumped out of the ground. Where once he reviled Italy for its brutal decades of occupation before World War II — the world's first civilian concentration camps were established by Italy to punish rebellious Libyans in the early 20th century — Qaddafi made especially nice with corrupt Italian leader Berlusconi, promising to help him keep unwanted African immigrants from crossing the Mediterranean into Italy.

Hillary Clinton making nice with Qaddafi's son Muatassim, also reported killed today.

Qaddafi's grown children tried to rehabilitate their reputations and that of their father, posing as international businessmen or diplomats. Heck they were international businessmen selling lots of oil to a greedy European market. But all those smiles went south when the season turned to Arab spring.

Memo to self: beware of shaking hands with members of a government that has already tried to kill you even if the last time you met them they seemed happy to see you.

One of the last stamps issued by the Qaddafi regime (in 2010) honored the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and claimed racism was outlawed in Libya.

Qaddafi was the last of his kind: that generation of late 1960s/early 1970s nationalist leaders who spoke a language that sounded like it was leftist and anti-imperialist but on closer examination proved to be something quite different. It seems like today's authoritarians have mostly dispensed with the language of socialism or social justice. The dictators of Qaddafi's day needed to legitimize themselves by claiming a higher cause. Sadly, in the end they just poisoned the well, ruining the reputation of socialism which became equated with mere statism and repression; reserving the equality of poverty for the masses while a privileged class at the top enjoyed villas and luxury yachts.

And so this last Qaddafi-era stamp is sort of poignant. I mean, even the United States hasn't put MLK on a stamp since the 1980s. Yet it seems extraordinarily unlikely given the rumors of racist atrocities against West African immigrants by the now-victorious Libyan rebels that there was some kind of widespread anti-racist consciousness under Qaddafi's rule.

I hope the Libyan people find justice and freedom from new kinds of oppression. I hope they haven't poisoned that well with the brutality of this civil war and the extra-legal execution of their former ruler. I hope they understand — or learn quickly and not too painfully — what kind of deal with the devil they have made by inviting in NATO and empowering a new spirit of American interventionism. A new spirit of interventionism that is, by the way, already evident in President Obama's dispatch of a small unit of American soldiers and military advisers to Uganda to fight the so-called Lord's Resistance Army. Yes, our so-called "peace" president involves the country in another war.

I hope Arab spring fulfills its promise. As spring turns now toward winter, there are reasons both for hope and for concern. Libya shows how hard the "West" will try to keep control of the situation. Despite the decidedly mixed bag of events in Libya, Egypt, Bahrain, Syria, Yemen and Palestine, we also have the worldwide Occupy Together movement birthed by #OWS but spawned by a new popular awakening. As much as NATO bombings and executions in the streets seem like depressing precedents, I remain hopeful. Spring always comes round again.

Stamp images mostly from Libyan-Stamps.com

Everything You Need to Know About Republicans (2)

2011-10-19T07:37:00.006-04:00

At last night's disturbing Republican presidential debate in Las Vegas, in which candidates competed to display more heartlessness to the American people, more racism toward immigrants, and more stupidity on international issues:

Anderson Cooper: "Herman Cain, two weeks ago you said 'Don't blame the big banks, don't blame Wall Street, if you don't have a job or you're not rich, blame yourself.'... Do you still say that?" (Cheers from crowd)

Herman Cain: "Yes I do say that." (Wild cheering ovation from crowd)

There's a clip on Huffpo that I won't embed here because it has a commercial.

#OWS Occupies Times Square

2011-10-17T22:02:00.007-04:00

Many thousands of people turned out Saturday night to bring the #Occupy Wall Street movement uptown to Times Square. While confused tourists milled about and police laid down a heavy hand with horses, motorcycles, and blocks and blocks of metal pens and barricades, thousands of people came out just before sunset to express their support to the rights of the 99% for economic (and social) justice.

The police response seemed to atomize the protest a bit, isolating a louder, angrier crowd around the military recruiting station from a more playful, music-playing "Occupation Party" crowd up near the TKTS booth. The police prevented feeder marches from joining the protests, and generally amped up an aura of explosive tension. After some abusive arrests earlier in the day at a protest inside a Citibank branch, the cops staged a confrontation with some protesters at the end of the Times Square event, arresting dozens. The protesters were engaged in nonviolent expression, and it's clear that the Mayor has ordered the police to limit that expression as much as they can get away with.

I love the sign above: "Decolonize Wall Street - Wall St. Is On Occupied Algonquin Land - Decolonize the 99%"

The Occupy Times Square Action was part of a global day of actions, with protests held in hundreds of cities in dozens of countries. Here's a sign expressing common sentiment at Occupy Wall Street Protests, and I gather, at protests world wide: "If Voting Could Change Anything, It Would Be Illegal - Join Us. We Are the 99%." If the fruit of all that excitement prior to Obama's election means anything, this is certainly a point up for debate.

And Cuban revolutionary Che Guevara made a welcome return visit to New York City courtesy of this red flag with the iconic Korda silhouette of the martyred hero. Of course my eye gravitates to red flags, but there was plenty of more middle-of-the-road sentiment present also. Considering this is a movement of the 99%, that road is pretty broad; and more power to it.

(Photographs by me; click on them to see them larger)

Rick Perry's Plan to F*ck the Cr@p out of the Environment... (USA! USA!)

2011-10-15T11:25:00.007-04:00

Rick Perry said it, but this is pretty much the platform of the entire Republican party:

"America has proven but untapped supplies of natural gas, oil and coal. America is the Saudi Arabia of coal with 25 percent of the world’s supply. Our country contains up to 134 billion barrels of oil and nearly 1.2 quadrillion cubic feet of natural gas....But President Obama and his over-reaching Environmental Protection Agency won’t allow American businesses and American labor to draw on even a fraction of this domestic energy from reserves on government-owned lands....

We will open several American oil and gas fields for exploration that are currently off limits because of political considerations. The current administration has restricted exploration in the Gulf of Mexico, Alaska, and the mid-Atlantic....I will work to open up Alaska’s abundant resources to oil and gas exploration, including the ANWR Coastal Plain and the National Petroleum Reserve of Alaska. In this one instance, we will need congressional authorization. But it is worth it when you consider we will create 120,000 jobs. We will initiate off-shore exploration in the Beaufort and Chukchi seas off the northern and western coasts of Alaska. This will create 55,000 jobs. We will resume pre-Obama levels of exploration in the Gulf of Mexico and create another 230,000 jobs. I will support the construction of the Keystone XL pipeline to take Canadian Crude to coastal refineries, which would create 20,000 direct jobs for American workers....And right here in Pennsylvania, and across the state line in West Virginia and Ohio, we will tap the full potential of the Marcellus Shale and create another 250,000 jobs by getting the EPA out of the way...." —Texas governor and 2012 Republican presidential candidate Rick Perry announcing his "energy" plan yesterday in Pittsburgh. Below, what Texas looks like today.

Yes, they actually think the Environmental Protection Agency is a chief cause of the economic crisis.

#OWS Occupy Wall Street in Danger

2011-10-13T21:45:00.006-04:00

From OWS:

"EMERGENCY #OWS EVICTION DEFENSE:
Prevent the forcible closure of Occupy Wall Street

Tell Bloomberg: Don't Foreclose the Occupation.
NEED MASS TURN-OUT, SHOW UP NO LATER THAN 6 A.M.

This is an emergency situation. Please take a minute to read this, and please take action and spread the word far and wide.

Occupy Wall Street is gaining momentum, with occupation actions now happening in cities across the world.

But last night Mayor Bloomberg and the NYPD notified Occupy Wall Street participants about plans to “clean the park”—the site of the Wall Street protests—tomorrow starting at 7am. "Cleaning" was used as a pretext to shut down “Bloombergville” a few months back, and to shut down peaceful occupations elsewhere.

Bloomberg says that the park will be open for public usage following the cleaning, but with a notable caveat: Occupy Wall Street participants must follow the “rules”.

NYPD Police Commissioner Ray Kelly has said that they will move in to clear us and we will not be allowed to take sleeping bags, tarps, personal items or gear back into the park.

This is it—this is their attempt to shut down #OWS for good.
PLEASE TAKE ACTION

1) Call 311 (or +1 (212) NEW-YORK if you're out of town) and tell Bloomberg to support our right to assemble and to not interfere with #OWS.

2) Come to #OWS TONIGHT AT MIDNIGHT to defend the occupation from eviction.

For those of you who plan to help us hold our ground—which we hope will be all of you—make sure you understand the possible consequences. Be prepared to not get much sleep. Be prepared for possible arrest. Make sure your items are together and ready to go (or already out of the park.) We are pursuing all possible strategies; this is a message of solidarity.

Click here to learn nonviolent tactics for holding ground.

Occupy Wall Street is committed to keeping the park clean and safe—we even have a Sanitation Working Group whose purpose this is. We are organizing major cleaning operations today and will do so regularly.

If Bloomberg truly cares about sanitation here he should support the installation of portopans and dumpsters. #OWS allies have been working to secure these things to support our efforts.

We know where the real dirt is: on Wall Street. Billionaire Bloomberg is beholden to bankers.

We won't allow Bloomberg and the NYPD to foreclose our occupation. This is an occupation, not a permitted picnic."

This morning on the radio (WNYC no less) the pro-Bloomberg media cheerfully reported that Bloomberg visited the encampment and said they would be allowed to stay if they temporarily vacated the plaza for cleaning. Of course the radio didn't say that the city's intention was to end the encampment by establishing "rules" denying the right of people to lie down in the park after they "cleaned" it. For the record, when I've been to the plaza it was cluttered and full of people but it didn't smell, there was no filth, and no evidence of the lack of sanitation facilities (which for crying out loud, New York should have in its public spaces anyway). Let this be crystal clear: Bloomberg and his media enablers are liars on the side of the 1%.

UPDATE: The overnight protest effort seems to have at least postponed the eviction. Some inspiring details in this Gawker account.

Did You Hear the One About the Iranian Used Car Dealer?

2011-10-12T20:38:00.004-04:00

An Iranian used-car dealer in Texas has a relative in the Iranian military and they're actually super spies who tried to hire the Mexican mafia to kill the Saudi Arabian ambassador to the U.S. because, well, just because. I mean, everybody knows ALL IRANIANS ARE TERRORISTS!!!11!. And the news just happened to break the same day President Obama's jobs bill was defeated in its first test vote in Congress strangely pushing that event off the headlines. And strangely Secretary Hillary Clinton and various members of Congress are now rattling sabers against Iran again instead of commenting on the U.S.-supported Yemeni dictatorship gunning people down in the streets. And just a couple weeks ago it turned out the U.S. sold bombs to Israel that would be perfect to destroy, say, an underground nuclear facility in Iran.

Suuurrrre. I believe it's all happening just like the government says it is. Don't you?

The peasants are revolting...

2011-10-11T22:10:00.003-04:00

'Heather Amato, 35, a psychologist who lives near the protest area, said she felt disturbed by some of the conduct of the protesters. She said she had to shield her toddler from the sight of women at the park dancing topless. “It’s been three weeks now,” Ms. Amato said. “Enough is enough.”' — New York Times, October 7

As the Occupy Wall Street movement gains momentum, spreading across the country to dozens of local Occupy protests, marches, sit-ins and encampments, the establishment, to use a word spawned by the 1960s protests, has begun to look down on the movement with some consternation and confusion. Besides the hatchet job quoted above about how Occupy Wall Street is nothing but dirty, smelly, rude hippies with no respect for property, there was an extraordinarily condescending OpEd piece by the Times's resident old-line conservative, David Brooks:

"If there is a core theme to the Occupy Wall Street movement, it is that the virtuous 99 percent of society is being cheated by the richest and greediest 1 percent. This is a theme that allows the people in the 99 percent to think very highly of themselves. All their problems are caused by the nefarious elite....The Occupy Wall Street movement may look radical, but its members’ ideas are less radical than those you might hear at your average Rotary Club." Of course, Brooks is a die-hard defender of the 1%.

A two-pronged attack on Occupy Wall Street is unfolding: it's an attack by the class that has the most to lose from these protests that hint at the incredible potential suggested by the awakening of those who have thus far been the victims of class war waged against them. The attack will be a classic good-cop bad-cop act.

The first prong of the attack, the "good cop" is as Kasama warns: "Here is the deal: The smell of sulfur is upon the land. Satan himself is coming now… Of course we don’t believe in Satan. It is a metaphor. What I mean is this: The real and difficult struggle within this movement and for this movement is now starting. The media is turning on the machinery. The unions officials will now come as “supporters” but broker for the liberal establishment. “Advisers” will show up. People (who are pliant and acceptable) will now be declared leaders and spokespeople in the media. Demands will be announced or promoted or demanded that correspond to the program of the Democratic Party…. and much more." This will be the strategy of the liberal establishment to co-opt and blunt the Occupy Wall Street movement...to feign sympathy for its ends while trying to channel its energy away from radical potential.

The second prong will be the "bad cop," as those forces who will do anything to defend their privilege and power attempt sway public opinion against the Occupy movement, and then when they believe the movement to be weak, they will unleash whatever forces of repression are necessary to sweep up the remnants.

On the internet front, check out two widely circulated graphics from the teabaggers trying to demean the Occupy movement. The first attempts to paint the movement as idiot hypocrites for being consumers as if to oppose Wall Street we should all walk around in burlap sacks. The second attempts to paint them as anti-patriotic criminals looking for government handouts. For those with strong stomachs, check out the Think Progress video contrasting how the right-wing media coddled the Teaparty and attack the Occupy movement. I could only watch half of it. Link here. And read Gawker's evisceration of the thoroughly tragic attempt by the right-wing to paint the protesters as freeloaders and get suffering working-class Americans to identify with the cause of their suffering, "We are the 53%." To quote Gawker editor Richard Lawson: "these people have been glamoured by vampires, have bared their necks and welcome the pain as a gift. It's so deep and so bedrock in national mentality that the only salve seems, honestly, to be some sort of genuine revolution. I kind of feel like a French person in 1788. I wish these people knew they had allies behind them."

We don't know what will happen. The Occupy movement may grow and bloom, or it may succumb temporarily to winter. I do know that it's impressed the hell out of me personally, and the people involved in it are very, very smart, and becoming very very very wise by their own actions. The time is overripe for this kind of movement. If there's one thing that I hope people in the Occupy Movement understand, and I suspect many of them do, it's that the so-called 1%, whatever that true number is, do not need to understand or be educated, or learn anything: they are doing what they are doing because it is in their self=interest to do so. The rich want to stay rich. The powerful want to keep power. Appealing to the better natures of those with power has its limitations, especially when they understand the logic of the movement even if not everybody in that movement has drawn the same conclusions through to the end.

Those of us who want — who need — change or economic and social justice: it is for us to take. These things are, by virtue of our absolute majority and humanity, our right. No begging is necessary.

(The graphic, of course, is Mel Brooks and Harvey Korman in "The History of the World, Part 1." If you've seen it you'll know why it's here!)

This Is What Democracy Looks Like!

2011-10-09T18:57:00.009-04:00

"Rise Up – We Are the 99%"
Artwork from a one-day guerrilla art exhibit for Occupy Wall Street called "No Comment" held in the now empty former J.P. Morgan building in downtown New York City.

"Another World Is Possible. On a Quiet Morning, I Can Hear Her Breathing"
Sign on the sacred space altar at one corner of the Occupy Wall Street encampment in New York City.

"Power to the People!!" Sign near the drum circle at the Occupy Wall Street encampment today.

"No list of demands. We are speaking to each other, and listening. This occupation is first about participation. - Tens of thousands of New Yorkers streamed into Foley Square on Wednesday — labor unions rolled out, students walked out. The occupation of Wall Street grew to resemble the city we live in. What race, age, religion, occupation did we represent? None of them. All of them...This is our movement. It is our narrative too. The exhausted political machines and their PR slicks are already seeking leaders to elevate, messages to claim talking points to move on. They, more than anyone, will attempt to seize and shape that movement. But how can they run out in front of something that is in front of them? They cannot.... We aren't going anywhere. We just got here." — editorial note from the second edition of Occupy Wall Street's broadsheet "The Occupied Wall Street Journal"

More art from the "No Comment" guerrilla art show:

"Think outside this box - Fuck Nationalism!" graffiti on an American flag.

"Wake Up - Unite - Organize - Rise - Forgive - Evolve"

Wall stencil. Not sure what it means, but a striking image.

"This Is What Democracy Looks Like"
"They Got Bailed Out, We Got Sold Out"
"All Day, All Week, Occupy Wall Street"
— chants from the Occupy Wall Street protest

(All photos by me; click on the images to see them larger. All credit to the original artists)

Hater Speaks at Hate Groups' Confab of Hate

2011-10-08T15:18:00.007-04:00

There are plenty of other bloggers who enjoy watching every hateful, insane thing uttered by right-wing fundamentalist Christians and their various hate groups, and normally I'm not one for paying too much attention to every bit of hate speech they utter. It's nauseating and tediously repetitious. But here's a brief clip from Brian Fischer of the hate group American Family Association group making the concise point at today's Family Research Council-sponsored Value Voters Summit that the twin dangers of Islam and homosexuality are the worst things facing America today.

To my knowledge not a single Republican politician has explicitly distanced themselves from this single-minded focus on hatred as the unifying principle behind so-called "Values Voters" or social conservatives. It should be presumed that any politician who attended this conference with an aim other than denouncing it completely, including alleged moderate Mitt Romney whose religion has also been denounced by some of these same hate mongers, thinks it's okay to villify gays and Muslims in exchange for votes. What kind of country to they want to live in? Not the one I do. Shame on anyone who does not recognize this conference and every last social conservative it represents as being nothing but a modern-day Klan rally. Indeed while Mitt Romney has generalized about "poisonous language" from Fischer, he certainly didn't boycott the forum provided by people who share Fischer's views, and agrees with Fischer that gay Americans should be denied equal rights. All these groups with "Family" in their name prefer that gay people not be allowed to build loving families equal under the law. "Family" is their codeword for hatred of lesbians and gays.

Incidentally, the hate group FRC, organizers of today's summit, is run by Tony Perkins, who has given money to David Duke of the actual KKK as well as spoken to the white-racist Council of Conservative Citizens.

(Clip from Right Wing Watch via Gawker)

What Is the Steve Jobs Legacy?

2011-10-07T05:00:00.003-04:00

"Think different. Steve Jobs didn't make your iPad, Chinese kids did."

Since the products of Steve Job's Apple Corporation are by and large what has made the internet what it is today, it's not surprising that outpourings of grief for Mr. Jobs have been front and center on the internet since he died yesterday, far too young, of the dread pancreatic cancer. By all accounts he was a brilliant man who truly changed the world in ways that define our current era. I currently produce this blog on an iMac, and my professional career is currently based on working on Macs. I love my iPod, and the fact that I have no iPhone to love is a product of my deficient personal economy not aspiration. I post this graphic I found not to disrespect the memory of Mr. Jobs nor to demean his achievements. But I was immediately struck by how direct and important the message of this graphic is, and how superficial and partial are so many of the ubiquitous encomiums to the legacy of Steve Jobs. I certainly don't post this graphic to make anyone feel guilty about their Apple products since I'm guessing nobody but the Amish can claim a life free of the products plucked from the trees of universal corporate exploitation.

To my mind the statement of this graphic is less than a condemnation of Mr. Jobs — though a proprietary relationship with factories employing child or slave labor is highly problematic — but more a condemnation of us as consumers for not remembering that without the workers, children or adults, laboring to produce these miraculous little machines, Steve Jobs was nothing but a man with great ideas. I have my cool iMac and iPod not just because of his imagination, but because flesh and blood people put these things together with craftsmanship and know-how. And the fact that I was able to afford these things is probably thanks to the fact that other people made less money than I to do the hard work of making these things real.

Pondering all of this I did come to another realization: every time in the last twenty-some-odd years I've found myself out of work, I could blame Mr. Jobs and his creations. And here is something not often stated about our current economic condition.

In the 1980s I supported myself as a photo-typesetter. It was a valued craft. The development of desktop publishing via MacIntosh toward the end of that decade killed the typesetting business, and with it my skill-set. I transitioned first to pre-press, and then to the production and creative end of computer-based print graphics. But I wound up working in the music business, and soon iPods and iTunes killed the demand for CDs, and down went the music business starting in the mid-2000s and with it my replacement career and skill-set. Today I am slightly underemployed, working freelance in the print newspaper business at a much lower level than I was before. With the continued internet revolution and the development of the iPad, the grim reaper has his eye fixed firmly on the business model that supports me. I'm not sure at all what I will do when print design finally bites the dust or when the last newspaper goes all digital.

Don't get me wrong, I love the modern technology. I consume it. But talking about the economic crisis, if manufacturing is largely gone from the U.S., and soon fields like mine which once employed millions are obsolete memories, what indeed will we all be doing for work in the future? If computerization and automation combined with outsourcing so sharply reduce the number of people needed to keep the world functioning, it strikes me that all this nonsense the government is play-acting through about "job creation" is so much missing the point. With the one-two punch of technological improvement and the globalization of labor, there really is less and less for Americans to do. Of course, stupid Republicans, the government is going to be bigger, because that's getting to be one of the last places the jobs are. Along with serving bad, robotic food and working for banks or insurance companies to find ways of ripping people off of their money.

It seems inevitable that the much-lauded creative engine of capitalism would contain the seeds of its own obsolescence. Steve Jobs was very very smart: yes, visionary even. But not smart enough to avoid creating a world divided into soon-to-be-unemployed consumers with useless, outdated skills, and exploited, regimented child slaves working their tiny skilled fingers by the piece.

Graphic snagged from Lenin's Tomb.

Occupy Wall Street: Spring Is Coming!

2011-10-06T05:00:00.006-04:00

I haven't seen a crowd like this at a protest since some of the big anti-war marches in the run-up to President Bush's attack on Iraq. I haven't seen such a big protest with such a broadly anti-capitalist pro-social/economic justice focus, well, ever. Tonight thousands of people came out for a rally and march sponsored by a coalition of labor unions and similar organizations to support the Occupy Wall Street encampment. I missed the beginning of the event at 4:30, but by the time I got down there after work at 6:30, the march was long and spirited and I could see neither ahead to the front of it nor back to the end of it. The march ended up at the Occupy Wall Street base down at Liberty Plaza, where some dispersed, and some, a much smaller group, attempted to continue the march down to the heavily barricaded Wall Street area itself, where a small number of marchers were eventually arrested. The police presence was massive; and dozens of empty buses were parked all over the place should the cops need to fill them up with arrested protesters. I've already seen one video of a short but vicious episode of cop brutality.

"Revolution: Anything Less Is Bullshit."

I continue to be inspired and impressed by the diversity of protesters, by their enthusiasm, and by their many creative ways of expressing a fundamental disagreement with the status quo. There was a wide spectrum of opinion: and I can't but note how significant it is that despite the reputation of the Occupy Wall Street organizers for being "hippies," the organizations of working people have recognized the crucial nature of the moment and the opportunity to change the national discussion opened up by the newly vocal and rebellious left.

"No Bulls, No Bears. Only Pigs"

As a veteran of another time of activism, I'm so excited to think that perhaps the moment has finally arrived when people are waking up to the class war being waged against them, and waking up to the possibilities invited by standing together outside the structures and contexts of systems like elections that are stacked against us. A huge banner I wasn't able to get a good picture of read: "Arab Spring. European Summer. American Fall." (Someone in the crowd yelled, "Global winter!") I so worry that the approach of cold weather will dampen the fighting spirit, and I hope this nascent movement manages to hold itself together to reveal a real American Spring in the new year.

This guy was exhorting the crowd to move on to Wall Street. He was telling people around him that he had been there since the very beginning a few weeks ago, amazed that what started out as a handful of people has taken on such life and become so big. As one sign I loved said, "I Lost My Job But Found An Occupation."

There are many many challenges ahead for this movement. The left is furiously debating how to relate to this new and amorphous radicalization. (I recommend a perceptive and thought-provoking discussion on Kasama, especially this post by Kasama leader Mike Ely). There is all kind of danger of co-optation, not least from the politicians gearing up for next year's election. And there is the very real threat of repression from local police and politicians who are freaked out at the possibility of the militancy and rebelliousness evidenced this year in the U.K., Greece, Spain, and the Middle East.

But there is also so much possibility. Spring will be a beautiful season.

Change the Rules!

2011-10-05T13:51:00.003-04:00

A Trip Down Disco Memory Lane

2011-10-03T21:33:00.003-04:00

I'm not sure what kind of nostalgic melancholia influenced me to wallow in this song and ones like it this past weekend, but this I did. Musique was a studio assemblage, the brainchild of Patrick Adams, one of the pioneering geniuses of the disco art form, based out of New York. It's the product of a room full of semi-anonymous studio musicians, including the later-to-become-a-diva Jocelyn Brown among the cooing female singers, most assuredly not the same trio of models seen cavorting on the album's cover. The album "Keep On Jumpin'," released way back in 1978, spawned one huge hit, the precocious ode to, depending on your perspective, pubic hair or public-park sex or perhaps a daringly risqué confusion of the two, "In The Bush" (as in "Push, push, in the bush"). Ironically I first heard the tune as a young gay man at a Chicago gay bar equally precociously named The Bushes. You had to rely on context to know if someone's "I'll meet you later at the Bushes," was a call for a midnight rendezvous in Lincoln Park or merely an invitation to a trendily accoutremented pub on Halsted Street. The ads for this bar in the local gay bar-rag happily evoked the possibilities. I personally didn't experience the joys of night-time park-going until I moved to New York, but that is a different story.

If "In The Bush" is promiscuously propulsive and funky (do track it down if you've not heard it), its album-mate "Summer Love" was the kind of tune reserved for the later hours of the disco near closing time when its sugary-sweet first taste would soon dissolve into bittersweet self examination and a veritable tidal wave of stoically repressed tears on the dancefloor.

Patrick Adams understood how clearly good disco music had to manipulate not only a listener's feet and pelvis, but his emotional inner life as well. Listen to what vocal arranger and singer Christine Wiltshire has done with the vocals here: the playful sexiness of "In The Bush" is abandoned in favor of an almost somber and restrained harmony, wondering whether the Summer Love — past or present dancing partner, presumably — would stick around through thick and thin or wander off into an autumn dawn, never looking back. In 1970s gay disco dancing there was not a lot of conversation: each dancer is alone with the sensory overload of the experience and with the feelings conjured up in the musique, er, music. Here Adams gives us something to think about...to feel about. On the floor, and I remember it well, pain is transformed into catharsis and when the flashing lights and the sound of pounding loud drums are left behind in the night, so much painful emptiness has been healed by hearing hope and worry and love or lack thereof strummed away, as it were, by the dj's fingers. Your body's a little sore, and if you're coming down off some good psychedelic drugs, you're feeling like you may have just fought a battle but you emerged victorious, having traveled to the far realms of the innerverse. At least that was what 1979 was like for me.

The heroes of this music are the strings, giving real definition and substance to the cliché "heartstrings." Even the instrumental "Love Theme" version of this song, also on Youtube, manages to convey the same bittersweetness without the presence of the voices and the modest lyric. Give the funky drummer some, sure, but it's that real old-fashioned analog string orchestra that makes this music so human, and at least to me, maintains a certain emotional impact thirty-plus years later. They don't make disco music like this anymore. But maybe you had to be there.

(Apologies for the unbelievably horrible visual accompanying this video. It was the best-sounding clip of this song I could find on Youtube. This album has stayed in print on CD and download.)

"Don't Be Afraid to Call It a Revolution"

2011-10-02T18:45:00.007-04:00

I spent part of the afternoon at the Occupy Wall Street encampment in downtown Manhattan today. It's a few hundred people gathered in a small paved park roughly midway between Wall Street and the World Trade Center site. I found the gathering truly inspiring. It seems to get its energy from the overwhelming presence of young people, but it's drawn plenty of the not-so-young; while it seemed to be majority white it was by no means exclusively so. Having watched three years of so-called Tea Party protests on the news it was utterly refreshing to see — even on signs challenging President Obama — a complete and total absence of the dogwhistle racism foundational to the teabaggers' modus operandi. Here was real protest about economic issues (as well as social justice ones). Significantly I saw many trade union activists identifying themselves as such.

I've read hype describing Occupy Wall Street as an attempt to bring the spirit of Egypt's Tahrir Square to the United States; and while this movement is much smaller than that, I thought there was a kernel of truth in that. The energy at the encampment is busy and exuberant: some people were playing music together, others grouped together energetically discussing the issues. The encampment seems alive with consciousness and awareness. The signs are clever and inspiring: "Feel It Trickle Down?" "Arise and Seize the Day." Significantly just yesterday 700 Occupy Wall Street protesters were arrested on the Brooklyn Bridge as the city's repressive forces displayed their no tolerance for disruption of traffic. Despite that act of repression the spirit of the Occupiers seemed completely undaunted.

I suspect the weather will shortly curtail the momentum of the Occupy movement, though a solidarity march this Wednesday is scheduled to bring the encampment the support of unionized workers and groups like the Working Families Party. Hopefully the spirit of this exciting movement can be kindled throughout the winter and bring us a real American Spring next year. It thrills me that young people are proclaiming "Don't Be Afraid to Call it a Revolution." Could people be starting to finally wake up?

I thought this protester dressed as the Hindu goddess Mother Kali was brilliant: Change Is Coming, indeed. I like how she's managed to so succinctly unite spiritual and political consciousness in one playful statement.

Occupy Wall Street has issued a declaration, crafted by a consensus gathering at the encampment. You can read the full text at Dangerous Minds. It was also published in their "The Occupied Wall Street Journal" broadsheet, just printed and being passed out for free at the encampment. In part it begins, "As one people, united, we acknowledge the reality: that the future of the human race requires the cooperation of its members; that our system must protect our rights, and upon corruption of that system, it is up to the individuals to protect their own rights, and those of their neighbors; that a democratic government derives its just power from the people, but corporations do not seek consent to extract wealth from the people and the Earth; and that no true democracy is attainable when the process is determined by economic power. We come to you at a time when corporations, which place profit over people, self-interest over justice, and oppression over equality, run our governments. We have peaceably assembled here, as is our right..."

All photos by me. Click on them to see them larger.

We Will Kill You Because We Can, No Due Process Necessary

2011-09-30T21:17:00.007-04:00

Two dissident Americans were assassinated today by terrorists.

Although the two were active vocal opponents of United States policies, and though they were accused by some of being "linked" (whatever that means) to various acts of violence and conspiracy, the two dissidents were not charged with crimes, apprehended or arrested, nor prosecuted and tried by American authorities. Nobody was asked to prove their guilt or allowed to profess their innocence before the button was pressed that ended their lives.

The two Americans were killed, apparently by a CIA predator drone, in a military strike on Yemen, which allegedly is at peace with the United States. The U.S. is currently attempting to bolster the rule of Yemen's beseiged dictator. The two were Anwar al-Awlaki and Samir Khan, both allegedly propagandists for the Al Qaeda network.

Let it be said: this was extra-legal murder, and anybody who has ever said a critical word about the United States or its policies — including American citizens who falsely believe themselves to be protected by the rule of law — should feel a chill at this action undertaken by the Obama administration. These two American citizens were executed without any due process because the government said they deserved to die. No evidence, no charges, no trial, no defense, nothing.

Al-Awlaki and Khan were accused of being members of an organization that any fighter for justice, indeed any decent human being, should abhor. With a faux anti-imperialist sheen, Al-Qaeda's politics are a vile blend of religious fundamentalism and nihilism: these alleged fighters for Islam have killed thousands and thousands of decent, peace-loving Muslims. They've killed children at a rate to rival the worst excesses of the American war machine or Apartheid Israel. But advocating for a horrible organization is not a capital offense: and if the two were engaged in capital crimes or conspiracies, why were they not brought to the halls of blind justice that the U.S. claims to be so proud of?

The action that the CIA undertook today was a blatant act of terrorism: a random act of death from the skies for which there could be no defense. The people in Yemen killed today were going about their lives as hapless as the Americans killed on 9/11.

This was a terrible, terrible precedent. And one has only to read columnist Glenn Greenwald's tweet today to ponder the unleashed potential:

While it seems highly unlikely that she will be the one to replace President Obama, Michele Bachmann (or someone just as bad as her) has just been enabled to dispatch murderous predator drones to kill opponents of her policies on her say-so. Samir Khan is accused of publishing a web-based Al-Qaeda magazine. Al-Awlaki is accused of giving pro-Al-Qaeda video sermons on Youtube. If these are now considered executable crimes without proof or process, what will the next resident of the White House consider kill-worthy?

It is not enough that the government said these two men were criminals or terrorists: that's not the way the law is supposed to work. Or perhaps, we've just been shown that the law is an utter illusion. Look to the skies.

Graphics snagged from today's Times.

Does Mormon Presidential Candidate Mitt Romney Practice Human Sacrifice?

2011-09-28T21:55:00.005-04:00

(Bloody human sacrifice in Ancient Mexico, that may, or may not, be just like the human sacrifices that the Mormons, may, or may not, perform; 16th-century illustration from a Codex).

"When this sign and portent was first seen, [they] were overcome with terror, weeping and shouting and crying out...These shouts and cries were accompanied by sacrifices of blood and of human beings, for this was their practice whenever they thought they were endangered by some calamity." — Not a quote from the Book of Mormon but from The Broken Spears, The Aztec Account of the Conquest of Mexico edited by Miguel Leon-Portilla

"The messengers went to the [temple]...The two captives were then sacrificed before his eyes: their breasts were torn open and the messengers were sprinkled with their blood. This was done because the messengers had completed a difficult mission: they had seen the gods...they had even conversed with the gods!" — Not a quote from Mormon Elder Brigham Young, but another from The Broken Spears

It was almost fifteen years ago that I was initiated into the religion of Santeria; it was a life-changing event, and though I am no longer really active in the religion I am ever grateful for the blessings and changes it brought to my life. As most everybody knows, Santeria is notorious for including the widely misunderstood practice of animal sacrifice. In truth, animal sacrifice is a somewhat disguised component of most of today's religions including the big three Abrahamic faiths, but it's usually considered something prettier and less controversial, like Easter dinner or Passover. Without going into it at great length, the offering of animals in Santeria is most definitely not an exercise in macabre animal cruelty, it's a respectful ritual act that connects worshippers with the mysteries of the life force in a graphic experience of communion. In most cases, though not all, the animals are cooked and eaten, just like that lamb you eat for Easter. It's definitely a challenging part of the religion for those of us who grew up around store-packaged meat, but it ultimately teaches humanity and the sacredness of life. No cute kittens — or human babies — are harmed. It's not some antisocial or Satanic worship of death and gore (and please note Satanism is a subset of somebody else's religion, and that would be Christianity), and despite the occasional slanderous B-movie or tabloid exposé, Santeros most certainly do not sacrifice people.

Anyway my initiation ceremony was a beautiful and transformative thing, altering my consciousness and the way my spirituality is wired like nothing else I have experienced. Two of the priestesses there were elders in the religion, a lesbian couple who I'll call R & R. One was Puertorican, the other non-Hispanic of Jewish ancestry. They were knowledgeable and experienced priestesses, and also very generous and giving people. New initiates are especially encouraged to visit the homes of elders in the religion during their first year, when they're walking around clothed in a protective and identifying total white. R & R were wonderfully welcoming to me; especially considering my own status among the small minority of non-Hispanic white people drawn to what is fundamentally a religion of the African diaspora.

It was probably at one of their ocha birthdays that we were all sitting around their living room in Manhattan. R & R were discussing a recent vacation. They had been out west, I think to Vegas with a side trip to Salt Lake City, Utah. They were regaling us with their visit to the huge Mormon Temple there. I don't remember which of these two Santeria priestesses, expert at the handy dispatch of a chicken, was doing most of the talking: "And we saw the altar! You know beneath that altar is where they do the secret human sacrifices." A hush went over the room. "Really. They do them right there! Oh they don't admit it, but everybody knows they do it." The other priests and priestesses in the room shook their heads and clucked their tongues. "How horrible!" everybody agreed.

(Above is the Mormon Temple in Salt Lake City where Mitt Romney may, or may not, conduct his human sacrifices, if he performs them, which he may not.)

Two of the 2012 Republican presidential candidates are Mormons, one the allegedly moderate Jon Huntsman competing for last place; the other tabula rasa trojan horse not-so-moderate Mitt Romney competing for first. And it turns out that more people than my Santeria priestess friends think the Mormons have a human sacrifice problem. If you go to google and start typing "Mormon human", right after the prompt for "Mormon humanitarian efforts" pops up the prompt "Mormon human sacrifice."

It turns out that Evangelical Christians, a base of today's extremist Republican party, do not consider Mormons, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, actual Christians. And very many of them think the Mormon Church is up to no good at all. Researching this post I found websites devoted to accusing the Mormons of being the Illuminati, Freemasons, Kabbalistic Jews, Satanic homosexual child abusers, Jehovah's Witnesses, and, of course, Satanic sacrificers of human children.

I would say that the Mormons, Mitt Romney, Jon Huntsman, and the Republican party saddled with candidates that its base doesn't trust, have a big, big problem. Would you want your child to be kissed by Mitt Romney if you were worried he would afterwards snatch it up and hurl it onto an altar of blood-letting? I mean, hey, Wikipedia might explain that the doctrine of blood atonement doesn't mean modern Mormons have anything to do with something as bizarre as human sacrifice, but sites like "Real Mormon History" shout "Holy Murder" begging to differ.

So what's the truth?

Well, you know there's an old saying: you made your bed now you lie in it.

I actually know some former Mormons who regret the church's repressive nature, but who remember their childhoods in the church, or their missionary year, with some fondness. Of course most of the gay former Mormons I know don't look back with anything less than a certain anger. There's a movie I heartily recommend called "Brigham City," that is a small-town crime story made by a Mormon director that is tremendously touching and humanizing. You come away watching this film getting something profound about the nature of community that seems to be of deep spiritual importance for Mormons. It's a beautiful film. It helped me to respect the many mysterious ways that spirit calls to people: some are called to religions that outsiders don't get. I don't challenge that at all; spirit is a beautiful and mysterious thing. I don't challenge anyone's right to follow a spiritual path of his or her own calling, including LDS Mormonism. I don't want my religious practices to be judged unfairly, and I can understand Mormons not wanting theirs to be judged unfairly either.

But here's what else I know: the Mormon Church has spent an untold fortune trying to deny the civil rights of lesbians and gays. They sunk an uncountable fortune into the at least temporarily successful effort (Prop 8) to repeal marriage equality in California. They are widely believed to be one of the main bankrollers of the anti-gay hate group NOM, "The National Organization for [sic] Marriage," that has quite successfully derailed marriage equality in a number of states. The Mormon church, as an organization, is hateful and bigoted: and like many Evangelical Christian churches and the Catholic church, doesn't understand or respect the difference between secular law and church law. The Mormon church and its allies are actively trying to deny equal rights to gay people....to match religious principles that people outside that church don't share. That is simply unforgivable: the separation of church and state should be absolute and inviolable.

Mitt Romney may be an former east-coast governor and alleged social moderate, but he is 100% behind his church's efforts to deny civil rights to lesbians and gays. He's also a sworn enemy of a woman's right to choose, and of family planning. His politics on the subject of marriage equality are no different than right-wing freakshows Rick Santorum or Michele Bachmann. His views on immigration are horrible: he supports walling off the U.S. from Mexico (of course in true hypocritical fashion he's also reputed to have hired cheap undocumented workers to mow his lawn). Mitt Romney may or may not actually engage in human sacrifice — I wouldn't know the man, um, from Adam — but he certainly wants to sacrifice the rights of some Americans on the altar of his religious beliefs, and that is deeply, deeply troubling.

Is voting for people who want to deprive some Americans of their rights any worse than voting for people who might, or might not, secretly kill babies?

The evidence suggests that the idea that Mitt Romney and other Mormons are actively committing blood sacrifice of children or adults in the secret inner sanctuaries of their temples is nothing more than a crazy and delusional paranoid conspiracy theory, based on the all-too human tendency to demonize that which one does not understand. But hey, what do I know? They want to deny me civil rights, so maybe they do have a taste for human blood or maybe they don't. Maybe if their church joined the civilized world of respect for civil rights people wouldn't question their secret motivations.

Hey Mitt Romney, kiss my baby! You'll give it back, right? Right? As long as it's not gay?

(Any longtime readers will recognize part of this post is a retelling of a tale I told four years ago, during the last presidential cycle).

If You're Not Careful...

2011-09-27T23:40:00.002-04:00

Floating around facebook: "If you're not careful, the newspapers will have you hating the people who are being oppressed, and loving the people who are doing the oppressing." —Malcolm X

Using Chemical Weapons Against "Their Own People"

2011-09-26T21:09:00.003-04:00

This disturbing video of protests related to the "Occupy Wall Street" encampment in downtown New York City, shows peaceful protesters in a mesh pen set up by police being attacked, unprovoked, by cops with so-called pepper spray, a non-lethal chemical weapon.

The longer video below shows considerably more violence on the part of the police, who are shown assaulting and physically abusing other protesters, also unprovoked. There's dragging of young women by big burly cops, and the unbelievable scene where a copy kneels on a protester's neck so he can cuff him.

I confess to not knowing much about the groups behind these protests. I read some good things and things that concerned me. I haven't been down to the site of the protests to see for myself who they are. But no matter, they're fighting a good — if a little unfocused — fight and apparently, they have provoked Mayor Bloomberg's notoriously repressive police force into showing its true colors. This is the same police force cited for abuse of free speech outside the Republican convention a few years ago; the force that is constantly being reprimanded for its racist "random search and seizure" policies, and its frequent gunning down of unarmed African-Americans guilty of being black.

I noticed this disturbing trend of penning up smaller protests a few years ago: it kind of freaked me out when I went to a peace rally and found it herded behind metal barriers onto a side street out of sight. It's now clear what stage two of this pen 'em up philosophy is.

This is a clearly a violation of people's rights to free speech and protest. Not surprising. I think government at all levels is clearly freaked about the possibility of the worldwide protests of the past year spreading to this country. Somebody explain to me how this is different, other than by degree of severity, than what repressive Middle Eastern regimes are doing? Hello Egypt, Syria, Yemen, Israel?

Somewhat related thematically, be sure to read up on the protesters in California now convicted of exercising their right to free speech in protesting the Israeli Ambassador. Disturbing stuff.

(Thanks to Joe.My.God. for hipping me to both videos.)

Sunday Reading: The "Lives" Parody

2011-09-25T17:03:00.007-04:00

I'm not a journalist. I write for self-expression, or fun, or sanity, or to give myself the illusion of power in a powerless world. It can be a kind of desktop activism, and a spiritual exercise. I've rarely been paid for my writing, though I certainly would relish the opportunity to be paid for expressing myself. Anyone who reads this blog knows I'm not shy about expressing my opinion. But I also just like the beauty of words, the turn of a phrase. I'm happy with our twenty-first century internet overstimulation. I read things that stimulate my mind and imagination, and things that I wish I'd written, that I wish I'd had the clarity to express.

I grew up with the tradition that Sunday was a day to luxuriate in reading, starting with an excursion out the door to buy the Sunday Times. There's a weekly column on the last page of the New York Times Sunday Magazine called "Lives." For years this column has annoyed the hell out of me. I'm not sure what the column is supposed to achieve each week, but it's usually a first-person nostalgic journey through someone's difficult life learning experience. Except that by the time you're finished reading the short page-long story, you're left with a vague distaste for the story's writer and a sense that you've read something strangely inappropriate that you wished you hadn't. "Lives" columns usually don't have happy endings, and while that might mirror the episodic disappointments present in anybody's real life, the cliche-ridden predictability of these stories is a marvel. I was talking with friends about the column and we realized we all often turned to the "Lives" column first just for a kind of sardonic laugh.

Here's a couple typically bleak recent excerpts:

"After all, my life as I know it began 23 years ago, when, in a freakish accident, I was hit in the head by a ceiling fan in our home in Fort Worth, Tex...." — Sept. 16

"The house keys are peeled from a ring. Sometimes they thank me. Sometimes they cry....At least I don’t make them turn out the lights one last time as they leave. That’s my job." — Sept. 23

"And then a few months ago, his mother called. She said her son had taught his last class of the semester, cashed his paycheck and padlocked himself in a hotel room with an ample supply of crack, heroin and alcohol. An autopsy confirmed he died of an overdose." — Sept. 9

"George dares me to send this former classmate a friend request on Facebook, “for closure,” and I do. I am almost giddy... A day goes by. No response. Then a week. Then another week. I quietly delete the request. And there I am again, the 12-year-old girl who can’t look herself in the mirror." — July 29

You get the idea. There are familiar patterns: a random multiculturalism, the illusive nature of hope, the ever-presence of random tragedy, a sense of oversharing navel gazing that has nevertheless failed to make its author more self-aware. After laughing at a few columns with friends, we weren't convinced that someone wasn't pulling a fast one by submitting parodies to print. We thought, what if we wrote actual parodies of a Sunday Magazine "Lives Column"? And so that is what I've done. With my profound apologies I offer it up for your Sunday edification. Please note this is a work of deeply off-color fiction.

-----

LIVES

My parents quickly warmed to my choice of brides.

Soon after I introduced them to Susan, they opened their lives to her. My mother and Susan would go shopping together at the mall; they’d luncheon during the week when I was at work.

I was first taken aback at this added dimension of intimacy. Susan seemed to enjoy my parents’ company more than I did, sometimes.

Of course Mom and Dad had to tell Susan all the family stories. No childhood embarrassment was taboo. The time I had almost ran over the neighbor’s cat with my first hand-me down car. And there were the tales of Frankie, the twin who was lost one sad winter to a case of pneumonia none of us understood until it was too late.

“Oh Frankie was a special little boy, Susan,” my mother regaled late one warm summer evening. We were in the screened-in porch. “He used to pick dandelions from the front lawn and hand them to me in the kitchen. He’d hang on to my apron and say ‘I love you mommy’ and I’d tell him he was my special sailor boy.” My mom pushed back a tear.

“It was funny, Susan, your George here,” she pointed at me, mom did, “he was a nice boy, but not giving and generous like Frankie. Oh heavens, I remember when we were toilet training those boys…”

“Mom, must you?” I tried to interject, tried to salvage some of my own dignity.

“Oh hush, George.” She laughed as a memory surfaced. “Anyway one day little Frankie came out of the bathroom with his hands outstretched, full of a mess, saying ‘Mommy look what I made all by myself! Am I a good little boy? Mommy’” Mom and Dad both chuckled in the memory. Dad turned away as the chuckle turned into a little sob. “Oh yes, Frankie, I told him, you’re a good little boy. Mommy’s little sailor. But let’s go wash our hands now baby. Oh that child, he sure tried hard. Not like our little George here. Isn’t that right George?”

Mom gave my ear a good tug and walked in to the kitchen to refill her tumbler of wine.

Susan and I were married later that year. It was a beautiful time. Sadly Dad passed on the very next year; I got promoted at work and we decided to start a family. Mom wasn’t handling the loss of Dad too well so Susan and I talked it over and decided we would invite Mom to move in with us. Susan was pregnant and Mom could help with our new arrival. Susan’s parents has returned to their native Malaysia and I knew she could use the help and support.

Neither of us realized what kind of state Mom was really in. She had taken to drinking just a little bit too much, too often. And at first we were able to dismiss her sudden lapses of memory as quaint senior moments but it soon became clear things were not all right at all.

One day I came home from work and she called out to me “Oh, Frankie! Where have you been!” she grabbed the sides of my head and embraced me tightly. “Mom, it’s me, George…Frankie’s gone, don’t you remember?” The blissful look on her face soured immediately.

“Oh George…it’s only you. Leave me alone.”

“Can’t you see your mother’s tired, George? Leave her alone.” I was surprised at Susan interjecting like that. We went to bed tense, a wooden silence between us for the first time.

The policemen who rang the doorbell the next evening said that they didn’t have a chance in that downpour, the semi was coming too fast, the driving rain causing a chain of events nobody shorter than God could have prevented. Susan was gone. Mom, who had been driving her home from a baby shower, was in ICU.

I rushed to the hospital. Mom was hooked up to tubes and machines. Groggily, she looked my way. “Frankie? Frankie!” Awareness straightened the smile on her face. “Oh, George. Only you. Where’s my little sailor boy Frankie?” Dried blood caked the weak hand she lifted up from the bed questioningly.

I went into the small hospital bathroom. I strained, I reached back, and filled my hands with love for my mother.

“Mommy? Mommy do you love me?” I raised my hands to her as I came out of the bathroom, dripping, reeking. She smiled.

“Yes Frankie. My perfect little boy.”

The Betrayal

2011-09-22T21:09:00.010-04:00

"Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman on Tuesday presented the United Nations with his draft for a population and territory swap, as part of an eventual peace deal between Israel and the Palestinians. Under Lieberman's controversial scheme, part of Israel's Arab population would be moved to a newly created Palestinians state, in return for evacuation of Israeli settlements in the West Bank.'A final agreement between Israel and the Palestinians has to be based on a program of exchange of territory and populations,' Lieberman told the United Nations General Assembly in New York."
— rightwing Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman advocating the ethnic cleansing of Israel, in 2010, quoted in Ha'aretz

"Or, we can say that this time will be different – that this time we will not let terror, or turbulence, or posturing, or petty politics stand in the way. This time, we will think not of ourselves, but of the young girl in Gaza who wants to have no ceiling on her dreams, or the young boy in Sderot who wants to sleep without the nightmare of rocket fire. This time, we should draw upon the teachings of tolerance that lie at the heart of three great religions that see Jerusalem’s soil as sacred. This time we should reach for what’s best within ourselves. If we do, when we come back here next year, we can have an agreement that will lead to a new member of the United Nations – an independent state of Palestine, living in peace with Israel.”
— Barack Obama at the United Nations, September 2010

"Let us be honest with ourselves: Israel is surrounded by neighbors that have waged repeated wars against it. Israel’s citizens have been killed by rockets fired at their houses and suicide bombs on their buses. Israel’s children come of age knowing that throughout the region, other children are taught to hate them. Israel, a small country of less than eight million people, look out at a world where leaders of much larger nations threaten to wipe it off of the map. The Jewish people carry the burden of centuries of exile and persecution, and fresh memories of knowing that six million people were killed simply because of who they are. Those are facts. They cannot be denied....And we will only succeed in that effort if we can encourage the parties to sit down, to listen to each other, and to understand each other’s hopes and each other’s fears. That is the project to which America is committed. There are no shortcuts. And that is what the United Nations should be focused on in the weeks and months to come."
— Barack Obama at UN, September 2011, effectively announcing that the U.S. will veto the application of Palestine to the UN Security Council for recognized statehood

'Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman congratulated President Barack Obama Wednesday on his speech at the United Nations General assembly, praising him for not stating that negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians should be based on 1967 borders. “I congratulate President Obama, and I am ready to sign on this speech with both hands.”'
— Avigdor Lieberman on Obama's 2011 UN speech, reported in Ha'aretz

"I did not believe what I heard, it sounded as if the Palestinians were occupying Israel. There was no empathy for the Palestinians, he only spoke of the Israeli problems."
— Hanan Ashrawi, a member of the Palestinian UN delegation

"Let's be honest: Israel is surrounded by neighbors that have waged repeated wars against it. [false] Israel's citizens have been killed by rockets fired at their houses and suicide bombs on their buses. [correct but this should be balanced by explaining that 10 times more Palestinians were butchered] Israel's children come of age knowing that throughout the region, other children are taught to hate them. [Israelis teach hate 100 more times than the other way around and hate of the colonizer to the colonized is not the same as the reverse]. Israel, a small country of less than eight million people, looks out at a world where leaders of much larger nations threaten to wipe it off of the map. [That is nonsense; Israel wiped Palestine including 530 villages and towns and now is the fourth strongest country plus having you Obama and Congress as its lackeys]. The Jewish people carry the burden of centuries of exile, persecution, and the fresh memory of knowing that six million people were killed simply because of who they were. [Irrelevant and highly emotional: just study the history of Nazi-Zionist collaboration to see how absurd to link Apartheid Israel with "The Jewish People", itself a mistaken term no more valid than concepts of "The Christian People" or "The Muslim People"]. These facts cannot be denied [they are regurgitation of Zionist myths, irrelevant facts, and half truths]. The Jewish people have forged a successful state in their historic homeland [a racist apartheid state based on land theft and ethnic cleansing; is that your definition of success?]. Israel deserves recognition [no it does not, Israel deserves to be faced with the truth and pressured to transform just like Apartheid South Africa]..."
— Obama's speech with bracketed comments from blogger and Professor Mazin Qumsiyeh at Birzeit University in Palestine

"Palestinians have a better chance of getting a state on Craigslist than from Barack Obama... Not a word about settlements or occupation. Not a word about Palestinian conditions, or Palestinian nonviolent resistance, while he sang praises of the Arab spring. No sense of the strategic let alone moral urgency of ending the longest military occupation in modern history."
— Philip Weiss of Mondoweiss blog

"This morning Mr. President you are so popular in Israel. You are the king of Israel. You did great job. It will be such a shame if you lose the next elections after such a speech. While you where speaking at the UN, Ahed Wahdan, a 15-year-old Palestinian boy who was shot yesterday by Israeli soldiers with rubber bullet in his eye, listened to you....We listened to you when you talked about Israel’s citizens who have been killed by rockets fired at their houses, and that other children are taught to hate Israeli children. Do you not think that Israeli children hear what is said by rabbis who preach hate about Arabs? And we listened about Jewish suffering. No doubt Jewish people have suffered Mr. Obama, but let us put things in order: Jewish people are not the victims here. The Israeli state is not the victim; it is the occupier and the oppressor which continues to deny Palestinians living in their homeland and in exile ‘their universal right to live in freedom and dignity’. When you fail to mention Palestinian suffer under occupation, when you fail to consider Palestinian children as equal human beings who deserve a better future, who are also entitled to human rights, you might win elections, but you lose your integrity, and you make it clear to everyone why the ‘so called peace process’ should be out of your hands. We listened to you when you said “there are no shortcuts”, we couldn’t stop wondering, how come South Sudan deserved such a shortcut? A new precedent has been made with the case of South Sudan, UN recognition in five days. No need to answer, we understand that the interests there are different, and so are the standards and the values."
— Palestinian feminist blogger Abir Kopty

The Palestinian Delegation has promised to bring its application for statehood to the Security Council on Friday.

The white areas of the map at top show the areas of the West Bank "accessible" to Palestinians; this fragmented area is the basis for all the proposals made by Israel for a Palestinian micro-state. Note the lack of an international border. The colored areas on the map below show the Bantustans, fake "nations," that white-minority ruled apartheid South Africa was gradually granting "independence" before the establishment of majority rule and the dismantling of apartheid. Hmm....notice the similarities? Top map snagged from Zunguzungu.

"I Am Troy Davis, and I Am Free!"

2011-09-21T14:03:00.008-04:00

A message from Troy Davis, an innocent man who is scheduled to be put to death by the racist state of Georgia tonight. His last appeals for clemency seem to have been denied.

"To All:

I want to thank all of you for your efforts and dedication to Human Rights and Human Kindness, in the past year I have experienced such emotion, joy, sadness and never ending faith. It is because of all of you that I am alive today, as I look at my sister Martina I am marveled by the love she has for me and of course I worry about her and her health, but as she tells me she is the eldest and she will not back down from this fight to save my life and prove to the world that I am innocent of this terrible crime.

As I look at my mail from across the globe, from places I have never ever dreamed I would know about and people speaking languages and expressing cultures and religions I could only hope to one day see first hand. I am humbled by the emotion that fills my heart with overwhelming, overflowing Joy. I can’t even explain the insurgence of emotion I feel when I try to express the strength I draw from you all, it compounds my faith and it shows me yet again that this is not a case about the death penalty, this is not a case about Troy Davis, this is a case about Justice and the Human Spirit to see Justice prevail.

I cannot answer all of your letters but I do read them all, I cannot see you all but I can imagine your faces, I cannot hear you speak but your letters take me to the far reaches of the world, I cannot touch you physically but I feel your warmth everyday I exist.

So Thank you and remember I am in a place where execution can only destroy your physical form but because of my faith in God, my family and all of you I have been spiritually free for some time and no matter what happens in the days, weeks to come, this Movement to end the death penalty, to seek true justice, to expose a system that fails to protect the innocent must be accelerated. There are so many more Troy Davis’. This fight to end the death penalty is not won or lost through me but through our strength to move forward and save every innocent person in captivity around the globe. We need to dismantle this Unjust system city by city, state by state and country by country.

I can’t wait to Stand with you, no matter if that is in physical or spiritual form, I will one day be announcing,

“I AM TROY DAVIS, and I AM FREE!”

Never Stop Fighting for Justice and We will Win!

What a tragedy. My heart goes out to Troy Davis's family. Once again, the true nature of justice in America reveals itself.

From Soa-watch, via Kasama

UPDATE: As of 10:20 pm the execution has been temporarily stayed while it is reviewed by the U.S. Supreme Court.

CODA: Alas, my update was just a moment too soon. After the Supreme Court refused to stay the execution, Troy Davis was murdered by the government of Georgia just after 11pm this evening. Rest in peace. Jesus wept.

Peoples of the World, Beware!

2011-09-20T21:14:00.007-04:00

"At the same time, Libya is a lesson in what the international community can achieve when we stand together as one. I said at the beginning of this process, we cannot and should not intervene every time there is an injustice in the world. Yet it’s also true that there are times where the world could have and should have summoned the will to prevent the killing of innocents on a horrific scale. And we are forever haunted by the atrocities that we did not prevent, and the lives that we did not save. But this time was different. This time, we, through the United Nations, found the courage and the collective will to act....

The United States was proud to play a decisive role, especially in the early days, and then in a supporting capacity. But let’s remember that it was the Arab League that appealed for action. It was the world’s most effective alliance, NATO, that’s led a military coalition of nearly 20 nations. It’s our European allies -- especially the United Kingdom and France and Denmark and Norway -- that conducted the vast majority of air strikes protecting rebels on the ground. It was Arab states who joined the coalition, as equal partners.

This is how the international community should work in the 21st century -- more nations bearing the responsibility and the costs of meeting global challenges. In fact, this is the very purpose of this United Nations. So every nation represented here today can take pride in the innocent lives we saved and in helping Libyans reclaim their country. It was the right thing to do....

First, and most immediately: security. So long as the Libyan people are being threatened, the NATO-led mission to protect them will continue.... For without security, democracy and trade and investment cannot flourish."

—President Obama at the United Nations today

Read between those lines very carefully. This is why the American/NATO intervention was wrong, and much worse than the faux left-wing Qaddafi dictatorship on a grand scale. With the Libyan action U.S. imperialism, the world's sole superpower, was announcing that the disaster of Iraq would not stop it from deciding for the world's peoples which of their governments, which of their struggles, which of their aspirations, are deemed legitimate. All the pretty talk about saving lives, let's tell it plainly, is utter bullshit.

Tell the people of Bahrain that the U.S. cares about democracy. Tell the people of Gaza the U.S. cares about saving lives. Tell the people of Yemen the U.S. cares about injustice.

Even the New York Times sees between those lines. Check out how they reported this speech: ' “Today the world is saying, in one unmistakable voice, ‘We will stand with you as you seize this moment of promise; as you reach for the freedom, the dignity and the opportunity you deserve,’ ” he said Tuesday. But he was talking about Libyans, not Palestinians. American officials say that Palestinian statehood at the United Nations will jeopardize the peace process; Israel is adamantly opposed to United Nations recognition of a Palestinian state.' [italic emphasis added]

The most powerful war machine on earth (and we know that's not Denmark and Norway) now knows it can get away with sending remote-controlled death from above on your country, your cities, your revolution, your counterrevolution — no matter — with total impunity. They will get away with it. They will claim it is the will of the "international community." And there is nothing you can do about it. There is no way you can fight back against it.

And if you are not in their pocket, do not offer them the proper strategic or "trade and investment" opportunities, they will look the other way. They will ask you to "negotiate." They will stab you in the back. Beware what has now been unleashed.

Graphic is a 1960s Cultural Revolution-era Chinese poster, snagged from the extraordinary ChinesePosters.net. It reads, optimistically: "Awakened peoples, you will certainly attain the ultimate victory!"

What Is Yesterday's Media Racism Tomorrow?

2011-09-19T20:28:00.008-04:00

Inspired by a post on the "We Are Respectable Negroes" blog, a favorite, I decided to search for a few choice keywords on the vast archives of the New York Times. To explicate the irony of its own name, WARN was looking for historical uses of the phrase "respectable negroes." I wondered what other keywords might be searched. I chose the racist epithet "darkies." Having recently returned from a holiday in Bermuda, one of the 1,390 search results caught my horrified attention. From the April 8, 1883 issue of the New York Times: (You can lick on the graphic above to read the whole thing)

"SURPLUS WHISKY.
BERMUDA DARKIES FATTEN ON THE GENUINE AMERICAN BLUE GRASS

The steam-ship Orinoco came in last Sunday, bringing a large number of passengers and valuable cargo from Bermuda. This is the season when Bermuda vegetables are beginning to ripen, and when they bring the highest prices in the New York market...."

The article goes on to explain how this ship did not contain onions and potatoes, but barrels of whiskey. An early form of tax sheltering, whiskey was taken to Bermuda, and then reimported, saving duties and presumably interstate taxes. But oh the wry nags at the NY Times have "humor" on their minds in this tale of complicated corruption:

"Among the 8,000 or more colored persons in Bermuda, there are several who have a liking for strong drink, and who are particularly fond of American whisky. When the officer on duty [at the port of Hamilton] is at the other end of the town such unrighteous persons have only to conceal themselves among the barrels of whisky, produce a gimlet and a straw, and operate. In this way Bermuda darkies have been known to intoxicate themselves so thoroughly in 10 minutes that it took them a fortnight to straighten out. Whisky sucked out of a barrel through a straw would not ordinarily be considered an enticing beverage, but to the Bermuda colored mind, it touches the right spot. This gimlet and straw act has come to be so well understood on the balmy islands that when one of the dusky bacchanals remains sober longer than seems natural it is said of him that 'he's lost his gimlet.'"....

Perhaps this was a normal display of white editorial racism in 1883. It probably was. But it should serve as a cautionary tale about time, context, and the mutability of point of view. When today's media, even today's New York Times, the avowed American flagship of mainstream liberal journalism of record, wax wryly or even authoritatively on the politics or cultural affairs of others outside its own narrow frame of reference, how much horror-provoking nonsense are they recording for future generations of students of media?

I think particularly of the attitude of American media to the Palestinian people. How quick the media are, even liberal media like The Times, to follow up the word "Palestinian" with "terrorism." How quick they are to establish that the editorial point of view, the us talking about them is you know, Americans and Israelis together. How quick is the media to line up behind conventional wisdom and popular sentiment. How horrifying in a town where a recent special congressional election having nothing actually to do with Israel was won on the basis of which candidate was more slavishly devoted to ensuring total obedience to Israel in foreign policy, to the point where the winning Republican had an Israeli flag on the dais behind him at his election night victory rally. The media could know better, if it chose to, right now, not in 130 years.

Hopefully The Times is embarrassed by its casually repeated use of the word "darkies" (much less "dusky bacchanals') a century ago. Though I did not note an apology for said usage. Let's just say that in the future more embarrassment, more apologies, need to be forthcoming. And a little sooner.

Work Makes You Free!

2011-09-17T10:18:00.003-04:00

Above each of their labor camps the German Nazis installed a sign that read "Arbeit Macht Frei," or "Work Makes You Free." The Nazis believed that certain people were good only for slave labor, and the concentration camps that were not designed as extermination camps were a source for super low-cost labor for German industry, where no regulations and no unions would interfere with eeking out every last drop of productive energy for corporate profit. As everyone knows, the Nazis believed that non "Aryans" like Jews and Roma (so-called Gypsies) were inferiors, parasites on the society of actual German citizenry. Of course "Work Makes You Free" was also a lie. There was no exit intended from the labor camps.

Which brings us to the clip below from right-wing Iowa Republican congressman Steve King below.

A few choice excerpts: "John Smith said, clear back then in the 1600s, No work, no eat. And that's part of the New Testament... We can't have a nation of slackers... and borrow money to pay the welfare of people who won't work."

What a horrifying and fascinating speech: utterly revealing about the mindset of the Republicans and their "tea party" fascists. He seems to be implying that the unemployment crisis is somehow voluntary, due to laziness. This is absolute dog whistle racist code speech. Which he even tries to justify with a Bible quote, for crissake. Who exactly is he talking about? This is standard white Republican code for the masses of blacks and hispanics who, with their insidious plots like ACORN, they imagine, actually caused the economic crisis.

You can see that he doesn't really believe that unemployment is a real problem, and that in some fundamental way he opposes social programs like unemployment compensation and foodstamps. This is what the Republicans mean when they talk about "job-killing regulations": they mean the regulation to pay a living wage and the regulation to care for the citizenry when the economy is in crisis. They believe that if all the "slackers" would get off their asses and work for less than minimum wage, the job crisis would be over.

Hmm. What did they have back in the 1600s that we don't have today? Perhaps there's a wise solution there? Serfdom? Indentured servitude? SLAVERY? Let's take America back...to 1650! The politics of Republicans like King may not be short steps from the institution of Nazi-style repression and labor camps, but it is indeed short steps away from the ideological justification for them.

Tip on Steve King thanks to Joe.My.God. "Arbeit Macht Frei" sign at Sachsenhausen concentration camp near Berlin, photo by me.

Late Summer

2011-09-15T21:54:00.005-04:00

I had to stay late at work today...with the fringe benefit of catching this beautiful late summer sunset. Above is more or less the view over my shoulder from my desk. Below, a wider panorama of the same view and at bottom, the sun exploding into fire over New Jersey. That's the Empire State Building above.

I was going to rant about a few things tonight...the Republicans who would rather people die than get healthcare and want to make sure little girls are at the mercy of preventable diseases... the four congressional Democrats who put a bill up today to blackmail, er, take away foreign aid from any nation that votes for Palestinian statehood in the U.N.... the Obama administration's shameful appeasement of Netanyahu for Jewish votes and their abject denial of Palestinian self-determination.... The horrible anti-gay hatred about to be written into the North Carolina state constitution....

But I'll save it. Ahhhh...

Speaking of Never Forgetting

2011-09-13T20:58:00.006-04:00

Forty years ago today New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller unleashed the full and brutal armed might of the state against the rebellious prisoners at the Attica State Prison. Hundreds were shot and injured. Dozens were killed indiscriminately by Rockefeller's storm troopers, including prison guard hostages who had been unharmed by the rebels:

William Allen, Elliott (L. D.) Barkley, John B. Barnes, Edward Cunningham (hostage), John J. D’Arcangelo (hostage), Bernard Davis, Allen Durham, Willie Fuller, Melvin D. Gray, Elmer G Hardie (hostage), Robert J. Henigan, Kenneth E. Hess, Thomas B. Hicks, Emanuel Johnson, Herbert W. Jones Jr. (hostage), Richard J Lewis (hostage), Charles Lundy, Kenneth B. Malloy, Gidell Martin, William B. McKinney, Lorenzo McNeil, Samuel Melville, Edward R. Menefee, Jose Mentijo, Milton Menyweather, John G. Monteleone, (hostage), Richard Moore, Carlos Prescott, Michael Privitiera, William E. Quinn (hostage), Raymond Rivera, James B. Robinson, Santiago Santos, Barry J. Schwartz, Harold Thomas, Carl Valone (hostage), Rafael Vasquez, Melvin Ware, Elon F. Werner (hostage), Ronald Werner (hostage), Willie West, Harrison Whalen (hostage), Alfred William

The New York Times revealed a newly-released tape recording of Rockefeller reporting to President Nixon on the success of the attack on the prisoners: “They did a fabulous job,” Rockefeller told Nixon. “It really was a beautiful operation.” You can hear how disgusting Rockefeller's gloating is on an audioclip at the NYTimes link.

As far as I'm concerned it is Rockefeller's name that should be forgotten.

(Names from the excellent downloadable resource "Attica Prison Uprising 101: A Short Primer" from Attica Is All Of Us.) The more you read about the rebellion and its causes and aftermath, the more furious you will be.

Anti-Americana: From the Mouths of Babes

2011-09-12T12:00:00.002-04:00

A child's drawing from Gaza; part of an exhibition that was to have been held by The Museum of Children's Art in Oakland, California, entitled "A Child's View of Gaza." Under protest of pro-Israel lobbyists, the exhibition was cancelled. See no evil and it doesn't exist, apparently. But even the little children of Gaza know where the weapons come from that kill their parents, their siblings, their friends, their relatives. Silence the little children and maybe it will all go away.

Excellent discussion of the shutdown at Democracy Sometimes: "Imagine for a moment that MOCHA were presenting an exhibition of Tibetan children’s art, and supporters of the Chinese government protested that allowing people to see drawings by children who lived under Chinese occupation was anti-Chinese. Not only can I not conceive that MOCHA would cave in to the pressure and cancel the show, but if they did, every human rights and civil liberties organization in town, or in the country, would be screaming foul. In fact, I would bet that the same Jewish organizations who act so decisively and aggressively to shut down anything that might generate sympathy for Palestinians would be among those decrying censorship by pro-Chinese forces."

For more examples of Anti-American art featured here at The Cahokian, click here.

911 remembered: two images

2011-09-11T11:30:00.001-04:00

The elegant "Towers of Light" memorial, from the site of the World Trade Center in New York City, last night. Photo by me.

The chart that says it all. From RT, via Kasama.

Echoes of a Past Life: Dies Irae

2011-09-11T01:00:00.003-04:00

This is my 911 story, reposted from last year. I post it here as a ritual contribution to the tenth year anniversary of the tragedy; but I don't think I'll be reposting it every year. The murder of so many innocent people was horrific, but the fact that they were Americans does not make it a more horrific event than the drawn out murder of many thousands more around the world in the decade since. The innocents killed so senselessly in the decade of revenge after 2001 were priceless, multidimensional and unique human beings snuffed out as unjustly as the American officeworkers and firefighters were at the Twin Towers, and it doesn't help to know that many of those killed in the past few years were done so on the questionable claims of American leaders. Whether targets or the obscenely labelled "collateral" deaths: they're just as dead and gone, and their survivors suffer equally. It's time to move on, not from the memories of the treasured souls we lost, but from waving 911 about as though it qualifies American survivors for some kind of uniquely righteous grief. My heart goes out to those who lost relatives, lovers and friends on that day, but if people started seeing the faces of their lost loved ones in the faces of somebody else's lost loved ones taken by American militarism in distant lands, then maybe we'd be further along to preventing future senseless tragedies.

My friend Jim lived uptown, and I lived in Brooklyn. We'd meet up midway between us, often at the World Trade Center. Jim had an entirely questionable fetish for Marvin the Martian and underneath the WTC plaza, near the massive banks of escalators going down to the Path trains was a shop that sold cartoon trinkets like Marvin the Martian figurines. So stopping there was always a plus for him, before walking to Chinatown for lunch or hopping on a Path train to visit a mall in Jersey. I remember seeing a poster for the Windows on the World restaurant, thinking that it would be an awesome place to get a meal. Somehow we never made it there, until, well, it stopped being there; returned to an ethereal spot of empty sky.

On Tuesday, September 11, I walked a couple short blocks from my apartment in Brooklyn to the school where I was going to cast votes in an election primary. God what a beautiful day. Blue sky, warm but not hot. It wasn't a presidential year--that had been a disaster the previous fall--and I don't even remember who I was voting for. I got to the school when I noticed a small handful of people standing on the corner. I asked them what was going on. Prospect Heights wasn't called that for nothing; one of the highest spots in Brooklyn. They pointed and plain as day you could see the twin towers of the World Trade Center. Funny thing, there was smoke coming out of one of them. "It's on fire," someone said. If there was anything in their voice it was doubt and confusion. Such a thing was hard to fathom. How would the fire trucks spray water up so high? "Oh wow my wife works there. I hope she's ok," said a man nervously. Others muttered reassuringly. I went into the school. Turnout was light, of course. When I got out of the school the people were still on the corner. I looked up at the smoke. Strange, I thought.

As I crossed the street out of view of the Manhattan sky I heard loud gasps behind me. Two women had moved their hands to their faces. I walked on, a little more confused, but I didn't want to be late for work. I walked around the corner to the diner to pick up coffee and a roll. I could see smoke drifting in the sky, but couldn't see the towers. When I got to the diner I said to the lady who made me coffee every morning, "Hey look. The World Trade Center is on fire." "Really?" You couldn't really see it from inside. She kinda scrunched down so she could see the sky. "Oh my God, what happened?" She quickly turned on the radio.

I had two more blocks til I reached the subway. At Flatbush Avenue there was a crowd looking across to Manhattan. Hey wait, now there was smoke coming from both towers. That made no sense at all. "What happened?" I asked. "Two small planes crashed into the towers," someone told me. "Somebody must have gone crazy at Newark and got their directions wrong and sent planes into the buildings!" somebody speculated. There was a lot of smoke. You could see a thin line of fire, even at that distance. I didn't want to be late for work so I went down into the subway.

As the train rolled over the Manhattan bridge the motorman or conductor made an announcement. "The World Trade Center is on fire." There were loud cries in the car and people rushed to the windows on the left side of the train. It was a crazy sight. "What happened?" No one could figure it out. The train crossed the bridge and plunged back into the darkness underground.

At Times Square I got out. I came up that secret back stairway by the recruiting center. There was nobody on the street. It was weird. The huge jumbotrons had these strange pictures I didn't understand. It looked like smoke pouring off cascading dust and rubble like liquid. I couldn't make sense of what I was seeing. I looked downtown. I saw some smoke, high in the sky. But you could never see the towers from Times Square. I walked the two blocks to work.

I took the elevator up and somebody ran by me, crying. The floor was strangely empty, its energy electric and off-center. I found my boss and some coworkers huddled around a television in a conference room. "The first tower fell!" someone said. "People were jumping!" said another. "Did they say what happened? Somebody in Brooklyn said a flight controller had freaked out." I wanted to know. "Terrorists," somebody said. Somebody ran into the conference room. "There are more planes. Another one hit the Pentagon. They say some are heading this way. They don't know how many more there are. We have to get out of here."

We all paused; picturing the canyons of Times Square beckoning like a giant target to all comers. Even indoors I found myself wanting to look up to scour the sky for approaching danger. I wanted to duck. I went to find one of my coworkers; she was gone already or hadn't come in. My boss rushed by me saying "Oh my God the second tower fell. We have to get out of here. Come to our place." My boss lived near Union Square. It seemed like a very good suggestion. The streets were no longer empty; we met up with his partner on a corner and walked down to the apartment they shared. Although I know for days and days later I had trouble getting television and radio reception, they had cable, and we watched the unfolding story on the television unable to speak much. The towers were gone; it seemed like building after building was being consumed by a huge fire.

I realized I had to go home. The subways had been turned off. We imagined the two subway lines that passed under the towers turned to caverns of rubble. There was no choice but walking. All of Manhattan was emptying out. By the time I reached the Manhattan Bridge I was part of a long column of tired, silent people trudging home. The further south we all walked the more the air was acrid with burning. Some people had congealed smoke on their upper lips. Huge columns of smoke pulsed into the sky below us, but none of us stopped to stare at them. The people were silent but the air was filled with the screams of sirens and the whirl of flashing lights. So many sirens. At the foot of the bridge volunteers had amassed with paper cups from the Red Cross full of fresh, cool, water. When a woman handed me a cup I started to cry. I still have that cup. (The photo above is not my cup. My cup is in a paper bag with newspapers from the days that followed that I can't bear to consider looking at but can't bear to consider throwing away either. This cup photo is from somebody's flickr.) After downing that impossibly delicious liquid, I hung onto that cup across the bridge; and I didn't look back.

Somewhere in downtown Brooklyn the crowd thinned. The streets were oddly calm, no sirens, no rushing about. Somebody said that the subway under Flatbush Avenue was running again, and I went underground and rode the last way home. Once home I checked in with friends and family. Jim was okay, but two of his coworkers had been at a conference at Windows on the World and they were missing. David was okay, but he had watched the whole day from his roof in the East Village. He described roofs full of clots of people all screaming as the towers twisted and fell. I reassured my mom I was okay. Strangely (we had not actually talked in over a decade), I even got email from my father.

In the morning the air smelled of fire. You could see smoke from my tiny bathroom window. A pillar of smoke where you could previously see silver towers. Crazily I went into work. Which was a mess. My department head's brother who worked in the towers was missing. Coworkers were xeroxing flyers with his face on it and dividing up into squads to scour the hospitals. An IT's guys fiancee who worked across the street from the towers had somehow died at her desk. Nobody was working. There was a lot of crying. In the early afternoon all of us who had made the futile attempt to carry on with normality called it a day. We all realized the utter impossibility of faking it, and stayed home til the next Monday.

I remember that week through a daze of tears. What had happened? It made no sense. The papers were filled with unbelievable photos and accounts of what had happened; details burned into my memory that writers had to get off their chests that now we know are better left unspelled out. You'd look at the photos with the tiny falling people, or the ones with figures peering out from the wreckage high in the sky, trying to make out the expression on a tiny doomed face. And then of course you'd cry. I'd be trying to watch TV, the antenna positioned weirdly to get the one channel that worked. I'd start crying. Alone with my thoughts, I'd start crying. I walked over to Park Slope. At the firehouse there the sidewalk was filled with candles and flowers. The air there was so thick with spirits and grief it vibrated; it was like walking through waves. I cried, and turned back. At a local Presbyterian church there was a service, I went in just in time for its ending. I stood by the door, my lips and eyes quivering with coming tears, as a procession of black women dressed as though it were Sunday walked by me, shaking my hands with the softest palms and fingers I have ever felt, sharing a state of grace that brings me back to those tears even in memory. Few words needed to be shared. We all knew what it was about.

Out and about everywhere you went were walls of photos. Faces of the missing, the lost. People were not yet ready to believe all these faces had just vanished into smoke. I went to Union Square in Manhattan. It was filled with candles and flowers and signs and love. And unlike the belligerent voices threatening from the airwaves it was filled with calls for peace. I have never seen it so beautiful. It was such a healing place. I passed by there and paused often til one night they carted it all away. You couldn't go downtown. There was still a pillar of fire. And a terrible chemical-tainted stench. And now metal fences and bars.

I wondered where I would meet up with Jim. Ironically at some point I saw a post-911 photo of the basement of the World Trade Center. It was after the fires had been extinguished but before the ruins were demolished and the pit was cleared out. There was a photo of that underground lobby and the banks of escalators. They were still there. Dead still and empty; dust-covered. But not crushed. Not damaged; somehow the collapsing towers had missed them. They looked pretty much like Jim could have been standing there next to his favorite store window waiting for me to show up.

Months later, before he moved out of town, when meeting up with Jim in the Village, I'd find him stopping and staring into the sky with a puzzled look on his face. "I'm trying to remember," he'd say, "if I could see them from here. Now that they're gone, I can't seem to figure out where they were." And although he had seen the pillars of smoke on his trip home from work and in the days that followed, he had seen the burning towers only on TV. To him, one minute they were there in the background, and then in another, they weren't. Me, I remember details about the streets around the World Trade Center that I realize I'm not sure where they were; even today I can't really register the changed landscape downtown with the one in my memory.

In the days and weeks and months that followed gradually the posters were all taken down. After months of ritually retelling our survival stories, we eventually tired of them. The intimacy felt by strangers on the street eventually faded back into the anonymity favored by us city dwellers. While now "911" tumbles easily off the lips, for at least a year the people I knew just referred to it as The Day, or The Events. To name it seemed casually obscene. To turn what we had been through into a jingoism-tinged catchphrase was unthinkable.

There are those who curl their lips when recalling that day, snarling out vengeance. "Never forget. Never forgive." It's still stencilled on firetrucks and police cars and pickup trucks. Me I don't like those words. Oh I know the terrorists who committed this horrible crime could just have easily been aiming at me. I'm well aware of God's grace and there but for where I might be going. But I'm tired of the rage of 911; tired of that day of wrath, and as tired of the hatred it has spawned as of the hatred that spawned it. I'm tired of seeing American flags pasted and painted on any possible flat space as some kind of chest-thumping passive-aggressive dare. I'm tired of the crimes committed in the name of that Day.

The people who died that day weren't special. They were just regular people going on with their lives. Some were working, some were travelling. Some were just passing by. Some were selflessly doing some very dangerous jobs. But there aren't none of us better than any of the rest. And no amount of killing other regular people thousands of miles away is gonna bring them back or make meaning out of a senseless loss. That "two wrongs don't make a right" cliche? It's actually pretty wise.

It's not my religion, but the hymn "Day of Wrath" resonates:

Worthless are my prayers and sighing,
yet, good Lord, in grace complying,
rescue me from fires undying!
While the wicked are confounded,
doomed to flames of woe unbounded
call me with thy saints surrounded.
Low I kneel, with heart submission,
see, like ashes, my contrition;
help me in my last condition.
Ah ! that day of tears and mourning !
From the dust of earth returning
man for judgment must prepare him;
Spare, O God, in mercy spare him !

It's time for a season of mercy.