Because somebody needs to say it

 

Trigger warning, I'm just gonna say something and not argue it out: sometimes life is really fucking rough. Capitalism sucks. Get the fuck over it and do something about it, or not. Stop treating people like assholes for also being imperfect. If you can't handle something, walk away. Also TRIGGER WARNINGS ARE REACTIONARY NARCISSISTIC BULLSHIT.

On Pete Seeger and the Purpose of Hammers

Pete Seeger performing in the 1950s

If I had a hammer,
I'd hammer in the morning
I'd hammer in the evening,
All over this land

I'd hammer out danger,
I'd hammer out a warning,
I'd hammer out love between my brothers and my sisters,
All over this land.

...

Well I got a hammer,
And I got a bell,
And I got a song to sing, all over this land.

It's the hammer of Justice,
It's the bell of Freedom,
It's the song about Love between my brothers and my sisters,
All over this land. —Pete Seeger, 1949

Like everybody else on my Facebook wall — people my age, older than I, and younger than I — I grew up on Pete Seeger's music, on his warm voice, and on his sunny optimism and apparent unflagging commitment to every decent cause of humanity. It is hard to imagine a world without him, for sure. 94 is an impressive age. That said, I feel compelled to raise a few questions about the meaning of Pete Seeger. With all due respect to somebody who lived his long life in an apparently principled. humble and admirable way, I don't mean to piss on his personal reputation. But something needs to be said, not about Seeger the man, but about the comfortable niche that Seeger's vision found in American society.

Somewhere between the late 1930s, the 40s and 50s, American radicalism became so infatuated with its own narrative that it cast aside the quest for actual political power. With a few heroic exceptions (and to be fair, by the 1950s in the face of extraordinary repression), American leftists began to repudiate the idea of making actual revolution, of challenging the state power of capitalism. In hoping to ride progressive but ultimately no more than liberal waves of change and avert the harsh scrutiny of cold-war anti-communism, radicals started to deny that their goals represented any kind of threat to the American system as we know it. By the time that the McCarthyite reign of terror made such disavowals legally beneficial, something was rooted out of radicalism, and that was its revolutionary spirit. While this spirit has occasionally returned for short periods of time (as in the aftermath of the 1960s student, antiwar and black-consciousness movements that birthed the New Communist Movement and a host of other mostly doomed left grouplets), an utterly reformist lack of imagination came to dominate American social movements. Political struggle would be the good fight, but it would only take place in a context of an almost mythological view of America that smoothed out all the rough edges, and assured us that good would triumph over evil if only our intentions were true and our votes wisely cast.

Pete Seeger, as witness to most of the 20th century, was profoundly a product of that process. He came up as a fellow traveler of rightward-drifting American communism. His radicalism was tamed, unthreatening, heartwarming even. The faux nativism of the folk movement, as much as it combined egalitarian notions that allowed common people to make their own music, also marked a perpetuation of the mythological narcissism that defanged the American left. Social justice activism has done a lot of great things, all to the tune of Seeger's soundtrack no doubt. But this sunny narrative of the good fight will never actually end the cause of everything that is foundationally wrong with our system. Indeed, it perpetuates the system because it waves away difficult and unpleasant questions about capitalism itself and what it might take to actually finally transform society by confronting state power. It is a harsh question to ask but at what point does Seeger's music become the lullaby that lulls us to the sleep of satisfaction with the incremental?

All these incremental struggles over the past few decades: there's much real progress there, along with the unresolved and the lost and the undone. But, and nothing has taught me this more than the experience of the Obama years, that hammer has to do more than ring out warnings. The myth that everything gets better and returns to some primal American state of fundamental justice is demonstrably a lie that in turn perpetuates capitalism. I think there's something in the culture of Pete Seeger that consciously perpetuates this liberal, reformist myth.

The love between our sisters and our brothers is a thing of beauty, for sure.
But hammers are also for smashing things that need to be smashed.

Crunching the Numbers...of Perverts

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

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?

Politicians' Follies

It seems to be the political sweet season. Here's a few must-read links.

Herman Cain Casting Call
Courtesy of We Are Respectable Negroes blog, a chilling Herman Cain video coupled with a leaked casting-call for a Cain commercial. Includes this priceless paragraph:

"7. Arab American with Dog. One person from the Middle East is needed with his or her dog. Preferably, a yellow Labrador retriever or a lovable mutt who enjoys interacting with others. The dog should be a puppy. If it is exceptionally talented and has prior acting experience, an older animal will also be acceptable."

Read the whole post here.

The Important Lies of Anthony Weiner
The underwhelming Weinergate generated some hilarious headlines. But what about the actually important lies Weiner has told? Hint, they're about neither his penis nor whether he sexted his facebook friends.

"WEINER: You can see a difference in the development in the West Bank with 11 percent year over year growth, with no Israeli occupation there either, with increasing access to checkpoints...
COHEN: No occupation in the West Bank, did I hear you right?
WEINER: Yes."

Read the list of his actual lies on Mondoweiss.

T-Paw's Imaginary Economic Plan
Former Minnesota governor Tim Pawlenty entered the Republican race with a plan to oppose gay adoption. And with a plan for full economic recovery achieved...by lowering taxes! Ezra Klein demolishes T Paw:

"This plan isn’t optimistic. It isn’t a bit vague. It’s a joke. And I don’t know which is worse: The thought that Pawlenty knows that and went forward with this pandering, fantasy-based proposal anyway, or the thought that he doesn’t know it, and he really thinks this could work."

Read the whole thing on WaPo. And hey Minnesota, what is wrong with you people? This guy AND Michelle Bachmann?

Breaking: Newt's Rats Jump Ship

As of this posting, Newt Gingrich's campaign team just walked out on him.

"At least Newt wasn't being treated for cancer when this happened."

Hilarious analysis at aplainblogaboutpolitics.

Rick Santorum Doesn't Like Being Made Fun Of

Also recently officially-announced ultra-right wing and ultra-uptight Republican candidate Rick Santorum has a google problem. His program consists of little more than his hatred of gay people. Watch him whine frothily and then read the comments of the gay people who rightfully hate him back at Joe.My.God.

Sarah Palin Said Something Unintelligible
Oh wait, I was posting news.

Who Will Tell the Truth Now that Gil Scott-Heron Is Gone?

Gil Scott-Heron had a way with words; a way with the truth.

Some people think that America invented the blues
And few people doubt that America is home of the blues

The blues has grown
by the country has not
The blues remembers everything the country forgot

America has got the blues
It's got the blues because of partial deification
of partial accomplishments
over partial periods of time
Halfway justice
Halfway liberty
Halfway equality
It's a half-assed year
And we would be silly in all our knowledge
In all our self-righteous knowledge to acknowledge anything less than the truth
About this bicentennial year
And the truth relates to 200 years of people and ideas getting by

It got by George Washington
slave-owner general

It got by Gerald Ford
Oatmeal man

Ronald Reagan, it got by him
Hollyweird
Acted like a actor
Acted like a liberal
Acted like General Franco when he acted like governor of California
And he acts like somebody might vote for him for president

It got by Henry Kissinger
The international godfather of peace
A piece of Vietnam
A piece of Laos
A piece of Angola
A piece of Cuba

The blues is in the street
America has got the blues
But don't let it get by us
(Bicentennial Blues, 1976)

He had a complete vision of the way things were. He wasn't afraid to take the symbolism of America head-on. He knew the history and the facts, and he knew what it was like to experience the reality of racism, violence and hypocrisy. He knew how much life costs.

And now democracy is a ragtime on the corner
Hoping for some rain
It looks like he's hoping, hoping for some rain
And I see the robins perched in barren treetops
Watching last-ditch racists marching across the floor
Just like the peace signs that that vanished in our dreams
Never had a chance to grow
And now it's winter
Winter in America
(Winter in America, 1975)

He was pissed off. And found a way to express it clearer than any. He channeled bitterness into lyric beauty. Here he is on the pardoning of Richard Nixon.

We beg your pardon because the pardon you gave this time was not yours to give.
They call it due process and some people are overdue.
We beg your pardon America.
Somebody said 'brother-man gonna break a window, gonna steal a hubcap, gonna smoke a joint, brother man gonna go to jail.'
The main who tried to steal America is not in jail....
We beg your pardon America because we understand now much more deeply than we understood before
But we don't want to take the pardon back, we want to issue some more
Pardon brother Frank Willis, the Watergate security guard, he was only doing his job
Pardon H. Rap Brown, it was only burglary
Pardon Robert Vesco, it was only embezzlement
Pardon Charles Manson, it was only mass murder
And pardon us while we get sick
Because they pardoned William Calley, 22 dead, and America in shock....
We beg your pardon America because we have an understanding of karma
What goes around, comes around
And we beg your pardon for all of the lies and all of the people who've been ruined and who look forward to next year because they can't stand to look at this one.
We beg your pardon America because the pardon you gave this time was not yours to give.
(Pardon Our Analysis, 1975)

But Gil Scott-Heron knew how to laugh through tears. His poems — his songs — were witty and expressive and moving, but they also expressed a wry sense of humor. Mixed with outrage, for sure, and brilliance, but deadly funny.

There will be no pictures of pigs shooting down
brothers in the instant replay.
There will be no pictures of pigs shooting down
brothers in the instant replay.
There will be no pictures of Whitney Young being
run out of Harlem on a rail with a brand new process.
There will be no slow motion or still life of Roy
Wilkins strolling through Watts in a Red, Black and
Green liberation jumpsuit that he had been saving
For just the proper occasion.

Green Acres, The Beverly Hillbillies, and Hooterville
Junction will no longer be so damned relevant, and
women will not care if Dick finally gets down with
Jane on Search for Tomorrow because Black people
will be in the street looking for a brighter day.
The revolution will not be televised.
(The Revolution Will Not Be Televised, 1971)

He was not always an optimistic man. His outlook could be bleak: he knew what the odds were, the strength of what he was — we are — up against.

So you cry like a baby
Or you go out and get high
But there ain't no peace on Earth, man
Maybe peace when you die
(A Sign of the Ages, 1971)

There's a sense of duty and obligation in his lyrics too. He knew what he had to do. Even as he fought his inner demons he couldn't set down his weapons in the battle for justice. I think it made him weary. But he was never able to stop, completely.

We want to be free
Yet we have no idea
Why we are struggling here
Faced with our every fear
Just to survive
We've heard the sound
And come around
To listening
(Beginnings/First Minute of a New Day, 1975)

He cut many great albums in the 1970s and some adequate ones in the 1980s. I had the sense that his tragic miscalculation about Ronald Reagan — indeed the tragic miscalculation about all of us on the left that America would actually vote a person like that into the presidency — haunted him, and dulled the certainty of his vision.

As Wall Street goes, so goes the nation
And here's a look at the closing numbers: Racism's up, human rights are down.
Peace is shaky, war items are hot — the house claims all ties.
Jobs are down, money is scarce and common sense is at an all-time low on heavy trading. Movies are looking better than ever and no one is looking because we're starring in a B-movie.
You don't need to be in no hurry
You ain't never really got to worry.
Just keep repeating that none of this is real.
This ain't really your life,
Ain't really your life,
Ain't really nothing but a movie.
(B-movie, 1981)

Gil Scott-Heron was, to all appearances, an anguished soul. He fought drug addiction his whole life, and lived that side of his life in the lyrics of his songs, openly sharing his pain. His last two records were full of the hard toll on his life. His honesty is almost painful to listen to.

Life is like a circle and you end up where you started
If you end up where you started ain't no other side
Yeah but if like is like a curtain then I'm 90% certain that I'm looking through at something
Yes I'm almost touching something on the other side
If life is like a mirror than the nearer you get clearer
You can see it so much clearer
Feel like you know about the other side
My friends all swear they know
What I should do with my life
How I should run my life
What should be happening with my life
They're on the other side
They're on the outside
I'm on the inside
(The Other Side, 1994)

Gil Scott-Heron is gone now, way too soon, at the age of 62. I'm happy for the legacy he left behind, the music; but I can't believe I never got to see him, and I can't believe there will be no more.

Early this morning
when you knocked upon my door
and I said, Hello Satan, I believe it's time to go
Me and the Devil walkin side by side
Say I don't see why you keep on dogging me around
You may bury my body down by the highway side
So my old evil spirit the Greyhound bus can ride
(I'm New Here, 2010)

Who will tell the truth now that Gil Scott-Heron is gone? Peace go with you, Brother.

Straddling the darkness
he controlled the bucking thrusts and rode on
into the emptiness that he alone would try to fill
into the middle to try to be the bridge between spirits
EXPAND he screamed
the vacuum was aroused, suspicious and alarmed
who would dare? but on he rode...
(And then he wrote Meditations, 1972)

(All italics are lyrics by Gil Scott-Heron).

UPDATE: Here's an audio tribute from my friend Blackclassical.

RIP Gill Scott Heron by Black Classical on Mixcloud

"Geronimo EKIA"

“Geronimo is arguably the most recognized Native American name in the world,” the chiefs said, “and this comparison only serves to perpetuate negative stereotypes about our people.” — Leaders of the Onondaga Nation quoted in the Syracuse Post-Standard.

"Geronimo" was apparently the US Special Forces codeword for Al Qaeda leader Osama Bin Laden in the raid which ended with his assassination. Every American schoolchild knows that Geronimo of the Chiricahua Apache nation was the name of one of the last Native American leaders to engage in armed resistance to white American conquest at the end of the 19th-century. The raid in Pakistan ended with the transmission back to headquarters, "Geronimo EKIA," or Enemy Killed in Action.

Such a fascinating choice of words that says so much not only about what the military was thinking, but about the complicated legacy of America's genocidal past. Zunguzungu blog has amazing quotes about the myth-laden meaning of Geronimo, as well as a collection of links to analysis. (One of the passages quoted on Zunguzungu reminds us that George Bush's ancestors were among those who obscenely stole the real Geronimo's actual head for a fraternity trophy at Yale.) The choice of this word manages to equate the Special Forces with the "Good Guys," at least in the standard American History narrative, as well as tar Osama with an air of doom. The Onondaga leaders are quite right that it perpetuates the demonization of Native Americans in equating their history of resistance to Bin Laden's fundamentalist jihad. And it exposes the real barbarity behind the smug white American depiction of its enemies as barbarian savages.

I'm struck by the fact that the articles all over the web discussing this issue use one of the posed pictures of Geronimo that make him look armed and dangerous, showing him crouching with his rifle. These photos are pure mythology since they were taken after his surrender, when he had become a fairground attraction at a Wild West show. Of course the picture I've snagged for this post is also a posed one, showing him with his nieces some time in the early 1900s. Although these photos do show the human being inside the Geronimo myth, they're also a mirror reflecting back at American culture.

The bottom line is that America has issues.

Belief Without Doubt?

"Stones from the River" is the story of a young German woman growing up before, and living through, the Second World War. Written by German-American author Ursula Hegi, it's not a new book: a copy has been floating around my office and it was my turn to read it. It was published in the early 1990s and at some point achieved the dubious award of being an Oprah book club selection. Anyway the perspective of the book's heroine, Trudi Montag, is quite unique. She's an outsider in her community since she was born a "little person," or dwarf. It's a satisfying story with, of course, more than its share of tragedy given the setting. Trudi isn't an international spy or resistance hero, she's just a person trying to live her life, though her personal morality helps her to make important decisions to reject the national chauvinism and anti-Semitism rising with the Nazification of the world around her.

Anyway one passage caused me to fold up the corner of the page it resonated so clearly. It's about the time she hears Hitler give a speech shortly after he took over the government. At the risk of invoking the dread Godwin's Law, I thought this little bit of fiction shined a spotlight on a phenomenon I worry about in our own trying times. Which isn't to say any of the current wave of political demagogues out there are quite so genocidally single-minded or precipitously bound for dictatorship as was Hitler. History doesn't repeat itself exactly, but it makes one grateful that the current crop of hateful idiots out there in the public square seem to lack the charisma necessary to truly rise above the mobs in which they are ensconsed.

Here's the excerpt:

"He was not nearly as tall as she'd expected from newspaper photos, and he look straight at her when he talked, not excluding her like the assistant pastor, Freidrich Beier, who spoke above her head as if she were too insignificant to be included.... Herr Hitler's mouth moved independently of his eyes. There was something wrong with his face: the features didn't work together. But he looked directly at her — at everyone in the swollen crowd — like a magician performing some amazing trick of singling out everyone at once, and it was that gaze — filled with an immeasurable greed — that held all of them while his high-pitched voice spun silken ropes around them.

She fought the excitement of his gaze and voice because what he wanted from her was only too familiar — belief without doubts — something she'd resisted since first grade.

She fought him by reminding herself what her father had said to Emil Hesping — that they lived in a country where believing had taken the place of knowing..... Trudi had a sudden image of him, alone in his bedroom.... The greed she'd felt in him, the greed which had sucked all those people into his influence, was still in the room with him, and she was seized by a deep fear for the world." [emphasis added by me]

Isn't that it exactly? "Belief without doubts" and "a country where believing has taken the place of knowing" seem to sum up exactly what I find so terrifying about the right-wing in America. There is no factual discussion to be had; no argument that can be won on its own merits. In line with yesterday's musings on lies and liars, today's demagogues are free to say whatever they want because people are greedy for easy solutions, for easy answers, and they know that there is an audience out there who will not question or doubt what they say. Trying times indeed.

Image is a 1933 German propaganda postcard from the online German Propaganda Archive.

Lies! All Lies!

I was reading an article in the Times this weekend about Rep. Michelle Bachmann, presumed far right Republican presidential candidate. It treated her seriously, which I find remarkable in and of itself. Also remarkable were the comments on the Times' website, where outraged conservatives called her "highly intelligent" and accomplished. I think these are remarkable because to me, setting aside for the moment the quite real possibility that she is clinically mentally ill, I'm not sure I have ever read a statement coming from Rep. Bachmann that wasn't if not a complete and total lie, at least in large part full of dishonest intent and insinuation. What kind of person would vote for a liar like her?

Or consider Donald Trump, a wealthy buffoon who seems to be also toying with a run for President on the Republican ticket. While most serious prognosticators say that is unlikely, he's certainly all over the internet trying to make a name for himself as the last of the "Birthers," that is, promoters of the thinly-disguised racist lie that President Obama is somehow not actually an American citizen. Nobody seems to believe that Trump actually believes what he is saying, which is a reasonable argument because Trump's line of argument seems to have emerged untainted by actual facts like a giant turd directly from his ass. But nevertheless the man is making at least internet headlines just by spinning yarns. What kind of person finds a liar like him even slightly amusing?

President Obama announced his reelection campaign today, which gave me pause to remember all the hopes most of us placed on him after eight years of listening to Bush bumble (and lie) his way through a presidency that seems to have been nothing but a huge disaster for the United States and the world. Obama has of course fine-tuned the art of lying... or at least misleading and deflecting. I'll save for a rainy day my overall analysis of his presidency -- it isn't all bad news, considering -- but I'm saddened to announce that he is safely ensconced back in the ranks of lesser-evil Democrats. For me the last straw has been the utter atrociousness of his Middle Eastern policy and the facility with which he has wandered into a new war. But let's set aside any specific criticism or damning praise and say that we all know Obama is a lying politician -- just like the rest of them.

I googled "bible verses on lying" and got back a list of well over a hundred references, split between the Old and New Testaments, which means that most people raised with even a casual awareness of the Abrahamic faiths which so influence world culture are exposed to the idea that lying is a bad thing. And yet I would imagine that most people in most countries, our own certainly included, believe that their governments routinely, if not habitually, lie to us. Indeed some governments probably lie almost exclusively.

So my question -- and this time around I have no answer -- is how did this come to be? How do we, the lied-to, come to be so accepting of what we know are lies? I try very hard not to lie in my personal life. Little white lies torment me. The seductively manipulative power of lying is always offset by guilt and self disgust. I suppose lies of omission come easier, but it all seems so stressful and complicated. Who wants that?

Lying is of course a valued professional skill. In fact we have an entire industry -- it's called "marketing" -- which specializes in prettified lying. We beg to have our aspirations manipulated, which I suppose contextualizes at least American politics. But since I think politics is more important than breakfast cereal or new cars or poisonous medicines, I think it's fair to ask, why do we put up with this? What would happen if we didn't? And isn't it interesting that in politics, by my definition anyway, the "good guys" are the ones who can embrace the cynicism of knowing better and the "bad guys" are the ones who pretend that nothing's wrong?

What a mess! Welcome to Pinocchio culture! What kind of people are we?

Oscar Night

Apparently it's Oscar night. What I want to know is why there is not also Bert & Ernie night. Or Miss Piggy night. I think it's unfair that only Oscar the Grouch gets his own red-carpet celebration.

Actually I'm a hair too old for Sesame Street. But I'm not too old (or young) to remember Emily Litella. So, "Never mind!"

Here's the sad truth. I don't go to movies much. Sure I enjoy being entertained, I enjoy the escapism of movies -- who doesn't? -- but it's so damned expensive. I realize of all the movies up for Oscars this year I've seen exactly three. And one of them was last night on video (The Social Network) and another a couple weeks ago (Inception) and a third a couple weeks before that (The Kids Are All Right). I remember extraordinary details about history and music. But I just don't care about actors and actresses. My boyfriend can attest that I am forever asking, "Who's that?" about any actor in any movie. I guess I think it's weird to watch the same people over and over again pretend to be other people. Some of them are talented, sure; some of them are even hot. But I can never help but feel that if Americans paid as much attention to what's happening in the world as they do to Hollywood gossip, we wouldn't be in such a mess. Hey wait, so who's Oscar the Grouch now?

Update: If you're coming for the Oscar picture, I hope you'll stay for the other content here. This blog is about my perspective on life in the U.S. but it's also about the necessity of fighting for real freedom and social justice around the world and here at home.

Anti-American Art: Revolutionary Appropriation

Hilarious application of graffiti to a Kentucky Fried Chicken in Tahrir ("Liberation") Square in revolutionary Cairo: The graffiti reads "No to Mubarak the US Client." Hah!

From 3arabawy's flickr, via the Angry Arab News service.

Margaret Whiting & The Freedom Train

In honor of the passing this week of singer Margaret Whiting, aged 84, here's a completely kitschy piece of post-WWII vaguely progressive patriotica entitled "The Freedom Train." It's credited to Peggy Lee, but it's got equal parts Margaret Whiting and Johnny Mercer, the brilliant songwriter who was the guardian of Whiting's early career. The band is Benny Goodman's, and it was recorded in 1947. The lyrics were cowritten by Lee and Irving Berlin.

Take the lyrics for what they're worth. It's interesting to listen to them the day after President Obama's Tucson speech here in 2011:

"This song is a train song
It's a song about a train
Not the Atcheson-Topeka
Not the Chattanooga Choo-choo
Nor the one that leaves at midnight
For the state of Alabam

This song is a train song where the engineer is Uncle Sam
Hear comes the freedom train, You better hurry down
Just like Paul Revere it's coming into your home town

Inside the Freedom Train you'll find a precious [friend]
Those words of liberty, the documents that made us great
You can shout your anger from a steeple
You can shoot the system full of holes
You can always question we the people
You can get your answer at the polls
That's how it's always been and how it will remain
As long as all of us keep riding on the Freedom Train

Johnny Mercer, Peggy Lee, Benny Goodman, Margaret Whiting
The Pipers and the Western Band
Sitting on the observation, spreading freedom through the land

You can write the president a letter
You can even tell him to his face
If you think that you can do it better
Get the votes and you can take his place

If you hate the laws that you're obeying
You can shout your anger to the crowd
We may disagree with what you're saying
But we'll fight to let you say it loud
That's how it's always been
That's the way it's gonna remain
As long as all of us keep riding on the Freedom Train
Riding, riding
Riding, riding
Keep on riding that Freedom Train"

(Lyrics transcribed by me)

I don't know a lot of Margaret Whiting's work, but she was the wholesome voice of jazz-era pop music: hear her sing and it's impossible not to instantly like her. While her mass stardom had long faded, she was one of those legends of the American songbook whom showtune queens always loved. Oddly enough her legend deepened with her marriage in the 1990s to the hunky and well-endowed gay porn star Jack Wrangler, who passed on just a couple years ago. Here's a woman who could literally say she did it all.

Bang Bang

Thoroughly a creature of cities, and a child of polite middle-class intellectuals, I was not raised around guns. The only time I saw them in real life was in the holsters of cops. I didn't grow up around hunters, in a military family, around criminals, or around people excessively paranoid around criminals. I was raised by pacifists, and was taught that there was something profoundly unnecessary about having a relationship with guns. And I grew up in the years of the Vietnam War, of police massacres of Black Panthers, of Kent and Jackson State, of assassins: The people with the guns were the bad guys.

I've had three personal encounters with guns.

When I was a young leftist, a number of left-wing activists and members of a rival left-wing sect were shot down -- murdered -- at a rally in cold blood by armed Klansmen in Greensboro, North Carolina. The group I was with made a point of protesting KKK and Neo-nazi rallies in the Chicago area and around the midwest, and at the time there were a lot of these. So we were a bit terrified: it could have been us. It was decided not that we should arm ourselves, or start carrying weapons around with us, but that we should at least know how to shoot a gun. We all went to a shooting range to get a lesson in how to do it. I guess we thought this was some kind of protection, some kind of power. A couple of my comrades were familiar with guns and they showed us what to do. I will never forget how all of a sudden what had been abstract to me felt in my hand: surprisingly heavy, much more substantial than a staple gun. And jesus if you pointed it the wrong way you could kill somebody or yourself. I don't remember if I was a good shot -- I doubt it -- but I remember feeling like I had my hand around a powerful writhing serpent struggling to get away from me. And it was loud. It wasn't very much fun, and I didn't want to do it again.

Flash forward a few years and I had moved to New York City. I was riding an empty subway late at night with a friend when a guy came up to us with what appeared to be a gun draped in a handtowel. He pointed it at us and mumbled something. We were, for a flash, terrified, until the "gun" started to droop beneath its cloth. It wasn't a gun at all but a length of rubber tubing. The three of us watching this happen were silent for a moment when me and my friend laughed disdainfully and our would-be assailant slunk sheepishly away. He had no power and we had no fear.

In the late 1980s I lived in a neighborhood in Brooklyn that went from being quietly residential to being violently stricken by crack. One night I went to my local Chinese takeout place to get a late dinner. I placed my order through a roughly-cut hole in a thick plastic partitition and sat in the untidy waiting area. There was this complex little arrangement where the food would be placed on a turntable with an inner door closed and an outer one opened. It was creepy; but the owner of the place had been badly beaten up in a robbery a couple years before. Two teenage kids were also waiting for their order. They were playing around with each other loudly, but like buddies do, and certainly without anger. One was waving around a 5-dollar bill. His friend jokingly snatched the bill out of his hand. At which point the other guy reached into his coat and pulled out a pistol and pointed it at his friend. No longer joking. He was going to kill his best friend for playing a little joke. While I was watching. While the Chinese family behind the partition was watching. I didn't wait for my food. And I left that neighborhood within a couple months.

Which brings us to the "Tucson Massacre" and the shooting of Rep. Giffords by Jared Loughner.



There's a really creepy video that went up this morning in which Sarah Palin calls herself a victim of "liberal blood libel" for the insinuation that teabagger rhetoric -- her rhetoric -- was in some way to blame for the shooting. Hilariously she suggests that people should be held to their words: "Each individual is accountable for his actions." Her narcissism and denial and manipulative opportunism is in full display. It's extraordinary. And frankly, frightening.

It's true that we don't (yet?) really know exactly what was going on this latest political murderer's probably deranged head. We know that he owned and used a handgun and thought it would be okay to go out and kill a bunch of people. We also know the culture around him: the culture of the state of Arizona, of much of white America, of people who love conspiracy theories, of people who want to own guns, of people who grow up loving guns.

I have acquaintances -- not apparently crazy nor rightwingers -- who claim to love and enjoy guns. But I don't love guns. I don't want to own one, for hunting, for supposed protection, or for anything else. And frankly I don't entirely trust people who do love guns. I certainly don't like or trust Sarah Palin. And if her crosshairs campaign poster was in such good taste, so far removed from the actual shooting that came to take place, why was it so completely scrubbed from her website?

Everything about Sarah Palin's world of patriotic posing, of fake reverence, of faux down-home just folksiness disgusts me. As her relationship to guns disgusts me. As her offensive posture in the wake of the Tucson shootings disgusts me.

But if only it stayed that simple. The world, whether we like it or not, is indeed at times a violent and terrible place. For all the guns in the hands of the wrong people, it must be said that sometimes the good guys having guns has ended very very well. The heroic people of Vietnam whose propaganda art I have featured here for much of the past year learned to love guns. Those guns gave them liberation.

For all the moral beauty of the teachings and commitments of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and the Mahatma Gandhi and Tich Nhat Hanh, we seem as a species to lack the necessary patience for the doctrine of nonviolence to win out over the armies of evil men armed to the teeth. And how sad that the attempts by King and Gandhi to write nonviolence on a large canvas were cut short not by the forces of evil empire but by small men alone with their guns.



And as we ponder guns, it's hard, ultimately, knowing about the terrible war machines slumbering in bunkers and silos and occasionally unleashed upon sleeping innocents to think that the biggest problem in the world today are laws allowing an occasional crazy person to buy a handgun and start killing people. I don't want to be the innocent bystander visiting a shopping mall in Arizona -- or a Chinese takeout joint in Brooklyn -- to pay the price for somebody's combined antisocial behavior and gun ownership. I don't want to pay the price for Sarah Palin's irresponsibility, for the rhetoric of the teabaggers. But I'm not sure where the small actions of living our lives and trying to escape being shot for whatever reason fits into that large canvas.

And here's the ugliest reality: President Obama who gave a moving speech in Tucson this evening touching on cosmic themes like love and innocence; this thoughtful intelligent man preaching respect has his finger on the button and has ordered his armies to steal the lives of many more innocent people on the other side of the world than the six who lost their lives last weekend. It's cold comfort that his intelligence and professed compassion is a blessing compared to what Sarah Palin might do with her fingers on that same button, her orders going out to the brute force of gun lovers that is the U.S. war machine. It makes me sad that Obama, who I often like, especially when he gives a speech like tonight's, is in some scary way closer to the world that Sarah Palin lives in than the one I want to live in. I don't want to be the innocent victim -- or not-so-innocent enabler -- of a rain of missiles or predatory drones or attack helicopters sent by President Obama, who I voted for, or by Sarah Palin who I dread.

I can't condemn the people in this world who have used weapons, violence, to free themselves from oppression and tyranny. But I can't help feeling that we are deluding ourselves to focus on the weapons of deranged individuals and not on our failure to notice something systemic and foundational about our allegedly free society. Hint: America is not the innocent bystander.

The Rights of the People

I can't decide if this is the ultimate in subversive kitsch or a kind of authoritarian countersubversion. It's the decidedly un-hip pop group The 5th Dimension singing the American Declaration of Independence set to gloriously baroque pop music. Unfortunately, this is just a music track not an actual performance. But I've counted this as a guilty pleasure probably since it came out in 1970. On the one hand it's sort of an "Up With People" Rockwellian populist co-optation, something the entire family could smile warmly to as it aired on some television variety show without question. On the other hand, it's the fucking declaration of independence turned into a sort of glossy soul showtune, and the lines they choose to make the most memorable sound practically insurrectionary. Which I suppose it was. With hooks and harmony. I was reminded of it last night and tracked it down to youtube. I believe the original album track segued into "A Change Is Gonna Come."

I'm reading Howard Zinn's "A People's History of the United States," which I strongly recommend to anyone who has the whitewash of childhood education too freshly coating their brains or to people like me so long from the school books the facts need a little freshening up. If an accurate teaching of American history proves anything, it's that American mythology needs to be approached with a questioning mind open to subversion. Who better than a soul group even your mother could love to start asking the right questions?

Can you surry? Do you picnic?

Echoes of a Past Life - Confessions of a Pornographer (part one)

I moved to New York City in 1981 to work on a socialist newspaper. The job was great, the salary subsistence level. It didn't take me more than a year or two to realize that the Big Apple was no place for no money, so while I continued for a while to design the paper on a volunteer basis, I jumped at the opportunity to take a real job for real money. My socialist paper gig had taught me the basics of professional graphic design and the publishing biz, so when my friend David said he knew of a typesetting job at a magazine company he thought the two of us could share, I eagerly agreed.

The magazine company was looking for an evening shift to cover its expanding roster, and yes as long as everything got covered, the two of us could divide up nights. Eventually David moved on to his real interest of journalism and the shift was all mine. We arrived at the office late each afternoon when everybody else was getting ready to leave. We were handed a manila folder of typed manuscripts ready to be typeset on their state-of-the-primitive-art CompuGraphic editwriter, a prehistoric dinosaur level computer with a spinning filmstrip that exposed rolls of photosensitive paper; which would then be developed in a special kind of dark-room simulating processor machine. The job was basically retyping and coding manuscripts to turn them into galleys of type that would be cut and pasted up by the art department the next morning.

There was one detail about Modernismo Publications that we needed to know. While Modernismo published a line of high-end knitting magazines in seven European languages, its bread and butter came from "Adult Sophisticate" magazines. The daytime typesetter preferred to work on the knitting magazines: she wanted little to do with "Adult Sophistication," which, it turned out, were codewords for smut. Modernismo published a line of pornographic gay magazines: Mandate, Honcho, Playguy, Torso and Inches, and a line of heterosexual skin magazines: Juggs, Legshow, and Cinema Blue. While I was there they started an absolutely hilarious boxing magazine called Fight Beat but that's another story.

Anyway, being a red-blooded young gay man I was familiar with the gay magazines. Mandate had literary pretensions, combining legit fiction and cultural writing with fantasy stories and skin spreads, plus the occasional travel feature and actual news story. Honcho was a little edgier, focusing on hyper-masculine models, gearing its taste in fantasy in the direction of the leather crowd. Playguy, despite its catchy name, was a sort of sad orphan, showing skinny young models who looked younger than their of-legal-age-IDs, catering no doubt mostly to the dirty old man set. It was the cusp of the AIDS epidemic and while the disease was eventually going to cut a swathe through the magazine's editorial and art staff, as well as through its audience and cultural sensibility, these magazines all still adhered to a late 1970s hedonistic sensibility of newfound freedom and openness in gay male sexuality. I thought it would be a hoot to work on these.


Modernismo was owned by George Mavety, a big man almost always seen smoking a cigar. He was a sort of poor man's Larry Flynt. Rumored to have an actual family somewhere, it was not unusual to see him keeping company with some busty young blonde. Mavety was a classic entrepreneur, and while heterosexual himself, he knew the value of his property. His cultivation of gay pornography was shrewd and successful: the gay mags were staffed all with gay men and given a fairly independent editorial voice. But Mavety was well immersed in the pornography world as a whole. One day a Japanese skin magazine came to the office and took photos of the place for a feature they were writing on the American trade. That's me at my typesetting machine in the top center of this photo montage from Japan's "Bachelor" magazine. (Modernismo eventually became Mavety Media Group; George Mavety died in 2000; his gay magazines finally shut down just a year or so ago)

Of course I had to work on Modernismo's heterosexual magazines as well and that was an education. "Juggs" and "Legshow" were not "Playboy." "Juggs," whose tagline was "The world's dirtiest tit-mag" was all about women's breasts, the bigger the better. It featured chubby models, older models, pregnant models ("lactating lovelies"), anyone who would display absolutely huge breasts. Ironically, Jugg's reigning "Tit Queen," a frequent centerfold and regular columnist was the original Candy Samples--no relation to my current Drag Queen friend of the same moniker--whose breasts were each larger than her head. "Legshow" was for the legs-and-ass crowd. Both mags were mass market hardcore, which meant they could compete with anatomy textbooks for their raw display of female genitalia, but being sold on newsstands they could not show penetration or actual sex. These magazines had no literary or cultural pretensions, just crude raw fuel for male masturbatory fantasies.

The difference between the gay and straight pornography I spent my evenings typesetting was a fascinating lesson in objectification and fantasy. I'll leave a fuller discussion of that for another essay. But I took the job and became a kind of working-class cog in the real pornography industry...it was a crazy job. I'll talk about what it was like to work as a pornographer in a third essay.

Fast forward a year or two: I left Modernismo for a job at a small family-owned type shop. Turned out I was a really good typesetter. It wasn't just typing: my typographic sense and design talent and my ability to get these primitive computers to churn out better quality turned out to be a marketable skill (for a little while, anyway) and after a couple years typing smut it was time to move on. But who doesn't need extra money? I had remained friends with the editor of the straight mags at Modernismo and I asked him if I could write some stories for him. I figured even if I was a textbook Kinsey 6 of a gay man I had lots of experience in reading these stories as I typeset them, so how difficult could it be to write them? I knew I was planning to take a spring and summer off to travel to Nicaragua, and I figured I could write stories from there, send em in, and keep a small paycheck going.

I was thrilled that he agreed. He greenlighted the one story I wrote before my trip and then I sent him a small handful of stories I typed out on my trusty manual typewriter from Managua. And I got paid; not a lot, but enough to soften the blow of my return to the States after a summer away.

Now here's the thing. I wasn't going to write gay pornography, not stories I actually found hot. I was going to write crude Juggs-style porn. The stories for Juggs were hilarious to me. Compared to the gay stories with romantic subtexts, the straight stories were raw exercises in titillating escapism where average Joes lived among ravishing women wanting nothing more than pure physicality, unencumbered by actual responsibilities or real-life complications. I wanted to take the stereotypical scenarios from straight porn and the vile objectification and rude language and ridiculous cliches and see if I could subversively produce a story that I thought was amusing. And so a new pseudonym was born, Sergeant Babs "Bust 'Em" Brady.

The stories I wrote are filthy dirty, full of words I would never use and can't believe I'm going to retype for this blog. But they make me laugh every time I read them. I don't think they're exactly erotic; they're meant to be subversively over-the-top. I still had--and have--a commitment to a certain kind of (sex-positive) feminist ideal, and I didn't want to completely betray my principles, even if the scenarios I had been typesetting for so long blurred crucial lines between rape and consensuality. But I thought it would be hilarious if I, a gay man, writing in the voice of a heterosexualized lesbian, could write satirical caricatures of straight pornography and have them published as actual pornography, and that is what I did. Here is the first of these stories. I have two more of them sitting by my 'puter and will continue these in later installments of "Confessions of a Pornographer."

-----

"You're Under a Breast"
by Sgt. Babs "Bust 'Em" Brady
Originally published in the December 1986 issue of Juggs Magazine


[Editor's note, 2013. I decided after thinking this over and over that this writing was just too rapey to let stand. It was done with some humor that does not survive the moment, as an in-joke, and because, frankly, I was a little angry and bitter, at a lot of things. I'm not going to apologize for writing it, that would be disingenuous, but I'm gonna say it wasn't my proudest moment. So I'm pulling the actual porn story I wrote. In so doing, I'm not taking a stand against porn, or analyzing the complicated human psyche that might eroticize rape in an abstract fantasy setting; but I am taking a stand against saying that there's anything funny about actual, real rape. And I will not be adding the two other porn stories I wrote to the "Echoes of the Past" series. Sorry if you've been waiting all these years for the follow up. Live and learn. Respect each other. —ISH]

The Savagery of White People, continued

Last month's post on apocalyptic fiction got me interested in re-reading some of these chestnuts. I got to "Alas Babylon," Pat Frank's 1959 novel of a (pre-Disneyworld) central Floridian community surviving a US-Soviet nuclear conflict. Frank seems to think of himself as a bit of a liberal, including the family of the African-American help in the core story of neighboring households banding together to survive. Then there's this pre-attack exchange between neighbors:

Bill locked his hands behind his back. "I can't guarantee it, of course...[Mr. Offenhaus] says the only real danger we face is being overrun by people swarming out of Orlando and Tampa. He doesn't even think there's much chance of that. Fort Repose isn't on any main highway. But he does say we'll have to watch out for the dinges. Keep 'em under control."
"Please, Bill!" Lavinia said. "Say darkies!"
"Darkies, hell! The dinges are liable to panic and start looting. Oh, the local niggers, like Daisy, our cook and Missouri, the cleaning woman, may be all right. Mr. Offenhaus was talking about the migrant labor, orange pickers and so forth....Mr. Offenhaus strikes me as a pretty solid businessman."

So there you have it, a world where "darkies" is the polite word. I say blow it all to hell. Finishing this book I really wished a nuke had landed square on them and cut the novel short then and there.

Of tea parties and things left unsaid

Do you know how racist white people who know better talk about black people? It's almost pathetic to listen to: when they get to the word "black" they pause; their eyes dart blankly left and right. The word itself is uttered in an embarrassed spit of a whisper; the eyes flashing anger and resentment before the sentence is resumed in a normal speaking tone. It's kind of like how straight people who hate gay people, or maybe just don't know any, say the word "homosexual," drawing out those first two syllables with clearer enunciation than they have ever used in their lives to make it a full almost sing-song "HOE MOE sexshuall."

I can't speak for what happens in the South, but in the Northeast and Midwest where I have spent my life, racist white people generally know better than to use the word "ni**er." I've certainly heard it spoken, but usually by the young and angry. Everybody knows the taboo of this word, and if racist white people wish they could use this powerful word they understand, at the very least, that it also has the power to get them into trouble.

Which brings us to the so-called Tea Party movement, which recently held its for-profit convention featuring keynote speaker Sarah Palin. Ariana Huffington keeps saying that the teabaggers represent the canary in a coal mine: that their rebelliousness against Washington's love affair with Wall Street is indicative of a tide of mass American anger. Similarly liberal New York Times columnist Frank Rich makes a sad and condemning portrayal of the relationship between politicians and Wall Street in his recent column; Rich talks about the teaparty being populist pawns for demagogues like Palin but seems somehow sympathetic to the concerns of the teaparty ranks. I usually like what these two have to say (reserving judgment, for the moment, on the institutions both of them represent). They've both pointed out that on the one hand the teabaggers criticize government spending and criticize government involvement in healthcare, they have no actual plan because they're deeply caught in contradiction. Let us not forget the infamous "get your government hands off my medicare" protest sign: how many of the baby-boomer teabaggers are now dependent on government hand-outs as they decry government spending?

But I think Rich, Huffington, and the tide of media conventional wisdom are fundamentally missing the mark in their portrayal of the so-called tea party movement. The financial populism of this "movement" is contradictory and without actionable platform because it is actually not really their main agenda. This so-called movement, which somehow materialized out of thin air seconds after the president's inauguration -- having previously had no truck with financial corruption and massive spending under Bush -- is using its financial argument to cover up its real priorities, which everybody knows and which everybody knows are not acceptable in polite society. And that is the deeply offensive and wounding notion to these resentful white people that their president is African-American and that the black, latin, and gay hordes have taken their beloved country away. The tea party's public profile makes no sense because it is a cover for their deeply entrenched racism and bigotry.

While teabaggers may be stupid at times (Who can forget signs like "Get a brain! Morans!" or "Obama! Half breed muslin!"), they're not stupid enough to use the word that they're really all thinking. These resentful white people are not afraid of what they're thinking, they're afraid of getting caught using words that they know are forbidden.

When they call Obama a socialist, a communist, a Hitler, a Muslim, an Indonesian, a Kenyan, they mean he's an outsider, they mean he's not entitled to be President, they mean he's a ni**er. The teabaggers may have a lunatic fringe who believes bizarre conspiracies about who Obama actually is, but they also have a mainstream that tolerates that lunatic fringe. It is the lunatic fringe that is the canary in that coal mine: seeing how far their right-wing argument can be pushed before it is pushed back against.

The teabaggers believe that our economic crisis was brought about by the collusion of Wall Street (Jews) and ACORN (ni**ers) giving mortgages to lazy welfare recipients who then failed, of course, to pay their bills. They don't have a problem with government spending, they have a problem with WHO the government might be spending money on. It's like how the right-wing was interested neither in Africa nor in AIDS until they realized they could get the government to spend millions of dollars on Christian churches spreading Christian-based abstinence advocacy in Africa (and in the US) and call it humanitarian AIDS relief.

The teabaggers think hate crimes legislation and marriage equality are plots to take something away from them. It's actually pretty shocking to read how outraged many fundamentalist religious leaders have been over hate crimes legislation and proposed local anti-bullying rules. They cannot believe their right to demonize gay people, to incite anti-gay hatred, might be taken away from them.


And this is really the problem: the media and political establishment ignore the foundational reality of the teabaggers at their own risk. It's interesting to talk about where the teabaggers come from in terms of our current economic crisis. Fox News and some very well-financed right-wing organizations have created astroturf that is apparently convincing even liberal commentators that it's actually grassroots. But what is grassroots here is the very American nerve of racism and resentment that the teabaggers share, beneath the skin of their somehow acceptably populist fervor.

But it's time to call a spade a spade. The Tea Party movement is a lynch mob in waiting. This is the core of nativist American fascism. Just because they're not running around in white sheets and using the word "ni**er" doesn't mean they're not thinking it. Watch teabaggers interviewed about what they believe. Their faces goes through those same darting contortions as they reach for words they know they can get away with.

This is not a populist movement; it's a racist one. This mad hatter's tea party is prelude to real trouble. Prettify it at your own risk.

The dream of the 132 Roman Soldiers

A post on another blog reminded me of this, my favorite part of many many comic books back in the Sixties. The comparatively sad reality of this vivid illustration can be found here.

I loved violent war toys as a child, though mostly of the historical variety more than GI Joe. (I loved those GI-Joe sized Indians and Vikings though....even if they were disappointingly anatomically incomplete.) Yet I grew up to be a pacifist. Letting urban kids play with realistic toy guns seems a little foolish, given cops with itchy trigger fingers, but maybe there's something good to be learned from playing at war. Maybe it gets it out of your system so that when you're a grownup you know it's not a game.

Enhanced Contradiction

One nation has used nuclear weapons, incinerating thousands in the blink of an eye. And if it is Japan, Germany, and Russia who have the reputation for being the bad guys of the last century, going around and attacking other nations unprovoked and then brutally occupying them, one might want to maintain some perspective and remember who carpet bombed North Vietnam for much of the 1960s and 1970s, who invaded the Dominican Republic in 1965, who invaded Grenada in 1983, and who invaded Iraq in 2003--all more or less if not unprovoked, unthreatened in any real way. And one might want to remember who was behind a multitude of coups and proxy wars in Guatemala in 1954 and the 1980s, Nicaragua in the 1980s, El Salvador in the 1980s, Cuba in 1961, Congo in the 1960s, Iran in 1953, Afghanistan in the 1980s.

What I grew up hearing called "Chinese water torture" (thanks to the Korean war) turns out to have its roots in the Spanish Inquisition, practice at the hands of Japanese militarism, and perfection with hoods and boards at the hands of the Khmer Rouge, is now called "water boarding" with its subtle suggestion of leisure-time recreation. And in the nation that most excels in double plus good euphemistical new-speak water-boarding turns out to be only one of the many prescribed practices of "enhanced interrogation" spelled out in recipe books issued by our former president George Bush's ironically-named justice department.

President Obama has, to his vast credit, opened some of the books on these deplorable inhumanities, shedding a little light on the Bush/Cheney doctrine of bureaucratic inhumanity that lead to our modern day gestapo-esque reality of Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, Baghram, and CIA black site prisons.

So now we all know, crimes were committed. What will we do about that? Well, apparently not very much, including not even clearly saying it won't happen again. Here's the rub. In his eternal optimism--and I don't actually mean that to sound so harsh--Obama knows that just under half the country doesn't have much of a problem with these crimes. It must be said that half the country doesn't seem to have much of a problem with the rest of us being enslaved to insurance companies, credit card companies, banks, soul-lessly greedy corporations, corrupt politicians, or religious fundamentalists either.

So how does the agenda of change which half the country DID vote for a few long months ago proceed? How now when the mildewing morality of a nation which claims to be free and progressive is revealed to be rotten with stinking and exposed corruption and hypocrisy is Obama to proceed?

President Obama is at one of many crossroads. He, who now controls the predator drones that kill innocent and guilty alike without trial or appeal, who now must choose secrecy or openness, who now holds the keys to the torture cells still stocked with people of unjudged innocence, who now claims to steer the ship of state, can choose not to fight this battle. Having defeated that other half of the country in his election he now hopes to unite us and heal us.

But what if it is not possible to heal that contradiction between the nation that murders at will (and the half of the population that unquestionably supported the actions of Bush and his predecessors in tradition) and the nation that claims to stand for a higher vision?

I want universal healthcare. I want marriage equality. I want economic justice. I want green energy. I want all the promises that Obama has made. But if all of these things are going to be battles, then let the battle be joined now over torture, where the morality is clear. If Obama is going to need more allies in the fight for a new more humane future, let him win them by repudiating completely the past and dismantling its machinery of murder. That intolerant, militaristic, backward, corrupt less-than-half of America is not monolithic. Let them be called out.

The United States has done terrible terrible things. They didn't start with Bush and they didn't end with him leaving office. We will win nothing if at every step we allow the forces of reaction to call the tune, to threaten, merely by their presence, to derail the cause of justice.

The previous administration must be held accountable, and responsible, for its crimes. Whether its judges or bureaucrats or interrogators or George Bush himself, the guilty must be punished. President Obama is wrong to reject that path.

Barack Hussein Osama?

This hilarious slice of satire on the upcoming New Yorker is, to my mind, the perfect distillation of right-wing American stupidity. Sadly, in going over the heads of those morons who actually do believe Obama is a muslim, it's not hard to imagine it becoming un-ironic rightwing propaganda.