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.

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

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.

I Would Rather Have Sex with a Horse than Vote for Carl Paladino

(A note to Googlers: It has come to my attention that this is statistically one of the more popular posts on my blog, and that's because it comes up in google searches for people looking for pictures of people having sex with horses. First, this is an article about politics not bestiality. Horses do not want to have sex with people, and people, if you're looking to have sex with horses you have a problem. Seek professional help. Sex is about intimacy, intimacy that it is not possible to have with animals. If you're looking for pictures of women being brutalized or degraded, you are not welcome here; do the world a favor and go someplace and cut your dick off. Finally, let me say that while I continue to be glad that a pig like Carl Paladino was defeated, turns out Cuomo is his own kind of pig. I regret my vote for this Democrat; never again. —ISH, August 2013)

"I just think my children and your children would be much better off and much more successful getting married and raising a family, and I don’t want them brainwashed into thinking that homosexuality is an equally valid and successful option — it isn’t...I didn’t march in the gay parade this year — the gay pride parade this year. My opponent did, and that’s not the example we should be showing our children." Republican candidate for New York State governor Carl Paladino on Sunday, Oct. 10

"Exposing [children] to homosexuality, especially at a gay pride parade — and I don’t know if you have ever been to one, but they wear these little Speedos and they grind against each other and it’s just a terrible thing." --Paladino defending his remarks the following day.

It was a good weekend for Democratic candidate Andrew Cuomo. Andrew Cuomo is a moderately liberal career politician who believes he is entitled to the job once held by his father, Mario. Mario Cuomo sought, and got, the endorsement of the fake "Independence" Party, the unlikely coalition of the Fred Newman mind-control cult and wealthy business interests. He blackmailed the progressive Working Families Party into backing his policies in return for accepting their endorsement: WFP is dependent on getting a certain number of votes in an election to stay on the ballot, so they've been forced to toe Cuomo's line to keep their electoral viability. But Carl Paladino, who won the Republican primary by a huge margin over the establishment candidate who had been expected to win, probably just handed Cuomo the election.

Citycouncil member Charles Barron is running a left-of-center campaign from his newly formed Freedom Party, but for me, Paladino has just gotten me to vote for Cuomo. I don't want Carl Paladino spouting his anti-gay, racist crap from Albany. Cuomo has denounced Paladino's remarks. I'm sure--and saddened--that Paladino's remarks just reinforced his support among the plentiful bigots who voted for him already. But hopefully more people are disgusted by his latest remarks.

Carl Paladino is a real estate developer who has taken millions in tax breaks who complains about government spending. He's a marriage-equality opponent who cheated on his wife and had a child out of wedlock. He is renowned for sending out racist emails like the one below, as well as sexually-objectifying emails like one reputedly showing a woman having sex with a horse. He's endorsed by the teabaggers and by anti-gay organizations.

Well, Carl, I'd rather have sex with a horse than vote for you.


Above is one of the horrifying racist graphics emailed by Carl Paladino. The rest can be seen here.

Carl Paladino is the true face of the so-called "Tea Party." Let them win the midterm elections at your own risk.

Echoes of a past life: Could it be Satan?

Recently the mayor of Moscow called a planned gay pride march "Satanic" and vowed to stop it. People throwing around the accusation of Satanism has always amused me: it's one of those superstitions that seems imprinted on people of modest faith and fundamentalists alike. Sadly, the accusation ends up causing a great deal of harm as the gullible find a powerful rallying cry to victimize people who might stray from some dominant societal norm.

Here's a piece I wrote (yeah, under a pseudonym) for a New York City pagan newsletter back in 1991. "Our Pagan Times" was the newsletter of New Moon New York, an open circle. I actually edited the monthly newsletter for a year, though this predates that time. New Moon was a great group: it was a good place to meet people at different levels of experience and involvement in Paganism. I learned a lot from those folks. Anyway this short piece has a fairly simplistic conclusion that I would say quite differently today. But the core point that the fundamentalists are displaying extreme hypocrisy is fair enough: it's a safe bet to say more children are abused by crazy fundamentalist parents trying to beat "the devil" out of them than by any so-called actual Satanist. I've done some very slight editing to this piece to fix some poor choices of words; blame any poor choice of ideas on my 1991 self.

Satanic Child Abuse and Intolerance
by Moonchild
from Our Pagan Times, Vol. 1 No. 8, October 1991

A dangerous bunch of fundamentalist Christians have been running around claiming to be "Satanic Cult Survivors." They even held an art show recently in SoHo, and have published a six-page resource entitled "identifying Characteristics of Satanic Cult Survivors." This document consists of long lists of associations that potentially reveal whether one might be a survivor of satanic cults and satanic incest without really remembering actual events. The document is actually hilariously funny, full of side-splitting suggestions such as "Strong reactions to babies' crying [suggests] Memories of hearing babies cry during sacrifices." And "Drink[ing] large quantities of water, soda...gives the impression of washing away the taste of human flesh. Cannibalism is a necessary part of cult rituals...Many survivors become vegetarians."

But this type of ridiculousness and similar efforts on the part of similar folks are not always a laughing matter.

I suppose it should be said here, for the record, yet again, that Witchcraft, Paganism, Wicca, are not Satanism. To be a Satanist, that is, to invert the icons of Christianity, one must first be a Christian. We are not Christians; we are not interested in dualities of good and evil and we are certainly not interested in chanting the Lord's prayer backwards.

Are there Satanists? Sure. They fall into several sometimes overlapping groups. First, there are a handful of creepy individuals fascinated by the dark side of the occult, and fascinated by their own alienation from society. I'm sure you can go to The Magickal Childe [an occult bookstore in NYC--ish] to meet them. But they commit no mass murders, and control no secret strings behind the scenes of society. They choose dark spiritual imagery because it is "forbidden," because it seems to give them power they don't find in reality.

Then there are the heavy metal teens. Pimples, parental alienation, lack of hope for the future, and bad music are enough to drive anyone to Satan! But seriously, they're not serious, and only hurting themselves slightly more than if they took up the J.D. hobbies of the past like smoking in school bathrooms and crashing parties at the gym.

Then there are the mentally unbalanced. This society is a very difficult one to live in. Our big cities, New York especially, are full of too much hostile, negative energy. Insanity and madness are rampant here: they are a product of our self-destructive society. I suspect most of those who think they are the survivors of Satanic cult abuse fall into this category. They've been badly hurt -- by living in an alienating society, and maybe even occasionally by actual incest and abuse -- and need some healing. They have found what appears to them as healing in the delusions of the biggest group of Satanists of all, and the most dangerous.

That group is Christian fundamentalists themselves.

We, as Pagans, know it is possible to manifest reality through focused energy raising and visualization. Now, the fundamentalists have raised tremendous energy and constantly visualize the this image of an evil god called Satan and his vengeful "good" god Jehovah. What are they manifesting?

The increasing racial violence, the threat to abortion rights, the violence against lesbians and gays, the violence to the environment. The rolling back of the social revolution of the '60s and '70s. These are the manifestations of Christian fundamentalism. These hateful, intolerant bigots are, through their religious practices, manifesting the evil that they cleaim to be crusading against. And mind you, they turn around and claim that we Pagans are the same as Satanists.

Goddess bless, we know the world as a diferent place than they do. We have a lot of healing to do.

By Way of Full Disclosure, Some of It Embarrassing

I've noticed that when I post a comment on other blogs, the number of visitors to this site jumps. I enjoy reading blogs and sometimes add my voice to a discussion: most of my regulars are listed on the sidebar. It probably won't reassure anybody that I really do split my internet reading between the topics of music, left-wing politics, spirituality, gay issues, and cute/funny kittens. I've commented on all these subjects. It's obvious, especially tracking the visits from left-wing blogs, that people want to know who's responsible for the comment drawing either their agreement or outrage.

Anyway, here, for the benefit especially of any leftists trying to figure me out, is the most embarrasing confession about my past. This photo, and the quote below, are from an article entitled "Campus Radicalism In These New Times," written by Leslie Lapides, which appeared in the May 17, 1978 issue of the Chicago Journal. The article interviews several student radicals who recount their journey to becoming socialist activists. The interviewer talks to members of the Young Socialist Alliance, of the Maoist Revolutionary Student Brigade, of the Trotskyist Spartacists, and a former Yippie. Most articulately detail their life's circumstances and explain the attraction of a Marxian view of the world, telling fascinating stories. Then on the other hand we get to this:

"Ian Horst of the SYL [Spartacus Youth League--ish] visited Poland after graduating from high school and thought 'It was better there. The economy ran better. It was planned and rational.'" Yeah, that's me on the right, with my then "comrades" Gloria, Emily, Larry and David. It's really a shame this photo isn't in color because, filling in the portrait of me as some kind of Stalinist naif, I think that's a threadbare blue Mao jacket I'm wearing. And honest, despite the bizarre looks on all our faces, to my knowledge none of us was dosed with mind-altering substances. I look like I was practicing for a career selling pornography at church retreats.

I left the Spartacists that very year, when I also left the world of the campus. I would chalk it all up to youthful indiscretion except that I remained a radical activist through much of the next decade. After a brief period of involvement with the extraordinarily clandestine (if extraordinarily namby-pamby) group The Spark, I joined the Revolutionary Socialist League, a now defunct group which at the time combined gay activism, general social activism, and a lively and questioning attitude toward Leninist and Trotskyist orthodoxy. I exited the organized left about 1986 or so, mostly for reasons of personal exhaustion and demoralization.

This was all a long time ago. Some people streaked in the 1970s; some people joined hippie communes and spent the year with their minds blown out on acid; some people finished their educations and started serious careers. Me, I became a leftist. Obviously I'm not ashamed of this. I still value that lively and questioning attitude toward orthodoxy that I learned then. But I'm not sure I'd call myself any kind of Marxist--there's a lot of water under that bridge. I'd be lying if I said I paid enough attention to all the ideological jetsam floating thereunder trying to rescue elements of that core ideology after the fall of the Soviet Union. I'm proud to remain committed to social justice and to peace; I'm smart enough to recognize that the hope for a better world isn't lingering about in tiny obsolete sectlets. I'm also old enough to know better: life just isn't as simple as any one set of ideologies would have you believe.

The choices, both successes and mistakes, we make in our lives make us complete human beings. I've done things I'm proud of, and embarrassed by. Frankly, I'm proud to still be alive in this new decade. I learned a lot in my years on the left, not least I learned the fundamentals of graphic design, my actual career, from a former member of the Students for a Democratic Society who apprenticed in the old-school newspaper world; if nothing else that's a pretty cool legacy.

So, dear reader, who are you and who did you used to be?

Crossposting from Ile Oxumare: Have a Blissful Day

This is a crossposting of an essay and compilation that originally appeared on one of my music blogs.



Perhaps because it's when I came of age, I have long been fascinated by the decade of the 1970s. Long reviled in the popular imagination, it seems to be the decade that cultural historians would like to erase. It's laughable how, for instance, the reviewers over at the All-Music Guide will tend to leave the 1970s output by many jazz musicians off their discography, and when an individual album from that time is covered, unless it happens to be a collection of standards harkening back to the classic era, it tends to get written off as "not so-and-so's best album." Disco music has come to symbolize the seventies in a sort of warped way: portrayed as the effete frivolity of coke-snorting polyester-clad airheads, its reality as a kind of ecstatic mass egalitarian communion for a new generation of proud black and gay urbanites is overlooked. The corruption of Nixon and the weakness of Ford and Carter are remembered, not the progressive community and consciousness-building organizations that flourished until repression, hard times, or eventual exhaustion laid them low. And the 1970s is most definitely remembered as the era of the religious cult, which brings us to the compilation at hand.

In those days before the megachurches of Christian fundamentalism, spirituality in America was in a vast state of flux. As the younger generation came to reject the political and cultural establishment in the 1960s, so it rejected the religious establishment. Everybody knows how the Beatles flirted with eastern religion: newly expanded higher consciousness inspired the newly aware to explore spiritual paths that would have been unimaginable to whitebread America a few years before. Astrology and numerology became mainstream; "eastern" concepts like auras and karma and reincarnation became widely accepted.

Nature abhors a vacuum. Into this wide-open spiritual openness stepped preachers and teachers and gurus and holymen, and a host of evangelical organizations, many of which eventually being accused of manipulation and mind-control. On the eastern front, gurus like Swami Satchidananda and Sri Chinmoy gained a huge number of adherents, Sri Chinmoy in particular influencing many in the music world. The Hare Krishnas, eventually the International Society for Krishna Consciousness lead by Swami Prabhupada, became ubiquitous. There were Christian-derived societies like the politically conservative Unification Church of Rev. Sun Young Moon (the so-called "Moonies") or the ill-fated left-wing People's Temple of Rev. Jim Jones; there were the Jesus Freaks and Jesus People. There was the cult of Scientology for sci-fi geeks; there were Egyptian revivalists promising health through colon cleansing; there were African cultural nationalists redefining black cultural identity. There was Transcendental Meditation; there was Nichiren Buddhism and its prosperity chanting. There was the beginnings of New Age philosophy with theories of healing and medicine outside traditional "Western" pharmacology. All these new ideas competed for the attentions of young people, especially those adrift in confusing cultural times.

The dark side of all this is undeniable. When I was in junior high school my best friend John went off on a picnic with a group--maybe they were Moonies--who offered him an afternoon of food and fraternization. We didn't see him again for six months. When he returned he wouldn't talk about what happened, but he was changed and brooding. The religious cults had a predatory aspect, requiring their devotees to change their behaviors and their lifestyles. In some cases this turned devotees into beggars, like the Hare Krishnas haunting the airports giving out "free" books and then demanding a donation. Other cults turned into tragedies, like the hundreds of poor people who moved to Guyana to build a new world with the People's Temple who ended in an orgy of mass suicide and murder.

But it wasn't all mind control: in those innocent days nobody followed an alternate spiritual path or joined a cult for negative reasons, they did so out of hope, out of the desire to be spiritually uplifted and fulfilled; out of the desire to find like-minded people with whom to share, to celebrate, to build, to learn, to teach. Which brings us to the music.

The music of this world of spiritual exploration in the 1970s is actually pretty awesome. It can be spiritually meditative or joyously upbeat. It crosses musical genres ranging from jazz to rock to folk to disco to funk. It's got a blissful positivity that I find inspiring: "free" is probably the word sung most by this diverse collection of spiritual optimists.

Several of the artists represented here might actually be considered representatives of "cults:" Ananta, Rasa and J.O.B. Orquestra were all adherents of ISKCON and their records were sold directly by Hare Krishnas. The People's Temple Choir song is from an album recorded several years before their emigration to Guyana. The bonus track recorded by George Harrison's London Ashram will be familiar to anyone who has ever seen Hare Krishna devotees chanting on the street. Some of the lyrics here are fascinating: JOB's "Dont Want That Illusion" is the most peculiar (anti) love song I've ever heard.

Other artists represented here were personal adherents of evangelical eastern religions: Turiyasangitananda Alice Coltrane, herself a swamini, or teacher, was a devotee of Swami Satchidananda (this is, by the way, one of her few recordings on fender-rhodes electric piano). Devadip Carlos Santana and Narada Michael Walden, the producer of the Don Cherry track here (himself a Buddhist), were devotees of Sri Chinmoy.

The remainder of the artists here are examples of how widespread the ideas preached by the cults became. I wasn't able to find evidence that members of Odyssey, Shanti, Seawind, Karma, etc. were actually involved in specific groups, but the content of these songs makes it clear these are all fellow travellers to this world. Perhaps the most strange of these is the track from the "mighty burner" Charles Earland which will change your opinion of him forever.

"Cult" is a word with terrible connotations. As someone who is himself a practitioner of a religion outside the mainstream, I choose to identify here with the people who are singing about their love of God, their hope for a better world, their joy at life, their mastery of the spiritual realms; and pull from these songs inspiration rather than doubt, and joy at revelation rather than fear of manipulation. Better this open celebration of life and spirit than the harsh dictates of many of today's right-wing fundamentalists. In a world of fanatical suicide bombers, communal and sectarian violence, churches mobilizing to deny rights to gays and immigrants, and self-righteous hypocrites preaching hellfire, the spirit of this "cult" music is refreshingly forward-looking and life-affirming.

I'm not gonna shave my head, renounce the world, and start chanting for money on the corner, but with music like this I'm sure gonna celebrate life a little more.

The originally posting, with track details and links to a download, can be found here.

What's wrong with this picture?

This is a photo of Lenora Fulani with NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg. Bloomberg, who was elected twice as a Republican, recently strongarmed democracy and bribed City Council into letting him run for a third term, against the term limits laws twice voted into law by New York voters. Lenora Fulani is a figure in the Independence Party. Since Bloomberg--at least until last week; apparently he will now ALSO be running as a Republican again--calls himself an Independent and "Independent" sounds like "Independence" and he thought that would be a nice way to appear on the ballot.

Bloomberg basicaly agreed to bankroll the Independence Party in return for their party line on the ballot. Nice deal, eh? But who is the Independence Party? Just a bunch of nice independents?

Um, not really.

The Independence Party is the latest incarnation in a mind-control cult half a step away from such outfits as Scientology and with traceable connections to Lyndon LaRouche. Formerly known by such entities as The New Alliance Party and the Institute for Social Therapy and Research, this shady outfit and personality cult for Fulani and founder Fred Newman, used to haunt the left and progressive movement trying to siphon off disaffected questioning individuals into its near brain-washing psychotherapy programs. They would urge troubled people to attend their therapy sessions with a doctrine saying that "the system" was responsible for people's depression or mental issues and that the solution to personal unhappiness or psychological issues was to join their group and fight capitalism.

Now, apparently capitalism is no longer the enemy. As the left and progressive movements faded, providing a lack of recruits for this cult, the Independence Party drifted rightward, toying with all sorts of unsavory right-wing characters. This unholy alliance between a would-be dictator and a power-hungry personality cult should be a major scandal in this city, but it is not. My question is:

WHY?

I moved to New York City in 1981. One of my closest friends was a man names Steve Rose. He had moved to NYC from upstate New York, become an RN, and joined the gay activist world with gusto. He joined GAA, the Gay Activists Alliance--in the late 1970s, and was part of the faction of GAA at its end who became sympathetic to the Revolutionary Socialist League, then one of the left groups most active in that pre-AIDS gay movement. Steve was not drawn to the left through intellectualism, through student disaffection at some ivory tower. He became a leftist because his heart told him it was the right thing to do. He chose the RSL because of its unique attempt to combine socialist orthodoxy with a left libertarian spirit and its complete embrace of the nascent GLBT movement.

Eventually as the RSL imploded in those dark Reagan years Steve and I had a falling out. We both moved on, and sadly, Steve joined those first ranks activists to be diagnosed with AIDS. His first over Alberto passed on first, and Steve himself lost his battle with injustice sometime in the mid to late 1980s. The last time I saw Steve was on a street corner. Although a few years before he made numerous sharp and stingingly incisive polemical attacks against the New Alliance Party and their ilk, by then he was defeated. Facing personal demoralization along with the challenges of fighting HIV Steve joined the NAP. When I saw him on that corner telling me of his new allegiance to NAP I saw such despair behind his eyes belying the wooden and rote recitation of how NAP had helped him to see that his problems were not his own, rather the burden of oppression and capitalism. It was heartbreaking to see him so broken, so surrendered to the easy answers of a cult that could do his thinking for him. I grieve that he spent his last years in such company. While brash and not always sympathetic, Steve was a fighter and a real hero of gay liberation. The cult that parasitically attached itself to him, joining the HIV in sucking out his life force, cannot now go unopposed.

Bloomberg's unholy alliance must be exposed, and Bloomberg's Giuliani-like power grab must be spiked.

update: check out Lyndon LaRouche Watch for a lot of details about the Fred Newman cults.