The State of Obama

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Republican Candidates Threaten Cuba

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

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

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

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

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

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

Barbarians R Us

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Election...Eighty Years Ago

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

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

Which changes everything.

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

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

Internet on Strike!

The Cahokian will be available again on Thursday.

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

Without Comment: 1% vs. 99%

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

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

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

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

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

— Occupy Wall Street activist Yotam Marom interviewed by Naomi Klein

Liberate the Neighborhood!

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

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

Rise & Root

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

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

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

"How To Survive a Plague" Going to Sundance!

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

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

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

Anti-Americana: Peace President

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

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

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

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

Happy New Year 2012: The Beginning Is Near

Happy New Year to all the readers of The Cahokian!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Even The Longest Night Gives Birth to Dawn

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Our enemy is here at home, first.

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

December 17 2010: The Man Who Changed the World

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It's been nice knowing you all.

Crunching the Numbers...of Perverts

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?

An Invitation to Ethnic Cleansing

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

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

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

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

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

Musical Interlude: Smile of the Beyond

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Keep Occupying!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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