27 October 2015

For the Love of Germaine Greer and Fidel and Gadaffi and Assata and All the Rebellious Rogues


Someone I have no reason to disrespect politically just responded to a post I made of feminist Germaine Greer writing "I just learned of her today in the context of her apparent transphobia."

The person who wrote that appears young, but I do not know how young. Whatever his age, he is intelligent. The point is Greer is nearing 80, and is not young, and has indisputably served much of her life as an anti-assimilation, anti-racist, anti-patriarchal, anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist, anti-industrial feudalism class warrior. Agree with her or not, her record is wide and deep.

So this reflex by rising generations of activists, which seems to have gained steam over the last 20 years only, where we approach our radicals like Mormon missionaries on safari, is disturbing.

Stop it.

What do Fidel Castro, Che Guevara, Margaret Sanger, Assata Shakur, Muammar Gadaffi, Robert Mugabe, Mohamed Morsi have in common? I don't know, but they are to some controversial figures, and to others they are heroes.

They have all been important enough to get me unfriended, blocked, cussed at. To be absolutely fair, I have unfriended, blocked, cussed at a few people who've crossed the line of civilized debate with me and resorted to personal attacks in place of argument.

I am a man of ideas. Not of people. Ideas outlive people: they are handed down. People die. I do not quote, share, cite any of these peoples' works to make gods out of them but to nurture the soil of revolution and revolutionary thought. My belief in their contribution to this thought is unequivocal.

To the extent they might be deemed imperfect is arrogance to me. I don't care if they are drunkards, philanderers, starved their children, as Marx is said to have done.

What does this have to do with Germaine Greer, the author of The Female Eunuch and many other writings?

Revolutionary thought is done no service by abbreviating two generations of work of someone like Greer to her articulated position on transsexuals, any more than we miss study of a revolutionary movement by reducing Fidel to a "dictator" and those UMAP camps [where gays and dissenters were sent in the early years of the Cuban revolution].

If this is all Fidel is for you, then you will miss his cogent, deep, sometimes colorful analyses of capitalism in general and the Western empire in particular. You will also miss his position on those camps and his own evolution, but I maintain these are irrelevant to his contributions.

Before Hillary and Benghazi, Gadaffi lost me about 10 friends in one day on Facebook, all of whom had their "Christopher Hitchens moment" and supported the overthrow of the Libyan revolutionary. They openly despised me for coming to his defense. They were tone deaf to my counter-argument that while the US was ambivalent about South African apartheid yet arming the white regime, Gadaffi was giving money and weapons to crush that racist regime. This has made Libya a heroic figure in the global South in anticolonial, Pan-African struggle. I urged a broader perspective; they did not want one.

Just a few days ago, I unfriended a young white man, who had only recently requested my friendship. This debacle was over Pres. Mugabe. Before he told me I was full of hate and provoked my pushing the eject button, he had reduced Mugabe to a homophobe who was orchestrating pogroms against lesbian and gay Zimbabweans.

Now, to the first, there is evidence; Mugabe has said some disturbing things; to the pogroms, the record is very thin. Human Rights Watch is interestingly disturbed now about "equal rights" now that white farmers are being kicked off lands. They are silent about pogroms, except for the harassment and arrest of a leader of an unlicensed gay rights NGO. This is regrettable but hardly a pogrom.

What I wanted to impress upon this man and his worldly ways was that for some people on the continent and in the diaspora, Mugabe is a freedom fighter who successfully kicked the British settler government out of what was this colonial Southern Rhodesia. While the British queen and her ministers were fiddling "God Save the Queen" and making all sorts of excuses about the white occupiers of African lands, Mugabe - an aspiring school teacher - was waging a rebellion, a rebellion he is still waging at 90 years old.

I guess I have crossed the rubicon into "older." I understand less and less these young radicals, who are almost entirely millennials, who demand ideological purity to what is currently in style.They don't read anything longer than a Tweet. They have a lingo but no syllabus.

This essay isn't about demanding they share my view of things, but for godsake be a little reticent and more global. Anyone who would reduce Greer to a transphobe  is not doing any reading. This is not to say one way or another what Greer's position is: it is to say it's probably not relevant to the weight of her contribution.

In George Bernard Shaw's writing and stage play, "St. Joan," the maid of Orleans is described as an early feminist and rational stylist when it came to clothes. She was an anti-warrior warrior and military strategist. But the patriarchs of the time could bear none of this, let alone see it. Threatened by these things, they burned her. The last words Shaw puts in Joan's mouth, which end the play, resonate: "
O God that madest this beautiful earth, when will it be ready to accept thy saints? How long, O Lord, how long?"

13 October 2015

A More Perfect Communism

 
Yesterday I was in a serious motorcycle accident coming down Kaiminani at about 5 AM. My front tire suddenly lost air, handle bars twisted sharply to the left, and over and down, and over I went, followed my the longest skid of my life.

X-rays and Catscans later revealed the worst of my injury was a break in my left leg, the side of the body that took most of the fall.

But I am already getting ahead of myself. This story isn't really about me.

Laying there dazed in the middle of the street, one car drove around and passed me and continued down the hill. Another car heading up the hill, pulled to the side to see if I was alright. I heard him call 911, give his name and number, and he said he'd try to stay but he was late for work.

As I crawled to the side of the street, this good Samaritan picked up my motorcycle - this is when we noted the front tire was airless and flat, and he engaged in some small talk until the paramedics arrived, followed by the police.

Routine questions were asked. I was put in the back of the ambulance. One of the officers was to arrange for a tow with my AAA card. I was off to the Kona Community Hospital.

You may not have noticed in that briefest rendition are examples of communism, and I want you to think about them, appreciate them, and strive to better them. The alternative is at the end of this story.

Communism, you say incredulously? Where are the Reds?

A lot of nonsense still fills the heads of the pioneer West about communism, even though we ask for it everyday in all kinds of subtle but obvious ways.

The good Samaritan. I did not have to hire anyone to stop and help. It was not part of his job: the fact he was anxious about being late for his job tells me he's not even a middle-management type, just a wage-slaving Joe like most of us. So without reward, he reached out.

The paramedics came. They never asked for my insurance or asked for a fee to begin care. I was on the ground. My first thought when I stopped skidding after the crash was who would feed my cat -- but I did not tell them this since they might think I had a head injury. They did their jobs. They followed their training. This is what we call a Public Service.

Public Services are services open to all. Our public schools. Our fire departments. These are also public services. No administrator stops to ask for a fee or to see if your monthly subscription is in good standing before the child is admitted to class or, worse, the fire in your house is put out.

As a nurse later put it to me in the ER "our job is to revive the patient until we cannot revive the patient." Period.

Public Services are examples of communism.

The Police. I have to distinguish them from the other services because their function has earned mixed grades over time. The police were started explicitly to deal with poor people and the threat they posed to the Establishment. While much of the role of the police has not changed much over the last few hundred years, as public servants they can and do strive to achieve this end.

But police are a public service and also examples of communism. Armies are examples of communism, too. But they were designed to break things and kill people.

So just because communism is good doesn't mean everything it produces is good.

The Community Hospital, where I was taken by ambulance. Yes, that, too, is communism.

I know this pioneer country is full of myths and people who strive to fulfill those myths, who not only hate communism but also hate "government" - which I am arguing is communism to the extent it organizes public institutions to serve the public broadly or in target communities. These pioneer types want you to believe that all it takes is you and your sturdy bootstraps

But look what happens after a natural disaster. Nothing makes an anticommunist more communist than when a wildfire is about the burn down his precious home and the fire department show up and, without question, "revive the patient until we cannot revive the patient." Those fire fighters follow their training and extinguish that fire.

We all paid into the pot for the service; we all benefit. That is communism.

When was the last time you heard someone ask how much money the fire department made in the last fiscal quarter? The police? The ambulances? Your schools?

But my story took a rather sour turn. No it wasn't the trauma suffered on my torso or my broken left leg. It was my motorcycle.

AAA would not retrieve my bike, so unbeknownst to me - I was in an ambulance - the police officer called their outside-contracted tow service to collect it.

A friend took me to this dump site where my bike was being held not 8 hours after my initial accident, and I was presented with a bill for over $400 to claim my motorcycle.

Ladies and gentlemen, comrades and co-conspirators: this is an example of capitalism. Unadorned, unromanticized capitalism.

The proponents of capitalism obfuscate it in all kinds of distracting ways: like cowboys on their horses, ranchers, tales of upward class mobility, and lifestyles of the rich and famous.

The bottom line about capitalism is it seeks to maximize its wealth in return for as little loss as possible. Just so, for towing my bike a few miles and housing it for a few hours at most, these people were able to extort $400 from me.

Capitalism extorts as much labor as it can, on or off the books, for as little compensation it can spend. That is why the old economists, the radicals, and even at one time the Republican Party called this wage-slavery.

Capitalism does demand performance, but not "our job is to revive the patient until we cannot revive the patient." No. It demands to know how much more you earned this quarter from last. It asks how did you minimize your costs.

Remember, they are authorized, outside contractors with the Hawaii police. In fact, I did call the police. I felt I was being extorted, and this was a scam. True to their history as defenders of the Establishment against the poor, the police officer arrived sharply dressed, polite, and in total collusion with the impound lot.

"IF I saw some criminal activity here ..." he said to me.

"If? ... Really?"

But that was that.

What it comes down to is which kind of society you want to cultivate for yourselves, your neighbors, your children, and so on.

I have drawn two sharp visions. These are real-life stories. Now our pioneer establishment must exist on the myth that only one story is tenable, the capitalist one. But they rarely show you its brutality and tell you that humans are naturally selfish creatures. This is nonsense.

Clearly, a good Samaritan and public services are as equally possible as that car that left me in the middle of the street to pull myself up by my bootstraps and police-authorized extortionists demanding much from you for little in return.

For my part, I am a communist, and only want to cultivate and perfect such a society for everyone.