25 August 2012

Obama's New Rabbit Hole



The fat, sweaty white guy sitting in front of me on the employee shuttle seemed to be trying to push into fifth gear in his four-gear, lithium-deprived brain: something, as they say down yonder, had got into his craw, and he was in full, incoherent, angry flow about the US president.

Of course, this is all taking place in Orange County, the western-most seat of the Ku Klux Klan and the American NAZI Party [American and NAZI being empirically rather redundant, in fact].

The shuttle was practically empty, except for his loud mouth, a white woman in front of him who politely made occasional eye contact with him as he pretended to talk to her, me, a Latino man in the back, and the low-paid East Indian shuttle driver. So, for all this thick-necked buffoon's loudness, I took his rants as performance art, not for the white woman whose attention was at best remote, but rather for the darkies to whom he had to declare his independence.

The half-wits flew out of his mouth like little birds.

"Obama hates this country!" The right-wing always address the presidents they despise by their surnames; while the chalk-brained Reagan is forever "President Reagan."

"His only goal is to ruin our Constitution."

"He's put this country so deep in debt, we'll never get out."

"If Obama's car ran over a pot hole in the street, he'd blame President Bush."

But amid all this King Georgesque madness, there is an astute narrative, but this man, and, it seems, most of my country of whatever shape, color, hue, or sexual fetish, is grossly unaware. The enemy is personified, never institutionalized. So every four years, it's Groundhog Day!

When Noam Chomsky was asked if there was anything of the country for which a citizen could be proud, Chomsky conditioned his response on what the person meant by the "country". If this means "the government": No. Governments are purely instruments of power, states are violent institutions; you can never be proud of that. Not any government, he said.

This revelation that our institutions are corrupt and contaminate any who enter them seems never to have occurred to that Aryan sector of Orange County for whom a Black man aspiring to be president could never have been born on this Holy Ground - or for any of its walled-off Aryan sectors [in Los Angeles or anywhere else segregation still holds firm].

Only now, the government as headed by Barack Obama is deemed a nefarious enemy of gun owners, full of waste, and its machinations to create Death Panels to exterminate us widespread.

Why did we let this Foreign-born, Muslim Socialist become president?

Vicious white racism is only different than the European variety because of simple dynamics: while the West was being won - built up, industrialized, amassing wealth, and breeding psychotic billionaires - the whites on these conquered lands were forever having to fight range wars. The Native inhabitants and the imported Africans would not comply easily to the strange ways of this European trash and its gutter religion, and they kept rebelling. These dark people can never, therefore, be trusted.

The Untouchables for the European Powers were in the Congo, India, and other far-flung places. Queen Victoria could have an Indian servant as a pet, but this didn't disturb anyone outside the upstairs-downstairs of Buckingham Palace. The elites in the US literally had the natives everywhere breathing down their necks, ready to storm the back doors.

Obama enters the US consciousness of a people hunkered down in the trenches of a race war, which, lost, threatens to dismantle their apartheid system. Like most of my screeds - to use the right-wing expletive - notions of race wars is not newsworthy but just my anger, and to be dismissed. Dismissed like those swathes of urban poor, Black and Brown, and the persistence of worst poverty among Native descendants. Unlike my screeds, the science and philosophy and Opinion that justifies our apartheid is perfectly acceptable, because, after all, weren't the Blacks savages in Africa until Europe civilized them?

Many lies have become agreed-upon truths, made careers, and justified the worst penal system in the world. That's Big Business, and it has used science and philosophy and Opinion because it owns them.

What that fat man and his Klan cousins are too slow-witted to realize is Obama is not the source of this hegemonic system: he is its servant. And this is the tip of the iceberg these Aryans refuse to see.

The months prior to the 9/11 attacks, Bush's poll numbers dropped precipitously, the economy continued to stagger ever downward like a Greek tragedy in need of a deus ex machina. In the wake of the 2000 election fraud, this should have provoked a lot more discussion than it did. But barely a newspaper of record investigated.

Then our Reichstag came. War would follow. More than 10 years of war and counting, longest in US history for a hot war [unlike that long, long Cold War].

The presidency's task is to keep this steam ship rolling along, which really means to do nothing at all to solve real problems. The steam ship is commerce. This impotence to do little else is not an accident.

The founders of the US asserted that those who own the country ought to run it: so much for not letting the daylight in on the magic!

The French and English revolutions cut off the heads of kings to progress the exceptional values we hold so dear, for freedom and democracy to flourish. This is what we are taught.

The truth is otherwise. These were merchant - not popular - revolutions: that is, they were basically attempts by the merchants, investors, and bankers to liberalize [meaning: pry open and out of the hands of the locals!] the economy to increase their market share - in slaves mostly.

Mass, insurgent attempts after the English Revolution to challenge the authority of the state, to question the dominance of Parliament and the Military frightened the bankers so much they needed to do something to protect their privilege from mass scrutiny: so the monarchy, the one institution shielded from the electorate and popular pressure, was duly restored. The religious order was re-established.

Perhaps indoctrinated with a hierarchical, patriarchal religion, logic dictates that Fathers must head families, Government school teachers are omnipotent, Bosses run workplaces, the King can do no wrong, and the state is on a predestined course to do Good. From the myths, lies are born.


This is why religion is not only an opiate but also a lobotomy.

Like any corrupt institution, our modern states will only promote those men and women who will serve its functions, to advance commerce, increase market share, beef up quarterly stock reports. This is not conspiracy theory but rather an obvious institutional analysis.

Anyone who gets in the way will literally, or figuratively, get a head chopping.

That angry man on the shuttle will put the weight of the world's problems on the shoulders of a Black man without hesitation. The poor, the dark, the colonials, are always ripe for blame over what ills our Chosen People. But he will not see what links us as workers in a country whose government wants to compete with slave-labor shops, like China. He will make no connection between the system that ended one service contract for a cheaper one, with cheaper shuttle drivers, earning what your average WalMart associate earns, which is equally alarming, to our elite's fascination with sweat shops and seeking lower and lower wages, breaking more and more unions, and driving more and more people into poverty.

This angry man will hit a pot hole and in fact blame Obama for it, not the failed state.

This is not about Obama any more than it is about Bush, Clinton, or Reagan. They all serve their function, which is increasingly to the detriment of wider and wider swathes of the population.

But Barack Obama is in a pretty precarious spot. While he is constitutionally qualified (so is Sarah Palin), he's clearly not up to the tasks of the people having sold his political soul, or of Wall Street, who does not trust a man of this color to make the country safe for more sweat shops.

The country is enduring a worst malaise than that of the 1970's, an economic Depression has hit whole sectors of our economy, and Obama can do nothing. History will regard his presidency comparable to Jimmy Carter's, who made a success at being an ex-president. So there is hope for Obama in his professional afterlife.

Meanwhile, Obama plays with a rather dull collection of toys from a Cracker Jack box, and the Mormon with his offshore accounts will balance the books as easily as Queen Victoria did with those Irish she starved to death.

They paw at each other through the hazy gossamer veil between them. Neo-campaign politics.

Congress doesn't want to get anything done - like the president, it has essentially gotten out of the way, vacated its posts, so the banks and financiers can maximize their trade routes. Commerce. The US Supreme Court, rarely a defender of the rights of people and communities, has become the legislative body de jure of our state capitalist, failed system.

What a shame, as Gordon Ramsay would say understatedly, examining a ruined expensive entree. Obama began as somewhere on the left - with much of the rest of the country. He supported universal health care, like every first world country has; he supported gay marriage; he stood against our wars, against the human rights, Geneva Convention violation of Guantanamo; he was against the blockade of Cuba, which the UN General Assembly has repeatedly condemned [only Israel, naturally, supports us].

For all Obama's vapid, empty campaign rhetoric of 2008, the expensive entree is what people wanted in power, before our own twilight extinguishes in the same ruins as our supposed nemesis, the Soviets. But since Wall Street selects our presidents and directs policy, Obama had to do an about-face. It was an error, we were told, that he supported gay marriage. Guantanamo has made a war criminal of him as has his strange assassinations of US citizens without any trial. Assassinating non-US citizens we are expert at, and something we must all reckon with.

The people - that shrinking half who vote - are further demoralized. The elites are anxious to accelerate neoliberal failures at home that they once imposed in the global South, and like their redneck underlings they don't trust this president to do it. Their money has been filling the campaign coffers of the Mormon with offshore accounts, a chilling forecast indeed.

What to do? Elect the Mediocrity from Lego Land or the Mormon with Offshore accounts? Either way, it seems the Mayan forecast is spot on, an End is near, though just not the literal one the religious zealots peddle.





04 August 2012

Europe and the Roots of Our Pathology



Are human beings incurably depraved? Our masters talent for continuing to fuck things up for their inferiors is to be expected, even if it is genocidal. But our own talent as slaves for being so gullible, so lazy, so narcissist, so dis-empowered, so depressed to do any meaningful thing for our own good or the good of the whole should make us all despair not only for succeeding generations but for our present, toxic, death-laden one.

Since as long as I remember, it was conventional wisdom that pedophiles/child molesters were also incurably depraved. This was alleged because the trauma they faced themselves as children - defiled and deflowered more than we defile and deflower most other children - was so great, so severe, that it had done irreparable harm: the wound had cut too deep to heal.

Anyone who is immediately unsettled by my drawing an analogy between ourselves and pedophiles does not know, fundamentally, what we do in the names of God and Commerce - to children: it is just a glimpse to what we do otherwise and elsewhere.

Arguably, after white slave trafficking, the subjugation of women, Jewish holocausts, economic-induced famines, nuclear detonations on civilians, bombing ancient civilizations back into the Stone Age, court-sanctioned wife beatings, the forced migration of millions of nameless Africans from their homeland and their new Christian governments turning the other cheek to lynching, the extermination campaigns against Amerindians, Native Hawaiians, Aboriginals, and the forced relocation of the survivors, a Holy Inquisition against earth-based religious followers - not to forget the State Inquisitions against labor and human-rights activists: it's probably fair to say we've all been a bit defiled and deflowered and traumatized.

But have the wounds run too deep for us to stop the bleeding?

Watching reality shows, like Gordon Ramsay's "Master Chef" the one thing I take away is that there are countless people out there - many gainfully employed in revered professions - who despise their lives because they are unfulfilled by their work, which, if you include getting dressed, commutes, and actual eight-nine hours workday, consumes the vast part of our time in the sun and our youth and our energies. Time, keep in mind, we will never get back. 

These people are ready to chuck it all away in a tantrum of hopefulness for the chance in a 1,000 to be the selected 100, to compete to do something meaningful and creative with their lives, like being a cook.

And yet, for all their supposed job status in the twin towers, they have no power over their lives to make themselves better, or make anything better. All they are empowered to do is work harder or displace themselves from the machine and win a lottery.

Why not chuck the system away? Why not destroy the machine itself? But are we, as I originally asked, too traumatized to do even that?

The trauma is often intentional and meant to instruct deliberately. In that way it is different than the abuse we do to children. Or is it? Beating up, deporting, and shooting labor activists can have a very sobering effect on other workers who will think twice about speaking up; and they won't think once about befriending that brash coworker who is always causing problems.

So many classrooms to this alleged "service-oriented" economy are still arranged with the factory system in mind. Rows of desks, all facing the head, the teacher, whose instructions must be followed to the letter or you are singled out to stand in a corner, after school detention, or to the principal's office for worse punishment. This is as it was intended, then and now: a model workplace. The good students raise their hands, are otherwise quiet, faces down in their books; the bad kids won't follow direction.

Assigning various hash tags to our economy is a bullshit enterprise that may only interest the cottage industry of Economics Departments. Industrial. Post-Industrial. Service Oriented. Capitalist ... and my favorite blooper: the mixed economy. These all hide the reality of a slave system that demands obedience to the ruling order, the chain of command, the titans of industry. Our way of life [which even in the loosest sense of the meaning of the word civilization: it is not].

If I did join the bullshitters, the economics departments, and the spinning talking heads the better tag for our system is a European system. But even this is sloppy.

To the extent we have a memory, it is to Europe [which in itself shows we have no memory]. To the extent we relate to an institutional history it is to that horrid little boil on the planet, with its kings and queens, its hollow liberty, equality, fraternity, which managed by fault of geography to be a war-loving, savage, greedy monstrosity


You can go back to the Greeks and Romans for equally heinous civilizations, and study, for example, how the aggregation of Roman civilization directly contributed to the clear-cutting of the old growth forests of Northern Africa: to build Roman ships to conquer new lands, to subdue Egypt for grain needed to feed Roman citizens. This produced an arid desert, perfect for David Lean to film on for his "Lawrence of Arabia."

But to the average American - by design - Greece connotes exotic food and a pantheon of human gods. Rome is pretty much reduced to a list of emperors we know nothing about, and it imploded ... because it violated some prohibitions of the Old Testament. Something like that, right?

Our history books falsely delineate Ancient Greece and Rome from Modern Industrial Europe, but it is actually the same creature in different advanced stages of ... decay. Yes, the mightier its sword the worse its consequences to the ecosystem.

Europe, imperial, majestic, and bloodthirsty, is to the ancients not what humans are to their ape predecessors: not an evolution backwards. Europe is the prince of Wales, the first born, the male heir to the ancient civilization.


As one German expatriate friend noted, the European landscape is a barren wasteland unfit for human life, let alone our monuments to their plunder, and undeserving the huge concentrations of wealth and power. This runs exactly counter to what we are carefully taught about Europe's genetic and racial superiority contrasted with the inferiors of the global South, so it needs some careful unpacking.

In other words, they had to search outside for development.

The wealth of the world, the riches, lie in the soil and sweat of the global South, which is poor and despised and maligned for its laziness and backwardness. That's why Europe has been so obsessed with the global South, scrambling for them, with how its states are drawn up, who rules them and how, and making sure any nationalists, labor activists, communists, anarchists - anyone who will rock the boat is exterminated quickly, often with European weapons: this is called "stability".

And this is why the global South is poor and despised and maligned.

The real impoverishment lies in the global North, which has few resources, what arable land it has is quickly turned into a dust-bowls by backward farming practices, yet it is praised for its advanced civilization.

The religion of Europe - Christianity - is a wonder of the world, but not really. What predatory society has not had a corresponding philosophy, which would allow - say, in keeping with my earlier allusion - the persistent abuse of children in a Roman Catholic Church and not be shut down, taken over, disbanded?


In other, more brutal, words, Europe's incurably depravity is rooted in the values it had to cultivate ... and teach, enforce, justifying mediocrity for superiority; wealth from conquest and theft; and for calling any man or woman who refused to turn their other cheek a criminal terrorist. Do not, an English historian in not a too dissimilar context alerted, "let too much daylight in on the magic."

Europe's barrenness and its needs not only to breed wars within its region for survival - and to develop in the peculiar way it did, militaristically, because of its needs for war - but also to spread these wars of conquest to any corner of the world.

Frontiers always close down at some point, and a people whose civilization is parasitic from the genesis must always find another route to India.

Presently, Europe is going through yet another upheaval. Its civilization was always precariously placed on the backs of the global South, it bribed wider and wider sectors of its population with higher wages and social benefits - meaning: greater access to the pillage of the global South - and now it has collided with yet another frontier closure. It is not going peacefully into its twilight: 19th century style colonial wars are becoming the norm, even if our teachers won't call our adventures in Afghanistan and the other Stans, Yemen, the Sudan and AfriComm, Iraq, ad nauseum, just what they are.

The world is not their oyster; a quarter of the globe will not be painted red to represent the British Empire. Other empires are rising from the East, which promise to bring more problems - not just competing and outbidding with our traditional masters in Europe, which I could care less about - but mimicking the European civilization and decimating the ecosystem still further.

This is after all how the West was won - the West being a vast, right-wing conspiracy of merchants and slave traders who cut off the heads of the feudal regimes to burn villages to save them and construct monuments. 

The global hedge funds, billionaires, and emerging global governments of India and the People's Republic of China are scrambling to buy the best arable land in Africa, leaving the worst lands for the Africans, who face displacement, famine, disease, and of course being called lazy and unable to govern themselves by Western commentators.

More Christian missionaries cannot be far off.

This is the European system. It is, as the rightwing Economist Magazine once headlined "the Anglo-Saxon system." It is incapable of correcting its wrongs and brought us up - its slaves, its Eichmanns, its paper pushers, its mediocre managers - to believe in the utter perfection of the system, to dissociate the carnage, the collateral damage, the suffering, the polluting to air, water, land, and spirit.

Philosopher George Draffan is easily right: sooner or later we will revisit the Stone Age. How we get there, what becomes of humanity and the ecosystem cannot be left in the hands of pirates, even and especially the pirates in our own heads, put their by a carefully constructed indoctrination system.

The pirate instead of preparing for a long, cold winter want to expend huge amounts of energy to extract the last drops of petroleum from the earth.

This is bad religion.

Still, worst there is something else we can learn from those reality shows I referred to. What they demonstrate is not only our unhappiness of the state of things, our visceral reaction to a slave system, but they also sadly show our inclination to seek mystical solutions to real social problems. Lotteries and gambling casinos will neither end poverty, reverse disturbing social trends, or dismantle genocidal paradigms. These games are a form of magical thinking.

"It is now time for a destructive order to be reversed, and it is well to inform other races that the aboriginal cultures of North America were not devoid of beauty. Furthermore, in denying the Indian his ancestral rights and heritages the white race is but robbing itself. America can be revived, rejuvenated, by recognizing a Native School of thought" Chief Luther Standing Bear [Lakota Sioux].