Chelsea Manning and the dungeon of our despair

Just moments after being sentenced to a 35-year prison sentence for leaking government crimes and malfeasance to Wikileaks, Chelsea Manning, formerly known as Pvt 1st Class Bradley Manning, announced she would commence to live her life as a woman.

Maybe it is the chip on my shoulder but I felt the air being sucked out of the room. The Right, of course, has never liked Manning, so their support is not expected. The Left has always shown its dysfunctions more publicly. Witness how the San Francisco Lesbian & Gay Pride Committee withdrew considering Manning as Grand Marshall for the Parade earlier this year (but as I have said too many times of that reputed city, all that glistens has never been gold).

Now that Manning has just as publicly declared her gender and that she will begin taking hormones, I imagine much of the Left will simply drop her from their thoughts while she languishes in prison.

How many "I AM CHELSEA MANNING" placards will be see? Time will tell, but history is a guide. We've only just come to liking lesbians and gays, as long as they are devoid of militancy and long deeply to be hetero-normative ... Or is that the chip on my shoulder?

History, at any rate, is also a guide for this conundrum we find ourselves in regarding such topics as sex, gender, and race identities.

We in the Western world - and this includes the non-West where our tentacles have reached - live in a madhouse. I do not mean this metaphorically. Our madhouse is around color and gender identities, and we are crazed about it. This means that our perception of these things are immediately warped, always suspect, and potently volatile. We kill over the stupidest things.

To the strict Western duality, there is Black and there is White. There is Male and there is Female. There is also the Man and there is the Woman. Each must know his [and her] place. Just as there were once mulattoes and quadroons and octoroons, and they had to know their place too.

You are this, or you are that, but if you try some other course you may be lynched.

This duality is about power and maintaining it.

A Patriarchal arrangement with an Old Man God in the sky to whom we must submit as we submit to our husbands and to our kings, and even to our vanguard, must make these distinctions between human drones sharp and few.

As true to a system which affords us Coke or Pepsi, and fewer choices of how to rent and sell ourselves in wage-slavery, it would be stretching hope to think we'd be given broad options in the expression of our so-called identity.

Options would be a threat. Options, simply put, is a means to abolishing the West and its prisons and its morality and its labor system.

I have, for example, read that among many native American groups, the "Two-Spirit" existed while in West African societies, the "Gate-Keeper" thrived.

Modern gay/straight duality thought have placed these phenomena on the LGBTQ team, but this misses the point. The Two-Spirits and the Gate-Keepers weren't fringe subcultures brought out like pets. And it seems while these indigenous cultures had two sexes, they embraced many genders.

They existed as a norm before the West was Won: not as an alternative, not as a "gay lifestyle" but as one of many norms within complex civilizations which had a better relationship with the natural and supernatural world.

Those true civilizations knew what we have lost: we are ourselves expressions of this natural and supernatural world, and this fact confronts the Western claustrophobic one every day. This is why governments and monotheists have waged wars against any expression of difference.

If we had escaped what anthropologist Margaret Mead called, simply, "an accident of history" - that is, us, here and now, enslaved, brutalizing each other, exterminating the ecosystem, fouling the planet, and seeking to spread our plague to galaxies far, far away [and calling it Progress!] - we might still have our civilization and not live in a dungeon of barbarism, guilt, and man/woman duality.

Yes, we got history backwards. Our official texts tell us we are modern and civilized, advanced and developed while our ancestors were primitives. That is a lie. What we really have done is what the Hon George Galloway lectured the US Senate in a not dissimilar context: we have defied evolution and gone from a butterfly and become worms.

In our real civilization, the ones we aren't supposed to know about, people like Manning would not be imprisoned in the binary male-female world: is she a man, or is she a woman, and what do I call ... him? .

I say these things about our false gender choices at some risk of angering my more sympathetic friends and allies on the Left. Because I am skirting dangerously close to criticizing Manning's announcement. Maybe that old chip on my shoulder wonders how civilized cultures, like who embraced the Two-Spirit and the Gate-Keepers, among others, would have nurtured Manning in his youth and allowed that human being to grow and become, period. It was not a Coke and Pepsi world back then. It would have offered the child more ways of being, as normal and as natural as another. It would not have told him, in so many violent ways, "if you are not this you are that."

Are Unions Obsolete (or, If they are not, should they be)?

The relevance of trades-unions is not really a subject to be addressed to the Democratic and Republican Parties. Their hands are not clean. Both the political parties represent first and foremost the interests of the business class - Wall Street and international capital.

These elites have shown their intentions: the class war in the US against unions began in blood shed and continues right to this hour against workers who may work full-time work and be starving.

In fact, that we keep talking in terms of just these two parties, with all the problems we have and the problems building up in front of us on the horizon, would alert an elementary school child.

This toy is broken; and that toy is broken; so I want a new toy. Why are we wondering if Hilary is running in 2016?

But we have become too sophisticated to think with such elementary logic, so we keep turning to these two political parties and a very broken system while our workers and our communities, not by accident but by design, are made less and less viable.

But back to unions. I address this question of their obsolescence to the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), the Confederacion Nacional de Trabajo (CNT), International Workers Association (IWA-AIT), Solidarity Federation, Workers Solidarity Alliance, and their "types" and supporters. These unions maintain, at least rhetorically, a militancy and a vibrant pro-worker history. All of them, except the IWW openly embrace anarcho-syndicalism.

For this militancy these unions have - again right to this hour - faced repression and harassment. Note Spain's conservative government and its hounding of CNT organizers.

If you're not familiar with any of these unions you should be. They are not the business unions you are familiar with. Business unions, like the Teamsters, AFL-CIO, etc., cuddle up to the two pro-business political parties.

In an of themselves these business unions are a motivation to put unions in the dustbin of history and end this essay.

Because to whatever extent trades unions ally themselves with elites, with the nation-state, with kings and presidents and corporations, they should be obsolete. They have no use to workers: this is not dogma, but something borne out in fact. Wall Street rallies, workers gets screwed.

The AFL-CIO is not a trades-union of tradition. It and its kind are booster clubs for the Democratic Party, rallying the downtrodden to add legitimacy to corporate elections which make us more downtrodden.

But whether it is a militant trades-union or a business union, they share a similar problem.

The conundrum with trades-unions generally is they organize themselves around workplaces - factories or stores in most cases; or broadly by trades. Historic reasons exist for this.

But our workplaces and our trades are not today what they were in earlier times when trades-unions were organizing. An average worker may change careers - to use that word loosely - four or five times in his or her lifetime.

Added to this conundrum is that throughout modern history elites have so degraded what it means to work that it means nothing at all.

Work today is a task done for a paycheck. That task is rarely open to scrutiny by even militant trades-unions, who are interested in wages and health and safety issues. This is best seen in urban areas, where the chambers of commerce designate as work anything which supports the bottom line - viz, office support staff for the importation of produce from outside areas, other states, or foreign countries.

Not validated are the tasks which would make notoriously unproductive cities less unproductive, more self-sufficient and aligned with the natural world - like reclaiming land to grow food, water reclamation, and meaningful tasks the indigenous populations did for thousands of years without harming the landbase.

But opening up for question an urban metropolis challenges the validity if not viability of our cities. Can our trades-unions do this?

Meaningful work does exist, but it rarely gets done. Can a trades-union, actively organizing a workforce, at the same time open for question the very work that is being done?

Our trades-unions, even our militant ones, seem stuck in an old paradigm where: a worker in a factory is automatically deemed a social benefit; and it is assumed that this worker is employed with some longevity so he or she would have a sustained interest in making improvements.

Both presumptions are false.

Can a movement centered on debauched tasks and unsteady employment, where we move from job to job and care less and less what we do but will it make ends meet, ever be an effective movement?

Or do we need now a broader, social movement, a militant, avowedly anarchist [-syndicalist, -primitivist, -communist, etc] organizing, above and below ground,  of whole communities and across communities?

This is where our work needs to be focused.

Is kidnapper Ariel Castro really the worst kind of human being?

The question is worth asking. Ariel Castro has been given a life sentence and an additional 1,000 years. If a 1,000-year sentence does not convey overwhelming disgust I do not know what else would.

In an older day, not too long ago in fact, Castro would not only have been executed without a trial but also tarred, feathered, and castrated in the public square. In other words, a lynch mob would have desecrated his body as they hoped to send his soul to Hell.

What was Castro's crime? He kidnapped three innocent girls and kept them for 11 years, torturing and raping them.

Castro said on his behalf that he is not the violent man he has been portrayed, that he did not torture anyone, that the rapes were not rapes at all but consensual.

This testimony is widely mocked.

You don't seem to need a psychiatric credential to say this man is delusional, to ridicule his supposed defense of what he did. Psychiatrists have weighed in, but so have almost every media commentator and news reporter. His crimes and the sentencing have made the front pages.

And yet, what the US government has done for eleven years to these boys - who have become men - at Guantanamo should to a civilized people be indistinguishable from what Castro did for eleven years to three girls.

But where are our mainstream commentators tripping over each other to express shock, demand justice, and use their front pages for the injustice of Guantanamo prison?

The United States government maintains the Guantanamo gulag on occupied territory on the south end of Cuba. This fact is virtually never reported. The Cuban government has demanded for almost 60 years the US leave its island. The US ignores the Cuban government.

The US government ignores a few other things: the Geneva Convention, Nuremberg Principles, habeas corpus, and access to attorneys are all sidelined as the mob of an older day clearly wants to desecrate the bodies of these men.

Guantanamo Naval Base has been used for various nefarious purposes since the US imposed its presence there at gunpoint. Most recently after the 9/11 attacks, the base became one of several judicial no-man's lands for young, battle-aged Muslim men from the expanding war zones in the Middle East and Asia: to be water-boarded and various other methods of interrogation, all for the good of the "cause."

As we suspected then and know now, not all the boys and men the US troops kidnapped were waging any war. They were said to be on the battle field, which when fighting something called "terrorism" can be anywhere you say it is.

Among the over 700 men the US Dept of Defense maintains or has maintained at Guantanamo, none to my knowledge have made the front pages or elicited the robust indignation of our American commentators. Attempts at bringing their cases to court are rebuffed.

The US, like Ariel Castro, offers a bizarre defense: We are not torturing. Or, what we do is not technically torture. Or, one of our bureaucrats has certified what we are doing is OK. Or, its the fault of the detainees being in the wrong place.

But no one among our elites mocks the United States government for its delusions.

As far as I know Ariel Castro was not in charge of what went on in Guantanamo. There is no link, and I do not mean to suggest any.

But I am waiting for the conspiracy theories that he was a CIA assassin trained at Abu Graib. Such theories came out after 9/11 about the conspirators, followed the underwear bomber, and were hinted about the Boston Marathon perpetrators.

What these conspiracy theories reveal - in themselves, true or not, and I am in no position to know since my government keeps its cards close at hand, telling me nothing and suspecting me of everything - is an actual, clear moral force, a lack of any hypocrisy.

This is unique characteristic if you only follow the mainstream media and digest the lies of the elites, who forgive us our trespasses but mightily and overwhelmingly condemn trespassers.

In such conspiracy theories is a consistence. It acknowledges an evil, a crime against humanity, and it links these crimes, one to another, and singles out a probable culprit.

Isn't this what police detectives do, after all? Patterns.

Many scoff at these strange conspiracy theories, but the fact of them says just as much about some of us, which I do find encouraging, as the overwhelming hypocrisy among our intelligentsia says about them. We don't means test our victims. A crime is a crime. We are trying to connect dots. Their only standard is the king can do no wrong: this opens the door to no standard at all, and the worst kind of human being.