Well, duh. They moved to Jena... This column by Gary Younge puts it perfectly.

I dread going to see Banished, about the racial cleansing of towns in George, Missouri, and Arkansas, just a few of the cases. Pogroms and cleansing actions, can't happen here? Already has, my friends. We know Jim Crow and American apartheid warped everyone involved, so that those poodle-skirted 50s white girls howling for blood in Little Rock (nice old grannies now, some of them?) were victims, too, but try as I might I can’t whip up any sympathy up for all that psychopathic hate. You know, don’t you, about the Hershel Gordon Lewis film, Two Thousand Maniacs? Car load of northerners gets waylaid by a village of down South. Sub-Corman, and yet virtually a documentary. I mean, these were people who picnicked while hanging, castrating, and burning their fellow human beings.

And speaking of the unredeemable, there will always be soldiers, won’t there, and cops, and Blackwater goons to enforce their master’s filthy will? Burma’s foots soldiers, many probably just peasant boys, are doing their masters bidding to destroy the will of their own people. So it ever is. Boys made into tools. Kent State. Jackson State. Newark. The state’s tools will gun you down when you get ahead of them.

India and Japan are both big investors in the Burmese generals (Pol Pot-like fantasists, the've created their own capital city deep in the jungle); they at least are democracies, susceptible to internal pressure. China, of course isn’t. Haven’t you boycotted Chinese stuff yet? For Darfur, for Burma, for poor Tibet? It’s no hardship, stopping the purchasing of that shit. It can’t make you happy; in case you haven’t noticed, the voracious machine of consumption doesn’t want you happy, because you might stop buying if you were happy, because you must keep buying to attain happiness, which is precisely the point because the shit isn’t happiness.

Where did they go?

50 years since Ike sent in the 101st Airborne to Little Rock to enforce the federal courts. Where today are all hate-filled people in the background of the pictures, the ones screaming, spitting, hurling garbage? Whatever happened to all those psychotic white people?

Blackwater

It's only surprising that it's taken this long. The Blackwater massacre is finally revealing the lawless mercenary economy of Iraq. These cowboys have been shooting up the dismembered ruins of Iraq for years now. This weekend they slaughtered eleven to twenty people. Unaccountable to the U.S. military and what has essentially become an Iraqi Shite police state, the mercs may number as many as 180,000 "private contractors" in-country, but nobody knows. That effectively doubles the US presence in Iraq (although, being mercenaries not all are American citizens: aparthied thugs, goons, and ex-state security killers from all over have signed up). They've been sucking millions from the US treasury and nobody knows how many, how much, and what's being purchased. And the merc companies insist that the US is legally liable for any lawsuits and death benefits (over a 1000 contractors have died there). Naturally, they're very wired into the GOP. Scahill's book reveals the psycho-right-fundamentalist connections at Blackwater, but that's only one of the 180 private force companies working there. Naomi Klein calls it "disaster capitalism." The old name is war profiteering.

Another creep job

Considering the corruption, incompetence, and constitutional-loathing masters of the regime, who would willingly work for these criminals? AG nominee Mukasey is getting positive burbles from the likes of Chuck Schumer, Senator from the Investment Banks, but that shouldn't impress you. Schumer, after all, is one of the dupes who have so notably failed to stop the Bush coup. Meanwhile, Mukasey's been advising Rudy G. in his retirement, which suggests something seriously wrong with his character. Combine that with his agreement to sign up for the lawless Bush/Cheney Gang and what do you get? More bad news.

Phalanx v. legion

The rightwing "phalanx" on the Supremes (Roberts, Alito, Thomas, and Cardinal “Sharia” Scalia) is dissected here by Ronald Dworkin.

So how do you defeat a phalanx? (Hoping for some bad hearts, and hence short lifespans, obviously doesn’t apply here since these trolls on the court don't have hearts). Well, judging from some reading I've been doing about the end of the Hellenistic Age, what defeats the phalanx is the legion. Then it was the Roman legion, but now, obviously, I mean the legion of democracy.

What I mean is that the turn to the courts was a mistake, precisely because these hidebound institutions could so easily be subverted by the money power. Courts are traditionally conservative, after all, and through most of American history they have been the defenders of power, wealth, and the corporations. In our own age, mildly reformist courts rose during the last half of the 20th century, a tendency the old enemy has fought back against furiously. They've largely succeeded. Packing the courts with faithfully partisan and reactionary ogres has been rather easy since the Democrats have refused to filibuster this perversion.

So where is this legion? It is of course unpopular, if not incomprehensible, to discuss mass action (for instance, strikes and occupations to shut down the system down), and in many ways it has been outlawed (even labled "terrorism" in some cases), but how else will gain the world we want? By asking politicians for it? By asking lawyers to get it? I don't think so. I think we have to rise and raise hell and take it.

Next week in Washington

Hey, I seem to have missed that memo. When was General Pretorian made "Deciderer"?

First Bush stole an election, then he further undermined the Constitution, and now he's given it up for some brass. If nothing else, the last seven years sure have proved a lot about the American people's willingness to be suckers.

Party Values

I go out of town for a week, pay no attention to the news, and look what I miss: worm-tongued Abu Gonzalez’s resignation and Larry “Family Values” Craig’s “wide-stance.” Bye-bye Abu, enoy the subpeonas.

As much as I like to see the bigoted hypocrites burn in the fires of their own making, there are two things in the Craig story that are particularly egregious. One is the GOP’s witch-hunting homophobia, not that that's news, of course. Craig’s out, but Vitter, the prostitute-employer, remains? (Of course, there’s the politics: Idaho’s GOP governor will appoint another Republican to Craig’s wide seat, while Louisiana’s Democratic governor would appoint a Dem. to fill Vitter’s.)

The second is that the Craig case sounds like pure entrapment. Doesn’t the Minneapolis police department have anything better to do than lay traps for saps in the john? What’s the crime exactly? Making a pass? Who gives a fuck if two consensual adults play footsie? (In this case, some wives, I suppose, but who else?) If you aren't interested, say so. The panic engendered by my fellow straights (man, talk about namby-pambies!) here is amusing. Will no bathroom be safe? Maybe it'll make you think twice about hitting on every women you run into....

Reading

Fascists quickly profited from the inability of centrists and conservatives to keep control of a mass electorate. Whereas the notable dinosaurs disdained mass politics, fascists showed how to use it for nationalism and against the Left. They promised access to the crowd through exciting political spectacle and clever publicity techniques; ways to discipline that crown through paramilitary organization and charismatic leadership; and the replacement of chancy elections by yes-no plebiscites. Whereas citizens in a parliamentary democracy voted to choose a few fellow citizens to serve as their representatives, fascists expressed their citizenship directly by participating in ceremonies of mass assent. The propagandistic manipulation of public opinion replaced debate about complicated issues among a small group of legislatures who (according to the liberal ideals) were supposed to be better informed than the mass of the citizenry. Fascism could well seem to offer to the opponents of the Left efficacious new techniques for controlling, managing, and channeling the “nationalization of the masses,” at a moment when the Left threatened to enlist a majority of the population around two nonnational poles: class and international pacifism.

And so the conservatives essentially invited them in. Robert O. Paxton's The Anatomy of Fascism