A gang of moderate conservatives

What are we going to do with the Democrats? Mike Davis has an interesting, if long-winded analysis
here. Sure, the party is liberal in cultural matters, but it is just as beholden to the corporate power structure of America (and the world). (Nader’s critique is still valid, even though he is persona non grata and a convenient scapegoat: after all, it was Gore who couldn't get those Nader votes, nor fight for his actual plurality.) It’s just as ensnared in the money power, which has developed a “bipartisan” system very much to its liking. Instead of the GOP’s oil, health profiteers, and mercenaries, the Dems have hitched their stars to high tech and high finance. Yes, they’re just plain nicer than the GOP, but they’re still in thrall to the bond market and the rest of the neoliberal project. As such, even if they win the Presidency and larger majorities in Congress, they will give us nothing but tepid measures. Unless, of course, we force them to change our nation for the better, towards a socal democracy that cares for its citizens, not the profits of a few, for us and not that tiny elite of owners whose boots they polish and hope to wear. And that force, of course, doesn’t come from the checkbook.

So while it’s sweet that lots of people are writing checks for Obama, I remained stupefied about the willingness of people to continue in their infantile course of hoping something will happen instead of making it happen. We already had the Man from Hope, an absolutely fucking disaster who paved the way for GOP control, so now it’s the man of hope? When are people going to realize that a symbolic politics keep leading to the same winners, and that’s not us.

This is a nation of taxi passengers. The driver breaks all the rules and the passengers just sit there hoping to get to their destination without saying anything, contributing to the lawlessness, recklessness, and obnoxiousness of the journey.

Happy Birthday

For a bunch of property owners, not a bad piece of work…the Declaration. Check out that bill of particulars about the crimes of the then George.

And here's to the continuing struggle to make it real. The reign of witches shall pass!

The Cat in the Machine

“The tigers of wrath are wiser than the horses of instruction,” wrote Wm. Blake, no doubt thinking of those plodding old nags in the Royal Academy…

I love dogs! Case in point, the border collie: handsome, brilliant, and comes in cool colors (check out the merles). I love them perhaps a tad more than cats, but I’m not one of these either/or extremists; I believe there’s nothing wrong with dogs and cats living together, but I have to admit that dogs are usually to be found the wrong side, iconographically speaking. Think German shepherds, Birmingham’s dogs loosened on the crowd (“we feed our dogs on Civil Rights” sang Phil Ochs), and Abu Ghraib. Cats, it’s true, have witchcraft marked against them, but wasn’t witchcraft just a nasty old patriarchal purge of uppity rhymes-with-witches?

The cat, actually, is curiously and most often associated with the left (baring A. Spiegelman’s Nazis). Must be the nine lives: the glorious future of unfettered capital having resulted in ruin, anomie, and those glories of what the market will bear (porn/drugs/sex/violence), resistance emerges from the shadows, from under the couch to rub its back against your thigh. Le chat noir, le chat rouge: the old trickster. Chris Marker’s long meditation on what happened to the ‘68ers, Grin Without a Cat (Le Fond de l'air est rouge, revised) and his shorter exploration of “M. Chat” in the Case of the Grinning Cat (Chats Perches) are cases in point. The sly, secretive, wily feline with the grin, against all the odds? Able to melt into the air like all that is solid? Think the Cheshire Cat, the Reverend Dodgson’s elusive kitty. On my side of Okeanos, the Wobblies had their black cat (a wild cat, of course, hence the strike), arched in hissing menace.

The Cat in the Hat, though not specifically radical (although under the Prussians, it must be said that elementary school was banned as subversive) is still an anarchic spin on things, and oh-so-elegantly dressed. And Krazy Kat, who was neither crazy nor a cat according to his hip cat inventor Geo. Herriman, may be the most radical of all in her/his optimism. (The man was playing with race, gender, & identity long before Weimar, much less the academy.) There is a heppy heppy land, my friends, and though it be far away, in monumental Coconino of the mind, the journey is worth taking. You can read C. Van Vechten’s Tiger in the House along the way, the book having been reissued by one of my favorite imprints, New York Review Books. Meanwhile, in the tiger’s stripes, Walt. Ford sees the ghosts of warriors past fighting colonial invasions. Meow, you motherfuckers.

Scootered

No, seriously, how do you deal with these motherfuckers? In my effectless rage, I sent this into the maw of the White House tonight... adolescent of me, I know, but...

Thank you for commuting I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby's sentence. The thought he might have to serve time for subverting the fundamental basis of our judicial system was entirely too much for my old heart to take. Two counts of perjury, one of obstruction of justice, and one of making false statements to federal investigators, crimes which go to the very heart of the integrity of our judicial system, well pish! In your America, only the poor and stupid should suffer the full weight of the law. The rest of us have either good lawyers or Presidents who are above the law. Hooray! A government of laws is for losers, communists, terrorists, and other unamericans. Keep up the good work, Commander. Law and order, law and order, law and order forever!

PS: take notes from that Putin guy, since he knows how to run a country good.

The Activist Court

Bleating Leahy, who voted for Roberts, was complaining this weekend how disappointed he is with Roberts’ partisan leadership of the reactionary Supreme Court. WTF? How can someone this bright be so clueless? The GOP agenda to radically transform the Court into the pro-corporate anti-democractic entity it used to be has NEVER been secret. Scalia, Thomas, Alito, Roberts, and Kennedy: five conservative Catholic men are now the activist majority at the Court (talk about bad news for women!), and the Democrats did nothing to stop them from gaining that control. These guys stand for the power of the state (as a corporate tool), the corporation, and the church; they are the handmaidens of the elites. They are against desegregation, for control of the polity by wealth, for sectarian division, for controlling women’s bodies. Last week’s string of precedent-turning 5-4 decisions for “fee speech” (sic) for corporations and against free speech for high-school students; for the continuing re-segregation of education; and against antitrust were long ago foretold. Once again, thanks Democrats, for nothing.

Fantasy Islands

In the fantasy Gulf States, third world laborers build Xanadus for the world’s masters and their pet scribes (cf. flathead Thomas Friedman). Working as indentured servants, if not downright slaves, these East Asians are shipped in, have their passports confiscated, and housed in barracks away from the glitter, completely at the mercy of authoritarian states making their hellholes safe for finance capital. In the hotels, imported maids clean the excrement of highflying capital accumulators, consultant pols (Bill Clinton’s been pimping in the region), and other reps of the Global One Percent, from the rims of toilets. Meanwhile, prostitutes shipped in from the ruins of eastern Europe and Russia service other needs.

A long way from here? Not really. This model of the global service economy is alive and well on the resort island of Nantucket. Now thickly warted with what I call SUV-houses, grossly overscaled (and a real perversion of the island’s character), the place has become a case study of the workings of the global gastarbeiter system. A quarter century ago when I graduated from high school there, it was American college kids who used to do the lawn-mowing, bed-making, cleaning, and cooking; I washed dishes and cooked there myself there during college summers. More recently, there was a cohort of Irish kids; today, it’s workers from Brazil, the Caribbean, and Eastern Europe. Last week, there was an article in the local weekly (which I also used to work for) about three young Bulgarians who were suckered into paying serious coin to come to work as maids on the island. Only, once they got there, there were no jobs. Nor any place to live, either.

Dorm-like workers housing, pimping job brokers both here and abroad, dubious legal status and hence limited protections, profiteering landlords, pampered wealthy being clean up after; it all adds up to an old story, really.

Manufactured Landscapes

Just before leaving town for some time away, I saw Manufactured Landscapes, a documentary about Edward Burtynksy’s photographs of the human exploitation of the planet. The movie was so-so: Burtynsky was rather full of himself, so the filmmaker could have used some distance, but the themes were wide. We’re the only animal that has no sense of balance: we live wantonly. While the culturally dominant view of nature is as a competition, this view is woefully ignorant of all the many forms of cooperation manifested in the natural world. And in our destructive, unsustainable frenzy to chop, mine, burn, eat, & scour, we are so incredibly out of balance that the tipping point, to return a phrase, seems imminent.

Reading David Harvey’s Brief History of Neoliberalism, so the film’s concentration on China (endless factories producing consumer junk, toxic dumps recycling electronic garbage, and the Ozymandian Three Gorges Dam) was a propos. There’s hardly a finer example of neoliberalism’s authoritarian essence.

Alas, poor China. For the people and culture of Tibet, for those in Darfur, Burma, and Zimbabwe, whose leaders are all propped up by Beijing, and for the millions of Chinese themselves debased by the currupt dictatorship of the Party, next year's Olympics are anathema. Shame on all who participate, and all who profit.