Category Archives: soap box

It Makes Perfect Sense

On the day after marchers clogged downtown NYC to protest America’s lack of a real response to catastrophic man made climate change I take a moment to set down, in my aggravatingly simplistic Devil’s advocate way, why the status quo makes perfect sense.  In the process you will no doubt see the folly of protesters who lack the economic clout trying to get serious attention from a government run by the private dollars, speaking loudly and freely, of those who do.

Let’s look at this from the point of view of the industry that produces and sells the amazingly lucrative products that result in the pumping of carbon into the atmosphere.   It may be true that carbon emitted by millions of cars, trucks, trains and airplanes increases the greenhouse gases that are warming the earth and already creating great climate disturbance.  May well be true, though those great climate disturbances may also just be part of a natural cycle or the wrath of a vengeful God.   It may also be true that an industry based on extracting an ever decreasing natural resource from deep inside the earth is a bad long-term business model.  Let’s also admit that could probably be the case, eventually, though you must also admit you don’t have a viable alternative plan at the moment.

Now look at it from an economic point of view in the here and now, from the perspective of the Oil and Gas Industry and those whose vast fortunes are based on its ongoing prosperity.   The internal combustion engine, powered by fossil fuel, made most of human progress in the last hundred years, a time of unprecedented human progress, possible.  We transport things from coast to coast, around the globe, fly airplanes everywhere, commute long distances to jobs, travel in gas powered vehicles to beautiful places for holidays.   Our economy depends on this wonderful engine, which is powered by the transformed and processed remains of dinosaurs.  Industries related to automobile and other gasoline powered transportation employ literally tens of millions.  

Let’s take a quick look at the bottom line and we’ll evaluate who is the foolish party in this debate over whether man is really destroying his home by allowing carbon to flow freely from smokestacks and exhaust pipes.    From the dawn of the automobile the oil business has been a gold mine.   Billions and billions in profit are made every year from the production and sale of this liquid gold.  As the supply gets smaller and smaller, and demand rises, the price only goes up.   The immutable law of economics.  Talk about a business model!   If you were an executive in an oil company, or an investor, rich beyond your millionaire father’s wildest dreams, with a product whose supply is ever diminishing and whose price has tripled in the last decade, would it not behoove you to spend however many millions it took to convince people that those who march in protest of the unfettered use of this miraculous product are misguided idiots, at best?

They hate our freedom, you will say, and it will certainly be true that they hate yours.   They gullibly and blindly believe the vast majority of scientists who have studied the climate and are constantly issuing alarming findings about ice caps melting, sea levels rising, droughts, floods, murderous super storms, raging wild fires.  What do you call someone who is alarmed by supposedly alarming news?   That’s right, an Alarmist.   These are Climate Alarmists, freedom haters.   If you had to use one word it might be Communists.   You see, if they had their way, free enterprise would be ended and we’d all be back to using horse drawn carts.  It is far wiser to be skeptical when so much is at stake.  After all, we have scientists too who will tell you this is all ideologically driven liberal alarmism.   They will say, with no equivocation, that carbon produced by human activity has nothing to do with the natural cycles of climate or the wrath of God.  And the wrath of God will surely be upon those who hate freedom.

If a kid has a genius idea for a website he sells for a billion dollars, the pressing question on the minds of the business community is– how will he make even more money for his invention?  How will he keep it relevant, monetize it more efficiently, keep it moving forward, dynamic, maximize its profitability?   A billion dollars may look good on a balance sheet, or in a headline, but what is this bright 27 year-old’s next move?  The pressure is on the young man now, you see. The engine of our economy does not rest on making a fortune and living a life of good works, doing what you love, living on your fortune.  The engine of our economy does not rest– it drives ever forward, onward, upward.  And the engine it drives is powered by gasoline– and never being satisfied to have merely enough.

Isolation Chamber 

 

Solitary confinement is probably the cruelest form of incarceration, as has been noted in many contexts and by various schools of experts.  

Youthful offenders subjected to periods of solitary confinement may suffer irreversible damage, to pull a dramatic sounding, likely indisputable, fact from a nether cavity.   Routinely, for disciplinary reasons and others, teen prisoners in America are shut into cells by themselves and allowed to stew for days or weeks.   It is very cruel, but apparently quite usual, just the way we do business here in the U.S.A. these days.

 “Ah, another soapbox!” says my old friend.

“Just so,” says I.   And I’ll tell you something else, isolation is not an isolated problem restricted to forced detention.  Look at the wild popularity of social media, which is neither, strictly speaking, social nor media.  It is a constant contest for attention in a distracted world that has only so much attention to pay to any of its hundred million media creators.  How often do we note that people with 10,000 friends on Facebook don’t have one to call when they are feeling down?   140 characters, gaily and bravely tweeted out to the world, somebody…. follow me.   Into the breach, follow me!!   Hello? Can I get a tweet back?  Retweet?  Ping?  Hello?

 “Turn that burner down, partner, your pot’s about to berl over, and you’re sounding a bit… crazy…” my friend says.

 “’My friend’…” I think, recalling Napoleon’s great remark, to his diary, about friendship.  After noting that he regards man as base coin existing merely to gratify his passions he records that he fully realizes he has no true friends, only people who suck up to him because he’s powerful, charismatic, etc., he sniffs to his diary “as for me, you don’t suppose I care?”

 “To his diary, you say?” says my friend, getting the ironic point I will belabor briefly now.  Napoleon denied that he needed friends, intimacy or anyone to confide in.   He denied it to his best friend, the journal he confided his most intimate thoughts to.

 I know very well I have no friends, I say to this apparition, this flimsy literary device, “my friend”.  To the extent that I can make people laugh, or think, or feel something, I am a wonderful guy and liked just fine.  Like Napoleon in power, I know I will have all the friends I need as long as I remain as I am.  I recall walking with a group of friends on a long hike a few autumns ago, first with one, then another. We caught up, exchanged a few anecdotes, touched base.  Before I left each friend they were laughing.  I left ‘em laughing, each one, and each in a unique way.   That’s neat, I remember thinking.

 “But you say these people are not your friends?” he asks.

 “You need to shut up too,” I say, very, very tough.

 Here’s the thing. I was in mid e-conversation just now with somebody about a business mentor, and setting up a meeting with a business solutions specialist when I realized I was no longer online. “Hello?”   I had a response ready to send to one, was phrasing one for the other when… “hello?”  The line was dead.  Silent.   The dreaded silence descended like a gigantic, hideous, world masking testicle.

 “There goes a gigantic, hideous darling you should murder toot sweet, that gratuitous and disgusting testicle image,” says a friend with a keen editorial bent.

 Isolation does things to a person who lives alone.   I can tell you for sure. The internet suddenly winking out looms like a major catastrophe to people who communicate largely on line.   Silence.

 Oh, you have plenty of people you interact with every day. I understand. You make sales calls, have meetings, colleagues, discuss business, consult, talk to clients, josh with customers, prospects, make dinner plans, plan trips, talk to waiters, drivers, talk to strangers while waiting on line at the movies. You chat up everybody, and I don’t begrudge you that small, important pleasure. I don’t even ask you to consider what I’m writing here—there is no reason to ask or to consider.

The entire exercise — gratuitous.   Maybe that subway poster advertising The School of Visual Arts back in the 1970s hit the mark and will always hit the mark: having a talent is not worth much unless you know what to do with it. Talent is worthless, they intimated artfully, unless you monetize it.  All art is commercial in a commercial society, you dig?

“Art…” Hermann Goring grunts in disgust, although he plundered more than his share of valuable Degenerate Art during the Nazi gravy years, “when I hear the word culture I reach for my gun.”

Hard to blame the Nazi bastard on that score, you know? I don’t own a gun, except for the metaphorical one I fire off here from time to time.

“You are a chattering rictus,” an observer observes.

“Yes,” I say, “but I’m sure you don’t want your guts blasted with this metaphorical Glock 9.”   End of that particular story.   I stop, turn full face and flash my adorable rictus, gentle reader.

 

Clever Marketing is the Key to Success

Sekhnet came up to urge me to join every social media site linking businesses that I can find.  I am isolated and it is an increasing problem, especially for someone trying to run a shop and attract customers.   She showed me the social networking entry for an accomplished man we know, an angel investor on a site where these entrepreneurs mingle looking for opportunities.  She showed me how clearly he laid out his interests, qualifications and expertise.  She urged me to do the same, to advance my stalled not-for-profit business.   I agreed that she was right about the usefulness of joining more sites where I might meet like-minded people, then read her part of the email I’d spent the past hour writing.

I’d been led to pet one of my favorite peeves by my friend’s emailed, on target, comment:

(“You spend way too much time petting your peeves,” Sekhnet observed.)
 
I’ve grown more and more bitter over the fact that nothing succeeds on its own merits–that whatever makes it in our world, does so because someone has packaged and sold it cleverly.  Which helps to explain why we end up, in the culture, in our food, in our politics, with so much rancid shit.
 
Well said and I share the bitterness, though I try (mostly without success) not to let it stop me. A sociologist who wrote in the 1930s (Harold Lasswell, I think) whose work I read decades ago while researching Hitler’s rise to power and how ruthlessly Herr H. used the mass media to influence public opinion and promote his famously rancid ideas, concluded that “the religion of the United States is advertising”.  He proclaimed this self-evident truth before TV, in the infancy of radio, when the mass media was being cranked out and printed on pages that were disseminated by child hawkers on street corners.  He described how American industry sent Polish immigrants back to Poland to unfurl giant painted banners of American streets literally paved with gold and lie to the workers they fronted steerage tickets for to bring to work in factories.   Greek Americans went to Greece, Italians to Italy, wherever they were recruiting they sent native recruiters to lie in the mother tongue.   Woodrow Wilson’s Committee for Public Information was run by an ad man named George Creel who whipped up patriotic fervor for a war being fought by the rest of the world in muddy trenches along the lines of the worst of the Civil War, except made even more hellish by the addition of machine guns, poison gas and airplanes.   There were parades in the streets and long lines at the recruiters because of Creel’s genius in whipping up support for WIlson’s senseless (except to those who made a killing) War to End War, War to Make the World Safe for Democracy, War for Fuck You We’ll Kill You Under the Espionage Act For Trying to Use the First Amendment in Time of War to Aid Our Enemies, You Fucking Traitor!
 
The rulers of our society have always ruled by selling lies to people raised from infancy on advertising jingles and tag lines.  By the time kids are ten they’ve done their Gladwell’s 10,000 hours quota of commercials on TV, they are masters of being marketed to.  Presidential debates and elections?  Decided by image, body language, sound bites.  A few years ago promising presidential candidate Howard Dean lost his political future by cackling euphorically into a microphone at a rally.  Might have had good reason to be euphoric at that moment, he was leading in all the polls, but they played the 3 second clip of a cackling madman 24/7 until he was toast.  It’s despicable what greed and cynical marketing have done to the world and it explains much of the misery, disease and early death.   Capitalism is a cancer and the only cure, it would appear, is the total destruction of life on earth, which they are well on their way to accomplishing. God bless ’em.  But in this context, in our competitive free market society, there is only one way to successfully sell an idea– the old fascist way, the single-minded way Mr. Hitler had such brutal insight into, to put the most distasteful possible gloss on the gentle and perfectly neutral art of persuasion.  Trying to do it without retching, not always easy for the squeamish.
 
Sekhnet told me I should clean it up, lose the ending, and send it to the Nation as a letter or note, that people would be interested in the little history I’d presented, that I write these great things and never send them anywhere to find an audience for them.
 
“Did you ever read the Nation?” I asked her.  She hadn’t for a long time, but knew their politics and thought their readers would appreciate a letter to the editor containing this well presented information.

I appreciate her feelings, I really do, and her desire to help.  Motivated by love, and my best interests, and an understandable desire to see me step forward in the sticky muck.   She agreed that it wouldn’t do to send it in without cleverly packaging it, somehow, and relating it smartly to some current hot topic, the hook.   The irony was not lost on me, though I took the way of the world and said nothing about it.

Then her native optimism and desire to help rose up again– the stories of a Big Lie are so common that I won’t have long to wait until the next news cyclone generated by one, and I can send it in then!  

Meantime, I do the online equivalent of printing it out, rolling it up and sticking it where the sun don’t shine.

She asked me why the vets who died waiting were so docile

I have a feeling these 40 dead veterans are just the tip of the iceberg.  Doesn’t seem right that they could have been so docile, my only theory is depression over their powerlessness.
 
We routinely say “thank you for your service” to people our great democracy has fucked over so many times in recent years. Redeployed over and over, deployments extended, sent into combat without combat armor against non-uniformed insurgent armies whose main weapon is the roadside bomb, criticized by the former Secretary of War (“we fight with the army we have, not necessarily the one we might like”), kept alive, due to advances in technology, with traumatic and disabling injuries that would have killed them even 15 years ago.  It’s hard to imagine who among them would NOT have PTSD, something the military resists diagnosing, since so many soldiers would rightfully use it as a reason to get sent home.   Let us not forget, hyper-masculine army culture prevents many soldiers from admitting they are depressed, anxious, in a panic whenever they hear noise.
 
Suicide has become the leading cause of death for our military lately.  I’m sure they feel hopeless, are promised over and over that they’ll get the life saving services they need and– uh, maybe next month.  Hang in there, buddy!  Have a nice day!
 
To me it’s a mindless extension of the selfish notion that everything, including schools, should be “privatized”, run with both eyes on the bottom line, with the attendant diminution of the value of human life (unless, of course, that human is wealthy).  The corporate mentality — hide inconvenient things, have robots answer phones so you don’t have to pay people to do it, screw the customer if they don’t like it, pay yourself first, maximize profits in every possible way, change the laws to keep more profit, and, above all, get your bonus.  Why the hell would you give pay incentives to VA administrators for properly running their hospitals in the first place?
 
This country may never have been the place it pretended to be, but it is worse now, in terms of the partisan hatred afoot, than at any time since the Civil War (or for the 100 years after that if you were what was nonchalantly called a ‘nigger’, especially if you didn’t know how to act).  I read about that June 21, 1964 lynching in Neshoba County, Mississippi the other day and shuddered to think I was alive and in 3rd grade when it happened, ten days after my 8th birthday.  This is not ancient history.
 
Around that time local racists sent my mother’s friend Mildred Rose an anonymous letter, on whose envelope some hate-twisted coward had scrawled COMMIE.  Mildred was a Commie (and my mother too, for that matter) because she supported busing to achieve racial integration TEN YEARS after Brown v. Bd. of Education.  Talk about incrementalism.  Schools are as segregated now, I’d wager, as they were in 1953.  All deliberate speed, yes indeed.  
 
Apparently when Senator Eastland pushed for the overtly racist William Cox (who first dismissed the indictments against most of the lynch mob who killed three young men, after burning down the black church they were using to organize a voting drive)  to be appointed to the federal bench in Mississippi he told Robert Kennedy “tell your brother to appoint him and I’ll let you have the nigger”.  The nigger was Thurgood Marshall, who got a seat on some appellate court without the dixiecrat’s opposition.
 
This country has traditionally been very bad for (apologies in advance to anyone offended)  homos, niggers, spics, Jews (I still like that we get that capital letter), Asians, Native Americans, socialists, intellectuals, a lot of other people.  I heard the other day that homosexuality was listed in the DSM until 1973, the year I graduated high school.  No wonder Ricky S____ was so coy about staying in the closet, light in the loafers and giggly though he also was (when not tearfully depressed).  Being gay was a shameful mental illness, the experts said so, don’t you know?  Many teenagers still kill themselves every day because of homophobia, in spite of a more nuanced understanding of homosexuality, and great social advances in attitudes toward it.
 
In certain ways we’re better as a nation now, in some ways much worse.  That profit drives everything and money equals speech may be the end of the game for democracy, no sense to even pretend otherwise.  I give $100 to some cause, everyone I know does the same.  Charles and David Koch kick in $1,000,000 and let’s just call that all Free Speech, how about it?  Can you say it with me, boys?  Free speech in the Free Market, Freedom on the damned march, get out of the way if you hate our freedom.
 
And the best part for those with the means to effectively exercise their free speech, you can buy your free speech anonymously, if your lawyers set up a 501(c)(4) nonprofit political action committee (PAC).  What Commies disparagingly call Dark Money is really a robust expression of freedom, in the opinion of those efficiently influencing elections and legislation.
 
On the other hand, can anyone tell me why a PAC is tax exempt, just like a charitable nonprofit prohibited by law from engaging in political action of any kind on pain of losing its tax exempt status?  Can anyone tell me why a 501(c)(4) is not required to disclose who funds it?  
 
The answer, of course, is as self-evident as the proposition that all men are created equal.   It is the same reason a dog licks its privates. Because it can.  Since money equals speech, those with the most money get to lick, or be licked, wherever they want, since it’s a parliament of pandering prostitutes.   Freedom is a beautiful thing, to those free to enjoy it.
 
But enough ranting, time to shave and exercise some of my other inalienable rights.  Goddamned shame about the way this country treats those brave souls we send into hell and then thank for their service, as we tell them to have a very nice day and let them wait, on secret lists, to die.  A small percentage of the corporate taxes unpaid by GE, Exxon, Apple and their ilk could fund a first rate health care system for veterans, but that would be so damned unfair to corporate CEOs!

Cultivate Mindful Empathy

I urge myself today– take a calligraphy pen and write it again, as handsomely and lovingly as you can:  cultivate mindful empathy.

Though it’s difficult, particularly when feeling dispirited and abandoned by friends and family alike: remember to be aware of the troubles of others and not to minimize them.   Remember to be sensitive to what others are suffering, even when it may seem senseless to you.  Yesterday a friend, thinking of people who mistreated him decades ago, expressed understandable thoughts of revenge.   As one of the most remarkable people I’ve met, the late, great Fran MacDonald, often said, to great effect: “I understand.”  

Think about the power of that simple response:  I understand.  I hear you, I feel what you’re saying, I have digested the import to you.   On the other hand, it may have been Fran’s way of gently telling me to shut up whenever I complained, which was often.  

A talent for complaint, a genius for it, really, runs in my family.  It just comes naturally to some people.  “You’d complain if you were hung with a new rope,” my father observed to his only son more than once.

Just the other day, in the context of complaining about the many weaknesses of the so-called Affordable Care Act,  I compared our brilliant president’s many laudable speeches with his many less laudable actions, to the great annoyance of a friend who thinks Obama is a great man.  The president has spoken eloquently about the need for a transparent government while invoking the 1917 Espionage Act to intimidate leakers and maintaining an administration more opaque, less accessible to journalists and seekers of information under the Freedom of Information Act, than even the secretive Cheney’s administration was.  Net neutrality, equal access to all websites, at equal speed, is something the president has often correctly called a cornerstone of democracy.  He has pledged over and over to defend it, his ominous appointments to the board that will decide who can sell what at which internet speed and service notwithstanding.  His first official act as president was symbolically closing Guantanamo Bay prison, showing that his heart is in the right place; never mind the devilish details of the many uncharged prisoners, detained now for more than a decade, that we are force feeding there as they try to starve themselves to death.  A commitment to renewable energy, laudable, and new records for petro-fuel extraction quietly applauded by the oil companies.   Add the boom The Wall Street Journal crowed about: pumping thousands of gallons of secret, highly toxic chemical stews into the earth in order to extract trapped, and highly profitable, natural gas from deep inside the earth.  The worrisome Keystone pipeline that will transport tar sand sludge thousands of miles, from Koch Brother owned land in Canada to refineries in the American Gulf of Mexico that will extract gasoline from it, so far Obama has only approved the southern half of it for operation.    No reason, but past experience, to believe he will OK the crucial northern half of the pipeline.

By the way, I learned recently that the Koch Brothers’ father was a founding member of the John Birch Society, the outfit that contended then president Dwight D. Eisenhower was an agent of Communism.   The old reactionary is smiling in his grave at how skillfully his billionaire sons are advancing his old agenda.   Breeding will out, I suppose.

I say these critical things about our president sadly and fully realizing the virulent hatred this half-black man faces, the troubled, divided, ravished country he inherited and the additional pressure to accommodate that is placed on him, as a half-black man and our first “post-racial” president.

But I was talking about empathy a moment ago.  I can hear the haters, and I should pause to understand:  

Whoa, nothing “half” about it, dude.  We are stricter here than the good folks who made the Nuremberg Laws.  One half black equals black.  Shoot, a damn quadroon is black!  Same for an octoroon, damn it.   We American racists are strict, son, what the hell you talkin’ about “half-black”?   Did you bother taking a look at him lately?  The only half-black thing about him is his damn policies, and his embrace of virtually every policy G.W. Bush ever enacted, and that’s the only good half.  The indisputable fact is: the man’s still black.

Which puts me in mind of my friend, the fan of Obama’s, and his measured, reasonable sounding point about incrementalism.  With all the faults of Obamacare, he said, it’s a step in the right direction that was made against unprecedented, rabid opposition and something that no previous president had the courage or political will to do.  Leaving aside that it may in many ways favor the profits of private insurance companies over the needs of American medical patients, that it leaves millions of Americans without insurance, that it makes no sense compared to a public option, it is still a step, an incremental improvement over what came before.  Of course, he works for a corporation that provides his health insurance and so is not directly effected by it, but he’s read a great deal about the details and knows many things about the law that he’s sure even those suffering under it don’t know.

I gave him an example of incrementalism from history that caused him to crease his brow and agree to disagree.  After the Civil War the 14th Amendment guaranteed the rights of citizenship to all Americans, promising due process and equal protection of the laws [1].  It also granted Congress the power to pass any laws necessary to enforce its provisions against recalcitrant states, formerly in rebellion and forced by economic necessity to ratify the amendment as a condition for federal aid, that might be intent on violating these rights.  

Within a few years of the Amendment’s ratification, in the depths of a severe economic depression caused in large part by the war to preserve or abolish slavery, the Supreme Court clarified matters.  The privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States were spelled out explicitly by the wise and unappealable jurists of the nation’s high court:  the right to migrate freely from state to state, the right to freely use navigable interstate waterways and a third, equally important right of citizenship.  

The remaining privileges and immunities of American citizenship, the Court held, were the business of the States, and if the Ku Klux Klan itself ran the damned state, well, that was not the business of the federal government, unless, of course, the State was trying to abridge any of those three enumerated rights.  Case closed.  “Call me pisher,” as my grandfather used to say.

That remained the constitutional law of the land for more than 90 years, talk about incremental.  It remained so until some clever New York radical attorneys came up with a way to invoke the long slumbering century-old enforcement statute, never repealed,  to enforce the 14th Amendment, after the murders of civil rights workers Schwerner, Chaney and Goodman in June 1964,  down in the bowels of Mississippi.  Courageous southern judges on the federal bench ruled that the old statute could be used to bring such cases into federal court.  It has been used, literally millions of times, since, after a refreshing almost hundred year nap, to enforce the original intent of the 14th amendment. 

In that Mississippi trial, by the way, seven of the nineteen accused members of the lynch mob who murdered Chaney, Schwerner and Goodman, after indictments against them were dismissed and the dismissal was overturned by the Supreme Court, eventually were convicted and sentenced to three to ten long years in prison [2].  The grinning sheriff was not convicted, though his deputy eventually served four years of his six year sentence.  Incrementalism, my man, something to be happy about — if you live to be 150 or so.

It is easy to be distracted, that’s for sure.  What is hard, and well worth doing, is cultivating mindful empathy.  It is at times very hard.  I suppose those are the times when it is most worth doing.  Today would be a good day for me to work on it.  It’s either that or jump out of my skin, leap onto my skeleton, already posed horse-like, and gallop off howling.

Come to think of it, that might be a better idea.

 

[1]  No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

[2]  On December 29 (1967), Judge Cox imposed sentences.  Roberts and Bowers got ten years, Posey and Price got six years, and the other three convicted defendants got four.  Cox said of his sentences, “They killed one nigger, one Jew, and a white man– I gave them all what I thought they deserved.”   source

 

The Corporate State

I have been fond, in an involuntary, Tourretic kind of way, of stating that the Nazis won World War Two.    There is a convincing argument to be made, the Nazis were, after all, on the forefront of many of the innovations now routinely used by those who rule the world today.   I would back this up in a scholarly paper, if there was time, if there wasn’t so much else to do.   (Similarly, there’s a scholarly paper on the shameful history of not only American slavery, and genocide, but the more than century long continuation of these things, under different names, during a reign of violence and mayhem slyly winked at by the Supreme Court.)

Please stop me if I told you this already.    Adolf Hitler, one of the most famous mad men in history, wrote a seldom read (but often purchased) manifesto called My Seven Year Struggle Against the Lying Race Poisoning Traitor Jews and Acchhhh! the Burning Slaver on my Rabid Dog Tongue! Fuck You, I’ll Kill you all, You Fucking Niggers… shortened, by a savvy editor, to “My Struggle” or Mein Kampf.

I tried to read it once.  Each sentence is a page long, with the verb at the very end.  Some sentences are longer and more convoluted.  If a dog with rabies could dictate its thoughts to an idiot with pen in hand (a loyal believer named Rudolf Hess, imprisoned with the future Fuhrer in Landsberg Prison after an unsuccessful putsch in 1923), the book that it produced might be Mein Kampf.  Hitler is reputed to have written a short crystal clear primer on propaganda, included in Mein Kampf, and I began combing through the lice and maggot infested prose to find it.

Et, voila.  The Fuhrer wipes the foam off his lips, takes a breath, and proceeds, in ten or fifteen cogent pages, to tell exactly how it should be done.   Frighten people, appeal to their desire to be protected, tell whatever lies are needed to make them hate, enrage them, focus their rage on enemies they can then be sent to destroy.   His right hand in propaganda, Josef Goebbels, Reich Minister of  Public Enlightenment and Propaganda, was very much down with the program, and an innovator in his own right.

First thing: control every organ of mass media.  Newspapers, radio, film, literature, theatre, put a Nazi sympathizer in  control every where, to root out all non-Nazis.

Second thing:  repeat the bullshit over and over and over.  Where there is no other voice, your explanations, no matter how lame or demonstrably false, will generally carry the day.

Third thing:  find and root out anyone who does not buy the stinking tissue of lies you are selling.  Take these people and make grotesque examples of them.  Nothing like a little dramatic public violence against them to get the attention of other would-be heroes.

I know, you are thinking it is a big, simplistic leap from a group of madmen with a murderous agenda to the super-wealthy leaders of our modern global corporate world.  Certainly the leaders of the oil industry, the financial sector, the global corporations that drive the world economy are not comparable to Hitler, Goebbels, Himmler, Goring.  Certainly.  Only a hyperperbolist would compare Dick Cheney, let’s say, to Hermann Goring.  If thousands, or even hundreds of thousands, are killed and millions displaced violently advancing the goals of corporations, it’s not as if they PLANNED to murder all these people or did it deliberately.  Big difference, no?

But here’s the thing:  you have a society that values only one thing, they call it “free enterprise” or the “free market”.  The only thing free about it is the freedom of those on top to keep most of the profit it produces.  So instead of a vision of a pure world polluted by those who must be destroyed– Jews, Communists, Freemasons, Homosexuals, Gypsies, People named Dave, you have a vision of a world of abundant but limited resources where the few are entitled to own everything they can acquire, and it is nobody’s problem if most of the world is dispossessed, if children die of hunger, if preventable disease kills millions, if the world itself is destroyed by pollution.

What does the mass media show?  When it presents the issue at all — freedom vs. tyranny and our American Exceptionalism.    Our mass media features distraction, stylized zero-sum competition and advertisements.  The news features stories that excite passion and resist reasonable discussion.    Every view, no matter how idiotic, is presented as being of equal value, thus real debate is stymied in the name of an absurd version of “fairness.”  And then, in case you are actually thinking about any of this,  a loud, attention grabbing word from our sponsor.  While you are watching one show there is an animated crawl on the bottom of the screen, an ad for another show you should watch, but there is no time to squeeze it in with paid advertising, so you cram it into the bottom of the show other sponsors are already paying for.  Lack of campaign finance laws?  No problem, political ads are a boon to television stations that are supposed to serve a public interest function for the privilege of having a broadcast license.  A quaint notion nobody gets excited about any more.  There’s too much money to be made!!!

What happens to those insiders who, at great personal risk, expose the details of and decry the unjust, illegal state of things?  These are no longer considered whistle blowers performing a valuable service to democracy.   We try them as traitors under a 1917 statute created to smash dissent as Woodrow Wilson was gearing up for America’s entry into World War One.  A statute that carries the death penalty.   Nothing gets the attention, or chills the blood, like the possibility that if you lose in court, you will be killed by the state.

I believe it was Dr. Goebbels who stated that the man of the future would be the ‘corporate man.’   A kid in the animation workshop, seeing a picture of Woody Guthrie playing a guitar with the words “This Machine Kills Fascists” painted across it, asked me what a fascist was.   “A facist is someone who wants to control everything that you do,” I told him.  I think that’s right.  Fascists know Best, as the sitcom of the fifties made clear.

I am clearly in a foul mood, otherwise why would I be sputtering this way?   Still, there is something to ponder in this:  we are living in a corporate state with all that entails.   President Obama has said from the beginning that it will require millions pushing him to enact any kind of progressive agenda.  What he didn’t say, because he is a smart man and a skilled politician, is that it will require many, many millions to push back against the prerogatives and privileges of those very wealthy persons and entities who funded his insanely expensive election campaigns.  How much say does your $20 contribution buy, compared to a plate that cost someone $5,000?

As every citizen of a corporate state knows: you get what you pay for.  Sometimes.

Accepting Criticism

An emotionally intelligent person, concerned with effectively communicating with others, is interested in people’s reactions and takes them into consideration.  

What is clear to the person speaking, or writing, or pitching, or drawing, or singing, may not be clear to the people she is directing it to.  A person who would communicate well must be attuned to intelligent comments, as well as cluelessness, and the opinions of people who may be saying what they are out of an undigested mixture of helpfulness, envy, anger, confusion, ambivalence, distraction and so forth.  Many of these comments will be useful in helping to refine communication.

Even those who blurt out, ten seconds into a thirty second rough sketch, why the thing fails as a whole, may have a good point.  The only thing, it is sometimes hard, even for the person who graciously accepts suggestions and easily revises accordingly, not to snarl when this helpful approach is the only approach encountered.

Political Orientation and Class Warfare

An old friend, a former leftist who had a political awakening on September 11th, 2001 and thereafter came to believe Bush and Cheney had the right approach, sometimes chides me for being uncharitable to the super rich. She considers herself an independent now.   She asked me recently if I knew how many really wonderful very rich people there are in the world.  I have no idea of the number, and was at a loss for a reply.  I admit I have a certain antipathy towards a class who, as a group, puts the acquisition of more than they can ever spend as their top priority.

She sent me an email today with a link to an article entitled  Americans in Poverty Have TVs VCRs Cellphones and Airconditioning (click on it, if you like).    The author, she wrote, backs up her thesis, American poverty is “a problem of fatherless homes, values, ennui, purposelessness, soul-work.”   She also lamented the lack of people, poor or otherwise, who believe in something greater than themselves.

I tried to be mild, since I value our friendship.  I’m not sure if I succeeded.   I wrote: 

If you will forgive me, I didn’t see anything very convincing in this little opinion piece which suggests America’s poor are doing just fine, thank you.  I know the right wing view of poverty which the title of this piece advertises quite prominently — moral failure of lazy non-workers, bloated, spoiled entitled parasites, godless hedonists.  People lacking the moral fiber and drive that folks like our former presidents Bush were both born with.
 
The other side of this view can be seen during a walk in any of the actual slums of the richest country on earth, slums that have been slums for generations, where the infant mortality rate is as bad in as the worst third world hell holes and the challenges of day to day survival are daunting.  Many do have tvs, and cellphones, and $200 sneakers.  Yes, I know, it seems unconscionable that people with such short life expectancies and so little to live for crave the luxuries that America advertises 24/7.  Particularly shameful when you consider that a hard-working HS graduate on minimum wage ($7.25 federal and NY state) makes under $300 for a 40 hour week, before taxes.  Seems an impossibly small amount of money to live on– only a greedy fool making that pittance would try to have a cell phone or TV.
 
The tax on the wealthiest goes back up, amid great gnashing of wealthy teeth, to pre-Bush tax cut levels by about 10% of the total rate while the payroll tax on everybody else goes up 48%.  Fair is fair.  Does one really have to be a Marxist to see that there is a class bias to our laws?  Is it unfair to criticize greed when it’s perfectly legal and enshrined in our laws?  Why should a CEO make only 40 times what his factory foreman makes (1970) when now he can make 400 times what that manager makes?  He’d be a fool to settle for 1/10th of what he can get, right?
 
So I’m not going to go further into this subject, though I may have gone too far already.  It’s something I guess we’ll never agree about.  Are there good rich people?  I’m certain there are many.  Are there good poor people?  I’m sure there are millions.  Are there greedy, vicious sociopaths both rich and poor?  Certainly, but in my book the poor, as a class, get the benefit of the doubt on that one.   At least they don’t amass more wealth than they can spend in 10,000 lifetimes, and fight for every penny of it as their right as successful Americans, and buy legislators and pass laws that favor their advantages, while children go to bed hungry across town for lack of food and others die needlessly for lack of access to routine medical care, while the aged poor eat scraps and wear extra sweaters to save on heating bills they can’t afford.
 
Perhaps the percentage of good and evil people is the same in both groups, good people and moral scum probably occur in roughly the same proportion in the rich and in the poor — but since there are thousands of times the poor people, I think the world has many more good poor people than good rich people.
 
Of course, most of the working poor are too busy holding down two or three low-paying jobs to write opinion pieces in prestigious publications, or on their websites. 
 
Love,
Groucho

What am I trying to do?

I am looking for the kids the system is about to give up on, future public enemy types about to turn their back on a world that despises them.  In a way, they are making the only dignified move available to them by saying “fuck this” and walking away from a system practically designed to make them drop out.   The schools were not made for children who come from endless generations of poverty, certainly not now that there are no decent paying factory jobs left in America.  

Today smart entrepreneurs are using the failure of the public school system, and the drying up of real economic opportunity for millions born poor, to build their own alternative schools, making nice money as they shine a false light on what needs to be done, building small, elite, for-profit  schools, in public buildings, funded by vouchers that come out of the public school budget, instead of working to fix our larger problem– although there is a lot of good work that desperately needs to be done well in our society, there is nothing real for most poor children to aspire to in our kinder, gentler, more global nation.  

The public schools are built on the old factory model and while there are many good people working very hard in the system, it is set up to make many kids tune out and quit, especially the children of the poor, children who have the most reason to be discouraged when they start to fall behind.   These are the kids I’m looking for, trying to reach before they are beyond reach.

“What the hell are you trying to do that for?” virtually everyone asks, and there is nothing fake about how mystified they are.  I have no house, no car, I wear the same clothes I’ve had for years, same winter jacket, new boots once a year.  I don’t care about eating in nice restaurants or going to beautiful vacation spots where poor people will treat me like a king.  I don’t even care about having a really nice guitar, though I play well enough to have one.  I don’t say this out of any sense of virtue, I just truly don’t care very much for these things.  What I care about is becoming the change I want to see in the world– a mild, effective man, nurturing creativity instead of my own bitterness.

“What do you care for?” a caring friend asks, and I tell the story of the kid on the beach. A story I heard years ago at a conference for public school teachers I attended on a half day.  The kids were home, or running in the street, and the teachers were in a convention center, listening to a great speaker inspire us to be the best teachers we could be.

“So it’s low tide, and there are about a million star fish drying out on the rocks on the beach, as far as the eye can see.  And a little boy is bending down and picking up half dead starfish and flinging them back into the water.  ‘What are you doing?’ asks a man in a mildly derisive tone, ‘what difference does it make if you throw a few back?  Do you think you can save them all?  Look, there are millions, you can’t save all of them. What difference could it possibly make if you throw a few back?’  And the kid picks up a star fish and heaves it back into the ocean– ‘it makes a big difference for that one’ he says to the crusty old bastard.”

Only, of course, the man talking to the kid was the voice of reason, the voice of the world, and the inspirational speaker didn’t speak of the mercilessly realistic fuck as a crusty old bastard.  The speaker was probably being paid very well to talk to that huge room full of tired teachers, hell, most of the teachers were getting a hundred maybe two hundred dollars just to sit in that room for half a day, listening to this great speech.  I heard it more than twenty years ago, when I was an idealistic third grade teacher in Harlem, and it still resonates, sings.  It’s a bell of clarity, really.

Torture– drop the word casually, it means little

People who know me, who’ve been to this untidy, dilapidated place where I live, would all agree I have many more important things to do right now than stew about politics.   I know it is a symptom of something else, but I can’t clear my throat sometimes.  There are things that stick there like poisoned steel wool, irritating to no end.   So let me try to pump this one up, like a cat with a hairball, and get on with my life today.  

President Change You Can Believe In (you can also believe in the tooth fairy or the patriotism of men willing to torture suspects– so he’s not really misleading anyone)  casually spoke the word “torture” the other day, I heard the sound bite.  He admitted explicitly, for the first time, that our great nation had descended to torture in the so-called War on Terror.  Torture was committed in secret, in our names, against people who are abstractions. It was authorized and justified, under a changed name, in secret memos, with surprisingly little legal support, that were authored by Bush Administration lawyers, one now a federal judge for life, the other a tenured professor of constitutional law at Berkeley.

It’s not like there were witnesses as actual people we know were hung by their arms for hours at a time, forced to soil themselves, stripped naked, kept in freezing cold or boiling hot cells, kept awake for days at a time, kept in airless cells too small for them, thrown against walls (harmless, just to get their attention!) shaken, punched, slapped, kicked, water-boarded.   Some of these people were guilty as hell, even if many were not.  At any rate, full disclosure, agents of We The People tortured people, we’re not going to do it anymore, and that’s that.  There’s no point prosecuting anyone, heck, we’d probably have to prosecute ourselves too, which would suck!  In addition to posing an uncomfortable conflict of interest.

It was as shocking hearing the president finally say “torture” as it was hearing the word “poverty” come out of his mouth for the first time in public during his second inauguration.  I heard it like this “we murdered some people, frankly, we did,  in cold blood and without any real legal defense for our actions.  We also engaged in systematic rape, of men and women, some admittedly quite young, and other atrocities.  We killed babies, and old women, we broke down doors and beat up and sometimes slaughtered people in far away lands who had nothing to do with terrorism.   We grabbed people in airports that we sent to savage regimes to be tortured and found out only years later that many of them were innocent.  Guilty as charged.  These things are terrible, unforgivable, and we abhor them to our core.  I say, not without some personal sadness, that as a practical matter we will never hold anyone accountable in any way for any of these policies.  We made sure that our contractors are immune from prosecution, and we sure as hell are not going to prosecute the wealthy and powerful men who created the secret torture program.  Get over it, America.”

“After all, we are wealthy beyond counting, as a nation, but 21 million of our children go to bed hungry every night, is that not in some ways a greater national shame than torturing people we don’t even know?    We have neighborhoods where the death rate is as high as in third world nations engaged in civil wars.  Shit happens, people.  I say these things not because I will hold anyone accountable for crimes we committed in the past, for the crimes we continue to commit or for a system that allows the wealthiest to increase their wealth beyond the wildest imaginings of the greediest while children, by the million, are asked to eat shit and die.  I mention these things only because I am a man of conscience and an expert in constitutional law.  If you think it is easy to be an expert in constitutional law, think again.  I challenge you, for example, to find the three discreet phrases buried in that succinct document that formed the constitutional basis for human slavery and its strict legal protection for almost a hundred years.”

“We do some very bad things, I will admit.  Most of these terrible things we keep secret.  You have 1,000 channels of TV programming to distract you, a fantastic network of professional sports where some of the greatest athletes in the world compete for your enjoyment, many fake news channels, a hundred Darwinian contests, scripted reality TV shows with colorful people in many cases even dumber than you are.  You have great stores full of wonderful products and you can buy anything you like on-line, from the comfort of your favorite chair.  You have everything you need, unless you’re really poor, or working class, in which case you may feel left out of the American Dream.  I pity you, I really do, it’s really a great dream.”

“But I must also point out that I will be very, very strict with anyone who tries to make public things that the public must not know.  If the U.S. military has a digital video of an American helicopter crew getting permission to gun down unarmed Iraqi civilians who come to try to rescue other civilians shot down by that same American helicopter crew, that is their business.  The military knows best how to deal with these things, it has been doing so for over two hundred years.  Things like this are classified for a reason and anyone who releases such information is a traitor and enemy of the state worthy of death.  And guess what?  As we’ve already shown, we no longer need to even accuse you of a specific crime or have any kind of due process before we take you out with a flying remote control death machine.  Thank you for listening and God bless these United States of America.”

“Oh, and one more thing.  Vice Admiral John Poindexter, a shady character out of the Iran-Contra scandal and former Deputy National Security Advisor to President Reagan, was pitching a data mining system that could be used to keep tabs on the activities of conspiracies to undermine America.   It could be used, for example, to get the names of everyone opposed to a specific government policy, the phone numbers of everyone involved in street protests or petitions, those subscribing to internet lists or those organizing for any purpose that might run counter to the best interests of America as defined in secret by unaccountable persons.  I am not at liberty to say if the NSA data mining program recently revealed by a traitor worthy of death, a reckless and dangerous young man named Edward Snowden, is that same program Poindexter was peddling or not.  Does it make any difference to you?  God bless America.”

“And goodnight, Gracie.”