http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/the_folly_of_empire_20131014
The Folly of Empire
The final days of empire give ample employment and power to the feckless, the insane and the idiotic. These politicians and court propagandists, hired to be the public faces on the sinking ship, mask the real work of the crew, which is systematically robbing the passengers as the vessel goes down. The mandarins of power stand in the wheelhouse barking ridiculous orders and seeing how fast they can gun the engines. They fight like children over the ship’s wheel as the vessel heads full speed into a giant ice field. They wander the decks giving pompous speeches. They shout that the SS America is the greatest ship ever built. They insist that it has the most advanced technology and embodies the highest virtues. And then, with abrupt and unexpected fury, down we will go into the frigid waters.
The last days of empire are carnivals of folly. We are in the midst of our own, plunging forward as our leaders court willful economic and environmental self-destruction. Sumer and Rome went down like this. So did the Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian empires. Men and women of stunning mediocrity and depravity led the monarchies of Europe and Russia on the eve of World War I. And America has, in its own decline, offered up its share of weaklings, dolts and morons to steer it to destruction. A nation that was still rooted in reality would never glorify charlatans such as Sen. Ted Cruz, House Speaker John Boehner and former Speaker Newt Gingrich as they pollute the airwaves. If we had any idea what was really happening to us we would have turned in fury against Barack Obama, whose signature legacy will be utter capitulation to the demands of Wall Street, the fossil fuel industry, the military-industrial complex and the security and surveillance state. We would have rallied behind those few, such as Ralph Nader, who denounced a monetary system based on gambling and the endless printing of money and condemned the willful wrecking of the ecosystem. We would have mutinied. We would have turned the ship back.
The populations of dying empires are passive because they are lotus-eaters. There is a narcotic-like reverie among those barreling toward oblivion. They retreat into the sexual, the tawdry and the inane, retreats that are momentarily pleasurable but ensure self-destruction. They naively trust it will all work out. As a species, Margaret Atwood observes in her dystopian novel “Oryx and Crake,” “we’re doomed by hope.” And absurd promises of hope and glory are endlessly served up by the entertainment industry, the political and economic elite, the class of courtiers who pose as journalists, self-help gurus like Oprah and religious belief systems that assure followers that God will always protect them. It is collective self-delusion, a retreat into magical thinking.
“The American citizen thus lives in a world where fantasy is more real than reality, where the image has more dignity than the original,” Daniel J. Boorstin wrote in his book “The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America.” “We hardly dare face our bewilderment, because our ambiguous experience is so pleasantly iridescent, and the solace of belief in contrived reality is so thoroughly real. We have become eager accessories in the great hoaxes of the age. These are the hoaxes we play on ourselves.”
Culture and literacy, in the final stage of decline, are replaced with noisy diversions and empty clichés. The Roman statesman Cicero inveighed against their ancient equivalent—the arena. Cicero, for his honesty, was hunted down and murdered and his hands and head were cut off. His severed head and his right hand, which had written the Philippics, were nailed onto the speaker’s platform in the Forum. The roaring crowds, while the Roman elite spat on the head, were gleefully told he would never speak or write again. In the modern age this toxic, mindless cacophony, our own version of spectacle and gladiator fights, of bread and circus, is pumped into the airwaves in 24-hour cycles. Political life has fused into celebrity worship. Education is primarily vocational. Intellectuals are cast out and despised. Artists cannot make a living. Few people read books. Thought has been banished, especially at universities and colleges, where timid pedants and careerists churn out academic drivel. “Although tyranny, because it needs no consent, may successfully rule over foreign peoples,” Hannah Arendt wrote in “The Origins of Totalitarianism,” “it can stay in power only if it destroys first of all the national institutions of its own people.” And ours have been destroyed.
Sensual pleasure and eternal youth are our overriding obsessions. The Roman emperor Tiberius, at the end, fled to the island of Capri and turned his seaside palace into a house of unbridled lust and violence. “Bevies of girls and young men, whom he had collected from all over the Empire as adepts in unnatural practices, and known as spintriae, would copulate before him in groups of three, to excite his waning passions,” Suetonius wrote in “The Twelve Caesars.” Tiberius trained small boys, whom he called his minnows, to frolic with him in the water and perform oral sex. And after watching prolonged torture, he would have captives thrown into the sea from a cliff near his palace. Tiberius would be followed by Caligula and Nero.
“At times when the page is turning,” Louis-Ferdinand Céline wrote in “Castle to Castle,” “when History brings all the nuts together, opens its Epic Dance Halls! hats and heads in the whirlwind! Panties overboard!”
The anthropologist Joseph Tainter in his book “The Collapse of Complex Societies” looked at the collapse of civilizations from the Roman to the Mayan. He concluded that they disintegrated because they finally could not sustain the bureaucratic complexities they had created. Layers of bureaucracy demand more and more exploitation, not only of the environment but the laboring classes. They become calcified by systems that are unable to respond to the changing reality around them. They, like our elite universities and business schools, churn out systems managers, people who are taught not to think but to blindly service the system. These systems managers know only how to perpetuate themselves and the system they serve, although serving that system means disemboweling the nation and the planet. Our elites and bureaucrats exhaust the earth to hold up a system that worked in the past, failing to see that it no longer works. Elites, rather than contemplate reform, which would jeopardize their privilege and power, retreat in the twilight of empire into walled compounds like the Forbidden City or Versailles. They invent their own reality. Those on Wall Street and in corporate boardrooms have replicated this behavior. They insist that continued reliance on fossil fuel and speculations will sustain the empire. State resources, as Tainter notes, are at the end increasingly squandered on extravagant and senseless projects and imperial adventures. And then it all collapses.
Our collapse will take the whole planet with it.
It is more pleasant, I admit, to stand mesmerized in front of our electronic hallucinations. It is easier to check out intellectually. It is more gratifying to imbibe the hedonism and the sickness of the worship of the self and money. It is more comforting to chatter about celebrity gossip and ignore or dismiss what is reality.
Thomas Mann in “The Magic Mountain” and Joseph Roth in “Hotel Savoy” brilliantly chronicled this peculiar state of mind. In Roth’s hotel the first three floors house in luxury the bloated rich, the amoral politicians, the bankers and the business owners. The upper floors are crammed with people who struggle to pay their bills and who are steadily divested of their possessions until they are destitute and cast out. There is no political ideology among decayed ruling elites, despite choreographed debates and elaborate political theater. It is, as it always is at the end, one vast kleptocracy.
Just before World War II, a friend asked Roth, a Jewish intellectual who had fled Nazi Germany for Paris, “Why are you drinking so much?” Roth answered: “Do you think you are going to escape? You too are going to be wiped out.”
Thursday, October 24, 2013
SC119-15
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/the_radical_christian_right_and_the_war_on_government_20131006
The Radical Christian Right and the War on Government
There is a desire felt by tens of millions of Americans, lumped into a diffuse and fractious movement known as the Christian right, to destroy the intellectual and scientific rigor of the Enlightenment, radically diminish the role of government to create a theocratic state based on “biblical law,” and force a recalcitrant world to bend to the will of an imperial and “Christian” America. Its public face is on display in the House of Representatives. This ideology, which is the driving force behind the shutdown of the government, calls for the eradication of social “deviants,” beginning with gay men and lesbians, whose sexual orientation, those in the movement say, is a curse and an illness, contaminating the American family and the country. Once these “deviants” are removed, other “deviants,” including Muslims, liberals, feminists, intellectuals, left-wing activists, undocumented workers, poor African-Americans and those dismissed as “nominal Christians”—meaning Christians who do not embrace this peculiar interpretation of the Bible—will also be ruthlessly repressed. The “deviant” government bureaucrats, the “deviant” media, the “deviant” schools and the “deviant” churches, all agents of Satan, will be crushed or radically reformed. The rights of these “deviants” will be annulled. “Christian values” and “family values” will, in the new state, be propagated by all institutions. Education and social welfare will be handed over to the church. Facts and self-criticism will be replaced with relentless indoctrination.
U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz—whose father is Rafael Cruz, a rabid right-wing Christian preacher and the director of the Purifying Fire International ministry—and legions of the senator’s wealthy supporters, some of whom orchestrated the shutdown, are rooted in a radical Christian ideology known as Dominionism or Christian Reconstructionism. This ideology calls on anointed “Christian” leaders to take over the state and make the goals and laws of the nation “biblical.” It seeks to reduce government to organizing little more than defense, internal security and the protection of property rights. It fuses with the Christian religion the iconography and language of American imperialism and nationalism, along with the cruelest aspects of corporate capitalism. The intellectual and moral hollowness of the ideology, its flagrant distortion and misuse of the Bible, the contradictions that abound within it—its leaders champion small government and a large military, as if the military is not part of government—and its laughable pseudoscience are impervious to reason and fact. And that is why the movement is dangerous.
The cult of masculinity, as in all fascist movements, pervades the ideology of the Christian right. The movement uses religion to sanctify military and heroic “virtues,” glorify blind obedience and order over reason and conscience, and pander to the euphoria of collective emotions. Feminism and homosexuality, believers are told, have rendered the American male physically and spiritually impotent. Jesus, for the Christian right, is a man of action, casting out demons, battling the Antichrist, attacking hypocrites and ultimately slaying nonbelievers. This cult of masculinity, with its glorification of violence, is appealing to the powerless. It stokes the anger of many Americans, mostly white and economically disadvantaged, and encourages them to lash back at those who, they are told, seek to destroy them. The paranoia about the outside world is fostered by bizarre conspiracy theories, many of which are prominent in the rhetoric of those leading the government shutdown. Believers, especially now, are called to a perpetual state of war with the “secular humanist” state. The march, they believe, is irreversible. Global war, even nuclear war, is the joyful harbinger of the Second Coming. And leading the avenging armies is an angry, violent Messiah who dooms billions of apostates to death.
Dominionists believe they are engaged in an epic battle against the forces of Satan. They live in a binary world of black and white. They feel they are victims, surrounded by sinister groups bent on their destruction. They have anointed themselves as agents of God who alone know God’s will. They sanctify their rage. This rage lies at the center of the ideology. It leaves them sputtering inanities about Barack Obama, his corporate-sponsored health care reform bill, his alleged mandated suicide counseling or “death panels” for seniors under the bill, his supposed secret alliance with radical Muslims, and “creeping socialism.” They see the government bureaucracy as being controlled by “secular humanists” who want to destroy the family and make war against the purity of their belief system. They seek total cultural and political domination.
All ideological, theological and political debates with the radical Christian right are useless. It cares nothing for rational thought and discussion. Its adherents are using the space within the open society to destroy the open society itself. Our naive attempts to placate a movement bent on our destruction, to prove to it that we too have “values,” only strengthen its supposed legitimacy and increase our own weakness.
Dominionists have to operate, for now, in what they see as the contaminated environment of the secular, liberal state. They work with the rest of us only because they must. Given enough power—and they are working hard to get it—any such cooperation will vanish. They are no different from the vanguard described by Lenin or the Islamic terrorists who shaved off their beards, adopted Western dress and watched pay-for-view pornography in their hotel rooms the night before hijacking a plane for a suicide attack. The elect alone, like the Grand Inquisitor, are sanctioned to know the truth. And in the pursuit of their truth they have no moral constraints.
I spent two years inside the Christian right in writing my book “American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America.” I attended services at megachurches across the country, went to numerous lectures and talks, sat in on creationist seminars, attended classes on religious proselytizing and conversion, spent weekends at “right-to-life” retreats and interviewed dozens of followers and leaders of the movement. Though I was sympathetic to the financial dislocation, the struggles with addictions, the pain of domestic and sexual violence, and the deep despair that drew people to the movement, I was also acutely aware of the dangerous ideology these people embraced. Fascist movements begin as champions of civic improvement, communal ideals, moral purity, strength, national greatness and family values. These movements attract, as has the radical Christian right, those who are disillusioned by the collapse of liberal democracy. And our liberal democracy has collapsed.
We have abandoned our poor and working class. We have created a government monster that sucks the marrow out of our bones to enrich and empower the oligarchic and corporate elite. The protection of criminals, whether in war or on Wall Street, is part of our mirage of law and order. We have betrayed the vast and growing underclass. Most believers within the Christian right are struggling to survive in a hostile world. We have failed them. Their very real despair is being manipulated and used by Christian fascists such as the Texas senator. Give to the working poor a living wage, benefits and job security and the reach of this movement will diminish. Refuse to ameliorate the suffering of the poor and working class and you ensure the ascendancy of a Christian fascism.
The Christian right needs only a spark to set it ablaze. Another catastrophic act of domestic terrorism, hyperinflation, a series of devastating droughts, floods, hurricanes or massive wildfires or another financial meltdown will be the trigger. Then what is left of our anemic open society will disintegrate. The rise of Christian fascism is aided by our complacency. The longer we fail to openly denounce and defy bankrupt liberalism, the longer we permit corporate power to plunder the nation and destroy the ecosystem, the longer we stand slack-jawed before the open gates of the city waiting meekly for the barbarians, the more we ensure their arrival.
The Radical Christian Right and the War on Government
There is a desire felt by tens of millions of Americans, lumped into a diffuse and fractious movement known as the Christian right, to destroy the intellectual and scientific rigor of the Enlightenment, radically diminish the role of government to create a theocratic state based on “biblical law,” and force a recalcitrant world to bend to the will of an imperial and “Christian” America. Its public face is on display in the House of Representatives. This ideology, which is the driving force behind the shutdown of the government, calls for the eradication of social “deviants,” beginning with gay men and lesbians, whose sexual orientation, those in the movement say, is a curse and an illness, contaminating the American family and the country. Once these “deviants” are removed, other “deviants,” including Muslims, liberals, feminists, intellectuals, left-wing activists, undocumented workers, poor African-Americans and those dismissed as “nominal Christians”—meaning Christians who do not embrace this peculiar interpretation of the Bible—will also be ruthlessly repressed. The “deviant” government bureaucrats, the “deviant” media, the “deviant” schools and the “deviant” churches, all agents of Satan, will be crushed or radically reformed. The rights of these “deviants” will be annulled. “Christian values” and “family values” will, in the new state, be propagated by all institutions. Education and social welfare will be handed over to the church. Facts and self-criticism will be replaced with relentless indoctrination.
U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz—whose father is Rafael Cruz, a rabid right-wing Christian preacher and the director of the Purifying Fire International ministry—and legions of the senator’s wealthy supporters, some of whom orchestrated the shutdown, are rooted in a radical Christian ideology known as Dominionism or Christian Reconstructionism. This ideology calls on anointed “Christian” leaders to take over the state and make the goals and laws of the nation “biblical.” It seeks to reduce government to organizing little more than defense, internal security and the protection of property rights. It fuses with the Christian religion the iconography and language of American imperialism and nationalism, along with the cruelest aspects of corporate capitalism. The intellectual and moral hollowness of the ideology, its flagrant distortion and misuse of the Bible, the contradictions that abound within it—its leaders champion small government and a large military, as if the military is not part of government—and its laughable pseudoscience are impervious to reason and fact. And that is why the movement is dangerous.
The cult of masculinity, as in all fascist movements, pervades the ideology of the Christian right. The movement uses religion to sanctify military and heroic “virtues,” glorify blind obedience and order over reason and conscience, and pander to the euphoria of collective emotions. Feminism and homosexuality, believers are told, have rendered the American male physically and spiritually impotent. Jesus, for the Christian right, is a man of action, casting out demons, battling the Antichrist, attacking hypocrites and ultimately slaying nonbelievers. This cult of masculinity, with its glorification of violence, is appealing to the powerless. It stokes the anger of many Americans, mostly white and economically disadvantaged, and encourages them to lash back at those who, they are told, seek to destroy them. The paranoia about the outside world is fostered by bizarre conspiracy theories, many of which are prominent in the rhetoric of those leading the government shutdown. Believers, especially now, are called to a perpetual state of war with the “secular humanist” state. The march, they believe, is irreversible. Global war, even nuclear war, is the joyful harbinger of the Second Coming. And leading the avenging armies is an angry, violent Messiah who dooms billions of apostates to death.
Dominionists believe they are engaged in an epic battle against the forces of Satan. They live in a binary world of black and white. They feel they are victims, surrounded by sinister groups bent on their destruction. They have anointed themselves as agents of God who alone know God’s will. They sanctify their rage. This rage lies at the center of the ideology. It leaves them sputtering inanities about Barack Obama, his corporate-sponsored health care reform bill, his alleged mandated suicide counseling or “death panels” for seniors under the bill, his supposed secret alliance with radical Muslims, and “creeping socialism.” They see the government bureaucracy as being controlled by “secular humanists” who want to destroy the family and make war against the purity of their belief system. They seek total cultural and political domination.
All ideological, theological and political debates with the radical Christian right are useless. It cares nothing for rational thought and discussion. Its adherents are using the space within the open society to destroy the open society itself. Our naive attempts to placate a movement bent on our destruction, to prove to it that we too have “values,” only strengthen its supposed legitimacy and increase our own weakness.
Dominionists have to operate, for now, in what they see as the contaminated environment of the secular, liberal state. They work with the rest of us only because they must. Given enough power—and they are working hard to get it—any such cooperation will vanish. They are no different from the vanguard described by Lenin or the Islamic terrorists who shaved off their beards, adopted Western dress and watched pay-for-view pornography in their hotel rooms the night before hijacking a plane for a suicide attack. The elect alone, like the Grand Inquisitor, are sanctioned to know the truth. And in the pursuit of their truth they have no moral constraints.
I spent two years inside the Christian right in writing my book “American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America.” I attended services at megachurches across the country, went to numerous lectures and talks, sat in on creationist seminars, attended classes on religious proselytizing and conversion, spent weekends at “right-to-life” retreats and interviewed dozens of followers and leaders of the movement. Though I was sympathetic to the financial dislocation, the struggles with addictions, the pain of domestic and sexual violence, and the deep despair that drew people to the movement, I was also acutely aware of the dangerous ideology these people embraced. Fascist movements begin as champions of civic improvement, communal ideals, moral purity, strength, national greatness and family values. These movements attract, as has the radical Christian right, those who are disillusioned by the collapse of liberal democracy. And our liberal democracy has collapsed.
We have abandoned our poor and working class. We have created a government monster that sucks the marrow out of our bones to enrich and empower the oligarchic and corporate elite. The protection of criminals, whether in war or on Wall Street, is part of our mirage of law and order. We have betrayed the vast and growing underclass. Most believers within the Christian right are struggling to survive in a hostile world. We have failed them. Their very real despair is being manipulated and used by Christian fascists such as the Texas senator. Give to the working poor a living wage, benefits and job security and the reach of this movement will diminish. Refuse to ameliorate the suffering of the poor and working class and you ensure the ascendancy of a Christian fascism.
The Christian right needs only a spark to set it ablaze. Another catastrophic act of domestic terrorism, hyperinflation, a series of devastating droughts, floods, hurricanes or massive wildfires or another financial meltdown will be the trigger. Then what is left of our anemic open society will disintegrate. The rise of Christian fascism is aided by our complacency. The longer we fail to openly denounce and defy bankrupt liberalism, the longer we permit corporate power to plunder the nation and destroy the ecosystem, the longer we stand slack-jawed before the open gates of the city waiting meekly for the barbarians, the more we ensure their arrival.
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http://kulturcritic.wordpress.com/posts/the-new-dark-ages-amerika-2020/
The New Dark Ages: Amerika 2020
I was inspired this week by a phrase from the great Jim Kunstler in his most recent CFN column, The Snapback: “Thus the nation enters its new dark age.”
It seems to me Jim’s comment here telescopes a much broader phenomenon just noticeable on the darkening horizon in this, the twilight of Western Civilization. A new monastic order is already emerging to fill the gap in this, our new ‘Dark Ages’ – as scholars (perhaps prematurely) designated those years between the Fall of the Roman Empire and the birth of the Renaissance. This new ruling elite will pretend to be the keepers of the flame of human knowledge and righteousness, safeguarding key elements of the erstwhile Curriculum of the West, while we all dutifully await the establishment of the kingdom of god on earth.
The lunatic fringe of politicos, headed by retro-Nazi zombies like Texan-Canadian US Senator, Teddie the Cruzader, a self-styled dominionist prophet, would-be king over a new heaven and a soon-to-be denuded earth – whose father is Rafael Cruz, a rabid right-wing Christian preacher and director of the Purifying Fire International Ministry – together with his fanatical gun-totting-lobby of old-rebel believers, will strictly and mortally enforce the morality of global expansionism (dominion), economic serfdom, and self-immolation upon the pitchforks of capital. This will be the plight of the tired and unwashed masses, as the newly self-anointed masters of the universe cruzade against the unregenerate and disenfranchised among us, seeking to rid the earth once and for all of the disease-spreading vermin of overpopulation. Don’t misunderstand me, I am not an advocate of gun control (and that is merely a sideshow in any event), but it is a very frightening idea to have a bunch of fanatic Christian zombies (just as it is to have possessed Moslem jihadists) walking the streets with firearms, locked and loaded, dressed in christened camouflage, and ready to kill the infidels.
Look in the mirror, folks. You are either saved or among the walking dead; ‘you are either with us or against us’ in the immortal words of his highness, George W (the burning) Bush.
As the Gospel of John, the Book of Revelations, clearly prophesized, the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse will emerge, – Monsanto, Nestle, Apple, Lockheed-Martin and, of course, their general… General Electric – destroying the old and bringing to life a new world order, with its own priestly class, and their minions propped up by this Holy Corporate Oligarchy. This new priestly class will keep the flame of the Western Curriculum burning brightly in its sanctuaries of power; in the midst of darkness, the curriculum of the West will be sanctified and protected behind their gated compounds, buried within their treasure troves of extravagance and prestige. They alone will be a light unto the world, and they will bring death and destruction to the vast majority of the world’s population… as they must if they are to survive and keep the fires burning brightly with the last remnants of fossil fuel.
We, who are not among the elect, yet fortunate (or is it ‘unlucky’) enough to escape the extermination camps, will lead nomadic underground lives, shuttling by cover of now permanent darkness, from cave to cave, tree hollow to tree hollow, surviving off the rotting corpses of our fallen comrades and the discarded scraps of the priestly class, as they continue litering the wasteland with their leftovers and post-civilized excrement.
The New Dark Ages: Amerika 2020
I was inspired this week by a phrase from the great Jim Kunstler in his most recent CFN column, The Snapback: “Thus the nation enters its new dark age.”
It seems to me Jim’s comment here telescopes a much broader phenomenon just noticeable on the darkening horizon in this, the twilight of Western Civilization. A new monastic order is already emerging to fill the gap in this, our new ‘Dark Ages’ – as scholars (perhaps prematurely) designated those years between the Fall of the Roman Empire and the birth of the Renaissance. This new ruling elite will pretend to be the keepers of the flame of human knowledge and righteousness, safeguarding key elements of the erstwhile Curriculum of the West, while we all dutifully await the establishment of the kingdom of god on earth.
The lunatic fringe of politicos, headed by retro-Nazi zombies like Texan-Canadian US Senator, Teddie the Cruzader, a self-styled dominionist prophet, would-be king over a new heaven and a soon-to-be denuded earth – whose father is Rafael Cruz, a rabid right-wing Christian preacher and director of the Purifying Fire International Ministry – together with his fanatical gun-totting-lobby of old-rebel believers, will strictly and mortally enforce the morality of global expansionism (dominion), economic serfdom, and self-immolation upon the pitchforks of capital. This will be the plight of the tired and unwashed masses, as the newly self-anointed masters of the universe cruzade against the unregenerate and disenfranchised among us, seeking to rid the earth once and for all of the disease-spreading vermin of overpopulation. Don’t misunderstand me, I am not an advocate of gun control (and that is merely a sideshow in any event), but it is a very frightening idea to have a bunch of fanatic Christian zombies (just as it is to have possessed Moslem jihadists) walking the streets with firearms, locked and loaded, dressed in christened camouflage, and ready to kill the infidels.
Look in the mirror, folks. You are either saved or among the walking dead; ‘you are either with us or against us’ in the immortal words of his highness, George W (the burning) Bush.
As the Gospel of John, the Book of Revelations, clearly prophesized, the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse will emerge, – Monsanto, Nestle, Apple, Lockheed-Martin and, of course, their general… General Electric – destroying the old and bringing to life a new world order, with its own priestly class, and their minions propped up by this Holy Corporate Oligarchy. This new priestly class will keep the flame of the Western Curriculum burning brightly in its sanctuaries of power; in the midst of darkness, the curriculum of the West will be sanctified and protected behind their gated compounds, buried within their treasure troves of extravagance and prestige. They alone will be a light unto the world, and they will bring death and destruction to the vast majority of the world’s population… as they must if they are to survive and keep the fires burning brightly with the last remnants of fossil fuel.
We, who are not among the elect, yet fortunate (or is it ‘unlucky’) enough to escape the extermination camps, will lead nomadic underground lives, shuttling by cover of now permanent darkness, from cave to cave, tree hollow to tree hollow, surviving off the rotting corpses of our fallen comrades and the discarded scraps of the priestly class, as they continue litering the wasteland with their leftovers and post-civilized excrement.
Friday, October 18, 2013
SC119-13
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/the_sparks_of_rebellion_20130930
The Sparks of Rebellion
I am reading and rereading the debates among some of the great radical thinkers of the 19th and 20th centuries about the mechanisms of social change. These debates were not academic. They were frantic searches for the triggers of revolt.
Vladimir Lenin placed his faith in a violent uprising, a professional, disciplined revolutionary vanguard freed from moral constraints and, like Karl Marx, in the inevitable emergence of the worker’s state. Pierre-Joseph Proudhon insisted that gradual change would be accomplished as enlightened workers took over production and educated and converted the rest of the proletariat. Mikhail Bakunin predicted the catastrophic breakdown of the capitalist order, something we are likely to witness in our lifetimes, and new autonomous worker federations rising up out of the chaos. Pyotr Kropotkin, like Proudhon, believed in an evolutionary process that would hammer out the new society. Emma Goldman, along with Kropotkin, came to be very wary of both the efficacy of violence and the revolutionary potential of the masses. “The mass,” Goldman wrote bitterly toward the end of her life in echoing Marx, “clings to its masters, loves the whip, and is the first to cry Crucify!”
The revolutionists of history counted on a mobilized base of enlightened industrial workers. The building blocks of revolt, they believed, relied on the tool of the general strike, the ability of workers to cripple the mechanisms of production. Strikes could be sustained with the support of political parties, strike funds and union halls. Workers without these support mechanisms had to replicate the infrastructure of parties and unions if they wanted to put prolonged pressure on the bosses and the state. But now, with the decimation of the U.S. manufacturing base, along with the dismantling of our unions and opposition parties, we will have to search for different instruments of rebellion.
We must develop a revolutionary theory that is not reliant on the industrial or agrarian muscle of workers. Most manufacturing jobs have disappeared, and, of those that remain, few are unionized. Our family farms have been destroyed by agro-businesses. Monsanto and its Faustian counterparts on Wall Street rule. They are steadily poisoning our lives and rendering us powerless. The corporate leviathan, which is global, is freed from the constraints of a single nation-state or government. Corporations are beyond regulation or control. Politicians are too anemic, or more often too corrupt, to stand in the way of the accelerating corporate destruction. This makes our struggle different from revolutionary struggles in industrial societies in the past. Our revolt will look more like what erupted in the less industrialized Slavic republics, Russia, Spain and China and uprisings led by a disenfranchised rural and urban working class and peasantry in the liberation movements that swept through Africa and Latin America. The dispossessed working poor, along with unemployed college graduates and students, unemployed journalists, artists, lawyers and teachers, will form our movement. This is why the fight for a higher minimum wage is crucial to uniting service workers with the alienated college-educated sons and daughters of the old middle class. Bakunin, unlike Marx, considered déclassé intellectuals essential for successful revolt.
It is not the poor who make revolutions. It is those who conclude that they will not be able, as they once expected, to rise economically and socially. This consciousness is part of the self-knowledge of service workers and fast food workers. It is grasped by the swelling population of college graduates caught in a vise of low-paying jobs and obscene amounts of debt. These two groups, once united, will be our primary engines of revolt. Much of the urban poor has been crippled and in many cases broken by a rewriting of laws, especially drug laws, that has permitted courts, probation officers, parole boards and police to randomly seize poor people of color, especially African-American men, without just cause and lock them in cages for years. In many of our most impoverished urban centers—our internal colonies, as Malcolm X called them—mobilization, at least at first, will be difficult. The urban poor are already in chains. These chains are being readied for the rest of us. “The law, in its majestic equality, forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, beg in the streets or steal bread,” Anatole France commented acidly.
Erica Chenoweth and Maria J. Stephan examined 100 years of violent and nonviolent resistance movements in their book “Why Civil Resistance Works.” They concluded that nonviolent movements succeed twice as often as violent uprisings. Violent movements work primarily in civil wars or in ending foreign occupations, they found. Nonviolent movements that succeed appeal to those within the power structure, especially the police and civil servants, who are cognizant of the corruption and decadence of the power elite and are willing to abandon them.
“History teaches that we have the power to transform the nation,” Kevin Zeese said when I interviewed him. Zeese, who with Dr. Margaret Flowers founded PopularResistance.org and helped plan the occupation of Freedom Plaza in Washington, D.C., continued: “We put forward a strategic framework that would allow people to work together in a common direction to end the rule of money. We need to be a nationally networked movement of many local, regional and issue-focused groups so we can unite into one mass movement. Research shows that nonviolent mass movements win. Fringe movements fail. By ‘mass’ we mean with an objective that is supported by a large majority and 1 percent to 5 percent of the population actively working for transformation.”
Zeese said this mass resistance must work on two tracks. It must attempt to stop the machine while at the same time building alternative structures of economic democracy and participatory democratic institutions. It is vital, he said, to sever ourselves from the corporate economy. Money, he said, has to be raised for grass-roots movements since most foundations that give grants are linked to the Democratic Party. Radical student and environmental groups especially need funds to build national networks, as does the public banking initiative. This initiative is essential to the movement. It will never find support among legislative bodies, for public banks would free people from the tyranny of commercial banks and Wall Street.
The most important dilemma facing us is not ideological. It is logistical. The security and surveillance state has made its highest priority the breaking of any infrastructure that might spark widespread revolt. The state knows the tinder is there. It knows that the continued unraveling of the economy and the effects of climate change make popular unrest inevitable. It knows that as underemployment and unemployment doom at least a quarter of the U.S. population, perhaps more, to perpetual poverty, and as unemployment benefits are scaled back, as schools close, as the middle class withers away, as pension funds are looted by hedge fund thieves, and as the government continues to let the fossil fuel industry ravage the planet, the future will increasingly be one of open conflict. This battle against the corporate state, right now, is primarily about infrastructure. We need an infrastructure to build revolt. The corporate state is determined to deny us one.
The corporate state, unnerved by the Occupy movement, has moved to close any public space to movements that might reignite encampments. For example, New York City police arrested members of Veterans for Peace on Oct. 7, 2012, when they stayed beyond the 10 p.m. official closing time at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. The police, who in some cases apologized to the veterans as they handcuffed them, were open about the motive of authorities: Officers told those being taken to jail they should blame the Occupy movement for the arrests.
The state has, at the same time, heavily infiltrated movements in order to discredit, isolate and push out their most competent leaders. It has used its vast surveillance capacities to monitor all forms of electronic communications, as well as personal relationships between activists, giving the state the ability to paralyze planned actions before they can begin. It has mounted a public relations campaign to demonize anyone who resists, branding environmental activists as “ecoterrorists,” charging activists under draconian terrorism laws, hunting down whistle-blowers such as Chelsea Manning, Julian Assange and Edward Snowden who shine a light on the inner secrets of power and condemning them as traitors and threats to national security. The state has attempted—and in this effort some in the Black Bloc proved unwittingly useful—to paint the movement as violent and directionless.
Occupy articulated the concerns of the majority of citizens. Most of the citizenry detests Wall Street and big banks. It does not want more wars. It needs jobs. It is disgusted with the subservience of elected officials to corporate power. It wants universal health care. It worries that if the fossil fuel industry is not stopped, there will be no future for our children. And the state is using all its power to stymie any movement that expresses these concerns. Documents released under the Freedom of Information Act show Homeland Security, the FBI, the Federal Protective Service, the Park Service and most likely the NSA and the CIA (the latter two have refused to respond to FOIA requests) worked with police across the country to infiltrate and destroy the encampments. There were 7,765 arrests of people in the movement. Occupy, at its peak, had about 350,000 people—or about 0.1 percent of the U.S. population.
“Look how afraid the power structure was of a mere 1/10th of 1 percent of the population,” Zeese said. “What happens when the movement grows to 1 percent—not a far reach—or the 5 percent that some research shows is the tipping point where no government, dictatorship or democracy can withstand the pressure from below?”
The state cannot allow workers at Wal-Mart, or any other nonunionized service center, to have access to an infrastructure or resources that might permit prolonged strikes and boycotts. And the movement now is about nuts and bolts. It is about food trucks, medical tents, communications vans and musicians and artists willing to articulate and sustain the struggle. We will have to build what unions and radical parties supplied in the past.
The state, in its internal projections, has a vision of the future that is as dystopian as mine. But the state, to protect itself, lies. Politicians, corporations, the public relations industry, the entertainment industry and our ridiculous television pundits speak as if we can continue to build a society based on limitless growth, profligate consumption and fossil fuel. They feed the collective mania for hope at the expense of truth. Their public vision is self-delusional, a form of collective psychosis. The corporate state, meanwhile, is preparing privately for the world it knows is actually coming. It is cementing into place a police state, one that includes the complete evisceration of our most basic civil liberties and the militarization of the internal security apparatus, as well as wholesale surveillance of the citizenry.
The most pressing issue facing us right now is the most prosaic. Protesters attempting to block the Keystone XL pipeline can endure only for so long if they have nothing to eat but stale bagels. They need adequate food. They need a system of communication to get their message out to alternative media that will amplify it. They need rudimentary medical care. All of these elements were vital to the Occupy movement. And these elements, when they came together, allowed the building of a movement that threatened the elite. The encampments also carried within them internal sources of disintegration. Many did not adequately control some groups. Many were hijacked or burdened by those who drained the political work of the movement. Many found that consensus, which worked well in small groups, created paralysis in groups of several hundred or a few thousand. And many failed to anticipate the numbing exhaustion that crushed activists. But these encampments did provide what was most crucial to the movement, something unions or the old Communist Party once provided to militants in the past. They provided the logistics to sustain resistance. And the destruction of the encampments, more than anything else, was a move by the state to deny to us the infrastructure needed to resist.
Infrastructure alone, however, will not be enough. The resistance needs a vibrant cultural component. It was the spirituals that nourished the souls of African-Americans during the nightmare of slavery. It was the blues that spoke to the reality of black people during the era of Jim Crow. It was the poems of Federico Garcia Lorca that sustained the republicans fighting the fascists in Spain. Music, dance, drama, art, song, painting were the fire and drive of resistance movements. The rebel units in El Salvador when I covered the war there always traveled with musicians and theater troupes. Art, as Emma Goldman pointed out, has the power to make ideas felt. Goldman noted that when Andrew Undershaft, a character in George Bernard Shaw’s play “Major Barbara,” said poverty is “[t]he worst of crimes” and “All the other crimes are virtues beside it,” his impassioned declaration elucidated the cruelty of class warfare more effectively than Shaw’s socialist tracts. The degradation of education into vocational training for the corporate state, the ending of state subsidies for the arts and journalism, the hijacking of these disciplines by corporate sponsors, severs the population from understanding, self-actualization and transcendence. In aesthetic terms the corporate state seeks to crush beauty, truth and imagination. This is a war waged by all totalitarian systems.
Culture, real culture, is radical and transformative. It is capable of expressing what lies deep within us. It gives words to our reality. It makes us feel as well as see. It allows us to empathize with those who are different or oppressed. It reveals what is happening around us. It honors mystery. “The role of the artist, then, precisely, is to illuminate that darkness, blaze roads through the vast forest,” James Baldwin wrote, “so that we will not, in all our doing, lose sight of its purpose, which is, after all, to make the world a more human dwelling place.”
Artists, like rebels, are dangerous. They speak a truth that totalitarian systems do not want spoken. “Red Rosa now has vanished too. …” Bertolt Brecht wrote after Luxemburg was murdered. “She told the poor what life is about, And so the rich have rubbed her out.” Without artists such as musician Ry Cooder and playwrights Howard Brenton and Tarell Alvin McCraney we will not succeed. If we are to face what lies ahead, we will not only have to organize and feed ourselves, we will have to begin to feel deeply, to face unpleasant truths, to recover empathy and to live passionately. Then we can fight.
The Sparks of Rebellion
I am reading and rereading the debates among some of the great radical thinkers of the 19th and 20th centuries about the mechanisms of social change. These debates were not academic. They were frantic searches for the triggers of revolt.
Vladimir Lenin placed his faith in a violent uprising, a professional, disciplined revolutionary vanguard freed from moral constraints and, like Karl Marx, in the inevitable emergence of the worker’s state. Pierre-Joseph Proudhon insisted that gradual change would be accomplished as enlightened workers took over production and educated and converted the rest of the proletariat. Mikhail Bakunin predicted the catastrophic breakdown of the capitalist order, something we are likely to witness in our lifetimes, and new autonomous worker federations rising up out of the chaos. Pyotr Kropotkin, like Proudhon, believed in an evolutionary process that would hammer out the new society. Emma Goldman, along with Kropotkin, came to be very wary of both the efficacy of violence and the revolutionary potential of the masses. “The mass,” Goldman wrote bitterly toward the end of her life in echoing Marx, “clings to its masters, loves the whip, and is the first to cry Crucify!”
The revolutionists of history counted on a mobilized base of enlightened industrial workers. The building blocks of revolt, they believed, relied on the tool of the general strike, the ability of workers to cripple the mechanisms of production. Strikes could be sustained with the support of political parties, strike funds and union halls. Workers without these support mechanisms had to replicate the infrastructure of parties and unions if they wanted to put prolonged pressure on the bosses and the state. But now, with the decimation of the U.S. manufacturing base, along with the dismantling of our unions and opposition parties, we will have to search for different instruments of rebellion.
We must develop a revolutionary theory that is not reliant on the industrial or agrarian muscle of workers. Most manufacturing jobs have disappeared, and, of those that remain, few are unionized. Our family farms have been destroyed by agro-businesses. Monsanto and its Faustian counterparts on Wall Street rule. They are steadily poisoning our lives and rendering us powerless. The corporate leviathan, which is global, is freed from the constraints of a single nation-state or government. Corporations are beyond regulation or control. Politicians are too anemic, or more often too corrupt, to stand in the way of the accelerating corporate destruction. This makes our struggle different from revolutionary struggles in industrial societies in the past. Our revolt will look more like what erupted in the less industrialized Slavic republics, Russia, Spain and China and uprisings led by a disenfranchised rural and urban working class and peasantry in the liberation movements that swept through Africa and Latin America. The dispossessed working poor, along with unemployed college graduates and students, unemployed journalists, artists, lawyers and teachers, will form our movement. This is why the fight for a higher minimum wage is crucial to uniting service workers with the alienated college-educated sons and daughters of the old middle class. Bakunin, unlike Marx, considered déclassé intellectuals essential for successful revolt.
It is not the poor who make revolutions. It is those who conclude that they will not be able, as they once expected, to rise economically and socially. This consciousness is part of the self-knowledge of service workers and fast food workers. It is grasped by the swelling population of college graduates caught in a vise of low-paying jobs and obscene amounts of debt. These two groups, once united, will be our primary engines of revolt. Much of the urban poor has been crippled and in many cases broken by a rewriting of laws, especially drug laws, that has permitted courts, probation officers, parole boards and police to randomly seize poor people of color, especially African-American men, without just cause and lock them in cages for years. In many of our most impoverished urban centers—our internal colonies, as Malcolm X called them—mobilization, at least at first, will be difficult. The urban poor are already in chains. These chains are being readied for the rest of us. “The law, in its majestic equality, forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, beg in the streets or steal bread,” Anatole France commented acidly.
Erica Chenoweth and Maria J. Stephan examined 100 years of violent and nonviolent resistance movements in their book “Why Civil Resistance Works.” They concluded that nonviolent movements succeed twice as often as violent uprisings. Violent movements work primarily in civil wars or in ending foreign occupations, they found. Nonviolent movements that succeed appeal to those within the power structure, especially the police and civil servants, who are cognizant of the corruption and decadence of the power elite and are willing to abandon them.
“History teaches that we have the power to transform the nation,” Kevin Zeese said when I interviewed him. Zeese, who with Dr. Margaret Flowers founded PopularResistance.org and helped plan the occupation of Freedom Plaza in Washington, D.C., continued: “We put forward a strategic framework that would allow people to work together in a common direction to end the rule of money. We need to be a nationally networked movement of many local, regional and issue-focused groups so we can unite into one mass movement. Research shows that nonviolent mass movements win. Fringe movements fail. By ‘mass’ we mean with an objective that is supported by a large majority and 1 percent to 5 percent of the population actively working for transformation.”
Zeese said this mass resistance must work on two tracks. It must attempt to stop the machine while at the same time building alternative structures of economic democracy and participatory democratic institutions. It is vital, he said, to sever ourselves from the corporate economy. Money, he said, has to be raised for grass-roots movements since most foundations that give grants are linked to the Democratic Party. Radical student and environmental groups especially need funds to build national networks, as does the public banking initiative. This initiative is essential to the movement. It will never find support among legislative bodies, for public banks would free people from the tyranny of commercial banks and Wall Street.
The most important dilemma facing us is not ideological. It is logistical. The security and surveillance state has made its highest priority the breaking of any infrastructure that might spark widespread revolt. The state knows the tinder is there. It knows that the continued unraveling of the economy and the effects of climate change make popular unrest inevitable. It knows that as underemployment and unemployment doom at least a quarter of the U.S. population, perhaps more, to perpetual poverty, and as unemployment benefits are scaled back, as schools close, as the middle class withers away, as pension funds are looted by hedge fund thieves, and as the government continues to let the fossil fuel industry ravage the planet, the future will increasingly be one of open conflict. This battle against the corporate state, right now, is primarily about infrastructure. We need an infrastructure to build revolt. The corporate state is determined to deny us one.
The corporate state, unnerved by the Occupy movement, has moved to close any public space to movements that might reignite encampments. For example, New York City police arrested members of Veterans for Peace on Oct. 7, 2012, when they stayed beyond the 10 p.m. official closing time at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. The police, who in some cases apologized to the veterans as they handcuffed them, were open about the motive of authorities: Officers told those being taken to jail they should blame the Occupy movement for the arrests.
The state has, at the same time, heavily infiltrated movements in order to discredit, isolate and push out their most competent leaders. It has used its vast surveillance capacities to monitor all forms of electronic communications, as well as personal relationships between activists, giving the state the ability to paralyze planned actions before they can begin. It has mounted a public relations campaign to demonize anyone who resists, branding environmental activists as “ecoterrorists,” charging activists under draconian terrorism laws, hunting down whistle-blowers such as Chelsea Manning, Julian Assange and Edward Snowden who shine a light on the inner secrets of power and condemning them as traitors and threats to national security. The state has attempted—and in this effort some in the Black Bloc proved unwittingly useful—to paint the movement as violent and directionless.
Occupy articulated the concerns of the majority of citizens. Most of the citizenry detests Wall Street and big banks. It does not want more wars. It needs jobs. It is disgusted with the subservience of elected officials to corporate power. It wants universal health care. It worries that if the fossil fuel industry is not stopped, there will be no future for our children. And the state is using all its power to stymie any movement that expresses these concerns. Documents released under the Freedom of Information Act show Homeland Security, the FBI, the Federal Protective Service, the Park Service and most likely the NSA and the CIA (the latter two have refused to respond to FOIA requests) worked with police across the country to infiltrate and destroy the encampments. There were 7,765 arrests of people in the movement. Occupy, at its peak, had about 350,000 people—or about 0.1 percent of the U.S. population.
“Look how afraid the power structure was of a mere 1/10th of 1 percent of the population,” Zeese said. “What happens when the movement grows to 1 percent—not a far reach—or the 5 percent that some research shows is the tipping point where no government, dictatorship or democracy can withstand the pressure from below?”
The state cannot allow workers at Wal-Mart, or any other nonunionized service center, to have access to an infrastructure or resources that might permit prolonged strikes and boycotts. And the movement now is about nuts and bolts. It is about food trucks, medical tents, communications vans and musicians and artists willing to articulate and sustain the struggle. We will have to build what unions and radical parties supplied in the past.
The state, in its internal projections, has a vision of the future that is as dystopian as mine. But the state, to protect itself, lies. Politicians, corporations, the public relations industry, the entertainment industry and our ridiculous television pundits speak as if we can continue to build a society based on limitless growth, profligate consumption and fossil fuel. They feed the collective mania for hope at the expense of truth. Their public vision is self-delusional, a form of collective psychosis. The corporate state, meanwhile, is preparing privately for the world it knows is actually coming. It is cementing into place a police state, one that includes the complete evisceration of our most basic civil liberties and the militarization of the internal security apparatus, as well as wholesale surveillance of the citizenry.
The most pressing issue facing us right now is the most prosaic. Protesters attempting to block the Keystone XL pipeline can endure only for so long if they have nothing to eat but stale bagels. They need adequate food. They need a system of communication to get their message out to alternative media that will amplify it. They need rudimentary medical care. All of these elements were vital to the Occupy movement. And these elements, when they came together, allowed the building of a movement that threatened the elite. The encampments also carried within them internal sources of disintegration. Many did not adequately control some groups. Many were hijacked or burdened by those who drained the political work of the movement. Many found that consensus, which worked well in small groups, created paralysis in groups of several hundred or a few thousand. And many failed to anticipate the numbing exhaustion that crushed activists. But these encampments did provide what was most crucial to the movement, something unions or the old Communist Party once provided to militants in the past. They provided the logistics to sustain resistance. And the destruction of the encampments, more than anything else, was a move by the state to deny to us the infrastructure needed to resist.
Infrastructure alone, however, will not be enough. The resistance needs a vibrant cultural component. It was the spirituals that nourished the souls of African-Americans during the nightmare of slavery. It was the blues that spoke to the reality of black people during the era of Jim Crow. It was the poems of Federico Garcia Lorca that sustained the republicans fighting the fascists in Spain. Music, dance, drama, art, song, painting were the fire and drive of resistance movements. The rebel units in El Salvador when I covered the war there always traveled with musicians and theater troupes. Art, as Emma Goldman pointed out, has the power to make ideas felt. Goldman noted that when Andrew Undershaft, a character in George Bernard Shaw’s play “Major Barbara,” said poverty is “[t]he worst of crimes” and “All the other crimes are virtues beside it,” his impassioned declaration elucidated the cruelty of class warfare more effectively than Shaw’s socialist tracts. The degradation of education into vocational training for the corporate state, the ending of state subsidies for the arts and journalism, the hijacking of these disciplines by corporate sponsors, severs the population from understanding, self-actualization and transcendence. In aesthetic terms the corporate state seeks to crush beauty, truth and imagination. This is a war waged by all totalitarian systems.
Culture, real culture, is radical and transformative. It is capable of expressing what lies deep within us. It gives words to our reality. It makes us feel as well as see. It allows us to empathize with those who are different or oppressed. It reveals what is happening around us. It honors mystery. “The role of the artist, then, precisely, is to illuminate that darkness, blaze roads through the vast forest,” James Baldwin wrote, “so that we will not, in all our doing, lose sight of its purpose, which is, after all, to make the world a more human dwelling place.”
Artists, like rebels, are dangerous. They speak a truth that totalitarian systems do not want spoken. “Red Rosa now has vanished too. …” Bertolt Brecht wrote after Luxemburg was murdered. “She told the poor what life is about, And so the rich have rubbed her out.” Without artists such as musician Ry Cooder and playwrights Howard Brenton and Tarell Alvin McCraney we will not succeed. If we are to face what lies ahead, we will not only have to organize and feed ourselves, we will have to begin to feel deeply, to face unpleasant truths, to recover empathy and to live passionately. Then we can fight.
SC119-12
http://kulturcritic.wordpress.com/posts/through-a-glass-darkly-1-corinthians-1312/
Through A Glass Darkly: 1 Corinthians 13:12
While the mayor of Mecca is bent on destroying the city’s cultural and material legacy, building the infrastructure for a city of the future, the residents of Senegal are fighting one another in the streets for potable water. In the meantime the folks in the Bay of Bengal are cleaning up what’s left after Tropical Cyclone Phailin, whose speeds were as fast as a Formula One race car, just as our friends in the US Midwest are still digging out from their early October surprise, while Canada is making plans to bury its nuclear wastes at the bottom of Lake Huron. Meanwhile, the universities in Greece are getting ready to close their doors, just as Obama and the brat pack are considering more ways to fuck-over the American people. Seems like the only safe haven is here in Siberia!
I no longer know what’s real and what’s propaganda. Of course, we now know that in America the ways and means of totalitarian control (C. Hedges) are through distraction and propaganda, i.e., marketing. Not that the world isn’t cooperating in this effort; it is! I mean even Mother Nature is getting in on the action. But the real tools of manipulation and control are spectacles, carried out by our media, our pundits, and our pitchmen – viz., politicians. And oh! How effective it is! Our imperious bosses have mastered the art of deception and sleight of hand, the art of the deal, the art of systematic distraction. You cannot boot-up your computer, open your smart phone, click on the car radio, or turn on the 72” flat-screen at home, without hearing and seeing the ongoing saga, the melodramatic displays that bind us to the narrative, and blind us to what is really happening out there or even in here. Even a typhoon, a cyclone, a Syrian revolution, a debt crisis, and an Iranian olive branch, all are presented as high melodrama, the events themselves shaped by the media stories about them. Never are we allowed to see the man behind the curtain, never to understand what is really transpiring in the world around us… We never are given to understand the roots of such crises or events; we simply look out onto the screens of our life, as through a glass darkly. We are amused and bemused, entertained and detained by the passing menagerie, like the floats in a Macy’s Day parade.
We view life as a series of scenes, screenplays, just like our reality TV shows have taught us, not as lived events; everything is an extension of the dramatic art; life imitates… life! It is all spectacle. If the cameras are rolling, then its show time as usual. Our attention and our concern, reduced to somnambulistic watching of the chaos, as remotely as alien observers, assuming that we play no part, no role in this drama, and that our actions and lifestyles have done nothing to engender or foment these events, that the world turns as we passively and perversely look on like voyeurs. We sleep walk through our daily lives, as the masters of the universe continue to prepare the movie sets, people the anchor desks, relocate the journalists, prepare the cameras, the ready the makeup artists, and rearrange the deck chairs. Lights! Camera! Action!
Like Dorothy, some of us are curious and really want to find our way back home; but the men pulling the levers are doing their damnedest to keep us in the dark, to deny and obfuscate what is increasingly obvious, so again, we only see, as through a glass darkly. The terms of the agreement have been laid out in detail. We will poorly train you (for money), barely feed and house you (for your labor), entertain you (for your obedience), and protect you (with the blood of your sons and daughters). But whatever you do… DON’T question our authority, our judgment, or our motives… for we know better. Thus Spake the hegemony; thus speak our politicians and their corporate sponsors. And so the distraction machine ratchets up… FOX, CNN, CNBC, NPR, HuffPost, Al Jazeera, your local news network affiliates, their gazettes, journals and radio stations, Madison Avenue, Wall Street, Hollywood, Silicon Valley, and Bentonville Arkansas! The control and brain washing is, literally, MIND NUMBING!!!
It’s all about consumer choice they tell us… give the folks what they want; better yet, tell them what they want… pinker salmon, redder tomatoes, bigger tits, faster cars, more security… ok, we’ve got it. Just leave everything to us, and sit down and shut up. And the new Russians are lining up just like us, just like we did, their old enemy back West; and they love the spectacle, especially prancing around in all their new finery.
“Welcome back my friends, to the show that never ends… We’re so glad you could attend, come inside, come inside. There behind the glass lies a real blade of grass.” (ELP)… It is the one and only global Curriculum of the West. But end it must, and certainly it will. Watch for it soon… on your local evening newscast, delivered by your very friendly and sexy anchorwoman. See you there, through the glass. Darkly!
Through A Glass Darkly: 1 Corinthians 13:12
While the mayor of Mecca is bent on destroying the city’s cultural and material legacy, building the infrastructure for a city of the future, the residents of Senegal are fighting one another in the streets for potable water. In the meantime the folks in the Bay of Bengal are cleaning up what’s left after Tropical Cyclone Phailin, whose speeds were as fast as a Formula One race car, just as our friends in the US Midwest are still digging out from their early October surprise, while Canada is making plans to bury its nuclear wastes at the bottom of Lake Huron. Meanwhile, the universities in Greece are getting ready to close their doors, just as Obama and the brat pack are considering more ways to fuck-over the American people. Seems like the only safe haven is here in Siberia!
I no longer know what’s real and what’s propaganda. Of course, we now know that in America the ways and means of totalitarian control (C. Hedges) are through distraction and propaganda, i.e., marketing. Not that the world isn’t cooperating in this effort; it is! I mean even Mother Nature is getting in on the action. But the real tools of manipulation and control are spectacles, carried out by our media, our pundits, and our pitchmen – viz., politicians. And oh! How effective it is! Our imperious bosses have mastered the art of deception and sleight of hand, the art of the deal, the art of systematic distraction. You cannot boot-up your computer, open your smart phone, click on the car radio, or turn on the 72” flat-screen at home, without hearing and seeing the ongoing saga, the melodramatic displays that bind us to the narrative, and blind us to what is really happening out there or even in here. Even a typhoon, a cyclone, a Syrian revolution, a debt crisis, and an Iranian olive branch, all are presented as high melodrama, the events themselves shaped by the media stories about them. Never are we allowed to see the man behind the curtain, never to understand what is really transpiring in the world around us… We never are given to understand the roots of such crises or events; we simply look out onto the screens of our life, as through a glass darkly. We are amused and bemused, entertained and detained by the passing menagerie, like the floats in a Macy’s Day parade.
We view life as a series of scenes, screenplays, just like our reality TV shows have taught us, not as lived events; everything is an extension of the dramatic art; life imitates… life! It is all spectacle. If the cameras are rolling, then its show time as usual. Our attention and our concern, reduced to somnambulistic watching of the chaos, as remotely as alien observers, assuming that we play no part, no role in this drama, and that our actions and lifestyles have done nothing to engender or foment these events, that the world turns as we passively and perversely look on like voyeurs. We sleep walk through our daily lives, as the masters of the universe continue to prepare the movie sets, people the anchor desks, relocate the journalists, prepare the cameras, the ready the makeup artists, and rearrange the deck chairs. Lights! Camera! Action!
Like Dorothy, some of us are curious and really want to find our way back home; but the men pulling the levers are doing their damnedest to keep us in the dark, to deny and obfuscate what is increasingly obvious, so again, we only see, as through a glass darkly. The terms of the agreement have been laid out in detail. We will poorly train you (for money), barely feed and house you (for your labor), entertain you (for your obedience), and protect you (with the blood of your sons and daughters). But whatever you do… DON’T question our authority, our judgment, or our motives… for we know better. Thus Spake the hegemony; thus speak our politicians and their corporate sponsors. And so the distraction machine ratchets up… FOX, CNN, CNBC, NPR, HuffPost, Al Jazeera, your local news network affiliates, their gazettes, journals and radio stations, Madison Avenue, Wall Street, Hollywood, Silicon Valley, and Bentonville Arkansas! The control and brain washing is, literally, MIND NUMBING!!!
It’s all about consumer choice they tell us… give the folks what they want; better yet, tell them what they want… pinker salmon, redder tomatoes, bigger tits, faster cars, more security… ok, we’ve got it. Just leave everything to us, and sit down and shut up. And the new Russians are lining up just like us, just like we did, their old enemy back West; and they love the spectacle, especially prancing around in all their new finery.
“Welcome back my friends, to the show that never ends… We’re so glad you could attend, come inside, come inside. There behind the glass lies a real blade of grass.” (ELP)… It is the one and only global Curriculum of the West. But end it must, and certainly it will. Watch for it soon… on your local evening newscast, delivered by your very friendly and sexy anchorwoman. See you there, through the glass. Darkly!
Monday, October 14, 2013
SC119-11
http://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/creepily-close/
Creepily Close
Things that can’t go on, the prophet Herb Stein once observed, go on until they can’t. Criticality eventually bushwhacks credulity. The aggregation of rackets that American life has become is rolling over like a great groaning wounded leviathan and the rest of the world is starting to freak out at the spectacle. Instead of a revolution, we’re having a suicide party.
But don’t worry, a revolution would not be far behind. My guess is that it would kick off as generational rather than regional or factional, but it would eventually incorporate all three. A generation already swindled by the college loan racket must be chafing at the bureaucratic nightmare that ObamaCare instantly turned into at its roll-out, with a website that wouldn’t let anyone log in. Isn’t technology wonderful? I wonder when the “magic moment” will come when all those unemployed millennials join a Twitter injunction to just stop paying back their loans. If that particular message went out during this month’s government food fight, it would do more than just get the attention of a few politicians. It would crash the banks and snap the links in every chain of obligation holding the fiasco of globalism together.
So far, the millennials have shown about as much political inclination as so many sowbugs under a rotten log, but it is in the nature of criticality that things change real fast. In any case, the older generations have completely disgraced themselves and it is only a question of how cruelly history will treat them in their unseating. The last time things got this bad, the guys in charge divided into two teams with blue and gray uniforms, rode gallantly onto the first fields of battle thinking it was a kind of rousing military theatrical, only to find themselves in a grinding four-year industrial-scale slaughter in which it was not uncommon for 20,000 young men to get shot to pieces in a single day — one day after another.
Of course, things are a bit different now since we became a nation of overfed clowns dedicated to getting something for nothing, but despite the abject futility of American life in its current incarnation, there is room for plenty of violence and destruction. The sad and peculiar angle of the current struggle is that both sides in government wish heartily to keep all the rackets of daily life going — they just disagree on the distribution method of the vig.
What amuses me at the moment is the behavior of the various financial markets and the cockamamie stories circulating to explain what they are doing in this time of perilous uncertainty. One popular story is called “the energy renaissance.” This is a fairy-tale that pretends that we have enough oil at a cheap enough price to keep driving to WalMart forever. Of course, shale oil wells that cost $12million to drill and produce 80 barrels-a-day for three years before crapping out altogether do not bode well for that outcome, but the wish to believe over-rides the reality. Another laughable story du jour is “the manufacturing renaissance.” This story proposes that the “central corridor” of the USA, from North Dakota to Texas, is about to give China a run for its money in manufacturing. The catch is that any new factory opening up in this scenario will be run on robots — leaving who, exactly, to be the customers paying for what these factories produce? Think about it for five minutes and you will understand that it is just a story calculated to goose up a share price here and there, and only for moment until it is discovered to be just a story. What interests me most is what happens when the stories lose their power to levitate the legitimacy of the people who tell them.
Well, Christine LeGarde, chief of the IMF, tried to read the riot act to the American clownigarchs over the weekend, but they’re not paying attention to her. What has she done for her own country, France, lately anyhow. They’ve got their own set of rackets running over there. The Chinese are getting a little prickly, too, since they are sitting on a few trillion in US promises to pay cash money in the not so distant future. The Chinese are beginning to apprehend that future perhaps never arriving.
In case you haven’t heard: America is “in recovery.” We can play all the games we want with money, or what passes for money these days. And then the moment will come when we can’t. That moment begins to feel creepily close.
Creepily Close
Things that can’t go on, the prophet Herb Stein once observed, go on until they can’t. Criticality eventually bushwhacks credulity. The aggregation of rackets that American life has become is rolling over like a great groaning wounded leviathan and the rest of the world is starting to freak out at the spectacle. Instead of a revolution, we’re having a suicide party.
But don’t worry, a revolution would not be far behind. My guess is that it would kick off as generational rather than regional or factional, but it would eventually incorporate all three. A generation already swindled by the college loan racket must be chafing at the bureaucratic nightmare that ObamaCare instantly turned into at its roll-out, with a website that wouldn’t let anyone log in. Isn’t technology wonderful? I wonder when the “magic moment” will come when all those unemployed millennials join a Twitter injunction to just stop paying back their loans. If that particular message went out during this month’s government food fight, it would do more than just get the attention of a few politicians. It would crash the banks and snap the links in every chain of obligation holding the fiasco of globalism together.
So far, the millennials have shown about as much political inclination as so many sowbugs under a rotten log, but it is in the nature of criticality that things change real fast. In any case, the older generations have completely disgraced themselves and it is only a question of how cruelly history will treat them in their unseating. The last time things got this bad, the guys in charge divided into two teams with blue and gray uniforms, rode gallantly onto the first fields of battle thinking it was a kind of rousing military theatrical, only to find themselves in a grinding four-year industrial-scale slaughter in which it was not uncommon for 20,000 young men to get shot to pieces in a single day — one day after another.
Of course, things are a bit different now since we became a nation of overfed clowns dedicated to getting something for nothing, but despite the abject futility of American life in its current incarnation, there is room for plenty of violence and destruction. The sad and peculiar angle of the current struggle is that both sides in government wish heartily to keep all the rackets of daily life going — they just disagree on the distribution method of the vig.
What amuses me at the moment is the behavior of the various financial markets and the cockamamie stories circulating to explain what they are doing in this time of perilous uncertainty. One popular story is called “the energy renaissance.” This is a fairy-tale that pretends that we have enough oil at a cheap enough price to keep driving to WalMart forever. Of course, shale oil wells that cost $12million to drill and produce 80 barrels-a-day for three years before crapping out altogether do not bode well for that outcome, but the wish to believe over-rides the reality. Another laughable story du jour is “the manufacturing renaissance.” This story proposes that the “central corridor” of the USA, from North Dakota to Texas, is about to give China a run for its money in manufacturing. The catch is that any new factory opening up in this scenario will be run on robots — leaving who, exactly, to be the customers paying for what these factories produce? Think about it for five minutes and you will understand that it is just a story calculated to goose up a share price here and there, and only for moment until it is discovered to be just a story. What interests me most is what happens when the stories lose their power to levitate the legitimacy of the people who tell them.
Well, Christine LeGarde, chief of the IMF, tried to read the riot act to the American clownigarchs over the weekend, but they’re not paying attention to her. What has she done for her own country, France, lately anyhow. They’ve got their own set of rackets running over there. The Chinese are getting a little prickly, too, since they are sitting on a few trillion in US promises to pay cash money in the not so distant future. The Chinese are beginning to apprehend that future perhaps never arriving.
In case you haven’t heard: America is “in recovery.” We can play all the games we want with money, or what passes for money these days. And then the moment will come when we can’t. That moment begins to feel creepily close.
Thursday, October 3, 2013
SC119-10
http://kulturcritic.wordpress.com/posts/a-state-of-exception-a-state-of-grace-a-state-of-denial/
A State of Exception . A State of Grace . A State of Denial
How are we to make sense of this ongoing war of words? How do we understand the cocky swagger, the egoism of this continuing and unabated national self-importance of American Exceptionalism? The bobbing-head-doll leading this parade — our charade of international self aggrandizement — continues to demonstrate why such an attitude is so very dangerous — for our own health and the health of the planet. To take oneself so seriously as to thoughtlessly LORD it over the rest of the globe is dangerous in any hands and in any framework. True, we may be exceptional at misreading how the rest of the world perceives us. And we are exceptionally ignorant of the terror we unleashed on the original inhabitants of the Americas, as well as the torture we inflicted on those tribal peoples from Africa we abused in order to create human-livestock to perform our unskilled labors. We are exceptional in our ignorance of the world we inhabit, from the subtleties of cultural and linguistic variation to the gross identification of geographies.
We believe, in keeping with the Abrahamic tradition grounding this nation, that we are a chosen people; chosen to lead the rest of humanity into some promised land. Of course, for decades that self-delusion was kept in check somewhat by our alter ego, the Soviet regime, which also thought itself exceptional in some critical respects. After all, they too wanted to convert the world to their specific view of human relations, marginally less hierarchical than our own, and perhaps more assertively aggressive, but no more authoritarian in its intention.
We need to give up this delusion of exceptionalism, just as surely as we need to give up the illusion that we are a democracy. We are neither exceptional or democratic in any meaningful sense of those terms. And while our leaders continue to feed us on the fairytale about living in some state of grace — that no matter what we do it must be right, righteous and good because of who we are — the facts before us tell a different tale altogether. But we cannot give up this fairytale, just as we cannot give up the myth of democracy or human progress, which we have been chosen to lead. At least, those running the show and reading the polls will work overtime to insure that we never give up such illusions. They have too much to lose. At the very least, they need us to watch television and buy whatever it is they are selling now.
They have honed and refined the tools to keep us in check and enslaved to their fairytale. Not only with the strong diversionary tactics provided by the propaganda of consumer economics, but, now with the enriched tools of the security state covertly built on the foundation of new ‘terrorist’ propaganda, one perhaps created in large measure by their own prior machinations, in order to justify the build up under the guise of safeguarding our exceptional lifestyle.
Yet, who is the target here, and who, the protected? It is becoming increasingly clear that we are as much a target as are the ‘others.’ The revelations of Manning, Assange, and Snowden are just a few who give body and voice to that intuition. We, The People, can not even step back far enough or long enough to see, let alone admit, that this lifestyle they are seeking to maintain is itself unsustainable — fleeting, destructive, and ultimately unfulfilling because the fulfillment of one desire leads to more, ad infinitum, until all efforts and all resources are focused on and dedicated to achieving one goal, maintaining the system itself.
And they will do ‘whatever it takes’ to achieve that goal, whether it requires decimating all who refuse to accept their terms, depleting all available resources, or even reducing human existence to a virtual life lived in underground cities on another planet. And when a small cadre of compatriots tries to question them (like with the OWS movement), it must be snuffed out before it gains traction. If a regime needs to be changed to gain better access to vital resources, so be it. Finally, they will keep exploiting the sciences and technologies of control and manipulation in order to maintain the upper-hand on all social, political, and natural forces. At least they will try. It is a perverse manifestation of the ‘will to power’ unique to a State (a people) that believes it is unfettered, no longer bound by the intersticies and the intertwinings to which all natures must adhere, human and nonhuman alike. It is a community living in denial of itself (its connectedness) by believing it lives in a state of grace, and therefore elevates itself above those who live daily in fear and trembling. It is the mistaken self conception of a would-be Superman.
A State of Exception . A State of Grace . A State of Denial
How are we to make sense of this ongoing war of words? How do we understand the cocky swagger, the egoism of this continuing and unabated national self-importance of American Exceptionalism? The bobbing-head-doll leading this parade — our charade of international self aggrandizement — continues to demonstrate why such an attitude is so very dangerous — for our own health and the health of the planet. To take oneself so seriously as to thoughtlessly LORD it over the rest of the globe is dangerous in any hands and in any framework. True, we may be exceptional at misreading how the rest of the world perceives us. And we are exceptionally ignorant of the terror we unleashed on the original inhabitants of the Americas, as well as the torture we inflicted on those tribal peoples from Africa we abused in order to create human-livestock to perform our unskilled labors. We are exceptional in our ignorance of the world we inhabit, from the subtleties of cultural and linguistic variation to the gross identification of geographies.
We believe, in keeping with the Abrahamic tradition grounding this nation, that we are a chosen people; chosen to lead the rest of humanity into some promised land. Of course, for decades that self-delusion was kept in check somewhat by our alter ego, the Soviet regime, which also thought itself exceptional in some critical respects. After all, they too wanted to convert the world to their specific view of human relations, marginally less hierarchical than our own, and perhaps more assertively aggressive, but no more authoritarian in its intention.
We need to give up this delusion of exceptionalism, just as surely as we need to give up the illusion that we are a democracy. We are neither exceptional or democratic in any meaningful sense of those terms. And while our leaders continue to feed us on the fairytale about living in some state of grace — that no matter what we do it must be right, righteous and good because of who we are — the facts before us tell a different tale altogether. But we cannot give up this fairytale, just as we cannot give up the myth of democracy or human progress, which we have been chosen to lead. At least, those running the show and reading the polls will work overtime to insure that we never give up such illusions. They have too much to lose. At the very least, they need us to watch television and buy whatever it is they are selling now.
They have honed and refined the tools to keep us in check and enslaved to their fairytale. Not only with the strong diversionary tactics provided by the propaganda of consumer economics, but, now with the enriched tools of the security state covertly built on the foundation of new ‘terrorist’ propaganda, one perhaps created in large measure by their own prior machinations, in order to justify the build up under the guise of safeguarding our exceptional lifestyle.
Yet, who is the target here, and who, the protected? It is becoming increasingly clear that we are as much a target as are the ‘others.’ The revelations of Manning, Assange, and Snowden are just a few who give body and voice to that intuition. We, The People, can not even step back far enough or long enough to see, let alone admit, that this lifestyle they are seeking to maintain is itself unsustainable — fleeting, destructive, and ultimately unfulfilling because the fulfillment of one desire leads to more, ad infinitum, until all efforts and all resources are focused on and dedicated to achieving one goal, maintaining the system itself.
And they will do ‘whatever it takes’ to achieve that goal, whether it requires decimating all who refuse to accept their terms, depleting all available resources, or even reducing human existence to a virtual life lived in underground cities on another planet. And when a small cadre of compatriots tries to question them (like with the OWS movement), it must be snuffed out before it gains traction. If a regime needs to be changed to gain better access to vital resources, so be it. Finally, they will keep exploiting the sciences and technologies of control and manipulation in order to maintain the upper-hand on all social, political, and natural forces. At least they will try. It is a perverse manifestation of the ‘will to power’ unique to a State (a people) that believes it is unfettered, no longer bound by the intersticies and the intertwinings to which all natures must adhere, human and nonhuman alike. It is a community living in denial of itself (its connectedness) by believing it lives in a state of grace, and therefore elevates itself above those who live daily in fear and trembling. It is the mistaken self conception of a would-be Superman.
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