"Fuck Bernie": [GOP] Death Throes and the Middle of the Road

The low hanging fruit that is the wit and wisdom of Chris Matthews, the corpus of which is solemn moaning  “Tip O’Neil” while waving hands on the corrupted skull of St. Reagan of the Ranch, invoking Daniel Patrick Moynihan or “Puddy-Catting” at top volume over anyone in the room, or anyone watching the room via the ever creeping irrelevance of MSNBC and the clattering death rattle of its “liberal” bonafides .

Truth is, MSNBC was never liberal; it only appeared liberal when compared to FAUX News, and only really during the Bush years did it climb out of Lake Ersatz, and by it, I mean Keith Olbermann tainting the rest of Scarborough country with something appearing to be centrist.

And let’s be clear on the what “centrism” is; in the wake of St. Reagan, Bush, Clinton, Bush pulling the country right, the center is mediated as Linc Chafee—Liberal Republican —which makes sense, since the media is a commercial enterprise.    A positive, Up With People type front,  Don Draper’s AmWay utopia of peace, love and carbonated beverages.

About a month ago, Tweety  absurdly suggested that Hillary Clinton, the anointed one who’s coronation was eight years delayed by the Kenyan Muslim usurper Barack Obama, who made her Secretary of State (where she performed admirably while pulling some completely avoidable Clintonian bullshit that is currently haunting her candidacy.  It’s always something with the Clintons) select John Kasich as her running mate.  As asinine as this suggestion is, it speaks to the kind of bi-partisan, centrist (right wing) bullshit that had sent media hearts aflutter for a proposed McCain-Lieberman ticket.  True to his craven heart, McCain backed off of that idea with disastrous consequences for his candidacy in the short term,  his party in the long term, and for everybody but Yukon Barbie and the rest of her clan, who were only in it for the money anyway.

When a Sunday Morning fits the paradigm of a hangover song of regret, or more pertinently, you find a can of reliably GOP beer your best friend in lieu of the ringing church bells of Christ’s promotion to glory, a few things become clear while you listen to John Coltrane—and aside from the Velvet Underground sounding better than ever— you begin to ascertain certain paranoid, ignoble truths, if you will, about reality of two party system as it is constituted now; more specifically, Team Blue:

The first second ignoble truth:  the party establishment seem hellbent on reminding you of the first ignoble truth until you sit down, shut the fuck up, and love Hillary Clinton.  

The second ignoble truth is the sneaking suspicion that your politics, which you had understood as All-American, communitarian, New Deal-y, are ostensibly, radically, and irreconcilably at odds with the will of the Democratic Party establishment.   

The third ignoble truth:  corporate media demands dramatic narrative, and will force a narrative superstructure to gin up ratings.  Both parties will reliably, but idiosyncratically, oblige, either with a Coke commercial or Folger's Commerical (or the Rubio cover).

The fourth ignoble truth: to quote Mario Savio, sorta, "freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose".  Or something like that.

The triangulating Clinton machine has long waited for its perfect moment, the culmination of a lifetime of scheming, deal making, prevari—and—equivi-cation, pandering and a nearly constant fog of unforced, almost pathological errors, the appearance of inpropriety and general bullshit that exhausts.  Even recalling the Clinton years makes me exhausted, as does a nostalgia for the 90's, which aside from three years at the beginning of the decade, which may have just been an extension of the late eighties, the nineties are more Sugar Ray and Smash Mouth than Nirvana:  "Hey now, you're a fly now, we party with tattoos now. Drink Coke."

Yet, as I have previously written, the other party is in a pitched battle for its very soul, between the, craven,  rugged cross platitudes of Glenn Quagmire flesh avatar Ted Cruz promise of a New America that looks and feels like town from Footloose, and Donald Trumps (not so) crypto-Fascist view of government as business, Trump branded border wall and general "blame the _____" nativism. Assuming this act of self-immolation, inevitable since the Southern Strategy courted the racist Dixiecrats and Christianists, reaches its horrifying climax in Cleveland, the Republican Party as a big tent, as we understand it, will be over.

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Hillary Clinton's campaign playlist is revealing , as was the syrupy shit sounds from 2008; its the kind of middle of the road shit calculated to appeal to the kids, as opposed to something that connects with the soul she presumably had at some point, and as politic, and rhetoric, it's custom built hollow optimism, no doubt knicked from an intern's iPhone, or assembled by a PR firm.  Maybe I'm being just being pissy here, but I have a hard time imaging Hillary--or even Chelsea--listening to Katy Perry unless they thought they could get something out of it...

Naw, I'd imagine Hillary to be more Thirtysomething in her taste, perhaps the pensive poetry of Bruce Hornsby, or the reflective middle (of the aged and road) majesty of Mike + The Mechanics as being the newest editions to her collection; if my druthers had any bearing (and not that they would--ever), I would have recommended the dulcet tones of the Climax Blues Band, because I'd bet a Tall Boy she owns this on 45:

"Time was drifting, this rock had got to roll

So, I hit the road and made my getaway

Restless feeling, really got a hold

I started searching for a better way

And I kept on looking for a sign in the middle of the night [road]

But, I couldn't see the light, no, I couldn't see the light

I kept on looking for a way to take me through the night

Couldn't get it right, couldn't get it right..."

Maybe Sugarloaf's "Don't Call Us (We'll Call You).

The New York Primary is in the books, and the saavy, metropolitan, international progressives of the Empire State  Big Apple (and, to be fair, the equally sexy metropoli of Buffalo, Rochester and, et tu? Syracuse?) resoundingly and thunderously spoke:  We Loved the Nineties. 

Let's be clear:  so far, Hillary, though coat tailing riding the no doubt consequential and historic presidency of liberal-ish centrist Barack Obama (who is only a "socialist", if you are the sort of dittoheaded shit for brains that would vote for the Fascist Trump or the Tedocratic Cruz) who is only "liberal" because of how far right the line has been dragged, has proposed little that is different than her failed to-the-right 08 campaign:  more of that "middle of the road" neo-liberal horseshit that fast tracked us into the Reaganomics meltdown and Great Recession.  No Money Down on another Cow Colored Box of Voodoo Economics!

 "Fuck Bernie" is the new "Sit down and shut up, Hippie" Or:  I didn't sell out; I bought in.

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Well, that escalated quickly.   Bring it on...

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A quotation often and questionably attributed to Winston Churchill (whose missing bust has London mayor and The Donald coif biter Boris Johnson in a tizzy) is instructive because Hillary Clinton, like Bill Clinton, is a quintessential political animal of the E Pluribus Unum variety (though certainly more "ME" rather than "We"):  Americans will do the right thing after they have exhausted all other possibilities.  And, if polling is to be trusted Clinton will likely reach an insummountable delegate lead, and be able to victory lap her way to the coronation long denied to her.  And it will be a historic moment--both when she accepts the nomination, and when she wins in November.   I suppose if somebody wants to be the first at something, and is as tireless in the pursuit of that goal, then it is little surprise when they achieve it.  Congratulations.

But over the course of this campaign, I have come to realize something that the Junior Senator from Vermont has been telling us, and will likely remind us again:  it was never about him, because there is no singular hero to ride into town and set things to right, no political messiah to fix this fucking shitmire of graft, grift and the sort of brain laziness usually reserved for the board rooms of General Motors....

It was always about THE IDEA.

The idea that "general welfare" in the Constitution means "ALL OF US",  that we are better when we are ALL better, that the corruption of moneyed interests poisons our society, and that we can do better if we want to.

And the Sander's campaign has shown that.  A New New Deal is possible, if we DEMAND IT.

That's the thing to hold on to, folks;  the disappointment and the butthurt pure ideological proclamations must give way to this realization:  we already won.  This is our party now, and the vestiges of the old order must reconcile themselves to the new reality.  Secretary Clinton will, if she wants to win, have to contend with a new, robust left, who are loud, proud, and unafraid and she, craven as ever, will, ironically, govern left rather than paying lip service. She may not be ideal, but if she form a coalition that will keep the Fascists and the Theocrats out of Executive Power, the vacuum from the GOP's self immolation will create space unimagined since Roosevelt for a truly Left Progressive agenda.

Theology: Bowie, Barthes and Blackstar

Joe Coscarelli wrote in the New York Times four days after Bowie's death:

"Like most children of the 1950s, David Bowie considered Elvis a mythic figure. The pair, who would go on to share a record label, RCA, in the 1970s, also happened to be born on the same day. 'I couldn’t believe it,' Mr. Bowie said.  'He was a major hero of mine. And I was probably stupid enough to believe that having the same birthday as him actually meant something.'

Following Mr. Bowie’s death on Sunday, the search for meaning in his own final works — the album 'Blackstar,' which arrived on Friday, his 69th birthday, and the musical 'Lazarus' — has led back to Elvis. On this week’s New York Times Popcast, the philosopher Simon Critchley, whose book 'Bowie' was released in 2014, points to the rare Elvis song “Black Star,” an alternate version of 'Flaming Star' from the 1960 Western of the same name.

The lyrics speak for themselves:

Every man has a black star/A black star over his shoulder/And when a man sees his black star/He knows his time, his time has come/Black star don’t shine on me, black star/Black star keep behind me, black star/There’s a lot of livin’ I gotta do/Give me time to make a few dreams come true, black star

'It must be a clue,' Mr. Critchley said. 'At the very least, it’s a fitting cosmic coincidence.'"

There is little to say or write about David Bowie that hasn't already been said or written, including this:  I am still processing a world without David Bowie.  I listened to *Blackstar* in its entirety only after Bowie left this world, though the provocative long video "Blackstar", with its Kenneth Anger imagery and eerie jazz--something music very much haunted my psyche:  I was not sure what I had just seen or heard, but I was enthralled.  I couldn't stop thinking about it.  The melody is utterly possessive.

A few days later, I found the above Coscarelli piece, and found myself utterly fascinated, turning the connection over and over again.  A relatively obscure Elvis song about Death chasing a Cowboy, the "Black Star over his shoulder" becomes a reference to the Bhagavad Gita "I am a *Blackstar*" as "I become Death".  But Bowie, who apparently recorded this thinking he had beat the cancer (some have interpreted the title as a reference to Bowie's own cancer lesion), must have been the Cowboy as well, with "a lot of living to do".

I remember reading somewhere that Bowie had written "Golden Years" for Elvis, so there's that.

The other day, while continuing to ponder these things--Bowie, Death, Elvis, Death, Bowie, Elvis, Death--I thought about the unknowable nature of both Bowie and Elvis.  Elvis became unknowable because the man receded, and then succumbed, to the celebrity. What ever Elvis thought or felt authentically, even as we feel connected to him, through is music, is not there for us to access and understand, and likely, had not been there for the man for too many years.  All we have, he had, was E-L-V-I-S.

Bowie seemed to grasp intuitively at first, and later compulsively, the illusory and elusive nature of celebrity and stardom, creating himself as an enigma, leaving fans and writers flummoxed, grasping for something authentic.  Bowie wasn't interested in being "authentic" in any way aside from a compelling, challenging artist.  He once said in an interview that there is no "real" David Bowie.  Certainly, someone as well read as he understood that his authorship was negated through the interpretation of his music by his fans.  Roland Barthes, in his "The Death of the Author", denies the personhood of the Author as a knowable, asserting instead that the idea of the Author is a historical construct.   Bowie knew that who he was is who his fans thought he was, and his various personae were zeitgeist, performance and meaning making on the part of his fans, attempting to grasp a "theological meaning" that simply did not exist.   Bowie, as fan of music, also knew how important the illusion of "knowability" is because music is so profound in changing moods, changing lives, that we need it, and the artists who produce it, to be "real".  Perhaps the teenaged David Jones felt this, as so many did, with Elvis.  To quote Barthes:

To give a text an Author is to impose a limit on that text, to furnish it with a final signified, to close the writing [...] [However] by refusing to assign a 'secret,' an ultimate meaning, to the text (and the world as text), liberates what may be called an anti-theological activity, an activity that is truly revolutionary since to refuse to fix meaning is, in the end, to refuse God and his hypostases--reason, science, law...

*Blackstar* is...a summation of a career?  A self-conscious last word. Self-Eulogy? Finnegans Wake?  A limitless text, refusing neat meaning.  All of the above/None of the above...

David Bowie must have died a long, a long long time ago.  Now, I understand that was the point...

Suck it Haters!!!: "Friendly" Fascists and American Authoritarians

                                               Doctored to protect the stupid, with minor commentary.



I was an undergraduate back when Grunge was King, and by the end of my Sophomore year (1995 ish), my disappointment in Bill Clinton as a craven opportunist had festered into a betrayal of the ideals I had voted him in for in the first place.  Certainly, I was naïve when I cast that first vote, thinking that the good guys had defeated the nightmare of the Reagan years, and surely, sanity and fair play would follow--of course, I was not prepared for the move from betrayal to the utter disillusionment that made me leave the Democratic Party, returning only provisionally, and usually holding my nose--first voting Libertarian in 1996, and then, finally finding  (for me, anyway) the Democratic Socialist Green Party in 2000.  And yes, I kind of regretted that vote in hindsight, because what happened next-- but I voted in Indiana,me and the other 18 grand Greens would not have made a goddamned bit of difference--was an utter disaster, but may only be the prelude.  But enough with the preamble.

Anyway, I was fully engrossed in critical and political philosophy, reading Marx and Bakunin, pivoting from the malaise of teenage nihilism to a journey of Existentialist (ah Simone!) discovery, and generally trying to make sense of a world that seemed fucked up.  I need a hermeneutic for the world.  One that I discovered was Bertram Gross's Friendly Fascism: The New Face of Power in America (excerpted here).  Gross argues--in 1980-- essentially that Fascism becomes inevitable as Capitalism becomes more unfettered, concentrating wealth at the top, it will necessarily adapt to the people and times.  Consider the following:

Despite the sharp differences from classic fascism, there are also some basic similarities. In each, a powerful oligarchy operates outside of, as well as through, the state. Each subverts constitutional government. Each suppresses rising demands for wider participation in decision making, the enforcement and enlargement of human rights, and genuine democracy. Each uses informational control and ideological flimflam to get lower and middle-class support for plans to expand the capital and power of the oligarchy and provide suitable rewards for political, professional, scientific, and cultural supporters. . .

A major difference is that under friendly fascism Big Government would do less pillaging of, and more pillaging for, Big Business. With much more integration than ever before among transnational corporations, Big Business would run less risk of control by any one state and enjoy more subservience by many states. In turn, stronger government support of transnational corporations, such as the large group of American companies with major holdings in South Africa, requires the active fostering of all latent conflicts among those segments of the American population that may object to this kind of foreign venture. It requires an Establishment with lower levels so extensive that few people or groups can attain significant power outside it, so flexible that many (perhaps most) dissenters and would-be revolutionaries can be incorporated within it. Above all, friendly fascism in any First World country today would \ use sophisticated control technologies far beyond the ken of the classic fascists.

In 1995, 1996 I was able to see this in action on TV, newspapers and radio, and was always alarmed by the "meh" attitudes of so many.   Of course, I knew while people were getting some drippings from the lords' table, they'd be satisfied until their ship came in. 

At that time, the Internet was just emerging on a mass scale, and I was excited for the future; surely, the democratization of information was an obvious good, and certainly, a new world was coming.

I was expecting Star Trek;  I got Star Wars instead...


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The hangover of yesterday's Trump victories, and my ever increasing fear and dread for the future occupies my mind, leadening my heart with the feeling that Gross's text may have been prophecy, or even the blue print for the cagey motherfucker to more effectively and efficiently shill the rubes.  Bad tidings from the Louisville Trump Rally involving avowed White Supremacists assaulting people has only depressed me more.

I find comfort in knowledge, and ideas.  Amanda Taub's report "The Rise of American Authoritarianism" does little to assuage, but much to explain.   Citing Heathrington and Weiler, she asserts:

Their book concluded that the GOP, by positioning itself as the party of traditional values and law and order, had unknowingly attracted what would turn out to be a vast and previously bipartisan population of Americans with authoritarian tendencies.

This trend had been accelerated in recent years by demographic and economic changes such as immigration, which "activated" authoritarian tendencies, leading many Americans to seek out a strongman leader who would preserve a status quo they feel is under threat and impose order on a world they perceive as increasingly alien.

These Americans with authoritarian views, they found, were sorting into the GOP, driving polarization. But they were also creating a divide within the party, at first latent, between traditional Republican voters and this group whose views were simultaneously less orthodox and, often, more extreme. . . eventually, authoritarians would gain enough power within the GOP to make themselves heard.

At the time, even Hetherington and Weiler did not realize the explosive implications...looking back now, the ramifications of their research seem disturbingly clear.

Authoritarians are thought to express much deeper fears than the rest of the electorate, to seek the imposition of order where they perceive dangerous change, and to desire a strong leader who will defeat those fears with force. They would thus seek a candidate who promised these things. And the extreme nature of authoritarians' fears, and of their desire to challenge threats with force, would lead them toward a candidate whose temperament was totally unlike anything we usually see in American politics — and whose policies went far beyond the acceptable norms.

A candidate like Donald Trump.

The Bush-Cheney years were characterized by dog whistle jingoistic atavism built upon a sand castle shining city on the hill as the foolish lack of national self awareness.  What changed after 9/11 was not Bush and Cheney--they'd already stole the election and had the opportunity to ignore critical intelligence--but our willingness to sacrifice civil liberties under the illusion of security, despite the warnings of our earliest and greatest citizens (who we either ignore, or misappropriate, to suit our ideologies).   To say that George Bush, or even Darth Cheney, were Fascists, is hyperbolic.   To say that some Americans were "activated" into becoming Authoritarians cannot be disputed, and to say that these Authoritarians were more often than not Republicans or became Republicans as a result of 9/11.  

The same is undoubtedly true in the wake of the Obama presidency, for the same reason: Humans cannot stand ambiguity, cannot tolerate deviation from a perceived norm; that is inertia.  However, most humans can critically think, understand, and find their way to tolerance difference.  Authoritarians cannot, and feel these things more deeply.  The threats become more real, more immediate, and somebody has to do something.

Like Donald Trump.

The "Moran" above is searching, and finding, the aspirational candidate in Trump, like many of us were in Obama--somebody who is ideologically coherent, and thus, the guarantee of a country set to right.  The difference is she grew up uncritically among authoritarians in an in an emerging  (emergent?) crypto-fascist society where mass media is social media.  For many, demography determines identity and, this person, like so many others, a complex of empty signifiers of what one consumes, whether it is slogans or cola.  Capitalist ideology, taken to its logical conclusion, must become Fascist for its own survival, because Fascism is the only way to the eliminate contradictions which threatened its hegemony.   The "Moran", like so many others supporting Trump, are inseparable from that ideology, and become perfect, unquestioning Fascists, living vicariously through the wealth and privilege of someone like Trump, and applauding policies which are self-negating.

It is important to remember that this is a mis-led person, and that minds and hearts can be changed through self-reflection and critical awareness that ones humanity can, and should be separated from ideology, that we are more than empty signifiers of consumption.  I fervently hope this person experiences such a satori.

Unfortunately, it is also important to remember that this person is also a authoritarian partisan, and is actively supporting a candidate who will suppress the process by which ideologues become humans.  While she is treated as a means to an end, she understands this--all of it--as the way of the world. She is now eliminating contradictions from her view, objectifying the rest of us as enemies to be disposed of, a process of dehumanization in service of safe, coherent worldview.

In the Fascist-Authoritarian World View, even under the American Flag, it is a short hop from "Suck it Haters" to "Up Against The Wall, Mother Fucker".

Of Hippie Punching and Grave Dancing

El TrumPig... lo vamos a dejar ser Presidente?
Posted by Jorge Mújica Murias on Saturday, February 27, 2016

Back to _Wizarding ways?  Back to "Long Division".

The intense dread I feel today has nothing to do with the candidate I am supporting, or the Democratic Party for that matter, despite my long and contentious relationship with the machine that belched up Hillary Clinton--AGAIN!--for  the "I Love the '90s"  Neo Liberal Nostalgia ( Yesterday's Back, Yesterday's Back) coronation and a little more of the "sit down, shut the fuck up hippie" that broke my little first time voter heart within a year or so of the 1992 election.

No...we'll have plenty of time to unpack this shit--again.

The intense dread I feel today has to do with the two party system, and the fate of our democracy.

Okay, so the two party system is itself un-democratic because some voices will still be silenced (DO Stop Thinking About Tomorrow). If we are to have a two party system, and for that system to be as democratic as it can be, each party must necessarily have big tents, and critical voices must be present.  For all the hippie punching from the DNC,  the fact that there are still liberals in the party speaks to the inclusiveness of the party despite itself, and chiefly, why a New New Deal Democrat like Bernie Sanders could be the 45th President of the United States.

The knock on Hippies is that Hippies are touchy-feely, and all about feelings, where as serious people use reason, pragmatism and a kind of paternalism that reminds us wild eyed commies that we have to live in the real world, not some Aquarian Idyll.  The world is a dangerous place, and we need sober solutions, son.

On the other hand, the GOP's version of hippie punching concluded, really, with the election of George W. Bush, and wasn't really about punching "hippies" in the usual sense, because "Republican Hippie" is oxymoronic to the point of cognitive-dissonant meltdown--or stoner comedy hilarity. What ensued was not so much comedy as irony, and then irony gave way to dread as it became the new normal.

When the Bush Administration derisively referred to the "reality based community", it seemed the culmination of the disastrous "from the gut" leadership from a man that had shit for brains, and after that was shown to be disastrous, I certainly hoped that it was an outlier, a historical "whoops" and sanity would resume as soon as an adult was elected.

Noper.

The GOP hippie punching was not directed at social justice idealists, but rather from radical ideologues toward the kind of reason based, "Dad" governance that had been the GOP brand for forty years.  The Far-Right, the Dick Armey (named for the astroturf "Tea Party" the former Texas Representative and Far Right Bastard created to co-opt the grassroots) rabble rabbled the Conservatives into punching the Moderates, who in turn beat the crap out of Liberal Republicans--all cheered on by Drudge, Breitbart, RedState, Limbaugh, FAUX News and the assortment of bitter, angry dittoheads as getting the RINOS (Republicans In Name Only) the fuck out of the party.  The problem is that once the liberals were out of the party, the purge was on like Donkey Kong, and the moderates were the new liberals, the new RINOS, and they had to be punched out of the party--all to the screaming delight of the dittoheads and the right wing bloggers, who love nothing more than "kicking ass".  Rinse. Repeat.

The result of all this punching is a party that rejects reason  and pragmatism a priori, and that has managed to be both reactionary and radical at the same time.  Quite a feat, really, until you consider utter illogical, zero sum  rage of the angry white men who make up this party's base, and now, its candidates.  

Sure, they have a lot to be angry about--lost jobs, lost homes, an American Dream slipping away-- but after years of the GOP convincing people that single Black mothers, or Guatemalan immigrants, or lefty college professors or any of the other host of Straw Bogey Men are the true oppressors, aren't "real" Americans, and the crypto fascist "blood and soil" rhetoric of the "Heartland" and the anti-intellectual, anti-reason, anti-reality "gut feeling" governance of Bush, the GOP has devolved into a roiling beserker projection of all embedded white male supremacy, Social Darwinism, Know-Nothingness and unfettered greed and power lust that fester below the lofty words of our creed.  What you see and hear at a Trump rally is the naked Id of Old Evil America foaming at words that are a rich ingrate's approximation of Mussolini by way of Morton Downey Jr.

Trump will win tonight not because his policies make sense--he doesn't have any.  Yet, he will win by shilling the dittoheads, who are long past thinking too deeply about any of this, and just be the  avatar for their free-floating bitterness and hostility toward everything they have been acculturated to hate, which is now, apparently, everything but the promise of restoring America.  Of course, this will accomplish nothing but the upward transfer of wealth, because that part has not changed.

And then, voters willing, he will lose, and then GOP will collapse utterly, and that will be that.  The party of Lincoln will have come to thoroughly self inflicted end, and unlike my friends who consider the Democrats "their team" and would applaud total victory.  I won't.

As a small "d" democrat first, and a capital "D" Democrat out of shared interest and a sense of responsibility to elect people who are more or less competent at government, rather than the proudly anti-competent on the right, the idea of single national party scares the fucking shit out of me...

Actually,  I suppose the dread I feel is about the Democratic Party,  because I know the history of the party's when hubris when it perceives its hegenomy and, from working for NKY for Obama in '08, the craven nature of its machine politics.  If Team Blue absorbs the moderates, as it did with most of the Liberal Republicans, then the Neo Liberal right turn will continue, the hippie punching will ramp up.

And what the fuck will we do then?

Update: The ignoble end to the party of Lincoln is nigh, taken over by racists.  There is nothing defensible here, no way to explain away Trump as the party's nominee, no justification in voting for him.  None.  You are, or will be, complicit.

Blackout

Make you voice heard!

Auld Lang/Sign

As I sit in the Cock and Bull Public House (otherwise known as the English Livingroom) pondering the past year and what it means or meant, I am brought back to words and the meaning of words, as a means of reflection. 


Words always contain their opposition in the definition--or rather, our understanding of that definition.  This year was a year of contrasts, and I cannot help but appreciate the play within those contrasts, because the nuance between the oppositions containna truth all their own. 


Certainly, the contrast between Assistant Professor and unemployed educator is a stark, devastating reality, but even within that opposition is the very meaning of the play within a word as we understand it:  though employed, it was not secure, thus the promise of employment, vis a vis, security, was not really present nor a presence for any number of reasons.  Its opposite, unemployment, where insecurity is almost by definition, and. certainly presence, was not as fraught with despair and loathing as I had imagined.  These last months have seen joy, laughter and, to my shock, survival.   The world did not end.


The reality of words grabbed me by the back of the head, and forced me to look at its end;  life, as I had know it with a dear friend and colleague flowed too easily into its opposition, and a loved one, a fellow traveler and inspiration, slipped away in the hostile angst of a summer where the world was too present, and its cold truths, brutally vivid.


Yet, other words, ideas, have experienced this play as well: the world has seen fundamental change as people reassert humanity in governments and society in hopes of reclaiming their future.  The opposition between the " past" and " the future" becomes a false dichotomy as both co-mingle in the dynamic present once again.  No longer are either an institutional oppression but a positive vehicle to the new.


If there is a fine point on this, its how stark oppositions are tethered to the thing they reference.  Last year, things seemed hopeless, crumbling facades of sanity, self, and society were everywhere.  Plainly...life fucking sucked.  Now, a year on, the worst has come to pass, yet the things that tell me what life is worth remain as rocks.   What was barren a year ago is now a garden of delight.  Where death haunted summer, life and renewed purpose illuminate the winter--and they are not mutually exclusive, but inextricably bound: Our final descents, as Joyce notes, falls faintly in the universe, upon "all the living and the dead".  We must all shine on.


"Shining on" are the words of Love. Love is always the biggest, boldest, baddest, most vexing word.  Its meaning is the panoply which defines our natures. 


Here's to it:  It's actually all you need.

The Owl (Update 03 December 2011)

BLEED FOR ME You’ve been hanging ‘round / With an enemy of the state / Come with me to the building / That no one stops to watch / Chorus: C’mon bleed / C’mon bleed / C’mon bleed / Bleed for me / We’ll strap you to a pipe / Electrodes on your balls / C’mon scream / C’mon writhe / Face down in a pool of piss / (Chorus) / In the name of world peace / In the name of world profits / America pumps up our secret police / America wants fuel / To get it, it needs puppets / So what’s ten million dead / If it’s keeping out the Russians / We’re well trained by the CIA / With yankee tax money in Ft. Bragg / The Peace Corps builds US labor camps / When they think they’re building schools / Ha Ha / When cowboy Ronnie comes to town / Forks out his tongue at human rights / Sit down, enjoy our ethnic meal / Dine on some charbroiled nuns / Try a medal on / Smile at the mirror as the cameras click / And make big business happy - / Anytime / Anywhere / Maybe you’ll just disappear / (Chorus)

I AM THE OWL I am your plumber / No I never went away / I still bug your bedrooms / And pick up everything you say / It can be a boring job / To monitor all day your excess talk / I hear when you’re drinking / And cheating on your lonely wife / I play tape recordings / Of you to my friends at night / We’ve got a girl in bed with you / You’re on candid camera / We just un-elected you / Chorus: I am the owl / I seek out the foul / Wipe ’em away / Keep America free / For clean livin’ folks like me / If you demonstrate / Against somebody we like / I’ll slip on my wig / And see if I can start a riot / Transform you to an angry mob / All your leaders go to jail for my job / But we ain’t the Russians / Political trials are taboo / We’ve got our secret / Ways of getting rid of you / Fill you full of LSD / Turn you loose on a freeway / (Chorus) / Send you spinning / Send you spinning / Send you spinning all over the freeway / Spinning on the crowded freeway / Spinning on the freeway / Spinning on the freeway / Spin / Spin / Spin - lookout! / The press, they never even cared / Why a youth leader walked into a speeding car / In ten years we’ll leak the truth / By then it’s only so much paper / You know, Watergate hurt / But nothing really ever changed / A teeny bit quieter / But we still play our little games / We still play our little games / (repeat) / I am the owl From The Dead Kennedys Plastic Surgery Disasters.

Plastic Surgery Disasters is one of my favorite albums. Ever.

And for my money, it represents not only the ethos of the band most powerfully, it has the most powerfully coherent words Jello Biafra has committed to either page or tape, his take on America post-Vietnam American politics vividly rendered in all its snarky left wing funhouse glory.

I have always thought of “Bleed for Me” and “I am the Owl” as constituting a kind of suite; thematically, both are about the withering of democracy in these United States, though the former tackles foreign policy, and the latter, domestic spying and the silencing of dissent. Biafra was, and is, always acutely aware of the inextricable nature of foreign and domestic policy, seeing that these things are manifestations of the powerful corporate interests which these prongs of the government are designed to propagate.   Bob Dylan once observed that “Money doesn’t talk, it swears” and while Biafra is more likely a Phil Ochs fan (he covered “Love Me, I’m a Liberal” after all), he’d agree, and add “Not only does it swear, it threatens with a butcher knife” Or a gun. Or a bomb. Or a plurality thereof.

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The other day, I was driving to Devou Park to run around the park for a while, and while waiting on the light on KY 8 to turn left and head into the park, I saw a white SUV from the Department of Homeland Security a car or so ahead of me.  This wasn’t the first time  I’ve seen DHS vehicle; that was a couple of months ago in Cincinnati, but I’ve seen more lately. I mused, or rather was amused, as the SUV headed west on 8 and I turned on Crescent Avenue, that perhaps some terrorist plot was hatching out of the Bromley Yacht Club and they were on the case?  Maybe an invasion of drunken Mount St. Joseph students via the Anderson Ferry needed to be thwarted?  Chuckling, I entered the park, fired up my MP3 player, put on my Adidas Kanadia TR3’s, and made my way around the park.

Yet, I couldn’t seem to shake an increasing feeling of dread: “Why do we need more Federal Policing? Isn’t that what the FBI does?  The Secret Service? The NSA? The ATF? The DEA? And why are they driving around Covington?”

The answer is obviously 09/11, silly.  Remember? Everything Changed, right?

Right…

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DHS was created by President George W. Bush to protect us from the evil-doers, and folded, under one Department, everything from FEMA to the Coast Guard. The goal was more effective communication between disparate department, as this was the excuse du jour as to why Al Qaeda incinerated over three thousand people that September morning( of course, the two bickering agencies whose intelligence should have been shared in order to prevent the attack, the FBI and the CIA, are not in the DHS trust tree, so there you go. Then there’s the issue of a certain memo, obscurely titled “Bin Laden determined to strike in US”, that was ignored by the Bush Administration-- but hey, why dredge up ancient history?).  Add a little Congressional negligence in the form of the USAPATRIOT Act (summary here;  full text here), and its reauthorizations, we are perhaps safer in the bodily sense from terrorists. 

However, the rights guaranteed to us, are undermined in unprecedented ways by DHS, with an assist from the USAPATRIOT Act, and now, we are seeing just how.  Let’s start with the DHS mission statement:             

The Department's mission is to ensure a homeland that is safe, secure, and resilient against terrorism and other hazards. Our efforts are supported by an ever-expanding set of partners. Every day, the more than 230,000 men and women of the Department contribute their skills and experiences to this important mission. Our duties are wide-ranging, but our goal is clear: a safer, more secure America.

Like many Americans, I wanted to give the government the benefit of the doubt after 9/11 that some paradigm shift was necessary, but when it became clear that government was seeking sweeping powers, I became alarmed, despite official noise about being an “alarmist” and that they were just catching the bad guys.  Nine years later, it’s becoming clear who the bad guys are:

…the Mayor of Oakland acknowledged that the Department of Homeland Security had participated in an 18-city mayor conference call advising mayors on "how to suppress" Occupy protests.

So…wait a sec:  Peaceful dissent is now the realm of “bad guys”?  How in the hell are teachers, librarians, pipe fitters, fire fighters and students, seeking redress of the cronyism between corporate power and government, fall under the heading of “terrorism”? How is this crackdown contributing to a “safer, more secure America”?

The answer may lay in either the words “other hazards” or in the tension we can apply to “a safer, more secure America.” It seems that Occupations are about the insecurity of most Americans, the loss of New Deal safety nets, and the stratification of our society into rich and poor.  Who is becoming more secure?  :

For the DHS to be on a call with mayors, the logic of its chain of command and accountability implies that congressional overseers, with the blessing of the White House, told the DHS to authorise mayors to order their police forces – pumped up with millions of dollars of hardware and training from the DHS – to make war on peaceful citizens…

Since Occupy is heavily surveilled and infiltrated, it is likely that the DHS and police informers are aware, before boundless fees once they are close to the legislative process, reforming the banks so they can't suck money out of fake derivatives products, and, most critically, opening the books on a system that allowed members of Congress to profit personally – and immensely – from their own legislation, are two beats away from the grasp of an electorally organised [sic] Occupy movement … well, you will call out the troops on stopping that advance.

Apparently, the only America worth making “safer, more secure” is the America of business, corporations, banks and their abettors in government.  The institution of government, which was designed to be of and for the people, guaranteeing rights and arbitrating, even advocating, for the people rather than for other institutions, i.e., corporations is now an ideological construction, existing subjectively while it objectifies we who it once contained and protected it.  The Government, rather than the people it serves, evidentally needs the protecting.  America, now just another ideological construction rather than a reality to most of us, is the gated community for the corporate-fiduciary plutarchy.  The rest of us serfs can wait on the drippings from the lords table, or wait on his wrath.

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May 2008: During the heat of the Democratic Primaries, as a full throated Obama supporter, I articulated on the old blog why I could not support Clinton:

When Hillary Clinton announced her candidacy, I was filled with dread, because, with the Imperial Presidency of Bush, which has expanded executive powers beyond anything imagined at the founding of this Republic, it would be of the utmost importance that our next President roll those back, and re-establish the balance. In other words, avoid the awesome temptation to try and do some good with this power, because there is no good that can come of this unbalance. When I thought of Hillary Clinton, I thought about the Nineties, and I realized there was no goddamned way she would restore balance to the force. Case closed.

I do not have buyer’s remorse so much as I am feeling resigned to the facticity of our corporatist plutarchy; I have watched President Obama, for all his promise and rhetoric, the dream of something not Bush, not Clinton, not Reagan, but new, ignore or contradict the spirit of his campaign.  Three years on, and it is clear that the new boss seems the same as the old boss, as it were. And, for all ire among liberals, progressives, Democrats toward the Bush Administration for the war, DHS, the USA Patriot Act and the like, the deafening quiet about Obama’s failure to redress and re-establish the rule of law not only speaks to the administration’s priorities, but the stupid mascot mania of the party of the people, and its willingness to sacrifice principle for power:

Telling the story of Obama's first term without including any of it is a shocking failure of liberalism. It's akin to conservatism's unforgivable myopia and apologia during the Bush Administration. Are liberals really more discontented with Obama's failure to reverse the Bush tax cuts than the citizen death warrants he is signing? Is his ham-handed handling of the debt-ceiling really more worthy of mention than the illegal war he waged? Is his willingness to sign deficit reduction that cuts entitlement spending more objectionable than the fact that he outsourced drone strikes to a CIA that often didn't even know the names of the people it was killing?

Why would anybody  feel that they can take the tools of despotism and turn them to freedom?  Using evil to do good?  I am at a loss as to recall a time when this has ever been accomplished? The cognitive dissonance is so stark as to throttle all sense of logic.

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While Jello Biafra and The Dead Kennedys are certainly leftist in political persuasion, it would stupidly reductive to think of them in terms of “Democrat” and “Republican” or “Liberal” and “Conservative”. Their 1979 single (and signature tune) “California Ubër Alles”, before it was recast as a Reagan warning, was a scathing critique of the quintessential liberal California politician, then Governor Moonbeam, Jerry Brown.  Biafra wrote of the dire consequences of the ideological institution, the cult of personality that sits as its titular head, and the forces which wield power in our country.  Don’t be fooled by “liberals”; they are just as capable of horror as anybody else, particularly when the people are robbed of their subjectivity, and instead are reduced to tools of political expediency, sacrificed to save the institution they supposedly serve those people, or historical ambition.  Obama the liberal, like candidate Clinton, like President Clinton, could not resist exploiting the holes poked in the Constitution by their predecessors to further their own goals.  Whatever the wrong headed motivation, however much good these people think they are doing or whether it is just a cynical power grab, one thing is abundantly clear: our collective welfare is only a concern insofar as our ability to enrich and further entrench the few. Our sacrifices in service are things to exploit, our voices are to be ignored or silenced through propaganda or violence.  Either cheer for the way it is, or shut the fuck up. 

I am tired of being told to shut the fuck up…
 

UPDATE:  AlterNet's Josh Holland thinks that Ms. Wolf may be connecting unconnected dots:

…if federal authorities were ordering cities to crack down on their local occupations in a concerted effort to wipe out a movement that has spread like wildfire across the country, that would indeed be a huge, and hugely troubling story. In the United States, policing protests is a local matter, and law enforcement agencies must remain accountable for their actions to local officials. Local government’s autonomy in this regard is an important principle.”

But there has not been a single report offered by any media outlet suggesting that anyone – federal officials or police organizations – is directing or in any way exerting pressure on cities to crack down on their occupations. Instead, there have been a lot of dark ruminations that such an effort is underway…

I really hope Mr. Holland is correct and Ms. Wolf is darkly ruminating; however, with the Defense Authorization Act seemingly suspending Habeas Corpus for Americans on American soil, I am, sadly, not so sure.