"For us capitalism is not a dream to be pursued, but a nightmare come true. Our challenge lies not in privatizing the state but in deprivatizing it. Our states have been bought up at bargain prices by the owners of the land, the banks, and everything else. And for us, the market is nothing more than a pirate ship - the greater its freedom, the worse its behavior. The local market and the world market. The world market robs us with both hands. The commercial hand keeps buying from us ever cheaper and selling to us ever dearer. The financial hand, which lends us our own money, keeps paying us less and charging us more.
"We live in a region of European prices and African wages, where capitalism acts like the kind of man who says, 'I'm so fond of poor people that I never think there are enough of them.' In Brazil alone, for example, the system kills a thousand children a day by disease or hunger. With or without elections, capitalism in Latin America is antidemocratic - most people are prisoners of need, doomed to isolation and violence. Hunger lies, violence lies: they claim to be part of nature, they pretend to belong to the natural order of things. When that 'natural order' becomes disorderly, the military steps in, hooded or barefaced. As they say in Colombia: 'The cost of living goes up and up, and the value of life goes down and down.'"
-----Eduardo Galeano, "We Say No - Chronicles 1963-1991" p. 278
Monday, October 30, 2017
Legalienate Intercepts "The Sludge Report"
Things Fake News Won’t Dare Tell You
All accusers of Harvey Weinstein are anti-semitic, holocaust
denying, jew hating criminals.
Shocking investigation of Trump links to Putin reveals
shocking news that Monica Lewinsky and Bill Clinton shockingly employed Russian
hackers to shockingly defeat Hillary.
New survey reveals that people who scratch their butts and
pick their noses with the same unwashed finger are more likely to vote for
lesser evils and teach economics at graduate schools.
Neo-Fascist White Supremacist Racist Psych-Support group
formed for all media stars, starlets and wannabes not sexually compromised by
Weinstein, Cosby, O’Reilly and others. Called “You Are Attractive and Gifted,
Too!” the group offers its services only to registered voters.
Washington insiders make astounding discovery that just as
pimps deal in dollars for sex, political pimps deal in dollars for democracy.
Supreme Court rules that marriage between neo-cons and
neo-libs of opposite, same or neither sex is not only constitutionally
protected but an absolute necessity in preserving global capitalism, private
profits, the free market and all else that we hold sacred.
Person of no color elected president of new Republica of
Democratica asks to be identified as “shim” and is proud to be first Albino of
gender-fluid unknown parents to achieve high office on a platform of free pet
food, book burning, meat eating and politely conducted wars.
Friday, October 27, 2017
Bulletin! Russian Plot To Enable Americans To Think
- This Just In From The Garlic
- CNN: Special Counsel Robert Mueller has filed first charges in Russia investigation
- Breaking (from CNN): First charges filed in Mueller investigation
The American Ministry of The Mundane has presented evidence from an unimpeachable source - a Russian pimp who has asked for sanctuary from Putin's Gulag - that indicates numerous Russian inspired presentations of critical thought seen on TV applied to the American Democratic System which is based on the least thought possible.
" We must rally around the flag as never before" said former presidents Obama and Bush in a joint statement made while holding hands " and stop this attack on American political ignorance before it goes any further and causes more harm to sales of guns, pet food , birth control and narcotic pills and the artificial intelligence that makes our colleges and universities expensive and useless, in the tradition of our founding fathers who had to get slaves to write the constitution because their hands were so bloody from beating their wives, boyfriends and gender fluid pets the document would have looked awful with all that blood on it."
The shocking news caused an immediate cessation of the war on terror in the middle east to focus all american power on the war on consciousness being waged all over the world, especially in New York, Los Angeles, Tel Aviv, and Hoboken New Jersey.
Stay Tuned!!!
Thursday, October 26, 2017
Dumb Means Dumb: Fighting Rape By Expanding Its Definition
“What dimwitted sort of feminism wants
to shelter women from the richness of their own mistakes? . . . . Self-induced
helplessness isn’t gender progress.”
-------Laura Kipness, Unwanted
Advances – Sexual Paranoia Comes to Campus
Now that the story of a Hollywood producer (Harvey
Weinstein) using his position for sexual abuse of women has come to light (We
at Legalienate were deeply shocked to learn that rich celebrities get sex on
demand from Hollywood starlets. Who knew?), indignant calls to dispense with
“rape culture” are once again the order of the day. Men are urged to “stand
with” women and “always believe” the accuser in rape cases, because women
rarely lie about rape, and the damage done to them in doubting their stories is
far more serious than the lesser effects to men falsely accused. As activist
and commentator Zerlina Maxwell put it in a 2014 Washington Post article, “We should believe as a matter of default
what an accuser says. Ultimately, the costs of wrongly disbelieving a survivor
far outweigh the costs of calling someone a rapist.” This comment was made in
reference to a University of Virginia rape case that turned out to be based on
a false accusation. Even after this was proven, Maxwell continued to insist
that all accusations of rape be believed.
Of course, we’ve already tried believing - “as a matter of
default” - women who claimed to have been raped, and it didn’t turn out too well.
From the 1890s to the civil rights era thousands of black men falsely accused
of rape were lynched in the South, and all black men feared being similarly
treated. Surely it is a perverse sort of utilitarianism to suggest that the suffering
of those men – tortured, mutilated, and burned - was relatively unimportant compared
with that of actual rape victims when their stories are not believed. Who can
make such judgments?
Unfortunately, this is hardly an isolated instance of dogmatic
absurdity on this topic. At U.S. universities, definitions of rape have become
ever more elastic over the years, shifting from forced penetration to lack of “affirmative
consent,” a concept fraught with ambiguity. Furthermore, since college social life is
saturated in alcohol, and alcohol is very often used precisely in order to
eliminate the need to make a completely conscious decision about sex (assuming
a fully conscious decision is possible about anything), we end up insisting that the most spontaneous of human activities justify itself on completely deliberate grounds. This peculiar outcome is in turn the product of an odd alliance of “social justice” crusaders and power-grabbing
administrators ludicrously attempting to micromanage the sex lives of horny
college students via careful bureaucratic control. Acts that are pleasurable
only when spontaneous and uninhibited are now subject to long “affirmative
consent” checklists that attempt to ban any behavior associated with an
unpleasant outcome, even if the unpleasantness only becomes apparent
retroactively.
In one famous case, (Emma Sulkowicz, the “mattress girl”) a
Columbia student waited eight months to file a rape accusation against a fellow
student she had had consensual sex with multiple times, while sending him dozens of explicitly sexual text messages, including "I wuv you so much," and
“f—k me in the butt,” even continuing friendly communication after the
alleged rape occurred. Though begging to be sodomized would appear to be quite
enthusiastic sexual consent, feminist activists insist to this day that Sulkowicz’s case was clearly one of rape.
Matters are now so out of hand that college students find themselves being urged to take a
picture of their signed contracts granting "affirmative consent" to
engage in sex (what a turn on!), in order to prove that the sex is free and
voluntary for both parties. This has become necessary at least in part because of the many cases
of retrospective regrets leading to assault and rape accusations well after the fact. These
accusations are in turn guided by feminist ideology claiming that a gross power
imbalance between men and women often disguises assault or rape as consensual
intercourse even to those who least suspect this. Gender wage inequity alone can allegedly render women sexually
helpless, so the theory goes, as men enjoy greater disposable incomes with
which to make sex happen on their own terms. Even a friendly drink is often
construed as though it were the equivalent of a forced injection of heroin, deliberately designed
to incapacitate its victim.
Does any of this really make sense? Suppose someone were to make similar claims about “voluntary” employment under capitalism, to wit:
I've been re-reading Das Kapital recently, and I now realize I've been economically raped by every employer I've ever had, going back decades, and I want to collect! I never truly gave voluntary consent to work for the wages they paid, because power relations were grossly unequal between us and outcomes hopelessly skewed by extractive "rape culture" instituted centuries ago by owners of capital who can only be described as sheer beasts. According to objective calculations by my lawyer I should long since have been made a billionaire. It's payday - retroactive!
This kind of “thinking” has unfortunately led to rampant
sexual paranoia on U.S. campuses, with professors living in dread of
inadvertent comments spiraling into career-ending disaster. Anything associated
with sex – a joke, a risqué comment - is dangerous, and if one insists on
outdated notions of inviolable constitutional protections against arbitrary
punishment, this can only mean that one is an apologist for “rape culture”, in
the same way that raising questions about the canonical Holocaust makes one a
“Holocaust Denier.” Obviously, this is crippling to free intellectual inquiry,
the supposed mission of universities, but emotions run so high on such topics
that few people notice and even fewer care.
Furthermore, as with the canonical Holocaust, a
“preponderance of evidence” cumulative proof rather than tight deductive logic
is used to determine what the truth is. And just how is “preponderance”
determined? By a quantity of detail in the accusation, though it’s not clear
why a more detailed accusation has to be truer than a less detailed one. In other
words, it’s a matter of how much mud can be thrown against the wall, not
whether any of it sticks.
Ironically, the image of women given to us by many feminists in
alleged justification of all this is the proverbial helpless damsel-in-distress
incapable of defending herself, and utterly without obligation to do so. In
fact, for this type of feminist, even to suggest that women take preventive action
against predatory males is to make oneself part of the problem rather than the
solution. After all, it is men who must learn to “not rape,” not women who need
to learn self-defense.
Is there any reason we can’t do both? The fact that robbers
ought to learn not to rob is not generally thought to be a justification for
banks to leave their vaults unlocked at night. Obviously, women would be
considerably better off if male predators routinely faced stern verbal
challenges to their unwanted advances, followed by swift physical damage if these went unheeded, just as gay
males have benefited from gay bashers getting beaten up by gay men they mistook
for hapless victims. Word spreads, and gay bashing wannabes learn a bit of
self-restraint.
In any case, educational efforts to make men strive for
“affirmative consent” before having sex have failed to
reduce the incidence of rape on campus, though they have made it easier to
punish men, even when they are innocent. Innocent men (often teenagers) are railroaded out of university, their
academic and vocational careers ruined before they start. But this allegedly doesn't matter, because we must only believe their accusers, even when they are lying. If this is feminism,
feminism no longer has anything to do with justice.
But all is not lost. Like so many other tragic features of life in the money-mad U.S.A., anti-rape paraphernalia sells, and is now bringing forth what feminist Laura Kipnis calls the “sexual assault industrial complex,” replete with alarming but questionable assault statistics (to guarantee continued funding), assault prevention smart phone apps, online training classes, web-based platforms to navigate sexual assaults and the reports made about them. By now, every school in the country is required to conduct trainings and surveys, which virtually guarantees that Anti-Rape Culture Inc. will be a rapidly growing industry with high profit potential for years to come.
Sources:
Laura Kipnis, “Unwanted
Advances – Sexual Paranoia Comes to Campus” (Harper Collins: 2017)
Ann Coulter, “To Say, ‘Stop
Raping Me!’ In English, Press ‘1’ Now,” May 10, 2017 www.anncoulter.com
Batya Ungar-Sargon, “In
2014, the Campus Rape Debate Drowned Out More Important Feminist Issues,” The New Republic, December 30, 2014
Zerlina Maxwell, “No Matter What Jackie Said, We Should
Automatically Believe Rape Claims,” Washington
Post, December 6, 2014
Emily Yoffe, "The Uncomfortable Truth About Campus Rape
Policy,” The Atlantic, September 6, 2017
Tuesday, October 24, 2017
Genocide and Competitive Victimhood: "I'm More Pathetic Than You" is a Chump's Game
One of the wonders of the internet is getting regular updates on political outrages from around the world. Part of this week's trawl relates to "braid-chopping" in Kashmir, hair crime not as bad as scalping (clearly), but certainly as serious (I'm told) as forcibly cutting off the long locks of Chinese immigrants in the years of yellow peril hysteria.
Such stories are the steady product of networks of political "radicals" apparently striving to become the best-informed atrocity buffs in the semi-free world. But to what end? The endless search for the most discrediting detail in capitalist/imperial brutality is a fool's errand, somewhat like trying to determine which food conglomerate has the crunch, crunch, crunchiest pickles or the crisp, crisp, crispiest potato chips. These are technical details, a distraction from the main story. Who has the evil, evil, evilest genocide? There is no reason to investigate or even care. The Holocaust Industry claims, via the homicidal gas chambers thesis, that the "evilest" genocide was committed against Jews during WWII; in fact, purists insist that it's the only true genocide in history, a notion that simply gives Israel unmatched political capital to commit endless atrocities.
Competitive victimhood may ultimately force us to retire the word genocide from our political lexicon, as it seems to distort and distract more than illuminate. For example, David Stannard's "American Holocaust" makes clear that the "genocide" against the Indians of the Americas was a far more thorough elimination of peoples than what the Nazis accomplished, but it is rarely described this way, nor does it have anywhere near the stature of Jewish suffering under Hitler. And this is because organized Jewry has a patent on genocide. (See Deborah Lipstadt's "Denying the Holocaust" for an example of the Jewish exclusivist dogma that reigns supreme in victim studies.)
Even Stannard seems to recognize this, albeit unconsciously, for about half-way into his well-researched tome he starts quoting Elie Wiesel - favorably - without the slightest awareness that the man is a charlatan. In fact, Stannard goes to considerable lengths to imitate the Wiesel style, talking about literal rivers of human blood in the wake of Spanish massacres in the same way that Wiesel refers to geysers of blood spurting several feet in the air in the wake of Nazi atrocities in Europe. Sure.
The obsession with tit-slicing, baby-skewering, entrail-oozing, testicle-chopping horror, as though eliminating entire societies without such sickening details wouldn't be horrible enough, no doubt owes a great deal to centuries of Christian descriptions of the writhing of the damned in Hell. St. Thomas Aquinas described the ability to peer over the battlements of Hell to watch sinners being tortured for all eternity as the chief delight of being in Heaven. (This perspective makes it extremely difficult to morally distinguish the saved and the wicked.)
Seven-and-a-half centuries after Aquinas we seem to regard one of the principal satisfactions of dissent as the opportunity to search out and relish knowledge of utmost depravity. Sadly, we are increasingly atrocity-obsessed and analytically deficient, unaware that the search for the most diabolic form of evil is just another kind of status seeking via competitive victimhood. This cannot lead to peace, only further horrors.
Such stories are the steady product of networks of political "radicals" apparently striving to become the best-informed atrocity buffs in the semi-free world. But to what end? The endless search for the most discrediting detail in capitalist/imperial brutality is a fool's errand, somewhat like trying to determine which food conglomerate has the crunch, crunch, crunchiest pickles or the crisp, crisp, crispiest potato chips. These are technical details, a distraction from the main story. Who has the evil, evil, evilest genocide? There is no reason to investigate or even care. The Holocaust Industry claims, via the homicidal gas chambers thesis, that the "evilest" genocide was committed against Jews during WWII; in fact, purists insist that it's the only true genocide in history, a notion that simply gives Israel unmatched political capital to commit endless atrocities.
Competitive victimhood may ultimately force us to retire the word genocide from our political lexicon, as it seems to distort and distract more than illuminate. For example, David Stannard's "American Holocaust" makes clear that the "genocide" against the Indians of the Americas was a far more thorough elimination of peoples than what the Nazis accomplished, but it is rarely described this way, nor does it have anywhere near the stature of Jewish suffering under Hitler. And this is because organized Jewry has a patent on genocide. (See Deborah Lipstadt's "Denying the Holocaust" for an example of the Jewish exclusivist dogma that reigns supreme in victim studies.)
Even Stannard seems to recognize this, albeit unconsciously, for about half-way into his well-researched tome he starts quoting Elie Wiesel - favorably - without the slightest awareness that the man is a charlatan. In fact, Stannard goes to considerable lengths to imitate the Wiesel style, talking about literal rivers of human blood in the wake of Spanish massacres in the same way that Wiesel refers to geysers of blood spurting several feet in the air in the wake of Nazi atrocities in Europe. Sure.
The obsession with tit-slicing, baby-skewering, entrail-oozing, testicle-chopping horror, as though eliminating entire societies without such sickening details wouldn't be horrible enough, no doubt owes a great deal to centuries of Christian descriptions of the writhing of the damned in Hell. St. Thomas Aquinas described the ability to peer over the battlements of Hell to watch sinners being tortured for all eternity as the chief delight of being in Heaven. (This perspective makes it extremely difficult to morally distinguish the saved and the wicked.)
Seven-and-a-half centuries after Aquinas we seem to regard one of the principal satisfactions of dissent as the opportunity to search out and relish knowledge of utmost depravity. Sadly, we are increasingly atrocity-obsessed and analytically deficient, unaware that the search for the most diabolic form of evil is just another kind of status seeking via competitive victimhood. This cannot lead to peace, only further horrors.
Friday, October 13, 2017
Edward Abbey Vs. Liberal Dogma on Immigration
To The New York Review of Books, 12/17/81:
“John M. Crewdson’s review of Miller’s On the Border and
Hansens’s The Border Economy, though lengthy, provides little essential
information on the illegal immigration problem, and misinterprets what
information it does provide. Those of us who actually live in the U.S.-Mexican
border region owe it to other readers of the NYR to correct Mr. Crewdson’s
misunderstandings and fill in his lacunae.
“It
is absurd, for example, for Mr. Crewdson to repeat Tom Miller’s facetious
‘calculation’ that it would take two and a half million men, standing shoulder
to shoulder, to close the Mexican border to illegal aliens. In fact most of the
border runs through flat, wide open, sparsely vegetated desert country. Except
for the far-scattered towns and cities, most of the border could be easily
patrolled and easily ‘sealed’; a force of twenty thousand, or ten men per mile,
properly armed and equipped, would have no difficulty – short of a military
attack – in keeping out unwelcome intruders. In and near the few towns and
cities a physical barrier is obviously needed, of the type routinely used
everywhere else to restrict and control access. People do not cut holes through
fences when the fences are watched and guarded.
“Furthermore,
there is widespread popular support for closing our southern border to the
Latino invasion. A recent NPR [National Public Radio] broadcast (the All Things
Considered program) cited various national polls indicating that 80 to 90
percent of Americans now object strongly to these mass immigrations from Mexico
and other Hispanic countries. A poll by Arizona’s Senator DeConcini revealed
that 79 percent of his constituents (and this in a state with a large and
rapidly growing Hispanic population) want the illegal aliens deported and the
immigration laws strictly enforced.
“No
doubt there is an element of ethnic chauvinism in this hostility to Mexicans et
al. – and that element will grow violent and much larger if the influx
continues – but the sentiment is based on the clear awareness that these aliens
do indeed take jobs away from American citizens and that the estimated ten
billion dollars remitted annually from Mexican aliens to their relatives still
in Mexico is money that should be going into the pockets of American workers.
“To
say, as Mr. Crewdson does, that the presence of these foreign millions
‘creates’ employment for American workers is [in line with] the magical
economics of Reagan & Co., that wondrous world wherein food is produced in
supermarkets and rabbits are born in hats. If, as Mr. Crewdson seems to
believe, the proliferation of human bodies somehow ‘creates’ new wealth for
all, then Mexico would be a rich nation without need to push its surplus
population northward, and India and China would be the richest nations on
earth.
“The
actual reason why our immigration laws are not enforced is simple, obvious and
well known, (though seldom mentioned in polite print): there are small but
powerful groups on both sides of the border who benefit from this expanding
northerly migration.
“Cui bono? Is now as always the
appropriate question, and the answer is, first, American employers in all
fields, from industrialized agriculture to factory manufacturing, who thrive on
this unlimited supply of cheap, docile, non-union labor. One simple way to halt
the alien incursion would be to penalize employers, with jail sentences if
necessary, who hire illegal aliens. Simple but politically unlikely to be
enforced; no doubt it will be easier to militarize the international border.
“The
second group of beneficiaries are the merchants on the American side of the
border towns, who do a brisk trade in selling American goods to Mexicans. A
third group are the Mexican-American politicians in the Southwestern states,
eager to expand their power base. The fourth group are the wealthy and dominant
classes in Mexico itself, who require the safety valve of emigration in order
to postpone for as long as possible the next, and inevitable, revolution in
their desperately overpopulated nation.
“American
‘interests’ (the term ‘ruling class’ is now taboo, right?), anxious to secure
access to Mexico’s oil, must therefore appease Mexican ‘interests’ by overlooking
illegal immigration while at the same time offering at least a token response
to the popular demand for a halt to it; thus we have the cosmetic but
ineffectual proposals of the Carter and Reagan administrations.
“These
are harsh, even cruel propositions, but in fact the American boat is full, if
not already overloaded; we cannot allow further mass immigration. The American
public is fully aware of this truth even if our ‘leaders’ prefer to attempt to
ignore it. We know what they will not acknowledge, that the tendency of
large-scale immigration is to degrade and cheapen American life. Anyone who has
made a recent visit to Mexico, to East L.A., or even to Miami, Florida, knows
what I mean.
“When
the call for compassion is raised (a word now hopelessly corrupted by its use
in the mouths of such as Nixon, Carter, and Reagan), we must answer that the
most compassionate thing we can do for nations such as Mexico is to encourage
them, somehow, to commence the policies of radical internal reform and vigorous
population control that are clearly necessary.”
-----Edward Abbey
(Quoted in Postcards From Ed - Dispatches and Salvos From an American Iconoclast, pps. 109-11)
When Edward Abbey TKOed Alexander Cockburn
The following letter from the late Edward Abbey (popular author of "The Monkey Wrench Gang" and "Desert Solitaire," among other great works) appears to be the letter Alexander Cockburn refers to in "The Golden Age Is In Us," which he says he left unanswered because he didn't know how to respond to it. The non-response illustrates a peculiar inability to engage real political dialogue on the part of the American left, particularly surprising in Cockburn himself, who was at least open to listening to right-wing libertarians and populists on occasion. But here not. Note the closing line, more relevant today than ever.
To Alexander Cockburn 5/5/88:
“I’m a regular reader of
your column in The Nation, always with interest, usually with
general agreement.
You can easily imagine, then, how deeply you have wounded my
feelings by
calling me (and my good friend Dave Foreman) “fascist,”
“racist,” etc. I am
accustomed to such childish name-calling from sectarian fanatics
like Murray
Bookchin, but I would have assumed that you would adopt a more
rational tone.
“Opposition
to mass immigration, legal or illegal, from any source, does not
make one a
fascist or racist. It merely makes one an opponent of mass
immigration, as are
the overwhelming majority of American citizens, including most
Mexicans,
blacks, Indians etc. (If we can believe the polls. And the
response of Congress
to years of complaint.) Most labor leaders and unions are
against more
immigration, for good and obvious reasons; almost all
conservationists are
against immigration, for reasons even more good and obvious. The
basic fact is that
America is sinking under an overload of political, social,
economic and
environmental problems; we are in no position to take on those
of Latin
America, Asia and Africa as well.
“Of
course much of the Third World’s misery is caused by European
and American
imperialism. Among our many moral obligations is to bring that
infernal
meddling to an end. E.g., no more loans, no more weapons, no
more medical
missionaries, no more CIA chicanery. Agreed. But it’s merely a
white middleclass
liberal guilt neurosis to imagine that our domineering arrogance
is the sole or
even the central source of mischief. Africans were murdering,
eating and
enslaving one another long before Vasco de Gama appeared off the
Angolan coast.
The endless horrors of Mexico go back at least to the Mayan and
Aztec empires
and their culture of war, massacre, slavery, torture, human
sacrifice and
cannibalism. To most Mexican Indians, Cortez probably appeared
(at first) as a
liberator. And Asia: India and its caste system, China, Japan .
. . Ah well,
you see my point.
“If
you hope for any sort of
dialogue and unity with all factions on the vaguely leftist or
radical side of
politics, you must cease from silly verbal abuse. If you don’t
want it, then we
go on as we are, fractious and impotent.”
-----Edward Abbey
-----Edward Abbey
(Quoted in "Postcards From Ed - Dispatches and Salvos From an American Iconoclast", pps. 239-40)
Friday, October 6, 2017
Putin-Russo-Phobic Source?
"Obsessions
are persistent ideas, thoughts, impulses or images that are experienced as
intrusive and inappropriate and that cause marked anxiety and distress…the
content of the obsession is alien, not within the control of the obsessive."
Diagnostic
and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders
Wednesday, October 4, 2017
Guns, Statues, Anthems, Toilets and War
After still another mass murder tragedy even worse than past
experience and immediately followed by wafer-depth debates as to whether the
usual presidential platitudes after the horror were suitable or whether the
false flags of illuminati allegiance were waving behind it all, a still shaken
public will find renewed arguments over what is called gun control in a
national marketplace that shows signs of sinking more deeply into chaos. While
this can be said at any moment, given rising real estate “values” as homelessness
increases and renters are under assault, to mention only one economic
contradiction, present circumstances give anyone a very difficult time to come
up with sane explanations for what passes for democracy in a nation ruled by
allegedly free market forces under total control of minority private sources.
When a relative handful of billionaires have more money than
the majority of working Americans put together, that defines a political
democracy the way economic analysis defines no-dinner-no-movie rape as a
profitable form of dating.
So we will have renewed discussion about exercising some
controls over particularly shameful behavior at the mall we call our home and
putting some limits on who and how many weapons can, should, or will be owned
by one or another citizen. Left out of the debate is the national weapons
production and war making profits that are the backbone of our political
economy. In the land of fast food and slow thinking, guns, bombs, missiles,
death rays, drones and other aspects of murder play even greater a role than fossil
fuels as both serve in mutual attacks on life’s social and natural environment.
But we’ll more likely hear about the menace of silencers on guns, thereby
muting any focus on the substance of the problem; our enormous creation of
weaponry and a warfare budget and long term debt to support it that dwarfs
anything else in our market democracy which is about as free as food, clothing
and shelter.
While liberals will support stronger background checks on
gun purchasers, conservatives will wave the second amendment false flag with
neither argument touching on the background checks we need on the wealthy
owner-operators of our government. That state entity serves the interest of a
tiny minority and does so at the expense of the great majority who have nothing
but a symbol they are trained to salute while ignoring the fact that it has no
substance. No landlord will accept a flag as rent or mortgage payment nor will
any food mart take statuettes in lieu of plastic or cash. So while in righteous
anger we trash, burn or tear down symbols, the reality of violence and poverty
increases and thus leads to a more passionate public furor over symbols.
We are dis-organized to obsess over the production of water
pistols while creating billion dollar upgrades to our nuclear weapons
stockpiles. Actually, we haven’t confronted that terrible threat of wetness, but
under peace prizewinner Obama we took steps to assure our nukes could destroy
humanity faster and better than anyone else’s. This is America, the essential
nation of master race self chosen people, where we are manipulated into
actually believing there is more than one race and that we belong to whichever
one is able to exercise its privilege to have housing, go to college and
survive encounters with police without getting shot, while others live in the
street, ghetto or projects and suffer a much lower survival rate when
encountering public servants under trying circumstances. Money and class
background, of course, have nothing to do with any of this.
The gun lobby will argue, as usual, that the overwhelming
majority of gun owners do not commit murders, and they will be correct. But
this makes as much sense as pointing out that the overwhelming majority of
Americans have never killed any Koreans, Vietnamese, Iraqis, Afghans, Libyans,
Palestinians, or any of the other peoples the USA has slaughtered by the
millions. And that’s only covering the period from mid 20th century
to the present. If we add the death tolls most of us had no direct role in
inflicting in the Second World War, we could all have as many rifles as the
Vegas murderer had accumulated but simply never use them to kill anyone and
voila; we’d be a pacifist nation?
The problem is the enormous number of weapons and the cult
of fear and violence that causes us to live in some kind of psycho-babble
induced terror lest the evil
government-terrorists-russians-koreans-syrians-whoevers come bursting into our
living rooms and attack us while we peacefully drink wine, smoke pot, eat
burgers, watch surreality tv or pray to jesus-moses-allah-the big bang. We must
be prepared, according to a constitution most of us have never read and few
even care to, which guarantees our right to keep and bear arms even if it
offers us no right to have food, clothing, shelter or health care when we need
it.
We are a people who can become righteously supportive of favored identity groups – when those groups represent no threat to the rule of our oligarch royalty class and will add to its profits – but forget the ideals of real democracy which involve coming together as a majority in order to make life better in what used to be known as the common good. But who wants to be common? That’s why we can rally to the banner of social justice for some of us as we support the political economics of social injustice for most of us.
We are good to consider the toilet problems of a minority
who are defined as trans-gender but rather lame brained if not bad to
completely neglect a larger minority who have a toilet problem because they
have a greater problem of no home. Which is where most of us use toilets unless
we are of the tiny minority that finds them social meeting places like coffee
shops, wine bars and food courts. Toilets are hardly as symbolic as flags or
statues but our manipulated treatment and awareness of them are sadly signs of
our mental and moral condition under the dictatorship of the rich and their
media and political servants.
When relatively privileged members of society come forward
to support the rights of those less privileged, it speaks to our potential
strength as a people. But when that coming forward only looks at those less
privileged as the source of our social problems and totally neglects the
minority forces that profit from injustice, that strength becomes a terrible
weakness. As when college educated folks, many destined for professional class
unemployment, look at those even less educated and nowhere near professional
status employed or not, and identify them as the problem source of inequality
or racism or sexism or whatever branch of the poisoned forest whose tree they
have been socialized to focus on, causing all of us continued suffering.
The blame game that puts responsibility for a crumbling
political economic system on the backs of evil leaders and politically
incorrect identity groups will only bring individualists any comfort, and not
for much longer. These are the types who note what an egoist we currently have
in the nation’s CEO position while using the first person singular as often as
he does. That’s how we are socialized, shaped and branded. To see ourselves as
isolated except when it is safe to identify as a group which can be organized
to play a greater role in the consumption of waste system, what the pope calls
the “throw away economy”, which is throwing more human beings away every day.
We have a problem and it’s much bigger than you and me and
whether each of us is armed or not, and we can only solve it by coming together
and truly acting as a democratic people. It isn’t just some violent gun owners
but of a homicidal bordering on insane system of warfare that will destroy all
of us if we don’t radically change it before a greater than ever imagined
tragedy will take it away from all of us.