Entries tagged with empire

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empire,
mcarchons

(no subject)

Guns, like drugs and money, are fleurs du mal of the archons. They yield the opposite of what they promise. But the moment you become aware of this, it reveals a fundamental aspect of human nature we don't much like to talk about -- because this awareness in itself doesn't make you want or need them any less.

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yet another glimpse into how empires feed on starvation

A while back I commented on the connection between Empire and starvation: the Empire keeps us all starving because we are more pliant that way and less likely to look up from our struggles to apprehend the bigger picture.

This is the first thing I thought of when a friend on FB linked to this story:

With nearly 14 million unemployed workers in America, many have gotten so desperate that they're willing to work for free. While some businesses are wary of the legal risks and supervision such an arrangement might require, companies that have used free workers say it can pay off when done right.

"People who work for free are far hungrier than anybody who has a salary, so they're going to outperform, they're going to try to please, they're going to be creative," says Kelly Fallis, chief executive of Remote Stylist, a Toronto and New York-based startup that provides Web-based interior design services. "From a cost savings perspective, to get something off the ground, it's huge. Especially if you're a small business."

In the last three years, Fallis has used about 50 unpaid interns for duties in marketing, editorial, advertising, sales, account management and public relations. She's convinced it's the wave of the future in human resources. "Ten years from now, this is going to be the norm," she says.

from Unpaid jobs: The new normal?

So, basically, we can expect more and more that companies will string people along without pay for as long as they're willing to go along with it, because they're disposable and replaceable and there's someone else starving and desperate waiting in line for the opportunity. They will hire just enough of these people to make it seem like other than a con.

Fortunately at present there are still laws protecting people from being used like this. Wanna bet that's going to change in the next two years?

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how convenient that 'virtue' can be ignored

Mark Morford has me thinking this morning about the pull of temptation. It is a very old moral dilemma; the defining dialectic of Christian (and perhaps Judeo-Christo-Islamic) society; the worldly vs. the pure, participation in the 'world' versus the path of virtue and holiness.

I do not see the world this way, though the culture around me does, and this creates a dissonance. For me, the dilemma is between privilege and lack, and the gap created by people who act with disregard to the ethics of taking. I've described this before, but put simply, my assertion is that we have an ethical obligation to consider the cost of taking something, even something that appears to be freely available to us or willingly offered.

Consider, for example, a couple where the female partner does more of the housework than the male partner. How does this common pattern come to be? In my experience when a man and woman live together as a couple they fall into this pattern without it ever being discussed. And all the while the woman's resentment builds slowly at the fact that she is doing more than her fair share around the house until it erupts into argument, at which point the man pleads innocence. "I never asked you to do all that," he might say. And it's probably true, on the face of it, that he did not specifically ask her to do everything she does.

The system of ethics we are taught in the United States tells us it is wrong to take what does not belong to us. However, it is okay without reservation to take what is due to us. And it is quite amazing when you contemplate it how much the average US citizen considers his or her due. Even better to take that which is offered to us or freely available.

In movies and on TV we see 'noble yet primitive' Indians giving thanks when they hunt and kill. There are so many things that could be said about this, but what is relevant to this post is that this strikes me as a relic of awareness that not all people have the same ethics of taking as we are taught in the US. There is in this the tacit admission that, well, yeah, it would probably be better to consider at least for a moment the animals we kill and eat, but, we've moved beyond such quaint spiritual values. We are a nation of 'the world.'

This brings me back to the point I was making at the outset: the dialectic between 'the worldly' and 'the virtuous.' Christian virtue is often presented as a package deal (you're either in or out, no in-between) and once a person has already decided they are not going to participate, then it becomes that much easier to dismiss the 'loftier' parts of it, especially in the absence of anyone to call them out. "You're a better person than me," someone might say, before shrugging and taking what is their 'due.'

When you say, "Don't take someone for granted," it is understood that this is generally a crappy thing to do. Or "Be respectful or considerate," it is understood that these are generally good things to do. But they are shunted off as virtue, as a detached abstract value that can be easily and safely shelved (though maybe with the occasional vague abstract sense of guilt about it), rather than considered as actual ethical obligations.

The difference between a spiritual virtue and an ethical obligation is that the latter does not go away because you decide not to adhere to a religious belief. Ethical obligations reflect the material consequences of actions, and the fact that humans are smart enough to see them in advance much of the time.

Behold the architecture of privilege.

It is privilege not to consider what something costs. Only that which has a price tag has cost, right? How very convenient it is that expenditure of effort, or even more invisibly, silent sacrifice, are not viewed as things of "cost," because there is no one to stick a monetary price tag on them. There are those who dismiss, with a smirk even, the hidden cost of performing tasks, because pain, fatigue, resentment, what are these, they are ephemeral, they are unseen, keep them unseen and give me my due.

So, going back to my example of the couple above, while the male partner may not have specifically asked his gf/wife to do more of the household stuff than he does, he also didn't object or say anything when she did. Since he materially benefited from it, he was by my perspective ethically obligated to consider what it means to accept the gift of her labor. We could get into things like, maybe her standards are higher than his, unreasonably high, etc., but this is an aside from the larger issue because this goes way beyond household chores. It concerns the conduct of humankind as a whole.

It goes to things like humankind eating a plentiful species into extinction, or strip mining whole mountain ranges, or dumping so much trash there's a continent of floating plastic in the ocean. This is not driven, organized evil; simply the collective result of a million decisions made by individuals with little or no thought given to the ethics of taking what can be taken. Just a few pesky nags like me complaining, and we are easily enough ignored. Whether or not we could have known, or even should have known, that such things can result from our collective decisions, we can't afford as a species to forever react in hindsight to consequences. We're smarter than that.

Mea culpa.

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how class drives even the lgbt agenda

Yesterday I had a bit of an epiphany about the meaning of marriage and why same-sex marriage is so contentious. At the heart of this is that marriage means different things for the upper class and middle class.

If you're middle class you can go your whole life without getting married and still feel, on the whole, fulfilled and happy. You can accomplish your goals and live the way you want; and while most people seem happier to share those things with a partner, it's not a necessity. If you're middle class, your understanding of marriage mainly revolves around health insurance, taxes, and signing a mortgage together. It doesn't even really encompass having children, because the average marriage lasts four years, and the modern urban economy is structured so that children are somewhat discouraged.

But the upper class understands that the world is not ruled by individuals, it is ruled by dynasties. The proper role for someone born into a dynasty is to continue the family line. What is required of someone in this role is to marry someone from a family of at least equal prominence and have as many children as possible.

You're not required to love anyone else. You're not required to like anyone else. You're not required to believe in God, though you may have to sometimes make appearances at church. You can do pretty much whatever you want -- in fact that is the whole point of being rich -- up to and sometimes including murder, as long as you don't go against the family. Doing whatever you want includes having same-sex lovers, as long as you're relatively discreet. It will be whispered about, but no one really cares, as long as you do what you're required which is to marry and have children.

It turns out that upper class people, especially royalty, are exceptionally good at spreading and preserving their DNA. Most people alive today are at least distantly descended from someone of noble prominence. This is the true social darwinism. It has nothing to do with those genes being "better" and everything to do with the fact that having privilege makes it more likely that you will live to spread your genes.

The people who live inside this system are facing the sudden conundrum of how to deal with "pink sheep" of the family who are now able to marry people of the same sex. It *is*, after all, getting married. and still usually involves having children. It's just not the way these things were done in the past.

I think though this also says something about why the most prominent GLBT activists and their political allies are focused on same-sex marriage rather than on the Employment Non-Discrimination Act. ENDA would help the rest of us, arguably far more people than marriage equality. As I said above, if you're middle class you can get by without getting married, but you do need to have income. Someone from the upper class rarely needs to worry about employment; marriage is a much higher concern. Obviously, the political agenda is not being set by middle-class activists.

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(no subject)

I think I'm finally ready to comment on the Israel/Palestine situation. Because something finally clicked into place for me, something deep enough that now I feel like saying to myself, "Thanks, Captain Obvious," though it is not something that is ever talked about and therefore seems to be the invisible elephant in the room.

The historical perspective is shunned in American discourse. Maybe it's a consequence of not having much of our own, I don't know. But the relevant historical perspective here is this: 3,400 years of history in which Jewish people have not been allowed to live in peace by any of their neighbors. There are times and places where there have been exceptions but all have proven without exception to be temporary. The figure that puts this in perspective for me is the estimate by writer James Carroll that the Jewish population of the world today would be 200 million, instead of 13.5 million, if not for all of the wars and persecutions that have occurred since the Roman-Jewish war 1,870 years ago.

So when you add that history to the history of aggression against the modern state of Israel, it is not perhaps completely outlandish to conclude that Israel will never have peace, so it can at least ensure its own survival and security. From this perspective, peace overtures and alliances are doomed to ultimate failure, and so are only a means to buy time. From this perspective, international public relations are irrelevant; it doesn't matter what the world thinks of their retaliations against Hamas in Gaza, or their building of settlements in the West Bank, or their raid this weekend on a flotilla in the Mediterranean, because they believe whether or not they act peacefully, inevitably the world will turn to condemnation and war.

There's a chilling, unassailable logic at work here. You cannot prove to someone who believes this way that it could well be a self-fulfilling prophesy. If peace talks fail, it only seems to prove the point. If allies criticize and withdraw, it is not seen as an indication that they should change their strategy; it looks like proof they are right.

Another dimension to this perspective is the conclusion that even if what Israel is doing in the West Bank and Gaza is wrong, it is justifiable on the grounds that it buys future generations of Jews in Israel a better chance at survival. Frankly... I find that last sentence heartbreaking. But I think it is the heart which drives policies which any of us should objectively find revolting. I hope the people who do them are as revolted when they consider their own acts, but I think I can begin to understand where they are coming from if they cannot see an alternative. I don't know how the rest of the world can say, in a way that will get through, "Yes, we're as aware of all the history as you are, but really, trust us; stop this and there will be peace."

The one thing that undermines this perspective is that not all Jews agree with it. The argument that Jews who disagree with the Israeli strategy are "self-loathing" only goes so far, especially when for example among the activists in the Gaza aid flotilla is a Jewish holocaust survivor. In a prominent recent article in the New York Review of Books, Peter Beinart wrote:

In 2003, several prominent Jewish philanthropists hired Republican pollster Frank Luntz to explain why American Jewish college students were not more vigorously rebutting campus criticism of Israel. In response, he unwittingly produced the most damning indictment of the organized American Jewish community that I have ever seen.

The philanthropists wanted to know what Jewish students thought about Israel. Luntz found that they mostly didn’t. “Six times we have brought Jewish youth together as a group to talk about their Jewishness and connection to Israel,” he reported. “Six times the topic of Israel did not come up until it was prompted. Six times these Jewish youth used the word ‘they‘ rather than ‘us‘ to describe the situation.”

Beinart goes on to argue that the liberal plank of the American Jewish community has proven more willing to distance itself from Israel than from leftist critics of Israeli policy.

I don't really have an answer to this. There is no nation of the world which does not have blood on its hands; how therefore can any nation assure Israel that if they stand down from their hard line, there will never be another holocaust or even another invasion? In the meantime, what is the toll of their hard line stance on their humanity?

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how the hero narrative distorts our view of crimes against humanity

Maya Arulpragasam, also known as M.I.A., released a new video, a short movie around her song "Born Free." The music is not my usual speed, but the video is striking (and graphically violent). I watched it last night, and reflecting on it this morning realized I had rarely seen anything like it.

Usually, in American media, whenever you see depictions like this -- stormtroops rounding people up, killing them for fun -- Mel Gibson is there. Or Bruce Willis. Or Sly Stallone. They'll fight back and win, or run away, survive, and get revenge. Our sense of reality is shaped around the idea that the bad guys won't really get away with anything so heinous. World War Two is proof of that, right? The Nazis tried to pull that stuff, and boy did they get handed their asses. If there weren't heroes in real life, Hollywood can just invent some when they tell the story. And even if heroes don't make sense in a narrative, God and nature will set the slaughterers straight.

Maybe this is the nature of narratives. People who participate in overwhelmingly one-sided slaughter don't tell their stories about it. Neither do the ones who are slaughtered. So I suppose the only narratives we have about genocide are from those who survive being slaughtered, or their children.

It's easy to say, "Well, stories with no hero, with no one acting righteous, are just depressing. Who wants to watch that? Who would be enriched by it?" The problem is, though, as I see it, that we've become so used to just assuming that a hero will come along and the bad guys won't win that we've become unable to process reality, because bad guys do win quite a lot of the time. Almost always, I would even say. And since they are winners, certain other aspects of our cultural discourse kick in and we even sympathize with them. The hero stories, though, enable us to side with bullies and abusers even while pretending we don't. It is, unfortunately, a bucket of bull-hockey.

( M.I.A. & Romain Gavras, 'Born Free', NSFW )

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"about", part 2

I'm still a bit mildly stunned by the moment yesterday of fully grokking, as if all at once, that the real essence of the writings of the Marquis de Sade was not sexual deviation, but the rich doing whatever they want to poor people without any sort of consequence or accountability. (Well, okay, I was helped along to this epiphany by Grant Morrison.)

It is fascinating that the class aspect of these seminal writings rarely ever comes up at all in modern discourse about sadomasochism. Not surprising, but fascinating.

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the revolutionary gnosis

This post brought to you by the Thievery Corporation, who started their latest album Radio Retaliation with "Sound the Alarm," a collaboration with Sleepy Wonder:

Sound the alarm, order the attack
Selassie I soldiers beat Babylon back.

There's a lot of meaning in that beyond the historical reference, though we can start there. In 1928, Ras Tafari Makonnen was crowned King of Ethiopia and he assumed the royal name Haile Selassie I. Ethiopia was then one of only two independent nations in Africa, and many in Africa and the African diaspora saw the crowning of Selassie I as representing African resistance to the European colonial scheme.

In 1935 Benito Mussolini, who aspired to be the ruler of a new Roman Empire, invaded Ethiopia. It's hard to think of this as a "war"; Italian casualties were somewhere between 355 and 500, while Ethiopian casualties were in the order of 275,000. The colonial powers of Europe approved and recognized the occupation and annexation of Ethiopia in 1936 by the Italian Empire. Selassie I, in exile in England, warned Europe: "It is us today. It will be you tomorrow." Three years later saw the start of World War Two; and in 1941 British and Free French forces helped Ethopian troops liberate Ethiopia.

On one level the song is about these historical events, and on another level it is about the larger context of Africa shaking off the colonial powers. It also echoes the present day anti-neo-colonialist movement.

On yet another level, the song is a profession of the Rastafari worldview. "Babylon" is a generic name for empire (taken from those parts of Jewish scripture written after forced exile in Babylon) in a way that blends political reality with religious worldview. In this view all empires are the same; and all emperors, while they may have conflicts with one another, recognize each other as the powers that control the world's businesses, governments, and institutions.

Because my awareness of this worldview started with my investigations of ancient middle eastern Gnosticism, I still think of this as the gnostic view of political reality: worldly rulers are seen as shadows of demigod archons, whose empire over the earth is all-reaching; the faces may change, emperors may be deposed, but the numinous nature of Empire casts a permanent shadow on the human soul, and dominance will always resurface. Resistance against Empire is therefore not just political rebellion, but a challenge to the very concept of fate and to the notion that human nature is forevermore shaped by the desire to dominate others by force when possible. But this view is more than "gnostic": it the response of the religious spirit to the totality of economic and hegemonic domination that exists in the human sphere.

The visage on the album's cover is that of Subcomandante Marcos, the leader of the EZLN, and I bring this up to point out that while the song casts resistance to Empire in militaristic terms, the EZLN has actually turned away from the militaristic approach. This is good and necessary because, as the Revolution is beginning to understand, there is no way to defeat the Empire by matching the Empire's violence. When you take up arms "against" the Empire, you become of it, because Empire is rooted in the power you gain by pointing a weapon. For a graphic illustration of this point, I recommend Karin Badt's illuminating interview with a former FARC guerilla who was recruited as a young girl.

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a mostly-rhetorical question to ponder

Does the very existence of nation-states require the oppression of minorities, women, and the poor?

This is a dangerous question, because it calls into question the doctrine of many religions (namely, that those in charge are favored by God) along with the fundamental tenet of post-Renaissance political theory (namely, that legitimate authority to govern is given by consent of the governed).

But it's hard to avoid the question, when looking at just how universal an issue institutional and ideological racism is, and keeping in mind the words of Incite! regarding the state and its law enforcement agencies as a major source of violence against women of color (and just this morning

ginmar made a post with an example close to her circle of friends). It's also in my mind seeing the utter panic beginning to spread among American white supremacists as they contemplate the prospect of someone "not like them" becoming president of the US (h/t

redslime for the video) (and the violence and threats which are starting to brew as a result).

At first i thought it was just empires that operated this way -- playing off one minority against another, the way Stalin did so well (just look at the legacy of this approach still in use today). Is there any way to demonstrate that nation-states are not just little empires in this regard?

Related question: why has every historical example of a spontaneous egalitarian revolution (like, for example, anarchist Catalonia (h/t

sammaelhain) or the Paris Commune) been undermined by the bourgeoisie?

I know there are a number of presumptions in the way that i'm framing these questions, and they, like the questions themselves, are fair game...

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(no subject)

It's hard to muster the energy to care anymore. 51% or more of my fellow Americans are perfectly content to continue electing politicians who are going to continue doing as they please to benefit a privileged few, at great cost to everyone else, in defiance of any sense of justice, fairness, or rightness.

Even in my weariness, though, i am jarred by this latest bit of dada from the Bush Administration:

[S]ome commentators have suggested that we should criminally prosecute the people found in the reports to have committed misconduct. Where there is evidence of criminal wrongdoing, we vigorously investigate it. And where there is enough evidence to charge someone with a crime, we vigorously prosecute. But not every wrong, or even every violation of the law, is a crime. In this instance, the two joint reports found only violations of the civil service laws.

Gee, "some commentators have suggested" that people who break the law should be prosecuted. Who, i wonder, might these "commentators" be? Um... maybe... everyone? I mean, isn't that what laws are for? You get caught breaking them, you face the music? But according to the Crony General, "not every violation of the law is a crime." Let's just throw accountability out the window, shall we?

That does not mean, as some people have suggested, that those officials who were found by the joint reports to have committed misconduct have suffered no consequences. Far from it. ... To put it in concrete terms, I doubt that anyone in this room would want to trade places with any of those people.

Oh noes! Poor Monica Goodling, poor Kyle Sampson. The Crony General has now publicly said they broke the law but won't be tried for it. Now they'll have to settle for high-paid cushy jobs at some conservative think-tank retirement-home-for-bespoiled-cronies like AEI. Or maybe they'll just take an early retirement and write their memoirs. That's some harsh justice! I'm sure the thousands of folks whose houses and cars were taken because they bought some pot, and who now earn 11 cents an hour working for UNICOR during the duration of their prison sentence, will be concerned for Goodling and Sampson.

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meta-neo-inquiry, part one

The goal of meta-neo-inquiry is to answer, as well as possible, the question: "What is going on here, and what is the most just way to respond?"

Response is an indispensable element because meta-neo- ethics demands more emphasis on right action than on right words or right belief. It's not what you say or feel, it's what you do that matters. I can forgive errant words if your actions put you on the side of conscience.

A lot of the time the answer is pretty straightforward. Someone is beating up someone else; the most just way to respond is to stop the fight and find out why it started. Someone stole someone else's car; the most just way to respond is to recover the car and return it to its owner.

Sometimes though the answer is not straightforward at all, often because the truth has been occluded.

Discourse tends to be dominated by those in power; and so where conscience leads us into opposition with the power paradigm (on those fronts where the people in power are committing injustices and warping the cultural discourse to legitimize or cover it up), discourse itself becomes territory to be fought over.

Dissidents are kept off-balance by having even their very language pulled out from under them like a rug. One generation of dissidents comes up with a way to vocalize what is happening to them and what is wrong with their condition; it's an organic process which starts with art and fashion, or other kinds of consciousness raising. Political changes are demanded, and a few concessions are made. But by the time the next generation comes along, when it comes time to pass on this knowledge, all of the groovy terms and images they came up with to communicate their dissent have been misappropriated and commodified by the power paradigm. They've been rendered useless; their meaning has decayed.

It is fair to ask, of every text you encounter, what is the author's agenda? As time passes it becomes harder and harder to answer this question, because one's agenda in writing a text is a response to the culture to which she belongs. Cultures change but texts tend not to. So any text older than, say, 40 or 50 years, can easily be subverted by the power paradigm and people can be educated to read it a certain way; afterwards, one requires a specialized awareness of historical context to have any hope of recreating the original agenda of any text, especially if the text had any degree of subversiveness to it.

My contention is that this line of inquiry will demonstrate that many spontaneous movements over the centuries -- whether political, religious, philosophical, or artistic -- can be demonstrated to have their origin in subversion against the injustice of the power paradigm. The products of a "culture industry" established by the power paradigm itself tend not to endure because they carry remarkably little meaning to begin with, and most of us carry an innate recognition of that even if our consciousness has not been raised.

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who gets to speak for 'the people'?

The American Indian Movement yesterday launched a new, interesting discourse on authority and colonialism, in declaring their intention to dissolve the treaties between the Lakota nation and the United States of America and seek international recognition as a soveriegn nation.

I have to confess, i read about what happened yesterday with a great deal of joy, but also a considerable amount of worry. The AIM is not well regarded by the US federal government and, assuming the feds don't just ignore this completely, they are likely to find themselves being designated a terrorist organization.

If that happens, any US citizen who expresses support for their cause would be considered by the federal government to be a terrorist sympathizer. Let that sink in for a moment.

Consider these two different articles describing yesterday's event:

( Read more... )

Here's what i want to draw my attention to, because it's essential to how the world and the US federal government are going to respond to this. The first article describes the Lakota delegation as a collection of freedom-seeking activists who pointedly do not represent the official tribal governments. The second article characterizes the delegation as a collection of Lakota tribal leaders, and treats their declaration as if it has official force.

So, what does this mean? Essentially the move is being done by a collection of influential activists who are denouncing the authority of their official tribal governments and claiming for themselves the authority to negotiate with the United Nations on behalf of the Lakota people.

Can they do that?

Well, that's a hell of a question, isn't it?

Who has the right to speak 'on behalf of' someone else? Well ideally, someone can only speak for you if you have individually granted them that authority. But functionally it's just not possible to get individual assent from every single person.

I'm not familiar enough with the AIM or with Russell Means and his allies to know how much popular backing and authority they have within the Lakota nation. I think, though, that they are acting on their own and counting on widespread popular support for their actions within the Lakota nation: a sort of after-the-fact delegation of authority from the populace to speak for them. The underlying chance they're taking is that a significant number of Lakota Indians will even notice it. So whether or not Means & co. can claim to speak for the Lakota people will become clear over time.

In the meantime, it may be said that they perceive a need to speak out, even without that official, on-paper authority which we all pretend comes from democratic elections. They perceive that they live under an unjust hegemony and feel driven by conscience to speak out against it and to seek allies, to seek like-minded people who have the position and authority to give assistance. As such, they're taking a chance that in claiming authority before the fact it will materialize after the fact when a 'critical mass' of people act as though they have it.

Which is why AIM is seeking the assistance and recognition of the new South American Superpower.

In any case, isn't this basically what a prophet does? I mean, setting aside religious and spiritual dimensions, a prophet is basically someone who speaks on our behalf before the rest of us even know that a thing needs to be said. I'm not saying Russell Means & co. are prophets (you can each be the judge of that), but i am saying that we don't always know who is and who isn't a prophet until after the fact.

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the rubber-stamping of mukasey, another shiv stuck in the heart of freedom

A senior Justice Department official, charged with reworking the administration's legal position on torture in 2004 became so concerned about the controversial interrogation technique of waterboarding that he decided to experience it firsthand, sources told ABC News.

Daniel Levin, then acting assistant attorney general, went to a military base near Washington and underwent the procedure to inform his analysis of different interrogation techniques.

After the experience, Levin told White House officials that even though he knew he wouldn't die, he found the experience terrifying and thought that it clearly simulated drowning.

source: Bush Administration Blocked Waterboarding Critic

How did the White House reward this intrepid and enterprising individual? By forcing him out of the Justice Department before he could finish writing his memo.

As Keith Olbermann put it (thanks

novapsyche for the link):

The presidency of George W. Bush has now devolved into a criminal conspiracy to cover the ass of George W. Bush.

All the petulancy, all the childish threats, all the blank-stare stupidity; all the invocations of World War III, all the sophistic questions about which terrorist attacks we wanted him not to stop, all the phony secrets; all the claims of executive privilege, all the stumbling tap-dancing of his nominees, all the verbal flatulence of his apologists...

All of it is now, after one revelation last week, transparently clear for what it is: the pathetic and desperate manipulation of the government, the refocusing of our entire nation, toward keeping this mock president and this unstable vice president and this departed wildly self-overrating attorney general, and the others, from potential prosecution for having approved or ordered the illegal torture of prisoners being held in the name of this country.

Four retired generals weighed in on the matter [PDF]:

...We write because this issue above all demands clarity: Waterboarding is inhumane, it is torture, and it is illegal.

...This is a critically important issue - but it is not, and never has been, a complex issue, and even to suggest otherwise does a terrible disservice to this nation. All U.S. Government agencies and personnel, and not just America's military forces, must abide by both the spirit and letter of the controlling provisions of international law. Cruelty and torture - no less than wanton killing - is neither justified nor legal in any circumstance. ... Abu Ghraib and other notorious examples of detainee abuse have been the product, at least in part, of a self-serving and destructive disregard for the well-established legal principles applicable to this issue. This must end.

But will it end? Here's the punchline: the nomination of Mukasey for attorney general, after he could not, in the course of his role in covering the ass of George Bush and Dick Cheney, even admit to having thought about this question, has just been rubber-stamped by the Democrats.

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for consideration, a meta-neo-marxian semiotic principle

A while back, someone on my friend's list linked to an essay about art as misappropriation. I don't think it was linked approvingly, but the concept has stuck in the back of my mind, something to digest.

Then not long ago i read about the iconic image of Che Guevara as now appears on tee-shirts and numerous other commercial products. I don't know as much as i should about Che, but i think i have already well expounded on my views that anyone who uses violence is no revolutionary at all but is a part of the system. Anyway, this bit stood out in my mind, a quote from Trisha Ziff, who has organized an exhibition on the Che icon.

"There is a theory that an image can only exist for a certain amount of time before capitalism appropriates it. But capitalism only wants to appropriate images if they retain some sense of danger."

Hmm, i have to back up a little. I call my views "meta-neo-Marxian." "Neo" because we have progressed quite a bit in the last 150 years, in understanding the sociology of oppression and the intricacies of economics, and "meta" because i am not a subscriber to a philosophy, but merely a critic whose views are inspired by the trajectory which Marx played a role in laying out.

I view our situation as less a matter of "capitalism vs. socialism" and more a matter of me-centered world-parsing vs. us-centered world-parsing. I take this view because (a) the same problems preceded capitalism and have also tended to plague socialist societies and (b) i believe a truly just and merciful society could function compassionately with almost any economic or political arrangement.

So let me re-write that quote into a version that more closely matches my current views:

"There is a theory that a subversive image can only exist for a certain amount of time before the power paradigm strips it of meaning and makes it a commodity."

For the political-socialist, the image of Che is a commodity in that it is a valuable emotional push-button; and for the political-capitalist, the image of Che is a commodity because it sells tee-shirts. Neither point of view is really interested in exploring the meaning of Che's life, words, and actions.

Now, for the principle i promised in the title of this post. To wit:

Images and text will lose their meaning over time, in part because meaning is anathema to the power paradigm.

The surest way to strip an image of meaning is to give it a dollar value or to use it as an emblem of demagoguery. But the principle works in other ways. Part of this is because each generation tends to create its own kinds of meaning, and so young people do not react in the same way to a creative work as earlier generations of people did.

I thought about this while reading recently about a Monet painting which was vandalized. Frankly, i found i could care less; some old painting who's time has come and gone was damaged. But i realize that the painting meant something to its creator; it meant something to the creator's contemporaries; and it means various things to various people today. Do those meanings resemble one another?

Who could do such a thing as vandalize a Monet? Someone to whom the work of art had little or no meaning. (Or, alternately, someone to whom the act of destruction meant more than the painting itself -- but... well, i have to reign in the scope of this somehow.)

But what is the meaning of a work of art? What is meaning? Without waxing too philosophical - i want to intentionally leave this a little fuzzy - i think of meaning as the reaction one has when contemplating something. But, additionally, the genuine meaning of a creative work is primarily that reaction which is intended to be provoked by the work's creator. I emphasized that because there are theories of criticism which argue the opposite - that meaning is supplied by the observer of a creative work. Such theories can, in my opinion, be demonstrated to be apologetics for the power paradigm.

One way to reduce the meaning of an object is to directly misappropriate it - to use the phrase or image to advance a different agenda and then to use your superior numbers or budget to simply drown out all incidence of the original usage. A radical movement of any import can expect to see this happen to their language, and as a result the dissenters of each generation are pretty much on their own. Another way to reduce the meaning of an object is to surround it with approved, dissent-sanitized replicas: the culture industry.

However, it is not just subversive meaning which is distrusted by the power paradigm - ultimately, it is all meaning that is unreliable. Meaning is capricious, meaning is unquantifiable, meaning is unmarketable and unprofitable. Even meaning which has nothing to do with politics can inspire someone to question the status quo. This includes faith. "Spirituality," as i mean it when i use it in my journal, is a process of misappropriation by which the words used by people of faith and conscience to describe their experience is sanitized of any politically radical content in ways that turn it into icon-worship. In other words, "spirituality" (as defined by me) is the attempt to destroy meaning and faith and replace it with a religion industry.

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it's all about the way we define our society's priorities

The Gap has gone into full PR-damage control mode after it was revealed that one of their vendors was selling them clothing made by literal child slaves.

They have plausible deniability of course, because they buy from vendors who hired subcontractors to make their clothing. And they probably are actually appalled by the problem itself, not just by the criticism they're facing. They never told anyone to purchase children as slaves... they just gave their business to whoever could come up with clothing at the lowest price.

The Marxian term for the process at work here is commodity fetishism, which is a distortion in social priorities brought about by putting price tags on things. It's a distortion which blinkers us to the causal effects of our decision-making, the long-range or distant ethical ramifications of continuous cost-cutting and profit-maximization.

One aspect of this distortion is the devaluation, and subsequent discarding, of children.

In the agricultural and pastoral economy, children are a boon and blessing; in the urbanized economic model, they are (economically speaking) a burden. It is not a simple matter of children working on farms and ranches but not working in markets or factories - throughout most of history (including the present), children have occupied a place in the urban division of labor. No, the real issue is that in an urban economy people are separated from the wealth they create. They make things or perform services, for which they receive a wage which is not - which is never - equal to the average revenue product of their labor. What that means, in plain language, is that a person is never paid a wage equal to the value their labor creates.

That extra value is sucked up by the upper class. This is how it is that the gap between rich and poor tends to grow, and this is part of what i have, for two years now, referred to as slow-motion cannibalism.

Simply by virtue of existing in an urbanized society, an individual wage earner can statistically expect their net value to decrease over time. Some people manage to improve their lot; for every one who does, there are two or three who sink further into the whole. This is reflected in our financial life by perpetual debt; unless one owns property and capital, one is in debt forever to landlords and to banks. And to a poor family which has little of worth to give a child upon their birth, a child is an economic drain from the instant she or he is born.

It is a drain that people are willing to bear because of love. But being in debt makes you vulnerable. And a family that starts out with a margin of zero is on very thin ice indeed. Any kind of mishap - an illness, a drought, an inopportune death, and suddenly the unthinkable becomes the inevitable.

There are certain realities that are not altered by economic or political philosophy, and one of these realities is that the survival and caretaking of an individual human child represents a tremendous investment, of time, energy... even of love.

However, because of the way commodity fetishism works, this investment is not recognized as such. It is not recognized as an undertaking which creates value, even though it does. Viewed through dollar-sign-colored-glasses, the investment of raising a child is invisible, contrasted with the investment of buying a new piece of factory equipment.

When bankers run into problems, other capitalists and the government rush to prop them up. But when parents run into problems, they are on their own, a problem exacerbated by the urban breakdown of the extended family. On their own, with no prospects of aid or rescue, a desperate family will turn to horrific measures to survive - selling a child into slavery, or prostituting them, or killing them.

As an alternate vision, imagine a society that does recognize and give value to the investment of child-raising. Imagine a society where parents who run into difficulty are able to draw upon assistance based on the capital of their investment in the future. This would have to be a society where people ask, "How does this benefit us?" instead of, "How does this benefit me?"

We are only a state of mind away from it.

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the un declaration on indigenous rights

Not that it's been mentioned in US news anywhere, but yesterday the UN General Assembly adopted a resolution on the rights of indigenous people which has been in negotiation for 20 years.

Four nations voted against it: the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. What do these nations have in common? Huge tracts of land and vast amounts of natural resources which were stolen from indigenous people.

Critics in Canada, New Zealand, and Australia are vocal about their country's "no" vote. Here in the US? I think the media's still talking about how 'fat' Britney Spears looks now.

The State Department is concerned that this will impact US relations with Indian tribes. Most galling for the empire, i think, is Part V which requires the consent of all indigenous nations before laws can be passed which affect them.

Defenders of the vote in Australia and New Zealand have echoed the old racist refrain that it gives "one group special rights over another." It just sickens me every time i see challenges to one's privilege and efforts to bring about equality interpreted as "reverse -ism."

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tyranny of the quantitative

Boston's Big Dig. The NYC steam pipes. And now a freaking highway bridge in Minneapolis.

Forget terrorists. I'm afraid of our crumbling infrastructure. Each of us is far more likely to be killed by collapsing bridges, falling ceiling panels, or exploding steam pipes than any terrorist.

Let's go further back and include the Katrina response in this, because it, too, reflects a similar lack of focus.

And, let's expand outwards and include ethylene glycol in toothpaste and melamine in pet food. Because all of these things are connected by a central theme... which is, ironically, the lack of anything resembling a common focus or vision.

We don't have any kind of meaningful common focus in our decision-making as a society. So many of the quandaries we're in -- from global warming to the oceans dying to resource depletion -- happen because millions of developers, politicians, investors, and laborers are each doing our own thing, with little or no regard to anything resembling a big picture.

We're winging it, and we can't do that anymore. Luck runs out.

Part of this problem has been described in economic discourse as the Tragedy of the Commons. But beyond the obvious difficulties of overuse and depletion, these problems are a tangible result of the dearth of meaningful discourse regarding economic problems and solutions.

Politics has become an advertising-driven enterprise. Campaign consultants talk about their candidate's image as a "branding" concern, and they judge the success of their efforts by what kind of emotions people have when they think of their client. They focus-group test sound-bites and slogans and key phrases which are designed to worm their way into your brain and install an emotional pushbutton so you respond the proper way when they press it. Meaning is driven from the process because meaning is unpredictable. If any candidate comes along who says something really meaningful, it could throw the whole scheme off, and everyone's jobs in the campaign-industrial complex would be threatened. The consultants, whose job it is to win elections, not solve society's problems, distrust meaning. And the media, of course, plays right along, encouraging this trend and helpfully marginalizing any candidate who threatens to bring in too much meaningful discussion. Because for them, too, meaning is dangerous.

This sounds like an abstract problem, but it isn't because people are dying as a result of this, and those of us who haven't been killed by it are seeing our quality of life be affected.

"Boring" things like routine maintenance and food inspections and disaster preparation -- you know, the stuff that should be a no-brainer -- gets de-funded and de-prioritized because it's easier to get a photo op standing in front of something new, bigger, shinier. The result is mile after mile after mile of empty shopping centers, brownfields, urban blight, crappy schools, decaying neighborhoods.

This isn't a call for a political solution, BTW. This problem can develop in a Communist nation (cf. Chernobyl) just as easily as it can happen in a capitalist nation. The real issue is lack of involvement. Lack of discourse. Lack of contemplation and consideration.

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government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth

Yesterday was July 4, and i spent some time reflecting on sentiments formalized by the Continental Congress 231 years ago.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

Beautiful words, and it is hard not to love the sentiment behind them. Yet barely 9 years later, several of the people who signed this document were calling for men to be put to death for (mostly peacefully) resisting injustice supported by their government. Others used the event in question to bolster their argument that the federal government must be strengthened and expanded.

This event was known as Shays' Rebellion, a peasant uprising in protest against the large number of farmers in western Massachusetts who were being driven off their land by debtor's courts and foreclosing banks.

Eight years after that, George Washington (then US president) personally commanded a militia assembled to put down the Whiskey Rebellion in Pennsylvania. This, too, was essentially a peasant revolt.

And so, less than 20 years after the Declaration of Independence was signed, the nascent United States was already defying its own founding principles, using force to suppress dissent and civil disobedience.

Thomas Jefferson grasped the wrongness of this, though i suspect when he wrote this he was being maybe a little facetious:

A little rebellion now and then is a good thing. ... [W]hat country can preserve its liberties, if its rulers are not warned from time to time, that this people preserve the spirit of resistance? Let them take arms. The remedy is to set them right as to the facts, pardon and pacify them. What signify a few lives lost in a century or two? The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time, with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure.

What does it mean that even the people who wrote and promoted these words could only carry them so far, and not to their natural conclusion? These words, drawn by a collection of men many of whom were slaveowners, rest side-by-side in a document characterizing Indians as "merciless Indian Savages whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions."

It tells us something interesting about the human mind, that one can apprehend an important new principle without really seeing how it applies to oneself and one's own interests. This is why it is vitally important to nurture dissent and honest discourse -- because sometimes we need other people to point out our own shortsightedness.

It tells us something else interesting about the human mind, that it is able to draw inspiration from words beyond what they were really intended to mean, in the process creating a new trajectory in human history. The American Revolution and the subsequent birth of the American Empire would not have been anything new in human history; racism and the use of government force to maintain an unjust social order are common motifs, and revolution so often represents only a changing of the guard. And yet along with it came this sentiment which we have elevated to nearly the status of scripture, because of its capacity to inspire hope that we will someday chart a path to a more complete understanding of human freedom.

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what “impressionable” means

Originally published at Monstrous Regiment. You can comment here or there.

This morning i had a jarring, chilling exposure to what the word “impressionable” really means.

My wife and i had to go to her son’s school this morning to deal with, well, the kinds of things kids do. All we knew was that the principal wanted to talk to her. I went along as moral support. We didn’t know they were going to drag her son into the room with us so that he could sit on one side of the room with four adults looking at him asking him about what happened. We had no idea we were going to be made into de facto accomplices.

And, to be fair, they didn’t grill him like interrogators. No, it was all maddeningly “reasonable.” It’s just that under any sort of scrutiny whatsoever he closes up, so we didn’t hear much at all of his side of what happened.

I’ve never seen anyone squirm so much in my life. And so, with him basically having been found guilty, we coached him through what he would say by way of apology and reassurance to the other aggrieved kids. To some extent that was appropriate, since kids are still learning about what it means to be an ethical person who respects other people’s boundaries.

But my wife and i were profoundly uncomfortable about the whole “words being put in his mouth” thing. And that’s all i saw everywhere i looked in the school. The “pledge of allegiance to the flag,” which was recited while we were there. Everywhere, ‘motivational’ posters with captions like “Curiosity: i choose to learn.”

The underlying message is, this is a place where we put words into your mouth. You know? I don’t think i’ve ever met a kid who had to be told to “choose to learn.”

When you’re a kid, you don’t have the liberty to choose what you want to do or say. You are told what you want to do or say. And it is often presented obliquely as if it is a desire coming from you, the kid. And when it is said this way often enough, and when you parrot it and get the appropriate reward, it sinks in. Really, really deeply.

It doesn’t matter whether or not kids understand what the pledge of allegiance is about. To them, it’s just dumb words that they have to repeat every morning… which they do in a droning, hypnotic, rhythmic monotone. But they do understand, on a basic level, that it is something they do to make the adults around them beam with pride (”What good, obedient, upstanding, patriotic kids we have!”) and to avoid punishment for not complying.

And much of this is about learning how to perform the gender we’ve been assigned.

Being in school helped remind me about how that worked when i was younger. I remember viewing adulthood as this barren wasteland where you wander around as a broken person, your dreams and individuality stunted beyond repair. I suppose that was my expectation because my preparation for adulthood consisted of this constant pressure to be someone-not-me, by way of the silencing of my own galla-voice and the replacement of it with something suitably “masculine.”

I remember, for example, eagerly joining the high school wrestling team after lots of input from my father about how much he had enjoyed it. I had never been a sporty kid, though being on the wrestling team was actually good for me in some ways. I wonder if people today look at my almost-thigh-length hair and somewhat femme presentation (minus, you know, the occasional stompy boots) and have any trouble picturing me grasping someone and pinning him to the mat?

But i would never have “wanted” to do that if it hadn’t been subtly put there, if it hadn’t been rewarded and encouraged once i said i wanted to do it.

On a bigger scale, this is why women’s “consent” to various kinds of things in a patriarchal society can be so sketchy sometimes.

But this leads into troubling territory because i’m wondering how we can distinguish between “educating” a kid (enabling their cognition while also respecting their identity and will) versus putting our thoughts into their heads and our words in their mouths. Kids don’t always know how to make decisions, it’s one of the things they’re still learning, and they sometimes have to be guided to a decision. (Or… light bulb comes on… do they?)

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the personal is political

Originally published at Monstrous Regiment. You can comment here or there.

At Boston Pride i tabled for the Network La Red for a couple of hours. A Latino fellow came by at one point and said he’s against domestic violence too — and hinted (i don’t remember his exact words) that he was obliquely referring to INS raids and similar anti-Latino actions of the US Government.

But it’s all connected, really. Oppression of a minority by a government is much the same thing on a bigger scale. The mechanisms in prevailing ideologies and institutions which make it easier for someone to get away with battering their partner also enable and justify official racist violence. These webs of abuse interweave, for example when a woman is brought into the United States as a domestic worker and then turned into a sex slave; the people holding her threaten to reveal her undocumented status to the INS as a way to keep her compliant.

Personal, first-hand experience can be unreliable; but it’s also the only thing we have that cannot be taken away from us. The messiness of our lives under oppression, the various survival strategies which “coincidentally” do not fit on religious moralistic laundry lists, make it more difficult for anyone to sympathize with us. That we live in a society that teaches us to compare other peoples’ lives to ideological checklists makes it easier for us to stay divided as well.

Understanding the way the world works, the way our laws and doctrines and “common sense” and logic and language have been constructed in order to maintain privilege for those who have it, is an important part of working for justice. But, just as “upholding the law” is taught to us as the way we know justice has been done, upholding ideology is taught to us as the way we know we’re right.

Which is why it’s significant and subversive to say “the personal is political.” Those of us who live, inconveniently and untidily enough, outside the lines like a stray crayon mark can give direct personal testimony to the wrongness (or at least incompleteness) of an ideology. This is true even when the ideology is radical; and the results can be disastrous for the unity of the radical community.

For example, during the 1970’s and 1980’s a prevailing ideology throughout much of the feminist movement was that “women are good and nurturing while men are bad and abusive.” (For the record, it’s worth noting as an aside that Andrea Dworkin, often cited as a gender essentialist, took a lot of grief for taking a vocal public position opposed to the idea of “natural female superiority”.)

In that climate, women who came forward seeking shelter because they were being abused by their lesbian partners were quite often silenced. Battered women’s shelters had been set up on a “female victim, male abuser” model and women who had been beaten by women were inconvenient and unwelcome. When they did gain admittance to shelters they had to deal with homophobia from staff and other survivors.

Lesbian abusers, like battering husbands, used prevailing misogyny to frighten their partners. But they could use the threat of outing to keep their victim in line. They could use their partner’s lack of knowledge about lesbianism to keep them in the dark about the abusive nature of their relationship (”This is what lesbian love is like,” etc.) They knew, too, that their partners would not find sympathy within the women’s shelter network. Ideology, institution, and abuse woven together in a web keeping women down — and the experience from the survivor’s point of view is quite similar whether their batterer is a man or a woman.

Lesbian (and gay) abuse survivors were also silenced by the gay and lesbian activist community, seeking to establish an image of our community as “clean and upright.” They were afraid that seeing us discuss things like gay or lesbian partner abuse would place ammo in the hands of homophobes. Abuse survivors would just have to “take one for the team.”

Now, fortunately, there is some recognition of the issue, and movement in some areas, even though it is still largely uphill.

The thing is, anyone who silences another person on the basis of a prevailing ideology is doing the work of domination. Why is not as important as what. That is a part of what we are saying when we say the personal is political.

I think we should make it a kind of radical oath that we must resolve to hear what people say about their experience before ideology. It’s hard — it’s very hard. I see myself violating this all the time.