Musings

United States of Conspiracy

WATCH: United States of Conspiracy

Interesting doc of how trafficking in conspiracy theories went from the fringes of U.S. politics into the White House & into the minds of millions. FRONTLINE examines the alliance of conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, Trump advisor Roger Stone, and the president, and their role in the battle over truth and lies.

The Ugly Terror of a Fascist Abyss Lurks in the Background of This Pandemic by Henry A. Giroux

Source: TruthOut

There are lessons to be learned regarding how history is reproduced in the present. First, there is the Trump administration’s caging of children on the southern border. Second, there is Trump’s threat to use “dominating force” and unleash the National Guard and police upon demonstrators peacefully resisting police violence against people of color. Third, as Jason Stanley points out, there is Trump’s relentless language of violence designed both to embolden second amendment gun rights activists toward committing violence and to dehumanize certain populations while attempting “to harness the emotion of nostalgia to the central themes of fascist ideology — authoritarianism, hierarchy, purity and struggle.”

Trump’s authoritarian impulses and fascist politics took a dangerous turn when he authorized the use of unmarked, military-clad federal law enforcement shock troops to round up and detain protesters in Portland, Oregon. The troops offered no proof of identification, drove around in unmarked cars, pulled people off the streets with no probable cause, provided no sense of whose directives they were acting under, or who was to be held accountable for their actions. Ted Wheeler, the mayor of Portland, called such actions “an attack on our democracy.” Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi tweeted in reference to Portland that, “Trump and his storm troopers must be stopped.”

We have seen this before under Hitler, Augusto Pinochet in Chile, and in other dictatorships. When such actions appeared in the past, dissidents, demonstrators and intellectuals disappeared, were beaten, tortured and interrogated in undisclosed sites, and in the worse scenarios, were murdered. What has happened in Portland suggests that the “war on terror” has shifted from abroad to the homeland. Outraged by such actions, Charles Pierce, writing in Esquire, suggests that this may be a trial run for an authoritarian state:

A major American city is being softly Pinochet-ed in broad daylight. And, if we know one thing, if this president and his administration get away with this, it will only get worse … this could be a dry run for the kind of general urban mobilization at which the president has been hinting since this summer’s protests began…. Portland may be a dumbshow for dummies, but it also looks like a dress rehearsal. This is not an “authoritarian impulse.” This is authoritarian government — straight, no chaser. And this administration has a powerful thirst for it. It will do anything if it thinks it can get away with it in order to benefit a president who wants to bring the Republic down on his head. Unmarked vehicles, disappearing people off the streets?

These events mimic, if not recall, an older period in history when Hitler, following the crisis produced by the Reichstag fire, seized upon the ensuing fear, terror and war fever to further consolidate his power. Trump pushing the United States to the edge of fascism in the midst of a pandemic by using the military to stifle domestic protests reinforces the seriousness of growing claims that the United States is moving closer to a full-blown authoritarian state.

A crisis has spread across the globe driven by a pandemic pestilence that exhibits a dystopian presence at odds with any just, prudent and equitable notion of the future. The U.S. is in a state of crisis. This, medical, racial, economic and educational crisis touches every aspect of public life. We are in a new historical period, one that has inherited a neoliberal legacy in which every aspect of society has been transformed and corrupted by the tools of financialization, deregulation and austerity. This is an era in which the scourge of neoliberalism merged with the ideologies of racial cleansing and a politics of disposability — an age in which economic activity was divorced from social costs, all the while enabling policies of racial cleansing and white nationalism to become defining features of the public sphere and an established mode of governance.

We are also in a period in which the old social order is in the midst of a legitimation crisis and new political formations are trying to be reborn, to paraphrase the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci. Out of this period of uncertainty, new forces for change have appeared evident in the presence of millions across the globe protesting racial injustice and state violence. The COVID plague has produced an age of uncertainty, fragmentation, despair and a dire foreboding about the future. Certainties have been replaced by shared fears. More troubling is the apprehension that the present crisis has an air of longevity about it, constituting a turning point in history. The stark choice of what the future might look like appears to hang between the forces of despotism and democracy. Yet, as real as this foreboding appears, history is open, and how it will unfold remains in the balance. The pandemic is a crisis that cannot be allowed to turn into a catastrophe in which all hope is lost. On the contrary, the pandemic that threatens democracy’s ability to breathe should also offer up the possibility to rethink politics and the habits of critical education, human agency, values and what life would be like in a democratic socialist society. Amid the corpses produced by neoliberal capitalism and COVID-19, there are also flashes of hope, a chance to move beyond a contemporary resurgence of authoritarianism. This suggests rejecting the normalizing ideologies of a poisonous cynicism and a demobilizing conformity endemic to neoliberal capitalism. It also points to the need to reclaim a vision of a radical politics that is more compassionate, equitable, just and inclusive.

Within a new wave of resistance and rebellion, anti-democratic principles that had been normalized are being questioned with an inspiring sense of collective urgency. This is especially true among people of color and others bearing the burden of economic and political colonialism. The horrors of inequality, compulsory austerity, defunding of public health systems, and the collapse of the economy in 2008 produced by four decades of neoliberalism are finally being acknowledged as the fundamental plague behind the current pandemic. This is a plague marked by egregious degrees of exploitation, unchecked militarism, and a racialized politics of disposability and terminal exclusion in which human beings are viewed as disposable, reinforced if not propelled by an ethos of white nationalism and white supremacy. This long residue of unbridled capitalism is inseparable from its deep-rooted institutionalized racism and a pestilence of disposability, updated into a form of neoliberal fascism.

 

Fascist principles now operate at so many levels of everyday society that it is difficult to recognize them, especially as they have the imprimatur of power at the highest levels of government. Fascist pedagogical ideas, practices and desires work through diverse social media platforms and mainstream and right-wing cultural apparatuses in multiple ways. This is the space of a pandemic pedagogy that is produced in the workstations and cultural apparatuses that function ideologically and politically to objectify people, promote spectacles of violence, endorse consumerism as the only viable way of life and legitimate a murderous nationalism.

A pandemic pedagogy has emerged in the midst of this plague that makes ignorance a fundamental principle of politics, and in doing so, tends to function so as “to erase everything that matters.”

Pandemic pedagogy works subconsciously as an affective mode of self-sabotage. It legitimates the discourse of hate in everyday exchanges, degrades people of color, promotes thoughtlessness through the ubiquity of celebrity culture, and produces an endless array of authoritarian pedagogical practices that serve to exploit, dominate and depoliticize us. In the pandemic fog of social and historical amnesia, moral boundaries disappear, people become more accepting of extreme acts of cruelty, and willingly submit to propaganda machines that disdain notions of truth and view any viable critique of power as “fake news,” all the while disconnecting language and policies from their social costs.
This plague of neoliberal fascism is just one pestilence among many. This is a pestilence that engulfs U.S. society as memories of caged children disappear into a vaporized culture of immediacy, the killing of journalists is forgotten, and the lynching of Black bodies is buried beneath the discourse of a post-racial society. In addition, the terror of a fascist politics evaporates in the affective modalities of pleasure and fear, and a rampant culture of political theater and spectacles.

As the underside of fascist politics, pandemic pedagogy closes down the space of translation, and thrives on a machinery of inscriptions that erases the notion that human beings are not only moral and political agents, but also historical subjects capable of both understanding and changing the world. This depoliticizing practice is not only a political and ethical issue but also an educational issue that connects the power of critical understanding to the capacity for action, empowerment and transformation.

Pandemic pedagogy makes clear that the most important forms of domination are cultural, intellectual and pedagogical while embracing the tools of belief and persuasion as appropriate weapons in the struggle over meaning, knowledge, values and identities. This depoliticizing practice is not only a political and ethical issue but also an educational issue that undermines the power of critical understanding to produce the capacity for action, empowerment and transformation. Pandemic pedagogy functions as a propaganda machine to bury what Foucault once called “the dramaturgy of the real.”

On the other hand, critical pedagogy works to establish a symbolic relationship with the world. It highlights the workings of power and the possibility to use the symbolic and pedagogical dimensions of struggle as weapons in the struggle over power, knowledge, agency and social relations. This is a pedagogy in which the political becomes more pedagogical by taking on the challenge of using the power of persuasion to change the way people see things and resist those ideas and institutions that thrive on the energies of the political zombies. Critical pedagogy deepens the role of the political by including and emphasizing the importance of the struggle over cultural meanings and identities as well as over more narrow political terrains like the workplace, schools and the state. If pandemic pedagogy fuels multiple forms of domination that accelerate the deaths of the unwanted and make social death a self-generated practice, critical pedagogy is the political antidote to such practices.
As a counterpoint to existing pandemic pedagogies, the relationship among education, historical consciousness and political action points to new possibilities for change. And while historical consciousness can be both informative and emancipatory, it can lead to “malicious interpretations of the present, as well as elements of history that are difficult to accept.” The trajectory of history is not innocent and it needs to be interrogated in order to think through how we can build on it through a process of critique and possibility. At the level of critique, as Angela Davis has suggested, “we need to figure out context within which people can understand the nature of U.S. history and the role that racism and capitalism and heteropatriarchy have played in forging that history.”

On the more emancipatory and empowering side, critical pedagogy informed by the value of historical consciousness and moral witnessing can uncover dangerous memories and the narratives of those whose voices have been drowned out by those who have the power to write history to serve their narrow and reactionary interests. The greatest pandemic we face is the pandemic of ignorance and the willingness to surrender our power as individual and social agents to those who write the past and present in the scripts of domination. Pedagogy has never been more urgent as a political tool that can offer the resources to challenge the ideological, educational and militant practices deployed by emerging right-wing and fascist groups. Pedagogy is crucial for understanding how power shapes and is reinvented with respect to questions of culture, sexuality, history and political agency.

As a political project, pedagogy is the struggle over those public and private spaces in which people’s everyday lives are aligned with particular narratives, identities, cultural practices and political values. As such, pedagogy is the essential scaffolding of social interaction and the foundation of the public sphere. It is a crucial political practice because it takes seriously what it means to understand the relationship between how we learn and how we act as individual and social agents; that is, it is concerned not only with how individuals learn to think critically, but how they come to grips with a sense of individual and social responsibility. At issue here is the crucial political question of what it means to be responsible for one’s actions as part of a broader attempt to be an engaged citizen who can expand and deepen the possibilities of democratic public life. Human agency is inseparable from the formative cultures and pedagogical practices that create the possibility of a mobilized citizenry and radical change.

As such, critical understanding is not just a state of mind but an empowering practice. It is the precondition for social change and pedagogy is crucial in shifting the way people view themselves, others and the larger world. Democracy requires a certain kind of subject who thinks in terms of broader solidarities and is willing to both translate private troubles into larger systemic considerations, to challenge the various threats being mobilized against the ideas of justice, equity and popular sovereignty.

In order to make education central to politics, critical pedagogy should provide the capacities, knowledge and skills that enable people to speak, write and act from a position of agency and empowerment. In addition, it should energize individuals to think differently so they can act differently. For instance, the current mass rebellions against racism, inequality and injustice have embraced the pedagogical task of attempting to recognize those modes of agency, identity and values that have been erased from the script of economic, political and personal rights and freedoms.
Agency is being rethought within a notion of freedom that expands human rights to the realm of economic rights. The notion of agency is severely limited and political and personal rights largely invalidated if one is engaged in a constant struggle to survive economically. In addition, individual freedom under neoliberal capitalism falls on the side of undermining the solidarities needed to live in a socially responsible and just society. As Frank Bruni observes, “along the way, we went from celebrating individual liberty to fetishizing it, so that for too many Americans, all sense of civic obligation and communal good went out the window.”

We are in the midst of a crisis in which it is crucial for individuals and social movements to learn anew how to take responsibility, to learn how to listen, and to act with vigilance. The pandemics of injustice that are ushering in massive degrees of poverty, exclusion, suffering and death must be resisted with a new understanding of politics and agency.
Moreover, the move from extending the capacities for individual agency must be expanded to a notion of social agency imbued with a sense of collective resistance. In the current historical moment, this points to the necessity to create an international social movement for the defense of public goods and the principles of a democratic socialist society.

The pandemic crisis is much more than a medical crisis. At its core it is both a political and ideological crisis. It is both a crisis of agency and politics. If the radical political horizons of a future society are to be brought into fruition, it is crucial to engage those everyday pedagogical spaces where identities are produced, modes of recognition come into play and critical points of view can be redeemed. The energies of fascism have become less intense, more fragile, and open to challenge as the limits of right-wing and updated fascist populist movements become more visible. As the virus spreads, the merchants of misery and hate have no language to explain or address “the ubiquity of death” spreading across the planet.

At the heart of the current pandemic crisis is the need for developing a new radical imagination and political language in which the crisis of citizenship is connected to the crisis of education, and the crisis of globalization is situated within the crisis of power.

The most important challenge that the pandemic has produced is not simply how to stop the spread of the virus. We must also ask: What kind of society do we want in the future, how do we want to live and who will be the agents to address these issues? Under what narrative for justice will various resistance movements both domestically and internationally come together to put a stop to the pandemic of poverty, inequality, racism and militarism? The relevance of this challenge hinges on reclaiming the relationship between education and democracy and taking seriously the recognition that the force of education operates in multiple social and public spaces, and those spaces should be places where individuals can realize themselves as informed and critically engaged citizens. The current pandemic follows a wave of right-wing movements and modes of governing that want to destroy any vestige of a democratic imaginary and to relegate the value of ethical and social responsibility and the question of justice to the wasteland of political thought.

The ugly terror of a fascist abyss lurks in the background of this pandemic, one that murders dreams, employs cynicism as commonsense, and prevents people from claiming any democratic sense of moral and political agency. What this dystopian pandemic can teach us is that democracy is fragile as “a way of life” and that if it is to survive, critical education and pedagogy must become central to producing citizens who are informed, politically aware and willing to produce a culture with the habits and sensibilities that keep a democracy alive.

If the pandemic can teach us that democracy is only as strong as the people who inhabit it and who are willing to struggle to keep justice, equity and the principles of a socialist democracy alive, the ominous clouds of fascism will not prevail in the United States. Democracy needs to breathe again, inspired by the struggle to dismantle the death machine at the heart of empire. Resistance is no longer optional, given that both humanity and the life of the planet are at stake.

THE TWELVE

Watch: The Twelve

 “The Twelve” tells the story of twelve spiritual Elders from around the globe who gather at the United Nations in New York to create a unique ritual for Humankind and planet Earth. By interviewing each one of them in their home environments, the film is told exclusively through the voices of these elders. They give an unprecedented insight into their knowledge, traditions and rituals. Each of the twelve share a long forgotten wisdom and knowing of our eternal and complex connection with Nature and all of humanity, reminding us what it means to be human and how to live in harmony with each other and with Nature. The Twelve are from Australia, Alaska, Brazil, Botswana, Colombia, Gabon, Japan, Nepal, Mexico and Siberia.

The Twelve is available to download in English and to stream and download in 7 other languages including French, German, Portuguese, Japanese, Chinese, Spanish and Arabic under https://lecielfoundation.com/download-the-twelve/

Seeds of Neo-Colonialism

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Western "experts" are channeling the message of the biotech industry, heavily controlled by US-European seed and chemical giants Monsanto/Bayer, Syngenta and DuPont Pioneer. The message once again is that failure of African farmers to adopt GMO technology is the root cause of hunger and poverty on the continent. It is ironic that GMO foods are banned by law as unsafe in the European home countries of those giving the advice. This speaks volumes. One just has to take a look at what GM cotton did to Burkina Faso's cotton farmers to understand the disaster that GMOs present. 

Trump’s Reelection Strategy Involves Terrorizing Us With Secret Stormtroopers by William Rivers Pitt

Source: TruthOut


Donald Trump and his cohort of propagandists at Fox News would have us believe the major cities of the United States have been turned to ashes and rubble by mobs of racial justice and antifa activists. But after weeks of sustained protests in the aftermath of the police murder of George Floyd, the only thing actually in ashes is Trump’s credibility.

The image of rampaging activist hordes, however, is key to the all-encompassing fiction the right has been spoon-feeding to itself for decades. Believing in that fiction translates into the belief that anything done to stop it is positive on its face.

Enter the faceless, anonymous, heavily armed federal officers snatching protesters off the streets of Portland, Oregon. One would think that people on the right, who have spent years warning of “jack-booted government thugs” coming to take our rights by force, would be horrified by what we are seeing in Portland. It is their grim prophecy made flesh, and yet they are responding either with silence or active support, apparently because they saw it on Fox.

“I’m going to do something, that I can tell you,” Trump said of the uprising during his erratic Fox News interview last Sunday. “Because we’re not going to let New York and Chicago and Philadelphia and Detroit and Baltimore and all of these — Oakland is a mess.”

 

And then, the penny dropped.

“We’re not going to let this happen in our country,” Trump continued. “All run by liberal Democrats. Look at what’s going on — all run by Democrats, all run by very liberal Democrats. All run, really, by radical left. If Biden got in, that would be true for the country. The whole country would go to hell. And we’re not going to let it go to hell.”

Deploying federal forces to Portland — and to Chicago, Detroit, Philadelphia and other cities, according to reports — is the unmistakable shriek of authoritarianism. Governors of the potentially affected states are gearing up to fight the administration. Their mood was best captured by, of all people, Tom Ridge. Ridge, the former Republican governor of Pennsylvania who served as George W. Bush’s director of Homeland Security, minced no words regarding Trump’s flagrant abuse of power.

Trump’s actions in Portland are terrifying by any standard.

 

“Had I been governor, even now, I would welcome the opportunity to work with any federal agency to reduce crime or lawlessness in the cities,” Ridge told the Pennsylvania Capital-Star. “But I would tell you, it would be a cold day in hell before I would consent to an uninvited, unilateral intervention into one of my cities.”

Trump’s actions in Portland are terrifying by any standard, but are also as crass and grasping as everything else he has done since he first polluted the White House. By openly stapling these actions to “Biden” and “very liberal Democrats,” Trump made it clear that as far as he is concerned, this is all about politics and the upcoming election. In poker, this is what they call a “tell.”

According to every reputable poll taken over the last several months, Donald Trump is trailing presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden by wide margins. Trump himself appears to have finally accepted this, which may explain the absence of bombastic nonsense at his newly reborn COVID-19 briefings. Of course, as far as those briefings go, we’ve all heard “responsible-sounding Trump” before.

Trump cannot campaign on his successful fight against COVID, because he has failed that challenge with spectacular vigor. He cannot campaign on the economy, because it has been all but obliterated by his COVID failures. He has tried to campaign on brazen racism, but it has not turned the polls in his favor.

What, then, is left to campaign on?

Why, the left!

Specifically, the vile, truthless caricature of the left Trump and his people have been conjuring for his base in an effort to justify the use of anonymous federal gendarmes against us.

More to the point, one gets the definite sense that Trump desperately wants an on-camera street fight with these protesters. Deploying those federal officers is a massively antagonizing move, and Trump would love nothing more than to have some protesters take the bait.

There would be more blood in the streets, Trump would have his fight, and he could point and say, “Look! This is the America Biden and the liberals want! Only I can save us!” Indeed, new Trump campaign commercials are making that specific argument. Ads are one thing; live footage of street violence is something else altogether.

If Trump really doesn’t want this, he’s damn close to getting it by accident. In the meantime, the protests will continue as citizens demand a long-sought redress of glaring racial and social injustices.
In Portland, the protests have produced surreal and beautiful displays of strength from vulnerable protesters in the face of federal violence. Some days ago, at the intersection of Third Avenue and Taylor Street, a group of protesters were being corralled by law enforcement officials, including some of these anonymous protest-snatchers.

Out of the crowd emerged a naked woman wearing only a mask and a cloth hat. She performed some ballet moves in front of the police before sitting down and exposing herself to their potential violence.

The police fired pepper balls at her feet, but she did not budge. A protester ran to her with a shield to protect her, but she waved him off. She sat, as bereft of protection as the police were armored, until the police — seemingly demoralized and confused — backed off. The woman disappeared back into the crowd, and no one knows her name, but some have come to call her “Naked Athena.”

The secret, rights-crushing cops in the streets of our cities are a manifest campaign move by Donald Trump. They also represent a deeply dangerous power grab that seemed inconceivable before Trump. He has successfully normalized the unthinkable, and in places like Portland, he clearly appears to be doing so to get votes.

Poet’s Nook: “untitled” by anonymous

(Official video: I Just Wanna Live)


Could you hear me?
As I was being intruded
On being perceived as an intruder
My place of rest turning into my rest in peace
As my soul silently slipped into the night
No peep(?) will be there to protect my innocence
I was proven through college proclaimed praises to
Pull people up but was put down by a false perception

Do you see me?

Or because of the coloe of my skin you see a criminal
Deserving quick executions but slow explanations
From a system designed to keep me killed
I sit behind the wheel just as intimidated by the world
As the world is intimidated by me
I calmly begin speaking sensing tensions
Peaking seven shots
I'm bleeding while screaming

"I wasn't reaching..."

Do you know me?

Or do I become prey when I step into your territory?

I wasn't a baseball player so I didn't know that on my home run
I'd be going....going......gone
That's wrong

Because this life matters

But your silence on this matter is deafening
I was playing games when real shots rang
Real blood stains real pain but it's all the same
And I'm tired

I'm tired of being overwhelmed
I'm tired of being angry
I'm tired of shouting for justice
but seeing jus-ishhh
I'm tired of trying to catch my breath
All hate is kneeling on my neck

I just want to live

Let me be

Let me



breathe

Viktor Frankl on How Music, Nature & Our Love for Each Other Succor Our Survival & Give Meaning to Our Lives by Maria Popova

 

 Source: Brain Pickings

Who can weigh the ballast of another’s woe, or another’s love? We live — with our woes and our loves, with our tremendous capacity for beauty and our tremendous capacity for suffering — counterbalancing the weight of existence with the irrepressible force of living. The question, always, is what feeds the force and hulls the ballast.

Viktor Frankl (March 26, 1905–September 2, 1997), having lost his mother, his father, and his brother to our civilization’s most colossal moral failure yet, having barely survived himself, Frankl takes up the question of what makes life not only survivable but worthy of living in what now lives as Yes to Life: In Spite of Everything (public library) — a slim, powerful set of lectures he delivered a mere eleven months after the Holocaust, just as he was completing the manuscript of the classic Man’s Search for Meaning.

Tucked into Frankl’s immensely insightful meditations on moving beyond optimism and pessimism to find the deepest source of meaning is a passage of great subtlety and great splendor — a portal to a truth so elemental that it might appear trite if stated merely as an abstract truism, but one which rises titanic and majestic from the crucible of this human being’s unfathomable lived experience.
In a sublime sidewise testament to the singular power of music, which some of humanity’s vastest minds have so memorably extolled, Frankl writes:

It is not only through our actions that we can give life meaning — insofar as we can answer life’s specific questions responsibly — we can fulfill the demands of existence not only as active agents but also as loving human beings: in our loving dedication to the beautiful, the great, the good. Should I perhaps try to explain for you with some hackneyed phrase how and why experiencing beauty can make life meaningful? I prefer to confine myself to the following thought experiment: imagine that you are sitting in a concert hall and listening to your favorite symphony, and your favorite bars of the symphony resound in your ears, and you are so moved by the music that it sends shivers down your spine; and now imagine that it would be possible (something that is psychologically so impossible) for someone to ask you in this moment whether your life has meaning. I believe you would agree with me if I declared that in this case you would only be able to give one answer, and it would go something like: “It would have been worth it to have lived for this moment alone!”

More than a century after Mary Shelley celebrated nature as a lifeline to sanity in considering what makes life worth living in a world savaged by a deadly pandemic, and decades before Tennessee Williams reflected as he approached his own death that “we live in a perpetually burning building, and what we must save from it, all the time, is love… love for each other and the love that we pour into the art we feel compelled to share: being a parent; being a writer; being a painter; being a friend,” Frankl adds:

Those who experience, not the arts, but nature, may have a similar response, and also those who experience another human being. Do we not know the feeling that overtakes us when we are in the presence of a particular person and, roughly translates as, The fact that this person exists in the world at all, this alone makes this world, and a life in it, meaningful.

In how we suffer and how we love, Frankl concludes, is the measure of who and what we are:

How human beings deal with the limitation of their possibilities regarding how it affects their actions and their ability to love, how they behave under these restrictions — the way in which they accept their suffering under such restrictions — in all of this they still remain capable of fulfilling human values.

 So, how we deal with difficulties truly shows who we are.

Yes to Life is a slender, spectacular read in its totality. Complement this fragment with Borges on turning trauma misfortune, and humiliation into raw material for art and Whitman, shortly after his paralytic stroke, on what makes life worth living, then revisit Frankl on humor as a lifeline to survival.

Poet's Nook: " The Ghost of Sabato Rodia" by Elliot Sperber

How old were you
When you first saw
The cops beat the weak
And the young, and the poor

Who, as they say,
will inherit the earth
When the cops dissolve —
With the rich, who train them,
Like horses, or dogs

The common will
In common —

And Simon Rodia
Whose towers of wires
And cracked crocks and cans can
Show us the way

To pull beauty up
From garbage heaps
Build them right there in the street
And, so, free them
And the White House will be a museum

Musings

“You are a light. You are the light. Never let anyone—any person or any force—dampen, dim or diminish your light. Study the path of others to make your way easier and more abundant. Lean toward the whispers of your own heart, discover the universal truth, and follow its dictates. […] Release the need to hate, to harbor division, and the enticement of revenge. Release all bitterness. Hold only love, only peace in your heart, knowing that the battle of good to overcome evil is already won. Choose confrontation wisely, but when it is your time don't be afraid to stand up, speak up, and speak out against injustice. And if you follow your truth down the road to peace and the affirmation of love, if you shine like a beacon for all to see, then the poetry of all the great dreamers and philosophers is yours to manifest in a nation, a world community, and a Beloved Community that is finally at peace with itself.”

John Lewis (February 21, 1940 - July 17, 2020)

Chris Hedges: Gaslighted by the Ruling Class

Police take the knee. NASCAR and the U.S. Marine Corps ban the display of the Confederate flag. Nancy Pelosi uses a kente scarf as a political prop. Joe Biden, one of the driving forces behind militarized police, the massive expansion of mass incarceration and the doubling and tripling of sentences, speaks at George Floyd’s funeral. The National Football League apologizes for its insensitivity to racism, although no teams appear to be negotiating with Colin Kaepernick.

The mayor of Washington D.C., Muriel Bower, had the words “Black Lives Matter” painted in 35-foot-tall letters on a street near the White House but has also proposed a $45 million increase in the police budget and the construction of a $500 million new jail. The press, which does not confront corporate power and rarely covers the poor, rendering them and their communities invisible, engages in circular firing squads, sacking or admonishing editors and journalists for racially insensitive thoughtcrimes, to advertise its commitment to people of color.

Once again, we see proposed legislation to mandate police reform — more body cameras, consent decrees, revised use-of-force policies, banning chokeholds, civilian review boards, requiring officers to intervene when they see misconduct, banning no-knock search warrants, more training in de-escalation tactics, a requirement by law enforcement agencies to report use-of-force data, nationally enforced standards for police training and greater diversity — proposals made, and in several cases adopted in the wake of numerous other police murders, including those of Eric Garner, Michael Brown and Philando Castile. The Minneapolis Police Department, for example, established a duty to intervene requirement by police officers after the 2014 killing of Brown in Ferguson. This requirement did not save Floyd.

Police unions, often little more than white hate groups, continue to have the unassailable power to brush aside would-be reformers, including community review boards, mayors and police chiefs. These unions generously bankroll the campaigns of elected officials, including public prosecutors, who do their bidding. Police unions and associations have contributed $7 million to candidates running for office in New York state alone, including $600,000 to Andrew Cuomo during his gubernatorial campaigns.

It is, as Yogi Berra said, “déjà vu all over again.”

The public displays of solidarity are, as in the past, smoke and mirrors, a pantomime of faux anguish and empathy by bankrupt ruling elites, including most Black politicians groomed by the Democratic Party and out of touch with the daily humiliation, stress of economic misery and suffering that defines the lives of many of the protesters.

These elites have no intention of instituting anything more than cosmetic change. They refuse to ask the questions that matter because they do not want to hear the answers. They are systems managers. They use these symbolic gestures to gaslight the public and leave our failed democracy, from which they and their corporate benefactors benefit, untouched. What we are watching in this outpouring of televised solidarity with the victims of police violence is an example of what Bertram Gross calls “friendly fascism,” the “nice-guy mask” used to disguise the despotism of the ultra-rich and our corporate overseers. Whatever you think about Donald Trump, he is at least open about his racism, lust for state violence and commitment to white supremacy.

 

The crisis we face is not, as the ruling elites want us to believe, limited to police violence. It is a class and generational revolt. It will not be solved with new police reforms, which always result, as Princeton professor Naomi Murakawa points out in her book “The First Civil Right: How Liberals Built Prison America,” in less accountable, larger and more lethal police forces.

The problem is an economic and political system that has by design created a nation of serfs and obscenely rich masters. The problem is deindustrialization, offshoring of manufacturing, automation and austerity programs that allow families to be priced out of our for-profit healthcare system and see nearly one in five children 12 and younger without enough to eat.

The problem is an electoral system that is legalized bribery designed to serve a tiny, unaccountable cabal of oligarchs that engage in legalized tax boycotts, deregulation, theft and financial fraud. The problem is that at least half of the working class and working poor, a figure growing exponentially as the pandemic swells the ranks of the unemployed, have been cast aside as human refuse and are being sacrificed on the altar of profit as the country reopens for business and the pandemic crashes in wave after wave on front line workers.

The problem is the diversion of state resources, including over half all federal discretionary spending, to an unaccountable military machine that wages endless and futile wars overseas, the savage face of white supremacy beyond our border. This military machine perfects its brutal tactics and tools for control on people of color in the Middle East, as it did in other eras in Vietnam, Latin America and the Philippines. It passes on this knowledge, along with its surplus equipment, including sophisticated equipment for wholesale surveillance, drones, heavily armed SWAT teams, grenade launchers and armored vehicles, to police at home. Smashing down a door and terrorizing a family in a night police raid in Detroit looks no different from a night raid carried out against an Afghan family by Army Rangers in Kandahar.

Empires eventually consume themselves. Thucydides wrote of the Athenian empire that the tyranny it imposed on others it finally imposed on itself.

The entrenched racism in America has always meant that poor people of color are the first cast aside in society and disproportionately suffer from the most brutal forms of social control meted out by the police and the prison system. But there will not be, as Martin Luther King pointed out, racial justice until there is economic justice. And there will not be economic justice until we wrest power back from the hands of our corporate masters.

Until that happens, we will go through cycle after cycle of brutal police murders and cycle after cycle of the profuse apologies and promises of reform. We are trapped in an abusive relationship. When we finally have enough, when we cry out in pain and walk out, our abuser comes after us with flowers and apologies and promises to change. Back we go for more.

My hope is that this time around the gaslighting will not work. The protestors that have taken to the streets in some 750 cities are young, diverse, angry and savvy. Many were betrayed by the Democratic Party hierarchy who once again ganged up on Bernie Sanders to shove a corporate stooge down our throats, the calculation by the ruling elites being that as awful as Biden is, we will vote for him because he is not Trump. That this tactic failed in 2016 doesn’t seem to faze the oligarchs.
Many of those in the streets can’t find meaningful work, are often burdened by large sums of student debt and have realized that in this world of serfs and masters they don’t have much of a future. They understand that if these protests are to succeed, they must be led by people of color, those who suffer disproportionally from the inequities and violence meted out by the occupying forces of the corporate state. And they also know that social inequality is at the root of the evil we must vanquish.

The ruling elites will never willingly defund or abolish the police, which cost taxpayers $100 billion annually and often eat up half of city budgets, for the same reason they will never pay a minimum wage to the 2.3 million prisoners who work in our ever-expanding gulag. By defunding or abolishing the police, or by paying prison workers fair wages, the primary bulwark used to keep a subjugated population in check will be removed, or in the case of prisons make the system of neo-slavery financially unsustainable.

Rather, the elites, while assuring us that they feel our pain, will insist, as Biden is doing, that by throwing even more money at the police, and increasing police numbers on the streets of our cities, police will be accountable. This is true. But the police will be accountable not to us but the ruling class.

In 1994, then Senator Biden pushed through the Violent Crime and Law Enforcement Act. It was supported by the Congressional Black Caucus, evidence of the growing disconnect between black political elites and those they should protect. The caucus has, in the face of the current crisis, once again called for the tired and toothless reforms that got us into this mess. “Black elected officials have become adept at mobilizing the tropes of Black identity without any of its political content,” notes Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor in the New York Times. 

The bill authorized $30.2 billion over six years for police and prisons. Biden boasted that he “added back into the Federal statutes over 50 death penalties — 50 circumstances in which, if a person is convicted of a crime at a Federal level, they are eligible for the death penalty.” The bill, he bragged, authorized “over 70 increased — 70, seven zero — 70 increased penalties in new offenses covering violent crimes, drug trafficking, and gun crimes.” It also established the Community Oriented Policing Services or COPS Program that has handed more than $14 billion to state and local governments, most of the money used to hire more police. COPS also provided $1 billion to place police in schools, accelerating the criminalization of children.

The 1994 bill more than doubled the prison population. The United States now has 25 percent of the world’s prison population, although we are 4 percent of the world’s population. Half of the 2.3 million people in our prisons have never been charged with physically harming another person and 94 percent never had a jury trial, coerced to plea out in our dysfunctional judicial system.

Biden proudly said in 1994 he represented a new Democratic Party that was tough on law and order. “Let me define the liberal wing of the Democratic Party,” he said at the time. “The liberal wing of the Democratic Party is now for 60 new death penalties. That is what is in this bill. The liberal wing of the Democratic Party has 70 enhanced penalties, and my friend from California, Senator Diane Feinstein, outlined every one of them. I gave her a list today. She asked what is in there to every one of them. The liberal wing of the Democratic Party is for 100,000 cops. The liberal wing of the democratic Party is for 125,000 new State prison cells.”

There is only one way to defeat these forces of occupation and the ruling elites they protect. It is not through voting. It will come from the streets, where tens of thousands of courageous men and women, facing arrest, indiscriminate police violence, economic despair and the threat of Covid-19, are fighting for not only an end to racism, but for freedom.

---

George Monbiot on Empire

Musings

In Conversation: Chauncey DeVega & Dr. John Gartner - Trump is Using the Pandemic as a Type of Biological Weapon Against the American People

Dr. John Gartner is a psychologist, psychoanalyst, and former professor at the Johns Hopkins University Medical School. He is also the founder of the Duty to Warn PAC, an organization working to raise awareness about the danger to the United States and the world posed by Donald Trump. He is a contributor to the 2017 bestseller "The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 27 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Assess a President. Dr. Gartner is also featured in the upcoming documentary “Unfit: The Psychology of Donald Trump”.

Dr. Gartner warns that Donald Trump is actively using the pandemic as a type of biological weapon against the American people. He also explains in this podcast that Donald Trump’s supporters are members of a political death cult where not wearing a mask is an act of loyalty to and love for their personal savior and Great Leader.

Invoking Manifest Destiny

                                                       LISTEN: Manifest Destiny

The Racist Underpinnings of the American Way of War by Walden Bello

Source: Foreign Policy in Focus

The U.S. military command’s pushback against President Donald Trump’s attempt to use the military against people demanding racial justice has received a lot of good press.

But let’s not overdo the praise. For most of their existence, the U.S. Armed Forces were racially segregated. It was only in the 1950s that the slow process of integration began, with racial discrimination still a major problem in the ranks today.

While race has been widely discussed with respect to the composition and organization of the military, much less attention has been paid to the way racism has been a central feature of how the United States has waged its wars.

The military is an institution of American society, and as such its origins and development have been centrally influenced by the political economy of U.S. capitalism.

The political economy of the U.S. is built on two “original sins.” One was the genocide of Native Americans, the main function of which was to clear the ground for the implantation and spread of capitalist relations of production. The second was the central role played by the slave labor of African Americans in the genesis and consolidation of U.S. capitalism.

These original sins have had such a foundational role that the reproduction and expansion of U.S. capitalism over time have consistently reproduced its racial structures.

So powerful were its racial impulses that providing the legitimacy necessary for capitalist democracy to function necessitated the radical ideological denial of its racial structures. This radical denial was first inscribed in the Declaration of Independence’s message of radical equality “among men” that was drafted by the slaveholder Thomas Jefferson. Later it appeared in the ideology that the mission of U.S. imperial expansion was to universalize that equality among the non-European, non-white societies.

Why do we focus on war-making? First, because war is an inevitable event in the political economy of capitalism. Second, because it has been said that the way a nation wages war reveals its soul, what it’s all about, or to use that much derided term, its “essence.”

The deadly interplay of racism, genocide, and radical denial at the heart of American white society has been reproduced in that society’s military, and it has been especially evident in America’s Asian wars.

War in the Philippines: A Genocidal Mentality

Racialized warfare was practiced in the Philippines, which was invaded and brutally colonized by the United States from 1899 to 1906.

In charge of the enterprise were so-called “Indian fighters” like Generals Arthur MacArthur and Henry Lawton, who fought against the Apache fighter Geronimo, who brought to the archipelago the genocidal mentality that accompanied their warfare against Native Americans in the American West.

Filipinos were branded “n—ers” by U.S. troops, though another racist epithet, “gugus,” was also widely used for them. When Filipinos resorted to guerrilla warfare, they were dehumanized as barbarians practicing uncivilized warfare in order to legitimize all sorts of atrocities against them. The war of subjugation was carried out without restraints, with General Jacob Smith famously ordering his troops to convert Samar into a “howling wilderness” by killing any male over 10 years old.

But at the same time that it was waging a barbaric war that took the lives of some 500,000 Filipinos, Washington was justifying its colonization of the archipelago as a mission to extend the benefits of democracy to them. Rudyard Kipling’s “Take Up the White Man’s Burden,” written in 1899 to glorify the American conquest of the archipelago, resonated throughout white America.

World War II in the Pacific: Racism Unbound

The war in Europe waged by the U.S. during the Second World War was promoted among the American public as a war to save democracy. This was not the case in the Pacific theater, where all the racist impulses of American society were explicitly harnessed to render the Japanese subhuman.

This racial side to the Pacific War gave it an intense exterminationist quality. To be sure, this was a face-off between two racist militaries. Both sides painted the other as barbarians and people of inferior culture, in order to license atrocities of all kinds. Violation of the rules of the Geneva Convention was the norm, with neither side preferring to take prisoners. When prisoners were taken, they were subjected to systematic brutality.

Even as the U.S. waged war against Japan, it waged a domestic war against Americans of Japanese descent, declaring them outside the pale of the Constitution and incarcerating the whole population, something that was unthinkable when it came to Americans of German or Italian descent, though Germany and Italy were also enemy states.

But perhaps the most radical expression of the racial exterminationist streak of the American war against Japan was the nuclear incineration of Nagasaki and Hiroshima in August 1945, an act that would never have been entertained when it came to fellows of the white race like the Germans.

War in Korea: “Everything Is Destroyed.”

The Korean War of 1950-1953 also saw the dialectic of racism, genocide, and denial come into play. The war was justified as one of saving Koreans from communism, but it came close to exterminating them.

General Douglas MacArthur, who was supreme commander, advocated the use of nuclear weapons. His plan was to use atomic bombs against the Chinese and North Koreans while retreating and then spreading a belt of radioactive cobalt across the Korean peninsula to deter them from crossing into South Korea. This was disapproved by Washington in favor of unlimited aerial bombing using both conventional blockbusters and the new terrifying napalm bombs.

The result was the same. The U.S. dropped more tons of bombs in Korea in 1950-1953 than in the Pacific during the whole of World War II. The result was described this way by U.S. General Emmett O’Donnell, head of the U.S. Air Force Bomber Command: “Everything is destroyed. There is nothing left standing worthy of the name.”

Before Congress, General MacArthur unwittingly admitted the exterminationist quality of the war he waged. “The war in Korea has almost destroyed that nation of 20 million people,” he said. “I have never seen such devastation.”

It was in Korea that the marriage of racism to advanced technology to produce the overwhelming devastation that is a central characteristic of the American Way of War was perfected. Precious white American lives had to be expended as little as possible, while taking as many cheap Asian lives as possible, through technology-intensive unlimited aerial warfare.

Vietnam: “Bomb Them Back to the Stone Age”

The streak of racial exterminationism emerged again during the Vietnam War.

Labeling the Vietnamese “gooks” — a term derived from the term for Filipinos, ”gugus,” in an earlier colonial war — dehumanized them and made all Vietnamese, combatant and non-combatant, fair game.

As in the Philippines at the turn of the century, Vietnamese guerrilla tactics frustrated the Americans — and the racist underpinnings of the American military mind allowed Washington to wage a war without restraint in a desperate effort to win it, one that ignored all the principles of the Geneva Convention. As in Korea, the U.S. waged in Vietnam a “limited war” in the sense of confining it geographically so that it would not escalate into global war, but it waged this limited war with unlimited means.

The racial dehumanization of the Vietnamese found its classic expression in the words of General Curtis LeMay, head of the Strategic Air Command, who said that America’s aim must be to “bomb the Vietnamese back to the stone age.” And Washington tried to do just that: From 1965 to 1969, the U.S. military dropped 70 tons of bombs for every square mile of North and South Vietnam — or 500 pounds for each man, woman, and child.

At the same time that they were killing them indiscriminately, Washington was insisting that its mission was to save the Vietnamese from communism and bring American-style democracy, just as it had brought it to the Philippines, Japan, and Korea, and that it would not take no for an answer.

Again, U.S. political and military strategy cannot be understood without reference to the subliminal racial assumptions that guided it. The costs exacted by a war marked by a racist and exterminationist streak were devastating: some 3.5 million Vietnamese killed in less than a decade.

The American Way of War

In sum, what we might call the “American Way of War” has emerged from a convoluted historical and ideological process.

This war-making cannot be divorced from the racism that is fundamentally inscribed in the capitalist political economy of the United States and is structurally reproduced in its growth and expansion.

This structural inscription stems from two original sins: the genocide of Native Americans to clear the social and natural path for the rise and consolidation of capitalism, and the slave labor of African Americans that played an essential role in laying the foundations for industrial capitalism.

Owing to the foundational role of genocide and racism, the ideological legitimation necessary to make the system function has involved a radical denial in the form of a declaration of equality “among men,” and the claim that the aim of U.S. imperial expansion is to extend this equality throughout the world.

This tortuous dialectic of genocide, racism, and radical denial gave America’s imperial wars in Asia an exterminationist streak.

Finally, the American Way of War is marked by the marriage of advanced technology and racism that is intended to limit the expenditure of lives on one’s side while inflicting massive devastation on the other side — under the guiding assumption that white lives are precious and colored lives are cheap.

All Human Beings by Maria Popova

Source: Brain Pickings

“Love is the only way to rescue humanity from all ills,” Leo Tolstoy wrote to Mahatma Gandhi in the stirring correspondence that would unspool over four decades until Gandhi’s assassination in 1948. By then, Gandhi had been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize five times, including days before his death. That year, the Nobel Committee awarded all other disciplines except the Peace Prize, for which they found “no suitable living candidate.”

On December 10, 1948 — the day of the Nobel ceremony in Stockholm — the United Nations General Assembly gathered in Paris to adopt the most visionary, idealistic, and poetic document ever composed: The Universal Declaration of Human Rights. A pioneering effort to standardize the raising of conscience, kindness, and reason above self-interest and the hunger for power, it was the culmination of two years of systematic refinement by a global drafting committee of eight men from five continents, chaired by Eleanor Roosevelt (October 11, 1884–November 7, 1962), with her floral dresses and her “spine as stiff as the steel girder of a skyscraper.” Roosevelt’s nomination as a U.N. delegate had had to pass through the United States Senate for approval, where she suspected certain conservative Senators would disapprove — “because of my attitude toward social problems,” she later reflected, “and especially youth problems.” But her nomination was heartily approved — only one Senator voted against her, citing her troublesome devotion to racial equality. Shortly before her U.N. nomination and shortly after the end of WWII, Roosevelt — another indefensible blind spot in the Nobel Commission’s dispensation of the Peace Prize — had lost her husband. In the thick of her bereavement, she wrote in her daybook:

When you have lived for a long time in close contact with the loss and grief which today pervades the world, any personal sorrow seems to be lost in the general sadness of humanity.

She coped by pouring her indefatigable energy into drafting this buoyant document aimed at protecting human beings from the sorrows they inflict upon one another. Later, she would look back on her life with the unwavering conviction that “in the long run there is no more liberating, no more exhilarating experience than to determine one’s position, state it bravely, and then act boldly.” Now, she was tasked with creating the blueprint for bold action toward justice, contoured with bravely stated words. She insisted that the document be adopted as a declaration rather than as a treaty, hoping this would confer upon it the inspiriting power to do for the world what the Declaration of Independence had done for her homeland. And so it did: Despite the abiding challenge of our species — the unhandsome fact that there is no universal utopia and that all utopias are built on someone’s subjugation-bent back — the document that emerged became a beacon of justice for generations to come, founded upon the conviction that a “recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world,” radiating Maya Angelou’s stunning lyric insistence that “we are the possible, we are the miraculous, the true wonder of this world.” Translated into more than 500 languages, making it the world’s most translated document, the UDHR went on to shape myriad national and international laws, inspire the constitutions of various newborn countries, and furnish the legal definitions of “fundamental freedoms” and “human rights.” Buried into the language of the document is also a landmark unsexing of man as the universal pronoun (though it would take many more decades to seep into culture) — the trailblazing Indian activist, writer, and feminist Hansa Jivraj Mehta suggested replacing “all men are equal” with “all are equal.” Today, as we come to see ourselves as Angelou saw us — creatures “whose hands can strike with such abandon that in a twinkling, life is sapped from the living yet those same hands can touch with such healing, irresistible tenderness” — some of the articles in the declaration read both as chilling indictments of where we have fallen short and as a defiantly aspirational blueprint for where we can and must go as we rise to our highest human potential.

Article 3: Everyone has the right to life, liberty and security of person. Article 5: No one shall be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.

Two generations after the adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, composer Max Richter honors its legacy and reimagines its spirit for a world more diverse and equitable than even the document’s idealistic creators imagined. (I have noted elsewhere that even the farthest seers can’t bend their gaze beyond their era’s horizon of possibility; but the horizon shifts with each incremental revolution as the human mind peers outward to take in nature, then turns inward to question its own givens.) In a stunning piece titled “All Human Beings,” part of his record Voices — a soulful sonic landscape of thought and feeling, powerfully transportive yet grounding, a decade in the making — Richter builds a sonic bower of piano, violin, soprano, and choir around a 1949 recording of Eleanor Roosevelt reading the UDHR. It begins with Roosevelt’s voice, then passes the generational and cultural baton to Kiki Layne, who continues reading in English before morphing into a crowdsourced choral reading in multiple languages by human beings all over the world. Richter reflects on the project:

I like the idea of a piece of music as a place to think, and it is clear we all have some thinking to do at the moment. We live in a hugely challenging time and, looking around at the world we have made, it’s easy to feel hopeless or angry. But, just as the problems we face are of our own making, so their solutions are within our reach, and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights is something that offers us a way forward. Although it isn’t a perfect document, the declaration does represent an inspiring vision for the possibility of better and kinder world.

Cornel West: Love Is a Form of Death

What really stuck with me was when he said:

Justice must be rescued by something much more deeper than justice, which is love. Love of truth, love of neighbor and for me love of enemy. We won’t get into that now but I think that’s very, very important. ‘Cause it means then even your foe is part of the human family. And in some ways an extension of your own humanity...

Whew!

A Cassandra Foretells An Election Nightmare

 

Greg Palast is an investigative journalist whose work has been featured by the BBC, the Guardian, the Nation, Rolling Stone and Salon. He has become one of the nation's foremost experts on vote suppression, vote theft and vote fraud. He is the author of the bestselling books "Billionaires & Ballot Bandits" and "The Best Democracy Money Can Buy." His new book is "How Trump Stole 2020: The Hunt for America's Vanished Voters."

Palast has warned that that Joe Biden's chances against Donald Trump are worse than the polls suggest because millions of Democrats will have their votes thrown out on Election Day. Moreover, many of those voters will have no idea that their votes were purged and therefore not counted.

This book should be essential reading as our very democracy -- what's left of it - is about to be blown to smithereens.

The Collapse of Meaning in a Post-Truth World by Chi Luu

                                                        Tower of Babel

On Surrogate Divinity: Capitalism Between You and God

This is Hell! · On surrogate divinity: Capitalism between you and God.

Writer Eugene McCarraher explains how the logic of capitalism swallowed our lives, and calls of losing faith in a system that degrades life, and finding purpose in fulfilling human need, and ensuring human flourishing.

Eugene is author of the book The Enchantments of Mammon: How Capitalism Became the Religion of Modernity

A Message for Our Restless Times

“After I became president, I one day requested some members of my close protection to stroll with me in the city to have lunch at one of the restaurants. We sat in one of the downtown restaurants and all of us asked for some sort of food. After a while, the waiter brought us our orders. I then noticed that there was someone sitting in front of my table waiting for food. I told one of the soldiers of my protection guard to go and ask that person to join us and eat with us. The soldier went and asked the man to do just that .The man brought up his food and sat by my side and began to eat. His hands were trembling constantly and he was sweating profusely. He then somehow managed to finish his food and left.

 

One of the soldiers then suggested that the man appeared to be quite ill as his hands trembled as he ate.

 

I said the man was not ill and told him that the man was one of the guards of the prison where I spent so many years. Furthermore I informed them that many times after I underwent torture in prison , I used to scream and ask for a little water. The very same guard would then come over to me and, instead of giving me water, he would urinate on my head .This is why he was trembling. The man expected me to retaliate as I was now President .

 

But this is not my character nor part of my ethics.

 

The mentality of retaliation destroys states while the mentality of tolerance builds Nations.”

What White Folk Want by P.L. Thomas

---

 

KEEP AMERICA PURE

WITH

LIBERTY PAINTS.

(Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison, p. 196)

What do white folk want?

Rigid accountability for other people.

License for “me” (the white view of the world is rugged individualism masking white nationalism/supremacy).

And “whiteness” never to be named, never voiced—only allowed to be embedded as an understood in “human” (“There is only one race, the human race”) or “lives” (“All Lives Matter”).

This last point is vital for the first two, in fact, and appeared recently on a Twitter exchange:

Reich is recognized as a Democrat, a progressive or liberal associated with Bill Clinton.

Yet Reich offers what he intends as a racially woke Tweet, only to expose the power of whiteness not to be named. Reich, of course, means “Black people weren’t even considered people by white people on July 4, 1776,” but omits the white context because in the U.S. whiteness is a given.

Even or maybe especially to, as Martin Luther King Jr. described, the “white liberal who is more devoted to ‘order’ than to justice, who prefers tranquility to equality.”

The mythologies masquerading as history leave out that white people came to the Americas to escape a specific religious persecution of them—in order to establish their own brand of persecution with them in charge.

The eventual rebellion from England, again, was not about universal human freedom, but about restarting white/man dominance on stolen land:

Let’s put our heads together
And start a new country up
Our father’s father’s father tried
Erased the parts he didn’t like (“Cuyahoga,” R.E.M.)

July 4, 1776, represents another independence for white men, the wealthy a bit more free than others. And, like Reich’s Tweet, the Preamble has a glaring omission: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all [white] 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 independence for white men begun in the summer of 1776 also included their freedom to enslave humans as well as freedom to rape the enslaved.

But that use of “freedom” is also misleading because with the Declaration we witness a country established in the first two points above—accountability for other people who are not white or male, and license (not freedom) for “me.”

Well into the next century, the U.S. begrudgingly ended enslavement, and not until the next century did women earn the right to vote. Four decades after that, civil rights were acknowledged for Black people (again begrudgingly as well as with violent resistance and symbolic protests often by white political leaders in the South).

Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness have come quite a bit later and in our recent past for LGBQTIA+ people.

However in 2020, to understand the U.S., as James Baldwin repeated throughout his career, you can still expose whiteness by its relationship to Black people and Blackness; for example, the Reich/Moore Tweets.

What do white folk want?

Black Americans who assimilate into the unspoken whiteness called “American.”

But in that assimilation, there can be no confronting of whiteness. Certainly no dismantling.

White folk want Tiger Woods or Michael Jordan, not Muhammad Ali or Colin Kaepernick.

White folk want Ben Carson or Clarence Thomas, not Barack Obama (a master assimilator who, however, rose too high).

White folk want the passive radical myth of Martin Luther King Jr., only tolerating MLK until he rose too high and had to be sacrificed to make that myth possible, not Malcolm X or James Baldwin.

White folk want white Jesus, not historical Jesus.

White folk want O.J. Simpson and Bill Cosby, not Dave Chappelle.

White folk want Ta-Nehisi Coates, not #BlackLivesMatter.

Fit in to get in but don’t rock the boat.

Along with the unspoken given of whiteness and the essential rugged individualism myth to maintain white privilege comes the need for holding other people accountable and clinging to white license.

The frailty of whiteness has been exposed by Covid-19, in fact, even as the virus disproportionately ravages Black Americans—a painful real-life science fiction allegory of U.S. racial inequity.

The anti-face mask movement is white denial, white privilege, and white fragility in real time acknowledging very little about individual or public health but demonstrating that white folk want license, not universal human freedom.

Driving intoxicated is not freedom, it is license.

Public smoking is not freedom, it is license.

Refusing vaccines is not freedom, it is license.

Not wearing a face mask is not freedom, it is license.

But whiteness requires that the world be seen only as “I” and never “we” because “individual freedom” is a powerful code for white license.

White Americans are panicking because they sense a loss of white privilege, of white license.

The sort of white license that allows you to murder Black people but have your name emblazoned on public buildings, ground your political career in racism but have your name emblazoned on public buildings, lead a military revolt against your country to protect the license to enslave people but have statues built in your honor, or boast about grabbing women by the “pussy” but become president of the U.S.

It is 2020 and what do white folk want?

Rigid accountability for other people.

License for “me.”

Musings

Toni Morrison, Nobel laureate, Pulitzer Prize winner, and peerless American author - considered one of the finest novelists the US has produced - had the demeanor & wisdom of a prophet. Her work explains so much of what is going on today & this clip breaks down racism in a simple yet devastating way that only folks like James Baldwin, Zadie Smith or David Foster Wallace could have done with similar power & efficiency.

Poet's Nook: "Let America Be America Again" by Langston Hughes

Let America be America again.
Let it be the dream it used to be.
Let it be the pioneer on the plain
Seeking a home where he himself is free.

(America never was America to me.)

Let America be the dream the dreamers dreamed—
Let it be that great strong land of love
Where never kings connive nor tyrants scheme
That any man be crushed by one above.

(It never was America to me.)

O, let my land be a land where Liberty
Is crowned with no false patriotic wreath,
But opportunity is real, and life is free,
Equality is in the air we breathe.

(There's never been equality for me,
Nor freedom in this "homeland of the free.")

Say, who are you that mumbles in the dark?
And who are you that draws your veil across the stars?

I am the poor white, fooled and pushed apart,
I am the Negro bearing slavery's scars.
I am the red man driven from the land,
I am the immigrant clutching the hope I seek—
And finding only the same old stupid plan
Of dog eat dog, of mighty crush the weak.

I am the young man, full of strength and hope,
Tangled in that ancient endless chain
Of profit, power, gain, of grab the land!
Of grab the gold! Of grab the ways of satisfying need!
Of work the men! Of take the pay!
Of owning everything for one's own greed!

I am the farmer, bondsman to the soil.
I am the worker sold to the machine.
I am the Negro, servant to you all.
I am the people, humble, hungry, mean—
Hungry yet today despite the dream.
Beaten yet today—O, Pioneers!
I am the man who never got ahead,
The poorest worker bartered through the years.

Yet I'm the one who dreamt our basic dream
In the Old World while still a serf of kings,
Who dreamt a dream so strong, so brave, so true,
That even yet its mighty daring sings
In every brick and stone, in every furrow turned
That's made America the land it has become.
O, I'm the man who sailed those early seas
In search of what I meant to be my home—
For I'm the one who left dark Ireland's shore,
And Poland's plain, and England's grassy lea,
And torn from Black Africa's strand I came
To build a "homeland of the free."

The free?

Who said the free? Not me?
Surely not me? The millions on relief today?
The millions shot down when we strike?
The millions who have nothing for our pay?
For all the dreams we've dreamed
And all the songs we've sung
And all the hopes we've held
And all the flags we've hung,
The millions who have nothing for our pay—
Except the dream that's almost dead today.

O, let America be America again—
The land that never has been yet—
And yet must be—the land where every man is free.
The land that's mine—the poor man's, Indian's, Negro's, ME—
Who made America,
Whose sweat and blood, whose faith and pain,
Whose hand at the foundry, whose plow in the rain,
Must bring back our mighty dream again.

Sure, call me any ugly name you choose—
The steel of freedom does not stain.
From those who live like leeches on the people's lives,
We must take back our land again,
America!

O, yes,
I say it plain,
America never was America to me,
And yet I swear this oath—
America will be!

Out of the rack and ruin of our gangster death,
The rape and rot of graft, and stealth, and lies,
We, the people, must redeem
The land, the mines, the plants, the rivers.
The mountains and the endless plain—
All, all the stretch of these great green states—
And make America again!