Invisible Blackness w/ Adrian Younge featuring Nelson George

 

Invisible Blackness is a podcast that documents the development and evolution of racism in America. This series analyses the Black consciousness of America with new historical parallels to the future and the past.

Mr. Fish: The Political Cartoon Is Dead: Long Live the Cartoonist!

 

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Political cartoons have helped us make sense of the world in which we live since they first appeared in the 18th century–though some, like the iconic cartoonist Mr. Fish, argue the art predates even newspapers. Although it’s an art form that is in many ways dying out, there are a precious few political cartoonists out there that still understand the importance of speaking truth to power through insightful humor and visual commentary.

In this interview with Robert Scheer, the inimitable Dwayne Booth (AKA Mr. Fish) talks about his life, his passion, his art, and his latest book, “Nobody Left: Conversations with Famous Radicals, Progressives and Cultural Icons About the End of Dissent, Revolution and Liberalism in America.” Although the book does include some of Mr. Fish’s unforgettable cartoons, it is largely made up of interviews with figures such as Norman Mailer, Lily Tomlin, Christopher Hitchens, Howard Zinn, Joan Baez, Dennis Kucinich, Tariq Ali, Mort Sahl, Paul Krassner, Jon Stewart, and others.

Another book to add to my outrageous bookshelf! 😁

Musings

 

Chris Hedges: The Evil Within Us

 

Source: ScheerPost

Robert Aaron Long, 21, charged with murdering eight victims, six of whom were Asian women, at three Atlanta-area massage parlors, told police that he carried out the killings to eliminate the temptations that fed his sexual addiction. His church, Crabapple First Baptist Church, in Milton, Georgia, which opposes sex outside of marriage, issued a statement condemning the shootings as “unacceptable and contrary to the gospel.”

The church, however, also immediately took down its web site and removed videos, including one that was captured by The Washington Post before it was deleted where the church’s pastor, the Rev. Jerry Dockery, told the congregation that Christ’s second coming was imminent. And when Christ returned, Dockery said, he would wage a ruthless and violent war on nonbelievers and infidels, those controlled by Satan.

“There is one word devoted to their demise,” the pastor said. “Swept away! Banished! Judged. They have no power before God. Satan himself is bound and released and then bound again and banished. That great dragon deceiver – just that quickly – God throws him into an eternal torment. And then we read where everyone – everyone that rejects Christ – will join Satan, the Beast and the false prophet in hell.”

I heard a lot of these types of sermons by fundamentalist preachers during the two years I crisscrossed the country for my bookAmerican Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America. I attended Bible studies, prayer groups, conventions, tapings of Christian television shows, rallies held by Patriot Pastors, talks by leaders such as James Dobson, D. James Kennedy and Tony Perkins and creationist seminars. I visited the 50,000-square-foot Creation Museum in Petersburg, Kentucky, took an Evangelism Explosion course, joined congregations at numerous megachurches for Sunday worship and participated in right-to-life retreats. I spent hundreds of hours interviewing scores of believers.

The simplistic message was always the same. The world was divided into us and them, the blessed and the damned, agents of God and agents of Satan, good and evil. Millions of largely white Americans, hermetically sealed within the ideology of the Christian Right, yearn to destroy the Satanic forces they blame for the debacle of their lives, the broken homes, domestic and sexual abuse, struggling single parent households, lack of opportunities, crippling debt, poverty, evictions, bankruptcies, loss of sustainable incomes and the decay of their communities.

Satanic forces, they believe, control the financial systems, the media, public education and the three branches of government. They believed this long before Donald Trump, who astutely tapped into this deep malaise and magic thinking, mounted his 2016 campaign for president.

Core Beliefs

The killings in Atlanta were not an anomaly by a deranged gunman. The hatred for people of other ethnicities and faiths, the hatred for women of color, who are condemned by the Christian right as temptresses in league with Satan, was fertilized in the rampant misogyny, hyper-masculinity and racism that lie at the center of the belief system of the Christian right, as well define the core beliefs of American imperialism.

The white race, especially in the United States, is celebrated as God’s chosen agent. Imperialism and war are divine instruments for purging the world of infidels and barbarians, evil itself. Capitalism, because God blessed the righteous with wealth and power and condemned the immoral to poverty and suffering, is shorn of its inherent cruelty and exploitation. The iconography and symbols of American nationalism are intertwined with the iconography and symbols of the Christian faith. In short, the worst aspects of American society are sacralized by this heretical form of Christianity.

Believers are told that Satanic forces, promoting a liberal creed of “secular humanism,” lure people to self-destruction through drugs, alcohol, gambling, pornography and massage brothels. Long, who had frequented two of the massage parlors he attacked, was arrested on his way to Florida to attack a business connected with the pornography industry. He had attempted to block porn sites on his computer and sought help for his fascination with porn from Christian counselors.

The secular humanists, along with creating a society designed to tempt people into sin, are blamed for immigration programs that fuel demographic shifts to turn whites into a minority. The secular humanists are charged with elevating those of other races and beliefs – including Muslims whose religion is branded as Satanic – along with those whose gender identities challenge the sanctity of marriage as between a man and a woman and patriarchy.

The secular humanists are believed to be behind an array of institutions including the American Civil Liberties Union, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the National Organization for Women, Planned Parenthood, the Trilateral Commission, the United Nations, the State Department, major foundations (Rockefeller, Carnegie, Ford), elite universities and media platforms such as CNN and The New York Times.

In D. James Kennedy’s book, The Gates of Hell Shall Not Prevail: The Attack on Christianity and What You Need to Know to Combat It, he writes that although the United States was once a “Christian nation,” that is no longer the case because today “the hostile barrage from atheists, agnostics and other secular humanists has begun to take a serious toll on that heritage. In recent years, they have built up their forces and even increased their assault upon all our Christian institutions, and they have been enormously successful in taking over the ‘public square.’ Public education, the media, the government, the courts, and even the church in many places, now belong to them.”

The incendiary rhetoric creates an atmosphere of being under siege. It imparts a sense of comradeship, the feeling that although the world outside the walls of the church or the home is dangerous and hostile, there is a select community of brothers and sisters. Believers only owe a moral obligation to other Christians. The world is divided between comrades and enemies, neighbors and strangers. The commandment “Love your neighbor as yourself” is perverted to “Love your fellow Christians as yourself.” Nonbelievers have no place on the moral map.

When Christ returns, believers are told, He will lead the elect in one final apocalyptic battle against the people and groups blamed for their dislocation and despair. The secular world, the one that almost destroyed them and their families, will be eradicated. The flaws in human society and in human beings will be erased. They will have what most never had: a stable home and family, a loving community, fixed moral standards, financial and personal security and success and an abolition of uncertainty, disorder and doubt. Their fragmented, troubled lives will become whole. Evil will be physically vanquished. There will be no more impurity because the impure will no longer exist.

This externalization of evil, however, is not limited to the Christian Right. It lies at the core of American imperialism, American exceptionalism and American racism. White supremacy, which dehumanizes the other at home and abroad, is also fueled by the fantasy that there are superior human beings who are white and lesser human beings who are not. Long did not need the Christian fascism of his church to justify to himself the killings; the racial hierarchies within American society had already dehumanized his victims. His church simply cloaked it in religious language. The jargon varies. The dark sentiments are the same.

The ideology of the Christian right, like all totalitarian creeds, is, at its core, an ideology of hatred. It rejects what Augustine calls the grace of love, or volo ut sis (I want you to be). It replaces it with an ideology that condemns all those outside the magic circle. There is, in relationships based on love, an affirmation of the mystery of the other, an affirmation of unexplained and unfathomable differences. These relationships not only recognize that others have a right to be, as Augustine wrote, but the sacredness of difference.

External Force to be Destroyed

This sacredness of difference is an anathema to Christian fundamentalists, as it is to imperialists, to all racists. It is dangerous to the hegemony of the triumphalist ideology. It calls into question the infallibility of the doctrine, the essential appeal of all ideologies. It suggests that there are alternative ways to live and believe. The moment there is a hint of uncertainty the ideological edifice crumbles. The truth is irrelevant as long as the ideology is consistent, doubt is heretical and the vision of the world, however absurd, absolute and unassailable. These ideologies are not meant to be rational. They are meant to fill emotional voids.

Evil for the Christian fundamentalists is not something within them. It is an external force to be destroyed. It may require indiscriminate acts of violence, but if it leads to a better world this violence is morally justified. Those who advance the holy crusade alone know the truth. They alone have been anointed by God or, in the language of American imperialism, western civilization, to do battle with evil. They alone have the right to impose their “values” on others by force. Once evil is external, once the human race is divided into the righteous and the damned, repression and even murder become a sacred duty.

Immanuel Kant defined “radical evil” as the drive, often carried out under a righteous façade, to surrender to absolute self-love. Those gripped by radical evil always externalize evil. They lose touch with their own humanity. They are blind to their own innate depravity. In the name of western civilization and high ideals, in the name of reason and science, in the name of America, in the name of the free market, in the name of Jesus, they seek the subjugation and annihilation of others. Radical evil, Hannah Arendt wrote, makes whole groups of human beings superfluous. They become, rhetorically, living corpses before often becoming actual corpses.

This binary world view is anti-thought. That is part of its attraction. It gives to those who are alienated and lost emotional certitude. It is buttressed by hollow cliches, patriotic slogans and Bible passages, what psychologists call symbol agnostics. True believers are capable only of imitation. They shut down, by choice, critical reflection and genuine understanding. They surrender all moral autonomy. The impoverished language is regurgitated not because it makes sense, but because it justifies the messianic and intoxicating right to lead humankind to paradise. These pseudo-heroes, however, know only one form of sacrifice, the sacrifice of others.

Human evil is not a problem to be solved. It is a mystery. It is a bitter, constant paradox. We carry the capacity for evil within us. I learned this unsettling truth as a war correspondent. The line between the victim and the victimizer is razor thin. Evil is also seductive. It offers us unlimited often lethal power to turn those around us into objects to destroy or debase to gratify our most perverted desires or both. This evil waits to consume us. All it requires to flourish is for us to turn away, to pretend it is not there, to do nothing.

Those who blind themselves to their capacity for evil commit evil not for evil’s sake, but to make a better world. This collective self-delusion is the story of America, from its foundation on the twin evils of slavery and genocide to its inherent racism, predatory capitalism and savage wars of conquest. The more we ignore this evil, the worse it gets.

The awareness of human corruptibility and human limitations, as understood by Augustine, Kant, Sigmund Freud and Primo Levi, has been humankind’s most potent check on evil. Levi wrote that “compassion and brutality can coexist in the same individual and in the same moment, despite all logic.” This self-knowledge forces us to accept that no act, even one defined as moral or virtuous, is ever free from the taint of self-interest. It reminds us that we are condemned to always battle our baser instincts. It recognizes that compassion, as Rousseau wrote, is alone the quality from which “all the social virtues flow.”

Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel said that “some are guilty, but all are responsible.” We may not be guilty of the murders in Atlanta, but we are responsible. We must answer for them. We must accept the truth about ourselves, however unpleasant. We must unmask the lie of our pretended innocence.

Long’s murderous spree was quintessentially American. That is what makes it, along with all other hate crimes, along with our endless imperial wars, police terror, callous abandonment of the poor and the vulnerable, so frightening. This evil will not be tamed until it is named and confronted.

In Conversation: Chauncey DeVega & Anne Nelson Discuss the Right-wing Shadow Network & Its War on America

 

Anne Nelson is the author of Shadow Network: Media, Money, and the Secret Hub of the Radical Right. She is an adjunct professor at the School of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University.

Nelson is also a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, and a former Guggenheim Fellow. Her writing has appeared in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, Harper's, BBC, CBC, NPR and PBS.

In this episode of the Truth Report, she eloquently explains how a highly secretive right-wing alliance of Christian fascists, white supremacists, oil lobbyists, gun “rights” operatives, gangster capitalists and others operating under the banner of the Council for National Policy have been actively working to subvert American democracy and freedom for the last four decades.

She also details how the Trump’s regime's coup attempt on Jan. 6th was part of a much larger long-term plan to subvert and overthrow multiracial secular democracy.

And Nelson warns that many of the same Republicans and other members of the anti-democracy right-wing including QAnon cultists will likely gain even more power in the 2022 midterm elections as they work to stop Joe Biden and the Democrats’ efforts to protect democracy and improve American society.

America Radiates Violence: Challenging the Politics of Isolated Incidents by Henry Giroux

 

 Source: CounterPunch

 

In light of the tragic violence that has unfolded once again in the form of mass shootings in Boulder, Colorado and Atlanta, Georgia, it becomes clear that another pandemic defines the United States–a pandemic of violence. The figures speak for themselves. Since the Columbine shooting in 1999, there have been 114 mass shootings with 1300 victims. Moreover, as one national report notes “Every day, more than 100 Americans are killed with guns and more than 230 are shot and wounded.”  All of this happening in a country in which there are more guns than people and where laws are enacted that make it easier to buy a gun than to vote.

 

America radiates violence and mass shootings are only one register of this plague. The richest country in the world is armed, has one of the largest prison systems in the world,  rings the planet with over 800 military bases in 70 countries, and has a military budget of $738 billion that is insanely bloated and is larger than the next ten countries combined. Moreover, it criminalizes social problems, has an entertainment culture that trades in violence as a spectacle, demonizes people of color, militarizes its police forces, and elects politicians who denounce democracy and support a former president who emboldens right-wing violent extremists by using language as a vehicle to glorify violence as a way of solving social problems.

Sadly, 75 million Americans voted for Trump whose penchant for violence is only matched by his hatred of democracy and a celebration of ignorance and the crushing of dissent.

Americans can no longer be safe in schools, supermarkets, walking down the street, or going to church, synagogue, or any other house of worship. Violence is not just endured or ubiquitously present in the United States, it is glorified in its culture and ignored in its history. Lawlessness shapes its politics while the logic of financialization, consumption, deregulation, and commodification erases all traces of social and moral responsibility.

Domestic terrorism now rules the United States as it abandons the demands of democracy for a war culture, if not perpetual war. Americans no longer appear capable of understanding where violence ends since it has become a solution for addressing most of America’s pressing problems. The public imagination has turned lethal. America has blood on its hands, and the mass shootings will continue unless such violence can be understood as surface manifestations of the much larger issue of a society in which matters of justice, equality, and social responsibility are under attack in a neoliberal capitalist state that elevates profits over human needs, ignorance over reason, and inequality over community, and expulsion over the common good.

Mass shootings cannot be treated as isolated events since they are rooted in institutional and systemic economic and political problems normalized every day through a market-based callousness and collapse of conscience that allows a staggering threshold of violence to shape almost every level of society and daily life.

Violence in America has become routine, almost expected as a new normal. There is more at work here than the limited debates about gun culture or the sordid implication that violence is largely produced by people with mental health problems.  Violence saturates American culture domestically and in foreign policy. It defines the mainstream notion of a vitriolic masculinity and militarization of social relations manifested in a growing assault on women’s bodies, undocumented immigrants, young people living in poverty, indigenous populations, and the elderly who are warehoused in dilapidated and dangerous nursing homes.

The spectacle of violence dominates the mainstream media adding to a culture of cruelty and misdirected notion of pleasure in which violence becomes the chief source of entertainment. Violence is a business and source of profit for the merchants of death that include lobbyists for the defense industries, the National Rifle Association, and the gun dealers.

The mass shootings that extend from Columbine and Las Vegas to more recently Boulder and Atlanta raise more questions than answers. The United States has a culture soaked in blood, and violence is its calling card.  Violence becomes visible in the most shocking of instances, but it is the slow, accumulating violence beneath the surface of the mass killings that needs to be addressed. This extends from a savage form of capitalism that denigrates anything and anyone that does not fit into the script of commercial exchange to the systemic and death dealing forms of systemic racism, sexism, nativism, and militarism that permeate every aspect of society and provide the fodder for explosions of violence that now define all social relations, including the destruction of the planet.

The shootings, pipe bombs, drive by killings, gun mania, police violence, and prison-industrial complex must be seen within a broader understanding of a society marked by massive inequality, systemic injustice, and death dealing poverty. Matters of violence must be examined critically within the totality of sites in which it takes place, which serve to mutually reinforce the legitimacy of a war culture, a ruthless survival of the fittest economic system, and a plague of massive aggression against the most vulnerable populations. Everyday violence, including mass shootings, have to be linked to state violence, underwritten by a political culture indifferent to the value of human life, except for the rich and privileged.

If we want a real debate about violence, it is crucial to understand it as part of a larger social order that enacts the abandonment of public goods, health care for all, basic social provisions, democratic values and democracy itself. America is addicted to violence because it has become the organizing principle of a predatory socio-political-economic system in which human suffering, human misery, and death function as a valued form of political and economic currency.  The mass shootings that have become expressions of daily life are signposts that make clear that America has become a failed state, a country in which fascism now has a smooth edge.

The conditions for democracy have been obliterated under neoliberal capitalism. In its place is a society imbued with a penchant for violence. America has a fascist problem that marks its emergence into an age of public death and political psychosis, and it must be addressed if we are to think our way to a different politics and future.

 

Poet's Nook: "Holy Elixir" by Kate Tempest

 

  

 

 I touch the beginning Animating animals and tree Gods Scratching out legends in cave walls The days pour down into nights as we watched We matched stars with peaks We fought beasts We caught food for the feast And we walked to a breast to receive the bound wheat     The grass Black and strange As we razed plains to ash We laid claims Exchanged grains And made pacts And we clashed And we strained And the rains lashed The young maids were brave but they were made to lay flat The old ways were too ingrained to make the reins snap We laid traps    We gave our names back to the Saints We sang out thanks and complaints We burned fat Arranged bones in the flames Each bird a great catch Our songs were spells And our spells were plain facts    She laid down in the road where the people go by And declared herself willing to try I laid down beside her But all I could see were the feet as they walked over me That's when she told me: "I was Holy Elixir" She said "I thought I knew the world but it was only a picture"    She said "We're all written in the holiest scripture It's just we're living in this time that says no inhibitions Get yours, keep going, the distance, no limits And don't bother protesting because nobody listens Besides All your solutions dissolve under scrutiny And you can't stand a note of derision Instead seek approval to justify your existence Have opinions but have no resolve or conviction Just keep your head down Breathe the fumes and indulge your addictions Routine is healthy, ignore the affliction The cost to the soul and the constant constriction Don't consider too closely, have no intermission Keep throwing your fists in slow repetition Most of us manage, what makes you so different? Now, you seem a bright spark Go ahead, take the road with the pilgrims Head for the temples of democracy Freedom, growth, reason, liberty, hope But don't pay attention to what's hanging from the rope"    She said "Decode the language Unfold the symbols Untold disciples got lost in the hillside Following intellect, they let go of wisdom And now they'll tell you the soul's a closed system They sacrificed instinct to phony ambition And now what they hold in their fist has become all that there is But total existence needs meaning and myth Many misjudged the way and got lost in the mist Your loneliness is the symptom, not the sickness"    The moment her lips said "peace" My peace melted I became a memory I felt myself peel I was atoms Magnesium Calcium I was real She said "We are born of collision We are divisions of a bigger vision And yet We run around like hamsters Spinning the wheel Spinning the wheel Spinning the wheel"    I was on my knees then Begging for pardon I was old and clothed in white garments In a vast red desert Where the rocks were dark blue and varnished And a voice said "This is the garden Now you better start sowing Or there won't be a harvest"    I came to Under a domed roof The light was cold and clear and fragmented There was people, moving I watched them I saw a muscle of school girls performing I saw the ticket woman massaging the small of her back And the young gent, neat as a crease in his work clothes And the light, light as breath on the dirty, old track