Nonspirational Mantras

The Arkansas derivatives forgeries were so easy to pull off, so almost reflexively evil, that they occurred as easily as ordering office supplies or creating a marketing flyer [source]. They illustrate one of Asher’s Maxims (see title). Of course, I suspect the forgeries in Arkansas are actually quite common everywhere. Look at the crap that was forged to justify the invasion of Iraq – which people still call, erroneously, a “war”.

The Colosseum – Cultural Insanity, Ideology, & Personalism: Ideology creates group insanity. You see it everywhere. Look at the fundamentalists watching disasters with baited interest, speculating that it signals the apocalypse. They can’t love or maintain an attitude of compassion – that part of them has been shriveled to a stump by ideology. They wonder aloud whether God is punishing the victims. They are lost, as surely as people are lost in the floods.

The absence of any ethos, and the reduction of reality to personal preferences, though, is equally debilitating. Those enjoying with morbid curiosity the spectacle of emotional disasters, like Charlie Sheen’s break down, or Britney or Tom Cruise, before that, have lost their own sanity, stunted what represents a fully human attitude of compassion, as surely as any ideologue.

The culture is the Colosseum. That it ping pongs between ideology as the one offering and nihilism/pragmatism/solipsism (the absence of an ethos) as the other, demonstrates that the culture itself is sick, is stunted, has gone insane. Neither the ideologues, nor the nihilists can tell us about the world beyond themselves and their own proclivities. Unaware of their own deprivation, we can look to them as examples of deprivation, but not as indicators of what deprivation means.

The Colosseum is not the world. It is the amputee ward of the world, the hospice of missing parts. And if we would save ourselves from a life consigned to this reverse convalescence, we must repudiate ideology and also put back the missing limbs that repudiation has cost us.

Propping Up Dictators Has Been a Nonstop US Policy: Watching people surround all the murdering, torturing, embezzling, lying, oppressive dictators that the U.S. and other “freedom loving” powers supported, funded, and kept in place all these years, one can’t help but observe that this is such an ingrained norm in the U.S. that it’s unlikely to change with U.S. intervention and help of any kind. After all, the leadership the US installed in Iraq (Maliki) is exactly that kind of autocrat. So is Karzi in control of Afghanistan. But hell, the U.S. helped run Operation Condor with Pinochet and others in Chile, Argentina, and Uruquay. What do you expect?

People fucking forget than in 1989-1992 (yeah, just 20 fucking years ago), the U.S. conducted ops to bring down the government in Afghanistan, including using cluster bombs on civilians. Don’t like it? Fuck you, facts are facts. Go back to 1984 and US-backed Afghan rebels are firing on a civilian airliner. In the same period, the US provided the weapons for the Sudanese Civil War in 1983-2005, which killed 2million civilians, and displaced 4million more to starvation and deprivation.

This is the government that in 1981 refused to sign the protocol of the UN convention restricting use of napalm and white phosphorous against civilian targets. The British aren’t any better – they deployed tactical nukes in the Falklands. Didn’t use them, but it’s still a sign of who and what that society is.

Don’t fucking forget that the U.S. bombed Libya, before too. 1981-1986, it’s dropping bombs on Qaddafi, and killing civilians, including Q’s adopted daughter.

In the 80s and 90s (yeah not long ago huh?), the US trained Latin American soldiers in torture. All that “disappearing” you heard of back then (or ignored) was CIA sponsored. This was the Iran-Contra period. From 1977-2002, in Mozambique, the US supported RENAMO, the anti-marxist group with a policy of massacres of civilians and using child soldiers. Condor (1976-83) is the most interesting, because it’s Kissinger, Cheney, Rumsfeld, just like it has been in Iraq.

Skip over the gulf wars, and the US is still supporting a 1975 attack on Iraq by ally Iran. In 75-78, the US backed the invasion of East Timor by Indonesia, then an ally and now a place run by some serious religious nutjobs the US is worried about, or should be.

One could go on and on and on with this tuff. Even skipping Laos and Vietnam and all the related stuff. Noam Chomsky talks about most of this material in his piece on why the rest of the world hates the U.S.

But you know, I don’t give a bumble fuck in hell if you’re a liberal, progressive, libertarian or whatever, it’s your country, your system, your liberal, progressive, and libertarian representatives that voted for this or that pet war or covert action, or funded it, or it’s the cult-like executive pastor-leader-dictator and his group that you helped vote into office. And it doesn’t matter when, either. There’s never been a moment since World War II that the US hasn’t been openly at war or else conducting covert wars or both and, often as not, it’s both. And your savior politicians and ‘good people’ and ‘better people’ have supported it. And so have you.

So this is why I think all political people are liars. Right down to the well meaning grandma that sends her dollar to a campaign and the campus marcher and the intellectual distinguisher between just and unjust war, and the religious nutjob that murders in the name of Jesus. Liars, all of you. If you had any decency, any at all, anarchism would be the only sane, rational, ethical response you could choose. A complete rejection of all the systems that have led and do lead consistently, repeatedly, demonstrably to annhilation for somebody – just not you. I don’t judge a man by what he dies for – I judge him by what he decides others should die for. And so far, I haven’t seen one good god damned thing that justifies anything like the murderers, torturers, robbers, and liars that each generation of US policy has propped up.

And choosing WWII was arbitrary. You could argue, if you want to go back, that there’s never been a time in US history that it didn’t support dictators, genocide, or some other evil damned thing. That’s what the textbooks should say. That’s the truth anyone but a liar would teach their kids, at least at some point. And it’s the truth any US citizen except a liar would own up to about the fictional nation of the free he thinks he lives in.

I’m getting sick not of Charlie Sheen, but of people enjoying the spectacle of mental illness in a celebrity. It’s like watching someone on fire, flailing about in the street, and taking an either academic or vaguely amused and curious interest in it. Sheen’s sickness makes far less of an impression on me than the emotional amputees serving as his spectators.

Curriculum, Textbook Wars, Fundamentalists, and Left Wing Nuts: I was listening to NPR’s retrospective on the textbook wars in West Virginian in 1974, and I found myself thinking that, as little truck as I have with fundamentalists of any stripe, they are not without some valid points in this matter.

For one thing, the textbook committees that produce these texts have either got to be the dumbest fucking people on earth or among the most ideologically biased and dictatorial. There are lots of ways to give kids diverse experiences with lots of literature, but come on – excerpting Eldridge Cleaver’s book, written from prison – the one in which he revels in raping a white woman? I mean, though that’s not the excerpt chosen for the texts, it’s a bit like saying we’re going to learn about white people in Wisconsin by reading Jeffrey Daumer’s diaries. If you think that’s reasonable, you’re not liberal at all, you’re just a retarded moron who does what he’s told, takes what he’s given, and tries to make that out to epitomize being open-minded.

And secondly, being dialectically reactionary, by deciding “We’ll show those fundamentalists. Our kids will get whatever the schools teach. Drink it down wholesale. Purple Koolaid or no. We’ll be… educated.” makes you every bit as fundamentalist as the religious wingnuts. Actually far more so – I’ver never seen a religious fundamentalist without some level of discretion and discernment about what their values are and what they care about. Some of the reactionary non-intereference parents I’ve met, who consider themselves an intelligentzia, make the worst fundies look like rational geniuses. And I respect the left-wingnuts less, not only for being more foolish, more credulous, more anti-rational, and more blindly reactionary than religious fundamentalists, but also because they don’t have the basic honesty to admit they’re just abdicating and using their fascade of enlightenment to justify it.

In other words, the left-wingnuts are also liars and bad parents. At least the fundies are looking out for their kids, however misguided they may be. True, there may be some racism behind the fundie rhetoric, and some levels of ideology they don’t really acknowledge. But even that lack of forthrightness doesn’t approach the dishonesty of parents who consign their children to the system under the pretense that most of what it spits out is reasonable, let alone educational. Any truly rational person would look at the mediocrity of the educational system in the West and conclude that sentencing a kid to that for the first 18 years of his life, if not 22-30 years, isn’t about education at all – it’s about sawing him off on a procrustean bed of knuckle dragging normals, so they feel like they generated a good copy of themselves. It’s narcissism, not motherly love.

Frankly, too, it’s appalling to see all those activist parents – one it was overalls, now it’s yuppy suburbans – protesting text books. Why the hell don’t you take your kids out of those places, take some responsibility, and give them a decent education yourself, instead of sobbing endlessly about society not doing it. And don’t back talk with that guff about “not every parent can do that”. If anyone can, you fucking culdesac shoppers can, and it’s part of the responsibility you preach about, when you choose to have children. You’re abdicators, same as the left wing douche bags are.

I have always held that regardless of the side you take over curriculum in schools, if you’re gathered around public education, which incidentally is a form of welfare (so you can put that in your Tahoe or your bong and smoke it too), what you’re really engaging in is the spectacle of justifying neglect. You’re either saying the people we dump our kids minds on should be our maids and do exactly what we want, or that we don’t care what they do to our kids, as long as it’s not what the religious people want. Either way, you’re dumpers, as surely as if you dumped a puppy in the woods, you fucks. So let’s get one thing clear, there’s a whole lot of us looking at you, who see you for exactly what you are, and your rhetoric for what it is, and you’re not nearly as convincing as you think. You’re bad parents, you’re bad people, and you’re bad liars.

That’s my take. If you were offended, so be it.

The irony of Muslim courage, compared to how they’ve been portrayed in the West, is seen in that the protestors in Libya are so brave. The mercenaries and “militia” working for Gaddafi are such cowards. It’s easy to receive acclaim for courage when you’re wearing a million dollars in equipment on your back, or driving a ten million dollar vehicle, or flying a hundred million dollar plane, dropping bombs from the air. But the real test is when you have nothing but bare hands and are facing machine guns, missiles, grenades, and those very planes. The courage we’re seeing in Libya is real courage. It is beyond bragging or being worshipped because you wear a uniform. It is beyond ideology and political parties. These men are hurling their bodies at armed men, resisting, and they won’t back down. Where is such courage in the world? One can’t help but feel it ironic, in the West, that it is the Muslims demonstrating such courage. It is they who are the children of Ghandi and Martin Luther King now. I realize they might fight back if they had guns, where those men and their movements didn’t. But for now, at this moment, they are putting just their bare bodies, wearing less than a Westerner wears to go to the corner store, on the line. Praise the bravery of these men and women.

Gaddafi is like the gun toters that shoot people in public schools (“ready to die as a martyr”); he has basically said he is willing to kill a lot of people, destroy their ability to survive (e.g. the oil wells and pipelines), and then kill himself. Once a person reaches this point, and there’s no negotiation, you’ve really got not recourse but to launch an assault to capture or kill him. The yellow hatted murderers who are invading homes, and the mercenaries sniping at people in the street, can’t be stopped except by the Libyan military. If the military are standing with the people, then it’s their role, more than anyone’s, to bear arms against Gaddafi’s mercenaries and the “militia” that are executing people. It’s their job. If they don’t, and they turn on the people, they become defacto foreign mercenaries too.

It costs a billion dollars now, we’re told, to run for president. You know, even the dumbest person who makes fun of conspiracy theories should be able to figure out that a billion dollars isn’t coming from the ordinary guy on the street, however much microdonations may have been an interesting facet of the last election. Multinational corporations, mega-industries like healthcare, arms, and energy, purchase elections. An election is a product, like any other product. And that should, to a logical person, make clear the correlary truth: they’re’re not really purchasing a president – they’re purchasing a policy of which the president is just a figurehead. I’ll say again: long-term policies with global populations are too important to leave to the exigencies of one man’s health, cooperation, or delusions – the government that you buy is not vested in a man – it’s vested in a network of men who have chosen their visible symbol as a marketing piece for their mass/sheep level supporters, most of whom suffer from the very policies they are implementing. So that man needs to be “Christian” or something like it, and reasonably clean looking, and do a host of other media-related things to come off a certain way. The recent supreme court decision to lift the limits on corporate dollars going to elections should tell any sane observer that the US just deregulated the policy market, and future elections will be streamlined sales. I recommend registering electionbay.com and creating a technology around the bidding.

On renewing the Patriot Act: I just wish the advocates of fascism (conservatives) and statism (conservatives and liberals) were actually honest people. If they could admit that when a state deprives people of civil liberties like privacy under supposed “emergency conditions”, it has no intention of returning those liberties to the people under ordinary conditions, or else “ordinary” will just never return. If they would admit, when they’re legislating away liberty, that it’s permanent, then at least even the dumbest people clamoring for security would deserve what they get, and we could all just live honestly in a world of cow-like morons.

A genuine anarchist has nothing against the actual operation of capitalism, which is predicated on separating foolish people from wealth they don’t deserve (just look at what they’re spending it on). It’s the institutions and ideology of capitalism that an anarchist considers toxic to life. It’s one thing to trick people out of their money – it’s another to teach them it’s right to be fooled and punish them if they resist.