Our Worst Enemy Is Our Cult of Closed-Minded Optimism

Just as the dark undertow of Russian history drowned the bright promise of Soviet democracy, so now the revolutionary potential of the Occupy Movement, which hopes to resurrect itself on May Day, is being smothered by the Polly Anna conditioning to which we in the U.S. 99 Percent have been subjected since birth.

Of course it is not just Occupy that is so afflicted. It is our entire nation. We persist in telling ourselves lies about how good things are – how bright is our future, how great is our potential, how fortunate we are to have been born Americans – when by every statistical measurement the United States has become the most oppressive nation in the industrial world.

At least though events have now begun to disclose our true philosophical heritage – capitalist hucksterism as personified by Dale Carnegie's tactics of manipulation, Ayn Rand's gospel of maximum greed as ultimate virtue and – let us not forget – Norman Vincent Peale's self-obsessed Christianity of “positive thinking,” as if the Roman imperial death-warrant on the old crucifix were now replaced by a Smiley Face: “have a happy day,” never mind the twisted agonies of the alleged Messiah or the oppressed minions for whom he supposedly died.

The resultant attitude – an aggressive, cultoid optimism reinforced by the same lock-box closed-mindedness that defines the zealotry of fundamentalist Christians, Muslims and Jews – has become the dominant trait of the U.S. citizenry. It transcends all class distinctions. It imposes submission in welfare lines (“this is America I might win big”) as effectively as it fuels greed on Wall Street (“this is America mine for the looting”). Indeed it is the quintessence of the Moron Nation psyche. But its Disneyland notion of happiness turns quickly to hostility, anger and even violence whenever it is confronted by criticism, questions or legitimate differences of opinion.

And the Occupy Movement – as I learned during my involvement with Occupy Tacoma – is no exception. One of OT's original participants, I repeatedly urged during general-assembly efforts to formulate a local statement of purpose that OT recognize its function as a vehicle for articulating the grievances of the 99 Percent. Typically the first step in organizing a union, the formalized voicing of grievances could also begin a local, national and finally international process by which we might evolve an effective ideology of resistance to capitalism. Obvious as all this seemed, my proposal was resoundingly denounced by a number of OTers who, for reasons they never made clear, apparently found it profoundly threatening. Soon afterward I was ever more excluded from OT activities. Hence my eventual realization I can serve the broader cause of Occupy far better as a supportive albeit independent observer – in other words as a journalist – than as one of its activists.

Hence too the relevance of a book-review/author-interview by Michael Busch that was published a couple of weeks ago in Truthout. Busch wrote that Chris Faraone's new book on Occupy Wall Street, 99 Nights With the 99 Percent, presents “a broadly rendered portrait of a national movement” that accurately depicts all its “diversity, beauty and self-contradiction.” Among those contradictions, as Faraone himself noted during the interview, is the same “you're either with us or against us” rejection of criticism that seemed refreshingly absent from OT at its beginning but later became increasingly oppressive, whether at general assemblies or on the OT website.

As I said on the associated comment thread:

Mr. Busch's most important disclosure reveals the extent to which reflexive Ayn Rand values – values in which most of us have been conditioned since birth – yet lurk beneath Occupy's rhetorical radicalism:

“And finally, the observation I keep coming back to - which is obvious, but we rarely talk about it - is that the problems the camps had to confront - homelessness, drug addiction - are not new problems as anyone who has lived in a city can tell you...And not surprisingly, the reaction from a lot of people was 'yuck, go back to where you came from.'”

A textbook example of identification with the oppressor, the “yuck” reflex reflects an attitude that – if uncorrected by self-criticism – will be Occupy's undoing. For the camps did indeed become magnets for chronically homeless mental patients, drug addicts and alcoholics. And the response of the occupiers themselves was too often immediate revulsion and subsequent retreat.

In Occupy Tacoma, which I served via its Media Workgroup, there were persistent reports social-service people were telling the street-dwelling drunks, junkies and psychotics our Occupation Park was the best place in town to get free food and shelter. Whether these referrals came from state welfare bureaucrats or elsewhere could never be determined.

But the long-term impact was the destruction of the camp, certainly slower than by the police violence employed elsewhere on the West Coast, but nevertheless as inevitable. Which suggests the problem may not have been accidental but was instead an experiment in the tactical use of afflicted populations as a weapons of disruption.

There's no doubt the associated chaos prevented Occupiers from building solidarity with another far more vital group of homeless people – bitterly angry, formerly middle-class youth whose parents have been thrown out of work, then foreclosed and evicted. It is precisely this sort of experience with oppression that combines with ideological discipline to produces a formidably effective activist. But the potential of newly homeless people was nullified by the disruptions inflicted by the chronically homeless.

Meanwhile the presence of so many junkies, drunks and psychotics was pounced upon by Ruling Class Media to slander the entire Occupy Movement as nothing more than a rebellion by petulant and often demented misfits.

The lesson should be obvious. To the extent Occupiers remain entrapped by the undertow of bourgeois values, the afflicted-populations tactic will obviously succeed – with far less expense to the One Percent than the brute force utilized elsewhere.

But I doubt the lesson will be learned. As I can personally attest, the “rarely-talk-about-it” response was in truth a rigidly enforced taboo, resulting even in the censorship of my own Occupy Tacoma reports by one of Truthout's rival news services. Thus – to the entire movement's possibly terminal loss – the requisite self-criticism will probably never take place.

As if that were not disheartening enough, there was an even worse example of Occupy's penchant for PollyAnna self-delusion evident in an obnoxiously self-congratulatory piece by Douglas Schoen that Reader Supported News published yesterday morning: 

“(I)t is becoming increasingly clear that Occupy Wall Street (OWS)—while less visibly active in recent months following clashes with the police, infighting, and eviction from its flagship encampment in New York’s Zuccotti Park last November—is nonetheless seizing control of the political debate in America this election year.”

“Occupy Wall Street’s rhetorical dominance of Democratic messaging,” the advertorial essay continues, “fulfills one of the clear goals its followers articulated last October, when my firm, Douglas E. Schoen, LLC, conducted a survey of OWS protesters. At that time, a clear plurality (35 percent) of the Occupy Wall Street protesters interviewed said their top goal was for Occupy Wall Street to move the Democratic Party distinctly and boldly left.”

To which – accompanied by the virtual jeers and hisses of many RSN readers – I responded with a harsh dose of reality:

Mr. Schoen's claim – that Occupy is "seizing control" of the 2012 political debate – is not just a shameless advertisement for his business. It is also utter nonsense.

Worse, it typifies our crippling penchant for self-deception.

As we learned from Obama the Orator's transformation into Barack the Betrayer, the U.S. political debate is meaninglessness. Note how "change we can believe in" became the biggest Big Lie in our national history.

Indeed the only discernible impact Occupy is having on U.S. politics is giving the One Percent a rationale for expanding the Gestapo powers of its Department of Homeland Security. Without Occupy, it's probable the abolish-the-constitution sections of the National Defense Authorization Act and Trespass Act would not have been demanded of Congress.

That's not Occupy “seizing control.” That's the One Percent “seizing” the means to crush us.

Note too how these laws received nearly unanimous approval – undeniable proof the two parties are in truth one.

Also – were Occupy influencing U.S. politics – the Buffett Rule would not have been filibustered to death. Had it passed, Mr. Schoen's claim might have a solid foundation. But unless such change takes place, to assert Occupy is “seizing control” is no more than delusional self-indulgence.

Which – precisely as Sun Tzu noted 2600 years ago – is the most fatal mistake such a movement can make.

*****

VIPRs on Buses Prove Oppressive Truth Denied by Occupy Optimists

The true extent to which Occupy is “seizing control” of our national politics is glaringly reflected by a report first broadcast by the superb English language news service of Russia Today (RT.com/USA), then published by RSN.

The Transportation Security Administration, say RT and RSN, is morphing into the national transit police, harassing even riders of local buses with stop-and-frisk intrusions.

“No surprise, really,” the RSN story adds. As soon Homeland Security Director Janet Napolitano “established groping in airports,” she “expressed her desire to expand TSA jurisdiction over all forms of mass transit. In the past year, TSA's snakelike VIPR (Visual Intermodal Prevention and Response) teams have been slithering into more and more bus and train stations - and even running checkpoints on highways - never in response to actual threats, but apparently more in an attempt to live up to the inspirational motto displayed at the TSA's air marshal training center since the agency's inception: 'Dominate. Intimidate. Control.'”

Given how the VIPRs who were frisking bus riders in Houston, Texas last week were reportedly accompanied by drug-sniffing dogs, it seems another purpose behind TSA's expanded reach is to seize more slaves for the for-profit prison system.

Which prompted my response:

“Dominate. Intimidate. Control.” That says it all, the appropriate dicta not of dutiful cops who protect and serve but rather of concentration-camp guards and Gestapo agents.

But I doubt even the Gestapo was so bluntly outspoken – “Dominate-Intimidate-Control” – about its tyrannical purpose.

Hence, precisely as the dicta imply, we witness the transformation of TSA from airport guards to national transit police, soon from national transit police to national police and thence to recreation of the original Geheime Staatspolizei.

Somewhere in Hell, Heydrich, Himmler and Hitler are all smiling. Meanwhile here on Earth it's “Dominate-Intimidate-Control”: welcome to the Fourth Reich.

Later in response to another poster I added:

More to the point, what does the "Dominate-Intimidate-Control" paradigm tell us about our future?

In bitter truth it proves beyond a scintilla of doubt that "recovery" (whether of our jobs or our constitutional rights – is the ultimate Big Lie. Instead what the One Percent has in store for us is national enslavement, for details of which see “Prison Labor as the Past and Future of American 'Free-Market' Capitalism.” 

And capitalism it is – infinite greed as maximum virtue (as it was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be) – its smirking masters enabled by ever-more-savage capitalist governance: absolute power and infinite profit for the Ruling Class, total subjugation and genocidal poverty for all the rest of us.

For how else but by exploitation of "human capital" – the enslavement of us all – will the capitalists maintain their obscenely lavish lifestyle in a time of dwindling natural resources and a planet raped to increasing rebellion against human survival?

*****

Deluded Washingtonians Think Republicans Might Be Better 

 

As I said in this week's lead item, it's not just Occupy that suffers from self-destructive optimism. A report in The Stranger, a Seattle alternative weekly, describes a consequence of the idiotic delusion a Republican governor might somehow prove more humanitarian than the state's Democrats who – though no different from the GOPorkers in unspeakable cruelty to impoverished and disabled people – have nevertheless steadfastly protected women's reproductive freedom and defended gay rights.  

Here's the story:

“Washington's gubernatorial race is the third hottest in the nation, according to national political news site Politico. The site led off its latest rankings with an unrhetorical question about Democrat Jay Inslee's campaign: 'Can it possibly be successful with such an unwelcoming reception from the local media?'”

The Evergreen State press corps, never the brightest bauble on the money-tree of Ruling Class Media, is curiously convinced Inslee will lose the gubernatorial election to Republican Rob McKenna, who is not just an anti-health-care-reform state attorney-general but is already weasel-wording on women's rights.

As I wrote in response:

Ruling Class Media supports McKenna because that's what it is: Ruling Class Media, hence Republican, hence fascist.

 

The question is whether Washington voters understand that McKenna (or any other Republican) in the governor's mansion will turn our state into Wisconsin, Ohio and Arizona: war against workers, JesuNazi Jihad against women, genocide by abandonment against anyone elderly, disabled or chronically impoverished.

 

This is not speculation; it's proven fact. The new GOPorker gubernatorial tactic is to run as a moderate Rightist, then rule like Wisconsin's Scott Walker, channeling Mussolini, Franco, Pinochet, Father Coughlin, Joe McCarthy and of course occasionally even der Führer himself.

 

Perhaps though it's the will of the electorate to impose the will of the One Percent: turn Olympia into another Madison and the entire state into another Arizona, where all wombs now belong to that divine sadist the Christians hail as their god.

 

You'd think Washingtonian women, at least, would have better sense.

 

But maybe the ideology of Ayn Rand has poisoned politics here as hopelessly as it has amongst the DemocRats in general – note the prevalence of anti-union “progressives.” Note too the Ayn Rand influence within the U.S. feminist movement and the subsequent triumph of its unique ideology: capitalism – infinite greed as maximum virtue – as maximum "liberation" as well.

 

It's a terrifying likelihood, especially for somebody like me, old, crippled and permanently impoverished by the One Percent's malicious contractions of the economy.

And likelihood it is: look how the state's voters have already bought the Big Lie “mass transit is welfare” and would rather terminate public transport – anything to torment the poor – than pay tiny sales tax increases of two or three pennies on a ten dollar bill.

 

Admittedly the DemocRats are hardly a utopian alternative. There's no denying the lessons taught us by Barack the Betrayer and Christine the Cruel. But at least Inslee (might) spare us the imposition of Christian theocracy so characteristic of Republican rule.

 

Sure a McKenna Regime could wake people up. But by then it will be too late – especially for all of us elderly and disabled people he and his fellow GOPigs will have deliberately murdered by cutting off our Medicaid and food stamp stipends: genocide – the elimination of unprofitable humans – without the international embarrassment of death camps.

*****

National Fat Epidemic: Illness as Enslavement, Health as Liberation 

 

Phil Rockstroh, a New York City poet and essayist to whom I'm going to pay more attention, has spelled out what is probably the ultimate illness-as-metaphor hypothesis:

“The corporate food industry wrought epidemic of obesity in the U.S. is a microcosmic representation of a global-wide system of macro-imperialism...As the one percent has acquired their grotesquely bloated assets, large segments of the American middle and laboring classes have acquired larger and larger amounts of excess body fat. As corporate executives have sweetened their salaries with limitless perks and multimillion dollar bonuses, their workforce has sucked down copious portions of high fructose-based soft drinks and obesity-engendered disease has increased accordingly...Addiction to fattening food speaks of our inner emptiness; so called Reality Television relates to our hunger for social engagement and communion; the images that haunt the corporate state media hologram attract us because we long for the images that rise from the soul.”

I presume Rockstroh understands, as I do, not all obesity comes from willful overeating.

That said, I know precisely of what he speaks, and why he describes it with such disgust. I ride the bus each week with young single-mothers, women who were probably once beautiful, whose eyes have become opaque with hopelessness, whose bodies are not just swollen from compulsive eating but are morbidly, suicidally, grotesquely fat – literally circus obese.

These mothers, who are invariably White, spitefully hog the scanty bus space nominally reserved for cripples like myself. They often glare hatefully at those of us who are elderly and genuinely disabled, especially if we happen to be of a minority race, and they always defy the transit authority regulations that require them to fold their giant perambulators, which are invariably filled with Wal-Mart hoards of potato chips and other eat-yourself-to-death convenience foods, even as their infants, some only months old, already bear the mortal taint of caloric excess.

Such parenting disgusts me, not the least because my own post-smoking weight gain is largely the legacy of a vindictive mother who force-fed me into a repulsively fat child – this her ultimate vengeance against my father, against me and against anyone born with a penis. Though I shed this burden of blubber very quickly after I started smoking (spring 1955, age 15), the fact my mother's curse is literally inescapable became apparent two weeks after my first day as a true non-smoker, 23 September 1995. It was then, 7 October, I discovered I had already gained 12 pounds – never mind my food intake had remained unchanged. (I should weigh 160 and in fact weighed 158 when I began the ten-year battle against nicotine addiction that culminated with my last cigarette the day before 1995's autumnal equinox.) But my post-smoking weight, the personification of ugly, has gone as high as 265, nominally varying between 225 and 245 – in any case completely beyond any known means of control.

Though no less contemptible than the fat of compulsive overeating, weight-gain of this sort is assuredly not a defense against existential angst. Indeed it intensifies such misery, all the more so because its source, the long-term metabolic chaos inflicted by the excruciatingly endless process of nicotine withdrawal (already nearly 17 years) and intensified by my age (72), defines it as an inescapable loathsomeness I will bear into the grave.

Yet I cannot but pity these transit-tyrannizing mothers the dread emptiness against which they blanket themselves with bloat. I am sorry for them even when – as happens so often – they subject us to their own microcosmic version of the venomous disregard with which the macrocosmic capitalists routinely savage us all, forcing those of us who are elderly and/or legitimately disabled out of our allegedly reserved seats and into the awkward painfully sardined devil-take-the-hindmost hurly-burly of a standing-room-only rush-hour bus.

My pity is no doubt intensified by the fact I recognize morbid obesity as genocide – conveniently self-inflicted of course – another of the diabolical tactics by which the One Percent rid their United Estates of surplus workers. Why else the war against health-care reform? Denied access to medical sustainment, the obese will perish all the more quickly. Again I reflected on my personal slogan: in these times, survival itself is an act of revolutionary defiance. Then I wrote the following, hoping Rockstroh himself would read it:

Were it still the '80s – were Mr. Rockstroh another regular at the Lion's Head, and were we to converse in another of those memorable dialogues so characteristic of that long-ago and still lamented realm three steps down from Christopher Street – I would ask him only one question.

I would ask if he too feels himself forced by the ever-more dire circumstances of our ever-more-enslaved species on this ever-more gang-raped planet to acknowledge our only salvation lies in an as-yet-unformulated hybrid of Jefferson, Marx and the Gaia Hypothesis.

But I cannot fault his “Hungry Ghosts.” It seems to thrust us in the very direction I dare name: Thomas Jefferson and Karl Marx and an underlying ethos formally absent from the Earth since the sack of Knossos – seemingly triple heresy whether from Jeffersonian, Marxian or Gaian viewpoints, yet (ironically) each the only possible facilitator of the others.

Meanwhile and however one reads its multi-leveled meaning, “Ghosts” is also quite possibly the best piece of writing – “best” in its painterly use of language – Common Dreams has ever published.

I merely wish Mr. Rockstroh's prose were a bit more Hemingwayesque, the better to catapult his life-preserving vision – “a resonate relationship with the world at large” – to more of those slave-ship castaways who have been seduced by the siren-song of trinket materialism and are now drowning in the predatory seas of Moron Nation.

Not that I have any right to criticize: I have too many times indulged myself with the complexities and potential of Faulknerian sentence-structure rather than discipline my prose into the easy-to-comprehend Ernest-ness rightfully demanded by every editor at every publication that ever paid me wages: “ El Sordo was making his fight on a hilltop.”

The quote – its nine words a perfect who-what-when-where-why daily-newspaper lead – is the opening line of a now-forbidden Hemingway short story, “The Fight on the Hilltop,” a heart-rending portrait of those who courageously resisted the fascists in Spain.

Juxtaposed with Mr. Rockstroh's work, it illustrates the writers' dilemma, especially in the unprecedented circumstances of now. For whom do we write? Do we write only for our Muse – or at least for those who might become our lovers? Or do we write for those we would never let into our dwellings, much less invite into the naked-soul intimacies of our beds?

Alas to make a revolution we must learn do the latter.

LB/29 April 2012

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