SOMETIMES SEVERAL TOPICS mesh into a single essay, a process to which I alluded, though only en passant, as I was writing and assembling last week's OAN.
But that meshing was slap-in-the-face obvious this week, as Internet
reporting on governmentally sanctioned persecution by Christian
theocrats at the U.S. Air Force Academy shared indicative synchronicity
with five other topics. These were the release of some new data on the
forcible impoverishment of the 99 Percent; the smashing of a
unionization campaign in the de facto Christian theocracy of
the South; the methodical falsification of U.S. history (specifically
about the Vietnam War, President Richard Nixon's treason and President
Johnson's humanitarianism); the judicial approval of religious profiling
by the ever-more-ubiquitous secret police, and a provocative review of
poetry as a medium for speaking truth to power, which Reader Supported News thoughtfully picked up from The New Yorker.
What
ties all these pieces together is the fact they are each – even the
poetry review – about class struggle. Though we USians are conditioned
to reject class struggle – even to deny its existence – its reality
becomes obvious whenever you focus on the increasingly unapologetic,
might-makes-right savagery of capitalism. That's because what is called
capitalism is at its Ayn Rand core nothing more complex than infinite
greed elevated to maximum virtue – the conscious rejection of every
humanitarian principle our species has ever established. Its individual,
clinical state is called moral imbecility or sociopathy. When it's
metastasized from economic theory into a defining national philosophy,
as it has in the United States, what you get is capitalist governance –
absolute power and unlimited profit for the One Percent, total
subjugation for all the rest of us – another name for which is fascism.
The class-struggle common denominator of these stories is provided by new economic-inequality data, for which a tip of the green visor to an extremely useful email newsletter, PopularResistance.Org Daily Digest.
The data, assembled by the Economic Policy Institute, show a key aspect
of how we in the 99 Percent are methodically impoverished: “Between
1979 and 2007...the average income of the bottom 99 percent of U.S.
taxpayers grew by 18.9 percent. Simultaneously, the average income of
the top 1 percent grew over 10 times as much—by 200.5 percent.”
EPI
then addresses the discrepancy state-by-state. The worst states – the
realms of capitalism so malevolent the One Percenters allowed us no
increase in average incomes – are Nevada, Wyoming, Michigan and Alaska.
The 15 next worst, where the One Percenters made off with from half to
84 percent of all income growth between 1979 and 2007, are Arizona
(where the richest of the rich grabbed 84.2 percent of all income
growth); Oregon (81.8 percent); New Mexico (72.6 percent); Hawaii (70.9
percent); Florida (68.9 percent); New York (67.6 percent); Illinois
(64.9 percent); Connecticut (63.9 percent); California (62.4 percent);
Washington (59.1 percent); Texas (55.3 percent); Montana (55.2 percent);
Utah (54.1 percent); South Carolina (54.0 percent); and West Virginia
(53.3 percent).
Another Popular Resistance dispatch – a photo essay on the homeless camps
that have become a signature presence in the USian woodlands –
exemplifies the real-world consequences of the EPI data. (The
suppression of these communities, which earlier generations knew as
Hoovervilles, is amongst the primary reasons for the endemic closures of
formerly public lands throughout the United States.) Ben Marcin's
pictures of individual dwellings at these sites are well-composed, so
much so they vividly portray the eerie, almost tangible sense of tragedy
and banishment that haunts all such locales. Though that is part of the
story's strength, I must nevertheless as a photographer and former
photo editor fault the work for its failure to include the people who
built and inhabited these wretched domiciles. But its publication in the
same edition of PRODD as the EPI report is laudable – another wake-up call demanding we recognize the forbidden truth of class-struggle.
Likewise
the conclusion of the EPI report: “Policy choices and cultural forces
have combined to put downward pressure on the wages and incomes of most
Americans even as their productivity has risen...In the next decade,
something must give. Either America must accept that the American Dream
of widespread economic mobility is dead, or new policies must emerge
that will begin to restore broadly shared prosperity.”
Meanwhile
the One Percenters' choice of alternatives – zero-tolerance fascism –
is already obvious in the politicians' embrace of “austerity” at every
level of USian governance, federal, state and local. Hence the
class-struggle relevance that binds the following texts and
comment-thread responses into a single OAN entry.
***
“How the Union Was Defeated at Volkswagen” Kevin
Drawbaugh and Nick Carey of Reuters byline an obviously-censored report
that nevertheless manages to suggest the behind-the-scenes,
beyond-the-workplace coordination that defeated the United Automobile
Workers effort to unionize a Volkswagen plant in East Tennessee. The
defeat is all the more revealing because VW's (German) management, which
believes workers do have rights, welcomed the union's presence. But the
wire-service dispatch, though detailed, says nothing about the
anti-union fanaticism of the local white churches, to which I can attest
because I lived in Tennessee for a miserable 13 years. Such theocratic
malevolence is often enforced by the Ku Klux Klan – colloquially known
as “the Saturday Night Men's Bible Study Class.” Hence my contribution
to the comment thread: We on the Left need to “recognize the role
Christianity plays -- Godzilla huge and King Kong strong -- in keeping
the South anti-union. The so-called 'Prosperity Gospel,' which
originated in the fundamentalist South but is now the doctrinal mainstay
of Christianity throughout the USian homeland, holds that wealth and
power are meted out by the Christians' god to reward godly men. An
extension of the same doctrine decrees the manager is god's anointed
representative in the workplace. Managerial right is thus divine right –
the same entitlement formerly accorded kings. Thus too any disobedience
is deadly sin -- and from this perspective, there is no greater sin
than unionism. (Moreover) this is all part of 'a cultural/ideological
war that extends far beyond the workplace.' It reaches into the bedroom
via bans on abortion and birth control; into the schools via bans on
teaching scientific truth; and into the military via the forcible
Christianization imposed on the officer corps. It is nothing less than
an organized campaign to replace the constitution with Biblical Law, the
Christian equivalent of Sharia, and it has already conquered the
federal government, for which see The Family: the Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power: (Jeff Sharlet; Harper: 2008)”
Ralph Nader's later, much more revealing report on how East Tennessee and Ayn Rand ideology defeated the UAW is here.
But even Nader, a skilled and insightful researcher, missed the
Caucasian pulpit-pounding that, sure as sunrise, hammered home the
Christian god's commandment “to put them uppety workers back in thar
rightful place.”
***
I
regret I did not comment on why the court decision is so personally
disturbing: because I remember how the authorities in East Tennessee –
including officials at the University of Tennessee – persecuted
Unitarians during the 1950s, and how the First Amendment was ultimately
our only defense.
Now
in the looming Christian theocracy of the USian Empire, I can easily
envision the secret police whether local, state or federal again
assigned to monitor the political conformity and even doctrinal
orthodoxy not just of Muslims (as in the Newark case), but of all people
– especially those in sects officially viewed as “suspicious,” as
Unitarians were during the era of the postwar purges, as all
non-Christians, agnostics, atheists and even non-fundamentalist
Christians are today.
***
“Lying to Survive at the Air Force Academy: An Open Letter to Lt. Gen. Michelle Johnson” Mikey
Weinstein of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation shares a letter
he received that bitterly protests the Christian theocracy imposed upon
the U.S. officer corps. I point out that “In the de facto
Fourth Reich of today's USian Empire, the Christian church in its more
savagely fundamentalist cults is becoming the equivalent of the Nazi
Party in the Third Reich of Hitler's Germany...In which context recall
the inscription around the swastikas on German military uniform belts: Gott Mit Uns -- 'god with us,' thereby granting Christian sanction even to the Holocaust.”
***
“Does Nixon's 'Treason' Boost LBJ's Legacy” Robert Parry of Consortium News
reports on the oft-ignored fact President Nixon's treason prolonged the
Vietnam War, adding at least 20,000 U.S. military people and perhaps a
million Vietnamese men, women and children to the death toll. As a
result, President Johnson's domestic humanitarianism is “overshadowed”
to the point it is nearly forgotten. My answer notes what should be
obvious: “Methodical censorship of historical facts that rehabilitate
President Johnson's image is understandable when viewed from the
perspective of class struggle. The benefits of LBJ's generosity toward
the 99 Percent were very real. These included giant strides toward
redefining USian health care and adequate transport as civil rights
rather than privileges of wealth; equally significant steps toward
ameliorating the socioeconomic disadvantages that keep lower-income
peoples imprisoned in poverty; and, as a result, strong reinforcement of
the New Deal/anti-Ayn-Rand notion of the United States as a genuine
land of opportunity. Were LBJ to be historically rehabilitated, these
aspects of his policies -- humanitarianism that is truly revolutionary
in the context of the Ayn Rand fascism that rules the USian Empire today
-- would be brought to the forefront.”
(Which
is not, say again NOT, to suggest LBJ's conspiratorial role in turning
a little war into a big war -- and thereby handing his One Percent
masters untold profits -- should ever be forgiven.)
***
“Misremembering America's Wars, 2003-2053” Nick Turse of TomDispatch describes
an ultra-high-tech 2053 in which government propaganda is the only
so-called truth. He then uses this improbable fiction to legitimately
criticize the Big Lie “history” of the USian Empire's wars now being
disseminated by the military. While I applaud his critique, I am so
vexed by its underlying PollyAnna notion of progress, I focus mostly on
that: “Mr. Turse's high-tech 2053 will exist, if at all, only in the
privileged quarters of the One Percent and its factotums, the
politicians and bureaucrats whose job is to perpetuate capitalist
governance: absolute power and unlimited profit for the aristocracy,
total wretchedness for all the rest of us. The One Percenters and their
enablers will live in guarded and gated compounds. As for us, think not
of Star Trek but of Les Miserables; picture not houses and
apartments but the sordidness and stench of slave pens and homeless
camps...That will be the real 2053.” Another poster rejects the
likelihood of slave pens; I say “slave pens -- specifically for-profit
prisons -- are already a key part of the USian Empire's Ayn Rand
economy.”
(And
this was before I had seen Marcin's photographs of homeless camps –
which are so vivid you can almost smell them, exactly as I have smelled
them in parts of the Cascade Mountains back country before it was closed
to public access.)
***
“Can Atrocity Be the Subject Matter of Poetry?” Robyn Creswell in The New Yorker reviews Poetry of Witness: The Tradition in English, 1500-2001 (Carolyn
Forché and Duncan Wu, editors; W.W. Norton: 2014).
Creswell gets the title wrong but raises compelling questions about the relationship between politics and art. As a socialist, I of course believe the two are inseparable, that what Robert Graves describes as “one story and one story only” cannot be told without reference to the elements of class-struggle that are evident even in our most ancient myths. But Creswell – a man of obvious Ruling Class privilege no doubt schooled in the capitalist dogmas that dismiss class struggle as delusion and proclaim art and politics to be like Kipling's East and West, “never the twain shall meet” – damns the anthology for its very democracy: “(t)he editors’ decision to include the voices of heroic liberalism...means there is too much verse that is, by all conventional criteria – vividness of language, ability to surprise, techniques of rhyme and rhythm – very bad.” His review -- despite its begrudging nod to editor Wu and many other critics of the socioeconomically exclusive, academically cloistered narcissism so much USian poetry has become since the 1960s -- is perhaps then an exposition of the selfsame exclusiveness. But that insight comes to me only now, after a much more careful reading. My original comment was written in delight at finding a poetry review – any poetry review – on RSN. My intent was mostly to thank RSN Founder/Editor Marc Ash for running it and to express my hope it represents another expansion of the site's already eclectically gratifying content. I also applauded a fellow comment-thread poster “for reminding us of Yevgeny Yevtushenko and 'Babiyy Yar,' which was later set to music by Dmitri Shostakovich in his wrenchingly powerful 13th Symphony, subtitled with same name in a slightly different spelling, Babi Yar."
Creswell gets the title wrong but raises compelling questions about the relationship between politics and art. As a socialist, I of course believe the two are inseparable, that what Robert Graves describes as “one story and one story only” cannot be told without reference to the elements of class-struggle that are evident even in our most ancient myths. But Creswell – a man of obvious Ruling Class privilege no doubt schooled in the capitalist dogmas that dismiss class struggle as delusion and proclaim art and politics to be like Kipling's East and West, “never the twain shall meet” – damns the anthology for its very democracy: “(t)he editors’ decision to include the voices of heroic liberalism...means there is too much verse that is, by all conventional criteria – vividness of language, ability to surprise, techniques of rhyme and rhythm – very bad.” His review -- despite its begrudging nod to editor Wu and many other critics of the socioeconomically exclusive, academically cloistered narcissism so much USian poetry has become since the 1960s -- is perhaps then an exposition of the selfsame exclusiveness. But that insight comes to me only now, after a much more careful reading. My original comment was written in delight at finding a poetry review – any poetry review – on RSN. My intent was mostly to thank RSN Founder/Editor Marc Ash for running it and to express my hope it represents another expansion of the site's already eclectically gratifying content. I also applauded a fellow comment-thread poster “for reminding us of Yevgeny Yevtushenko and 'Babiyy Yar,' which was later set to music by Dmitri Shostakovich in his wrenchingly powerful 13th Symphony, subtitled with same name in a slightly different spelling, Babi Yar."
I
cannot listen to Babi Yar without getting tears in my eyes, and I doubt
anyone who is fully human can. It achieved enormous popularity in the
allegedly brainwashed Soviet Union, but here in the allegedly free world
of USian homeland, Babi Yar died in the oblivion of public
indifference – one of the many reasons the Soviet citizenry often jeered
us as nyekulturniy. Other great works, including virtually all
of the formerly recognized occidental classics, have similarly
perished. That's because the One Percent uses censorship as a weapon of
class struggle. And censorship thus employed takes many forms. There is
censorship by denunciation, as in Craswell's review. There is censorship
by obscurity, imposed by the fact so many USians never lose the
intellectual gag reflex with which our public schools condition us to
reject art and literature, thus to ensure we carefully avoid the near
occasion of enchantment by aesthetic agitators. There is censorship by
price, as the anthology in question lists at $29.95, more than most of
us in the 99 Percent can afford for anything beyond the necessities of
our household budgets: food, clothing, transport, doctors, medicine,
shelter. And now there's censorship by suppression (as against Edward
Snowden or as implicitly demanded by the Federal District Court in
Newark), plus of course censorship by the Big Lie, as in the falsified
histories of the empire's wars. But let us not despair: our
understanding of class struggle – in this instance the One Percent's
escalating efforts to ensure we proletarians and peasants remain forever
impoverished, powerless and ignorant – now melds a plague of seemingly unrelated oppressions into a single,
potentially revolutionary summation of grievances.
LB/23 February 2014
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