I POST, OFTEN DAILY, to individual story-threads on a number of Internet sites. But I never know whether republishing those stories and comments here serves any meaningful purpose.
Sure it fills the space and sometimes spares me the extended effort of writing weekly essays. And yes it's egotistical fun to reproduce my own work in the pseudo-profundity of italic type.
But is it useful? Does it call attention to news items your own chosen media somehow missed? Does it provide new information on familiar topics? I have no way of knowing...unless you (please) use the Outside Agitator's Notebook comment section to tell me.
Meanwhile here's a selection of web reports I regard as vital reading, their disclosures the source of this week's page header, the material combined into three essays. Each includes key parts of the remarks I posted on the original discussion threads, with full text available via the links.
U.S. Military's Response to Occupy: Death Rays for Crowd Control
Defying a news blackout imposed by Ruling Class Media, the Common Dreams staff has exposed a new terror weapon with which the U.S. military plans to suppress the ever-more-frequent protests by the increasingly angry 99 Percent.
It's called the “Active Denial System” – a heat ray that inflicts intense, unbearably painful heat.
As I said on the associated thread, this is the most depressing, most emotionally wrenching, most infuriating news report I have ever read. It left me intellectually paralyzed in a way no story has ever done. It was a bit more than 30 hours before I managed to verbalize a reaction. I had been silenced by astonishment and revulsion, not just by the story itself but by its implicit and infinitely damning revelations:
(1)-What the development of such a terrifying weapon tells us about the attitudes, values and unforgivable malevolence of the One Percent, the Ruling Class who financed its development.
(2)-What the development of such a weapon tells us about the intentions of the One Percent toward those of us in the ever-more-disenfranchised, ever-more-enslaved and therefore ever more rebellious 99 Percent.
(3)-What the weapon's gleeful acceptance by the military tells us about our ever-more-obviously deluded belief the soldiers, sailors, Marines and air corps personnel might turn against their officers when they are ordered to kill and torture U.S. civilians just as they are now killing and torturing civilians in the overseas realms of the U.S. – or rather Wall Street – empire.
Obviously, despite claims to the contrary, the heat ray is a death ray, an electronic variant of the flamethrower, which means its core purpose is to inflict a modern version of burning at the stake, the most agonizing form of death there is.
Imagine the glee with which modern Christians will turn this weapon against rebellious women, no doubt chanting “burn witch burn” as they flip the switch.
Picture what happens when the ray is aimed at a typical Occupy demonstration, a peaceful crowd of women, children, men, people who are elderly and disabled including those who depend on service dogs.
Envision a blind girl, herself shrieking in agony, her seeing-eye dog howling in pain and panic, both trying desperately to escape the invisible fire. The girl loses her white cane; then she can no longer hold her dog's leash. The dog struggles to protect her, but girl and dog are trapped within the panic-striken mob, battered, knocked to the ground, trampled to a writhing, whimpering tangle of death, finally just two more anonymous forms in the scatter of twisted, smoking corpses that litter the broad plaza.
See the Ted Bundy smiles on the faces of the heat ray's crew, look into the wasteland of their morally imbecilic eyes, hear their sadistic laughter, remember the searing touch of their psychopathic fire, ever afterward flee in such fear as you never before imagined...
Combine this death ray with the Patriot Act, the National Defense Authorization Act, the Federal Restricted Buildings and Grounds Improvement Act of 2011 (which makes protest demonstrations a federal felony) and Barack the Betrayer's newest executive order (which gives the president the absolute power of a Hitler, a Roman emperor or – yes – a Tsar), and you'll understand why it took me 30 horrified hours to react. The national portrait that emerges bears little resemblance to the United States in which most of us were born and raised.
What we see instead is a slave-realm, a land in which our liberty has been stolen from us by a succession of measures intended to preserve and expand the greedy despotism of the One Percent. These laws and orders have abolished not just the Bill of Rights but the entire Constitution. The result is definitively capitalist governance: absolute power and unlimited profit for the Ruling Class, total subjugation and genocidal poverty for all the rest of us.
There's no doubt the One Percent now defines us – the 99 Percent – as the enemy. Why else high-tech surveillance so acute it can monitor our every breath? Why else militarized cops and Gestapo-ized military, both increasingly armed with weapons of hitherto-unthinkable terror? Why else the draconian measures to suppress dissent?
Thus our beloved U.S.A. is crushed beneath the combat-boots of capitalism, reduced to a nightmare nation far more oppressive than anything George Orwell might have imagined.
It is not just the de facto Fourth Reich we are becoming. We are confronted by the most horrific fantasies of science fiction come to life, as if the One Percent were now revealing itself to be the Borg, threatening us with even more unspeakable horrors to come and warning us to surrender before it is too late: “resistance is futile.”
As I said: this is not the United States I was born in.
Quoth the I Ching: “Darkening of the Light. In adversity it furthers one to be persevering.”
*****
At Last, Recognition We're Being Herded into Christian Theocracy
Finally after years of denial both the Left and the libertarian Right are awakening to the (formerly unspeakable) threat of the United States being converted to Christian theocracy, first by stealth, now by open betrayal of the Constitution, soon by brute force – every stage of the assault lavishly financed by the One Percent.
The opening volley of the theocrats' war against separation of church and state was addition of the phrase “under God” to the Pledge of Allegiance in 1954. From the beginning, the emphatically capitalized G was intended as a thunderbolt of prejudice and rejection, a specific invocation of the tyrannical and tyrannically male god singular to Christianity and the other two Abrahamic religions, “God” as in “the Lord thy God” or “no God but Allah.” Despite Big Lies to the contrary, all deities “not consistent with Judaeo-Christian tradition” were deliberately excluded, a ban the Supreme Court has since affirmed, including – of course – exclusion of the wondrously revolutionary goddess of neopaganism, of whom I wrote so extensively in “'Dancer' Resurrected.”
But the U.S. Left, effectively purged of its intellectuals and thereby deprived both of Marxian analysis and semiotic understanding, mostly refused to acknowledge the horrid significance of adding God to the Pledge. Among the few exceptions were Paul Krassner and Frank Cieciorka, whose deliciously outrageous “one nation under God” cartoon enlivened the March 1964 issue of Krassner's magazine The Realist.
Now – bolstered by such vital works as Chris Hedges' American Fascists, Kevin Phillips' American Theocracy and Jeff Sharlet's The Family – there are long-overdue beginnings of genuine alarm, as shown by the following news reports and/or the comment threads so generated.
But – as the anonymous comment on the last theocracy thread demonstrates – it's probably too late. The Christians are already clamoring for our deaths.
The topmost anti-theocracy piece, via Reader Supported News, was by the former New York Times reporter Timothy Egan. It decries Republican efforts to impose what Egan labels “the church lady state...what your freedom-hating Republican Party has been doing across the land to restrict individual liberty.”
“They want the state to follow you into the bedroom, the bathroom and beyond. They think you're too stupid to know what to do with your own body, too ignorant to understand what your doctors tell you and too lazy to be trusted in a job without being subject to random drug testing. Your body is the government's business.”
Since Christianity is – like all Abrahamic religion – definitively anti-female, I should have challenged Egan on the misogyny implicit in the term “church lady.” Discouraged by RSN's 1500-character response limit, I didn't, which I now regret. Instead I replied as follows (scroll down the linked thread to view my entire commentary):
Three points:
(1)-Mr. Egan is mainstream media, a former New York Times reporter who parlayed his elite employment into lucrative freelancing, a career move impossible for any of us with lesser resumes.
(2)-It is notable when someone so privileged dares publicly decry the One Percent/Republican campaign to make the United States a Christian theocracy. (Too bad he ignores the One Percent/Democrat role: for example Obama picking the JesuNazi Rick Warren to read the inaugural invocation, then radically expanding Bush's “faith-based initiatives.”)
(3)-The “larger picture”... is to be found in the South, de facto Christian theocracy since Reconstruction, where “industrial psychology” discovered Christians make the best post-slavery slaves. Taught all authority is divine right, Christians view disobedience as sin. Terrified of eternal damnation, they are reliably anti-union. Taught women are the source of evil, Christians are reliably misogynistic, hence vehemently anti-sexual. Crazed by frustration, their sex drive sublimates into frantic productivity, frenzied materialism, envious hatred of nonconformists. Hence the Ku Klux Klan, a death squad, colloquially “the Saturday Night Men's Bible Study Class.”
Capitalism in action: infinite greed as ultimate virtue; the South now Everywhere U.S.A. (“one nation under God”); maximum profits for the One Percent.
“Be afraid. Be very afraid...”
Then when a reader missed the significance of my concluding sentence (“...the south now Everywhere U.S.A...”), I elaborated:
The savagely theocratic South is the test-model for the zero-tolerance Christian theocracy the One Percent is now imposing on the entire United States.
Why? Because, by every capitalist measure, Abrahamic theocracy (Christian, Muslim, Jewish), is the most profitable form of governance. It guarantees capitalism's ultimate purpose: unlimited profit and absolute power for the Ruling Class, total subjugation for all the rest of us.
Yes the threat is global. Note the identical movements – each lavishly financed by the One Percent – in all Abrahamic religions.
“Be very afraid” because of what zero-tolerance Abrahamic theocracy means: witches and heretics burned at the stake; homosexuals and people caught in extra-marital or pre-marital sex stoned to death; women reduced to chattel – the Christians want all of these horrors in their Biblical Nation. The Dominionist Christians demand it, the rest of the Christians support it by their refusal to denounce the Dominionists. (Google: “Dominion Theology,” no quotes.)
Yes fear oppresses. But oppression prompts rebellion. And to name one's fear is to begin the process of liberation...
***
A seemingly unrelated RSN item – a vital report by Katrina vanden Heuvel exposing “the most powerful federal employee you never heard of” as “the man blocking America's recovery,” also prompted me to speak of theocracy:
...(Y)ou and many others need to understand the two-party charade.
(1)-There is really only one party, the Ruling Class or One Percent party, of which the Democrats and Republicans are merely pseudo-factions.
(See Bill Moyers' disclosures of 10 July 2009. For working journalists, this was nothing new. It was the ultimate dirty secret of U.S. politics. But Moyers was the first of us to dare publicly expose it.)
(2)-The GOPorker/DemocRat scam is nothing more than a variant of the good-cop/bad-cop con. One party screams and rants to provide a rationale for the other party's betrayals, as in the health-care debacle or the ongoing war against women.
(3)-Innumerable studies in what used to be called "industrial psychology" prove capitalism's most profitable employees are those who are (A), terrified to unquestioning obedience, and (B), so sexually frustrated they sublimate their forbidden desires in frenzies of productivity and impulse buying.
Hence the oppression in which both alleged "parties" are equally complicit: denial of health care (fear); the war against women (war against sexuality); and the imposition of zero-tolerance Christian theocracy (guaranteed obedience, as proven long ago in the post-Reconstruction South).
***
Ending this week's theocracy alert is a Truthout report disclosing how Christians poisoned a critic's dog, which boiled my blood thrice, first the by incident itself, next by kindred atrocities in my own life, lastly by the poster who demanded my death:
I have no doubt Prof. Mullin's unforgivable act of heresy – the alleged sin for which his dog was made to suffer – was openly suing to combat the savage Christian theocracy that has long reigned at the Air Force Academy and is now being imposed on all of us, civilian or military, who lack the means to escape the United States.
The poisoning of one's dog is a classic fundamentalist tactic, now routinely employed throughout the U.S. by Christian terrorists, made notorious by the Ku Klux Klan during the years of the Civil Rights Movement. In which context note carefully the colloquial name for the KKK throughout the South: "the Saturday Night Men's Bible Study Class."
Indeed the Christian penchant for dog-poisoning is an outrage to which I can twice testify.
The Klan fatally poisoned my dog Brunhilda in 1964. She was an especially beloved German shepherd I raised from a pocket-sized pup, and she had in fact saved my own life the year before, attacking a KKK hitman as he was climbing in through my kitchen window.
Then in 1988, bible-thump JesuNazis trying to drive me out of a rented farm-cottage in rural Washington state poisoned another dog – this time non-fatally – and also hung a dead cat on the driver's-side door handle of my automobile.
Nice people, these godly Christians, exactly as proven by their long history of Inquisitions, witch-burnings and other such genocidal atrocities.
Verily, they are made in the image of their infinitely sadistic god.
(Disclosure: mostly an agnostic, I also identify strongly with Taoism, Zen, Gaian paganism and First Nations spiritualities.)
To which an anonymous commentator replied, demonstrating not just his hatred but the ignorance of grammar and punctuation that so often accompanies such emotions:
You, are a complete idiot. It's really a shame that KKK hitman didn't get a chance to finish the job...
Ah yes, Christian love...
(To see my remarks in context, you've got to scroll way down, clicking “Load More Comments” at least three times, until the header “Showing 100 of 159 comments” appears.
*****
Republican Hypocrisy: GOPorkers the Biggest Governmental Spenders
To conclude – and vital for its discussion of economic reality – is an analysis by the conservative blogger Andrew Sullivan that shows, complete with illustrative graphics, how Republican presidents deliberately ran up the federal deficit, outspending Democrat presidents by substantial percentages.
My commentary, which generated 80 clicks of approval, reminded us of our too-often-forgotten history:
Three points:
(1)-One of the avowed purposes of Reaganomics, many times confirmed by the Reaganoid guru David Stockman, was to inflate the federal deficit to the point social services – not just welfare but Social Security and Medicare – would become unaffordable.
(2)-The purpose of destroying social services, a goal about which the Reaganoids were a bit less forthright, was creation of the sweatshop/debt-slave economy by which we are oppressed today. The operant equations go like this: maximum social services + maximum employment = maximum assertiveness amongst workers = maximum wages; zero social services + maximum UNemployment = maximum terror amongst the workers = lowest possible wages.
(3)-The only accurate analysis of capitalism – the absolute evil of infinite greed elevated to maximum virtue – is provided by Marxism. But – not the least because the U.S. 99 Percent is the most anti-intellectual (or intellectually lazy) proletariat on the planet, we will continue our Moron Nation resistance to Marxian ideological discipline and thus remain forever imprisoned in the (ever expanding) slave pens of the Ruling Class.
*****
No, CenturyLink has not lifted its embargo against this blog.
Nevertheless – not the least as demonstrated by the foregoing endorsement, an unprecedented 80 thumbs-up on an unabashedly Marxian post – our quest for liberty expands in strength of numbers, solidarity and force of will.
Yes, even here amidst the ashes of the American dream and the ruins of the American experiment in constitutional democracy – even here in this wretchedly oppressed land of death rays, forcible Christianization and Moron Nation gullibles who dare not see past the politicians' Big Lies – our determination intensifies.
Let us then find affirmation in lines from an old song of resistance:
“Far and away the road goes winding
– Look and see how merrily the road goes”
– Look and see how merrily the road goes”
LB/24 March 2012
-30-
