CAPITALISM
DEFTLY CAMOUFLAGES its evil behind innumerable Big Lies and a facade of
constitutional democracy. But we see its hideous truth in the atrocities the U.S. Empire commits abroad. Here at home we see the same capitalist savagery manifest in the eviction of that older woman I wrote about four weeks ago.
We
also see it in ever more glaring evidence of the desperate poverty that
now oppresses fully half the USian population: young workers missing
teeth due to the definitively capitalist combination of sweatshop wages
and prohibitive dental costs; formerly middle-class parents whose jobs
were outsourced, whose mortgages were foreclosed, who were evicted into
homelessness and whose children now live as street urchins; formerly
secure elders now dependent on soup kitchens as their only defense
against starvation.
All these atrocities and innumerable more – think Bhopal or Deepwater Horizon or Bangladesh
– are the essence of capitalism in action. Capitalism's defining
premise is infinite greed elevated to maximum virtue – the deliberate
rejection of every humanitarian principle our species ever asserted, the
ultimate example of the biblical exhortation, “by their deeds shall ye
know them.” Though I am not a Christian – though I can never be a
Christian – these words attributed to Jesus surely apply to recognizing
the evil capitalism inflicts on all but the obscenely privileged few.
***
Witnessing
that eviction four weeks ago was wrenching for many reasons, but the
most painful was the extent to which the woman's frantic scurrying about
the ruins of her life reminded me of my own helpless behavior after the
times my identity was violently obliterated.
I
write this statement knowing it will be challenged by anyone who
stubbornly clings to identity politics. How could I, a so-called
“privileged white male,” presume to imagine suffering a loss such as
that Tacoma woman suffered. (Yes, despite the socioeconomic lessons of
the past several decades, there is still a legion of useful
identity-politics idiots who serve the Ruling Class by fostering the
hostility of one Working Class identity group toward all other Working
Class groups.)
The
hypothetical identity-politics question – and I have no doubt it will
be asked in real time – reminds of an incident in Manhattan c. 1983,
when a white female personnel executive rejected my employment
application because it had taken me until I was 36 years old to earn my
bachelor of arts degree. According to this personnel officer, the
duration of my educational effort combined with the fact I “had all the
advantages of being a white male” to prove I was “obviously not serious
about doing college-level work.” Therefore – or so she reasoned from her
(genuinely) privileged Ivy League background as she looked down upon me
from her managerial throne – I was unsuitable for editorial employment.
By
the diplomas and certificates on her office wall, this young woman had
undoubtedly lived a sheltered, pampered life – a prerequisite of
graduation from any of the prohibitively expensive Ivy League schools
that train the sons and daughters of the One Percenters and their most
valued Ruling Class servants. Moreover, her reference to white male
advantage made it clear she was blinded by identity-politics
resentments. She could not imagine any seemingly successful, apparently
middle-class white male encountering genuinely insurmountable obstacles.
Hers was the same Ayn Rand/New Age hybrid of presumptuousness that
believes unemployability is merely a state of mind: “change your
thinking and you change your reality,” no revolution required. From her
perspective, there was nothing in the world so daunting it could delay a
white male's baccalaureate degree by 14 years, unless of course the
male in question was “not serious” – that is, too lazy.
Thus
does identity politics eliminate empathy, which in turn eliminates
class solidarity, blinding huge segments of the 99 Percent to the fact
all USian Empire subjects whether proletarians or peasants and
regardless of our gender or race or ethnicity are sisters and brothers
of the Working Class.
***
The
bitter truth of my own life is that I was never middle-class enough,
much less successful enough, to be financially secure. Even at the
height of my journalism career, whether as a daily-newspaper news-editor
in Northern New Jersey or as the editor-in-chief of an international
trade-journal in Manhattan, I was never more than a paycheck or two away
from financial ruin.
Though
I have never been thrown into the street with all my possessions, I was
ousted by family treachery from a place where I had lived for 11 years
and assumed I would spend the remainder of my life. The ouster, which
occurred in 2004, is a perfect example of why to me the term “family” is
a synonym for all sorts of unpleasantness including rejection and
betrayal, which were the everyday norms of my childhood, and genuine
risks of bodily harm or death, which thank Goddess occurred only rarely.
But
you can only lose your home once, and I lost mine – and my family as
well – on the Summer Solstice Eve of 1945, when my mother sought to kill
me. Based on independent evidence I gathered as a middle-aged adult, my
death was to have climaxed a sequence of events my mother had been
scheming since before my conception. I was not a love-child; in fact I
was its opposite, a hate-child deliberately conceived to entrap my
father into marriage. Though my father saved my life – a canceled
meeting brought him home early on that pivotal Solstice Eve – now that I
know the larger circumstances, I can understand and almost forgive what
he did next. As if he were overwhelmed by the parental equivalent of
buyer's remorse, a few weeks later he sought closed-door judicial
permission to dump me in a state orphanage, but the judge forbade it.
From then until I turned 18, I was never more than an albatross around
the necks of my father and my new stepmother, his former executive
secretary.
Meanwhile,
to escape the looming public scandal of judicial actions in open court,
my mother's wealthy parents paid for her confinement in a posh private
insane asylum. She remained there until 1947, after which she obtained a
court order decreeing I would spend the summers with her and spend the
school years with my father and his wife. But from the moment my mother
tried to celebrate the 1945 Solstice by her intended sacrificial act of
post-partum abortion, all but one of her kin regarded me as an unwelcome
reminder of bad times and scandalous events. The one exception was the
blessed aunt whose later intervention saved me from dyslexia. In the
eyes of my other maternal relatives, I was never more than a worm in the
shining apple of the hypocritical bourgeois respectability they so
carefully cultivated and so diligently maintained.
Albatross
and worm – so I remained until I moved out of my father's house and was
freed from the judicial indenture of obligatory summertime visits to
the domain of my mother. Thanks to my aunt, who in the summer of 1948
got me the tutoring that laid the foundation for all I later became;
thanks to my father's books, which filled a wall 22 feet long and 10
feet high from floor to ceiling and overflowed into several glass-front
bookcases; thanks even to my father himself, a master of Socratic method
despite his rejection of me as a son and his failure as a parent; and
thanks most of all to an inner strength I often cursed in
please-let-me-die adolescent despair – I had managed to survive.
Eventually I even thrived, though only for a bit.
But
then at age 43, just as it seemed I was approaching a peak of
journalistic achievement, I was robbed of my life's work, stripped of
all my identity and denied any further potential for anything humanly
recognizable as success. The mechanism of my ruin was a fire I do not
doubt but cannot prove was government arson – the event of 1 September
1983 that obliterated all my life's work and has ever since defined who I
am, what I am and all that I will never be.
In
other words, I am no stranger to losses of the magnitude suffered by
that shockingly unfortunate woman who was evicted from her home in
Tacoma on what should have been called not an “anniversary” but rather
our 50th annual day of mourning. There is not one scintilla of hyperbole
in my assertion of empathy with her. But at least I have thus far
survived all that has been done to me, and with all my heart I wish the
same for the woman who was evicted.
That
is why, in the face of all that is being done to all of us, I long ago
recognized survival as an act of revolutionary defiance – the very point
at which the personal becomes political.
It
is a realization now made all the more poignant by a “happy holidays”
convergence of complex medical problems that promise to reduce my 2014
to a year of unrelenting misery even before its arrival: Merry Christmas
to me from a relentlessly hostile Jesus.
*****
Relevant Remarks on the Comment Threads of Other Websites
“NSA Surveillance Program: It's Going to Get Worse” Dave Eggers of The Guardian
notes how the National Security Agency and its kindred secret-police
agencies have effectively nullified all U.S. constitutional protections
against illegal search and seizure. Moreover, he warns, history –
specifically the post-World-War-II purge – proves that anything the
government can employ to oppress us, it will eventually use without
mercy. I agree, noting that a government does not collect such material
without malevolent purpose. I also note it is increasingly obvious an
enemy of the USian state is anyone who objects to capitalist savagery,
whether they seek to abolish capitalism or merely reform it. “(F)rom the
perspective of the One Percenters who own the government and the
politicians, bureaucrats, cops, soldiers and religious authorities who
make up the Ruling Class -- the enemy is anyone who dares challenge the
present socioeconomic order.”
“Barack Obama Is Not George Bush” Jonathan Chait of the Ruling Class journal New York Magazine
pens a clever piece of Democratic Party propaganda, and I refute it as
another of the party's pre-Congressional-election efforts to make us
forget how Obama the Orator became Barack the Betrayer and thus revealed
the party's new strategy for serving the One Percent: campaign as
Democrats, rule as Republicans. Challenged to provide an alternative to
capitalist governance by the One Party of Two Names – to posit a means
of relief from the policies of absolute power and unlimited profit for
the Ruling Class, total subjugation for the rest of us – I answer that
the winning methods of Councilwoman Sawant in Seattle teach us
everything we need to build an effective
resistance.
*****
Winter Solstice Greetings and happy holidays to all, even amidst this time of political strife and personal wretchedness.
LB/22 December 2013
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