READER ALERT: In what is obviously another act of politically motivated censorship, HotMail will no longer transmit Dispatches. This is the second incident of retaliation by service providers, as America On Line (AOL) email began locking out of Dispatches
transmissions several months ago. Despite the aggravation, I take this
as an inadvertent compliment: clearly this material is frightening some
of our corporate overlords.
***
CAPITALISM AND JESUNAZISM AS CHOREOGRAPHIES OF SUICIDE: today's Dispatches open with another bitingly relevant essay by Chris Hedges that in one way or another embodies the message implicit in all of today's news items.
I
link to Hedges' work so often not only because this long-declared
socialist eloquently and informatively journeys ever further to the
(real) Left, but because I am increasingly convinced he may be the
greatest USian nonfiction writer of this era. If indeed our species has
any future at all, he will at the very least be honored as the most
courageously outspoken English-language essayist of the early 21st
Century.
Implicit
in all his work is acknowledgment of the infinitely damning and
therefore often emphatically denied truth the common denominator of our
present-day human consciousness is despair.
Nor
does Hedges flinch from the obvious but even more forcibly suppressed
corollary that if we are to make the revolution that is necessary to
preserve our species and save our Earth from reduction to a bug planet –
that is, if we are to overthrow capitalism – we must find a way to make
revolution an assertion of affirmation rather than a frenzy of
destruction.
DESPOTISM AS DEATH (1) – THE MILITARIZED COPS to whom we the people are the enemy continue to run amok, especially now that their murderous brutality is publicly endorsed and applauded
by Trump. The first of these two linked reports includes a partial
roll-call of the dead, an ancient ritual that in the thealogy of my
Pagan Celtic ancestors was an invocation of the Morrigan
in her aspect as Goddess of Retribution. Meanwhile because of
escalating police violence against people of color, women and LGBTQ
folk, the NAACP advises against visiting the state of Missouri or even traveling through it.
DESPOTISM AS DEATH (2) – GENOCIDAL DENIAL OF HEALTHCARE: As
cannot be said too often, the Trump/Pence Regime's opposition to
Obamacare, Medicare and Medicaid is a byproduct of its fanatical
Christianity. That's why Trump's threats – which
are ultimately threats to murder us all by denying us the care that
keeps us alive – are to be taken as seriously as any death threat from a
known serial killer. How many times must it be said: this is not a
policy dispute. It is religious war, a doctrinally motivated effort to
impose genocide.
DESPOTISM AS DEATH (3) – MENTAL ILLNESS REDUCES US TO THROWAWAY PEOPLE (a passage from the linked text): “Under
the current neoliberal order, our mental health is subordinated to the
needs of the market. On the one hand, the government and big business sell us the idea of happiness
and wellbeing, a kind of consumerist dream where we seek our personal
fulfillment through a well-paid job and a happy relationship, furnished
with consumer goods as markers of our success. On the other hand, when
the capitalist system fails to deliver on our dreams and goals, we are
encouraged to blame ourselves for our failure to succeed. But if we
begin to crack psychologically, then we find there are few psychological services available to help.”
The
linked report also describes the efforts of Marxian psychologists to
combat Capitalism's often-sadistic victimization of people who are
mentally ill. An otherwise thoughtful and thought-provoking essay by
Hazel Croft, it unfortunately omits any mention of the pioneering work
by the late David Smail, with whom I briefly corresponded just after the turn of the century. Though not Marxian per se,
Smail nevertheless argued that much of what is defined as mental
illness must be understood as the result of wounding by the savagery of
Capitalism.
While
Croft focuses entirely on the plight of mentally ill people in Great
Britain, her text is nevertheless a relevant introduction to the infinitely worse conditions here in the USian Homeland, where chronic mental patients were amongst the first victims of Capitalism's regression to the malevolence that defines its transition into fascism.
Now,
with entire USian governments increasingly captive by the JesuNazis,
there is a grotesque likelihood governmental policy will increasingly
reflect the JesuNazi viewpoint: that mentally ill people are cursed by god and should thus be exterminated. Which – given the popularity of JesuNazism amongst cops as evidenced here, here and here – puts a horrible new light on the fact nearly 50 percent of those killed by the police are mentally ill or mentally disabled.
DESPOTISM AS DECEPTION (1) – MORE “CHANGE WE CAN BELIEVE IN”: The Democratic (sic) Party continues to rely on various and sundry Big Lies
in its deliberately ineffectual and therefore undeniably bogus effort
to recapture Congress next year. One of the Democrats' more obviously
self-defeating tactics is its open recruitment of avowed misogynists, a ploy that has already prompted a properly angry petition campaign from the feminist group We Are UltraViolet.
(To read the rest, go here.)
