Wisconsin: 78 Years Later, Nazi-Wall Street Alliance Wins

FAR TOO FEW of us realize the Republican victory in Wisconsin heralds a  blitzkrieg that will undeniably overwhelm us in November. 

Fewer still understand the Wisconsin debacle portends the ultimate triumph of fascism the One Percent has sought since Wall Street and Berlin collaborated in the 1934 Bankers Plot (for which Google) -- a nearly successful scheme to turn the United States into the fourth member of the old Berlin-Rome-Tokyo Axis.

But once we acknowledge the new paradigm of U.S. governance demonstrated by the Republicans in Wisconsin – absolute power and unlimited profit for the One Percent, total subjugation and genocidal poverty for all the rest of us – we're also able to recognize the unspeakably treacherous role of the Democrats as the deliberate facilitators of Republican victory.

That's the only possible strategy underlying Obama the Orator's self-transformation into Barack the Betrayer.

It's also the only possible purpose behind the Democrats' (deliberate) loss of the Wisconsin recall – see "True Wisconsin: How and Why the Democrats (Deliberately) Lost." 

Likewise note the landslide losses the Democrats suffered in the 2010 Congressional election, the direct result of an embittered electorate awakening to the ugly truth "change we can believe in" was a Big Lie from the beginning. 

And all this makes perfect sense when we recognize the bitter truth We the People have been totally disenfranchised – that, exactly as Bill Moyers says – U.S. "democracy" has become nothing more than a charade.

Meanwhile, behind the scenes, the two parties collaborate to impose the tyrannical will of the global One Percent: note the unanimous or nearly unanimous Congressional votes that have downsized our paychecks and abolished our constitutional rights: GATT, NAFTA, Patriot Act, NDAA, etc. ad nauseum. So descends the newest darkness of fascism, guarded and expanded by the United States and its imperial military machine – complete with Nazi-style helmets that subtly proclaim the dread reality of a de facto Fourth Reich.

Be very afraid. The forthcoming fascist victory in the November elections means those of us who are no longer exploitable for profit – seniors, disabled people, others who are chronically impoverished – will be targeted by a "final solution" of deliberate genocide. Not in death camps – that would be too internationally embarrassing – but by termination of Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, food stamps, unemployment compensation and any other life-sustaining socioeconomic program.

Exactly as some Teabaggers already publicly acknowledge, that's the real purpose – extermination of those of us adjudged to be burdensome – behind the definitively murderous Paul Ryan Budget: the maliciously forcible redistribution of wealth President-to-Be Romney has already enthusiastically endorsed.

(An earlier version of this essay was published in the comment thread generated by “Snap out of it Obama,” in Crosscut, Seattle's excellent on-line daily.)

*****

Weaponized Rape: Another Preview of Post-Wisconsin Realpolitik 

NAOMI WOLF'S REVIEW of a documentary film entitled The Invisible War, a daring exposé of the “systemic rape of women in the (U.S.) military and the retaliations and coverups” by which the victims are then repeatedly savaged, is more of the superbly informative prose we have come to expect from this notably courageous Guardian headliner.

 

But the review nevertheless suffers from Ms. Wolf's obvious unfamiliarity with the military itself.

As a Regular Army veteran (six-year enlistment 1959-1965, three years active duty including extended service in Korea, three years reserve, honorably discharged), I know the military does nothing by accident – that its collective behavior is always purposefully commanded. I also know enough history to recognize chain-of-command purposefulness is especially characteristic of the military of a fascist empire. The classic example is how the Axis – particularly the Nazi Germans – used the Spanish Civil War to kill-harden their soldiers in preparation for the atrocities Hitler would soon unleash against other Europeans, particularly the citizens of the Soviet Union.

Thus the U.S. military high command's outrageous tolerance of rape proves these attacks are not only tacitly encouraged but are in fact purposeful expressions of some dire agenda of malevolence that, at present, remains hidden.

In this context it is useful to contrast the U.S. military's response to males who rape their fellow service personnel with what was done to the (very few) such rapists in the Red Army, where women served on the front lines both during the Russian Civil War (1918-1923) and during the Great Patriotic War Against Fascism (what we call World War II).

The U.S. rapists are, as Ms. Wolf notes, outrageously protected, even pampered. But in the Red Army and other Soviet forces – where women were among the best most daring combat pilots (Google "Night Witches") and among the deadliest snipers in military history (Google Lyudmila Pavlichenko) – such rapists were properly recognized as soldiers who had turned against their comrades and were summarily shot as traitors.

While the Soviet response is belittled by misogynists as a “wartime measure,” the fact remains the pandemic of rape in the U.S. armed forces is itself occurring in a time of war. Hence the U.S. rapists are as much enemy combatants as any (other) terrorist.

Why then are these rapists not prosecuted accordingly?

Given that sexual assault is a hate crime – an expression of the infinite contempt with which patriarchal males regard anyone they adjudge to be weaker, given too that such violent hatred for the powerless is the defining characteristic of a conqueror – it is obvious the high command by its tolerance of rape is training its male soldiers in the brutal and sadistic techniques by which conquered populations are traditionally subdued.

Women in the military – despised as they are by the males the fanatically Christian-fundamentalist commanders have methodically proselytized to maximum misogyny – have thus been made surrogates for more broadly defined “enemy” populations. 

Viewed in the context of present-day U.S. politics, the eventual intended target is obviously the U.S. civilian population, especially the Left, a preponderance of which is not only female but avowedly feminist -- intolerable to the JesuNazi zealotry that is increasingly the Moron Nation state religion.

     

(An earlier version of this essay appeared on the comment thread of Wolf's “Rape in the Military a Culture of Coverup,” Guardian via Reader Supported News.)

LB/17 June 2012

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Wisconsin: Why the Democrats (Deliberately) Lost

AFTER A WEEK of reading detailed analyses of the Wisconsin recall debacle, I will say aloud what no one else on the Left apparently dares even whisper: the Democrats were not “beaten”; they deliberately lost the fight.

When we examine what happened in Wisconsin – when we look at it from the (forbidden) perspective of class struggle – no other conclusion is possible. We need only review the associated history. Gov. Scott Walker's manifest fascism – his  termination of collective bargaining and his genocidal cutbacks in government services vital to seniors, disabled people and lower-income folk in general – goaded a huge faction of the 99 Percent into rising up angry. If the Democrats were truly advocates for “change we can believe in,” they would have been overjoyed: not only was organized labor rediscovering its lost militance, the party itself was again attracting genuine radicals – the sorts of people who made the New Deal a new reality and, four decades later, gave the Civil Rights Movement the endorsement and protection of federal law. But the Democratic Party's' actual response to Wisconsin's revolutionary potential was a public succession of meaningless gestures – the bare minimum essential to keep alive (the imbecility of) “hope.” Behind the scenes, the party's top-level operatives worked overtime to co-opt, nullify and eventually destroy the community of rebellion that was (seemingly) emerging from the uprising Walker had provoked.

In truth – because the (covertly fascist) Democrats are as beholden to the One Percent as the (overtly fascist) Republicans, the Democrats were terrified by the activist solidarity that was evolving in Wisconsin, and they suppressed it accordingly. They did not use the brute force reserved for mass movements that can be denounced as rabble via the Ruling Class Media propaganda machine. Instead they employed a high-intensity mix of stealth and co-optation – strategy and tactics no doubt crafted by the same secret-police types who plotted the campaign of thuggery and infiltration that destroyed Occupy. As a consequence, Walker's 58-percent unpopularity (November 2011) became, within six short months, a 54 percent victory margin. The magnitude of Walker's funding meanwhile gave the Democrats the perfect excuse beneath which to hide their (additional) disempowerment of the 99 Percent and their malice toward organized labor in particular.

Since then any number of U.S. and European writers have detailed how the Democrats destroyed the Wisconsin Rebellion. But not one has thus far dared call the destruction by its proper name: betrayal. And that word alone, though infinitely damning, is not sufficient. For the result of this betrayal is (yet another) fascist triumph, and with it the demobilization of any segment of the Wisconsin population that might actively resist or otherwise jeopardize the methodical expansion of capitalist tyranny. As always, it's absolute power and unlimited profit for the One Percent; total subjugation and genocidal poverty for the rest of us – the Wall Street master-plan ever-more obviously served by Democrats and Republicans alike.

See for yourself – especially if you doubt my conclusion. Rather than attempt to condense all the Wisconsin postmortems into a summary that would of necessity eliminate their nuances, I here provide links to a representative sampling. By far the most revealing of these analyses (and therefore the most essential to my case) is Gary Younge's “There's class war in Wisconsin, yet the Democrats sing Kumbaya,” The Guardian (UK). The head tells the whole story. The text spells out the ugly details – and does so with enough clarity we can (if we are so inclined) extrapolate for ourselves the operational doctrines by which the Madison Rebellion was reduced to the Wisconsin Waterloo.

Here too by title and author is a bibliography of seven more vitally informative reports, each with its own unique perspective on the defeat, each providing another piece of the proverbial puzzle that – when assembled – gives us a panoramic object lesson in how the One Percent easily suppresses a potential revolution even when the revolutionaries have sufficient respectability to protect themselves from armored cars, pepper gas and mass arrests by truncheon-wielding thugs. The articles preceded by one asterisk are those I especially recommend; two asterisks means I consider them vital:

“Accountability in Defeat: On a Whupping in Wisconsin,” Matthew Rothschild, The Progressive via Common Dreams;

**“Five Things to Consider in the Walker Recall Vote,” Robert Borosage, Campaign for America's Future (website) via Truthout, with one commentary and three rebuttals to hostile posters as my contributions to the associated discussion thread;

*“Get Left or Be Left,” Carl Gibson, original reporting for Reader Supported News;

“Getting Rolled in Wisconsin,” Andy Kroll, TomDispatch.com via Common Dreams;

“How Republicans Prevented Thousands of Wisconsin Students from Voting,” Scott Keyes, (with the story carefully omitting the fact the Obama Justice Department did nothing to prevent this egregious violation of the 1964 Voting Rights Act), Think Progress via Reader Supported News;

**“In Wisconsin, an Ominous Crucible of U.S. Politics,” Arun Gupta, The Guardian (U.K.) via Common Dreams, with two commentaries by me – one a pull-no-punches explanation of “what is being done to us”;

*“The Sliver Lining in Walker's Victory,” Arun Gupta and Steve Horn, misleadingly headlined but otherwise excellent original reporting for Truthout;  and

**“The Wisconsin Recall Aftermath,” Charles Pierce, Esquire via Reader Supported News;

The combined weight of the these disclosures make it clear the Democrats' tactics were so obviously self-defeating, not even stupidity is a plausible excuse. In the parlance of sports-gambling, the Big D threw the game. No other conclusion is possible.

*****

'Little Chance' of Victory in Wisconsin...Or in November 

One of my earliest essays on Wisconsin, “Madison's Pivotal Challenge: Finding Our Way Beyond Capitalist Greed,” published here 27 February 2011, provides something of an (eerily prophetic) backdrop to the newer material material above.

As I wrote then, almost a year and a half ago, “our national credo of infinite greed and limitless selfishness is becoming as commonplace amongst politicians and bureaucrats and even their receptionists as it is (and always has been) amongst banksters and tycoons...Indeed this signature combination of capitalist greed and Ayn Rand selfishness has become the binding unum of the e pluribus, the one anti-value that unites the many. It is now the defining characteristic of the nation as a whole. In a terrifyingly real sense, the gang-banger with the fist-sized solid-gold dollar-sign dangling from his solid gold neck-chain is the common denominator of us all.”

Greed – specifically the core ethos of Moron Nation as manifest in workers so suicidally idiotic they turn against their comrades in hatred and envy whenever those comrades successfully resist capitalist oppression – was the major factor in the Wisconsin outcome: that's how the Republicans won 38 percent of the union vote.

A week earlier in February 2011, via a piece titled with a line from an old Red Army song – “'Far & away the road goes winding; look & see how merrily the road goes'” – I correctly reported how “The revolutionary potential of the Labor Uprising that started in Wisconsin and is spreading across the nation is already terrifying the Ruling Class. Definitive proof of the extent to which the capitalist aristocracy is genuinely frightened comes from two seemingly unrelated developments. One of these is the government's decision to charge Private First Class Bradley Manning with a death-penalty crime – the intent obviously to make him an example a la Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. The other development is Time magazine's publication of an anti-Marxist warning that eerily recalls the Rosenberg era...”

Thus as Madison evolved into a liberation movement, the covertly fascist Democratic Party responded accordingly, employing a variation on the tactics by which the CIA's Operation Chaos infiltrated and destroyed the old Counterculture, particularly the alternative press. First the Democrats endorsed the rebellion, then they used their endorsements to leverage infiltrators into key positions, then finally the infiltrators generated enough chaos, disinformation, divisiveness and disunity to neuter the rebellion from within.

Why? For the same reason (and essentially by the same methods) the Democrats killed Employee Free Choice and public-option/single-payer health care: each of these – the promised Wisconsin recall and the promises of “change we can believe in” – represented acts of rebellion. Each threatened not just to revitalize the labor movement but – by alleviating hopelessness and raising expectations – to resurrect anti-capitalist resistance amongst lower-income peoples, who might then join ranks with larger and more economically and politically powerful factions of the 99 Percent to build a genuinely powerful Working Class. But nothing is more horrifying to the One Percent, who believed such activism had been permanently extinguished by the political murders of the 1960s, particularly the deaths of Martin Luther King Jr. and Sen. Robert F. Kennedy. Snug in now-eternal servitude to the Ruling Class, the Democrats could not abide the possibility their party might again become the vehicle of near-revolution it had been under the aegis of the New Deal. To today's Democrats, repaying their debt to Wall Street by ensuring the continued oppression of the Working Class is infinitely more important than electoral victory. Hence their record of brazen betrayals: EFC, health care...and, yes, Wisconsin.

In this dark context, the unanimous and near-unanimous Congressional votes by which the Democrats and the Republicans have repeatedly demonstrated their hostility to our (former) constitutional rights is the most revealing fact of all: to paraphrase an infamous Nazi slogan: One Percent, One Party, One Tyranny.

Which is precisely why I believe the Democrats intend to lose November's national election exactly as they lost June's Wisconsin recall: by suppressing the language of class struggle, by allowing the Republicans to divide and conquer – in either case, Wisconsin or the nation, the Democrat payoff to Wall Street. Thus will the Democrats facilitate Republican victory, performing their last remaining service to the One Percent.

(Memo to the Working Press: if you dare, probe the extent to which the events in Wisconsin were investigated by the Department of Homeland Security and all the rest of the Ruling Class equivalent of SS-Reichssicherheitshauptamt, the National Security Agency and the Central Intelligence Agency included. My bet is the Gestapo types were out from the first days of the demonstrations in Madison – with direct lines both to the White House and the main mansion of the Koch Brothers.)

Such is realpolitik on the Big Plantation of the post-American Dream, post-constitutional United Estates.

*****

Wisconsin Recall: Another Charade to Ensure We Remain Sedated 

Wisconsin is also (yet more) additional proof of what I have come to think of as the Bill Moyers theorem: that for many years now – I would say since the murder of President John Fitzgerald Kennedy – U.S. politics have been nothing but a charade carefully scripted by the One Percent and acted out by the two parties.

As Moyers says, the real decisions are now always made behind closed doors, in the star chambers of the Ruling Class and the privy councils of the politicians who impose their increasingly despotic will.

The purpose of the deception is not just to conceal the reality of plutocratic tyranny; it is also to Big Lie us into submission, convincing us the American Experiment in constitutional democracy is functioning as the Founders intended and the American Dream therefore lives on – never mind the contrary evidence increasingly provided by our five senses. 

It astounds me so few people understand what is being done to us – especially after the Moyers disclosure, which verbalized an ugly truth the working press has known since the 1970s but none of us dared reveal lest in retaliation we be forever banished from journalism.

Perhaps the reason the Democrats' role in this process is so difficult for so many to understand is too few of us are hunters anymore. The sustaining service the Democrats provide U.S. electoral politics is exactly analogous to the function of decoys in duck hunting: just as the decoys convince the ducks all is well, bringing them into shotgun range and luring them to their eventual doom in the hunter's oven, so do the Democrats reassure us, herding us into helplessly passive acquiescence to the non-alternatives provided by our hopelessly corrupted voting booths and positioning us within easy reach of the Republican genocide invariably facilitated by Democrat “cave-ins”: permanent joblessness, bankruptcy, foreclosure, eviction, homelessness, unrelieved hunger, untreated sickness, termination of Medicare and Medicaid, unsurvivable reductions in Social Security, death.

Thus the Ruling Class intends to achieve its final self-serving objective: radical reduction of the global population, forcible shrinkage of the 99 Percent to exclude all of us who are no longer profitable as slaves.

LB/10 June 2012

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Fucked Up: Notes on the Inescapable Curse of Dyslexia

I SHOULD WARN  all of you at the very beginning this is an essay of endless disappointment, anger and embitterment. As I have acknowledged via this space many times before, I am accursed. The curse is dyslexia – an indescribably horrible, bottomlessly depressing, makes-me-look-like-an-idiot disability vividly demonstrated by the mortifying fuckup that no doubt stripped me of all journalistic credibility and reduced last week's essay to a textbook demonstration of personal and political grandiosity.

It is precisely because of dyslexia I have never been able to take myself seriously as a writer. What is so embittering at this (final) stage of my life is I have no choice but to embrace writing as my primary medium. My physical ability to photograph – that is, to lug around the requisite equipment and perform the essential contortions of the Photographer's Ballet – is increasingly diminished: I am crippled by worsening arthritis in knees and shoulders; I am hobbled by deteriorating spinal injuries, the legacy of a Washington state archetype, an obscenely coddled habitual drunken driver. My finances are even more wounded: I can scarcely afford the expense of film and processing; the cost of digital equipment and its prerequisite software is forever beyond my reach. But to call myself a “writer” is a lie, a gesture of phoniness, for no matter how hard I try to avoid it, my twisted mental circuitry will inevitably do as it did last week: make some horrendous mistake – typically a transposition – that will give me the appearance of nothing more than a presumptuous moron.

Such is dyslexia and the bottomless miasma of fear and self-hatred in which the dyslexic is forever entrapped. It is no doubt the reason as a child I came unusually late to speech, so late my mother had begun to dread she would be publicly disgraced by having spawned a congenital idiot. Probably – because dyslexia also destroys one's sense of balance and thereby retards one's ability to learn to walk (for me a frightful struggle during which my parents encouraged bipedal locomotion by spanking me whenever I crawled) – my first recognition of selfhood was acknowledgement of unacceptable inferiority. Obviously I was terrified of making mistakes – or rather of the punishment so provoked – long before I dared talk. I remained stubbornly silent until I felt reasonably sure of my linguistic skill: what remained unsaid remained unpunished. Finally I uttered my first word – “light” – and then, to my parents' astonishment (or so I am told), I immediately began speaking in complete sentences.

Dyslexia is also why I was unable to read until I was rescued from illiteracy by my mother's older sister, my Aunt Alecia Durand, dead of old age since September 1993, but during her long lifetime a working artist and professor of fine arts, the sole familial elder who did not either despise me or regard me with embarrassment and scorn. My memories of Alecia are uniquely fond and always uplifting, the only reliable kindness and warmth in an otherwise cruel and chilly upbringing. It was Alecia who understood what is wrong with me, who did not reject me for my dyslexic failings, who gave me art supplies and encouraged my creativity, who hired me a summertime tutor after I nearly flunked second grade and who thereby freed me to advance so rapidly I was reading at a 12th-grade level half way through third grade. Alecia was my liberator, my childhood's first and only grown-up Muse. The tutoring she arranged for me was the best, most pivotal, most affirming, most cherished gift I was ever given by anyone in this life. It expressed a depth of understanding and acceptance never approached by any other adult in my family including my father, who – though he gave me my first cameras – was so repulsed by my dyslexic disabilities he belittled me as “goon boy” well into my early teens.

But not even Alica could cure my loathsome penchant for dyslexic error. For example though I grasp mathematical principles quite easily, I can never do the actual arithmetic: my dyslexic brain invariably scrambles the digits into the wrong answer. Elementary, junior high and high school math was a nightmare of parental scorn and retribution, two years of algebraic misery and a year of geometric stress, a three-year sequence mandated by my father though my grade never once rose above an unacceptable low C – my dismal performance the source of his judgment I was “not worth sending to college.”

Two decades later, my father already dead, I had the proverbial last laugh. Much to my surprise, college math proved notably easy: I chalked up a solid four-point average in basic physics and astronomy and the remedial courses essential to compensate for my bottom-of-the-garbage-can math score on the Scholastic Aptitude Test. I even began to understand the mathematically stated principles of physics as a kind of poetry. At first I rejoiced, believing I had somehow been miraculously healed by passage through the groves of academe. Later I learned it was merely because in college I could smoke in class: nicotine, a potent neurotransmitter, momentarily alleviates dyslexic dysfunction.

Meanwhile journalism – specifically photography and reporting (my efforts at the latter always reinforced by cigarettes) – had become the one and only intellectual endeavor at which I dared trust myself: film didn't lie or distort its message, at least not in those days, and when the job called for writing, I made damn sure I took accurate notes. There was always enough nicotine to keep my brain focused and there was always a sufficiently competent editor to make sure the demons of dyslexia hadn't betrayed me with some inadvertent but nevertheless ruinous fuck-up. For the first time in my life I acquired actual self-confidence: if there was a story to be gotten, I knew I could reliably get it. Hence the contents of my lifetime resume: about two-thirds of my income earned by reporting and editing, mostly in staff jobs at various local newspapers and a couple of major trade publications; the other third earned by photography which – because it was blessedly immune to most forms of dyslexic self-sabotage – brought me many years of local recognition as an artist and occasionally garnered the imprimatur of credits from genuinely significant journals: Newsweek, Paris-Match and The New York Times.

But it was my reporting skill – my insatiable curiosity and my ability and persistence at asking pointed questions – that opened the greatest number of newsroom doors. Never mind my dyslexia-tainted spelling was always less than perfect; never mind that was another of the failings that proved to me I could never be a real writer. Even when I was a teenager, covering sports as a part-time stringer, my editors applauded my reportorial talent, suggesting – absurdly I always thought – I was destined for journalism's upper echelons.

Obviously none of these people recognized me as a dyslexic; had they done so they would have dismissed me as my father had : “goon boy,” at worst an embarrassment, at best a creature of no value. But by the time I was doing newspaper work I had learned to hide my affliction behind eloquence, to never allow anyone close enough to discover my dysfunctional family's lurking scandals – madness, attempted murder, divorce, brutality – much less to see my own repugnantly flawed mind. As a result I was alone, profoundly lonely and without hope of alleviating my loneliness. Not only did I “talk funny” – I had never completely shed the accents of my mother's Michigan, my father's Boston and my own native New York City – I was also spastically clumsy, a dyslexic affliction impossible to hide and especially repellent to females raised to lust after only the most gracefully athletic males. My fellow teens saw my body-language as contorted and grotesque; their disgust was palpable enough to keep me on the sidelines at the few dances I dared attend. Better I not dance at all; better I stay home – or content myself with covering the event for the school paper, of which, by my senior year (1957-1958), I was managing editor.

In September 1962, near the end of a miserably off-and-on marriage to pretty but untrustworthy Baltimore art student and after my completion of the three years active-duty required by a six-year Regular Army/Army Reserve enlistment, I took a sports writer's job on The Knoxville Journal, which had employed me as a stringer from September 1957 through November 1959 and offered me full time work when I returned from Korea to civilian life. All went well for the next nine months, but on 3 June 1963 – 49 years ago today – I was swept up in the flagrantly illegal mass arrest of “40 Negroes and whites, most of them students at the University of Tennessee” – suspected Communists, Communist sympathizers, artists, intellectuals, bohemians and Civil Rights Movement activists targeted by the local One Percent, a vindictively racist clique of haughty southern aristocrats. (Have patience; this is a revealing story – I promise – and what it has to do with dyslexia will be clear in a moment.)

Quickly freed on the strength of my press card, I naively believed The Journal would right the outrageous wrongs I had witnessed firsthand: an unprovoked raid against a quiet gathering of graduate students and faculty members, arrests without cause, the savage beating of a Panamanian vice-consul named Milton Vargas, the brutal invasion of an academic couple's shrubbery-enclosed yard and home by Knoxville city police and Knox County sheriff's deputies, sneering thugs-in-blue who rousted the bewildered guests, awakened and terrorized the couple's hitherto soundly-sleeping three-year-old daughter and then trashed the dwelling itself. But Editor-Publisher Guy L. Smith was uninterested in what had really happened. Instead he demanded I write a racist lie – that I substantiate a carefully contrived frame-up that would have convicted and probably jailed 39 innocent men and woman on false charges and in many cases ruined their lives or at the very least destroyed their careers. I refused; Smith retaliated. He had me arrested in his newsroom and charged – again falsely – with disorderly conduct. Ron McMahon, Smith's disciple, star reporter, and chief journalistic factotum then knowingly slandered me and the other arrestees on Page One. Josef Goebbels would have been proud.

The criminal case was soon dismissed, but I had volunteered my reportorial skills to the Civil Rights Movement my first hour out on bail. I agitated judicial resistance to the mass arrest and wrote I-don't-remember-how-many accounts of what had truly happened. Among these was a detailed report eventually published under my byline by The Knoxville Flashlight Herald, a local African-American newspaper. Though a (white) Congress of Racial Equality activist named Phillip Bacon edited the piece to death – he reduced my angry prose to coldly emotionless academic dreck – the text nevertheless revealed the basic facts of the atrocity. Meanwhile Ruling Class Media throughout the nation methodically suppressed the real story, either repeating the racist lie or affirming it by silence, never mind the beating of vice-consul Vargas had escalated the arrests into an international incident. But the formidably skilled reporters of Telegrafnoye agentstvo Sovetskovo Soyuza – Telegraph Agency of the Soviet Union (aka TASS) – soon assembled all the relevant details, and Pravda published them on Page One of its Moscow and International editions, the first public disclosure of the incident's ugly truth, a welcome exposé of capitalist “democracy” and an enduring lesson in the varied meanings of journalistic freedom.

Though I had nothing to do with the Soviet press coverage – at least nothing I know of – the notoriety of the arrests themselves soon ended my already troubled first marriage. I will never forget the concluding conversation with my first wife:

Carolyn: “Are you getting involved with Communists and stuff?”

Me: “Probably.”

Carolyn: “Then I'm gone.”

Obviously she did not realize I was “involved with Communists and stuff” at least from the moment I became my father's son and – if reincarnation is anything more than fantasy – for a lifetime before that as well.

Given Carolyn's personal goals, which despite her bohemian facade included many of the conventional milestone/millstones of success, she was undoubtedly right to have left me, and I was relieved to see her go. Indeed her departing question was typically, definitively hypocritical: she was well aware of the red-star/hammer-and-sickle politics that for as long as I can remember have been and remain the ideologies of my heart, yes even during the years when – stupefied with anger at my betrayal by a social-service agency – I was trying vainly to transform myself into a “libertarian conservative.”

But that is getting ahead of the story. Suffice it to say I was able – despite the 1963 incident, despite also my penchant for the occasional dyslexic error – to make a comfortable post-arrest home for myself at a succession of small and mid-sized newspapers merely because I had an indelible reputation as a competent reporter. Nor did I conceal the fact I had neither personal regrets or professional contrition for my defiance of Smith and his Ku Klux-minded effort to purge UT of its “troublemakers” and “outside agitators” – the latter the source of this blog's title. Often I made it clear that, were it necessary, I would go to jail again – an assertion I frequently used to determine whether a prospective employer and I would be a suitable paring.

Then as now, the episode's only lingering bad taste is the astonishingly ungrateful silence of the 39 men and women my journalistic integrity and personal honor saved from conviction on trumped-up charges. Not one of these intended victims – some of whom went on to distinguished academic careers – has ever thanked me for the protection I gave them. None even deigned to acknowledge my defiance of Smith, much less the penalties I paid for it. Apparently U.S. academics regard newspaper reporters – even reporters who dare rise up against oppression – as beneath their notice. It is a prejudice I have observed many times since, another manifestation of our nation's allegedly “nonexistent” class-warfare.

The point though is the Knoxville incident, the odium of which undeniably imposed an ideological ceiling on my career, nevertheless left me at least marginally promising prospects for employability as a journalist, thereby further encouraging my foolish belief I could overcome dyslexia. I was especially emboldened in the Northeast, where in 1965 I quickly learned my seemingly odd combination of cynicism and open-minded curiosity was welcomed as an indigenous trait. Back in Manhattan during the middle '80s, it appeared I would prosper there as I had during the '60s – that is, until my first serious (medically mandated) effort to quit smoking resurrected my dyslexia in all its dysfunctional destructiveness. The result not only cost me a superb job but ended my career: when you get the boot at age 46, you're done; the cause of your termination is irrelevant. After that event – in 1986 – my life spiraled steadily downward. Dyslexia always wins.

Its triumph was also victory for the clinical depression induced by the 1983 fire. Though its mysteriously ignited flames destroyed my life's work, consumed my identity and burned away any rational hope my efforts would ever achieve meaningful recognition or significance, gainful employment had dampered the depression itself. But it had nevertheless smoldered like stubbornly persistent embers, and the career-loss inflicted by dyslexia fueled it into a slow-motion inferno, an all-consuming conflagration of inextinguishable magnitude and paradoxically glacial result.

Thus began my interminable journey on the highway of woe that descends to the lowest most frigid circles of dyslexic hell. Familiar with Washington state's formerly generous approach to rehabilitative services – knowledge imparted mostly by years of award-winning reportage (1970-1983) – I returned here from New York City in late 1986, stupidly believing the Division of Vocational Rehabilitation run by the Department of Social and Health Services would help me find some line of steady employment with which to replace my dyslexically ruined journalism career. Indeed I had a prospective occupation in mind, something for which an extensive battery of DVR tests soon indicated I was both intellectually qualified and psychologically fit. But DSHS, apparently viewing me as a “white male oppressor,” chose to destroy me instead. In 1989, after a long and bitter controversy over my eligibility for rehabilitative services, DSHS labeled me “permanently unemployable” and thereby forced me onto Social Security. Twenty-six years before I was due to retire, I was condemned to live out my remaining years inescapably imprisoned by the increasing loneliness and isolation imposed by ever-worsening, eventually fatal poverty. The ruin so inflicted was total and irreparable – not just economically fatal, but a psychological death-sentence as well, anathema to anyone for whom life and work were not just inseparable but synonymous.

Whether ousting me forever from the workplace was the agency's revenge for my earlier history of truthful and therefore invariably adversarial reporting on its outrageous arrogance and habitual malfeasance, or merely another example of the bourgeois-feminist fanaticism with which it defied legislative intent by enforcing secret and illegal gender quotas, or some malicious hybrid of both, I will never know. Nor do I care; it no longer matters. What does matter is DSHS ended my life as anything more significant than a complex lump of protoplasm; its damning decree – ironically rescinded only by the formal conversion of my disability stipend into my old-age retirement pension – informed the world for the next 26 years I had been nullified, finished, canceled out.

Had my quest for a new career been successful, I would have continued writing even if most or all my income came from unrelated sources. I did just that during my year as a commercial fisherman (engineer/deckhand on a salmon seiner, 1982-83), likewise through the years I earned most of my pay working in printshops (1972-1976), during which I was also the founding photographer of The Seattle Sun. But the fire had made it impossible for me to pick up a camera without being felled by grief; its most agonizing loss had been thousands of irreplaceable prints and negatives, many of historical or sociological value. Though I would once more take up photography in the mid-1990s, writing seemed after the fire as if it were fated to remain my primary medium. Because I assumed the label affixed to me by DSHS guaranteed I would never again be credibly published, I now wrote purely for recreation: journal entries, attempts at poetry, even reportage. The utter absurdity of seeking significant publication was a backhanded blessing; it ensured I was never dyslexically compromised by the absence of competent editors and so absolved me from fear. In an eerie parallel to my early childhood, what went unpublished went unpunished.

But deteriorating health forced me to quit smoking again, this time permanently, and 23 September 1995, my first day as a non-smoker, seemed to be my last day as a writer of any sort. To attempt to write was to trigger an intolerable nicotine fit, its physical sensation a massive jangling of nerve-ends, its mental image my brain reduced to a writhing double-handful of spaghetti-like worms from which I was trying vainly to extract a word, a sentence, a paragraph, even a single character or letter. For the next seven years I was so paralyzed by dyslexia I could compose nothing more complex than grocery lists. Eventually – because I discovered I missed the emotional release provided by recreational writing, I taught myself to write again – practice, practice, practice – though I knew my post-nicotine ability would never equal (or even approach) the intellectual focus or the verbal speed and fluency I had achieved by the suppression of dyslexia with tobacco.

Eventually I did learn how to construct workable sentences and paragraphs without nicotininc self-medication. But as I said before, dyslexia always wins. Last week's unforgivable error proves I am as angrily disabled by dyslexia today as I was on my first day without cigarettes, as ravaged as I was on that awful 1946 morning in first grade I was proclaimed the class dunce after the first public demonstration of my inability to read. All that is different now are the manifestations: though I am no longer revealed as an imbecile by my former inability to distinguish between “went” and “want” or between “from” and “form,” I am still effectively reduced to imbecility by the fact – no matter how good I am at editing the work of others – I cannot catch a glaring blunder like the one that utterly destroyed the credibility of last week's essay and in all probability also obliterated the credibility of every word I have ever written: misstating the title of Richard D. Wolff's Occupy the Economy: Challenging Capitalism.

Of course I eventually corrected my horrific fuckup – I had dyslexically typed “Challenging Communism” – but I did not discover it until nearly 12 hours after the irrevocably damning fact of its electronic publication, and by then the damage was done. Now you see why the prospect of dyslexic errors always terrifies me, as well it should; blunders like these have ambushed me for as long as I can remember. As a smoker I nearly always caught them; when I failed, my editors came to my rescue. The one exception throughout my entire career in paycheck journalism – the still-nauseating public mortification of a dyslexia-induced mistake on Page One of a suburban Seattle paper – was allowed into print by a soon-to-be-ousted boss because his malice toward me trumped his concern for the thrice-weekly's quality and reputation. Now, today, as last week so emphatically proved, I have no defense at all against dyslexia. And I presume it is only politeness that protects me from a comments section justifiably overflowing with hurtful jeers. Verily, I thank you for your silence.

Again, such is dyslexia, a source of self-hatred that can never be ameliorated because its demonstrations of disability are unrelentingly merciless. Nor, in my case, is it dyslexia alone. This affliction in concert with a long and depressing litany of other dismal autobiographical facts – the fact I was conceived not with love but to entrap my father into marriage; the corollary fact my mother tried to murder me on the Summer Solstice Eve of 1945 (apparently, or so the evidence indicates she believed, to pay the Devil for facilitating her entrapment of my father); the subsequent fact my father – who had saved me from my mother's knife – tried only weeks afterward to dump me in a Virginia state orphanage – all this I take as irrefutable proof the infinitely sadistic god of Abraham (if indeed he exists at all) not only regards me as an abomination and hates me accordingly but takes cruel glee in inflicting just enough suffering to ensure the core characteristic of my life is constant obstruction – omnipresent gloom that now in old age is intensified by the mostly low-grade but nevertheless relentless pains of physical disabilities.

Such too is the awful fate – or so say any number of mythologies – of the intended sacrificial victim who somehow escapes or is rescued from the altar of doom.

Because dyslexia frustrates all its victims, anger and bitterness are among its clinical hallmarks, but my own frustration is radically intensified by the fact I have an exceptional intellect. Depending on the measurement of intelligence-quotient, whether I was hung over when I took the test and whether I was allowed to smoke, my IQ scores range as high as 145 and have never been lower than 135. My verbal skills are even more exceptional: they test in the topmost one-tenth of the nation's uppermost one percent. Worse – at least for me – is the corollary fact such abilities invariably foster irrepressible “callings” – the instinct to be productively useful and win recognition thereby. But now that I am forever denied the clarity of nicotine and the protection provided by editors, dyslexia invariably reduces these alleged “gifts” to liabilities, reducing the associated “callings” to nothing more than invitations to grandiose disaster. Talent and the instinctive need to properly apply it thus become, via dyslexia, a mechanism of indescribable vexation – literally an internalized torture machine.

That is the real horror of dyslexia: whether by the neurological clusterfuck of “went” versus “want” or by its adult counterpart in “capitalist” versus “communist” or by some other failure too hurtful for me to remember or imagine, it forever obstructs my purposes. It obliterates the joys of my achievements and replaces those rare pleasures with unspeakable agonies of failure. Such is dyslexia as I know it: the eternal triumph of a genetic flaw over which I am utterly powerless to do anything save curse the god in whom I mostly don't believe for damning me with an affliction the ruinous totality of which I cannot doubt – a perfect example of divine malevolence, its tribulations escapable only by death and perhaps not even then.

Do not misunderstand: this is not my resignation from an always disappointing and increasingly miserable life that given the realities of capitalism can only become more desolate. As I have said so many times before, the savagery of capitalism redefines survival itself, elevating it to an act of revolutionary defiance. This is especially true if one is, as I am, part of the bottom-most 99 Percent, those of us who – because we are no longer exploitable for profit – are ever-more-brazenly targeted for extermination by genocidal abandonment: the unspoken policy behind the threats to Social Security, reductions in Medicare, Medicaid and TriCare, and the slashing of every other government service vital to our survival. Hence I will continue to write; I will even – when I am so moved and assuming I am physically and economically able – continue to photograph.

But after last week's capitalism/communism fuckup I will never dare imagine my writing has any merit beyond the fact it fills my remaining hours and maybe weeks and months or even years and thus rescues me from the overwhelming boredom that alternates with politically or medically induced fright as the dominant conditions of the cast-off worker's long slide through the carefully muzzled ghettos of old age downhill into the ultimate silence of the grave. Such is the final lesson taught by dyslexia, the ultimate proof life itself is at best a cosmic joke, at worst a terminal illness. Never since the Summer Solstice of 1945 have my actual prospects risen above temporarily abated misery. It cannot be said too often: dyslexia always wins. I am again my disparaging father's “goon boy,” again my hateful mother's “clumsy little oaf.” Dyslexia prevails.

LB/3 June 2012

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What's at Stake in Moron Nation's War against Knowledge

LIKE MOST AMERICAN intellectuals, I instinctively trust and respect librarians. They are, after all, the priestesses and priests of Knowledge, a realm I hold infinitely more sacred than any edifice of Abrahamic rites whether Jewish, Christian or Islamic. 

Even now, after 72 years learning the cynicism we in the 99 Percent soon discover is the chief prerequisite of emotional survival here in the Slave World the late Thomas Wolfe so aptly described as “this most weary unbright cinder,” Knowledge remains my Light-Bringer.  Its grail-quest is my only act of faith, its amelioration of ignorance my only act of true contrition. I enter libraries with a secret silent genuflection of the mind as fervent as the overt gesture of obeisance devout Catholics make when they approach their altars.

The only other locales I ever regarded with comparable awe are the long forgotten but eerily potent shrines of vanquished cultures one sometimes discovers in remnants of the American wilderness. These places, their ancient holiness preserved by isolation, are sanctuaries not just of Knowledge but of forbidden divinities and the uniquely sustainable alternatives for living they yet represent, their never-printed texts preserved in the ancient Mother Tongue of our collective unconscious – the lost but vital glimpses of past and future I sometimes blessedly encountered in the years before physical disability combined with our nation's new dystopian locked-gate exclusiveness to banish me  from Nature's own biblioteka: the back country I so loved to explore, usually under the guise of fishing or hunting.

I freely admit it; not just people but books and –  yes –  dogs and ravens and even trees and troutly waters and abandoned roads and standing stones sometimes speak to me. In the City I was always loquaciously a-prowl for new ideas, new songs,  new sensations, new intensities of love, new depths of human connection. But in the country I was silent, capable of extended motionlessness, ever alert to the messages of the environment, ever receptive to the soft barely discernible heartbeat of the forest, ever a-listen for the seductive voices of the river, which are so like women talking fondly in some adjacent room. That is the sort of man I am, a person for whom Knowledge is life itself, for whom the worst most terrifying aspect of death is that it is the end of Knowledge.       

Hence I approach librarians not just as my potential friends but as fellow conspirators in the resistance against censorship and the induced ignorance that fosters  our imprisonment in Moron Nation.  Only twice in my life have librarians disappointed me. One these disappointments was a sadly comical demonstration of ignorance by an employee of the Bellingham Public Library:  when I asked why there was nothing by Tacitus in the BPL card catalogue, the librarian responded by asking me if this classical Roman was a “current author” and if his  works were “current books.”  The other disappointment was  far worse, an astonishing act of anti-Knowledge treachery by one or more politically motivated librarians in New York City, about which I'll elaborate in a moment.    

But I never regarded either of  those dismal episodes to be anything more than anomalies.  Save in Bellingham (where the city's librarians were also infamous for serving the secret police by compiling lists of who borrowed which books), librarians have always my natural allies. Sometimes, by providing vital information, librarians have been my saviors as well – especially in Manhattan.  Hence when I saw Melissa Gira Grant's “Occupy Wall Street Librarians Strike Back,” I read it knowing I would learn something very important, as indeed I did, for the  text detailed an atrocity about which I had hitherto  seen only the most fragmentary reports:  how New York City – allegedly the cultural epicenter of the Western World – maliciously destroyed the 5000-volume free library assembled by Occupy Wall Street. 

Obviously this newest assault on our right to know was ordered because someone (again) adjudged Knowledge to be “dangerous,” an intolerable source of radical agitation. It hardly matters who gave the order or whether it was given at City Hall, at Gracie Mansion or in some clandestine enclave of the Homeland Security Department's secret police;  the salient fact of this story is the wanton destruction of the books, which by its undeniable truth is now proven to be an official policy of governance in the United States.

If this sort of action evokes a troubling deja vu – as surely it might – be assured your mind is not playing tricks;  the deliberate trashing of libraries is nothing new.   But libricide –  that is the proper term for it – is not just a Nazi German outrage. It was also popular in Pinochet's Chile, which makes its appearance on Wall Street hardly a surprise given the Central Intelligence Agency's Nazi, Chilean and New York City Police Department connections. Thus the following comment:   

Anyone who questions the need for a People's Library –  not just in NYC (which allegedly has the finest "public" library in the U.S. and one of the best in the world),  but everywhere else throughout our ever-more-oppressed nation –  should go to my blog for a glimpse of the significant radical history maliciously suppressed by the New York City Public Library itself. 

As I reported in my blog last year, The East Village Other published a fully detailed extra covering the riot, but by 1983 the extra had been removed from NYCPL archives by city librarians –  obviously cut from the microfiche files and the film then professionally re-spliced.  

No doubt the censorship was imposed because the 1967 incident was a genuine police riot –  an outrage in which the cops launched an unprovoked attack (note my photos in the above link) on a group of musicians who had obtained an NYC troubadour permit for their outdoor performance.

Also –  because the cops initially admitted their attack was triggered by two or three  complaints from the Lower East Side's small but disproportionately influential community of Ukrainian immigrants –  the incident raised an enormously embarrassing question.  How was it a few complaints from a notoriously fascistic, adamantly theocratic (Eastern Orthodox) minority had nullified,  for several hours on 30 May 1967,  not just a city-issued permit, but the rights guaranteed by the New York State and United States constitutions?  

The question was especially relevant since a substantial number of those immigrants had allegedly fled the Soviet Union to escape war crimes charges for their collaboration with the Nazis and were  said to be under the sponsorship and protection of  the Central Intelligence Agency.  Then as now, the answer might have revealed disturbing details about the relationship between the NYPD and the CIA, itself already infamous as a haven for Nazi war criminals.   

Though at first it appeared Ruling Class Media would adequately report the details of this atrocity –  note for example my photo in Newsweek –   the reportage quickly deteriorated back into oppressive conformity with the cops-as-heroes/hippies-as-demons motif  that characterized all "mainstream" coverage of the Countercultural rebellion in any and all of its forms –  anti-war, feminist, back-to-the-land, new music, alternative press, alternative spirituality etc. –  with EVO's unprecedented extra the sole documentation of what actually obtained that dreadful day in Tompkins Square. 

The extra's deliberate destruction by the city's librarians –  another act reminiscent of "the worst regimes imaginable" –  is therefore not just a ruinous loss, but a damning example of how "public" libraries can be co-opted to serve the will of the One Percent. Hence it might be revealing to know how many of the destroyed People's Library books had already been "disappeared" from NYCPL, whether catalogued (but never available for circulation) or deleted entirely. 

Obviously, the Ruling Class intends to keep our minds imprisoned in Moron Nation –  the 21st Century's artificially induced equivalent of the ignorance that paralyzed the peasants of  pre-Revolutionary Russia –   even as our bodies are herded ever closer to de jure enslavement.

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Apparently it is this unspeakable purpose – the imposition of ignorance so paralytic it cannot be overcome even by collective effort and so bottomless it cannot ever be escaped – that has clandestinely motivated much of the domestic policy inflicted on us by the One Percent since the end of World War II.

First was the demonization of intellectuals – psycholinguistic warfare that made “intellectual”  synonymous with “subversive” and even “traitor.” This brainwashing – or, more accurately, “brain-warping” – was cleverly sandwiched within the purges of Communists and socialists that began literally hours after the Japanese surrender.

For people too young to remember those years, one fact should suffice as portraiture: throughout the 1950s, my younger half-siblings and I were sternly instructed never to reveal to anyone our household included a substantial library, our father's lifetime collection of books. Even then, possession of Knowledge – unless of course one was part of the Ruling Class – was already a de facto crime: just ask the hundreds of thousands of classroom “brains” who were jeered, beaten, raped, and otherwise bullied into feigned stupidity.  The public elementary schools and junior highs were bad enough, but public high schools – in which vicious children had grown sufficiently large and strong to inflict severe and sometimes fatal wounds –  were realms of genuine horror, a topic to which we shall return. 

Meanwhile the quality of public education deteriorated steadily, a decline so obvious it was triggering school-reform controversies even before the Soviet Union orbited Sputnik I in the fall of 1957 and thus forever claimed for Communism the title “First into Space.” 

Though post-Sputnik panic brought about momentary improvements in public education under presidents Kennedy and Johnson, the rebellions of the 1960s once more frightened the One Percent with the power of Knowledge to inspire and agitate, and by the end of the decade, the deliberately induced decline in educational quality was again evident. The conservatives, especially the more overtly fascist John Birchers, loudly blamed “Communists” and “Com-symps,” but the outcry – as always – merely functioned to conceal how capitalism was transforming public education to serve its long-range goal of reducing the United States to its United Estates – eventually a realm of the corporate equivalent of antebellum plantations, literally a nation of slaves. The real villains were of course the One Percent, their malevolent Ayn Rand influence clandestinely applied at every level, a do-not-dare-tell-it truth recognized at least subconsciously by any reasonably perceptive reporter who was assigned to cover public education during those years.

                                                   *** 

As I implied above, we cannot discuss the origins of Moron Nation without discussing bullying, a manifest hellishness I encountered in every public school I attended.

It was especially prevalent in the southern public high school where I endured ninth and tenth grades. Throughout my freshman year and into the first weeks of my sophomore year, I was bullied relentlessly: not only had my “Yankee” origins taught me to “talk funny”;  I was also smallish and slender, dyslexically clumsy and  dark-haired enough to be suspected of being Jewish. But I finally taught my slow-learning tormentors a sufficiently discouraging lesson:  attack me, I'll fight you;  and even if you win the fight, I will damn well inflict substantial hurt. In eleventh grade I attended school in urban Michigan, where a variety of factors combined to ensure I was not bullied.  But familial dysfunction involuntarily returned me to the South for twelfth grade,  and though I was in the same semi-rural district where I attended ninth and tenth grades, my enrollment in a newly constructed school apparently nullified my reputation for violent response. 

Because the act of writing is so often also an act of vivid recollection, working on this essay brought back the following long-forgotten incident in all its wrenching fear, anguish, rage and mortification:  

During class change maybe the first week of that final high-school September, a gang of at least a half-dozen football players attacked me in the hallway, forcibly yanked down my pants and hurled me into an adjacent girls' restroom, a vicious “prank” the purpose of which was to get me caught in pantless trespass by the school authorities and thus branded a pervert. But the hateful scheme failed. I fought my assailants with anything-goes ferocity,  inflicting enough pain they were unable to de-pant me completely, and when I was flung through the forbidden door, it was with one leg still trousered.  Then – much to my surprise – the girls themselves not only aided my escape but refused to rat me out. When word got around I was again carrying the modified bicycle chain with which I had notoriously avenged myself on a bully two years earlier, the jocks quickly found other targets.     

Given the perspective of 55 years and work on several in-depth education stories, I now recognize   schoolyard bullying as a central part of U.S. education: it is how we are psychologically prepared to function under capitalism – infinite greed as maximum virtue – whether we are destined to be predators or prey. It is also how we are all taught to behave under capitalist governance: absolute power and unlimited profit for the One Percent, total subjugation and genocidal poverty for everyone else. Schoolyard or workplace, the bullies maintain the capitalist order: executive attire, athletic jerseys or badges and uniforms, under capitalism they are all licenses for savagery and sadism, differing only in price and permissiveness.  That's why all the official pronouncements against bullying are ultimately nothing more than Big Lies – additional examples of the same sort of propaganda by which this Nation of Falsehood hypocritically denounces the savagery its policies intentionally perpetuate.

Indeed, bullying IS capitalism, the perfect micrososm of its predatory psycho-dynamics. But to connect capitalism and bullying (or to name capitalism as the perpetrator of its many other atrocities) is to commit heresy, to utter a statement so subversive, so taboo,  none dare do it publicly: a topic on which Richard D. Wolff has a great deal to say in a new book entitled Occupy the Economy: Challenging Capitalism, about which more in a moment.   


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A Chris Hedges Essay We Should All Read at Least Once

Apropos our slave-pen economy, a month ago Chris Hedges published a provocative essay entitled “The Implosion of Capitalism,” which I bookmarked for recommendation and comment but then set aside as events later dictated. Now though in the aftermath of Memorial Day, which presumably   turned our thoughts to the costs inflicted on ourselves, our fellow humans and our planet by capitalism's relentless quest for “growth,” I offer it as an appropriate meditation.

Here, in the hope they will encourage you to read the essay from start to finish, are a few significant lines in which Hedges suggests the direction we must take if our species is to survive:
 
“Marx, though he placed a naive faith in the power of the state to create his workers’ utopia and discounted important social and cultural forces outside of economics, was acutely aware that something essential to human dignity and independence had been lost with the destruction of pre-modern societies...Rebuilding this older vision of community, one based on cooperation rather than exploitation, will be as important to our survival as changing our patterns of consumption, growing food locally and ending our dependence on fossil fuels.”

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Shameless Promotion of What I Hope Will Be a Vital Book

A few paragraphs ago I mentioned Wolff's Occupy the Economy, a chapter of which was printed recently by Truthout. Here is a sample paragraph:

“Questioning and criticizing capitalism have been taboo, treated by federal authorities, immigration officials, police and most of the public alike as akin to treason. Fear-driven silence has substituted for the necessary, healthy criticism without which all institutions, systems, and traditions harden into dogmas, deteriorate into social rigidities, or worse. Protected from criticism and debate, capitalism in the United States could and has indulged all its darker impulses and tendencies. No public exposure, criticism and movement for change could arise or stand in its way as the system and its effects became ever more unequal, unjust, inefficient and oppressive. Long before the Occupy movement arose to reveal and oppose what U.S. capitalism had become, that capitalism had divided the 1 percent from the 99 percent.”

I have not yet read the book, but I surely will. Wolff's potentially widespread public exposure of the taboo against naming capitalism as our adversary – a topic of Outside Agitator's Notebook since its inception in 2009 – is long overdue.

Perhaps now we've at last begun the national discussion that is prerequisite to our liberation.

LB/28 May 2012

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