“The more outrageous the Republicans become, the weaker the left becomes.” Ralph Nader
This line from a longer interview with Nader by Chris Hedges sums up nicely the triangulation phenomenon that we are now caught in. We have right wing Democrats in office who are carrying forward with the corporate agenda, and no organized resistance. The left has been sucked into the Democratic party, and had its balls cut off as a consequence.
But how many times have you heard some Democrat say “Yeah – but look how crazy those Republicans are!”
Like a fox. Right wing craziness is aimed both at its crazy Tea Party wing and at the progressive left. For the TP people, it’s music to soothe the soul. For the lefties, it’s frightening enough to cause a stampede into the Democratic Party.
Republicans are not crazy. They know the impact of their words. The sound effects are measured and calculated to create the effect we are seeing. I have long said that the public pronouncements of politicians do not carry useful information. I am more in tune with Josef Goebbels, JC’s main man, who said words to the effect that everything that is done in public is done for effect.* I cannot find the actual quote, and hope that someone out there possibly reading this can do so.
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Here it is, courtesy of Ellul, Propaganda, page x footnote 1: Goebbels said:”We do not talk to say something, but to obtain a certain effect.” And F.C. Bartlett states that the goal of propaganda is not to increase political understanding of events, but to obtain certain results through action.
I’ve been spending part of my mornings with Christopher Hitchens’ God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything. I love the guy, and wonder why he spends so much of his excellent mind thrashing at the windmill of religion. But I’ll read whatever he writes about anything of his choosing, as it’s a delight just to sit in his sidecar as he navigates. (He says he’ll leave them alone when they leave him alone. Surely he knows both are impossible.)
Just a couple of his observations – if God rested on the seventh day, what did he do on the eighth? (Never thought to ask.) Religion, he says, is “both the result of and the cause of dangerous sexual repression.” Too true, says this Catholic boy who sheepishly had to confess through a screen to a possible child abuser that he had touched himself to a happy result.
Nothing optional – from homosexuality to adultery – is ever made punishable unless those who do the prohibiting (and exact the fierce punishments) have a repressed desire to participate.
He wonders how the Jewish people ever made it as far as they did before Moses while thinking that “murder, adultery, theft and perjury were permissible.” It must have been quite a mess before the old guy stumbled off the mountain. I did not know (the 8nuns did not tell me!) that the Immaculate Conception was not official church doctrine until 1852, and the problem of there being something about Mary was not solved until 1950, when they discovered her miraculous Assumption into heaven, hymen intact.
The moments I spend with Hitchens in the A.M. are better spent and far more enlightening than those of monks and nuns creeping into chapel. Is it possible that he might be some kind of deity. We’ll see after he succumbs to esophageal cancer … if he returns in a more durable body.
The odds were never in my favorI have been chastised on occasion for having a less-than-universal focus here, as if my little light could actually shine more than a few feet in this vast universe. I do have many thoughts that go beyond the mundane, but also a deep sense of absurdity, as if to sit here and comment on the larger affairs of our country and world could possibly matter to anyone but me. The fact that I have a small forum, and that I get the nominal number of “hits” that a minimally credible blog gets (200-300 daily, most just passing by and who have not read this far), only means that there is some power in the Internet. It has nothing to do with me – it is the vehicle, nothing more, that is on exhibit here.
Early pioneers deeply influenced meThere was once a thing called the “alternative press,” and it was a rich source of reading for me – I read all I could of Covert Action Quarterly and so many others long since gone under. I slowly let the subscriptions expire, the last one to go was the Anderson Valley Advertiser, where a very smart man who is also a good writer, Bruce Anderson, did some great work for 2-3,000 readers in pot/wine-infested Boonsville, CA. (Alexander Cockburn, who now manages Counterpunch, allowed his weekly column to be published in AVA for a nominal $25 per week, and advertised himself as a “weekly contributor to the Anderson Valley Advertiser” when he had a weekly column in the Wall Street Journal in the early 90’s. It was, as I see now, an inside joke. AVA still has 2-3,000 subscribers.)
This web site, Piece of Mind, was fashioned on the premise that we are constantly being threatened by hobgoblins. But it has failed to take hold. In a country where propaganda is so sophisticated that none realize it even exists, my point of view will never be anything more than a quirky sideshow. Sort of how I pictured myselfI thought this would be a launching pad to a career in writing, that by this time I would have thousands of readers, but it never developed. Worse yet, I never managed to break out of the narrow Montana community in which I was bred. As a Colorado resident, I have come to realize that Montana blogging is what it is because it is a small state. There is no “Colorado blogging community” as such. That atmosphere can only exist where the patrons are few. By definition, the impact is nil and has no reach, no effect on politics.
It’s been fun – I met some nice people – Ladybug and Bob Garner, and have come to know some more complex people – this guy “Max Bucks” actually wants to be seen as off-kilter. This allows him the freedom to say whatever insulting thing comes to mind. I really like that. Big Swede and Dave Rye are as dense as any two people I have ever met, but I came to like each on his own terms, as they bear no ill will and have sensitive feelings.
Blogging should be an expression of multiculturaism, but some how, it failsThen there is the chorus … the affectations and egos of liberals who imagine themselves enlightened, and Randians and libertarians who just don’t travel well and so cloister and talk among themselves. (Yeah, you, Budge.) Without this medium, blogging, we would never know each other. It’s a trip through the garden of life – many blooms and colors. It is not an outlet that has any effect on the movements of power and politics – that part is silly. (Newspapers don’t have impact either, as they are owned by the very people they should be reporting on. Those folks are silly as well but take themselves so seriously! Any blogger who takes himself seriously ought to quit too.)
It is fun just to butt heads. That’s all this was ever about. And it’s over. I’ve bruised too many egos, and I’m no longer welcome in the right places. I should have known to be gentle – the larger the ego, the quicker the reprisal. But that’s not my style – the larger the ego, the more I am disliked. It was a badge of honor. I take that badge with me into retirement from blogging. I am proud to be disliked by Natelson and Crisp, Budge and Kailey/Kailey, Kemmick and Fleischman, J-whatever-girl … all of the pretension, the demand to be taken seriously as a cover charge for debate … I can’t take it anymore. Too much ego in those places, too little knowledge. I can’t take it anymore!
(Hint: He's fucking with you)Anyway, I’m signing off now. Odd as it may seem, it’s been a pleasure. I really, really enjoyed the debates, tests of skill and feats of strength, the harsh feelings and false sentiments, the massive egos and fake identities that are far more interesting than the actual people behind them. Good bye, and be well.
(If you made it through this tripe, you are one of the three who make blogging worthwhile. Quitting is not an option.)
People have encouraged me in the past to subscribe to the Wall Street Journal for better news coverage than is available from other sources. Investors, after all, need real news. I have subscribed in the past, but it is very hard to keep up with such a large newspaper, and we leave so much unread that it seems like a wasted expense. They tend to pile up, we never get caught up, and eventually give up.
But there are two other sources of news that offer a counter to the highly filtered U.S. outlets.
One is the Financial Times, which is delivered to us daily with our Denver Post (which does an excellent job of covering the Denver Broncos, and not much more). FT is a thin newspaper, and carries many news stories that U.S. sources don’t. Just yesterday, for example, it carried a front page story of China’s having developed an anti-aircraft carrier missile that is a “game-changer” in the Pacific, according to prominent U.S. military officials. The only other U.S. sources that covered that story were Stars & Stripes, AOL News, and Business Insider.
FT also had a story about the rising of the minimum wage in Beijing, China, and throughout all of China during 2010 to spur demand and add equality to wealth distribution. The only other U.S. source that I found covering this story was the Wall Street Journal. Minimum wage is frowned on in the U.S., and so doesn’t get much ink.
That’s just one day’s news from one source – two stories of interest in the U.S. not available for general consumption.
Another good source of news is Al Jazeera, seen all over the world, and available in the U.S. on Link TV (Direct TV channel 375, and Dish 9410). In a propaganda system like ours, we are conditioned to automatically disbelieve any statements made by our enemies. Al Jazeera is just another news outlet, but since it has an Arab name, is automatically distrusted here in the land of the free. Fair enough – we should watch it anyway, and apply the same distrust to American news outlets.
Chris Hedges speaks at an anti-war rally in DC on Dec 17. He (and Daniel Ellsberg) were arrested. There was no media coverage of the event. I was listening to Chris Hedges being interviewed by Bob McChesney this weekend (his Sunday, December 19, broadcast), and am not quoting him precisely but have his meaning – he said that the reason that Noam Chomsky is so despised by liberals is that Chomsky spends so much time exposing liberals.
LiberalThat is one of the truly hard concepts to grasp about our nation – that our “liberals” are as much spear-chuckers for power as our right wingers. Neo-liberals and neo-conservatives are the same animal. They are totally in the game.
Thomas Friedman is a liberal, as are Bill Clinton and Barack Obama. They are somewhat reserved about certain actions – for instance, they might think that the Iraq invasion was not well carried out, tactically. But they would never, ever go so far as to say that the Bush people had dishonest motives. LiberalThat would be offensive, and would quickly move them to the margins with those who are true dissenters. Like Chomsky, they would never be heard from again.
This is why, when Bill Clinton took office, he closed the door on the crimes of Bush I, and why Obama has slammed closed the door on those of Bush II. As “liberals,” they represent the furthest we are allowed to go to the “left” in dissent. Those who go further are automatically marginalized. LiberalThose Democrats who hoped that Obama would haul up Bush Administration officials for torture, preventive and aggressive war, and other crimes, should have adjusted their perceptions to instead understand the American liberal.
LiberalWe need to relieve the term “liberal” of all its baggage. Liberals are not concerned about mainstream social issues, nor are they in any sense pacifists. They have no problems with the use and abuse of American power, whether it is used to attack innocent people and countries or be used righteously. It is safe to say that most American liberals are pro-legal abortion, but beyond that it is not safe to say that they differ much at all with conservatives or right wingers.
Liberal I chuckle when I hear someone call an extreme right-wing “liberal,” like, say, Joe Lieberman, a “moderate.” Perceptually, that’s the only way we can describe him that makes any sense within our two-party structure. He’s not in the Republican Party, but he acts as if he is. Because, there is only one ideology.
To say that our liberals and right wingers are all the same overstates the case. But not by much. From this vantage point, then, it should come as no surprise that Barack Obama won the 2008 election because he had more money to spend that John McCain, and that this was due to a shift on Wall Street from right wing Republicans to “liberal” Democrats. They have no problem backing either party. (Obama’s largest bundle of corporate contributions came from Goldman Sachs.)
LeftyThis is Carl Oglesby speaking at the SANE march on Washington DC in 1965 to protest the Vietnam War:
“Think of all the men who now engineer that war, those who study the maps, give the commands, push the buttons, and tally the dead: Bundy, McNamara, Rusk, Lodge, Goldberg, the President [Johnson] himself. They are not moral monsters. They are all honorable men. They are all liberals.”
It was not any different in 1965. It has not changed since then. We are not a different country now than we were then. Journalism has not changed. American foreign policy has not changed, and does not change when we switch from one party in power to the other. And this gives the lie to the ultimate fraud: We are not comprised of two major parties.
There is only one. And it has been that way throughout the entire post-war era.
Julian AssangeJulian Assange stated in an interview last Thursday that he feared that if extradited and imprisoned in the United States, that he would die in prison “Jack Ruby style.”
For those not familiar with that reference, Ruby maintained throughout his stay in prison that he was framed – not that he did not kill Lee Harvey Oswald, but rather that he had no choice.
“The world will never know the true facts of what occurred–my motives. . . . Unfortunately, the people that had so much to gain and had such an ulterior motive, and who put me in the position I’m in, will never let the true facts come aboveboard to the world.”
Jack RubyRuby died in prison in 1967, shortly before he was to be given a second trial in Waco, Texas. He was convinced that an injection that he received while in prison contained active cancer cells. I don’t know the science of that – I do know that premature death of people like Ruby should be regarded with high skepticism.
Assange appears to be playing a game here – he is raising his profile, possibly buying assassination insurance. There is no doubt that the Obama people want him jailed, and probably dead. The combination of corporate and government activities to shut down Wikileaks ought to raise eyebrows everywhere, but we are a land of shaved brows.
But if Assange’s profile is kept high, killing him becomes problematic, as any “accidental” death would everywhere (except in the American media) be regarded with suspicion.
Here in the Land of the Free and Home of the Brave public opinion does not favor Assange and Wikileaks. We are a most docile people, not even needing locks on our jail cells.
We are past the portal now and well into our new world, which isn’t new at all. Corporatism goes by many names, the oldest being feudalism. It’s a natural regression to the mean when we cease to be constantly vigilant: a few who have accumulated wealth and power presume to know that they “earned” it, and for that reason believe themselves to have superior wisdom. From there it’s a quick succession from superior wisdom to superior essence, from a big house to a big house on a hill to a gated community.
From that insulated viewpoint, all of us become rabble, outsiders, sometimes glimpsed at through the window of a limousine. Somehow their eggs are on their plate in the morning, somehow their garbage is carted off, but in the meantime they are going on about the important business of amassing more wealth. In their lexicon, which their pet economists are trained to repeat, it is called “creating jobs.”
In fact, didn’t I just hear this from Obama? Didn’t he even say that economists had told him if he kept the Bush tax cuts in place, that our employment picture would improve? (AP restricted story: Yes, he did! He said that “Economists predict higher job growth in 2011-2012 if tax deal passed!” Yes, we can!)*
The best expression of how unregulated and untaxed economies function is the board game MONOPOLY. There are strategies at play that can help, but the important life lesson to take from the game is this: once a player reaches a certain critical mass of wealth, it takes on a life of it own, and it builds on itself. And the “economic driver” on the board and in real life and is a set of dice.
In corporate world, post Citizens United, we are all of us going to be second class citizens. As I awoke this Christmas morning, as my mind began to focus, I found myself wondering if us white folks are going to be very good in the roles we used to assign to non-whites.
Will we accept our Wal-Mart jobs with good grace? Will we accept that most medical conditions just can’t be dealt with on Wal-Mart income? Will we easily give up this high-falutin’ notion that education will improve our lot in life?
Life in a gated communityWill we too begin to drop out of high school in droves? Will we join the underground economy – the drugs and crystal meth one? That too is mere capitalism, free enterprise of a sort that lands one in a different type of gated community.
My suspicion is that us white folk will not be very good at being black folk, or Hispanics or whatever other color we look down upon. I fear we will turn hateful, and having been taught that there are none to hate above us, will turn our hatred outward and downward.
This is the function of the Tea Parties. They are a product of the public relations industry – no doubt the idea sprung up in a Hill and Knowlton office in DC, or some other such place. They are a political device, but also serve for misdirection. They take our discontent, which is real and reasonable, and direct it away from the real cause of the problems.
Welcome to corporate world. Merry Christmas to all.
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*[Note to self: Economists don’t know much about the past or the present (what’s a cause and what’s an effect and all of that), and so restrict themselves to the future.]
During a recent family tragedy, we were overwhelmed by messages from friends and relatives that they would “pray” for us. I understand the sentiment – they want to be helpful, but are miles away and can’t do anything but offer moral support. The closer to the victims of the tragedy, the more that wonderful people offered real help, support, hugs and tears and consolation. They did so because they could, because they are real, loving and caring people. Those who could not offer real help would do so if they were closer at hand. The “prayer” is really just a way of saying “I feel compassion for you, I hurt for you.” As I told one person who wondered if I, as a nonbeliever, appreciated his prayers, I said that I welcomed all good thoughts and feelings, no matter how he chose to express them.
As I have aged and endured suffering, as we all do, I’ve come to think of Christmas as a pagan holiday masked with our own religious mythologies. It is no coincidence that it happens around the solstice, and the wasting of perfectly healthy trees and references to virgin births go back far into our history, long before 6CE, the year of the Census of Quirinius that might be the one referenced in the Bible. In the modern era, the holiday is also swathed and swaddled in commercial ideology – the need to buy and wrap is deeply embedded in us. “What to buy for someone who does not need anything?” Well, I’ve got to buy him something, anything. I’ll spend an hour at COSTCO and find some Chinese merchandise that he will put on a shelf in his garage and someday donate to Goodwill.
Children are showered with gifts, but are not capable of true appreciation for things that they did not know they wanted, much less needed. A child is capable of expressing only so much appreciation, usually verbally expressed at the parent’s command. That same appreciation is divided by two with two gifts, and with ten gifts is hardly expressed at all, as the child is no longer grateful, but is instead looking for things that offer more than a moment’s satisfaction. Children are children, and I like them just like everyone else, but I deliberately avoid the unwrapping ceremonies. It’s a little unsettling.
The important thing is that I spent some money, so that merchants have a good holiday season. How does a good holiday season translate into our “common good”? It offers people some part-time employment without benefits, and is a great jobs program for the republic … of China.
So here is how we celebrate Christmas: We observe it, in the true sense of “observe.” Mostly, we just watch what is going on around us. We have a tree, because grandchildren expect that of us. We don’t go to church, just as with all other days. We have a nice meal, my wife and I exchange gift that we think really might bring some joy to one another. We devise a letter that tells of all the events in our small family over the past year, avoiding any reference to “straight A’s” and the invention of vaccines and work in Calcutta. Joy to the world!But the truth is that in our family we have one daughter who actually did pull straight A’s for two years (having belatedly discovering her inner student), and another who is working in Haiti for the Canadian Red Cross. She is witnessing true suffering and first world indifference to the third world, and thereby gaining true wisdom. We didn’t do those things, we didn’t cause those nice things to happen. But it was worthy of mention. The rest of our kids are just doing what they do, surviving and making their way.
And that’s about it. I want the holiday to end soon so that David Sirota and the Daily Show and Bill Maher return. It’s also a hump – six weeks after New Year’s day, pitchers and catchers report to spring training.
Two things happened this week that merit some applause – ratification of the “START” treaty, which somewhat lessens our nuclear arsenal, but more importantly allows for Russian inspection to see that we are not violating the limits; and the elimination of “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell.” That the latter was even controversial is an indication of how backward our leadership is in the advance of human rights.
The passage of the treaty surprised me, but I’m easily surprised. Our quest ought to be for total elimination of the weapons, as they, as opposed to conventional weapons, actually threaten our existence. Reduction of our stock from 2,100+ to 1,500 is hardly meaningful, given that one might set off a chain reaction that will end with our annihilation. And hidden in the details is a Bush-era initiative to gussy up our stock, spending $84 billion on making those weapons we are keeping even more threatening. This is a dramatic increase over what Bush initially asked for, $60 billion, as I recall. Again, Obama has out-Bushed Bush.
And then I heard on the radio yesterday that Obama praised the lame-duck session for accomplishing more than any lame-duck session in decades. And I heard radio liberals praise Obama, one saying that he “got his Mojo back.” Why? He gave a good speech. That’s all it takes to make these clowns happy.
What did he accomplish? Removal of DADT is nice, but has little effect on the larger issues of governance – militarism, taxes and rule by wealth – that affect our population. It has the feeling of a wedge issue, though I sympathize with those who suffered under it. I don’t minimize it for them, and congratulate the Congress for finally coming around on that one issue.
Obama’s big accomplishment was a massive betrayal of a campaign promise, for which he has gathered wide praise. While campaigning, he promised to allow the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy expire, while preserving them for anyone making less than $250,000 – virtually all of us. He didn’t “negotiate” or “compromise.” He screwed us with royal vigor. He saved the cuts for the wealthy, probably in perpetuity, while amazingly raising taxes on 45 million of our poorest households. He planted a time bomb in Social Security that will explode in two years.
It is a massive screwing! And done right out in the open. The 2010 elections did not reflect any kind of shift in voter sentiments. Voters with sentiments who voted in 2008 simply didn’t vote in 2010. Obama turned out to be, well, not so much.
Yes, he got his Mojo back. Democrats have to be proud that the old speech-maker is back on his game. For the rest of us, well, elections don’t matter in this country. Back to work now, folks. Nothing has changed.
Piece of Mindful 