Apropos of absolutely nothing else of consequence, I admire J.K. Rowling for not making Ron Weasley black.
'Yessir, Mr. Potter! Dat sho' is fright'nin'!'
Silly thought for the week
Either way, it’s in your name
There’s a little* firestorm brewing over the above photo. What does it mean? Why would these men pose with such an infamous martial symbol?
I have a theory that gives them the benefit of the doubt: these men are making a point about what they’ve been sent to do in a foreign land. More on this in a moment.
The men in the photograph are trained killers, their training paid for by our tax dollars, and our elected representatives sent them to the foreign land to do exactly what they do. They are U.S. Marines, the best killers in the world. I don’t say this to be laudatory, sarcastic, or ironic; I’m merely pointing out the obvious. So when we send these men to Afghanistan to kill, we can expect that’s what they’ll do and do very well. Whether or not they enjoy what they do, or find dark humor in what they do, or hate what they do, it’s their job. Whatever brought them to the doorstep of the U.S. Marine Corps, they all took an oath to defend this nation. Their oath doesn’t come with an a la carte menu; they don’t get to decide** which deployment fits the definition of their oath and which is a clear violation.
So I say it doesn’t matter why the men in the photograph decided to put a Schutzstaffel flag underneath the U.S. flag. Whether or not it was their intention, the men hanging the SS flag are sending a clear moral message about the nature of what they’ve been ordered to do in Afghanistan. If you are outraged by what you see in the photograph, then you need to ask yourself why; because SS flag or no SS flag, the killing is continuing.
Again, the men in the photograph, or thousands like them, are still over there doing what they were trained and deployed to do. If what they are doing is wrong, then we all ought to be more offended by the presence of the Stars and Stripes than we are of the other flag; which one, after all, is supposed to be drenched in innocent blood? On the other hand, if we’re happy or content with what the men are doing, then we shouldn’t complain about the SS flag, unless maintaining hypocritical fiction is more important to us than doing the right thing.
That last clause brings us to the core of this little controversy. What’s more important: emotional reaction to the imagery, or the moral weight of the reality? In November 2008, roughly 98% of U.S. citizens who voted chose a presidential candidate who had promised to continue the war in Afghanistan. So you all got what you wanted, and the men in the photograph are the ones sent to do it for you. Don’t condemn them for showing you the moral reality of what you asked for.
*I say ‘little’ to make clear my view that the firestorm would have been much larger had the photo been taken and released during the Bush administration. I’ll leave it to Glenn Greenwald to explain that bit.
**In the strictest, most literal sense they do get to decide, assuming they’re willing to accept the consequences for such a potentially contrary decision– and some have heeded their consciences and accepted the consequences– but just imagine the chaos if every individual military person suddenly began to individually decide which deployments and which missions he or she believed worthy of execution. In some ways we might think this a good thing, but it would still be moving the cart by pulling it sideways.
A little something about hope…
I have a problem with the concept of hope. It was central to Obama’s 2008 campaign, and it stank to high heaven then. It’s possible that that campaign had an effect on my perception of the concept, I’ll admit. Seeing millions of people line up to try and exorcise their Bush fatigue by opting for a slicker, smarter, seemingly more morally palatable version of what they were supposedly sick of– well, it didn’t exactly endear me to the vast majority of the electorate. It didn’t help that a plurality only a few millions smaller stood in line (I’m guessing in a much shorter and more comfortable line, on average) to vote for one of the most comically vile tickets ever to be offered to the public by either of the major parties. So what all these people were ‘hoping’ for I can’t say, because I don’t want to use any profanity in this post.
To me, hope is something that exists for only two classes of people. The first class is by far the largest, and it consists of suckers, idiots, the morally weak, and others who don’t want to put in the work of actually trying or sacrificing. I know that description sounds harsh, and I mean it to. It’s one thing to say ‘I hope the Cubs win today’; it’s a meaningless thing, really, perhaps except for the small emotional lift a Cubs fan might receive from an otherwise futile and pointless outcome. When there’s something important on the line, however, one does not resort so easily to hope; one does not look at the economic and foreign policy mess created by eight years of Bush (and eight years of Democratic capitulation) and say ‘I’m going to hope this smiling black Democrat with the Harvard education and the good diction will help make things better.’ No, one doesn’t do that. One looks long and hard at all the available candidates on the ballot and one decides which one will be most likely to get on that bully pulpit and take that vastly expanded executive power and fight back against the creeping fascism and casino capitalism and rampant imperialism. One doesn’t use ‘hope’ as a starting point.
But enough about my disgust with the voting habits of the vast majority of my fellow citizens. We can drone on about that later. I really sat down to discuss the other class of people for whom hope exists. This class is small enough to be statistically insignificant. It consists of persons who see the struggles they have before them; they weigh their options, and they exhaust all human energies and possibilities in their various fights. These are the few who earn hope. I am not one of these people, and I don’t know that I’ve met more than a few.
I want to tell you about one whom I never had the chance to meet, but whom I’ve been fortunate to learn about. First, though, let me tell you why.
About four years or so ago, my union, Local 2, worked out a deal with the City of Chicago that gave all the city’s firefighters and paramedics access to a very expensive full-body scan at HeartScan of Chicago. Thousands of us took advantage, and I know personally of a few whose lives were saved by the discovery of potentially catastrophic conditions they never would have caught otherwise. The only item of interest on my scans was a translucent nodule, no bigger than a nickel, on the upper lobe of my left lung. Not a big deal, or so thought the HeartScan physician who pointed it out to me. Still, she recommended I take the scan info to my own doctor, which I did.
Dr. Sean D. O’Connor, a cool and competent physician whom I’m lucky to have stumbled across, had the same reaction as the HeartScan doctor. He didn’t make a big fuss, but recommended letting the experts around the corner at Robert H. Lurie take a look. I was sent to a particular doctor, an excellent one who’s since severed his affiliation with the Lurie Center and whose name I can’t recall. That doctor thought it might be nothing, but advised keeping an eye on the nodule; he recommended I return to the center every six months to a year for a fresh scan to watch for any changes. The case was eventually handed off to a Dr. de Hoyos, who began to discuss the possibility of surgical removal of the nodule.
About nine months or so ago, a Dr. Malcolm DeCamp took over. The first scan I received under the watch of his team showed a slight increase in the opacity of the nodule, and a slight change in its shape if not its size. It was time to cut the sucker out. So I agreed to the surgery, let my wife know what was going on, and so forth. The surgical plan was as follows: I’d be anesthetized, and then three or more holes would be cut through the left side of my rib cage. With the assist of a video camera and other tools I can’t imagine, the lung would be deflated and folded over, and a wedge of it containing the offending nodule would be removed. While I was still out on the table, the wedge would be transported down to a lab for a biopsy to determine if it were cancerous. If not, I’d be sealed up, reinflated, and sent home either that night or the next morning, and probably back to my normal activities within two weeks. If it were cancerous, then the surgery would continue with the removal of the top twenty percent of the left lung along with the lymph nodes that drained into that segment. It would mean a couple more nights in the hospital and a longer recovery, but I’d be technically cancer-free and back to normal eventually.
I tell you this entire story because I want to illustrate that I’m very fortunate. I have excellent insurance, for one thing; it’s a dirty shame that one has to say that in so wealthy a country, but there it is. Because of that insurance, and because of having a good union (how many workers can say that, too? Another shame), I was able to get really expensive early detection of a decidedly non-aggressive cancer; I was able to have the cancer monitored; and finally, I was able to have the cancer removed and have my recovery supervised by one of the finest medical staffs in the world in one of the finest facilities in the world.
So you see, I got off easy, and I got to come home to the same love and support that helped me get through my brief stroll in the park past a cancer that waved hello but was walking briskly and texting and didn’t have time to stop and chat.
Unfortunately, though, early detection and excellent medical care are often not enough, even for some who might have access to some of the material advantages that I’ve had. I don’t know the percentages, but not all cancers are so fittingly lacking in ambition as was mine. There’s a reason the word ‘cancer’ can immediately plunge one into mortal fear or at least into thoughts of morbidity.
Now I want to introduce you to Hank Schueler. I never met Hank, though I was fortunate enough to meet his family. Hank’s dad Matt told me Hank’s story, and I honestly can’t write this part without weeping from the memory of Matt Schueler telling that story. So I won’t ruin the story by trying to tell it myself. I’ll leave that to others who’ve done a much better job of it. I will say in closing that I’m glad to have met Hank’s family; I’m also grateful to have once been a tiny part of helping raise money in the fight against diseases related to pediatric cancer, grateful because it was a chance to pay tribute to a kid who earned hope, and to the family that earned it with him.
This is you, and this is me, and we suck.
I watched the video embedded below, and a nasty, discouraging thought occurred to me.
This is me. This is you. I’m not referring to the people on the ground being mercilessly and gleefully beaten and stomped. I’m referring to those administering the wanton abuse. Sure, they are part of an organization that has received billions of dollars of U.S. ‘aid’ over the years. Sure, while we were toppling a government that provided its citizens with one of the highest standards of living in the Eastern world, and the most freedom to its female population, we were letting the violent tyranny represented in the video go unchecked.
That is all true, and we as U.S. citizens are partly responsible for that behavior, but the nasty, discouraging thought had little to do with events so far removed. Behavior such as this has been meted out to dissenters right here in the U.S. Much of it has been hidden from the masses by the complicity of our corporate media, but enough has gotten through the wall of silence and obfuscation that most of us should understand what’s been done in our name (but on behalf of a very slender segment of the population).
Even the violence and oppression handed out to the Occupy movement isn’t precisely what I’m referring to. After all, it isn’t anything new. The ‘Miami Model‘ has been in effect for roughly a decade now, at least. In fact, the nasty thought piqued by the video above refers to an application of the Miami Model which is now being arranged for my own city next spring.
On a recent day at work, I heard talk of generous amounts of overtime to be offered to a number of fire and police personnel. There will be federal and probably some military deployments as well, to be sure, as the G20/G8 Summit and the NATO Summit will be held a week apart in Chicago in May. I’m sure much of the city center will be turned in a police-state fortress, all so that undemocratic organizations can shield themselves from the nonviolent anger and dissatisfaction of representatives of the majorities they refuse to represent.
Our city’s mayor, Rahm Emanuel, is a dear friend of the elite financial interests represented by the G20/G8 contingents, and a close ally and fellow traveler of the neoimperial interests represented by NATO. So Emanuel will have no trouble securing the many millions of dollars needed to pay for the temporary fortress (even though there’s no money available anywhere to pay our unionized public school teachers). Even that nastiness isn’t what I find discouraging.
What I find discouraging is that all this money will be spent, all the intimidation and, if possible, violence, will be handed out, and the local and national corporate media will sell it as necessary business as usual. And you and I will sit there and buy it. Some of you are my colleagues, some of you are my allies on the street (police officers); you will be the worst, because some of you will put on your uniforms and whatever riot gear and collect the overtime and go out intimidating the protesters and cracking their skulls, and for what? To defend the interests of some wealthy assholes who are just waiting for the right time to fuck you out of your pensions and benefits? But you won’t be alone. The rest of us will sit there, while the kind of brutality in the video above is either implied or acted out before our eyes, and we won’t do shit about it. In fact, most of us will probably line up a few months later to elect some of the same assholes who have brought us to this point.
We suck, and we deserve what’s happening to our country. I would like to be able to say that the human race deserves better, but I seriously doubt that. We may think we can get away with ignoring the brutality being meted out to our fellow human beings, but Planet Earth is warming up to give us what we deserve, even as we shop and entertain ourselves and pretend there’s no price to pay for our catastrophic irresponsibility.
Idiotic totems and cognitive dissonance
First I’ll recommend the following post by Amanda Marcotte, who is on fire this week:
Gingrich was taking your Harley out for a weekend, nothing more
These rubbers are, as you can imagine, largely Republican. They are definitely the sort of people who find the Tea Party compelling; I’m guessing that many motorcycles since I’ve moved have been updated with “Don’t Tread on Me” logos, as well as more Confederate flags, as a talisman to keep the reality that we elected a black President from penetrating their consciousness.
Amanda’s focus on reactionary Harley riders called to mind something I saw during the summer, when I was working at the firehouse near Wrigley Field. One of my colleagues parked his shiny Harley against the firehouse, and on his vehicle at least two of those black POW/MIA decals were prominently displayed. If I recall correctly, he was wearing some article of clothing that also bore the logo. This is a topic I like to revisit periodically, because it is a stark reminder of the amount of vile bullshit that gets elevated to sacred, totemic status in our society.
In Chicago, and I’m guessing in the entire U.S., you are unlikely to pass two or three government buildings (of any level of government)– be they firehouses, post office branches, libraries, or others– without finding at least one flying the POW/MIA flag. Given the satanically odious motives behind the original POW/MIA campaign, and the epic dishonesty that the campaign and its symbols represent, there are few items more symbolic of our terminal national political illness.
Vietnam & Other American Fantasies
review by Christian Parenti
Reading between the lines
Sometimes dishonesty isn’t as simple as directly saying something false.
For example, there’s this.
Then there’s the following, from a Chicago Reader report (by our always excellent local journalism gems, Mick Dumke and Ben Joravsky) about local political reluctance to decriminalize marijuana:
The mayor said he was considering policy changes but had concerns about decriminalization. “Other cities that have done this have then had to go back and do corrections because it’s created its own set of problems,” Emanuel said.
A reporter asked him what sort of problems he was talking about. The mayor declined to detail them.
“I’m not going to get into hypotheticals,” he said.
(Emphasis mine.) Note his first statement, wherein he offers a direct, unambiguously defined reason for his “concerns” (‘concerns,’ a word used by the reporters, here connotes reluctance). Emanuel mentions “cities,” and he mentions “problems” that required “corrections”; these are common nouns that denote more specific, detailed definitions. When asked to add such details to his clearly defined construction, the mayor characterizes such specifics as “hypotheticals.”
Now, if you’ve read more than one or two posts of this humble blog, and you’re reasonably fluent in English, and you’ve never been married to me, then chances are you’re going to accept that I’m not completely stupid. I’m going to give you, dear reader, that same benefit of the doubt. I’m also going to accept that Rahm Emanuel is not so ignorant of the English language that he can’t tell the difference between hypothesizing and providing specifics to a clearly defined evidential construction.
If you ask me if I think the sun will rise tomorrow, based on my observation of the sun’s behavior on previous days, then you’re asking for a hypothesis. If I tell you I know of some days in the past where the sun rose but it was obscured by cloud cover, and you tell me provide a list of such days, you are requesting specifics to a clearly defined evidential construction. See the difference?
Mayor Emanuel signals his reluctance and offers a clear reason, one that is lacking in specific details. He declines to give those details, citing a wish to avoid “hypotheticals.” So that leaves us with three possibilities here: 1) a smart, educated man and skillful politician displayed ignorance or laziness with his use of a very specific noun; 2) he’s skipping a rhetorical step, assuming that listing the problems he’s vaguely cited would lead to a ‘hypothetical’ discussion which he would rather avoid; and 3) he’s being evasive. I’m leaning toward 3 while recognizing that it’s not mutually exclusive of 2.
Is the mayor’s veracity important here? If you read the rest of the article, and keep in mind that Emanuel is a highly skilled and seasoned politician who’s worked directly with two of our nation’s most beloved presidential dissemblers, maybe you’ll agree that it is. Why would Emanuel trouble himself to make a public statement about an important political issue if he weren’t going to actually do anything substantial?
Why, indeed.
Globalization and Coercive Violence
America is today the leader of a world-wide antirevolutionary movement in the defence of vested interests. She now stands for what Rome stood for. Rome consistently supported the rich against the poor in all foreign communities that fell under her sway; and, since the poor, so far, have always and everywhere been far more numerous than the rich, Rome’s policy made for inequality, injustice, and for the least happiness of the greatest number.
Arnold Toynbee, 1961[1]
There are only two ways to govern: with consent or with fear.
Naomi Klein[2]
Coercive violence is a fundamental element of globalization. Failure to adequately address the phenomenon of coercive violence could result in a reification of globalization’s worst conceivable outcomes.
In order to analyze the integral nature of coercive violence to globalization, it is necessary to place the phenomenon of globalization in its proper historical context.
The analysis will begin with a brief overview of the regional and imperial histories of globalization, and discuss the transition from the last self-identified imperial power—Great Britain—into the Anglo-American/Western European aggregation of nation-states that currently dominates much of the political and economic sphere. The analysis will proceed to the present, where the U.S. and its Western allies have brought coercive global violence into a new phase.
‘Thou shalt fuck over thy neighbor…’
Okay, that isn’t part of the Decalogue, but as moral imperatives go it’s a hell of a lot closer to our national ethos than any of the Ten Commandments. Put that in front of your courthouse, jerky!
I’ll let Morris Berman say the smart words at which I’m only hinting:
As Jerry Seinfeld’s lawyer in the final episode of the series tells him: “You don’t have to help anybody; that’s what this country’s all about!” The problem is that if you live by the dollar, you die by the dollar. That’s what’s going on today. In fact, perhaps the really interesting question is not why we are finally coming apart, which strikes me as being more or less obvious, but how we managed to stay together for this long. Competition cannot be the glue of a society, because by definition it’s an anti-glue. Thus David Ehrenfeld, Professor of Biology at Rutgers University, recently wrote: “A society driven mainly by selfish individualism has all the potential for sustainability of a collection of angry scorpions in a bottle.”
Read the whole thing; it’s priceless.
Anyway, in my Facebook meanderings I found this article:
Private Prisons Spend Millions on Lobbying to Put More People in Jail
JPI claims the private industry hasn’t merely responded to the nation’s incarceration woes, it has actively sought to create the market conditions (ie. more prisoners) necessary to expand its business.
According to JPI, the private prison industry uses three strategies to influence public policy: lobbying, direct campaign contributions, and networking. The three main companies have contributed $835,514 to federal candidates and over $6 million to state politicians. They have also spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on direct lobbying efforts. CCA has spent over $900,000 on federal lobbying and GEO spent anywhere from $120,000 to $199,992 in Florida alone during a short three-month span this year. Meanwhile, “the relationship between government officials and private prison companies has been part of the fabric of the industry from the start,” notes the report. The cofounder of CCA himself used to be the chairman of the Tennessee Republican Party.
This is really bad, and it reminded me of this: Continue reading
“Nigger, nigger, nigger.”
I read the previous post after not thinking about it for a while, and at first blush it seems a little harsh and a bit too focused. I intended it more as a thought experiment than a cogent analysis, though, so I wasn’t overly concerned about it’s intellectual accuracy. However, this morning I saw this:
Is the Manufactured Crisis at the Post Office a Push Toward Privatization?
I’ve mentioned this before somewhere in the past, but I believe it more relevant now: I once heard a joke, told to my face, by a white colleague at a former job. It goes as follows:
Q: What do Florsheim Shoes and the U.S. Postal Service have in common?
A: 20,000 pairs of black loafers
So if you’re wondering now if I am fixated on race, if I’m imputing racial motivations to an issue that is more generically political and economic, allow me to clarify. I’m not suggesting that the move to destroy the unionized, lower-middle-class labor force of the USPS is entirely racially motivated. I’m suggesting the saboteurs understand that racial politics make the destruction an easier sell.
While we must never forget that racism is a core element of conservative politics, I don’t believe this dynamic excludes putative liberals. They may not use the word ‘nigger,’ not even in their thoughts, but when they see this USPS story in corporate media, what do you think will stand out in their minds? The letter carrier they rarely if ever see, who delivers their mail day in and day out, faithfully upholding the United States Postal Service creed? The workers they’ll never see, tirelessly sorting mountains of mail for hours on end (or something like that)? Or will they envision the sassy black bitch who didn’t smile at them after they waited twenty-five minutes in line trying to mail a package in late December?
My money’s on the latter. While the efforts of the Wall Street protesters are vital and admirable, I believe that the majority of putative liberals are Oprah-liberals and hedge fund Democrats. This doesn’t mean most of them are wealthy, but it does mean they’ve bought into the same ‘free market’ nonsense as have the right-wingers. As reflected in their voting choices, they are unwilling to seriously challenge the neoliberal bipartisan oligarchy that runs our country. A few are deeply invested in it, yes, but the rest are just hanging on for the diminishing consumerist ‘benefits.’ So when they don’t see massive, nationwide prosecutions of mortgage fraud or securities fraud or the like, they don’t even shrug. Conversely, when they see thousands of hard-working public employees being scammed out of their livelihoods by a craven Congress beholden to reactionary antilabor interests, they don’t blink. Serves those ‘black loafers’ right, I guess.
The antirevolutionary effects of racism
Could world social unrest hit America’s streets?
"Don't cry, sis. At least we're not niggers."
Americans turn on themselves first, and then on each other. What we have is worse than learned helplessness. It’s learned self-loathing. To put it crudely, we are taught to hate not just the nigger over there, but also the nigger within. Ironically, and almost paradoxically, it is this largely racially motivated self-hatred– ‘you’re okay as long as you’re better than a nigger’– that precipitates the paralysis or the badly misdirected activism (e.g. teabagging)*: the fear and loathing of all things black, including the internalized states of mind and being that have morphed out of the concept of the despised and feared African descendant, creates a cognitive dissonance that prevents people from rising up against their true systemic antagonists. The term ‘class warfare,’ so bluntly wielded by right-wing mouthpieces, is an example of the exploitation of this dynamic. To suggest that the majority of working people (i.e. non-wealthy whites) should organize against their betters (i.e. predominantly white rich people) is to suggest that those working people must also identify with others who have been put upon (i.e. non-wealthy brown and black people). In other words, to fight against the traditionally white power structure, they must become niggers. For at least a healthy plurality of working white people, that is a sin worse than remaining enslaved to a worsening status quo that is manipulated against them by the traditionally white power structure.
Keep in mind that most people (especially those most involved in its perpetuation) would probably not articulate this phenomenon in such stark terms as I’m using here, and I’m not suggesting that the phenomenon is purely racial in structure and character. I’m just trying to cut to the core in as few words as possible. You know how difficult that is for me.
*It’s also part of what drove countless thousands of poor, put-upon Southern laborers to take up arms to protect the profits and bloated lifestyles of their aristocratic Confederate countrymen, instead of uniting with their black fellow laborers to overthrow the plantation economy and culture.
