Obligation

Break the law or support the war. Is there any other choice?

I have written on more than one occassion about Rosemarie Jackowski of Vermont. Jackowski is an advocacy journalist and former Liberty Union candidate for state attorney general. She is also a principled and fearless activist working on behalf of the victims of US aggression, and a grandmother.

I am happy to report that the guilty verdict against Jackowski for her non-violent act of civil disobedience in 2003 has been overturned. Jackowski blocked traffic with a sign that read "Stop US War Crimes". She was charged with disorderly conduct and sentenced to prison.

An article in the Rutland Herald notes that Jackowski "believes she had an obligation, morally and under international law, to speak out against the death of Iraqi civilians."

For my part, I believe that we all have such an obligation, grandmothers, politicians, artists, factory workers, black, white, short and tall, all of us. It's wonderful to have examples of courage set by a 69-year-old member of Veterans for Peace. Sure. But what do the rest of us have to lose? What can we risk -- what can we offer the people Jackowski believes she has a moral and legal obligation to protect?

(Answers such as "attending State-sanctioned mass rallies on Saturday afternoons" do not count.)

Jackowski has claimed that, with the case essentially thrown out of court (because the State wants to avoid "wasting taxpayer dollars" on it), she will not have an opportunity to explain what she did and why. Here, then, is a link to Jackowski's Courtroom Speech from October 2004. Please read it carefully.

At the end of the speech Jackowski stated "What happens to me here today is not important. Since the day of my arrest, more than 13,000 Iraqi civilians, many of them children, have been killed. That IS important." Take that number -- thirteen thousand -- and think about it. It represents people just like you and me, condemned to horrific, brutal deaths. They committed no crime, but stood in the way of the crusade of the US government and its allies to thieve the resources and sovereignity of Iraq and test out the sadistic machines and gadgets of the military-industrial complex.

Now take that number and multiply it over and over and over, many times, until you reach the current and growing death toll. Who can fathom that kind of carnage? (Certainly not typically pacified Americans.) Or here's another question: with what other regimes in history do the US and its coalition partners share the stage for having been responsible for that kind of carnage?

On the day after she announced her good news at Mickey Z.'s blog, Jackowski (known to readers there as RMJ) shared an email she had received from a supporter named Richard. It hits the nail on the coffin, as it were, and I reproduce it here.

“I support the war in Iraq and Afghanistan.

I support the killing of innocent women, children and soldiers.

I support the desecration of the Constitution.

I support the destruction of our environment and our eco-systems.

I support Global Warming.

I support the death penalty for poor people and people of color.

I support population control through starvation.

I support the power to imprison us without our due process by eliminating habeas corpus.

I support these things by DOING NOTHING.”

A Man Without a Country

I just finished Kurt Vonnegut's latest book, A Man Without a Country. Superb. In it, Kurt says

No matter how corrupt, greedy, and heartless our government, our corporations, our media, and our religious and charitable institutions may become, the music will still be wonderful.

And Kurt Vonnegut says

Evolution can go to hell as far as I'm concerned. What a mistake we are. We have mortally wounded this sweet life-supporting planet--the only one in the Milky Way--with a century of transportation whoopee.

And he also says

"Socialism" is no more an evil word than "Christianity." Socialism no more prescribed Joseph Stalin and his secret police and shuttered churches than Christianity prescribed the Spanish Inquisition. Christianity and socialism alike, in fact, prescribe a society dedicated to the proposition that all men, women, and children are created equal and shall not starve.

What else?

I have some good news for you and some bad news. The bad news is that the Martians have landed in New York City and are staying at the Waldorf Astoria. The good news is that they only eat homeless men, women, and children of all colors, and they pee gasoline.

But this is not a funny book. Vonnegut says as much himself. To him, this is no time to be funny. I was talking about this with my friend Joel Ryan yesterday, who said that a film like M*A*S*H would be impossible today. Too true. Vonnegut again:

The good Earth--we could have saved it, but we were too damn cheap and lazy.

Vonnegut, at 84, shames the rest of us for our lack of outrage. He obsesses over global meltdown so severe--with his country at the helm--that he cannot even do his job.

I don't think I would be able to do my work if I lived in the United States of America either (although at a very meaningful level, the US is a prison we are all living in). Art springs from context, and I do not think I would be able to produce anything good over there--regardless of whether the Asshole-in-Chief is named George or Hillary. Or Barrack.

That's just a feeling, nothing "anti-American" about it. A few years ago, my good friend Greg Altman visited me here in The Hague. We grew up playing funk music in bars together. Greg is a phenomenal drummer. He produces television shows now. I arranged a gig for us at <>TAG, in fact, it was the first event I curated there. We performed a piece I wrote called Dodging Bullets. A audio waveform of a skipping CD is visible on a large screen, and there are markers with text placed in the waveform to pass by the cursor in the middle of the screen. The music on the CD is aggressive and noisy. The "rule" of the piece is that each time a marker connects with the cursor the musicians must choose from three very simple musical gestures to play. By the end of the piece (twenty minutes later) everybody is wiped out, exhausted. Cathartic stuff.

Anyway a lot of the crowd loved the piece and said as much. Greg was shocked the audience didn't walk out. They would, he felt, in New York. He tells that story whenever we see each other, how we performed this crazy music and people listened. And liked it.

Or this: a week ago I performed in Krakow with Rafal Mazur and Morten Nottelmann. Imagine the worst scenario to try to get people to come listen to a free-jazz trio. Almost no promotion. Snowing. Venue in the middle of nowhere. Hard to get to. Cold. 7PM on a Saturday night. No famous last names on the bill. No bar at the venue. But the people came out. And they enjoyed themselves. In my experience people in Manhattan rarely go to Brooklyn to see live music, regardless of the weather. It's like pulling teeth.

When I first arrived in Krakow to study in 1999 and told people that I was a composer (that's how identified myself then), I would receive the same nod of respect one might get in the States if they were to say they were a doctor . . . with a private practice. It was nice. No one, not a single person in Poland, ever suggested I teach music to make a living (for years that's all I got from people in the US).

It's all just a feeling and I could very well be full of shit. Fact is, I'm not a big fan of countries per se, and I don't mind being a man without one (I would like that residence permit I've been waiting six months for, though, please, already, Dutch bureaucrats). I don't like the idea of the US anymore than I like the idea of The Netherlands, or Poland, or Iraq. I do like the idea of people, different, talking to each other, making things together, trying to dig their way out this hole we're in, that's OK.

As Morten was saying on the way to the gig in Krakow, there are two strata of society, and we operate amongst the people, not amongst the politicians. Yes, and sometimes it can be fun up here.

Busy

When a stupid man is doing something he is ashamed of, he always declares that it is his duty.

---George Bernard Shaw


And so it remains the policy of this government to use every lawful and proper tool of intelligence, diplomacy, law enforcement, and military action to do our duty, to find these enemies, and to protect the American people.

---George W. Bush (2007 State of the Union address)


Nice one. And where have I been?

Been busy. In December I finished and exhibited an audiovisual installation (Another World Bank), screened my video Revolution 5 at Resfest, performed a (disastrous) live electronica/live video solo set at the Sugar Factory in Amsterdam, and visited family and friends during New York City's first winter since the 1890's without snow.

In January I played a bit with my old bandmates from the States, produced five short videos for Ensemble Klang, performed and recorded with Matt Wright in Canterbury, and I'll be doing the same this weekend in Krakow with Rafal Mazur and Morten Nottelmann in our trio Stability Group. On the first of February I'll be performing a solo saxophone set at STEIM and joining Kerbaj, Sehnaoui, and Yassin for the second set of their trio gig at <>TAG in The Hague on February 4.

Yes, I'm busy. But I'm not nearly as busy, apparently, as these twisted scumbags in US Army uniforms, armed to the teeth and protecting the known universe from the scourge of terrorism that manifests itself as a lone, defenseless, and crippled dog. As I wrote in a comment on Mickey Z.'s blog where I first saw the video, I wish these assholes all the mercy and compassion they show in their treatment of this poor animal. Then I hope they are torn to shreds by wild dogs.For the sheer amusement of the dogs.

In these busy two months I have necessarily distanced myself from "the news", although I have been observant enough to know that tonight George Bush, undoubtedly one of the worst human beings ever born, announced to the world that he---soulless chickenshit criminal that he is---would send more armed and indoctrinated children to murder and torment people (and other creatures) in Iraq.

I have not been busy enough. The planet's crumbling and we're still putting people like this, like this fascist psychopath Bush, up on pedastals. Adoring him with air time. Showering him with money and power. Letting such people determine how our world works. Surrendering our dignity to their perversions.

Hooray for my busy career. Hooray for yours. But please. We need to get busy. NOW.

Tone of Voice

First, a little something from Neil Postman's wonderful 1985 work on the end of public discourse, Amusing Ourselves to Death:

Everything in our background has prepared us to know and resist a prison when the gates begin to close around us . . . But what if there are no cries of anguish to be heard? Who is prepared to take arms against a sea of amusements? To whom do we complain, and when, and in what tone of voice, when serious discourse dissolves into giggles? What is the antidote to a culture's being drained by laughter?

I had that passage on the brain today when I happened upon Paul Street's latest blog entry.

Go have a look at Street's brief message to so-called Congressional Progressives. It's good stuff. Now try this: print it and read it out loud. Read it aloud to yourself, to your friends, to your television screen. Don't hold back. Full voice. Shout. Say it like you mean it ('cause you do).

This is the tone we need to use. This is the tone we use not on easy targets like that menu of criminals known as the Bush Administration and related national and multi-national rat bastards. No. This is the tone we use on the possible allies, the would-be friends who for one reason or another just cannot seem to do their jobs, be responsible, and -- as Street echoing Spike Lee says -- do the right thing.

Enough being sweet. Enough being friendly. Time for the tough love to kick in. And this idea reaches across national borders. It's not just about asking democrats in the US Congress to impeach the lying, cowardly, soul-less, asshole of a puppet ruling the planet. Not just about that. We need national governments throughout the world to do their jobs, to stop working against the interests of their people by continuing to do business with the thugs at the top in Washington. Rumsfeld's retirement was not enough. Yes they all need to be stripped of their cushy jobs as ambassadors, cabinet members, World Bank presidents, civilian advisers and whatever. But they also need to be on no-fly lists. Listen here: none of us on this side of the Atlantic want America's war-mongering, neo-conservative backwash soiling the streets with their presence (unless they're being dragged in belly-cuffs to the International Criminal Court), earning money with their bullshit speeches, or enjoying themselves at all, ever. Ever.

How embarassing will it be if people like that human shitstain Rumsfeld get the Kissinger treatment around the world only to continue to live comfortably in the States. So Street is right: put impeachment back on the table, and now that there is something like a non-reactionary majority in the US Congress, the gloves should come off.

* * *

Don't get me wrong. With the criminals behind the occupation of Iraq behind bars the work will be anything but finished. It is really just an excercise in empowerment. While it will be official government business to bring Bush and Company to trial and put them far, far away (locked up tight, for as long as their miserable bodies breath the air they've been pleased to foul), it is up to individuals to mend the damage we do of our own accord. To what extent are individual members of a destructive culture blameless? What amount of personal responsibility should each of us take? I have in mind here the problematic disconnect between asking corporations and governments to take more (and better) action against environmental degredation while people are pleased as punch to work for them, first of all, and secondly to consume wildly out of proportion with anything approaching sustainability. Ending the reign of scum like Bush (and you British could do your part by taking down your cowardly war criminal lap dogs as well) is a very small part of the larger project of ending our own hyper-consumerist, ultra-materialistic, planet-murdering lifeways.

Or does anyone disagree?

Go Ask Your Democrats

On the mid-term elections in the US earlier this month:

Congratulations! If you are an American -- and with US military bases scattered across the globe, who isn't? -- you are now the proud owner of a Congress controlled by the Democratic Party, the absolute lousiest bunch of political criminals the United States has had to offer since, well, the Republicans.

But before you get too tipsy celebrating the trade-off of a handful of Republican scumbag liars for a handful of Democrat scumbag liars (and the switcheroo between outgoing War Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and the incoming CIA agent taking his place), here are some questions you may want to ask your local, state, and federal Democrats:

1. When will the USA Patriot Act be repealed?

2. When will the Military Commissions Act be repealed?

3. When will the last US troops leave Iraq?

4. When will funding for Israel's brutal and illegal occupation of Palestine be cut off?

5. When will the US join the International Criminal Court, and sign and honor the Kyoto Treaty and the International Landmine Ban?

6. When will the legislation authorizing a gigantic concrete fence to be built between the US and Mexico be killed?

7. When will the tax code that unjustly favors the wealthy (in particular those who do nothing to earn their money) be changed?

8. When will the resignation of US Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, who thinks of the Geneva Conventions as "quaint", be demanded?

9. When will John Bolton, the US Ambassador to the United Nations who has said "[t]here is no such thing as the United Nations. There is only the international community, which can only be led by the only remaining superpower, which is the United States" be fired?

10. When will Vice President Dick Cheney, who has carried out secret meetings on energy policy and the invasion and occupation of Iraq, be removed from office?

11. When will US corporations, businesspeople, and investors be made to take responsibility for the havoc their extraordinary unaccountability causes throughout the world?

12. When will the US nuclear weapons arsenal be dismantled and the program to build more destructive weapons shut down?

13. When will those responsible for the policies of torture and extraordinary rendition be brought to trial for their crimes?

14. When will the SOA / WHINSEC be shut down?

15. When will Diego Garcia be returned to its people?

16. When will reparations be paid to the victims of aggression authorized by the United States Congress?

17. When will the US pay its dues to the UN?

18. When will the US stop meddling in Latin American affairs?

19. When will the US Congress adopt an acceptable and sustainable stance toward the rapidly crumbling global environment?

20. When will the US Congress adopt a humanitarian, rather than a corporate or religious fundamentalist, policy on alleviating the scourges of hunger, AIDS, and other diseases in the Global South?

21. When will the US Congress break up the media monopolies that have decimated political discourse?

22. When will the US Congress defend the supposed ideals of its Constitution by opening up political discourse to more than the two ruling corporate parties?

23. When will access to healthcare and affordable housing be made available to everyone living within the US?

24. When will the US start pushing a version of "globalization" that globalizes labor, repeal harmful trade agreements such as NAFTA and CAFTA, and withdraw its support for backwards and ineffective IMF and World Bank policies?

25. When will US Congresspeople give the xenophobic rhetoric a rest?

* * *

Now is a good moment to recommend Paul Street's post-election Empire and Inequality Report for his merciful take on what should be done with the Bush Cabal. Of course my list above is just a start, and an easy-going one at that. None of the questions are particularly nasty, or motivated by polticial ideology. There is a great deal of triumphalism going around, and now that Democratic supporters are exhaling their big sighs of relief, the pressure is off. Certainly the establishment would prefer a slightly less reactionary version of itself to a public so fed up that it removes its blinders and no longer sees a difference between the two criminal parties.

But more importantly, it should be obvious to everyone that in Washington, where (let's be honest) nothing but the label has actually changed, none of our very real problems are going to be addressed or solved. Think for a moment about what those problems are, and consider where (if not in Washington) and how (if not politically) they might be dealt with.

How to Vote

Next week, a veritable handful of people in the United States will be voting in midterm elections. Provided the right people vote for the Right party (and both of the war-criminal business parties in the US are right-wing), some of those votes may even be counted.

Many commentators say the election will be a referendum on the continued taxpayer-funded bloodbath in Iraq, while others say it will reflect the response of Americans -- politically discerning as they are -- to various financial and sexual indiscretions of a small selection of the sleazeballs in the US Congress.

Little people push the little buttons on their little computers and stories about the Republican Party's imminent implosion appear in cyberspace.

I will not be taking part in the electoral fiasco in the United States next week, though I am registered in New York State to do so. The American political system, wrongly known by some of the more deluded among us as a "democracy", is fronted by the soulless, morally absent underlings of the business-class bastards fast-tracking the planet to unlivable, who would strongly detest the will of the people were they to know what it is. It is fronted by supposed employees of the people, who openly and proudly declare their support for torture and proto-fascism, encourage rampant xenophobia, homophobia, and ecocide, push narrow-minded conservative agendas into private lives, and use scare-mongering to claw their way to the top of the American political shit-heap.

I don't feel at home as a participant in this.

At what point should people cease to cooperate with the systemic destruction of their planet, conducted under the false guise of "democracy"? At what point ought people discontinue their active legitimization of rule by criminals happily signing away on murder, torture, bogus science, the weaponization of space and diplomacy as a series of enormous concrete fences throughout the globe?

The idea that Americans could vote this all into extinction if they wanted is a myth. As proof I could submit what occurred in Florida in 2000 or Ohio in 2004. But I prefer to think of a more important indicator of that myth. If Americans went to the polls next week in record numbers and swept the Democrats into power in local and national elections, what would change? Democrats would enact foreign policy to more effectively control the planet, with a better marketing campaign to go along with it. At home it would be business as usual, with a nod here and there to minimally slowing down the environmental destruction that is the American way of life. A few states might even allow people to control their private lives, regardless of their gender or sexual preferences.

But not one person from the party in power would challenge the mega-corporations actively consolidating their control of for-profit healthcare, prison management, news media, energy distribution, and so forth.

Look around for a moment on this here internet and you can find example after example of elected and appointed government officials brazenly denouncing democracy whenever it fails to line Yankee pockets. I wonder if it is even possible to name a single country to the south of the United States that has never had its democracy tampered with by its most unneighborly northern neighbor.

This is what Hillary Clinton, the incumbent junior Senator from New York, had to say last week regarding elections in Palestine earlier this year: "If we were going to push for an election, we should have made sure we did something to determine who was going to win."

Not only do I refuse to vote for people who hate democracy, I refuse to vote against them. Asking who one votes for in a rigged democracy is simply asking the wrong question.

If you live in the United States and can vote (that is, if you are neither a victim of the horrendously racist American judicial system nor what Americans have shamelessly taken to calling an "illegal"), and you truly feel that you must vote, there is at least one candidate worth supporting: Rosemarie Jackowski.

Rosemarie Jackowski is a dedicated advocacy journalist and activist working for social justice. A victim of continued abuse and miscarriages of justice, she is the Liberty Union candidate for Attorney General of Vermont.

In a response to a Burlington Free Press editorial endorsing the incumbant attorney general (a response that all of Vermont's major newspapers have refused to publish) Rosemarie writes

My global view includes a deep respect for the law. The most important qualification for the office of Attorney General is an absolute, unwavering commitment to Justice for all, young and old, rich and poor...NO politics, NO cronyism, and NO excuses.

She advocates the creation of a citizen watchdog group to monitor the policies of the office of the Attorney General, an end to paying for testimony during trials, and independent investigations into AG wrongdoings. Perhaps best of all, Rosemarie Jackowski knows exactly what kind of analogues can be drawn between an unaccountable Vermont Attorney General working against the interests of the people, and a similarly out of control, though more dangerous, United States Attorney General.

Whether or not you vote, consider passing on what I have pasted in below to friends and relatives who do. Rosemarie first entered it as a comment at Mickey Z.'s a few days ago.

---

NEVER VOTE FOR AN INCUMBENT -- Rosemarie Jackowski

Voting for an incumbent is like going back to the same dentist who pulled the wrong tooth the last time.

Voting for an incumbent is like going back inside your camping tent even thought you were just bitten by a snake there.

Voting for an incumbent is like re-marrying your spouse even though she cheated on you the last time around.

Voting for an incumbent is like getting in a plane with a pilot who crashed his aircraft last time he went up.

Voting for the incumbent might mean that you need a change in your medications.

Voting for the incumbent is like taking your computer back to the same repair shop, even though last time they told you that your computer needed a lube and an oil change.

Voting for an incumbent is a vote for “staying the course”.

Voting for the incumbent means that you believe that things can never get any better.

Voting for the incumbent signals the end of all hope for change.

Voting against ALL incumbents is the perfect way to achieve term limits.

Mafia T-Shirt

The other day I saw a boy too young to be choosing or buying his own clothes wearing a black t-shirt with the word "MAFIA" silkscreened in big, bright letters across the front.

What gives?

Why is the suggestion of organized crime and a willingness to protect one's financial dominance with violence the kind of thing a parent would want to emblazon on the chest of their eight-year old?

It's almost as bad (as in irrational and dangerous to the child's psychological development) as wearing a t-shirt displaying a national flag.

I'm no expert on the subject, but I suppose organized crime's star began rising in the pop culture with dramatic films (and to a lesser extent books) that dealt with archetypal human relationships in the context of mafia violence and related misdeeds.

I take no issue with films like The Godfather (or even the substantially lesser quality soap opera The Sopranos) if observers are able to effectively understand and critique them. One doesn't need to admire the anti-heroes played by the likes of Pacino and DeNiro in order to admire their abilities as actors, or to comprehend the world their characters inhabit, or to appreciate the skill with which writers, directors, editors and cinematographers tell those characters' stories.

Hollywood does not seek from viewers understanding and critique. It wants to move product. It works hand-in-pocket with its ugly sister The Fashion Industry and myriad other "product"-producing relatives. It has also (and less dramatically) made the image of reckless soldiers engaged in the act of murder (for personal or national honor) a positive one. Ditto for filthy, gunslinging, genocidal cowboys, playboy secret agents, and go-it-alone cops who blow up as much as possible before personally bringing the bad guys to justice.

I want to know how it comes to be that people are pleased to accept the values of valueless and escapist entertainment as their own.

I know: wearing a mafia t-shirt or buying yourself the same car that James Bond drives doesn't necessarily mean that you favor organized crime or having sex-crazed, alcohol-drenched spies undermining impossibly evil plots around the globe. But the planet is full of real-life, non-celluloid organized crime, violence, and simple thuggery. It takes an enormous amount of what is truly criminal activity to keep a relative handful of people driving BMW's, or the masses clothed in the products of sweatshop labor.

Not everyone is going to watch a Hollywood film and immediately dissect it from a left perspective. But one might think twice before dressing children in clothes more suitable for the political and corporate mafiosi treating the planet like a disputed streetcorner in gangland.

Wouldn't that be refreshing: if the cutthroat psychopaths running the planet traded in their power suits for t-shirts accurately emblazoned with descriptive words like "mafioso", "gang leader", "hitman" and "dick" . . . ?

Unask the Question.

Today I reluctantly picked up some groceries at the not-so-friendly (and oh-so-corporate) Albert Heijn, a cultural icon far more ubiquitous than any other in The Netherlands. While one of the most shocking things about visiting a grocery store in the US is the initial confrontation with the illusion of choice, here in NL the mess is tidied up and the choices are narrowed down, often to this or that. This or that usually differs by no more than a few cents. The ingredients (of packaged food, of which we buy rather little) are often the same. Much of what you buy at Albert Heijn tastes like either cardboard or organic cardboard.

Heading out of the shop this evening (with the only kind of fresh parsley one can buy there: wrapped in plastic foil) I was approached by a young woman canvassing for some organization.

She: "Do you live in The Netherlands?"
Me: "Yes."
She: "Do you have a Dutch bank account?"
Me: "What's this about?"

. . . at which point she showed me some of the World Wildlife Fund material she was handing out. I thanked her and said that I had been a supporter for years (true) but had stopped some time ago.

"Why?" she asked, and what I should have said is that WWF focuses on damage control rather than the root causes of environmental degredation.

I should have said that it compromises too often on a range of issues (including logging and seal hunting). I should have said that a tactic based on asking people in our ecocidal culture to cough up a few euros per year (while continuing to maintain their materialistic and consumerist attitudes) was bound to fail. I should have said that an organization set up to protect animals that doesn't explicitly promote not eating them is a contradiction I will not support financially. I should have said that WWF's slick and even cheerful style is discordant with how serious the trouble is. I should have said that WWF's hierarchical structure reveals that it embraces exactly the kind of thinking that put the global environment in the state it's in.

But what I said instead is "WWF's not radical enough."

"So you're a Greenpeace person," she responded.

I guess I deserved that.

Should it trouble me that Greenpeace is the most radical environmental organization that a WWF volunteer could think of? Or that she assumed I must donate money to some organization. I am perturbed by this faulty line of questioning. Such thinking is not unique to inquiring into which environmental organization one writes an annual cheque to. More than once, for example, I have been asked if I'm a democrat or republican.

Or if I was for or against the document erroneously called the EU constitution.

Or if I'm a Protestant or a Catholic, a Christian or a Jew, a capitalist or a communist.

I have been asked if I am pro- or anti-abortion, if I'm pro- or anti-Israel, if I'm pro- or anti-war, and whether I support the troops or not. I have had to identify myself as left- or rightwing, over- or underage, married or single, travelling for business or pleasure. I've been told to love it or leave it, to watch CNN or FOX, to wear Nike or Adidas, to use a Mac or a PC, to drink Coke or Pepsi (or coffee or tea). In the US I am welcome to keep my mouth shut or shout my head off in designated "free speech zones".

But of course the ayatollah of all the inane, black or white, up or down, hot or cold, in or out questions that I have been confronted with is the line that seeks to cut our very planet in two.

Are you With Us or Against Us?

It's a question that needs to be unasked. The world I live in is not made up of ones and zeros, and no lines, real or imaginary, divide it. There is no such thing as a legal or illegal immigrant, "them" or "us", "yours" or "mine" unless we accept the questions posed by these false designations. Separation walls and the fascist laws that go along with them are symptoms of a culture that happily plays heads or tails with entire populations.

Nope. Not me. Too narrow. I am one-hundred percent, without question, pro-choice.

Shame (Gregor Samsa-style)

As any regular reader of the irregular writings here knows, supporting artistic freedom and rejecting censorship is important to me. There are moments, however, when humanitarian concerns trump artistic freedom.

I am not sure how I feel about the current trial of Simon Bikindi, a popular Rwandan singer accused of inciting genocide with his music. I am not sure about it because it would set a precedent that would see a good deal of the musicians in the US up on charges of incitement to war crimes.

Surely every patriotic song, from the most hideous country-rock pro-war pap to Ray Charles' otherwise wonderful rendition of "America the Beautiful" have served useful support roles in US wars of aggression over the years. (Jimi Hendrix' "Star Spangled Banner" is a notable exception.) Whether these artists intentionally supported the horrors or -- like the Nazi misappropriation of works by Beethoven, for example -- were simply exploited, can be questioned. But what if making a work of art is in itself cruel, inhumane, dangerous, or murderous?

Last night I performed music in an art gallery where just such a work was exhibited. The work was so sickening that as the artist -- whose name will not receive any popularization here -- set up her work I literally shouted "that's fucking disgusting" more than once. (The artist, drunk, cordially introduced herself later.)

What was the work in question? The artist chose to express herself by placing a translucent box full of live cockroaches atop an overhead projector. As the evening progressed and the lamp of the projector heated the box, the cockroaches, subjected to intense heat, were tortured. For the first hour or so they were absolutely frantic, becoming progressively more aggressive toward each other, and then one by one they were cooked to death, while survivors crushed each other up against the presumably cooler edges of the projection surface. To the depraved delight of some in attendence, this was all visible, many times enlarged, on a wall of the gallery.

I feel intense shame at the part I played in this. Why? Several days ago some friends and I were invited to perform at the after-party of an exhibition opening. For a small fee. Upon arriving at the gallery and seeing what was going on I didn't refuse to play. I didn't refuse to get paid. Aside from loudly registering my discomfort (which probably had as much to do with my low-level insect phobia as my high-intensity objection to anything being tortured) and complaining (read: bitching) about the work to people in the audience after I was finished playing, I didn't deal with the problem. We started our first set with a text of mine that indirectly addressed the issue, but this had been planned in advance, before I knew what kind of horrible shit I would be witnessing. Shame on me for standing on a stage with a microphone, witnessing torture, and "respecting" an artist's right to conduct it.

And what about the audience? I spoke to some people who appreciated the aesthetic effect of giant cockroaches crawling on the walls (we feel at home amidst a hundred Gregor Samsas, no?), but felt this could have been done with film, and thus without degrading the artist or the observers or torturing living creatures. Of the hundred or so people who spent any time in the gallery last night, only one person needed to pull the plug to make the point that needed to be made. But no one dared. A room full of artists and musicians, all apparently creative, all engaged in an orgy of torture (read: destruction) ostensibly on the grounds that to turn off the torture device would be an infringement on someone's artistic freedom.

But it wasn't art we witnessed. It was Abu Ghraib. It was Guantanamo fucking Bay. Projected on the wall was any number of individuals demeaned, tortured, and murdered, demonstrating some sadistic bastard's definition of everything from "freedom" to "justice" to "democracy" or whatever (I've lost track of the inane justifications). Just as last night in the smoke-filled, alcohol-infused art gallery, today we witness and we stand agape. And we do nothing.

We witness well over half a million murders in somebody's "global war on terror", one of every four US veterans of it returning home with a disability (if at all), the legalization of torture and indefinite imprisonment without charge, a million unexploded US-made cluster bombs sprinkled on a tiny patch of Lebanese soil (are they called bomblets because so many of them destroy children?) and it gets me to wondering: who are the cockroaches around here?

Perhaps the work last night would have been a decent sociological experiment if several dozen living beings (yes, oh yes: with feelings) hadn't been sadistically tortured for "art's sake". But they were. And the mark of shame is with all of us who stood on and did nothing.

Pull the plug. Pull the plug. Pull the plug.

---

Coda.

There is a somewhat similar work by Chilean-Danish artist Marco Evarissti: ten living goldfish swimming in ten food blenders. It is the work that made the artist famous (the director of a museum exhibiting the work was taken to court and fined for animal cruelty). Although I personally dislike the work, and I dislike the implication (that it is okay to make a point about human morality by imprisoning a living thing and subjecting it to potential violence), I do not think this work approaches the cruelty of the work I witnessed last night. Why? While Evarissti's work places the mortality of the work's subject directly in the hands of the observer, making the violence implicit, the overhead projector was placed out of reach and the violence was explicit: fundamental to the work. To follow on my metaphor above, the torture and detention centers of the US empire are similarly "out of reach", but the off switch is right there in your hands.

Shakespeare and McChesney and Nichols

I spent three weeks in Mexico in the summer of 2003. After a week in Mexico City, and nearly another in Oaxaca, I landed in the mountaintop city of San Cristobal de las Casas, in Chiapas. I spent one afternoon lying in a hammock reading Shakespeare's Measure for Measure, and another reading Our Media, Not Theirs. I just found the notebook that I kept on that trip. From Shakespeare:

"Our doubts are traitors,
And makes us lose the good we oft might win,
By fearing to attempt."
Lucio, I.iv

"Who is it that hath died for this offense?
There's many have committed it."
Isabella, II.ii

"O, it is excellent
To have a giant's strength; but it is tyrannous
To use it like a giant."
Isabella, II.ii

"I had rather give my body than my soul"
Isabella, II.iv

And from Nichols and McChesney's Our Media, Not Theirs:

"Because the fight we propose is first and foremost a struggle for democratic processes, the potential base of support includes everyone in the population who favors democracy over plutocracy. In short, the traditional distinctions of left and right are not decisive categories. The more accurate split is between up and down, those who benefit materially from the corrupt status quo, and those who do not."

"Perhaps the strongest indictment of corporate journalism is that the preponderance of it would be compatible with an authoritarian political regime. So it is that China has few qualms about letting most commercial news from the United States inside its borders; it can see that this low caliber of journalism is hardly a threat to its rule."

"At its worst, in a case like the current war on terrorism, where the elites and official sources are unified on the core issues, the nature of our press coverage is uncomfortably close to that found in authoritarian societies with limited formal press freedom."

"[T]he cheerleading from American newspapers and television commentators [serve] as a reminder that the sympathies of those who enjoy the freedom of the press in the U.S. do not lie with those who seek to preserve basic freedoms and democracy in other lands."

"This is a generation that is under pressure from the media it consumes to be brazenly materialistic, selfish, and depoliticized: devoid of social conscience. To the extent one finds these values problematic for a democracy, we should all be concerned."

"The fundamental challenge at this point is not convincing people that something should be done. . .[t]he challenge is to convince people that something can be done."

"When faced with organized money, the only recourse is organized people."

"[W]e need to weave the project of radically changing the media into the braidwork of the larger movement for peace, democracy, and social justice."

"All the organizing in the world won't amount to a hill of beans unless there is something tangible to fight for, and to win."

A Record High

Here's a little piece of news from the US that seems odd from here: Democracy Now! reported yesterday that in 2005, more than three quarters of a million people in the United States were arrested for violations of marijuana laws.

This is, ahem, a record high.

According to the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws, enforcement costs US taxpayers up to $12 billion per year, a sum that (according to figures from the National Priorities Project) could provide more than:

2.5 million people with health care or
100,000 affordable housing units or
1,300 new elementary schools or
2.1 million univesity scholarships or
190,000 music and arts teachers or
19.5 million homes with renewable electricity or
173,000 port container inspectors.

So put that in your pipe and smoke it!

[recommended soundtrack: "Smokey" off Funkadelic's Hardcore Jollies, 1976]

Cicero says...

"I criticize by creation, not by finding fault."

This week they said...

"The lesson of every movement in US history is that being right is only half the battle; being loud helps, too."
---Bill McKibben


"The terrorists hate our freedom, so by eliminating the freedom, we can stop the terrorists from hating us."
---Boing Boing


"It's going to take so much more than talking to an opinion pollster or walking into a voting booth to punch the cards for a now opportunistically anti-war Democrat. The Cheney-Bush-Rumsfeld cabal should be removed before the next appointed quadrennial extravaganza and before the launching of at least an air war on Iran."
---Paul Street


"[According to the Center for Global Development] much of the US's aid . . . was contingent on the purchase of US goods, and so was in fact a 'backdoor subsidy for American interests.'"
---BBC


"Are there words in the English language suitable for the impeachable serial war crimes you are intimately involved in committing not only in Iraq but also now through your encouragement and supplying of the once again invading Israeli government?"
---Ralph Nader [in an open letter to George W. Bush]


"More than anything else, the two most popular television shows [Big Brother and The Weakest Link] are public rehearsals of the disposability of humans. They carry an indulgence and a warning rolled into one story. No one is indispensable, no one has the right to his or her share in the fruits of the joint effort just because she or he has added at some point to their growth, let alone because of being, simply, a member of the team. Life is a hard game for hard people. Each game starts from scratch, past merits do not count, you are worth only as much as the results of your most recent duel. Each player at every moment is for herself or himself, and to progress, not to mention to reach the top, one must first cooperate in excluding the many who block the way, only to outwit in the end those with whom one cooperated. If you are not tougher and less scrupulous than all the others, you will be done by them -- swiftly and without remorse. It is the fittest (read: the least scrupulous) who survive."
---Zygmunt Bauman, Society Under Siege (2002)


"As force is always on side of the governed, the governors have nothing to support them but opinion. It is, therefore, on opinion only that government is founded and this maxim extends to the most despotic and most military governments as well as to the most free and most popular."
---David Hume (1758), quoted today by Mickey Z.

Enlightened Despotism in the 21st Century

"Everything for the people, nothing by the people."
---attributed to Joseph II, Holy Roman Emperor

I have had enough of people defending the big heart of billionaire Bill Gates. There is nothing special about criticizing the Bush Administration's woefully insufficient and damaging stance toward the AIDS crisis, and there should be nothing special about a person worth fifty billion dollars giving half of it away.

While people are quick to commend him for his philanthropy, nowhere that I have seen -- and readers, correct me if I'm wrong -- has Mr. Gates lashed out at the root causes of much of what is wrong in the world: the incredible and shameful accumulation of wealth in a world of deprivation (that Gates himself, as the richest individual on the planet, typifies).

The Bush Administration's juvenille and patronizing "ABC" policy (abstinence, be faithful, use a condom) is not difficult to criticize. From his position as a well-known business leader, Gates is correct to insist that women be empowered with the tools to protect themselves, and that research be shared and non-proprietary.

But Gates knows, like no other, that business is business. Since the beginning of his career, Gates has been a powerful advocate of proprietary software. That's how he made his billions. Another business leader -- beholden, as they all are, to the rising stock portfolios of their shareholders -- might be making billions in proprietary pharmaceuticals or agriculture. Business interests are also defended -- at the expense of human lives and the destruction of the environment, always at such expense -- by the essentially violent policies of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund and the impossible demands they make on war-torn, disease stricken countries ravaged by resource extraction (read: theft) by the so-called developed world.

To put the lives of the people suffering the most in the hands of those suffering the least is to remake the model of the enlightened despot of an earlier age. Allowing anyone the power and influence that comes with the accumulation of wealth, and then hoping they will use it in generous and humane ways, is simply backwards and wrong. The emiseration of the Global South is not due to benign causes, whatever closet racists and apologists for predatory capitalism may suggest.

I would like to see Mr. Gates turn on himself, to point his finger not at intermediate causes of problems -- such as the horrendous but unsurprising stance of the anti-humanitarian Bush Administration on, well, anything -- but on root causes, such as the massive divide between rich and poor and the rich world's giving with one hand (when it so chooses) while always taking with two.

* * *

Related: must-see documentary The Corporation.

Weekend Quotes III

"They tell us that we live in a great free republic; that our institutions are democratic; that we are a free and self-governing people . . . Wars throughout history have been waged for conquest and plunder . . . And that is war in a nutshell. The master class has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles."
---Eugene V. Debs, as quoted in Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States


"In skating over thin ice, our safety is in our speed."
---Ralph Waldo Emerson


"When first introduced into English vernacular, the concept of 'political' was a war cry and a call to arms. It has lost that meaning since . . . it was originally coined as critique of reality but later transformed into 'objective description' of reality as its heralds and missionaries turned into that reality's administrators."
---Zygmunt Bauman, Society Under Seige


"If you are not frightened yet, you have not been paying attention to recent world history . . . You better check out what happened to the people of Diego Garcia, when the U.S. military decided that it wanted their island as a military base."
---Rosemarie Jackowski, advocacy journalist and Vermont Attorney General candidate


"If this is the best god can do, I am not impressed. Results like these do not belong on the resume of a supreme being."
---George Carlin

Had Enough Yet?

I just learned (reading the always stimulating weekly review at Harper's) that the US has now been occupying Iraq for as long as it was at war with Germany in the 1940's. Trivial though this piece of information may seem, it does beg some attention. Back then there were quantifiable successes to fight for in Europe, among them the liberation of the death camps (mainly accomplished by the Soviets) and the removal from power of a racist, supremely aggressive, militaristic regime hellbent on occupation and slaughter.

Fast forward to now. The US is uncontroversially (unless you are insane) guilty of the supreme crime of aggression. Its military prowess is beyond the wildest dreams of the German National Socialists. Instead of liberation, the US offers the people of Iraq a country poisoned by depleted uranium, littered with prisons and torture chambers -- call them concentration camps if you like -- and deprived of its archeological treasures. Entire cities have been filled up with gunfire and emptied of families, businesses, communities, and histories. Iraqi men are imprisoned and tortured seemingly for being Iraqi men. Back in the Homeland, media ownership rules have been modified substantially enough to squeeze out any legitimate public discourse about what is occurring; indeed, to squeeze out anything but corporate cheerleading for the imperial project, even as the White House has closed its press room for "renovations." The world's largest embassy is being built in Baghdad by utterly unaccountable contractors -- call them war profiteers if you like -- while recruitment efforts for the military in the US are stepped up, training is shortened, tours of duty get extended, and the dead are hidden from view.

This ends when you say it does.

The slogan had enough? will be used this fall by American Democrats (far too many of whom have spinelessly supported the invasion and occupation of Iraq at one point or another) preceding the November elections. I don't put much stock in the American political system, and I value the Democratic Party about as much as I value whiney dirt with a blue suit and hairspray, but the slogan is useful. Now that the US has been at war with an abstract noun in Iraq longer than it fought Nazi Germany, and is slowly but surely assuming its own fascist garb for the 21st Century, ask yourself if you've had enough. Start a conversation with someone, with anyone, anywhere. You don't need a pretext. Just ask them. Had enough? They will say yes. Ask yourself. You will say yes. Now what are you going to do about it?

Cheerleading for (Certain) Democracies

One bad thing about weekends is there's no Democracy Now! to download. This is one hour essential to each of my weekdays. To keep the rhythm going on Saturdays and Sundays I recently started listening again to NPR (American National Public Radio), however I can only handle a brief listen before getting thoroughly fed up with its news programming. I used to listen nonstop to the NPR member station in Ithaca, New York in the late 90's, so I got to hear fantastic programs like Alternative Radio along with what I believed then to be decidedly non-commercial radio programming.

So what a surprise it was to tune in Sunday morning and hear an NPR member station broadcasting a program called "Newsweek On Air". Produced by Newsweek itself, within seconds I felt that I was actually hearing something akin to a video news release, a faked news story produced by a corporation or the government for the purpose of deceiving the listener into believing the segment was actually journalism rather than propoganda.

The very obviously very scripted interview I listened to sounded like nothing more than outright cheering for the empire. (This may be nothing new for some readers, but for my girlfriend and I it's an intrusion; we have constructed a television-free world for ourselves in which corporate pap disguised as fair, accurate, balanced, or true must be actively sought out for criticism.) Newsweek's imbecile guest---one of its magazine commentators---was telling the inane co-hosts that "Muslim culture" was, in fact, amenable to "democracy" because of all the, you know, important facets the two have in common. Like what? asked the inane co-hosts. Says the imbecile guest: like private property.

Earth to planet Earth: private property is not a facet of democracy. People with imperial agendas are always confusing democracy and capitalism. That is why whenever a population makes a democratic choice to reject some aspect of capitalism or empire, the Empire always complains about "threats to democracy."

The Vietnamese want communism? Bomb them. The Palestinians want the right to self-determination? Bomb them. Iran wants to nationalize its oil? Sponsor a coup. Transparent, highly monitored elections have occurred recently in Venezuela, Lebanon, and Palestine, in which opposition to empire has been proclaimed loudly by voters. No wonder there is such hostility among defenders of imperialism to these governments.

But then, what did the imbecile Newsweek commentator have to say about democracy in the Middle East? He talked about "successful" new democracies in Afghanistan and Iraq, and about advances in the Gulf States, Jordan, and Morocco (which I sort of think of as being in northwest Africa, but whatever). Absent in the cheerleading of corrupt governments under American occupation or monarchies for chrissakes was any mention of the open democracies we are actively crushing in Palestine and Lebanon.

Why is an NPR station broadcasting insipid shit from Newsweek? They have their agenda. On mine is a daily dose of Democracy Now!.

More Quotes at the Weekend

"There are crimes of passion and crimes of logic. The line that divides them is not clear. But the Penal Code distinguishes between them by the useful concept of premeditation. We are living in the era of premeditation and perfect crimes."
---Albert Camus (1913-1960), The Rebel


"As the physicists are busy engineering the world's annihilation, the social scientists can be entrusted with the smaller mission of engineering the world's consent."
---Peter Berger quoted in Noam Chomsky's Problems of Knowledge and Freedom


"The recent arrests that our fellow citizens are now learning about are a stark reminder that this nation is at war with Islamic fascists, who will use any means to destroy those of us who love freedom."
---George W. Bush, 10 August 2006


"Weeks before September 11th, this is going to play big."
---anonymous White House official, 11 August 2006


"[T]his culture's destructive urges can yoke all circumstances to its advantage."
---Derrick Jensen, A Language Older Than Words


"When a nation calling itself "the Jewish state" oppresses people, it is not surprising that the victims tend to develop a hatred of Jews. This equating of Israel's crimes and all Jews is of course unwarranted, and one way to mitigate this unfortunate association is for Jews to forthrightly criticize Israeli wrongdoing. Blanket endorsement of Israeli crimes by non-Israeli Jews just confirms the anti-Semites in their stereotypes. Anti-Semitism has become much more pronounced in the Middle East in recent years. But the solution is not to drop bombs on everyone. (Some will immediately reply, "so you want us to go quietly to the gas chambers?" as if the two choices in the world are behaving like sheep or behaving like ogres.) [...]

"When the director of Israeli military intelligence declared in 2003, "Better Palestinian mothers should cry and not Jewish mothers" he was expressing a view not only deeply immoral, but tragically ineffective, for the result of such brutal policies is likely to be weeping by Lebanese, Palestinians, and Israelis alike."
---Stephen R. Shalom, Lebanon War Q&A

Quotes At The Weekend

[Note: I am attempting a regular feature for this space to encourage meaningful discussion leading to action. You may consider these brief passages in the context of the previous week's news if you like, or in context of the larger crisis of creativity.]


"Endless money forms the sinews of war."
---Cicero (106-46 b.c.e.), Philippics


"Speaking of costs and effects (the sole way of speaking that 'makes economic sense'), no other form of social control is more efficient than the spectre of insecurity hovering over the heads of the controlled."
---Zygmunt Bauman (1925-), Society Under Siege


"[W]e ourselves are no longer able to choose our problems. They choose us, one after the other."
---Albert Camus (1913-1960), The Rebel


"With all due respect for the undeniably pivotal role of corporate-imperial media mendacity and bias, I think Americans are running out of excuses for narcissistic and infantile indifference to the mass murder being carried out with their tax dollars and by their policy makers and allies. It strikes me that photographs, clips, and stories about the criminal carnage inflicted on Arab people and communities by the blood-soaked-butchers who rule the United States and its client state Israel are readily available to any moderately interested American who knows how to search the Internet, read a newspaper, or watch television."
---Paul Street


“American progressives need to wake up to the fact that they are just as big a part of the world’s problems as the Republicans, so long as they insist on living the American lifestyle. As long as they continue to thoughtlessly consume the world as if it were their birthright. All talk and no walk. Buying organic toilet paper and voting for evasive Democratic hacks just isn’t going to cut it, guys ... Here is what I consider the most important philosophical question anyone can ever ask themselves: ‘What is the question to which my life is the answer?’”
---Joe Bageant


“You want to know why we don’t rebel? We still think we have something to lose. That’s what’s stopping us. As soon as we realize we have nothing left to lose we’ll be dangerous.”
---Derrick Jensen


(Thanks to Mickey Z. for those last two.)

For-profit Racism

I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.
---Albert Einstein

Are we there yet? Below is an excerpt from Robert Fisk's most recent appearance on Democracy Now! Fisk has been reporting from Beirut for three decades.

On the ground, when you're here, when you see the wounded, see the dead, you realize the immorality, the obscenity, the atrocity of statesmen, as they think they are, claiming that, you know, it isn't yet time for a ceasefire. A hasty ceasefire would not be a good thing, as Condoleezza Rice said. 24 hours before, I saw a picture of her on a beach in Malaysia. And people remember this. People remember this. In the hospital it was a young man who said -- turned to me, he said, “Why have you done this to us? Why have you done this to us?” And the woman I was talking to said the same: “Why does the West want to do this to us?” [...]

What’s going on in southern Lebanon is an outrage. It’s an atrocity. [...] It’s against all morality to suggest that 600 innocent civilians must die for this. There is no other country in the world that could get away with this.

...I wrote in my paper last week, there were times when the IRA would cross from the Irish Republic into northern Ireland to kill British soldiers. And they did murder and kill British soldiers. But we, the British, didn’t hold the Irish government responsible. We didn't send the Royal Air Force to bomb Dublin power stations and Galway and Cork. We didn't send our tanks across the border to shell the hill villages of Cavan or Monaghan or Louth or Donegal. Blair wouldn't dream of doing that, because he believes he's a moral man, he’s a civilized man. He wouldn't treat another nation like that.

But when the Israelis treat Lebanon like that, it's okay, and Blair doesn't want a ceasefire. You can’t have a real ceasefire. In other words, we've got to have the Lebanese on their knees to sign the dotted line, before we give them a ceasefire.

Fisk's comments underline the inherent racism in what the world's pathetic political leaders are allowing to occur in Lebanon. If not racism, what else could it be? Surely no one wants to suggest that this war of aggression is actually collectively and personally profitable to people like Blair and Bush and other post-Enlightenment leaders who want this violence to continue. Behind their cowardly pseudo-diplomacy, there is the real sale of real weapons to real people. It is to the credit of Israel's neighbors and others who have called repeatedly for an immediate ceasefire that they do not bring it upon the aggressor nation in this conflict by force. That would be very bad. But someone is signing off on all those weapons being used. There are actually people out there who directly profited from the development, sale, and use of the weapons dropped on Qana and innumerable locations like it. Analogies to the crimes of German, British and American corporations during the Holocaust would be far to easy for me to make. So I'll let you make them yourself.