Message from America

IMPORTANT MESSAGE FROM AMERICA, TO ITS POLITICIANS:

If you deny our state workers' unions the right to collective bargaining,
we will occupy state capitols.

And if you savage the economies of Latin America for a century,
we will re-elect you.

If you cut funding for education,
we will organize school walk-outs.

And if you grind children into dust in Afghanistan for nine years running,
we will re-elect you.

If a gallon of gas costs more than $4,
we will scream bloody murder.

And if you sell out our pristine wilderness to oil & gas companies,
we will re-elect you.

If you threaten to defund Planned Parenthood,
we will organize & we will protest.

And if our soldiers abroad make a habit of raping people under occupation,
we will re-elect you.

If your sexual indiscretions are made public,
we will shame you in our corporate media.

And if your torture regime is made public,
we will re-elect you.

If people on the other side of the world risk their lives for self-determination under authoritarian rule,
we will demand you support their struggle.

And if you tighten your authoritarian grip here at home,
we will re-elect you.

"Harshing Your Mellow"

Interesting conversation with a stranger today. Cooling off with a $1 beer on the stoop of one of my favorite locals, I was asked how I felt about the August 4th passage in the New York State Senate of an 11-month moratorium on new hydrofracking permits in the Marcellus Shale. Hydrofracking is something that I have thought deeply about, and intermittently acted and advocated against, since I first learned of the issue late last year.

(To summarize: Hydrofracking (high volume slick water hydraulic fracturing) is a particularly toxic method of natural gas extraction. The Marcellus Shale formation, stretching from northern New York State to Pennsylvania and West Virginia, has been identified as especially ripe for drilling. In Pennsylvania (and many other states) where the laws have been more lax, residential tap water has been shown to be flammable due to the effects of gas drilling. Hydrofracking uses a toxic mix of secret, proprietary chemicals (owned by the vile assholes at Halliburton, of course), sand, and millions of gallons of water to fracture gas pockets in the shale and force precious fossil fuel to the surface. In the process, a portion of the toxic fluid remains in the ground, while most of it returns to the surface. This fluid is industrial, radioactive waste that is known to cause birth defects, brain damage and cancer. And so on and so forth.)

So what did I say to the stranger who wanted my opinion? I said that the drilling continues. So-called "exploratory" drilling, which is presumably not covered by the moratorium, allows ecocidal corporations to drill without environmental oversight. But whatever. The Senate vote will first be reviewed by the State Assembly in September. Who knows how long they will discuss the matter, while current and new drill sites poison the water table. When they are done discussing, the Governor will review the issue. (The current Governor, by most accounts, appears to be a bought-and-paid-for, inept dick.) Meanwhile, if I am deciphering the insane politics correctly, the moratorium does not go into effect. At all.

The stranger who had asked for my opinion of this wonderful news countered with something about how "we did all we can" and "it worked" and the Senate vote "offers some hope." To which I responded that "we" did not do all we can. The main thrust of public effort on this issue has been political, and is moving in typical sludge-like political time. But the Earth cannot wait. I responded with the thought that "we" did all we wanted. Were we to do all we can, "we" might have slashed the throats of ecocidal maniacs willing to drill (to go to one extreme), or "we" might have set their machines on fire, or monkey-wrenched them to uselessness, or blockaded drill sites. I was not overtly advocating such behavior. I was pointing out the gulf that exists between what was done and what could be done. What was done was legal and sanctioned by the same forces ready to destroy the soil, water, and air tomorrow for a buck today. Calling for a moratorium, and maybe getting it passed (later, maybe, and perhaps with a shit ton of loopholes, why not, that's how this garbage always goes down) was already in the script.

There is a bottom line. What is it? It is clean air, clean water, and clean soil. That is the minimum requirement for species survival (our species and the various species with which we interact). The fraudulent, corrupt, make-believe, quote-motherfucking-unquote democratic process is a wholly inadequate channel for protecting the bottom line. How many tragic reminders do folks need? How many oil spills? How many "severe climate events?" How many extinctions per goddamn day? How many asthma sufferers, cancer patients, victims of brain damage? It is not a victory when the ecocidal corporatists that would readily sell your survival down the toxic river set the terms of your victory. (Hope & Change, anyone? I bet the hundreds of thousands of mothers and children killed during the Bush/Obama Imperial holocaust in Iraq are celebrating in their irradiated graves over President Peaceprize's announcement earlier today of the end of U.S. combat operations in their former Earthly home.)

Back to the stoop, and my friendly conversation. I added that there ought to be in place an "underground railroad" for heroic people dubbed "eco-terrorists", animal liberationists, monkey-wrenchers and so on. Not everyone will stand up, bodily, to the engines of war against the Earth. But when such folks do, and when they are on the run, they deserve our protection physically, legally, rhetorically, philosophically, spiritually.

The stranger, who claimed to be a 30-year veteran of anti-nuclear activism, then announced (like a perfect, left-liberal fauxgressive) that I was "harshing his mellow." Which was just fine by me. Fuck his fucking mellow. People sometimes ask me why I am so angry. I want to know why those same people aren't.

Of Exasperation and Democracy

I sometimes send an email update to a few hundred people to inform them of my creative activities. To my latest update I added a paragraph detailing some of my main reasons for not voting in the U.S. (Not much changes, here’s a link to what I had to say about voting two years ago.) This paragraph was not only pertinent to the time I sent out the mailing (a week before the 2008 presidential elections) but also to an audiovisual installation of mine Registering Our Exasperation currently on exhibition at the Melkweg in Amsterdam.

I will not be voting in the upcoming U.S. elections, though I am eligible to do so. I see the electoral situation as not so different from that of Belarus, wherein the democratic process is so obviously flawed that participation only seems to indicate legitimization. I wouldn't bet on a horse that I knew in advance would not make it to the race. Only the extraordinarily well-funded are given access to the public through mainstream media. And they--the well-funded (and forked-tongued)--maintain attitudes that are so obviously divergent from the majority of the people that even with their obscene funding they will not allow other ideas to compete for public attention and support. I am not suggesting that there is no difference between the two main actors this particular year, but that the difference does not speak to the breakdown of democracy. Given the various extinction-level crises that an American president sits at the helm of, I am not willing to be pragmatic in the question of government, at least not with regard to the illusion of choice. As I have written many times before, this is not only an American issue. However one chooses to participate in democracies flawed or perfect, I advocate a particpation in community that obviates mega-powerful, centralized governments. To be clear, I am refering to the kind of participation that Henry David Thoreau had in mind when he wrote "Cast your whole vote, not a strip of paper merely, but your whole influence." Because without a community actively defined by those who live within it, any government is irrelevant and any election is ridiculous. If it is change that one wants, it is change that one must do (and not change that one must vote for).

Anyway, I received a number of thought-provoking responses, some from people who share my attitude. The majority of the substantive responses, however, were from people who thought my decision poor, although all agreed with the notion that American democracy is in a very sorry state. But the suggestion seemed to be vote for the candidate who is black, because he is black, and that is historic, and he talks about change, and change would be good, and the other candidate is really much much worse. Which all may be true, but how that would address the democracy issue I do not know. As it happens, I found this to be exasperating, again appropriate to the work I am presenting at the Melkweg. So I wrote the following to be made available at my exhibition. It has some cursing in it.

How do I register my exasperation? How do I indicate the frustrating understanding I have come to that mega-nations & governments run by madmen are causing all of the problems—problems that, year in & year out, someone, somewhere, is telling me I should solve by voting for different madmen? Could everyone please stop telling me to vote?

Go ahead & vote, vote, get your candidate or political party of choice to win some sham election, vote. Pat yourself on the back for participating in democracy & then go back to sleep for the next few years, while politicians & the corporations that own them ride roughshod over the earth, killing people & rivers, enslaving children & the integrity of genes, slaughtering languages & rainforests, mocking democracy.

Or do they? Do they mock democracy? Hitler, Mugabe, Lukashenko, Hussein all won elections. Even that shit-brained son-of-a-bitch Bush nearly did, twice. What is democracy anyway in our age of perverted information, when all information is commercialized, when shit floats, when access to your intellect is sold to the highest bidder, when soundbites will have to suffice because neither you nor your candidate have time to read the policies drawn up in backrooms by people whose names no one even knows?

How do I register my exasperation? Stop telling me to vote. Stop telling me to participate in a counterfeit electoral process, in a democracy in which political parties can be divided over whether human industry is cooking the planet or not, over whether the violence should be conducted by insufferable idiot jerk-offs or charming intellectuals, over whether this or that group has the right to self-determination, over whether torturing someone constitutes ‘torture’, over whether the integrity of borders is more precious than the integrity of the lives of those who wish to cross them, over the extent to which women’s reproductive rights & the civil rights of homosexuals threaten the nation.

I am not part of a community that stretches across multiple mountain ranges, over rivers, beyond the corpses of once-proud & impenetrable forests, that has asserted its right to pave the planet & pour chemicals into the eyes of bunnies to create new cosmetics or find cures to cancers the culture causes in the first place.

No. How do I register my exasperation? What place does democracy have in the mass extinctions we are witnessing, mass extinctions of a magnitude only seen when a comet smashes into the planet or an ice age covers it for centuries? Vote. Vote for liars who pay lip service to the builders of bombs, to the financiers of fire & brimstone, to the high priests of pedophilia and misogyny, to the conquerors of carbon, the gangsters of genetics, the vanquishers of forests. Vote for them & encourage everyone around you to do the same, get the vote out, they say, get it out. Rock it. Get it out & then go back to sleep, & in a few years’ time another cast of back-alley elite, socialite sociopaths will dance on camera for you in expensive suits, with flecks of corporate shit in their teeth & the fresh blood of a million children on their breath.

You raise your voice & say no, no, these are not my nations & this is not my way, these democracies are killing my planet, my first & last & only beloved planet, & listen to the response you get, they say, with less subtlety than Chavez or bin Laden: but do you want a dictatorship? And that’s when you realize just how shallow all this fuckin’ democracy is, you knew it stank, you knew it was false, a fraud, a fake, but it wasn’t until democracy loving people—& it’s true you are surrounded by intelligent and creative people, & they love democracy, just love it, every time an election comes around they get hard with hatred for the greater of two evils—but when such creative, intelligent, imaginative & democracy loving people as those around you fail to imagine anything but this violent shithouse, this fiction, this sham, this obscenity parading as righteousness, this vile method to slowly annihilate the whole goddamn toy, well that’s when you ask, how do I register my exasperation? How do I register my exasperation? How, midst all this skullduggery, all this shallow & pernicious blather, do I register my exasperation?

For a while, I listened to the radio program Democracy Now! I listened & I listened & all the guests were getting tortured or incarcerated or had brothers & sons about to be executed for the color of their skin or the sexual orientation of their partners, or were lawyers fighting against the latest surveillance laws & bipartisan gladhanding to fund more war & on & on & on. So I took away the words & left the aspiration, meaning both what these beleaguered activists & dissidents wanted and literally the sound of their breathing & pausing while they spoke. And it sounded like exasperation. They were all exasperated, like me, perhaps like you.

This was in 2006 & everything they were saying was something no one wanted to hear, people just wanted the economy to go up, up, up & for news of the wars to go away. Well the wars are still here & at the moment the economy stinks the way it has always stank to me, like shit, but back to the artwork in question all that audio of exasperation was of things no one wanted to hear, so I put it together with the text from my video Things You Cannot See, which I had just made & the two seemed to go together very nicely, things you cannot hear & things you cannot see, I put them together & gave the work the title Registering Our Exasperation, & so to answer the question How do I register my exasperation? I think a pretty decent start is to make some art, something that relates & transports at the same time, in which the content goes together very nicely, as artwork should, form is important after all, yes, to make some art & to talk to people, to vote with my whole influence & to turn my back on the madmen.

Teraz Polska

Prelude: please begin by reading this article by Doug Ireland.

* * *

Here's a question: what's the deal with Poland's creeping fascism, and what is integrated Europe---risen from the ashes of its militaristic, intolerant, genocidal, and all-around street-thuggish past---going to do about it?

I ask this because I care deeply about the place. Before moving to The Hague I lived for a while in Poland, and may again someday. I fell in love there. I gained a family and incredible, fascinating friends there. I've climbed its mountains, performed in its theaters and clubs, studied in its cultural capital. I've learned its language. I've taken it for my own and many Poles have welcomed me as their own.

So what? So now when I visit Poland I have to contend with what may very well be the EU's leading fascist state.

It is already quite well known that the Polish government has happily allowed the CIA to transport its captives through Poland, to be later subjected to torture. (More on that here.)

And I don't have to remind anyone that four years ago, in opposition to a slight (and rational) majority, the Polish government sent troops to criminally assist the United States in its illegal mission to invade Iraq, murder its people, and destroy its environment and infrastructure. Last year the current government broke its predecessor's promise to withdraw Polish forces from Iraq by 2006.

At the moment, openly fascist twin brothers Lech and Jaroslaw Kaczynski, president and prime minister, are taking serious and aggressive steps against homosexuals. This government has some ties to groups that advocate violence against gays, and incidents of violence are on the rise.

The Kaczynski government enjoys friendly ties with the criminal government of Israel (built partially on Poland's ashes but still no friend to universal human rights). But its open encouragement of extreme intolerance harks back to the early days of another pseudo-socialist regime, one that ended up bleeding Poland not only of its Jews, but many Catholics, Roma, and yes, homosexuals as well.

One of the most disastrous things in all this is the way wealthy "Christian" groups in the US lend enormous support to the Polish government's hateful policies. Some civil rights disaster is bound to occur because of all this, and with Poland's horrendous unemployment and the flight of skilled workers to Western Europe, it's more a question of when than if.

I think at a certain point internal opposition becomes powerless against unrepentant fascism. It would have been immensely helpful if elements in the United States (for example) had not done business with Nazi Germany preceding (and during) the Second World War. Similarly, I honestly believe that world governments have a moral obligation to diplomatically and economically isolate the United States until it ends its utter belligerance and rejoins the international community.

International law, basic human decency, and some help from our morally-equipped friends in business are necessary to prevent the proto-fascist regime in Poland from goosestepping over the edge. Yes, I am appealing to the business community: stop doing business with a Polish government that includes the odious Liga Polskich Rodzin (League of Polish Families).

The European Union is currently celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of the establishment of its direct predecessor, the European Economic Community.

Now. I know that the EU was and always will be first and foremost an economic arrangement, that it favors capitalists, and that capitalism always conflicts with human rights (if not at home, then at factories, farms, prisons and war zones abroad).

Still. Let's pretend that there is some validity to the press release version of the 50th anniversary festivities, that peace and stability, freedom and democracy are also part of the EU's mandate. Let's allow, for a moment, for argument's sake, that European integration had everything to do with a strong and justified reaction to the horrors of the Second World War. Imagine that. It follows that the EU must do everything it can to prevent the atrocities the Polish government is preparing.

* * *

Postscript: lest anyone think this issue---of depriving gay people of their civil rights---is an isolated issue within a weak Polish government, think again. It looks like Europe's newest member, Romania, is preparing the same or worse.

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.