Health Scare #3: Limbaugh, Beck, Ingraham Laugh at Toothless Woman, Flash Everyone With Evil Underbelly of America

Thanks to David Brock's penance, Media Matters, even those us who consciously chose not to amerce ourselves in the Right-wing noise machine get to learn (as if we needed a refresher) just how evil a nation the United States really is.

During her turn at health care summit, Rep. Louise Slaughter (D-New York) talked about plenty of stuff. But because our media is full of sensationalist bullshiters, the only comment of her's with any legs turned out to be the story of a constituent so poor she "wore her dead sister's teeth."

The store grew gams thanks, in part, to the noise machine, a prime example of political symbiosis that keeps this country deadlocked into a uneven tug-of-war between centrist and rightwing crazies. A so-called "liberal" tells a horrible story in public. So-called "conservative" voices respond to it with ridicule, vitriol, and spite. And we can already here liberal voices rising in a chorus of indignation (MediaMatters holding the baton) at the Rightwing mouthpiece's callous indifference to the suffering of their fellow Americans. As if something like this:

LIMBAUGH: You know I'm getting so many people -- this Louise Slaughter comment on the dentures? I'm getting so many people -- this is big. I mean, that gets a one-time mention for a laugh, but there are people out there that think this is huge because it's so stupid. I mean, for example, well, what's wrong with using a dead person's teeth? Aren't the Democrats big into recycling? Save the planet? And so what? So if you don't have any teeth, so what? What's applesauce for? Isn't that why they make applesauce?

should come as a surprise. "Let them eat cake," Marie Antoinette shouted. Well, no, she didn't, but never mind. Evil people have shouted it ever since, whenever they wanted to display their complete contempt for the rest of the human race.

While discussing the probably results of privatizing Medicare (sick, old people tossed out of hospitals, into the streets, to join the legions of crazy people already tossed out in '80s), Rep. Slaughter declares, "We're better people than that." Well, I'm sorry, Congresswoman, but we're really not. Have you seen Glen Beck's ratings? I have. More people watch his rambling civics-lesson-tirades in one night than visited these pages last year. Surely all of them are sincere, red-blooded Americans, hoping to keep pace with the endless treadmill that is the News. And maybe they like their current events served up in silky, semi-sweet Beckness. Who am I to begrudge them?

Such was my thinking. Until I heard this:

On his February 26 radio show, Glenn Beck played an audio clip of Slaughter's account then said, "I am wearing George Washington's dentures right now. I'm wearing his teeth right now." He later added, "I just like wearing dead people's teeth. But in America -- I'm sorry, I didn't know that that was -- I've read the Constitution before. I didn't see that you had a right to teeth." Echoing Limbaugh's remarks the previous day, Beck stated, "The environmentalists should be all over Slaughter. 'How dare you say that?' My gosh, they're just recycling. They're just reusing."

You can hear Beck and his "sidekick" break out into frat-boy giggles when Rep. Slaughter says, "she wore her dead sister's teeth." Now I want to be clear, here: I respect Glenn Beck's right to laugh at the pain and suffering of Rep. Slaughter's constituents. All I ask in return is that he, and everyone else, respect my right to fantasize about his parent company's (owner's) destruction at the hands of an angry mob. That makes me giggle.

After all, Glenn Beck's program is taped at the News Corporation office studios, 1211 Avenue of the Americas (Sixth Avenue to the rest of us) New York, New York, right down the street from MSNBC's 30 Rockefeller Plaza.

So imagine, if you will, Keith Olbermann and Rachel Maddow leading a torch-wielding procession of correspondents, line producers, key grips, camera operators, runners, ADs, journalists, bloggers, and talking-heads through the night streets of Manhattan, singing "All Hell Can't Stop Us," or "I Wanna Free Miss Liberty" or some other fine selection from the IWW's Little Red Songbook. They storm News Corps' offices, overwhelming security. Rent-a-cops shit themselves in fear as red-eyed, foam-mouthed, Brooks Brothers-outfitted lefties, fed up with years of taking conservative shit, break down the revolving doors and pour in. Shattered glass twinkles in their frosted, TV hairdos.

Enmass they rush raving up the narrow stairwells, pouring out like a latte-fueled wave into the live studios. Sound men battle with boom mikes for bo staffs. Camera men's faces are driven into teleprompters by rebellious runners. Studio and viewing audiences keep their seats, shocked into rigidity by the sight of liberals actually doing something for a change. Other than bitch on endlessly about how dirty, evil and mean are those ol' conservative media whores, dag nab them.

Bill O'Reily, dragged from behind his desk, exposes his rubber-ducky emblazoned, $2000 silk boxers to a stunned and horrified world. He declares the whole "fucking thing sucks" as he's carried out to the streets on the shoulders of Chris Matthews Show interns, who proceed to tar, feather, and set Bill marching south, down Sixth Avenue, with instructions not to stop until he reaches the Village.

Meanwhile, back upstairs, Maddow stomps Laura Ingraham into bloodied unconsciousness with a pair of Manolo Blahnik's alligator boots, while Beck looks on, enraptured. Not by the girl fight. No, our man is caught by the visionary's paralysis. Like the audience itself, he is enrapture by the sight of his own worst fears made flesh. In a last ditch moment of egoism sure to make his spiritual grandmother, Ayn, proud, Beck has just enough time to stand and declare, "See? I WAS RIGHT!" before an Ed Schultz boot-to-the-naughty-bits reduces him to a simpering ball of well-dressed muck...

Whew. Sorry. Blacked out there a minute. And now I've got old union songs stuck in my head. What was it we were talking about?

Oh, yeah. Right. Fantasy.

Ayn Rand: The Beast 666

I keep running into Ayn Rand, for she seems to have regained her place as the darling of the American Right. Very creepy experience.

My life with Rand began in junior high. My mother the English teacher receives an annual maildrop of information about the Ayn Rand Ayn Rand Institute Essay Contest. Every year the Institute, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit in Irvine, California, splits $85,000 into 569 prizes and hands each to a Junior High or High School student brave enough to read one of Rand's godawful novels. Many a money-conscious parent has force many a young reader into undergo that traumatizing experience. It's probably destroyed more budding socio-political novelists than anything since television.

A Jewish pharmacist's daughter, born Alisa Zinov'yevna Rosenbaum in St. Petersberg, 1905 (the year of Bloody Sunday and revolution), Rand was twelve in 1917, when revolution again seized Russia, this time for good.

Escaping to America in 1926, young Alisa Rosenbaum committed the kind of auto-genesis her characters are always going on about and renamed herself. Alisa Rosenbaum may have got on the boat, but it was Ayn Rand to when to Hollywood.

During this period, she ran into Cecil B. DeMille, designed costumes for RKO and married an actor. She also, according to the eXiled's Mark Ames, began idolizing the serial killer William Edward Hickman, "The Fox."

Hickman was a check forger, convict, and armed robber who kidnapped his former employer's twelve-year-old daughter, strangled her, cut her into bits, and tossed the bits out of a moving car all over Los Angeles. His capture in the town of Echo, Oregon, trial, and subsequent execution were the celebrity trial of 1928. And, as Ames notes,

This is the “amazing picture” Ayn Rand — guru to the Republican/Tea Party right-wing — admired when she wrote in her notebook that Hickman represented “the amazing picture of a man with no regard whatsoever for all that a society holds sacred, and with a consciousness all his own. A man who really stands alone, in action and in soul. Other people do not exist for him, and he does not see why they should.”

Other people don’t exist for Ayn, either. Part of her ideas are nothing more than a ditzy dilettante’s bastardized Nietzsche — but even this was plagiarized from the same pulp newspaper accounts of the time. According to an LA Times article in late December 1927, headlined “Behavioralism Gets The Blame,” a pastor and others close to the Hickman case denounce the cheap trendy Nietzschean ideas that Hickman and others latch onto as a defense:

“Behavioristic philosophic teachings of eminent philosophers such as Nietzsche and Schopenhauer have built the foundation for William Edward Hickman’s original rebellion against society…” the article begins.

The fear that some felt at the time was that these philosophers’ dangerous, yet nuanced ideas would fall into the hands of lesser minds, who would bastardize Nietzsche and Schopenhauer and poison the rest of us. Which aptly fits the description of Ayn Rand, whose philosophy developed out of her admiration for “Supermen” like Hickman. Rand’s philosophy can be summed up by the title of one of her best-known books:The Virtue of Selfishness. She argues that all selfishness is a moral good, and all altruism is a moral evil, even “moral cannibalism” to use her words. To her, those who aren’t like-minded sociopaths are “parasites” and “lice” and “looters.”

"Thriller" novelist Michael Prescott (who's Next Victim my Aunt Judith happened to be reading over Christmas, so props to you, Michael) adds more depth to the picture on his page of Rand:

In her journal circa 1928 Rand quoted the statement, "What is good for me is right," a credo attributed to a prominent figure of the day, William Edward Hickman. Her response was enthusiastic. "The best and strongest expression of a real man's psychology I have heard," she exulted. (Quoted in Ryan, citing Journals of Ayn Rand, pp. 21-22.

The more I read up on her life, the creepier she becomes. A picture emerges of writer, speed freak, and sociopath. A cult-leading Anne Coulter. A dress-wearing Glenn Beck. A roadshow barker, tossing red meat to the masses she despised, labeling them “parasites” to be ground under food.

Over at Slate, Johann Hari concludes his little book review/psychoanalytic biography of Rand with this eminently reasonable assessment:

Rand was broken by the Bolsheviks as a girl, and she never left their bootprint behind. She believed her philosophy was Bolshevism's opposite, when in reality it was its twin. Both she and the Soviets insisted a small revolutionary elite in possession of absolute rationality must seize power and impose its vision on a malleable, imbecilic mass. The only difference was that Lenin thought the parasites to be stomped on were the rich, while Rand thought they were the poor.

I don't find it hard to understand why this happened to Rand: I feel sympathy for her, even as I know she would have spat it back into my face. What I do find incomprehensible is that there are people—large numbers of people—who see her writing not as psychopathy but as philosophy, and urge us to follow her. Why? What in American culture did she drill into? Unfortunately, neither of these equally thorough, readable books can offer much of an answer to this, the only great question about her.

Now, Rand's followers, on the other hand, diverse nothing but scorn. And, as Ames points out, some very highly placed people--Alan Greenspan, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, Rep. Michelle Bachman (R-Batshit Crazyville), Glen Beck, Rush Limbaugh, and God only knows how many ordinary Americans who have nothing like her fucked up childhood to use as an excuse.

Whenever you hear politicians or Tea Baggers dividing up the world between “producers” and “collectivism,” just know that those ideas and words more likely than not are derived from the deranged mind of a serial-killer groupie.

One who died the year before I was born, alone and unloved, from lung cancer. So it goes.

You'd think, in a nation so obsessed with protecting our children, we might do something to protect them from the cackling-mad doctrines of this evil old woman. To say nothing of the fact that her books are downright boring. Even her early novels, like Anthem (which I read in eight grade) show signs of terminal Victor Hugo's disease, a kind of sprawling, preachy romanticism that went out when Dostoyevsky died.

Yet Rand's crap remains popular, and tough economic times are forcing pundits from all corners to blame populism. Yet the essence of her "objective" truth is elitism--the belief that you are superior to everyone and everything around you. And what could be more American than that?

Health Scare #2: We've Already Lost. They've Won

In the lead-up to tomorrow's health care "summit" (i.e., pointless political show-pony piece), the quixotically-named Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington released a wonderful (pdf) list of just how much health care cash each of the participants has received. Ranked from highest to lowest, reading it is an exercise in "Oh...now I understand. That's why John Boehner, Harry Reid and Steny Hoyer have been acting like such god-almighty dicks this past...zombie Jesus, it's been almost a year already. Where does the time go?" Straight down the drain, along with any chance you ever had of affordable health care.

From CREW's website

According to CREW’s study, the five summit invitees who have received the most health care dollars since 2005 are:

• Sen. Max Baucus (D-MT), who has received over $2.5 million in contributions, $777,113 from the pharmaceutical/health products sector alone;

• Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY), who has received over $2.2 million, $802,500 of which came from doctors, other medical professionals and their trade associations;

• Rep. Eric Cantor (R-VA), who has received nearly $2 million, $483,750 of which came from the insurance, HMO and health services industries;

• Rep. Charles Rangel (D-NY), who has received almost $1.9 million, $572,237 of which was contributed by hospitals and nursing homes; and

• Rep. Steny Hoyer (D-MD), who has received over $1.8 million, and like Sen. McConnell, received a large portion of that -- $709,261 -- from health professionals

So. We see the bribery wheel continue its Grand Round. Where she stops, nobody knows, but odds are good it won't be anywhere you (you less-than-filthy rich, politically disconnected, more-or-less completely disenfranchised person, you) would want to go.

And lest any of the ten or so people who actually bother to read these notes (not that I have anything but love for all you wonderful lurkers who come to steal my screen shots from Godzilla the Series) think Our Glorious Leader is somehow, magically above all this, CREW reminds us all that, "Additionally, President Obama received over $18.6 million during his presidential campaign."

Since precious few of us will ever see any side of $18 million, I took a quick walk around the internet and found that such a chunk of change is:

• the total amount raised by Bono's Product Red campaign for The Global Fund, despite a year's worth of endorsements from every supposedly-conscientious celebrity from Stephen Spielberg to the Mad God, Oprah. (Called a "meager $18 million" by the industry shills at Ad Age...which just goes to show you what world they really live in. Big hint: it ain't ours.)
• the amount of stimulus money the AARP received last year for the Senior Community Service Employment Program ("Hello! Welcome to Wal-Mart! Been a nice winter, hasn't it?")
• the rumored sale price of the Fire Island Pines resort. And if you don't know what that is, congratulations: whatever doubts, masturbatory fantasies, or drunken, back-seat-of-a-car "experiments" you might've had in the past, I hereby declare you straight. Go forth and sin some more.
  
• (and) the amount of money allocated for a upgrade to one (that's one) government website. Which one? Recovery.gov, of course. Because its not really "irony" until you feel that knife twist a bit.
  

Happy political theater, everyone. How's that "Canadian system" looking?

John Yoo's "Bloodshed of the Two Torture Memos"

Two Decembers ago, former Vice President Dick Cheney said,

"we don't do torture."

And the authors of the two most-famous Bush-era "torture memos"--the ones advocating "enhanced interrogation techniques" including waterboarding and the forced consumption of Brittany Spear's albums--were just cleared of any and all misconduct by an internal Justice Department review. So we must not "do torture."

And yet, on February 14th, Cheney brazenly admitted "I was a big supporter of waterboarding."

So just so we're clear, here...

You're the Office of Legal Council to the President of the United States. The Vice President's office sends word down that we're fightin' a new type of war and all, and maybe that ol', moth-eaten Geneva Convention really don't apply to the people we catch up in this war. Maybe we just need to, oh, I don't know...start letting the CIA kidnap people, throw them in some hole in the ground somewhere...like Morocco...or Cuba...and start torturing them, ya know? The Vice President's representative asks you to whip up a way this might be accomplished. What do you do?

Do you:

(a) Politely thank the Vice President's representative (probably his lawyer, David Attington), show him out the door, immediately grab the phone, call the President, and inform him his Number Two is a raving mad asshole who wants to undermine that greatest of great myths of ours: the rule of law, warping the character of this great nation into a grinning, horrible, schizophrenic parody of itself. Or do you

(b) Inform the Vice President's man that you'll do everything in your power to see that such a policy conforms to the laws of the United States, as proscribed by the Constitution and determined by the courts, or

(c) Inform the Vice President's man you'll be sure to write a memo equally sure to abandon "fundamental practices of principled and balanced legal interpretation,” fail "to cite highly relevant precedent, regulations, and even constitutional provisions," and misuse "sources upon which it does rely," conveniently ignoring everything else in a hard-line, insane drive to vest the Executive Branch of this country with unrivaled power. After all, we're at war. No time to be liberal pantywaist and wring our hands over "the laws". It's time to go all Howard Roark on these Camel Jockey assholes. Tell you what, screw writing up a legal case. You've decided to join up with the U.S. Marines right now, because that'll be the shortest distance between you and you ventilating terrorist scumbags.

Or do you

(d) Call a meeting with other senior lawyers from the Attorney General’s office, the White House counsel’s office, the Departments of State and Defense, and the National Security Council regarding whether the Geneva Convention applied to members of al-Qaeda and the Taliban. Inform the Vice President's man that, at these meetings, you and your lawyer pals will do everything in your power to draft a memo sure to abandon "fundamental practices of principled and balanced legal interpretation,” fail "to cite highly relevant precedent, regulations, and even constitutional provisions," and misuse "sources upon which it does rely," conveniently ignoring everything in a hard-line, insane drive to vest the Executive Branch of this country with unrivaled power.

(These quotes come from a 2007 critique of John Yoo's torture memo written by Dawn Johnson, currently head of the OLC under Our (new) Glorious Leader, President Obama--so suck on it, Johnny.)

Said memos will be sure to justify the Vice President's stated wishes, producing documents the President, Vice President, SecDef and Attorney General will spend the next eight years (Yoo wrote the torture memos back in 2002) hiding behind. Remember when Bush and Dick used to go on and on, when they were all, like, "Nope, we good. It's all legal. We've got these memos from the OLC, and they say it's fine. Foggedaboutit, not problem. Stop trying to coddle the terrorists and grow your balls back, you liberal pantywaist." Weren't those great times?

And it'll be okay. Really. No one will ever hold you accountable for providing a legal cover to the Bush Administration's obviously-adamant wish to torture people. You can even write a book all about it and no one will even bat and eyelash.

Let's be clear: Dick Cheney's valentine this year? Waterboarding. Fuck Liz and the kids, right? Sick fetishist is all about strapping men down to tables, putting washcloths over their mouths, and dribbling two-gallon milk jugs full of water onto them until their gag reflex makes them puke, or pass out, or both. Former Vice President Dick is a self-described "fan" of this. A "big" one. Sweet bleeding Jesus.

But wait: it gets worse. Lawyers for a Tunisan Gitmo prisoner, Rafiq Alhami, have just filed a lawsuit alleging that CIA kidnapper-spooks were torturing people as far back as December, 2001

In his lawsuit, Alhami stated, as the Associated Press described it, that, from December 2001, he was held in three CIA “dark sites,” where “his presence and his existence were unknown to everyone except his United States detainers,” and where, at various times, he was “stripped naked, threatened with dogs, shackled in painful stress positions for hours, punched, kicked and exposed to extremes of heat and cold.” He also stated that his interrogators “sprayed pepper spray on his hemorroids, causing extreme pain.”

[...]

Moreover, although the OLC memos dealt specifically with a “high-value detainee” program that began with the capture of Abu Zubaydah on March 28, 2002, it’s also clear that the administration began working out how to deal with prisoners outside of existing legal frameworks within days of the 9/11 attacks. Most of this centered, at the time, on expanding the program of “extraordinary rendition” developed by the CIA under Bill Clinton in order to deliver “terror suspects” to third countries, where they could be interrogated by proxy torturers or even “disappeared.”

This in itself was enormously worrying, of course. The Clinton-era program occupied a horribly gray area, in which “terror suspects” — mostly Egyptians — were seized by the CIA and rendered to the custody of the Egyptian government, which was then free to kill them, torture them or imprison them after show trials, but it was at least a carefully controlled program, involving 13 prisoners between 1995 and 2000, according to research undertaken last year by Peter Bergen for Mother Jones, and a detailed paper trail that required the existence of a sentence by a court, even one handed down in absentia by a government with a disturbing human rights record.

After 9/11, however, all these restraints were abandoned. Within 12 days of the attacks on New York and Washington, a Yemeni named Jamal Mar’i, who worked for a Saudi charity in Pakistan, was kidnapped from his house in Karachi and rendered to Jordan, one of several countries with whom the Bush administration had swiftly established arrangements involving “extraordinary rendition” and torture. In the ten months that followed, before the OLC issued its indefensible opinions, at least 25 more prisoners were rendered to torture in Egypt, Jordan, Morocco and Syria, and we now know, from one of three more OLC memos released two weeks ago — written in May 2005 by Steven G. Bradbury, the Principal Deputy Assistant Attorney General, and revisiting the OLC’s August 2002 torture opinions — that, after the CIA brought torture in-house in August 2002, 94 prisoners in total were held in secret CIA custody.

The fact I can even cut and paste these words without my head exploding, gumming up the keyboard with fragments of skull and brain goo, just goes to show you how far down the moral-evolutionary ladder eight years of Dick Cheney has really pulled us. Congratulations to us as a nation and as a culture: we've re-branded torture and once again made it cool by embracing it in absentia, through our "elected leaders." Great job all around.

Maybe next we can bring poisoning wells with dead bodies back to good. Quick, someone think up a name for that that won't scare people when they hear it on the six o'clock news. Something boring and bland, like the rest of American politics..."enhanced...water treatment techniques"?

Obviously, the correct answer to the above is (d), since torture memo authors John Yoo and Jay Bybee were ruled "not guilty" of professional misconduct. The Justice Department's Office of Professional Responsibility did what the government does best and issued a report about it on Friday. Remember when your kid told you about that flunked Math test on the trip home from Six Flags? Well, the DOJ just pulled one of those one us. With Congress out until Monday (thanks, President's Day) and nobody important watching TV Friday night, they knew they could get away with giving Johnny and Jay a cute little smack on the wrist. Bad, bad boys, you two; letting that mean-old Mr. Cheney talk you into writing things. That gets you in trub-ble!

This sends a clear and concise message to conscientious men and women within the American government, and, indeed, all free governments of the world: suck-up, brown-nose, and bend over backward to please your powerful superiors. Not only will this allow you to twist and mutilate the law, but if your superiors are evil enough, you'll even get to twist some human beings along with it.

Christ sake, these two won't even be disbarred. Bybee will go right back to his day job as a federal judge (of all things), while John Yoo gets right back to the business of molding young minds at...Berkeley...of all the goddamnedest places in the Universe. Yoo, at least, has out-and-proud admitted he fixed the law to justify his "client's" (the Administration's) wishes. In the middle of bitching about Obama's decision to close Guantanamo Bay (and, one year out, what the hell's going on with that anyway?) Yoo even let slip the fact "President" Bush himself personally authorized waterboarding "three times in the years after 9/11."

(Sidenote: you know the Spirit of the 60s is well and truly dead when the man who literally wrote the book [and, first, the memo] on American torture programs can remain in his job at UC Berkeley with, apparently, no loss of life, limb, or property. God, the political Left in this country really is a coalition of toothless, bourgeois hypocritical fucks. He's authorized waterboarding for goddsake. C'mon Berkeley radicals: the least you could do is trash the man's office.)

Obviously, at this point, no one in the Obama Administration is the least bit interested in investigating the crimes of their predecessors. Why should they be? President Clinton was equally obliged to let the previous Bush Administration get off scott-free. It's not as if moral, ethical, or even legal concerns are foremost in Our Glorious Leader's mind. You noticed all this "extraordinary rendition" bullshit (when FARC does it it's just called "kidnapping" but I guess American "doesn't do that" either) started under Bill Clinton, didn't you? Good ol' Slick Willy sure stabbed us in the back on that one. The point is, all this is bigger than one evil, little man...or one evil, god-all-mighty-stupid presidential administration.

Let's be clear: U.S. torture policies grow out of fundamental assumptions of U.S. foreign policy. Foremost is the assumption that we, as the U.S., have the power to do whatever we want, whenever we want to do it. And get away with it. Until we get over that little canard, there's not a damn thing voting for your favorite corporate puppet is going to do about all this.

Just FYI.
(Within the Empire is supported in part by a grant from Dick Cheney Foundation: doing what Dick Cheney says, before he shoots us in the face. And by the annual financial support of Dick Cheneys like you. Go fuck yourself, Mr. Cheney. Go fuck yourself right up the butt.)

"take my pound of flesh and sleep well"

Around nine o'clock this morning, central standard time, a man named Joseph Stack set his house on fire, stole a Piper Cherokee from a nearby Georgetown, Texas airfield, and crashed the plane into an Austin office building, the Echelon I.

Echelon I is home to both the FBI and IRS field offices. Two people are in hospital. One is currently missing. Joe Stack is, rather obviously, dead, and already he's been christened the new Grey Champion of his age. Or the new Osama bin Laden.

Whichever way you lean, copies of Stack's suicide note/exegesis are now available in a variety of places, for the informing of your opinion. Titled "Well, Mr. Big Brother IRS man, let's try something different; take my pound of flesh and sleep well," it paints the portrait of man driven out of his mind by fifty-four years of good ol' American hypocrisy. Signed, "Joseph Stack 1956-2010. 2/18/10," it shows deliberation, for all its short comings of coherent rhetoric (which its author freely admits). At once autobiographical and firmly political, Stack's note is scathing indictment of American political culture, sure to be swept under the rug at the first convenient opportunity.

In his note, Stack narrates of a life of repeated failure, with IRS bureaucrats, repeatedly cheating him out of his retirement savings. He rails against government bailouts of big business (GM, the airlines, the drug and insurance companies who grow fatter by the day thanks to "the joke we call the American health system") and big business' corruption of government ("there has never been a politician cast a vote on any matter with the likes of me or my interests in mind. Nor, for that matter, are they the least bit interested in me or anything I have to say"), tacking right off the deep end of America's political spectrum with a new, violent populism, which is really as old as this continent. He justifies his heinous actions (which we at Within the Empire would never in any way condone, defend or advocate) by concluding

"I would only hope that by striking a nerve that stimulates the inevitable double standard, knee-jerk government reaction that results in more stupid draconian restrictions people wake up and begin to see the pompous political thugs and their mindless minions for what they are. Sadly, though I spent my entire life trying to believe it wasn’t so, violence not only is the answer, it is the only answer. The cruel joke is that the really big chunks of shit at the top have known this all along and have been laughing, at and using this awareness against, fools like me all along."

In other words, watch out, America. Your citizens are growing desperate, dangerous, and crazy. Not that we've ever been otherwise. But under certain strained circumstances, we have historically been moved to act on our national inclinations.

Personally, I'm putting everything I've got into canned food and shotguns.

Memo from the Climate Scientists: We're All Screwing Ourselves

Via Climate Progress, "a project of the Center For American Progress Action Fund," overseen by Dr. Joseph Romm (author of Hell and High Water) comes a chart n' graph-laden Illustrated Guide to the Latest Climate Science everyone interested in facts should at least glance at sideways before opening their mouths.

The gist? We're screwing ourselves as a nation, as a species, and doing it faster and more thoroughly than even the most pessimistic number crunchers ever though possible. But with all that snow on the ground, don't try to tell anyone about global warming. No. Obviously God Himself has answered those effete, elitist scientists with a triple handful of "treacherous," continent-ravaging storms. That's what we get for letting evil secularists study problems without their partisan blinders firmly stapled into place, and issue uncensored reports.

My dentist paused in the act of torturing my teeth to reveal his own ignorance. "Well," he said, glancing out the window at dead, Midwestern grass, "the climate's changing all the time."

Sure, Doc. But that's not the point. It's changing faster and more radically because of what we do. We, the collective entity known as "the human race" are senselessly murdering our biosphere thanks to a combination of ignorance, willful-stupidity, gross incompetence and greed. Blithely labeling this problem "Global Warming" or (as it was re-christened under Bush) "Global Climate Change," is itself a symptom of our wider, cultural myopia and unwillingness to confront the problems we create for ourselves.

Personally, I told my dentist, I like to cut through all the bullshit and lies and just call the problem what it is: the Apocalypse. Or, at the very least, an Apocalypse. As Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel spent years trying to teach us, there's always another Apocalypse around the corner. Only the concerted efforts of those fighting the "good" fight prevent them from destroying us hundreds of times over.

My problem with Dr. Romm? He (and thus, his organization) have fallen into a trap. By critiquing the Bush-era's Apocalyptic policies, decrying the "politicization" of a global crisis (as if global crisis' occur in the Ideal universe of Plato's Eternal Forms, far removed from politics) he, his organization, and the PAC that funds it, have all fallen into the very trap they hoped to set at Dubya's feet. They have politicized themselves by entering the arena of America politics. And bloodier, more unforgiving stage you will not find this side of Restoration-era England. They have ceded the high ground, because the American System (to use Henry Clay's term) as its currently constituted, requires them to get down in the mud, with paleolithic assholes, like the Republican Governor of Virginia, Bob McDonnell. Who, in his White Presidential Power rally response to Our Glorious Leader's State of the Union Address, brazenly declared (in a nod to Dominionist voters across the Old Dominion and throughout the national TV audience):

We are blessed here in America with vast natural resources, and we must use them all.

Because obviously, if we don't, the terrorists will win.

This Apocalypse is not insolvable. The simple fact is, the vicious plutocrats who control the ruling institutions of American (and, to a large extent, global) society do not care. They don't give a high, holy fuck about you, me, the plant, or anything on it unless they can turn a profit by converting whatever-it-is (you, me, our homes, our fellow citizen's lives) into a market derivative. Forget the politicians, as Saint Carlin said,

"Politicians are put there to give you the illusion you have freedom of choice. You don't. You have owners. They own you. They own everything. They own all the important land. They own and control the corporations. They've long-since bought and paid for the Senate, the Congress, the State Houses, the City Halls, they've got the judges in their back pockets, and they own all the big media companies so they control all the news and information you hear. They got'cha by the balls. They spent billions of dollars every year lobbying to get what they want. Well we know what they want: they want more for themselves and less for everybody else...They don't want a population of citizens capable of critical thinking...You know what they want? They want obedient workers. People who are just smart enough to run the machines and do the paperwork, and just dumb enough to passively accept all these increasingly shittier jobs with the lower pay, the longer hours, the reduced benefits, the end of overtime, and the vanishing pension that disappears the minute you go to collect it..."

So what are you doing reading this? Time to climb into your S-Fuck-UV, sit in traffic for an hour, making sure to kill your quota of polar bears, show up five minutes late to your designated cube and waste another ten minutes getting a multisyllabic reaming from your asshole boss, who's surely in the same sinking boat as you, as all of us, are. But may all the gods lend you aid in getting him to recognize that fact. After all, "The climate's changing all the time." Nothing wrong here. Go back to sleep.

In Honor of President's Day

we offer this critique of the Obama Administration by special guest columnist Friedrich Nietzsche:

Hope. Pandora brought the jar with the evils and opened it. It was the gods` gift to man, on the outside a beautiful, enticing gift, called the "lucky jar." Then all the evils, those lively, winged beings, flew out of it. Since that time, they roam around and do harm to men by day and night. One single evil had not yet slipped out of the jar. As Zeus had wished, Pandora slammed the top down and it remained inside. So now man has the lucky jar in his house forever and thinks the world of the treasure. It is at his service; he reaches for it when he fancies it. For he does not know that that jar which Pandora brought was the jar of evils, and he takes the remaining evil for the greatest worldly good--it is hope, for Zeus did not want man to throw his life away, no matter how much the other evils might torment him, but rather to go on letting himself be tormented anew. To that end, he gives man hope. In truth, it is the most evil of evils because it prolongs man`s torment.

--Human, All Too Human (1878) #71
(Photo by Photo by Pete Souza, whitehouse.gov)