Another Inspiring Message of Hope from Rage Against the Machine

Lewis Black on Life Within the Empire

The$e are the Thoughts That Set Fire 2 Your City (An Inspiring Message of Hope from Rage Against the Machine)

Norman Solomon on Getting Out of Iraq (November 21st, 2005)

Originally published at AlterNet. Note how nothing has changed.

If the Pentagon had been able to subdue the Iraqi population, few in Congress or on editorial pages would be denouncing the war. As in so many other respects, this is a way that the domestic U.S. political dynamics of the war on Iraq are similar to what unfolded during the Vietnam War. With the underpinnings of war prerogatives unchallenged, a predictable response is that the war must be fought more effectively.

That's what the great journalist I. F. Stone was driving at when he wrote, a few years into the Vietnam War, in mid-February 1968: "It is time to stand back and look at where we are going. And to take a good look at ourselves. A first observation is that we can easily overestimate our national conscience. A major part of the protest against the war springs simply from the fact that we are losing it. If it were not for the heavy cost, politicians like the Kennedys [Robert and Edward] and organizations like ADA [the liberal Americans for Democratic Action] would still be as complacent about the war as they were a few years ago."

In the United States, while the lies behind the Iraq war become evermore obvious and victory seems increasingly unreachable, much of the opposition to the war has focused on the death and suffering among U.S. soldiers. That emphasis has a sharp political edge at home, but it can also cut another way -- defining the war as primarily deplorable because of what it is doing to Americans. One danger is that a process of withdrawing some U.S. troops could be accompanied by even more use of U.S. air power that terrorizes and kills with escalating bombardment (as happened in Vietnam for several years after President Nixon announced his "Guam Doctrine" of Vietnamization in mid-1969). An effective antiwar movement must challenge the jingo-narcissism that defines the war as a problem mainly to the extent that it harms Americans.

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Senator Mike Gravel (D-AK) on Eisenhower's Warning to Us All

The only rational being running for President speaks in New Hampshire. And while the corporate media would like to pretend this man does not exist they cannot stop us from learning who he is and what he’s done. This is the man who released the Pentagon Papers to the American public, giving us the until-then secret history of the Vietnam War. This is the man who’s calling for Universal Health Care, a National Initiative program and an immediate (not this September, not next September, not when the next President takes office) withdraw from Iraq. He probably won’t get past the primary season (baring an act of some god or another), yet it is unbelievable refreshing to see someone, somewhere, stumping for these issues…especially now that the corporately anointed candidates have revealed themselves to be mewling, spineless pantywaists.

A New Review and Bill Maher on Life Within the Empire (New Rules for March 15, 2007)

And You Thought It Was Safe (?) Reviews They Live. Enjoy it after Bill.

Noam Chomsky on Modern Industrial Civilization

George Carlin on the Ten Commandments

(Not) Our House

Our first choice for a house was owned by a very nice man. When another group of his tenants suffered a devastating fire in their house he offered them “ours”. We did not get that house.

My Ambassador and I discovered our second choice of a house while on a walk around the neighborhood. We were (or, at least, I was) on a St. Patrick’s Day quest for Guinness and noticed the house. Two blocks down from our current moldering roach trap. Three bedrooms. Two stories. A back yard. A detached, two door garage. A finished basement complete with carpeting and a secret room I’d loved to turn into a Batcave…all this and a tree in the back yard, its branches pruned and sawed away, true, but it was still a live and I planned to see that it grew strong in time…but we were slow.

As a unit, as a household, we were slow. Uncoordinated. There are four of us now: my self, my Co-President Dye, my Ambassador (who is also my love and heart) and our new member who of this writing has not received nearly enough ceremony. She has yet to be initiated into the modern self-made family/nation state we call Monster Island. I supposed she will be Speaker for the Conclave at some point (thereby giving us a Legislative branch to balance our Duel Executive) but that point has yet to come. At present she does not even live with us. And while she has the soul of a patient confidant I have the distinct impression that she is not yet One of Us…and will only become so through the same patient weathering process that drove all of us toward each other and made us all what we are now.

We will find a house. We must. We can no longer manage this place. Rent is up a hundred dollars in three years and we’ve suffered a parade of foolish, self-infatuated toads who’ve posed as our Apartment managers. The current batch are no better than their predecessors. They check smoke detectors. They hand out maintenance request forms. They accept rent checks and general ignore us, their “valuable” tenants. There is no doubt that when (no longer “if”) we get our house they (and their corporate masters) will rape us for every penny they deem necessary to repair all the “wear and tear” in this moist cardboard box.

I suppose I should take another walk. It’s warm enough. Spring has come and my adopted city is green and good again. Who knows what I might find.

My Presidential Predictions

With the Main Event still eighteen months away and the field crowded in what the The Daily Show has rightly termed a “clusterfuck to the White House,” I’m going to go out on a limb here and toss out my prediction for InDecision 2008. Because politics, like war, is quickly becoming a matter of who gets their first with the most, as the current obsession over the candidates first quarter fundraising (Mitt Romney leading the pack with $23 million in the bank) shows us. The most money in the bank and the most boots on the ground. The most Secretaries of State on your campaign staff and the most voting machine companies on your contributors list. The most family friends on the supreme court and the most family members in swing state governorships. And while it is exceedingly hard to measure little things like that at the moment (none of the current candidates have allowed anything more than the usual suspicious signs to flit through the media filter…hell, at this point, they all know no one but the camera crews are really paying attention…they can, at this point, pretty much get away with anything short of going on Larry King and admitting they enjoy sodomizing cheerleaders on the hoods of expensive sports cars) I will go out on a limb and predict that our next president will be…a white, Anglo-Saxon, protestant male.

Surprised?

Preface to Initial Conclusion after One Day of Experimentation in the Field of Modular Thinking

Today I mastered the ability to do my job without the need for directed, conscious thought.

Let me explain: though I am a thoughtful soul, and would never advocate the voluntary suspension of conscious activity. However, as my job does not demand even the slightest pretence of such activity, I would much prefer my cognitive energies be directed toward something else. Anything else.

So I began experimenting, knowing that while the Western tradition is quick to separate body and mind into distinct, oppositional objects, the Eastern tradition is in large part based upon the idea of mind and body affecting each other in a holistic unity. Trance states, hypnosis, self-induced feats of superpowered mental control...all these are, theoretically, possible, in so much as anything is possible. Proceeding thusly, I managed to spend the entire day plotting a scene from my current story, while at the same time working a full days work to my usual high degree of capacity. I know, because my work is so routinized, so autonomic, so absolutely unvarying, that any variance in the movement of my hands, the timbre of my voice, or the inflection in my callers response instantly dragged me from my self-induced, story-plotting state (what my bosses would no doubt label “daydreaming”) and into full attention.

I didn’t fuck up. And I didn’t get caught. Loose yourself in a story, especially one of your own, in any other public place…a school, say…and it wouldn’t be long before the local jumped up authority figure came down on you hard for having a spark of interest in your glassy-eyed stare. (Capital crime in my old school…you could drool all you wanted as long as you trained your eyes to follow the teacher…but all the gods help you if you stared out the window.) But at our jobs we are truly isolated…as apart as you can be in a room full of people, answering the phone all day. The walls of our “pods” (a cubicle by any other name still has three sides and no privacy and no view of anything other than my coworkers cubicles) separate us from each other. The phones separate us from our “customers”. Office doors separate our supervisors from us and miles of distance separate me from my home, this apartment, this chair, and the…absolutely…beautiful creature sleeping in my bed…

The point is, no one noticed me. Tonight I came home, wrote down what I’d thought about, and found enough inspiration in that to write more. It was (even though my superstitions make me loath to admit it) a good day, all told. I hope to repeat my experiment tomorrow. Whoever may read this: wish me well. I’d do the same for you.

April Fool

The scene: 9:45 a.m. I’ve just woken up.
Her: “You know those at home pregnancy tests?”
Me: “Um…yes…”
Her: “Well…I already took one…and you know what…we should play the lottery…because we’re good at beating long odds.”
Me: “…you’ve got be fucking kidding me. There’s no way. There’s just no way.”
Her: “There’s something else.”
Me:…what is it?
Her:...April Fools!

Spring is here and I feel a profound sense of disconnection. For the past months I’ve only felt comfortable when truly alone. When you’re alone there is no self-censorship. No selective omission. No need for strategic truths. When you’re alone you’re completely cut off from the responsibility of interacting with others. It is a condition as liberating as it is potentially dehumanizing.

Most of the time I long for nothing more than a quiet moment to myself. A moment to stare and think. An hour. An entire day. I rarely find time for things, being that I (foolishly, perhaps) chose to live in a major American urban center…with people that I love…rather than go all Walden on everyone. If, as Thoreau said, “A man is measured by the things he can leave behind,” then I have certainly inherited the dreaded “short gene.” I am too lazy to build a cabin in the woods and too antisocial to do anything else. I work all day at my mechanized job, and at night I lock myself inside a room and star into my computer. This soul-less, humming box that is certainly inhuman in its unfailing ability to do only what it is told.

I feel as if I have assimilated some of its less-enjoyable traits. I, too, seem to suffer from a bad habit of doing what I’m told, of acquiescing to other’s needs, of not getting what I want, or even knowing what that is. Of having nothing to want…or wanting only the impossible.

Jagger said, “If you try some times, you just might find you get what you need.” I will continue to try. Otherwise all of this is going to turn balls-up, into the sixth season of Buffy. And nobody wants that. That would just be maudlin.

Shamless Friend Promotion

This month my roommate, Action, is a guest D.J. over at church of girl radio. Those who frequent this page are herby ordered to listen to her chosen songs. There is no better, quicker, or more efficient way to fathom the depths of her. As I writer, I find her autobiography (visible for free) a work of craft, while her occasional bouts of self-expression (rough and ready though they are) have the spark of true Art.

Philosophizing, Issue Two: Rousseau

Born in Geneva in 1712, Jean-Jacques Rousseau is a breath of fresh air to the utilitarian selfishness of Nietzscheianism and the grinding sameness of everyday life. In spite of a constant, withering criticism of the world in which he lived (which is still our world in more ways that matter than not) he nevertheless, at his core, possesses an optimistic vision of humanity that howls with a romanticism that is almost…foreign to these times. I quote Rousseau at length, there being no other way to quote him (thank you, 18th century French sentence structure):

“If we consider human society with a calm and disinterested eye, it seems to show us nothing but the violence of the powerful and the oppression of the weak; the mind is shocked by the cruelty of the one and equally grieved by the blindness of the other; and as nothing is less stable in human life than those exterior relations, which chance produces oftener than wisdom, and which are called weakness or power, poverty or riches, human establishments appear at first glance like so many castles built upon quicksand; it is only by taking a nearer survey of them, and by removing the dust and sand which surrounds and disguises its edifice, that we can perceive the unshakable basis upon which it [human society] stands and learn to respect its foundations.”

--On the Origin of Inequality

The Half-Assed, Trillion Dollar Proposal

I see one of my Congresspeople, David Wu (D-OR1) is teaming up with a Yale law professor named Bruce Akerman to propose another Way Forward in Iraq. Far from the non-binding resolutions proposed by Congressman Wu’s dickless wonder-colleagues in the Senate, the two’s plan calls for an actual act of Congress…thought not one, it should be noted, that a majority in either House of Congress is willing to support, despite overwhelming evidence that the continued occupation of Iraq is quickly growing as unpopular at home as it has always been abroad.

So call the Wu/Akerman plan “starving the fire.” They call it the "Half-Trillion Dollar Solution." How about calling it the “just one more cigarette” solution. Basically (they write in the American Prospect) Congress will give Our Glorious Leader an ultimatum:

It is Congress's job to restore fiscal balance first, by placing an overall limit on Iraq war expenditures. Congress should limit this president to spending half a trillion dollars on the Iraq war -- and no more.... [T]he president would have no choice but to sign this ceiling to get short-term funding for his war.

You hear that? A half a trillion and no more. Just one more half trillion dollars and no more. Nada. Zip. That is it young man, no more. And when we go to the lake you are to have no dance party. God if I catch you in our wallet again I swear I will snatch the black right off of you.

How absurd it is that we are still debating this. How absurd that my Congressman actually believes Our Glorious Leader will do the sane, rational thing and Bring the Boys Back Home before the money runs out. Because if there’s one man in this country known for sanity and reason his name is George W. Bush.

The Iraq War (I still prefer the Daily Show’s “Mess o’potamia”) will go down in history as the first Ignored War of the twenty-first century. It might as well be taking place on the moon for all the effect it’s had on America’s national shameless march into obese, drug dependent, indolence and work-related injuries. I swear…never has living in an imperialistic superpower felt so…disappointed. We’ve reaped no rewards from this fiasco, and done horrible evil to a people most of us refuse to believe exist. No destiny manifested itself in the Iraqi’s sands; we’re carving that out now with blood and ammo. There are no gods left on our side (unless you count Pat Robertson’s) and we can all see what’s going on for ourselves if only we are willing to look, read and listen. The Iraq War will also go down in history as one of the best documented bits of blood shed in history.

Yet we still manage to go through our day. The peace protests have dwindled, the marchers have dispersed, the glass windows remain unbroken and most of us are just trying to get through the day. War is…gross. It’s hard to watch. It’s harder to go through, after all…part of the reason we’re here and not over there, enjoying the triple digit heat and the roving hoards of bullets.

More likely Our Glorious Leader will decide to let the troops stay right where they are. He’s already hinted that “finishing the job” will be the work of a President who’s name isn’t his. Perhaps he plans to leave the whole damn thing to Jeb, a final Frat prank from older brother to younger. In any case, don’t believe for a second he values the lives of “our troops.” He won’t hesitate to led their funding dry up and leave them stranded in hostile territory, their equipment falling apart, their meals riddled with parasites. As if he’s the first President to leave them so for short-sighted political gain. He’ll probably turn right around and shout, “You see? Those damn Democrats tied my hands. They left our troops balls up in the war zone before the job was done. So remember…vote Republican come November.” After all, he is still George W. Bush, and he still approves his own messages.