Power Systems, Noam Chomsky

Many of Chomsky’s recent books are more or less transcriptions of interviews by David Barsamian. They explore questions such as, Why does the radical right oppose social security, both today and at its birth?, and public education, the most recent strategy being charter schools? Chomsky’s take is that these social functions create solidarity, they contribute to community and so undermine the notion, favored by the right, that we’re on our own, isolated individuals looking out for number one! Solidarity, working together, threatens elite-rule. The Egyptian Spring and other uprisings worry the elite and when they’re worried they double down on the propaganda machine.

Aristotle, according to Chomsky, concluded, after studying governing options, that democracy was probably the best one. A problem though is that since the poor vastly outnumber the rich, under democracy the poor may decide to confiscate wealth. His solution to that problem was… LESS INEQUALITY. Alexander Hamilton, one of the founders of the United States offered, and he was not alone, a quite different solution to that problem… LESS DEMOCRACY. This polarity weaves throughout our history, the Hamilton faction all too often prevailing. The scapecoating and obsequious service to the 1% by republicans and democrats with expensive campaigns to run, scrutiny of that same class by the Bernie Sanders campaign are a current manifestation. The “middle ground” is occupied by the current frontrunner. The likely choice this Fall will, once again, be between the one who wants to break both of your legs and arms and the one who will only break the legs.

Among the elite there is a range of opinion that you can see reflected in the elite-owned mainstream media, presented as if that were the whole picture. The range is pretty much an argument on how big the middle class buffer between the rulers and the rabble need be. The faction that thinks it should be very small indeed has come to dominate since Reagan, forcing democrats into becoming “new democrats”, that is, republican-lite, what used to be moderate republicans, an extinct species.

An interesting diversion from the political, Barsamian inquires about language, the field where Chomsky made his professional reputation. He explains that language, unique to humans, has only been around about 100,000 years. This is too short a period to be explained by evolution. There must be some minor genetic variant accounting for it, just as in biology the difference between an elephant and a gnat reduces to that kind of slight genetic shift. Chomsky is 87 now and still going strong. In response to Barsamian’s question about how long he intends to maintain his activism he said he’d just keep going until he can’t anymore. The man flies all over the place giving talks, not hesitating to take the grueling flight to Turkey or South America. You’d think the guy often referred to as the greatest intellectual alive, the 8^th most quoted author on the planet, might get a little mainstream media air-time but the the NO on this is predicted by Chomsky’s own analysis of the range of “respectable” opinion, being that range among the rulers, all else pretty much excluded.

But back to the political: part of how education is under attack, aside from the teach-to-test strategy that kills both love of learning and teaching, is in its approach. The pour water (information) into a bucket method is the current emphasis because it encourages obediance. The other method encourages learning to learn, creativity, questioning authority, obviously not supported by elite power. On top of this we have large increases in tuition that make higher education ever more elitist, limiting it to the wealthy or creating a sort of indentured debt that will channel behavior into repayment, leaving little time or energy for examining or questioning the 1% dominated system. There is no reason that the richest country on the planet cannot offer free education, K through college. It is done by Finland and most of Western Europe (although segments of elite forces there would very much like to emulate the United States – witness EU, German banks really, insistence on brutal austerity for Greece and Spain).

On the current presidential race Chomsky describes Sanders as a decent new-deal democrat, not a socialist as he claims. Clinton of course is republican-lite, a corporate business-as-usual candidate. Trump/Cruz, the whole remaining republican slate, represent blowback from years of vicious republican exploitation of basic fears and prejudices. After being manipulated into voting against their own interests in election after election citizens have begun to notice that something is wrong, things haven’t gotten better, quite the reverse. Trump is tapping into that malaise, offering up the usual targets/scapegoats but in a way that bombastically amplifies the previous more subtle manipulation. Ironically one of the biggest practitioners of what has created the malaise has convinced many that he is the solution. Kind of like Obama appointing Larry Summers and other designers of the financial disaster to administer the economy. Bernie Sanders also is tapping into that alienated demographic but in a way that actually addresses the causes of the insecurities and abandonment of large segments of the population. A serious transfer of wealth from workers to the already wealthy cannot be sustained without some kind of reaction. 1930s Germany demonstrated the kind of forces that can be unleashed when the masses of citizens are alienated and highly insecure economically.

Yew Nawk City, quick trip

Gotta set aside climate change guilt sometimes, do some rationalization. I figure the airplane’s going there anyway, with or without me… and my credit card points make it almost free… so we fly. Got the very last seats, no window but plenty of avant garde audio from the engine just on the other side of that thin skin. We navigate our way to the East Village and though we enjoy a very pleasant visit with daughter and son-in-law, this is about three days of museum-hopping in Yew Nawk.

Day 1. MOMA (Museum of Modern Art): We use my time-tested strategy – zip through the whole shebang, go get a coffee, decide what to go back to for a closer look. Except coffee is rip-off expensive and my companions have had enough so it is only me re-visiting the exquisite Picasso, Cezanne, Mondrian, DeKooning, Van Gogh (always a crowd around that guy)… that whole history they have there, thanks largely to Alfred Barr their early genius curator. There are newer works scattered outside the exhibition area proper, like a fine large Basquiat and a Jaspar Johns, his cross-hatch period.

Basquiat reminds me of a student I had in grad school. I asked folks to go up to the chalk board, one at a time, and draw something. Most folks had a little stage fright, like being asked to give an impromptu speech. One student though was nonplussed, improvising freely with the most delightful imagery just flowing out of his chalk. I hated later to see it erased. That’s what Basquiat seemed to possess, that uninhibited ability to freely draw. Picasso remarked that it took him forty years to learn to draw like a child. I think I know what he meant.

Johns’ painting was large-ish too, maybe 8′ square, consisting of parallel lines in bundles, “cross-hatching” but the line bundles stood alone, they didn’t cross each other. Where Basquiat was primarily about spontaneous imagery, Johns was about paint. The “cross-hatching” merely provided a place to put oozing, rich layers of color which sometimes splendidly dripped. Speaking of drips, a mini Jackson Pollock retrospective exhibit traced how he gradually evolved toward the later drips and splatters.

A room of large electronic screens, perhaps a dozen, each depicted maps and a hand marking a journey, while a voice-over described the trip. Conceptual Art, if that is what this was,… I get it but I’m also sort of over it. Some pieces, like one I saw at the Whitney the following day, hit me but mostly, he sheepishly confesses, that genre tries my patience. My painting addiction will not be diverted by that stuff much anymore, even though I’ve quit painting myself.

Day 2. The Whitney Museum of American Art, the new one. Interesting to discover that the Metropolitan Museum of Art has taken over the old Whitney on Madison Ave for their more adventuresome shows. We walked from the East Village, crossed the chilly Williamsburg Bridge, for the view, caught the subway back to 14^th Street and walked then east to the Whitney. These museums ya know are expensive. And two floors being closed ought to warrant a discount. The new joint provides a view of the Hudson River and Manhattan from it’s balconies that stretch ever further east as you descend floor to floor. Like the Guggenheim, they recommend starting at the top.

Speaking of Conceptual Art, the top floor is occupied by Laura Poitras, the very same who documented whistleblower supreme Edward Snowden’s flight to Hong Kong then Russia. Laura herself had to sort of hide out until the dust settled, feeling justifiably, that the Patriot Act etc; made her freedom questionable, daring to question authority as she had. She was put on a watch list resulting in over 50 interrogations. So, the whistle blowers get hunted like criminals and the criminality they reveal gets hidden behind that famous last refuge of a scoundrel, the flag. This exhibit offers, aside from its own message, one that suggests the 1%, who fund these kind of museums, aren’t across the board right wing crazies like some I could mention (initials are Koch), for they would freak out by the exhibit if they were. There are slots in a darkened corridor in which are brightly lit memos, presumably obtained through the FOIA (freedom of information act), from CIA to NSA. The memos are not particularly damning in themselves, the ones I read, but generally raise the sinister issue of spying and manipulation. Another dark room allows you to ly down on a carpeted platform and observe a view of the nightly heavens, speeded up so you can see the zodiacs pass, along with clouds and occasional tracers or drones, muffled radio transmissions – as seen from Pakistan and Afghanistan. The vast cosmos shrinks the importance we mortals place on the most trivial of endeavors. Its indifference falls on the just and the unjust. Moving into the next room you see infra red video of yourself arriving and lying on the platform and you feel the shadow of the presence of the National Security Agency. A nearby wall is hung with FOIA memos, heavily redacted, to the point of absurdity.

On the next floor down is a show of portraits by artists of artists or self-portraits, a fine Alfred Leslie in gray, a Warhol by Alice Neel, a selfie by the sadly late Hanna Wilke. Her use of her own body as subject at first was indistinguishable from cheesecakebut as time passed and she aged, then contracted cancer, the difference became jarringly obvious. A few warhols remind me that he is an artist one can’t dismiss. His soup cans at MOMA were stand out, and immensely popular – people were contantly posing in front of them for photos. In the far end of that space, facing a mirror which reflects the view out onto that floor’s balcony, and doubles his already large self, is a wax sculpture of Julian Schnabel. “He” towers above the spectators in the round as he does in life, and ego rumor has it. There’s one of his broken plate paintings in the show also, the plates providing “canvas” for the portrait.

There were several other exhibitions that didn’t move me enough to mention. But a Michael Heizer conceptual piece is worth a word: the artist dug (or had dug) a 32′ deep hole in Germany then photographed the side and top edge from below before filling the hole back in. The exhibition which the Whitney proudly “owns”, consists of huge blowups of those photos, probably size-determined by the room which boasts of being the largest column-less space in Manhattan, something like that. That I can describe this and you needn’t actually experience it yourself is characteristic of Conceptual Art. I used to love this kind of stuff but lately I’m hopelessly, anachronistically enthralled by paintings of a previous era.

The High Line was too chilly for more than a brief foray so we walked back, through Greenwich Village, to the east side. New York is like that, unique neighborhoods, just walking the streets is a treat as fascinating as the museums, to a visitor at least. The homeless no doubt see it differently, but from that POV most places look pretty dismal.

Day 3. The MET (Metropolitan Museum of Art). The last time I was in town there was a construction fence blocking off the northeast side with a sign thanking David Koch for funding the renovation. So apparently he’s not all bad… or has too much money, or too many fingers in our culture. A guy who doesn’t accept climate change on the board of the Smithsonian. How does that work?

I used a different approach to the MET. I went straight to Washington Crossing the Deleware, that grand, if not grandiose, depiction from our founding mythology. It’s an impressive work. In the same room is a Bierdstadt illustrating an eight wigwam Indian village, with fascinating detail of daily life, next to a placid lake below impossibly huge mountains. An early Inness Italian landscape hangs nearby. I more or less rushed, from there, past Sargent, Eakins, the Ash Can school, some fine Mary Cassette and on to the Rembrandts, passing incredible paintings with only a glance. I did pause at a small but superbly detailed Joachim Wtewael and just couldn’t not pause at Vermeer… but the Rembrandts… I’ve been thinking lately these are the greatest paintings ever made. The Frans Hals aren’t bad either, though more extroverted, and further along is Bruegel’s Harvest painting, one of five, according to a tour guide who happened to be there, depicting the seasons… why five? Dunno.

Next, the Picassos and Cezannes and Matisses mainly. But who can ignore Gauguin, Van Gogh (crowded as ever), Pissaro, Monet… then dashing to the more recent stuff, Dubuffet, Jackson Pollack (whom I’m apparently finally ready for) Pat Steir, Chuck Close,… and Klee, Kandinsky, Stuart Davis, and Norman Rockwell – an exquisite painting by someone often dismissed as cornball… for all this work I need synonyms for the word exqusite. A Thomas Hart Benton mural reassembled from somewhere (?) in a large room is pretty impressive. The powerful painting touches on about every social theme you can think of, workers, drinkers, travelers, children, prostitutes, partyers, businessers, farmers… I guess that’s why they call it Americana. I’ve been reading a biography of DeKooning and find that DeKooning, Arshille Gorky and John Graham were the big guns of 30s New York. Here they all had paintings in the same room and of the same year, 1944, year of my birth… is that an omen or what?

The MET has a nice admission policy. They don’t promote it much but it’s whatever you want to donate, making it very affordable if you’ve got the nerve. They’ll get you back though at the cafeteria, watch those calories. Down the elegant MET steps on Fifth Avenue, over in a light rain to Lexington, south to find a subway entrance, down into the bowels again, south to Astor and that walk to home base and dinner, past Cooper Union, the Village Voice, busy busy streets, full of vitality and character, sky-high rent for postage stamp-sized apartments. One last night in that heady city before tripping back here, to the land of neanderthal politician-philosophers.

Budgets Three, One for Thee

There are three budget proposals up for a vote soon, the President’s, the House of Representative’s and the Progressive Caucus’. The Progressive proposal is aligned with what polls say the general public wants so naturally this one doesn’t have a chance. The other two go to different lengths to cut services for the general public and increase breaks for the wealthy, corporations and spending for the military. The fiscal year for this budget kicks off October 1.

The annual budget to-do follows this order: the president submits his to congress (dead in the water, given the hostility of this Congress to anything the president proposes), lawmakers submit theirs, the Senate and House resolve the differences among the three, the president signs it. It’s almost never done on time so temporary funding resolutions are passed to keep the government going until the new budget is passed.

Enough hustlers run for Congress because that seat brings their greedy hands within proximity of the national treasury, so that insures that a lot of wrangling will go on this time of year. It’s not an attractive process. Say a corporation spends one million dollars to bribe, excuse me, to help key senators with their reelection campaigns. A pretty good investment if the budget process channels a couple billion their way.

President Obama’s budget adheres to the numbers from last year’s. Sequestration is the law that requires all budget items to be cut by a fixed percentage if the various factions can’t come to agreement. Of course they will always find a way to exclude the military from this meat cleaver. The President calls for an end to sequestration, a Reagan-era idea and part of the anti-government trappings of that reactionary regime.

The military gets a $2 billion increase with an extra “slush fund” of $59 billion – so named because it doesn’t have to justify itself. An interesting factoid: the Pentagon is excluded from the necessity that all other departments are subject to, the annual audit. Doesn’t that make the whole thing a slush fund? By the way, the U.S. spends more on the military than most of the rest of the world combined. Billions have literally disappeared in Iraq and Afghanistan, no one knows where those dollars went or in whose pockets it now resides. Imagine the scandal if the food stamp program or Planned Parenthood couldn’t account for billions of taxpayer dollars.

There is also a capital gains tax increase in Obama’s budget, sure to fall on deaf GOP ears.

The House proposal is light on detail but prioritizes deficit reduction and claims to create jobs – as usual by cutting taxes for the wealthy using the same old same old discredited trickle-down theory. The $59 billion military slush fund is in the House version, as well as the over $550 billion “defense” budget.

I remember complaining about the $250 billion spent annually on the military but 911 apparently gave the Pentagon a license to print money. Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine discloses how sordid politicians habitually lie in wait for a crisis under the cover of which they can loot the treasury and pass unpopular measures. 911 was an answer to their prayers.

This budget calls for $30 billion in cuts to discretionary funding, like Medicare, Medicaid, Food Stamps… programs that serve the general public as opposed to those citizens, the important ones, with the tax cuts. Over ten years this budget would slash $887 billion affecting domestic initiatives. There is also a shift to the states of the cost to administer programs, another funding burden that makes for an indirect tax increase on ordinary workers. Or maybe this provision is just another way of sabotaging the services. Or, likely, it’s both.

The Progressive Caucus (75 representatives and 1 senator – Bernie Sanders of course) proposal repeals sequestration and invests in domestic initiatives, job creation, education and other popular programs. The job-creation, unlike the House proposal, is specific, diverting (presumably from the Pentagon) $1 trillion over ten years to invest in the nation’s infrastructure and creation of 3.6 million jobs by 2016.

The Progressive Caucus budget would eliminate the Pentagon slush fund, moving it into the main budget which is slightly more accountable, and requires defense department auditing for the first time. There are cute little items in the military budget, not subject to sequestration caps, like the Overseas Contingency Operations (OCO) fund. It would cut the new-but-doesn’t-work-yet-but-trust-us F35 jet fighter and reduce nuclear weapons funding.

Obama's budget proposes $10 trillion over 30 years in nuclear arms spending... and this guy’s a liberal? We should spend trillions to increase the dangers to civilization? Who are his advisors on this, the NRA?

The Progressive Caucus budget foresees savings when troops are finally withdrawn from Afghanistan and Iraq and increases funding for diplomacy over war (gee, isn't that unAmerican?). It would also raise taxes by closing the capital gains loophole which taxes wealthy income at a lower rate than working people. Not that the rich don’t work – they work, some of ’em, very hard, at maintaining and expanding their privileges. There is only so much privilege and money so how it is distributed affects us all and our system is set up to favor, you might have anticipated this, the elite. This same elite would be stopped, under this plan, from avoiding taxes using off-shore trickery.

Polls show that Medicare and Medicaid are considered very important programs by 63% of our citizenry. Similar numbers support national health care and most of the Progressive Caucus budget.

The House budget is most likely to reach the President’s desk. It reflects how the general public goes woefully underrepresented in our theoretically representative government, which for various reasons, not least the lack of public financing of elections, ends up representing, above all, the interests of that infamous 1% – the ones whose tactics of domination, of divide and conquer, have overstepped, creating odious blowback in the form of Donald Trump.

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Author’s Note: This article draws heavily from a recent webinar sponsored by Women’s Action for New Directions (WAND).

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• Image: The illustration is by the author, Tom Ferguson.

Where the Bodies Were Buried, T.J. English, a review

T.J. English writes what my librarian calls, “guy books.” – books about the mob, organized crime and criminal justice: gangsters in Hell’s Kitchen, Vietnamese gangs in China Town, the History of the Irish mob and this one, about the infamous Boston gangster Whitey Bulgar. His murderous escapades were sanctioned, even abetted, over a twenty year period, by segments of law enforcement and the FBI. This book covers the trial that convicted Bulgar, sentencing him to life x 2 plus 75 years, and the suppression of the story of government malfeasance.

Anyone who has worked in an organization, particularly a large one, knows that certain ambitious and unscrupulous parties maneuver always to advance their status. If they finally get to the top, then the way to promotion in that organization becomes aiding and abetting the unscrupulous. Conversely the way to ruin is honesty or whistle-blowing. Thus was the organizational status of the FBI under J. Edgar Hoover, manifested to the Nth degree in Boston, in this case from the 70s to 1995.

The few who questioned the policies that used Whitey Bulgar as an informant to decimate the Italian Mafia in Boston and Providence, Road Island, protecting his criminality to the extent of murder, were rebuffed. One idealist was drummed out of the FBI very close to retirement, thus losing that hard won benefit. The arrest and conviction of the regional Mafia leader, the Patriarca crime family as represented by Raymond Patriarca Senior was the goal of this unsavory alliance. It had been determined on high (Hoover), after years of denial that the mob even existed, that the way to promotion and bonuses now lay in busting the mafia. So allowing non-mafia criminals to thrive in order to take down Mafia figures was a no-brainer under those guidelines. Not perhaps to the honest agent but that wasn’t who counted.

As a consequence, Bulgar’s inner circle known as the “Winter Hill Gang” felt immune and proceeded to conduct their illegal activities unhindered, committing gruesome murders along with their other loathsome racketeering. In several instances, as part of the FBI’s determination to maintain and protect their source, Bulgar was tipped off as to “snitches” in his own or allied gang’s ranks, resulting in predictable and swift death to said snitch. In at least one instance, Bulgar felt so confident of his immunity he invited a fellow gangster to his home, beat and tortured him to obtain as much of his ready cash as he could, $50,000 in this case, then killed him, burying the body in his rented basement. Joining this basement of bodies, that gave English his book title, were two women who Bulgar and his team concluded had to go, knew too much, were loose cannons, women who actually had nothing to do with the organization but may have picked up information incidentally hanging out with these killers. One was Bulgar’s mistress, the other his closest associate’s step-daughter, who was abusing her and decided to shut her up.

Again and again during the trial, Bulgar’s lawyers attempted to bring in what they argued was the “context” of their client’s situation – government enabling. This the prosecutor fought quite successfully to disallow, obviously not because it was irrelevant as claimed but to protect law enforcement from the stain that public knowledge of their little project would bring. They already had statuette of limitation immunity but, like the police wall of blue, these prosecutors protected their own. Part of that protection came out of the fact that Bulgar had been on the lam for sixteen years, tipped off to imminent arrest by his FBI handler, John Connolly. That agent was the only one on that side of the equation to be prosecuted for his involvement, which included taking money, trips, gifts and socializing with the Winter Hill gang. In Connolly’s case he came perilously close to being a member of the gang. The FBI prides itself on its legendary (if mythical) reputation of incorruptibility and was anxious to limit its exposure on this count. The Justice Department, not for the first time, made a joke of its own name and shared the FBI’s concern to limit the damage. Another discouraging item is the fact that so many of the government’s witnesses had participated in murder yet were granted immunity in exchange for their testimony. One even went on to star in a TV Reality show. A parallel situation, I’d say, is the DOJ and Obama Administration allowing his predecessor, the organized gang in the White House under George W, to skate on their war crimes (illegal invasions, torture etc;).

If you’re a “guy” in my librarian’s sense, you’ll appreciate T.J. English’s diligently researched take on criminality. It is incredibly frustrating to have this scourge preying on our society and infuriating to learn of blatant corruption among those who take oaths to oppose it. As Dylan said in his song Hurricane,

“couldn’t help but make me feel ashamed
to live in a land where justice is a game.“

A Talk and a Book on Israel and the U.S.

Jeff Halper, an Israeli peace activist, spoke at Atlanta's Oakhurst Baptist Church Monday night (2/29/16). He confirms and elaborates much of what Noam Chomsky says on the subject of Israel-U.S. relations in his talk and War on the People, his book. Halper raises the question, why does the U.S. so unconditionally support Israel, enabling a brutal occupation and blocking peace with the Palestinians? He dismisses several conventional answers as being factors but in themselves not satisfactory: the U.S. christian right expecting Armageddon in the mid-east and the Israeli lobby. He proposes instead two other rather troubling factors: The famous U.S. Military Industrial Complex, (which President Eisenhower so wisely warned us about, when leaving office, but so heartily endorsed while in office) and Israel's formidable companion. 

The U.S. complex, Boeing, Lockheed etc; obviously favors war and threats of war because that enhances their bottom line. The Israeli cousin does the same. The natural resource of oil is not overlooked in this analysis.    

The United States is the largest arms merchant on the planet, producing the really big stuff. The new F-35 bomber Halper cites as a huge financial commitment (for the taxpayer), and whether it works is not particularly relevant. Profit-making will occur just as whether the meat was rotten or not did not affect the profits for the entrepreneurs flocking to supply the army during the civil war. Israel produces the little stuff, the highly sophisticated electronic apparatus that so enhances the killing machine. U.S. drones are really souped up Israeli drones.     

Interestingly, Israel has unprecedented access to U.S. technology, uses that knowledge, selling it around the world. In a sort of circular logic, the alliance incentivizes itself to ever greater accomplishment in order to stay ahead and retain its position as go-to armaments dealer. Israel also is guaranteed by the U.S. a frontal position. If the U.S. sells armaments to Saudi Arabia for example ($7 billion recently), Israel must get the more advanced, cutting edge stuff, ahead of all rivals. Israel will receive the new U.S. F-35 bomber before, that's right, before the U.S. military.    

Halper reminds us that Israel is about the size of New Jersey yet, all told, is guaranteed $70 billion from the U.S. over the next ten years, in military assistance. That tiny country is the 4^th most powerful nuclear-armed nation. It can deliver its warheads within a geographic circle which passes through London. So U.S. politians make a great to-do about Iran who has zero nukes and no way to deliver them if they had them. But nary a word about Israel. Though the U.S. has military bases in 174 countries (there are only 200+ countries) Israel has military relations with 130. The U.S. bases are mainly enclaves in countries from which to attack other countries. Israel's presence goes deeper and is very profitable. These relations include countries with which the U.S. is at odds, China and Russia for example.    

This brings us to Israel's export of its expertise in security – everything from fences to surveillance to truly scary nanno technology weaponization, all aimed at what Halper calls the War Against the People or Securocratic Warfare. Israeli websites (there are 500 arms companies in Israel) advertise their war stuff as “combat proven” and here is another reason Israel opposes peace with the Palestinians. Gaza and the West Bank are handy sites to test their weaponry and security apparatus.    

Halper ends his presentation with a local disturbing twist, a list of Georgia law enforcement personnel who have traveled to Israel for training. This is part of the militarization of policing that accompanies the erosion of civil rights, the Patriot Act etc; Halper points out that the act was passed so quickly that it had to have been on the shelf, ready to go, just awaiting the proper “crisis”. Israel has developed leading expertise in repression, or more kindly, control (of Palestinians) and this expertise is, apparently, a prized commodity among those who wish to suppress dissidents. Substitute the Occupy Movement for Palestinian, or any other movement that calls for significant questioning of the global who-rules-for-whose-benefit. Israel's gruesome calling card might as well read, like the old TV cowboy assassin, Have Gun Will Travel. Or, it might be modernized to Have Repression Technology, Will Deliver... not as catchy, or economical but hell, by now they can afford it.

The Grand Old Party Animal

   





















 In my neighborhood rats are quite timid and though definitely there, are little seen. In my wanderings I've noticed that when these creatures become bold as squirrels and many in number, and the cats are correspondingly few, it is time to take prudent measures.
     In my wanderings I've also noticed certain elite urban country clubs. Though all are exclusive, in a way of speaking, they are of varied affluence. They occur in many neighborhoods in the cities and plains of our great world and are named according to local vernacular ie, Gentlemen's Societies, Daughters of the Confederacy, Associations for the Adancement of White People, Chambers of Commerce, Nationalism, Plutocracy, Fascism etc; Some have evolved out of elite but “moderate” organs, exploiting whatever respectability the former organization once held but instituting a more rigorous mission statement. Republican National Headquarters and local affliliates are a prime example of this latter group. Some might argue that the respectability associated with this party is quite meager, citing as they might, an earlier acronym used in one of their campaigns – CREEP, the Committee to Reelect the President – but I think most sober observers would admit to at least a noticeable tightening of the mission statement since those heady days.
      The Mafia is to the 1% as the Republicans are to the Democrats, that is, not exactly the same but similar. A high government official for example would sadly accept a medical professional's good faith failure to save a loved one whereas the gangster Don might use violence and threats, his primary vocational tools, to promote successful treatment and death to punish failure. But in matters of domination and control, it is perfectly accurate to compare, say a small business in the hood failing to pay “protection” money to the mob and a small country in the 1%'s government's self-declared “back yard” who attempts an alternative to “market forces”. This comparison is not apparent to the general population due to the government's employer, the 1%, who exercise disproportionate influence via their ownership of the mainstream media, their financing of political campaigns, their presence on the boards of our institutions and of course corporations. This control allows propagation of fairy tale narratives regarding the beneficient nature and superiority of the “homeland”, especially its foreign policy. The zealotry of the faction among the 1% which advocates more or less total domination has gradually come to the fore, starting most enthusiastically with Ronald Reagan's presidency, a hired gun if there ever was one. But he seems quaintly moderate by comparison to what has evolved since. This faction would mark Reagan's ascendency as the point where recovery began from the limitations imposed by the New Deal. The 1% hated Roosevelt and his programs in his time and their descendents inherited a determination to roll them back. 
     The Democratic party has responded to these forces generally by becoming “New Democrats”, ie, Bill Clinton, The “moderate” element in the GOP, pushed mostly aside, worried that the zealots were going too far. Not that they objected to the wealthy having it all on principle. No, their objection was pragmatic. They argued that a buffer was needed between the rulers and the rabble, a nice affluent middle class, the ones who vote and maintain a respectable illusion of democracy. If things get bad enough, they fear, the voters will start listening to the socialists. The zealots were having none of it and the appeal of the candidacy of Bernie Sanders is one of the consequences.
      Stangnant wages, insecurity, unemployment... all conditions the 1% seem intent on normalizing for U.S. workers. A parallel condition ensues where, as Bernie Sanders points out, bankers swindle millions of people out of their pensions and savings and are, at worst, fined while someone who doesn't wear a three-piece suit spends serious time in prison for smoking marijuana. The National Security state breaks numerous laws spying on citizens, and the Department of Justice viciously goes after the whistle blower, Edward Snowden in this example, while the NSA lawbreakers continue business as usual, with promises to be nice. The perpetrators of an illegal, brutal and incredibly expensive invasion lie to congress and the people to justify it, killing hundreds of thousands of civilians and creating chaos in the middle east. Their punishment? They are honored with high honorariam speaking engagements and consulted by the 1%-owned media for their “expertise.” Meanwhile a courageous Chelsea Manning exposes some of their murderous behavior and is rewarded with a brutal arrest and impossibly long prison term. Again, the candidacy of Bernie Sanders is one of the consequences of this hypocrisy. Was it Lincoln (or Dylan?) who said, “You can fool all of the people some of the time, and some of the people all of the time, but you can't fool all of the people all of the time.”

A Subversive Activity - reading

In an earlier post I mentioned that I had, via Christopher Hitchens' essays And Yet..., discovered Henrich Heine (whom I had never heard of) and Edmund Wilson (actually I had been aware of him thru Gore Vidal so re-discovered)... well, I have now spent more time with HH and can report that that guy (1797-1856) was a cinematic writer, one who in turns can inspire one to pen and to despair (at one's own feeble efforts). We have the handy word master to apply to folks like that. Florentine Nights, I'd heard of it only vaguely. The narrator returns again and again to visit a dying young woman, pale, bed-ridden and delicate. To persuade her to follow doctor's orders to ly as still as possible, he tells her stories which he presents as from his own life. This is the device he uses to ty the tales together in what might otherwise be a collection of short stories. In another, Ideas – Book Le Grand, he addresses the reader as Madame at the beginning of each chapter, as if talking with or writing to a friend. It eventually evolves to an homage to Napoleon which, like Beethoven's Emporer's Concerto, he came later to repent.

    Heine was famous in his time and quite successful. As I've found reading early writers like Dickens, Rousseau, Voltaire, I'm amazed at how unexpectedly modern they seem. And how so many phrases and sayings I took to be of recent vintage either originated with these writers or were commonplace in their time. I picture the life around them, what was going on: in the U.S., relations with Native Americans were approaching genocide, slavery was perfectly legal, the barbarity in the western U.S. toward animal, vegetable and mineral was pretty much unlimited, women couldn't vote, petty and not so petty wars raged between the great European powers, England, France, Germany... the French Revolution, Napoleon's megalomania (and forced spreading of egalite and liberte). The ruthless cruelty of colonialism was in full swing and... well, plumbing was pretty primitive. But on the other hand there was Handel, Beethoven, Mozart, Ingres, David, Gros, Delecroix, Manet, Goya, Darwin,... and Morse Code, Electricity,... and Heine, who has been compared to the literary giant Goethe whose book Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship was listed by Schopenhauer as one of the four greatest novels ever written, high praise indeed and heady company. BTW claims for the greatest novel have also been made for George Eliot's, Middlemarch. I've only tasted it but can vouch for the superb writing. But back to Heine – what attracted me was Hitchens describing him as a wit. I was in the mood for some laughs. A chuckle is a healthy thing for the ol' bod. Well, that was there all right, a bit Mark Twain-ish maybe. It could be that it doesn't translate well but I found David Sedaris a lot funnier, and Twain of course is the master.

    Edmund Wilson's, To the Finland Station, is a survey, from 1930, of left thinking up to that time, from Michelet to Marx and Lenin. The hysteria conducted by the 1% toward this view, threatened as they were by its call for sharing, attempts to make damned sure that the average person won't go there in their reading or thinking. But Wilson is a remarkable intellectual so fears not thought. You don't have to agree with every paragraph but this is a good place to explore the seriousness of that historical movement.
    His Axel's Castle explores imaginative literature from 1870 – 1930, Yeats, Paul Valery, T.S. Eliot, Proust, Joyce (Ulysses was Joyce's latest book, Finnegan's Wake not yet published), Gertrude Stein and Rimbaud. It is probably my own defect but Yeats bored me silly, I skipped Valery and most of T.S. Eliot, pausing at The Waste Land (odd for a songwriter and poet to say but poetry tends to not entertain me). My interest in the book was primarily Proust and Joyce who Wilson seems to think have written the most momentous fiction. I read a lot of crime fiction. It fits nicely with my energy level when I get around to books late in the night. But when I have dipped into Proust, and Dickens for that matter, I've been rewarded with some spectaculor writing (and now Heine added to that list). Joyce is all right but doesn't knock my socks off. I find in Wilson's analysis that Ulysses was written to parallel the Illiad, a structural device which even Wilson admits is sometimes a cumbersome stretch.

    My own experience reading Finnegan's Wake reminded me of improvised Jazz. I'd read somewhere that the book was filled with references to Greek mythology and cross-cultural references to befuddle even the most extreme cross-word puzzle enthusiasts but, since this doesn't describe me, I found that by thinking of it as improvised jazz and letting it wash over me as I read, it made a kind of sense – a non-literal sense, like the musical idiom where rhythmic riffs are what are important. I must admit to a limited reading (like with the prolific John Foster Wallace I can only take so much in a sitting) but I intend to re-visit some day.
    Joyce's disciple and secretary (I guess that means assistant, typer... whatever) was the subsequently famous fellow Irish-er, Samuel Becket. I spent some time in Paris (1970) and after some battering experiences trying to speak French to Parisians I retreated to reading it, translating Becket to English. Anyway, I then got interested in Becket and read his Murphy, Mallone, The Unnameable, Watt and saw some of his plays performed in Atlanta by the great Del Hamilton.... I was much more taken with him, for a time, than Joyce.
    Interesting that Wilson disses the only woman in his list, more or less claiming that Stein burned herself out after a couple early books. I was curious about Gertrude, supporter of Picasso and Hemingway, as to how she survived, as a Jew in occupied France. I found that the wealthy U.S. citizen retreated to her country place in Vichy. But the question remains, why wasn't she sent to the camps? Or why didn't she, of means, flee? Turns out she was under the protection of an influencial Nazi officer who checked in regularly to make sure she was not rounded up. But that says little about her writing. She interested me as a cultural influence but her writing did not grab me. Like why does one piano player enchant while another, also impressively skilled, leave you cold? I dunno.
    Dylan mentions in his song, Tangled Up in Blue, the subject of Wilson's last portrait, the gifted iconoclast Authur Rimbaud. He's almost as famous as Dylan himself but all his poetry was written in a brief three years after which he abandoned the effort and chased money and, more importantly I guess, experience. I can appreciate the contemplation of being that poetry generally pursues but I find in Dylan, relflecting here my philistinism once again, all the poetry I need (aside from my own, and maybe Robert Bly and Joe Ruesing). This would earn me the mockery of Gore Vidal I know but what can I say, it just doesn't do it for me. My own reflections don't seem to do it for others either so it isn't like this is an egotistic stance. As John Lennon said, Whatever gets you through the night, is alright. And, in further self-defense, quoting the great Popeye, I yam what I yam. I didn't even know what a literary critic was until 1974. Edmund Wilson is one of the stand-outs in that arena, his writing and insights a reward, even after all these years, for the lover of intellect.