July 5, 2008

jesse helms wanted to know whether you wanted negroes working beside your wife and daughters

 

Southern man
better keep your head
Don’t forget
what your good book said
Southern change
gonna come at last
Now your crosses
are burning fast

Neil Young, “Southern Man” (Journey Through the Past)

 

Abraham, Martin, and John … and Jesse

The longtime employer of John McCain’s chief political strategist Charlie Black  passed away today–Black previously served as an enthusiastic strategist for the wretched Jesse Helms, whose god-damned soul is winging hellward at this moment.  Ben Smith sums up the nefarious relationship  and McCain connection on Politico.

The, ummm, whitewashing of this man’s unholy soul has already begun (see the President’s befuddled eulogy below), but the Village Voice, leading with the homepage headline “Jesse Helms Finally Dies,” strikes exactly the right tone:

If we’re lucky, he took some of his bitter bigotry with him.

Jesse Helms, an unrepentant supporter of unnatural causes throughout his life, died of natural causes this morning at the age of 86.

The only sign of moderation ever shown by the longtime North Carolina senator was his decision to stop saying the word “nigger” when he was likely to be quoted in public settings.

The death of Helms is just about the best birthday present the United States could wish for on July 4. Free at last — of Jesse Helms.

(If that sounds rough, well, keep reading for some of Helms’ choice descriptions of the denizens of the Village, below).

Helms made his name dealing racism, not to put too fine a point on it (and oh that he lived to see North Carolina swing Democrat come November, and swing for Obama to boot!), and his personal bete-noir was of course none other than Dr. King.  His lifelong antipathy–he stood foursquare against any holiday associated with MLK, and no doubt saw Martin resurrected when Nelson Manelela spoke before the U. S. Congress, a session publicly boycotted by the lifelong supportetr of the apartheid regime–is sufficient evidence not only of his hideous moral sensibility, but, actually, of his intelligence: unlike so many on the right and left, especially today, forty years after King’s murder, Helms had a pretty good idea of what MLK was all about, and understood that King wasn’t simply looking to some kumbayesque celebration of diversity on the other side of River Jordan.  When Helms said, in 1963, that “”Dr. King’s outfit…is heavily laden at the top with leaders of proven records of communism, socialism and sex perversion, as well as other curious behavior,” he was onto something; I can’t speak to the perversions-and-curiosa, but Helm’s fiery denunciation of King two decades later (1983) is a lot closer to the mark than many of King’s contemporary admirers might be comfortable with:

Throughout his career King, unlike many other civil rights leaders of his time, associated with the most extreme political elements in the United States. He addressed their organizations, signed their petitions, and invited them into his own organizational activities. Extremist elements played a significant role in promoting and influencing King’s opposition to the Vietnam war-an opposition that was not predicated on what King believed to be the best interests of the United States but on his sympathy for the North Vietnamese Communist regime and on an essentially Marxist and anti-American ideological view of U.S. foreign policy (more here).

Here’s King, in what I’ve long considered his best speech (Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence, April 4 1967 Riverside Church–read the whole thing!) :

But they asked — and rightly so — what about Vietnam? They asked if our own nation wasn’t using massive doses of violence to solve its problems, to bring about the changes it wanted. Their questions hit home, and I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today — my own government. For the sake of those boys, for the sake of this government, for the sake of hundreds of thousands trembling under our violence, I cannot be silent.

To me the relationship of this ministry to the making of peace is so obvious that I sometimes marvel at those who ask me why I am speaking against the war. Could it be that they do not know that the good news was meant for all men — for Communist and capitalist, for their children and ours, for black and for white, for revolutionary and conservative? Have they forgotten that my ministry is in obedience to the one who loved his enemies so fully that he died for them? What then can I say to the “Vietcong” or to Castro or to Mao as a faithful minister of this one? Can I threaten them with death or must I not share with them my life?

They watch as we poison their water, as we kill a million acres of their crops. They must weep as the bulldozers roar through their areas preparing to destroy the precious trees. They wander into the hospitals, with at least twenty casualties from American firepower for one “Vietcong”-inflicted injury. So far we may have killed a million of them — mostly children. They wander into the towns and see thousands of the children, homeless, without clothes, running in packs on the streets like animals. They see the children, degraded by our soldiers as they beg for food. They see the children selling their sisters to our soldiers, soliciting for their mothers…

Increasingly, by choice or by accident, this is the role our nation has taken — the role of those who make peaceful revolution impossible by refusing to give up the privileges and the pleasures that come from the immense profits of overseas investment.

I am convinced that if we are to get on the right side of the world revolution, we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin the shift from a “thing-oriented” society to a “person-oriented” society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.

Helms was a savage, but from the standpoint of his own occult neo-trinitarian commingling of race, religion, and laissez-faire capitalism, King, and all that he stood for, could be nothing other than a mortal enemy.

I would like to say: Helms was the mortal enemy all that we stand for, we heirs to King’s sense and vision. Sadly, Helms goes to the grave victorious, in the City of Man if not the City of God. Americans have adamantly and pretty much unanimously forsworn giving up “the privileges and the pleasures that come from the immense profits of overseas investment.”  A people who make up 4% of the world’s population and yet consume 25% of its resources must perforce commit its imperial legions to the four quarters of the globe, lest the indigenous peoples demand a living wage for their labors or a fair price for their resources. His death might give pause to those liberals busy castigating him for his outrageously racist, homophobic comments, as the Democratic Party, the financial establishment, the media, and, yeah, the whole military industrial complex goes on merrily perpetuating the vision of  Helms and not Dr. King.  The angry shade of Jesse Helms will wind round the world for some time yet, will haunt us until we ourselves reject not only racism but the materialism and militarism that lie at the very heart of what’s known as “globalization.”

You yourself are not a racist. Or a homophobe. You’re probably opposed to apartheid and bantuization, too, except in special circumstances, like Obama is, what with the pesky business of the West Bank and all that.  But remember, this campaign season, which candidate recently said that he “loves” free trade; which candidate promises to increase the insane defense budget; which candidate recently declared that he would maintain the Cuban embargo; which candidate has said he would expand US combat operations into yet another country; which candidate has said he would leave a residual force of American soldiers (actually, he plans to continue to use mercenaries) in Iraq ad infinitum; which candidate’s campaign war chest is funded primarily by contributions from banks and investment firms and telecom and etc.  

And ask yourself whose vision is being fulfilled by that candidate–by both candidates: is that the vision of Martin Luther King, or of Jesse Helms?

 

Jesse wins, the world loses.

 

 

I saw cotton
and I saw black

 
  

Jesse Bequeaths Charlie to John

 

The racist’s racist par excellence, Helms never really changed his stripes, as FAIR notes:

As an aide to the 1950 Senate campaign of North Carolina Republican candidate Willis Smith, Helms reportedly helped create attack ads against Smith’s opponent, including one which read: “White people, wake up before it is too late. Do you want Negroes working beside you, your wife and your daughters, in your mills and factories? Frank Graham favors mingling of the races.” Another ad featured photographs Helms himself had doctored to illustrate the allegation that Graham’s wife had danced with a black man. (The News and Observer, 8/26/01; The New Republic, 6/19/95; The Observer, 5/5/96; Hard Right: The Rise of Jesse Helms, by Ernest B. Furgurson, Norton, 1986)

Ancient history? No. Helms remains unapologetic to this day. Forty years after the Smith campaign, Helms would win election against black opponent Harvey Gantt with another ad playing to racist white fear– the so-called “white hands” ad, in which a white man’s hands crumple a rejected job application while a voiceover intones, “You needed that job…but they had to give it to a minority.”

Chief McCain strategist Charlie Black’s role (Ben Smith again):

1990: Black Advised Jesse Helms. As He Ran Controversial “Hands” Ad Against Black Candidate. Newsday reported that Helms, “through a series of blistering advertisements unleashed just days before, had beckoned the long-simmering issue of race to the surface of this senatorial contest. In doing so, Helms had hurled the campaign into its most bitter and acrimonious phase to date, namely by labeling his opponent, falsely, an advocate of racial job quotas and accusing him of conducting a ‘secret campaign’ in the black community. … On the television commercial, the camera zones in on a white man’s hands, crumpling what apparently is a job rejection letter. The announcer then intones: ‘You needed that job and you were the best qualified. But they had to give it to a minority because of a racial quota. Is that really fair? Harvey Gantt says it is,’ the message continues. ‘Gantt supports Ted Kennedy’s racial quota law that makes the color of your skin more important than your qualifications.’” Black, an adviser to the campaign and a consultant for the Congressional Club – Helms’s political machine – insisted the race would come down to turnout: “‘What it’s going to come down to is turnout,’ said Charles Black, chairman of the Republican National Committee and a Helms adviser. ‘It’s, no question, the biggest challenge at this point.’” [Newsday, 11/4/90]

Black Defended “Hands Ad.” Black defended Helms’s “Hands” television ad, which featured white hands crumpling a job rejection letter and linking Helms’s black opponent to racial job quotas. Asked about the ad on the MacNeil/Lehrer Newshour, Black said, “Well there is nothing racial about the campaign.” When asked if there was anything improper about the ad, Black said, “Of course not.” Another guest on the show, DNC Chairman Ron Brown, pressed Black again, saying, “You are a principal adviser of Jesse Helms. Would you advise him to run that kind of ad, Charlie? Do you approve of that ad, Charlie?” Black responded, “I advised Jesse Helms to do what he’s always done.” [MacNeil/Lehrer Newshour, 11/5/90]

 

Helms and the Great Hate

Chuckling commentators are remarking left and right that , oh boy, Helms may sounded outrageous, but, dammitall, you gotta give the good old boy credit for standing by his convictions. I generally don’t like the too facile comparisons to Nazism, but in this case, that’s rather like saluting Himmler for his loyalty to the cause. The man was while; his ideas were vile; those who salute(d) them are vile, e.g., Trent Lott, who declared that “Jesse Helms has been the conscience of our party for thirty years,” which, after reading the following, will tell you pretty much everything you need to know about the Republican’s Party moral foundations and perspectives; Pandagon publishes a few choice quotes:

“Unless our Negro citizens submit more easily than we predict they will, North Carolina does not have the simple choice between segregated schools and integrated schools. Our only choice is between integrated public schools and free-choice private schools. … The decision will have been made by a very small minority of people who are hell-bent on forced integration.””

“To rob the Negro of his reputation of thinking through a problem in his own fashion is about the same as trying to pretend that he doesn’t have a natural instinct for rhythm and for singing and dancing.”
- Helms responding in 1956 to criticism that a fictional black character in his newspaper column was offensive.

“I shall always remember the shady streets, the quiet Sundays, the cotton wagons, the Fourth of July parades, the New Year’s Eve firecrackers. I shall never forget the stream of school kids marching uptown to place flowers on the Courthouse Square monument on Confederate Memorial Day.”

 

 

..and I saw black
Tall white mansions
and little shacks.
Southern man
when will you
pay them back?
I heard screamin’
and bullwhips cracking
How long? How long?

 

Below, some not-at-all-atypical quotes from Betty Bowers–visit “her” site for more:

They should ask their parents if it would be all right for their son or daughter to marry a Negro.”
– In response to Duke University students holding a vigil after Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated, 1968

 

“It’s their deliberate, disgusting, revolting conduct that is responsible for the disease.”
– Justifying his refusal to give financial support to families of AIDS victims.

“Homosexuals are weak, morally sick wretches.”
– 1995 radio broadcast

“She’s a damn lesbian. I am not going to put a lesbian in a position like that. If you want to call me a bigot, fine.”
– Explaining why he was opposing the appointment of a woman for a cabinet post.

Lily Belle,
your hair is golden brown
I’ve seen your black man
comin’ round
Swear by God
I’m gonna cut him down!
I heard screamin’
and bullwhips cracking
How long? How long?

Mother Jones had neatly summed up the creep and the secret to his success  back in 1995::

How did someone so mean-spirited end up in a position to act on his divisive politics? For the most part, Helms wins political battles by keeping the spotlight on the morality plays he stages. To hear conservatives tell it, Helms is a personal friend of Jesus Christ, a populist defender of the little guy, and a bitter opponent of big government.

Shifting the spotlight reveals a different Helms. A former bank lobbyist whose fundraising machine has been fined for breaking federal campaign laws, Helms favors a big-spending, activist government–one that aids those in economic power. He voted to bail out the savings and loan industry, for example, and has seldom met a big-ticket missile system he didn’t like. By contrast, he has voted to slash school lunches for impoverished children, medical care for disabled veterans, prescription drugs for the elderly, and wages for working families (see “On the record,” below).

“Looking at the record, people ought to understand that Helms is not representing them on the great majority of issues,” says Rep. Melvin Watt, a North Carolina Democrat. “They perceive that he stands up for the little guy, but he really stands up for rich people rather than poor and working-class people.”

 
We end with the President, who, never one to miss an opportunity for asinine effrontery, weighs in with a typically pathetic and utterly inaccurate summation of this pig’s life and character:

“Jesse Helms was a kind, decent, and humble man and a passionate defender of what he called “the Miracle of America.” So it is fitting that this great patriot left us on the Fourth of July. He was once asked if he had any ambitions beyond the United States Senate. He replied: ‘The only thing I am running for is the Kingdom of Heaven.’ Today, Jesse Helms has finished the race, and we pray he finds comfort in the arms of the loving God he strove to serve throughout his life.”

In Jesse’s memory, the great Nina Simone  (great interview, read it through) and “Strange Fruit”:

<

 

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Filed under ARMAGEDDON: The Election, Blogged, INFERNO: The Right, ROME: American Empire

June 10, 2008

ralph nader says it all starts with fire in the belly


nosuppertonight video montage:Nader in Cambridge June 6 2008
_______________________________________________________
By Michael Horan

But you’ve been told many times before,
Messiahs pointed to the door,
No one had the guts to leave the temple….
–Pete Townshend, Tommy

But what about the next time? Who is going to explain in 1976 that all the people who felt they got burned in ’72 should “try again” for another bogus challenger?
Hunter Thompson, Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ‘72

How Many Times Can a Man Turn his Head, Pretending He Just Doesn’t See?

Last week, The Nation asked—in its lead editorial no less (subscription only)—

Where is the challenge to the bloated military budget, which equals the total amount spent by the rest of industrialized world? Who’s talking about an exit from the “war in terror,” which has made us less secure while curtailing our civil liberties? Where is the massive public investment to repair our collapsed bridges, collapsed levees, and bursting schools? Democrats have called for a repeal of Bush’s tax cuts for the wealthiest, but where are the proposals for a truly progressive tax system? Where is the challenge to corporate power and a serious strategy to empower workers to win their share of profits? Who’s talking about our failed “war on drugs,” and our faltering criminal justice system? And while there is growing demand that we leave Iraq, who’s challenging Obama’s plan to keep troops in bases there beyond 2009?”

My initial reaction: somebody’s not paying attention. Because I can answer that question without qualification, having watched Ralph Nader get up in front of a small crowd at First Parish Church in Cambridge Friday night and discuss each and every one of these issues. Head-on. (Along with tax reform, electoral reform, Palestine, the voting age, single payor healthcare, and etcetera). Issues that neither Obama or Hillary are going to acknowledge, much less address . The question isn’t “who is willing to point out the veritable herd of elephants in the room, and, great, stinking beshitted angry elephants at that?”; the question is why on earth The Nation and its readership, since they apparently share precisely the same ideals, refuse to acknowledge the obvious answer. Of course, what The Nation is really asking is, “what magnificently-funded Democratic candidate bearing the corporate nihil obstat and the Wall Street imprimatur is raising these issues?” To which the answer is, such a beast does not, cannot exist in nature, and the absurdity of of asking this basilisk beast to bite the hand that feeds it–or rather, to devour its keeper whole–is patently obvious..

Nader can’t figure out it either; as he inquired on Friday,

..why are we under the yoke of a two party dictatorship, where people, who agree with one another, are adversaries, if one part of that agreement happens to go into the electoral arena instead of writing articles for The Nation? And so the political bigotry that is directed at any small party independent candidate that challenges the Democratic Party inside the electoral arena, especially at the national level, comes from liberals and progressives addicted to the “least-worst” voting patterns against these challengers. Who they agree with! That’s a rather strange experience to have. I’m used to corporate lobbyists fighting what we’re doing. I rather enjoy it. I understand them—at least, I know where they’re coming from. The oil companies, drug companies, insurance companies, banks. But how do you understand people who agree with you on most issues and turn around and call you a spoiler? These are people who three years out of four condemn the Democratic Party. In all kinds of ways. You could have stopped the war … the Patriot Act …[etc]…

The gap between the The Nation’s blind eye and Nader’s vision—his eminently pragmatic vision, as befits a man with forty years on The Hill and a jaw-dropping history of legislative success—is the result of sheer timidity on the part of progressive forces in this country, something unknown to their more robust counterparts on the far right (who demand their planks and get them). For example, listen to the drivel with follows in said editorial and which concludes the piece:

If the limits of the debates aren’t pushed by the nascent progressive movement, we could miss a critical opening. Of course, progressive can’t lose sight of the practicalities of registering voters and getting them to the polls, But this mobilization can also push the Democratic Party to think more boldly and dissent more creatively from the failed conservative consensus of the last quarter century.

I have no idea whatsoever what that means. Especially that word “push.” Push means pressure, and pressure means witholding money and votes, and if there’s one area where Democrats really have demonstrated what “appeasement” is all about it’s in their quadrennial capitulation to whatever representative of the monied interests is busy posing as the next populist savior. Obama is heavily funded by Goldman Sachs, his chief economic advisor is an admirer of Milton Friedman, the head of his VP search team is a major hedge fund manager; the progressives on his team, meanwhile, include , ummmm … no one. And we won’t even get into Hillary, for goddsake, and the high priests of privilege and avarice who make up her posse. And The Nation expects to “push” Senator Obama, along with the rest of the Democratic field this November, into debating the defense budget and “empowering workers to earn their fair share of profits?” With what, another editorial? The question is, when he refuses, as he most certainly will: so whaddya gonna do about it?

Based on past history, you’ll show up at the polls, duly cast your vote for the Democratic leadership, and rejoice at the sight of George Bush being rushed out of the Inauguration ceremonies to a chorus of boos, rotten fruit, and with any luck a mob of enraged citizens hightailing it down the street after him, tar, feathers, and pitchforks in hand. But your issues will remain unsolved—more likely shelved. And so will the problems of the wretched of the earth. (For a while; a little while longer, yet. But not forever).

And Your Wise Men Don’t Know How It Feels To Be Thick as a Brick

I have in front of me a page ripped from the July 8, 2007 Sunday New York Times, headlined “Through a Prism of 40 Years, Newark Examines Deadly Unrest” (“5 Days of Riots Driven by Race-Tinged Rage”). There’s a startling photo of a young black kid walking down the street followed by a squad of National Guardsmen with bayonets leveled, and there’s a discussion with one Junius Williams, today a thoughtful, successful non-profit director who was a very angry young radical in 1967. Mr. Williams “stayed after the fires died down, believing that what he called `the rebellion’ could be harnessed for political change”:

”When we sat down at the bargaining table, an unnamed person sitting with a brick was with us. The most important weapon was that there had been a riot and the powers that be were afraid of us. They would do anything to keep a lid on black anger.”

Well. In 2004, Nader met with Kerry and “provided over 20 pages of issues ranging from environmental protections, labor, healthcare and tax reform to Kerry. He told Kerry that if he highlighted three of these issues in his campaign [Nader] would refrain from running. Kerry failed to act…” Why? Because unlike the good burghers of Newark 40 years ago, the Democratic leadership understands that they have no reason “to keep a lid on progressive anger.” As always, they’ll damn the Democrats up and down for easy acquiescence on the war, on tax cuts, on SCOTUS nominations, on the Patriot Act, on the Farm Bill, on the military budget–and they’ll turn up in November to lend their tacit support for more of the same. Words without bricks mean nothing.

In any case, rather than being a good Party Member and saying to hell with the working class and to hell with drug addicts and to hell with Palestinians and to hell with the defense budget and to hell with the war and to hell with overprescribed drugs and to hell with safe food, Nader walked. That’s “making a demand” and following through; that’s bringing the brick to the table.

In other words, progressives must name the price to be paid to for non-compliance. I remember Nader in ‘04: “If you grant them your vote, they’ll take your vote for granted.“ Your vote is your brick. Frederick Douglas said that “Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did, and it never will,” and he would know. The demand is your brick. Knowing full well that every progressive populist in the country, outside of a few despondent feminists, will join Hillary’s turkey-shootin’, boilermaker-guzzlin’ Democratic brethren in turning out for Obama in November, what compelling reason does the Senator have not to tack to the middle, or worse? We can give them one: Nader is our brick.

Nader reminded us the other night—it’s towards the end of the clip above and it’s a segment worth watching—that “we need more fire in the belly.” We also need the unnamed man with the brick.

____________________

The last time I saw Ralph was at the same venue I did Friday, Cambridge’s First Parish Church. Patti Smith (along with Howard Zinn) joined him, then did an impromptu little late afternoon benefit show downstairs at the Middle East, and I remembered what rock and roll can be, and Ralph joined her onstage and I realized what politics could be; and I remembered too when I first saw her, on New Eve’s 1976, the same year this video was shot, and she did this song, and nothing was ever the same again; so this one’s for Ralph, and this line’s for all of us:

“C’mon pretty boy can’t you show me nothin’ but surrender?”

(be patient; the music kicks in soon enough)

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Filed under ARMAGEDDON: The Election, Blogged, CITY UPON A HILL: New England Notes, NEW JERUSALEM: Marxism, Socialism, & Third Party Po

June 3, 2008

Some rise, some fall, some climb, to get to terrapin

Bo Diddley died today. But you heard about that. Also departed: Alton Kelly, who with collaborator Mouse (”riffing off each other’s giggle”) provided some of the most sumptuously festive iconography of the past half-century, ranging from the team’s trademark signage, as in this handbill for Bo himself, to classics like the Skull and Roses emblem and, of course, the sublime cover art for Terrapin Station. There’s a nice  tribute at DeadNet.

As for Bo, this about sums it up. Overlook the occasional burst of unhappy effects; this is what the angels sound like. 

 

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May 6, 2008

chuck turner says we gotta revolutionize ourselves: a tale of two marches

\

A Tale of Two Marches

Michael Horan

On May Day I went to the rally (pro labor, pro immigrant, antiwar) on Boston Common, then marched with a few hundred anarchists to Copley Square, raising all kinds of noisy hell.

  

On the following Sunday I went on the annual Walk for Hunger, strolling with some 40,000 others on a twenty-mile jaunt through greater Boston, raising in the neighborhood of 3.5 million dollars.

The anarchist event involved a lot of sound and fury signifying plenty but accomplishing, seemingly, nothing. The Walk puts millions of dollars of food into regional food pantries, and at the same time draws together an extraordinarily diverse crowd.

The Kumbaya Factor

This was the first time I’ve done this or any other charitable “walk”; it was pretty much a spontaneous reaction to of the in-credible rise in food prices globally and locally. The good people of Massachusetts have not yet set upon the local markets with pitchforks and flaming torches, but hunger-riots, and murderous riot-suppression, goes on elsewhere. Something about really hungry people being gunned down by security forces strikes me as particularly hideous even in this age of serial atrocity, and so it seems incumbent to do what little we can with what little we have.

The Walk is in its fortieth year, and one of the obvious reasons for the historical success of the event (and the biggest difference between it and the May Day event) is its wholly non-ideological nature. There is no speechifying. There is no philosophizing. No arguing. In short, there is no alienating anyone (of course, this being Boston, there are doubtless a few misanthropes who stand firmly, on one principle or another, in Favor of Hunger). You can’t help but feel welcome. And Project Bread keeps it simple. All the many complex issues swirling around global hunger are reduced to one essential fact: there are hungry people in your neighborhood. All the vast and weighty plans to eliminate hunger are reduced to a second essential fact: you can help feed those neighbors. The idea couldn’t be simpler, hence, the appeal couldn’t be more universal; it’s an idea to which pretty much everyone can subscribe, and an activity to which most people will contribute at least something.

The beauty of the Walk, then, is in its very lack of ideological content. Make any demands beyond the simple “brother, can ya spare a dime?,” and you begin alienating potential supporters; keep the premise as simple as that, and you maintain the numbers and diversity. Again, it’s very hard to find fault with that.

The Connection Between Hungry Bostonians and Murdered French Revolutionaries Revealed

And yet. There is something unnerving about the content-free atmosphere around the event. Hunger isn’t a physical ailment requiring that we subsidize pharma’s efforts to “discover” (and patent) a “cure” for one variety of cancer or another. Hunger isn’t something that occurs because, say, “of adulterers hath the land been full; for because of these hath the land mourned;dried up hath been the pleasant places of the wilderness,” or because the Lord hath sent a plague of locusts, frogs, flies, or any of the other marvelously inventive engines of famine He devised in order to tweak the beards of the Pharaohs. Nor does anyone, aside from Dick Cheney and various neo-stalinist dictators, want people perpetually hungry: hungry people don’t tend to be avid early adopters of new techno-gizmos, they’re a nuisance when you’re trying to make your train, and, when there’s a critical mass of them, they tend to become downright unruly and blame whatever political or economic regime has them in thrall at the moment, and you know how that goes—one pleasant summer night you’re enjoying a glass of pinot grigio al fresco on Newbury Street and the next thing you know it’s Marie Antoinette all over again, Robespierre demanding more blood and Marat stabbed in the bath. No one wants that sort of thing.

But hunger doesn’t occur in a vacuum, ideological or otherwise. It isn’t natural, and it isn’t desirable, but there it is, and it’s growing. Hunger is rooted at a nexus of political, economic, scientific, technological, and spiritual ideologies, making that one hell of a busy rotary indeed.

Uh-Oh, Here Comes Engels!

And the overriding ideological factors in the current wave of spiking prices, food shortages, and death are two-fold: capitalism (the flawed belief that there is something inherently democratic in “free markets,” when unregulated markets make food inaccessible to so many while so few have so much) and technocracy (the flawed belief that technology is the “solution” to nearly all of our problems, including hunger). The inherent, and inherently evil, flaw at the heart of capitalism is the greed that drives speculators to drive up prices; the folly of ill-considered technocratic solutions is becoming increasingly manifest in the biofuel/food dichotomy.

Here’s a headline from a recent edition of Britain’s Independent (5/4/2008): “Multinationals Make Billions in Profit Out of Growing Food Crisis.” The ensuing story notes that “…speculation is helping to drive the prices of basic foodstuffs out of the reach of the hungry. The prices of wheat, corn and rice have soared over the past year driving the world’s poor - who already spend about 80 per cent of their income on food - into hunger and destitution… The World Bank says that 100 million more people are facing severe hunger. Yet some of the world’s richest food companies are making record profits. Monsanto last month reported that its net income for the three months up to the end of February this year had more than doubled over the same period in 2007, from $543m (£275m) to $1.12bn. Its profits increased from $1.44bn to $2.22bn.”

Another headline: “The Great Biofuel Famine. “ The story: “Biofuels are a dead end technology that can only lead to more human misery, hunger, and environmental destruction no matter what biofuel crops we grow. Two years ago the price of corn was only $2 bushel, but expanding ethanol production has pushed corn prices up to over $6 a bushel today, which raises the price of chicken, eggs, beef, and diary products, as corn is our main animal feed. In the year 2007, the USA alone turned enough corn, soybeans, and rapeseed into biofuels to satisfy the yearly caloric needs of over 250 million people…” (OpEd News, April 10, 2008).

In Which the Wisdom of our Candidates is Questioned

Which leads me back to May Day, and a young black Iraqi vet explaining from Boston Common’s gazebo that

“Everybody out here knows that this election’s coming up. Right? Yeah. What do you think John McCain’s going to do for you? What do you think Hilary Clnton’s going to do for you [woman’s cry from crowd: `Not a damn thing!'] What do you think Barack Obama, the savior, is going to do for you? He’s not going to solve your problems. It’s not going to happen. So we got to work together….”

Damn straight. As far as curtailing the ills of late capitalism, simply consider the pedigree of Obama’s chief economic strategist Austan Goolsbee (University of Chicago School of Economics, and you can learn more than you want to about the geniuses installed therein in Naomi Klein’s recent Disaster Capitalism), and consider too Clinton’s halfwitted solution to our deepening economic woes (create an “emergency group” consisting of folks like Richard Rubin and Alan Greenspan—you know, the Wall Street lizards who created the damn mess in the first place). Then consider, too, the candidate’s thinking on biofuels:

From Obama’s Web site: “Twenty years from now our nation’s transportation fuels sector will be powered primarily by domestically produced biofuels, if we have the vision and the will to make that happen…”

From Clinton’s Web site: “Aggressive action to transition our economy toward renewable energy sources, with renewables generating 25 percent of electricity by 2025 and with 60 billion gallons of home-grown biofuels available for cars and trucks by 2030.”

Now listen carefully to Lester Brown (president of the Earth Policy Institute think tank in Washington and a gentleman “who has been tracking agricultural commodity trends for more than half a century”):

Corn prices, however, were still relatively cheap at around $2 a bushel. Suddenly, the market price of ethanol was about double the cost of producing it…That’s a juicy profit margin - and billions of dollars began to flow into biofuels. About 18 percent of the U.S. grain harvest now goes to make ethanol. Brown forecasts that by the end of the year the figure could be more like 28 percent.
“What has happened is that we have basically developed a very substantial capacity for converting grain into oil - or ethanol,” he said. “What this means is that the price of grain is now tied to the price of oil because if the food value of the commodity is less than the fuel value, then the market will move that commodity into the energy economy.
“We used to have a food economy and an energy economy and they were more or less separate. Now they’re beginning to fuse, and in this new world where the price of grain is tied to the price of oil, if the price of oil goes up, so grain goes up.
“And that is a threat to political stability and security in the world that I don’t think we’ve come close to grasping yet…
“What we now have is a situation where the 860 million people who own cars are competing with the 2 billion poorest people in the world for the same grain supply. This is a new not only political and economic issue but also a moral issue [italics mine].” (“Why are Tortillas Now Tied to Oil Prices”, Reuters AlertNet 4/13/2008).

Here you have it: political, economic, military, technological, and moral ideologies, a series of ill-matched gears all grinding against one another.

Hence, on the Walk for Hunger, the lack of any kind of clear perspective is, truly, striking in its absence. Consider that the Walk for Hunger raises about 3.5 million dollars. There are, by Project Bread’s own estimates, some 450,000 hungry people in the state of Massachusetts. A cynic might say, splendid—you’ve bought them each the dollar equivalent of a lunch at McDonalds. Or, if you prefer, a small sack of rice. I’m not that cynical—I know how cash-strapped food pantry volunteers must feel when ProjectBread hands them a check for $45,000. That’s a wonder-full thing. And I have to believe in something pretty deeply in order to show up on Boston Common at eight on a chill, damp, Sunday morning, believe me. But ProjectBread, and all of the other truly helpful philanthropic organizations like it, are supplying band-aids to a world that is bursting major blood vessels left and right.

Greater Love Than This Hath No Pig

One scene drove home the essential contradictions at work here. There was a food stop at about the 7- mile mark, at Cleveland Circle, and a sausage stand, next to a sign pronouncing it the “official food stop on The Walk for Hunger.”

There was a long line. There was nothing to indicate that producing one pound o’ pork requires six pounds of grain. Which is, I suppose, a damn sight better than the 16 pounds required to create your pound o’ beef, but it leaves you scratching your head: stripped of any significance beyond it’s annual re-enactment, and thereby promoting, albeit unconsciously, precisely the type of consumption that contributes directly to the problem we’re trying to alleviate, the Walk can’t inspire the kind of personal and political changes necessary to have any real and lasting impact. Either those changes occur, and soon, or–if the Walk results in, on a per capita basis, about $8 per hungry person–we’ll basically all have to solicit the same dollar amounts we did for May fifth … every single day of the year; and if the price of food staples continues to rise, we might have to double that amount. Ready walk forty miles every day for hunger? Every day?

Viva Chavez! Hasta la Victoria Siempre! Send Lawyers, Guns, & Money!

I began by saying that the–that we–May Day marchers accomplish “seemingly nothing.” I should have said: nothing material, nothing so quantifiable as tonnes of foodstuffs purchased, nothing comparable to the very pragmatic success achieved by the Walk. But I don’t think it’s any less essential, in that speakers at these events, the marchers themselves, hell, even (especially) the bands, have a genuine understanding of the systemic nature of issues like hunger, and grasp the underlying relationships between the military industrial racket, the ownership of politicians by transnational agribusiness who also own the patents on indigenous seeds (horrible but true), the fact that it’s invariably brown people who are going hungriest no matter what continent you’re talking about, the faux embrace of “green lifestyles” by a population determined to perform feats of real magic in having it all and yet leaving no “carbon footprint,” which is psychopathological to say the least, the saber-ratting in the faces of people like Fidel and Hugo Chavez, both of whom have decried the relationship between biofuel development and food shortages, the ongoing prosecution of energy wars, and the persecution of so-called “illegal” immigrants who straggle into those golden doors into which Liberty once beckoned “the poor, the wretched refuse” of the world and which today are guarded by wannabe heroes who determine the quality of a man’s patriotism by the lengths to which he will go to rid the nation of “illegals” (a small sample of the same showed up to counter-demonstrate against the May Day gathering, which focused on the rights of immigrants legal or not).

 

That’s a mouthful, but it was all there on May Day: in the lyrics, in the signage, in the speeches, in the shouting. And in the discussions going on everywhere. You see, socialists and anarchists believe that there are rights that transcend whatever the hell is on the lawbooks of one state or another, and that boundaries, as one performer sang, “are an illusion”; and they tend to think that there are rights that are even more fundamental than the right to forever-turn-a-profit-and-consequences-be-damned. Like the right to eat enough every day.

This is necessary stuff. This is the corollary to the Walk. This is the global context, and it demands more than a charitable contribution, more than an annual stroll; it demands revolution—literally, a turning back, back to a common-sensical, organic and communal politico-agricultural system of growing and distributing food—on both a national and a global scale, and it demands a personal revolution in every day life, in the manner in which we conduct ourselves as members of a global polis.

So, sure, I’ll do the Walk against next year. It is, in itself, a genuinely good thing. But I’ll show up again next May Day as well to be reminded of our proud labor tradition, immigrant tradition, and Socialist tradition, and to be reminded of how much is left to be accomplished.

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May 1, 2008

lenin wishes you a happy may day

WE MARCH FOR THE CONSTITUTION ON MAY DAY–HOWARD FAST

“Those who produce should have, but we know that those who produce the most - that is, those who work hardest, and at the most difficult and most menial tasks, have the least.”–Eugene Debs

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May 1, 2008

hillary kisses the devil’s hindquarters on walpurgisnacht

Last night was Walpurgisnacht, historically the night upon which the witches of Europe took to their brooms and descended upon Mount Bracken—in Goethe’s Dr Faustus,

Now to the Brocken the witches hie,
The stubble is yellow, the corn is green;
Thither the gathering legions fly,
And sitting aloft is Sir Urian seen:
O’er stick and o’er stone they go whirling along,
Witches and he-goats, a motley throng,

…a night upon which good Christian folk cowered as a debauched Hillary Clinton committed all manner of unholy lewdness with Bill O’Reilly. NOT in (pace Coleridge)

A savage place ! as holy and enchanted
As e’er beneath a waning moon was haunted
By woman wailing for her demon-lover,

but on national television. Witches and he-goats indeed! (All this, of course, just days after her campaign chair, the reprehensible Terry McAuliffe, thanked the news network for its “fair and balanced coverage,” by which he meant repeating ad nauseam the Wright tapes).

You know the Disneyfied Fantasia interpretation of Mussorgsky’s “Night on Bald Mountain”; here’s something earlier and creepier—Un Nuit sur le Monte Chauve, by Claire Parker (1933)

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April 30, 2008

dr hoffman thought the walrus was paul

Albert Hoffman died today at 102, and the dwindling tribe of Deadheads, already devastated by Jerry’s death (umm, over a decade ago now), turn their sorrowful eyes toward Terrapin Station (and, one assumes, the technolibertarian utopia assured by John Perry Barlow, whose new agey marriage of Milton Friedman and George Gilder has spawned thinking most monstrous). Hoffman was the generally unhappy father of rambunctious offspring lysergic acid diethylamide-25, simultaneously displeased by both the medical establishment’s failure to fully explore its beneficient powers, and pop culture’s seemingly all-too-ardent embrace.

Many others disagreed, and American culture was inarguably enriched by blotter acid art, Aldous Huxley’s influential essay The Doors of Perception, Tom Wolfe’s dazzling account of Ken Kesey and the Pranksters, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, and of course, Sergeant Pepper, a record which Time Magazine, quoting “an editor of a London magazine,” pronounced ” “drenched in drugs” back in 1967, while admitting  “it is not clear whether  their songs are meant to proselytize in behalf of drugs or simply to deal with them as a subject of the moment.” Yeah, I ask myself that too every time I crank “Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds.”

(All that and not a word on the actual effects? See below in re “the bus”).

Hoffman’s interested in psychedelia was longstanding; like Dr Andrew Weil, who got his start studying entheogens, Hoffman became expert in the psychoactive properties of more than a few diverse species, all the while hoping to see his discoveries put to use by the psychiatric establishment as opposed to being swapped for tofuburgers in the parking lot before Phish shows. He might have died with a sense of satisfaction; according to wikipedia, “In December 2007, Swiss medical authorities permitted a psychotherapist to perform psychotherapeutical experiments with patients who suffer from terminal stage cancer and other deadly diseases. Although not yet started, these experiments will represent the first study of the therapeutic effects of LSD on humans in 35 years, as other studies have focused on the drug’s effects on consciousness and body. Hoffmann supported the study, and continued to believe in the therapeutic benefits of LSD.”

Microdots, tabs, blotter, sloppy blotter—mmmm, sloppy blotter—liquid, shrooms; the subculture that could speak eloquently to the virtues of each vehicle took from the Pranksters and their famed bus Further the motto, “you’re either on the bus or off it,” a truism that pretty much renders any further discussion here moot; except to say, that Dr. Hoffman was definitely on the bus after all.

In tribute, here’s The Beatles, either–yeah, “proselytizing in behalf of acid or simply dealing with it as a subject of the moment.”

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April 20, 2008

campaign strategists call it a “major debacle” and a “can’t win”

The very people in charge of the campaign is now admit that it’s turned into a “major debacle,” the outcome “in doubt,” despite a buildup of ground support in the most critical parts of the countryside. The “long term impact” of what has become a internecine war “has not been calculated.” Of course, many blame the strategy developed at the outset of the campaign, and accuse campaign strategists of  overconfidence, allocating only what resources were requited for an early knockout. Others go straight to the top, charging leaders with exhibiting what was in “many instances an imperious attitude.” The chief campaign strategist was fired, but the thing won’t seem to end, despite increasing calls to withdraw from the fight and to concentrate on the real foe.

HIllary in Pennsylvania? No, the most damning asessment yet of America in Iraq. Brought to you, well, by the folks who designed the damn thing.

I’ve seen a lot of pics from Iraq. More than I should, maybe. But none so damning as this.

 

This photo, ripped from the ever-insightful BagNewsNotes, was originally published in the Washington Post’s online photo gallery on April as these kids’ father left for his second tour in Iraq.  For all the McCain supporters out there, so willing to witness a hundred-years photostream of shots like these,  I give you The Doors:

 

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April 18, 2008

danny schecter ain’t fooled by the appearance of dissent & debate

Last night I made the mistake of clicking between the Yanks-Sox slugfest (final: NY, 15-9) to attend to the so-called “debate” between the Democratic rivals, summed up by media critic Danny Schecter as the “most despicable” presentation ever of mediated-politics, or political theatre, or however you want to label the spectacle of two “respectable” pundits, Stephanopoulos and Gibson, engaging in the rehashing of FOXNEWS style slander and innuendo while pretending to be hosting a most solemn and decorous event. Schecter, in fact, accused former Clinton minion Stephanopoulos of lamely attempting to appear “even handed” by basically trotting out a laundry list of “Hannity talking points,” and summarized the proceedings as a whole as “an orchestrated attempt to produce more heat and light.” Well, for either heat or light, I shoulda stuck with the Sox game.

Promo for Scheter, Old South Meeting House lobby

He said this, and much besides, tonight during a Ford Hall Forum address in Boston’s Old South Meeting House, the site that launched the Boston Tea Party,and Schecter’s brash but consistently thoughtful, gloomy and yet often hilarious talk was well worth passing up the second game of the two-game stand in NY. One of the real pleasures of moving up here was discovering that Boston’s Revolutionary-era historic haunts aren’t treated simply as tourist traps, but retain their original, practical value, so that the same halls and pews that heard Samuel and John Adams today reverberate to equally incisive, and equally dissident, voices. Schecter himself began by discussing the Meeting House’s history, describing Boston as the epicenter of a people’s revolution against the forces of invasion and occupation and subtly indicating that America is engaged in something all-too-similar today, albeit playing the redcoat role. Then it was off to a 90 minute rollicking ex tempore romp through his own fascinating biography, which largely served to illustrate his overarching point that it wasn’t so long ago that “the media” enjoyed a degree of license and independence of spirit lacking entirely today, thanks in large part to consolidation and the emphasis on corporate profits that spur radio station owners to talk about their “markets,” not their “communities,” and to devote endless energies to the trivial—weather and sports—and less and less to sensible analysis.

And again, it was difficult to listen without constantly thinking back to last night’s debacle. In Philly’s Constitution Center, I mean, not Yankee Stadium. Obama himself repeated the criticism of countless bloggers, media critics (nicely summed up here as well as on Schecter’s own blog), and, I assume, the vast majority of Americans who, acting out of some perverse sense of civic duty, tuned into the damn thing, at the same time reflecting on Clinton’s obvious debt to Rovian politics:

“They like stirring up controversy and they like playing gotcha games, getting us to attack each other. And I have to say Senator Clinton looked in her element,” Mr. Obama said. “She was taking every opportunity to get a dig in there. You know, that’s all right. That’s her right. That’s her right to kind of twist the knife a little bit…. That was the roll-out of the Republican campaign against me in November. That is what they will do,” Mr. Obama said. “They will try to focus on all these issues that don’t have anything to do with how you pay your bills at the end of the month.”

With a wide smile, and a sarcastic tone, Mr. Obama sought to brush aside criticism about his performance in what he said was the 21st debate of the presidential nominating fight.
“I will tell you, it does not get much more fun than these debates. They are inspiring events,” Mr. Obama quipped. “Last night, I think we set a new record because it took us 45 minutes before we even started talking about a single issue that matters to the American people. It took us 45 minutes!”

Of course, Obama’s playing it safe, as always—ABC hit a new low last night, and that was obvious to pretty much everyone (except David Brooks and Michelle Malkin, neither of whom will ever be accused of objectivity or artful nuance. Brooks, one of the top editorialists at America’s most important paper, actually promotes the geeky sideshow aspect of the campaign: “… issues like Jeremiah Wright, flag lapels and the Tuzla airport will be important in the fall. Remember how George H.W. Bush toured flag factories to expose Michael Dukakis. It’s legitimate to see how the candidates will respond to these sorts of symbolic issues”). It would have been refreshing to have heard some really meaningful criticism of the media from Obama right from the outset, but that’s harder to do when you’re the flavor of the week.

Again, though, it was good to see him strive to maintain the high road throughout. Immediately after Clinton added to Stephanopoulos’s downright tedious grueling of Obama-“Do you think the Reverend Wright loves this country? Is he as patriotic as you?” –by dredging up Obama’s spectral relationship with Louis Farrakhan and Hamas—yeah, you read that right—Hillary was hit with a question about her mythical battle with crazed Bosnians. Or Serbians, or Kosovars, or Croats, or whatever. Obama’s response?

“I think what’s important is to make sure that we don’t get so obsessed with gaffes that we lose sight of the fact that this is a defining moment in our history. We are going to be tackling some of the biggest issues that any president has dealt with in the last 40 years. Our economy is teetering not just on the edge of recession, but potentially worse. Our foreign policy is in a shambles. We are involved in two wars. People’s incomes have not gone up, and their costs have. And we’re seeing greater income inequality now than any time since the 1920s. In those circumstances, for us to be obsessed with this — these kinds of errors I think is a mistake.”

The overwhelming difference between the two candidates is obvious nowhere so much as in their responses to the smears being hurled by the corporate media creatures. Clinton takes it a step further, and a genuine step into real absurdity, playing the innuendo game to the hilt (just as she did recently wih her “Obama’s not a Muslim … I mean, as far as I know”); Obama eschews the bait and uses it as a springboard to ask the media why they focus on such stupid shit.

Of course, we were also treated to a downright classic throwback Clintonian spin on the lies the Senator repeatedly told about the Bosnian Caper. The only dignified, accurate response is: I lied. Instead of expressing any genuine remorse, Clinton displayed precisely the same brand of unmitigated disdain for her fellow citizens her husband did with “it depends on what your definition of sex is” when she blew this rococco effluvia out:

Well, Tom, I can tell you that I may be a lot of things, but I’m not dumb. And I wrote about going to Bosnia in my book in 2004. I laid it all out there. And you’re right. On a couple of occasions in the last weeks I just said some things that weren’t in keeping with what I knew to be the case and what I had written about in my book. And, you know, I’m embarrassed by it. I have apologized for it. I’ve said it was a mistake….We both have said things that, you know, turned out not to be accurate. You know, that happens when you’re talking as much as we have talked. But you know, I’m very sorry that I said it. And I have said that, you know, it just didn’t jibe with what I had written about and knew to be the truth.

Grammar says everything. “It didn’t jibe with what was in the book.” It? Huh? Or “with what I knew to be the truth.” Or with “what I knew to be the case.” Clinton dares talk of elitism, while refusing to shoulder anything resembling real responsibility with a torrent of lawyer-speak? A “mistake?” A mistake is what happens when you confuse Sunni’s with Shias and Al-Quaeda’s relationships with each, as McCain is wont to do. When you make up heroic stories about yourself and repeat them until caught, you are not guilty of intellectual error, but of moral fraud. And then the Senator blames on it being “tired,” as though she’d maybe gotten tripped up on some GAO numbers rather than spinning a wholesale grandiose lie out of nothing: “So I will either try to get more sleep, Tom, or, you know, have somebody who, you know, is there as a reminder to me.” What the hell that is supposed to mean I have no idea. New Gingrich maybe?

Do we believe her? Do we even know what she means? Schecter thinks we’re all too gullible. Comparing the state of Soviet citizenry forced to endure deacdes of Pravda and state-controlled broadcasts, with your sharpwitted postmillenial American, Schecter claims that Russians. at least, were in the joke–no one actually took the state-sponsored blather with anything approaching seriousness. The tragedy in America, he suggests, is that a supremely brilliant corporate media has managed to create “the appearance of dissent and debate,” and thus duped us all into believing that the debates, for example, have any bearing on reality whatsoever, when they decidely do not.

In any case, I used to wonder why bother going to hear folks speak when you could probably get whatever they were saying out of their writing. I suppose this was residue left over from my years in academe; if you’ve ever attended an academic conference, and dragged yourself out of bed on a Saturday morning to sit in a classroom room at 8 in the morning listening to an earnest if prematurely aged professor read a paper, word-for-word, on the use of similes in Bishop Hugh Latimer’s Sermon of the Plough (1548)—which in fact I have—you’ll know what I mean. But I’ve found it important, almost essential, to go and listen, because most of the folks I read and admire aren’t looking on the sunny side of life, and much of what they have to say in print is downright gloomy. It’s important, then, to go and see them and to realize that these seemingly dour spirits are enormously vital, hearty, really funny human beings—that they can shake the gloom-and-doom and remind us, in Izzy Stone’s words, that

The only kinds of fights worth fighting are those you are going to lose, because somebody has to fight them and lose and lose and lose until someday, somebody who believes as you do wins. In order for somebody to win an important, major fight 100 years hence, a lot of other people have got to be willing — for the sheer fun and joy of it — to go right ahead and fight, knowing you’re going to lose. You mustn’t feel like a martyr. You’ve got to enjoy it.

Danny Schecter–who knew Izzy Stone–confessed tonight to vacillating, day-by-day, between hope and despair, noting that invitation to speak at events like tonight’s served to banished the latter. (Thankfully, he enjoys it, and his joy is contagious). Demonstrating, again, as Carlos Arrendondo did last month, that we all, all of us in this motley, ill-defined, but genuine “movement,” really do feed off one another’s energy. It’s important that tribunes like Schecter are there to address, to inspire and admonish, us; it’s just as important that we are there to keep them heartened. Subscribe to Danny’s daily “News Dissector” blog, read his books, by all means see his documentaries, and contribute, if you can, to MediaChannel, which is forever not waving but drowning. But most of all: show up. It’s not just taking heart; it’s giving blood to the body politic. And we need it.

And so, for Danny, and the legions of bloggers and zinesters and alternapresspeople struggling to free whatever vestiges of truth are buried underneath the daily media scrap heap, happy Friday:

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April 15, 2008

hillary clinton will drink you under the table, bag you a duck, and tune up your tractor, Pennsylvania

In mycountrytisofthee, we’ve hit that sweet spot in the campaign where all those details about healthcare mandates and biofuels are forgot as the genuinely silly season begins and the last vestiges of any kind of mock-seriousness are replaced by Pythonesque displays of hyperbole, shape-shifting, vitriol, and a steady stream of mis-speakings followed by either Byzantine explanations or quick displays of remorse. And it’s only gonna get worse–Joe Bageant, writing on the “bitterness’ business: “November is still seven months away. No normal person can stand, much less relish, seven more months of all this. But we will wallow in it all for the same reason a hog spends most of its life knee deep in shit. It has no other choice, it has plenty of company, and doesn’t know any other way of life.”

The Reverend Wright got the party started, “God DAAAAAMN America!” serving as the political equivalent of it’s getting-hot-in-here, so-take-off-all-your-clothes. Senator Clinton, jealous of the attention Obama received as a result of Wright’s bellicose imprecations, cast herself in a latter day Perils of Pauline, dodging sniper fire on a Bosnian tarmac, and added to the melodrama by scripting fables in which Chelsea narrowly escaped death at the WTC on 9/11. Then, in what must seem to be an nightmarish re-enactment of the Iowa primaries, the candidates found themselves forced to consort with the commoners and cows of Pennsylviania. Obama disgraced himself rolling a gutter ball, and further highlighted the gap between himself and The People by casually referring to anyone outside of Philadelphia as a bitter, racist, shotgun-toting snakehandler. Having spent a good chunk of my life in Pennsylvania, I was impressed by the speed with which he summed up the terrain. Hillary, on the other hand, re-invented herself once again as—in the kind of turn I’d like to see Obama making more often—an “Annie Oakley,” bragging about the ducks she’s bagged and doing boilermakers with the locals. Joe Lieberman took time out from campaigning for McCain to sum up the situation and draw the obvious conclusions:

NAPITALIANO: Hey Sen. Lieberman, you know Barack Obama, is he a Marxist as Bill Kristol says might be the case in today’s New York Times? Is he an elitist like your colleague Hillary Clinton says he is?

LIEBERMAN: Well, you know, I must say that’s a good question. I know him now for a little more than three years since he came into the Senate and he’s obviously very smart and he’s a good guy. I will tell ya that during this campaign, I’ve learned some things about him, about the kind of environment from which he came ideologically. And I wouldn’t…I’d hesitate to say he’s a Marxist, but he’s got some positions that are far to the left of me and I think mainstream America.

These positions would include things like not planning to wipe Tehran from the face of the planet in between the swearing-in and the inaugural ball. Still, it would be fascinating to hear Joe get more deeply into the subject. Would he consider Obama as tending towards Leninism or Maoism? Do Obama’s economic positions seems to reflect those of the earlier Marx in the Grundrisse, or the “scientific” Marx of Capital? Does Lieberman suspect that Obama would implement, with the assent of a Democratically-controlled Congress, the infamous “community of women” envisaged by Marx? What impact would that have on the Lieberman marriage?

(What I haven’t myself seen pointed yet out yet, amidst the blather, is that Obama’s use of the word “they” exploded his own myth. It was all about us, the great big happy family celebrated in the 2004 DC keynote speech, the we in yes we can, Ashley and “the elderly black man” in that masterful speech on race. Whether the use of “they” in front of a San Francisco audience was condescending is beside the point; in positing an us-and-a-them, Obama revealed the very real fissures underlying his campaign theme, and the binary way of thinking to which he too is susceptible. What I would have liked to have heard: “WE are bitter. I speak for the bitter, not because I “understand” them, but because I AM one” (and the bitter comes out better on a stolen guitar….)

Meanwhile, someone new showed up in Congress, walked into the House of Representatives, “the most junior of junior Congresspeople,” and delivered a swearing-in-speech that included a blast against the war that had Republicans stalking out of the Chamber. But when you’ve actually taken five bullets on the tarmac, the real ones, not the kind Hillary Clinton fabricates out of the thin Yugoslavian air, maybe you don’t care so much about whether a few Republicans boo.

Her name is Jackie Speier, and she replaced the late Tom Lantos after a run—off for California’s 12th district seat, and the shooting on the tarmac (Jonestown) was not even the worst experience of her rather remarkably tragic life—this is a pretty good account. She’s tough and I find myself really liking her. Meanwhile, Obama bowls, Hillary spins, and the war goes on.

So, for Congressman Speier, a suggestion from the Cramps: c’mon little mama let’s tear this damn place up.

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