OCCUPY COLO. SPRINGS will be occupying the 3rd UCCS OWS symposium this Wednesday to challenge the straw man argument that Latinos are underrepresented in the Occupy Wall Street Movement. Nationwide, OWS may be white and middle class, but in the context of the outcry for global democracy, isn’t OWS a bandwagon cargo cult of the Global South?
Let me first begin with how I was exposed to Ayn Rand. I am in high school and awhile back my teacher was doing a course on homelessness. In a ‘prompt’ that she gave me as to what are the causes of homelessness, I answered CAPITALISM. A week later I was astonished to get back my paper with a Zero. I showed this to many people all of whom agreed that it was in no way deserving of a zero. My dad and I took this question as to why I had gotten a zero on my paper to the teacher. I wasn’t expecting much but even after one hour of asking my English teacher why I had gotten a zero on my paper she had no reasonable answer other than that I had not followed the ‘format’ correctly, even though I had a previous organizational sheet on which I based my writing on following her format. she ended by saying I was a horrible writer; we gave up trying to get to through to such a numbskull.
I didn’t quite understand why she had given me a zero until a couple months later, and so began my experience with Ayn Rand. My teacher took us to get the book. As I read the summary I knew it would be some sort of method for her and d-11 to push their politics on students; however I had no previous knowledge of who Ayn Rand was. The next day in class she gave us a powerpoint on the background of Ayn Rand and what the book Anthem was about. It was filled with negative comments on communism including that communism supposedly takes away knowledge, individuality and free expression. As I was assigned to read more and more of Ayn Rand I realized how horrible of a writer she was. I started to listen to Ayn Rand’s interviews. I then understood that they were forcing me to read a writer who didn’t believe in helping anyone, because she was a racist, a nationalist and a pure evil witch. These interviews can be found on <youtube> and <bluecorncomics> among many other articles revealing Ayn Rand to be a racist.
The more and more I read into the book the more i was infuriated at the pure ridiculousness and hypocrisy of it. In the ending chapters it is written by Ayn Rand that
“The word WE is the lime poured over me, which sets and hardens to stone, crushes all beneath it, and that which is white and that which is black are lost equally in the grey of it. It is the word by which the depraved steal the virtue of the good, by which the weak steal the might of the strong, by which the fools steal the wisdom of the sages. What is my joy if all hands, even the unclean, can reach into it? What is my wisdom if even the fools can dictate to me? What is my freedom, if all creatures, even the botched and the impotent, are my masters? What is my life, if I am but to bow, to agree and to obey?”
As i read this I wasn’t sure whether to laugh, throw up, or rip the book apart . I was sickened by how when I had expressed my “free speech” I was given a ZERO; by how I had to read an author who believes being selfish is a virtue. And by how every day, whenever I went to class instead of being taught English literature I got the teachers Right Wing, anti-communist politics thrown into my face. Each time a question on the book was asked I didn’t hear an opinion on whether the book was good or bad i only heard questions on how communism takes away individuality and how Ayn Rand is right on what her idea of what communism is? I said the teacher was expressing personal opinion and the whole class started to yell at me to shut up. I got so alienated and depressed after they said that communism makes robots, and brain dead people even though I couldn’t find more brain dead robots as hard as I looked than the ones that were sitting right next to me.
I couldn’t take the class anymore as it was an insult to who I was, what I believed in, and all the people I respected were continually insulted and lied about. I started skipping the class after my dad not only talked at a school board meeting but also to my assistant principal, in both cases we were given the cold shoulder and treated horribly rude. I decided to go to the class again and deal with it. As I read the quote given above in that class and as I looked around i became terrified of being like them. I was torn between staying and swallowing my believes and to be JUST LIKE THOSE SHEEP or to get up and leave. The overwhelming fear of being lost into them made me get up and walk out of the class. Later that day the assistant principal took me out of a class and made me feel like an outsider, like a weird person that needed to be put in a psychiatric hospital. I complained that I was being pushed politics in a public school and his response was that no other students felt like I did. When I told him that the teacher had given me a zero and was now failing me out of the course, who had said I was a horrible writer; he said He didn’t believe me and that I was wrong. He told me that if I was to walk out again I would have to deal with the consequences even though he wouldn’t deal with a teacher pushing politics. He smiled as I cried for being looked at as being an idiot and a weirdo kid ; it took me about two hours to get with it. We continued to try to get me switched out of the class, which finally we did only to find that Ayn Rand was being taught in that course too and in all English classes for that matter.
I realize I will probably never get them to change, to respect students, parents and INDIVIDUALITY. But this continuing fight which is probably the hardest I’ve ever had to fight proved to me that I would stand up for myself against a herd of flesh eating zombies, that I would NEVER BE LIKE THEM . And I felt pride in knowing I stood up to being brainwashed by anti communist right wingers.
Whew! These Occupy posts are far more difficult to pry from myself than their predecessors; the hands-on mechanics of putting the earlier stuff into practice in the present world, amongst the isolated pools of individuated consciousness we humans represent, each with his or her own vision of the whole, has been at the very least disorienting. I’ve lately revived an old motto i swiped from the good people at Oat Willie’s down in Austin, Texas: Onward Through the Fog! How odd is it that i’ve recently connected with some folks that hark back to that place in ways that are deeply surreal. Oat Willie’s and Fat Freddie will seem to be completely out of place in this bit, in which i mean to address the notion of cooperation amongst disparate factions, but not permanently i hope. By the end of this post, i hope to connect Occupy, The Tea Party, disparate passions, and yes, Hippies. It will be necessary to engage in some relatively surreal thinking.
Last night on a new Facebook page, “UNITE: OCCUPY,” (cap lock and all), i got into a conversation about this stuff started by a guy that asked whether anyone thought a joint event between Occupiers and Tea Partiers might be possible. Sure, i said, our Colorado Springs group had lots of Tea Partiers among its earliest enthusiasts, and although many have pulled away, there still exists a close association with many that veer sharply toward the Te Party camp, especially among Ron Paul supporters. The common ground Occupy shares with the Tea Party, at least t a grass root level, is substantial. There can be no doubt of the equally substantial differences. I suspect that it would take some pretty serious ideological barnstorming to bring the two camps together, but nothing prevents the groups from at least tentative discussion to find commonalities.
Tonight our Occupy group staged a talk by Tea Party stalwart, Constitutionalist Mike Holler. Mike seemed for all appearances to be an earnest and well-versed supporter of Constitutional “fundamentalism,” if you will. He peppered his talk with lots of my favorite quotes from my favorite founding fathers. He got a little testy about the revisionist history his kids bring home from college early on–perhaps indicative of one point of separation between Occupiers and Tea Partiers. Some of those are important. Occupy is international, where the Tea Party can display degrees of jingoism. I, personally, respect the earnest efforts of our Enlightenment founders, but recognize that they were flawed, and aver that their document was dated by racist, sexist, and elitist provisions and thinking that they might be excused from by noting their temporal milieu. We don’t have the same luxury. Occupy is legitimately grass root, supported by sweat and blood more than funded, where TP is, or at least became very quickly corporately funded “astroturf,” disingenuously proffering libertarian ideals as a smoke screen for corporate license to plunder. Occupiers are in my experience far more diverse than Tea Partiers. Socialist and Anarchist Occupiers are common, as are assorted races, genders, orientations, and religious persuasions, where Tea Partiers seem to my limited observation to be relatively homogeneously white Christian capitalist patriots. Mike interjected that both groups had been misrepresented by the media, and that seems likely to be so given that mainstream media seems content to misrepresent ’bout anything they report in this country, but Fox news and the rabid right like the Tea Party so much i have to wonder if he’s fallen victim to a personal soft spot.
Mike spoke eloquently enough in his effort to simplify the Constitution, focusing on issues of freedom, and state’s rights. He said very little with which i could find disagreement. He pointed out two major points of confluence between Occupy and the Tea Party–personal liberty, and a rally-cry, “No more Bailouts!” I suspect he fastidiously avoided some points he knew or at least feared might be contentious, like for example the ludicrous assertions i’ve heard often that environmental warnings from the scientific community stem from some kind of Satanic control scheme from the–well just whom is never too clear. The Vatican or something. Commies, i guess. That just maybe the best way for Tea Partiers and Occupiers to interact, though, for now, concentrating on the common aversion to what amounts to Fascism. Interacting from that perspective could exclude much conversation. It could put the Tea Party in the same position as the Occupy movement, after their Fascist sponsors withdraw in horror. Whatever. We Occupiers got on just fine with Tea Party Mike–“Mr. Constitution.”
Mike largely expressed notions we Occupiers could embrace. I suppose he could have done a bit of research and tailored his speech toward that end, but i think we just agree; he seemed a grassroot kind of guy, to me. He briefly alluded to schisms within the Tea Party, and there’s no sensible reason to avoid acknowledging the same within Occupy. Last night’s event was attended by Occupy people that have had such extreme altercations in their attempts to wrestle a semblance of ideological unity from a stubbornly liquid platform that it could easily enough have disintegrated into bedlam. I attended with my dear friend Thomas, with whom i often disagree. In fact, he and i often disagree so strongly that sometimes i feel like smacking him in back of the head. I expect he feels the same way about me at times. Maybe much of the time. Take note, war-mongers of the world: Thomas is a great guy, and even though we disagree with one another, sometimes strongly, neither of us has smacked the other in back of the head. Get it?
So here we were last night, disparate Occupiers engaging a Tea Party mouthpiece in a room full of people that have all experienced the vagaries of human interaction under a fairly pressurized circumstance over the past few months. No butterflies fluttered around the room, but no one worked up a bickering session, either. We worked together. All of us. One could recall the old adage that “The enemy of my enemy is my friend,” but that would be devolution. I prefer to imagine that those with arguments present recognized the futility of scrapping amongst friends, if only below the radar of their Egos. Whether my nobler hopes for those pained souls in the room last night are valid or not, the assertions i made in these non-pages well before Occupy began remain true. The system we wrestle against is collapsing around our heads. And the solution is spiritual, to a far greater extent than it is temporal.
Fat Freddy is a comic book character that lives in Denver. Seriously. I met him a little while ago. (This only seems out of place, i promise.) Mr. Constitution Mike Holler expressed the opinion last night that our American republic, our constitutional federation of states, is in its final throes; that we are in a position where, ” it’s too late to save the country, but too early to start shooting.” Mike seemed tentative in expressing his hope that God might pull some kind of supernatural rabbit from his celestial hat to resolve our monumental national woes. I expect he feared perturbing the often non-Christian sensibilities of the Occupiers. He needn’t have worried quite so much–we may be largely skeptical of literal interpretations, but we’re pretty tolerant of that sort of thing. When i met Fat Freddy–an icon of counter-cultural activism important to me since childhood, an old-school Hippie with connection to the most famous and infamous of that crowd–he singled me out and pulled me aside to explain in some detail his expectation for a spiritual upheaval in coming days. Freddy’s taken up with the Urantia Book, a tome i’ve heard Christians disparage as devilish. I couldn’t see anything devilish about what he showed me. He earnestly explained his expectation for resolution. Soon.
We had come to Denver to talk about foreclosures and bank jiggery-pokery with another guy, and pulled up at Freddy’s house without knowing it. It just happened that way. These old Hippies like Tea Party fave, Ron Paul. (Follow along, now, i know it’s weird, and yeah, i know a lot of Occupiers don’t like Paul; i’m not sure about him myself). Also in attendance at that meeting was a woman i had been conversing with on line for quite a while in the context of Occupy. It took me nearly through the whole meeting to recognize her, because i knew her to live down in the Four Corners neighborhood of Colorado. She lives at Freddy’s now. This juxtaposition is so weird that now i’m expecting the Mad Hatter, or Lewis Carroll himself to pop up at some meeting quoting from Jabberwocky. Mike Holler holds out for resolution to the country’s woes in a traditional Christian context. My own suspicion, shared with J.B.S. Haldane, is that the Universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose. But somewhere in the mix i am convinced that some divine Thing many of us think of as God is deeply interested in the little proceedings here on our little blue marble and that our interactions are subsequently and necessarily thus influenced.
We live right here. We have no choice but to manage things on a coarse, physical level; but we also live, i think, on an overlapping and less tangible plane, where we have more influence than we might ordinarily imagine. At the same time, things seem to occur herethere without our conscious direction. We’ll need to keep plugging away at things like grasping the Constitution, and taking on massive, quixotic quests like fighting banks and a world full of renegade, intransigent governments and power brokers, not to mention our own internal battles, as finely defined as within our own Souls. We’ll need to recognize the Truth in one another, even when it’s obscured by a bunch of worldly disagreement and fog. And so far as i can tell, were learning. Whatever that means.
Reprinted from hipgnosis.
THANKSGIVING would seem to commemorate misplaced thanks. Our thanks are not for the bounty of the New World, or for receiving aid from the indigenous peoples, or for being bequeathed stewardship over their gardens and farms, or God forbid for their joining us for supper. American white folk give thanks that the North American indigenous resistance quite unwisely didn’t massacre our settlers to the last man and refute at least symbolically the European invasion of their continent. How many acts of turning the other cheek have been rewarded with a victor’s treachery? It’s become fashionable among environmentalists to think of mankind as a parasitic scourge soon to overrun the Earth its host, but that’s only Western Man isn’t it? Indigenous anarchist man has led a sustainable existence for longer than we celebrate our HAPPY history.
Here’s one of the more popular pamphlets distributed at Occupy Colorado Springs, courtesy of the DABC. DEAR OCCUPIERS: A LETTER FROM ANARCHISTS
Support and solidarity! We’re inspired by the occupations on Wall Street and elsewhere around the country. Finally, people are taking to the streets again! The momentum around these actions has the potential to reinvigorate protest and resistance in this country. We hope these occupations will increase both in numbers and in substance, and we’ll do our best to contribute to that.
Why should you listen to us? In short, because we’ve been at this a long time already. We’ve spent decades struggling against capitalism, organizing occupations, and making decisions by consensus. If this new movement doesn’t learn from the mistakes of previous ones, we run the risk of repeating them. We’ve summarized some of our hard-won lessons here.
Occupation is nothing new. The land we stand on is already occupied territory. The United States was founded upon the extermination of indigenous peoples and the colonization of their land, not to mention centuries of slavery and exploitation. For a counter-occupation to be meaningful, it has to begin from this history. Better yet, it should embrace the history of resistance extending from indigenous self-defense and slave revolts through the various workers’ and anti-war movements right up to the recent anti-globalization movement.
The “99%” is not one social body, but many. Some occupiers have presented a narrative in which the “99%” is characterized as a homogenous mass. The faces intended to represent “ordinary people” often look suspiciously like the predominantly white, law-abiding middle-class citizens we’re used to seeing on television programs, even though such people make up a minority of the general population.
It’s a mistake to whitewash over our diversity. Not everyone is waking up to the injustices of capitalism for the first time now; some populations have been targeted by the power structure for years or generations. Middle-class workers who are just now losing their social standing can learn a lot from those who have been on the receiving end of injustice for much longer.
The problem isn’t just a few “bad apples.” The crisis is not the result of the selfishness of a few investment bankers; it is the inevitable consequence of an economic system that rewards cutthroat competition at every level of society. Capitalism is not a static way of life but a dynamic process that consumes everything, transforming the world into profit and wreckage. Now that everything has been fed into the fire, the system is collapsing, leaving even its former beneficiaries out in the cold. The answer is not to revert to some earlier stage of capitalism—to go back to the gold standard, for example; not only is that impossible, those earlier stages didn’t benefit the “99%” either. To get out of this mess, we’ll have to rediscover other ways of relating to each other and the world around us.
Police can’t be trusted. They may be “ordinary workers,” but their job is to protect the interests of the ruling class. As long as they remain employed as police, we can’t count on them, however friendly they might act. Occupiers who don’t know this already will learn it firsthand as soon as they threaten the imbalances of wealth and power our society is based on. Anyone who insists that the police exist to protect and serve the common people has probably lived a privileged life, and an obedient one.
Don’t fetishize obedience to the law. Laws serve to protect the privileges of the wealthy and powerful; obeying them is not necessarily morally right—it may even be immoral. Slavery was legal. The Nazis had laws too. We have to develop the strength of conscience to do what we know is best, regardless of the laws.
To have a diversity of participants, a movement must make space for a diversity of tactics. It’s controlling and self-important to think you know how everyone should act in pursuit of a better world. Denouncing others only equips the authorities to delegitimize, divide, and destroy the movement as a whole. Criticism and debate propel a movement forward, but power grabs cripple it. The goal should not be to compel everyone to adopt one set of tactics, but to discover how different approaches can be mutually beneficial.
Don’t assume those who break the law or confront police are agents provocateurs. A lot of people have good reason to be angry. Not everyone is resigned to legalistic pacifism; some people still remember how to stand up for themselves. Police violence isn’t just meant to provoke us, it’s meant to hurt and scare us into inaction. In this context, self-defense is essential.
Assuming that those at the front of clashes with the authorities are somehow in league with the authorities is not only illogical—it delegitimizes the spirit it takes to challenge the status quo, and dismisses the courage of those who are prepared to do so. This allegation is typical of privileged people who have been taught to trust the authorities and fear everyone who disobeys them.
No government—that is to say, no centralized power—will ever willingly put the needs of common people before the needs of the powerful. It’s naïve to hope for this. The center of gravity in this movement has to be our freedom and autonomy, and the mutual aid that can sustain those—not the desire for an “accountable” centralized power. No such thing has ever existed; even in 1789, the revolutionaries presided over a “democracy” with slaves, not to mention rich and poor.
That means the important thing is not just to make demands upon our rulers, but to build up the power to realize our demands ourselves. If we do this effectively, the powerful will have to take our demands seriously, if only in order to try to keep our attention and allegiance. We attain leverage by developing our own strength.
Likewise, countless past movements learned the hard way that establishing their own bureaucracy, however “democratic,” only undermined their original goals. We shouldn’t invest new leaders with authority, nor even new decision-making structures; we should find ways to defend and extend our freedom, while abolishing the inequalities that have been forced on us.
The occupations will thrive on the actions we take. We’re not just here to “speak truth to power”—when we only speak, the powerful turn a deaf ear to us. Let’s make space for autonomous initiatives and organize direct action that confronts the source of social inequalities and injustices.
Thanks for reading and scheming and acting.
May your every dream come true.
OCCUPIED DENVER- So we got a little bored with Saturday’s march, the white-bread marchers being kept to three chants, (99%, Democracy & Our Streets). Parade marshals insisted procession not overtake a fat woman in a wheelchair, preventing the march from stretching out and disrupting any more than two blocks at a time, effectively handicapping the march! For respite we got some giggles by greeting some third story well-wishers with this variant: “OUT OF THE WINDOW, INTO THE STREET!” Absent on Saturday were anti-imperialists to mix it up, which prompted me to inventory chants to remember to bring to the next events.
Ain’t no power like the power of the people
’cause the power of the people don’t stop! –Say what?
Si, se puede! (Because “Yes we can!” is now Obama’s)
WE ARE the ninety-nine percent, (and so are)
YOU ARE the ninety-nine percent, (and so are)
Show me what Democracy looks like.
This is what Democracy looks like!
Off of the sidewalk into the street!
Stop watching, start marching!
Whose streets?!
Our streets!
Hey Wall Street, it’s not a pretty picture
The poor get poorer and the rich get richer
The POLICE ARE the army of the rich.
More anti-police:
From Denver to Greece, Fuck the Police!
Oink oink bang bang, everyday the same old thang.
One bullet, one pig. One bullet one pig.
America lives in the heart of every man everywhere who wishes to find a region where he will be free to work out his destiny as he chooses. –Woodrow Wilson
Our understanding of history shapes our perception of the present, and informs our actions in the moment. This post, for example, is given additional flesh by the eviction of Occupiers from Zuccotti Park in Lower Manhattan last night by forces directed by 4.0 × 10-8 percenter Michael Bloomberg, one of the richest guys in the USA, and probably in accord with Federal direction. Zuccotti Park is a “Privately Owned Public Space,” (POPS), and that odd status has no doubt been notable in current discourse. Across the USA and elsewhere, including here in Colorado Springs, governments at various levels have utilized no-camping ordinances and public park hours to harrass Occupiers, often to such extremes as to soundly demonstrate some of the protesters’ most salient points. So what is the history of “property,” and how does it pertain to the Occupy Movement?
We citizens of the USA are virtually without foundation where historical discussion is concered, unless we educate ourselves beyond the standard drivel so ineptly foisted in our direction by teachers bound by our disastrously faltering public indoctrination system, mislabeled “education.” We learn a sanitized verion of our own history, and the European history from which ours so largely derives, focused on patriotic and Euro-centric hero-worship rather than on the genuine and controversial currents that have effected societal changes at various junctures in world history. We often become enraged when these inane presumptions are questioned, as i have personally witnessed when service veterans have come unglued when protesters suggested they ought not to have been engaged in foriegn adventurism for resources, or when Occupiers have come near to blows over rights or priveleges the foundations for which they often demonstrate but scanty comprehension.
The story of Christopher Columbus and his noble and brave explorations of a frightening unknown quantity for the lofty purpose of betterment of the human condition, followed immediately by even more noble American colonists’ successful efforts to throw off the shackles of monarchical tyranny culminating in the sacrosanct US Constitution is ingrained in our collective psyche like a Freudian complex. The quote from the nearly deified US President Woodrow Wilson at the top of this page is meant to illustrate this phenomenon. Wilson said some things that seemed to spring from a font of humanity, but he was demonstrably a heinous racist and an elitist, encouraging reestablishment of the KKK, turning US finances over to the Federal Reserve, propagating celebrated treaties he subsequently ignored, and intrepidly belittling any expressor of opinion contrary to his own, among other public sins. Columbus filled his own journals with tales of religiously inspired avarice as he gleefully reported his intent, and execution of his plan to conquer the lands and subjugate the peoples he encountered. The US Constitution, while serving to codify some dignified and egalitarian principles, was still seen as some as an instrument of avarice in its formative days, as has proven to be the case with Adam Smith’s doctrines when handed over to naturally acaricious men. Even the highest-minded of US founders–St. Jefferson springs to apperception–firmly established racist, misogynistic doctrine and elitism by excluding all but white, male land owners from the earliest US political process. Those Founders also knew themselves to be limited and allowed the mechanisms for change to exist within the document.
The land owners so favored by the Founders above had been granted holdings either by monarchical fiat, or by purchase from those granted such holdings. Subsequent years were full of similarly motivated action, wh en”pioneers” once again ennobled by our propagandist history strode across North America claiming everything in sight by perfectly legal Homestead acts and the like, and killing or subjugating anyone not European, male, and white, assuaging their consciences with the absurd “moral” doctrine of Manifest Destiny. Many US citizens, usually white and of European descent, have blithely sloughed off Native American claims to the land here as anachronistic, habituating themselves to the notion that a couple of generations represent a lengthy historical stretch. “Indians,” many of whom don’t experience the epoch between, say, the gleeful rape and resettlement of their great-grandmothers as very lengthy at all, advocate for the removal of white Europe from “their” lands. This may not be anachronistic after all, but it has indeed become impractical, and it is no more nobly motivated than the insistence on Americans, or anyone else, to scarf up resources, such as but not limited to land, to which no human being enjoys a more legitimate claim than any other.
The uproar in Zuccotti Park last night is based on laws that derive from the notion of public versus private property. The Banks we Occupiers have been railing against hold the threat of eviction from private property over the specious doctrines of land ownership in this and other countries. The spats in Colorado Springs over tents, where they belong, and who belongs in them derive from the same set of doctrines, which i hearby proclaim to be bogus, in my opinion. The bad habit of human beings to either grovel or dominate is yet another matter.
One can follow the tendency to dominate and conquer, along with the development of Divinely appointed land control in western culture at least as far back as the dubitable stories of Hebrew escapades in the Levant, supposedly ordered by a loving god to kill, pillage, and rape in order to spread their doctrine of light. Ahem.
While the recalcitrant problems of aggression and slithery competitve spirits, as well as our quickness to condemn one another’s mere habits lead us deeper and deeper into an environmental cul de sac, we continue to pursue failed doctrine. The USA has, in apparently actual fact, presented the world with a still viable political framework within which to effect the sort of massive changes necessary for everyone involved, and it may well be our saving grace, if we acknowlege and rectify its initial errors and subequent abuses. Lots of thinking will be necessary. It’s awfully difficult to conclude that genuine unfettered Anarchism is likely to produce a civil society. Laws are not intrinsically bad unless they’re bad laws. Few really believe Libertarian suggestions that unregulated exploitation of natural resources can lead to anything but irredeemable destruction akin to the recent oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, or the impending collapse of our fisheries.
Did you notice how comfortable my use of the term “our” felt, applied to a natural resource in that last sentence?
Capitalism and the American Constitution found themselves on private property ownership. Some things belong intrinsically to individuals and groups. Marxism denies any right to private property at all and kills innovation, in the argument of McCarthy’s legacy. Marx and Lenin were motivated by historical factors as well, even if their doctrines were no more effective at legislating kindness than ours have been. Most of us will agree that our bodies ought naturally belong to ourselves–the person whose consciousness centers in that particular body–and yet many of our laws belie that acceptance even now that we’ve abolished open slavery. We’ve built a gigantic and Byzantine body of law here in the US, and in countries all over the world, based on principles of subjugation and rapine that are in actual fact now fully anachronistic, using justifications that are fully mythological. The conquering of neighboring lands and their parceling for sale for personal enrichment, using armies fed a long and patriotic line of shyte about motives is simply not sustainable any longer. We can continue to fight over detritus after we, (by which i mean everyone and not just Europeans or Americans), collapse the entire playing field, or we can recognize our errors and take on the extraordinarily difficult prospect of admitting fault and rectifying our relationships with one another both here in the US, and everywhere else. Some things belong to everyone.
This post is largely about bad history, and partly about the failure of both Capitalism and Communism. I’ll be putting it up lacking a certain amount of flesh in order to have it in place. The natural aggression inherent in confronting some of the subject matter contained requires some additional referenceing, which i’ll add later. The characterization of both systems as failures could be entirely specious if i were unprepared to offer alternatives. This is not the case, and i’ll be addressing the whole kit and caboodle, whatever that means, at greater length in the future. The best suggetion i’ve come across thus far is from Henry George, and i hope you’ll investigate. But even if you don’t i hope you’ll give this the thought it warrants. My ideas are unlikely to be the best out there. Look around, though. The one’s we’re working with now are bullshit.
More links are forthcoming, but the take on history expressed here is largely indebted to Howard Zinn’s “Peoples’ History of the United States,” and James E. Lowen’s critique of history as taught in public schools, “Lies My Teacher Told Me.”
COLORADO SPRINGS- Local filmmaker, city council candidate, and critic of urban sprawl, Dave Gardner, screened his new doc GROWTHBUSTERS to a receptive hometown audience last night, on the heels of its world premier in Washington DC. Gardner has long defined his personal mission as questioning the wisdom of “growth”. Finally his unpopular theme is gaining traction. With GrowthBusters Gardner addresses economic growth, rampant consumption, carbon footprints and over-development, building to what he’s decided is the most elephantine challenge in the room, global population growth. Except, I’m sorry, that’s an elephant of another color. I resisted the Q & A, not wanting to pull down the evening’s celebratory curve. A giddy panel of white folk is for me as much a temptation as the easy target Gardner chose. In the privacy of the internet, we at Not My Tribe don’t have bubbles we’re too reluctant to burst.
Dave Gardner’s long unrewarded campaign against our city’s recidivist, graft-driven, and ever tragically unsustainable growth is so damn laudable, and his chopping away at the Capitalist assumptions of neoclassical economists is so urgently pertinent. But by folding both into the Inconvenient Truth of exponential global population rise, does Gardner mean the Colorado Springs audience takeaway to be we must distribute condoms to our Machiavellian land developers?
Let me first applaud Gardner’s critique of our region’s imbecilic growth. It’s ugly and residents are unhappy but powerless to depose the greedy exploitative speculators in charge. A memorable segment describes the Southern Delivery system being built to bring Pueblo water northward to serve El Paso County’s endless eastward developments. The energy to pump that water uphill will require the output of an average coal fired power plant, that much more emissions, pollution and coal ash.
Over the years Gardner has proven to be more than a gadfly battling our land barons. When he challenged Jerry Heimlicher, a pro-growth incumbent for a seat at the city council, the otherwise like-minded progressive adversary beat him, only to resign after his victory to make a sudden move out of town, leaving the position to be chosen by the usual undemocratic powers, looking suspiciously like his campaign had been a desperate measure to keep Gardner’s anti-growth voice off the council. There’s more to applaud about Gardner locally, but first–
I know this is easy to overlook in Colorado Springs, but Dave, the demographic character of the Stargazer Theater audience was what, last night, entirely white? It was, and probably not coincidentally, the dozens of experts you interviewed onscreen were also with one single exception white. Further, I’m sure we can agree the economic class represented was equally homogeneous; let’s call it comfortable. Tell us then, Dave, what does Middle America’s middle class white birthrate add to the worrisome arc of population growth?
Not that I think any socioeconomic group should address itself to out-breeding the next, but an audience with a zero or negative birthrate hardly needs to concentrate on curbing its numbers. Anticipating the challenges of exponential population growth is important, but HOW UNSEEMLY for a white community to plot counter-reproductive measures for the larger masses, specifically the darker-complected Global South, virtually all of its peoples lesser advantaged?
And let me add, how embarrassing that a Grist Magazine editor wants to brag about her lifestyle choice not to have a family, exchanged for the benefit of a “more dynamic schedule” which leaves her more easily free to join three similarly unencumbered friends for coffee.
We’re trading our biological imperative to live a Seinfeld episode?
I am not accusing anyone of deliberate racism, unlike the Sierra Club, who was certain this documentary took aim at Hispanic Americans. This was a detail we learned from the post-screening panel discussion. The local Sierra Club chairperson who sat on the panel last night told us that the national office was alarmed to learn that its Colorado Springs chapter was cosponsoring a documentary which called for curbing population growth. She assured her headquarters that she knew Dave Gardner personally and that GrowthBusters‘s thesis was above reproach. In particular, she explained, it didn’t target illegal immigration, which she presumed was their worry. To clarify, she was thinking: not birthrate but immigration rate, not global population growth but national population growth.
Population growth as it threatens America.
Once again we are reminded of the provincial brain freeze that characterizes our community. Even progressive ideals become distorted by the gravitational pull of our Tea Party tendencies. We support national reformist campaigns, but only to the limit of our stunted conservative comprehension.
Yes, discussing how to limit the birthrate of people of color is racist. It’s White Man’s Burden theology to believe that it is the privilege of the developed white world to decide for our lesser brethren whether they can procreate.
How is rushing to Dave Gardner’s defense, vouching for him that no racist insensitivity was intended, very much different from the excuse given by Congressman Doug Lamborn when he called President Obama a Tar Baby? Lamborn explained that he didn’t know black people were offended by “Tar Baby”. Would it really surprise Gardner that his call for White America to be alarmed about population growth, would threaten the of-color communities whose cultures still encourage having children?
Dave Gardner partnered with strange bedfellows when he took his anti-growth message to what he thought was the next level. The experts he interviewed are well aware their prognostications invite accusations of racism. I found it rather odd that one of them, speaking for the Club of Rome, was not introduced with his organization’s repute fully disclaimed.
If I were to guess, hitting upon the population question is where Gardner’s production finally took wing. Friends were recounting last night how he’d labored on the project for over half a decade, one scene shows Gardner lamenting the lack of financing available for a subject such as his. In the local sequences of GrowthBusters, the subject was about development and sustainability, while all the national interviews concerned population growth. When Gardner described the last year spent immersed in the project, I’m guessing that’s when underwriting for the population meme kicked in. The small cadre of usual suspects advancing today’s equivalent of eugenics theory were probably eager to add a fresh name to their roster. Yesteryear’s infamous population doomsayer Malthus was reviled because people inherently equated dire population projections with depopulation solutions. Malthus’ inheritors are accustomed to the same heat.
It is hard not to wonder if the First World’s cavalier disregard of climate change is because depopulation programs are being readied on the front burner. Peak oil, diminishing resources, declining agricultural yields and higher ecological toxicities cease to threaten human survival with the implementation of depopulation scenarios. Presentations like Gardner’s which reinforce the imperative of reducing the world population, create the popular consent with which population control compliance can be manufactured.
I’d have no problem with population growth engineering if it meant applying in the Third World, the proven method that has subdued the birthrate in the First World. Prosperity. If developed nations could share their abundance and education with the developing world, rendering the wealth of Africa’s natural resources back to Africa’s people for example, they’ll arrive at zero birthrates just like ours.
SPOILER ALERT: Redistribution of resources is not in the cards among the solutions which GrowthBusters suggests. Instead the feel good conclusion of this movie revolves around local applications of sustainability measures. Here I should confess I have a prejudice to corpulent over-eaters lecturing others on sustainability. Austerity measures are danced around, and a suggestion of cutting work hours to twenty one hours a week masks obviously a 50% cut in income.
Just as Gardner celebrates a return to hands-on farming, the oversimplified doubt he casts on the benefit of financial growth ignores the technological progress we all enjoy as its result. Gardner lampoons government planners who look to compensate for trends toward zero birthrates. They’re not “pro-growth”, they mean to fill diminishing labor pools. This is why the US invites its illegal immigrant workers. An increasingly idle population, mostly aging, needs people to service it. The benefit of growth and development was by design at least a rising tide for all.
I say we all, but who is comforted by Gardner’s thesis? How many of us have the savings to invest in a house with land to farm, install an orchard and solar panels to take ourselves off the grid, prepared to barter with our neighbors for the necessities we cannot make ourselves? Few of us live near an American dairy brave enough to defy government regulations against raw milk, I dare say that demographic has shrunk to approximate, no coincidence, the currently proverbial “one percent”. How many of us have access to community shared farms? I’ll hazard a guess you probably can’t afford to buy shares in the farms we have already, Grant Farms or Venetucci.
Let’s be honest about who’s supposed to be cutting back on having babies, and who’s in the position to weather the austere future mankind faces. One of the final scenes of Gardner’s domestic sustainable bliss depicted a model family unit belonging to one of the population growth think tanks. I’d like to think this was an oversight, but in a passing bit of the b-roll footage the audience was let to see that one of the white affluent women was pregnant.
I know very little about the dark side of Colonel Gaddafi. I’ve never seen him outside the filter of Western media. For all I know he emptied baby incubators, hid WMDs and ran rape camps. He wasn’t responsible for Lockerbie, the CIA knows that much. The deposed leader’s execution yesterday was nothing to celebrate. It was sad, brutal and shrouded in mystery. Hugo Chavez hailed Gaddafi as a fallen hero, and I’ve never had occasion to disagree with Chavez. Nor have I ever taken issue with George Galloway and he hated Gaddafi. Probably the aging revolutionary was both heroic and corrupt, eccentric and lunatic. Gaddafi was the most powerful protector of Africa, and the only leader to have apologized for Arab role in African slave trade. Naturally he had to be booted from the club.
Is the US only ever up against evil strongmen? Isn’t it obvious that any leader who opposes US hegemony has to be a strongman? Putin is as formidable as any former Soviet foe, and by comparison, Gaddafi was fey. He let down his guard, thought he could sell out to the New World Order and keep his nationalized oil. But the Capitalist jackals do not respect ideologues and will exploit it as weakness.
Captured alive, Gaddafi was brutally mobbed, although the predominant Arabic voices urged keeping him alive. Multiple video angles contradict the official statement that Gaddafi succumbed to crossfire. Video images seem to show special uniformed soldiers heading against the flow of Libyan fighters converging on Gaddafi after the fatal shots.
Was this a Mussolini moment? Hardly. To the last moment Gaddafi seemed incredulous that his people would betray him. I’m not really sure they did. He railed against the CIA and al-Qaeda backed “rebels” who were tearing Libya asunder. NATO’s strength undoubtedly tipped the balance, and Gaddafi’s demilitarization of Libya left him with insufficient defenses.
Looking at a video still of the final moments of Libya’s deposed leader, I’m reminded of the picture we once posted of Silvio Berlusconi’s bloodied face. We took it down I believe because it celebrated violence I suppose. I regret caving to whatever bastards took offense. Their timid sensibilities keep fascists like Berlusconi in power. Since that one glorious grasp at justice populi the Italian despot has stayed out of the public grasp, the Prince of Wales nearly didn’t it.
The Western press is pitching Gaddafi’s undignified death as a warning to all leaders who challenge white rule. I think it’s significance reaches much further. Summary execution at the hands of a mob. Could happen to the highest of the well heeled.
There he is in all his glory, an NYPD “White Shirt”, the now feared NYC police commanders, raring back and using both hands to club Occupy Wall Street marchers. Other footage shows a whole squad of white shirts swinging away. But “squad” is wrong word, that already denotes boys in blue. So what’s the Murder-of-Crows syntax for a gang of black-gloved White-shirts? Love it: a thug of whiteshirts.
In Italy the fascists were blackshirts, in German they were brownshirts. Corporate America is white collar, so it’s armed enforcers are whiteshirts.
Sorry but Youtube is keeping the above video behind its sign-in wall. Gawker’s got it.
NYPD skinhead swaggers at thought that “my nightstick is going to get a workout tonight.”
Or was it because she was British and not American? In WHERE-DA-WHITE-WOMEN-AT NEWS, American white fixation Amanda Knox and cohort have been set free in Italy, leaving authorities to wonder who else could have scrubbed the murder scene with bleach, contrived it to look like a break in, while the pair were home, among the many incriminating clues. Have you noticed that when affluent white people are accused, the investigation is always “botched,” police are always biased, and victims turn out to be of ill repute? For accused black men like Troy Davis on the other hand, it’s the chair. The arrest of Egyptian dictator Hosni Mubarak and his wife suggest you can also keep a physician on hand to divert jail time to the nearest hospital.
For you, Willie. God bless the Hell out of ya! Alright, so this is all the same thought and I’m just thinkering around with it some for y’all. And it’s all bullshit.
I bet some of y’all forgot this was in the offing. I didn’t, and it really is all one thought. It’s about more than lost weekends or divorce fodder, too. It’s about God and country, life, liberty, and the pursuit of revolution in the fast lane. Let’s hope no one gets hurt, because it’s not me in the fast lane. And you thought I was going to tell you something torrid, din’cha!? Wait–maybe I am!
A lot of the guys that started this country–the U.S.A., where I live–were church folk. They tried real hard, ya have to grant, but they were church folk after all, so they had blinders on just like lots of church folk always have, and still do today. Get to lookin’ too closely at the periphery of things and it’s scary, don’t we all know….
They came over here in the first place on the run from some other church folk, that wanted to kill the Hell out of them. So, naturally they immediately set about establishing a domicile, ( in someone else’s back yard, mind you), where they could kill the shit out of everyone else, instead. After a while that arrangement started to smell a little funny–on account of the bullshit, see–and a few got together to to try and straighten things out. Besides, the Grand Game wasn’t working out quite right and the game pieces kept getting scattered.
The Occupiers read St. Thomas’s Declaration at Acacia Park the other day, ( I call him St. Thomas just to mess with him–he was just as scrambled as the rest of us, if ya didn’t know). It was a beautiful thing. It was beautiful when Kyle read it with his shredded voice. It was beautiful when Jefferson wrote it, and beautiful when they read it in the Boston Common. It’s all the more applicable today if you crunch a few names and change a few numbers, and Jefferson would certainly be needing to restrain Patrick Henry from swinging blows by now if those guys lived now, and had let it all slide as far.
Jefferson wrote the Declaration, , but he had nothing to do with the Bill o’ Rights. He was out of town when they threw that stuff together, which they did ’cause they knew he hated the idea. In fact, he may have ditched town because he knew they were gonna just have to write it and he just couldn’t stand it. He figured it best to leave well enough alone, for fear of a thing developing like we’ve heard, “Everything not forbidden is mandatory.” Now would be the moment to mention that this is an axiom in–wait for it… Quantum Physics, stolen from literature fair and square by a fellow named Gell-Mann and named the “Totalitarian Principle”. That’s right–physicists see the poetry and the downright ridiculous humor in all this, too, sometimes.
The Bill o’ Rights contains stuff designed to keep government unobtrusive. No one could figure out a way to make it go away completely back in the day, but those guys had eaten enough shit to realize they didn’t want a buncha power to inhere in the Halls of Power. Even the church guys had had enough–my mom’s family came over to escape religious persecution real early on, (my aunt Leslie paid someone a boatload of money to tell her we came over with a boatload. Surely it’s not bullshit). So that’s what they were thinking about when they put together the addenda to the Constitution. How could Jefferson and the rest have guessed that it didn’t matter about the enumeration? We were bound to fuck it up, anyhow.
Willie, still onea my heroes, used to let his freak flag fly without regard for whom it may have snapped when the wind caught it. No doubt being out in the weather like that has worn his flag out some, so I hope I can spiff it up some for him–add some color, if you will. That weed-rag interview that set me off about all this was sad as a dirge, to me, simply ’cause I still idolize Mr. Nelson. I still hope he gets to be POTUS. If he does I wanna do some bongs in the Oval Office! But when I read his carryings on about medical marijuana, and how we ought to tax and regulate it and all that Republican, party-line shyte, I wanted to spend the rest of the week wearing a black arm-band, even though I know most of the”patients” at the weed stores here in Colorado just want to get stoned.
The decision to alter one’s consciousness, which each and every human being makes every single day as soon as the notion to open his eyes in the morning passes across the surface of his frontal lobes, is absolutely private, to be rendered with the final consultation of no one but the individual in question, and his or her God, (or absence of god, if such a thing were really possible). I promised I wouldn’t use that clunky English, but it’s important to be sure no one feels left out of this. Maybe I should say “his and her” now, to be sure I don’t miss any hermaphrodites, drag queens, or Chas Bono. The fact that this is a strictly spiritual decision relieves the government, and everyfuckin’body else of responsibility for my decisions, or anyone else’s decisions other than their very own. It also renders it illegal for them to regulate or tax. “Sin” tax, right? Ooooh– I can smell the smoke coming form y’alls ears from here, though I know not all those brain cells are heating up for the same reasons.
I promised to squeeze marriage into this, right? Still think I can’t do it? Watch this….
We have spent an awful lot of effort in this country worrying about whether or not queers ought to be allowed, allowed, to marry each other. Who is it gonna do the allowing? We the people? Aren’t we talking about the government? Isn’t marriage at its very most basic essence an spiritual agreement between some people and whatever god or non-god they deign to invoke? So what the fuck is a secular government doing in the marriage business at all??? If your church doesn’t like queers, don’t have any. If your church doesn’t like straights, get the pastor to put on lots of makeup and a Dolly Parton wig–that ought to scare them off well enough. But if those perverts in Washington start foisting their own crap on us then–oh, wait–they have, and the shit is totally screwed now!
St. Thomas said the government should do no more than to prevent folks from harming one another. (He got that idea from J.S. Mill, who likely got it by Divine Inspiration, if you ask me). So, a bit of tastefully rendered social contract law wouldn’t hurt, but licensing marriage is utterly unconstitutional, and maybe straight from the Devil, or the Balrog, or something. Just like prohibition laws of any stripe. You just can’t write one in stripes that are recognizably red, white, and blue. Maybe Willie’s flag is too faded for it to remind him of that, but I know the damn thing is still flying. I have to believe it. ‘Cause Willie’s a hero, an icon of the War from back before he was born.
And when we get together next summer we’re gonna laaaugh–’cause he gets it, ya know….
I lied about it bein’ part two, though. It’s all been the same story–all of it. I lied about the bullshit, too –it’s all fuckin’ True!!!
(Reprinted from Hipgnosis)
On the day after the state murder of Troy Davis, you’ve got to feel sorry for the Obamapologists who must have a lot more in a knot than their panties. How do you explain why President Obama couldn’t intercede to save the life of accused off-duty-cop-killer Troy Davis? Because it would have been unseemly for a black president, the first, to intervene in the sanctioned lynching of another black man, whose number is lost among the countless. It would have been a formidable first, but Obama took the highroad, out of Dodge. Was it a matter of not stepping on states’ rights? Because preventing an injustice would not have been worth it? To save a human life?
COLORADO COLLEGE- The ultra conservative Young America’s Foundation erected a September 11th memorial on the grounds of Colorado College consisting of little American flags stuck in the grass to commemorate the 2,977 lives lost ten years ago, since avenged 500 fold.
Seen this video? Conspiracy theory mocked in less than five minutes.
“American Fall” would be a pun, yes. A pan-Arabian-like Spring causing the US anti-democracy to tumble, being the objective. The English riots have put a dark spin on what might be Middle America’s reception to popular uprising, but mark the dates, because the brass ring nears whether you have the courage or not, and you won’t have the stomach for the alternative.
You’ve probably already sensed the buzz about #SEPT17, campus groups across the country have been bypassing the conventional chaperones to coordinate OCCUPY WALL STREET. Can they do it? Not without your help, and that doesn’t mean switching your phone service or knocking on doors to Get Out The Vote.
Donate, organize or help with the logistics. If you’ve the temerity, attend in person. At the very least, you’ll have your expenses reimbursed when the city settles your civil suit against them for false arrest. New York City already budgeted for the insurance policy that will pay the legal settlements for the probably now textbook law enforcement practice of kettling inconvenient protests. Or, thinking positively, you may just witness history. To make history you have to make it. Don’t leave it up to the Little Red Hen if you want a piece.
Next up is #OCT6, although the day varies regionally. The date marks the 10th anniversary of the Afghan invasion, but social justice groups of all stripes are throwing their sundry complaints unto one banner and have organized marches nationwide. Of course the nationals aims to SEIZE DC, where activists will converge on Freedom Square, English for “Tahrir Square”, with plans to camp there until the people’s voice is heard. DC has passed ordinances against overnight protests, but Freedom Square may be cut some slack for being off the National Mall. It’s a smaller public space which lies on the diagonal between the White House and the Capitol Building, abreast of General Tecumseh Sherman’s horse actually.
The determination to reclaim American Democracy with an action in DC hopes to recreate Madison Wisconsin on the Potomac, with the same grassroots support for a broad set of issues to which both parties have shown themselves unresponsive.
A successful DC foothold will get real traction being closely followed by an international call for a worldwide uprising. #OCT15 is being spearheaded by Spain’s movement for GLOBAL DEMOCRACY. Will it dilute regional efforts to have actions running concurrently, or will synchronized demonstrations overwhelm our transnational overseers? We can wait and see, or we can give it our best shot.
Here are more graphics in support of the kickoff September 17. Borrowing from Tunisia and Egypt, and before that Chicago 1968, it’s US Days of Rage.
In the course of a single spring we’ve seen massive demonstrations which provoked governments to interrupt cellphone service, shut down internet access, and answer protestors with direct gunfire. To what extreme will the USG be driven? What rights remain inviolate in the US? Not communication. Activist cellphones were blocked on the BART in San Francisco to thwart protests against police brutality.
Visitors to what remains of the WWII-era Granada Relocation Center located on Highway 50 past Lamar, are tempted to conclude that the remote location was isolation enough to restrict the movement of its 7,000 Japanese-American internees. Gone are all 560 buildings except their concrete foundations; the few remaining photographs depict a vast layout of spartan barracks, playing host to ordinary civilian lives, minus the atmosphere of incarceration. Were there cyclone fences and watch towers? The answer should not surprise you. Of course. Camp Amache was ringed by the usual multiple perimeters of prison fences, including six watch towers manned by military police, who were there, it was explained, for the internees’ protection. I think plans to further restore Amache need to begin with the security fortifications. If such blights on American history as these race-based detention centers are memorialized in the hope that our nation not do it again, it dishonors our victims, and blunts the lesson, not to illustrate our heavy hand.
I attended a recent screening of a documentary made of Camp Amache, attended by its producers, who expressed the usual motivation: in remembrance, never again. Special emphasis was placed on the contributions made by Japanese-Americans during the war, and on the magnanimity with which the internees accepted their lot. Survivors were not to receive an official apology until 45 years later, given $20,000 restitution for their livelihoods and families destroyed. It would be safe to say the audience felt well beyond the prejudice that had motivated their parents. Against Japanese-Americans.
Unfortunately both the documentary and the filmmakers’ commentary left the impression that “never again” describes a successful holding pattern. Of course, America has been at it again and as usual, its citizens have been obliviously complicit.
Look at the War on Islam, which has necessitated the internment of Muslim-Americans and Muslims worldwide. Guantanamo is not much different from the Wartime Relocation Authority (WRA) special Isolation Centers such as Dalton Wells, near Moab, where the WRA sent internees profiled as potential insurgency threats.
America has been building a network of fresh detention facilities to house Hispanic-Americans who run afoul of the country’s illegal labor market. Most of the detainees are promptly deported, but many languish while immigration issues and family ties are sorted out. While ICE pretends to protect the American people from the security-threatening unlawfulness of illegal aliens, in reality its detention centers enforce the successful abuse of a Hispanic-American slave labor pool.
You need only visit a traditional prison or jail to see that an overwhelming disproportion of its inmates are African-American and Hispanic-American, far exceeding what can be excused as representative of America’s poor. The American judicial system is still stacked against non-whites, and motivated by the same racist premise of protecting the security of white Americans.
And of course there are the open air prisons which still incarcerate the Native-Americans, the internment camps we call reservations, the original Wartime Relocation Centers.
COLORADO SPRINGS- If US Rep. Doug Lamborn (R-CO) remembered one thing from the Uncle Remus stories, it was not to touch that Tar Baby! You know, the one Brer Rabbit mistook for a cute black infant who would not tip his hat to his better. Or was that a Porch-Monkey? Colorado’s 5th District is unclear about the distinction if the local media and Fox News are to be believed. Either term refers to a poor person whose sticky problems become your “quagmire” if you ignore your natural prejudice to their skin color and you let them touch you. Can a representative of bigots be bothered to know if a racial slur is offensive? According to Lamborn, he can’t. More important, the congressman reiterates –as he professes his apology to people taking umbrage at racism he hadn’t intended to express– is: NOT TO TOUCH THAT OBAMA!
To be clear, Doug Lamborn hasn’t apologized to his constituents, he’s only claimed to have sent President Obama a letter, assuring all that Obama, the black untouchable, will have the grace to forgive him as “a man of character”.
And so this Uncle Remus tale simply goes on…
The story so far
Lamborn calls black US president a Tar-Baby, public outrage ensues, Gazette newspaper lends support to Lamborn’s excuse that Tar-Baby wasn’t used in racist sense. Protests held by NAACP, community groups and local progressives, all which Lamborn refuses to meet. Lamborn office erects sign NO PROTESTS.
ACT II: Lamborn office calls for his supporters to rally, presumably under the “no protest” sign. His office issues a press release: AP, Fox News, national and statewide outlets report before the fact that LAMBORN SUPPORTERS RALLY. Huffpo and Springs activists scramble to get images of said protest sanctioned despite “no protest” sign, find none. Local TV station KOAA which had depicted rally with a photo, hours before it was alleged to happen, omitted to mention photo was from file, conveniently unfocused and likely of a past year election event.
With every shenanigan, the theme resounds: the Colorado Springs establishment supports what Doug Lamborn said about Obama being a Tar Baby.
Racism in Colorado Springs
No one is in denial about the unsavory support behind Doug Lamborn. So does Colorado Springs support his bigotry?
Does the Tea Party shit in Acacia Park? You should see those clan gatherings, you can’t find a parking space for blocks, then it’s a sea of hate-filled white faces, with Doug Lamborn right there up front.
The comment section of every local media blog overflows with indignation that “Tar-Baby” is being construed to be racist. Commentators assert their preference for Freedom of Speech over Political Correctness.
BTW, Colorado Springs is as segregated as Chicago, with black neighborhoods, churches and schools. Many lives never cross the path of another of different ethnicity, so we’re blameless actually when we conclude there’s no racism here.
Except toward Hispanics, grouped conveniently with illegal immigrants, who don’t count, by definition, according to our favorite definition: legality. Same as used to apply to slaves.
The Pikes Peak region was a hotbed of clan activity in the 1930s, and obviously before that. At the turn of the century, the good folks of Limon had to hold up a lynching, make the poor young black boy wait hours in the November cold because hundreds wanted to come on the train from Colorado Springs to see 16-year-old Preston Porter burned alive at the stake.
Lynchings of Native Americans weren’t even recorded, being as they were, sanctioned as vermin control. It was seldom that white men distinguished themselves by speaking out in defense of Indians. Pikes Peak volunteers rode with Colonel Chivington to commit the Sand Creek Massacre.
Today downtown Colorado Springs boasts a lone statue of an African-American, a William Seymour, among the city notables immortalized in bronze. His is the only likeness made to take off his hat, outdoors, I kid you not.
Speaking of which, that was Tar-Baby’s offense.
Brer Rabbit and the Tar-Baby
Brer Rabbit was passing by the little black figure, and called out a friendly hello. But Tar-Baby wouldn’t answer when spoken to. When he wouldn’t even take off his hat, Brer Rabbit figured he’d teach him a lesson. Apparently, it’s not inappropriate to clobber some status of people if they’ve disrespected you.
Of course that was the only way Brer Fox’s plan was going to ensnare the rabbit, to mire him in the tar.
You might ask, how did Brer Fox know that Rabbit was going to mix it up with the Tar Baby? Would Rabbit have laid his hand on the baby if he’d been white? Would it have mattered if a white baby didn’t answer to his greeting?
Put aside that the Tar Baby expression became a racial slur in itself, the original Tar-Baby character impersonated an African-American child who didn’t show the expected deference to a rabbit.
The accompanying images reflect the changing visual representation of Tar-Baby. He makes his first appearance in an early chapter of the Uncle Remus Tales (as collected by Joel Chandler Harris) called “The Wonderful Tar-Baby Story.” Above is one of the original illustrations by artist A.B. Frost. There Brer Fox creates a “baby” made of tar to lure Brer Rabbit into his clutches.
The next images are from Disney versions. First the animated film SONG OF THE SOUTH, then the children’s books which followed.
Disney famously has not released Song Of The South after its theatrical run. The depictions were too ethnic, and Tar-Baby recalled the black-face entertainment that ought not to have so amused white audiences. Black-face is what passes for a negro face to whites. Similarly, a baby made of tar passes for a negro, but only in exaggeration. Oblivious to many, apparently, is that African-Americans are not by any approximation black. If Brer Fox had made a baby out of milk, would white people confuse its color for their flesh tone?
Disney rewrote the tale for its children’s book series, making the tar baby this time out of glue. Not only that, but they gave him ears to resemble a rabbit. This preempted confusing him for a human baby, black or white. Now Brer Rabbit could be seen taking him for his kin, which of course shifts the premise, and might puzzle some children to wonder why Brer Rabbit is so quick to come to blows.
Uncle Remus
Some will probably ask in earnest: are the Uncle Remus tales racist? No, but their context is complicated. The stories emerged from the plantation South, from storytellers who lived in slavery. The lessons imparted are universal, but the particulars were obviously crafted to help slaves come to terms with their unchallengeable fate. Shall I quote a few passages to see if you get the idea?
Brer Tarrypin, he lay back up dar, he did, des es proud ez a nigger wid a cook possum.
–chapter 10
He scrape it clean en lick it dry, en den he go back ter wuk lookin’ mo’ samer dan a nigger w’at de patter-rollers bin had holt un.
–chapter 17
Dey er mighty biggity, dem house niggers is, but I notices dat dey don’t let nuthin’ pass. Dey goes ‘long wid der han’s en der mouf open, en w’at one don’t ketch de tother one do.
-chapter 27
How about this wrenching bit from A Story of War?
Nigger dat knows he’s gwineter git thumped kin sorter fix hisse’f, en I tuck’n fix up like de war wuz gwineter come right in at de front gate.
From chapter 33: Why the Negro is Black:
ONE night, while the little boy was watching Uncle Remus twisting and waxing some shoe-thread, he made what appeared to him to be a very curious discovery. He discovered that the palms of the old man’s hands were as white as his own, and the fact was such a source of wonder that he at last made it the subject of remark. The response of Uncle Remus led to the earnest recital of a piece of unwritten history that must prove interesting to ethnologists.
“Tooby sho de pa’m er my han’s w’ite, honey,” he quietly remarked, “en, w’en it come ter dat, dey wuz a time w’en all de w’ite folks ‘uz black—blacker dan me, kaze I done bin yer so long dat I bin sorter bleach out.”
The little boy laughed. He thought Uncle Remus was making him the victim of one of his jokes; but the youngster was never more mistaken. The old man was serious. Nevertheless, he failed to rebuke the ill-timed mirth of the child, appearing to be altogether engrossed in his work. After a while, he resumed:
“Yasser. Fokes dunner w’at bin yit, let ‘lone w’at gwinter be. Niggers is niggers now, but de time wuz w’en we ‘uz all niggers tergedder.”
“When was that, Uncle Remus?”
“Way back yander. In dem times we ‘uz all un us black; we ‘uz all niggers tergedder, en ‘cordin’ ter all de ‘counts w’at I years fokes ‘uz gittin’ ‘long ’bout ez well in dem days ez dey is now.
But atter ‘w’ile de news come dat dere wuz a pon’ er water some’rs in de naberhood, w’ich ef dey’d git inter dey’d be wash off nice en w’ite,
en den one un um, he fine de place en make er splunge inter de pon’, en come out w’ite ez a town gal.
En den, bless grashus! w’en de fokes seed it, dey make a break fer de pon’,
en dem w’at wuz de soopless, dey got in fus’ en dey come out w’ite;
en dem w’at wuz de nex’ soopless, dey got in nex’, en dey come out merlatters;
en dey wuz sech a crowd un um dat dey mighty nigh use de water up, w’ich w’en dem yuthers come long, de morest dey could do wuz ter paddle about wid der foots en dabble in it wid der han’s.
Dem wuz de niggers, en down ter dis day dey ain’t no w’ite ’bout a nigger ‘ceppin de pa’ms er der han’s en de soles er der foot.”
And my favorite passage, called Turnip Salad:
“How many er you boys,” said he, as he put his basket down, “is done a han’s turn dis day? En yit de week’s done commence. I year talk er niggers dat’s got money in de bank, but I lay hit ain’t none er you fellers. Whar you speck you gwineter git yo’ dinner, en how you speck you gwineter git ‘long?”
“Oh, we sorter knocks ‘roun’ an’ picks up a livin’,” responded one.
“Dat’s w’at make I say w’at I duz,” said Uncle Remus. “Fokes go ’bout in de day-time an’ makes a livin’, an’ you come ‘long w’en dey er res’in’ der bones an’ picks it up. I ain’t no han’ at figgers, but I lay I k’n count up right yer in de san’ en number up how menny days hit’ll be ‘fo’ you ‘er cuppled on ter de chain-gang.”
“De ole man’s holler’n now sho’,” said one of the listeners, gazing with admiration on the venerable old darkey.
“I ain’t takin’ no chances ’bout vittles. Hit’s proned inter me fum de fus dat I got ter eat, en I knows dat I got fer ter grub for w’at I gits. Hit’s agin de mor’l law fer niggers fer ter eat w’en dey don’t wuk, an’ w’en you see um ‘pariently fattenin’ on a’r, you k’n des bet dat ruinashun’s gwine on some’rs.”
What about “nigger”?
When Russel Means writes of today’s economic and anti-democratic troubles, and addresses America’s newly impoverished middle class by saying Welcome to the Reservation, this is the wisdom I think he’s looking to impart. Welcome to niggerdom, Nigger.
With that word now struck from Huckleberry Finn, the concept of “nigger” becomes harder to grasp and can’t teach us its lesson.
Listen to Uncle Remus talk about what it means to be a lowest class being, beneath the interest of humanity, untouchable, as government functionaries like Doug Lamborn would prefer the underclass laborer remain.
It’s against the moral law for niggers to eat when they don’t work. AND
I ain’t handy with figures, but I lay I can count on one hand how many days it’ll be before [“knocking around” will land you niggers] in the chain-gang.
I suggest you reread that last passage of Uncle Remus in its original. Now I’ll try my hand at the last half of that phrase:
It’s against the moral law for niggers to eat when they don’t work, and when you see them apparently fattening on air, you can just bet that ruination is going on somewhere.
The US Department of Defense finally released the list of US soldiers killed on the NATO MH-47 Chinook helicopter downed in Afghanistan.
Median age was in high 30s, which is unsurprising for highly trained Special Ops, but isn’t it interesting that the usual disproportionate percentage of Americans of Color as cannon fodder (see casualty figures) doesn’t extend to the higher-paid military career jobs?
Huge props of course to African Americans who decide against being career hitmen. And let’s not neglect the exclusively white composition of the Abu Ghraib snap shot perps, and the docket, however sparse, of other US soldiers accused of war crimes.
2011 DIVERSITY FAIR, NOTES, PART 1- What is our police department doing with high school age “explorers?” They’re uniformed and have their own shoulder patch. Exploring what? The limits to which they impose their weight against peoples’ rights? I’m at a civic festival in Confluence Park, across from a canopy whose shade does not conceal a mass of blue uniforms, adult officers bulky with bullet-proof vests and leather, holstering all manner of law enforcement weaponry, and CSPD apprentices, skinnier for lack of the armor and accouterments, but otherwise dressed exactly like police officers, and adopting the swagger which comes of trooping the colors, emboldened by the anonymity of the requisite Ray-Bans.
I don’t know what the CSPD think they’re doing. Community outreach would be far better accomplished in t-shirt and shorts. I can’t help but think that the authority communicated by the uniforms is being abused in this setting. I’m reminded immediately of the menace which fascist youth groups projected over even their parents. These kids are strolling around the event like appointed hall monitors. Patrolling, some of them would you believe, with their thumbs looped on their leather belts. If they had clubs they’d be twirling them.
Of course, they stroll pretending it means assimilation, as if submission to authority is a normal ingredient of any balanced community. I suspect that’s what the early indoctrination “explores.”
Actually, the Explorers get their name because they’re “exploring law enforcement as a career.” Yes any profession would be something an apprentice might want to explore, but police craft is one which requires alerting the public that this uniformed person does not have full-on authority/responsibility over you. Well, responsibility is probably what they’re most concerned about.
No one should doubt the craft of policemanship bears complexities worthy of journeymen, but I’d rather recruits came into law enforcement in the more common manner, after a college education.
Well, this IS the EVERYBODY WELCOME Diversity Fair, so we can’t exclude the Fascists. But do the city’s traditionally marginalized populations really feel welcomed by such an asserted police presence? I’m thinking of the immigration-challenged circles. But in general, how welcome do you suppose Hispanic, African, or Native Americans feel with white kids semi-officially playing cop?
Presumably the Klan was excluded from invitation, like any hate-group, because it offends the hatees. Probably law enforcement should take a backseat too, and not pretend that policing be considered a cultural component of a community.
It’s given me an idea however. Maybe the point could be brought home if we injected the event with worse than these crew-cutted crackers. How about a para-militarized presence?
I’m thinking cops in riot gear, patrolling like it was no big deal. In protest situations it’s become the norm, imagine if the average non-protester were to see the face of the US police state. Would citizens be so comfortable if instead of officer friendly, or junior uniformed friendlies, the event was patrolled by storm troopers. The CSPD knows better than to expose itself like that, but imagine a riotous development to draw them out.
Or, why not assert a pseudo-authoritarian presence for them?
If not riot gear, maybe a paramilitary uniform, American dark blue, with plenty of USA insignia, the American eagle made to look a little Germanic, let’s say. Jack boots, riding pants, leather straps, and black gloves a must.
Technically, the force could pretend to be a secret service, community outreach for the NSA or the plethora of intelligence agencies. The idea would be to present a dark, ominous authority. Handing out small fliers that read “Please take no notice of us, if you’ve done no wrong, you’ve nothing to be afraid of.”
I had a white American lunch today. It sounds like stereotyping to say that, but it’s true, I had the Friday special at a local luncheonette. Roasted white meat of turkey, on white bread, with mashed potatoes and whitish-yellow gravy. Nothing of color, or shading, except a one ounce plastic cup of cranberry sauce to make it red blooded. Now who else is going to eat that?
Of course I want to joke that green would have been unpatriotic, but sadly it’s more likely a price issue at poverty wages.
“It is a far better thing that I do now than I have ever done before #splat“
–tweeted by activist/comedian Jonnie Marbles, immediately before pie-ing News Corp godfather Rupert Murdoch at UK parliamentary hearing. Murdoch’s wife Wendi Deng reached over their bodyguard to strike Mr. Marbles, and curiously, hearing room cameras cut all direct images of the spectacle. Watching Murdoch deny knowledge or curiosity about NOTW wrongdoings, you wonder how word even reached him that his presence was requested at this parliamentary inquiry.
I’m thinking the PR coaching the Murdochs received is being overrated. Pretend to be a hands-off boss so not to expose your wrists to be slapped in cuffs? No one was buying Murdoch the Elder’s senility schtick, until the media began its spin, and wasn’t it amazing to gaze upon the breadth of media fealty shown to Rupert? Everyone wanted to distance themselves from Braveheart Marbles, because he purportedly threw audience sympathy to Murdoch. Right. The only ones fooled are those shills pretending. The world TV audience saw Murdoch for what they know he is, a blackmailer of world leaders, pursuing the ugliest of neoliberal war-making agendas.
Of course Rupert’s media was going to praise the Missus for her flying-clawing attack of the pie-wielding Marbles. It wasn’t intervention mind you, but retaliatory. I hope he can sue her. He’d already done the pie and was being subdued, she leaped over security to have at him.
Did Marbles spoil the show? Nonsense. He waited until the last of the softball questions, and took his turn. The parliamentarians may have been setting technical legal snares to trap the Murdochs at a later date, but certainly they could also have been asking, for example, did Murdoch wonder how the NOTW obtained confidential information, and was any ever withheld because it would lead others to question its illegal source. Also, did Murdoch ever use the threat of releasing confidential information to leverage government policy in his favor?
The big story for me was how the camera feed cleverly cut away from Marbles’ stunt. Ostensibly to capture the action suddenly coming from off-camera, but ultimately censoring the main scene. Where were the multitude of stills from that moment, of Elder Murdoch’s face filled with pie? Images abound now of the pie-wielder, caught effectively with egg-white on his face, but of Murdoch, not even a smudge, his splattered jacket whisked out of view before the frontal camera feed was let to resume.
How that sequence was managed for Murdoch tells a lot I think about the power he wields. Similar to the aftermath of the murdered girl’s violated voicemail. As the story broke, it wasn’t just messages erased, but internet caches of the early evidence, effaced even from hacktivists who know how to rescue unarchived data. Tracks of NOTW malfeasance erased by malfeasance at a much higher pay grade.
But I celebrate Jonnie Marbles, aka Jonathan May-Bowles, for daring something even the most powerful men in the world dare not, to humiliate Rupert Murdoch, on live TV with a world audience no less. It was a feat worthy of the shoe thrower, and no less deserved. I only hope the price Marples may have to pay, isn’t the fate of Sean Hoare, an earlier source of ire for Murdoch Elder.
I celebrate Jonnie Marbles’ last tweets before his deed:
I’m actually in this committee and can confirm: Murdoch is Mr. Burns.
RT @RachelvsPublic: Have you ever wondered what a verbal sudoku would be like to solve? This is it. #Hackgate #Yates
One gets the sense that they haven’t really done the required reading ahead of their presentation. Think they may fail this module #hackgate
It might be quicker if Baby Murdoch simply listed all of the things that he does know #hackgate
It is a far better thing that I do now than I have ever done before #splat
UPDATE: The Guardian gave Jonnie Marbles a chance to explain his stunt. He’s taking a beating in the comments, but here’s my favorite:
At last we have someone in this whole sorry mess who can own up and take responsibility for their own actions.
If the Murdochs had thrown a pie at Johnnie the article would read :
I never threw that pie. I was not in the position at the time to throw that pie.?
I don’t remember that pie, I throw 56,000 pies every day, how I am supposed to remember one individual pie??
If a pie was thrown, then someone I trusted must have thrown that pie.?
With hindsight I never threw the pie but if I had thrown the pie it was a mistake and I will apologise once all the facts are known about the pie and if I really threw it or not.?
This is the most humble pie day of my life.
Cheer up Johnnie.
COLORADO SPRINGS– Uh oh, news at six. I chanced upon District 17, room S380 today where Detra Farries is accused of dragging a tow-truck driver to his death earlier this year. The mother of eight was trying to prevent her vehicle, filled with all the family’s belongings, from being towed from an apartment parking lot. The result was horrific scene and Ms. Farries immediately cooperated with the police. But the local press has been very unkind to Ms. Farries and they’ve described the event as Farries jumping into her car to speed off. Hopefully they will temper their condemnation today as the evidence revealed the tow chains were not attached until after Farries got into her vehicle. Which means what, the tow-truck driver was defying Ms. Farries? I’m wondering, if Farries had been a white male, would a local TV audience more easily empathize with a driver refusing to surrender his vehicle, determined to move it himself instead of surrendering it to a tow-truck? Possession being 9/10ths, personal property rights, etc… At issue today was Ms. Farries’ $50,000 bond, five times higher than what it should be. The prosecution asserts that the mother of eight is a flight risk, pointing to her car-full of belongings as evidence of her airworthiness. Can you devise any more insulting a charge against someone who’s homeless?
Article in progress.
UPDATED– In a flurry of conflicting tweets, French Flotilla II member DIGNITE AL KARAMA made for the open sea, beyond the reach of Greek authorities currently detaining the AUDACITY OF HOPE, TAHRIR, LOUISE MICHEL, GUERNICA, JULIANO and others. Reporter Quentin Girard has been communicating the DIGNITY’s progress, its eight activists electing last night to complete their run all the way to Gaza.
The French vessel escaped Greece on a technicality, as a pleasure craft, the Dignity is not confined by the regulations being used to block the larger Flotilla participants. Aboard the Dignity with Girard, are Olivier Besancenot, Julien Rivoire, Omeyyaa Sedic, Nicole Kiil-Nielsen, Annick Coupé, Nabil Ennasr. (Both Coupé and Besancenot are registered on Twitter, but neither has communicated yet.)
Girard’s most recent tweets, translated:
July 5, 3:02
All is well thank you 🙂 but we were in an area where reception was bad.July 5, 3:15
Despite what we can read, the Dignity is still in international waters. It will be there in one hour.July 5, 7:41
The passengers of the Dignity have finally come to the decision (only now really) to go to Gaza.July 5, 8:19
TF1 should attempt to rejoin Dignity and embark.July 5, 8:43
We’re moving again after a “media” pause on the high seas. 15 hours of sea left before I might go silent. Kisses!July 5, 12:19
Into the night the DIGNITY continues its advance. In the distance, small lights.July 5, 13:38
Not really enough beds for everyone, so I sleep under the stars on the upper deck. beautiful sky.
In their original French:
05.07 3:02
tout va bien merci 🙂 mais on était dans un endroit où ça captait mal.05.07 3:15
Malgré ce qu’on peut lire le Dignité n’est pas encore dans les eaux internationales. Il y sera dans une heure.05.07 7:41
Les passagers du Dignité viennent de prendre enfin (seulement maintenant vraiment) la décision d’aller jusqu’à Gaza05.07 8:19
TF1 devrait tenter de rejoindre le Dignité et embarquer dessus05.07 8:43
On bouge à nouveau après une pause “média” en haute mer. C’est parti pour 15h de mer, où je risque d’être silencieux. Des bises.05.07 12:19
Dans la nuit le dignité avance toujours. Au loin, des petites lumières.05.07 13:38
Pas vraiment de couchettes pour tout le monde, donc je dors à la belle étoile, sur le pont supérieur. Beau ciel
Below is the Girard’s July 5 article in the LIBERTE.FR (auto-translated, sorry, until I can review it)
En route to Gaza, “Dignity” is appealing to the media
The French ship of the “freedom flotilla” sailing in international waters off the coast of Greece. The crew decided to go to Gaza.
By QUENTIN GIRARD special envoy on the “Dignity”
16 hours in Greece, somewhere in international waters, on Tuesday afternoon. After much discussion, the Dignity passengers finally made their decision. They will go to Gaza. A bit surreal moment where the middle of the sea, tossed by the waves, they set up banners and make an official statement.
When they left the industrial port of Salamina, Monday morning, they did not really know how far they try to go. There, as they finally arrived in international waters a little to 15 hours – after wet night in a small cove – they say they are determined. “We’re going to Gaza. The French and international community officially announced that they supported us regardless of our decision, “enthuses Julien Rivoire, one of the spokesmen of the campaign. “But to get there, we also need the media, as TV join us to show our work and safety issues,” he continues.
In the distance we see no island, not even a few freighters, these little black spots that usually reassuring scattered throughout the year. “We wanted to show that we could block the Greek blockade, says Julien Rivoire. It once was that we wondered what we were doing then. ”
Return to France? Impossible
That same morning, the discussion was intense as ever on the Dignity. What to do? Return to France? Impossible for them. Go to another country such as Tunisia symbolic to wait, to show that it is a stopover? Why not, it’s better, they say. But no. The only viable solution they think is necessary. Go to Gaza. “You have the dignity to the end represents French and international committees,” argues Olivier Besancenot.
“The important thing that determines the political feasibility, technical feasibility, must be as representative as possible and supported,” Nabil Esnari continues, President of the Association of Muslims in France. “We do not want to be seen as Islamic-leftist Khmer-green-act in our corner,” says the MP-Europe Ecology Nicole Kiil-Nielsen.
“My preference would be to go to Gaza without delay,” takes on Olivier Besancenot position as others. “Our protection is proof that we exist, we continue to move forward. We can not afford to become a ghost ship. ”
There remains the question of technical means. The Dignity is a small yacht of 15 meters long, categorized craft. It was originally one of the smaller boats in the fleet. He has no self to go off the ridge to Gaza. It would necessarily need to be refueled and water en route. Hence the difficulty that there will in the coming hours to coordinate the political ambitions and technical means.
A small creek, goats, and … Sea
But they want confident. The twelve passengers (1) are refreshed by their two days at sea after a week of pitfalls in Athens. Although the coup, the Greek landscapes provide a particular coloration to the adventure. In the capital locked up in meeting rooms to multiply the points and plan protests, the mood was serious and solemn. Not even have time to visit the Acropolis.
There hard to escape the Greek islands. On the night of Monday and Tuesday, the Dignity was anchored in a cove of a small island. In the morning, passengers were woken up by goats with bells tinkle merrily. A shepherd ran along the cliff, the whoop, some small white houses with blue shutters, of steep cliffs, the water so beautiful … “In the morning, you go through three stages,” said Olivier Besancenot. “First you wake up, you do not know where you are, then you look around you and you say,” oh yes, it’s beautiful. ” And just after you wonder what’s next meeting, what is the plan that will be put in place. ”The Plan: Gaza, having embarked with TVs. Maybe he will change in the coming hours. Meanwhile, the Dignity vogue. Engine noise makes deaf. The smell of fuel oil a little drunk. In front, nothing. The sea, just the sea.
(1) On board were three crew members, eight activists – Olivier Besancenot addition there are Nicole Kiil-Nielsen, MP, Europe-ecology, Annick Coupe, spokesman for the union Solidarity trade union, or Nabil Ennasr, President the Collective of Muslims in France – and a journalist, the author of these lines.
The earlier July 4 Liberte.fr article:
On board the “Dignity”, en route to Gaza
A French ship with a few activists on board, including Olivier Besancenot and Annick Coupé, eventually left Athens and headed to Gaza despite the obstacles. The “flotilla to Gaza” is reduced to its simplest expression. The story of our special correspondent on the deck of “Dignity.”
By QUENTIN GIRARD special envoy on the “Dignity”
“The pins in the plastic, it will not be possible,” said Olivier Besancenot, in full session yourself. 11 hours on Monday, in a small Greek port. The Dignity Al Kamara, one of two ships of the French committee for Gaza, left at dawn the creek near the industrial town of Salamina, where he had hidden for three days. In another cove where he made a first step, the passengers – including Besancenot, so – try to install the satellite antenna to communicate with the outside world.
3 o’clock this morning, Julien Rivoire, a member of the NPA and a spokesman for the campaign called “Wake the captain, we’re back.” Between them and the small annex that links with the boat, watchdogs of the port or adjacent businesses. They bark violently at night. They fail to wake the whole neighborhood. Tunisian Omeyyaa Sedic and Julien Rivoire, equipped with the latest load required, can not pass. Latest in a series of tragicomic events that marked the week of the fleet. “We’re not James Bond, it is OSS 117” is trying to be amused Julien Rivoire finally climbing on Dignity.
Plaisance
Sunday evening, the decision was made. It was long in coming, interspersed with calls to Iniohos Hotel where the rest of the delegation. A consensus is emerging: the Dignity attempt to leave no matter what. This small yacht 13 meters long, having left France ten days ago, has a status of “craft” and is theoretically not subject to the same prohibition to start than other boats of the delegation.
On Friday, an American ship tried starting one. Saturday, the captain was imprisoned. It could several years in prison for having left without permission. After several announcements bullies, to show their determination and their will as strong as ever to go to Gaza to bring humanitarian assistance, the committees have defected last one after the other. Masters of Spanish ships and Canada have announced that they did not want to take as many risks as they were sure they could not be more than thirty meters. The former president of Greenpeace France, Alain Connan, captain of the main French ship Louise Michel, after long hesitation, agreed with this position, some attracted by the Greek jails.
He went to ask permission to start at the harbor. Refused of course. The passengers were then organized a demonstration on the deck of Louise Michel. They simulated a departure. They should all file a complaint for obstruction of freedom of movement in the afternoon.
Parano
5 o’clock this morning, the Dignity springs. The sun is not up yet. Some cargo ships moving in the distance. Around him, two or three carcasses that rust for too many years, the ferry may be ready to leave but which seem, at dawn, desperate still. Twelve boats, twenty-two different nationalities and several hundred passengers announced, the fleet is now reduced to three crew members, eight militants – Olivier Besancenot addition there are Nicole Kiil-Nielsen, MP europe-ecology, Annick Coupe, spokesman for the union Solidarity trade union, or Nabil Ennasr, president of the Collective of Muslims in France – and a journalist, the author of these lines.
The Dignity enters the channel. In the distance, lights, shadows indistinct, but no coastguard. Surprise among the passengers. They believed they were identified and a small star suddenly arise between two cargo ships to stop them. For two days, each gull, each fishing boat, each jet-ski with the big guys who spend every man piss in the night under the white lights of the port is an opportunity when paranoid.
To starboard there. A port, nothing. In the distance behind, already, the lights of Athens. The sun appears between two hills. After a week of failure or disruption, and the blows of fate have joined forces to keep them in port, for the first time the French committee actually managed something in Greece. They feel like defeat stress, even if they are tired, even if the tension is palpable at times between them, although discussions and waiting endlessly sometimes not.
Determination
Of course, they know that this little boat is not much. That Israel, obviously, has won the game this time and that the only issue that remains is to show that they have tried everything, it’s not a “fucking failure”, as stated Besancenot. Certainly they know that it is unlikely to go to Gaza, especially alone. Unless a Greek ship to join them. The committee led by Vengelis Pissias announced that they had a new, third, a “surprise” that the authorities do not know. But they have promised so many things since the beginning of last week …
The Dignity vogue. It will reach international waters in a few hours if not arrested by the Coast Guard before. There, passengers will make official statements. They expressed their determination against the blockade of Gaza and denounced the attitude of the international community against them. They then announce the next steps. If there is a sequel.
June 25 Le Monde article:
Gaza flotilla II imminent departure
A year after the arrest of a murderer off the first convoy of Israel, a new international fleet prepares to sail to Gaza to try to break the blockade imposed on the Palestinian enclave. Unlike last year, two French ships involved in the operation.
The first of these ships, the “Louise Michel”, is currently in Greece. The second, “Dignity-Al Karama” sailed this morning from the Ile-Rousse in Corsica. I get on one of them and try to deliver on this blog Monde.fr the story of the expedition.
A campaign launched in October 2010
This project, called “A French boat to Gaza” would not be possible without the 600,000 euros of the money raised during the campaign launched in October under the leadership of the combined platform of French NGOs for Palestine and the National Collective for a just and lasting peace between Israelis and Palestinians.
Nearly 70 organizations (associations, political parties and unions) were involved in mobilization. From Lille to Marseille via Strasbourg, Toulouse or Alencon, speakers and activists around the country. Three-week tour in February. “It was a real success,” testifies Julien Rivoire, a member of the New Anti-Capitalist Party and the coordinating committee of the campaign. “It happened in the markets with a sound truck, banners, leaflets and a bank. In Toulouse, the Mirail, 600 euros were collected in two hours. It was during the Tunisian and Egyptian revolutions. There was a particular climate, people were saying ‘it is possible to make a difference “.
SNOWBALL EFFECT
Driven by this momentum, mobilizing snowballed, quickly exceeding traditional activist circles. Events, exhibitions, film screenings or symbolic release of paper boats … In the end, more than 1,500 events are held across France. Donations tributary. “We never imagined that the movement would take on such a scale,” comments Maxim Guimberteau, communications officer of “A French boat to Gaza.”
“I feel that this campaign has awakened people. A real fervor has replaced the fatalism that had won many former activists involved in the pro-Palestinian,” observes Alain Bosc, and member of the Cimade Coordinating Committee of “A boat to Gaza”. Very relayed in associations, the initiative has been enthusiastically received in poor neighborhoods and in particular “to the French families of Arab origin, sensitive to the Palestinian question and the fate of the inhabitants of the Gaza Strip.”
90% of individual donations
Many structures such as the Christian Catholic Committee against Hunger and for Development (CCFD-Terre Solidarity) or the Christians of the Mediterranean have also mobilized their networks. An appeal, launched at the initiative of the Archbishop of Sens-Auxerre and bishops of Troyes and La Rochelle, was sent to all dioceses to encourage the faithful “to a special place in their personal prayer and a community for the second flotilla of freedom to achieve its objectives in the service of peace. ”
The result of all collected 600 000 euros, 90% of donations come from individuals. According to organizers, “most people participated at 5, 10 or 50 euros.” Added to the contributions of the signatory organizations, grants from several local and payment of the foundation “A world for all.” All support checks were made payable to the Movement against Racism and for Friendship between Peoples (MRAP), which opened a special account to centralize. “Everything was done in a transparent, ensures the collective. We have not accepted money from foreign countries or associations.”
46 PEOPLE IN FRENCH VESSELS
The funds raised were allocated to the purchase of two vessels, the formation of crews, and communications expenses. “Chartering vessels is what has been the most difficult in the end, recognizes Alain Bosc. We’re not owners, there have been some setbacks.”
Finally, 46 people are expected on board. Alongside the militants of the various associations involved in the campaign, carrying several personalities from the political or voluntary, as Olivier Besancenot (NPA), the Communist deputy in Le Havre, Jean-Paul Lecoq, MEP Nicole Kiil-Nielsen (EELV) the Breton sailor Jo Le Guen, or Julien Bayou, the collective “Out of colonialism.”
From June 25 FRANCE3
The “Dignity-Al Karama”, a 19-meter boat flying the French flag, left the waters of the Ile-Rousse to 11:15. It must join in the next ten to twelve days boats that make up the flotilla to Gaza.
“The entire fleet will sail next week from various Mediterranean ports,” Julien Rivoire told AFP a committee member coordinating the French countryside. Ships, including two freighters carrying medical supplies, “should reach the port of Gaza at the end of next week,” he added. Among them, a cargo bought a quarter of France and the rest of Sweden, Norway and France, making the “Dignity” the only boat in the fleet entirely French.
“We hope we can do it so as to breach the blockade,” said Omeyya Seddik, a passenger on the “Dignity”, reached by telephone by the AFP, for whom “joy is the feeling that dominates the time of departure. “This fleet is part of “the natural continuation of the revolution for freedom and democracy,” in Arab countries, said Seddik, of Tunisian origin.
Before taking off, a passenger on the boat at the stern hoisted a Palestinian flag and made the “V” for victory.
Is “Freedom” the same thing as Liberty? Let’s see, ACFU? It has an unfriendly ring to it.
The American Civil Liberties Union commissioned this fundraising magnet from halftone-deaf one-note Obamartist Shepard Fairey, but somebody confused this for a Department Of Defense contract. “Leading Freedom Forward”? That’s USA’s imperialist catchphrase! Please note at the helm is Fairey’s first client: Obama.
Linguists have long lamented America’s abandonment of liberty for the nefariously vacuous “freedom.” Freedom is for Operations, Markets, CIA-funded Pro-Democracy [sic] ops, and O-wellian doublespeak. “The Price of Freedom” is the title of the Smithsonian’s military history exhibit. Now the ACLU jumps on the war-wagon? That’s the Statue of Liberty with a bullhorn, as a union organizer — you can tell by the clipboard, but they’ve draped her in a flag, literally. Can you imagine any national monument with less need to prove her patriotism? I would have preferred they had used blind Lady Justice in reference to nationalism, where her blindfolded could have been the Red, White and Blue. But that’s probably a too obvious fashion statement about fascism. Dear ACLU, where are you going with this?
Let me clarify my criticism of Shepard Fairey. He’s a brilliant artist. By “halftone-deaf one-note” I refer to the FANS of his Blue Period, circa 2008. My beef is that this work recalls Fairey’s iconic Obama poster, though obviously it wouldn’t be considered a “Shepard Fairey creation” if it hadn’t. But. Is it appropriate that the ACLU wants to promote itself and its vital uni-partisan cause, with a ubiquivisual trademark that screams Democratic Party? Thankfully ACLU’s legal team at least has not failed to recognize Obama’s DP as the current reigning champion of civil liberty oppression.
I know little about fine art photography, darkroom craft or print collecting, but I will foolishly assert this: the future of the two dimensional print is the time-dimensional print. It’s only with the evolution of high definition that I dare say it, video. THE FUTURE OF 2D IS NOT 3D IT’S 4D. (Actually 3-D is a tech injected myopia, by 4D I mean two dimensions plus time plus sound) I do know that photo technology for everyman has breached the fourth dimension, mounted paper prints are a throwback for older generations like mine, who think of the past in terms of stills. Before us it was black and white. Moving picture snap shots are no gimmick. Purists can mourn losing the split-second frozen in time, but who can argue that elapsed time does not add an infinity of fractions more? Yes color film lost the contrast of monochrome, just as paint left the shading of charcoal. Movies have long since eclipsed slide shows and now it’s time that single-frame photographers step up to digital video, same fixed shot, same composition, time exposure set to however long will hold the viewer’s gaze. Soon online videos will embed as smoothly as static images, and two dimension visuals will be lifeless.
And like its archival predecessors, devoid of the information we already want to glean from the past.
I offer two examples for this argument. If modern galleries can break the silence barrier, the visual arts would also benefit by retaining the dimension of sound too.
Michael Deppisch’s montage of the 2010 Nashville flood.
Hector Thunderstorm Project by Murray Fredericks
Hector Thunderstorm Project from Murray Fredericks on Vimeo.