Dolce et decorum est

So Sarah Palin apparently plagiarized this poem on her Twitter feed. I couldn't care less about that, but let's take a closer look at the sentiments in this post, which are commonly held by military fetishists.

It is the Soldier, not the minister
Who has given us freedom of religion.

It is the Soldier, not the reporter
Who has given us freedom of the press.

It is the Soldier, not the poet
Who has given us freedom of speech.

It goes on like this for some time, but you can get the basic idea here. I am generally of the philosophy that you shouldn't get much credit for fixing something you broke in the first place. And indeed, all of the benefits the author claims as the byproduct of the military require similar armed coercion to remove them in the first place. Indeed, the more present the military is in public life, the less free the society tends to be, as any citizen of Burma or North Korea could tell you. Which they won't because, well, you know.

Individual soldiers may well believe in their mission as entirely benevolent crusaders for all sorts of high-minded enlightened causes. As a unit, though, their actions are entirely controlled by an absolute hierarchy ending with the government at the top. They are no more and no less than the muscle behind the Gummit's interests and are completely dependent on the state for moral direction, or the lack of it. Thus, this poem attributes a philosophical independence to the military which doesn't exist, and would be highly dangerous if it did. Conservatives, I suspect, know this, which explains the paradox between condemning Big Gummit while enthusiastically backing the Gummit's Hammer. They hold out hope such a break will occur and save them from the unfortunate democratic impulses of their fellow citizens.

Smedley Darlington Butler gave a much better summary of the soldier's duty in 1935.

I spent 33 years and four months in active military service and during that period I spent most of my time as a high class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism. I helped make Mexico and especially Tampico safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street. I helped purify Nicaragua for the International Banking House of Brown Brothers in 1902-1912. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for the American sugar interests in 1916. I helped make Honduras right for the American fruit companies in 1903. In China in 1927 I helped see to it that Standard Oil went on its way unmolested. Looking back on it, I might have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was to operate his racket in three districts. I operated on three continents.

Don't know much about title-ry

I'm not sure quite what future conflicts over religion in the world will look like, but one thing seems clear enough; the era of struggles between different world religions as they are traditionally understood is coming to an end. What we will get in its place are struggles between interfaith coalitions consisting of hierarchical, patriarchal fundamentalists and egalitarian progressives.

I got the impetus for this train of thought from reading James Loewen's "Lies my Teacher Told Me." Loewen mentions that American history textbooks rarely emphasize the role religious conviction has played in the lives of historical figures because of the objections of both religious fundamentalists, who will object to any unflattering portrayal of their religion, and axe-grinding atheists, who will object to any positive mention of sincerely-held beliefs. The latter note is extraneous for the moment. The interesting corrollary is how many formerly combative sects have come together to scrub any mention of their historical conflicts from the record. This is part of a larger compact between Protestants and Catholics, and between Christians in general and conservative Jews, which has been made in the past few decades, a trend which I think will continue into the future as more and more fundamentalists realize that shared material and power interest outweigh their theological differences.

Now, Ditchkins*-flavored Nu Atheists will doubtless jump in here to say that it is their gains and not the liberal religious which has caused the global circling of the wagons. This I doubt. Nu Atheists have a symbiotic relationship with the fundamentalists in which each replenishes the other's raison d'etre. They share, in the apostate class, a common enemy. And why would the Nus want to get rid of their most valuable resource; easily-manipulable strawmen? Plus, there is the reality that Nu Atheism in its design can never become a mass global movement; it exists to make Western liberals feel smugly superior from the ignorant masses, not achieve any kind of social change to threaten the entrenched power structures.

The greater threat here, as it always has been, is the apprehension by the religious elite that their own theological impulses can be turned against them. This has been most readily apparent in the past few decades with the Vatican's war on liberation theology and its association with the Latin American left movements. More recently (and more ambiguously) it has been the struggle between old-line evangelical Christians and the younger "emerging" movement which is dangerously apostate on the Real Issues. I suspect there were similar sorts of ecumenical kumbaya moments at comparable points in history; just before the Civil War, for example.

The other point of note here is that Western fundamentalists do at least still claim to be in conflict with fundamentalist Muslims. But this too seems to be more as a result of ongoing political necessity than any material disagreement. One would imagine that, when all sides come to realize their shared interest in censorship, patriarchy, and preserving the proper political succession, any alleged differences will also melt away.

*h/t Terry Eagleton

Got a Polish email in my pocket...

Stephen F. Hayward:

Surprisingly, the survey reveals Tea Partiers to be slightly more economically secure than the general population. Combine those findings with the fact that Tea Partiers are a well-educated cohort, and the narrative that the Tea Partiers are a bunch of pitchfork populist rubes becomes harder to maintain.

Hayward presumably means this as a defense of Tea Partyism, but says it only one paragraph after approvingly asserting the Teabaggers populist bona fides. Consequently, his own narrative that tea marchers are spontaneously organized bands of working people genuinely concerned that over-taxation is grinding them into poverty also becomes rather hard to maintain. As Michael Lind succinctly puts it elsewhere in the Times compilation, "Tea Partiers put the “petty” in petty bourgeoisie."

The Tea Parties have arisen (in such cases as where they are not simply a rebranding of local Republican Parties) out of an honest concern that their privileged position in American political and economic life could be threatened by the present moment. Naturally, then, there's little they fear more than an organization of the working class, thus even such modest organizations such as the SEIU or the late ACORN play a pivotal role in Teabaggers' conspiracy lore. Like most self-proclaimed advocates of liberty, their principled stand against the tyranny of federal governments erodes quickly when it comes to the dissolution of voluntary mass organization along class lines. It's instructive to compare their rhetoric of liberty to that of Eugene Debs in 1895 righteously upbraiding government intervening on behalf of the Pullman car company. Certainly libertarians wouldn't be nostalgic for such days of tyranny would they?

Oh.

Death'n'taxes

The great problem with democracy, the bourgeois revolutionaries found to their dismay, turned out to be resolving the contradictions between concentration of wealth in a few hands and the fact that the throng of impoverished could still vote. "Democracy," says our libertarian interlocutor, "means people can vote themselves wealth they haven't earned!" "Western democracy of today is the forerunner of Marxism," said another right-winger with a mustache who invaded Poland. Luckily, someone has found a solution.

Natural habitat

Balloon Juice:

Kos has a good piece about why Democrats should try to do immigration reform before the 2010 midterms. The gist is that Dems can’t do much worse than they did in 2008 among working class whites—the group that is most likely to be anti-immigration reform—in any case, but that it might be able to improve its standing among Latino voters (especially in terms of turn-out) if it passes immigration reform.

Of course, there's an important discussion to be had on illegal immigration, the reasons why it exists, the real effects it has on working-class citizens, and how to solve it in a way that empowers workers of all races.

Screw that, though. The important thing is to pump an immigration reform that's as racially divisive as possible, because there's a hot new demographic that can be locked into voting Democratic on the basis of fundamental ethnic preservation. And as we know, the purpose of Democrats winning elections is that Democrats will have won elections, which will allow us to feel better about ourselves and continue to laugh at "working-class white" people, who surely have no problems we might want to address.

Hating sinners

Renegade Evolution:

...in all these threads and what not about Bullock and James, people are fuckin’ up in arms and ready to burn people alive due to James’ alleged racism and hate, but at the same time, a whole hell of a lot of them are hating on, well, “low life” gearhead/”sleazy” white folk with tattoos and whatnot. It’s all woohoo- we hate racists and racism, we hate intolerance and stereotypes- that shit is bad- but fuck if we cannot stand those crackers!

We are headed for an endgame in American politics where the two-party monopoly locks us all into a world of stagnating, mutually-reinforcing tribalism. The elite right stirs up white fear of a cavalcade of different-looking people coming to look and sound different from you and steal your shit!, while the liberal wing points at the former and reminds their constituency of the dire consequences of a giant cracker army turned loose. Meanwhile, actual policy distinctions become harder and harder to elucidate.

For the aforementioned liberal technocrat, the specter of cracker racism is an all-encompassing narrative. There is nothing it can't do to obscure and indeed justify his own class privilege. It is, for him, the same kind of corrupting cancer that homosexuality is for a certain kind of right-wing Christian. There are no lengths to which he will not go to uncover the association with the vile prejudice which comes from never taking an African-American studies class, your general sense of common justice be damned. When he finds it, any and all of your unique circumstances can be waved away. Are you losing your house? Well, you once called a black guy "articulate," so we'll be outside cheering on the bank.

Of course, our right-wing Christian homophobe at least recites the game claim that he "loves the sinner but hates the sin." Rightfully no one believes him, so I suppose it's a blessing that the liberal technocrat makes no pretensions to doing anything but look for sins to excuse his class and cultural prejudices. Meanwhile, it's highly debatable whether any of his ostensible anti-racist crusaderism has done a lick to decrease the amount of actual racism. Indeed, when you have Pat Buchanan wailing that you should be irrationally afraid of non-white people, "intellectuals" incessantly reminding you that you are irrationally afraid of non-white people, well, damned if you don't start to believe you're irrationally afraid of non-white people.

This will become even more pronounced as liberals become increasingly unable to defend the current Democratic government's rightward surge on the merits (and right-wingers find fewer and fewer places of ideological disagreement). It's the Iraqification of America, the victory of vacuous tribal politics while the ruling class parasites walk away from the table with everyone's chips.

Tommy pop-pop

It's hard for me to get too unkempt over The Mustache of Understanding's latest shite because, while it is filled with the usual pig-ignorant twaddle about the desperate Hole in the Middle of American politics, he actually ends it by stumping for an instant-runoff voting system, an easy common-sense reform I also support. Now, Friedman may not be aware of this, if a taxi driver from Bangalore hasn't told him, but IRV advocacy is usually the territory of the independent left, not the center, precisely because progressives will no longer be forced to cave to ConservaDem demands under threat of ZOMGRepublicans! If Tommycakes thinks the Democratic Party is in the throes of the Radical Left now, what will he think when the party's right wing minority is no longer able to bar the exit doors because what's beyond them is the vacuum of space?

All else is commentary

Lawyers, Guns, and Money:

A great progressive moment.

I am largely ambivalent about the passage of the health care bill. It seems likely that, whether the bill passed or failed, the window for passing serious health reform will be closed for a generation. Had it failed, of course, the ruling class would have declared the subject closed and decided. With the apparent passage, the establishment--both Serious Liberals and Beltway status-quo-ites--will now claim victory and retire to the sidelines. Earnest progressive boosters of the bill who hope it is some kind of first step are headed for disappointment. The bill does nothing to cure the real disease of American health care, in fact, it enshrines the maximum profitability of health inscos and pharmaceuticals into law. I can't see how you plan to build on that.

With that in mind, it's hard to see how online liberals can hail this as any kind of progressive "victory." That's hardly how I would characterize squandering considerable popular political will for reform by watering it down first in a futile attempt at the unattainable holy grail of "bipartisanship" and later buying off the support of industry-owned conservative Democrats. It was not a progressive victory to allow a small cadre of far right nutters to drive the public debate while whipping the left into line. Backers have sent out the old standby of reformists everywhere, that it provides short-term relief to the uninsured; in this case with the same junk for-profit insurance which already leaves many millions of citizens under-insured.

No, this hardly seems like a victory. While the supposed wild unpopularity cited by opponents is a fiction, the modest new institutions aren't likely to be popular enough to survive the next Republican government. What we have here is evidence for the vacuity of the Serious Liberal admonition to "work within the system." Fellow workers, if this is the best you can do within the system, then it is the best you will ever do within the system. It is time to change the system.

Maple Leaf Dawn

Fellow Workers!

After careful analysis of all rhetoric* on the issue here at Mel-Anon Labs, I believe I have solved the health care crisis once and for all!

All we need to do is the following:

1.) Convince Canada to invade.
2.) As mounting any kind of civil defense would be too expensive and We Just Can't Afford That Right Now, said invasion should be a walkover.
3.) Hello, United States of Canuckistan!

This seems like a foolproof plan to me, so call your Member of Parliament today!

*Okay, mostly just television ads during the basketball.

Hammer time!

The Raw Story:

"There is an argument to be made that these extensions, the unemployment benefits, keep people from going and finding jobs," he told CNN's Candy Crowley Sunday.

"In fact there are some studies that have been done that show people stay on unemployment compensation and they don't look for a job until two or three weeks before they know the benefits are going to run out," he argued.

"People are unemployed because they want to be? " asked Crowley.

"Well, it is the truth. And people in the real world know it," said DeLay.

Supposing DeLay is right, the question which immediately arises is why anyone would choose to barely subsist on unemployment benefits rather than earn a meager wage being overworked at menial labor by tyrannical bosses. Oh, but I've answered my own question, haven't I? The Hammer, of course, prefers an entirely non-coercive free market where the choice between starvation and slavery is left up to you!

Vainglorious bastards

Two very worthwhile reads sizing up the Tea Party movements can be found at Americana and the New York Review of Books.

Trying to nail down a taxonomy of tea partiers is difficult because of the great potpourri of programs bandied about, ranging from Paulian escapists to local Republican parties hoping for a re-branding. There are upper-middle class suburbanites afraid for the first time that popular movements from below might reshuffle the tax burden (they have nothing to fear, of course, but the fear itself is helpful to someone.) And there are working-class people angry at the elite power structure who are looking to throw their weight behind anyone who will give them some answers.

This confusion is encapsulated by the media's response to it.

The tea party is an interesting movement because it is a combination of people that can be shit on without repercussion and powerful interests looking to exploit the movement for political gain. The media is in a sort of holding pattern, some coverage is hyper-critical and other hews to the standards of covering the powerful.

Case in point is this David Brooks column in the New York Times. Brooks, the quintessential establishment conservative, dismisses the Tea Partiers with a series of thrown-together superficial similarities between them and the New Left of the 1960s. Brooks not only re-assures the establishment that he is not on board, but also reminds everyone that Non-Serious people, regardless of their particular proclivity, are distinguished first and foremost by their Non-Seriousness and exist in a kind of solidarity likewise.

However, there is this:

I see the rank and file as working class people, generally. I don’t fault people for not having enough time to research the world because that time and energy is a luxury that many people cannot afford. I don’t fault them for being ignorant about that which has not, until recently, been relevant to their lives. They as much as tell you that they are angry, violent and afraid of the future, that is

I would sympathize with this if I felt it were descriptive of much of Tea Party Nation. But I'm not sure it is. Here is Jonathon Rabun at the Tea Party Nation in Nashville.

Few of us would see much change from the $1,500–$2,000 we'd spent on travel to Nashville, the $558.95 convention fee with service charge, a room at the hotel, and a couple of drinks at the hotel bars, where a glass of the cheapest wine or whisky cost $12. Seen as a group, we were, I thought, a shade too prosperous, too amiably chatty and mild-mannered, to pass as the voice of the enraged grassroots.

I asked one woman whether she'd been part of "9/12," as tea partiers call the great taxpayer march on Washington, D.C., last September. No, she'd missed it, she said, and "felt really guilty" about doing so, but she and her husband had been on vacation.

"Where did you go?"

"We spent a week in Amalfi, then we toured Tuscany, then we spent a week in Rome."

I can believe that many of these people really did have a "political awakening" of sorts leading them to tea-partydom, but it was not likely born out of a lack of leisure time to consume political news, but instead--as I hinted above--from a realization that sudden upheavals and class unrest could be in serious jeopardy for the first time in their lives. Tea partying served as a kind of pre-emptive strike; using the standard right-populist framework of mimicking a working-class, salt-of-the-earth ethos.

Give me syrupy or give me death

Here's a conclusion I didn't think I would ever reach.

Of the following, I much prefer the saccharine naifs with their huggy puppy romance to the self-righteous pietists who, like the puritans who need to constantly remind you they don't own a television, must constantly assure themselves and you how above it they are. Of course, they are lying to themselves and the rest of us. Join a monastery or convent if you want to prove your chaste bona fides. Otherwise, stuff it. I don't believe you.

Crass warfare, part II

Found on the internet:

...it’s more accurate to say all white Americans are implicated in a racist system, because we all benefit from it. Even those of us who are not racist in any way... are still inheritors of the system.

Nothing will ensure the continued prevalence of racism quite like reminding working-class white people of how much they benefit from it. Perhaps it can only be topped by assuring them that, yes, their economically-precarious position does in fact come from previously marginalized minorities taking away their jobs. It used to be you had to rely on the ruling class and white-supremacist reactionaries like Pat Buchanan to make these arguments; now you can get it from zealous, self-flagellating liberals.

Perhaps that's the point

If the composition of government will always be regarded by Broderist bipartisanship fetishists as an even 50-50 split, why have elections?

Dick Cheney Appreciation Night

You've got to hand it to the guy. By defiantly defending his participation in crimes against humanity, he dares mealy-mouth reformists, Serious thinkers and play-nicers to continue plowing the ship of empire right through the iceberg which is now plainly visible for all to see. Previous American war criminals at least kept their activity out of the press long enough for establishment historians to edit it out of the textbooks. But this guy is putting it right out there, making the apologist scribes look even more venal in defending him from The Hague than any genuine anti-imperialist ever could.

Crass warfare

BroadSnark:

Here’s a hypothetical situation.

You work in a town with one factory. You need your job. Moving to another town, starting your own business, or getting some other means of survival is not an option at the moment.

One of your coworkers (let’s call him Bob) is a racist, sexist, homophobic SOB. You are a black lesbian (let’s call you Michelle) who, for obvious reasons, does not get along with Bob.

You and Bob have found yourself in a situation. Your employer (let’s call him Dick) is planning on cutting your salaries in half and doubling your work load. Dick is counting on the animosity between you and Bob preventing any collaboration to thwart his plan. Dick has his eye on a lovely yacht that he will be buying with your recouped wages.

What do you do here? Take the cut in pay? Move into your car? Live on Ramen noodles? Or do you find a way to work with Bob to fight Dick?

ladypoverty:

The working class has one option to further its interests, and it is not in finding common cause with the ownership caste of the country, but in reconciling the differences within itself and striking at the economic heart of its enemy -- in the workplace and within communities -- where all class power is fundamentally derived.

There's a reason why a great many successful liberation movements--in the USA prior to 1970 and around the world to the present day--has held that success in winning equality for an oppressed group won't come without a component dedicated to fighting against imperialism and in favor of broad economic justice. This is important to remember as the current exploding fad in American public history of remembering the struggles of women and ethnic minorities--we are in Black History Month, after all--is trying to extricate these elements and retroactively jam these movements into accepting the contemporary neoliberal utopia of a post-racial, post-gender free market Pax Americana.

The reason is this: As long as people understand innately--as they will-- that they are getting unjustly worked over by the economic system they are in, they will be looking for someone to blame. Without organizing themselves as a class, that blame will usually fall on someone deemed to be less powerful on more vulnerable. Women, blacks, immigrants, whatever looks like a division to be exploited; it will be a whack-a-mole cycle of blame until the real culprit can be identified.

Unfortunately, such an organization may require temporary tactical alliances with people who have not yet combed through magazine advertisements unlocking the racial symbolism. But if the liberation movements of the past could understand this, why are our current batch of liberals so squeamish?

Did not do the research

Shorter Mahablog:

• Anarchists and right-libertarians both hate government, therefore they are exactly alike. Also, the USA and USSR were on the same side in World War II, ergo FDR was a Stalinist.

Maybe this will help.

All-American zero

Despite laying off hundreds of workers in recent years, Focus on the Family--much ignored around these parts lately--is laying out as much as $4 million on a Super Bowl ad featuring golden boy Tim Tebow and his mother with what will presumably be an anti-abortion message. Being the nice guy that I am, I think even fundamentalist Christians should have jobs. But there'll be pie in the sky when they die, at least. CBS has accepted the ad, reversing it's prior policy, and the policy of all networks regarding Super Bowl commercials, of not airing what it deems political "advocacy" ads, likely as a result of discovering that big game ad revenue is not recession-proof.

It's hard to imagine exactly what the backers hope the ad accomplishes; even if the Tebow story is believable, there's the jaw-droppingly-obvious-to-non-insane-people conclusion that, hooray, the woman had a choice about what she wanted to do. And that's before they realize the grotesque logical result of the story, which is apparently that anti-choice nuts think all women ought to endanger their lives to bring forth the holy fetus, where good Christian conservatives will proceed with ignoring its well-being until it reaches employable age.

There's little more to be written about Tebow which hasn't already been said about the most media-fellated jock in the history of sports. Alas, the Great White Hope of a nation doesn't seem to have the kind of skills needed to continue his residency on your television set as a professional. His power-running quarterback shtick is just what professional football teams were looking for...in the 1920s. Perhaps that's why he is taking this unusual career step. While there are certainly no shortages of pious professional athletes, very few wade into the water publicly shilling for contentious social issues. Pro sports are big business, of course, and ownership doesn't want to alienate the customers, meaning athletes of any kind of political sympathy typically stick to promoting bread-and-butter non-controversial charities approved by the leagues. So Tim Tebow looks at his future life carrying clipboards and decides now's the time to make his mark while the last live snap he took is still a recent memory. Or maybe he's that delightful breed of arrogant virtuousness who believes he can be the heroic proselytizer where his forbears have failed. Watching him flounder will be delightful.

It's good to be a corporation, part II

As discussed here some months ago, the Supreme Court today handed in its decision on Citizens United v. FEC declaring limits on corporate campaign spending unconstitutional.

The ruling represented a sharp doctrinal shift, and it will have major political and practical consequences. Specialists in campaign finance law said they expected the decision to reshape the way elections were conducted. Though the decision does not directly address them, its logic also applies to the labor unions that are often at political odds with big business.

Well, it's awfully magnanimous of them to make unions exempt as well, since there's nothing the American labor movement needs more than to throw away more money in a Sisyphean effort to battle corporations in the political arena. This is, I guess, the court's idea of "balance;" I don't see how this provision doesn't help big business even further.

On the positive side, it will now be impossible--if it weren't before--to deny the elephant in the room of corporate-bought democracy. Maybe, as many have suggested, our politicians can take a page from auto racing and wear the logos of their sponsors on their suits. Imagine the acceptance speeches now! "I'd like to thank the boys of Citibank and DuPont for giving me a great car out there this campaign season." It could go places.

MOAR: American Leftist.

Your kids now belong to the state of Massachusetts

I'd guess most mainstream liberals are skeptical about the merits of plebiscite democracy, at least the few I've read on the subject are. And it does correspond well to their general attitude toward the stupidity of the mob rule. The preponderance of anti-gay ballot initiatives and the general political malaise in California are generally cited as examples of where allowing popular votes on policy go awry.

The MA-Sen race, however, provides a pretty good oppositional case against media-managed representative government. Despite the localized nuances of the race and the fact that a not insignificant number of Brown voters were in protest of watered-down healthcare reform and timid policing of Wall Street, the narrative of Brown's win is nonetheless being written to fit the script prepared by the managers of democracy. Choosing between two candidates with purposefully ambiguous policy aims makes it virtually impossible for the public to make concrete political desires manifest.