I Floss My Ass With May '68

Letter to The Editors:

I know what you meant. No, neither of us has every done anything material for Egyptian democracy. The only thing we have done is pay taxes that funded Mubarak. But undoubtedly, neither had many of those in Tarhir Square before January 25. Do you think Egypt normally holds 1,000,000 professional revolutionaries? Not at all! Some of those in Tarhir are car salesmen, or store managers, or landlords. Does the presence of landlords preclude the possibility of true freedom? The point is to destroy the landlord who fights against the people. But if he is willing to risk everything for freedom, whatever changes come later?

There is no special virtue in being with a movement from its beginning. This is, in fact, a repressive belief—that legitimacy, power, authenticity come from length of association. What does this belief defend? Religions, states and systems. You know what have never been around as long as religions, states and systems? Individuals. But who is suffering and who producing the suffering? Virtue is to always be on the side of the people to whatever extent you can be. You cannot be everywhere at once, but you must always be fighting for justice wherever you are.

Intellectual superiority has eaten at the Left for thirty years, ruining some of its brightest minds and rendering the rest irrelevant. We must define our own way forward. We must be totally willing to destroy every theory we have ever encountered. What theory has brought freedom and peace?

In fact, the deep pessimism with regard to public movements is nonsense bequeathed by that paternalistic maternalism of post-Cold War Americology. Our parents' generation tell us it won’t work. Why not? Because they failed, and they were the greatest! But you know what? I floss my fucking ass with May '68. Those old shit bags can fucking retire on the 401K their generation invented to fucking incentivize the working 60-year-old. They can fart on over to their McMansion suburbs, and then later the Gated Retirement Communities they built to imprison their parents. And they can take yoga and be serious about recycling and just seriously fucking kill themselves, I don’t give a shit. The hippies, the soixante-huitards are total fucking bullshit, and so are the USSR and the Spanish anarchists and Victor Serge and Sergei Eisenstein and the Fucking Situationists and Delueze and Zizek they can all jump off a fucking cliff. We need a new paradigm, and it starts with throwing out all the bullshit hero worship and respect. Those fuckers have failed us. They are responsible for where we are today: who the fuck are they to even have a suggestion? We will take what is valuable from them but we will consider them as toothpicks!

FUCK YOU,

No Innocents

Who's House Is That?

http://www.mediabistro.com/fishbowlDC/files/original/thomas%20friedman.bmp

Oh, it's right there in the URL. That is Thomas Friedman's house.

One Divides Into Two

When trying to know your enemy, don’t look to where you disagree. This is why they are your enemy, and you know all this already. Look to where you agree.

This article, about widespread bipartisan support for food stamps, states pretty clearly (though, as always, by accident) why the right and the liberal left can agree on funding food stamps.

Wisconsin’s former governor, Tommy G. Thompson, a Republican, boasted of cutting the cash rolls, but advertised the food stamp rise. “Leading the Way to Make Work Pay,” a 2000 news release said… In a given month, nearly 90 percent of food stamp recipients still have incomes below the federal poverty line, according to the Department of Agriculture. But among families with children, the share working rose to 47 percent in 2008, from 26 percent in the mid-1990s, and the share getting cash welfare fell by two-thirds.

Force people into low paying jobs and then make sure they can eat. A hungry worker is a revolutionary; a dead slave is useless.

- No Innocents

Stupor Bowl

Ah, the Superbowl, the one day of the year where Americans sit on their asses for five hours, gorging themselves and watching tv, and actually critically engage the commercials that every minute destroy consumer choice and rob Americans of their individual desires. In a society where importance and expense are synonymous, it is the ‘most important’ advertising day of the year. In short, Superbowl commercials are the most concentrated spectacular display of American fears and desires, (“fears” because what do commercials do other than replace fear with desire?) as seen by the capitalists who produce them.

This year the most controversial ad was supposed to be Focus on the Family’s anti-choice propaganda, but it played almost even-handed in comparison to the onslaught of misogyny, alienation and misanthropy on display in the other ads. Audi presented a fascistic future in which “green police” would arrest you for using the wrong light bulb. Dodge offered up a series of men staring straight into the camera, while a voiceover droned in miserable monotone about submitting all of their free will and happiness to their bosses and their wives, with the car being tagged “Man’s last stand”. Budweiser had a thousand people turn themselves into a human bridge a la Buzby Berkely, or more accurately Albert Speer, so that a Bud truck could arrive at their bar, where they could then buy the beer.

Perhaps the most symptomatic ad of the evening was one from Bridgestone tires. A car speeds across a post-apocalyptic landscape, and stops at a roadblock, where a leather-clad cyborg-ish man declares in a menacing accent “Your tires or your life.” Suddenly, the passenger door opens, and a sexy, post-apocalyptically (which is to say scantily) clad woman stands, bewildered, outside the door. The car screams away, and the man cries :“Your life, not your wife!”

On display last night in commercials by Doritos, Budweiser, FloTV, Dockers, and others was not the standard misogyny of advertising: ie, a sexy, bikini-clad girl standing next to pizza. These were narrative ads depicting men being made miserable by their wives and girlfriends, with the product being promoted as a solution to this misery. Rarely since the end of the Bush administration has such straightforward contempt been on display in every home in America.

The New York Times, in a typically weak critique, has pointed out this misogyny: “There seems to be a theme in many of the Super Bowl spots: the need to reassure men that they are as manly as they hope they are… [the Dodge ad] showed men thinking to themselves about the women in their lives. The thoughts were not of the type to win plaudits from feminists; they were grudging and stereotyped.” But the Times failed to realize why these men need to be ‘reassured’. Or rather the Times, as always, failed to ask.

Today, with unemployment, political impotence, debt and fear for the future at an all time high, Madison Avenue can no longer sell with images of affluence and happiness. The distance between the reality of working class lives and the dream image of superbourgeois luxury has become too great. Even Coke ran an ad with the Simpsons’ Mr. Burns, archetypal arch capitalist, being foreclosed out of home and possessions. Americans (men and women, because in a society in which misogyny is so deeply ingrained, women self-identify as sexy hate-objects, and like it) see themselves in the landscape of the apocalyptic Bridgestone ad, which echoes the worlds of such recent movies as The Road, Book of Eli, 2012, etc. This year advertisers could not even promise the lie of affluence and happiness being one new car away. Instead, they can only offer their products as ameliorators against the degradation of 21st century America. Desperate to increase sales, advertising must make visible and obvious its most powerful tools, hate and alienation, in order to rationalize buying new tires, or more beer, or better pants.

But if advertisers feel the need to turn up the heat, perhaps it is because they unconsciously sense that the current state of affairs will be bad enough to allow the alienation they now visibly exploit to slip away. Advertisers fear an awakening of Americans to the material reasons for their suffering and thus to a moving away from the mad, spiraling self-consumption of the last thirty years. To prevent this, advertisers must make sure that the misery of American consumers remains a spectacle, an image that can be bought and sold, so Americans keep groping for their wallets instead of their guns.

-- No Innocents

Ft. Whodunnit?

Senator Joe Lieberman, captain, cook and first mate of the USS Goonsville (the Senate), has made a shocking revelation today: the murderous rampage at Fort Hood was a “homegrown terrorist attack.” Let’s ignore for a moment that if Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan had instead been named something like, say, Seung-Hui Cho, honorable monsieur Lieberman would have gotten no traction out of these allegations. Let’s even forget that for the entire six years Maj. Hasan worked at Walter Reid he was in constant conflict with his superiors, consistently received negative psychiatric evaluations, and that his fellow students and teachers called him ‘paranoid’ ‘belligerent’ and ‘schizoid’. Terrorists are pretty often anti-social unhinged psychopaths; it’s not impossible that Maj. Hasan could be both a nut job and a terrorist.
So let’s take Sen. Dopey at his word: Maj. Hasan is a “homegrown terrorist.” What exactly turns an unbalanced American army psychologist from bad couch jockey to violent maniac? The key is from Shoeless Joe’s own mouth: “homegrown.” Maj. Hasan’s work in an American psychiatric hospital did not expose him to extremist ideology: he wasn’t administering to Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, but traumatized, wounded, PTSD-afflicted infantrymen. Hasan was made a terrorist by the horror of the war, a fact most inconvenient for most of the congress and the White House. Lieberman is perhaps more invested than most in maintaining American denial of the trauma of these wars: he’s one of the most vocal and belligerent of the moldy-minded, mealy-mouthed old farts responsible for sending an ever-increasing number of our youth through the wringer.
Joe’s three-card-monte is pretty clear: imply that Hasan was receiving clandestine instructions from an undiscovered cave in Afghanistan, rather than direct orders from an undisclosed bunker in Wyoming, and slip the ace of spades off the table: these wars are so ugly that it turns the psychiatrists treating our soldiers into terrorists. Maj. Hasan sure could be a homegrown terrorist, but, without the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, without Hasan administering terrible psycho-therapy to the broken shells of twenty-one year olds, does even Joe Lieberdouche believe the slaughter at Fort Hood would’ve happened?
Maj. Hasan, a Palestinian fundamentalist Muslim, gave no ideological defense of his actions. No terrorist group has taken credit for his spree. He cracked, he was a lone gunmen, he is, indeed, a “homegrown terrorist.” The wars have crossed the Atlantic: they don’t only make more suicide bombers in Palestine, more Taliban diehards in Afghanistan, more Sunni extremists in Iraq. Now they are turning American soldiers onto the path of pointless martyrdom too.
Thank God Obama hasn’t given up this war on terror, but merely tried to euphemize it away. We’re gonna need all the experience we can get fighting terrorism for when the two-hundred thousand potential “homegrown terrorists” return to the US from our sickening misadventures in the desert.

- No Innocents