America as ‘horror’ film made real…or: Hell as ‘process’, not ‘place’…

America as ‘horror’ film made real…

…or: Hell is less a place we transit to than a ‘process’ we cultivate—radically and absolutely…

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the final processing…

In considering the narrative of Empire from its inception and, continuing, reading the Fallujah account, please consider: what would your reaction have been if it came to light that one of our military agents—e.g., a Marine—had, nearing the culmination of battle, knelt down before the corpse of his recent victim, the abdomen torn open (the effect of ordnance) and lapped, with appreciation (and even zeal) at the still warm—but specifically—sanguineous flesh? With what emotional and intellectual metric would you have responded? Extreme dismay? Mild discomfort? Something between those two poles—e.g., apathy? As far as we know this has not occurred—or, it has not surfaced yet…

so, let us help one another, because, in Hell, there is no helping one another…

Hell, as reasoned, ought not to be viewed as a ‘place’ we embark towards, i.e., with a limen we approach and transit through. And this, in contradistinction to the literary construct of the portal notice in the Inferno, i.e., “Lasciate ogne speranza, voi ch’intrate” (“abandon all hope ye who enter here…”).

Far from existing solely as a literary—or, even fantastic—notion readily dismissed (as being merely an example of cultural artifice, imagining, etc.), the contention here is that Hell is, rather, the all-too-real—and condign—effect of our freely-willed acts and behaviour, i.e., what we as sentient, interdependent beings have chosen and actualized. And this, being all the more serious as our most elemental natures are at variance with a state of interminable alienation from the Other, as it is the case with behaviour deemed self-destructive.

the opposite of helping (i.e., love, or caritas) is not hatred, but indifference…

We cultivate an ethic of indifference towards the Other—and even ourselves—and, as this willed behavior is essentially foreign to our natures as interdependent social beings, we undergo, almost imperceptibly, a…devolving—a changing at the most elemental level.

To continue: if the willed code of behaviour is sustained it would seem to follow that at some point the effect is final, and irrevocable.

On the urban myth of the necessity of specific demands for the sustaining of OWS…

being a refutation of same via the Bakhtinian concept of the Carnivalesque…

A current vogue in OWS ‘scholarship’ has it that it the arc of the OWS cause is sorely needing a specific litany of core demands, i.e., or it risks deconstruction. The agent of such observations is, typically, a well-intentioned Liberal observer—not participant—who is seemingly intent upon conflating Left activism as all of a piece. All too often such observer/adviser figures employ an activist benchmark akin to late sixties/early seventies’ “special interest” politicking, e.g., as seen in opposition to war, Black liberation, feminism, Green activism, etc.

What is ignored in the academic assessment of the current regime—i.e., the era of Late finance capital—is the utterly diffuse havoc being played upon all cadres, all organizational fronts, etc., via the class war waged by rentiers, the Fortune 500 CEOs, the banks, etc., against a mutually dissociated collective, i.e., the working class. Further, this oppressive state of financial massacre has as its concomitant effect a dispiriting malaise of anomie, helplessness, depression, etc., all serving to keep any would-be activism by those being preyed upon in abeyance, with actors fragmented, and uninvolved. And this, a reality in Empire for time out of memory.

The unique nature of the current manifestation of investor-class hegemony, however, is seen in the highly accelerated and aggressive nature of the opponents of We, the People. That is, the financial gain for the 1% is so impossibly high that a seduction exists to destroy the 99%, which seduction running rampant and sustained by the state as well as the corporate-owned media.

That is, there exists an abiding moral social pathology which is sustained by denial, distraction (e.g., “entertainment”, consumerism, etc.), etc., in tandem to a prevalent suffering: suffering at the individual, familial and community levels—all occurring simultaneously!

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Academic meddling and OWS: self-serving at best, destructive at the other pole…

[An open letter to Academics and arm-chair (onanistic) activism, riding a wave with…talk]

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There are several dynamics in play here, which need not be conflated as one needful Left agenda.

As Chomsky notes, there is an abiding mutual disassociation present among the working class which inertia hinders, at the most essential level, even the possibilty of a nascent Left activism. That is, OWS has inspirited a massive segment of the population to—voila!—get out of the house and become involved!

This fact needs to be valorized as the incipient moment of what may potentially be a coalescing of many seemingly disparate causes: anti-war, universal health care, EFCA and card check, doubling of the minimum wage, worker control of the means of production, etc.

To aver that OWS is remiss, i.e., “they really need to be doing more,” is to overlook the dynamics of Left activism. For example, to argue that “The absence of demands isn’t a strength,” is yet more effluent (institutionalized logorrhea) from anxious careerists who have been found out—i.e., who haven’t been at the barricades. To compensate for this egregious moral lack they cover their—’smell’ via learned disquisition…

On deconstructing the rhetoric in Tucson…

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Maintaining the Economic Disparity by Handling the Working Class

—in which the State/investor-class regime co-opts a child’s death…

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Last year, while speaking near 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, Ralph Nader offered the irrefutable observation that “there was a seamless transition from Bush to Obama.” In that vein, another journalist has observed that Obama is enacting Bush’s third term. Both accurate, both incontrovertible statements.

With the connivance of the State, i.e., the Right and near-Right (both parties are corporatist),  there is, in fact, a war being waged here at home—that being economic warfare as gross incivility—to maintain the investor-class-configured status quo by an elite coterie of five per cent, consisting of rentiers, their consiglieri, the Fortune 500 CEOs and their major stockholders, and bankers, as the never-to-be-sated fund overlords. The brazen manipulation of the non-participant ninety-five per cent of American labor is seen most recently in the utility found in a child’s senseless death, a death co-opted in the service of manufacturing the consent of the “bewildered herd.”

quem dii volunt perdere dementant prius…

The investor class/State-induced inequity here at Empire is so inherently tenuous—by virtue of the purposefully volatile nature of market activity—that the status quo complex must be finessed on an ongoing basis via MSM duplicity, disinformation, etc., in order to maintain momentum. Hence, the grotesque contrivance at Tucson lamenting the death of a child at the very same moment that Obama’s murderous military programme—in only one of a myriad of examples: Afghanistan—effects the deaths of scores of children struck down by drone shock-and-awe of, e.g., wedding parties! A pipeline connecting vast natural gas resources in the Caspian Sea to India^1,2 compels ongoing war crimes conducted in plain sight: this is merely our 235-year-old narrative of aggression and acquisition writ large in the era of Late (i.e., finance) Capital.

That is, we are witnessing the death throes of an ostensible “experiment” in democracy gone terribly—but quite predictably—awry. The Greek-tragedian notion of “whom the gods would destroy they first make mad” has relevance to the State as well, as Empire proceeds blithely in its final horrific turns of global bloodletting and rapine. It is nothing short of evil run rampant, and the reckoning, too, will be appalling.

to hell with the Inclosure Acts!…or: the lesson of the Commons

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Imagine for a moment that the Bolsheviks had chosen, on principle, not to do away with the worker’s councils (i.e., the soviets), not insisting, as they nevertheless did, upon a “temporary”, top-down, controlling vanguard–i.e., taking their cue from Marx (his essential error?). Further–and in contradistinction to that failed attempt, and the ruin that ensued–Bakunin’s view is that one can never undo “old” top-down control (Tsarism, the kulaks, feudalism in Russia, etc.) by instilling “new” top-down control, however transient.

That is, the essential fact of our lives is that we must work, and, therefore, it makes nothing but good sense to establish the democracy we insist we want–i.e., a participatory democracy–at the syndicalist level, that being a decentralized matrix of worker’s collectives, or unions.

There, we establish the distinct possibility of 1) ongoing dialogue, 2) effective arbitration, 3) mutuality, and 4) participation of the kind sorely lacking in the highly centralized, top-down, hierarchical arborescent-model (i.e., Ponzi?) construct under which we suffer.

Hayek (Mises, and, more recently, Summers, et al.) argue to the necessity of control via “the unseen hand of the market”–i.e., the centralized market. If, however, we prescind from the idea of the Federal-as-God-as-needed-control mantra and consider the reality of “smaller,” decentralized (i.e., the rhizome model of, e.g., Deleuze and Guattari) local collectivization with localized, non-hierarchical communication displacing the virtually religious idée fixe of control, then a space of negotiation exists when one was lacking a moment ago.

we are many, they are few…

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Rise like Lions after slumber
In unvanquishable number -
Shake your chains to earth like dew
Which in sleep had fallen on you -
Ye are many – they are few.

[Shelley; an homage to anarchy]

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the killing fields of St. Peter…

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“The Peterloo Massacre has been called one of the defining moments of its age. Many of those present at the massacre, including local masters, employers and owners, were horrified by the carnage. One of the casualties, Oldham cloth-worker and ex-soldier John Lees, who died from his wounds on 7 September, had been present at the Battle of Waterloo. Shortly before his death he said to a friend that he had never been in such danger as at Peterloo: ‘At Waterloo there was man to man but there it was downright murder.’” ¹

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“On 16th August 1819 in St Peter’s Fields, Manchester, armed cavalry charged a peaceful crowd of around 60,000 people gathered to listen to anti-poverty and pro-democracy speakers. It is estimated that 18 were killed, and over 700 seriously injured.”², ³

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To honor and preserve the memory of both the incident as well as the martyrs to participatory democracy Percy Bysshe Shelley (4 August 1792 – 8 July 1822) wrote the following ninety-one stanzas to commend and magnify a non-centralized, non-hierarchical political economy, i.e., anarchy:⁴

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As I lay asleep in Italy
There came a voice from over the Sea,
And with great power it forth led me
To walk in the visions of Poesy.

I met Murder on the way -
He had a mask like Castlereagh -
Very smooth he looked, yet grim;
Seven blood-hounds followed him:

All were fat; and well they might
Be in admirable plight,
For one by one, and two by two,
He tossed the human hearts to chew
Which from his wide cloak he drew.

Next came Fraud, and he had on,
Like Eldon, an ermined gown;
His big tears, for he wept well,
Turned to mill-stones as they fell.

And the little children, who
Round his feet played to and fro,
Thinking every tear a gem,
Had their brains knocked out by them.

thus spake capital…

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“The more we do to you, the less you seem to believe we are doing it.”
Josef Mengele, der Todesengel (“the Angel of Death”)

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As Empire proceeds in its death-courting danse macabre—both globally and here at home—its proximate victims, i.e., those wage-earners now facing both foreclosure as well as the rescinding of unemployment aid, appear to fall like grass under a scythe: the Left activism so desperately needed in the US to curtail the Wall Street-bred bloodbath is almost indiscernible.

The State responds to the economic maelstrom, a class-engineered upward displacement of rank-and-file hard-won equity, pension fund accounts and savings by establishing a National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform—i.e., the Deficit Commission—whose mandate is, nevertheless, seen as (and, quite typically) safeguarding the status quo of “the opulent minority.”¹

Their “report” recommends austerity measures unilaterally, i.e., the spending reductions, if implemented, would cause grave hardship to that group having little to no advocacy on Capitol Hill, even as it unfailingly accommodates elitist interests—being that sector having virtually direct access to the State—sparing same from the burden of deficit reduction proposals.

the DC/investor-class dyad dictating terms again…

The self-serving Ivy League whores in DC–and, in keeping with investor-class world ruination–have, once again, dictated terms to the global community, i.e., in this case–and quite evidently–they’ve “instructed” Swedish authorities to crucify Wikileaks founder Julian Assange.

What has prompted this pending transnational witch hunt (a State-underwritten persecution claiming sexual assault) is the posting at his website, Wikileaks, of thousands of files of classified documents revealing US war crimes in Iraq. The current legal feint occurs despite the facts having been examined–and the matter dropped–months ago (DemocracyNow, 2 September 2010):

“WikiLeaks Founder Speaks Out Against Swedish Probe”

“Sweden’s top prosecutor has reopened an investigation of rape allegations against the co-founder of the whistle-blowing website WikiLeaks despite dropping the same case last month. The probe of Julian Assange comes less than two months after his group released thousands of classified US government documents on the Afghan war. In a television interview, Assange again denied the allegations and said he’s the target of a smear campaign.”

the American Gandhi…

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“Before reading [his autobiography], I knew and greatly admired Dave Dellinger. Or so I thought. After reading his remarkable story, my admiration changed to something more like awe. There can be few people in the world who have crafted their lives into something truly inspiring. This autobiography introduces us to one of them.” — Noam Chomsky, from the dustjacket of From Yale to Jail

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Anarchist Dorothy Day on being asked about how best to address militancy and the violent:

“you don’t argue…I mean, you can’t argue with somebody who’s very…I saw Dave Dellinger get a broken jaw from one of the militants who came up and gave him a terrific crack on the side of the face…and, with the blood coming out of his mouth, and spitting blood, why, he went right on talking…he lost a few teeth…he went right on talking–perfectly calm, perfectly self-possessed: Dave Dellinger is really a non-violent person. And, the man went up and apologized to him afterward–he was completely taken aback…” [from Marquette University lecture, 1969].

on being open to a money/Power seduction…

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“the banality of evil”…

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…having at last managed to shed the remnants of self respect and conscience they may once have claimed for themselves—i.e., and, therefore, with their moral ground now lost to them—they then give themselves over to being seduced by money/Power, i.e., money/Power pursued as useful diversions over the course of now effete lives…this is then rationalized as realpolitik—not moral depravity, corruption, degenerate behavior, or—as Arendt put it—”the banality of evil”…

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(l. to r., top: Forwardlooking, Cheney, Hillary;   second:  Bill, Pelosi, Geithner; third: W., Condi, Blankfein, Harman; bottom:  Schapiro, Bernanke, Rumsfeld, Reno)

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“Power tends to corrupt; absolute power corrupts absolutely.”

John Dalberg-Acton

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from On Civil Disobedience:

“Absolutely speaking, the more money, the less virtue; for money comes between a man and his objects, and obtains them for him; it was certainly no great virtue to obtain it. It puts to rest many questions which he would otherwise be taxed to answer; while the only new question which it puts is the hard but superfluous one, how to spend it.

“Thus his moral ground is taken from under his feet.

Q: “What are your future plans?” A: “Resistance.”

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(“I feel that there are many people who are in despair over me, and are extraordinarily scandalized by what I have done. I feel, at times, in great despair over…Christians.”)

DB: Oh…I think we didn’t realize that the waters were very apt to turn to blood—that might happen…it has happened…If fires were reborn…might actually cause—might actually cost the death of very good men…These waters of time have become dipped in a great deal of blood since then. From innocent Vietnamese blood to innocent American blood.

[scene: narrator voiceover to DB photo stream]

VO: Father Daniel Berrigan is a poet and a Jesuit priest who defied the law as a means of dramatizing his opposition to the war in Vietnam. On May 17, 1968, Father Berrigan, his brother Philip—also a priest—and seven other men and women entered the Selective Service office at Catonsville, Maryland and burned several hundred draft files with homemade napalm. The Catonsville Nine were later tried and convicted of destroying government property. On April 9, 1970, the date he was due to begin serving his prison sentence of three-and-a-half years, Father Berrigan went underground. He successfully evaded capture for four months. On August 11th, Father Berrigan was finally arrested by agents of the FBI on Block Island, Rhode Island.

“love” is NOT “like”: sublimating desire—versus the Thanatos instinct…

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“If I speak in human and angelic tongues but do not have love, I am a resounding gong or a clashing cymbal.

“And if I have the gift of prophecy and comprehend all mysteries and all knowledge; if I have all faith so as to move mountains but do not have love, I am nothing.

“If I give away everything I own, and if I hand my body over so that I may boast but do not have love, I gain nothing.

“Love is patient, love is kind. It is not jealous, (love) is not pompous, it is not inflated, it is not rude, it does not seek its own interests, it is not quick-tempered, it does not brood over injury, it does not rejoice over wrongdoing but rejoices with the truth.

“It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.

“Love never fails. If there are prophecies, they will be brought to nothing; if tongues, they will cease; if knowledge, it will be brought to nothing.

“For we know partially and we prophesy partially, but when the perfect comes, the partial will pass away.

“When I was a child, I used to talk as a child, think as a child, reason as a child; when I became a man, I put aside childish things.

“At present we see indistinctly, as in a mirror, but then face to face. At present I know partially; then I shall know fully, as I am fully known.

“So faith, hope, love remain, these three; but the greatest of these is love.”

I Corinthians 13: 1-13

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the fatal error in reifying desire: a “faith” in being chosen…

As activist Dorothy Day lived it—her ”message”—loving has nothing to do with liking…

What is gained, then? That is, what part of our make-up is gratefully, joyously transcended in loving as Paul reveals it?

Desire.

We inflect from the dis-ease of desire when we love—when we love truly.

What is taken, too, as desire’s adjunct, is fear, i.e., we live without fear if we love. Desire is of the Self. Like an infinite regression seen in mirroring desire replicates itself solely for its own sake. That is, the desiring Self seeks solely, endlessly, to be desired—i.e., to be chosen. No desire (it being literally a longing for what is not there) and fear—i.e., the impossible fear of not being chosen as a personal belief in death (that is, punishment)—is burned off as the sun burns mist.

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“There is no fear in love, but perfect love drives out fear because fear has to do with punishment, and so one who fears is not yet perfect in love.”

I John 4:18

to what end, Empire?

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“Power tends to corrupt; absolute power corrupts absolutely.”

John Dalberg-Acton

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“Oh what a tangled web we weave, When first we practice to deceive.”

Walter Scott

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(“The reasons for intervention, subversion, terror, and repression are not obscure. They are summarized accurately by Patrice McSherry in the most careful scholarly study of Operation Condor, the international terrorist operation established with U.S. backing in Pinochet’s Chile: ‘the Latin American militaries, normally acting with the support of the U.S. government, overthrew civilian governments and destroyed other centers of democratic power in their societies (parties, unions, universities, and constitutionalist sectors of the armed forces) precisely when the class orientation of the state was about to change or was in the process of change, shifting state power to non-elite social sectors…Preventing such transformations of the state was a key objective of Latin American elites, and U.S. officials considered it a vital national security interest as well.’

“It is easy to demonstrate that what are termed “national security interests” have only an incidental relation to the security of the nation, though they have a very close relation to the interests of dominant sectors within the imperial state, and to the general state interest of ensuring obedience.”)

Dives and Lazarus in New York City…

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(“With the $57 she and four friends put together in 1933, partly from an article she published in America magazine, they printed an eight-page tabloid called The Catholic Worker and handed out 2,500 copies at the May Day Communist rally in Union Square. With only the $5 she had to her name a few months later, she rented a vacant apartment to provide emergency shelter for six homeless women after hearing that one of their friends had thrown herself in front of a subway. These two acts launched one of the most elegantly simple revolutions in history.”)

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“There was a rich man who dressed in purple garments and fine linen and dined sumptuously each day. And, lying at his door was a poor man named Lazarus, covered with sores, who would gladly have eaten his fill of the scraps that fell from the rich man’s table. Dogs even used to come and lick his sores.

When the poor man died he was carried away by angels to the bosom of Abraham. The rich man also died and was buried, and from the netherworld, where he was in torment, he raised his eyes and saw Abraham far off and Lazarus at his side.

And he cried out, ‘Father Abraham, have pity on me. Send Lazarus to dip the tip of his finger in water and cool my tongue, for I am suffering torment in these flames.’

Abraham replied, ‘My child, remember that you received what was good during your lifetime while Lazarus likewise received what was bad; but now he is comforted here, whereas you are tormented.

Moreover, between us and you a great chasm is established to prevent anyone from crossing who might wish to go from our side to yours or from your side to ours.’

He said, ‘Then I beg you, father, send him to my father’s house, for I have five brothers, so that he may warn them, lest they too come to this place of torment.’

But Abraham replied, ‘They have Moses and the prophets. Let them listen to them.’

He said, ‘Oh no, father Abraham, but if someone from the dead goes to them, they will repent.’

Then Abraham said, ‘If they will not listen to Moses and the prophets, neither will they be persuaded if someone should rise from the dead.’”

Luke 16: 19-31

the “American Heroes” series, and the shot heard ‘round the world…

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“Lord, I’m one, Lord, I’m two, Lord, I’m three, Lord, I’m four, Lord, I’m five hundred miles away from home.
Away from home, away from home, away from home, away from home, Lord, I’m five hundred miles away from home.”
[from a popular folksong by Hedy West, heard in the sixties]

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[Rosa Parks, with Dr. King]

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Parks: “When that white driver stepped back toward us, when he waved his hand and ordered us up and out of our seats, I felt a determination cover my body like a quilt on a winter night.”

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Regarding Parks’ decision to remain seated on the Montgomery, Alabama bus she was riding, many issues had come to a head, with the Emmet Till murder on 28 August 1955 being only the most recent crisis in the Southland.

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Having just finished her studies that summer at the Highlander Folk School in Tennessee—being a rural, adult program of social and labor activism training—Parks’ decision on 1 December 1955 galvanized a collective of both Blacks and whites preparing to effect racial equality and dismantle segregation in America.

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The first result of Parks’ action was the Montgomery Bus Boycott, which resulted in the Supreme Court ruling citing bus segregation laws in Alabama to be unconstitutional.