William S. Burroughs’ Thanks Giving Prayer

William S. Burroughs’ Thanks Giving Prayer

For John Dillinger, In hope he is still alive
Thanks for the wild turkey and the Passenger Pigeons, destined to be shit out through wholesome American guts
thanks for a Continent to despoil and poison —
thanks for Indians to provide a modicum of challenge and danger
thanks for vast herds of bison to kill and skin, leaving the carcass to rot —
thanks for bounties on wolves and coyotes —

thanks for the AMERICAN DREAM to vulgarize and falsify until the bare lies shine through —
thanks for the KKK, for nigger-killing lawmen feeling their notches, for decent church-going women with their mean, pinched, bitter, evil faces —
thanks for “Kill a Queer for Christ” stickers —
thanks for laboratory AIDS —
thanks for Prohibition and the War Against Drugs —
thanks for a country where nobody is allowed to mind his own business —
thanks for a nation of finks — yes,
thanks for all the memories… all right, let’s see your arms… you always were a headache and you always were a bore —
thanks for the last and greatest betrayal of the last and greatest of human dreams.

An Angry Letter to American Liberals

I spent my time on the left in America.    No, that’s not correct, or rather that’s not accurate.  How about this:  I spent my time marching with the left.  By “Left” I don’t mean the “Democrats” I don’t mean what was, at the time, the Kerry crowd, I didn’t vote for Obama for president.  I haven’t voted for a Democrat for president since I was eighteen-years-old and didn’t know any better.  I remember the whole drive behind Obama in the 2008 election, I remember it vividly.  I remember wanting to vote for him, and part of what the far right is saying was true, a part of me wanted to vote for him because he was Black.  They are wrong about the whole “white guilt” part of their little perverse equation.  I’ve never felt guilty that I was white; I just felt that a Black president was historic, is historic, but what was more was the lingering hope that I might have been electing Dr. King as president.  That Obama might have had the same sensibilities.  King, after all, was in Memphis to support a strike, to support the working people of America.  He wasn’t on a race mission in Memphis; he was supporting my class, my people.    The temptation to support Obama was certainly there.

But then, Obama was a Democrat.  He was a liberal, and I had taken sides with the left in America.  I couldn’t betray them.  Obama might not have voted to go to war, but he was part of the party that supported it.  He was part of the party that denounced Moore when he made his Oscar speech.  I didn’t see “Hope & Change” in Obama, all I saw was “slightly better than Bush.”  In the end I voted third party.  I can’t even remember who I voted for, but I wrote his name down on a piece of paper & wrote him in when I voted.  I just couldn’t side with the people I was fighting against.  He might not have been Bush, he might not have been a Republican, but he was part of the party that supported Bush, and I couldn’t support that.  At the end, I think I was right, I’m content that I did the right thing, and that breaks my heart.  Deep down, I wanted to know that not voting for Obama was the biggest mistake of my life.  I didn’t want to be right.  Now we are looking at four more years of Obama, I’m not going to vote for him again, and again I’m hoping that I will be wrong about it.

Clinton killed my hopes for the Democrats in America.  Clinton passes NAFTA & with it took away my prospects for a decent job when I graduated.  I had no illusions about having my whole life ahead of me.  By the time I was graduating high school way back in ’98 I already knew enough people struggling and laid-off to understand my prospects were dim.  I was good at history & economics even back then, I understood that a white kid in the suburbs had advantages, but a white kid in the suburbs that knew college educated people searching for jobs meant that the situation would only get worse by the time I graduated.  I had already read Marx & Smith & Hitler & knew what I was facing.

I had grown up in a circle of liberal Democrats, and already leaned towards them.  But when I got to college I met the ISO, the International Socialist Organization.  The liberals were telling me that the Blacks needed Affirmative Action, that they had a culture of their own, & that if I thought there was a “Black Problem,” I was a racist.  The Socialists, on the other hand, told me something entirely different.  They told me that there IS a Black problem in America & the problem was class, the problem was that they part of a larger disenfranchised group of people in the United States.  The Socialists told me that all the “Black Cultural Heritage” & Affirmative Action wasn’t going to do a damn thing to help them.  The Socialists told me that if I wanted to improve my lot in life, I had to help them improve theirs & the only way to do that was to tear down the walls that are dividing us & help them to achieve the equality that the liberal pretend they already have.  The Black population in America is enormous & if they are doing better, than I will have the opportunity to do better.

Who was I going to believe?  The Liberals telling me that the Blacks were equal to them even if they lived in ghettos & were either unemployed or under-employed?  Was I going to believe the liberals that were telling me that if we had Affirmative Action it would create equality and solve the problem?  Or was I going to side with the Socialists that said, “Look, Sam, they are still living in the ghettos, they still don’t have access to good schools, & they are still an enormous disenfranchised bulk of the population, clearly more needs to be done.”  It’s impossible to argue against the people pointing to the ghettos & telling me to look & see for myself.  And you know what?  There were people struggling there & the system wasn’t doing anything to really help them.  America has its first Black president & the situation there has only gotten worse.

In college we had a feeling of rage.  I’m sorry; we had a strong feeling of RAGE.  We were livid, we were insane with anger.  We were mad that 9-11 happened, but we were even madder that 9-11 opened the door for endless killing.  Socialists are news addicts, they knew that Iraq had nothing to do with it whatsoever; they were the first to read that the yellow cake was a lie.  They knew friends and had family in the military, their parents served in Vietnam, even if they didn’t go to war themselves they understood what happens when you give frightened kids weapons & then push them into a live or die situation, they knew for a fact that the causalities were going to be more than just combatants.  Most of the liberals in America, at least at first, were supporting the war.  At least where I was, it was the Socialists that were the first people to organize against the killing.  They were the first to say that, no, war is murder, in fact, the ONLY thing that war is, is murder.  It’s not justified, we aren’t defending America, we’re just killing Muslims.

I remember the anger I felt more than anything else.  I remember the anger we felt, & that angry feeling is still more vivid than the marches and protests.    You marched down Michigan Avenue & you were shaking with rage, you were pointing out simple truths & no one was listening.  The liberals were largely still supporting war, at least the morality of the war.  They were appearing on NPR’s Fresh Air & MSNBC claiming that they were “reluctant war hawks,” persisting with the fact that Iraq would be better off with a military occupation than a stable government, no matter how brutal it may have been.  They were firing the journalists that didn’t tow the pro-war line, even in the liberal media.  They were attacking Moore for speaking out against the war only days after it was declared.  They instantly turned their guns on Noam Chomsky.

For those in the American left, the Wikileak videos of helicopters gunning down journalists & children wasn’t shocking.  The video was exactly what we were saying was happening.  We didn’t need to see it with our own eyes, we knew the people that were doing it.  We knew them because they came from our class of people.  We had heard the stories from our parents that had served in Vietnam.  We assumed, & assumed correctly, that the endless wars on terror would be no different.

And then came the domestic spying.  The USA PATRIOT ACT was passed and signed into law.  It would not have passed without support from the liberal in the government.  The police and FBI were sent to spy on anti-war groups, those that protested against the death penalty, & those that protested against ANY part of the system.  The most vocal among us were put on “no fly lists” and searched at the air ports, they were regarded as terrorists.  The government was running under the assumption that the people that were protesting against murder were the same people that were likeliest to commit murder.  And the liberals in America accepted that, they supported it.

The Liberals supported HR 1955, which would make this little rambling & the people that are reading it “domestic terrorists.”  It passed the House only to linger in limbo in the Senate, probably more because it meant that the Democrats would have also been labeled as terrorists more than because it would make civil disobedients terrorists.  The liberals in America ignored HR 4102, the Stop Outsourcing Security Act that would have phased out the private military contractors in Iraq & put the war & occupation back into the hands of government accountability.  Private security forces were outnumbering the people in the Pentagon, they were conducting intelligence work for the US Military, & the bill was stopped.  The liberals in the government didn’t ignore the bill as much as they rejected it.  They preferred to have our intelligence run by the people that worked for corporations that had a greater responsibility and loyalty to shareholders and profit than they did to America.

The sad thing is these views, my views, are still rejected by the liberals in America.  I want to live in a more just and equal world, I want to stop the killing, I want the same opportunities my father had, or more so, the same opportunities my grandfather had & the liberals in America label me a “crazy leftist” because of it.

But what is worse than that, is the fact that the right has moved so far to the right that the liberals that still support corporate interests, the liberals that supported bailing out the banks and not the people, the liberals that supported the wars, the liberals that supported the stripping of our civil liberties are now regarded as “Socialists” and “left wing radicals.”   The liberals in America are the vice of moderation between the financial elite and everyone else & this moderation is now seen as the far left.  Go no further, you will be off the map, here be monsters.

Instead we have a nation in the grips of fascism.  Or problems are blamed on the Blacks, the immigrants, the Jews in Israel, the Muslims, the Mexicans, the Feminists, the Homosexuals, & the people like me that want us all to have the same opportunities that my parents had.    When I was in college the people I knew were filled with rage, they were angry, now the people are hopeless.  Rage is bad for the government, anger is bad for the system, & hopelessness is bad for the people, bad for Americans.  The people that are angry are going to fight for the people, fight for themselves, side with King, X, & Debs.  The people that are hopeless are going to find someone to blame, they are going to take their side with the John Birch Society, the Heterosexual Organization for a Moral Environment, the new Fascist movements in America, Anne Coulter.  They are going to believe in conspiracy theories that give them something to blame, some minority group that if eradicated will solve all their problems.

I have Mexican neighbors.    A family, their middle son works at Pizza Hut & brings me back a pizza every now & again, he’ll show up at my door with food and relax with me over a beer.  The mother wakes me up at seven on Sunday morning to have coffee and donuts with them.  Every third Wednesday we have tacos together at the local Mexican grease pit.  I’m tutoring their daughter in history; I’m helping the mother with her English.  We are very close friends.    They liberals are the voice of moderation, not the voice of the left, fine, but if the right has it’s way, being as far right as they are, we could find ourselves in a situation where I’d be forced to hide the Gonzalez family in my apartment as if they were the Franks.  The political rhetoric is building up to that & I’m the one that’s crazy for rejecting that thought process.  And the liberals in America think I’m crazy for wanting them to have the same opportunities my father had.

The solution is simple.  As Chomsky said:

“Don’t take assumptions for granted.  Begin with taking a skeptical attitude towards anything that is conventional wisdom.  Make it justify itself.  It usually can’t.  Be willing to ask questions about what is taken for granted.  Try to think things through for yourself.  There is plenty of information.”

The liberals have to up their game.  They are now considered the left in America.  It’s about time they started acting like it.

On to Cathay!!!!!!

I am moving to China. Well not now, but soon.  I am a background check & a health test away from China.  Truth be told, I’m scared shitless.  Honestly.  And it’s not the horror stories my buddy Magnus is sending me over the wire from Germany:  “Watch out for the toilets, you Americans don’t have the thigh properly power to properly hover.”   It’s really kind of a First Amendment thing.  I’m an American, you know, & unless you’re a right-wing nut job, it’s the First Amendment you worship.  I am a sane American, I can’t hide behind the Second Amendment, it’s not protecting me like the First is, I’m not the type of person that needs to wave the Second Amendment around in your face, I don’t bring a Glock-7 into the corner to buy a bag of chips.  I don’t even own a Glock-7, I’m a historian, historians are nearly exclusively 1911 guys.  You know, Browning made it, & he was a genius,  so it has that going for it, & then, you know, there’s the historian thing, as a race, we’re wimps, if I shoot you I don’t want you to get back up, because then you’re probably going to kick my ass.  A .9mm is not going to do the trick, but a .45 will drop your dead.

Don’t get me wrong, I support the 2nd Amendment, well, all ten of them actually.  I’m not a fake liberal, I’m in this shit for the long run.  I firmly believe that as a people, you can NEVER have too much freedom.   Hell, I’ve found myself in situations where I’ve been damn lucky I knew the Bill of Rights by heart.  I’ve found myself in situations where I’ve had to use Amendments other than the First to remain free, I went to college, after all, people smoke dope in college.  Sure, I’ll admit that too much freedom creates problems, but I’d rather deal with those problems than those other problems.  You know, those problems that you get when you don’t have enough freedom.

Being who I am–& my sister, father, & mother have all pointed it out–I’m a pilgrim about to travel to an unholy land.  I mean, if you read my blog, I’ve pissed all over America.  A little bit more than that actually.  In some of my posts, the ones back in the day before I realized that people stop reading your blog the moment they see a footnote, I sort of dropped trow and squeezed out a Cleveland Steamer on my country.  And if you have a problem with it, well then fuck you, its my right to do it.  And you know what?   If you don’t like it, thanks to the First Amendment, it’s also my right to tell you to go FUCK yourself.  Because I, like everyone else in America, have the First Amendment protecting my over-opinionated self-righteous ass.

 

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

Yeah, I know, I get way to hard when I read that.  It’s the most beautiful thing on earth.  Unlike so many other laws we have in America, this wasn’t created by a bunch of drooling Neanderthals, this was written by geniuses that had seen their printing presses smashed by, what was at the time, the freest country in the world.  They understood that words have power, that words would make or break their revolution.  And they also understood that words would keep their new world free, just look at Adams & Jefferson, it was words–& very harsh words–that won that election.  There’s a reason why they put words first.

Flag.  It could be an upbringing thing.  Flag.  It’s more than just a villain in a Stephen King novel.  My father thinks the American flag is the most beautiful flag in the world.  I’m going to have to play the bull shit card on that one.  I’m a historian, I’ve seen about every flag there is, & everyone knows that Alaska has the most beautiful flag on earth.  Followed closely by Canada & Japan.  I understand where my father is coming from, The American Flag is not just a tricolour,  every country has a tricolor.  Tricolors are not only dull, they are overdone.  The American Flag is like the Union Jack, you know, it has an actual design on it.  The Union Jack is a pretty cool looking flag, so is the Betsy Ross Flag, I like the circle thing more than the field, it’s a bit more pleasing to the eye.  But personally, I’m of the view that flags, like National Anthems, should be about something beautiful people can see when they visit you.  In that respect, America the Beautiful is a far better choice.  Trust me on this, I’ve been all over America, I’ve seen both the purple mountain majesty & the amber waves of grain, & you know what, they are both breath-taking.  Tricolors remind me too much of governments, nations should be first & foremost about the people.  That is what nation means, after all.

But flags, at least in America, are a hot button issue.  I remember not to long ago under Bush, they tried to make it illegal to burn the flag.  My father was in a mad uproar & vowed to be the first person arrested, if they actually passed the bill.  Mind you, this is the man who will knock you flat if he ever caught you burning the flag.  He looks at it as the gravest insult to the American people.  Fuck the government, it’s the people he’s protecting when he attacks flag burners.  But then, it’s the First Amendment he’s defending when he gets all up in arms about the close-minded fascists that want to make it illegal to burn the flag.

Try burning the flag in China, and you end up in a forced labor camp.  China is not only lacking a First Amendment, they are also lacking an Eighth Amendment.  In America, our Eighth is slowly decaying, but China never even had an Eighth.  That is a frightening fucking thought for a Westerner–for an American Westerner that likes to shoot his mouth off.  I’m going to be living & working & teaching in a country that doesn’t have a First or an Eighth Amendment to protect my over-opinionated self-righteous ass.  I’ll bitch & moan all I want America–& I do, at length, if you want to hear it or not–but at least here in America, that’s my unalienable right.  Seriously, the moment you take away my right to say this nation is turning into a steaming pile of dog shit, the moment you take away my right to say that Hunter Thompson was right, & the American dream is fucked, that’s the moment you & I are no longer living in America.

So I’m going to China.  Facebook, youtube, WordPress, Skype, World of Warcraft, myspace, ISOhunt, twitter, google, wikipedia, banned in China.  In fact, here is a list of words you are not allowed to search in China, and here is a list of websites that are blocked by the Great Firewall of China.  Playboy is blocked in China.  In fact pornography is illegal in China.  China has one of the harshest anti-pornography laws in the world.  Obviously I am going to a world where logic is void.  Let’s face it, the very reason why it takes me so long to write these posts is because of pornography.  A nation that is so frightened it’s people will rise up & overthrow it should have long ago found the wonders of pornography.  Pornography is a distraction.  Pornography will keep many a potential revolutionary from accessing the information they need to really see through the haze China has created & start pushing for human rights.  Let’s face it, if you want to keep your people distracted from the truth, you want pornography & drugs to be legal.

So yes, I’m very frightened to be leaving the safety of the west for the authoritarianism of the east.  Especially at a time, where certain political parties in America want stricter morality laws, a time when the Tea Party wants to enter into the private lives of Americans & restrict just about every freedom save the Second Amendment.

I’m going from citizen to subject & that is a very frightening thing.

7 Billion, That’s with a “B”

Try my best to keep this short.  There’s an old Chinese curse: “may you live in interesting times.”  If you get a degree or so in history the curse has special meaning to it, generally speaking, you don’t spend much time studying the uninteresting times.    Even if you teach history you don’t spend much time teaching the uninteresting times, especially high school history where if you want to keep the student’s attention there’s really one rule,”carnage candy.”  Now you do have to be a little socially off to study history, you have to be able to say to yourself, “that’s disgusting, I have to learn more about it,”  & a fair few times you have to be able to look at a decayed corpse of your human brethren & be fascinated by it, not repulsed.  Yes it’s a dead body, yes it smells, but you know what, that body has a story to tell, & no matter how close it looks to the Crypt Keeper, you sort of have to be more focused on the potential story behind what Lindow Man has to tell you rather than how utterly disgusting he looks.  Besides mummies usually smell good, kind of like incense.

Despite the fascination with the morbid, unless you’re talking to a complete psychopath, if you ask a historian what time he or she would most like to live in, chances are, they aren’t going to answer with the time period they specialize in.  You won’t hear “Yes, I’d like to live in America during the Civil War,”  or, “I would love to be alive in Russia during Stalin’s Purges,” it’s probably not going to happen.  They are, more often than not, going to pick a time & place that they’ve never spent much time teaching about.  If you live in the interesting times, you’re likely to see your family slaughtered, brother pitted against brother, or just end up working yourself to death in Siberia.  Even if you keep your head down and your mouth shut.

It’s a wonder we’re still here at all, let alone now have 7 Billion people.

And that poor 7th Billion person was born into one of the most interesting times this world has ever seen.  Let’s recap.

1) There’s a protest on Wall Street that has spread to LA, & over seas to China, Germany, England, Spain, & so on.  This has never really happened before in the world, at least not the way it’s happening now, & the prospects for the future are ominous.    Generally, when these things happen, the powers that be are less than understanding about it, we’re probably lucky Obama is attempting to buy them off with trinkets, you know, rather than locking them away in a nameless prison & forcing them to work themselves to death in Siberia.

2) There was a very recent nuclear meltdown in Japan, & currently a protest requesting an end to nuclear power, & if not that, the Japanese government should at least move people out of the area & give them the medical attention they need.

3) There’s a global food shortage, especially in India where thousands of farmers are offing themselves in record numbers due to the debt that is causing the famine.  Famines, recently, are financial.  Black 47 was a year where Ireland was creating enough food to feed the Irish, but instead it was being sent over to England, at a mark-up, a country that already had enough food.  In this case, the cause is Monsanto.  Monsanto is a private company that controls our world’s food source, or at least the seed stock, India & a number of other countries can’t afford to buy the genetically altered seeds from the company, at least without out & out bankruptcy, & they can’t save seed either, because these seeds kill themselves.   So again we have famine, for profit.  There’s enough food out there, but you’re probably not going to eat any of it, number 7 Billion, in enough time, I probably won’t either, unless something drastic & utterly depressing happens to the world.

4) Let’s not forget about the Arab Spring.  The Eastern World, it is exploding, violence flaring, bullets loading, & all that & a bag of chips.  It’s not exactly a singular thing, it’s called the Arab Spring because it’s happening all over that part of the world.  No one in any type of authority, podium, press, or pulpit, can tell you the outcome, chaos & carnage, & Saudi Arabia is doing their best to oppress the spirit of the Arab Spring out of their people & using Blackwater to do it, which, usually backfires, horribly.

5) And of course there’s the global money shortage, strikes in Greece, all that manner of Global Feudal nastiness that brings us back to 1 through 4.  Let’s face facts here, number 7 Billion is born into a world that has grown sick & tired of being serfs to the upper-class.  It doesn’t bode well, at least to all of us with a long enough memory to remember the global spark of revolution, violence, & reigns of terror that brought the end to feudalism about 300-years-ago.

6)  And then there’s peace in Ireland.  Bono & Clinton forced Adams & Blair to sit down & talk things out, despite the snakes Patrick left in the north.  The Troubles could be essentially over.  Saint John the Divine added that little point as a harbinger of doom for the world, the first mark of the coming of the end times, & he wrote his little gem of misinterpreted gospel about 600 years before Henry II started that mess.  Not to mention the fact that the Stone of Scone is back in Scotland.

OK, maybe number 6 was a fairly dark joke, but just as Europe is getting it’s act together & has stopped killing each other over money & empire, they’ve hit the global economic block.  Thank God they have a social state-based safety net, otherwise they may be as hard up as we are here in the states.  But I don’t know, England is privatizing their medical system aren’t they?   Not a good idea.  Just ask how much my sister had to pay to give birth to my nephew.

So welcome to the World number 7 Billion, I hope you survive the experience.

TEA Party Politics: Dealing in Absolutes

I received a very familiar comment on my last post:

You forget that we can push these rabble into a corner and give them no alternative but to step over the line and legitimize our purging of them.

This is some concern to me.  Not so much because there is a lone individual reading my blog & hoping for an excuse to put civility aside, but rather because I’ve seen this type of comment many times before.  Check out Yahoo! Answers.  Grant you, Y!A is only one example, & an example full of trolls & individuals fighting over who can be more extreme than the other & thus garner the most feedback, probably a result of a small pathetic desire for some sort of recognition.  But take a moment to read through it.  Shift through the questions about statutory rape, Child Protective Services, & video game inspired military questions, & what you’ll soon find is a deep political divide in America.

I know, I know, it doesn’t come as a shock.

Now there are liberals on Y!A, a fair few, using terms like “cons” & “Teabaggers” & believe me when I tell you I’m not about to defend their rhetoric.  But then read through the conservative posts…………notice the difference yet?  Do you pick up the same authoritarian rhetoric I do?  It seems like they are itching for a fight.  Better yet, their itching for the opportunity to turn America into a one party system, to actively stomp out any political view that doesn’t completely conform with their ideology. Better yet, do what I do.  Listen to what Rush Limbaugh has to say, watch Fox News, & then shift through Yahoo! Answers…………..

Sound familiar?

You didn’t actually do it, did you?

That’s OK, you’re here reading inevitablepolitics, where we habitually read the news & history for you…when we’re home long enough to post.  It’s really not a joke, I’m sitting on a couple of very thoroughly unused degrees.  I majored in the type of subjects you only really major in when you have an unhealthy obsession with the subject.  The type of degree that, once you leave the warm confines of academia you suddenly discover that all you can do is, well, teach, & then after a year of that you discover not only that society can’t afford teachers any longer, but they certainly don’t want their children learning history.

And I digress.  So it goes.

At any rate, you’ll find the people on Yahoo! Answers parroting a fair few sources, Rush Limbaugh, & Fox News being two such sources.  The others are right-wing blogs, like American Thinker & Red State, & a fair few others.  To be fair, the liberals on Yahoo! Answers do relatively the same thing, hitting Truth Out, The Guardian UK, & Media Matters, with the amount of relative frequency.  Back in the day, waaaay back in the day, when Glenn Beck was still on Fox, you could turn him on & read through Y!A & see the exact same thing posted on the site.  The thing is, Glenn Beck doesn’t really ask that many questions, does he?

Neither do the people on Y!A.

This is interesting.

This is interesting because Y!A isn’t the only place you can do this on, it’s just one of the biggest.  One of the most popular.

The real shame of it is, I have used Y!A to actually find answers to questions that have been bugging me & all the inter-web research in the world couldn’t find an answer to.  Like, “What’s that movie about the boy that really, really, wanted to be a traffic reporter?”  And I’ve gotten answers within a couple of seconds.

I’m not joking either.

It’s super useful.  The movie’s called Pie in the Sky (1996).  I don’t remember John Goodman being in it.  I don’t even remember if it was any good.  Does it really matter if it was any good?  Hell no!  How many movies do you see where the protagonist wants to be a traffic reporter?  Hollywood isn’t going to give you anything more original than that.  I can sort of see it, I like helicopters, but not that much.  I haven’t seen it since I was a kid.  There’s probably a reason for it.

At any rate, getting involved in the political page on Y!A is completely useless.  Reading the same page is about as useful as watching the news.  It makes a solid point.

What point?

America is based on the individual, fair enough, but it’s also based on conformity.  Right now, in the world we have two parties, one of which is demanding complete & totally conformity.  Ever heard the term “RINO?”  It stands for Republican In Name Only (RINO).  It’s an insult.    It’s honestly really insulting if you are a Republican.  It’s reserved for individuals that don’t completely agree with everything the republican party has to say.  100% conformity.  For example, Scott Brown, that man is a RINO.  John McCain is a RINO.  It generally means that the candidate in question is no longer going to receive support from either the party or the conservative media.

Sorry Scott.

You’re outta there!

“Only the Sith deal in absolutes.”

This is a matter of concern.  Seriously.  These people eat their own.  Relentlessly.  How many different people have been the new fighting hope of the TEA Party?  Rick Perry, Sarah Palin, Michele Bachman, Herman Cain, Joe Miller, Jesse Kelly, Dan Maes, Marco Rubio, Mike Lee, how many others?  Listen to what they have to say, by & large, they all agree with each other.  OK, 9-9-9 doesn’t hold water when you do the math–unless you are rich–& to be honest, they all have a different plan to do the exact same thing, but those that disagree….wait….are there any that disagree?  Not really, the ones that don’t tow the party line are out.  They will even rally their soldiers and the press against an incumbent that has a strong chance of beating out a democrat if he or she expresses views that don’t totally conform with the party proper.  That’s right, they’ll willingly throw away an election to counter any moderate dissent within their own party.

They are willing to eat their own.

Now lets read that comment again.

You forget that we can push these rabble into a corner and give them no alternative but to step over the line and legitimize our purging of them.

Now let’s revisit Y!A, let’s review Glenn Beck, American Thinker, Red State, Fox News.  Those of us that love propaganda are especially frightened with propaganda that not only turns Americans against their countrymen, but also against dissent & discussion within their own party.  I know, I know, I could be taking things the wrong way, but the rhetoric here is violent.  You can spin it all you want, but the anti-liberal rhetoric in said comment, is extremely authoritarian, extremely violent.   Point in fact, most of the conservative rhetoric you hear in America today is authoritarian & violent.  What should really frighten you is that this rhetoric isn’t coming from the top down, not any more.  This rhetoric is coming from the party supporters.

Do you know what that means?  It means that the people supporting the establishment where all of this has started already agree that your liberal views don’t have any right to exist in their country.  And in some cases, if you are really speaking out, you don’t either.  After all, you’re just a pathetic bleeding heart liberal, right, a “libtard,” as they say, you’re brainwashed by George Soros, Al Gore, Michael Moore, & Jesus Christ….well, the Jesus Christ that told you to love thy neighbor, not the Jesus Christ that told you to screw your neighbor to increase profit margins.  What?

 That’s OK, right?  The GOP doesn’t have a strong candidate anyway.

Dead wrong.  There’s a war on voting at the moment.  I’m not joking, there’s a good chance that by 2012, it won’t matter who you vote for.  Obama could win & still lose.  Fall of the Roman Republic, hey? Poof.  Gone. Magic.  And who is left in power?  The people who don’t tolerate dissent, not even within their own party.  The people who are re-writing history.  The people who want one religion.

The violent rhetoric at the moment might be a joke.  At the moment.  But it’s a joke out of the mouths of the people who are working to take away your right to vote.  These people have support.  So it’s a joke today to legitimize the purging of the Occupy Wall Street protesters.  Is it going to be a joke when they take office?  Was the bomb thrown into Occupy Portland a simple child’s prank, the drain-o bombs we used to make for kicks in high school, or was it a product of this rhetoric?

When I was in high school we used to make little bombs like that all the time.  Just to hear the bang, you know, boys with toys.  But throwing a kids bomb in the middle of nowhere just to hear the bang is completely different from throwing a kids bomb into a group of people.  There’s a different thought process behind that.  The high school bombs my friends & I made weren’t intended to be used around anyone but us, they weren’t even intended to be strong enough to actually destroy anything, they were just loud fireworks.  It’s not terrorism, we’ve all done it.  There’s no great political or religious reason behind it, there’s no need for destruction.  It’s just, you know, a really loud bang.

BANG!

What teenaged boy doesn’t like that?

Anyway.  We don’t make them anymore.  We don’t have to.  We’re over 21.  When we want to hear something go bang, we drive across the border & buy the shit that’s going to make a loud noise & give us pretty lights.  Drain-o bombs don’t give you pretty lights.  We can do that now, it’s semi-legal, at least in the state we’re buying them in.

Pretty lights are awesome.

But throwing a bomb into a group of people.  That is different.  It’s more than a high school prank.  It’s still a prank, mind you, it’s still some dumb high school kid looking for a cheap thrill.  But this prank has politics behind it, moreover, it has the intent of harm behind it.  He probably didn’t want anyone to get hurt, I’m not a psychologist, I actually understand that boys will be boys will be boys.  He probably only intended to frighten them, to threaten them, to scare them.  But he did also target them, & the reasons why he targeted them are more than evident & a symptom of something ominous on the horizon.

Occupy Wall Street: A Question of Violence

Let’s take a moment & talk about violence.  Anyone that actually reads this blog knows that I don’t buy into that whole artistic-intellectual belief that violence solves nothing.  It’s actually very much the opposite.  But hey, I’m a historian, & worse, I’m a materialist.  Violence & the threat of violence, for better & for worse, usually, historically, is the apex of any movement, the deciding factor of anything generally comes with blood.  It’s been a part of our history since there was history, sure HLA-C*0702 may be  proof enough that our closest relatives were bumping uglies with modern-man, but that isn’t proof that we for some reason didn’t partake in our particular brand of ugliness with them as well as our cave dwelling brothers.  Otzi, was murdered after all, & if that’s not enough evidence, turn on Animal Planet.  Everything from ants to wolves to humans fight one another all the time.  Let’s be honest here, violence isn’t a part of human nature, it’s a part of nature in general.  Are you with me so far?

Now take a moment, stop clinging to that white liberal doctrine of nonviolence & take a look at human history.  Actual human history, not the over-educated, pseudo-hip, Bachelor of Arts History.  Let’s take a moment & look at history through the eyes of a historian.  Can you name a single movement that was free of violence in all of the high school textbook history you know?  I can name one……………………………..that’s right, the American Women’s Rights Movement.  You see what I did there?  I bet you didn’t see that one coming, did you?  I know what you’re thinking, “But what about Mohandas Karamchandi Gandhi?”  or for those of you more in-tune to American culture, “What about Ben Kingsly?”   Sorry Ben, but you took a club to the head yourself, & let’s not even mention all the peacefully protesting Indians that got the on the bad side of the British Occupation.  There’s no way you can bring up Martin Luther King, if you have an objection to excluding King from this list, take a moment, & talk to an old Black man who lived through the Civil Rights Movement.  I promise you he can tell you a couple of violent horror stories.

You certainly can’t bring up Occupy Wall Street, not after what happened to Scott Olson.  They threw a flash grenade at the people trying to help him.  Now tell me that doesn’t boil your blood.

So there was blood.  But what does this mean?    For starters it means that his movement is absolutely no different from any other movement.  Wait, what?  Isn’t it different?  Well, yes.

Difference:  In ’68, in Chicago the protest was super violent, but just in Chicago.  The Civil Rights Movement was fairly peaceful, on the side of the protesters, that was a national movement, but only a national movement.  Occupy Wall Street has turned not only National, but Global.

Difference: Well now, is this one different?  Oh, I don’t know.  Here we are not protesting for Civil Rights, or against a war, we’re protesting against the entire order of things.  Occupy Wall Street is a protest against the established order.  The people are protesting against the consolidation of wealth and power in the hands of a few people at the expense of the many.  Now we’ve seen this before in History.  But when we’ve seen this kind of protest it has been significantly different.  Russia in 1917,  Mexico in 1910, America in 1776, France in 1789, Ireland for about 800 years.   The examples are many as are the differences.

In any case, Russia, Mexico, France, Wall Street, the grievances the people are issuing against those in power are the same.  The difference is Wall Street hasn’t picked up a gun yet.  And the reasons for this are two-fold.  Partly it’s peaceful because of the 1st Amendment.    I know, you totally saw that one coming:

“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”

“Or the right of the people to peaceably assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances,” powerfully important words.  What it means is simply that there is no need for violence on behalf of the protestors because the actions they are taking are firmly within their rights.  Protestors do not need to arm themselves to petition the Government for a redress of grievances, because by Constitutional Law they already have the right to do it.  The right to protest, the right to question, & the right to dissent has been cemented into the Constitution, it’s certainly the keystone of the American system & it assures that we do not need to follow in the footsteps of France in 1789, Russia in 1917.  These type of Revolutions, indeed most Revolutions, tend to turn to purges.

Sure, it’s happened in America before.  April 12, 1861.  All negotiations broke down.  Our nation was thrust into a brutal Civil War.  But afterwards, arguably because of the 1st Amendment, we didn’t feel the need to purge out Johnny Reb.  Sure, Reconstruction ended in failure, the 14th Amendment turned into a joke & spawned the problems we have today.  But eventually the good guys won the day, more or less & over a very long period of time, & again, because of the 1st Amendment.

ANARCHY!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

“By any means necessary,” now here’s the shocker.  The Civil Rights Movement DIDN’T turn violent on behalf of the protesters at least.  In a very large way we have enlightened leaders like King to thank for this & in a smaller way the gradual enlightenment of X.  Occupy Wall Street has neither King nor X, & this is very good for the continued peacefulness of the movement.

Excuse me?

Sure, the Occupy Wall Street Movement doesn’t have a leader like King.  Which could be a bad thing.  But look at the positive side of things, it also does not have a leader like Robespierre, or Lenin, or Mao, or even John Adams.   The movement is run through direct democracy.  It’s the dream of the anarchist.   It’s the first time in history that a movement led through anarchy has been this successful, it’s the first time in history that a movement led through anarchy has spread this far, & most importantly it’s the reason why the movement hasn’t yet embraced violence.

What’s that now?

Let’s face it.  There are a few historical facts we have to recognize.  Most of the time, we as a species, play follow the leader.  In the case of movements, most of the time, these leaders tend to turn to violence.  As a point of fact, most violent movements can only be violent through a leader.  It’s what separates the occasional riot from the Russian Revolution.  A riot you can deal with, a Revolution is a far darker subject.  A riot is the people redressing the government of grievances through a temper tantrum.  A Revolution is an armed uprising.

Now before you disagree with me look at things logically.  Anarchy is essentially a direct democracy.  Now, if America was governed through a direct democracy, would the people have voted to go to war with Vietnam?  Let alone Iraq?  Seriously, if we were governed with a direct democracy we wouldn’t have even involved ourselves in the War of 1812, or World War I, case in point, most wars, The American Revolution included, didn’t have the support of the majority of the people.

The lack of a solid leader is probably the most important reason why Occupy Wall Street isn’t a violent movement.  Sure, the people can agree to march on the banks.  No problem there, but the anarchy involved is always going to stop short of turning the march on the banks into tearing the banks down.  Let’s face facts, with the amount of people there, the police probably wouldn’t be able to stop them is they turned truly violent.  conversely though, the fact that they aren’t violent is probably also the soul reason why so many people are involved.

“‘That’s some Catch that Catch-22,’ he observed.”

“‘It’s the best there is,’ Doc Daneeka agreed.”

Now that’s the good news.  The bad news is that there is a grave potential of violence.

His name is Scott Olson.

Now let’s take a moment to point out the Press.  Sure, we have the good guys in this whole mess of protest (http://www.democracynow.org/2011/10/27/iraq_war_vet_hospitalized_with_fractured) thank God for journalists like Amy Goodman.  But then there is the mainstream press, & unfortunately, they seem to be missing the point (http://audio.wrko.com/a/47228890/outstaying-their-welcome.htm, & http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/09/30/bloomberg-hints-that-wall-st-protesters-could-overstay-welcome/, & http://www.correntewire.com/shamelessness_outstays_its_welcome) OK, the last one was a blog, but I have to admit a private addiction to right-wing blogs.  But let’s face it, the current mood seems to be placing a picture of a cop with a nice cuddly kitten on the front page & loudly proclaiming that the Wall Street protestors have out stayed their welcome.

What is probably news to the news is that the people are protesting because they’ve come to the conclusion that they aren’t welcome in their own government.  They don’t have enough money to be welcome, which begs to question; how can the unwelcome 99% out stay their welcome?

Historians, or rather historians with a love for propaganda, have probably already come to the conclusion that the government is gearing up for a crack down.  The press tried to ignore the movement, than gave it lip service, & now seem to be uniting against it.

Bad idea.

It’s better to ignore it.

Hungry people don’t stay hungry for long.

If the press ignores the protests, if the establishment lets it continue the potential for it fizzling out is pretty good.  Winter is coming & New York has hard winters, Chicago has brutal winters.  There’s a pretty good likely hood that the movement will slowly die out over a long harsh winter & with our current climate, it looks like we are going to have a long harsh winter.

Conversely, well, his name is Scott Olson.  Or, for the culturally in-tune, his name is Robert Paulson.  His name is Robert Paulson, his name is Scott Olson, his name is Robert Paulson, his name is James Connolly.  Now call me Irish, but , if it hasn’t already happened, the Oakland PD may have given the Occupy Wall Street Movement the first official martyr.  Again, not a good idea.  Martyrs are generally more dangerous as martyrs than they are as people.  This hasn’t happened yet, this might not happen at all, but Scott Olson is a two-tour Iraq Vet.  Scott Olson is prime for martyrdom.  Martyrs are a very, very dangerous thing.

The best thing to do, is back off.  The Occupy Wall Street Movement has a causality, the first official causality.  If the powers that be are smart, they’d calm down a bit & let Scott Olson be a tragic causality & not make him into a martyr.  Prosecute the officer that pulled the trigger & the officer that threw the flash grenade.  Given the circumstances it’s probably nobodies fault, tensions run high in these confrontations, but it’ is the Oakland police & Oakland Police have a reputation there.  It’s better to turn two cops into martyrs for police station than it is to let them go unpunished & turn Olson into a martyr.

Will it be fair to really prosecute the police to the full extent of the law?  Probably not.  But they are lucky Olson is still alive, & prosecution will certainly put the flames down a notch.

Ultimately though, the more the establishment pushes, the more the movement is pushed into a corner.  In the animal world, there is nothing more dangerous than a cornered animal.  The political world is no different.    The best thing to do is to let things run their course.  The more the establishment pushes the movement, the more temptation there is to push back.  Arrests are an invitation for things like this to turn violent.

 

 

 

Occupy Wall Street

What’s going on here America?  What’s going through your mind?  What’s next?  Have we finally found the spark?  Is this how it begins?  Has the Arab Spring spilled over to the United States?

My father used to tell me that change in America, change in America in my life time is a lost cause.  He used to tell me that I was unfortunate enough to be born in a nation of helpless sheep, cowering in fear of the government, or stupid enough to believe that if they just worked hard enough, they too could be as rich & powerful as the Koch brothers.  Either way, stupidity or fear, nothing was going to happen.   But then again, I remember the endless fights on election day, my mother and father loudly going at it over who the other voted for, it was the only time I ever heard my mother talk about politics.  She’d get mad because my father voted for a third-party candidate, throwing his vote away so the Republican could slip into office.  He got mad because she was complacent enough to vote for a Democrat, perpetuating the two-party system that will never change.  My father would tell me that I live in a country of sheep, but he votes for a third-party, he has his stories about the protests he attended in his day, he saw Abbie Hoffman in Chicago & in DC.  Mom told me he snuck out of the house to go to a Postal Worker’s rally the other day, he’s talking about revolution more & more than he ever did before, not the usual whisper but more pf a ritual prayer.  It makes me wonder if the old Yippie I was too young to know is putting himself back into the game, it makes me wonder how much longer he’s going to complain he’s living in a nation of sheep.

I’ll be honest, I haven’t gone to New York, but I am going to Chicago on my free days & nights.  I’ve come to the conclusion that “Occupy” is the proper word for what’s happening.  It is an occupation.  Chicago isn’t as large as New York, or at least it doesn’t look as large compared to what I’ve seen of New York on the television.  It certainly isn’t as large as Madison was, but it’s Chicago, & do believe it’s growing every day.  The occupation at the moment is segregated from itself, a few people here, a mass of people there, separated from the police, but each segment seems larger every time go out there.

I’ll be honest, I agree with my father, or at least I agree with him enough to have not voted for Obama in ’08, despite the temptation of being one of the masses to vote for America’s first Black president.  What was the point?  He was a Democrat, part of the same party that passed NAFTA, & worse, he was a Chicago politician & why on God’s green Earth would a sane man vote for a Chicagoan to hold the highest office in the land?  We’re a city famous for unbridled corruption.  But America voted for him anyway, & in record numbers, they voted for him because he wasn’t part of the Bush agenda, they voted for him because he promised change, & maybe they voted for him because he was Black, because maybe a Black man would actually follow through on the change so many White men have promised & not even tried to achieve.

But now it’s 2011 & we’ve seen no change.  It’s 2011 & we’ve seen Obama bend backwards to compromise with the people who America tried so hard to vote out of office in ’08.  It’s 2011 & things have only gotten worse.  Daily we’ve seen the TEA Party rally against the 99%,  we’ve seen them block every bill in the House that could have helped us, we’ve seen them work tirelessly to shut down the government & drive up the debt.  We’ve seen them bust Unions, destroy education, attack the systems we rely on ever day.  We’ve seen them slowly strip away our right to vote.  In Madison they’ve privatized & sold off local governments, they’ve denied the right to vote for minorities and the young by demanding identification at the polls, identification they know well the liberal voting masses do not have.  We’ve seen them redistrict entire states so that the Republican’s will win the election.  And now they are trying to reform the electoral college so that even if a liberal wins popular vote again, a republican will be president.  We’ve watched Beck, we’ve seen their rallies, their accusations of class warfare as they carpet bomb the middle class.

And all through it the left has remained silent.  Complacent.  Seemingly peaceful.  Sheep.

Then there was  Madison.  I was there.  I heard Michael Moore when he said that there is, in fact, enough to go around.  When he said that America is not broke.  When he said that  “The country is awash in wealth and cash. It’s just that it’s not in your hands. It has been transferred, in the greatest heist in history, from the workers and consumers to the banks and the portfolios of the uber-rich.”  We saw the right in Wisconsin attempt to deliver a death-blow to the poor & middle class, & we saw them fight back, with vigor.  They demanded their change, they brought it to a vote, & they almost won the entire god damned thing.  Just one seat held.  The right song victory, but it was a Bunker Hill of a victory, the type of victory they can’t afford to win again.

Today we have the occupation of Wall Street.  The left is no longer silent, they are making their voices heard, & they aren’t assembling around the federal government, they aren’t attacking the capital, they aren’t camping out on the White House lawn.  When the left finally mobilized they occupied the source of the problem.  Almost as if they had the collective understanding that the problem isn’t with the government.  The government can be changed, each election is a little revolution.  They seem to understand that if the system is going to change, they need to attack it at its source & shut down the people who own our government, the people who have stolen our democracy.  They are holding both parties accountable, & that’s a frightening thing if you’re they type that lingers too long in the halls of power.  Labor has joined their cause.

The left has moved, & now we wait & watch.  How is the government going to react?  Will Chicago turn into ’68 again?  At the moment Amy Goodman is still free, but any life long leftist remembers vividly what happened at the RNC in St. Paul way back in 2008.  The pigs marched in force, arresting the journalists first, then the protesters, then the witnesses, they charged us with terrorism, they silenced their rape of the 1st Amendment.  In Wisconsin the police seemed to be on our side, but not in New York where the smell of pepper spray lingers in the air & the clubs fall on the activists & journalists alike.  Even in Chicago we’ve had arrests & fines, in Seattle, the police seem to have rallied to the upper class, but is it only for the moment?

The Right can rally & march all they want without molestation, but history shows that there police and National Guard are called in to act with violence when the left gathers to peacefully protest.

So now we sit, & wait.  Moore was right when he said that “Madison was only the beginning.”  The American left is starting to push back, & they are lucky Obama is in office & not Bush or McCain.  We sit, & we wait, we wait with the knowledge that violence begets violence, we wait with the knowledge that the left is out en mass, & that hungry people will not stay hungry for long.

My father might be right when he talks of revolution.  But this time it’ll be global, North Africa to Greece, to the United States, & back to main land Europe, any way you look at it, peaceful or not, the world is facing a new age of revolution.

 

4th of July Reading List

The American Revolution really started in 1768 when the Regulator movement started to gain momentum over a simple bread-&-butter issue.  They were a group of men in the southern colonies that had grown tired of watching their fellow yeomen starve as the wealthy land owners grew fat & shifted the weight of the taxes onto already poor & hungry.  The poor worked the farms for meager pay in medieval conditions, & on-top of  the labor & heavy taxes, along with toiling with their required corvee, or free labor, forced labor, to maintain the manor roads & infrastructure.  The Regulators, like 18th century Robin Hoods, vowed to take some of the wealth back & keep their neighbors from starving under the weight & mistreatment of their employers.

They were eventually turned over to the British by the Sons of Liberty who saw their efforts as to radicle.  After all, one of the problems with Democracy is that “it makes men so arrogant that they won’t bow to a civil rule.”

Cogliano, Francis D. (2000). Revolutionary America 1763-1815: A Political History. New York, New York: Routledge

Ellis, Joseph J. (2002) Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation. New York, New York: Vintage Books

Franklin, Benjamin (2003) Fart Proudly. Columbus, Ohio: Enthea Press

Granger, Bruce Ingham (1971) Political Satire in the American Revolution, 1763-1783. New York, New York: Russell & Russell

Hamilton, Alexander, Madison, John & Jay, John (1949). Selections From The Federalist. New York, New York: Appelton-Century-Crofts.

Hogeland, William (2006) The Whiskey Rebellion: George Washington, Alexander Hamilton, and the Frontier Rebels Who Challenged Americas New found Sovereignty. New York, New York: Scribner

Jordan, Winthrop D. (1974) The Whiteman’s Burden: Historical Origins of Racism in the United States. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press

Kaye, Harvey J. (2005) Thomas Paine and the Promise of America. New York, New York: Hill and Wang

Martin, Joseph Plumb. (2006) Memoir of a Revolutionary Soldier. Mineola, New York: Dover Publications inc.

Morgan, Edmund S. (1999) The Puritan Dilemma: The Story of John Winthrop. New York, New York: Longman

Nash, Gary B. (2005). The Unknown American Revolution: The Unruly Birth of Democracy and the Struggle to Create America.  New York, New York: Penguin Books.

Paine, Thomas (1984). Rights of Man. New York, New York: Penguin Classics.

Paine, Thomas (1987) The Thomas Paine Reader. London, England: Penguin Classics

Puls, Mark (2006) Samuel Adams: Father of the American Revolution. New York, New York: Palgrave Macmillan

Shankman, Andrew (2004) Crucible of American Democracy: The Struggle to Fuse Egalitarianism & Capitalism in Jeffersonian Pennsylvania. Lawrence, Kansas: University of Kansas Press

Zinn, Howard (1999) A People’s History of the United States 1492-Present.  New York, New York: Harper Perennial

Happy Birthday Malcom X

Civil Rights Reading List:

Brophy, Alfred L. (2002) Reconstructing the Dreamland: The Tulsa Riot of 1921: Race, Reparations, and Reconciliation. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press

Douglass, Frederick (1968) Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass. New York, NewYork: Signet Press

Echenberg, Myron (1996) Black Death, White Medicine: Bubonic Plague and the politicsof Public Health in Colonial Senegal, 1914-1945.  Portsmouth, New Hampshire: Heinemann

Equiano, Olaudah (1995) The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano: Written by Himself. Boston, Massachusetts: Bedford/St. Martin’s

Friedman, Benjamin (2005) The Moral Consequences of Economic Growth. New York,New York: Vintage Books

Fussell, Paul (1983) Class: A Guide Through the American Status System. New York, New York: Simon & Schuster

Hine, Darlene Clark; Hine, William C. & Harrold, Stanley (2004) African Americans: A Concise History Combined Volume.  Upper Saddle River, New Jersey: Prentice Hall

Jordan, Winthrop D. (1974) The Whiteman’s Burden: Historical Origins of Racism in the United States. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press

Lafeber, Walter (1994) The American Age: U.S. Forgein Policy at Home and Abroad, Volume 2 Since 1896 2^nd edition.  New York, New York: W. W. Norton & Company

Lynn, Martin (1997) Commerce and Economic Change in West Africa: The Palm Oil Trade in the Nineteenth Century.  Cambridge, United kingdom: Cambridge University Press

Nash, Gary B. (2005). The Unknown American Revolution: The Unruly Birth of Democracy and the Struggle to Create America.  New York, New York: Penguin Books.

Northup, Solomon (1996) Twelve Years a Slave. Baton Rogue, Louisianan: Louisiana State University Press

Paine, Thomas (1984). Rights of Man. New York, New York: Penguin Classics.

Paine, Thomas (1987) The Thomas Paine Reader. London, England: Penguin Classics

Patterson, James T. (2000) America’s Struggle Against Poverty in the Twentieth Century. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press

Quadagno, Jill (1994) The Color of Welfare: How Racism Undermined the War on Poverty. New York, New York: Oxford University Press

Rowling, J.K. (2005). Harry Potter: and the Half Blood Prince. New York, New York: Arthur A. Levine Books

Sunseri, Thaddeus (2002) Vilimani: Labor Migration and Rural Change in Early Colonial Tanzania.  Portsmouth, New Hampshire: Heinemann

Thompson, Hunter S. (1973) Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72.  New York, New York: Straight Arrow Books

Wilson, William Julius; Taub, Richard P. (2006) There Goes the Neighborhood: How Racial, Ethnic, and Class Tensions in Four Chicago Neighborhoods and Their Meaning for America. New York, New York: Vintage Books

Wright, Donald R. (1997) The World and a Very Small Place in Africa.  Armonk, New York: M.E. Sharpe

Wright, Richard (1998) Black Boy. San Francisco, California: Perennial Classics

Zinn, Howard & Barsamian (2006) Original Zinn: Conversations on History and Politics. New York, New York: Harper Perennial

And, or course, for those of you with my tastes, no list of civil rights books can be complete without:

Claremont, Chris (2000) X-Men: Days of Future Past. New York, New York: Marvel Comics

My New Job Possibility, that Will Hurt America

I’ve been thinking about my possible job, I feel really horrible about it, I feel like a scab, & the only reason I can justify taking the job, is because there is not union, so I’m not technically a scab.  I don ‘t know, my father is a union steward, has been all my life, & the way I was raised, well, I’ve never crossed a picket line, & that is certainly in my top of the tops morale lifetime achievements.  I even blew off classes once, for about a month, my mentor’s class, because I just couldn’t do it–but I did show up to school every day, & call him, so I could wave to his window & reassure him that I at least came, albeit in solidarity with the other side, but in the end I think showing up to the strike instead of staying home gave me the attendance I needed for the A in his class.

At any rate, I have this job opportunity because they just fired hundreds of employees who had been working for the factory for decades, because it’s cheaper to hire people like me.  Right?  I have a grad degree & I’m taking a $9.00/hr job, so are the other applicants with decades of factory & maintenance experience that were laid off from their other jobs & are now working for near minimum wage again, & doing the same kind of work.

And you know this company is getting a tax cut for hiring me, if they aren’t they have management with horrible negotiating & business skills, which is seriously doubtful considering how long they’ve existed.

Now part of me feels horrible because I know I’m taking a job away from someone else because I’m willing to work for less money, much less money, & that’s the only reason why.  But then, me taking that job is just more proof that everyone everywhere can freely lower wages & working conditions & even the college over-educated will willingly take the jobs, because unemployment is a hard thing to face, because we have to, because there is really no other choice.  We can work in a system that won’t pay us fairly, or we can starve, & by working, we’re allowing everyone else to lower their wages & working conditions.  So what I’m doing, in taking this job, is hurting everyone everywhere, in America & abroad.

So I’m not only harming American’s by doing this, I’m harming people in other countries that I’ll never meet, because NAFTA & globalization allows jobs like mine to go overseas, & even if the companies weren’t taxed in the US, they’d still be making more profits by building unsafe factories, paying .35/hr, .75/hr, or even $1.00/hr for labor, rather than my $9/hr, & shipping the products back to the US, which in turn makes even more people lose jobs, but more importantly creates the atmosphere where it’s possible for factories like mine to lay-off long-standing employees because people like me, & people with the same experience as they just laid-off are willing to work for far less money & in worse conditions than they previously were, when the company was still making good profits, but not nearly as good.  And to top it all off, the taxes I’m paying are going to the government so that they can violently kill & torture people in other countries so that our globalization can work & the companies can pay less money for labor at the expense of the freedom & livelihood & safety & health of people I’ll never meet in countries I’ll never see.

And to top it all off, me taking this job, at this wage, is one of the reasons scientists are only making $30K a year with a PhD, where in other countries, Japan, India, China, even Cuba, they’d probably be making more than lawyers are.  So by taking this job, I’m also directly hurting our scientists & scientific progress, & I certainly don’t want to be one of the reasons the people who will cure cancer & advance this nation are having a hard time making her worth with a PhD, paying off their student loans.  But by taking this job at this wage I kind of am.  By taking this job, I’m hurting scientists, I’m hurting my co-workers, I’m hurting my family, my friends, my nation, the economy, & many other countries that are currently third world, & will in the future, be third world after another one of our genocide bordering coups on behalf of UFCO, or Nike, or Coca Cola, or whomever.

This, in turn, hurts the over-all global economy, since America is the ultimate consumer nation, & if I & so many others are working for next to nothing, helping to lower the wages everywhere, it means that less & less people are purchasing goods, which over the long run forces lay0offs & will eventually even hurt the companies that are making the extra profits by emplo0yeeing me & the people abroad that are being used to lower my wages, who certainly cannot afford to purchase Nike shoes, Coca-Cola, or any of the other products the factories are making for the companies that now have to lay-off people to maintain the profits they once reaped by actually selling their goods in a capitalist market.

Thinking about it, I feel really, really really bad about getting this job…if I get it.  So the question is, do I pay rent & eat, or do I cling to my morals & live homeless out on the streets, ultimately doing America more good by freezing to death in the Chicago winter….I’ve been job hunting for almost two years, I’m not in a good situation here, & I’ve always thought I was a fairly clever monkey, I work hard & I can figure things out quickly, why wouldn’t you want to hire me?  And to top it all off, I hate job hunting, I hate being unemployed, & I don’t need much cash to stay happy, give me enough for some beer & a road trip every once & awhile I’m in hog heaven.  I’m even a low rent traveler (http://www.couchsurfing.org/), but at my age, socializing  & meeting people are more interesting ways to spend my down time than expensive TVs, video game councils, & luxury vacations.  Seriously, I grew up in the grunge era, thrift shops are where you buy your clothes, I wouldn’t know what to do with an upper-middle class income, there are millions of people like me in America, people who would be perfectly comfortable on a middle-class or even lower-middle-class income & just can’t earn it because I’m willing to work for next to nothing rather than NOT working at all.