Commander Gordon said he “would not want to speculate” about whether Mr. Hamdan would be released at the end of his sentence.
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Twice.
The typical New York Times Magazine article, often tucked between glossy photos of fashion models in semi-undress and scratch and sniff perfume ads, is almost always highly manipulative. There are appeals to voyeurism and jealousy. A good New York Times Magazine writer usually knows how to guide your perception, to draw out the right combination of outrage and curiosity, and slip in his political agenda while you aren’t looking. He knows how to get you to ignore what he wants you to ignore and to get obsessed about the trivial issues he wants you to be obsessed about.
But not every good New York Times Magazine writer is also a good investigative journalist. More often than not, the New York Times Magazine gives us more flash than substance, more sound and fury than real information. So it’s important to be able to tell apart the important articles they publish and what they publish as filler to take up space between your fantasies of Kate Moss’s breasts and multi-million dollar homes on the North Shore of Long Island.
You do that by reading it twice.
Read it the first time for the flash and manipulation. Allow yourself to be taken where the writer is trying to take you. If he wants you to be angry at terrorism, or pedophilia, or if he wants you to feel inadequate next to the multi millionaire software executive he’s profiling, go with it. But read it for the second time for the substance. Critically examine what he’s trying to do. Look at his rhetorical strategies. Figure out his agenda. Ask yourself if he’s giving you any real information or if he’s done any real journalism.
Let’s take an example.
Last Sunday’s New York Times Magazine had a story about a particularly frightening menace, a danger not only to American society, but to western civilization as a whole. A band of amoral nihilists with access to technology incomprehensible to the average American, and organized in widely dispersed, unstructured manner is bent on the destruction of our way of life. No, the article was not about the remnants of Al Qaeda hiding out in the Hindu Kush or the new revelations about the Anthrax attacks that came out of Fort Dietrich Maryland just after 9/11 and the subsequent media cover up. It was about something much worse.
Internet trolls.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/03/magazine/03trolls-t.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1
When I first read Mattathias Schwartz’s revelations in “Mawebolence”, I have to admit I was frightened. After a brief introduction to the culture of trolling in general and to the Lori Drew affair, where a middle aged woman created a fake identity on MySpace and manipulated one of her daughter’s friends into committing suicide, we are introduced to two men who, for lack of a better word, might be called “supertrolls,” Jason Fortuny, age 31, and “Weev”, somewhere in his early 20s. The Internet troll, it seems, can be a lot more dangerous than the stereotypical lonely guy in his mother’s basement. Fortuny and “Weev” do a lot more than simply post comments to the Code Pink message boards that say “George Bush rulz, lol.”
Fortuny is a skilled con artist and manipulator. A few years ago, he got his 15 minutes of Internet fame when he published an ad in Craigslist purporting to be from a woman looking for a “str8 brutal dom muscular male.” He got over 100 responses from men, who were more than willing to send their real names, phone numbers, and pictures. Then he published it all online, ruining a number of lives, including his own. He’s currently living in hiding. “Anyone who knows who and where you are is a security hole,” he tells Schwartz. “I own a gun. I have an escape route. If someone comes, I’m ready.”
“Weev” is a lot scarier than Fortuny. Even though he looks just like the typical college freshman in the photo that Schwartz provides us, don’t let that fool you. “Weev” is a skilled hacker and specialist in identity theft (he e-mails Schwartz Schwartz’s real social security number). He’s also a nihilist and, from the way he describes himself, a potential terrorist. “We are headed for a Malthusian crisis,” Schwartz describes him as saying. “Plankton levels are dropping. Bees are dying. There are tortilla riots in Mexico, the highest wheat prices in 30-odd years.” He paused. “The question we have to answer is: How do we kill four of the world’s six billion people in the most just way possible?”
By the end of his article, Schwartz had me right where he wanted me. I was scared out of my wits. Oh my God, I thought. Some super troll/hacker I might have pissed off on the Internet is sure to steal my identity, mess up my credit, hack into my home computer and turn it into a zombie machine uploading kiddie porn to bit torrent, or post messages on an Al Qaeda message board spoofing my Comcast IP. It was only a matter of time.
Then I read the article a second time and realized that not only was Schwartz being manipulative, not only was he engaging in scare tactics (and I can only imagine how a parent with no internet savvy and several teenage kids with MySpace would react to hearing about Fortuny and Weev), he was completely full of shit.
First of all, Schwartz takes everything that both Fortuny and “Weev” say at face value. Weev claims to be worth millions of dollars. Schwartz never poses the question of how he made all that money, and seems uninterested in determining whether or not it’s true. What he relates about “Weev” is not what he’s been able to find out about Weev, but only what Weev tells him.
“Weev, the troll who thought hacking the epilepsy site was immoral,” Schwartz writes, “is legendary among trolls. He is said to have jammed the cellphones of daughters of C.E.O.’s and demanded ransom from their fathers; he is also said to have trashed his enemies’ credit ratings. Better documented are his repeated assaults on LiveJournal, an online diary site where he himself maintains a personal blog. Working with a group of fellow hackers and trolls, he once obtained access to thousands of user accounts.”
Second, Schwartz tells us how Weev e-mailed him his own social security number but fails to tell us, or even speculate about how Weev managed to steal his social security number. For the critical reader of Schwartz’s article, it simply looks as if he’s a lazy journalist. After all, there are various ways you can steal a social security number. There’s nothing particularly mysterious about it. But Schwartz is more interested in keeping the theft mysterious, as though Weev is not simply a criminal, but some kind of Internet superman who can menace us all. Once again, try to imagine how a middle-aged parent with no Internet savvy and several teenage daughters with MySpace accounts would take this.
Third, Schwartz’s trolls, hackers, scam artists and identity thieves bear little or no resemblance to the real scam artists or identity thieves that populate the Internet. There are no Nigerian spammers or Brooklyn camera store owners. We don’t hear about phishing or Ebay fraud. Instead, Weev and Fortuny resemble not criminals but members of a counterculture. They’re young. They move around a lot. They don’t seem to have steady jobs. They talk in a language middle aged adults can’t understand. They think of themselves, not as petty scam artists, but as rebels. What’s more, the way Weev and his circle are described, young snots with easy access to money, sex, and luxury items they don’t have to work for, is almost guaranteed to piss off a middle aged, middle class New York Times reader.
Fourth, Schwartz lets Fortuny steal his identity. Schwartz, who’s smart enough to have a feature article published in the New York Times Magazine, goes to visit a notorious hacker and “troll,” and yet he's dumb enough to leave his credit card lying on top of his laptop in plain site.
“I asked Fortuny how he could troll me if he so chose, he writes. “He took out his cell phone. On the screen was a picture of my debit card with the numbers clearly legible. I had left it in plain view beside my laptop. “I took this while you were out,” he said. He pressed a button. The picture disappeared. “See? I just deleted it.”
So what’s the point to all this? What's the point of writing an article that manipulates us into taking every story two emotionally disturbed and rather uninteresting young men try to bullshit us with at face value? To guiding our perceptions into thinking two internet trolls' inflated sense of the amount of destruction they can cause is real without the slightest bit of skepticism? Why would you intentionally allow a man you know to be a petty criminal to steal your credit card number?
We need more censorship obviously, Schwartz argues, slipping in his real agenda when we least expect it. How can we just let all of this go unregulated? Law enforcement needs more tools to protect us against Jason Fortuny and Weev. We need more laws, more regulations, more authority, more censorship.
“Many trolling practices, like prank-calling the Hendersons and intimidating Kathy Sierra, violate existing laws against harassment and threats,” Schwartz writes. “The difficulty is tracking down the perpetrators. In order to prosecute, investigators must subpoena sites and Internet service providers to learn the original author’s IP address, and from there, his legal identity. Local police departments generally don’t have the means to follow this digital trail, and federal investigators have their hands full with spam, terrorism, fraud and child pornography.”
As I said, always read any feature magazine article twice. That’s what Congress should have done with the Patriot Act.
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His politics fall squarely inside the area formed by the intersection of one circle marked “libertarian right” and that other circle marked “antiwar left.” To get an idea of the tone of Silber’s writing, just imagine the prophet Jeremiah transported from 6th Century Judea into a Starbucks somewhere in 21st Century America and given a laptop.
If you prefer a witty detached writer who doesn’t take himself too seriously, stay far away from Arthur Silber. But if you feel as if you’re smack in the middle of Poe’s “The Masque of the Red Death” and that you’re the only person in the world who understands the impending doom, Silber’s 5000 word rants on American foreign policy and on American depravity can often be just what the doctor ordered.
http://powerofnarrative.blogspot.com/2007/08/worsening-nightmare.html
The conclusion is stark and infinitely bleak: an attack on Iran would wipe every other issue and concern out of existence for the foreseeable future, probably for years to come if not much longer. Forget debates about global warming; nuclear clouds might be spreading across the globe. Never mind reforming our health care system; millions of people around the world, and possibly here at home, will be worried about survival of the most primitive kind. Nothing else will matter in the least.
John McCain is the Republican nominee for President of the United States.
One of the best-known politicians in America, McCain is famous for his “straight talking” style, his years in the Hanoi Hilton as a POW in Vietnam, and his radically hawkish views on foreign policy. During the 2000 Republican primary, the neoconservatives who signed the PNAC statement actually preferred John McCain to George W. Bush. According to the arch neoconservative and radical Islamophobe Daniel Pipes, the Bush administration is confident that McCain will attack Iran that if he’s elected president this November, but has little or no faith in Barack Obama.
http://www.antiwar.com/blog/2008/06/06/daniel-pipes-if-obama-wins-bush-will-attack-iran-in-november/
“Should the Democratic nominee win in November, President Bush will ‘do something.’ and should it be Mr. McCain who wins, he’ll ‘punt,’ and let Mr. McCain decide what to do.
In other words, it would be reasonable to assume that John McCain is the very last person in the world Arthur Silber wants to see in the White House. If, for example, Silber thinks that “an attack on Iran would wipe every other issue and concern out of existence for the foreseeable future,” then you could not be faulted for thinking that Silber wants to see McCain stopped at all costs.
But you would be wrong. For Arthur Silber, John McCain is the “lesser of two evils.”
http://powerofnarrative.blogspot.com/2008/06/its-1930s-and-you-are-there.html
Depending on how this campaign develops, and depending on how Obama conducts himself and -- very significantly to me -- how Obama's most devoted supporters act, I may conclude that, if you vote, you should vote for John McCain. Unbelievable, I realize, but I may have no choice but to think that the alternative is far too dangerous to countenance.
What’s going on here?
According to the 14th-century English logician and Franciscan friar William of Ockham "entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem.” Roughly translated that means "entities must not be multiplied beyond necessity. The simplest solution is always the best solution.” In other words, Arthur Silber is so worried that Michelle Obama will scrawl “fuck you whitey” in the ladies room in the White House that he’s willing to risk a nuclear holocaust to make sure it doesn’t happen. Barack Obama’s the kind of man who would knock your sweet little old white grandmother to the ground just to get to the front of the bus. So, like one of Bull Connor’s German Shepherds, Silber growls, bares his teeth and goes right for the jugular.
http://powerofnarrative.blogspot.com/2008/06/four-more-months-of-this-crap-noooo.html
That reminds me, Obama, I've been meaning to tell you something. You truly are a shithead, shithead. Shucks, you don't like it when I talk the sweet talk?
No Arthur, I don’t.
But, Ockham’s Razor notwithstanding, that would just be too simple.
Over the past 7 years, as George Bush, along with the collusion of the Democratically controlled Congress has gutted the Bill of Rights, the Presidency is being pulled in two opposite directions. As the power of the office increases, the prestige of the office goes down. George Bush is simultaneously the most powerful and the least respected president in American history. Even as Bush continues to get just about everything he wants from Congress with little or no resistance, his poll numbers have slipped below 25%. Less popular than even Richard Nixon at the height of Watergate, Bush seems to have shrunk into a nonentity, the invisible president.
While the vast majority of the American people have no intention of moving a muscle to push a recalcitrant Congress into impeaching George Bush, it’s also clear that this same vast majority of the American people believe George Bush richly deserves to be impeached. What’s more, for a large segment of the intellectual elite, the office of the President of the United States has been fatally compromised. Any person who seeks to be the President without first rolling back the dictatorial powers accrued to it under Bush and Cheney is deeply, and rightfully suspect. Many leftists and progressives, despairing of being able to impeach George Bush, fully intend to treat Barack Obama or John McCain this coming January as though either is George Bush himself.
Over the past few weeks, as Obama has moved to the center, has backed down on the FISA bill, pandered to AIPAC and the Christian right, excluded women in Muslim dress from campaign rallies, reversed himself on campaign finance reform, and hired a team of neoliberal advisors who favor partially privatizing social security, he has found himself as one of the left’s major demons right up there with Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld. If McCain gets more of a pass than Obama does, then it’s partly because nobody thinks he can win, but also partly because of his almost complete lack of charisma. For Arthur Silber, the best that one can hope for in these darkest of times is a weak, old, tired man in the White House, someone who will be so ineffective that he will negate the increased powers of the office by his personal shortcomings, a Warren Harding or a Gerald Ford. The thought of a young, vigorous man with enough charm to connect to the American people, one who would have enough strength actually to wield the huge arsenal of weapons Bush and Cheney have laid up in the White House armory terrifies Silber.
http://powerofnarrative.blogspot.com/2008/06/its-1930s-and-you-are-there.html
Among the horrors of the twentieth century were several notable leaders who initiated events that led to slaughter and destruction on an ungraspably monumental scale. These charismatic leaders evoked a response from their followers almost identical to that called forth by Obama. These leaders specialized in "personal stories of political conversion." Doesn't anyone see the connection? Doesn't anyone remember any of this?
If it stopped at mistrust of the office of the presidency, of course, Silber would be right on target.
The American president wields an arsenal of 10,000 nuclear warheads, a military with a budget in the trillions of dollars, and enough economic and diplomatic power to make even super states like Russia and China pale in significance. A mad Roman emperor like Caligula was a danger to his courtiers. A mad American president is a threat to annihilate the human race. Anybody who doesn’t deeply mistrust a presidency permanently inflated to the semi-dictatorial status Congress allowed it to swell into after 9/11 is simply ignoring the inevitable end not only of American democracy, but also of limited government itself.
But by carefully cherry picking what he wants to hear from Obama’s supporters on the 24/7 cable news and on the internet in order to convince himself that the Obama's supporters are somehow both vapid and silly and potential fascist storm troopers gearing up for the apocalypse, Silber goes beyond mistrust of the American government to out and out hatred for the American people. Even worse, in his zeal to see Barack Obama as that rough beast slouching towards Washington who will at long last release the fascist demons that have seemed to be permanently lurking just around the corner over the past seven years, Silber proof texts history so badly he renders it almost unrecognizable.
http://powerofnarrative.blogspot.com/2008/07/thinking-ahead-if-you-can-if-you-dare.html
No one expects a Hitler -- except for a very few people, and there were such people in Germany in the early 1930s, who study politics, culture and many other subjects with great care, and who understand "the motion, that is, of history, not the reports of single events or developments." Monsters do not announce themselves as monsters in advance. Of necessity, they announce themselves in radically different terms.
Silber, for all of his criticism of Obama’s supporters as being incipient religious fanatics, seems to have an almost magical theory of history. That nobody in Europe, except of course a few intelligent sensitive souls like himself, could have foreseen the horrors of fascism in the early 1930s, that somehow Hitler sprung up fully grown out of nowhere to spark an incipient but yet unrecognized authoritarian streak in Germany, is ludicrous.
By 1932, the German right had already murdered Rosa Luxemberg and Karl Liebknecht, the leaders of the newly minted German Communist Party. Mussolini had already marched on Rome. Stalin was already in power in Russia. Germany had already gone through years of hyperinflation and the Great Depression was in full swing. Only 20 years before, millions of Europeans had died in the trenches of the Great War. Far from “not announcing themselves as monsters” the German right reveled in the idea that they were amoral strongman who would clear away the decadent culture of the Weimar Republic and restore order. Hitler’s SA did not speak in vague terms about “hope” and “change”. They spoke in very specific terms about “blood and iron”. The Nazi takeover of Germany was not a demonic force that sprung out of nowhere. It was the culmination of a long decade of civil war and economic disaster.
Silber’s distorted view of Barack Obama doesn’t in fact resemble the historical Mussolini or Hitler at all (let alone Stalin) but Tim LaHaye’s fantastically imagined anti-Christ, Nicolae Carpathia from the “left behind” series. But in Silber’s case, the unspeakable and unimaginative evil dwelling behind the charismatic young leader’s seemingly benevolent and liberal façade isn’t Satan. It’s the American people, whom Silber quite obviously loathes.
This of course is all well and good with the American right, and Silber falls right into their carefully baited trap.
At this point, imagine right wing lobbyist and intellectual Grover Norquist with fishing pole in hand and Silber helplessly dangling with the hook in his mouth. As Norquist often remarks, he doesn’t want to abolish government. He simply wants “to reduce it to the size where” he “can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub.” Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld may be evil, but they’re far from stupid. The far right that’s governed the United States since 2000 has a carefully thought out plan, one that’s so subtle that it uses its own mistakes and unpopularity to advance its agenda. The more they alienate liberal critics, the more big government New Deal Democrats they turn into paranoid libertarians, the closer they are to their goal.
By invoking the paranoid fear that a rather typical liberal Democrat like Barack Obama tacking to the center is Yeat’s “rough beast,” the catalyst that may set us on the road to the apocalypse, Silber not only contributes to suppressing the vote in the fall and just perhaps throwing the election to John McCain, but also to making it impossible for Barack Obama to govern, should he get elected. The real danger to programs like Social Security is not so much a neo liberal advisor or two like Austin Goolsby, but a long term process whereby the American people lose so much confidence in the ability of the government to solve problems they simply throw their hands up in the air and let private industry do whatever it wants. The real danger to the constitution is not a mass of new and perhaps inexperienced voters who talk vaguely about “change and hope”. It’s apathy.
Arthur Silber should know this but unfortunately he has fallen for that oldest of scams, the one where the mark gets robbed because he thinks he’s smarter than he really is.
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“Zinoviev. Did you do the translations of my speech?”
“I supervised it. Yes.”
”I didn’t say holy war. I said class war.”
“I took the liberty of altering a phrase or two.”
“I don’t allow people to take those liberties with what I write.
“Aren’t you propagandist enough to utilize what moves people most?”
“I’m propagandist enough to utilize the truth.”
“And who defines this truth? You or the party?”
In this scene, Beatty, who accomplished the unlikely feat of making a classic, big budget Hollywood movie about the Bolshevik Revolution at the height of the Cold War in 1981, captures the appeal that Communism once had for intellectuals. There’s nothing particularly remarkable about their debate. We could be in the offices of any college newspaper in the United States. But we’re not. We’re on a Red Army troop train in the middle of the Russian Civil War.
As the tension between the two men grows more intense, as Zinoviev becomes icier and more cynical and Reed more angry and passionate, history, quite literally, explodes into the middle of their argument. “Don’t you ever change what I write,” Reed says wagging his finger at Zinoviev, just before a Czarist artillery shell hits the railroad car. “Counter Revolutionaries, Zinoviev shouts as he draws his revolver, kicks out a window, and leaps outside to shoot it out with the Whites, who have set up an ambush. Reed isn’t so quick, and it’s not because he’s afraid.
He wants to continue the argument.
There he stands, fists clenched, jaw tightening, still glaring at the spot where Zinoviev had been sitting, furiously angry because he wasn’t able to finish his point. For the typical American, who would loudly bellow that soldiers only fight for the man on their right and their left and that the Civil War was never really about slavery, Reed’s behavior is just crazy. For a Trotsky, who argued that part of labor organizing should be teaching the workers classical Russian literature or a Mao, who set up drama schools in the middle of a guerilla war, dying in a war without ideals is just obscene.
And yet when Reed, who is losing his faith in the revolution and, thus, his reason for fighting at all, finally decides to kick out another window to join Zinoviev, what he finds isn’t horror. This isn’t Saving Private Ryan, but war at its most romantic. As he looks at the thundering White Army cavalry charge, at the Bolshevik horsemen literally riding out of the brightly painted Red Army troop train, decorated with vivid scenes from the history of socialism, to join the battle, as he watches the efficient machinery of the Communist state swing into action to counter the forces of Czarist reaction, his eyes light up. He’s finally in the middle of history, even as it’s being made.
To write about someone who still believes in the idea of a Communist revolution today in 2008 in the United States involves a choice. Do you play it straight or do you go for satire?
If you go for satire, if you decide to highlight the sheer absurdity of any one of the many Marxist Leninist “parties” any of the Socialist Workers or Trotskyist sects who hawk newspapers at the fringes of anti-war rallies and on college campuses, all of whom resemble something of a combination of a sect of ultra orthodox Jews and a Civil War reenactment club, you might learn something about human nature. What would make anybody devote his life to a political ideology that defined by the very idea of mass movement of the working-class --- and the paper that John Reed edited was called quite appropriately “The Masses”--- but which can no longer inspire the imagination of the masses of the working class or even, at this point, very many intellectuals on the campuses? Writing about any Marxist Leninist in the United States in 2008 is a bit like going to the Middle East to make a movie about the last Zoroastrian in Tehran.
And yet, if you only go for satire, if you only highlight the gigantic chasm between an American Marxist Leninist “party” and contemporary politics, you miss the point. If you want to know what I mean, first read Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s poem “A Jewish Cemetery.” Then read any biography of Theodor Herzl and follow it up any history of the founding of Israel that includes David Ben Gurion’s humiliating and ultimately futile attempts to meet with Franklin Roosevelt in the 1940s. Then, finally, examine Hillary Clinton, John McCain, and Barrack Obama abjectly pandering to the Israel Lobby at last week’s AIPAC conference. A small, disciplined group of people who are masters of a rich and powerful intellectual and ideological tradition are more than capable of coming out of nowhere to seize state power. That is precisely, in fact, what Lenin and the Bolsheviks did in 1917.
Jeremy Pikser, who wrote the screenplay for Reds and for Bulworth, one of Beatty’s other political films, is a long time supporter of The Revolutionary Communist Party, a small, obscure, and yet amazingly resilient Marxist Leninist organization which has retained its radical Maoist ideology almost entirely intact since it emerged from SDS and the Black Panthers in the late 1960s. For the Revolutionary Communist Party, their selling point, what distinguishes them from the other 10 or 15 Marxist parties who sell newspapers and hawk their wares in the decaying, run down marketplace of post 9/11 radical America is that they believe in doing a communist revolution the old fashioned way.
Social democrats like Lula and Michelle Bachelet and left wing populists like Hugo Chavez in Latin America, they would argue, get it wrong. While they have been given room to maneuver by the fact that the American military is tied down in Iraq, they also remain limited in their goals and largely reformist, Roosevelt Democrats with a Spanish accent, and an Aztec profile. Since that leaves them playing by the rules of international capitalism, it means that they’re doomed to fail. What we need is a good old-fashioned Bolshevik seizure of state power in the name of the working class, exactly the way they did it in Russia in 1917 or in China in 1949, to smash the dictatorship of capital and replace it with the dictatorship of the proletariat.
But even Lenin didn’t go far enough, they argue. Mao had it right in the 1960s. The gang of four had it right in the 1970s. Only a complete break with the culture of imperialism will prevent any communist revolution from being rolled back and replaced with capitalism. The Bolsheviks won the battle in the 1920s and lost the war in the late 1980s. Far from being the totalitarian monstrosity even left wing historians describe it as in the west, the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution in China is the only thing that can save us. What we need is a is a complete rupture with the capitalist way of life itself, with the profit motive, with buying and selling of human labor, with the exploitation and commercialization of human sexuality, and, most importantly of all, with religion. Not only should we imagine there’s no heaven, and not only is it easy if we try, but if we can’t imagine a world where there’s no hell below us and above us only sky, we’re all doomed. The only thing that can save us is “Revolution,” which, not coincidentally, is also the name of their weekly newspaper.
In practice, of course, they’re a good deal less radical. They own a bookstore with posters of Mao taped up to the walls. They sell T-shirts. They put on speaking tours by left wing intellectuals who are almost never communists but who are usually well known and quite reputable. The Revolutionary Communist Party is also very good at putting together slick, well-organized anti-war organizations like World Can’t Wait, Not in Our Name, and Refuse and Resist.
But speaking tours and “mass organizations” that manage to put together long lists of celebrity endorsers don’t make for a revolution, or even very effective campaign of liberal dissent. Among anarchists and other Marxist Leninists in the United States, it has the reputation of being anything but revolutionary. On the contrary, they’re seen as authoritarian fakers who talk a good game but rarely deliver, at best an oddball front group for left liberal Democrats, and at worst, a cult that exploits idealistic young people to raise money and sell newspapers. Here, buy a copy of “Revolution.” It’s only a dollar.
When I pointed out that if you write about an American Marxist Leninist organization in the United States in 2008 you always have to choose between playing it straight and playing it for satire, I left one thing out. You don’t. There are times when the best possible way to satirize a political organization is to play it straight, to bring out the Grand Canyon sized gap between their ideological pretensions and their actual effect on history by taking everything they say at face value. Mike Ely has done just that. In an earnest, well thought out and very long pamphlet called “9 Letters to Our Comrades,” Ely, a long time Revolutionary Communist Party organizer and writer for their old newspaper “The Revolutionary Worker” has offered up a detailed critique of the Revolutionary Communist Party’s organization and political strategy.
In other words, Mike Ely plays it straight.
Why, he asks, hasn’t “Revolution” been covering the successful Maoist insurrection in Nepal? Why did the party’s mass anti-war and pro-impeachment organization World Can’t Wait spend over 6 months organizing for a nationwide day of protest in October of 2006 and succeed in doing little more than putting on a few small demonstrations, none of which attracted over 5000 people? Why hasn’t the party succeeded better in establishing any following in the unionized working class? Why have they cut back their organizing around Mumia Abu Jamal, abortion rights, police brutality, and state repression? Why did they respond to their failure to gain any traction in 2006 by turning inward and becoming almost a parody of themselves, by putting out a long, turgid, and almost unreadable supplement in “Revolution” dedicated to singing the hosannas of their party Chairman Bob Avakian?
And the Revolutionary Communist Party provides the satire.
“Nine Letters To Our Comrades” was met, not in the spirit of “comradely debate” with which Ely believes he intended his criticisms, but with a long, sarcastic, and angry denunciation in “Revolution.” The “party writing group” that put together the response to Ely’s criticism, a group that probably includes people who have contributed to putting together much of the party literature that calls for lively and vigorous dissent within the larger revolutionary struggle, responded not by taking Ely’s criticisms at their face value, not by playing it straight, but by going for a crude verbal knockout blow. By taking words out of context, by willfully misreading Ely’s less carefully put together arguments, and by accusing him of trying to drive a wedge between the masses of Americans and Bob Avakian, they have written something that resembles a mainstream Democratic or Republican party political hit piece, but with an important difference. Mainstream Democratic Party and Republican Party intellectual thugs are fighting over genuine power and influence.
What Mike Ely and the Revolutionary Communist Party’s “writing group” are actually fighting over, what kind small time power struggles, financial squabbles, and bruised egos has motivated their split might, of course, be the subject of an interesting short story. But we probably won’t find out. American Marxist Leninist organizations in general, and the Revolutionary Communist Party in particular are notoriously paranoid about security and about airing dirty laundry in public. Like the Russian revolutionary exiles Joseph Conrad wrote about in “Under Western Eyes” or the nihilists Dostoevsky wrote about in “The Possessed” a small intense group of ideologues fights about ever smaller differences between themselves far out of the public eye even while they believe their every move is being closely monitored by the authorities. What we’re left with is a classic Marxist Leninist pissing contest about revolutionary theory, a debate that’s not about revolutionary theory at all, but a series of coded arguments about specific points of party organization and about personal relationships that are essentially meaningless to anybody not privy to what they’re really talking about. As a result, the longer it goes on, the less we know. The more ink they spill, the less we care.
Nevertheless, Ely gets the best of the dustup, if only because he’s willing to call attention to the elephant in the room, the Revolutionary Communist Party’s long term and only chairman, Bob Avakian.
For Avakian, who played a relatively marginal role in the late 1960s in the Black Panthers and in the latter stages of SDS, the failure of Communism can be explained by the kind of “great man theory of history” most of us would associate with a conservative historian like Thomas Carlyle or, to be a bit more harsh, with fascism. A successful communist revolution, Avakian argues, is, a bit like a symphony by Beethoven, a painting by Michelangelo, or a scientific theory by Charles Darwin or Albert Einstein, the product of a singular genius, a great man who came along at the right time and seized state power and the reigns of history. While most of us would agree that at some point the Soviet Union stopped being a socialist country and started to become just another empire and that at some point in the 1980s, the economy of China was transformed into a system of authoritarian state capitalism, Avakian gives us the exact dates, 1954 and 1976, the year when Stalin died and the year Mao died. Once Stalin and Mao were out of the way, reactionary, pro-capitalist and pro-western forces in each country were able to seize power and destroy socialism.
The Revolutionary Communist Party also has a program for the resurrection of Communism and, once again, it involves a “great man,” Avakian himself. For the Revolutionary Communist Party, Avakian, who is perhaps best known, if he’s known at all, for leading a wild protest against the Chinese leader Deng XiaoPing 30 years ago at the White House before going into exile in Paris, is no mere John Reed. On the contrary, he's a world historical ideological leader on the level of Lenin or Mao, Paul the Apostle, Martin Luther, or Charles Darwin. Bringing back socialism, they argue, would involve overthrowing the dictatorship of American capitalism and replacing it with the dictatorship of the proletariat, and, more specifically, the dictatorship of Bob Avakian.
While at first glance, this theory of history seems so ridiculous that the only possible reaction anybody could have would be to laugh out loud while cautiously taking all the sharp objects out of the room, it’s actually not as dumb as you might think. After all, the invasion of Iraq was manufactured largely by a small, tightly knit group of people who look up to Leo Strauss in pretty much the same way many Revolutionary Communist Party members look up to Bob Avakian. Strauss, a professor of Philosophy at the University of Chicago was, over his long academic career, able to so ideologically mould a large enough group inside of the intellectually and political elite that, even after his death, he was able to control American foreign policy through his followers, almost as if he had manufactured a coup from the grave.
But Avakian is no left wing version of Leo Strauss. Strauss had a tenured position at an elite American university, had immediate access to a consistent stream of elite college students certain to occupy high positions in government and academia, never actually argued that he wanted to be an actual revolutionary dictator, and, most importantly, wasn’t in hiding. Avakian was cleared of all the charges stemming from the 1979 protest at the White House that originally led to his application for political asylum in France in the early 1980s. But after having lived through the FBI’s Cointelpro attacks on the Black Panthers and the new left in the late 1960s, Avakian has never quite been able to get past the idea that the government wants to kill him. And so he’s in hiding. Avakian doesn’t make public appearances, give book tours, speak to the media, or get involved in the nuts and bolts of political organizing.
That’s all well and good for a JD Salinger or a Thomas Pynchon, for a novelist who likes his privacy and hates the public spotlight, or, conversely, for someone leading a guerilla army in the jungles of Vietnam or Columbia, but it’s a fatal handicap for political organizing aimed at building a mass movement in the United States. That the party’s ultimate strategy for Communist revolution centers around an obscure intellectual, most of whose books are either anti-religious screeds along the lines of a Christopher Hitchens or a Sam Harris, or popularizations of Maoism and the Great Cultural Revolution in China without the benefit of any deep scholarship or even knowledge of Chinese on Avakian’s part, and the idea that the answer to all the world’s problems is putting this obscure intellectual, a purveyor of atheist book chat and author of Marxist pamphlets, into absolute state power, would be self-defeating enough if you could actually see the guy speak. But even if one of the Revolutionary Communist Party’s organizers, more often than not some 20 year old kid who has been dragooned into selling newspapers, is successful in interesting anybody in the possibility of Avakian’s leadership, he’s doomed from the start.
“Sounds interesting. So when do I get to meet him?”
“You don’t.”
“Hey. I’m from CNN. When can we set up an interview?.”
“You can’t.”
Mike Ely’s critique of the Revolutionary Communist Party, however, is not without its own faults. Attacking a Marxist Leninist Maoist organization in the United States in 2008 for not having more of a mass following is a bit like walking into a Taco Bell and badgering the counter people that the cheesy stuffed burritos have too much fat. The idea that anybody in the United States could keep a Maoist political party going on for over 35 years without compromising its radicalism while at the same time attracting the support of mainstream liberal intellectuals like Chris Hedges, Jim Wallis and Michael Lerner is a remarkable achievement, not exactly one that most Americans would admire, but still showing a rather formidable ability to organize on the part of the people who do it. Ely’s splinter group has no mass following, no support in the trade unions, and, unlike most Marxist Leninist parties, not even a newspaper. At this point, it’s simply a website put together by some disgruntled ex party members and not one that attracts or even tries to attract a broad readership.
In the end, this debate, like every debate among Marxists, comes down to one issue, who gets to be Zinoviev and who gets to be John Reed.
After all, everybody would like to be the romantic rebel speaking truth to power but someone has to make sure your troops have enough rifles and ammunition to counterattack when the Whites start lobbing shells into your troop train. No one likes to do the dull, nuts and bolts political organizing needed to maintain even the tiniest and most isolated political movement, especially people who like to declare themselves Maoists in America in 2008, but, in the case of the Revolutionary Communist Party, someone has to pay the rent on the bookstore and put a new poster of Mao up every few years.
What’s more, the area where the Bob Avakian and the Revolutionary Party have had success in building a popular following is in precisely the area Ely wants them to water down their uncompromising line, religion. While the Revolutionary Communist Party has had no success in organizing inside the unionized working classes, watering down Avakian’s attacks on “Christian Fascism” is not going to snatch fundamentalist Christians away from Barack Obama or John McCain. Indeed, it will do just the opposite. To argue, as Ely does, that American Maoists should spend less time bashing religion and more time supporting the guerillas in Nepal is, quite ironically, to do exactly what he’s arguing against, pull the party’s organizers farther away from any potential mass base and more and more into isolation.
It’s no accident, for example, to use the Stalinist phrase, that any number of slick, right wing attacks on religion have surfaced over the past few years. After all, the American ruling class wants that huge pile of oil sitting on top of one of the more religious and conservative parts of the world, and neoconservative apologists for American imperialism like Christopher Hitchens and Hirsi Ali have transformed themselves into celebrities bashing Jesus and Mohammed. What’s more, reactionary, neo social Darwinists like Steven Pinker and Richard Dawkins have resurrected atheism as another way to justify the redistribution of income up the social ladder and the further imposition of authoritarian state control over the genetically inferior.
The answer is not, as Ely argues, to water down the Revolutionary Communist Party’s critique of religion but, instead, to offer up an alternative variety of militant atheism that addresses the issues Hitchens, Pinker, Ali and Dawkins are addressing, but from a Communist and not a neoconservative or Social Darwinist point of view.
One of the more remarkable developments I’ve noticed over the past few months is how harshly secular middle-aged white feminists have reacted to Barack Obama’s attempt to use traditional religious imagery in order to poach potential McCain voters in the Bible Belt. They see the repeal of Roe vs. Wade in every reference Obama makes to Jesus. They scour his speeches for Biblical references, shrieking with joy when they find one and shouting “see he’s just another kind of fundamentalist.” While the source of this hostility has obviously been the endless primary season and the sense that the nomination was stolen from Hillary Clinton because of some kind of deep misogyny inside the Democratic Party, here’s a disgruntled group within American society that’s ripe for the picking by a group of militant atheists, Little Red Books or no Little Red Books, and not one that’s likely to respond to appeals to support the Maoist rebels in Nepal.
Indeed, the fact that Avakian’s been flogging God from a revolutionary communist point of view since 9/11 and has published books attacking religion that predate Christopher Hitchens and Hirsi Ali by several years is nothing to sneeze at. And at this point, I wouldn’t mind a legion of disgruntled teenagers rampaging through every Barnes and Nobles in suburban America replacing “God is not Great” with “Away with All Gods,” or at least taking all of Hitchens’ books and moving them to the fiction section.
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What makes “Burn Notice” so original and so entertaining is how it reverses the formulaic plot of the gunslinger who wants nothing more than to hang up his guns and retire. Weston, who is played by the actor Jeffrey Donovan with just the right mixture of vulnerability and smirking asshole, doesn’t want to hang up his guns at all. On the contrary, he wants nothing more than to get back into the game, to be out in some third world country conducting black ops for the US government. Along with Sam, an ex Navy Seal who mooches off of older women and spies on him for the FBI, and Fiona, an IRA demolitions expert who, thanks to the outbreak of peace in Northern Ireland, no longer gets to practice the trade she so obviously enjoys, he spends his time trying to find out who “burned” him so he can get his security clearance back.
While he’s waiting, he does small detective jobs for people who can’t pay much but who have somehow fallen afoul of Miami’s criminal underworld. Michael Weston is an amoral but basically likeable thug who, thanks to the fact that the American government no longer needs his services in the third world, is now the good guy. He doesn’t particularly seek out the role a superhero fighting for truth, justice and the American way. He has no money in his checking account. He has to borrow his mom’s car just to get to work fighting the bad guys. He can never quite shake the constant FBI surveillance. But he quite obviously relishes using the skills he learned assassinating labor leaders and propping up corrupt dictatorships in the third world for the Central Intelligence Agency to help the needy.
When his mother’s elderly friends sign away their life savings to a ring of mail order scam artist, for example, Weston becomes a one man Cointelpro squad. He plays the gang’s members off against one another, drives them into a paranoid frenzy, and, finally, frames them as Al Qaeda terrorists plotting to kill a federal judge. When a sleazy family of Israeli arms merchants threatens an innocent security supervisor into letting shipments of arms through customs at the airport, Weston infiltrates the family and turns the brutal stupid son against his elegant but sinister father. Along the way, manages to seduce the son’s fashion model girlfriend with his stories about gun running in Afghanistan. When a Columbian drug lord sends a hit team to assassinate a single mother and her daughter to prevent them from testifying in court, Michael assigns Fiona to be their bodyguard. “I need you to hide in the bathtub and keep your head down,” she says, just before blowing up the assassination squad’s armor plated SUV with a pair of Molotov cocktails.
But the most entertaining thing about Burn Notice is Donovan’s deadpan voice over.
“If you really have to get into a fight. Look for somewhere with lots of hard surfaces. A public bathroom is as good as place as any.”
War Inc., the new anti-war film written by Mark Leyner and John Cusack is a lot stupider and a lot less fun.
Basically “Grosse Pointe Blank” meets “The Shock Doctrine,” it stars John Cusack, who reprises his role as the world-weary assassin from Grosse Point Blank and Marisa Tomei as Natalie Hagelhuzen, a left wing journalist for The Nation, and a very thinly veiled stand in for Naomi Klein. The story is set inside the “Emerald City Mall,” a thinly veiled stand in for the Green Zone, and it involves the occupation of the fictional oil-producing country of Turaqistan, a thinly veiled stand in for Iraq, by “The Tamerlane Corporation”, a thinly veiled combination of Halliburton and Blackwater.
This will be the “first war conducted entirely by a private corporation,” one of the film’s characters tells us, and we’re supposed to think it’s a brilliant idea. On the other hand, “first war conducted entirely by a private corporation?” Uh, hello, Mark Leyner, Naomi Klein and John Cusack. Ever hear of King Leopold in the Congo?
But I digress. Brand Hauser, Cusack, is a deadly ex CIA operative who, yawn, just wants to hang up his guns and retire. A stone cold killer, he’s also tormented and irritatingly moral. No, it doesn’t make him any less capable of gunning down three Germans in a bar up in the Northern territories of Canada in cold blood without even flinching. It only makes him that much more irritating. Hauser’s latest mission, assigned to him by “The Vice President” of Tamerlane, a thinly veiled stand in for Dick Cheney played by Dan Ackroyd, is to assassinate Omar --Ha! Ha! Arab names are funny! -- Sharif, the president of the biggest oil company in Turaqistan, a Hugo Chavez like nationalist who wants to use Turaqistan’s oil money for the good of Turaquistan’s people instead of for the benefit of American business. Tamerlane, which is already occupying the country, will then make a fortune rebuilding it. The fact that Omar Sharif is portrayed as a child-like simpleton who, far from needing a high tech hit at the hands of a master assassin, could probably be taken out by a teenage thug with a prison shank, is left unexplained.
War Inc. is not entirely without redeeming value. The first 45 minutes of the film are very good indeed, even brilliant. The chorus line of amputees and the virtual reality tour journalists take so they can “cover” the war in Turaqistan without ever leaving the Emerald city are nothing less than inspired. But it seems to me that Cusack and Mark Leyner became so obsessed with helping Naomi Klein and the left wing journalists who advised them on the film develop a cinematic vocabulary for the American occupation of Iraq and the surreal quality of the Green Zone that they never quite got around to writing an actual script for the film.
Take David O. Russell’s vastly superior film about Iraq Three Kings. Three Kings starts us out in the same place, an American occupation zone that is detached from the reality of Iraq and almost surreal, but then it takes us outside and plunges us into the middle of the Shia uprising of 1991. Where the American soldiers in Three Kings quickly learn how thin the veneer of an occupation can be and how little protection an American has outside of a few very small, defined places, John Cusack’s assassin in War Inc. is an imperialist superman. Even when his armored Humvee is destroyed in a town that’s a thinly veiled stand in for Fallujah, he still manages to rescue the kidnapped journalist from Al Qaeda and be back to the Emerald City for dinner. In fact, Brand Hauser kills so many thugs and so many terrorists you lose track of the body count. After awhile, you simply don’t care. You sit in the dark thinking “ok. Cusack has to kill a few more so they can move the plot forward. Let’s go to the bathroom or something.”
But the plot never moves forward. It just gets dumber.
Even worse is the film’s entirely unintentional, and therefore more disturbing Orientalism.
In the film’s most ludicrous and convoluted subplot, Hillary Duff plays Yonica Babyyeah, the “Britney Spears of Central Asia”. No. I’m not kidding. It’s a potentially funny concept and would have played well had Yonica been a minor character in the film. But be warned. She’s not. Anybody who pays money to see War Inc. will also be subjected to almost 2 hours of Hillary Duff shaking her ass and speaking in some strange combination of an Eastern European and Persian accent.
“In every gook”, the line goes from Stanley Kubrick’s classic film Full Metal Jacket goes, “there’s an American waiting to get out.”
In the case of Yonica, it’s quite literally true. I won’t spoil the plot, not because I’d have anything against spoiling the plot of this ridiculous script, but simply because the plot twist I’m referring to is so illogical, convoluted, and comes so utterly out of nowhere it would take another 1000 words to explain at all and even then you might not even get it. But what I will do is answer people who would object to my calling the film “Orientalist.”
Isn’t “War Inc.” satirizing the idea that a Muslim woman would want to be just another American? Isn’t it protesting the idea of American cultural imperialism?
Yes, that’s what it thinks its doing. But underlying War Inc.’s passionate left wing anti-Americanism is the idea that Middle Easterners are childlike blank slates, that any contact at all with the west will immediately erase whatever identities they never had. Every Turaqistani in the film, from Omar Sharif, to the Al Qaeda cell who kidnaps Natalie and plans to behead her on video, to Yanica’s entourage of wanabee Muslim rappers, to the street urchins outside of the Emerald City who torch Hauser’s armored Humvee because he won’t give them candy, is some form of blank slate who never had any potential or any culture worth preserving. Indeed, what War Inc. objects to is not that Americans would impose American culture on the Middle East but that they would oppose the wrong kind of American culture on the Middle East. All Yonica needs, in the end, is a little psychobabble, a slightly better diet, to learn how to date men who aren’t quite so vulgar and classless, a few years of mothering by an older liberal white American, preferably one who resembles Naomi Klein, and a strong father figure who will take her to the Museum of Modern Art instead of letting her watch American Idol.
In every gook is an American trying to get out.
War Inc. agrees. It just wants us to make sure it’s the right kind.
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Gus, a 37 year old assistant manager at a Walmart in New Jersey who sports “Jane Fonda Traitor Bitch” and a “9/11 Terrorist Hunting Permit” stickers in the rear window of his 11 year old Ford F-150 right behind the gun rack comes home, sits in front of his computer, clicks around the Internet, and feels a strange emptiness inside.
Steve, a 41 year old virgin who lives in the basement of his parents house in Duluth, Minnesota, still hates Sean Penn for having nailed Jewel at the beginning of her career, and reflexively begins to mouth “four more years, four more years” whenever he sees an image of George W. Bush flash across Fox News knows that something is missing but can’t quite put his finger on it.
Sally, a 32-year-old dispatcher at a small town police station in Connecticut, who posts at various conservative websites under the name of “Ms. Crusader,” tears up whenever she rereads the Wikipedia entry describing how King John Sobieski drove the Muslims out of Europe for good at the gates of Vienna, who considers herself the “number one groupie” for the Gathering of Eagles, and who looks forward every year to the Rolling Thunder motorcycle ride to Washington DC isn’t so shy.
“They’re all traitors,” she says. “Rush, Charles Johnson, even Misha at the Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiller, “they’re all appeasers, dhimmis. They might as well vote for Barack Obama or move to Eurabia. What next, are they going to take the ‘Rachel Corrie Pancake’ jokes down? Talk about a two state solution? Send money to fucking J Street? Hell, why don’t they just all convert to Islam? I don’t care anymore. When President Bush leaves the White House this January, I have no idea of how I’ll be able to go on. We’ll never see his like again in our time.”
I have to admit that when I first heard about how Ted Kennedy had been diagnosed with a malignant brain tumor, I immediately turned to my computer, and began to search through my list of favorite conservative websites.
First, the obligatory disclaimer: I have nothing against Ted Kennedy. If I wanted to I could go back through his career, pick out a few events where he voted in his own class interests against his liberal ideology, and write up an Alexander Cockburn style hit piece, but I could do that for anybody. I could do it for Bernie Sanders. I could have done it for Paul Wellstone. Kennedy’s far from the worse man in the Senate. In fact, over the past few decades, he’s been one of the best, a dinosaur relic from the days when there really were liberals in the Democratic Party, a living monument to the 1960s and the Great Society.
Nevertheless, watching Chris Mathews, Bob Schrum, and Pat Buchanan on MSNBC, three pompous old white guys singing the praises of another pompous old ruling class white guy, getting nostalgic without offering any real substance, I couldn’t quite put my finger on it but I needed more. All of it reminded me of the way they spoke about Ronald Reagan who, quite coincidentally, died almost exactly four years ago. To make it even worse, Kennedy wasn’t even dead yet. It was a bit like that scene from “Monty Python and The Holy Grail” where the town official pushed a cart through the city shouting “bring out your dead” and one of the would be corpses kept struggling and saying “I’m not dead yet.” It got worse, much worse. Finally, when Mathews turned to Bob Schrum and told the story of how Kennedy and his wife actually rewrote the lyrics of “Camelot” for Schrum’s retirement party, changing the words around so that they read “Schrumelot” instead of “Camelot” I knew what I needed, a nice blast of right wing meanness to clear my head of the hypocrisy. I needed Kennedy jokes.
I didn’t get them.
First, I clicked around. I went to Google’s blog search and got nothing but dull mainstream political sites like “The Politico” and “Talking Points Memo.” So I decided to turn to the big right wing bloggers, the people who regularly call for the editors of the New York Times to be hanged as traitors, laugh at dead Palestinian children, and fantasize about the police throwing away the plastic handcuffs and really beating up anti-war protesters. But there was nothing on Rush, nothing on Drudge, nothing on Michelle Malkin, and nothing on Free Republic.
I then went to the nastiest, most toxic right wing website of them all, the place where they regularly publish the home addresses of liberal bloggers, and where, after hearing about how Rachel Corrie, the American anti-war activist, was run over by an Israeli bulldozer, took up a collection to send pizzas to the IDF. I’m talking of course about the Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiller and The Emperor Misha. But there was nothing. Oh there were plenty of attacks against Barack Obama, the usual scare mongering stories about how the Muslims are taking over Europe, even a post making fun of John McCain, but nothing on Ted Kennedy. What happened? Were they mellowing out? Did someone take up a collection to send the Emperor Misha to the Emperor’s Club? What was going on?
I got my answer at Little Green Footballs. When I clicked on Johnson’s notoriously Islamophobic website and saw a post that said “Breaking: Ted Kennedy Diagnosed with Brain Tumor” and had over 1000 comments, my heart began to beat. At long last I’d get my Ted Kennedy jokes. I also thought that maybe I’d get some answers on Chappaquiddick, maybe a debate that threaded itself through the hostility and noise that would go back over some of the questions that nobody in the corporate media (and don’t underestimate the number of Kennedy family loyalists in the corporate media) was willing to bring up. But, once again, I got nothing.
Even worse, I got stuff like this.
“Politics aside, my prayers are with him and his family, for peace, comfort and consolation during this very traumatic time”.
And it went on for hundreds of posts. It went on, and on, and on, a flood of prayers, warm hearted sentiments, best wishes, personal reminiscences about family members who died of cancer, group hugs, and frank openness about the fear we all have of dying of a horrifically painful illness. My God, I thought. Are conservatives actually nice people after all? Having spent the past few days getting ripped to pieces on various leftist community sites for the unpardonable sin of having criticized Ralph Nader, I held out some hope. Was Michelle Malkin right? Were people on the left really more hateful than people on the right? After all, I must confess, when Reagan died in 2004, my response had been something like “fuck the old war criminal. Hope he enjoys his room in hell.” Maybe I’d join the Republican Party and vote for John McCain, start going to church, start walling off my compound in New Jersey for the coming battle with the Islamonazis.
But I wasn’t buying it. I know conservatives and I know they’re assholes.
At comment 973, I finally got my answer.
“Not all of them, it grieves me to say. The mods at Free Republic have locked every Teddy string so far, since they don't want to spend the whole day continuously deleting offensive comments. As Charles pointed out yesterday, Free Republic has been far too tolerant of offensive comments in general for a long time and this lax policy is coming home to roost.”
It was a lockdown. The major right wing websites had placed restrictions on Kennedy jokes. The next day Johnson admitted the reason. Liberals were watching his every move.
Class Acts All Around Wed, May 21, 2008 at 9:42:42 am PST As expected, Media Matters went hunting for some right-wing ranting about Senator Ted Kennedy, and the best they could come up with was Michael Savage—who, right on cue, gave them exactly what they were looking for: Media Matters - Michael Savage plays Dead Kennedys song ‘in some respect for’ Sen. Kennedy.
It was followed by hundreds of comments, most of which resembled this.
“It's funny that Media Matters ignored the Daily KKKos risible and vile postings. You know, because the media matters and Daily Kos has the ear (and provides a sounding board) for Democrats across the country.”
And there you have it. Where once left and right wing weblogs were unmoderated free for alls, fever swamps of hate and contempt, cesspools of loser Freudian Id where people like Gus, Steve, Sally, and, above all, people like myself could type out our hearts content against the (liberal or right wing depending on your point of view) conspiracy to silence real Americans, now both sides are just auxiliaries to the Democratic and Republican parties. They run the same ads, shill for the same political candidates, and watch one another like hawks for any sign of embarrassing free expression, and censor malcontents and social misfits. If anything even slightly out of the mainstream appears on the Daily Kos, it appears the next day on Little Green Footballs. If anything on Little Green Footballs gets a little too embarrassing, it gets posted on Sadly no or Media Matters. On the right, they learn to speak in code and dogwhistle just like any mainstream political hack. On the left, they censor 9/11 conspiracy theories, stories about voter fraud, and debate on the Israel Palestine conflict. Left and right, Democratic and Republican, it’s one big self-policing blogosphere of boredom.
It almost makes you happy we still have Fred Phelps.
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When I returned home a few hours later, I learned that I had been part of the largest anti-war protest in history. Over 20 million people in every major city in the world had gathered to send a clear message to the American government. Don’t invade Iraq.
For George Bush and Dick Cheney, those 20 million people were irrelevant. “Democracy” meant nothing. It was a world they could use to sell the invasion of Iraq, not a concept they were willing to respect themselves. The right wing ideologues running the American government were so rigid in their ideology, so certain they were correct, they could dismiss 20 million people as a “focus group.”
Five years later, we’re watching the tail end of the Democratic primary, a race between an African America man who opposed the invasion of Iraq from the very beginning, and a woman who claims that, unlike those 20 million people who came out onto the streets on February 15, 2003, she had been “misled.” It’s May 20th and it’s still going on. Hillary Clinton has just taken backward, reactionary Kentucky by a large margin. Barack Obama has taken progressive, liberal Oregon by a slightly smaller margin. Over the weekend in Portland, Barack Obama spoke in front of the largest political rally of 2008, over 70,000 people according to official estimates but which, to look at the photographs, was a lot bigger.
I didn’t vote for Barack Obama against Hillary Clinton in the New Jersey primary. For me the election was part of a process that had been started months too early, a process that sucked money out of the anti-war movement, that sent resources that could have been used to fund independent media swirling in the giant toilet bowl of campaign ads and political consultants, a process that made sure the impeachment of George Bush stayed off the table. Looking at the photographs of Obama’s campaign rally in Portland, I realize a lot of people seem to disagree with me.
How will I react? Will I react like George Bush and Dick Cheney, so certain in my ideological correctness that I can dismiss a tenth of the population of one of the most progressive cities in the United States? Or will I try to figure out what they’re seeing that I’m not? Will I chose democracy or ideology?
My plan had originally been to sit the election out this year, to punish the Democrats for voting to fund “the surge” and taking impeachment off the table. But no battle plan ever survives the first shot. A good athlete instinctively feels the game changing around him and reacts according to his instincts. I can spot a tourist in Manhattan in a split second, merely by the way he’s clumsily trying to find his way. As any soldier who ever walked point in Iraq realizes, one of the easiest ways to get killed is to stick to the notes in your head and not to react to the facts on the ground. In the two months since the New Jersey primary, the battle and the game have changed. Any progressive who planned to sit the election out should throw away the ideological guidebook and look around. The cultural moment has defined itself. You didn’t choose this fight but it’s chosen you. What are you going to do?
During the first few months of the Republican and Democratic primaries, the narrative seemed very simple. The Democrats would chose Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, or John Edwards, one of three centrist, representatives of corporate capital. The Republicans would chose a hard core conservative like Mitt Romney or Mike Huckabee. Immigration would play an important role in the general election. The media would frame the general election as a contest between an out of touch, and elitist pro-immigrant Hillary Clinton versus the representative of hard working white America. Whether the Democratic nominee would be Edwards, Obama, or Clinton didn’t seem very important. The best you could hope for was that the right wing insurgent Ron Paul would hook up with the left wing insurgent Dennis Kucinich, and there would be some kind of third party run from an alliance of social democrats and anti-imperialist conservatives. It was a long shot, but it was something to hope for.
But then something happened. Barack Obama, who was being groomed for the future as a smooth, superficially liberal black face on American imperialism, who would perhaps become Hillary Clinton’s running mate, surged ahead in the polls. Young people, progressive intellectuals, African Americans, disillusioned moderates came together to support the junior senator from Illinois in a way nobody could have anticipated. Yes, my fellow leftists are right. Barack Obama is indeed a creation of the Chicago democratic machine and the elite media and no, he’s not an insurgent, or even a genuine liberal. But the surge of support he got in March and April, the money that flowed into his campaign that enabled him to spend Hillary Clinton’s campaign into bankruptcy, the gigantic campaign rallies that got larger and larger are genuine. Nobody could have scripted it.
Then an even more unexpected cultural bomb went off just a few feet away. The neoconservative right, that constellation of American reactionaries, from racists like Rush Limbaugh, to Fox News, to the Israel lobby, to the eventual Republican nominee John McCain, a pro-immigrant neoconservative (i.e. someone who hates Arabs more than Mexicans) looked out at the emerging alliance of young people, African Americans, intellectuals, and, above all, small donors, people who could change the political landscape and decided they needed to stop it in its tracks. An alliance of progressives, alternative funding, and a cool headed liberal centrist at the head of the ticket could derail the whole imperial project in the Middle East, even if they didn’t intend to. It need to be destroyed. But how?
The right didn’t have to look far. They quickly found their instrument in the vain, unprincipled Hillary Clinton who, seeing her chances at being president slipping away, decided to become the champion of Rush Limbaugh, Bill O’Reilly, AIPAC, and the racist white underclass of Appalachia. Clinton and her team of cutthroat operatives, realizing they couldn’t win in 2008, decided that they could destroy Obama in 2008 and set themselves up for 2012. Clinton, the woman who coined the term “vast right wing conspiracy” in the 1990s, turned to that very right wing conspiracy who impeached her husband in 1998, and a new Richard Nixon was born. The Democratic primary process went from a boring exercise in centrist platitudes to a race-baiting extravaganza. The attacks on Michelle Obama and Jeremiah Wright, the dark whispers that Obama was a secret Muslim, the insinuations that he had sold drugs in his 20s, the rumors that he had contacts with Hamas, the coded messages that he was an elitist, uppity Negro who hated hard working Appalachian whites, all of it was given relentless air time by the right wing media.
The race is now all race all the time.
Indeed, when Obama was cast in the media as an attractive but rather bland centrist whose main purpose was to put a superficially liberal face on corporate America and appeal to moderate Republicans on the basis of his competence, not his ideology, there was little reason to vote for him. In terms of his economic and foreign policy, there’s still little reason to chose Barack Obama over Clinton, John Edwards, Joe Biden, or even John McCain.
Unfortunately, however, Bill and Hillary Clinton and the right wing media have turned the vote into a litmus test on race and on popular participation in the electoral process. By their constant appeals to white working class fear over an African American becoming president and their appeals to resentment over young people and progressive intellectuals, it’s clear that the Clintons and the right wing media are, in collusion with the Republican party, trying to suppress the vote. They want to keep turnout low on election day, and to stem the tide of new African American and young voters Obama is bringing into the political process. Indeed, negative campaigns are designed not only to harm your opponent. They’re intentionally designed to create such a feeling of disgust and alienation that you simply stay home on Election Day. Doing so would be playing right into the hands of the anti-democratic forces who have currently lined up behind Hillary Clinton and will shortly switch over to John McCain after Obama officially secures the nomination this Summer. Not voting for Obama because he’s not left enough for you is choosing ideology over the idea of defending democracy. It's exactly what they want you to do.
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