Chocolate soldiers

You've probably figured out that I hold the current Administration in low esteem.

That said, the "problem" with the United States of America, as currently constituted, is that means that my opinion, and my ability to take any sort of effective action based on that opinion, means exactly jack and shit and, as the saying goes, Jack has left town.

So I'm effectively powerless as an individual.

I suppose I could, if I chose, become a sort of dangerous nuisance. 

Figure out a way to ambush the local ICE thugs. A successful vehicular ambush, especially the first vehicular ambush of a guerrilla campaign, isn't that hard to pull off, provided you can assemble the materials on the downlow and the targets are arrogant and careless.

It's not getting caught putting together the IED, or, if that goes well and the ambush happens, repeating that initial success now that the targets are alerted and proactive that's the hard part. Without an organization larger than myself alone, without a network of intelligence assets, solid effective security, a collection of safe places to hide or lay low, guerrilla allies...there's a reason that most wannabe urban guerrillas have very brief careers.

That game's not really worth the candle. I want to beat these motherfuckers, not get killed or rot in prison just taking down only a handful of their Einsatzgruppen grunts.

No. To defeat these sonsofbitches takes power. And in a republic, notional as our "republic" may now be, power means numbers.

So I went to the meeting of the local "anti-MAGA" organization last weekend.

I'm not going into detail. For one thing, OPSEC. For another, well...let me describe the meeting.

The venue, a run-down sort of backstreet sort of ballroom hung with the faded decorations of a dozen low-budget quinceaneras, was full of Portland lefties. Mostly middle-aged or elderly. Somewhere between late-hippie-chic through solid working class cits to goths and fetish kids. Overwhelmingly white (Portland, y'think?). Lots of teachers or teachery-looking people, and a scattering of pretty obvious union reps.

One of the "organizers", a fairly bougie-looking young-middle-aged white woman, introduced the group by name and a generic mission-statement, and then handed things over to a youngish artsy-looking white woman and that's where, in my unhumble opinion, things started going completely off the fucking rails.

Because she led the group through the music and lyrics, and then the bulk of the group spent the next eight or ten minutes singing a song.

And we're not talking stirring battle hymn. No International here. No Marseillaise. Not even one of the rousing old union battle songs like Bread and Roses.

There was something about love. And being worth fighting for. Not giving up. It was all very affirmative, and uplifting, with not so much as a whisper about hordes of prisoners of starvation, slaves, traitors, or conjured kings.

And that set the tone for the whole thing.

There was a very earnest, collective-wisdom sort of DIYism to the whole magilla, the idea that if people just gathered in little groups they would somehow come up with ideas of how to smash a fascist state.

To me it reeked of how I perceived Occupy back in 2011.  

As I wrote in that post, the Sixties Left has a lot to answer for by the way it convinced many of us on the modern left that simply singing and marching and shouting and sitting-in would beat the massed power of capital, mass media, and all the might of the police-military-industrial-governmental complex.

Compare that to the progressive organizations that succeeded in their resistance. like the SCLC and NAACP and the Civil Rights era groups, the AFL, CIO, UMWA, and the other labor union organizations of the 19th and early 20th Centuries. The Indian National Congress. Solidarnosc. The African National Congress.

All these had 1) an actual strategy that involved an entire range of acts, from pure theater to violent protest, and some notion of how and where these would be applied, and 2) an actual structured leadership - often fractious, even infighting - but leaders and a hierarchy below them that were there actively planning the attacks on their opponents down to the detsils of who, when, where, and with what. 

The New Left's intellectual successor Occupy Wall Street and these lovely people at the quinceanera place all seem to suffer from the goofy fuzzy-logic cloud-leadership that is to my mind the very worst hangover of the Sixties protests. 

People like John L. Lewis and Gandhi and Nehru and MLK were in many ways unlikeable, manipulative, cunning sons-of-bitches. The Left since their time seems to have absorbed the wrong lesson, which is that to get to a beneficent end you need to be a beneficent person, and that to end organized repression you have to be unorganized.

Two years later I quoted Robert Reich on the failure of Occupy:

"But Occupy eschewed political organization, discipline, and strategy. It wanted to remain outside politics, and outside any hierarchical structure that might begin to replicate the hierarchies of American society it was opposing.

So when mayors, other public officials, and university administrators cleared the Occupy encampments by force — encampments that had become the symbol of the movement — nothing seemed to remain behind. Some Occupiers made plans for further actions, but a movement without structure, discipline, and strategy proved incapable of sustaining itself."

Yep. 

The ANC didn't beat apartheid in South Africa because Nelson Mandela was a secular saint or because the cause was just and the arc of history bends towards justice.

No, it won because it was organized. It was ruthless when it needed to be. It won because it worked the press and international organizations and got funding and took appalling losses in lives and careers and health and hopes. And, yes, because Mandela was a secular saint.

But. 

Having UmKhonto weSizwe skulking about in Angola and Rhodesia didn't fucking hurt, either. 

At the end of this thing the original organizer asked the group to say how the meeting had made them feel (in the opening presentation there had been some discussion about "compassion fatigue" and how stressful it was dealing with ICE and Trumpenscum) and got responses like "empowered" and "hopeful" and "energized".

That's when I realized that this had been more of group-therapy session than planning resistance to fascists, more about "self-actualization" and feelings than setting up cells to surveil the fash and resist the cops and soldiers.

Well. Fuck. 

Look, I'm chuffed that the blow-up frogs and dancers and protestors have been fighting fucking ICE here and have to some extent forced the bastards to go low profile. I'm glad that the decent people of Portland want to beat the MAGAt scum, want to damn Trump and all his works.

But...gang, look. ICE is still here. Still doing their evil shit. We haven't "stopped" them.

These damn people don't give a shit whether you feel empowered. They respect nothing but force and fear. If you can't face up to that beating them will require gaining the power to make them fear you, well...if they won't respect law and regulation - and they don't - and if they won't respect your votes - and they won't - what will you do then?

Songs are fine. But, as the song said, you can praise the Lord so long as you pass the ammunition. Real resistance to evil means faith and works. Empowerment is fine, so long as it also includes a healthy dose of steel.

What this meeting thing was?

Was not that. 

As another observer of famous clusterfucks might have said, "C'est ravissant, mais ce n'est pas la guerre: c'est de la folie." - It's cute, but it's not war: it's foolishness.

 Sounded better in the original French, too.

The tumult and the shouting die...

Charles Pierce said that at least they were shouting at the right buildings.

And they were.

The problem was that after the shouting was beaten down there was nothing left.

Bob Reich has a decent post-mortem of the Occupy movement that sums up what went wrong:

"Occupy put the issue of the nation’s savage inequality on the front pages, and focused America’s attention on what that inequality was doing to our democracy. To that extent, it was a stirring success.

But Occupy eschewed political organization, discipline, and strategy. It wanted to remain outside politics, and outside any hierarchical structure that might begin to replicate the hierarchies of American society it was opposing.

So when mayors, other public officials, and university administrators cleared the Occupy encampments by force — encampments that had become the symbol of the movement — nothing seemed to remain behind. Some Occupiers made plans for further actions, but a movement without structure, discipline, and strategy proved incapable of sustaining itself."

That's too bad, because the political reality is that there were, and are, natural allies of Occupy all around us. The Occupiers were too impressed with their own purity to look around and find them.

Two years later and the 1% is 1-percentier-than-ever. The United States looks increasingly like a nation that is headed towards an unbridgeable divide between the Haves and the Have-nots. Between the bought-and-paid-for influence that the American wealthy have in both main political parties and the complete and utter anti-government insanity of the Right - seeing as the only potential counterweight for large private organizations such as businesses is the power of large public taxation, regulatory, and legal enforcement free of the influence of those organizations - there appears to me no potential for changing this direction.

I think we will look back on this failure to recognize that the real enemies of "our freedoms" are not sitting in a cave in the tribal areas of Pakistan or in some beige cubicle in a federal office building but in boardrooms and lobbying congresscritters as the great tragic failure of our age.

Because if we do not or cannot act we are looking at our oligarchic masters and the political structures they have co-opted for the rest of our lives. Reich sums it up: "Occupy served an important purpose, but lacking these essentials it couldn’t do more. Inequality is worse now than it was then, and our democracy in as much if not more peril. So what’s the next step?"

What's frustrating is that this should be simple. Both the remnants of the actual Left as well as the Tea Party Right should agree that corporatism - the unholy alliance of government and big business - is bad for those of us not in two-yacht families. The tragedy seems to be that while the Left is willing to at least give things like resurrecting Glass-Stegall and breaking up the "too big to fail" banks and retooling tax and tariff policies to favor wages over "investments" and actually creating jobs instead of creating tax shelters and calling that "job-creation" the Right won't touch this stuff. It's "more government", see, and government is Bad.

Mind you, I can't find a movement Conservative answer for this "Return to the Gilded Age" that doesn't depend on magical ponies and sparkle fairy dust. But...government is Bad, so...FREEDOM!

So I hate to keep banging this drum but...if those of us lacking a key to the executive bathroom can't or won't find a way to agree on figuring out a way to change our direction we will find ourselves, we petty men, walking under the huge legs of the Wall Street Bull and peeping about to find ourselves dishonorable graves.

Men at some time are masters of their fates. The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars but in ourselves, that we are underlings.

Headshot

I was watching the Beeb last night about the protests in Brazil, comparing them to the protests in Turkey, and wondering about my own country.

Because it seems to me that two far-distant places are experiencing much the same political problems; both are democratic republics, both have a legal system in place for the citizens to vote for change. But in both a substantial minority of the people believe that their "votes" are meaningless, and that the way the system of government is currently set up that they have no hope of bettering the lives (or affecting particular issues they see as worsening their lives) within the democratic process.

So they take to the streets.

We had that here, not so long ago, with the Occupy protests, and to my mind the only real difference was in the reaction of the governments. In Turkey and Brazil the police agencies had and have a long, ugly history of brutal reaction to public protest. The initial beatings and gassings had the effect of reminding Turks and Brazilians how much they reeeeeally hated the way their cops beat and gas them, and the protests became as much about that as about the initial grievances.

Here our coppers have learned to be crafty and patient. Protest met with a riot baton wrapped inside a comfy pillow is protest that gradually loses its vitality. If it doesn't lay you out cold a rap on the skull just pisses you off. But an indifferent stare is boring. The U.S. coppers knew that the way to defuse Occupy was to make it boring, and they did. The U.S. public lost interest, Occupy lost it's momentum and has already faded into insignificance.

Which in my opinion will be remembered as a tragedy. The Occupiers had one burning insight; that from the mildly benign oligarchy it had been from 1932 to the late 1970s the U.S. is rapidly becoming a predatory toxic oligarchy through the rapaciousness of its oligarchs. This insight was lost in the foolish cacophony of noise the Occupiers generated and the criminally negligent reportage of the courtier press. I believe that we will one day regret that we did not pay more attention to the rise of the modern aristos.

The result has been a continued slide back to the rampant inequality and social division of the Gilded Age, with the concurrent erosion of the sort of stodgy bourgeois middle-class attitude of the "rest" of the U.S. public as it sees it's decent-wage jobs, it's pensions, it's influence, and it's security ever more crammed down and eroded away. Combine that with the overwhelming sense that gold now makes the rules and that the reopening of government to massive inflows of cash has made individual voting almost meaningless and you get a public that seems to me daily more vulnerable to a demagogue, a "man on horseback" that promises to make those changes that they can't.

And that vulnerability makes me think of perhaps the saddest image I've seen from these recent protests:

This young woman was first said to be an Egyptian visiting Istanbul; since then the Egyptian embassy has devowed knowledge of her. So we have no idea of who she is - or was, since she must have suffered massive head trauma from the direct gas-canister hit and is very likely dead - or why she was there, or what she was doing and thinking at the time that the heavy metal can turned that day into endless night.

Whatever drove her into that street drove her to her own doom.

That seems to be pretty much what happens when desperate, vulnerable people take to the street. Few popular rebellions seem to end well; as bad as conditions were before the Revolution it seems hard to imagine that Napoleon is an upgrade over the Bourbons or Stalin over the Tsar. The defenestration of oligarchy usually seems to produce autocracy and war, not liberty and law.

The promise of the United States is the chance to pursue life, liberty, and happiness. Not to win them, but to pursue them.

But it seems to me that that promise now stands in the street we've built to let some of us drive towards increased wealth and power.

Will they collide violently? Will the streets explode in anger, as they have in Brazil and in Instanbul?

Will the result be that promise ending up lying in the street as she lay, dazed and barefoot, dying?

Carrot? Stick?

A friend of mine posted this on Facebook:

Here's the deal. The woman who posted this is really a Good Person. Kind, caring, great mom...she was instrumental in the foundation of Occupy Portland. Has an immense sense of social justice. Very serious about Doing the Right Thing.

Yet...

This little motivational card typifies everything about my friends on the Left who are a certain type of lefty that drives me absolutely crazy.

It's all the kindness, all the love that it prescribes as the cardinal (or even the only) method of child-rearing; "...if we choose to be there as a guide, as a compassionate presence that can motivate from a place of genuine interest with patience and understanding so that ultimately our children will WANT to do things."

Mmmph.

Now in case you're already reaching for the phone to dime me off to CSD, look; I don't believe that kids - any kids, my kids, yours, whosever - should be raised through force and fear. I agree that "tricks and threats" are not a good idea; I didn't like them as a kid and I don't like them now, either as an adult or a parent.

But I do think that there is more to parenting...hell, there's more to LIFE...than "genuine interest...patience and understanding."

The bottom line is that there are some things that nobody wants to do. Nobody "wants" to go to the dentist. Nobody "wants" to pay taxes. Nobody "wants" a colonoscopy, to break up with their lover, to clean up human waste, to go forward through mortar fire, to work long hours in bad conditions. No amount of interest, patience, understanding, love, money, incredibly great mind-altering monkey sex...will make any of that shit more likeable and want-able.

But that stuff still has to get done.

Some of the most important lessons I've ever learned in life involved discovering the ability to persist through truly rotten times and places and finish whatever task I had to complete. That required a certain degree of internal toughness that wasn't inherited or inspired from within; it was instilled, and often through the teaching of people who were anything but compassionate and gentle.

So, yes, as parents (or peers, or leaders, or mentors, or followers) we should be patient, compassionate, understanding, and interested. That's an important part of teaching and learning; the saying "If you don't care about them they won't care about you." is true as hell. The only thing a savage who "leads" through fear earns is a cooked-off grenade through the door of his hootch as soon as his victims work up the nerve.

But...I think there has to be some steel there, too. I believe there has to be a place for a simple declarative statement; "You need to get this done. Now." Because...well, because sometimes it does have to get done now. And not in your time, or in your way, but at some time and in some way that you may not "want" because if you don't then other people - and, possibly, you - will lack for something or suffer ill consequences.

I always get the sense that this kinder-gentler thinking has permeated the Occupy movement and much of the Left in general. It's the need for consensus, the unwillingness to be rude, judgmental, abrupt, and unpleasant. Sure, we do our name-calling, but to what effect? How does marching in the street calling some bloated bankster a "vampire squid" affect said bloated plutocrat up there in his paneled office? How does that reinstate Glass-Steagall? How does that kill the sunofabitch's "carried interest" deduction?

Where's the lefties who "want" to do the had graft of twisting legislators' arms, drumming for donations, running campaigns, winning votes and defenestrating these rotten plutocratic bastards and their bought Republican stooges?

I'm not exactly calling for the rope and the torch...but, still...I just don't see how you beat Darth Cheney with love, patience, and understanding. And I don't see how that - and ONLY that - helps give a kid the kind of persistence in the face of frustration and lack of pleasant reward to become an adult who can do unpleasant things when they need to be done.

I am being to harsh on my liberal friend? I feel like I am being so. I sort of hate the feeling of being the Mean Boy and rudely thumbing my nose at all that lovingkindness and gentility.

Yet I can't escape wondering if people like the Homestead strikers and the freedom riders of Montgomery, the Paris Communards and the students and workers on the barricades of 1848 and 1917 - the humble people who actually took on the bosses and their hard men and changed the world - might have had something a trifle more demanding in their upbringing than genuine interest, patience, and understanding.

Wind and Rain

I was truly on a blogroll and then...

...I had to drill four borings in Wilsonville.

I've been up every morning since Monday at four and working long past dark. It's been effing cold, and today it's supposed to get worse - driving rain and temperatures in the low forties. I'm whacked, and so posting's been light.

And in all honesty the recent destruction of the Occupy sites in Portland, Oakland, and NYC has me truly, viciously depressed. Sucking-the-muzzle depressed. What-the-fuck-are-you-people-thinking depressed.

Here are people, committed people, concerned people, trying to tell you politicians and plutocrats that returning this country to the political and economic land of the Gilded Age might...just might...ALSO return us to anarchist bombings, labor riots, and the Upton Sinclair jungle of violent urban poor and rural squalor...and your reaction is to flex-cuff 'em and and ignore 'em?

Yes, they're annoying. Yes, they're all over your nice little parks. Yes, you'd rather not think about what they're talking about just bybeing there. But...instead of reflecting on the past fifty years of relative peace and prosperity they'rer trying to talk about returning to, you're doubling down on the Boss Tweed plutocratic fucking crazy?

Are you fucking insane?

You WANT to hand your country over to the sort of malefactors of great wealth that created and then destroyed the Mortgage Bubble Economy that landed us in the Lesser Depression?

And yet you can STILL find the time and money to chase some raggedy-assed muj around the hills of West Buttfuckistan?

As they say on Mandalore: Kaysh mirsh solus. Your fucking brain cell is lonely.

And speaking of Mandos, right now I'm feeling kinda all kinds of Mando about my "leaders" - in Portland, fucking Bloomberg in NYC, inside the Beltway...and not in a good way. Specifically, "Ib'tuur jatne tuur ash'ad kyr'amur"

It's a good day for someone else to die. and I can think of a number right off the top of my head.

And now I have to go out in the wind and rain and make a living.