I figured I’d return to the closing text of “Addicted to War” for this post. Now I read the whole thing in one sitting, but since we went over large sections of this in class it seems only fitting to try to conceptually nest the two biggies we discussed this class: the prison industrial complex and the military industrial complex.

The first things that become obvious when you start to really scrutinize these elements of our government and private enterprise is just how much spending gets done on their behalf. The second is the manner in which they employ human beings, particularly poor and colored human beings, as a form of resource. Of course given our drive for non renewable energy forms (or resources to put it bluntly) over the last century or so it should come as no surprise that human resources are generally not nurtured or considered in the long term. Education, socioeconomic conditions and the general welfare of the population all seem to fall by the wayside in favor of feeding the current system. There is of course a particularly cruel reason for this: you’d have to be desperate or easily deceived in order to subject yourself to the meat grinder these two systems have become. If you keep people undereducated and living hand to mouth you create a system by which a ready supply exists to be predated upon.

The problem with this slaughterhouse (or oilfield, if you like) mentality is twofold. One, eventually you are going to run out of qualified people to operate it- or worse weaken the general population so far that the entire nation falls apart. Or two, the system will fold under the weight of its own un-sustainability (i.e., too many people in jail or at war for the population at large to afford)- thus causing the entire nation to fall apart. Both of these are happening around our country right now. Our jails are overcrowded to the point where we have broken the bank of states like California and we are waging warfare on so many fronts that it has pushed even our own military budget to the breaking point.

None of this is a long-term solution, but because of the deliberate dumbing of the American population at large we conceive of it as if it were. It is, in fact, flawed logic borne from our own sense of entitlement and greed. The zero sum idea (probably American in origin) that if someone is to win, someone else has to lose. If we insist on treating human beings as a commodity, (and some people will never be broken of this pastime, just look at SHRM) then we should begin to do something that is uniquely un-American (yes, I know what McCarthy said, he was a drunk) by learning to plan for the long term. That means cultivating your future generations, not to be chattel, but to be ready. And for people in charge to understand that when they undermine those beneath them they cut away at the legs on which they stand- the people that do not merely make a country great but make a country. Period. This isn’t socialism, this is pragmatism. It is good planning.

Systems of greed, of which the legalized slavery of our industrial complex has become, fail. They fail because slavery is not a natural state, and because to take hold of another human being in any way makes the captor complicit with the system. Enslaved to its order and their place in it. Blind to the chains around their own ankles. Like men from the middle passage going overboard— in long narrow strips of frail humanity.

It is difficult for me to discuss, as it is for many people around this country still, the events surrounding 9/11. I have trouble with images of the towers spewing smoke, so economical in their silhouettes as to be almost graphic in nature. Even without the element of fire they loom. I watch favorite movies set in New York and mark them: before, after, before, after. I have the same conversations with people about this again and again when I’m with someone, “That’s right, did you hear they removed images of the towers from Spiderman one after 9/11.” Even Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11 doesn’t show the towers. I remember having a reaction just watching that much: images of people shielding their eyes from the bright morning sun to look up at them, the sounds of people screaming, shouting, running from the wall of smoke and dust that careened down the avenues.

But I wasn’t there. I saw it on television like most of America. I was working nights and was sleeping when someone woke me up in the house I was living in. They told me something was happening, then left me alone in that empty house to see it for myself. Maybe that was what bothers me the most. You see I’d had a birthday the day before. So I was waking up to the whole world being born again. We don’t talk about it much these days- the towers I mean. 9/11 has taken on a whole other context in our nation since then. It has come to represent warfare, the oppression of freedoms, the torture of prisoners, spying on Americans, the suspension of habeas corpus, corporate greed, farce and the utter failure of this nation to see its own shortcomings. 9/11 was a missed opportunity. A chance to turn inwards, grieve and change the world for the better. Many of us still don’t get that. The only reason we’re ending the war now is because we’re tired of fighting, not because we’ve learned anything. The systems are all still in place for this to happen again. One person cannot fix this. The same can be said of the Zinn interview we read this week.

In it he talks about things we understand in hindsight to be old hat, where the war will lead, why we are really in Iraq, and of course the thing we are all most recently aware of: what really started it all. That a group of people could hate us so much they would want to kill us is not so hard to believe. Just as they do not see us- except through the facade of our corporate and governmental occupiers- we do not see them. But we should have when they attacked the targets they did: a center of corporate financial activity, the center of our military bureaucracy and what would have possibly been the White House. They attacked the faces they saw. Because of our greater means, we attacked them all. Zinn talks about “collateral damage” showing how it is used to reduce and defuse the emotion of an action, but fails to get at the heart of what that word means in the context of the whole picture that is 9/11. Acceptable losses. That’s what it translates to in the context of the Iraq war and all that has become clear during its course. Loss, like a business loss. Human beings commodified, because that is what we do as Americans, we crunch the numbers on the human condition. Maybe its capitalism, maybe its the “me first” attitude but the big fear in the heat of a crisis like this is in becoming a statistic.

2974 dead when the towers fell, 19 hijackers, flights 11,175, 77 and 93, one man- a sikh- murdered on 9/15, the stocks lost 1.4 trillion dollars that week, 2500 contaminants dispersed when the towers fell, 10,000 people in the Ground Zero lawsuit, 1,311,696 Iraqi’s dead by some estimates on the Iraq war, 31, 089 dead as the official body count, 320,000 soldiers with brain injuries, gas peaking at $4.11, $12 billion spent each month in Iraq to keep it all going, 12.5 million people unemployed.... it goes on and on. But still we haven’t fixed the problem. We forget how easily we make men like Timothy McVeigh, John Muhammad, Osama Bin Laden and so on. They were all forged in the crucible of events in the Gulf (McVeigh and Muhammad were both Gulf war vets). Hitler was made in the fires of the battlefields of WWI. Ho Chi Minh, ignored by members of the post WWII Yalta conference, moved away from the democratic ideals he had been seeking and towards the ideology that began the Vietnam War. There are countless examples throughout history of what happens when we remove the human face from history, ripples in the pond. And so Zinn appears in hindsight to be missing the mark. With suggestions like arming Palestine, he contradicts his own statements about just wars. Perhaps he was being ironic.

The title of this writing is drawn as a paraphrase of a work by the comic artist Art Spiegelman, who wrote the Pulitzer Prize winning book Maus- about his family’s experiences in Auschwitz. The title of the original text was “In the Shadow of No Towers” and was meant as a way for Spiegelman to deal with emotions surrounding the terrorist attacks on 9/11. In a way this fact should encourage us. That he made work and tried to heal, not through rhetoric but through art should show us all some kind of path. I am weaker for all of this now. And small. And the world perhaps frightens me at times the way it did when I was a child, even though I understand it better. But I am healing. And in the darkness of the now, breath comes to me. There is hope that I can learn. That we all must learn.

I think that it is easy to talk about the way in which we treat our prisoners from the outside of the jail in which we pen them up like animals. We treat things like prison violence and prison rape as the punch lines to the jokes we tell each other over beers after work in our tiny little lives. What we forget is that our treatment of others and our apathy towards a system that perpetuates racial prejudice and the cruel and inhuman treatment of our fellow human beings (and they are us, but for five or ten sorry minutes of their lives, many of them) says more about ourselves and who we are than the men and women we keep on the inside of these places.

It is easy not to care when there is a wall between you and them, when every crime show on television talks about criminal activity it terms of simple dualistic states of being- the “good guys” and the “bad guys.” You’d have thought we’d had enough of this sort of thinking after the last fifty years. This Manichean way of looking at the world is what got us into so much of the trouble we’re in. The military industrial complex is as big as it is because we viewed communism, socialism and Russia in particular as the bad guys under Reagan (the original “evil empire” concept originated under him) and when we were done with that we found knew enemies- the latest a self perpetuating smorgasbord of ideologies that could last well beyond the end of us: the war on terror. The war on terror, of course, in many ways is a path to continuing the war on drugs. You even have the etymological connective tissue of the commercial shown in “American Drug War” with the two white business men talking about this in particular. And while I may find it is easy to blame a Christian conceptualization of good and evil (or good vs. evil) as Reagan and both Bush’s so often utilized such under their presidencies, we should realize that peace is what the bible really talks about. Peace even against all odds. The men and women who call on it for violence are selling something most likely (sometimes, ironically it’s a bible). And for the last fifty years or so, we’ve been buying it: lock, stock and barrel and link by link.

We have been sold on this through a sophisticated marketing campaign that it so thorough you even have those in direct contact with the system who have fallen for it. Watch an episode of COPS sometime and tell me how many conversations with the law enforcement officer talking about what they do conclude with the idea presented by the police officer that they are “catching bad guys” when they go out on shift. I’ve only seen a handful of them that say they are helping people. Which fits a little better with the “protect and serve” motto on the side of so many law enforcement vehicles (the only accurate motto I’ve seen for what is actually going on under our current system is to be found on the side of the sinister Decepticon police vehicle named Barricade in the live action Transformers movie says “to punish and enslave”- the presence of a villainous police car may allude to the director’s understanding of how certain facets of American culture have come to view the law). This plus the proliferation of crime dramas over the last ten years or more- which has been startling and only helped to contribute to the wasteland of television programming.

Sheriff Joe Arpaio is no exception to any of this, of course, and most of you are probably thinking about him after reading some of the things I’ve written above. He sees the world as we are all seeing it right now. And it is hard habit to break. We’ve been trained through everything from antidrug advertising to action films to perceive people who are not villains as such. They are us. At worst, they are sick and should be helped. Attempts to change jail facilities over to more humane methods within the United States result in resistance at every level. This is the system we have made: a system of brutality, of daily horrors, of new forms of slavery. This is the system we have made, and it is us.

Robert Elliott Burns is a figure unmentioned in the articles we read on the prison industrial complex and well it should be, because we have failed to keep the memory of what he accomplished less than a century before. We have failed because he broke the system of the prison industrial complex in the south during the Great Depression by escaping from it and writing about his experiences in the chain gangs of Georgia, and we put it all back together again. Chain gangs persist in Georgia, but like so many things they are kept out of sight, inside the high windowless walls of prison factories, or in the stinking swamps stringing telephone cable where you could never get a paid worker to go. A thing out of sight is a thing, more often than not, out of mind.

Thus the problem I encountered in speaking with a classmate in another class entirely from this about the prison industrial complex. His name is Jack and he is a lawyer practicing under the auspices of the state of Maine for the last 25 years, and like so many near sighted individuals working within the system he is not only blind to the problem, he is part of it. You see Jack believes, as many people of white upper class educated backgrounds believe, that psychopaths and violent offenders are the makeup of the prison system, that race is not an issue, and instead replaces the concept of race with the concept of politics or the idea that race has been politicized and that is all there is to it. He sees race as separate from socio-economic background, which it is, but not in the way Jack perceives it. And to prove his point in our conversation he tells me to look for an article on psychopaths that was published in the November issue of the New Yorker:

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/11/10/081110fa_fact_seabrook

(a magazine I couldn’t get him to understand would have a biased presentation format, being for a largely white upper class audience, and has had issues with racism in the past on more than one occasion:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_new_yorker#Crown_Heights_in_1993

http://www.racialicious.com/2008/07/14/the-new-yorker-and-hipster-racism/ )

Neither he, nor the other classmate in the room- a Rebekah Juarez, sees anything wrong with people making 22 cents an hour when they are charged 10 dollars per day to be in the prison. And it occurs to me both are from a very particular background, different in age but both unconnected to the social economy of prison inmates by any direct personal relationship. They have both traveled the world and the country and have explored extensive educational opportunities. They are secure in their fixed narrow view of the world because they feel they’ve seen enough to know. And they are right in this, they have seen enough, and they should know. But there is a difference between seeing the world and living in it. The world they live in and the world a modern prison inmate, subjected daily to the effects of the prison industrial complex, lives in are, to use a tired euphemism, like night and day. Simply put, they do not care about these people and what is happening to them because they have never known the unfairness of a system. Their lives, no matter how difficult, have never been the indomitable struggle to achieve that someone of average intelligence growing up in the urban blight of modern America must overcome. A handful of people rising out of this environment do not make for the end of racism and poverty. They are not some exception which proves a rule. In statistics these would be called outliers, anomalies. Jack tried to tell me in the conclusion of the conversation that my implication with these statistics was the recitation of dogma. Esprit de l'escalier, in hindsight his viewpoint is the dogmatic one, whereas mine is conjecture. My viewpoint is only dogma if you perceive empathy, introspection and the desire for investigation as elements of an ideology. Foolish me, I thought they were valuable communicative traits.

I’ll close with this thought: the Goldberg/ Evans article begins with a statistic citing over 1.8 million people behind bars, potential workers for the prison industrial complex if you read the rest of the article. Many of these, some 70% according to the numbers, are people of color and if the figures on violent versus property crimes are correct (14% of offenders are violent- leaving 86% there for property, drug related or other offenses) the vast majority of them are also poor. These figures, the total populations of prisoners in the United States in particular, are of course growing all the time. On the eve of the Civil War in 1860 a census was taken showing the slave population at just fewer than 4 million people. With the speed of increase in prison population and societies view from the outside of this problem, the belief in incarceration rather than rehabilitation, it looks as though we’re moving proudly and steadily towards some old numbers we’d thought we’d escaped. Like in the reversal of Mr. Burns’ efforts, we have discovered the best way to slap the irons of slavery back on is accomplished by the same devices as it always was: apathy and ignorance.

There has been a lot of talk lately, in posts for this class, about the dependence of one group upon the whims of another and how somehow this is a subordinate state. The language supplies us with this hierarchical structure to words. We place value where there should be none. It’s exactly the sort of thing that is done with ideas about race. Black is not different when we say it, it is less than other things. Or if we’re being more PC we instead internalize this as “being different” is less than. This is somehow broader in scope and worse. It may simply be the nature of the language as Derrida suggested. Something innate in its structure that aggravates the symptoms of the disease. I think that’s the easy way out in our apathetic, self aggrandizing culture. We could fix it or at least acknowledge it if we tried.

But the way we deal with these difficulties of language and the hegemony of indifference is to simply say: you’re black, so what. You’re gay, so what. You’re a woman, so what. You’re poor, so what. You want a prize for being these things? No one is hanging black people from trees today, or putting homosexuals to death, or expects a woman to make babies her whole life and live under her husband’s rule, you can pull yourself up by your bootstraps and work your way out of being poor, or uneducated if you really wanted to. So shut up, just shut the hell up and leave me to my egocentric thinking. Because I’m not any of those things and therefore I shouldn’t have to engage with any of them.

Well, hoo-fucking-ray for your upper middle class white privilege. Hoo-fucking-ray for your college education and the life you’ve lead so far that keeps you from having to think about any of these things. The world outside of your shoebox view is changing day by day, whether you can see it change or not. It’s an ecosystem. The whole world is a complex web of life, the kind you can find described in any high school level biology text. Dependence in the natural order of things (and not the artificial order that puts humans at the top- you’ll notice it’s a white man in most of those devices of scale) is not a subordinate position. How can one thing be less (or more) than another in a web? Yet we see it that way when we look at the world. What Wise was trying to do was reverse the field of view for a moment, to get us to consider the other and our place in their lives (and no, in the end, that’s not a slave-master dialectic regardless of what we secretly want).

Was Wise being specific enough with his examples to make his point, perhaps not, but he wasn’t writing an academic paper, he was couching in the blogosphere. He was trying to reverse the stream if even for a moment. And we don’t like to see it that way. That fact is the reason why Prof. Hentges told us so many people react strongly to this article. And we did didn’t we? We went and hid when we were confronted with the reversal of fortune, or the remotest awareness that our fate is not entirely our own. That we might be subordinate- dependent- and because of how we view that word we don’t like it used on us. Did you ever think people might not be poor or downtrodden if jerks like us got out of the way once in a while? So by the bootstrap analogy, (ironically so common to people who’ve never had to struggle against the sorts of things the people they use it on have) pulling oneself up based on what I just described would involve the elimination of our entire white race and the eradication of the culture which predates the problem- tearing down the master’s house, so to speak. After all that’s been done to these various groups, it’s a wonder that something like this hasn’t happened yet. So maybe you’re right after all, that there is a hierarchy. Because for all the patience, tolerance and careful discussion they’ve offered in return for our brutalization, I’ve got to say, they clearly are better than us.

I can’t believe I read the whole thing. Maybe it was the fact that it had been formatted as a comic book, which prevented me, in good stead, from stopping before I reached the end or else that it seemed so thin, but I simply couldn’t put “Addicted to War” down. And while much of what I was reading could be suspected in the activities of the last eight years I’ve never seen it all laid out so clearly. Ken Burns is speaking about national parks on C-Span as I write this and he just briefly alluded to films someone he knows is doing about war. He generalizes at first and then clarifies: World War II. The fact that this simple phrase requires clarification in our modern moment disturbs. Which war? The war(s) of recent memory or the war(s) of the past. With the goal appearing to be to create a circumstance whereby a living human being won’t be able to count all the wars the United States conducts within his lifetime on the fingers of both hands (or maybe even his toes).

I suggested to a faculty member that war is apparently profitable for some people and this is likely the reason the United States (now apparently operated wholesale by corporate gluttons) pecks away on this frontier. The response made me think, especially in light of the recent reading: a war is actually only profitable for its first three to four years. This of course makes me wonder on some level about H.W. Bush’s air blitz (maximum destruction, minimal cost, maximum reconstruction profit), the likes of which I believe was only superseded by his son (who we all know ceded the profitability end of things to Halliburton and a few other friends). Did we do this same crap in Japan after World War II? If we had, what would contemporary Japan look like? For that matter, what will the Iraq of the future look like? Hint: probably not like contemporary Japan.

And then there’s Kanye’s song. Which probably helped a very wealthy man feel somewhat better about all his bling (which I suppose is a statement I could tie directly into Peruvian Cocaine and/or Lubiano‘s article but I‘m going to be a little bit more self indulgent first- since Kanye was too). Here’s the thing though: my father was an earth science teacher for 30 years in public schools and occasionally dealt with wholesale mineral purchases to gather specimens for use in his classes. What he learned about some of these places he occasionally told me. So I remember the story he related about the artificial inflation in the diamond market. This is done through a system of storage and release similar to the one shown near the end of Blood Diamond (oh, and the company name you’re looking for is DeBeers by the way, they controlled 85% of the diamond trade at the point when the film was set and only -gee- 65% now). So you have what Kanye seems to be talking about (in addition to how no one- including myself- can apparently get his name correct), which is conflict diamonds.

Only this isn’t the whole picture if you pick up an issue of National Geographic that talks about diamond mining in Africa. You see, while only a small percentage of the diamonds are known as conflict diamonds the rest are mined in a manner not so dissimilar to the hellish conditions depicted in Blood Diamond and Kanye’s video. And while these diamonds, mined legally, do not enslave anyone literally as Kanye and Blood Diamond suggest, or end up being used to fund conflicts (that I personally know of), I somehow doubt that in a country where garment manufacturers brutalize workers through hellish working conditions and astronomically low wages, that even a legit multinational diamond company is going to strive through some crisis of conscience to break the cycle of worker exploitation. So here we have Kanye, essentially participating in all of this (knowing of course that rappers are prone to wearing diamonds- ice is popular amongst everyone with the money to buy it right now). And conflict free diamonds are pretty hard to come by in the states (since they’re ILLEGAL for the wholesale diamond buyers to acquire in the first place- making them nearly impossible for the end consumer to get a hold of). So we can only assume that this whole video is a giant commercial for the diamond companies, since it ends prompting people to demand conflict free diamonds, in the meantime failing to make anyone realize the exploitative circumstances under which a perfectly legal diamond can be had and the artificial nature of the market to begin with. So human suffering is the only thing of any profit in this situation, because the end product is worth a lot less than we are led to believe. All I can say to that is: I hope DeBeers wrote you a fat check for your video, Kanye.

If one thing stuck in my mind after last class it was the suggestion made by someone talking in the video for class about how the protest is the poor man’s printing press. First, I must admit, I watched this video in the same way I watched the Battle of Algiers when I saw it in my Post Colonial Fictions class. I watched it as a strategist might watch it. I was studying what these students and the organizations working in concert with them were doing not merely so that I could understand the historical significance of a moment, but how I myself might employ similar tactics myself. What worked and what did not. I wanted to know that. Particularly when that line about demonstration being a way to get a message out came up. From there on out I was watching very closely. I tried to compare what I could recall from contemporary protest and demonstrations I had seen on the news. Everything from paid rioters at the WTO Seattle protests hurling tear gas canisters back into police lines, to the countless- and largely ignored by mainstream media- antiwar protests which transpired during the Bush years.

And a few things struck me as distinctly different from these confusing contemporary melees and the heartfelt cries of students fighting for a right not to be commodified as their parents had before them, fighting for hope and most importantly the future of an entire culture at least within the purview of the LA county school system. The first of these is how well organized a modern protest is. From the rapidly deployed “flash mobs” of the cell/texting generation to the “grass roots” movements that function in a manner more similar to a corporate branding strategies than anything born from the heart. The contemporary protest must be media savvy and able to think on their feet if they want to be seen against the backdrop of you tube and blogger sites. They must twitter and facebook- understanding that in a contemporary ambiance these things are verbs with actions associated with them as virulent as an TV camera crew on site can bring and possibly more. And at the same time, the opposition has grown more sophisticated. Media blackouts in an age where we are swamped with information must be surprisingly easy to pull off. Between the concept of media conglomeration and the blitz the idea of a slow news day simply doesn’t exist. There simply is no lull in the action to mark the passage of something gone unreported. The only thing that may keep them honest is the absolute proliferation of the video camera in modern post industrial societies. This kind of mutually assured self incrimination however isn’t enough to keep all the dark territories at bay, but the risk is often too great for modern media outlets to ignore (they’ve begun recruiting them its gotten so bad- see CNN’s ireport nonsense).

The second thing, and maybe this is the result of a tactic employed via the current system, how lacking in clarity these modern movements seem to be. It could be that the same confusion existed around the Chicano school protests (a few people interviewed even in a modern light seemed confused about the student motivations- administrators among them duly noted) when word of mouth would have been the best way to get information on a protest. I know the reason students were protesting in the video is about their school system and quality of their education. But I couldn’t tell you why people were protesting globalization in Seattle, or even give you a clear answer as to what corporate gluttony will do to our natural resources (other than the few romantic notions some idiots a press crew interrogated during one particular green protest (and this was the leader of the movement). Protests seem to come from one of two things in a modern light: either the heart or the head. They are either intellectual arguments against something that are difficult to elocute, or they are half formed thoughts and strong feelings with little tangibility behind them (something like clouds I’d imagine)- thus the green protesters who can’t really decide if they’re green or anti-corporate (or just socialist) or even what it means to be any of that. My suspicion is that when a protest succeeds it is not because it is overcoming some sinister media mélange (though it might be, as in the case of war protesters) but simply arrives at a moment where the voice of the crowd is strong, clear and resonant. In other words, where the heart and the head meet in harmony. So as for it being the poor man’s press: demonstration runs the same gambit for clarity of ideas (and ideals) that any leaflet suffers through. More therefore does not always equal power, sometimes it just equals cacophony.

“Between the devil and the deep sea,” was a term that came out of ship building from almost 150 years before now and came to mean that you were caught between a pair of dangerous choices. Well, last night I found myself in that exact place, except in my case it was to be caught between the song “Propaganda” and C-SPAN’s Newseum programming as they discussed conservative radio shows and the blogosphere in relation to traditional forms of media. The commentator on C-SPAN implied through convoluted questioning that there was some sort of an issue with the fact that recognized media resources were finding that they now needed to address or take seriously the commentary stream erupting from both the conservative radio programming and the blogosphere (a largely liberal base). I’m thinking what he really meant, or maybe just what could be derived from his question, was the idea that these new media sources could not be curbed or controlled like the conventional outlets. People were going to say what they were going to say and nobody could stop them. And because of the nature of these two instances: they also had a platform from which to spout their ideals. In other words, freedom of speech, freedom of the press is okay so long as the extreme of either side doesn’t gather a crowd. I was pretty proud at that moment. They were running scared.

Based upon the ideas in the Dead Prez’s Propaganda song though I find myself being given something to think about: First) with all the resources those manipulating information resources have and given the success of so called “viral” marketing campaigns already being utilized on the web to deceive people into agreeing with what they believe is one of their own, we must ask ourselves who is out there doing the talking in the first place. Who keeps them in Cheetos, so to speak? Second) even if none of the conservative or liberal extremists (or moderates or whatever) found on the web aren’t being manipulated or paid to manipulate (which some of them most certainly are) they are still spewing some form of propaganda or another. Third) it is perhaps even more dangerous when the mainstream media finds they have to address it because of this. Even opinion can become propaganda when it gets enough of a platform. And no, despite what Rush Limbaugh says, if the people you are talking to believe it- you are not an entertainer any longer. Nor when you get 2 million hits on your blog and Wolf Blitzer has to read a press release about you to the world is what you’re saying personal opinion because at that point it’s pretty much part of the public consensus or consciousness.

We are, all of us being manipulated. I think the data on the relationships between schools and corporations should sell us on that. One of our classmates stated a teacher had told them always to ask: what is the person gaining by doing what they are doing? I think this is more important to ask now than ever. If you were to strip out all these influences garnered over time, twisting the way in which we look at the world, what would we have left? Would there be anything of us in it? I’m not saying that there isn’t a ton of cultural indoctrination which goes on in the world. It is a natural function of the human condition, a way in which we pass on knowledge to each consecutive generation. But no one group should ever profit by the way someone arrives at thinking about something. I mean most of human history, if you really look at it, is about attempting to profit from one idea or another. Maybe the most dangerous thing the modern human ever created wasn’t the atom bomb, but a formal system and institutions by which this trait could be utilized.

...

I think maybe I spoke with a bit more brevity than I would have liked, and failed to address some of the points Tim Wise was making in "White Like Me" about our education system. From the opening paragraph he discusses the idea of white privilege not only in American culture as a whole, but particularly within our education system. Based upon the other articles we've read this week and his own personal anecdotes on how this sort of thing can transpire, I say the numbers support it. To make matters worse, given the statistics surrounding college attendance for many minorities and the level of education and critical thinking acquired at this level, the larger point this may put forward is that the minority populations at large may have greater difficulty perceiving some of the manipulation they are subject to. Due to overwhelming poverty in many of the school systems they are educated in they will likely be exposed to it on a greater scale as well, when these schools accept the money of private companies in place of the public dollars they should be getting.

The stuff about the McDonald's Corporation writing school curriculum in "Kids for Sale" was probably the most depressing of anything I read. I mean, do you really see them getting away with this kind of blatant indoctrination into corporate culture in an upscale white school system? Something tells me the kid they interviewed probably wasn't white either. How does this kind of education give them anything but a fair shot at wage slavery? Given this is what they're exposed to (and punished when they don't accept) it's no wonder they fight the system in the only way they can: by leaving it.

I’ve got to admit I don’t have much to say about Fannie Lou Hamer, and I can’t really expound on why. When I think about the fact that I hadn’t heard about her before now I wonder if it’s merely because she was a woman. If she had been a man, might I have known her better? Is her gender the only reason why she isn’t known, or does the reason why her mark on the fabric of history allude to her lacking the traditional brand of martyrdom so many black men suffered during the civil rights movement? Does someone really have to die for their cause in order for us to recall them?

And then I think of Rosa Parks. Rosa Parks who wasn’t even the first really. Who was ripped up and torn down by Eddie, Cedric the Entertainer’s character, in Barbershop. The Montgomery bus boycott immortalized her. But why is she recalled more than Fannie Lou in my mind? Why does the popular culture call her to the forefront more than her other counterparts? They call her the “mother of the modern civil rights movement”, elevating her beyond mortal ken, while Fannie Lou Hamer seems distant- out there in the cold and the dark somewhere… singing. Rosa Parks didn’t even want to be who she was. She lost everything, just because she stayed where she was. Fannie Lou took the fight to the enemy. She chose to be who she was and knew full well the risks. So why is Rosa Parks the saint?

I know why so many men are remembered. They’re the ones writing these histories. Not that one should get into the habit of belittling the sacrifices made by the likes of King, Evers or X. They died for what they believed in. But I find it somewhat ironic that a woman like Parks, who spent much of her life rejecting (politely) the fame she was offered should be remembered above someone who fought so bravely and so actively. Perhaps it is the fate of the angry few in black history, although it is a righteous anger, to be erased from history because that is what they’ve tried to do with the angriest amongst them. Vilifying Malcolm X and reducing Fannie Lou Hamer to such a degree that people who should want to remember her, can’t understand any longer why they should. Perhaps this is the only real villainy that is done in history.

As for the second of our viewings, the one which touches on the sacrifices on the Chinese immigrants who constructed much of the railroads and then were quietly shuffled out of our country, I feel in looking back that so much of the history of our country is made up of these things. Can we in knowing them even begin to correct such grievous errors? Will a little plaque really begin the healing? Will educating a stranger about the brutality of our past help them to understand the present? Or will they, overwhelmed by these affronts simply turn away and look elsewhere for new lies (for we are always creating new ones)? Will they truly drink the sand at the oasis because they don’t know the difference, or because they don’t want to know?

I listened last night to a news and media expert railing about how we needed a narrative for the current crisis, as if all would be fine if we could find a metaphor for the state of the union in this present climate. As someone who deals with the narrative in his daily life I am inclined to agree, but I think the time has come to look into the past with clarity and to craft new narratives. The same old stories are the just that. If we are ever to teach our children the fallacy of our actions we must craft the language with which these stories are to be told. And we must not shrink from recollection. It was suggested in the same news program that a consensus being reached would be like the communist revolution, or the Nazi’s seizing power. As if the only place in history that a consensus could be reached is in the arms of a totalitarian state. I disagree. I think from time to time the actions of the past are revisited in an attempt to correct some future path. To progress as a civilization. It is the natural order of things and in many ways this is a self actuating task. I’ll close with a paraphrasing of a text we should all be familiar with:

“Prudence, indeed, will dictate that [histories] long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such [history], and to provide new Guards for their future security.”

My title this time around, I hope you can tell, is ironic. Not that there is anything ironic about racism, but it seems to me that it is one of those systemic things that upon closer examination should be obvious- that to despise or think low of another human being because of the color of their skin, or gender, or sexual preference, etc.- it shouldn’t exist or function in the way that it does. Hate isn’t pragmatic. It’s a ship’s anchor crushing the life out of us. Yet the culture, in which we live, like so many others around the world, subscribes to its practices through silent complicity. So little progress has been made that we must mark, as Marable suggests, the tragedies rather than the triumphs of a history written in the blood of martyrs and placed on the bent and anguished backs of a people still very much in chains at times.

I see a strong connection between the concepts in Marable’s article and some of the ideas presented in the song Dream Team, not only of history but of who is elevated by their place within it. To make something- a person, event or place- a part of that history elevates them in context to the rest of us. Many of us will not find our lives in part or whole relayed across the annals of the past. Now many of the figures Spearhead would replace in his basketball team, people whom he sees as more representative of the black community, are the traditional canon from black history. That is until we arrive at the figure of Nat Turner. By most stretches in traditional history texts he is a figure out of a brutal past. To some a mass murderer, to others a white Southerner’s bogeyman. Why then is Captain John Brown not viewed in the same manner? He murdered innocent people, men who did not even own slaves in the South and made an incompetent run at Harper’s Ferry in order to inspire blacks to rise up. Response to his death in the North is said to have inspired some of the earliest sentiments at the start of the Civil War. Yet an almost comically failed white abolitionist is remembered more fondly and more eloquently than a black man who freed himself long enough to exact a harsh and effective revenge against the whites who enslaved him. Why is Nat Turner not looked upon as a freedom fighter? Why are there no poems penned about the midnight walk of Nat Turner? The only voice he has in history is his forced confession.

And yet the black community clings to him, raises him high. They do the same with Malcolm X, though with his film Spike Lee is somewhat responsible for attempting to balance the scales, for although Malcolm may have advocated an armed black population for defense, he never advocated the kind of violence that took his life. But it was because this that the concept of the angry black man was branded into white public conscious. Figures like the Black Panthers, who did more to protect their communities than law enforcement did, and armed them with a sense that the system could not be relied upon- could not be trusted, cementing the idea of the angry black. And now, with many of these figures murdered, disbanded or jailed in retaliation for their only real crime, that of proclaiming independence and defense from a system which brutalized them, the black community turns to figures like Larry Davis. Gangster rappers, drug dealers, murderers this is the way our system, as whites, recalls these figures. But to the black population of the Bronx, in his day, Davis was elegized by both himself and others as a Robin Hood figure who defended himself against the system and triumphed.

Knowing all the history that has passed between the start of this problem, and how systemic racism is. How whites at times seem believe the axiom: out of sight is out of existence. It is a wonder that the black individual is not angrier. Is not more heavily armed and organized than before. Who is it that remains and lifts up the figures of King, Parks and Evers? Were we to look around would we find only whites standing beside us on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial? Or will this man that we have voted for, black and white alike, captivate the attention of blacks for longer than the breadth of history has shown us for others with his same message. Can a message of cooperation survive in this new age against all the blood gone past?

Not that it may matter to anyone else, but its important to me: My brother departed for the West Coast yesterday morning. In a way it’s a good thing because he’s headed out there to try and find work because there is nothing around here that pays anything worth talking about. The fact that this has always been a rampant problem for Maine aside its especially aggravated by the current state of both jobs overall and the economy. But having him leave had another effect (besides depressing me). It made me realize: I’d arrived at this moment before.

For those of you who aren’t especially knowledgeable about cultural anthropology (and I really only remember enough to explain this next part), anthropologists classify only two cultures into what is known colloquially as the “nuclear” unit: the Inuit people and us. Now many of course will mistake the term “nuclear” as having something to do with fission reactors, the atomic bomb and the dawn of that particular age. And part of that may be appropriate, because I’m almost sure it entered into the nomenclature during this period. But that doesn’t of course begin to explain why it ended up as a descriptor for the Inuit. That’s because its real meaning is derived from the term “nucleus.” Or, in other words, the core elements of a family. It means roughly the same thing in both cultures to which anthropologists apply it. The base familial parts: mother, father and children are able to function as an autonomous and culturally accepted whole, just as many American families do. The trait developed of course as a modus for survival in harsh living conditions where concepts of extended family living arrangements would hinder the mobility necessary for the family to function. Except in the case of the Inuit they still maintain extensive contact with family members outside of the nuclear whole. Americans (and perhaps many contemporary cultures) have aggravated the nucleus concept by breaking it apart even further.

Now we have single mothers and father and in the case of examples like my brother: immediate family members living great distances apart and minimal social interaction with the rest. It is a pretty empty existence we’ve built for ourselves and not simply because we lack a cultural narrative to describe clearly many of these new elements that have come into play. But one thing is certain: the nature of the economic monster we’ve created is largely responsible for the break down of the inherent social fabric enjoyed by every other culture on the face of this planet. For it is really only in our own unique American brand of economic cultural demands that we find these sorts of things transpiring. Which of course brings me back to some of the reading we did for last class.

Now I know I discussed this somewhat out of context during the class time, but I think I’ve been able-since my brother’s departure- to reexamine the intent of the particular portion I brought up. When Lipsitz suggests: We need to learn from people and cultures that have been forced to make themselves as mobile, flexible, and fluid as transnational capital, yet still capable of drawing upon separate histories, principles, and values. Was what we have fashioned our culture into the very thing to which he might have been alluding. Except that as a national identity is concerned we really only encounter this sort of diaspora in lower classes. They are the only ones who must reinvent themselves and that comes about because they are seen quite literally by the wealthy and powerful as transnational capital, specifically in the form of the labor which they can perform.

Now obviously, within the context of the article what Lipsitz is arguing for is the reinvention of our idea of self: the mythology of American identity in order to include not only the myriad of new stories which cry out for inclusion but also for the simple sake of adaptation. But these adaptations (and yes, even these inclusions) come at a steep price. There is no larger cultural story to explain them. And indeed such stories take some time in order to come about. Such as the cultural narrative about blacks which took 400 years to change in order for the citizens of our nation to be able to elect a black man to the highest office we have to offer. How much more will it take for our personal views to change in order to elect a woman (and no we have not come as far as one would think- just look at the way we attacked and what we expected from both Clinton and Palin in this last election)?

Right now the myth of American identity is being manipulated through corporate branding and the ideas the wealthy and powerful have about what we should be. Part of this is good. A mutable nature allows for rapid progress. As we saw with the win that surprised so many this last November. But it also allows for regression entirely on the whim of others. As we saw with the state of fear we found ourselves immersed within over the course of the last eight years thanks by in large to the propaganda machine of the previous administration. If we are to stand against this sort of thing in the future it will only be through greater definition of self. The longer we wait to define ourselves, the greater the risk that someone else will define us instead. The American identity should not be encapsulated by something so crass as a brand.

The idea of class as a force for inequality in the world is a thing that absolutely enrages me on some level. Maybe its the fact that I’ve been one of the statistical “working poor” described in Chasin’s book my whole life, never making more than $10.20 per hour no matter how hard I’ve worked at some shitty job. (Yes, I’m going to be writing A LOT of swears in this one, scuse- this topic really pisses me off) Seeing the statistics which surround this everyday abuse most of America suffers according to statistics doesn’t really make me seethe any less. What I can tell you is that laissez-faire capitalism is a major part of my problem. The free market breeds the refuse of humanity, and the sons and daughters of the wealthy are monsters who view monetary gain as a form of morality (if they have more, they are better, more right with god, whatever..). I had a young woman (probably in high school, though perhaps in college) come into a retail business in a wealthy section of Maine (West Falmouth), in which I was employed, and say out loud, as if to the air (I guess I was supposed to agree with her or something): fucking homeless. And that pretty much sums up six years of dealing with these people.

While I have struggled to pay rent in the area of Sand Hill, Augusta, ME. These people take trips to foreign countries for spring break and annoy Japanese working class (http://worldblog.msnbc.msn.com/archive/2009/01/22/1756719.aspx?gt1=43001). I suppose I should thank them for being in the vanguard, should I ever want to visit a Tokyo fish market. And for anyone that thinks the people described licking the fish weren’t American, go and talk to professor Olaf Rankis about his experiences working with the federal government trying to educate Americans about other cultures and how to behave when conducting business in them. Make sure to ask him how much money gets lost each year because of stupid shit like this.

Many of the statistics on the things described in Chasin’s text I’ve heard before now, but I’ve never seen quite so much of this sort of data in a single news article, and not so recent either. It’s depressing to see, and what annoys me further is the little fun facts regarding how the even some of the wealthy have picked up that unbridled greed is bad for the market overall. Capitalism is a good system. The free market may even actually work given the opportunity (though Ayn Rand’s suggestion of a separation of government and economics may be the only way this could happen- that’s right- no lobbyists, no business interests AT ALL in Washington. Fuck em! It’s the FREE MARKET baby! Governments should only exist to protect the rights of the individual! To hell with corporations! Some parts of objectivism really appeal to me, though only when you make them absolutes). But what we currently have, or rather had under the Bush administration (or everything since the 1970s, yes- Reagan was to blame for this, and yes I’m glad he’s dead, but his policies to benefit the wealthy and screw the poor are alive and well) is not capitalism. And it certainly is not the free market, though the Kato Institute would likely agree with me strangely.

And then there’s this little beauty:
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:GM_-_Countries_by_Economic_Freedom_Index.png)

Now if you take a look at that map what it shows is an assessment by the Fraser Institute (a conservative think tank out of Canada, if you care) of the market freedoms enjoyed in countries around the world. Now I know as Americans, we have a little trouble with maps, but take a closer look. The cooler the color, the better the market freedoms in the country. Let’s see: Venezuela, Iran, China, Cuba, Ukraine, North Korea and Zimbabwe seem to be hot spots of inactivity. But wait! Most of these people (except for Zimbabwe-remember nobody cares about Africa after all- in statistical terms this is called an outlier- or politically something we ignore) are also our “enemies”... Could it be the way that the United States classifies an enemy is because they won’t trade freely with us? (or take our shit) My, my- that doesn’t sound like objectivism- now does it?

In a free market capitalist system, things should go up and other things should go down. Realize- some free market purists have been arguing just this when they say to let GM and the others fail. As well we should. Though in my opinion this would be to punish them for asking for taxpayer monies after killing Flint, MI (see Roger and Me, the visuals of Flint will remind you of news reports from a few months ago when the foreclosures really picked up) and the outsourcing of American jobs. But as you see, as Chasin’s text alludes to, we’ve had several moments of economic downturn since the 1940s. And yet corporate wages and tax relief have continued to pile higher while the wages of the American taxpayer have been getting flushed along with union protections (a democratic socialist concept like they have over in Britain- where it has not failed: see The Labour Party movement). That is not free market capitalism, hell it isn’t even a meritocracy when you consider that over half the Yalies and Harvard good ‘ol boys are made up of the unqualified children of alumni rather than deserving applicants. This is elitism, made fat on greed through half a century of deceptive practice. If the free market worked we wouldn’t be seeing these discrepancies it labor data, because any idiot knows the more poor people you have in the world, the less they can buy. Poverty kills market forces. So the next time some conservative attempts to accost you on the street, or at a cafe, or in a library, or wherever- and extols the virtues of a free market system. Tell him we don’t really have one and make sure to explain why. Then punch him in the head and tell him its from me.

The next several posts are from work I did in my American Studies class where we blogged, reacted or ranted about things we were reading. The topics include discussions on: the nature of American Studies, historical revision, racism and other forms of discrimination, the military industrial complex and the prison industrial complex, popular culture, 9-11, education, state violence and social movements. The title for each post is in the subject line.

"I have a friend who recently completed a Master’s in History, so in a way I’ve had a dialogue about this idea of historical revisions on at least a couple of previous occasions. Needless to say, this wasn’t the first time I’d seen someone double take a piece of history, or a historical personage, in a way that made me a bit ill. And don’t get me wrong, its not that I haven’t heard these things about Jefferson before, any school kid with a decent grade school education understands the irony that Jefferson, for all his Lockean ideals, owned slaves. What the video of course abbreviates is the other elements inherent in that. How he taught his slaves to read and write (not a common practice-if it was practiced at all); may have had an extended affair with one of them (okay this isn’t necessarily a good thing given the position his would be love was in, but it is something); and that all of them were freed upon his death (not that this meant much during the course of their lives- being freed in a country where they would have enjoyed no rights under the documents drafted by their former master). But these facets were as much a part of Jefferson as that awful cataloging of Virginia’s slave population and his views on them laid out so clearly.

History is more complex than a mere second look. Though we treat it as a narrative in order to relay the moments of significance to the next generation, it is still a narrative: a work of fiction. The truth is the economy and the time in which he lived, the political ideologies to which he dearly clung, would have necessitated such an awful act. And yet we can scarce begin to understand the complexities of this moment through hindsight. It is not even close to 20/20. We clarify history through removal of things. And just as the removal of Jefferson’s passage on blacks and the 3/5ths law in the Constitution he helped pen from the collection of facts school children come into contact with might be used to alter the truth. So to does their re-inclusion when we omit things like the fact that John and Abigail Adams wrote letters back and forth as Jefferson was working about how the term “all men are created equal” should mean the more enlightened idea both John Locke and our contemporary views allow for. They agreed blacks, Indians and women should be included in that definition. But Adams also understood the politics of the moment and knew they would need the vote of every colony just to form the nation they were seeking to form. But of course these were people from a northern colony. They had the luxury, without an economy based upon slavery, of thinking in this way.
Still other things come into question when we look at Jefferson, a brilliant man in his own right. Who stood up to the Calvinists when they wrote letters insisting he tie his new nation a little closer to faith. He fought even in those early days for something we would have found intolerable now and he might have found far less backing for in his time. The first slaves that fueled the southern economy weren’t actually slaves, but indentured servants who could (provided of course they lived long enough) buy there way out of the contract they were in. Some of these indentured servants were of course black and some of these succeeded in buying their way out of the contract they signed on for. What would you say if I told you that these men and women turned around and began to farm themselves, acquiring for the task indentured servants: the majority of these were of course white. So there was a point in American history where blacks could have been considered to own whites.

Not something most people are aware of and though it doesn’t change 400 years of horrors by any stretch, it qualifies as a “before” moment classified in the video. That is to say, before Jefferson wrote his book on Virginia where blacks were reduced to property. From the prerogative of the video he is the one who started all this (I think it notes that this is the first time such a description appeared in print) and the weight of history is rested on his shoulders for this act in the revisionist narrative we see in the video. The segregationist politician George Wallace reversed his stance later in life, but some of us will remember that he barred the door of an Alabama school from young black students and others of us will remember that he was shot and crippled for life, without ever understanding why. This is part of the fiction in the narrative of history. It is not the decision of some lone figure that damns or saves the world, no matter what the historians would tell us. It is, as Tolstoy suggested, the will of a people that shapes the course of history. It is us. We are all to blame and to be congratulated."

Date:	2008-04-27 08:27
Subject:
Security:	Public
Mood:	cheerful
Music:	High by James Blunt

See? I told you I'd finish it someday! Of course I had to make it into a homework assignment in order to complete it. My teacher was talking just a few days ago about what to do in prep for an MFA program and the thing he was pretty insistent about was: don't do work for an MFA that you don't want to do on the other side of the program. In other words, stop doing assignments and then going home and doing your own work. Make your own work the assignments. So that's what I did.

Date:	2008-03-02 15:19
Subject:	Promo Materials
Security:	Public
Mood:	busy as fuck
Music:	none

These are the promotional pieces I did for an event I organize every semester on my campus called "Expressions". Because the school is a commuter campus- no dorms- it can be extremely difficult to organize these "student participation" kinds of events. Its a challenge to get people motivated when they are all working jobs, taking care of kids and trying to get their careers started. Rough life for me. I'd rather be a pirate.

Date:	2008-02-20 17:38
Subject:	Graduation Card Design
Security:	Public
Mood:	chipper
Music:	A Sort of Homecoming by U2 "The Unforgetable Fire"

So some of my class will be graduating soon enough (though myself without them) and I offered to do a postcard design for their gallery show. I'm in the show as well, but I won't graduate this year because of my minor. This is the initial design for the front of the card. I was supposed to have had a collaborator and like so many group projects over the last year that didn't happen. Luckily we had talked briefly and a third classmate had nodded and grunted in approval for the initial idea which I have fleshed out here:

The teacher in charge of coordinating the gallery space with students has yet to get back to me regarding any of my emails, but then its vacation. Its vacation and yet again I have work to do.

Date:	2008-02-20 16:51
Subject:	The Myth of Identity
Security:	Public
Mood:	complacent
Music:	40 by U2, "War"

Been meaning to post this for a while. It's big though (meaning higher quality) so it may take a while to get up there. Just be patient, or check out its actual web address:



Or right click and hit 'save as' to download the short film: The Myth of Identity

Enjoy.

Date:	2008-02-09 13:03
Subject:	Fire in the Belly
Security:	Public
Mood:	Zen
Music:	Alabama 3

Something to ease the tension. I did a drawing of an old character of mine. The actual sketch i much more complex. I'll post it when I'm finished. It surprises me just how much better I've gotten with Photoshop and with anatomy sometimes.

Date:	2008-02-07 21:48
Subject:	The Warming
Security:	Public
Mood:	PISSED

I kind of need some help here. A while back I had a gallery show and these jerks took my press release and used it as a way to misinform the general public about global warming. I responded (because people are being killed by these weather patterns and their ignorance annoys me) and now its turned in to a gang up on Ted flame war. I've been holding my own, but could use a little support. You can post anonymously on the site in question and I do not recommend you leave any personal info on this site no matter how much you want these buttheads to contact you and discuss it over pistols at dawn . Send this to your friends. Please get them involved. Its this kind of stupidity in America we've been fighting against for the last 8 years. These people represent the worst of what makes up our country in a lot of ways. I found links on this Topix site discussing why white pride groups weren't racist. It's time we show them we're the ants, and what ants can do when they gather in numbers. Pass this on to your friends please!

Check out the conflict so far at:

http://www.topix.com/forum/news/global-warming/T0UU01G00N7GGKME2

Date:	2007-02-27 05:36
Subject:	My web page is jam packed with little fishies!
Security:	Public
Mood:	calm
Music:	silence