Yet Another Woke Rally

Liberals are yet again up in arms as Missoula's trangender representative gets banished from the legislature. Zephyr voiced her outrage over anti- "gender affirming care" bills moving through the State House, what she naively calls "the People's House". Like they did when Roe v Wade was overturned or when George Floyd was murdered or any number of culture battles erupted, crowds will gather at the courthouse, signs will be waved, fiery speeches given. Like the Tennessee Three gun control advocates, or the Defund Police campaign, nothing substantive will come of these passionate efforts but there will be lots of rhetoric about our "endangered democracy" and representing the voice of The People. Like Jimmy Stewart in the movie Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. Zephyr is a true believer that if you speak truth to power and express the "will of the people" with passionate conviction, the arc will point towards justice. So precious and so absurd. She claims to represent 11,000 constituents ( a dubious assertion) but the fact is it is still a teensy tiny minority. The majority spoke and Zephyr (and Missoula liberals) lost. In a capitalist democracy the rules on decorum say you accept the majority opinion, even when you don't like it. That's what Democrats would expect Republicans to do if the roles were reversed. It's one of the reasons liberals hate Trump, his total disregard for decorum. If you want to play the game, and it is just a spectacular game, then you must play by the rules. But if you want to become a media sensation and get your fifteen minutes of fame, you can invade the sacred chambers and hold a loud protest and get on MSNBC. Get an article in the NY Times. Fire up a crowd at a rally. Whatever. What is to be done? Vote for Biden. Vote for Tester. Vote for Zephyr. Sign a petition. Write a letter to the editor. Save our "democracy".I wait patiently for the fundraising letters to arrive. Money needed to get Zephyr re-elected. And John Tester. Biden. Help us speak mre truth to power so power can tell us to fuck off.

The Perfect Capitalist Organization

The Wagner Group is starting to make a real name for itself. Combining all the elements of capitalist success; violence, public relations and crisis exploitation, it is finding fertile ground in what is called "the periphery", those countries used as resource colonies by The West. Wagner is the Mafia 2.0., a super-cartel, making money the old-fashioned way, with intimidation and corruption. This is the logical endpoint of capitalism, stripped of its veneer of "democracy". A mask we in the "advanced economies" cling to as though our souls depended on it. We settle our issues by voting while the backward, savage "Third World" is filled with killing fields. Of course it is thanks to all that blood that cheap minerals and calories keep coming to our shores, filling our market shelves and maintaining our Christian "way of life". And "groups" like Wagner make it all happen. With unlimited funding for paramilitaries and social media networks, they are a post-post-modern supplement to the old imperialism. Those supply chains stay open without getting all that blood on your hands. Just contract it out to "specialists". The "free market" has always required enforcement to keep wealth flowing upwards and for a certain price, Wagner is happy to oblige.

Non-reformist Reforms

Author David Camfield, whose latest book is Future on Fire: Capitalism and the Politics of Climate Change, is one of the few who openly shares my view of "non-reformist reforms". Many of those in activist circles perform ridiculous contortions trying to decide what these are in actuallity. Camfield says: "The way that I think about it is that more important than the demands themselves are the methods of action that people engage in order to achieve them. I guess this brings up the idea that people often talk about, of non-reformist reforms. And I’m skeptical that such a thing exists. We can assess the different reform demands brought forward, but I don’t think there’s any reform that is inherently non-reformist. I don’t think that’s a problem. It was Rosa Luxemburg who said that the social revolution is the goal and the struggle for reforms is the means to that end. That’s the way I think about it. The question really is: What can we do that will try to get large numbers of people into motion around demands?" As he points out, every reform runs into the problem of legitimizing the system and diffusing the rage that prompts direct action. If your demand is radical ( nationalize fossil fuel industry) but you wish to achieve it by petitioning the government or voting harder, you are sending the message that capitalist "democracy" works just fine. No need for revolution. Just lobby those in power. This disconnect only serves to nuetralize movements seeking total system overhaul. I'm going to read Camfield's book and see what other insights he may have but this is a good start.

Sleepyville

Who is awake and who is dreaming? And how would you know? This ancient philosophical conundrum is playing out in real time on our public stage in what are called the “culture wars”. In the conservative lexicon, those who “wake” from the sleep of traditional white, Christian, “American” values/culture are maligned as elite “social justice warriors”, expressing their condescending contempt for the common man by forcing their version of equality on them. In this telling, to be progressive is to abandon all standards and conventions and to believe those still committed to tradition to be the ones asleep. Paradoxically, the Q Anon movement believes itself awakened from the nightmare of deep-state propaganda. “It’s time to wake up”, says the mysterious Q. They believe those entrenched in Establishment media are the sleeping, manipulated subjects. Each group believes others are caught in a dream, psychologically captured by those in power. In other words, you need to be awake, just not woke. In the conservative mind, dissolving traditional gender identification and roles is the Trojan Horse, the opening through which the traditional family can be undermined and destroyed. If boys and girls are not male and female, are not he and she, then we have entered the relativistic post-modern hell where there can be no truth, no certainties. To be “woke” is to abandon right and wrong, reason and rationality. It is to condemn and reject the history of Christian morality in favor of libertine tolerance for any and all behavior. It is to condone and promote the breakdown of society. Of course, if you are already “awake” to the vast government conspiracy as imagined by Q, the breakdown has already been achieved, our freedoms curtailed, and stability an illusion. It is disruption that is required to break the sheeple from their “mind forged manacles”. If you get beyond culture war wokeness, you see the machinations of fossil capital as it deems climate awareness a form of wokeness. If they can bundle the Paris Accords in with trigger warnings and trans people playing sports, their job becomes much easier. A prime directive of capitalism is to destroy all foundations. As Marx wrote: “All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned…” This is not a comfortable place. Marx envisioned this tension resolving itself as: “ man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real condition of life and his relations with his kind.” Unfortunately, the Old Man may have overestimated man’s “sober senses”. He too believed in rational man. But if you wake into the dream or wake and find you are an insect dreaming you were a human….

Power to the People or Scream into the Void?

It is more than a little embarrasing to watch liberals rally around the two Justins in Tennessee, especially Black liberals. If in their minds these two Representatives believe they are the second coming of MLK and Stokely Carmichael, here to restore Democracy to a broken land, they are in for a rude awakening. The high-flying rhetoric and raised fists may ignite romantic devotion in those nostalgic for the heady days of Black Power, but their appeals to government of,by and for the People will fall on deaf ears. Or more likely, incite yet more white backlash. Yes, they gave the NYTimes something to write about other than Donald Trump, and yes they have a future on the lecture circuit. Liberals will gather to hear them explain why Black Lives Matter and why assault weapons kill people and why prisons should be abolished but those liberals will just go back to their mortgaged houses and bullshit jobs and try to vote harder next time. Every liberal is wailing about our "broken democracy". Gerrymandering. Apathy. Whatever. Maybe they should spend more on campaign ads next cycle! Yeah. And find better candidates! Yeah. This is what a typical believer told a reporter: “There has been this whirlwind of stress,” she said. “A lot of people are feeling like they have their hands tied. There is a sense of helplessness and frustration.” She said it was important to force the legislature to listen. “It makes you feel a little less alone and a little less like you are screaming into the void to have someone actively take notice and stand with you." The first thing is to recognize that you ARE sceaming into the void. Then you have to figure out why. If what you have been doing for the last sixty years hasn't been working you may want to re-examine your theory of change. Or just go on the Bill Maher show and host Saturday Night Live.

Both

Actually, both guns and people kill people. I know Americans demand either or but generally we are talking about people with guns. This is not a problem that can be solved in the current system. Which makes the casket industry a great investment. Conservatives have a logic problem when it comes to the self-defense argument. They like the idea of shooting burglers or migrants cutting across their property, but what they really like, why the AR is so popular, is the idea of defending themselves from a tyrannical government. But they love the police and the military, the armed wing of the government. Will they shoot the cop coming to foreclose on their property? why are there so many mentally ill people? Obama. or Hillary.or Bengazi. or some Senator said that because we let boys decide to be girls (and visa versa) the confusion makes for shooters.Something like that.Let's pray. Anyway, an Israeli politician wants to pass a bill making it ok to slaughter a lamb on the Temple Mount during Passover. Seems reasonable, from a biblical perspective. Probably will require some AR 15's however. What else? Kind of fascinated by this idea of California's record snowpack flooding the Central Vallley. Refilling a massive lake they tried to engineer away. At the same time the salmon run has been totally decimated by the dry years (and industrial capitalism, of course). Also, I saw where an Italian central banker is saying a way to slow inflation is to limit profit. Huh.

Anti-Trump Industry

Sitting on a friend's coffee table were three, large, hardback books, all of whose subject matter was Donald Trump. It seeems there is a whole industry springing up to feed the appetite of the rabid anti-Trumpistas of both the left and the right. And I suppose if all I cared about was book sales I could get in on the craze, because the genre requires no special talent or intellectual accuity whatsoever. The three books were "I Alone can Fix It" by a couple of political reporters, "Betrayal" by some other guy and "Everything Trump Touches Dies" by political operative Rick Wilson. What I am about to write is not a review because there is no way I could read these things. The most I could accomplish was a scan of the jackets and a few pages of the intro. The point I wish to make is that the fanatical fixation on the person of Trump, by both progressives and conservatives, is misdirected. Make no mistake, I think the man is an abomination. But he is also a reflection of a society, and none of these authors want to talk about the deep structural issues that brought Trump into being. They can avoid Trumpism by their sensational focus on a person. It is pathetically simplistic to frame Trump as an abberation from a just, rational norm. My friends on whose table the books sat think of themselves as good, tolerant liberals who wish to preserve the capitalist "democracy" which helped them become fabulously rich. Trump and Trumpism threaten that imaginary country where politicians represent their constituency, where we have government of, by, and for the people and voting is your most precious right. Respect for institutions, for norms of decency, for all the things Trump turned into the butt of his jokes, this is what outrages the defenders of the status quo. The worst of these is Rick Wilson. His umbrage stems from the fact that Trump subverted his beloved conservatism. Rick is a political operative hack, writes attack pieces and specializes in negative campaigning for the worst of the beltway slime. But he is all moral outrage when it comes to The Donald and those conservatives who sold their soul to support him. As if these cynical ghouls had a soul to start with. I'm sure there are a dozen more Never Trump books on the shelves or being written along with the usual MSNBC schlock. All of it is a diversion from the real issues facing not just the USA, but so-called liberal capitalist democracies everywhere.