Bernie, Martin, Malcolm, & Booker T.

Recently Bernie Sanders said in an interview, “I am not a great fan of being rude and disturbing things.”  I immediately thought of Martin Luther King saying, “I think that we’ve got to see that a riot is the language of the unheard.”

In the Kansas Democratic primary this year, Bernie Sanders backed Brent Welder over the winner, Sharice Davids, a member of the Ho-Chunk Nation.  In terms of political ideology, it made sense because Welder’s expressed positions line up more with Bernie’s than did those of Davids.  So, fair enough.  Should Davids win, she will be be the first, or one of the first along with Deb Haaland, Native American women in Congress as well as being the first out lesbian.

In New York primaries, however, after personally endorsing Zephyr Teachout for attorney general and Jumaane Williams for lieutenant governor, Bernie failed to to do the same for progressive candidate for governor Cynthia Nixon against a clearly establishment center-right candidate who leans heavily toward the right and opposes most of Bernie’s positions.  This in spite of the fact that Our Revolution, the organization he created after Clinton stole the primary from him in 2016, fully endorsed Nixon.  One wonders what Nixon and Davids have in common that rendered them not worthy in his eyes of a Bernie endorsement.

Perhaps Bernie was following the lead of the New York Times, which also endorsed Teachout and Williams but gave its support to Cuomo, which Bernie’s lack of strong verbal support for Nixon did by default.

I’ve cited this quote before, with slight alteration, from Martin Luther King’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail”:  ‘I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen's Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to “order” than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: “I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action”; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man's freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a “more convenient season”.  Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection.’

Recently I came across a similar quote from Malik Shabazz, the former Malcolm X: “The liberal elements of whites are those who have perfected the art of selling themselves to the Negro as a friend of the Negro.  Getting sympathy of the Negro, getting the allegiance of the Negro, and getting the mind of the Negro.  Then the Negro sides with the white liberal, and the white liberal uses the Negro against the white conservative.  So that anything the Negro does is never for his own good, never for his own advancement, never for his own progress.  He’s a pawn in the hands of the white liberal.  The worst enemy that the Negro has is this white man that runs around here drooling at the mouth professing to live Negros, and calling himself a liberal, and it is following these white liberals that has perpetuated problems that Negros have.”

Both of these statements, incidentally, the one from Dr. King and the one from Minister Shabazz, were written in the same year, 1963.

Jim Crow in America, the system of official racialized apartheid in the American South, started in various forms in the 1870s.  What is not widely known is that there was tremendous resistance among the Afro-American population and their white allies to varying degrees across the South.

However, any hope of a united resistance was crushed by two setbacks in the mid-1890s.  The Plessy v. Ferguson case (1896) in the U.S. Supreme Court that established the doctrine of  “separate but equal” was the second of these, but the first came at the hands of one of their own.

At the international exposition in 1895, Booker T. Washington, head of the Tuskegee Institute and a founder of the National Negro Business League, delivered a speech commonly known as the Atlanta Compromise.  Speaking not only for himself but for Afro-Americans across the South, Washington promised that in return for free basic education, limited to vocational training with no liberal arts teaching, Afro-Americans would not challenge Jim Crow, would not fight the growing disenfrachisement of freedmen and their descendants, and would not retaliate against racist behavior.  This speech coincided with the peak of lynchings of Afro-Americans.

The Atlanta Compromise hung like poisonous smog over the USA for the next 70 years.  Black business leaders and reverends loved it because it allowed them to feel morally upright while betraying their people in order to hold onto their single talent.  White liberals and moderates loved it even more, and showered Washington with money and praise.  Indeed, the speech is what made Booker T. a national celebrity.  A celebrity who was a scalawag, a collaborator.

To give him due credit, he really did strive to uplift Afro-Americans through education, but his capitulation all but killed active resistance to white racism against blacks for decades and surrendered the pride in themselves of Afro-Americans throughout the country until the Civil Rights Movement.  To cite one example, in 1905, there were two major attempts in the cities of Chattanooga and Memphis to launch boycotts of the segregated streetcars.

The moniker Uncle Tom is often used to refer to an Afro-American who capitulates to white racism, either to ingratiate himself with them or to preserve personal gain, but this is a misnomer, because the Uncle Tom in Harriet Tubman’s book was a stand-up guy who was beaten to death for refusing to whip another slave.  For that, the character, even if fictional, should be honored rather than slurred.  All those who refuse to follow orders that are immoral and/or illegal or go along with the crowd headed in the wrong direction should be proud to be called an Uncle Tom.

I propose that as an insult for blacks who collaborate with or capitulate to white racism Uncle Tom be replaced with Booker T.  We should use the same term for anyone who calls themselves a practical, pragmatic, or pro-business progressive to justify their betrayal of working and poor people in the name of grasping their own single talent.

On a related note, we should stop dignifying white racism and xenophobia with the term “white nationalism”.  There is no such fucking thing as a “white nation”, so there is nothing for white xenophobic racist bigots to defend.  Calling them nationalists puts them in the same category as those pushing for independence in Catalonia or the Scottish Nationalist Party.  Call them what they are, white bigots, white racists, white supremacists.

I’ve said several times the past few weeks in comments and posts on Facebook that the people in the global South fleeing war, persecution, famine, criminal gangs, and climate disaster to seek refuge or asylum in the more stable countries of the global North should not be called “migrants” but “refugees”.  Many people on the Left began using the term “migrants” after the Right kept calling them “illegal aliens” or simply “illegals”.  The term “migrants” is actually short for what the Right used to accuse this class of people being, “economic migrants”, when those on the Left called them “refugees”.  By sleight-of-hand, the Right has thus tricked the Left into adopting its language and playing by its rules, and I think it’s way the fuck past time for that to stop.

The EU, Neoliberalism, Obama, and the Clintons

The prospect that the European Union—and the UK (or any other country for that matter) staying in it, two separate issues, mind you—is a good thing is just as valid as the hypothesis that Hillary Clinton was a good choice for POTUS because she wasn’t Trump.  A case in point is the very recent reversal of Italy’s 5-Star Movement on the EU’s deficit limit of 3% of a member state’s GDP from opposition to acceptance. 

When I posted an article about that to Facebook, I remarked, “In other words, ‘we accept the limitations and strictures and deficits of neoliberal socioeconomic anti-humanism, thereby surrendering our principles and claim to status as anti-establishment’, as well as revealing the party’s anti-establishment stance to be nothing more than a pose adopted to become the establishment.  Like the slaves who dream of becoming the masters rather than of freedom for themselves, much less for the people they supposedly serve.

During the Great Depression, the governments of most of the world used increased budget spending to deliver their people out of the ruins created by the 1% of that time, and little resembling such an effort has taken place to cure the Great Recession.  Instead, we the people of the world have only been inflicted with more and more austerity, so that the rich get richer while we all get poorer.  I’m so glad the world’s stock markets are doing so well, but as Stieg Larsson noted, the stock market has fuck all to do with the economy.  Therefore, this 3% limit accepted by the 5-Star Movement in Italy is yet another instance proving that the EU as an organization is nothing more than a shithole operating for the benefit of the wealthy few.

The leaders of our countries treat social welfare benefits not as if they were created to serve the needs of the people who receive them but as if they were created to enable their corporate sponsors to pay their employees less.  Workfare, means testing, work requirements, and other such demeaning, humiliating ways of mistreating people in need are not about lifting people up but grinding them down, making them feel helpless, weakening their will to fight back, make them feel as if their poverty is their own fault rather than the fact that the few at the top horde to themselves resources far beyond what they need.  Mind you, many of these abuses did not originate with the Tories in the UK or the Republicans in America, many were first instituted in the USA by New Democrat Bill Clinton and in the UK by New Labourite Tony Blair. 

Those last two groups, Clinton’s New Democrats and Blair’s New Labour, are as fucking useless as the reformists in the Islamic Republic of Iran and the CHP in what is becoming the Islamic Republic of Turkey.  As opposition, Turkey’s CHP is to Erdogan and the AKP and Iran’s reformists are to Khamenei and the Revolutionary Guard are slaves who want only to become masters, just like the New Dems and New Labs are to their counterparts to whom they want to do nothing more than replace.

The Obama presidency was such a fucking waste of potential and a betrayal of hope, as great a betrayal, in fact, as that perpetrated by his successor upon his own supporters.  When he came into office as POTUS, Obama had a supermajority in Congress.  He could have passed single-payer healthcare that included price controls on drugs, he could have passed welfare changes that were actual reforms rather than deforms, he could have enacted changes beneficial to Afro-Americans, but he did none of those things.  He did not do those things, because he did not really want to do any of them, which anyone paying attention would have noticed long before the 2008 primary.  Like too many of his fellow Dems, the greed of the few was and still is more important to the one who promised hope and change than the needs of the many.

Obama revealed his true colors soon after his inauguration in March 2009, behind closed doors away from public view, mind you, when he met with the lords of Wall Street on the then recent crash and Great Recession which began then and is still continuing, at least for most people.  “My administration is the only thing between you and the pitchforks,” he told them.  “You guys have an acute public-relations problem that’s turning into a political problem.  And I want to help.  I’m not out there to go after you.  I’m protecting you.”  And you have to admit that he that on that, at least, he was good at his word, else he would not be getting $400,000 for a one hour speech to the 1%.

Recently, Donald Trump issued an executive order allowing states to to institute work requirements for people receiving Medicaid.  As originally structured, Medicaid covered only those whose income was below a certain level and were pregnant women, children and young adults up to age 21, parents or caregivers of those children, women in need of breast or cervical cancer treament, Supplemental Security Income beneficiaries, and those who have received an SSI check and Social Security check in the same month at least once since April 1977. 

One of the undeniably good things Obamacare did was to expand those eligible for Medicaid beyond that narrow scope to all persons with income below 133% of the poverty line.  Unfortunately, states with mean, stingy legislatures like that of my own successfully sued in the U.S. Supreme Court to allow states to opt out of that, which the Republican-controlled General Assembly of the State of Tennessee promptly did, with the Republican governor’s signature.

Despite the fact that the General Assembly rejected Medicaid expansion, leaving those eligible to that limited list above, Republican Speaker of the Tennessee House Beth Harwell, who is a candidate for governor in the next election, almost immediately introduced a bill to put that new indignity which Trump inflicted on the poor into effect.

Unlike the thankfully failed repeal of Obamacare at the national level, this change does effect me directly, or at least would if our state’s Republican-controlled legislature had not shitcanned the Medicaid expansion authorized by Obamacare.  Because of that, at 54 years old, I have not been to a doctor in nearly ten years.  However, it does or at least could effect those like me.  So I will fight back, even if it means I have to go on hunger strike if Speaker Harwell’s latest cruelty is passed.  Poor and working people, people like me, are worth dying for, and so is our dignity.

Afro-Americans voting for a Clinton are like working-class whites voting for Trump.  You get the betrayal you voted for.  The white liberal dog-whistle racism that first became acceptable under the Clintons is what has allowed Trump-style racism to flourish.

If the Rapture Were Real

If the eschatological fantasies of Christian evangelicals were true and the Rapture which they for which they hope so they can go to heaven without the transition of death out of their fear and lack of faith, not accepting that they have to die in order to live, that nirvana is samsara, and that damnation comes before salvation actually came, I’d have to say, Sorry, Jesus, my friend, but if you take all of these, there will be no one to suffer with those left behind, and besides, I’d rather laugh with the righteous sinners than sing with the sanctimonious saints.  I want to #carelikeademon and #fightlikethedevil. 

Jesus, looking at me, winked with a smile, and told me that removing all of these smug, self-righteous, priggish little shits who cling in vain to their surety and their wealth for security as both weapon and shield against the Other from the backs of those upon whom they look down was succour for the suffering of their victims.  Fuck ‘em if they can’t take a joke, he said behind his red mask as he took them away to the sanctuary of a solitary confinement where they will be just as safe from all that they fear and loathe as were the guests in Prince Prospero’s abbey.  If they miss the punchline, he concluded, fuck them all.

Suddenly, Jesus stopped and turned back, saying, And Another Thing...since Make America Gay Again and #LuciferSaved trended on Twitter the same day, 15 June, henceforth world without end let that day be observed as Save Lucifer Day.  Or maybe I should say Save Me, or rather Save Us, Day, since he and I, Lucifer and Jesus, are the same person, melded together in an alloy like white gold, except that in an alloy two separate metals unite to become one while he and I have never been anything but.

A Better Definition of "Proletariat", and the Parable of the Talents

In an interview by Suzi Weissman for Jacobin Radio of David Graeber about his most recent book, Bullshit Jobs, Graeber critiqued what I have always seen as one of the major shortcomings of Marx and Marxism.  That failing is Marx’s restriction of the definition of what constitutes the proletariat to industrial workers and the corresponding definition of what constitutes “work” to physical production of goods.  That definition has sent many a Marxist theoretician into very ludicrous convolutions of logic.  Not only that, but it has served to divide the actual proletariat against itself and lent rhetorical support to capitalism by that very definition.  It also, as Graeber pointed out, contributes to anti-feminism and toxic masculinity.

As I and others have pointed out, the term “proletariat” derives from the name for the Roman lowest class, the proletarii, which owned little or no property, at least not any kind of surplus property.  In Marxist terms, personal property only but no private property, which would in fact in the last two centuries take in most of the so-called middle class.  So, from now on can we just accept that the term proletariat takes in all those people, instead of doing the neoliberal capitalists’ work for them?

The whole idea of “middle-class” is a fiction meant to convince the upper working class house slaves that their  interests lie with the masters rather than with their fellow slaves toiling in the fields, a pretence to which all too many of them cling, like the ungrateful servant.

I’d like to remind everyone that, with the notable exception of its patriarch, the members of the Manson Family, especially the women, came from this fictional middle class.

Keeping in mind my more pragmatic definition of the word proletariat, let me paraphrase one of my favorite passages from Martin Luther King’s writings.

The proletariat’s great stumbling block in its stride toward freedom is not the Americans for Prosperity or the American Legislative Exchange Council, but the so-called middle class, which is more devoted to order than to justice; which prefers the absence of tension to the presence of justice; which constantly says: “I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action”; which paternalistically believes it can set the timetable for other’s freedom; which constantly advises the proletariat to wait for a “more convenient season”.  To which I add, “and in doing so ensures its own destruction”.

I finally figured out the meaning of the Parable of the Talents in the Gospel of Matthew.  A rich man going away gives three servants different amounts of talents—talent being a measure of currency in the first century—the first five, the second three, and the third just one.  The first two invest and profit, the third hides his portion in order not to lose it.  For this, the third has the one talent taken from his and he is cast out.

This parable is certainly not a defence of capitalism, which would not exist for another millennium or fifteen hundred years, depending on whether you date capitalism from the development of the finance system still used by the world’s banks during the Crusades or the sale of the first stocks at the dawn of the so-called Age of Exploration.  The two servants who sell and make a profit in this story are just stick figures. 

The focus of the parable is on the last servant, the one who fears his master will be angry if he loses his portion and therefore buries it.  The story is not about profit.  The story is about the consequences of not acting in defense of our fellow humans in hopes of maintaining that which we have been given rather earned and do not necessarily deserve.  Like the so-called middle class, also known as the house slaves of capitalism or the upper working class, all too often does with respect to the proletariat.

Remember Noami Shulman’s words from Novermber 2016:  “Nice people make the best Nazis.  My mother spent her childhood in Nazi Germany surrounded by nice people who refused to make waves; who looked the other way and focused on happier things than ‘politics’ when things got ugly.  They were lovely, kind people who turned their heads as their neighbors were dragged away.”  Don’t forget to step up, to resist; the life you save may be your own.

Questions and Answers

I heard a line on a TV show recently that made the suggestion that by asking the question, we create the answer.  I don’t remember the context or which show, but when I thought about it, I realized that all often that statement is true.  

We ask a question looking for an answer to fit into our preconceptions, or, if not, we only look for answers within the frame of the question we ask, thus by asking we create, and what we thus create is inevitably self-delusion.  

Because in doing so, in asking a question we think we already know the answer to or only accepting answers that fit into the framework of the question, we are attempting to control, and control is an illusion, and believing we have it is self-delusion.

Our Votes Do Not Belong to You

To the Democratic Party:

In addition to primaries for national elections here in NeverNeverland, many of which have pitted pro- and anti-Trump Republicans against each other on one side and progressive versus neoliberal establishment Democrats on the other, several local and state elections have put Democrat against Republican.  In a special election for the House of Representatives seat in the 12th District of Ohio, the Democratic challengers narrow lost, by a few hundred votes, to the Republican incumbent. 

Quite predictably, Democratic celebrities, outlets, active rank-and-file of the party, and supporters almost immediately began caterwauling about the evil Green Party whose candidate in that race polled about the same number of votes as the difference between the two candidates of the major parties.  That and Russian meddling, with zero evidence of the latter. 

To these, I say, “Listen, you fucking cunts: our votes do not belong to you.  They are not yours by right; do something to fucking earn them.  Grow the hell up and engage in a little self-criticism, because you sound like a bunch of whiny crybabies.  Like the snowflakes that POTUS and his right-wing pundit friends accuse you of being.  Stop putting forth candidates who run after the votes of moderate Republican and former Kasich voters.  

We the people are done with your mewling centrist neoliberal bullshit.  Give us candidates who will support the needs of the many instead of the greed of the few, or we will find someone who will.  Before we have to suffer through the four more years that you staying your course brings; neither we nor the rest of the world can afford it.

On Identity, Part 1

Greetings from your clever commie cunt in Chattanooga, Tennessee, USA, in the Never Never Land where corporations are people, money is speech, and the rights of the few  to excessive wealth, power, and property outweigh the rights of the many to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, author of the blog Notes from the Ninth Circle and group owner-administrator of Terran News on Faceook.  Just call me Chuck.  Or Protest Dad.  Or Mac Mheic Con Raoi, king of Gno, king of Delbhna Tir Dha Locha, king of Muintir Conraoi, king of Baile Mac Conraoi in Conmaicne Mara and overlord of Baile Conraoi in Corco Mruad, Chief of the Name of MacConroy, and primary heir of Tuireann Delbaeth mac Ogma, god of thunder and 6th High King of the Tuatha De Danaan in Ireland.

Okay, maybe not really on that last, as far as anyone knows, but I very well could be.  

I first connected with my Scottish past and ancestry after avidly watching the miniseries Roots in 1977 when I was 13.  My favorite character, and hero, of the miniseries was Chicken George.  It is what first inspired me to search for my own roots. 

Up to that point in my life, I’d always been told by my Anglophile mother that we were English, the Hamiltons that is, and Scotch-Irish in the case of the rest of our families.  Since I knew that families name or are often named for the places they come from, I sat down with our giant atlas and began scouring England for a city, town, village, or hamlet for anything Hamilton.  Disappointed but not too surprised, I happened to glance up the page to Scotland, where the town of Hamilton was properly marked.

I was really, really excited.  Mom resisted the idea that the Hamiltons are not English, but after several Saturday bus trips I later took to do research at the public library, she caved in.  I learned a lot about the House of Hamilton, found out that my Uncle Dick had traced the Stewarts, my dad’s mother’s family, back to the Royal Stuarts of Scotland, and discovered that the Buchanans, Haddens, Olivers, Adams, Hornes, Hawkins, and possibly Martins originated in Scotland.  And so, essentially, I thought of myself as Scottish-American, though the distance in time between me and the mother country in both space and time were quite lengthy.

One day in my sophomore year at uni, I went to see my granddad at the nursing home and experience one of the more disconcerting aspects of dementia.  He thought I was my dad.  But that wasn’t as disconcerting as what he told me next: that my great-grandfather Hamilton was not really my great-grandpa, at least not by blood.  That he, my grandpa, was a bastard, and that his father’s surname was King.  He told me that he had even worked for him at the A&P grocery, but that his da had never acknowleged him.  I later confirmed all this through my mother, who called my aunt after I told her.  Margaret replied that Aunt Lorraine had learned as much from my long-dead Great-grandma Hamilton and told her several months before, she just hadn’t gotten around to letting the rest of us know.

Still kind of grooving on the whole Scottish identity thing, I checked to see if there were any Scottish clans, houses, grains, septs, or families named King.  I was nearly overjoyed to learn that King was one of the pseudonyms adopted by members of Clan Gregor after they were outlawed for being, well, outlaws.

It was not until I returned from the Philippines in the early 1990s is when I began to do actual geneaological work to try and trace the lines back to at least the first illegal immigrant of that line.  Unfortunately, by that time Uncle Dick had died of cancer and no one knew where he kept those records, so either I will have to do all that work over again or just go with what I have.

My great-grandma Hamilton was born Anna Roach, and after a lucky find in an old, old family Bible learned that she was the daughter of Silas Roach Jr. and Alda Rice, both of whose fathers served together during the Civil War in the 10th Tennessee Infantry of the Confederate army, a unit nicknamed the “Sons of Erin”.  That they had subsequently moved to Arkansas Territory together indicates a certain Irish clannishness, making it like that when Anna’s parents moved their family to Indiana, they sought out other Irish-Americans.  Not definite, but likely, even probably. 

That being the case, my biological great-grandpa King was also likely Irish-American, and if that is the case, the most probable home for him and/or his ancestors was the southwest of the region of Connemara, also known as the barony of Ballynahinch, the westermost part of Co. Galway in Ireland.  Why?  Because in the 19th century the members of Muintir Conraoi, the MacConroys of Ballymaconry, almost universally adopted King as the anglicized form of their name after having used McEnry for a couple of centuries.

For a thousand years, the dynasty that became the MacConroys ruled the portion of the Delbhna people in the land known as Ti Dha Locha, or Land of the Two Lakes, also known as Gno, G-N-O.  They were one of eight branches, and the largest, of a larger population known as the Delbhna, who once rule Central Ireland.  They were pushed from their homes in Tir Dha Locha by the O’Flahertys in the 13th century after the latter were kicked out of Magh Seola east of Loch Orbsen.  The main branch went to Ballymaconry in the southwest of the west of what is now Co. Galway, a region known anciently as Connemara and since the 16th century as the barony of Ballynahinch, while the smaller group of the famil went to Ballyconry on the shores of Corco Mruad at the eastern end of Loch Lurgan (or Galway Bay).

The MacConroy was one of the four sea-kings of Connacht, the others being The O’Malley of Tir Umhaille, The O’Dowd of Tir Fiachrach, and The O’Flaherty of Iar Connacht.  Besides trading and smuggling in partnership with the MacTeige O’Briens of the Aran Islands, many of the MacConroys sailed and fought and robbed and reived with the Pirate Queen of Connacht, Grainne Ni Mhaille herself.  Hell, being descended from them is just as good as being descended from Clan Gregor.

Gaelic Ireland is often said to have died with the Flight of the Earls from Ulster in 1607, but in fact, Gaelic Ireland lived on in Gno Mor and Gno Beg (the divisions of Tir Dha Locha under the O’Flahertys) and Connemara (which remained without division) by law until 1625, and after that unofficially until the Cromwellian plantations of Connacht in the 1640s.

The MacConroys were so old school they never adopted medieval coats of arms.  Thus, they probably never adopted the system of primogeniture, sticking with the classic system of election from among the derbhine, or beyond that if there not a sufficient candidate within that small grouping.  So I could very well be The MacConroy after all.

Okay, a lot of that was a massive bunny trail.  But it is relevant.  Once I had started to wrap my head around that, I also started to learn that nearly all my Scottish ancestors, nearly all my ancestors period, in fact, had come to America from Ireland.  Sure, a few were directly from Scotland or England, but the overwhelming majority came from Ireland before landing in the Americas.  Which makes me Irish-American rather than Scottish-American.

Despite the fact that many in Never Never Land use it to mean that their ancestors come from both Scotland and Ireland, the American term Scotch-Irish has a racist origin.  It is one that only came into vogue in the North (of the USA) in the 1840s when the old timer Irish-Americans, largely descended from Irish Protestants and Dissenters, wanted to separate themselves from the pathetic, desparate, starving huddled masses yearning to break free who were coming over from Famine Ireland.  Much later in the 19th century, as Jim Crow began to rise in the American South, whites there began to use the term Scotch-Irish as a euphemism for white. 

In truth, the only Scots-Irish, the more proper form of the term, are descendants of Scots in Ireland.  Like Ian Paisley and Arlene Foster.  Or Gerry Adams and Bobby Sands.  In Ireland, the racist ethnic term corresponding is Ulster Scots.  Because those who call themselves such are Scots-Irish.  The only thing that can validly carry the name Ulster Scots is the dialect of the Scots language spoken there.

As for the origin of my King great-grandpa, true, circumstanial evidence indicates that he was probably Irish-American, but he could well have been Scottish-American.  Hell, he could even be descended from Lithuanian Jews originally named Koenigsburg.

Not were I meant to go when I started writing this, but fuck it, there it is.

Reflections on the Anniversary of Occupy

Watching the science fiction series Sense8 recently, I caught a great line: “Your life is either defined by the system, or by the way you defy the system” (spoken by character Nomi Marks). 

The anniversary of the beginning of the Occupy movement came again this past 17 September (2018), and I think the occasion is appropriate to point out that Occupy was not about occupying physical space so much as it was about changing the conversation in the United States and the world from one based on a passive, if grudging, acceptance of neoliberalism to one based on providing for the needs of the many rather than serving the greed and ambition of the few.

Complaints from the Establishment and its mainstream media about the seeming amorphousness of the Occupy movement included that there were no stated goals; that there were no designated leaders; that the movement did not want to work within the system.  They seemed desperate to find some way to deflect, to undercut, to coopt, to diminish, to reduce the outraged masses to the status of a loyal opposition within the system to serve the capitalist Behemoth and the conformist Leviathin of the global neoliberal order  with the labor of their hearts and minds.

But entering the system in order to defeat it from the inside is a lie, because becoming part of the problem is, well, becoming part of the problem.  Working for change within a corrupt system is self-delusory because that requires acceptance of the very thing one wishes to change.  To attempt to correct injustice while maintaining a status quo is utterly futile.  That’s why I believe that leftists in the UK, and the rest of Europe, who support the EU are like progressives in the USA who supported Hillary Clinton and the Democratic Party establishment.

All too often, people want someone to save them, when they have the power within to save themselves. They somehow believe that their “betters” will take care of them if they obey their rules, and don’t have the self-possessed awareness to realize they have a right to their fair share of the pie, that it is their natural right as humans born on this planet to have enough even if they have to fight for it.  And we know it.  We all know it.  It’s ingrained in us by evolution to make sure each and every member of the tribe has enough and that no one gets a second trip to the table until everyone has been through once. 

I believe in the the dignity of humanity, not the sanctity of property.  Political democracy, without concurrent social, industrial, and economic democracy, is meaningless.  You know what happens when fewer and fewer people have exponentially more wealth and exponentially more people have less and less?  A shrinking economy.  Because the only thing trickling down in capitalism is piss from the mountain of shit.

National borders are merely the lines between territories held by different elites.  Patriotism is nothing more than Stockholm syndrome submission to the owners of the territory in which lies the land upon which you live.  These elites are not your peers; they are your masters, your rulers, your gods.

The desire for peace and freedom, for all humans to be treated fairly and with dignity, does not recognize any artificial borders created by the avaricious and ambitious elites which govern the world and are the cause of most conflict and deprivation.

True leadership is not about wielding authority; it is about empowering people (paraphrasing Becky Brodin slightly).  Never have faith in in people who put themselves forth as “leaders”; they will always betray you.  Gods are more trouble than they are worth; destroy them.  Don’t look for a messiah or a prophet or guru to save you; everything you seek is within yourself.  If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him, and be your own buddha.  Worship no gods, serve no masters, follow no leaders.

Anarchy does not mean ‘without rules’, it means ‘without rulers’.  What most refer to as anarchy is actually chaos, the opposite of cosmos (which is Greek for ‘order’).  Anarchy is, in fact, voluntary order, the social contract of Locke and Rousseau, human-to-human, as equals.

The ability of a minority to dominate the majority depends primarily upon the consent, whether passive and acquiescent or active and willing, of those who make up that majority. All the dominated need to throw off their shackles is to stand up and abandon the creeping meatball, knowing that that single act is only a beginning, but still a beginning.  You can’t abandon the creeping meatball if you don’t first rise up.

To paraphrase Angela Davis: Instead of accepting the things that you cannot change, change the things you cannot accept.  Tell the impossible to go fuck itself.

In response to Sasha Grey posting on her MySpace page (remember MySpace?) a photo of herself with the caption “Why am I scared?”, I replied, “I’m scared because I’m alive.  The trick is not to not do things because we’re afraid, but instead to do those things specifically because we ARE afraid.  If we ever stop being scared, then we’re dead, and if we are still moving around it’s only because we don’t know it yet and are just animated bodies walking around in a permanent vegetative state of mere existence, with our souls already outlined in chalk.”

Religion is like looking thru a pinhole in a stone wall and describing what you see as the ultimate truth.  In order to see the whole truth, the wall must be destroyed.  To protect its view thru the pinhole, religion guards that wall with every power in its arsenal.  Imagine that: guarding a wall separating humanity from truth in order to protect a pinhole.

For some people life always looks better in the rear view mirror.  Then they drive into a brick wall.  All of us are living under a sentence of death that cannot be revoked or overturned.  No one gets out of here alive.  And sometimes you have to die in order to survive.

The Upanishads say that the path to salvation/liberation is difficult, like walking along the sharp edge of a razor.  But I say this: Don’t walk along the razor’s edge; be the razor’s edge.  Be the darkness that illuminates, the silence that resonates, and the stillness that agitates.

And remember: Your life is either defined by the system, or by the way you defy the system.

Religious Belief (a poem)

if you believe

then you deceive

if only to cleave

to what you preconceive

and wear on your sleeve

to hide what you thieve

from those too naive

to ever achieve

freedom to leave

and can only grieve

what they’ll never receive

even if they reeve

through the lies you weave

Bi Visibility Day 2018

Since 1999, Bi Visibility Day, or International Celebrate Bisexuality Day, has been observed all over the world on 23 September.  Bisexuality is not a way station between the terminals of heterosexuality and homosexuality, but rather the obverse of a coin with the reverse being the monosexuality of which heterosexuality and homosexuality are variations. 

When I first posted the bi flag as my Facebook cover photo on in April 2017, I wrote:  “This is the bi pride flag. I couldn’t care less about “bi pride”, though I am bisexual and have known that since I was 15, but have made this my cover in solidarity with the gays being persecuted in Chechnya.”  Today, I have to change the statement above somewhat.

I do care about Bi Pride, and I care about Bi Visibility.  For me, bi visibility is not just just about resisting bi erasure, but about bisexuals coming out of the shadows to stand in solidarity with our LGTBQ+ siblings and cousins throughout the world.  It’s why for the past several months I have been involved with the Chattanooga Queer Community Forum and the Chattanooga Equality Project.  For bisexuals, particularly those more attracted to the opposite sex rather than the same sex, it is all too easy to hide.  Let us stand and be visible.

"Next Time" Is Now!

In 1980, they told us, ‘Yeah, we know about Carter, but we have to keep Reagan out of the White House.  Maybe next time we can have real change’.

In 1984, they told us, ‘Yeah, we know about Mondale, but we have to get Reagan out of the White House.  Maybe next time we can have real change’.

In 1988, they told us, ‘Yeah, we know about Dukakis, but we have to keep Bush out of the White House.  Maybe next time we can have real change’.

In 1992, they told us, “Yeah, we know about Clinton, but we have to get Bush out of the White House.  Maybe next time we can have real change’.

1n 1996, they told us, ‘Yeah, we still know about Clinton, but we have to keep Dole out of the White House.  Maybe next time we can have real change’.

In 2000, they told us, ‘Yeah, we know about Gore, but we have to keep Bush out of the White House.  Maybe next time we can have real change’.

In 2004, they told us, ‘Yeah, we know about Kerry, but we have to get Bush out of the White House.  Maybe next time we can have real change’.

In 2008, they told us, ‘Yeah, we know about Obama, but we have to keep McCain and Palin out of the White House.  Maybe next time we can have real change’.

In 2012, they told us, ‘Yeah, we still know about Obama, but we have to keep Romney and his healthcare plan out of the White House.  Maybe next time we can have real change’.

In 2016, they told us, ‘Yeah, we know about Clinton, but we have to keep Trump out of the White House.  Maybe next time we can have real change’.

In 2020, it's time we told the Democratic Party Establishment (DPE), ‘Fuck you and the sickly pale centrist, neoliberal, dog-whistle racist-white supremacist horse you rode in on.’

The foregoing was adapted from part of a piece I did for a podcast of Left Ungagged (https://leftungagged.org/) during the USA's 2016 election campaign.

The delusion of the Democratic Party as a progressive vehicle through which the Left could influence American politics originated through the early Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and other New Left entities, primarily from the ranks of the white middle class.

After rejecting Clinton and the Democratic Party enthralled to him and his fellow neo-Dixiecrats of the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC) over their over the mewling centrism, neoliberalism, and dog-whistle racism, I looked at the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), but couldn't stomach it's then Michael Harrington-inspired slavish compliance with whatever direction the Dems took.  So I joined the Communist Party USA (CPUSA), but found it too as slavishly obedient to the Democratic Party I was trying to leave.  Thankfully, both those entities have changed direction and rather than follow the DP are actively seeking to change it.

Our day will come, inshallah.  Keep the faith.  May the Aught be with you.

* * * * *

A New Party of a New Type

https://www.jacobinmag.com/2018/07/electoral-rules-third-party-ballot-line-ocasio-cortez-dsa

Russiagate is a ghost story for liberals

https://mondoweiss.net/2018/07/russiagate-ghost-liberals/

Bisexuals: Time for Us to Step Up

I think it’s way past time for bisexuals to step up for the queer community.  Yes, it may take a moment to warp our heads around the fact that we are as queer as gays, lesbians, trans persons, and all other non-cisgender, nonstraight people.  As I remarked at a meeting a few months ago of a working group attached to Chattanooga Queer Community Forum, in the LGBTQ community I’m about as under the radar as you can get; white, outwardly middle-class, and gynephiliac bisexual.

Besides helping to bring to the surface a world in which we can actually be and to support our fellow queer folk, it will be good for the well being of we ourselves and those like us.  One of the local persons memorialized on the day of our vigil for the victims of The Pulse massacre was a very out gay man named Lester Childress.  Lester was also known as Della Reeves, a drag queen performing regularly at a club here known as The Toolbox, though he was not trans, just a performer.  One night after a sexual encounter with a much younger man with whom he had encounters before, Lester was stabbed 28 times and slashed 70-80 times further.

Keith Jackson, his murderer, was engaged to be married and said he had told Lester he wasn’t gay, even though he clearly had sexual relations of some type with him more than once.  And the truth is that he probably wasn’t, but because of the straight-gay dichotomy with which even more enlightened quarters limit their views of human sexuality, bisexuality isn’t dismissed, rather it’s not even considered. 

In my own case, though I had known in my head that I was bisexual, it wasn’t until my freshman year at uni that I had intense physical sexual reactions to other males, and I underwent a lot of emotional trauma over that.  And I already KNEW I was bisexual.  But because of that limited dichotomy, rather than interpreting those reactions as an expression of my already recognized bisexuality, psychologically speaking, I interpeted them as a sign of gayness.  That didn’t bother me because I thought there was anything wrong with being gay, but if I was then I couldn’t go out with girls anymore.  I nearly killed myself over that too.

If bisexuality were more out of the closet, more understood, if human sexuality were understood to be the spectrum it is rather than so limited to those two options, Keith may have been able to accept his true nature and might not have murdered Lester.  And I might not have come so uncomfortably close to eating a 12 gauge 00 breakfast when I was 18.

Dashane Stokes once said, “Amazing how eye and skin color come in many shades yet many think sexuality is just gay or straight.”  A-fucking-men to that.  So say we all.  Or at least we should.

On Jails Profiting from Prisoners

One of my favorite quotes of a socialist is from the opening of Eugene Debs’ statement to the court upon his conviction for sedition over an anti-war speech he made in Canton, Ohio.  “While there is a lower class, I am in it; while there is a criminal element I am of it; while there is a soul in prison, I am not free.” 

The penal system in America is capitalism in the nude.  The dystopian nightmares in which for-profit corporations control every facet of a human individual’s existence, in which a person can be lobotomized, literally or figuratively, for not producing enough profit, are not dystopia in America, they are a fact of life for millions in the largest per capita prison system in the world.

For instance, at the Hamilton County Jail here in Chattanooga, the population within the 800-person facility is routinely 150 persons over capacity.  Inmates sleep in showers and several to a cell.  Within the past year, the jail cancelled in-person visits in favor of expensive video chats, paid for either by the visitor or the inmate’s “commissary”. 

The “commissary” is an account from which an inmate pays for “luxuries” such as soap, shampoo, sanitary napkins, toothpaste, safety razors, shaving cream, etc.  Outsiders can contribute to a prisoner’s commissary fund, but be warned that the jail takes a cut of every donation no matter the source.  And the “luxury” items purchased with an inmate’s commissary are always sold at an exhorbitant profit. 

Keep in mind that this is jail, for charged prisoners either awaiting trial and unable to pay excessive bail or prisoners convicted of misdemeanors and serving sentence.

Hamilton County hosts another penal facility, Silverdale Correctional, now a multi-security prison that holds both local and state prisoners.  Formerly the county’s penal farm, it became the flagship of the private industry in 1984 when Corrections Corporation of America, now CoreCivic, assumed management.

This situation is not unusual in the United States.  Commissaries have always been part of penal life, but not to the degree that began with the launch of prisons-for-profit.  The main purpose of the system now is to coerce populations in prisons, the longer-term penal facilities, to work for pennies to make profits for either the corporations running them or for outside corporations for profit, much like the old convict lease system which enslaved so many in Tennessee and all across the country.

I’d known much of this, of course, before the meeting last week of the group of which I am a part that is trying launch a community bail fund.  But one of the new members that week gave us an insider’s view in a way which focused all of it into a very fine point.  In the post-meeting debrief, I could only remark that, “I’m pissed off.  Really pissed off”.

* * * * *

E. V. Debs

Statement to the Court

Upon Being Convicted of Violating the Sedition Act

September 18, 1918

Your Honor, years ago I recognized my kinship with all living beings, and I made up my mind that I was not one bit better than the meanest on earth. I said then, and I say now, that while there is a lower class, I am in it, and while there is a criminal element I am of it, and while there is a soul in prison, I am not free.

I listened to all that was said in this court in support and justification of this prosecution, but my mind remains unchanged. I look upon the Espionage Law as a despotic enactment in flagrant conflict with democratic principles and with the spirit of free institutions…

Your Honor, I have stated in this court that I am opposed to the social system in which we live; that I believe in a fundamental change—but if possible by peaceable and orderly means…

Standing here this morning, I recall my boyhood. At fourteen I went to work in a railroad shop; at sixteen I was firing a freight engine on a railroad. I remember all the hardships and privations of that earlier day, and from that time until now my heart has been with the working class. I could have been in Congress long ago. I have preferred to go to prison…

I am thinking this morning of the men in the mills and the factories; of the men in the mines and on the railroads. I am thinking of the women who for a paltry wage are compelled to work out their barren lives; of the little children who in this system are robbed of their childhood and in their tender years are seized in the remorseless grasp of Mammon and forced into the industrial dungeons, there to feed the monster machines while they themselves are being starved and stunted, body and soul. I see them dwarfed and diseased and their little lives broken and blasted because in this high noon of Christian civilization money is still so much more important than the flesh and blood of childhood. In very truth gold is god today and rules with pitiless sway in the affairs of men.

In this country—the most favored beneath the bending skies—we have vast areas of the richest and most fertile soil, material resources in inexhaustible abundance, the most marvelous productive machinery on earth, and millions of eager workers ready to apply their labor to that machinery to produce in abundance for every man, woman, and child—and if there are still vast numbers of our people who are the victims of poverty and whose lives are an unceasing struggle all the way from youth to old age, until at last death comes to their rescue and lulls these hapless victims to dreamless sleep, it is not the fault of the Almighty: it cannot be charged to nature, but it is due entirely to the outgrown social system in which we live that ought to be abolished not only in the interest of the toiling masses but in the higher interest of all humanity…

I believe, Your Honor, in common with all Socialists, that this nation ought to own and control its own industries. I believe, as all Socialists do, that all things that are jointly needed and used ought to be jointly owned—that industry, the basis of our social life, instead of being the private property of a few and operated for their enrichment, ought to be the common property of all, democratically administered in the interest of all…

I am opposing a social order in which it is possible for one man who does absolutely nothing that is useful to amass a fortune of hundreds of millions of dollars, while millions of men and women who work all the days of their lives secure barely enough for a wretched existence.

This order of things cannot always endure. I have registered my protest against it. I recognize the feebleness of my effort, but, fortunately, I am not alone. There are multiplied thousands of others who, like myself, have come to realize that before we may truly enjoy the blessings of civilized life, we must reorganize society upon a mutual and cooperative basis; and to this end we have organized a great economic and political movement that spreads over the face of all the earth.

There are today upwards of sixty millions of Socialists, loyal, devoted adherents to this cause, regardless of nationality, race, creed, color, or sex. They are all making common cause. They are spreading with tireless energy the propaganda of the new social order. They are waiting, watching, and working hopefully through all the hours of the day and the night. They are still in a minority. But they have learned how to be patient and to bide their time. The feel—they know, indeed—that the time is coming, in spite of all opposition, all persecution, when this emancipating gospel will spread among all the peoples, and when this minority will become the triumphant majority and, sweeping into power, inaugurate the greates social and economic change in history.

In that day we shall have the universal commonwealth—the harmonious cooperation of every nation with every other nation on earth…

Your Honor, I ask no mercy and I plead for no immunity. I realize that finally the right must prevail. I never so clearly comprehended as now the great struggle between the powers of greed and exploitation on the one hand and upon the other the rising hosts of industrial freedom and social justice.

I can see the dawn of the better day for humanity. The people are awakening. In due time they will and must come to their own.

When the mariner, sailing over tropic seas, looks for relief from his weary watch, he turns his eyes toward the southern cross, burning luridly above the tempest-vexed ocean. As the midnight approaches, the southern cross begins to bend, the whirling worlds change their places, and with starry finger-points the Almighty marks the passage of time upon the dial of the universe, and though no bell may beat the glad tidings, the lookout knows that the midnight is passing and that relief and rest are close at hand. Let the people everywhere take heart of hope, for the cross is bending, the midnight is passing, and joy cometh with the morning.

https://www.marxists.org/archive/debs/works/1918/court.htm