THOMAS PAINE’S CORNER |•

A SPECIAL MESSAGE TO OUR READERS.

For over two years now, Thomas Paine’s Corner has been a powerful and unwavering voice for a courageous and badly needed agenda for change. We have consistently delivered hard-hitting and insightful commentary, polemics, and analysis in our persistent efforts to persuade, educate, and inspire, and serve as a discriminating but generous platform for voices from many points of view with one thing in common: their spiritual honesty and quality of thinking.
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Aside from the caliber of its content, Thomas Paine’s Corner’s strength is that there are no advertisers or corporations to exercise de facto censorship or orchestrate our agenda. We aim to keep it that way and we need your help!
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As a semi-autonomous section of the multi-faceted, thoroughly comprehensive, and highly prestigious Cyrano’s Journal Online, we share Cyrano’s passion for winning the battle of communications against systemic lies, an act which is essential to attaining social and environmental justice. To help us achieve that goal, Cyrano’s Journal, besides its regular editorial pages, intends to begin producing editorial videos to expose the lack of proper context, ahistoricalism, excessive over-emphasis on inane events, and outright lies the corporate media, and in particular television, present to you and your family as a steady diet of pernicious intellectual junk food. This will be an expensive under-taking and there will be no grants forthcoming from the likes of the American Enterprise Institute, the Coors or Heritage Foundation. You can be sure of that!
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As Greek mythology has it, the powerful are frequently defeated by their own hubris, and that’s precisely what we are witnessing today. Our rotten-to-the-core, usurping plutocracy has become so overtly and arrogantly corrupt that our patience has now reached its generous limit, and the membrane of America’s collective consciousness is about to burst. This will result in a significant restructuring of our socioeconomic and political environments, we hope (and must make sure) for the better. Considering what is at stake in the world today, Cyrano’s Journal and Thomas Paine’s Corner want to accelerate the arrival of that new day, and its promise of a new, truly well organized, kind, and honest civilization.
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Assisting us in our cause is as simple as clicking on the PayPal button below and exercising the power of your wallet. No matter how large or how small, we thank you in advance for your donation! If you are serious about our struggle for a new society, please don’t put it off. Let us hear from you today.
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Jason Miller
Associate Editor, Cyrano’s Journal Online, and Editorial Director, Thomas Paine’s Corner.
Patrice Greanville, Editor in Chief, Cyrano’s Journal Online

NOTICE TO OUR READERS: The editors will be most grateful for your attention at the end of this feature. Thank you.

“In folk stories, when giants are about, drought and famine withers the land and starvation stalks its people. Accordingly, the ruthless giantism inherent to the Corporate/Military/Mass Media state has withered our inner lives, blighted our landscape, and left us powerless before a huge, demeaning system that devours our time, health and humanity.”

by Phil Rockstroh

6/28/07

In microcosmic mimicry of the plight of the besieged middle and laboring classes, my parent’s Atlanta neighborhood, as is the case with many others in the vicinity, is being destroyed, in reality –disappeared — by a blight of upper-class arrogance. The modest, post-war homes of the area are being “scraped” from the landscape as an infestation of bloated mcmansions rises from the tortured soil. These particleboard and Tyvek-choked monstrosities loom over the remaining smaller houses of the area, as oversized and ugly as mindless bullies, as banal as the dreams of petty tyrants.

In the surrounding suburbs, in a similar manner as mcmansions eclipse sunlight, throwing the adjacent houses into half-light, mega-churches eclipse the light of reason, leaving their congregations in an ignorant half-light of dogma and superstition. Of course, these true believer lunatics are wrong about everything, except, perhaps, for their elliptical apprehension regarding the arrival of proliferate cataclysms in the years to come. Oddly: Although they promulgate dire warnings on the subject, they seem gleeful at the prospect of wide-spread suffering.

How could they not be? They’ve seized upon a fantasy that allows them to escape from the tyranny of their own life-suffocating belief system. Attempting to subdue the suffocating dread of their corporately circumscribed lives, they wish for the destruction of the entire planet. Hence, their escapist fantasy, by the necessity of narrative, is huge, outrageous — apocalyptic. The progenitor of their End Time tale is this: The believer’s emotional inflexibility begets a form of ontological giantism — a phenomenon that arises when one’s worldview is too small to explain the larger world. Therefore, a story must be created that contains violence and terror on such a massive scale that it’s unfolding would kill off the entire, problematic world. “That’s right world, there’s not enough room on this planet for both you and my beliefs. One of us has to go.”

Upon the nation’s roadways and interstate highways, the overgrown clown cars of the apocalypse, SUVs, Humvees, and oversized pickup trucks also evince hugeness to compensate for the feelings of those folks inside the grotesque vehicles of being crushed down by alienation and isolation — not only while on the road — but by the realities of an existence within a hapless, oil-dependent empire which is itself powerless against the changing realities of the larger world.

In the ranks of the exploiter class, the fat salaries of CEOs separate them further from the general population of the consumer state (that they take every opportunity to bamboozle) as the American public itself grows fatter and fatter in body mass, vainly attempting to sate an inner emptiness borne of their perceived helplessness before the predation of corporate culture.

Concurrently, in Baghdad, the U.S. embassy, which, when completed, will be the largest “diplomatic” compound on the planet is, in fact, an inadvertent monument to the mindless colossus the U.S.A. has become. The structure is as accurate as the art of architecture can be in its depiction of the spirit of a nation’s people. As big and bloated as our national sense of exceptionalism, it stands in the so-called Green Zone of Baghdad, shielding those who will be bunkered down within it — not only from the murderous madness unfolding outside its highly fortified walls — but from reality itself. A massive emblem of the arrogance of power, the embassy is a testament to how the noxious vapors of cultural self-deception can be made manifest in reinforced concrete, armed watchtowers and razor wire.

Through it all, like some eternally slumbering Hindu deity, we Americans dream these things into existence. Far from blameless, we continue to allow the elites to exploit us; therefore, we enable and sustain their titanic sense of entitlement. In turn, we accept their paltry bribes and, as a result, our banal, selfish dreams have conjured forth George Bush from the zeitgeist. Ergo, Bush is a man whose impenetrable narcissism is so grotesque and ringed with fortifications, that all on his own he constitutes a walking analog of the American embassy in Baghdad.

In addition, we Americans continue to believe our fables of righteous power: Big is good, goes our John Wayne jack-off fantasy. Our leaders must be large: Only Mcmansion-like men, such as Mitt Romney, are acceptable. We believe: Dennis Kucinich is too diminutive in physical stature to be president – with the length of his body being roughly the size of Romney’s head.

In turn, our national landscape is stretched to the breaking point: Cluttered upon it, gigantic islands of garish light torment the night, scouring away the stars, estranging us from imagination, empathy, and Eros, and leaving us only with the insatiable appetites of consumerism. Thus, around the clock, inside enormous, under-inspected, industrial slaughterhouses and meat processing plants, underpaid, benefit-bereft workers ply their gruesome, monstrously cruel trade, then the butchered wares are transported by way of brutal, double and triple-axle trailer, diesel trucks over stygian interstate highways to sepulchral supermarkets and charnel house restaurant chains. Insuring, we flesh-eating zombies are provided with all the water-bloated, steroid-ridden meat and industrially farmed, pesticide-lacquered vegetables and starches — The Cuisines of the Living Dead – we could ever crave … uum, uum, it’s the Thanatotic yumminess of empire’s end. Try our convenient drivethrough window. Would you like us to super-size your order of commodified death?

Hyperbolic ravings, you say. America is not a culture in love with death.

Let’s see. Drawing upon just one example: The corpses of well over half a million dead Iraqis testify otherwise. Moreover, the continuing Iraqi resistance to our occupation speaks volumes as well. Yet still, most of us cannot hear their elegy of outrage over the din created by the parade of killer clowns that we have mistaken for the pageantry of nationhood.

How does one slow this juggernaut of psychosis and curb these acts of murder/suicide being perpetrated on a global scale? Truth is, we might not be able to stop it, because this is what lies beneath our unlimited sense of entitlement and self-defeating arrogance: a death-wish that manifests itself as exceptionalism and may well destroy the nation by means of imperial overreach — which is, of course, the time-established method by which empires dispose of themselves.

Further, this state of affairs is exacerbated by the narcissistic insularity of our media elite. At the end of the day, it’s their tumescent egos that are distorting our societal discourse; their vanities and attendant self-serving pronouncements are little more than steaming cargos of horseshit, carried and delivered by one-trick-jackasses — jackasses endowed with the singular skill of being able to read a teleprompter … Fred Thompson, your agent is calling: You have an important call from Washington, DC.

Notice this: The more permeating the rot becomes within the system’s structure the more huge and pervasive the edifice of media imagery will grow and the more trivial its content will become. The closer we come to systemic collapse the more we will hear about celebrity contretemps. Cretinous heiresses and shit-wit starlets, with shoddy mechanisms of self-restraint, people the public imagination, because they carry our infantilism, embody our collective carelessness, and, in turn, suffer public humiliation, as we desperately attempt to displace, upon them, the humiliation of our own daily existence within the oppressive authoritarianism of the corporate state.

Correspondingly, there is a well-known (by those who care to look) link between fascism and corporatism. To Mussolini, the two terms were interchangeable. According to rumor, we defeated fascism, during the first half of the 20th century. Yet, at present, we spend our days sustaining a liberty-loathing, soul-enervating corporatocracy. To live under corporatism is, in ways large and small, to be a fascist-in-training. Everyday, hour by hour, the exploitive, neo-liberal concept of work devours more and more of our lives. As a consequence, the true self within is crushed to dust and what remains rises as cultural squalls of low-level fear, with its concomitant need for constant distraction. As all the while, the psyches of the well-off (financially, that is) become inflated, gaudy and ugly; in short, internally, they become human versions of mcmansions.

Freedom is a microcosm of the forces of evolution engendered by living in the midst of life — a mode of being that apprehends and is transformed by the beauty, sorrow, and wit of the world. Conversely, authoritarian societies are collectives of accomplished liars and lickspittle ciphers, where one must conceal one’s essential self at all costs and the soul falls into atrophy.

To what extent does authoritarian rule diminish both the individual and a nation? Simply, take a look around you and witness the keening wasteland our nation has become. Furthermore, our emptiness cannot be filled by any amount of wealth or power. This is the reason the obscene amounts of mammon acquired by the privileged classes is never — can never be –enough to satisfy them, for their inner abyss is boundless. In a similar vein, no amount of killing can sate a psychopath’s emptiness. Dick Cheney will scowl all the way to the boneyard, hoping he can ascend to heaven by scaling the mountainous pile of corpses he’s responsible for placing there.

In folk stories, when giants are about, drought and famine withers the land and starvation stalks its people. Accordingly, the ruthless giantism inherent to the Corporate/Military/Mass Media state has withered our inner lives, blighted our landscape, and left us powerless before a huge, demeaning system that devours our time, health and humanity.

The bone-grinding giants of the American corporate and political classes have shot the Golden Goose full of growth hormones, enclosed her in an industrial coop, and hoarded her voluminous output of eggs. Yet, nothing satisfies them.

Meanwhile, online, we struggle in a Jack in the Beanstalk Insurgency, hoping that from things as tiny and seemingly trivial as mere beans — our postings, exchanges and periodic meet-ups — the fall of tyrannical giants might begin.

Phil Rockstroh, a self-described, auto-didactic, gasbag monologist, is a poet, lyricist and philosopher bard living in New York City. He may be contacted at: philangie2000@yahoo.com

______________________________________________________

A SPECIAL MESSAGE TO OUR READERS.

For over two years now, Thomas Paine’s Corner has been a powerful and unwavering voice for a courageous and badly needed agenda for change. We have consistently delivered hard-hitting and insightful commentary, polemics, and analysis in our persistent efforts to persuade, educate, and inspire, and serve as a discriminating but generous platform for voices from many points of view with one thing in common: their spiritual honesty and quality of thinking.
•
Aside from the caliber of its content, Thomas Paine’s Corner’s strength is that there are no advertisers or corporations to exercise de facto censorship or orchestrate our agenda. We aim to keep it that way and we need your help!
•
As a semi-autonomous section of the multi-faceted, thoroughly comprehensive, and highly prestigious Cyrano’s Journal Online, we share Cyrano’s passion for winning the battle of communications against systemic lies, an act which is essential to attaining social and environmental justice. To help us achieve that goal, Cyrano’s Journal, besides its regular editorial pages, intends to begin producing editorial videos to expose the lack of proper context, ahistoricalism, excessive over-emphasis on inane events, and outright lies the corporate media, and in particular television, present to you and your family as a steady diet of pernicious intellectual junk food. This will be an expensive under-taking and there will be no grants forthcoming from the likes of the American Enterprise Institute, the Coors or Heritage Foundation. You can be sure of that!
•
As Greek mythology has it, the powerful are frequently defeated by their own hubris, and that’s precisely what we are witnessing today. Our rotten-to-the-core, usurping plutocracy has become so overtly and arrogantly corrupt that our patience has now reached its generous limit, and the membrane of America’s collective consciousness is about to burst. This will result in a significant restructuring of our socioeconomic and political environments, we hope (and must make sure) for the better. Considering what is at stake in the world today, Cyrano’s Journal and Thomas Paine’s Corner want to accelerate the arrival of that new day, and its promise of a new, truly well organized, kind, and honest civilization.
•
Assisting us in our cause is as simple as clicking on the PayPal button at the top of the left hand column and exercising the power of your wallet. No matter how large or how small, we thank you in advance for your donation! If you are serious about our struggle for a new society, please don’t put it off. Let us hear from you today.
•

Jason Miller
Associate Editor, Cyrano’s Journal Online, and Editorial Director, Thomas Paine’s Corner.
Patrice Greanville, Editor in Chief, Cyrano’s Journal Online

NOTICE TO OUR READERS: The editors will be most grateful for your attention at the end of this feature. Thank you.

Sculpture: “The Id” by TJ Dixon and James Nelson

By Jason Miller

6/24/07

Children are completely egoistic; they feel their needs intensely and strive ruthlessly to satisfy them.

–Sigmund Freud

Frightening as it may be, the Earth’s fate rests in the hands of children. With incredibly formidable military firepower at its disposal, the United States could catalyze Armageddon at any time. And while they may be adults chronologically, our sociopolitical structure is dominated by emotional infants.

Nietzsche once pronounced God dead. In the United States, we have a more readily demonstrable (and perhaps related) problem. Our collective id has rendered its governing superego impotent, and perhaps dead. Our prevailing moral standards, as inconsequential as they have become, are of the Jerry Falwell variety. They are mean-spirited, self-serving, judgmental, narrow-minded, selfish, and belligerent. As far as US Americans are concerned, Christ may as well have preached the Sermon on the Mount from the lowest recesses of Death Valley.

Recall that our basic drives such as libido, hunger, and aggression flow from the infantile dimension of our psyche known as the id. In terms of psychodynamics, the superego’s role is to counter-balance the irresponsible, amoral, and essentially sociopathic nature of the id with a healthy degree of conscience and guilt. Yet in the United States, we are inculcated with a deep sense of our exceptionalism and entitlement from the moment we emerge from the birth canal, thus crippling our ability to empathize and seriously impeding the development of our superego.

Consequently, conscience, guilt, personal discipline, and delaying gratification are barely extant in the toxic cesspool of our sociocultural environment.

Continue Reading »

By Stephen Lendman

6/23/07

Michel Chossudovsky is a noted academic, author, activist and relentless researcher concentrating on America’s imperial crusade to control planet earth for its markets, resources and cheap exploitable labor. He’s a Canadian economist by profession having taught at the University of Ottawa as well as at academic institutions in Western Europe, Latin America and Southeast Asia. In addition, he’s been an economic adviser to developing countries’ governments and a consultant for many international organizations, including the UN Development Programme (UNDP), UN Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean, International Labour Organization (ILO), and World Health Organization (WHO). He’s also the editor of the Centre for Research on Globalization and its web site, Global Research.ca.

“America’s War on Terrorism” - An Overview

Chossudovsky’s book is a greatly expanded version of his 2002 book titled, “War and Globalization: The Truth behind September 11.” The current newly titled 2005 edition (post-9/11 and the 2003 Iraq invasion and occupation) includes 12 new chapters with those in the original edition updated. The author states the book’s purpose is “to refute the official narrative and reveal - using detailed evidence and documentation (not speculation based on opinion alone)” - the true nature of America’s “war on terrorism,” that’s as relevant now as when the book was first published.

Chossudovsky calls it a complete fabrication “based on the illusion that one man, Osama bin Laden (from a cave in Afghanistan and hospital bed in Pakistan) outwitted the $40 billion-a-year American intelligence apparatus.” He calls it, instead, what, in fact, it is - a pretext for permanent “New World Order” wars of conquest serving the interests of Wall Street and the financial community, the US military-industrial complex, Big Oil, and all other corporate interests profiting hugely from a massive scheme harming the public interest, in the name of protecting it, and potentially all humanity unless it’s stopped in time.

Continue Reading »

“We can produce slick, television-friendly self-promoters — i.e. Thompson and Obama — but we can’t rebuild New Orleans or devise an exit strategy from Iraq.”

By Phil Rockstroh

6/14/07

Recent news reports have revealed that the Bush Administration has bestowed upon itself the right to grant itself absolute power if “any incident, regardless of location, that results in extraordinary levels of mass casualties, damage, or disruption severely affecting the U.S. population, infrastructure, environment, economy, or government functions” might come to pass.

http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2007/05/20070509-12.html 

Actually, the hypothetical catastrophes stated above sound very much like the veritable calamities inflicted upon the nation by the Bush presidency itself. Worse, at present, many of our Democratic representatives are showing their outrage regarding the disastrous policies of the administration — by agitating to bomb Iran.

Regarding such circumstances, Eric Fromme warned, “the destruction of the world is the last, almost desperate attempt to save myself from being crushed by it.” Ergo, we witness these collective pathologies play out in the perpetual aggression of American foreign policy, the exploitation inherent in our corporate workplaces, marketplaces, and healthcare practices and the exponentially expanding destruction of the environment.

How, then, can we begin to alter these seemingly ineluctable circumstances?

First off, don’t give the elites credit for being more intelligent than they are. Ruthlessness, striving and cunning should not be mistaken for intelligence. The only real accomplishment of the present day ruling class has been to transform their self-justifying lies into a form of performance art.

In reality, they have left private institutions bloated and public ones bankrupt. And left us, as a people, directionless and bereft of hope.

But that is not the totality of the situation: We must muse upon our own complicity in creating this cultural catastrophe. We’ve all been employed as landscapers on this blood-sodden deathscape.

At present, in our alienation and attendant passivity, our plight is analogous to that of so-called “crib babies,” those socially and emotionally arrested, orphaned children who were left to languish in indifferent institutions. Culturally, we seem devoid of the ability to respond to each other, to create a just society — or even envisage one.

Continue Reading »

By Michael Goodspeed

6/12/07

“To see the universal and all-pervading Spirit of Truth face to face, one must be able to love the meanest of all creation as oneself.”

—Mahatma Gandhi

Late last week, I returned home to Portland, OR, after attending a three-day conference on the Electric Universe in Las Vegas, NV. The event brought together an impressive array of scientists, authors, and independent researchers from many different disciplines and walks of life, all unified in their quest to develop a better understanding of the cosmos and our place in it.

Throughout the event, I had the privilege of interacting with some very accomplished scholars in such seemingly disparate fields as electrical engineering, physics, plasma physics, geology, and comparative mythology. In every instance, I was very pleased to find that I was treated as an equal, even though I claim no special expertise on the topics discussed. This lack of pretension on the part of the “experts” enabled a very free and comfortable flow of ideas amongst all participants, specialists and laymen alike.

In Wallace Thornhill’s introductory presentation, he repeatedly used the word “convergence” in describing the interdisciplinary nature of much Electric Universe research. Specialists with very different areas of expertise have found themselves growing increasingly DEPENDENT on one another, and of each has been required an openness to previously unconsidered ideas, and a willingness to be proved “wrong” on many points. Continue Reading »

By Jason Miller

6/10/07

Each day untold millions of US Americans unwittingly immerse themselves in an intellectual, social, cultural, economic, political and spiritual cesspool so rancid and toxic that even microbes with the most voracious appetites for human waste, vomit, and inanimate flesh would shun this infinitely repulsive sewer.

Many highly qualified and intelligent researchers, analysts, and authors have written books, essays, and reports documenting the astounding multitude and variety of crimes committed by the United States throughout its history. Since a nation is an entity comprised of numerous elements and dynamics, we can’t simply blame the government, the Republicans, the Religious Right, the Democrats, George Bush, Bill Clinton, or any one particular component. Therefore, nearly all US Americans bear a degree of responsibility. Obviously, some (i.e. Bush and Cheney) are far more culpable than others because they wield such tremendous power and act with a conscienceless, cynical awareness of the suffering they are inflicting on the Earth and its sentient inhabitants.

Continue Reading »

“You say you want a revolution? Well, you know … we’re all doing what we can.”

–John Lennon

“Is This Heaven?”

by Mike Palecek

“Nope.

Iowa.”

Where brown puppies are frisky, U-Turns aren’t risky, and good girls sip their whiskey.

On the road, on my book tour, I was asked a few times, well, then, what should we do?

“I don’t know. … I just don’t know.”

Hey.

The new presidential directive says that in case of emergency George W. Bush has dictatorial powers.

The new presidential directive.

What’s that? What was the old presidential directive? Who said he gets directives?

Did you vote for that?

So. If you don’t like that, what do you do in the United States?

Vote for a Democrat?

Try to figure out whom to shoot?

Speaking of voting. Didn’t we think we did this big thing awhile back when we elected a bunch of Democrats and Nancy Pelosi was the new house mom?

And the first thing she said before she was even the leader was that impeachment was off the table, and now they support Bush.

People also asked me on the tour which candidate I liked. I would like to meet the candidate in a cafe who would pull our troops out of Iraq yesterday, start a real investigation into 911, impeach Bush, and prosecute Bush, Cheney, Rove, Rumsfeld, Ashcroft, Powell, for crimes against humanity.

If these guys are not criminals, then open the gates of Attica, Leavenworth, Terre Haute, Lewisburg. There are no criminals. There is no such thing.

I did not feel great when I told the people who asked me what to do, that I did not know what to do.

One guy in Madison, Wisconsin asked me if I thought we had come to the point where a revolution was needed.

I told him I didn’t think I could ever kill anyone.

He said he was not talking about taking up the gun.

Oh. Well, maybe that actually says more about me than I wanted to reveal. Not really. I don’t have a gun to take up. Don’t want one. Too cheap to buy one. Won’t happen.

I’m not looking for that kind of commitment. Pick up a gun and you are really into this thing. You aren’t sending off some column over the computer and then going jogging.

The same thing — almost — can be said about someone who goes out and does some sort of civil disobedience and really confronts the evil. Then you get the horn. When you get into the ring with the bull. Do not make direct eye contact. The murderers don’t like that.

But, the whole violent revolution thing, non-violent revolution thing, war thing — well, how can it not be on your mind when you are living in a not-democracy during a time of war?

It’s frustrating, when you really see the need to change things.

But if your life is not really, really being affected, you kind of have a tough time garnering the fire to push up off the couch.

I have been thinking about Alex Jones, Che Guevara, the Weather Underground, Korey Rowe, Abbie Hoffman, Mindy Kleinberg, Jerry Rubin, Helen Woodson, Carl Kabat, Phil Berrigan, Dan Berrigan, Frank Cordaro, Larry Rosebaugh, Ralph Nader, Dennis Kucinich, Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, Al Gore, Charlie Sheen.

And how things just keep going on: 9-11, stolen elections, warships to Iran, lies from the government, poor people dying.

I suppose that’s always been going on, always will. Anybody seen the new Shrek?

Do you vote Democratic at the Legion hall, slump home, and then set yourself up on the patio with some Old Style on ice, the Cubs playing on the other side of an open window, a Big Mac warming your lap, and “War! Good God Ya’ll!” booming on the tiny white iPod speakers in your big-ass ears?

You, too? Dude, should the term cognitive dissonance mean anything to us?

After 9-11, with Kate Smith blustering all over the dial about God Bless America, I turned the radio to classical and let it blare as I drove to the gym, then over to work, to try to drown it all out and keep my life.

Massive amounts of work goes into putting hundreds of thousands in the streets in major U.S. cities and then it seems to do nothing.

Cindy Sheehan goes home because the Democrats turn out to be just rats.

A whole bunch of dedicated people work their butts off for months for a bunch of candidates who then end up voting to fund the war anyway and taking impeachment “off the table.”

There is no “one answer.”

Isn’t that the safe response?

How about a violent response? Is that on the table?

Well. What if.

What if you did kill a bunch of people and got your very special person up there waving to the masses from a high balcony of the White House. Would that be worth it?

It would be a thrill, a rush.

Boy, we really are fighters, aren’t we. We really did something. We are special, too.

But what about when you turn around and see all the dead people behind you, and their families behind that, crying, wailing.

And then what if your very special person up there doesn’t do just what you think she should? Will you kill her, too?

Or, maybe it’s just totally wrong to kill and let’s not even go there.

I heard on the radio the other day about the anniversary of a bombing at the University of Wisconsin during the Vietnam War in which someone was killed. Some people went to prison for that, and one is still on the run.

What if that were you, still hiding out from the 1960s? There is not one day that goes by that you do not think about the person you killed, or about the life you might have had.

But, you did fight the United States government and its killing of thousands and thousands. And maybe you even stopped thousands more from being killed.

We don’t seem to care if our government kills people in other countries. We vote them into power again. We still stand when they enter the room, wave at their motorcades.

Now what about the American Revolution? Those people shot and killed in order to get the kind of government they wanted. And those people are saints to us. Shout “Founding Fathers” in a crowded nursery and the newborns will struggle to stand.

And the world wars? More saints made by killing millions. We don’t call them whackos or deluded. We don’t make WW II veterans hide out in Dumpsters for forty years.

Can one person’s vote really make a difference?

How about one person with a gun?

Sirhan Sirhan or whoever, Lee Harvey Oswald or whoever, James Earl Ray or whoever, whoever killed Malcolm, whoever killed the young Black Panthers in their beds in Chicago — did those murderers make a difference? Did they change the course of history?

Could a bunch of people with guns, who go to the Appalachians, the Catskills, the Ozarks, the Sierra Nevadas, the Everglades, the Sandhills, make a difference?

What is the difference that we wish to make?

What about the argument that refusing to kill in World War I and II would not have inflicted the amount of damage on the human community as participating and slaughtering millions did?

What about the feeling you get, though, when you fight — that you are at least doing something — that you work up a sweat and it feels good.

And the other feeling you get when you feel you are being run over, just letting things happen?

But Ghandi said you could do both: work up a sweat and also not kill anyone, nuke anyone, drop napalm on anyone, sneak up in the bushes and the mud on your hands and knees with a knife in your teeth and assassinate anyone.

What about Commandante something-something in Mexico?
Castro?
George Washington
Geronimo
The French resistance
Nelson Mandela
AIM
Leonard Peltier
John Brown
Robert E. Lee

Is anyone poor enough in the United States to do that? To go to the hills?

Thou shall not kill.

Yes, Old Testament.

Jesus said pretty much the same thing. Or maybe you are not Christian or don’t believe in God.

Would there be a difference, morally, between someone who bombed a United States bomb factory — today — and someone who might oppose the U.S. on the battlefield?

Would there have been a difference between someone working to assassinate Hitler, perhaps a German citizen — and a soldier in the United States Army fighting in France?

So what do we do?

Things are pretty bad, no matter what you hear at the mall or in the park — the almost total lack of discussion or concern about this government, or how it came to power, or the wars and policies it is undertaking in our names.

Doing nothing is doing something. When tens of millions of us do nothing other than go to work and return each others cell phone calls, don’t tell me that doesn’t have an impact. It is definitely something.

Should we bomb something and kill someone and then run away, change our names, work the drive-through lane at the Ukiah McDonald’s until we are 95, hoping we will never die and have to face God if there is one?

Should we vote for a Democrat who will likely do nothing of substance in his or her lifetime?

Or do we crank up Chopin, fill every second of every day with some sort of violent rushing about, and try not to think about it?

I just don’t know.

Seeya

–Mike

This passage is from my novel “Joe Coffee’s Revolution.”

Joe Coffee is published by Badger Books of Madison, Wisconsin. I wrote it after my run for the U.S. House of Representatives in 2000. I was the Iowa Democratic Party nominee for the Fifth District. I received about 67,000 votes in a very conservative district on an anti-military, anti-prison, pro-immigration platform. I received no support from the local, state or national levels of the Democratic Party. I wrote the book to tell my side — to present the story, the what-if, the should-be — of someone, a nobody, running for office in the United States trying to do the right thing, and what he might encounter.

During my campaign I met a lot of people. Some of the most interesting were a handful of scattered farmers — intelligent, hard-working, incredibly pissed off. They seemed willing to fight. Almost.

In this passage we sit down to coffee with a family of farmers — Ray, Sam, Karen, Herb Tinker — talking about fighting, considering revolution.

Sam Tinker: “What’s to say the next headline might say: “Land Revolution Reform in Iowa?

“It happens in El Salvador, twenty families owning most of the shit, and finally the little guys get together and say they want to revisit the issue.

“Happens in Mexico, South America, all over the world. Why would we be any different?”

“Nobody’s hurting bad enough to fight,” said Herbert.

“I think you’re wrong. Everybody knows six guys running six companies sitting in six fancy rooms in six big buildings in six big cities run almost everything.

“I go to about a dozen coffee shops around this county. Everybody’s hurting.

“What we need is a pro-democracy movement in this country, somebody to stand in front of the tanks and say that’s far enough, bud.”

Sam poked Ray’s pad with a finger.

“Tell me what you think of this. Violence to achieve human rights.”

He looked at both of them, then stared at the back of Karen’s head.

“What do you think of that?”

Karen turned around to face them.

“American Revolution,” Sam began, “Vietnam, Gulf War, Kosovo bombing, abortion bombers, John Brown, Chechen rebels.”

Sam turned to his father to gauge how far he had gone, then looked down at the middle of the table and continued to talk.

“It happens. We can’t keep going like this. My family, your family. Every family in the county … won’t be here in ten years … five years … if the rich folks have their way. And let me tell you … they could give a shit. They don’t care about your kids or my kids or if any of ‘em lives or any of ‘em dies. Never have cared about poor folks, never will.”

Karen sat up. Her jaw roiled.

“We are the campesinos of El Salvador and they are us. When you scratch the surface and get to the bone, it’s all the same,” said Sam in a calm, serious, bass voice.

“The only thing we don’t know, is if we will fight.”

Palecek books:

KGB [Killing George Bush], The Truth, Joe Coffee’s Revolution, Terror Nation, The Last Liberal Outlaw, Looking For Bigfoot, Twins, The American Dream.

Mike Palecek website: http://www.iowapeace.com

Contact Mike: mpalecek@rconnect.com

Palecek books are available through local bookstores, Amazon, or by going to cwgpress.com, howlingdogpress.com, badgerbooks.com, newleafbooks.net, essentialbooks.com, mainstaypress.com.

The American President is selling a product that America does not have.

6/6/07

President Bush is in Europe flaunting, in a hard sell pitch, his brand of democracy to the world at large and to Russia in particular. He is known to have said: “We believe that the voice of the people ought to be determining policy, because we believe in democracy.”

That, ladies and gentlemen, is as fallacious a statement as any that the President of United States has been giving since he took over the reins of his great country. Fallacious too because the American President is selling a product that America does not have.

Granted that we in the Muslim countries have not much idea of the fruits of democracy, having been perpetually ruled by kings, despots, generals, tyrants, autocrats and dictators of all hues. Granted too the fact that no democracy is perfect and at any given time it is either getting better or getting worse, yet the President’s statement is a wholly fallacious one. Fallacious because despite calling itself ‘the champion of democracy’, internally, the U.S. has hardly ever had a direct democracy where American people determine American policy, the true essence of democracy, and externally, it has a long and sordid record of closely coddling mambas like Pol Pots, Marcos’s and Zias of the yore. The American President is selling a product that America does not have.

The President’s statement is fallacious because corporate corruption of American politicians and government has shredded to bits whatever semblance of democracy America was left with. Fallacious too because instead of having democracy in the decision making institutions of America it is rather the fine art of corporate corruption that now stands democratized and institutionalized with all now having a chance at equal opportunity corruption. All it takes is money. Corporate corruption in America is now at a stage where it has become a bipartisan, open, and legal practice with Americans finally coming to accept it as a status quo, an integral part of a dollar-driven, cheating culture. The American President is selling a product that America does not have.

The President’s statement is fallacious because it is now plain for all to see that misrepresentative government and corporatism has oppressed American citizenry to the extent that their democracy has become nothing more than a corporate theocracy, a fascist feudal state in which “the serfs” serve the corporate state as voiceless workers, voracious consumers, submissive citizens and pliant subjects. The American President is selling a product that America does not have.

The President’s statement is fallacious because the immoral alliance that he and his predecessors have been having with dictators the world over runs exactly counter to the false pledges of democracy to their subjects. Fallacious too because those who cosset ruling tyrants cannot advocate for themselves the exclusive privilege of bringing democracy to the oppressed. The American President is selling a product that America does not have.

The President’s statement is fallacious because despite the fact that for all his internal and foreign misadventures, from social issues to Iraq war, the support of American masses having decidedly moved from a trusting to a distrusting majority, he presses on stubbornly. Fallacious because while clinging doggedly to his disastrous policies, he is known to have called himself ‘the decider’ on more than one occasion. Fallacious too because despite the aforementioned fact, there is not one single institution in that ‘mother of all democracies’ that can help loosen the death like grip of the yellow fangs of his administration from the jugular of its unfortunate victims. The American President is selling a product that America does not have.

The President’s statement is fallacious because contrary to its democratic plumage, his own party’s strategy is now out in the open. And that is a Republican Party that permanently runs the United States and a United States that permanently runs the world. Fallacious too because the severely mauled, but still breathing, Democratic opposition has so far miserably failed to nip in the bud this wicked vision of a one-party global empire. The American President is selling a product that America does not have.

The President’s statement is fallacious because he has had real laws passed at home that have torn bomb-size holes in the Bill of Rights, set into motion an actual shift of American judiciary toward the radical right and has so fused his government with corporations, the military, portions of the media and a hugely expanded secret police apparatus that now it scares the living daylights out of common Americans. The American President is selling a product that America does not have.

The President’s statement is fallacious because the world can see his quisling lackeys overseeing his experiments in Afghanistan and Iraq about to roll in dust and his ally in Pakistan looking with stunning disbelief at the shifting sands of national opinion beneath his feet. Fallacious too because had his vision of democracy bore even a scrap of resemblance to the original idea, his friends in these countries would have been elevated to prophet hood by the innocent masses of these countries. The American President is selling a product that America does not have.

The President’s statement is fallacious because we the world can see that for us at least, American democracy has boiled down to nothing more than that of a lynch mob who vote on the fate of their victims even as the rope is being readied to carry out the inevitable verdict. The American President is selling a product that America does not have.

The President’s statement is fallacious because American democracy is not only not a democracy; it is in fact the exact opposite…a ‘minocracy’. He is trying to sell to the world a system in which if only 60% of the people bother to cast their vote, in a majority system with two parties, 31% of the electorate can impose its will on the remaining 69%; and with three parties competing, 21% of the people could rule a country through an appointed elite. The American President is selling a product that America does not have.

The President’s statement is fallacious because American democracy has actually translated itself into vesting the incredible amount of the power of the President of United States into a mediocrity like the incumbent President with disastrous results for America and the world at large. Fallacious because mediocrity has now become the rule and unlimited irresponsibility one of the privileges associated with his kind of totalitarian democracy. Fallacious too because with the justification of a popular mandate, a third-rate politician has been given the license to squander resources and bring chaos into the world without the fear of being held accountable for it. The American President is selling a product that America does not have.

Some democracy, America.