The Grand Theatre

The American political drama, or electoral theatre, is reinforced so aggressively because it is the most basic and effective distraction people have for their social malaise and misery. Voting is a reflection of binary models, it is really just exchange value. And voting makes everyone equal. And Americans have even taken to wearing little stickers that proclaim they voted. So electoral theatre as a shaming device. But voting becomes even more than just a threadbare symbol of equality, it takes on almost occult significance for many. It is one of the few rituals in bourgeois society that seems to encompass something almost magical. Voting is an affirmation of one’s existence, of one’s autonomy and even freedom. I can vote for whoever I choose. Well, off a menu of two.

But I have seen leftist writers proclaim lesser evilism is not to be debated. This is, apparently, because Trump is some sort of special category of evil. This is a hugely regressive and politically immature position. Firstly, voting is not going to solve shit. Full stop. No, the entire apparatus of elections and voting machines and voter suppression or corrupt counts is part of this grand theatre. And this emphasis also promotes a popular idea with the ruling class, that of individualism.--JS

This is an especially bright essay.  Highly recommended for truth seekers. People whose brains have transmogrified into nests of snakes are urged to read it as well.


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What Next?

Anthony DiMaggio lecture.

A shortened, accompanying text.


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Tom Clark, 77

I'm a little late with this, as with all else, but the poet Tom Clark died August 23 at age 77, three days after being struck by an auto near his home in Berkeley.

I didn't discover the info until I went to his blog, Beyond the Pale, and noticed that the last entry was written on August 18. I had a hunch and searched for the worst and immediately found this Times obit.

This was Clark's second run-in with a car on a busy street near his pad. Surviving the first accident, he complained about the uptick in traffic on his street. The first accident put him down for a month or more, and it is just damn weird and tragic that a similar accident ended his life.

I had a short and lively exchange of emails with Clark six years ago as Round Bend Press brought out a pair of poetry books by Charles and Bill Deemer. Clark wrote to tell me how much he liked the work.

"Those Deemer boys really know how to write," he said.

Indeed. And so did Tom Clark, RIP.

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Happy Birthday of Death

Sadly, as a nation, the U.S. doesn’t recall Cheney’s lies, or his role in planning the contemptible “Shock and Awe” saturation bombing campaign that destroyed a sovereign nation, which posed no threat to the United States, and left the world’s cradle of civilization in ruins. Conveniently, it doesn’t recall the over 500,000 deaths from war related causes, as reported by the Huffington Post in its 2017 updated article; nor does it recall that obliterating Iraq’s government created a sociopolitical vacuum that enabled the exponential growth of the CIA’s unique brand of Islamofascism and its resulting terrorism, which has culminated in war-torn Syria and Yemen.--LS

I've always wondered why I seem to be the only U.S. citizen outraged by this. I know I'm not alone, but damned if it doesn't feel like it most days.


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American Psychosis

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Ignore Him

Here’s a thought: What if the media just stopped covering Trump on a daily basis? Why must they dutifully replay every infuriating word from every canned, rigged, reality-TV campaign rally and faux news conference and then bemoan his total narcissism, his complete lack of empathy, his wedge-driving failure of leadership, his dog whistles for racists, his winks and nods to neo-Nazis, his total and unrelenting lack of human decency?--SK

I like this. 

And that's just one; there's much, much more to be had here.


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Guilty

DURHAM, NH—Blaming those with a differing worldview for sowing rampant discord in society, political scientists at the University of New Hampshire announced Wednesday they had traced the current polarization in American democracy to those fucking idiots on the other side of the aisle...

The rest of the story from The Onion.


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Pass the Popcorn, Please

The efforts by the Democratic Party and much of the press, including CNN and The New York Times, to discredit Trump, as if our problems are embodied in him, are futile. The smug, self-righteousness of this crusade against Trump only contributes to the national reality television show that has replaced journalism and politics. This crusade attempts to reduce a social, economic and political crisis to the personality of Trump. It is accompanied by a refusal to confront and name the corporate forces responsible for our failed democracy. This collusion with the forces of corporate oppression neuters the press and Trump’s mainstream critics.--CH

I hear and read a lot of this from Trump critics. Based on their conviction, one would think that before Trump rose out of the muck America was a sweetheart ideal located somewhere in the West, an idyllic Eden where no wrong was ever attempted, no murder was ever committed, no shackles were ever in vogue, no pain existed or unfairness exploited, no hearts were ever broken or corporate robberies committed, nor evil ever imagined much less acted on.

Following Hedges thesis here, one imagines the wailing anti-Trump noise is itself cultist in nature.

Hey, we get it man.  He's an asshole and lawless president who should have been impeached yesterday.

Keep yelling. It's doing a world of good.


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Post Politics

It’s election season again, that joyous time of the biennium, and you know what that means: a renewal of the perennial left-wing debate over “lesser-evil voting.” Is it wrong to vote for a Democrat, rather than someone on the genuine left, in order to keep a reactionary or a fascist out of power? Or, on the contrary, is it wrong to vote for a leftist who has apparently no chance of victory, thereby denying a vote to the Democrat and so increasing the odds that the reactionary candidate will win? The most famous advocate of “lesser-evil” voting is Noam Chomsky, who argues that the most immediate moral imperative is to prevent the worst possible electoral outcome from occurring. Critics of lesser-evil voting are legion, as a simple Google search indicates.--CW

A sensible argument for LEV, which I can no longer abide by. The duopoly has had its day and will continue to have many more of them in a fraudulent political process that both sickens and embarrasses me. I do not think it my civic duty to support fraud.

I know many people--I should say most people I know--buy Mr. Wright's thinking, if they think at all. Those who do not think an iota are inconsequential, and hence the real problem.

As I've said over and over, the level of political discourse in the U.S. bottomed out long ago.  The U.S. is a police state.

As long as that little problem lingers, whom to vote for hardly matters at all, despite Wright's painstaking argument.

(Picture: Obama's war in Yemen)


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Mr. Fish

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Art Bastards

Louis Proyect goes in-depth on the commodification of art in this compelling piece.


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Hedges Visits Portland's Street Roots

PORTLAND, Ore.—It is 8 a.m. I am in the small offices of Street Roots, a weekly newspaper that prints 10,000 copies per edition. Those who sell the newspaper on the streets—all of them victims of extreme poverty and half of them homeless—have gathered before heading out with their bundles to spend hours in the cold and rain.

“There is foot care on Mondays starting at 8 a.m. with the nurses,” Cole Merkel, the director of the vendor program, shouts above the chatter. “If you need to get your feet taken care of, come in for the nurses’ foot care. Just a really quick shout-out and thank you to Leo and Nettie Johnson, who called up to City Hall this week to testify about the criminalization of homelessness to City Council and the mayor. Super awesome.”--CH

A Street Roots vendor whom I speak to frequently told me Chris Hedges visited the newspaper's Portland office last week.

Here is Hedges' resultant column at Truthdig.

A good read.


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Give

Give to CounterPunch, the best online zine in the world.

My computer was down, finally responded briefly and I heard something like a whine in the fan area.  I slapped the fan encasement a couple of times.  Presto.

Probably not the best fix. We'll see how long it lasts.


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Beyond Alleged Assault

In the hearings, Kavanaugh tried to pass himself off as a regular guy who worked his way up the ladder on merit, not connections: “I got into Yale Law School,” he pointed out. “That’s the number one law school in the country. I had no connections there. I got there by busting my tail in college.”

Nope, no connections. It’s just coincidence that he’s a Yale “legacy” (his grandfather graduated Yale in 1928), that he attended high school at the exclusive Georgetown Prep (his father graduated Georgetown University), and that his father headed a large DC lobbying group representing more than 600 companies (the Cosmetic, Toiletry, and Fragrance Association, now known as the Personal Care Products Council). Surely Brett Kavanaugh would have risen to the top of his field even if he’d been born in a public housing project and attended public schools, right?--TK

No silver spoon, right?  Ha ha.

Beyond the "did he do it?" obsession.  Kavanaugh has done plenty, most of it harmful.

Corporate media, television and big newspapers, have America paralyzed with stupidity and sleaze.  Powerful drugs.  So glad I kicked the big-media habit many years ago.

I don't know the next big thing, that is the next pop sensation being manufactured by big money for my salvation, but neither do I walk around with worms in my brain.


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Happy Weekend!

What are you doing here reading this crap when you could be here reading the stuff that counts?

I'm too tired to have a good weekend, but that shouldn't stop you from having all the fun your incredible shrinking brain is capable of conjuring up.

Seriously, break both legs on your way to the exotic foods specialty shop.

Have fun.


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