Zizek, Kristeva, Hooks, and Understanding the Connecticut Shooting

In American neighborhoods, those quiet peaceful neighborhoods, where common folk are continually shocked by the horror of single acts of deep cruelty, the lessons learned are easily forgotten and placed on the list of little murders by those not directly affected. The recent grotesque acts in a Newtown, Connecticut school must force us not to forget but to delve into the deeper social issues inflicting America. Perhaps theorizing with Slavoj Zizek, Julia Kristeva, and Bell Hooks can awaken this surprise for some but not all. Most would rather move on and forget.

In the 1971 film ‘Little Murders’ with actors Donald Sutherland, Eliot Gould, and Alan Arkin; the film depicts a society on the brink of chaos. Human values seem nearly nihilistic, and on a daily basis unsolved murders take innocent lives, never following any 'pattern'. In the French philosophers’, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guittari’s, ‘A Thousand Plateaus’ the deep analysis, nearly intentionally incomprehensible at times, dissects the nature of Capitalism and Schizophrenia: In the extreme late-Capitalistic societies, such as the United States, humans have become so alienated from one another that they can no longer relate or connect in a socially interactive community. Due to economics and technology, the human mind has discarded certain necessary traits that progressively allow people to interact in a healthy way. This can result at times where those outcast alienated individuals take out their psychosis in psychopathic ways. Schizophrenia is a loose term associated with numerous mental health illnesses. Only in countries so advanced do individuals of certain economic upbringings have the luxury to manifest a psychological neuroticism, be heavily medicated, or lose the moral capacity at the slightest market instability.

The instability pattern in the Connecticut shooting, the Columbine shooting, the Virginia Tech shooting, the Batman premier shooting, the Arizona congress woman shooting, and recent other similar atrocities reflect individuals quite often who are not from poverty stricken families, or from Third World communities, or low-income minority families. These all ‘male’, typically white but not always, acts of aggression represent individuals from bourgeois middle-class and have chosen no healthy outlets to externalize their internal psychosis. Unlike the recent community organized protests in developing nations, where frustrated individuals come together to protest their governments, like in Egypt, Tunisia, Thailand, and Chile in the past few years; in late-Capitalist nations, there rarely is any deeper sense of community until tragedy or hurricane occur; but then within a short time passes, the alienation returns. So most likely until the deeper failures of economic imbalance and social bankruptcy are addressed, more singular acts of violence may continue. It is very likely to continue since most people refrain from tackling the deeper systematic failures of inclusion. Rather than addressing the core of social failures, the superficial tactics of high lobbied politicians reflect a real failure of irresponsible leadership.  Americans cannot wait for political leaders to address the issues but need to take a citizen’s role of speaking out and speaking with one another on all levels.

Several years ago, when breaking news covered a series of individual acts of cruelty in China, when grown men frustrated and lonely went into schools and hospitals shooting or stabbing children and strangers, Americans were mortified and looked at China failing to socially address the lack of support services for depressed and mentally ill individuals. American media claimed it was due to a lack of freedom. Yet in America where the right to choose is usually determined via consumer interests, this mirror is equally violent, as seen recently in Connecticut. When angered and frustrated individuals do not have support and constant inclusion, the pattern reflects that they take their anger out at weaker or those individuals who cannot protect themselves, like children; this is often similar to the bully-syndrome, where a bully tends to bully because he cannot stand up to those stronger than himself exploiting him, so he takes it out on those who he feels he can overwhelm. This is a failure beyond the self. There is a larger systematic failure in the Capitalist society that inevitably creates a society of Haves and Have-nots (China in the 21^st Century is a capitalist society). The United States is a late-Capitalist society struggling to address what is socially lacking that no matter how many products one consumes the material gain won’t address the social lack.

In Slavoj Zizek’s ‘The Ticklish Subject’, the Slovenian philosopher tackles the underlying problem between the ‘real, the symbolic, and the lack’. The danger of normalcy as he puts it, is that those who are essentially claiming to be ‘normal’ will not step away from their own selves to realize that the act of madness in one isolated individual is a representative failure of what ‘normal’ includes. Rather than the ability to think hard about community values, individuals will blame others rather than deduce a discord with what is overall lacking. The second consequence that Julia Kristeva theorizes in her understanding of societies failure to revolt together in the 21^st Century for a more inclusive system is that the “I” is isolated. Her analysis notices that there is an erosion in the capacity to rebel as a “sign of national depression” similar to “what the individual feels in isolation” (Intimate Revolt). Tina Chanter reflects on Kristeva’s awareness of the ‘weakness of law and the absence of responsibility’: “As this claim makes clear, ‘the new maladies of the soul’ is not a retreat from the tasks of social transformation but precisely a demonstration of the psychic consequences of such a retreat.” America has clearly escaped responsibility from social accountability in the Corporate practice of big business, to the Government failures protecting public education, to the War Industrial Complex, to lack of prison reform and gun-control laws, and this passes over to simple failures of parents’ lacking the responsibility in giving necessary guidance to their own children while they sit glued to their cell phones and drop the child for endless hours in front of the television or computer. 

           

For Bell Hooks in her essay ‘Talking Back’, talking back meant daring to disagree from ‘normal’ acceptance, speaking when one is not being spoken to as a courageous act, and sometimes just having an opinion (Hooks). When people fear going deep and talking about the personal, “We have to go that deep”; this overcoming of pain and degradation that Hooks talks about is our struggle, a struggle of memory against forgetting (Hooks). A dialogue is necessary, not only locally, but also internationally. If the crimes of those who of low-income tend to be minor thefts from drugs, car robberies, mugging, and individual alley shoot outs, and the crimes of isolated middle-class alienated young men are to take guns to public areas and shoot at random multiple people, the crimes of the rich involve large segments of populations like U.S. led wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, fracking oil in the central United States, or the closing of a General Motors factory in Flint, Michigan. The pattern of acceptance of ‘normalcy’ is out of control and social accountability is absent.

A necessary dialogue is long overdue. The pain that American’s feel is also uniquely connected to the pain that the Chinese feel. When American clothes and dolls, like Barbie, are manufactured in Chinese factories, the exploitation at home is directly connected to the exploitation abroad. When protest and revolt occur in the Middle East, their pain and frustration is directly connected to the pain and frustrations Americans feel, and at an imbalance. When Americans are frustrated that the price of gasoline is getting higher and they cannot drive their cars. The frustration of those in the Middle East is ten-fold because our unaccountable corporations and government have supported ruthless dictators for decade after decade. The oil giants of Exxon and Mobile are greedy enough to manipulate the American system for so long conditioning the belief that oil is a necessity to the American way of life. But this is directly connected to the frustration and pain in the Middle East not having a genuine outlet for democratic values. Such absence of social accountability leads to increases in fundamentalism.

The false ‘normalcy’ that is so expected of fuel, clothes, style, and technology is the very ‘lacking’ that comes from the overvaluing economic principles and devaluing moral social values, and this creates alienation. The pain at home is uniquely connected to the pain abroad. There is a common failure.  While the pain abroad can collectively turn out and organize revolt, it seems that in the extreme capitalist/consumer nations such as the United States, the system alienates so many individuals that occasionally and what appears to be a growing concern is that certain, mostly male characters cannot connect with their fellow human beings, in an almost social autism, resulting in acts of unjustified irresponsible violence in public space, as seen in Connecticut this week. Americans must stop the political shallow discourse and delve into discussing the systems overall failure, or these sorts of acts (little murders) will continue.  

Angela Davis, Herbert Marcuse, Paul Goodman, Gloria Anzaldua, and Nawal el Saadawi: On Political Shallowness and One-Dimensionality worth Shattering:

The gaffe of Mitt Romney for president, at an all-rich benefit event, said that 47% of the nation is not worth caring about. Truth is, in a have and have-not society, the Capital system does not provide for all.

Paul Goodman and Herbert Marcuse would agree that beyond the bourgeois ad nauseam, “boredom in politics may set the self-focused individual free from making a stance,” where the false democracy of limiting votes to two corporate controlled parties, still hoodwinks the masses into apathy or fetish for brand name parties. “A mass alienated from deep natural concerns, but occupying the consciousness and pre-consciousness with every manner of excitement, news, popular culture, sport, emulation, expenditure, and mechanical manipulation” (Goodman).  Paul Goodman later admits that the ability of parties and governments to accomplish any positive good is slim to none.

One online video on Yesmagazine.org recently reflected that all politicians should be required to wear labels like NASCAR drivers, to reflect the truth of which corporations, donors and lobbyists pay them top dollar. “I cannot lead or easily be led, and I am dubious about the ability of parties and governments to accomplish any positive good” (Goodman).

The real wealth and power in the United States is associated, still to this day, with corporations and families tied to the Robber Barons during the earliest years in the 20^th Century, who boomed to new heights after World War II: the Rockefellers, the Carnegies, the Fords, the Mellons, the DuPonts, as well as the Wallmart families, those behind Bank of America and Chase, the friends of the Bush family, and those behind Halliburton, General Electric, Monsanto, and Bechtel. Each of these elites is tied to oil, natural resources, chemicals, finances, pharmaceuticals, and consumer goods.

Hollywood does not have value power, nor does the elected official. Hollywood needs the current system as much as others because it provides the base for a never tired living vicarious audience. Big business reigns! Of course, Microsoft, and the Internet industries provide means to share information. But this new form of technology, still recent in the length of historic clout, has a two-way direction. One of threat to those in power and freedom of connectivity between alienated individuals, but also it could lead to dependency on the natural resources to make the technology and with stricter and stricter rules to control individual sharing capabilities. “This means of communication, available to all,” now has a growing lack in engaging people in controversial issues beyond the screen. Distracted by games, videos, and couch potato passivity, it is hard to move past the length of the power chord.

In light of Herbert Marcuse’s “One-Dimensional Man”, the most advanced areas of industrial society “exhibit throughout these two features, a trend towards consummation of technological rationality and intensive efforts to contain this trend within the established institutions” (Marcuse).    

Promoted by politicians and media, this One-Dimensional thought process is constructed by the political needs of special interests that convince the individual into a belief system that corporate needs are actually individual needs. As the old advertisement stated: “What is good for General Motors is good for America!” This sort of chime echoes today in Vice-President Joe Biden’s chant, “General Motors is Alive, and Osama Bin Laden is Dead!”

Controlled modes of thought and behavior become linked to no longer production, but consumption. No matter how much an alienated individual spends, it will not fill up the hole that is missing in a spiritually empty world under a capitalist mantra.

The thought police under Hitler’s Germany, Stalin’s Russia, or Edgar Hoover’s America are fairly undifferentiated. Many people believe that times have drastically changed. But now that limited freedom has been gained, the gas chamber is the open environment that Monsanto, BP Oil, and DuPont pollute; the chains and the walls are restricted to mind control of manufactured consent; television, movies, and popular magazine trends are the image police, and media has no longer a journalistic responsibility, but a profit motive to boot.

The flavor and favor of the One-Dimensional world limits the definition of beauty and success; technical and administrative skills favored over mental skills; and this masterly fashion limits quality experience to masses of office spaces distracted with semi-satisfied machines, or sales-people, manual laborers, or construction workers beating out hours of work for works sake. Work, work, work, work, and if he or she has too much time on his or her hands, then give them more superficial distractions: sporting, shopping, accessorizing, and one-dimensional entertaining. Fluff can set you free and yet all it really does is perpetuate the acceptance of an affluent society unaware of its dependencies on overseas labor in China, Mexico, Vietnam, Indonesia, etc, Oil from the Middle East, immigrant labor at home, natural resource usurped from Africa, South America, or Asia; and a garbage bin big enough to dump all the leftovers, which is usually poor nations or poor neighborhoods having to choose between “poverty and poison”.

Tracy Chapman once sang, “Give them drugs and give them candy; Make them think that they are happy …  But if they start to question … Bang, Bang, Bang, Shoot them down.”

Angela Davis connects directly the relationship between minorities, immigrants, and the civil rights movement to the greater global international direction socially and economically; and this divergence is due to the dislocation/severed limbs between democracy and capitalism. The two ideologies do not go hand in hand. The limbo of today’s dilemmas and the future solutions are blotchily unforeseeable, except for the immediate drift towards catastrophe and collision. 

The 47% that Romney cancels out are not only those Americans, who make $10,000.00 a year or less but are also veterans, elderly, citizens with disabilities and predominantly minorities. Many are too busy working to actually find the time to vote. Many are convinced that neither party will do any thing to help the greater community, with good reason to believe this. As well, Third Party candidates are always naively easily cancelled out. There are many who do not know enough to make a stand as well as those who are unemployed, unemployable, outsiders, outcastes or other cultures.

In a letter from Raya Dunayevskaya to Erich Fromm about Herbert Marcuse’s “One-Dimensional Man” she summarizes, “Marcuse seems preoccupied with the idea that an advanced industrial society has replaced ontology with technology … we (individuals) have lost our power (according to him) of ‘negative thinking’ and have become so much a part of the status quo that” they are a ‘technicality’ rather than an opposition, who are easily swallowed up in minor modes of protest …” When capable the modes of “Zen, Existentialism, and Beat ways of life …  like other such modes of protest, are no longer contradictory” but have been absorbed into the status quo (Dunayevskaya). These modes of protest are no longer negating the status quo but have now become a ceremonial part of behavior practice. Such modes are now merely fashionable and are harmless like Punk, Rap, Graffiti, and Skate Boards.

While Raya Dunayevskaya until her death still believed in the ‘proletarian revolution’, Herbert Marcuse, had long given up on the Marxist notion. He equated that the blue-collar worker, the white-collar worker, and the average Joe had now been so absorbed into the consumer system that the working class had lost its ability to revolt in the previous capacity that Marx had anticipated. Voting seems just another mechanical chore, even though less than one hundred years ago women and minorities were strictly prohibited in accessing such rights.       

In Kevin Anderson and Russell Rockwell’s intro on Dunayevskaya’s correspondences with Marcuse and Erich Fromm, they note the differences between Marcuse and Dunayevskaya: “for Dunayevskaya, the creative role of labor is the key to all else” and for Marcuse, “interprets creativity ‘outside of labor’, as central to the post-capitalist society.”   In summing, one will either have creativity in their choice of work, or one will find creativity in his or her life outside of work. The debate comes to terms with the fact that human daily activities cannot fully abolish the need for labor, but it can be a means and not an end to self-development only if it leads to intellectual growth not just consumptive material growth.

If Marxists wanted a revolution of laborers over CEO’s and business elite, the post-revolution would have put the power over work in the worker’s hands; but for Marcuse, this is not enough if we do not redefine the ideal meaning of ‘work’. As for Anarchist-Intellectuals, such as Paul Goodman, they do not believe this type of revolution that Marxists hope for would lead to a healthier future under communism but instead a decline in actual freedom. Evidence is seen in the social evolution in Stalin and Mao’s grip over revolutionary power; leaving only single dictatorial voices over what is acceptable or not.

Goals of most historic Anarchist-Intellectuals, such as Har Dayal of India and Ricardo Flores of Mexico were of the “objective to not just reform government, but to leave government as unnecessary and only nominal” because if individuals have been educated enough to be ‘responsible and inclusive’ in decision making, governance would not be necessary (which a great many at the top of the greed list fail to learn) (Har Dayal). Our system is not self-improving but self-declining because of a failure in responsible leadership. The hierarchy of power is unnatural and willing to sacrifice the mass to save those at the top tier. 

Many critical workers realize that for the most part, “people who actually perform a function usually best know how it should be done.” Most employed individuals can admit that far more than they need, a boss is unnecessary. When the job is being performed, the limited micro-management the better, so as to improve self-efficiency; an ‘honest day’s work for an honest day’s pay.’ The illusionary ‘busy’ work is not fooling anybody. It even does little to relieve job anxiety.

In similar alignment with Marcuse, Paul Goodman’s summation in “Drawing the Line” reflects that, “an enormous amount of effort from people in our society is used to create a synthetic demand.” Advertisers, politicians, and those in commodities “caught up in the profit system,” make you believe that you need more materials than you actually do need, and their salaries are based on hoodwinking the masses to believe this synthetic demand is natural (Goodman). This behavior is quite irresponsible and self-seeking. This artificial stimulation leads to personal egotism, and is a buffer to the ‘one-dimensional’ reality seen today at work, at home, or in social circles.

Herbert Read, who also has a great essay book entitled “To Hell With Culture”, commented on Herbert Marcuse’s “One-Dimensional Man”. Read stated that “Marcuse had moved to reconcile that originality and spontaneity and all the creative aspects of our human nature have been reduced in all its varieties of temperament and desire into one universal system of thought and behavior”. He notes that Marcuse does not claim to solve this problem, “but by presenting the alternatives in clear and critical terms, he makes the choice inevitable to every socially responsible individual … that we realize that the choice is now between the life and death of our civilization” (Read).

Though Marcuse does not claim to solve the problem, other intellectuals since then have pushed on how we can activate past the dilemma. Angela Davis in a 1995 interview with Lisa Lowe reflected on her experience with Herbert Marcuse during the 1960’s, and though he was in his 70’s at the time, the elderly activist participated in helping the youth movement. In the interview, Davis states, “The Seduction of the ‘One-Dimensional Society’ can be resisted (and still can be). He not only theorized these developments but he actively participated in mobilizations both in the US and in Europe. Working so closely with him at the time, I learned that while teaching and agitation were two very different practices, students need to be assured that politics and intellectual life are not two entirely separate modes of existence. I learned that I did not have to leave political activism behind to be an effective teacher” (Angela Davis).

Paul Goodman in agreement with Angela Davis also noted that “if anything is to be accomplished, it must be accomplished through continual pressure … Wiser, more compassionate people must continue to educate those who surround them.”    

Nawal el Saadawi and Gloria Anzaldua go even further. One-Dimensionality can be resisted. Nawal el Saadawi, in an essay entitled “Women and the Poor”, suggests: “we need unity and solidarity between men and women who resist global injustice at the local level as well as the international level. But we need a movement that is progressive, not backward, which seeks unity in diversity, by breaking down barriers built on discrimination (by gender, class, race, religion…)” and she emphasizes that we need to “Unveil the Mind”. Unveiling the Mind must expose the contradictions of both the economic and cultural order now controlled by corporate interests. Locally, we are controlled by the status quo. Globally, we are controlled by the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and the World Trade Organization (Saadawi).   

As with the act of unveiling, Gloria Anzaldua has invoked the image of a ‘Nagual’, a spiritual shape-shifter that goes ‘in-between’ spaces. Such terminology from her essay “Haciendo Caras, Una Entrada” where the masks that we wear (or veils) have driven ‘a wedge between our intersubjective personhood’; after “years of wearing masks, we may merely be just a series of roles” or merely just one-dimensional. Anzaldua suggests breaking down into fragments, creating space between the single mold, which as with any shattered piece “provides space” between the broken shards, and we must crack the masks. In our “self-reflexivity and in our active participation with the issues that confront us, whether it be through writing, front-line activism, or individual self-development, we are uncovering the interfaces” (uncovering pieces that came out from the shattering) (Anzaldua).

‘Uncovering our interfaces’ or ‘unveiling our minds’ resist one-dimensionality.  The ‘new mestiza’ that Gloria Anzaldua mentions is a person who inhabits multiple worlds due to gender, sexuality, color, race, class, bodies, spirituality, and other realities. Such a provocative alternative will allow the responsible individual to find “the guts and adrenaline that horrific suffering and anger, evoked by some of the shattered pieces, catapult us into” that acknowledges history rather than ignores history (Anzaldua). “These pieces are not only about survival strategies, they are survival strategies.” Anzaldua notes that dwelling on terms that cliché ‘diversity’ and ‘multiculturalism’ is a way of avoiding serious dismantling, not only of racism but also the one-dimensionality that trivializes our independent histories. “Inherent in the creative act is a spiritual, psychic component – one of spiritual excavation” that requires ‘body, soul, mind and spirit’. 

While the election nonsense reflects the superficial politics that whitewash depth of a clearer democratic void, real politics deals with shattering the One-Dimensional thought process that has limited the American society for far too long. Voices of resistance, such as Gloria Anzaldua, Angela Davis, and Nawal el Saadawi continued and have gone beyond the realms Herbert Marcuse, Raya Dunayevskaya, and Paul Goodman had attempted to reach due to each woman’s unique creative ability and layerage of personal history. This is a quality that the 47% in deed have but need to embrace. Marcuse and Goodman started the discourse, but those who picked up the single fold that followed gave reason to shatter the process of one-dimensionality even beyond. Resistance is necessary, and activism in teaching is a required responsibility.  

Uranium, AIDS, War or Uranium Aids War

Farfetched or Not so Far...

Uranium Kills! In a previous post I mentioned Winona LaDuke’s call for ‘Cyclical Thinking’, where natural flows and cycles create birth and rebirth. If negative acts occur, the cycle will bring back in unknown ways additional returns. The purpose of this essay is to look at ‘unknowns’ or ‘known-but-not-open-to-the common-ear’ and attempt to connect abstract dots with recent information I had stumbled upon. It is a talking out loud to see if farfetched equations are actually not so far fetched. Can it make sense? Is it already known but not spoken about?

AIDS (Auto-Immune Deficiency Syndrome), Cancer, and War are some of the most atrocious killers of innocent people across the globe. One of the scariest weapons today is a Nuclear Weapon. Back one hundred years ago, neither AIDS, Cancer, or threats from nuclear weapons or even nuclear power were very foreseeable to the crisis they have come to today.

It is clear that radiation causes cancer. Large amounts of radiation kills and studies regarding the after-effects of the Chernobyl disaster of 1986 have shown direct evidence that nuclear fallouts can significantly lead to cancers, immune deficiency, leukemia, and other deadly diseases. Scientists, doctors, and researchers, such as Vladimir Chernousenko and Jay M Gould, have recorded their findings regarding wide-spread impacts to public health not just in the immediate area around Chernobyl but groups of populations in neighboring areas in Belarus, Ukraine, Russia, and within a radius where wind currents and water flows.  

The US and NATO bombings of the Balkans have had similar findings from the conflicts in the 1990’s. The uranium from the bombs dropped in Kosovo, Bosnia and Serbia have resulted in a rarely spoken in the media human cancer epidemic and an environmental disaster that will continue decades after the actual conflict had ended.  Reports from doctors such as Doctor Slavko Zdrale have noted specific types of cancers in locals, and European and American soldiers since. Similar findings are occurring in Iraq.

Nuclear Power is dependent on uranium. This is true with the Chernobyl disaster. But also, the War Industrial Complex in the United States and NATO are dependent on uranium for missiles, bombs and other weapons that companies such as Lockheed and Martin produce with uranium.  

Uranium is a by-product of gold. Corporations since the beginning of the 20^th Century have been mining uranium. Nuclear Power industries need uranium to thrive, just as much as the Nuclear Weapon industry. For most purposes, they are one in the same. The earliest mining of uranium was off of the Native American reservations and out of Sub-Saharan Africa.

In Africa, John Gunther has recorded in his book Inside Africa, that Edgar Edouard Sengier observed Belgian uranium mines in the Congo particularly at the key time of World War II, and due to the Belgian’s abhorred relations to the Germans at the time sold radioactive uranium to the United States just before the US used the uranium to make the atomic bombs dropped on Nagasaki and Hiroshima, Japan. The Belgian company, Union Minicere, had been pulling uranium out of the Congo in areas of Kambove and Katanga throughout the colonial occupation of Africa.

At the same time that the Belgian’s were mining uranium out of the Congo, the apartheid South African government and corporations were profiting on sales to the US military with mines in South Africa and current day Namibia. Mines most likely existed in neighboring Botswana as well. Throughout the 20^th Century, the resources for nuclear weapons, weapons, and nuclear power were being plundered from the African continent. However, the other key region of the world where uranium was being pulled from the environment was in areas allotted to Native American tribes in the United States. Winona LaDuke and Paula Gunn Allen mention the private and military interests in native territories or alongside of native reservations that led to eventually significant statistics of health crimes to the populations.

New Mexico was where the US military first tested the atomic bomb. The Laguna Pueblo had noticed the US government mining uranium in their areas around the late 1930’s. The Anaconda Company’s Jackpile Mine lasted until 1981. Since the discovery of uranium in native territories the environmental damage and health hazards to the local communities have increased significantly. Pulmonary cancers have been linked highly with uranium miners, recorded in research by Joseph Wagonner, Ariel Schurgin, and Thomas C Hollacher.

Not only did the mining of uranium lead to environment and health depletion, but the disposal of Nuclear Waste after uranium is used for nuclear power and weapons led to and continues to lead to some major hazardous regions of the United States. In Nevada, as Winona LaDuke has reported on, the Yucca Mountain is the largest nuclear waste dump in the continental US, where at least 109 nuclear plants have shipped toxic waste to be buried deep below the surface. However, since the birth of the waste dumpsite, the Shoshone Native American tribe has had major fatalities due to related diseases due to the radioactive mountain.

On the US controlled island of Saint Lawrence, between Alaska and Russia, which was a 1952 military base, abandoned in the 1970’s, the Yup’ik Eskimos have had major health problems and fatalities due to the remains abandoned and still not cleaned-up by the US military. The former base continues to pollute the island and the ocean waters that surround it. Even the Navajo reservation near the first testing of the atomic bomb, around the Crown Point Area, has recorded since the 1970’s major health problems due to the irresponsible activities.

Japan’s 2011 earthquake triggering the nuclear fall-out is another key example why nuclear power should not be considered as a clean energy source regardless of media-advertisement.

Immediate results of uranium related activities, whether simple excavation in mines, testing weapons, dropping weapons during war time, or disposing of nuclear waste from power plants, has enormously damaged the environment and attributed to major cancer related diseases. But that is not all.

The mystery behind how the AIDS epidemic in Africa began may be more related to the uranium than we can rationally connect. An Abstract concept, in deed, but not impossible; before cancelling out the absurdity, one must map it out. The largest region plundered of uranium in Sub-Saharan Africa is from the Congo through Angola, Namibia, Botswana, to South Africa. The largest population exposed to AIDS is in deed the same region.   

High levels of critical thinking leads one to ask – Did high doses of radiation from uranium exposure in the mines in Southern Africa, lead to the secret behind how AIDS began in Africa? Radiologist specialists Sternglass and Scheer have considered the potential link.

But first, to build a parallel, lets analyze the involvement of radiation that led to the rise in Hantavirus in the United States. Hantavirus is a deadly disease when humans are in contact with rodent feces. According to the US Army Medical Research Institute, Connie Schmaljohn states, “HPS was first described in 1993 when a cluster of cases of adult fatal respiratory distress of unknown origin occurred in the Four Corners region of the United States (New Mexico, Arizona, Colorado, and Utah). The unexpected finding that sera from patients reacted with Hantaviral antigens was quickly followed by the genetic identification of a novel Hantavirus in patients' tissues and in rodents trapped near patients' homes” (Schmaljohn). Like AIDS, Hantavirus first appeared in the public by unknown origins.  

The leaking of toxic materials into the soil, Paula Gunn Allen notes, created a radioactive hazard. At first slightly unnoticed, except in isolated cases, the outbreak led to the growing awareness that Hantavirus was indeed in existence. Some reports believed that the virus came about when rodents, mice and rats, ate contaminated materials in the soil and water. Radioactive material has been recorded to appear even in areas congested with mushrooms, as seen in areas like the Balkans on mountainsides adjacent to areas bombed during the conflict in the 1990’s. The toxic chemicals from uranium weapons biologically cycle through the environment and nature attempts to mutate the waste, which is one reason locals in areas along mountains are recommended to not eat certain mushrooms. If mushrooms are natures way of recycling toxins, it is possible to connect that not all animals, such as rodents, will be as affected by toxic waste as humans would be. Hence, rats and mice that carry Hantavirus, which appeared in areas like New Mexico, Arizona, Colorado and Utah, trekked through the very areas where there was nuclear waste and uranium depleted soil, and can possibly carry a deadly disease to humans but not be at harm.

Yes, absurd to connect the details in such a way. But areas heavily mined by local populations in southern Africa could have been exposed to uranium’s harmful after-effects without awareness and then the exposure could have mutated in the body, followed with spreading the new virus to others they came in contact with.  If this is true, then it could very easily be true for some people to say that ‘the White man did bring AIDS to Africa’. Industry’s excessive greed to mine uranium out of the continent during the colonial period and today parallels the rise in AIDS. AIDS emerged in the public eye in the early 1980’s. Auto-Immune Deficiency Syndrome, like the effects of chemotherapy radiation, begins by depleting the human body of its immune system. Let’s come back to this thought…

The rates of HIV in Russia and Eastern Europe have significantly increased since 2001. Is there a correlation between the Chernobyl catastrophe and the increase, regardless to the increase in drug use, sexual relationship standards and the lack of social health institutions that vanished after the end of the Cold War? Maybe, or maybe not, but if the environment has depleted their immune systems, the environment may have led to the bodies inability to fight off the virus.

Perhaps as Hantavirus passes toxic exposure from soil to rodent to man, AIDS bypasses the rodent and is a connection of toxic exposure passed from soil to human to human.

The connection with uranium and AIDS from the research from Brown University of Dr. Ernest Sternglass and Dr. Jens Scheer are tied with the similar destruction of the immune system and mutations due to radiation exposure. Other doctors such as David S. Greer and Lawrence S. Rifkin were quoted as early as 1985, in an LA Times and New York Times matching articles, stating the similarities between the effects of nuclear fallout and AIDS: "Since large numbers of the survivors of nuclear war can be expected to have immunologic deficits like those in individuals with AIDS, a marked increase in the incidence of AIDS and AIDS-related diseases should be anticipated" in the event of such a war, the report said. "Epidemics . . . are likely in the months and years following a nuclear attack."

In her 1985, LA Times news article Marlene Simons stated that David S Greer’s findings reflected that “diseases likely to occur after such an attack include tuberculosis, leprosy, pneumonia, legionnaire's disease and cancer, the report said, as well as the illnesses most commonly associated with AIDS, Kaposi's sarcoma, a rare skin cancer, and Pneumocystis carinii, a respiratory infection” (Simons).  

Dr. Greer was quoted saying, “The abnormalities of the immune system found in AIDS patients are marked by an "absolute depression" of these "helper" T-cells. Basically, these "helpers" direct other immune-system cells to attack invaders such as cells of tumors, disease-causing bacteria and viruses.”

Cancer rates in the world are at a record high and will only increase as long as the technologies that we use to power society is profit-driven and not health-driven. Cancer is directly connected to exposure to radiation whether one can pinpoint which direct exposure triggered the rise in depletion of health. Uranium has been directly or can be directly connected to major disasters that used weapons or enriched materials, such as Chernobyl and NATO bombings in the Balkans and Iraq.

Why is AIDS quickly discounted in the connection? I’m extrapolating, thinking out loud, maybe there is some level of correlation. The truth is that what the public has been informed or exposed to about the roots of AIDS is limited and small. In the future, all the knowledge about AIDS today will be looked at as primitive and all our assumptions will be clarified, perhaps one hundred years from now. Just look at our knowledge of diseases today compared to one hundred years back. 

But Uranium still kills. It seems most people do not even understand what uranium even consists of. But the sales are political and controversial.  Even as of today, September 14, 2012 in ‘Uranium Investment News’, the United Arab Emirates Nuclear Program was granted funding while the Iran Standoff escalates, the Australian Government remains silent on its own Uranium Mining efforts, in Canada, outside of the Athabasca Basin, the Kivalliq Energy Corporation is advancing Northern Canada’s Highest Grade Uranium Project, and in India the protests towards the opening of the Koodankulam nuclear power plant has been mostly ignored by the government, reflecting little concern for public distrust of claims that it is safe or inclusive to the greater populations health and future.

The Failure of the Self in the Consumer World: American Culture Exposed

In the wishful spirit of Mother Jones, Ida B Wells, Emma Goldman, Angela Davis, Grace Lee Boggs, Anna Mae Pictou-Aquash, and Lolita Lebron; these are individuals we should ‘draw our sustenance from’, but we don’t. Who is the ‘we’? Specifically, those citizens residing in the lines of the globalized economic system accepted by most governments in the United Nations, regardless of free volition.

Politically, as in context, why do so many Americans still think that America was great under Ronald Reagan or Bill Clinton’s presidency? Just recently the governor of New Jersey, Chris Christie claimed, “Let’s make America great again!”  Yet when was he believing America was great and for whom? The answer is Never, if greatness comes at the expense of so many: foreign and domestic. Intentional amnesia misses clear claims to US wealth: genocide to Native Americans, Slavery, atrocious working conditions before the Labor Movement domestically, and continually abroad, supportive dictators for oil, resources, and much more. Oh, but so many say it is not our problem what happens overseas, but it is our problem. We created those problems. How does it make Iraqi’s feel that we’ve already forgotten what our nation has collectively done to them?

Standing at a bar, I see the masquerade. I see it in our movies and on the streets. Our characters are empty, settling for image rather than depth. Herbert Marcuse was correct to note that the way the self exists in America is mostly one-dimensional. So how best can we create a sense of self, when it has been flattened of edges, waves, spirit, resistance, and sustenance?

Toni Cade Bambara, notes in her essay, ‘Deep Sight and Rescue Missions’ that “the less children know, the easier it’ll be for them to fit in and make their way, seemed to be the thinking of half the household. They lobbied for lobotomy, in other words, convinced that ignorance was the prime prerequisite for assimilation, and assimilation was the preferred path to progress” (Bambara). In contrast, while walking in Harlem the other day, I saw a shirt on an elder African-American woman that stated: “Danger: I am intelligent.” Why do so many people fear intelligence? Critical thinking skills are key for individuals when separating the self from a mindless existence of consumption.

Winona LaDuke believes in ‘Cyclical Thinking’, which is common to most indigenous groups or cultures, and is an understanding that “the world (time, and all parts of the natural order, including moon, tides, women, lives, and seasons) flows in cycles. Within this understanding is a clear sense of birth and rebirth and a knowledge that what one does today will affect one in the future!” (LaDuke). This absence appears in the daily actions nurtured in contemporary postmodern America. Instead, our society nurtures that tomorrow doesn’t matter unless “I enjoy first, today for my self.”

The postmodern American Self does not think cyclically. The modern American surprisingly does not like to think, does not want to think, and is nurtured via technology and media to not. “Let somebody else solve the problems (why not vote for a janitor rather than a politician to clean up our mess).” This lack of thinking should not be confused with the teachings of Zen Buddhism, where the mind is ideally supposed to free itself in meditation. We are not all following the goals of Zen by zoning-out the world with headphones, cell phones, smart phones, and I-phones.

Though there is a scarcity of women recorded in classic Zen literature, as Grace Schireson notes in her book ‘Zen Women’; Moshan Liaoran, one of the earliest Zen women in historic Buddhism, taught that, “the Peak is not revealed … I am not pointing to myself, my position, or my ability. To understand the peak, the essence of my teaching, you need to penetrate your own confusion, and whatever has covered this peak from your view. I have no need to show off to you, to point to this, the peak, but you may uncover my teachings by seeing through your own delusions” (Schireson).

It is not even just delusions but the ability to get away from self-focused thoughts. The American culture has embraced the ‘virtue of selfishness’. This obedience to make the world revolve around the I rather than the reverse makes it extremely challenging for the material projected self of what-one-has and what-one-does-not- have-yet to think about other worlds and other I’s, adhering to each one’s own Napoleon complex.  This is a crisis, which is cyclical and will be short sighted. This is as close to a lobotomy from reality as one can get locked behind self-seeking technology. This will come back to us in unseen ways in the near future.

On the same front, one of the earliest French novelists, rarely acknowledged in the literary canon, was Francoise De Graffigny, who lived in 1747, and her novel ‘Letters from a Peruvian Woman’ represented an Incan princess kidnapped by the Spanish during the conquest of Peru. In an English translation, her confessions acknowledge, “When one single object draws all our thoughts, events only interest us through the relations we find them to have with the object … Time like Space is known only by its limits. Our ideas are equally lost when confronted with constant uniformity of one or the other.” If individuals today cannot associate objects, events, and history with their own personal self, they cannot comprehend meaning for them. When the self is intentionally limited to a consumer level, the expectations for them to bring far ranging details for a higher purpose outside of self-gain, is even lower.

Individuals are allowing the culture to funnel the choices for a subjective self rather than looking beyond to a higher Zen, cyclical self, or whatever deeper level one can name for that reference. The Hungarian Marxist Agnes Heller reflects on the idea of the self as well. “Kierkegaard once said that if you do not choose yourself, you let others choose for you.” Individuals born in the ‘consumer’ world are a ‘bundle of empty possibilities’. Heller reflects that the self is the ‘idiosyncrasy of the interpretation’ he or she has with the human world, and this world according to a narcissist is one of emptiness, which will remain empty as long as he or she is solely self-focused causing the ‘self’ to be merely on its own: useless.

Agnes Heller emphasizes in her essay, ‘Can Everyday Life be Endangered?’ that “the Newborn is certainly not like a tabula rasa … everyone is thrown into a concrete network of social regulations by the accident of birth. Culture takes care of transforming this accident, perceived as organic embedded-ness, into fate or providence. Both social regulations and genetic uniqueness are therefore prior to human experience”(Heller). If this bundle of empty possibilities does not go beyond the self in the consumer world regardless of class, race, or gender, he or she will remain empty (and not in the Zen way).

In the globalized world of economic dependencies and interconnected markets, ‘Why is it essential that the American remain self-reliant?’ The Laguna Pueblo activist, Paula Gunn Allen, answers her own question regarding why the American self can go on being community-less, without a place to belong, without a past to remember, or indifferent to all of the above. The American culture was built upon a separation of the self from the circle of nature clinging to a loneliness that reasserts man’s power over nature. Why do we cling to loneliness? Gunn Allen notes, “there is something that can be done, there is a way around the destruction” that perpetuates more destruction foreign and domestic, “but it requires giving up America’s real love: loneliness.” Such chants of affluent children to exemplify this loneliness are ‘I want my own car’, ‘I want my own room’, ‘I want my own cell phone,’ and ‘I want my own way to block out the rest of the world.” I am not aware that I am connected to the rest of the world.

Paula Gunn Allen notes that we are ‘idolized for singular determination’ and overall  “American society substitutes love of the family, comrade, village, community, and tribe for the self-proclaimed triumph of the isolated, superior individual.” Many have taken the messages of 19^th Century Transcendentalists like Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau far beyond their original intent. In Gunn Allen’s book ‘Off the Reservation’ she projects that the real reason American corporate elite feared and still fear socialism and communism is because it requires cooperating with others, and sharing … “It seems fairly obvious from this that a society intent on eradicating theft in all its forms must eradicate ‘civilization’. Cooperativeness, the willingness to share goods and land, is not possible in a basically selfish framework” (Gunn Allen). 

In parallel to Paula Gun Allen’s awareness of the American self, the philosopher Julia Kristeva pulls to the forefront that now beyond the US border and within, “21^st Century Globalization hopes that passions will be reduced under the two fold effect of Nasdaq economic well-being and Prozac’s biological well-being” (Kristeva). This leads to a stunted-self of ‘consumption’, economics, and pharmaceutical bliss. When reduced to this sort of universal, true individual potential is sacrificed to emptiness and buffed up with egotistical cosmetic and psychological cover-up. Democracy under these conditions will not lead to communalism but ignorant pawns voting for puppets that benefit the few elite.

Outside of the privileged and outside much of the lobotomized masses, one sees America as an “imposed financial, economic, and cultural oligarchy that is liberal in its inspiration but risks excluding an important dimension of human liberty. Other civilizations have other visions of human freedom. They also need to be heard in this globalized world and to be allowed to add their own corrections, through diversity, to this new global vision.” … At present, instead of this liberty, humanity is betraying itself in a process of increasing technical and robotically uniformitarianism (Julia Kristeva, ‘Hatred and Forgiveness’). Limiting humanities opportunity to be more whole, more complex, and more multi-dimensional stunts sustenance and ignores cyclical growth. This fragile system is in danger of progressing to a more violent conflict foreign and domestic. Can the ‘self’ afford to remain shallow, or must it find an outlet to go deeper and beyond what pays the bills and feeds the greedy?

Susan George tries to practically answer this question economically and structurally in her book ‘Whose Crisis, Whose Future’. She lays out how the regime of neoliberal globalization keeps the public in prison without the needs of actual prison walls but through financial spheres of coercion both politically and socially. Those with power use the tools to divide the selves. They give wealth to a status group and occasionally gift a few lucky individuals with affluence. They feed the status quo with patriotic election confetti so that the masses can one-dimensionally decide which puppet on the ballot will target interests for the next four years to divert attention or simply to build up public apathy.

Susan George cannot see a big bang, a ‘once-for-all end to our present economic system’, or a revolution. Instead, she sees an “ongoing process of transformation fuelled by constant public pressure” with constant voicing from larger selves who go beyond the individual self for a cooperative social context. She doesn’t believe that “violence can provide a lasting solution or advance human emancipation, but” she fears it could overtake us unless we act quickly enough to reduce the glaring injustices in the present global and national interrelated conditions.

After voices like Julia Kristeva, Susan George, Paula Allen Gunn, Winona LaDuke and Agnes Heller, et al, make empowering analysis, specifically female intelligence that is stronger than the reflections of the male leadership that overrides government and executive boards; why are such voices dangerously being ignored? The ‘virtue of the selfish’ is not qualitative. It is an obedient emptiness. The flaw so apparent at this time of those who control the economic, political, and subjective landscape is that they are running out of ideas fast and they don’t want to hear from intelligent voices beyond their capacity and who state the obvious future that they have no power in. The corporate elites are running out of ideas, this is evident with the current global stagnation and unrest. They are also aware that there are less areas of the globe to bully. They are shortsighted and fail to use natural cyclical knowledge.  The self must seek sustenance from the healthier teachers that nurture a higher personal growth not one of emptiness, limited politics, and economic malnutrition.     

Sharp Stated Parallels:

The first leader of independent Ghana, Kwame Nkruma once stated: “Capitalism is a gentlemen’s method of slavery”. The American activist Mother Jones, also stated, before Nkruma was even born, that “One does not have to vote to raise hell.” Mother Jones did not want women or men to go from one form of slavery into merely another form of slavery. At this time in history, the public is disillusioned with politics and most know that the election system in the US is an illusion of democracy.  One can bet that the turnout in the upcoming election will be significantly less than the previous election. I for one have been considering the George Carlin approach (fuck politics).  The Corporate state has brainwashed the masses for way too long, and one needs to make more noise than just vote.

Once in awhile I stumble on a discarded library book that seems no longer of interest to a library due to its publication date but supplies significant information and insight. Last week I picked up a copy of John Gunther’s 1955 text “Inside Africa” for fifty-cents. The author traveled and reported on nearly every nation in Africa at the time, and this was prior to the colonial move to grant countries in Africa independence. From Slave Trade to capitalist plundering of the richest continent, Africa has been and continues to be plundered by powerful interests.

Before 2011’s NATO intervention in Libya, and before Gaddafi’s 1969 revolution, John Gunther provides information of US interest in Libya. Just after World War II and afterwards the US had a military base in Libya near Tripoli known as Wheelus Field. The US also had a military base in Asmara, Eritrea and another in Morocco. Throughout the reign of apartheid South Africa the number one buyer of Uranium mined by South Africa in their borders and South-West Africa (now known as Namibia) was the United States. Uranium is the military industrial complex’s favorite natural resource to build bombs.

Before Mugabe’s 1979’s victory over apartheid Rhodesia, where for a moment in time, like Gaddafi, he had emerged as a revolutionary hero, the copper trade between Rhodesia and the US was significantly high in the 1950’s. Both Libya’s and Zimbabwe’s dictators helped stand up to imperial domination. But the nature of power corrupted them. However, their teachers on how to behave in the capitalist world did root with colonial capitalism.

John Gunther reflected: “No Industry can operate forever on the basis of discrimination against the huge majority…”(Gunther). He was referring the British, French, Belgian, and Portuguese business practices in Africa during the 1950’s and prior. But the same holds true to the US business practices globally and nationally. The double standard of the Truman Doctrine after World War II to assist in democracy building worldwide was rhetorical. Though Gunther, who was not an activist, and who favored western democratic principles, did not go out of his way to point out the misconception, but his words hold information that reflects what followed over the next fifty years.

When Tunisia sought US assistance to get the French out of their nation, the US under Woodrow Wilson and then Truman did not get involved, noted Gunther. Wilson and yet again Truman also did not get involved in the early 1950’s when Ho Chi Minh sought assistance from the US to get the French out and build a democratic system. When Ho Chi Minh was blatantly ignored and disregarded twice by the double standard, he then sought communist interest for his people.

In Nadine Gordimer's novel 'A Sport of Nature', written before the official end of apartheid in South Africa, the author's narrator notes that when countries in Africa such as Angola, South Africa, and Namibia finally gain independence depending on the treatment the US has supported over the time of previous dictators will determine how their future relations with new governments will be (244). She notes that those who have actively ignored the double-standard will not be respected. 

Kwame Nkruma did not want to embrace the western corporate style economic policies that did not respect younger nations hopes for genuine development nor did he want to embrace communism; but because he chose an independent root, he was taken out of office in 1972. In Gunther’s book, he notes Kwame's reasonable approach to moving towards independence could be short lived. It was. After independence came, his astute leadership was not worthy enough for obedience to British or US interests. Instead the West favored loyal dictators without certainty of how they may evolve, such as Mobuto in Congo, the Shah in Iran, Saddam in Iraq, and King Farouk of Egypt (et al).

Even Dick Cheney and George H W Bush continually in their different roles in varying administrations in the 1970’s and 1980’s supported apartheid South Africa and considered Nelson Mandela a terrorist; only until after he was released did they embrace him as a freedom fighter. But throughout most decades both voices from multiple US administrations as far back as the Nixon administration, were heavily connected to industries that profited from natural resources that sought material to build up the war-industrial complex. They cared little about the human treatment of those they did business with.  

The American citizen whether accepting or refuting cannot avoid factual history. Interpretations of facts can be twisted, but the facts do exist. There is evidence. Most of my fellow Americans, just as with Brits and the French (etc) towards the previous colonial era either don't know history or do not care enough to bother. In Nadine Gordimer's 'Sport of Nature', her character reflects that "assumptions of understanding that understand nothing." She goes on to reflect on the character's little daughter who asks her mother where babies come from? She tells her that they grow in her tummy, and as far as the girl is concerned it is an acceptable answer. Anything more is 'unthinkable for her to grasp' at her level of understanding. "She doesn't know enough to want to ask" to know more. "The questions aren't even ever the right questions ... In each society there's a different way of putting things, a different way of interpreting what happens and what has been said (Gordimer). By not going beyond what is acceptable disinterest, one could say that interpretations of 9-11-2001 attacks required more questions than mere retaliation. 

Along the lines of Gordimer's character development, Yuri Smertin in his analysis of Kwame Nkrumah draws in Herbert Marcuse's assertion "that in the developed capitalist countries, characterized by an increased rate of scientific and technological progress and a relatively high standard of living, the working class was integrated into the 'Consumer Society', lost its revolutionary potential and was changed from the antagonist into the defender of the bourgeois system" (Marcuse). For example, in the US women during the civil rights and women's rights movements fought for equality and the ability to reach a higher standard of identity. This was true during Mother Jones' era and during Gloria Steinem's era. However, the majority of unconscious women in the US society today still give their daughter's Barbie dolls. Barbie has historically exploited young girls in the US to look a certain way, dress a certain way, focus on physical appearance more so than intellect; while at the same time, young women in factories in China are forced to accept child and slave-labor conditions to make the dolls that they cannot even afford. Barbie not only manipulates women in the US but women in China and other nations where the dolls are manufactured.      

No election is going to change the system with shallow political voices spitting out campaign speeches. It is inevitable regardless of the US election that the 21st Century will not belong to the US. While the imperial British and French dominated the 19th Century and the US dominated the 20th Century, the 21st Century will belong to Asia, Africa, and South America. The majority of the population in the US has changed face and the diverse minorities are in deed combining to be the majority.  Eventually the disenfranchised in the world will overcome as any other oppressive force. Slavery in any form if it involves continual exploitation will always be malignant. As Gunther noted, no industry can operate forever on the basis of discrimination against the huge majority.     

Same Old, Same Old

I haven’t been active enough with my writing this summer. I seem at a loss for words that I have already said before. However, my summer reading list has been quite active.  As for current affairs, my disappointment with the predictable is repetitive: from General Electrics monopoly over the Olympics with NBC to Olympic sponsors of Dow Chemical and British Petroleum, who lack social accountability. I am concerned that the progressive voice is hitting deaf ears.

My summer reading list has included: Huda Shaarawi’s Harem Years, the challenges of an Egyptian activist in the early years of the 20^th Century; Nawal El Saadawi’s Walking Through Fire, a current activist exiled from Egypt, who lived through the British colonial exploits through the mixed messages of the Nasser regime towards women’s rights, through the Sadat and Mubarak schemes, and today; Leymah Gbowee’s Mighty Be Our Powers, her memoir reflecting on her life organizing women in Liberia to overcome violence during the 1990’s conflicts up until her activities today; Assia Djebar’s The Tongue’s Blood Does Not Run Dry, a collection of vivid stories reflecting on the multiple challenges women in Algeria face; Ken Saro-Wiwa’s A Month and A Day, his detention diary reflecting on his battle against the Nigerian government to protect the rights of the Ogoni people, and ever since the British Empire passed through Nigeria, greed and corruption has fused violence in the land, and will continue as long as oil is in the delta; and finally, Ngugi wa Thiongo’s Dreams in a Time of War, the Kenyan novelist’s reflection of his youth in Kenya just before independence from the British.

Knowledge is Power! These books reflect the ripples of aftershocks from not just the British colonial period, but also the French, the US, and the corporate dominance for natural resources, land, and power over other people. 

Last year at this time, the infamous London Riots shook the British streets. Now at this time, the 2012 Olympics have turned England into a police state until the international games are complete. Corporate dominance of the games has made athletes less about physical triumph and more about advertisement and sponsorship. In Bhopal India, hundreds of survivors of the 1984 chemical explosion and next generations, still exposed to birth defects from remnants still surrounding the city from the abandoned factory, have conducted a protest and Special Olympics to show outrage that Dow Chemical should be sponsoring the official Olympics, regardless of their humanitarian track record.

As well, with BP Oil sponsoring the Olympics after the Gulf of Mexico fiasco and environmental carelessness, one would expect more from leaders of the Olympic committee; but in truth, this double-tongue, Janus-faced event has continually ignored human accountability. In Buzz Bissinger’s essay Faster, Higher, Stronger, No Longer; the author lists controversies from nearly every Olympics since 1968 when ten days before the Summer Olympics in Mexico the government massacred thousands of protesting students, to the 2008 games when China hosted the Olympics while cracking down on protestors in the western Xinjiang region.      

I brought the Buzz Bissinger essay into my summer school class last week, my students yawned. Regardless of the commercials, they just haven’t been watching. So perhaps this summer is a blah slide from activism. I still have my reading list to inspire me. I am half way through the stack mentioned earlier. What can I learn from my heroes? That life is a challenge and will always be a challenge. Like all those voices of resistance, the need to make noise is an endless road but an important one to trek. 

REVIEWING MY OWN THOUGHTS OF LAST ELECTION:

I wrote this essay 4 years ago just before the elections in 2008. Do I feel the election in 2012 will be any different? We will see…

Taking scope of the US political economic history tied to the corporate elites hegemonic control in America over the last 100 years, one can understand why Barack Obama has won the election as part of the Democratic Political Party. By the end of the 19th Century with legislation such as the Sherman Act, certain industrial capitalists got favoritism by the government. The New Deal carried this favoritism as far as our present in the 21st Century by creating the illusion that Big Business was going to be regulated by the State. Actually, this allowed Big Business to be protected by the State and to control the State. By having politics and economics entwined together, individual lives were dictated by the bottom-line of money first. Robber Barons through the New Deal had a tunnel into your life under your very nose. Eventually, Television brought and bought them into your home. The distinction between “political society and civil society, which is made into and presented as an organic one, whereas in fact it is merely methodological. Thus it is asserted that economic activity belongs to civil society” (Antonio Gramsci).



The corporate elite in America has known that this deliberate conditioning would keep them on top. They have known that if they do not create the illusion of an opposition party, the public would inevitably make their own opposition; hence the fabrication of a two party system creating Democrats and Republicans, Pepsi and Coke (or more like Coke and Minute Maid). Though presidential faces have changed since the end of WWII, the bottle is the same, merely different labeling and dress. And though the Republicans and Democrats have switched executive labels every 4 or 8 years, the same corporate elite have maintained command. From 1945-1976, the political economic climate was called Keynesian Economics, where the State appeared to have direct regulation over corporate interests; this is when companies gained names such as the United Fruit Company, US Steel, Standard Oil, General Motors, General Electric, even the National Biscuit Company. When government started to become a liability for the corporate elite under Nixon, the steps to a new appearance was needed. From around 1977 up until this very day, the current political economy is known as Neoliberalism.

Reagan and Thatcher pushed this concept to new global levels, and in its second push Bill Clinton reached corners of the globe that had not been open before. The catch phrase that was pushed involved keeping government out of big business and deregulating the corporate business; and under George W. Bush this deregulation gave the corporation limitless options.



But what does this have to do with Obama!? Obama ran under the Democratic Party. As Antonio Gramsci‘s reference to Machiavelli’s Prince (which is still quite relevant today) is that the new prince in modern history has not been the individual but the political party. The individual is indeed a celebrity for both Republican and Democratic parties as a label on the bottle. With the mainstream use of television, the face on the screen is highly important. This new face must “represent plastically and ‘anthropomorphically’ the symbol of the ‘collective will’.” This prince carries a mass element and a cohesive element, and when the election is over and the party has taken office, this individual will be politically inept if he does not work with the corporate elite. 



As Gramsci reflects on the Prince, the words hold a new meaning when Obama becomes the subject:

 "Here we are dealing with a subaltern group, which is prevented by this theory from ever becoming dominant, or from developing beyond the economic-corporate stage and rising to the phase of ethical-political hegemony in civil society, and of domination in the State. In the case of (Neoliberalism), one is dealing with a fraction of the ruling class, which wishes to modify not the structure of the State, but merely the government policy; which wishes to reform the laws governing commerce, but only indirectly those controlling industry. What is at stake is a rotation in governmental office of the ruling class parties, and not the foundation and organization of a new political society, and even less of a new type of civil society" (Gramsci).

Just as after the Nixon era ended and the Keynesian cycle of political economy rotated into the Neoliberal cycle, the Bush era is clearly a signal that a rotation is needed again. The Neoliberal era had bolstered worldwide corporate control over individuals and their traditional societies; and the extremes of suffering varied depending on how close the natural resources were to your home; An extreme example, but an absurd film, absurd in its proximity to contemporary events, is John Cusack’s "War, Inc.". 

Since most of us, Americans, are so far away from the immediate abuse, our acceptance gives us the luxury to enjoy politics, or not necessarily enjoy but be brainwashed by television and media to a level of apathy and satire.

This cyclical political/economic control swallows us with ideology. Whether McCain had won, or Obama won the election, both will have taken the role and will be creating new policies to cycle the public back into a Keynesian mode. We have already seen this in the last three months before the election with the bailouts to Fanny/Freddy, Wall Street, and government partial takeovers of banks. Both political parties encouraged this. In the last few years, companies that were once Rockefeller’s Standard Oil divided by the New Deal into illusory pieces as Standard Oil of New Jersey and New York, now known as Exxon and Mobil, have merged back together again. The airline industries are following a similar breaking apart and coming back together. 

We think that we have diversity in the grocery store, yet the various brands turn out to be owned by the same corporations: i.e. Unilever owning Ben and Jerry’s, Breyers, Good Humor, and Klondike. Our media is controlled by an elite handful, from General Electric owning NBC and all its affiliates, to Disney owning ABC and its affiliates. 

The forced choice of freedom; though there were eight candidates running for president, only two were allowed to appear significantly and strategically on television, in debates, and encouraged locally. The Independent parties not backed by the corporate elite, had little place in showing their existence to the average citizen. Obama had to have been apart of the Democratic party if he wanted to make history.

We are allowed to question the parties and the government, but we cannot question the system; it becomes absurd. 

Yet just today, November 11, 2008, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said she wants ``immediate action'' to give automakers additional aid this would assist General Motors and Ford. However, these auto-industries have had their chance in assisting the American public and have shown callous regard for the American worker, consumer and international labor force for the last thirty years with annual cuts of 30,000 US workers, unsafe vehicles designed for quantity and not quality, exploiting factory workers in developing countries with poor conditions, choosing to sack more energy-efficient vehicles in the 1990’s in order to maximize profits in the short run at the expense of environment and health decline. How does the new prince plan to act? Obama has already met this week with Bush on the issue.

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So almost four years later can I say that my view on policies have changed, has the American public gotten less luxurious, or do I believe that the next election will be any different? I think the excitement that people had in the 2008 election has changed because 'Hope and Change' did not fulfill the public's delusion that a new president would change the economic flight downward. The job market still seems to decline in quality even if occasional ups and downs come in the predictably slim pickings. The Keynesian system has not returned though; instead, Corporate power has gotten sloppier and tighter. Political change is not social change regardless of the face in office. Mother Jones stated, "You don't have to vote to raise hell!", George Carlin stated "Politics Sux!", and Grace Lee Boggs says now is the time to change the system. This upcoming election is not going to be impressive. The amount of voter turnout will significantly be less. Romney is not a McCain image, an image of the legislative branch that sits in a room and talks endlessly without action; Instead, Romney is an image of Big Business at its best and worst. His history of buying up smaller companies and forcing them into bankruptcy and failure, so that he can capitalize on the losses, is a clear reflection of what he will do to the larger economy. Now the choice is to either vote for empty promises of a big business man unconsciously walking the country to bankruptcy, or a legislative voice, who has been a puppet of rhetoric, as all congressmen and senators will always do. I prefer Mother Jones to either of the choices.  

Homage to the Mosquito and to Thought:

The mosquito at night desperately fights with its own shadow in the lampshade cut from its own perception, not realizing it is fighting its own self.

Chris Hedges stated in an essay this week, that “in every conflict, insurgency, uprising and revolution I have covered as a foreign correspondent, the power elite used periods of dormancy, lulls and setbacks to write off the opposition” (Hedges). I hope that he is right, and that the excitement of 2011 mission to occupy and challenge corporate-financial control was not just a fling.

At a vigil the week of June 18 in New York City, a slim fifty progressives appeared in Washington Square Park. For me, it was a disappointment. It was a W.O.W (women of occupy wall street) session/general assembly. Now when I saw members of this group last March at the Left Forum I was excited about the edge the women had. However, when I went last Monday to Washington Square Park, none of the women from the panel at the Forum were there. Instead it was only a small 50 people and the activists there that I had been grouped in a discussion with flattened the edge. Rather than solidarity, they made me feel that I had to defend my voice.  

The skepticism toward silent straight men at the vigil made them want me to prove myself to them. Not a healthy chemistry. I tried my best to appeal to their cynicism to not cancel out those who reflect an image they are use to being hostile against. They made themselves appear hypocritical and wounded. I hope that the movement learns to grow.  The Occupy Movement almost feels dead and atrophied. So many have branched out into different less visible outlets.

So I sought some additional enlightenment. On an earlier Monday, June 11, 2012 the Nobel Laureate Jody Williams made a commencement speech in northern Spain at the Cantabria International Campus (I caught it on the internet). In her speech, she mentions that “People Need to De-militarize how they think” and this is essential to stop a closed-minded violent world. Disarmament can only happen when we educate the youth about the value of nonviolence (Williams).  Jody Williams’ passion is always an inspiring antidote to keep me moving forward. But how can I bring her ‘demilitarized mind’ to my experience of a possibly dilapidated social movement?

Albert Einstein, highly debunked and depressed after realizing that the knowledge he had, couldn’t foresee the doom of his atomic discoveries from energy to weapons made a moral observation. He stated: A human being is a part of the whole called by us ‘the universe,’ a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings, as something separate from the rest – a kind of optical delusion of consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening the circle of understanding (Einstein).  Freeing ourselves from our violent reactive visual prison is our responsibility and not that of the opposition. We have to learn to begin to see better than we have done in the past.   

In all HONESTY and the experience I had at the vigil on Monday June 18, 2012 was in part the continual backlash of progressive and protest frustration of many women and minorities with the Occupy Wall Street’s greater failure of going beyond dominant white straight male supremacy, even in the movement that claims to challenge the system. The greater Occupy falls ill to the same limits it protests, and the more selective protests have a harder time escaping ripple effects of discomfort with those who represent the status quo.  How can we slip out from this cycle effect?

Chandra Mohanty and Cherrie Moraga are two prominent intellectual activists who dwell on the idea of ‘home’. Mohanty, originally from India, states that ‘Being-Home’ refers to a place where one lives within familiar, safe, protected boundaries; ‘Not being home’ is a matter of realizing that home was an illusion of coherence and safety based on the exclusion of specific histories of oppression and resistance, the repression of differences even within one self (Mohanty, Feminism Without Borders).

The location and function of one’s location acquires meaning when individuals assume a particular, singularly fixed essential bounded fortress as Mohanty suggests, and this leads to false limited horizons (from limits in conventionality, to limits in race and gender relations, to limits in ideology). In a reflection on Gloria Anzaldua in her book A Xicana Codex of Changing Consciousness, Moraga sheds that “Anzaldua felt that she had to leave ‘home’ because its cultural restraints would have killed her – body and spirit (in more ways than one). Freedom resided elsewhere” (Moraga). On the contrary, Moraga suggests the opposite.

The Chicano activist and theorist strategized that “what I have come to believe through my political and spiritual practice is that as marginalized peoples, we all have to make our way back into the ‘home’ sites that have rejected and deformed us in order to reform them (Moraga).  Moraga pushes the notion that all marginalized voices must go back to the home and wreck house in order to make the heads-of-the-households know that they are not the sole voice. Given the opportunity that is self-created, a mosquito will enter the house, and will make itself present.

Mohanty agrees with Moraga when she states, “Home - is a warning to all feminists that ‘we are going to have to break out of the little barred rooms” and cease holding tenaciously to the invisible. All activists female and male need to “break down the subject-object duality that keeps her prisoner and to show in the flesh, through the images in her work and actions, how duality is transcended” (Mohanty).  Not all women are feminists, and not all feminists are women.

Change must come from the bottom up. Mohanty and Moraga remind us that feminism and masculine-ism from wealthy standpoints of those who have the luxury to speak out do not bring sufficient voice to represent the misrepresented, the poor, the homeless, and the minority positions. These voices have been excluded due to ‘cognitive dimensional constituted permissible thinking’ and inferring of inferiority. For example, just last week the Spanish Prime Minister used insulting apathy and indifference to his reference that Spain deserved a worthy bailout from the European Union because they weren’t ‘Uganda’. Such blind statements that ignore historic imperialism and colonialism reflect how out of touch certain classes of luxury shed no responsible steps of inclusion.

A debilitating generality is the callous act of movement failure, whether it is a protest, problem solving, or a social network; the object-status limits higher grip over significant yields.   

Cherrie Moraga encourages us to question, “How do we remember rupture beyond what we have been schooled to imagine?” and she alludes to the activist/novelist Toni Cade Bambara’s push “Can you afford to be whole?”

In the anthology African Women Writing Resistance, Adesola Mafe states: “Resistance - has generally meant ‘non-compliance’ to me. I know that my non-compliance is not always immediate, not always self-evident, and not always strong enough … but Audre Lorde warns us that ‘Your Silence will not protect you’” (Mafe).

Nawal El Saadawi acknowledges the silence, “Scared people are easy to control”. It is patriotism that protects us from the deeper, harder complicity. In that light, “terrorism will never be defeated by big guns”, and Jody Williams and Albert Einstein have been aware of this. Part of the means to ‘demilitarize the mind’ would be to “Be Among”. Chandra Mohanty explains, to ‘be among’ is to “choose to participate in defining the terms of one’s own existence,” she quotes a Filipina factory worker, “because the only way to get a little measure of power over your own life is to do it collectively, with the support of other people who share your needs” (Mohanty). We as activists must “Undo ingrained” trajectories of image and identity bias based social movements: Throwing yourself into the next century, we take ourselves seriously only when we go ‘beyond ourselves’ (Mohanty).

Richard Wolin states, in his 1992 analysis Terms of Cultural Criticism, “Specify very carefully what type of utopia one intends”.  By going beyond our selves and pushing past our visual barriers, will be the only way to break down the cycle. In some ways, we have to admire and embrace Helen Keller. Her insight was deeper than our limitations and our senses. She learned to see and hear though she was blind and deaf. She learned to read as her teacher taught her through her sense of touch. She opposed war and she utilized her ability to think. If need be, cover your eyes and shield your ears, just feel intuitively where the inclusivity is most evident.  

Scattered thoughts in multiple directions, I lose my audience as I reflect on the thoughts that double speak through me. Walter Benjamin said that there are limits and fear when a ‘meaningless emancipation’ leads to a human race with no cognitive self, no sense of purpose and need to exert identity, or to have an adverse obstacle to overcome. The fear of nihilism is a shallow accord; once activists find a cause to fight for we must not lose the meaning in the limits of our image.