Monthly Archives: June 2013

Decorum, Dissent, & the Texas Democratic Party

Posted on June 30, 2013 by | 2 comments

Card handed to me by unsuspecting Texas Democratic Party staff.

In the first few hours of June 21st, 2013, citizens overwhelmed the proceedings of a committee hearing in Texas for an unscientific and inhumane piece of legislation. HB60, later SB5, would have further restricted abortion access to five clinics across the state leaving no providers west of Interstate-35. After being insulted and arbitrarily warned off by the committee’s chairman, the people protested against the government during the first battle of decorum vs. dissent. Starting with my own testimony about seven and a half hours in, we ran the chairman off and forced remaining politicians to do their jobs by staying and listening to more testimony until 4am that morning. This pattern of dissent and ceasing with the theater of “decorum” continued for the rest of the fight against SB5. When the clock struck midnight on June 26th , it was the unelected citizens who nullified the special session by overpowering attempts to vote on the bill with 20 minutes of sustained screaming, cheering, clapping, and singing.

Photo by the Texas Tribune

Photo by the Texas Tribune

The entire effort was only possible because a critical mass of Texan women and their allies were scared and angry enough to travel to the Capitol to do the job of real dissent. When it was crunch time, the people watched Democratic senators get steamrolled by their own protocols of decorum and resign themselves to failure. Even after the midnight protest, the people witnessed the manipulation of official state records in an attempt to reflect a timely vote that never happened. Throughout, the government tried and failed to justify its own presence and proceedings. Alternatively, people resisted submission at each crucial turn of the fight for women’s rights. Before the final citizens’ filibuster, it’s true that one female state senator picked up on the brevity of the people and bucked decorum before the replacement Senate chair. It’s also true that another female state senator sacrificed her body for 13 hours in the hopes of defeating SB5 though legislative procedure and proper decorum.

Just a fraction of the political class which has brought Texas to its knees in 2013

Just a fraction of the political class which has brought Texas to its knees in 2013

Frankly, I’m not willing to rah-rah about those female politicians for much longer. It was their job to perform that way. Millions of Texans have been suffering in silence for much longer than those women endured for one Monday. The state’s abysmal human rights and quality of life records are not only due to the malfeasance of one political party. For the past thirty years, the acquiescence and lack of class-consciousness by our other “major” party also helped shuttle Texans and their families along a stultifying descent. None of that suffering, waiting, or hoping seems to matter a week and change after the SB5 rebellion. The Texas Democratic Party (TDP) revisionism is already beginning to set in. Their newest star, Sen. Wendy Davis, is describing the citizen’s filibuster as “true democracy,” instead of the rejection of the official democratic process that it really was. Headlines of many fundraising emails should indicate that the people shut government down but instead we are credited with helping this party or that party (but especially the Blue Team) further their mission to fight for the rights of women or the unborn. Also, could you spare some money or free labor for this or that campaign?

Today, at 12pm a rally is being held by a coalition of women’s health providers and Democratic party organizations to herald the beginning of the 83rd legislature’s second special session. It will be a final movement in the government’s three part symphony of failure. This second emergency session  promises to prop up the careers of Republicans and Democrats already elected to the Texas legislature. Along with some truly helpful information presented by women’s health providers, there will be “opportunities” to be deputized to vote and to thank all of the current politicians for their “hard work”. If you or your opinions are needed, the coalition will be happy to snap a picture or video of you in the Capitol auditorium for safekeeping. And oh, here is what the organizers of the rally think that the women in desperate need of healthcare want to see on stage:

rally pic

Those in attendance today need to remember that the needs of the working poor and most vulnerable in Texas still aren’t being addressed by this second special session or either political party. Already, the lack of diversity and shallowness of that rally lineup has angered some Texan women of color enough to refuse participation in the rally. I am begging the people who identify as Texas Democrats or liberals to demand more space and time for the citizens to guide this process free of TDP manipulation or stage dressing. Many of the people who will attend the rally and trainings look like and come from the same class of those who already enjoy the easiest access over candidate selection and legislative direction. This privilege comes with duty, the duty to ask party staff and officials where all the millions of dollars and hours of human capital went during thirty years of failure. Party consultants and those enriched by decades of stagnation need to be tested like the politicians and their procedures were on June 26th.  The direct action that stopped SB5 can continue and may still be led by unelected Texans — if the party faithful can remain in dissent.

 

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Dirty Wars (2013)

Posted on June 13, 2013 by | 1 comment

Jeremy Scahill gets out of the tank and walks with the locals 

Richard Rowley makes a good documentary – well shot, well narrated,  good storytelling – but there was something that kept nagging me throughout the showing. I finally put my finger on it near the end, when Jeremy Scahill was going over his revelations, his horror at how largely evil the world has become in the last 10 years. I remember being a bit of a smug huff at his crawling out of a tank in Afghanistan to explore the surroundings on his own, his anguish in facing a “boring” life back in Park Slope, all pretty normal for a documentary. Even the bloodied Somali corpses as props for Scahill to express appropriate disgust and horror is pretty par for course in an American documentary against an imperial backdrop. But what really had me was – really? What’s changed? Targeted assassinations,  kill lists, death squads, shadow proxy wars.. none of this is particularly new. Not even the part about extrajudically killing American citizens, either at home or abroad. I even asked the question to the panel at the end, maybe is the change something to do with the executive branch having more concentrated power? But this question was glazed over. Instead, we learn about how Scahill’s book (available for purchase by the concession stand) and this documentary were “piercing the veil” and how the New York Times calls it “riveting”. At one point, it was even compared to Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which was also credited with starting the Civil War, which is not only strange but a weird way of reading history.

But then, the scope was rather small. Even though the film describes 75 countries as suffering JSOC invasions and drone strikes, we are only presented with the theaters we understand a bit about already: Afghanistan, Yemen and Somalia. It was strange to me how Pakistan – being the main focus of these attacks – was somehow left out of the story. But either way, we are given “Islamic terrorism” and “drug cartels” as being the main reasons behind these attacks, with no broader scope as to the United State’s geopolitical and strategic capital interests. We get the feeling from the film that America needs to be doing something about these terrorist Muslims and drug lords, but perhaps it could be in a more humane way. After all, there is no dialectical relationship between the Taliban and the women and children slaughtered by Hellfire missiles. The link cannot exist because then we must see it also exists between Scahill, the Hellfire missiles being used to kill, and ourselves safe and sound in the IFC theater.

The finest part of the film is where a Somali general tells Scahill how Americans are the “masters of war” and “great teachers”. But the point is given in such a way where Americans watching have the chance to immediately settle back into the comfortable dichotomy of the Taliban vs. innocent Afghanis. Black and white, good guys and bad guys. No relationship, no history, just the sort of hogwash George Bush would hoot about on the radio. After all, we too must scramble to separate ourselves from responsibility. We too must be able, as Americans, to separate ourselves from our government – after all, we voted for Kerry in 2004 and did our part. In this film, there is no dialectical relationship between the people and power.  Surely there can be no connection between our relatively comfortable lives in the United States and children born without limbs in Fallujah – otherwise we really could do something about the violence done in our names.

It was a good documentary, as I said. It’s important that people know what’s going on, how the United States’s endless lust for war affects human beings all over the world. However it should not be understood as “groundbreaking” or something that will change the tide of politics forever in this country. Whipping out my checkbook or signing a petition is not going to stop America’s ravenous appetite for blood and gold. These sorts of things have always happened in American history, maybe not with so much executive power and technological gadgets, but the idea has remained the same for hundreds of years. The question elicited from the film shouldn’t be “what can I do?” but rather, “how does this happen?” Once we understand how the machine works, we can properly throw a wrench in the gears.

The other questions during the Q&A session were mainly concerned with calls to action, what is it that we can do? The questions sounded rather like the “we” meant a crowd of individuals as opposed to “we” the people. They brought up a journalist jailed in Yemen, petitions for his release as he was arrested while covering this story. Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, as well-off citizens nestled on the island of Manhattan, is there nothing more you can do than sign a petition? On your own? I guess not. In the theater, many of those watching the horrific catalog of violence wrecked by the American government probably voted for Barack Obama, the man whose voice on the phone actually demanded the Yemeni journalist’s imprisonment, the man whose order slaughters thousands of unnamed innocents. The viewer does not trust their own ability because she is limited by their view of the world where all one can do is sign a petition and vote the lesser of two villainous warmongers.

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Posted in afghanistan, america, capitalism, death toll, Discussion, film, globalization, history, human rights, imperialism, neo-colonialism, neoliberalism, occupation, orientalism, terrorism, violence, war, warfare

reality check: American radicalism

Posted on June 5, 2013 by | 9 comments

At the start of December 4th 1969, Fred Hampton was drugged by a FBI informant after teaching a political education course at a local church in Chicago. Later, when he was passed out, fourteen cops burst into his apartment and murdered him in his bed, next to his pregnant girlfriend. After two shots to the head to confirm his death, he was dragged into the hallway and left in a pool of blood. He was 21 years old.

Almost 100 years earlier, John Brown sat at his desk, waiting for execution at the age of 59. He wrote his last words to his wife. She was waiting nearby, but he was refused the right to spend the last night of his life with her, that refusal being the only time his stoic comportment threatened to break down. He had helped lead a militant uprising of enslaved people. He was hanged and then put in his coffin, noose still around his neck, and sent back north to be buried.

The list of American radicals who died in battle against a massive system of oppression is long and should be a source of pride for Americans who seek to follow a life fighting for economic and social justice. They were those who were expelled by the society they lived in because of their beliefs, because of the color of their skin, because of their sex, the list goes on. These were people willing to die for their beliefs. Even those who were possibly not ready still died sometimes. They were those whose death would perpetuate the American machine of oppression and pain.

What is a radical? A radical is a thorn in the side of what she opposes. The radical is pushed outward like a splinter under the skin. The radical accepts that she will live a life of lack unless she gives in and changes her mind. Even then, she might not make her way back into the fold. This is to be expected – a radical seeks to disrupt the reproduction of  oppression, not negotiate or change it warmly. As we edge closer to the abyss, as the planet itself threatens to crumble underneath our feet, those who would call themselves radicals must make a decision. Are they pleading or are they demanding? Are they negotiating or are they accusing?

When I was a little girl, I learned about my great-grandfather, shipped over from the old country as a child and sold to a mining company in Montana. He grew up to become an IWW organizer and was beaten, threatened and blacklisted. Blacklisted was the first radical word I learned. To be blacklisted is a heavy thing for sure, and my grandfather grew up in crushing poverty. My great-grandmother begged for food. No one offered him a warm hand because he was a thorn in the side of capitalism, because he demanded that workers have the right to the means of production and to the fruits of their labor. The labor movement was fighting for an eight-hour day. Now, as the eight-hour day slips through our fingers, today’s self-proclaimed radicals write television reviews for major American newspapers and hold court at academic conferences.

They claim they are interested in building a party – but where is the phone number? How do I get involved? Is it a party that will vote Democrat? The academics – and I am an academic, considering my education – fight over semantics and whether or not pornography is ethical. Meanwhile, people all over the country are ready for more. They are ready for disruption. Sectors of this generation see the ability to reproduce themselves being eroded away. Nearly seven million Americans are under correctional supervision. Schools are being closed. Poison is being poured in our lakes and rivers, in our oceans and all over our land. Be sure – this will not hold. It’s not sustainable. But the people in power will try every trick in the book to sustain themselves.

We’ve seen it before. We talk about women as if their biggest problem is what sort of clothes they’re wearing. We talk about race as if we have the first black president. Now the very term “radical” – a comforting dogwhistle nowadays for sleepy anticapitalists – is being appropriated, subsumed into the project of class reproduction. When you broadcast your opinions and find it thrilling that major media outlets have brought you on board, you need to consider your part to play in the reproduction of class. Do you make a living on your radicalism? Do you want to? My beloved once told me: “I want to be a low-level Soviet bureaucrat, but you live the life you have, not the life you want.”

There is nothing wrong with carving out a corner and trying to feed yourself. It is quite another project you are envisioning, however, when book deals with no outlines line up and event coordinators begin to court you. When you imagine a new party, one that appeals to the so-called masses through the capitalist propaganda machine, you must be very careful. When you start getting printed in the New York Times and Washington Post, when you see your face staring back at you as the primary photo accompanying a story, you must be even more careful. A story about you is not a story of the system of oppression that cracks skulls every day in this country.

When your critics become your trolls, this is because you somehow think your points are correct because you have more of a space to speak. You forget how you got this page space, you forget why it was given to you. You (yes, you dear reader!) are part of this machine now. The skin is not pushing you outwards, it is pulling you in towards its organs. Close your eyes and imagine what is is like to have paid staffers, then wonder why so many Black Panthers were sleeping in the same apartment that tragic night in Chicago. When you yell down that someone is a troll because they have less twitter followers than you, remember that you are calling yourself a radical and placing yourself in a pantheon of radicals who gave their lives to end capitalism. Wonder then, why Fred Hampton wasn’t published in the New York Times.

Slavoj Zizek is honest when he says that he thinks there must be a vanguard party because he himself wants nothing to do with struggle, with politics. He wants to be a boring man with a boring life somewhere. Who then, will execute the ideas of those who proclaim to be on the vanguard of the Left today – who are the radicals? Do they exist? The Left Forum is this weekend in New York, and Verso, the leading publisher of leftist books, sent out invitations to their after-party. Have we ever seen such a crowd of communists who are so willing and able to rationalize away their own inaction? Watch them drink cocktails and discuss the importance of this or that idea, watch them rally around positions like it’s some sort of game. I went to an ISO meeting in Brooklyn and met fund managers, people in advertising. We must look at the way that these “radical” ideas should shape our lives. What worth does a bunch of words on paper have when there is no one that is willing to put their thoughts into action? What do these “writers” even think of their own ideas when they do not even inspire themselves to make the necessary sacrifices, adopt the necessary discipline? Here we suddenly find shivering cowards, insisting that they are caught up in their everyday lives too much to put a shoulder to the wheel and push.

Overthrowing capitalism is about sacrifice and discipline. When we fantasize class revolution or wars against Nazis, we fancy ourselves willing to give our lives to the cause. Yet when it comes to choosing paths in our lives, we hesitate in committing fully to our positions. It becomes about this or that obligation, the desire and right, we bark defensively, to lead a normal boring life. Tough shit, comrade! If even Marx shivered in poverty while shoveling what money he had into failed revolutionary causes then surely you puffing up about twitter followers, an appearance on television or in the pages of a society magazine is nothing to brag about. If people like John Brown were willing to put their head in a noose, if strikers willing to be shot in the streets for demanding eight-hour workdays, if tens of millions of Soviets died fighting the Nazis, isn’t steering clear of a lifetime of normalcy and comfort the least you can do?

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Posted in america, atomization, capitalism, choice, communism, Great Thinkers, neoliberalism, persona non grata, public relations, the future, western lifestyle, Western perspective, women, work