Clancy Sigal's Blog, page 3
January 9, 2017
IN CHICAGO THE RIVER FLOWS BACKWARDS
“”Chicago murder rate is record setting - 4,331 shooting victims with 762 murders in 2016. If Mayor can't do it he must ask for Federal help!”” - Trump tweet to mayor Rahm Emanuel, white Chicago’s own Darth Vader.
***
My old burned out, burned up Chicago west side Lawndale-Garfield Park neighborhood accounts for an amazing number of recent street massacres often by teens killing teens over a pair of Air Jordans or an Instagram diss.
Can you imagine the PTSD that shot-at shat-upon families feel in desolated Lawndale? You hear a sudden noise and hit the floor. Leaving your house you run to make a smaller target.
Doctors Without Borders should send in whole teams of first-aid therapists.
Most of Chicago’s killings occur around “Bronzeville” the traditionally established black south side, and my own Lawndale, first pioneered by Germans, Czechs, Poles then Jews followed by more turbulent “Great Migration” black families from the American south, and now a part by Latinos in “Mexico of the Midwest”.
But I’m stuck way, way back in the once-heavily Jewish Lawndale where I grew up knowing exactly who I was due to Chicago’s rigid ethnic boundaries. South of Ogden Ave. the Irish beat you up especially at Easter because you killed Christ. West of Pulaski Road the Poles chased you because you made out with their luscious sisters and because, well, they’re Poles. East of California Street you dare not stroll because the feared Eyetalians – the African Americans of my time – would surely kill you with a Sicilian dagger. Or so we believed, with some justice.
Ah, for the good old days when the only guns you saw were on movie screens (who could afford a pistol?), petty survival crime like shoplifting was the norm, and our next door neighbor was the local expert in setting no-casualty insurance fires in bankrupt stores.
To the point of obsession I’m umbilically attached to North Lawndale’s square mile. I track new killings in the newspaper to see is it’s on my turf. And, decades past my time, was compelled to attend graduation at my old grammar school on 16th Street.
I even dream about Lawndale’s garbage-strewn alleys, its churches (St Agatha’s where the priest let me use the gym until I announced that Jesus was the first labor organizer) and monumental synagogues like “Chicago’s Jerusalem”, Anshe Kanesses, now either vandalized/demolished or adapted to crumbling Baptist temples.
In Lawndale’s sight line you have a clear view for miles out to the horizon because so many buildings have been torched in riots or by absentee landlords or demoralized tenants.
Yet the neighborhood itself, shorn of its ashen rubble, is rather beautifully laid out with parks and broad avenues. North Shore snobs called us a slum, but for us kids it was the Land of Oz, a universe unto itself where you learned what’s what about life. Exiles from Boston’s Southie, LA’s Boyle Heights and Glasgow’s Gorbals may feel likewise.
I’ve gone back to Lawndale several times and toured alongside black Fillmore Station cops (each with a .45, a hipster .38 and ankle .25 plus Mossberg shotgun in the rack) the only safe way for a white guy to stay alive.
Don’t get me started on Chicago cops who, in the midst of a murder spike, have backed off making arrests by a rebellious 80%. They want to stay alive and unsued, especially after a white cop on Pulaski – my street! – pumped 16 bullets into the fetal-prone
body of black teenager Laquan Macdonald, a murder covered up by the mayor until after his re-election. And on Homan Square – my street! – Chicago police have “disappeared” more than 7000 people in their own Abu Ghraib in an abandoned Sears warehouse, detaining them “off the books” without access to lawyers and sometimes toilets.
Solution? Send in the therapists, organize Mexican-style Autodefensas community militias, or gentrify my sweet, smelly old neighborhood to bring down the crime rate.
***
My old burned out, burned up Chicago west side Lawndale-Garfield Park neighborhood accounts for an amazing number of recent street massacres often by teens killing teens over a pair of Air Jordans or an Instagram diss.
Can you imagine the PTSD that shot-at shat-upon families feel in desolated Lawndale? You hear a sudden noise and hit the floor. Leaving your house you run to make a smaller target.
Doctors Without Borders should send in whole teams of first-aid therapists.
Most of Chicago’s killings occur around “Bronzeville” the traditionally established black south side, and my own Lawndale, first pioneered by Germans, Czechs, Poles then Jews followed by more turbulent “Great Migration” black families from the American south, and now a part by Latinos in “Mexico of the Midwest”.
But I’m stuck way, way back in the once-heavily Jewish Lawndale where I grew up knowing exactly who I was due to Chicago’s rigid ethnic boundaries. South of Ogden Ave. the Irish beat you up especially at Easter because you killed Christ. West of Pulaski Road the Poles chased you because you made out with their luscious sisters and because, well, they’re Poles. East of California Street you dare not stroll because the feared Eyetalians – the African Americans of my time – would surely kill you with a Sicilian dagger. Or so we believed, with some justice.
Ah, for the good old days when the only guns you saw were on movie screens (who could afford a pistol?), petty survival crime like shoplifting was the norm, and our next door neighbor was the local expert in setting no-casualty insurance fires in bankrupt stores.
To the point of obsession I’m umbilically attached to North Lawndale’s square mile. I track new killings in the newspaper to see is it’s on my turf. And, decades past my time, was compelled to attend graduation at my old grammar school on 16th Street.
I even dream about Lawndale’s garbage-strewn alleys, its churches (St Agatha’s where the priest let me use the gym until I announced that Jesus was the first labor organizer) and monumental synagogues like “Chicago’s Jerusalem”, Anshe Kanesses, now either vandalized/demolished or adapted to crumbling Baptist temples.
In Lawndale’s sight line you have a clear view for miles out to the horizon because so many buildings have been torched in riots or by absentee landlords or demoralized tenants.
Yet the neighborhood itself, shorn of its ashen rubble, is rather beautifully laid out with parks and broad avenues. North Shore snobs called us a slum, but for us kids it was the Land of Oz, a universe unto itself where you learned what’s what about life. Exiles from Boston’s Southie, LA’s Boyle Heights and Glasgow’s Gorbals may feel likewise.
I’ve gone back to Lawndale several times and toured alongside black Fillmore Station cops (each with a .45, a hipster .38 and ankle .25 plus Mossberg shotgun in the rack) the only safe way for a white guy to stay alive.
Don’t get me started on Chicago cops who, in the midst of a murder spike, have backed off making arrests by a rebellious 80%. They want to stay alive and unsued, especially after a white cop on Pulaski – my street! – pumped 16 bullets into the fetal-prone
body of black teenager Laquan Macdonald, a murder covered up by the mayor until after his re-election. And on Homan Square – my street! – Chicago police have “disappeared” more than 7000 people in their own Abu Ghraib in an abandoned Sears warehouse, detaining them “off the books” without access to lawyers and sometimes toilets.
Solution? Send in the therapists, organize Mexican-style Autodefensas community militias, or gentrify my sweet, smelly old neighborhood to bring down the crime rate.
January 3, 2017
YES, BUT FIRST LET’S CLEAR OUT THE STABLE
Of course you remember the Greek myth.
The fifth labor that the great hero Hercules must perform is to clean out King Augeas’s stables of shit dropped by 1000 royal cattle who haven’t been cleaned in over 30 years. Augeas, head of the Schumer-Pelosi Democratic National Committee, hates Hercules who comes armed with fresh new ideas hateful to the long-reigning King. So the task Augeas sets for the hero is both impossible and humiliating.
But Augeas reckons without the hero’s tenacity and wit. Hercules takes one look at all the corrupt cattle shit and diverts two whole rivers to wash out the filth. He then kills the tyrant and gives his kingdom away.
Our New Year starts not today but on 20 January. There are many good ideas how to protest and which fearless groups to join to defy, obstruct and protest. Bernie Sanders has rallies, Michael Moore has five things for you to do (look it up as his ‘5 Steps Resistance Plan’), and Jeffrey St. Claire’s Counterpunch has ’20 Groups Standing Between You and Doom’. There’s other useful stuff out there, too.
We most of us have the same problem of where do we find the time and energy? And start exactly where?
Meantime, give a stray thought to those shitty Democratic Party stables that haven’t been cleaned out since Jimmy Carter.
In Chicago ward politics, or Stalin’s Russia, we’d call this a purge. Whatever it takes, feet to the fire, sign a loyalty oath, or “are you now or have you ever taken money from Goldman Sachs?” Or even George Soros.
You start at the very top of the Democratic establishment and fumigate all the way down, stopping only at a few, a very few, select street fighters like John Lewis, Barbara Lee and, yes, our own proud Pocahantas, Liz Warren.
Leaving the shit in the stable – all this earnest talk of “finding authenticity” “restructure and reform” “regaining touch with working class voters” – guarantees permanent loss.
Absurdly, a lot of energy is going into lining up would-be presidential candidates for 2020. Four years away! It only took Hitler a few weeks to cripple trade unions, set up his own court system and get rid of enemies in his own party.
Such an awesome task. Fit only for a Greek hero.
The fifth labor that the great hero Hercules must perform is to clean out King Augeas’s stables of shit dropped by 1000 royal cattle who haven’t been cleaned in over 30 years. Augeas, head of the Schumer-Pelosi Democratic National Committee, hates Hercules who comes armed with fresh new ideas hateful to the long-reigning King. So the task Augeas sets for the hero is both impossible and humiliating.
But Augeas reckons without the hero’s tenacity and wit. Hercules takes one look at all the corrupt cattle shit and diverts two whole rivers to wash out the filth. He then kills the tyrant and gives his kingdom away.
Our New Year starts not today but on 20 January. There are many good ideas how to protest and which fearless groups to join to defy, obstruct and protest. Bernie Sanders has rallies, Michael Moore has five things for you to do (look it up as his ‘5 Steps Resistance Plan’), and Jeffrey St. Claire’s Counterpunch has ’20 Groups Standing Between You and Doom’. There’s other useful stuff out there, too.
We most of us have the same problem of where do we find the time and energy? And start exactly where?
Meantime, give a stray thought to those shitty Democratic Party stables that haven’t been cleaned out since Jimmy Carter.
In Chicago ward politics, or Stalin’s Russia, we’d call this a purge. Whatever it takes, feet to the fire, sign a loyalty oath, or “are you now or have you ever taken money from Goldman Sachs?” Or even George Soros.
You start at the very top of the Democratic establishment and fumigate all the way down, stopping only at a few, a very few, select street fighters like John Lewis, Barbara Lee and, yes, our own proud Pocahantas, Liz Warren.
Leaving the shit in the stable – all this earnest talk of “finding authenticity” “restructure and reform” “regaining touch with working class voters” – guarantees permanent loss.
Absurdly, a lot of energy is going into lining up would-be presidential candidates for 2020. Four years away! It only took Hitler a few weeks to cripple trade unions, set up his own court system and get rid of enemies in his own party.
Such an awesome task. Fit only for a Greek hero.
A CHRISTMAS GHOST STORY
“War is the health of the state.”
- Randolph Bourne
Actually, two ghost stories. They’re the twin semi-invisible specters hanging over our “peace and justice” movement that’s hardly moving at all.
One spook is that many if not most of us are part of a socially deaf, educated elite miles and miles above the cries of rage and pain of America’s Trump-voting deplorables.
The second ghost is much harder to grapple with, which is that for nearly 100 years our welfare benefits have been paid for by our either selling or aggressively using war goods.
We give to ourselves with one hand and kill foreigners with the other.
It’s built into the system.
A poignant example: Uncle Bernie Sanders, who we all (well, almost all) love, is an anti-war socialist, right? He voted against Bush’s Iraq invasion even though he helped lay the philosophic groundwork in Congress with speeches urging Sadam Hussein’s overthrow, but let that pass, we don’t want a politician without contradictions, do we?
Bernie is aggressively pushing to keep in his Burlington, Vermont constituency the 1.3 billion dollar Lockheed Martin F-35 “stealth” fighter, a fearsome if catastrophically failed war plane. Lobbying for the F-35 means 1400 badly needed jobs in a small state. Don’t say hypocrisy, say South Carolina which is trying to muscle Bernie out of the F35 picture.
“War is the health of…Vermont?”
It’s a rarely challenged truism that money spent on the Vietnam war scuttled Lyndon Johnson’s ambitious “Great Society” program against poverty and racial injustice.
Let’s look at it the other way round: that the money spent on pouring “social funds” into Brown&Root, Halliburton, Dow Chemical (napalm), Monsanto (agent Orange), Lockheed Martin, General Dynamics and Bechtel functioned to keep American workers in their jobs at liveable wages.
The connection between how we live and who we kill is a ghost that has haunted us for a long time. Eventually we pay the cost in 9/11 and ISIS terror and, at several removes, the mass migrations from Africa and Asia.
Just because connections are hard to “prove” doesn’t mean they don’t exist and will come out of the dark closet whenever they please.
- Randolph Bourne
Actually, two ghost stories. They’re the twin semi-invisible specters hanging over our “peace and justice” movement that’s hardly moving at all.
One spook is that many if not most of us are part of a socially deaf, educated elite miles and miles above the cries of rage and pain of America’s Trump-voting deplorables.
The second ghost is much harder to grapple with, which is that for nearly 100 years our welfare benefits have been paid for by our either selling or aggressively using war goods.
We give to ourselves with one hand and kill foreigners with the other.
It’s built into the system.
A poignant example: Uncle Bernie Sanders, who we all (well, almost all) love, is an anti-war socialist, right? He voted against Bush’s Iraq invasion even though he helped lay the philosophic groundwork in Congress with speeches urging Sadam Hussein’s overthrow, but let that pass, we don’t want a politician without contradictions, do we?
Bernie is aggressively pushing to keep in his Burlington, Vermont constituency the 1.3 billion dollar Lockheed Martin F-35 “stealth” fighter, a fearsome if catastrophically failed war plane. Lobbying for the F-35 means 1400 badly needed jobs in a small state. Don’t say hypocrisy, say South Carolina which is trying to muscle Bernie out of the F35 picture.
“War is the health of…Vermont?”
It’s a rarely challenged truism that money spent on the Vietnam war scuttled Lyndon Johnson’s ambitious “Great Society” program against poverty and racial injustice.
Let’s look at it the other way round: that the money spent on pouring “social funds” into Brown&Root, Halliburton, Dow Chemical (napalm), Monsanto (agent Orange), Lockheed Martin, General Dynamics and Bechtel functioned to keep American workers in their jobs at liveable wages.
The connection between how we live and who we kill is a ghost that has haunted us for a long time. Eventually we pay the cost in 9/11 and ISIS terror and, at several removes, the mass migrations from Africa and Asia.
Just because connections are hard to “prove” doesn’t mean they don’t exist and will come out of the dark closet whenever they please.
WE FORGET
(Note: Today is Boxing Day in Britain. Although 800 years old, nobody knows why this holiday is called Boxing Day. Nothing happens except a few Christmas drunks wander around lost since there are no Tubes or buses no matter what the schedule says.)
Bad regimes are in the business of making us forget. More than anything they want to cancel our feeling for the impossible that twists some of us into impractical romantics. Teenagers tend to pass through this phase before buckling down to the hard business of living, with grocery bills and mortgages, the stuff parents lecture us about.
Idealism, fair play, “how it should be” rather than “what is” usually passes, like growing pains.
I was lucky to go live where a little of the “how it should be” actually existed. Not in Shangri La or Gauguin’s Polynesia or E.T.’s home planet but grubby, damp, tight-little-island Britain.
My luck was in the timing, after a deadly war and before Mrs. Thatcher and Tony Blair. Before fatigue set in.
Nothing worked very well – O those primitive Press Button B phones and exploding Ascot heaters! – yet things seem to run incredibly smoothly without the Internet or Starbucks. The post delivered letters twice and sometimes thrice a day, and the district nurse came on her bike when called…free of charge.
True, hardly anyone had money, but a good fattening, hearty heart-attack breakfast could be had for practically tuppence.
Then as now the political election cycle strictly lasted only six short weeks.
Even illegal aliens (like me) got single payer medical care. Government-run utilities. Strong trade unions. Gunless cops. A ‘fair shares for all’ social bargain left over from the war.
It wasn’t easy. Unlike Sweden’s welfare state, which grew war-rich by selling to the Nazis, the Brits came out of six years of bombing broke and nearly bankrupt. Imagine having no money AND inventing an efficient free for all National Health Service over the fierce opposition of the nation’s doctors won over by the bullying of a “red” South Wales miners’ leader, the Health Minister Aneuran Bevan.
The British welfare state was not a sudden “revolution” but built on a solid base of previous slow and steady, bit by bit reforms, a fascinating mix of Methodism, Marxism, Victorian liberalism and from-below mass protest. Just like our own welfare system - Social Security and Medicare – about to be Trump-dismantled, didn’t come out of thin air.
At the moment, while we’re still dazed and hoarding obsolete allegiances, it doesn’t seem possible not only to rescue but improve upon the best of what we have. But then it wasn’t long ago when landing on the moon and electing a black president didn’t seem possible.
The incoming president’s mission is to help us forget.
Bad regimes are in the business of making us forget. More than anything they want to cancel our feeling for the impossible that twists some of us into impractical romantics. Teenagers tend to pass through this phase before buckling down to the hard business of living, with grocery bills and mortgages, the stuff parents lecture us about.
Idealism, fair play, “how it should be” rather than “what is” usually passes, like growing pains.
I was lucky to go live where a little of the “how it should be” actually existed. Not in Shangri La or Gauguin’s Polynesia or E.T.’s home planet but grubby, damp, tight-little-island Britain.
My luck was in the timing, after a deadly war and before Mrs. Thatcher and Tony Blair. Before fatigue set in.
Nothing worked very well – O those primitive Press Button B phones and exploding Ascot heaters! – yet things seem to run incredibly smoothly without the Internet or Starbucks. The post delivered letters twice and sometimes thrice a day, and the district nurse came on her bike when called…free of charge.
True, hardly anyone had money, but a good fattening, hearty heart-attack breakfast could be had for practically tuppence.
Then as now the political election cycle strictly lasted only six short weeks.
Even illegal aliens (like me) got single payer medical care. Government-run utilities. Strong trade unions. Gunless cops. A ‘fair shares for all’ social bargain left over from the war.
It was real, unromantic, rain-sodden, pull-together Bernie Sanders “socialism” – and it worked. Call us drab and dismal, if you like. And tell us we don’t know how to cook our food or wear our clothes – but, for heaven’s sake, recognize that we’re trying to do something…extraordinary and difficult - to have a revolution for once without the Terror…-- J.B. Priestley, his play The Linden Tree
It wasn’t easy. Unlike Sweden’s welfare state, which grew war-rich by selling to the Nazis, the Brits came out of six years of bombing broke and nearly bankrupt. Imagine having no money AND inventing an efficient free for all National Health Service over the fierce opposition of the nation’s doctors won over by the bullying of a “red” South Wales miners’ leader, the Health Minister Aneuran Bevan.
The British welfare state was not a sudden “revolution” but built on a solid base of previous slow and steady, bit by bit reforms, a fascinating mix of Methodism, Marxism, Victorian liberalism and from-below mass protest. Just like our own welfare system - Social Security and Medicare – about to be Trump-dismantled, didn’t come out of thin air.
At the moment, while we’re still dazed and hoarding obsolete allegiances, it doesn’t seem possible not only to rescue but improve upon the best of what we have. But then it wasn’t long ago when landing on the moon and electing a black president didn’t seem possible.
The incoming president’s mission is to help us forget.
December 20, 2016
HELP FOR HOARDERS
It’s estimated that over 3 million Americans are hoarders, which is recognized as an actual psychological disorder. There are companies, like Clutter Cleaner, that are expert in dealing not only with the effects of the disorder, but also with the people who suffer from it. “Homes inhabited by hoarders can be dangerous, unhealthy, or both,” warns Clutter Cleaner, “and dramatic action is required to address the problem and start the hoarder on the road to recovery.”
Can we hire Clutter Cleaner to get rid of our political rubbish?
What have we hidden away that we don’t want to look at? Stuff that reeks and is unsightly and has strange bugs crawling all over it.
We start with the obvious. Junk we don’t need any more if we ever did.
Out go the Democratic party hacks Hillary and Bill and their many hackettes among pollsters, experts, advisors, close friends and celebrity supporters (Madonna, the Clooneys, etc). Out, out, out! No mercy for crapola.
Next buy for $175 a Honeywell air purifier to get rid of the static interfering with clear thinking, whoosh whoosh, away you go! Putin’s hacks threw the election to Trump…”faithless electors” of the Electoral College will save us…Hillary won the popular vote…a black Muslim former Farrakhanite will lead us to victory…white voters will wake up tomorrow to Trump’s absurdities and their betrayed self interest…
That’s for starters. It's an emotional trauma, I know.
The hard stuff comes when we examine ourselves for hoarded schmootz, the stuff we really, really don’t want to think about.
Which is, our deepest darkest dustiest secret. That we educated liberals are a conjoined twin of the One Percent, the wealthy (Koch Bros etc) who oppress and exploit American workers and middle class into voting for Trump because our professional class is seen as MORE oppressive than the vulgar rich. (Trump’s money-shot line: “I love the poorly educated.”)
Face it: we educated liberals are seen as part of the conspiracy that keeps so many less educated Americans down in the dumps.
Proof: Hillary’s campaign. Tin ears and blind eyes all the way. Not a clue. With her every word an insult to working people that threatens their jobs, if they have them, and their way of life. All the prattle about “minority rights” and “celebrate diversity” and “ecological survival” sounded wonderful in our tin ears but came across to the poor in income and spirit as a big Fuck You.
Once we clean up and de-clutter what’s left? An empty space, thank heaven. We can breathe and move freely again unencumbered by the dregs of yesteryear.
Now, then…!
Can we hire Clutter Cleaner to get rid of our political rubbish?
What have we hidden away that we don’t want to look at? Stuff that reeks and is unsightly and has strange bugs crawling all over it.
We start with the obvious. Junk we don’t need any more if we ever did.
Out go the Democratic party hacks Hillary and Bill and their many hackettes among pollsters, experts, advisors, close friends and celebrity supporters (Madonna, the Clooneys, etc). Out, out, out! No mercy for crapola.
Next buy for $175 a Honeywell air purifier to get rid of the static interfering with clear thinking, whoosh whoosh, away you go! Putin’s hacks threw the election to Trump…”faithless electors” of the Electoral College will save us…Hillary won the popular vote…a black Muslim former Farrakhanite will lead us to victory…white voters will wake up tomorrow to Trump’s absurdities and their betrayed self interest…
That’s for starters. It's an emotional trauma, I know.
The hard stuff comes when we examine ourselves for hoarded schmootz, the stuff we really, really don’t want to think about.
Which is, our deepest darkest dustiest secret. That we educated liberals are a conjoined twin of the One Percent, the wealthy (Koch Bros etc) who oppress and exploit American workers and middle class into voting for Trump because our professional class is seen as MORE oppressive than the vulgar rich. (Trump’s money-shot line: “I love the poorly educated.”)
Face it: we educated liberals are seen as part of the conspiracy that keeps so many less educated Americans down in the dumps.
Proof: Hillary’s campaign. Tin ears and blind eyes all the way. Not a clue. With her every word an insult to working people that threatens their jobs, if they have them, and their way of life. All the prattle about “minority rights” and “celebrate diversity” and “ecological survival” sounded wonderful in our tin ears but came across to the poor in income and spirit as a big Fuck You.
Once we clean up and de-clutter what’s left? An empty space, thank heaven. We can breathe and move freely again unencumbered by the dregs of yesteryear.
Now, then…!
December 19, 2016
WHEN IS YOUR CLIMAX?
France, 1940. Our nation is paralyzed and shocked when Nazi armies roll over the border in a few days destroy the allegedly invulnerable proud French army. Almost overnight France is occupied by a racist, gloating Wehrmacht singing its surprise victory over its traditional soft, liberal, corrupt enemy.
The shock is so great it’s too early for effective resistance. You must think of your own survival. The Germans are notoriously thinskinned and vindictive and take reprisals against disagreeables.
People are so depressed and German victory seems so inevitable that resistance seems useless. But slowly it begins with what the French call refus absurde (“absurd refusal”) just simply refusing to accept that the Nazis would win and even if they did it’s better to fight back, somehow.
Many résistants often spoke of some "climax" when they saw an intolerable act of injustice, or bizarre stupidity, after which they could not longer remain passive.
Gradually the defiance instinct takes organizational form. It’s not easy to put together a fighting coalition of liberals, conservatives, communists, socialists, anarchists, Catholic nuns and priests, military officers and students. Key is an open mind to embrace attitudes one personally disagrees with.
Feeling their way into the dark resisters improvise. Small cells, networks, guerrilla tactics, creating an underground newpaper. Barricades come later now is for the hard unromantic grind.
In the 1940s it took a foreign army to liberate France with the help of resisters like Camus and Samuel Beckett.
Trumplandia is not wartime France. Yet many of us behave as if we’re in a newly Occupied America because that’s how it feels.
Jumping the gun? An exaggeration? A misuse of historical model?
We’ll see.
The shock is so great it’s too early for effective resistance. You must think of your own survival. The Germans are notoriously thinskinned and vindictive and take reprisals against disagreeables.
People are so depressed and German victory seems so inevitable that resistance seems useless. But slowly it begins with what the French call refus absurde (“absurd refusal”) just simply refusing to accept that the Nazis would win and even if they did it’s better to fight back, somehow.
Many résistants often spoke of some "climax" when they saw an intolerable act of injustice, or bizarre stupidity, after which they could not longer remain passive.
Gradually the defiance instinct takes organizational form. It’s not easy to put together a fighting coalition of liberals, conservatives, communists, socialists, anarchists, Catholic nuns and priests, military officers and students. Key is an open mind to embrace attitudes one personally disagrees with.
Feeling their way into the dark resisters improvise. Small cells, networks, guerrilla tactics, creating an underground newpaper. Barricades come later now is for the hard unromantic grind.
In the 1940s it took a foreign army to liberate France with the help of resisters like Camus and Samuel Beckett.
Trumplandia is not wartime France. Yet many of us behave as if we’re in a newly Occupied America because that’s how it feels.
Jumping the gun? An exaggeration? A misuse of historical model?
We’ll see.
December 16, 2016
ASK CLANCY THE AGONY AUNT
Mary a friend asks, “But what choice do we have except for the Democratic Party?”
Dear Mary:
I feel your dilemma. So many battered wives and husbands share your problem. Your spouse promises to treat you better and for a short time they’re so nice and gentle you feel hopeful for the future but then they revert to type and beat the living crap out of you.
For how many years have you endured this cycle of promise and abuse only to finally realize, I have got to leave this terrible marriage?
But what then? It’s terrifying to think of being politically partyless. Out there, alone. Too much freedom, makes you ill even to think about it.
It’s not as if you’re leaving the marriage for a new or better one. Or having an affair (with Jill Stein? Libertarians? Working Families?) No, leaving a bad marriage is all on you, dear.
I wish there was a political Battered Politicals shelter for you to be taken in and cared for until your mind clears. Alas, your best support system is your own free desire to be unshackled from past love for your old Democratic spouse who practically killed you in the recent election.
And of course you should rely on your friends who are also Battered Democrats. Maybe all you can do for now is hold each other’s hand. Who knows? That could be the start of something really big.
Good luck, Mary. Know how you feel.
Dear Mary:
I feel your dilemma. So many battered wives and husbands share your problem. Your spouse promises to treat you better and for a short time they’re so nice and gentle you feel hopeful for the future but then they revert to type and beat the living crap out of you.
For how many years have you endured this cycle of promise and abuse only to finally realize, I have got to leave this terrible marriage?
But what then? It’s terrifying to think of being politically partyless. Out there, alone. Too much freedom, makes you ill even to think about it.
It’s not as if you’re leaving the marriage for a new or better one. Or having an affair (with Jill Stein? Libertarians? Working Families?) No, leaving a bad marriage is all on you, dear.
I wish there was a political Battered Politicals shelter for you to be taken in and cared for until your mind clears. Alas, your best support system is your own free desire to be unshackled from past love for your old Democratic spouse who practically killed you in the recent election.
And of course you should rely on your friends who are also Battered Democrats. Maybe all you can do for now is hold each other’s hand. Who knows? That could be the start of something really big.
Good luck, Mary. Know how you feel.
December 14, 2016
BETTE DAVIS WAS RIGHT ABOUT THE LONG WAR
“U.S. leftists and liberals need to reorganize themselves and prepare for a LONG WAR that has no end in sight with militant groups like the Trump White House and their allies in Fox News…,” is my absurd mistranslation of Joint Chief of Staff’s Gen. Martin Dempsey’s farewell speech to the Pentagon about our endless war.
Of course what Dempsey actually said is that this “long war” will be against ISIS and involve worldwide proxy wars like Syria, Iraq, Yemen and Africa.
Gen. Dempsey might as well be talking to us: “We must be able to rapidly adapt to new threats while maintaining comparative advantage over traditional ones,” Yes, indeed!
When thousands of U.S. veterans helped Sioux “water protectors” temporarily win at Standing Rock, I flippantly suggested that we could learn from the military. Like how to reorganize ourselves for our own version of the long war.
Or as Bette Davis says in All About Eve, “Fasten your seatbelts. It’s going to be a bumpy night.”
In hearing the agonized responses of friends and other writers to Trump’s election I’m struck by the same words they use over and over: grief, horror, mournng, shock and shellshock, despair, sad, depressed, blocked etc.
Really? Still? It’s been over a month since 8 Nov. As George C. Scott as Gen. Patton liked to bellow at traffic jams, what’s the holdup?
Surely we’re not waiting for the dead-ass Democratic Party?
From Hillary and Obama on down they’re wasting precious time squabbling like has-been boxers, “We wuz robbed!”
Does it help or hinder to grasp that Bannon-Trump’s election coup is not unprecedented but the culmination of a previous “long war” not against Obama but decades ago against Franklin D. Roosevelt’s attempts to save capitalism from itself in the depressed 1930s?
The One Percent, then called the Liberty League based at J. P. Morgan’s 23 Wall Street, never recovered from the trauma of one of its own class FDR stabbing it in the back. They even tried to mount a military coup against him.
Unlike us nice people, Republicans are gut fighters. They never give up, because they retain long, long memories of how “socialist” and awful life is when the top class is taxed at top rate and when the middle class, poor and weak have, gasp! Social Security and jobless insurance.
Democrats fight for their rights; Republicans fight for their lives.
The struggle changes form over time. It adapts to circumstances. What’s unchanging is the ancient, smug hatred of the poor and misbegotten.
That’s us, folks.
Fasten your seatbelts.
Of course what Dempsey actually said is that this “long war” will be against ISIS and involve worldwide proxy wars like Syria, Iraq, Yemen and Africa.
Gen. Dempsey might as well be talking to us: “We must be able to rapidly adapt to new threats while maintaining comparative advantage over traditional ones,” Yes, indeed!
When thousands of U.S. veterans helped Sioux “water protectors” temporarily win at Standing Rock, I flippantly suggested that we could learn from the military. Like how to reorganize ourselves for our own version of the long war.
Or as Bette Davis says in All About Eve, “Fasten your seatbelts. It’s going to be a bumpy night.”
In hearing the agonized responses of friends and other writers to Trump’s election I’m struck by the same words they use over and over: grief, horror, mournng, shock and shellshock, despair, sad, depressed, blocked etc.
Really? Still? It’s been over a month since 8 Nov. As George C. Scott as Gen. Patton liked to bellow at traffic jams, what’s the holdup?
Surely we’re not waiting for the dead-ass Democratic Party?
From Hillary and Obama on down they’re wasting precious time squabbling like has-been boxers, “We wuz robbed!”
Does it help or hinder to grasp that Bannon-Trump’s election coup is not unprecedented but the culmination of a previous “long war” not against Obama but decades ago against Franklin D. Roosevelt’s attempts to save capitalism from itself in the depressed 1930s?
The One Percent, then called the Liberty League based at J. P. Morgan’s 23 Wall Street, never recovered from the trauma of one of its own class FDR stabbing it in the back. They even tried to mount a military coup against him.
Unlike us nice people, Republicans are gut fighters. They never give up, because they retain long, long memories of how “socialist” and awful life is when the top class is taxed at top rate and when the middle class, poor and weak have, gasp! Social Security and jobless insurance.
Democrats fight for their rights; Republicans fight for their lives.
The struggle changes form over time. It adapts to circumstances. What’s unchanging is the ancient, smug hatred of the poor and misbegotten.
That’s us, folks.
Fasten your seatbelts.
December 13, 2016
“BRING OUT YOUR DEAD!”
(A 14TH century cry during the Black Plague to let people know that the cart for dead bodies was passing by. Anyone with a dead friend or relative would "bring out their dead" and throw the person on top of the pile. Also: see Monty Python and the Holy Grail.)
Don’t fret overmuch about Steve Bannon’s cabinet picks announced by his stooge Trump. Of course each new appointment will be worse than the other, from “Burgers in a Bikini” Andy Puzder to a labor secretary who despises labor. But keep your eye on the out-of-sight lower government levels where a loyalty cleanup is already happening.
You may not agree, but government bureaucrats make the best parts work. Admittedly, I’m biased since they sent me free of charge to college and manage Social Security, Medicare and my Veterans Admin doctors. Sometime they stupidly screw up, but so?
The Bannon-Trump plan is to make life so unbearable for decent hardworking (and unionized) government employees that they either quit or shut up. Think Hollywood blacklist but vaster.
The point of a blacklist is to get your own ass kissers in while strongarming all the others into obedience.
I’ve lived with blacklists all my life. My labor-oriented folks and extended family (cousins Charlie and Davie) saw a blacklist’s derailing their lives as the price of doing business as union organizers. But most govt workers today probably want to keep their jobs by zipping their lips and hunkering down in a trumpstorm.
Here’s how it works even before Jan 20.
Steve Bannon’s “transition team” springs a 74-point questionnaire at the Department of Energy demanding names of all employees and contractors who have attended climate change policy, as well as emails and documents associated with the conferences. Names, names, we gotta have names.
Scott Pruitt, a climate change “denialist” and atty gen of frack-caused earthquake-exploding Oklahoma, who hates the Environmental Protection Agency, is the EPA’s new boss. He will cull the Energy Dept’s disloyalists who want to limit carbon dioxide emissions.
Put yourself in the shoes of a mid- or lower-level EPA or Energy Dept. employee when your new boss asks if you love him you better have the right answer.
The lasting impact of the old Hollywood blacklist, where I have experience, was less in who got fired than the ripple effect of bullying and browbeating. Whole communities dependent on film making were scared into silence or cynicism. History books say Sen. McCarthy fell due to his “excesses”. Untrue. He lives on in these 74 point questionnaires.
The 1930s Germans called it gleichschaltung. Look it up.
Don’t fret overmuch about Steve Bannon’s cabinet picks announced by his stooge Trump. Of course each new appointment will be worse than the other, from “Burgers in a Bikini” Andy Puzder to a labor secretary who despises labor. But keep your eye on the out-of-sight lower government levels where a loyalty cleanup is already happening.
You may not agree, but government bureaucrats make the best parts work. Admittedly, I’m biased since they sent me free of charge to college and manage Social Security, Medicare and my Veterans Admin doctors. Sometime they stupidly screw up, but so?
The Bannon-Trump plan is to make life so unbearable for decent hardworking (and unionized) government employees that they either quit or shut up. Think Hollywood blacklist but vaster.
The point of a blacklist is to get your own ass kissers in while strongarming all the others into obedience.
I’ve lived with blacklists all my life. My labor-oriented folks and extended family (cousins Charlie and Davie) saw a blacklist’s derailing their lives as the price of doing business as union organizers. But most govt workers today probably want to keep their jobs by zipping their lips and hunkering down in a trumpstorm.
Here’s how it works even before Jan 20.
Steve Bannon’s “transition team” springs a 74-point questionnaire at the Department of Energy demanding names of all employees and contractors who have attended climate change policy, as well as emails and documents associated with the conferences. Names, names, we gotta have names.
Scott Pruitt, a climate change “denialist” and atty gen of frack-caused earthquake-exploding Oklahoma, who hates the Environmental Protection Agency, is the EPA’s new boss. He will cull the Energy Dept’s disloyalists who want to limit carbon dioxide emissions.
Put yourself in the shoes of a mid- or lower-level EPA or Energy Dept. employee when your new boss asks if you love him you better have the right answer.
The lasting impact of the old Hollywood blacklist, where I have experience, was less in who got fired than the ripple effect of bullying and browbeating. Whole communities dependent on film making were scared into silence or cynicism. History books say Sen. McCarthy fell due to his “excesses”. Untrue. He lives on in these 74 point questionnaires.
The 1930s Germans called it gleichschaltung. Look it up.
FEELING OUR WAY TO THE WAY OUT
Like many of us I’m gingerly feeling my way into the Trump wreckage. I look to others to see how they do it. One obvious place is where the Missouri and Cannonbll rivers meet at the Sioux’s Sacred Stone resistance camp at Standing Rock.
Many Native American nations came together in subzero blizzards to stop Energy Transfer Partners from completing an army Corps of Engineer-approved link of an oil pipeline that will pollute their water supply and desecrate ancient burial ground.
Standing Rock is the most powerful gathering of American Indians since the great 1890 Ghost Dance religious revival.
After Amy Goodman took video, and mainstream reporters broadcast how North Dakota cops and hired mercenaries grenaded, sprayed freezing water and set dogs on the protestors, suddenly the Corps of Engineers got environmental religion and put a screeching stop to drilling under sacred land…for now.
A win not a victory.
Myself I believe the tipping point came when 2000 military veterans from all over showed up as a human shield between the peaceful camp and the angry police. Whoops! Can’t have corporate rent-a-cops in full camera view shooting combat veterans who have showed up wearing patches of their old uniform. Bad publicity!
OK, what can we learn?
First, absolute nonviolence. David Archambault, the head of the Standing Rock Sioux, insisted that the camp was a place of prayer, drum circles and sacred fires. Not your ordinary rah-rah protest but a “spiritual quest”.
Trouble is, most of us are not Native Americans with their long and bloody history that makes it natural for the nations to come together en masse and raise a little hell.
And some of us are not noticeably as spiritual as a Sioux or Lakota. I’m a godless plodder, so it’s not an easy ladder for me to climb. Although I suppose I can learn if I channel my past with the church-going civil rights Student Non Violence Coordinating Committee who taught us that loving Jesus and loving ourselves was a successful political strategy.
And we’re not ex soldiers who share a disciplined command language and quick reflexes that helped them “muster” – in full gear - at four days’ notice. I’d like to “militarize” the left by borrowing some of the army’s best bits, like punctuality, the buddy system and respect for the Constitution.
And we’re not sitting in today’s California legislature which defiantly may announce itself as a “sanctuary state” and is putting together a legal package to help the undocumented.
Nor are we California's police chief Charlie Beck who told Trump to go take a flying leap if he expects his cops to help deportations. (In LA alone we have half a million undocumenteds.)
So if we’re not spiritual Native Americans or soldiers or law makers or cops, who are we and what can we do?
Forget deal-happy Democrats like Chuck Schumer and pathetic Al Gore (“Trump is a good listener”) they’re yesteryear’s men. It’s on us. And, please, no more clichés of shock and horror, our model is Muhammed Ali who took terrific punishment on the ropes before rope-a-doping to victory. Yes, he paid a big price and so may we.
If many of our fellow citizens are Nazis in their hearts, like the apprentice storm troopers who scream “Treason!” and “Lock her up” at Trump Nuremberg-style rallies, what’s our choice except to outnumber and outfight them?
Many Native American nations came together in subzero blizzards to stop Energy Transfer Partners from completing an army Corps of Engineer-approved link of an oil pipeline that will pollute their water supply and desecrate ancient burial ground.
Standing Rock is the most powerful gathering of American Indians since the great 1890 Ghost Dance religious revival.
After Amy Goodman took video, and mainstream reporters broadcast how North Dakota cops and hired mercenaries grenaded, sprayed freezing water and set dogs on the protestors, suddenly the Corps of Engineers got environmental religion and put a screeching stop to drilling under sacred land…for now.
A win not a victory.
Myself I believe the tipping point came when 2000 military veterans from all over showed up as a human shield between the peaceful camp and the angry police. Whoops! Can’t have corporate rent-a-cops in full camera view shooting combat veterans who have showed up wearing patches of their old uniform. Bad publicity!
OK, what can we learn?
First, absolute nonviolence. David Archambault, the head of the Standing Rock Sioux, insisted that the camp was a place of prayer, drum circles and sacred fires. Not your ordinary rah-rah protest but a “spiritual quest”.
Trouble is, most of us are not Native Americans with their long and bloody history that makes it natural for the nations to come together en masse and raise a little hell.
And some of us are not noticeably as spiritual as a Sioux or Lakota. I’m a godless plodder, so it’s not an easy ladder for me to climb. Although I suppose I can learn if I channel my past with the church-going civil rights Student Non Violence Coordinating Committee who taught us that loving Jesus and loving ourselves was a successful political strategy.
And we’re not ex soldiers who share a disciplined command language and quick reflexes that helped them “muster” – in full gear - at four days’ notice. I’d like to “militarize” the left by borrowing some of the army’s best bits, like punctuality, the buddy system and respect for the Constitution.
And we’re not sitting in today’s California legislature which defiantly may announce itself as a “sanctuary state” and is putting together a legal package to help the undocumented.
Nor are we California's police chief Charlie Beck who told Trump to go take a flying leap if he expects his cops to help deportations. (In LA alone we have half a million undocumenteds.)
So if we’re not spiritual Native Americans or soldiers or law makers or cops, who are we and what can we do?
Forget deal-happy Democrats like Chuck Schumer and pathetic Al Gore (“Trump is a good listener”) they’re yesteryear’s men. It’s on us. And, please, no more clichés of shock and horror, our model is Muhammed Ali who took terrific punishment on the ropes before rope-a-doping to victory. Yes, he paid a big price and so may we.
If many of our fellow citizens are Nazis in their hearts, like the apprentice storm troopers who scream “Treason!” and “Lock her up” at Trump Nuremberg-style rallies, what’s our choice except to outnumber and outfight them?
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