Clancy Sigal's Blog, page 4

A TRIAL BALLOON FULL OF POISON GAS

(A dictionary definition of trial balloon is “a tentative measure taken or statement made to see how a new policy will be received”.)

Here’s the scoop: The New York Observer, a failing newspaper owned by Donald Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, calls for the FBI to crackdown on nationwide anti-Trump protests.

Titled “Comey’s FBI Needs to Investigate Violent Democratic Tantrums,” it’s by Austin Bay, a retired U.S. Army Reserve colonel who (God help the students) teaches at Austin’s U of Texas.

“The hard left’s violent reaction to Donald Trump’s election is vile and dangerous,” writes Bay. “The demonstrators vandalize and destroy.”

That's us he's talking about.

Jim Naureckas, editor of Extra!, the media watchdog magazine, says “It struck me as a ‘first they came for the communists’ moment. He ties up this conspiracy of protesters, people seeking recounts and George Soros into one vast conspiracy that the FBI ought to get to the bottom of.”

People like Jared Kushner and Gen. Bay know how Trump thinks. As in the Third Reich they seek promotion by anticipating what they believe The Leader wants by his body language and dropped hints (today’s tweets). Which is to scare us.

Our take? Follow the lead of California’s Democratic state legislators and be combative as hell. We'll be punished anyway so might as well explore how to be nonviolently "vile and dangerous".

A GUY WITH A RIFLE SHOOTS UP A PIZZA JOINT BECAUSE HIS BRAIN IS INFECTED WITH A CONSPIRACY THEORY DREAMED UP BY TRUMP’S #1 MILITARY ADVISOR WHO IS CERTIFIABLY NUTS

A GUY WITH A RIFLE SHOOTS UP A PIZZA JOINT BECAUSE HIS BRAIN IS INFECTED WITH A CONSPIRACY
THEORY DREAMED UP BY TRUMP’S #1 MILITARY ADVISOR WHO IS CERTIFIABLY NUTS

WashPost news story today: A man was arrested Sunday after he walked into a popular pizza restaurant in Northwest Washington carrying an assault rifle and fired one or more shots. The man told police he had come to the restaurant to “self-investigate” a conspiracy theory involving Hillary Clinton, pedophilia and sex trafficking that was spread online by Gen. Michael Flynn and his even crazier son Michael..


Hands up! Anyone who believes:

Lee Harvey Oswald conspired to kill Pres. Kennedy with the Mafia, Cuban exiles, Lyndon Johnson, or the CIA (choose one).

The Moon Landing is a fake. NASA hired director Stanley Kubrick to create credible footage.

The Rothschilds through IMF and World Bank control us through the world’s money supply.

The Jews did it (whatever it is, see above).

Alien spacecraft landed at Area 51 as a base for a military takeover.

9/11 was planned and executed by the U.S. govt (or, them again, you know who).

Paul McCartney is dead and that’s his double on tour. Jim Morrissey is alive and living in a Paris old age home.

The U.S. govt does not consider us as human beings but “bodies of water” subject to obscure maritime laws.

The U.S. govt does not care if we live or die because it takes out an insurance policy on each one of us at birth so stands to profit by our death.

Bernie Sanders was screwed out of the nomination by a conspiracy of Hillary’s top Democrats like Debbie Wasserman Schultz. (I’ll go to the fiery stake before disbelieving this.)

Jesus slept with Mary Magdalene and His children live among us.

As sci-fi movies say, We Are Not Alone in swallowing bunk.

Conspiracy is a Universal Religion that probably has more parishioners than all three monotheisms combined. It’s the faith of the stepped-on or those who feel stepped on.

KPFK is Paranoia Central, plus the whole of Africa (the west created AIDS to oppress black people) and is deeply dug inside Donald (“birther”) Trump’s head as well as much of the Arab world which is held together by the Universal Conspiracy Church’s Bible on Zionist treachery.

Is there a common theme? Yes. The shadowy “they” who control us is elusive and undefined. No matter. Belief is rooted in our POWERLESNESS. We are insignificant herdlike “sheeple” controlled by “Them”. To rise above sheeple we must educate ourselves about the truths their System is hiding.

Beliefs are facts. Facts can be invented on the spot. Trump speeches wildly sprinkle “facts” with beliefs so that you don’t know which is which because it doesn’t matter as long as you like the speaker.

When conspiracies control us we are slaves to the unprovable.

Right now I’m free, I’m free! I no longer care that Debbie Wasserman shafted our Bernie. So what? Holding on to a conspiracy theory – any which one – is playing the game of people trying to harm me.


#

(My thanks to Jake Pinger for helping me think this through.)

CAN WE HAVE A LITTLE CLARITY ABOUT WHO ACTUALLY ORGANIZED THE CUBAN REVOLUTION BEFORE WE GET BACK ONTO THE TRUMP MESS?

Now when we need group solidarity is no time to rain on history’s parade. That is, history written carelessly.

Talking obsessively about Fidel (r.i.p.) as the “maximum leader” and inspiration of the 1959 uprising against the corrupt USA-backed Batista regime is like citing only George Washington in our 1776 American revolution without Ben Franklin, Jefferson, Tom Paine etc.

It’s amazing how few of Castro’s obit-tributes mention his role in the horrific 1962 Cuba Missiles Crisis where, until he was pulled back by Khruschev, he seemed totally OK with shooting ICBMs on our eastern seaboard to protect “his” revolution.

Yes, I know about the literacy rates and the wonderful export of Cuban doctors to diseased countries. And those doctors really are wonderful.

But just before we pass on let’s doff the cap to two real heroes who did the grunt work.

The official story, as manufactured by Che Guevera and boosted by our celebrity-is-all culture, is that Castro's 200 guerillas single-handedly defeated tens of thousands of Batista's professional soldiers and liberated the people of Cuba.

The reality is that FRANK PAIS, a young school teacher, and JUAN ANTONIO ECHEVERRIA, an architecture student, did the ground-level work of organizing city-based insurgencies in Santiago and Havana which built popular support for resistance and undermining the authority of Batista and his secret police. At the time, though not in our media, both Pais and Echeverria rivaled Castro in popularity and power. Neither lived to see the movement succeed.

About Che Guevera the less said the better. “Seremos como el che!” Cuban children are drilled to chant. I sure hope not. And oh those iconic posters on every Sixties college dorm wall! With the help of Russia’s KGB he masterminded creation of the Cuban secret police that executed and imprisoned thousands of disagreeables, gays, former comrades and anyone else the “idealistic” (delusionary) Che disliked.

The Cuban revolution had to happen. The Cuban people are in trouble again with Madman Trump’s ascendancy. (If Donald wasn’t in the White House he and Fidel might get along famously; two “charismatic” personalities with loose mouths and a distaste for dissent.)

I’m sorry if this offends some of my friends. But in all the hoorah let’s not forget Frank Pais and Juan Antonio Echeverria.

WHAT’S WRONG WITH SNOBBERY?

“If we are going to let Trump get us depressed, then he still has control of us.”
– Rabbi Steven Jacobs


Internal exile or “inner emigration” is what happens in fascist countries like Putin’s Russia or Pinochet’s Chile when citizens don’t go along with the regime but also want to duck the pain and risk of open resistance.

Such “inner defiance” can run from quiet gentle opposition to subtle jokes to just getting on with one’s own personal work, like the German painter Otto Dix and Sartre-Beauvoir under Nazi occupation, deafening oneself to the Leader’s noise.

Voltaire had his hero Candide decide to turn away from the world’s cruelty and “cultivate one’s own garden”. That is, mind your own business.

I don’t know if I’m going that way but like one or two friends I hardly look at the newspaper since Nov. 8 and force myself away from TV except to watch Classic Baseball Games or cooking shows. Leave me alone, I’d rather talk to myself than constantly be psyched up for the oncoming roar of the locomotive bearing down on us, like Harrison Ford in “The Fugitive”.

This too will pass. I grew up on newsprint, caring not if it carried lies and slander, and the beast will have to be fed sooner or later. Right now I’m full of rage and guilt – it’s all my fault! For not listening to myself. For refusing to know what I knew, that their grudge would beat our demographics. Take that Rachel Maddow!

NOT HAVING “SOLUTIONS” TO CONFRONTING THE RECKLESS LOCOMOTIVE ISN’T SUCH A BAD PLACE TO BE. Wandering lost in a palace of illusions is a little bruising – you keep bumping your knee against sharpedged old assumptions. But I’d rather have a skinned knee than fall victim to what some of us are doing now, trying to “understand”, or better yet empathize, with the people who are beating us up.

(Bernie Sanders and I are both from the Jewish working class. But he won’t like the rest of this.)

In coming days we “liberal coastal elites” will need all our arrogance and self confidence. To hell with the deplorables. They hate us and only want revenge, on us and as it will turn out, themselves.

Don’t cede an inch to the ignoramii. We will claw back our gains despite them. Half the country declared war on us who live in the other half. Us is multi-colored multi-sexed multi anything else we can think of. Embrace our elitism. We’re smart, we’re as potentially nimble as Harrison Ford escaping the Death Train, and we own the keys to the kingdom of science and rationality.

Nuts to the fucked over flyovers. We’re fucked too.

I WILL NOT OBEY IT, BY GOD!

The following was written for the Washington Post by Linda Hirschmann a labor lawyer and philosophy teacher. I’ve butchered it for space. Question: does her centuries-old model work for us?

“But what can anti-Trump liberals and progressives actually do to conquer despair?

One episode from history reveals reasons to hope.

In 1850, like the Democrats and their allies in 2016, the abolitionists took a terrible hit. They had worked for 20 years to bring down slavery but Congress basically handed those territories to the pro-slavery forces. And with a new Fugitive Slave Act it forced every Northern citizen to become a slave catcher.

And yet, a little over a decade later, Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation, a road map away from the election of 2016.

Indeed, by marching and making street theater, forces of resistance to the Trump and GOP victories have already started emulating the abolitionists.

In 1854, the federal government tried and convicted fugitive Anthony Burns, sending him back to slavery. But on the day of Burns’s rendition, 50,000 anti-slavery protesters lined the streets as federal troops marched the fugitive Burns to the ship that would take him back to his Virginia master. Opposition to the Fugitive Slave Law spiked. Boston’s Ralph Waldo Emerson said of the Law: “I will not obey it, by God.’’ Today it’s deportations. Trump has threatened to overturn the amnesty that has protected “dreamers” — immigrants brought to the United States as children.

What would the abolitionists do? They would gather in huge numbers every time federal agents came for an Hispanic student. They would compel those agents to use force if they wanted to proceed. They would document every moment. And they would use the media — back then it was the penny press, the Twitter of its time — to spread the images. Every vulnerable dreamer should be carrying a cellphone with a number to text if the feds come.

But resistance movements need the support of permanent infrastructure that changes minds and behavior.

In 1831, faced with hopelessness, William Lloyd Garrison and friends formed the New England Anti-Slavery Society, the first of thousands of such societies.

Of course, the Democratic Party is an established network. But it reaches out to people only at election time. Why not go back to good ole community organizing not with TV ads and Twitter but by actually talking to friends, relatives and even strangers?

It must have seemed like a permanent failure for the abolitionists when they heard about the Compromise of 1850. But the end of slavery wasn’t as far off as they feared.

#

CLANCY'S TAKE: the Abolitionists, bless ‘em, had a single understandable cause. We’re whacking a mole, running hither and yon from deportations to the latest disaster, a public school hater as Education Secy. What do today’s Abolitionists do?

SOUTHERN DISCOMFORT

“I'm sorry but the "rednecks" really are too "dumb" to vote according to their self-interest. And if they're not actively racist, they're at least looking the other way…Their buyer's remorse should be kicking in any moment" -- from a Facebook friend
in response to an article by a (rare) Clinton voter in rural Texas.



When I was a child and came up to Chicago from my first school year in Tennessee with a thick ‘suthin’ accent the kids on the block tried to break my nose with a snow shovel. (I still have a tiny scar.) Back in Chattanooga the streetcar conductors wore pistols against a feared race rebellion, Robert E. Lee’s birthday was a holiday but not Lincoln’s, and Minie balls from the Civil War were embedded like shrines in trees on Lookout Mountain.

The first racist limerick I ever learned is unprintable here even though rap artists use it all the time. Gosh, I’m getting tired of not being able to say certain words like Obama’s banned Islamic terrorism. (One of many reasons why we lost.)

We’re snobs…they’re racists…the new president is an already bored white supremacist circled by Rasputins like our new attorney general Jefferson Beauregard Sessions the Third who despises even legal immigrants and calls African Americans “boy”; Confederate-loving Steve Bannon who doesn’t like Jews; and gay-hating v.p. Pence. Where is my man Malcolm X when we need him?

Snobs. I was on assignment from London to Los Angeles in 1976 when Jimmy Carter ran against Gerald Ford. In homes and hotels all over the liberal province of West LA I kept hearing Carter referred to patronizingly as “that peanut farmer”. Hollywood types especially made fun of his Gawjuh accent.

Flash forward to Obama’s first run in 2008 when I helped work a phone bank. My patch was southern Missouri. One day the phone was picked up by a farmer in a grouch because I’d interrupted his dinner. He brusquely broke into my practiced spiel: “Okay, I’ll vote for your damn nigger.” (Sorry, it’s what he said.)

The man was probably a “racist” with all sorts of prejudices and wrong notions about African Americans – but Obama got his vote – and the votes of many other real, so-called and semi conscious racial bigots.

Should we ever compromise on anything with racially or sexually biased people?

FDR our best modern president certainly did. To give us Social Security and other life-saving measures he constantly negotiated with, and sometimes surrendered to, really disgusting lynching-tree bigots. (Indeed, he appointed a former KKK member, Hugo Black to the Supreme court.) The GI Bill of Rights that sent my whole generation to college was co-sponsored by the most virulent segregationist and antisemite in Congress, Mississippi’s John Rankin.

That was then now is now.

Many people on our side believe what they saw in the movie “Deliverance”. Those Appalachians, who stand in for most suthinahs, are subhuman morons capable of playing a banjo and nothing else.

That’s a winning attitude, for sure, yes?

SHE SAYS NO

Let’s hear again from the sharp Russian-American journalist Masha Gessen. If she still lived in Moscow, she’d be dead at Putin’s hands like so many good reporters.

She assumes Trump-USA is more or less the same as Putin-USSR.

Gessen is gay, treacherous in homophobic Russia, and cheerleads for Pussy Riot the immensely brave punk feminist rock group that goes out of its way to offend the Kremlin as well as their fellow Russian citizens who attend church and vote the Putin ticket. For "hooliganism" Putin slaps them behind bars.

Masha Gessen opposes any form of conciliating, whether from Eliz Warren, Bernie or Obama. “Give him a chance.” “Good faith.” “I’m not going to try to make my president fail.” “We owe him an open mind.”

Can this work in practice? Steve Bannon, Trump’s Goebbels, swears he’s promoting a Roosveltian ‘New Deal’ to put people to work on infrastructure.

Here again are Gessen’s (edited) Rules for Survival to salvage your sanity and self respect under Trump, courtesy NYRB.

Rule #1: Believe the autocrat. He means what he says.

Rule #2: Do not be taken in by small signs of normality.

Rule #3: Institutions will not save you. The national press is likely to be among the first victims of Trumpism.

Rule #4: Be outraged. It is essential to maintain one’s capacity for shock. This will lead people to call you unreasonable and hysterical, and to accuse you of overreacting. It is no fun to be the only hysterical person in the room.

Rule #5: Don’t make compromises. Those who argue for cooperation will make the case, much as President Obama did in his speech. They will be willfully ignoring the corrupting touch of autocracy.

Rule #6: Remember the future. Failure to imagine the future may have lost the Democrats this election.

Resistance—stubborn, uncompromising, outraged—should be normal.

U2 – YOU TOO?

To vote against Trump in rural Texas or Alabama must make you feel like a U2, a “submarine”, the slang
term for the few scattered Jews in Hitler’s Germany who by luck and God made it through to war’s end.

What must it have been like hiding, constantly on the move, your neck forever swiveling to look behind you,
fixing your face with a smile when Nazis loudly praise the Fuhrer and you must nod “Yes, yes, how right you are.”

(In a minor key I was an illegal immigrant in the UK and lived on rooftops and on park benches.)

I’m currently obsessed learning how women and men, in other places and times, survived under the
extreme stress of popular hatred and official hunt-down. Since our Nov. 8 defeat I find myself picking through memoirs for practical tips, not for me (at the moment) but for people I know and who work and live around me.

We’re lucky in southern California to have a Jewish-Mexican mayor Eric Garcetti and a white anglo
police chief Charlie Beck prepared to tell the ICE Gestapo “not in my town”. What’s immigrant-hating
Jeff Sessions going to do, arrest and deport the half of Los Angeles that is Latino? Bet he’s thinking about it.

People around us are really scared.

The LA school board will do its best to protect vulnerable children. Of the district’s 600,000 pupils three out of four are Latino. Many are “illegal”, taken across the border as infants or born here by undocumented parents. Many signed up (or are now afraid to sign up) with Obama’s DACA, the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals policy that lets
undocumented immigrants work and study here on a temporary basis. Now they’re afraid DACA can be
repealed by a swipe of Trump’s pen or their personal data can be used against them.

Already there’s been an incident of a Trump-voting middle school teacher taking student names for deportation.

Many kids and their parents are at immediate risk of becoming U2s under attorney general Sessions and Trump’s ICE.

If you know anyone from across the border, which includes the violent hellholes of Central America, with tact so you don’t sound as if you’re from the feared “la migra”, ask how are they?

You must assume, as we do, that they are very scared, about themselves, relatives and friends. So don’t make
your inquiry sound like an interrogation.

Patriotism starts with solidarity on the door step.

ALT-RIGHT CRAP! CALL THEM WHAT THEY ARE

Built up by Trump’s “chief strategist” Steve Bannon, they’re crawling out of the swamp and sieg-heiling as if Hitler never died.

Breitbart/Drudge’s Storm Troopers just held a victory celebration in Washington DC where 200 or more white American guys screamed “Heil!” and gave the Nazi salute to their current leader, Richard Spencer.

After some pussyfooting while the media was still in the hall, they got down to it when most reporters left.

However, NYT’s Joe Goldstein stayed (as did a reporter from Atlantic). Goldstein writes, “(Spencer) railed against Jews and, with a smile, quoted Nazi propaganda in the original German. America…belonged to white people, whom he called the “children of the sun,” a race of conquerors and creators who had been marginalized but now, in the era of President-elect Donald J. Trump,
were “awakening to their own identity.”

Gruppenfuhrer Spencer cursed the mainstream media because it had criticized Trump to protect Jewish interests. Or “Perhaps we should refer to (the media) in the original German?”. His audience immediately screamed back, “Lügenpresse,” reviving a Nazi-era word that means “lying press.”

Come on news gatekeepers, drop this “alt-right” nonsense. Name these creeps what they are
so we can defend ourselves with real words against a real enemy.

Jumping the gun? Crying wolf? I think not.

As George Orwell taught us, it starts with words.

While we’re still making nice with wimpy words like “extreme conservative”, “militant rightwing”,
“white nationalist” and “fringe element”, they are organizing and empowered.

In the 1930s aristocratic, Hitler-adoring Oswald Mosley was Britain’s fascist leader jailed during
the war for treason. But the snake never dies. On release he and his black shirted thugs, whose prewar hobby was beating up East End Jews, went right back to trashing Jewish schools and brutalizing Carribean black immigrants.

In response, “43 Group”, a thousand combat-ready Jewish and non-Jewish war veterans, including former Commandoes and Marines, went after Mosley’s fascists with knuckledusters and fists. For a while they stopped British fascism in its tracks. (Among 43’s soldiers, sailors and airmen was a hairdressing apprentice named Vidal Sassoon.)

Out-punched, Mosley’s Einsatzgruppen disbanded - only to emerge from its coffin when I arrived
in England in the late 1950s. Again an antifascist fighting force was organized now called “Group 62”.
(I was a member.)

It would be destructive, counter-productive and provocative for our side to do violence on Bannon’s
new Nazis as long as they limit it to hate speech. They’d love us to.

They now have state power. We have only words and George Orwell.