This site is a journal of political, philosophical and psychological evolution, a work-in-progress by an old, impoverished and therefore presumably cast-off man. I write with a unique perspective that combines the reactions of a Manhattanite (I am a New Yorker by birth) with the perceptions of one who has learned to be at home in deep country -- this plus the recognition that today I am as likely to be hatefully denounced for my rejection of ideological conformity as I was despised in childhood for my divorced parents (and thus damned as white trash) by the Southerners among whom I involuntarily spent most of my school years. Nevertheless I remain proudly defiant, recognizing that -- in this time and place no less than in the South to which I was taken during boyhood -- survival itself is a revolutionary act.
A once-productive journalist with a 28-year employment record that began in my teens and was interrupted only by a three-year Regular Army enlistment, I became temporarily disabled during the mid-1980s and eventually -- unable to work -- had no choice but to go on welfare, this to finance the continuation of treatment that was gradually but nevertheless steadily relieving my disability. But the welfare bureaucracy -- acting under gender quotas unofficially imposed by its radical-feminist policymakers -- not only terminated my treatment but denied me any other services that might have helped me return to the workforce. Recognizing what was being done to me and why, I protested, but my protests engendered nothing but malicious retaliation: my diagnosis was arbitrarily changed to proclaim me “permanently unemployable” and in 1989 I was thus ousted forever from the workforce -- forced onto Social Security 16 years before my anticipated retirement date. With the official verdict of “permanent” unemployability dooming any future quest for work and my pension thus prematurely closed to additional earnings and frozen in its shrunken state, I was condemned to live the rest of my years in inescapable and worsening poverty.
In short I was destroyed: not by any folly of my own, but by the institutionalized antagonism of the “politically correct” bureaucrats upon whom I had been forced to rely in a moment of dire need.
And in my anguish and bitterness I rejected the definitively left-leaning values that until then had governed my life: for were these not the selfsame values by which my destroyers -- had they cared enough to think about it at all -- would have smugly rationalized my destruction?
Thus from 1988 until 2004 I voted Republican in revenge, and for a time (2001-2004) I publicly defined myself variously as a “libertarian conservative” or a “neo-conservative -- a former leftist who saw the impossibility of resolving the self-destructive contradictions of socialism” -- especially since it was one of those contradictions that flung me forever into the cesspoool of hopeless poverty merely to punish me for being born male.
Eventually though I was forced to confront the self-destructive absurdity of vote-Republican vengefulness: people like myself who vote Republican are voting not only against our own economic interest but now -- in the age of euphemistic genocide (whether in post-Katrina New Orleans or via the DemoPublican Medicare Part D Prescription Drug Lord Benefit), we are casting ballots for our own extinction as well: truly, it is as simple as that.
But I still cannot not ever again bring myself to vote enthusiastically for Democrats, whose party has not only spat in the faces of all working Americans by its support for the job-thievery and paycheck-shrinkage of outsourcing, but has never abandoned its fanatical intent to impose forcible disarmament on civilian America -- first (and as adeptly as any Republican) stealing our jobs, next denying us our only means of self-defense, pivotal issues of survival whether one lives in country or city. Nevertheless in 2006 I voted straight Democratic, even casting my ballot for Sen. Maria Cantwell, an avowed and venomously hysterical anti-gunowner fanatic. Though in Cantwell’s case it was nothing more than a gamble -- she is as pro-outsourcing and anti-labor as any corporate GOPorker including her Republican opponent -- but the worsening economic despair I see all around me left me no choice but to hope for the best even as I anticipate the worst.
Which brings me to the ugly and perhaps terminal truth of the American political experiment: the fact that the two major parties have each become class-specific: the Republicans represent only the plutocracy -- the fat-cats growing ever more wealthy by misering out ever-dwindling wages -- even as the Democrats represent only the bourgeoisie -- a fancy name for yuppies who not only desperately want to be plutocrats (and therefore vote to support outsourcing) but lack the private armies that protect the rich and are thus so terrified of working folk with guns, they want to abolish the very right that brought our nation into being. Hence both parties represent only the suits and bosses -- the people Karl Marx long ago correctly identified as “the ruling class” -- just as neither party represents those of us who have to sell our labor to survive: the vast majority of the U.S. population. Thus too we working-class folk -- all of us dependent on wages or salaries or pensions or unemployment compensation and yes even welfare -- are flung into political homelessness: deliberately reduced to the very same powerlessness that, in its most genocidal form, abandons men, women and children to huddle under bridges and banishes them to solitary deaths in the garbage-littered doorways of derelict buildings.
It is to protest this reality -- and in the process perhaps find some genuine alternatives -- that I have resurrected this blog after the long hiatus that began on 25 June 2005.
Because I have other obligations, I cannot promise I will post to this space more than once each week, and occasionally I may not even be able to comply with that self-imposed schedule, though I will surely try. Occasionally too I will also write full-length e-columns, pieces akin to my long-ago editorial-page efforts, essays that will discuss various topics of the day, and perhaps (as with my 2002 disclosures of Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge’s anti-Second Amendment bias and how it contradicted President Bush’s claim to be protective of the right to keep and bear arms) add whatever new information I may have found the time to ferret out.
Though my interests are primarily political, they range far beyond politics and the related topics of sociology and history and include religion, spirituality, folklore, mythology, archaeology, geology, astronomy and science in general, and this site will reflect not only that same diversity of interest, but my underlying conviction that politics is ultimately the distillate of everything in life. Sometimes I will also occasionally venture into the realm of autobiography -- perhaps even to the point of sharing some of my poetry or what little remains of my photography, the bulk of which was destroyed in the same 1983 fire that wiped out a book project begun in my 19th year, a labor that spanned 24 years (mostly on research and analysis and related photography accomplished despite the competing demands of full-time editorial jobs) -- an endeavor that united all the diverse threads of my life (and was thus really the summation of my life itself) -- that is, until hostile fate turned it all to ash: a description that only hints at the fire’s huge material and psychological devastation.
These days -- as I did before the fire and indeed until the extended and wrenching shock of victimization by the welfare bureaucracy -- I again consider myself a leftist. But now I am also increasingly an eco-socialist, admittedly influenced by Marx and the historical truth of class-struggle: indeed its undeniable validity has opened my eyes as they have never been opened before. Hence I am unwavering in my determination to transcend the environmental, historical (and thus ultimately practical) dead-ends that, though unquestionably real, nevertheless represent problems to be solved rather than the allegedly impenetrable obstacles so used to belittle socialists and discredit socialism.
However in truth I still do not fit any universe of doctrinaire labels. My politics are like this journal: a work in progress. As much as I value theory and analysis, I distrust dogma (as too often born of ulterior motives), and I am profoundly skeptical of ideological exclusiveness (which all too often is but another opiate -- especially of yuppie pseudo-radicals). On many issues, I am a live-and-let-live libertarian: I do not believe government has any business reaching into bedroom or gun-safe. Probably the standard I most often apply is the practical one of “does it work,” modified by insistence that it must be ethical, in ecological compliance with the mandates of Earth Household, and above all else, faithful to the Bill of Rights -- especially the First, Second, Fourth and Fifth amendments.
Indeed the only oath I ever took in all my 66 years was to defend the United States Constitution “against all enemies foreign and domestic” -- and I do not believe I am relieved of its obligation merely because I am too old and too physically enfeebled to serve in the armed forces: the fact of the matter is that my commitment to the Constitution and its principles is as much as an affair of the heart as of the mind. Thus just as I belong to the American Civil Liberties Union, I also belong to the National Rifle Association. Alas, such seeming paradoxes are not always understood -- not even when they are explained as equal manifestations of an overriding commitment to liberty.
Because ours is a time that demands a genuinely cultoid degree of conformity -- an expression of the same gnawing insecurity that makes the color of a food label so much more important than the flavor of the content it describes -- one of the consequences of my political independence is the almost-laughable paradox that some of my detractors denounce me as a “fascist” even as others belittle me as a “flaming red.”
These days the main reason I am labeled “fascist” is because -- in profound disagreement with the tyrannical majoritarian pacifism of our nation’s self-proclaimed Left -- I believe the war against terrorist Islam is a war for the very survival of our civilization and should be pursued exactly as Islam pursues it -- without any mercy whatsoever. New York City is my birthplace, was my home for the first three years of my life, and was my home again during the second half of the 1960s and the middle four years of the 1980s. Hence like other New Yorkers I take 9/11 very personally.
Also unlike much of the nation’s self-proclaimed Left, I know enough history to recognize that the penchant for terrorism is endemic to Islam itself, which has been at war with the civilizations of the Occident and the Orient for nearly 1400 years -- ever since Mohammad himself established conquest by jihad as a primary expression of his creed, raising an army that in 629AD sacked Mecca, the city of his birth: a desert crossroads-town where some accounts say Mohammad himself then ordered all the non-Moslem Meccan males slain and all the non-Moslem females raped and sold into slavery -- vengeance for the fact a few skeptical Meccans had previously jeered Mohammad as a fool and an imposter.
Contrast Mohammad’s blood-drenched return to Mecca with Jesus’ entrance into Jerusalem on what Christians now celebrate as Palm Sunday: “If you in your turn had only understood on this day the message of peace” (Luke 19:42). Christian or not, compare the two events and you will understand the ultimate difference between the two religions. While I am no fan of Christianity either -- as with Abrahamic religion in general, Christianity’s notions of “god’s chosen people” and “god’s revealed truths” facilitated unspeakable atrocities -- its contradictory ethos of human kindness has since become its majority view: "I tell you solemnly, in so far as you did this to one of the least of these...you did it to me" (Matthew 25:40). Islam, meanwhile, has remained singularly violent -- never mind that its most recent epoch of violence was indirectly financed by the U.S. itself: the decision, in the early 1950s, to fund the revitalization of Islamic fundamentalism as an antidote to the then-growing popularity of Marxism in the Middle East.
But no matter how vicious our nation’s socioeconomic practices nor how profoundly disaffected I am by its present-day socioeconomic savagery -- I cannot passively accept (much less implicitly countenance) a notoriously murderous attack on the helplessly vulnerable civilian population of my own City: truly another date that, as Franklin Delano Roosevelt said of 7 December 194l and the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, “will live in infamy.” If that makes me a “fascist” in some people’s eyes, so be it.
Nevertheless it was for this very reason -- my cold and unrelenting fury in the wake of 9/11 -- I was so readily susceptible to the Bush Regime’s enormous lies about Iraq: a war I now recognize was not only a dreadful (and dreadfully murderous) mistake, but a wholly inexplicable strategic sleight-of-hand that has not only trapped the U.S. military in the gory abyss of another Vietnam-like meat-grinder but has allowed the alleged perpetrators of the 9/11 attack to escape unscathed and slaughtered uncounted Iraqi civilians in the process -- thereby ensuring the lingering hatred of an ancient people already noted for their long cultural memory. Whether that unprecedented debacle is simply the Bush Regime’s atrocious incompetence or the fulfillment of some dread clandestine purpose -- indeed whether the attackers of 9/11 were granted undefended skies by accident or precisely to create the tyrannical potential of a modern Reichstag Fire -- I surely cannot say. Though suspicions once aroused -- and further supported by the regime’s record of deadly ruthlessness, whether in post-Katrina New Orleans or via the Medicare Prescription Drug Lord Benefit -- cannot easily be laid to rest.
Which brings me to the reason I have been branded a “flaming red,” both in the long-ago past and now again today.
I believe very fervently that the ultimate measurement of our society is not executive pay or the Gross Domestic Product but how well we care for our own -- especially how well we care for those who for whatever reason cannot adequately care for themselves. My belief in this principle never diminished even during the years I vengefully labeled myself conservative, but it has since been far more heavily underscored by the fact the urban area in which I now live is literally awash with homeless people: not merely Skid Road derelicts, but folks who formerly lived middle-class lives, not a few of them people who (often thanks to the outsourcing begun by the Clinton Administration) work for wages now so low they live in their automobiles because they cannot afford even subsidized rents.
Witnessing the struggles of these victims of capitalism -- witnessing too the undeniable fact of their increasing number -- I could not even at the height of my conservative self-delusion escape recognizing that something had gone dreadfully wrong with our economy. Indeed I had never seen its like: I was a child during World War II, when our nation yet included the ragged peoples of countless Great-Depression Hoovervilles, and even in the early 1950s, it was an everyday matter to witness families so desperately impoverished they had to gather coal along the railroad tracks -- coal randomly spilled by coal trains, coal these folk collected lump by lump to cook their meager meals and heat the chronically drafty rental-shacks in which they dwelt. But this present-day epidemic of homelessness and beggary far exceeds anything I saw during the 1940s and 1950s in the Deep South and in West Virginia or East Tennessee. And finally, witnessing it daily during the past two years -- confronting also the overwhelming fear that in an ancient, stooped and filthy man who inhabits a nearby park I am but glimpsing my own inescapable fate -- I at last came home to the only positive legacy of a father whose hatred had not only scarred my childhood but, until his death, harried me through adulthood too. And though his was a wholly unintentional bequest, it was a priceless heirloom nonetheless -- the principles of Marxism, above all else the historical truth of class-struggle.
For it is class-struggle that explains -- as nothing else ever written -- not only the huge increase in homelessness I see daily, but all the outsourcing, pension-looting, downsizing and safety-net destruction; all the theft of jobs and all the methodical concentration of wealth; all the assaults on Constitutional rights and all the dumbing-down of the electorate inflicted by public education and corporate mass-media -- every bit of it explained by the historical truth of class-struggle as not only the tyrannosauric greed of capitalism now again tragically unleashed by the collapse of its former chief opponent, but capitalism’s response to the impending double-apocalypse of petroleum exhaustion and environmental collapse: a New Dark Age in which -- if capitalism has its way -- there will be but two classes: the robber-barons safe behind their castle walls and everyone else condemned to slavery. Or as Marx put it 158 years ago, the ruling class and the working class -- with all of the latter enslaved. If such recognition makes me a “red,” I wear the armband proudly.
If we are to save ourselves from the post-apocalyptic world that is clearly taking shape -- corporate feudalism, quite probably supported, maintained and thought-policed by the implicitly fascist theocracies of Abrahamic religion (fundamentalist Christianity in the Americas; fundamentalist Islam in Africa, large parts of Asia and perhaps even Europe too; Israel finally betrayed and abandoned) -- I believe our salvation will come almost entirely from the reinvigoration of labor: a rejuvenation that may already be underway, as evidenced not only by the increasing workplace activism of U.S. unions, but by labor’s emerging leadership in the global peace and ecology movements.
Labor’s re-awakening could also at long last provide the U.S. electorate with its desperately needed alternative to the Republicans and the Democrats, who on matters of socioeconomic policy are now effectively merged into the board-room and personnel-office wings of the same Plutocratic Privilege Party, the Republican board-room behaving with its customary murderous greed and the Democratic personnel office -- ever mindful that “human capital” is an old ante-bellum synonym for “slaves” -- dutifully spouting Orwellian euphemisms to try to convince us we are being cared for when in fact we are being subjugated and even slain.
I am of course eternally suspicious of the Democratic Party, though never more so than because of its huge entanglement with the welfare establishment, of which Hillary Clinton herself is the chief personification. This is because the welfare establishment -- here clearly distinguished from rank-and-file social-service workers (who are every bit as exploited as the rest of us) -- has opportunistically transformed itself from one of capitalism’s harshest critics to one of its most unyielding supporters. It demonstrates its support precisely by its refusal to acknowledge the truth of class struggle: as long as poverty can be blamed entirely on the individual and never acknowledged as the logical consequence of the health-stealing, soul-destroying savagery of the system in which the individual is entrapped, capitalism remains sacrosanct -- safe as the parasitic jobs of the welfare policy-makers who protect it. So there will be no succor here -- not as there was during the New Deal, not even as there was in Michael Harrington’s day. The truth is the welfare apparatus has been co-opted into one of the corporate world’s most infinitely reliable sources of non-union labor -- labor trapped forever in the defacto slavery of minimum wage -- and that arrangement alone (though merely one of many such devil‘s bargains) has compromised the Democratic Party beyond any possibility of recovery. Thus I would no more trust the Democrats to solve our economic crisis than I would entrust the solution to Enron’s top management.
Nor do I think it is unfair to single out the welfare establishment. While it is true this is the bureaucracy that destroyed my life -- an atrocity for which I freely admit I bear it a lifelong grudge -- it is also true that the welfare establishment embodies the principle of class struggle more vividly than any other institution in the entire capitalist system. Thus too does class struggle explain what was done to me and precisely whose purposes it served: a higher-paid male was prematurely but permanently expelled from the workforce, which made room for a lower-paid female, thereby boosting profits by helping forcibly reduce wages in general -- a cause-and-effect relationship that, by the way, is conclusively proven by the federal government‘s own labor statistics. The forbidden truth of class-struggle brings these economic realities into sharp focus -- precisely the reason it is tabooed.
In any case the foregoing should suffice to give you a taste of what is to come. I hope -- particularly after the extensive update I posted here today (21 December 2006) -- this site will soon become important enough to you that you will visit it regularly. I encourage your comments, and I am interested not only in news tips but in any suggestions you might have for expanded coverage. I also encourage your contributions via the PayPal link below. Thank you for your response.
Please note that this site is again under construction and may therefore be subject to sudden outages, electro-glitches, gremlin eruptions, e-Puckishness, e-Trickster manifestations of Raven and his southwestern counterpart Coyote and all other such expressions of Murphy’s Law. But I have consulted with a web-Druid in the hope of avoiding as many of these problems as possible, and I therefore beg your patience as I update autobiographical material and make other vital changes.
Posted by Loren at September 27, 2004 04:01 AM