1) Immigration
It's been pretty effectively overshadowed by yesterday's ACA ruling, but a few days previous, the Supreme Court upheld Arizona's demagogic immigration law, that effectively gave police the power to harass anyone walking on the street if they happen to look, let's be frank, "un-American". What's so fucking unbelievable to me is that a party claiming to reduce the size and power of government and champion individual liberties would be so wholeheartedly behind gutting the rights of a individual to walk unharassed in public space...so long as that individual's not white. It's disgusting. Not to mention unbelievably hypocritical, given that A) it's a trope, but we all hate immigrants once WE got here, and B) America is integrally responsible, from outright stealing Mexican land to ratcheting up the price and violence of an illegal drug was through creating a black market to C) crippling industry via NAFTA.
I really, really think America is going to need to have a racial reckoning at some point, really look in the mirror and say, yes: we commited atrocities, and, between chattel slavery, forced relocation, and "battles" against civilian Native American villages, probably killed at least as many civilians as any genocidier, though perhaps over a great period of time. I'm not advocating some kind of huge national penance, but just a reconciliation, a sober recognition of what power and racial bigotry can do when they meld together.
2) "Occupation": Semiotics and Politics
When I came across this article, one of many illustrating in garish, fluorescent colors the banal, everyday oppression perpetuated by the Israeli occupation of Gaza and the West Bank, it struck me how loaded a word "Occupy" must have been, from the Palestinian perspective, when it was taken up as a rallying cry. It really does signify two, if not opposite, then definitely distinct poles: space being controlled by citizenry vs. space being controlled by enforcers of an effectively martial law.
On the off chance some of you aren't familiar with the unbelievably far-right policies currently implemented by Netanyahu's Likud government, and, more to the point, because this article makes me angry, I'd like to share a few quotes, and this fantastic picture, with you. (Though I strongly, strongly encourage you to read the whole thing)
In 1949, shortly after Israel’s War of Independence, S. Yizhar—the doyen of modern Hebrew prose writers—published a story that became an instant classic. “Khirbet Khizeh” is a fictionalized account of the destruction of a Palestinian village and the expulsion of all its inhabitants by Israeli soldiers in the course of the war. The narrator, a soldier in the unit that carries out the order, is sickened by what is being done to the innocent villagers....
Sixty-three years have passed since Yizhar wrote “Khirbet Khizeh.” I wish I could say that what he described was an ugly exception and that such actions don’t happen any more. It is not, and they do. This week I find myself in Susya, in the South Hebron hills, near the southern corner of the West Bank. Like their counterparts in many other Palestinian villages, Susya‘s approximately 300 inhabitants are impoverished, badly scarred, terrified, and defenseless. The week before last the officers of the Civil Administration, that is, the Israeli occupation authority, turned up with new demolition orders in their hands; these orders apply to nearly all the standing structures in the village—mostly tents, ramshackle huts, sheep-pens, latrines, and the wind-and-sun-powered turbine that Israeli activists put up some three years back to generate electricity on this stony, thirsty hilltop in the desert. If the orders are carried out—this could happen at any moment—then it means the nearly complete destruction of an entire village and the violent expulsion of its people...
Earlier this year, in February, a settlers’ NGO called “Regavim” (literally “clods of soil”—the name aptly represents the romantic fantasy of belonging that settlers typically cultivate), petitioned the Israeli Supreme Court, demanding that demolition orders issued years ago by the Civil Administration for Palestinian Susya be carried out immediately. The petitioners, many of whom live on stolen land, had the temerity to refer to Palestinian Susya, the last remnant of the ancient village, as an “illegal outpost.”...
[Describing a demonstration of Palestinian citizens against the demolition of their homes]
Of course, the army was waiting for us, and the soldiers, too, lost no time in doing what soldiers do. There were stun grenades, which can make you deaf for a few days if they go off close to you, and tear gas, and the usual threats and shouts and orders barked at us by senior officers. ...As in other Palestinian villages I’ve seen in this mode of non-violent protest, at Susya the women had a leading part, fearlessly engaging the soldiers, taunting them, dancing and singing before them, insouciant. Alongside these women was a troupe of five brightly costumed clowns, no less daring and inventive. Imagine a soldier, laden down with helmet and cartridges and grenades and boots and all the other foolish bits of metal and plastic, pouring sweat in the midday sun. What, exactly, is this soldier to do when a clown with a bright red nose, cackling and giggling, sticks a peacock’s feather down the muzzle of his sub-machine gun and then proceeds to tickle his nose?Whatever you think of Israel's history, this everyday grinding down of a powerful military machine on a people whose lives, in my opinion, they want to make so miserable that they will give up agitating for freedom (a freedom which, given the indefensible antics of settlers in slowly and illegally eroding Palestinian land, becomes more ephemeral by the day), is tragic, morally decrepit, and outright sad. As this article references, the Jewish community has moved from a position of being on the forefront of social change and social justice to - at least among those who support the occupation - being the agents of injustice. I recognize the precursers of Israel's right-wing militant policies, and I recognize they are born of fear. But this occupation helps nothing. As far as I (and Peter Beinart, who you should read) can tell, any self-conception of Israel as a democratic state is undermined and made to strain credulity when one sees and reads of the policies in the Occupied Territories. The most apt summation I can give is that dehumanizing also dehumanizes the perpetrator, and that if Israel is to maintain any shred of moral high ground, not to say any hope of security, this. occupation. must. end. Gathering more and more weapons and becoming more and more militarized, retreating behind Jabotinsky's proverbial "Iron Wall" is only going to erode democracy within that wall.
3) Corporatism in Insurance
Although I'm cautiously pleased at the healthcare ruling, I nonetheless am frustrated that we're still mired down in a corporate-driven insurance market, where we pay middlemen obscene amounts of money to produce paperwork, try at every turn to deny us coverage, and often make us pay anyway. From my point of view, having a corporate middleman facilitating insurance is completely useless: they themselves are responsible for no innovation or technical development (as they aren't actually practicing medicine) and they very infrequently actually face the kind of competition that gives the buyer any kind of market power. Their only benefit is the efficiency boost given by economies of scale, but that could be just as easily achieved via a public option - my ideal healthcare paradigm. Throw out the insurance vampires, who we're feeding money for essentially no unique or innovative service, and give people a choice that empowers rather than disempowers them.
4) Defense vs. Healthcare
What always strikes me as absurd is that we think it perfectly within the government's purview to spend a mind-blowing amount of money, and perform a troubling amount of governmental power consolidation, in order to build a military, given the relatively small number of deaths violent conflict is responsible for (drug wars not included) in our society. Whereas disease, and the PREVENTATIVE HEALTHCARE that is the easiest way to ward it off, and which our system discourages people form using, kills far, far more Americans, but somehow, saving people's lives THAT way is a horrendous evil breach of liberty.
As an aside, it's amuses me that the right is so adamant about their "right to bear arms" and racheting up defense to the point where the ostensible purpose of those arms (defense against a potentially tyrannical government) is utterly laughable. If the U.S. gov't wanted to control its own people, it easily could. Even if you had all the machine guns in the world, if the military wanted to be tyrannical, it could, because we feed it so much power. Your guns will be peastickers. This is why, in my opinion, it is so, so vital to keep armies under CITIZEN control, rather than letting control slip to Blackwater types, and hand over control of what are essentially private armies to shareholders and contractors.Who has the military has the country, plain and simple, and allowing clearance and military technology to be used by private entities is, in my view, a sickening step closer to corporations having armies of their own, corporations that have no concern for individual liberties, and see individuals only as labor, or as consumers. America's great innovation was to place the military under accountable civilian rule: don't let that slip away.
5) Corporatism in School Lunches
I've been watching Jamie Oliver's Food Revolution, of late, and it's been making me progressively angrier over the way children are being nutritionally abused in our schools - served "pizza as a vegetable," given all kinds of cheap processed foods, to the utter detriment of their future health, for no reason I can see beyond lining the pockets of big-budget food companies, who would be hurt by a shift to more natural, unprocessed, cooked-not-reheated food. Don't believe me? Look at who lobbied for that nauseating "pizza" ruling. The fact that the American political system is SO broken that even the lives, future diseases, future obesity, future shortened lives of our children can't induce it to prioritize health over corporate profits is DESPICABLE, is not a joke, and is a trend that absolutely must be reversed.
6) Future systems: Corporate vs. National?
All of this has seemed to reach an eventual theme: the role of corporate power vs. national power, especially when the former gains military control and can reduce its own competition to become monopolistic. It makes me wonder what direction we're going in. Will we still have nation-states in 100 years? Or will that innovation have been usurped by corporate states, where power, money, and military, the essential components of control, have been passed over to an exorbitantly wealthy corporate class, where people self-identify via brand loyalty and, a la Brave New World, are controlled not by outright oppression but by consumerism. I know I come off sounding a bit apocalyptic and "the sky is falling!" but I'm genuinely concerned that multinational corporations are increasingly becoming more and more powerful, and, while that may be a boon for their shareholders and for innovation, are we willing to potentially sacrifice liberty to buy that innovation?
Hopefully tomorrow/when I post next, I'll be more upbeat.
Just keep swimming,
Cody
Quote of the Day, pulled fortuitously from Tumblr: "But I don't want comfort. I want poetry. I want danger. I want freedom. I want goodness. I want sin" - Aldous Huxley, Brave New World
Second Quote of the Day: "Society grows great when old men plant trees whose shade they know they will never sit in" - unattributed Greek proverb
Cody!!!! Tried to comment on your blog the other day. Did it make it? Anyway, you should look into the LEAP program. We talked about the word "occupy" quite a lot yesterday.
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