Armed & Educated

It’s Gone Too Far: A Rant

dsputhoff — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 04:39:04 +0000

Afghanistan and Iraq did not cause people to pause enough. After the 1990s and the dissociative intervention of the Clinton years, after the fall of the Soviet Union, after the rag-tag effort to shut down the WTO in Seattle in 1999, after 9/11, people just finally decided it wasn’t so bad that corporations owned everything. People just finally believed that their government was the only thing keeping us safe, that it had our best interests, and the interests of global democracy and trade at heart. Panama and Chile and Nicaragua and Cuba and – Haiti – were years ago. What mattered were the ter’rists. What mattered was the new shopping mall opening where orange groves used to be. Where wetland used to be. Some of us really believed that Muslim Arabs were just “jealous of our freedom,” jealous of our Nikes and 24-hour McDonalds and this would be enough for them to want to cause us harm – so steeped were we at interpreting the world from a consumer standpoint that we reduced our understanding of foreign policy to a soccer mom’s Black Friday mindset. We were, in essence, blinded by the propaganda: the $1 trillion corporations were spending annually to brainwash us – $1 trillion in cash that could not have been theirs without our labor. While the government on behalf of business interests dismantled our unions and our mass transit and our public schools and libraries, we as a working class set our heads down and went to sleep.

So even when people had the knee-jerk reflex left of them to stand up against Bush’s second war, it wasn’t enough; the Cowboy didn’t even blink. And the people didn’t have the foresight to fortify the struggle. It fizzled out, creating a negative feedback loop, “proving” that “people don’t want to struggle.” In a sense, that’s true. Of all the people I speak to about politics, the spirit behind their words is why bother.

Yes; why bother? Why bother when Haiti looks like Iraq looks like Afghanistan might someday look like Yemen might someday look like Somalia might someday look like Detroit? Why bother when our own country has become SUCH a wasteland of the unemployed that illegal immigrants, virtually nothing more than at-will corporate slaves, decide to move BACK to Mexico to try their chances there? Ask yourself, when was the last time you went to a union meeting? When was the last time you stood out with people picketing for higher wages?

When was the last time your individual effort to fix your problems – problems with work, with bills, with acquiring goods – when was the last time, “I have problems of my own” actually fucking fixed that problem? Remember the ole American addage, “United We Stand, Divided We Fall”? Well, the mindset has divided us as much as humanly possible by this point. It’s divided us all the way down into post-modern drivel, a toddler version of Truth that yells and kicks and screams that nobody can understand anybody, least of all me understand you. It hearkens the hollow liberal value of “diversity,” mindlessly celebrated everywhere, which of itself means virtually nothing, has no intrinsic utility. Where diversity is important is in collaboration. Where individual truths are cherished is when using them to find and create consensus. The flower of your unique and special problems are an outgrowth of a root, of capitalism, and you find if you keep your ears and your eyes open that everyone’s plant is the same.

Last night, the Supreme Court decided 5-4 to essentially end restrictions on corporate donations. On the ground of the First Amendment. On the presumption that corporations are people. Not even liberal capitalist Obama had anything good to say about it

So I suggest people start thinking about what’s the what. Some of you can’t get jobs. Why do you think we can’t get jobs? Because there isn’t enough work to be done in the world – or because corporations are set on making profit? There is plenty of work to be done and it won’t get done until we challenge corporate domination of our economy, from the retail stores through the trucking and shipping right down to the factories. It may take several elections for this Supreme Court case to unfold its first stage of development. This is an election year; I don’t know yet what we can expect to see, but the mid-term elections are probably going to be dominated by populist Republican rhetoric. Anti-immigrant, patriotic, pro-business, anti-regulation, privatizing, anti-Federal Reserve, flat taxers.

Without a working class alternative to the Democrats and Republicans, there is nowhere to take your dissatisfaction. Enough people are confused that the Republicans could conceivably take control of parts of the government again.

Whatever the case, the corporate heyday of the last twenty years, aka “the Age of America” and “the end of history,” are total bunk. If we don’t take action, alternative, independent action, we are only going to keep losing. We will be in debt for the rest of our lives, paying for everything. Even the small comforts and refuges of life as we know it will be in peril.

So the way I see it, y’all can clamp your hands over your eyes and just keep screaming “no no no” or you can get together with the people around you and start planning on how to fight back. Naturally I think the best way is with Socialist Alternative, so if you ever want to know more about that, hell, you know where to find me.

01/23/2010

A Reading Liste

dsputhoff — Thu, 31 Dec 2009 15:40:31 +0000

Here is a list of worthwhile books I read (or re-read) in 2009 that I think are worth reading and considering together.

Fiction
- The Name of the Rose, Umberto Eco
- Baudolino, Umberto Eco
- A Canticle for Leibowitz, Walter M. Miller, Jr.
- The Dharma Bums, Jack Kerouac
While I have not yet read Lord of Light by Roger Zelazny, I anticipate it also fitting on this list. [edit: nope. Could not engage this book; did not finish it. Neee~ext!]

Political
- Marx’s Ecology, John Bellamy Foster
- History of the Russian Revolution, Leon Trotsky
- Teamster Rebellion, Farrell Dobbs
- A People’s History of the United States, Howard Zinn

These two lists can be inclusive or exclusive as you please. I like to think that the fiction illustrates (Baudolino) or deviates (Leibowitz) from the theory of dialectical materialism in interesting and instructive ways.

Good luck in the New Year.

untitled

dsputhoff — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 13:34:12 +0000

It’s too bad these skyscraper
glass beams frames light lunchtime
cubicles countless, computers,
myriad particulars detailed at the stars
orbit, illumination
of advertisements, false but hot
with the promise of life

breed these same young mortals
male female other
dusty heads buzzed flower hymen
so thin
lips gums spittle teeth
that the beads poking
against clothes remind you of bones,
remind you of you still living.

They Sure Have a Way With Your World

dsputhoff — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 16:11:21 +0000

If there’s class warfare we are losing.
We have no class, the TV tells me,
chewing, elbows halfway in my plates.
The TV tells me it’s a snow day,
a whiteout, a win
for freedom via the electronic vote.
It’s a black day indeed for Loui-
siana, where Harlem meets Compton
down South. It’s not Wall Street gone
south or bad apples sour. On bailout
take two we feel bitter in the morning.
Critical, sure, but cringing. It still smarts -
like dad’s belt. What smart-mouth
gets for getting between the master
of the house and momma terra.
The classy classless confused, caught
in the middle, all elbows and assholes
waiting for a turn
to swing that nice fine whip.

two “Twin Cities” haiku

dsputhoff — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 23:55:33 +0000

Pure autumn clear crisp
parades austere peace canyon
shimmering snipers

—–

Autumn leaves dead
heaped at the barricade
foreclosed Rosemary’s house

Why I Will Not Teach Your Child

dsputhoff — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 18:31:36 +0000

I cannot instruct the young.
Despite my hours of patiently listening
to my own thoughts as I watch the walls age,
despite the careful touch I lend my friends
as they paint their own limitations red
with the blood of their fingers, I fear
I do not have the patience
for your children. They are loud
and restless, ceaselessly trembling like a litter of puppies
suckled on sugar and trained
with epileptic lights,
and you, I have no clue
what kind of rotten job you’ve done
in raising them
but
this is not the reason for my fear.
In that tangle of thoughts and hormones
lies a confusion about the tangle greater yet:
the world. And they’ve been misled
already by instructors more insidious than I
not to believe or trust or even know
a goddamn thing. And even if they happen to find
one thing to hold more often than not it is
a poison but

I am not afraid, either, of demon tutors or chalkboards
or the opiates kids gobble like Halloween treats.
With my arms crossed over a saturnine sigh
the only true refute rings and echoes leadenly.
Because I would have the truth out at last:
it is in all the secret books and speakers
half-hidden, buried in public vaults, dammed up
behind a circus of distractions and I
would give their bright and salivating eyes
this advice:

To steal. Steal
everything you can get your hands upon,
every book and movie
anyone dares dismiss:
the making of a criminal knowing,
an outlaw canon, is the highest passion
you can encourage in yourself.

So because you’ve so recklessly amused them
and because you will make them hate
every pulsing light and whizz-bang sound someday,
patiently I will let them teach themselves
to break you.

It’s funnier that way.

Walking X

dsputhoff — Tue, 26 May 2009 04:22:16 +0000

Maybe now I’m drinking,
and pretending
the waitress
is flirting
with me

but six hours ago, man,
I was pacing Hennepin
Avenue north to south,
freezing my fingers off
and ruling the world with
my stride.

Walking IX

dsputhoff — Sun, 24 May 2009 19:23:41 +0000

The concrete shows right through
the bad ice.
It is smooth words from winter’s
flattering icicle jaws.
It is the lust for curved
surfaces, the compulsion
to worry at it with your feet
like a stress-stone
(though you know its caress
is gravity’s laugh,
the gutter’s catcall).
If only the good ice
which is all around you
was all before you, if only
the bad ice wasn’t
a path of shimmering pearl.
It spreads out like a dais
from the snow-crusted sidewalks
into the gritty streets
promenading our majestic little bodies
into traffic.

Walking VIII

dsputhoff — Thu, 21 May 2009 14:05:24 +0000

Walking VIII

dsputhoff — Tue, 19 May 2009 02:43:49 +0000

A Response to Henry Moore’s Warrior With Shield

I enter the room and there you sit
on your unthronely block
squinting through a scar.

You do not flinch as I walk around you to examine your stumps and bronze bruises.

Who abandoned you here,
friend, who are you
still raising your misshapen
disk

to defend?