Those Forgotten

Exit Through the Gift Shop was discussed, briefly, here in Tidbits.  This movie presents an arrogant summary of "street artists": wealthy, white, multilingual rebels who travel about the cities in the world that matter (Paris, London, Los Angeles, and New York), gluing interesting pieces of pre-made art to public venues.  These heroic, authority-defying rebels are occasionally accosted by the police for defacing property, and later make a movie about their exploits, in which they describe themselves as the forerunners of a new kind of art: street art.

The prodigious stupidity and incalculable arrogance of that statement stands contrary to human history, but in a narrow sense, it represents wealthy, hipster douchebag whites appropriating African American hip hop culture. "Street art" has always been there, but the modern rebellious media take on it which filth heaps like Banksy are trying to steal is of the African American gangster variety.  Here's the real story:

1) Americans have slavery.  It sucks.  Black Americans suffer.

2) Americans have Jim Crow.  Americans have the KKK.  It sucks.  Black Americans suffer.

3) Americans have the Civil Rights movement.  It begins to address more meaningful issues.  A very convenient, completely random, absolutely not sponsored by security services white crazy person shoots, completely on his own, MLK.  Civil Rights movement stalls, its figurehead cut off.

4) American blacks are moved into ghettos.  To finish off the Civil Rights, anti-imperialist echoes still lingering after the assassination of MLK, security services work with domestic racketeering organizations to traffic drugs through American ghettos, turning many African American neighborhoods into war zones, killing off young blacks, and validating the demonization of American blacks, because it was "their choice" to "deal drugs and live badly" even after they were free, and had a civil rights movement (the "Iran-Contra scandal").

The black gangster culture sprang, in part, out of these drug wars: blacks attempted to control territory, protect communities against white gangs, Hispanic gangs, Asian gangs, other black gangs, etc., and to retain more of the profits from the trafficking, winnowing down the percentages that the security services and their South American cronies were able to skim.  A form of "street art" flourished, whereby gangsters would demonstrate national independence by marking territory, portraying their own histories and self-interpretations, and warning away intruders.  A culture movement intermixing hip hop music, graffiti, break-dancing, and low-riding caught some of the general interest.

Many American cities, rail cars, and other venues had, have, and will have, stunning murals and other incredible pieces of visual art done in the context of this culture.

However, opportunistic shits like Banksy soon moved in to buy out the urban blacks and claim the mantel of rebellion and originality for themselves.  After all, who has more claim to be a swag rebel in this world than white British people?  So, you painted pictures.  Good.  But you didn't start a radical new form of art.  African Americans, on fear of death, torture, imprisonment, utter social scorn, and the blind eye of the entire world, struggled to mark territory, and express beauty and rebellion, in between set tripping or deals big and small.  They worked with what they had, where they were.  They did not travel the world, all expenses paid, filming themselves executing creative vandalism in major industrial capitals.  They bled on the pavement, used cheap spray paint, and did their art on the spot.  They did not piece together careful spray plates at the neighborhood Kinko's, then enlist a team of buddies to drive around in a film-crew van and glue-gun their pre-made art to buildings.

Just another one forgotten.  It makes you think: hundreds of years from now, historians--and the entire culture, perhaps--will look back on late 20th century, early 21st century society, and conclude, "Banksy, and white Englishmen like him, spawned a style of urban art that was unparalleled in their time.  Here are some of their photocopied masterpieces."

While the thousands upon thousands of blacks, and the real, amazing urban work they did on buildings long demolished, will be forgotten into the mysts of time.

If a tree falls in the forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?

What, then, of Leonardo, or Michelangelo, or Raphael, or the greatest of the great artists in the past?  The ones who sold out their entire craft to the nobles in order to paint rich heirs, banal religious recreations, and token Greco-Roman scenes, so that all human children, until the end of time, could ascribe artistic greatness to them?  Is it possible the same thing happened, there?  That the really good, true, pure, original stuff was done, but will never be known, because the lords' PR guys were making movies (err, books) about the fervently religious dross getting churned out by the big names?

As you stumble through this world, think, at least, on this possibility, and look somewhere other than under the patronage of the noble houses of the day, if you search for something with real spirit and quality.  History is written by the victors, goes the old saw, but it is not always the victors of "wars" who write it, but the victors of thought and creation, be they right or wrong, good or true.

From a 2349 mindzine article from Twisted: Modern Takes on High Art and Culture: "In his latest work, Greenburg joins such literary giants as Rowling and Shakespeare to create a compelling tale of..."

In closing: Banksy, please take your "independent film" award to 1980s Compton, find the nearest six gangbangers, and tell them how you created street art and are all up in their hood with your photocopied cutouts.

Tidbits

Instruction by DVD

As the great Ms. Ravitch reports, at the New Living World School in Louisiana, Louisiana will soon be subsidizing, to the tune of $8-10K/student, religious K-12 instruction for young LAers, at a price you can't back away from even if you're not religious.  Monotheistic westernized religious schools, crazy, yes.  For the purposes of the sort-of radical, what's interesting about this particular privatization is the predictive model it offers of the future envisioned by Warren Buffet, Bill Gates, and the rest of the philanthropists currently buying out public education through tax-deductible charitable foundations:

Instruction in the school is offered for 20-30 minutes each class on DVD, while ”the classroom teacher is on hand to manage the class, review homework, answer questions and give assignments.” This is Governor Bobby Jindal’s plan to reform education, remember?  

Stuff White People Like: Art

No one more needs a visit from your choice of set for the 1992 Crips than the sniveling, uber-white, wealthy, powerful, self-glorifying, movement-stealing, faux-rebellious "street artists" of Exit Through The Gift Shop.

Each Office Is Independently Owned and Operated

(Updated below)


Baseline Reading

   You walk into a room where a man sits at a table, stirring his porridge furiously, not yet eating it.  A checkered tablecloth of white and red covers his small, four-legged breakfast table, its hems dangling to the floor for modesty.
   Curiously rapt, you watch him stir for at least two full minutes.  Around and about goes the spoon, like that of an expert pastry chef at the dough: whipping; coiling; curling; blending...  "Oh, hello," you say when he notices you.  "That...too hot?"
   He shrugs.  "Not really."
   "Need to add some water?"
   "I just sorta like to do it."
   Weird.
   You circle the table, notice a banana peel on the floor, and toss it in the trash.  "That yours?"
   He pauses in his stirring just long enough to glance up with a little grin.  "Yeah."
   Sitting down next to him, you browse the paper.
   After a few minutes, he gets up and leaves, not having eaten any of the well-stirred porridge.
   Weird.

Scenario Two

   You walk into a room where a man sits at a table, stirring his porridge furiously, not yet eating it.  A checkered tablecloth of white and red covers his small, four-legged breakfast table, its hems dangling to the floor for modesty.
   Curiously rapt, you watch him stir for at least two full minutes.  Around and about goes the spoon, like that of an expert pastry chef at the dough: whipping; coiling; curling; blending...  "Oh, hello," you say when he notices you.  "That...too hot?"
   He shrugs.  "Not really."
   "Need to add some water?"
   "I just sorta like to do it."
   Weird.
   You circle the table, and notice the body of a girl of about six years old, lying in a puddle of fresh blood near his feet.  Omigod...  "Ah..."  Your throat catches.  "She your kid?"
   He pauses in his stirring just long enough to glance up with a little grin.  "Yeah."
   Sitting down next to him, you browse the paper.
   After a few minutes, he gets up and leaves, not having eaten any of the well-stirred porridge.
...

American amusements are, by themselves, not necessarily horrors.  Stirring the porridge for no particular reason--or doing the NYT crossword puzzle, or getting excited about seeing the latest corporate cinematic adventure--is, by itself, of little note.  Maybe it's stupid; maybe it's clever.  Maybe it's derogatory, offensive, soulless, easily entertaining, or just an abuse of resources--but on its own, any one of these little quirks is not more than an interesting tidbit in the day of many someones.

In this dark land, though, when you come upon the giggling, stirring, chatting, and pointing, the macabre portrait gains a new dimension of meaning.  When not merely the banana peel or the clean floor, but instead the dead girl lies on the other side of the table, the unsettling nature of the worthlessly stirred porridge, and the location of the sitting character, reveals itself as an act of greater significance than mere fidgeting with breakfast food.

"Oh, isn't it terrible?  Who did that, anyway?"
"I hear it was the guy upstairs!"
"Yeah, yeah.  Soja' stir your second bowl, yet?"
"You know it--on my third already.  I love the resistance this mix offers!"


Updated with Scenario Three

   You walk into a room where a man sits at a table.  His hands conceal his face; sobs rack his shoulders.
Concerned, you place your hands on the tablecloth.  "You all right?"
   "My...my daughter," he sniffs.  Not meeting your eyes, he nudges his head toward the floor.
   You start to look, then catch yourself.  There isn't much space between the table and the far wall, and by the broken way he shudders...  "Oh my god...what's going on?"
   "I called the cops..."  Raising his head, he struggles to keep his voice even.  "She slipped, but I can't bear to move her.  She's...no one'll believe me, but I guess I don't care...not with my priors...after this, I won't see you for a while.  I just...I gotta have some breakfast.  Even this is better than what I'll be getting for the rest of my life."  Tears run down his face as he gives his porridge a quick stir, then spoons a small bite to his mouth.

Same crime as in Scenario Two, and eerie in its own way, but not quite the singing of the loons that the original stirring of the porridge and clownface suggested.

Which came first--the Glasgow smile, the happy madman who wears it, or the crimes he commits?  Like the chicken and the egg, these things probably feed on one another over the generations of a life, renewing and altering slightly each time: but when you see that man eating that porridge next to that body, there's a wrongness present that doesn't quite figure into words.  "Ordinary" behavior alongside "extraordinary" activity presents as a sign of mental illness to a licensed mental health professional--and the diagnosis can be accurate, and chemically verifiable, in many instances--but scientific language doesn't offer ways to explain, in fullest detail, the manifestation of such an air of wrongness about the act.

Destroying Children, Part 3

Succeeding Part 2 and Part 1.

Comparative Destruction

The war to destroy children, and produce fearful, vindictive adults, plays out in a way similar to the way that cigarette companies, to choose one villain, act against the human populations of the living world.  In the process of "making profits to their own selfish ends," they lace tobacco leaves with toxins, addictive substances and preservatives, making it more harmful while also more desirable.  Once addiction has been achieved, it is substantially easier to harm humans and extract resources from them--and all with the human making the independent, proactive choice to buy cigarettes.

Denying the Biological Nature of these Shells

A denial of the biological nature of the human shell is necessary in order to help people fear themselves.  This causes them to seek solutions that can be provided "for profit" while curiously hurting the maker of the choice (for the Stage Third, or progressive/anarchist analyzer) or that harm them, leading to the destruction of the self and the aberrant, hated desires (for the Stage Fourth).  Those who fear themselves and their own desires often seek to first not understand them, after which they can be ignored, denied, etc.

Desires?  When a heterosexual human man sees a shapely blonde twenty-year-old female crouched nude on her knees, looking invitingly over her shoulder, there often results a biological reaction in the form of chemical secretion, at the very least.  This results in corresponding changes in the male's thought processes, as well as, perhaps, some discernible physical reactions in the nether regions.

Almost as commonly accepted by c. 2012 society is a fear reaction.  For an inexperienced tourist to walk around a hiking path and encounter a snarling grizzly bear, there will, just as invariably, result a fear reaction. Regardless of the carefully planned itinerary of the tourist, the tourist may find herself sweating, panting, panicking, twitching, or desiring to run in the opposite direction.  She may even start, without deliberately planning to use her muscles in such a fashion.

From pressure points to sexual arousal to anger to anxiety to the patellar reflex, these bodies have made clear to their corresponding minds that the "mind" does not fully run the show.  Things regularly happen to the body that are not planned by the mind.  The incredibly intimate, co-dependent relationship between body and mind--like that between mammalian "mother" and "child"--is one in which the mind is not a detached observer, but an active participant.  A participant whose thoughts are not fully controllable possessions, but rather things affected directly and constantly by the shell that it has created and been created by.

No dice?  Avoid letting the body sleep for fifty hours and see how well that arch, scientifically intellectual overmind continues to function.  Pinch yourself to see if you're dreaming.

The deathly monotheistic tradition has made its entire mission the severing of the body from the mind, alleging an immortal and separate "soul" that can cast off the body like so much wasted nothing, and ascend.  The sensations of touch, taste, smell, movement, lovemaking, and listening to music, are attributed not at all to the wonders of the mortal shell's crafting.  Instead, the physical form is treated as consumer-culture car, to be swapped out for the new "heaven" model after the fall rapture line comes out.

Angry Socialized Repression

During the era of Freud, the thought of young women having sexual desires, or any sort of sexuality at all, was a charged topic.  C. 2012, as focuses shift, adults are encouraged to embrace their adult sexual desires in ways that do not upset imperial war, while more insidious repressions are slipped into place.

One of the largest of these, and an integral part of destroying children to destroy's humanity's future, is the repression of a belief that mammalian human mothers, in general, want to and need to nurse, and that mammalian human infants, in general, want the same.

Manna from Heaven

And when the dew fell upon the camp in the night, the manna fell upon it.
Numbers 11:9

Mammals grow to understand their connection to one another through the symbiotic act of nursing.  Nursing infants lie against their mothers, putting their largest organ against that of mother's (skin), and receiving the internal warmth that can only be transferred by skin-to-skin.  They instinctively, powerfully want to suck--to receive nutrients--and to grasp, burrow, and be held.  Proximity provides a sense of safety, but also of heartbeat and breathing regulation.  For the mammalian infant, newly created, it is a novel task to regulate heartbeat and regulate breathing--the best and safest way to learn how to perform these tasks safely and automatically is to lie against someone whom you are more alike physically than anything else in the world, and feel and listen to their heartbeat, and their breaths, to learn how to make it look so easy when you grow up.  Milk also provides calories and vitamins, of course, in the cocktail specifically designed not only for human children, but for the child of the mother producing it; it provides antibodies to diseases the mother has suffered, and familiarizes the infant with the smell of mother, so that mother can be more easily recognized in the dark, or picked out of a group of strangers as someone who can be trusted to offer protection and nourishment.  The baby who forms this bond is more relaxed, neurologically stable, and better able to grow, learn and develop, trusting in its sense of mother = security, lessening associated worries, and focusing on "getting bigger" and "breathing" and "developing," etc.  These healthy developmental effects cannot be overstated, except in a culture designed to sever this bond, where it is no longer taken for granted, but rather, argued about: should dependent mammalian infants (1) be held against their mothers' bodies and nourished by her? or (2) warmed with artificial blankets and machines, and fed artificial substances for calories alone?

And no, old, genocidal, Chosen racists of the Torah--the single, divine nutrient from heaven, which is the perfect food designed just for lost, helpless humans, is not manna given from a single all-powerful old-man patriarch/Father/LORD in the sky, but rather milk, given from each and every woman who has grown and borne a child.

Severing the Mother-Infant Connection

To stop children from gaining the antibodies, deep physical connection, warmth, reassurance, and inexpensive nourishment of nursing, western antilife comes from two fronts: the first is an "American conservative," pro-business, product-choice attack, while the second is an "American liberal," feminist, lifestyle-choice attack.

These attacks rely on consumers who don't understand what "nursing" is, and who don't understand the design of their own bodies, and that of their babies, vis a vis nursing.  Some highlights:

1) Nursing isn't automatic.  Like "peeing" and "pooping" and "having sex," it's something that people can all figure out on their own, but which often takes some practice or guidance from other humans first, particularly to do it well.  For those who believe that those things are all automatic, they're forgetting what it's like to not know--to be a lonely egg in the dark, completely reliant on other humans to become something grown up who knows it all.

If mothers do not learn to nurse, give it up before they've figured it out, or don't even try because they've been convinced it's too hard, then antilife wins.

2) Mothers' bodies generate milk in response to the presence of babies, and the suck of babies.  Like the man becoming aroused by the comely woman, or the man needing to urinate because of eight beers, the maternal physical form reacts to the cry, tug, and suck of the baby by producing milk.  It takes a while, just as it may take a man a while to "get it up" in the bedroom or a nervous person a while to pee in front of an audience for $50 (or pee for free at a roadside urinal next to the 6'6" trucker with the hairy arms).

If mothers do not nurse their babies, or do not learn how to properly, the body may stop giving milk, just as people can become constipated by not defecating properly, or impotent by not urinating properly.  It may then become impossible to nurse, because the natural reaction has been long enough stymied.

and, of course

3) Shame.  This one worked really well for decades, and is still used, though against a growing resistance.  Social shaming has worked great on homosexual behavior, non-legally-acknowledged-citizen-adult sexual behavior, interracial relationships, etc., and maintains a constant western record of working against the human body itself; it still has an important place in the destruction of the mammalian mother-child bond.

The American conservative attack is, naturally, the funnier of the two big fronts in the war.  Like the old tobacco producers club, it's bald-faced, rude, abjectively stupid, and highly, highly effective.

Choice is a Red Herring discusses some of the most recent fun, involving both ROMNEY!!! and a token woman enabler from "across the aisle":

Like cigarette smoking, breastfeeding is a public health issue, not a freedom of choice issue. Obviously, US women feel free to choose not to breastfeed; most of them do. If women were actually intimidated into breastfeeding, we would have a breastfeeding culture. Instead, we have a bottle-feeding culture in which 67% bottle feed. Only 33% of mothers breastfeed. If there is, in fact, any social pressure to breastfeed, it certainly is not effective. I would argue, that the social pressure is to bottle-feed...

The tragedy is that the breastfeeding choice issue is a formula industry tactic. Here’s how it came to be. When, in December 2005, the Massachusetts legislature became the first in the US to prohibit formula sample bags in hospitals, then Governor Mitt Romney pressured the Public Health Council to rescind the ban. The council successfully resisted his pressure until he fired and replaced three members just prior to a vote on the ban; in May 2006 it was rescinded. Less than two weeks later, Romney announced a $66 million deal with Bristol-Myers, the world’s largest formula manufacturer, to build a pharmaceutical plant in Devens, Massachusetts.

In June of that year, Massachusetts state representative Helen Stanley (D-Second Essex) introduced House Bill 2257 to protect a new mother’s right to receive formula sample bags in the hospital. The wesbite, momsfeedingfreedom.com—created to oppose the Massachusetts ban—hosted a petition in support of this bill...

At the time, the website, momsfeedingfreedom.com, was registered to eNilsson, an international web consulting firm whose clients included Romney for President. Now it openly states that it “was made possible by a grant from the International Formula Council. “A mirror site, babyfeedingchoice.org, is copyrighted by the International Formula Council.

Here the comparison to cigarette companies is so apt it's beyond comparison; it's a direct copy of their South American business model of getting vulnerable young people hooked on something that then becomes very hard to give up.  What formula companies do is send marketing reps to hospitals, where they encounter new mothers lying in hospital beds, exhausted and recovering from delivery stress, painkiller cocktails, more involved drugs, or surgery.  They offer "free samples" of their new product, which is then fed to infants--and when the infant is full of formula, it dozes off, does not suck at its mother, and the mother's body stops producing milk.  The infant then needs to receive formula, because the natural source is gone.  Not only cigarette pushers operate this way; consider the history of the fossil fuel industry and its acceptance of various renewable sources of energy.

Mother's milk, like sunlight or the earthwind, is free, and there for the gathering by humans.  It's not instantly as "easy" as burning gas or mixing artificially sweetened baby-nutrition packs, but the long term consequences of taking that deceptively easy route are often catastrophic.

American liberals use feminism to develop this method.  By suggesting that infants are using their mothers, they urge women to demonstrate freedom by not nursing.  Not nursing means either letting the baby starve, or buying formula: ergo to be "feminist" in that light means avoiding something your female body naturally produces, and instead, connecting to your child by selecting which brand to use of a patriarchal megacorp's product, patronizingly marketed to women--because women and women's bodies couldn't possibly know better than powerful male nutrition consultants.

The nuances of this debate go on at exceeding lengths, as the battle against patriarchal oppression becomes an issue of consumer choice: Ford v. Chevy; Coke v. Pepsi; Similac v. Enfamil. 

For those who are discovering this particular aspect of the MIC's various assaults on humans, discovering the attacks on infant mammals gives a clue to the future: fewer and fewer nursed babies produce future generations of children who have even less of a connection to their kin than those previous--which forebears, despite often being under the rule of tyrants, were forced by reduced cultural technology to at least rely on their mothers for love and nourishment, before enterprising capitalists began developing flour pap, then formula.

As many human males want to have sex with females, many human females want to have and raise children, and many human babies want to suck milk, grow, learn, love, and explore, the shutting off of the baby's desires, and corresponding attachment of the baby to a factory's synthetic chemical blend, is the shutting off of the baby to its mother, and to its species.  The rejected baby, left with only the calories--which were, perhaps, the least important part of it all--will grow up without the belief that life comes from another person.  Instead, life comes from a bottle.  Life is sold at a price from for-profit corporations run by powerful men in great suits.

Any callous trends here observable?

1) Buying things satisfies me and makes me happy.  The empty feeling can be solved by finding something new to buy.  Even if sometimes I feel like I'm never actually getting what I really want.

2) Deep down, I know people can't be relied upon.  They need to be denied what they think they want, as I was denied what I wanted, because the world is just that way.

3) The world, ultimately, holds failure, sadness, denial and tragedy.  

The hatred of women's menstruation that arose out of Judaism and its monotheistic, patriarchal offshoots has become, in the modern age, the subtle, smiling Romney, glitzy "free choice" of product over person.  It was once popular to directly bash nursing, while now, the "choice" ruse is necessary to create the illusion of independent will that results in large majorities having no other path to choose, once a few innocuous drug samples cause their body to turn off the free flow.  While perhaps an honorable, necessary, exceedingly expensive choice for those (extremely) rare women who actually can't be helped into nursing by other women, the creation of generations of corporation-feeders is the increase of disempathy, disconnect, and callous bleakness for this decaying species of wandering mammals. 

Yes, mammals.

From Slavery to Supermax

The Positives of Abolition

VastLeft recently discussed an old Arthur Silber article on compromise, in which Silber was quoted like so:

It is not necessary, and usually it is not even possible, to restrict one's compatriots to those with whom one agrees about all issues, or even a significant subset of issues. One need not and should not expect or demand that those with whom one joins in a particular cause agree with or endorse one's general views. In this case, Clarkson and Wilberforce disagreed on every other then-current issue of importance and controversy.

But they agreed about slavery, and they agreed that it must be ended. That is all one should require and, I stress, that is all that is necessary. As in this case, the goal must be very clearly defined, and the members of the coalition must be fully committed to it. I would go still further: provided the goal is defined in a way that is not subject to compromise and equivocation, even the reasons which inform the participants' commitment to that goal need not be the same. Provided they agree on the goal itself -- as here, that slavery be ended -- that is all that is needed.  

This one responded as follows:

The end result of that compromise was segregation, and is now Romney v. Obama. If we cannot subscribe to a higher ideal than what seems to work effectively moment by moment, we're making the argument of the ends justifying the means, and accepting a lesser evil because it's "lesser."

And VastLeft followed up:

Did the limits of what abolition accomplished mean it was a mistake to advocate for it?
...
As with racial segregation following abolition, a single legal change wouldn't wipe bigotry off the map, you're quite right. But it might be a meaningful step in a long road, no?

There, the subject was abolition as an improvement, if an imperfect one, and one whose positive effects may still be with us today.

Slavery as Institution

It bears noting that "American Slavery" was no singular, simplistic issue.  In its creation, it was facilitated in part by African tribal chiefs willing to sell some of their people--criminals, malcontents, or the unlucky--to various traders, in exchange for goodies, or more likely, permission to survive as a breeding population to sustain the trade.  In short, not a good bargain.  To justify this tough but necessary sacrifice to their people, some of them may have made the same "lesser evils" argument that Americans use today to different ends: If we let the white men pay us to enslave some of our people, the others will be spared.  To resist them would only result in us all being conquered and enslaved.

As far as that logic went, we have today, err, Somalia, the Middle East, and the rest of the prosperous African continent--which does not just include the non-Arab sections, of course.  The scars of slavery were and are terrible ones.  If the African tribes had united and utterly swarmed/butchered the first European colonial forays, perhaps the Triangular Trade would not have become so (un)successful for so long.  To be sure, the chances of resisting the entrenched colonials were not very good, but yielding to the traders created a very real, very vicious class of sell-out locals willing to trade their kinsmen in, much as some modern Af-Pakers will settle grudges and gain briefcases of cash to turn "terrorists" over to CIA body-counters.

Slavery in America was not monolithic, either.  Slaves were not, to the woman/child/man, a singular block of oppressed peoples.  Social ranks existed within slave communities, and there were slaves who "had it better" than poor "whites," poor Indians, poor half-breeds, poor Irishmen, etc., to compare one awful situation to another; there were slaves who lived in the house, ate good food, spanked hell out of rich young white kids, and defied the conventional postmodern-white-guilt image.  There were slaves who rebelled, escaped, moved west, bought freedom, et cetera.

Nonetheless, and of course, the institution "American slavery" was noxious and terrible.  "Ending it" is something like good, and was often, probably, pursued as a result of good motivations.

Ending It

To what end, "ending it"?  The immediate result of slavery was Jim Crow laws, the occupied South, droves of starving blacks, and the Ku Klux Klan.  Positive step?  Positive step for a majority of blacks?  Is being "free" worth it if you can't afford to eat at the lunch counter?  Some have suggested that it's not.

American blacks gained the same freedom as dirt-poor American whites: the freedom to starve; the freedom to sharecrop their labor and lives to the owning castes; the freedom to be raped, lynched, and marginalized; the freedom to be used and ignored.  The Algonquin may not have believed that men could "own" land, yet the developers of America felt that deeds vested ownership in colonizing whites--similarly, Americans believed that Africans could be "owned" as slaves.  Still later, it became a victory to decide that people would not be owned.  Instead, they would continue working for the same masters, but without even having the false virtue of propertization to make white owners letting poor blacks starve be a direct economic loss to the white owner.  Work, go hungry, be beaten, be exploited, join the Army, get mistreated and abused by society at large, but you're "free," so it must be progress, right?

(Sharecropping, or contracted slavery, has its own separate, terrible history just as to post-1800s America, lasting longer and in a more insidious form than most Americans know.  Check this reference for one unforgotten scrap.)

c. 2012, some percentage of American blacks have joined the ownership class.  Was ending "slavery" an acceptable goal?  Poverty remains a massive, crushing, deadly problem.  Urban African American ghettos are flooded with drugs, which can be blamed on the Mexicans or the white suburban buyers or the C.I.A., as you prefer.  1 in 21 young black men die of violence; higher or lower, depending on the survey you choose, and black mothers/infants have prenatal care and mortality rates lower than any other group in the "developed world."

Better than slavery?  Poor whites are better off in 2012 America than poor whites in pre-Civil-War America: more flush toilets, modern emergency rooms, occasional college scholarships, et cetera.  And of course, many are proud to be Americans, because Americans are free.  And blacks get to enjoy the same privileges as poor whites, poor Hispanics, poor Pacific Islanders, and poor non-citizen ghosts.  Token representatives from all groups now participate in managing the elite grindery.  Good?  Progress?  Did a switch between numbers in musical chairs change the world?  Did changing terminology from "Slave" to "Sharecropper" to "Worker" to "Associate" to "Regional Sub-Director in Charge of Loss Prevention" make or break the world?  Is the slave shack worse than you and your kids getting evicted from your studio apartment and sleeping under the light rail bridge next to the urine puddle that never evaporates?

Hey, if you can't find a job, there's always the military.  Guaranteed employment for free, able-bodied ethnic minorities.  Lots better than picking cotton.

Are advances in medical care, toilet paper, flush toilets, clothing production, and transportation, and their accessibility to free whites and blacks, something for which "ending slavery" deserves credit?  No; the improvement in lot from "slave" to "free worker" is not responsible for these things, anymore than Obama is more responsible for killing Osama bin Laden than Bush et. al. are/were.

The reality of the situation is that the "freedom" of the slaves was a shuffling act; a token; an 1800s advancement in the way elites manipulated race relations, no more or less valuable to those who were "freed" than any other elite farce earlier or later, be it the Equal Housing Act or the forthcoming Equal Marriage Act.  At the end of the day, the color composition of the Board of Directors might have changed a little, but the real story didn't change.

Don't believe it?  Well, serfdom was ended, right?  England made a lot of progress with that one.  It was, how you say, "all that [was] necessary. As in [that] case, the goal must [have been] very clearly defined, and the members of the coalition must [have been] fully committed to it."

And the English were, when they ended slavery.  The problem was, that was done in the vicinity of the 1500s.  And it only paved the way for the Triangular Trade and African-American slavery.  One group of slaves became "free," so that another could take their place.  And the English had no problem starving and butchering their "freed" serfs, when the times became right--which they did, again and again.  Compromise with evil--choosing the lesser evil to improve the plight of the serfs--created African-American slavery.  It accomplished nothing positive, except in a selfish sense, for the serfs who could believe that a real change had happened.  They were now free to be pushed off the land of the lords, starved, whipped, tortured, executed, or die in elite wars.

Slavery to Supermax

As to American blacks c. 2012 specifically, how does the bad side of the coin look?  Aside from violent death, starvation, suicide, extreme poverty, depression, military service killing people in Africa, Asia, or other places, or a long, healthy life filled with crushing labor for the upper castes, the modern "free" life has come up with horrors that outgloom the worst slavery had to offer.

We're all likely familiar with the differing rates of incarceration for black Americans; the less pleasant plea bargains; the reduced availability and resources of defense counsel; the displeasure of juries, even black juries; and, the urban setups and drug wars that keep so many millions of African Americans without freedom or effective citizenship.   Of course, being in prison is so very different than being a slave, because black slaves were forced to be slaves by virtue of birth, while black prisoners chose to commit the crimes that ended them up in captivity, with concomitant physical abuse, forced labor, and loss of all civil rights.

What's it like on the worst side?  Thanks to sensitive government records, we'll never know, but we do occasionally get glimpses when a Vortigaunt sends word.  Control-unit prisons, baby.  Take your choice: working your ass off picking cotton, or spending weeks alone all day in a soundproof concrete isolation room, occasionally released for an hour into a concrete pool, emptied of water, to lift weights with the Aryan Brotherhood, if you're lucky, or still alone, if you're not.  For the rest of your life.

Picking "the room" might seem preferable, if you're unfamiliar with the psychological effects of long-term sensory deprivation and isolation.

In supermax, prisoners are generally allowed out of their cells for only one hour a day (in California state prisons they are allowed out for one-and-a-half hours); often they are kept in solitary confinement. They receive their meals through ports, also known as "chuck holes" or "bean slots", in the doors of their cells. When supermax inmates are allowed to exercise, this may take place in a small, enclosed area where the prisoner will exercise alone. Prisoners are under constant surveillance, usually with closed-circuit television cameras. Cell doors are usually opaque, while the cells may be windowless. Conditions are plain, with poured concrete or metal furniture common. Often cell walls, and sometimes plumbing, are soundproofed to prevent communication between the inmates.  (from Wikipedia link above.)

Forever.  For psychological effect, the facilities are usually designed so that the windows look out on the side of another building or on the inside of an interior wall.

Forever.  You still happy about the whole "not picking cotton" thing?

This article, though not typed up very neatly, has some nice research.  If you need help reflecting on the Supermax life, read through it.

Luckily, we can at least trust official government statistics to tell us (1) how many of these facilities exist, (2) how many are located outside national boundaries, (3) if there are even more cruel facilities in existence, and most importantly, (4) who the people are in them, how many people are kept there, how long they are kept there for, and what their crimes were.

Of course, it's an improvement on slavery, because the African-Americans not in these facilities, or less-controlled ones, are "free," and the ones who are in those torture boxes forever made independent choices to commit social transgressions that rightfully placed them in those boxes.

Compromise


This is where compromise brings us.  Compromising with evil is accepting evil; is enabling evil; is doing evil.  Performing an evil act to avoid a different evil act is performing evil.  "Freeing" slaves, so that they can become a "free" lower caste of abused citizens, and then, hundreds of years later, making them equal in every way, so that they can be subject to horrible elite laws and state-sanctioned torture, is not "the best progress we could hope for."  Rather, it is simply a way for evil to evolve over the years in order to perpetuate the same results that slavery offered: lives of misery, drudgery, and hopelessness.  When evil evolves, it grows stronger.  Nat Turner had a chance at rebelling out of a plantation, but isolate him inside walls of two-foot-thick concrete, and he would not even have the chance to die fighting.

As the renaming of various forms of slavery throughout human history has shown us, cute compromises designed to appease different versions of postmodern liberal guilt syndrome, which don't actually change power relations, are not small steps in the right direction: they are large steps in the same terribly wrong direction as before.

Evil endures by compromise: it rarely says, "I am evil, and I intend to do evil."  It says, instead, "This thing you have perceived is so terrible that you must perform but a small evil to combat it."  Those small evils that you will commit in order to save the better part of the world are the evils that your successors will commit to combat the results of your small evils.  Those evils you wish to end, and the compromises that resulted in them being there to face you, were the choices made by those who came before you, who thought they were accepting a "slightly better" situation in order to avoid a "more unpleasant" result.  This is how it happens, and this is what it means.

Had the battle for ensuring a good life for all people been fought in place of the Civil War, the world might look differently today.  Empire, genocide, the Klan, and countless other evils may have never lived.  Using the rallying cry, "End slavery, and end slavery now, and worry about other injustices later," continued slavery under different names and in different parts of the world, while making other evils even more powerful and prevalent.

In closing, the old doctor speaking, "break 'em off some."

Steve Jobs tribute movie

Yup.

If any were yet doubting the collusion between art pushers and death pushers, feast upon:

Sony Pictures officials say the Oscar-winning writer will write a screenplay based on the Steve Jobs biography. Sony Pictures co-chairman Amy Pascal says Sorkin will make the film about the late Apple founder "everything that Jobs himself was: Captivating, entertaining and polarizing." Sorkin won the adapted screenplay Academy Award for 2010's "The Social Network." The 50-year-old writer was nominated in the same category for 2011's "Moneyball." His other credits include "Charlie Wilson's War" and "A Few Good Men." He also created TV's "The West Wing." Actor Ashton Kutcher is set to play Jobs in a separate project.

Does anyone else see a smash hit, swarms of social media posts about how your friends haven't seen it yet but are going to this weekend and are excited about it, and serious, critical reviews posted in major publications about how the movie had some problems, but really had a lot of emotional impact and was one of [token-year]'s best stories?

A hundred years from now, university students will spend two weeks worth of classes comparing and contrasting the 2013 iJobs with the 2024 A Gates Moment, in order to better understand art, creativity, imagination, and literature.

Deceptive Whispers

What?

A message of evil is one of hopelessness; it is to say to the world's children, "This is the best you can hope for.  Aspire for nothing higher."  "Humanity's" brief history has been an act of memorialization; of explaining, ex post facto, that what humanity has accomplished is the best it could have possibly hoped for, and that to dream of better things is to be ignorant, foolish, wasteful, and generally bad.

The message of crushed hope is most efficiently delivered by powerful, successful, respected people.  It needs to be tweaked a little bit depending on whose hope should be crushed.  Republicans do it differently than do Democrats, who do it differently than mullahs, who do it differently than city managers, et cetera.  In the face of power that seems overwhelming, it's easy to tell someone that they have no chance for a better world, except to take the occasional millimeter of "progress" that "everyone" agrees is all you can get--and terrifyingly easy to convince them to give up hope and settle for something that you define as "realistic"--i.e., "less hopeful."

To modern "radicals," that's the role of Dr. Pinker, and here's Glenn Greenwald and some his fawning commentators more profanely making that point.  Rand and Romney tell white trash that they're going to get rich as soon as the communists stop holding them back from becoming highly paid industrialists; why demand something outrageous like socialism, to guarantee the tangible results of life security that they seek, when "trickle down" economics can benefit them indirectly?  It's just a little step in the right direction, after all.

Viperous fiends will have you believe that scoring two cigarettes rather than one in a Verdun trench in 1916 is an advancement; that being isolated in a black-site prison with a feeding tube slashing up your throat is an improvement over being a slave in the cotton fields; that a man getting the right to marry a man in the bosom of the genocidal DU poisoner of the living world is cause for a spot of celebration.  Keep spreading frosting on that shit, Greenwald--you'll be eating it until the day you die.  Not just eating it, with a big, shit-frosting smile, but telling everyone else how good it is, and how there really is no cake out there.  The cake is a lie--so dig into Obama's shit.  Beam at the world as you convince a new generation of children to munch genocidal shit in exchange for domestic policy alterations for their own "country."

Don't whip slave darkies in the field; instead, respect the diverse culture of African-Americans and their rich contributions to a better world.  Okay, that's done, or at least, "in progress," or "better than 1950" or "1850" or what have you.  We're there now, wherever you define there.  Have the bombs stopped dropping?  No; they've actually invented better ones, and are developing even more advanced ways of ensuring their use by postmodern superstates.  The respectable veneer of post-racial society proves to be exactly the pill needed for keeping the grindery alive.  Is the police state gone with Jim Crow?  No, same answer.

The appeasing elites were delighted to cheer on the Magna Carta as a limitation on monarchical power.  Did it end the torment of the serfs, the genocide of the gypsies, the wars of the European continents, or the terrors of the monarchs?  No.  Mass killing now is done farther away, with more efficient machines, and fewer bodies need to be seen by the general populace, but "more and better violence" is not "more and better overall."  To make these terrors palatable--to hide the shit under the frosting--they must be presented as tiny steps in the "right" direction.  As far as the metaphor of progress goes, little political policy changes are baby steps up a descending escalator.  It's time to fucking run, pplz--if you want to avoid falling off entirely when you finally get to the bottom.  Walking slowly upward against the track is still going down overall, no matter how many calories you burn.

Greenwald does develop the traditional model of hopelessness.  He doesn't say, "Obama is great, and this new domestic social policy mission statement is great."  He says, instead, a far more clever call to a dispassionate stasis; a sugar-coated cyanide pill: "I admit Obama does many terrible things, but we can still cheer him for this new domestic social policy mission statement."  The little admission of truth--Obama does many terrible things--is used to help the core of the message slide down easier.  "Yes, I ran over your son, but I missed the mailbox, didn't I?"  We should be talking about the child, but Greenwald would prefer to focus on the new paint coating the mailbox.  This is what makes it more noxious.  Mentioning the mailbox at all is profane when the child was just run down and another one will be run down tomorrow by the same driver in the same car.  In this example, though, a child is run down every minute, and it's been this way for, let's just say, five hundred years.  Mentioning the mailbox then goes beyond profane.  There are no words.

As to this particular message of hopelessness, here's the worst part of Greenwald's position:

I’m generally no fan of mass murderers, and we all know the reasons why, so let's not bother discussing them. . .
On this issue, though, SUPREME DICTATOR'S statement on DOMESTIC SOCIAL ISSUE will be remembered LATER, while his motives and his previous dithering on this issue will be long forgotten. A sitting head of the HEGEMON is willing, for the first time, to personally back basic civil rights for CITIZENS OF HEGEMON WHO ARE NOT IN CUSTODY OR DEAD OR OTHERWISE INTIMIDATED AGAINST USING THESE CIVIL RIGHTS WHICH MAY CHANGE AT ANY TIME . 

That is an action. It’s mostly symbolic, sure, but it will mean a whole lot to CITIZENS OF HEGEMON WHO ARE DIRECTLY AFFECTED BY THIS PARTICULAR DOMESTIC SOCIAL POLICY.
I’m old enough to remember eight years of THIS ONE GUY once NOT ADDRESSING A DIFFERENT DOMESTIC SOCIAL ISSUE FOR CITIZENS OF HEGEMON. Any STILL LIVING CITIZEN WHO REMEMBERS THIS DOMESTIC SOCIAL ISSUE will instantly recognize today’s significance. That was less than A TIME ago. To get from there to this is remarkable.
No, today’s statement doesn’t get any legislation passed (at least, not directly), and the states’ rights hedge is a copout. But the important takeaway is that DOMESTIC SOCIAL ISSUE opponents, can no longer dismiss  DOMESTIC SOCIAL ISSUE as a fringe concern, and the notion that we can be separated from the fabric of HEGEMON life and be shunned, buried, and forgotten is officially dead.

Got yours?  Because the frosting really makes it taste good, huh?  Things are improving.  Sure, it's not as fast as we'd like them to improve in our wildest, most ridiculous fantasies, but after, like, decades of toying with this DOMESTIC SOCIAL ISSUE, getting a statement about it by an important person means so much that it's an indication that things may later happen which may change the tone enough to allow other things to happen which may cause those non-incarcerated, living, legal-citizenship-having, non-homeless, non-otherwise-discriminated-against, token people to get something that may be a benefit for them and only them.

Let's take a moment to congratulate ourselves, Mr. Greenwald and friends, for small domestic policy improvements that help make us feel good and progressive while we continue turning faraway children into gritty bolognese sauce.  You selfish, spoiled, terrible pieces of murdering filth.  This is the new face of Imperial America: a face of compassionate, diverse, tolerant murderers who care enough about shifts in the formal social status of various sexually-identifiable cisgender groups to make them cheer on Murder Himself.

Why?

Why can they do this?  Because of the message of hopelessness.  If you believe that humanity has nothing better to offer than this, or that humanity can only accomplish things decades or centuries or millenia from now, then increasing drone strikes on little brown kids far away while letting gay people get married is a good thing compared to merely increasing drone strikes on little brown kids far away while not letting gay people get married.

There's no real difference, of course.  The elite wars have raged for thousands of years, and will continue to rage.  Even now connected by our "internet," we find ways to justify these horrific slaughters--and those ways are to have pompous, wealthy, powerful, diverse middlemen assure us that this is the best we can hope for.

"Take tiny steps."

"You can't stop the killing.  You have no chance of that.  Just relax, and be glad that gays might be able to get married in a few years."

"Production is up 15%.  Things are progressing."

The deceptive feeling of freedom is what allows the killing to continue.  By encouraging us to accept the little domestic goodies the genocidal tyrants come up with every few years as a distraction, these awful middlemen are a vital part of the process.  Greenwald promises Americans that meaningful strides are being made in civil rights so that they believe they have improved the world--even just a little bit--through Obama. In a hundred years, Americans will be making great strides fighting discrimination against half-Arab futanari with DU Syndrome, while a new executive council murders a different subgroup in a different place, in a different way--while a different rich lawyer writes thoughtful, impressive articles explaining how good and noble Americans are for taking steps to end discrimination against half-Arab DU futas.

Hope

In a mind of hope, this is disgusting.  To be offered these token parcels by peripheral servants of the killing empire is not to be rewarded, but to be cozened--to be lulled; to be tricked into believing that something has been accomplished.  The world holds greater things than what these terrible little men would have you be satisfied with.  The sky is higher; the sky is limitless.

Beautiful truths from a great ghost:

The good Earth is rich--the solar system, the galaxy, the universe, the multiverse, and places beyond and betwixt, can give "us" everything we want.  The petty joys of gobbling up the scraps that occasionally fall from master's table--or of being the tyrant who drops those scraps, and finding meaning in the distinction between scrap and main course--are shallow, empty, horrifying things, which distract humans from what could be.

If you don't believe it's possible, you need to seek a new faith in humanity.  It may seem unlikely--it may seem impossible--but the power is within humans to arise, on even one day, and make a new world.  We were not always this way, and we will not always be.  Somnatic, soulless pharmaceuticals like the words of Greenwald may drip-feed promises that our mere mortal world can never hold the treasures of a distant heaven...but beauty is immanent, and can still be reached for, free of the illusory bonds of those who believe nothing can ever be truly good.  We are meant for more than an endless series of lesser evils and sold honors.

Perhaps, in this age, they will seem to be proven right, but humans and life are far greater than the stunted, already-trodden paths that those with tongues of worms and poison would have us walk again.  A bright future awaits, around the corner on an instant or ten thousand years away.  If you will not bring your shell to it in your current form, do not practice disbelieving in it, as the pushers would have you do--there is hope.  There is good; there is life.  In the face of all seeming impossibility, and past the whispers of soothsayers and terrible men, believe that you and all of us can and must have better.  Your dreams are fantasies of what could be; they come to you not as mockery, but as a map.