Progress

WaPo:

Richmond’s grand statue of Gen. Stonewall Jackson came down Wednesday in a sudden thunderstorm and a burst of mayoral muscle, becoming the latest Confederate monument toppled amid a national reckoning on racism and injustice.

Hundreds gathered to watch crews dismantle the statue, one of five honoring Confederate icons on Monument Avenue in Richmond, the former capital of the Confederacy. Onlookers cheered, and bells rang out from the nearby First Baptist Church.

One supporter of the monuments cried.

Richmond Mayor Levar Stoney (D), bucking advice from the city attorney and relying on emergency powers, dispatched a crew to take down the statue after the City Council delayed a vote on removing it along with three others owned by the city along the avenue. The fifth Confederate statue is owned by the state

Once the equestrian statue was lifted from its base and lowered to the ground, just after 4:30 p.m., Stoney compared the moment to the end of the Cold War.

“The Berlin Wall fell, but also the system fell with it,” the 39-year-old mayor said. “Now for us, as elected leaders, alongside our community, it’s our job to rip out the systemic racism that is found in everything we do — from government, to health care, to the criminal justice system.”

There are no statues of Lenin or Saddam or Tojo or Mussolini or Rommel.

We should not be putting up monuments to exalt "the noble losers" - no matter how valiantly they fought in service to a cause that proved out to be little more than the usual desire of evil men to impose a gross injustice on an unwilling populace.

BTW, that's how you do it. You make a political decision based on the outcome of an election. You remove the offending article in broad daylight, under peaceful conditions.

I think I understand the impetus for protests and the impulse to destroy the symbols of oppression and hatred.

But we have rules. We even have rules on how you break the rules.

Don't throw rocks and then hide your hands

Today's Today

Tiananmen Square, 04 June 1989.

Beijing has been blocking these videos.

Once the violence starts, it'll "run its course" almost no matter what. And the government is always going to win as long as the police and armed forces are "loyal" to government leaders.

When this kind of thing happens in a society where the general populace is not well-armed, the optics get really bad really fast, government is seen as the brutal assholes they usually are, and they end up having to make changes and accommodations for people. We've seen that all over the world. 

But if we get this shit going here in USAmerica Inc, it's not just going to "run its course".

More True History

Trying to square some people up with the truth seems futile.  But there's value in writing this shit down as I go - and the value may be mostly in pointing this out to myself from time to time, if nobody else.

The Atlantic, Adam Serwer - 2 months ago:

The strangest part about the continued personality cult of Robert E. Lee is how few of the qualities his admirers profess to see in him he actually possessed.
- and -

Lee had beaten or ordered his own slaves to be beaten for the crime of wanting to be free, he fought for the preservation of slavery, his army kidnapped free blacks at gunpoint and made them unfree—but all of this, he insisted, had occurred only because of the great Christian love the South held for blacks. Here we truly understand Frederick Douglass’s admonition that "between the Christianity of this land and the Christianity of Christ, I recognize the widest possible difference."

Privately, according to the correspondence collected by his own family, Lee counseled others to hire white labor instead of the freedmen, observing “that wherever you find the negro, everything is going down around him, and wherever you find a white man, you see everything around him improving.”

In another letter, Lee wrote “You will never prosper with blacks, and it is abhorrent to a reflecting mind to be supporting and cherishing those who are plotting and working for your injury, and all of whose sympathies and associations are antagonistic to yours. I wish them no evil in the world—on the contrary, will do them every good in my power, and know that they are misled by those to whom they have given their confidence; but our material, social, and political interests are naturally with the whites.”

Publicly, Lee argued against the enfranchisement of blacks, and raged against Republican efforts to enforce racial equality on the South. Lee told Congress that blacks lacked the intellectual capacity of whites and “could not vote intelligently,” and that granting them suffrage would “excite unfriendly feelings between the two races.” Lee explained that “the negroes have neither the intelligence nor the other qualifications which are necessary to make them safe depositories of political power.” To the extent that Lee believed in reconciliation, it was between white people, and only on the precondition that black people would be denied political power and therefore the ability to shape their own fate.

Redneck Participation Trophies

April is the "unofficial" Confederate History month because there's a Democrat in the Governor's Mansion right now. As soon as that changes, I suspect we'll be right back to the Dixie Rising bullshit that comes back on us like malaria every few-to-several years.

And this junk is everywhere.

There are some pretty solid efforts now to get these things relegated to the museums where (I think) they belong - they are some pretty great pieces of art, after all. And they depict a facet of our history that needs to stay front and center, even if the monuments to the "heroes" who led a bloody traitorous insurrection (in support of White Supremacy and the "right" to own human beings as chattel) should be removed from the public square.

The Big Show

The Daily Show
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This wasn't an announcement so much as an attempted Product Roll-out.  But anyway, once they actually got to the point, we got all the usual bullshit. Liberty, justice and personal responsibility.

He's gonna get the economy cookin' by FREEDOM (privatization)!!!

He's gonna break the cycle of Poverty-Lousy Schools-Unemployment-&-Crime by PERSONAL RESPONSIBILITY (privatization)!!!

He's gonna get the federal government under control by JUSTICE (privatization)!!!

And he's gonna Take Our Country Back!!!!!!!!!!

I slag the Press Poodles a lot.  And this crap from yesterday is a fair example of why I slag the Press Poodles a lot.  There was almost no real policy in anything Paul had to say.  There was lots of jingoism and the obligatory attempts to seem "Reaganesque" - which for Lil Randy just made him look like the standard 2-year-old wearing daddy's great big shoes.  And nobody said anything about any of that.

I don't think it's unreasonable for me to expect somebody to ask one or two obvious-as-fuck questions when these guys disgorge some of the less meaningful (ie: Content-Free) bromides that their focus group gurus feed them.

Senator Paul: "..we're going to take this country back."

Press Poodle: "Take it back from whom?  Who has it?"

-or-

Poodle: "Take the country back ... to the 1950s? - the 1890s?  the 18th century?"

In the end, what this guy wants is to take what's left of this country away from all of us and sell it to his buddies.  So he needs us to go along with the toxic notion that the Noble Rich are the only ones who worked their asses off to build this joint and so they're the only ones who deserve to cash in on it now.  Unfortunately, he's got a fuck-ton of self-loathing rubes standing in line, looking for an excuse to start turning over all the wrong tables and throwing shit thru all the wrong windows.

When there's so much money and power concentrated in so few hands, and when the rest of us are left with nothing more to lose, guess what happens.  Paraphrasing: rebellion is the language of the powerless.

We'd best be making sure we've got this thing pointed in the right direction.

VICE

Doing god's work, the folks at VICE are trying to show us all something that at least has some faint ring of truth to it.



Quick aside:
Isn't it interesting that so many of these Rebel Patriots crow about "both sides" being rotten, but their little militia-ness always seem to be in full flower only when the Dems hold power?

It's never about what they tell you it's about - "they" being Government or Business or Media or Political Activists.

The first corollary is that it's also never about what you think it's about.

All we can do is look at what information we can find - or whatever "they" allow us to see - and then gun it through our filters of experience and reason, trying to assess the probability that what we're observing is true or false or somewhere in between.

A couple of the smartest things I've heard anybody say in a while (Chris Hedges):

"Language is not benign - You have to get people to talk in the language of violence before they commit violence."

--and--

"Violence isn't gonna work.  Violence is a mistake.  The machine wants violence - it justifies further repression."

Also interesting is the view from inside this piece that there's a thread of truth that ties all of us together - the feeling of being alienated, used and abused, and disposable.  The trick now is to remember that most of us really do want the same things - in a broad and general sense - but we do; we want the same things.

Of course, we have to work out the details of how we go about getting what we want, and that's gonna take some serious attention to our absolute #1 Principle; the thing that lies at the very root of American Exceptionalism...compromise.

Figure it out, guys.  The only way you always get everything you want is to shoot everybody who disagrees with you, and that's not just rude, it's counterproductive, which makes it ineffective.  People have been trying to conquer the world in exactly that way for more than 500 centuries, and guess what - the world remains undefeated.

Ya sit down.  Ya have a drink.  Maybe a nosh.  And you work it the fuck out.

Oops - Almost Forgot

In honor of Confederate History Month here's my tribute to The Lost Cause, and to the nobility of the great struggle to defend our proud traditions during The War Of Northern Aggression:

Offended?  Bite me.

Today's Outlook - Bleak

This piece is a bit less hopeful than I usually like myself to jump into, but sometimes ya gotta say straight out that it looks pretty shitty from where you're standing. (UnrepentantLiberal at Democratic Underground):

They figured it out.

Who's gonna stop us? Most Americans don't read political websites and blogs. Their kids want milk, they buy milk at the supermarket. A two minute report on CNN is easily forgotten when the latest celebrity scandal breaks.

What are you gonna do if the politician we own puts this law in the books?  You ain't gonna do shit.

What are you gonna do if you're making less money now than you were 30 years ago?  You ain't gonna do shit.

What are you gonna do if we bust your union?  You ain't gonna do shit.

What are you gonna do if we close down the factory that provided your grand father, father and you a means to provide for your families?  You ain't gonna do shit.

What are you gonna do if we privatize your rotting town and part out what's left?  You ain't gonna do shit.

What are you gonna do if we cut off the social services you now need to survive?  You ain't gonna do shit.

What are you gonna do when we steal the Social Security account that you paid into for 50 years?  You ain't gonna do shit.

What are you gonna do if you protest and we beat you, arrest you on trumped-up charges and then have Erin Burnett make fun of you?  You ain't gonna shit.

And when it's all gone and we're living a life of luxury with the money we took from you?  Well, you know the drill.

Suckers.

The Winners Write The History Books

hat tip = Little Green Footballs

Can't wait to see what the "conservatives" wanna do about the "dirty, Librul, 'Murica-hating leftists" because of this, from Smithsonian.com:

Bailyn has not painted a pretty picture. Little wonder he calls it The Barbarous Years and spares us no details of the terror, desperation, degradation and widespread torture—do you really know what being “flayed alive” means? (The skin is torn from the face and head and the prisoner is disemboweled while still alive.) And yet somehow amid the merciless massacres were elements that gave birth to the rudiments of civilization—or in Bailyn’s evocative phrase, the fragile “integument of civility”—that would evolve 100 years later into a virtual Renaissance culture, a bustling string of self-governing, self-sufficient, defiantly expansionist colonies alive with an increasingly sophisticated and literate political and intellectual culture that would coalesce into the rationale for the birth of American independence. All the while shaping, and sometimes misshaping, the American character. It’s a grand drama in which the glimmers of enlightenment barely survive the savagery, what Yeats called “the blood-dimmed tide,” the brutal establishment of slavery, the race wars with the original inhabitants that Bailyn is not afraid to call “genocidal,” the full, horrifying details of which have virtually been erased.

 --and--

“Yes,” he agrees. “Look at the ‘peaceful’ Pilgrims. Our William Bradford. He goes to see the Pequot War battlefield and he is appalled. He said, ‘The stink’ [of heaps of dead bodies] was too much.”

Bailyn is speaking of one of the early and bloodiest encounters, between our peaceful pumpkin pie-eating Pilgrims and the original inhabitants of the land they wanted to seize, the Pequots. But for Bailyn, the mercenary motive is less salient than the theological.

“The ferocity of that little war is just unbelievable,” Bailyn says. “The butchering that went on cannot be explained by trying to get hold of a piece of land. They were really struggling with this central issue for them, of the advent of the Antichrist.”

Suddenly, I felt a chill from the wintry New England air outside enter into the warmth of his study.

The Antichrist. The haunting figure presaging the Apocalypse from the Book of Revelation plays an important part in Bailyn’s explanation of the European settlers’ descent into unrestrained savagery. The key passage on this question comes late in his new book when Bailyn makes explicit a connection I had not seen before: between the physical savagery the radical dissenting Protestant settlers of America wreaked on the original inhabitants, and the intellectual savagery of their polemical attacks on the church and state authorities they fled from in Europe—and the savagery of vicious insult and vile denunciation they wreaked upon each other as well.

“The savagery of the [theological] struggle, the bitterness of the main contenders and the deep stain it left on the region’s collective memory” were driven by “elemental fears peculiar to what was experienced as a barbarous environment—fears of what could happen to civilized people in an unimaginable wilderness...in which God’s children [as they thought of themselves] were fated to struggle with pitiless agents of Satan, pagan Antichrists swarming in the world around them. The two [kinds of struggle, physical and metaphysical] were one: threats from within [to the soul] merged with threats from without to form a heated atmosphere of apocalyptic danger.”

Any of that last part ring any bells?  Is it possible to substitute Iraqis or Afghanis for the American Aboriginals?  How about Muslims? Or Immigrants?  And can I imagine myself being seen as one of those 'pitiless agents of Satan' in the eyes of the American Taliban?  Sad questions with potentially very sad answers.

It Just Gets Funner

Rhetorical violence and revenge fantasies are "just talk", so there's "no way we can tie the things that are said and the images that are seen (coming from the Right Wing of the spectrum) to the violent behavior of individuals who're obviously acting of their own accord."

If I buy the arguments of Conservative Apologists, then every time there's a shooting spree, I can only shake my head and wonder where the shooter could possibly have gotten the crazy idea to start shooting people.

Heard alla dat before.

A few things.  First, violent imagery cuts a lot of ways that aren't predictable and can't be controlled.  It might be a good idea to remind the TheoCons about that "reap what you sow" thing.

Second, I suspect we're gonna hear a lot about "See?  Liberals shoot people too", so we'll get bogged down by the usual bullshit of "both sides do it".

Third - As bad as it is for the victims and their families, for the broader society it's not really a huge problem until "the other side" starts shootin' back.

We've been in a slow-motion Civil War Redux for a good 50 years, and I'm hoping we haven't just seen an important escalation.

From Addicting Info:

The incident is being treated as domestic terrorism. What Corkins intended to do if he had succeeded in infiltrating the building is unknown and what his motivations were outside of disagreeing with the FRC’s policies is unclear.

Rebutting the inevitable False Equivalence (Media Matters):

SPLC Intelligence Project director Mark Potok attributes this dramatic increase in right-wing extremist activity to three factors: "Resentment over the changing racial demographics of the country, frustration over the government's handling of the economy, and the mainstreaming of conspiracy theories and other demonizing propaganda aimed at various minorities."

We've Only Just Begun

We're actually involved in a kind of (so far) slow-moving Civil War. And I think the progression is pretty easy to see.

1) Leadership. It's a fairly simple and obvious fact that if you have enough money, you're not subject to the same "Justice" as the rest of us. Once people see "leaders" getting away with larceny, fraud, torture, bribery, child rape, and even murder, then why should the "common folk" hold themselves to any other standard of behavior?

2) Followership: Even when those standards are set and adhered to by people we admire, over time, we will misconstrue and eventually totally pervert the concept. Vince Lombardi says, "winning isn't everything; it's the only thing", and a very short time later, it's morphed into "win at all cost". And that perversion happened well after Lombardi publicly refuted his own statement, saying he regretted ever having said it. Didn't matter.

3) Political Marketing: Self-Governance = Self-Loathing. Anti-Gubmint sentiment strikes at the very heart of our little experiment in democracy.

We're the Government, and Government sucks, so: We Suck.

But our need for self preservation requires us to try not to internalize that hatred - we will most likely turn it outward, looking for some external agent to blame for our feelings of being victimized. So pick a group - any group. Muslims, Hispanics, Liberals, Tea Partiers, NRA Members, NeoCons...you name it, we got a group for you to hate with the power of a thousand suns.

So what we have now is the beginning of something I think is already in motion and will simply continue to snowball until it consumes us all. If that sounds as dire and overblown to you as it does to me, then we can still hope for cooler heads to prevail, but it's probably best if you don't now start thinking about what happens if we mix in a nice big hunk of the disruptions we can expect to be driven by Climate Change in the next 10 - 30 years.

So, here's what I think is a kind of instigating incident:

Any given Stand Your Ground law is being interpreted by an awful lot of average yahoos as a license to impose their will on anybody they don't like, and/or act out their Wyatt Earp fantasies, and/or exact vengeance for what they perceive as "those people" tearing down our once-great USA blah blah blah.



None of these boneheads oughta get medals for brains - but nobody ever deserves to get shot arguing about noise in the neighborhood. This just gets worse from here on out.

Another War Of Independence

From Ta-Nehisi Coates at The Atlantic:

In our present time, to express the view of the enslaved—to say that the Civil War was a significant battle in the long war against bondage and for government by the people—is to compromise the comfortable narrative. It is to remind us that some of our own forefathers once explicitly rejected the republic to which they’d pledged themselves, and dreamed up another country, with slavery not merely as a bug, but as its very premise. It is to point out that at this late hour, the totems of the empire of slavery—chief among them, its flag—still enjoy an honored place in the homes, and public spaces, of self-professed patriots and vulgar lovers of “freedom.” It is to understand what it means to live in a country that will never apologize for slavery, but will not stop apologizing for the Civil War.

Coates describes the Civil War being characterized as a tragedy in the white-folk narrative, but points out that it was, in fact, the War For Freedom for black-folk (more broadly, a step towards a more perfect union, but when the main cause is slavery and the main outcome is freedom for black-folk, then it's not a big stretch).

If I look at the Civil War in that light, I can take the circumstances leading up to the American Revolution and the Civl War and the Labor Riots and The 30s and The 60s; overlay them onto what's been bubbling up since the 2008 Implosion, and I can see a truer meaning of the phrase "freedom ain't free".

Remember that it's never about what the popular narrative tell us it's about.