Don't Let The Door Hit You...

The common phrase is "don't let the door hit you in the ass on your way out". I also like, and perhaps prefer, "don't let the door hit ya where the good Lord split ya". I endorse both sentiments for Texas today, or at least for the citizens of that state that wish to secede from the Union.

Upon how many levels is this despicable? Rhetorical questions often have real answers, so let us list the ways:

Firstly, secession is treason as defined by law. I believe this was settled in the case known as United States v. Confederate States. That was a rather bloody and protracted ruling, as I recall. Considering that "treason" is a word loosely thrown about in Bush country, this fact seems salient.

Secondly, the relationship between red states and the federal government is as follows: red states bitch incessantly about big government and high taxes but, with exceedingly rare exceptions, red states take in far more revenue from the federal government than they dole out. Yes, most red states, including Texas, are welfare queens writ large.

Thirdly, how spoiled can you be? Texas ran the world for 8 years. Bush. Gonzalez. Rove. Bush. Bush. Bush. The "Western White House". The "I have a huge dick" strut across the sunburned sands. The clearing of brush. The insipid and insouciant and insulting "folksiness".

Texas had a stranglehold on the government for 8 years. 3 months after it ends, their first impulse is to....commit treason. Wow, way to skip steps 2 through 9, Texas. Did it ever occur to Texans that Rhode Islanders may have wanted to secede 8 years ago?

Did it ever occur to Texans that their beloved president was "elected" by a coup d'etat and that Mr. Obama, Rhode Island's president, was elected by a good old-fashioned passionate ass-whippin' of the highest democratic tradition? Did it ever occur to Texans that their last two presidents (LBJ and W) started the shittiest, most immoral, most unwinnable wars in our history?

Fourthly, what are Texas' plans for independence? Good luck building an army and navy and coast guard. Good luck inventing and stabilizing and distributing your own currency. Good luck arranging treaties with 190 countries. Good luck sending ambassadors to 190 countries. Good luck with the million other things every country must do. And good luck with PAYING FOR IT ALL YOURSELF.

Clearly the sentiment in Texas is all pomp and bluster, but what is the deal with this government-hating as of late? The government stopped regulating monetary flows. Monetary flows caused a disaster. And several people blame the government. After those very same people said that the government should have no say.

This Texan secession bluster is part of the same charade, which rivals anti-intellectualism in its insidiousness. People tear down the very foundations of society to prove that society doesn't work. What they need to confront and accept is that, deep down, they themselves hope to God that nobody truly listens to them.

A Short Torture of History

The above photo is of a South Vietnamese soldier water boarding a Vietcong captive while an American soldier looks on. The American soldier went to prison. He went to prison for watching a captive being tortured.

Yes, during one of the moral nightmares of the American dream in Vietnam, we retained the humanity and the political will to punish those of us who had clearly tortured human beings in their custody.

The continuing debate over torture is a clear sign of national decline, of the stuff that fallen empires are made of. The rule of law is not some hippy-tainted fantasy that we should ideally pursue; it is the floor under which WE MUST NOT FALL. Because under the floor are the graves.

If torture is okay on occasion, why is rape not occasionally permissible? What if we had a female terrorist in custody? What would be the harm in a little "induced fornication protocol"? What if she knew where the ticking bomb was? How could we NOT rape her in that scenario?

Water boarding is torture. It has been illegal for over a century in this country. There are those among us who obscure this fact and excuse this sin in the name of "necessity".

If a thing is moral and effective, we do it. If a thing is moral and ineffective, we don't. If a thing is immoral and ineffective, we don't. If a thing is immoral and effective, we shouldn't, but we might. But torture us NOT effective which makes the sin even worse. Torture is immoral and ineffective.

The defenders of torture tell us it saved lives. To disprove that is impossible, as one would have to prove a negative. To say that torture prevented attacks is like saying that Hurricane Katrina prevented an attack on New Orleans planned for the day after the Hurricane. Maybe it did, but was it worth it?

It is, of course, highly doubtful that torture saved any lives. We know what happens under torture, and especially under water boarding.

During the Korean War, Chinese soldiers water boarded American POW's. Their goal? To elicit FALSE confessions of atrocities and the like from the Americans to use for their propaganda.

So....what did we get when we water boarded our captives? Lo and behold, we got false confessions. We got information about plots that didn't exist. We publicized those "threats", of course, which led to more hysteria, which led to demands for more "information."

One goal of the torture was to "prove" the link between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda, much as American POWs were tortured to "prove" that Chinese Communism was utopia itself and to write press releases to that effect.

Just as tortured American soldiers condemned their country to cease their unbearable anguish, so did our captives tell us what we wanted to hear. "Saddam and Osama? Oh, yeah, I saw them at Target together.....can you stop drowning me now"?

There is nothing funny about this, of course. The wages of sin is death. The war in Iraq was based upon the insistence that Saddam Hussein had WMD and ties to al Qaeda. BOTH of those claims were based on "intelligence" extracted under torture.

So, did torture save lives? Or did it actually lead to the Iraq War, which led to more torture, which led to more war, which will led to more torture? If you think there hasn't been another 9/11 because we torture, I can't refute that. Perhaps torture prevented attacks. Perhaps the alignment of the stars or the glisten of a chicken's intestines prevented attacks. We can't prove negatives.

What we CAN prove is that torture is barbarism defined and that our use of torture gave us "information" which "justified" the invasion of Iraq. Now we're in an unwinable bitch of a war with the dregs of our moral authority seeping out into the sand. Still think it was worth it?

The Unforgiven

I took the picture above 5 years ago in Rome. It is a stenciled image of an Abu Ghraib torture victim. As I toured Europe that summer, I saw photos everywhere of Muslim captives tortured by Americans, the type of photographs that would be considered "distasteful" in our media.

The whole world knows, and has known for 5 years, that Americans tortured prisoners under direct orders from the Bush administration. This is not up for debate. This is an established fact of historical record which has been irrevocably proven by the recent memos released by the Obama administration.

President Obama has chosen to release the documents which prove the government's sanction of barbarism. I suppose he deserves credit for that. But he has also stated that there will be no prosecutions, speaking of "healing", or of avoiding "persecution". This raises several problems.

Firstly, since when does the president of the United States decide which crimes will be prosecuted in this country? Does the president not swear to see that the law is "faithfully executed"? And is torture not against "the law"?

The idea that Barack Obama has the authority to decree who is beyond the reach of criminal prosecution is one of the thousand points of tyranny to which we are exposed daily and which go unnoticed, unremarked upon.

In MY country, the facts decide who is prosecuted, not the president. But I realize more and more than I don't live in MY country. The country I live in is no country for old men. I just never thought I'd be so old at 29.

Secondly, if prosecuting crimes would deprive us of "healing", why do we prosecute ANY crimes? Do we let murderers walk free in the interest of not "digging up the past", in the interest of seeking "healing"? Do we tell the murder victims' families, "let us focus on the future"?

In actuality, "healing" only comes when justice is attained, or at the very least aggressively sought. Obama aims to do neither.

Thirdly, since when is prosecuting someone for a crime akin to "persecution"? Did we "persecute" Timothy McVeigh? Did we "persecute" Ted Bundy? No. We prosecuted them.

Fourthly, how far does this blanket amnesty extend? There are two types of culprits. There are those with blood on their hands, and there are those with ink on their hands.

Those with blood on their hands, the Americans who physically committed the torture of captives, are entitled to the oldest defense on record (because the only TRUE defense, which is self-defense, is so purely self-evident that it does not NEED to be on record): "I was only following orders".

While we should be wary of this defense, it is sometimes meritorious, and there are considerable extenuating circumstances in this case. I am not comfortable at this point with the idea of prosecuting the torturers. Not because they are not guilty, but because they are far less guilty than others.

Those with the ink on their hands, the "lawyers" at the "Justice" Department who wrote the legal authorizations for illegal acts, are more guilty than the torturers in this case. These are the people who should be prosecuted first and foremost, and who President Obama should never have defended.

That a domestic and international crime against the Constitution and humanity itself was authorized and committed by the Bush administration is firmly in the realm of objective fact. We tortured. The Royal We. Our Government. It happened.

The question now is what laws are enforced. The question now is whether prosecution of government's crimes are called persecution and therefore avoided. The question now is why we have 2 million people in jail for stealing cars and selling marijuana, but no government officials in prison for ordering the animalization of human beings?

This has nothing to do with George Bush or the Republican Party or any other person or things so trivial and temporal. This is about who we are. This is about what we sweep under the rug and what we confront.

We swept slavery under the rug in 1776. We got the Civil War. We swept civil rights under the rug in 1865. We got a century of segregation. If we sweep torture under the rug now, what do we expect?

Why is Germany so peaceful and prosperous today? Because it confronted its sins. Why is Russia so dysfunctional and disconcerting today? Because it refused to do the same. Which course will we choose?

Self-introspection is horrifying, but only if we don't believe in our own worth. If we do believe in our inherent goodness and promise, introspection is liberating rather than horrifying. Most people never come to this realization. Most countries never do, either.

The Madness

I'm not precisely sure of the metrics, but I assume I've extended my life by at least one week for every one day I spend abstaining from "news" coverage. Partly this abstention has been driven by my desire to maintain my illusions about Barack Obama for at least 6 months. And partly this abstention has been driven by the realization that I, and everyone else I know, am considerably more honest and intelligent than most of the people we rely upon to stay informed.

I made the mistake of watching the "news" one night recently during which I was informed that President Obama is "slashing" the defense budget. After researching this claim on my own for approximately 20 seconds, I learned that the President is "slashing" the defense budget by a negative amount, which is to say that the President is increasing the defense budget.

Perhaps I shouldn't be shocked that facts and "news" are now officially in precise contradiction with one another, that a mirror-image synergy has been reached. Thusly, if the fact is that Obama increases the defense budget, the "news", naturally, is that Obama has "slashed" that budget.

The military industrial complex is perhaps the one segment of American society where rationality is least welcome. The American military industrial complex attained a level of armament 35 years ago that would allow it to kill every human being on earth. Did we stop there? Of course not.

The military industrial complex has nothing to do with defense. "Defense" is the appellation chose for "permanent and total global military domination" because the former sounds considerable more rational and necessary than the latter. In fact, the United States has truly needed "defense" just one time since 1812.

And in September of 2001, how did our trillions in investment pay off? How did our "Deparment of Defense" function? As I recall, our Department of Defense couldn't even defend itself.

No, the "defense" budget has nothing to do with defense. It has to do with building as many weapons as possible, and nothing more. Therefore, any cuts in any weapons production is seen as a suicidal "slashing of defense."

Let's think about fighter jets. We still spend billions of dollars per year on fighter jets. Fighter jets are intended only to fight other fighter jets. If we were rational people, we'd ask, "when was the last time we fought a country with fighter jets?" Well, Germany and Japan had a few jets.

American soldiers in the last 65 years have fought primarily with rifles, ironically enough. Given that, we might expect that our investments went to rifles and body armor. Instead, we build weapons that could only be useful if World War II started over again tomorrow.

So when we hear that Obama "slashed" our "defense", what actually happened was this: Obama increased defense spending. Within that spending, however, certain programs were cut back while the overall total increased.

So, if I went from spending 100 dollars per week on food to spending 120 dollars per week on food, but cut pork rinds and soda out of my diet, what sort of person would accuse me of "slashing food spending"? How does that happen?

It happens because the military-industrial complex has insidiously woven its amoral tentacles into every single congressional district in this country. So if Obama wants to cut back on plans for flying invisible tanks, the rationality of the decision doesn't matter. What matters is that individual pieces of the flying invisible tanks are made in every single congressional district.

Therefore, nobody will vote to cut this program, even if none of them can defend it. Even if the weapon does not and will never work. That doesn't matter. What matters is that the system has been designed to promote and protect irrationality. Only the government could protect waste so thoroughly and self-righteously.

It's akin to the cigarette tax. Cigarettes are now over 8 dollars per pack in my state. Cigarette smokers being perpetual targets of do-gooders, there are few shedding tears over this. But our enlightened leaders have set up a system whereby cigarette taxes pay for state-provided health care.

In other words, my state is dependent upon people smoking cigarettes. If nobody smoked cigarettes, our health care system would collapse. It takes a special kind of genius to dream this shit up. So, long story short, if you want to promote the health and safety of your fellow citizens, either start smoking or start a war.

Lawyer? Liar Trader? Traitor

This is an important blog to me for two reasons. The first is that it's my Ghostface Killah moment, where I belatedly reveal my face. The second reason is intimately linked to the first.

This is my face after a day of roofing, and etched on my face is precisely what has been derided in our get-rich-quick culture. The dirt on my face is just a little bit of the literal grit which elicits nothing but contempt from silver spoon suckers who insist that they can create "wealth" with amoral accounting and narcissistic definitions of "liberty".

The economic meltdown is difficult for "normal" people to understand. "Normal" in this case means "people who think debt is not an asset". Here's how bad our economic lever-holders fucked up: Marx's critique looks more relevant now than at any time in at least 70 years.

I don't mean that Marx's proposed solution is a good idea. His critique, however, has been proven surreally salient. "The capitalists will sell us the rope to hang them with". And that is what we've done.

In 1945, America produced 50% of the world's wealth. "Wealth" back then was directly connected to tangible goods with tangible worth. Gold. Oil. Food. Factories. Natural Resources. Educated citizens. Bridges. Stable banks. Et cetera.

Now, America's "wealth" is only vaguely associated with "things". Even accounting for the digital revolution, where music libraries are measured in invisible computer memory rather than physical stacks of records, we have gone off a cliff. And our neo-capitalists built the road to the cliff. They just neglected to tell us there was no bridge.

We also must take into account that, as a society's wealth increases, its citizens inevitably shift from agricultural and raw material processing to manufacturing and then to service industries. Service industries, by definition, produce "wealth" that is far less tangible than a bridge or a roof or a ton of grain.

In the last 24 hours, I've put a roof on a house and taught a class of high school juniors. These are different types of labor. But both of them can be seen to produce something of worth. There is no shame in the service sector, but there IS shame when a critical sector of the service sector (banks) completely forsake the actual foundation of American wealth, which will always be manufacturing tangible goods.

There used to be a bond between the manufacturing sector and the bankers of some sort. The roofers understood that the bankers had gone to college and knew better than anyone else how to safely invest the roofers' money. And the bankers understood that they would have no fucking idea what to do if it started raining in their house.

But something happened. It got to a point where the bankers forget whose money they were throwing around. They forgot whose money was making them rich. They forgot who kept the rain and snow out of their living rooms. They started to believe that the money was theirs, and that anyone who wanted to know what they were doing with that money was an insufferable meddler, an ignorant chump, a naive Luddite.

So, bankers no longer invested the wealth created by the broken backs of real men in municipal bonds or long-term savings accounts or other safe investments. Why? Did the roofers get greedy? Did the roofers start demanding 150% returns on their pension plans?

No. The bankers did. They couldn't settle with making a living off other peoples' money; their attitude is best encapsulated by Lil' Wayne: "fuck makin' a livin', man, I'm tryin' to make a killin'".

So, they took the wealth of America, the REAL wealth, the wealth created with blood, bones, sweat, sulfur, tears, and tire irons. And instead of investing all that wealth in the traditional market, which will inevitably yield a return (because capitalism DOES work when regulated) they invested it in the neo-market which could yield a HUGE return, but could just as easily result in instant catastrophe.

This was a gamble. And, being a libertarian, I acknowledge the bankers' right to take this gamble. But not with other peoples' money. Yet that is what they did. And they didn't tell the stakeholders that they were switching their investments from industries as stable as booze and ice cream to "industries" that even the most degenerate gambler would steer clear of out of sheer self-preservation. Unless someone else's money was in his pocket.

My collar has been light-blue for quite a while. I've rubbed shoulders with as broad an array of people as anyone else I know, and my anger here is not heated by an irrational resentment of educated folks or intellectuals. In fact, the heat is hotter, as well as brighter, precisely because I KNOW these people.

I know the people who create actual, tangible wealth. One of them is me. And I know the people who have nothing but contempt for these people and their place in society. And I wonder what sort of society we are inheriting when an investment banker judges his chances of making a windfall as paling in comparison to his sacred station of protecting the wealth of working Americans.

Capitalism has run a-fucking-muck. The whole idea of the Dow Jones index is absurd, a self-fulfilling and self-deluding rabbit-hole. When wealth is based upon tangible things that people actually need, that wealth can survive anything save physical destruction. When wealth is based upon gambling that mortgages and credit card bills don't default, that wealth can not survive anything. And, lo and behold, anything happened.