cheese it, the cops!

What if Donald Trump is really the Joker but with as a result of inbreeding just has a lower IQ?

Just wondering about a few things. 

My latest piece of at Veterans News Today. We're kind of banned by Facebook these days, and I'm ok with that. It seems pretty clear that while we all must be insane to think that writing for an alternative media independent and intentionally unbridled will in any way accomplish or gain anything. Hell, we don't even get T-shirts.

“Logicians have but ill defined /As rational, the human kind; Reason, they say, belongs to man,/But let them prove it, if they can. Wise Aristotle and Smiglesius,/By ratiocinations specious, Have strove to prove with great precision,/With definition and division, Homo est ratione præditum;/But, for my soul, I cannot credit ’em. And must, in spite of them, maintain/That man and all his ways are vain;  And that this boasted lord of nature/ Is both a weak and erring creature. That instinct is a surer guide /Than reason-boasting mortals pride; And, that brute beasts are far before ’em…” Jonathan Swift, The Battle of the Books, 1697

Enjoy, and Slainte!

trump and i

[how donny did the eclipse]

 

alright, i'm going to tell you, guiltily, what i like about trump, why i keep returning to a seemingly sympathetic tone, or why i sometimes 'relate,' though i utterly reject his politics. on the charlottesville weekend, i wrote this on saturday. (on saturday a counter-demonstrator was killed by a white supremacist, trump gave a lame reaction or a 'both sides do it' sort of thing. then on monday he said exactly what everyone demanded he say. then on tuesday he went off, in the disastrous way that finally convinced me that he actually is sympathetic to white supremacism.) 

through my life, i have done a lot of saying what i was not supposed to say, from the slightly continually inappropriate to the in-your-face transgression. i have calmed down a lot through the years, actually, but i definitely have an impulse, in any given situation, to feel for the verboten position, word, line of jive, and then find a way to deliver it, perhaps with a slant that makes it a bit hard to interpret. when i feel that people are telling me what to say, i have a vivid physical sensation of constraint; i might comply for awhile; ultimately it won't go well. the peeceer the people around me, for example, the more i talk wrong, or work on ways to undermine the constriction.

this impulse, i feel, has stood me in good stead many a time, and if you ever want a counter-consensus position, i am the wholesale outlet. it's led me to important moral insights, i believe, including that the political state is completely incompatible with any decent ethics whatsoever. but it will also tempt me toward the dark side, toward, for example, the views that are the opposite of the pc views. but that they're not pc, of course, does not entail that they are not evil, and so on. i sort of sometimes end up on the wrong side even by my own lights.

trump has that same set-up, which is more or less why i connect with him. whatever his views on race, etc, his very being was rebelling at the notion that everyone was writing a script for him, that they didn't care what he thought as long as he said a pre-rehearsed set of words that anyone could write in their sleep. that press conference tuesday was his whole being just saying 'fuck you'; he was chomping at the bit; he had the sensation of a release from physical constraint, of selfhood and self-respect and defiance. but he also expressed considerable sympathy with fucking neo-nazis, alright? you cannot have that in a pres of the united states, however he got there.

on the other hand

total pacifism and resulting anarchism from william lloyd garrison:

We cannot acknowledge allegiance to any human government; neither can we oppose any such government by a resort to physical force. We recognize but one King and Lawgiver, one Judge and Ruler of mankind. We are bound by the laws of a kingdom which is not of this world, the subjects of which are forbidden to fight; which has no state lines, no national partitions, no geographical boundaries; in which there is no distinction of rank, or division of caste, or inequality of sex; and which is destined to break in pieces and consume all other kingdoms.

(amdef 152)

i'll just remark again that no matter who drew the conclusion (tolstoy, for example) or who did not, anti-statism follows obviously from pacifism, because the political state rests on force.

garrison was a big hero of my step-father, richard abell, who was a beloved teacher at sidwell friends in dc and walt whitman in montgomery county, md. of granite new hampshire stock, like nathaniel rogers, he was a quaker on and off, a conscientious objector in world war 2, and a draft counselor during vietnam. during his co service, he contracted polio and used a wheelchair after that. also, like garrison, he was a free speech fundamentalist: a lifetime supporter of the aclu, among other causes.

[richard and my son samuel abell sartwell, rolling around the farm in rappahannock county, va on the 'richmobile'. a handicapped-accessible organic vegetable farm. my mom still lives there.]

he took me to a few quaker meetings. silence is hard when you're 14 and known informally as 'the mouth.' well, 50 minutes of silence is still hard for me as an adult. i've had some influxes of spirit, though, in such circumstances. one thing that's helping in my time of trial is the beautiful quaker document a testament of devotion, by thomas r. kelly.

 

 

the real hip hop

amdef, p. 99:

Who are the white people that we should fear them? They cannot run fast, and are good marks to shoot at. They are only men; our fathers have killed many of them. We are not squaws, and we will stain the earth red with blood.

--Tecumseh (1812)

department of defiance

 

american defiance is out in paper, with kindle coming soon. it is a collection of anti-authoritarian texts stretching from anne hutchinson's defense against and attack on the puritan theocracy to voltairine de cleyre's "anarchism and american traditions."

there are some celebrated slices, especially emerson and thoreau, but there is so much that is so little known. i've tried to give whole texts or very substantial parts. john woolman's 'plea for the poor' from the 1760s anticipates the arguments of peter singer. sarah grimke's letters on the equality of the sexes is probably the first feminist book published in the us, and she's better than fuller, i think. william lloyd garrison argues for total anti-statism in 1838. sitting bull lures a reporter into the new york herald's last stand. there is a really stunning and ground-breaking essay on race by frederick douglass that is almost never read (better than dubois 50 years later), along with a big chunk of david walker's unbelievable appeal. angela heywood throws down some surrealist political sex poetry. anti-federalists, abolitionists, anarchists, and antinomians are all represented. 

this is our most radical and most american heritage: a fierce anti-hierarchical tradition, the texts themselves sometimes unimaginable acts of defiance. we need remindin.

in editing this book, i am appointing myself secretary of defiance. these texts constitute our artillery battery, our canon.

rogers in paper on capital punishment

i've gotten hold of a couple of copies of the paperback of *herald of freedom: essays of nathaniel rogers, american transcendentalist and radical abolitionist; it looks pretty good; very serviceable; images came out ok.

Responding to the idea that God the Father demands capital punishment, Rogers writes as follows.

What would one of these fathers, here on earth, think of his family of children, who should set up such an institution, out of his door-yard where they go to play, and should string up little Charley or Anna or whoever by the neck, for some childish misdemeanor, done without permission of the majority of them? How would he feel - the depraved old gentleman - coming out, some time, to enjoy the glee of the young ones, to find one of them dangling by the neck, and older brother Sam, or Jim, standing dismally by, as Chaplain? And then Jim or Sam roll up the white of their eyes, and charge him with having ordained what they had been about.

 If the family are of a gibbety temper and character, why let them have gibbets and be hanged to them. And if they don't hate one another quite bad enough for that, and do, for shutting up in dungeons for life or for years - let them have dungeons. Or fine or whip or crop ears, or whatever the family are malignant and hateful enough, to do. When they come to love one another, they will leave it off. Cross children will snap at each other and quarrel. Deprave them sufficiently, make them bad enough, and they will strangle one another.

 

executed in self-defense

 

i saw the end of the judge's presentation in the brelo case in cleveland. now, maybe there is a point to the idea that, in a situation where 12 officers are riddling a car with bullets, you can't tell which shot was fatal. i would think that's a good argument for prosecuting them all, actually. but judge john p. o'donnell quite gratuitously exonerated all the officers (though only one was on trial) by the end, saying that they all had an objectively reasonable belief that they were in immediate danger. offhand, that seems ridiculous to me: they were no more in danger than any other firing squad engaging in an execution. then again, it doesn't take much to make cowards feel endangered.

 

5

10:20 cnn reporter miguel marquez, getting pushed away by police from people who are getting arrested: "are we under martial law? we have a right to work." "i think the constitution still applies." " this is a curfew, not a police state."

10:10 one possible issue: the police might be angry. put down the fucking sticks.

10:07 baltimore is interesting tonight. the curfew itself has become the issue, and it would really be a shame to straight-up provoke a problem in a fundamentally happy city by sheer military-style occupation. the occupiers are themselves the issue tonight; the massed national guard, the horses, and so on. i don't think that curfews in general can be constitutional, for one thing. but if things go bad tonight, they have only themselves to blame.

day 4

10:30 maybe it's going to be relatively quiet tonight after all.

10:17 fox sent geraldo rivera, for pity's sake.

9:38 the argument about 'thug' is completely characteristic of today's political discourse. megyn kelly is bashing people about it right now on fox: folks are 'thug is a racialized term'. right, replies megyn. so you're saying that obama and rawlings-blake are racists? because i look at barack obama and i don't see a racist. really, they're snickering about it. for god's sake argue about something rather than nothing. i realize that nothing is easier to deal with than something. people really do have a straight-up magical account of language. words are powerful. they're probably at home right now doing incantations to control the weather, or folding up the names of their enemies on slips of paper and setting them on fire. 'words are powerful' is prologue to the censorship. people think that not saying 'thug' or finding some new euphemism or whatever would address the problem. the prohibition on 'racialized language' is fundamentally how white racism went unconscious. i can't be a racist because i don't us the wrong words. but every word has a dozen close synonyms; you just have the same thoughts in slightly different terms. people think that is substantial improvement. protesters or criminals? i don't know, they are doing what they're doing. you can see it. call it whatever, you haven't changed it.

9:15 note on the march route in philadelphia: the federal detention center is a block from the national constitution center. the former certainly gives a clearer, more honest picture of what america is. they should just toss the schoolkids in there when they come to see the liberty bell and let them fend for themselves.

8:32 seriously it's quite as though they are trying to provoke (and justify) violence. hard to know, but this might be pretty different than the last couple of nights.

8:27 where is barack obama? our first black president is our second white richard nixon. country's kind of teetering on the brink right now. i guess i am, as expressed at 8:15. 

8:15 honestly? i'd be responding by theorizing that the police threw those molotov cocktails at themselves. for very good reasons, they wanted to self-immolate. part of their relentless pursuit of justice. to serve and protect. or just to serve up some good pork barbecue. or, to back off a second: maybe before you served up some ridiculous evil bullshit, you should have thought about just how angry that would make people.

8:05 yo it is tough in philly right now. this is pretty amazing; certainly unprecedented since the 60s: multiple american cities in serious civil unrest. seems like police have let them onto 95? hard to see exactly where they are. at any rate, right near my lover jane irish's place. no i guess they diverted them.

5:05 you'd have to be truly bent to take seriously the police leaks about how freddie gray assaulted himself. this is one of many things that show you who we're dealing with, and who the people of baltimore have been dealing with for a long time. quite the vicious piece of self-defense, and one that will help you assign credibility to whatever report may someday be produced. there may be no solution short of getting rid of absolutely everyone who has ever in any official capacity been anywhere near the baltimore police. these people expect to have credibility because of their 'authority' and outfits and stuff. when that finally dissolves...never respect, for example, the president in virtue of the fact that he is the president; that's mere self-subordination. and surely any superficial acquaintance with american history etc would teach a rational being that presidents or police chiefs etc are no better - no smarter, no more decent or truthful - than average among human beings. i'm not saying they're not worse, however.

4:55 one thing i like is that it took the authorities 40 years to realize that the 'war on drugs' wasn't working, or that it was an insane racist nightmare relying on the principle that the state has a right to control your body and immediate environment: a total assertion of the legitimacy of tyranny. now even hillary clinton is pretending to re-think. but really, we're just going to continue to place our lives in the hands of politicians who are this immune to reality. we ourselves might be immune to empirical evidence about what political 'leaders' are: how smart, how worthy of our deference and trust. every time it didn't work for forty years, that was an argument for redoubling our efforts to incarcerate all black men or whatever. the sudden realization now is sad and stupid and based merely on polling.

4:40 as a matter of fact, philly is in the house. 'philly is baltimore'.

arms race

i think that the militarization of the police indicates that we had better strap and armor up. i heard one of these defend-the-popo kind of guys saying that the message of the garner case was 'comply with the police'. i'd elaborate on that: comply. comply unto death. but if, contrary to my advice, you are not going to comply, you may find yourself needing to resist with extreme prejudice. you don't have to be a cop to choke someone out, baby.