Yeah, Laura Bush, You Go and Criticize Other Countries’ Governments for Not Doing Enough to Save People from the Storm

Um, is there any reason to write anything else here?

Groups Advocating for Single-Payer Healthcare Should Stop Basing Their Organization on Screenings of Sicko

A couple of months ago, I joined one of probably a bunch of groups advocating for single-payer healthcare.  At the present time, if I’m going to do any activism, it’s going to be for groups that are trying to do something to alleviate the suffering of many working and unemployed people, including myself.  I still may work with a group of a more revolutionary perspective, especially if it’s a matter of helping them to get out their information, trying to spread a little good theory and consciousness…  But I think that, especially at the present time, the first priority of activism should be to try to increase the pressure for policies that will help to ease the suffering.  I have no patience for anyone who wants to argue that advocating for a public or social welfare plan is somewhow wrong or questionable because it supports the power of the state. 

Though, needless to say, my activism is very limited in general these days…  But it would be nice if I could contribute to the cause of trying to bring single-payer healthcare to this country, even if the chances of accomplishing that are kind of small - just like the chances of accomplishing many other goals that would help to make our country and our society a little more civilized.  The problem is, though, that I haven’t yet seen a group advocating for single-payer healthcare do anything that would really help increase the public pressure.  I’ve already said before that I think there should be more activity out in the streets.  (I hesitate to use the word “militant” here for obvious reasons, but maybe that is the best word to describe where we should be going. )  But at the very least, groups should be consistent by supporting those who really work for, not against, their goals.

And we have to ask ourselves what this guy Michael Moore really is doing to help bring about single-payer healthcare.  He’s got a movie called Sicko that is supposed to champion this cause, and groups who support the cause who can’t really think of much else to do at the moment tend to organize around screenings of the film.  (The group that I signed up with also pushes screenings of this film - though it might be unfair to say that’s what they organize around.  I would have to work with them a little more to see what else they do.)  But, aside from making this movie, what is Michael Moore doing in the political arena to advocate for this cause?  It appears that he is not working for the cause but against it…

Because he’s become a big advocate for Barack Obama.  He recently wrote an editorial that got bounced around the Net in which he enthused about the “Obama movement” and expressed his passionate commitment to the campaign.  (I don’t know exactly where the article is right now, unfortunately - but maybe I’ll dig up a link someime.)  Meanwhile, Barack Obama isn’t going to do a damn thing to bring us single-payer healthcare; in fact, he’s spoken against it.  Moreover, Obama doesn’t even seem to care about universal heatlhcare of any kind.  He doesn’t even seem to support a bad plan for universal healthcare; he seems perfectly content with the idea that a good number of Americans, especially adults, will remain without hope of getting health coverage.  (And, as it looks right now, I will continue to be one of those Americans.)

Should an advocate of single-payer healthcare really give such glowing, unqualified support to someone who opposes that policy?  It seems to me that if this cause is high on your list, then you should emphasize the fact that you will withhold support from anyone who won’t even consider the idea.

Meanwhile, I don’t think Moore’s films are all that good anyway.  Roger and Me was a nice surprise for its time (despite some obvious condescension here and there), but Farenheit 9/11 was a more mixed effort IMO, especially because of the way that it kept pointing the finger at Bush family ties, suggesting conspiracy with the Bin Ladens, when it should have delved much more into a critique of the whole system.  Additionally, I just find Moore’s political commentary in general to be kind of sloppy, and I’ve never been very impressed by him.

Anyway, if we are really to have a movement advocating for single-payer healthcare, the movement should bring in a lot of people who are suffering because of lack of healthcare.  I haven’t seen Sicko, but I understand that it doesn’t even discuss the real uninsured.  But the real uninsured are the people who know best how bad the present system is.  And people who are really suffering because of this atrocious situation don’t need to see a movie to learn how bad it is.  Especially not a movie made by someone who serves as the champion for politicians who oppose the very cause we’re supposed to be supporting…

Why I Dropped the Book Meme

I removed the book meme post because I decided I didn’t like it or my answers (sorry, Darren, hope you aren’t offended).  The truth is, I just don’t like novels a whole lot in general and haven’t for a long time (at least judging by those that I find published and sitting on the bookshelves), with some rare exceptions - and those exceptions can resonate with me, sometimes for a while.  But novels are a highly overrated medium, as far as I’m concerned, and they’ve never been the biggest influence on me.  (As I said, even back when I was reading a lot of fiction, I really liked short stories more.)  Also, if I were to list, say, the 26 novels that I did like the most or were the greatest (relative) influence on me, they certainly wouldn’t come out as one novel per each of 26 authors corresponding to each letter of the alphabet.  Those rules in the book meme were too restricting - and I didn’t find them fun.   Moreover, because of all those limits - only novels, one per author, one author per letter in the alphabet - I ended up typing a list that didn’t accurately reflect my present tastes or written influences.

—–

P.S.  Of course, my ideas about what I like or what influences me can change.  For instance, I was completely off movies for a long time, and then I got back into them - mainly through Indian movies, Bollywood and Kollywood.  (That’s one of many reasons why I’m spending all my time on the other blog now.)  But I think one reason for that - aside from this refreshing exposure that I got to movies from another culture and tradition - is that I started to watch movies in a different way, opening my mind up a little in terms of being able to appreciate different aspects of performance and production.

Maybe I’ll appreciate novels in a different way too sometime…

I like going through phases, always changing or, even better, expanding my influences and tastes, and I think I’m doing more of that now than I did when I was younger, especially more than when I was much younger.  (One way, once again, that I seem to go against the stereotypes and expectations that people have regarding aging or “maturity” - which I’m not necessarily proud of, because I think it would be smarter to fit into expected patterns, since people who do so get along much better in this world.)

More Agreement with Mickey Z.

This time in an interview at the blog Transmissions…  I agree very much with all of this:

On ending the war in Iraq:

I’m sure some confluence of events will impact the durability and/or feasibility of the US occupation. I’m also pretty sure those events will not involve anything that we call “activism” today.

On tactics:

If I randomly walked up to a man, kicked him in the nuts, and then smashed his face down onto my rising knee, I’d justifiably be vilified as a dangerous sociopath. If that same man was brutally attacking someone I loved (or anyone, for that matter) - perhaps even with a weapon - and I came along on the scene and promptly acted out the above scenario, would I still be a sociopath? The trouble is, once you give anyone “permission” to anyone to use force, they often abuse it. No easy answers for sure. Maybe Malcolm X said it best: “We are nonviolent with people who are nonviolent with us.”

On the “Good Old Days”:

The danger inherent in the Good Old Days (GOD) myth is twofold. Like all myths, its mere existence makes other illusions easier to swallow. If the GOD invention is accurate, the wars fought, the businesses started and subsidized, the legislation passed, the culture created, and the leaders elected in the GOD get a free ride on its coattails. We become a nation of people gazing backward for innocence lost rather than looking ahead for lessons learned. This is the second danger of the GOD fiction: disempowerment. By accepting that “the greatest generation any society has ever produced” roamed the earth some 50 to 70 years ago, we surrender new ideas and embrace whitewashed nostalgia. The answers, we acknowledge, are found in the past; all we have to do is slam on the brakes and throw our SUVs in reverse. A valuable step in fostering a more forward-thinking approach would be to expose the GOD for what they were-a mixed bag of good and not so good-like all such “days.” If we don’t buy into the mythology, it’s harder to convince us that most or all the solutions lie in the past.

On his home neighborhood, Astoria:

As much as I’m probably displaying irrational chauvinism toward my “homeland,” I genuinely appreciate having grown up in a true “neighborhood,” one in which you walk to get where you’re going and thus meet people – a staggering ethnic diversity, btw - face to face and create bonds.  Astoria is where one can live in New York City without Manhattan’s skyscrapers and maddening pace (just 10 minutes away by subway).  I wouldn’t want to have grown up anywhere else and I wouldn’t want to live anywhere else right now.

I have some of the same feelings about growing up in The Bronx.  I went through some rough times there, but I’m also glad that I grew up in a place where I could walk to where I was going (which contributed to the strange handicap that I have - at least it’s a strange handicap for an “American” - that I never learned to drive).  My neighborhoods in The Bronx were also quite ethnically diverse.

Western Queens is even more ethnically diverse.  I like visiting Astoria, as it has many of those same qualities that I enjoy from living in the area of east Woodside/west Jackson Heights.  I like my neighborhood even more because it’s a bit livelier and grittier (especially on Roosevelt Avenue) and though I’m often a very quiet and reclusive person (or maybe because I am), there’s a lot that I enjoy about being able to leave my apartment and immediately find myself in that kind of atmosphere.  (At the same time, though, it doesn’t have all the congestion and the overt rat-race aspects that you find when you take the 15-minute train ride into Manhattan.)  And I would venture to say that Woodside/Jackson Heights is even more diverse than Astoria.  Also, as everyone knows, I’ve gotten a lot of enjoyment out of living right next to the big “Little India” of Queens.  (Astoria, I guess, is best known for its traditionally Greek population, especially the Greek food.  Which is nice, but as far as I’m concerned, it doesn’t come close to Indian food.  And in Astoria, it isn’t quite as common when you walk down the main streets to hear reggaeton coming out of one car and bhangra from the next - I still get a kick out of that.)

I saw Mickey Z. give a good talk at a place in Astoria a short while back.  The event was sponsored by some liberals and people whom I would call “soft progressives,” and during the post-talk discussion, there were times when I felt I might be considered disruptive, because I felt compelled to point out some issues I had with the standard soft-progressive ideas about tactics, supporting the Democrats, etc.  I also felt that I had to point out that Ithere was a little lacking in the discussion with regard to class struggle.  But Mickey was very welcoming and supportive of my comments, at least in part because - as evident in his writings - he agrees much more with me than with most of the people who were sponsoring him. 

I meant to talk about some of Mickey’s ideas and writings earlier, but I’ve been a bit neglectful of this blog, as I’ve been occupied by a pressured but futile job search (with a lot of thanks to the economic policies of our ruling business parties) combined with a lot of involvement in my other blog, the music and culture one (which has been influenced a lot by my living in this diverse neighborhood and the cultural things that I’ve encountered constantly in my walks into Jackson Heights.)

So anyway, a belated welcome to the writings of Mickey Z., and I’ll probably be posting even more words from him that I agree with, sometime soon. 

Hope Is For Suckers - Yes, Indeed!

I couldn’t agree more with my fellow western-Queens-based revolutionary Mickey Z. when it comes to his thoughts about “hope”…  So here are a few excerpts from his excellent article “Hope Is For Suckers,” which I found at Infoshop:

“Hope is the worst of evils, for it prolongs the torments of man.” - Friedrich Nietzsche

We can’t give up hope, I’m often told.  Keep hope alive, the saying goes.  If we lose hope, nothing will ever change…or so they believe.  Well, I’m here to say:  Fuck hope.  We live on a planet brimming with hope yet that same planet is under perpetual assault…and the hopers are losing.  The corporations raping our eco-systems don’t hope they can steal more land, exploit it, poison it, and make boatloads of cash.  They make a plan and make it happen…damn the torpedoes.  (You might even call it “direct action.”)

. . .

“Hope is a bad thing,” sez Henry Miller. “It means that you are not what you want to be. It means that part of you is dead, if not all of you. It means that you entertain illusions. It’s a sort of spiritual clap, I should say.”

. . ,

Author Derrick Jensen explains the impotency of hope as good as anyone: “I’m not, for example, going to say I hope I eat something tomorrow. I just will. I don’t hope I take another breath right now, nor that I finish writing this sentence. I just do them.

. . .

How about some good old-fashioned anger, rage, and passion?  (Che sez: “If you tremble with indignation at every injustice then you are a comrade of mine.”)  Let’s forget hope and aim for vision, clarity, strategy, courage, and finally: some goddamned results.  “Creativity comes from trust,” sez Rita Mae Brown.  “Trust your instincts.  And never hope more than you work” (as they say in South Florida:  bingo).

At its worst, hope is a dangerous cop-out.  At best, it’s a frivolous idea.  But even so, as Henry Miller sez: “Ideas have to be wedded to action.”

Wedded, huh? Repeat after me: “I do.”

Interesting Ideas About The Foreclosure Crisis from Stop Me Before I Vote Again

I swear, this site called Stop Me Before I Vote again is more and more often voicing thoughts that have crossed my mind but which would normally seem incredibly politically incorrect on all alleged sides of the visible spectrum…  As was definitely the case in their post Closure = Foreclosure.

For instance, here’s one thought that’s crossed my mind a little, but which I don’t see discussed a whole lot:

 More and more people have gone into it, and decided it’s actually in their best interest to go into foreclosure because you basically get to live in the house free for a year and save up some cash while the proceedings grind on…and, because it stiffs the banks, deliberately letting your house go into foreclosure might actually be a new and innovative form of civil disobedience…

But here’s another thought - probably highly politically incorrect with the ostensible “left” - which has crossed my mind to a much greater degree:

…not to mention the fact that I’m having a really hard time summoning up any sympathy for all these people who signed onto the ARMs so they could have the cushy McMansion with the cathedral ceiling in the living room and the granite countertops in the kitchen.

The other day, when I accidentally saw ten minutes of CNN, they were running a profile of a two-earner couple who are now living at a public campsite after losing their big cushy house, featuring the wife wistfully talking about the granite countertops, and whining about how the bank hustled her and her husband into signing onto the ARM and how they were “lied to” by the bank.

Seems like the only time CNN and the like try to show any sympathy for “homeowners,” it’s these lily-white couples who went for the bamboozle because they somehow thought they were entitled to the big cushy pad.  There’s little concern for the millions of people who’ll never be able to afford the illusion of owning their own home…uh, that is, what we call “homeownership.”  These folk are lucky to even be able to afford rent on a decent apartment anywhere in this goddamn country anymore.

“Able to afford rent on a decent apartment”?  Damn, that would be a dream.

Would someone like to bail me out for the credit card debt that I incurred taking out cash advances during the last recession so that I could pay the rent on a cheap share?

(I probably shouldn’t even type that because you never know who’s watching…  Sometimes it feels as though I must live like a fugitive because I committed the crime of losing jobs to personnel cuts and layoffs.  Which just happened again a couple of months ago.)

Anyway, yes, I’ve been wondering too why even the “left” is focusing all this attention on foreclosures while we don’t hear anything about what can be done for renters who aren’t even going to be able to afford the little housing that they had as the economic crisis grows deeper.

Not that there shouldn’t be some efforts to stop foreclosures…  But as they indicated at SMBIVA, please don’t let the issue of foreclosure overshadow the issue of people who have to struggle to keep a roof over their heads though they never paid out a penny to buy anything.

Are We Really Taking “The Seven Steps to Revolution”?

Also at Stop Me Before I Vote Again (going a little further back), a post linking to an article in Campaign for America’s Future (a blog that defines itself as “the strategy center for the progressive movement”) about how present conditions are leading us down The Seven Steps To Revoluton.   According to a key passage in this article:

There’s something implacable, earnest, and righteously angry in the air.  And it raises all kinds of questions for burned-out Boomers and jaded Gen Xers who’ve been ground down to the stump by the mostly losing battles of the past 30 years.  Can it be - at long last - that Americans have, simply, had enough?  Are we, finally, stepping out to take back our government - and with it, control of our own future?  Is this simply a shifting political season - the kind we get every 20 to 30 years - or is there something deeper going on here?  Do we dare to raise our hopes that this time, we’re going to finally win a few?  Just how ready is this country for big, serious, forward-looking change?

Recently, I came across a pocket of sociological research that suggested a tantalizing answer to these questions - and also that America may be far more ready for far more change than anyone really believes is possible at this moment.  In fact, according to some sociologists, we’ve already lined up all the preconditions that have historically set the stage for full-fledged violent revolution.

Personally speaking, though, I’ve seen that speculation a few too many times already, at different stages of our unmistakable decline over the years.  Hence, I wonder if it might be a bit too optimistic.

Some people have accused me of being a bit too optimistic when I somewhat endorsed theories about the decline or decay of capitalism.  I do think there is a real systemic decline in capitalism (internationally) that goes well beyond business cycles and capital’s seemingly endless ability to recuperate.  And there is some comfort, I admit, in the belief that the system is really going down for good, rather than just becoming harsher and harsher for so many people of the world (while the ruling capitalists in the long run continue to thrive).  But that comfort is very thin, because a decline in the system does not automatically mean the birth of a new and better system to replace it (e.g., real communism or socialism).  As I’ve also said before (repeating the ideas of people who’ve been much more articulate in discussing these ideas than I am), we really could just continue sinking into barbarism.

If we are to hope for a revolution, we should make a distinction between that and the liberal notion that we will “take back our government.”  While I’ll gladly support many of the policies of people who say that we should “take back our government” (hence I’ll gladly support something like the Nader campaign, for the issues that it might bring to the public forum, and therefore the extreme limits of the major-party candidates that it might illuminate just a little), the whole idea that we can “take back” our government or “our country” conveys a perspective that is not very revolutionary.  If we want a revolution, it’s not because we want to return to some mythical better days (especially not days under the present system), but because we want to move forward into a system that is better than ours has been all along.  And one problem with our system all along is that we never really had “our government” or America to take back.  We may have had a worsening of conditions in the Bush years, but in many ways, that has simply been in an increase in tendencies that have existed for a much, much longer time. 

Put more succinctly,  a revolution would not be ”taking back” things that we thought we once had but lost recently (because of those evil Republicans, etc.); it would be finally taking things that we never had.

And will our country ever be on the road such a revolutionary change?  (Or, a better question might be, will the world be ready? - since “revolution in one country” is an idea that has been discredited somewhat over the years.)   It’s hard to say, but I’m not feeling optimistic.  I don’t see the consciousness and awareness out there.  There might be a lot of mounting dissatisfaction, which will make it more difficult for our political and economic rulers to carry out their policies with any appearance of public consent.  That’s kind of like a silver lining in some very thick clouds.  (Though even that tendency could be set back, in the short term, by widespread illusions about some corporate-controlled, politically “centrist” leader (which means a very conservative leader on the world spectrum) who talks a lot about “change.”  Albeit, it looks less likely that those illusions will take hold the way they seemed to be doing a month or two ago.)  But I think any talk about how we’re following these historic steps to revolution might be awfully premature.  I wouldn’t say I’m certain about that - revolutions historically have happened when many people least expected them.  But based on what I see and know myself, I certainly wouldn’t predict it right now. 

“The Un-Uncola” (from Stop Me Before I Vote Again)

I love this passage from one of my favorite blogs of coverage on the primaries, Stop Me Beofore I Vote Again.  About The Un-Uncola:

I’ve had a few conversations with Obama supporters.  These folks are not, admittedly, the perfervid young True Believers depicted in will.i.am’s You-Tube videos - more like grizzled old liberals still hoping, hoping, for a break in the weather, a break that hasn’t come since the ’40s and certainly doesn’t appear to be imminent.

What these folks always end up saying is something like this:  Well, he’s better than Hillary, isn’t he?

Of course they’re right.  It would be hard to be worse.  But note that we now have a recursion of lesser-evillism.  We vote for the Democrats because they’re “not as bad” as the Republicans - and among Democrats, we support Obama because he’s “not as bad” as Hillary.  The Democrats are the un-Republicans, and Barak is the un-Hillary - a double-Un!

There’s a nightmarish Achilles-and-the-tortoise quality to this reasoning - the sort of vertiginous slide down through orders of magnitude that you get in fever dreams.  How small could these distinctions get before quantum effects would begin to be felt?

Lots of “Action” in the Comments Section

Well, I wouldn’t exactly call it action, but I’ve delved into extended commentary and debate in the comments section of the last post.  I did a similar thing, in a different way, in the comments section for my comments on the Rolling Stone article on Brad Will.  (I know, that looks a bit confusing, but how else to I describe it?)  I’m choosing to keep these debates in the comments sections because I don’t have the inclination, time or energy to focus the main part of the blog on these lengthy discussions - i.e., making the debates within the comments sections into regular posts (as I might once have done) might invite a little too much more of the same.

I wrote a longer post ruminating over the condition and fate of the main sections of the posts in this blog but I decided to delete most of that - probably sparing a lot of people a bit of hardship on the eyes…

At The Music Blog - A Video by Ralph Nader and Patti Smith

Yes, Ralph Nader and Patti Smith, together.  (Speaking of all those influences going back to the mid ’70s…)  I talk more about it there too.