My Recommendation for Super Tuesday: DON’T VOTE. STAY HOME.

This is not an anti-voting diatribe.  I never advocated staying home from the polls on principle (unless it can be part of a visible and organized boycott, which it never is), and I’m always sympathetic to the what-the-hell approach to pulling that lever on Primary Day and Election Day.  I am always willing to lend an ear, and sometimes an opinion, when there seems to be even a miniscule political difference between candidates.   (An ear, that is, to those who feel they must select a Democrat, since I don’t think that I ever encoutner people who would seriously be agonizing about which Republican to choose.)   But this year, at this time, there is absolutely none.

And it’s a shame that we’re left with absolutely no choice this time - for some reason, it’s much worse, much earlier, than it was in 2004.

There was one guy up to a short time ago who actually took a decent stand on some issues.  His name was Dennis Kucinich.  In 2004, I held onto my membership in the Democratic Party (even though I’d long ago given up any belief or faith in that entity) so that I could vote for him as my lame little protest against the usual candidates when I had a little extra time and nothing else to do.   But this time around, even if I had registered in time to vote in the New York City Democratic Primary, I wouldn’t have the chance to vote for him, because he dropped out.

Then there’s this guy named John Edwards.  His political record showed him to be just about the same as the other “major” candidates, but at least he paid lip service to the problem of growing economic inequality, even approaching the issue of class division in this country.  In terms of what he was saying, he was far better than his two adversaries among the “major candidates”; at least there was a chance he might have gotten a few people thinking or talking about certain things that the other two wouldn’t.  For that reason alone, I was thinking that if I had actually registered in time to vote in the Democratic Primary, I might be tempted to vote for him.  But Edwards took that thought away from me with his hasty departure.  So, there’s no longer a John Edwards on the ballot anymore either.

That leaves two candidates between which there is absolutely no political difference!  (And sorry if I’m repeating myself…)

Sometimes I think that I’d actually like to see Hillary Clinton win it because Obama is such a fake.  The fact that he is fooling some people into thinking that supporting him is somehow “progressive” could very well make him more dangerous to the left.  But really, what’s the danger to the left these days, anyway, considering that the situation can’t get any worse?  There is no left left; it will have to start from scratch; there’s nothing left for these delusions about Obama to ruin.

And, of course, no one has any such delusions about Hillary, I wouldn’t think.  The only people who would consider Hillary progressive or liberal (let alone a leftist) are the hard right wingers and all the people they’ve duped.  But there’s no point in my talking about them, because most of those people are utterly incomprehensible to me.

So, more than ever before, more than in any other primary, we have Tweedledee vs. Tweedledum.  If anybody sees a real political difference between them, let me know.  (Oh, yeah, Obama supposedly opposed the war in Iraq - though in 2004, I seem to remember him saying that he didn’t know how he would have voted on granting Bush those powers.  But I don’t exactly see Obama being at all anti-war in other ways - he wants to expand the military and he said he would bomb Pakistan.   He admired military men all his life, and he loves Ronald Reagan.  How is he any less an imperialist war monger than Hillary Clinton or any of the others still in the running?  And by the way, how’s his great healthcare plan?)

So, as far as I’m concerned, even if you are a voter and a reformist and you are far more “moderate” than I am, there is no point in voting on primary day.  (And once again, I hope I’m not repeating myself too much…)

And come the General Election, I might as well say it right now:   I personally would not pull a lever for either of the major party candidates, whichever scoundrels finally get into the final slots.  I, personally, will probably be voting for Ralph Nader again.  (Yes, the rumor is that he’s probably planning now to run again.)   And if Ralph decides not to run after all or he does or says something that disgusts me, I’ll vote for one of the obscure socialists.   There’s also a chance that I’ll stay home from the polls on Election Day if there’s a real organized boycott (unlikely) or if I have something better to do.

And those in an nutshell, my dear (three or four) readers, are the Commie Curmudgeon’s recommendations and endorsements for the Vote of 2008.

(I suppose people still will be voting, but I wish we could all find something better to do.)   

Brad Will In Rolling Stone - Some Thoughts About That Article, Another One, and Other Stuff

So, apparently there’s a cover story about Brad Will in Rolling Stone.  I haven’t seen the issue (maybe it’s not out yet), but through some other sites, I landed upon a page from a Crimethinc site that has the story in its entirety.  It also has some dialogue about whether or not it was a sellout for a friend of Brad’s to write a story like this for a corporate-run paper, etc.

Personally, I don’t care about the  sellout problem (though it would be awfully nice to earn big bucks writing about such matters, if only I’d learned how to play the game)…but I would argue that when it comes to stories about contemporary anarchists, only one kind of article makes it into the big, corporate-run magazines (at least where the supposedly “positive” stories are concerned).  That’s the human-interest, anecdote-filled, bio-type piece.  And with all due respect to the writer of this story, this typifies such a piece in the way it’s written, organized, the whole general style.

I remember some years back when I was deeply involved in the organizing of a New York City event called the Intergalactic Anarchist Convention…  Brad was part of that, and Priya/Warcry (also mentioned in the Rolling Stone piece) was considered the sort of leader of that.  I think I did more work on that event than she or anyone else did (though Warcry would probably argue with that), but the sloppy journalist who reported on the event didn’t even mention me, because she based most of her reporting about the benefit on one night out of  the three days when they had the big party (which I actually skipped because I was exhausted) and just reported it as though everybody involved was at the party, the things that they said were all that mattered, and it wasn’t necessary to do any fact-checking.  The article was also mostly a star piece for Warcry, which pissed a few people off.  But none of that bothered me so much as the style in which it was written, and its emphasis.  It was just dripping with that “human interest” biographic flavor.

The Village Voice story also deliberately created a picture that would conform to certain expectations and stereotypes.  Such as, the idea that this event was run by, and populated by, lovably naive and very young idealists.  Of course, that’s not entirely true.  There were certainly a few older people involved, especially behind the scenes, but the journalist wanted to create some dramatic picture of the next generation of super idealists being passed the big torch.  So…  Overblown generalizations coated in lots of sweet stuff (which some considered positive but might also have been considered condescending), without much word about the concrete ideas that people were committed to and the actual debates taking place.

The story on Brad Will in Rolling Stone is good for what it is, probably much better than that Village Voice thing.  But while it talks about anarchists, it doesn’t really say a whole lot about the concrete ideas that different anarchists believe in and the reasons they were commiting themselves to certain things.  It doesn’t say a whole lot about the situation in Oaxaca, either.  (OK, it touches on this stuff - I’m realizing now upon a second reading, but not a whole lot and not so prominently.  It’s all just sort of buried under the human-interest stuff.)

And one more thing - I’m sorry to say this, but it seems that some of the things said in this article aren’t really so accurate.  Some of the things here are slightly off, from what I remember, and seem to have been described in certain ways specifically for the right dramatic effect.

For instance, the first paragraph of the story seems waay off to me:

Even before he was killed by a Mexican policeman’s bullet, Brad Will seemed to those who revered him more like a symbol—a living folk song, or a murder ballad—than like a man.  This is what the thirty-six-year-old anarchist-journalist’s friends remember:  tall, skinny Brad in a black hoodie with two fists to the sky, Rocky-style, atop an East Village squat as the wrecking ball swings; Brad, his bike hoisted on his shoulder, making a getaway from cops across the rooftops of taxicabs; Brad, locked down at City Hall disguised as a giant sunflower with patched-together glasses to protest the destruction of New York’s guerrilla gardens. 

I’m sorry, but I don’t remember things this way.  Did people really “revere” Brad in this way for doing those particular things?  He was offbeat, he was eccentric, he was quite a hippie, he was very knowledgeable about certain tactics in civil disobedience, and maybe some people really liked him (while some really didn’t), but I don’t remember the Che Guevara quality being added to his public persona until after his death.  (And by the way, as I said before, I got to like Brad…  Not for the big antics that occurred at big events, but for a couple of thoughtful conversations that I eventually got to have with him, when we had a chance to sit down and talk sometime.  To his credit, I think people liked him for those personal interactions, not because his activities at big events made him into some kind of rock star.)

Anyway, the tearing down of the squats was very dramatic, and lots of people chained themselves to objects like fire escapes, etc., while the police stormed the places dressed in all sorts of crazy gear.  (Actually, I wrote my own little journalistic-type piece, which I spread around the Internet, about a young woman I knew who’d chained herself to the fire escape of the squat known as Dos Blocos, while the police emerged from some kind of tank they’d brought in, dressed in these germ-warfare-type outfits that looked like something from The Andromeda Strain.)  So, of course there were very strange and dramatic moments (with quite a few people dressed in black hoodies), but I don’t remember anybody getting ”revered” for these scenes.  (That’s my perspective, of course - anyone is free to tell me that I’m wrong…) 

The gardens events were places where quite a few people dressed up in big, ridiculous costumes, usually as vegetables or flowers.  Brad did nicely with his sunflower costume, but I don’t remember this being something he was doing that set him apart from everyone else.  In fact, there was another guy I know of there who had much more of a reputation for dressing himself up as big flowers and that sort of thing.  And (gettng to another line in the article, somewhere else) that other guy was more the guy who organized people into the “media-savvy civil-disobedience corps.”

Not to take anything away from Brad’s legacy, but…  If the writer of this article wanted to create an accurate picture, why didn’t he mention that there were many, many people who sported these big costumes, precisely to get attention from the press?  And why did he phrase it as though Brad was the chief organizer of the gardens protests when he wasn’t?  (I guess that would detract from the dramatic center of the story, or something like that?)

So, anyway, in the first paragraph and in some other places, we’re given a picture that isn’t exactly, well…complete, not from my first-hand memory of things.

But it always seems to me that there’s some distortion or other to contend with whenever I read articles that try to create some human-interest drama based in this scene that I experienced that relatively few other people know about…

And, I’m sorry, but to sum it all up, this kind of article just kind of annoys me, sometimes a whole lot…  I wish that some of these stories about radicals, anarchists, etc., could be written a little differently, without so much concern about creating the right (and familiar) dramatic effect.

I wish somebody could write an article in the mainstream press - and in some big magazine, not just a newspaper that’s going to disappear the next day - that discussed some of the nitty-gritty stuff that went through people’s minds during radical protests, the ideas, the differences, the arguments, etc.   If they wrote about all this other stuff, it might not be as ”positive” as these human-interest pieces.  But to me, at least, it would actually be more interesting, because it would be different from the sort of story that we see in the big press again and again.

For instance, I think it would be a lot more accurate - and more interesting to me, at least - if somebody actually wrote something about the three-hour meetings full of contentious arguments that went on before, say, an anti-globalization protest, rather than just depicting spontaneous actions of lovable young idealists (or crazy, violent young idealists, depending on the perspective).   Or even better, when people put on a benefit…  If you want to write an article that’s positive about the people involved in putting on the thing, how about talking about all the work that went into it, and all the arguing, and all the complicated logistics, and the exhaustion that they got through - all the real stuff that the real adults who did stuff had to contend with - rather than making it look as though everybody was just  having some barely planned 21st-century love-in?

Anyway,  I guess I’ve ranted enough… I just had to get some of this “out of my system” (haven’t had a chance to be a curmudgeon - not a REAL curmudgeon - for a while). 

Now That the Economy’s Officially Bad, All These Stories Come Out About How It’s Been Hard on Some People All Along

Yes, funny how that goes.  Now that the well-to-do and heads of state also are experiencing worry and dissatisfaction with the direction of the economy, a bunch of news comes out from the mainstream/corporate press about how it hasn’t been so good for so many workers and poor people for quite some time.  Nonetheless, it is good that they’re publishing these stories: 

Highly Skilled And Out Of Work: Long-Term Joblessness Spreads in Middle Class - from the Washington Post.  Correct for the most part, though I don’t know why most of these long-term jobless would still be defined as “middle class.”  Maybe because we’re in a country that’s still so stuck on cultural definitions of class.

Poor People Still Suffering from Last Recession  - from Reuters/Yahoo.  Nice that they’re mentioning this.  Though yours truly is tempted to answer this with a loud “Well, doh!”  But there probably are a good number of people who’ve been sheltered from this reality.

 Blue-Collar Jobs Disappear, Taking Families’ Way of Life Along  - from the New York Times, found through a reference from Our Man Flint.  A central theme to this story is how people in their 30s and 40s have to move back in with their parents rather than  helping their elderly parents out while living in their own homes, which used to be the more normal case.  Actually, it’s nice that they have that option to move back in with their parents.  But not nice that a guy with an associate’s college degree is working in a McDonalds and another guy who earned $66,000 a year before now must settle for $20,000.  (Though $20K doesn’t look like total poverty to me, because I had to settle for less than that for quite a few years (albeit working fewer hours than a full-time worker in fast food), and it is still a lot more than a lot of people are earning.  However, it’s a little disturbing if this decline from $66K to $20K is the sign of a major trend - especially considering that the rich have been getting far richer all along.) 

Economic Doom Watch Advisory

I believe that’s how the terminology changes when a storm that has been watched for has finally arrived, or at least is due at any moment.  Is there anybody doubting the doomsaying now?  If it’s not the whole system coming down (which might take a lot longer, with a lot more suffering in the future), at the very least we’ve got a serious downturn.

As usual, I seem to be among the early victims of the new recession - just lost my long-term wage stint, and I’m not optimistic about finding something to replace it anytime soon.  (When I was first told that this layoff of sorts was likely, I was also told that it would be only temporary…but when it finally happened (after much talk for a little while), things had already gotten a lot gloomier.  So, I’m definitely not counting on that “temporary” part anymore.)

It’s hard to resist the urge to tell a lot of people, “I told you so.”  But “I told you so” is not so enjoyable in this case.  Clearly, many people who might qualify to say “I told you so” are going to be among the first ones to suffer the consequences.  The system is not going to reward people for speaking the truth (nor, in most cases, will it even allow their words to be heard except by a handful of comrades), and with the exception of a few stars here and there (academic or some other kind), most of the people who saw and spoke the truth  are going to get smacked down by this thing that they didn’t want to see happen yet had no power to stop.  The people who are going to suffer least, or at least avoid real suffering for the longest time, are those who were most willing and able to help perpetrate the scam.   (Usual story - this is capitalism, after all.)

Sometime, I’ll collect some good new links about this crash…  Though right now, it doesn’t seem as necessary because you can see it all over the mainstream news. 

Over At the Other Blog: Some Arundhati Roy

I used to nitpick about her writing and I still like her fiction more than her other works.  But these days, all the stuff that she says in her political writing and speeches sounds so refreshing compared to the crap that is inundating us from fake “progressives.”  (Election years can get so depressing - almost as depressing as recession years.  Combine both and, well, somebody please wake me from this nightmare sometime.)  

So, anyway, two posts at the other blog that include some words and video related to Arundhati Roy: 

http://roughinhere.wordpress.com/2008/01/19/arundhati-roy-weworlds-poor/

and

http://roughinhere.wordpress.com/2008/01/19/fascination-with-kerala/

Must-Read at Dandelion Salad: “2008 Election Charade: White House Bought by Big Money” by Larry Chin

Yes, I particularly love these observations found at Dandelion Salad:

There is no illusion what the “election” really is, and whose hands are manipulating the sock puppets.  Each sock puppet serves the world’s upper management, and uses the populace as cannon fodder.

All the talk of “campaign finance reform,” “fighting special interests,” particularly from the corrupt John McCain (who is enthusiastically mainlining funding as you read this), is just that:  talk.

The candidates are lying.  The prospective puppets with the real chances of being selected are career liars to begin with.

Cultural abyss reflected in celebrity support

Election insanity also breeds a cultural sickness that worsens by the day.

The ignorant, acquiescent, uninformed and often painfully stupid mass US populace not only marches to the beat set by a blatantly corrupt corporate media, it further adds to its self-destruction by aping the political views of wealthy Hollywood celebrities — who are themselves painfully ignorant and misguided individuals, making asinine decisions with their celebrity power and mega-fortunes…

A Bunch of Words About My Politics on My Music Blog

More and more, I seem to be politically outing myself on my “separate” music blog.  I just can’t help it.  Oh, well.  Here’s another post at the music blog that would be at least as appropriate here:

Ponting Out a Political Difference with Several of the Blogs on My Blogroll…

——————-

P.S. [1/16]:  Also got into an interesting conversation with Wayne of Wayne&Wax (see blogroll), regarding all these matters, in the comments section to the above post. 

(More) Wise Words from the World Socialist Web Site Regarding the Current Primaries

I don’t always agree with them, especially when they write historical articles about Trotsky and Kronstadt, but I think the World Socialist Web Site is truly superb when it comes to reporting current events and critiquing mainstream politics.

So, a few (more) wise words from them on the present primary hoopla:

The US elections:  In whose interest is the campaign for “bipartisan unity”? 

The demand for bipartisan unity serves to obscure the objective reality of a society that is riven by class and social divisions.  The agents of Wall Street who preach the gospel of “unity” have good reason to suppress any genuine political discussion.  They preside over a country where the concentration of wealth has reached unprecedented levels, with the top 1 percent of families owning 40 percent of the nation’s net worth.   And the economic disparities continue to grow.

 . . .

The rhetoric of bipartisanship has also played a major role in the corporate media’s embrace of Barack Obama.  There has been a frenzied media campaign over the past two weeks to transform Obama into an unstoppable frontrunner, an effort that was at least temporarily stalled Tuesday by Hillary Clinton’s narrow victory in New Hampshire.

Obama is a conventional bourgeois politician, dependent, like his rivals, on lavish financial support from corporate interests and the wealthy.  He is not the product of any sort of genuine movement from below in American society, but rather the latest in a long line of demagogues employed to foster illusions that the big business-controlled political system can serve the interests of ordinary people.

Working people have absolutely no stake in the outcome of the struggle between Obama and Clinton for the Democratic nomination.  Neither has any answer to the social crisis affecting ever wider layers of the population, and both defend the use of military force to secure the global interests of the US corporate-financial elite.  The Democratic Party, no less than the Republican Party, is an instrument of the financial elite that monopolizes the wealth and dominates the political life of the country.

. . .

The campaign for bipartisanship thus has a distinctly antidemocratic and sinister aspect.  It is an effort to discipline the political squabbling within the US ruling elite in order to face a far greater danger:  an eruption of social conflict produced by the increasingly desperate conditions facing the vast majority of the American people.

A Big Ditto to These Statements from Marx and Coca-Cola

Yes, I’d like to add my big ditto marks here to these statements made at Marx and Coca-Cola:

In America we have two parties (and our system is designed for only two):  a democratic liberal party, and an authoritarian liberal party.  (I’m using liberal in the classical sense: a belief in free-market representative government.)  The difference between the two parties is that Democrats want to read only some of your E-mails.  Oh, and Republicans are obsessed with your genitals.  That’s why so many of them are arrested in bathrooms.  Unlike the rest of the industrialized world the US doesn’t have a social democratic party (that drum circle that calls itself the Green Party doesn’t count).  If such a party did exist we probably wouldn’t be any better off judging from the actions of the SPD, Parti Socialiste, and especially the Labour Party.  But the existence of these parties at least puts economic issues in the political discourse.
. . .  

None of the candidates offer anything new.  There is a desire for real change, and hope (that’s why they talk about it), but no one is going to change the underlining problems of the capitalist system.  Why would they?  Real change isn’t going to come from some professional politician.  It’s clear we need to organize outside of the political system.  We need to break the lock of identity politics, especially over the “left,” and get back to old fashion economic issues.  Anyone got ideas on how to do this, because I don’t, I’d like to hear them.