Playlist for Show: Long Waves

Confronting the denial of Rex Americana
Like an alcoholic who won’t face his drinking problem, we as a nation cannot admit who we are.
We cannot admit that we hurt people. We never apologize. G H W Bush famously said, “I’ll never apologize for the US.”
Who never apologizes? Who is never wrong?
Abusers, madmen,
Let’s consider a couple of cases of our madness. They don’t seem related on the surface but there are underlying patterns.
Interestingly, two of the examples come from Indiana, recently in the news over its sleight of hand attempt to legalize discrimination against LGBT people in the name of defending religious freedom.
Because, you know, the freedom of Christians in this country is under attack. Nope.
Smells like another Fox news, GOP strategy to mobilize the base with fear and hatred.
To the cases:
Purvi Patel
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Case affects women, marginalized, and women of color, twice marginalized. It is not only Indiana who is at fault, but the whole of the country who see one battle but not another. If only poor women of color had a Dan Savage as an advocate.
The second Indiana case involves Gov. Pence HIV epidemic forced him to rescind his ban on needle exchanges.
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So, when enough people suffer he is OK with needle exchange. News is in the papers, so he can’t pretend its not happening.
Effective, proven, low cost prevention of HIV, HBV, HCV other consequence.
Obviously the governor and the majority of voters in Indiana are not interested in reality, or truth, or facts, or even fairness. They are interested in maintaining the lie of their own goodness financed through suffering of others.
Perhaps the rest of US should take the advice of JQ Adams who advocated that non-slave states should secede from the slave states to create a more perfect union.
“I prefer John Quincy Adams. He proposed that the non-slave-holding states secede from the Union in order to create a more nearly perfect social contract. A more human community. “The bargain between freedom and slavery,” he asserted as early as 1820, “is morally and politically vicious.” It robs “the poor, the unfortunate, the helpless” of their elementary rights. Secession in the cause of freedom would be traumatic, demanding, and dangerous; but “I dare not say that it is not to be desired.”
William A. Williams : There is tough talk not heard today on the Left.

RETURN TO THIS WITH DISCUSSION OF REST OF PIECE
Now we are close to the heart of the matter.
We all bitch about the state of the nation. The left bemoans their loss of a representative seat in government, and far too many of what Vidal would have called the right wing of our unitary corporate politics, have embraced the canard that granting of what they see as special rights strips them of their rights, more accurately called privileges.
Consider the privilege demanded by the doctors, government officials and others associated with Johns Hopkins, who are now being sued, injected children, prison inmates, and psychiatric patients with STDs including syphilis in the 1940s and 50s. All this in Guatemala, a small weak country where the holders of great privilege misused the the poorest, weakest, least empowered in experiments that rival those of the NAZI doctors.
Think of the Tuskegee atrocity where AA were likewise infected with STDs, including syphilis and were not told nor in some cases treated.
I hear older apologists talk about such things: times were different, people had different values then. No. The times and people are the same, and the values and beliefs are the same. The racism is the same. The misogyny is the same. The utter disregard for others is the same.
We cannot become a good people without recognizing ourselves as who we are, and abandoning the bad faith of our existence. Sartre: bad faith is lying first to yourself then to others.
Just like alcoholics. We remain in denial.
Denials are elaborate and well-practiced.
Made in bad faith, they allow the most amazing leaps of logic and philosophy.
Indiana is all about the rights of fetuses, fetae. Not because they have any cogent idea or facts or even philosophical truths, and certainly no history on their side.
Many states and people are the same.
The arguments are not about “THE UNBORN CHILD” they are about setting personal prejudice against women into law under the protection of poorly cherry-picked scriptural arguments.
The bible says much more about the occasional necessity and even the joy of murdering infants than it says against LGBT people. Hosea 9:14
Numbers 31:15 Kill the Midanite non virgin women (take the rest for slaves)
1 Samuel 15: 3 Go and attack the Amalek…kill man and woman infant and nursing child.
Psalms 137: 8-9 Happy is he who repays you for what you have done to us. He who seizes your infants and dashes them against the rocks.
Bronze Age thinking. Bronze Age values: vengeance, murder, genocide.
You can’t pick and choose which values you want to have and which you want to ignore. In taking up arguments from scriptures, people show that they do indeed have these values: Bronze Age Values: Murder, Vengance, Suicide.
Jung: Scratch a moden man a quarter inch and you will find a savage.
So, savages they are.
Savages we are. It’s in our blood, it’s in our history, it’s in our old stories of goodness and truth. Savages.
This is the truth we must repress and deny to maintain our delusional belief that we are good and we are kind. Sitting in a church pew, or pretending to does not make goodness. Striving for goodness does.
Now you and I may not be murderers but we ignore the unjust killing of others, worse we support it.
We support governments who lie to us and we encourage their lies for they tell us what we want to hear. The upcoming election cycle is going to be interesting.
It will be as if the heavens have opened and manure is raining from the skies.
Pleasing lies. Pleasant lies. The lies of co-dependents covering up for us. The lies of enablers helping us maintain our fantasies of goodness.
And these lies of empire and power are among those we wish to hear:
The republicans have never met a war they didn’t like. ]
Undermined the Iran treaty. Talk of more war and expansion of war.
Perhaps this is just part of their circus act of scaring people and then producing a war for the big defense contractors who, we must admit it, have taken the role of the people in the legistlatures. They can’t vote but they can sure as hell buy.
How else do we make sense out of the senselessness of the middle east. What contortions of reality and historical fact must occur for us to believe that the role of the US has been what we claimed: the forming of democracies, or have we already abandoned that one. The stopping of terrorists, well that makes no sense at all. If we could just admit its about stealing other people’s oil, we would be closer to the truth.

READ SAKER

Tolstoy: What then must we do?
“Truth to tell, most of us may bitch about lawyers and Wall Street bankers but we go right on sitting on our thumbs. TALKING OF REGAN HERE But it is important to understand that he thinks that substantive, tough criticism is “excess democracy.” Hence he argues that the President should be freed from all “picayune…restrictions and prohibitions.” It follows that the “right and ability to withhold information” is essential.
How refreshing it is to turn to a grandchild of John Quincy Adams. Henry Adams observed that such attempts to impose uniformity upon a continent might easily – if not certainly – produce more corruption and other evils than the wickedness commonly ascribed to diversity. He concluded his evaluation with this judgment: the old system had collapsed, and the refusal to imagine and create a new social compact meant that “nine-tenths of men’s political energies must henceforth be wasted on expedients to piece out – to patch or, in vulgar language, to tinker – the political machine as often as it broke down.” And it surely has been breaking down.”
So we are tinkering with the wheezy machine of government, while the corporatists are solidifying their control on the remaining piece of government.

“First of all, I think that involves reasserting the supremacy of the legislature as an instrument of the citizenry in order to destroy the legislature as a tool of the State. Second, it hinges upon our creation of alternatives to the corporation.
If we are to so transform – or revive – the legislature, we must devise and agitate a concrete program supported by a strong plurality of citizens dedicated to changing the existing system. The guts of it all have to do with the allocation of taxes and the positive assertion of elementary human rights. Either you subsidize corporations or you do not. Either you build redundant nuclear weapons and delivery systems or you do not. Either you help the poor and other disadvantaged to become full citizens or you do not. “
So we need to set up our own rehab. What would it look like? How would we do it. What do we want to establish, protect, and defend for all, not just for the privileged and powerful.
Crimethink puts it this way. To change everything, start anywhere.

END
“I want to change the system. I could not care less about the corporations and the Pentagon. We can create a different economic system, and we have enough bombs to insure our security while we revive Virtue – that “positive passion for the common good.”
I want to invent a new way for individuals and groups of citizens to use modern technology to practice freedom and liberty in association with each other. I am sympathetic to the idea of local and regional public enterprises. It is not so much that small is good, as that small is human. I am willing to tolerate a significant degree of inefficiency in order to allow people to make their own mistakes, to practice democracy on the job, and to create an educational system that informs people that they can learn as much from reading Shakespeare and William Blake as from becoming a master slave of Apple, Texas Instruments, or IBM. Or a pawn of the State immunized to freedom and liberty by the placebo of world power.
In short, I have chalked my cue, and I have come to play the only game in town. I want to transform the crisis of democracy into a true crisis.“

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