The Inquirer used to rake in Pulitzers, but serious reporting required a sustained investment of money, time and intellect, so when its then-owner, Knight Ridder, balked at this, the Philadelphia newspapers went into their death spiral. This is no local phenomenon, because the entire country is suffering from the dearth of hard-hitting news about anything that really matters: Wall Street and DC corruption; constant lying from our government; an endless war that’s bankrupting the nation and begging for blowbacks and, soon enough, riots; or the accelerating collapse of the economy, and thus, your way of life. In their stead, encyclopedic sports coverage and celebrity gossips, as purveyed by various moronic outfits. Today’s earthquaking burp from Yahoo!, “The prince says an unusual noise kept him awake the night before his nuptials.”

Divorced from local news and conversations, rootless and detached from what’s closest to them, most Americans are dragnetted into a national matrix as defined by cynical or sinister mind fuckers who care nothing about them or their individual communities. Yahoo! is run out of San Jose, long a cultural wasteland, but it was the home of Gary Webb, an American hero who broke the story about the CIA pushing crack cocaine to LA blacks to fund its covert war in Nicaragua. For being an excellent and ethical journalist, Webb was ran out of a job, then hounded into committing suicide, the official story, or simply killed. In any case, what happened to Webb is an apt parable for an America that punishes integrity and bravery, and rewards dishonesty and cowardice. In such a society, degradation is guaranteed.

Yesterday, I walked by the Daily News and Inquirer headquarters and saw, in its window, a blown-up cover about Chase Utley, an aging and often-injured second baseman. Like the country itself, the city is unraveling, but let’s fret over the Phillies, Sixers, Flyers and Eagles. Hey, how about dem Birds! Across the street, I spotted something unusual, however: an upside down 13-star flag in front of the Steak & Bagel Train, a diner in business since 1907. We’re due for another American Revolution, wouldn’t you say?

As I photographed this provocation, a security guard from the adjacent building marched over, “Hey, I didn’t even see that! Somebody is going to burn his place down. I’ve got to ask him tomorrow what’s up with that.” He also informed me that a flag cannot be up at night, unlit, and that he had a flag on his front porch, with a spot light shining on it.

“It’s freedom of speech,” I said to this security dude. “He probably thinks the country is in distress.”

“Yeah, but he’s playing with fire, buddy. Somebody is going to burn his place down.”

So for being a good enough citizen to rouse your compatriots from their slumber, you and yours may be torched, or, like Bradley Manning, held in solitary confinement and stripped naked each night.

Don’t rock the USS Full Spectrum Blowhard Righteous Recovery, you terrorist asshole, though this ship has neither fuel nor compass, nor even rats, not unless you count the Congressmen, Senators, Cabinet Members and Supreme Court Justices surrounding an oil-slick and blood splattered POTUS.

A block from the newspaper office, I saw a sign common in many distressed neighborhoods, “PROJECT FUNDED BY THE American Recovery and Reinvestment Act.” I wasn’t sure what the project was, but the sign itself had been well tagged by graffiti, plus some clever guerilla art, a depiction of the Fountain of Youth.

Seen from the side, a hag, with cane and sagging breasts, enters a fountain, then emerges as a lovely young lady, proudly frontal in her nudity. The hag half is shadowed by a vulture and littered with thorny weeds, while the sexy chick half is serenaded by song birds and blooming with flowers. No spring chicken myself, I wouldn’t mind a personal recovery through a dip in some miraculous pool, but as with Juan Ponce de León and his dolorous dick, to believe in magic is to court disaster.

Speaking of the paranormal, let’s walk a few blocks up Broad Street to check out the hulking ruins of the Father Divine Hotel. Few remember him now, but Father Divine was once nationally famous. Known as America’s first cult leader, and an inspiration to Jim Jones, Father Divine inspired his followers with the commonsensical, such as being self-reliant and debt-free; to the idealistic, such as being color blind, even to yourself; to the puritanical, such as abstaining from tobacco, alcohol and gambling; to the weirdly ascetic, such as total celibacy even among married couples. Though he declared himself a living god, and his second wife, four decades his junior, to be the reincarnation of his first wife, his followers believed everything their 5’2” leader said because he was supremely confident and a charismatic speaker, and when he died, many of his devotees even thought he would rise again. It is telling that Father Divine’s movement peaked during the Great Depression.

Now that we’re entering what promises to be an even greater period of material and spiritual despair, which Father Divine will rise up to save the desperate and gullible? Instead of preaching self-control, racial harmony and charity, what bitter impulses will they unleash? The magical Fountain of Recovery will likely gush blood.

Like many acculturated Americans, I was familiar with Robeson as an entertainer; his rendition of “Ol’ Man River” from Showboat (written by Oscar Hammerstein II and Jerome Kern in 1927) is considered an American classic. The dirgeful ballad describes the toil and strife of the black slave working the gambling ferry boats:

Colored folks work on de Mississippi,
Colored folks work while de white folks play,
Pullin’ dose boats from de dawn to sunset,
Gittin’ no rest till de judgement day.

In the score this refrain is marked optional; replaced with “[a] musical part” depending on the whim of the director, in deference to audiences perhaps not comfortable with this rendition. This “comfort level” is the driving force of acceptance of Othered minorities as citizens, as well as their presence within cultural manifestations and national mythologies. The allowance or not of these couplets speaks of an understood ever-shifting limit of tolerance, the tolerated never quite alloted full freedom.

From this vantage point, the recent presidential election takes on a different significance, the opposite of current received wisdom, that a historic event has taken place with the election of a black American as marking a “post-race” America. Barack Obama’s election instead represents a similar “limit of tolerance”, based on the behavior, thought, and action of the one tolerated. His mediation* as a new “ideal” on the other hand, wholly separate from actions which make him hard to differentiate from his predecessors, and removed from the mood on the street and realities suffered on the ground, is, in this light, not a contradiction.

One month before the election in 2008 I stopped into a hip-hop clothing store in Bloomfield, New Jersey. Various T-shirts sported the visage of Obama along with statements of pride and hope. “My President Is Black” read one, against the backdrop of an American flag, and with the words “The American Dream” on the reverse. This explosion in production of T-shirts and signage outside of the licensing purview of the Democratic National Committee¹ bears witness more to the weight placed on Obama’s shoulders than belief in “Hope” or “Change”. On the wall of the shop was a graffitied art piece reflecting Obama’s perceived political peers: Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Nelson Mandela. To peer into Obama’s future we simply have to examine King, sadly reduced post-mortem to a shill for Alcatel and Cingular, and Mandela, who now serves a similar function as an ideal wholly removed from the realities of a post-apartheid South Africa, currently morphed into a neo-liberal and globalized nightmare.

Malcolm X, on the other hand, represented in image as well as in word and deed something much closer to the reality of lived life for many in the country, as stated in his famous “Ballot or the Bullet” speech in 1964:

No, I’m not an American. I’m one of the 22 million black people who are the victims of Americanism. One of the 22 million black people who are the victims of democracy, nothing but disguised hypocrisy. So, I’m not standing here speaking to you as an American, or a patriot, or a flag-saluter, or a flag-waver–no, not I. I’m speaking as a victim of this American system. And I see America through the eyes of the victim. I don’t see any American dream; I see an American nightmare….

Reframed, these T-shirts thus become a grassroots manifestation of the poet Langston Hughes’s The Dream Deferred;² they implicitly contain the projection of what might happen if the dream is put off any longer. Unfortunately, the same cannot be said of an Obama presidency.

Malcolm X also happens to be the only Black activist in the USPS booklet (this due to lobbying efforts), nonetheless painstakingly described therein as a “lifelong criminal” who did time in prison before his conversion to Islam. No mention is made of his assassination, perhaps due to his prescient description of the assassination of John Kennedy as America’s “chickens [coming] home to roost”. This was echoed by the Rev. Jeremiah Wright who said the same about the attack on the World Trade Center, and Like Malcolm X and Paul Robeson, Reverend Wright also suffered a smear campaign to paint him as a threat to the nation.

Full acceptance in a culture which mocked their aspirations

Part of what marks X, King, Robeson, and even Obama is their not matching their bestowed stereotype. In his book Harlem: The Making of a Ghetto (Harper Torchbooks, 1966), Gilbert Osofsky states:

What was most striking about the Negro stereotype was the way it portrayed a people in an image so totally the reverse of what Americans considered worthy of emulation and recognition. The major and traditional American values were all absent from the Negro stereotype. The Negro was conceived of as lazy in an ambitious culture; improvident and sensuous in a moralistic society; happy in a sober world; poor in a nation that offered riches to all who cared to take them; childlike in a country of men…. Negroes hoped for full acceptance in a culture which mocked their aspirations.

The condition of the American black man was a function not just of racism, but of a built-in inability of those so tagged to voice or discuss the nature of the problem; an inversion in which the dominant discourse promulgated stereotypes which were subsumed within the dominated culture itself, and then further assumed and re-characterized by the targeted group in question.

It is only relatively recently that we are witnessing documentation of Robeson and his work–time having defused any revolutionary potential here–along with one of the first stars of an entertainment realm that tolerated black performance: Bert Williams. In 1903 Williams staged a musical comedy entitled In Dahomey that was so successful it forced the racial integration of many theaters in the States. Simultaneously, W.E.B. DuBois was seeing the birth of a Black cultural awakening in such work. In an essay from 1916 entitled “The Drama Among Black Folk”, he wrote:

In later days Cole and Johnson and Williams and Walker lifted minstrelsy by sheer force of genius into the beginnings of a new drama. White people refused to support the finest of their new conceptions like the “Red Moon” and the cycle apparently stopped. Recently, however, with the growth of a considerable number of colored theatres and moving picture places, a new and inner demand for Negro drama has arisen which is only partially satisfied by the vaudeville actors….The next step will undoubtedly be the slow growth of a new folk drama built around the actual experience of Negro American life.

This cultural expression, wrested from the dominant class, spoken in its own language, and directed inward in terms of audience was the de facto segregated black nation attempting to stand on its own feet and create its own place, speak in its own voice. For this reason it could not be tolerated. Dubois’s appeals for funds for such a theater went unheeded; audiences wished to see re-affirmation of their view of black Americans, as shaped by white actors in blackface makeup. The stillborn theatrical awakening was reduced even further to the horrific tragedy of actors such as Williams smearing oily burnt cork ash on their own [not] black [enough] faces.

This inversion of Black culture through the mediation of the white artist is evident as well in Porgy and Bess, an opera about Black life (written by George Gershwin and DuBose Heyward in 1935). In a biography of George Gershwin, Duke Ellington, the jazz-era band leader stated, “the times are here to debunk Gershwin’s lampblack Negroisms.” Similarly, when listened to outside of the dominant discourse such as on the radio show L’épopée des musiques noires broadcast on Radio France Internationale,³ such artists speak openly of the racism that they suffered and which continues to plague them. That Duke Ellington successfully staged all-black musicals that rose above the minstrel dross remains lost within history; meanwhile, Showboat and Porgy and Bess have replaced actual historical memory.⁴

Black to the future

This specter of white men in black face rises every so often as a reminder and as a warning, but also as a marker of white privilege defended as “free speech”, as in the case of firefighters on Long Island who wore Afro wigs and black face in a community parade in the late ’80s:

The police commissioner’s management authority has been undermined by federal Judge John Sprizzo’s June 23 ruling, following a non-jury trial, that the city did not have the right to fire a police officer and two firefighters who rode in blackface and wore Afro wigs on a parade float in 1988. Police Officer Joseph Locurto and the two firefighters were punished, wrote Sprizzo, “in retaliation for engaging in protected speech.” This “protected speech” involved being part of a float with the banner “Black [sic] to the Future: Broad Channel 2098,” which the defendants said was a parody of black racial integration into the mainly white Broad Channel neighborhood. They threw watermelon and fried chicken at parade goers and, as the parade was ending, a firefighter grabbed the back of the truck and dangled himself toward the ground, re-enacting the brutal dragging murder of a black man in Texas two months earlier.

Although we might not remember the vaudeville circuits of the early 20th century, this news item attests to the lingering epithets and uglinesses that were used to disparage blacks of that period. Their deep-seatedness is revealed in the non-reaction to their use, and the ensuing disapproval if not dismissal of the discussion that might follow such an event. This legally protected “free speech” leaves no humanizing aspect untargeted, by referring directly to black stage characters and their disempowering nicknames (Step-‘n’-Fetch-It, Jim Crow); to the sight of white eyes peering out of black face ([rac]coon); to the percentage of black blood in a person’s bloodstream (high yellow, quadroon); to one’s renegade slave background (maroon). Furthermore, the “reverse” of this often used as a defense, namely, disparaging terms for whites, are few in number, hardly as powerful, and are by contrast comical in their ineffectiveness.

This brings up the main point of any such discussion of representation, which cannot be limited to its visual or aural perception: the power differential involved. Who is the audience, and where do they fit societally speaking? What is my physical, technical, and economic ability to reach them? What are the various legal rights that enable and/or impinge such communication? What is my privilege to make such a statement, and what personal, communal, moral, etc. limitations might I place on myself before doing so? What is my luxury to so speak, above and beyond these other aspects of such expression?

Examples of unspoken referents thus weigh even heavier, in the sense that one need not even speak to evoke the same racist sentiment: Confederate flags flying over southern state capitol buildings (or in hidden locations out of public view); separated primary elections that reflect the class breakdown of the political parties along racial lines; the voting down of a federal holiday commemorating Martin Luther King (“states’ rights” makes direct reference to George Wallace’s statement of “segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever”); the practice of diluting minority power via the gerrymandering of electoral districts; the use of scare tactics at the polls; the prohibition of the vote for felons; etc.

The equivalent disparity of direct expression within the culture, along similar overt as well as covert lines, includes endless examples: Billie Holiday used to relate how she was run out of Mobile, Alabama for singing “Strange Fruit” (written by Abel Meeropol in 1937), a song about the infamous practice of lynching. In Louisiana more recently, black students were convicted and imprisoned for their protest and reaction to a noose being hung from a tree on the school lawn; this “warning” to the black student population came after they decided to assemble underneath the “white student’s” tree. A super-mediated* discussion of the word “nigger” took place when Michael Richards (Kramer from the television show Seinfeld), not happy with some black hecklers, informed them that “fifty years ago we’d have you upside down with a fucking fork up your ass.” More disturbing are the commemorative postcards made from photographs of hanged men, these “black bodies swinging/in the Southern breeze”, surrounded by smiling white faces as might be seen at a picnic or a communal pigsticking, and today disturbingly mimicked by images from Abu Ghaib prison in Iraq, as well as of soldiers in Afghanistan posing with corpses.

A share of the wealth and a piece of the action

It should thus come as no surprise that during the Democratic primaries of 2008, Andrew Cuomo made reference to Barack Obama’s “shuck and jive”, a phrase which has no meaning outside of imposed black vaudeville dialect for shiftiness and evasiveness, making semantic reference to costume change, rapid dance steps, and a fancy ability with words. The attorney general’s disavowal of the term as racist is contradicted by his former statement that voting for his [black] rival for the New York governor’s race, Carl McCall, would result in a “racial contract” between Black and Hispanic Democrats which “can’t happen”.⁵ Similar was the statement from Georgia Congressman Lynn Westmoreland that Obama seemed “uppity”. Everyone who speaks American English completes this noun phrase with the one epithet that follows, explicitly referring to a black man who should “know his role”.

These terms and images are so loaded that they only need be hinted at to get the message across; even in their denial they hit the target and leave their mark. The resulting backtracking can be seen to be prefigured; meaning they are planned if not staged, the knowledge remains that exculpation awaits for simply denouncing the action of having stated them, or else by labeling the targets thereof as “oversensitive”, “politically correct”, or “racist” themselves. In this way, the legacy of the ignoble practices and codes of that time most assuredly live on, as a chronic condition of the culture itself; the equivalent of linguistic sucker punches such as “I would never refer to my opponent as a Communist.”⁶

Then candidate Obama listlessly defended himself against such provocations, and was rewarded with the presidency. In stark contrast, no U.S. postage stamp, indeed, few American history books represent any leader from the Black Power movements of the 1960s, and this despite the acknowledgment at that time by then president Richard Nixon, who used the term Black Power in a speech attempting to subvert the movement at its core:

[M]uch of the Black militant talk these days is actually in terms far closer to the doctrines of free enterprise than to those of the welfarist thirties–terms of “pride”, “ownership”, “private enterprise”, “capital”, “self-assurance”, “self-respect”… What most of these militants are asking is not separation, but to be included in–not as supplicants, but as owners, as entrepreneurs–to have a share of the wealth and a piece of the action. And this is precisely what the Federal central target of the new approach ought to be. It ought to be oriented toward more Black ownership, for from this can flow the rest–Black pride, Black jobs, Black opportunity and yes, Black power…⁷

The actuality is better known: the former Black Power movement leaders have either been assassinated or put in prison, have come around to parrot the dominant discourse, or have retreated to obscurity and/or academia; all have been rendered place-less, historically silenced and disappeared. Similarly, if no one remembers the black musicians of jazz, blues, funk, gospel, etc. that the U.S. Postal Service attempts to pay tribute to, everyone on the other hand knows their white stand-ins, their role-reversers: Elvis, Joe Cocker, The Rolling Stones, Eminem, etc. To reinforce this diminishment, blacks of a certain celebrity are often referred to as the shadow of their white counterparts, especially in terms of politics and culture: “the black Daniel Webster” applied to Samuel Ringgold Ward, or “the black Callas”, attributed to Barbara Hendricks, or now, “the black Kennedy”, in a reflection of racial privilege, and the one-way directional flow of cultural appropriation and political designation.

The rainbow sign

In one such Black spiritual now forgotten, God gives Noah the “Rainbow Sign” that ends his estrangement from the land; however the sign comes with a warning that He is done with water, promising “the fire next time”. In his book of the same name, James Baldwin describes Malcolm X’s relationship with the United States thus:

Whether in private debate or in public, any attempt I made to explain how the Black Muslim movement came about, and how it has achieved such force, was met with a blankness that revealed the little connection that the liberals’ attitudes have with their perceptions or their lives, or even their knowledge–revealed, in fact, that they could deal with the Negro as a symbol or a victim but had no sense of him as a man. When Malcolm X, who is considered the movement’s second-in-command, and heir apparent, points out that the cry of “violence” was not raised, for example, when the Israelis fought to regain Israel, and, indeed, is raised only when black men indicate that they will fight for their rights, he is speaking the truth. The conquests of England, every one of them bloody, are part of what Americans have in mind when they speak of England’s glory. In the United States, violence and heroism have been made synonymous except when it comes to blacks, and the only way to defeat Malcolm’s point is to concede it and then ask oneself why this is so….there is no reason that black men should be expected to be more patient, more forebearing, more farseeing than whites; indeed, quite the contrary. The real reason that non-violence is considered a virtue in Negroes…is that white men do not want their lives, their self-image, or their property threatened.

Here Baldwin presages the purely symbolic non-threatening black man who will be acceptable in the United States. Another such example, Bill Cosby, echoes this when he states that “all the problems [on his TV show] were not solved, but were dealt with without violence.” In contrast to the [acceptable] violence of Israel and England (which too has its own “Jerusalem”⁸ ) Baldwin reveals what is most threatening about the landless or placeless minority nations within Anglo-Saxon realms. More importantly, he reveals society’s inherent fear of those who have similarly examined the topic of self-representation (Ture, Fanon, Roy, Dabashi, etc.), and who conclude that violence is, perhaps, the only possible reaction to greater violences both actual and virtual suffered by the oppressed.

We’re here without any rights

This discussion of violence controlled by those who have the power to define the parameters for said violence brings us to Sacha Cohen, and his portrayal of an Arab leader in his movie The Dictator. In naming the dictator “Gen. Shabazz Aladeen”, pointed reference is made to the Nation of Islam and Malcolm X’s taken name, juxtaposed mockingly against the exoticized “Aladdin” (which removes any religious significance here). In an interview with Howard Stern Cohen states:

“All these dictators blame everything on the Zionists,” said Baron Cohen, “it’s a great scapegoat. Now, young people are saying the reason we’re not happy is we’re living in these dictatorships. There’s a guy who’s a trillion-aire who’s sleeping with models and actresses, and we’re here without any rights being persecuted.”

In a failed bid to play victim, Cohen instead reveals his “Arab-face” minstrelsy; his portrayal of stereotypes are in fact directed at an audience the class of which has controlled the destiny of those living “under dictatorships” for the greater part of the last century, if not the past 500 years. The insinuation here is that such dictatorships are a function of the Arab inability to assume democracy (a great Orientalism, barely worthy of non-scholars such as Bernard Lewis) and claiming falsely that the region has no democratic or, indeed, socialist, pan-Arabist, anti-colonialist, etc. aspects to its past. It is too easy to discuss these neglected historical forces of liberation in the Arab and Muslim world to debunk such heinous racism–Mossadegh, Shari’ati, Fanon, Memmi, Nasser, etc. (among many, many others) all come quickly to mind–and this, coupled with the fact that the Third World’s leftist realm has been targeted for extermination for decades if not more than a century, only reinforces the hubris of Cohen’s statement.

In economic terms, it also reveals the power differential inherent to capitalism and globalization, and is reminiscent of Bill Cosby’s attacks on “bling”-style rap artists–he doesn’t even admit to their more political precursors–who have managed to acquire wealth and status by following all of the lessons learned in a neo-liberal society (similar to Mexican drug cartels, the Mafia, the Saudi monarchy, etc.) but who get punished when they become too competitive (like Nazi Germany or Imperial Japan) and are thus rendered docile and brought within the domain of global Capital. “The trillionaire sleeping with models and actresses” is a glorified trope within American culture, so it is odd to find it given populist overtones as concerns the current Arab revolts and uprisings, as if we are to believe that in any way Sacha Cohen finds common cause with the Arab street.

The idea that the struggle against the colonial apartheid state of Israel, indeed, that the resistance to First-World globalizing dominance in the region as premised and foregrounded by the Palestinian struggle, might somehow be simplistically reduced to “criticism” of Zionism (in and of itself an ignoble ideology) is so Orwellian an inversion as to be unworthy of retort. There is no point wasting time considering the cultural “flip”, in imagining an Arab or Muslim “doing the same thing” culturally speaking; there is likewise no point in discussing the ridiculous concept of “reverse racism” when such debates require a thorough examination of said expression along economic and political lines. This, the power differential of the dominant culture as portrayed by that culture’s media, is the central point of this discussion, and however we might examine it, those who are minority, who are Other, fundamentally cannot rise above such representations as they are played out within this mediated system.

A critical black gaze

As a black American convert to Islam, Malcolm X, despite mediated attempts to historically reduce him, could very well be a case of a sub-mediated* image that survives such a pulverization, and as such, serves as a model to follow to bring us out of this quandary. As stated by bell hooks, in one of her essays concerning and quoting Malcolm X:

Understanding the power of mass media images as forces that can overdetermine how we see ourselves and how we choose to act, Malcolm X admonished black folks: “Never accept images that have been created for you by someone else. It is always better to form the habit of learning how to see things for yourself: then you are in a better position to judge for yourself.” Interpreted narrowly, this admonition can be seen as referring only to images of black folks created in the white imagination. More broadly, however, its message is not simply that black folks should interrogate only the images white folks produce while passively consuming images constructed by black folks; it urges us to look with a critical eye at all images. Malcolm X promoted and encouraged the development of a critical black gaze, one that would be able to move beyond passive consumption and be fiercely confronting, challenging, interrogating.⁹

Proclaimed “hope” or promised “change” should not derail any criticism of the Image Machine, especially when this Machine has minimized minority histories to literally belittled images riding on tickets of commerce; to bogus misrepresentative celluloid trash; to symbolic representations of white privilege embodied in the heads of state and power: All the more reason we must be “fiercely confronting, challenging, interrogating…look[ing] with a critical eye at all images”.

The answer to such racism lies not in a faux multi-culturalism, nor in a homogenizing, “borderless”, “nomadic” neo-liberalism. The answer lies in manifestations of resistance to this dominant culture which are able to pre-emptively prevent co-optation by the dominant discourse. Hamid Dabashi, in his book Post-Orientalism: Knowledge and Power in Time of Terror, states:

Out of this cul-de-sac, one possibility has always remained open: a creative re/constitution of cultural character and historical agency from a range of poetic and aesthetic possibilities, where the notion of the beautiful is violently wrested out of the banal, the sublime forcefully out of the ridiculous, agency defiantly out of servitude, subjection combatively out of humiliation.

This requires, however, that we change our perspective and our own viewpoint first; that we radically re-orient ourselves in terms our relationship to cultural consumption and its source. These manifestations as described by Dabashi are hard to suss out since we have unfortunately lost the ability to read them as such, for having been so long out of touch with our own creative potential, and for having forgotten the formerly “local” media manifestations of guerrilla television, public access cable, pirate radio, radical journals, homegrown theater, etc.

True to our native land

On January 30, 2009, in Denver, Colorado, a black woman was asked to sing the national anthem during the State of the City address by the mayor of Denver, John Hickenlooper.¹⁰ Instead of the Star-Spangled Banner, Rene Marie offered a rendition of the “black national anthem”, resulting in hate mail and an outcry denouncing her action. She stated that her decision was based on “how I feel about living in the United States, as a black woman, as a black person”. Further, she said that she would no longer sing the national anthem because she “often feels like a foreigner in the United States”.

The correct response of the mayor’s office should have been “this is her right; this is her freedom of speech”, like our blackfaced firemen, like Andrew Cuomo; this was not forthcoming. The song which originally debuted in 1900 is entitled, “Lift Every Voice and Sing” (words and music by John Johnson, ironically quoted in the benediction for Barack Obama’s inauguration ceremony), and it ends with the lyrics: “May we forever stand,/True to our God,/True to our native land.” This takes on a particularly humbling tone given the replacement of the previous attempts of minority Americans to leave their ghettoes with more current almost prideful acceptances of this, their “allowed” place.

This is manifested in the outlying reaches of Los Angeles–180 degrees removed from Cohen’s Hollywood–the scene of the Watts and Rodney King riots, and described in the music of Bambu¹¹ among many others, and where a “beautiful” form of dance was created from the “banal” by Tommy Johnston, aka “Tommy the Clown”, borrowing from stripper pole-dancing, although performed by both sexes, and used to entertain children and adults at birthday and block parties. The dance is referred to as clowning, and it went on to spawn another form of dance, angrier and reflective of street realities for a generation lost, often mimicking police beatings and other brutalities, called crumping. Both are performed by youth attempting to escape the reality of gang-controlled streets, where misuse of colors is a marker for murder, and choices of home, school, job, and future are systemically limited.

In the documentary about this dance form called Rize! the youth in the movie describe their lives imbued with a renascent spirituality, sense of purpose, and avoidance of the commercialization that has befallen previous expression from this community. Included in this film is the striking image of a black man now painting his face up in white clown makeup and not minstrel black burnt cork, referencing a forgotten cultural marker and not a racist imposition; following Malcolm’s advice to “never accept images that have been created for you by someone else.”

Speak from the street

And so as Arabs and Muslims now targeted with similar minstrelsies, we do ourselves no favor when we simply smear brown paint on our brown features in order to entertain the Master in the Master’s house; we perform no beneficent action by simply parroting endless mediated exchanges with little bark and less bite. Sacha Cohen would ironically represent all of us as tinpot dictators, when it is he, culturally, politically, economically, and in terms of class and avowed ideological affiliation, who has much more in common with this fetid realm of the world stage than does the majority of Arabs and Muslims on the planet. What does Sacha Cohen know about what is going on in his own backyard, much less this world in active revolt? Indeed, it is Cohen who needs to “know his role”.

While we point out this obvious classist and racist arrogance, we must also strive to find the countervailing non-mediated* representatives that exist closer to home and which speak from the street: the Egyptian women whose strikes in the textile mills (not Twitter) led to intifada; similarly the women of the neighborhoods surrounding Tahrir Square in Cairo whose cooking fed this revolution; the 70,000 Palestinian refugees marching to the Lebanese border in May of 2011; the owner of the last kufiyyeh factory¹² in occupied and embattled Al-Khalil, undone by sanctions and outdone by Chinese imports; the Syrian migrant workers slaving to build Beirut skyscrapers, far from their rural communities rightfully rising up in revolts kidnapped by regional powers; the Bedouin populations kept stateless and impoverished; Palestinian hunger strikers; etc. ad infinitum, all with their unique creative contributions of craft, art, music, graffiti, dance, calligraphy, song, poetry, spoken and written word, theater, etc.

For of this common resistance might rise the creative manifestations–the “new folk drama”–that feed back into the revolts against the likes of Sacha Cohen and his ilk who would define us and confine us; manifestations that do not allow simply for a misconstrued and patently false “comfort level” or status quo, that do not inadvertently sell us short, that do not continue to sell us out. In this is perhaps a great step forward, since, as Malcolm X asks of us, once the realization of such mediated deception and the unveiling of the deceivers hits home, once we move from defensive mode to rediscovering the energy that would be better put to creative output, once we wean ourselves from the source of our own misrepresentation, then we might actually recognize the creative source all around us; a new nahdah; proving with our creative action what we already know to be true in our thoughts and words. Paul Robeson, in control of his own creative manifestation in concert, changed the formal and staged lyrics of “Ol’ Man River” to better frame his feelings of being an outsider within American society. It is likewise time for our own re-imaging; our own reformulation; our own restaging.

* Mediation
Mediation defines expression as a function of the distance from direct sensorial witnessing, on a spectrum that ranges from non-mediated to super-mediated.

Non-mediated: A spontaneous expression that is not designed, pre-selected, edited, planned; the voicer of the unsaid.

Example(s): The spontaneous verbal utterance or physical actualization in reaction to witnessing a car accident; Kanye West going off-prompt during a televised fundraiser for the victims of hurricane Katrina, stating: “George Bush doesn’t care about Black people.”

Super-mediated: Expression that is designed, pre-selected, edited, or planned, possibly within the constraints of a given group, its ideology, its manifesto or tenets, that may or may not stand in opposition to the dominant discourse, but whose use of tools, languages, systems, and technologies in fact are meant to enable, sustain, and promote such dominant discourse.

Example(s): The television show Cops with an episode concerning drunk driving; drivers’ education movies; a presidential press conference in the aftermath of Katrina.

Sub-mediated: Expression that is designed, pre-selected, edited, or planned within the constraints of a given group, its ideology, its manifesto, or tenets, that absolutely stands in opposition to the dominant discourse often in its uniqueness and its non-derivation from current customs or tropes, and which avoids or attempts to subvert the tools, languages, systems, and technologies of super-mediation.

Example(s): The white-painted ghost bikes of various cities that represent both the individual killed in an accident and their collective whole; the Legendary K.O’s rap song set to mashup videos for “George Bush Don’t Like Black People”.

1. “Dreaming XXL”; Jake Austen. Harper’s, November 2008. p. 58–59.
2. What happens to a dream deferred?/Does it dry up/Like a raisin in the sun?/Or fester like a sore–/And then run?/Does it stink like rotten meat?/Or crust and sugar over–/like a syrupy sweet?/Maybe it just sags/like a heavy load./Or does it explode?
3. The Story of Black Musics [sic].
4. Both musicals are featured as postage stamps. To note is that “First-day” issue of stamps exists for a very particular audience that collects such stamps for their value; this is a different audience than the subject of the stamps themselves.
5. Reference to this conversation taped by a reporter for the Jewish Forward. Interesting here and necessitating another treatise is the ability of Cuomo to claim “whiteness”, as opposed to his formerly equally marking ethnic identity.
6. Testimony of Paul Robeson before the House Committee on Un-American Activities.
7. Black Liberation and Socialism, Ahmed Shawki.
8. William Blake poem and later hymn.
9. Outlaw Culture: Resisting Representations.
10. USA Today, January 31, 2009; “Controversy after singer substitutes ‘black national anthem’ for ‘Star-Spangled Banner.’
11. “Pull It Back.”
12. Kufiyeh project.

When her breathing slows, and then turns ever so erratic,
I break into my lover’s dreams to steal whatever sleep I can …. See
how her belly begins to show! My arms barely encircle her from behind
as she banks her Yamaha 450 through the radioactive wasteland of our town.
After 3 days on the road, we return to find everything we’ve ever built or grown—
the people we loved—piled into mountains of debris they’ll say equal 40 years of trash.
Women unaware that their nipples and areolas glow faintly green in the half-dark
kneel in mud giving suck to babies who retch up everything they swallow.
Countless times her rear tire blows, and she swerves into the path
of the same oncoming relief truck, always empty of supplies,
but not once have we tried to make each other wake up.

After making love on the futon, I notice faint scars
starting at her underarms and running down her sides
like an old map of tides surrounding the island of her flesh,
and ask if what she let slip about having been abused is really true.
She squeaks out a high-pitched laugh, says Only by you! and closes her eyes again,
Truth be told, I often see dreams like that inside her troubled dreams, but in them
I take the shape of an advancing wall of water, and despite her cries, I cannot stop!

It’s not hard to imagine her as a child, for I know we must have drunk from similar cups
in kindergarten, hanging from a string by the sink, or upturned on a faucet. We shared
every disease with the others in the school, for if nothing else, at least we learned that
we are one. And as we grew, you can bet everyone at her dinner table stuck chopsticks
into a common nabe pot of whatever fit her mother’s daily budget: vegetables and fish,
chicken, the cheaper sorts of meat, boiled together in a broth made of kombu seaweed,
katsuobushi dried bonito flakes, shoyu, mirin, miso, sake; and of course, fat udon noodles
we kids fought over at the end. Now we breathe radiation escaping from the incinerated
wreckage with everybody else. What they burn in the air burns in our bones, yet they cart
debris away to prefectural landfills throughout Japan. The government simply will not let us
suffer alone. But still we don’t sleep well. And if truth be told, our dreams should not be told.

Starting from the adopted home base of Killadelphia — city of descending tough guy mayors like Frank Rizzo, MOVEabomber Wilson Goode and, now, raccoon-killer Michael Extermi-Nutter, a city where the pedophile priests and NAMBLA-pamby football coaches roam and the streets overflow with the cheapest narcotics (Philly cheese steaks), a city where the homeless and their outdoor nuisance feedings are now “raptured” out of sight from the brand new Barnes Foundation building and where Christian forgiveness is reserved for dogfighting millionaire quarterbacks (so long as they convert on third and ten) — I drove 2700 miles to San Diego.

The Pennsylvania turnpike, Ohio, Indiana and Illinois were all uneventful. But somewhere in southern Missouri, towering over the puppy mills (and really blossoming in Oklahoma), the Intercontinental Ballistic Crosses (ICBCs) started to appear — gigantic symbols of the Lord, having nothing to do architecturally with the churches they dwarfed, just proudly smiting the earth amid funny church signs and the dubious morality of the “Kum & Go” convenience stores. I imagined that people woke up one morning and found the ICBCs erected overnight, unaware that they were actually defused Russian ordnance from the Cold War. I think when Gorbachev found his marbles and went home, he changed the targeting a few degrees and, in a kind gesture, fired the empty crosses where they would be most appreciated.

Ohio is just as religious as Oklahoma but you won’t see these showy crosses along the highways of the buckeye state. The reason is that Ohio is very poor and if these crosses weren’t secured really well, they’d end up torn apart and sold for scrap or tinkered with in somebody’s barn; some crafty person might take a blow torch and tin snips and fashion them into howling wolves, grizzly bears, soaring eagles, coyotes wearing bandanas and other iconic symbols of American freedom that nobody in work-till-you-drop Ohio has ever actually experienced. Or, whole ICBCs might be laid out in the parking lot of the Caesar Creek Flea Market just like any other self-defense weapon we have a God-given right to carry — whether we can carry it or not. A mechanic from Donnelsville might turn the tiniest ones into formula one crosses and race them at the Kil-Kare Speedway in Xenia. So long Akron Soap Box Derby, hello Crucifix 500.

(It may surprise you to learn that should there ever be a revolution in America, Ohioans will be at the forefront. This is because Ohioans understand that laws are bullshit. The first step of revolution is lawlessness because anything lawful you can do is totally ineffective, and anything effective that you can do will soon be outlawed. For instance, no one in Philly will ever — again — lead a revolution because they all think it’s normal to sit obediently in traffic for two hours. In Ohio, if there’s a wreck on I-70 and people have to sit for longer than ten minutes, you’ll see cars backing two miles down the shoulder to get off at the previous exit or pick up trucks driving over the most broken down fence they can find through somebody’s field. And the cops know to mind their own business which is not the people’s business. “Waiting” is for rude loud REMFs from New Jersey, whose state bird is the tufted nowherefastgoomba. People from New Jersey think they’re whip smart but they don’t know the answers to the simplest questions — like: What’s the difference between a hillbilly, a briar and a briar-hopper?)

But don’t imagine that God is troubled by the uses that Ohioans might find for crosses. God loves Ohio’s hillbillies — that’s why He didn’t ruin our lives with money. I didn’t even know I was a hillbilly till I moved to Philadelphia several years ago. Then I found out I have a drawl and that I operate on “Ohio time,” meaning I’m slow as agave nectar. Apparently, East Coasters can see their entire lives pass before their eyes before I can get the next word out. We Ohioans know that hillbillies, proper, are from Kentucky and we make all kinds of fun of them.

Where does that put Tennessee, you might ask? For the answer, I recommend that you stand high on Route 449, just entering Pigeon Forge, and look at all the booths and shops and stalls and shelves and tables that line both sides of the road for what seems like miles, the people let outside and doing their business on God’s creation, the beautiful junk sale of America all tamped down by a bosomy haze, said to be fog but really just smoke from round the clock gun blasts. Like a lot of sanitized American history, they don’t teach you in school that this area was originally called the Great Gunsmoky Mountains. Then have one more cup of coffee before you go to the valley below, onward to Dollywood where you will bounce off the sweltering human wall paper of sexist t-shirts, rebel flags, hunting caps and, unlike any other amusement park parking lot I’ve ever been in and for no discernible reason, white guys walking around with shotguns and rifles. (It’s OK, Dolly, the Thunderhead coaster makes up for everything.)

What’s Alabama like, you persist in asking? It’s like this: Once, on a roller coaster trip, a friend woke up from a nap and saw I was driving his brand new company car 100 mph in a 70 mph zone. “What the fuck are you doing — slow down!” he shouted. And I said, “Go back to sleep, everybody’s passing me, they’re pissed off I’m going so slow.” See, Alabama might have some revolutionary tendencies.

But I digress. Back to Oklahoma.

Interspersed with the funtasmal play of crosses and Kum & Gos there are also large highway signs noting five Oklahoma people treasures: General Tommy Franks, Toby Keith, Garth Brooks, Will Rogers and Mickey Mantle. (WARNING: two first names = trouble ahead.)

Right away I don’t like these signs because 40% of the people on them either directed (Franks) or vocally supported (Keith) America’s monstrous wars of aggression and racist occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan. I didn’t have a permit to carry my paranoia, negativity and vengefulness into Oklahoma but, being an unlawful Ohioan by birth, I did it anyway, and I found these signs to be jingoistic, probably racist, probably expressing a certain (highly crappy) political viewpoint rather than some innocuous list of meritorious Oklahomans, and all probably geared toward reminding us white people the required every five miles and every five minutes that we’re still on top, goddamit, whether it’s kicking dark-skinned ass across the ocean or making it magically disappear in the “homeland” — like the African-American author of “Invisible Man,” Oklahoman Ralph Ellison, who’s probably in line to get his name on a sign right after a Toby Keith roadie.

I can see Will Rogers being on this list. And Mickey Mantle, too — although if I wanted the greatest American athlete of the previous century, according to a 2001 ABC Wide World of Sports poll, it would be Sac and Fox Nation Jim Thorpe. And although I don’t like “new country” music; I understand putting Garth Brooks up there because, wake up and smell the tofu chicken fried steak (yeah, Brooks and wife Trisha Yearwood are now vegan): Brooks has sold more records than anybody except Elvis and the Beatles — more than Sinatra, Dylan, the Stones and Johnny Cash. But if I chose an Oklahoma musician it would be the communist Woody Guthrie. Brooks (let alone Toby Keith) will never have the influence on other musicians or the country as a whole that Woody Guthrie continues to have. Guthrie wrote the most communistic popular song, “This Land Is Your Land,” that American school children are still joyously belting out, and he’s famous for having a sign on his guitar which read: “This machine kills fascists.” If Gen. Tommy Franks was a troubadour his guitar would say, “This machine kills women and children” and, with every strum, white phosphorus would blow from the hole as he sang his greatest hit, “Lord, I Don’t Do Body Counts.”

So I called the Oklahoma Department of Transportation to find out what’s up with these signs. What I found out is that my carefully considered thesis was wrong because these signs went up in 1994, way before the Bush/Cheney attack on Iraq, and I mean the 2003 George W. Bush/Cheney attack on Iraq, not the 1990-1991 George H.W. Bush/Cheney attack on Iraq which, actually, Tommy Franks was also part of, though not in the “starring” role.

America, I know you can forgive me about being wrong about this because you forgave Condi Rice scaring the bejesus out of you talking about a a nonexistent “mushroom cloud” and Colin Powell talking about Saddam Hussein’s nonexistent weapons of mass destruction and Dick Cheney talking about the nonexistent Saddam/al-Qaeda connection. You know, all the mass murder that your nonexistent empathy leads to.

Still, to show what a tussle God and the Devil go through in Oklahoma I give you, in this corner, ruling class gangsters like General Franks, neo-con CIA spook Jim Woolsey and gay-bashing Family Research Council director Tony Perkins.

But in the other corner, punching way above his weight: a young gay Oklahoma man, a peace hero, a working class hero, the kind of stand up and be counted person that America always says it loves, let’s hear it for Private First Class Braaaaaadley Maaaaaanning who, if he actually did release the classified documents of American war crimes to WikiLeaks, is a great patriot and that most rare specie on earth, an American CITIZEN — someone who believes in an informed and engaged populace, who believes that America’s misleaders should be held accountable and taxpayers should see how our money’s spent, who believes that the Geneva Conventions and the Nuremberg Principles matter more than the emetic decrees of Baracchio Obama whose ears get bigger with every promise he breaks — presumably, all the better to “listen” to us in his panopticon surveillance state. (Right on, Big Brother! Disempower to the sheeple! Gimme five — no, no, hold up, not five years in prison, not five bucks an hour, not five more tours of Ragheadistan, I don’t want your reelection platform, just gimme five — oh, you wouldn’t understand…) And Manning not only believes in being a functioning American citizen but is willing to go to jail for it, possibly for the rest of his life.

(Cartoon intermission. Here’s how fractured this fairy tale is: Baracchio, formed by his creator Goldman “Geppetto” Sachs, has morphed into Dumbo the Republican elephant while Pinocchio at least changed part-way into the Democrat’s symbol, the jackass. Can’t Joe Biden give a blowhardy speech to all the insects on the White House lawn in the hope that a Jiminy Cricket hops forward to give Baracchio a little conscience?)

Contrast Manning’s courage and self-sacrifice with the video game drone killers bombing people from 7,000 miles away or the silence of Baracchio’s vacant liberal lambs, who had such a blast trashing the Texlexic bumpkin (before war crimes were cool), and whose racist floodgates are now officially open to “get tough on” and slaughter people of color around the globe just like their secret idols, the right wing fascists. Manning is not a “good German” — guess we should update this to “good American” — but he’s a great Oklahoman.

To better honor Gen. Tommy Franks I suggest that Oklahoma have a million crime scene silhouettes painted on the roads representing the Iraqis that Franks is partly responsible for killing and erect four million minaret-shaped reflectors along the shoulders representing the Iraqi refugees he helped make. The whole state could be haunted, just like this entire country needs haunted until it stops its savage destruction of other nations. The American military has every advantage in the world but is still getting kicked out of Iraq and Afghanistan, despite trillions spent and despite hundreds of thousands of American soldiers wounded, maimed and mentally destroyed and over 6,400 killed. And Bradley Manning gets put in a cage — this is all that the world needs to know about the in-your-face evil rot that is America. And what have the “good Americans” done — aside from their children baking cookies for the troops in the beginning? Nothing — they’re more immature than their children: they won’t fight the wars, they won’t end the wars, they won’t even pay for the wars — that’s on their kids’ dime. They lost interest in the broken Iraq and Afghanistan toys a long time ago. KMAG YOYO indeed.

Oklahoma has never produced a leader, a president, of the white settler nation of America while Ohio has produced eight of them. And this white settler nation has never had a woman leading it, unless you count Eleanor Roosevelt. Oklahoma, however, has produced the leader of a nation, the Cherokee nation and a woman to boot, Wilma Mankiller. Oklahoma, you have leaders and heroes, maybe you just don’t like their color, gender, sexual orientation, ethnicity or political beliefs. Jim Thorpe, Bradley Manning, Woody Guthrie, Ralph Ellison, Wilma Mankiller … shhhhhh. You might as well have roads signs that say: Leaving the MediOKre State — Please Drive Through Like Hell Again.

The real problem with Oklahoma isn’t the ICBCs or the lack of recognition for many of its heroes and leaders. No, the real problem is that Oklahoma conquered the world, starting in the 1930s. I knew the world was conquered, and I unfriended it a long time ago, but I didn’t know exactly how it got conquered until recently.

Back in the 1930s, the zeitgeist was buzzing like flies on shit in Oklahoma. Wiley Post became the first person to fly around the world in 1931 and he designed the pressurized flight suit in 1934 (he later died in the same plane crash as Will Rogers.) And in 1935 electric guitar pioneer Bob Dunn made one of the first recordings (western swing) of the electric guitar for Decca.

And, for our purposes, several Oklahoma visionaries wandered alone in the flat dusty non-wilderness, unknowingly creating a great and powerful new religion that would rapidly eclipse and make all others seem really boring: engineering professors Holger Thuesen and Gerald A. Hale invented the parking meter (1935), Sylvan Goldman, owner of the Oklahoma City Piggly Wiggly supermarket chain, invented the shopping cart (1937) and police officer Clinton Riggs first conceived of the highway yield sign (1939). These prophetic Oklahomans understood that modern Americans and their wheeled contraptions needed to be rounded up, tamed and organized for the coming religion of Stuff — their innovations helped the faithful forage for it more safely, haul it more efficiently and wait our turn for it more fairly. The streets of heaven were to be paved with… more pavement, lots of pavement, and the purpose of life was revealed to be buying and spending and acquiring. Goldman, in particular, stands taller each day because his ingenious shopping cart is now the home on wheels for millions of Americans, but without the pollution and waste of resources associated with a motor home or the upkeep of the stationary kind.

And it all led inexorably to the temples of Oklahoma-based Walmart, the pointy end of late monopoly capitalism’s spear, where the believers, though speaking in tongues, can be understood to say: “I saved 5 cents on the knife used to cut my own throat! Hallelujah!” And if you need further proof that this religion has arrived, (i.e., they’re fighting about it), attend the Black Friday service or the midnight madness prayers where the lumpen shoppetariat tramples and pepper sprays other worshoppers to “save” and get “saved” the most. As a kind of Crackerjack prize, there’s also self-flagellation but it doesn’t happen on the pilgrimage — it happens 30 days later upon opening the mail, at 23% interest compounded anally for however long you can take it.

This land isn’t my land and it’s not Woody Guthrie’s land. Oklahoma, this land really is your land. It’s a Piggly Wiggly world.

I’d like to thank the people at the Oklahoma Department of Transportation who answered my questions about the highway signs, though one did wonder, “Where are you’re going with this, Randy?” As you can see, as with most things in life, there’s never really anything to worry about.

Sane men and women don’t consent to kill, rob and rape, much less be killed, robbed and raped, least of all to enrich their masters, and that’s why their minds must be molested as early and as much as possible. Hence our nonstop media brainwashing us from the cradle, literally, to the grave. Fixated by flickering boxes, even infants are now mind-conditioned to become scatterbrained idiots before they stagger into kindergarten, to begin a lifelong process of becoming docile and slogan-shouting Democrats and Republicans.

Yes, savages killed, but, like apes and monkeys, our ancestors, they mostly tried to intimidate and trash talk their way out of conflicts. There wasn’t a lot of murdering after the haka, frankly. They didn’t wipe out entire cities by defecating exploding metal from the sky, nor sit in a brightly lit and spic-and-span office stroking a joy stick to ejaculate missiles half a planet away. Drone hell fire for y’all, with sides of bank-sponsored debt slavery and austerity, plus an unlimited refill of American pop bullshit. Would you like a public suicide with that? No, sir, these savages need to take webcast courses from us sophisticates when it comes to genocide, or ecocide, or any other kind of cides you can think of. When it comes to pure, unadulterated savagery, these quaint brutes ain’t got shit on us plugged-in netizens chillaxin’ in that shiny upside down condo on da capital-punishment-for the-entire-world, y’all, hill.

You’d think that a government with absolute power would not bother with expensive parades and elaborately-staged rallies in stadia, as are routine in North Korea, but such is the importance of propaganda and mind-control. America has gone way beyond Kim Jong-Un and his Nuremberg-styled pageantry, however, because the Yankee Magical Show is relentlessly pumped into our minds via television and the internet, at home, in office or even as we’re walking down the street, so that we’re always swarmed by sexy sale pitches, soft and hard porn, asinine righteousness and imbecilic trivia. All day long, we can stuff ourselves with unlimited kitsch. Today’s urgent topic, “Sylvester Stallone Spotted in 16th Century Painting.” Yesterday’s, “Tom Cruise’s Daughter Gets Inked.” Imagine a triple-amputee Iraq vet or an unemployed mother, sitting in an about to be foreclosed home with unpaid bills scattered across her kitchen table, staring at such headlines. At 48, I’m old enough to remember when it wasn’t this overwhelmingly stupid, though the dumbing down of America will only accelerate as this cornered and bankrupt country becomes ever more vicious to its citizens and foreigners alike.

Not content to kill and loot, America must do it to pulsating music; cool, orgasmic dancing; raunchy reality shows and violence-filled Hollywood blockbusters, and these are also meant for its victims, no less. In a 1997 article published by the US Army War College, Ralph Peters gushes about a “personally intrusive” and “lethal” cultural assault as a key tactic in the American quest for global supremacy. As information master, the American Empire will destroy its “information victims.” What’s more, “our victims volunteer” because they are unable to resist the seductiveness of American culture.

Defining democracy as “that deft liberal form of imperialism,” Peters reveals how the word is conceived and used these days by every American leader, whether talking about Libya, Syria, Iran or America itself. Recognizing that the lumpens of his country are also victims of empire, Peters frankly acknowledges that “laid-off blue-collar worker in America and the Taliban militiaman in Afghanistan are brothers in suffering.”

Much has been made of the internet as enabling democracy and protest, but whatever utility it may have for the disenfranchised and/or rebellious, the Web is most useful to our rulers. As Dmitry Orlov points out in a recent blog, the internet is a powerful surveillance tool for the state and, what’s more, it also keeps the masses distracted and pacified. Echoing Queen Victoria’s remark, “Give my people plenty of beer, good and cheap beer, and you will have no revolution among them,” Orlov observes that virtual sex thwarts rebellion. In sum, while the internet may empower some people, as in allowing John Michael Greer, Paul Craig Roberts or Orlov to publish their unflinching commentaries, the same internet also drowns them out with an unprecedented flood of drivel. Defending the empire, Ralph Peters cheerfully agrees, “The internet is to the techno-capable disaffected what the United Nations is to marginal states: it offers the illusion of empowerment and community.”

Though our only hope is to be expelled from this sick matrix, many of us will cling even more fiercely to these illusions of knowledge, love, sex and community as we blunder forward. A breathing and tactile life will become even more alien, I’m afraid. Here and there, a band of unplugged weirdos, to be hunted down and exterminated, with their demise shown on TV as warning and entertainment. Inhabiting a common waste land, we can each lounge in our private electronic ghetto. Until the juice finally runs out, that is.

And when I finally matriculated at Indiana University in ’66, there was already a robust Black and white anti-Vietnam War and Women’s Liberation Movement confronting IU’s intransigent Administration. But after Dr. King’s murder in ’68, things began to rapidly – radically – change. Over 110 cities exploded into revolutionary fires immediately following that assassination. “Black Power” as espoused by Kwame Toure (nee Stokely Carmichael), and Huey P. Newton’s Black Panther Party came to the fore and swept across this nation-state with a hurricane-force cleansing wind.

On campus we began to suspect that our white allies were not quite as committed to Black empowerment as they claimed to be. One of our leaders, “Rollo”, began to not just notice this phenomenon, but condemned it. “When the going gets tough,” he declared, “they (the Hippies, Yippies, and other assorted white friends) will cut their long hair, put on skirts, suits and ties and go home to their fathers’ and uncles’ firms, businesses and farms, while we will still be in the ghetto competing with each other for janitor jobs.” And you know what? He was absolutely right. When the crackdown came in the guise of “Law and Order, ” as proclaimed by President Nixon, our “white liberal” friends abandoned us as though we had the Bubonic Plague. And today? They will not even talk about their “youthful indiscretions” and certainly do not regale their children and grandchildren with stories of Black/white unity from “the good old days.”

It is impossible to come of age as a so-called “white” person in this nation-state and not be afflicted with the scourge of white supremacy. Each and every social, political, economic and cultural practice, policy and process is skewed to protect, maintain and grow white power and white privilege over and above everybody else. This is not news to Black folks, white supremacy’s second most beleaguered victims. But so-called “white liberals” always seem to struggle with the very idea that they, by their conscious or unconscious acceptance and practice of “white privilege”, bolster white supremacy’s death-grip on this nation-state and rest of the world.

The foremost reality that white liberals must understand and then deal with is that every square inch of land, every lake, river and stream, every mountain, field, every blade of grass or grain of desert sand that they proudly refer to as the “United States of America” is stolen property – stolen from a people who rarely, if ever, warrant even a back-handed mention in today’s socio-economic and political discourse. This terrible reality lies at the bottom of a continent-wide and unimaginably deep sea of red blood which separates the two blue eastern and western oceans. By now they must be aware of the magnitude and meaning of such an unconscionable atrocity. Hell, at some level they’ve always known; but do they care?

White liberals must go further, though. They must understand that the reason Chicago, New York City, Philadelphia, Houston, San Francisco, New Orleans, St. Louis, etc., ad infinitum, sport such high and gleaming alters to capitalism is because the raw materials and laborers used in their construction were ripped from the soil and souls of Black, Brown, Red and Yellow peoples not only here but from throughout the world. The white liberal must understand that those villages, countries, nations and nation-states are labeled and defined by them as “Third World”, “underdeveloped”, “developing” because it was and remains white supremacy and their embrace thereof that put and keep them there.

Appalling numbers of white liberals are in deep denial of the unfathomable pain, suffering, and death that the pursuit of white supremacy has wrought. Yes, their denial is appalling but completely understandable. They labor under a grand form of “cognitive dissonance” which exquisitely defines the term. I have wondered often that had I been born “white”, how utterly impossible it would be, must be, to simply look into a mirror knowing how much innocent blood lay behind my reflection, my history. Absolute denial and rejection of that blood, of that reflection and history would be the only means of maintaining even a semblance of sanity.

On another level, though, many, perhaps a majority, of white liberals appreciate quite clearly what they have done. Indeed, they celebrate and gleefully swim in that bloody sea of denial, ever thankful for their whiteness and their conscientious and well-meaning liberalism. This set of white liberals eagerly embraces their unearned privileges and power and protect themselves and their whiteness behind world-destroying weapons, multi-million-man armies – or “gated” enclaves. Their fear is understandable as well for they have much to fear, going all the way back to, and starting with, Indian attack and slave revolt.

Black folks know very well that all white people are not knowingly white supremacist in their worldview and daily lives. That is, there are now and always have been some “good” white folks – those few who fought and died alongside Blacks at various stages of history against white supremacy. The problem is, however, that the good have never outnumbered the bad. The “good” white people have never constituted the majority of white people. And, somehow it seems that when it comes to Black folks, some sort of “compromise” must always be made in order that white supremacy remains supreme.

Finally, what can and must white liberals do to redeem themselves, their people? The time has long passed for any more perfunctory “national discussion of race” between whites and Blacks. There is nothing more to talk about. White people, including white liberals, invented “race”, racism and white supremacy. They must begin the redemption process by disavowing and denouncing the validity, legitimacy of each of these self-serving and pernicious concepts and ideologies.

They must first acknowledge, recognize and accept their guilt.

Then repent. Repentance can take many forms, but it must be holistic, all encompassing, just as holistic and encompassing as the past 500 years of white supremacy have been. White liberals must teach each other and their children the unvarnished history of this nation-state. They must begin and see through to the end the hard work of dismantling all of the covert and overt institutional structures and scaffolds which have framed and perpetuated a white racial consciousness and its attendant white supremacist practices for the last 25 generations.

They must teach themselves and their children that the number one problem in the world has been, is, and remains Europe’s and America’s Original Sin: white supremacy – not global warming nor environmental degradation, not the national debt/deficit, not gay rights, not the energy crisis, and not women’s liberation – but white supremacy. In doing so, they will discover that these other “issues” are but symptoms and byproducts of the most debilitating disease that has afflicted the whole of mankind since those first Europeans began rampaging across the seas circa 1444.

And, yes, white liberals must undertake permanent, sweeping, demonstrative and affirmative actions to repair the damage white supremacy has done to all “nonwhite” people, but especially Black and African people. This will require discussions with Black people – discussion not negotiation.

But if history is any guide, white supremacy will not die a quiet death. White liberals (and white folks generally) have shown themselves incapable of just living and let live; of accepting their place as just another group of people among the masses of humanity. My mother used to wonder just under her breath why do white people think they must have or are entitled to the lion’s share of everything, leaving the crumbs for the rest of us. There is no good or logical or reasonable answer to her question. Thus, the entire world of variously colored peoples will have to someday face down and then take down this damnable doctrine, and set the world aright again.

Once I had gotten past the Prologue – which I thought did not belong at the beginning of the book – Khan’s narrative never lost its power to sustain my interest. The book takes the reader through many unexpected shifts in the protagonist’s life – from cricket to charity work, from charity work to politics, from the life of a celebrity to a life of piety, from disdain for Islam to a deepening respect for its richness and depth, from contempt (a colonial legacy common to Pakistan’s elites) for ordinary Pakistanis to a growing concern for their tormented lives, from wilting shyness before audiences to a determination to face the glare of public life, from growing anxiety about Pakistan’s problems to an unshakable resolve to do something about them; etc. In short, the book takes the reader through the life of an extraordinary man, at first fully immersed in the privileges of his class and his cricket celebrity but slowly turning inwards, questioning the colonial mindset of his own privileged class, angry at the limitless corruption of Pakistan’s rulers, and, finally, reaching resolution in his commitment to take Pakistan back from its corrupt elites. A politician with Imran Khan’s record would be rare in Western ‘democracies.’ In a country like Pakistan, mired for decades in the corruption of rapacious elites, he is an anomaly – an outlier. Should the Pakistanis embrace Imran Khan, should they give him the chance to pick and lead the nation’s political team, this could be a game-changer for their country.

While describing his spiritual journey following the pain of his mother’s death, Imran Khan sums up his life in an aphorism, “A spiritual person takes responsibility for society, whereas a materialist only takes responsibility for himself (87).” Quite apart from the truth-value of this statement (since a ‘materialist’ or someone without belief in God or afterlife may also choose to take responsibility for society), this sentiment very aptly describes the author’s long and tortuous passage from indifference towards larger questions – both metaphysical and political – to a deepening engagement with God and the history and fate of Pakistanis and Muslims. In time, after much soul-searching, Imran Khan chooses to take “responsibility for society.” Once he has formed a conviction, Imran Khan has shown that there is no turning back for him.

Imran Khan’s autobiography contains some homespun theology too. At one point, he describes how cricket nudged him towards faith; it began with observations on cricketing luck. A game can turn on the toss of a coin; success in bowling can depend on the way the ball is stitched, on umpiring mistakes, on fortuitous injuries, on the weather, etc. In other words, “there seemed to be a zone beyond which players were helpless, and it was called luck (84).” He muses, “… could what we call luck actually be the will of God?” Is it possible, amidst the infinite complexity that produces any outcome, that God intervenes in our lives, nudges a particle here a particle there to confront us with outcomes that surprise us, overthrow our certainties, deflate our egos, forcing us to think of higher forces?

After his mother’s painful death from cancer, Imran Khan turned away from God. Questions of theodicy troubled him. He worried that his life’s accomplishments could vanish in a moment. In the face of this vulnerability, persuaded by a logic that recalls Pascal’s wager, he resumed his salaat. “This was really like an insurance policy – a sort of safety net in case God really did exist.” It is likely that Imran had arrived at his reasoning on his own, or he had encountered this argument in the Qur’an. Unknown to most Muslims, the Qur’an makes this argument on several occasions; it is then taken up by Hazrat Ali, the Prophet’s cousin, and in the eleventh century by al-Ghazzali.

Imran Khan speaks reverently of the influence of Mian Bashir on his life, an obscure but spiritually gifted man who gently led him to discover the inwardness and beauty of Islam. People who have lost touch with metaphysics will likely frown at this influence. Untroubled by such skeptics, Imran Khan recognizes this obscure sufi as the “single most powerful spiritual influence” on his life. I respect this openness to the Unseen, this divinely implanted ‘naiveté’ – if you will – that lies at the heart of all authentic religious experience, and that Western rationalism and scientism have nearly destroyed in modern man. Despite the materialism that assails us, we can stay in touch with this ‘naiveté.’ In better times too, very few men and women could reach the summits of the mystical ascent; but they sought spiritual sustenance in the baraka of the valis, friends of God. Unknown to Pakistan’s militant secularists, Asadullah Khan Ghalib too – despite his celebrated skepticism – sought intimacy with God through veneration of Hazrat ‘Ali and his family.

2.

Imran Khan is nothing if not resolute in pursuing the goals he sets for himself; and his goals have never been modest. “Over the years,” he writes, “I came to the conclusion that ‘genius’ is being obsessed with what you are doing (63).” Quite early in his cricket career, spurred by the example of Dennis Lillee, he decided to remake himself as a fast bowler. His teammates and coach warned him that he “had neither the physique nor the bowling action to become a fast bowler (118)” and he could ruin his career if he tried to change his bowling style. Imran Khan was not deterred. He remodeled his “bowling action to become a fast bowler,” and as he worked hard towards this goal – he writes – “my body also became stronger for me to bowl fast.” Most cricket commentators agree that Imran Khan went on to establish himself as one of the greatest fast bowlers of all time. Fewer still have combined his eminence in fast bowling with skill at batting and leading his team.

When Imran Khan set out in 1984 to establish Pakistan’s first cancer hospital – he ran into a wall of skepticism. When he presented his plans for the Hospital to the leading Pakistani doctors in Lahore and Lon-don, they were dismissive; he did not give up. Working indefatigably to collect mostly small donations from tens of thousands of people at home and abroad, Imran Khan began construction work on the project in April 1991. The Hospital admitted its first patients in December 1994, with a com-mitment to provide free care to all poor patients. Skeptics had warned that this policy was not viable, but generous Pakistanis proved them wrong. Now plans are underway for building two more cancer hospitals in Peshawar and Karachi.

Our author has shown the same dogged persistence in the arena of politics. When he announced his entry into politics in 1996 – with the for-mation of a new party, Tehreek-e-Insaaf, dedicated to fighting corrup-tion in public life – Pakistanis ignored him. In the first elections it contested in 1997, the Tehreek won no seat; in the second election in 2002, it won a single seat. Imran Khan could draw large crowds to his rallies, but they were drawn to their cricket hero not the political leader who promised to deliver a better future for them. Perhaps, Imran Khan had not done his homework. His promise to fight corruption did not yet carry a broad appeal; his message did not resonate with workers, peasants, students, clerks and small shop-keepers. Pakistanis knew that their leaders are corrupt, but they did not see Imran Khan as the force that could pry Pakistan out of their dirty but powerful grip. Imran Khan had not begun the hard work of building his party from the ground up, creating a cadre of committed workers and donors. He spent too much time on talk shows and too little time organizing his party.

The failure of Tehreek-e-Insaaf to make an impact in the 2002 elections may well have ended Imran Khan’s political career; but he was not ready to quit the field. He persisted in his attacks on Pakistan’s corrupt elites through regular appearances on television talk shows that had proliferated following General Musharraf’s liberalization of the media. Then came the attacks of 9-11, the US decision to draft Pakistan into its so-called Global War Against Terror. Gleefully, Pakistan’s generals accepted every demand that the US made on Pakistan’s sovereignty; they gave the US air and land corridors to Afghanistan, control of one or more airbases in Pakistan, and free run of Pakistan to CIA operatives. Only the religious parties and jihadi factions opposed this surrender of Pakistan’s sovereignty, but they occupied limited political space in Pakistan. With few exceptions, Pakistan’s ‘liberal’ and ‘left’ intellectuals also supported the US War; they were happy to see the Taliban driven out by the American invaders. The political tides were begging to turn for Imran Khan. This was his opportunity to broaden his critique of Pakistan’s corrupt political classes; their corruption now veered towards treason. None of this was surprising, but it did bring out into the open Pakistan’s descent to the depths of servitude.

As events unfolded, the charge of treason would gain greater plausibility. General Musharraf’s government kept the Americans happy by killing the Taliban who had sought refuge in Pakistan; others were captured and handed over to the Americans. In open violation of Pakistan’s constitution, the government also began to disappear Pakistanis who were then secretly transferred to the Americans. Pakistan’s involvement in America’s war entered a new phase in 2004 as the CIA mounted its first drone strikes on Pakistani territory. On American demand, the generals also directed the Pakistani military to attack Taliban sanctuaries in Waziristan. Pakistan’s political classes had now privatized the army. Pakistani soldiers now killed the Taliban and Pakistanis to enrich the country’s political elites.

While the generals collected cash from the US, Pakistanis would pay the price for this treason. Pakistan’s war against the Taliban and their Pashtun hosts produced a frightening backlash that has continued to grow. The logic of this backlash was simple, as Imran Khan also explains. No doubt encouraged by the Afghan Taliban, the families of the Pashtun victims – calling themselves the Pakistani Taliban – mounted devastating retaliatory attacks against military and civilian targets in Pakistan, but mostly against the latter. There was no change in Pakistan’s commitment to America’s war when a civilian government, led corrupt politicians rehabilitated under a deal hatched in Washington, replaced General Musharraf in 2008. While Pakistan’s liberal and left intellectuals wanted the government to exterminate the Pakistani Taliban; they insisted that the Pakistani Taliban was an Islamic fundamentalist movement to take power in Pakistan and had nothing to do with the war Pakistani military had unleashed against the Pashtuns. Imran made the opposite argument. Terminate the war against the Pashtuns and Afghans, and the Pakistani Taliban would cease their attacks; they would disappear as quickly as they had appeared.

After a long delay, Imran Khan’s strategy began to pay off. As Pakistan escalated the war against its own people in two of its four provinces, as Paki-stani capital fled and foreign capital shunned the country, as the economy worsened, as poverty deepened, as political factions in Karachi engaged in bloody turf battles, as power outages persisted, as supply of cooking gas be-come intermittent, the anger and desperation of Pakistanis also grew. Who could lift Pakistan from this descent into chaos? Pakistanis knew better than to expect a savior to emerge from the military or the established political classes: for they had produced the mayhem and were its chief beneficiaries. In this gloom, Imran Khan beckoned to Pakistanis. His calls for justice grew louder, his jeremiads against corrupt politicians became sharper, his critique of the generals became unsparing. Slowly, his message began to resonate with Pakistani youth and the urban middle classes in Pakistan. Starting in mid-2011, the polls signaled a surge in his popularity.

On October 30 2011, Imran Khan was ready to take a measure of his popularity with a rally in Lahore. The rally was a great success; more than two hundred thousand people showed up. Most people agreed that nothing like this had been seen since the days of the charismatic Zulfikar Ali Bhutto in the 1970s. On December 25, the Tehreek organized a second rally in Karachi, the stronghold of a local ethnic party, with the same results. Finally, some sixteen years after his entry into politics, people were beginning to rally around Imran Khan and his party. This surge in his popularity suddenly changed the political map of Pakistan. It also produced some unwelcome results; now that his prospects looked brighter, some members of the established political class began to knock on the Tehreek’s door. Imran Khan was now a political force; after wandering for many years on the margins, he had arrived with a bang on Pakistan’s political scene.

Imran Khan offered a more optimistic assessment of his prospects. He described the surge in his popularity as a political tsunami that would in time sweep out the old corrupt order. Was this a case of excessive self-congratulation? This would depend on whether the Tehreek could sustain the momentum it had generated, whether it could capitalize on this surge to build a grassroots organization, whether it could expand its program to incorporate the interests of workers and peasants, and whether it could create an intellectual cadre that would disseminate its message through print, television and the internet. Can Imran Khan energize the people, raise their hopes of change to a fever pitch, so that attempts to defeat them by extra-legal means could backfire and persuade the Tehreek to lead an uprising? I will return to these questions; but first, I wish to turn to the increasingly shrill and frenzied attacks against Imran Khan by Pakistan’s putative liberal and left-leaning intelligentsia; these attacks are most visible in the English-language print media. Their shrill commentary suggests that they are beginning to take him seriously.

3.

Pakistan’s ‘liberal’ and ‘left-leaning’ groups bring three related charges against Imran Khan: he is an Islamist (or fundamentalist), a partisan of the Taliban, and a rightist. They rely on less than half-truths in making their case.

Imran Khan is certainly Islamic in his thinking, inspiration and identity but he is not an Islamist, a term that generally applies to Muslims who subscribe to a literalist interpretation of the Qur’an and the Traditions of the Prophet. Unlike many Pakistanis who identify themselves as liberals or leftists – and take a Kemalist view of Islam as a backward religion that must be rigorously excluded from the public discourse and even public space – Imran Khan derives his identity from Islam and seeks inspiration in the Qur’an and the Traditions. In regards to the relevance of some of the legal aspects of the Qur’an, together with Allama Iqbal and Fazlur Rahman (for many years, a professor of Islamic Studies at University of Chicago), he recognizes the need for revisiting some of the rulings that were given currency by the consensus of a previous age. In this sense, it would be appropriate to describe Imran Khan as an Islamic modernist; but unlike most Islamic modernists he also feels a strong affinity for the sufi tradition of Islam that has emphasized the spirit and inward content religion without neglecting its outward practice. In both respects, I doubt if there are Islamists who would admit Imran Khan into their inner circles.

Is Imran Khan then a partisan of the Taliban? The United States has used its hegemonic control over mainstream global discourse – especially since launching its global military offensive under the cover of the Global War Against Terror – to smear all freedom fighters it does not support as terrorists. The discourse on terrorism is very cleverly designed to focus the world’s attention on the relatively insignificant acts of violence by oppressed peoples and thereby legitimize the massive acts of violence perpetrated by Western nations against the rest of the world. In American demonology, anyone fighting against the US occupation of Afghanistan is a terrorist – whether he is Afghan or Pakistani. Most ‘liberal’ and ‘left’ writers in Pakistan have internalized this American rhetoric; it follows that the Afghans and Pakistanis fighting the US occupation do not have a legitimate cause regardless of what fighting tactics they employ. In describing Imran Khan as Taliban sympathizer, then, these writers hope to smear him as a terrorist-sympathizer. This smear will not stick. Most Pakistanis recognize that Imran Khan supports the right of Afghans to rid their country of US occupation; other than that and his ethnic kinship with the Pashtuns, there can exist little affinity between him and the Afghan Taliban.

It is time now to explain the scare quotes surrounding the political labels left, right and liberal. In much of the Islamicate, politics has moved into strangely dubious territory, where these labels retain very little of their original meaning. As the liberal or left-oriented political elites in much of the Islamicate began to lose their legitimacy starting the 1970s – because of their dismal failure to create free, sovereign and prosperous polities – and faced growing opposition from various Islamist movements, they chose to sacrifice their ideology in order to cling to power. They had risen to power on an anti-imperialist, anti-Zionist and, in some cases, socialist platform. Starting in the 1970s, the survival of the increasingly repressive regimes they led was tied to the support of Western powers in return for keeping the Islamists out of power; this was the pact they made with the devil. It was an enduring pact that crushed any opposition to these regimes until the recent Arab uprising. The liberal and left factions in Pakistan also reprogrammed themselves after the end of the Cold War. Under Benazir Bhutto, the Pakistan People’s Party, once left-leaning, anti-imperialist, sought legitimacy in Washington and quickly embraced its neoliberal program to open the economy to Western capital.

If the formerly liberal and left leaning forces completed this metamorphosis with little difficulty, this is not entirely surprising. Even when they proclaimed socialist ideals or employed anti-imperialist rhetoric, the thinking of the politically dominant classes in much of the Islamicate had been shaped by an Orientalist narrative. After the Western powers had destroyed or marginalized the traditional learned classes – judges and jurisprudents trained in Shariah, theologians, physicians, engineers, architects and artists – this created space for the emergence of new intellectual classes that were beholden to their colonial masters. More often than not, they were secular and nationalist in their politics, and, following their Orientalist mentors, they blamed Islam for their backwardness; as a result, even when they paid lip service to Islam, they were determined to exclude it from their political discourse. In keeping with their colonialist thinking, they affected Western styles and mannerisms but did little to acquire the institutions, sciences and technology that were the motors of Western power and prosperity. It is no exaggeration to assert that these new elites – despite their nationalist rhetoric – felt closer to their colonial masters they had replaced than to the people they claimed to lead.

In consequence, as Islamist opposition movements began to reject their claims to leadership, the failed political elites retreated into the arms of their former colonial masters. They sought to convince the Western world that they faced a common enemy; the Islamist parties eager to replace them would turn the clock back on human rights, women’s rights and the rights of minorities. Worse, should the Islamist opposition gain power they would pursue policies openly hostile to Western interests. Despite the about-turn in their policies, however, these elites continued to sport their old political labels. They were ‘nationalists’ but owed their survival to Western arms, money, diplomatic support, intelligence, and advice. They were ‘liberals’ but they were happy to use the police state to suppress opposition to their regimes. They were ‘socialists’ but eagerly embraced the neoliberal dictates of the IMF and the World Bank.

In Pakistan, different factions of the ruling elites – who variously claim to be ‘nationalists,’ ‘liberals’ or ‘leftists’ – strenuously lobby the Americans or the British to gain power or to keep it. They outbid each other in sacrificing vital national interests; they never tire of proclaiming that the nation’s economic salvation depends on attracting foreign investment; they have backed unconditionally America’s so-called war on terrorism; they oppose the Afghans’ right to free their country of foreign occupiers; they cheered when General Musharraf used Pakistan’s military to fight Pakistanis who aided the Afghans; they privately assure the Americans that – despite their public stance – they stand firmly behind the deadly drone strikes against ‘targets’ inside Pakistan. Disregarding Pakistan’s Islamic sensibilities, a tiny minority of ‘secularists’ in Pakistan want to impose Western sexual mores on Pakistan; they have campaigned to abrogate the nation’s laws against blasphemy, not prevent its abuse or mitigate its penalties; they refuse to defend the rights of Muslim minorities in Western countries; they support America’s demands to shut down the madrasas in Pakistan but have long supported a colonial system of education for the elites that uses syllabi and exams designed in Cambridge.

Indeed, recently, one columnist at Dawn – a leading English newspaper – lampooned Imran Khan for refusing to share the podium with Salman Rushdie at a literary event in India. I do not know what inner demons drove Rushdie to produce his obscene caricature of Islam, but it does seem odd that a writer – that any person with imagination – would seek to sully and shatter a sacred treasure of humanity only because he finds himself excluded from its deep mystery. Needless to say, I did not support Ayatollah Khomenei’s call for Rushdie’s assassination; nor do I support the death penalty for apostasy. Islam supports free choice in matters of conscience, but the state may limit the activities of well-funded foreign missionaries that use pecuniary inducements to gain converts.

4.

Imran Khan has a great deal to say about the canker of Pakistan’s colonial legacy; the cultural divide that separates the class of brown sahibs and the great mass of Pakistanis who remain anchored in their history and traditions; and the new American masters this class has served since the departure of the British.

He also writes about his own struggles to overcome the Orientalist culture into which he was born, the culture of the brown sahibs, their sneering contempt for Islam, their denigration of the ‘natives’ and their culture. He describes his long and distinguished career in cricket that reveals a perfectionist and a man undaunted by failures. He shares with the readers his personal discovery of God, about growing spiritually through his own struggles in cricket and his charity work; finding inspiration in Islam’s great thinkers, poets and sages – most of all the great Islamic poet, visionary and philosopher, Muhammad Iqbal – but also seeking the blessings of nameless sufis, who prefer to live in obscurity and poverty despite their spiritual gifts. This review can only look at some of these issues; to accompany Imran Khan on his life journey, to walk through the many stages of his life, to explore his personal narrative of Pakistan’s political failures you have to read his Pakistan: A Personal History.

Quite rightly, Imran Khan blames the brown sahibs – a few thousand of the most powerful military officers, bureaucrats, and influential landed families – for never giving Pakistan the chance to develop into a self-respecting, sovereign and prosperous country. This class had retained or acquired its social rank, wealth and power during the colonial era by rendering loyal service to the British rulers; demonstrating their servility to their foreign masters by adopting their dress, mimicking their life style and mannerisms, and gaining familiarity with the history of British royalty, British place names, and British writers. They turned to jaundiced Orientalists for their knowledge of Islam, the history of Muslims and of India; and from them they acquired their deep contempt for Islam, the Muslims and their languages and traditions. Like their British masters, they interacted with the ‘natives’ – those who did not speak English or spoke it with a native accent – only as social inferiors, as clerks, peons, servants, peasants, low-ranking military officers and nameless jawans in the army.

Imran Khan provides several vignettes from the social life of these brown sahibs in Pakistan. “In the Gymkhana and the Punjab Club in Lahore,” he writes, “Pakistanis pretended to be English. Everyone spoke English including the waiters; the men dressed in suits; we, the members’ children, watched English films while the grown-ups danced to Western music on a Saturday night (43).” At Aitchison College, where the sons of Punjab’s landed elites were trained to become brown sahibs, boys “caught speaking in Urdu during school hours were fined, despite it being the official language of Pakistan (47).” Elsewhere, he writes, “When I was a boy I remember one of my uncles asking a cousin of mine, who was wearing shalwar kameez, why he was dressed like a servant (49-50).” Asked if he could speak Urdu – I can recall – the son of leading civil servant who served during General Ayub Khan’s tenure, shot back, “Only a little, when talking to the servants.”

Led by Iqbal, Jinnah and a small band of dedicated leaders – from the various provinces of British India – the struggles and sacrifices of ordinary Muslims had created a country they had hoped would make them proud, a country that would be guided by the highest Islamic ideals of justice, a country where they would be safe, where they could prosper, a country that would be a source of strength for the Muslims they had left behind in India, a country that would offer inspiration and leadership to the Islamicate. This was not to be. Within a few years of gaining independence, the brown sahibs in Pakistan seized control over the affairs of the country. That was the beginning of Pakistan’s descent into a shameless kleptocracy in the service of foreign powers.

“Far from shaking off colonialism,” writes Imran Khan, “our ruling elite slipped into its shoes (43-44).” Our brown sahibs made no significant changes to the colonial structures developed by the British to keep their Indian subjects on a tight leash. This omission was deliberate: the intent was to keep the ‘natives’ down, to continue to smother their long-suppressed energies, to stifle their creativity. As a result, the economy that Pakistan’s elites promoted soon became dependent on foreign loans; its capitalist class built its wealth on defaulted loans; its manufacturing sector could not move too far beyond processing raw materials; the educational standards at state institutions were allowed to deteriorate so that quality education was confined to the rich; and sixty years after independence more than half the population remains illiterate.

Over time, the emerging middle classes too began to mould themselves in the image of the brown sahibs. Since Urdu or the regional languages would get them nowhere in Pakistan’s private or public sectors, they began sending their children to English schools. Under colonial rule, the Muslim middle classes had abandoned Arabic and Persian, thus losing contact with the classics of their civilization; in the sixty years since gaining nominal independence, the new generations that attended English schools have become strangers to Urdu as well. Were it not for the logic of audience ratings – most viewers do not understand English – that forced the proliferating television channels to run their programs in Urdu, spoken Urdu too would be on its way out. Nevertheless, many of the actors who play lead roles in the Urdu serials can scarcely carry on a conversation in Urdu; the credits for these serials too are often presented in English. A growing number of commercial billboards in the cities also display their Urdu slogans and jingles in Roman letters.

The style of education at Aitchison College – the elite boarding school that he attended – Imran Khan writes, transformed Pakistani students “into cheap imitations of English public school boys.” These students adopted Western sportsmen, actors and pop stars as their role models. Only much later did Imran Khan come to understand how much this “education dislocated our sense of ourselves as a nation.” A generation later, this cultural dislocation is being reproduced on a much larger scale in dozens of elite schools – all run as profit-making enterprises – that prepare their students for the Cambridge O-level and A-level exams. As a result, writes Imran Khan, “Today our English-language schools produce ‘Desi Americans’ – young kids who, though they have never been out of Pakistan, have not only perfected the American twang but all the mannerisms (including the tilt of the baseball cap) just by watching Hollywood films.” In imitation, poorer children too are deserting the state-run Urdu schools to attend poorly staffed English medium schools run out of apartments but carrying exotic labels. Some are named after Catholic saints, in a tawdry attempt to bask in the prestige of Christian missionary schools. Others carry more hilarious names. One school, less inclined to borrow the halo of Catholic saints, calls itself, Oxford and Cambridge Islamic English-Medium School. I am aware that this faux Anglicization is being driven by global forces as well, but – in the Islamic world alone – Turkey, Iran and Indonesia continue to give primacy to their national languages.

A slavish Westernization among the elites has forced Pakistan into intel-lectual sterility. Over the past century, these Westernized classes have produced little world-class scholarship on the country’s history or social and economic structures; their scientific production too remains mostly meager and mediocre, if not worse. Nearly all the great Muslim thinkers and writers of the previous hundred and fifty years in South Asia had received their early education in wholly or partly traditional setting; and this includes Ghalib, Hali, Syed Ahmad Khan, Muhammad Iqbal, Abul Kalam Azad, Shibli Nu’mani, Syed Sulaiman Nadvi, Syed Abul ‘Ala Maududi, Saleemuzzaman Siddiqui, and Faiz, to name only a few illustrious figures from that period. Yet the growing cohorts of Western-educated Muslims since the 1900s have produced scarce any thinker or writer who could stand comparison with their predecessors. As the middle classes too increasingly submit themselves to the same shallow Westernization, this has deepened the poverty of Muslim intellect in South Asia. As the shift towards Western education has drained the Madrasas of its recruits from the middle classes, this has produced another deleterious effect: the coarsening of the Islamic discourse that flows from the madrasas. Imran Khan is deeply cognizant of this intellectual malaise. “If our Westernized classes started to study Islam,” writes Imran Khan, “not only would it be able to project the dynamic spirit of Islam but also help our society fight sectarianism and extremism… How can the group that is in the best position to project Islam do so when it sees Islam through Western eyes? The most damaging aspect of the gulf between the two sections of our society is that it has stopped the evolution of both religion and culture in Pakistan (340-1).”

The coarsening of religious discourse in the West too flows in large part from similar causes: the abandonment and denigration of religion and its mystical traditions by the intellectual classes. In the West this process began with the Renaissance and the Reformation, gained strength with the Enlightenment, and reached its apogee in the nineteenth century with the launching of Darwinian evolutionalism. As a result, over the past three centuries, Christianity has increasingly adopted hard fundamentalist positions – especially in the United States – that draw their inspiration from the conquest narratives of the Old Testament not the teachings of Jesus in the Gospels. Over the past half century, especially, the more fundamentalist variants of Christianity have become the refuge of whites who have been marginalized by the rapid economic and social changes in the United States. They vent their anger at immigrants, blacks and Muslims, at women who take charge of their bodies, and – paradoxically – at ‘big’ government, the only institution that could help reverse their economic marginalization. Increasingly also, they have been led by Christian Zionism and Israel’s military successes to identify with Jewish colonization of Palestine. In their commitment to Israeli expansionism, these messianic Christians are more intransigent than the Israelis themselves.

5.

Imran Khan blames the Westernized elites for the Pakistan’s deepening problems. Quite early on, these elites ensured that independence would merely exchange one set of white masters for another: the Americans for the British. Unlike the British, the Americans would rule over Pakistan through local surrogates; the brown faces of these surrogates would maintain the happy illusion that Pakistanis were in control of their destiny.

Although this neocolonial relationship has seen some ups and downs, starting in the 1990s, the top echelons of Pakistan’s governments have been appointed by Washington and, accordingly, their activities are monitored and supervised by the US ambassador in Islamabad. In turn, the Pakistani rulers and their cronies use the government to capture rent, much of which is transferred to foreign bank accounts. Pakistan’s subordination to the US reached a new low after the 9-11 attacks as the rulers – civilian and military – rented the country’s ports, highways, airspace, air bases, and, soon, its military to the US for moneys that have largely gone into private coffers.

Although Imran Khan does not spell out the manifold linkages that bind Pakistan’s corrupt rulers to the United States, he understands that Pakistan cannot move forward unless it ends its neocolonial ties to the United States. To this end, he sets himself several interrelated tasks. A Tehreek government will pull Pakistan out of America’s so-called war on terrorism; this means stopping the drone attacks on Pakistani territory, revoking all the territorial concessions General Musharraf made to the United States, and ending Pakistan’s war against its own people in Pakhtunkhwa. “Pakistan should disengage from this insane and immoral war,” writes Imran Khan (360). If this could be done, the chief factor that has been destabilizing Pakistan, pushing it to the edge of a civil war, will disappear. Pakistan’s military disengagement from the US will be followed by efforts to end Pakistan’s dependency on foreign loans to pay for gov-ernment programs, much of which have been diverted to private coffers in the past.

Is all this doable? Despite the dire warnings of slanted commentators, should Pakistan withdraw from the US war against terror, it is extremely unlikely that it would face a war. At present, the US has no stomach for starting another war even as it and Israel threaten to start a war against Iran. The US will certainly stop payments of the blood money, but this should not hurt Pakistan since most of this money finds its way back where it came from. China too will oppose any US attacks against Pakistan, and will stand ready to tide Pakistan through its balance of payments difficulties.

Pakistan can gain economic independence – Imran Khan argues – by ending tax evasions; this alone will double the government’s revenues. Ending corruption at the highest levels of government, therefore, is the Tehreek’s signature policy goal. Imran Khan has sought to develop a culture opposed to corruption in his own party; the Tehreek requires the party’s office bearers to declare their assets and tax returns; it has set in motion steps to elect all office bearers to the party; it will deny the party’s ticket to anyone with a record of corruption; and, it has promised to make all elected and unelected officials accountable to an independent National Accountability Board. Ending corruption at the top – Imran Khan maintains – will banish corruption from lower levels of government. I am afraid this is a wish not a well-considered expectation. It will take a lot of hard work – a variety of administrative reforms – to push back against Pakistan’s rampant corruption.

Reforming the country’s education system is a fundamental goal of the Tehreek. The country’s three-tiered system – consisting of private English-medium schools, public schools using Urdu and local lan-guages, and the madrasa system – is divisive. The English schools reproduce the class of brown sahibs and spread their pernicious culture to the growing middle classes; the poorly staffed and poorly equipped public schools deny the great majority of the country’s population a decent education; and the madrasas have become a welfare system for the poorest children. The plan is to replace this multi-tiered educational system, one that has perpetuated the colonial mindset, with a uniform system of education for everyone that will embrace mathematics, the natural and social sciences, and history while giving their proper place to the Pakistani languages, English, and the Islamic sciences.

Another important policy goal of the Tehreek is to create a system of local governance for Pakistan’s 50,000 villages. This will take local development funds out of the hands of politicians and put them in the hands of elected village councils, who will decide how this money is spent. They will also serve as the local government for the villages, with responsibility for maintaining municipal services, including a registry of births, deaths and marriages; and reviewing the work of local officials responsible for policing, health, irrigation, and education. In addition, like the panchayats of the pre-colonial era, the village councils will provide cheap and quick adjudication of local disputes.

Imran Khan has not articulated – at least in his book – an economic policy. Most likely, this omission is deliberate; he has had many occasions to set forth his economic policies but he has persisted in reiterating his position on a few signature issues, including corruption, lawlessness, and the betrayal of Pakistan’s , national interests by the rulers. As a result, we know very little about what policies he favors on infrastructure, industry, agriculture, urban labor, urban transportation, exports, energy, water, R&D, etc. This appears to suggest that he takes a rather Adam Smithian view of economic development. If you provide honest governance – I have heard him say this a few times – this will create the right incentives for all other matters to move in the right direction; the proverbial invisible hand will sort things out for the best. With their property rights secured, private individuals, pursuing their own interest, will generate savings, investments, innovation and, therefore, rapid economic growth. It is possible that Imran Khan has not had time to formulate policies in these areas; or he believes that the focus on a small number of core issues will best help to energize support for his party. In either case, it is this writer’s view, that he should quickly remedy this neglect. For good governance alone will not energize Pakistan’s people to become active economic agents of change. In addition, from an electoral standpoint, he is more likely to expand his support base by articulating his position on issues that are vital to the inter-ests of workers, peasants, ordinary citizens anxious for their health, and pro-spective investors in Pakistan’s economy.

Certainly, better governance will be a hugely positive thing for Pakistan; it can start to reverse the ruination produced by decades of rampant corruption. But good governance alone will not lift Pakistan out of poverty nor will it produce economic miracles. Objectively considered, no one will contest the British claim that they instituted ‘good governance’ in India once the rule of the East India Company was replaced by representatives of the Crown. Nevertheless, the evidence is also clear that during their long stay in India the British produced a great deal of economic misery; unfettered British imports destroyed India’s manufactures; British capital displaced indigenous capital from the most vital areas of the economy; their destruction of indigenous educational institutions produced mass illiteracy; and they pauperized the Indians. Good governance alone will not produce economic development if that governance is not used to encourage the growth of indigenous capital, institutions, technology, education and skills. Good governance must also be used to correct past social inequities and the new ones that a capitalist system is certain to produce. If good governance is used only in support of markets and capital, it will very quickly be overthrown by the inequities produced by the capitalist system. Let us not forget that Western democracies – especially in the United States and Britain – are now mostly hollow institutions; they are tolerated by corporate leaders only because they can game these systems to perpetuate their wealth and power.

6.

Notwithstanding the surge in his popularity in the cities, what are the chances that the Tehreek, if given the chance, will be able to form the country’s next government?

If Pakistan had a presidential system of government, it is more than likely that Imran Khan would sweep the polls; the rivals that any party might place against him would look like cretins. Under Pakistan’s parliamentary system, however, he faces an uphill task. In this decentralized system, where elections have to be won in several hundred local constituencies, the Tehreek candidates will have to fight against the power of corrupt local incumbents who will use their traditional authority, their money, dirty tricks, thugs, and help from their foreign masters to defeat a challenge that threatens to end their plundering binge. Winning a majority of these local contests cannot be easy.

On his path to power, Imran Khan will have to face a showdown with several factions of Pakistan’s corrupt elites. Many top generals, bureaucrats, politicians, media barons, loan-defaulting mill-owners, journalists, television anchors, and leaders of civil society have become entangled with American interests: they have cultivated ties with various US agencies; they or their close relatives hold green cards; they or their relatives work for subsidiaries of Western corporations; they have advised or worked for Western think tanks; their NGOs have thrived on foreign funding; and they have become rich and are hungry for more. Perhaps, the corrupt elites may concede victory to the Tehreek, since they may soon engineer a return to power; but it appears more likely that they will fight back, since this will end even if temporarily the bonanza they have enjoyed since 2001.

If it appears that the Tehreek is going to win the next elections scheduled for 2013, will these elections be held or, if they are allowed to proceed, will they not be rigged to ensure the Tehreek’s defeat? Alternatively, the political parties in power may try to increase the chaos in Pakistan’s cities, and thus pave the way for a military takeover that may end Imran Khan’s political career. More simply, the CIA or some segment of the corrupt elites, or the two working together, may assassinate Imran Khan. Can Imran Khan forestall these subterfuges? None of these options are certainties, but not to anticipate them and have contingent plans to deal with them would be reckless.

The power of the corrupt elites will be hardest to dislodge in Pakistan’s rural hinterlands that are still dominated largely by traditional power barons: the landlords, dynasties of so-called pirs, and tribal chiefs. Despite his tremendous charisma and notwithstanding his populist rhetoric, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto chose the easy route to electoral victory by co-opting the traditional rural power barons. This compromise brought an easy victory but, bending to the power of these barons, Bhutto proceeded to marginalize the left block in his party. At the same time, he implemented his farcical ‘socialist’ agenda of destroying Pakistan’s nascent capitalist class; he seized and handed over their industries, banks and even schools to the stalwarts in his party. Imran Khan too is aware of the handicap he faces in a parliamentary system; and – on a smaller scale so far – he too has opened leadership positions in his party to the old power barons. This compromise is certain to alienate the old workers in his party, but it also carries the more serious risk of alienating the young voters who have pinned their hopes for change on the Tehreek’s commitment to establish a just order in Pakistan. The propagandists of the old order are already hammering home this point. It does not inspire confidence when the Tehreek takes a strong stand against drone strikes but appoints a former foreign minister – who supported these strikes during his tenure – as the vice-chairman of his party.

Imran Khan’s defense of these compromises is not convincing. These old politicians – he parries – are welcome to join his party but he will vet them for corruption before he awards them the party’s tickets to the national and provincial assemblies. If the Tehreek cannot win the rural constituencies without enlisting the local power barons, he will have to embrace many more of their kind. Should he do this, however, he will surrender his chief strength – the unwavering commitment to reform the old order. Once the scions of the traditional political families begin to fill his party – even if they look less corrupt than others – the Tehreek cannot implement the reforms that will hurt the economic and political interests of this class of people.

Aware of these risks, Imran Khan is seeking to strengthen his hand by organizing his base, consisting of younger voters. He has launched a drive to register them as members of the Tehreek. Once the membership rolls are ready, he promises that they will elect their local, regional and national leaders. It is a formidable undertaking; it has never been done by any party other than the Jamat-e-Islami that restricts membership to practicing Muslims. If the Tehreek succeeds in this endeavor, this may begin to alter the dynamics of power at the local levels. As a grass-roots party with a strong organization, it could stand up more effectively against the power of the local barons. This will reduce the need to bring these rural barons into the party; the Tehreek could use them selectively to win a few seats in districts where its support base is weakest.

The Tehreek has a chance to extend its populist appeal to the rural areas with its plan to institute thousands of elected village councils. This is the only program that carries the prospect of mobilizing the peasants behind the Tehreek, but for this populist appeal to take roots, the party has to do two things. It must ensure that the rural population hears about this program and understands the benefits it can bring to them. More importantly, the Tehreek has to come up with a plan to assure the rural poor that these village councils will not be captured by the local power barons. How is this to be done? If the party members can be organized at the level of the villages, they can pit their organized strength against the bullying of the local thugs. The Tehreek should also create mobile brigades of young idealist college students who will be ready to travel and deploy to the villages to support – with their disciplined but non-violent presence – the rural poor during the elections to the village councils. The elections can be staggered to ensure that these college volunteers are available at the village elections. In addition, these elections should be held only after the Tehreek has had time to reform the police force.

Since it began drawing crowds, its rivals have accused the Tehreek of receiving support from the ‘establishment,’ a code word for the security agencies working under the umbrella of the Pakistan army. This is a smear. The Tehreek‘s support has grown because the people can see more plainly than before their country being pushed ever closer to the brink by the unbridled corruption of their rulers: and they see Imran as their only real chance of reversing their country’s slide into chaos. The Tehreek should continue to distance itself from any material assistance of the security agencies, but I hope that that it enjoys the tacit sup-port of the mid-level and junior officers and the jawans in the military, who cannot be too happy at having to kill other Pakistanis and whose lives were sacrificed by the military leadership so that they and the civilians leaders could collect blood money from the United States. In 1996, the Pakistan army faced a spate of desertions from its ranks as they were asked to fight the Afghan resistance and their Pakistani hosts. Although these desertions were contained, it cannot be doubted that resentment still simmers in the army’s rank and file against the military leadership for their readiness to do the bidding of the United States for pecuniary gain. One hopes that as the Tehreek ratchets its campaign, it will work in subtle ways to win the esteem of the rank and file in Pakistan’s army. The knowledge that their own rank and file have their eyes on their backs will restrain the generals who may want to extend their profitable partnership with the United States.

The Tehreek should also send out signals – convincing signals – that it has a second arrow in its quiver. It must let Pakistanis know that it is ready to mobilize its ranks for more forceful action if the corrupt political elites will use dirty tricks to extend their corruption binge for another five years. Pakistan cannot survive another five years of their depredations. In times of crisis – and Pakistan has never faced a greater crisis than it does now – the movement to save the country must be ready to proceed along two tracks: change through the electoral process but if that is obstructed the people must be ready to bring down the corrupt rulers through massive and sustained but non-violent protests. Victory only comes to those who are prepared to broaden their democratic struggle if change becomes impossible through the ballot box.

Consider the facts.

First, as boneheaded and unprofessional as their conduct was (and no one can deny that the whole mess was a diplomatic embarrassment), give them credit for not having boasted to the prostitutes—even while drunk—that they were part of Obama’s security detail. Considering how readily men succumb to the urge to show off for women, these guys didn’t do that. They didn’t brag. According to the reports I’ve read, the Colombian prostitutes said they had no idea these “customers” were Secret Service agents.

Which, integrity-wise, is more than we can say for Dick Morris, Bill Clinton’s former political advisor, who was reported to have bragged to a prostitute that he was so “connected” to the Oval Office, he could get the president on the telephone any time he liked. To prove it, Morris went ahead and called the White House, got Clinton on the phone, and allowed the woman to listen in. What a sleazeball.

Second, it’s one thing to insist that public servants representing the United States behave responsibly, but it’s another thing to wallow in self-righteous indignation. Let’s not be hypocrites. Despite the shrieking outrage expressed by pundits and commentators, male visitors to foreign cities tend to do much the same thing as these agents did. U.S. soldiers did it in Saigon and Bangkok; Southern California teenagers did it in Tijuana, Mexico; and even some of my fellow Peace Corps volunteers—noble and idealistic as they were—did it in India’s larger cities.

What kept me personally from doing it wasn’t moral rectitude or piety. It was fear. Fear of being robbed, fear of catching a disease, fear of word getting back to Peace Corps officials and being sent home in disgrace, and fear of the Communists. I cringe at admitting to that last one, but it’s true.

The U.S. State Department had warned us volunteers that there were Indian Communists lurking about, waiting for an American fool like me to do something stupid or reckless or illegal, so they could report it to the media and embarrass the United States. And I was just dumb and naïve enough to believe it.

When it comes to being de facto ambassadors, young, testosterone-fueled American males are bad choices. That’s because they view foreign countries not as exotic cultures, with unique histories, languages and artifacts, but as “playgrounds.” This viewpoint is exacerbated by the fact that in many countries prostitution is not only tolerated, but statutorily legal. Which brings us back to the Secret Service. As wrong as their actions were, it’s doubtful these same agents would have gone out trolling for prostitutes had they been on assignment in Denver or St. Louis.

If we’re serious about fixing this problem, there’s a way to do it. We can do what Hollywood did to resolve the “casting couch” phenomenon (where casting directors extracted sexual favors from eager young actresses in return for giving them roles). Hollywood fixed that problem by putting women in charge of casting. And that’s what we should do with the Secret Service. Assign only women agents on these foreign junkets.

This brings up the question: what made them dangerous? The underlying answer is simple: the dead were black. This is the same assumption made by George Zimmerman when he followed Trayvon Martin. This fact illustrates the nature of racism in today’s United States (and probably in much of Europe and the rest of the world). I believe Mr. Zimmerman and his family’s claim that they do have black friends. This fact does not eliminate their racism. It does mean that they are not necessarily prejudiced against African-American individuals they actually know. This seeming contradiction illustrates the particularities of racism in a “post-racial” society. So does a criminal justice system that not only targets people of color (especially young black men) in its pursuit of arrest quotas, but also tends to imprison those arrestees at a much greater proportion to their actual numbers in the general population. So does an educational system that under-funds schools in neighborhoods that are predominantly African-American. This lack of funding results in a poorer education, which, in turn, results in a lower employment rate and, when combined with the aforementioned policing and sentencing practices, a higher incarceration rate for this demographic.

That is just one aspect of a societal construct that allows a relative few African-Americans and other non-white residents of the United States a pass into the better life assumed by most white-skinned Americans. I recently attended an anti-racism rally in Burlington, Vermont, a small city in the northeaster US with a small African-American population and a somewhat larger Somali and Sudanese refugee population. This rally, held in the wake of the Trayvon Martin murder, featured a speech by a black high school student. This young man spoke about growing up as “the other” in a society that seemed to have it in for people like him. His talk wasn’t a lament, but a genuine attempt to express his fears, his frustration, and his refusal to play any role assigned to him that did not allow him to be who he wanted to be. He acknowledged that he lived among people who were afraid of him solely because he was dark-skinned; at the same time he acknowledged that the menace associated with that identity was part of what made being a young black man in the US “kind of cool”. He went on to state that entertainment like gangsta rap fed off this menace while also celebrating a lifestyle that limited too many of his friends’ambitions to a life that meant prison somewhere along the line. In other words, it could be argued that it perpetuated the racist system.

Discussing racism is always a tricky business. It seems even more difficult in today’s climate. While only a few far right fringe groups openly declare their racism in public, a common understanding exists that denies the historical effects of an economic and social system built on the systemic denial of a people’s basic humanity because of their skin color. This understanding continues to create clear lines of economic and social estrangement for a majority of the black residents of the United States.

The ripple effects of this phenomenon are also apparent in Latino and other communities composed of people not of European descent. Racism is something much deeper than individual prejudices; it is systemic and so pervasive it is just part of the general consciousness we exist in. Let’s get this straight, however. Racism in the US exists because of white people. Darker skinned people pay the most obvious price for this disease founded in ignorance and capital’s need to dominate, and white people benefit from the phenomenon even when they actively oppose it.

In 1970, a group of leftist organizations in the US held a Revolutionary People’s Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia PA. The convention was primarily organized by the original Black Panther Party. Although the convention’s audacious hopes to create a revolutionary document foundered, the fact that 15,000 people gathered to try and create that document stand as a unique moment in history. There were some important statements that came out of the discussions held that weekend, including identifying that anti-racist organizing by whites should take place in white communities. After all, it’s that segment of the population where racism still festers and it’s the same segment that prospers from it. The consensus of the convention was that since racism is white people’s problem, then white people need to oppose it in those areas where it is at its worst, such as the US Congress, most police forces, and various media outlets, not to mention many of their neighborhoods. Unfortunately, ignoring its existence does not eliminate it.

More and more individuals in the United States ignore the false separation of skin color and ethnicity, finding friendship, love and marriage across former lines of division. Individual acts of racist prejudice are rare enough that when they do occur they often make the news. Yet, a system designed within a racist paradigm continues to deny most African-Americans (and many other non-whites) a life comparable to their white neighbors. This occurs despite the presence of a black man in the white house.

Simultaneously, the inherent racism of this dynamic pretends to be something else, imprisoning black and brown people at an unconscionable rate, preventing their access to quality education, and limiting their opportunities via the mechanisms of an economy originating in the enslavement of Africans and the exploitation and colonization of brown people. By manipulating the desires of most US residents for a post-racial society, the contradiction between personal experience and the greater economic and social reality makes the continued domination of an essentially racist system possible.

Greece is Ground Zero of the austerity onslaught, a massive, global re-engineering of capitalist societies designed to roll back workers’ gains of the past century into a neo-feudal state of debt peonage. In Greece, public sector wages have been cut by 20 to 30 per cent, while tens of thousands of civil servants have been put on partial pay. Pensions have been cut by 20 to 40 per cent. Health and education spending have been slashed as well.

Last week, a 77-year-old retired pharmacist, Dimitris Christoulas, in despair over what international bankers have done to his country, shot himself in the head in front the Greek parliament. Many Greeks believe his death was not a suicide but a murder by capitalism. His death prompted mass mourning and protest.

Austerity is not only killing the future, it is also killing the past. A new law passed as part of the austerity measures requires the Greek Ministry of Culture to cut 30 to 50 per cent of its personnel.

Today 66 administrative departments of antiquities throughout the country handle the workload and law enforcement pertaining to Greece’s cultural heritage, including permits for use of land where archaeological treasures are thought to be buried, the organisation and running of archaeological sites and museums, excavations and archaeological surveys, and archaeological scientific research.

The Ministry of Culture and Tourism is comprised of 7000 employees, including 950 archaeologists, civil servants, and 2000 guards and night-guards. Moreover, each year 3500 extra employees are hired on short term contracts. In November 2011, 10 percent of the total workforce of the Ministry of Culture that represented the most experienced employees (with more than 33 years of experience) was forced to leave the service and retire, as part of plans to reduce the total number of public sector employees in Greece.

In recent months, there have been burglaries at National and Municipal Galleries, and an armed robbery at the Museum of Olympia, the site of the first Olympic Games.

Despina Koutsouba, president of the Association of Greek Archaeologists (SEA), says treasure dating back to the Classical, Hellenistic and Byzantine periods has disappeared from the museum, including “a golden ring stamp, copper sculptures from the eighth century BC, coins and clay vases.”

In Italy, a similar fate is befalling ancient artifacts because of austerity cuts. According to an April 9 report,

Fragments of the 2,000-year-old Roman amphitheatre — now at the centre of a busy road junction and blackened with pollution — have begun falling down and the restoration project’s start date of March is looking increasingly unlikely.

Meanwhile, at the archaeological site of Pompeii near Naples, which has also been hit by a series of alarming collapses in recent months, the long-mooted prospect of bringing in private investors is still a distant prospect.

Italy, like Greece, is now turning to privitization schemes to keep its cultural heritage sites standing. Greece has offered the Acropolis to “advertising firms, movie companies and other ventures.” And even though Italy, the fourth biggest tourism destination in the world, devotes only 0.21 per cent of its Gross Domestic Product to culture, austerity measures have seen cuts of 17 million euros to the La Scala opera house and Piccolo Teatro in Milan.

The latest victim of capitalist austerity, the ancient past in Italy and Greece, echoes the destruction of ancient cultural sites and artifacts in Afghanistan and Iraq following US-led invasions.

Following the entry of US forces into Baghdad in April 2003, a wave of looting broke out that targeted the country’s cultural institutions, with the National Museum of Iraq, which holds one of the world’s most important collections of Mesopotamian antiquities, being looted, the National Library and Archives burned and other institutions up and down the country, including museums, archaeological sites, schools and universities looted or destroyed.

In an interview that appeared in this newspaper at the time, Mounir Bouchenaki, then assistant director-general for culture at the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation, UNESCO, in Paris, spoke of his shock at crunching through the 20cm of ash covering the floors of the burned-out Iraqi National Library on a fact-finding mission to Baghdad.

An estimated 400,000 to 600,000 artifacts were looted from Iraqi archeological sites between 2003 and 2005, and at least 25 per cent of the Iraqi National Library’s holdings were destroyed in the fires of April 2003.

Some 60 percent of the country’s Ottoman and Hashemite archives were destroyed. While some 600-700 Islamic manuscripts were apparently destroyed in the fires that destroyed the library of the Ministry of Awqaf on 13-14 April 2003, a further 5,250 had been moved off site, though their whereabouts is unknown. The Ministry’s collection of 45,000 printed books, including rare Ottoman Turkish works, was destroyed.

The imperialist wars for oil and other resources, as well as strategic military positioning in the region, wiped out artifacts and sites of cultures that were over 5,000 years old, in the so-called “cradle of civilization.” Now the ancient cultures of Italy and Greece are facing the same capitalist pillaging.

The Italian Autonomist Franco Berardi once said, “The future now seems imaginable only as the intersection of catastrophic tendencies. Paradoxically, only from the interference between the various planes of catastrophe does it seem possible to imagine a salvation.” When the catastrophic history of the austerity agenda is finally written, one wonders what other histories will remain?

Americans have been watching authentic bottom-up revolutions in other countries but remain oblivious to a very different kind of revolution by elites that has been in progress for over three decades in the US.  It has not destroyed the government or Constitution, merely bought control of both.  Our government was not overthrown in a bloody revolution.  It was purchased to win the class war against the 99 percent.

Call it the frog revolution.  It is best understood by the parable of the frog in water that stays in it as the temperature is raised, ultimately to the boiling point, killing the frog.  The key indicator of the US frog revolution is a mountain of data showing the rise in economic inequality, the loss of upward economic mobility, and the killing of the middle class.  The vast majority of Americans, the 99 percent of frogs, remain ignorant of how they are being destroyed by that infamous rich and powerful one percent.

Note that in a poll released by Pew, 19 percent of Americans agreed with the statement that “success in life is pretty much determined by forces outside of our control,” the highest number since 1994.  It would be much higher if there was not an epidemic of delusional thinking.  But more on target, 40 percent of Americans — also the highest number since 1994 — agreed with the statement that “hard work and determination are no guarantee of success for most people.”  For the counter-revolution we need that number must get much higher.

Consider new data about American reality from a study by University of California economist Emmanuel Saez.  In 2010, despite non healed wounds from the great recession, an amazing 93 percent of the additional income created in the country that year, compared to 2009 — $288 billion — went to the top 1 percent of taxpayers, those with at least $352,000 in income. That delivered an average single-year pay increase of 11.6 percent to each of these households.  Yes, the rich are getting richer.

But there is more to this depressing story. All the talk about the top 1 percent misses the truth about the super rich.  In 2010, 37 percent of these additional earnings went to just the top 0.01 percent, a miniscule collection of about 15,000 households with average incomes of $23.8 million. They saw their incomes rise by 21.5 percent.  The richer you are the richer you get.

What about ordinary Americans?  The bottom 99 percent received a microscopic $80 increase in pay per person in 2010, after adjusting for inflation. The top 1 percent, whose average income was $1,019,089, saw an 11.6 percent increase in income.  Most Americans are no longer sharing in economic recovery or growth.

Consider this finding: David Madland and Nick Bunker of the Center for American Progress recently found that in pre-frog revolution 1968, when 28 percent of the workforce was unionized, 53 percent of the nation’s income went to the middle class.  In 2010, when only 11.9 percent of the nation’s workers were unionized, the fraction earned by the middle class had fallen to 46.5 percent.  And if current efforts to destroy unions are successful, the vast majority of non-unionized workers will suffer more.

Still more numbing numbers: Over time the top 1 percent has done better in successive economic recoveries of the past two decades. In the Clinton era expansion, 45 percent of the total income gains went to the top 1 percent; in the Bush recovery, it was 65 percent; now it is 93 percent.   How much more negative impacts of the frog revolution will it take for a counter-revolution to take back our country?

Add to all this: Research by Julia Isaacs of the Brookings Institution, as part of the Economic Mobility Project, has shown that intergenerational mobility in the United States has fallen far below the levels in Germany, Finland, Denmark and other more social democratic nations of Northern Europe.  In other words, the American Dream really is nothing more than a big, delusional lie that far too many Americans still cling to and that mainstream politicians still boast about.  Those politicians enable the elites to sustain the top-down frog revolution.

Listen, all around the 99 percent the socio-economic waters are still being heated up more by the rich and powerful 1 percent that runs the two-party plutocracy.  Delusional frog-citizens are mostly blind to the hot water they are in.  Far too many are still clinging to the myth that voting for one party or the other will somehow make things better.  Wrong.  Both major parties have allowed and sustained the top-down frog revolution.  What we need for the counter-revolution is finding a way to overturn the status quo political system.

A major opportunity is using what the Founders gave us in the Constitution: an Article V convention of state delegates with the power to propose reform constitutional amendments.  This should be a priority for both the Tea Party and Occupy movements and any candidate coming through the Americans Elect nomination process on the Internet should also support using the convention option.

What is at risk without effective rebellion is much more than dollars.  Harold Meyerson got it right: “If belief and participation in democracy are sustained by people’s conviction that democracy produces good economic outcomes, then the growing concentration of wealth and income in the United States is a long-term threat to everything we profess to stand for.”

You never want to hear that kind of news. When it happens, you remember how many Trayvon incidents happen everyday all over the world… It doesn’t seem like the race problem will ever get solved. I like to be optimistic, but it doesn’t seem like it’ll ever get solved.

And yet, later in the interview, speaking of the same 17-year-old high school football player gunned down for walking while Black, some of that optimism seemed to peek through. “Maybe he thought in football he’d have a legacy.” said the widely respected rapper. “But now his legacy can become something that helps change things, hopefully.”

With that, Nas exhibited the ongoing battle between pain and promise that hip-hop, at its best, has long tapped. The killing of Trayvon Martin, and the wave of outrage it’s provoked, has once again put this struggle at center stage.

This is far from the first time that the hip-hop community has been moved to speak out on the flagrant racism of America’s criminal injustice system. Incidents like Trayvon’s are so shamefully frequent that Chuck D’s famous quip, “rap is CNN for Black people,” seems cliche by now. Something about this feels different, however.

Numbers of protest attendees alone don’t do justice, but they do give you an idea. Thousands in New York, 5,000 in Minneapolis, 1,500 in Rochester, somewhere around two thousand at three different actions in as many days in Chicago, a thousand in Denver, and countless smaller actions from Maine to San Diego. All on top of high school walkouts across the state of Florida, and the thousands who have descended upon Sanford in several marches..

Comparisons to the 1955 murder of Emmett Till, which some consider an opening shot in the Civil Rights movement, have abounded. Like Till’s death, Trayvon’s murder has pulled the lid off a long-simmering anger at the persistent racist bile that continues to run through American society.

And as before, it’s opened the way for so many who might otherwise remain silent to stand and be counted — even MC’s not normally considered “political.” Among those is Young Jeezy: “He looks like an innocent kid. I understand the situation as far as dude wanting to be [on] neighborhood watch, but everybody that’s black and young ain’t ‘up to no good.’”

The Game has similarly been moved to dismay in a recent interview: “For some reason, people don’t think that they need any excuse to kill us, beat us, hit us, run us over, disrespect us or anything like that.”

As always, however, the most moving responses have come from artists more in touch with hip-hop’s grassroots. At the time of this writing, Mos Def has teamed up with dead prez to record a tribute track for Trayvon. Immortal Technique has pointed out that vigilante violence is a regular occurrence on the US-Mexico border. RodStarz of radical Bronx duo Rebel Diaz, appearing on Davey D’s radio show, was quick to draw comparisons to Ramarley Graham, another Black teen gunned down by the NYPD a few weeks before Trayvon’s killing.

One of the countless local artists to write tracks dedicated to Trayvon is DC’s Slimm Goines. Though this isn’t the first political song he’s written, it seems that this murder has hit Slimm, like so many others, in a very deep place. When I ask him why he wrote “My Hoodie Weighs a Ton,” he responds “not sure. I just needed to say something. I haven’t written anything overtly political in a while. I just felt I had to.”

Slimm points out that the hip-hop response to cases like Trayvon’s is, of course, nothing new:

Hip-hop has always been quick to take up cases like this. Be it Yusef Hawkins in Bensonhurst back in ’89, the beating of Rodney King, Amadou Diallo, Abner Louima, Sean Bell, the hip-hop world  has always been at or near the forefront in speaking out against the senseless violence against young black men that seems to be excused in this society. Most hip-hop folks, being young and non-white, have intimate experience with being racially profiled, harassed, and in some cases, assaulted for being in the ‘wrong place at the wrong time.

The sense that we’ve been here before poignantly runs through most of the tracks dedicated to Trayvon. Mistah FAB, the Bay Area MC who first popped up on many fans’ radars for his track dedicated to Oscar Grant, released his song “God Don’t Love Me” on March 21st. It’s a simple, bare-bones track connecting the dots between Trayvon’s death and African America’s daily degradation at the hands of the criminal injustice system:

The whole world wanna talk about Kony
But ain’t nobody speaking on the little homie
So many Trayvons over the years
Left so many Black minds puzzled, in tears
We kill them we’re in a cell doing life
They kill us they post some bail ‘cuz they’re white

Pittburgh rapper Jasiri X takes a different direction. The acclaimed activist MC, who, over the years, has responded in this same manner to the cases of the Jena Six, Troy Davis and others like them, does his best to put himself in Trayvon’s shoes:

Trayvon never gave his cousin [sic] the Skittles
Mr. All-Star Game didn’t see another dribble
And George Zimmerman wasn’t even arrested
The message is white life is only protected in America!

Indeed. We most certainly have been here before. Far too many times. But it seems every time that the issue of race is brought up in the US, it’s brushed aside in favor of rhetoric of the “post-racial society.”

What has made hip-hop in particular both so durable and controversial over the past thirty years, however, is that it’s been one of the few bastions in popular culture where post-racialism is called out as a sham. It’s been one of the few art forms that has dared to speak up and say that the Civil Rights movement of yesteryear left a lot of unfinished business in its wake.

Perhaps that might be changing. It may be painful to acknowledge that it’s taken the death of yet another young Black man to finally provoke a modern movement for Black liberation. There’s no doubt, however, that such a movement is needed. The increased attention and mobilization around cases similar to that of Trayvon in the past few weeks — Ramarley Graham, Rekia Boyd — may signify that the time has at long last arrived.

“The world is changing pretty fast,” says Slimm. “From the Arab Spring to the Occupy movement, ordinary people are standing up. We’re less willing to accept the excuses that the people in power try to offer in situations like this. That nonsense about ‘waiting until all the facts are in’ is no longer good enough for us. The facts on the surface were enough for most folks to say, ‘You’ve gone too far this time.’ And, you know what? As the facts come in, we continue to be proven correct.”

That’s what it all comes down to. The countless thousands now marching for Trayvon, Ramarley and Rekia, who have hit the pavement for Sean, Oscar and Troy, the MCs who have dared to speak out from the street corners to the recording studios, were correct to do so. They’ve known what the disdainful shills for Zimmerman and his ilk have never quite grasped: that hungry people don’t stay hungry for long.

The case in point is the death of Trayvon Martin, the teenager killed with a gun by a vigilante posing as a ‘citizen patrol’ in a gated community in Florida. The event has triggered a firestorm of protests, as well it should.

We tend to think we have no responsibility for the George Zimmermans of the world – broken humans who feel their hatred is justified and grants them the right to all sorts of abominable behavior. We know that it’s crazy. But do we see how every time we allow ‘little’ racist remarks to go unchecked, whether from a friend or co-worker, a TV show or article, we contribute to horrific situations such as Trayvon must have faced in that Florida gated ‘community’.

George Zimmerman typifies many emotionally-wounded Americans who are off-kilter, over-influenced by Fox News, the NRA and even our government(s), which creates laws like ‘Stand Your Ground’ at the behest of the gun lobby and other extremists. I suspect that Mr. Zimmerman also has trouble with a black president, social services and evolution. The pattern is pretty common among hard-line fundamentalists, even as they name themselves Christians..

It’s worth noting that in spite of a past assault charge on a police officer, Mr. Zimmerman seems extra cozy with his local law enforcement officials. Without that coziness, he likely doesn’t commit this egregious crime. Their little hater’s club allowed his racism to be considered okay, maybe even cool. We know there was some level of tolerance for his actions, as he was not charged with a crime at the scene. [And as of this writing has not been charged yet.]

But how many of us find ourselves in similar, if not so obviously racist, situations at times? Most all of us. And how do we react to such comments and behaviors? Sadly, most of us have been too afraid of confrontation or too disinterested in civil society to take action. If this were not the case, racism would have been long since abandoned by even the most raging haters. We’ve not stood up to it in the past. Now that we’re awakening, it’s time for a change.

We do not need to be aggressive or hostile to racists – they have plenty of that already. Our methodology needs to be one of gentleness, of peace and of love. “Wow, George, it kind of surprises me to hear you say that. He seems like a fine/pretty average/typical kid to me.” or perhaps “You know George, except for an accident of birth you could be him and he could be you. Funny.” or again “George, remarks like that are unacceptable. We are all children under God’s light, and such talk is not at all Christian.” This last version is a little more challenging, but cast in the context of Christianity we can perhaps be a bit more firm.

No matter how peacefully we approach our ‘George,’ the possibility exists that they will react against you. It may be abusive, perhaps even violent. That potential outcome doesn’t relieve us of our personal responsibility to end racism. If the situation is too flammable, we may not be able to express ourselves fully. But most of all, we cannot let such situations continue due to our indifference. We owe it to each other as brothers and sisters, here together in Life on Earth to take a stand against racism.

As we know, racism and the hater mentality are not aimed solely toward those of African descent. Such vindictiveness can be hurled at other races and other creed-holders as well. Other minority communities have felt the unjustified wrath, the violence and the bullets. Muslims and the LGBT community know the feeling. The citizens of Haiti, Darfur and Palestine – they know that feeling. We must be vigilant for them as well.

The simple truth is that Mr. Zimmerman and those of a similar ilk, in a healthy society, are controlled by ethical systems and the vast majority of citizens who are healthy. Of course, in a healthy society, we do not have endless war, food and energy systems controlled by corporations, too big to fail banks, or an utterly dysfunctional federal government.

Nor do we have a gun lobby with no respect for human life. A justice system with no respect for justice. A police system in Florida where a violent attacker is not tested for drugs or placed in jail to await trial. There might be another hoodie who suffers the ultimate injustice.

In this broken and dysfunctional society of America, 2012 – we clearly need substantial change. We need a new cultural operating system based on ethics – principles like peace and love – instead of this broken system of globalization built by and for the 1%. Fortunately, such an idea already exists. It’s called World 5.0. It reminds us how a new, ethical system is critical. But like any other system, it will only be as effective as the people who are engaged within it.

What should one think when several weeks ago officials at Claremont McKenna College admitted that for years a senior administrator had been reporting inflated SAT scores in order to boost the school’s ranking in the U.S. News & World Report annual ranking issue? Or that tuition at public college and universities has skyrocketed 40% from 2001-2006 and that a typical American college graduate leaves school with a debt of $17,500 to go with their degree?

And it’s not just at the university level. About a year ago parents of a four-year-old sued York Avenue Preschool in Manhattan for not adequately preparing their daughter for the exams necessary for acceptance into elite prep schools and eventually the Ivy League. According to the suit the child in question was lumped closely with younger children thereby dumbing down the four-year-old age group’s lesson plans. While it is just and easy to criticize a parent that would sue a preschool for inhibiting their child’s collegiate future, what should the school expect from a parent paying $19,000 a year for preschool (that was the price listed in the lawsuit, according to the York Avenue Preschool’s webpage the price for four year olds has climbed to $25,925)?

Then recently several New York City newspapers were full of lists of individual ratings of thousands of city teachers based on what is called value-added analysis. Value-added analysis uses complex mathematical formulas (which, depending on which formula is used, can include factors such as English proficiency and income) to predict how individual students will perform on future standardized tests. The ratings were listed for 12,000 teachers who taught forth through eighth grade English or math between 2007 and 2010. Value-added alleged analysis calculates a teacher’s effectiveness in improving student performances on standardized tests, based on past test scores. The forecast figure is compared to the student’s actual scores with the difference considered the ‘value added’, or subtracted, by the teachers. If a teacher’s students performances on average fall short of predicted results a teacher is deemed ineffective. This type of analysis currently accounts for 20-25% of a New York City new teacher’s evaluation. While nobody denies such statistical analysis holds some insight (along with plenty of uncertainty since there are many different factors that may or may not be incorporated into a given formula–different states calculate it in different ways), it was perfectly obvious that the real motive of New York’s media was less educational and more an effort to discredit the city’s teachers’ union.

So there you have it: from pre-k through university. One of Barack Obama’s more famous sound-bytes as presidents was to declare: “In the 21st century, the best anti-poverty program around is a first class education.” This comes in the midst widening economic disparity and a tuition bubble that mirrors the housing bubble that led to the economic crash from which the country has yet to recover.

As far as universities go there have been no shortage of reasons and solutions put forward. Many reasons for the tuition bubble reflect the economy as a whole: decreased state budgets, rising healthcare costs, the influence of the Ivy League (their resources make other universities spend more), and of course simple greed.

This greed, especially surrounding public universities, was illustrated nicely by Kevin Carey in The New Republic:

Imagine you’re in the business of selling apples that cost $1 on the open market. Then the government decides more people should have the opportunity to buy apples and society would be benefit from a net increase in apple consumption. So it decides to drop the price of apples to 60 cents. Sometimes it does this by giving you 40 cents for every apple you sell, on the condition that you start selling apples for 60 cents. Sometimes it gives people vouchers worth 40 cents that can only be used to purchase apples from approved vendors. At first the policy works splendidly.

Effectively in that apples (i.e. college) is less expensive so more people buy them. However before long the apple vendor evaluate the situation and say “Hey, the market price of an apple is still $1. Would it be great to charge $1 for apples and still get 40 cents from the government for every apple I sell?” Since raising the price all the way up to $1 in a single shot would jeopardize political support for the program itself, the raise comes two, three, four, five percent at a time. When questions arise vendors could simply claim that apple production is expensive and that extra money is needed to make the very best apples. As Carey points out apple quality, like quality education, is largely subjective, so it’s a hard claim to dispel. Meanwhile the extra profits can go into hosting grand weekend sporting events and other goodwill builders and/or lobbying the government on whether any new seller can become an approved vendor worthy of subsidy, thereby severely limiting competition.

Carey’s solution to all this is for the government to create a framework allowing other, low-cost organizational entities to be recognized as providers of higher education. These organizations would not have to be colleges at all (Carey sites an Artificial Intelligence course taught online by two Stanford professors to 20,000 students around the world as an example) and in that case not needing approval from independent accrediting bodies run by existing universities, as recipients of federal aid are today.

In his book Aftershock: the next economy and America’s Future, Robert Reich put forward the idea that all America’s public universities should be free with graduates paying a certain, fixed percentage of their taxable earnings, he estimates maybe 10%, for the first their first ten years of full time work to fund current students tuition (students who choose to go to private schools should be would be eligible for federal loans and not be prey to private lenders).

While bursting the tuition bubble in a way that would lower costs and broaden access to higher education is very important the discourse about education’s importance in the ‘21st century economy’ misses a much larger point. The point is simply whatever the importance placed on a college education jobs needing a college degree of any kind are a comparably small part of the American economy. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) only 20% of jobs in 2010 required a bachelor’s degree, while 26% did not even require a high school diploma, and 43% required only a high school diploma or an equivalent. As Jack Metzgar points out in an excellent piece on the Working Class Perspectives blog, this doesn’t figure to change much over the coming decade. The ‘knowledge economy’ is growing. It needs more than 6 million people with MAs or PhDs now and will need over a million more by 2020. Yet this will be less than 5% of the economy. Expand this to include jobs needing more than a high school education of the percentage is still less than one-third of all available jobs in 2020. That will encompass a lot of jobs (about 44 million) and within those fields that fall within that number more education does lead to more financial success.

But most of the economy isn’t there. According to the BLS the three largest employment categories now and the near future are office and administrative support occupations, sales and related occupations, and food preparation and serving occupations. Other industries that will produce the largest amounts of jobs in 2020 are child care workers, security guards, janitors and cleaners, home health aides, and construction workers. The conclusion to draw is the best anti-poverty program cannot be a first class education when more than two-thirds of our jobs don’t require anything of the kind. The best anti-poverty program would be higher wages for the jobs Americans actually have now and will have in at least the future.

Metzgar puts it nicely:

If we were serious about eliminating poverty or restoring the credibility of the American Dream or simply respecting lifetimes of hard work, we would be debating how to raise wages directly- how to make it easier for workers to organize themselves into unions, how to get the federal minimum wage higher and on a steady inflation-adjusted escalator, whether to require some kind of workers council for all employers, and then legally require that benefits of productivity growth be shared with workers.

In other words the 21st century solution to poverty is the same age-old solution that worked for generations past: working class organization, collective action, progressive legislation. For decades the harsh message to the American working class majority has simply been if you want success and security then don’t be working class. It’s past time to recognize the cultural toxicity of this and to wake up to the timeless truth that solidarity and community are more significant for our country than high-end preschools, the right college, and exploitive college debt. It’s as true in the 21st century as it ever was before.

St. Augustine lived in the late fourth and early fifth centuries, in the Roman Empire. In that empire, occupied and occupier got to know one another all too well, from Britain to  Mesopotamia (Iraq) where resistance forces forced a withdrawal Roman troops in 117.

Britons rose up against the Roman occupiers and their Queen Boudicca died fighting around 60 CE. (She’s quoted by Tacitus as determined to avenge “lost freedom, my scourged body, the outraged chastity of my daughters.”) Familiarity bred rebellion resulting in vicious Roman responses, including the suppression of multiple uprisings in Judaea from 66 to 135.

Familiarity bred contempt in India as well as British authorities recruited Indian soldiers into their army from the eighteenth century. The sepoys rebelled in 1857 in protest of promotion policies, pay and assignment issues, reports of Christian proselytization, and the rumor that the cartridges needed to load the soldiers’ rifles were greased with pork fat — a terrible offense to Hindu and Muslim religious sensibilities. The mainly upper-caste Hindu sepoys turned on their British trainers in a bloody uprising that led to the fall of what was left of the Mughal Empire and the transfer of authority from the East India Company to the British crown.

The U.S.A. is today’s Roman Empire and British Empire rolled into one. With its allies the U.S. invaded Afghanistan over 3,825 days ago. The vast majority of people in this country at the time regarded the invasion, less than a month after the 9/11 attacks, as a war “of necessity” provoked by those attacks. Even many usually progressive people passively accepted the need for a vindictive response. Those who dissented were treated as naïve at best, traitorous at worst.

The facts, as packaged by officials, seemed clear: the U.S. had been attacked by al-Qaeda; al-Qaeda was based in Afghanistan; the rulers in Afghanistan (the Taliban) had “sponsored” Osama bin Laden. So the Talibs needed to be overthrown, while the U.S. bombed and obliterated bin Laden’s camps.

But the U.S. wouldn’t just act in its own self-defense. It would also magnanimously liberate the oppressed Afghanis. The Bush administration posed as the champion of Afghan women in particular, depicting their plight (symbolized by the mandatory wearing of the burqa) as rooted in Taliban rule. (In fact, the burqa had been standard female attire in Afghanistan for hundreds of years, and has remained so since the Taliban were overthrown. One might hope that it will “vanish from the page of time” but that’s likely to require more than an invasion.)

In November 2001, in the opening stage of the war, Laura Bush took over for her husband in delivering the president’s weekly radio address. She told us that “ a regime guilty of “brutal oppression” of women was “now in retreat across much of the country, and the people of Afghanistan, especially women, are rejoicing.” The bombing missions ordered by her husband were bringing joy to the Afghan people!

Actually, while the bombing killed thousands of civilians, a lot of Afghans did welcome  the overthrow of the Taliban and the establishment of a new regime. During the first few years, plausible public opinion polls showed fairly high support for Hamid Karzai, the CIA operative hand-picked by Washington to serve as president. The prospect of being aligned with the U.S., which had aided the Mujahadeen in their decade-long war against the Soviets, and receiving massive doses of U.S. aid for roads and schools, was attractive to some. (But then, the alliance with the USSR, and Soviet aid had been attractive to many Afghans from 1978. Afghanistan like most places contains diverse political forces with differing world views.)

As time passed, Karzai’s weakness and corruption became apparent. Gradually feelings soured, as warlords reestablished control over their former fiefs; as the national police acquired a reputation for abuses including the kidnapping and sexual abuse of children; as  the Taliban and aligned movements resurged and capitalized on the dissatisfaction; as the bombings and drone strikes and night time raids on homes produced such anger that Karzai and the parliament began insisting they must stop — feelings soured. And U.S. public opinion soured on the Afghan War, validating the objections some of us had expressed at the outset.

The behavior of some foreign troops over the last year (collecting body parts as trophies, urinating on dead militants’ bodies, burning Qur’ans, the March 11 massacre of 16 Afghan civilians in Kandahar) may have brought us to the tipping-point.

The “Red Team” Study

The U.S. Army has long been concerned about the fact that its soldiers fighting to support the Karzai regime and contain the resurgent Taliban have a terrible relationship with the Afghan soldiers and police they’re obliged to work with and train. A “red team” headed by Jeffrey Bordin, a political and behavioral scientist, was dispatched to Afghanistan last year to investigate. (In the Army, a “red team” is supposed to “provide commanders an independent capability to continuously challenge plans, operations, concepts, organizations and capabilities in the context of the operational environment and from our partners’ and adversaries’ perspectives.” It’s supposed, in other words, to help commanders think outside the box.)

Bordin’s study, completed last May, is entitled “A Crisis of Trust and Cultural Incompatibility: A Red Team Study of Mutual Perceptions of Afghan National Security Force Personnel and U.S. Soldiers in Understanding and Mitigating the Phenomena of ANSF-Committed Fratricide-Murders.” It’s available online.

In the report, Bordin noted that there had been since September. 2009 at least 21 instances of  “fratricide-murder incidents” in which Afghan National Security Force (ANSF) members killed 51 foreign troops, mostly U.S. forces, who had been sent to train them. (The toll has risen to over 80 since. About a quarter of foreign troops killed in Afghanistan this year — including three more on Monday, March 26 — have been killed by Afghan security forces.) He declared that the magnitude of the killings (referred to in U.S. military parlance as “green-on-blue” incidents) “may be unprecedented between ‘allies’ in modern history.” But why is there so much hostility between U.S. forces (and other foreign forces) in Afghanistan and the soldiers they’re supposed to train.

Bordin explained:

 “Factors that fueled the most animosity included U.S. convoys not allowing traffic to pass, reportedly indiscriminant return U.S. fire that causes civilian casualties, naively using flawed intelligence sources, U.S. Forces conducting night raids/home searches, violating female privacy during searches, U.S. road blocks, publicly searching/disarming ANSF [Afghan National Security Forces] members as an SOP [standard operating procedure] when they enter bases, and past massacres of civilians by U.S. Forces (i.e., the Wedding Party Massacre, the Shinwar Massacre, etc.). Other issues that led to altercations or near-altercations (including many self-reported near-fratricide incidents) included [U.S. soldiers] urinating in public, their cursing at, insulting and being rude and vulgar to ANSF members, and unnecessarily shooting animals. They found many U.S. Soldiers to be extremely arrogant, bullying, unwilling to listen to their advice, and were often seen as lacking concern for civilian and ANSF safety during combat.”

(The “Wedding Party Massacre” refers to the incident in Nuristan Province in July 2008, when 47 people including 39 women and children were killed by a missile. The deputy speaker of the Afghan parliament stated that none of them had had any connection with either al-Qaeda or the Taliban. The U.S. initially denied that there had been any civilian deaths. The “Shinwar Massacre” refers to the March 2007 incident in which a U.S. convoy in Nangarhar Province killed 19 and injured up to 50 as they fired indiscriminately after a humvee was struck by a minivan laden with explosives that injured one Marine.)

According to the study, U.S. forces for their part held “extremely negative” views of the ANSF, finding among them “pervasive illicit drug use, massive thievery, personal instability, dishonesty, no integrity, incompetence, unsafe weapons handling, corrupt officers, no real NCO corps, covert alliances/informal treaties with insurgents, high AWOL rates, bad morale, laziness, repulsive hygiene and the torture of dogs. Perceptions of civilians were also negative stemming from their insurgent sympathies and cruelty towards women and children.”

Notice that both sides complain of the other’s treatment of women and children. But while the Afghans interviewed complained of specifics — foreigners observing women in a yard from a roof; breaking down a door to enter a female’s room; taking photos of women; searching them without reason; giving children candy even though their proximity can lead to them dying in attacks — the U.S. soldiers’ complaints were more vaguely expressed. “How they treat their women and children is disgusting,” said one GI. “They are just chattel to them.”

Both complain of the other’s treatment of dogs. But the Afghans complain that the U.S. soldiers kill dogs who belong to people — dogs on leashes outside people’s homes. They do it for sport, or to shut them up if they bark, even in the presence of their owners — one of whom according to this report joined the Taliban after his dog was shot to death. The GIs kill cattle and donkeys as well, say the Afghans. The U.S. troops for their part complain that the Afghans kill stray dogs. (Of course, there’s never any excuse to torture an animal, but isn’t it possible that Afghan society has traditionally controlled the population of feral dogs? Neighboring India has a huge population of pariah dogs, who are often rabid — over 70,000 in Mumbai alone. In that city they bite 25,000 people per year. They’re a real management problem most people in this country can hardly imagine. Perhaps this issue of feral dog killing can be seen as a “cultural” issue between the Afghans and the occupiers.)

According to Bordin’s report, U.S. troops in Afghanistan not only dislike and mistrust ANSF — for reasons that seem related to the Afghans’ habits and customs, poverty, and illiteracy (90% among the Afghan troops) — but also have “negative” views of Afghan civilians in general. This, he posits, is due to civilians’ sympathy with the insurgents and because of the “cruelty towards women and children” that occurs in Afghan society.

While the relationship between the occupiers and the people was beyond the scope of Bordin’s assignment, this observation is obviously significant. If the GIs see the Afghans in general –  not just the insurgents, but ANSF (who allegedly form “covert alliances/informal treaties with insurgents”), and even the bulk of the population — so negatively, how can they ever mould ANSF into a viable military and police force, meeting their own expectations? How can they ever crush the Taliban and its allies, and win over the masses?

The Main Problem is Not a Culture Clash

“A Crisis in Trust” is a statistical study that tries to examine the recognized “green-on-blue” problem. But it misses the forest for the trees. The “factors fueling most animosity” are factors generic to invasions and occupations: the arrogance and condescension of the invaders; the insistence on regulating movement of people in the invaded country; the response to (real or imagined) attacks with overwhelming firepower that inevitably kills civilians; the need to recruit local, often unreliable snitches; night raids, etc. These have nothing to do with “cultural incompatibility” but with the arrogance of power bound to produce indignation. How ought Afghans to respond to such national humiliation? Should anyone be surprised that their indignation has mounted over ten-and-a-half years?

In what Bordin calls the “first tier” of Afghan complaints about U.S. troops is the charge that they are “extremely arrogant.” This is related to other “first tier” issues, specifically: night raids, disrespect for Afghan women, roadblocks, refusal to allow Afghan troops to pass U.S. convoys, indiscriminate shooting of Afghans following attacks, killing of many civilians, constant cursing (including calling Afghan troops “motherfuckers”—which is deeply resented), and publicly searching any Afghan soldier entering a U.S. base.

But how can the U.S. troops not be arrogant? Their basic training is designed to inculcate a sense of righteousness about their role. They’re conditioned to believe that they’re on a heroes’ mission to defend family and friends at home, and keep the U.S. safe from another 9/11 type attack. They need to do this by containing the Taliban resistance, which they’re encouraged to associate with al-Qaeda. (They’re also encouraged to associate the Taliban with Iraq and any “bad guy” Muslim force they might read about, including Gulbuddin Hekmatyar’s Hezb-i-Islami forces, Iran, Hizbollah, Hamas, Somali pirates, Gaddafi, etc. While they’re routinely told “We respect Islam” they’re also encouraged to see the world in simple “us vs. them” terms, and it just happens that all the enemies are Muslims.)

This simplistic “war on terror” mentality, pitting the “good” warrior against a vague, omnipresent Evil is a key aspect of the problem, for both them and the Afghans. The invaded population may be tradition-bound, largely illiterate, religious fundamentalists. But the invaders are fundamentally deluded about their mission. This is by design, part of the boot camp experience.

Things the Invaders Aren’t Supposed to Know

The troops aren’t briefed about the fact that the Taliban regime — bad as it was – had, and has, a considerable social base. It was preferred by many Afghans to the warlords of the Northern Alliance who are now back in power in much of the country. They’re not told that the Taliban is rooted in the anti-Soviet Mujahadeen of the 1980s which the U.S. eagerly supported, deliberately pitting Islamic fundamentalism against the pro-Soviet regime and its secularist policies. They don’t necessarily realize that U.S. policy helped generate the enemy they now face.

They’re not told that the Taliban took power in most of the country in 1996 with help from Pakistan’s Inter-Service Intelligence, which had worked intimately with the CIA throughout the 1980s. (As the late president Benazir Bhutto once noted in an interview, longtime U.S. ally Pakistan supported the Taliban because it seemed most likely to insure the stability of Central Asian trade routes.)

The troops aren’t told that the Taliban never invited bin Laden into their country. They’re not told that the U.S. agreed in 1996 to allow bin Laden to fly out of Sudan in a C-130 transport plane with 150 men, women and children on board, to refuel in pro-western Qatar (where he was greeted warmly by government officials) and to relocate to Afghanistan where he was welcomed and hosted by anti-Taliban chiefs. (He settled in Qandahar in May 1996. The Taliban only acquired control over Kabul that September.)

They’re not told that the Taliban once in power tolerated bin Laden’s presence and let him maintain his training camps (initially established with CIA help) out of appreciation for his assistance in the war against the Soviets when he was working with the U.S. (They also appreciated his financial assistance to them, at a time when only Saudi Arabia and Pakistan recognized their regime and provided aid, and felt obliged to observe the Pashtunwali code requiring hospitality for strangers.) But they never embraced his program for a global jihad. Indeed they claim that after the USS Cole incident off Yemen in 2000 they placed him under detention and cut off his communications.

U.S. troops aren’t told that Zalmay Khalilzad, the Afghan-American special envoy to Afghanistan in 2002, and later the ambassador to Afghanistan, then Iraq, then the UN — the man who arranged for Karzai to become president –had six years earlier actually written an op-ed supporting U.S. engagement with the Taliban!

“The Taliban does not practice the anti-U.S. style of fundamentalism practiced by Iran,” the former State Department official declared in the Washington Post in October 1996. “It is closer to the Saudi model.” He later, as a Unocal executive, hosted Taliban leaders at his Texas ranch to discuss a gas pipeline deal in the late 90s.

They’re not told that after the Taliban successfully banned opium cultivation in 2001, Secretary of State Colin Powell praised their effort and delivered $43 billion in aid to them. They’re not told that the Taliban not only sought good relations with the U.S. before 9/11, but even (as reported on Counterpunch) agreed to turn bin Laden over to the U.S. as early as November 2000. It was willing to do so unconditionally after the 9/11 attacks, but the U.S. government never accepted the offer.

(The Taliban issued a statement on September 12, 2001:  “We do not allow Osama bin Laden to use Afghanistan’s territory to launch attacks on any country in the world… We denounce this terrorist attack, whoever is behind it.”)

The troops aren’t told that the current U.S.-backed president Karzai was briefly the foreign minister of the Taliban government (in 1996) and that he still insists there are “good men” among the Taliban. He’s even offered to welcome Taliban chief Mullah Omar to Kabul for negotiations. In 2008 he appealed to Taliban chief Mullah Omar “to return home under guarantees of safety to help bring peace to Afghanistan.” The U.S. sternly objected, prompting an indignant public statement from Karzai that the U.S. had no veto rights on inter-Afghan matters.

The troops aren’t told that none of the 9/11 hijackers were Afghans and that only two of them were known to have ever been in that country at any point for any reason. They’re certainly not told that Attorney General John Ashcroft spoke falsely when he told a press conference after 9/11 that all of the hijackers had been trained in Afghanistan.

U.S. troops aren’t told that many — maybe most — Afghans aren’t even aware of the 9/11 attacks on the U.S. (A 2010 study showed that 92% of people in the Pashtun south have never heard about them!) And even if they learn about them, they don’t understand why they would justify the invasion and occupation of their country. It’s not hard to understand why many would assume that the invaders are waging a war on their religion.

U.S. soldiers are encouraged to believe the Taliban and al-Qaeda are closely connected, if not one and the same thing. But this is simply untrue. The Taliban is an inward-looking, Pashtun-Afghan nationalist movement. It wants to impose a version of Muslim law upon a country torn by war since 1978. But it’s shown no interest in joining an international jihad. It merely wants to do what Afghan resistance movements have done from the time of Alexander the Great (which, by the way, was a millennium before the introduction of Islam). It wants to drive the invader out.

Al-Qaeda, now based in Pakistan and Yemen, is actively promoting a global confrontation between Islam and the West. But the Taliban has repeatedly declared it will not allow attacks on other countries from Afghan soil when/if it regains power. (And again it has consistently stated it had no knowledge of al-Qaeda plans while bin Laden was in the country.) Intelligence officials in Pakistan have stated that the Taliban has broken with al-Qaeda and would, if returned to power, crack down on any remnants of the organization in the country.

The U.S. troops are not mainly in Afghanistan to prevent al-Qaeda from making Afghanistan its base for a global jihad. It’s unlikely that, even if the occupying forces withdrew tomorrow, this decentralized web of groups of unknown size, with franchises and affiliates in Algeria, Yemen, Pakistan, Uzbekistan and elsewhere, would be able to transform Afghanistan into a headquarters for launching attacks on the U.S. (Anyway, weren’t the 9/11 attacks planned more in Germany and Florida than in Afghanistan?)

The foreign troops are not in Afghanistan to fight al-Qaeda, or anyone connected to attacks on the U.S. They’re, rather, to create and leave behind, whenever they leave, a “stable” country with a friendly regime, an effective security apparatus that will contain any “Islamist” forces the U.S. regards as potentially threatening, allow the presence of half a dozen U.S. military bases in the country (close to Iraq, Pakistan and Iran) and cooperate in the construction of a pipeline that will bring Caspian natural gas to the Indian Ocean. (The latter is of major geopolitical importance to Washington since most gas from the region is now piped through Russia, and the U.S. wants a pipeline that also avoids Iranian territory.)

Some of the troops have come to question their mission. Some have even been radicalized by their Afghan experiences and have become antiwar, anti-imperialist activists. But few fully grasp that they’re imperialist invaders, and so receiving the same treatment the Soviets experienced in the 1980s when they tried to occupy Afghanistan. So they cannot understand why the Afghan soldiers they’re supposed to train are so unenthusiastic, and why in general the people are so unwelcoming and unappreciative.

According to the Red Team study, most soldiers’ “perceptions of civilians” are “negative stemming from their insurgent sympathies.” But wasn’t this the case in Vietnam and Iraq as well? Or for that matter the Philippines from 1899 to 1902? Weren’t U.S. soldiers conditioned to expect warm receptions shocked to find the local people so cold and so prone to support the “enemy” instead of themselves?

The Sgt. Robert Bales Case

No one wants to be in a foreign country, asked to accomplish the impossible, surrounded by sullen people who find you rude and vulgar and want you to leave. Staff Sgt. Robert Bales surely didn’t.

Bales, relocated over Afghan objections to Ft. Leavenworth, Kansas, is accused of going on a rampage the evening of March 11 in Panjwai district in Qandahar, the birthplace of the Taliban. He’s been charged with the premeditated murder of 17 Afghan civilians.

According to some reports, a roadside blast in the village of Mokhoyan, blew off the leg of one of Bales’ buddies on March 7 or 8. Villagers say U.S. troops rounded up all the adult males in the village, lined them up against a wall and told them they would “pay a price.” It’s, of course, not clear that this alleged incident influenced Bales’ subsequent actions in two villages. But the “Qandahar Massacre” may be the worst, clearest instance of a soldier to date expressing “negative perceptions of civilians” due to their “insurgent sympathies.”

Bales has his sympathizers, who see him as the victim of repeated deployments in places where U.S. soldiers confront resentful populations. They see him as someone who just “snapped” at a certain point, such that he decided to march off and shoot Afghan women and children, and burn their bodies. “I kind of sympathize for him,” a former neighbor told AP, “being gone, being sent over there four times. I can understand he’s probably quite wracked mentally, so I just hope that things are justified in court. I hope it goes okay.”

This is entirely in the tradition of unconditional “support for the troops” deeply entrenched in our culture. There was widespread outrage in this country when Sgt. William Calley was convicted of mass murder of Vietnamese in 1971. Georgia governor Jimmy Carter established “American Fighting Man’s Day” and urged Georgians to show Calley support. The governor of Indiana asked that all state flags to be flown at half-staff for Calley, and many states’ governors protested the verdict and demanded clemency. How, they wondered, could the U.S. court system persecute a hero-soldier who, fighting for his country and for freedom, just happened to slip up a little on the rules and kill between 22 and 500 Vietnamese civilians?

But Laura King, in the LA Times, takes the opportunity to assert a high American standard of morality, juxtaposing it against an Afghan one. “In American minds, “ she writes, “the moral distinction between the accidental and the deliberate, between the carefully judged risk and the deranged act, is incalculable. But for Afghans, the result — the shrouded bodies, the wailing relatives, the bite of shovels into dusty ground — speaks to the numbing sameness of unexpected and violent death.”

In other words, the “American mind” is highly moral, and while forgiving episodes of Accidental “collateral damage” it recoils in disgust at any deliberate act of terror. King seems to echo Bales’ own words to a home-town reporter in 2007. The soldier after an Iraq deployment expressed contempt for anyone who would put “his family in harm’s way,” adding “I think that’s the real difference between being an American as opposed to being a bad guy.” For this accused mass-murderer, Americans are, by definition, “good guys.”

Whatever her intentions, King’s piece seems almost an apologia for U.S. imperialism. U.S. citizens as “their” forces invade maintain this “incalculable moral distinction” between what the soldiers do deliberately and what they do by accident. But the poor natives are unable to distinguish between “the numbing sameness” of the accidental killing of civilians (the “collateral damage” of airstrikes or roadblock incidents) and the occasional deliberate targeting of civilians.

Isn’t the point that the invasion itself was a very deliberate event? A crime against peace? And that such invasions usually produce these sorts of results?

“End of the Rope”

Ekil Hakimi, the Afghan ambassador to the U.S., told CNN recently that Bales’ rampage was “not the first incident; it was the 100th, the 200th and 500th incident.”

Hakemi is very much in the pro-U.S. camp. And yet even he complains to the U.S. mass media that the U.S. is routinely slaughtering civilians in his country.

The Afghan parliament has voted — unanimously! — to withdraw from the existing military agreement with the U.S. in protest of the removal of Bates from Afghanistan and the Afghan legal process. The legislators (even though they obtained their own positions as a result of foreign occupation) see it as an insult to the nation. Karzai probably won’t sign the law; he is, however much he postures as a nationalist, dependent on U.S. aid to secure his own position. But isn’t it significant that even a parliament established under U.S. hegemony, excluding any Taliban forces, favoring the warlords grateful for U.S. support, is making such a statement?

Meanwhile Karzai’s demanding that foreign troops withdraw from villages and return to their bases, declaring U.S.-Afghan relations “at the end of their rope.” These are surely positive developments

Some of those most closely aligned to the U.S. in Afghanistan are saying: Please go away. We don’t like you. Even if we once did, we don’t anymore because you’ve killed too many of us, and insulted and offended us in too many ways. You have overstayed your welcome in our country.

And the U.S. troops are saying: We don’t like these people, and we’re shocked by their ingratitude and hostility.

Of course, mutual animosity shouldn’t generally be a cause for celebration. But mutual animosity between occupied and occupier is normal, and certainly (as Mao Zedong put it) “it’s right to rebel” against oppression. And don’t the host of Afghan grievances cited by Bordin constitute oppression?

At this point the level of animosity has become impossible to conceal with cheery reports of “progress” such as that delivered to Congress by Gen. John Allen, commander of NATO forces in Afghanistan, earlier this month. Fallout from the Qandahar Massacre is causing some to predict or urge a speedy pullout. Retired General James A. Marks, senior Army intelligence officer at the time of the Iraq invasion, has said it “not inconceivable” that that massacre might prompt a U.S. withdrawal “in weeks.”

The My Lai Massacre helped turn U.S. public opinion decisively against the Vietnam War, and so maybe we can say that Calley’s victims did not die entirely in vain. The silver lining to the Qandahar Massacre might just possibly be an early withdrawal from Afghanistan. Optimally, these episodes reflecting mutual contempt in Afghanistan might actually bind people in both Afghanistan and the U.S. together — in revulsion towards imperialism.

The annual farce of the chancellor’s budget has little of the pageantry of the yearly visit by the monarch, but given the fact that the nation’s media seem unable to find anything else to talk about when it happens, it is of course always useful as a distraction from the many other events the people should be hearing about. We should be hearing more about what our country’s intentions are in the impending war with Iran, for example; or finding out why exactly our government is sabre rattling around the Falkland/Malvinas islands – again; or what exactly is behind the government initiative to export teaching jobs to Indian call-centres. But no; our trusted media spend hours and hours distracting our attention with their supposed analyses of the chancellor’s budget. Well we all know what the implications of the chancellor’s budget will be. We don’t need the media to waste our time telling us. They’re exactly the same implications as they’ve been for at least the last thirty years:

The rich are going to get richer, and the poor are going to get poorer. And until we have significant political reform that will be exactly the same budget story, year after year, until there’s absolutely nothing left to plunder – by which time the plunderers will have packed up and left to enjoy their ill-gotten gains in their various treasure islands and other off-shore tax-havens, exactly as has happened to every other dying empire since the dawn of “civilisation.”

I think parliament should start a new annual custom to precede the chancellor’s budget. Rather than the present naff pantomime where the world’s press collect outside the door of 11 Downing Street to film a dull-looking little businessman leaving home with a tatty red box, we should instead see a masked highwayman striding arrogantly out his door, mount a shining black steed and gallop off towards parliament, black cape billowing behind him, pistol waving in the air as he cries out through the streets of London, “Your money or your life.”

When interviewed by Leslie Stahl on CBS, Sixty Minutes (May 12, 1996), Secretary of State Madeleine Albright stated that the deaths of 500,000 Iraqi children were worth it. There was hardly a ripple of concern about Albright’s statement. Maybe it is just luck and timing that caused the news about the Afghan massacre to be reported, but there is no doubt that it soon will be replaced with news about which celebrity is sleeping with someone else’s spouse, or the latest misadventures of some other celebrity who probably has not read a book in years.

Those not familiar with military training might be surprised by the latest slaughter of civilians. Others know that one of the main goals of military training is to eliminate any taboo against killing. Military training is designed not only to kill the enemy, but also to kill the conscience. Parents and new recruits take notice!

Let’s take a closer look. Sixteen civilians slaughtered in the middle of the night in their homes. Nine of them children. A war crime? An act of insanity? Julian Assange once said that war is just one damn thing after another. He is correct. War and occupation result in deaths of innocent civilians.

No one should ever be surprised when innocent children die in war zones. In fact, every time a Drone fires a weapon, or a bomb is dropped from a plane, it is probable that innocent civilians are killed.

There are some actions that the USA could consider in view of the fact that things are not going very well.

1. Immediately turn over the accused killer and any accomplices to Afghan officials.

2. Withdraw all troops, contractors, CIA, and other personnel from Afghanistan.

3. Close all US bases on foreign soil.

4. Release all prisoners in Guantanamo. Close all prisons in the secret prison system.

5. Celebrate Whistle Blowers, including Julian Assange. Free Bradley Manning.

6. Pay reparations.

7. Cut the military budget by 90%.

8. Convert the Pentagon into apartments for the homeless. The Pentagon has become a world-wide symbol of US aggression. It will continue to foment hatred toward the US. It guarantees that there will be Blowback.

9. Prohibit the manufacture and use of Drone technology.

10. Respect the right of other nations to have nuclear weapons until the US has destroyed its stockpile. Why should the only nation to have ever used nuclear weapons to kill civilians have any say on this issue? The US has lost any moral authority it might have had.

Will any of these things happen? No – not one. Why not – Because too many US voters lack the critical thinking skills necessary to understand how the world works. We have a dysfunctional political system, a culture that celebrates stupidity and violence, and an inferior educational system. Of course, there are exceptions. Some teachers are smart, dedicated, and supportive of their students. There are not enough of them. Some people choose C-Span Book TV over the reality shows. But not enough citizens make that wise choice. It seems that the national IQ is at an all time low. People don’t know what they don’t know. Uninformed voting is epidemic and has disastrous consequences.

There is a more important reason why the US will not change its ways and become a good world citizen – that is the lack of empathy toward fellow human beings. Too many Americans still support the policy as stated by Madeleine Albright, that the deaths of 500,000 Iraqi children were worth it.

Label (n.)— short classifying phrase applied to a person…

— Oxford Desk Dictionary

In the stratified, hierarchical marketplace which we inhabit daily, we encounter (but do not relate to) “food servers,” “store clerks,” “flight attendants,” and so on.  As “consumers,” we may even collaborate with their supervisors in rating their “service” on a scale of 1 to 10 (rather like the product ratings provided by the readers of Consumer Reports).  Since such service jobs require the display of a “friendly” demeanor and attitude, most such encounters are emptied of any human authenticity.  Not unlike traditional caste-systems, which reinforced hierarchical relations of dominance/subordination, such social-distancing promotes detachment and indifference on the part of  “customers.”

Such labels are de-humanizing because:

1) they reduce each person to a mere occupant of  an economic status/role (“housekeeper,” “peasant,” “unemployed baker’s assistant”); and

2) they expunge the value of each individual—his/her unique personality/subjectivity—within the generic category.

The term “peasants,” often used when referring to Vietnamese people during the Vietnam War, lumped countless numbers of real, distinctive individuals into a de-humanizing, low-status, category.  Any possible identification with such “civilian casualties,” on the part of Americans, was thereby further obviated.  No doubt many Americans merely shrugged when told the estimated numbers of Vietnamese “peasants” killed by the American military.

Furthermore, the mainstream media continues to hold up a distorting lens, a cognitive filter which blocks any immediacy of human comprehension or identification with “the other.”  For instance: Palestinian “terrorists,” Iraqi “insurgents,” and so on.  (Oddly, the connotation of the word “rebels” varies widely, depending on whether the U.S. military supports them or kills them.)    With the imposition of such misleading (and fear-inducing) labels, any direct understanding of such individuals’ human experiences and outlook is blocked.  Such labels, once affixed, can result in grave distortions in the perception of social reality itself.  One need only consider the blanket term “enemy,” and the historical consequences of its imposition onto real people (such as families who happened to live in Hiroshima–or Falluja).

In striking contrast, a universalizing, egalitarian ethos is once more in the ascendant worldwide.   In the past decade or so, the anti-globalization and democracy movements, facilitated by new forms of interactive media, have promoted a wider sense of human solidarity as such. (And ultimately, as the Biosphere itself reacts to global warming, with all sentient beings as such?).  A growing “empathic-humanism,” as I would define it, means not necessarily “sympathetic identification,” but rather the developing capacity to “feel-into” (and thereby validate) the diverse experiences of others worldwide—regardless not only of ethnicity and culture, but also of class, status and occupational role.

Long overweight, he has always sought to expand his eating horizon. Starting with the blasé turkey, he moved on to spicy Mexican, Cuban, Puerto Rican, Filipino and Okinawan, etc. Lately he’s been stuffing his face with all-you-can-eat helpings of hummus, sharwama and sheikh mahshi. Yummm! But no earth is big enough to satisfy this infinite growth appetite, so with his overseas options dwindling, the fat man is consuming his own body. America is eating up its own young and future.

What to do? When a country is this sick, how do you go about curing it? And what should we tend to first? Among presidential candidates, the only one with anything like a sensible platform is Ron Paul, who insists on bringing all the troops home, restoring our raped Constitution, and lopping off the Federal Reserve, thus castrating our thieving banksters, but since Paul threatens the beast so directly, there’s no way our military/banking complex will allow him to win.

American electoral politics is modeled after game shows, sit-coms, professional wrestling and Jerry Springer, with everything well-orchestrated and media sculpted, but should the masses fail to cheer, laugh, tear up or become indignant on cues, there’s still the Diebold voting machine to yield a preordained result. Even with a fair shake, however, voters may still reject Ron Paul because of his opposition to social programs and abortion, as well as his laissez-faire stance towards big business.

As for third party candidates, the last one to have even the remotest chance of winning was Ross Perot, in 1992, but he ended up with zero Electoral College vote! As for Ralph Nader, his best showing was 2.74% of the popular vote, in 2000. In short, we don’t have a viable candidate to lever us from this quicksand. The system simply won’t allow it.

It won’t allow it because it’s not there to serve us, silly. This is no government for the people. Where have you been? While we had a brief moment occupying a few plazas, dusty lots and parks, they continued to occupy everything else. With their nonstop media pollution, they occupy your very mind. So what are you going to do about it?

Many of us just want to get off this death train. In 2008, a Zogby International poll revealed that 22% of Americans believed that “any state or region has the right to peaceably secede and become an independent republic.” A growing number would rather be a citizen of the Second Vermont Republic or Cascadia, etc., and in Wyoming, lawmakers just narrowly voted down a “doomsday bill” that would have prepared the state to function independently of Washington. Though it was posed as an emergency measure, it sounded suspiciously like a secession plan, what with the state having its own currency, army and even aircraft carrier.

Aspiring Cascadians chafe having “to put up with indifference and condescendence from distant seats of power,” but you can live in Washington DC itself and feel exactly the same way. Just ask the many homeless sprawling on the sidewalks within sight of the US Capitol, or the people of Adams Morgan or Anacostia. Like those in Bagdad or Kabul, they are not being served by the war criminals who huddle daily on that hill. So the distance is ideological and not necessarily physical. In the latest poll, released three weeks ago, 86% of Americans disapprove of the job Congress is doing. Some may see their “representatives” as incompetent, but many Americans already know that they are being ruled by an alien government that only got elected through a rigged system and lying.

The more illegitimate they become, the more flags they display, and the bigger the flags, though they care nothing about what the flag stands for. To them, the American flag is just something to drape over your coffin, after they’ve sent you to commit mass murder for Big Oil, Big Banks and Israel, after they’ve used you thoroughly to enrich themselves. Isn’t it time we bury this grotesquely corrupt and bloodthirsty cabal? The big question is how?

Strategies, strategies. Recognizing that one-day protests accomplish nothing, the Occupy Movement sought to disrupt the system by occupying Wall Street. It didn’t happen that way, of course, because hundreds of cops were brought in to protect the New York Stock Exchange for months on end.

Thwarted, the occupiers moved to a park, and that became the model nationwide, but you can occupy as many parks as you want and the system will not change. As you sleep outside and become symbolically homeless, your sneering masters will continue to ruin lives by starting wars and ripping people off in plain sight.

And so the first stage of our rebellion is over, and though I fully applaud the courage and sacrifice of those who endured prolonged discomfort or police brutality to rouse America from its slumber, we must now aim for tangible results and not symbolic victories. Since time is short, we must get deadly serious. No more hedges.

We fancy ourselves indebted middle-class, but this mirage is quickly evaporating. Most of us are indebted slaves. Banks conjure money out of thin air to enslave most of us for life. We must go into debt to buy a house, a car or go to school. Many of us go into debt just to eat. Like you, you and you, I will carry my shitty credit score to a mass paupers’ grave, with my hearse a U-Haul. There is a renewed emphasis on going to college as a means to success, but in this economy, a degree will likely only impoverish you further, since you will be in hock to the banksters even as you work a job completely unrelated to your dubious education. If you can even get a job, that is. Joining winos and bag ladies with smudgy and off-target makeup will be legions of useless scholars.

Still, there are perks to being house slaves of the empire, since even homeless Americans sport brand name shoes, and our poor are generally the most obese, meaning they have enough to eat, even if what they’re ingesting may shorten their lives by decades. We are unique in having thousands of fat people moving about on so-called mobility scooters, though their only handicap is overeating. Some of our grossest even star on TV, where they can sob in self-pity while competing to lose tonnage.

Though we may be stuffed and surrounded by stuff, our lives are not quite secure, because few of us own outright the roofs over our heads, as in many other countries, even if theirs are of tin or even grass. And since most of us owe more than we own, any financial slippage can mean an instant catastrophe. Surrounded by gadgets, an American can go from wealthy, by global standards, to being worse off than a Third-World slum dweller, if this Yank suddenly finds himself sleeping on a sidewalk, under a bridge or in a tent, when he’s not being shooed away by cops. With no floor under us, what good are our cumbersome arrays of possessions?

In Philly, there is an elegant and homeless woman of about 55. Since shelters don’t let you in until evening, if they accept you at all, and promptly kick you out by dawn, this woman has to spend all of her waking hours outside, like most homeless folks. What makes her unusual is the amount of stuff she’s still trying to hang onto to, and I’ve seen her outside for nearly three years now. With a dozen or so boxes and bags, and an odd suitcase, she can only walk about 30 feet at a time, shifting each container one by one without losing sight of any of them.

Like individual Americans, America also spends more than it earns, a situation made possible only because this is an empire with military bases worldwide and war ships off every shore. We are an extortion racket the world is trying to shake off, and when that happens, our living standards will truly plummet. Many Americans like to depict themselves as the oppressed 99%, but from the world’s perspective, we are an insufferable 5% that are milking the world dry when not bombing it into submission. As long as we partake in the ill-gotten fruit of empire, we are complicit in its crimes. We! Are! The 5% that will pulverize you if we don’t get our ways!

Foot soldiers of empire, we do our share to prop it up, everyone from the poor who enlist to kill foreigners for bogus reasons, to spineless academics who stay clear of political taboos, to cynical journalists who mouth obvious nonsense daily. The Obama-voting liberal who drives an SUV and frets about gas price is a clear beneficiary of empire, but so am I, though I attack its bloody policies and own next to nothing. What I do buy would cost a lot more, however, if America withdrew all of its overseas goons. Without American missiles pointed at the world’s temple, the dollar would become asswipe overnight. That’s why even domestic foes of Bellum Americanum should be prepared to suffer personally for its cessation.

There are those who think that we can power down, trim our holdings and lose weight gracefully, that as this murderous edifice crumples, a saner arrangement will rise up, and I, too, hope that a humane revolution is in the offing, though I suspect that as the physical empire goes down, its worst mental aspects will blossom. Its ideology will harden and shoot. Deprived of their toys, many Americans will demand that their government does whatever is necessary to restore the good old days, so there will be more desperate wars, and more repression of those who oppose this American way of life. Meanwhile, the media will serve up opulent fantasies to feed a nostalgia for this lost and glorious past. The poorer we become, the richer we will look on television.

Americans will have less, and our lives will be harder, but no one wants to talk about this decline, least of all politicians, since that would be the quickest way to not get elected, but even if we had a wise and ethical leadership, our country will still go into decline, because the resources for infinite growth are simply not there. They never were, of course, since this is a finite planet, after all, where natural limits must be reached sooner or later. That moment is now, unfortunately.

Don’t kid yourself that the fiery anger burning through Greece, Spain and elsewhere won’t be but a tame prelude to what will happen here, what with our robust sense of entitlement, deep alienation and trigger happy ways. Our government seems to anticipate as much, for it has put into place all of the physical and legal means to clamp down on us hard, when things do explode.