Sitting facing each other in an auditorium filled with nearly 1,000 cheering people at a CNBC-sponsored event at Columbia University in New York, the CEO of Berkshire Hathaway Inc. and Microsoft founder Bill Gates fielded questions from Columbia Business School students on the recession, investing and what’s the next Microsoft.

And you know how late-imperial ruling classes get decrepit, and become unable to acknowledge, let alone redress, their objective problems? Here are your top two “free market” geniuses’ remarks on where they see us standing in history:

Buffett: “The financial panic is behind us…. I did not worry about the overall survival of our economy.”

Gates: “We proved that we can make mistakes. But the fundamentals of the system, a marketplace-driven system where we invest in education and a great infrastructure for the long-term, that’s continued…. Capitalism is great.”

See? This has been merely a “financial panic,” not a huge recession, not a normal and predictable result of the radical mal-distribution of wealth under corporate capitalism, not the onset of Great Depression III, not a harbinger of Peak Everything, not a wake-up call in a make-it-or-break-it century.

Yes, mistakes were made, even though nobody expects a capitalist ever to make one, do they?

Take it from Bill and Warren: The future looks bright for this great system of ever-expanding resource consumption and behavioral manipulation!

How are we to understand this? Heartless, bloodthirsty people with no moral compass? Bored, diminished people with no interests beyond the most immediate and dramatic sensations? A deeply divided and class based society in which some humans were considered human and others were rejected from the human family? A society that valued on the basis of some artifice and not the living condition?

I remember the shock that attended my first learning of gladiators; not the moment itself (most likely associated with a Hollywood film), but the sensation of disbelief laid over by the certainty of actuality; an incomprehensible abyss separating two clearly true and incompatible things. It is a sensation that has revisited me many times and that is as poignant today as at its first occurrence.

‘There must have been something wrong with the Roman people, with their leaders and societal trendsetters.’ This was as far as my thinking went for many years. The details of a world in which slavery was common place; where war was conducted ‘man on man’ from arm-length distances with knives; where the elite didn’t do any work other than to manage their social relations and wealth; a supporting caste saw to the delivery and distribution of goods and services; and a vast population of poor supplied the muscle and struggled with daily survival needs; this was all foreign to my small town experience and formal education about the rights and plights of humanity. Understanding that place and time has become more and more important as my own immediate society begins to look more and more like the Roman society that I could not comprehend as a child (not only the Romans, they just stand as the pinnacle example).

I am not making the facile comparisons of real gladiators with the WWF or wage slavery with the indentured slavery of Rome. It is rather a whole set of designs and behaviors adapted to our time and technologies: it is a descent into meanness of spirit and narrowness of vision; it is about easy fear and easy escape from fear; it is about all the normal and expected human behaviors made bigger and more concentrated than a society can stand.

Rome is only a metaphor. I don’t really care about Rome. It is now, yesterday and tomorrow that I care about. “Think of the children” is not trite. If you believe this trite and simple minded, then I would happily remove your head with a short sword. The people of Rome were not thinking of the children. The elite made their children into monsters. We are making our children into monsters; because children will be made into the image of their society. The children, in their biological wisdom fight back until they are ultimately overwhelmed with materialism and the incomprehensible abyss; they do give up. Giving up means that the human body and mind are distorted into some, primarily, economic form and are left to express what is left of their humanness in twisted and destructive ways like depression, obsession with powerful biological drives and (mostly) passive violence.

In Rome the people had each other. In today’s world we have media. Nothing of consequence was delivered into the homes of the Roman citizen, and so they had to come out. There was money to be made by giving them a place to go. For our world there is money to be made, vastly more, by delivering into the home something to do. This changes things.

I believe that the concentrating effect of mass activities led to the bloody arena, but it was forces like those that we experience today that supplied the push. We are able, today, to design and deliver all manner of distraction. While Rome did have pictures, it did not have moving ones. Movement requires real bodies; real bodies in real movement bleed real blood. We might be a very long time away from real killing as public entertainment, but we are fully in the world of the twisted. Our media, be it information media or the distracting media, is filled with images of power; power abused, power used, power vastly more accessible than it is in our daily lives: it is in the gun, it is in the martial artist, it is in the wealthy, it is in the supernaturally stimulated, it is in the ruthless and the mad. And it is to power which we, like remora, wish to attach ourselves no matter how tenuously.

A design begins to reveal itself. As the people feel power in their own lives they do not support and sustain the power of their leaders, but rather expect them to function as organizers and suppliers of the services of governance. As the people feel less and less power the more they grow the image of power in others to whom they may attach in some fashion – primarily that of believing the powerful to be representatives of their needs and safety. This draws out the most distorted of behaviors the way a poultice is supposed to draw out the puss from a sore.

The individuals drawn to power over others are never those who can be trusted with such power. Some people will accept the need to take on a responsibility, but to actively seek authority over other human beings is a pathology rather than a vocation. In a world where everyone has personal power in their own lives sufficient to see themselves as in charge of their destiny, those who seek more power must simply serve to attain some sense of authority; and they will always be ‘brought up short’ by their community when they overstep (which they will do consistently).

If the people become less personally powerful, due to some perturbation in their world, an opening is made for the power-hungry to begin the process described above. And such perturbations always come. So it is that human societies have cycled through egalitarian and despotic governance. Despotism will, like a bad parasite, kill its host, the people will be thrown back onto their own resources and, in being personally powerful again, require governance that supports the community and not just the interests of the leadership.

Another dynamic is that the power-hungry are certain to come to an understanding of the role of distributed personal power in their quest for power over others. Since it is to their advantage to reduce both the real power (difficult) and the perceived power (much easier) of the people, ‘those who would be King’ make such reduction a major goal. They are supported in that effort by all the parts of the society that are disbenefited by empowered, self-possessed individual citizens.

From here we can return to Rome, to the Coliseum, to the cheap seats, to the psychological needs and state of a people without sufficient power to control their lives. No one person or group of people conspired to create a stadium, a city, an empire full of people whose dependencies reduced their personal power to such a low point that the most basic needs for security and safety sought a source of power outside of themselves. It was the combination of population growth, economic growth and design, rapid social change exacerbated by the very process of empire; and the release of the power-hungry (amplified by the systemic real powerlessness of a society out of control) to dominate others.

It was not the blood on lascivio agri that drew the Romans to the stadiums; it was the hole in their souls, hollows left by the loss of their immediate and daily capacity to be in charge of their own life experience.

It is not the mature pleasure in CSI, NCIS, Law and Order, The Terminator, Batman and the others in the endless string of blood sport “entertainments” that fills the couches and the lazy-boys in isolated living rooms across the nation; it is the holes in our souls.

I think of the prescient observers of the decline of their Rome looking desperately for some salvation, something to change the course of events. Eventually even they must have said, “Let’s just get this over with.” Our situation today is different in a number of regards. One is the desperation of facing a biological limit for all of our actions, but another is that the tools of our distractions have the potential to communicate rapidly and clearly with huge numbers of people. Our direction is actually changeable.

The Great Many have been diminished in their sense of power, even as they still retain real power if they could recognize their own best self-interests and organize around them. And the dangers are not 100 years, 300 years in the future: the barbarians are at the gates in the form of ecological collapse. Those “leaders” who refuse to see the immediacy of our dangers are, everyone, benefited in the moment by that refusal. The acquired ‘helplessness’ of the Great Many must be recognized for the terrible, perhaps insurmountable, problem that it is and must be given the deepest consideration, but assuming that it is addressable:

The present world is not Rome, but has come to its own and new place driven by the same human forces. Getting it wrong this time will not simply lead to the rise of Constantinople and the empires of a new Middle East, but will shock the biosphere and change all of life on earth.

the Army confirms that the gunman (thought to be killed) was Army Major Malik Nadal Hasan. Reports said 12 were dead (raised to 13, including one civilian) and 31 others wounded from an incident at the base Readiness Processing Center where troops prepare for deployment. Two other soldiers were detained as suspects. Another was believed at large. The shooting began about 1:30PM after which Fort Hood was locked down.

CNN reported over 100 rounds fired. Some military retirees were skeptical, calling it bogus. An unidentified Army captain said it’s impossible for a non-combatant like Hasan to fire that much with two pistols without being subdued. He’d have had to reload giving someone a chance to do it. Others said the same thing.

Sergeant Donald Buswell called the official story illegitimate saying a room full of combat veterans wouldn’t let one shooter do this kind of damage. “Multiple shooters is the only plausible scenario. This sounds like Major Hasan has been used, and perhaps is a patsy.” Vietnam veteran Michael Gaddy said the Army’s version doesn’t compute. “People on the ground have told me cell phone towers were jammed to prevent unauthorized dissemination of information after the shooting.”

Citizens for Legitimate Government (legitgov.org) said “Hasan’s neighbors, medical trainers, colleagues, friends, cousin, uncle, grandfather – even the store owner where he bought his food — all… praise(d his) temperament. This appears to be a psy-ops, six ways to Sunday.” His grandfather called the act “impossible. He is a doctor and loves the US. America made him what he is.”

Early November 5, the day of the incident, “he showed no signs of worry or stress when he stopped at (a) 7-Eleven for his daily breakfast of hash browns, said Jeannie Strickland, the store’s manager… (there was) nothing weird, nothing out of the ordinary.”

The FBI and Pentagon investigated alleged contacts he had with a “Yemen-based militant” over the past year after intelligence agencies reported emails he exchanged with imam Anwar al-Awlaki, known for his anti-American teachings. Al-Awlaki was once spiritual leader at the suburban Virginia mosque where Hasan worshipped. The communications suggested nothing out of the ordinary. Yet Charles Allen, former Bush administration Under Secretary for Intelligence and Analysis, described Al-Awlaki (with no proof) as an “al-Qaeda supporter..who targets US Muslims with radical online lectures encouraging terrorist attacks from his new home in Yemen.

Members of two Joint Terrorism Task Forces contacted Hasan’s superiors, reviewed his military records and computer for suspicious activity and found nothing. Yet Senator Joe Lieberman told Fox News (Sunday, November 8) that “strong warning signs” showed he was an “Islamic extremist,” and two officials said on ABC News that intelligence authorities knew he tried to contact suspected al Qaeda members. On November 11, Senator John McCain called the tragedy an “act of terror.”

Congressman Pete Hoekstra (R. MI ranking House Intelligence Committee member) plans an investigation on “homegrown Jihadism.” He sent a preservation order to the FBI, CIA, NSA, and DNI chiefs directing them to save relevant documents for his committee’s review.

A November 7 UK Telegraph report linked Hasan to three 9/11 “hijackers” because Al-Awlaki was their “spiritual advisor.” The FBI will now check if he met them. Telegraph writers Philip Sherwell and Alex Spillius said “the army missed an increasing number of red flags that Hasan was a troubled and brooding individual within its ranks.” It quoted an unnamed source warning military officials that he was a “ticking time bomb” after he allegedly defended suicide bombers, expressed anti-Jewish sentiments, and claimed the “war on terror” is a war against Islam. So do many others.

ABC News said Hasan “wanted out of the Army after being constantly harassed by others in the military and was called a ‘camel jockey,’ his family said. As (he) was about to be deployed to (Afghanistan), he was suffering from some of the same stresses that he was trained as an Army psychiatrist to treat.” As a result, he hired a lawyer to help him get out of the Army.

A London Guardian article cited base commander, Lt. Gen. Robert Cone, saying Hasan shouted “Allahu Akbar” (God is great) before shooting. One of his colleagues, Col. Steven Braverman, said he did his job well. There were no signs of trouble. “We had no problems with his job performance while he was working with us.” But he was “mortified by the idea of” deploying to Afghanistan, according to his cousin Nader. “He had people telling him on a daily basis (about) the horrors they saw over there.”

More from the New York Times

On November 5, writer James Dao headlined, “Suspect Was ‘Mortified” About Deployment… because he knew all too well the terrifying realities of war,” according to his cousin Nader Hasan.

Earlier, the FBI “became aware of Internet postings by a man calling himself Nidal Hasan… but the investigators were not clear whether the writer was Major Hasan. In one posting (he) compared the heroism of a soldier who throws himself on a grenade to protect fellow soldiers to suicide bombers who sacrifice themselves to protect Muslims.” The emailer said: “If one suicide bomber can kill 100 enemy soldiers because they were caught off guard that would be considered a strategic victory.”

“It could not be confirmed, however, that the writer was Major Hasan.”

On November 8, writers James McKinley Jr. and James Dao headlined, “Fort Hood Gunman Gave Signals Before His Rampage,” saying “relatives and acquaintances (said) tensions that led to the rampage had been building for a long time…. In recent years, he had grown more and more vocal about his opposition to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and tortured over reconciling his military duties with his religion.”

He was “a troubled man full of contradictions (who) complained bitterly to people at his mosque about the oppression of Muslims in the Army. He had few friends, and even (some who knew him said he was) a strange figure….”

On November 9, writers David Johnston and Scott Shane headlined, “US Knew of Suspect’s Tie to Radical Cleric… known for his incendiary anti-American teachings…. Given (his) radical views,” Congress will likely investigate potential links to terrorism.

The Times‘ David Brooks said political correctness clouded the reporting, portraying Hasan: “as a victim of society, a poor soul who was pushed over the edge by prejudice and unhappiness…. This response was understandable. But it was also patronizing. Public commentators assumed the air of kindergarten teachers who had to protect their children from thinking certain impermissible and intolerant thoughts.”

On November 10, writers Peter Baker and Clifford Krauss headlined, “President, at Service, Hails Fort Hood’s Fallen (in assuming) the role of national eulogist (and leading) the country in mourning….”

In shamelessly promoting America’s imperial wars, ahead of new troop deployments, Obama referred to:

“… trying times for our country. In Afghanistan and Pakistan, the same extremists who killed nearly 3,000 Americans continue to endanger America, our allies, and innocent Afghans and Pakistanis. In Iraq, we are working to bring a war to a successful end, as there are still those who would deny the Iraqi people the future that Americans and Iraqis have sacrificed so much for.” Fort Hood’s fallen soldiers “reaffirm the core values that we are fighting for (to give) others half a world away the chance to lead a better life.”

The Atlantic’s Marc Ambinder said it’s “The Best Speech Obama’s Given Since…. Maybe Ever. Today, at Ft. Hood. I guarantee: they’ll be teaching this one in rhetoric classes. It was that good.”

The New York Times called it “soaring rhetoric.” Political Wire.com said it’s his best speech ever. Attending politicians from both parties agreed that he touched all the right points. Other media comments expressed strong undertone support for America’s imperial wars and need to fight terrorism.

More Islamophobic Response

On November 6, in Rupert Murdoch’s New York Post, retired Army Lt. Col. Ralph Peters headlined, “Fort Hood’s 9/11″ calling it “the worst act of terror on American soil since” that day. “This was a terrorist act. When an extremist plans and executes a murderous plot against our armed forces to protest our efforts to counter Islamic fanatics, it’s an act of terror. Period.”

From the Wall Street Journal:

– On November 10, Evan Perez and Keith Johnson headlined, “Hasan, Radical Cleric Had Contact (but it) Didn’t Raise Red Flags to US Authorities; and

– editorial writer Dorothy Rabinowitz’s same day op-ed saying, “His (Hasan) terrorist motive is obvious to everyone but the press and Army brass.”

The press? Apparently Rabinowitz doesn’t read her own paper that wreaks with innuendoes and accusations. From the dominant media as well.

From the Washington Post:

– lots of inflammatory reporting and a November 12 editorial headlined, “In plain sight?” It mentions the same “red flags” saying, “In isolation, they may have appeared less than actionable. Unfortunately, (the Fort Hood) tragedy… linked the puzzle pieces. (So) it’s fair to ask whether red flags should have become red alerts.” The editorial’s conclusion – “A serious investigation must probe these issues, among others.”

On November 10, Newsmax.com’s Ronald Kessler said “10% of US mosques preach jihad,” according to FBI estimates. “That sums up the problem facing us as we ponder the meaning of (Hasan’s) slayings of 13 people at Fort Hood, Texas. Given his association with a pro-al-Qaida imam in northern Virginia and his preoccupation with radical Islamic Web sites, it’s clear that the radical element of Islam influenced Hasan.”

From right-wing ideologue Michelle Malkin:

– The “military’s blind pursuit of diversity allowed Fort Hood shooting” to happen. “Fort Hood jihadist Maj. Nidal Hasan made his means, motive and inspiration clear for those willing to see and hear.”

On November 9 on The 700 Club, Pat Robertson used the tragedy to vilify Islam, calling it:

– a “violent religion,” then adding, “Islam is not a religion, it is a political system… bent on world domination;” and added

– “Muslims should be treated like “members of the Communist Party (or) some fascist group.”

On November 10, CNN’s Lou Dobbs said:

“Tonight, the government faces tough questions. Intelligence agencies now (admit) they knew (Hasan) had terrorist ties almost a year ago. Why were there no investigations…. Warning signs (were) ignored. Red flags (were) missed.”

He referred to a December 2008 “bombshell” revelation that he was communicating with a Yemeni cleric and other “red flags ignored…. Could the Fort Hood massacre have been prevented?”

Under pressure from critics, Dobbs announced his resignation on November 11. According to New York Times writers Brian Stelter and Bill Carter:

Months ago CNN president Jonathan Klein “offered (him) a choice. (He) could vent his opinions on radio and anchor an objective newscast on television, or he could leave CNN.”

The article said Dobbs met with Fox News head Roger Ailes in September. Perhaps that’s where he’s headed.

The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) was one of his most vocal critics. On November 12, it issued the following statement:

Last night, CNN anchor Lou Dobbs announced his departure from the network. As you know, we’ve been highly critical of (him) because he has used his platform to spread myths and propaganda — poisoning the debate over immigration reform and inciting fear and hate against Latinos.

The SPLC was one of the first groups to bring public attention to Dobbs’ use of false information provided by racist hate groups…. we took a stand (to fire him), and our actions made a difference.

On November 10, Fox News‘ Bill O’Reilly’s “Talking Points” featured “The Truth About Major Nidal Malik Hasan’s (attempt) to contact associates of Al Qaeda. If true, that’s huge. Why would the Army allow any soldier to serve under those circumstances?” Later in the broadcast he added: “I have the highest rated show. I’ve decided it was an act of terrorism.”

On November 9, Fox News‘ Sean Hannity asked what the tragedy says “about Barack Obama and our government.”

The same day on Fox News, right-wing columnist Charles Krauthammer said:

“Surprise, surprise, that somebody who shouts Allahu Akbar (God is great) as he shoots up a room of soldiers might have Islamist motives in doing that. I think the real moral scandal… is trying to medicalize mass murder.”

On his November 9 radio show, Rush Limbaugh also blamed Obama for the Fort Hood shootings saying:

“We could almost say this is Obama’s fault, because this guy (Hasan) said he believed Obama was going to get us out of Iraq and Afghanistan. Obama hasn’t done it, and that’s one of the reasons why the guy cracked…. I am sure they’re not going to call this (a) hate crime….but let’s not forget this man had no problem with killing people. (He’s) not a pacifist (or) a conscientious objector. He didn’t like Americans in Afghanistan or Iraq.”

AP headlined, “Who knew of Fort Hood suspect’s radical contacts (in suggesting) opportunities were missed to head off the massacre in which 13 died and 29 others wounded last Thursday.”

National Public Radio’s (NPR) Daniel Zwerdling called Hasan “cold (and) unfriendly,” according to a fellow psychiatrist “who worked very closely with (him) and knows him very well… the medical staff was very worried about this guy….He did not do a good job in training, was repeatedly warned, you better shape up, or, you know, you’re going to be in trouble… more relevant (was that) he was very proud and upfront about being Muslim… he seemed almost belligerent about (it), and he gave a lecture one day that really freaked a lot of doctors out… he was the kind of guy who the staff actually stood around in the hallway, saying: Do you think he’s a terrorist, or is he just weird?”

NPR’s Steve Inskeep called Hasan “disturbed” and “disliked.”

On Public Broadcasting’s (PBS) News Hour, Gwen Ifill discussed his “extremist” views and “ties” to a “radical cleric” with Washington Post writer, Dana Priest. Focusing on her November 10 article titled, “Fort Hood suspect warned of threats within the ranks,” she explained his late June 2007 Power Point presentation to supervisors and other physicians and mental health staff expressing “a quite radical view of Islam and the Koran, with warnings throughout that Muslims (will be conflicted) if they are asked to fight and kill other Muslims….”

Titled, “The Koranic World View As It Relates to Muslims in the US Military,” Priest stressed elements like:

• guilt feelings and religious conflicts facing Muslims in the military;
• offensive jihad, or holy war;
• Hasan saying: “If Muslim groups can convince Muslims that they are fighting for God against injustices of the ‘infidels;’ ie, enemies of Islam, then (they) can become a potent adversary; ie, suicide bomb(ers), etc;
• another comment saying: “We love death more than you love life;” and
• under conclusions, writing: “Fighting to establish an Islamic State to please God, even by force, is condoned by Islam (and) Muslim soldiers should not serve in any capacity that renders them at risk to hurting/killing believers unjustly.”

Not addressed in Priest’s article was the following:

• Muslims’ objections to the Iraq and Afghanistan wars;
• out-of-date Pentagon information about Muslim attitudes in the military;
• over 4,000 armed forces members are Muslims, not the media-reported 2,000 – 3,000 number;
• most are African Americans, so it raises troubling implications about extending imperial wars to Africa using black Americans to fight them; and
• more than 3,000 armed forces members converted to Islam while stationed in the Persian Gulf in the 1990s.

Priest mentioned Hasan’s recommendation urging the Defense Department to release Muslims as conscientious objectors “to increase troop morale and decrease adverse events.”

Reporter Ray Suarez painted a “conflicting portrait (of the) accused Fort Hood gunman,” devout, quiet, hardly known or understood by his neighbors, disenchanted with the military, and eager to get out. He cited the Council on American-Islamic Relations’ Ibrahim Hooper saying his BlackBerry buzzed with hostile messages, “one calling for all-out war on Islam.”

BBC highlighted Hasan’s “contact with a radical cleric (known to be) sympathetic to al-Qaeda (and for) run(ning) a website denouncing US policy. It praised Major Hasan’s alleged actions at Fort Hood as heroic.”

Darren Hutchinson’s Dissenting Justice blog asked why Hasan wasn’t fired for his views when gay and lesbian soldiers are on grounds of their sexual orientation, saying:

Apparently, the military retained a person who suffered from known (or reasonably discoverable) psychological problems and who attempted to contact an anti-US terrorist group. Meanwhile, the military continues to enforce Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell and to discharge mentally fit and loyal gay and lesbian service members… Hasan’s religious views were prominent, if not exclusive factors for why he slaughtered fellow American soldiers. The motives appear as clear as any could be.

Real Clear Politics’ Debra Saunders referred to an “unstable person (immersed) in extremist ideology before he turned his rage on his fellow man.”

On November 11, an Islamophobic NEFA Foundation Alert headlined, “Afghan Taliban Celebrate Ft. Hood Massacre,” saying it:

issued a new official communique in response to the massacre at Ft. Hood… titled, ‘The Attack in Texas Is A Proof On The Disagreement Among American Soldiers Over The War,’ the Taliban celebrated the ‘fight and trance and enormous fears within the military and civil circles in America’ caused by the incident.

Referring to Hasan as a “hero,” it warned that if the US doesn’t withdraw from Iraq and Afghanistan, “it will become normal for (similar) incidents and attacks (to) expand to the Pentagon and the rest of the American military bases….”

Instances of Violence in the Military

On November 9, New York Times writers Michael Moss and Ray Rivera headlined, “At Army Base, Some Violence Is Too Familiar,” citing past examples from combat stress:

– after returning to Fort Hood in 2008, Sgt. Gilberto Mota shot his wife Diana, an Army specialist, and took his own life;

–in July, two returning First Cavalry Division members were at a party when one killed the other; and

– the same month, Sgt. Justin Lee Garza, over-stressed from two deployments, shot himself in a friend’s apartment outside Fort Hood four days after being told no therapists were available for counseling.

The article said “Reports of domestic abuse have grown by 75 percent since 2001, (and) violent crime in (adjacent) Killeen has risen 22 percent….” Other stresses showed up in 76 Fort Hood suicides, 10 in 2009. Overall, record numbers of them are occurring, likely more than officially reported, as well as on average 10 failed attempts for each lost life. The reasons — extended, repeated combat zone deployments causing post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and severe depression.

In January, the Veterans Affairs Department (VA) reported 178,483 Iraq and Afghanistan vets diagnosed with mental illness between 2002 and September 2008. Included were cases of PTSD, depression, neurotic disorders, and psychoses, as well as drug abuse and alcoholism. A 2008 RAND Corporation study estimated that 20% of Iraq and Afghanistan vets (or 350,000 people) suffered from PTSD, nearly double the VA figure. In addition, up to 18 US veterans of foreign wars commit suicide daily — over 6,500 annually. The numbers are troublesome and unreported by the major media supporting calls for more troops.

The Times said interviews with Iraq and Afghanistan vets and with family members of those killed in Texas show that the Army hasn’t dealt with this crisis. “Even some alarm bells rung by the Army leadership have gone unanswered.” Open-ended billions go for militarism and imperial wars. Appallingly little helps the young men and women fighting them when they most need it.

The Fort Hood tragedy is a profound “red alert” indictment of America’s imperial wars and the immense human cost to soldiers and non-combatants alike.

Fragging in Vietnam

War-induced stress sparks violence in the ranks. Fragging was the Vietnam term for rank-and-file soldiers killing NCO and officer superiors by fragmentation grenades, shootings, and other means. According to Texas A&M historian, Terry Anderson, the Army knew of at least 600 officer cases from 1969-1973, plus “another 1,400 who died mysteriously.” He believes that late in the conflict, the Army was more at war with itself than the Vietnamese.

Congressional hearings in 1973 estimated that from 1961 – 1972 up to 3% of NCO and officer deaths were from fragging by fragmentation grenades alone. Many others were by “handguns, automatic rifles, booby traps, knives, and bare hands (by) increasingly pissed off enlisted men.”

Writing in 1971, a Col. Heinl said:

The morale, discipline and battleworthiness of the US Armed Forces are… lower than anytime in the century and possibly in the history of the United States. By every conceivable indicator, our Army that remains in Vietnam is in a state of approaching collapse, with individual units avoiding or having… refused combat, murdering their own officers and NCOs, drug-ridden and dispirited when not mutinous.

Despite today’s all-volunteer force, the longer America’s wars go on, the closer a similar state approaches critical mass because of declining moral, repeated deployments, combat stress, battle fatigue, and what Vietnam vet Steve Hesske wrote in 2003 on newdemocracyworld.org:

the “negative universals in all warfare. Lousy nutrition. Cramped, dirty, awful living conditions. Terrible weather. Unreasonable often senseless demands made by superiors. And what Michael Herr describes in DISPATCHES (as) ‘long periods of boredom punctuated by moments of stark terror.’ ”

Leaving Iraq occupied, letting conditions there fester, and expanding the Afghan-Pakistan theaters promise enough growing resentment in the ranks to perhaps cause the type Vietnam breakdown Col Heinl described. One no Islamophobic media response can hide or prevent.

Over the past few years a growing number of white people have joined the longstanding indigenous people’s critique of the holocaust denial that is at the heart of the Thanksgiving holiday. In two recent essays, I have examined the disturbing nature of a holiday rooted in a celebration of the European conquest of the Americas, which means the celebration of the Europeans’ genocidal campaign against Indigenous people that is central to the creation of the United States.

Many similar pieces have been published in predominantly white left/progressive media, while indigenous people continue to mark the holiday as a “National Day of Mourning.”

In recent years I have refused to participate in Thanksgiving Day meals, even with friends and family who share this critical analysis and reject the national mythology around manifest destiny. In bowing out of those gatherings, I would often tell folks that I hated Thanksgiving. I realize now that “hate” is the wrong word to describe my emotional reaction to the holiday. I am afraid of Thanksgiving. More accurately, I am afraid of what Thanksgiving tells us about both the dominant culture and much of the alleged counterculture.

Here’s what I think it tells us: As a society, the United States is intellectually dishonest, politically irresponsible, and morally bankrupt. This is a society in which even progressive people routinely allow national and family traditions to trump fundamental human decency. It’s a society in which, in the privileged sectors, getting along and not causing trouble are often valued above honesty and accountability. Though it’s painful to consider, it’s possible that such a society is beyond redemption. Such a consideration becomes frightening when we recognize that all this goes on in the most affluent and militarily powerful country in the history of the world, but a country that is falling apart — an empire in decline.

Thanksgiving should teach us all to be afraid.

Although it’s well known to anyone who wants to know, let me summarize the argument against Thanksgiving: European invaders exterminated nearly the entire indigenous population to create the United States. Without that holocaust, the United States as we know it would not exist. The United States celebrates a Thanksgiving Day holiday dominated not by atonement for that horrendous crime against humanity but by a falsified account of the “encounter” between Europeans and American Indians. When confronted with this, most people in the United States (outside of indigenous communities) ignore the history or attack those who make the argument. This is intellectually dishonest, politically irresponsible, and morally bankrupt.

In left/radical circles, even though that basic critique is widely accepted, a relatively small number of people argue that we should renounce the holiday and refuse to celebrate it in any fashion. Most leftists who celebrate Thanksgiving claim that they can individually redefine the holiday in a politically progressive fashion in private, which is an illusory dodge: We don’t define holidays individually or privately — the idea of a holiday is rooted in its collective, shared meaning. When the dominant culture defines a holiday in a certain fashion, one can’t pretend to redefine it in private. To pretend we can do that also is intellectually dishonest, politically irresponsible, and morally bankrupt.

I press these points with no sense of moral superiority. For many years I didn’t give these questions a thought, and for some years after that I sat sullenly at Thanksgiving dinners, unwilling to raise my voice. For the past few years I’ve spent the day alone, which was less stressful for me personally (and, probably, less stressful for people around me) but had no political effect. This year I’ve avoided the issue by accepting a speaking invitation in Canada, taking myself out of the country on that day. But that feels like a cheap resolution, again with no political effect in the United States.

The next step for me is to seek creative ways to use the tension around this holiday for political purposes, to highlight the white-supremacist and predatory nature of the dominant culture, then and now. Is it possible to find a way to bring people together in public to contest the values of the dominant culture? How can those of us who want to reject that dominant culture meet our intellectual, political, and moral obligations? How can we act righteously without slipping into self-righteousness? What strategies create the most expansive space possible for honest engagement with others?

Along with allies in Austin, I’ve struggled with the question of how to create an alternative public event that could contribute to a more honest accounting of the American holocausts in the past (not only the indigenous genocide, but African slavery) and present (the murderous U.S. assault on the developing world, especially in the past six decades, in places such as Vietnam and Iraq).

Some have suggested an educational event, bringing in speakers to talk about those holocausts. Others have suggested a gathering focused on atonement. Should the event be more political or more spiritual? Perhaps some combination of methods and goals is possible.

However we decide to proceed, we can’t ignore the ugly ideological realities of the holiday. My fear of those realities is appropriate but facing reality need not leave us paralyzed by fear; instead it can help us understand the contours of the multiple crises — economic and ecological, political and cultural — that we face. The challenge is to channel our fear into action. I hope that next year I will find a way to take another step toward a more meaningful honoring of our intellectual, political, and moral obligations.

As we approach Thanksgiving Day, I’m eager to hear about the successful strategies of others. For such advice, I would be thankful.

Talk about nuts!

Thankfully, Garry South, “a top strategist for [former] Democratic gubernatorial candidate Gavin Newsom,” is on to Brown’s seditious psychosis:

“California Democrats need to ponder very seriously the prospect of putting up a candidate for governor who comes with reams of radio-show rantings like Brown,” he states, sagely adding that “Republicans will put tens of millions of dollars behind making him look like a conspiracy-spouting fringe lunatic to the average voter.”

Good on them! And thank goodness they have tons of money at their disposal, too, which, if scary Jerry had had his way, would have been a vital tool long removed from the political process, thereby denying freedom-loving corporations their constitutional right to buy as many congressmembers, er, as much access as possible. For here’s Brown from his radical radio days waxing wacky about campaign reform: “The way politics is organized… money buys power, even though as a principle, that is condemned.”

“Money buys power”? Well, duh! It also buys patchouli oil, lava lamps and Internet porn (uh, so I’ve heard), and isn’t it interesting how he doesn’t rail against those.

As a dissident DJ, Brown also bashed another beloved American institution: institutions (as in, correctional), knocking locking up druggies and throwing away the key:

“Here’s the real scam. The drug war is one of the games to get more convictions and prisoners. There’s a lot of chemicals out there and when certain ones are made illegal, they become a huge profit opportunity and bring violence, crime and more people to imprison.”

So, let me get this straight: Instead of spending bazillions on eons-long prison sentences for adults partaking of intoxicants in the privacy of their homes, activity that causes irrevocable damage to our society, you know, um, somehow, what would Brown have wildly suggested? Legalize drugs, tax them and then blow the dough on school construction and highway maintenance? Earth to Jerry: if we’d wanted to live like namby-pamby socialists, we’d never have revolted against France. Get a clue!

Further cementing his criminal-coddling credentials, here’s Baby-‘Em Brown’s death penalty lowdown: “The great danger of humane punishment is that people will come to accept state murder as something sanitary. I don’t think bureaucracy should ever be entrusted with that kind of power.”

Now, I’m sure liberals would insist we ask the 138 people exonerated from death row in the U.S. since 1973 what they think about capital punishment, even though their bias would be obvious. Fine, whatever; but it still doesn’t change this unalterable fact: nobody kills anybody when they’re dead. (Yes, tree huggers, ‘tis true there have been at least eight people executed in recent years even though it was determined a little too late — oops! — they were almost assuredly innocent but, hey, what are you, perfect?)

But the thing that galls me most about Jerry Brown is the Marxist nature of his on-the-record anti-corporatism, for who else but a closet commie would blame Big Business for our great nation’s woes? Everyone knows that banks, insurance companies, the pharmaceuticals industry, weapons manufacturers and other corporate mega-entities have never had anything but our country’s best interests at heart, and anyone who reads ulterior motives into their God-given right to fully service us, check it, provide us full services, is truly an America-hater of the first order.

Personally, I’m couldn’t be happier to donate my tax dollars to help save critically-needed financial institutions in exchange for the privilege of using credit cards with perfectly reasonable 29.99% interest rates. I’m proud as a patriotic peacock to continue supporting the ever-burgeoning defense industry and its half-dozen or however many wars it is they’ve got going now, ‘cause one never knows when the next Iraqi or Afghani — or even the first — will attack us from hating the freedoms we used to have. I’m all for making taxpayer-subsidized health insurance mandatory for every American, and for do-gooders who complain it’s nothing but a backdoor windfall for soulless HMOs and marvel at the chutzpah of fining or even jailing fellow citizens too poor to comply, I’ve only one question: where’s your famous bleeding heart compassion when it comes to shareholders and CEOs, huh? They’re human, too, you know. (Probably.)

Fortunately, time wounds all heels or at least tempers their views, and moderation is apparently what’s happened to Jerry Brown’s extremist ideas from his far-out radio daze. The Bee makes it clear that Brown, in his undeclared desire to regain the governorship, has ratcheted his rebellious rhetoric way down.

That’s fine by me, ‘cause one thing’s for sure: if old Governor Moonbeam’s retro ravings ever came to pass, we’d no doubt have an America that looked radically different from how it looks today.

And who would want that?

They are each sites where Americans killed Americans in a culture whose violence extends from here to places like Iraq and Afghanistan. They are symptoms of a deep problem not likely to disappear without serious intervention.

Connections exist among the violence here at home and American violence in wars abroad, which indicate a pattern. These incidents are among growing signs that we should analyze carefully, now, before additional warnings happen and perhaps even worsen. The root causes of such eruptions should be studied.

Responses to Ft. Hood could develop into what is described as a “tipping point” in the best-selling book of that title by Malcolm Gladwell. Others describe such a time as a “turning point.” Perhaps we could turn away from such extreme violence.

Where might terror strike next and who might be the perpetrator(s) and victims? More students, soldiers, or some other group? How is such domestic terrorism bred and what can we do to interrupt it? It’s time to look inside, rather than seek outside scapegoats. Raising haunting questions is more important now than rushing to facile answers and seeking revenge.

At Oklahoma City an anti-government activist detonated the bombing of a federal building. At Columbine two high school students pulled triggers on other students and a teacher. At Virginia Tech a college student killed other college students. At Ft. Hood the suspect is an Army physician who killed five other psychotherapists and an additional eight people, and wounded some 31.

What does it say that a mental health professional seems to have endured so much trauma that he broke under the stress and engaged in a mass shooting? It is too easy to just blame these individuals.

As a former Army officer whose military family gave its name to Ft. Bliss, Texas, who was raised partly near Ft. Hood, this massacre struck close to home. As a college professor, when I read about shooting at schools, I think about my responsibility to help protect students.

The American shoot-‘em-up approach to solving problems is not new, especially in Texas and the remaining Wild West. These recent tragedies have lessons to teach us, so that the likelihood of other such incidents can be reduced.

Rather then merely indict the individuals that committed these heinous crimes, we could benefit from looking beyond them to consider our own responsibilities as citizens to reduce such violence and improve the context that spawns it.

It is easier to demonize the killers, rather than try to understand why these desperate men felt driven to such violence that would likely take their own lives or lead to extreme punishment. Their anguish and agony must have been substantial.

Punishment of the perpetrator alone is unlikely to break the cycle of violence that Americans commit here at home and carry abroad. A careful study of patterns would be more helpful.

The recent violence at Ft. Hood and in the town of Killeen, where it is located, is not new. The area “has been beset by crime and violence since the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq began,” according to the New York Times on Nov. 10. “Reports of domestic abuse have grown by 75 percent since 2001,” it continues. Soldiers come home from combat and beat their wives, sometimes to death. 76 suicides by personnel assigned to Ft. Hood have occurred since 2003.

There is no one to blame other than Americans. We did it. Not Muslims, Arabs, or outside “terrorists.” Not external enemies. “We have met the enemy, and it is us,” asserts a famous line from a Pogo cartoon from my childhood. It is time for us to reflect on the context that breeds such self-destructiveness.

From the day after the Ft. Hood massacre on Thursday to Sunday I mainly read and clipped many articles, while continuing my regular life. I was especially struck by the heroism of civilian Sgt. Kimberly Munley, who bravely took the shooter down, even as she went down with four bullets in her body.

It was not until Sunday night that I really felt the horror. I became numb, immobilized, depressed.

Fortunately, earlier that day I emailed my Sonoma State University students to put Ft. Hood on the lesson plan for my “War and Peace” class. I wanted to gently encourage them to get beyond denial to express their feelings, develop opinions, and engage in critical thinking. The students were attentive and thought deeply about the implications of Ft. Hood and what it reflects about us as a nation and our future.

“It takes a little while before the grieving starts,” reads the last quotation in a Nov. 8 article in our local daily The Press Democrat. It opened me to my own grief. The words are those of Col. Bill Rabena, who runs the new post-Ft. Hood massacre Spiritual Fitness Center. It offers counseling, soothing music, a religious library and meditation space, among other services, to help survivors cope with psychological trauma.

While I was in the Army during the l960s and the American Wars in Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos we did not have such centers. So I have felt mainly alone during the some 40 years after my discharge and having to de-militarize myself and deal with my own trauma. I am still recovering and easily triggered, especially by loud sounds.

We need to work to enhance the safety of our students, soldiers, and citizens as a whole, or future similar incidents are likely. Public places—such as schools, government buildings, and even military bases—have become less safe during this 21st century.

Perhaps the Ft. Hood massacre can awaken us to the pain and suffering of our military personnel and the lives that they touch overseas and in their families. On the other hand, a Nov. 16 Newsweek column on the new book American Homicide by Ohio State professor of history and criminology Randolph Roth notes “that gun and ammunition sales are up nearly 50 percent from a year ago.” What does that say about the state of our union and our future?

Now is a time to grieve our national losses and work to minimize such losses in the future. Such collective grief can inform and educate us.

It makes no difference what the questions or answers were. Journalism hasn’t been a priority of television for a long time. What matters is that a network hired someone with no background into a job with an income substantially above what most journalists earn. Jenna Bush isn’t the only one to parlay dubious credentials onto network television. Beauty pageants—it makes no difference if it’s the Miss Rutabaga or Miss America contests—are full of contestants who say their ambition is to be a TV anchor—or an actress, whichever comes first.

Now, Jenna Bush, in her mid-20s, had also become a best-selling author, something that rarely happens even to the best writers. HarperCollins, owned by Rupert Murdoch of Fox News fame, printed an initial 500,000 copies of Ana’s Story in 2007. The press run was about 100 times greater than the average run of a first book by even a good writer. A year later, HarperCollins published a children’s book co-written by Jenna Bush and Laura Bush, who promoted their books on the major talk shows, including The Tonight Show, with Jay Leno. Thousands of publicists and authors literally beg to get network exposure. Most books that do get published can be found in the remainder bins—or recycling bins – within a year of publication—if the author is fortunate enough to even secure a contract.

The Bushes aren’t the only celebrities who have written children’s books. Among dozens of celebrities who easily found publishers for their children’s books were Julie Andrews, Bill Cosby, Katie Couric, Jamie Lee Curtis, LL Cool J, Jay Leno, Will Smith, Jerry Seinfeld, and even Shaquille O’Neal.

Superstar pro athletes can often get book deals in the six- and seven-figure range. Among them are 7-foot-5 NBA star Yao-Minh, whose command of English is minimal, but who scored a $1.5 million advance for his autobiography; and Dennis Rodman, aided by a fluorescent-hued hair, multi-body tattoos, and a seven-figure advance, who wore a dress and feather boa in Detroit and a wedding dress in Manhattan to promote his own in-your-face autobiography. O.J. Simpson was a cross-over—a superstar pro athlete and a criminal. Criminals whose stories make the front pages, and who while in prison “find” religion and do a great job of feigning repentance, can often secure book deals.

Thousands of 20-something students and recent graduates have worked extremely hard, usually in anonymity, to earn internships, many of them unpaid, in the media or in government. However, unlike most interns, Monica Lewinsky, Bill Clinton’s presidential playmate, became a best-selling author. And, like other celebrity-authors, she was able to parlay her notoriety into numerous talk show appearances, all of which helped promote Monica’s Story and more than $2 million in income.

Add Paris Hilton to the list. In 2004, she secured a book contract for an autobiography, reflecting her entire 23 year life of entitlement and near uselessness. Of course, the book became a New York Times best-seller.

At one time, “legacy children,” the ones whose parents or grandparents earned fame or fortune, would have settled for being admitted to the parents’ Ivy League colleges, even if minimally qualified, and then getting some job in the family business. But, the omnipotence of the mass media has given the entitled darlings other opportunities. Chances are there’s a TV gig or a book contract somewhere in their futures. And all that this says is that those who work hard to learn and perfect their craft, perhaps to contribute ideas to society, and hoped-for mass distribution, will probably continue a life of anonymity while buried by the train wrecks that have become the mass media.

Robinson Crusoe’s ethics are rooted in his inherent imperialism. Being the only representative of his race and culture for 27 of his 28 years upon the island, and considering both superior to all others, he not only endeavors—regardless if it is applicable, necessary, or even viable—to replicate the society from which he came but, through these means, to reign supreme over his environment. Crusoe is culpable because he acknowledges that he has been freed from socially-defined standards and, more importantly, that such standards might, in themselves, be questionable yet, after rationalizing the ethically justifiable course of action, he frequently opts for a more self-aggrandizing, convenient, or profitable avenue.

For example, he criticizes the Spanish Inquisition as being unjust yet forces a Caribbean native whom he has liberated from being cannibalized—not on moral grounds but in order to obtain a servant—to assimilate to his Anglo-Saxon lifestyle. Crusoe never bothers to ask the native’s given name. Instead, to commemorate the day upon which Crusoe acted so gallantly, “the creature” is nonchalantly dubbed “Friday.” Crusoe then demands that the native be clothed despite Friday being uncomfortable in such adornments and, moreover, the climate not requiring such. Furthermore, Crusoe rarely inquires into Friday’s perspectives, customs, or culture (the latter has to offer them), thus implying that Crusoe believes his ways to be implicitly superior as he proceeds to teach Friday to speak English and convert him to Christianity. It is worthy of note that, when Friday is rescued, he grovels at his liberator’s feet. Crusoe does not lift Friday up but permits him to remain in his subservient position so as to establish the desired hierarchy (he has Friday refer to him as “Master”) as well as to satiate his narcissism. Astoundingly, Crusoe allows this to occur not once but twice. (Similarly, prior to Crusoe’s discovery of humans upon the island, he revels in his “sovereignty” over the island’s fauna, as he observes that he has capricious control over whether it lives or dies.) The epitome of Crusoe’s moral myopia toward Friday resides in Crusoe’s lack of empathy after having once been enslaved himself. Most pointedly, being free of societal customs and beliefs, there is no alibi for why he continues to uphold the institution of slavery, especially considering that, for several years, Crusoe and Friday are the island’s only inhabitants. Granted, he does not literally bind Friday in shackles and chains, however, he treats him as an inferior and in a manner which, if back in Europe, he would by no means apply to a fellow Briton.

It is with such happenstance convenience that Crusoe reinforces his religious views before summarily dismissing them. For instance, after several languid gestures toward reverence, once Crusoe is born-again, he maintains a calendar and observes the Sabbath. Yet, when he loses track of the date, his devotion subsequently subsides. Additionally, when he notices that barley has sprouted near his “castle” (shelter), being unable to reconcile how it arrived there, he attributes its presence to God’s will. He then recalls that he’d discarded several husks which might have contained seeds and dismisses divine intervention as being the culprit. Obviously, Crusoe’s level of devotion is dependent upon need (such as illness or desperation) or occurrences which he cannot readily rationalize and his theological fervor abruptly diminishes once he no longer requires assistance or deduces a non-supernatural cause for previously inexplicable events. Not surprisingly, he considers abandoning his faith in favor of another once he is rescued because doing so would be more lucrative (Catholicism is the reigning religion in Brazil, which is where his tobacco plantation resides).

Even in the wake of society, Crusoe is unable to sever himself from his entrepreneurial tendencies and, however futile, desire for material and monetary possessions. Despite his conjectures that, like Jonah, he might have been cast out for his sins (Crusoe would have never found himself stranded had he not set out to sea to procure more slaves), he produces more food than he can consume only to watch it rot. He practices animal husbandry and agriculture after conceding that the island aptly provides for his needs without having to resort to such labor-intensive activities. He even goes so far as to craft a table and chair. As noted, he has a “castle,” but he also possesses another shelter-cum-estate as well, which he refers to as his “bower.” Even after admitting that money has no intrinsic value in a tender-free existence, Crusoe hordes every coin he finds. Lastly, toward the end of his “reign” upon the island, the self-described “king” begins cataloguing people as possessions: He refers to the island’s inhabitants as his “subjects,” prisoners as “my people,” and even perceives specific (and in his mind, civilized) individuals as being his own, i.e. “the Spaniard” quickly metamorphoses into “my Spaniard.”

Other instances of Crusoe’s moral hypocrisy and logistic incongruity include his consenting that cannibals might well be acting upon political or cultural principles and, as a result, it may not his place to pass judgment upon them. (Friday confirms this when he informs Crusoe that cannibalism is the consequence of warfare and is not a standard practice, as evidenced by 17 stranded Britons currently residing peacefully amongst Friday’s people.) Nevertheless, and despite his newfound religiosity, Crusoe—against his better judgment and moral conscious—proceeds to slaughter cannibals in the name of God. He never reconciles the paradox in his condemnation of the cannibals’ capital punishment and his own country’s like sentence for mutiny.

Not surprisingly, Crusoe hasn’t any friends. Rather, his associations are strictly limited to accomplices, acquaintances, or business partners. (After he is rescued, he does go on to marry but never cites his wife by name.) Every individual’s worth is based upon the person’s utilitarian value as Crusoe refuses to permit sentimentality to intervene in his decision-making. This is best evidenced in his selling of Xury, a Moorish youth who aided Crusoe in escaping enslavement, which Crusoe later regrets—not because he misses the boy (though he does)—but because he is in need of additional labor on his Brazilian plantation. Dauntingly, when he is rescued, Crusoe leaves the island to British criminals without attempting to notify those who have set off to sea in search for help—the aforementioned Spaniard and Friday’s father—that there are new, dangerous inhabitants awaiting them upon their return. These individuals are not even an afterthought in that, in lieu of the maritime risks involved atop the political tension between Spain and Britain, Crusoe never bothers to inform us of the rescue mission’s fate, even after returning to the island years later. This omission is all the more insulting given that the seafarers aided Crusoe in retaining control of the island after mutineers came ashore.

What perhaps best outlines the Crusoe’s Machiavellian nature is his reaction to a single footprint which mysteriously appears on the beach one day. Though, upon his initial appearance upon the island, he longed to be rescued, Crusoe gradually becomes apprehensive of any sign of human life, as seen in him automatically assuming the enigmatic mark to be the sign of a hostile presence. Crusoe’s paranoia stems from fear that his comfortable state of existence and omnipotence might be compromised whereas before, when he was unsure of his ability to survive, he longed for salvation. He fears, not only cannibalistic natives, but also Spaniards. Yet ironically, fellow Britons prove to be his greatest threat (thereby negating Crusoe’s ethnocentricity). His megalomania is exemplified by his inability and unwillingness to admit fault even after he has returned to Europe. Various dates in his calendar are blaringly incorrect and, though a simple pen stroke would eradicate the errors and the reader would be none the wiser (while saying nothing of the intellectual integrity that most authors would insist upon in acknowledging the mistakes so as to better represent the conditions under which they were operating), Crusoe chooses to ignore them.

Though he does possess a few redeeming qualities, such as resourcefulness and determination, Daniel Defoe’s character of Robinson Crusoe is by no means a hero or even an admirable human being. He is an unapologetic racist, imperialist, fickle theist, and megalomaniac par excellence. He continually shirks moral obligation in favor of activities wherein he will profit, be it financially or socially, or which will appease his narcissism. His lethargy is only superseded by potential harm or ennui. He displays little moral development in that he rewards those who were faithful to his financial interests while he was stranded—not out of respect or gratitude—but anxiety and vanity respectively: Fearing that the Inquisition may result in martyrdom, he sells his plantation and donates the proceeds, of which “The world will seldom be able to show the like of.” During his valediction, Crusoe declares that he has since cast off once again, thereby implying that—to our knowledge—he might have committed many of the same moral atrocities on his “new adventure.” And why not? What evidence do we have to the contrary that, after 28 years on a desert island, he is any the wiser since this ten-year voyage opens with his return to the island where (in true capitalistic spirit) he divides “his colony[’s]” land into plots before announcing to its populace that it is not permitted to leave?

Next, we add hand made housing of straw-bale, adobe, log, rammed earth, or other local material, along with attached solar green houses according to many successful contemporary designs. The humans, of course, maintain a stable population and live with a stable biological unit.

Then we add a new human culture based on aiding the life force rather than its consumption and destruction.

Paradise is obviously not a new idea. Richard Heinberg in his book Memories and Visions of Paradise says, ” We are faced with some extraordinary facts. In virtually every culture on Earth we encounter a myth telling how humankind originated in a time of peace, happiness, and miraculous power and, because of some mistake or failure, degenerated to its present condition. Moreover, nearly every tribe and nation reveres the sayings of some ancient prophet who foretold the corrupt human world will one day be consumed in a purifying cataclysm to make way for a renewed Golden Age. And, as if the similarities of these ancient myths and prophecies were not remarkable enough, we are confronted by the additional fact that much of our civilization’s greatest literature and many of its most inspiring theories and experiments seem to derive their vitality and appeal from these mysterious memories and visions of paradise.”

This paradise can be done now. All of these systems have been worked out in the thousands of ecovillages around the planet and in many other similar designs. The above permacultural design has the effect of putting us in biological adaptation to the planet Earth. This is the key and crux of the matter. We as a species must be biologically adapted to the biological energy flows (food chains, biological webs) or we as a species cannot live on the earth. This is not to say that we must adopt a loin cloth and eat roots and berries such as the incredibly successful two million years of our ancestors, but it does mean that we somehow must biologically adapt to the earth. This means that the very foundations of our human culture of materialism must change.

THE CULTURE OF LOOTING

Human agriculture has been one of the most ecologically destructive disasters to hit the planet. When agriculture began and the first plow or digging stick was struck into the breast of Mother Earth, the destruction began. Soil scientists say that it takes between three hundred and a thousand years to accumulate each inch of topsoil in optimum ecologies. This is what agriculture drains from the earth. Surpluses from the life force of the earth is what the civilized are after and have been after for eight thousand years, draining the fertility of the earth through agriculture, overgrazing and deforestation The more surpluses that members of the empire can haul to the capital city, the more their social stature, in a materialistic society. Now that ninety per cent of the large fish in the ocean are gone, we are down to ten per cent of the planetary forest and soil erosion, exhaustion and desertification are racing ahead on all continents, even the unconcerned can see the problem. “Civilization,” since its inception has accomplished its growth by sucking the fertility out of the life force of the planet.

The phrase, “survival of the fittest,” was taken up out of Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution and made into a violent cultural norm by the British Empire. “Social Darwinism” soon followed. Those who ruled by violence, theft and lies, considered it obvious that they were the ‘best,” and on the forefront of evolution, since they ruled. Those who ruled Babylon in the now ecologically destroyed “fertile crescent, the Han Chinese who ruled a country that was once half covered by a fertile temperate zone forest and those imperial rulers who occupied the once fertile Indus River Valley, no doubt thought they were the “best” – eight thousand years ago. That human culture has descended through the years to the point that “pioneers” on their way to loot the U.S. west, killed thousands of buffalo, took their tongues to market for money and left the carcasses to rot on the plains. This is an appropriate image of the culture of civilization and its ten thousand year project of killing the life force of our planet.

A CULTURE OF ADAPTATION

Another part of Darwin’s theory — that the English ruling class neglected — is the value of biological adaptation. When the banker leans on the farmer, the farmer leans on the soil, for more surpluses. The city dweller eats some of the food and throws the scraps, along with all other organic material in the landfill where its mass becomes an ecological problem. This is a simplified version of the whole of the culture of empire. There is no reward for the upstream supplier of biological energy, there is simply looting.. The ecology that provided the soil is not rewarded with the organic material so as to continue its growth. In many cases the old growth forest that originally provided the topsoil is gone.

In a great cultural turn-around, thousands of ecovillages have sprung up around the planet, pointed toward reversing the civilized cultural values and seeking adaptation to the planetary biology. Biological adaptation is the only way that the human species can be on this planet in perpetuity.

Much concern has been expressed recently about economic collapse, but the big collapse right behind it is what most people in the materialistic society do not see. This is the biological collapse of the life force of our planet. In this late stage of the “crisis of empire,” the only beneficial act one can do is seek biological adaptation in some manner. All other activities are frivolous and pointless.

As the culture of looting crashes in flames, our hope is that some of the thousands of ecovillages around the planet will survive the cataclysm to thrust a new pattern of cultural values, and a new adaptation to the life force, into the future.

This fall, I began my first lecture on Eurocentrism by asking my students, How Eurocentric is your day? I explained what I wanted to hear from them. Can they get through a typical day without running into ideas, institutions, values, technologies and products that originated outside the West – in China, India, the Islamicate or Africa?

The question befuddled my students. I proceeded to pepper them with questions about the things they do during a typical day, from the time they wake up.

Unbeknownst, my students discover that they wake up in ‘pajamas,’ trousers of Indian origin with an Urdu-Persian name. Out of bed, they shower with soap and shampoo, whose origins go back to the Middle East and India. Their tooth brush with bristles was invented in China in the fifteenth century. At some point after waking up, my students use toilet paper and tissue, also Chinese inventions of great antiquity.

Do the lives of my students rise to Eurocentric purity once they step out of the toilet and enter into the more serious business of going about their lives? Not quite.

I walk my student through her breakfast. Most likely, this consists of cereals, coffee and orange juice, with sugar added to the bargain. None originated in Europe. Cereals were first cultivated in the Fertile Crescent some ten thousand years BCE. Coffee, orange and sugar still carry – in their etymology – telltale signs of their origins, going back to the Arabs, Ethiopians and Indians. Try to imagine your life without these stimulants and sources of calories.

How far could my students go without the alphabet, numbers and paper? Yet, the alphabet came to Europe courtesy of the ancient Phoenicians. As their name suggests, the Arabic numerals were brought to Europe by the Arabs, who, in turn, had obtained it from the Indians. Paper came from China, also brought to Europe by the Muslims.

Obstinately, my students’ day refuses to get off to a dignified Eurocentric start.

In her prayer, my Christian student turns to a God who – in his human form – walked the earth in Palestine and spoke Aramaic, a close cousin of Arabic. When her thoughts turn to afterlife, my student thinks of the Day of Judgment, paradise and hell, concepts borrowed from the ancient Egyptians and Persians. ‘Paradise’ entered into English, via Greek, from the ancient Avestan pairidaeza.

Of medieval origin, the college was inspired and, most likely, modeled after the madrasa or Islamic college, first set up by a Seljuk vizier in eleventh century Baghdad. In a nod to this connection, professors at universities still hold a ‘chair,’ a practice that goes back to the madrasa, where the teacher alone sat in a chair while his students sat around him on rugs.

When she finishes college and prepares to receive her baccalaureate at the graduation ceremony, our student might do well to acknowledge another forgotten connection to the madrasa. This diploma harks back to the ijaza – Arabic for license – given to students who graduated from madrasas in the Islamicate.

Our student runs into fields of study – algebra, trigonometry, astronomy, chemistry, medicine and philosophy – that were introduced, via Latin, to Western Europe from the Islamicate. She also encounters a variety of scientific terms – algorithm, alkali, borax, amalgam, alembic, amber, calibrate, azimuth and nadir – which have Arabic roots.

If my students play chess over the weekend and threaten the King with ‘check mate,’ that phrase is adapted from Farsi – Shah maat – for ‘the King is helpless, defeated.’

When she uses coins, paper currency or writes a check, she is using forms of money first used outside Europe. Gold bars were first used as coins in Egypt in the fourth millennium BCE. With astonishment, Marco Polo records the use of paper currency in China, and describes how the paper used as currency was made from the bark of mulberry trees.

At college, my student will learn about modernity, ostensibly the source and foundation of the power and the riches of Western nations. Her professors in sociology will claim that laws based on reasoning, the abolition of priesthood, the scientific method, and secularism – hallmarks of modernity – are entirely of Western origin. Are they?

During the eighteenth century, many of the leading Enlightenment thinkers were keenly aware that Chinese had preceded them in their emphasis on reasoning by some two millennia. By the end of this century, however, a more muscular, more confident Europe chose to erase their debt to China from its collective memory.

Similarly, Islam, in the seventh century, made a more radical break from priesthood than the Reformation in Europe. In the eleventh century, an Arab scientist, Alhazen – his Latinized name – devised numerous experiments to test his theories in optics, but, more importantly, theorized cogently about the scientific method in his writings. Roger Bacon, the putative ‘founder’ of the scientific method, had read Alhazen in a Latin translation.

When our student reads the sonnets of Shakespeare and Spenser, she is little aware that the tradition of courtly love they celebrate comes via Provencal and the troubadours (derived from taraba, Arabic for ‘to sing’) from Arab traditions of love, music and poetry. When our male student gets down on one knee while proposing to his fair lady, he might do well to remember this.

On a clear night, with a telescope on her dormitory rooftop, our student can watch stars, many of which still carry Arabic names. This might be a fitting closure to a day in the life of our student, who, more likely than not, remains Eurocentric in her understanding of world history, little aware of the multifarious bonds that connect her life to different parts of the ‘Orient.’

We are being told to fear the swine flu virus, and then learn that the vaccine, which was supposed to be available in mid-October, won’t be ready for awhile.

It makes little difference anyhow, since about fifty million Americans don’t have health insurance and couldn’t afford the cost of vaccinations or treatment.

The ogres of health reform, also known as Republicans and the insurance industry, have already frightened Americans by spewing lies and hatreds no costumed kid could ever top.

The teabaggers, thousands of Americans dressed in work clothes but who seem to despise the working class, disgorge even more lies, half-truths, fear, and hatred, along with spurts of poisonous doses of racism and bigotry, since they have to blame someone for their own problems.

The minority party has long since ceased being the loyal opposition and are now just bitter and venomous cogs in the progress of society. These pseudo-patriot reptiles who have taken over the Republican party have further shown just how disloyal they truly are when they hissed at the President of the United States for winning the Nobel Prize and then cheered that Chicago lost the Olympics bid to Rio de Janiero. The increase of hate isn’t likely to level off soon.

Also not leveling off are unemployment, bankruptcies, housing foreclosures, and the problems caused by increased homelessness, all of which began increasing more than two years before Barack Obama became president. As long as the Party of No, with the assistance of Blue Dog Democrats, can block reform, don’t look for an eight-year-old wearing a devil’s costume to be the scariest thing around.

American taxpayers have doled out billions to banks, which have figured out new ways to scam their customers and clients. The taxpayers have also bailed out auto manufacturers who had frivolously spent more than a fleet of drunken sailors while not being able to figure out how to get their own operations in ship-shape competition.

Americans, who are struggling just to survive, are being tricked by banking, insurance, and investment portfolio executives who are wearing Cheshire cat grins while they continue to reap in millions in taxpayer-provided bonuses for being incompetent and inefficient.

The fear instilled by the 9/11 attacks led Americans to willingly yield some of their Constitutional rights, while pretending that such laws as the PATRIOT Act would protect them from further harm. The fear of the past eight years that has led to the theft of six Constitutional amendments is scarier than any costumed pirate.

Frightening is also having a mass media that prefer to do play-by-play reporting on the latest celebrity break-up or coupling, real or imagined, rather than looking into critical social issues.

Indeed, ghosts, goblins, and things that go bump in the night don’t stand a chance of competing on Halloween with the fear that now exists in our country.

I was advised before my journey that Shanghai is not exactly a ‘cultural shock’, quite the opposite; one seems to have met Shanghai in one’s urban fantasy a long time before landing there. Shanghai is in fact the incarnation of the Western urban dream: it is an astonishing materialisation of everything the Western metropolis is claiming to be. In parts it is the embodiment of the urban imagery; it is what New York was aiming at but somehow failed to reach. In other parts, it is the ultimate urban tranquillity of a Parisian tree-lined avenue with small bars and cosy cafés. It offers everything a big city can offer in terms of culture, entertainment, business and food yet it is totally sympathetic to its visitors and inhabitants.

I was teaching jazz in China this week and performed at the Shanghai Jazz Festival, Though I was pretty busy with my students, Jazz combos, concerts and other musical commitments, I tried to absorb as much as I could. I travelled around, tried to meet local people and to grasp this miracle. I, for instance, visited the Shanghai Music Fair, probably the biggest music fair in the world.

China is now the biggest producer of Western musical instruments. And guess what, they are making some unbelievably good saxophones out there. I have tried and reviewed Chinese saxophones in the past. For some reason I was always pretty convinced that the many Chinese brands were made by one or two manufacturers. Somehow, all contemporary Chinese saxophones and clarinets follow a very similar design and they are all equally good. In the music fair I realised that I was totally wrong. There are actually many small Saxophone manufacturers and they are all very good at it. The Chinese manufacturers whom I met were actually seeking criticism. In a very modest manner they would ask for your honest opinion of their different models. They just want to make it better. They want to improve.

China is a financial miracle. It is about to surpass Japan as the world’s second largest economy. It is expected to leave America behind within the next five years and to become the world’s largest economy. China is the largest producer of most industrial and agriculture products. In spite of the ongoing Western criticism of China’s political structure and its one party system, the success of China proves that its political system and economic model maybe far more efficient than anything Western democracies can offer. Unlike the crumbling English Speaking Empire and other Western service economies, China is a productive society and it is ruled by a single “People’s Party”. Rather than copying the Western economic model and value system, China adopted some Western advantages, modified them and integrated them into its own economic model and social system.

China and Israel

In my Shanghai visit I stayed in a rather fancy Western hotel. Already on my arrival just after checking in, while attending the tourist desk, a familiar golden Menora¹ shined at me from one of the tourist brochures. I picked it up, “The Jews in Shanghai”, it said: the story of 30.000 Jews who found shelter in Shanghai between 1933 and 1941. I guess that you can no longer imagine a metropolis on this planet unless it has some relevance to the Holocaust or the Jews. Visitors to Shanghai have a lot to choose from: temples, sight seeing, shopping, new developing markets, food, Chinese folklore and ofcourse even a bit of ‘Shoa business’. I honestly believe that no one, except a few Jews, is interested in the historical role of Shanghai in the Holocaust. And yet, the brochure was there for a reason. Many Israelis and Jews are visiting Shanghai in the last two decades, as China and Shanghai are the future and the Israelis know it very well.

In the breakfast at the hotel I could hear a lot of Hebrew. They were not Israeli tourists. They were actually ‘selling and buying’. They were meeting local businessmen already at 8.00 am. But it wasn’t just business. The Israeli infiltration is noticeable on every possible level.

In the bus that picked us up to go to the festival’s stage, we found an Israeli flag hanging under the driver’s front mirror. A quick inquiry with the assistance of our English speaking stage manager revealed that the band to play before us was an Israeli Dixieland band. I may as well mention that I myself have lived in Britain for 15 years, I travel around the world with musicians from many different parts of the world and I have never seen a single musician leaving nationalist souvenirs anywhere. For Israeli artists, so it seems, leaving their Star of David is apparently a common practice.

I soon realised that I knew those Israeli Dixieland musicians, they were actually my old friends from Israel. Some of them were my teachers and mentors others had been playing in my band. Two of them were very close friends of mine at the time. Needless to say that it was very exciting to meet them after so many years. In fact they were very good at what they were doing. They could play the music and they clearly mastered the Dixieland style. On stage I heard one of my old friends telling the Chinese audience, ‘here we are, 60 years for the People’s Republic of China, 61 years for the Jewish State and all we really want is peace.’ Such a simple message, we the Jews and you the Chinese all share one simple belief.

The Israeli horn player may not have realised that a few hours earlier the People’s Republic of China voted in favor of adopting the Goldstone report at the Human Rights Council. As far as China is concerned, Israeli war crimes should be further investigated.

However, it is common knowledge that most if not all Israeli art exports are sponsored by the Israeli Foreign Ministry. Israeli artists are operating as messengers of the Zionist propaganda and Hasbara lies. It is a pretty simple concept: as the IDF drops White Phosphorous on Palestinians or starves others, Israeli artists travel the world spreading a 1960’s message of ‘Sex, Love and Peace’. Needless to say, the people around me didn’t really buy it.

Zionism, as we learn from Herzl and his too many followers, is all about tracing the bond between the Jewish national interests and world dominating powers. China is no doubt the rising power; it is in fact a rising sensation. In just one week in China I saw for myself the intensity of the Israeli activity on the ground.

As we all know, some naive peace activists around put all their cards on a possible growing rift between Israel and the USA. They forget that Israel can easily change its leagues as they did rather often in the past. Israel is always building relationships with rising powers. The Israelis have already invested some enormous energy on India and China.

A lot of China’s success story is because it is run by a very unique People’s party political system. It is a miracle because it somehow manages to restrain hard capitalism with a unique socially orientated system. It is a big question whether there is room in this system to accommodate Israel, a bourgeoisie nationalist philosophy based on racial supremacy and choseness in general.

1. Menora: a seven-branched candelabrum that is one of the oldest symbols of the Jewish people.

Maybe that’s what it’s all about. … Maybe all that happens is, you get older and you know less.

– Frank Sinatra

Children:

In Amerika today we have two parties … the Fascist Union (also known as the F.U. party) and the Phony Cooperative Baloney party (also known as the P.C.B.).

The F.U. party stands for wholesome, Amerikan values–what we used to call “rugged individualism.” We don’t use this term anymore because today we understand the dangers of “individualism”–especially among the lower classes. We know that smart and crafty people always get together to form cartels, meshing economic, political and social lives to pursue their own best interests—and to hell with everyone else! This is a law of Nature known as “survival of the fittest.” It’s also known as the “invisible hand” of the market. Even the great slave-holder, Thomas Jefferson, understood this when he wrote about “liberty” and the “pursuit of happiness.” Notice that he did not write about “justice” and the “pursuit of truth.” Today we know that “justice” and “truth” are in the eyes of the beholder. Each person has his or her own idea of what those words mean and you can’t run the New World Order with a lot of loose threads hanging out, can you?

The P.C.B.’ers pretend they serve the interests of the “common people.” You can tell how much contempt they have for us right there—we are “common,” but they are not. Well, children, there is nothing “common” about me! And, I hope, nothing “common” about you! I am proud to be part of the crew that powers the ship. Let the captains decide where the ships are going. They have all the information and we couldn’t begin to understand it even if we tried. They tell us what to do and think through the mass media—including education–, and life is certainly a lot easier when you know what to do and think. Don’t be confused by idiots like Michael Moore. There are always some crackpots who believe they’re too good to be conditioned like everyone else. In one of the renegade Moore’s classic movies, Capitalism: A Love Story—a classic example of mis-alignment, one might say—he tries to make a distinction between capitalism and democracy! Yes, you are right to snicker! There really is no distinction. Democracy is rule by the people and the people obviously want capitalism or they wouldn’t keep this system in place year after year, decade after decade—as far back as any of us can remember, even back to the glorious Roman Empire of the sanctioned history books.

To prove that we are a capitalistic democracy we have to put up with the PCB crowd. They like to parade the old platitudes like “fairness,” and “government of the people, by the people, and for the people,” and all that Martin Luther King blather about “all God’s children,” blah, blah, blah … but everyone knows they are “in on the take.” They have to raise huge amounts of money to run their silly campaigns. A lot of them are “filthy rich” themselves and they get into politics as a hobby because they’re not clever enough to make more money and create jobs for the “working poor” they’re always crying over like spilt milk. If, perhaps, they don’t have their own money, they go hat-in-hand to the corporate bosses, cut deals—wink! wink!–, promise “the people” this, that and the other while all the time knowing they can’t or won’t deliver. Sometimes, a PCB’er breaks through. Remember President Obama? Yes, you can “boo”—it’s all right. Some people say now that he actually believed his own rhetoric. “Change we can believe in!” (Yes, you can hiss!) Would someone tell me what the hell that means?

Today we know that the people cannot change anything; only the elite, the elect, the select and the carefully groomed Guardians of the New World Order have the Intelligence necessary to ensure success. They gather Intelligence from everywhere—from every corner of the globe, from every nook and cranny. No one can escape. Resistance is futile. That is why we have these cameras and microphones in the classroom, in the cafeteria, in the halls, in the library, in the lockers, in the gym, etc. … so what we say, what we do, what we think, can be constantly observed, monitored, heard, vetted, discussed, dissected, appraised, and, if need be, corrected. If need be, deleted. Remember the saying: “Our predator drones are ever watchful, vigilant, never sleeping.” (A word to the wise is sufficient!) That is why there are cameras and microphones in your homes, in your computers, in your phones, in the watches you wear, the products you buy … in the streets, in your vehicles … in fact, everywhere. It is all designed to make us better citizens of the glorious New World Order—better soldiers in the armies, better, uncomplaining workers, better consumers of so-called “junk food,” so-called “junk information.” Today we know that the Guardians are watching—and, if they want us to die sooner, well, we should all be prepared to “win one for the Gipper,” stiffen our backbones and do what’s necessary because they see the bigger picture, they know our best interests. It’s because they are watching us—and watching out for us! It’s because they know our hearts and minds and very souls—and what is good and proper for all of us—better than we do.

Now, let us stand for the Pledge of Allegiance.

Three Israel-related events this year have stayed in the headlines, reflecting the importance of Israel in Canadian political and cultural life.

First, Canadian Ambassador to Israel Jon Allen was recently honoured at Canada Park — built on occupied Palestinian land in violation of international law — as one of hundreds of donors who helped establish the park on the ruins of three Palestinian villages. Just north of Jerusalem, it was founded in the early 1970s following Israel’s occupation of the West Bank in the 1967 war. It is hugely popular for walks and picnics with the Israeli public, who are by and large unaware that they are in Palestinian territory that is officially a closed military zone. Former Israeli parliamentarian Uri Avnery has described the park’s creation as an act of complicity in “ethnic cleansing” and Canada’s involvement as “cover to a war crime”. About 5,000 Palestinians were expelled from the area during the war. A plaque bearing Allen’s name is attached to a stone wall constructed from the rubble of Palestinian homes razed by the Israeli army. The Jewish National Fund, treated as a charity for tax purposes, establishes and manages such parks on behalf of Jewish people worldwide. Canada Park is believed to be the only example, outside East Jerusalem, of the JNF becoming directly involved in managing land in the Occupied Palestinian Territories.

Then there is the wildly popular exhibition, “Dead Sea Scrolls: Words that Changed the World,” at Toronto’s Royal Ontario Museum (ROM), a joint project with the Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA), funded by the Toronto Tanenbaum family dynasty who coincidentally were instrumental in the creation of Canada Park. This exhibition provided a fitting gala premier for the museum’s ultra-modern wing designed by Israeli-American Daniel Libeskind. Libeskind, whose parents were Polish Holocaust survivors, also designed the Berlin Jewish Museum, the Felix Nussbaum Museum in Osnabruck, Germany, and the Danish Jewish Museum in Copenhagen. The Dead Sea Scrolls, regarded as one of the greatest archaeological discoveries of the 20th century and including what is purported to be the oldest known version of the Old Testament (150BC-70CE), were found by a Bedouin shepherd in caves near Qumran, near the Dead Sea, and later by the Palestine Archaeological Museum (also known as the Rockefeller Museum) in a joint expedition with the Department of Antiquities of Jordan and the Ecole Biblique Française between 1947-1956. The Scrolls were displayed at the Palestine Archaeological Museum in East Jerusalem until 1967, when they were seized and relocated to the Shrine of the Book at the Israel Museum in West Jerusalem. Since 1967, additional (illegal) excavations and findings by the Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA) took place in Qumran and the surrounding area, and artefacts continue to be (illegally) appropriated by Israel, under the auspices of the IAA.

Under international law and in accordance with Canada’s and Israel’s obligations as signatories to the 1954 UNESCO protocol for the “Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict”, Israel is not entitled to these artefacts. The repatriation of the Scrolls and millions of other artefacts to Palestine remains a key issue for those seeking peace and justice in the Middle East. In 2005, Canada signed other UNESCO conventions and protocols specifically aimed at preventing the removal and the exhibition of illegally removed artefacts from occupied territories, and adopted domestic Canadian legislation — the Cultural Property Export and Import Act — which makes it a criminal offense to import cultural property in violation of the conventions. The ROM, for its own part, is a member of the Canadian Museums Association whose Ethics Guidelines states that “museums must guard against any direct or indirect participation in the illicit traffic in cultural and natural objects that are: stolen, illegally imported or exported from another state, including those that are occupied or war-stricken.” The 1954 Convention clearly requires Canada to “take into custody cultural property imported into its territory either directly or indirectly from any occupied territory” and “return, at the close of hostilities, to the competent authorities of the territory previously occupied, cultural property which is in its territory.”

Israel not only continues to illegally excavate in occupied Palestinian territory but dismisses international law altogether (despite its UNESCO pledges), using archeology and discoveries such as the Dead Sea Scrolls to reinforce the Zionist national narrative and the colonial project upon which the state was founded. Supposedly a science removed from political, religious, or ideological bias, archeology under the IAA is the very antithesis of this, being rooted in Biblical mythology. Artefacts like the Scrolls are, according to Amos Elon, “almost titles of real estate, like deeds of possession to a contested country”. Like British, French, and German imperialist functionaries before them, Israeli archeologists sift through the many layers of historical evidence in search of what will prove their belief that they are indeed God’s Chosen People, ignoring or rather destroying the intervening layers and interpreting finds to suit their needs. The thousands of years of non-Jewish Arab civilisation don’t matter. Historian Keith Whitelam says in The Invention of Ancient Israel: The Silencing of Palestinian History, the modern state of Israel has “cast its shadow of influence backwards to claim previous periods as its ‘prehistory’.” The IAA is just as much a steamroller, flattening indigenous Palestine, as the Israeli Defence Forces, in their policy of archeological apartheid. Committee Against Israeli Apapartheid (CAIA) activist Ali Mustafa writes that Israeli archeology is explicitly categorised by the IAA as either Jewish/Israeli or Arab/Muslim in a process whereby ancient artefacts that supposedly belong to the Biblical era are actively sought after, while supposedly encouraging Palestinians to do the same concerning later Islamic periods. Following the Oslo peace process, Israel claimed it was prepared to assign jurisdiction of all “Arab” and “Muslim” archeological sites in the West Bank over to the PA; however, the offer was flatly refused, and the PA instead demanded control over all sites, as well as an immediate return of artefacts seized since 1967. The logic is simple: conflate all Palestinian history as Islamic (openly disregarding Christian and secular influences), and apply these reductive and simplistic binary terms to all artefacts ignoring the region’s shared past and overlapping cultural heritage. Despite the overwhelming evidence that the Scrolls should be seized by ROM and the Canadian government under their international obligations and held or handed over to UNESCO until their ownership is determined, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation concluded in June that “the museum feels the scrolls are legally held and both the federal and provincial government have expressed their support of the exhibition.”

The third event is the Toronto International Film Festival’s “City to city Spotlight on Tel Aviv”, in cooperation with the Israeli Embassy and the Canada-Israel Cultural Foundation. Along with the ROM exhibition, this PR scheme was to be the centre- piece of Israeli Consul Gissin’s special Canadian “Brand Israel” campaign, dreamed up in 2008 on his arrival in Toronto, using the same mass marketing techniques of “The Israel Project”, launched in 2002 in the US, to present a more “benign” vision of Israel to the Canadian public. The Israel Project uses “grassroots” encounter groups to hone their propaganda efforts. Canadian partners in the Project’s Canadian spin-off included Sidney Greenberg of Astral Mediaand David Asper of Canwest Global Communications, arguably the most powerful media magnates in Canada, who are funding a million dollar media and advertising campaign aimed at changing Canadian perceptions of Israel.

“Brand Israel” is intended to take the focus off Israel’s treatment of Palestinians and refocus it on achievements in medicine, science and culture. In The Israel Project’s 2009 Global Language Dictionary, Frank Luntz explains: “Americans want a team to cheer for. Let the public know GOOD things about Israel … The language of Israel is the language of America: ‘democracy’, ‘freedom’, ’security’, and ‘peace’”. Fleshing out how to rebrand Israeli atrocities, Gissin made it clear that his mission was to “make Israel relevant” to Canadians and use Toronto as a test market for the Israel brand during his term. The lessons learned from Toronto would inform the worldwide launch of Brand Israel in the coming years, Gissin said. Official Brand Israel logos and advertising can be found across Toronto in bus shelters, on billboards, on radio and TV. Gissin said the ad blitz would be “an attack on all the senses.” The idea was to see “how to introduce a brand into Toronto” with emphasis on “grassroots” exposure, to promote Tel Aviv as a city of peace, untouched by the wars Israel has waged since 1948, despite the fact that many Palestinian communities were destroyed and Jaffa annexed to make way for the emergence of modern-day Tel Aviv.

But all is not well in the Land of Nod. The Canadian government regularly opines it is assiduously monitoring anti-Semitism despite the absence of anti-Jewish sentiment and despite the pro- Jewish nature of the media in this most laid-back, multicultural of nations. But Canadian “grassroots” are not limited to pro-Israeli marketing groups. Despite mainstream media subservience to Canada’s vigorous and large pro-Israeli lobby, some people have had enough. Zionist propaganda efforts in this “so friendly” country have increasingly met with resistance, and all the Israeli consuls in the world cannot undo the damage that Israeli war crimes have done and continue to do, as the siege in Gaza and the expansion of illegal Israeli settlements continue.

There are now strong citizen groups fighting Canada’s official support of every Israeli government whim. There are many Jewish anti-Zionist groups, such as Jews for a Just Peace, Jewish Voices for Peace, Not in Our Name, Women in Solidarity with Palestine, Independent Jewish Voices, and the International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network (IJAZ). Nonspecific Jewish groups include Canadians for Justice and Peace in the Middle East (CJPME), Palestine House, Canada Palestine Association, and the above-mentioned CAIA, which has grown rapidly with centres in Toronto, Montreal, Winnipeg and Vancouver. Anti-Zionist activists have been holding vigils regularly at the Toronto Israeli Consulate for eight years now. They are organising the sixth Anti-Apartheid Week to be held soon on more than 25 university campuses across the country, and demonstrations and fundraising events on behalf of Palestinians are held regularly. IJAZ has launched a campaign “Divest from Israel: Support the Palestinian call for boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) against Israel”, which includes stickering Israeli products in stores, requesting stores to de-shelve Israeli products, targetting businesses, organisations or government officials that support Israel, “organise a public tachlit service, a ritual that symbolises the casting away of our misdeeds, to spiritually divest from Zionist narratives and mythology and to atone for the ways that we have fallen short in countering them.”

Allen’s support for Canada Park, implicitly condoning Israel’s ruthless ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, has landed him in hot water. He had to deny any personal contribution to Canada Park, an External Affairs spokesperson insisting that he had not made a personal donation and that his name had been included as a benefactor when his parents gave their contribution. Uri Davis, an Israeli scholar and human rights activist who has co-authored a book on the JNF calls Canada Park “a crime against humanity that has been financed by and implicates not only the Canadian government but every taxpayer in Canada.” Canada Park is particularly sensitive for Israel because it lies outside the country’s internationally-recognised borders. The Palestinian inhabitants’ expulsion, Eitan Bronstein, director of the Israeli NGO Zochrot (Remembering), said, was a premeditated act of ethnic cleansing of villagers who put up no resistance.”We have photographs of the Israeli army carrying out the expulsions,” he tells tourists, holding up a series of laminated cards. According to Zochrot, 86 Palestinian villages lie buried underneath JNF parks. Zochrot activists regularly select a destroyed village, taking Palestinian refugees with them as they place a handmade sign detailing the village’s name in Arabic and Hebrew. Within days, the signs are removed. Bronstein said he believes signs erected by official bodies may have a greater impact in opening Israeli minds. “In a recent newspaper interview, a senior JNF official admitted that it would be hard to stop our campaign,” he said. “Slowly we believe Israelis can be made to appreciate that their state exists at the expense of another people. Only then are Israelis likely to be ready to think about making peace.”

With Zochrot’s efforts in mind, Uri Davis joined in an application to the Canadian tax authorities to overturn the JNF’s charitable status and said attempts to rename Canada Park “Ayalon Park” over the past decade suggested that the Canadian authorities were already concerned about the prospect of the country’s involvement in the park coming under scrutiny. In April, before the ROM exhibition opened, Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper and executives at the ROM were sent letters of protest from senior officials of the Palestinian Authority, including PA President Mahmoud Abbas, declaring that the scrolls were in fact illegally seized by Israel following its occupation and annexation of the West Bank in 1967 and calling for their repatriation. The ROM exhibition inspired a campaign of protest led by the CJPME trying to get ROM officials to adjust the display of the artifacts to reflect the fact that the Scrolls were confiscated from East Jerusalem during Israel’s 1967 invasion and occupation of the Palestinian West Bank, to use “West Bank (Israeli-occupied)” and East and West Jerusalem with 1948 Armistice borders on maps. CJPME’s Thomas Woodley said, “We would like there to be a balanced narrative. The ROM is presenting the scrolls entirely from the Israeli perspective. There’s no discussion about what happened between their discovery and their exhibition today.”

ROM met with CJPME members and initially agreed to make changes and even distribute an additional leaflet to be inserted into the museum’s brochure. Friday pickets were held throughout the summer to inform the public about the theft of the Dead Sea Scrolls. However, a visit by Al-Ahram Weekly to the exhibition revealed that no such changes were made, and the history of their discovery in Jordan and seizure in 1967 was finessed. ROM’s PR spokesperson Marilynn Friedman declined to answer questions about why ROM reneged on promises to accommodate CJPME’s concerns.Woodley said ROM director Thorsell was receptive, and assumes that the IAA vetoed any changes that would detract from the Zionist narrative. Tens of thousands of innocent schoolchildren are being respectfully shepherded through subterranean, darkened halls, and left with the impression that the ancient “Israelis” inhabited the kingdom of “Judea”, that their “descendants” heroically prevented the “pillaging of the Scrolls by Bedouin” and are the rightful owners. The mythical kingdoms of 10th-3rd century BC Palestine — for which there is no conclusive evidence — are carefully delineated and explained in commentaries as if they are actual history. A dazzling success story for the most part for Gissin’s “Brand Israel”.

The dust-up, however, continues to provide a platform for activists to educate Canadians and empowers demonstrators at the nearby Israeli consulate. It has provided a 6-month platform for re-rebranding Israel as the centre of 21st-century apartheid. And no amount of slick PR can undo the fact that merely by continuing to exist, despite all odds, Palestinians endure as testimony to the injustice of “The Israel Project” in all its manifestations. Palestinians only have survival itself as proof of the crimes committed against them, choosing to maintain traditional dress, religious faith (both Christian and Islamic), and the historical memory of the Nakba as their most meaningful and durable expressions of resistance. Though former Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir notoriously declared that “there is no such thing as Palestinians,” Palestinian academic Edward Said more accurately explained that, “In the case of a political identity that’s being threatened, culture is a way of fighting against extinction and obliteration.” The battle being waged over the Scrolls is not so much about any particular ethnic, religious, or even cultural-based claim, but more importantly a means of opposing Zionist colonial discourse.

Finally, TIFF’s cozying up to the Israeli propaganda machine blew up into a global scandal, as a spontaneous movement of protest among a few filmmakers turned into an international incident, bringing 1,500 signatures from prominent Israeli public figures and the likes of Jane Fonda, Julie Christie, Alice Walker, Naomi Klein, Guy Maddin, Walter Bernstein, and Harry Belafonte to the now historic “Toronto Declaration”. Leading Canadian filmmaker John Greyson, the catalyst for the declaration, refused to screen his latest film Covered in protest. Egyptian director Ahmad Abdalla withdrew his feature film debut Heliopolis, as did Ahmed Maher (The Traveller). The protesters were denounced in the mainstream media, called “opportunists, hypocrites, fascists, censors, storm- troopers, apartheid-supporters, intolerant totalitarians, a mob of homophobic anti-Semitic terrorist regime supporters” acting “effectively [as] Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s local fifth column” by Canadian film producer Robert Lantos. Yet the protest overshadowed the festival itself and was a godsend for educating the wider public, which could not help but hear about the unprecedented protest, despite mainstream media indifference or hostility. Greyson condemned the opportunism of TIFF for its complicity with the Israeli consulate’s “Brand Israel” campaign. “I’m reminded of last year, when the opening night party for Passchendaele featured real soldiers posing on a Canadian Armed Forces tank. Many of us were disturbed by this uncritical collaboration with the Canadian army, currently fighting in Afghanistan. So I have to ask: who is politicising TIFF? Why hasn’t TIFF explicitly explained and repudiated the perceived Brand Israel connection, beyond vague disavowals? What’s the extent of Israeli sponsorship, beyond airfare, receptions, and the Mayor’s presence? Why an exclusive programme of Israeli state-sponsored features, when shorts could have provided critical alternative voices?”

Opponents of Greyson wrote to York University, demanding that he be investigated, fired, even deported. In a delightful irony, the popular 2nd Toronto Palestinian Film Festival opened just a few weeks after TIFF closed. “It feels like the days of the first anti-apartheid struggle back in the 1970s,” enthused one activist. BDS is already a buzzword among politically-aware Canadians. Of course, there was much momentum back then from the successful anti-Vietnam War movement, the Zionist control of mainstream was less stifling, and there was much stronger political awareness in those Cold War years. But the anti-apartheid movement eventually brought everyone on board, even the notorious Margaret Thatcher, who seeing the writing on the wall, joined in. This anti-apartheid struggle phase two is picking up steam, even among Israel’s best friends. In presenting the Toronto Declaration, Greyson explained that he had just returned from South Africa, where he visited the Hector Pieterson Museum, dedicated to the memory of the 1976 Soweto massacre, where over 500 school children and anti-apartheid activists were killed by security forces. Among other things, the museum documents how this event became a turning point for the world, “a line in the sand, a moment when we ostriches finally woke up and expressed our outrage against South Africa’s apartheid regime. During my visit to the museum, the 2008 words of former Israeli Education Minister Shulamit Aloni echoed in my head: ‘Israel practices a brutal form of apartheid in the territory it occupies. Its army has turned every Palestinian village and town into a fenced-in, or blocked-in, detention camp.’” Greyson was overwhelmed by the outpouring of protest at TIFF and predicted that “Gaza represents a similar turning point to Soweto, a similar line in the sand. A moment when it’s imperative to speak out against the outrages of the Occupation.”

What is this ingenious program, you ask?

Enlisting the Girl Scouts to help fight terrorism!

Believe it or not, the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is organizing Girl Scouts throughout the USA to “combat hurricanes, pandemics, terror attacks and other disasters.”

This campaign is part of a government effort to make Americans better able to cope with natural and man-made disasters.

As DHS head Janet Napolitano explained, “As a former Girl Scout, I know the ‘Be Prepared’ motto well, and I look forward to working with the Girl Scouts to spread the preparedness message to all of our nation’s citizens.”

One longs for the good old days when the Girl Scouts were better known for hawking their overpriced but tasty cookies.

In conjunction with Girls Scouts USA, Homeland Security has even designed a new “preparedness badge” that girls can earn while defending the American Fatherland.

It will probably resemble some of current badges worn by Girls Scouts like in the picture below:

What patriotic American girl wouldn’t be proud to rock a kewl new Preparedness Patch?

The Preparedness Patch program itself was developed jointly by the Girls Scouts Council of Washington DC and FEMA (yes, the same FEMA that performed so admirably during Hurricane Katrina). The Council’s website describes some of the important skills that Girl Scouts are required to master like being able to:

• Identify local risks and potential emergencies
• Connect with local community service agencies
• Understand hazards and appropriate protective actions
• Learn local alerts and warning systems
• Prepare themselves and their family
• Deal with emotional responses to an emergency
• Discover how to get trained and become involved in community emergency planning
• Explore additional resources

There is no mention if other requirements for earning this Preparedness Badge include spying on antiwar protestors or providing FEMA-style rescue and relief “help” for hurricane survivors.

As documented on the DHS and Girl Scouts USA websites, this is part of a greater institutional alliance between the US Government’s Citizen Corps program and the Girl Scouts “to advance community preparedness nationwide.” Indeed, there is even a formal statement of affiliation between Homeland Security and Girl Scouts USA.

Ultimately, you have to ask what is the significance of this development and what is it really about?

Why would the Department of Homeland Security be working with the Girl Scouts USA in the first place?

Isn’t the very idea of this collaboration strange? It would be analogous to the Central Intelligence Agency establishing a program with the Cub Scouts!

As I see it, this partnership between Homeland Security and the Girl Scouts is reflective of the broader militarization of American society.

This militarization is often couched behind the idea of national service, which involves not only things like Americorps or Teach for America but also the possible mobilization of the populace for war crises.

There have even been suggestions that the recent Generations Invigorating Volunteerism and Education Act (or GIVE Act) is a step towards instituting a mandatory national service requirement with decidedly militaristic overtones:

The GIVE Act views military-style regimentation as a model for the nation. Its National Civil Community Corps would seek to “combine the best practices of civilian service with the best aspects of military service.” This reminds some critics of Obama’s declaration last July: “We’ve got to have a civilian national security force that is just as powerful, just as strong, just as well funded as the military.”

This is the larger political context from which the Girl Scout Preparedness program emerges.

As one blogger put it, “It’s nice to know that the United States now has its own version of Hitler’s League of German Girls program.”

All we need now is an Obama Youth Brigade.

While the European events of WWII may play a big role with a Jewish population they are not as significant to many others, especially most Muslims. Why should they be? These events only affected some Muslims with the creation of Israel. America backed U.N. Resolution 181 primarily because of the events in Europe during the war. If the U.S. had really believed in democracy they would have supported Palestine being returned to the Arabs at the end of the British Mandate. After all Britain had previously supported Arab independence with the McMahon-Hussein correspondence of 1915, two years before the Balfour Declaration was issued. England and France eventually said, “No” to both the Arabs and Jews with the Sykes-Picot Treaty and divvied up the spoils of the former Ottoman Empire between themselves.

Shortly after the Balfour Declaration President Wilson rightly observed on July 4, 1918,

The settlement of every question, whether of territory, of sovereignty, of economic arrangement, or political relationship, rests upon the basis of the free acceptance of that settlement by the people immediately concerned, and not upon the basis of the material interest or advantage of any other nation or people which may desire a different settlement for the sake of its own exterior influence or mastery. If that principle is to rule, and so the wishes of Palestine’s population are to be decisive as to what is to be done with Palestine, then it is to be remembered that the non-Jewish population of Palestine – nearly nine-tenths of the whole – are emphatically against the entire Zionist program. The tables show that there was no one thing upon which the population of Palestine was more agreed upon than this. To subject a people so minded to unlimited Jewish immigration, and to steady financial and social pressure to surrender the land, would be a gross violation of the principle just quoted, and of the People’s rights, though it is kept within the forms of law.¹

Twenty-nine years later and another world war under our belt, the U.S. sang another tune. Truman pragmatically observed when questioned regarding his overruling a report by the State Department advocating against the creation of Israel, “I’m sorry, gentlemen, but I have to answer to hundreds of thousands who are anxious for the success of Zionism. I do not have hundreds of thousands of Arabs among my constituents.”² This support from the Truman Administration was borne out of guilt and political expedience. It is notable that Truman refrained from championing having all those displaced Jews sent to New York instead of Palestine.

Sixty-two years after the creation of Israel the west is still consistently battered with images of WWII by Israelis and Jews as some type of bastardized excuse for nearly any type of crime or aberrant behavior they might be guilty of. In July 2009 New Jersey resident Ben-Ami Kaddish pled guilty to spying for Israel. The top secret documents he sent were far more extensive and damaging than those Jonathan Pollard, another Jewish spy handed over to Israel. For sixty seconds the media had a field day playing the holocaust card and whining that M.R. Kaddish was too old to stand trial and that the events occurred years ago. Kaddish was eventually convicted of a single offense and sentenced to pay a $50,000 dollar fine. Kaddish’s reply when Judge Pauley passed sentence, “No problem.”³ Obviously spying for Israel pays well.

The media along with Representative Jane Harman and the usual suspects, AIPAC and ADL were also very instrumental in getting the trials of AIPAC spies, Steven Rosen and Keith Weissman derailed. Oddly enough the federal official who was not Jewish and involved in passing information to Rosen and Weissman is presently doing hard time for his part of the crime.

In September, Toronto journalist and author, Naomi Klein and a group of artists signed a letter calling the Toronto Film Festival on the carpet for celebrating Israeli filmmakers. Klein likened the recognition as the same as celebrating California wine during the 1960’s grape boycott or South Africa during its apartheid history. She and the other signers were instantly labeled anti-Semites and self-hating Jews. Some went as far as offering absurd rationalizations how Klein could be Jewish and an anti-Semite too. This was no doubt why activist Jane Fonda backed down faster than a turkey tossed from a 747 when confronted by this monolithic lobby.

Most recently holocaust politics has played a big role in the Roman Polanski case. Polanski, who was convicted of drugging and having unlawful sex with a minor, has been a fugitive from American justice for 31 years. The Los Angeles Times ran two articles and an editorial on Polanski in their October 1, 2009 edition. When was the last time a movie director warranted three pieces in a single issue, none dealing with his latest hit film? All three articles invoked the holocaust as some excuse for not sentencing Polanski. One piece even went as far as to mention the fact that the director was arrested on Rosh Hashanah. As if the Swiss police were lying in wait for Polanski like nefarious Nazis to capture him on a Jewish holiday. According to this line of thinking then any Catholic pedophile should be given a pass on Ash Wednesday and Good Friday.

Regarding Polanski’s arrest, Peg Yorkin was quoted, “My personal thoughts are let the guy go. It’s bad a person was raped. But that was so many years ago. The guy has been through so much in his life. It’s crazy to arrest him now. Let it go. The government could spend its money on other things.” It is highly doubtful Ms. Yorkin would be expounding such ideas if it was her 13 year old daughter who was drugged and sodomized. The fact that a woman would defend Polanski only serves to demonstrate how warped the thinking is of those practitioners of holocaust politics. Bringing the events of WWII in as some jaundiced defense for Polanski also smacks of gross elitism. The thinking is that what happened to Polanski’s mother being sent off to a camp is so traumatic it would be cruel and unusual punishment to send him to prison. Guess what, prison is supposed to be punishment for committing a crime, especially one as socially unacceptable as pedophilia. The logical end to this type of thinking would be to give all Chinese-American rapists a pass since over 6 million Chinese civilians were slaughtered by the Japanese during WWII.⁴ The most time Polanski can ever do is 16 months. That is less than two years for brutally stealing a young girl’s childhood.

This use of holocaust politics allowing Israel to summarily dismiss the Goldstone Report and rationalize that Ben-Ami Kaddish is too old to prosecute only makes the argument that Jews considered themselves above the law, specifically because of events which occurred 70 years ago in Europe. Of course there are those exceptions, Bernie Madoff who stole primarily from Jews, and certainly wasn’t a beneficiary of holocaust politics is now doing time. It does beg the question that if Polanski’s case is so ancient that the Los Angeles D.A. shouldn’t bother with it, then an explanation is certainly due as to why so much of the government’s time and money was spent seeing that alleged Nazi guard, John Demjanjuk was deported for a crime that he already served time for and was found not guilty of by an Israeli court.

Debra Winger is on record saying, “The whole art world suffers from such arrests [Polanski’s].”⁵ Hollywood and the media continue to bellyache about Mel Gibson’s 2006 DUI arrest and he didn’t touch a person, let alone a young girl. Where is Winger’s support for an artist like Mr. Gibson? When the cast of Seinfeld recently reunited the media was conspicuously silent about Michael Richards’ racial invective against African-Americans at a comedy club in 2006.⁶ Obviously Mr. Richards’ crime was old news and wasn’t worth bringing up.

Accountability is something all countries and persons should face for their actions. No one should be above their country’s laws. No country should be above international law. Considering Israel’s recent war crimes and the fact they are chomping at the bit to bomb Iran, the dropped cases against AIPAC spies and the excusing of a convicted pedophile it should give one pause to wonder if the consistent use of holocaust politics has created a chosen group that is above criminal prosecution and accountability for their crimes.

1. President Woodrow Wilson speech on Independence Day July 4, 1918, text in Tannous, Izzat. 1988. The Palestinians: Eyewitness History of Palestine Under British Mandate. I.G.T. Company, New York, p. 72.
2. ”Harry Truman,” Wikipedia; also quoted in “Anti-Zionism,” ed. by Teikener, Abed Rabbo & Mezvinsky; also in Cape Cod Times “The Sorrow of Truman,” Sean Gonsalves, Nov. 28, 2000.
3. New York Times, “Man 85 Avoids Jail Time for Giving Military Secrets,” Benjamin Weiser, May 29, 2009.
4. The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust, Iris Chang,
5. ”Euro outrage over Polanski arrest,” Variety.
6. It is a public record that Michael Richards committed the act mentioned in the article. YouTube videos of the occurrence were the first to break it. It was also covered on Huffington Post at the time.

Though there is laughter there’s also poverty, for one sees only the tip of the iceberg in the Zócalo. No one has any money or, as a scruffy looking artist with a loud voice and thatched gray hair proclaimed: “No one that is, except the governor! And he’s so corrupt the Devil won’t have him in Hell!” How close in contact the artist is with the Devil, I don’t know, but one doesn’t have to have lived a long time in Oaxaca to know that cell phones, women’s slacks and Internet are merely twentieth century window dressing on a colonial cacique system of hacendero and impoverished, dependent sharecroppers.

Oaxaca’s government is one of most corrupt in a country noted for corrupt state governments. All the power is concentrated in the hands of a privileged few and very little money trickles down to the unprivileged. Oaxaca journalist Pedro Matias ruefully explains that Oaxaca does not require that a governor give an exact accounting of the billions of dollars available to him. Oaxaca’s ex-governors are among the wealthiest landholders in the state.

But the state is one of Mexico’s poorest. The central valley, where nearly half of the inhabitants live and where its capital, the city of Oaxaca, is located, is ringed by a series of mountains intersected by deep canyons that isolate many rural communities. Nearly 45 percent of the state’s more than three million 500 thousand residents are indigena; 40 percent of them speak one or more of the fifteen different native languages and 76 percent of them earn less than seventy pesos—a little more than $6 U.S. dollars—a day. The main source of revenue for the majority of rural families is money sent to them from relatives working in the United States.

“At first only the men went and they returned every winter. Then they started staying longer,” rural schoolteacher Thelma Leger explained to me. “Now the women are migrating too. Often a twelve- or thirteen- or fourteen-year-old girl is left to take care of the younger children. Instead of going to school they work. It is sad. It is very, very sad.”

So great is the expectancy that young people will go to the United States to seek work that another teacher told me that parents of some of her indigena students asked that she teach them English instead of Spanish “so they would do better when they got to the ‘Other Side.’”

While officially Oaxaca governor Ulisés Ruiz and his predecessors in office voiced consternation over the massive migration out of Oaxaca they quietly shifted government funding away from social programs. Oaxacans receive over $1 billion dollars a year in remittances of $50 to $500 sent from the United States, over 95 percent of which goes for food, housing, clothing and medical expenses that the state government no longer funds. Instead it has invested in marinas, new administrative offices, airplanes, helicopters and around-the-world visits by Ruiz and select Institutional Revolutionary party (PRI for its initials in Spanish) members.

Attempts to break what many Oaxacans call “the tyrannical power” of the privileged elite have driven governors out of office and triggered a century-long push-pull of violence, protest and repression but the elite not only controls most of the material wealth but has had the backing of the federal government—also a power elite of a select privileged few—who since they came to power through revolution early in the twentieth century fear popular uprisings and act immediately and often brutally to detain them.

How brutal and how violent was evident in October and November of 2006 when a force of nearly 5,000 federal police and military and that many or more state and municipal police swept through the city of Oaxaca, arresting, beating and torturing innocents and protesters without consideration of their ages, occupations or political affiliations. For nearly five months the Popular Assembly of the People of Oaxaca, led by the 70,000-strong Oaxaca branch of the national teachers union striking for better salaries and working conditions, had taken over the governing palaces of the city of Oaxaca and several other cities throwing the state into convulsions that forced the closing of thousands of small businesses. Tourism sank to its lowest level in sixty years nightly barricades throughout the state impeded the passing of police and paramilitary death squadrons and airlines and surface transportation severely cut back their services.

The Popular Assembly burst into being after Ruiz ordered state police backed by helicopters spewing tear gas to break up a sit-in by the teachers’ union in May 2006. Women’s committees, priests, students, indigena organizations and human rights groups rallied to support the mauled strikers. Within two weeks the Popular Assembly not only had active spokespersons and a plan of action but tens of thousands of supporters.

“That day was the parting of waters for Oaxaca,” Pedro Matias told a Rights Action emergency human rights delegation. “There was only going forward, no going back.”

Although the Popular Assembly seemed to have come together by magic, Miguel Vázquez, co-founder of Oaxaca’s Services for Alternative Education, insists that the attack on the teachers encampment provided a catalyst for uniting groups that had been organizing for over twenty years. Once organized, and with a center of control in the capital city’s historical district, the Assembly voted to restore the traditional “usos y costumbres” (uses and customs) participatory way of community government and social responsibility that had been the Oaxacan way of life before the arrival of the Spanish conquistadors.

“Under usos y costumbres,” Miguel Vázquez explains, “every community member participates in every aspect of government. There are no caciques, no leaders or chiefs. Everything is decided by assembly. Whether the community is tiny — a few dozen members — or huge, with thousands of members, those within the community assemble and make their decisions. Whatever the majority decides, that is what the community does.”

Not only are policy decisions made during the assemblies but those involved also decide what cargo (charge, or office) each community member will hold. Under usos y costumbres each male member of the community serves in a designated capacity for a predetermined length of time, usually a year. To fulfill these communal obligations an individual may serve as a policeman one year, be responsible for arranging traditional fiestas the next, be the street sweeper the year after that. (Migration has so decimated most rural communities adhering to usos y costumbres that many women now serve in their husbands’ places.)

In addition to the assigned cargos all community members practice tequio — unremunerated community service. Much like in early U.S. pioneer communities, tequio involves everything from house and fence building to road construction and childcare services. Like all other community matters projects are determined by assembly vote.

The third salient aspect of usos y costumbres is the guelaguetza: “giving.” To those whom God has been generous, and who have profited financially during the year, guelaguetza becomes a way of returning to the community some of the individual’s good fortune. The giver may build a community cistern, sponsor a fiesta or provide scholarships for high school students. And he does not expect anything but sharing in return.

Over the past 450 years most Oaxacan communities have become Roman Catholic although evangelical Protestant congregations have multiplied throughout the state. Padre Manuel Arias, the spokesperson for Oaxaca’s Catholic presbytery, sees no contradiction between either branch of Christianity and usos y costumbres.

“Usos y costumbres,” he explains, “is a way of social organization. It is horizontal, rather than vertical. It is very similar to social conformations established by the early Christians. Many priests are, in fact, usos y costumbres advocates.”

Oaxaca law currently authorizes community self-government by means of usos y costumbres. By vote communities elect either usos y costumbres or the partido (political party) system. But no matter which they choose their independence is very constricted.

“Ruiz controls the finances. He controls the police. Communities can organize their tequios and have their fiestas but they really have very little authority,” Pedro Matias sighed.

Although the teachers union abided by Popular Assembly decisions (many of which they instigated) both the leadership and the majority of members regarded the Popular Assembly as a support organization built around the union. Whereas the Popular Assembly advocated a “horizontal” governing structure (which in many cases resulted in no structure at all), the union maintained its traditional “vertical” organization with elected leaders who directed activities and assigned teachers to schools throughout the state. The union continued to act on its own apart from the Popular Assembly, coordinating with other sections of the National Workers in Education Union (SNTE) to protest the privatization of Mexican social security and to urge the deposing of federal education czar Elba Gordillo. The various regional indigena organizations also focused on their own activities while vocally supporting the Popular Assembly and sending participants to the assemblies and protest marches. The same was true for the smaller NGOs.

The Popular Assembly’s primary goal was getting rid of Governor Ruiz. Elevated into office in 2004 after elections widely criticized as fraudulent, Ruiz controlled not only executive functions but also the legislature, law enforcement and the judiciary. Past governors, including Ruiz’ predecessor José Murat, successfully quashed potential uprisings but none had to deal with a force as large or as organized as the APPO.

For five months the teachers’ encampments covered over fifty square blocks in the center of the city. They barricaded hundreds of streets and highways to prevent Ruiz-paid death squads from circulating at night. Even so, snipers gunned down José Jiménez while he was participating in a Popular Assembly march. Others waylaid and killed eighteen protesters before non-uniformed police stormed a barricade in Santa María del Camino, a city of Oaxaca suburb, and shot U.S. video photographer Bradley Will.

The news of Will’s murder flashing around the world prompted Mexico’s federal government to demonstrate that it wouldn’t tolerate non-conformance. Outgoing president Vicente Fox sent over 4,000 soldiers and federal preventive police (PFP), along with dozens of armored vehicles and helicopters, to Oaxaca. Two days after their arrival they launched an all-out assault, destroying the barricades and occupying the center of the city. Four weeks later they caught the fleeing remnants of a protest march in a pincer movement and indiscriminately beat and apprehended everyone they could lay hands on, including many men and women who had not participated in the march. As Governor Ruiz proclaimed, “Oaxaca is again safe for tourists,” federal and state police and paramilitaries continued to intimidate and jail Popular Assembly leaders and participants. Others went into hiding. Thanks to brutal federal support Ruiz, the cacique, was in charge again.

But despite the arrests, imprisonments and media control of reporting the events, the Popular Assembly remained a symbol throughout Mexico of the possibility for political change. Julio Hernández of the Mexico City daily La Jornada told a March 2008 Día de Mujer forum in the city of Oaxaca, “What happened here is an example, an example of action… that gave hope to the entire pueblo of Mexico.” He affirmed that the Popular Assembly awakened “a sleeping giant.”

Like the student rebellions of 1968 in Mexico City and the anti-Vietnam and integration movements during the same period in the United States, the Popular Assembly of the Peoples of Oaxaca ruptured traditional mores, which is a grand precursor for permanent change. Women throughout Oaxaca began challenging the old order, even in indigena strongholds of machismo. The successes of the barricades, if temporary, convinced people who never had participated in any kinds of political act that they have rights and can exercise those rights. They exposed the PRI’s weaknesses and corruption and the teacher’s union, reorganized under new aggressive leadership in 2009, is challenging federalization of teacher placement and many indigena communities are expelling corrupt caciques and forcing multi-national corporations to curtail hydroelectric and mining projects.

Marcos Leyva, one of the Popular Assembly founders, explained the movement’s sudden formation as “combustive” — Oaxaca had been a dry brush land waiting for a spark to ignite it and Ulisés Ruiz provided that spark when he ordered state and municipal police to break up the protesting teachers’ sit-in and drive them out of the city center. For nearly six months the conflagration raged and abated only when federal militarized police and army tanketas and troops overpowered the pacifist protesters by brute force.

They crushed the outward manifestations — the symptoms — but they didn’t stamp out the disease. Oaxaca continues to be a crackling dry tinderland. When will the next spark set off a conflagration? And what will the consequences be?

They will burn more than just Oaxaca. The entire country will feel the flames.

It’s a short but pithy book, aimed at the hypocrisy of the modern U.S. stance on (some) drugs as much as at the stuffy classicists who maintained, in the face of reams of textual evidence, according to Hillman, that “[the Romans] just wouldn’t do such a thing.” I’m not a classicist, but Hillman doesn’t have to work very hard to convince me that Rome’s pleasure-seekers didn’t just drink lots and lots of wine in those saturnalian romps of theirs.

The Chemical Muse is a brief overview of the evidence that the ancient Greeks and Romans were both aware and tolerant of the use of psychoactive substances: opiates, cannabis and other plant-based drugs, while they simultaneously warned of the dangers of “poisoning” (what we would refer to as overdose) and prescribed precautionary remedies for it. In fact, according to Hillman, the only aspect of drug use that was criminal in these societies was the intentional poisoning of another person with a drug.

Hillman is mostly interested in presenting his case from a civil libertarian standpoint; since our own imperfect understanding of civil liberties is largely derived from Classical society via the Enlightenment, he wonders how we can have descended to a position so much less enlightened in this regard than our primitive forebears in the ancient world.

But in his defense of Greek and Roman recreational drug use, Hillman barely touches on what is to me, the heart of the matter: drugs may have stimulated the very visions and insights that gave early poets and philosophers levels of understanding that Western civilization has built on ever since, while systematically purging the parts of those understandings that didn’t gibe with any practice not useful to refining social control and/or increasing the production of profit. Hillman does make note of the pre-Socratics, chief among them Pythagoras and Empedocles, for whom mysticism and rigorous investigation of the natural world were no contradiction. He says: “the roots of Western philosophy reach deep into the fertile soil of the human imagination, where shamanism, divination, and narcotic experiences have held sway for thousands of years.” While this idea alone could easily be the subject of a book, Hillman is more interested in documenting classical references to drug use than to linking it to the production of important concepts and archetypes, from mathematics to theology.

The Greeks themselves were not exempt from the process of ideological exclusion, which probably reached a point of no return when Plato threw poets out of his ideal republic and animism out of nature. Yet, as long as the pharmakon was not actively banned, the visions it produced were tolerated too, although from the misogynistic Greeks with their cautionary tales of murderous Medea or the Bacchae begins its long descent to complete anathema, the tool of witchcraft that would undermine the later Christian social order. Ending up, of course, in the gynocide that European Christianity required for its triumph, which washed right up on the shores of Plymouth and swept over the colonists at Salem.

Much as Hillman would like us to see the current war on drugs as a modern aberration, it’s still a very old story. Perhaps as old as the rise of monotheism: tellingly, there is no society where monotheism dominates in which psychoactive drug use is officially tolerated (and psychoactive is the key here) unless that society has since become much more thoroughly secular than our own. And that’s why drug use is not really a just a matter of civil liberties per se, of the “individual freedom” that libertarians maintain is the true legacy of Western civilization. The issue isn’t whether or not you have a personal right to alter your mood—after all we have caffeine, and we have alcohol and nicotine which are far more strongly addictive and dangerous to health than cannabis, but we don’t have cannabis. Why? Because cannabis can alter your perception of reality, not just your mood.

Reports of psychoactive drug experiences tend to support the idea that the user can become aware of multiple levels of reality all present simultaneously that are far more complex and yet more harmonious and unified than normal experience permits her to perceive. All sorts of understandings are possible, based on the particular mind and the particular drug, but this type of awareness is a through-line. Why would monotheism particularly be afraid of this? Because the experience tends to reinforce the idea that while there is undoubtedly a transcendent realm of existence, it doesn’t recognize those equally hallucinatory desert-engendered patriarchs Yahweh or Allah as its exclusive landlords. So, to coin a phrase: how’re ya gonna keep ‘em down on the farm, after they’ve seen Par-ee?

Yes, you will say, but Almighty God or no, whatever consumer capitalism wants consumer capitalism usually gets in our good ol’ U.S. of A. So why did we abolish Prohibition only to let the drug war run on and on with no sign of ever ending? What’s the difference, when pleasure can be turned so readily into cash?

There’s no doubt that American culture is schizoid as regards pleasure: for a consumer capitalist society, pleasure is the big money, the holy grail of profit, but for a never-truly secularized monotheistic society, dominated by a particularly sensation-hating brand of monotheism at that, pleasure is always deeply suspect, a terrorist in our midst. Still, I would maintain that insight, not pleasure, is the real target, or at least the real casualty, of the American war on the particular drugs it has chosen as the enemy. Sensual pleasure may be a danger to organized religion, but insight is dangerous to both religion and profit.

And let’s remember that Prohibition, once in place, was not repealed until after American capitalism crashed its car and was stumbling around, reeling, in the wreckage. A broke government couldn’t help save it, and Prohibition, just as in our day, was denying the government millions in revenue from taxation while forcing it to spend more millions on enforcement. God would have to rethink his position on this one.

Up to now, it’s clear our drug war has been extremely convenient for the powers that be. It’s conveniently mostly harmed only the poor in our society and in producing countries. It’s conveniently resulted in their mass incarceration in the U.S., keeping them from troublesome agitation for greater social equality. Consumer capitalism has found plenty of stuff to sell that’s just as lucrative or more than the cut it would get from marijuana dispensaries or cocaine fun pills (including all sorts of mood enhancing but not mind-altering pharmaceuticals, for the millions whose pleasure deficit has hit a clinically definable level). There’s no correlation of forces strong enough yet to push our strangely picky God to the side on this one, even though we’re getting closer all time: governments bankrupted by drug war enforcement and incarceration costs are less and less able to provide the infrastructural bootstrap that business unendingly needs to be pulled up by, or the social stability it needs to generate profit. Or even, at a certain point, enough skilled employees to manage its enterprises, since schools tend to die where prisons grow. But drug policy change, like actual job creation, will probably only come as an absolute last resort, so profoundly distasteful is it to those who have benefited most from its absence.

At the same time, while the social benefits are almost undeniable at this point, it’s naïve to expect that some kind of renaissance of insight-based living would sweep over this land if psychoactive drugs were legalized. Holland would be full of transcendentalist philosophers if that were true. I’m not saying there would be a linear consequence of greater intellectual maturity in the populace the more drug use was accepted. There’s nothing linear about psychoactive drug use; that’s of course another aspect that makes it an anathema to social policymakers. Hillman shows that Classical writers were well aware of the risks posed by psychoactive stuff; they warned against the power it had to distort personality and breed contempt for traditional lines of authority, particularly, as I’ve noted, in that hidebound patriarchy from which our own descends, in the hands of women.

Contempt for authority would be a fine consequence, in my view. But while a temporary subversion of authority may have been a laudable consequence, the anything-goes surge of psychoactive drug use in the ‘60s also left a lot of individual casualties strung out (so to speak) along the way. The salient word is individual. As long as the whole subject is confined to individual choice, we’re on the wrong track, just as with, say, health care, or organic food. If legalization is only about an individual’s “right” to an expanded menu of pleasures, well, ancient Rome already provides a fairly negative example of what that would look like.

At the same time, much as today’s spiritual questers, Burning Man trippers, ayahuasca tourists, and so forth may be hoping to trigger some new transformative wave of enlightenment that will wash over us all simultaneously as we align with the galactic center in 2012 (or whatever)—messianic, culturally-decontextualized attempts to jump-start our continued evolution, whether with drugs or machines, conveniently attempting to skip over the mess of social inequality, endemic violence and environmental collapse we’ve so far created could just as easily be elements of some junked up dystopia, an even more schizoid reality in which most people’s experience would still be the phenomenon of living inside somebody else’s nightmare. Huston Smith, a renowned scholar of religion who participated in Timothy Leary’s Harvard experiments with LSD, has written compellingly of the potential of psychoactive drugs to provide transcendental insights, even calling them entheogens, god-producing substances. But he also felt that the U.S. psychedelic movement was not mature enough to create a truly functional social alternative out of the possibilities of psychoactive substances. Without discipline and a sense of overriding obligation to some sort of collectively defined, sustainable way of life, its insights were not transferable.

So maybe we’re not worthy of anything better than what we’ve got, yet. Where psychoactive drugs seem to have been employed most usefully and with the fewest negative side effects is in small, low-tech societies where there is a high level of mutual trust built up over generations of co-habitation, aided by highly disciplined guides whose mission is to support the community, strengthening its web of relationships and showing how those relationships extend to the natural world. As a society we’re currently about as far from that as it’s possible to be. After all, we can’t even use tobacco correctly; it was a salubrious ceremonial substance for untold generations until we got hold of it, and turned it into a mass killer. But it’s conceivable that changing material conditions generated by the glaring contradictions in our current system will encourage at least some of us to move in a more communitarian direction simply in order to survive. And psychoactive drugs could be useful in catalyzing that process—why not? They’ve already been so for thousands of years.

Other reasons for ending the drug war a.s.a.p. are still compelling enough, and even absent an effective social reform movement, the economic forces no one really controls anymore may finally do it in. I hope that regardless of how it happens, our Manichean war will someday be seen simply as another of those quintessentially reactionary futilities that were once endemic to materially powerful institutions and societies: like attempts to stop the sun from rising by holding your hands in front of your eyes. Because without somehow disseminating expanded consciousness (along with the material basics for a decent life) more widely through our species, it’s difficult to see how we’ll avoid getting trapped in our own 4-D labyrinth, whose walls of unintended consequences just seem to get higher faster all the time now. The only way to neutralize the imprisoning power of a labyrinth is to be able to see it from above.

But the current financial crisis—and impending societal collapse in the US—threatens Hollywood’s hegemony over the celluloid screen.

As inventor and independent financial analyst Max Keiser reported in his blog for Huffington Post, bond trader Cantor Fiztgerald recently filed an application with regulators with the intention of launching an exchange that allows users to hedge and speculate on the financial performances of movies.

Keiser, host of The Oracle on BBC World and podcast Truth About Markets, predicts that “the Cantor/HSX futures will actually drive the prices of stars, films, marketing and the industry as a whole DOWN:” a topsy-turvy world of rivals selling out rivals and driving down prices—perceptions included—for high prices are good marketing in America. Indeed, Max predicts the Hollywood cartel—at the forefront of the consciousness industry since the 1920’s—will enter into a period of infighting as each studio struggles to be the vanguard of Hollywood.²

The theory of technical primacy encapsulates the importance of Hollywood, arguing that Hollywood—a comparably new innovation in the arsenal of imperialism, especially leading up to and after World War II—played nearly as important a role as military and economic forces in bringing about allied victory during World War II.

For example, immediately following the attack on Pearl Harbor, the war became one of the most frequented subjects of the U.S. motion picture industry: from 1942 until 1945, out of the 1,700 movies produced in that period altogether, approximately 500 depicted a pro-war stance.

In fact, the cooperation between Washington and Hollywood’s War Activities Committee in the face of international conflicts was so penetrating, that few agencies within the federal government were not represented by Hollywood, the White House included. Demonstrating symbolically the importance of this relationship, was the U.S governments approval of something like 4,000 members of the U.S. Film Industry—directors, studio bosses and sales managers—to wear military officer uniforms. In reality, the military has been deeply involved with the film industry since the Silent Era.

Hollywood represented a new form of imperialism, not in idea or intent, but rather in effectiveness. It penetrated the public’s consciousness and reoriented social values, as demonstrated by the aforementioned change during the 1950’s in European consumer habits.

The brain is infinitely more advanced at synthesizing data than modern computers. The cornucopia of modules responsible for the gross sum of our realities, nonetheless, functions largely at the realm of the subconscious. In other words, upwards of 90% of our daily experiences are understood separate from our own awareness. In a speech for the leading managers of the U.S. film industry on November 5, 1961, Edward R. Murrow quoted Carl Sandburg:

I meet people occasionally who think that motion pictures, the product that Hollywood makes, is merely entertainment, has nothing to do with education. That’s one of the darndest fool fallacies that is current…Anything that brings you to tears by way of drama does something to the deepest roots of your personality. All movies good or bad are educational and Hollywood is the foremost educational institute on earth, an audience that runs into the estimated 800 million to a billion, What, Hollywood’s more important than Harvard? The answer is, no as clean as Harvard, but nevertheless, farther reaching.

Others echoed this disposition:

“The film is to America what the flag was once to Britain. By its means Uncle Sam may hope someday, if he be not checked in time, to Americanize the world.”³

“If one were to write the history of economic imperialism, the American film production would be one of the most interesting chapters.”⁴

In a study for the State Department, the Institute of Communications Research recommended the liberal use of film, stating: Films are especially suitable for unsophisticated audiences…it makes no difference what we have to show them. You will find this true almost anywhere except perhaps among intellectual groups where they are blasé about it. There is a fascination that films have for people. Even among intellectuals there, they come to be critical…You can do anything you want to them (sic) as long as you don’t drive them away.”

There is a multitude of ironic motifs teased easily out of Hollywood films of the 1950’s, many of which not so different from the recurrent themes of Nazi cinema. An internalization of self-censorship as a result of the McCarthy show trials in the 1950’s sent Hollywood film dollars to politically safe westerns, all-encompassing of subtle allusions to a slimy, collectivist red menace.

Hollywood had mustered so much clout, that the industry could dictate the movies of other countries. In Germany, for instance, Hollywood blocked the subsidizing of the German film industry after the war, a once formidable competitor. Due to widespread devastation in Europe and much of the world after the Second World War, Hollywood had secured a dominant position as the bedrock of the global consciousness industry. In fact, the dominance of the Hollywood cartel was so widespread, that it wholly negated the undertakings of a free market in terms of cinema.

The influence of American culture in Europe after the Second World War was enormous—some have referred to it as the new Monroe Doctrine; that is, the Marilyn Monroe Doctrine. The postwar period was a period of huge opportunities for victors, allowing the U.S. to build upon the old European dream of U.S. democracy as a way of life that secured a high standard of living for the masses, and also had the financial means to organize a comprehensive cultural program that embraced all facets of life. One such cultural program, implemented by the U.S., stated as its mission the use of “each material and psychological medium to create respect, even awe in the lifestyle of America, and also to undermine other political philosophies;” and so they did, on up through today. However, representing the power of the consumer, Hollywood did open up its content during the creedal passion period of the 1960’s to reflect the general sentiment of the population at that time, as well as to keep the cash flow coming. Films such as Platoon and Full Metal Jacket portrayed war in a much more critical light than, say, John Wayne films of the 40’s and 50’s.

These days, the Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines, Coast Guard, and Department of Defense occupy entire floors of Los Angeles office buildings so as to ensure films fulfill the agenda of those institutions. In exchange for high-tech, tax payer funded, otherwise unavailable gear, Hollywood allows the military to censor scripts to suit their needs.⁵

Southern California’s reign as the epicenter of American culture might very well be over. The state of California is shambles, and one of the country’s most populous regions—approximately 24 million people call the agglomeration home—is also one of the most fragmented and therefore compromised, for its ability to act in a unified, cohesive manner, should it need to, is severely limited. The problems facing southern California are multi-faceted, especially when multiplied over all major facets of life—economic, social, cultural and environmental. The five-county region that makes up southern California ought to be watched closely over the next decade, as it very well might serve as an example of what industrial collapse is. That is what this series is about, but first: Hollywood.

Fittingly, art is imitating reality. A new wave of Hollywood disaster flicks coming this fall reflects the actual position of Hollywood, if not the world. Unlike disaster flicks of the Atomic-Age and Watergate which dealt with the fall of civilization, the new flicks deal with the struggles of post-apocalypse existence. The wave of post-apocalyptic manuscripts is aimed at cinemas and TV screens, where battles with cannibals, the acquisition of survival techniques, and the struggle to keep one’s humanity will be portrayed in stunning detail.

In January expect The Book of Eli, in which Denzel Washington stars as the fierce protector of a book holding the key to mankind’s redemption in an American wasteland wrought by war. NBC’s Day One features a gang of neighbors trying to survive and come to terms with devastation and a beyond dilapidated and useless infrastructure. The Film adaption of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, due in October, includes footage shot during recent disasters, such as Hurricane Katrina.

According to Rob Kutner, writer for The Tonight Show with Conan O’Brien, escapism plays a part in the latest glut of apocalyptic cinema, since “people are less concerned about their house being foreclosed when it’s being taken over by mutant appliances.” Perhaps some of these films serve social engineering programs by way of predictive programming.⁶

By portraying on the big screen a world on the edge, when, in fact, the world is on the edge, engineers in Hollywood predispose audiences to accept extreme austerity and catastrophe, causing them even to expect it, as opposed to sacrificing the crazy-quilt lifestyle of society for true human community and overcoming. A process of gradual and subtle inculcation, predictive programming creates an environment in which feedback loops of expectations generate a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Despite the seriousness of the issues tackled by Hollywood this fall and winter, most of the films strive to avoid moralizing the collapse—a tactic that has been historically lethal at the box office.

What we have in store, according to Roger Smith—an executive at the research firm Global Media Intelligence and a former film executive who oversaw Terminator 2—is “the film version of the Cuban Missile Crisis; we have to get the edge of extinction each time.”

I’d place a bet that, were Hollywood to go bust, the human species would have a better shot at surviving than if not. Indeed, U.S. movie box office grosses for July 31-August 2 were down 21.5 percent from a year ago 21.5 percent, though many Hollywood officials would be quick to deem those statistics insignificant.⁷

With summer blockbuster grosses down, Hollywood continues its struggle to find a place in a digital world that eats old business models for breakfast. In a bid to seek new audiences, IMAX Corp. partnered in June with China’s largest film studio to release three Chinese language movies, representing the first time Imax shows foreign-language films on its giant specialty screens.⁸

New technologies, venues and business models have both benefitted and hurt those businesses which rely on intellectual-property rights. Hollywood has yet to adequately take advantage of the digital positives, such as marketing and distribution, while prosecuting effectively the negatives—negative, at least, in their view—such as piracy. Prosecuting alleged pirates in a court of law has had mixed results. The MPAA, although less-so than the music industry, has indeed also taken this route, though it in many ways has proved inefficient. “You have to do some enforcement,” says Dan Glickman, chairman and chief executive officer of the Motion Picture Association of America, “but we have to do more than that, and the focus has to be on technological solutions and on doing a much better job educating people about the impact of piracy.”⁹

Will a Hollywood futures market hasten the loosely knit cartels downfall? Keiser seems to thinks so.¹⁰

Look for studios to sabotage each other’s projects by short selling and ‘naked’ short selling competing projects on the Cantor Exchange to drive the perception of a film’s popularity down before it’s released. No problem, just spend more on marketing. More money will be made trading box office futures than at the box office. Inside information will become legal. Milton Friedman will rise from the dead and advise the Honduran government. Brat Pitt will star.

1. Reinhold Wangleitner. 1994. Coca-Colonization and the Cold War. UNC Press, Chapt. 8, The Influence of Hollywood.
2. Max Keiser. Will Hollywood Futures on the CantorExchange Kill Hollywood? Huffington Post, 8 December 2008.
3. Warning by London Morning Post in 1923.
4. Rudolf Oertel.
5. Nick Turse. Hollywood is Becoming The Pentagon’s Mouthpiece for Propaganda, AlterNet, 22 May 2008.
6. John Jurgensen and Jamin Brophy Warren. Hollywood Destroys the World. Wall Street Journal, 31 July 2009.
7. Lauren A. E. Schuker. Summer Box-Office Sales Cool Down. Wall Street Journal, 3 August 2009.
8. Lauren A. E. Schuker. Imax Set to Partner With Chinese Studio. Wall Street Journal, 15 June 2009.
9. William Tripplet. On The Future of Movies. Wall Street Journal, 21 July 2009.
10. Max Keiser. Dr. Blankfein Or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying & Love Goldman Sachs, Max Keiser, 2009.

Well, for starters, the above title is a damned lie, since this little screed is not a history. It’s just rumination on the tilting point at which Americans started the slide into the deepest sort of cultivated consumer consciousness — which is to say our corporate managed engorgement and swinedom at the service of the rich.

Very rich families and corporatists, to whom, as in earlier articles, we shall refer to as “the bastards,” have always been with us. Even Tom Jefferson thought periodic revolution against wealth and authority was desirable to keep these bastards in check. Which implies that he figured they would inevitably get us by the throat down on the floor from time to time.

But the bastards scared the hell out of later presidents too. Abe Lincoln feared the large corporations born of business profiteering during the U.S. Civil War — the military industrial complex of the day — easily constituted the greatest threat to the American republic. Being president and all, he couldn’t call them what they were, and settled for the term “money power,” and predicted that, “money power will … work upon the prejudices of the people until all wealth is aggregated in a few hands and the Republic is destroyed.”

And as everyone knows, Dwight Eisenhower famously feared the same military-industrial complex was busy taking over the nation. What we never hear about though, is that Eisenhower’s definition of the complex included among the bastards, not only the military defense industry corporations, but also right alongside them the news media and the university and private research establishments.

If nothing else can be said for the bastards, we must admit they do plan far ahead, (or seemed to anyway, before the latest meltdown) even if only to screw us blind, which is usually the case. Since the early robber baron era of John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil, just after the turn of the century, the bastards understood that the key to national domination was oil — creating an economic culture based on petroleum — and planned toward that end. Big corps such as E.I. DuPont had invested heavily in the oil industry since the turn of the century, and especially since the 1930s creating synthetic materials such as plastics, in which the public was decidedly uninterested in buying. Then World War II came along, creating big demand for synthetics such as nylon for parachutes, tires, tents, ropes. DuPont and similar bastards had drawn a royal flush.

SCREAMING MAN HERE!: RIGHT! IT’S THE ONLY SURE RACKET. ASK ICE MAN CHENEY. YOU MAKE STUFF, SELL IT TO THE PENTAGON MOB AND RAM THE PRICE CLEAR UP THEIR ASSES. THEN THEY BLOW THE STUFF UP, INCENERATE IT, AND COME BACK FOR MORE AT DOUBLE THE PRICE BECAUSE NOW THERE’S A SHORTAGE! FOR A FAST DEPENDABLE BUCK, YOU CAN’T BEAT INDUSTRIAL SCALE WARFARE WITH A GODDAMNED STICK!

(Ahem!)

Unfortunately all good things end, no matter how bloody profitable. But those super-expanded wartime corporations that had cranked out planes and tanks were not going to downsize just because we had run out of Dresdens to bomb. They intended to remain dominant and even expand. With the war drawing to a close, and with fewer burning jeep tires on the battlefields and fewer parachutes left dangling in the trees of Belgium, American citizens were going to have to eat the slack. The bastards would have to stuff’em fuller than a Christmas goose; make them eat petroleum based synthetics, if it came down to that. Which it eventually did of course, in the form of petrochemical agriculture, food dyes, etc.

SCREAMING MAN: YOU GOTTA A FUCKING PROBLEM WITH NUMBER TWO RED DYE OR SOMETHING, ASSHOLE? DON’T BULLSHIT THESE PEOPLE, YOU FLAMING OLD FRAUD! I’VE SEEN YOU EAT A WHOLE BOX OF PINK HO-HOS BEHIND A BOTTLE OF JAY DEE AND SOME COLUMBIAN BUD! AM I GONNA HAVE TO TAKE MY NEEDLE NOSED PLIERS TO YOUR LYING ASS?

Plastics, heralded as durable and everlasting (and today lamented for the same reason) eventually gobbled up nearly every other material market, in the from of jewelry, dashboards, dishes, clothing, napkin rings, perfume bottles, knickknacks, flooring and carpeting, resin building materials, vinyl raincoats and boots, molded furniture, radio sets … America was remade in the image of open chain hydrocarbons. That nine tenths of what was produced and marketed was unnecessary, and downright shitty did not go unnoticed by the American public, which had been deeply distrustful of plastics and synthetics from the time they were first ballyhooed at the 1933 Chicago World’s Fair. People were just not buying the sales job. But the combination of wartime shortage frustrations and massive industrial public relations delivered the one-two punch, and the consumer knuckled under. Or perhaps they were just worn down by industry PR, which enlisted the help of trusted figures such as Frank Capra and Walt Disney, among others, along with in-school industry propaganda for the next generation: “Our story of the miracle of plastics starts with an oil well in a faraway place by the Persian Gulf … ”

AND IT GODDAMNED WELL IS GONNA END THERE TOO! IN ABOUT 15 MINUTES, IF IT HASN’T ALREADY! DOES ANYBODY REALIZE THE NUMBER OF SARAH PALIN BLOW-UP DOLLS SHIPPED TO THE TROOPS IN IRAQ? IF THAT’S THE KIND OF ARMY WE’RE SENDING TO KILL OFF THE PALM VERMIN, THEN WE’RE GONERS ALREADY!

As I was saying, the bastards not only created an economy by and for themselves, based on the black sticky stuff, they also built a civilization. From the tallest building right down to the petrochemical soaked dirt in which the food supply is grown, and all along the chain through processing and plastic packaging and distribution, The black stuff was cheap and it was plentiful, so long as the bastards were willing to buy off the top dog sheiks like ibn Saud, who would in turn keep the dusky peasantry in line through good old perennials such as beheadings and public stonings.

SCREAMING MAN MISSES THOSE POST 9/11 BEHEADING VIDEOS, DON’T YOU? IT WAS SO EASY TO TELL WHO AMERICA’S ENEMIES WERE THEN. BUT AT LEAST WE’VE STILL GOT BEN BERNANKE AND BILL GATES.

During the 1940s AND ‘50S while ibn Saud was fathering some 60 children by 22 wives in Arabia and dishing out corporeal punishment to the far flung wretches of his kingdom, here at home the corporations were doing their own hit jobs on the this nation’s peasantry — the farmers. Petroleum based synthetics, with legislative help, wiped out one quarter of the domestic cotton market in the first few years following the war, along with flax for linen, and hemp fiber, replacing them with ugly but profitable synthetic nylon and polymer textiles. Not to mention replacement of literally hundreds of farm produced natural organic materials for medicines, cosmetics, milk by products such as casein for glues and paints, with synthetic petro-based commodities, all of which were mercilessly hammered into the populace as “miracles of modern science.”

Kings may croak, but cash lives forever

The fact that the bastards were corporate entities made them more powerful than any robber baron’s best wet dream, because their power and reach extended beyond human mortality. Deathless corporations and trusts replaced the mortal thieves such as Rockefeller and Morgan; and despite the advent of income taxes, capital continued to aggregate in the bastards’ coffers, particularly financial bastards, at what was seen then as an unimaginable scale. “Money for nothin’ and chicks for free …”

Powered entirely by balance sheets, and existing for the sole le purpose of wealth accumulation, parting with any assets was antithetical to their very purpose. Not to mention the logic of the wealth based stockholders. The majority of assets were held by elite, whose main accomplishment was then and still is coming from families that commandeered some substantial portion of the public medium of exchange in order to derive more wealth.

WHOA THERE FATSO! WHOSE FAMILY ARE WE TALKING ABOUT HERE? PARIS HILTON’S? OR MAYBE ALICE WALTON’S? PARIS HILTON HAS EARNED EVERY JEWEL ENCRUSTED THONG IN HER CLOSET! FROM TUSH TO TITTIES, WE’VE SEEN EVERYTHING PARIS HILTON HAS TO OFFER. AND IT’S WORTH A FEW BILLION TO KEEP HER IN CIRCULATION. GIVES THE MEN OF THIS MISERABLE WORKHOUSE NATION SOMETHING TO BELIEVE IN. SOMETHING TANGIBLE. SOMETHING THEY CAN ACTUALLY SEE AND WHACK OFF TO. HER DIRTY FLICK, “1 NIGHT IN PARIS” WAS A GIFT TO ALL MANKIND. LET THE LESBIANS FIND THEIR OWN PARIS HILTON … BUT ALICE WALTON? SCREAMING MAN WOULDN’T FUCK HER WITH YOUR WHANG, BUSTER! THAT MISERABLE DRUNKEN BITCH RAN DOWN AND KILLED A FIFTY YEAR OLD WOMAN IN TEXAS. WHAT’D SHE GET? A $925 FINE! SHE HAS 20 BILLION DOLLARS AND GETS OFF FOR LESS THAN A THOU. AND WHAT DOES ALICE GIVE US? CHINK MADE FLIPFLOPS AND GODDAMNED PLASTIC PATIO CHAIRS THAT BUCKLE LIKE OBAMA AT A BAILOUT PARTY! GIVE THE SCREAMING MAN PARIS HILTON ANY DAY. NOW, FATSO … YOU WERE SAYING?

Hell, I can’t remember. Oh yes, the bastards. Once you are born into the Royal Court of the Kingdom of Bastardy and are issued your caviar spoon, no further effort is required to amass capital. You simply keep on withholding capital from those who had create it — the working masses — keep captive the economic lifeblood upon which all others depend. Observe, for instance, the banking industry’s present refusal to unass any money for credit, despite the hundreds of billions handed to them as a taxpayers’ gift, a bailout AFTER they’d ripped off their shareholders and customers, and looted their own institutions from the inside.

UPSET ARE YOU, FATSO? LET THE SCREAMER TELL YOU HOW IT REALLY IS. IT WAS ALL AN ACT. THE FED WAS JUST PRINTING AND HANDING OUT WORTHLESS WALLPAPER — WHICH THE BANKING BASTARDS, WITH ALL DUE APLOMB, WILL PAY BACK IN KIND. THEN THE BASTARDS WILL BE DECLARED SOLVENT, FAT AND HEALTHY AS A BUNCH OF PARK BEARS. MEANWHILE, YOU GODDAMNED PEASANTS WILL CONTINUE TO ANGUISH OVER THE BAILOUTS LONG AFTER THE REAL RIP-OFF IS IN. THE ONE YOU NEVER SAW AND CAN’T EVEN WRAP YOUR SORRY POINTED FUCKING HEADS AROUND. THE REAL DOUGH IS SPREAD ACROSS DUBAI, MONACO, LONDON, AND FOR SAFETY’S SAKE, BEIJING. WHILE YOU ANGUISH, PATE OF UNBORN VEAL CALF IS BEING SERVED TO THE REAL BASTARDS UP ON THE 50th FLOOR. THEY POUR ANOTHER GLASS OF 1999 PERRIER-JOUET, AND CHORTLE AT THE DISMEMBERMENT OF A NO-TALENT HACK LIKE BERNIE MADOFF. THAT HAPLESS SMALLTIME JEW GREASEBALL WHO CAME INTO THE GAME WITH $5,000 IN PENNY STOCKS THAT HE BOUGHT WITH MONEY HE MADE INSTALLING SPRINKLERS. NEVER A REAL PLAYER LIKE US, EVEN WITH HIS BULLSHIT WALL STREET TITLES. JUST A DUMB FUCK FROM QUEENS WHO DIDN’T KNOW WHEN TO QUIT A SCAM. LET THE SERFS GNAW AT HIM. KEEPS ‘EM BUSY AND OUT OF OUR HAIR. LOOK, THEY’VE PULLED ONE OF HIS ARMS OUT OF ITS SOCKET. CHRIST, NOW THEY’VE RUINED LUNCH.”

THAT’S WHAT’S REALLY GOING ON, FATSO.

The bastards. Why have they lasted this long? Purely on their own merits, most American corporations probably would not have survived the 1930s. By then our wildly fluctuating economy was already demonstrating the folly of overly concentrated capital and power. What was needed, said the big players who’d wrecked the economy with their uncontrolled speculation and greed, was, lo and beshit, a controlled economy! One even more controlled by corporations. Problem was, the only entity capable of such control was the government. And unfortunately, the Constitution of the United States was founded on a separation of business and state to the same degree as that of church and state.

If the bastards were to run the economy, if Americans were going to be pistol whipped down the road to “prosperity through unprecedented consumption,” then government authority by Constitutional law would be necessary. As a 1937 shareholder’s report of the E.I. DuPont Company “the revenue-raising power of government [taxation] must be converted into “an instrument for forcing acceptance of sudden new ideas” and a “social reorganization.” Uh oh! Just whose sudden new ideas? And what kind of social reorganization?

The report stated bluntly that to realize further extensive profit from its wartime investments, the U.S. government “must be the primary tool.” While their plans to use the government were put into the shareholder’s report, they were never publicly discussed.

FDR saves the bastards’ bacon

The chance to pull it off came ironically or maybe not so ironically, with Roosevelt’s New Deal. FDR was, contrary to the subsequent hagiography that has grown up around his grave, was first and foremost a capitalist and was determined to save capitalism. Given his affluent background and times, he, like everyone else, could not imagine anything but capitalism as the nation’s economic system. Yet nowhere in the Constitution is capitalism specified as America’s preferred economic system. His lifelong circle of friends and associates consisted entirely of the elites of family and corporate wealth, which meant that it also included some of his enemies. But together they created a host of “emergency legislation,” in much the same fashion as 911 let George W. Bush get away with so much under the excuse of a national threat. Even allowing for the resistance of some wealthy elites, FDR favored the bastards’ plans toward a thoroughly corporatized national economy.

The Supreme Court, however, a stickler for details such as the U.S. Constitution, did not see things Roosy’s way. It would take a rewriting of the U.S. Constitution for the government to crawl into bed with the corporations. So every piece of legislation FDR and his cohorts created got snagged in Supreme Court and just kept piling up.

The key for FDR and the Princes of Bastardy turned out to be taxation. To control society means to control individual behavior. The Constitution prohibits that, except for those few powers granted in the Constitution, such as the coinage of money or declaring war. Throughout the 1930s the public watched FDR and the corporatists duke it out with the Supreme Court. While the public was engaged in the debate over FDR’s threatened stacking of the court, FDR and the bastards managed to accomplish their agenda in controlling opposing social behavior — taxing it to death. The government is granted the power to tax by god! And the Roosevelt era saw the art of behavior modification through taxation perfected.

Now in changing American social behavior through taxation there are two rules. The first tax must be a very logical one. And the second must be one created of whole cloth, a manufactured one to counter a manufactured threat. So after the Supreme Court knuckled under to FDR’s threat to divide up the judicial limelight by appointing more justices, a more compliant court happily passed a $200 tax on machine guns — the equivalent of $3,000 today — the same tax, incidentally, that allowed the ATF (Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms division) and the FBI to invade the Branch Davidians at Waco. It was unconstitutional as hell. But the court understood public relations. What kind of deranged fucker needed a machine gun anyway? Well, there was There was John Dillinger (whose penis was 14 inches long, according to folk legend of the day, which was either threatening, or vastly intriguing, depending upon one’s sex or moral perspective on life). There was Seymour “Blue Jaws” Magoon, Bonnie and Clyde, Pittsburg Phil, Baby Face Nelson, Al Capone, Bummy Davis. And if there was any further doubt, there was also the fact that the members of Murder Incorporated were Jewish, Italian or Irish. Ah ha! More proof to the then-majority Anglo Americans of naked immigrant depravity. So two hundred bucks per tommy gun it would be under the 1937 Machine Gun Tax Act.

The second tax the court upheld was the 1937 Marijuana Tax Act. Most Americans had never heard the word marijuana. The tax act had adopted a little known Mexican street term as a name in order to demonize it, and differentiate it from the thousands of acres of government hemp being grown for naval ropes, etc. Never mind that in the entire previous year only a couple of pounds of the stuff were seized by border police. A $200 an ounce tax had worked on machine guns, so a $200 tax per ounce was placed on hemp cultivation without permit, and no permits were issued. And so as an added bonus — or maybe intentionally — the synthetic fiber industry and the plastics industry saw its most threatening long term competitor, hemp, eliminated.

And for the first time in the history of the United States the bastards could use the government to tell farmers what seeds they could put into the earth. In short order by way of the New Deal, through various agricultural acts, corporatists, through government policy, had control over the land even though they did not own it. The chief competitors to industrial food giants and synthetics industry, the small farmer producers of thousands of natural goods and raw materials, were eventually taxed or regulated out of existence. At the same time, subsidies for big-time agri-biz producers started snowballing. A nation of consumers of synthetics was cultivated in the next generation. The result we see around us, obese Americans willingly wearing the bastards’ brands on acrylic clothing … and guzzling synthetic soft drinks, Americans who’ve never once considered that the pizza crusts they gnaw at start out with a grain crop called wheat.

Ten thousand years of agriculture was synthesized into money. The soil-to-city chain of small farms, villages, and towns to the great city markets was destroyed. Those ever more profitable compressed gobs of humanity in the cities and suburbs could be cultivated for maximum productivity and profit as the bastards increased their domination of the needs hierarchy. If you made a movie of this, swapping out the humans for some sort of large intelligent rodent or insect, and left everything else as it really is in American life, people would call it chilling science fiction.

Long story short: The bastards won.

This distillation of how they won, this little piece of feral scholarship, is sure to be disputed by hairsplitting pinheads in political science and history departments. The “Oh but …” crowd. Which is OK with me. Everybody needs a job, I suppose. But that’s the view from here in the cheap seats among the non-players, the fuckees in the great fuck-the-proles game of bastard politics and ever bigger money. Call this a pulp comic summary of post war history. It’s not a very damned funny history. Maybe that’s why we choose not to remember it. Here in the United States of Amnesia. We cannot retain what happened last week, much less history. But I’m trying here folks. I really am.

SCREAMING MAN: BULLSHIT FOLKS! DON’T BELIEVE A WORD FROM THIS GODDAMNED BEER SOAKED, REDNECK WHO CAN’T SPELL AND THINKS HE’S A GENIUS BECAUSE HE KNOWS HOW TO BRING UP WIKIPEDIA ON HIS BROWSER. IF AND WHEN HE’S SOBER ENOUGH. THE SCREAMING MAN HAS BEEN TRAPPED INSIDE BAGEANT’S BLOATED, DISEASED CARCASS FOR SIXTY TWO YEARS, AND THE SCREAMER CAN TELL YA THIS: IF BRAINS WERE DYNAMITE BAGEANT WOULDN’T HAVE ENOUGH POWER TO BLOW OFF A GOOD FART. YOU’VE JUST WASTED TWENTY FUCKING MINUTES OF COMPANY TIME. NOW GO TAKE UP SOMETHING USEFUL, LIKE NARCOTICS. FOR CHRISSAKE GET A LIFE!