Having set up his system Dühring undertakes to discuss the nature of the “state of the future.” His ideas are, Engels maintains, watered down simplifications of notions he has gleaned from Rousseau and Hegel. In his own words, Dühring bases his state on the “sovereignty of the people.” He explains what he means in the following passage of essentially meaningless mumbo jumbo:

If one presupposes agreements between each individual and every other individual in all directions, and if the object of these agreements is mutual aid against unjust offenses– the the power required for the maintenance of right is only strengthened, and right is not deduced from the more superior strength of the many against the individual or of the majority against the minority.

Don’t worry if that passage doesn’t make any sense as Dühring adds the following to explicate it. He says, “The slightest error in the conception of the role of the collective will would destroy the sovereignty of the individual, and this sovereignty is the only thing conducive to the deduction of real rights.” Engels thinks this pretty “thick” even by the standards of Dühring’s so called “philosophy of reality.”

This is especially so since the “sovereignty of the individual” consists in the fact that he or she is, Dühring says, “Subject to absolute compulsioin by the state.” This is because the state “serves natural justice” and that is the best guarantee of individual sovereignty. There will be a police force for internal security and an army as well — to enforce the will of the state — which is the same as that of the community of sovereign individuals and to ensure people don’t use their sovereignty in an incorrect and un-sovereign manner. And just in case the state makes an error, well, the citizens will still be better off than they would have been if left in the state of nature! Anyway, they will get free lawyers to boot.

Since Dühring says his new state is based on “sober and critical thought”, he announces that religion will be banished from the commune.” In the free society,” he says, “there can be no religious worship; for every member of it has got beyond the primitive childish superstition that there are beings, behind nature or above it, who can be influenced by sacrifices or prayers. [A] socialitarian system, rightly conceived, has therefore … to abolish all the paraphernalia of religious magic, and therewith all the essential elements of religious worship.”

It is important to note, since in the real history of socialism in the twentieth century, some socialist and communist states tried to eliminate religion and religious practices by forceable means, that this idea ["the state has to…"] comes from Dühring, an enemy of the Marxist outlook, and not from anything Marx or Engels had to say. Engels explicitly criticizes this view.

This is not to say Marx and Engels were in any way “soft” on religion ["opium of the masses" and all that] but they respected “individual sovereignty” enough not to dream of using the “state’ [which they wanted to abolish in any case] to trample on people’s rights of conscience in religious affairs.

At this point Engels adds a succinct account of the Marxist view of the origin, social function, and future of religion. It is more or less as follows. Religion is just a reflection in the brains of people of the forces in the external world that are out of their control which affect their lives and that they imagine as supernatural beings which they need to fear and placate. Originally these were the powers of nature that took on the guise of gods and goddess, but as human society progressed and evolved social forces also came to assume these roles. Over time, in the West at least, the many gods and goddess representing these alien powers were distilled down to one god [monotheism; e.g., Jews and Moslems, or three gods posing as one as in the Jewish-pagan synthesis called Christianity- tr] and in this form religion will have a lease on life as long as humans are dominated by natural and social powers they neither understand nor control.

In contemporary capitalist society people are dominated and controlled by an economic system that they have themselves made yet rules over them as if it were an independently existing power beyond their control. The Market– made by humans, rules humans. This is essentially the same reification as is found in religion, and it reinforces religious attitudes and beliefs already historically present in modern society. Engels thinks of this development as the First Act of human development. It is now time for the Second Act.

In the Second Act humans will take control of the means of production and distribution which they have created over the long ages [thereby hangs a tale] and by means of scientific understanding and advance be able to control them rather than being controlled by them. Science will also explain the origins of life, the workings of nature, and the role of humans, leading to advances in medicine, agriculture, education, etc., so that humans will seek to understand the world instead of bowing down before it in stupefaction.

Engels says “only then will the last alien force which is still reflected in religion vanish: and with it will also vanish the religious reflection itself, for the simple reason that then there will be nothing left to reflect.” Dühring can’t wait and wants to administratively abolish religion before humanity has reached the intellectual and social level where it will of its own accord fade away. This will only inflame resistance, antagonize the masses, and strengthen the hold of superstition over the brains of people by giving it “a prolonged lease of life.” I might add, if some of the socialists and communists of the past century, let alone this one, would have taken Engels to heart many mistakes and tragedies could have been avoided.

After Herr Dühring has disposed of religion he tells us that “man, made to rely solely on himself and nature and matured in the knowledge of his collective powers, can intrepidly enter on all the roads which the course of events and his own being open to him.” Fine. Let us see how “man” travels down these roads. First he is born. Then he, or she as the case may be, is under the control of his mother the “natural tutor of children” until puberty (about 14 years) when the role of the father kicks in, as long as “real and uncontested paternity” can be demonstrated. If not a guardian is appointed. Ancient Roman law serves Dühring as a model for these ideas.

This shows, Engels says, that Dühring has no sense of history. The family, for him, is immutable, basically the same in Ancient Rome as in modern capitalism with no allowance for the changes in economic conditions and social relations between the ancient world and contemporary world. Engels then quotes the following passage from Volume One of Das Kapital to show the superiority of Marx’s outlook to Dühring’s. Marx wrote that “modern industry, by assigning as it does an important part in the process of production, outside the domestic sphere, to women, to young persons, and to children of both sexes [due to the rise of the working class movement capitalism's urge to exploit children in the productive process has been somewhat curtailed-- tr] creates a new economic foundation for a higher form of the family and the relations between the sexes.”

This new form is still in the process of creation, but there is no going back to the Ancient Roman family, nor even, as our Republican politicians are learning to their chagrin, to the patriarchal family of the Christian Middle Ages — so beloved by the reactionary classes in our country.

Dühring next informs us that “Every dreamer of social reforms naturally has ready a pedagogy corresponding to his new social life.” He may think he is putting others down and himself coming up with a truly scientific plan for the educational needs of society, for the “foreseeable future”, but he is actually a worse dreamer than those he opposes, according to Engels.

In the schools of Dühring’s future cooperative society the children will, Dühring writes, learn “everything which by itself and in principle can have any attraction for man” and so will include “the foundations and main conclusions of all sciences touching on the understanding of the world and of life.” Dühring also tells us he sees in outline all the textbooks of the future but he is personally unable to actually see their contents and just what the children will be learning as that “can only really be expected from the free and enhanced forces of the new social order.” But they will concentrate on physics, math, astronomy and mechanics while biology, botany, and zoology and such will be “topics for light conversation” [!]. He completely forgets to say anything about chemistry. Engels says his knowledge of the sciences seems to be confined to Natural History for Children — a popular book of the 18th Century by Georg Christian Raff (1748-1788).

When it comes to the humanities, Dühring sounds like a second rate Plato. He wants to ban, for example, the great artistic creations of the past because too many of them have religious themes. As Plato banned Homer for portraying the Gods with human flaws, so Goethe is banned by Dühring for “poetic mysticism” and others for any religious content at all — since religion is banned completely in the future state.

American monoglot educators will appreciate Herr Dühring’s attitude to foreign languages. Latin and Greek will be junked entirely — who needs dead languages? Living foreign languages “will remain of secondary importance” and the students will really concentrate on their own native tongue. Engels thinks this is a way to perpetuate the dulling national narrow mindedness of people who are basically ignorant of the world and of the Other. Latin and Greek actually open up people’s minds to a broader perspective of the world and history, at least if they have a classical education, and learning foreign modern languages also allows peoples to have greater understanding of others and their cultures. Dühring’s views are those of the narrow minded Prussian Philistine and similar to the “English only” bigotry found on the right in this country.

Engels gives Dühring credit for at least being aware of the fact there will be a difference between educational policies under socialism and those currently employed in bourgeois society, but since he keeps capitalist relations of production in place in his future communal society he can’t quite figure out what those policies will be. Thus he is reduced to coming up with such ideas as “young and old will work in the serious sense of the word” which, along with other empty phrases, Engels calls “spineless and meaningless ranting.”

Engels counterpoises a brief comment on socialist education from volume one of Das Kapital where Marx says that “from the Factory system budded, as Robert Owen has shown in detail, the germ of the education of the future, an education that will, in the case of every child over a given age, combine productive labour with instruction and gymnastics, not only as one of the methods of adding to the efficiency of production, but as the only method of producing fully developed human beings.” Our own educational system, which produces dropouts and graduates functional illiterates, is American capitalism’s answer to what education will be in the future.

Finally, after we find out how children will be educated in Dühring’s future society, we find out how they are to come into the world. Dühring, no doubt inspired by Plato’s Republic, tells us that future humans must be “sought in sexual union and selection, and furthermore in the care taken for or against the ensuring of certain results.” We are here on the road to Dühringean eugenics. The most important thing to keep in mind about the future births is not the number but “whether nature or human circumspection succeeded or failed in regard to their quality.” This leads Dühring to conclude that “It is obviously an advantage to prevent the birth of a human being who would only be a defective creature.”

Modern scientific sentiment would not reject this conclusion out of hand, regardless of the feelings of those blinded by religious prejudices or logically challenged. It all depends on the kinds of defects that are presented. Dühring is thinking, however, along lines made popular by Nietzsche, of some sort of super human race compared to the run of the mill humans that unaided Nature tends to produce.

Dühring believes in a human right which may be important, but is not generally appealed to these days, for the purposes of eugenics; i.e., “the right of the unborn world to the best possible composition” [biologically-- tr]. “Conception,” he says, “and, if need be, also birth [infanticide- tr] offer the opportunity , or in exceptional cases selective, care in this connection.” Dühring is not just talking about medical defects– but also “aesthetic” defects.

He thinks, in fact, that people should be bred to look like the ancient Greeks! “Grecian art — the idealization of man in marble [not "European" man but "man"]– will not be able to retain its historical importance when the less artistic, and therefore from the standpoint of the fate of the millions, far more important task of perfecting the human form in flesh and blood is taken in hand.” OK, so we won’t all look like Antinous or the Venus de Milo but that goal will be a work in progress for the future Dühringean society.

How does Dühring bring about the this perfection of the human [ancient Greeks-- Dühring had no use for modern Greeks] form? Well, he says force would be harmful but it will come about as a natural result of the mating of beautiful people– sort of by an “invisible hand” (but in this case a different anatomical feature will be at work). Here is Dühring’s quote: [From the] “higher, genuinely human motives of wholesome sexual unions … the humanly ennobled form of sexual excitement , which in its intense manifestations is passionate love, when reciprocated is the best guarantee of a union which will be acceptable also in its result…. It is only an effect of the second order that from a relation which in itself is harmonious a symphoniously composed product should result.”

Engels thinks Dühring’s views on sex are “twaddle.” This is because force would have to be used to make sure all unions were “wholesome” by Dühring’s standards. In the real world it is not just the beautiful people who fall in love and have children (symphoniously composed products) but all kinds of people so “the second order” effects of lovemaking would be the same in the future communal state of Herr Dühring as they are now. [He could, however, try for a rigged lottery a la Plato's Republic to match up the "best" people and only allow those with baby licenses to reproduce. This would lead to more problems than the Chinese have had with the one child policy -- which was successful in limiting population numbers but a failure from the point of view of creating balanced population growth.]

Engels also critiques Dühring’s “noble ideas about the female sex in general”[prostitution is a normal activity due to the constraints of bourgeois marriage]– but both Dühring’s ideas and Engel’s response are too shaped by nineteenth century conditions to be applicable to twenty-first century advanced industrial societies so I will pass this topic by and come to the conclusion of Anti-Dühring.

After having gone over all the major views that Dühring had presented in a series of writings over the years, and refuting them by giving a proper Marxist response to his mixed up theoretical constructions, Engels sums up Dühring’s oeuvre as being the product of mental incompetence due to megalomania.

Postscript: Eugen Dühring survived Engel’s critique and wrote more books and articles. In the 1880′s he began turning out anti-Semitic writings some of which led Theodor Hertzel to conclude that the Jews needed their own state. Frederick Nietzsche’s rantings against socialism were the result of his having read Dühring’s works not those of Marx and Engels (although I doubt it would have made any difference). Of his many books only one has been translated into English — his anti-Semitic tract on the Jewish question was published in 1997 as Eugen Dühring on the Jews by 1984 Press. Dühring died in 1921 thus being deprived of seeing the fruits of his anti-Semitic labors. These and other interesting facts about Dühring are to be found in the Wikipedia article “Eugen Dühring.”

Last year, Hefner attended the premier of a film commemorating his life called Hugh Hefner: Playboy, Activist and Rebel at the Gene Siskel Film Center, part of Chicago’s Art Institute. Looking more like a seasoned Maurice Chevalier or elder statesman than Bathrobe Erectus, Hefner received a standing ovation.

The movie, directed by Brigitte Berman, is one of several recent films to chronicle Chicago history. Last year the center screened Disturbing the Universe about Chicago 8 lawyer extraordinaire William Kunstler. The year before, the film center premiered Radical Disciple: The Story of Father Pfleger, which had David Axelrod, Chicago’s second most famous son (after President Obama) in attendance.

Anyone who grew up before Reagan, in Chicago or both enjoyed the forgotten cultural icons that director Brigitte Berman revives in the film: Dick Gregory, Lenny Bruce, Miles Davis, Dizzy Gillespie, Count Basie, Louis Armstrong, Sammy Davis Jr., William F. Buckley, Dick Cavett, David Steinberg and many more.

TV clips from hifi, party record and hootenanny days from the TV shows Playboy’s Penthouse and Playboy After Dark feature folk singers Pete Seeger and Joan Baez and rare performances.

Who knew, until the film, that Playboy sponsored one of the biggest jazz festivals in history? Who knew it sent the Playboy jet to retrieve Vietnam orphans who were nursed back to health by bunnies (out of costume)? Who knew Playboy supported Children of the Night, a group that helps runaways evade prostitution?

But halfway through the movie, a creep factor sets in. Maybe, it was the parade of so many talking heads who have died since the film was made–Alex Haley, Robert Culp, Tony Curtis–or the fact that Hef wannabe Penthouse publisher Bob Guccione died right before the film was shown.

Maybe it was the ubiquity of Kiss’ Gene Simmons who is so sexually and psychiatrically unbalanced that he told NPR’s Terry Gross to “open your legs” in an interview–or the appearance of a leering James Caan who was linked to Hollywood prostitute broker Heidi Fleiss. (At the film’s end, Simmons who, pontificates about male sexual parts being aroused by clothing while women’s are hidden away (what?) removes the sunglasses he’s been wearing through all the film in a repulsive gesture of grandiosity and apparent exhibitionism.)

Still the straw dog enemies of lust that director Berman sets up in the film–Pat Boone, Jerry Falwell, Charles Keating–are not nearly as creepy as those who are supporters of Hefner’s brand of lust.

What, for example, is the Rev. Malcolm Boyd, author of Are You Running With Me Jesus, doing at an establishment where half the sky, as Nicholas Kristof puts it, is deemed worthy of wearing animal tails? Where have Hefner supporters Dick Cavett and David Steinberg been for the last 30 years to not notice that Oprah, Chelsea Handler and the women on the View have retired them? And what is up with Bill Maher’s appearance?

In fact, the pride that Hefner says he feels for “liberating” the segregated New Orleans Playboy Club so that African-American men could enjoy “cottontail” service produces a sense of incredulity in women viewers. It brings to mind a scene in Sacha Baron Cohen Bruno in which Cohen invites the singer Paula Abdul, who has arrived for an interview, to use a Mexican gardener on his hands and knees as a chair–and she does! Hefner’s fight against “oppression” and “sexual McCarthyism,” that the film exalts is like the Bruno scene–everything is fine if you ignore the furniture.

An admitted sex, Dexedrine, Pepsi and work addict, Hefner has the constellation of self-centeredness and resentments often called King Baby. He says he “deserved” seven girlfriends because he had been monogamous for eight years before that. He says the death of playmate Dorothy Stratten, who was murdered by her husband, Paul Snider, months after she was named the 1980 Playmate of the Year, gave him his stroke and that it was a “miracle,” he got through it. (Let’s talk about ME.) And he says the suicide of his former secretary, Bobbie Arnstein, who was found dead in a Chicago hotel room after an overdose of drugs in January 1975, was caused by drug officials and hurt the Playboy brand and image.

Hefner is admired for his business acumen yet he’s clueless about why the magazine tanked by the late 2000′s. He actually blames Former Attorney General, under Ronald Reagan, Edwin Meese for labeling the magazine obscene, not the laddie magazines and cyber porn that carved away his market. Hefner took the brand hard core in 2001 over the objections of daughter Christie, CEO of Playboy Enterprises, who told the Daily Telegraph as a “feminist” she would not take the magazine hard core.

Of course the half the sky who became doctors, judges, senators, astronauts, scientists, House Speakers, Secretaries of State and magazine publishers also helped retire the Playboy brand along and a backlash against commodification capitalism and mindless consumerism.

In fact, when asked flat out about Playboy treating women as sexual objects–animals with tails attached–Hefner still stands by the brand and says it is because they are. Hugh Hefner: Playboy, Activist and Rebel confirms that Playboy is a just a White Boy’s Club that decided to let men from other races in.

So big man LeBron got upstaged by little J.J. Barea, generously listed at 6 feet even. LeBron couldn’t score when it mattered. He talked big, but acted tiny. His mouth was huge. His deed puny. He shrank before climax. Many of us little people, so miniscule we’re invisible, got a big kick out of witnessing the biggest man, a self proclaimed King, brought down to size.

It’s always about sex, of course, and all performances are sexual auditions in disguise. At least Congressman Weiner thought so, for he sought to convert his public, well-dressed success into a series of ego-swelling, virtual striptease for half a dozen, oh so lucky (?) ladies. It was all a harmless prank, Weiner thought, because he hadn’t done anything but sent out pixels of his relatively adorable or icky self. Everybody is doing it. Hall of Fame football players, teens, preteens, grandmas. What’s the harm, really, aren’t we here to spread the joy? Shouldn’t we all be virtual friends, at least, with virtual benefits? Like countless men before him, Weiner also figured that public triumphs ought to be redeemable as private, sexual rewards, but since Weiner is not JFK or even Clinton, his mistresses are no fleshy Monroe or Lewinski, but wi-fi mirages of an ex porn star, a black jack dealer and a get-out-of-my-face college student.

So LeBron and Weiner have been stripped of their fancy fig leaves, but the most elaborate loin cloth of all is the one still taped to the groins of America. Uncle Sam talks a big game, still blusters about universal freedom, democracy and economic recovery, but what’s left, really, behind that humongous cod piece?

America hides behind state of the art fig leaves. She has long led the world in well-designed, colorful and seductive packaging. Don’t worry about substance, just jazz up the graphic design. Wrapped well, even crap will sell. It’s all packaging, advertising and public relations.

Sport arenas are themselves fig leaves. In city after city, stadia are the best, most impressive pieces of architecture, with the televised fans neatly dressed and well groomed. Slobs in the cheap seats are not visible, but the biggest, fattest slobs are priced out of these spectacles altogether. Drowning out guns and sirens, they can cheer from home, in their distressed neighborhoods. Who else but the well-heeled can afford these hundred-dollar tickets, not to mention overpriced parking, food and drinks?

Beyond the outfield is gorgeous downtown, with their phallic banks jutting into the sky. Americans get their glimpses of distant cities most often through sporting events, so with these slick, beautiful stadia and postcard perfect downtowns, everything looks first rate and first world, still.

In slums across America, you can go for a mile or two without sighting a supermarket or a bank, only donut or fried chicken shacks, check cashing agencies, liquor emporia and store front churches. Though ubiquitous and spreading, this America is almost never seen.

A block may be half abandoned, yet each occupied home, even one with a leaky roof or collapsed porch, will sport a working satellite dish so images of a glamorized normalcy can be beamed in nightly. White, black, brown or yellow, most Americans look fantastic on television, don’t they? All of television is a commercial for its host society. This is how we live and play, or, rather, this is how we want you to believe we live and play. All of television is a fig leaf.

Take New Jersey. (Please.) On television, it’s an ocean lapped playground where a nice tan and decent sex are the only aims and worries, but in real life, a desperate Atlantic City casino has just added a “naked circus” to draw in customers. In South Jersey, three women were just arrested for removing 380 military grave markers, plus flower urns, from cemeteries and selling them for scraps. Some of these date back to the Civil War. The same week, firefighters fighting an arson, set in a long abandoned factory, had to draw water from the river because nearby hydrants had been vandalized. Their brass threadings had been stolen and sold for scraps.

How much can you get for a bit of brass, you may wonder? But when people are desperate, they’ll resort to anything. In Philadelphia, I often see men pushing shopping carts filled with aluminum cans. Scavenging, they can make about 20 bucks a day, though one claimed he earned 50 daily. “I have to get up at five every day,” he proudly said. An impressive dude, he even wore a work uniform with a “SERVICE” patch on his chest. In Denver, one man explained that to make a single buck, you have to walk a mile. In Detroit, 500 bricks will fetch you a hundred dollars, and I saw two young men trying to knock down an abandoned factory wall with hammers.

Is it that bad? Of course, it’s that bad, but you wouldn’t know it from the mainstream media. There are more than four available workers for each job opening, but that’s the official statistic, so you can double it. When McDonald’s had a national job fair recently, a million people filled applications, but only 62,000, or 6.2%, were hired. A McDonald’s job used to be the last resort, a joke, really, but now it has become an out-of-reach, first aspiration for many Americans. I know a recent law school graduate who considers himself lucky to be employed as a manager at Subway. An ex-security guard told me he had applied for over a hundred jobs in six states. Out of options, this 34-year-old was thinking of joining the Army.

Except as criminals or horny garbage, desperate Americans rarely make the news, yet stories like “Celebrities Out of Makeup,” “Celebrity Styles Worth Stealing” and “Michelle Obama Steps Out in $29 Gap Dress,” etc., have become national fare, presented each day for our contemplation and edification. Evening, we can sit behind our triple bolted doors and stare at a televised ballgame in a beautiful stadium, with a serene yet virile skyline in the background.

But at street level, even the beautiful downtowns are showing cracks, with commercial spaces at prime business spots abandoned. It is now customary to cover empty stores with large photos or false fronts touting their potentials. Imaginary, well dressed clients are tastefully displayed, and over them, the screaming pitches. IMAGINE THE POSSIBILITIES! PICTURE YOURSELF HERE! YOUR RESTAURANT HERE!

Across America, these potemkin hallucinations are mushrooming, and in New Orleans, I even saw a smallish, much graffitied shell of a building projected as a future time travel terminal! Among the destinations, Paris 1968, San Francisco 1957, Berlin 1973, Enlightenment, Garden of Eden and Victory Condition. It is telling that no recent years are on offer, no 2001 or 2008, for example. The current mantra of recovery, recovery means that Americans would rather not be in the here and now, but as things get even worse, we may yet develop a nostalgia for this frustrating, desperate and confusing era. As hard as it is to believe, we may grow to miss 2011.

Thanks to resource depletion, primarily oil, the entire global economy is contracting, but this crisis has been compounded by corruption, misallocation and waste, with none greater than the trillions our Pentagon spends on its six, is it six?, illegal wars. As the United States shrinks, its bright, kinetic fig leaf will swell until the country is nothing but giant fig leaf masking the rot and emptiness within. Don’t bother switching the channel, because it will only be the same show at another station. Try looking outside.

Eve, who asked that her real name and age remain confidential, spent two years in prison. During her time behind bars she was raped and contracted HIV. Upon release, she was forced to register in the state’s sex offender database. The words “sex offender” now appear on her driver’s license. “I have tried desperately to change my life,” she says, but her status on the database stands in the way of housing and other programs. “When I present my ID for anything,” she says, “the assumption is that you’re a child molester or a rapist. The discrimination is just ongoing and ongoing.”

Now Eve is one of nine plaintiffs fighting the law in a federal civil rights complaint that advocates hope will finally put this official discrimination to an end.

This legal action comes in the context of increased scrutiny from the federal government over the conduct of the New Orleans Police Department. A US Justice Department investigation of the NOPD, released today, found “reasonable cause to believe that patterns and practices of unconstitutional conduct and/or violations of federal law occurred in several areas,” including “racial and ethnic profiling and lesbian, gay, bi-sexual and transgender (LGBT) discrimination.”

Punishing Women

Eve was penalized under Louisiana’s 205-year-old Crime Against Nature statute, a blatantly discriminatory law that legislators have maneuvered to keep on the state’s books for the purpose of turning sex workers into felons. As enforced, the law specifically singles out oral and anal sex for greater punishment for those arrested for prostitution, including requiring those convicted to register as sex offenders in a public database. Advocates say the law has further isolated poor women of color in particular, including those who are forced to trade sex for food or a place to sleep at night.

In 2003, the Supreme Court outlawed sodomy laws with its decision in Lawrence v. Texas. That ruling should have invalidated Louisiana’s law entirely. Instead, the state has chosen to only enforce the portion of the law that concerns “solicitation” of a crime against nature. The decision on whether to charge accused sex workers with a felony instead of Louisiana’s misdemeanor prostitution law is left entirely in the hands of police and prosecutors.

“This leaves the door wide open to discriminatory enforcement targeting poor black women, transgender women, and gay men for a charge that carries much harsher penalties,” says police misconduct attorney and organizer Andrea J. Ritchie, a co-counsel in a new federal lawsuit challenging the statute.

A media-fueled national panic about child molesters has brought sex offender registries to every state. But advocates warn that, across the U.S., these registries have been used disproportionately against African Americans and other communities of color, and are often used for purposes outside of their original intent. Louisiana, however, is the only state in the U.S. that requires people who have been convicted of crimes that do not involve minors or sexual violence to register as sex offenders.

In 1994, Congress passed Megan’s Law, also known as the Wetterling Act, which mandated that states create systems for registering sex offenders. The act was amended in 1996 to require public disclosure of the names on the registries and again in 2006 to require sex offenders stay in the public registry for at least 15 years.

Megan’s Law was clearly not targeted at prostitution. However, Louisiana lawmakers opted to apply the registry to the crimes against nature statute as well, and at that moment started down the path to a new level of punishment for sex work. “This archaic law is being used to mark people with modern day scarlet letter,” says attorney Alexis Agathocleus of the Center for Constitutional Rights, another party in the lawsuit.

People convicted under the Louisiana law must carry a state ID with the words “sex offender” printed below their name. If they have to evacuate because of a hurricane, they must stay in a special shelter for sex offenders that has no separate facilities for men and women. They have to pay a $60 annual registration fee, in addition to $250 to $750 to print and mail postcards to their neighbors every time they move. The post cards must show their names and addresses, and often they are required to include a photo. Failing to register and pay the fees, a separate crime, can carry penalties of up to 10 years in prison.

Women and men on the registry will also find their names, addresses, and convictions printed in the newspaper and published in an online sex offender database. The same information is also displayed at public sites like schools and community centers. Women — including one mother of three — have complained that because of their appearance on the registry, they have had men come to their homes demanding sex. A plaintiff in the suit had rocks thrown at her by neighbors. “This has forced me to live in poverty, be on food stamps and welfare,” explains a man who was on the list. “I’ve never done that before.”

In Orleans Parish, 292 people are on the registry for selling sex, versus 85 people convicted of forcible rape and 78 convicted of “indecent behavior with juveniles.” Almost 40 percent of those registered in Orleans Parish are there solely because they were accused of offering anal or oral sex for money. Seventy-five percent of those on the database for Crime Against Nature are women, and 80 percent are African American. Evidence gathered by advocates suggests a majority are poor or indigent.

Legal advocates credit on-the-ground organizing and the advocacy of the group Women With A Vision (WWAV) for making them aware of this discriminatory law. WWAV, a 20-year-old New Orleans-based organization, provides health care and other services to women involved in survival sex work. “Many of these women are survivors of rape and domestic violence themselves,” says WWAV executive director Deon Haywood. “Yet they are being treated as predators.”

Plaintiffs Tell Their Stories

Ian, another plaintiff in the legal challenge to the Crime Against Nature statute, was homeless from the age of 13, and began trading sex for survival. When an undercover officer approached him and asked him for sex, Ian asked for money. “All I said was $50,” he says, “And they put me away for four years.”

In prison, Ian was raped by a correction officer and by other prisoners, and like Eve, he contracted HIV. Now, he says, potential employers see the words “sex offender” written on his ID and no one will hire him. “Do I deserve to be punished any more than I’ve already been punished?” he asks. “I was 13 years old. That’s the only way I knew how to survive.”

Hiroke, a New Orleans resident and another plaintiff in the suit, spoke on a call set up by advocates. “I had just graduated from high school and was just coming out as transgender,” she says. Hiroke was arrested and convicted while still a teenager. As she began to describe her experience, Hiroke’s voice began to shake. “I was being held with men in jail at the time…” she began. Then there was silence on the line. Holding back tears, she then apologized for being unable to continue.

The Louisiana legislature recently passed a reform of the Crime Against Nature statute, but for the vast majority of those affected, the change makes little to no difference. Although the new law takes away the registration component for a first conviction, a second conviction requires 15 years on the registry, and up to five years imprisonment. A third conviction mandates a lifetime on the registry. More than 538 men and women remain on the registry because they were convicted of offering anal or oral sex, with more added almost every day.

The legal challenge to the Crime Against Nature law, called Doe v. Jindal, has been filed in Louisiana’s US District Court Eastern District on behalf of nine anonymous plaintiffs. It was filed by the Center for Constitutional Rights, attorney Andrea J. Ritchie, and the Law Clinic at Loyola University New Orleans College of Law. The anonymous plaintiffs include a grandmother, a mother of four, three transgender women, and a man, all of whom have been required to register as sex offenders from 15 years to life as a result of their convictions for the solicitation of oral sex for money.

• This article first appeared here.

The first breast augmentation processes popped up (pardon the pun) in the late 19th century. In 1889, Austrian physician Robert Gersuny tried paraffin injections. In 1895, German physician Vincenz Czerny placed tissue from a benign growth on a patient’s back in a breast where he had removed a tumor to “avoid asymmetry.”

In the first half of the 20th century, the race for the perfect fake boobs heated up. Well-apportioned actresses like Lana Turner and Ava Gardner were lighting up the big screen and gracing the covers of all the big-name magazines. Women and their husbands wanted topographical equality and doctors were eager to lend their talents and pad their bank accounts. By the late 40s, physicians were augmenting breasts with glass balls, ground rubber, ivory, ox cartilage, Terylene wool, gutta-percha, Dicora, polyethylene chips, polyvinyl alcohol-formaldehyde polymer sponge, polymer sponge in a polyethylene sac, polyether foam sponge, polyethylene strips wound into a ball, teflon-silicone, polyester rubber, etc.

In 1950, New York doctor Jacques Maliniac tried a “flap-based” augmentation and rotated a woman’s chest wall tissue into her breast to increase volume. In the 1950s and early 1960s, approximately 50,000 women received silicone injections, but they led to dangerous granulomas and painful breast hardening.

In 1961, the first silicone breast implants were developed by Dr. Thomas Cronin and Dr. Frank Gerow, two plastic surgeons from Houston. They were made of a tear drop shaped rubber sac and filled with a thick, viscous silicone gel. They caught on in Hollywood first, because the price tag for the prosthetics was cost prohibitive. But, eventually, prices came down and they migrated back home.

Today, in most affluent areas in Texas, you can hardly stand in line at the supermarket or go watch your kids’ basketball games without being confronted by trophy topography, and it’s a little bit sad.

What happened to dancing with the ones that brung ya? Are the real things just not good enough for us anymore? And wasn’t there a revolution in the 1970s that involved women railing against sexual objectification?

Is there any greater embrace of sexual objectification than fake boobs?

In the end I guess my own gender is most to blame. Gratuitous breast images sell us material goods and anchor the marketing campaigns for some of our favorite entertainment mediums. Even as adults, middle-aged dads and graying solitary or married men, we still lead with or can be led by our loins. And the bearings of our existential compasses are too often affected by women’s breasts, real or fake.

Men are obviously pathetic for placing a premium on such things, and women are silly for caring so much about male premiums. Perhaps it’s simply our nature but, if so, it’s probably time for a little transcendence. Topographical transcendence.

It’s often said that everything is bigger in Texas and, 50 years ago, two Houston doctors developed prosthetics to make sure such was the case. But their invention was a mockery of the Lone Star quality of authenticity. And I’ll take authenticity over artificiality any day.

When you get right down to it, fake boobs are about as attractive as toupees. And I don’t know how folks are turned on by the former any more than the latter.

That’s true of accounts of political awakening as well, especially for those of us born into unearned privilege as a result of systems of illegitimate authority. Not only do we love to tell stories in which we come out looking good, but we know how to decorate the narrative with the trappings of humility to avoid seeming arrogant.  We use our failures to set up the story of our transformation; even when we speak of our limitations we are highlighting our wisdom in seeing those limitations.

So when I got a request from a researcher to tell my story about how my political consciousness was raised, I was hesitant. I don’t like feeling like a fraud, and something always feels a bit fraudulent about my account, even when I am being as honest as I can. But, like most people, I feel driven to tell my story, mostly to try to explain myself to myself. So here I go again:

As a teenager coming of age in the 1970s in mainstream culture in the upper Midwest, I missed the United States’ radicalizing movements by a decade and several hundred miles. I developed conventional liberal politics in reaction to the conventional conservative politics of my father and his generation. But in a more basic sense, I grew up depoliticized — like most contemporary Americans, I was never taught to analyze systems and structures of power, and so my banal liberal positions seemed like cutting edge critique to me. After college I worked as a journalist at mainstream newspapers, which further retarded my ability to think critically about power; reporters who don’t have a political consciousness coming into the field are unlikely to develop one in an industry that claims neutrality but is fanatically devoted to the conventional wisdom.

The raising of my consciousness began when I started a journalism/mass communication doctoral program in 1988, a time when U.S. universities were somewhat more intellectually and politically open than today. After years of the daily grind in newsrooms, I felt liberated by the freedom to read, think, and talk to others about all the new ideas I was encountering. My study of the First Amendment led me to the feminist critique of pornography, which at the time was an important focus for debate about the meaning of freedom of expression. My first graduate courses were taught by liberal defenders of pornography, who were the norm in the academy then and now. But I also began talking with activists in a local group that was fighting the sexual-exploitation industries (pornography, prostitution, stripping), and I realized there was a rich, complex, and exciting feminist critique, which required me to rethink what I thought I knew about freedom, choice, and liberation.

As a result of those first conversations, I started reading feminist work and taking feminist classes, and I kept talking with folks from the community group, which led me to get involved in their educational activities. I didn’t make those choices with any sense that I was constructing a radical philosophical and political framework. I was just following the ideas that seemed the most compelling intellectually and the people who seemed the most decent personally. Those ad hoc decisions changed my life in two ways.

First, they opened up to me an alternative to the suffocating conventional wisdom, in which liberals and conservatives argue within narrow ideological boundaries. This exposure to feminist thinking, especially those people and ideas most commonly described as radical feminist, allowed me to step outside those boundaries and ask two simple questions: Where does real power lie and how does it operate, in both formal institutions and informal arrangements?

Second, they helped me realize the importance of always having a political life outside the university. Instead of putting all my energy into my teaching and research, I was anchored in a community project and connected to people who weren’t preoccupied with publishing marginally relevant research in marginally relevant academic journals. Although I had to publish scholarly articles for my first six years as an assistant professor, once I got tenure and job security I immediately returned to community organizing and ignored the pseudo-intellectual pretensions that dominate in most of the so-called scholarly world in the social sciences and humanities. I had developed respect for rigorous and relevant scholarship but had come to realize how little of it there was in my fields in the contemporary academy.

From those first inquiries into the sexual-exploitation industries and the role of a pornographic culture in men’s violence, I continued to think about how power is organized and operates around other dimensions of our identities and statuses in the world. After opening the gender door, it was inevitable that I would have to open the race door. From there, questions about the inherent economic injustice in capitalism and the violence required for U.S. imperial domination of the world became central. Finally, I began thinking more about how human domination of the living world is destroying the ecosphere’s capacity to sustain life as we know it.

All of those inquiries led me to the same conclusion: We live in a world structured by illegitimate hierarchies and based on a domination/subordination dynamic. For those of us with unearned privilege, the rewards for ignoring this conclusion are whatever status and money we can squeeze out of the system, while the cost of capitulation to power is a surrender of some essential part of our humanity. More than 20 years after embarking on this investigation, I can see that clearly. But when I first started confronting these issues, I only knew that the conventional wisdom seemed inadequate, that the platitudes uttered by people in power seemed empty, and that the rationalizations offered by the intellectuals in the service of power seemed self-serving. I didn’t know what I wanted, but I knew I didn’t want that kind of career or life.

All that seems clear to me now, but it wasn’t at the start. The researcher’s query that prompted this essay asked about my “earliest consciousness-raising memory.” I have no simple answer, because my awakening was such a gradual process. But there were some moments along the way, such as the day I read Andrea Dworkin’s 1983 speech entitled “I Want a Twenty-Four-Hour Truce During Which There Is No Rape,” in which she asked men for “one day in which no new bodies are piled up, one day in which no new agony is added to the old.”¹ In that speech she pointed out that feminists don’t hate men, but instead “believe in your humanity, against all the evidence.” ²

I also remember the crucial role of one friend in the anti-pornography group, a white man who was older than I and was a part of not only the feminist movement but the civil-rights, anti-war, and environmental struggles. He provided me with a model for how someone with privilege could contribute to radical politics in a principled fashion. In my book on pornography, I wrote about one particularly important moment with Jim Koplin, when we talked about my motivation in volunteering with the group:

“If you want to be part of this because you want to save women, we don’t want you,” he said. At first I was confused — wasn’t the point of critiquing the sexual exploitation of women in pornography to help women? Yes, Jim explained, but too many men who get involved in such work see themselves as knights in shining armor, riding in like the hero to save women, and they usually turn out not to be trustworthy allies. They are in it for themselves, not to challenge masculinity but to play out the role of heroic man in a new, pseudo-feminist context. You have to be in it for yourself, but in a different way, he said.

“You have to be here to save your own life,” Jim told me.

I didn’t understand exactly what he meant at that moment, but something about those words resonated in my gut. This is what feminism offered men — not just a way to help those being hurt, but a way to understand that the same system of male dominance that hurt so many women also made it impossible for men to be fully human. ³

Jim challenged me to ask myself why I was there and what I hoped to gain, and I came to understand that my interest in feminist politics was driven in large part by my own alienation from traditional definitions of masculinity. For me to tell a simple story about doing the right thing, implying nobility on my part, wasn’t going to cut it.

More than 20 years later, I’m still wrestling with these questions about why I make the choices I make. I am a man who is part of a feminist movement and a white guy who critiques the white supremacy deeply embedded in mainstream culture. I am an American who opposes U.S. imperial foreign policy and a middle-class academic working with a local group that organizes immigrant workers. For these efforts, I get attention and praise that is disproportionate to my effort and ability, a fact I point out as often as possible. People sometimes listen to me not because I’m smarter than feminist women, but because I am a man. My writing on race is not better than the work of non-white authors, but I’m appreciated because I’m white.

This is the tricky part of my awakening story. I was lucky to learn to see the world from the point of view of those who struggle against power, and I’m rewarded in many ways when I speak, write, or act in public in these movements. But I recognize that those rewards are unfair, and so my professed humility becomes another mark of my alleged sophistication. Yet if I were to refuse to use my privilege — if I dealt with this angst by fading into the background — I would be throwing away resources that come with my position in the world and which I can offer to these movements.

I am trapped, yet I am trapped in a system that makes my life relatively easy. Even when there is some threat of punishment for my political activities, such as during the fallout from critical essays about U.S. war crimes that I wrote after 9/11, I have so much support from outside the power structure and so much privilege as an educated white guy that I never really felt threatened. Even if I had been fired from my university position after 9/11, I likely would have landed on my feet.

I realize not all who adopt a critical perspective, even those in privileged categories, fare as well as I have. But in recent decades in the United States, in which dissent by people who look like me is mostly tolerated, there has been no widespread repression of people in the privileged sectors. People in targeted groups (particularly immigrants, Muslims, Arabs) have had to be careful, and there’s no guarantee that a more widespread repression won’t return to the United States, especially as U.S. power continues to decline around the world and elites get nervous. But for now, white men with U.S. citizenship are pretty safe. We may risk losing a job, but that’s trivial compared with the fates suffered by radicals in other eras in U.S. history or in other places today.

So, here’s my consciousness raising story summarized: I wandered through the first 30 years of my life mostly oblivious to the workings of power, protected by my privilege. For the past 20 years I’ve been struggling to contribute to a variety of movements for social justice and ecological sustainability, getting my consciousness raised on a regular basis whenever I seek out new experiences that push me beyond what I have come to take for granted (lately for me that has been happening at 5604 Manor, our progressive community center in Austin, TX). Although I love teaching and put considerable energy into my job as a professor, my community and political activities are just as important to me — and a greater source of intellectual vitality. If consciousness-raising is an ongoing project, it’s not likely to happen in moribund institutions such as universities but will come through engagement with people taking real risks in political work.

That’s as accurate an account as I can offer about how I became, and continue becoming, the political person I am. But telling this story always makes me a bit queasy; I have yet to find a way to describe my political development that doesn’t sound self-aggrandizing, as if I am casting myself as an epic hero.

That longstanding discomfort in telling my story is further complicated by new concerns in the past few years. More than ever I’m aware that no matter how high anyone’s consciousness in the United States is raised, there may be very little we can do to reverse the consequences of modern industrial society’s assault on the living world. I don’t mean that there is nothing we can or should do to promote ecological sustainability, but only that the processes set in motion during the industrial era may be beyond the point of no return, that the health of the ecosphere that makes our own lives possible may be compromised beyond recovery.

In contemporary left/progressive organizing, we typically focus on those small victories we achieve in the moment and on a vision for social change that sustains us over the long haul. With no revolution on the horizon, we pursue reforms within existing systems but hold on to radical ideals that inform those activities. We are willing to work without guarantees, bolstered by a faith that, as Martin Luther King, Jr. put it, “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” ⁴ That’s supposed to get us through; even if our movements don’t prevail in our own life time, we contribute to a better future.

But what if we are no longer bending toward justice? What if the arc of the moral universe has bent back and the cascading ecological crises will eventually overwhelm our collective moral capacities? Put bluntly: What if homo sapiens are an evolutionary dead-end?

That’s the central problem with my consciousness-raising story. When I was politicized 20 years ago, I made a commitment to facing the truth to the best of my ability, even when that truth is unpleasant and painful. My ideals haven’t changed and my commitment to organizing hasn’t waned, but the weight of the evidence suggests to me that our species is moving into a period of permanent decline during which much of what we have learned will be swamped by rapidly worsening ecological conditions. I think we’re in more trouble than most are willing to acknowledge.

This is not an argument for giving up on or dropping out of radical politics. It’s simply a description of what seems true to me, and I can’t see how our movements can afford to avoid these issues. I’m not sure I’m right about everything, though I am sure this analysis is plausible and should be on our agenda. Yet it’s my experience that most people want to push it out of view.

In trying to make sense of my political consciousness-raising, I try to avoid the temptation to cast myself as an epic hero who overcomes adversity to see the truth. That’s a struggle but is possible when one is part of a vibrant political community in which people hold each other accountable, and for all my fretting in this essay, I think I’ve done a reasonably good job of keeping on track. We can overcome our individual arrogance.

More difficult is facing the possibility that the human species has been cast as a tragic hero. Tragic heroes aren’t characters who have just run into a bit of bad luck but are protagonists brought down by an error in judgment that results from inherent flaws in their character. The arrogance with which we modern humans have treated the living world — the hubris of the high-energy/high-technology era — may well turn out to be that tragic flaw. Surrounded by the big majestic buildings and tiny sophisticated electronic gadgets created through human cleverness, it’s easy for us to believe we are smart enough to run a complex world. But cleverness is not wisdom, and the ability to create does not guarantee the ability to control the destruction we have unleashed.

Not every human society has gone down this road, but we live in a world dominated by those who not only exhibit that arrogance but embrace it, refusing to accept the reality of decline. That means our individual awakenings may be taking place within a much larger dying. To face that is to live in a profound state of grief. To stay true to a radical political consciousness is to face that grief.

1. Andrea Dworkin, Letters from a War Zone: Writings 1976-1987 (London: Secker & Warburg, 1988/Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books 1993), pp. 170-171
2. Ibid., pp. 169-170.
3. Robert Jensen, Getting Off: Pornography and the End of Masculinity (Boston: South End Press, 2007), p. 9
4. “Where Do We Go From Here?” (annual report to the Southern Christian Leadership Conference), August 16, 1967

India was an impressive, wonderfully diverse country, and my two years there were, without question, the most memorable and developmentally important period of my life.  But to a group of 22-year old Americans, India was shockingly alien.  The sights, the sounds, the food, the languages, their sense of time and space, all of it.  And it was decidedly different in regard to sexual customs.  In fact, sex, as a component of human nature, didn’t seem to exist.

As repressed or “puritanical” as Indian society seemed to be, sex was a popular discussion item among the men.  Whether it was professors at the local college, students, our neighbors, co-workers, the guy at the tea stall, our bosses in the Irrigation Department, whoever—once they got to know us well, they invariably wanted to discuss U.S. sexual mores.  Specifically, they wanted to know if what they’d heard about American women was true.

There were many related questions (some of which were bizarre), but these seemed to be the Big Three:  (1)  Is it true that most American brides aren’t virgins?  (2)  Is it true that women commonly engage in sex with men they not only don’t intend to marry, but men they barely know?  And (3) is it true that American men have no problem allowing these shameless, sluttish sex pigs to be the mothers of their children?

Because the Peace Corps, at least in those days, was still seen as this noble experiment in bringing together people from disparate cultures, the last thing we wanted to do was antagonize our hosts by getting into a pissing match with them.  Still, it was clear that these guys had absolutely no idea what the U.S. was all about.  Moreover, through ignorance or cultural arrogance, they had insulted American womanhood.  And whether motivated by pride, chivalry or the need to educate, we felt it our duty to defend it.

There’s no point drawing this out, so I’ll fast-forward to the end.  Nothing we said mattered.  None of our attempts to explain to these people the tenets of a sexually liberated society made the slightest bit of difference.  I can’t emphasize this enough.  They didn’t accept any part of  it. And I’m not speaking only of the uneducated (shop keepers, rickshaw drivers, cultivators); this also represented the view of professionals (academics, engineers, accountants, artists, journalists).

Not only did the Indians not think their country was sexually repressed, they thought the exact opposite; they considered their sexual attitudes to be morally “perfect.”  Their sexual morality was perfect and ours was a teeming cesspool.  That we American men would willingly take these “tainted” women as our wives was shocking enough, but that we’d wish them to be the mothers of our children struck them as insane.

We should have been prepared for this, but we weren’t.  Despite more or less knowing in advance what to expect (during training we’d learned that there was no courtship in India, no dating, no pornography, very little divorce, no kissing shown on movie screens, etc.), the extent to which the Indians reviled American sexual mores came as a genuine shock.  Maybe we were more naïve than we thought, but their disapproval was mind-boggling.

Which brings us to Lara Logan.  The fact that a mob of Egyptian men would grope her, tear at her clothing, beat her, attempt to sexually assault her, was all too predictable.  Let’s be clear:  No one is making excuses for their actions.  What they did was not only reprehensible, it was illegal under Egyptian law.  Indeed, these assailants have already been disgraced, roundly criticized by their own countrymen.

But because cultural sovereignty counts for everything, these Egyptians undoubtedly saw Logan as a shameless, fuck-happy Western woman commingling with a group of men.  That’s what they saw.  Accordingly, groping her didn’t seem entirely illogical.  Also, it would be a mistake to label their act a purely sexual one.  Given their pristine view of womanhood, it was a form of punishment.

Logan, according to an official CBS announcement, was attacked by a group of about 200 Egyptians and “suffered a brutal and sustained sexual assault and beating before being saved by a group of women and an estimated 20 Egyptian soldiers.” The mob, probably pro-Mubarak supporters, but never identified by CBS, had separated Logan from her camera crew.

About a week earlier, Mubarak’s army detained, handcuffed, blindfolded, interrogated, and then released Logan and some of her crew after several hours. The government ordered her expelled from the country, probably for her on-air comments about the government intimidating and harassing foreign journalists. Logan returned to Cairo shortly before Mubarak resigned. She returned to the United States the day after the assault, and spent the next four days recovering in a hospital.

The Mubarak administration at the beginning of the protests had expelled the al-Jazeera news network, and began a random campaign against all journalists, the result of the government believing that the media inflamed the call for revolution and the overthrow of Mubarak. There were about 140 cases of assault and harassment of journalists during the 18-day protest, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ). Ahmad Mohamad Mahmoud, an Egyptian journalist, was killed by sniper fire, probably by pro-Mubarak supporters.  Among American reporters physically assaulted were CNN’s Anderson Cooper and photojournalist Dana Smillie, who was seriously wounded by what appeared to be a dozen BB-size pellets. Journalists displayed “admirable levels of courage as they — initially as individuals and small groups, and eventually in droves — made statements and took actions that exposed them to immense personal and professional risk,” according to the CPJ.

There can be no justification for the rogue gangs of thugs who attacked Logan, dozens of journalists, and hundreds of citizens. But, from the story of reporter and citizen courage against a 30-year dictatorship, no matter how benevolent it may have appeared, there emerged another story, one not as dramatic, nor as compelling, nor as important. But it is a story, nevertheless.

Because of deadlines and a sense of having to get the story at any cost, news organizations sometimes become in-your-face inquisitors. Privacy isn’t usually something the more aggressive news organizations give to those they want on air or in print. It’s still common to see microphones stuck inches from faces of people who have suffered tragedies

But when it comes to one of their own, news organizations seem to have a different set of standards. The brutal attack upon Logan occurred February 11, but it was four days until CBS released any statement. After a brief review of the facts, CBS refused to make further comment or to respond to reporter inquiries. “Logan and her family respectfully request privacy at this time,” the network said. A four day delay to give a basic statement is inexcusable by CBS; a statement that it did not give more information about the attack in order to protect the correspondent’s privacy is hypocritical, and trumpets a double standard that the news media are somehow exempt from the reporting practices it demands of news sources.

There is another factor in this mini-story. Judith Matloff, a journalism professor at Columbia University, told the L.A. Times, “Generally, female correspondents do not come out and talk about it [sexual assaults] because they worry that they won’t get sent on assignments again.”

Paternalism in the news profession often has editors and news directors, most of whom are male, “protecting” their female reporters and correspondents. Journalists and news crews who go into dangerous situations, including riots, demonstrations, and war must be trained to deal with violence — and must be given every assistance by their organizations when they have been harassed or attacked. But, for news executives to discriminate on who to send because of the “fear” that women may be subjected to sexual assault, and for women not to report it to their bosses, is to acknowledge that they, and probably society, haven’t come far in eliminating sexism within the profession.

There is a further reality. The news media often don’t identify adults who have been raped or sexually assaulted, a belief that somehow these crimes are more personal and more traumatic than any other kind of assault. However, sexual assaults and rapes are always brutal and vicious crimes of power and control. For the news media to continue to adhere to some puritanical belief that they are protecting womanhood by not reporting names and details perpetuates the myth that rape is purely a sexual intrusion, and not the brutal attack it truly is.

Featured prominently in liberal media outlets like the New York Times and The Advocate, Sheng claims that the pictures “underscore the silence permeating the unsung heroism of gay and lesbian military personnel.”  Undoubtedly, there is something subversive about these images, especially the few that depict the emotionally charged interaction of same-sex couples in which both partners are in uniform.  However, they also do insidious political work.  By fully domesticating their subjects’ military service — that is, by removing it from the context of American imperial power — the photographs preempt conversations about the problematic relationship between U.S. militarism and the politics of liberal integration.

Let me be clear.  DADT is a draconian policy whose repeal should be welcomed.  It is unacceptable that the Department of Defense, the nation’s largest employer, continues to fire people for coming out of the closet.  In an era in which the poverty draft is swelling the ranks of the U.S. military with young adults who would have probably pursued other employment if given the option, taking DADT off the books is a priority.  But Sheng’s photographs, like the vast majority of liberal critiques of DADT, go well beyond the argument for equality in the workplace by embracing a rhetoric of lesbian/gay patriotism intended to ingratiate the movement to American warhawks.

In a typical story on Sheng’s work, ABC News notes that ‘Samuel’, one of the anonymous service members who posed for the photo series, “loves his work [in the military].  He believes in his work.  The only aspect of military life Samuel does not believe in is the current law.”  Of course, one is left to wonder whether the soldiers and sailors like Samuel, who are so invested in a more humane workplace within the military, have given much thought to aspects of contemporary U.S. ‘military life’ such as the torture of racialized ‘enemies’, the murder of civilians, and the decimation of local economies and infrastructure.

Radical LGBTQ activists like Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore have already pointed to the very limited upside of the seamless integration of lesbians and gays into an institution tasked with the oppression of queer communities and communities of color abroad.  What I want to add to Sycamore’s critique is an analysis of how Sheng’s photographs offer an extremely deceiving vision of the relationship between sexual politics and the U.S. military.  I hope that such an analysis will emphasize the need to situate an endorsement and celebration of the repeal of DADT within a broader network of concerns among the radical left.

There are several alarming aspects of these images.  The first is the cleanliness and sterility of the homes, apartments, and hotel rooms that serve as the backdrop.  These living spaces are absolutely immaculate, almost clinical (and certainly a far cry from the homes that my fellow sailors and I maintained when I was in the navy).  With such pristine backgrounds (not to mention uniforms), it becomes very difficult to imagine the pictured soldiers and sailors as agents of death and destruction rampaging through the Middle East or Central Asia.

In Sheng’s photographs, their military service is critiqued solely within the realm of the private sphere.  Thus, their personal struggles within the military are implicitly prioritized above their active and enthusiastic participation in global conquest.  With this in mind, it seems odd that Sheng remarked to a journalist at Southern California Public Radio that “the invisibility of these wars [in Iraq and Afghanistan], as well as our lack of recognition towards everyone in the military and their efforts, became a powerful inspiration for the work.”  If anything, war is entirely invisible from these images.

This invisibility seriously limits the emotional content of the pictures. Take, for example, the many images of soldiers and sailors with their heads in their hands, frozen in poses of palpable anguish.  It is easy to imagine any number of reasons why we might see troops in such a pose: the violent death of a comrade, the guilt over participating in war crimes, or a divorce prompted by months of separation.  But recognition of these possibilities is blocked when the subjects inhabit spotless scenes of domestic order.  In other words, when the world around a soldier — gay or straight — is so neat and tidy, the only suffering we can easily associate with their experience is the internal torment generated by a sexual identity deemed unworthy of patriotic service.

Nor do the photos of lesbian and gay service members posing with their hands as if they are holding a gun rectify the aforementioned absence of war.  Similar to the image of ‘Grace’, a female soldier jumping playfully on her bed, the make-believe guns transform the subjects into innocent children who few would dare to imagine pulling the trigger with an ‘insurgent’ in their crosshairs.  Sheng’s own description of the work emphasizes this narrow representation.  As a recent piece from CNN.com explains, “Sheng said he hopes his photographs open eyes to the way the ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ policy affects closeted service members who are fighting and dying for their country.”  Clearly, the way that ‘fighting and dying for their country’ itself affects the service members (and others) is not at issue for the artist.

Mainstream liberals who have been pressing for a repeal are likely to object that, in the words of one commenter on the Bitch Magazine story featuring Sheng’s photos, “sure, militarization is problematic but that is not what this piece is about.”  At best, this is naïve optimism about the potential for standard liberal equal rights discourse to operate independently from American militarism.  As scholar Melanie McAlister has aptly pointed out, since Gulf War I a central component of the media strategy used by the U.S. military and political establishment to legitimate its ‘humanitarian intervention’ abroad has been the emphasis on the ‘multicultural’ makeup of America’s troops.  According to McAlister, images of American power projected by a multicultural fighting force in advertisements and other representations have “provided the mandates for that power: the diversity of its armed forces made the United States a world citizen, with all the races and nations of the globe represented in its population.”

Moreover, as journalist Lila Rajiva has explained, claims of facilitating feminist liberation of Iraqi and Afghani women have become important rhetorical pillars of U.S. justification for its continued interventionist strategy in the ‘war on terror’.  In other words, there is a relationship between mainstream rights discourse and the contemporary configuration of American militarism.  Claiming the contrary is tantamount to an endorsement of ‘humanitarian imperialism’.

Ultimately, the danger behind work like that of Sheng is that it suggests that the repeal passed by Congress this weekend marks the final round of struggle.  It encourages liberal adherents to sit back and bathe themselves in self-congratulation for supporting the integration of the military, when, in fact, the task at hand is building more meaningful dialogue and cooperation between the LGBTQ, anti-war/militarism, and anti-austerity movements.  The inclusion of openly lesbian and gay service members who otherwise support the military’s role in underwriting American power abroad will not change the fact that the brutalization of foreign ‘enemies’ so often takes shape around an assumed equivalence between homosexuality and depravity (one need only recall the well-publicized photos from Abu Ghraib to confirm this connection).

Moreover, the repeal in no way addresses the de facto conscription (and isolation from radical queer politics) of more and more impoverished youth from the LGBT community who see the military as their only viable path to economic survival.  With these things in mind, we must recognize that Sheng’s photos are not the type of activism we need.

All the military brigs and stockades are filled to overcrowding with such disorderly service -men and -women, but the number of offenders is so vast that the services cannot confine the entire population of “sexual orientation mutineers” (SOMs), as the top brass have dubbed them. This “purple passion military awakening,” as advocates from national LGBT organizations have labeled this phenomenon, is a surprise to everyone and has instantly undone ongoing military operations.

The obvious problem is that as openly gay soldiers, sailors, airmen and airwomen are deemed unfit for the U.S. military (because of DADT), the services now find themselves without personnel to implement the many campaigns being waged. In frantic emergency meetings at the Pentagon, the Joint Chiefs and the Secretary of Defense are struggling through what is reported to be acrimonious debate to arrive at a consensus on what to do.

One option advanced by fiscal conservatives is to proceed immediately with mass discharges of current military personnel (which these conservative advisors recommend be “dishonorable” so as to dramatically reduce the future cost of veterans’ benefits) and then try to quickly recruit and train a new mass of acceptably ‘gayless’ — or at a minimum, undetectably gay — soldiers, sailors, airmen and airwomen.

This tack is seen as too damaging to military readiness, and the continuity of military operations, by liberal military advisors who instead recommend the issuance of a general letter of reprimand to be inserted in current servicemen and servicewomen’s personnel files, with a penalty of the forfeiture of one week’s pay, and then offering each SOM service person an otherwise clean record and elimination of any pending charges (for nonviolent offenses, including insubordination) in exchange for an immediate return to duty.

The proponents of this liberal approach counter the howls of conservative protest that it is “a pusillanimous pandering to prurient pilfering of patriotic pulchritude” because it is not just a complete negation of the existing DADT policy, but its active antithesis. This liberal approach would accept openly gay troops henceforth. The popular advocates of this policy tout it as “pink patriotism” while the enraged opponents deride it as “poisonous pansy-ism.”

While the policy debate rages, U.S. military operations around the globe are in abeyance, and one immediate consequence of this lull is a dramatic drop in both military and civilian casualties in the various war zones and occupation zones manned (and ‘womanned’) by U.S. forces. Such casualties as have occurred this week seem to be simply due to the usual types of household and road accidents, and not armed conflict.

Unless the problem is solved quickly, the wars in Afghanistan and elsewhere will not be able to proceed, and the entire thrust of U.S. foreign policy will collapse amid a hail of ridicule from around the world. The President warned that unless the U.S. military can overcome “this pink tide of emotional pacifism and interpersonal distraction” that “clouds our national resolve to maintain the rigor of our thrusts in many sensitive vital areas,” the United States “will disappoint our many partners, who want us behind them” in their struggles “to secure a satisfying state.”

Despite such concern, the collapse of U.S. war-fighting efforts has received a worldwide happy reaction. A spokesman for the U.S. State Department dismisses this initial overseas positive reaction as “no doubt due to a lack of understanding about the true meaning of the situation, and on sober reflection foreign governments and populations will soon realize how dire the situation will be for them unless the U.S. military can return to its traditional role and stabilizing activities around the world.”

The Israeli government as well as a number of Kings and presidents of nations in the Middle East echoed this concern, pointing to it as “the major security issue” for their administrations, though the government of Iran and the general popular sentiment “on the street” throughout the region remained “rapturously gay” on the subject, as characterized by the Iranian press.

In a recording sent to Arab language media, a spokesman for Al Qaeda said that their franchises would certainly be on the lookout for any “homo-erotic infection of our cadres by the degenerate Crusader occupiers” nearby, and they would be quick to behead any Al Qaeda member who exhibited “this disease from the West.” A Tea Party congressional member of the Military Affairs Committee, commenting on the Al Qaeda communiqué, agreed with the idea claiming “it would do a world of good for the U.S. military to enforce a similarly high standard of moral discipline.” However, a recent poll of likely U.S. voters shows them to be cool to the idea of firing squad executions for military personnel court-martialed for purple passion mutineering (PPM), with 49% opposed, 34% in favor and 17% undecided.

The purple passion pacifism (3P) crisis that has collapsed U.S. war-fighting capability is still unresolved tonight, and the world waits with bated breath to see what will transpire. Never has the fate of the world been so precipitously punctuated by such a precarious period pendulous with perilous possibilities. Professor Algernon Illingworth, a retired Oxford don and aging classicist, quipped to British television reporters that we were “witnessing an inversion of Aristophanes’ Lysistrata.”

It was later reported that Illingworth was placed on a “no fly” list by U.S. anti-terrorism agencies, and a search was initiated for the operative code-named “Aristophanes Lysistrata” (dubbed “A-List” by the CIA, and who has not yet been identified but is expected to be detected soon and tracked by anti-terrorist imaging from space satellite, ATISS). Once identified, A-List’s web-purchasing accounts will be blocked to thwart terrorist activity. The work of freedom never rests.

Wherever they’re deployed, it’s the same. In Haiti, for example, where for the first time ever, an illegal MINUSTAH mission enforced coup d’etat authority against democratically elected President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, instead of staying out or backing his right to return.

It’s no better elsewhere. In the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), for example, where MONUC (renamed MONUSCO in July 2010) never brought peace and stability, and may be involved in reports of mass rapes and other atrocities. It wouldn’t be the first time there or elsewhere.

In December 2004, the London Times reported the following about DR Congo:

• UN staffers committed 150 or more sex crimes, including pornographic videos and photos, “now on sale in Congo;”
• two Russian pilots enlisted girls for sex in exchange for jars of mayonnaise;
• UN peacekeepers in Kisangani, on the Congo River, impregnated 141 Congolese women and girls; others were accused of rape;
• Congo’s Minister of Defense, Major General Jean Pierre Ondekane, told a top UN official that all peacekeepers in Kisangani would be remembered “for running after little girls,” not doing their job;
• at least two UN officials, a Ukrainian and Canadian, were forced out of DR Congo for impregnating local women;
• many other abuses involved sexual abuse and exploitation, involving sex trafficking and rape; and
• then UN Under-Secretary General for Peacekeeping Operations, Jean-Marie Guehenno, told the Times: “The fact that these things happen is a blot on us. It’s awful. What is important is to get to the bottom of it and fight it and make sure that people who do that pay for what they have done.”

Unfortunately sexual abuse, rape, and sex trafficking are more commonplace than occasional, wherever Blue Helmets are deployed.

On November 5, 2009, the London Independent published Bradley Klapper’s AP report headlined, “Fifty UN peacekeepers punished for sex abuses,” saying:

At least 50 were involved in “committing sexual abuses (and exploitation) on United Nations missions since 2007, the UN said today.” It’s the tip of the iceberg. Since the first June 1948 UNTSO mission after Israel’s “war of independence,” abuses occurred regularly in Bosnia, Kosovo, Sudan, Lebanon, Cambodia, Liberia, East Timor, Rwanda, Haiti, DR Congo, and elsewhere. Since 2007 through late 2009 alone, UN officials uncovered over 450 instances of misconduct. Imagine how many others weren’t reported, and abuses remain ongoing today.

In January 2009, Save the Children reported Blue Helmet abuses, including trading food for sex with girls as young as eight in Liberia, said also to go on in Burundi, Ivory Coast, East Timor, DR Congo, Cambodia, and Bosnia. Various other reports were similar, abuses including sex with young girls, rape and trafficking.

On July 16, 2009, IPS writer Marina Litvinsky headlined, “Rape by Regular Army a Growing Problem, HRW (Human Rights Watch) Says,” stating:

In DR Congo alone, “tens of thousands of women and girls have suffered horrific acts of sexual violence at the hands of the government army,” according to a new report, titled “Soldiers Who Rape, Commanders Who Condone: Sexual Violence and Military Reform in the Democratic Republic of Congo.” Little is done to stop it nor against culpable peacekeepers. As a result, Congolese women and girls are ravaged with impunity.

HRW’s report came two days after an Oxfam one about rampant sexual violence and abuse in 20 conflict-ridden North and South Kivu communities. As a result, people there live in constant fear of more attacks, vulnerable on their own. Congo’s MONUC head, Alan Doss, also took note, saying:

“We have also seen violence against women and girls in provinces that have been at peace for many years.” In large parts of the country, no one is safe.

On September 7, 2010, New York Times writer Neil MacFarquhar headlined, “UN Officials Say 500 Were Victims of Congo Rapes,” stating:

In July and August, they were raped in eastern Congo. Rebel and government troops were accused, involving girls as young as seven. Worse still, “Over 15,000 rapes were reported annually in both 2008 and 2009,” according to Atul Khare, deputy head of peacekeeping, omitting how many peacekeepers may be culpable, given how often later evidence shows it wherever they’re deployed.

On October 3, New York Times writer Jeffrey Gettleman headlined, “Mass Rapes in Congo Reveals UN Weakness,” saying:

Peacekeepers stood by as marauding rebels mass raped at least 200 women. “Despite more than 10 years (and) billions of dollars, the peacekeeping force still seems to be failing at its most elemental task: protecting people,” though left unsaid was why. It’s because their mission everywhere is for privilege and power, not people, especially when Black and impoverished.

According to Eve Ensler, author of The Vagina Monologues, “Congo is the UN’s crowning failure. If the women being raped were the daughters or wives or mothers of the power elites, I can promise you this war would have ended about 12 years ago.” Instead it continues to rape Congo of its resources as well as its women, easy pickings, including for peacekeepers.

On May 27, 2008, CNN reported that:

“Humanitarian aid workers and United Nations peacekeepers are sexually abusing small children in several war-ravaged and food-poor countries,” according to Save the Children.

“After interviewing hundreds of children, the charity said it found instances of rape, child prostitution, pornography, indecent sexual assault and trafficking of children for sex.” According to Jasmine Whitebread, Save the Children UK’s chief executive:

“It is hard to imagine a more grotesque abuse of authority or flagrant violation of children’s rights.”

As shocking is the “chronic under-reporting” of believed thousands more children suffering globally in silence, “too frightened to report the abuse, fearful” more will follow, and no one will confront their abusers.

Report on “UN Peacekeeping Economies and Local Sex Industries: Connections and Implications”

In September 2009, Kathleen M. Jennings and Vesna Nikolic-Rstanovic prepared the MICROCON (Micro Level Analysis of Violent Conflict) Research Working Paper 17 with the above title.

Examining Blue Helmet missions in Bosnia (UNMIBH), Kosovo (UNMIK), Liberia (UNMIL), and Haiti (MINUSTAH), the paper examined “the interplay between the peacekeeping economy and the sex industry, including domestic sex work, trafficking for sexual exploitation, and sex tourism.”

Despite claiming “zero tolerance,” UN officials haven’t stopped decades of serious peacekeeper-committed abuses. According to MICROCON:

It “suggests that the existence and potential long-term perpetuation of a highly gendered peacekeeping economy threatens to undermine, if not actively contradict, the goals and objectives to gender roles and relations that are generally an implicit or explicit component of most contemporary peace operations.”

Organized Sex Transactions in Peacekeeping Economies

Sexual exploitation is wide-ranging, including slavery and prostitution, what the UN calls “transactional sex,” peacekeepers very much involved. In countries like Bosnia and Kosovo, “domestic sex work and sex trafficking have become a seemingly permanent part of the” economy. Their peacekeeping missions affect both supply and demand, “effectively creating avenues (for) trafficking of women for sexual exploitation into/through these areas.”

Local women often can’t satisfy the demand so foreign ones from poor nations are imported to supplement. Bosnia and Kosovo “are consistent with other (countries where) the development and evolution of sex trafficking is a component of the overall expansion of the sex industry, which in turn is driven by militarism.”

Organized crime also gets involved. The prevalence of rape and sex slavery increases. Women and young girls are brutally exploited, and “documented cases of UN soldiers (show) that, far from helping the victims,” they become clients or otherwise implicated in the trade.

Former prisoners said they saw girls forced into UN vehicles and driven away. International military and civilian personnel are directly involved in the sex industry, including trafficking, a 2002 Turin Conference on Trafficking, Slavery and Peacekeeping report saying “peacekeepers are often part of the problem,” connected to organized crime, because human trafficking provides “an important revenue source.”

In addition, once established, the sex trade continues when peacekeepers leave, its effects permanent and destructive. MICROCON also asked if the link between peacekeeping economies and sex industries remains valid given claimed UN efforts against it. Yes, based on evidence and observations in Haiti and Liberia where the local sex trade and trafficking flourish, demand “generated by the peacekeeping economy.”

“The impact of the UN’s zero-tolerance policy on (Haitian and Liberian) sex industries… is debatable.” The policy is hard to enforce, harder with little or no effort made to do it. Further, it says nothing about the legality or illegality of the sex industry in countries with peacekeepers, and doesn’t try to regulate their types or nature. In fact, it can’t as it’s up to national or sub-national authorities, often corrupted and complicit.

“The critical issue — the environment that enables the commoditization of the sexual labor of local women, men, and children – is ignored, except insofar as mission personnel are prohibited from patronizing certain establishments,” or otherwise being involved. Yet, they do it anyway, the above evidence showing how pervasively and abusively.

Conclusions

MICROCON concluded, saying different peace missions have different gender mandates, goals, and objectives, despite UN Resolution 1325, calling for a gender perspective that includes the special needs and rights of women and girls. The ultimate goal is gender equality, nowhere near achieved.

“….there seems to be a fundamental mismatch between the (UN’s) goals… and its participation in and perpetuation of a peacekeeping economy that has concrete and often negative impacts on” local women and men. As a result, peacekeepers often undermine local economies, raising considerations about their effectiveness and real purpose.

UN officials acknowledge the problem, including its own personnel involved in committing sexually exploitive or abuse acts. Yet acknowledgement only highlights its “tendency to compartmentalize problems… rather than (address) symptoms of the larger political economy that it is unable or unwilling to deal with constructively.”

The UN’s zero tolerance policy is more rhetoric than effective policy, and won’t change fundamentals on the ground that include an informal and exploitable labor force, corruption and criminality, no accountability, and ongoing sex trade. As a result, UN peacekeepers are more corrosive and negative, not a positive influence where they’re deployed. They serve power, not local people needs, and that’s the crux of the problem UN authorities make no effort to address or correct.

Tidholm made several trips to the brothel during a three-year period to find out why sex is so important to men.

Paying the €5 entrance fee gives you access to all eleven floors. Over 700 men pass through the entrance of the brothel every day to enjoy the 150 women that work here. For only €30 you can get an orgasm on the first floor (the brothel even offers a money-back guarantee in case customers are unsatisfied). There are different themes on different floors. Dream about doing a nurse? Then you’ve come to the right place. Are you into Asian women? The fourth floor is theirs. You’ll find the transvestites on the seventh floor.

During daytime hours, Tidholm says, most of the people that make a visit to the brothel are businessmen, especially when big conferences and fairs take place in Cologne. Family men stop by late during the weekends, or on Monday mornings, after a tough week with the family.

We meet Sonia, a cute, dark-haired woman working at Pascha. It was very hard in the beginning, she admits, but eventually you “get used” to it. The job doesn’t make her feel bad about men (“men are men, you know”). Sonia believes that prostitution serves a purpose, that it prevents violence against women and children. In Romania, her country of origin, she was raped seven times.

“You don’t have to think it’s bad because if you think it’s bad you start crying, you get depressed,” she explains. It’s better for her to make a living by selling sexual favours than to be a murderer or thief. She wants to have a family in the future and by soliciting she can make some money. “I think this is the last thing that I wanted in this life.”

Sonia says that some men like to talk, and some even start to cry when telling her what it’s like at home. “What do you feel when they cry?” Tidholm asks. “Sometime I cry also. You feel compassion. You feel bad for them.”

We meet André, a fairly good-looking, German man. He recalls one time when he and his girlfriend spent a week at her parents’ home, during which they had to abstain from sex. Upon returning he was in the mood, she wasn’t. “I was so angry I said, ‘Okay, I’ll go to Pascha’.”

Of course, that’s not what he told is girlfriend: “I said I had to go to a meeting with my clients.”

He goes to the brothel once or twice a month. Most men change their behvaiour when they enter the brothel, André says. “They feel like a cowboy on the ranch. … They say, ‘Okay, I’m the boss, and these are all my girls’. That’s the reason why people are enjoying themselves.” He goes on explaining that there are two types of visitors. There are those who just want to fuck or get a blowjob and then leave. André himself belongs to the other category, those who want to party and have fun before getting to it.

When Svante Tidholm made his first visit to Pascha he found the place to be “abnormal, almost unreal.” But as time went by, he started to feel that he was the one who’s abnormal. Sad, yet understandable. Human beings can get used to almost anything. Everyone at the brothel defends prostitution. An employee thinks it’s simple: “When you feel your teeth hurt, you go to the dentist. And when you need sex, or just to talk to someone… you come here.” Needless to say, the men who visit the brothel don’t seem to give a second thought about what they’re doing to the women.

“A brothel is a symbol of how we try to solve a problem in society,” Tidholm says in the beginning of the documentary. “We have a lot of men with some sort of idea about sex that isn’t working particularly well. The brothel is an idea of how to solve this problem.” He adds that in the brothel—just like in the rest of society—it is women who are to take care of men.

Pascha is a place where these men can run away from their problems and their families, if only for a short while. The brothel symbolises a solution to a problem that isn’t a solution at all. In reality, it is a legal way for men to exploit women. But it also symbolises the failures of Western society where there’s equality on paper but not in real life. It symbolises the failures of the Left, which has fallen for the capitalist scam that exploitation and abuse is alright as long as the victim gets paid. And worst of all, legalising porn and prostitution tells men (and women) that it is fine to exploit others for your own personal needs.

Going to church no more makes you a Christian than sleeping in your garage makes you a car.

– Garrison Keiler

Do you ever wonder what Jesus would say about the sadistic cesspool that is swirling throughout the Catholic dysfunctional structure at tsunami speed? Unfortunately, since the New York Times drew attention to the issue in March, the answer to that is getting buried deeper each day under fresh accusations of child molestation, counter accusations, denials and sordid attempts at justification.

It’s been an eye-opener for those attempting to struggle through the damage-control rhetoric coming from the Catholic hierarchy — priests, cardinals, bishops — all running around in such a frenzy that only a guy like Boots Randolph can keep up with them.

Just days after the March 25 Times article by Laurie Goodstein revealing the church’s handling of sex abuse charges against Father Lawrence Murphy who was accused of abusing hundreds of deaf children at Milwaukee’s St. John’s School for the Deaf — Cardinal William J. Levada, who succeeded Pope Benedict XVI as prefect of the Vatican Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, was on her case. The National Catholic Reporter quotes Levada as saying that Goodstein and the Times were not after the truth; their prey was Pope Benedict himself…

She uses the technique of repeating the many escalating charges and accusations from various sources (not least from her own newspaper), and tries to use these ‘newly unearthed files’ as the basis for accusing the pope of leniency and inaction in this case and presumably in others,” Levada said. He then shrugged the entire matter aside, saying he did not “have time to deal with the Times’ subsequent almost daily articles by Rachel Donadio and others, much less with Maureen Dowd’s silly parroting of Goodstein’s ‘disturbing report.’

Then, back in the U.S., Brooklyn’s Bishop Nicholas DiMarzio jumped into the mix, telling his flock to “send a message loud and clear that the pope, our church and bishops and our priests will no longer be the personal punching bag of The New York Times.” But don’t boycott the paper, he admonished, because “we need to know what the enemy is saying.”

For weeks, they were in a frenzy. Bill Donahue, head of the Catholic League, pooh-poohed any crime committed or damage done to deaf children by Father Murphy. As Daniel Tencer wrote in Raw Story, Donahue stunned a panel of commentators on CNN’s Larry King Live show by insisting that homosexuality — not pedophilia — was the church’s problem…

“You’ve got to get your facts straight,” Donahue said, addressing sex abuse victim Thomas Roberts. “I’m sorry. If I’m the only one that’s going to deal with facts tonight then that’ll be it. The vast majority of the victims are post-pubescent. That’s not pedophilia, buddy. That’s homosexuality.”

On Easter Sunday, Cardinal Angelo Sodano, a Vatican official, denounced the “petty gossip” about sexual abuse of children, and said the Church would not be intimidated by spurious attacks on the Pope. Just two days earlier, on Good Friday, Reverend Raniero Cantalamessa, the papal household preacher, said the violent attacks on the church reminded him of the Jews, and such attacks were equal to anti-Semitism. However, because of the uproar, the Vatican quickly backed off that talking point.

The more they talk, the more apparent it becomes that the frocked molesters are the victims here, not the thousands of children forced into sexual bondage — children at the mercy of those chosen to protect them — with no help, no one to turn to. It’s obvious that if the kids had just kept their mouths shut; had honored their forced vows of silence, there would be no scandal threatening God’s House. Besides, didn’t folks know there is a statute of limitations on sin?

Even Pope Benedict, who said at the beginning of his papacy that he was just “a simple humble worker in the vineyard of the Lord,” appears unable to grasp the magnitude of the problem. Does the good Pope not see that the Lord’s vineyard is overgrown with weeds? It’s not just a priest here and there who should be removed to engage in a period of penitence and prayer as the Pope suggests. The scandal is sweeping the universe and, like the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, it appears to be uncontrollable. Cases continue to emerge, not just in the United States, but in Austria, Germany, Ireland, Holland, Switzerland, the Netherlands, France, and on and on…

There are those who say that others routinely abuse children, such as parents, teachers, medical personnel — even the Boy Scouts. It’s a “cultural” thing, they say — so what’s the big deal about the Catholic Church? Well, although raping a child is a sin (and a crime) no matter who does it, the Catholic Church claims to be holy — God’s own beacon of truth and light, with its moral authority authorized by Jesus Christ Himself. That’s a big deal.

I have always viewed the Catholic Church as an organization that does unbelievable good in this world on many levels. As Nicholas Kristof wrote recently in the New York Times:

In my travels around the world, I encounter two Catholic Churches. One is the rigid all-male Vatican hierarchy that seems out of touch when it bans condoms even among married couples where one partner is H.I.V.-positive. To me at least, this church — obsessed with dogma and rules and distracted from social justice — is a modern echo of the Pharisees whom Jesus criticized.

Yet there’s another Catholic Church as well, one I admire intensely. This is the grass-roots Catholic Church that does far more good in the world than it ever gets credit for. This is the church that supports extraordinary aid organizations like Catholic Relief Services and Caritas, saving lives every day, and that operates superb schools that provide needy children an escalator out of poverty.

This is the church of the nuns and priests in Congo, toiling in obscurity to feed and educate children. This is the church of the Brazilian priest fighting AIDS who told me that if he were pope, he would build a condom factory in the Vatican to save lives.

But these pedophile preachers have indelibly tarnished the image of the entire Church, as well as the reputations of those chosen to care for its children. It’s time for the empty accusations, excuses and justifications to stop. I agree with Stephen King, who wrote on page 922 of his latest thriller — Under the Dome — “When the Devil got a preacher, he was apt to fall low — low enough to put on a top hat and crawl under a rattlesnake.” Creatures who roam hallowed youth halls in the middle of the night like ravenous zombies are not Christian, and it is my personal belief that they are committing a sin for which there is no atonement.

Some are saying, with justification, that Pope Benedict and the Catholic hierarchy are weary and confused. Perhaps they should ask Jesus what HE thinks about all of this, for Jesus said…

Matthew 18:6 — But whoso shall offend one of these little ones which believe in me, it were better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and that he were drowned in the depth of the sea.

Mark 9:42 — And whosoever shall offend one of these little ones that believe in me, it is better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and he were cast into the sea.

Luke 17:2 — It were better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and he cast into the sea, than that he should offend one of these little ones.

Case closed.

For that matter, Walgreen’s is also gay, along with Home Depot, and the entire Presbyterian and Unitarian Universalist Church. In fact, according to the wide ranging assortment of corporate sponsorships backing the crowds and displays at this year’s 30th Annual Pride Day parade in Phoenix on April 17th, being gay is as American as well … the Bank of America.

Unofficial police figures estimate that the crowd for the long-running multi-day Phoenix Pride event at Indian School Park would be over 30,000 and did not dispute that spectators along the parade route and/or participating in the parade that morning exceeded 5,000. When you are talking economies of that scale, many a business is willing to try bi-.

Like Starbucks, there’s a gay on every corner these days and he is not checking out your butt, merely questioning your sorry fashion sense. But the Starbucks at this year’s Pride Day had a guy in a Star Wars storm trooper suit, gave away free coffee, and raised funds to build a water well in Uganda. You know, Uganda? The country where the American right-wing has sent lobbyists to attempt to convince the Ugandan government to make homosexuality a crime punishable by death. If that’s the kind of courage that comes from being queer, I hope we all get gay.

And the morning of the Pride Day parade it seems like it — like all of Phoenix could be happy and gay all at once. For a small town reporter in a pink shirt carrying a moderately clever but clearly heart-felt sign, my first trip to a Pride Day parade had me walking with a mince and I was definitely gay to have finished the parade route with only moderate chaffing.

Dozens, I’m serious, dozens of people queer as folk jumped out of the crowds that lined the parade route to get their picture taken with my sign that read, “With Liberty and Justice for All” in rainbow color painted by children.

And I wore the pink shirt to identify with Phoenix Code Pink, which also must be gay. If not, they’d call it “Phoenix Code Some Super-Butch Color to Appear Exaggeratedly Macho.” If Code Pink’s stated agenda, “Troops coming home from all wars” is gay, then I’m gay for that.

These days over on the Tea Party end of the American Main-street there is a lot of talk about a gay agenda. But that morning the closest thing I saw to gay agenda was when these two schedules stuck together front to back.

The queer nation mentality, however, was widely displayed on parade. No wonder the right-wingers were worried. They want to do ridiculous things like love their children unconditionally, dress outlandishly, and love unlimitedly. They wanted to throw darts, hug a lot, and listen to dance music. They wanted to end wars. They wanted to wear fashion disasters that did not involve blue, white, and red — with stars.

And I will tell ya, after some of the train wreck fashion statements I gasped at picketing the Glen Beck rally at the Jobing Arena the week before, I am clear that being around all that gayness left me feeling a lot happier. Glen Beck and his crowd are decidedly not very gay. In fact, they’re not happy at all. And they have reason to be worried and not that the soap gets slippery in the shower sometimes. Turns out that despite all his strident pandering, and all their saber rattling, the newest New York Times poll only gives the Tea Party 18% of the electorate.

Over at Beck’s rally the people yelled at me that “we need to the kill the commies,” when they read my protest sign for the Beck event that read “Insure Domestic Tranquility/Provide for the Common Defense/ These are the Real American Values.” The continuing effrontery and foolish arrogance displayed in a typical encounter with a tea partier has me wondering if the reason the 18th century minded White American males are fighting tooth and nail against change is because they have every right to be afraid of revenge? That they know they have acted like jerks?

On the other hand at the Pride Day Parade, people I didn’t know kept running up to me, hugging me and yelling, “Happy Pride!” On Pride Day, this supposed sexually deviant LGBT sin-fest, the worst that happened was I got lei-ed by a family of three, complete with bicycle built for two, who carried signs that read, “We love our children unconditionally,” with hand-rain bowed Os. Their 6 year old’s sign said, “I love my Gay sister and brother.”

You choose.

No. Glen Beck’s behind the times. It’s no wonder America has gone gay, just like America is already Black and is next to swiftly turn Hispanic. In the land where Manifest Destiny once meant a Christian god meant Indian murder and everyone took it in the shorts, at the 30th annual Pride Day parade both the cowboys driving the Wells-Fargo stage and the Navajo Indians (as represented by Ms Indian Transgender, 2010-2011, Kristel Lee) were merely having fun together (some of the best “being gay” to be had and all). And I bet you already thought of biker clubs and classic car clubs were gay? Well, at the Pride Day, the crowd of those types of guys were truly jolly; though you may not want to say, “Hey, gay guy we love you!” to every biker or car nut you see.

Still all joking aside, like the shirt on the chest of my favorite drag king, Fox Malone, read, “Queer rights are civil rights.” Or the sign carried by a member of PFLAG: “I hope one day my children will live in a world or acceptance without feeling afraid or rejected.” I feel the same way about my kids and they’re straight. That’s as American as loving a hotdog or a slice of pie. The sticker the Stonewall Democrats distributed that day best crystallized the meaning of the morning in three words: “Equal Means Equal.”

Of course, when it comes to buying a part in a long-time big time annual downtown pageant that dares to dream all Americans have equal rights and are not only tolerated, but embraced, lots of folks are ready to buy in to selling some dreaming. Gay America is bought and sold America just like everything else these days, except with cuter models.

Macy’s has long backed parades with big balloons, but generally not with this many fishnet hose on so many of the men who held the strings. But if you don’t believe me, check my Facebook photos. (That’s right, I’m inviting you to friend me and check my pics of pecs and pickled people in every color of the Rainbow and generally several at once on a sunny Saturday morning in Phoenix.)

On Pride Day, however, corporate and academic America simply see Americans and their dollars in action. Bank of America’s gays’ green spends just as gaily as at US Airways’ or at ASU. ASU Gay? A fact the folks from U of A have been rumoring about for years. And, just saying, there has got to be some joke available about juxtaposition of the words “gay” and “Cox” (as in Cox Cable, yet another corporate sponsor); but I am sure you have already thought of some.

New Orleans’ Black and transgender community members and advocates complain of rampant and systemic harassment and discrimination from the city’s police force, including sexual violence and arrest without cause. Activists hope that public outrage at recent revelations of widespread police violence and corruption offer an opportunity to make changes in police behavior and practice.

On a recent weekday evening, a group of transgender women met in the Midcity offices of Brotherhood Incorporated, an organization that provides health care and fights the spread of HIV and AIDS in low-income Black communities. When the conversation turned to the police, the mood in the room turned to outrage, as each woman had a story of harassment and abuse. Tyra Fields, a health worker who facilitates the meeting, told a story of being arrested without cause one night as she walked into a gay bar. “They never give us a reason they are arresting us,” she says, explaining that being Black and transgendered is often enough reason for arrest, generally on prostitution-related charges.

A young and soft-spoken transgendered woman named Keyasia tells a story of being persecuted by police who followed her as she walked down the street, rushed into her apartment, and arrested her in her own home. “Within the last four or five months, I’ve been to jail eight or nine times,” says Keyasia. “All for something I didn’t do. Because I’m a homosexual, that means I’m a prostitute in their eyes.” Expressing the frustration in the room, she adds, “I want to go to the French Quarter and hang out and have cocktails just like everyone else. Why can’t I?”

Diamond Morgan, another of the women, says she has faced a pattern of harassment from police that begins, she says, “Once they discover my transgender status.” She says she has been arrested and sexually assaulted by police and by employees of Orleans Parish Prison, who are part of New Orleans Office of Criminal Sheriff. She details her own personal experience of assault, and those of friends, adding that Orleans Parish Prison is a site that many women she knows speaks of as especially abusive. She says that sexual assault of transgender women is common at the jail, and other women in the room agree.

Tracy Brassfield, a transgender sex worker activist also attending the meeting, has dedicated herself to fighting against discrimination. Originally from Florida, Brassfield moved to New Orleans because she fell in love with the city. “But when I got here,” she says, “I started running into problems with the police.” These problems included what Brassfield calls deliberate harassment from officers who she says are targeting Black transgender women not because of any crime they’ve committed, but just because of who they are. “They say, you’re transgendered, you’re a fag, you’re a punk, you’re going to jail,” she says.

Brassfield decided to fight back and organize: “I was raised in an activist family,” she says. “I know my civil rights.” She has contacted local social justice and legal advocacy organizations such as Women With A Vision, Critical Resistance, the ACLU of Louisiana, and the Orleans Public Defenders, seeking allies in her struggle. She has also reached out in the community of transgender women. “My thing is put it out there, get it exposed,” she explains. “This is not just about me, this is about everyone.”

Patterns of Violence

Both local and national attention is currently being directed on the New Orleans Police Department (NOPD). In recent months, the city has been rocked by revelations of police murder and cover-ups, with the justice department and FBI investigating at least eight separate cases, and signs that the federal government is headed towards a takeover of the department. Mayor-elect Mitch Landrieu is engaged in a national search for a new police chief, telling reporters that the department needs “a complete culture change.”

Although the current federal investigations have not looked into police treatment of the Black and transgender community, advocates hope that the justice department will also look into these complaints.

Members of the city’s larger gay community complain about unwarranted arrests and a criminalization of sexuality, with police specifically targeting bars in the gay community. “If a gay man wants consensual sex, the undercover officer lies and says money was offered,” says John Rawls, a gay civil rights attorney who has spent decades in New Orleans fighting on these issues.

Advocates and community members also say that once gay men, transgender women are arrested for offering sex, they are more likely than others arrested in similar circumstances to be charged with a “crime against nature,” a felony charge. The law, which dates back to 1805, makes it a crime against nature to engage in “unnatural copulation” — a term New Orleans police and the district attorney’s office have interpreted to mean soliciting for anal or oral sex. Those who are convicted under this law are issued longer jail sentences and forced to register as sex offenders. They must also carry a driver’s license with the label “sex offender” printed on it. The women’s health care organization Women With A Vision has recently formed a coalition with several advocacy and legal organizations to attempt to fight this use of the sex offender law.

Stories of Abuse

Wendi Cooper, a Black and transgender health care worker, was charged under the law almost ten years ago. Although Cooper only tried prostitution very briefly and has not tried it again since her arrest, she still faces harassment from the police. She is frequently stopped, and when they run her ID through the system and find out about the prostitution charge, they threaten to arrest her again or sometimes, she alleged, they demand sex.

“Police will see that I been to jail for the charge,” she said. “And then they’ll try to have me, forcefully, sexually…One I had sex with, because I didn’t want to go to jail.”

Thinking about her experiences with police over the years, Cooper got quiet. “Sometimes I just wanna do something out the ordinary, and just expose it, you know?” She sighed. “They hurt me, you know? And I just hope they do something about it.”

In response to the allegations of abuse, New Orleans Police Department spokesman Bob Young responded, “Persons are charged according to the crime they commit.” He encouraged anyone with complaints to come file them with the department, adding, “the NOPD has not received any complaints against plain clothes officers assigned to the vice squad.”

The New Orleans Office of Criminal Sheriff did not respond to requests for comment. However, a September 2009 report from the US Department of Justice (DOJ) found that, “conditions at OPP violate the constitutional rights of inmates.” The DOJ went on to report; “Inmates confined at OPP are not adequately protected from harm, including physical harm from excessive use of force by staff.” And documented “a pattern and practice of unnecessary and inappropriate use of force by OPP correctional officers.” This included “several examples where OPP officers openly engaged in abusive and retaliatory conduct, which resulted in serious injuries to prisoners. In some instances, the investigation found, the officers’ conduct was so flagrant it clearly constituted calculated abuse.”

Abuse Starts at Young Age

Wesley Ware, a youth advocate at Juvenile Justice Project of Louisiana, says that harassment against those who are perceived as gay or gender noncomforming begins at a young age, and can include hostility from their parents, fellow students, and often from school staff. According to Ware, this leads many of these youths to bring weapons to school to defend themselves. “Gay and bisexual boys and young men are four times more likely to carry a weapon to school,” he says. “Of homeless youth, 50% identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender. Of kids in youth detention, 13% are LGBT.” Ware adds that many of these youth face an unsympathetic court, including judges who think that they will help “cure” gay youth by sending them to juvenile detention. “Ninety nine percent of the kids in youth detention in New Orleans are black,” adds Ware. “So obviously what we’re talking about is youth of color.”

“This community is facing systemic discrimination in pretty much every system they deal with,” says Emily Nepon, a staff member of the Sylvia Rivera Law Project, a legal organization that fights for transgender racial and economic justice. According to Nipon, women in this community deal with intersecting forms of oppression. “High levels of employment discrimination, housing discrimination, overpolicing, profiling that leads to higher incarceration rates, and higher levels of abuse within prisons.”

Mayor elect Mitch Landrieu calls criminal justice one of his signature issues. But will he be willing or able to try to change the culture of the New Orleans police? Advocates say change will not come easy. “You can do a million police trainings,” adds Nepon. “But, in general, that doesn’t have an impact on rampant police homophobia.”

Many advocates believe federal oversight can make a difference in these patterns of police abuse. They are also pressing for an end to the use of the Crime Against Nature statute, as well as a general shift from charging people with nonviolent offenses. Attorney John Rawls, who is generally supportive of current Orleans Parish District Attorney, Leon Cannizzaro, believes the DA understands that the current use of the sex offender statute invites discrimination.

However, adds Rawls, it will be hard to get his office to stop charging people under the statute. “People who hold powerful offices have many motives, and one of them is they love being powerful,” he says. “Prosecutors get their power from criminal statutes. The more statutes they have, the more ways they can prosecute someone, the more power they have.” If activists are going to challenge this power, they will need to utilize the current public outrage for far-reaching reforms, says Rawls.

Back at the meeting at the Brotherhood Incorporated offices, Brassfield urges women to stand up and fight back. “We need to document,” she says. “What you want to do is illustrate a pattern of harassment and abuse.” She hands out flyers and phone numbers for Women With A Vision, Critical Resistance, and a sympathetic lawyer. “We have to look out for each other,” she says. “I want to organize, just what we’re doing now. The girls got to stick together.”

Or what if you warned of an incoming brave new world? Would your claim be greeted with consternation or contentment? With a “this is f’d up” or by a coffee shop subscriber to the Democratic Party claiming: “Oh, a brave new world would be so peaceful and harmonious. Mmm, yes  — I’m so liberal,” while sipping on cappuccino and glancing at the New York Times, just for effect.

Well, in this century of change you can rest easy, for you might not scare off your friends so easily by fearing that 1984 or a brave new world seems to have shown up in the last two years of the first decade of the 21st century. In fact, they might indeed share many of your concerns. Whether or not they have the capacity to care is a different discussion.

Some of the most astute western authors of satire over the 20th century have, for many, turned out in today’s climate as just that: naive. This, to be sure, is hardly a result of their own imaginative shortcomings, but more-so the awesome totality by which three dimensional renderings of their dystopic and fantastic settings, arguably on a much grander scale, have been translated into reality. 

I’m not writing on the way in which the blue screen life, where, from nine months old, images on television and in the movies transpose loaded symbols and ideas on us, has out done past forms entertainment and media handed us by the consciousness industries. Instead, I am calling George Orwell, Aldus Huxley, and Kurt Vonnegut out for their naiveté! I mean, when do we start up the debate about what “post-Orwellian” looks like?

Yes, Hollywood has captured the imagination and directed the cognitive orientation of a great many people. And, in fact, the general attitude of recent Hollywood films has been quite catastrophic and pessimistic. Maybe the violent flux in the markets has taken the studios for a fatal roller coaster ride, on which those who end up holding on the longest might inherit a radical oligopoly or, what’s more, a monopoly in the consciousness industry. At the same time as studio collective output seems certain to fall by one-third, its biggest films feature extraordinarily austere dreamscapes.¹

The film District 9 centers on an alien race stranded above Johannesburg, South Africa. Eventually, the humans get to talking and they decide (I don’t recall a vote) to board the ship.  The aliens inside are a pitiable lot, suffering from sickness and malnourishment. The humans label the aliens Prawns (perhaps an extraterrestrial version of Orwell’s Proles) and forcibly relocate them to the overcrowded and militarized District 9. The area is policed by Multi-Nation United (MNU), a private military industrial corporation.

The man in charge of the re-location operation, der Merwen, is exposed to an alien engineered substance which begins changing him into an alien. He is taken to a hospital where it is revealed that one of his arms has transformed into an alien arm. They take him to a MNU laboratory, where unethical scientific experiments are conducted on Prawns, and force him through torture in order to test fire alien weapons. Through the years of testing, MNU discovers that the alien weaponry is bio-engineered so that only beings with correct DNA are capable of using the weapons. Because der Merwen matches such DNA criteria, the multi-national decides to harvest his body for organs while he is alive as a means of reproducing his DNA structure and developing a method of bio-engineering other humans so as to be able to use the alien weapons.

Before he is dissected, der Merwen escapes. His body, however, has become an important asset to MNU. As a part of the manhunt, the corporate controlled media uses incessantly a portrait of his face, claiming that he has acquired a sexually transmitted disease that they say resulted from intercourse he had with an alien.

Whether or not the alien was consenting is not revealed. It is safe to say, that it would be hard to catch an alien and then have intercourse with it.

Additionally, 3-D films took the box office by storm early in 2010. These films, which seem innocent enough, bring audiences literally into the film’s setting. Instead of peering in on a two-dimensional world, from which there exists a specific disconnect and therefore a comparatively scant blending of reality and fiction, audiences exist within the 3-D film. In the future, expect audiences to go see three dimensional renderings of war and other forms of extreme violence, which will be happening all around them, not just in front of them, thereby normalizing the carnage. Similarly invasive, one marketing device used for the District 9 was advertisements on city benches, stating “Bus bench for humans only.” In this day-and-age, media transcends the screen and takes its seat in our daily lives.

Even if Hollywood has outdone the books of the 20th century to portray the world crumbling, nobody has done a better job than that of the policy planners themselves — known as technocrats — who turn the screws above politics.

To give these classic authors due credit, many of these social engineering technocrats admire, or admired, their work. Early last year, for example, the Queen of England gifted Felipe Calderon, President of Mexico, a first edition of George Orwell’s classic, 1984.²

The next year, Barack Obama tipped his hat to George Orwell while giving his acceptance speech for the Nobel Peace Prize. President Obama, it turns out, is multilingual, with quite the proficiency in Doublespeak:

The instruments of war do have a role to play in preserving the peace,” that “all responsible nations must embrace the role that militaries with a clear mandate can play to keep the peace,” and that imperialist troops should be honored “not as makers of war, but as wagers of peace.³

Remember: down is the new up.

Orwell despised totalitarian governments. In Animal Farm, he attacked collectivism and Stalinism. In 1984, he helped us to imagine the definitive totalitarian bureaucracy stooped in force and force only. Any orthodoxy, he believed, could be taken to an extreme version of itself, and give rise to a despotic world system. He warned us of the future: “If you ever want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face…forever.”

But, it seems, the Queen might have interpreted the work a bit differently than most, and President Obama incorporated the morals into his own life a bit too literally. Maybe Kurt Vonnegut was on to something when he stated: “There is a tragic flaw in our precious Constitution, and I don’t know what can be done to fix it. This is it: Only nut cases want to be president.” 

The Queen and a coterie of like-minded global elites — President Obama included —have seemed to see the book more as a template from which to borrow than a warning about a historical movement hell-bent on centralization and domination. For them, Orwell’s novel is a blueprint by which to mold the future.  Her country has been dubbed the closed-circuit TV camera capital of the world, with more than 5 million cameras recording the everyday lives of the average Brit.⁴ Recently, the government announced plans to install 20,000 of these cameras inside private homes so as to make sure kids are doing their homework, getting to bed early and eating their vegetables. The British “nanny state” seems to be growing bitter and crockety in her old age.⁵

From 1984:

Whether he went on with the diary, or whether he did not go on with it, made no difference. The Thought Police would get him just the same. He had committed — would still have committed, even if he had never set pen to paper — the essential crimes that contained all others in itself. Thoughtcrime, they called it. Thoughtcrime was not a thing that could be concealed forever.

In this age of social networking, private daily diaries have been replaced by online profiles. On Facebook, where people’s daily actions, thoughts and relationships are catalogued — sometimes on a daily basis — the CIA and FBI use ads, tailored to individual users, to recruit. To think they also aren’t using social networking sites for intelligence gathering purposes would — you know, considering the twentieth century — be really stupid.

One big difference between Orwell’s dystopia and the present reality is the abundance of worthy news mediums on the internet. While the corporate-controlled media sees its ratings tank, alternative news programs and websites celebrate a ballooning in their audiences. Steps towards dubbing bloggers as terrorists, however, have many worried that internet freedom is under a sustained attack.⁶

The US already data mines blogs as a means of finding terrorists in order to prevent a terrorists attack. They have developed massive computer systems, capable of collective stupefying amounts of data, to help them in this endeavor. American internet providers have indeed helped foreign countries to jail bloggers for posting undesired content on their blogs. Just a couple of examples: Microsoft shut down the website of a dissident Chinese blogger, and Yahoo provided Beijing the name of a dissident Chinese journalist, who received ten years in jail for his web postings.⁷

In the United Kingdom and European Union, efforts to regulate the internet focus on persons who use the internet to spread propaganda. A rather dubious concept, the word propaganda, itself, could mean, well, just about anything. You are, after all, being propagandized this very second, aren’t you?

Although brain scanners have yet to be rolled out on a large scale, they do seem to be a natural progression from body scanners, which represent virtual strip searches for everybody who wishes to board a plane. Not to mention a nice shot of radiation, certainly a danger to frequent travelers. By the way, the brain scanners, known as the Malintent system, have been designed and are in their test phase.⁸

In Aldus Huxley’s Brave New World, mass use of the drug soma is used to ensure a “stable” citizenry, who conform readily to societal norms. From Brave New World:

“Stability,” said the Controller, “stability. No civilization without social stability. No social stability without individual stability.”

In 2007, according to Medco’s Health Solutions Inc., 51% of American children and adults were using one or more prescription drugs for a chronic condition, most of which are taken daily. Medication use for chronic problems was seen in all demographics: Almost two-thirds of women 20 and older; one in four children and teenagers; 52% of adult men; three out of four people 65 or older.

Further, the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry has apparently uncovered a new sort of disease: Oppositional Defiant Disorder — known by parents and children everywhere as temper tantrum and/or growing up. Symptoms include:

• Frequent temper tantrums
• Excessive arguing with adults
• Often questioning rules
• Active defiance and refusal to comply with adult requests and rules
• Deliberate attempts to annoy or upset people
• Blaming others for his or her mistakes or misbehavior
• Often being touchy or easily annoyed by others
• Frequent anger and resentment
• Mean and hateful talking when upset
• Spiteful attitude and revenge seeking⁹

The academy cites medication as a possible solution for this new and vexing problem. “Because I told you so,” might actually start working on your children! Now, that’s stability.

In Brave New World, “everyone belongs to everyone else.” Citizens of the brave new world are conditioned to be sexually promiscuous: everyone is expendable. Although, in the real world, many young people celebrate the joys of sexual liberation, Huxley outlined the way in which sexual promiscuity cheapens love. Sex appeal in advertising, a ubiquitous marketing tool, promotes a non-romantic and promiscuous sort of love: screw like rabbits, don’t settle down with a partner for life. Also, don’t have children, because babies are carbon monsters and the world is over-populated.

Double-think

Well, maybe not — just get an abortion. That will take care of the so-called “carbon problem.” Take that, carbon based life!

In 2008, More magazine polled 2,000 young women about their sex lives. The magazine found that one in four young, British women has slept with more than 10 people, whereas only one in five men have matched that “impressive” tally. Half of those questioned revealed that they had been unfaithful.¹⁰

The editor of More, Lisa Smosarski, said: “Our results show that after decades of lying back and thinking of England, today’s twenty-something women are taking control of their sex lives and getting what they want in bed.”

The majority of young women are losing their virginity at 16. Seven out of 10 said they had had a one-night stand, and 60 percent said they would “kiss-and-tell” or sell their account of a one-night stand with a famous person for 20,000 pounds. You see, people are expendable.

According to the study, young women are taking large risks with their health. 38 percent do not use a condom with a new partner and 16 percent have contracted a sexually transmitted disease.

But, are these young women really “getting what they want in bed,” as Ms. Smosarski claimed. The respondents said they are not having as much sex as they would like, with 13 percent claiming their love life is “disappointing.”

Cheap jokes about male ineptitudes in the sack aside, it seems that “sexually liberated” attitudes might not be fulfilling people as some persons would like to think they might. If sex with multiple partners — on average three times a week, says the survey — is not fulfilling these young women, then why do they prefer to do it five times a week? Is sex being used as a means to escape? Is screwing serving as much as a distraction as Must See Television? Plus, once you get bored, you can always just change the channel for some new and instant gratification.

From Kurt Vonnegut’s Player Piano,
                                                   

Here it was again, the most ancient of roadforks, one that Paul had glimpsed before, in Kroner’s study, months ago. The choice of one course or the other had nothing to do with machines, hierarchies, economics, love, age. It was a purely internal matter. Every child older than six knew the fork, and knew what the good guys did here, and what the bad guys did here. The fork was a familiar one in folk tales the world over, and the good guys and the bad guys, whether in chaps, breechclouts, serapes, leopardskins, or banker’s gray pinstripes, all separated here.

Bad guys turned informer. Good guys didn’t — no matter when, no matter what.Here it was again, the most ancient of roadforks, one that Paul had glimpsed before, in Kroner’s study, months ago. The choice of one course or the other had nothing to do with machines, hierarchies, economics, love, age. It was a purely internal matter. Every child older than six knew the fork, and knew what the good guys did here, and what the bad guys did here. The fork was a familiar one in folk tales the world over, and the good guys and the bad guys, whether in chaps, breechclouts, serapes, leopardskins, or banker’s gray pinstripes, all separated here. Bad guys turned informer. Good guys didn’t  —  no matter when, no matter what.

While there are valuable truths to arguments both for and against the “them vs. us” view of the world, those days do come in history when we have to choose between a well-defined right and wrong.

Today in the United States, more than 23,000 persons from private industry work also with the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security. This rapidly growing group, InfraGard, receive secret warnings regarding terrorists threats before the public, and sometimes even before elected officials. All they have to do is provide information to the government. InfraGard members also have permission to “shoot to kill” in case of martial law.¹¹

Maybe it is a good idea to hold off on those cubicle decorations you were saving up for, and get it bullet-proofed first

1. Pilkington, Ed. “Hollywood film output likely to fall by a third.” Guardian, 18 October 2009.
2. “Mexico’s president given George Orwell’s 1984 by the Queen.” Telegraph, 20 March 2009.
3. Obama Nobel Prize Speech.
4. O’Neill Brendan. “Watching you watching me.” New Statesman, 02 October 2006.
5. “Britain: CCTV Surveillance into Thousands of British Homes.” Global Research, 31 July 2009.
6. Pareene Alex. “Government Declares Bloggers Potential Terrorists!” Gawker.
7. “Bush Tags Bloggers as Terrorists.” Patriot Daily News Clearinghouse via Daily Kos, 12 February 2006.
8. Elsworth, Catherine. “New airport screening ‘could read minds.’” Telegraph, 23 September 2008.
9. American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry. Children with Oppositional Defiant Disorder, June 2009.
10. Beckford, Martin. “Young women ‘have more sexual partners’ than men.” Telegraph, 08 December 2008.
11. Rothschild, Mathew. “Will NorthCom Takeover in Swine Flu Outbreak?” The Progressive, 29 April 2009.

Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle
By Chris Hedges
Hardcover: 232 pages
Publisher: Nation Books (2009)
ISBN: 9781568584379

If you’re looking for one of those treacly Oprah books—The Secret, and its variants—avoid this one. Those books nourish like potato chips and leave most people more confused, more desperate, more thirsty for fantasies than before. No amount of wishing, earnest yearning, visualizing and New Age mysticism is going to get us out of the morass we’re in. In Empire of Illusion, Chris Hedges takes a sober look down our hall of distorting mirrors. The son of a minister, with a degree in theology from Harvard, a columnist for Truthdigger.com, Hedges has worked as a foreign correspondent in Central America, the Middle East, Africa and the Balkans. His books include War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning and American Fascists. He was part of the New York Times team that won the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for the paper’s coverage of global terrorism. Here are some of the pertinent facts he contemplates:

• The top 1% of Americans now control more wealth than the bottom 90% combined.
• World-wide porn revenues, including in-room movies at hotels, sex clubs, and the Internet, topped $97 billion in 2006—more than that of Microsoft, Google, Amazon, eBay, Yahoo!, Apple, Netflixs, and EarthLink combined.
• The football coach is the University of California-Berkeley’s highest paid “employee”; he makes about $3 million a year. Nationwide, full-time faculty positions have been disappearing, replaced by adjunct positions, with itinerant instructors barely making living wages.
• Collapsing and overwhelmed sewage systems release more than 40,000 discharges of raw sewage into our drinking water, streams and homes each year.
• One-third of our schools are in such a severe state of disrepair that it interferes with the delivery of instruction.
• We spend $8.9 billion on ICBM missile defense systems that would be useless in stopping a shipping container concealing a dirty bomb.
• A family of 4 now pays about $12,000 a year in premiums for healthcare—up about 90 percent from 2000 to 2006. About 50 million Americans are uninsured; another 25 million are “under-insured.”
• We have 2.3 million of our citizens behind bars. With less than 5% of the world’s popultion, we have 25% of the world’s prisoners (1/2 for non-violent drug crimes).

Any wonder there’s been a flight to fantasy? But, more profoundly, what’s the connection between fantasy and our decaying culture? How did we get here? Digging beneath the statistics, we find an increasing number of warm-blooded humans suffering like they never have before: lost in a world of promises broken; the American Dream of endless consumption and fulfillment–nightmarishly evinced.

“A culture that cannot distinguish between reality and illusion dies,” Hedges writes. “And we are dying now. … Those who cling to fantasy in times of despair and turmoil inevitably turn to demagogues and charlatans to entertain and reassure them. …” As bad as things are now—the disconnectedness, fragmentation, loneliness, im- and a-morality–we can extrapolate, interpret the trend lines, read history, and find worse to come. Hedges dissects “our cultural embrace of illusion and the celebrity culture that has risen up around it” in five comprehensive chapters:

   The Illusion of Literacy
   The Illusion of Love
   The Illusion of Wisdom
   The Illusion of Happiness
   The Illusion of America

At his best, Hedges has a “true” journalist’s (i.e., the careful observer’s, the truth-digger’s) eye for detail, and a novelist’s ear and sense of flow. His book is a compilation of some of the best thinking on corporate power, the Corporate State, the decline of the American empire—deftly knitted together with wit and a lively writing style. (His chapter on the “Illusion of Love,” focusing on pornography, is both funny and poignantly sad.)

Empire begins with spectacle. We’re in a wrestling ring with jeering fans chanting at the villainous “tycoon” actor-wrestler, John Bradshaw Layfield: “You suck! You suck! You suck!” Layfield is pitted against the “Heartbreak Kid,” the crowd favorite, a working-class hero. “You lost your 401(k). You lost your retirement. … You lost your children’s education fund,” Layfield taunts the Kid and the audience. Then, he offers the Kid a job—working for him! All the Kid has to do is leave the ring. Humiliated, that’s just what the Kid does. And in their identification with their fallen hero, in their vicarious humiliation, the anger and resentment of the audience is stoked against the tycoon. They hunger for vengeance.

“The bouts are stylized rituals,” Hedges writes, “public expressions of pain and a fervent longing for revenge. The lurid and detailed sagas behind each bout, rather than the wrestling matches themselves, are what drive crowds to a frenzy. … And the most potent story tonight, the most potent story across North America, is one of financial ruin … and enslavement of a frightened and abused working class.” This mirroring of the “ emotional wreckage of the fans” is the “appeal of much of popular culture, from Jerry Springer to ‘reality television’ to Oprah Winfrey.” It succeeds “because we ask to be fooled.”

Celebrities become our “vicarious selves” who provide us with release from anonymity and drudgery—“ultimate fulfillment before death.”

Given his background, its no small wonder that Hedges would spend much of his book wrestling with the angel. “Morality is the product of a civilization,” he writes; but, in “a society that has less and less national cohesion, a society that has broken down into warlike and antagonistic tribes where ‘winning is all that matters,’ morality is seen as ‘irrelevant.’”

Ours is a culture of manipulation, one of “inverted totalitaianism.” Hedges borrows the phrase from Sheldon S. Wolin’s Democracy Incorporated. “Inverted totalitarianism,” Hedges writes, “unlike classical totalitarianism, does not revolve around a demagogue or charismatic leader. It finds expression in the anonymity of the Corporate State. It purports to cherish democracy, patriotism, and the Constitution while manipulating internal levers. … Political candidates are elected in popular votes by citizens, but candidates must raise staggering funds to compete. They are beholden to armies of corporate lobbyists … who author the legislation. … Corporate media control nearly everything we read, or hear. It imposes a bland uniformity of opinion. It diverts us with trivia and celebrity gossip. …In classical totalitarian regimes … economics was subordinate to politics.” In America, economics is dominant.

“The fantasy of celebrity culture is not designed simply to entertain. It is designed to keep us from fighting back.” We need not stretch ourselves, I imagine. The hero of The Matrix will stretch for us. So will Plastic Man or Batman or Superman. In our culture of distractions and manipulations, Aldous Huxley “feared that what we love will ruin us.” Citing Neil Postman, he reproduces a dialectic between the authors of 1984 and Brave New World:

What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared that the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance.

I put it this way: We need not worry that Big Brother is watching us; we need worry about our dual fascinations with watching Big Brother—and with being watched! In fact, we’ve become a nation of double voyeurs: we watch people on “reality shows” who are being watched and monitored by the unblinking camera recording their humdrum lives.

We are what we eat and we’ve been eating a lot of baloney. It comes to us in various forms including the petrochemical-sprayed food we eat, the Big Pharma pills we take to keep us drugged, numb and complaisant. We watch our celebs gulping it and pitching it back at us. Our politicians sprinkle it with mustard and daub it with relish.

Conditioning. … Both those geniuses—George and Aldous–were trying to deal with it: the whole spectrum of the Propaganda State grown up around the theories of Edward Bernays—Freud’s nephew. They both understood the necessary concomitants of fear, repetition, tribal identity and group conformity. They gave it different expressions, but they grounded it in the imperative of psychological re-structuring and transformation. Orwell with the gut-wrenching fear of our worst chimeras; Huxley with mind-numbing lullabies to babies, easy, commitment-free sex from puberty onward, and lots of soma.

Hedges’ chapter on the “Illusion of Happiness” addresses the issue of psychological conditioning. It would be amusing if it weren’t so tragic. It has the same tenor of pathos as his chapter on sex, in which one enthusiast waxes eloquent about his $7500 anatomically correct silicone dolls. (He has eight, with removeable heads, and he exults over the simulated veins in the feet and the dorsal venous arch—“really, really cool.”)

The silicone pitch in academia is “positive psychology,” or what Professor Cooperrider at Case Western Reserve University calls, “Transformational Positivity.” According to the professor, “Institutions can be a vehicle for bringing more courage into the world, for amplifying love in the world … temperance and justice, and so on.”

And so on it goes. Just think positive. (Remember that Indian guru who beguiled the Beetles? “Just be happy!” ) All we need is “appreciative inquiry” in order to “transform organizations into ‘Positive Institutions’.”

Cooperrider is hardly alone. There are more than a hundred courses on positive psychology on college campuses. The University of Pennsylvania offers a Masters of Applied Positive Psychology, and Claremont Graduate University offers Ph.D. and M.A. concentrations in “The Science of Positive Psychology.” Such degree programs are also available in England, Italy and Mexico. They focus on “cultivating strengths, optimism, gratitude, and a positive perspective.” Think positively and positive things will happen. Sound familiar? Perhaps we should call such programs, “Becoming Oprah.”

Hedges lifts his lens high enough to kindle fire here: “The purpose and goals of the corporation are never questioned. To question them, to engage in criticism of the goals of the collective, is to be obstructive and negative. … If we are not happy, there is something wrong with us. Debate and criticism, especially about the goals and structure of the corporation, are condemned as negative and ‘counterproductive.’” And he’s a good pitbull here:

“Positive psychology is to the corporate state what eugenics was to the Nazis.” It’s a “quack science” that “throws a smokescreen over corporate domination, abuse, and greed.”

So, if you’re looking for treacle, look elsewhere.

My one cavil is with the ending of the book, the last part of the last chapter. Hedges can be polemical and he does repeat himself. The last chapter needs less polemicism and summary arguments. And I can’t help but wonder: What is the other side? Is there any way to avoid catastrophe? Perhaps an interview with one of those heroes whose names pepper this important book would have sharpened the quill: people like Ralph Nader, Cynthia McKinney, Father Roy Bourgeois, Kathy Kelly, Amy Goodman, Bill Moyers, Jim Hensen—what sustains them, keeps them going?

Also missing in action is Marshall McLuhan, whose Understanding Media of some forty years ago established the scientific foundation of critiquing the media—the mesmeric effect of mentally connecting pixiles; the alpha waves generated in a half-waking, half-sleeping state.

Morris Berman and Derrick Jensen have argued that we’re already past the “tipping point.” NASA scientist Jim Hensen says we should have started yesterday to bring down C02 levels or face global cataclysm.
In the last couple of pages, Hedges seems to pull his punches for a gentle caress: “No tyranny in history has crushed the human capacity for love,” he writes. “The mediocrities who mask their feelings of worthlessness and emptiness behind the façade of power and illusion, who seek to make us serve their perverse ideologies, fear most the power of love. … Love will endure, even if it appears darkness has swallowed us all, to triumph over the wreckage that remains.”

I don’t know. I’m not sure. The power of love is cold comfort to the corpses and the wasted lives. Love without wisdom, like freedom without wisdom, has caused as much mischief and grief as the genuinely malignant spirits and ideologies among us. Perhaps the overriding question now is how best to organize collective action against the tyranny of corporatism, the relentless pulsations of conformity. How do we return to a “literate, print-based world, a world of complexity and nuance, a world of ideas”?

One book cannot do it all, of course. Hedges has trained a brilliant light on our confused and murky, rather bizarre culture. In the last couple of pages he leaves us with another powerful idea, probably as good as love. He alludes to Rostand’s Cyrano: “The ability to stand as ‘an ironic point of light,’ that ‘flashes out wherever the just exchange their messages,’ is the ability to sustain a life of meaning.”

This year, instead of the usual sparsely attended events, town hall meetings across the United States have turned into raucous free-for-alls as opponents of President Barack Obama’s health care reform proposals have taken to shouting down a host of senators and congresspersons.

Over the years, one could slice and dice just about any period of U.S. history and determine that a “civility” project might have been useful. During the past few decades, however, churlish and bombastic invective has often prevailed over carefully calibrated discourse.

When former Republican Party vice presidential candidate and former governor of Alaska Sarah Palin recently commented about Obama’s health care reform initiatives, she claimed that his “death panels” would decide who would live and who would die.

Palin was not only playing to the Republican Party’s wired up base, she was clearly displaying a lack of civility (she later reversed course and came out in favour of civility).

Mark DeMoss, a long-time Christian Right/Republican-oriented public relations expert who believes that today’s political landscape is completely out of whack, has launched “The Civility Project,” an attempt to provide guidelines so that political opponents can disagree without being disagreeable.

So if you were DeMoss, and you were starting up something as high-minded as “The Civility Project,” would you start off by bashing gays and lesbians?

Recognising society’s division and polarisation, and concerned “about the hate and animosity being aimed at men and women with whom we may disagree on one issue or another”, DeMoss, a conservative Southern Baptist whose clients have included the late Rev. Jerry Falwell, recently “reached out to some people from various political, racial and religious backgrounds to see if we could join our hearts and minds together in calling others to civility”, he wrote in a statement titled “Welcome to the Civility Project.”

Unfortunately, DeMoss started out by attacking gays and lesbians. “I had spent about two years volunteering for Mitt Romney, and I saw a lot of ugly rhetoric and behaviour aimed at Mormons and then at me,” DeMoss said.

“And then the results of the Proposition 8 vote in California [the constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage that passed last November'] contributed to my thinking – when you saw gay activists responding to the… vote by vandalizing churches and temples,” he claimed.

DeMoss’s comments were an odd way to get started in the civility business. Over the past several decades, the Religious Right’s fortunes have in part been built on demonising gays and lesbians. By recognising that history, DeMoss might have started out on better footing.

DeMoss is the president of a public relations outfit called The DeMoss Group, which, on its website claims that it is “the largest PR firm specializing in faith-based organizations and causes.” The DeMoss Group focuses on communications, media relations, marketing, non-profit management, and crisis management.

According to its website, “The Civility Project [is] a collection of liberals and conservatives, Democrats and Republicans, blacks and whites, and people of various faiths – or no faith – who agree that even in sharp disagreement we should not be disagreeable.”

“I decided to launch a project where I would talk not about unity, not about tolerance, not about getting along, not about compromise, but just about civility,” DeMoss said.

Participants are invited to “Take the Civility Pledge”, in which signatories agree to: “Be civil in my public discourse and behavior; be respectful of others whether or not I agree with them; stand against incivility when I see it.”

The key Democrat supporting The Civility Project is Lanny Davis, a tough political combatant who has been a longtime adviser to the Clintons, and who has served three terms on the Democratic National Committee.

According to CitizenLink, a news service of the conservative group Focus on the Family, “DeMoss was so impressed with Davis’s civil tone [while he was involved in Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign] that he wrote him a letter:

“I suspect that politically you and I may have nothing in common,” DeMoss wrote. “But as I’ve watched you conduct yourself in the public arena, I’ve always appreciated how you handled yourself, how you handle your adversaries, how you show respect for those who disagree with you, and for modeling civility in an increasingly uncivil town.”

Davis said the letter came as a surprise: “I’m getting all this hate mail, and I get this amazing letter from a perfect stranger who identifies himself as an evangelical Christian. I always try to give deference to somebody who disagrees with me. That is the point Mark made in his letter, that he noticed that about me, that I always try to be respectful of people who are of a different opinion.”

Writing about the Civility Project at Religion Dispatches, Candace Chellew-Hodge pointed out that perhaps the religious right was “taking its cue from George Barna’s book UnChristian, which calls for conservative Christians to be kinder [and] … soften their rough and often hateful rhetoric, especially toward gays and lesbians.”

“DeMoss has no intention of learning about the person on the other side of the issue,” Chellew-Hodge maintained. “He’s not interested in tolerating them, or finding a place of common ground where there can be unity, or compromising on his principles, or even getting along — it’s simply about being polite to one another — to not yell at one another, but to still push our own agendas.”

“In short, DeMoss has no interest in dialogue. He has no interest in learning about what those who oppose him think or believe, or even how they arrived at that thought or belief. He just wants them to smile, slap him on the back, and get out of his way while he pursues his agenda,” she asserted. “If they don’t, then he can paint them as the ‘uncivil’ person or group who is obstructing his progress.”

Many questions remain as to the efficacy of The Civility Project.

How will the third point in the civility pledge, the one about “standing against incivility when I see it”, manifest itself?

Does it mean that when former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin gives a speech, Ann Coulter writes a column, Rush Limbaugh broadcasts, and Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity, Bill O’Reilly and Lou Dobbs take to the air, Civility Project folk will be monitoring their speech?

Thus far, the project has not issued any statements condemning the current Republican/insurance lobby-sponsored tactic of aggressively breaking up town hall meetings in districts of Democratic Party Congressional representatives.

Is DeMoss sincere with his plea for civility, or is he reading the political tea leaves (the Republicans and the Christian Right have hit low points in public opinion polls)?

Candace Chellew-Hodge characterised DeMoss having started out by gay-bashing as an example of “bigotry with manners.”

2) We don’t have souls and don’t go anywhere but into the ground to be eaten by worms when we die. Let’s bravely acknowledge that fact.

3) Quit contending that global warming isn’t real. Except for discredited, charlatan “scientists” of the kind who promote Intelligent Design, the overwhelming majority of truly qualified experts agree that manmade greenhouse gases are dangerously heating the planet. Conservatives can’t bring themselves to admit that “liberals” and United Nations types could ever be correct about anything, so they nay-say, sit on their hands, and would allow their grandchildren (and ours) to ultimately perish, fearfully gasping for precious breath.

4) Nationalism sucks. Belief that one’s own country is better or more important than all others has generated massively destructive jingoism and xenophobia through the ages. Combined with religion, it’s been the chief cause of war for bloody centuries. Join me in pledging to never take up arms against anyone on bogus pretexts — or to imagine them inferior, “evil,” etc. — just because they live beyond the ocean, look strange, and have unfamiliar customs.

5) Let’s jettison monopoly capitalism, which is so parasitically harmful that it makes a starving vampire bat seem benign. If we the people took over the economy, democratically controlling it for public profit and common gain, we’d never get robbed at the gas pump again, pay an arm and a leg for medical care or prescription drugs, lose our homes to usurious mortgage thieves, or get sent off to die in meddling neocons’ criminal invasions abroad. Fire the boss! Become a fair-minded owner of America, along with your fellow workers and neighbors!

6) Stop bashing immigrants. Each of our own arriving ethnic groups was accused by existing nativists of stealing jobs, being a societal drain, having criminal and otherwise unsavory tendencies, or spreading disease, just as mostly Hispanic immigrants are condemned today. Such successive discrimination plainly benefited divide-and-conquer corporate profiteers. It was only when ethnicities, races, and genders united — understanding that an injury to one is an injury to all — that the overall U.S. working class made decisive advances and acquired a mutually better living standard.

7) Admit that nothing worthwhile comes from conservatism. It’s abject selfishness masquerading as a valid ideology. Its sole purpose is to perpetuate minority privilege attained through illegitimate power wielded against consequently suffering masses. Conservatives will never utter the word “justice,” for it’s a shattering indictment of their consistently exploitative role in human affairs. Everything good has been fiercely resisted by the political Right: abolishing slavery and child labor, gaining women’s suffrage, struggling to achieve racial equality, raising the minimum wage, implementing progressive taxation, establishing health and safety standards in the workplace and the community at large, just to name a few.

8) Accept that, while abortion isn’t pretty, it’s often necessary. Furthermore, only each female in each specific, unique circumstance has the right to determine what constitutes a legitimate abortion need. No male, or male-dominated institution, should interfere in this most personal and difficult choice. Before guys say one word about the supposed impropriety of terminating an unacceptable pregnancy, they should produce ironclad guarantees about controlling their reckless libidos and keeping their penises in their pants, if that’s where they’re told they should remain.

9) Repeat after me: “Better gay than grumpy.” The only problem with homosexuality is that some straights, insecure about their own orientation, get uptight over it. Most animal species engage in same-sex contact on a minority basis. Therefore it isn’t “unnatural,” just different, and entirely involuntary, like being left-handed rather than right. Besides, aren’t the last six words of the Pledge of Allegiance “with liberty and justice for all”? Quit being hypocrites and get aboard the freedom train!

10) To nurture the collective human spirit, which is quite different than a religious “soul,” think less about what you can personally acquire, in a material sense. Instead, join struggles for shared prosperity. Know that the greatest reward is giving a deprived child reason to laugh. Honor and guard our earthly home. Lie down beside a blade of grass and contemplate its simple magnificence. Then, when relentless age takes its final toll, buy the farm with a contented smile. You lived well. You did the right thing.

Feed those worms and help make that grass grow!

– prostitution and sex services – 46%;

– domestic service – 27%;

– agriculture – 10%;

– sweatshops or factories – 5%;

– restaurant and hotel work – 4%; with the remainder coming from:

– sexual exploitation of children, entertainment, and mail-order brides.

It persists for lack of regulation, work condition monitoring, and a growing demand for cheap labor enabling unscrupulous employers and criminal networks to exploit powerless workers for profit.

The International Labor Organization (ILO) defines forced labor as:

“…all work or service which is exacted from any person under the menace of any penalty and for which said person has not offered himself voluntarily.”

Forced child labor is:

“(a) all forms of slavery or practices similar to slavery, such as the sale and trafficking of children, debt bondage and serfdom and forced or compulsory labor, including forced or compulsory recruitment of children for use in armed conflict;”

“(b) the use, procuring or offering of a child for prostitution, for the production of pornography or for pornographic performances;”

“(c) the use, procuring or offering of a child for illicit activities, in particular for the production and trafficking of drugs as defined in the relevant international treaties;” and

“(d) work which, by its nature or the circumstances in which it is carried out, is likely to harm the health, safety or morals of children.”

The Free the Slaves.net’s definition is being “forced to work without pay under threat of violence and unable to walk away.” It reports:

– an estimated 27 million people are enslaved globally, more than at any other time previously;

– thousands annually trafficked in America in over 90 cities; around 17,000 by some estimates and up to 50,000 according to the CIA, either from abroad or affecting US citizens or residents as forced labor or sexual servitude;

– the global market value is over $9.5 billion annually, according to Mark Taylor, senior coordinator for the State Department’s Office to Monitor;

– victims are often women and children;

– the majority are in India and African countries;

– slavery is illegal but happens “everywhere;”

– slaves work in agriculture, homes, mines, restaurants, brothels, or wherever traffickers can employ them; they’re cheap, plentiful, disposable, and replaceable;

– “$90 is the average cost of a human slave around the world” compared to the 1850 $40,000 equivalent in today’s dollars;

– common terminology includes debt bondage, bonded labor, attached labor, restavec (or de facto bondage for Haitian children sent to households of strangers), forced labor, indentured servitude, and human trafficking;

– explosive population growth, mostly to urban centers without safety net or job security protections, facilitates the practice; and

– government corruption, lack of monitoring, and indifference does as well.

American Anti-Trafficking Efforts

US laws prohibit all forms of human trafficking through statutes created or strengthened by the 2000 Victims of Trafficking and Violence Protection Act (VTVPA) with imprisonment for up to 20 years or longer as well as other penalties.

In April 2003, the Protect Act was passed (Prosecutorial Remedies and Other Tools to End the Exploitation of Children Today Act). The law protects children and severely punishes offenders when enforced. It’s to prosecute American citizens and legal permanent residents who travel abroad for purposes of sexually trafficking minors without having to prove prior intent to commit the crime.

The 2000 law (reauthorized in 2005) provides tools to combat trafficking offenders worldwide. It also establishes the Office to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons (TIP Office) and the President’s Interagency Task Force to help coordinate anti-trafficking efforts. The State Department’s Bureau of Population, Refugees, and Migration (PRM) also is for victim protection. In addition, various other US agencies are involved, including the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) through its Rescue and Restore Victims of Human Trafficking public awareness campaign and by identifying victims.

The Department of Justice handles prosecutions, and along with DHS and the State Department, addresses various trafficking issues through the interagency Human Smuggling and Trafficking Center. Still, enforcement is often is lax or absent, at both federal and state levels, because offenders are powerful and those harmed are the “wretched of the earth,” mostly poor blacks, Latinos and Asians. As a result, the practice is rampant and growing. Below are examples of its forms.

Farmworker Slavery

In a March 2004 report, Oxfam America highlighted the growing problem in a report titled “Like Machines in the Fields: Workers without Rights in American Agriculture.” It’s a shocking account of how “Behind the shiny, happy images promoted by the fast-food industry with its never-ending commercials, there is another reality:”

– nearly two million overworked farmworkers living in “sub-poverty misery, without benefits, without the right to overtime,” a living wage, or other job protections, including for children;

– in Florida, it’s not uncommon to find instances of workers chained to poles, locked in trucks, physically beaten, and cheated out of pay; it’s pervasive enough for a federal prosecutor to have called the state “ground zero for modern-day slavery” in a New Yorker magazine article;

– John Bowe, author of “Nobodies: Modern American Slave Labor and the Dark Side of the New Global Economy,” calls Florida agriculture “an unsavory world” where workers like Adan Ortiz fear talking about their bosses because he has nightmares that they might “come after me with machetes and stuff;”

– basic US labor laws exclude farmworkers, including the right to organize; laws like the 1935 National Labor Relations Act (NLRB) and 1938 Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA); also OSHA protections are lacking; the 1983 Migrant and Seasonal Agricultural Worker Protection Act (AWPA or MSPA) provided modest but inadequate relief and none at all when it isn’t enforced; Oxfam reported that, except in California to a modest degree, “state laws perpetuate inequality,” especially in Florida and North Carolina;

– overall, enforcement at both federal and state levels is lax and has weakened in recent years; most notable are the lack of investigations, prosecutions, and resources allocated for either; in the case of undocumented workers, nothing in the law protects them;

– many serve as forced labor against their will in a modern-day version of slavery: terrorized by violent employers, watched by armed guards under conditions of near-incarceration, living overcrowded in “severely inadequate” barracks or trailers, often plagued with rust, mildew, filth, broken appliances, sagging or leaky roofs, non-working showers, and multiple occupants being over-charged up to $200 a week by unscrupulous employers; yet workers put up with it because in the words of one: “If we don’t work, we don’t eat;”

– the commercial power of giant buyers and retailers like Wal-Mart (selling 19% of US groceries) and Yum Brands (the world’s largest fast-food company) squeeze growers and suppliers for the lowest prices;

– increased competition from imports have had a similar effect, especially in winter months;

– yet while wages and prices to producers are squeezed, profits are passed up the distribution chain to corporate giants at the top.

Farmworkers have been punished as a result and are perhaps the poorest and most abused laborers in America. Around half of them earn less than $7500 annually. Lucky ones earn up to $10,000, in either case it’s far below the federal poverty threshold, and their wages have been stagnant since the 1970s.

Doing some of the worst and most dangerous jobs in America (from exposure to toxic chemicals and workplace accidents), poverty has forced them into sub-standing housing, temporary jobs, increased migrancy, and family separation.

Besides sub-poverty wages, around 95% get no Social Security, disability, or medical insurance benefits (let alone vacations or pensions) for themselves or their families. Women farmworkers face other abuses like male dominance, sexual harassment, or worse, while at the same time remain primary family caregivers.

Crop and livestock agricultural jobs exist throughout the country, but over half are concentrated in California, Florida, Texas, North Carolina, and Washington. Most farmworkers are young (between 18 – 44 or younger), male (about 80%), and Latino. They have little education, and many are recent undocumented immigrants (mostly from Mexico) forced north because of destructive trade laws like NAFTA.

Organizing efforts have won important victories but not enough to increase workers’ bargaining power under a fundamentally unfair system. So while achievements of organizations like the Coalition of Immokalee Workers in Florida (with over 2000 members) are impressive, they’re no match against agribusiness giants or Wal-Mart.

Nor can they ameliorate conditions in one of the country’s most hazardous occupations. Farmworker disability rates are three times than for the greater population. Around 300,000 laborers suffer pesticide poisoning annually, and many others endure accidents, musculoskeletal, and other type injuries (some chronic).

A 1990 North Carolina study found only 4% of workers had access to drinking water, hand-washing, and toilet facilities, a particularly dangerous situation for children and pregnant women.

Oxfam calls farmworker conditions today the equivalent of a “19th century plantation-style” model relying on field hands, rudimentary equipment, long hours, little pay, no benefits, under a basically “inhumane, anachronistic (system crying) out for reform.” But how when all levels of government turn a blind eye to the worst of abuses, and for the undocumented blame them for their own plight.

Domestic Servitude in America

Each year, many thousands, mostly women, arrive in America with temporary visas to work as live-in domestic workers – for the wealthy, foreign diplomats, or other domestic or foreign officials. They come to escape poverty or to earn money to send home to families. Often they’re exploited or victimized by unscrupulous traffickers who hold them in forced servitude, work them up to 19 hours a day, keep them practically incarcerated, pay them $100 or less a month, and often subject them to sexual abuse.

Undocumented workers have no protection, but even legal entrants have few. Because visas are employment-based, they’re obliged to one employer no matter how abusive, and if leave they lose their immigration status and are deported. As a result, few do or file complaints. Some who do are rarely protected because government agencies are lax in their monitoring and enforcement.

Live-in domestic workers are also excluded from labor law protections with regard to overtime pay and right to organize, strike, and bargain collectively. In addition, they’re unprotected by OSHA and against sexual harassment under Title VII workplace safeguards as it applies only to employers with 15 or more workers. In cases of foreign employers, they enjoy diplomatic immunity, even from criminal, civil, or administrative prosecutions.

As a result, special visa domestics endure human rights violations. Employers are immunized while workers are powerless to stop abuses like:

– assault and battery, including physical beatings and threats of serious harm;

– limited freedom of movement, including arbitrary and enforced loss of liberty by use of locks, bars, confiscation of passports and travel documents, chains, and threats of retaliation against other family members;

– health and safety issues, including unhealthy sleeping situations in basements, utility rooms, or other unsatisfactory places; unsafe working conditions endangering health; denial of food or proper nutrition; and refusal to provide medical care and having to work when ill;

– wage and amount of work concerns – US labor laws afford no protections so long hours, little rest, and low pay are common;

– privacy invasions – the UN General Assembly’s December 1966 International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) provides that “(n)o one shall be subjected to arbitrary or unlawful interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence;” it applies to everyone, even live-in domestics on visas; nonetheless violations of ICCPR are common and migrants get no redress;

– psychological abuse – often highlighting employer superiority and worker inferiority to enforce control and render employees powerless; other abuses include insults, food restrictions, denying proper clothing, and various other demeaning practices; and

– servitude, forced labor, and trafficking – ICCPR and other international laws and instruments prohibit it, yet don’t effectively define “servitude” as distinguished from slavery; as a result, abusive labor relationships are inevitable; trafficking is specifically prohibited under the UN’s Protocol to Prevent, Suppress and Punish Trafficking in Persons, Especially Women and Children, supplementing the (UN-adopted 2000) Convention against Transnational Organized Crime; nonetheless, the practice is rampant and growing; in the case of migrant domestic workers, abuse is widespread and greatly underreported.

Sex Slavery in America

It’s the largest category of forced labor in America and with good reason:

– it’s tied to organized crime and highly profitable;

– the demand for sex services, including from children, is high and growing; and

– the lack of safe and legal migration facilitates it.

The US Department of Justice (DOJ) states that the average entry prostitution age is between 12 – 14. Shared Hope International documents modern-day sex trafficking and examines conditions under which it exists. It confirms that most victims are underage girls. A congressional finding estimated that between 100,000 – 300,000 children are at risk at any time. A DOJ assessment was that pimps control at least 75% of exploited minors by targeting vulnerable children using violence and psychological intimidation to hold them.

The Internet is a frequent recruitment tool. Other vulnerable victims are shelter and street youths, including runaways. An estimated 2.8 million children live on city streets, a third of whom are lured into prostitution within 48 hours of leaving home. Familial prostitution is also common and involves the selling of a family member for drugs, shelter, and/or money.

The market includes prostitution, including with children, pornography, striptease, erotic dancing, and peep shows, often controlled by organized crime. The combination of legal and illegal sex generally is part of a larger portfolio of products and services that include drugs and drugs trafficking.

Sex traffickers usually recruit victims of their own nationality or ethnicity, and migrant smuggling facilitates it. In addition, state and federal laws too often conflict enough to withhold victim status from the abused, impede prosecutions, and result in too lenient sentences when they occur. Also, rarely are prostitution purchasers (including from children) arrested or prosecuted, and overall, law enforcement agencies face legal and systemic challenges that interfere with their ability or inclination to go after buyers. Society provides few protections for victims, including custodial shelters for young children, and as a result, sex services in America thrive.

Sweatshops and Factories

According to the Union of Needle Trades and Industrial Textile Employees, 75% of New York garment factories are sweatshops. The US Department of Labor says over 50% of all US-based ones are, the majority in the apparel centers of New York, California, Dallas, Miami, and Atlanta but others located offshore as well in American territories like Saipan, Guam and American Samoa where merchandise produced is labeled “Made in the USA.”

Competing with low-wage offshore producers pressures US producers to cut labor costs to a minimum, even by breaking the law, sometimes egregiously through forced labor. Like agriculture and domestic service, the sector is especially vulnerable as it often operates within the informal economy where regulatory enforcement is lax or absent. As a result, worker exploitation persists. Wages are sub-poverty. Overtime compensation is the exception, and work environments generally are poor to hazardous. Workers who complain or try to organize usually are fired and replaced by more amenable ones.

Starvation wages, long hours, unsafe working conditions, and no protections are standard practice in an industry long known for its labor abuses.

In 1995, two major scandals made headlines, one at home, the other offshore. On August 2, police raided an El Monte, California apartment complex in which 72 undocumented Thai immigrants were kept in forced bondage behind razor wire and a chain link fence. They’d been there for up to 17 years sewing clothes for some of the nation’s top manufacturers and retailers.

They were housed in crowded, squalid quarters. Armed guards imposed discipline, pressuring and intimidating them to work every day, around 84 hours a week for 70 cents an hour. Workers were forced to work, eat, sleep, and live in captivity. No unmonitored phone calls or uncensored letters were allowed, and everything bought came only from their captors at highly inflated prices. Seven operators were arrested and later convicted of conspiracy, kidnapping, involuntary servitude, smuggling, and harboring illegal immigrants.

Also in 1995, National Labor Committee investigators found teenage women, as young as 13, sewing clothing for Kathy Lee Gifford’s Global Fashion plant in Honduras. Pay was from 9 – 16 cents an hour under oppressive working conditions. Forced overtime was imposed to meet deadlines. Only two daily bathroom visits were allowed. Supervisors and armed guards applied pressure and intimidation to work faster on machines that were rust laden and prone to accidents. Attempts by the women to demand their legal rights were thwarted. Merchandise produced was for major US retailers like Wal-Mart.

American restaurant and hotel workers also work under onerous conditions and are underpaid. In hotels, nearly all housekeepers are women who are required to clean 15 or more rooms a day. Often they must skip meals and rest periods, work off the clock to meet quotas, and have a 40% higher injury rate than service workers overall as a result. According to US Department of Labor figures, they earn an average $8.67 an hour or about $17, 340 annually provided they work full-time.

Immigrants, mainly women, are especially vulnerable in hotels and restaurants. A June 2005 ACLU press release highlighted one example among many pertaining to a law suit brought by two immigrant waitresses against a New Jersey Chinese restaurant charging sex discrimination and labor exploitation.

Filed in June 2003, Mei Ying Liu and Shu Fang Chen charged that from May 2000 – November 2001 they were completely controlled by their employers, forced to work an average 80 hours a week, paid no wages or overtime, had to pay a kickback from tips received, faced gender and ethnic discrimination, were housed in an overcrowded, vermin-filled apartment, and were threatened with death when stopped working at the restaurant.

Guest Worker Trafficking on US Military Bases

Besides Halliburton’s exploited army of tens of thousands of foreign nationals in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere, the National Labor Committee (NLC) reported last July that “hundreds of thousands of foreign guest workers – among them 240,000 Bangladeshis – have been trafficked to Kuwait (under false promises of well-paid jobs, and) forced to work seven days a week (11 hours a day) at a US military base” under horrific conditions.

Stripped of their passports on arrival, they’re housed in overcrowded, squalid dorms with eight workers sharing small 10 x 10 rooms, paid 14 – 36 cents an hour, beaten and threatened with arrest when they complained, forced to use most of their wages for high-priced food, and the case of “Mr. Sabur” is typical. Hired by the Kuwait Waste Collection and Recycling Company to work at the Pentagon’s Camp Arifjan, his job was to clean the base – everything from offices and living spaces to tanks, rocket launchers and missiles.

He worked an 11-hour shift seven days a week and got a one-hour midnight break for supper. For this, he earned $34.72 a week, far less than he was promised, and he had to pay a Bangladesh employment agency 185,000 taka ($2697) for his three-year contracted job. His family sold everything possible for the money, still came up short, and had to borrow the rest from a neighbor.

On the job, the Kuwaiti company illegally withheld his first three months wages, forcing him to borrow money to survive. When he asked to be paid, he was beaten, and after an 80,000 worker strike, he was arrested, incarcerated for five days, beaten in prison, then deported to Bangladesh still wearing his torn, blood-stained clothing.

He was owed but never paid thousands of promised dollars in back wages, and he’s typical. NLC estimates that all 240,000 Bangladeshis have been cheated out of $1.2 billion, and the Pentagon is complicit in the crime. These same abuses are common on US bases in Iraq, Afghanistan, and likely other offshore locations as well. In the words of one Sri Lankan laborer for a Halliburton subcontractor in Iraq: “They promised us the moon and stars,” but instead gave us dirty work, low pay, long hours, bad food, and for the first three months held us in windowless warehouses near Baghdad’s airport with no money, and for some of them afterwards in tents even worse than the warehouses.

A Final Comment

This is the plight of America’s vulnerable and those we exploit abroad, whether in restaurants, hotels, agriculture, domestic work, the sex trade, or on US offshore military bases, and seldom do courts provide justice. It’s America’s dark side along with an appalling record of crimes and abuses, including imperial wars, torture, and looting the national wealth for criminal bankers and the rich at the expense of growing millions in need left wanting at the most perilous economic time in our history. America’s long and disturbing legacy, not at all one to be proud of.