The Girl Who Didn’t Watch Rape Scenes

Note to folks who haven’t seen/read any of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo series: this will probably ruin it for you.

Riz watched “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo” and says, “I’m amazed that you liked that movie.” We share a deep aversion to witnessing violence in movies, Riz and I, so a whisper of bafflement-laced betrayal tailgated his voice. Uh, being’s how I was the one who recommended this brutally violent film to him and all.
“I probably should have warned you about that, huh,” says me, the thoughtless cur.
“Uh, yea-haa.”
Further badness: “I guess I forgot to mention that I’d read the book before watching it, so I knew when not to look.”
“Well I didn’t, did I?”
“No. No, you didn’t.”
I owe you something magical and sparkling for that one, Riz.
Please forgive me.

Like I say, I didn’t actually watch the scene where Bjurman raped Lisbeth. However, I was surprised that I could stomach the one where she later dildo-raped his ass and sloppily tattooed “I am a sadistic pig and a rapist” across his torso. In fact, the thought, “Dang, you didn’t have a bigger dildo than that?” flitted through my head as she unlubricatedly rammed it in.
It was hard to watch, but the context made it delicious in conjunction with nauseating, like eating a Grandma-packed picnic lunch starring blackberry cobbler while driving on a windy, curvy mountain road.

I don’t like rape scenes.
They sicken us all—some of us physically. I haven’t viewed a rape scene in a movie since “Last Exit to Brooklyn” came out in 1990-whatever. I wrote about this extensively in “Cunt”. Rape scenes are generally in movies to give us a reason why our hero is so angry at the people he is going to end up killing. Filmmakers often find ways to make rape scenes erotic and thus. grossing out otherwise healthy-hearted folks with the experience of being sexually turned on while watching someone be horribly brutalized.
Fucken, ick.
I can’t say I was sexually turned on when Lisbeth ass-raped Bjurman, but I definitely had a similar experience where the rare, shining satisfaction of someone being actually punished for raping a woman churned inside me like a hurricane, as I cringed at her violence and brutality. Towards the end of the movie, you see that same ruthlessness when she allows the serial killer rapist, Martin Vanger, to burn to death after he overturns his car as she chased him on her motorcycle. She walks down to the ravine where he crashed and casually smokes a cigarette as he begs for his life.
Totally unmoved.
Bored, even.
Martin Vanger, you see, is a man with a cellar. You’re probably familiar with the type. You’ve read about him when he gets caught, if he gets caught. He is a man who spends thousands and thousands of dollars sound-proofing and customizing his cellar (storage space, garage, attic, whatever) so he can indulge his penchant for torturing and killing other people, often children.
Lisbeth let him burn, not a qualm in her heart.
I would have too.
Qualmlessly.
One less cellar man on the planet, can you say amen.

So this me loving “Girl With the Dragon Tattoo” business is one of those things where god or whoever loves to play jokes and no matter what you say you believe, she’ll bust out with some reality to make you qualify your belief.
Happens to me constantly.
If I had seen the movie without first reading all three books, I am sure I would have walked out. No amount of delicious vengeance can justify depicting a rape scene.
But see, my sister highly recommended the books, and she used to see me sob when some mom or baby or dad got killed during Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom, so even as I read the rape scene in bed at night, I trusted her on this one.
And so, I went into the movie already knowing the deeply complex story of Lisbeth Salander. I knew that Bjurman raping her was a major arcana of the plot and resonated with many other things that happen in this and the next two films—as well as marching in step with the over-arching plot of Harriet’s Vanger’s past. Lisbeth HAS to be raped by Bjurman in order for the story to unfold as it does. And since she secretly films Bjurman’s hideous crime—an artifact that comes into play in the next two films—there’s really no getting around the film makers having to depict the rape scene in some detail. It is the only movie I’ve seen where a graphic rape is, indeed, needed to carry the story. This entire series of films/books is, after all, a brilliant study and critique on sexual violence towards women.

In the second film, “The Girl Who Played With Fire,” a greasy reporter named Per Sandstrom is just grossly fucking an Eastern Eurpoean woman who is tied to the bed in the exact same manner that Bjurman tied up Lisbeth. This is not viewed as a “rape,” but it is actually, in a way, even more brutal that what happened to Lisbeth. This unnamed woman is forced to endure sex with anyone who wants to have sex with/rape her, and in anyway he wants to do so. She is kept, trafficked and has no rights. For her, there’s no end in sight.
Later, when Lisbeth strings Per Sandstrom up (a maneuver she evidently learned from Martin Vanger’s technique in the first film), and interrogates him, she asks why he wanted to have what he thinks of as “sex” with this woman. He says, “Because she was beautiful.” So being beautiful and kept against your will is really all it takes for some greasy, sweaty pig to rape/fuck you with absolutely no misgivings, pangs of compassion in his heart or consequences.
If you look around the news and see the cops, white college boys, star athletes and every other entitled jackass thinking like Per Sandstrom, this shit kinda resonates deeply.

Me n’ Derrick Jensen, author of A Language Older than Words and many other genius works, once had a disagreement about violence. He believes that the present power structure cannot be overthrown without violence. I believe that violence only begets more violence. Peace and love have never sprouted on the banks of rivers of blood. I also believe that there are occasions when violence is the only possible way to safety. So the question Derrick Jensen asks becomes how do you define “the only possible way to safety” when you are a salmon, polar bear, honey bee, old growth tree? When you are a mountain in coal country and you kinda want to keep your top? When you are, like Lisbeth Salander, a child growing up in a violent, misogynist, racist rape culture? When you are an ocean and oil drilling corporations have dibs on you? How then do you define “the only possible way to safety?” Or is safety, in fact, a fucking pipe dream for you?
And this is where things get tricky.
For safety, I have learned, is something very difficult to live without. I wrote a poem about safety and it appears in the same-titled chapter in Rose. It goes like this:

Safety

I remember safety.
I remember feeling safe.
I remember crafty safety.
You don’t miss it til it’s
long, long gone.

Feeling safe and
clean drinking water
have that in common
you know.

It was okay at the time
everyday I would say,_ “This is okay, this is okay, today is okay okay okay.”
Sometimes I would be crying
when I said this,
but it was still important to say,
like praying is for Muslims n’ Christians,
and like chanting is for
Tibetans.
Speaking in tongues, maybe.
Maybe a capella.
I could never tell.
Lord how I missed
crafty safety.
Sleeping well.

Lighting a candle and thinking
about just the light of it
and not the darkness it
casts away.
While
it’s
lit.

I never remembered safety
until it was long long gone.
Then I remembered
sly ol’ safety.
Crafty, crafty one.
Water, food, air, love,
these are all so obvious.
Safety laughs at
their lack of subtlety.
It is tricky.
Don’t let it fool you.
Hold onto it real real tight.
That is, if you got it in your sights.

Lisbeth Salander videoed Bjurman raping her. Later, she played the video for him as he lay hog-tied on the floor with a (coulda-been-bigger) dildo jammed up his ass. After the two hour video was over, she went back into the room and tattooed his torso up for him. She let him know the video would be released if he ever hassled her in any way again. The tattoo served to warn other women who came into intimate contact with him. Due to past experience, Lisbeth—quite rightfully, as we come to understand in the later films—does not trust the police to help her in any way. Her scheme is an elaborate one, for certain. And it is very violent. It’s also what Lisbeth needed to do in order to feel safe again. In the final movie, The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest, this video becomes a lynchpin in her bid for freedom and justice. The rape scene that takes place in the first film becomes a striking piece of evidence against corruption and abuse of power reflected in the entire state.

Riz says, “You know, it’s not that I want to avoid all the horrible things happening in the world right now. I don’t. And I know what’s going on. But I find myself actively seeking out Pretty right now, you know? I look for Pretty Things, and Inga, that movie’s not Pretty.”
He hasn’t watched The Girl Who Played with Fire and The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest, and there’s no force on earth that will make him change his mind, so I content myself with just relaying the whole epic saga to him, because I want him to see the Pretty of these films—of Lisbeth Salander and her difficult violence.
We’re getting our asses kicked here. I know it, you know it, Riz knows it. If the context of their crimes meet certain criteria, rapists, pedophiles and murderers are free as birds. Corporations rule the planet. Tea Party bitches have waged a well-funded war on unions, public education and health care. Sarah Palin is hooking up with kneecap-busting biker vets for her presidential campaign tour. The Koch brothers have their spokesmodel all set up, she just needs to act the part. They have already paved her way to the White House, it’s only a matter of whether or not people can disrupt this nefarious plot. I can’t even think about the wolves and wild horses right now.
And on and on.
So I look at someone like Lisbeth Salander and I think, “Maybe there’s some hope here. Maybe someone like her will walk on the scene and really fuck shit up for these earth-killing rapist pieces of shit.” She gave me an image, a hero, a point of reference, an insight into possible ways I might wish to conduct myself.
There is a Pretty in these movies.
It’s a rare, complicated Pretty, but dang, I’ll take it.

White America Has Lost It's Fucken Mind Yet Again

I love Steven Thrasher!
His article, “White America Has Lost It’s Mind” appeared in the September 29, 2010 edition of the Village Voice. So far there’s over a thousand comments, most of them thrashing our dear Thrasher. For you see, the internet has emboldened the silliest coward humankind produces, and this coward also happens to often be a racist piece of shit—be he “liberal” or be she “conservative”—and what, with the mainstream media always chomping at the bit to instill terror into everyone, things get skewed quite a bit.

The internet has seriously compromised the craft of writing.

Imagine if Steven Thrasher was a musician instead of a writer. Immediately after his song is played on the radio, people are invited to call in and tear his shit apart. Or if he was a film maker and instead of having the credits roll, theater goers reactions to the film scrolled up the screen in real time. Imagine if he was a chef and the restaurant patrons got to pepper in suggestions over his shoulder as he prepared their meal.
The internet has suddenly made everyone a “writer.”
Steven Thrasher spent countless hours researching his article. This, on top of many years working with words in order to have the wherewithal to construct witty, cohesive, edifying sentences into paragraphs which lead into each other. He thought about this article for a long time before he wrote it. It was the product of many hours of hard mental labor.
And here comes Jackass 2.6 Second Martina on 10/3/2010 at 5:08:01 P.M:

“Mr. Thrasher...pull your racist black head out of your a$$. Blowhard!”

Fuck you cowardly Martina. Let’s see any of these commentators construct an argument that could hold a stubby birthday candle to Steven Thrasher’s brilliant Olympic Torch of thought.
Yellow-bellied lazy racist weasel.
Fuck you and your mean-spirited namby-pamby ilk.
Everyone needs to turn the comment button off, now.

Meanwhile, white people in the U.S. are crazier than raccoons drinking from a stream fed with Wellbutrin run-off. Which is what happens whenever white folks get to thinking about our collective sense of entitlement. The Ku Klux Klan arose from the ashes of the Civil War. Jim Crow laws came by the way as soon as Reconstruction was utterly destroyed and whites seized political control from blacks, carpet-bagging Northerners and Radical Republicans. (For you see, back in the day, Republicans were cool people and Democrats sucked ass. It switched around at some point, but that is another story, and both suck ass now, which is yet another story, but one you should already know, since you’re living it.) During the period before the Civil Rights Era, Black communities were routinely destroyed in atrocities history adores referring to as “race riots” instead of “white people committing genocidal acts of ethnic cleansing after they accuse a black kid of raping a white woman.” The instant people of color (and white women—who, by the way, were arguably the biggest beneficiaries of the Civil Rights Movement) settled in to their newfound rights and freedoms, the interstate freeway systems sliced through black communities, across the nation. Then in a further act of vengeance for achieving civil rights, Reaganomics paid a call, closing factories and introducing crack cocaine in serpentine exchange for arms sales in Iran and paramilitary training in Central America. This utterly devastated the black communities still kicking ass after the various “race riots,” and "infrastructure enhancements."

So let’s be clear: black people in the United States of America have been under active seige from whites pretty much non-stop for the past five-hundred years. Their successes have been retroactively paid for quite dearly, and meanwhile whites have never stopped engaging in predatory behavior. We don’t come calling in white hoods anymore, we come calling with seizure deeds from the bank that offered ponzi-assed mortgages.
From time to time in history, whites have settled into newly existing mainstream designations and grudgingly allowed certain realities surrounding our racism to morph a tad. That is all we have ever done. We have never evolved. We have never “changed.”
Change is such a fucken lie.
We still have the exact same mindset that our founding father-slave owning forebears had back when we shafted England out of their big new colony idea.
The perfect storm of Barack Obama’s ascent to the presidency, coupled with the grifter-assed leavings of the Bush administration have awakened genetic memories of this unacknowledged racist history. Steven Thrasher’s article does a really, really god job of describing this present mindset, but without even a glimmer of interest in investigating our history, whites are ill-equipped to face this truth. It sounds like a bunch of “white bashing” to people who have never stopped to wonder what, exactly people of color, homos and white women keep belly-aching about seemingly non-stop. Whites genuinely wonder, “Why can’t black folks just settle down now that they have a brother in the white house?” Well, because President Obama does not rectify the past. He does not magically erase our country’s history. He walked into a government that had been ransacked by his predecessors. Given all of that, he, himself, seems to believe in the sanctity of corporations, and does not present a challenge to the present power structure.
He has, for instance, evidently happily gone along with the corporate and media blackout in the Gulf region. The oil and, more importantly, the dispersant, Corexit, used to cosmetically bleach that oil, are snuffing all life. All fish, birds, marine animals, plantlife and human beings are dying down there. Most people are apathetic about this slaughter on our home shores because the “bad guy” is not someone our government is comfortable designating a “bad guy.” All of the corporations and agencies involved (Transocean, Halliburton, Marine Management Services and BP) are dear to the oil industry. They can’t be controlled, and so they police Florida’s beaches, smiling upon toddlers building sandcastles in the toxic wastesand, while arresting anyone with a shovel and a camera.
This happened to my wife, and is not a conspiracy theory.
It’s a different kind of dying than in Afghanistan. It takes longer and is easier to refuse to see. The perpetrators can’t be acknowledged without taking down the entire oil industry, so people here in the U.S. sit around and parrot the media’s BP-sponsored message:
“It’s their own damn fault down there since they all vote for Republicans, and they’re living the high life off BP’s constant flow of cash anyway."
So, no.
Obama ain’t willing or ain’t able to go up against that.
And yes, this deep shit of our history is still stinking up the world today.
The exact same justifications are used for slavery, building interstates through black communities and crack cocaine:
“It’s their own damn fault and they’re all on welfare, living offa my dollar, anyway.”

Neely Fuller said it best:

“If you do not understand white supremacy (racism)—what it is and how it works, everything else that you understand will only confuse you.”

This is not about being “liberal.” I do not consider myself a liberal. In fact, if I was on Survivor and my tribe choices were Bayou Rednecks and Bay Area Liberals, I’d happily pick the rednecks. In my experience, rednecks are honest about what they believe. We therefore have the number one funnest fights together. Also in my experience, liberals are mealy-mouthed, passive aggressive and if white, underhandedly racist. I do not enjoy engaging with people who espouse self-interested “change” while comfortably living with the lies of the past.
This here though, this is not about ideology.
This is just the facts, ma’am. Without looking at the facts of our history, you cannot possibly understand what is going on in the present. If you are unhappy with the present, look to the past and dig your head out of your ass because time is running short.
Especially for people living by the Gulf of Mexico.
If you find yourself feeling “guilty” because it makes you feel so bad to look at this horrorshow that is U.S. history, then sit with your feelings for a minute and then let them go.
Guilt leads to blame and resentment.
Let those feelings go.
Simply bear witness.
White people today are not responsible for the past. What we are responsible for is unquestioningly repeating the past livelong day in and livelong day out. And white people are not, by any stretch of the imagination, the only racial demographic who embrace this practice. It is learned behavior built upon centuries of violence and oppression.
Taking responsibility and educating ourselves—these are things we can deal with if we have the courage and the inner-strength. Shy yourself away from being a meanspirited, namby-pamby coward, because you actually have something very valuable to contribute to this world.
And like I say, time is running short.

Pacts and Fiction

Hiya I'm not a multi-tasker. I've been working on a new book and it's consumed all of my writing energy for quite some time. My cousin has been nagging me for more than six months to write something here, but every time I sit down to do so, I think of something for the book.
Close this file and open that one.
So, begging your pardon.
The book's mostly finished and it feels good to want to write other stuff now.

Let's talk about pacts with the devil. According to everyone's favorite catastrophe fetishist, Mr. Pat Robertson, Haiti suffered a huge earthquake as part of his 700 Club god's wrath. See, it's because Haiti made a pact with the devil back in the late 1700's in order to rebel from the French.

Here's his exact quote:

Something happened a long time ago in Haiti, and people might not want to talk about it. They were under the heel of the French. You know, Napoleon the third, or whatever. And they got together and swore a pact to the devil. They said, we will serve you if you will get us free from the French. True story. And so, the devil said, okay it's a deal.
And they kicked the French out. You know, the Haitians revolted and got themselves free. But ever since they have been cursed by one thing after the other. Desperately poor. That island of Hispaniola is one island. It is cut down the middle on the one side is Haiti the other is the Dominican Republic. Dominican Republic is prosperous, healthy, full of resorts, etc. Haiti is in desperate poverty. Same island. They need to have and we need to pray for them a great turning to god and out of this tragedy I'm optimistic something good may come.

A pact was made, and there was a devil involved, but Mr. Pat's got quite a few things backassed. Please allow me to break this down:

Something happened a long time ago in Haiti, and people might not want to talk about it.

This "something" that one is led to assume might be a source or shame or secrecy for the Haitian people is a religious ceremony that took place in Bois Caiman in 1791, on the eve of the revolution against French rule. Pat Robertson thinks it's shameful to believe in Vodou, so naturally, he feels comfortable assuming that everyone else does too. Enough people agree with, or at least identify with his ignorance, to assure him a place in the mainstream media every time he spews forth his vile and vitriol into the world. This cultural identification is collaborated by the hideously racist Princess and Frog movie that Disney recently set upon us. It's supposed to be a big deal because it features a black princess. For the privilege of being included in Disney's future marketing tsunami, black folks must sacrifice any dignity around this ancient religion that served many of their ancestors. Vodou is butchered on Disney's happy chopping block.
Even if you don't know about the historic religious ceremony that took place in Bois Caiman, you can tell from Pat's sentence that "something" dark and probably evil took place. In reality, the Africans were, at the time, multi-generational citizens of Hispanola, some free, some slaves. Inspired by the French Revolution, the folks thought, "Dang, freedom and autonomy sounds nice. Let's us go for it just like the French in France." On the eve of such a huge undertaking, why would folks NOT get together and pray to their gods for strength, guidance and courage? Africans have practiced Vodou for thousands of years. It pre-dates pretty much every other religion on the planet. Their parents and grandparents were from Africa. Why would they adopt any other religion than the one that served their forebears? They heard about a revolution far away, and prayed for the victory of freedom at home, big fucking deal. There is no shame in that and if anyone doesn't want to talk about it, it's probably because they don't want to hear ignorant people judging their religion.

They were under the heel of the French. You know, Napoleon the third, or whatever. And they got together and swore a pact to the devil. They said, we will serve you if you will get us free from the French. True story. And so, the devil said, okay it's a deal.
And they kicked the French out. You know, the Haitians revolted and got themselves free.

Actually, that's not a true story at all. It is called a true story by Pat Robertson because he is lying and he knows that he is lying. I suspect he also knows who the devil is, and the devil looks a lot like Pat Robertson. The Haitian people would not swear a pact with some Christian villain because they did not observe Christianity. It makes no sense to make a pact with someone you don't know, when a whole host of tried and true gods and goddesses inhabit the religion of your ancestors.

Before Columbus came around, the island of Ayiti, which whites renamed Hispanola, was populated by Arawak and Taino indians. The Arawak/Taino folks had agriculture, religious, economic and political infrastructures firmly ensconced for thousands of years. Columbus figured they'd make great pack mules for carting gold onto his ships to bring to King Phillip and Queen Isabella back in Spain. He brought murder, rape, syphilis, small pox and slavery to the land. This sounds like the devil to me, but then my idea of the devil differs from Columbus and Pat Robertson.
Almost needless to say, the Arawak/Taino population suffered greatly from Columbus and his men, and after numerous rebellions, were eventually all but annihilated.
In this time, and for the next three hundred years, the slave trade was all the rage. Haiti is a geographically unfortunate place, much like Afghanistan. It is a great place to stop in after a long voyage across a vast ocean. When slavery became pre-industry for newly white territories, Haiti was a major port for buyers and sellers to partake in the slave trade. Many Africans were transported to Florida and Louisiana via Haiti.

In the late 1600s, Hispanola was divided. The French got Haiti (then known as Saint-Dominigue) and Spain got the Dominican Republic. The Taino and Arawak got whatever hills and caves they could find to avoid the whites and the Africans who weren't carted off to slavery either joined the indians in the hills and caves or managed to get along with the various whites. This went on for a time, and in this time, free Africans developed a cultural identity and sense of entitlement. Within a hundred years, Saint-Domingue was France's wealthiest colony. The Code Noir was adopted, and was rigidly adhered to. Most of the code involved rules around religion. Everyone was to be Catholic and to love all things Catholic. (This is when Haitians incorporated various Catholic saints into Vodou. It is not altogether true to say people who practice Vodou don't observe Christianity. Christian influences were absorbed into Vodou to keep the French off people's backs during church services.) Masters could chain and beat slaves, but, magnanimously, not for the pleasure of torturing someone.Children born of slaves were to be slaves, and children born to slave dads were slaves, but children born to free moms were free. Blacks were under the bootheels of whites, but there was a class of black folks who could plug along in society and get education and wealth. How bizarre the French Revolution must have sounded to black folks in Haiti when world news traveled their way. The people who made up laws like "slaves belonging to different masters may not gather at any time under any circumstance," were rebelling in their homeland.
This is how the slave revolt came about, but it was not won through pacts with Pat Robertson's devil. The Haitians "won" because Britain was causing problems for France. Of note amongst these problems, the British invaded Saint-Domingue. The French sat down with the Haitians and said, "All right look. We'll work this freedom stuff out. Just let's get together to kick the Brit's asses, huh?"
Our hero at this time was a man named Toussaint l'Ouverture. He assembled and ran a very nimble army and kicked the British and the Spaniards off the island. At this time, France saw itself as a more or less a benevolent grandpa, giving blacks all the freedoms they wanted, so long as the money still flowed to, by, for, and about them and the homeland. The Haitains were serving the French quite well in their quest to be the only whites ruling San Domingue. But once the other whites were gone, and the new government in France was headed by the ever-psychotic Napoleon Bonaparte, all kindly grandpa-ness suddenly became 50,000 French troops bound and determined to put down the slave rebellion once and for all. But l'Ouverture's badass army and yellow fever beat Napoleon's troops down. L'Ouverture was invited to parley, but was instead kidnapped and taken to France, where he soon died a very sad death. This would become the destiny of any leader who dared to loved the land, nation and people of Haiti.

In 1804, thirteen or so years after Pat Robertson's alleged pact went down, Haiti declared independence. Jean-Jacques Dessaline, l'Ouverture's good pal, ruled for a minute, and the present age of retribution began. Europe put in place a trade blockade with Haiti that has, in various forms, been in place ever since. Every subsequent government in Haiti has suffered from some kind of punitive economic terrorism or another. The only exception was on the rare occasions when a government, such as Papa Doc or his son Baby Doc, agreed to go along with white folks bright ideas about the nation and population's destiny. In any event, it wasn't until 1825, and at the cost of 90 million francs, that Haiti was truly, legally free from France.

But ever since they have been cursed by one thing after the other. Desperately poor. That island of Hispaniola is one island. It is cut down the middle on the one side is Haiti the other is the Dominican Republic. Dominican Republic is prosperous, healthy, full of resorts, etc. Haiti is in desperate poverty. Same island. They need to have and we meed to pray for them a great turning to god and out of this tragedy I'm optimistic something good may come.

If black folks in the U.S. have had a tough time since the "failure" of Reconstruction, folks in Haiti have had it much worse. Haiti is the world's first and only nation brought about through slave rebellion, and the white devil that Haitians have consistently refused to make a pact with has been punishing Haiti pretty much ever since. In fact, it's instructive to look at the "failure" of Reconstruction, for here, we find the exact same argument that Pat Robertson is using today. History books love to tell us that Reconstruction "failed" because black folks just couldn't get their act together. Few mention the routine lynchings, looting, night time raids, fire bombings, gang rapes and abject terrorization of successful black towns and communities, and how these activities hastened the "failure" of Reconstruction. Likewise, Haiti. Since that fateful day in 1804, wealthy white nations have systematically stomped down the dreams and aspirations of the Haitian people. Meanwhile the Dominican Republic, you know, same island, but the nation with all the resorts and prosperity, has never revolted against anyone. The Dominican Republic has been lucky enough to maintain leaders who kowtow to whites. The island of Hispanola is the perfect living, cross-section metaphor for "Good Blacks" versus "Bad Blacks." The Dominican Republic is the nation that made the pact with the white devil, and it has enjoyed relative peace and wealth for the trouble. Haitians and Dominicans regard one another in a similar way that field slaves and house slaves once did. The possibility of both nations coming together and uniting against the rich white nations is remote, as there are too many business interests involved that would quell any such cooperation.

And now we have the news that aid workers are having a "logistical nightmare." Perhaps if the U.S. allowed President Aristide to continue doing the work he was doing instead of kidnapping him and carting him off to the Central African Republic, there would be a more servicable infrastructure in place to assist in the off-loading of supplies. If the U.N. gave a rats ass about any of the Haitian people instead of busting moves to save, feed and shelter their own, perhaps the work on the ground would go smoother. But then if President Aristide wasn't whisked off, there would be no need for the U.N.'s presence in Haiti.

The aid that is pouring in to Haiti is not reaching poor Haitian people. It is going to the privileged and the whites. Even in the dust of this devastation, the Haitian people will continue to be punished for daring to stand up against white oppression.

And these words and thoughts of mine, this history I perceive, none of this resonates with the masses of people in the U.S. It is easier to identify with Pat Robertson and Rush Limbaugh than it is to face devilish white racism in history and in the world today. I find the fact that these men and their words are considered newsworthy, and are granted space in our minds, much more troubling than any particular thing they might have to say.

I still have some book work to do, so it may be a while before I get back to this blog business. Until then, Dawn Adell a Female Hell, this one's for you.

No Reservations

Hi, I’m Genocide.
I have a good time because there is a place for me wherever I go,
and I,
I am a world traveler.

I’ve been to the United States, delighting in my all-time favorite demographic, indigenous people. Slaves and folks descended from U.S. slaves, they know me well.
I have tucked into Bosnians, the Irish, Scots, Rwandans, Turks, Kurds, Romas, Columbians, Nicaraguans, Tibetans, Vietnamese, Laotians and Cambodians.
Yum, yum, what a smorgasborg of a world we do live in.
I mean, truly.
I am the Anthony Bourdain of human suffering.
During WWII, I had the opportunity to make many, many new friends. I had my first taste of homosexuals, en masse. Artists and Catholics, I found, are a sinister, musky,
complex flavor, when skillfully combined.
And Jews. Mmmm, tasty, tasty Jews. Everyone knows I ate lots of Jews. The Laotians, say, they don’t have the same marketing skills. No one else has really figured out how to earn cache from one of my long-term stays.
Unlike Anthony Bourdain, I don’t pay much attention to who serves me, or how a meal came into my presence.
Quantity makes the quality inherent.
Every once in a while, however, something does catch my attention and right now, I am laughing.
The Zionist Israelis, who created an entire victim identity around how horrifying and devastating I am, pwahahaha, they are serving me Palestinians! I mean they’ve been serving Palestinians, Syrians and Lebanese folks in a slow, steady syrupy trickle since 1948. This is nothing new, but I have heard the news and they are ready to bring me a feast. A Heil Hitler repast from the Jews! I feel so utterly vindicated. They have bad-mouthed me, while remaining a steady source of a good appetizer for the past 60 years. And now they feed me, house to house, just like the Nazis did.
My laughter is nefarious, villianous.
I always come out on top.



Enough. It's time for a boycott.
The best way to end the bloody occupation is to target Israel with the kind of movement that ended apartheid in South Africa

Naomi Klein
The Guardian, Saturday 10 January 2009

It's time. Long past time. The best strategy to end the increasingly bloody occupation is for Israel to become the target of the kind of global movement that put an end to apartheid in South Africa. In July 2005 a huge coalition of Palestinian groups laid out plans to do just that. They called on "people of conscience all over the world to impose broad boycotts and implement divestment initiatives against Israel similar to those applied to South Africa in the apartheid era". The campaign Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions was born.
http://www.bdsmovement.net/
Every day that Israel pounds Gaza brings more converts to the BDS cause - even among Israeli Jews. In the midst of the assault roughly 500 Israelis, dozens of them well-known artists and scholars, sent a letter to foreign ambassadors in Israel. It calls for "the adoption of immediate restrictive measures and sanctions" and draws a clear parallel with the anti-apartheid struggle. "The boycott on South Africa was effective, but Israel is handled with kid gloves ... This international backing must stop."
Yet even in the face of these clear calls, many of us still can't go there. The reasons are complex, emotional and understandable. But they simply aren't good enough. Economic sanctions are the most effective tool in the non-violent arsenal: surrendering them verges on active complicity. Here are the top four objections to the BDS strategy, followed by counter-arguments.
Punitive measures will alienate rather than persuade Israelis.
The world has tried what used to be called "constructive engagement". It has failed utterly. Since 2006 Israel has been steadily escalating its criminality: expanding settlements, launching an outrageous war against Lebanon, and imposing collective punishment on Gaza through the brutal blockade. Despite this escalation, Israel has not faced punitive measures - quite the opposite. The weapons and $3bn in annual aid the US sends Israel are only the beginning. Throughout this key period, Israel has enjoyed a dramatic improvement in its diplomatic, cultural and trade relations with a variety of other allies. For instance, in 2007 Israel became the first country outside Latin America to sign a free-trade deal with the Mercosur bloc. In the first nine months of 2008, Israeli exports to Canada went up 45%. A new deal with the EU is set to double Israel's exports of processed food. And in December European ministers "upgraded" the EU-Israel association agreement, a reward long sought by Jerusalem.
It is in this context that Israeli leaders started their latest war: confident they would face no meaningful costs. It is remarkable that over seven days of wartime trading, the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange's flagship index actually went up 10.7%. When carrots don't work, sticks are needed.
Israel is not South Africa.
Of course it isn't. The relevance of the South African model is that it proves BDS tactics can be effective when weaker measures (protests, petitions, backroom lobbying) fail. And there are deeply distressing echoes of apartheid in the occupied territories: the colour-coded IDs and travel permits, the bulldozed homes and forced displacement, the settler-only roads. Ronnie Kasrils, a prominent South African politician, said the architecture of segregation he saw in the West Bank and Gaza was "infinitely worse than apartheid". That was in 2007, before Israel began its full-scale war against the open-air prison that is Gaza.
Why single out Israel when the US, Britain and other western countries do the same things in Iraq and Afghanistan?
Boycott is not a dogma; it is a tactic. The reason the strategy should be tried is practical: in a country so small and trade-dependent, it could actually work.
Boycotts sever communication; we need more dialogue, not less.
This one I'll answer with a personal story. For eight years, my books have been published in Israel by a commercial house called Babel. But when I published The Shock Doctrine, I wanted to respect the boycott. On the advice of BDS activists, including the wonderful writer John Berger, I contacted a small publisher called Andalus. Andalus is an activist press, deeply involved in the anti-occupation movement and the only Israeli publisher devoted exclusively to translating Arabic writing into Hebrew. We drafted a contract that guarantees that all proceeds go to Andalus's work, and none to me. I am boycotting the Israeli economy but not Israelis.
Our modest publishing plan required dozens of phone calls, emails and instant messages, stretching between Tel Aviv, Ramallah, Paris, Toronto and Gaza City. My point is this: as soon as you start a boycott strategy, dialogue grows dramatically. The argument that boycotts will cut us off from one another is particularly specious given the array of cheap information technologies at our fingertips. We are drowning in ways to rant at each other across national boundaries. No boycott can stop us.
Just about now, many a proud Zionist is gearing up for major point-scoring: don't I know that many of these very hi-tech toys come from Israeli research parks, world leaders in infotech? True enough, but not all of them. Several days into Israel's Gaza assault, Richard Ramsey, managing director of a British telecom specialising in voice-over-internet services, sent an email to the Israeli tech firm MobileMax: "As a result of the Israeli government action in the last few days we will no longer be in a position to consider doing business with yourself or any other Israeli company."
Ramsey says his decision wasn't political; he just didn't want to lose customers. "We can't afford to lose any of our clients," he explains, "so it was purely commercially defensive."
It was this kind of cold business calculation that led many companies to pull out of South Africa two decades ago. And it's precisely the kind of calculation that is our most realistic hope of bringing justice, so long denied, to Palestine.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/jan/10/naomi-klein-boycott-israel/
naomiklein.org



… and Olmert Smote the Philistines

John Maxwell

It’s a time-tested method used for more than four thousand years; people always get killed but nothing is ever settled.

God confided to Moses that he was giving the Israelites title to the land of Canaan. There was one small problem: lots of other people were already living in Canaan and had been for ages. So, in order to enforce the Israelites’ title, Joshua had to clear the land.

The book of Joshua tells of the labours of the hero and the Israelites as they laid claim to their divine endowment smiting cities and their rulers right left and centre … ‘So Joshua smote all the country of the hills, and of the south, and of the vale, and of the springs, and all their kings: he left none remaining, but utterly destroyed all that breathed, as the Lord God of Israel commanded.

And finally, ” … Joshua took the whole land, according to all that the Lord said unto Moses; and Joshua gave it for an inheritance unto Israel according to their divisions by their tribes. And the land rested from war.”

Palestine did not long rest from war. The first kingdom of Israel lasted a few generations before splitting in two, largely owing to the arrogance of Rehoboam, a precursor to Ariel Sharon. Sharon also came a cropper trying to exterminate the Palestinians and has lain comatose now for most of a decade.

Before his unfortunate seizure Mr Sharon’s government had been accused – by the International Committee of the Red Cross – of war crimes against the Palestinians. In 2001 the Red Cross condemned Israeli settlements in the occupied territories as equivalent to war crimes under international law. “The transfer, the installation of population of the occupying power into the occupied territories is ... an illegal move and qualifies as a grave breach," said ICRC's René Kosirnik at a press conference in Tel Aviv … equal in principle to war crimes."

Condoleezza Shamed

Later, when Mr Sharon was attempting to pulverise the Palestinian Authority and Yasser Arafat, Sharon’s soldiers targeted not only journalists, but Red Cross and Red Crescent ambulances, doctors and nurses, women and children as well as Palestinian policemen and Arafat himself.

Since Mr G.W Bush was at that time trying to assemble support within the Arab world for a posse to go after Saddam Hussein the US President did not find Sharon’s behaviour ‘helpful’. Then as now, the Israeli government demonstrated a contempt for its patron the US, and Mr Bush was very upset. He was sufficiently upset not only to withhold $800 million in aid promised to Israel by the outgoing Clinton administration, he decided to support a Security Council resolution which spelled out, for the first time , the right of Palestinians to their own independent state. This commitment got lost somewhere between Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib.

The political nous and social evolution of Sharon’s successor may be gauged by a tale told by Mr Olmert himself. In the Israeli leader’s version of why the US had abstained on a UN resolution attempting to get Israel to play by the rules, Mr Olmert gave himself a starring role.

"When we saw that the secretary of state, [Condoleezza Rice] for reasons we did not really understand, wanted to vote in favour of the UN resolution ... I looked for President Bush and they told me he was in Philadelphia making a speech," Olmert said .

"I said, 'I don't care. I have to talk to him now.' They got him off the podium, brought him to another room and I spoke to him. I told him, 'You can't vote in favour of this resolution.' He said, 'Listen, I don't know about it, I didn't see it, I'm not familiar with the phrasing.'

"He gave an order to the secretary of state and she did not vote in favour of it - a resolution she cooked up, phrased, organised and manoeuvred for. She was left pretty shamed and abstained on a resolution she arranged."

Now! Aint that Sump’n !

Or, as they say in Peoria – WOW!!!

Mr Olmert does not perhaps know that waiting to succeed Miss Rice is a woman who is not partial to being kneecapped by a self-important, obnoxious, sexist, Middle Eastern potentate, and we may credibly suspect that Mrs Clinton and her boss and the entire Obama Cabinet may soon be itching to put Israel in its place.

Successes of the Blitzkrieg

What has Israel achieved in nearly three weeks of its Gaza blitzkrieg?

• As the Guardian says “The extraordinary number of civilian deaths, and of children in particular, is for many a defining and shocking feature of this 18-day offensive. The figures are stark. At least 910 Palestinians are dead, among them 292 children. At least 4,250 are injured, among them 1,497 children. Many have injuries that will leave them permanently disabled and facing more operations and months or years of rehabilitation therapy”

More than half of Gaza's 1.5 million inhabitants are children.

• Israel has reduced to rubble the physical infrastructure of Gaza, destroying, schools, community centres, homes and apartments as well as farms, shops, factories, and places where people might seek shelter in emergencies.

About two-thirds of the territory's 1.5m people have no electricity; the rest have only an intermittent supply, the UN says. Hospitals are overloaded with the injured, and 500,000 Gazans still have no access to running water. "Israeli bombardment is causing extensive destruction to homes and to public infrastructure throughout the Gaza Strip and is jeopardizing water, sanitation and medical services."

•The indiscriminate destruction is not only intended to terrorise and intimidate, it is clearly also, maliciously intended to destroy social capital, to maim the society’s ability to recover and to take care of itself. It is punishment of people,as human beings, innocents with no argument with anyone and to make sure that, as after a ferocious natural cataclysm, a tsunami, a Katrina, there is not only enormous material loss but deep emotional scarring and wounds that may never heal.

• The blitzkrieg has destroyed Fatah and all Palestinian opposition to Hamas. In the West Bank strongholds of Fatah everyone is now for Hamas. In the Egyptian Hospitals outside Gaza news agencies are reporting that people who are wounded, people who were never politically active, want to go back to Gaza to fight for Hamas. The conversion rate is quite remarkable and even moreso on the Arab street in places like Cairo, Damascus and Jerusalem.

•Despite public vows by Israeli politicians to destroy Hamas's military capability, Israeli officials said Tuesday that the movement had lost only a fraction of its fighters and retained a large stockpile of rockets and other armaments. A "few hundred" Hamas fighters have been killed, out of a total force of 15,000, according to a senior Israeli military official.

To say that the government of Israel may be wrong or evil, is interpreted not as a political judgment but as an expression of racist prejudice. Criticising Israel is attacking Jews and Jewishness and is therefore anti-semitic.

‘ … those countries that count’

The Israeli government’s attitude to external criticism may be gauged from the following quotation:"The tone of the criticism is moderate, restrained, more balanced, at least in the case of those countries that count," a senior government official said.

Such extreme positions have provoked a backlash inside and outside of Israel. Some of he world’s most prominent Jews have publicly condemned the actions of the Israeli government and one of the best known – journalist Naomi Klein has joined other people, Jews and Gentiles, in calling for an economic boycott of Israel.

As the Guardian, no enemy of Israel said on Tuesday: “That is why the talk elsewhere is now of boycotts, of arms embargos, of revoking trade agreements, withholding financial support and cancelling export credit guarantees. These are not all appealing options, nor should they be yet necessary. But a country which truly rejects the collective concerns of the international community leaves its friends, never mind its enemies, running out of road.” (my italics)

That such a situation should come about is remarkable sinceis almost impossible for Hamas to have its case presented fairly. In the great western world where the press is free it seems impossible to find any big news agency which conveys the real grievances and arguments of the PALESTINIANS, let alone Hamas. As Mark Levine points out in the Huffington Post: The claim that Hamas will never accept the existence of Israel has proved equally misinformed, as Hamas leaders explicitly announce their intention to do just that in the pages of the Los Angeles Times or to any international leader or journalist who will meet with them.Levine: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/mark-levine/who-will-save-israel-from_b_156943.html

What has changed has much to do with the arrogance of Israel. By banning independent journalistic coverage of the blitzkrieg the Israelis have eliminated much of the usual spin that favours Israel and demonises the Palestinians. When the public and the press have to depend almost entirely on video, photographs and statistics, the truth has a better chance of surfacing.

Amira Hass, a journalist and daughter of Holocaust survivors writes:

“History did not begin with the Qassam rockets. But for us, the Israelis, history always begins when the Palestinians hurt us, and then the pain is completely decontextualized.

‘ …Gaza is not a military power that attacked its tiny, peace-loving neighbor, Israel. Gaza is a territory that Israel occupied in 1967, along with the West Bank. Its residents are part of the Palestinian people, which lost its land and its homeland in 1948.

In 1993, Israel had a one-time golden opportunity to prove to the world that what people say about us is untrue - that it is not by nature a colonialist state. That the expulsion of a nation from its land, the expulsion of people from their houses and the robbery of Palestinian land for the sake of settling Jews are not the basis and essence of its existence. -http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1055241.html

Silent Spring?

Somewhere near the beginning of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring she has a wonderful paragraph about what she calls ‘biocide’ – the indiscriminate broad spectrum war against insects and other “pests” that, she warned us – nearly a half-century ago – was doomed to failure. This was because the barrage of pesticides was not only poisoning us but simultaneously, accelerating the forced evolution of many life forms. In what she called a triumphant affirmation of Darwin’s thesis of natural selection she predicted what we have since seen happening – the evolution of super pests, insects, bacteria and diseases, making inconsequential our efforts at pest extermination..

The Israeli government is the only government I know of with a state policy of targeted assassination. While the government did not declare that assassination of Hamas leadership was a priority in Gaza, it clearly was, as the attacks on the homes of leaders demonstrated.

Sharon tried to exterminate Fatah and got Hamas.

Has Israel already found its next Rehoboam? Its next exterminator?

(Endnote: Democratic Israel has banned from contesting elections two small Arab political parties. Will any notice be taken by the free world’s press? Stay tuned)

Copyright ©2009 John Maxwell



UN human rights chief accuses Israel of war crimes
Official calls for investigation into Zeitoun shelling that killed up to 30 in one house as Israelis dismiss 'unworkable' ceasefire

by Rory McCarthy
The United Nations ' most senior human rights official said last night that the Israeli military may have committed war crimes in Gaza . The warning came as Israeli troops pressed on with the deadly offensive in defiance of a UN security council resolution calling for a ceasefire.
Navi Pillay, the UN high commissioner for human rights, has called for "credible, independent and transparent" investigations into possible violations of humanitarian law, and singled out an incident this week in Zeitoun, south-east of Gaza City, where up to 30 Palestinians in one house were killed by Israeli shelling.
Pillay, a former international criminal court judge from South Africa, told the BBC the incident "appears to have all the elements of war crimes".
The accusation came as Israel kept up its two-week-old air and ground offensive in Gaza and dismissed as "unworkable" the UN security council resolution which had called for "an immediate, durable and fully respected ceasefire".
Protests against the offensive were held across the world yesterday just as diplomacy to halt the conflict appeared to falter.
With the Palestinian casualty toll rising to around 800 dead, including 265 children, and more than 3,000 injured, fresh evidence emerged yesterday of the killings in Zeitoun. It was "one of the gravest incidents" since Israel's offensive began two weeks ago, the UN office for the co-ordination of humanitarian affairs said yesterday.
"There is an international obligation on the part of soldiers in their position to protect civilians, not to kill civilians indiscriminately in the first place, and when they do, to make sure that they help the wounded," Pillay told Reuters. "In this particular case these children were helpless and the soldiers were close by," she added.
An Israeli military spokeswoman, Avital Leibovich, said the incident was still being examined. "We don't warn people to go to other buildings, this is not something we do," she said. "We don't know this case, we don't know that we attacked it."
Despite the intense bombardment, militants in Gaza fired at least 30 rockets into southern Israel yesterday. Sami Abu Zuhri, a Hamas spokesman, told al-Jazeera TV: "This resolution doesn't mean that the war is over. We call on Palestinian fighters to mobilise and be ready to face the offensive, and we urge the Arab masses to carry on with their angry protests."
Israeli officials said they could not be expected to halt their military operation while the rockets continued and said they first wanted an end to the rocket fire and a "mechanism" to prevent Hamas rearming in future.
"The whole idea that Israel will unilaterally stop protecting our people when Hamas is sending rockets into our cities to kill our people is not a reasonable request of Israel," said Mark Regev, spokesman for prime minister Ehud Olmert. Israel wanted security for its people in southern Israel, he said, and dismissed suggestions his military might seek to topple Hamas, saying they were "not in the regime-change business".
Israeli public opinion still strongly favours the war. One poll of Jewish Israelis yesterday, by the War and Peace Index, said 90% of the population supported continuing the operation until Israel achieved all its goals.
Olmert held a meeting of his security cabinet, and on the agenda was discussion about whether to intensify the offensive by launching a fresh stage of attacks in which Israeli troops would invade the major urban areas of Gaza as more reservists were called up. There was no word on the outcome.
So far 13 Israelis have been killed in this conflict, of whom three were civilians.
Another 23 Palestinians were killed by the Israeli military yesterday. Seven from one family, including an infant, died when Israeli jets bombed a five-storey building in Beit Lahiya, in northern Gaza. There was heavy aerial bombing and artillery fire across the territory.
More than 20,000 Gazans have fled their homes in the north of the strip and thousands more in the south. In some cases Israeli troops have told them to leave, or dropped leaflets warning them to evacuate their homes. Some are even dividing their families between different addresses for fear of losing them all in a single air strike.
"Many people are leaving their homes and moving to the centre of the cities," said Abdel Karim Ashour, 53, who works with a local aid agency, the Palestinian Agricultural Relief Committee. He, his wife and their four children fled their house on the coastal road in northern Gaza on the third day of the conflict. He sent the four children to stay with his brother while he and his wife are staying at a friend's house. "We were in an area of heavy shelling, so we left and I divided the family to try to reduce the victims if we face any trouble. We try and keep in touch by telephone but there are problems with the network," he said. "We're just hoping for a ceasefire. If the fighting goes on there will be more victims."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/jan/10/un-human-rights-gaza-zeitoun

Israel is Attacking a Civilian Ship in International Waters!

This is from freegaza.org
Please take action immediately! Along with medical supplies and food, Cynthia McKinney is on that ship.

URGENT! Israeli Navy Attacking Civilian Mercy Ship! TAKE ACTION IMMEDIATELY!

Date : 12-30-2008
The Dignity, a Free Gaza boat on a mission of mercy to besieged Gaza, is being attacked by the Israeli Navy in international waters. The Dignity has been surrounded by at least half-a-dozen Israeli warships. They are firing live ammunition around the Dignity, and one of the warships has rammed the civilian craft causing an unknown amount of damage. Contrary to international maritime law, the Israelis are actively preventing the Dignity from approaching Gaza or finding safe haven in either Egypt or Lebanon. Instead, the Israeli navy is demanding that the Dignity return to Cyprus - despite the fact that the ship does not carry enough fuel to do so. Fortunately, no one aboard the ship has yet been seriously injured.

There are 15 civilian passengers representing 11 different countries (see below for a complete list). At approximately 5am (UST), well out in international waters, Israeli warships began surrounding the Dignity, threatening the ship. At 6:45am (UST) we were able to establish brief contact with the crew and were told that the ship had been rammed by the Israeli Navy in international waters, and that the Israelis were preventing the ship from finding safe harbor. We heard heavy gunfire in the background before all contact was lost with the Dignity.

It is urgent that you TAKE IMMEDIATE ACTION!

URGENT! Israeli Navy Attacking Civilian Mercy Ship! TAKE ACTION IMMEDIATELY!

The Dignity, a Free Gaza boat on a mission of mercy to besieged Gaza, is being attacked by the Israeli Navy in international waters. The Dignity has been surrounded by at least half-a-dozen Israeli warships. They are firing live ammunition around the Dignity, and one of the warships has rammed the civilian craft causing an unknown amount of damage. Contrary to international maritime law, the Israelis are actively preventing the Dignity from approaching Gaza or finding safe haven in either Egypt or Lebanon. Instead, the Israeli navy is demanding that the Dignity return to Cyprus - despite the fact that the ship does not carry enough fuel to do so. Fortunately, no one aboard the ship has yet been seriously injured.

There are 15 civilian passengers representing 11 different countries (see below for a complete list). At approximately 5am (UST), well out in international waters, Israeli warships began surrounding the Dignity, threatening the ship. At 6:45am (UST) we were able to establish brief contact with the crew and were told that the ship had been rammed by the Israeli Navy in international waters, and that the Israelis were preventing the ship from finding safe harbor. We heard heavy gunfire in the background before all contact was lost with the Dignity.

It is urgent that you TAKE IMMEDIATE ACTION!

CALL the Israeli Government and demand that it immediately STOP attacking the Dignity and endangering the lives of its passengers!

CALL Mark Regev in the Prime Minister's office at:
+972 2670 5354 or +972 5062 3264
mark.regev@it.pmo.gov.il

CALL Shlomo Dror in the Ministry of Defence at:
+972 33697 5339 or +972 50629 8148
mediasar@mod.gov.il

We Lost

I don’t know exactly what we were trying to win.
Maybe we wanted to teach Russia how to colonize not only Afghanistan but also Iraq to boot. Well, we didn’t. We showed the world that the assessment, back when the U.S.S.R. fell, was the correct assessment.
Maybe we wanted oil, well we didn’t get it. We got an economy looted before our very eyes, in much the same manner as curators from Baghdad’s ancient museums watched relics and artworks that have survived for millenia, crushed to smithereens or sold on Ebay.
Maybe we wanted to bring democracy (sponsored by WalMart, Home Depot, Halliburton, Burger King, Black Hawk, Disney, GE, Exxon, Kellogg, Brown and Root, Microsoft and Starbucks) to those poor ol’ Muslims who invented civilization 4,000 years ago.
In any case, we lost.

Yes, I am the New York Times. I am CNN. I have millions of blogoreaders across the blogosphere and you heard it here first.
The brutal occupation of Iraq is over.
Our troops must be out of Iraq by December, 2011. All troops in cities, towns and villages must leave by June, 2009. The Green Zone is to be handed over to the Iraqi government practically immediately. Best of all! Private contractors (a.k.a. Dick Cheney’s best pals) will no longer have legal immunity, so everyone who murders tortures and/or rapes Iraqi folks or women associated with the occupation from now on will actually face some kind of penalty.
This seems like big news to me.
In the rest of the world it’s big news.

So there you have it. All the protests, all the petitions, all the articles and essays and organizations that started in outrage of this brual occupation have been vindicated.
There were no weapons of mass destruction
There was no democracy-bringing.
There wasn’t even a war.
There was a shameful, brutal occupation.
Millions of people died, were illegally incarerated or lost their homes. Millions of people can now officially able to be diagnosed with post traumatic stress disorder (which is a lot more luxurious than on-going traumatic stress disorder).
It’s over.
George Bush and his pals will lose a little face, but they made so much money off this shit, the point of “winning” or “losing” never entered those bitches consciousness.
If they aren't tried for war crimes then I might have to become a terrorist.
The people of Iraq lost a lot.
We lost too, but what exactly we lost will only come to light when the Iraqi people begin the arduous process of rebuilding their country.
Allah be with us all.

Thanks to Alexander Cockburn at Counterpunch for letting me know it was over. Here is his article, entitled: "It's Official: Total Defeat for the U.S. in Iraq."

http://www.alternet.org/waroniraq/112768/it%27s_official%3A_total_defeat_for_u.s._in_iraq/

P.S. Bush did not go there for a "farewell lap." He went there to get shoes thrown at him and to sign the papers saying "You failed, you miserable piece of shit."

Oh By the Way

I keep getting emails from folks asking me who I am endorsing for president.
It seems like such a foregone conclusion, I have largely not repsonded to these emails.
Sometimes I am an asshole and alas, this is one of those times.
I said to my asshole self, “If someone has read either of my books and is asking me who I am endorsing for president, they must be fucking insane.”
But then the wife was all, “God you are such an asshole.”
She is from the south and understands things about propriety and decorum that honestly never occur to me. “It’s about making a formal proclamation. Good god, you must be insane.”

The first time I saw Barack Obama’s name was a few years ago and I knew he would be president.
Because I am a writer, I put great store in the resonations of words, karmic, poetic and otherwise. Obama and Osama have the same phonetic resonation and polar opposite karmic associations in the collective imagination. Meanwhile the poetry of a president named Obama dances a merry-assed jig around my heart. I liked the seamlessness of all this and started paying great attention to the beliefs, communication patterns and ideals of Barack Obama.
To me, word resonation is science, divination and a very handy way to figure out things about the world.
In my heart, I endorsed Obama long before he announced his candidacy.

I do not endorse Obama because I think he is my hero who will come and save us all and restore our nation to the potential—as opposted to the historical imperative (with the exception of Reconstruction and the Civil Rights times)—to be a truly great democracy.
(Run-on sentences rock!)

Honestly, I believe that Barack Obama will endure a character-assassinating term in office. He will not be physically murdered because then his murderers will then, in perpetuity, have to endure a national holiday in honor of him. No, they will go after his character. He will be under seige from the moment he steps into the White House. There will be some kind of “terrorist” attack courtesy of the head of Al-Qaeda, Karl Rove.
In fact, Colin Powell strangely alluded to this when he endorsed Obama on Meet the Press. Tom Brokaw asked Mr. Powell what he would recommend to the new president (a.k.a.Barack Obama) if he was asked for advice on January 21st.
I have excerpted Mr. Powell’s response below:

GEN. POWELL: I would start with talking to the American people and talking to the world, and conveying a new image of American leadership, a new image of America's role in the world.
The problems will always be there, and there's going to be a crisis come along in the 21st or 22nd of January that we don't even know about right now.

For the full transcript, go to
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/27266223/

The presidential inauguration is January 20th. Colin Powell clearly states that there is going to be a”crisis” (a.k.a. Karl Rove “terroris” attack) on January 21st or 22nd. He could not be clearer. This quote was not, to my knowledge, repeated in any of the news stories about Mr. Powell’s endorsement, but there it is, plain as a plane in a tower, in the transcript.
Even if this particular “crisis” does not come to pass on either of these days, Obama will be under seige upon his fist breath of Oval Office Air.

Though I have willed and believed in an Obama Presidency for almost a year, I don’t see the man as a hero. He is not going to make all of our problems go away. He is going to be very busy, staving off the offensive, every single waking and sleeping hour for the next four years.

Many Obama supporters are content blaming the Bush Administration for the horrors of the past eight years. Bush and his various Turdblossoms are, however, reflections of our culture, and by extension, us. Those men could not exist in the way they have existed without engaging our collective imagination. Perhaps we are horrified that so many people have died horrible deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan, that torture is a legitimate policy.
Perhaps.
But in our consciousness and imagination, it seems somehow inevitable that white Christian males will terrorize and murder people who are viewed as the enemy. In our history, we have seen this enacted time after time.
Like Thanksgiving, Columbus Day and the celebration of Lewis and Clark, it appears with such frequency, the atrocity of our collective imagination and will is unseeable.
In this way, no matter what one’s moral position in regards to the Bush Administration’s crimes against humanity, we are all complicit.
We accept many crimes.
As I write this, potential Obama voters all over the country are being targeted with disinformative fliers, emails and phone calls. People are being threatened that the police will be at polling places, checking into backgrounds for outstanding tickets or warrants. I just read an article on the AP about these serious crimes, but they are referred to as “trickery.” (http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20081102/ap_on_el_ge/dirty_tricks;_ylt=AiKFvn5BncK95Cp_cww2bSJvzwcF)
Crimes are often called tricks (or mistakes) when they are sourced by white Christian males.
It is not “trickery” for a private investigator hired by a Republican lawyer to knock of folk’s doors, demanding proof of citizenship and threats of deportation. Two woman are filing a lawsuit against these assholes, and good for them for doing so, but where are the police? Why are these men allowed their freedom, when they are doing everything in their power to disenfranchise people of their freedom? Voter fraud is a crime. For two victims—out of possibly hundreds of similarly intimidated U.S. citizens—to file a lawsuit is absurd. This is a serious crime and these men should not be on the streets. But they are because it seems inevitable, even reasonable, somehow, for white Christian males to terrorize people they see as the enemy.

Obama is not going to change this fundamental flaw in our cultural reality, and it causes us a lot of problems, personally, civically, nationally, and globally.
But what he will do, just by being himself, is this:
He will affect our collective imagination and consciousness.
This is why I support Barack Obama. Not because of any of his policies or plans, nothing on his resume means a thing to me. He will be dealing with so much harsh shit for the next four years, I don’t really believe he will actually change much at all.
He does, however, bring out the very best in people.
He inspires people to look at themselves and the world differently.
An Obama presidency will bring a pause to the part of us that thinks nothing of stealing someone else’s parking spot, and also someone’s country.
He is a reflection of our collective good will, instead of the meanspirited little turd that has a place in all our hearts.

Good Will Hunting Part II

Letters to Nowhere

Rovian chickenshits have normalized cheating.
Whereas back in days gone past eight years ago, it was somewhat remarkable. Yeah, back when I was a grownup, cheating used to be a sign that you must not thinkyou’re worthy of achieving life’s little triumphs via tenacity, hard work, integrity and yes, gasp, good will.
Believe it or not youngstas, cheating once reflected poorly on one’s character.
It meant you were a loser, not a “winner” with the chickenshit Rovian turpitude to rig the game in your favor.
The simple act of volunteering for the McCain campaign gives one an immediate opportunity to parttake in cheating.
It seems a Dutch journalist named Margriet Oostveen volunteers for various campaigns to get a layperson’s behind-the-scenes story. She doesn’t expect to be made privy of scandalous goings-on, but it’s her attempt to gain a clearer understanding of various politicians. So, she volunteered for The McPain to Nowhere Campaign and, expecting to be enlisted on the phone bank or some innocuous shit, Ms. Oostveen was surprised with the task of lying and cheating from Day One.
A staffer asked her to write fictitious “Letters to the Editor.”
Which editor?
Why, the editor of the local newspaper, silly.
Which local newspaper?
Any local newspaper in the country that might need a generic, xenophobic, ignorant, blindly-supportive letter to any editor in any town where the rigging of the vote needs to somehow be justified.
It was explained to Ms. Oorstveen that the letters would be signed by various locals, thus ensuring the opportunity to “flood” any given newspaper.
She wrote a letter describing herself as a mother who’s son was, like Track Palin, serving in Iraq. Sticking to the “talking points” the campaign furnished her with, she extolled the virtues of Sarah Palin:

Dear editor,
Being the one-in-a-million executive supermom is not even the biggest quality of Sarah Palin. Her biggest plus to me is that, being amazingly smart and qualified, she managed to remain a woman like us. She is the PTA running hockey moms. She is the working mothers of special needs children. She is every caring mother of a challenging teenager. And most of all, she is just like any mother of a child who deploys to Iraq in the service of this country.
My son too, is there.
And my heart needs him back safe so much.
But when I see him again, I also want to see his face glow with pride. Just like the day he told me he enlisted.
That is why Senator John McCain could count on my vote from day one.
With Sarah Palin, I have even more reason to trust in victory. She represents my heart.
Sincerely,


Salon compiled all of the emails between Ms. Oostveen and various turd-blossomettes with the McCain campaign:

http://www.salon.com/news/primary_sources/2008/09/24/mccain_letters/

Talking points should not be, but have become, another form of cheating.
There is a self-defense tactic called “The Broken Record.” If someone if hassling you, the idea is to repeat the same phrase over and over, rather than engage in a confrontation. It could go something like this:
“C’mon baby, come home with me.”
“I am very happy spending time with my friends here at this bar. Please go away.”
“C’mon baby, you know you want it.”
“I am very happy spending time with my friends here at this bar. Please go away.”
“I got some good weed and some whiskey at my apartment.”
“I am very happy spending time with my friends here at this bar. Please go away.”
“I thought you liked me. I saw the way you were looking at me earlier.”
“I am very happy spending time with my friends here at this bar. Please go away.”

The Broken Record is a way to assert yourself with someone who does not, in any given moment, understand that you are a human being worthy of respect. By repeating the same phrase over and over, the offender is given the opportunity to see that you will not back down no matter what.

The Chickenshit Rovian Republicans found out about The Broken Record, only they call it “talking points.” Instead of actually engaging with people and honoring our intelligence and innate level of integrity, a defensive, Broken Record tactic is employed.
Here’s an example:

“Hi I’m a maverick. Haya America needs some mavericks. Mavericks love Joe the Plumber. Joe the Plumber knows how important it is to distribute the wealth. Mavericks like us know how Joe the Plumber feels. I’m the hockey mom. Voracious reader! Special needs! Pitbull! Lipstick! Moose hunt! You betcha, I said hell no to the bridge to nowhere! Drill baby drill!”

The idea is, just like in a self-defense situation, to wear down the listener. It has worked well in the past, but I think people are tired of if after eight years.


The Terrorist Ashley Todd


And then we have the I-was-assaulted-by-a-large-black-man-and-he-carved-a backwards-B-on-my-face.
Look, if you’re going to cheat, at the very least, have someone else carve into your face. You see, if you carve something into your face while looking in the mirror, it will appear backwards to the viewer. Forensic scrutiny is not a prerequisite.
Ashley Todd, aged 20.
Oh lord, I can’t even bear to describe her idiocy. If you haven’t read about Ashley Todd yet, then google her foolish ass.
Aren’t white people tired of accusing black men of raping white women yet? I mean, sure, black men do horrible things.
Sure.
In this culture, everyone has ample opportunity to do horrible things. It’s one of the rare places where equality actually reigns.
Back in Reconstruction times, whenever white people felt the need to destroy a black community, someone came forward and said that a black man raped his daughter, wife, mother, etc. Then the whites razed the black community. It happened in every state, in every city where black folks flourished. By the time Emmitt Till was killed, thousands of black men and hundreds of black communities had been destroyed via this accusation.
So Ashley Todd is, in my mind, quite the monster of our times. Not only did she grow up in a culture that celebrates cheating and meanspiritedness, not only is she a Republican operative who understands that “winning” is the only thing that matters, she is also a terrorist. Because of Ashley Todd and women like Ashley Todd (Susan Smith comes to mind), women of any race who actually ARE sexually assaulted by men of any race are terrorized by hostile judicial systems and defense lawyers. Every time a woman comes out saying she was raped or assaulted when she, in fact, was not, defense lawyers all over the nation file that shit away in their minds, pre-forming arguments to get their clients aquittals.
An entire rugby team in North Carolina got off, and in fact were portrayed as “victims” by this very scenario. The fact that the rapists were white and the woman they assaulted was black certainly helped things along for the little thugs.

I doubt if Ashley Todd put much historical thought into her actions and choices. She instinctively knows what white people will respond to and she did her best to become a kind of cheating hero.
It is very sad that a 20-year-old would come up with this scenario, but she is a product of our culture.
A monster, like I say, of our times.
I don’t know how the Ashley Todds of the country will pull through when cheating is no longer the way to get things done.
I don’t in fact know if cheating will ever again be viewed as a character flaw.
Nonetheless, I continue to hunt for good will.

Hunting Good Will, Part I

Don't Get Him Started

The other night I watched Good Will Hunting for the first time since it busted a move on Ben Affleck and Matt Damon’s respective careers. Came out in 1997. Dazzled at the Oscars, la, la, la.
I have a hard time remembering movies and books, so it was kinda like watching it for the first time. I do recall enjoying it, but if you’d asked me what it was about, I’da said, “Oh yes, Good Will Hunting. It’s these two white male students who go to some fancy college in the east. Robin Williams plays a professor who helps them to defy the odds and reach new heights.”
Triumphant poignancy ensues.
That’s not what it’s about.
It’s about Matt Damon’s title character, a foster kid/working class math genius who provides custodial services to MIT. During his shift one day, buffing the floor, he pauses to solve an impossible mathematical formula on a chalkboard in a hallway outside a math theorist’s classroom. Earlier that day, you see, the teacher put the problem on the board and promised any student who solved it a chance to appear in some bigshit math journal.
Later on, some passing students see that the problem is solved, they find their professor, and all go to the hallway. While they stare in wonder at the board, the teacher asks who did it. None of the students know. So the next class day, the teacher asks all of the students who solved the problem. No one cops to it. This leads the teacher to find Will Hunting, who is in jail for assault. The teacher gets him sprung, under the condition that Will gets into therapy, enter Robin Williams.
Triumphant poignancy ensues.
There’s a shocking sticking point in this plot—one that still very much lingers in my mind.
When the professor asked the packed lecture hall full of students who solved the problem, I was astounded to realize that I expected someone to take credit, but no one did.
Ten short years ago, there weren’t that many cell phones. Folks in the movie use pay phones. There are no lap tops in classes, no text messages, MySpace pages or other myriad barriers between humans actually engaging with one another. Most of all, there was no C- president who lied, bullied and cheated his way into the White House for eight years, committing war crimes and looting various nation’s financial infrastructures, ours included.
I am now accustomed to people not paying attention to each other, to lying, bullying and cheating. Inspiring teenagers to commit suicide through sordid MySpace machinations.
So when the math professor asks who solved the problem, I was shocked that no one took credit. Worse, I was shocked to find myself shocked for this commonly decent act of normal human good will. No one cheated, or tried to steal Will Hunting’s thunder. I totally expected someone to raise their hand, and NO ONE DID. The wife had the exact same experience and we paused the DVD to recollect ourselves. It was seriously jarring shit.
The viewer knows Will Hunting solved the problem, but that is not the point. In just over one decade, we have become a population of lying, bullying cheaters—that’s the point.
Is it really possible that folks have devolved so dramatically in one decade? People in Good Will Hunting largely dress and talk the same as we do now, but the level of integrity I used to take for granted was freakishly, disappointingly, refreshing.
If no one answers the phone, it really means they are not home.

I told my dear friend Riz about this. He is older than me, and said, “It’s Bush. Don’t talk to me about not blaming Bush for everything. The president sets the tone for the way the people act, period. Reagan brought the “Me Decade,” you remember that? It went like this: Cocaine, me, me, cocaine, me. Bush took that shit to a whole new level. It’s disgraceful.”
Then he said,
“Don’t get me started.”

I was too young to have a frame of reference when Reagan became president. I was a teenager and it was very important to me to act like I knew what was going on. The grownups around me were the ones who showed me how to show I knew what was going on. And I did cocaine a few times too. I never gained an understanding about cocaine.
It hurts your nose.
(“Oh no, not pure cocaine, honey, this is pure shit. It won’t hurt your nose.”
Yeah, right jackass. Snorting baby powder would hurt your nose. Noses aren’t engineered for snorting. They’re engineered for blowing and breathing.)
And it makes you talk like a fool for hours on end and then you stay awake for three days.
Mmmm, fun. Cocaine.
Anyway, I didn’t see the 80s as a grownup. I saw the 80s as an insecure teenager—who, at all costs, must not let on that I am in any way insecure because it will Ruin My Life if anyone finds out how terrified I truly am—trying to figure out how to make my way in this society.
Which was, evidently, the Me Society.
In much the same way that anyone under 30 probably has no frame of reference for good will, intergity and actual human engagement.
Humans are really amazing creatures. Give us 8 years of unmitigated bullshit and we will learn to accept that bullshit is human nature.
Yes, indeed, I am an olden timer, harkening back to days of yore, when folks might actually notice your presence because they aren’t text-messaging their cousin who is pregnant with her best friend’s boyfriend’s baby and nobody’s mom knows yet, and the sht iz gna slam d fan. Im sayn: sht-fukn-strm.

Bugliosi Fever

Growing up in California in the 1970s, Vincent Bugliosi was a name you heard almost every day. At least for a while—during the whole Charles Manson thing. Bugliosi was the prosecuting attorney in the case, seeking a conviction for a man who was not present at either of the Tate-Labianca killings.
I guess people kinda like it when there are clear demarcations of good and bad. It resonates well with our cultural indoctrination to have a good guy and a bad guy. This really doesn't authentically happen often, though folks like to pretend it does. I used to have nightmares about Charles Manson and his creepy/abused cadre of hippie girls. Those crazy-assed eyes of his were terrifying, so it was very clear to me:
Manson = bad.
Bugliosi = good.

In my teens, I read Helter Skelter. It was impressive that Bugliosi wrote the whole book without a ghost-writer. It was also dignified, engaging and very clear to those of us not involved or interested in the law.
I wasn't like a fan or anything, but I did appreciate the man.

Now I am a fan.
He just came out with a new book, winningly entitled, The Prosecution of George W. Bush for Murder. I mean, really, impeachment is obviously for presidents who think up erotic uses for cigars and then lie about it.
Fucka impeachment.
This president is responsible for the death, rape, torture, displacement, injury and trauma of millions of people on the planet. Not to mention pillage of our economic infrastructure, but that is another crime.
Could possibly come up in civil court.

I am on the email list of this brilliant Jamacian journalist named John Maxwell. He sends out his articles as well as other stuff. So it was a couple weeks ago I get a link to a video interview with Bugliosi about trying Bush for murder. As this very thing is on the agenda of my daily prayer system, of course I hit the link.
It was very exciting to learn that Vincent Bugliosi wrote this book. It lays out the entire case. He did all the work for any prosecuting attorney in the U.S. with the courage to take it into the courtroom.
Oh dear god, did he really do this?
Yes, yes!
Vincent fucken Bugliosi did this!
One thing that really bothered me though, was he and the interviewer kept talking about the 4,000 U.S. soldiers who have lost their lives. I was like, "What about all the Iraqi folks, Vince? How can you not mention them? What about all the torture victims? The U.S. soldiers who have been raped and murdered by their alleged compatriots? C'mon, Vince."
It really bothered me, and kinda put a damper on the initial elation.
But then I got to thinking. Maybe Mr. Bugliosi is ACTUALLY sending a very clear message to the International Criminal Court. Could that be possible? Hmmm. Maybe he can't get convictions for people who aren't U.S. citizens? Maybe he is not a xenophobic piece of shit after all. Maybe he is, in fact, trying to get a international war crime conviction.
That would be delicious.
Ultra, velvety delicious.
And so yesterday it was confirmed that Vincent Bugliosi has done found himself another Charles Manson, except this one's cadre isn't creepy/abused hippie girls.
It's creepy/reptilian civilization-bringers.

Re; the possible xenophobia, a quote from an interview Michael Collins did with Bugliosi at smirkingchimp.com:

I spent a great amount of time at the L.A. County Law Library and the Ninth Circuit Library here in L.A. working on the issue of jurisdiction, because I realize that even if someone is guilty of murder, if you don't have jurisdiction to prosecute them, you don't have a case, really. I was unable to establish jurisdiction for the over 100,000 innocent Iraqi men, women, children and babies who have died so far in Bush's war. He is guilty of those murders, but I could not establish jurisdiction against him for those murders. But I definitely established jurisdiction on a federal, state and local level to prosecute Bush for the murders of the 4,000 young American soldiers that have died so far in Iraq. ( http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/16353 )

Here is what he has to say about priorities of the U.S. justice system:

I was telling my wife a couple of days ago, I said, "You've heard about these cold case files," and she said, "Of course." And they even have a TV series, I guess, on it. But I've known about them for years down at the DA's office. Very commonly you'll have just one victim of a murder, just one victim, and you'll have a detective assigned to the case pursuing the killer for 10, 15, 20, 25 years, and then after he retires, some other detective takes over. Some of these cases go on for 30, 35, 40 years. The Black Dahlia case in Los Angeles, I think, goes back in the ‘30s. They're still investigating it 75 years later. And frequently we read in the newspaper that the killer is found back East. He's living under an assumed name and he's brought back to Los Angeles and he's prosecuted. Just one victim and you have this detective tenaciously and endlessly pursuing this case.

So I said to her, "There may be as many as one million victims, not one victim, but one million victims in their cold graves right now decomposing as a result of George Bush's monumental crime." And I said to her -- "What person in authority on the face of this globe is representing these one million people in their graves, fighting to bring about justice for them, pursuing the person, the guilty person who put them there?" And she said, "You." And I said, "No, you didn't hear what I said. I said what person in authority is going after the killer of these million people?" I said, "I don't have the authority of an emaciated moth. I don't have any authority." ( http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/16353 )

And so the man is—like me, like many of us—obsessed. He wants someone to step up the the plate. He BUILT THE ENTIRE CASE already. When he was the prosecutor in Los Angeles, Vincent Bugliosi got 104 out of 105 convictions in the major cases he worked on. He knows the law. He knows crime and criminals. He is a bad ass.
So now, the act of willing Bush to prison for the crimes he has comitted is no longer part of my daily prayer system. Now I put all of that energy into forging Vincent Bugliosi along his merry way.
All in all, a much more positive focus.
Whee.

Super

I've been wondering about the whole SuperDelegate thing. Though I've been a stalwart voter since I was 18, this is the first election where SuperDelegates have come up so much. At least as far as I can recall. And everyone I ask hasn't ever heard of them either. When did these extra-special voters appear? Where did they come from? And why do their votes matter more than mine?

In 1903, a Republican Wisconsin governor, "Fighting Bob" La Follette set up primaries so that the voters votes actually mattered. He had an ax to grind, in his ongoing crusade to revamp the Republican Party. Back then, the party was divided between shady, criminal "Stalwarts" and progressive, anti-corporate "Insurgents." (Uhm, guess who ultimately prevailed.) I was not aware that the Republican Party once stood in complete opposition to the fools in charge right now, but then I never excelled at Poli-Sci, and so this is probably not a surprise to many people.
In any case, La Follette had been working on the way the elections took place for a long time, and it was his firmly held belief that the people motor and hum our free democracy along.

Here's a brief rendition from Wikipedia on how thing went for ol' Fighting bob:



In 1891, La Follette claimed that Philetus Sawyer, one of Wisconsin's Senators and a powerful Republican leader, attempted to bribe him in order to fix a case. The incident cemented La Follette’s resolve to reform the party. The party dissidents who joined La Follette became known as "Insurgents" (or the "Progressive" faction), and their opponents within the party were called the "Stalwarts". The Insurgents stressed the need for more direct voter control and championed consumer rights. The Insurgents' call for reform gained more support after the Panic of 1893 shook up the economic, class, and ethnic assumptions held by most Americans.
In 1894, the Insurgents began to openly challenge the Stalwarts for leadership of the Republican Party. The Insurgents’ Nils Haugen sought the party nomination for governor in 1894, and La Follette followed in 1896 and 1898. His speeches decrying the sway of big business (especially the railroads) and his call for a more direct democracy (including direct election of nominees in party primaries) drew ever larger crowds.

In 1900, La Follette formed a coalition that temporarily disrupted the Stalwart hold on the nomination process. After securing the nomination, he “traveled to sixty-one counties, gave 216 speeches and spoke to 200,000 people.” He gave many of his campaign speeches (which often lasted over three hours) from the back of a buckboard wagon. He won the 1900 race for governor by 100,000 votes.

From 1901 until 1906, La Follette served as Governor of Wisconsin. During his first term, he proposed to set up a railroad commission, impose an ad valorem tax on the railroad companies, and establish a direct primary system. The Stalwarts blocked his agenda, and he refused to compromise with them.

During the 1902 elections, the Stalwarts organized to oppose La Follette’s nomination and moved to block any reform legislation. La Follette began working to unite insurgent Democrats to form a broad coalition. He did manage to secure the passage of the primary bill and some revision to the railroad tax structure.

When the legislative session concluded, La Follette traveled throughout Wisconsin reading the “roll call”; that is, he read the votes of Stalwart Republicans to the people in an effort to elect Progressives. During this campaign, La Follette gained national attention when muckraking journalist Lincoln Steffens began to cover his campaign.
With the press coverage and his successful re-election, La Follette rose to become a national figure. His message against “vast corporate combinations” attracted more journalists and more progressives.



It's kinda hard to imagine a politician of Fighting Bob's caliber thriving in today's political system.

So, back to SuperDelagates. They made their first appearance in the early 1980s. In 1992, Walter Mondale, one of the folks responsible for all this Superness—wrote an opinion piece in the NYT, letting readers know that while everyone is able to participate in our fine democracy, the participation of more knowledgable people matters MORE SUPERLY than the participation of your average citizen.
He wrote:

"The election is the business of the people. But the nomination is more properly the business of the parties. . . . The problem lies in the reforms that were supposed to open the nominating process. Party leaders have lost the power to screen candidates and select a nominee. The solution is to reduce the influence of the primaries and boost the influence of the party leaders. . . . The superdelegate category established within the Democratic Party after 1984 allows some opportunity for this, but should be strengthened."

Note the "but" after "The election is the business of the people." It was once pointed out to me that anything said after the word "but" is always, always a value judgement. According to this theory, the SuperDelegate system—and by extension our entire free democracy—is based on a value judgement.
Wheee! I heart tenuousness, don't you?
Let's harken back to Wikipedia, for a rundown on some of the issues important to Fighting Bob, the personification of the (according to Mondale) "reforms that were supposed to open the nominating process:"

As governor, La Follette championed numerous progressive reforms, including the first workers' compensation system, railroad rate reform, direct legislation, municipal home rule, open government, the minimum wage, non-partisan elections, the open primary system, direct election of U.S. Senators, women's suffrage, and progressive taxation. He created an atmosphere of close cooperation between the state government and the University of Wisconsin in the development of progressive policy, which became known as the Wisconsin Idea. The Wisconsin Idea promoted the idea of grounding legislation on thorough research and expert involvement. To implement this program, La Follette began working with University of Wisconsin-Madison faculty. This made Wisconsin a “laboratory for democracy” and “the most important state for the development of progressive legislation”. As governor, La Follette signed legislation that created the Wisconsin Legislative Reference Library (now Bureau) to ensure that a research agency would be available for the development of legislation.

And so, there you have it. SuperDelegates represent everything that is UnAmerican in our democracy, and Fighting Bob's fight appears to have been heartily, vindictively vanquished in the past 25 years.

*Thanks to Paul Rockwell at The San Jose Mercury for helping me understand this shit. His article appears at:
http://www.mercurynews.com/opinion/ci_8793401?nclick_check=1