NEW RAP SONGS
Nature and Civilization
God's a thin concept so absurd
it's undignified to talk about it. But Mother Nature's a heavy metaphor
for something real. The personification is appropriate and handy. It's
mystical nonsense to say, "God is dead," but it makes perfect sense to
say that Mother Nature as goddess-in-chief should be cautiously impeached
in all civilized sectors of the world.
All revolutionaries should understand this.
Civilization is a revolt against Mother Nature, a brutal, nearly omnipotent
bitch with no self suspicion and no mercy, whose only agenda is survival
through relentless reproduction and growth. She's an anarchist, not a
communist - a laissez-faire Social Darwinist - the rightful mother of
mean self-rightious capitalists who are comically shocked by her while
growing up in her distorted image. They're her favorite children, but
she'll eventually eat them for stepping on her flowers. She's also the
mother but jealous antagonist of nature taming scientists and communists
(the logical architects of civilization). When they go too far, she'll
eat them, too.
When the seldom-right right stupidly declares
communism "too" ideal because it's against human nature, they're for once
partly right. Nothing is too ideal, but the barbarism of the right does
lie in their UNcurbed human nature; and civilization, which is NOT barbaric,
is UNnatural. I'm trying to clear up some serious confusion here, because
it's INconvenient that leftists are confused and dishonest about what
they ARE (or should be).
Rightists may HAVE TO BE confused and dishonest
to live comfortably with their bloody agenda. Their confusion obscures
their primitive purposes. A conveniently jungle-like philosophical chaos
is their rightful milieu, so though it seems contradictory that Republicans
wear shoes and live in houses and covet high tech products while their
rightful mother, Mother Nature, lives barefoot and naked in a cave or
tree, modern ways of killing with bullets and bombs and the use of cunning
contractual ambushes to tear money from the throats of the weak exactly
reflects their mother's style. Taking baths, going to the theater and
blubbering about the plight of the poor while running for office shouldn't,
but hypocrisy and deceit do. When she finally smacks them down, it will
be for stealing from HER, not for being unlike her.
But leftists need a clearer view. When they
are cunningly told communism is "too" ideal (by those who DON'T consider
equality ideal), they should reply: "Good! That's why I'm for it!" Living
in houses, learning to read and being vaccinated against disease ARE both
ideal and unnatural. A civilized community of neighbors living peacefully
together in modern, comfortable, pretty but equal little houses with easy-to-clean
tiled bathrooms and kitchens, each with a yard and a garden, all working
together in safe conditions, not competitively but as participants in
a rationally organized state, to produce and willingly distribute the
goods and services a good life requires - equally - constitutes a rebellion
against Mother Nature. It's not natural. It's ideal.
Nature is a battlefield. Civilization is a
peaceful enclave. To keep that good and clear, Mother Nature needs to
be impeached in all civilized sectors of the world.
But there's a condition. Civilization is UNnatural,
but its raw materials and life breath are born from and irrevocably tied
to nature. So having been deposed as dictator of the world, Mother Nature
has to be reappointed Secretary of the Jungle, where her savage and destructive
tendencies are checked and balanced and ultimately productive instead
of fatal, as they necessarily are to civilized enclaves. Seemingly paradoxically,
we need her natural products, but don't need either her or her more natural
human children running or subverting our civilized clearings.
Civilization is impossible without the jungle,
which Mother Nature runs best. We can't live on a naked rock planet. We
need the green dynamically sustained and balanced eco-system we came from
and are psychologically part of. Maybe we could survive in some ugly plastic
way not yet invented, but it's not necessary, because Mother Nature, bitch
that she is, is a good organizer of jungles. And her now unhealthy jungle,
which wasn't broken until we started fixing it, needs to be given back
the space to heal and flourish.
1. Civilization is an UNnatural aberration
that won't work unless the natural jungle is kept out of it's clearings.
2. But too much civilized clearing is a threat to the essential natural
balance of the jungle that humans need as a resource bank and esthetic
backdrop.
Without letting in the lions and tigers, our
enclaves have to be jungle friendly. Mother Nature's domain is flexible
and can accomodate deserts and civilized enclaves to a point, but the
limit is set by the laws of physics and biology, not by us. We have to
keep the size and population of our own domain well and safely below the
limit, lest we anger Mother Nature whose goddess power to eat us is not
the first but the last law of physics and nature.
We have the right to insist on civilization
and make any intrusions of nature including overly natural humans behave
themselves inside our enclaves. Our enclaves, to be civilized, have to
be unnaturally socialist and ultimately communist. To escape Mother Nature's
bloody "free"-for-all and achieve a civilized life, humans must supress
their natural piggishness and understand why. Leftists, if they're to
lead the way to the UNnatural ideal of civilization, have to clear away
their counter-productive chimeric pseudo intellectual chaos of "you-know"
democratic mysticism and understand that civilization, being unnatural
and prone to dissipation, has to be organized in a different way from
the natural jungle from which it is hacked out.
A "sustainable"* clearing in the jungle can't
be a slob's encampment carelessly sprawling into and fucking up the jungle
around it. A "sustainable"* civilized enclave has to stay an enclave,
creatively flexible but clearly planned, constructed, and maintained,
its size and population permanently BOUNDED.
*The word sustainable is, for once, correctly used here. There
can be no such thing as the "sustainable growth" of a civilized enclave.
-Glen Roberts
Talking Back
to Walter Scott
Breathes there a man with
brain so dead he never to himself has said, "Hey! If this is my own, my
native land, why the hell is all the land around here owned and fenced
off and posted NO TRESPASSING! by a few rich people who call it their
private property?"
-Glen Roberts
No,
I Don't Support The Troops
I support everyone's right to
good health and a good home, including the rights of vets who've been used,
broken and discarded sick and homeless by the war industry. But as
the "troops" of that war industry bombing other people's homes and
killing and crippling other people they don't know in places they
know nothing of for reasons they don't understand, NO! I don't support
them.
Of course, unlike thoroughly confused bumper
sticker Republicans and many of the "troops" themselves, I don't imagine
they're fighting their own war. They didn't declare it and they're not
banking the profits. It's no more their enterprise than the United Fruit
Company ever belonged to Guatemalan pickers or California cannery workers.
The taboo against NOT supporting the troops is like taboos against disrespecting
people's religion or the "cultural integrity" of the poor. Religion is
force fed to the religious, picturesque poverty is dumped on slum dwellers,
and the war the troops fight ISN'T THEIRS.
Or mine either. If you think it's rude to say
so, I think it's stone stupid, when the one tenth of one per cent insiders
who own America, its oil, its banana plantations, and its arms factories,
bill you for their war ventures, share their enemies with you and
send your children to do their fighting for them, to respond by saluting
their flag without even questioning why, for instance, it was THEIR
World TRADE Center - their world corporate pyramid scheme headquarters
(with a lot of hired money-mill workers like you inside) that was targeted
by THEIR enemies. Maybe criticizing a victim's willingness to be
victimized is rude, but it's worse to cheer their sacrifice or bless it
with diplomatic silence.
That the always eaten dogs always support the
always top-dogs in all the dog-eat-dog systems and scams in the world doesn't
mean I have to applaud. Soldiers proud of fighting for the rich are like
wives who defend the husbands who beat them. Their stupid pride in their
black eyes and broken teeth doesn't justify their abusers or them, either.
I don't support suckers who give their integrity to religious fakes or
poor people who idolize the rich. And I DON'T support the troops.
I'll support any troop who comes to his senses
and says NO! But I don't support hollow uniforms who accept their "duty"
to bully, torture, and kill as ordered. War isn't always wrong, but when
it's cynical and barbarous, the soldiers who fight it are almost as indefensibly
at fault as the government they allow to misuse and waste them.
I'm sorry some people think they have to take
any job they can get. But I have to live in the uncivilized world mass
stupidity allows, so, while I'll reserve most of my anger for the high
priests of stupidity, greed, and war who blind them, bind them, and tear
out their hearts, I refuse to romanticize or idealize or support the willing
gullibility and cooperative self-abuse of the victims.
-Glen Roberts
In The Green Zone
Wise youth, since the world
ends each time anyone dies, the fact that the world at large is virtually
ending (since it's gone past saving) doesn't matter to anyone but those
who love their children and grandchildren and to those who find the rotting
phase unbearable.
. But it's a reality that affects the importance
and unimportance of how you live your life and how you choose to consider,
live with, or react to the pigs who've taken control of the world and who
are responsible for its death.
If you and I went to Iraq and looked in some
doors, we'd probably find it to be a good metaphor of what all wise youth
has to put up with. I think we'd find people who keep going through the
daily motions of pretending to participate in the screaming, tailspinning
charade that's all that passes for civil life there just to collect their
salaries, so that in the spaces between the bombs and bullets they can
keep the insides of their homes clean and quiet and their gardens tended
- pseudo citizens with semi-civilized hide-outs.
Maybe, if we lived there, you'd be better suited
for it than me. I couldn't join any insurgency as crazy and cruel as their
oppressors, but I'd probably be too angry to do anything but throw away
the rest of my life dodging bullets to distribute vain propaganda urging
intellectual revolt against the armed occupation. Since you can't remember
what I remember and are more used to being boxed in, maybe you could adapt.
Here, too, to go on eating good meals, drinking
good wine, and getting what good you can from life in the ruins (no individual
having a broom big enough to sweep the stupid self destructive capitalist
system crowding the world it's already ruined out of the way), you can't
help having to go on wresting some kind of perhaps disgraceful but expedient
living out of the mess.
But, hey, there's no dishonor in trying to
survive and I won't blame you for choosing to endure what you've decided
is a necessary measure of tedious participation. In a civilized socialist
state, any work would be honorable participation, doing one's part to keep
the system going - actually for everyone's benefit. In a capitalist war-zone,
since, to survive, participation is a necessary evil, there's at least
no dishonor. And if you know why you're doing it, it can be done impersonally
with your eyes and ears and mouth mostly covered.
As a wise drudge, you take the Monopoly money
out of your pay envelope, leaving all the unread blather still inside,
mentally mark the envelope "return to sender" and drop it into the recycle
can on the way back to whatever living room your drudgery buys. It's good
to have work you can stand. It's probably best to have a tedious civil
service job that guarantees (for the time being) the security of your refuge...
...even if it's in the green zone.
-Glen Roberts
For more NEW RAP SONGS
and other honest poems and outbursts, click
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NOTES TO NOWHERE
Popular philosophy
The left flies right
on Air America
Talking about the contemporary "left" in America - on campus, on
the air, in the only somewhat alternative press.
My problem with (just for example) the Air Americans
is that they call themselves progressives and they're not. They are as
stuck in their own spot on the runway of intellectual flight as Republicans
are stuck in the hangar. In fact, it's sometimes hard to tell the difference.
They are nowhere close to the left-hand edge of left, as their co-opting
of the progressive label implies. Oh they say some great things on Air
America, but they always stop - short - at the Democratic Party limits.
The Air America squadron fire sometimes straight
and sometimes wildly at specific individuals that need to be shot down
and they expose specific shenanigans that should be exposed, but they always
treat their targets as aberrations; they don't forthrightly renounce the
system. Fragment after fragment, "youknow" after "youknow," stuttering
wildly yet always accurately dodging the word capitalism, these
hot-aerial acrobats fly all around but never land on the obvious conclusion
that ugly capitalism is normal capitalism and business ownership of the
country is the logical end of "free" enterprise.
They protest on behalf of certain poor people
in certain newsworthy instances as the victims of certain acts of cruelty
or neglect that are obviously the regular, mathematically necessary side
effects of competitive "free" enterprise under Democrats or Republicans,
but, though they can pronounce the word poverty and propose band-aid
solutions in very specific contexts, they never protest inequality, and
they religiously fail to find poverty or inequality systemic.
I once heard an Air America hostess declare
that what "we" want is to lift the poor into the middle class, but how
a bottomless class system is to be locked up without taking the "freedom"
out of "free" enterprise or why "we" want such an obviously still unfair
half class reshuffle she didn't explain. I never heard any Air American
support Kofi Annan's efforts to declare inequality a human rights abuse,
and I didn't expect to.
It's not (as the Republicans say about Democrats)
that they have no ideas, but, bold as they sound, like Democrats with brassy
voices, they seem afraid to carry their ideas far enough leftward to legitimize
them. And, like all Democrats AND Republicans, they're far short of a full
deck of ideas. They occasionally mouth the words environment and
ecology as if reading them from someone else's notes; but they betray
no glimmer of understanding or concern about never-ending "free" enterprise
"development" as a catalyst of eco-collapse, and they certainly can't pronounce
overpopulation. They often sneer at Republican religious stupidity,
but they also often invoke Jesus, and they sometimes even set political
correctness aside and claim they're better Christians. Exactly parallel
to that, they damn the Republicans for wrapping themselves in the flag,
but they constantly wave the same flag while unctuously and often proclaiming
themselves better patriots.
It would be too weird (or too obvious) to call
themselves better capitalists, so, in only blurred reference to the economic
dogfight that is the centerpiece of American life, they curse only Republican
pitbulls, demonizing the mean Republicans with details, while sainting
the nice Democratic bystanders by omission of near duplicate details. Of
course, that's no worse than should be expected inside the actually general
capitalist arena. "Free" speech is often dishonest. What I'm talking about
is the direction and effect of their dishonesty, which is to confuse and
co-opt what little could-be-honest left is left in America by pretending
to be progressive.
They are NOT. They are as mainstream as the
Republicans. They reside fully within the mainstream religious patriotic
capitalist camp, which is divided between right wing Republicans and centrist
Democrats. There's no left in it. Democrats, after all, range only from
conservative to conservative liberal - i.e. centrist. The Democrats have
absorbed some surviving 60's liberals and a meek mainstream version of
3 or 4 60's issues. But the truer progressives of the 80's (who've been
erased from both the main-stream and somewhat alternative media's version
of history), who were adamantly to the left of liberal and almost consciously
PROGRESSING, are now, I suspect, a repressed nightmare of the post-1990
slightly liberal centrists. I remember some 80's progressives talking about
"working from the inside," so maybe that's where they disappeared to. But
no Air American ever publicly remembers living in a shanty and sweating
with the poor to build anything in Central America or marching in the streets
to stymie Reagan's Nicaraguan invasion plans. Obviously, if they were there,
they've wiped U.S. progressive support of the Sandinista revolution completely
off their revised memory slates, and I've never heard them support Cuba
and I don't expect to.
You can verify what I'm saying about Air America
easily, but I could be talking about almost all the known American so-called
"left" since at least 1990, couldn't I? My problem isn't just Air America.
Air America is an example of something that's gone very wrong with the
entire American "left." There are some young Americans in Venezuela now
supporting Hugo Chavez, a quantum leap past wringing one's hands for lost
theocracy in Tibet, but we don't hear much about them. The American "left,"
or the only part of the American "left" we regularly hear about, has certainly
turned right. So decisively that I am entertaining a fantasy about it which,
even though it seems a little on the far side, I'm going to share with
you.
In "Inside The Company," Philip Agee told us
the CIA so thoroughly infiltrated some South American leftist student movements
while he was there that CIA agents were both funding and leading those
movements. They could do that because a movement needs supplies, transportation,
facilities, refreshments, contacts, and leaders with time and resources
to be leaders. So the CIA was literally paying their supposed enemies'
piper and calling their tune - a leftist tune, by the way, to facilitate
U.S. and U.S. puppet reaction.
Surely, something like that can happen in America,
too. Why wouldn't it happen? The right are wrong and often stupid, but
their topcats are also rich so they have to be somewhat cunning, and they're
certainly energetic, dedicated, unscrupulous and insidious, and they won't
stop at anything to keep their wealth and power and, with their incredible
wealth and power and their own embedded media covering for them, they don't
have to stop at anything. The CIA stunt Agee described would be easier
to pull off on their own turf.
To get the attention and effectively keep the
attention of any significant part of a crowd of millions takes some resources,
and he who provides the resources sets the agenda. Obviously, a few people
decide who will lead and set the agenda for both the Democrats and the
Republicans. Obviously, the same people realize they can't prevent a grassroots
leftist movement from existing (especially on college campuses) but that
any grassroots group is greatly influenced by apparent friends who know
how to raise money, who have the contacts to get them what little substantive
publicity they get, and who boldly take charge of them.
It's certainly true that the leadership of
the American "leftist" movement on the national level is now restricted
to an elite group, that individuals who go beyond that group's agenda are
marginalized or squashed or effectively unheard of, and that the leadership,
who certainly somehow have resources, have co-opted and are constantly,
energetically (insidiously? cunningly?) rigidly defining and limiting the
American "leftist" agenda to the politically correct. I think the main
main-stream "left" today (not just Air America) have popularized a nice,
safe box that the insidious, cunning, rich, resourceful right themselves
might like to keep the "leftists" in.
If that seems to me to be happening, and if
the rich right could and would like to make it happen to keep the main-stream
"left" toothless and nonthreatening to their wealth and power, then why
not assume it is happening? After all, WHAT obviously very irresistible
influence keeps the mainstream "left" from ever promoting atheism (or even
logic) or communism (or even socialism - or even equality) or a one-world
state or a human population and encampment reduced to and kept at a size
that can subsist off the ecosystem without crushing it? WHO so pervasively
and successfully instead dreams up and promotes the conveniently vague,
nongrammatical, and development friendly liberal babble about "sustaining"
development and growth and proliferating high-density housing?
It's easy and maybe it's valid to tie the main-stream
"left's" lameness to philosophical cowardice, to human genetic limitations,
to the brain-tangle bound to result from a chimeric alliance of mismated
movements, to the inevitable over involvement of confused youth, to the
fatal effect of religiously democratic chaos on intelligent organization.
Maybe all of that is the best explanation. Maybe the American left just
scared themselves so badly in the 80's and were so embarrassed by the one-two
punch of the fall of the Eastern Bloc and the 1990 Nicaraguan elections
that they haven't yet gotten over it.
There's no maybe about that last sentence.
I suspect some post-1990 now centrist "liberals" reluctantly following
me this far may have involuntarily shivered when they read it. But the
humiliation and apparently brain-shrinking trauma of being smacked down
and trampled when "the people" of Nicaragua they'd thought they were helping
suddenly stampeded right back over them into the darkness didn't just happen.
The effectiveness of childhood brain-binding and a steady diet of mainstream
media propaganda for life set them up. That's a given. And it would only
amount to a continuation and refinement of that given if there were and
are equally cynical infiltrators at work now. Right?
Actually, there probably are. This is a principal
that supposedly always guides good investigative journalists: there may
not have to be, but there probably are because there could be and because
any cunning plan I can think of, somebody else can think of and execute.
The motive, the means, and the will exist, so the end probably exists.
If I had the computer skills of a Cecil Adams, maybe I could dig up the
evidence. But whether or not I could prove that right wing moles have taken
over and now run the left, and whether or not it's true, it might as well
be.
As for Air America, it may just be an unusually
aggressive and profane main-stream Democratic Party voice that falsely
calls itself "progressive" because it really doesn't know the difference.
But, whether unfortunately or insidiously, it walks, quacks, and looks
exactly like a right-wing mole luring naive youth looking for actually
leftist causes down a virtual mole hole, so it might as well be a right
wing mole.
And the same is true of most of the post 1990
leadership of the lame American left. In fact, the left has always been
healthier outside U.S. borders, especially south of the Rio Bravo, especially,
ironically, now. Cuba exists, after all, and is regarded as a beacon in
every Latin American and European country I've been in. Why are Americans
never told that by their own so-called left? Why have the elections of
a series of potentially socialist presidents in Latin America not even
cast a shadow on the agenda of Air America (or The Nation) or the (merely)
liberal Democratic dialogue in America? If I was in Howard Dean's shoes,
my platform would be to join the UN and the new Latin American "Axis of
Good," phase out the military, start treating the arms industry like the
tobacco industry, promote much more aggressive and comprehensive world-wide
strategies than the Kyoto Accord to try to restore the ecosystem (global
warming is NOT the only problem), end the Cuban embargo and join Hugo Chavez
(the kind of leftist leader America needs) in subsidizing the Cuban experiment
to help perfect a socialist model the whole world can emulate.
If that sounds too radical, excuse me. It's
just the way we progressives talk. Come on, Air America! Take off! Straighten
up and fly left. You won't see Jesus sitting on a cloud, but you'll get
a better view of the complete absence of lines running across the ground
or through the Air between America and the World.
-Glen Roberts |
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