NEW RAP SONGS
Rapping On The Walls
While the universe has to be infinite
because it can't have edges, an Earth with no edges to sail over is nevertheless
finite and locked in by hard factual walls against which a Colombian humanity
sailing ever and arrogantly onward had to at last crack up.
Whoopee! We did it (decades ago)! The proof
is overwhelming to anyone but the deliberately and stubbornly deaf and
dumb. Good grief! The ice caps are melting. Ozone holes, acid rain (HEY!
ACID rain), and pollution of everything pollutable are rapidly increasing.
Deserts are spreading. Large lakes are dying - or dead. Whole rivers are
poisoned and even flammable. Water tables are sinking and turning salty.
Forests, coral reefs, birds, animals, and fish are disappearing. Vital
resources are becoming precious. And ALSO, while timidly talking about
it excuses us from talking about anything else, the ecosphere is dangerously
warming, TOO.
Meanwhile, excess human numbers, the cause
of the catastrophe, are growing faster than ever. The asphalt and concrete
deserts of the human encampment are spreading faster than humanity. Once-wild,
now rapidly developing and growing countries are demanding resources already
overgrown countries thought were theirs. Refugees of wars for space and
resources are flooding across all the borders.
And politicians, who aren't philosophers and
became politicians only to be bigshots and get the influence to smooth
the way for their businesses to "freely" GROW and make them and their
friends richer suddenly have to deal with a reality they've never even
acknowledged in which "free" growth and blind human business activity
have deadly limits and consequences. And they don't know what to do.
They thought they wanted more people to sell
things to - "the more the merrier." They thought "freedom" and "growth"
"made the world go 'round." But they were blind to the real world's finite
size and limits and unprepared for the mathematical results when the separate
whirling edges of all the separate ever-growing merry-go-rounds, none
of whose politician operators gave a shit about each other, filled and
then jammed and then exceeded their no-longer separate spaces and gridlocked.
Now the mythical national boundaries they foolishly
took seriously are overlapping and disintegrating, and the real natural
physical limits of "free" enterprise they've always foolishly dismissed
are in the way and their"free" business juggernauts are piling up and
they aren't prepared for it because they never thought about such things
before and they don't know what to do.
So Senator Cheerful and Governor Forceful and
Secretary Slick, when asked by reporters, turn out not to HAVE an immigration
policy or an energy policy that has anything to do with the real world.
They always thought the world would stay the way they used to think it
was. They thought a packet of signed and stamped pieces of paper they
paid good money for would, with a few cops to enforce them, make fancied
lines around mythical countries work.
They thought everyone knew they were the good
guys. And now that millions of people are ignoring their imaginary borders,
including bombers sent by foreign clones who don't like them, they don't
know what to do. When the very ground and water revolt against their pissing
and dumping too much on what they thought was their god-given private
property, and zoning changes don't help, they don't know what to do.
They thought nature was in the zoo and on educational
TV. They still don't realize Mother Nature has her own merry-go-round,
older bigger and more presumptuous than theirs, and that She doesn't believe
in their gods or their flags or their property rights, is sick and tired
of their "freedom," and doesn't give a damn about their business interests,
either.
Hey, humanity! You're in a mess, and you don't
know what to do. What you've been doing doesn't even SEEM to work anymore,
and you don't understand it. There are TOO MANY of you and you've got
TOO MUCH junk and you're bumping into each other and fighting each other
for space and resources that are running out, and you still don't get
it. It takes realism and logic and organized thought, and you've always
hated those things. But the mess is real and smiling and coloring it "green"
won't make it go away. You can't keep "sustaining" growth and "sustaining"
development. You've got to UNgrow and UNdevelop. And you don't know how
to think about it, because the problem is real, and your habitual thinking
processes aren't.
Hey, humanity! Pay attention! There's no god
who loves you. And all the diplomacy and positive thinking and smiling
that win you points with each other don't even phase natural reality,
which is deaf, blind, and even dumber than you. There's not REALLY even
a Mother Nature, arms crossed, clucking her tongue, who might give you
another chance. There are only natural forces that (luckily for your ancestors
but not your descendants) accidentally formed a construct of real substances
and conditions that you could have lived in comfortably for eons, if you
hadn't fucked it up. But it's a SYSTEM - accidentally but logically organized,
and freedomanddemocracy won't fix it. And neither will praying. And neither
will the Democrats or Republicans. And neither will buying low energy
light bulbs and hybrid cars and even MORE hi-tec "green" gadgets to very
slightly slow global warming - only one facet of the problem.
If your whole world eco-system can be fixed
at all, it'll take a hair-pin U-turn in human thinking and behavior, a
huge reduction in human numbers and human encampment size (a 100-year
project 100 years late), and a new and inhumanly logical compact with
the ecosystem, IF the ecosystem can be restored. It will take logical
realistic organization and international cooperation, which can't be "free"
and which group humanity has never been any good at. It won't happen.
Hey, Humanity! You say you don't know what
to do? Oh, you didn't say that? You said you're going to, by golly, do
whatever it takes?
I bet.
The Underside
There's an old counter-myth
about the devil being the
good god and the supposedly good god being a fraud - evil
cross-dressed in a brass halo. There's a lot to it.
There's something like that going on in the
real world
of political and social classes, where power is usually
inherited and can be risen to only by those stupid or cunning
enough to go along with the crooked game being played,
while honest potential leaders must accept suppression or,
against all odds, take up arms.
I've got a note buried in my heap of "Notes
to Nowhere" about the necessity of at least ceremonial stupidity in
"high" places, which credits some bigshots with the low
cunning and purely political determination it takes to just
continuously pretend to be popularly stupid for ceremonial
purposes.
But I don't really think city hall and capitol hill
pols, their courtiers, the embedded rich or even their embedded bards are often faking their regressiveness. The
topside definitely stinks of a kind of evil behind its mask -
not just religious in nature (only the brass god's minions
care much about that) - but anti-intellectual, counter-ethical, and philosophically inept.
Good realistic writers have always been onto
this reverse negative reality. Realistic literature disguised
as fiction is rife with reliable blue-collar heroes, gutter
saints, and even low-life losers, lunatics, and crooks who are
better than the puritans who despise them. There's a whole
genre of gin drinking, wise cracking p.i.'s fired from the
police force, endowed by their creators with convincing
contempt for the establishment cops.
The masters of noir regularly tease their readers'
suppressed rebelliousness with barely masked offers
of hope that the supposedly bad anti-heroes will get away
with their crimes against the supposedly good establishment.
And, in some of the very best books, they do. I relate better
to Wolf Larson, Ahab, and Merseault than to Robin Hood,
but there's catharsis for me in even a fairy tale revolution
that defies the cloudy throne to mete out fictitious reverse
justice that real world media and politicians would
ceremonially deplore.
Of course, in the real world, the supposed
underside doesn't always or even often fit any good devil role,
though you can't tell about people whose worth has been
wrung out of them or who think they have to cover it up in
a world that won't stand for any smart talk. But sometimes
even anti-heroes escape from the bookshelves and earn real
underside acclaim. The officially unrecognized idolization of
The Great Randy, Jello Biafra, Fidel Castro, and now Hugo
Chavez are dramatic examples.
But it's only logical, or
reverse logical that the best examples - the real elite among
good devils - have to be more completely unknown (like me,
of course), because, while it's only bullshit religious morality
that's reversed in the Satanic mass, it's a whole reversed
value system I'm talking about, and the grasp as well as the
granting of worth, recognition, and influence are among the
the concepts mirror-reversed.
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, how come all the land where I live is legally owned and fenced off by a few rich people who call it their private property?"
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CRITICAL NOTES
Notes To Nowhere, No One, No Avail (dedicated
ultimately to the illiterate flames of some random dump). Then, in 2004, I traded my Bic for a pocket pc and now, heaped
in drawers and on my pc I have enough to make this page and its various jumps seem endless. The purpose of the notes has always been exactly as
explained under Motive
#4 on my other website (iammyownreporter.com), which means it's OK if they don't grow into printed
conversations, but, as explained in the legend above, qualified readers are invited to respond to any of them. This website was conceived partly in reaction to "Air America", and the first note (written years ago for magazine submission, which is why it's so long) reflects that.
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 Anan'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 chemeric 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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