"America is not so much a nightmare as a non-dream. The American non-dream is precisely a move to wipe the dream out of existence. The dream is a spontaneous happening and therefore dangerous to a control system set up by the non-dreamers." -- William S. Burroughs
"The empire never ended" -- Phillip K. Dick
We live in a time of profound spiritual crisis.
I don't know how much of my own spirituality comes across to others nor do I know exactly how to define it, but I do know it is the root from which all other things in my life arise. It is the source from which flows my sense of right and wrong, my sense of justice and injustice, my sense of the good and the true and the beautiful. Whatever it is that you would claim to be definitive about me, I know it all springs from the same source. At that source is a humility and an emptiness. It's something that I have always carried with me. Sometimes I wonder if it could be part of who I was before language irreparably divided and categorized reality (as it does for us all): a kind of precognitive sensibility. It derives from a sense of wonder about the actual living world, but also more than wonder; it's a sense of intimacy. It's through intimacy that I know my place in that world and find that humility and emptiness. I have always had an intimate relationship with the living world around me, and if I don't maintain that relationship I fall into despair. When that relationship is threatened, I feel threatened. Before I had even the remotest understanding of geopolitics and justice, I knew, innately, that it was wrong to cut down living land to make room for dead buildings.
“Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away.” -- Phillip K. Dick
I have always seen a difference between the aspects of reality that self-perpetuate without our aid and the aspects of reality that would vanish if humans were to vanish. This distinction is the real bedrock of my worldview.
“The little flowers grew everywhere around the rocks, and no one had asked them to grow...”-- Jack Kerouac
When you really ground yourself in that perspective, truly believe it, not as an idea about the thing but the thing itself, then you understand the malleability and plasticity of so much that we build our lives around.
"Nothing is true. Everything is permitted." -- Hassan-i Sabbah
I don't even know if this all truly qualifies as spiritual. But on one hand, I know no other word for it (especially in our culture as there is even no real respect or outlet or place for it (particularly on an institutional level)), and on the other, it seems to me, in my studies, to be the unified understanding of all actual mystics. I am not talking about religious leaders: those who would manipulate the passions of the masses for the sake of obtaining/maintaining power. I am talking about those who actually participated in whatever practices that led them to obtaining a sense of truth about the nature of their own mind/being/felt presence of reality. Those who had an intimate relationship with the living world of nature/consciousness. It seems to me that there is a unified understanding among mystics (though, granted, not corroborated) that there exists another place, the one outside the realm of daily human operation, wherein deeper truths lie waiting for those who are capable of finding them.
But artists say this too. Artists across all media, from painters, to musicians, to poets, to stand-up comedians, to athletes, to chefs, all address the shutdown of the rational mind when encountering inspiration. There is that moment of pure transmission when you are not thinking about something, you are receiving something. That holy human moment of creativity. The divine moment of the good idea.
"Our world is endangered by the absence of good ideas; our world is in crisis because of the absence of consciousness" -- Terence McKenna
And so this is the dream Burroughs speaks of, the other world, the altered state where all ideas come from. The only real antidote to stale institutions and ideology.
Shamans have always lived on the edge of the village. The border. The threshold. That line between the social order and the ever-present wilderness. It is up to the shaman to dream, to willfully enter ecstatic dream states, to heroically enter the wilderness where the wild ideas live. These ideas are dangerous to the social order, but that is exactly why they are so vital and essential. The order itself is only a previous idea domesticated, an idea wrestled out of the ever flowing stream of space/time and frozen into place, crystallized into matter by the alchemy of language and institutions and ideology.
Another way to put it: we desperately need what we don't know right now.
"What we know is very very remarkable. But it's a very tiny part of this enormous universal thing of not only what we don't know but what we never will know and what is indeed in every sense of that we understand it: unknowable... We need what we know. We need to respect what we know. We need to pay attention to it; we need a good education plan... we need all of these things... but finally it's what a great Chinese master said in the 9th century... [what we know] is like a hair floating in empty space... it's [comparatively] so small, so little... It's also very deceptive. Because what you know can hide what you don't know and make you think that it's the real thing, and it isn't. It's only an aspect of the real thing. It's something that allows you to have a relation with the real thing, but it isn't the real thing itself. The real thing is always what you don't know... Even death is only part of the unknown... And the imagination which goes beyond knowledge, moves closer to the unknown and of course comes out of the unknown."
-W.S. Merwin
What we know has profoundly failed us because it is haunted by the specter of what we don't know. The crystallized institutions of our society have fallen out of harmony with the wild from which they sprang. These institutions spew forth endless answers. Our world is awash in answers. But the dream is a question, and we are in desperate need of the right questions.
We have forgotten how to dream.
______________________________________________________
The Dream is Personal
It is up to us to foster a sense of agency in our lives. What other goal could we strive for as free and liberated human beings? As a people so beholden to the idea of Liberty, how could agency possibly slip from the forefront of our lives?
The two questions I have seen most since Trump was elected president have been "How could this happen?" and "What do I do?" Both convey a dire lack of agency. I have been asked directly, "what do I do?" and the first thing you do is that you understand that you are entirely responsible for and capable of answering that question.
And then the next thing you do is understand that everything you do matters.
The Dream is Communal
One of the biggest lies of our culture/society is the lie of individuality.
This is a tremendous, tremendous issue because from individuality springs forth identity and identity had become profoundly contentious and problematic in our culture.
Without traveling that full labyrinth just yet, let us focus on individuality.
Individuality is the assumption from which racism, nationalism, sexism arise. But most of all, it is the assumption from which the very nature of exploitation arises. The idea of individuality is woven deep into the ideology of capitalism. Self-made men. Bootstraps. Corporations literally won the right to be considered individuals. etc.
And particularly under capitalism, from that assumption arises another: that survival is an individual act. At the core of American culture, we have confused self-preservation with survival. We operate as a culture by and large on a "me and mine" kind of basis.
But this mentality masks a fundamental truth: that of inter-dependence. It's not some hippy bullshit platitude. It's the fundamental nature of reality and anyone with any sense of education should be able to understand this. We live in a world of cause and effect. We live in a world that survives on an ever-unfolding chain of dependence that begins with the sun and ends in myriad developments of being.
But... America operates on the deliberate refusal to recognize that fundamental reality.
So, of course, disgustingly entitled white nationalists, yes, they obviously perpetuate the deliberate refusal to understand the reality of inter-dependence.
But... so do economists. So do scientists.
So does George W. Bush and Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump.
So do I.
So do you.
It is inescapable. _________________________________________________________________________
My Dream
The cognitive dissonance regarding survival that we share as a culture is built into our very way of life. Everything about us depends on the perpetuation of this fundamental disconnect. When we see the injustices of the world and we feel powerless, that's because the institutions of our culture are specifically designed to give us no access to avenues for that kind of change because the existence of those institutions depends entirely on things staying exactly the same.
Here, then, if we are to dream ourselves a new world out of questions, are the two most important questions I would like you to answer with me.
_____________________________
Is there any greater injustice in human history than empire?
Is America an empire?
___________________________
The aboriginal Australians are believed to be the oldest living human culture on the planet.
The aboriginal Australians have preserved a profound connection to a generative realm of alternate reality called the Dreamtime.
The aboriginal Australians were also subject to the horrors of empire.
It's not talked about much in common history classes. We are more likely to study India because of Gandhi or the Congo because of Joseph Conrad, but before Australia was ever a penal colony, it had to be colonized first. The familiar scenes of empire ensued: rape, murder, slavery, theft, brutalization, betrayal, lies.
But if we are to crack it open, at the very core of empire itself are there not the seeds of exploitation, superiority, and the very notion of the Other? And from these seeds grow the aforementioned notions of individuality, self-preservation, racism, misogyny, xenophobia, etc.
And out of those cultural concept conditions grow institutions of power and order and governance.
Can we extricate that kind of essence from the fiber of these institutions? Can we refine our institutions and reform them without abandoning them?
The conditions that we find ourselves in have already answered, "no," a long time ago. These institutions are born from rotten seed and they are desperately out of harmony with the living and generative now, the ever flowing stream of space/time which speaks of a dying earth and a spiritually suffering population and a finite amount of time.
America was born from empire.
Will you please bravely join me in accepting that fundamental truth about the nature of our being?
America as empire is 100% inescapable.
Not just as a history lesson, but as a profoundly imperative aspect of our current reality.
America sits on stolen land. America was built on the backs of slaves. This is the soil from which our institutions rose, and it is built into our very way of life.
Empire is built into our very way of life.
Exploitation is everywhere in American culture.
We seem to have been inoculated with the most obvious ways that it exists. We were injected with small doses as common place reality, and it has rendered us numb to the truth and also blind to the ways it has infiltrated our lives so deeply.
I keep seeing the word "normalize" floating around. As in, we shouldn't normalize the alt-right or Donald Trump. But, America has been normalizing empire and exploitation for 250 years. America has been normalizing white male supremacy dominator patriarchy for 250 years.
This is empire.
Obviously, global capitalism is imperial. The word globalism used to be something intellectuals were concerned with, but I haven't seen much mention of the word in years.
I don't think we need to do deep personal searching to understand that Coca-Cola, for example, practices imperialism. Any corporation that exploits cheap foreign labor, steals natural resources, and leaves behind poison is clearly imperial. Apple, Coca-Cola, Nike, Monsanto, etc.
Obviously, our need as a nation for natural resources and the resulting strife we inflict on the world is imperial. From our meddling in the affairs of the Middle East and South America to our outright occupations for the past fifteen fucking years, we are an empire.
But, we must understand how deep it goes. Empire is not just shitty foreign policy and corporate capitalism run amok. It is everywhere.
Retail capitalism is built on it. Save costs on "unskilled labor." A totally manufactured term that we now accept as reality. When you reject that term as merely a euphemism for exploitation, we understand that without stock boys and cashiers, the business doesn't run. These workers are just as essential as anything else about the web of inter-dependence that generates profit for the company.
This exploitation is perpetuated by a giant feedback loop. The hierarchy of exploitation sets up the desperate conditions that the poor submit to in order to survive.
Colleges nation-wide have adopted it. Save money on labor. 76% of all college faculty are adjuncts and they are teaching over 50% of all college classes. The people upon whom the whole institution depends are exploited the most so that an entire hierarchy of administration can be paid more than those who conduct the classes.
But it's deeper still. It's everywhere.
It's Facebook. It's the way Facebook exploits our likes, our tastes, our ideas, our art, our behavior, our predilections, our friendships, our emotions and it turns it all into a type of agriculture. Facebook harvests data, these endless piles of digital ephemera somehow representative of the dynamic human spirit, and it creates an empire for itself. It creates a little bubble economy where the upper class are privy to the scheme and are happy to think of new and brilliant ways to keep the hive running, to tinker with the algorithms, and keep the data honey flowing.
It's a self-serving pyramid scheme.
Everything is empire.
Immigration is profoundly tied to empire and yet we never talk about it that way. Who are the immigrants? What do they do here? Unskilled labor? I guess you could call it that. Jobs Americans don't want? Maybe. Have we asked Americans about that one?
Or maybe what they are really doing here is what we should call illegal labor. The immigration issue will never be solved until we address the fact that our economy is being propped up by the domestic front of the imperial sweatshop model. The agricultural industry, the hospitality industry, the service industry are all propped up by what is essentially slave labor. Labor totally beyond the reach of labor laws and humanitarian concerns.
____________________________________________________________________________
The Responsibility of the Middle Class
All crises are opportunities for self-reflection. Through each of crisis of my own life, I have called upon myself to become a better person and everything I respect about myself currently is a direct result of rising to the challenge of taking responsibility for my own failures and developing a sense of agency instead of a sense of helplessness and victimhood.
Now is the time for the middle class to look into the mirror and take up the true responsibility that is tied to the word privilege.
Everything about the American comfortable cozy privileged middle-class life is built on the back of empire.
Everything. This is water.
Empire has afforded you your hopes and dreams, your aspirations, your art, your car, your next hot shower, your next glass of cold water, the plastic bags you use, the canvas bags that you use to avoid plastic bags, the healthy eyesight you are using to read this, the very beating of your heart is built on the back of empire because we live inside of an empire.
But most importantly, empire has afforded you your education.
There are those who believe that inside the labyrinthine construction of any given system exists the thread that if pulled would unravel the entire system.
In my eyes, it's here. It's middle class education. Through the privilege and luxury of middle class education it is therefore the responsibility of the middle class to become fully self-aware and steer the will of the American collective away from empire.
So when I see people whom I know are smarter start to demonize lower classes of people, start to build Others out of the stone and straw detritus of a sensationalized and divisive spectacle circus media, I become furious. It is absolutely imperative, profoundly paramount, that we make sure those we deem enemies actually hold power.
When I see people whom I know are smarter start to support figureheads of American empire like Hillary Clinton, who worked to sell you the motherfucking Iraq war, and not have the totally complacent media even slightly take her to task for it during the election season, I become furious.
When I see residents of the Hudson Valley throw themselves very suddenly into hysterics about the results of an election when they live in one of the most segregated places probably on earth, I become furious.
I am glad there is concern regarding the threat of racism, but do not fall into the trap of externalization. Externalization is the tool of empire. Make very certain that you have efficiently eradicated racism from your life and community first and foremost before you go out demonizing poor people's uneducated choices.
Just because there are not packs of Klansmen on horseback roving up and down the Hudson Valley does not mean we have solved racism. Residents of the Hudson Valley do not have any position of moral superiority when our daily lives perpetuate the endless exploitation of American empire. Many in this area have lived lives profoundly normalized to exploitation and to privilege, so before we begin to throw out the accusation of Nazi and white supremacist, let's ask ourselves if we have any sense of agency inside the minority communities of our literal backyard. Let's ask ourselves if we have any true place as an ally to the minority communities in our literal backyard.
Who among us is an ally to Poughkeepsie? Are you routing out the economic effects of 250 years of racism in Poughkeepsie? Are you a friend of Newburgh? Are you helping to assuage the desperation of poverty inside Newburgh? Are you saving Kingston or are you gentrifying it? Are you remaking Kingston to serve the members of its aboriginal community or are you recasting it to harmonize with your privileged desires?
The time for taking pride in our own ideology is over. It's simply inadequate. Adorning yourself in altruistic beliefs and taking pride and a self-congratulatory moral high ground is doing no good when we daily turn right around and support the very foundations of exploitation and empire with our actions.
It's our way of life that demands the need for more/cheap oil and therefore the need for the NDAPL. It's exactly the middle class's predilections for the service and hospitality and retail industries that create the need for the slave-wage economy of illegal immigrants and exploited "unskilled labor."
We like cheap food. We like cheap gas. We like being comfortable.
We are complicit in empire.
We are ignoring the fundamental truth of inter-dependence. ______________________________________________________________________
Woody Guthrie famously scrawled "This Machine Kills Fascists" on his guitar, and following suite Pete Seeger emblazoned upon his banjo, "This Machine Surrounds Hate and Forces It To Surrender." For a long time, I have chewed on which is better. Guthrie's seems more powerful, but this election taught me Seeger's is truly superior.
Sometimes hate can be disguised as righteousness. There are many disguises and tricks underfoot right now. Superiority disguised as the protection of identity. The material objectivism born of empire disguised as the monopoly on truth.
I don't wish to hate. My heart breaks for the middle class. Arthur Miller nailed the tragedy of the middle class down in 1949 and it has only gotten worse since. I come from a distinctly middle class family. I watched my father sacrifice his entire life for it, and his father die of lung cancer after inhaling asbestos as an electrician for his whole life. The middle class is endlessly exploited in profound ways, but it's a pampered exploitation. The middle class has things to lose which is the very source of their complacency.
And this is where we must defeat our lack of agency. There lies the thread to unravel the system. We have been trained since birth (especially my generation) to be nothing but consumers and it shows. That's how we treat ideology: blind consumption without agency. There is no doubt that the structure of our society has distinctly removed any sense of agency from the lower classes. But we must fully understand that the poor are hobbled and the wealthy and powerful will never willfully surrender power.
It is up to the self-aware middle class to create a better world. A world that isn't built of exploitation. That doesn't contain the conditions for the desperation of violence, of racism, of misogyny, of homophobia, of xenophobia, of terrorism...
But it must be imagined from the current conditions of who we are. It can't be born of the stale institutions that are the result of slavery and empire. Those institutions are the very parasites standing in our way.
And we cannot know who we are while Others exist. Obviously we understand the monstrous results of creating an Other out of race. But there is no Other at all, ever. It is a fabrication. It is a deliberate blinder created by the dominator class to aid in exploitation, to divide and conquer.
Even a tyrant is just a man obsessed with his own Otherness.
Otherness is a rancid and obsolete idea. It is a non-dream.
We have forgotten how to dream.
______________________________________________________
"I have a dream..." -- Martin Luther King Jr.
The Dream is Personal
It is up to us to foster a sense of agency in our lives. What other goal could we strive for as free and liberated human beings? As a people so beholden to the idea of Liberty, how could agency possibly slip from the forefront of our lives?
The two questions I have seen most since Trump was elected president have been "How could this happen?" and "What do I do?" Both convey a dire lack of agency. I have been asked directly, "what do I do?" and the first thing you do is that you understand that you are entirely responsible for and capable of answering that question.
And then the next thing you do is understand that everything you do matters.
The Dream is Communal
One of the biggest lies of our culture/society is the lie of individuality.
This is a tremendous, tremendous issue because from individuality springs forth identity and identity had become profoundly contentious and problematic in our culture.
Without traveling that full labyrinth just yet, let us focus on individuality.
Individuality is the assumption from which racism, nationalism, sexism arise. But most of all, it is the assumption from which the very nature of exploitation arises. The idea of individuality is woven deep into the ideology of capitalism. Self-made men. Bootstraps. Corporations literally won the right to be considered individuals. etc.
And particularly under capitalism, from that assumption arises another: that survival is an individual act. At the core of American culture, we have confused self-preservation with survival. We operate as a culture by and large on a "me and mine" kind of basis.
But this mentality masks a fundamental truth: that of inter-dependence. It's not some hippy bullshit platitude. It's the fundamental nature of reality and anyone with any sense of education should be able to understand this. We live in a world of cause and effect. We live in a world that survives on an ever-unfolding chain of dependence that begins with the sun and ends in myriad developments of being.
But... America operates on the deliberate refusal to recognize that fundamental reality.
So, of course, disgustingly entitled white nationalists, yes, they obviously perpetuate the deliberate refusal to understand the reality of inter-dependence.
But... so do economists. So do scientists.
So does George W. Bush and Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump.
So do I.
So do you.
It is inescapable. _________________________________________________________________________
My Dream
The cognitive dissonance regarding survival that we share as a culture is built into our very way of life. Everything about us depends on the perpetuation of this fundamental disconnect. When we see the injustices of the world and we feel powerless, that's because the institutions of our culture are specifically designed to give us no access to avenues for that kind of change because the existence of those institutions depends entirely on things staying exactly the same.
Here, then, if we are to dream ourselves a new world out of questions, are the two most important questions I would like you to answer with me.
_____________________________
Is there any greater injustice in human history than empire?
Is America an empire?
___________________________
The aboriginal Australians are believed to be the oldest living human culture on the planet.
The aboriginal Australians have preserved a profound connection to a generative realm of alternate reality called the Dreamtime.
The aboriginal Australians were also subject to the horrors of empire.
It's not talked about much in common history classes. We are more likely to study India because of Gandhi or the Congo because of Joseph Conrad, but before Australia was ever a penal colony, it had to be colonized first. The familiar scenes of empire ensued: rape, murder, slavery, theft, brutalization, betrayal, lies.
But if we are to crack it open, at the very core of empire itself are there not the seeds of exploitation, superiority, and the very notion of the Other? And from these seeds grow the aforementioned notions of individuality, self-preservation, racism, misogyny, xenophobia, etc.
And out of those cultural concept conditions grow institutions of power and order and governance.
Can we extricate that kind of essence from the fiber of these institutions? Can we refine our institutions and reform them without abandoning them?
The conditions that we find ourselves in have already answered, "no," a long time ago. These institutions are born from rotten seed and they are desperately out of harmony with the living and generative now, the ever flowing stream of space/time which speaks of a dying earth and a spiritually suffering population and a finite amount of time.
America was born from empire.
Will you please bravely join me in accepting that fundamental truth about the nature of our being?
America as empire is 100% inescapable.
Not just as a history lesson, but as a profoundly imperative aspect of our current reality.
America sits on stolen land. America was built on the backs of slaves. This is the soil from which our institutions rose, and it is built into our very way of life.
Empire is built into our very way of life.
Exploitation is everywhere in American culture.
We seem to have been inoculated with the most obvious ways that it exists. We were injected with small doses as common place reality, and it has rendered us numb to the truth and also blind to the ways it has infiltrated our lives so deeply.
I keep seeing the word "normalize" floating around. As in, we shouldn't normalize the alt-right or Donald Trump. But, America has been normalizing empire and exploitation for 250 years. America has been normalizing white male supremacy dominator patriarchy for 250 years.
"This is water" -- David Foster Wallace
This is empire.
Obviously, global capitalism is imperial. The word globalism used to be something intellectuals were concerned with, but I haven't seen much mention of the word in years.
I don't think we need to do deep personal searching to understand that Coca-Cola, for example, practices imperialism. Any corporation that exploits cheap foreign labor, steals natural resources, and leaves behind poison is clearly imperial. Apple, Coca-Cola, Nike, Monsanto, etc.
Obviously, our need as a nation for natural resources and the resulting strife we inflict on the world is imperial. From our meddling in the affairs of the Middle East and South America to our outright occupations for the past fifteen fucking years, we are an empire.
But, we must understand how deep it goes. Empire is not just shitty foreign policy and corporate capitalism run amok. It is everywhere.
Retail capitalism is built on it. Save costs on "unskilled labor." A totally manufactured term that we now accept as reality. When you reject that term as merely a euphemism for exploitation, we understand that without stock boys and cashiers, the business doesn't run. These workers are just as essential as anything else about the web of inter-dependence that generates profit for the company.
This exploitation is perpetuated by a giant feedback loop. The hierarchy of exploitation sets up the desperate conditions that the poor submit to in order to survive.
Colleges nation-wide have adopted it. Save money on labor. 76% of all college faculty are adjuncts and they are teaching over 50% of all college classes. The people upon whom the whole institution depends are exploited the most so that an entire hierarchy of administration can be paid more than those who conduct the classes.
But it's deeper still. It's everywhere.
It's Facebook. It's the way Facebook exploits our likes, our tastes, our ideas, our art, our behavior, our predilections, our friendships, our emotions and it turns it all into a type of agriculture. Facebook harvests data, these endless piles of digital ephemera somehow representative of the dynamic human spirit, and it creates an empire for itself. It creates a little bubble economy where the upper class are privy to the scheme and are happy to think of new and brilliant ways to keep the hive running, to tinker with the algorithms, and keep the data honey flowing.
It's a self-serving pyramid scheme.
Everything is empire.
Immigration is profoundly tied to empire and yet we never talk about it that way. Who are the immigrants? What do they do here? Unskilled labor? I guess you could call it that. Jobs Americans don't want? Maybe. Have we asked Americans about that one?
Or maybe what they are really doing here is what we should call illegal labor. The immigration issue will never be solved until we address the fact that our economy is being propped up by the domestic front of the imperial sweatshop model. The agricultural industry, the hospitality industry, the service industry are all propped up by what is essentially slave labor. Labor totally beyond the reach of labor laws and humanitarian concerns.
____________________________________________________________________________
The Responsibility of the Middle Class
All crises are opportunities for self-reflection. Through each of crisis of my own life, I have called upon myself to become a better person and everything I respect about myself currently is a direct result of rising to the challenge of taking responsibility for my own failures and developing a sense of agency instead of a sense of helplessness and victimhood.
Now is the time for the middle class to look into the mirror and take up the true responsibility that is tied to the word privilege.
Everything about the American comfortable cozy privileged middle-class life is built on the back of empire.
Everything. This is water.
Empire has afforded you your hopes and dreams, your aspirations, your art, your car, your next hot shower, your next glass of cold water, the plastic bags you use, the canvas bags that you use to avoid plastic bags, the healthy eyesight you are using to read this, the very beating of your heart is built on the back of empire because we live inside of an empire.
But most importantly, empire has afforded you your education.
There are those who believe that inside the labyrinthine construction of any given system exists the thread that if pulled would unravel the entire system.
In my eyes, it's here. It's middle class education. Through the privilege and luxury of middle class education it is therefore the responsibility of the middle class to become fully self-aware and steer the will of the American collective away from empire.
So when I see people whom I know are smarter start to demonize lower classes of people, start to build Others out of the stone and straw detritus of a sensationalized and divisive spectacle circus media, I become furious. It is absolutely imperative, profoundly paramount, that we make sure those we deem enemies actually hold power.
When I see people whom I know are smarter start to support figureheads of American empire like Hillary Clinton, who worked to sell you the motherfucking Iraq war, and not have the totally complacent media even slightly take her to task for it during the election season, I become furious.
When I see residents of the Hudson Valley throw themselves very suddenly into hysterics about the results of an election when they live in one of the most segregated places probably on earth, I become furious.
I am glad there is concern regarding the threat of racism, but do not fall into the trap of externalization. Externalization is the tool of empire. Make very certain that you have efficiently eradicated racism from your life and community first and foremost before you go out demonizing poor people's uneducated choices.
Just because there are not packs of Klansmen on horseback roving up and down the Hudson Valley does not mean we have solved racism. Residents of the Hudson Valley do not have any position of moral superiority when our daily lives perpetuate the endless exploitation of American empire. Many in this area have lived lives profoundly normalized to exploitation and to privilege, so before we begin to throw out the accusation of Nazi and white supremacist, let's ask ourselves if we have any sense of agency inside the minority communities of our literal backyard. Let's ask ourselves if we have any true place as an ally to the minority communities in our literal backyard.
Who among us is an ally to Poughkeepsie? Are you routing out the economic effects of 250 years of racism in Poughkeepsie? Are you a friend of Newburgh? Are you helping to assuage the desperation of poverty inside Newburgh? Are you saving Kingston or are you gentrifying it? Are you remaking Kingston to serve the members of its aboriginal community or are you recasting it to harmonize with your privileged desires?
The time for taking pride in our own ideology is over. It's simply inadequate. Adorning yourself in altruistic beliefs and taking pride and a self-congratulatory moral high ground is doing no good when we daily turn right around and support the very foundations of exploitation and empire with our actions.
It's our way of life that demands the need for more/cheap oil and therefore the need for the NDAPL. It's exactly the middle class's predilections for the service and hospitality and retail industries that create the need for the slave-wage economy of illegal immigrants and exploited "unskilled labor."
We like cheap food. We like cheap gas. We like being comfortable.
We are complicit in empire.
We are ignoring the fundamental truth of inter-dependence. ______________________________________________________________________
Woody Guthrie famously scrawled "This Machine Kills Fascists" on his guitar, and following suite Pete Seeger emblazoned upon his banjo, "This Machine Surrounds Hate and Forces It To Surrender." For a long time, I have chewed on which is better. Guthrie's seems more powerful, but this election taught me Seeger's is truly superior.
Sometimes hate can be disguised as righteousness. There are many disguises and tricks underfoot right now. Superiority disguised as the protection of identity. The material objectivism born of empire disguised as the monopoly on truth.
I don't wish to hate. My heart breaks for the middle class. Arthur Miller nailed the tragedy of the middle class down in 1949 and it has only gotten worse since. I come from a distinctly middle class family. I watched my father sacrifice his entire life for it, and his father die of lung cancer after inhaling asbestos as an electrician for his whole life. The middle class is endlessly exploited in profound ways, but it's a pampered exploitation. The middle class has things to lose which is the very source of their complacency.
And this is where we must defeat our lack of agency. There lies the thread to unravel the system. We have been trained since birth (especially my generation) to be nothing but consumers and it shows. That's how we treat ideology: blind consumption without agency. There is no doubt that the structure of our society has distinctly removed any sense of agency from the lower classes. But we must fully understand that the poor are hobbled and the wealthy and powerful will never willfully surrender power.
It is up to the self-aware middle class to create a better world. A world that isn't built of exploitation. That doesn't contain the conditions for the desperation of violence, of racism, of misogyny, of homophobia, of xenophobia, of terrorism...
But it must be imagined from the current conditions of who we are. It can't be born of the stale institutions that are the result of slavery and empire. Those institutions are the very parasites standing in our way.
And we cannot know who we are while Others exist. Obviously we understand the monstrous results of creating an Other out of race. But there is no Other at all, ever. It is a fabrication. It is a deliberate blinder created by the dominator class to aid in exploitation, to divide and conquer.
Even a tyrant is just a man obsessed with his own Otherness.
Otherness is a rancid and obsolete idea. It is a non-dream.
“History, Stephen said, is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.” -- James Joyce
