American Distance

I began my higher education at Rockland Community College where I was lucky to come into contact with some really inspiring faculty who worked for the honor's program. Dr. Beisel had a mantra that he heaped on to students constantly: "test your untested assumptions."

Crisis has a way of testing our untested assumptions.

The American way of life is profoundly precarious. It operates heavily on many untested assumptions both ideological and material. As time passes without any serious test, the assumptions solidify, the molten mass hardens into what seems like truth or, even more dubiously, reality. But, invariably, the deeper reality of impermanence has a way of sneaking back in. We seem to pray that we can live our lives out until it comes to claim us individually, dodging what it would mean if it came for the soggy foundation on which we build everything else.

The immediacy of our day to day creates a kind of tunnel vision beyond which lie all kinds of realities we ignore.We ignore other human realities like poverty, hunger, inhumane labor, abuse, violence, and all kinds of depravity. And behind the human realities are the planetary realities that unfold: a whale turns over in the depths of a dark ocean, an owl blinks under a starry sky, arctic ice groans and snaps. These realities are so alien to most in spite of sharing the same physical plane as our day to day. And of course, beyond still is the inconceivable reality that lies outside this planet in the unending cosmic corridors where even the assumptions we consider to be most untestable start to bend and distort.

We live on a remarkably thin cultural membrane that is stretched across the the earth. We skate across it with suspended disbelief. The elaborate stories of our lives and our personhoods, the towering and teetering conceptions of our identities are built on fundamentally untested assumptions that knit together this cultural membrane that is stretched over the raw and wild reality of this planet.

We have lived inside a distance for a very long time.

"We must return to first premises" - Terence McKenna

We are distant from this fundamental wilderness. I don't just simply mean "nature," but all primary conditions connected to our survival. The wilderness of reality outside anthropocentric cultural narratives.

It's not hard to understand how we are distant from our own survival. Our food and warmth and clothing and health are delivered to us via anonymous externalities. But the bigger picture is that we have been distant from each other for generations: socially but really spiritually The cultural trajectory for Americans over the course of many decades has been a collapse inward, away from public space, shared experience, and common goals. Suburban isolation and sprawl, consumption over community, dead lifeless space devoted only to commerce, constantly externalizing value, sending it out of communities to centralized headquarters, and then once physical public spaces were gone, the division of the inner spaces began. The retreat from collective shared cultural taste; from broadcast national experiences to narrowcast self directed music streams and podcast microaudiences.

It's a cocoon that the membrane allows for.

Maybe ideas become endangered like species. Underneath the cultural membrane, ecosystems are collapsing. Species are vanishing. Balance is disturbed by our distance and the center cannot hold. Similarly, in our cocoons our distance from each other has consequences. We lose ideals the way we lose species. We lose elements of our humanity.

There is no more endangered idea than interdependence. There is no more severe hallucination and delusion than to ignore interdependence. Interdependence is fundamental.

Our society is sick because it is built on a distance from interdependence, a profound and violent ignorance of and resistance to interdependence. Interdependence is primary. It exists beneath the membrane. From the primary law of interdependence comes the wilderness that we have distanced ourselves from, the ecosystems that we have sent towards collapse. From interdependence between each other comes the better angels of our nature, the higher order social ideals, the fundamentals of civilization, the ideals that represent the fundamental nature of humanity: equity, justice, compassion, mutual aid, cooperation.

So many of the institutions we live by are in no way capable of or even meant for nurturing, fostering, proliferating interdependence. We are on our own... but the trick is we are on our own together. This is the great oxymoronic ourobourous nature of american politics. We look to political structures to foster and deliver humane ideals like  justice, equity, compassion... but they are structures so fundamentally divorced from the root of all those blossoms: interdependence. Still, the recognition of interdependence doesn't require permission or law or bill or vote or decree. It's a truth lying in wait that only requires acceptance. It's a question being asked quietly in the background of everything all the time.

"There's only one instant, and it's right now, and it's eternity. And it's an instant in which God is posing a question, and that question is basically, 'Do you want to be one with eternity? Do you want to be in heaven?' And we're all saying, 'No thank you. Not just yet.' And so time is actually just this constant saying 'No' to God's invitation" - Waking Life

"often, in light, on the open hills—

you can pass an antelope and not know

and look back, and then—even before you see—

there is something wrong about the grass.

And then you see.

That’s the way everything in the world is waiting."

-William Stafford

Crisis has a way of testing untested assumptions. We have a strange opportunity before us greater and more profound than any election. It's an opportunity to cast aside all false narratives, narratives of ego and identity, narratives of hatred and division, any and all narratives that deny interdependence. We have the opportunity to step outside the membrionic suspended animation world of american culture and touch our feet firmly on the ground of the primary wilderness of interdependence. This requires a return to physical immediate action. It requires us to actively and interdependently reconstitute social and communal fabrics based on equity, justice, compassion, mutual aide, and cooperation. We must build structures ourselves out of the clay and mortar of interdependence: community necessities, resources, funds, and relief must come together. We must physically cross the lines and boundaries drawn by our cocoons and reenter the primal space of interdependence and solidarity.

We must if we want to remain human.

If we want to rescue this crisis from the darkest outcome.

If we want redemption.

"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.
 ______________________________________________________

"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

Marking My Words

I quit.

I have quit meat, cigarettes, coffee... I know I have the will to drop habits and I know I have the wherewithal to realize when something is toxic. So I am taking the opportunity to write this post as a formal resignation from this election cycle. I don't mean to be petty or combative even; not throwing a temper tantrum, I'm just exhausted. I choose to drop out; I have encountered too much resistance and even downright hostility to engage in this any further, and the scary thing, the genuinely frightening thing is that this is coming from people who should be allies. So this is my letter of concession. I refuse to post anything else political, especially about this election, until way after November. It's my own little one man protest. I don't expect it will accomplish much, but I would like to take the opportunity to mark my own words and thoughts in this insane year of post-Bowie reality.

I feel like a bit of history is in order, as in my own history.  So often when I get in debates with people, it feels like we are tossing a ball back and forth but we are standing on entirely different piles of pretext context and subtext and in this climate of sound bites and gotcha media moments, the time and attention true dialog needs and deserves is rarely ever afforded. So, to understand my points, maybe understand me a little bit because I also feel that some of the rhetoric I have heard floating around there in the realm of what I would call "vote shaming" is decidedly ad hominem.

My foray into politics began one September morning long ago. I woke to my clock radio as was my routine so that I could get ready for my classes for the day. I reached over and hit the snooze button, but as I did, I caught the normally jovial and flippant host of the talk radio program say, "so you saw people jumping from the building?" I closed my eyes and rolled over, but couldn't fall back asleep. The snippet of the conversation was ringing in my ears. I sat up, turned back on the radio. Then I turned on the TV and I watched the World Trade Center collapse.

I was only 20 years old and in the midst of taking classes at my local community college. It's hard to really communicate the impact of that day, not because it's hard to put into words, but because my life became so definitively fractured at that moment. It was as if who I had been had died and to this day, the world as it existed before 10:28am 9/11/01 seems like some hazy alternate reality I once inhabited, and I have been drifting through this afterlife ever since. It's hard to communicate because it's hard to know myself without that day. Who I am currently is inextricably linked to that day. It's hard to know who I would have become without that day. It is too much with me, so to speak.

Of course, at 20 years old, one is in the midst of growing up anyway. Indeed, I was on my way out of my previously sheltered and self-absorbed kind of life, awakening to larger ideas and getting a sense for the world outside myself.

I was just getting hit hard by poetry shortly before, as well as authors like Terence McKenna and Kerouac. Even though I was previously sheltered, I had a strong innate understanding of what I found to be good and true and beautiful, and I always found the good and the true and the beautiful to be lacking in the consumer world I was surrounded by. I always was looking for something more genuine than what I was offered. So, to find echoes of that innate understanding in not just other people, but adults, and not just adults, but canonized adults who were part of this curriculum... that hit me just as hard as the events of September 11th. I have always, for better or worse, taken things rather seriously.

I only cried once on September 11th. It wasn't while watching TV or seeing the actual smoke on the horizon with my own eyes traveling down Route 17 in NJ. It was after I shut off the TV. I wasn't sure if I should go to my classes. My house was empty, parents at work, brothers at school, but I knew I wanted to see my friend Franz more than anything, so I decided I would make my way to campus to look for him (back in the days when you had to look for people). I got ready to leave the house and before I did I sat at the top of the stairs. The house was quiet and the sun outside was golden. I sat there and I cried not exactly because of the destruction and devastation, but because I knew we were going to war.

That was a profound moment in my life. I knew it. I had no real context of geopolitical precedent, but I knew it... maybe most people did, certainly turned out that most people wanted to, but I knew that we would go to war and I knew any idea of my generation enjoying a peaceful existence was lost and I cried.

I had no stake, no affiliation, no predetermined biases (my parents have always been philistines), I have just always been a person who has looked and listened very carefully to all of the world around him, to people and nature and my own heart and to the currents of power. My point is to tell you the following: all of my concerns and fears of the past 15 years have only grown worse: heavier, darker, more urgent, more transparent and obvious even, but never better. Not even for a second.

So this is why I would like to mark my words. I know I have little sway over your vote right now, and I'm growing to the end of my belief in voting at all but I'd like to leave this behind as a trail of breadcrumbs that we might be able to pick up in about a year or two. I would love if California and New York could give the Green Party 5% of the vote, but I am so exhausted and disgusted right now, that I might not even vote at all.

Politics won't solve our problems when they are too busy creating our problems.

Before I get to my message at large, a bit more ethos: I didn't just start paying attention to the political realm. Yes, I consumed a likely unhealthy diet of news. I read lots of books. Watched lots of documentaries. Searched out alternative sources of media. But I got involved too. I took part in historic protests. I found myself at Town Hall meetings. I marched. I rallied. And, in 2004, when Jason West defiantly began to marry same sex couples in New Paltz, I watched two of my friends get arrested at the end of our march in support of equality. Two points about that incident: 1) That was the same year Hillary Clinton outspokenly opposed same sex marriage. 2) while my friends were being arrested and the rest of us were shouting "shame!" at the police officers, I noticed an unmarked Jeep Cherokee pull up, and a man in a blazer and tie and jeans jump out and begin taking pictures of all of us. From the press, you say? Maybe. But these were the Bush years. and the fact that I could have any doubt as to his intentions speaks to how dark those times were.

Those are two very important ideas for the way I see things.

But I mean to say that I wasn't just a spectator and I wasn't just towing anybody's line. I was only concerned with justice. Which brings me to how furious I am that some of you are accusing me, or anyone who rejects both Trump and Clinton, of a kind of privileged stance. I have always taken my privilege quite seriously and tried to put it to good use. But now some of you, really some of the most privileged, some who are so privileged that they don't have to care about this realm of life until another four years roll off... some of you want to stroll in like some Catholic only going to church on Christmas to A) be so proud that you have the moral capacity to choose Hillary Clinton over Donald Trump and B) tell me that my simultaneous opposition to these two despicable candidates is a product of my own privilege.

My message in part is that the only privileged position, or the most privileged position, is the idea that we have time to wait for radical change. You dig me? Only the most comfortable on this planet want to keep things the way they are and you are a privileged minority.

My message is mostly aimed at Democrats. Why is that? Well, I suppose there are a few reasons, but the main one is that we (y'all and I) both identify as "leftist" or "The Left" and the problem therein is that y'all aren't. Hillary isn't. Obama fucking ain't. As far as I can tell, the American Left is door-nail-dead right now. I can think of only two voices that represent true Leftist ideals in any kind of complete and legitimate way (especially now that Chomsky released a guide to voting for the lesser evil): Dr. Cornell West and Chris Hedges. There are some very good voices that smatter the political landscape, especially those who distanced themselves from the DNC during the primaries, but by and large, I am trying to tell you that Democrats are centrists and their drift to the right of center is constant and certain.

The term centrist is very important. Maybe some of you like that idea. No one wants to be "far-(x)". We don't want to be nutjobs. We don't want to be radicals. Right?

Conceptually speaking centrism really only means one thing: preserving the status quo. Keeping things exactly as they are. Here's the rub: Republicans are centrists too. Now, I hear you saying, "what are you talking about?? Republicans hate abortion and gay rights. And Democrats hate guns and love science etc etc." Right. I understand.

But we must take a closer look: as Chomsky once pointed out, a great way to maintain the status quo is to limit the scope of issues that exist in the public sphere but agitate fierce debate around those issues.

Listen, another caveat: I know that leftist opposition to the status quo has been mutated and caricaturized by the likes of Alex Jones in the years since 9/11, and the very act of critiquing and re-narrating the power structure cocks eyebrows and upturns noses and conjures images of tinfoil hats, but this is what I'm talking about when I say the Left is dead. Leftist critique is about speaking truth to power and it once was an intellectual enterprise. It once had among its ranks titanic figures like Chomsky, Gore Vidal, James Baldwin, Allen Ginsberg, Martin Luther King Jr, Malcom X. These are the voices sorely absent in these very desperate times.

Here's the truth I see: Gerorge W Bush ran on an anti-abortion platform.  Doing so, he won the evangelical vote which is exactly how Reagan pushed the neoconservative agenda through the doors too and got the whole ball rolling. Similarly, Barack Obama ran on an anti-war and pro-transparency platform. NEITHER of those platforms came to fruition. Bush could have absolutely overturned Roe v. Wade. There was absolutely nothing in his way. He didn't. Obama won a Nobel Peace Prize and then carried out more drone strikes than his predecessor, you know, the one we call a war criminal. And as far as transparency goes... well, not only has the NSA grown more under Obama than Bush's quaint little wire taps, we have seen the imprisonment and exile of whistle-blowers again and again. Chelsea Manning has been tortured in solitary confinement for three years. Why? For exposing war crimes. And we all know Mr. Snowden and Mr. Assange a little better, and their plights are similar though not as extreme. I guess how is exile ever not extreme? But all of this, all the things Snowden revealed about the NSA, the profound insight Assange just offered us about our political process, or what about the committee reports on CIA torture, all met with a collective shrug from "the Left."

The same "left" that called Bush a tyrant and a war criminal has done nothing but yawn as Obama carries out the same exact legacy. Yawning is actually too kind. They cheer him on. They love him. Look at him; he puts his feet up on the desk; he hangs out with Jerry Seinfeld. This guy's great.

What is going on here? The way I see it is that there are larger agendas afoot. Agendas that don't involve us. We are meant to squabble over scraps. There are indeed two Americas, but not actually divided among Republicans and Democrats, but divided along the lines of the powerful and those utilized by the powerful to maintain said power.

Think about it for a second: if the word freedom means a goddamn thing at all then the issues we exhaust ourselves with should not even be issues at all. Civil rights for the LGTBQ community? The right of women to have domain over their own bodies? Even the right to own as many goddamn guns as you want... these are non-negotiable. These are basic human freedoms in a supposedly free country that screams on and on about liberty. If these freedoms are threatened, then we stand on the White House lawn until our rights are restored. End of story. But we are too divided for that. (More on that idea later as it is actually the most important of all.)

The larger agendas are not hard to find. Maybe I take for granted my adeptness at critical reading? I don't know. But it's there nestled between the lines of news stories. It's there in the blanks of political stump speeches that we are invited to project upon. When Elizabeth Warren says "The game is rigged...." she's serious, you know? That's not hyperbole. That's not metaphor. We just fucking watched how rigged the game was as Hillary Clinton made her power grab. Because that's what it was folks. Oh, I know, Russia and Skeletor and all the other badguys out there.

All of you throwing absolute hissy fits over the encroaching shadow of Trump's reign of tyranny..... Can you please just stop for one second and realize... The RNC primaries, his rise to power were WAY MORE DEMOCRATIC THAN HILLARY'S. How does that not disgust you? How does corruption laid bare not make you recoil in absolute horror? And again, the goddamn pride some of you take in supporting her like you are doing something moral and just or even pragmatic and practical makes for that much more of absolute cognitive dissonance.

Here are the issues that matter to me, the issues of the "other" America, the hidden one, issues that lie at the margins of the normal hot-button fodder: perpetual war/imperialism/hegemony, NSA reaching into the lives of normal innocent citizen/panopticon, militarized police and their clearly documented and rampant and murderous abuse of power, the use of state violence to oppress our first amendment right to peaceful protest, the cultural and moral degradation that lead to countless instances of mass violence, the sinfully exorbitant budget of homeland security and defense spending, campaign finance/lobbying/corporations as people/corporate welfare/the wealthy rising above the rule of law/TPP, universal healthcare (which Obamacare is 100% fucking not), the rape and pillage of the middle class, the rape and pillage of the natural world, to return to imperialism: corporate exploitation of foreign labor and resources, America's many many industrial complexes: military, prison, pharmaceutical, agricultural, news media, the fucking college industrial complex which is quite near and dear to my heart (and empty wallet)....

There's really only one reason why those issues matter most to me. It's really quite simple: They are the things that drive our way of life. The oil in our cars, the relatively cheap consumer goods, the comfy cozy life of dreams and aspirations is brought to you by all of the bullshit listed above. It is the bedrock of our way of life and that's the reason why it will never be critiqued by the two major parties. But, we don't even have to touch the amoral and unjust nature of our way of life because it's even more simple than that: Our way of life is unsustainable. We currently live in a totally dysfunctional country. The emperor has no clothes. Our infrastructure is collapsing. Our drinking water is poisoned. Our political process is totally broken. The engines of capitalism are hanging by a thread. We are dangling over a precipice from which, if we fall, we will not return. No one's getting married if the global economy collapses. The Supreme Court won't mean shit if we pass the brink of disaster.

And now, 30 years since Ronald Reagan began this ball rolling, you want to blame me for Trump because I have taken the time and dedication to be invested in my understanding of this bullshit? Because I understand that we can run endless circles around the issues of obvious America, the ones we are encouraged to obsess over, but fuck-all will be changed about the issues in the hidden America if either of these sociopaths take office?

You want to blame me for Trump? How about you blame the fucking DNC for tipping the election towards a detestable candidate and away from a man with more integrity than ANY POLITICIAN I HAVE EVER SEEN who also BEAT TRUMP IN EVERY SINGLE NATIONAL POLL. Though, I have news for you: he wasn't looking so hot in the perpetual war/imperialism/hegemony category either.

You know who you should blame for Trump, actually? Blame Bill Clinton. And Hillary Clinton too. and Reagan, and the long line of neoconservative/neoliberal Presidents who did everything in their power to absolutely gut and eviscerate the middle class and begin the migration of wealth toward the 1%. NAFTA for example has done nothing but fan the flames of the the legitimate anger and disillusionment and disaffection and radicalization of the millions of Americans who are now supporting Trump. Legitimate anger behind an illegitimate candidate is some pretty fucking bad news. No doubt. But forget Hillary creating ISIS. She and her husband created Trump. She and her husband began the mass incarceration of the prison industrial complex which again, devastated communities across the country. The devastation to the middle class that followed the deregulation of Wall Street created Trump.

I really had nothing to do with it.

Of course Trump is an imbecile. Of course he is a histrionic boy king. Are you seriously proud that you figured that out? Are you seriously going to stand on the ash heap that you call the moral high ground with your chest puffed out? Are you seriously going to hang on every word he says in hopes that you will find the one irrefutable gaff that will suddenly disarm his momentum? Here's the deep bitter irony: you won't. Do you know why? Because your support of Hillary is just as blind, knee-jerk, impervious to reason, fear-based, identity-based, insubstantial, and fucking batshit crazy.

The man is a fucking buffoon. He is a snake oil salesman. He is totally incompetent, totally amoral, totally narcissistic. His only agenda is to win, and if he does, he will 100% implode.

Hillary won't though. She is more competent. She is more qualified. But to do what?

Am I supposed to not be cynical about her VP pick? Am I supposed to just brush off the fact that she could have picked an equally historic running mate, a queer person, a person of color, a woman, all of the above? But who did she pick? The former chair of the DNC. Hmmmmm. Isn't that curious? This bland, wonder bread, no name chuckle fucker used to be the chair of the DNC. Crazy me for finding that at the very least uninspiring.

But yea, she is more competent and qualified, to do what? To maintain the status quo.

And again, I laid out my credentials to you. I would sign an affidavit that says these have been my beliefs since day one, and I promise you I have yet to be wrong. Things have yet to get better. The clouds have yet to break up. Direction has yet to change. To the precipice, full steam ahead. If Clinton wins, my concerns will not only be unaddressed but they will be made worse.

So let me begin to close this out with first a prediction, and again, we can just mark my words, and see what happens. Not only will Hillary continue down the road of perpetual war, she will begin major conflict with Russia. This was on my mind before the DNC leaks and now look: the specter is already haunting the background. The next bogeyman is lined up at the gates and he's an old classic. The Russians. Time to reboot that franchise. It was the original if you recall.

Prediction #2: Hillary will reverse her stance on the TPP. Maybe they will shuffle around some bullshit parameters and she will say "ah now it's better and I can support it," but do you understand that this document will make it legal for corporations to sue against laws that they believe hinder their ability to do business. Do you understand how fascist that is? I know the man with the bad hair who says dumb things is a total Nazi and all... but corporate lawlessness frightens me a bit. Do you understand that only Bernie's pushback made Clinton switch her stance on the TPP and I promise you it will just as easily flip back the other way. 

And finally, let me leave you with this: Ralph Nader was the best candidate for president that I have had the pleasure of supporting in my political life. And I watched spineless Democrats call him spoiler, protest his appearance at New Paltz, disrupt his Q&A session, beg him to drop out, tell me to wait for real change in the next election, to build a viable third party in the mean time, and then totally not give an ounce of shit about Obama's policies that directly mirrored Bush's, so forgive me for being disillusioned by the DNC, but they can seriously go fuck themselves.

But here's why Nader was the best: he was human. Politicians are written speeches. They are not human. They are talking points that are compiled from market research and focus groups. Their language is carefully crafted and their views are purposefully narrow; they will never critique the deeper structural issues of American power because it is the structure of American power that funds and props up these candidates. They are in the pocket, so to speak. That is exactly what Bernie was talking about.

Ralph Nader was human and therefore he had the ability to address issues that lie outside the scope of normal candidates. My favorite thing that he said was this: the real problem with America is that we no longer create our own culture. Absolutely profound statement. When's the last time you heard a politician make a profound statement? Culture should be of, by, and for the people. It should be a local, indigenous, bottom up, grass roots, phenomenon. Nader was saying that we are handed culture from the top down and he was saying this about the era of mass media television, and here in the age of social media echo chambers it has morphed slightly but it certainly isn't any better.

We may have a bit more content control now, but we are wrapped tightly in cocoons of comfort and identity. There are too many Others. We all have these blinding ideologies that we cling to and we are in a perpetual arms race with the deemed opposition, the end game seems to be total annihilation. Compromise isn't possible. Dichotomies and dilemmas abound. The war of binaries wages hard and the two blinders we wear called Republican & Democrat have lead to a really staggering kind of myopia...

The beloved John Oliver recently pointed out how the Democrats' convention was uncharacteristically patriotic. I think this is actually a very astute point but he didn't really run with it. I think the worthlessness of patriotism and nationalism is very much the point right now. What exactly do we have to be proud of? We all understand that there was no America so great that we need to return to it, right? So, what are we supposed to be proud of right now? Because a black president resides over mass incarceration and militarized police execution squads?

I mean, there's a standard level of American exceptionalism that is always dished out when a politician claims (and they all do) that America is the greatest country on earth, but this rah rah of the DNC is particularly vile and inappropriate. I saw a meme posted the other day that claimed that only privileged white guys with their heads up their asses (this is literally the rhetoric of the meme) can't see the difference between Trump and Hillary. The takeaway being that all the oppressed peoples of America understand full well that Trump is the clear and present danger and Hillary is the obvious choice. And of course, I get it. I have already spoken to the fact that I have stood in defense of oppressed peoples from day one. Trump is unacceptable. But, so is Hillary, and I think once we take off our rosy white and blue glasses for a minute and consider the perspectives of oppressed all around the world, not just America, we might find that they don't see much of a difference either. Has it really become so divisive that we have forgotten that other people exist in the world besides Republicans & Democrats?

I don't think a million dead Iraqis would see any difference between Trump and Hillary. I don't think starving and impoverished and occupied Palestinians would see much of a difference. I don't think war torn Syrians or Libyans would see much of difference. I don't think the paranoid eyes on the sky in Pakistan would see much of a difference. These are realities that most Americans can't even fathom, and when you champion Hillary Clinton it sounds to me like you don't want to fathom them.

We are in a bubble. It will burst. It would be best if we willfully step outside of it and adjust, you know, take some fucking responsibility for who we are, but it will burst and it's not going to be good. 

All I can say is this: break up the binaries. Find the third voice. Don't vote for third party candidates. I don't really care anymore. The system is hopeless. But how about you. You be a third voice of tempered reason and logic who steps out of the ideological pong game, back and forth, endlessly. The medium is the message, right? Are we surprised that the political landscape is so fucking divisive and wrought with impossible impassable binaries when we are dominated by a two party stranglehold. It is toxic and we must eliminate it or we will surely perish. 

Because I will tell you this as maybe a unique insight gleaned from my 15 years of paying attention.

During the Bush years, there was that ominous feeling of oppression, where it was hard to speak out and easy to feel ostracized and marginalized. You're either with us or them, after all. When Obama got elected, it was as if some valve was opened and a bunch of steam was let off the pressure cooker. I mean, clearly, Obama wouldn't have won if a large portion of swing voters didn't come his way. But something curious happened after. Suddenly the Right stirred up a gigantic cauldron of marginalization for themselves. Suddenly counter-culture conspiracy theory wasn't about following the lines of Halliburton in Iraq. The narrative suddenly came out of the writing room of Fox News, again, Nader's words ringing in our ears; the narrative came from centralized media, blatant propaganda. Yarns were spun about Obama's death panels and socialized medicine. His secret Muslim agenda. The war on Christmas. Glenn Beck rose to power. Fox News stirred the pot with intense vigor. I stand behind the idea that the past five presidents have their hand in creating the legitimate anger behind Trump, but Fox News is clearly the reason it is directed toward an illegitimate candidate. I want people to reject Obama and Clinton for the right reasons, not the Right's reasons which are without a doubt latently racist and sexist. But my point is this: make no mistake, right or wrong impetus, Hillary Clinton is a reviled figure.

No matter which one of these people is elected, there will be no release this time. Turmoil is here to stay.

Election 2016

I miss my column dearly now here in election season, and a particularly crazy season at that.

There's a lot to write about but the two most sensational stories, regardless of how you feel about them, are of course Trump and Sanders.

Let me say something crazy: I like Trump. Let me say that again: I like what Trump is doing to the Republican party. Surely, the passion out there for him as a candidate is lurid and disheartening, but without it, he wouldn't be able to do what he's doing. I don't believe for a second he's doing any of this with any noble sense of purpose either, unfortunately. I don't see him as a cunning troll or an insurgent candidate. I see him as a maniacal, crass, narcissist who will say anything and do anything for attention/ratings. Trump gets off on winning. That's all.

I'm teaching Death of a Salesman right now and while viewing the old CBS production of the play with my class, I was struck by how Dustin Hoffman's Willy Loman could easily pass as a Bernie Sanders skit on Saturday Night Live. And there's something of Willy in Bernie besides the old time Brooklyn roots. There's the underdog everyman who represents those who get chewed up and spit out by this great and terrible beast called Capitalism. It's funny how much Trump reminds me of Willy though at the same time. In his desperation to be "well liked" and to be seen as a cock of the walk business man, he will trample his own rhetoric and bend numbers and truth in dizzying displays of backpedaling and doublespeak.

But Arthur Miller seems incredibly prescient as his cautionary tale of how the American Dream is built on shifting sands rings just as true if not truer than ever.

But, anyway, here's the thing about Trump and the Republicans: Trump to me seems like a horror movie creation. He is the runoff of all the vile politics of the Republican party of the past 15 years spilled into some overlooked ditch and made sentient by a fateful strike of lightning one dark and stormy night. Take the caustic river of obstructionist politics, mix in a torrent of latent racism, add the festering ooze of white privileged patriarchy/chauvinism and blind American exceptionalism, and finally a heaping helping of the sensationalism found in a vapid crony-controlled media that stokes the suffocating flames of a lazy, amoral culture.

Of course, all of these aspects of the Republican party have been traditionally delivered with a certain sense of PR sheen. They have always been there as subtext. Half the battle with the Republican party has been to uncover, define, and un-spin these practices. They have always been lined up behind this notion that Republicans were beholden to doing "the right thing," as in what's best for the country, what is morally and constitutionally just, and not at all operating entirely on self-interest. There is this unspoken idea, at times certainly more spoken, maybe even increasingly spoken on the timeline, that they are rescuing America from the hands of heathens so that it might be returned to shine under the light of Christ. But this is the story of wooing particular outlier demographics (in the Republican case, fundamentalist Christians) through the adornment of some moral garb, while turning around and doing the bidding of campaign financiers and a long litany of special interest.

Take the debate after Scalia's death for example. The preened establishment candidates had their serpentine reasoning for not allowing an Obama appointee, all this talk of 80 year precedent and tradition and blah blah blah. But, Trump just came out and said it: "Delay, delay, delay." That abandonment of pretext is exactly what I'm talking about. That's just a pure declaration of obstructionism and really actually anti-Democracy.

And this is where Trump is doing something important. The poison of the constant back and forth my-word-vs-your-word bickering "nuh-uh/uh-huh" "I know you are but what am I" of two party politics has slowed the vitality of the entire country to near death. He is saying that these other candidates are phony and it's totally true. He knows what it takes to buy a politicians because he's done it his whole life. Watch the 2011 documentary called You've Been Trumped and watch a local government turn down his plans to build a golf course on pristine Scottish shore-front, and then continue watching as that resolution is mysteriously reconsidered by higher-ups and reversed. He knows that politicians are for sale and he's calling them out. 

More crucially important than anything is the GOP establishment response. Suddenly they are aware of their own laziness and entitlement which let him slip through. The more they circle the wagons of the party in this last ditch effort to try to keep him out, the more they prove his exact point.

Not only is Trump the amalgamation of the classic toxic GOP SOP, they were the ones who preened his audience. Their political husbandry over the past 15 years has reared an audience that is exactly frightened, disenfranchised, reactionary, xenophobic, myopic enough to ravenously gobble up everything Trump has to offer.

It should be kind of a GOP dream come true. The problem is that he doesn't play by the party rules. The party is getting more and more frustrated that he's crashed. He's drank too much and he's dancing with too many wives and generally rendering the traditional guidelines and tactics moot.

If you paid attention at all to how the Republicans were gearing up for this race, you would notice that they were seeking a new identity. They realized that the wellspring of frightened white Christians was pretty much dried up. They realized that the deeply religious and conservative slice of the Latino vote was their best chance and they were planning on dishing out a kinder friendlier (ie browner) version of Republican politics. Just the idea of running Cruz and Rubio should make this clear, but even Jeb(!) when launching his campaign delivered a line en espanol at the rally.

Of course, Trump laid waste to this idea right off the bat when he went hard on anti-immigrant rhetoric. The Republican establishment has been using latent racist attacks against Obama for the past eight years and now they act shocked that their constituency salivates when Trump rings that bell.

I don't feel Trump is all that dangerous in and of himself. The hysteria surrounding his campign is a bit much, on both sides. I think he's too disingenuous and honestly too daft to have any real agenda that would be any more or less reckless than standard American policy. I do understand that he is playing with fire and he ultimately is a child. Stirring up the primal forces of fear-based hate is never a good thing.

But, this race is a straight up fucking apocalypse. I mean that in it's literal definition as an unveiling. Because let's make no mistake: both parties are totally corrupt and totally worthless. Bernie's treatment on the other side is essentially the same though maybe not as sensational. The (D) wagons are circling just as much around their heir apparent. The media outlets that are beholden to the Democrats are spinning the headlines as fast as they can. From the obvious shill shows of CNN and MSNBC to the oft-considered reputable sources like the NYT and NPR.

I know Trump is scary and I know the suppression of Bernie is disheartening, but make no mistake: this is the coolest thing to happen in the time that I have been paying attention to politics. We need to take this opportunity to really smash the two party system. In a supreme show of arrogance, the parties allowed Trump and Sanders past their gates with no thought of them ever being successful. To their shock and dismay, they found that we, the public, are actually really really sick and tired of the status quo.

Mitt Romney spoke out against his own party's frontrunner. Every corporate media outlet includes Hillary's superdelegate count in their tallies. Democrat debates were suspiciously scheduled for inopportune times. Some out there are baffled by this behavior. It should be no surprise. These instances are evidence of the fact that these parties have their own agenda that is in absolutely no way beholden to the public at large. The scary thing is that they don't have to be. The government, yes, technically they should belong to us, but not the parties. They are these technically private entities who can make their own rules and present to the public whomever they feel fit to run. In our defense, the problem is that they have become monopolies. They have worked tirelessly to repress all possibility of a viable alternative party. They've kept third party candidates out of their debates, discredited them, and generally dissuaded the public from taking them seriously. The two major parties have become so lazy entitled and disconnected from the actual public that they let their undoing walk right through their doors.

Again, this is fantastic. Both Trump and Sanders are appealing to the idea that they belong strictly to the people. How true this is from either of them remains to be seen, but the public is surely reacting to it. The stranglehold the establishment thought it had is not as strong. The wool over our eyes is not as thick.

We should be focused dead tight on this idea. To all voters who have sworn allegiance to either party: look at what's going on. Both parties are spitting in the face of your will. This is the point worth making.

As a life-long leftist, I am still wary of Bernie. His foreign policy stances are troubling. But there's something revelatory going on. It's really hard for me to not see it in crazy cosmic terms. I cut my political teeth after 9/11, so for the Republican front-runner to stand upon the debate stage and call the Iraq war the disaster that it is... that's gigantic. And yes, Bernie is not the perfect candidate, but let's consider a few things. One: his long bulletproof career of being a progressive voice in American politics. If he is truly is a public servant, perhaps we can actually change his mind on certain issues. Let's not forget that this is how it's supposed to work. More importantly though: for years I have said that the one thing missing from the "national conversation" is the concept of class. The class warfare that began under Reagan has not truly stopped since.

Bernie, no matter what, has pushed the line forward, and really so has Trump. It's hard to think of what happens after this election. The status quo narrative is busted to pieces right now and I don't think the genie goes back in the bottle from here. So drop your worthless party identity. Both parties are dead husks wrapped around a rotten core of self-interest. Let's find ways to unite on this.

Trump represents the reality of who we are. If you are afraid of his authoritarianism, like it's something that could happen, sorry to say, that ship has sailed. Bush laid the authoritarian groundwork long ago and Obama perpetuated it through the NDAA and elsewhere. You already are living in the authoritarian world you fear Trump will bring about.

Bernie represents the reality of who we could be. I mean, it's not even all that special. We live in such desperate times that common decency sounds like a revolution. Bernie is simply reminding us of what we deserve as citizens of the leading industrialized nation on the planet. But it's good. It's decent. It's just.  

Strange times in this nervous year of America. 

Apocalypses are always scary and messy. Hold tight. And remember: it's just ride.

9/11/2011

9/11 changed my life.

I had only been 20 years old for a little over a month when I woke just in time to watch the towers fall live on TV.

Suddenly, I became interested in the world outside myself, and I began a great quest to know exactly what had just happened. With a burgeoning interest in poetry already formed by that time, I trudged through the mire of philosophy, esoterica, conspiracy theory, and political rhetoric.

Traveling south that day on Route 17 in New Jersey, I saw the smoke on the horizon with my own eyes. And, like a heavy cloud, fear crept into my life for a long time afterward. Lying awake at night, living only tens of miles away from Manhattan, I wondered what it would be like to have my body ripped apart by a nuclear explosion. I became obsessed with the news, breaking apart all the double speak of government officials and tossing the refuse into the fires of my righteous indignation.

My thoughts today go out to "patriots" and "truthers" alike. They involve the very tangled relationship between fear and control. To fear is to be controlled, even if it is just being controlled by the fear itself. Fear dictates our actions and clogs our ears to the voices around us. But the desire to control is also a desire rooted in fear. That means those who seek to control us fear us or at least fear the absence of control.

I think this is the great lesson of 9/11. Whether you believe the Commission Report to be hallowed truth or if you, combing the internet tonight, find a security camera tape of Dick Cheney personally wrapping the support beams of WTC 7 in C-4, there is no doubt how 9/11 was co-opted as a brand of fear.

I see absolutely no way around the fact that the Bush Administration took 9/11 and made it into a brand. No matter what you believe happened, they took the events of that day and used them to control. They did not deploy grief counselors to asses the PTSD of the population. All they offered was the drumbeat of war and the continuation of bloodshed as they slowly tightened their grip on the landscape of our civil liberties. The with us or against us attitude was pure fear and alienation. Those amongst us who did not see any value in perpetuating violence were viciously marginalized. Make no mistake: the Obama administration has done fuck all to reverse this stranglehold and has merely perpetuated it. 9/11 became a brand and it's slogan still is "Never Forget." As in, never let go of the fear you felt that day. Always fixate on the terror and always bow to we who can protect you.

Ten years later, fear still haunts me. Not so much in the way of terrorism and nuclear holocaust, but in my life and in my actions, I see the dark fingers of fear groping at all that I value and turning it brown with decay.

Robert Anton Wilson wrote about Karma:

"Karma, in the original Buddhist scriptures, is a blind machine; in fact, it is functionally identical with the scientific concept of natural law. Sentimental ethical ideas about justice being built into the machine, so that those who do evil in one life are punished for it in another life, were added later by theologians reasoning from their own moralistic prejudices. Buddha simply indicated that all cruelties and injustices of the past are still active: their effects are always being felt. Similarly, he explained, all the good of the past is also being felt.

Since most humans are still controlled by fairly robotic reflexes, the bad energy of the past far outweighs the good, and the tendency of the wheel [of Karma] is to keep moving in the same terrible direction, violence breeding more violence, hatred breeding more hatred, war breeding more war. The only way to 'stop the wheel' is to stop it inside yourself, by giving up bad energy and concentrating on the positive. This is by no means easy, but once you understand what Gurdjieff called 'the horror of our situation,' you have no choice but to try, and to keep on trying."

My point here is that we must recognize that it is not a matter of what we believe; it is a matter of what we do. On both sides of the great divide in this country, we have people who like to cloak themselves in ideas. People who like to wear what they believe like badges, proof of who they are, proof of their moral identity. Or more accurately, they wear them like accessories as we are the greatest race of consumers this world has ever known.

But, while many champion the fact that "they still can't control the way I think!" they (they being whomever you think attacked us) have a pretty good stranglehold on the way we treat each other, the way we act. Ultimately, we are still free to treat each other with love and respect, but it takes not thought. It takes vision and a great wrenching of the wheel of Karma, an exertion of great internal force to quell all that we have been taught, all reactionary response, all that we have inherited in this great system of fear and trauma. The more we see through the eyes of community, the more we offer help and rely on the help of others, the less fear and isolation we experience and the less we have to depend on centralized systems of control.

Wikileaks and the Decentralization of Culture

Wikileaks is the closest thing to a paradigm shift that I have ever seen. And really, it's ultimately a story about the promise of the internet.

One can see the internet as a bit of a Frankenstein's monster. Surely, the internet is used most often to serve corporate interests. Facebook doesn't want you to "like" everything because it wants you to express yourself in new and exciting ways. The entirety of Facebook is market research. Data mining so that tabs can be kept on our consumer desires. (Or really to make sure that our consumer desires are being manufactured properly and tweaked accordingly, depending on how you look at it.) Of course, there are also games and the virus that is advertising. But for all the insidious distractions of the internet, we still have knowledge at our fingertips, the ability to communicate and disseminate information like never before, and now the ability to reclaim culture.

Culture has become a centralized tool of control. A feedback loop of a narrative perpetuated by centralized corporate media and based on our lowest common desires and fears. And this is exactly what Wikileaks is threatening. And over the past few weeks, the internet has looked like a whole new world in which we suddenly exist.

Every time you watch the news, doesn't matter who delivers it, Olberman or O'Reiley, you are being told a story. That story is rarely, if ever, representative of your immediate local reality. And never will it contain all the subtlety and nuance of your immediate local reality. So the metaphor is of someone looking at clouds in order to get an idea of how to traverse the terrain beneath his feet. ("Truth knocks on the door and you say: 'Go away I'm looking for the truth.' So it goes away" - Prisig.) That immediate local reality has been suffering because of our lack of attention. Like some garden that is left to be scorched in the sun, our immediate local reality has been neglected for the divisive fear-mongering centralized media. Centralization is the great plague of this whole country really: centralized food sources, centralized currency, federal laws. (Makes me wonder if it's all some strange trauma of the Copernican Revolution that we are still grappling with.)

Wikileaks certainly does not offer the subtlety and nuance of your immediate and local reality. But it does usurp the "official story" of the way things are.

Particularly my hope is that the tired and really deadly story of Republican morality vs Democrat morality will end here and now. First off, both institutions (like all American institutions) are morally bankrupt. Second, all politics revolve around corporate interest. End of story. Nothing else matters. The media seems almost particularly designed to smokescreen this fact these days. We are all angry and with good reason, but we are not each others' enemy. We need to refocus our passion from silly hot-button issues toward the widening social class gap and the fact that real reform has been stiffed by corporate interest.

When Mastercard and Visa cut off Wikileaks as a customer, they became a court of law and convicted the site of illegal practices which law enforcement itself has yet to do which is why they have to hold Assange on condomless sex charges. So in retaliation, Wikileaks releases today the deal the American government made in Russia on behalf of MasterCard and Visa: exactly what I was hoping for: the exposure of the real enemy: who's in whose pockets

This is the promise of the internet. We regain control of our culture. The genie is out of the bottle. The data dumps of Wikileaks are raw and unpasteurized: the strange digital residue of reality, but they render the corporate narrative impotent. Aside from direct holes punched in illusions, the volume of the leaks alone makes the sound bites of corporate media seem obsolete and inadequate. Suddenly, it's not just our entertainment that has become decentralized, our very notions of reality are up for grabs.

And this past week has become even more interesting: Hackers took down the bank that froze Assange's account and just today they froze Mastercard's website; Hundreds of mirror sites are hosted all over the internet, including one hosted by long time pirate faction Razor 1911, and there are reports of the discordians-at-heart of 4chan joining the fight as well.

The internet is a new frontier. Douglas Rushkoff has described the evolution of this top-down model of knowledge dissemination. Using the Jews escape from ancient Egypt as an example, he points out that until the Jews developed their own alphabet in the desert and wrote their own law, the literate ruling class created reality. The Old Testament is a story that mirrors extacly our struggle to break free and reclaim our culture. And by reclaim it I mean create it ourselves and not consume it from faceless sources. Unfortunately, we have always been one step behind in this process. They gave us reading, but we couldn't write. They gave us writing but we couldn't program. Now we can. Now it seems like the internet is the desert, a vast wilderness with no law except what we write for ourselves. Now the playing field is leveled and no bullets or bombs or blood are necessary.

The revolution will not be televised. But it just might be computerized.