”Defiance is beautiful. The defiance of power, especially great or overwhelming power, exalts and glorifies the rebel.” Edward Abbey
What’s happened to Tim DeChristopher is most unfortunate in the short term, but in the long term, he’s going to be the winner. The government and the corporate lackeys that direct it have further entrenched Tim as a folk hero. He’ll get out and have an opportunity to be even more vocal and reach more people. So, in a way, it’s a win for our side, not theirs. Not so great for Tim for a couple of years, but I doubt he’ll serve the full sentence.
In some ways, those that oppose the shameless and misguided use of land are like the American Indians in the 19th century. We keep losing a little bit at at time. Little by little, capitalist interests are gaining greater and firmer footholds in the public sphere. But who or what is the real enemy? What really ended the empires of the Great Plains, for example, wasn’t the government so much as it was the capitalist interests that wanted the land. The government, as it is today, was little more than the advance guard of capitalism. Nothing more than a pawn.
So, in hindsight, what should they have done? What could they have done differently? Perhaps nothing would have changed the ultimate outcome, but I think if they could do it over again, there would have been a much more coordinated and forceful resistance from day one. And that’s precisely what we need. A coordinated and forceful resistance.
Ultimately, the American Indian was overwhelmed by numbers and technology. They didn’t have the same tools to fight American capitalists. But we do. The primary tools are money and the law, not guns. Let’s use our money, our minds and good lawyers, ones willing to enlist in the cause, to fight these bastards. Let’s not acquiesce, march on to the reservation with our heads bowed, and declare ourselves willing to take up “the way of the growth capitalist.” Let’s fight to the last man. To the last dollar.
I’ve been reading a fascinating account of the last days of the Comanche empire titled Empire of the Summer Moon, by S.C. Gwynne. Gwynne’s background is in journalism, not in history, but the account is well written, highly entertaining, and for the most part, well researched and accurate.
In the spring, I finished Pekka Hämäläinen’s academic work, The Comanche Empire, the 2009 winner of the Bancroft Prize in History. Hämäläinen’s work is they type of work you’d expect from a historian, it’s heavy footnoted, extremely detailed and accurate. But it’s also revisionist, posing interesting challenges to many of our long held views of these people and their history on the North American continent. I highly recommend both, and I highly recommend reading them back-to-back, or simultaneously, as they compliment one another well.
Oh, and I should also mention Dispossessing Wilderness, Mark David’s Spence’s book about Indian removal from the National Parks. I just finished that one, as well, and give it very high marks. Digging deeply into that history will challenge your views about the National Park Service, because frankly, what happened to those people, particularly the Blackfeet, is a national embarrassment. A huge mistake! There should be Blackfeet in Glacier today, but of course, there’s nary a one. Plenty of gift shops, restaurants and SUV’s. Industrial tourism run amok!
But it’s also been interesting to read these books as our nation’s so-called leaders haggle back and forth over the debt limit, our ongoing wars, unemployment and the economy in general. I keep thinking back about how the Indians lost a little here and a little there until they lost everything. The Blackfeet, for example, signed a treaty that gave them what they thought were perpetual hunting rights in Glacier. As along as it was “public land.” They didn’t expect the trickery that would follow, however, when judges ruled the Indians had the same hunting rights as American citizens (which means no rights), since when Glacier became a National Park, it was no longer “public land.”
Huh?
The logic, or lack thereof, was that public lands can be sold, and since Glacier was a National Park and couldn’t be sold, it wasn’t public land. So, you have no rights, Redman. Get in line and get some rations. How ’bout a blanket?
And we of course know public lands (think BLM) can be sold. To the highest bidder, so the bidder can bulldoze, extract and destroy as it sees fit.
Fast forward to the present day and ponder our system. A perpetual capitalist growth machine that requires new markets and new opportunities ad infinitum. Eventually, however, it hits a limit, a wall. There’s nowhere to go. And when it does this, it starts devouring its host, which is us. Like a parasite, it turns on its own people. The ideology, as Edward Abbey said, of the cancer cell.
Little by little, just like the Indians, we’re losing things. In order to prop up Wall Street and the sinking financial services industry, an evil coalition of political leaders and corporate hegemons have devised a plan to privatize Social Security. They’re demonizing it through a carefully orchestrated plan of lies and propaganda so they can hand over trillions of our money to their corrupt friends. They need a boost. What better than to rob the national treasury and hand over the trillions in the Social Security fund?
The same thing is happening in healthcare, as they’re demonizing the Medicare so they can turn that over to private interests. They’re selling our public lands. There’s the commodification and centralization of renewable energy (you didn’t think they were really going to allow decentralized energy to gain a foothold, did you?) Slowly but surely the vice is tightening and we’re gradually becoming similar to reservation Indians. But it’s not government handouts we’re dependent upon. Our nation’s most vulnerable are becoming completely dependent on the private sector, an entity which has only one responsibility, profit and returning shareholder value, not meeting the needs of the less fortunate.
Think about a world without Social Security and Medicare for a moment. For most of us, that means our security as seniors will be placed entirely in the hands of profit motivated, poorly educated, mostly selfish crooks. Look at the track record. A lot of people will basically just be reduced to begging. They’ll find themselves in squalor. When Social Security was enacted, nearly fifty percent of seniors were in poverty.
Some doctors are already refusing Medicare patients. They only want the higher returns paid by private insurance. Pretty soon, there will come a day when if you don’t have private insurance, and you’ll be required by law to have it, you’ll have nowhere to turn.
The inescapable, cold, sobering reality is a lot of people will simply die. They won’t have the money saved, and they won’t be able to afford private insurance. They’ll die under a viaduct, cold, sick and destitute.
And so, it’s autumn in America. The season before winter, before the death throes set it. You can feel the chill in the air, those cold northern winds starting to kick up. The leaves are turning and soon they’ll fall. Except its anything but pretty like golden Aspen in late September. This is ugly. It’s brutal.
It’s the gloaming of America, a nation that turned on its own people but in doing so, insured its own death. Then again, maybe it was inevitable. Maybe we’re getting what we deserved, since our history is stained with the blood of so many innocents. How we built our nation is shameful. There’s no denying it. Maybe it’s just our time to face the music.
Let’s hope that out of the ashes we can build something better.
All the talk on the street is the debt ceiling, something 80% of Americans had never even heard of before this year. Word is that if our government doesn’t raise its own credit limit, the nation will be plunged into financial abyss, a catastrophic outcome for every American and our foreign friends. The good faith and credit of the United States will be down the tubes.
Seems to me our good faith and credit went down the tubes a long time ago. We cast our honor out the window in the 18th century. Now our financial street cred is in danger.
But not to worry. There was never any danger of the debt ceiling not being raised, because not doing so would have put the personal fortunes of our so-called leaders at risk. And trust me, nothing is more important to this bunch of lying bastards than their own asses. So, the whole sordid mess has really just been a game. Obama trying to look tough to his left-of-center supporters while really serving the needs of his moneyed centrist base. The right trying to look like it’s defending the interests of its supporters, the wealthy and the insane.
And just who are Obama’s supporters, the ones that really matter? They’re wealthy people, a lot of New York, Los Angeles, Portland, Austin and Chicago types that love the arts, the symphony, theatre and trekking vacations in Tibet. They go there so they can “find themselves” and practice what Edward Abbey called Zen bullshit. They give to big non-profits, which is good. They have some liberal sensibilities, but at the end of the day, most of them are pretty disconnected with the average working guy on the street. The people suffering all around them. A personally know a few here in Memphis that are on the front lines getting their hands dirty, but most aren’t. Most of these folks are rolling in money and have white table cloth lunches nearly everyday. You should ask yourself how they acquired such wealth, because my experience suggests few of them are innocent in how they did it.
Lurking beneath it all you’ll find vast stocks and holdings in companies that don’t treat people or often entire ecosystems very well. You’ll find they say all the right things at cocktail parties while their managers and directors are mowing down forests, laying off workers and committing various types of corporate subterfuge. The stock market is far from benign.
The wealthy on the right generally care little for the arts and such, but they do like the forest cutting and the subterfuge. They love that shit. They’re at the Hunt and Polo Club and too busy developing and drilling to care much about such trivial non-sense as art and theatre. Plus, all artists are gay, on drugs or liberal. Why bother with that rabble? Nothing would please them more than to see NPR and PBS get the guillotine. They could create the Forbes Channel. Oh, and cut liberal arts at state run universities, too, while you’re at it.
Yeah, these are mostly stereotypes, but they’re mostly true. At least from my own experience.
Obama has another group of supporters, though. Real, working class liberals that really care about the environment, sustainability and fairness. Their hearts are in the right place, but their eyes aren’t. They’d like to see some democracy, but they’re looking in the wrong places for it. They’ll support Obama again in 2012, on the somewhat logical premise of supporting the lesser of two evils, but in the process of doing so, they’ll insure nothing ever changes in America. We’ll have another four years of Obama, still no national healthcare, two or three wars, a bankrupt treasury (thanks to Reagan and Bush and inaction by Obama) and be even closer to privatizing Social Security. To save it, of course.
And that’s what all of this is really about. It’s about creating financial panic and boogeymen like Social Security. Demonize it and tear it down, and then to save it, shift its trillions to their private sector buddies on Wall Street. When they’re done, they’ll take nice paying jobs as advisors and lobbyists for the people that joined them in the heist.
Obama needs to believe his working class base is going to abandon him. He’ll have his billion or so from Wall Street for the campaign, but at the end of the day he still needs votes. I believe the only thing that will get him to act decisively is the fear of losing those votes. But even then, maybe that’s not enough. Maybe we’re seeing the real Obama, and he believes he can win with centrist support alone. We’ll see.
Regardless of what happens, rest assured the spigot will remain wide open, especially for the perpetual war machine. We’ll keep spending trillions in the Middle East although the biggest threats are right here on our own continent.
At some point, however, it will all collapse. The biggest Ponzi scheme and fraud ever perpetrated on mankind will fall apart, and perhaps then we can build something we can be proud of.
“Anarchism is founded on the observation that since few men are wise enough to rule themselves, even fewer are wise enough to rule others.”-Edward Abbey