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Righteous Anger & Despair In The Time Of Obama - Peter Lemkin - 28-05-2009
Against the Tortured Logic of Obama’s Placebo Presidency: A Call for the Audacity of Hopelessness
by Phil Rockstroh / May 27th, 2009
http://dissidentvoice.org/2009/05/against-the-tortured-logic-of-obamas-placebo-presidency-a-call-for-the-audacity-of-hopelessness/
From time to time, events unfold that are so large in scope, so all-encompassing in their implications that one’s initial response is muted by an inability to categorize it all within the realm of experience. Previous reference points prove of little service. One’s image of oneself and one’s place in the world is under seize, perhaps even in danger of being torn away. One stare’s into the abyss, until the abyss removes its dark shades and makes direct eye contact. The mind buzzes; one’s thoughts scuttle in circles like stunned insects.
On a collective basis, we as a nation are living through such a time. At present, we are witnessing the descending spiral of Icarusian Capitalism; our sacred delusion of the perpetual ascendancy of a god-like market place lies broken in the dust. Malls and McMansions stand abandoned, desolate as the edifices of forgotten gods, as the come-ons of the salesmen of deregulated capitalism are churned to spittle amid a cacophony of collapsing market platitudes.
And not an uptick in public optimism, nor a surge of euphoria on Wall Street, nor the “invisible hand of the marketplace” sprinkling pixie dust will bring back the Olympian days of 2005, when the wise men of Washington and Wall Street knew the force of gravity was just a myth believed in by those embittered prophets of doom whose only joy in life is fantasizing the fall of their wealthy betters. It does not matter a damn how many dollars our present day believers of neoliberal tall tales, President Obama and Treasury Secretary Geithner, pour into the hole in the ground where the crash occurred, a bean stalk, twining skyward towards a golden, debt-negating goose, will not flower forth.
Fortunately, when false convictions fall, it is possible for a leveling of sanity to prevail. But there can be no more hubristic flights borne on waxen wings. No more multibillion dollar confidence scams from Wall Street. No more smash and grab imperial wars. No more tea parties for the dim and deranged. There is the banality of evil, and then there is the evil of banality. Both, the present era has produced in abundance. From about the late nineteen-seventies to the present, The United States all but ceased manufacturing products and went into the business of manufacturing marketplace hype, baseless fears, and illusionary enemies. Due to this economic and cultural derangement, a dark tower of self-imprisoning delusions has circumscribed our nation’s fate. Is it any wonder the quintessential dark lord of the darkest tower, Dick Cheney, will not exit the scene?
And what will foster real change? Not pleasing sound bites and rousing oratory from President Obama, then a continuance of many of the pernicious policies of his criminal predecessors. Conversely, the iron gates of Hell must crash closed behind us. The absence of light must grow so unbearable to us that we’re willing to ask how is it we arrived in this place and become willing to challenge our most cherished concepts about ourselves and our place in the scheme of things. That is the sort of “indefinite detention” the nation could use. What is needed is the audacity of hopelessness.
President Obama and the Democratic Congress could have ridden a wave of public discontent towards meaningful reform, but instead they have hugged the shore. And they seem to be surveying the property, scouting locations to build beach house retreats for their elitist benefactors and the militarist fantasists whose tsunami-sized arrogance wrought the present destruction in the first place.
Meanwhile, right-wing radio haters, like penned dogs, bark into the empty air of their meaningless day. Daily, we negotiate our way through the encompassing banalities and casual brutalities of soft oligarchy, as beneath it all churns the nebulous rage of the powerless that creates an audience for the likes of Beck, Hannity, and Limbaugh.
It is high season for those virtuosos of displaced anger, because not only the nation’s treasure, but its élan vital, has been squandered inflating the bubble-borne vanities of the ultra-wealthy up to the point of economic immolation. The elite have perpetrated an act of catastrophic clownishness so massive that it has left the rest of us stunned, and left to pick amid the debris of our exploded hopes. Bur hopes do not die pretty. Once dead, they do not rise like the redeemer gods of myth; instead, they stagger about, rotting and snarling like B-movie mummies. They leave us with our mouths tasting of ash. Our hearts choked by dry thistle.
Yet the buffoons of Wall Street and the killer clowns of our militarized Disneyland strut and swagger past the smoking ruins they left behind after their high-end looting spree. In their plundering, the only thing they didn’t steal for themselves was any sense of self-awareness. Or is self-awareness necessary when you’re obscenely rewarded for your narcissistic follies? What motivation would a high-chair tyrant have to modify his self-centeredness when he is shielded from the consequences of his bratty machinations? Why become an honest actor in the realm of human events when one can strut through life with a con artist’s inexplicable sense of entitlement?
And what about the rest of us? The financial elite, by means of their bagman in the Executive Branch and Congress, continue to plunder our hopes for a meaningful future byway of that legal larceny popularly known as the bailout, i.e., the latest transfer of wealth from the bottom upward. This is why the buffoonish tea-bagger types hoard their resentments. All they’ve been left with is a heap of fragmented hatreds. Those toxic baubles they shore against reality.
Tragically, when not addressed, fear and resentment will increase in intensity and can become an exponentially growing feedback loop of paranoid rage. At present, such a process has created that haunted forest of the airwaves known as right-wing talk radio. It is the voice of anger feeding off of itself, and it seems dangerously close to reaching the point of hypertrophic breakdown. It is the audio analog of a belief system in exponential decay . . . The more the rot increases in the system the more Glen Beck babbles and weeps. It is physically manifested in the cataclysmic ecosystem of Rush Limbaugh’s repulsive bulk . . . his corpulent carcass is the morbid bloat of unregulated capitalism.
Right-wing hatred is a many headed hydra that feeds on fear and desperation. It cannot be fought by attacking its spindling heads, each of its hissing mouths dripping with black poison. Instead, one must make thrusts at the noxious heart of the raging beast. But one cannot know where the heart of an external monster beats without suffering the agonies of one’s own. Accordingly, one must allow one’s heart to be broken. And don’t look to Barack Obama’s bland charm to mend it. Because the honest grief of the heart provides a point of reference, a foundation of knowledge, as to why the monster is inconsolable in its wounded fury; hence, this provides a strategic starting point as to how to fight it.
And that is why we must release the photographs of torture. Moreover, we must bring public ignominy upon the respectable psychopaths in high places who mandated these policies, plus bring a leveling of shame upon the high-flying, highchair tyrants of high finance who exploded the global economy. Our ugliness must be public like a frog. The nasty secrets must be revealed; the mortifying pictures gazed upon. Our stomachs should seize up in revulsion. The ordeal must exact such a degree of revulsion within us that we will never again allow these despicable practices to transpire on our watch.
There is a stench of putrefaction rising from beneath our feet. We must uncover the corpses laid under by empire. Being placated by Barrack Obama’s bland charm — in the same manner we were cowed by George W. Bush’s infantile petulance, amused by Bill Clinton’s brilliant, bad boy seductions, and drugged by Ronald Reagan’s stupefying 1940’s Hollywood bromides — will only defer the reckoning and render us ignorant stooges in the impersonal sweep of history. As a people, we have a choice: We can be strengthened by embracing uncomfortable truths, or we can grow enervated and enfeebled by pushing them away.
But sadly, Obama is attempting the tried and tested political trick — used effectively by Washington hacks from Watergate (”Our long national nightmare is over”) to Iran-Contra (”We cannot have another failed presidency”) — of inducing the uniquely American trait of Instant Amnesia that has, in the past, allowed the empire to stagger on, repeatedly committing variations of the same crimes, then coddling and protecting the same variety of corrupt elitists responsible, and thereby, reducing the Constitution to tatters and rendering the rule of law rubble.
But this time, the rot is too deep, the pathology too systemic. Obama’s placebo presidency will not stem the hypertrophic decay. Granted, it was good to evict the previous, psychotic tenants from the property (Although Dick Cheney seems to be stalking the place with his obsessive, media drive-bys.) but that does nothing to repair the collapsing foundation of the structure, its core eaten away by an infestation of anti-democratic termites. Rather than addressing the core issue, the deterioration of the rights and liberties granted by the U.S. Constitution, President Obama is wallpapering over the rot wrought by the national security state’s termite hive mind of authoritarian appetites, that has been, silently, and hidden by darkness, gnawing the house of state to sawdust.
Again our choice: Either open up the decay within the system to the light of day and start the process of rebuilding and renewal, or allow the republic-ravening pestilence to continue unchallenged, hence unabated, and let the nation go bughouse crazy as the house comes down around us to the strains of the insect-brain stridulations of Beck, Hannity, and Limbaugh.
Righteous Anger & Despair In The Time Of Obama - Ed Jewett - 30-05-2009
... a good 'piece'
Righteous Anger & Despair In The Time Of Obama - Peter Lemkin - 30-05-2009
Ed Jewett Wrote:... a good 'piece'
Yeah, he really kicks-ass with that piece...but it is all true, IMO, and I can't believe the country is not seething with anger. They seem determined to take away everything and all too many seemingly will just watch it happen to themselves on TV.....:bebored:
Righteous Anger & Despair In The Time Of Obama - Ed Jewett - 31-05-2009
We are (well, most of us, anyway) vapid immobile mind-controlled 'comfortably numbed' lemmings contemplating our SUV's, McMansions, annual bonuses and the latest in 'reality TV' but incapable of seeing the reality of what has happened (continues to happen) despite being presented with the facts and cajoled with the evidence. We find the idea of revolting ... well, revolting: don't bother us (well, most of us) with jabbering about war crimes, the rule of law, that paper called the Constitution, or global disapproval of the excesses of empire.
By the way, who won American Idol?
Righteous Anger & Despair In The Time Of Obama - Peter Lemkin - 31-05-2009
Ed Jewett Wrote:We are (well, most of us, anyway) vapid immobile mind-controlled 'comfortably numbed' lemmings contemplating our SUV's, McMansions, annual bonuses and the latest in 'reality TV' but incapable of seeing the reality of what has happened (continues to happen) despite being presented with the facts and cajoled with the evidence. We find the idea of revolting ... well, revolting: don't bother us (well, most of us) with jabbering about war crimes, the rule of law, that paper called the Constitution, or global disapproval of the excesses of empire.
By the way, who won American Idol?
It has been the longterm project of the ruling elite to dumb-down the Sheeple; to make them feel a sense of profound helplessness and hopelessness to change things; yet to make them feel they live in the best of all possible countries/societies; that they are historically/politically/philosophically 'blind'; that their unquestioned religion is Americanism; that corporate capitalism is the endstage of evolution; that humans are here to rape and pillage the Earth - with America leading this obscenity; that Natural values and philosophy are 'unnatural'; that kitsch is kunst; that might makes right and the domination paradigm is valid; etc. :marchmellow:
However, a few are not brain-dead and more could be taken off the thought-control......if.....if......we lived as if life mattered, and we were in control of our part of it - as much as the elites [and more righteous in our cause and goals]. "Talking 'bout a revolution....." of ideas, ideals, values, polity, philosophy, structure of society and human's relationship to Gaia and one another. I'm not optimistic, but willing to sign-up [allready have] and fight. What more can one do. I'm sick at heart at where America has fallen to - along with most of the rest of humanity. The Native Americans were on the right track, much more than the invaders who now have control....as are most indiginous peoples. Civilization has failed and needs to be dismantled as constructed IMO. A whole new paradigm is needed. :nurse:
Righteous Anger & Despair In The Time Of Obama - Ed Jewett - 31-05-2009
Peter, I have been aware of and have helped inform others about that "longterm project of the ruling elite", and we do need to counter-act it in our personal lives, our families, our friendships, our communities; then, maybe, it gets to our national level. It sounds like you are a reader of Derrick Jensen, and I hear echoes from my blog.
Three tidbits from my blog:
THOUGHT FOR THE DAY
From www.whatreallyhappened.com
"This focus on money and power may do wonders in the marketplace, but it creates a tremendous crisis in our society. People who have spent all day learning how to sell themselves and to manipulate others are in no position to form lasting friendships or intimate relationships...
Many Americans hunger for a different kind of society -- one based on principles of caring, ethical and spiritual sensitivity, and communal solidarity. Their need for meaning is just as intense as their need for economic security."
-- Michael Lerner, journalist
***
I received an offer in the mail:
$20 for 12 issues of the recently-reborn Poetry Magazine.
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/index.html
The editor, Christian Winman, enclosed a card that said
“Let us remember …. that in the end we go to poetry for one reason, so that we might more fully inhabit our lives and the world in which we live them, and that if we more fully inhabit these things, we might be less apt to destroy both.”
***
So how do we transform our anger about assassinations, false flag attacks, torture, war crimes, corruption, war-mongering for profit, and the psychopathology of our current leadership into something that speaks to and sustains joy, community, and life? That is perhaps an inappropropriate discussion for this forum, or at least requires a new thread.
Righteous Anger & Despair In The Time Of Obama - Paul Rigby - 31-05-2009
Peter Lemkin Wrote:Against the Tortured Logic of Obama’s Placebo Presidency: A Call for the Audacity of Hopelessness
by Phil Rockstroh / May 27th, 2009
http://dissidentvoice.org/2009/05/against-the-tortured-logic-of-obamas-placebo-presidency-a-call-for-the-audacity-of-hopelessness/
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2009/05/28-3
Published on Thursday, May 28, 2009 by TedRall.com
An Early Call for Obama's Resignation: With Democrats Like Him, Who Needs Dictators?
by Ted Rall
Quote:We expected broken promises. But the gap between the soaring expectations that accompanied Barack Obama's inauguration and his wretched performance is the broadest such chasm in recent historical memory. This guy makes Bill Clinton look like a paragon of integrity and follow-through.© 2009 Ted Rall
From healthcare to torture to the economy to war, Obama has reneged on pledges real and implied. So timid and so owned is he that he trembles in fear of offending, of all things, the government of Turkey. Obama has officially reneged on his campaign promise to acknowledge the Armenian genocide. When a president doesn't have the 'nads to annoy the Turks, why does he bother to show up for work in the morning?
Obama is useless. Worse than that, he's dangerous. Which is why, if he has any patriotism left after the thousands of meetings he has sat through with corporate contributors, blood-sucking lobbyists and corrupt politicians, he ought to step down now--before he drags us further into the abyss.
I refer here to Obama's plan for "preventive detentions." If a cop or other government official thinks you might want to commit a crime someday, you could be held in "prolonged detention." Reports in U.S. state-controlled media imply that Obama's shocking new policy would only apply to Islamic terrorists (or, in this case, wannabe Islamic terrorists, and also kinda-sorta-maybe-thinking-about-terrorism dudes). As if that made it OK.
In practice, Obama wants to let government goons snatch you, me and anyone else they deem annoying off the street.
Preventive detention is the classic defining characteristic of a military dictatorship. Because dictatorial regimes rely on fear rather than consensus, their priority is self-preservation rather than improving their people's lives. They worry obsessively over the one thing they can't control, what Orwell called "thoughtcrime"--contempt for rulers that might someday translate to direct action.
Locking up people who haven't done anything wrong is worse than un-American and a violent attack on the most basic principles of Western jurisprudence. It is contrary to the most essential notion of human decency. That anyone has ever been subjected to "preventive detention" is an outrage. That the President of the United States, a man who won an election because he promised to elevate our moral and political discourse, would even entertain such a revolting idea offends the idea of civilization itself.
Obama is cute. He is charming. But there is something rotten inside him. Unlike the Republicans who backed Bush, I won't follow a terrible leader just because I voted for him. Obama has revealed himself. He is a monster, and he should remove himself from power.
"Prolonged detention," reported The New York Times, would be inflicted upon "terrorism suspects who cannot be tried."
"Cannot be tried." Interesting choice of words.
Any "terrorism suspect" (can you be a suspect if you haven't been charged with a crime?) can be tried. Anyone can be tried for anything. At this writing, a Somali child is sitting in a prison in New York, charged with piracy in the Indian Ocean, where the U.S. has no jurisdiction. Anyone can be tried. Why is it, exactly, that some prisoners "cannot be tried"?
The Old Grey Lady explains why Obama wants this "entirely new chapter in American law" in a boring little sentence buried a couple past the jump and a couple of hundred words down page A16: "Yet another question is what to do with the most problematic group of Guantánamo detainees: those who pose a national security threat but cannot be prosecuted, either for lack of evidence or because evidence is tainted."
In democracies with functioning legal systems, it is assumed that people against whom there is a "lack of evidence" are innocent. They walk free. In countries where the rule of law prevails, in places blessedly free of fearful leaders whose only concern is staying in power, "tainted evidence" is no evidence at all. If you can't prove that a defendant committed a crime--an actual crime, not a thoughtcrime--in a fair trial, you release him and apologize to the judge and jury for wasting their time.
It is amazing and incredible, after eight years of Bush's lawless behavior, to have to still have to explain these things. For that reason alone, Obama should resign.
Ted Rall is the author of the new book "Silk Road to Ruin: Is Central Asia the New Middle East? ," an in-depth prose and graphic novel analysis of America's next big foreign policy challenge.
Righteous Anger & Despair In The Time Of Obama - Peter Lemkin - 31-05-2009
Ed Jewett Wrote:Peter, I have been aware of and have helped inform others about that "longterm project of the ruling elite", and we do need to counter-act it in our personal lives, our families, our friendships, our communities; then, maybe, it gets to our national level. It sounds like you are a reader of Derrick Jensen, and I hear echoes from my blog......
Yes, I know Derrick and think very highly of him. I posted a thread about him previously here.
Righteous Anger & Despair In The Time Of Obama - Ed Jewett - 15-06-2009
Peter Lemkin Wrote:Ed Jewett Wrote:Peter, I have been aware of and have helped inform others about that "longterm project of the ruling elite", and we do need to counter-act it in our personal lives, our families, our friendships, our communities; then, maybe, it gets to our national level. It sounds like you are a reader of Derrick Jensen, and I hear echoes from my blog......
Yes, I know Derrick and think very highly of him. I posted a thread about him previously here.
I don't know him, but I've read six of his books, and I feel like I know him. He is a great writer and researcher; his 'stuff' is meticulously foot-noted, a fascinating read, and incredibly disquieting. Now if we can just get the BBC and PBS to cover him ....
Righteous Anger & Despair In The Time Of Obama - Peter Lemkin - 15-06-2009
Ed Jewett Wrote:Peter Lemkin Wrote:Ed Jewett Wrote:Peter, I have been aware of and have helped inform others about that "longterm project of the ruling elite", and we do need to counter-act it in our personal lives, our families, our friendships, our communities; then, maybe, it gets to our national level. It sounds like you are a reader of Derrick Jensen, and I hear echoes from my blog......
Yes, I know Derrick and think very highly of him. I posted a thread about him previously here.
I don't know him, but I've read six of his books, and I feel like I know him. He is a great writer and researcher; his 'stuff' is meticulously foot-noted, a fascinating read, and incredibly disquieting. Now if we can just get the BBC and PBS to cover him ....
...don't hold your breath. He is even anathema to many progressives, as he is calling for nothing less than the dismantling of civilization, as we know and [don't] love it. How much more radical than that can you get?! By the way, if you've not, do take a look at the videos on google videos of his speech, in two parts, entitled endgame. Endgame is certainly where we are today.....although I think few realize it..... One thing is sure to me. If we don't fight like hell, we will very shortly all loose - everything.