Archives for April 2013

I am always struck by how common the refusal to question. This has come up recently with a sort of mini- war in the media regards conspiracy and the Boston Marathon Bombing. Rachel Maddow, the branded "out" lesbian liberal at MSNBC, established clearly that she knows who signs her paychecks. (see below). The Gay Pride parade announced that this year's Grand Marshall was Bradley Manning, only to very quickly announce that no, that was a mistake and the perpetrator of said mistake was being disciplined. No word yet on who Bud Light and the other corporate sponsors DO want as Grand Marshall. I was reading a number of responses at a number of places on the topic of the withdrawal of … [Read more...]

Tom Brokaw of NBC news: no question about it. we're so an open society and vulnerable to attacks every day. everyone has to understand tonight, however, beginning tomorrow morning early there's going to be much tougher security considerations across the country. however exhausted we may be by them. we have to live with them and get along and go forward and not let them bring us to our knees. you will remember last summer we were unhappy with the conventions. now i don't think that we could raise the complaints of what happened today in boston. It seems clear that whether or not the government had anything to do with the Boston Marathon Bombings (more on that below) the state will seize … [Read more...]

I keep having this strange sense of the hallucinatory as I follow the Boston Marathon story. And then to follow or attempt to track the public response to the entire city of Boston being under martial law. The docility with which this was accepted is pretty alarming. The public response though cannot be separated from the public's consumption of Hollywood film, and/or TV and corporate news. The story of the Tsarnaev brothers increasingly resembles a film script. And people increasingly "watch" it as they watch a movie. But when I say movie, I suppose it's important to differentiate between corporate product and not corporate --OR--maybe it's not. The landscape portrayed in media, … [Read more...]

This is now the week of the Boston Marathon bombings. So all discussion takes places from within the shadow media has created. This is the shadow of american exceptionalism. U.S. lives are worth more. This topic is now so boring, so utterly idiotic that I don't think I can have it here. What is more interesting are the pronouncements of a new reactionary "left" that seems to be growing. For this is also still a week in which the dead Thatcher meme collides with domestic terror in the U.S. The recent covers of the New Economist: The real levels of domestic oppression continue to get ratcheted up. Over at Dissident Voice, Ajuma Baraka writes of a new report on state … [Read more...]

Random thoughts. Margaret Thatcher dies. There are the usual fawning obituaries, but also more than the usual number of attacks, which really speaks to just how widely hated she was, by even those seemingly close to her. At least on a personal level. One gets no sense of her personal appeal, of any intimate attractiveness. She was a repellent sort of lizard-person. Her spawn was feckless inbred and of weak character. Mark Thatcher made news ten years ago when he tried to organize a coup in Equatorial Guinea. First, Equtorial Guinea is a tiny dot of land on the west coast of Africa. It is a former Spanish colonial holding, and ranks as among the twelve most corrupt and repressive countries … [Read more...]

“The deviant male was above all a bourgeois, egoistic and unpatriotic as well as scarcely virile (because he was unfit or reluctant to repeatedly impregnate the female)l the deviant female was the too ‘modern’ woman, Americanized, independent and masculinized." Critica fascista (1937) "Man's authoritarian structure-this must be clearly established-is basically produced by the embedding of sexual inhibitions and fear in the living substance of sexual impulses." Wilhelm Reich One of my first experiences with institutional enforcement of masculinity was in junior high school. Two incidents occurred in 7th grade; the first in gym class with one of the boy's gym teachers. Actually, … [Read more...]

I have noticed recently an increase in a particular kind of cynicism. This is coupled to the belief, I think anyway, that large numbers of people believe ideas fall out of the sky. That ideology is self generating. The snark factor, the snide tone that seems to utterly permeate discourse today, is the expression of the weakened ego, the need to somehow identify with a manufactured "authenticity" (and more on that in a second). The cynic today is ahistorical: 'Oh they've always done that'. 'Oh, that went on long before....blah blah', 'Oh, that's how people are', etc. The stance is: nothing new under the sun. This logic takes one, of course, to the atribution of certain human behaviors … [Read more...]

I wrote about poverty before, here, in statistical terms, and in how they remain invisible in mainstream entertainments -- at least in Hollywood -- and when they appear in indi films, they are usually fetishized. One thing that seems absent, too often, are the working poor. Statistically, there are 22 million people looking for full time work. Most work is part time, and temporary. That's another hidden item in most government statistics on this topic. Wages have declined, hours increased, and union power is almost non-existent. Unions have been demonized in Hollywood, unless its a nostalgia project -- (Sally Field as Norma Rae) -- but an audience rarely connects that battle to … [Read more...]