Rebecca Solnit: A Paradise Built in Hell, The Extraordinary Communities that Arise in Disaster, 2009, Viking. $17.95
Dave Eggers: Zeitoun, 2009, McSweeney’s Books. $24.00
Naomi Klein: The Shock Doctrine, The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, 2007, Metropolitan Books. $28.00
Reviewed by Dale Pendell

Reading Rebecca Solnit’s A Paradise Built in Hell, I was struck by the contrast to Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine that I had read the year earlier. Between these two books, with their rather different views of disaster, one can obtain a surprisingly broad political education into the philosophical unpinning of global corporate capitalism and its perennial alternative, cooperative civic society.

In A Paradise Built in Hell, through studies of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, the Halifax explosion of 1917, the Mexico City earthquake of 1985, the financial crisis in Argentina in 2001, the attacks on the World Trade Center in New York in 2001, and Hurricane Katrina in 2005, Rebecca Solnit outlines how neighbors and citizens band together in spontaneous collectives to help each other. She also details how this emergence of “civil society” is often suppressed by the government due to what sociologists have called “elite panic”—fear by the elites that they are not in control and that citizens taking charge of their own rescues are a threat to elite privilege, power, and property.

Political philosophy is a long debate on the nature of human nature: are people vicious cannibals ready to slit another’s throat in order to further their own chances for survival, only held in check by “a thin veneer of civilization” (meaning armed troops or police), or are people generally cooperative and level-headed, ready to help with what is best for the general good? The former position was most memorably stated by Thomas Hobbes, appalled by the religious wars of the seventeenth century and defending the institution of monarchy. The latter position, as referenced by Solnit, was championed by Peter Kropotkin, the discipline of anthropology, and by the world’s great spiritual traditions. Solnit shows that in case after case, when push comes to shove in the most disastrous circumstances, it is the altruistic and compassionate side of human nature that comes to the fore.

As the rationale for coercive authority rests on the view that people are by nature selfish, brutish, lawless, and generally incompetent, evidence to the contrary is rarely aired in public media. I was dismayed to learn that the majority of the students in a high school English class in Santa Cruz, a relatively progressive community, still believed in 2010 that the reactions of the citizens trapped in New Orleans after the hurricane prove that people are every bit as bad as the fictional children in Lord of the Flies. This impression is the direct result of the media frenzy to portray New Orleans as a Hobbesian nightmare: armed gangs roaming the city murdering and thieving, babies being raped in the Superdome beside the corpses of the murdered—stories without foundation that were later retracted, but quietly. While hundreds of small groups of ordinary citizens were engaged in rescue and provisioning for the needy, newscasters played a picture of a black man walking out of a ruined store with a television set over and over, almost with glee, to make the point that such was what to expect when “authority” breaks down. According to scholars who study disasters, looting is actually quite rare in such situations, and as it turns out, much of the looting that did occur in New Orleans was by police—it’s on video. In any case, petty theft is not a capital crime, and the decision to redeploy troops who were engaged in search and rescue to, instead, guarding property, with the order to shoot looters, is elite panic at its worst. There were murders in New Orleans, but in the cases documented by Solnit the murders were by police or by white vigilantes.

Dystopias make better fiction than utopias, as scores of Hollywood movies seem to indicate. We are more riveted to scenes of dog eat dog, every man for himself, than to stories of ordinary civility. While our love of gore and rapaciousness has a lot to do with the aesthetics of drama, it is no more an indictment of human nature than is the joy of children playing “war” or “cops and robbers.”

Solnit does what she can to present the well-documented history of the behavior of the overwhelming majority of people in disasters, and she does a lot. Solnit is an excellent writer and A Paradise Built in Hell is a stupendous testimony to the human spirit—that no, we are not crazy, we are not naïve dreamers, and that our best hope for survival still lies with each other.

Not to be missed.

##
Zeitoun, by Dave Eggers, is like a miniature of the stories that Solnit presents. It is the story of one man, Abdulrahman Zeitoun, during and after the Katrina hurricane. Zeitoun was a house painter and contractor well-known in New Orleans who stayed in the city during the hurricane and was able to perform a number of rescues because he had a canoe.
The best writing, to my taste, is the least stylized: the chapters on Zeitoun’s arrest and imprisonment. Zeitoun and three other men were arrested in one of Zeitoun’s own apartment buildings by a group of men in mismatched military uniforms—out-of-state policemen, some perhaps Blackwater mercenaries, and some that may have been National Guard. All were armed with M16s and pistols.

Zeitoun and his neighbors were placed in small cages set up in the Greyhound Bus depot that looked as if they had been imported from Guantanamo Bay. None of the men were allowed to make a telephone call, then or during the days that followed. In the cages the prisoners were subjected to verbal and physical abuse. They were sprayed in the face with pepper oil and sometimes shot with beanbag guns. Their money was stolen and never returned—in the case of one man, his life savings of $10,000. After a week they were moved to the Hunt maximum security prison, and still no one knew where they were. After another week Zeitoun passed his wife’s phone number to a chaplain, very against the rules, and the chaplain, in an anonymous call, notified Zeitoun’s wife as to his whereabouts. Zeitoun’s wife hired a lawyer, and after another week Zeitoun was released. Zeitoun’s neighbors were held for five, six, and eight months. All charges against the men, vaguely related to looting or possessing stolen goods, were dropped.

People find it hard to believe that such injustice and abuse could happen in America, or be perpetrated by men in official uniform. Abu Ghraib, I suppose, is only a case of “a few bad apples,” and besides that was in Iraq. One reviewer opined that we have only Egger’s word for what happened. I assure you, however, that such scenes of arbitrary and sadistic brutality by guards is in no way unbelievable to anyone who has served prison time in the United States.

##
Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine is a difficult book to reopen, but the eerie parallels to A Paradise Build in Hell are too obvious to ignore. The Shock Doctrine presents not a mirror image of Solnit’s book, but a negative image.

Klein uses the word shock in three ways. She opens her book with a description of the electroshock treatments used by the psychiatrist Dr. Ewen Cameron, along with sensory deprivation and sensory overload, sleep deprivation, and other techniques, in his efforts to learn how to break a person so thoroughly that they are a “blank slate.” Much of his work was incorporated into the CIA’s interrogation handbook Kubark. The CIA did much to spread Cameron’s techniques around the world, and they are clearly enough still widely used.

The second use of “shock” refers to the economic theories centered around Milton Friedman and the “Chicago School.” As Klein points out, these two meanings of “shock” often travel together: after all, Friedman was an economic advisor to Augusto Pinochet, and Friedman himself used the phrase “shock treatment” to describe his advice to the dictator. And we might add here “shock and awe,” the slogan of the attack on Iraq, where Friedman’s “neoconservative” descendants hoped to create the perfect “free market” laboratory.

The third way that Klein uses “shock” is really a sub-heading of the above and brings us back to disaster: the way the corporate interests take advantage of disasters– natural, military, and economic—to further their program of privatization and profits. Klein looks at the tsunami in Sri Lanka, where the villagers and fishermen were not allowed to return to their coastal homes, opening the way for the construction of upscale vacation resorts. And she looks at New Orleans (the intersection of all three books discussed here), where the public school system was essentially dismantled (Friedman’s last will and testament), and public housing, most of it among the only undamaged housing in the city, was bulldozed. A “clean slate.”

In short, what Klein is calling “disaster capitalism” takes advantage of political, economic, or natural disasters to loot the public coffers: to privatize government functions at fire sale prices, to displace the poor to make room for expensive development, to roll back social programs, and to give global capital a free hand. (Or, a free hand until the next bailout is needed.) As the “austerity” will cause pain (unemployment, hunger, homelessness, shortened life spans), the people will resist—hence such measures are most easily implemented in times of crisis or disaster. If the people still resist, well, then there are the less metaphorical forms of shock. The disaster is like a left jab that puts the citizens off balance so that they relax their watch on the treasury, but the right uppercut is not far behind. Sometimes disasters are purposely induced—what we might call “disaster in the first degree,” by military coups, such as in Chile, Argentina, Uruguay, and Indonesia. In the western democracies, a convenient foreign war (The Falklands, Iraq) can be enormously helpful.

As for the intellectuals of disaster capitalism, we must judge that they are sincere in their beliefs and ideology, but Milton Friedman’s assumption seems to be that what is good for money is good for people, which, to my reading of history, has never been true. However, I think it fair to call the apologists for global corporatism cynical when they call their ideology “free market,” when nothing could be further from the truth. And it is more than fair to demand that the violence and coercion used to enforce this ideology not be swept under the mat. For a “Freedom Man,” Friedman left a lot of bodies and prisons behind him.

(I remember hearing Friedman, in his grandfatherly way, telling us that the garment worker in a Chinese sweat shop was not being taken advantage of, but that she was “working her way up,” that she had been given an “opportunity.” What he left out was her lack of choice: the poverty and desperation that drives the labor pool to accept low wage drudgery in the first place. )

But details are important: case studies and history—the manual labor of writing a book–and Klein requites herself with honors. The Shock Doctrine was written before the recent financial “disaster,” but Klein was uncannily prophetic as to its aftermath, where, as in the savings-and-loan bailout a decade earlier, more money was given to the financial tycoons than has been spent on welfare since the New Deal. Lots more. The results of Friedman’s policies, as Klein details, were disasters in themselves—in Chile, Argentina, and everywhere else they have been tried, including, I would add, the United States. Eighty percent of the world’s wealth is now owned by one percent of the population. Global corporatism indeed has a human face, but the human face wears a mask.

Or a hood.

“Denial” is a term used in addiction and recovery: “No, I am not an addict—I can quit anytime I want.” “No, I am not wrecking my home and my family.” “No, I’m not destroying my liver.” There is no hope for recovery while the addict, or the addict and his family, are in denial. First the addict has to “bottom out.” Three new books on global warming are doing what they can to wake us up, hoping to shake us out of our denial before we bottom out. In the case of global warming, if we “bottom out,” in spite of the seeming ability of technology to find ever more clever fixes, it will likely be too late for recovery.

The message of Bill McKibben’s book Eaarth, and hence the book’s title, is that we have already passed the tipping point of global warming and now live on a different planet than the one on which civilization developed and flourished during the last 12,000 years. The issue is not about “our grandchildren,” McKibben insists, the changes are already here: “one hundred or two hundred years from now” has become yesterday. The tropics have expanded by two degrees of latitude both north and south, exceptionally hot years are occurring every one or two years instead of once every twenty-five years, Arctic ice is disappearing, droughts are increasing in both frequency and severity, whole mountain ranges are covered by dead trees, fire seasons continually set new records for both frequency and acreage, and the ocean is acidifying. Is this the Wrath of God—punishment for worshipping the idols of Mammon and money—or is it just physics? While no single incident proves that the weather is abnormal, a pattern is emerging.

McKibben states that we’ve gotten ourselves into a problem we can’t just buy our way out of. The best we can do, he says, is to “downsize gracefully.” I think McKibben is right, but I see no signs of change anywhere—carbon dioxide emissions continue to increase. We are told that if the economy doesn’t grow, it will collapse (and that that would be bad). We are told that cutting back on fossil fuels will cost money, and we are even told, mostly by those corporations with high profits at stake, that global warming is a hoax. Soon we will probably be told that God will once again part the Red Sea and that corporations will drop manna from heaven.

The first step to solve the problem, according those who deny global warming, seems to be to kill the messengers. Sen. James Inhofe, the largest recipient of oil money in the Senate, is calling for the criminal prosecution of climate scientists. Send them to jail, and don’t let them talk to the press. And the second step? There is no second step. The corporations will go down fighting for one more quarter of record profits. While growth may indeed be essential for the survival of corporations whose stock prices are ten times their earnings, growth has never been necessary for the human economy. The corporation could care less about the climate, about the environment, or about human life—yours or your children’s. But then, a corporation is not a person.

##
James Hansen, author of Storms of my Grandchildren, is one of the best known climate scientists in the world. He also made news by refusing to be muzzled by Bush administration policy dictates that all press releases and requests for interviews had to be cleared first by political appointees at HQ.

The present book is an occasionally breezy, but more often sobering assessment of the current projections of global warming, Hansen’s own role in bringing it to governmental attention (he describes his meetings with Dick Cheney’s Task Force), and an overview of the technical components of climatology–the various climate “forcings” that are expressed in watts per square meter. (Climatology is a quantitative science.) Hansen apologizes to his readers for having to go into the technicalities of climatology, but there is nothing in the chapter that couldn’t be understood by an intelligent high schooler—except perhaps Hansen’s need for repeated apologies.

Hansen’s estimations are based on paleoclimate studies, not computer models. The principle source of uncertainty in calibrating the paleoclimatic record with the CO2 levels of today is the lack of data on aerosols. Astonishingly, the reflective component of aerosols has never been measured, though Hansen called for such measurement to begin twenty years ago with special satellites. Even with this handicap, Hansen shows that some prognosis is possible, and he has lowered his estimation of a “safe,” or at least a non-catastrophic level of CO2 from 450 to 350 parts per million. The current CO2 level is 387 ppm. The last really “hot” earth, when the continents were ice-free and sea levels were 250 feet higher than today, was 50 million years ago. The Paleocene-Eocene warming killed 90 percent of marine life. However, as CO2 levels are rising today about 10,000 times as quickly as they did at the end of the Paleocene, outstripping the ability of the oceans to absorb the heat, the effects could be even more catastrophic.

The dirtiest fuel is coal. There is, so far, no such thing as “clean coal,” other than for warm, feel-good advertisements on television and the speeches of politicians. Hansen’s conclusions are clear: the coal must be left in the ground. Otherwise, things could get bad for life on earth, perhaps very, very bad.

Alarmist? You bet, though Hansen optimistically thinks we can supply a lot of our energy needs with “fourth-generation” nuclear reactors: LMFBRs, or liquid metal fast breeder reactors. Fast neutron reactors could burn up some of the piles of depleted uranium now lying around from nuclear weapons production. Those of us who opposed the development of the LMFBR in the 1970s must consider Hansen’s assessment that plutonium is less dangerous than coal.

Hansen has a “simple’ solution to reducing hydrocarbon emissions: the fee-and-dividend plan. The fee-and dividend plan would add a gradually increasing fee on carbon fuels at the source, the fees to be collected in a special fund and distributed once a year equally to every American citizen—say, $3,000.00 per year for starters. If you conserve more than the average American, you have a net gain; if you burn more, you pay more. Simple: no special interests, no loop-holes.  “Cap-and trade,” another proposal, is by Hansen’s analysis a sham that will do little but funnel money to financial traders.

##
There are two clear messages from Climate Cover-Up by James Hoggan and Richard Littlemore, a well-researched and carefully documented book. First, there is no debate about the reality of human-caused global warming among climate scientists. Second, the seeming debate is a public relations scam heavily funded by coal and oil companies. If you want to know who the players are, where they come from, and what be their modes of operation, all is carefully presented in this book.

Several of the leading “deniers” have also worked for tobacco companies, denying the link between smoking and cancer. Remember the ozone hole “debate” twenty-five years ago? Industry-funded representatives also demanded equal time in that debate. Well, they’re back. Equal time is fine on an opinion page, but science requires evidence, not speculation. And evidence requires careful scientific work. Among those engaged in such work, the only debate is about details and timetables. And with ever more refinements to the data, the timetable seems to be shortening.

Hoggan also runs www.DeSmogBlog.com, where they maintain a database of global warming deniers and recent press posting by same. One of the most recent is by Donald Trump, who states that record-breaking cold storms prove that Al Gore was wrong and that he should be stripped of his Nobel Prize. Most of the other posts of global warming deniers are hardly any more scientific, and some are outright lies.

Climate Cover-Up won the Green Book Festival prize for “Best Book 2010.” My own book, The Great Bay: Chronicles of the Collapse, won “Best Science Fiction 2010.”

But sometimes it is instructive to frame the story in a different, if perhaps more fanciful, way. From a magical perspective, corporate personhood is conjuring–that is, giving a body to a spirit, to an abstract entity. There are three great prototypical shamanistic figures in the Western mythic tradition: Eve, Orpheus, and Faust. Of these three, conjuring is the specialty of the latter, and seems to be the most common form of shamanistic magic in western culture. Philosophically, conjuring is reification–that is, making a “thing” of something abstract.

In traditional ceremonial magic, giving a body to a spirit involves a magic circle (in this case the Court), certain writs and spells (“In the matter of”), and an abundance of smoke and mirrors. Breaking the circle–releasing the conjured spirit into the world at large–marks the magic as “black.”

But what sort of spirit or wraith is it that has been conjured? By its magical writ (its “charter”), the corporate spirit’s entire purpose is to accumulate monetary profit, without limit. This insatiable quality marks the spirit as a form of what Buddhists call the “hungry ghost,” the preta, inhabitants of one of the six realms of existence. Hungry ghosts are beings with such huge appetites, with such swollen bellies and with such narrow throats, that they live in a state of perpetual craving. Zen Buddhists make a small grain offering to the hungry ghosts at every meal, as a gesture of compassion, to try to relieve some of their suffering.

In the case of the corporation, the hungry ghost has a rather large throat. We have not only given the hungry ghost a body, but have enshrined it at the very core of our society. Is this not madness? Why would we expect it to do anything other than consume the resources of the earth, her cultures, and, yes, her people, in an attempt to fill its bottomless appetite?

But there is nothing inevitable about the corporation in its present form. It is not a necessary part of capitalism, nor of civilization, nor of technological progress. It can be dissolved by legal writ, the same way it was created. The corporation is not equivalent to “free enterprise,” in fact is inimical to such. There is no divine reason that stock companies or other collective endeavors should have the right to meddle in politics, to buy other companies, or, indeed, to engage in any other business than that for which they were specifically created, and for which we, the citizens, have relieved the investors of liability and assumed it ourselves.

Many (probably most) of us work for corporations. I, for one, would be happier if the entity to which I contract my labor were chartered to focus on production and service, for the common good, and that politics be left to citizens. That’s called democracy, and is still an idea worth trying.

Please leave any comments at Huffington Post:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dale-pendell/the-magical-basis-of-corp_b_442514.html

2. How Banks Create Money

The Bank of England
got its start
when a Scot named Paterson
made a deal with the King,
William of Orange, who needed money because
of an altercation with France.
Paterson conceived a bank, with a royal charter.
He sold shares in the bank to raise a million pounds
of capital: this he lent to the King, who gave him a royal IOU-
as good as they come for such things-that Paterson deposited
in his vault. On that basis, he lent out another million pounds,
as notes, to public borrowers, collecting high interest
on both loans.

Some went further: used their own notes as capital-
to loan more. Or even a note on the possible future value
of a note-all underwritten
by someone else’s note. Modern times.

The word “millionaire” came from France in the early eighteenth century
to describe the speculators in John Law’s Mississippi Company,
when the stock appreciated a thousand-fold.
That capital enabled Law and the Banque Royal
to loan yet more money, which was used to buy more stock.
No gold was ever mined,
and the company and the Royal Bank both soon crashed.

As early as the fourteenth century, it was noted by Copernicus
that it was always the least viable currency
(the most debased coins, or the shakiest paper)
that was used first, and hence the most circulated.

It also became clear that when there was an increase
in money, as when galleons loaded
with New World silver began
arriving in Europe, prices of goods went up.
In Andalusia, between 1500 and 1600, prices rose five fold.
(J. K. Galbraith: Money)

The mines today pump oil,
and supertankers have replaced the galleons.

Part one: Hamilton

Alexander Hamilton, who
on the night before his death wrote
“our real disease is democracy,” said
that the rich and well-born
ought have a stake
in the government–that the mass
of the people
could not be trusted
to judge or determine right,
which, actually,
is pretty true, unless
one compares the alternatives.

Hamilton created
a national bank, and sold shares
to his friends, that they
might profit
from government subsidized
bubbles, such as distilling.
Jefferson fought him, but lost:
the deck had already been stacked
to protect property
from the “excesses of democracy,”
where “property”
generally called his owner
“Massa.”

It took 40 years
and a man who killed men
in duels to kill
the Bank of the United States,
(which had given
fifty-eight thousand dollars
to Jackson’s opponents). Jackson
paid off the national debt,
and distributed the surplus
to the states.

The bankers, of course,
merely moved next door,
where the building
was privately owned,
and continued writing notes
that they couldn’t back up,
fueling inflation and speculation,
especially in government lands,
until it all fell apart
in 1837.

The depression that followed
was severe and world-wide
and lasted seven years:
nine-tenths of the factories closed,
people had no money, no food,
rioted in the streets, or moved
back to whatever farms
were still owned
by their relatives.

I distributed this poem as a free broadside at the Peace marches in San Francisco, February 16 and March 15, 2003. Many say the marches did no good, but that’s not true. Any time people get together publicly in huge numbers it is making a statement. Besides, it was fun.

After the march we found a group of Zen Buddhists and sat with them to do zazen. Someone had given me a sign that said “Make LSD, Not Bombs.” I’m not sure all of the Buddhists welcomed my presence. With all the clamor and noise zazen was challenging, but we’d had practice at Burning Man.

THE BUSH ADMINISTRATION

They stand before us and speak half-truths or bold lies,
proud of their power to deceive and prosper.
They will hide the corpses.

They have betrayed us, and even victory will bring
no honor. Rumsfeld equivocates, Rice dodges,
that poor warrior, Powell, serving a man beneath him,
covers his face with shame.

They fill their pockets with our stolen wages.
They poison the wells they leave behind.
They say it’s for our “protection,” but it’s us
they would kill to protect themselves.

If this were a land without prisons or poor,
there’d be no nation on earth we would fear.

**

This was written in 2005. Will a good theoretical physicist somewhere please step forward and use scientific principles and the mathematics of complexity to write a convincing critique of capitalism? A Nobel Prize awaits. So far the mathematicians seem to have taken jobs with hedge fund companies, finding yet more ways to build pyramid schemes. Kevin Phillips stated several years ago that only severe economic hardship would awaken the political awareness of those who work. I hope he wasn’t being optimistic.

How the Market is Not Like A Tropical Forest

Where layers of leaves, high canopy, mid-level broads
and fans, short shrubs below, where herbs and
moss on the floor, catch light.

Fungi, in the soil, recycle it all back to the top.
Every conceivable niche is filled, or over-filled
with “divinely superfluous beauty.”

In the “market” everyone targets the center–it levels
to a three-body problem with strange attractors
looping in useless eddies.

Work is taxed, capital let free to accumulate and be
skimmed off–more like an over-grazed pasture,
where each generation of forb is poorer than the last.

It’s an act of conjuring-the only real product is money
shaved from the margins of the future.
The invisible hand is in your pocket.

***

I’ve expanded these ideas in the last couple of years by adopting a shamanic context. In the western tradition, our three principal shamanic models are Eve, Orpheus, and Faust. Eve represents the visionary path. She was the one who dared, and the one who shared: the patron goddess of the “poison path.” Orpheus represents the poetic tradition: braving the realm of the dead and singing to wild animals and even charming the winds. But Faust remains our most distinctive and characteristic shaman.

All shamanism is ghost work, but Faustian magic is conjuring: giving a body to a ghost. Or, we could say, to an abstraction. The pretas, or “hungry ghosts,” were originally the “departed ones,” spirits who had not received the proper rites. They represent unceasing craving that can never be satisfied, that can never have enough. Buddhists offer them bits of food at every meal out of compassion. But to give them bodies, “corporate bodies,” and then to release them from the magic circle is black magic. And to put them at the center of a society is madness. They will consume everything: the forests, the air, the plants and animals, and the people.

Unbinding spells are the acme of the magical arts, and in all cases the most benevolent. If we do not dissolve the corporate “body,” easily enough done through magical writs in the legislature and the courts, none of our attempts at reform, such as voting for the more progressive of two candidates, will do much good. Even the campaign finance reform was thrown out by the Supreme Court because, according to the Court, money is corporate “speech,” corporations are persons, and therefore bribing politicians is protected by the First Amendment. This by those who call themselves “strict constructionists.”

The Ballad of the Hungry Ghosts

They have no breath, nor bones, nor blood;
They appear, and then dissolve.
Their only drive is for more and more
Until they own it all.

They have no children or family,
Neighbors, or sense of shame;
Their birth is a limited charter
Solely conceived for gain.

They’re called a corporate body
And given the rights of men:
Denizens of a nether world
To whom all flesh must bend.

****

A sonnet dedicated to Utah Phillips, 1935-2008.

And for an officer in the East German army who in 1989 countermanded his orders to fire on the demonstrators at the Wall. And for the “refusniks” in Israel. And to anyone who says “enough” to injustice.

Massive peaceful demonstrations have toppled half a dozen major governments in just the last thirty years. No government can endure a general strike. We should have one once a year just to keep in practice. It could be a day of celebration and dancing, of flowers and solidarity, an homage to direct action which is, after all, the foundation of freedom and liberty. Perhaps on, just as an idea, May Day . . .

This Day Like Any Other

I refuse to obey. I refuse the medal, the bullets, I
countermand, I will not fire, I will not pay, I refuse,
I, we, together, we refuse, we won’t, we’ll sit,
we’ll stand, we won’t work. Sir, I refuse

to obey, I won’t, again, anymore, this day,
any day, a jaguar day, this rattling of winds day,
this bread in the landfill day, this wounded,
this clawing day, we won’t, I won’t, I refuse.

It’s important, Sir, this fine day, this dire day,
this day the books litter the streets, this turning
day when the wall wails from rebuilding, this day
when angels would shudder in hiding, today,

this day, when the dead are too many, this day
like any day, but this day, Sir, I refuse to obey.

I remember the last time there was Great Hope. Let me tell you about 1968. I was in prison, in Texas. It seemed like a lot of people were in prison that year—not by today’s standards, of course—not by a long shot. The bull market in prisons was still in the future.

A black saxophonist from Las Vegas came and sat on my bunk and started talking about Robert Kennedy. I muttered something about George McGovern, the “peace candidate.” Rocky just scoffed, and carried on and on about Robert Kennedy. It was the same with the Chicanos. They were the majority party and they were for Robert Kennedy to a man. The young Black revolutionaries were also for Robert Kennedy. There was great hope—that “we” could win and end the war and stand united for social justice. Then the impossible happened. Robert Kennedy won the California primary and then he was dead. Martin Luther King had been assassinated two months before at the age of thirty-eight.

At the Democratic convention in Chicago the party bosses chose Hubert Humphrey—not a “bad” man, just one who had not won a single primary. The police staged a riot. We watched the televised pictures of the beatings and the bloodied faces from our cells. And we got Nixon.

Would history have been different with Robert Kennedy in the White House instead of Richard Nixon? Duh, yes. Would it have been different in Jakarta and in Chile? Yes.

The last two presidential elections in the United States were stolen. As Larry Beinhart shows in Fog Facts, using any of the six proposed methods of recounting the votes in Florida, Al Gore would have been the winner. Would recent history have been different, if Al Gore had entered the Oval Office instead of George W. Bush? Yes.

Unless someone can explain to me why the exit polls in 2004 agreed with the tallied votes in states using paper ballots, but differed by huge margins in states using electronic machines—the overwhelming evidence is that John Kerry won the election. Despite himself. Would history have been different—perhaps a little kinder, with a little less bloodshed, with a little more responsibility? Yes.

After stealing the elections the thieves moved into the treasury and looted that. When such things occur in South America, in Africa, or in Eastern Europe, we are appalled but not surprised. But it is hard for us to accept that it could happen in the United States of America—even when it happens right in front of us.

So I have succumbed to the Great Hope—that the dark ages can end. The bills are coming due. The third notice from the credit card company is in the mail and the thieves are packing their bulging bags. And I think of Jimmy Carter—another honest man—who became president when the bills from the war in Vietnam had to be paid and how everyone turned against him.

This is not Spain. It is not 1936. We don’t have a CNT or organized unions or collectives ready to take control of the country. Right wing calls for less government exempt the military and the police and the prisons and the judges who would even more callously defend big capital and an orthodoxy of superstition. At this point in history we have government and we must not ignore the choice. It is true that anarchism is an easier sell in dark times than in hopeful, but that is not enough reason not to vote for hope. A moderately progressive president will not solve the problems embedded in a global system based, at its corporate center, on greed and individualistic accumulation. Sullen opposition is less demanding than active politicking, but cynicism doesn’t help us. Obama is our best chance to stop being the pariah of the rest of the world community.

Having had our hopes dashed and trampled so often, we—my generation anyway—approach it warily. But it is time to again accept a share of the responsibility for the United States of America—even if it is only to get to the polls on November 4 and to vote for Barack Obama and the new generation. It does make a difference—even if the machines (again) are stacked against us