When I sing about love and war I don't really know what I'm saying I've been in love and I've seen a lot of war Seen a lot of people praying They pray to Allah and they prey to the lord But mostly they pray about love and war Pray about love and war I've seen a lot of young men go to war And leave a lot of young brides waiting I've watched them try to explain it to their kids And seen a lot of them failing They tried to tell them and they tried to explain Why daddy won't ever come home again. Daddy won't ever come home again I said a lot of things that I can't take back But I don't really know if I want to There've been songs about love I sang songs about war
Since the backstreets of Toronto I sang for justice and I hit a bad chord But I still try to sing about love and war Sing about love and war The saddest thing in the whole wide world Is to break the heart of your lover I made a mistake and I did it again And we struggled to recover Then I sang in anger, hit another bad chord But I still try to sing about love and war I've been in love and I've seen a lot of war Seen a lot of people praying They pray to Allah and they prey to the lord But mostly they pray about love and war Pray about love and war.
The current argument between Mr. Obama and Mr. Romney over Rom/ObamaCare is nothing but a smoke-screen, a fog that, unfortunately for the country, avoids what should be the real discussion: what a boondoggle this healthcare bill will be for the insurance companies, when the only thing that makes sound economic sense is Medicare for all. The President knows this, of course, even if Romney doesn't. But by targeting his opponent as the original champion for this fraudulent law, the President is merely pointing out how thin the difference really is between these two corporate shills now competing for the title of White House Occupant.
"There is no terrorism like state terrorism." --Arundhati Roy
"...The United States government is now structured so that, like an automobile needing gasoline, it needs war in order to function, in order to operate and be fueled. It's really, I think, best thought of as this insatiable beast, that needs as its primary nourishment, continuous war." -- Glenn Greenwald, Boardman Lecture (22 March) (my bold)
We have come further along now to the demise of democracy, with the gradual erasure of constitutional rights, rubbing out one piece and then another; while a charismatic African-American president just adds further irony to the loss. He alone is not responsible; but is assisted by his own party; and also prevails with a nod from his republican adversaries in Congress. We wanted to turn to someone like Obama, in 2008, who spoke of law and respect for our rights under the Constitution; but whatever we might have expected of him, he didn't really curb state terror and lawlessness.
In his speech of last month, Greenwald starts with some fundamental ideas from military historian, Andrew Bacevich: America is currently in a state of endless war. And war is no longer one of the practical instruments of foreign policy;--nor is it a means by which the policy is pursued,--so much as it has become "a foreign policy goal unto itself."
And Greenwald warns us that Obama has taken the abuse of power further than Bush dared:
The most tyrannical power that any government can possibly assert, which is the power to target its own citizens for execution far from any battlefield, without a shred of due process or transparency;--that's a power that the Obama administration has not only claimed for itself,--but now publicly justified, and in the case of Anwar al-Awlaki, exercised.
You cannot conceive of a more tyrannical power than the power to kill American citizens without due process.
But how can we be sure the persons (even US citizens) that the president wants to assassinate now without any due process at all, are really guilty? They haven't been afforded real trials. How do we know if those assassinated were really affiliated with al-Qaeda?--if they were involved with "associated forces"?--or with those "belligerent" to the US? They could have been framed by some malevolent faction in their country, or condemned by faulty intelligence.
Obama's Attorney General, Eric Holder, got especially squeamish when reporters repeated the term, "targeted assassination"; for as he sees it, a real distinction applies; and he went on to say that "targeted killing"was the right way to describe it. Nothing to worry about. Killing is normal government business; assassination, on the other hand, would be illegal.
Aren't American values just a twisted mutation after all this? The Attorney General thinks that secret life-or-death deliberations over the fate of an accused citizen, and the subsequent decision to carry out execution, and soberly assassinate/kill the person, is quite the normal thing to do. Eric Holder goes on the record, to add that executive due process requires no component of judicial due process. However, the founders of this country wrote due process into the Constitution; and they wrote it with no uncertain words, to include judicial due process as part of the rights of the accused.
Obama has signed terrible bills into law, voicing only some anemic words of protest. The NDAA, for example, which allows for the military to arrest US civilians on the "Homeland Battlefield", if it comes to that: and this new power permits indefinite detention of American citizens, when the president has a mind to declare an emergency.
"Governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed". Remember those words?
But to come back to the question of state terrorism, John Pilger writes:
Remember the tear-stained headlines when Brand Obama was elected: "momentous, spine-tingling": the Guardian. "The American future," wrote Simon Schama, "is all vision, numinous, unformed, light-headed ..." The San Francisco Chronicle's columnist saw a spiritual "lightworker [who can] usher in a new way of being on the planet". Beyond the drivel, as the great whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg had predicted, a military coup was taking place in Washington, and Obama was their man. Having seduced the anti-war movement into virtual silence, he has given America's corrupt military officer class unprecedented powers of state and engagement. [...]
On 5 January, in an extraordinary speech at the Pentagon, Obama said the military would not only be ready to "secure territory and populations" overseas but to fight in the "homeland" and provide "support to the civil authorities". In other words, US troops will be deployed on the streets of American cities when the inevitable civil unrest takes hold.
America is now a land of epidemic poverty and barbaric prisons: the consequence of a "market" extremism which, under Obama, has prompted the transfer of $14 trillion in public money to criminal enterprises in Wall Street. The victims are mostly young jobless, homeless, incarcerated African-Americans, betrayed by the first black president. The historic corollary of a perpetual war state, this is not fascism, not yet, but neither is it democracy in any recognisable form, regardless of the placebo politics that will consume the news until November.
The political class, riding on the inflatable US Empire, puffed up near to bursting, on petrodollars of uncertain worth, looks to be increasingly agnostic on the question of democracy. When their bosses (not us, but the 1%) demand their compliance, these politicos jump where they are told to jump. And it seems they are corrupt, operating with an indifference to human suffering, oriented in terms of the rewards they will reap for loyalty and their years of faithful service to the looters, embezzlers, and the officer class, and the defense lobby and war profiteers. When push comes to shove they are indifferent to democracy. The world according to decree is alright with them.
Dick Cheney's long-nurtured vision of the "Unitary Executive"is quite in style now in Obama's White House. Though this could be impeachable, or criminal on the face of it; the Defense Chief, Leon Panetta, nonetheless caused Senator Sessions some dismay, when the senator questioned him about where the administration would go, in order to find the legal basis for going to war. Panetta's evasive replies were aimed at avoiding the sticky issue--that is--the legal responsibility of the president to consult with Congress and obtain congressional approval, before going to war.
The aloof Defense Secretary was unconcerned about the senator's concerns, and less than concerned himself, about coming to Congress, in order to establish a legal basis for going to war; although he took pains not to say so directly. The administration believes it has the authority, in and of itself, to decide which nation it attacks; and this is based on its conviction that it knows best how, and when to defend the United States. As far as the basis of legality was concerned, that would arise, Leon Panetta said, from the consensus of the "international community" or our NATO allies.
Senator Sessions might have been wondering if our president, a constitutional scholar, had known better than to ignore Congress when he ordered the bombing attacks on Libya--that went on for months--without ever bothering to establish a legal basis for war. But Sessions wasn't about to challenge the administration with that question.
Yes indeed, there's a beast already loose in this land. It extracts wealth and resources from people who can't defend themselves; and this same beast has been exporting misery and hideous violence to foreign lands for as long as any of us can remember. It runs on insatiable greed. It's been busy for decades with its obscene work: seeing to the dismantling of democracy, hammering on public education, corrupting information; and all the while pretending to make us safe. Hypnotizing us with its endless military bullshit. It's no problem for the beast to rummage through our computer disks, our financial and medical records; nothing to do but infiltrate our political life with spies and hostile agents who try to sabotage peaceful change. Even the word, peace, has been evicted from our political vocabulary by this beast.
Speaking for the beast, Panetta's responses in the US Senate signaled the true apotheosis of imperial power; and not just its supremacy, but what the word signifies, the real deification of this kind of power: murder premeditated in secret, and carried out by executive decree.
The Repug campaign has taken on all the aspects of a carnival nightmare, complete with gargoyles, spooky clowns, and a musical sound track by Saint Saens or Maurice Ravel. As I watch it unfold from day to day, the one thing about it that I look forward to is its shock and awe quality as a perversion of entertainment--its appeal to the baser instincts.
It's as if the entire American audience is massing nightly to witness a hideous traffic accident, to applaud and cheer at the sight of crunched metal, smoke and fire, severed limbs and decapitations. Thus, as one after another candidate breathes his or her last gasp and drops out, having spent millions for a brief star performance in what appears to be less a presidential campaign than a Jerry Springer reality show, I can't help but feel a little--how can I say it?--a little let down. A sinking feeling, like watching the air leak out of a cut tire. First Michele Bachman, now Rick Perry. Romney may be next. Gosh, I'm gonna miss all those crazy loons. But hey, Santorum's still in. And Ron (Let 'em die) Paul--God bless him! And look--is that Herman Cain peeking up from the swamp? Bless you, Stephen Colbert. There's hope for this thing, yet. But I do wish Trump would come back. At least Donald knew what it was really all about.
Meanwhile, it seems that Facebook is making people sad. Yes, it's true. According to some university studies--one from Stanford, for instance--people who spend a lot of time on Facebook tend on average to be unhappier with life and have a vague sense that life is not fair. Gee, I'm not on Facebook, and somehow I already knew that life wasn't fair. Well, I guess the Facebook people are not looking at life in quite the same way that I am.
At any rate, it seems that the more time one spends looking at hundreds of one's friends, near-friends, pseudo-friends, friends from the past, friends from the future, associates and pseudo-associates, one begins to get depressed. The reason for that is that finally, one can only take so much of: "Gee, look at me, look at my smiling face, look how happy and successful I am. See me playing, see me with my dog, see me on vacation, dining out, partying down with my friends, living it up. See me, see me, see me. . . ." The whole thing it turns out apparently gives off a false impression. So you begin to compare yourself. You begin to feel less happy and more like a miserable, pathetic excuse for a human being, compared with all those legions of leering grinning people. The same study showed that those who actually spend time with other real people out in the world, instead of vicariously sucking up pseudo-friendship on the web, tend to have a happier, or at least, a more realistic outlook on life.
he wasn’t dead yet
but he would die just a few hours later
after I left
after I sat there looking him over
feet gnarled from old frostbite
swollen ankles, those hobbled legs
and skin like wax paper colored by the quitting
of his liver—
and he quit that broken body broken by booze
on the seventh day of October
just a few days after the cold rain had finally begun to fall
Harley said he was there when Joe collapsed
so he waved down a cop
who brought the ambulance to take him along river Clark Fork
away from the streets he slept on
to at least have the dignity of departure
washed and laid out on soft fabric and plush drugs
his sea of blood leading slowly to that stillness—
the dark October clouds outside the window—
Joe knew he was drinking down death
but he honored certain codes
and though proud of hustling, insisted no cussing
during business hours because (he told me once)
there might be kids around
the local paper would call him transient and
be done with him
this local poet says fuck that, his name was Cock-Eyed Joe
and I hope he finds peace beyond
because there is none here
There is no proper farewell that can be said to the people of Iraq that would not announce reparations, that would not include expressions of remorse, along with an admission of crimes committed and wrongs done by the US military. President Obama's official ceremonies marking the end of the war were occasions for broad smiles and declarations of unqualified success.
What was begun with bravado and a disregard for the deaths and suffering of Iraqi civilians, has ended with the same superficial rhetoric, the same military preening, the same myths, the same contrived proofs to justify the war and its horrible toll of torture, grief, maiming and killing. Perhaps a permanent war economy is what Obama and the US Generals meant by using the word, success.
This kind of war spreads beyond Iraq, with constant adaptations and a fluid concept of enemy; with its battlefield declared to exist almost anywhere, including our own country; and this is what has made possible the militarization of our whole society. The legacies of our presidents are intrinsically arranged by making war and have their origins in violence. Neither George W. Bush nor the current president, Obama, is to be satisfied with the destruction of one foreign country only, or the deaths of thousands upon thousand of innocents, or the bombing into rubble of works built by the labor of generations. And governments are their targets: some of these are changed, others erased. And the societies are ordered to conform, or else face chaos and disintegration.
The horror of Fallujah doesn't bother "no shock" Obama, as it didn't bother Bush; not the dogs howling during the attack, nor the smell of death saturating the city, a place described after the siege as "a city of ghosts". Bedridden invalids, white-haired husbands and wives, were shot to death in their beds. Families were machine gunned while trying to swim to safety. Boys were denied the opportunity to flee the city with their parents because, for the sake of revenge, the Americans had marked them for death; and one of the young ones was photographed dead, lying face up on the sidewalk, still clutching in his right hand the white handkerchief, with which he tried to surrender.
These wrongs to which we are all answerable cannot be evaded, they cannot be covered over with bluster or national piety; and we remain responsible for holding our leaders responsible.
Chris Floyd is eloquent as he writes about this, and comes directly to the point:
[President Obama] spoke of suffering, he spoke of sacrifice, he spoke of loss and enduring pain -- but only for the Americans involved in the unprovoked war of aggression, and their families. He did not say a single word -- not one -- about the thousands and thousands and thousands and thousands and thousands of Iraqis killed by this "fulfilled mission," this "extraordinary achievement," this" success." These human beings -- these sons and daughters, fathers, mothers, kinfolk, lovers, friends -- cannot be acknowledged. They cannot be perceived. It must be as if they had never existed. It must be as if they are not dead now.
The divorce from reality here is beyond description. It is only the all-pervasiveness of the disassociation that obscures its utter and obvious insanity. There is something intensely primitive and infantile in the reductive, navel-gazing, self-blinding monomania of the American psyche today. Think of the ancient Greeks, who constructed their psyches and their worldview around an epic poem, the Iliad, that depicted their enemies, the Trojans, with remarkable sympathy, understanding and insight -- while depicting their own leaders as a band of shallow, squabbling, murderous fools. Here was a moral sophistication, a cold-eyed grasp of reality -- and a level of empathy for one's fellow human beings -- far beyond the capacity of modern American society, and infinitely beyond the reach of the murderous fools who seek to lead it.
Democracy and empire cannot coexist. By the time the plutocrats took control of Ancient Rome, they too had stopped paying taxes, and destroyed the republic in pursuit of their selfish aims. They too were intoxicated with the plunder, the profits of military exploits, the pure rapine, the sights of destruction and submission in the Colosseum , the lust of the eye. In the 21st Century, the financial terrorism we are seeing is about constructing obedient and submissive subjects; and it, too, is war waged by other means. This financial malevolence is not only tolerated by our political class but also facilitated by them, because they are willing to sell their services and betray the people. They and their masters have no moral compunctions; and will not hesitate to use war, state terrorism, and financial anarchy, to make slaves of the rest of us.
Our country failed in Iraq. Our leaders told lies about the reasons for going to war. And we were defeated in Iraq because we fell into depravity in that country. And to not be clear in our minds about that war's depravity, is both unacceptable and dangerous, because it invites a deeper defeat.
Rep. Dennis Kucinich sounded alarms last week, concerning the National Defense Authorization Act that passed through Congress, and was handed to President Obama, to sign into law:
This bill authorizes permanent warfare anywhere in the world. It gives the president unchecked power to pursue war. It diminishes the role of this Congress. The founders saw Article 1, Section 8 of the Constitution, which places in the hands of Congress the war power, as essential to a check and balance against the executive abuse of power. This legislation diminishes Congress’ role in that regard.
This legislation authorizes the military to indefinitely detain individuals without charge or trial, including the detention of U.S. citizens on U.S. soil. In short, what this bill does is it takes a wrecking ball to the United States Constitution and gives enormous power to the government or the state. I want friends on both sides of the aisle to understand this; we are giving the state more power over individuals with this bill. It’s the wrong direction.
Our children deserve a world without end, not war without end.
"The evil men do lives after them; the good is oft
interred with their bones." --Julius Caesar
Hitchens could, even near the end of his life, write an
essay about Lincoln, that did not bear any of the affectation of his public
performances. After 9/11 he went nuts and lost his bearings, in a kind of
anti-fundamentalist fundamentalism; but in his time he spoke with some
eloquence and wit against Reagan and all his works, against the murderous reign
of the death squads, against Kissinger. This does not mitigate the sense of
loss about his deterioration in the public square; yet it seems to me that he
was once a comrade against authoritarian madness, and fought against injustice
in his own fashion. How Hitchens fell into justifying the Iraq War and the
Islamophobic worldview, is perhaps explained in terms of a nervous breakdown. I
don't know; but it seems such an incomprehensible departure from what once issued as
reason from him.
What has been said about his vanity and ego is probably
true, along with the dogfight-like debates, which were by no means the best of
him. I remember reading his essays many years ago, and thinking that he was a
good man to have in our corner.
His personal friend, Robert Scheer, writes of Christopher Hitchens:
Despite the vehemence of our debates, both public
and personal, he and his saving grace and wife, Carol Blue, held a gathering at
their home to discuss a book I wrote on the subject. This was a man unafraid of
intellectual challenge and committed to pursuing the heart of the matter.
That was his driving force, a seeker of truth to the end,
and a deservedly legendary witness against the hypocrisy of the
ever-sanctimonious establishment. What zeal this man had to eviscerate the
conceits of the powerful, whether their authority derived from wealth, the
state or a claim to the ear of the divine.
Hitch was the opposite of the opportunistic pundits who
competed with him for public space. He took immense risks, not the least in
offering himself for waterboarding before concluding it was unmistakably
torture, or challenging the greatness of God, knowing full well that he was
exposing himself as an object of wildly irrational hate.
To watch the kind of dissipation Hitchens went through is
painful, with his former self blurring in the process. There was too much drinking, too much
grandstanding, too much desire to play the enfant terrible of the Left. Who can occupy such a personal space of ego while our history
every day grows sicker? But it is my instinct to feel sad for him, for the fall
any human being may suffer, to remember his acts of personal courage, and his
talent which once counted for something.
Some disappointed supporters of President Obama have come right up to the edge of disowning the president; but have pulled back from the brink to reconstruct support for him, because they think the alternative is worse.
There are other ways I could express this dilemma; but it will probably be for the best, insofar as the best is also appalling, when the Obama team is out of the White House.
Chris Hedges has expressed our problem more elegantly; but the political system is so compromised, especially at the national level of presidential elections, that the candidates of either party are pre-screened and vetted by the corporate powers that run this country.
Obama is pliable alright and almost perfectly malleable; but not by us, the people.
The republican suits, Mitt Romney and Herman Cain, will fit the bill in their own way, and express the same malleability if they are nominated and elected. But our improvement as a nation lies elsewhere. Our dooms, the ones that are threatening us, are multi-headed to be sure; but there is more people power or constructive energy on the streets of New York, in the Occupy Movement. Our answers and the torch of activism is firmly placed in the hands of the young generation and those who can lend a hand to them.
The re-election of Obama--if possible-- is a muddle, a waste of time, and a complete political train wreck.
For the Democratic Party (if it can be salvaged) it is far more important for it to survive President Obama, than to become entangled in his re-election. This Obama administration's corruption, its failure to prosecute criminals, and its coziness with the corrupt elements of this society, are all things that will bury us deeper in the muddle we are already in.
Mitt gave a scary speech a couple of weeks ago, in front of some kids in uniform. It was all about our American religion of being the biggest hombre among nations, strutting our stuff forever, as we have every right to do, adopting as our holy writ, the notion that no nation or group of nations, should ever be allowed to grow so powerful as to even balance us. And this, of course, is the death head's dogma that leads directly to Apocalypse.
But Obama, whose administration now has its tarry fingerprints all over the Keystone Pipeline, has shown with equal and dreadful portent where our dooms gather and how they grow. The president withdraws from Iraq, since it is a dead loss, and squares off toward bloodier patches in Pakistan, flailing away in Afghanistan, menacing Iran, pacifying Libya into a failed state or a broiling civil war.
The US foreign policy is the same, the underlying belief system is the same, no matter the party in the White House. And if we as citizens keep churning up the same hopeless Faustian bargain, we are lost. The forces in our country of environmental destruction, economic war waged against us, and runaway militarism and aggression are sure to destroy us; if we don't help change this country in a fundamental way.
It's time that we join hands and go on to organize.
