November 2008

if, good netroots activist that you are, you observed buy nothing day this friday, you probably didn’t find yourself involved in a murder. thank you and congratulations!

but if you were one of several hundred shoppers mobbing up at the valley stream wal-mart before its 5am opening bell, maybe you did help kill somebody. could your foot on the neck or chest of Jdimytai Damour have been part of the straw that broke his 34-year old back? you may never know. or maybe you will, as police are now reviewing the surveillance tapes (hard to call them security tapes, since they ain’t seemed to make a fucking thing any more secure) in an attempt to identify the people who walked over — WALKED OVER — Damour after knocking him to the ground. criminal charges may result if any positive IDs can be made. unlikely, but i’m glad they’re trying.

i remember the first time fans were crushed to death at a rock show, almost thirty years ago, when 11 people suffocated in ohio when all they wanted was to see The Who live. since then, dozens more – from denmark to venezuela and london to indonesia – have died this way at concerts.

though the surface details of these killings are the same (too many too-eager people in a too-small, too-poorly-supervised space) there are stark differences at their core.

at a live show passions run high for two reasons: the love that the audience has for their artist, and the prospect of that artist taking unexpected risks to push that night’s performance over the top and into brilliance. it’s the anticipation of shared magic in a dark theater before thousands of sympathetic witnesses. there is a breathless pre-show exhilaration in the air, among the crowd, that is unlike anything else. i understand this feeling well, having spent countless hours on line in the freezing cold hoping to get belly-to-stage for patti smith, driving all the way to albany to see amanda palmer, sleeping overnight outside now-defunct tower records on 8th street in hopes of snagging a pair of tickets for mj’s Thriller tour. (what can i tell you? starting something was my twenty-something soundtrack.) so, while concert crushings are insane and utterly unjustifiable, the causes of the headlong fan rush are not incomprehensible for anyone who has been deeply touched by the work of an artist.

now consider what is at the core of something like yesterday’s wal-mart stampede. i must have that wii for johnny. i must save that ten dollars on the food processor. i must stretch those xmas shopping dollars far and farther and farther so that the kids can have more.

then consider what generates this bottomless need, what has turned us into a nation of eternally unsatisfied must-haves, where even houses with two dozen closets can’t contain one family’s shit, all the single-season wonders that simply must be had. that one must trample the part-time store clerk to get one’s holiday-shopping hands upon. people weren’t always like this, and it’s no accident: this eternally insatiable thing has been quite consciously and intentionally generated by the multibillion dollar advertising economy. it was not rockstar love pushing those black friday hordes forward; it was the glitz and seduction of nonstop, often subliminal, advertising campaigns. it was the neon sneakers in times square and dancing dinosaurs on the back of cereal boxes. that sweet recorded voice crooning over canned music at the mall.

consider the fact that even your bailout tax dollars are being used to fund corporate branding expenses. consider that some schools even sell ad space on their closed-circuit TVs and classroom walls.

we live in a culture so consumed and subsumbed by flashing ads lunging at us and over us and into our ears and onto our t-shirts and being sent home in brilliant four-color slicks with our kids from school and arriving in your mailbox and your email and on just about every single fucking page you visit on the web. 24/7/365, created by marketers with psychology degrees and billions of dollars of research at their disposal.

by all means, let’s hold the tramplers accountable if they can be found. by all means, let’s hold wal-mart accountable for irresponsible marketing practices like pairing “while supplies last” with a 5am opening time that guarantees a cold and impatient mob gathering for hours at their flimsy doors.

but let’s not forget the masterminds behind the monster of american consumerism and all its associated ugliness (not least of which is the environmental destruction caused by mindless mass consumption). we need to cut this kind of evil down at the root, and the root is on madison avenue. it’s time to regulate the where, when, how and how much of advertising in our lives. it’s time to take the public commons out of the hands of the advertisers who presently control it, and who do it, and us, absolutely no good.

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what strikes me most about the mumbai bloodbath is its apparent pointlessness.

yes, in a certain sense all terrorism is pointless, but in this case, where such a massive paramilitary operation goes unattributed, where no one is shouting the equivalent of “Free Mumia” in the streets, where there are no demands and the perpetrators could only maybe be tied to a group whose aims are equally murky, i can’t avoid the thought that this, that many terrorist actions, is little more than violence for its own sake.

objectiveless mayhem and murder. like a video game, where the player shoots down as many as he can because…he CAN.

i don’t like the word terrorism anyway. deepak chopra said on alternet that the phrase “war on terrorism” is an oxymoron, a war on war, and that terrorism is a word that is only applied to those on the other side (whatever side is “other” from the perspective of the speaker). he warns of the danger of going after the wrong people, and going after them too aggressively, in the aftermath of this attack. he talks about seeking peace, asking the muslim community (that would be one-quarter of the world, btw) for help in solving the problems.

and my mind keeps going back to events like the shootings at columbine and virginia tech. sick actions by a few sick boys, right? i don’t see that the attacks in mumbai or for that matter the 9/11 attack are so very different: sick actions by a few sick boymen. older, better financed, bigger guns, more complex plans, but at the heart of it i still see killing for the sake of killing. doing it because it can be done, actions born from an internalized rage at our increasingly unnatural world, practically an automatic reflex in response to the daily barrage of advertising and lies and hype that everyone other than the most remote and disconnected villagers (how many of those are left on this planet?) is bombarded with day in and day out.

i’m thinking out loud here, on a tiny computer with a tiny screen where i can’t see more than a couple of lines at a time, so i will apologize the inevitable disjointedness.

take los angeles street gangs or the KKK as examples. do teenagers take initiation with the crips because of their innate hatred for the bloods? i’d bet that in most cases the initiates don’t even KNOW any bloods, they join the gang because they are enraged and want, in the first place, to have some formalized communion with other enraged young men (and i am saying men deliberately in this piece, not just using the generic english-language catch-all) and secondly because of the opportunities gangs offer in acting on such generalized rage. membership gives you a target, an alleged reason to lash out: you are no longer a lone shooter on the grassy knoll acting out of your own pathetically furious mind, you are fearlessly carrying out acts of aythorized violence against a clearly defined opponent. just like soldiers in the army. i see the same with groups like the KKK — do most members join because their hatred for black people is so pure and strong that it keeps them up nights, or do they join because they want to walk through the woods heavily armed and completely disguised, searching with their brethren for targets to destroy?

i believe that dark underside of the brain is front and center in actions that we label as terrorist; that the violence is the end, not a means. and i believe that the electric sterility and growing impersonality that we have created in this 24/7 gimmequick anything goes winner-takes-all world is what has activated that dark underside for so many.

we need a healing so profound it almost defies comprehension if we’re going to get any kind of a handle on what is going on here.

and i don’t know if there’s time enough to do it: the results of our decades-long desecration of the environment are snowballing, and planet earth doesn’t have a button marked “hold”. when there’s not enough clean water, when the air is unbreathable, when crops don’t fertilize because all of the bees are dead, terrorism will come to seem a small and puny concern. men in white hoods? teenagers with bombs under their caftans? planes flying into buildings? minor details in the global megastory of suffocation, starvation, dehydration, irradiation.  the story of our extinction, a book there will be no one left alive to read.

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on this holiday morning, i offer you a rerun of the infamous sarah palin butchered turkey interview:

enjoy your dinner! but remember — the indians were here first.

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Citi has now joined the beggar’s parade of corporate bloodsuckers who are stealing your tax dollars to fund meaningless shit in order to promote their pathetically degraded “brands”.

yes, AIG and Citi spend millions of bucks shoving their names into the faces of unsuspecting sports fans.

your money, people. you are paying to Citi-ize the new shea stadium (why the mets would even want it there is mystifying). you are paying to put AIG-ify the soccer uniforms of a team in manchester, england.

AIG stupidly tries to justify their million dollar jerseys by saying it’s not a new deal, merely some negotiations around an ongoing, years-long deal. just maybe, if they hadn’t made a habit of squandering their capital on such useless crap, they wouldn’t have needed a fucking bailout in the first place. then, even more stupidly, they get into a fight about semantics with wonkette — WONKETTE! of all places — which posted a hilarious article this morning titled “AIG Using Taxpayers’ $150 Billion to Annoy Comedy Blog” after a series of emails from AIG’s so-called media rep, someone so tuned in to current events that they don’t even know wonkette spoofs the news rather than reporting it.

morons, all of them. just like the multimillion dollar executive morons at Citi.

while our hard-earned money is being flung wholesale into this bonfire of incompetence, chicago is busily enforcing a new zero-tolerance policy against homeless people riding “too long” on the subway and new york city is working hard to keep homeless men out of local drop-in shelters.

hello, chicago? new york? we’re getting ready to have a whole lot more homeless people, fucking homeless people will be dropping from the goddam trees outside Citi Stadium and begging for AIG soccer jerseys to put on their freezing asses. you think this is a good time to reduce services? to “crack down” on the good-for-nothing homeless? shit, yo mama might be homeless next. better think again.

why not take a lesson from canada (you know, that ridiculous country where people with medical problems are entitled to medical care) and set up something like their homeless nation, a resource website by and for the homeless. (happy side note! while researching this, i discovered similar resources here in the states, the homeless shelter directory and its companion, the angel forum, where homeless people can search for specific resources and get answers to questions. go mike! – whoever you are — for founding and funding these sites. he’s even created a homeless population counter widget, which will soon make its appearance here on GAWM.)

dunno how to build a website? you could always make a few (hundred) sandwiches, the way friends and family of the nearly-dead 11-year-old brenden foster did. brenden’s last wish (he may even be gone by now, when this movie was recorded he’d already outlasted his death sentence by a couple of days) and deliver them to local tent city residents.

a dying boy looks around him on his way home from the clinic and sees only how he might be of service to people facing very hard times. executives at AIG and Citi (and soon, no doubt, detroit) look around them and see only ways to profit from the same fucked population.

russell mokhiber of multinational monitor eloquently states that there is no possibility of economic justice in this country until the misbegotten statute recognizing corporations as “natural persons under the law” is revoked. i can’t think of a better moment to bring that issue to the table, because the actions of american corporations today, in the midst of this crisis, are nothing short of unnatural. 

inhuman, even.

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shop. that’s right. we ain’t gonna shop on black friday, the busiest mindless consumption day of the year, when millions of americans descend on the malls like so many mastercard-wielding locusts, scooping up disposable crap to wrap in disposable paper and fling underneath their disposable xmas trees. all in honor of their lord jesus christ.

but in this, our year of ultimate economic defilement, we will turn it all around by embracing adbuster’s brilliant buy nothing day program, amen. citizen actions are planned in all fifty states (well, maybe not wasilla) and you can either join a scheduled protest or create one of your own.

don’t just sit home all ajitter with shopping withdrawal, use your imagination! people carry out some great guerilla actions at the malls. my favorite, a couple years ago, was where some guys took a hundred bucks in one-dollar bills, went to the third tier of a mall and dropped the bills one by one down into the shopping mob, which (sadly and predictably) went nuts, people falling all over one another in a high-speed cash grab. for DOLLAR BILLS. you can’t even mail three letters for a buck, can’t get the smallest coffee starbucks sells. they taped the dollarbill feeding frenzy, but i can’t put my hands on that video right now.

instead of wreaking havoc at the mall, you might want to build your own very special lawn ornament:

if you’re lucky enough to be in nyc on black friday, you can dance your debt away in union square with rev billy and his church of stop shopping. on regular working days the good rev is busy doing cash-register exorcisms and orchestrating synchronized cellphone havoc at the disney shops.

certain people in your life just gotta get something? then give something real. mow your cousin’s lawn, shovel your grandmother’s driveway, hand-write a five-page letter to your friend who lives across the street. take your sister to the movies. trim the claws of your mother’s unruly cat. and so forth. if giving charitably “in honor of” is more your thing, check out the heifer project.

angelo verga, a brilliant nyc poet, wrote this in honor of BND eight years ago, and it’s never gotten stale:

A Checklist for Not Buying Things

Ask yourself: where was this made?
Could I borrow this, and save?
What will happen if it breaks?
Ask yourself: can I get along without it?
If I wait a day will my need to have this fade?
Ask yourself: how well is this thing made?
And if it turns out to be shit,
Ask yourself: can I get it fixed, replaced?
If I buy this now, will I need to buy a mate
to go with it? Is it complete?
Are they coming out with an upgrade,
or variation next week, even cheaper?
Wouldn’t something more dear convey cachet?
Ask yourself: how many of these do I already possess?
Have any made me happy?
Will one more make me less angry?
Less fat? Less ugly? Less lonely?
 
Angelo Verga
originally published on poetz.com, 11/00 

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Speaking of shock and awe, I am alarmed, disgraced and disgusted to hear that the auto industry has the nerve to ask for its own bailout. Next thing you know the oil companies, as primary beneficiaries of the auto manufacturers, will be asking for their own piece of the bailout pie too. It would seem that with credit being so crunchy and all, the best solution for the three failing car makers would be to obtain bridge loans from the banks that we bailed out yesterday (I’m sorry, I know it was longer than that, but who can keep track of all that money flying around, what with the cost of the war in Iraq and and the $700 billion dollar bank bailout and all) but the banks don’t want to play. They’re still too busy allocating cash for executive bonuses to concern themselves with the actual business of banks, which is to lend money.

What with everyone from AIG to GM approaching Uncle Sam with begging bowl in hand, it seems to me that there are other sectors of the economy that are deserving of their own bailouts, which, if administered, would do much more to inject some stiff into the sagging spine of the economy.

Let’s start with the call center employee bailout. This would provide for one-way fares back to the US for every technical- or other- support job exported to Bangalore or Mumbai, India, as well as a shot in the arm for the nation’s ailing commercial real estate market. Next up would be the sweatshop manufacturing bailout, providing safe haven for any job shipped off to China and returned to the United States. Maybe a children left behind bailout, injecting money into schools and healthcare, which, while without immediate benefit to the economy, would at least ensure that someone healthy and educated will be around in the future to absorb the costs, and perhaps mitigate the effects, of the larger, more AIG-like bailouts. We might also consider the Medicare Part D “coverage gap” bailout, which would save our senior citizens thousands in prescription drug costs, leaving them with more money to spend, thus helping to shore up the flailing economy as well. On this one we might be able to get a two-for, allowing Medicare to negotiate with pharmaceutical companies for better prices on prescription drugs; think of this as a kind of “bail-in” for the drug makers. Hey, with this new “bail-in” concept it might be possible to get the aforementioned, highly profitable oil companies to bail out the auto industry, leaving the government well out of the process.

I’m sure there are a tremendous number of bailouts whose results would lift the economy much more immediately than continuing to bail out greedy and mismanaged entities which merely suck tax money out of the nation’s barren coffers; bailouts that would not require the government to print more and more money to continue to unbalance the budget in the wrong direction. Until then, I leave you with this–either we all bail together, or the boat sinks alone.

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i am drinking tea with honey while the bees die.

i am eating fritters made with the corn that kills wombs.

without bees, soon, no more food. without wombs, soon, no more babies. maybe that’s a good thing, the perfect pairing. if there are no more babies we won’t need any more food. of course, if we — with our potions and poisons and tinkered genetics — disappear, then the bees will return for our habits will no longer be killing them.

and then there will be food again. no human mouths.

maybe that’s a good thing, for us all to die before eating our own irradiated recycling and birthing the few conceivable babies with six arms but no faces or fingers.

let’s just do it: die before the plague and the hurricanes, the drought and the flood.

before another dozen bodiless feet wash ashore in british columbia. severed, waterlogged, mysterious. how many more will there be? before our soldiers poison the world with their burnings.

while there is still some honey, still enough untainted water to make some cups of tea.

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as you’ve probably heard, vice president dick cheney and former attorney general alberto gonzales have just been indicted for prisoner abuse and organized crime. that would be racketeering, as in the mafia. no, they’re not exactly breaking the legs of local business owners.

poor gonzo, as if he didn’t already have his hands full defending himself against another federal lawsuit, for the illegal partisan firing of six government attorneys last year. so poor, in fact, that his defense is being financed by US: your dollars hard at work again. almost makes you proud to be an american, don’t it?

meanwhile, joe “am i a democrat or not” lieberman has just escaped congress with nary a slap on the wrist for spending the entire presidential campaign attacking and slandering his own party’s candidate. are the fucking democrats EVER going to grow a pair? they just won the election in the biggest landslide we’ve ever seen, and they are still diddling around? still ignoring phone calls from their constituents and making nice-nice over there in the senate? fuck that and fuck them: join the movement to defeat turncoat joe in 2012. if our representatives can’t bring themselves to do it, we’re going to have to get it done ourselves.

and what is our scumbag-in-chief up to in these dog days of his administration? oh, just more of the same — doing everything he can to prevent women who need abortions from getting them  and giving as much of our heritage as he can away for free to his cronies in the oil & gas industry.

i am sick and tired of having this international pariah as the public face of our country. his “peers” in other governments won’t even shake his hand any more! is this embarassing or what?

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until january 20th comes, i can’t look at the government in front of us. i’d rather look at the government behind us, and there’s no better place to do it than on google’s brand-new site of every life magazine photo ever published (and many that weren’t) since 1750.

hang in there. just a little bit longer to go now. drink plenty of water and take your vitamin C.

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Guest blogger, pinko commie faggot extraordinaire
Collin blogs daily at Modern Confessional

Yesterday, the California Supreme Court said it would hear appeals that challenge Proposition 8, which outlaws gay marriage and writes discrimination into the state’s constitution. And while the court will hear the appeals, it refused to block the implementation of the measure. That means no more same-sex marriages are allowed and the18,000 couples who were wed over the last five months are in legal limbo.

The American Civil Liberties Union, Lambda Legal and the National Center for Lesbian Rights filed legal challenges to the vote, but it could be March before the court takes up the issue again. That seems like a long damn time to me. Human and civil rights should have never been put on the ballot in California and it shouldn’t linger on a court docket either. It’s especially unfair to those married couples, who are awaiting an uncertain fate.

I joined about 1,500 protestors on the steps of the Georgia State Capitol in Atlanta this past weekend, although if you listened to FOX News there were only “about 300″ of us. The FOX fuckers believe that underreporting the number of protestors will diminish the massive backlash against Prop 8. The Saturday protests around the country are being called “Stonewall 2.0,” which is hyperbole, but it’s hard to ignore the uprising of the GLBTQ community over this issue.

The whole “gay marriage” question didn’t mean very much to me until recently. I’m a confirmed bachelor (how quaint), and marriage as an institution is overrated, but like any flaming liberal, I believe people should be allowed to marry, love, hate and divorce anyone they like. After Georgia wrote discrimination into the state Constitution banning same sex marriage in 2006, I realized that “gay marriage” is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to human and civil rights for GLBTQ persons. Now, there are rumblings that Georgia will try to ban gay adoption during the 2009 session, bolstered by a ballot measure that passed in Arkansas on Nov. 4.

Bush and Co.’s eight years of pandering to the Christian whackjobs have emboldened the religious right to try and push the GLBTQ back into the closet, and since I tore the hinges off that door when I was 16, I have no plans to go back. My fear is that the GLBTQ community will lose interest in this fight because, let’s face it, there are a lot of flighty queens out there just caught up in the drama. There needs to be sustained pressure on the government and legislators in all states so that the issue remains front and center.

A big shot in the arm would be the Democrats gaining a majority in Congress. I say piss on the “checks and balances” theory bandied about the losing GOP. We’ve been under the Republican thumb for years and now it’s time to reverse the polarity. That means Georgia’s Jim Martin needs to win the runoff against Saxby Chambliss (a right wing nut of the highest order) on Dec. 2 and Al Franken needs to win in Minnesota after the recount. Although democrat Mark Begich has finally won against Ted Stevens in the US Senate race, it still boggles my mind that more than 100,000 would vote for a convicted felon to represent them. Maybe we should encourage the secession of Alaska from the union. Something in the snow ain’t clean up there.

Another brave hope is  - and I know this isn’t polite - that two or three of the U.S. Supreme Court judges will die. Okay, maybe not die, but at least retire so Obama can bring some sanity back to that bench. Maybe with a more liberal-centered top court, we will finally see civil rights for all people. No matter who they choose to love.

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