[Trumbo - movie review] you can't do that. this is america

(Cross-posted between my daily Groundhog Day Project movie blog and my far-less-regularly updated Against the World political blog.)

The Naturalization, Alien Friends, Alien Enemies and Sedition Acts of 1798. Anti-German and anti-Irish sentiment in the mid-1800s (and beyond; is not the drunken Irishman still a staple of film?). More anti-German sentiment around the two World Wars. The Espionage Act of 1917 and the Sedition Act of 1918. Anti-Italian sentiment from the 1800s into the 1900s.

(For example, the largest mass lynching in US History was that of nine Italian-Americans who had been found not guilty of murder and let go in New Orleans, 1891. They and two other Italians held on unrelated charges were dragged from jail and lynched. Arrests followed, but not of those who did the lynching. Rather, more Italians. In a piece at cnn.com, 10 July 2012, Ed Falco describes how President Roosevelt called the lynchings "a rather good thing.")

Anti-Catholic sentiment just made things worse for the Italians.

(24 December 1806, protestors surrounded St. Peter's Church in Manhattan because of the strange rituals going on inside, i.e. Christmas Eve celebrations. Just last month, armed protestors surrounded a Mosque in Irving, Texas.)

Anti-Japanese sentiment and internment during World War II. Anti-Communist sentiment running throughout the 20th century. (Which is where today's film--Trumbo--puts us. (I have also just watched an episode of HBO's John Adams and the film version of 1776 is on as I'm writing.) But, let us not stop there just yet.) Anti-black, anti-Mexican, anti-gay... Anti-Muslim of late--that's just keeping up with the usual practice.

The American tradition of Otherization.

Dalton Trumbo and many others in Hollywood were blacklisted because they were (or were rumoured to be) Communists. There was no crime committed by Trumbo and the rest of the Hollywood Ten until they were subpoenaed to Congress and would not answer the questions put to them.

The film plays that testimony scene with both Trumbo (Bryan Cranston) and Arlen Hird (Louis C.K.) almost as comedy, despite the serious implications for these men's careers and also potential jailtime that may come from being in contempt of congress. 

In fact, there is a lot of comedy... or at least comedic moments in Trumbo. The film also, necessarily takes a dark turn as Trumbo deals with being blacklisted by working even more, under assumed names, taking amphetamines and drinking and smoking (perhaps) more than before. Trumbo is a deeply flawed character, the kind of character I love. There's a moment in the film in which he will not even take a break for his daughter's birthday celebration and cake and his daughter and (nearly) his wife turns on him. The film does not shy away from his horribleness, but rather presents him as a flawed man desperate to survive in the face of adversity that has put him in jail and cost him his career (officially, but not completely as long as he is willing to remain anonymous). My pet subject--identity--comes into play, but only incidentally. But the related idea of voice is key to the story. These Communists are the Other, distrusted just for meeting together. There's a line repeated a couple times (including in a theatrical newsreel) about the conspiracy of these Communists to undermine our American way of life, or something along those lines. a) I don't have the movie handy at home

b) the exact wording is not the point because the same damn argument just keeps happening in this country. (To be fair, I would never suggest that America is exclusive in this behaviour. But, America's part in it is the one that is immediate and personal to me.) Rex Reed (who I should really cite more often than I do) ends his review of Trumbo with the hope that the film "will broaden the knowledge of young audiences today that remain ignorant about Hollywood's darkest past." The real hope, I would say, is that any audience--let alone a young one--might even go see the film. It's made about $4 million so far, and I think there were about 3 other people in the theater where I saw it today. It opened at 37th in the box office about a month ago. #1 that weekend was Spectre, #2 The Peanuts Movie. The Martian was still doing pretty well, too. (I was actually excited to see this movie but took a month to get around to seeing it, so...) It's not going well.

But, we cannot expect a film that questions the joy we take at Otherizing anyone with differing political views to do well. We prefer out entertainment patriotic, jingoistic. We don't like a film that presents us someone different who remains unapologetically different. (Some of us do, but generally speaking, not so much.) Even Rex Reed, who seems to like the film, calls Trumbo's joining of the Communist Party "naïveté."

When Trumbo eventually won an award from the Writer's Guild in 1970--a moment dramatized at the end of the film--he said, "The blacklist was a time of evil. Caught in a situation that had passed beyond the control of mere individuals, each person reacted as his nature, his needs, his convictions, and his particular circumstances compelled him to." In the film (and possibly in the actual speech, though I cannot find a complete transcript), he adds, "[N]o one on either side who survived it came through untouched by evil... none of us--left, right or center--emerged from that long nightmare without sin." I think of images from the civil rights movement and the violence put against it--the dogs, the hoses, the burning crosses and lynchings, and I can see the point of Trumbo's phrasing. I don't believe in "evil" but if there is such a thing, surely it is that which turns man against man to no real end.

a brief thing about "feminism"

It bugs me when my kids think the term feminism is a negative. Wanting everyone to be equal is all well and good, but equalist just ain't gonna have the same ring. Nor is it descriptive. Nor is it the most appropriate term available.

Take the recent transition from gay marriage to marriage equality, for comparison. The point where the media starts referring to it as the latter instead of the former--

(Let us forget the limitation in the term gay marriage, because calling it (prior to Obergefell v. Hodges) gay trans bi all-inclusive marriage just doesn't roll off the tongue as readily.)

--is when, arguably... officially, equality exists. The problem before you get to that point is that one side of the debate thinks the other side is encroaching on its tradition, trying to tear down what it already has, rather than just attaining the same for itself. The same is true with gender equality, with feminism. Men are on top. Women are not. The patriarchy is held in place by tradition, by practice, by the sheer will of constantly reified heteronormative, paternalistic beliefs.

Equality can be attained two ways--if we simplify things. Tear down men to the level of women or raise women up. So equalist could mean that you want either one of those. Feminism, on the other hand, implies the raising up of women. However frightened some men may be, feminism does not imply the tearing down of men. It just doesn't.

We can call it equality when we've got it. As I told my son earlier today, it would be great if feminism and feminist were just words for a history class. Because we don't need them anymore. But, we just are not there yet.

don't. shoot. him.

In response to the shooter Dylann Roof--a white supremacist who murdered nine black people at the Emanuel AME Church in Charleston--being taken alive, a friend of mine posted on Facebook, "Great... now shoot him." Comments that followed included the usual notions about coming up with something better because shooting it too good for him. Because that is what a wounded nation needs--more violence and more death.

If anyone deserves to die, it is the likes of this man. But, that is a very big if. You know what we lose if this man dies, if we torture him to somehow pretend that that cures any ill or repairs any damage done? I mean, aside from a piece of the soul of who we should probably try to be instead of being the fucked up, mostly indifferent people we are. We lose any hope of understanding.

Why would we want to understand this man, you might ask. Or some question close to it. Because the racism at the heart of this man's murderous rage is the same racism that is at the heart of too many scenes of men in authority--white men and, unfortunately, men of color--taking the lives of men of color because it is all too easy to assume the worst and shoot first rather than risk... well, knowing that you are an overreactive, triggerhappy pawn of a system that needs us to struggle constantly against one another rather than ever fight against the system itself or the powers and forces and people at the top that keep this treadmill going.

The recent incidents in McKinney, Texas come to mind. Some deep-seeded expectation that we have that when a police officer tells you to do something, you do it, no questions asked. It's not even a matter of race, so much as it some cult of authority in which we have ceded away far too much of our freedom for an illusion of security. Just this week, outside of Cincinnati, white officers were recorded using pepper spray and one put his arm around a girl's throat in the process of removing a black family from a swimming pool over a boy not wearing the "proper swimming trunks."

And, that seems like a tangent, an insignificant matter when I should be listing off the dead people of color who died because it is okay for the police to use deadly force and darker skin makes for more of a hair trigger. It's easier to suspect people of color of wrongdoing because we've spent centuries now just in this country putting white over every other color. Of course a black boy would seem a little more dangerous because he's an outsider and outsiders can't be understood, can't be reasoned with, must be put down. It would just be sad if we didn't constantly defend such a system and such a nation and such authorities. Instead it's far beyond sad, far beyond tragic; it's disgusting and its despicable and its criminal and we need to stop asking why and start demanding change. Not just people of color. All of us. Stop defending the system just because you happen to be on top of it. Stop assuming that any system works if it results in death after death after death.

And, do not demand more death as a response when you bother to take the right side for a change. We do not need to take the life of a guilty white man to prove some sort of fucked up equality. We need to stop taking the lives of men of color, stop taking the lives of, well, anyone, and take a long, hard look at the world we've made for ourselves, at the people it creates. Dylann Roof is an anomaly, but he is not so far gone from the police officer who throws a teenage girl to the ground because she didn't follow orders to vacate a neighborhood she should have every right to be in, he is not so far from the neighborhood watch coordinator who saw a boy in a hoodie and assumed he was up to no good.

We click like and we share news stories and think that's enough... it's not enough.

But neither is an eye for an eye. More blood just perpetuates the idea that taking a life is ever something worth doing. If your reasons are good enough for murder, it's a nice ol' slippery slope to his reasons being good enough, anyone's reasons being good enough.

Lethal force is not somehow magically good because it is ours. Because we're the good guys. We're not the good guys. Nor are we the bad guys. But we seem to have a knack for doing bad things. And we need to stop.

on marriage

A week ago my wife and I told our kids that we would be getting a divorce. I begin with this to provide some context. Though mine will be ending, I believe in marriage. Humanity may not need marriage, may not need monogamy, but we have seen fit to have these things. Plenty of cultures throughout our history have had varying standards as to how marriage works, how it is arranged or spontaneous, how it based on love or tribal politics, how it might involve multiple husbands or multiple wives or just one of each... Or lately here in America, we've spent a lot of time debating the idea that it doesn't have to be one man and one woman. We cite The Bible, whether flippantly with Adam and Steve (or not so much, as the argument goes), or seriously, citing homosexuality as an abomination, a perversion. We argue that marriage has always been between a man and a woman (it hasn't) and we cannot possibly change such a vital definition of what makes our culture what it is. 

But this is something we do constantly. Even marriage--in this country, marriage was not a concern for those writing the Constitution because at the time, marriage was a local concern. The documentation didn't matter; if your community recognized you as a married couple, you WERE a married couple. That you probably had a ceremony in the local church (if there was one) was just a simple way of getting the community's approval.

But, as things went along, marriage became a larger concern. In Public Vows: A History of Marriage and the Nation, Nancy Cott argues essentially that American marriage in particular is defined primarily by the notion of consent, just as our form of government is built around the consent of the people. But, the question becomes, what happens when two adults' consent to one another offends the religious beliefs of others? Marriage had been recognized publicly long before America came along--the support of it helped maintain family structure and the larger societal structure atop it... it also helped avoid what Cott calls the "vagaries" of sexual conduct, the perversions we can cite from The Bible as well as the slippery slope arguments we can lump in with them (the common two: what's next, marrying our pets? what's next, legal pedophilia?). However much Christians--while I acknowledge that other religions also take issue with homosexuality, in America, it often comes down to "this is a Christian nation" vs. two consenting adults of the same gender wanting to have the same legal rights to marriage as the rest of us do... anyway, however much Christians may not like homosexual behavior, outside of a Christian dictatorship, they do not have the right to dictate their morality upon the rest of us. When we put our morality--especially that from The Bible, if we take it seriously and entirely--upon the masses, we endanger so many advances we have made. 

And, now it is my turn for a sort of slippery slope argument. If we argue ancient morality over progressive (and I do not mean Progressive, capital P) ideals, then we must reserve a place for slavery, a place for the right to not only have our wives (plural) but to beat them if they do not obey. We must reserve a place for polygamous marriage and concubines to boot. The notion of being conservative (again, no capital C) is nice--who wouldn't want to revert to a "simpler" time when the thrust of our modern world moves so quickly and so strongly in directions we not only find abhorrent but can barely even imagine sometimes. Personally, I cannot fully imagine having multiple wives. I think a good marriage in the busyness of modern life takes so much time and so much work that anything built on love (or something like it) would not fit into such a plural environment. But, not everyone necessarily needs marriage built around love, and plenty of cultures--including the central one of the Old Testament, mind you--have practiced plural marriage. In America, we didn't officially tackle that topic until the Mormons became a local, then national problem. And the Supreme Court argued that plural marriage was not a right guaranteed under the First Amendment. Yet, for those Mormons, and for those of many other human cultures, this was "traditional marriage." For Mormons, it was ordained by God. Yet, our nation could dictate it away.

And, it can dictate away the one man one woman marriage as well; rather it can add to it. And, when a recent Washington Post/ABC News poll found that 58% of the nation supports gay marriage, why shouldn't we add to the definition? Let us assume for a moment that there is a God and he is the God of The Bible and he will punish homosexuals for their lifestyle and their marriage. What difference does this make to the rest of us? Are we so stuck on Old Testament dictates--homosexuality is an abomination there, not in the New Testament--that we also fear God will destroy our nation like he did Sodom and Gomorrah because we have officially supported a sinful behavior? If this is the case, shall the Christians (and other religious affiliates who also have gods who don't like homosexuality) among us not simply follow Lot's example and be better, be worth saving?

The Old Testament God is an angry god, just as I am an angry man sometimes lately, not because I disagree with Conservative (capital C) values or that I hate the prejudices inherent in this entire debate (or because my own life is about to be twisted around into a form I wished it was not) but because we pretend like this is a simple argument on either side. God says it's wrong, so we must keep it from happening. There is no God and homosexual adults want legal recognition so we should allow it. We must treat debated issues simplistically most of the time; we must deal in broad labels and generic examples or we would never come to any decisions. But, far too often we forget (or deliberately ignore) the fact that real people are involved here. When we--the heterosexual majority, that is--find love and choose marriage, we expect that we will be allowed to express that love in obtaining that marriage, publicly, legally. We expect that we will have certain privileges--hospital visitation, for example--and recognition. The opposition interjects here, of course, that the gays can have civil unions, they don't need "marriage." But, that is the inequality that is unAmerican in all of this. If you want to argue that none of us get marriage anymore, and there will only be civil unions, that's one thing. But, I don't hear many suggesting as much. And, if they did, then "marriage"becomes meaningless as a term. I would interject: If it is only a religious label, then why would any gay couple want it? But, then I am simplifying. Let's backtrack to my slippery slope above. If, rather than freeing the slaves, we simply redefined "freedom" to include their servitude, then nothing has changed. We are still subjugating a people over superficial differences. We are still allowing out bigotry and religious views to overrule that which is humane.

There is no reason that a homosexual couple should not also expect the privileges and recognition that comes with marriage. There is no reason that a homosexual couple should not be allowed to marry just like the rest of us. It's flippant and simplistic, but a group of photos I saw online a few days ago comes to mind. One photo was a couple who, the caption tells us, were drunk and in Vegas and decided to get married. The second photo includes a woman who, the caption tells us, got bored of being alone so found herself yet another husband to marry. The third is a homosexual couple who is not allowed to marry because they live in a state where it is not legal. We value the first two "marriages" the larger caption tells us, but we do not value the third. Personally, as long as marriage has legal ramifications, I value all types of marriage between consenting adults, just as we would "value" all legal partnerships between them. As long as there is some "traditional" aspect to marriage, some "religious" notions attached, as long as our culture believes in love and the allowance that we can build partnerships based thereon, then there is room for debate. But, we choose to fight over superficial differences like gender rather than what we might truly value within marriage deeper within ourselves--or that we perhaps don't actually value that much, which may be why we don't debate it as much. In those photos just cited, maybe we don't value the drunk Vegas wedding, but we DO allow it. That is de facto valuing of it, even if we think little of it, even if it is annulled a day later. And, what is wrong with marrying repeatedly because the alternative is loneliness? And, what is wrong with marrying the love of one's life, regardless of what genitals that person may have? If we are reductionist about it and say marriage is strictly for the purpose of procreation, then there's a whole new slippery slope to go down, forbidding the marriage of anyone who is not fertile. But, we don't go there. Well, some of us may. I try not to.

I try not to make the slippery slope leaps unless at the same time labeling them as such, as I did above.

That being said, I must address the slippery slopes that come from opponents of gay marriage. To leap from gay marriage to bestiality and pedophilia and the downfall of our "Christian" nation is simplistic, misrepresentative, and patently ridiculous. Two consenting adults is in no way the same thing as an adult and an animal or an adult and a child. If I need to elaborate on that point further, then you reading this are too far gone to understand most of what I've already said and you should probably move along... and now I'm being rude. I don't mean to be. 

As I mentioned, I am angry. And, I am sad. The idea that a nation supposedly built on equality can ever pick and choose who gets to be equal or how they get to be is a depressing thing to me. That we have already subjugated blacks, slaughtered natives, and still so often operate under the idea that women are inherently inferior to men is similarly depressing. The idea that we cannot change for the better, to be more inclusive--that is something far worse.

If one's behavior does not hurt another, then it should not be illegal. If a couple's behavior does not hurt anyone... personal offense excepted, then it should not be illegal. It's strange, but it seems like the same people who would say to liberals (no capital L) like me, if you hate America so much why don't you leave, are the same people that don't understand that if they don't like gay marriage so much, they can simply turn away from it. If you turn out to be correct about God and sin and all that, He will punish those sinners. You do your part, be a good person who doesn't hate, who doesn't reduce others beneath human levels over personal offense. You be a good "Christian" and let the rest of us be good, well, good whatever we happen to be. We can actually all be good people, even if we disagree on some of the specifics. There's plenty of common ground on what is good. And, there is certainly some objective standards to what works FOR society rather than against it. Let us all do that. And, when it is, as they say, behind closed doors, let us do whatever we want as long as those involved are able to consent.

And, let us save our rage for things that actually hurt other people, not just things we don't like.

rough draft Article IV (take two) of "On Wage Slavery and Notions of Socialism"

“In the exercise of his rights and freedoms, everyone shall be subject only to such limitations as are determined by law solely for the purpose of securing due recognition and respect for the rights and freedoms of others and of meeting the just requirements of morality, public order and the general welfare in a democratic society.”

- Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Article 29-2

Article IV

Marx predicted that "the contradiction between ever richer capitalists and ever poorer workers would eventually lead to the collapse of the capitalist system and its replacement with socialism, by which he meant essentially the end of class warfare and exploitation and their replacement by a system in which the benefits of production were shared equitably” (Isbister, 51). But, of course this collapse is taking far too long, and destroying millions of lives the world over in the process, stagnating the lives of the poor abroad and here in America, consistently stripping the middle and lower classes of more and more options and of more and more of their power over their own lives. Leo Tolstoy argued in "What Is to Be Done?" that "it is really so simple. If I want to aid the poor, that is, to help the poor not to be poor, I ought not to make them poor" (54). As Engels suggests in "The Housing Question," the housing shortage, taken as one example of what our system forces upon the poor, is "a necessary product of the bourgeois social order... it cannot fail to be present in a society in which the great masses of the workers are exclusively dependent on wages" (44). In other words, our modern capitalist system not creates inequality not as an unfortunate byproduct but as a necessary piece. And, in response to the resulting, ever-widening gap between the upper and lower classes, it comes to those in charge to do something about it. Richard Cloward suggested the obvious, that "a federal program of income redistribution has become necessary to elevate the poor en mass from poverty." Of course, such a thing is only necessary as long as we remain within the confines of a capitalist system; Engels does, after all, argue that the housing shortage (or, I would suggest, any of the conditions that come with being the working poor) "can be abolished... only if the whole social order from which it springs is fundamentally refashioned" (44). But, in America, to even suggest anything other than capitalism is verboten. And, that same attitude is increasingly the case around the world. So, assuming operation within our modern Consumer Capitalist system, what is to be done?

Before answering what should be a simple question we must come to an understanding, beyond even the previous argumentation in the previous articles above, of what poverty is and how people come to it. As John Isbister describes it in Promises Not Kept, "lack of income is only the beginning of an understanding of poverty... Other attributes include low life expectancy, adult illiteracy, underweight [--or in America, for example, with our subsidized, corn syrup enriched diet, overweight--] children, inadequate housing, child labor, food insecurity, and lack of access to safe water, to health services, and to sanitation." We take many of these things for granted in the core nations, here in America or in her "democratic" allies. We have our own lower classes, our own citizens who live at or below the poverty level, but for the most part, we like to believe our people are doing okay. Economist and social theorist Simon Patten suggested we have come upon a "‘new basis of civilization.’ Industrial society, he contended, had moved from a ‘pain economy,’ where the scarcity of resources demanded a struggle for subsistence, to a ‘pleasure economy,’ in which abundance was potentially available to all” (Kasson 98).

That potential is the key to understanding the American Dream and American refusal to undertake real reform to diminish the economic gap between rich and poor. Fundamentally, it must be understood that "what poverty means is the inability to make choices" (Isbister, 18). Just as the capitalist system constricts all of our options, it restricts even further the options of the poor. But, we like to think that the poor are only poor because they made the wrong choices, not because they have been exploited, not because the system requires some of us to be on the bottom, but because they screwed up. We can blame them, we can ignore them, we can pretend they do not exist, but then, to channel Niemoller, what do we do when poverty comes for us?

It is important to draw a link, and a contradiction, between the American Dream and its notion that we can all have success, that we can all be well to do if we just work hard enough and make the right choices and ideas I proposed in my essay, "For Everyone Everything." The American Dream depends on us all believing that we can have everything. It does not necessarily tell us that in order for we as individuals to achieve the Dream, someone else must be left behind, left beneath. In fact, the Protestant Ethic discussed in Article III would suggest that, hand in hand with the American Dream, we are not only allowed but encouraged to assume that the poor we leave behind deserve to be where we leave them because, as I already said above, they made the wrong choices. And, by obvious inference, if we have success, if we get rich, then we made the right choices. Capitalism under the Protestant Ethic becomes not some objective system dealing in hard currency but a measure of each and every one of us in terms of moral and spiritual currency. In "For Everyone Everything," I suggested something that should befit the American Dream, if America is not a collection of disparate individuals but rather a collective formed by those individuals. Patten's notion that we have potential abundance for all is not far off from what is possible if we are more willing to share, more willing to lift each other up... At this point in our history, it seems, we would rather lift ourselves up by our bootstraps so that we can then stomp down on everyone else, the poor here or the exploited abroad with those same boots.

John Isbister suggests that "living in a world of obscene inequality, the privileged have a moral responsibility to do what they can to improve the lot of the less privileged." This seems like a very moral attitude, a Christian attitude, and yet we claim to be a Christian nation and reject this very idea. This is why, in "For Everyone Everything," I suggested "a new approach--call it socialist if you like...

This new approach: the government exists to promote justice, i.e. to renounce, discredit and disallow racism and sexism and other forms of discrimination, to ensure that those who commit crimes (and not just those who can't afford good attorneys) pay the price as our society sees fit. Also, that housing access is equal...

Remember the Universal Declaration of Human Rights quoted in the preamble above; it says:

Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services, and the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond his control. (Article 25-1)

Human Rights Education Associates suggest:

Population growth, migration to urban areas, conflicting needs for existing land, and insufficient financial and natural resources have resulted in widespread homelessness and habitation in inadequate housing. In every country children, men and women sleep on sidewalks, under bridges, in cars, subway stations, and public parks, live in ghettos and slums, or "squat" in buildings other people have abandoned. The United Nations estimates that there are over 100 million homeless people and over 1 billion people worldwide inadequately housed.

I further argued in "For Everyone Everything" that the new approach ensure "that access to education and jobs and transportation is equal, that access to healthcare is equal.". In addition to this, the Declaration of Human Rights suggests everyone has the right to equal access to public services (Article 21-2), to social security (Article 22), to "life, liberty and security of person" (Article 3), and even to an education (Article 26-1). After all, Thomas Jefferson called the people "the only safe depositories" of government. He argued that to render them safe from that government, "their minds must be improved to a certain degree." In other words, if we want democracy or any other form of society that includes the populace in the decision making, we need to have a guarantee of education.

My own argument continued with the notion that having access to these things--to public services, to social security, to an education--is what makes "domestic tranquility," the promotion of which I listed, per the preamble to the Constitution of the United States, as another reason for the government to exist. And, my argumentation continued:

This new approach: the government exists to promote the general welfare of all of its citizens, i.e. that, as Alexander Hamilton argued in his "Report on Manufactures," 5 December 1791, "the object to which an appropriation of money is to be made" or for which a law is to be passed (I would add), "be General and not local," that the government not promote, directly or indirectly, one portion of its peoples over another, be it certain corporations, be it certain races or creeds or religions.



This new approach, put simply in perhaps some very socialist terms: for everyone everything.




John Isbister calls the poor the "people on the bottom, the people denied benefits of the society in which they live.” If government is to exist, if government is to have a purpose, then guaranteeing the benefits of society to these people... to all the people should be its purpose. The American Dream--the Capitalist Dream--is something approximating my argument; instead of "for everyone everything," it's "for everyone the potential for everything." But, that simply isn't good enough. Potential means nothing without guaranteed access.

rough draft Article IV of "On Wage Slavery and Notions of Socialism"

“In the exercise of his rights and freedoms, everyone shall be subject only to such limitations as are determined by law solely for the purpose of securing due recognition and respect for the rights and freedoms of others and of meeting the just requirements of morality, public order and the general welfare in a democratic society.”

- Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Article 29-2

Article IV

Marx predicted that "the contradiction between ever richer capitalists and ever poorer workers would eventually lead to the collapse of the capitalist system and its replacement with socialism, by which he meant essentially the end of class warfare and exploitation and their replacement by a system in which the benefits of production were shared equitably” (Isbister, 51). But, of course this collapse is taking far too long, and destroying millions of lives the world over in the process, stagnating the lives of the poor abroad and here in America, consistently stripping the middle and lower classes of more and more options and of more and more of their power over their own lives. In response to the resulting, ever-widening gap between the upper and lower classes, it comes to those in charge to do something about it. Richard Cloward suggested the obvious, that "a federal program of income redistribution has become necessary to elevate the poor en mass from poverty." Of course, such a thing is only necessary as long as we remain within the confines of a capitalist system. And, in America, to even suggest otherwise is verboten. And, that same attitude is increasingly the case around the world. So, assuming operation within our modern Consumer Capitalist system, what is to be done?

Before answering what should be a simple question we must come to an understanding, beyond even the previous argumentation in the previous articles above, of what poverty is and how people come to it. As John Isbister describes it in Promises Not Kept, "lack of income is only the beginning of an understanding of poverty... Other attributes include low life expectancy, adult illiteracy, underweight [--or in America, for example, with our subsidized, corn syrup enriched diet, overweight--] children, inadequate housing, child labor, food insecurity, and lack of access to safe water, to health services, and to sanitation." We take many of these things for granted in the core nations, here in America or in her "democratic" allies. We have our own lower classes, our own citizens who live at or below the poverty level, but for the most part, we like to believe our people are doing okay. Economist and social theorist Simon Patten suggested we have come upon a "‘new basis of civilization.’ Industrial society, he contended, had moved from a ‘pain economy,’ where the scarcity of resources demanded a struggle for subsistence, to a ‘pleasure economy,’ in which abundance was potentially available to all” (Kasson 98).

That potential is the key to understanding the American Dream and American refusal to undertake real reform to diminish the economic gap between rich and poor. Fundamentally, it must be understood that "what poverty means is the inability to make choices" (Isbister, 18). Just as the capitalist system constricts all of our options, it restricts even further the options of the poor. But, we like to think that the poor are only poor because they made the wrong choices, not because they have been exploited, not because the system requires some of us to be on the bottom, but because they screwed up. We can blame them, we can ignore them, we can pretend they do not exist, but then, to channel Niemoller, what do we do when poverty comes for us?

It is important to draw a link, and a contradiction, between the American Dream and its notion that we can all have success, that we can all be well to do if we just work hard enough and make the right choices and ideas I proposed in my essay, "For Everyone Everything." The American Dream depends on us all believing that we can have everything. It does not necessarily tell us that in order for we as individuals to achieve the Dream, someone else must be left behind, left beneath. In fact, the Protestant Ethic discussed in Article III would suggest that, hand in hand with the American Dream, we are not only allowed but encouraged to assume that the poor we leave behind deserve to be where we leave them because, as I already said above, they made the wrong choices. And, by obvious inference, if we have success, if we get rich, then we made the right choices. Capitalism under the Protestant Ethic becomes not some objective system dealing in hard currency but a measure of each and every one of us in terms of moral and spiritual currency. In "For Everyone Everything," I suggested something that should befit the American Dream, if America is not a collection of disparate individuals but rather a collective formed by those individuals. Patten's notion that we have potential abundance for all is not far off from what is possible if we are more willing to share, more willing to lift each other up... At this point in our history, it seems, we would rather lift ourselves up by our bootstraps so that we can then stomp down on everyone else, the poor here or the exploited abroad with those same boots.

John Isbister suggests that "living in a world of obscene inequality, the privileged have a moral responsibility to do what they can to improve the lot of the less privileged." This seems like a very moral attitude, a Christian attitude, and yet we claim to be a Christian nation and reject this very idea. This is why, in "For Everyone Everything," I suggested "a new approach--call it socialist if you like...

This new approach: the government exists to promote justice, i.e. to renounce, discredit and disallow racism and sexism and other forms of discrimination, to ensure that those who commit crimes (and not just those who can't afford good attorneys) pay the price as our society sees fit. Also, that housing access is equal, that access to education and jobs and transportation is equal, that access to healthcare is equal.

Remember some of the terms of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights quoted in the preamble above:

•         “Everyone has a right to life, liberty and security of person” (Article 3)

•         “Everyone has the right of equal access to public service in his country.” (Article 21-2)

•         “Everyone, as a member of a society, has the right to social security…” (Article 22)

•         “Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services, and the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond his control.” (Article 25-1)

•        “Everyone has a right to education.” (Article 26-1)

My own argument continued with the notion that having access to these things is what makes "domestic tranquility," the promotion of which I listed, per the preamble to the Constitution of the United States, as another reason for the government to exist. And, the argumentation continued:

This new approach: the government exists to promote the general welfare of all of its citizens, i.e. that, as Alexander Hamilton argued in his "Report on Manufactures," 5 December 1791, "the object to which an appropriation of money is to be made" or for which a law is to be passed (I would add), "be General and not local," that the government not promote, directly or indirectly, one portion of its peoples over another, be it certain corporations, be it certain races or creeds or religions.

This new approach, put simply in perhaps some very socialist terms: for everyone everything.

John Isbister calls the poor the "people on the bottom, the people denied benefits of the society in which they live.” If government is to exist, if government is to have a purpose, then guaranteeing the benefits of society to all the people should be its purpose. The American Dream--the Capitalist Dream--is something approximating my argument; instead of "for everyone everything," it's "for everyone the potential for everything." But, that simply isn't good enough. Potential means nothing without guaranteed access.

flashback to 2001: "Osama the Carrot and the Mother of All Conspiracies"

The following was written in December 2001, and distributed along with an illustration at the Alternative Press Expo in 2002.

I was reminded of this old essay of mine in light of the cheering going on in relation to the announcement of the death of Osama bin Laden. It's pathetic, knee-jerk "patriotism" in the guise of rah rah and ding dong the witch is dead, and chants of USA! USA! I am not one to cheer death like this. Just another way I am unAmerican, I guess...

Anyway, the essay, entitled Osama the Carrot and the Mother of All Conspiracies:

The problem with both your average conspiracy theorist and the average person who thinks conspiracies are just a bunch of horseshit is that they tend to think everyone involved in a conspiracy has to be entirely conscious of his role in said conspiracy to take any part in it.

Take for example the idea that a recent Osama bin Laden video may have been doctored or mistranslated. I don't necessarily contend that anyone purposely would have mistranslated it. But, when in doubt, it's very easy to hear what you want to hear, very easy to translate phrasing very foreign to your source to phrasing not just familiar to them but, in the specific case of this video, expected by them.

I took some Spanish in college. I must admit I do not remember much of it aside from some basics and a word here or there. But, knowing how verb conjugation works in that language, and understanding how the same works in English, barring good sound quality, I would have trouble picking out difference between verb tenses, say, mira, miras, miro, etc. Yet, we find here, translating a seemingly far more complicated language than Spanish to English, people take it as face value in the English transcript that bin Laden is talking about what "we" (himself included) "anticipated" (future tense) about the attack on September 11.

Now, compare the difference between the following phrases:

"We didn't anticipate that the whole building would collapse."
"We never would have guessed that the whole building would collapse"
"We never would've guessed that the whole building would've collapsed."
"I didn't anticipate that the whole building would collapse."
"I never would've guessed the whole building would've collapsed."
Etc.

Only minor variations, and you try translating those from English to any other language, and you would be tempted, not entirely consciously, to translate them all the same. They are all very much alike, about how the subject, I, he, we, you, did not know or guess what would happen.

And, a quick aside, Osama bin Laden is an engineer. He could have as casual a thought about how a building might collapse as you might or I might think about any single aspect of whatever our occupation might be. Even, taking into account a proper translation, he could have very well seen the planes strike the towers and anticipated or not anticipated then quite easily how it might go from there.

Or, God forbid, maybe he knew about it beforehand. Knowledge of a plan before an act, however much our American legal system may try to convince us otherwise, is not guilt of participation in that plan. Osama bin Laden supposedly is a terrorist. Terrorists do not strike military targets or imperialistically commercial targets like the World Trade Center. Terrorists put bombs in mailboxes. Terrorists blow up rides at Disneyland. Terrorists attack embassies. Terrorists make it so that everyday life is full of fear. Well, any fear the average American has had in recent months about possibly being victim to new attacks comes from their own idiocy, unless they were already in the line of fire to begin with. Middle America has nothing to fear from anthrax in the mail. But, our government and our media would have us believe that we are all in danger. Nevermind that they put us in that danger in the first place, if it's even there. We are not all in danger. No nation on this planet could take over America. There are far too many people here who would never stand for that. No nation on this planet could destroy us without destroying themselves.

And, commandeering those planes back in September? That was not some desperate act by people jealous of our freedoms. That was not even a first strike against our nation as a whole. The targets were simple: the Pentagon and the World Trade Center. As I've called them before, the two hearts of the American empire, military might and multinational business, money and power, the bases for two prongs of our takeover of the world (the third, twisted up in those two and so broad that it would be hard to find any center to it, would fall somewhere in the entertainment field, with our movies and our television).

We have permanent military bases in countries around the world. We have the power to freeze financial assets around the globe. We compel the world constantly to bow to our every whim. The thing is, we don't do it so dramatically as to literally make anyone get down on his knees. We do it subtly, unconsciously. We believe so forthrightly that America is the pinnacle of civilization that we cannot fathom why anyone would dare or care to live any way but how we do. We believe, rather arrogantly, that they should be and will be thankful if we give them our movies, our television, our money and our way of life.

And, we let our government do whatever it wants to do around the world, for years covertly and now right under our upturned noses. We draw a distinction between one man grown rich off of oil and another man done just the same, one who would dare hate us, one who would dare lead us. We don't bat an eye at hearing that Dick Cheney and George W Bush will reap huge monetary benefits from not having the Taliban in the way of their oil pipeline wishes in Afghanistan. We look away as our soldiers and our allies torture and murder thousands of people on the other side of the world, all because we feel hurt and confused by the idea that anyone could possibly not like us.

We are the bully, people. We are no "world's policeman." We are the big kid on the playground who demands money and subservience from everybody else, and beats down anyone who will not comply.

But, it's so easy to leave things as they are, to just keep being what we are. As long as there's a demon out there for us to hate and hunt and kill. And, remodeling his particular corner of hell to suit our needs, well that's just a bonus once he's gone. It couldn't possibly be the reason behind it. But, to recognize that there might be ulterior motives, conscious or unconscious ones, to accept that someone might just be dangling a carrot in front of us to get us to keep marching would be to accept that maybe our way of life has a bigger downside than a few homeless people or unwanted pregnancies or rampant drug abuse. It only takes one person to ruin the world. How bad can we make it with millions banded together?

We need to open our eyes and see the bigger picture. We need to view all of this in a larger historical context, ongoing wars between Islam, Judaism, Christianity, commercialism, capitalism, democracy, socialism, every religion and every form of government, back and forth over time, all vying for some imaginary prize, all holding each other back from true enlightenment, if there even is such a thing. Nations have minds of their own outside of the individuals that comprise them. Social movements and ideas have lives of their own. Men and nations band together, often without even realizing it, or refusing to recognize it, to change the status quo, because the status quo does not work for everyone. There is no conspiracy, and there is the mother of all conspiracies, minds and hearts joined in purpose beyond conscious thought, or organized in official training camps and military bases, all to change the face of the world. And, lately, we are the enemy of that world, pushing harder and faster than anyone else in the direction the world needs not to go anymore. Globalization will not solve anything. People are different. People will remain different. If we were all the same, life would not be worth living.

Now, we need to all step back and see the big picture, that context that they don't want us to see. This war?and I use that term loosely?has been little but distraction after distraction from that big picture. We're given exciting images of explosions, personalities to follow, the American Taliban, the unfortunate CIA agent, the gaunt and evil bin Laden. We're offered "damning" evidence that is questionable at best, but as long as our president keeps telling us we will not stop and we will not fail, well, god damn, we're gonna believe him. Cause, if we dared to question him, our whole world could crumble around us, and change is frightening, even if for the better because, however better, it's still unfamiliar and unknown. And, what's scarier than that?

As long as we've got our carrot dangling in front of us, just out of reach, this war will go on. Unless we accept that we might not be able to reach our goal and there is plenty of food in plenty of other places than hanging before our eyes.

And, remember one thing.

Nothing of any import happened before September. That's what we're supposed to believe. We're in a brave new world, where it's all about the "war on terror." Our year now ending began on September 11. Nevermind our president recognizing the Taliban as a sovereign government in August, telling them to deal with us or be overthrown. Nevermind bush paying the Taliban back in march and complimenting them on their dealing with drug exports from Afghanistan. Nevermind a senator possibly murdering the girl with whom he was having an affair. Nevermind the births and deaths around the world of individuals all allegedly created equal and deserving of life as much as any of us. Nevermind whatever personal triumphs or tragedies we each may have faced in the first eight months of this year. It's all about good vs evil now, as if there were ever anything else going on.

One person can ruin the world. Millions banded together can destroy it. That's the easy part. It's saving the world that is hard.