Mexican Drug War Progress?
It wasn’t but just a few years ago that Mexicans coming up here were mostly two groups, the marijuanos and the braceros. The braceros were honest people who came to this country, the country of their dreams, to work hard for less money than the poorest American workers are paid. They appreciated the opportunity. They were not murderers, rapists, or thieves, but people with the family values to suffer risk and hardship. Because of them, the agriculture of California, Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas was made profitable, and our economy flourished. It was pretty hard on the Mexicans, but they could still earn enough to send home more money than they could make back in Mexico. Everybody was happy with the arrangement.
What the marijuanos brought into this country is a highly desired commodity, highly desired by tens of millions of Americans. Though it is not addictive, and nothing is stopping anyone from quitting it, those millions all agree that it is such a benefit in their lives that they say it is forbidden to them unrighteously, and they are willing to become outlaws to exercise what they believe should be their right to do, and they buy it and smoke it. It was about the only thing a Mexican could carry on his body and smuggle up here which he could be certain he could get a good price for. The Mexicans who grew the marijuana lived out in the country, and they had a good protective relationship going with their local authorities, and because they were growing the only possible money crop on the land, they could afford to send their children away to college, perhaps even to travel like American tourists do. Everybody was happy with the arrangement.
At some point somebody in American politics started getting up steam among working voters complaining about seeing Mexicans with jobs and food stamps, when they were paying the taxes, and how somebody should stop the Mexicans from coming across the border. The politicians didn’t want to let on they knew the farms would fail if they had to pay legal wages, so they had two solutions to the problem. One was the California system. When you find Mexicans without papers, you put the women with American-born children into state housing, and you put the men in jail as dope smugglers and deadbeat dads. You’ve also got the Texas solution. You put up a keep-out sign and make the river run red with the ones that don’t. That seems to be the Arizona solution too. They are down there making themselves a Taco Curtain, two fences with the ground cleared out in the middle, a DMZ. That’s a De-Mexicanized Zone. I was in Vietnam, on the DMZ, where we had the First Cav Division, my division the One-O-Worst (yes, we were the baddest), the US Marines, a fleet of Navy jets, and Air Force bombers that flew five hours to get there and dropped more bombs on each mission than a whole squadron of B-17s, and we still couldn’t keep people from getting across that strip of enforced border. Do we really want that in Nogales, and Laredo?
A few years ago the American drug companies who keep marijuana illegal because it can compete with their products put the pressure on the Congressmen they own to give money to the Mexican government to arm their DEA and send them out to make a real shooting War On Drugs against the people growing and smuggling marijuana. One way or another, that was pretty much everybody. To a good old Texas boy like George Bush, getting the Mexicans to solve his smuggling problem for him by shooting each other on the other side of the border was not just the most effective thing possible, it was funny as hell. Twenty thousand wetbacks and Mexican dope dealers have died down there, and we haven’t fired a shot. Then they blame the murders on the marijuana. Them good old boys are laughing their asses off. If that ain’t Drug War victory, I’ll kiss a pig.
The entire local economy of the northern states of Mexico is built on the smuggling and labor markets, legal and illegal. From highly placed officials to local estate dons, to the soldiers and the campesinos, there was a structure which peacefully and successfully conducted trade in a market which everybody must pretend they know nothing about, but everybody is making money doing. Suddenly there’s an invasion, with the trucks and the helicopters, and men with sharp new uniforms and machine guns, and people are shot, and arrested. People are betrayed, and imprisoned, and they become vengeful enemies of other people, and where before they were peaceful and loyal citizens, even if technically outlaws, they become truly the enemies of the state, filled with hatred for their own country’s government, and especially for ours. There is chaos, and they are at war.
The structure of connections which grew, marketed, and distributed the marijuana was suddenly disrupted, but the most fundamental truth is still true. Marijuana is still the only crop the common people can grow there for which they can make more money than doing brute labor.
Suddenly the dons, the estate holders, are gone, and the commissioners and deputies who maintained the protected order are gone too, killed or arrested. Crops are destroyed, and the growers must go farther underground, farther out in the country. There is a market which still must be served, however, if the economy is to survive with or without the gringos’ war. Suddenly there is hard competition for the seats of power, for the protection of product, and the protection of place in the market. The enemy of them all is the terrible killing machine the Americans sold their government, with its helicopters and black-armored robo-soldiers. They are also the enemies of each other. Each of them has been taken into the dark rooms and made to betray the other. Each of them has lost someone, betrayed by the other. Now they are truly at war, a war among themselves, and against an invincible high-tech overlord that comes in like from outer space and punishes them by killing the survivors, and destroying their fields and homes.
In such an environment, there is only one structure of organization that can survive such odds, and that is what is called Gangism. When I was a boy, the first thing we learned in the Cub Scouts was The Law Of The Pack. There were rules you did not break, nor fail to obey. You advanced by accomplishment in defined goals. As in a close family church, or a military unit with esprit de corps, the others are like brothers to you, but closer than brothers. Their fate is your fate, their fight your fight, and their respect your only desire. Akela is the leader, the top wolf in the pack, and when he speaks, all the other wolves stand up straight and listen. It is about loyalty and obedience, and being true to the values and goals of the order. The gangs are like that, but more so. They are truly wolves, and not packs of donkeys or babbling geese, or even good dogs. Wolves. The real wolf leader is not a discussion moderator. He could kick all the other wolves’ asses, and if you don’t want to take him on, you roll over and wag your tail. The price of disloyalty is to be torn apart by the other wolves, or at least, banished from the pack. When the pack hunts, you eat. When the pack fights, you kill or die.
Only the gangs are disciplined enough, and ruthlessly violent enough, to survive against the power of an armed DEA. Therefore, the new organizations that succeed the old ones will be gangs, instead of the post-feudal estates of yesterday. In America’s jails, new gang members are recruited by pointing out that those without their protection are prey to the black gangs, and the skinheads with the swastikas on their faces. Their families are identified and placed under pressure by agents on the outside, and they are made to understand the law of the pack is neither voluntary nor democratic. To be admitted, they must accept the demands of blood-in, blood-out loyalty. They must commit crimes that bind them for life, and they know if they try to leave, they will be hunted down and killed by their former brothers, and their families will be killed. This produces an organization of great power and implacable will. There is nothing surprising about this idea. It is the foundation of the Catholic Church. You must agree to take part in the murder by ritual sacrifice of the innocent Jesus to get in, and if you commit heresy or disobedience, you are burned at the stake. Blood in; blood out.
Certain big changes were done to the market by making war in Mexico. Marijuana is not easy to smuggle. It requires lots of land to produce, it is large in volume, it smells strong, and for its weight, is very low profit. It is favored by a clientele that are generally peaceful and easygoing, and likewise is grown by people who just want to be peaceful farmers. Its use does not lend itself to the gang system of social structure or marketing. The Mexican marijuana market has dropped off to almost nothing, and the quality of what gets through is very low due to the processing needs for smuggling. That is not grounds for congratulation, however, as it has been replaced by something which is truly dangerous, terribly and unquestionably lethal. Even heroin is not a drug that lends itself as well to the gang system as this new horror. Most people who use heroin are not desperate criminals, and only the weakest few actually destroy themselves with it. When a heroin user has a good supply, and he is in control of his addiction, he is at peace, and able to conduct a regular life. He is a threat to nobody. It is only when his supply is cut off that he becomes desperate, and dangerous.
However, there is a drug which is perfect for the life of the gang, and that is methedrine. It does not require a large agricultural base, and so it does not profit the common growers in Mexico, nor suffer their vulnerability to interdiction by the DEA. Great amounts of it can be made quickly in small movable laboratories, from products that can be bought on the open market (from American pharmo and chemical companies). It has almost no smell when finished, can be compacted into a very small space, and is easy to smuggle. Even a small amount is worth a lot of money. It is the most addictive substance ever created, and its users are most dangerous when they have it, as they are driven to action by a feeling more powerful than adrenaline. Like the extreme use of cocaine, it is an ego expander, and its users come to feel themselves invincible, and their thinking unchallengable as revelation. They feel no pain, suffer no fear, and they have great delusions which drive them to fight and to kill ruthlessly, for the thrill, and for the right to tattoo another merit badge on their chests. When they are suffering from withdrawal, they will do anything, literally anything, to get it. So, of course, will their clientele. An organized gang of angry Mexicans which traffic in methedrine to an American clientele they hate is a calculating predatory monster with which there is no reasoning, no compromise.
A few years ago we had a Mexican problem, we thought, because we had basically good people coming up here selling marijuana and working for the lowest wages in a country they hoped someday to live in. Now we have Americans dropping dead by the thousands from the cruel addiction to the methedrine, and we have prisons full of Mexicans who are being forged into cadres of highly organized extreme homicidal death squads who hate America and Americans, and from any reasonable point of view, justly. Instead of the open border and peaceful relationship with our nearest and should-be-best neighbor which I enjoyed growing up in New Mexico, we now are arming our border with robot airplanes and soldiers with guns, fanning the flames of racism on both sides, and making another nation of people our hated opponents.
We have made enemies not only of those Mexicans who are trying to get across the border, but of those who are already here. There are about fifty million of them, some born with citizenship, some with papers, some with millions of dollars and powerful positions, and some who have nothing but their hunger and their rage. I like to say Mexicans make good Americans. I know them to be good family-oriented hard-working people who make the best of friends. They are also a people with the cultural heritage of the Mayans, for whom the celebration of death was the very fabric of their society. The people of Aztlan accepted the idolatry of the Catholic Church precisely because it is a cult of human sacrifice. As the toreador in the arena demonstrates so gracefully and so cruelly, Mexicans are a people who dance with Death.
Like our Muslim problem, today’s Mexican problem is our own Frankenstein. What the anti-Mexican right-wing Drug War proponents and the left-wing social-services client-group-creators in and out of government have given us is already ten, a hundred times worse than the pot mules and chile pickers against whom we started this blood bath, and it is just beginning. Al Qaida was once just a small club of effete religious intellectuals who conceived and executed a single elegant tactical plan. As a result of the reaction of the same American leaders to that mission, there are now thousands of them, enemies we created who were once our friends. Take a lesson, for likewise, I warn you, to arouse the spirit of Mexico against us is to awaken the Jaguar.
James Nathan Post
If you happen to love the Mexican and Hispanic culture as I do from growing up in Billy The Kid's rugged and rowdy old Mexican border hometown of Mesilla, you might enjoy this book of humorous and heartwarming stories from the days of old New Mexico.
Three Tales In Lastima
Monday, May 31, 2010
Sunday, May 16, 2010
Do Violent Games Damage Minds?
Do Violent Games Damage Minds?
Do football, boxing, and computer killer games damage our children’s minds, or prepare them to be good soldiers in the reality of a world always at war?
We hear a lot about the damage being done to the minds of children by their super-violent computer games and TV cartoon shows. If such damage is actually possible, then what should be done about a TV channel for adults that glorifies killing alien people with strange cult beliefs, promotes hatred and fear of things they invent to frighten the viewers, considers people who make terms for peace to be weak, and leads viewers to believe that their actions are led by powerful ancient supernatural beings who can take over your mind and make you do bad things, decide who wins the ball game, and make hurricanes happen… FOX NEWS? THE 700 CLUB?
It is not new. It is the same old game, training our children to become soldiers. Today’s cutting-edge soldier is a fat kid who grew up on X-Box games, sitting in a bunker in Nevada with a soda and a bag of chips, using his computerized robo-bomber to locate and zap the drug-terrorist devil-worshipping bug-heads in the caves of Saddam Engamorra. It starts with ball games at recess in kindergarten to football, in which boys are taught to sublimate their dawning sexuality to the violence of the game (by showing them their sexiest classmates’ panties with the unspoken promise that she goes to the winner). They learn to become organized, submit their will to the group, and to regard all who are not members of the group to be thereby a little less than themselves, and to put all of their physical and emotional resources into proving Bulldogs can kick the Wildcats’ asses. It is only a short step to taking up the sword, or the ICBM, and sparing no life to prove the Yanks can beat the Gooks any day of the week.
This is not done secretly, but proudly, calling it “discipline” and “esprit de corps.” It does not surprise me to see American men in uniform swaggering the streets of foreign places talking down their enemies as “gomers, faggots, pussies,” like they did their high school ballgame rivals. The program works very well, and I am first to agree that the best of my contemporaries driving the 101st’s gunships, my section leader Cpt Charlie Rake and Lancer 6 Maj Ken Fitch, were both Oklahoma football players of distinction. I’m not saying it is a bad idea, just that is what violent games are for, and if we intend to keep producing generations of warriors, then we should keep celebrating the games. Likewise, we must recognize that as long as we keep using the games to teach our culture to our children, and to select its heroes, then we make warriors of them, and we make wars for them to fight, for our team’s colors. That now goes for the computer games as well.
In the 1970’s I wrote some science fiction stories dealing with this mental programming for war by use of games, computer games. That was when a geeky kid named Bill Gates was locked in a garage in Albuquerque with a pre-computer gadget he could write programs for, one byte at a time. I wrote about the use of computer virtual worlds to teach a generation of robot pilots how to get into their roles, and to really be there, fighting for their lives and for whatever abstract notion of loyalty their game calls for. It is still very prophetic and timely stuff, now available as a complete Sci-Fi Anthology: KING’S KNIGHT.
Do football, boxing, and computer killer games damage our children’s minds, or prepare them to be good soldiers in the reality of a world always at war?
We hear a lot about the damage being done to the minds of children by their super-violent computer games and TV cartoon shows. If such damage is actually possible, then what should be done about a TV channel for adults that glorifies killing alien people with strange cult beliefs, promotes hatred and fear of things they invent to frighten the viewers, considers people who make terms for peace to be weak, and leads viewers to believe that their actions are led by powerful ancient supernatural beings who can take over your mind and make you do bad things, decide who wins the ball game, and make hurricanes happen… FOX NEWS? THE 700 CLUB?
It is not new. It is the same old game, training our children to become soldiers. Today’s cutting-edge soldier is a fat kid who grew up on X-Box games, sitting in a bunker in Nevada with a soda and a bag of chips, using his computerized robo-bomber to locate and zap the drug-terrorist devil-worshipping bug-heads in the caves of Saddam Engamorra. It starts with ball games at recess in kindergarten to football, in which boys are taught to sublimate their dawning sexuality to the violence of the game (by showing them their sexiest classmates’ panties with the unspoken promise that she goes to the winner). They learn to become organized, submit their will to the group, and to regard all who are not members of the group to be thereby a little less than themselves, and to put all of their physical and emotional resources into proving Bulldogs can kick the Wildcats’ asses. It is only a short step to taking up the sword, or the ICBM, and sparing no life to prove the Yanks can beat the Gooks any day of the week.
This is not done secretly, but proudly, calling it “discipline” and “esprit de corps.” It does not surprise me to see American men in uniform swaggering the streets of foreign places talking down their enemies as “gomers, faggots, pussies,” like they did their high school ballgame rivals. The program works very well, and I am first to agree that the best of my contemporaries driving the 101st’s gunships, my section leader Cpt Charlie Rake and Lancer 6 Maj Ken Fitch, were both Oklahoma football players of distinction. I’m not saying it is a bad idea, just that is what violent games are for, and if we intend to keep producing generations of warriors, then we should keep celebrating the games. Likewise, we must recognize that as long as we keep using the games to teach our culture to our children, and to select its heroes, then we make warriors of them, and we make wars for them to fight, for our team’s colors. That now goes for the computer games as well.
In the 1970’s I wrote some science fiction stories dealing with this mental programming for war by use of games, computer games. That was when a geeky kid named Bill Gates was locked in a garage in Albuquerque with a pre-computer gadget he could write programs for, one byte at a time. I wrote about the use of computer virtual worlds to teach a generation of robot pilots how to get into their roles, and to really be there, fighting for their lives and for whatever abstract notion of loyalty their game calls for. It is still very prophetic and timely stuff, now available as a complete Sci-Fi Anthology: KING’S KNIGHT.
Thursday, May 13, 2010
Why Not Annex Mexico?
The part of Mexico we annexed in 1846 is doing better than the part we left behind. Wouldn't it be better for Mexico if we just annexed all the rest of it?
Wednesday, May 12, 2010
Governor Palin, What About Your Borders?
This was recorded back before Mt. Palin erupted, but it seems to be still very much appropriate and timely today. How would you answer that question for her?
Thursday, May 6, 2010
What Are We Doing Here?
WHAT ARE WE DOING HERE?
The critical and most difficult question: what do we think we are actually doing here? There is the fact it is self-gratifying to publicly express views we hold dear, our patriotism, our desire to see things promoted in our society like justice, honesty, and compassion. If that were all we wanted from this, there would be nothing wrong with that. If, however, we are out to have some kind of social impact, then just what do we think we can do, and what are we trying to do?
The key to doing anything is, in a word, exposure. Success could only result from getting masses of people finding what we offer as free reading online interesting enough that they will invest their time and their money in supporting whatever ARM is promoting, and perhaps even buying and reading what we write for sale. As I see it, there are three ways to make this happen, presuming our content is exciting enough to begin with. One, to pay for advertising to promote the site, two, to inspire people to propagate the site like a chain letter, and three, to do something else which gets enough attention that people will seek us out – like painting graffiti halfway up the Washington Monument, or kidnapping Barack’s dog Bo.
Hopefully, our primary objective should be to have a political effect. That, in a word, means votes. Next to selling artificial opium, pimping for Jesus, and bombing ragheads, the marketing of political candidates is one of America’s top industries. The key words here are again, masses and money. Millions of people, and millions of dollars. A dozen chatline fans and a few $10 donations just ain’t gonna cut it, much as we might enjoy having them. The American electoral system is 100% marketing. It all takes place on TV, or in media-generating mass gatherings. As has been clearly articulated by such brilliant even if amoral strategists as Karl Rove, we Americans do not vote what we are for, so much as what we are against. Karl observes that talking about yourself and your issues is political suicide, merely giving the other side grist for objection. You talk about your opponent, not yourself, and what is wrong with him, and you persuade the voter to find a reason not to vote for your opponent. It is not possible in our system to vote “against” anyone; you must vote for someone. If the voters can be made to hate or fear your opponent, then you get their vote by default, no matter who you are or what you believe. This is the basis of the “vote out the incumbent” idea, whereby it doesn’t matter what a candidate is, only that you vote for somebody other than the presumably crooked guy in office now. I think lots of this low-grade thinking is unfortunately motivating the so-called Tea Party.
Though it is very important that the positions and issues of minor third or fourth or tenth parties of the less-than-2% variety be publicly presented and debated, as election “leverage” they are actually powerless. Votes for them are simply meaningless, like voting for your Granny’s goat. Though the fringe parties' self-sacrificing statement-making votes might have some influence on which R-Ds are chosen by their parties to run next time, in most elections even very regional, the only votes that make a difference in who actually gets elected are those cast for the Repo or the Demo. Closest anybody ever got to pulling off a real independent win was Ross Perot, who did it by investing about $30 million of his own money, made by building super-computers for the CIA and IRS, and appealing to those who hate both the Repos and the Demos.
Suppose we actually succeed in getting somebody elected by arousing a sufficient vote. What can we then expect that person to do in office? There is only one thing they can do, and that is to vote for or against new laws, according to the rules and their job descriptions, and as Scott Brown quickly learned, knuckle under to the power. When the GOP openly declares it will simply vote as a bloc against the Demo, no matter what the issue or the law proposed, it clearly just doesn’t matter what any individual Republican believes in or stands for. They have reduced themselves to rubber-stamp automatons, each a lock-step vote without will or reason. The likelihood of them backing the ideas of an independent is incalculably small. The Democrats are more democratic, and likely to have diverse views, but they recognize they are forced to vote together, or fall victim to the GOP’s relentlessly united resistance. As long as we continue to use the same system of election, based on media power which must be bought, on voters who are propagandized by the calculated and sophisticated marketing techniques of the modern campaign, and we continue to fill the same offices and enact the same policies in accordance with the same premises, then no substantive changes are going to be made in the way life and law are conducted in America by changing the people behind the desks.
Though clearly there is nothing to be gained from organizing bands of armed angry men ready to blow up something and kill Americans, what can we realistically do in the face of the implacable and irresistible power of a highly evolved and interdependent infrastructure of government and industry? Is there really no option except trying to influence the way people vote? There is a point at which that begins to look like pissing in the wind.
What motivates people these days to vote? There is taxes. We all want less taxation, but the simple fact is that short of just printing the stuff up, taxation is the only way the government can obtain money to do anything. We all claim we want less government spending, but the fact is we all have things we believe the government should do, from buying bombers to saving the little brown babies of Katrina. The working class are motivated by fear the corporations that employ them will be taxed out of existence, and by the idea they will have to pay more taxes themselves. The lower classes are motivated by hope the government will give them a few of the crumbs that fall from the tables of the rich. The rich want the workers taxed, and the workers want the welfare to the unemployed cut off. The sad truth is that we all wish the government would cut off the other guy’s benefits and fund our program. The other sad truth is if we taxed everybody 99%, including the rich, it would still take two generations to pay for what has been borrowed in our names in the last 20 years. And if we did pay it, who gets the money? The same banks to which we are indebted now, who can only do one thing with it, and that is to lend it back to us. The people who run things now are aware of this. They know we have reached a point where the amount of the debt is meaningless, and the value of everything is abstract. Everything is done on borrowed money, and all the IOUs are backed up only by the promise of keeping the labor forces working and taxing them. This fact is global, whether we ideologically agree with “globalism” or not.
There is freedom. Though we use the word, and dare anyone to deny it is sufficient justification for anything, it is only a platitude. Though many of us have called for decades for the personal freedom to use our own bodies as we choose, for our habits, sex life, use of our property, trade for our labor, etc etc, Americans seem much more likely to vote for someone who will act to prohibit things they don’t do themselves, and would prefer other people be forbidden to do. Such freedom they decry as license to sin, and condemn it, calling for “freedom from sin.” The control-freak patriots call for “freedom from crime.” The so-called Right Wing uses the word to justify invading and destroying other people’s countries, for economic and religious reasons, calling it “freedom from tyranny.” I think the organized pro-hemp and pro-homo and the civil rights folks will all find common ground with us on most things, and could be encouraged to vote for a candidate with our views on those issues, of either party.
There is religion. Though it is nominally excluded from our electoral process and our government, the fact is that a huge and well-organized cabal exists in US government today striving to use the power of lawmaking to enforce the taboos and prejudices of the most extreme Christian mystic factions, the authoritarian and puritan fundamentalist charismatics and Pentecostals, the born again and called by God to office. These are people who are not moved by reason or even by the hard facts of reality, but only by their “faith” in the idols of their sect. They are willing to make demigods of preachers who claim, for example, that God creates hurricanes to punish homosexuals, and will make them happy and rich if they will bow down to the altar of Jesus, and leave a little gift. They command an enormous number of voters, and no election in America today is free of their influence. I think it fair to say that none of us here on ARM today, whatever our view of the truth about God, is willing to pander to their occult superstitions, prejudices, and beliefs (as the major party candidates do) to get their votes. They will not likely be swayed from their beliefs by rational discourse, so for anyone who stands for the free exercise of our Constitutional personal liberties and the rule of reason, they are the enemy, lovely people though they may be. It is they whom our candidates must defeat, though they have Jesus leading their parades.
Should we then be attempting to establish some kind of reasonable platform that people of both the Left and the Right would leave their own parties to support, and those who take their God to be more reasonable and tolerant might appreciate? What kind of platform might that be? Having such a platform, do we then attempt to locate or create a candidate who can motivate enough public attention that the media will pick him up, shower him with millions of dollars so he can put on a big enough show to get people watching their commercials, as they have done with the manufactured celebrity Palindoll? Should we be promoting just the ideology, and hoping we can find existing candidates that will leave their party to stand for it as independents? Should we be organizing public meetings, making speeches, and chartering jets to fly from one city to another, passing out fliers and living on pizza and Jack? Should we be seeking corporate sponsorship to pay for the PSAs and the jets? Ok, I’m not expecting to be doing anything that big, but as a matter of visualizing what direction we are going, and what the terrain looks like, you see what I’m saying. Are we bringing a mule to a Nascar race?
I do love expressing what I think, and reporting honestly and literally as I can how things look to me, hoping somebody will read it and feel elucidated by it. I would certainly love to see the effect of it in our society, but I confess I do not see a clear path to accomplishing a particular end here. What we need now is to arrive at as clear, comprehensive, and direct MISSION STATEMENT here at ARM as we can. Like I asked at the beginning: “What the hell do we think we are doing here?” We are here to motivate a movement, not to recruit a corps, so it is a meaningful question, not a rhetorical opening to a policy briefing.
James “Lancer 17” \:--]
The critical and most difficult question: what do we think we are actually doing here? There is the fact it is self-gratifying to publicly express views we hold dear, our patriotism, our desire to see things promoted in our society like justice, honesty, and compassion. If that were all we wanted from this, there would be nothing wrong with that. If, however, we are out to have some kind of social impact, then just what do we think we can do, and what are we trying to do?
The key to doing anything is, in a word, exposure. Success could only result from getting masses of people finding what we offer as free reading online interesting enough that they will invest their time and their money in supporting whatever ARM is promoting, and perhaps even buying and reading what we write for sale. As I see it, there are three ways to make this happen, presuming our content is exciting enough to begin with. One, to pay for advertising to promote the site, two, to inspire people to propagate the site like a chain letter, and three, to do something else which gets enough attention that people will seek us out – like painting graffiti halfway up the Washington Monument, or kidnapping Barack’s dog Bo.
Hopefully, our primary objective should be to have a political effect. That, in a word, means votes. Next to selling artificial opium, pimping for Jesus, and bombing ragheads, the marketing of political candidates is one of America’s top industries. The key words here are again, masses and money. Millions of people, and millions of dollars. A dozen chatline fans and a few $10 donations just ain’t gonna cut it, much as we might enjoy having them. The American electoral system is 100% marketing. It all takes place on TV, or in media-generating mass gatherings. As has been clearly articulated by such brilliant even if amoral strategists as Karl Rove, we Americans do not vote what we are for, so much as what we are against. Karl observes that talking about yourself and your issues is political suicide, merely giving the other side grist for objection. You talk about your opponent, not yourself, and what is wrong with him, and you persuade the voter to find a reason not to vote for your opponent. It is not possible in our system to vote “against” anyone; you must vote for someone. If the voters can be made to hate or fear your opponent, then you get their vote by default, no matter who you are or what you believe. This is the basis of the “vote out the incumbent” idea, whereby it doesn’t matter what a candidate is, only that you vote for somebody other than the presumably crooked guy in office now. I think lots of this low-grade thinking is unfortunately motivating the so-called Tea Party.
Though it is very important that the positions and issues of minor third or fourth or tenth parties of the less-than-2% variety be publicly presented and debated, as election “leverage” they are actually powerless. Votes for them are simply meaningless, like voting for your Granny’s goat. Though the fringe parties' self-sacrificing statement-making votes might have some influence on which R-Ds are chosen by their parties to run next time, in most elections even very regional, the only votes that make a difference in who actually gets elected are those cast for the Repo or the Demo. Closest anybody ever got to pulling off a real independent win was Ross Perot, who did it by investing about $30 million of his own money, made by building super-computers for the CIA and IRS, and appealing to those who hate both the Repos and the Demos.
Suppose we actually succeed in getting somebody elected by arousing a sufficient vote. What can we then expect that person to do in office? There is only one thing they can do, and that is to vote for or against new laws, according to the rules and their job descriptions, and as Scott Brown quickly learned, knuckle under to the power. When the GOP openly declares it will simply vote as a bloc against the Demo, no matter what the issue or the law proposed, it clearly just doesn’t matter what any individual Republican believes in or stands for. They have reduced themselves to rubber-stamp automatons, each a lock-step vote without will or reason. The likelihood of them backing the ideas of an independent is incalculably small. The Democrats are more democratic, and likely to have diverse views, but they recognize they are forced to vote together, or fall victim to the GOP’s relentlessly united resistance. As long as we continue to use the same system of election, based on media power which must be bought, on voters who are propagandized by the calculated and sophisticated marketing techniques of the modern campaign, and we continue to fill the same offices and enact the same policies in accordance with the same premises, then no substantive changes are going to be made in the way life and law are conducted in America by changing the people behind the desks.
Though clearly there is nothing to be gained from organizing bands of armed angry men ready to blow up something and kill Americans, what can we realistically do in the face of the implacable and irresistible power of a highly evolved and interdependent infrastructure of government and industry? Is there really no option except trying to influence the way people vote? There is a point at which that begins to look like pissing in the wind.
What motivates people these days to vote? There is taxes. We all want less taxation, but the simple fact is that short of just printing the stuff up, taxation is the only way the government can obtain money to do anything. We all claim we want less government spending, but the fact is we all have things we believe the government should do, from buying bombers to saving the little brown babies of Katrina. The working class are motivated by fear the corporations that employ them will be taxed out of existence, and by the idea they will have to pay more taxes themselves. The lower classes are motivated by hope the government will give them a few of the crumbs that fall from the tables of the rich. The rich want the workers taxed, and the workers want the welfare to the unemployed cut off. The sad truth is that we all wish the government would cut off the other guy’s benefits and fund our program. The other sad truth is if we taxed everybody 99%, including the rich, it would still take two generations to pay for what has been borrowed in our names in the last 20 years. And if we did pay it, who gets the money? The same banks to which we are indebted now, who can only do one thing with it, and that is to lend it back to us. The people who run things now are aware of this. They know we have reached a point where the amount of the debt is meaningless, and the value of everything is abstract. Everything is done on borrowed money, and all the IOUs are backed up only by the promise of keeping the labor forces working and taxing them. This fact is global, whether we ideologically agree with “globalism” or not.
There is freedom. Though we use the word, and dare anyone to deny it is sufficient justification for anything, it is only a platitude. Though many of us have called for decades for the personal freedom to use our own bodies as we choose, for our habits, sex life, use of our property, trade for our labor, etc etc, Americans seem much more likely to vote for someone who will act to prohibit things they don’t do themselves, and would prefer other people be forbidden to do. Such freedom they decry as license to sin, and condemn it, calling for “freedom from sin.” The control-freak patriots call for “freedom from crime.” The so-called Right Wing uses the word to justify invading and destroying other people’s countries, for economic and religious reasons, calling it “freedom from tyranny.” I think the organized pro-hemp and pro-homo and the civil rights folks will all find common ground with us on most things, and could be encouraged to vote for a candidate with our views on those issues, of either party.
There is religion. Though it is nominally excluded from our electoral process and our government, the fact is that a huge and well-organized cabal exists in US government today striving to use the power of lawmaking to enforce the taboos and prejudices of the most extreme Christian mystic factions, the authoritarian and puritan fundamentalist charismatics and Pentecostals, the born again and called by God to office. These are people who are not moved by reason or even by the hard facts of reality, but only by their “faith” in the idols of their sect. They are willing to make demigods of preachers who claim, for example, that God creates hurricanes to punish homosexuals, and will make them happy and rich if they will bow down to the altar of Jesus, and leave a little gift. They command an enormous number of voters, and no election in America today is free of their influence. I think it fair to say that none of us here on ARM today, whatever our view of the truth about God, is willing to pander to their occult superstitions, prejudices, and beliefs (as the major party candidates do) to get their votes. They will not likely be swayed from their beliefs by rational discourse, so for anyone who stands for the free exercise of our Constitutional personal liberties and the rule of reason, they are the enemy, lovely people though they may be. It is they whom our candidates must defeat, though they have Jesus leading their parades.
Should we then be attempting to establish some kind of reasonable platform that people of both the Left and the Right would leave their own parties to support, and those who take their God to be more reasonable and tolerant might appreciate? What kind of platform might that be? Having such a platform, do we then attempt to locate or create a candidate who can motivate enough public attention that the media will pick him up, shower him with millions of dollars so he can put on a big enough show to get people watching their commercials, as they have done with the manufactured celebrity Palindoll? Should we be promoting just the ideology, and hoping we can find existing candidates that will leave their party to stand for it as independents? Should we be organizing public meetings, making speeches, and chartering jets to fly from one city to another, passing out fliers and living on pizza and Jack? Should we be seeking corporate sponsorship to pay for the PSAs and the jets? Ok, I’m not expecting to be doing anything that big, but as a matter of visualizing what direction we are going, and what the terrain looks like, you see what I’m saying. Are we bringing a mule to a Nascar race?
I do love expressing what I think, and reporting honestly and literally as I can how things look to me, hoping somebody will read it and feel elucidated by it. I would certainly love to see the effect of it in our society, but I confess I do not see a clear path to accomplishing a particular end here. What we need now is to arrive at as clear, comprehensive, and direct MISSION STATEMENT here at ARM as we can. Like I asked at the beginning: “What the hell do we think we are doing here?” We are here to motivate a movement, not to recruit a corps, so it is a meaningful question, not a rhetorical opening to a policy briefing.
James “Lancer 17” \:--]
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