Commie Curmudgeon

My stats check tells me that I’ve gotten a hit from “Working Assets Internal,” which is making me a little nervous. Am I in for some kind of retribution here? Just in case they’re really checking up on this situation, I wanted to clarify a couple of things (which I was thinking of clarifying anyway). This is probably not the most interesting matter for a blog post, but some people might be interested.

I meant to add more “I think”s and “I believe”s in my discussion of the double-billing error. I don’t know one hundred percent that the high proportion of my account attributed to “cash advances” was the result of an incomplete repair of a double-billing error, but I do know that there was a $600+ double-billing error a few years ago that took months to erase (actually at a time, I think, when the Working Assets card was still with Fleet Bank, another big, sleazy corporation that hadn’t been attached to it when I first got my card), and that after the error was supposedly erased, I got a bill with a percentage of my account attributed to cash advances that I didn’t think had been changed back accordingly, and which seemed too high. I called the bank and wrote letters to try to get to the bottom of this, but I ended up going around in circles many times. At one point, the guy on the phone admitted that the bills for cash advances didn’t add up to the proportion mentioned on the total bill, but then he just told me to write to another department, which got me back to nowhere.

I stand by the rest of what I said about Working Assets and would love a response to my questions about their connections to MBNA and the obvious contradictions involved.

And I stand by my claim that their interest rates have been far too high. I think an average of 19 or 20 percent interest is way too much. And about three times over the years, they raised my interest rate to 28 percent for at least a month or two (though I always managed to talk them down). The first and maybe second time, they used a slightly late payment as an excuse. The third time, I hadn’t made a late payment in years – but they instead claimed that this was the result of a credit check that had nothing to do with my history with Working Assets!

To their credit (so to speak), more recently, MBNA told me it was OK to make a late payment (i.e., no consequences) because I had never received this month's bill. And the people in customer service, with just a few exceptions (among the hundreds of calls that I’ve made) have been very nice. (I have nothing against the rank and file workers; it’s the corporation and its leaders and the whole system that stink.) But I shouldn’t have to be paying so much money back on this debt (nor should probably millions of other people). And, if I were making more than the median income (which I don't think I have been, not by a long shot) and I wanted to file for bankruptcy, I would have a much harder time doing so after October 17, because of the very un-progressive bankruptcy laws that MBNA lobbied for extensively while they were acting as the biggest contributors to the campaign of George W. Bush.

I don’t normally post "Odd News" here, but this particular blurb at Bombs and Shields really caught my attention:

Gulf of Mexico - Dolphins trained to kill by the U.S. Navy and armed with "toxic dart" guns may be on the loose in the Gulf of Mexico after Hurricane Katrina damaged their coastal compound. The Navy has refused to confirm that any dolphins they trained may be missing but have been actively trying to retrieve missing dolphins since the storm....

It’s too bad that Agent 86 died the other day. We probably could have used his help.

Well, I couldn't go to Washington, DC for the big protests this weekend. The reason was clear - I am broke and I had to work, and the only time I can be assured of work right now is Friday and Saturday nights on the midnight shifts. So, a protest centered on a Saturday morning to afternoon is impossible for me. But to be honest, I didn't really care about missing the protest on Saturday that much anyway. I wish more that I could have participated in some stuff that happened today and, maybe, things that will happen tomorrow.

To be frank once again, I have to admit that any big march against the war in Iraq in which a bunch of people quietly walk for a while carrying signs, 90 percent of which signs are directed specifically at George W. Bush (or Tony Blair, if you're in England), is the kind of political protest that bores me to tears. For one thing, I have only limited interest in calling for the ouster or condemnation of one single leader, especially when the majority of people participating seem to be indicating that it would be a vast improvement to replace that leader with someone almost as bad, someone who will do nothing to help change the underlying systematic causes of the problems that the protest is directed against. Thus, I have limited patience marching with a crowd many of whom are carrying signs and saying slogans implying that everything would be just dandy if George W. Bush were kicked out of office and replaced by a Democrat. I don't believe that one bit. And I also don't believe that things would be improved in the long run if only we could persuade our leaders through our peaceful protests (yeah, fat chance!) to immediately bring the troops home from this single horrible war. (Yes, it's nice to save so many lives, but, then, so many more will be sacrificed in the next war, or in a hundred different forms of less blatant, more "unofficial" war.)

It felt very different five and a half years ago, when I went to DC to protest the IMF and World Bank. At that protest, there was no grand illusion within the crowd that it would be sufficient simply to replace one leader with another. At that kind of protest, in general, there is more of an understanding on the part of the crowd that the causes of the world going to hell are systematic, directly connected to capitalism or (if you're not one of the direct anti-capitalists) at least connected to neoliberalism, economic imperialism and/or global corporate control. It's understood among most of the crowd that it won't be enough to end a single war or oust a single leader. And it's understood among many in the crowd that it won't be enough to walk around quietly holding signs and/or listening to speeches.

Today, I started to wish that I had been able to participate in some of the things happening in DC. The thing that made me start having regrets was a report from To the Barricades which said:

Summary: Sunday, September 25 -- About 100 people delayed IMF and World Bank delegates from getting to their meetings on time this morning by blocking traffic at intersections surrounding the Renaissance Mayflower Hotel where the delegates were staying.

Starting at 4am, affinity groups gathered at different intersections near the hotel and blocked the flow of buses and vans to the meetings, which were to take place at the IMF and World Bank headquarters eight blocks away. To accomplish their aim, some garbed as "neo-clowns" and stood in the road; others draped rope or erected physical barricades. Meanwhile, a larger group of activists jammed the sidewalk outside the hotel and heckled delegates when they tried to walk to the meetings.

Now, that is more the kind of protest that I wish I could take part in more easily these days. (But I'm broke, I have no health insurance, I have to work weekends and live by this nocturnal schedule, I'm getting older, I'm depressed and disillusioned with these anarchist groups, and....whatever...none of these being wholly legitimate excuses, but excuses that I make for myself nonetheless.) I'm not going to start a debate here about whether this particular kind of protest is going to be most effective right now (in other words, I am really not in the mood for that debate!), and I know that people need to do a lot of other things, in addition to the periodic protest, in order to create any movement that will really change the world (which is a big challenge, uphill battle, etc.). But I will say simply that, just speaking for myself, for the reasons listed above, this is the kind of protest that I would be more interested in getting involved with (as I did, more or less, in the not-too-distant past), that wouldn't bore me to tears.

So, it seems that a few other bloggers were thinking of The Drowned World, too. One such blog that stands out is Bloggence, Cunning, Exile. (I'm going to add this blog to my "fave" list a little later, because it is very good, and it has some excellent radical and anarchist links on the side.) As the blogger, E. Heroux, points out:

Ballard thinks far beyond the mere mechanics of how global warming will have altered geography. The particular interest in his works [is] in the psychodrama and social conflict that ensue after cities are ruined.

Then he posts this very nice quote from the book:

The bulk of the city had long since vanished, and only the steel-supported buildings of the central commercial and financial areas had survived the encroaching flood waters. The brick houses and single-storey factories of the suburbs had disappeared completely below the drifting tides of silt. Where these broke surface giant forests reared up into the burning dull-green sky, smothering the former wheatfields of temperate Europe and North America. Impenetrable Mato Grossos sometimes three hundred feet high, they were a nightmare world of competing organic forms returning rapidly to their Paleozoic past, and the only avenues of transit for the United Nations military units were through the lagoon systems that had superimposed themselves on the former cities. But even these were now being clogged with silt and then submerged.

If only I could find the quote that I had transcribed...I think it was very close to this one. Heroux also refers to another good article on The Drowned World, by Jeannette Baxter of the University of East Anglia, found at The Literary Encyclopedia. I highly recommend this article to anyone who wants to know more about the plot and themes, as Baxter recalls this great and suddenly (more) pertinent book much more vividly than I did.

This morning, before going to sleep, I was looking for the place where I posted an excerpt of J.G. Ballard's 1962 novel, The Drowned World. I thought I might have posted it at Living on Less , but I checked the archives and I couldn't find it there. (Although I know that I did post it in 2003 or so...) Probably, I wasted the excerpt on some listserv.

During my search, I did stumble upon another person's blog post, in which the author basically could have taken the words right out of my mouth (although the similarities between our respective blogs probably end right there). By which I mean these words:

One of my favorite authors (at least with his early works) is the British science fiction/experimental fiction author J.G. Ballard.... During the 1960s Ballard wrote a series of "eco-disaster" science fiction novels, in which scientifically implausible but vividly described horrors are visited on our planet. His THE DROWNED WORLD, published in 1962, is set on an Earth where global warming has gone completely out of control, the temperate zones have become a tropical wasteland, the polar icecaps have all melted, and most of the world's coastal cities are under water. In 1966 he published THE WIND FROM NOWHERE, one of my favorite disaster books, in which a global hurricane of impossible speed and proportion grinds most of the civilized world into powder, while the pitiful survivors (if only short term, given the destruction of most of Earth's food-producing ability) huddle underground in subways, garages, and tunnels.

I thought of Ballard's disasters when I watched the wind from nowhere (well, not really nowhere) destroy the lush Gulf Coast. And now, the helicopters hover above the drowned world, and the salvage boats move through the waters of doom, trying to save the pitiful survivors. Ballard must be watching with great interest, as he is fascinated, even stimulated by horrific scenes like these.

I don't know if I like that description of the survivors of Katrina as "pitiful," and I recalled (and then confirmed) that The Wind from Nowhere was actually published in 1962, the same year as The Drowned World. But otherwise, I could very well have written that post myself, because Ballard and his disaster novels have been running through my mind, too.

The first time I read those Ballard books, it was almost 20 years after they were published. But it's hard to know what happened to my copies, since it's been almost 25 years since I read them. My copy of The Wind from Nowhere must have vanished a long time ago. (In fact, it might have even been a borrowed copy; I just don't remember.) And when I transcribed text from The Drowned World, that copy was already nearly destroyed by the elements, falling apart in my hands. I'm afraid that while I was moving last year, I might have tossed it into the trash. But maybe not. If I find it, I'll transcribe some paragraphs here, while the people of Texas say hello to Rita.

Congratulations to the students of DeWitt Clinton High for showing that they know how to do some collective action when the authorities try to push something on them that they don't like. As Bombs and Shields reports:

Bronx, New York, U.S. - Nearly 1/3 of all 4,600 students from DeWitt Clinton High School in the Bronx blocked traffic and marched almost two miles to the borough's Department of Education offices, to protest new regulations which require students to pass through metal detectors before entering the school and barred them from leaving campus during lunch. The metal detectors were installed as a way to deal with violence which is reported to be almost five percent higher at DeWitt Clinton than the citywide average. Students countered that most of the fights that occurred on school grounds happened outside where individuals would not be subject to searches.

DeWitt Clinton High School is about eight blocks away from where my parents live, and from the neighborhood where I lived from the ages of 13 to about 17. I used to take the bus past that high school in the mid '70s, on my way to and back from the hell called junior high. Back then, a number of DeWitt Clinton students engaged in another kind of direct action, bypassing bus passes and fares by storming onto the bus through the back door and/or smashed-open emergency windows. That must have happened dozens of times, and never once did the bus driver say anything. Back in those days, DeWitt Clinton was an all-boys' school. Now they've got lots of girls attending, but I don't doubt that it's still a little more violent than most other schools in the city. Nonetheless, the present students have just shown that they know how to be tough in a good way, too. I hope that they will organize more, bigger, better actions in the future.

I go back to this subject every now and then; I know that I wrote two posts about it at Living on Less last year. I admit that I have a personal reason for dwelling on this sham - if it weren't for the high debt, high minimum payments, extremely high interest rates, and tricky (Sunday) deadlines on my Working Assets credit card, I would probably be able to get by from month to month much more easily than I do. (Plus, they made a mistake that they never completely corrected, assessing my cash advances at a higher proportion than they really are, because, from what I can tell, they'd only partly eliminated the traces of a double billing error, and my efforts to straighten that problem out were futile. But that story's a little complicated.) And what have I supported through 17 years of being bound to a Working Assets credit card? A nickel here and there has gone to mildly progressive causes, but probably much more money has gone to stuff that isn't progressive at all.

I sent the following letter to Common Dreams. Of course, I haven't seen any response, nor do I expect one...
______________________

Hello. I have noticed that your front page prominently features articles from the Working Assets publication, "WorkingForChange." In the present edition, the "WorkingForChange" article complains that the Democrats do not present a significant alternative to Republican policies on issues such as the war on Iraq. I couldn't agree more. However, I think it's ironic that "WorkingForChange," the publication of Working Assets, criticizes people for not sufficiently opposing George W. Bush. The reason this is rather ironic is that Working Assets' credit card is owned by MBNA, one of the largest contributors to both presidential campaigns of George W. Bush; hence, everyone who has been using a Working Assets credit card (who may have been inspired to get one through publications such as "WorkingForChange") has actually been contributing to the campaigns of George W. Bush. (I might add that I also have a Working Assets credit card, but I got it way back in 1988, long before it was sold to MBNA, and now I'm stuck paying a huge debt to MBNA with outrageous interest rates. And I thought until very recently about declaring bankruptcy because of this, but...well, never mind...)

Yet the irony gets even deeper... I asked myself, when I remembered his fact about MBNA, where exactly I had heard about it. And then I realized that one of the sources was none other than "Common Dreams"! I happen to have saved that link, because I forwarded it to some people a couple of years ago, over an e-mail list and over a blog. The information can be found at http://www.commondreams.org/views03/0504-03.htm ("Take the 'For Sale' Sign Off the White House Lawn," by Nick Nyhart and Joan Claybrook), specifically where it says:

For example, in 2000, the top donor to President Bush's presidential campaign was MBNA Corp., a Delaware-based bank. MBNA's executives, their families and its political action committee gave him nearly $240,700. Though MBNA Chief Executive Charles Cawley and his wife, Julie, personally gave a total of $2,000 to Bush (the limit then was $1,000 per contributor per election), Cawley was a Bush "Pioneer," one of the volunteer fund-raisers who pulled in at least $100,000 apiece for the campaign. In 2004, Bush operatives are hinting that the bar for ranking as a Pioneer will be raised to $200,000 or higher.

(Incidentally, a good discussion about the Working Assets connection
can be found here: http://www.unknownnews.net/d0509.html#jime507.)

Considering this contradiction, I wonder if a progressive news service such as "Common Dreams" should prominently feature articles from a Working Assets publication. If you continue to do so, perhaps you should periodically publish more articles on the subject of MBNA, specifically reminding people of its connection to Working Assets.
________________________

Fortune Presents Gifts Not According to the Book

Fortune presents gifts not according to the book
Fortune presents gifts not according to the book
When you expect whistles it's flutes
When you expect flutes it's whistles
What various paths are followed in distributing honours and possessions
She gives awards to some and penitent's cloaks to others
When you expect whistles it's flutes
When you expect flutes it's whistles
Sometimes she robs the chief goatherd of his cottage and goatpen
And to whomever she fancies the lamest goat has born two kids
When you expect whistles it's flutes
When you expect flutes it's whistles
Because in a village a poor lad has stolen one egg
He swings in the sun and another gets away with a thousand crimes
When you expect whistles it's flutes
When you expect flutes it's whistles

I’m ambivalent about whether I’m going to buy tickets for Dead Can Dance’s show at Radio City Music Hall next month. I saw this group twice in New York City before, once in about 1994 and the second time in about ‘96. The first time was at Symphony Space, a small theater on the Upper West Side of Manhattan that actually featured a lot of arty movies and readings (but also some music, especially world music); the second time was at Town Hall, a slightly larger and ritzier venue that was more specifically focused on musical acts. Both times (although the first time, especially), I felt that I’d seen one of the greatest live shows I’d ever seen in my life. But back in those days, Dead Can Dance seemed a little different to me. They hadn’t broken up for a period of six years and then reformed as such a well hyped legend (albeit in cult-sized circles, but there still seems to be a little too much hype now), they hadn’t seemed quite so eager to push and merchandize themselves (they're making and pushing special limited CDs of many of these current shows, yet they're forbidding other people from recording or photographing them), and their ticket prices weren’t so damn high (the main reason I’m having real trouble getting around to seeing them now – especially since I know the show is selling fast and I’ve glimpsed the outrageous prices being charged by disgusting ticket-selling “services”).

It’s the same old story over and over again, especially for rock bands in the post-punk era: a band goes unappreciated during their peak creative time, during which time they also seem to present some kind of alternative to the mainstream fare, the gross commercialism all around us, the hucksterism of the rock industry. Then, after their peak time, their reputation grows, and they actually become a bigger seller and start to look like another rock commodity. Not that Dead Can Dance is doing TV commercials yet. (I don’t think so...although they have been in soundtracks of episodes of CSI . But I watch that show a lot myself (I like some of the characters, especially that grumpy old cop, “Brass”), so who am I to complain?) And it’s not that DCD have exactly become a household name or that they’re being listened to by suburban mall hoppers in really bad nightclubs (I don’t think). Maybe I’m just reading the kids on the Internet too much (I did a search to see what people are saying about them these days). But the feeling now is just...different.

I guess I should clarify something for those not familiar with this band... I’m not talking about a raging rebellious punk outfit here. Dead Can Dance rebelled in a different way, moving far beyond their post-Joy-Division Goth origins. They virtually started the genre of “ethereal Goth” music (along with the Cocteau Twins, I would guess) and then moved far beyond that, or took that as far as one can take it. They changed a lot over the years, but they always put together an exciting and compelling, if often mournful, mix of contemporary and ancient music (becoming experts at resurrecting “dead” instruments, sometimes in a way that made people dance), and of music from different parts of the planet, especially from the Mediterranean countries, North Africa, and South Asia. Their work probably influenced a host of world music fusion bands in addition to, more directly, inspiring a lot of pioneering global techno music, groups of the ‘90s such as Transglobal Underground (where the influence to me seems very obvious). They also had a lot of very original, unusual, and sometimes breathtaking vocals.

The breathtaking vocal contributions came most often from their female singer, Lisa Gerrard, whose incredible voice - incredible for its drama, range, etc. - could seem to be covering opera, Italian Renaissance music, Moroccan trance music, or Indian folk music and ragas (I’ve noticed some similarities to both Sheila Chandra and Musafir), but who was always doing some odd combination all her own, even making up words and languages (which, I know, is a vocal technique originating in several different cultural and religious traditions). Meanwhile, her relatively earthy partner, Brendan Perry, sang some very intriguing, often philosophical lyrics, which also revealed an egalitarian bent and evident, though not blatantly political, social consciousness – which mixed in nicely with the Bertolt Brecht songs that they covered.

If I have any reservations about DCD’s sound, it’s that maybe their heads have been a little too much in the clouds for my mood, especially these days. If they weren’t so earnest and genuinely dramatic, I would even say they might border on pretentious sometimes. And if they didn’t so often have that mournful, near-macabre quality inherent to much of the Goth genre, they would be much closer to all those New Age bands that seem to appeal to aging affluent hippies who have relatively few concrete, day-to-day problems to worry about. And finally, there’s the problem that sometimes they seem to glorify religion, especially during the churchier songs (usually sung by Lisa), though other times it occurs to me that what they’re doing is taking old religious music and rehabilitating it toward more constructive ends. But all of these reservations are just tiny quibbles compared to the enjoyment that this band gave me throughout the 1990s.

Still, I am inclined to think that I was better off experiencing their shows in the early and mid ‘90s than I would be this time around. Maybe I’m making excuses because I can’t afford their ticket prices (over $50 for good tickets from the box office, add $10 if you’ve got to pay a service charge, add a lot more money if all the good tickets have run out and you have to go to one of the big scalper services). And that fact, all by itself, doesn't sit too well with me – a band which did seem to rise above capitalist hucksterism for so long, whose members do seem so egalitarian, should make more of an effort to make themselves affordable. (Obviously, they are aware that some of us are less fortunate than others, so why not take that into consideration during their tours?) And maybe I’m just afraid that if I see them now, I’ll be disappointed – “When you expect flutes, it’s whistles.” Though if there weren’t so many bells and whistles accompanying this tour (the limited CD gimmick and all that stuff), I’d probably be more determined to go. But, we’ll see...

It’s become clear in many terrorist attacks over the past several years that Al- Qaeda and like-minded groups deliberately set out to kill people of the working class. I’ve discussed this before, but at no time has this fact become so blatantly apparent as in yesterday’s bombings in Iraq, when a suicide bomber (who, from all appearances, was part of a larger, coordinated attack by Al-Qaeda) set out to kill day laborers; apparently, this terrorist even lured a number of them to his car with the false promise of work in order to maximize the casualties. At this point, as far as I’m concerned, anyone on the radical left who claims or implies any kind of allegiance to these terrorists in a battle for proletarian goals or world socialism – ostensibly, as part of the battle against American empire and capitalism - has got to look like an idiot. Of course, these recent attacks had different specific goals from others around the world (the newly declared war on Shiites in Iraq, etc.), and very different people in different parts of the world could be claiming ties to Al- Qaeda. But if we are assuming something of a unifying outlook and strategy among all these different sub-groups and cells, then certain things have become just too obvious. For instance, it’s more clear now than ever that Al-Qaeda couldn’t have cared less about whether the World Trade Center was populated by technicians for the ruling class (as in Ward Churchill’s image of the "little Eichmanns") or ordinary workers; they would have been just as happy if those buildings contained no one but low-wage workers. In fact, they might be happier to kill off low wage workers, since the people in the lower classes are more vulnerable and defenseless and, therefore, easier to terrorize and ultimately control, at least in the minds of terrorists.

The International Communist Current made this point clearly in their leaflet about the London bombings aptly titled, "World Leaders," "International Terrorists" – all of them massacre the workers! I agree with the ICC’s perspective that, contrary to the claims of so many leftists and pseudo-leftists (and even pseudo-anarchists!), the terrorists of Al-Qaeda and the Iraqi "insurgency" are not allies in the worldwide struggle against imperialism; in fact, they merely further exemplify the imperialism that we need to struggle against.

As the ICC pointedly states:

All this is in the logic of imperialist war: wars fought in the interest of the capitalist class, wars for the domination of the planet. The vast majority of the victims in such wars are the exploited, the oppressed, the wage slaves of capital. The logic of imperialist war stirs up national and racial hatred, turning entire peoples into "the enemy," to be insulted, attacked and annihilated. It turns worker against worker, making it impossible for them to defend their common interests. Worse, it calls on workers to rally behind the national flag and the national state, to march off willingly to war in defence of interests which are not theirs, but the interests of their exploiters.

The truth is that Blair’s values and Bin Laden’s values are exactly the same. Both are equally prepared to cause death and destruction to innocent people in pursuit of their sordid aims. The only difference is that Blair is a big imperialist gangster and Bin Laden is a smaller one. We should reject utterly all those who ask us to take the side of one or the other.

{Emphasis added.)

While the people of New Orleans continue to struggle with their surreal nightmare, this morning, I, among a few others, get to commemorate that other nightmare which struck my own town four years ago. I saw the tail end of that destruction, starting at about 10:30 am, from across NY Harbor. There’s much more to that story, including how I happened to be awake at such an unusually early hour (for me), and how I almost had been in a situation in which I might have been coming out of the building across the street from the WTC (after doing a midnight shift) right at the time that the first plane struck (but I'd canceled “availability” for that shift because I had an appointment at about noon or 12:30 with another temp agency that day – which interview had to be postponed for a couple of weeks)...

Anyway, now it’s four years since the nightmare (or maybe I should say, four years into the nightmare)... I wanted to write some eloquent thoughts at the four-year moment, but I just came back from another midnight shift, and I am more than too tired to write anything but this rambling thing... Suffice to say, it is still a very sad anniversary. And it’s even sadder how the death of so many people was used/manipulated by “our” corrupt “leaders” to make the world a worse place (and as a pretext to kill so many more people, and so on). (Although I'm aware that this major social reaction was not just a conspiracy of a few evil people - it was the whole system, etc.) Overall, however you look at it, it’s been a pretty bad four years, but in the wake of the latest tragedy, in New Orleans, it seems that more people are coming to their senses somewhat, politically speaking, about the state of things. I’m not sure about that, but there is some hope, that “silver lining” that many people are talking about...

Things are a bit different now compared to the frightening period of jingoism that occurred right after the WTC was destroyed. I couldn’t understand back then why people reacted the way they did, pulling out all those American flags and praising our great “leaders”... I also couldn’t understand why so much of the left turned so timid at the time. I had been very involved in a project to build an anti-WTO protest in New York City for that November, and so much of our left coalition – especially the less radical elements – fled that whole scene, and then the police state started a major crackdown on the more radical elements who dared to stick around to protest anything. (Meanwhile, the more radical elements were busy arguing with each other and making more of a mess of everything, right up to the badly planned and easily police-repressed disaster that was the WEF protest in February of 2002. Although I had a nice moment being part of a small group that put together a related benefit called the Intergalactic Anarchist Convention, even if that task was neither peaceful nor easy, to say the least - ah, memories...)

And then there is the more personal element... The destruction of the WTC and existence of its ruins also had a very personal dimension for me. I wrote about that personal dimension here and there, in blogs and on listserves, and I was thinking that I might be able to repost a whole bunch of stuff here this morning, but I’ve been having a hard time digging up more than a couple of snippets. But I do like these two little passages that I found from all the material that I posted (about so many things!) when I was co-blogging at Living on Less in 2003-2004. I think these passages convey both the sadness and the great sense of surrealism that I felt.

Sadness, because, as I wrote:

The temporary destruction of those neighborhoods around Ground Zero was pretty devastating to me... The bottom of Manhattan was my own favorite walking grounds, especially at night (which it has become again, to some extent). In a way, more than any place in Staten Island, I've felt as though this sort of has been my neighborhood (maybe I developed some unwanted Manhattan snobbery after living in Manhattan for over 12 years and living close enough to it all my life - but I liked taking the ferry into this neighborhood as much as possible, notwithstanding this being the home of Wall Street and all that horrible capitalist stuff). And Tribeca was a neighborhood that I lived in for several years back in the late '80s and early '90s, during happier and more stable times. It was heart-wrenching when they finally opened up the southern part of Tribeca (where I'd once lived) and I saw how people were trying to recover their small shops and homes. My old neighborhood really had been demolished for a short time.

And I probably described the surrealism best when I said:

I've been able to get an incredible sense of peace walking through lower Downtown late at night. The only time it didn't feel so peaceful and pleasant was during the several months after 9-11, when I often had to pass the half-melted ruins of the World Trade Center, soaked in bright lights and always surrounded by the loud mechanical groaning and clanking of round-the-clock cleanup work. But I have to admit that there was a surreal beauty to this sight. Especially in the middle of the night, under the bright lights, it looked like something right out of a Dali painting. It was extremely unpleasant - and unnerving - to be reminded of this horror time and again, especially when the stench was still thick for miles around. But if I had to be confronted with a nightmare, it seemed fitting to encounter it in the middle of the night. Sometimes I wonder if I should feel guilty about getting some weird aesthetic appreciation from looking at the left-over remains of a colossal mass murder - I feel like that callous public figure who described 9-11 as a great "art project." But burnt up urban ruins can be strangely beautiful, as I learned back in the '70s in The Bronx.

Fuck, these sure have been some strange and terrible times...and on that note, it’s time for me to go to sleep.

Paul Craig Roberts says in Counterpunch, "Libertarians and free trade economists don't realize it, but they are pulling Marx out of his grave." Not only that, but they’re digging up his buddy Engels, too. Below are a few passages from a few different chapters in The Condition of the Working Class in England , written by Frederick Engels 160 years ago...

From Results:

But far more demoralising than his poverty in its influence upon the English working-man is the insecurity of his position, the necessity of living upon wages from hand to mouth, that in short which makes a proletarian of him. The smaller peasants in Germany are usually poor, and often suffer want, but they are less at the mercy of accident, they have at least something secure. The proletarian, who has nothing but his two hands, who consumes today what he earned yesterday, who is subject to every possible chance, and has not the slightest guarantee for being able to earn the barest necessities of life, whom every crisis, every whim of his employer may deprive of bread, this proletarian is placed in the most revolting, inhuman position conceivable for a human being. The slave is assured of a bare livelihood by the self-interest of his master, the serf has at least a scrap of land on which to live; each has at worst a guarantee for life itself. But the proletarian must depend upon himself alone, and is yet prevented from so applying his abilities as to be able to rely upon them. Everything that the proletarian can do to improve his position is but a drop in the ocean compared with the floods of varying chances to which he is exposed, over which he has not the slightest control....

From The Attitude of the Bourgeoisie Towards the Proletariat:

I have never seen a class so deeply demoralised, so incurably debased by selfishness, so corroded within, so incapable of progress, as the English bourgeoisie; and I mean by this, especially the bourgeoisie proper, particularly the Liberal, Corn Law repealing bourgeoisie. For it nothing exists in this world, except for the sake of money, itself not excluded. It knows no bliss save that of rapid gain, no pain save that of losing gold. In the presence of this avarice and lust of gain, it is not possible for a single human sentiment or opinion to remain untainted. True, these English bourgeois are good husbands and family men, and have all sorts of other private virtues, and appear, in ordinary intercourse, as decent and respectable as all other bourgeois; even in business they are better to deal with than the Germans; they do not higgle and haggle so much as our own pettifogging merchants; but how does this help matters? Ultimately it is self-interest, and especially money gain, which alone determines them....

From The Great Towns:

But the sacrifices which all this has cost become apparent later. After roaming the streets of the capital a day or two, making headway with difficulty through the human turmoil and the endless lines of vehicles, after visiting the slums of the metropolis, one realises for the first time that these Londoners have been forced to sacrifice the best qualities of their human nature, to bring to pass all the marvels of civilisation which crowd their city; that a hundred powers which slumbered within them have remained inactive, have been suppressed in order that a few might be developed more fully and multiply through union with those of others. The very turmoil of the streets has something repulsive, something against which human nature rebels. The hundreds of thousands of all classes and ranks crowding past each other, are they not all human beings with the same qualities and powers, and with the same interest in being happy? And have they not, in the end, to seek happiness in the same way, by the same means? And still they crowd by one another as though they had nothing in common, nothing to do with one another, and their only agreement is the tacit one, that each keep to his own side of the pavement, so as not to delay the opposing streams of the crowd, while it occurs to no man to honour another with so much as a glance. The brutal indifference, the unfeeling isolation of each in his private interest, becomes the more repellent and offensive, the more these individuals are crowded together, within a limited space. And, however much one may be aware that this isolation of the individual, this narrow self-seeking, is the fundamental principle of our society everywhere, it is nowhere so shamelessly barefaced, so self-conscious as just here in the crowding of the great city. The dissolution of mankind into monads, of which each one has a separate principle, the world of atoms, is here carried out to its utmost extreme.

Hence it comes, too, that the social war, the war of each against all, is here openly declared. Just as in Stirner's recent book, people regard each other only as useful objects; each exploits the other, and the end of it all is that the stronger treads the weaker under foot; and that the powerful few, the capitalists, seize everything for themselves, while to the weak many, the poor, scarcely a bare existence remains.

What is true of London, is true of Manchester, Birmingham, Leeds, is true of all great towns. Everywhere barbarous indifference, hard egotism on one hand, and nameless misery on the other, everywhere social warfare, every man's house in a state of siege, everywhere reciprocal plundering under the protection of the law, and all so shameless, so openly avowed that one shrinks before the consequences of our social state as they manifest themselves here undisguised, and can only wonder that the whole crazy fabric still hangs together.

Going back to old habits tonight… Looking through some old horror fiction by K.W. Jeter, a writer I used to read periodically about fifteen years ago. (I also hung out with him one time, in the fall of '93, because we had mutual acquaintances, but the meeting was inconsequential, since neither of us really had much to say – he'd said a lot more to me through his books.) Anyway, I did like some of Jeter’s books in the late '80s to early '90s and would say, even, that they were an influence. A little later in the '90s, apparently, he did some sellout work, writing novelizations of Star Wars, but when I think of K.W., that’s certainly not the sort of thing that comes to mind.

The book I’m quoting from below is In the Land of the Dead, published in 1989. Some people say it’s nice to read a good horror novel because it allows you an escape from the horrors of the real world. But often, in Jeter’s case, as you’ll see, the answer to that is – not really, because it gets right back to some of the things we’ve been talking about…

...Like those poor bastards on the long highways, in their beat-up old cars with every little scrap of stuff they had left to them, the farms' remnants of skillets and shovels, all piled in around their snot-nosed kids. And their wives, up front beside them, the anchors that had kept them locked down tight to a few acres of dust, where nothing had grown except the debt to the bank. Until they'd had to leave, like running out of a house on fire, getting out with just the clothes on their backs.

The men behind the wheels of those cars all had that half-crazy look, part of it their brains having started to shrink down from simple starvation so that they knocked on their brows like a fist inside the skull. And the other part of that look, like a scared animal in a trap, but smarter than that, just smart enough to know it's a trap, and the bit that was still a man, but just barely, even more scared because it's wondering if it's possible to stop being a man, to just...leave. Like the animal chewing off the foot that's caught in the trap and hobbling away leaving little bloody stump-prints on the ground. But still alive, still with sharp little teeth to get something into its empty belly. And a man goes crazy, just wondering if it's possible he could do that - just chew off the foot that kept him there, starving while he put food, what there was of it, in her mouth, in the children's mouths that always gaped wider and wider, like baby birds, with an unending, unfillable hunger that went on screaming at you while you spread yourself wider and wider, every nerve and muscle skinned into a net to keep the land in place but the wind kept blowing the dust away anyhow. And all the while the poor sonuvabitch knows what the tramps on the road know, what all the hungry men know, that a man can travel a lot farther on his own, he can get someplace where the land stays put and the fruit on the tree, even if it's another man's tree, you can bite into and fill your mouth with its juice. He could get there if he didn't have other mouths to feed, to drag along behind himself. He could just leave the foot in the trap, he could get along without it...he could make do. The way the tramps under the bridges do. And if that meant you'd be something different than what you were before, the way a three-legged animal's different from what it used to be, and maybe it would mean you wouldn't be a man anymore at all, but something else without a wife or children, just huddling with the others like you around a fire under a bridge, but still alive...hungry, always hungry, but alive...

That was how those old boys went crazy, Cooper knew, with their thoughts going all scramble inside their heads as they kept driving their loaded-up rattling cars down the highways, their eyes all red and itchy from staring at the lines in the road, trying to get someplace where they wouldn't have to think those crazy thoughts anymore. Watering down the milk for the children, until it was blue and so thin you could see through it, and resenting the nickel out of your dwindling poke of money that it'd cost, a shameful resentment that made you even crazier because you were ashamed of feeling it all...

I know of a few blogs now that have referred people to the list drawn up by John Scalzi at his blog Whatever, about Being Poor. I found out about it through Shawn Ewald's Public Humiliation. Below is a good chunk of that list, including a few items that I could certainly relate to at different times in my life (especially, unfortunately, during the past few years)...

Being poor is hoping the toothache goes away.

Being poor is relying on people who don't give a damn about you.

Being poor is a bathtub you have to empty into the toilet.

Being poor is an overnight shift under florescent lights.

Being poor is the police busting into the apartment right next to yours.

Being poor is deciding that it's all right to base a relationship on shelter.

Being poor is hoping the register lady will spot you the dime.

Being poor is getting tired of people wanting you to be grateful.

Being poor is knowing how hard it is to stop being poor.

Being poor is seeing how few options you have.

Being poor is running in place.

Being poor is people wondering why you didn't leave.

Go to Scalzi's site and see more of the list. Add a few lines of your own if you also happen to know what it's like to be poor, or even just almost poor. Then, send the list around to some of the "fuckbags" (to quote Shawn) who think they have the wisdom to preach "personal responsibility" to or about so many people who live in situations that they obviously can't even comprehend.

Despite typically atrocious corporate media coverage of the Katrina disaster, there is an abundance of better material to be found in the blogosphere and on the Internet. I think The Perfect Storm, at Chris Floyd's Empire Burlesque, sums things up pretty well (speaking of economy meets ecology...):

When unbridled commercial development of delicately balanced environments like the Mississippi Delta is bruited "at the table," whose voice is heard? Not the poor, who, as we have seen this week, will overwhelmingly bear the brunt of the overstressed environment. And not the middle class, who might opt for the security of safer, saner development policies to protect their hard-won homes and businesses. No, the only voice that matters is that of the developers themselves, and the elite investors who stand behind them....

The destruction of New Orleans was a work of nature - but a nature that has been worked upon by human hands and human policies. As global climate change continues its deadly symbiosis with unbridled commercial development for elite profit, we will see more such destruction, far more, on an even more devastating scale. As the harsh, aggressive militarism and brutal corporate ethos that Bush has injected into the mainstream of American society continues to spread its poison, we will see fewer and fewer resources available to nurture the common good. As the political process becomes more and more corrupt, ever more a creation of elite puppetmasters and their craven bagmen, we will see the poor and the weak and even the middle class driven further and further into the low ground of society, where every passing storm - economic, political, natural - will threaten their homes, their livelihoods, their
very existence.

The only objection I might have to the above statement is that it is not just Bush who's injected all this poison into "mainstream Amercian society." The editorial board of the World Socialist Web Site are a little more accurate when they state:

The storm that breached the levees of New Orleans has also revealed all of the horrific implications of 25 years' worth of uninterrupted social and political reaction. The real results of the destruction of essential social services, the dismantling of government agencies entrusted with alleviating poverty and coping with disasters, and the ceaseless nostrums about the "free market" magically resolving the problems of modern society have been exposed before millions.

And "Harry Looter" certainly gets it right over at Infoshop News when he writes:

In the midst of all of this pain and misery, the media and the authorities have decided that the central story now is the looting and "lawlessness" that are taking place around the city. The poor, mostly black, victims of Hurricane Katrina are being blamed for their response to the situation. Their logical response to having the homes and neighborhoods destroyed is understandable given that this disaster has been happening for a long time in their neighborhoods and lives. The ongoing disaster that they are reacting to is the catastrophe known as capitalism.