NEW RAP SONGS
Nature and Civilization
God's a thin concept
so absurd it's undignified to talk about it. But Mother Nature's
a heavy metaphor for something real. The personification is appropriate
and handy. It's mystical nonsense to say, "God is dead," but it
makes perfect sense to say that Mother Nature as goddess-in-chief
should be cautiously impeached in all civilized sectors of the
world.
All revolutionaries should understand
this. Civilization is a revolt against Mother Nature, a brutal,
nearly omnipotent bitch with no self suspicion and no mercy, whose
only agenda is survival through relentless reproduction and growth.
She's an anarchist, not a communist - a laissez-faire Social Darwinist
- the rightful mother of mean self-rightious capitalists who are
comically shocked by her while growing up in her distorted image.
They're her favorite children, but she'll eventually eat them
for stepping on her flowers. She's also the mother but jealous
antagonist of nature taming scientists and communists (the logical
architects of civilization). When they go too far, she'll eat
them, too.
When the seldom-right right stupidly
declares communism "too" ideal because it's against human nature,
they're for once partly right. Nothing is too ideal, but the barbarism
of the right does lie in their UNcurbed human nature; and civilization,
which is NOT barbaric, is UNnatural. I'm trying to clear up some
serious confusion here, because it's INconvenient that leftists
are confused and dishonest about what they ARE (or should be).
Rightists may HAVE TO BE confused
and dishonest to live comfortably with their bloody agenda. Their
confusion obscures their primitive purposes. A conveniently jungle-like
philosophical chaos is their rightful milieu, so though it seems
contradictory that Republicans wear shoes and live in houses and
covet high tech products while their rightful mother, Mother Nature,
lives barefoot and naked in a cave or tree, modern ways of killing
with bullets and bombs and the use of cunning contractual ambushes
to tear money from the throats of the weak exactly reflects their
mother's style. Taking baths, going to the theater and blubbering
about the plight of the poor while running for office shouldn't,
but hypocrisy and deceit do. When she finally smacks them down,
it will be for stealing from HER, not for being unlike her.
But leftists need a clearer view.
When they are cunningly told communism is "too" ideal (by those
who DON'T consider equality ideal), they should reply: "Good!
That's why I'm for it!" Living in houses, learning to read and
being vaccinated against disease ARE both ideal and unnatural.
A civilized community of neighbors living peacefully together
in modern, comfortable, pretty but equal little houses with easy-to-clean
tiled bathrooms and kitchens, each with a yard and a garden, all
working together in safe conditions, not competitively but as
participants in a rationally organized state, to produce and willingly
distribute the goods and services a good life requires - equally
- constitutes a rebellion against Mother Nature. It's not natural.
It's ideal.
Nature is a battlefield. Civilization
is a peaceful enclave. To keep that good and clear, Mother Nature
needs to be impeached in all civilized sectors of the world.
But there's a condition. Civilization
is UNnatural, but its raw materials and life breath are born from
and irrevocably tied to nature. So having been deposed as dictator
of the world, Mother Nature has to be reappointed Secretary of
the Jungle, where her savage and destructive tendencies are checked
and balanced and ultimately productive instead of fatal, as they
necessarily are to civilized enclaves. Seemingly paradoxically,
we need her natural products, but don't need either her or her
more natural human children running or subverting our civilized
clearings.
Civilization is impossible without
the jungle, which Mother Nature runs best. We can't live on a
naked rock planet. We need the green dynamically sustained and
balanced eco-system we came from and are psychologically part
of. Maybe we could survive in some ugly plastic way not yet invented,
but it's not necessary, because Mother Nature, bitch that she
is, is a good organizer of jungles. And her now unhealthy jungle,
which wasn't broken until we started fixing it, needs to be given
back the space to heal and flourish.
1. Civilization is an UNnatural aberration
that won't work unless the natural jungle is kept out of it's
clearings. 2. But too much civilized clearing is a threat to the
essential natural balance of the jungle that humans need as a
resource bank and esthetic backdrop.
Without letting in the lions and tigers,
our enclaves have to be jungle friendly. Mother Nature's domain
is flexible and can accomodate deserts and civilized enclaves
to a point, but the limit is set by the laws of physics and biology,
not by us. We have to keep the size and population of our own
domain well and safely below the limit, lest we anger Mother Nature
whose goddess power to eat us is not the first but the last law
of physics and nature.
We have the right to insist on civilization
and make any intrusions of nature including overly natural humans
behave themselves inside our enclaves. Our enclaves, to be civilized,
have to be unnaturally socialist and ultimately communist. To
escape Mother Nature's bloody "free"-for-all and achieve a civilized
life, humans must supress their natural piggishness and understand
why. Leftists, if they're to lead the way to the UNnatural ideal
of civilization, have to clear away their counter-productive chimeric
pseudo intellectual chaos of "you-know" democratic mysticism and
understand that civilization, being unnatural and prone to dissipation,
has to be organized in a different way from the natural jungle
from which it is hacked out.
A "sustainable"* clearing in the jungle
can't be a slob's encampment carelessly sprawling into and fucking
up the jungle around it. A "sustainable"* civilized enclave has
to stay an enclave, creatively flexible but clearly planned, constructed,
and maintained, its size and population permanently BOUNDED.
*The word sustainable is, for once, correctly used here.
There can be no such thing as the "sustainable growth" of a civilized
enclave.
-Glen Roberts
Talking Back
to Walter Scott
Breathes there a man
with brain so dead he never to himself has said, "Hey! If this
is my own, my native land, why the hell is all the land around
here owned and fenced off and posted NO TRESPASSING! by a few
rich people who call it their private property?"
-Glen Roberts
No,
I Don't Support The Troops
I support everyone's
right to good health and a good home, including the rights of vets
who've been used, broken and discarded sick and homeless by the
war industry. But as the "troops" of that war industry bombing
other people's homes and killing and crippling other
people they don't know in places they know nothing of for reasons
they don't understand, NO! I don't support them.
Of course, unlike thoroughly confused
bumper sticker Republicans and many of the "troops" themselves,
I don't imagine they're fighting their own war. They didn't declare
it and they're not banking the profits. It's no more their enterprise
than the United Fruit Company ever belonged to Guatemalan pickers
or California cannery workers. The taboo against NOT supporting
the troops is like taboos against disrespecting people's religion
or the "cultural integrity" of the poor. Religion is force fed to
the religious, picturesque poverty is dumped on slum dwellers, and
the war the troops fight ISN'T THEIRS.
Or mine either. If you think it's rude
to say so, I think it's stone stupid, when the one tenth of one
per cent insiders who own America, its oil, its banana plantations,
and its arms factories, bill you for their war ventures,
share their enemies with you and send your children to do their
fighting for them, to respond by saluting their flag without even
questioning why it was THEIR World TRADE Center -
their world corporate pyramid scheme headquarters (tragically with
a lot of innocent hired money-mill workers like you inside) that
was targeted by THEIR enemies. Maybe criticizing a victim's
willingness to be victimized is rude, but it's worse to cheer their
sacrifice or bless it with diplomatic silence.
That the always eaten dogs always support
the always top-dogs in all the dog-eat-dog systems and scams in
the world doesn't mean I have to applaud. Soldiers proud of fighting
for the rich are like wives who defend the husbands who beat them.
Their stupid pride in their black eyes and broken teeth doesn't
justify their abusers or them, either. I don't support suckers who
give their integrity to religious fakes or poor people who idolize
the rich. And I DON'T support the troops.
I'll support any troop who comes to
his senses and says NO! But I don't support hollow uniforms who
accept their "duty" to bully, torture, and kill as ordered. War
isn't always wrong, but when it's cynical and barbarous, the soldiers
who fight it are almost as indefensibly at fault as the government
they allow to misuse and waste them.
I'm sorry some people think they have
to take any job they can get. But I have to live in the uncivilized
world mass stupidity allows, so, while I'll reserve most of my anger
for the high priests of stupidity, greed, and war who blind them,
bind them, and tear out their hearts, I refuse to romanticize or
idealize or support the willing gullibility and cooperative self-abuse
of the victims.
-Glen Roberts
In The Green
Zone
Wise youth,
Since the
world ends each time anyone dies, the fact that the world at large
is virtually ending (since it's gone past saving) doesn't matter
to anyone but those who love their children and grandchildren and
to those who find the rotting phase unbearable.
. But it's a reality that affects the
importance and unimportance of how you live your life and how you
choose to consider, live with, or react to the pigs who've taken
control of the world and who are responsible for its death.
If you and I went to Iraq and looked
in some doors, we'd probably find it to be a good metaphor of what
all wise youth has to put up with. I think we'd find people who
keep going through the daily motions of pretending to participate
in the screaming, tailspinning charade that's all that passes for
civil life there just to collect their salaries, so that in the
spaces between the bombs and bullets they can keep the insides of
their homes clean and quiet and their gardens tended - pseudo citizens
with semi-civilized hide-outs.
Maybe, if we lived there, you could fit in better
than me. I couldn't join any crazy insurgents as brutal
as their invaders, but I'd probably be too angry to do anything
but throw away the rest of my life dodging bullets to distribute
vain propaganda urging intellectual revolt against the armed occupation.
Since you can't remember what I remember and are more used to being
boxed in, maybe you could adapt.
Here, too, to go on eating good meals,
drinking good wine, and getting what good you can from life in the
ruins (no individual having a broom big enough to sweep the stupid
self destructive capitalist system crowding the world it's already
ruined out of the way), you can't help having to go on wresting
some kind of perhaps disgraceful but expedient living out of the
mess.
But, hey, there's no dishonor in trying
to survive and I won't blame you for choosing to endure what you've
decided is a necessary measure of tedious participation. In a civilized
socialist state, any work would be honorable participation, doing
one's part to keep the system going - actually for everyone's benefit.
In a capitalist war-zone, since, to survive, participation is a
necessary evil, there's at least no dishonor. And if you know why
you're doing it, it can be done impersonally with your eyes and
ears and mouth mostly covered.
As a wise drudge, you take the Monopoly
money out of your pay envelope, leaving all the unread blather still
inside, mentally mark the envelope "return to sender" and drop it
into the recycle can on the way back to whatever living room your
drudgery buys. It's good to have work you can stand. It's probably
best to have a tedious civil service job that guarantees (for the
time being) the security of your refuge...
...even if it's in the green zone.
-Glen Roberts
For more NEW RAP SONGS
and other honest poems and outbursts, click
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NOTES TO NOWHERE
Popular philosophy
The left flies right
on Air America
This article isn't out of date. Air America may be gone. But
the so-called left in America is still flying rightward in the same
way as when I wrote this.
My problem with (just for example) the
Air Americans is that they call themselves progressives and they're
not. They are as stuck in their own spot on the runway of intellectual
flight as Republicans are stuck in the hangar. In fact, it's sometimes
hard to tell the difference. They are nowhere close to the left-hand
edge of left, as their co-opting of the progressive label implies.
Oh they say some great things on Air America, but they always
stop - short - at the Democratic Party limits.
The Air America squadron fire sometimes
straight and sometimes wildly at specific individuals that need
to be shot down and they expose specific shenanigans that should
be exposed, but they always treat their targets as aberrations;
they don't forthrightly renounce the system. Fragment after fragment,
"youknow" after "youknow," stuttering wildly yet always accurately
dodging the word capitalism, these hot-aerial acrobats fly
all around but never land on the obvious conclusion that ugly capitalism
is normal capitalism and business ownership of the country is the
logical end of "free" enterprise.
They protest on behalf of certain poor
people in certain newsworthy instances as the victims of certain
acts of cruelty or neglect that are obviously the regular, mathematically
necessary side effects of competitive "free" enterprise under Democrats
or Republicans, but, though they can pronounce the word poverty
and propose band-aid solutions in very specific contexts, they never
protest inequality, and they religiously fail to find poverty or
inequality systemic.
I once heard an Air America hostess
declare that what "we" want is to lift the poor into the middle
class, but how a bottomless class system is to be locked up without
taking the "freedom" out of "free" enterprise or why "we" want such
an obviously still unfair half class reshuffle she didn't explain.
I never heard any Air American support Kofi Annan's efforts to declare
inequality a human rights abuse, and I didn't expect to.
It's not (as the Republicans say about
Democrats) that they have no ideas, but, bold as they sound, like
Democrats with brassy voices, they seem afraid to carry their ideas
far enough leftward to legitimize them. And, like all Democrats
AND Republicans, they're far short of a full deck of ideas. They
occasionally mouth the words environment and ecology
as if reading them from someone else's notes; but they betray no
glimmer of understanding or concern about never-ending "free" enterprise
"development" as a catalyst of eco-collapse, and they certainly
can't pronounce overpopulation. They often sneer at Republican
religious stupidity, but they also often invoke Jesus, and they
sometimes even set political correctness aside and claim they're
better Christians. Exactly parallel to that, they damn the Republicans
for wrapping themselves in the flag, but they constantly wave the
same flag while unctuously and often proclaiming themselves better
patriots.
It would be too weird (or too obvious)
to call themselves better capitalists, so, in only blurred reference
to the economic dogfight that is the centerpiece of American life,
they curse only Republican pitbulls, demonizing the mean Republicans
with details, while sainting the nice Democratic bystanders by omission
of near duplicate details. Of course, that's no worse than should
be expected inside the actually general capitalist arena. "Free"
speech is often dishonest. What I'm talking about is the direction
and effect of their dishonesty, which is to confuse and co-opt what
little could-be-honest left is left in America by pretending to
be progressive.
They are NOT. They are as mainstream
as the Republicans. They reside fully within the mainstream religious
patriotic capitalist camp, which is divided between right wing Republicans
and centrist Democrats. There's no left in it. Democrats, after
all, range only from conservative to conservative liberal - i.e.
centrist. The Democrats have absorbed some surviving 60's liberals
and a meek mainstream version of 3 or 4 60's issues. But the truer
progressives of the 80's (who've been erased from both the main-stream
and somewhat alternative media's version of history), who were adamantly
to the left of liberal and almost consciously PROGRESSING, are now,
I suspect, a repressed nightmare of the post-1990 slightly liberal
centrists. I remember some 80's progressives talking about "working
from the inside," so maybe that's where they disappeared to. But
no Air American ever publicly remembers living in a shanty and sweating
with the poor to build anything in Central America or marching in
the streets to stymie Reagan's Nicaraguan invasion plans. Obviously,
if they were there, they've wiped U.S. progressive support of the
Sandinista revolution completely off their revised memory slates,
and I've never heard them support Cuba and I don't expect to.
You can verify what I'm saying about
Air America easily, but I could be talking about almost all the
known American so-called "left" since at least 1990, couldn't I?
My problem isn't just Air America. Air America is an example of
something that's gone very wrong with the entire American "left."
There are some young Americans in Venezuela now supporting Hugo
Chavez, a quantum leap past wringing one's hands for lost theocracy
in Tibet, but we don't hear much about them. The American "left,"
or the only part of the American "left" we regularly hear about,
has certainly turned right. So decisively that I am entertaining
a fantasy about it which, even though it seems a little on the far
side, I'm going to share with you.
In "Inside The Company," Philip Agee
told us the CIA so thoroughly infiltrated some South American leftist
student movements while he was there that CIA agents were both funding
and leading those movements. They could do that because a movement
needs supplies, transportation, facilities, refreshments, contacts,
and leaders with time and resources to be leaders. So the CIA was
literally paying their supposed enemies' piper and calling their
tune - a leftist tune, by the way, to facilitate U.S. and U.S. puppet
reaction.
Surely, something like that can happen
in America, too. Why wouldn't it happen? The right are wrong and
often stupid, but their topcats are also rich so they have to be
somewhat cunning, and they're certainly energetic, dedicated, unscrupulous
and insidious, and they won't stop at anything to keep their wealth
and power and, with their incredible wealth and power and their
own embedded media covering for them, they don't have to stop at
anything. The CIA stunt Agee described would be easier to pull off
on their own turf.
To get the attention and effectively
keep the attention of any significant part of a crowd of millions
takes some resources, and he who provides the resources sets the
agenda. Obviously, a few people decide who will lead and set the
agenda for both the Democrats and the Republicans. Obviously, the
same people realize they can't prevent a grassroots leftist movement
from existing (especially on college campuses) but that any grassroots
group is greatly influenced by apparent friends who know how to
raise money, who have the contacts to get them what little substantive
publicity they get, and who boldly take charge of them.
It's certainly true that the leadership
of the American "leftist" movement on the national level is now
restricted to an elite group, that individuals who go beyond that
group's agenda are marginalized or squashed or effectively unheard
of, and that the leadership, who certainly somehow have resources,
have co-opted and are constantly, energetically (insidiously? cunningly?)
rigidly defining and limiting the American "leftist" agenda to the
politically correct. I think the main main-stream "left" today (not
just Air America) have popularized a nice, safe box that the insidious,
cunning, rich, resourceful right themselves might like to keep the
"leftists" in.
If that seems to me to be happening,
and if the rich right could and would like to make it happen to
keep the main-stream "left" toothless and nonthreatening to their
wealth and power, then why not assume it is happening? After all,
WHAT obviously very irresistible influence keeps the mainstream
"left" from ever promoting atheism (or even logic) or communism
(or even socialism - or even equality) or a one-world state or a
human population and encampment reduced to and kept at a size that
can subsist off the ecosystem without crushing it? WHO so pervasively
and successfully instead dreams up and promotes the conveniently
vague, nongrammatical, and development friendly liberal babble about
"sustaining" development and growth and proliferating high-density
housing?
It's easy and maybe it's valid to tie
the main-stream "left's" lameness to philosophical cowardice, to
human genetic limitations, to the brain-tangle bound to result from
a chimeric alliance of mismated movements, to the inevitable over
involvement of confused youth, to the fatal effect of religiously
democratic chaos on intelligent organization. Maybe all of that
is the best explanation. Maybe the American left just scared themselves
so badly in the 80's and were so embarrassed by the one-two punch
of the fall of the Eastern Bloc and the 1990 Nicaraguan elections
that they haven't yet gotten over it.
There's no maybe about that last
sentence. I suspect some post-1990 now centrist "liberals" reluctantly
following me this far may have involuntarily shivered when they
read it. But the humiliation and apparently brain-shrinking trauma
of being smacked down and trampled when "the people" of Nicaragua
they'd thought they were helping suddenly stampeded right back over
them into the darkness didn't just happen. The effectiveness of
childhood brain-binding and a steady diet of mainstream media propaganda
for life set them up. That's a given. And it would only amount to
a continuation and refinement of that given if there were and are
equally cynical infiltrators at work now. Right?
Actually, there probably are. This is
a principal that supposedly always guides good investigative journalists:
there may not have to be, but there probably are because there could
be and because any cunning plan I can think of, somebody else can
think of and execute. The motive, the means, and the will exist,
so the end probably exists. If I had the computer skills of a Cecil
Adams, maybe I could dig up the evidence. But whether or not I could
prove that right wing moles have taken over and now run the left,
and whether or not it's true, it might as well be.
As for Air America, it may just be an
unusually aggressive and profane main-stream Democratic Party voice
that falsely calls itself "progressive" because it really doesn't
know the difference. But, whether unfortunately or insidiously,
it walks, quacks, and looks exactly like a right-wing mole luring
naive youth looking for actually leftist causes down a virtual mole
hole, so it might as well be a right wing mole.
And the same is true of most of the
post 1990 leadership of the lame American left. In fact, the left
has always been healthier outside U.S. borders, especially south
of the Rio Bravo, especially, ironically, now. Cuba exists, after
all, and is regarded as a beacon in every Latin American and European
country I've been in. Why are Americans never told that by their
own so-called left? Why have the elections of a series of potentially
socialist presidents in Latin America not even cast a shadow on
the agenda of Air America (or The Nation) or the (merely) liberal
Democratic dialogue in America? If I was in Howard Dean's shoes,
my platform would be to join the UN and the new Latin American "Axis
of Good," phase out the military, start treating the arms industry
like the tobacco industry, promote much more aggressive and comprehensive
world-wide strategies than the Kyoto Accord to try to restore the
ecosystem (global warming is NOT the only problem), end the Cuban
embargo and join Hugo Chavez (the kind of leftist leader America
needs) in subsidizing the Cuban experiment to help perfect a socialist
model the whole world can emulate.
If that sounds too radical, excuse me.
It's just the way we progressives talk. Come on, Air America! Take
off! Straighten up and fly left. You won't see Jesus sitting on
a cloud, but you'll get a better view of the complete absence of
lines running across the ground or through the Air between America
and the World.
-Glen Roberts |
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