#largely because colonialism truly raped those islands

[forestkodama]

For those reading along, if you value the amazing plant diversity that evolved in your geological area and are found no where else, please consider supporting the conservation efforts that keep land out of the real estate developers, the massive efforts needed to manage those land to keep populations safe, and the organizations that preserve, propogate, catologue, and educate about endemic plants. These organizations can be any level of government and public or private non-profits. Some are easily found, like native plant societies, while others can be a little obscure (like here in Virginia, The Clifton Institute just received a huge grant to research and propogate native plant seeds for public use). Even just purchasing a yearly pass through a state department that manages public land is telling the agencies that you value those lands and what is growing in them. Donate time and/or money (weeding is HUGELY cathartic). Support Indigenous people's efforts to get their lands back: Their land management strategies are far more holistic compared to that of the average property owner (and its the right thing to do vis a vis the treaties). Search around for other hidden gems. The southern states (i.e. Alabama, Mississippii, Lousiana, etc.) have a MASSIVE amount of biodiversity. The area has been called the Amazon of North America. Visit and support the lands conserved there. Did you know we have glow worms like the famous ones in the caves of New Zealand? Check out Dismals Canyon, where they glow along the paths (and learn about more atrocities commitied against Native Americans whilst there). In New Hampshire there is a non-profit solely dedicated to educating people about the wonderful diversity of native caterpillars you can find in our wild spaces. We have so many amazing forms of life not far from our backyards that our society takes for granted, and you can help bring them back.

I want to make people see how much has been taken away from them.

Did you know that there are dozens of species of fireflies, and some of them light up with a blue glow? Did you know about the moths? There are thousands of them, bright pink and raspberry orange and checkerboard and emerald. They are called things like Black-Etched Prominent, Purple Fairy, Pink-Legged Tiger, Small Mossy Glyph and Black-Bordered Lemon.

Did you know that there are moths that feed on lichens? Did you know about the blue and green bees? The rainbow-colored dogbane beetles? Your streams are supposed to teem with newts, salamanders, crawdads, frogs, and fishes. I want to take you by the hand and show you an animal you've never seen before, and say, "This exists! It's real! It's alive!"

There are secret wildflowers that no website will show you and that no list entitled "native species to attract butterflies!" will name. Every day I'm at work I see a new plant I didn't know existed.

The purple coneflowers and prairie blazing star are a tidepool, a puddle, and there is an ocean out there. There are wildflowers that only grow in a few specific counties in a single state in the United States, there are plants that are evolved specifically to live underneath the drip line of a dolomite cliff or on the border of a glade of exposed limestone bedrock. Did you know that different species of moss grow on the sides of a boulder vs. on top of it?

There are obscure trees you might have never seen—Sourwood, Yellowwood, Overcup Oak, Ninebark, Mountain Stewartia, Striped Maple, American Hophornbeam, Rusty Blackhaw, Kentucky Coffeetree. There are edible fruits you've never even heard of.

And it is so scary and sad that so many people live and work in environments where most of these wondrous living things have been locally extirpated.

There are vast tracts of suburb and town and city and barren pasture where a person could plausibly never learn of the existence of the vast majority of their native plants and animals, where a person might never imagine just how many there are, because they've only ever been exposed to the tiny handful of living things that can survive in a suburb and they have no reason to extrapolate that there are ten thousand more that no one is talking about.

It's like being a fish that has lived its whole life in a bucket, with no way of imagining the ocean. The insects in your field guide are a fraction of those that exist, of all the native plants to your area only a handful can be bought in a nursery.

Welcome to the Earth! It's beautiful! It's full of life! More things are real and beautiful and alive than a single person could imagine!!!

[arlingtonpark]

SNK Chapter 101 Review

I think I finally get how best to describe the events of this whole attack: this was Marley’s Pearl Harbor.

The historical event needs no introduction:

“December 7th, 1941 — a date which will live in infamy — the United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked by naval and air forces of the Empire of Japan.” –President Franklin Roosevelt, 12/8/1941

Following escalating tensions between Japan and the United States, the former country launched what was effectively a surprise attack on the headquarters of the Pacific branch of the US Navy, Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. Over 2,000 people were killed, 8 battleships were sunk or damaged, 3 cruisers and 3 destroyers were damaged, and over 180 aircraft were destroyed.

In this chapter, we see something similar. A surprise attack and seemingly major losses to the aggresse. Marley’s leader, Willy Tybur, is dead and so is most of the country’s military leadership. It’s possible that Reiner is dead, which means the Armored Titan is effectively out of commission and the War Hammer Titan may be as well. Marley only has the Jaw, Cart and Beast Titans ready and willing to fight, and that’s not counting Zeke’s likely duplicity.

Following the Pearl Harbor attack, Japan spread out across the Pacific, conquering many key islands, including the resource rich Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia), Southeast Asia, and bringing large swathes of ocean under their control. By the time the US was back on its feet, Japan had done all they could to prepare for the war.

And yet, they lost that war.

You may be surprised to learn that Isoroku Yamamoto, the mastermind behind the attack, was personally opposed to war with the United States because he knew that if Japan got in to a war with the US, they would lose. The US, in Yamamoto’s calculation, simply had more manpower and more resources then Japan did. Thus, the American military machine could outlast the Japanese one. Always buy American.

Paradis cannot win a war with Marley.

They just can’t. It’s impossible. Paradis is just an island and that necessarily means limited resources. Add to that the fact that they’ve been mired in a technological dark age until all of 4-5 years ago, and the only logical conclusion is that war with Marley means, in the end, that Paradis, along with everyone on it, will be wiped off the face of the Earth.

Paradis is but a small island with limited resources.

Japan is but a small island with limited resources.

That’s actually what Japan’s ultimate goal was, the reason why they went to war in the first place. Japan is lacking in many key resources, they don’t even have much in the way of farmland. Japan being a modern, major power is predicated on access to resources they do not have, resources they need to import.

This is why Japan is a loyal ally to the US today: the US Navy patrols and guarantee’s the safety of the high seas, which in turn facilitates the global trade Japan relies on to fuel its economy.

Japan’s goal in fighting World War II was to create a “Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere.” This sphere was basically a colonial empire, but less so than the European ones. Countries such as Thailand and Burma (now Myanmar) would, along with Japan, would remain independent, but would become part of a sort of bizarro European Union. Japan would lead the Co-Prosperity Sphere and all the other nations would defer to them. The economic relationship between Japan and the other countries would also be colonial in nature, with resources being extracted from the colonies member nations and funneled to Japan proper.

The Pearl Harbor attack was supposed to buy time. By crippling the American fleet, the hope was to quickly spread out and conquer strategic locations, both to obtain resources and to serve as outposts/fortifications that would deter the US from prosecuting a war. In essence, they would turn the whole of the western half of the Pacific in to a fortress.

Where Japan miscalculated was in underestimating American resolve and overestimating their own ability to implement this “fortress pacific” plan of theirs.

This brings us back to Paradis. Japan fought because it recognized its shortcomings and accepted war as a path to addressing those shortcomings. To that end, they formulated a plan with the Pearl Harbor attack being but one step in that plan. In other words, they had a bigger picture in mind.

So what’s the bigger picture here? What’s the plan?

And no, “protecting Paradis from the world” doesn’t count as a plan. That is an idea, not a plan that can be executed.

So, you want to attack a military target in a country you are not at war with yet? Okay, then what? Easy: spread out, conquer islands, and dig in for war. Make them see how costly war will be so they give up without a fight.

So, you want to attack the leadership of your enemy in a public venue crowded with innocent civilians and neutral foreign dignitaries? Okay, then what? Uhhhhh

Because of Eren’s attack, Paradis has the intiative, but because of an obvious lack of resources and because this attack was obviously not coordinated with the Paradisian government itself, this will be an opportunity squandered.

Marley will regroup, and they, with the world’s blessing, will destroy Paradis Island.

So, Eren was acting solo this whole time, wasn’t he? If that’s the case we can sidestep the question of whether this is an act of preemptive war or preventive war altogether.

It’s murder, plain and simple.

Eren is not acting as an agent of Paradis. Thus, his actions are not covered by the excuse that “it’s war.” He’s acting in the capacity of a private citizen. Human life is sacred. It can only be extinguished in some very specific circumstances. This is not one of them.

Even if he were an agent of Paradis here, that still does not excuse what he did to that apartment building. The taking of hostages, the arbitrary destruction of human life and civilian property, these are war crimes in our world.

What is the point of all this?

“He’s doing this for the freedom of himself and his people.”

He’s not fighting for freedom. I see that get thrown around a lot, but it’s not true. Eren is fighting for #freedom, the similar, though subtly different, perversion of actual freedom.

Freedom means to be able to do as one pleases without hindrance. Note, though, that there are some problems with this.

“Do as one pleases without hindrance.” Like murder, rape, and assault. Stealing your food because it would benefit me, siphoning off gas from your car so I can sell it, etc. You get what I’m saying here?

Freedom != moral and a lack of freedom != immoral. I cannot kill you, that is a hindrance on my freedom, but it is not an unjustified hindrance.

In fact, in some ways, freedom is contradictory. Guaranteeing my freedom from harm necessarily means curtailing your freedom to cause harm.

The point I’m trying to make here is that “freedom” is not an end in itself. That Eren thinks that it is reveals his world view for what it truly is: shallow, vapid, thoughtless, stupid, and childish.

This is what separates adults from children. Adults act for reasons. Adults fight for freedom because they want to use that freedom, or because that freedom is a right they are entitled to. Children act based on emotions. Children fight for freedom because “F!@k yeah, freedom!”

It’s #freedom, not actual freedom. One is an emotion, the other is a means to an end.

Freedom does not justify itself, rights justify themselves.

Rights like the right to self-determination, the right to freedom from harm, the right to life, these are what (maybe) justify Eren’s mission, not some stupid appeal to the vague notion of freedom. The fact that he himself does not realize this is an indictment of his own immature way of thinking.

I suppose there’s nothing more to talk about here.

The War Hammer Titan has a very unorthodox design, but it’s grown on me since I first saw it. You could say it’s pretty slick.

The new designs for the Survey Corps, however, haven’t (yet). That shot of Mikasa standing by Eren, the one where we get the first full body view of the new uniform, looks like something out of a 90s dystopian sci-fi movie. And that shot of the Corps running past Magath and his men on the roof looks like something out of a video game that also has a sci-fi dystopian setting.

Why? It’s completely out of nowhere. They look like they just arrived fresh out of Mad Max, and it makes no sense.

Unless Zackley actually is in charge…

[clubofinfo]

Expert: I don’t live in the U.S. any longer. I did, for over forty years, but left for good almost twenty years ago. But I return, often, and I even returned and stayed for a year. I returned again this last week as an invitee of the Buffalo/Niagara Falls Film Festival (more on that below). So, I wanted to talk about the America I found this time through. I changed planes in Washington D.C., at Dulles Airport (yes, named after cold war reactionary John Foster Dulles). I could not but think of that fascist loving arch elitist and racist as I sat there for an interminable few hours. I had a delayed connection to Buffalo. The first thing that strikes one, especially after having just left Gardermoen Airport, Oslo, and Copehagen’s Kastrup airport – both of which, along with Amsterdam’s Schipol airport, are maybe among the easiest and least stressful to use in the world – is the noise and sense of agitation. And what one notices right off, while still in Kastrup, is that the gate for the flight to Dulles is separate from the rest of the gates serving the international terminal. Flights to the U.S. have double the number of security personnel and are quite simply isolated. You are asked to submit to additional searches and are required to fill out additional forms — for what reason is anyone’s guess since as far as I can determine none of the forms are actually used for anything. Anyway, that was OK, I had my triple espresso and chocolate. Kastrup must have even better food than Schiphol. Once on the plane I had a nice young Swede in the seat next to me, a student from Ingmar Bergman’s birthplace island of Faro. The food was dreadful, of course. And I was struck, and this was to become a theme for this journey, with the insane and even delusional amount of packaging that is used. EVERYTHING is wrapped in plastic. In fact, plastic spoons and forks are wrapped in plastic. Plastic wraps plastic wraps plastic. And inside is stale preservative and sugar laden food, designed for long shelf life, and which closely resembles and tastes like…plastic. Landing means security. You must scan your own passport at Dulles. Why? I don’t know. You have to go talk to a passport control officer anyway. Then if you have connecting flights you are funneled into another line, in a hot terminal annex, and scanned again. For me it was the third scan in 12 hours — and I had never left the airports.  But then they ran out of plastic tubs and asked we just shove all our iPhones and what not into our carry on bags. And shove them all through the scanner. The young woman at the monitor wasn’t looking at the screen as the bags passed so none of any of this mattered in the least. It was a strange dysfunctional bit of security kabuki. Then more waiting. Only at Dulles you can’t get good food. You can’t get good coffee. You do get a lot of noise, though. Gardermoen is tomb-like in comparison with American airports. But there is another aspect to this. It is true that those rather almost obscenely pleasant Scandinavian airports are servicing a very affluent clientele. U.S. air travel is too, really, only the U.S. today feels increasingly polarized. First class is separate. You actually never see them. They are in lounges provided by the airlines of choice. Business class seems to mean 21st century Wily Lomans. No, it is first class and the rest of us. And the rest are subjected to an increasing battery of security abuses. Take off your shoes? Why? Because one simpleminded patsy tried to ignite his Nikes? ONE GUY? That’s it?? I saw old ladies have to, with some embarrassment, take off their shoes. And then there is the increasingly visible racism of the U.S. I watched when black or Arab workers carried bags or moved carts. I saw so many of those put upon white faces tighten ever so slightly. The animosity is in the air. On the TVs, and there are TVs everywhere in the U.S. Large screens EVERYWHERE. It is the only thing more common than cops. And on TV were endless photos of North Korea and the ‘Rocket Man’, or there were football games. One or the other. Jesus, but football is popular. And there is no other sport in the U.S. as saturated in jingoistic pro war rhetoric and symbol. And I am reminded that this is a game proven to cause irreparable brain damage. That said the, perhaps, hidden dialectic in this most militaristic of sports is the Kaepernick protests, which have spread. Sports always contain within it a kind of potential for such synthesis of contradiction (see Dave Zirin’s recent writing). So mostly the comments one overheard were about football. Or about how fed up people were with that Kim Jung whatshisname…hell, get rid of that fucker. Trump speaking of Nambia. An imaginary country that exists in that private colonial map in his mind. And then, a group of young Christians sat down near me at the gate. They seemed to be focused on ‘the holy spirit’. ‘Oh man’, one girl said, loudly, ‘I felt the holy spirit today’. I could feel it all day, she said, rather too loudly. I looked at her. She was blond, refried, maybe in her late twenties, and wore spandex pants and Rebok trainers and a blue t shirt with some other athletic brand name scrawled across the front of it. She was loud. Oh, and she kept eating M&Ms. A family from maybe India or Bangladesh walked past. They were tired, and had young children. Holy Spirit’s face darkened. She kept speaking on her phone but her voice lowered. The people I saw — those Americans — were all angry, just like the holy spirit girl. Nobody seemed happy. Nobody read. I was reading …Emmanuel Carrere’s bio of Philip K. Dick. A sort of perfect book for 7 hours spent at Dulles. I sat there as Carrere described Dick’s interpretations of Master Eickert’s idios kosmos. Dick battled periods of extreme paranoia. A giant black face in the clouds that watched him. Eventually he simply stopped looking up. I knew the feeling. It was the Dulles domestic terminal. Suddenly everyone felt like an alien, a robotic imposter. A hologram. Deplanning, as they say, in Buffalo, at midnight, is an odd and slightly unsettling experience. Walking down the long corridor to baggage claim I was reading the ads on the walls. One newer one advertised “Aesthetic Vaginal Surgery”, with two Indian doctors in pastel shirts, gold watches, and oddly colored brown suits. Across from them was an ad for “Divorce Lawyer: Legal Assistance, effective and compassionate”. The woman lawyer looked neither, but then looks can be deceiving. Many advertisements for sports, football or hockey. I got to Niagara Falls late. I checked into the franchise hotel reserved for me. In the morning I had awful hotel eggs and toast. The waitress, a sort of late 40s version of the holy spirit girl, spoke in a Marlboro rasp, and asked THREE times did I want bacon or sausage. I said neither, three times. Just eggs. I was already suspect. Around me, without exception, were morbidly obese Americans. Two men wore their cowboy hats on inside while they ate. A younger guy had his hockey stick with him (in its case, mind you) and everyone ate from the all you can eat buffet. It was very popular it seemed. Most of these people came for the Indian Casino (sic) down the block, next to the falls. It is a massive casino. Everything is a franchise. And the food. Again, the food. No wonder America is so miserable. Look at how they eat. It is truly appalling. Niagara Falls, itself, is a wonder, and yet surrounding it is the usual assortment of souvenir shops and fast food vendors. There was a “Daredevil Musuem”, but it had gone out of business. Too bad, I might have enjoyed that bit of American kitsch. The  tourist experience is one of absolute horror. I cannot find the words to describe just how spiritually nullifying the spectacle has become. Walk into those souvenir stores and very little is newly produced. All of it is, of course, made overseas. The faces of those working in these shops are portraits of depression. This is the white under-class, the part-time workers and long-term unemployed. They smoke and they are angry. They are ‘right-on-the-edge’. They have crawled out on that psychic ledge and there is no more space and there is no going back. Nobody even pretends to give a shit. Buy a Niagara Falls t shirt, buy a genuine Native American maple syrup figurine, or fucking don’t. We don’t care. Buffalo and Niagara Falls and Cattaraugus taken together is around a million people. The mean average income is half that of New York state overall. The house value is one fifth of New York overall. In other words if you own a home in Buffalo, you can’t give it away. Ancesteral lineage is mostly German and Polish and Irish. There is a sizable Indian and south Asian community, and quite a few recent emigres from Africa. The average age is slightly younger than NYC. There were forty murders in Buffalo last year, down slightly from the previous two years. Rape was up slightly. There is also the Niagara Falls Culinary Institute, which, judging from the photos out front, turns out steam table chefs for the big hotels. Cheerios are manufactured here. Archer Midlands Daniels runs a huge flour factory and it is home to the National Buffalo Wings festival and competition. Once upon a time, Buffalo was a reasonably rich city. And there remain a few of those great Queen Anne revival buildings that are often found in the major cities of the rust belt. The Richardson Olmstead Complex (architect Harry Hobson Richardson, who worked with famed landscape designer Frederik Olmstead, who created Central Park and Golden Gate Park) to create a still rather wonderful neo-Romaneque brick and sandstone mental hospital built in 1862. Beyond that the city is dotted with old turn of the 20th century gilded age (well, the first gilded age) houses, originally the grand homes of the leading industrialists of the time, or the homes of the managers of the factories of those industrialists. But that was all long ago. Buffalo is a microcosim. A micro-ecology, both psychologically and economically, and culturally for the entirety of the U.S. Tourism is driven by notions no longer believed in; the idea of recreation and family vacations. Nobody can afford that. Leisure was always modeled after work. An extension of work. A kind of faux work time. Adrono wrote of leisure: According to the prevailing work ethic, time free of work should be utilized for the recreation of expended labor power. For Adorno, the repetitive nature of alienated labor created a tendency to reproduce that repetitive boredom during times of leisure. And boredom, as he noted, was a sign of objective dullness. And that in turn linked to “political apathy”. Tourism is for the Japanese and the Germans today. Americans go to the Casino. I stood in line at Starbucks, across from the casino, and a young American pair came in. She was maybe thirty but dressed twenty. Halter and cleavage and long tanned legs. Very aerobasized, and he was buffed with a tight t shirt and baseball cap worn backwards. He was lean and athletic but he had that odd graceless gait of the gymnasium body. His face was handsome, chiseled and yet he looked terrified. Of what I do not know. His future or lack of it I suspect. And she radiated desperation. Both were anxious, nervous, and like the two pack a day souvenir vendors, they found themselves out on that ledge. So many white Americans, working class, have taken on a kind of furtive look. The backdrop of the Falls is pure allegory. The rising mist and the 20 bucks a pop boat rides (barely surviving one suspects) feel bereft of energy. Nobody seems to believe what is going on. The natural beauty of the Falls is now surrounded by massive tourist enterprises and commercialism. In a society of mass surveillance, knowing that you are being watched makes you reasonable AND paranoid. A society in which all movements are infiltrated to an almost impossible to imagine degree, the real becomes a fluid concept. Are my emails monitored? Does it matter? In an age when police can and do manufacture evidence, what need is there for monitoring emails or phone conversations? They can just as easily, more easily, make them up. Pilger wrote recently of his visits to the U.S. : Returning to the US, I am struck by the silence and the absence of an opposition – on the streets, in journalism and the arts, as if dissent once tolerated in the “mainstream” has regressed to a dissidence: a metaphoric underground.  There is plenty of sound and fury at Trump the odious one, the “fascist”, but almost none at Trump the symptom and caricature of an enduring system of conquest and extremism. Pilger also noted…. When Donald Trump addressed the United Nations on 19 September – a body established to spare humanity the “scourge of war” – he declared he was “ready, willing and able” to “totally destroy” North Korea and its 25 million people. His audience gasped, but Trump’s language was not unusual. His rival for the presidency, Hillary Clinton, had boasted she was prepared to “totally obliterate” Iran, a nation of more than 80 million people. This is the American Way; only the euphemisms are missing now. The problem with the fixation on Trump, which seems intentional on the part of corporate media, is that it trivializes the crimes of previous administrations. When walking around Niagara Falls and Buffalo I sense that almost all of my fellow citizens no longer believe what they hear, but they also are so terrified of voicing any dissent that they mostly nod in mute agreement. And this is partly about education. The default position for most Americans is one that has been shaped by Hollywood. And this week Rob Reiner announced the formation of something called The Committee to Investigate Russia, on whose board sit prominent neo cons and various reactionary commentators like Max Boot and Molly McKew (former advisor to Mikheil Saakashvili). McKew is sort of the liberals answer to Nikki Haley. A sprung frothing fringe lunatic, in other words. Also David Frum, longstanding arch conservative and supporter, last election, of Hillary Clinton. The now well known Morgan Freemann video was a piece of pure calculated propaganda. And this is why so many Americans feel it best to just keep silent. They haven’t even the beginnings of basic knowledge on these topics to formulate an opinion. There has been a four decade program of keeping the populace uninformed.But Freeman’s text sounds like a Hollywood movie; hell, he even uses screenplay metaphors, so in many places it will be very effective. Cutting across this, however, are a couple of other currents. One is the deeply entrenched and internalized racism of white America. Racism is like an encrusted psychic carbuncle on the collective soul of white culture. Having Morgan Freeman take the token torch from Colin Powell is perfectly predictable. Obama had already done it anyway. The racism of white America has learned to compartmentalize certain *special* black celebrities, often sports figures, while retaining a thoroughly white supremacist belief system. Then there is the other deeply entrenched adoration of militarism. This month also saw the nakedly revisionist Ken Burns documentary on the Vietnam War. These are grotesque projects of disinformation. But if all you know of the world is what you glean from Hollywood, then most of this will seem quite reasonable and sincere. It is worth noting, too, that Snopes took issue with any criticism of the Committee to Investigate Russia. I digress, but its really well past time to stop referencing Snopes as an impartial observer of anything. Buffalo is like much of the U.S. today. Unemployment is acute, as is poverty. Certain stats jump out at you, like 76% of disabled people live below the Poverty line in western New York state. Numbers mean nothing in unemployment, though, because the long term unemployed are simply not counted. All you have to do is walk around. There is an overriding sense of futility in American society today. And one feels it in a visceral manner when returning here. The looks, the suspicion, the anger. Maybe it is because I live in Norway, but the sense of anger in America feels overwhelming. But so does the sense of smug entitlement. On the long plane ride from Copenhagen to Washington D.C. I read but took some time off to look at a few minutes from various films on offer. A remake of Baywatch, something or other with the insufferable Scarlett Johanson, and, well, it hardly matters because all of it is steeped in self congratulation. And it is all profoundly out of touch with American society. I often wish my remaining friends in the U.S. would just leave. I have certainly never regretted it. It is hard to really understand the ways in which privilege is expressed by mass culture when one lives inside it. The constant onslaught of propaganda, of this unreality, takes a toll. It seeps into your consciousness.  It inhabits your grammar and speech and vision. The sound of U.S. society today is blatantly exceptionalist. WE are the best, the most special, unique, and the world follows our lead. People believe this. White America in particular seems to have collectively regressed. There are pockets, obviously, that are outside of this. But too few. And the cocoon of exceptionalism extends to travel, too. A vacation to some tourist resort means you haven’t really left the U.S. There is a sense, really, of a schizophrenic state existing at large. A collective shrinking of basic emotions and feeling. I met some very nice folks in Buffalo, of course. That is really not the point. Even nice (sic) people will feel they have to kill you if its for your own good. Or their own good. Philip K. Dick spent his life fixated on the details of daily life being or seeming to be slightly out of order, slightly askew. He sensed unreality where everyone said reality. He knew the man behind the curtain only hid more curtains and more men. Dick was not a political thinker. His vision of western society was instinctual, anarchic, and personal. For to him the personal was inextricably bound to the collective. He understood that fascism’s first goal is to change the past. He knew the future was not the real goal, only the past. For the past would foretell the future. This is the insight of the paranoid schizophrenic. To understand the New Cold War emerging today, it is necessary to reexamine the original conflict between the United States and the USSR. The present Russia panic follows an entire century of fearmongering and “threat inflation,” dating to the Russian Revolution, that has long served the interests of the U.S. military-industrial complex and security state. It has had little to do with either Russian or American realities, which have been consistently distorted. — Jeremy Kurzmarmov and John Marciano, “The Russians are Coming Again”, Monthly Review, 2017. It is ironic that the only actual cyber attack against a sovereign nation was one launched by the U.S. against Iran in 2008. Which fact is simply *not remembered* by media today. Instead the new security state is amping up rhetoric about Russia which they know is untrue. But what must be remembered here is firstly, the defense industry and U.S. military win even when they lose. Winning is not a hard fact. It is a loose concept. Sustaining budgets, or increasing them, is the first and only goal. And two, psychologically the ruling class is no less desperate and irrational and repressed than the underclass. It is only that Hollywood and corporate telecoms and places such as Clear Channel…that entire apparatus…they control message and they work very hard to reform the past. Jim Mattis and RC McMaster, and Stanley McChrystal…the entire cabal of white male generals were likely moved in to surround Trump once his fundamental incompetence was made clear. They are militarists, and Mattis was the architect of Falujah, and *earned* his nickname. Kelly and McMaster serve as guard dogs, and protectors of the Pentagon agenda. They seem cool, articulate, and the media adore them. Liberals fawn over them. Literally salivate and grovel in adoration. For the most pernicious and most indelible trope in contemporary America is that of military virtue and goodness. The square jawed buzz cut man of action. And in truth, compared to Trump and his family, they ARE efficient. It’s just that efficiency almost certainly serves the metasticizing of western capital to all corners of the globe, and to the protection of US global interests. If you want to know exactly how distracted from material reality most people are, ask a stranger directions somewhere. I can almost guarantee you will get wrong directions, or more likely still, get non directions. People have in general lost the capacity to organize their thoughts into sentences that convey specific material items or instructions. I had to find the theatre for this film festival. I chose to walk. A ten mile walk. Long but not crazy long. I like walking. But asking the man behind the counter at the hotel proved an exercise in futility. The walk was fine, hot, and as it turned out it took me directly through the shuttered refineries of Love Canal. I started this journey to New York by having an airport hotel not make a wake up call. I missed the flight. The young man who *didn’t* make the call had that deer in the headlights glazed look. He made little eye contact. In New York the slightly older young man simply had no words. He tried and finally printed out a google map…which turned out to be wrong…but whatever. The point is that a majority of American citizens cannot tell you how to get from here to there. Literally, I mean, literally they do not have a large enough vocabulary to explain directions nor to describe landmarks. The screen addictions of contemporary western society is related to this degrading of vocabulary and speech. On this trip, besides plastic wrap, the most significant repeated image is that of people staring down at their smart phones. Walking, not walking, wherever, whatever time, most people are addictively punching out simplistic abbreviated messages. The amount of face time today is drastically reduced. I have read no study or any figures, but again, just go outside and walk around. And people have begun to speak as they text. In short non grammatical half sentences. Texting is not really more than simple coded expressions for generic subject positions. Complex science cannot be texted, and there is no poetics associated with it. The rise, over very recent years, of emojis is another sign of how alienated the culture has become. This has been my experience in the U.S. And while its true in Europe too, it is not nearly true to the same degree. Matt Taibbi in Rolling Stone wrote of Trump: Trump has not only completely lost his sense of humor, particularly about himself, but he’s a lingual mess. In his current dread of polysyllables – his favorite words include “I,” “Trump,” “very,” “money” and “China” – he makes George W. Bush sound like Vladimir Nabokov. On the page, transcripts of his speaking appearances often look like complete gibberish. “When I did this now I said, I probably, maybe will confuse people, maybe I’ll expand that,” he said to Lester Holt in May, “you know, I’ll lengthen the time because it should be over with, in my opinion.”  He also can barely speak anymore, but without a close-up examination it’s impossible to say if this is a neurological problem or just being typically American. As the psychologist Michaelis puts it, one major cause for loss of cognitive function is giving up reading in favor of TV or the Internet, which is basically most people in this country these days. The multiplicity theme applied to internet users (from mainstream popular theorists like Sherry Turkle) sees social media and texting and screen usage as mostly benign if not actually positive, an enhancement of human potential. This is sort of the TED level thinking that glossy magazines promote. But I would argue that the constant fractured and incomplete language of digital communication is both a reflection of and creator of a fractured and increasingly incoherent personality. People check their phones at funerals, at marriages, at almost any public event. But what occurs to me is that people’s compulsive smart phone usage might well continue even if they were only communicating with themselves. If you eliminated a destination for texting, the text-er would continue. That is the pathological aspect of screen usage. It feels like amphetamine driven rats hitting that lever for more drug. The idea, as some have put forward, that texting has invented a new language that is actually very creative, etc., etc., etc., seems nonsense when you wander the streets or malls of America. There are no more depressing places on earth, I don’t think, than suburban America. Synonymous with White America. This is the revenge of white flight on itself. Turkle is correct, however, when she raises the fear that haunts the societies of the West today; the fear that ‘nobody is listening’. There is another aspect here, and that is that screen life, social media, in all of its formats, allows people to create an image by way of deletion and editing. It is, in a sense, a way to edit the past as well as the present. It is hard not to see the drop in literacy in the U.S. and certainly there are ample examples of misspeaking in the political class. Maxine Waters confusing Crimea with Korea (and then having the facts wrong anyway) or Bush thinking Africa was a country, or the dozen or so Trump errors. Geography is not taught in schools today. As I say, ask for directions. In the hotel in which I stayed, in the breakfast area, which serves also as a bar in the evening, there are SEVEN wide screen TVs on the walls. On one wall they are only a foot or so apart. During non sporting hours they are tuned to news channels. The sound is off, but that is no problem as there is close captioned subtitles at the bottom, as well as a constant scroll of news items. The hotel guests are then bombarded during all meals with a constant sound bite onslaught. A recent Zogby poll had 52% of Americans in favor of a preemptive strike against North Korea. Propaganda works best when it is delivered in sound bites. And when all you can understand is sound bites, you will eventually internalize purely authoritarian and fascist values. I wrote a while back on Italian cinema after WW2 and its relation to fascism. The anti fascist strategies, aesthetically and politically, of directors such as Pasolini, Bertolucci, and Antonioni. And I wrote this… In Italian cinema, after WW2, there were debates around the question of post synching the sound track. Elias Chaluja suggested that post-synchronization was an expression of the dominant class, of its ideology and a way to distance identification, but more, to ‘conquer the screen’. Remember that Pasolini, Bertolucci, Antonioni and a dozen others had signed the Amalfi Manifesto in 1968, protesting government censorship, and monopoly control of distribution, but also the laws concerning post synchronization. Antonioni perhaps above all other film directors, radically reversed trends in how to score films. His films create sound-scapes, for lack of a better word. He, like Pasolini, under duress, fashioned new ways to dub and post synch their films. Which suited both their sensibilities. The anti fascism of both instinctively rejected music cues for narratives. They were out to liberate the screen, not to conquer it. Screen life is now fully conquered, as it were. And it need not be so. If digital screen technology contains any inherent addictive qualities, they could certainly be minimized if they did not exist and develop within an utterly coercive and manipulative exploitive framework. Screen addiction is Capitalist screen addiction. Aesthetic liberation is just as crucial to today’s somnambulant population as is economic liberation. Cultural liberation in other words. The soundtrack to daily life is a very specific tone of voice that is heard across all news outlets and entertainment channels. The voice of the generic talking head as he or she mouth platitudes and empty repetitive cliches in cadences that never vary. It is an endless loop and long ago the content of what is being said became irrelevant. It is ‘that’ sound. And to awaken from it means to first turn it off. The festival itself was poorly attended. They had moved it to a new venue. There was an Afghan vet injured in the war, now legless, who came in a wheelchair. A nice fellow. He joined us at dinner. The discussion turned to Vietnam and I sensed growing tension around the table — especially with the guy who orchestrates the festival. We were all at a bizarre neo-Chinese buffet restaurant (the walls painted a curious flamingo pink, but never mind). I changed the subject. Everyone involved were vets. There is that knee jerk patriotic trope that white Americans can’t escape it seems. In most of the U.S., the Military remains sacrosanct. No matter what. I met three students, all black. And each of them sensed the need for dramatic change in the way the U.S. is run. If anything like socialism is to happen, these young men (all were male and all attended local colleges) will drive that movement. They also desperately wanted to know more, about everything. They hung around after my lecture and we talked for quite a while. They also are eager to leave Buffalo — shock, I know. But their curiosity, and desire for social justice, and for a sense of culture, was genuine and substantial. It is how revolutions slowly begin to form. They asked for reading lists, too. It made the entire five days worth the effort. http://clubof.info/

[the-best-is-still-unwritten-blog]

A Brief History... of My Restored Love for Fiction

In reading A Brief History, I was borrowing a book from my aunt to help me get through my summer waiting at airport terminals and taking cute but lonely trips to bars and cafés in between the sights and scenes of continental Europe. Truly, I was exposed to beautiful stories of complex cultures, within themes of poverty and wealth disparity, the growth of gang culture interlinked with politics, cultural divides of tradition and modernity and of American idolisation and western tragedy. Mystifying prose adjoins a showcase of beautiful stories, rich personalities, Caribbean sexualities and refreshing female and queer perspectives. This book is a giant, encompassing a vast range of modern problems from the social, cultural, economic and political, which allows it the grand promise of giving every reader a different story or a fresh understanding. Its context is historically accurate even if such an account is highly fictional; this means it sheds light on modern racism by crudely and hilariously accepting and publicising the true struggles since colonisation, slavery, independence and globalisation.

A Brief History of Seven Killings’ plot revolves around the 1976 failed assassination attempt of ‘the Singer’, who we know to be, Bob Marley. It offers this story through the eyes of ‘slum kids, one-night stands, drug lords, girlfriends, gunmen, journalists and even the CIA’ but in reality, offers much more. Through a number of books within the book - 5 to be exact - each set in a different time and to multiple locations, stories and characters, a most vivid picture of life, never mind Jamaica, is painted. Truly, the patient reader will come to feel for this as real as any textbook history.

One of the most annoyingly effective writing styles for fleshing out such a robust narrative is found by telling the story through a myriad of characters. In such an ambitious book, having characters juxtaposed against another but ultimately linked to the life of Jamaica’s almost omnipotent Singer, the book arrives at a place of joy for a reader who revels in the complexities and variations of humanity. Not just being inclusive and varied, this joint narration gives the reader added reason to continue on through another chapter, another voice, another story, another Jamaica and another world.  Flicking through tense visceral scenes from one character to the next, James offers little time for recovery. Sometimes the divide in characters appropriately furthers the cleavages of scenes and scenery, from heavily cocaine-fed patois to the Americanised yuppie talk of white visitors, from those who live in the Bush or the Ghetto and ‘don’t speak good’ to the suburban and apologetic middle-classes who do. Jamaica is provided as a divisive and divided place, with different and diverging ideas of how to change or flee the so-called ‘shitstem.’ This review will feature a selection of my favourite characters and scenes and thus contains some mild spoilers, I hope this review is taken as my personal understanding and critical analysis as I refute to be asserting anything as fact.

We are introduced to Bam-Bam early, in the first story of the book ‘Original Rockers’, he is one of a number of Jamaican gang-men narrating the book alongside Papa-Lo, Weeper and Josey Wales. Having grown up in what he describes as ‘the Ghetto’, he has been scarred by the inequality of poverty, his life subverted into crime early through desperation, anger and madness. In his first chapter he argues that within poverty is madness and that reason is only for the rich. “Madness that make you follow a man in a suit down King Street, where poor people never go and watch him throw away a sandwich, chicken, you smell it and wonder how people can be so rich that they use chicken for just to put between so-so bread, and you pass the garbage and no fly on it yet and you think, maybe, and you think yes and you think you have to, just to see what chicken taste like with no bone. But you say you not no madman, and the madness in you is not crazy people madness but angry madness, because you know the man throw it away because he want you to see. And you promise yourself that one day rudeboy going to start walking with a knife and next time I going jump him and carve sufferah right into him chest” – Bam-Bam.

Bam-Bam is less than pure, his vision of the world blighted by extreme poverty and a thirst to distance himself from the parents who were viscerally killed in front of him during childhood. Such brutal scenes of violence are further brutalised through the poverty they are set in, as he holds on to his Clarks throughout his loss it becomes an apt metaphor for his hardened clinging to materialism in spite of serious emotional turmoil. His passages succinctly signify the subtlety of violence and the inevitable initiations to gang culture, a lifestyle factor that ultimately leaves him vulnerable, cocaine addicted and imprisoned during various scenes of the book. Personally, I found Bam-Bam one of the least lovable characters, his fiendishness of cocaine and the homophobic suppression of his sexuality offer a number of ways this character denies himself dignity and understanding. His envy of wealth, and the selfishness associated with it, should however be universally understood. In a world where poor means bad and rich means good, he is trapped in poverty (badness) with no education (escape) and understandably, he sees crime not just as the only realistic opportunity to change this but an obvious reaction to his experiences and upbringing.

 From PNP to JLP, Cuban to American, Jamaican to Syrian, Black to White, Young to Old, Expat to Local, Traditional to Modern, Rastafari to Baptist, Religious to Apathetic, Poor to Rich, every vision of Jamaica reeks of the competition of peoples and cultures, ideas and morals. Contemporary issues here are far from ignored, with a seriously post-colonial and modern examination of race and racism presented and the understanding of this reproduced in a multi-ethnic but unarguably black culture, providing us with something as lovely but as barren as mountain scenery, beautifully stark but unarguably pure. Although overt racism has become almost unacceptable, the remnants of black oppression are still found in the global regime of idealising western beauty standards which leads to microaggressions of shadism, even (or more likely especially) in lands with majority black populations.

“Sometimes I think being half coolie worse than being a battyman. This brown skin girl look ‘pon me one time and say how it sad that after all God go through to give me pretty hair him curse me with that skin. The bitch say to me all my dark skin do is remind her that me forefather was a slave. So me say me have pity for you too. Because all your light skin do is remind me that your great-great-grandmother get rape.” – Tristan Phillips

Naively, I did not realise the Marlon James was a queer Jamaican, but in the BBC one documentary, much of his struggle during his youth and time in his homeland was blighted by his inability to accept his sexuality. Still, I wouldn’t define this story as a ‘queer read’, but it wholeheartedly offers broad and unexclusive understandings of masculinity and feminity. Weeper is another Jamaican gangbanger in Copenhagen City, his sexuality can be seen as fluid, Bam-Bam confirms for us that Weeper has homosexual tendencies when we learn of his time in jail.

“Three year in prison and a dick is just another thing to put up your ass.” -Weeper

Accordingly, there is still inequality and a binary to be found in these acts. Bam-Bam, with his hyper masculinised heterosexuality, sees this as a somewhat acceptable due to the unavailability of women, but this is only ever for the active (or dominant) partner.

“Don’t think the man who getting fucked must be the bitch. I shut him mouth and show him what my hole was for. I love you – I don’t mean that, I said.”

Weeper is clever and somewhat inspirational, a ‘ghetto’ kid with a love of books and self-education. His type is doubly conflicted in that he will be seen by many as a samfie gangster, but by his own friends as a bookworm. He leaves Jamaica in 1979 and becomes head of a Manhattan gang that distribute crack cocaine. Here we rediscover his sexuality and his awareness that what he enjoys and wants is not glorified or acceptable, whether in New York or Kingston.

“Think like a movie. This part you put on your clothes, boy wake up (but boy would be a girl) and one of you say babe, I gotta go. Or stay in bed and do whatever, the sheet at the man waist but right at the woman breast. Never going to be a movie with a scene like this bedroom ever. Don’ know. Could go back in bed right now, move in under him arm and stay there for five days […] Lookin’ at what just went up in me last night. Bad man don’t take no cock. But me not bad, me worse”

Another gay character, John-John K is introduced as the story weaves from the broken idyll of Jamaica to the greyer and dirtier New York, where a heap of Jamaicans, like many others, have resettled in an attempt to flee the ‘shitstem.’ But unknowingly, they often find a wholly shitter system with bland food and harsh weather, but the bonus of being anonymous, away and blissfully alone. Here we find good and bad, some characters find traditional employment and culture, often worth the not-so-subtle racism of American society. Others use their lack of morality (or privilege) and connections to the dark side of island life to sell crack cocaine in the neighbourhoods of New York that don’t defy the term ‘well-heeled’ - but much like their prostitutes - would be better described as completely fucking broken heeled. In the fringes of the city, in large derelict brownstone tenements, the crack epidemic of the eighties thrives on the souls of the city’s unloved. While in Jamaica the dabbling of cocaine is to the odd toot on the pipe in New York. This is the end of our story, the effects of violence and drugs complete, Josey shoots out every junkie in a crack den, including one unlucky mother interrupted with a bullet while giving head too busy multitasking with childcare and professionalism to realise. This chaotic scene is beautiful in its Irvine Welsh style brutalism, as Josey goes on a kill streak, oblivious addicts rummage through rubbish for needles in a bacground of desperate prostitutes and their johns being murdered gangland style, too busy with their work or pleasure to pause for final words.

Organised crime in Jamaica fuelling local and political rivalries are not played down and gangs in opposing communities and territories are stuck to a backdrop of serious poverty and marginalisation, seeming all too established to destabilise. Their exploitation by political groups and American influence seems to further fuel their need to escape while contradicting itself in the same breath: How is Jamaica really independent when everyone decent dreams of leaving or has already left? This desire reinforces the motives and storyline of our lone female narrator Kim, who readily pins her hopes on her one night stand with the Singer to result in visa rights and a general rescuing/escape plan. Kim, truly an independent woman, seems to contradict herself in externalising her ability to leave through her sexual and personal relations and never her own volition. Kimmy’s story has it everything it needs to earn her both my respect and my pity. An educated girl, her snobbishness is a reaction to her delicate and insecure nature in a country where she is neither pale nor dark, neither rich nor poor. She is cultured and intellectual, occupied in her fiery mind is a bold sexual energy and she features in scenes of heart-wrenching betrayal, oppression and downright abuse, continually struggling to reinvert herself and repress the situations that shaped her.

Standing outside ‘the Singer’s’ property time after time, she hopes he will recognise her and rescue her. After accidentally witnessing the infamous shooting of Marley and almost killing her father in a retaliation to a beating she receives from him after he finds out about the liaison, she becomes bound to our main storyline and runs away to Mobay with a newfound persona, her new meal ticket (or plane ticket) becoming her white American lover, even though he openly has a family stateside. The failure is hard on the reader, but harder on Kimmy; in desperation she results in paying a hefty amount for her visa, in both cash and her sexuality, before founding a new life in the run down suburbs of multi-cultural New York. Somewhat ironically, it is this move that prompts a rekindling of Kim’s love for her native land, her avoidance and repression ends abruptly in a hungry visit to a Jamaican café and the shocking news of the death of the one of our familiar Kingston gangsters.

Our story is often one of hopelessness and of discontent with the status quo being corrupt politics and rabid cutting inequalities. Of race and class determining who we are and what we do before our personality, intelligence or ideals have even the slightest chance of doing this for us. This is a world where politicians are gangsters and gangsters are political. Escaping the struggles of a post-colonial society riddled with crime and corruption is impossible if it leads to the same again, only with a different accent and a paler face. Our ideas of identity and home are bound to things that are somehow ubiquitous, following us no matter where or how we run and hide. For Kim, running is futile if all we realise is who we aren’t or where we’re not from, no matter how long we stay or how much we change. As she stops for Jamaican food on the way home, a symbolic peace offering to her homeland, she is confronted with her past, one that cannot be erased no matter how many times she changes her name or how much she learns about contemporary American art.

Jamaica is a product of imperialist greed, in this time alone we are told a story of secretive American intervention and the covert operations of the CIA in their dreams to operate a global regime. Jamaica, an island completely changed through slavery and the empires of France and Britain, now faces a new face of imperial force, the United States of America. While the island is a product of brutal colonial histories, it struggles with globalised issues stemming from these same persecutors. Leaving behind racism, homophobia, ethnic and religious tensions the island is now to deal with the growing appetites of American consumers of cocaine as Jamaica serves as an important logistic hub for the Caribbean. Alongside organised crime we find guns, violence and misery. Maybe worst of all, Jamaica is plundered of its traditions, aspirations and ideals as it continues to carry the risk and violence of submitting to helping wealthier, whiter Americans get coked up. Whereas much of the beauty of Jamaica, found in the soulful lyrics of soca and the brilliant white beaches in tourist resorts are exported for a different audience, creating an anger and a disconnect between the internal and external fictions and realities of Jamaica. I guess like Weeper and Kim, Jamaica has been used, like most of us deemed ‘unlucky’ or even just desperate, we have been victimised and we have victimised ourselves. Turning to others for safety and salvation: Kim, Weeper and Jamaica have been failed, their weakness and desperation exploited for the benefit of those more powerful or maybe just more confident (but often more moneyed and paler). A Brief History is (defiantly) not Brief but this isn’t to be criticised; as this History could never be complete; these struggles are not over. There are to be far more killings, real and metaphorical, before it could ever be.

Thank you Marlon, for the education - and the entertainment.