Your Moment of Zinn

We're in a self-congratulatory orgy of sacred cow-tipping these days, measuring our anti-racism by how many Confederate statues we can protest, remove, or even topple over in the dead of night.

 It's gotten so intense that chief White House economic adviser Gary Cohn had even drafted a resignation letter over Boss Trump's Charlottesville remarks praising white supremacy. But then, of course, Cohn's financial patriotism got the better of him, and he tore it up. The mega-banker's dream of one day chairing the Federal Reserve tipped the delicate moral scales in favor of continuing to serve in Trump's administration. At least Cohn won't have to face the onerous task of removing any confederate icons from United States currency. For now, anyway, George Washington is safe, despite that mouthful of teeth extracted from his own slaves. 

Unlike Trump, this was a president who knew when to keep his trap shut.

Meanwhile,  New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio has gone the anti-confederacy brigade one better and boldly suggested doing away with the statue of Christopher Columbus. This promptly brought out the crowds of protesters to Columbus Circle over the weekend. The anti-Columbus movement had been brewing for quite a while anyway. After several centuries, word has finally gotten out that Chris was part of an invasion of looting, rape, torture and slaughter of Arawaks in the Caribbean. So he didn't really discover America. Plus, America was not really America until some imperialists decided to name it after an adventurer named Amerigo Vespucci.

In June, the New Paltz, NY (my hometown) Board of Education passed a unanimous resolution which banishes Columbus Day outright. Instead, the second Monday in October will hereby be known as Indigenous People's Day, and the curriculum will be revised between then and Thanksgiving to include history from the perspective of the aboriginal people.

More and more thoughtful people seem to be getting their Zinn on. That would be the late Howard Zinn, author of A People's History of the United States. He tipped over any number of sacred American cows, beginning aptly enough with Christopher Columbus's orgy of brutalism, and continuing with the extermination of the natives, the kidnapping and enslavement of Africans, and the non-stop wars which have always made this country so exceptional. Absent any prosecution of Wall Street criminals and war criminals, at least we're finally getting a small measure of truth and reconciliation after Charlottesville opened up so many eyes.

Howard Zinn

  If Donald Trump serves any positive purpose at all, it is in yanking the mask right off all kinds of institutional ugliness and watching the refined perpetrators of the institutional ugliness squirm helplessly in the glare of his sputtering spotlight.

  People are actually starting to notice that the great American military machine is every bit as racist as Trump himself. One of the main gates of the United States Military Academy in New York is named after star cadet and later superintendant, General Robert E. Lee, as is one of the post's main thoroughfares.  General George Armstrong Custer, another grad and exterminator of native Americans, is buried on its hallowed grounds, as is General Winfield Scott, who oversaw the deadly expulsion of the Cherokees before going on to invade Mexico in another one of our nearly forgotten wars of bloody aggression. Thus far, nobody is suggesting we exhume their bodies and drive stakes through their hearts, although there is some movement toward symbolically removing all symbolic traces of Lee from the premises. He, after all, was a traitor, and the others are still considered patriots. Anyway, there is some doubt that the body buried at West Point is even Custer's.


The American military loves to put on a show of equal opportunity and multicultural propaganda these days. Since there is no more draft, recruits must be gleaned from the ranks of historically oppressed people, including from among the Amerindian descendants of Christopher Columbus's victims. 

But while the draft was still on and memories of protesters burning flags and draft cards in defiance of the Vietnam War were still fresh, the Academy saw fit in 1975 to invite Ayn Rand, queen of the extreme right, to their hallowed West Point grounds. She was there to give a philosophical pep talk talk to a very enthusiastic corps of cadets. The audience may well have included such future disgraced Iraq/Afghanistan war generals as David Petraeus and Stanley McChrystal (Class of 1976). Their classmate, the future National Security Director and unindicted perjurer Keith Alexander, is today credited with being the mastermind of America's unconstitutional global spying enterprise. He might have listened to Ayn Rand too. There were also a goodly number of budding CEOs in likely attendance, such as Procter and Gamble's Bob McDonald ('75) who would later become Barack Obama's Veterans Affairs director and infamously insist that wait times for VA medical appointments are not important. We don't exactly know who attended, because Ayn Rand's toxic talk is another historical fact that they'd just as soon the public forgot all about.

As a matter of fact, the full transcript and recording of her schmooze-fest with the military-industrial complex aspirants wouldn't surface until 40 years, and several wars and invasions, later. And for good reason: she told them that the military genocide of native Americans had been necessary and right, because they were "savages." And then they applauded her.

In the question-and-answer session, one unidentified cadet told Rand that he was about to ask her a liberal question from a point of view outside the norm of acceptable military discourse:

At the risk of stating an unpopular view, when you were speaking of America, I couldn’t help but think of the cultural genocide of Native Americans, the enslavement of Black men in this country, and the relocation of Japanese-Americans during World War II. How do you account for all of this in your view of America?

After blaming slavery, racism and internment camps on liberals, Rand went on:

If you are born in a magnificent country which you don’t know what to do with, you believe that it is a property right; it is not. And, since the Indians did not have any property rights—they didn’t have the concept of property; they didn’t even have a settled, society, they were predominantly nomadic tribes; they were a primitive tribal culture, if you want to call it that—if so, they didn’t have any rights to the land, and there was no reason for anyone to grant them rights which they had not conceived and were not using.

It would be wrong to attack any country which does respect—or try, for that matter, to respect—individual rights, because if they do, you are an aggressor and you are morally wrong to attack them. But if a country does not protect rights—if a given tribe is the slave of its own tribal chief—why should you respect the rights they do not have?

And therein lies the exceptional American doctrine of Manifest Destiny, which eventually morphed into the Bush Doctrine of preemptive aggression justified by the target country's disrespect of human rights - as selectively defined by Ayn Rand, that is.

Her nasty speech was greeted with "thunderous applause" from the once and future military/corporate American elite, a group which, for all intents and purposes, now runs the White House for useful idiot and military high school bad boy Donald J. Trump. Under their orders, he has "reluctantly" ordered several thousand more troops to the Graveyard of Empires, Afghanistan. He has gladly gone along to get along and is thereby rapidly achieving parity with his predecessors' global body counts and war crimes, which include the dropping of white phosphorus bombs on civilians in Syria.

Trump might be a national embarrassment for his unfettered tongue, but he is certainly no anomaly. This summer's fad of the confederate statue "debate" is just one more smokescreen to protect ingrained and ongoing All-American racist policies as well as the identities of both perpetrators and complicit enablers.

Anti-Democracy Democrats

The Democratic Party may have belatedly kicked Jefferson and Jackson out of its annual dinners for reasons of political correctness (having apparently just found out that both presidents were a tad on the racist side). But that doesn't mean the Democratic Party has suddenly changed for the better after its nearly two centuries of existence.

To the contrary.

Having just limited presidential primary debates to a maximum of six, and even threatened sanctions against any candidate who goes outside the party to hold informal debates, the 21st century Democratic Party is still operating very much in the Jacksonian tradition. And that tradition is speaking up for the common folk out of one side of its mouth, and pledging fealty to its wealthy benefactors out of the other.

To their credit, two of the national candidates -- Martin O'Malley and Bernie Sanders -- both spoke out against the undemocratic nature of the Party at the DNC's annual confab last week, rightly noting that the game is rigged for the establishment and against the voter. Left unspoken was the common wisdom that the less the electorate gets to see the robotic and ethically compromised Hillary Clinton juxtaposed with other, more populist candidates,  the better are her odds of securing the nomination based purely upon her money and her weighted press coverage and her powerful connections and her shallow progressive rhetoric.

 As told by Howard Zinn in his A People's History of the United States, the recently banished Andrew Jackson was the Clinton prototype. Jackson was the first American politician to pretend to "feel your pain" in order to get your vote. "He was the first President  to master the liberal rhetoric - to claim to speak for the common man."

 Despite the fact that he owned slaves, exterminated Indian populations and sent federal troops to beat striking workers into submission, he still enjoyed widespread support from the newly-enfranchised working class.

It was the new politics of ambiguity- speaking for the lower and middle classes to get their support in times of rapid growth and potential turmoil. The two-party system came into its own in this time. to give people a choice between two different parties and allow them, in a period of rebellion, to choose the slightly more democratic one was an ingenious form of control.

 Fast forward to 2015, and the Democratic establishment is still ingeniously, albeit desperately, trying to keep controlled debates largely confined to those between its own centrists and crazy Republicans. They don't want us to see arguments between centrist Dems and leftist Dems. Bernie Sanders is starting to give the plebes too many bright ideas and the power brokers too many conniption fits. The party establishment does not want the general public to see him and Hillary in too many head-to-head TV appearances. She might stumble. She might fall. She might start losing the super delegates who, she seems to undemocratically think, are not beholden to the wishes of actual primary voters.

America is in another of its periods of incipient rebellion, because the Precariat has gotten wise to the fact that we live under an oligarchy. Hillary Clinton openly admitted that she is anxious for a battle of the sexes and the hairdos between her and Donald Trump -- not a discussion about the malefactors of great wealth with Bernie Sanders. Even the four-to-six debates she has grudgingly agreed to are an inconvenience, a pesky bump in the road to her coronation. She and the Party establishment would prefer to give voters the choice between neoliberalism (free market solutions to social and economic problems, for the benefit of free market capitalists) and fascism (Trump's roaring xenophobia and racism for the benefit of free market capitalists) rather than a choice between neoliberalism and Sanders-style democratic socialism (for the benefit of ordinary people.)

That Sanders and even O'Malley are now shaking up the inner party structure from within is a stroke of genius. Sanders has long recognized that the establishment party system is anti-social to its very core and by its very nature.

Earlier this year, as the Democrats were formulating their electoral game plan at their ambiguous winter "issues retreat" they were also busily banning press coverage and otherwise acting in a distinctly totalitarian fashion. We could have seen that their summer agenda would try to consist of more of the same. This time, though, they had to let the media in. It might have looked undemocratic had they not allowed Bernie and other candidates to speak. Since he is running within the establishment and not as an independent, they had no choice but to let him in. Pure political genius on Bernie's part to make a public, in-house stink.

Meanwhile, an #AllowDebate movement has sprung up. From The Hill:

(Ben) Doernberg said he launched #AllowDebate earlier this month after realizing that many Democrats like him are frustrated with the DNC’s handling of its presidential debates this election cycle.

It now boasts 30 active organizers, he added, and approximately 500 members.

“The DNC exists – at least in theory – to reflect the will of the voters,” Doernberg said. “It is incredibly obvious that the DNC apparatus views us a nuisance and purely wants us to go away. That just seems wrong to me.”

Doernberg said #AllowDebate is inspired by the stark contrast between this election cycle’s debate rules and the DNC’s 2008 approach.

He said his organization is exasperated with the DNC’s unwillingness to let candidates participate in outside debates, which was allowed the last time the Democratic nomination was up for grabs.

 In the 2008 cycle, eventual nominee then-Sen. Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton debated each other 27 times, including outside debates.

“I think telling the candidates that they are banned from participating in outside events is incredibly undemocratic,” Doernberg said.

As French philosopher Simone Weil wrote 70 years ago in the wake of the last outbreak of global fascism, political parties are inherently undemocratic. She believed they should be abolished outright. Like capitalism itself, they exist only for the sake of their own existence. Their goal is to maintain power and enrich their leaders. Ordinary people are permitted to register for token membership and thereby become"sheepdogged" into compliance and obedience and loyalty to the designated plutocratic power broker. Ordinary people are not ordinarily permitted to have independent voices within the confines of the strict party system.

During this endless American election season, the standard complaint has been that the media are covering it as a horse-race rather than as a dialogue about issues. But political parties by their very nature are devised to be a game and a sport to which we are invited to participate as mere spectators, biting our nails in shock, awe and suspense, as we root for our favorite team.

 During this endless War on (and of) Terror, it's also apropos to remember that the very concept of the political party was born in the post-revolutionary Reign of Terror. Weil wrote:

The evils of political parties are all too evident; therefore, the problem that should be examined is this: do they contain enough good to compensate for their evils and make their preservation desirable?

It would be far more relevant, however, to ask: do they do the slightest bit of good? Are they not pure, or nearly pure, evil? If they are evil, it is clear that, in fact and in practice, they can only generate further evil.

Simone Weil observed that the extermination of Jews would have been just as evil under the Weimar Republic as it was under Hitler. And so too are the forever-wars and the mass deportations and the global trade deals and the record incarcerations and the political corruption and the police brutality and the racial profiling and the erosion of civil liberties and the pollution for profit just as evil whether they're performed under a Republican majority or under a Democratic majority.

Once political parties gain power, they always seem to forget the basic social contract. Their goal becomes greed itself: more votes, more power, more members, more money. Weil wrote, "Once the growth of the party becomes a criterion for goodness, it follows inevitably that the party will exert a collective pressure upon people's minds. This pressure is very real; it is openly displayed; it is professed and proclaimed. It should horrify us, but we are already too much accustomed to it."

Or are we? 

This could be one of those infrequent moments in history when we are actually starting to become horrified. It is, ironically, this very sense of mass horror that should be giving us hope. No matter our social status, our race, our ethnicity, our nationality, we can all join together in horror and outrage over the fact that unfettered capitalism is literally killing us.

 People are beginning to discover their own agency and their own anger.

The abolition of the two major political parties is not likely to happen, of course. But the fact remains that both of them are being rattled from within, without, and below.

Whether these upheavals will lead to Trump-style fascism, or whether they will lead to a new New Deal, is still an open question.