I’ve been meaning for some time to respond to Dan Vinik’s article on Brink at

http://www.brink.com/editorial/2180.com

on the anniversary of Curt Cobain’s suicide, but I’ve been too busy being disappointed in the primary mud slinging contest, and learning, (not AGAIN!) you can pour buckets of facts over people’s (especially the editor of the Weekly’s) heads and it doesn’t change one damn dumb thing.   The nasty reality that Clintons will never leave us----tho Bob Herbert has started to look at the tip of the iceberg:

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/10/opinion/10herbert.html?th&emc=th

-----the sad fact that our national conversation on race is so incoherent, and our political/environmental debate has gone from ill informed  to just plain silly, stupid and (that word again) suicidal is what finally did me in.  I share Dan’s sense of the relevance of Cobain’s suicide to current events and how we choose to react to them.  Cobain’s suicide, like Marilyn Monroe’s and Sylvia Plath’s, (the primary race a case in point) had a lot to do with the emptiness of public image and the way it sucks the life out of you as a private person.  Fame is greatly overrated and, especially in America, over conflated with intelligence and creativity.  The idea that actors and rock stars have anything to say is disproven nightly on every talk show and NPR programs and in every daily paper that tries to use them to fill an emptiness.  Rush Limbaugh and Michael Savage are proof positive that being entertaining is not even necessarily being real, and all it takes is the illusion of a conversation to keep us hanging on.  The public, that myth called mass, just isn’t bright enough to have much to offer in the choice of an identity much less a meaningful life.  It’s easy to imagine a spoiled rotten star like Curt being angry about being sold a bill of goods in that respect and, like a child trying to punish a parent, taking it out on the closest possible extension of the parent: himself.  Media mirrors create personality types that are like the machine that when you put a coin in, makes a hand reach up and turn itself off. 

The hippies and the punkers lost their cause when, in collusion with a simplistic sensationalist media, they became public satires of themselves, when you had to dress, talk, act a certain way, and put yourself on a plane above ordinary folks,  in order to prove you were an individual.  What the anti war, counter culture movement never got is that violent protest only deepens entrenched positions and passion only inflames argument.  The Brink community is headed down that same lost highway.  It’s good to create enough of a public spectacle to break through the hypnotism of corporate media, but look at the sixties: there was no plan to follow that up with public information.  In extreme cases, they blew themselves, and their cause, up.  “Take another little piece of my heart now, baby.” Janis Joplin and the love-as-a-drug dance. Another instance in which the wish for the ideal was the wish for death.

What that has to do with Brink is that’s been done and let’s not do it again.  Put the argument on a different plane and maybe it can get to another destination.  Especially in any political argument, the facts always conveniently arrange themselves around motive.  Once motive is set in small town America: to get even with people more educated and articulate than it is---nothing is going to change, but the best place to start is with Joe Friday’s line,

“Just the facts, Ma’am.”

When even Brink’s editors contribute to the mosh pit mentality of reactive speech, when its articles preach to the choir and create spats and flaps within the choir, we become the (political & therefore ugly) American in the LeRoi Jones poem, lost “in the forest of motives/where there were only half truths/and their opposites/ like man, he was really/nowhere.”  We’re like pool balls banging off each other with no direction of our own.  Nothing changes until you change assumptions.  Assumptions won’t change until you change the playing field, the format.  The media has Alzheimer’s.  Does Brink have to have it too?  Is there any affordable way of setting up, formatting and indexing an archive of edited or whole essays in a “shoebox” titled something along the lines of “LEST WE FORGET!” Yeah, I know it’s too much to ask, but while I’m dreaming could the format include it being edited, supplemented and vetted along the lines of a Wiki-style People’s Recent History Of The U.S.?  Otherwise, we’re like children of an orgy with no answers to where we came from and who we are.  Or wouldja rather just keep on ego bashing?  “So you say you wanna revolution!”  Then you gotta BE the change you want, spread real information as opposed to petty squabbles, or do you just wanna entertain and make money?  Nothing wrong with that but mistaken identity is the shortest route back to Cobain’s trip.  I realize this thing’s already got a momentum and is setting a course of its own, but if you can’t change your minds, how are you gonna change anybody else’s?

I also share Dan’s exasperation with the apathy of Brink’s readers & writers.  If we really believed in anything, there would have been rioting in the streets long ago.  If we really thought about what would be effective,, we’d have started a forum for the distribution of information in addition to or instead of rioting.  If we wanted that forum to be effective we’d have advertised it with mass media wedges like the FREE TIBET banner those excellent climbers hung on the San Francisco Bay Bridge.  They burned their own real hero slot in my brain that day because they were so damn good the cops couldn’t bring them down.  If we get anything done, it will be by that kind of methodical and courageous approach, but what are the chances?

Those who study history, generally conclude that people are incapable of change, and that learning from past mistakes is mostly composed of symbolic gestures..  In my own dyslexic way I studied history, but I still let hope lead me on.  SOMETHING WAS SUPPOSED TO HAPPEN.  After Mark Twain’s analysis of our involvement in South America and his cry, “America, redeem your honor, come home!”,  it was still necessary for John Perkins, to write “Economic Hit Man” saying that we’ve done even more evil in our time.   After Goebel’s 1939 statement “how to lead a country to war”, whose principles, “tell them they’re being attacked and attack the patriotism of those who dissent” laid the basis for the Neocon playbook, after Orwells 1946 essay about how all governments invent neologisms, such as “rejustification of borders” to cover up atrocities, we still fell for the duplicitous references of  “incursion”, “enhanced interrogation techniques”, “democratization of the middle east” and on and on.  After J.P. Morgan destroyed Nicolai Tesla’s 1900 World Fair free energy tower, after “A Golden Thread” outlined the history of GM, Goodyear, Big Oil and Big Gas destroying the burgeoning solar industry in the thirties and forties, we still give subsidies to Big Oil to keep on delaying the transition to a renewable fuels economy (NO WAR REQUIRED!), after “Only A Pawn In Their Game” we still let old style pols race bait, poor white bait and impugn the character of those whose greed isn’t covered by flag lapel pins or a chest full of medals.  After Howard Zinn’s “A People’s History Of The U.S.”, Rush Limbaugh has still not been fired for publicly suborning perjury by asking Republicans to lie on their party affiliation affidavits, and the CEO of Diebold is still not in prison after depriving an entire nation of the right  to vote in the elections  of ’00 and ’04 and The Supreme Court has been unable to sentence itself to life in infamy for its own participation in the fraud of  ’04.

And it just gets dumb and dumber.  In more recent history, after Hillary said she’ll continue taking money from lobbyists  because “they represent real Americans” (like her backers J. Mack of Morgan Stanley and Rupert Murdoch?) she’s still managed to convince small town voters that she just crawled out of a Norman Rockwell painting..  What’s wrong with Americans? Can’t they tell she’s a PHONY just by listening to her? After she voted to give Bush the authority to invade Iraq AND Iran, and said she’d “obliterate” Iran if it ever attacked Israel, after she said no dialogue with Cuba, North Korea or Iran, you’d think even feminists with a grudge and something to prove would start to realize they’re just trying to elect a good old boy, macho Rambo in a pants suit.  You’d think even The New York Times---that did this country the ultimate disservice of leading us into this war with their administration schills---would get a clue. 

You would think.  And then you’d wonder how we could let the public forget Jerry Zeifman supervised 27 year old Hillary Rodham on the Nixon Impeachment committee and FIRED her for violating the defendant’s right to representation.  He gave as his reasons, unethical conduct, lying, theft and suppression of documents and violation of the rules of the Senate and the Constitution.  He refused to give her a letter of recommendation.  During the Clinton presidency she refused to distance herself from a husband who philandered, illegally obtained over 900 confidential FBI files, took money (much of it laundered and handed over by Hillary’s brother) in exchange for pardons, operated the Health Care Task Force in violation of federal disclosure laws and was disbarred for life for perjuring himself on the witness stand.  So AIM activist, Leonard Peltier rots in prison the rest of his life for what we’ll never really know, and fugitive billionaire CLINTON CONTRIBUTOR Marc Rich goes free, for what we DO know.  The Clinton’s are powerful, dangerous  people.  They’re not going away any more than assholes like Trump and Murdoch.  They own half the big shots in the DNC, and they don’t care how it defiles the country as long as they get their way.

If, as many people think, we’re arguing over the arrangement of the deck chairs on The Titanic, this is still just the tip of the iceberg.  Google, Clinton and Chris Mathews in “Maggie’s Notebook”, The Progressive Review “Alzheimer’s In Arkansas”, “Absolute Power” by David Limbaugh, Clinton Lies To Tim Russert, “The Clinton Chronicles” video, and Clinton Oldthinker news, and any other site under Clinton, Lies, Fraud, Corruption and tell me why these sources aren’t worth vetting on the level of the history of Barack’s association with Reverend Wright.  As I watched The Clinton Chronicles I wondered how you could ever verify something like that, but even if it’s wrong it cries out for discussion, if for no other reason than because we all know what America does with people who fight politics as usual and want to change things for the better.  Build a better mousetrap and the world will beat you down.  What kind of public and what kind of media allowed Billary to hide a sociopathic, bottomless greed for power behind the image of Rocky Balboa? 

Why is it necessary to even remind anyone that Rocky is just a movie? And meanwhile back at the ranch where we’re watching real life on TV, liars and cheaters and outright criminals are winning the hearts and minds of a public that thinks they’re tough because they don’t have feelings for anybody but themselves.  I totally hate and despise politics now, because it’s like crime in real life, the innocent are punished and the guilty are not only set free, they’re given even more power as a reward for their self gratification. . 

Watching this campaign, a  line from “The Shawshank Redemption” keeps haunting me,”Let me tell you something, hope is a very dangerous thing. “  There are forces in America that don’t like change, and political speech never persuaded anyone to give up the lies (that got set with toilet training) they need to tell themselves. So why did I write at all, much less task myself with sending a letter to the editor of one Indiana paper a day?  In Indiana, for godsake, where Black Box Voting reported 130,000 (BLACK) voters just “suddenly” got purged from the rolls and they were using touch screen machines made in a third world country where the quality control is: shake the machine and if nothing rattles inside, it’s OK. “Inspected by #12345678.” Crap!  What good  can ever happen when the electorate forgets history in the prurient fascination with gaffes, gotchas and guilt by association.  Now I know again it’s not how low you go it’s show far you fall that hurts.  Bad as it feels for myself and my country, it’s amplified by my sympathy for the youth of America having to watch this sorry spectacle of the chance of a good debate on real issues ground into the dirt by a calculating woman playing games with Mistah Gotcha.

Knowing our consistent use of “the economic imperative” to justify employing death squads, the CIA, the Mafia and thugs hired by American Corporations to bring down or co-opt democratically elected governments in the third world, I don’t know how I could have been hooked into thinking we could ever do better.  Starting with Kurt Cobain we should all know by now WE CAN’T GET NO SATISFACTION IN THE SOCIETY OF THE SPECTACLE.  What we do with that fact is a matter of life and death.  If we let it drive us into depression, lack of affect or suicide (physical or emotional)---any number of forms of an inward driven temper tantrum, then the political terrorists win.  If on the other hand we say it is what it is and where can we go from here, maybe we can be content to be gratified by accomplishing a few things on a smaller scale.  If we’re an online media item like Brink, we have an editorial choice of whether we contribute to the spectacle or become a forum for real information. 

SOMETHING WAS SUPPOSED TO HAPPEN.  Especially now that we got all this wonderful new technology and it almost works.  But why DIDN’T something happen?  Contrary to Buckminster Fuller’s prediction, advanced communication has only SEEMED to make it more possible for people with good intentions to prevail in politics and business.  I don’t understand why people in China are imprisoned and tortured for criticizing their government on the internet.  I criticize my government daily on the internet and it not only doesn’t affect the government, it doesn’t change anybody’s mind about anything. Au contraire, the more things change, the more they stay the same. Better analyses than mine fail to reach the public because of their self congratulatory elitism.  And the choir always roars approval but nothing has changed. The best example of that is from another person who died in recent history—I wish I could forget history, at least enough just to stop remembering the way Williams F. Buckley Jr. used to lick his lips rapidly as if he were practicing fellatio on himself, after using a particularly arcane phrase or tortured argument.  He never used a simple word when a bigger word would do.  His effort to distance himself from the common man was his most successful gesture.   I, for one common man, never gave a crap about anything he said and his being dead has only deepened that lack of concern.  But his bad example and the environmental crisis both point to one possible moral of the story: we should never forget: that we are all in this awful mess together.