Category: Political
Standing Rock: The Most Important Struggle of Our Age?
It’s not the flow of oil that’s at stake at Standing Rock, it’s the flow of money. I was thinking about why there’s not been a massive shift of investment to renewable energy: wind, solar, wave, when it’s been pretty clearly established that renewables could replace virtually everything we get from oil but lubrication and plastics, both of which also have alternatives; and watching the battle over the pipeline, it occurred to me that the answer is right there in front of our eyes: oil flows. As oil moves from source to refinery and production, to all the points of distribution, capital follows, multiplying at every stage. Renewables are far more than alternative sources of energy; they represent, forgive the cliché—a paradigm shift for economics, and existing structures of power.
The renewables truly do belong to a different world. Think of Israel, as just one example. The oil based money pipeline that flows from the Middle East to Houston to New York to Israel—without it, without that flow of American capital, in the form of money and weapons, Israel would not exist as the rogue colonial power that it does. There is little resemblance with wind and solar, to the complex, capital multiplying networks of supply and distribution that exists with fossil fuels. Why? Because… wind and sun are everywhere. Generation favors locality, and what follows, is nothing less than the dismantling of the pipeline-tanker-refinery-banker system, and with it, the vast military complex used to control and defend it. The very fact of universal delivery presages the failure of the present system ( SEE — Niklas Luhmann: So-Called System Failure)
In this light, what an amazing confluence of interests and circumstances is happening now in North Dakota! The emergence of native peoples, the blocking of the pipeline, which is the blocking of the flow… the Flow, the power driving the one civilization blocked by this beautiful eruption of spiritual power from another, one that is both a reassertion of what existed before European dominance of the continent, and promising yet another, a new world that is indeed, possible! This confrontation in North Dakota has become, materially, symbolically, spiritually—the focal center of the most important struggle of our age—on the outcome of which hangs nothing less than the survival of our species… and the many others we will take down with us if we fail.
(I would very much appreciate feedback on this, and if you think it worth while–please share)
It was the end all along
In Israel, we see how the executioners always win. If they do not succeed in exterminating their victims, they know that they will be reincarnated in the survivors.
It’s the horror of this knowledge–unacknowledged by the executioners, that drives them to ever greater carnage, to ever greater acts of cruelty. To save future generations from yet another visitation of what they have become, they are driven toward the annihilation of their victims.
Genocide as an unconscious act of mercy to future generations.
When we killed the gods, they made us their heirs.
Fascism is real. It’s here. Now. RESISTANCE IS EVERYTHING!
“Dear Liberal Friends, you do not have the tools to fight Trump” … because it’s not
just Trump, it’s Fascism, and it’s world wide.
The particularities of historical circumstances aside, comparisons to Germany in 1932 can not be passed over as exaggerations. With existing technology, surveillance, militarized police, nuclear weapons–with global warming passing the point of no return–the seriousness of our crisis makes the disasters of the mid-2th Century pale in comparison.
If there were such a thing as a World Mind, our Zeitgeist would seem to be full out bent on collective suicide. No wonder, then, that such thoughts enter my own mind from time to time. I have to remind myself that Death needs no assistance from me–it will find and rally its armies on its own. Our resistance is the only vote that matters in this election.
The Future is Black Hole
What we see now, is essentially what has been in place since before most of those marching on the street were born. If it were not so, there would not be this rolling-over-on-it’s- belly full-out effort to normalize the nightmare. They were already fascists. We already lived in an Empire of Money and Death that deserved to be overthrown.
Some of us told you. Not that it affords any comfort or satisfaction. If we can’t turn this around; if we can’t prevent what is sure to happen, there really isn’t any reason to live. Death is by far the greater mercy.
After the rage…
I finally got a couple hours of sleep.
The rage has dissolved into tears, and the tears into grim resolve. It’s time to wipe the tears, to do what must be done… and then… to laugh, a laughter sadder than tears.
It’s not only at the beginning of the day, one must ask, why go on? but before every undertaking. There is nothing any longer that is trivial. Everything, everything–is life or death.
Do I bother to draw water to drink? Do I prepare food to break the fast? This pen, and these brushes? Is there any reason to pick them up, to make marks on this paper?
How many times I’ve wondered–what was it like, in Germany, 1933?
I think about the people who voted for … I will not write that name, or let it pass my lips… the ‘good Germans’
I will not be a ‘Good German.’ I will not be a ‘Good German.’
No more, the prattle of the ‘realists.’ No more talk of following those who ‘get things done.’ There is no longer any reality worth living, but that we take up and create for ourselves.
Love, Solidarity, Imagination…RESISTANCE!
Call for a National Day of Reparations
I‘m a son of parents who were children of immigrants, not a native of this continent, even so, knowing what I do about Columbus, this holiday deepens my depression and angry indignation. We can’t undo history, but neither will be free of its burden until we collectively, without reservation, acknowledge our complicity in what we have done and vow to make a new beginning. That goes both for the genocidal theft of land that was the mother of our indigenous peoples, and for the theft and enslavement of humans from the lands where their mothers bore them into the world.
Because so much of the wealth of this nation was purchased by their deaths and suffering, there is no, can be no, meaningful acknowledgement without reparations.
Let this day be known, not only as Indigenous Peoples Day, but The Day of Reparations for all those we have wronged.
Art and the Machines of Power: Connections
It’s difficult, when those in power, those with power over the lives of others, expose themselves as hateful assholes–difficult to not slip into the belief that it’s the fault of these assholes that we are, collectively, in such terrible trouble. If we could only be rid of the assholes–give power to ‘good’ people, everything would begin to improve!
But when I can manage to set aside my anger, my entirely justified anger, at these figures, I see that they do what they do, not because of character flaws, but because they follow the rules of the system, of the roles they have been assigned. Whether they have taken on those roles for selfish, or class serving motives, or because they sincerely believe that this is what works, that this is ‘reality,’ and if you are a ‘realist,’ you act accordingly. If Dick Cheney exemplifies the former, Obama might exemplify the latter–but what they do, the killing, the destruction of our supportive environment, the endless war, their support of the vindictive surveillance state, where whistle blowers are punished–when you measure them by what they do, there is little to tell them apart.
The machines of consumer capitalism, the war machine, are in a real sense, not metaphorical–self generative, independent actants. It’s those complex social/political/economic machines that determine the actions and ideas; it’s those machines that manufacture the assholes they need to keep them running.
Those of us of more progressive or radical views, have no problem recognizing how, in poor and marginalized classes, material and social conditions make criminals, create anti-social behavior, and yet we too easily fail to see how the capitalist myth of the individual, and personal responsibility, shape how we react to the assholes of the oligarchy–even when we understand ‘class,’ even when in our mouths and heads, we know it’s “The System,” and that it’s the system we have to change–that we waste our energy and thinking when we rail against individuals in power, instead of demonstrating how the system works to create the assholes, and dictates to them what they can and cannot do within it.
In my art, I think of this in terms of representing, not objects or ideas, but connections. Even when objects are represented–I am drawn to emphasizing the connections, and leaving the objects partially erased, covered over, and secondary to what is more real than the “thing” … the connections between that create, destroy, and create them again as something new.
My (brief) experience with Artfinder.
We all need to make a living
It’s not my problem
I was only following orders.
I thought I could stay under the radar. After getting kicked off Wetcanvas for using the word ‘Queer’ (to describe myself!), I thought… just play it cool. Chill. Fuck, I need the money.
I answered questions on the application, sent photos of my art, was accepted. It was going ok, until I had a problem with a required field in setting up my “shop.” They wanted a phone number. But only a cell would do… Skype wasn’t going to work. The help FAQ suggested I look in the forums. Big mistake.
I came across a thread where several artists were complaining about ArtFinder’s exclusionary promotions. Of the 6000 some members, only a handful have their work selected to be foregrounded, to be posted on FB, etc.
“What do you expect, it’s a business. It’s not about equality,” someone wrote.
I replied to one of those–that, this was to be expected. AF is a virtual gallery, so it follows the rules of the system. It’s how the gallery-to-investor system works. One of its primary purposes is to exclude–to secure the value of a very few “brands” for investors. That’s where the money is. It’s capitalism. Capitalism corrupts the whole process of distribution of art as a “product.”
I’m called an idiot. That AF is for “real artists,” and this is how “real artists” make a living. What kind of person am I, biting the hand … etc.
Bye bye ArtFinder.
Why are artists so often, so compliant, so unthinking, so docile and willing to be used by their Masters?
After this most recent difficult encounter with the establishment art world–I’m most grateful for A-Space and the radical community for providing a place for our work to be seen–I mean, for artists who don’t want/can’t make themselves, be part of the capitalist artist branding, gallery-to-investor system.
It’s a form of political censorship. And don’t tell me, “it’s my choice,” cause if it’s a choice for me, it’s so only because I chose to look the other way and not see the many for whom there is no choice, how for those who are suckered into the con game, it’s overwhelmingly white men who make up that 5 to 10% whose ‘brands’ are trending, and so appalingly few blacks and marginalized people even get let in the door.
It’s an utterly corrupt system–the same system that sends drones across the world to bomb hospitals and wedding parties, and call it “collateral” damage
… interesting, inn’it … the other meaning for that word, “collateral.” If you don’t have the collateral, you become the damage.
Capitalism has colonized art. That’s the reality. Suck up to the bloodsuckers, or you got no future in the system.
The Neoliberal/fascist War Machine
When we think of the war machine, the focus tends to be on the horrors of war itself, on the cost to social programs when so much of the national budget goes to military and arms makers, of our treatment of veterans… but these are only parts of the machine, and not the machine itself
When you see the figures for contributions to candidates and political representatives, the larger structure begins to emerge. Isn’t this the very heart of 21st C. neoliberal/fascism–that the war machine has become the real owner of the State, that the oligarchs we want to see as our owners and rulers, have themselves lost power over the War Machine–that to maintain their wealth and the illusion of influence, they are free only to act as operatives of and for the War Machine?
… a machine that has no goal but increasing destruction–of everything subordinate to it, until there is nothing left to destroy but itself… and all human life with it?
In the long run, all the Presidential candidates, are servants of the War Machine. There is no hope for survival, or significant change, within the orders of established power. We need to find the fissures in the walls, the cracks in the foundation, to build in spaces still invisible to The Machine–alternative lives, organizations and relationships in what, from within the orders of power, are but figments of the Unreal. Microspaces of imagination, resistance and love.
Jacob Russell's Magic Names 