WTF America!

Photo by Paul McLean

WTF America!
By Paul McLean

I’ve been thinking about Harold Jarboe, about a line Harold tossed around all the time. Harold is a Nashville-based filmmaker. I “crawled” him just now, and his website linked a video he’d recently made for former Miss West Virginia Julia Burton, titled, “What a Woman Wants.” By the way, if you look up Burton’s video on the Google, dear wired Rail reader, you shouldn’t miss Burton’s post-video comments on the Y’all Wire version, the one Harold linked. Classic Nashville. Heart.

Harold and I worked together on one art project, but mostly our friendship was a series of exchanges. When I lived in Nashville, our circles overlapped at the gym, coffee shop, art openings, and post-production shops.  When our trajectories crossed – and this went on for years – Harold would get a kind of wild-eyed fierce look on his face and intone (I think this is right): “To be an artist & awake & aware is to be in a constant state of rage.” I seem to recall Harold telling me the source of the quote a few times. I don’t remember what it was now, though.

I used to laugh off Harold’s pantomime. I don’t anymore.

∞

To get rightly situated for the composition of this essay, I listened to Allen Ginsberg read Howl on YouTube. So New Media, man. If I’m not mistaken the reading was taped at the Jack Kerouac School for Disembodied Poetics at Naropa. The audio recording wasn’t properly cited, but it played with a nice photo of Ginsberg in a snazzy suit. Imagine that!

I remember Ginsberg calling out the “troglodytes and fundamentalists and the moral minority trying to control what the majority hears” in 1988. Ginsberg said Kerouac would have called Oliver North a “wimp.”

Google has an archive of news clippings, now. That’s how I double-checked the quote. Who knew? We’ve come a long way, since the days of microfilm at the public library, baby!

Since Allen’s gone to the great poetry reading in the sky, we can only speculate as to what the poet might say about the American police/surveillance/prison state, as it is now, about the corporate media monopolies, about the United States’ endless war program, about the evil that is the SCOTUS ruling on Citizens United.

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Finally, to get in the proper state of mind to write this essay, I watched and listened to Joseph Nechvatal’s “pour finir avec le jugement de dieu (complete)” on YouTube, and then I scanned Donnie Brasco on Netflix. I’ve seen Donnie Brasco before, but it seems more real, now that I live in Brooklyn. Art and God’s judgment. Cops and criminals.

I’m going to try to write something important, something that breaks through, something like thunder, a pre-enactment; a Hologram, less like Chuck Close’s self-self-self-self portrait, on view at the New Museum, and more like Eric Leisers’ little ethereal things in “Hologalactic,” on view now at All Things Project at the Neighborhood Church of Greenwich Village, across from John’s Pizzeria.  

WTF, America.

∞

LIBOR.

The whole loan and interest game is rigged the world over, we discover. Then, the corporate media does its best to blackout the story, you know, the one about THE BIGGEST FRAUD CASE IN HISTORY.

JP Morgan Chase. MF Global. Standard Chartered. HSBC. Goldman Sachs. Terrorist-funding, drug cartel money-laundering, investor-swindling banksters-gone-wild. Who’s in jail? Bradley Manning. Who’s on the run from authorities? Julian Assange.

Disneyland. Anaheim. Cops gunning down and unleashing dogs on unarmed citizens, then responding to protests with cops geared-up like soldiers in Iraq.  WTF.

THE BIGGEST PROTESTS IN HISTORY, all over the world, all summer long. Others, it seems like a new one every day, springing up like wack-a-moles, everywhere. Mexico. Spain. Canada. Italy. Syria. Greece. Russia. South Africa. Nepal…  If you relied on the New York Times for your one-stop news, how would you know?

How about the Republican Presidential ticket? Romney apparently is a tax evader, and accidentally remained CEO of Bain Capital for years after he wasn’t CEO anymore. Ryan is accused of using his office for insider trading during the Crash. Those stories? Meh.

Painting by Alex Schaefer
News Corp executives on trial for bribing cops, for wiretaps – and no Department of Justice prosecution. Wal*Mart, paying bribes in Mexico. The Facebook/Wall Street fiasco. Revelations of surveillance networks in Manhattan, the new Jim Crow laws, Stop and Frisk. Chalking artists, like heroic burning banks painter Alex Schaefer, tossed in the slammer. Same deal. WTF.

And on and on.

Who even wants to get into the complete failure and irresponsibility of Congress? It’s a disgrace. The cruelty of politicians preaching proven-failed Austerity, while they protect corporate profits and 1% tax boondoggles, is astonishing. To make matters worse, we have drought, the likes of which has not occurred since the Dust Bowl.  The statistics on American “quality of life” standards, labor conditions, student prospects, medical care and such, are depressing. The Olympics, sponsored by McDonalds, BP and other destructive enterprises, barely put a dent in the malaise. WTF.

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I was talking to my friend Don - a Vietnam combat veteran, a retired doorman, a grandfather, a widower – what he thinks about America, right now. His answer was surprising. Don thoughtfully asserted that America is going to be alright. He went on to say that he didn’t think we need a President anymore. He voted for Obama, believed him to be a good man. Don had reached the conclusion, having studied the lives of many US Presidents, that the job might be too big now for one guy, and anyway, that we as a people could get along without a President and Vice-President. He wasn’t impressed, to say the least, with Romney and Ryan.

Myself, I’m going to cast a ballot for Bernie Sanders and Alan Grayson.

∞

Occupy with Art is morphing into the Occupational Art School. We concluded the spring’s programs like “Wall Street to Main Street” and “Low Lives: Occupy!” and are moving on to “CO-OP/Occufest” and the Occupational Art School. For a variety of reasons, tactical and ideological, our efforts have been marginalized. With a few exceptions, the art world, as such, is busy folding Occupy Art into its 1%-oriented status quo. No surprise there.

OWS focused its waning organizational juice and its budget on May Day, 2012. The protest was a humdinger, and the posters were great, as was Guitarmy. Since that largely peaceful party, Tax Dodgers got into the Baseball Hall of Fame with their hilarious and poignant antics. Some terrific videos have emerged, and a healthy, robust theoretical discourse, which percolates into mainstream threads and vehicles periodically, especially in the Guardian. The Soul of Occupy has been examined and great thinkers, including Zizec, Graeber and Chomsky, have proffered prognoses. I’ve thrown in my two cents.

People approach me to ask, “What’s going on with OWS?” It happens a lot. I’m supposed to have an inside story, and sometimes I do. What I tell them, though, is “You are Occupy. This is not a spectator sport. Democracy is not a spectator sport.” Scanning galleries of photos and archives of videos from the occupation regularly, I come across reminders of the directness of the Occupy message, which was plentiful and dimensional. One of the Grannies who protested in the park early on wore a sandwich-board sign with the “spectator sport” message. WTF, America, you still don’t get it.

Occupy wasn’t Jesus come to rescue you from the sins and sinners of Capitalism. It doesn’t work that way. OWS was never something you could get by following on Facebook. The occupation wasn’t and isn’t a struggle, mission and task your fractional proxy could accomplish by volunteering in your stead. Most importantly, the problems OWS erupted to confront have not improved. They’ve gotten worse, and for almost anyone who might be reading this text, much worse.

WTF, America? What are you going to do? What are we going to do?

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This is your historical moment. The problem is, it doesn’t look, taste, smell or feel anything like what you might have expected. It never does. It doesn’t read like a book. It doesn’t look like a program on the History Channel. It’s not the 60s or the Big War, or the Great Depression. It’s different.

The enemy is not going to appear in a uniform that says “ENEMY” on it. Your enemy is a successful CEO, a banker, and a wealthy industrialist or heir. The cops are not what hundreds and thousands of TV shows convinced you he is. You aren’t safer, now that your civil liberties have been dissolved with pen strokes and normalized lawlessness. The goals of the enemy are, however, the same. Evil psychopaths want to rule the world. They want you to acquiesce. They will insist you accept lives enslaved to their will, to their mad visions. They possess the means and desire to destroy your world, your society, your family, in order to create a New Order that situates them at its pinnacle. In that New Order the best you can be is a manager, a collaborator, a guard, a lackey, a technocrat, a shill or an entertainer. In their universal scheme, they are the stars, and you are nothing more than dark matter, expendable, a human resource.

∞

The “diversity of tactics” discussion in Occupy is a good start. Eventually, it will have to evolve into “by any means necessary.” This is because the enemy, who is dimensional in nature and practice, has settled on that course. Whether anyone wants to admit it or not, World War 3 has begun. The enemy is a now-global, syndicated plutocracy, which in one form and scale or another, has been a bane on humanity for thousands of years. Compared to these guys, the Taliban are the Three Stooges. They have the long view. They are willing to do, say, pay for anything to attain, maintain and sustain power, prestige, and a dominant position. They don’t care about you, your dreams, art, truth, beauty, your soul, your kids, your water, your church, your love, your humanity. Their greatest achievement, creatively, is the modern multinational corporation, an artificial infinite personhood, focused solely on the bottom line, equipped with armies (literally, now), the best lawyers, accountants, politicians money can buy, and millions of indentured servants, even straight-up slaves! You don’t even want to know what they do for pleasure (or maybe you do).

The iteration of the corporation they fashioned is Caesar. Its name is on the Coliseum. Everything in Heaven & Earth has been monetized under its rule. Birth, death, food, weather, sex, youth, sickness, conflict, breath… It foments its own art and political movements. It educates the people. It secures them in their (ha!) property and possessions (ROTFL). It explains why, how and who is necessary for good life, all life, to function effectively. What it doesn’t know, it will, eventually. It owns the demos, the democracy. It has the power of life and death, of silence. It is bigger than Nature. Bigger than God. It has destroyed demons and supplanted them with itself. It is its own cosmology. It will send itself into space. It will solve the mysteries of everything, and it will do so because it is the great owner of TIME.

And it is a LIE.

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WTF, America. How long are you going to be willing to put up with this? You’ve been robbed blind, swindled, hoodwinked. The goon who took you didn’t look like a cinema wise guy. Who cares! Your kids are being wasted in the deserts, of the Mideast, of the Midwest, of their own addictions, in a land increasingly devoid of meaningful opportunity, in the prisons of America, corporatized prisons, for profit. Your people, the real ones – their loss is the enemy’s gain!

What’s keeping you in your cave? Is it that there has been no resounding call to arms? Forget about it. It’s not coming. The enemy figured out you might be waiting for that and has made sure it won’t be happening. Are you waiting for your neighborhood to mobilize? Have you walked in your neighborhood recently? Are you expecting it to form teams and get on the job? I had that thought for a minute a few months ago, before I woke up.

Are you waiting to get ahead on your debts? Hah! Are holding out for a good job, with benefits, a pension? Just look at Wisconsin, and think of the men, women and children gunned down by cops with machine guns in Marikana. Remember that battle has been raging for 500 years (see Cerro Rico) in every “New World” the extractors and exploiters discover and see an opportunity to “order.”

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WTF. America, if you could beat the Nazis, the Japs, the Fascists of Italy in four years, don’t you think you can defeat these scumbags? Are you smart enough? Strong enough? Tough enough? Do you have the endurance? Do you have the will? Is God  - whatever your conception of God is, because THAT’S America - on your side, or theirs? By the way, they don’t care about God. The enemy believes they are gods, more or less.

America, if you could turn the tide of Russian and Chinese Communism and/or Socialism, and set it upon itself, don’t you think you can do the same for the Pimps of Davos? Like Jesus cleaning the money lenders out of the Temple, right? Boom goes the Dynamite! Get the bums out of Washington! Don’t quit until the job is done! Rally under the flag of your fathers!

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Or sit on your couch and get high. Go to your therapist. Buy a new CD. Rent a movie. Go to church on Sunday. Get in your 60 hours at the office to keep your job. Take the meds for your anxiety and heart condition. Stop at the bar, go on vacation, get some fishing in, head to the mall, take a drive. Jerk off to porn. Hook up with a co-worker. Play with the kids. Sue somebody. Whatever.

This is your moment in history. You idolize the Greatest Generation. Fair enough. You pine for the hippie free love of yore. Fine.  You celebrate emancipations, one after another, in our country’s troubled but great history. Compared to the great struggle we’ve faced – I’m sorry to be the bearer of the news – ours today is of the greatest consequence. The fact is, though, I think that’s always the case.

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The objective is to reclaim Time. I know, that notion seems awfully abstract, even conceptual. It’s real.

Time, your time, has been stolen from you, or you’ve willingly surrendered it, with or without much of a fight, if any. Maybe you grumble about it. Until you and we realize how precious time is, no one will have an idea of what we’re actually fighting for.

∞

The Bomb in the 50s was the most fearsome weapon on Earth. Today, it is and it isn’t. The greatest threat to civilization, to freedom, today is the derivatives market. If you’re not willing to figure out why that is, you won’t understand the 2007-8 Crash, LIBOR, the London Whale, or much of the international news that is, whether you accept it or not, gravely affecting your past, present and future.

The prime players in the world game called “You Bet Your Ass (or his, or theirs-)” have faces, names, houses, countries of origin, personal histories and dramas. Some of these players you may be familiar with (like Bloomberg) and others you may not. It’s more possible than ever to uncover the invisible hand of greed. Occupy has and continues to do a lot of that work for you, which is why the movement has incurred such brutal repression.

∞

One thing I’ve learned over the past year of occupation is that Revolution isn’t what you expect. It doesn’t always evolve in directions you personally might advocate. Revolution may not ask or want your opinion.  It may not respect your gifts, and you can’t own it. Sometimes, it will whip around and bite your ass. Ask the French. They had a lot of good ideas and intentions. They perfected execution by guillotine. Robespierre is a case study in Revolutionary dynamics.

A lot of sane people are very cautious about pushing revolution for that very reason. Many more people will justify apathy or fearful self-removal from conflict for the very same reason. Hitler and Germany – and all their enablers - demonstrated forever why accepting the unacceptable is finally unacceptable. At some point down the line, people usually will have to explain what they were doing, while Evil was growing and then consuming their society.

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WTF, America – what have you been up to, while the treasure of your nation, both material and immaterial, was taken from you, by wicked people through subterfuge or direct action? More to the point, what are you going to do about it, now that the cards are on the table, the jig is up, and you’ve been called?

There’s still time to pull yourself together and put down the Hun, but not much. Time will go on, regardless. The same cannot be said for American democracy. America will sustain, as a bottom-up proposition of freedom – not to be conflated with a free market, which has been shown unequivocally to be a lie – only if we individually and collectively commit to protect and preserve it. Obviously, there are millions, even billions of people around the world, who are ready, willing and able to join us in that task, who want essentially the same for themselves. Democracy, like the Granny said, is not a spectator sport. It has to be chosen. Many Americans have bled and died to defend this democracy – not for the Rockefellers, Gates, Broads and Fricks – for themselves, their families, their buddies, their towns, their futures.

∞

If we succeed, we’ll enter a new dimension. If we fail, the future appears Apocalyptic, right? WTF, America. Do it: do it one more time. It won’t be easy, but you’re worth it. Don’t choose slavery.

After that, you can recede into the dusk of history happy, sleeping comfortably in your own bed, cancer-free. The 1% are a cancer. Cut them out, burn them, poison them, like modern medicine prescribes for most cancers. Then, if you survive, try the 99% new agers, with their preventative measures, their homeopathics, whole natural foods, massages and meditation. Choose to be indigenous, a native. Choose to be happy, joyous and 100% free. Sure, that sounds fantastical. But if you finally manage to remove the vampire squid from your face, you might just look upon the world with new eyes, and realize all along you were living on a spaceship called Paradise, and each one of us is a captain, or whatever we want to play today.

Think Rip van Winkle. It may take thousands of years, but people will come around. In the meantime, we can take lots of road trips, make great art and babies.

Photo by Ambrose Curry