Monday, May 28, 2012

A MEMORIAL DAY for murderers--past and present?


By William PLEASANT

Today, the US secular religious cult celebrated Memorial Day.
We were urged to give thanks--apolitically--to the US military personnel
who "died for our freedoms". The day was marked with military parades and
mountainous steaming piles of sentimental oratory. President Buckwheat Obama stood on the altar of US imperialism and called forth a deluge of crocodile tears.
Meanwhile, retail outlets badgered the appropriately mournful patriotic masses to soothe their bereavement with the purchase of a new car or sofa. That was the holiday. That was Memorial Day 2012, America's secular Easter--death and resurrection symbolized by the custom of lowering the flag to half-mast at dawn and then raising it at noon.




As marxists, we understand the political and cultural function of holidays. Aside from their transparent commercial utility, holidays serve a specific political use for the ruling stratum.

Karl Marx wrote:"Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of the
heartless world, just as it is the spirit of a spiritless situation. It is the opium of the people."

The US secular religion is no less a narcotic. The CHURCH USA, as I style it, holds that every military escapade, past and present, is the work of an omniscient and benevolent god tasked with spreading his bounty--mainly consumer good, armaments and crass materialism--around the globe. The daily slaughter of civilians and military personnel is a necessary good for the glory of god who resides everywhere except in the political, social and financial agenda of the ruling class. One knows not where wars come from, but they are the will of the invisible god of America. Memorial Day serves to keep that god under wraps.


HIROSHIMA
 
Today, President Obama, the Pope of the CHURCH USA, in his Washington DC Memorial Day sermon, used the occasion to do a little historical revision on the 50th anniversary of the start of the Vietnam War. At the Vietnam war monument, he chastised past sinners for their apparent maltreatment of Vietnam War-era military personnel upon their return to the US. (Click here for complete text.)

"It was a national shame, a disgrace that should have never happened.
"That's why here today we resolve that it will not happen again," Obama told veterans and their families gathered on the national mall.

"You were often blamed for a war you didn't start when you should have been commended for serving your country with valor."


VIET NAM
 Indeed, returning members of the military were the target of national outrage over the illegal war in Vietnam. As operatives of a policy that was rejected by huge sectors of the population, they suffered the same repudiation as their civilian and military superiors. They were reviled for clear cut political reasons. Why did people throw garbage at returning soldiers? Namely, because military personnel committed atrocities against the Vietnamese people in the name of propping up the appallingly corrupt, neo-colonial clique known as the Republic of Vietnam. Most American people, particularly youths and non-whites, detested the war policy. They acted out on their political opposition. As Obama pointed out, that was a sin and the American people should sin no more.


GRENADA

But why shouldn't the gunslingers of US imperialism in Vietnam have been subjected to criticism and rebuke? Why, in a like manner, the marauding assassins who today operate in Afghanistan and Iraq not be called to task for their role in barbarizing the people in those countries?


PANAMA
Isn't a hitman as guilty of murder as is his employer?
 
The CHURCH USA requires a yearly mass supplication called Memorial Day to ward off the rather transparent fact that US military policy makers and their minions in the trenches are equally guilty of ongoing crimes against humanity. Memorial Day is merely a ploy to deflect political criticism of imperialistic military aggression by but again exploiting the cannonfodder class--dead and alive--as poster children. They bravely served the country, so they are worthy of our mourning and sympathy, correct? "The country" is really a myth. The military serves its paymaster, the ruling stratum. They kill for the ruling stratum. They occupy countries for the ruling stratum. And they make money, in the productive process of war manufacture, for the ruling stratum. Memorial Day is supposed to blind us with tears to the extent that we cannot discern the obvious.


IRAQ
 
The truth of the matter is that the holiday that we now call Memorial Day was invented by Black people in Charleston, SC. It was a political celebration based upon honoring dead Union Soldiers in the aftermath of the Civil War.

According to historian David Blight:

"During the final year of the war, the Confederates had converted the planters' horse track, the Washington Race Course and Jockey Club, into an outdoor prison. Union soldiers were kept in horrible conditions in the interior of the track; at least 257 died of exposure and disease and were hastily buried in a mass grave behind the grandstand. Some 28 black workmen went to the site, re-buried the Union dead properly, and built a high fence around the cemetery. They whitewashed the fence and built an archway over an entrance on which they inscribed the words, "Martyrs of the Race Course."

"Then, [B]lack Charlestonians, in cooperation with white missionaries and teachers, staged an unforgettable parade of 10,000 people on the slaveholders' race course. [May 1, 1865--Ed.]. The symbolic power of the low-country planter aristocracy's horse track (where they had displayed their wealth, leisure, and influence) was not lost on the freed people. A New York Tribune correspondent witnessed the event and described, "a procession of friends and mourners as South Carolina and the United States never saw before."

This holiday--originally called DECORATION DAY-- caught on throughout the Unionist states. But its political meaning was quickly transformed by the bourgeoisie in the 1870s. Disdainful of freed Blacks and in opposition to radical Reconstructionists/progressives who saw Decoration Day as a celebration of Black emancipation and the victory of social progress, Decoration Day was quickly transformed into a spectacle of national mourning for ALL deceased US military personnel from ALL wars--including dead Confederate soldiers from the Civil War!!!! This was quite convenient, since the northern ruling stratum had grown weary of Reconstruction and was eager to get on with making money with the assistance of the previously defeated Southern aristocracy. Reconstruction was abandoned in 1876, with the withdrawal of federal troops from the South. The former rebel slave-owners were freed to initiate a reign of terror against the emancipated slaves and their white supporters. Blood flowed in the streets of the South. Meanwhile, a myth of national unity was anchored in all-embracing holiday of reconciliation between white men of the North and South. Modern Memorial Day was born.


PALESTINE BY PROXY
Through the years and until the end of World War II, Decoration Day--renamed Memorial Day--served the task of inculcating the myth of US national unity--actually a unity of cadavers who had previously engaged in corporatized ultra-violence. But as US imperialism went into over-drive following WWII, leading to dozens of military adventures of at best dubious justifications, the theme of national unity was supplanted with a theme of worshiping the act of war making and its executioner. That was, in fact, the substance of Obama's sermon today. According to Pres. Buckwheat, we were supposed to reward mass murderers with praise as a reflex of patriotism .

--30--

Friday, May 25, 2012

Comprendre, On N’a Pas D’autre Choix Pour Respirer Et Voir

(To understand, one has no choice but to breath and to see)
By Malik Sekou OSEI
Oui,
              Comprendre,
                                  On n’a pas d’autre choix
                                                            Pour respire et
                                                                                  voir…..
          As the
               world
                gives birth
                              to the brightness
                                                    of
                                                        light
                                                        likes an
                                                                    up-side-down
                                                                                  chicken
                                   pushing…
                                        sunny-side
                                                        up…
             The tombs gray
                                  of stoic still
                                                   buildings
                                   becomes
                                                 a
                                                    brighter
                                                    shade
                                                             of the same…
               The brown of
                              Ebony
                                      Mother/women
                                                        feels
                                             the shrinking
                                                            shade
                                                                 of
                                                                     night,
                                               behind closed
                                                               eyes
                                                                       lids…
Oui,
    Comprendre, on n’a
              Pas d’autre choix
              Pour respire et
                                     voir….
                 As…
                    a mother—
                          as she, the braids of time
                                   across
                                        her
                                        temples
                                                and
                                                   forehead.
    Trying to
                  forget
                            the
                                 French.
         For history
         Is the post-card
          Of sentimental
                          choice.
          Her name
                    Of imposed
                    Nationality
                    From a
                    Furcated
                            City
                               Of
                                  A
                                 Profane
                                          Spain.
       This mother
              communicated
               through
                            her
                                 eyes
                                     in
                                   the
                             French
                                after
                                   the
        “Treaty of Versailles.”
               She
                     brought
                             fear
                                 to
                                      their
                                             eyes
             when
                    she
                        whispered
                             “REVO”
                                    in
                                      English.
        Now, pale
                   travelers
                              can’t
                                       get a
                                            tan
                                                 under
                                                       communism.
          This
               Woman/mother
                Kept a picture
                               Post-card
                                     Of Julien Fedon
                 In the back of her
                                       purse.
   Oui,
       Compredre, on n’a
       Pas d’autre choix
       Pour respire et
                              voir...
   Now, she must travel,
              Visit the undisciplined
                                          of
                                              immediate gravitation
                                                                           of
                                                                                youth…
    Under the
                  gray sun
                            the dysfunction of
                        in-and-out of uniform.
                        Of mad Negroes in blue
                        Who only role is to cowardly
                                               Accommodate
                                    the keeping of victims
                                     of iron
                                             bracelets and
                                             cheap rubber slippers.
       Oui,
     Comprendre, on n’a
     Pas d’autre choix
     Pour respire et
                             Voir….
      As the childish uniform
      cowards only to receive
      A check
                  every two weeks
      only
             to rationalize
      the privatize slave trade
                                of youth
                              ignorance
                                and who
                          public dress,
                                       only
                                exposes
                             the public
                           dyfunction
                                       and
                     lack of respect
                     for themselves
                    and the people 
                                 of their
                          comunities
                                      and 
                                             class
        oui,
             comprendre, on n'a pas d'autre choix
             pour respirer et
                                          voir...
  --30--

Wednesday, May 23, 2012

That black, shiny thing...

By William PLEASANT
(c) 2012 Thunder Publications, Inc.

[The bodies of FLEET and FLANNERY O’Connor are brought into the
theatre or cathedral or county courthouse on a single hospital gurney
by two pallbearers. Filthy white sheets cover the two cadavers.

The ARCHBISHOP leads the procession. Once the gurney is hidden in a "secret garden" the two pallbearers leave the page and take seats
beside the reader. They smoke and discuss trashy tabloid magazines,
as if OBLIVIOUS to the remainder of the poem...The ARCHBISOP (of Savannah?)
addresses the reader. As he speaks, FLEET and FLANNERY copulate
and slowly emerge from their blood-splattered shrouds. [This is a book you are reading.]
 


ARCHBISHOP
Lo! A nightingale of paradise singeth upon a twig of the tree of
paradise in a clear voice, proclaiming, the gladtidings of our nearness
to god.

(PAUSE HERE)

GOD!

GOD!
GOD?
Here lies the great southern author FLANNERY O’Connor and her
nigger lover, who took himself and her from this earth.

Double suicide!

As wicked as the lust between them.

FLANNERY, my sister.
The nigger FLEET, sullen bastard too good to be a nigger.
The perfect Nigger FLEET.
The nigger with one, two, three degrees, eight modern languages--
Greek, Latin and Hebrew, too.
Nigger genius FLEET!

Let me tell you about FLEET.
Let me tell you that I warned Daddy the day he brought that rascal
out to the house to drive our car.

I say: "Daddy, you see the way that nigra walks, the way he breathes?
Look at his hands, Daddy, how slender and smooth they are? Look at
the way his jaw is set. That is the face of a Messiah or a murderer.
Either way, he’s out to turn our world upside down."

Daddy, he say,
that be Merriett--that’s his real name--Dr. Merriett Cuffe--be Lula’s boy
and he’d promised Lula that once Merriett finished his schooling he’d
give him a job where her son wouldn’t get his hands dirty.

Those hands!
Lawd-a-mercy.
They plucked a piano or violin as effortlessly as
one could PULL A TRIGGER.

(PAUSE HERE)

He sang, too, in a satin tenor.

GODDAMN you, FLEET!
GODDAMN you.

(On knees, in supplication and remorse)

I named him FLEET after
Daddy’s big car--Fleetwood.
FLEET, get it? Fleetwood
Cadillac, the finest car MADE.

And I remember the first day
I called him that, he just held
his head low and sighed, as
though I had said something
inevitable, as if I had
disappointed him.

He never spoke a word to me again
after that. He only did whatever I told him to do.

And Daddy took up calling him FLEET, too.
He thought it was funny, a fitting name
for a Cadillac-quality darky,
That black shiny thing.


(PAUSE HERE)

FLANNERY vacillated some days:  it was FLEET and others it was
Merriett. No telling what name she moaned as she clasped him under the
sheets, on the backseat of Daddy’s car.
Wicked!
Wicked!


BUT. YET.
FLEET stood so straight, like a pole was jabbed up his behind.
His muscles?
I saw him on the days he’d strip to the waist to wash Daddy’s big
black car.

The day they buried Daddy, he was there--FLEET--his skin as smooth
and hairless as the body of that glistening car, molded or chisled from
iron or some unearthly stone.
I wanted to touch him.
I wanted to glide my fingertips across the lips of the wounds I gave
him--I called him FLEET first.
To name is the first act in murder’s drama.
I was the ROMAN soldier: my tongue was the spear that pierced him
out of the same dumb fate that placed a brilliant BLACK man as my
handservant and between FLANNERY’S hungry thighs.
WICKED!
WICKED!

In this "secret garden" rooted in black and white and blood,
And creamy dew-drops congealed around a shaft of gold hunger,
Then frozen in hatred as facile as the tautology X=X,
Terminology Almighty, this mean mathematics.


Variables? DEFEAT. INSANITY. SEX.

Or our DIXIE TRINITY,
strung along lynchrope syllogisms, blazing in the night sky
from mountaintops dotted with failed ghosts,
clutching their pricks and their yellow-haired women,
while they could be instead holding FLEET to their breasts,
His richness and perfection.

FLEET!

[Close the book now.]

--30--

Monday, May 21, 2012

Same-sex marriage: Pres. Buckwheat blows his sissies a kiss

By William PLEASANT w/ Sekou OSEI

We guess all of you had a chance to witness the latest stand-up comedy routine as policy statement by President Barack Obama. We got a chance to hear and see his proclamation last Wednesday night (May 16) on ABC that he supports same-sex marriage. Naturally, we also witnessed the US Liberal Establishment cheer this long-awaited declaration of pro-gay sympathy as a defining moment in the Obama presidency. Obama fixed a national "problem" on a television show, they say.

So, the federal government's failure to bless gay marriage is a fundamental contradiction of life in the USA? Pres. Buckwheat would like you to think so. The "same-sex marriage issue" has ascended to the same level of social urgency as wanton police violence against the poor, unemployment, mass incarceration of Black, Latino and Asian youths, an irrational for-the-rich health care system, sub-prime mortgage rip-offs and the extra-judicial murder of US citizens abroad (and soon coming LIVE to your neighborhood, too)...Oh no! The the most pressing issue facing the increasingly abused and confused US populace is the RIGHT of two people of the same gender to enter a state-brokered and regulated sexual contract.

According to a new PEW poll, gay marriage ranked 18th in the list of important issues, coming far behind the economy, jobs, health care and war.
Obama announced on ABC that, “for me personally, it’s is important for me to go ahead and affirm that I think same-sex couples should be able to get married,” adding that his position on the issue had "evolved" over the course of his presidency.

The Obama regime's Department of Mindfuck sought to frame their leader's remarks as a reaction to the "unscripted" gay-friendly statements from Vice President Joseph Biden the weekend before. We can see that the timing of Obama's proclamation had all the earmarks of a calculated political maneuver—an attempt to divert attention from the real economic and social crisis, while bolstering Obama’s support among the more privileged section of the white, liberal intelligentsia for whom issues such as gay rights and marriage are principal moral fetishes posing as political demands. He was simply pandering to his monied base on cue from his fund-raising managers. Moreover, Pres. Buckwheat does not want his gay and gay-friendly supporters kicking up a storm over the "same-sex marriage issue" through the summer and into the fall election season. In one swoop, he shrewdly set up the Republicans to have a premature wad-bust on the issue, AND GOT PAID FOR IT. Gay marriage is effectively off the table for the final lap of the 2012 campaign season. Touche', Mitt Romney!

Last week the New York Times set the tone for the response of the liberal establishment in its Thursday, post-epiphany edition. The Times proclaimed that with his statement, Obama “took the moral high ground on what may be the great civil rights struggle of our time.”

A companion article in the Times oozed that Obama’s approval of gay marriage “was by any measure a watershed.” The Times continued, “The very riskiness of what Mr. Obama did—some commentators were invoking Lyndon B. Johnson embrace of the civil rights in 1964, with all the attendant political perils—made it hard to understate the historic significance of what took place at the White House on Wednesday.”

The Associated Press further explained that, “Hollywood is home to some of the most high-profile backers of gay marriage, and the 150 donors who are paying $400,000 each to attend Clooney’s dinner Thursday night will no doubt feel newly invigorated by Obama’s watershed announcement the day before.” The AP added that targeted Obama donors would roll with a number of fundraisers in the next several days. Big $$$. Gay marriage will be the dominant issue, “culminating in yet another fund-raising event Monday in New York sponsored by gay and Latino Obama supporters.” The near-hysterical enthusiasm among these parasitical and opportunistic constituencies within the Democratic Party will add but another "leftist" veneer to the Obama regime.

The attempt by the New York Times to present the issue of gay marriage as historically on par with the mass struggles for civil rights during the 1960s is, as a political matter, absurd. We say this not from the perspective of the vulgar Marxists (Stalinists), who conjure up hierarchies of “issues”; nor as Black cultural nationalists minstrels who vehemently insist that their version of the "Black Thang" is the morally and historically most worthy of the Democratic Party's patronage--Negroes über alles! These are the same folks who whine that mere "sexual deviants" are upstaging their buckdance. That is absolutely not where we are coming from.

From a Marxian perspective, there is no competition between gay/lesbian civil rights and Black/Latino/Native/Asian civil rights. Civil rights are class-in-itself demands in the same way that organized labor demands are merely pleadings to the BOSS for fairness. Even if these concessions are granted, nothing changes in the social structure of power. The current structure of social power is in fact terracidal. It must be overthrown. The demand for civil right does not address this political and historical imperative.

Only opportunists (social democrats, retro-Black nationalistic posers and Marxist vulgarians) get their noses out of joint when a new pig challenges them at the Democratic Party's slop-n-crumb trough. Obama's new pigs are not representative of the poor and working class lesbian/gay folks who populate this country but a minority of patronage-hungry political oafs in drag, dedicated to creating a FAGGIT MICRO-NATIONALISM for their and only their opportunistic aspirations, as a vested caucus within the Democratic Party. They are just Obama's sissies. [QUOTE US!]

Pres. Obama threw the sissies and only them a kiss on ABC TV. At no time did he address the real history of state-organized abuse of lesbian/gay people. At no time did he admit that the US government carried out well-funded campaigns to purge itself of "deviants." Did Obama allude to or apologize for these human rights abuses during the ABC TV interview?

HELL NO!

Well, he has never even considered an apology for the atrocities of slavery and ethnic cleansing/genocide visited upon the Blacks and Native and Latino Peoples either.

Offering a half-ass personal epiphany regarding same-sex marriage
can in no way be construed as even lukewarm support the actual gay/lesbian civil rights agenda. 

Nonetheless, the glitterati of the "lesbian/gay community (whatever that means, except as a luscious advertising market and donor base to the DP)" has soiled its panties in joy, according to the NEW YORK TIMES. Obama said he has no problem with TWO LADIES or TWO GUYS getting married. So what?

That is not revolutionary. Tactically speaking, it isn't even progressive. Same-sex  marriage  operatively means that more county registry offices will collect more marriage license fees. We can expect Men's Warehouse to add bridal gowns to its stock. And likewise, Divorce lawyers will reap a new market for their brand of court room mayhem. Right? Think about it.

Marxists have the equivalent take on hetero-sexual marriage as "same-sex" marriage. Marriage is a VERY BACKWARDS sexual contract, policed by the state. Marriage was developed to assure property transfer to the descendants of deceased MEN--i.e., it allowed for a legal contract (church and/or state) record to be lodged as to the legitimacy of the heirs of the parents--in the form of a contract of sexual fidelity between the male and female partners. (The essence of the contract is that the female assures the male that all children resulting from HER COITUS are ONLY the biological offspring of her male contractual partner. It assures that no BASTARDS--acts of infidelity/breech of contract by females expressed as children--get to take a piece of the pie in surrogate/chancellery court against the estate of the male contractor.) .

Marriage is for men, especially rich men.
Same-sex marriage (a post-infantile version of playing "mama and daddy") only allows state policing of property transfer upon disability and/or death of contracting parties. A marriage is not required to allow that to happen. In actuality, an adult man and an adult woman, or a woman and a woman/man and a man may make any kind of contract they may choose that is non-criminal. It does not have to be a marriage--an open invitation to total state abuse and commercial exploitation.

The Democratic Party's mania over same-sex marriage has nothing to do with even rhetorically addressing nor ameliorating the suffering of poor and working class social/sexual outlaws--fashionably designated as gays and lesbians or QUEERS.

The specific repression against lesbian and gays is not the denial of access to legal marriage.

For Marxists, all "Legal" Marriage is utterly patriarchal and reactionary, same-sex or otherwise. That is why the comparison between the struggle for "same-sex marriage" is historically, socially and politically absurd when compared to the Black/Latino/Native resistance in the US. It is a joke when compared to the anti-imperialistic political and armed liberation tendencies in the US and elsewhere.

Actually, legal marriage is a tool of repression against all--gay or "straight."

In the end, you have a GAY/LESBIAN opportunistic proto-caucus within the Democratic Party urging acceptance of a LESBIAN/GAY VERSION of a patriarchal, bourgeois contract format, owned and operated by the state. Ironically, these alleged social/sexual outlaws now DEMAND the right to permit the police to get in their panties, too. That is all the social equality they and the Democratic Party have to offer lesbians and gays at this time. But the outlaws doing all the talking now are just privileged-class social deviants and their petite-bourgeois camp followers who see a chance for their tickets to be punched by Obama's Democratic Party. The "same-sex marriage issue" is just their crack in the door.

That is what DEMOCRATIC PARTY opportunism looks like.

The so-called lesbian/gay leadership is as thick and corrupt as the Black/Latino/Native so-called leadership. They are all pathetic geeks in the Democratic Party sideshow. But Barack Obama is the ringmaster of this circus. He is also determined to hold on to his job at any cost.

Meanwhile, the poor and working class, despite how they get their erotic jollies, are ground into the mud.

Rainbow. Right?

Lesbians and gays are sub-cultures which have endured two centuries of specific STATE repression in the United States. There has been de jure repression against them, as a response to their practical social deviation from patriarchy and the bourgeois labor replication regimen, i.e., the command that females are divinely mandated to replenish the cannon-fodder pool with slave babies.

The poor and working class lesbian/gay demand for relief from specific repression is historically lawful and progressive. And it is incumbent upon ALL MARXISTS and progressive social elements to support their demand for relief. Poor and working class lesbians and gays must be supported in their struggle for human rights and democratic inclusion. BUT THAT HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH THE THEORY NOR PRACTICE OF THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY USA, Barack Obama nor his wannabe amen corner on the social/sexual fringe.

When the poor of America cry out for bread, peace and justice Obama answers with austerity measures, more military conflict and increasing police repression.

Likewise, when grassroots gay/lesbian people cry out for relief all that Obama has to say to them is: "Well, now I feel like you can get legally married. But it's just a feelin'. Dig?"

The Democratic Party can only answer its electoral base, the poor, with betrayal and dismissal. That is its job in the system of decaying global monopoly capitalism.

The rebellion of the slaves will be the war of the landscapes.

Remember: History is on our side, not time.

--30--