oooh I’ve been aggravated. I live in a state of political aggravation. The causes seem only to multiply. Here’s a pledge I recently read by our former V.P. Dan Quayle, this a “Reclaiming America” conference in 1994:
“I pledge allegiance to the Christian flag, and to the Savior, for whose Kingdom it stands. One Savior, crucified, risen, and coming again, with life and liberty for all who believe.”
A few weeks ago Ha’aretz (a liberal Israeli paper) obtained and excerpted the minutes of the meetings of the new Palestinian Prime Minister Abbas with militant groups. Abbas told the militant leaders that Bush said God ordered Bush to attack Al Qaeda in Afghanistan, then God told him to attack Iraq, and lately God has told him to bring peace to the Middle-East.
I have been living in a bubble world of secularists. I grew up in that bubble world and I believed in it. But now the Christians have risen again and the horrible truth is you have to believe that they’re serious.
The Bible Belt has grabbed its razor strap and is coming for us.
I recommend a book by Michael Lind, a fifth generation Texan, “Made in Texas: George W. Bush and the Southern Takeover of American Politics.” It lays out the background for what is going on. The South has never been in my country, despite the fact that some of my ancestors came from there. This book reveals how deeply different the Southern political system has been, not only before the Civil War, but ever since.
According to Lind, although the South lost the Civil War, in their territory they established a de facto Confederacy, “with the economy of a non-industrial resource colony, the social order of a racial caste society, and the politics of a one-party dictatorship.” This party was the Dixiecrats, and after the Civil Rights revolution, its white constituents migrated politically to become the core base of the modern Republican party. The Republican takeover in the South has shown the consequences of the way the American system is rigged in favor of rural states. It has given the Confeds the power even if they don’t have the majority — witness, of course, the Presidential debacle (oops, election).
Today’s Southern right combines the political economy of plantation owners with the fundamentalist religion of hillbillies. When George W. Bush captured the White House that backwater rose up like the return of the repressed. We have become captives of the legacy of the South and the consequences are beginning to look devastating.
I’ve been in despair lately over the deterioration of the situation in Iraq. How do you have an anti-war movement when the war is supposedly over? Perhaps killing the anti-war movement is the real reason Bush did his pimp walk across the deck of that aircraft carrier, strutting against a military backdrop to hype his declaration of American victory. Now the guerilla war has begun and there’s no end in sight. I suspect the most passionate opponents of this new stage of American involvement are the grunts in uniform, worried about their exposed backs. They signed up to defend this country from real threats. Now they are stuck over there indefinately, eyeing a hostile and restive population any one of whom may or may not try to kill them. The only thing that is clear in this situation is that Iraq was never a threat to begin with. (Guess that faith-based intelligence isn’t always accurate!)
After the first Gulf War, Saddam ordered his people to get the country up and running fast and his terrified minions scurried and toiled and it was done --- in forty one days. The Palestinian grocer down the street confirms this. He worked for a water purification company in Baghdad after the first Gulf War, and when he arrived, 3 months after that war ended, the whole country was patched up and running smoothly except for one smallish piece of the telecommunications infrastructure. No wonder many Iraqis think the Americans have contempt for them and don’t care whether or not their country rots. How could the Americans, so stunningly efficient in winning the war, turn out to be stunningly incompetent afterwards? It’s a shock. But it really only confirms what was obvious to begin with about this Administration. They are driven by faith and ideology and the complexities of real human societies are beyond their capacities.
Such complexities are so overwhelming to this Administration that they have already enacted policies of censorship: in the CIA, the State Department, the Armed Forces, and the EPA. What’s next?
Bush is a Southern conservative. We’ve had many national politicians who were Southern moderates or even progressives. Bush is the first Southern conservative, and he is the chosen son of what I am calling the oligarchy — the ones who were Dixiecrats before they were Republicans, and who were slave-holding, plantation owning Confederates before they were Dixiecrats. This oligarchy is not the same thing as the managerial and technocratic business class. The latter certainly has its problems from a progressive point of view, but it is interested in the well-being and stability of the Federal Government (good for business). It would not and did not use Whitewater and adultery to launch an attempted coup. That came from the Southern oligarchy, one of whose most influential elected representatives recently said that their aim was to starve the Federal Government until it was small enough to be drowned in a bathtub.
If we want to understand the imperatives of the current Administration’s economic policies, it is instructive to look at the economic history of the Deep South. I quote Michael Lind:
The Southern oligarchy—in its various historic incarnations, ranging from enlightened slaveowners of Virginia like Jefferson and Madison to reactionary West Texas oil men born to family wealth—is a genuine aristocracy. The members of the Anglo-Southern “chivalry” who, in the 19th Century, compared one another to Bayard, the chevalier peur et sans reproche, were not pretentious frauds who had read too many books by Sir Walter Scott. They were the real thing: a hereditary ruling class with a premodern mentality whose power rested in ownership of land and domination of politics and the military. They were the first cousins of the British aristocracy and distant cousins of the Prussian Junkers, the Spanish creole elite, and the Russian service nobility. For centuries in their English-speaking section of tropical America they rode horses, fought duels, and were waited on by hordes of slaves or servants from birth until death. There were usually better at spending money than at making it. They were not bourgeois.
So many Americans today do not have ancestral connections to the Civil War that the notion that the history of the South is exerting powerful influences on our political present is often counter-intuitive. But consider that Enron and Worldcom, the biggest bankruptcies in American history, were headquartered, respectively, in Houston and Clinton, Mississippi. These were companies whose growth strategy was based on good-ole-boy politicking, bluffing, and swindling. Need I even mention the scam known as the “California energy crisis”, visited on California by Texas energy firms. Consider the business career of George W. Bush, the “MBA president”, who cashed in on his insider status as a Bush son and ended up with a fortune of $14 million. (In only one chapter to this saga, Bush invested $800,000 in the Texas Rangers and walked away with $14 million, because his business partners “voluntarily” gave up a share of their profits to him.) This version of capitalism is the way business is done in the Deep South. Over and over again the elite of the South have chosen to maintain their region as a resource colony, exploiting rather than developing resources and labor, because it served the interests of their cronies. For generations they have passed the buck—to each other.
These crony capitalists will be picking at the bones of the Federal Government after they’ve bankrupted it, but it will be bad times for the rest of us.
It was interesting for me to read Lind’s history of the South because it explained why my ancestors left Virginia for Chicago. Southern society, with its indolent elite, produced very few inventors. One of the few who came from the South was Cyrus McCormick. He is some kind of great great great uncle or whatnot of mine (distaff side, not in the family business). His invention, the reaper, couldn’t make it in the South because slaves were cheaper than machines. And that’s what brought my ancestors to Chicago! The reaper ended up freeing so many Northern men from work in the fields that it swelled the ranks of the Union Army and contributed to the defeat of the South in the Civil War.
It’s important to have a grasp of history in order to understand the times we are living in. The interests of business and the interests of cronies are not necessarily the same. The oligarchs can wreck our economy and enrich themselves, and historical precedent suggests that this is what they will do.
What to do? California has the temptation of the initiative process — it’s possible to force a discussion of secession from the new Confederacy, by getting it on the ballot. I’m sure we pay the Feds more than our fair share, and for what: policies of environmental degradation, energy hijinx, and imperialist war.
Then there’s the example of the progressive movement that started in the late 19th Century. I recently read the inaugural platform of the People’s Party, issued with deliberate intent on July 4, 1892.
...We meet in the midst of a nation brought to the verge of moral, political, and material ruin...Corruption dominates the ballot box, the [state] legislatures and the Congress and touches even the bench...The newspapers are largely subsidized or muzzled, public opinion silenced...The fruits of the toil of millions are boldly stolen to build up colossal fortunes for a few.”
A kick ass document! The progressives’ electoral impact peaked at 22 electoral votes in 1892 and a handful of Congressional seats, but their policy influence was huge. Everything from public education, wilderness preservation....They put the ‘progressive’ in income tax. Now that so many of us have, as one wag put it, “a bright future in the growing field of unemployment,” why not give it a go: organize fiercely. The progressives rose up when the country was being strangled by its ruling class — and it’s happening again. There’s just not much left to lose.
Now if you’ve read this far, you get a poem. It’s a prize, or a tease (if you’re that kind of person!). I’m starting a new project, The Blackboard Project, where fresh poems and other writing will be posted (then taken down & archived) every few days. It is a place for experimental writing to investigate interrogate and explicate the NOW. You can read this work — and also contribute your own. This is not a publication venue. It is a blackboard! Check it out.
Arabian Stud
War party. I brought my knife.
We drank to anger, skill set collapse,
to the end of liberalism.
I felt fleshy & full of intelligence,
ready for a long ride on an Arabian stud.
..the aroma of horse is a backdrop of our culture...
Her thudded leg split open
twice, over rain... it was a shame.
“What is shame,
but the suddenly realized weight of the visible?”
Tissues torn off that Coarsened stub
as Word after word slid down the throats of the Confederates.
Error of terror, that eye
swallowing--
All stand, scared but ready,
in case the dirt bunnies expectorate.
The past is eaten by the future and becomes
futuristic cannonball.
The present, intolerable melting,
while pimping the country
to his rich friends.
War, I mean. menace. me mean. men.
When I purchased my knife, I bought the idea.
Now I hide it in my name.
“Zone of entry into eroded life,
she’s stuck on the tip of
culture, as it dries up & blows
away.” Blow.
All the needles in the forest
dipped in cocaine.
My wooden moods, with clogs:
start there, the terrific saturation of the hitch point.
But I wonder what a poem is,
floating off like this, into its own idleness,
while I stroll around and look,
tourist in my own poetics.
BAM BAM BAM.
If I lay down my resemblance, would it flow from me into all these objects?
Past tense pushes out into my language like the ghost.
Past: that girlish brainiac childhood.
The plump world holds me up,
its shine elsewhere.
camille roy
the blackboard project
5:46:35 PM 
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