Five Nihilist Diatribes

It used to be “vacation pay.” Since no one can afford vacations, “personal time off” is what we get now. Oh well. Nice to be away from the roaring dust-cloud I call work. My gasoline boycott is equal parts protest and poverty.

Volumes of printed symbols, full of amazing facts and amusement, are free at the (socialist!) library. Used crap stores near universities have dust-cheap papyri with big words in ‘em and stuff.

“Literary” is a code word for fancy writing: eight words when two will do. Most poetry is like a crossword jig-saw puzzle; my brain is puzzled enough. I read “non-fiction,” trying to discover what is not fiction in this world of lies.

It Takes A Pillage : An Epic Tale of Power, Deceit, and Untold Trillions, by Nomi Prins. Hoboken: John Wiley & Sons. 2011

This country is screwed beyond its wildest nightmares. The Glass-Steagall Act passed in 1933, to keep banks from the paper-shuffling theft that caused the First Great Depression. After its repeal in 1999, the banks quickly brought us the Second G. D. This time, instead of punished, they were rewarded with immoral fortunes thanks to eternal debt. And they are still in charge, the same thing will keep happening!

In My Jack-ass Opinion: Blame Clinton, Bush, or Obama, but all money trails eventually lead to banks. They own the show. Their media blame our nation’s financial problems on the poor, who have no way to answer back. Move your money to a Credit Union, and don’t quit your job, no matter how crappy.

%$#@!

Murder City : Ciudad Juarez and the Global Economy’s New Killing Fields, by Charles Bowden. New York: Nation Books. 2010

Bowden’s got cojones. He shadows murder scenes in Juarez barrios. Hangs with a street preacher who runs a homeless/crazy shelter. Sneaks to interview a former hit man who found Jesus. He tallies the grisly daily rape/torture/murder. The U. S. gives the Mexican military $1.5 billion a

 year…”where the war is for drugs, for the enormous money to be made in drugs, where the police and the military fight for their share, where the press is restrained by the murder of reporters and feasts on a steady diet of bribes, and where the line between government and the drug world has never existed.” (p. 18) So we are paying to help bring drugs in, and paying to keep them out.

IMJO: The same as in USA Today 3/19/2009: 

Governments must secure and regulate the drug trade, because the alternative is organized violent crime. Sign up all the addicts, sell ‘em drugs cheap, and use profits to make drug rehab free for anyone who wants it.

 %$#@!

The Family, by Jeff Sharlet. New York: HarperCollins, 2008.

Politics brings odd folks together. These modern “Christians” permeate our government, sometimes helping murderous dictators, or CEOs who love the lack of health and safety laws in the third world and Jesus. They have manufactured a New Lord—no more sissified do-gooder touchy-feely meekness! No conscience, no personal responsibility, just submission to Super Jesus in the form of political power.

IMJO: Holy Constantine! What Jesus? The one who refused dominion over the world (Matt 4:8-10)? Who said to love your neighbor (Matt 22:39)? These righteous killers justify themselves with Romans 13:1 “…the powers that be are ordained of God.” (Which is incorrect; they are ordained by banks.) “Right-wingers” and “left-wingers” prayin’ together, then handing out welfare to bank thieves and war cartels. This new bad-ass Jesus looks a lot like Satan.

%$#@! 

This ain't the next book's cover. It's some pennies.

Freakonomics : A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything, by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner. New York: HarperCollins, 2005.

Unflinching statistical analysis: “…morality represents how people would like the world to work…economics shows how it actually does work.” People are likely to cheat under certain predictable circumstances, at predictable levels, depending on incentives. Realtors and funeral home directors take advantage of you. And a kid in a house with a gun and a pool is 100 times more likely to die from the pool.

IMJO: Wow, chapter four, “Where Have All the Criminals Gone?”: Logical proof that legal abortion was the main cause of crime declines 20 years later. Then the formula in reverse: In 1966, Nicolae Ceausescu, the Communist dictator of Romania, made abortion illegal, to boost population. Which doubled, but life in Romania was terrible for everyone but the rich. 23 years later he was executed on Christmas Day by firing squad after a youth-led revolt.

%$#@!

The Idler Book of Crap Jobs : 100 tales of workplace hell, edited by Dan Kiernan. New York: HarperCollins (again?), 2005.

Tales of lousy British jobs, or good jobs made bad by managerial indifference, incompetence, and/or dishonesty, by 100 modern slaves. Icons indicate whether each job was humiliating, disgusting, soul-destroying, futile, immoral, dangerous, or, like #1 “Phone sex line operator,”all six. “Maggot Farmer” (#84) starts in a huge pit full of maggot infested carcasses, wearing waders, turning over the rotting chunks. Your first promotion is to a net-covered airplane-hangar-size building, full of large ‘stud’ flies. All for minimum wage.

IMJO: In Britain, “Fordism” and “Fordist” are used as insults, meaning mass-produced crap and dehumanized work conditions.

In a Harvard study:

163 of 168 countries guaranteed paid maternity leave for mothers. Not the U.S.

 People whine about the breakdown of the family, this is why. Both parents have to work crap jobs to survive, unable to care for themselves or their children properly, living check to check. 

%$#@! 

Homage to Chiapas: The New Indigenous Struggles in Mexico, by Bill Weinberg. New York: Verso, 2000.

The theft of Native American lands and resources is ongoing, the victims won’t go away and shut up, nor can I it seems. The narcotraficantes and corporations bring

 violence, theft, and “progress”, encouraged and assisted by banks and governments and their militaries. All but the most remote pockets of resistance appear doomed. They keep fighting because they have so little left to lose.

IMJO: From the other end of the gun barrel, it looks like the intent is to kill, maim, exploit, and poison them all, and let God sort it out. No happy ending to this story till we get hungry enough to join our Zapatista homies. They’ve got 500 years practice fighting the evil bastards.

For now, we just keep dancing, to keep our spirits up, I guess. Dancing is free.

Also my next reading adventure should involve sunshine and lollipops. If not moonshine and crack.

Sunset, Arrowhead Village Mobile Home Park

%$#@!

“We–the ‘we’ of the relatively affluent and powerful–live in a time and a spatial order in which the ‘normalcy’ of our lives requires our active complicity in forms of exploitation and violence that we would decry and disavow were the physical, social, and linguistic distances that separate us from them ever to be collapsed. This is true of the brutal and entirely unnecessary confinement and killing of billions of animals each year for food, of the exploitation and suffering of workers in Shenzhen, China who produce our iPads and cell phones, of the ‘enhanced interrogation techniques’ deployed in the name of our security, and of the ‘collateral damage’ created by the unmanned-aerial-vehicles that our taxes fund. Our complicity lies not in a direct infliction of violence but rather in our tacit agreement to look away and not to ask some very, very simple questions: Where does this meat come from and how did it get here? Who assembled the latest gadget that just arrived in the mail? What does it mean to create categories of torturable human beings? The mechanisms of distancing and concealment inherent in our divisions of space and labor and in our unthinking use of euphemistic language make it seductively easy to avoid pursuing the complex answers to these simple questions with any sort of determination.”

Timothy Pachirat