Georgia on My Mind

[Rootsie]

by Rootsie

The reason evildoers get away with it is because they hide beneath the cloak of the unimaginable. What average American in 1980 could imagine the depravity of those manipulating the Iran hostage crisis, holding the lives of 52 Americans at naught, bribing the Iranians (with weaponry for their war against Iraq) to stop negotiating with the Carter administration for the hostages’ release in order to win an election? Which they did of course, and the hostages were released on Ronald Reagan’s inauguration day. It’s probable that GHW Bush engineered the operation. “We don’t negotiate with terrorists” indeed.

More and more of us in the seven years since September 11th have become familiar with entertaining the unimaginable.

So here’s the Republican dilemma in 2008—how to elect a Cold War dinosaur 20 years after the end of the Cold War? Well duh. You simply have to raise the spectre of the Cold War. This was easy. Since Kosovo’s recognition by the EU and the U.S., the Russians have been screaming about how nobody was recognizing South Ossetia and Abkhazia’s long-standing demand for independence from Georgia.  So does the Bush regime deign to talk to Russia about these “breakaway regions”? Of course not. Negotiation is neither their style nor their talent, and besides they have the upper hand in Georgia, having manipulated the ouster of former President Edward Shevardnadze and installing their guy Saakashvili, and having built a pipeline right under Russia’s nose. Instead, Georgia makes a violent incursion, Russia reacts, and McCain gets to play tough guy against those nasty old Russians and wax sentimental about a valiant little democracy being mauled by a bear, a la Czechoslovakia in ’68.  While the Democrats convene, Cindy McCain is over there on a “humanitarian mission,” just in time to star in her own tear-jerker video set to air in Minneapolis next week.

I am not interested in defending Russia, but I have one question. Would the United States just sit back if Russia had pulled a similar stunt, in Mexico for example?

We hear that McCain is a “close friend” to American-educated Saakashvili, holding his hand through the crisis.  In reaction, I believe, the Obama campaign conceded to the “lack of experience” charge and chose Joe Biden as VP, a disastrous concession on a total non-issue! What were Carter’s, Reagan’s, Clinton’s, G.W.’s foreign policy credentials? The last time I looked, the states of Georgia, California, Arkansas, and Texas weren’t conducting U.S. foreign policy.

McCain’s foreign policy advisors include Henry Kissinger and George Schultz, and George Soros too, apparently, since Georgia was one of his little projects: what century are we living in anyway?

And what did Condoleeza Rice promise to Prime Minister Maliki in order to get a status agreement out of Iraq? All of a sudden she’s talking ‘timetable’—imagine the coup if she comes up with one before the election.

Am I suggesting that the Bush regime fanned the flames in Georgia now, by whispering a thing or two in Saakashvili’s ear? And that they’ll pay a lot to get an agreement from the Iraqis before November? That they as a matter of course manipulate foreign policy in order to win elections.?  I guess we’ve gotten so used to this that it’s not even surprising anymore. A bunch of people dying and a bunch of refugees and a bunch of stuff blown up? It’s all in the game.

[three_sixty]

The democrats are right there ready to pounce on Russia too. Brzezinski, who was National Security Adviser to President Carter is serving a similar function for the Obama campaign.  There may not be a more staunch "cold warrior" - the man behind funding radical Islam in Afghanistan to fight the Russians which is inextricably linked to the groundwork for the start of the "war on terror."

He was right there with a story to publish in Time magazine about America's duty to confront Russia:
http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1832699,00.html

Cindy McCain was preceded by Joe Biden in a trip to Georgia prior to his official announcement as democratic VP candidate.
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/chi-joe-biden-georgia-080818-ht,0,840643.story

[Rootsie]

You're right of course. The difference between Democrats and Republicans is Democrats' tendency to try to make things nominally better 'at home' in order to put people to sleep. Both parties are imperialist war parties, and the difference between a neo-liberal like Clinton or Biden and a neo-conservative is quite narrow indeed.

But it seems to me that it's not so easy to fix an election as ones on the left would have us believe.

So much rhetoric at the convention was aimed at taking the militaristic argument away from the Republicans: we're big and bad too. There is some kind of power struggle going on between the parties--there's the way it's framed and the way it actually is, and I don't subscribe so much to your view of the way it is,  because it would make me mentally ill to imagine that there's a seamless conspiracy underneath it all which has micromanaged the future for the past however many decades or even centuries. My nervous system can't handle that level of cynicism. It is probably a failing. I know things are not as they seem. 

And I also have to admit that I would much rather see Obama as president, that I think it actually matters.
This may well not be rational at all, and I may be sucked in by the hype. I remember a teacher at college in the late '70's saying that the only time we would see a woman or a black put up for President was when things had gotten so bad that fall guys and gals would be the order of the day. I know I will probably live to regret it, and I am aware of the complexities, many of which I have written about here, but I just can't help it. I'm voting for Obama.  As of today, anyway.  It would be easier for me to do so if he quit talking about  "America's greatness", about Afghanistan, about Israel.

I feel the people of this country on the ground must somehow find a voice, and that this may be a first step.

[Rootsie]

One of the reasons I've stopped blogging until I can figure out what I really would want to blog about is that I am sick of being a part of the paranoid white side of things, the Kurt Nimmos and Alex Joneses and the less paranoid but no less arrogant Alexander Cockburns and all the other usual suspects on those pages and blogs. I can't quite put my finger on it, but it's still tied to white arrogance, and is in fact arrogance to the nth degree because these guys look down from above at the whole game and the conclusion of it all seems to be that there is nothing to do but cynically look down on the all the poor suckers who actually believe anybody can do anything about anything.  My dear sis Christine is on the verge of bringing her powerful self to bear in the arena of public health and my dear daughter Aisha is considering weighing in on the side of global sustainability. Both these women are cultivating the critical consciousness that will make them partners with people on the ground, not pundits and not great white hopes. I think there is a way for good people of all colors and persuasions across the planet to work together to make things better.

I think that Obama will probably turn out to be a huge disappointment, but no matter how cynically he may be saying it, it is indeed time for a different politics and different governance. It may well be true that 'we the people' have never really existed in this country, but it's time we did.  The Bush years have been a plus in that they have awakened a lot of people, and forced the politicians, even if it is simply rhetoric, to talk about the corporate stranglehold on the planet. That seems t be a talking point now, and even if it sounds silly coming out of McCain's or Biden's mouth, I think something hopeful is afoot. Yup I said it. Hope. I know I have pooh-poohed it on this very forum. And I know that Obama is light-skinned and mixed, but so is my granddaughter and so are my godchildren, and I would not pass up the chance to vote for them and I just can't pass up the chance to vote for a mixed-race African American with more than a good chance of winning. Whatever the motives behind putting him up there, I am voting on the chance that their best-laid plans will in the long-run backfire. As a white, as me, I don't think I have a choice but to vote for him. Maybe it's just symbolism, but maybe it goes beyond that and will have repercussions nobody anticipated.  When I observe the lengths some are willing to go to to see that he isn't elected, that makes me want to suspend my disbelief at least a little.

I'm the daughter of immigrants. My best times as a U.S. citizen are when I'm in the community college class I teach with students who are Serbs, Bosnians, Lebanese, Somalis, Congolese, Sudanese,Vietnamese, Peruvians, Bolivians, Tibetans, Irish, German, French, Iraqi vets, and I can say with my heart to them "Look around you. This is the best of what American means right here." And of all people I can be their teacher sharing with them my subversive ideas while they share with me their realities. There exists something here that is far better than the politicians who try to take credit for or get mileage out of trying to describe. I'm at a place in my life where I can see the price I've paid for my arrogant cynicism and I feel the call to wade in and get something done instead of relentlessly criticizing from the fringes. It's bad for my physical and mental health.

There is so much white Americans need to let go of. We need to let go of this idea that we are the 'leaders of the free world', that we know what's good for everybody, that 'growth' and linear 'progress' are worthy values. I think the realities of the coming years will disabuse us of these ideas. And I think the crushers and the slayers will fall on the weight of their own stupidity, however well-laid their plots and schemes. 

This is a ramble. And it's just directed out, and not at you, 360.

[Rootsie]

http://counterpunch.org/walker09022008.html

Where Do We Go From Here?
By COREY D. B. WALKER

Hold fast to dreams
For if dreams die
Life is a broken-winged bird
That cannot fly.
                        Langston Hughes

With Senator Barack Obama the official presidential nominee for the Democratic Party, the Obama campaign will now focus on winning the general election.  If some have noticed a pronounced “centrist” shift in the candidate’s rhetoric since the close of the primaries, then we should not be surprised that over the next couple of months the campaign will be, well, quite ordinary.  For as the junior senator from Illinois so powerfully reminded us in his acceptance speech, “Change does not come from Washington, it goes to Washington.”

After a primary season filled with promises of “change” and a “new” politics, we will enter a general election campaign that will saturate the airwaves with a faux economic populism that will placate the capitalist class while perpetuating the myth of the American dream.  We will be inundated with talk of a muscular diplomacy that fails to challenge the fundamental dictates of American imperialism.  And of course, we will hear affirmations of a conservative Horatio Alger-esque social philosophy leavened by neoliberal prescriptives for public policy.

To all of this, we should not be surprised.  Senator Obama is not campaigning to be president of a radical union local, but rather for the presidency of an empire.  As such, the dominant dictates of power in America mitigate against any radical transformation of capitalist economic relations, imperial diplo-military power, and conservative domestic policy.   

So, what is to be done?

Every four years, Americans are directed to do their civic duty and participate in – in as low-intensity and unobtrusive a manner as possible – what has come to be the mass-media spectacle of presidential politics. 

Every four years, we weather an avalanche of claim and counter-claim, partisan posturing, and endless political commentary that reinforces the dominant frames of political discourse. 

Every four years, we are dazzled by a new class of political technocrats who frame the election around the personalities of politically (in)distinguishable opponents built around a series of false political choices. 

Of course, this does not mean that the choice between the major party candidates for the office of president is inconsequential.  Only a political novice will believe that a single presidential election will change everything.  Conversely, only a rigid ideological dogmatist will argue that this presidential election is a choice without choice.

It should go without saying that Senator Obama is the better choice among the major party candidates – hence the persistent and robust criticism from the genuine left of his policy proposals and political philosophy. 

But after eight years of the rogue regime of Bush-Cheney and twenty eight years after the institutionalization of a vicious conservative politics signaled by the election of Ronald Reagan, one presidential election – even a campaign with historic implications – will not significantly alter the dominant configurations of political power in the United States. 

Fundamental change will not come from an ordinary campaign, but rather, from an extraordinary politics. 

With the severe constraints of the American system of electoral politics and the narrow confines of political discourse in the United States, an extraordinary politics moves us from an ordinary casting of a vote every four years to taking part in an extraordinary struggle to transform the everyday conditions and displace the prevailing ideas that marginalize hopes and life chances of the majority of citizens.

Extraordinary politics challenges the entrenched narratives that animate the narrow focus of dominant discourses of politics.  Challenges to established authority, new configurations of political power, and alternative proposals for public policy are the life blood of an extraordinary politics.  And ordinary people coming together and doing extraordinary things to change the way we live, think, and act are the proper subjects of an extraordinary politics. 

Through an extraordinary politics, everyday citizens will once again raise the “big” questions which are a significant part of our public lives.  What would it mean to develop public policy that does not prioritize private gain over the common good?  What would an American foreign policy be if we fundamentally disavowed the mandates of imperialism?  What would an economic policy look like absent an underlying philosophy of that views America as a “society of abundance”?   

To begin to entertain these questions will require an extraordinary politics that pushes the boundaries of legitimate political conversation pass the arbitrary limits of what is considered possible and pragmatic and reverse the severe atrophy of political imagination in the United States.   

Given the very ordinary character of American political discussion the very idea of an extraordinary politics will be readily dismissed as unrealistic, unworkable, and unthinkable.  But such dismissals only serve to continue the very political practices that diminish the extraordinary political potential of everyday citizens.

If we are to move beyond the current crisis of American democracy – which is not just the result of the past eight years of the presidency of George W. Bush, but rather the result of the telescoping of politics to the discipline of electoral campaigns – then we have to commit ourselves to an extraordinary politics.

Corey D. B. Walker is an assistant professor of Africana studies at Brown University and the author of A Noble Fight:  African American Freemasons and the Struggle for Democracy in America, which will be published in October.

[discipleofmaat]

what a circus...this obama thing.

It is like ones wanting to smile for holy pictures but no one wanting to look in the mirror for they do not want to look themself in the eye.

I will say this.

Obama is the perfect anti-KRST manifestation.  Just as I believe that God is internal and the devil is internal, I sight that the anti-KRST is internal.

Just when America is ripe to fall apart, along comes a white knight in black skin.

Along comes Dr. Frankenstein to make a false entity of life out of the graves of the wretched.  Along comes Count Dracula to suck the blood from the newly resurrected.

-------

The Absolute Absolution.

He personifies the hippy movement that you wrote about.  But let me correct that statement.  "HE" doesn't do anything.  He is just the figurehead that allows US (our egos) to carry on in a nice and comfy and non-confrontational FORGIVENESS and FORGET lazy blow-offish mindset instead of an ATONEMENT work-to-rectify, concessional mindset.

ATONEMENT takes work.  Atonement takes SACRIFICE (that you have also spoken about).  But America is about 'easy does it'.  No surprise...we are in the information technology age where everything is at our fingertips.  Someone we need to reach is just a cell phone button away.

Who dares to want to give up ANY of our spoils.

Who dares wil ask Obama to pull troops out of the Middle East if we have to spend more money at the gas pumps instead of enjoying a movie and a dinner at Red Lobster.

Who dare would suggest that whites give up anything when the election of Obama washes away the notion of a bigoted/racist country.

It is all engineered anyway.  The founders of this country intended for America to resort to fascism/totalitarianism once it became strong enough and justified enough to dominate the globe via the egotistical individualistic pursuits of the people.

OK...CUT!
The democracy experiment is no longer needed.  It worked...it worked just fine.  Thanks for the memories folks.

[Rootsie]

Maybe I'm reverting to type and my hippie ways are showing.  I wish Obama was a whole lot more peace and love and a whole lot less of an 'imperialist running dog' in the words of Chairman Mao.

The Christian Right is all about Obama as the anti-Christ.

Homeland Security and Secret Service and God knows who is practicing police state tactics right out in the open in Minneapolis/St. Paul this week.

The politics is so so broken it's extremely hard to tell what's going on for all the hype.

I believe all the things I've ever believed. My opinion of Obama hasn't changed. But I do in fact think there are differences between the two imperialist parties that are worth noting, and that there are some heavy guns invested in making sure Obama loses, which is interesting, don't you think? If it didn't matter to 'them' then why not elect the black guy and get the glory for having 'overcome' racism and just get on to business as usual?  It matters to these extreme treasonous war criminals, so I'm thinking it ought to matter to me.

It's a long time to November--I may very well not have the stomach to vote for anybody. But man we have got to move to solutions and stop being the perennial critics paralyzed by cynicism and yes by paranoia.  That is how 'they' want us to be.

[three_sixty]

I respect your opinion Rootsie. There is an ego trip that comes along with thinking we "know the plan" while we in effect look down on those who "don't get it." Perhaps that is why some of us are really so invested in it. I think right here we see another example of just what it is that defines what we are struggling with while we try to cultivate a better perspective of "reality."

[Tracey]

Have been enjoying the links shared on Mutabaruka from the other Speaks sites and was listening to one of Muta's reasonings "Hope and Salvation Lies Within" this morning...

Connected some of the reasonings to the current political situation here in U.S. and hype surrounding both candidates of "change".

There are many interesting views regarding the seemingly collective mind set, and by extension, the political stage - just depends on which lens the perceiver of the dream is looking through.

Excerpts:

The Master Key
by:L.W.DeLawrence

Serenity is a positive aspect and worry to which I have conferred

it is not sufficient not to worry

but one must cultivate a deep, quiet, peace compelling atmosphere

such an atmosphere of poise gives birth to forces awaiting our recognition.

________

Muta Response - Excerpt:

Everybody into this hopelessness nowadays - the newspapers, the talk shows..

this hopelessness well...

we have no hope in the religious systems
because we declare ourselves already
and we have no hope in the political systems
- so since we have no hope in these systems
we have to refine the hope in our self
and look into our selves to find that hope
that we don't see
in a political nor religious system

the people now need a hope in them selves
no in the sky
no in jamaica house
but in the self
it starts with the individual
and then it come out
and branch out
to the family,
to the community
to the nation
to the universe
it is like
growin growin growin
so we need fe extend that mind

http://www.mutabaruka.com/mutaseh.htm
....

And then he continues reasonings about looking in the mirror and talking out loud to self, reflecting on observations - thinking for self from day to day - moment to moment - discerning - willing to evolve from yesterday to today with new insights gleaned from self observations.... - relevant stuff.

I think the political arena serves as a collective stage for the unconscious - that once again, seeks outward socially conditioned forms to represent, speak, and rally on behalf of worldly issues- unbeknownst, that once again another ego constructed perception and dream of external symbols are but poor substitutes for taking personal responsibility and actual hope in one's self - the very essence and core of true change - like Muta seh - to branch out from the root/individual to the universe/collective/self.