Culture and Society

1. Toilet Paper. Instead of hoarding toilet paper for the coming disaster and anarchy that should never be out of your mind if you want to remain easily manipulable by cynical demagogues, invest in providing clean and accessible bathrooms for the homeless. This will radically improve the lives of millions of Americans and, as a happy side effect, make it much easier for us to engage in long-term demonstrations and nonviolent resistance actions in public places.

I stopped by a corporate chain bookstore this week and checked out the "Current Affairs" section. I was a little surprised to discover that according to a dozen or more books dominating the display we are all under a vicious life-and-death assault from a raving, drooling mob of communist devils led by that well-known pinko guerrilla Barack Obama.

On Friday I read in the New York Times that President Obama would be happy to cut $200 billion out of Medicare in order to inflict pain on his Democratic base, part of an imagined tradeoff in which the two parties inflict pain on their imagined bases in order to reduce the deficit without imposing sensible taxes on billionaires or shrinking military spending to sane levels. Also on Friday I got an Email from True Majority asking me to celebrate Obama's defense of Medicare.

We've progressed from "I feel your pain" to "I inflict your pain," and we're being told to like it.

When other nations' governments go off track, their people do something about it. In Tunisia and Egypt people have nonviolently claimed power in a way that has inspired Americans in Wisconsin and other states, as well as the people of Spain and the rest of the world.

Washington, D.C., is the weakest point in our democracy, without which state-level reform cannot succeed. Most Americans want our wars ended, our corporations and billionaires taxed, and our rights expanded rather than curtailed. We want our money invested in jobs and green energy, not a global military that can't stop itself. Our government in Washington goes in the opposite direction, opposing popular will on these major issues, regardless of personality or party.

Brilliant and humane playwright Karen Malpede has produced another play that grabs this country by the lapels, shakes it, caresses its cheek, and kicks its ass. The play is called "Another Life" and the life it leaves me thinking about is the life of our dreams.

The play is not so much a national nightmare or a national fantasy as a surreal reproduction of the mixture of horrors and hopes that most dreaming is: the most gruesome and graphic and taboo of our collective fears without exactly the fear itself, the deepest of longings and desires in immediate and mundane form but recognizable as revelations upon awakened reflection.

February 10, 2011, 4:00pm
Marriott Wardman Park Hotel
Washington, DC
That's where you should be to help present Donald Rumsfeld with a very serious award for his noble defense of the mythical document the Tea Party refers to mysteriously as "The Constitution," not to be confused with any document available in print.

This PDF schedule of CPAC's upcoming festivities opens on February 10 with Michele Bachmann (everybody take three steps to your left so she can see you), and goes straight into gay bashing.

Chris Hedges began a recent column, in these days just prior to congressional elections by announcing:

"The lunatic fringe of the Republican Party, which looks set to make sweeping gains in the midterm elections, is the direct result of a collapse of liberalism. It is the product of bankrupt liberal institutions, including the press, the church, universities, labor unions, the arts and the Democratic Party. The legitimate rage being expressed by disenfranchised workers toward the college-educated liberal elite, who abetted or did nothing to halt the corporate assault on the poor and the working class of the last 30 years, is not misplaced. The liberal class is guilty."

By David Swanson

"It's not meant to ridicule activism," Jon Stewart tells NPR, speaking of his planned rally on the National Mall. But you can see where someone might have gotten that impression. In the video of Stewart's announcement of the event, he rejects crazy right wing ideas and the idea that Bush allowed 9-11 to happen; he condemns right wing lunacy and the idea that Republicans oppose providing healthcare; he denounces lies and fascism plus daring to accuse war criminals of being war criminals. Stewart opposes activist messages and their messengers.

IN CONGRESS, JULY 4, 2010
The unanimous Declaration of the fifty united States of America, Washington, D.C., Puerto Rico, Guam, Guantanamo Bay, Assorted Offshore Oil Rigs, and the U.S. Servicemen and Women serving the Homeland in 177 nations around the globe, as drafted by the President

When in the Course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to bomb the bejesus out of another people and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and hegemonic station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's Christian God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to employ the most awesome military force the poor corrupt Muslim bastards have ever seen.