After disappointing citizen protests on March 18th marking the 3rd Anniversary of the war in Iraq, President Bush ran a press release to the majority of the population of America that has spoken in poll after poll to want US troops out of Iraq.

Fuck you.
And the Iraqis.

Emboldened by lower than expected anti-war turnouts across the country on March 18, today Bush promised to not pull troops out at all, stating that the issue of withdrawal will be decided by future presidents. The Right will take this tough talk theater as good political melodrama, one of the reasons they like Bush to begin with. The Left will look at this as more arrogance, as they are so fund of calling it, by the Bush administration.
I think we’d do well to remember that everything these guys do comes out of a playbook. You think Bush is sent out there to wing it? In everything presidential administrations do, our reaction is factored in. Duh. So what is this?

The anti-war left plans nationwide protests across the country. While March 18 international protests are huge, domestic turnout was pretty much a bust. Bush could have made his statements before March 18. I mean today is only the 22nd of March. Instead he waits until we do our thing then he gives the anti-war Left a collective fuck you.
Marching in the cold? Fuck you.
Standing in the rain? Fuck you.
Got thousands of people on the streets? Fuck you.
Even the troops in Iraq want to come home? Fuck all of you.
National level Dems will typically not respond. All of this will have a cumulative demoralizing effect on the anti-war Left and the country as a whole, which wants the war to end. The corporatocracy seeks everyone opportunity to nurture the culture of futility. So that is a natural angle for them. Constant convincing that everything we do is useless.

SUBMIT! Go turn on the WWE or something. Leave everything else to us.

The other, less obvious angle is the ’08 setup. This will give the country, which (even with the fake elections) certainly will not see a Republican prez in ‘08, all the more reason to run full speed into the arms of Hillary who is certain to wait until Americans are pulling their hair out then offer a promise to ‘fix’ Iraq. The ’08 version of Howard Dean will translate ‘fix’ into ‘end’ corralling the anti-war folks back into electoral politics for yet another cycle. Once the election is over, the war will continue, New Clintonites will hail how much better Hillary is than Bush, even if she’s not perfect.
I mean, can’t you hear it now? I can.

Bush promises not to leave Iraq. The ’08 election die has been cast. Now all we have left to do is wait for the new Dean to show up and for Hillary to declare her ‘Presidential Iraq Strategy’ which won’t come until Iraqis under the US death machine are screaming even louder than they are now. If that’s even possible.

The only thing that could derail this plan is if Bush was impeached over Iraq, not the wiretapping. We’ll see.

I think things couldn't get crazier and they always do. I can’t keep up. While the US govt silently refuses to make corporations broker with US workers, to even consider compliance with international norms and legal structures regarding nuclear war and military aggression, the Washington Post has front page coverage of what could be bigger news. They are reporting that Washington Nationals 2nd basemen, Alfonso Soriano, is refusing to play a new position.

In a completely sober fashion, the WaPo quotes Stanford University Law Professor, William B. Gould IV(what’s that IV all about?), on Soriano’s refusal:

“It is a landmark case”

WaPo continues quoting him:

“I can't recall anything in a major sport where a player has refused outright to perform his assigned job…It has implications not just in baseball.”

What are we talking about here? Stanford Law professors called on to talk baseball? It sounds so silly that if I had not read it myself I would have thought this ‘story’ was from the Onion. I don’t follow sports but this coverage is interesting to me because lots of folks in the US do follow sports, particularly baseball. Aside from the obvious ridiculousness of using Stanford Law professors to convince people that this is worth paying any attention to, while war evidently is not so important, there is additional psychological manipulation here worth taking note of. So what message do they have for the millions that follow this type of nooz?

Newspapers and corporate electronic media often take opportunities like this dispute to explain to America how unions work. Major League Baseball union, the NBA, auto workers union, there all the same, right? Anyways, here we have millionaire second basemen refusing to play another position. Of course, the millionaire player’s union comes to the player’s defense, as is the unions function. So we have a guy here whose job it is to catch and toss a ball around for millions of dollars.

US citizens are very tense, very anxious and nervous about all kinds of stuff. Professional sports, gladiators, are the salve. People do not follow sports for this kind of BS dispute. Unable to effect change in daily life, improve wages, actually like one’s job, feel good about the society one is a part of, get the govt to respond about things.

Americans are always ready to be angry.

Enter the WaPo and other nooz agencies with these kinds of stories where unions (which are all the same right) are cast as disruptive, megalomaniacal bureaucrats. Then when General Motors announces that it’s firing 35,000 workers yet another disruptive union-ALL UNIONS ARE THE SAME!-makes headlines as having made some kind of demand and now people are out of work.

Stories like this are one prong of an ongoing corporate psychological assault on the working class. A version of divide and conquer designed to make working class, baseball loving folks hate the institution that fought the battles enabling the working class to have the money (higher wages), time(40-hour work week instead of 70) and health to enjoy a weekend at the ballpark in the first place. These stupid sports stories are in actuality nasty, sophisticated psychological attacks.

In 2005 US union membership was 12.5% down from 20.1% in 1983 and which is down from what was believed to be 33% in the 1950s. And this isn’t just about jobs and wages, although it is about those things. It’s about our political system which is dominated by corporate elites whose only real balance is, you guessed it, labor unions.

This and other ostensibly stupid sports coverage like this are intimately connected with the war in Iraq, 40 million+ people without health insurance, declining wages and disappearing jobs. Unions were a large part of a political system which even at the height of unions was pretty rotten. With women and non-whites getting the vote and civil rights protections in the 20th century, unions should have had even more clout. Instead we have less control of our political system than we’ve had in perhaps 200 years.

The battlefield is psychological.

What does it say about American culture when Warner Brothers an international media empire, with its millions of dollars spent in market research, believes that the best way it can sell Superman to the US and the world-at-large is as an almost literal reincarnation of Jesus Christ? The white supremacist myth of a white man saving the lessers, continues.

From the trailer (Superman’s father speaking to him):
They can be a great people Kalel. They wish to be. They only lack the light to show the way. For this reason above all, their capacity for good, I send them you, my only son.

Don’t laugh. From Jesus to Neo, this multi-generational, multi-centennial narrative is a snapshot of the deeper psychological reason the US’ white citizens accept the racist frame that a US military led by a white president should-no, must- travel the world liberating various groups of brown and black people. Iraq, Haiti, Iraq again. Maybe Iran. Who else needs salvation?

I’m not suggesting those who watch Superman Returns will then go join the army. But people will vote to use the US’ army to unleash all manner of hell on women and children around the world under the guise of liberation and helping the poor bastards realize freedom, which is what this movie, and others like it, are all about.

Movies like Superman Returns, under the guise of two hours of neat computer graphics, base humor and special effects reinforce notions of supremacy for the next generation of Amerikkkans whose acquiescence the corporate run government will need for defending and extending empire. And of course, the guy we must follow in these fables about saving the world is always white.

Three years into the Iraq crime, very few things appear to have changed. American polls are touted as saying the American public is now firmly against the war. Contrary to the obvious assumption underlying the reveling in the poll results the only thing revealed is that American sentiment is roughly the same now as it was before the start of the war. If we can remember that far back, the US public was against the war by more than two to one. It was only after the US govt initiated the attack did the public pick up on the 'now that we're there' byline. Even more the white press' staid analysis of it all defiantly insists, on one hand, that the neoconservatives were right or, on the other hand, that although it started off as a plausible idea, most now agree that we made a mistake. This thought trap is the most current recycling of the American exceptionalism marking all US military crimes.

No matter how hard we try to do good, we so often seem to do bad.

And that's the Left, not the Right. Or at least what passes for the Left in America. More accurately, I should say, that's the white Left. The opinions of the true core of the American Left, black America, are ignored by the white press as well as the white Left, in general. Instead preferring the swing vote model where the most conservative voices of the US Left, usually 100% white, are given the megaphone and are considered relevant or serious. Black opinion reflected in black press is, as usual, light years away from US govt policy and only slightly less further away from the white American Left. The white Left maintains what little credibility remains for it among the white American masses by doing it's best, aided and abetted by the corporate media they claim to deplore, to disguise this fact. The white press in England plays the same game, constraining thought to narrow parameters, reserving the right to bring democracy to the next perceived threat. Maybe Iran. Some may read this and say that it isn't black and white, it's rich and poor. That is the preferred analysis of the white Left, class not race. That analysis, while demonstrably wrong, remains the favorite of the white Left because it continues to delay an examination of whiteness and instead pretends that black and white opinion are basically the same when viewed through the prism of class. Of course viewing it as only incidental that so many of the people in a certain class are black. Class, not race. Remember that.

But Iraq. Yes, Iraq. The current administration and the Congress is full of war criminals who, if held to the standards declared acceptable at Nuremberg, would be subject to the death penalty. But that's another essay. First we have to be able to agree on the very basic tenet that the Iraq war was not a mistake but a premeditated crime. I wish I could report that there was agreement within the American Left on that point. It would be an improvement if I could report that a raging debate was going on around that point. However, the point is virtually conceded that, like other US foreign misadventures, Iraq was a blunder. A mistake made based on bad information. Forget that the US never attacks countries that actually have arsenals, that actually might be a threat to their neighbors, no less the American island of power. Forget that. And while you're at it, forget all of history and lay aside all common sense and power of reason. Forget IraqGate '91. Forget Panama. Forget Haiti. Forget Iran in '53. Forget Vietnam. Forget everything. These are the prerequisites to adopting the white arguments regarding Iraq. Deal only with the 'bad intelligence' of the present and forget everything else, history, common sense, everything. Only from that perspective does the analysis of the New York Times, Washington Post, Chicago Tribune, ABCNNBCBS and FOX make any sense at all.

Even as I write this, the current drama unfolding within the white Left is how to deal with Senator Feingold from Wisconsin, who is suggesting a resolution to censure Bush for illegal wiretapping. First, is not suggesting that Bush should be censured for killing Iraqis, but for spying on Americans. See the racism? But even in making this meager suggestion, the story becomes, instantly, not about what Bush has done but about why Feingold is doing this and Feingold's '08 presidential aspirations and whether or not Feingold is going too far. I know right wing media have a part to play in this but if we are to be honest, white Dems and a few black Dems, are right wing so the characterizations of them, while disgusting, are, as in this case, too often accurate.

What Should And Could Be Happening

There are representatives on the political Left that could move the debate forward if they weren't hamstrung by the white moderates posing as the American Left.
Barbara Lee
Cynthia McKinney
John Conyers
John Lewis
Dennis Kucinich
And there are others who are undermined by white moderates and thus rendered ineffective in Congress and in the media. Instead of being lifted up, they are undercut by the Democratic Party and other institutions fronting as the Left. While not the first, I would like to appeal to whites of conscience to avoid the racist dynamic of waiting for blacks on the Left to speak up about the racism on the Left (only to of course be labeled a disruption by other whites). Do the right thing. The racism of the Left makes change impossible. Point it out! And go a step further and call the hypocrisy what it is. Racism! Don't wait for the minority of blacks in the room, that are barely keeping their lunch down, to say something. On Iraq, on electronic voting, on Katrina, on immigrant rights, on most of the issues of the day, there is a racial component at the core that must be addressed by both black folks and whites of good conscience. Together, and only together, the hypocritical gatekeeper of US empire, the American Left, can be toppled.