Greenspan Warns Against Continuing Bush Tax Policy

Economic violence is violence, and the massive redistribution of tax burden onto the shoulders of the middle class via the Bush tax "cuts" was a punch to the gut of the majority of Americans.  Of all people, Alan Greenspan (often in the past a proponent of similar sorts of economic violence) recently warned against continuing the Bush tax policy (as the GOP would like to do, despite their caterwauling about deficits). 

Another good article on the issue by Fareed Zakaria can be found here.

And here's a graphic representation of what happens to the debt if the tax cuts for the wealthy are extended without offsetting cuts.

Peace.

The Overuse of "Hero"

A brief, fantastic column by a soldier on the dangers of using the term "hero" as a synonym with "soldier."

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/william-j-astore/why-its-wrong-to-equate-m_b_655611.html

Peace,

Ted

Nonviolence: Lesson 2

After beginning my exploration of Mark Kurlansky's 25 lessons about nonviolence laid out in his "Nonviolence: The History of a Dangerous Idea," I've gotten off track and, well, lazy about continuing my posts. It always seems there's something that "needs" or "should" be done rather than blathering away on the blog, but I'm trying to make this a priority now.

Anyhow, last time, we looked at the first lesson: there is no positive word for "nonviolence." Today, we look at the second lesson.

Kurlansky's second lesson about nonviolence is this: nations that build military forces as deterrents will eventually use them. The idea of having a "robust" military merely to dissuade others from attacking is not nonviolence at all. Such a military will always end up being used actively (even if, as was the case in the invasion of Iraq, its use was disingenuously couched in the rhetoric of "deterrence" and "prevention").

The Russian dramatist, Anton Chekov, famously said that if you have a gun hanging on the wall of the set of a play in the first act, it must necessarily be used in the second. It would seem ludicrous to have such an attention-grabbing prop be there and remain unused.

The gun hanging on the set of the set of the ongoing production that is "The United States of America (Now More than Ever)" is our military.

There have only been a handful of years in its history when the United States didn't have its military in the field somewhere in the world participating in a conflict of some sort. It is a tragic example of the maxim, "If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail." We've spent so much money on our military and made it so central to our national ethos that we find reasons to use it even when it is the last tool that should be used. The current "wars" (which, it hardly needs saying, haven't been wars for years, but long ago morphed into clumsy and violent occupations) in response to the actions of 19 men with boxcutters is only the latest example of this attitude. 

Nonviolence: Lesson 1

I’m rereading Mark Kurlansky’s Non-Violence: The History of a Dangerous Idea. If Kurlansky sounds familiar, it’s probably because he was the guy who taught us about the role of cod and salt in history.

In an appendix to the book, Kurlansky lists what he feels are 25 lessons about non-violence that emerge from his overview of its history. As a sort of mental exercise, I thought I’d write a brief post about each of the 25 lessons, on a more or less daily basis for the next month.


The first of Kurlansky’s lessons is this: There is no proactive word for nonviolence.


If you pick up just about any book about nonviolence, this topic comes up. Nonviolence, as the word itself suggests, is defined negatively as an absence of violence. But this isn’t true. Nonviolence in the way practiced by Gandhi, Martin Luther King, and others is an active act, a positive one. Satyagraha, a word coined by Gandhi for his actions, translates to “truth force.” Unfortunately, it has never caught on (although I’m pleasantly surprised that, as I type this, Microsoft Word apparently acknowledges this word's existence, since no yucky red squiggly line shows up below it when I type it).


What we do and don’t have words for reveals something about our culture. Like the semi-mythical assertion that the Inuit peoples have a gazillion words for “snow” because its so much a part of their lives, perhaps we have so many words for various kinds of violence (and none for nonviolence) precisely because violence is such a part of our culture, while active, peaceful confrontation is so rare.

At the risk of verging into the esoteric, though, I’d suggest there is a word for nonviolence.

Consider the following actions:

Synecdoche Gaza

We’ve now learned that an American citizen was killed on the Turkish ship boarded by Israeli commandos.  Furkan Dogan was shot four times in the head and once in the chest at close range.

Everyone from the Pope to the Secretary General of the UN has criticized the forcible boarding of a humanitarian aid ship in international waters. But many, particularly in the United States (even those critical of Israel’s actions) wonder why the criticism is so one-sided. After all, although those on all but one of the ships used non-violent, passive resistance, the commandos did face physical resistance on the ship where the shootings happened.

There are a lot of reasons for this. First, all of the dead were members of the flotilla. While some commandos were wounded, none were killed. Then there’s the obvious David/Goliath issue, with the well-trained and well-armed Israeli commandos playing Goliath (ironically enough) to the David of a crew of unarmed men and women trying to deliver humanitarian supplies to Gaza. And then there was the fact that the boarding took place in international waters. While it would have been ideal for all members of the flotilla to practice nonviolence, it isn’t surprising that some would have tried to defend their ship when armed men dropped from the sky to take it over.

If any of these variables weren’t in place, I suspect the reaction would be a bit more nuanced and conflicted.

But there’s also a symbolic—even rhetorical—part of the answer as well. The vision of armed Israelis seizing control of a ship and shooting civilians serves as a synecdoche of the situation in Gaza.

Don't Believe the (Tax) Hype

One of the things that fascinates me is the ability of people to believe something despite all evidence to the contrary.  Some chalk this up to stupidity, but I think it's usually more complicated than that, involving attempts to resolve cognitive dissonance, a desire to forward an agenda, and a lust to make the world comprehensible (among other things). This is one reason I ended up doing my dissertation on conspiracy theories--what purpose does it serve to rhetorically construct an alternative reality that bears little to no resemblance to the known facts?  Why, for example, despite overwhelming evidence that Lee Harvey Oswald (and no one else) shot President Kennedy, do the majority of Americans no accept this explanation?

This interest resurfaced this week with the tea party/teabag tax protests.  Despite the caterwauling about the "socialist" tendencies of the current administration and the huge tax burden faced by the American people, the fact is that the tax burden for the overwhelming majority of Americans is lower than it's been in a long, long time.  That's right: unless you are ungodly rich, your federal taxes have gone down in President Obama's first year, not up. 

That's so contrary to the conventional wisdom and the narratives spun by not only the teabag crowd but by the mainstream media that it surprised even me.  Yes, I follow the news, so I knew that Obama campaigned on and delivered a modest tax cut to middle-income Americans.  That put me ahead of a lot of my fellow countrymen and women, but I was honestly surprised at the historic nature of this dip in taxes. 

It's a testament to the power of narrative that even someone disinclined to believe them and who probably reads more news than the average bear found himself surprised at this news.

Rhetoric of Violence Makes a Resurgence

So it’s come to this.



It seemed things couldn’t get more disturbing. Over the last few months, we’ve been treated to equations of Obama to Hitler, gun-totin’ teabaggers, and visions of an anti-healthcare reform mob taunting a man with Parkinson’s Disease.



But after Sunday’s vote, you couldn’t be faulted for thinking things might get back to being a bit more civil. After all, there was some evidence of it. Polls suggested that there was a growing consensus that, despite the enmity of the debate and the often egregious falsehoods flung into the public sphere, Americans were coming to feel that this bill was probably a good thing. Not perfect, but a step in the right direction.



But starting on the day of the vote itself, and then following, there’s been some ominous signs—things that remind me a lot of the craziest stuff being said and done during the Clinton presidency which culminated in Oklahoma City.



On the day of the vote, protestors yelled “nigger”at African American members of Congress. Another black congressman was spat on. An openly gay congressman was called “faggot.”



In the days that followed, vandals threw bricks at the offices of representatives who didn’t vote the way they wanted them to. Politicians received threats of physical violence. The brother of another congressman had a propane gas pipe broken by thugs who thought it was the congressman’s house.



As I type this, I’m hearing reports of congressional representatives having pictures of nooses faxed to their offices.



Sarah Palin now talks about “targeting” key Democratic congressional representatives in upcoming elections, complete with a U.S. map with crosshairs to mark the districts in question.



And one of the guys who has taken credit for advocating brick throwing at Democrats talks openly about guns being taken out and cleaned, as well as the necessity of preparing for combat. And oh yeah—he’ll be a featured guest at a gun rally held a high-power rifle shot from Washington D.C. to be held next month, April 19th—the day Timothy McVeigh chose to kill innocent men, women, and children at the federal building in Oklahoma City because it was the two-year anniversary of the conflagration at the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas (an event seen by the radical Right as evidence of the malevolence of the federal government).