the end of the southern strategy

That's it, over, done. Nigger-baiting in national elections has played out. For the entirety of my life until now, this has been the GOP's plank strategy. Thanks to a shift in demographics that's ongoing and will continue well into the future, America's going to be a predominantly brown nation, thanks mostly to Hispanic immigrants. Think about it: this has been going on since 1968. What Boogeyman is the Republican Party going to find next? Oh sure, terrorists, but that's not going to fit the bill.

No, I think they're basically screwed, but then, so are the rest of us thanks to them and racist American evangelicals (rural hicks, white Southerners generally). We're still heading on the wrong course in our obsession with military adventurism. We still have Citizens United. Ah, and don't think President Obama is FDR--he's not. What he's going to do is tow their line about the national debt, misrepresenting it, making the same claims that fly in the face of accepted economics theory, and we'll continue to have the same problems, albeit with a privatized or non-existent social safety net, and it will have been done by Democratic hands, not primarily Republican ones.

So, great, enjoy the parties for now, but the fact is that President Obama is going to continue to roll back our civil liberties with NDAA, a war on lawful government whistleblowers, and he's going to continue to commit heinous war crimes in the Middle East, North Africa, Africa generally, Asia, and so on, little will change. The missing-ingredient once more is the public holding him accountable, but with partisan tribalism what it is now, forget it. The American public will continue to be on the one hand an apathetic demographic blob, and a bloodthirsty rabble, the dream of authoritarians everywhere.

But at least the Southern strategy is over, done, kaput, and I can watch the assholes that ruined my nation writhe for four more years. None of this is reassuring. Expect the president to cut back on social services and to gut solid programs like Social Security. It's coming, and you're going to own it, because you're just as irrational as the Republicans, dear lockstep Democrats, you're exactly the same kind of morons.

Some visits to Zuccotti Park (the Wall Street occupation)

New York City--Me and my girlfriend paid a couple of visits to the Wall Street occupation over the last couple of weeks (on September 30th and October 7th), two days with marked contrasts for the site. September 30 was brimming with occupiers--as many as between 700 to 1,000 core individuals from New York were present (exact numbers are difficult to come by since how one defines an occupier can slippery at best), it was literally standing room only with "visitors" like myself.




It's my opinion that as this is a mostly symbolic action, "visitors" are just as worthy of being counted among the occupiers since we all share the same views about Wall Street and the bailout of the biggest American banks. We have come from all over the nation, from all walks of life and from a variety of age groups, a variety of demographics. What all of us share is that we're working class and that we're getting screwed by the economic sector and the political class. We know that working within the political process isn't going to bring about reform.




This occupation could go on record as the most photographed and recorded political event in American history to date, not even the Democratic Convention in Chicago in 1968.



Contrary to the contentions of early mainstream coverage, the occupiers aren't all twenty-somethings and they have a solid focus on why they're there and what their demands are: radical reform of the financial sector.

Also on that September 30 came some of the first representatives of American labor--the Transit Workers Union (TWU) Local 100--and we were present, recording the event...along with an NYPD surveillance pod on a crane and nearly everyone else there. The TWU has sued the City of New York for commandeering five MTA buses to arrest Wall Street occupiers crossing the Brooklyn Bridge and lost, the cops can arrest them if they refuse to allow the action. Interestingly, police on the curbside began enforcing pedestrian codes, as if on cue once the TWU showed, but I leave it to the reader to draw their own conclusion. Had the cops not rioted again two nights earlier, beating and pepper-spraying occupiers once again, I wouldn't be so suspicious of their motives.

A number of plainclothes detectives were on hand as well as select NYPD who were photographing and videotaping everyone in the crowd. But many of the cops I've encountered were simply doing their jobs. An "us vs. them" mentality should be applied when brutality and extralegal behavior are present, but not as a default, my opinion.

There have also been unsubstantiated rumors that police planted among the occupiers were arresting individuals on the 5th of October--they have yet to be proven out. It's not the first of such rumors either that has been making the rounds. My own conclusion from both visits is that the core of the occupiers is well organized and know what they're doing. They're resourceful and could be ready for the long haul when the occupation itself ends and the real work of organizing begins, and a beginning is what this is. Right now, the police shenanigans at the Brooklyn Bridge and the resumption of extralegal brutality on the 5th of this month have seemingly thinned the ranks. That's if you only count them and leave out us visitors...

From September 30th:

Above: The TWU arrives on site, Sept. 30.

Above: Speeches by occupiers, not leaders. As no bullhorns are allowed by NYPD, every few words are relayed across the crowd by selected individuals, spaced-apart, so as to reach the farthest boundaries of Zuccotti Park.

All images the intellectual property of Matt Janovic and Isabel Martins. Copyright 2011.

Do it for Karl Marx baby, do it for Bakunin...

“You make me feel like Emma Goldman with all of your ratiocinations! Dialectical materialism never felt so good, and I don’t even understand it, but it’s time, it’s time!” she purred.

"That's OK, he said with the copyrighted voice of authority, "I don't either, and neither do any of the readers out there." Their radical studies sessions had gone on for months and months and it was becoming clear that a very hot, sweaty, wet, and prolonged Hegelian synthesis was inevitable. Their vent worm ancestors smiled.

He grabbed her by her long, flowing hair, stroked her swan-like neck, and caressed her fulsome breasts: “Look—woman—Marxist-Leninist forced production never made for a worker’s paradise! What difference is there between Taylorist assembly-lines in the West and the moldering Taylorist factories of the former Soviet Union?” She looked up at him with her saucer-eyes and their daffodil-eyelashes, all coy and childlike, and could have been the French symbol for Liberty.

It could have been the very first time a woman gazed at a lover in adoration, and he returned it with the very same passion. Her gaze was so innocent--but focused--with constructive intent rather than the predictable power play found in human social groupings. She grabbed him and held him in the palm of her hand like all good comrades do. His excitement rose and he thought his heart would rip out of his chest and his face went flush. Beads of perspiration instantaneously formed on his brow. Revolution never felt so good, at least not since 1968 when the fluids were flying over the barricades.

“Women’s lives have been circumscribed by confining gender-roles and have only been truly able to join the fight in recent times, the last one hundred years. But women have been and embody an even greater dialectical potential for constructive subversion of hierarchy.” He smiled at that, and moved his hand towards her venus mounds, gently caressing her and stroking her back at the same time. She shivered and giggled, purred again.

“Give it up for Bakunin baby, give it up for Marx, haw-haw-haw!” chortled the thirty-something leftist to his radical studies partner. It all began with books, but like the rest of life, it ended in fucking.

“Now give it to me like a fucking man!” she screamed, and they dropped all their books for a time, all the bound-essays, and returned to the Garden, like children, like glorious children. Could this be? Could a relationship without an alpha, without a leader, a peaceful coexistence, compete in a market driven world? The revolution had begun, under cover of night, and things would never be the same.

A Russian Finlandia Vodka ad from a old Prague Spring soldier

Ed.--This was forwarded to a friend of mine who lives in the Czech Republic--Brno to be exact--so much a citadel of computer hacking and pirating that many large tech-firms decided to hire them. My pal in Brno claims he was a signer of the Charter 77 Human Rights Statement to President Carter by Czech dissidents; we met in 1986, here in South Bend, we both worked at the same restaurant.

I have little reason to doubt him--he was kicked-out of Soviet dominated Czechoslovakia just months later. Lucky him. If you wonder what things are like in Russia right now, here's a little cultural artifact, a peek. I agree with the logic of the ad, as vulgar as it may be. It's just true, and it works. The bottom-text appears to be Czech. As anyone can tell, I created this ad, never mind the temerity of posting it here, at another internet location. The gall, I know.

O.J. Simpson's memorabilia was his and yet not his...

WWW--This trial has been very interesting to me for a number of reasons. My brother has worked for over a decade in advertising and had the misfortune of meeting a lot of Northern Indiana businessmen over the years (hint: car dealers think "Top Gun" is the "greatest film ever made"--wrong again).

As one might vividly imagine, most of them are antisocial turds with less personality than a houseplant, but a few of them actually wanted to chum it up with "the help," so my brother had to oblige their overinflated egos.

One of these clowns was a very big O.J. fan. He took my brother down into the basement den of his very expensive and poorly-designed-and-built clapboard where there was a wall literally covered with sports memorabilia.

And there it was, it even had its own display-nook: O.J.'s 1968 Heisman trophy.

"He lets me keep it for him, and I give him money every once in a while," he said (I'm paraphrasing now, isn't it thrilling?). This was within the last eight years. Yeah, it's crazy, but these things just have a way of coming to me and not the reverse, a kind of "Jungian" latticework of coincidence that's plagued my life from its inception.

What is there to gather from this? That O.J. has such an enormous ego that in his mind he wasn't "selling" anything, but "allowing" fans to "rent" his memorabilia in return for an audience with him, to be on his "good" side. I won't even go into what it must have been like to have been on his "bad" side, that's now a foregone conclusion after this trial.

In 1999, O.J.'s Heisman was sold to a Philadelphia--that wonderful town Poe loved so much--businessman named Tom Kreissman, except that he went and sold it to the man who O.J. and his co-conspirators attacked in a Vegas hotel, Alfred Beardsley:

Nevertheless, it’s believed that he bought the 1968 Heisman trophy -- the first and maybe only one ever to be auctioned — from the winner of that 1999 sale. The trophy was originally sold to Tom Kreissman of Philadelphia at Butterfield’s auction house on Sunset Boulevard for $230,000. But a source at Butterfield’s says Kreissman returned and sold it a couple of years later. It’s thought that Beardsley was the buyer. ("O.J. Simpson's 'Victim' Part of a Long-Running Feud," Foxnews.com, 09.20.2007)

And why wouldn't Beardsley have "sold" or rented the thing out to raise money for himself and "the Juice"? Why not?

The unintelligent businessman told my brother, "I went to USC when O.J. was playing there, I've known him since then," and "I'm actually borrowing it from another collector." He exhaled on and on, painting a scenario in which all of these successful old school fans of O.J.'s were shuffling these artifacts around to hide them from the Goldman and Brown families who were doing their best to track down all of the assets he was selling off to pay them from the 1996 civil suit ruling ($33 million).

Hey, who says once something's sold that it's really "sold"?

Over time, O.J. had a number of folks around him who felt he "owed" them money, and the trophy changed hands several times before 1999, and likely afterward:

The man Simpson accused of stealing the items from him is Mike Gilbert, another one-time associate. As Simpson's licensing agent in the late 1990s, Gilbert admitted snatching Simpson's Heisman Trophy and other items from his client's Brentwood home as payment for money he said was owed to him. He later turned the items over to authorities, save the trophy's nameplate.

Gilbert swore he'd go to jail before turning the nameplate over to the Goldman family, which was trying to collect on the $33.5 million civil judgment won against Simpson. Gilbert later surrendered it under court order. ("O.J.'s Vegas Accuser Says He Wants Charges Dropped," Foxnews.com, 09.15.2008)

Yeah, real class act folks there. After 1999, the trail appears to grow cold, wikianswers-be-damned, the Wikiuniverse almost never being correct about anything.

I think that the Goldmans had a good idea this kind of shell game (aka "three card monty") was going on with wealthy fans of O.J., a constant shifting of the memorabilia around with a rental fee and lots of broken promises. Egomaniacs like Simpson can convince themselves of almost anything, the same applying to pea-brained American businessmen with penis envy.

My feeling is that these people aren't mere fans, but criminals--all of the players involved in ferring around O.J.'s memorabilia. Beardsley is just a flash point. I hope that this verdict smokes the rest of them out and that they pay the price of aiding a vile murderer simply because they love football too much. To these clowns, the murders don't even matter--only football does. What a pathetic bunch. I wouldn't use that Heisman for a doorstop, although it would make a great lighter/ashtray combination with a few modifications.

None of it matters, the game is over, finally, at long last. But I still have to wonder: where's O.J.'s 1968 Heisman...and why would anyone in their right mind want it? They may as well buy one of those lousy John Wayne Gacy oil-paintings while they're at it.

"O.J. Simpson's 'Victim' Part of a Long-Running Feud," Foxnews.com, 09.20.2007: http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,297400,00.html

"O.J.'s Vegas Accuser Says He Wants Charges Dropped," Foxnews.com, 09.15.2008: http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,296934,00.html

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. (1929-1968)

“They never gave us any meaningful news. They told us the day that Martin Luther King was shot, they told us the day that Bobby Kennedy was shot, but they never bothered to tell us about the moon shot. So it was certainly selected news.”--John McCain, emphasizing his indifference to the legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in 1987, when he thought it was safe to.

The United States of America--I was just about to be born when Dr. King was murdered by an assassin's bullet in Memphis, that tragic day of April 4th, 1968. What the media won't be telling you is that over 200 American cities were on fire the next day. Buildings were burning just two-blocks from the White House. There were meles between the Black Pather Party for Self-Defense in Chicago and other cities. Often, the Panthers were baited into it by police intelligence units. Military helicopters were doing flyovers above almost every major American city. Smoke billowed from the blazing-ruins of storefronts. It looked like a second civil war was coming.

Indeed, the war in Vietnam was coming home, and the violence was returning to those who had initiated it. The repression afterwards was ghastly, and things only got worse under Nixon, which could have been predicted. The "greatest generation ever" murdered Dr. King. The targets of assassination were on the Left, not the right. As we know, only two major right-wing figures on the cultural landscape were assassinated during the "1960s" (1964-1974): they were John Lincoln Rockwell of the American Nazi Party, and George Wallace. Wallace lived. Scoundrels frequently live to old age. Good men and women who join the struggle for social justice tend to die young. Dr. King was one-of-many during that storied era.

I'm not going into a recounting of all the possible scenarios surrounding his assassination, but it was a crime that certainly had more players to it than lowly old James Earl Ray. A number of retired FBI agents close to the case at that time--all retired, some deceased--have had some very shocking stories to tell, and some have even come forward with stunning and credible evidence.

During the 1990s, one of them produced documents he found in Ray's white Ford Mustang--he was the first agent on the scene, and knew that this evidence was going to "vanish." He forwarded it to the Clinton Justice Department, where it summarily destroyed. This should tell you a lot about where the Clintons truly stand on race and social justice. There are many other examples from them that are just as shocking. Then, there are those who are plainly racist in their behavior and rhetoric.

Roughly 25-years-ago, Arizona congressional representative John McCain voted against the establishment of a national holiday recognizing Dr. King and his sacrifices. This vote by the 47-year-old McCain was race-baiting, and in-the-spirit of the racialist Reagan years. Such a view was held as highly popular in the then-predominantly white Southwestern state. But the racialist mood was prevalent throughout Reagan America, which can now be viewed as a violent denial of the social justice movements of the 1960s-70s.

The fact that McCain would vote against this bill--whether he believed the inherent white supremacist assumptions by doing so--was egregious and unacceptable. He is clearly not a uniter, but then, neither are the Clintons. McCain was held by the North Vietnamese from 1966 to 1972. It appears he still has a lot of catching-up to do. None of this matters. Senator Barack Obama spoke of Dr. King's legacy so eloquently today in Fort Wayne, Indiana, just hours ago:

But in 1968, these workers decided they'd had enough, and over 1,000 went on strike. Their demands were modest --better wages, better benefits, and recognition of their union. But the opposition was fierce. Their vigils were met with handcuffs. Their protests turned back with mace. And at the end of one march, a 16-year old boy lay dead.

This is the struggle that brought Dr. King to Memphis. It was a struggle for economic justice, for the opportunity that should be available to people of all races and all walks of life. Because Dr. King understood that the struggle for economic justice and the struggle for racial justice were really one --that each was part of a larger struggle "for freedom, for dignity, and for humanity." So long as Americans were trapped in poverty, so long as they were being denied the wages, benefits, and fair treatment they deserved --so long as opportunity was being opened to some but not all --the dream that he spoke of would remain out of reach.

The tone in America has shifted, and the message is coming home to everyone. People are beginning to understand what the social movements of the 1960s-70s were saying: it's time for equality and a sense of fair-play. Welcome to the return of liberation theology in America, its time has come, and Dr. King is alive-and-well in the hearts of millions. As Dr. King said, we have the choice between chaos or community. That choice should be a simple one.