The Deliverators

On Lady Gaga

by ANDREW DOBBS

(For RKB, at long last...)

Any history of American music must be a history of popular music.  Even our classical composers are pop: Aaron Copeland was riffing on folk music with a symphony, Gershwin was inspired by jazz.  Gershwin and jazz in fact represent the two essential elements in North American musical innovation: Blacks and Jews.  The descendents of the Americas' African slaves create a new, inspired (“soulful”) way to make music, which is loathed by White people.  It isn't that the music isn't to their taste, it is that the music is sinful and degenerate.  The music speaks candidly about sensual experience of a common sort: fucking, getting tight, hatred for one's enemies, etc.  It is played on new instruments or on old instruments in new ways, and these are always decried as worthless, confirmation of how stupid the niggers really are.  The structural and vocal styles are similarly written off, but the music continues to be made by rough and tumble survivors of the Race War for other survivors. 

It is around this time that some hip Jews discover the innovation, and get wrapped around the axle with the possibilities here.  Likewise diasporants and freed slaves, they innovate and bring the product to market.  Think Gershwin, Benny Goodman, Rick Rubin, the Beastie Boys, etc.  And not to repeat stereotypes, but the Jewish influence is frequently on the money end of things, along with critical respectability.  Jewish writers, executives and promoters are the springboard into a broader White audience.  They translate the rawness of the sound into something digestible by White young people—prone to rebellion in any time, the social innovations of late capitalism have made White adolescents the sanctioned rebels of bourgeois society. 

Now the sound is big business and White people start making it themselves, but the effect doesn't always translate.  There are White people with soul (British/Irish proles are the most fluent—Van Morrison, Joe Cocker, George Michael come to mind), but coolness is inextricable from suffering and oppression.  Consider Margaret's mournful description of her closeted, alcoholic husband Brick in Tennessee Williams' Cat on a Hot Tin Roof:

Of course, you always had that detached quality as if you were playing a game without much concern over whether you won or lost, and now that you've lost the game, not lost but just quit playing, you have that rare sort of charm that usually only happens in the very old or hopelessly sick people, the charm of the defeated.--You look so cool, so cool, so enviably cool.

The play premiered in 1955, when “cool” was just being adopted by the hip set as the all purpose modifier/response it is today.  Margaret's line offers perhaps the best definition for this mysterious phenomenon known as “the cool,” born in 1949 with Miles Davis' seminal bebop record.  Coolness is only possible in the face of suffering, in a space where defeat has occurred.  Is this why the coolest Rock music was made under Vietnam's specter?  Black folks and Jews have been taking it on the chin for hundreds of years now, and the only way they've been able to survive is by getting cool the way Brick did.   

Coolness is, however, a panracial quality, and serves in fact as the main back channel between the races in our country.  Cool White people can communicate more or less openly with Black folks, and Black folks hold back less from them.  From this bazaar of innovation, rebellion and freedom (just another word, you'll remember, for nothing left to lose) comes the best of American music.  But with these White folks come others who make an ersatz version of the original: diet soul.  As these multiply and pollute the sample, the form dies and something new is called for.  The evil of “smooth jazz” easy listening garbage, White Boy Blues and virtually all contemporary Rock and Roll music is in mind here.

There are of course scenes like folk, bluegrass and country to make a mess out of the scheme above, but even these adopted slave instruments (the banjo for one) and blues inspiration.  One other form which creates problems for my theory is dance pop: born in Motown, it is designed to be panracial in its appeal and has so been from the beginning.  While some numbers have been decried by self-righteous White folks on the traditional moral/sophistication grounds, Top 40 dance pop has had its biggest enemies in the critical establishment: it isn't wicked, it is stupid—as opposed to uprightness, snobbery inspires its detractors.  

Of particular curiosity here has been the birth in the last 20 years or so of a broad set of the young/supposedly hip population which has sworn off of popular music on principle and have convinced themselves of the esoteric superstition that significance is to be found only in obscurity, and that the more wide the impact of a piece of music or the broader the appeal of a sound the less respectable it is.  They are cultural ascetics, aristocratic masochists in spirit, frequently enamored of their own intelligence.  “I don't listen to music on the radio” is their credo and when a band they've come to like does start getting airplay they immediately abandon the group, outraged that everybody now likes them.  This hipster fuckwit set is jealous like that, in the same manner as the Old Testament God. 

The fact that the foundations of Indie Rock lie in Top 40 (Bowie's canonical Station to Station, for example, reached #3 on the Billboard Pop Album Charts) is blown off, and it is assumed that music has become more businessfied over the last 30 years or so than in the past.  This is ludicrous, as the assembly line hackery of Tin Pan alley shows, along with the Booker T. style hypercapitalism of Berry Gordy or the mobbed up music industry of the 40s and 50s.  The music is indeed corporate, but Mozart was aristocratic.  Both nobles and corporations are enemies of humanity, but art can be more than its patronage, and beauty is ultimately a glimpse at the transcendent, at the indivisible expanse of being.  It cannot be held in political boundaries.  There are times too, of course, when the art is not more than its patronage, when it is cheap vanity.  But I would daresay the ratio of bullshit to brilliance is no lower in Indie music than in corporate pop. 

Ultimately the snobs hurt only themselves, as their prejudices alienate them from truly historic and brilliant artists.  The best example of this at the moment is their dismissal of Lady Gaga, certainly one of the most talented and exciting entertainers to emerge in years—one who, if she survives her fame, will be foremost in the creative arts for many years to come.  No dance pop figure has arisen of this caliber since Madonna more than a quarter century ago, and on the tomb of Michael (at my right hand), Gaga will be an icon of American music no snob heroes will ever match.

Lady Gaga is Stefani Germanotta's stage altar ego, a cyberpunk sex kitten spinning unbelievable tracks which demand ass shaking.  This is the basic function of pop music: to enable and encourage dancing.  Hipster music snobs are frequently found staring at the stage, perhaps bobbing their head or singing along.  Their music is best experienced in a live performance.  Dance pop is best enjoyed recorded and played over the PA in a dance hall—whether a junior high gymnasium or nightclub.  Germanotta has turned prodigious musical talent—she learned piano at four, wrote songs by the age of 13 and was accepted to both Juilliard and NYU's art school—into superstardom, making the smartest music on the Top 40 in years.  Her chops are to die for as well, and like Madonna and George Michael before her she authors her own music (with help from a passel of incredible producers, hand chosen by the Lady herself).   

Gaga's first single “Just Dance” is a terrific “command” dance song: the song commands you to dance, and if you watch the floor at the club when the number is played, many will obey.  Frankly sexual and hedonistic, it exudes ecstasy.  The song is side 1 track 1 of Gaga's debut album, The Fame.  Gaga is perhaps the first pop chanteuse to ever kick off her recording career with a concept album; this one explores the consciousness shift involved in becoming famous. The theme runs through the entire album—witness the impressionistic stuttering during the pre-chorus on the underplayed “Beautiful and Dirty Rich,” for example—but the effect of the entire piece is a sort of portfolio for the pop consuming audience to judge her by before adopting her as queen.  While every song invites ass shaking and getting down with, “Papparazzi” is a terrific ballad, “Eh, Eh, Nothing Else I Can Say” is pure bubblegum and “Starstruck” is as good as any hip hop/R&B jam on the radio today.  The assessment has so far been quite positive—her first four singles all hit number 1 (her latest--”Bad Romance”--peaked at number 2 in the US, but made the tops in both the UK and Canada), and the 23 year old has become an international star.

The second Lady Gaga release—The Fame Monster—is a yang to The Fame's yin—and continues the exploration of both the theme and her artistic capabilities.  The most shocking song on the album is “Speechless”--a piano ballad perfectly evocative of Queen, Elton John and the best of radio-friendly 70s rock.  Those who turn their nose up at Germanotta's use of auto-tune in her Gaga creations ought to listen to this track, preferably the live performance from this year's American Music Awards (which none of them watched live).  One understands then why Akon—Germanotta's sponsor in pop music—dubbed her “Gaga”after her Freddie Mercury pipes.  She closes the album with a truly different track: “Show Me Your Teeth.”  Featuring the inspired line “take a bite of my bad girl meat,” it is a bluesy track which doesn't call for grooving out so much as stomping of the feet.  “Telephone” is confirmed now to be the second single from the album, and it is guaranteed to exert a lusty hegemony over dance floors globally for months to come.

Perhaps the best song on The Fame Monster, however, is “So Happy I Could Die.”  The title itself tempts fate, and the hook's recognition of fame's potential lethality displays a self-awareness and introspection invisible in any other piece of pop music in years.  With a hypnotic and beautiful synth melody, the song is actually a celebration of masturbation and explores fantasy with depth and honesty.  “I am as vain as I allow,” she says.  “I do my hair/I gloss my eyes/I touch myself all through the night.”  The pre-Chorus speaks to the intoxication of sexual pleasure with uncommon poetry and precision:

Just give in
Don't give up baby
Open up your heart and mind to me

Just know when
that glass is empty
the world is going to bend

Next time you have a powerful orgasm notice the way things go all fuzzy and start to twist, as though you were on psychedelics.  Gaga encapsulates this phenomenon in lyric, she translates the sublime into poetry: is this not the task of all artists?  Is this not the prophetic charge laid before the creative?  Her accomplishment of this on “So Happy I Could Die” demands respect.  Taste is taste, but to deny Gaga respect because she uses auto-tune or gets played on KISS-FM is to stand alongside your redneck parents in hating rap because it is just Black guys talking over records.  There is a word for such ignorant self-righteous demonization of the new: bigotry.  Music snobs are bigots of the most pathetic sorts—at least racists are threatening and outrageous.  The indie rock aficionados are—on the contrary—pussies, and they are ridiculous; the sooner History buries this silly little subcultural backwater, the better. 

Bigotry crosses Top 40 pop in another direction: the early adopters who make or break dance music are gay men, and gay bars offer the best place for experiencing dance pop.  Lady Gaga has recognized from the beginning that her success depends on keeping the queers happy and has become a forceful advocate of gay marriage and other civil rights.  More than this, Gaga is herself queer.  She has said since “Just Dance” that she enjoys sex with women and men, that she does not endorse the binary sexual orientation theory nor does she feel the need to bind her desires to a specific set of genitalia layouts.  She has caught heat for this—Barbara Walters asked Germanotta what her father thought of Gaga's sapphic trysts, an absurd and uncouth question nobody would ask of a conventionally sexed person—but her broad popularity still gives hope to those interested in reviving the sexual revolution.  The first phase—breaking down monogamy's monopoly and virginity's normality—has succeeded.  The end to orientation must be next, and Gaga is a prophetess of a new sexual gospel offering hope for new pleasures and orgiastic freedom for all.

Pop success is a finicky thing, but its bases are obvious.  Talent is indispensable, so too originality.  Balancing these are a necessity for glamour—that is to say skillful artifice—and getting the job of moving asses done.  If you can riff on the standard lines within the structural traditions in a way that can only be yours, in a way that possesses people and compels them to shake their bodies, all with pipes and chops that demand respect from all quarters you are going to be a star.  Gaga's got It and she's going to be around until she dies, which even she admits could be any day now.  Truly—a scene is setting out, and anyone too important to themselves to get hip is liable to end up in art's lamest cabal ever. 

History demands Lady Gaga, and she is the Revolution.    

            

You May Be One Already (And Not Even Know It)

by ROGER BLACKAT

Politics and sex go together like gin and tonic, law and order or Northrup and Grummon: not only is the sexual always political, the political life has an erotic tone. One note which may escape notice is the way people have “political orientations” very much like sexual orientations. Like their carnal cousin, political orientations are tricky things—they blur at the edges and everyone carries a few hung up expressions of the others. In both cases the downtalkers of media, education and state act as though there are only two, perhaps three choices. You are gay, straight or bi (but probably lying or “in college”); you are Right, Left or moderate (but probably just an idiot). Of course, there are people turned on by car crashes, fire and women stomping on bugs, guys who like dressing like women and having women sodomize them with dildos, and a class of individuals who get off on total denial of sex. These folks tend to congregate in decadent and ancient sex cults such as the Roman Catholic clergy.

In the same way, your politics are probably not easily demonstrable on those online x/y graph political tests. Those tests seek to flatten something as rugged as our senses ofhow power is and ought to be organized into a short paragraph telling you exactly which of the bosses you ought to like the most. This is why you find yourself dissatisfied with the talking head choices on TV: if the choice is between the bloated dumbasses of the Right or Liberal Left (or the obscurantist arrogance of the “in college” Left), who could possibly care?

But you have a political orientation just as you have a sexual orientation. You might be generally straight or gay, reactionary or revolutionary, vanilla or kinked, mainstream or radical, but amidst these spectra and in consideration of the idiosyncrasies of your desires, there emerge orientations as unique to thee as thy fingerprints. Complicating this process is the way that certain stigmatized ideas are suppressed and repressed. The closet for gay people isn't just not talking about the fact that one is gay, it is a denial to oneself that it is or has to be true. It is a complete refusal to face facts, a compartmentalization of one's identity and a pathological rejection of one's desires in order to conform to the dictates of power. In the same way, political identity can be denied and deprived of a name despite the fact that it continues to program our reactions to objects of desire. That is to say, there is a queer political community you might very well be part of without even realizing it.

You've felt the urges for years, the desires to break the law, break rules, refuse to obey orders, fail to show up on time, the rejection of the requirements for your life set for you by others. There are a few specific manifestations of this desire which are dead giveaways as to the queerness's presence.

First, do you find yourself in more-or-less unrelenting contempt for the political leaders and movements of your day? Do you think that no political party has yet figured out a meaningful program that doesn't merely extend that party's power further into your life? Is the only thing more cynical than your opinion of politicians the scheming of these same scumbags? This sense infects your opinion of political institutions in general: the government is an object of scorn and suspicion, you don't trust bureaucrats, cops, national heroes with hideous secrets of their own, teachers or the mindless spectacle of patriotic conformity. For this reason you end up making up your own law and avoiding the agents of authority to the best of your ability. There are criminal actions—whether traffic violations, drug usage, public intoxication, tax cheating, shoplifting, etc.--which you happily adopt with a clear conscience, while there are “sacred” duties such as voting, snitching and saluting you abstain from always.

Second, do you find the commercialism of our contemporary culture loathsome? Does the sound of Christmas music in October make you nauseous with visions of the orgy of consumption, the fat middle-american, middle-class, mediocre middle-management types and their spouses and children jamming their faces and closets with garbage from McDonald's and Wal-Mart? You likely express this contempt at times as pity, as you realize that these people are just grasping at happiness in a world where their lives are dictated by their bosses, their TVs and their need for acceptance in a consumer culture. You know that while the government can't be trusted in any time, its most dangerous aspect today is its complete ownership by corporate interests. You resent having to sell your life for a paycheck, and you might even find ways to sabotage, slack off, reduce productivity or otherwise obstruct the machinery of capitalist nonsense. You get by pretty simply, and aren't likely to fall thrall to fads and fashions, and you hate waste.

Finally, do you reject the idea of any kind of celestial boss, a kind of burnt out Santa Claus of the skies ready to torture you without end for cussing, drinking and masturbating? Do you instinctively distrust all preachers and avoid all proselytizers? Do you explore the transcendent without needing labels; do you reject the guilt and hateful bullshit of the Bronze Age superstitions destroying all our cultures? Chances are you have found some way to address the inevitable—your imminent death—without resorting to childish and vulgar ideas of eternal happiness in reward for temporal subservience. People incapable of dealing reality as it really is find your independence and courage threatening or mystifying, but you don't really like talking to them about it, because they aren't worth your time.

If you feel at least some of these symptoms in each of the three categories, or note a strong affinity with the general sentiments of each, you are very likely an anarchist, without even realizing it. Anarchy is the idea that there is no power higher than the individual conscience, and that over time efforts to control freedom in the name of grander “social” goods will simply increase the level of chaos and misery in everyday life. It means no gods, no masters: you are king of your own life, just like everybody else.

The first thing that should be realized here is that the primary directive after one commits to freedom is RESPONSIBILITY. Freedom is not easy, it is not the lazy state-sanctioned “liberty” upholstered in consumer crap of everyday American life. It is a battle, because it means rejecting all limitations, because freedom under restraint means nothing more than the absence of restraint under restraint which is meaningless. If you are to be truly free, though, responsibility much reign: thou art responsible for the totality of thy life, for everything good and bad therein. This is a terrifying, liberating idea, but if you aren't willing to take responsibility for your conditions, your attitudes, your opportunities and (most importantly) thy failings you can never be free. Learning to provide, protect and create for oneself is the first step towards coming out of the closet.

But aren't anarchists the ones who throw bombs and break windows and generally wreak blind havoc? Aren't they agents of chaos? YES! Chaos is the only natural order—look at a forest for example. There is no rule here, no order or plan or philosophy or ideology. There is only chaos, and yet it is perfectly balanced and ordered. In order to return order to our political, social and everyday life you must increase the level of chaos, that is to say freedom where you are. The guiding principal for a responsible political movement here is DIRECT ACTION. This means that you aren't interested in writing a check so that the right guy can get elected so the government can take care of the problem. It doesn't mean petitioning management. It means finding something you can do immediately to take responsibility for smashing the forces of control and unleashing the power of creativity.

And these are the parameters of direct action, the criteria by which anarchist action is designed: CREATIVE DESTRUCTION. This idea, developed by the not-anarchist (or perhaps closeted) economist Joseph Schumpeter in the 20^th century has been an anarchist impulse for many moons previous. Mikhail Bakunin, the main anarchist voice in early industrial socialism once said “The Passion for Destruction is a Creative Passion.” Your direct action must smash away a part of the old as a means of bringing out some new beauty from the drear pieces of the status quo. Thou must create something new and awesome though the disciplined undermining of what is old. Whether you are scrawling slogans on the bathroom stall at work or setting fire to a cop car, you are creating something to inspire from the wretched refuse of that which oppresses.

Now were this a piece for a church or other religion, for a normal political party or even good ol' Marxism and general radicalism this is where I'd tell you why a particular little cabal of people is the only right one, and how they are wrong about nothing. It would be there that you, the newly enlightened anarchist would throw this away. The fact of the matter is that anarchists, particularly the closeted variety who've been too busy living to read up on all the old theories, are not really joiners. The idea of going to meetings, paying dues, signing up for volunteer hours or whatever sounds about as appealing as an intestinal flu. But this isn't for any philosophy or front such as the ones I mentioned; it isn't for any “movement” at all. It is for you, an individual who has been living a lie and knows that you must be free, and it is an introduction to how you can take care of your own damn liberation.

While anarchism is interesting and worth studying, ANARCHY is older, more universal, more closely akin to an orientation than an ideology. Anarchists have always lived and always will—just as there will always be those more attracted to the same gender as the opposite. You just need to find little ways to create destruction, to destroy creatively, to bring forth a new life in the shell of the old. Little acts of sabotage and trickery can be accomplished, and by acting alone you can slip under the radar screen, generally raising the stakes for a system of life we know can't be sustained. As you proceed you'll meet others of our tribe, of our lifestyle, and you may share affinities which make combined action possible. At times the work of your group may intersect with that of others and whole experiments in demonstrating freedom will arise. Ultimately a movement may result, but you are only responsible for the direct action you do to change your life.

You know that the government can't fix things, and even if they could the expansion of their power would be worse than whatever problems were solved. You know that the money system is a fairy tale told by a very few to enchant the many into wagering their lives in a losing game. You know that no liberation waits after the grave, and that only this life can be perfect and free. You are responsible for creating this life, for building a new world. Do something, build something, destroy something, and remember who you are, THOU ANARCHIST.

(Roger Blackat is Amerika's foremost street propagandist).

Immanentize the Eschaton

by MATTHEW GAULT

Find it hard to get up in the morning?

Work ruining your day?

Can’t seem to find the energy to get anything done?

Lost the script for your life?

There’s only one solution: immanentize the eschaton!

The current nuclear states of the world are like a group of men pointing guns at each others heads. At any moment the itchy trigger fingers of the paranoid leaders could land with a click and spray the brains of the entire planet across the greasy black backdrop of our solar system. The situation is so dire that any young buck newcomer to the circle suggesting that, perhaps, everyone should calm down and lower their weapons will surely win the oh so noble prize of peace. The people of the world have but one solution. Rise up, and kick your leader in the balls! Help him pull the trigger and usher in the post-apocalyptic landscape we all desire.

Tired of your commute? Cars will be chariots not wheelchairs.

Hate your job? Your only job will be survival.

Concerned about global warming? Nuclear winter is fucking cold.

Wringing your hands over countless existential threats? You’ll be too busy running from mutants and hiding from slavers to worry!

Bring the threats of the future to our doorstep and make nuclear armaggeddon a reality. Open the door to the end of all your concerns. The lucky will die and embrace the dreamless sleep of sweet oblivion. Survivors will be treated to a horrific carnival ride of subsistence and brutality more thrilling than a night out at the movies with the wife. The possibilities for growth and expansion among the few strong enough to ride the waves of chaos are limitless.

Ever wanted to run your own business? Grab a net and a rifle, start rounding up the wayward weak and make a killing selling man-flesh to the rough and tumble waste wanderer.

Wish women found you more attractive? Sweep through the rubble collecting orphaned girls and sour faced mourning women and start a harem.

Ladies not your thing? Plant a catamite garden.

Thought about jumping into politics? Get the biggest gun you can find, start a gang, and rule a suburb with an iron fist. Remember: no one leaves Elm Street without your permission.

Stressed? Panicked? Do you even know what you’re frightened of any more? The solution to all of life’s problems awaits. Immanentize the eschaton today!

The Taliban as Conspiracy Theorists

by ROBERT KELLY

Been reading David Rohde's account of being kidnapped by the Taliban. It's great writing. Dude was lucky to escape with his life. But, man, the humanity of his captors comes through it too, the emotional hell on himself and his associates, his family.

He writes about his guards' sense of humor, how they'd play games and sing songs together. It's sad, as in all wars, there's this push to dehumanize the enemy into this caricature of evil, and the Taliban are essentially an Islamo-fascist movement, but when you get them in a room they're not much different from anyone else. It would be worth the time trying to put yourself into the mind of a Taliban fighter to try and understand what about it is appealing.

This leads me to mention briefly several observations about Rohde's characterization of the Taliban.

He says he underestimated their extremism. My interpretation of this is that among Western intellectuals, it's said that one alternative to persisting in a war is to strike a deal with "moderate" or non-extremist elements within the Taliban, granting them rule over certain sections of the country, joining in the national government in a limited role, etc. in return for some kind of disarmament. Rohde's account suggests that this is really quite mad, and that they have no interest in compromise whatsoever. That is, there really is no distinction between the wider jihadist movement and the Taliban. The Taliban's ultimate goals are more or less indistinguishable, even if practical realities vary (different factions in different areas, with different day-to-day priorities).

The Taliban are also conspiracy theorists. They believe the attacks on New York and Washington were a plot by Jews and the United States to enslave Muslims. They believe all Americans are wealthy and corrupt, that because of their sinful nature they're prone to spread diseases, and that Western women are treated much worse than how the Taliban treats women because the emphasis on revealing dress turns women into sex objects.

Just to riff on the conspiracy theories for a moment, that such views are popular among the Taliban I find to be pretty remarkable, considering it's the Taliban-type of guys who carried out the attacks. I think this is related to a sort of fascist politics, which believers hold to whatever is convenient at the moment. They also, of course, support such attacks. They deny that they're responsible, but support it anyways.

I notice this among American far right groups. When the Texas Governor's Mansion burned in an arson fire, I checked out the web sites for the paranoiac rightist Alex Jones, and saw commenters declaring the attack as a victory for the Patriot Movement, while others were saying this was an elaborate plot to undermine their movement and crack down on civil liberties, establish a police state and usher in the New World Order and so on, as the theory goes. They claim to be fighting a revolution--they would support attacks on those they consider to be plotting to enslave them and kill their children (or should, if they are true believers)--but when an attack actually happens, like the bombing of the federal building in Oklahoma City, it's actually a plot by the same old enemy. After the murder of Stephen Tyrone Johns, a guard at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, by a white supremacist, his hate-comrades believed the thing to be a giant plot by the "Zionist Occupied Government", if you go look at the postings on the Stormfront message boards.

The final thing I'll add is how Rohde describes his captors as essentially simple gangsters. They claim to be pious and noble, but are greedy and duplicitous. Before writing this I had talk with Andrew about The Sopranos, how toward the end of the series Dr. Melfi cuts off contact with Tony because she discovers that her therapy may actually be expanding Tony's criminal potential. As she discovers this we see Tony behaving in horrific ways. We see that the Mafia underworld is a horrific place: they claim to be pious and upholders of a sacred code of honor, enforcers of moral boundaries, but they're really monsters.

On John Brown's Raid on Harper's Ferry

by ANDREW DOBBS

(Consider this a first draft).

One hundred and fifty years ago today the Civil War began with John Brown's raid on Harper's Ferry, Virginia (now West Virginia). Border Ruffians and Abolitionist settlers had been bleeding all over Kansas for five years by then—the theatre where Brown first made his name—but the raid on Harper's Ferry inflamed the press, raised the stakes of American politics and created the sorts of existential distress which makes war unavoidable. The raid is shrouded in mystery still and much of the history told of it has had a mystical bend.

The facts: on October 16, 1859 John Brown and 13 men executed a plan pondered and planned for months, the sacking and looting of the Federal Armory in Harper's Ferry in order to arm slaves liberated from nearby plantations. The raid had problems—though the telegraph wires had been cut, and the armory's single guard easily subdued, an eastbound train was assaulted by the raiders yet ultimately allowed to pass. Carrying news of the raid, locals quickly learned of the threat to their so-called way of life and formed a militia. Taking the high ground, they harassed and pinned down the raiders until Col. Robert E. Lee came with his Marines. When then-Col. Lee's troops entered the Armory, however, none of Brown's men were there to be found. With him were hundreds of rifles, thousands of rounds of ammunition and two dozen recruits from plantations also successfully raided. Their luck had swiftly changed, a secret route through the militia lines had been found and for the next eleven years the country would be at war with itself, peace only possible after the 1870 Constitution was ratified.

Deliverators Goes to the Movies: Zombieland

by MATTHEW GAULT

Zombieland is great. I’m glad we got that out of the way.

Zombies are my favorite movie monster, and their trajectory as objects of terror is fascinating. Starting off as brain dead servitors of voudon priests and evolving into the shambling hordes we’ve come to know and love, the zombie has a long and storied history.

There is a certain evolution that any horror creature undergoes. They change with the times, to be sure, but at a certain point the monsters stop being scary and become something else. You can see this in the classic Universal monster films of the 30’s. The Wolf Man and Frankenstein terrorized the hearts of the movie going public in the way back when. I know it’s hard to imagine, but at a certain point those movies were terrifying. The characters lost traction after knock offs and sequels filled the minds of the public, so the executives spiced things up by creating the versus movie. The Wolf Man fought Frankenstein, and horror action spilled onto the scene. But what do we do with a monster once it’s terrified you and beaten up one of your other worst fears. You make fun of it. That’s why Abbot and Costello met up with Frankenstein in 1948.

You can see this happening now with the popular movie monsters of the 70’s and 80’s. Alien and Predator are fighting a pitched battle as we speak, and even Freddy and Jason have gone toe to toe. These characters are allowed to retain their dignity (somewhat) as the trend to mock our fears (a great way to release them and come up with something else spooky to fill the void) has given way to the moneymaking scheme of rebooting popular franchises. They redid Jason, Freddy is up next, and even the Predator is getting the reboot treatment.

Zombies, however, are not iconic characters in the way a Freddy or a Frankenstein is, but rather a specific breed. There is no zombie Dracula, and so rather than starting over, the zombie changes. Hysterically, the zombie is now in it’s comedy stage of growth. Shaun of the Dead and others started it, but Zombieland brought it home. Zombies aren’t as scary as they once were, even the fast running rip you apart type found in the new action horror movies like 28 Days Later.

So what’s next?

It’s time for the zombie to evolve. To change. To become something different. You can see this occurring. Books like The Rising by Brian Keene show what kind of potential these creatures have, and how important they are to our cultural zeitgeist. New realms of unimagined terror are possible.

Let’s just hope they don’t go the way of vampires. The dead and rotting corpse of our loved ones resurrected and fiending for our blood had it’s dick cut off somewhere in the mid nineties and is now the wet dream of every 12 to 40 year old woman who’s into sensitive bad boys. Can you imagine if that happened to the zombie? Imagine 100 years from now when adolescent girls are pumped up about the brainless marrow chewing boyfriend they can’t bring home to meet the parents. I hear rigor mortis does great things for you in the sack.

"The evil, secretive desires that slumber in the hearts of German people"

by ROBERT KELLY

I think I've done enough writing on this. This is a moment for contemplation and that sweet stuff. I just read what I'm adding below, and it's really brilliant, from the great blog Contested Terrain. If you read it please visit. Or don't read it, and check them out anyways.

The closing paragraph is poetry:

If, nonetheless, militant leftists today do not see a reason for helplessness or even resignation in the idiotic conflict between two ethnic nationalisms, but rather a welcome opportunity for getting involved, blindly and fanatically taking sides and jumping into the “national liberation struggle” with all force of the imagination, then that has nothing to do with radical leftism, but rather with the evil, secretive desires that slumber in the hearts of German people. The Palestinians will not benefit and Israel will not be harmed. Rather, the victims will be foreigners within Germany, when the Germans cease to wage the struggle of national liberation vicariously for others and start to do so on their own behalf, and when the alliance between militants and the mob obtains a realistic political base.

Full text below the jump.

Some Thoughts on Israel and the Left

by ROBERT KELLY

Since Andrew's post came out of a conversation between us, I thought I should add something of my own.

I should say first of all that I've been reading Ta-Nehisi Coates' blog, which is usually very good. I've taken from him this idea that people always want to be in the right, to believe they're pure.

Being called a racist or an anti-Semite can come as a bit of a shock, because we've learned never to associate it with ourselves, but only to those we can clearly define as racists (i.e. the Klan, or the Third Reich, and so on and so on).  If you're a revolutionary communist, say, who is ostensibly at war with capitalism and racism and so on, you can't, in your own mind, possibly be a racist. And then, if you view anyone outside your political system as racist, "everyone who is not a revolutionary communist is a racist," well...

You're saying this zone of self-critique is basically over. The response is never (Coates sort of put it like this) "well, maybe you have a point, my bad." It's "how dare you call me a racist" or "maybe you're the racist." The second part is this weasel justification, "we're not homophobic, we're just defending ourselves against the gay agenda." It's not "we dislike the Jews," when the synagogue gets smashed up, it's about Zionism, it's about the injustice that justifies the dislike.

Breaking with that for a moment, I had an argument with someone on the far left, a self-declared revolutionary communist. I asked why he and his friends would incessantly compare Israel with Nazi Germany and the occupation of Palestine to the Holocaust.

He said the parallels are clear between the two, and that the occupation is eerily close to Germany in 1937.

I said there are major differences between the two. I said that should be clear and obvious.

Okay, my opponent said, but the Jews should know better, that's why I say it.

I told him that I thought his critique wasn't about the Jews. I said: isn't your critique one of Zionism and the state of Israel?

Alright, he said. It is about the Jews, I'll admit that. (I considered this somewhat of a breakthrough.)

I told him his critique is essentially anti-Semitic, "you do this to inflict pain on Jews through the memory of the Holocaust."

Okay, he said. But Israel is so bad, the Palestinian cause is so important, everything is justified, and I really don't care about the Jews any more.

That was most of the conversation. I have to admit being a bit floored. He went from believing that his critique of Israel came from an anti-racist perspective to admitting that his critique was anti-Semitic propaganda, and all the good for it.

I don't know what else there is to be said except that this attitude is probably the result of him having thrown himself in with a "side" in the struggle, not questioning his own motives seriously enough, and assigning the worst possible motives onto his enemy. I notice that ardent Israel supporters (specifically supporters of Israel engaging in military conquest) lapse into similar ways of thinking. 

As a mental note: Nazi comparisons are best made in a stark visual style like photography. As a medium it lacks context. I see a lot of side-by-side comparisons between some miserable Palestinian street and a Jewish ghetto, or an Israeli gunman with the barrel of his gun at some kid's eye level next to the Waffen SS clearing out a building.

Neil Postman, paraphrasing Susan Sontag in Amusing Ourselves to Death said that photography's "epistemological bias" is of the world as the camera records it, while real understanding is based in challenging those assumptions through language. The language I often encounter in these discussions seems very poor and debased.

On Israel and the Left

by ANDREW DOBBS

I spoke to Robert for a while on the phone the other night about Israel and Palestine. He said he'd been perusing pro-Palestinian boards on the web and leftist discussions regarding Israel and was shocked by the comparisons to the Holocaust, to the Nazis and the support for Hamas, Hezbollah and similar groups. Here are some thoughts I had during and after the conversation.

First, Israel puts the lie to all of our country's Rightist politicians and gadflies. The same mouths which suggest that anything even weakly hinting of socialism is a one way ticket to a police state praise Israel as the “beacon of freedom” in the Middle East. Israel, however, is a socialist republic—David ben Gurion was a socialist and the Zionist movement was in large part an international socialist affair. Israel goes so far as to subsidize hippies by keeping the kibbutzim afloat. For self-described socialists of the “long haired freaky people” variety to march under the Hezbollah flag while the Party of God bombs communal farms is the height of hypocrisy. It is second only to so-called Marxists chanting “Allahu Akbar” in protests: they are either blaspheming Marx and his dogmatic materialism, or the One True God by praising him with a dishonest heart. In truth, they probably do both.

This faithlessness extends across the board. Israel is a secular socialist republic, but Left radicals wave the Hamas standard—the colors of a brutally patriarchal, fundamentalist gang—over and against this socialist state. There are Left radicals in Palestine, there are Leftist activists and politicians targeted by Hezbollah in Lebanon, but rather than stand in solidarity with these particular forces, Western Leftists bear the symbols and endorse the powers of the reactionary enemies of these comrades. It is pathetic, a symbol of the Left's irrelevance and impotence today.

Nonetheless, Israel is a criminal state aided and abetted by the criminal United States. But are these the only criminal regimes in the world, or the worst? Why are Israel's crimes in the occupied territories more evil than those of Russia in Chechnya or Saddam's in Iraq (and neighboring countries)? There are standards for such a comparison, but at some level it becomes unseemly and disrespectful to the innocent dead to start drawing too fine of a distinction. Israel comes in for a seemingly disproportionate share of the Leftist handwringing and animosity in a world full of criminal regimes and their victims.

One standard that can be drawn in the ranking of crime, I believe, is that there doesn't seem to be a recorded crime in human history anywhere near the Nazi Holocaust. Israel is absolutely a criminal state, but their crimes are relatively run of the mill. Not to denigrate their victims, but Israel is founding its state in much the same way as any state—with a crime. Colonial or exiled nations are especially prone to these sorts of sins: the United States, South Africa and Australia quickly come to mind. In all these cases exiled or “excess” populations were sent to lands already (relatively thinly) populated lands, took land, got into it with the natives, and killed off, isolated, marginalized and otherwise ethnically cleansed these peoples. Israel is doing this today with the Palestinian Arab populations of the land rejected Jews have settled in.

This crime is a regular occurrence in human history. The Nazi Holocaust, however, was a singular occurrence, a scientifically calibrated and mechanically sophisticated machinery for the total annihilation of certain groups of people. In a calculating and disciplined manner, the tools of rational public administration were turned to the task of identifying and tracking every member of a suspect group in any locale across a massive empire. They were then rounded up and concentrated with great efficiency, classified, drained of all their labor power and finally killed in such a way as to minimize costs and maximize ease of disposal. It was a major feat of engineering, the Holocaust was, and like any great monument it was unique. Comparing the Israeli crimes in the Occupied Territories to the Holocaust is obscene.

In fact, Israel's crimes there are more closely akin to what Holocaust deniers claim about the Third Reich. There isn't necessarily any conscious attempt to kill off the suspect population, though there is uncouth treatment of this group. The result is in fact a crime, and many people die, but it certainly isn't anywhere near the order of sin the Holocaust entailed. Yet Leftist protestors and manners of the message board barricades enjoy nothing so much as comparing the Occupation to the Holocaust or the Warsaw Ghetto or replacing the Star of David with the Nazi swastika on the Israeli flag. This is bald-faced Antisemitism. Why bring up the Holocaust in this instance, why the Nazi comparison? There are much closer historical parallels to the crimes of Israel—the comparison to the apartheid regime in South Africa is valuable, also I believe the aforementioned sins of colonists in the Americas and Australia—and there are criminal regimes much closer to the Nazis which find apology or apathy on the Left—I'm thinking of Slobodan Milosevic here. At best the Holocaust comparisons and Nazi allusions from Leftists regarding Israel are intellectually lazy, more likely they are the expression of Jew hatred.

And these Leftists certainly hate them some Jews. They are fervent attackers of the Jewish State, even to the exclusion of equally criminal regimes not full of Jews. Not only this, but outside of Israel the Jewish community is overwhelmingly pro-Israel. Indeed, there is far more diversity of opinion and dissent regarding the occupation among Israelis than among Diaspora Jews. Robert discovered the sexist ideas of the Internet Maoist Vanguard (namely that Third World proletarians have a right and a duty to rape First World women, hence why Soviet atrocities during World War II were okay) and pointed out that the idea is rather creepy because all of the women any of these pasty fucks ever see are viewed by them as subhuman criminals punishable by rape. In the same way Leftist anti-Israel fanatics are in a situation where the typical Jew they'll meet is a criminal, suborning an evil state and promoting the most wretched political movement in the world today. Their very stridency puts them in this position, and one wonders whether or not this might be where they wanted to end up all along.

This is now getting very close to the standard Zionist rejoinder that all critics of Israel are antisemitic. This is very much like the current liberal fad of claiming all Rightist opposition to Obama is a product of White racism; in both instances it is a way of refusing debate, of answering meaningful (if often untoward) arguments with character attacks. These arguments seem to be nonfalsifiable—there is nothing the Obama opposition crowd can say or do for the liberal Left that would prove that they aren't racist. If they simply deny the claim, they'll be accused of either lying or of “subconscious” racism. If they point to Black friends or enjoying Black arts the liberals will roll their eyes and (correctly) point out that this is what racists always say. There is no difference between a subconsciously racist Obama opposition and an Obama opposition which finds race to be irrelevant.

But as for the left opposition to Israel, I think that the persistent use of Nazi themes to slander the Jewish State in particular should be evidence of a serious stream of antisemitic passions. It would be as if large numbers of Tea Party Protestors were depicting Obama as a gorilla holding a piece of fried chicken—while there is in fact some of that, I think that it is hardly as central to the aesthetic and themes of these protests as the “Israel = Nazis” malarkey is for anti-Israel protests. Furthermore, the waving of Hezbollah and Hamas banners is akin to Tea Party Protestors wearing white hoods or carrying nooses. Perhaps I'm being unfair to demonstrators on the Israel-Palestine issue, or perhaps I'm letting the craziest speak for the entire opposition, but my subjective sense is that opposition to Israel ends up boiling down to support for even her most loathsome enemies and slanders especially raw for Jewish people.

So what is needed then is a new style of opposition to the status quo in Israel and the Palestinian Occupied Territories. I think that Zizek handles this issue well, pointing out that a revolutionary project must ultimately be about busting through the boundaries of the possible and making the impossible a reality. For this reason I believe that the only revolutionary policy would be a single state policy. Well, in honesty I believe that the only solution is a No State Solution, but we're talking turkey here: the only hope for a broad, radical/revolutionary alternative to the brutality of both Israel and its enemies (and I am happy to draw moral equivalence between them all), and the only meaningful vision to oppose the various two-state stumbling blocks is a One State Solution. Imagine a single multiethnic, secular, socialist republic, Israel-Palestine, built on the common ground shared by Jews and Palestinians: the fact that nobody else wants them. This has been done at least once before, in North America, and its result was profoundly revolutionary. Now that the American experiment has run well past its sell-by date, Israel-Palestine would offer a place to launch a new project in human liberty, an opportunity for a realignment of the values of the world.

Now, geography certainly helped North America, and it was not founded by two warring tribes bearing prehistoric grudges. But the kind of historical, spiritual geography of Palestine—the Holy Land—would make such an experiment all the more powerful. Already this tiny patch of land demands a terrific level of attention; transforming the holy wars there into a trans-national resistance to the ruling classes, superstitions and status quo in that area would be epoch-making.

But as long as the revanchist ethic of these existing countries and their international networks of support continue to define the poles of this debate, the more people will die and the longer the crimes of Israel and the gangster forces among her enemies will continue. This is a wild vision, but—of course—if you will it, it is no dream.

Deliverators Movie Extravaganza! Say Goodbye to Summer

by MATTHEW GAULT

We’re halfway through September now and the Summer and it’s movies are well behind us. Around this time Hollywood starts sliding it’s award season contenders, dramas, and half-assed horror movies down the pipe and the Film media begins to poke at the summer they’ve just been through, trying to decide what was the best and what was the worst.

Some of our loyal readers may remember that I predicted that this summer would be shittier than the last. Now that I’m at the end of the whole thing, I’m not sure how true that is. I saw some awful shit this season, but I saw a lot of awful shit last season too. There were ups, there were downs, there were tears, there were explosions. All in all I’d say it’s about the same. Some of you might argue that the titanic blockbuster The Dark Knight would tip the scales in favor of last summer. I’d argue that movies like the The Dark Knight don’t come around very often and you have to take a thing like that out of the equation.

I’m a big enough man to admit when I’m wrong. Let’s move on to short and snarky reviews of the movies I saw that didn’t get a full write up.

GI Joe
As I stared at the screen I thought, “Why the fuck have I done this to myself?”

Drag Me To Hell
I tried for a long time to write a review for this, but couldn’t think of what to say. I loved it. Sam Raimi is a genius of making you laugh, making you vomit, and making you piss yourself in terror all within a five minute stretch.

The Hangover
I laughed till I felt hung-over. God bless Zach Galafankis. I can’t wait to see more of him . . .but not as much as we saw in The Hangover. That was a bit too much. The elevator. During the credits. You guys know what I’m talking about.

Public Enemies
Surreal and forgettable. My grandfather died after I saw this movie and I traveled to Indiana for the funereal, staying in Crowne Point with family. Crowne Point is the town with the prison from which Dillinger escaped using a gun carved from wood/soap (depending on which myth you believe.) It’s still a very tiny town, and all of the shop fronts were full of Depp and Dillinger merchandise. You can tour the jail if you want and see the cell. The whole thing gave me the whiggins.

Inglorious Basterds
Not at all what I expected, but one of my favorite things that Tarantino has ever done. He’s dangerously meta here, crafting a movie about World War Two movies and rewriting history. Watching director Eli Roth gun down movie patrons with savage abandon is worth the price of admission. Having the girl next to you squeal with delight when Brad Pitt plunges his finger into a woman’s flesh wound doesn’t hurt the experience either.

Up
The best movie I saw this season.

So who was the big winner this summer? Who took home the most cash? Michael Bay’s latest abortion: Transformers 2: Revenge of the Fallen. Proving once again that thirteen year old boys will shell out big bucks to watch Megan Fox run through the desert in slow motion. Which is why Jennifer’s Body is box office gold. Because school is much better to run through than a desert, and she totally kisses a girl.