Hurricane Katrina is Yo Mama!

If that's the only way to get Americans to rouse from their stupefaction, look at her and own her, then I will say it--I will shout it far and wide from the flooded American rooftops and from the shores of the sea of oil floating on the surface of the Gulf of Mexico that CNN is not showing us on TV. I'll shout it out: Hurricane Katrina is yo Mama.

Do you see the family resemblance? Hurricane Katrina was not some strange alien event on some other planet, like planet Iraq, for instance; no, she rampaged in your country, on your shores, and those were our fellow U.S. citizens promised protection from the benevolence of a billion dollar payed-for-by-our-damn-tax-dollar government apparatus called FEMA and HOMELAND SECURITY; citizens just like you and I, who were humiliated, abandoned and killed dead by Katrina, Yo Mama.

Of course, she had a lot of help from an idiot president who kept on playing golf as the reports came in of Black men, Black women, and Black babies dying of shock, thirst, and hunger, as the reports came in of old Cajun men drowning to death in their stifling attics, of old white women in wheelchairs dying from lack of heart medication and poor, working class children contracting dysentery and tetanus from sitting and lying for a week in foul sewage water, and of old people who developed gangrene from cuts and wounds that filled with pus, and became contaminated by the feces that caked on their bodies--the president took another swing with his nine iron, looking for that elusive bogie, and he paused only long enough to chuck his criminal FEMA director Michael Brown under the chin and praise him, like a fellow frat boy done good, "Brownie, yer doin' a heck of a job!

Yo Mama, Katrina, is the statue with her torch of freedom looming over Ellis Island; she's Mother Justice, blindfolded, holding her sword of justice and the scales of judgement, whose statue stands in glorious sunlight at the top of the stone stairs of the courthouse where you go seeking after justice and receive the tip of her sword instead, and she sticks it where the sun don't shine; she's the American Goddess, Columbia, whose image is stamped on movie studio frontispieces, on U.S. coins, and on savings bonds.

Yet she does not save. Katrina's victims were the colored, the aged, the children, and the poor--everybody America despises and abuses day in and day out and she did not save them, she killed them. As Lou Reed says in his song, "New York," in a laconic, ex junkie voice, "Give me your tired, your hungry, your poor, I'll piss on 'em. That's what the statue of bigotry says.”

Just as our corporate media is loath to tell us anything that's actually happening around us other than who wants to be a millionaire, and who the latest American idol is as we stumble with the stars and dance on our own graves, so also our schools and our universities don't teach us how to read and write anymore or teach us how to do research that would alert us to the fact that the same corporations that are now moving in to take over the land in New Orleans that was evacuated by Katrina victims, and those same schools and those same universities that are not teaching us anything other than how to 'dress for suck-sess, which means a dead end service industry job with no benefits and no future, these very same corporations and schools are locked in a marriage of convenience, bound for privatization and for profit's sake and government control for power's sake.

Katrina was an excuse to take off the gloves, and let nature takes its course--genocide by water and wind, and it'll happen again, and again, and again.

There is an earthquake/hurricane/flood/fire coming to your town, and you too, will find yourself standing on your roof waving a bedsheet at passing news-copters that don't lower you a rope, don't call for the national guared for you and don't give a shit about you as they film your terror, your thirst, your hunger and your death and your family's death for broadcast--details at 11. "You don't want to miss this one" the anorexic actor and ex model idiot news reader babbles as you die for the sake of Pepsi commercials.

You drink Pepsi, don't you?

We wouldn't know reality by now if it rained down on us and flooded us out of our houses. We wouldn't get the picture is we saw it on CNN:

No, we wouldn't, because that's somewhere else. Somebody else. That's not my Mama dead and bloated and floating in the flooded streets, that's...somebody else's Mama, isn't it?

Not your mother. No, because Yo mama is Hurricane Katrina itself, and Yo Mama did this, but it was yo daddy--the 21st century corporate government (also known as corpomerica, alias Papa fascism--check the encyclopedia definition) who turned what Yo Mama did into an industry long before 911, Katrina, or the earthquake that killed thousands of Haitians ever even happened.

As a reporter at Rense.com says:
The mainstream media was quick to focus the public's attention on the "LOOTERS." Perception control at it's worst. According to various eyewitness accounts, most looting was done for survival purposes. (9-1-5) --"This is a dispatch from New Orleans from Dr. Greg Henderson, a pathologist who recently moved from Wilmington...."

"The city now has no clean water, no sewerage system, no electricity, and no real communications. Bodies are still being recovered floating in the floods. We are worried about a cholera epidemic. Even the police are without effective communications. We have a group of armed police here with us at the hotel that is admirably trying to exert some local law enforcement. This is tough because looting is now rampant. Most of it is not malicious looting. These are poor and desperate people with no housing and no medical care and no food or water trying to take care of themselves and their families."
-http://www.rense.com/general67/email.htm

He goes on to argue that disaster management, managed chaos, and controlled mass death are exactly what our corporate masters have in store for us for the foreseeable future. Why? to insanely wipe out the human race? Naaaah, you can think better than that even half asleep as you are. Our master doesn't want to depopulate the Earth, oh, no, but rather simply wants to TRAIN us with suffering, fear, lack, hunger, thirst, poverty, tragedy, and disaster. Sure, millions will go on dying, especially in Africa, but the YOUTUBE conspiracy straws, seeds, and nuts who argue that genocide is the goal are thinking far too small. It would be too easy if that were the answer. We could all just cross ourselves, bend over and kiss our asses goodbye--no more struggle to go through, here we come for our reward and our wings, there'll be pie in the sky as we die.

But no. Our master has something more sinister in mind: obedience training.

Is that really so hard to believe? These are the same corporate masters who transported us by the millions across the oceans in wooden ships shackled to the bottom of the holds puking, bleeding, dying, screaming and moaning in our own filth (hey...sounds like the New Orleans masses trapped inside the Superdome during the storm, doesn't it? Gee, what a coincidence), and then sold us on the block into three centuries of brutality, illiteracy, and chattel slavery--

--To kill us? No. to use us to build the infrastructure and the economy of two continents. These are the exact same people who built death camps for profit and transported millions of Jews by steel rails to those camps to be methodically put to death and have their skins stripped from their corpses before burning and the skins made into lampshades. Did they hate Jews? Probably not, not those in charge of the entire thing, anyway, because as Himmler was reported to have said, to 'actually hate' these Jews would be foolish, would be self indulgent; the message of 'hate' was for mass consumption, not to be believed by the masters of German society, only by the brainwashed, propaganda shocked, gutless, obedient German masses. Nazi Ubbermensch, Reinhard Heydrich, eating pastries and drinking schnapps at the Wansee Conference in Berlin in 1942, where the "Final Solution" was hammered out (with Loki's hammer, no doubt) opined that the 'Jewish question' was one of logistics and technological efficiency, not of emotion.

In other words, after the scapegoat was wiped out, the Nazi's would surely have not shut down all that nice, modern, efficient mass death machinery--they would have fed new victims into the ovens: anybody who resisted them, in other words; in other

words, New Yorkers and Parisians, and Canadian Canucks. Our Master has been thinking rationally for a long time about controlling us since at least The Crusades, dontcha know. And what is the mass extermination of the citizens of Falujah but just the latest battle in the never ending Crusades? It ain't personal-it's management keeping things running like they should be for the good of all. These are the same corporations that castrated, impaled, and disemboweled millions of Africans in the Belgian Congo for the sake of rubber and oil profits. They built Guantanamo and tortured Arab citizens there not because they crave human agony (well, they do, but that's not why they did it). 'They' did it because 'They' mean to set an example for Muslims and Arabs everywhere. You know who THEY are, don't you? Remember? Exxon, BP, Dupont, Ford, and ITT and United Rubber, and The United Fruit company, the companies that once ruled Cuba and ran Batista, who killed Che Guevara and killed Patrice Lumumba, and Emilliano Zapata and brutally murdered Pancho Villa and assassinated Bobby Kennedy, and shot Martin King in the neck.

The same people who murdered Moctezuma, and stretched Toussaint L'Overture out to die. "A Company called TRW". A company, the same company, that created and maintained four hundred years of lucrative colonialism and genocide and the diamond industry and the oil baronies (remember, before the Gulf of Mexico was fouled by their oil and their chemicals and their 'dispersants' they did the same thing to Nigeria--half of Southern Nigeria is under oil because of the exact same sorts of 'accidents', remember.

Oh, that's right. You don't remember, do you? Well, they're the descendants of The British East India Corporation and the other Triangle Slave Trade jam master MC's of the 16th century, big pimpin', BIG pimpin and bangin' and slangin' Cocain in Afghanistan again with the help of Barak Obama (he sure looks handsome in a suit, don't he, Barak, I mean, huh? Makes you feel sort of proud to see him, President and all, represent-in us). You don't recall?

No, you don't, do you? See, but it really doesn't matter if you recall all this. Yo Mama and Yo Daddy both recall what you did when you rose up just 10 to 20 years ago on a global scale with mass marches, riots, demonstrations and a flood of socialist governments you elected all across Latin America. Those mass organizations you founded using semi-autonomous cells and technology like cell phones to avoid the old school mistake of offering up 'leaders' to be killed, that was some brilliant shite you came up with, there. Yes, you. You created a brand new political structure as a means to coordinate political action that carried out huge demonstrations whose numbers dwarfed the size of the anti war movement and civil rights movement (those old style movements whose leaders were all murdered, intimidated, or bought off, that the history books still yammer on and on about). You made King's march on Washington look like kindergarteners on a picnic, and you did all this with global organization and global implication.

It was called the "Anti-Globalist Movement" and it was historic, and you were the one who did it. But you really don't remember, do you? Hmmmm. Maybe it's something in the water. Maybe its something that is no longer in the educational system--like education, you know what I mean? Here's what you used to look like:

That's right: you planned, organized, and fought "The Battle of Seattle," and "The Battle of Pittsburgh," and "The Battle of Los Angeles," and "The Battle of New York," and a hundred other battles and mass rebellions against our master that rocked Capitalism back on its heels. You really frightened them, my sleepy-headed friend, I wanna tell you. I was there. I saw it. One fine day in 1991 You shut down Wall Street and Madison Avenue and the great White way and all the rest of the City of Manhattan for a whole day, with a human wave of a million people. I saw it. It was a thing to behold.

But they punished us for it. 911 was our punishment. It was the excuse to take away our Constitution, to further cadaverate the educational system and bear down on freedom of speech and redouble the new segregation and the constant atmosphere of gloom and intimidation and fear made us stupid. It made you forget who you are. Susan Sontag was among the first to raise an objection and they came down hard on her for it, remember? It was in The New Yorker Magazine that she shouted the truth, just a week after the attacks:

Our leaders are bent on convincing us that everything is O.K. America is not afraid. Our spirit is unbroken, although this was a day that will live in infamy and America is now at war. But everything is not O.K. And this was not Pearl Harbor. We have a robotic President who assures us that America still stands tall. A wide spectrum of public figures, in and out of office, who are strongly opposed to the policies being pursued abroad by this Administration apparently feel free to say nothing more than that they stand united behind President Bush. A lot of thinking needs to be done, and perhaps is being done in Washington and elsewhere, about the ineptitude of American intelligence and counter-intelligence, about options available to American foreign policy, particularly in the Middle East, and about what constitutes a smart program of military defense. But the public is not being asked to bear much of the burden of reality...Let's by all means grieve together. But let's not be stupid together. A few shreds of historical awareness might help us understand what has just happened, and what may continue to happen.
-http://www.wingo.com/opinion/sontag.html

Still fuzzy to you, all this? Well, how about the aforementioned Rense reporter's sharing of a quote from Liberty Forum.org:

"The media is concentrating on the looting racial angle and ignoring the fact that Bush and Co. cut 70 million dollars of funds intended to improve New Orleans flood control. Once again the anger of uninformed Americans gets directed AWAY from where it rightfully should be. And where did these funds go? That's right . . . straight to Bush's Iraq war chest and all that entails (no-bid contracts to his cronies). So on one side of the world American dollars are angering people and endangering American lives while here at home the lack of funding is leading to the death and destruction of a great city!" -- by Webtripperdude
-http://www.libertyforum.org/showflat.php?
Cat=&Board=news_news&Number=293930220

Does that ring any bells? Do you see then the significance of the deaths in New Orleans five years ago, and do you see yet that Katrina is Yo Mama? Memory starting to return yet? Okay, try this:

Still not sure you understand what's going on here in America where the poor, the powerless, the aged, the weak, and the colored people are concerned? Can't manage to remember how this all got started and what the connection is to the 16th century and the Triangle Slave Trade?

Ask your mother.

THE NOTHING THAT REFLECTS: Post-Postmodernism and "Crank 2"

I. A Tale of Two Theories: Stepchild v Black Hole
Those of us who swam through the prestige-flush and broadly funded high tide of graduate school studies in this country (the 1990's, a golden age for English, Comp Lit, American Studies, and Linguistics PhD programs) strove to acquire a facility with Critical Theory; what often is described simply as "Theory".

A more culturally specific term, i.e., a subset of critical theory, is what generally gets referred to as "Postmodern Theory."

Oh, we lucky few, we English majors, we band of post structuralists, we who grew comfortable with wine, cheese, and small talk about Derrida, Terry Eagleton, Husserl, Gayatri Spivak, Paul de Man, Jonathan Culler, Homi Baba, and Hortense Spillers at academic soirees, and, even more rarefied are we who sat Jonathan Culler's "Literature and Theory" course and Spillers' and Satya Mohanty's theory courses at Cornell. We, you see, are a vanguard, an elder tribe that was present at the dispensation. Postmodernism, the antique age (the age of the Armory Show!), the twilight of classicism, the death sigh of Kant, Hegel, Freud, and Marx, what comes after the Frankfort School; Postmodernism was our meat and mettle, and many of us in fact, now that we have taken our Cornell degrees and have scattered across the world, actually teach literary theory ourselves.

Postmodernism. That rangy, jittery, multidisciplinary, multinational and multi- linguistic Jean-Luc Godard of a stepchild of high modernism that speaks in the shards and the bits and pieces of modernism, that is, what was left of modernism after modernism failed (see Frederick Jameson, see Venturi, see Pastiche, see Baudrillard). Postmodernism is the ultimate urbaniche; it is metropolitan in the way your local, hip urban weekly newspaper is, which pimps sex ads and flaunts its own misogyny; nevertheless it presumes to speak in all our tongues.

Post-Postmodernism however, babbles in tongues far out beyond such coherent things as racism, sexism, homophobia, or Republicanism, for it is a dyslexic, an aphasic, a victim of memory loss even as it clearly and O so coherently conjures and disrespects the memory of utterly everything, even it self (this element of self contempt in Post-Postmodernism is a decisive departure from Postmodernism, which, whatever else it may be or do, certainly does hold itself in high regard). There is an almost tragic discontinuity between stepchild Postmodernism and crazy niece in the attic, Post-Postmodernism. Modernism and Postmodernism accidentally share core values, when all is said and done, you see; but Post-Postmodernism seeks to share nothing with no one, will not come to family get-togethers, and reifies nothing so much as it horrifies everything. If Postmodernism, through pastiche, celebrates the tragic dimension of Modernity's fall, then Post-Postmodernism through mockery celebrates the frightening idea that there is indeed no longer anything to celebrate, not even the fall.

Nothing matters anymore, from spectacle to boredom, to consumption, to loss, to horror, to joy, to disgust, to aliens destroying us in 2012 or the rogue planet Nibiru careening into the inner solar system to crash into Venus and tilt the Earth on its axis, to John Titor arriving from the year 2036 to warn us that there will be no more fossil fuels or KFC in the dismal future. All or any of these, might just as well be celebrated, or be forgotten, take your pick, since there is nothing inherently worth passing time doing--there is only the meaningless, blank passage of time. If Postmodernism is a monumental waste of time, as Woody Allen fumes, then Post-Postmodernism announces the end of time and the end of waste.

And Nihilism just doesn't suffice to describe this, now does it? This is something after, this is post nihilist. It is an after the gallows humor that no longer even seeks to be funny or absurd. It does not believe, but neither does it refuse to believe; it doesn't care one way or the other. It is stark, ugly, racist, sexist, homophobic, misanthropic, and cruel, simply because we are, and we find in Post-Postmodernism whatever we are, or were; all of it a depthless, reflective surface that is merely mirroring all these things back into the face of their source: ourselves. Yes, Post-Postmodernism goes the final distance that red giant Postmodernism only pantomimes: Post-Postmodernism is itself nothing more than reflexivity; not so much a surface as the nothing that reflects. It is the black hole that comes once the red giant and the white dwarf have completely collapsed. It sings, dances, acts out narratives on film (the car ride in "On The Waterfront" in which Marlon Brando decries Rod Stieger's betrayal or Gene Wilder's rant in "Willie Wonka and the Chocolate Factory that his guests have 'stole fizzy lifting drinks...so you get NOTHING; you LOSE! Good DAY Sir!" or Orson Welles standing up full  medium shot behind his desk at the Philadelphia Inquirer, assuring Mr. Thatcher that "They [the people] haven't anybody to look after their interests!" --any of it or none of it, it doesn't matter to Post Postmodernism, it utters them all, or it doesn't. It is ready for it's closeup, it takes the planks on stage to deliver Marc Antony's sililoquy that 'it comes to bury Caesar not to praise him, and it sings out Sweet Sweetback's Baaaad Asssssss Ssssssong. But these performativities are an absence, not a presence; full of sound and fury, they are nothing more that an event horizon signifying nothing.

Postmodernism cannot account for this. It, is a hip, leather jacketed ideosnycrato celebrating the procession of shattered surfaces left over from Papa Modernism's reign in ways that yes, subtly re-valorize the modernist project through sheer repetition in endless microcosm, and if it is a critique of Modernity, as those of us who defend "Gravity's Rainbow" believe, nevertheless it wins the frank title of modernism reborn (for Thomas Pynchon's novel is actually a dirge, a mourning for a death, a 'deathkit' to borrow from Susan Sontag -- and that death is us, it is the post war failure lurking in Nixon's five o'clock shadow). It reified modernism with its sense of humor even as it turns that humor on modernism's failure.

Post-Postmodernism is not laughing for us, it is not even laughing at us. Laughter has mass, and therefore falls into the vortex. Postmodernism is a critic. Post-Postmodernism is a crank.


II. Crank v Critique
A Crank is not a critic. A critic levels analytic disapproval in the hopes of pointing the way to a better conception by pointing out the ways in which a thing, a place, a time, a milieu, an ideology, a habit, or a dispensation has failed to reach its own potential. A critic, in short, is a bearer of hope; of negative capability; of knowledge through negation and therefore of value, standards, ethics, taste, judgment, of disapproval at least. A critic believes.

A crank is simply making noise. The crank gives voice to aches, to pains, to twinges; the crank clears a sore throat, not necessarily as a prelude to saying something, but well, in order to clear a throat. A crank belches up what cannot be digested, or simply rails at the unruly children who've just struck a baseball through the crank's window. The object is not to perfect, since there is nothing left in the crank's world that the crank can reasonably look to as being the standard which the thing being cranked about could ever possibly have achieved. No, the crank is a car engine, whining, grinding, forever about to start, which never will.

Not that Post-Postmodernism is without its own virtues. As I was once upon a time startled by the then new idea that funky Postmodernism could provide a 'pleasure of the text' (how, I wondered, can something as apocalyptic as post modernity provide pleasure?), I am again surprised to notice that it is possible for Post-Postmodernism (at least in the realm of cinema) to provide a a type of pleasure. If Postmodernity was Godard, then Post-Postmodernism is undoubtedly Robert Rodriguez.

For exempli gratia, the relatively recent American mid budget semi independent film, "CRANK" might be what one would call postmodern: "Crank" 's boorish, patriarchal-pubescent sexualization of violence was offensive, and there was a sense in which it seemed to know how offensive it was and was seeking to capitalize on its own pretense at satirizing contemporary culture. It is 'knowing' in the way postmodernism is. It is knowing and wants you to know it knows; and shell out for a ticket (and ultimately for a DVD at Walmart) in the process. "Crank" made light of our post public school culture of ugly, stupid video games. I saw "Crank" and had no desire to see it again, let alone to put it into my Netflix cue.

I put the more recent sequel to "Crank", "Crank 2: High Voltage", into my Netflix cue purely because of my favorite critics' (Gareth Higgins and Jet Lowe, hosts of the podcast, "The Film Talk") having stooped to review it. Half way through it I was enjoying myself so much that I had to pause to go back to read a few reviews of it, to read interviews done by the directors, Neveldine and Taylor. I went back to my bookshelf to reconsider a couple of Frederic Jameson's essays and to reconsider that Holy Grail of Post-Postmodernist film, "28 Days Later," (fast zombies!). I skimmed a little Laura Mulvey, and, (God help me) reviewed some Werner Fassbinder.

Yes, I said Fassbinder. As disgusting as Fassbinder is, there is something about his films that make you keep watching them, and though at the time he was making them the term "Post-Postmodernism" did not yet exist, it is clear now that what held our attention was the prescient black hole of Post-Postmodernism at the center of his work. The original "Crank" did not achieve the ugliness of "Crank 2" nor surpass its own false detachment in the way its sequel does and thus I was bored by the adolescence, the porn violence, the high key lighting, and the self conscious cartoon-reality (like Wile E. Cyote, Chev Chelios is burned, beaten, electrocuted, beaten, and falls from great heights, yet comes up punching over and over again with cartoon regularity).

I was immediately taken with the second "Crank" however, clearly a parody of video game visual and narrative conventions and cliches (moreover this second seems to know the difference between the two), and clearly also a parody OF the parody of the first "Crank". Thus it explodes the very notion of false detachment that plagues so much Postmodern art and culture (Karl Lagerfeld, "American Idol," the intellectual effluvia of "Illuminati" conspiracy theories, Slam Poetry, Prof Michio Kaku, the Lizard King of Comedy Hypocrisy himself, Jerry Seinfeld, the morbid plague of conservative Christianity, and anything said or done by Oprah Winfrey--all is false detachment which still rabidly pursues all it pretends to have detached itself from. "Crank" is knowing in a way that seems not to know how full of crap it is.

Seinfeld's famous dictum is his proclamation that his comedy 'isn't about anything really' as a sneer directed at the hypocrisy of American consumer culture; yet, nothing could be more self absorbed than Seinfeld's pretense that he is skewering self absorption. My favorite Detroit Finney High school English teacher Ernie Stengel used to laugh uproariously in class about the hypocrisy of the Song, "You're So Vain" in which the singer declaims, "You're so Vain, you probably think this song is about you/You're so vain, I betchu think this song is about you/don't you?". What could be more vain, Stengel would laugh, than Carly Simon berating Warren Beatty that he is vain?

The TV show "Seinfeld" virtually celebrated if it didn't get eaten alive by, its own self-reflexivity: it was definitely about something, alright--it was about trying very, very hard to appear to not be about anything. The harder it tried, the more it collapsed into just another version of "I Love Lucy," but without the saving grace of William Frawley, who played Fred Mertz, the barely tamed bulldog husband of Ethel Mertz-- Fred, an Irish working class counterpoint to the petit degenerate bourgeois pretensions of Cuban Ricky and Scottish Lucy.

"Crank 2" is Dave Chappelle to its predecessor's Jerry Seinfeld. It is knowing about the futility of trying to dissociate one's self from one's self, and thus genuinely not knowing about the forms of libidinal excess that the first one presented 'knowingly' in an unfunny, obnoxiously literal way, as if it intended to treat its audience like every viewer was a 16 year old multiplex geek with a cheesy skunk-hair mustache.

"Crank 2 High Voltage" in other words is fresh and vibrant, visually speaking--one cannot help liking at least that aspect of it if one loves cinema. And besides, where the first film was labored, the second is effortlessly satirical, as Dave Chappelle himself can be with his shamelessly vicious parodies of pop stars such as Prince, R. Kelly, and Lil Jon, or his very Post-Postmodern, "Being Taken to the Ghetto".

The opening long shot of Chelios falling out of the sky (ad continuum from the previous film's climax) and landing atop a car, bouncing, then landing again face down (or rather, cheek down) on the pavement in the extreme foreground is hilariously cartoon-like, not in the insultingly deliberate cartoonish tone of the first "Crank" but in the way of Post-Postmodernism: the opening has contempt for itself, for you, for Chelios, and most of all for an industry that would profit from cartoon versions of death. The level of absurdity is pushed beyond all reason so that the absurd fallings from great heights only to survive unscathed, which littered the first "Crank" becomes not only absurd but becomes grotesquely Grand Guignol, as in Chappelle's story of being taken to the ghetto where he does not just see the 'heart-wrenching' cliche of youths selling drugs on the corner but claims to have seen a BABY selling CRACK at 3 in the morning. For Grand Guiginol (a form of French psychodramatic/melodramatic theater that puts to use elaborate, outrageous excesses in the form of violence, the macabre, horror, and almost sickeningly grotesque attacks on the sensibility of the audience) is a form that forces one to face one's recognition of the Post-Postmodern ugliness of Things As They Are Now, with neither humor nor satire to soften the cruelty. As with Cahppelle's humor--which has as often earned him resentment and hostility, even from African Americans, as it has accolades--the raison d'etre of "Crank 2" seems as much to be its desire to disgust as it is a desire to amuse.

After the opening shot of Chelios' horrific fall, the next shot of henchmen literally scraping him off the street with a SNOW SHOVEL is priceless. While a more sober note could be struck regarding this film if one acknowledges the much more seriously cinematic innovations it achieves compared to its predecessor ("Crank 2"'s tight framing and the dynamism of a hand held $3,000 Canon XH A1 retail camera (!) makes it not just a Guignol, but a thinking bit of cinema both dynamic in its verite primitivism, and impressive in its technical virtuosity), the sudden irruptions of Guignol, Situationist parody, Surrealism, and outright Dadaism mark it as a decidedly anti-cinema work. It achieves a strong mash-up dynamism reminiscient of Ed Wood, Russ Meyer, John Waters, early Spike Lee, and early Quentin Tarentino due to the quick, jerky, hand-held reality of having no million dollar behemoths (studio quality, industry size cameras) to wheel and track and jack around, and is impressive in that directors Neveldine and Taylor have such a stripped down technical setup to work with that something very like real directors' chops actually show in their ratchet cuts, zip pans, gut jumps, porno edits and video game edits, Japanese mise-en-scene, classical tracking (?) and literal running shots.

Yet, Post-Postmodernism is not any of those old styles ('Surrealism,' 'DaDa,' or any of that) from the European ancien regime, but is simply indeed, "mash-up" and nothing any more pre-supposing than that. If late Tarentino often slips into a mawkishly backward-gazing Postmodernism ("Kill Bill") then Tarentino's good friend and fellow 'grindhouse' autuer, Robert Rodriquez is far less mawkish about race, identity, gender, vampires, and essence, as would be any colored man with good sense who must deal with the vagaries of artistic expression within the cut throat Hollywood system.

At any rate, Rodriguez seems more certainly a direct influence on Neveldine's and Taylor's style than Tarentino is. Witness the vaguely offensive bathos of Tarentino's "Jackie Brown," workerly talents of veteran actors Pam Grier and Samuel Jackson notwithstanding. Rodriguez's is a far more laconic, more polymorphously perverse style (he presents violence in a filmic world that suggests a cold medium where Tarentino's implied medium is more pubescent, breathless, and hot). Rodriguez's cinematic sensibility is closer to that of Nev and Tay than to that of the more adolescent Tarentino because Rodriguez, Nev, and Tay all choose neither the blue pill nor the red pill, but instead stick Morpheus up for huis fly ass leather jacket and are satisfied. None of that 'temet gnosce' footsie with The Oracle or scurrying about dodging bullets is necessary in the case of Post-Postmodernism.

One need only consider that Rodriguez's embodiment of female sexuality and eroticism is the fulsome, fecund Salma Hayek, while Tarentino's embodiment of female sexuality and eroticism is the homoerotic, flatly androgynous and vaguely Aryan Uma Thurman. Not that Nev and Tay's choice of bland blonde, Amy Smart is any more colorful than Thurman, but one simply notes the obvious similarities between Neveldine/Taylor and Rodriguez, where ouvre are concerned.

But again, the lack of the typical million dollar accouterments of Hollywood corporate cinema means that this B movie was going to either be the worst thing since somebody's film school MFA thesis or else be exactly what it is: a master's study session in how to create momentum, suspense, comedy, satire, visual energetics, a dynamic gestalt of image and sound, and the pacing of a street thriller using the most basic visual storytelling tools of action movie making.

It gives us something to think about. Namely, is this how dynamic and engaging the coming Post-Postmodern 'new' cinema will be once the monopoly of Hollywood excess ends (comes a digital paradise), and there is a Red Camera chicken in every pot, not just six mega huge studio chickens? Does the hand-held anomie Neveldine and Taylor conjure here raise the promise that we'll see once again the vibrancy of RKO, of the WPA artists, of Lon Chaney, and Charles Chaplin, of Preston Sturges and the early Hughes Brothers ("Dead Presidents")? Charles Burnett ("Killer of Sheep")? Or of the latter-year Orson Welles? Poor Orson, ultimate 'outsider' cine-global artist, Orson, cursed and blackballed by William Randolph Hearst, stone broke ragamuffin Orson, shooting budgets here one day gone the next, gadding about, God knows where in Spain, trying to create a sound montage by mouthing his dialogue into empty paint cans?

In the coming age of a new agitprop of pure democracy will all the Twitterers, Facebookies and MySpaceouts rise out of the rubble of a collapsing old corporate film oligarchy once everybody is able to run through the streets with relatively cheap high-end Canons?

No.

Because Neveldine and Taylor show with "Crank High Voltage" that the chicken still needs a skilled chef to make it edible. Chops are required.

All to the better.

III. Into the Hole
And then there is Neveldine's and Taylor's almost insanely proliferating accumulation of film references on top of references. No, not references really, but subsumations--cannibalizations.

"He die hard wid uh vengeance!' one Asian 'nurse' exclaims to another during one of Chev Chelios' several surgery/vivisection/autopsy scenes. The references range from macro pastiches like the early rooftop shootout as video game set piece, to the smallest, oddest fetishes of B movie excess, e.g., the 50's/60's horror film sub genre of disembodied heads. Chev is dragged by El Huron before Huron's brother who is now a living human head suspended in a vat of nutri-mucous electro-bio liquid stuff. Have Nev and Tay gone too far past satire and even parody with this? Au Contraire, mon frere. They have merely resurrected the sub genre motif of those heady hollywood rags, "The Man Without a Body," "The Frozen Head," and my favorite, "They Saved Hitler's Brain!"

Nev and Tay provide Guignol-hilarious allusions to the widely varying film grammars of Sergio Leone, Tarantino, Antoine Fuqua, Spike Lee, Robert Rodriguez' "Mariachi" cycle, and Run Run Shaw's Gung Fu vengeance motifs. Bravo to the directors' playful and implicitly 'critical' (but not) takes on a long string of horribly racist LA movies such as "To Live and Die in LA," and "Colors." Not to mention their attack on heavy handed 'Oye Ese, Mi Vato' television fantasies - cop shows like "The Shield".

Bai Ling's shameless, tripped out crack whore and Efren Ramirez's over the edge and into the trees gay Mexican 'full body Tourette's Syndrome' suffering Venus (brother to Kaylo) are open to our seeing them as sublime parodies of the predicament of every gifted actor and actress of Asian and Mexican descent who is forced by Hollywood to demean themselves in roles that are little more than ridiculous ethnic slurs. Likewise, Amy Smart's running series of public copulation scenes with Jason Stratham is a 'parodic' nod to all the gifted women in Hollywood films who are forced to do sex scenes with the male lead and show some T&A (ala Halle Berry) as the price of the Hollywood ticket. I don't know about you but I'm STILL heebie-jeebied by my memory, all these years later, of Catherine Zeta Jones slinking all up on old coot Sean Connery in 1999's "Entrapment," which even ten years earlier, in its nicer version, 1990's "Russia House" was just as nasty, putting not quite as old but just as bald Sean Connery in bed with Michelle Pfeiffer. Ick!

Is it just me, or did the incredible actresses of my youth (Diane Keaton, Faye Dunaway, Ruby Dee, Mia Farrow, Rosalind Cash, Sally Field, Sissy Spacek, etc.) seem a bit less badly used by Hollywood Postmodernism of the 80's? Sure, there are a few dignified actresses in the Baby Boom Postmodernism of current day Hollywood, such as Meryl Streep, grand dame of 'art babes' who never has to take her clothes off (okay, the necrophilia and booty popping of "Death Becomes Her" blows my theory to hell here, but, you know what I mean), and we've had Susan Sarandon and Little Susan Sarandon (Julianne Moore) as serious movie fare in recent years. Still, none of my students (I teach at the college level) has ever heard of the ground breaking feminist film, "Thelma and Louise" which doesn't seem to play the college circuit, and though Callie Khouri won the 1992 best screenplay Oscar for "Thelma and Louise" it was another 17 years before the very first academy award to a woman director was bestowed upon "The Hurt Locker." In short, Yvette Mimieux might have gone for it ala the creepy fusion of grumpy grampy John McCain and babe Sarah Palin, but I think Jean Seberg would certainly have turned down a tongue kissing scene with Extraordinarily Old Gentleman Sean. Pam Grier would have smacked him around a little for even asking.

Yes, I hate that I like this monstrosity, but this "Crank" sequel is Guignol with a vengeance, and with the smallest curlicues of detail, such as the old woman molested by Chev at the race track telling the inevitably vaguely Chicano stand-up reporter that her attacker had been sexy, 'like that guy from 'Train Spotting' (!!) Or did she say 'Transporter' (??) I started to get rewind fatigue after a while (or is that 'reverse' fatigue now that it's digital?), as I played and replayed scenes to catch the smaller details.

I became obsessed with trying to figure out if Clifton Collins Jr,'s megalomaniacal Mexican underworld boss was really Jim Carey or just an ironic sketch tribute to him (??) I mused over another recent moment, while watching the Star Trek reboot, when I'd gotten the strange feeling, watching the character Ayel, Nero's first officer, that I was watching Jim Carey in a lot of disfiguring makeup. A quick check of the cast of "High Voltage" told me that the same actor who'd played Ayel was now beneath the El Huron makeup. Oh, snap!

When I suddenly realized nearly at the last scene he was in that the Triad Boss "Poon Dong" was David Carradine made up to look like Keye Luke (Brilliant, I tells yuh! Brilliant!) I didn't know whether to keep laughing or seek out my dusty old VCR transfers of "Kung Fu" episodes to run on the TeeVee beside "High Voltage" on my computer so I could do a close comparison. So I thought about it a moment and realized it wasn't Keye Luke as Master Po in "Kung Fu" I was looking at Carradine doing--it was Carradine as Keye Luke as Luke's character, "Mr. Wing" in 1984's "Gremlins". Now I had the urge to look up a Betamax copy of "Gremlins."

I didn't. I mean, for dignity's sake, right? Somehow I suspect I would have seen startling similarities in the makeup jobs done on Carradine and Luke and that Neveldine and Taylor meant to do this to us--make us want to look. Besides. Think about it. 'Neveldine' --- 'Carradine'. You want to tell me that's just a coincidence?? I almost wanted to run to YouTube to seek out videos on the subtleties of illuminati conspiracy theory.

"Crank High Voltage" in its second half pulls out all the stops and tosses off every possible LA youth gang crack whore Mexican underworld crime boss and Chinese Tong/Triad fantasy ever conceived by Hollywood--with a little organ theft paranoia (ala William Gibson and the genre of Bio punk) thrown into the mix. In fact, by the time I started to feel paranoid about just exactly HOW many homages and film references were piling up in every scene, even to the point where I was searching the background mise-en-scene and straining to hear non diegetic sounds and off camera center details in the sound montage and mise-en-scene for clues, I became certain that "Crank High Voltage" is a lot more than simply a parody.

The two films taken together are above all the comedic take of Nev and Tay on the paranoia and absurdity of 21st century information sickness, bio punk organ theft phobia, the body as cyborg disposable, and the Mary Shelly nightmare gone viral. The first film and the second (and the obviously Mary Shelleyesque third film in the cycle that is upcoming in which Chev will be reincarnated once again, this time as something not quite human), are altogether a cycle making up one grand and crass homage to our lives today, The Way We Live Now.

The film's Urban trash, street opera, strip club machete killers, Black gay bikers, buttocks, elbows, nipples, and testicles at risk, provoke recognition in an unsettlingly effective way: "Crank" reminds us that there is arising in us all the dawning realization we all are awakening to, that somebody has done something to us, fiddled with our glycemic levels, manipulated our t-cells, exposed us to Chernobyl fallout, and 'monkeyed' as David Letterman would say, with our very genes; and that we have a limited time to track down who did it and where our collective heart has been spirited off to.

What the heck was in that cold-box Johnny Vang was carrying and desperately protecting, anyway? Chev Chelios finally seizes it from Vang, thinking it is his stolen heart Vang has been transporting, but stares quite uncomprehendingly into the box (shades of "Pulp Fiction"), asks aloud what the frack it is, then discards it in disgust. Maybe only Marsellus Wallace can tell us for sure, but it might have something to do with the other stolen artifact Chev Chelios will be looking for in the next film: It is Post-Postmodernism in that box; it is what has now been rendered obsolete; it is his soul.

Norman Mailer Cuffs Charlie Rose (and Charlie's too dense to notice)

It is continually amazing to me to see the wide breadth of artists, writers, actors, musicians, etc., who end up sitting across from Charlie Rose. Charlie can be downright thick at times, and from time to time churlish and obnoxious. The obnoxious Charlie Rose interrupts his guests to launch off into a comment or a tale about his own thoughts and experiences, and the thick Charlie Rose will stare uncomprehendingly, literally slack-jawed, at the interviewee, who has just made a profound or penetrating comment. The effect usually is that Charlie looks like he's struggling to figure out what the hell is going on on his own show.

An example of Charlie Rose in action:




Now, clearly, Mailer is thinking critically and analytically, rather than in manichian oppositions such as 'noble America' vs. 'ignoble America'. He signals just how complex his analysis is when he deftly sidesteps Charlie's schoolboy cliche by asserting that is it not America that is 'noble' but democracy, thereby putting his wrinkled finger squarely on the point he is trying to make: in our arrogance Americans have lost track of what is was originally that was distinctive, important, and, yes, inobling about America--that our founders envisioned a revivification of and a new world version of ancient Athenian democracy (infused with English common law and judicial oversight, and with separation of powers, of course).

In any event, Mailer is trying to retain some complexity in the discussion; he is trying, patiently, to push back against a cartoon understanding of our society being enunciated by Charlie and so prevalent at this historical moment. He is arguing in favor of a thinking assessment of America's worth and value beyond mindless rooting for her no matter her failings, as if for a beloved if tawdry and failed sports team ('Love Her or leave Her!")?? Like so many of Charlie's guests of a certain age have before, Mailer speaks not as a media monkey but from the rarified perspective of the left's 'greatest generation' (the sixties) when Americans were neither stupid nor afraid; or certainly at least American artists were neither of those things. What we have here is the obnoxious, self absorbed Charlie Rose who has spent years interrupting his guests, being impenatrably thick.

Hilariously, he hasn't the slightest idea how out of his depth he is here. It's a hoot. Norman fucking Mailer, for God's sake! An old lion of literary and political history (does anybody remember, does Charlie remember, that Mailer ran for mayor of New York once? Like Gore Vidal, a fellow American novelist giant of the mid century who himself ran for congress, Mailer used his political campaign to raise social issues that would never have been discussed otherwise). Norman Mailer. An ACTUAL intellectual who was a contemporary of Marshall McLuhan, Buckminster Fuller, Judy Chicago, Pauline Kael, Malcolm X. Angela Davis, Kathleen Cleaver, Bobby Kennedy, Marlon Brando, Adam Clayton Powell, David Halberstam, Herbert Marcuse (Angela Davis' mentor), and by the way, friends with Jimmy Baldwin and Truman Capote! Even at his age at the time of this interview he runs mental circles around Charlie, not even exerting himself. I shouted at my TV, "Stop swimming, Charlie, just be still, you've fallen off the ship, you're in the freakin' ocean Charlie, the deep blue, you're dead. Stop struggling, you'll only prolong it!"

Furthermore, this interview portion embedded above (part of a series on youtube) was amazing in as much as it underscores the very truth of what Mailer is saying here (he said it, and this interview was done, just before the launching of the invasion of Iraq): America is now an ignoble, "loutish" nation in which people cling to childish rhetoric, cliches, and hypocritical sentimentalities rather than trying to muster up enough mental energy to do critical analysis. Norman comes from a time in our history when it was commonplace for Americans, and particularly artists and writers, to do critical analysis. Language to a man like Norman Mailer was not merely a means of rhetorical invective but a thoughtfully employed tool.

Mailer is like his contemporaries--to name some of the writers closest to his own significance to American letters, Phillip Roth, or Gore Vidal, or Jesus bless her, Susan Sontag. To these people language was not an ephemeral mish-mash of leftover advertising jingles patched together in a blustering and nonsensical yawp of tendentious claims (such as Charlie's moment of blankness before hastily repeating Dick Cheney's dumb-ass boast, "they'll cheer us in the streets". Charlie's childlike discomfiture over Norman's very reasonable criticisms proves what a nitwit Rose is. And by extension what a nitwit society we live in post Malcolm and post Sontag-- the Reagan era (don't fool yourself: it's still the Reagan era because all of the most destructive forces and social disarray Reagan put ito motion are still rolling over us).

What an intellectual flyweight Charlie is could only have been exposed, not hidden in a conversation about America not as slogan but as a civilization--as Norman approaches any discussion of America! Rose has for years has been punting and bunting his Long Island lock-brain way through interview after thoughtless interview with people who tower over his middlebrow self. Most of these esteemed guests let him off the hook by either being humorous with him or ignoring his non sequitars altogether, waiting for him to shut up so they can get a word in edgewise.

NORMAN FUCKING MAILER, after all is of a mostly deceased generation that regularly took pikes at one another in the streets, and saw debate--hell, saw regular conversation--as boxing. Norman was the Ali of mental and verbal boxing. In fact, he actually would get into boxing rings when he was young and BOX!! How many Americans now engage in coversation as a BLOOD SPORT (how many of us even CAN now, failed public school dolts that we are)? Mailer doesn't even notice how he bloodies Charlie here.

Bravo. Charlie is exposed as the inveterate child he really is--a fellow who from the look of him I have always speculated must have fallen off some ivy league cabbage cart--possibly Harvard or Princeton from the waxy face he often displays, I speak from some knowledge too, because I've Ivy League degrees--Cornell. Charlie is walking through his interviews with the diffident, blind and dumb arrogance of a man who has never been punched in the face by life.

Well, Norman sure punches him here.

Symmetrical Analysis in the Time of Myopia: Seeing the New Colonialism; Seeing Genealogies of the Triangle Slave Trade; Seeing Ghosts

“The truth is, in the country of the blind,
The one-eyed man is considered to be crazy as hell.”
--Robin Palmer, Ex Officio, The Weather Underground

"The beauty of the dream vanished, and breathless horror and disgust filled my heart."
-- Mary Shelley's Victor Frankenstein

"If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet depreciate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground. They want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters. This struggle may be a moral one; or it may be a physical one; or it may be both moral and physical; but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what a people will submit to, and you have found out the exact amount of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them; and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress. Men may not get all they pay for in this world; but they must pay for all they get. If we ever get free from all the oppressions and wrongs heaped upon us, we must pay for their removal. We must do this by labor, by suffering, by sacrifice, and, if needs be, by our lives, and the lives of others."
--Frederick Douglass, his address on West Indian Emancipation (1857)


1. Preface
What is this 'Symmetrical Analysis' I speak of? It is the will toward seeing social, political, economic, and historical issues and reality not in isolation from one another. Thus, it is the act of refusing to accept the popular, media moderated practice of judging our reality and our freedom as any single sort of EFFECT; rather, our reality and freedom are the result of a collection of ALL of these material components. What is economic is political, and what is political has social ramifications. What exists must have its roots in history. Nothing makes sense unless all of these components are considered.

Yes, thinking requires effort. It is a form of labor. It is a form, in fact, of STRUGGLE. As Frederick Douglass warned us about struggle, it is a thing we must engage in, and must do so despite fear and pain and even death, for it is a necessary process if we are to preserve our freedom. Freedom, as has been lately observed with great alacrity, "Is a conversation by free men about being free."

2. Thugs Я Us: To Overturn the Nation State
The thugs (Rumsfeld, Cheney, Pentagon Advisor Richard Perle, Honorary Thug Bill Kristol, Gunga Din-Sambo Ahmed Chalabi, Honorary White Man Condoleeza Rice, John Ashcroft, Sad Sack Colin Powell, etc.) who had for eight years worked steadily at destroying our democracy, our Constitution, and our precious civil rights, have gone into eclipse following the election of President Obama.

But mark me well: their eclipse, like the eclipse of the moon, parallels any other celestial eclipse in that the thing eclipsed has not truly departed; it is merely now invisible, out of range, lacking its former luminescence and influence. Things in eclipse by astronomical definition always return sooner or later.

Let it not be forgoten that independent journalist, Doug Thompson, broke the story back in 2005 that Bush had openly expressed contempt for the Constitution in an oval office meeting attended by several congressional leaders, including conservative congressman Bob Barr, who, incidentally, veered far to the left of the Bush administration in 2005, becoming a vehement spokesman for civil liberties and a steadfast critic of Bush; could the events of that meeting as recounted by Thompson, have influenced Barr to recognize how the Republican adminstration was a chief enemy of human freedom and individual rights?

(see http://www.capitolhillblue.com/artman/publish/article_7779.shtml to read Thompson's article in full).

Thompson reported:


...Last month, Republican Congressional leaders filed into the Oval Office to meet with President George W. Bush and talk about renewing the controversial USA Patriot Act.
Several provisions of the act, passed in the shell-shocked period immediately following the 9/11 terrorist attacks, caused enough anger that liberal groups like the American Civil Liberties Union had joined forces with prominent conservatives like Phyllis Schlafly and Bob Barr to oppose renewal.
GOP leaders told Bush that his hardcore push to renew the more onerous provisions of the act could further alienate conservatives still mad at the President from his botched attempt to nominate White House Counsel Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court.
"I don't give a goddamn," Bush retorted. "I'm the President and the Commander-in-Chief. Do it my way."
"Mr. President," one aide in the meeting said. "There is a valid case that the provisions in this law undermine the Constitution."
"Stop throwing the Constitution in my face," Bush screamed back. "It's just a goddamned piece of paper!"
I've talked to three people present for the meeting that day and they all confirm that the President of the United States called the Constitution "a goddamned piece of paper."
-Doug Thompson, "Bush on the Constitution"....


The ever present danger of these beasts returning (in the case of Rumsfeld and Cheney, for instance, any future return will be their fourth time taking a run at destroying America: both men served in the Nixon, Reagan, and in the Bush I administrations in various positions and in various advisory capacities) means that our individual freedom, as guaranteed under the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Constitution, Emancipation Proclamation, and extending all the way back into English Common Law and the Magna Carta itself (remember: Bush Jr. actually overturned the writ of Habeas Corpus not only in its expression in our Constitution but had, through the Patriot Act, attacked the very roots of discovery, evidentiary justice, and rights of the accused as set forth in the Magana Carta signed by English King John in 1215!) was and still is, in its weakned state, in danger of dying in our lifetimes.

We had best keep Obama's feet to the flame.

So what exactly ARE these rights expressed as 'individual freedom'? The evolution of the nation-state between 1200 and 1600 AD was undeniably a causal factor in the birth of individual freedom under the law, freedom being exactly what is being largely lost in present-day America after what can best be understood as a 911 provoked regime change that took place here in the United States.

Freedom as a function of the rise of the nation-state is indeed in the process of being razed also in many other of the Western democracies, which are poised to fall like dominoes to the designs of America’s current ruling cadre of corporate brigands and thugs (i.e., the Exxon/Haliburton/Carlisle-Group/Blackwater/Kellogg, Brown, and Root tribe). The ‘brigands’ who used 911 as a pretext to begin a process of reanimating feudalism, slavery, and essentialist notions of race, had also begun a process of erasing the very notion of social justice predicated upon principles of intrinsic human and individual rights. This particular brigandage began as a small but feral cabal of right wing ideologues and administrators who’ve done Ronald Reagan’s dream of eliminating the nation-state one better by launching a rhetorical coup to seize the means of ideological, social, political, and finally economic production in the U.S. I say that the timing of the Wall Street economic collapse was no coincidence: it corresponded with the growing certainty last Fall that Barak Obama was destined to become the next president.

This process of ideological, socio-political, and economic unraveling was obviously conceived by American corporate thugs, as always, to be carried out in those very stages (ideological, social, political, and economic) and is was being executed by the Bushistos in that prescribed order. Such was the order of operations for earlier authoritarian thugs, e.g., the German National Socialists in Deutschland; the right wing of the Peronist power bloc in Argentia; Tito in Yugoslavia; Radovan Karadžić in former Yugoslavia/Bosnia-Hercegovina/Republika Srpska; the Francoists in Spain; and the Batista regime in Cuba. All these regimes followed or employed to various effect the methods of anti-Statism in their climb to and maintenance of authoritarian power.

Both Naomi Wolf’s “Ten Steps to Fascism” from her text, The End of America, and Professor Theodore M. Vestal’s writings on the characteristics of authoritarianism in several texts including his "Ethiopia: A Post-Cold War African State", discuss the various incremental changes in consciousness, in popular discourse, and in political institutions and social and public policy that inexorably shift modern populations away from social democracy (or even away from socialism in the case of Weimar Germany) and toward authoritarianism/fascism.

Among these incremental paradigm shifts is the establishment of what Professor Vestal calls ‘pervasive bureaucracy staffed by the regime, and what he calls the ‘creation of allegiance through various means of socialization’. Bushistos had heavily stacked formerly democratic, public policy bureaucracies with Republican/corporate shills while arbitrarily funding and empowering a huge new authoritarian bureaucracy (known as the Office of Homeland Security). They meanwhile had established a bogus, propaganda apparatus known as ‘Fox News’ in order to re-socialize the American mind, while compromising public education via the privatizing of schools, the imposition an anti-pedagogical testing regime to replace liberal curricula. They had meanwhile blanketed the mass media with right wing ‘noise’ (see "The Republican Noise Machine: Right-Wing Media and How It Corrupts Democracy", by former Bushido turned critic of Bush, David Brock). For her part, Wolf, in her “ten steps” ominously warns against the establishment of ‘a thug class’ (step #3), which of course, had been fulfilled by the Bushisto/corporate palace guard known as Blackwater Corporation, a mercenary army and corporation CEO’d/commanded by Bush family lackey, Erik Prince, who founded Blackwater right here in Michigan, my home state.

It bears mentioning, in fact, that Prince’s pedigree as candidate for Bush thugmeister reaches back to his little known tour as an intern in the Bush Sr. White House in 1992. His company, which he founded in 1997, is one of the chief war profiteering corporations to benefit from the U.S. Iraq occupation (as editorials and reportage in The Arab American News have pointed out, it is indeed an illegal occupation, not a ‘war’).

The upshot was the determined, and to a startling degree successful creation, by authoritarians, of a society-wide form of cognitive dementia in conjunction with a systematic diminution of the effectiveness or of the very purpose of democratic institutions, democratic government apparatuses, and the compromising and even overturning of the very means by which democracy is achieved: that is, the destruction of popular elections and of the electoral process.

Specifically, in order to eliminate the bases of civil society in its praxis of human and individual rights, to eliminate democracy, and to eliminate electoral values, it is first necessary to eliminate the collective expectation of these things in our minds. Having achieved this psychic excision, the next tactic was to eliminate its accoutrements. The coup was bloodless (if you don’t count the deaths during 911, in Najif, in Abu Ghraib, at Guantanamo, etc.)

3. New Colonialism: Race and the Slave Trade She Rode (back) In On
William Kristol, Newt Gingrich, Donald Rumsfeld, Gary Schmitt, Paul Wolfowitz, Dick Cheney, Richard Perle, Trent Lott, et al., as well as corporate funders (DeVos and Prince) and think tanks such as The Cato Institute, Heritage Foundation, the Scaife Foundation and The New Citizenship Project, have all waged this coup in order to recondition collective consciousness.

Historians like Richard Bean typically understand ‘nation-states’ (i.e. Bean’s essay, "War and the Birth of the Nation-State", from Journal of Economic History, Vol. 33, #1, March, 1973) as entities that have organized the forces of western ‘civilization’. By his definition statism distinctly positions itself against, or after, feudalism and monarchism proper. It nurtured ‘civilization’ and its accoutrements: egalitarianism, humanism, early mercantilist energies, post-Athenian/Post-Periclesian democracy, collective administration, and individual/minority rights. Statism literally gave succor in Central Europe to the post-Romanesque notion of individual freedom and individual rights.

This is so even while Statism admittedly was a force for repression of ethnic difference, local autonomy, and pluralism i.e., the 19th century Italian phenomenon of 'Il Risorgimento'. It must be admitted that the Risorgimento though it generally involved the birth of nationalist sentiments that drove out Austrian, Napoleonic, and Habsburgean foreign rule in Italy, particularly in the Italian-speaking northeast, nevertheless was a movement that contained and crushed dissent from annexed states and among defiant regionalist movements. Secessionists, particularly the Sicilians, protested and revolted against the centralized, authoritarian Italian state, and late 19th century resistance to Statism was particularly strong among the southern peasants who refused to accept the Risorgimento government. It goes without saying that certain Spanish, Arabic, and Greater Metropolitan African elements within the southern population continued to see areas such as Sicily, Messina, and Corsica as distinct, independent entities. The savage repression of regional autonomy and difference across the Italian peninsula was part and parcel of Italian evolution toward statism.

Still, statism across Europe in toto, created a social milieu in which social cruelties and barbarisms (such as slavery) could no longer be transparent, but became opaque. Unlike the milieu of ancient Rome, of ancient Carthage, or ancient Persia and Egypt/Kemet, the new milieu and age that followed the 13th century forced signing by King John of the Magna Carta and that included the 18th century rationalism and empiricism of the enlightenment and Renaissance (both of African origin, say many historians such as Cheikh Anta Diop and Martin Bernal) was one in which slavery needed a new justification since it arose out of a new impetus.

Certainly, even the archaic and antique periods of Europe, followed by the classical period and then the dark ages, all featured African influence, but the unique aspect of the African and Asian influences of the enlightenment itself was the drive toward democracy (first in Greece, then in Rome, and later in France and the Americas) that this particular period (from AD 1400-1800) entailed slavery was both a continued barbarism in Europe even after the enlightenment, a peculiarly altered practice because of the enlightenment and the statism that accompanied it (since slavery became a more mechanistic, corporate practice, as well as an aberrant practice whose days were necessarily numbered due to the very mercantilist and statist forces--under waning monarchism and feudalism--that drove the slave trade through those forces’ support of the slave trade).

The classical period had been one in which slavery had three clear and widely acknowledged justifications:

1. Slavery was a result of war—a form of pillage (a defeated enemy was understood to be subject to a portion of the defeated population being taken as slaves).
2. Slavery was a result of fiat—the will of a king (those subject to the monarchist rule of a king, emperor, or a Caesar, were understood to be subject to the whim of that ruler, who could declare one to be enslaved, or remove one’s freedom to the point of virtual slavery).
3. Slavery was the result of a debt—an indenture of indefinite length (a debtor might be subject to policy, procedure, or law, all of which might decree that his freedom be forfeited for a limited term of service, or for any term up life, in compensation for a debt).

By contrast to these acknowledged justifications for enslavement, the advent of the Transatlantic, Triangular Slave Trade was a break with all known standards of behavior, and this paradigm shift required a justification. Race became that justification. The invention then, of the ideology of ‘Race’ (and of ‘white’ supremacy), is contemporaneous with the creation of corporations and the rise of a global slave trade organized not by kings, not by states, and not by generals, but by corporations.

The global slave trade was unique in that it was highly systematized, mechanistic (in the sense that it established interlocking and complex patterns, policies and procedures commercial in nature that could create repetition of expenditure, storage, processing of ‘goods’, sales, and profits in a pattern meant to operate into perpetuity), and purely commercial in nature, with operations motivated and enabled through investment and strict profit margins. It was an immense, global, and nearly unprecedented mass relocation of millions of Africans, not after conquest in war, not through fiat, and not for repayment of a debt, but for no other reason than gross profit of the type that came into being after mercantilism and the birth of corporations.

To justify such mass theft not only of human labor but also of natural resources (such theft eventually becoming the project of global colonialism through which Europe ravaged Africa and Asia) necessitated the invention of a mythology of the sub humanity of Africans.

This was in direct contrast to the previous, classical conceptions of ethnicity and nationality (as opposed to ‘race’) which were the conceptions by which nations identified themselves and identified other nations. An Egyptian in ancient Rome was understood to be a resident of the nation of Egypt, while a Roman was understood to be a resident of Rome, or a descendant of a certain ethnic community native to Italy. Likewise, an Ossian, or German, or Greek, or Numidian, or Nubian would be understood as a member of those associated nations, tribes, or communities. The notion of ‘race’ per se, as we now understand it, did not exist, and so then neither did racism.

Racism, like brigandage, rape, war, monarchist cruelty, unrestrained pillage, or order by the whim of warlords, was essentially mitigated by the rise of the nation-state, and thus, at the behest particularly of corporations, race became a justification for the establishment of an exception to the growing protection of individual and collective justice that nation states tended to exert.

We habitually assert such claims about the beneficent potential of nation-states, notwithstanding legitimate anarchist critiques of statism. Nations, every bit as readily as monarchies, possess the strong potential, and even the tendency, to inflict war, oppression, plunder, and abuse upon other states, and even upon their own citizens. Yet, the undeniable history of the rise of the nation-state between 1200 and 1600 verifies the concordant, even resultant rise of the forces of egalitarianism, law, social constraints upon brigandage, and cultural freedom.

There was, however, an inevitability to the history of the Transatlantic Slave Trade, given the reality of the pure profit motive adopted by the nascent and the early corporations. The creation of the modern concept of ‘racism’ was rooted in the advent of the corporation. The formation and ‘chartering’ of the Stora Kopparbërg in Sweden (AD 1347), of the Dutch East India Corporation (Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie ) in The Netherlands (AD 1602), the and the granting by the British Crown of a monopoly to the British East India Corporation (AD 1600) commenced the history of corporate profit motive that led to the spread of the corporate model, the invention of the trust company and of limited partnerships in the 19th century, corporate fascism in the 20th century, and the current 21st century model of the multinational hegemonic corporations, such as Blackwater, and without borders or national identity (the incorporeal corporation).

4. Seeing The New Colonialism
Donald Rumsfeld’s presumptive Jewish identity notwithstanding, he was, in 2003, the Bush administration’s herald of New Fascism and of New Colonialism. During a series of rambling, psychically dizzying press briefings throughout the latter nine months of 2003 (the invasion of Iraq had commenced on March 20th, 2003) Rumsfeld introduced to a pacified White House Press Corps the theory and battlefield practice of ‘The Rumsfeld Doctrine’; a post modern rejection of heavy, tank-style attacks in favor of lighter armor, more rapid, more effective, fast moving columns carrying scant numbers of troops deep into enemy territory for the purpose of surveilling enemy positions in order to call in massive air strikes and then move on, eschewing secure bivouacs or fortress-like entrenchment.

Rumsfeld’s preening, neologistic, nonsense ridden diatribes in these press conferences (“There are known knowns…there are known unknowns…but there are also unknown unknowns: there are things we do not know we don’t know.”) marked a launch point for the only recently overturned (if we can actually trust that Obama's election overturned it), ongoing U.S. project of New Fascism.

Step one in this process, a process we are currently living through, was the re-introduction of Old World Colonialism (post-post Colonialism, if you wish, or Neo-Colonialism, or, as I prefer to call it, ‘New Colonialism’, for it hardly matters by what name we call the rose; it would stink as much).

Step two had proven itself to be the systematic desensitization of the U.S. population to the debasing of human rights, the founding of a pugnacious foreign policy based upon endless war, the founding of a torture state, and the destruction from within of democratic institutions.

Step three, it seems clear, would have been the imposition of massive social, economic, and political collapse, necessitating the impositio, presumably, of military rule, of a police state, and of society-wide surveillance and suspension of individual freedom.

A question to haunt us: has step three been averted thanks to Obama? And if so, for how long? Eight years is the legal extent of his presence in the White House. Without vigorous and harsh prosecutions and punishment meted out to the war criminals and thugs who hyjacked our democracy for eight years, will those now in eclipse return to finish their work?

Only time will tell.

Obama Rides the Same Old Policies (column reprinted from The Arab American News)

The
A r a b A m e r i c a n N e w s

Obama rides the same old policies in Palestine
By Rayfield A. Waller
Saturday, 03.21.2009, 01:19am

President Obama has ridden in on the winds of change, promising diplomacy rather than belligerence as U.S. foreign policy; but he has yet to speak clearly against the policy of underdevelopment and "removal" Israel deploys against Palestinians living under occupation.
Unfortunately, Obama's voice overseas, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, is mouthing policies nearly identical to those of the Bush White House; so much so that the Palestinian newspaper, Al Quds, has editorialized against her, calling her "‘Condoleezza Clinton," a reference to Bush's Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice. In her recent trip to the Middle East Clinton offered Israel only words of appeasement even as the ominous figure of an incoming Israeli prime minister who loudly opposes Palestinian statehood — Bebe Netanyahu — is making it clear that more conflict and less diplomacy will likely be Israel'’s course. What are we to call Israel's policy? We ought to call it what it is: Palestinian Removal.

The violence carried out by Israeli forces against Gaza in December has yet to be condemned by the Obama administration. Meanwhile, Israel has stepped up the frequency of evictions carried out against Palestinian families and the razing of Arab homes in occupied East Jerusalem while building new settlements there.

Clinton's clear message at a Gaza reconstruction conference in Sharm el Shiek, Egypt, on March 12, was not a repudiation of Palestinian Removal, but an announcement that the U.S. will withhold recognition and support for the democratically elected Hamas. In the face of Israel's continued strangulation of Arab civilian society by encroachment in Jerusalem, by embargo against Gaza, and by the use of bulldozers and tanks rather than diplomacy to settle Arab/Israeli conflict, Clinton clarified American foreign policy in the Middle East now that Obama is in the saddle: a promise of $900 million, "not a dime" of which will go to Hamas, so as to ensure the eventual creation of a Palestinian state that will be "peaceful and responsible."
Is this Orwellian doublespeak Obama's "change we can believe in?"

Even as Gaza's survivors digest the devastation of, in approximate numbers, 22,000 buildings destroyed, 1,300 dead, 500 or more injured, and 300 or more Palestinian children killed by Israel's planned, mechanized, and targeted attack in December upon civilians and upon civil infrastructure, it seems that yet another American administration rears up in the White House and in Congress to turn a blind eye toward huge sums of our tax dollars funding Israel's Removal Program against Arabs in the West Bank, Golan, Gaza, and East Jerusalem. With Netanyahu's ascension to power, increased Israeli hostility against Lebanon and Syria seems likely, despite Clinton's overtures toward dialogue with Syria. Netanyahu's track record as a hawk doesn't suggest he will support the U.S. in unilateral dialogue with his Arab neighbors.

Does Obama plan to continue the U.S. policy of supporting Israel's "security" through direct weapons sales, huge subsidies and favored nation trade status, and by providing billions of U.S. dollars in aid to Israel? In 2008, Israel received $2.4 billion in military financing, according to The Washington Report on Middle East Affairs (WRMEA), which dwarfs the $900 million promised to Palestine on March 12. The Congress has averaged the (comparatively paltry) figure of 100 million U.S. dollars annually in aid to the Palestinian Authority (PA); the new pledge of money to rebuild Gaza and cover budget shortfalls for the PA will be controlled by the U.S. Agency for International Development, earmarked for what Clinton called "institutional reforms and economic development."

Such a statement seems outlandish; as if American foreign policy is, as it has always been where Palestine is concerned, detached from reality: infrastructure projects, the meat and bread of any "economic development" and now necessary to rebuild Gaza, funded by the U.S. while far more USAID dollars continue to go to funding Israeli destruction of that same infrastructure, is not the diplomacy Obama promised but merely the continuation of the mendacity that U.S. policy toward Arab-Israeli peace has always shown itself to be.

Unless Obama changes irrational expenditures of monies said to "secure" Israel, and favors instead a sane, diplomatic approach to peace that includes rather than excludes parties at ground level, not only will Israel continue to be less secure, but Palestinian lives will continue to be sacrificed. Destruction of cohesive Palestinian daily life and culture is Israeli policy. Israeli bulldozers wreck homes rather than building this "economic development" Clinton speaks of. The Removal Policy will only pick up speed and funding from soon-to-be Prime Minister Netanyahu. The reigns of American foreign policy now belong to Obama.

If he chooses to ride the same old nag of Bush's policies, he will be riding not the winds of change but a whirlwind into continued conflict and bloodshed, and the blood will now be on his hands.

Professor Waller is on the adjunct faculty of the department of Africana Studies at Wayne State University. He is a freelance journalist, and contributing writer to Progreso Weekly and The Michigan Citizen.

The Implications of Gender Critique In the film, The Matrix (transcript of a lecture delivered at Florida International University in March, 2001)

1.What is Feminism?
Good afternoon. We will begin by defining feminism.
Feminism is humanism. That is, feminism as a political and a social movement is a humanist movement. It is one of the more crucial strands within a collective history of liberation struggle here in America. Along with Unionism, the Amerindian and First Nation struggles, the Black liberation struggle, the anti-war movement, the ethnic rights struggle, the free speech movement, the sexual liberation struggle, the socialist movements, and the public rights movements, feminism in all its guises and ethnic permutations has sought to humanize modern western societies. Its influence has expressed itself by calling for and working toward the goal of liberating women from the domination they suffer at the hands of a western political economy, simply said.

The western political economy is built upon the exploitation of women's work, and upon the surveillance, domination and control of women's bodies--their sexuality and their autonomy--this is how patriarchy functions. Both politics and economics are realms of male dominance. Men seize and maintain power, privilege, and autonomy through their domination of these two realms and by denying women access to these two realms—the political and the economic realms. That denial of access serves to maintain gender segregation and gender slavery (the unstable gains of American, bourgeois feminists not withstanding).

As a project, then, to claim legal, political, social, and economic rights for women, feminism has struggled against this patriarchal arrangement in the west, and its influence has extended, in the past twenty five years, to 'non-western' and 'non-aligned' nations and societies such as those in Asia, Micronesia, Latin America, Afrika, and Eastern Europe.

2.What is Humanism?
Without resorting to a long winded historical analysis of the Hellenic, ancient Greek roots of ‘humanism’ as the rejection of theism-centered and monarchist or militarist social organization, we can say that humanism in the west has arisen, since the founding of America and again since modernism, and most recently since the formation of the United Nations Charter and the UN's "Universal Declaration of Human Rights," as a philosophy and a strategy devoted to creating public space, independent thought, individual and human rights, democracy (also a Hellenic construction), freedom of speech and of association, and legal protection from domination.

Under previously empowered theistic, monarchist, and militarist political systems and social powers, gods, kings, popes, and generals ruled human existence with their own arbitrary impunity. What democratically elected Archon, Themistocles (Θεμιστοκλῆς; c. 524–459 BC ) and the other rulers of Athens Greece conceived, and what Socrates had earlier sharpened through his relentless attack upon and critique of Athenian democracy, was a new way of looking at human social structures and human existence in the west: a system of social organization which would value every single individual human being rather than merely valuing religious dogma, power, and conquest.

Implicit in this concept is the invention of the civil society (not the idiotic, 'civil' society spoken of by reactionaries like Ronald Reagan or Newt Gingrich--as in, 'civility and good behavior,' but the 'civil' written of by Plato in his Republic). The civil society, by definition at least, forces religion, patriarchy and monarchy, and military and policing forces TO THE MARGINS of the culture. As Thomas Jefferson argued, when helping to frame the new national democracy of the American republic, the civil society upholds, protects and defends the citizenry--its rights, its health, its welfare and freedom. This it does, as John Adams argued in Philadelphia during the drafting of the declaration of independence, through public institutions, through public authority, and through the repression of private interests and of capitalist power blocs under the guiding and regulatory powers of democratically elected government. Benjamin Franklin expressed similar ideas claiming that all of this would be ordained, propagated and maintained through public literacy, journalism, and education. As he wrote in one of his satirical rhymes:

Whoever thinks a country can be,
both ignorant and free,
Wants what never was,
and never can be.

3.Feminst "Reading"
Feminism is humanism. It supplies one of the most illuminating and empowering ways (for women, and also for conscious men) of reading texts--one among a multiplicity of ways of reading, to be sure, but one which can be especially enlightening when applied to film-text. Texts are anything we can 'read' and through reading, theorize. Books are texts, films are texts, paintings, songs, symphonies and architectures are texts, this classroom is a text, the cityscape of Miami seen from ten miles overhead, is a text. Your body is a text. All these things can be read, and because all these things can be 'read', they can all be theorized.

Jonathan Culler, professor of literary theory in the English department at Cornell University writes that there are four main attributes of 'theory', and the reading of literature and literary texts:

1.Theory is interdiciplinary.
2.Theory is analytical and speculative.
3.Theory is a critique of 'common sense'--what is assumed to be 'natural.'
4.Theory is reflexive--it makes us think about HOW we think about things, and the categories and methods we employ when we think about things, such as texts.

"As a result," writes Culler, in his book, Literary Theory:

Theory is intimidating. One of the most dismaying features of theory today is that it is endless. It is not something that you could ever master. Not a particular group of texts you could learn so as to "know theory. (Culler, 15)

This implies an idea which is completely counter to what has become the dominant idea of universities in the 21st century--that the point of thinking is to discover 'answers.' That the point of education is to gain 'mastery,' which is reflected in bogus 'certification' of one's authority to say, 'I'm educated' simply because one has a degree; as if one had gone off to see the Wizard and upon confessing one's lack of a brain, were to have the Wizard hand one a 'diploma' and pronounce one to no longer be a scarecrow.

No, in fact (and it is a fact upon which all of democratic, civil and humanist society is built, in fact) THINKING IS ITSELF AN END IN ITSELF--the point of thinking is thinking. Without this simple precept, we would even now be transported back to medievalism; to feudalism. I would be "nigger," there would be no women here on the campus of Florida International University, and there might well be a national guard division stationed on campus to repel public access by the poor and working class citizens of nearby Sweetwater, if those citizens are unable to pay the entrance fee of tuition.

In short, strategies for reading literary and cinematic texts, for reading cinema as text, are part of a long American tradition, since modernism, of democratic thinking. Thinking politically, thinking economically, thinking historically. Feminist reading seeks to give us tools to think about the political, economic and historical experience, roles and possibilities of women as subjects of texts. By implication then, it also gives us tools to think about the place and possibilities of masculinity in all that. It offers a radical gender critique.

4.Reading Ideas of Gender in The Matrix
Feminist strategies for reading texts such as films, suggest that The Matrix is a deeply questioning film. It questions:

(1)Our most fundamental assumptions about our own economic reality through symbolizing capitalism as an endless dream of ignorant and contented slavery;

(2)Our assumptions about and our conception of, the patriarchal social order;

(3)Our uncritical acceptance of the reductive ideology of 'naturalism,' of 'so-called, 'human nature' and of the retro-Newtonian concept of mechanistic, manifest social organization (which is the idea that all human beings 'naturally' organize themselves according to a 'manifest destiny' of inborn compulsions such as the will toward greed, competition, and aggression--the will toward patriarchy and domination of the female body);

(4)Our assumptions about gender (and race) as a category which defines essence, identity and possibility, through the radical reversal of sexist/racist hierarchies (The Oracle and Morpheus are the top of a hierarchy despite the fact that as a Black woman and Black man, characters in an American film narrative, their usual position would be a servile and a dehumanized one. Meanwhile, they both represent an even more radical reversal of our ideas of domination and our assumptions that domination is or ought to be contained within patriarchy and matriarchy as hierarchical modes of human relation;

And finally,

(5)Our assumptions about masculinity and its place in the social order. The relation between masculinity and the social order is exposed as one of slavery. The film achieves this exposure through its exploration and reversal of American assumptions about masculinity in bourgeois human relations such as the middle-class utilitarian family structure, friendship, and love. The film achieves this exposure also through a discreet reversal of role play in the interaction between Trinity and Neo.


For Further Thought:

The Razor's Edge
-demonstrates the deeper levels of meaning and identity in the history of the European working class (the origins of socialism and of unionism).

Marlon Brando’s role as Vito Corleogne
-demonstrates the classical, American Fuedalist/Calvinist/Puritain conception of the function of masculinity.

The Sopranos
-demonstrates the idea (a racist idea) of Italian (ethnic) masculinity, although the Sopranos is doing a very close-to-the-chest CRITIQUE of it as socially constructed by isolationism, and a larger culture of brutality and masculinity (how much of this is 'traditional' and how much of it is constructed by Capitalism and by Catholicism??)

The Thin Red Line
-demonstrates the richness of the world surrounding the social order and the symbolic order, as well as offering the idea of escape from them, transgression of them, and exposes the severe pain and unease that even assimilated men feel outside of it.
-Issues of NATURE, the FEMALE and of CHAOS and CORPORATE CAPITAL as James Jones presented them in his original novel and Terrence Malick explores them in his film adaptation, are crucial to confronting patriarchy and to constructing a feminist analysis of gender.

The Matrix
-Trinity as 'action hero' displaces male aggression and dominance of the social order she struggles against.
-Neo's dissatisfaction with his place in the social order, indeed, with the very reality of the social order, makes it possible for him to escape from that social order once he discovers the world that lies outside of his own simulacrum.
-What lies outside the simulacrum is the real world (‘the desert of the real’, as Morpheus says, after Baudrillard).
-Trinity reverses masculine/feminine assumptions
-The alternative to patriarchy is genuine fatherhood (unconditional love, mentorship, protection of the innocent and guardian of freedom) symbolized by Morpheus
-The scene in “The Thin Red Line” in which Captain Staros is rebuked and threatened by Cornel Tall, is co-relative to the scene in The Matrix in which Neo is interrogated by the LITERAL symbolic order (once he is arrested by Agent Smith)!
-The climactic 'fight scene' in The Matrix displaces race, gender, and power—it replaces patriarchy, aggression and libido with the THINKING and PHILOSOPHY of liberation.