Gordon Hilgers's Open Salon Blog

LET’S DROWN GROVER IN THE BATHTUB INSTEAD

Thu, 23 May 2013 19:05:30 -0400

Isn’t intriguing how all the little conservative cub scouts line-up to sign Grover Norquist’s no tax pledge of allegiance to corporatism? The red-headed Mussolini seems to think he’s boss.

How we ever got here isn’t really all that mysterious. For decades, the equestrian classes have been actively conflating Capitalism with democracy, and in the process now have us members of the political entity called the United States of America so confused that many of us have literally bought the little fraud.

Anyone who thinks Capitalism is democracy needs to get his or her head examined. While democracy does tend to promote individual initiative, there is nothing at all democratic about unregulated Capitalism, and all one has to do is look at the structure of just about any business in the nation.

The typical commercial structure is a hierarchical one. That means that there’s a boss or bosses at the top who know everything there is that needs to be known about policy, strategy, resources, etc. A tier below the bosses is a second tier that knows less than everything, and below them another tier that knows next to nothing at all what whims may come from the very top of the pyramid.

In essence, Capitalist hierarchical structures are totalitarian in nature, and the resistance of those who cling to it in the face of repeated attempts to democratize the totalitarian structure and allow even those at the very bottom to have a stake or a share or even a voice in how a company operates has been so fierce that only a child protecting his toy truck from mom or dad is more vicious. Yes, ownership is a powerful narcotic.

Enter democracy, even representative democracy, and you indeed do have a voice in how the political structure tends to move. And while America has done just fine as long as the political system is in control of the economic system, the reverse is beginning to happen, and Grover Norquist is part of the real problem.

I am here to advocate that those of us who believe in democracy send-out a posse to grab the muppet-gone-muppeteer and take him in for his extraordinary rendition. The little corporatist needs to be shown who’s really the boss around here.

Somewhere in the middle of the Cold War, in which the Soviet Union applied a great deal of pressure on democracy with its fear tactics and its overblown threats, we became so adamant in defending the free enterprise system that we forgot that free enterprise is merely a tool that is pointedly useless without some kind of governing hand. Of course, we used about 10,000 totalitarian regimes called businesses to battle the one big totalitarian regime, which is fine; it worked. But then we forgot to re-take the reins of the little horse and put it back in its paddock. Ever since that oversight, we’ve seen a growing, monolithic, unpredictable and
ideological monster emerge. It’s like Godzilla. It doesn’t care whether us peons get anything. Only the elite matters and this is beginning to cause a great deal of harm to both us and the world in which we live.

Not only has a fraudulent conflation of democracy and Capitalism pulled the wool over our eyes, but the entire definition of work has been changed. It used to be that work was a means to an end where individuals could satisfy their human needs for shelter and food and safety. Then something changed around 1980, and suddenly work became a means to the end of enriching a small elite at the expense of everyone else.

Worse, the definition of the individual in a democratic state has been altered to the point of reduction: self-interest. That’s pretty nasty, but over the course of 30 years, 3,000 screaming me-me’s on AM talk radio have managed to convince a lot of politically naïve people that they are merely bags of self-interest.

Grover Norquist needs to be drowned in a bathtub so democracy as we have long known it can survive. We have to show the commercial sector who’s boss around here, and do it quickly. The idea that a human being can completely satisfy himself or herself with material goods is bogus, and Grover Norquist needs to be drowned in a bathtub for the greater good of humanity.

TEA PARTY, THE TRIGGER-HAPPY, PARANOID ANGLE

Wed, 22 May 2013 11:05:10 -0400

They're gunning-up like crazy. They're talking about revolution. They're telling us that they and only they have a lock on patriotism. But they don't want to pay taxes.

The Tea Party is certainly an interesting phenomenon, isn’t it? It’s not every day that a group of people marches around demanding that everyone respect them and only them because, of course, they are the true patriots. And it’s definitely not every day that this group of so-called self-defined patriots not only identifies with the very rich but defends the very rich as part of their patriotism.

Considering that the Internal Revenue Service is in hot water with the patriots among us because the IRS had the unmitigated gaul to question their patriotism and their claims that their 501(c)4 status as “social welfare” groups gave them the King’s-X in regard to taxes they don’t want to pay, how could anyone, anywhere, argue with, well, patriotism?

Sorry, folks, but I don’t see anything patriotic in political agitation that is done dirt free of governmental oversight. I have a feeling, however, that this is why the Tea Party “collectives” are so damned angry right now.

This teapot tempest is being likened to Watergate, is being likened to governmental intimidation and is being likened to governmental attempts to quash their sheer, untrammeled love for America and all it stands for…without forking-up the one obligation that separates the wheat from the chaff.

This is the first time in my lifetime that a political action group of political advocacy has ever made such claims because, after all, aren’t these groups being financed by plutocrats like the Koch brothers and Big Tobacco? And aren’t they one damned far cry from a “social welfare” organization? Obviously, what is happening here is to set some kind of legal precedent for political groups that don’t want to make good on their collective obligations to the state they say they love so much.

What’s more worrisome, however, is the trigger-happy nature of these Tea Party groups. We had Sharon Angle in 2010 saying that, should she lose her primary, we should resort to “Second Amendment measures”. We had Tea Party protesters packing semi-automatic weapons less than 300 yards from a Presidential rally. We’ve had plenty of Tea Party folks arguing for revolution and “spilling blood to refresh the tree of liberty”.

Shoot, if I was the IRS, I’d check-out these folks real good. Wouldn’t you?

I used to be a member of a closed political chat room group on Facebook called Simply Politics. You’d think that with a name like that we’d be discussing politics, but mainly what I was treated to were questions regarding my patriotism, arguments in favor of something called “Civil War II” and even death threats. Possibly even worse was that the administrators of the groups would eradicate a thread if they didn’t happen to agree with its premise. After being called Commie, Nazi, fascist, O-Bomber lover, and other epithets by these posturing know-nothings, I finally left. Message received. Loud and clear. Anyone to the left of Heinrich Himmler was part of some mysterious fifth column, the likes of which have not been seen since World War II.

Really, this was a little scary. When people don’t want to pay taxes to support their government, but want to say gun-crazed things about others who don’t buy the Tea Party hype, my crap detector goes up. And rightfully so. These folks want a revolution. They want to take over the country in the name of unrestricted capitalism, not democracy or a republic or anything like that. It’s all about money, and I, me and mine.

When collectives like those that comprise the Tea Party resort to violent and often ugly language to purport their self-descriptive patriotism, I think it’s time for the IRS to examine them and find out what they are really after. In that sense, a good IRS audit is not a political tactic. It’s merely part of our security establishment keeping tabs on people who think they should carry guns everywhere.

And the fact they’re hollering, at least to me, shows their irritable guilt. They want “eyes off” their activities.

Why?

CONSERVATISM: A COLD WAR HANGOVER NEAR YOU

Tue, 21 May 2013 13:05:15 -0400

That’s funny. I seem to see something happening others never mention. That certainly doesn’t happen much, but we all need to think about the Cold War and our Cold War hangover and what it is doing to our political situation in the United States.

It’s only been around 25 years since the Cold War officially ended, and like many who grew up in the shadow of terms like “brinksmanship”, “mutual assured destruction” and “détente”, I am pretty glad the worst is over. I’m a “survivor” of the 1962 Cuban missile crisis, something that literally freaked us Denver, Colorado, residents, mainly because much of the nation’s ICBM research was taking place only a couple of miles away from where I went to school.

I remember the tension of those seven days in May as if it was yesterday. We at the Lasley Elementary School were pretty juiced by the nuclear war drills, the famed duck-and-cover stuff, but in 1962, we brought home forms for our parents to fill out. What was happening was that all us kids were getting tungsten dog tags that would help searchers to identify our burnt bodies in case of a nuclear attack. Ronnie Minks and I were pretty excited about getting to wear real dog tags, but that’s only because we really didn’t understand what was happening. I remember my mother and father crying over this. They were really scared.

And then in the middle of that wrestling match, some “Communists” broke into the Bancroft High School and set-off the air raid sirens. My dad was angry. This was in the middle of the slow change from the beatniks and their opposition to nuclear war and the “subterranean era” when the beatniks began to change colors. Instead of total black and being beat, the beatniks were adding colors. Life was changing. The movement was centered in Denver.

But I do remember the sick feeling I had over the idea that the entire world could end because of an international argument that, much like today’s ideological fussing, centered around money.

Money. That’s the problem. Here in America, us lucky dogs had suffered next to no physical damage to our cities and nation during a war that literally wrecked most of the rest of the world. Aside from the deaths and casualties, the United States made a smart choice to begin the Marshall Plan and rebuild Europe, a signatory activity that set us up to become one of the richest nations in the history of humankind.

I really didn’t know how the other side felt about what had happened until I began reading Solzhenitsyn in the Eighties. The Soviets unquestionably bore the brunt of the horrific Nazi Eastern Front and the casualties registered in the millions. According to Solzhenitsyn, the Russian people were seriously and psychically wounded by their losses. In fact, the xenophobia caused by Hitler’s invasion contributed greatly to the Soviet/U.S. Cold War.

But there’s another side, a different angle to this. A friend of mine suggested it in 1980 when we examined how it felt to be living in a new ramping-up of the old war footing under Reagan. He said it was his opinion that the U.S. and the Soviets had no choice but to sit on Europe until European’s ethnic-based nationalism died down. After all, we had to think of 1870’s Franco-Prussian war, 1914’s First World War and then 1939 when the Nazis invaded Poland. And then there was the Spanish Civil War of 1936. The place we call Europe was a mess over nationalism and what it had done to inflame old rivalries and engender new ones.

Regardless of how we felt about each other, the U.S. and the Soviet Union had a responsibility to serve as referees as Europe began to recover. If Marx is to be believed, the thesis, antithesis, synthesis of Hegel had resulted in the proliferation of social democracies, a kind of hybrid between Communism and American Democracy. And those little hybrids grew and matured to the point that we now have a fairly-well united Europe.

In 1933, FDR was faced with a horrible challenge: Not a single “anti-liberal” one party state wanted our stuff, but four of them did. Mussolini was bellicose over his guffawing that “liberal democracy” had failed and that the answer was fascist corporatism. Hitler was noisy too. As was Stalin. And Japan was busy conquering the East. In a sense, the Second World War was America’s greatest test. Could we compete with those one-party totalitarian states? Or was the Age of Reason over?

We had to make adjustments. We had to foster a reasonable governance of our economy in such a way as to protect the rights of the American people without losing democracy absolutely. That’s a big challenge, yet we won. We created a new Liberalism that not only competed with totalitarianism but beat the holy crap out of four of them.

I’ve always believed that the rising in the Sixties was a reaction to the Cold War. I know I was tired of the fight over money between two superpowers. Lots of us kids were. It was just absolutely stupid. And when we were called to join-in the fight in Vietnam, we balked. For good reason. We could neither vote nor even drink a beer. Worse, of course, was the bad timing of the signing of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the draft, mainly because a lot of us had fought tooth and nail to get Blacks in the South loose of the Jim Crow plantation.

What the counterculture boiled-down to was that, yes, the United States had its own genocidal past. When Columbus discovered America, there were an estimated 250 million Native Americans in the Western Hemisphere. But by the time I became aware of what had happened, that figure was a little over 9 million. In other words, our holocaust dwarfed the Jewish one by exponential numbers. We had to reform our attitudes and make up for the horrific crimes committed in the name of Manifest Destiny.

Today, we have a reactionary robot called conservatism still shadow boxing with the ghosts of the Cold War. The typical label used against us Liberals is that of “Socialism”. But that merely betrays conservatism’s arrogant ignorance regarding how, with Liberalism, democracy comes first and capitalism follows. The conservatives, quite similar to the Nazis and fascists, want this the other way around. They advocate that, no, capitalism should come first and democracy second. And anyone who disagrees is either a “convenient idiot” or a “fellow traveler” or a full-out Communist.

And that’s a manifestation of the Cold War hangover. The people who want to profit more than anything else are so afraid of democracy they are willing to call the democratic urge as symptomatic of totalitarianism. How many times have we heard the Tea Party proclaiming that government is the enemy?

I don’t know what the solution is to this Cold War hangover. What I don’t like about it is that the conservatives are taking advantage of deep-set fears in the low-information areas of the populace.

Apparently the Cold War isn’t over. The wars in the Middle East? Isn’t it odd that both China and Russia have steered clear and have opted to watch us waste ourselves in a rekindling of the oldest theocratic rivalry in the Western World? We may not know who the arsonist really was, whether it was the Nazis or the Soviets, but this whole war with Islam is a set-up. We’re being blindsided.

But look at this in another way. What if the United States, Russia and China are the new world order that is going to have to put an end to the old world order that was theocratic in nature? We have to rise above the petty squabbling caused by secular and theocratic urges. We have to show the theocrats and the capitalism-before-democracy folks who’s boss.

We need to doctor our Cold War hangover and disarm those who are using it against us.

IRS: CORPORATE APPROVAL NECESSARY FOR OFFICIAL DISSIDENCE NO

Sat, 18 May 2013 11:05:02 -0400

Wow. I’m gobsmacked. Although this is pretty obvious, obvious in other words that these Tea Party “collectives” that began to mushroom in 2010 after Obama and the Democrats did the Christian thing and used government to help poor people get better health care for less, are hollering like cats with their tails stuck in the door or under a chair, it is what is not so obvious that concerns me.

Around the right-wing death-squad blogosphere, the acronym COINTELPRO is being used more and more as if the IRS checking to make certain that “social welfare” organizations are really what they pretend to be, mainly because the T-Dancers are the biggest little pussies on the planet right now.

I grew up during the Cold War. The so-called threat of Communism was like a huge gray cloud hanging over my entire childhood. It wasn’t until I was almost 40 that the umbrella lifted, and during that time I saw 1) Ronald Reagan, Governor of California, using the FBI to investigate Mario Savio, the UC Berkeley student who stood on top of a cop car and gave one of the great speeches of the Sixties, mainly because he and many college students wanted to be allowed free speech on campus in the same way as U.S. Army recruiters had.

Ronnie didn’t like that. He immediately jumped on the “Commie bastards” ratline and contacted J. Edgar Hoover, and both of them infiltrated the Free Speech movement, jailed a number of people for anti-American activity (like, when is free speech anti-American?) and even drove the president of the university out of office because, according to Ronnie Ray-Gun, it was obvious he too was a Communist.

Jerry Rubin, one of the famed Chicago Seven, was there. He eventually did embrace Marxism, mainly because the utter hypocrisy of Reagan and Hoover had convinced him that, nope, these guys are definitely not on the level with these accusations of college students having the right to both assemble and dissent.

The Free Speech Movement exploded across campuses around America because of the ratline publicity Ronnie and J. Edgar “Mary” Hoover gave Savio and others. But how many lives were ruined by FBI files? How many people’s lives were disrupted by the FBI nosing into their taxes, their friendships, their rental agreements? Honestly. Apparently, corporate approval is necessary if you want to dissent dippy policies that won’t let you protest on campus.

Reagan had already messed-up the lives of dozens of Hollywood actors who he had decided were Communists. Personally, since Reagan was a happy Liberal in the Thirties, it’s entirely possible his 180 designed to save his tacky career as a B-list actor was also cover for his entirely totalitarian sensitivities.

I never really did understand what all the hype about Commies on campus was all about, but I could see, even as a 12-year-old that something was not right about all these self-described “patriots” taking away the rights of others because of the Godforsaken Cold War.

Cold War. That’s why us kids protested. We’d seen our parents living through their own Great Depression and World War II hangovers, and because of this dumb Soviet threat, we’d learned to crouch under desks and against lockers. In 1962, my school even mandated we wear tungsten dog-tags so our bodies could be identified after a nuclear attack. My parents cried. I thought it was great.

Now? Not so much. Living through the Cuban Missile Crisis was no picnic. I lived in Denver. The Rocky Mountain Arsenal was about two miles from our front door.

Can you see why the hippies decided to drop out of that dysfunctional situation that was wholly manufactured out of whole cloth by ideologues determined to scare the bejesus out of everyone in order to keep us in line. And yes, we protested. While it is true that many “red diaper babies” led some of those anti-war protests, what is upsetting is that the FBI under Hoover was tapping telephones, harassing people, jacking people, breaking into their homes and making life miserable for people who wanted no part in the militarization of the American dream.

I began to protest the nuclear power people here in Dallas in 1980. I joined the Comanche Peak Life Force, a core group of a large coalition called the Armadillo Coalition. I was perfectly aware that Socialists and some Commies, especially members of the Revolutionary Communist Party, were using the issue as political judo, but my aim was true: I worried about the problem of nuclear waste. I said so. I got jacked by….COINTELPRO.

That’s right: If you’re not corporate approved, you have no right to dissent. We weren’t corporate approved because one Dick Cheney, head of Kellogg, Brown and Root, didn’t like us shrimps getting in between him and his dumb, radioactive money.

Later, when the “single issue” moved away from nuclear power to El Salvador, I dropped out. I didn’t want to go political with any dissidence at all. Although a woman named Pat Pomanici, a Communist, wanted to date me, I told her no because of the politics. I didn’t want to sully my reputation.

Do you see what I am getting at? The Tea Party collectives are equally radical, but now they’ve got support within the government because the ideologues are in favor of the dumb stuff the Tea Party collectives support.

Honestly, a bunch of trailer trash gets out to try to get bailed-out of paying taxes, and because that’s politically expedient, it’s apparently OK to howl like a goddamned wolf over the IRS checking to make certain you’re really a “social welfare” group.

ACORN was a bona fide social welfare group, and look what those reactors did to ACORN. Some angry kids in the Sixties didn’t like the idea of being thrown into a battlefield when they were not old enough to either drink or even vote, and look: For the next 40 years, idiot-heads react and react and react.

I don’t know what the contemporary Republican Party would have done without us as the big scapegoats.

I am not a Communist. And Richard Nixon only said he was not a crook. He bailed. I stuck in there because I love the US. I am grateful to the help I’ve gotten from the government, and yes, I am very angry that Congressmen would use the Commie card every time us Liberals try to accomplish anything.

Little pussies on the Nazi ratline: That’s exactly what they are. That should be investigated. What do they want? No taxes, no obligations to the government, anti-governmental attitudes, but no investigations into their "private" activities.

In a word: Hypocrisy.

HERITAGE: REPUBLICAN ROBOT FOUND TO BE ALL-WHITE MELANIN DEP

Fri, 17 May 2013 12:05:17 -0400

Oh, man alive. It is now absolutely apparent that, not only is the Heritage Foundation, a supposedly respectable conservative think-tank, is full of white supremacists, but that they’re actually trying to back-track like Nazi Tiger tanks during the Battle of the Bulge. You know what I think? Big sweat. Go get a melanin shot.

In case you haven’t heard, the Heritage Foundation got popped last week when reporters discovered that Jonathan Richwine, a Harvard graduate and supposed quantitative analyst for Heritage’s long-awaited recommendations regarding immigration, also writes for several white supremacist agit-prop magazines. First it was the dumb-ass Charles Murray’s “The Bell Curve” that sought to document that Blacks are less intelligent than whites in 1996, and now this revanchist white Republican Robot report on Latinos, some of the smartest folks I know. And I know many Latinos.

Heritage? That’s a familiar term around here in Dallas, one of the twin towers of the Old South, the other being Atlanta. When we hear the term, we immediately know that what’s being suggested is the heritage of Jim Crow white supremacy and a defense of the old racist rabbit tricks the United States has been battling for over 50 years.

When are those T-dancers going to wake-up to the plain fact of the matter that both Blacks and Latinos have every right to be here? When are they going to realize that melanin dependency or melanin deficiency is a serious condition that strikes everywhere from Southern California all the way to Florida.

A couple of weeks ago, laughing a little to myself over this, I posted a picture of a turkey, dubbed it a photograph of Clark Gobbler, star of “Gone With the Wind” alongside a picture of a rabbit I named “Rabbit E. Lee”, actual photo. My friends on Facebook laughed too. It’s funny and odd that these Whiteys seem to think that, now that the Old South has industrialized, they can push us back to the mid-1950s and return dark-skinned people into the chattel those Igloo-heads seem to think they are.

Reactionary. Yes indeed. Pat Robertson, just today, announced that the problems the U.S. military is having in terms of violent assaults against women and gays is a female problem because they are temptresses that need to be put back in the kitchen. While Robertson, not necessarily known for his tact, didn’t go so far as to demand Gloria Steinem get him a beer, he came awfully close.

The “vaunted” Cumulus Media AM talk radio outlet here in Dallas, KLIF 570, sits in the Heritage building. Tune in there, and you hear the same white Republican robotism as on Rush Limbaugh, Lou Dobbs, and Alex Jones. When are they just going to give it up?

I remember moving to Texas in 1963, and the second I stepped out of the car that hot July afternoon, I felt the sheer white-hot hatred in the air. I had no idea what that was about, but supposedly the same “good Christian women” of Highland Park, Texas, an almost all-white village that has been desperately conservative since the Thirties, had already bashed Adali Stevenson, a Democrat, over the head with racist protest signs. Then, it was LBJ’s turn as the same women, dressed like the Kilgore Rangerettes in red, white and blue, spit on Ladybird as they were leaving the Baker Hotel in downtown.

Of course, my family, which is both white and predominately from the South in the first place, knows all about white Klan Republican robotville. My uncle, Richard Taylor Rives, is the 5^th Circuit Justice who decided the Rosa Parks case in 1956. The Klan burned a cross in his front yard in Montgomery, Alabama, and painted swastikas on family graves across the nation. I was three-years-old when someone with a Southern accent called our home in Colorado to tell me that he was going to kill my mother.

Those people are totally hateful, and now they’re in control of the Republican reactionary robot. Of course, they’re trying to hide it, but the lunatic fringe is alive and well. I think one Highland Park housewife even flew the stars and bars in the 1980s. The Reagan revolution was nothing but full-blown Southern Strategy designed to revamp conservatism and the rising of the Old South. I’ll never forget Reagan baiting Mario Salvio in 1964, calling any student who wanted free speech rights a Communist. J. Edgar Hoover helped: Shake n Bake.

When the Big Chill came true in 1981, we all realized we had been blindsided. The neo-conservatives were essentially reactionaries against anything that happened in the 1960s, and they’re still at it. Hasn’t anyone noticed that all this Islamo-fascism BS is nothing more than a revanchist reaction to the oldest rivalry in Western civilization and that the Russians and the Chinese have been sitting back watching reactionary Republicans waste our manpower and treasure?

Sure sounds like Cold War part two to me. My wish is that those idiot-heads would just go back to their woods. If they’re so melanin dependent, they can get melanin shots and become Black themselves.

In a word: Tired. Tired of racism. Tired of being held-down in Dallas by this proto-fascist Old South underground. Brought to you of course by the white-on-white reactionaries who have decided they want “their” country back.

Just today, some T-dancer on the Wall Street Journal’s Peggy Noonan op ed piece about Obama being the next Watergate told the world that Gordon Hilgers must be white.

Yes I am. And you know what? We don’t serve people like that. Go get a country of your own. I hear North Korea is open for business. Just saying.