Fred Hampton and the Illegitimacy of the State

Forty-nine years ago, the Chicago Police Department (CPD), in cooperation with the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), raided the home of twenty-one-year-old Black Panther Party leader, Fred Hampton, just before dawn.  Also killed in that raid was organizer, Mark Clark. 

I was eighteen years old when I began independently researching the murder of Fred Hampton.  This was ten years ago when I learned how the FBI planted an operative close to Hampton, a coward by the name of William O’Neal, who, on the night of the raid, drugged Fred Hampton so that he wouldn’t wake up when the police busted down door.  As a result Fred Hampton was shot in his bed next to his pregnant fiance, Deborah Johnson.

The photo evidence is a Google search away.  The documentary goes into more depth regarding the depravity and planning of the government agents that murdered Fred Hampton in his sleep.  I hate seeing the body of Fred Hampton laying across the bottom of his bedroom threshold, but I really hate the smug face of the cops that took Fred Hampton’s body out of his house, and every single person involved with the repression, harassment, and murder of Civil Rights and revolutionary Black organizers. 

At eighteen I understood the potential of State violence and their willingness to use it without remorse, and in the next ten years, I haven’t found a damn piece of evidence to counter this perspective.  It was Martin Luther King Jr. that called the United States government “the greatest purveyor of violence” in the world in 1967, and it still holds true today in the seventeenth year of the invasion of Afghanistan.  The State (by that I mean the Federal, State and municipal governments, bureaucracy, court systems, police, and military) is not a peaceful entity, but rather a self-serving leviathan of invested individuals dedicated to maintaining this current (unequal, violent, and polluting) organization of the world. 

How dedicated to maintaining control to the wealth and power in the USA?  Enough to target and kill a twenty-one year old in his bed because the head of the FBI declared the Black Panther Party “the greatest threat to the internal security of the country.”  The function of the State (and really any institution) is to maintain its existence, legitimacy, and control over wealth and power in an area.  The United States is pretty efficient at maintaining control and legitimacy, so much so that we can drop two atomic bombs in 1945 and then use the hypothetical existence of atomic bombs to invade another country (Iraq in 2003). 

Coming from a peace and justice perspective, it doesn’t take long to notice a trend: the pattern of violence, corruption, debauchery, and hate that has driven foreign and domestic policy since the founding of this nation.  On the flip side, it is equally apparent how much USAmericans and especially those at the top of the capitalist pyramid scheme, have to lose: material comforts, financial stability, excess, new items for consumption and dopamine spikes, and the rest of the manufactured and imported goods that are threatened by the necessary solutions to global climate change.

But this isn’t about climate change, this is about realizing the potential for depravity and violence that the boys in blue possess.  This is about my inability to forgive the police for the murder of Fred Hampton, and for harassing, targeting, imprisoning, and repressing so many other Civil Rights leaders during the sixties, including Martin Luther King Jr. 

Once you have this kind of knowledge on the nature law enforcement in the USA, there is no way in hell they can ever legitimize themselves again.  Not that they’re trying very hard.  The shooting of Emantic Bradford Jr. in the Alabama mall on Thanksgiving is being exposed, and it looks like the cops shot the twenty-one year old in the back as he directed shoppers to safety holding a firearm he was legally allowed to carry in public. 

Cops can plan out and execute a charismatic and promising twenty-one-year-old leader of a revolutionary Black organization while he sleeps, or they can gun down a twenty-one-year old in the back while he directs panicked people to safety.  For both instances, the boys in blue were threatened by someone with a gun because as I mentioned above, the function of the State is to maintain control by any means necessary.  And an institution with those kind of operating instructions, and with that amount of firepower, and with that much invested in the unequal distribution of wealth and power, well that institution is illegitimate and must be abolished. 

Radical Idealism: Jesus and the Radical Tradition

This piece was originally published on Counterpunch.org.

Another world is possible, if not already on its way – for better or worse.  There are humanizing and sustainable alternatives to the way we organize society, and there is a diverse tradition of individuals and movements that do the work to build a better future.  I would characterize this tradition as radical idealism: a stance dedicated to dignity, peace, and the constant struggle against injustice.

As a young person in US public education as well as the Protestant church, I did not consider the possibility of another world: it’s not the purpose of those (or any) institution to suggest alternatives exist.  But I was a critical child, and discovered the tradition of radical idealism through the punk rock scene.  Everything was permitted: from NOFX to Chumbawamba, Noam Chomsky to Emma Goldman, Edward Abbey to Rachel Carson, Leonard Peltier to John (Fire) Lame Deer, Howard Zinn to James Boggs, and from Fred Hampton to Subcomandante Marcos[1].  My education began where the school and church curriculum would not go.

The tradition of radical thinking, writing, organizing, and fighting for a better world – the foundation of radical idealism – is a fringe tradition. I recognized this early on, and made a connection to things I read in the Bible, namely the life and teachings of Jesus of Nazareth.

Jesus was a threat to the power structures during His time and was exiled immediately after birth.  He taught his followers a lifestyle incompatible with greed, individualism, authoritarianism, militarism, and nationalism.  He healed, preached, and educated without a place to lay His head because He knew what awaited Him if He was captured by the authorities.  His Sermon on the Mount wasn’t meant to comfort the listener in turbulent times, but rather establish an ideal: an impossible standard to guide and provide hope for humanity. Like so many radical idealists before and after Him, Jesus was executed by the State.

The contradiction is stark.  If Jesus Christ was radical, what happened to the religion named after Him? Why does the nation that identifies with that religion seem to be the most oppressive and dangerous nation in history?  French professor, Jacques Ellul, in addressing why Christianity gave birth to a culture “completely opposite to what we read in the Bible,” offered an entire book on the “the subversion of Christianity[2].”  Although, in His typical fashion, Jesus explained the disconnect on an individual level when he quoted the Old Testament:

“Though seeing, they do not see; though hearing, they do not hear or understand.”  In them is fulfilled the prophecy of Isaiah: “You will be ever hearing but never understanding; you will be ever seeing but never perceiving.  For this people’s heart has become calloused; they hardly hear with their ears, and they have closed their eyes.  Otherwise they might see with their eyes, hear with their ears, understand with their hearts and turn, and I would heal them.” (Matthew 13: 13-15).

Jesus spoke plainly, radically, and idealistically[3].  He challenged His followers to hear His words and not participate in the ways of predatory economics, authoritarian politics, and rampant individualism.  Unfortunately, Christianity allowed the social forces of greed (capitalism) and country (nationalism) to institutionalize the Man and His teachings in order to obtain a seat at the table of power.  When a person’s eyes, ears, and hearts are closed to the love and dignity of all humans, dehumanizing solutions develop in the darkness.

This darkness is palpable in 2018.  The United States of Amnesia, consumed by 24-hour news media and miles of Twitter feeds, has given way to an information age with little substance.  The most powerful office in the country is held by a White Nationalist, and it appears that many Christians in the U.S. support him.  The Democrats can only hope to be a moderating force against overt white supremacy, exploitation, and war as they shift quickly to the center-right of the political spectrum.  The socialists, if not consumed by the Democrats, can barely get a platform in the political arena.  All the while the anarchists battle the fascists, distribute for Food Not Bombs, and provide disaster relief.  The ideology of capitalism and war research is embedded in academic institutions, and will not allow the university a chance to combat a corrupt and oppressive society.  All the while, Noam Chomsky can’t stop reminding us that we face two existential threats: climate change and nuclear annihilation (i.e., the slow burn or the fast track).

Radical idealism is not delusional, but allows the individual a way to conceptualize light in dark times.  It does this by positioning us in the collective struggle for dignity, peace, and justice.  Radical idealists have left a trail of breadcrumbs and books for us to draw strength from including the teachings of Jesus contained in the Gospels.  It is up to us to build a new society in the shell of the old, an ideal society grounded in love, dignity, and lessons learned from the light of radical idealism.

Notes.

[1] Listed are leftist political musicians, USAmerican anarchists, environmentalists, Indigenous resistant fighters, working-class intellectuals, and revolutionary organizers.

[2] The contradiction inherent in radical idealism is the accompanying pessimism resulting from the fact that past attempts at redistributing wealth and power in society have resulted in totalitarian states either through seizing control internally as was the case with the Soviet Union, or waging war against the revolution as was the case in Spain in 1936. Therefore, any lesson from other movements that were corrupted by greed and the pursuit of power are valuable. (Ellul, Jacques. The Subversion of Christianity. Grand Rapids, William B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1986.)

[3] This particular reading of this Bible passage was offered to me by Joel Spring quoting Wilhelm Reich quoting Jesus of Nazareth in the phenomenal book, A Primer of Libertarian Education. (Spring, Joel. A Primer of Libertarian Education. Montreal/New York/London, Black Rose Books, 1998.)

Critical Hope

"For Marx, Freire, and the twentieth-century existentalist psychologists, it is in the realm of consciousness that the contradiction between freedom and determinism is overcome.  While consciousness and life activity are determined by material conditions, a person who has no consciousness of self, who has nothing but life activity, is completely propelled by social forces.  But the person who is aware of these forces and conscious of their nature is able to break with the trajectory of history and participate in the radical change of self and society."

- From "A Primer of Libertarian Education" by Joel Spring

For critical hope - the hope for another world, the hope for an end to a culture of violent individualism and fear - there is a necessity to pay attention, to stay woke, and to strategically go to the places on the outside of the mainstream narrative and do the lord’s work, that humanizing kind of work where we lose our lives in order to find them. “‘The unexamined life is not worth living’ and ‘the examined life is painful’” (Socrates and Malcolm X told through educator and writer, Jeff Duncan-Andrade).  I remind myself often that the old-timers despaired probably as much or more as I do now at the state of the world when the US invaded Afghanistan and Iraq.  I was only becoming aware of the world then, but I remember the rage of my older activist friends.  At the same time, I think the current day is a pretty unique and frightful reality.  Twitter doesn’t help - with more information comes more vexation.  Bombs, Trump, white supremacists, troops on the border, huge lottery jackpots, too many flavors of beer, memes, Marvel movies, climate change, ad infinitum…

What is required is a simultaneous rejection of despair and cheap optimism, a courageous and love-filled facing of the social forces that drive our material existence, and an affinity for the solidarity work that takes us outside our comfort zone to the marginalized places all over the globe in order to do the necessary work to struggle for equity, justice, peace and dignity.

Early Notes on National Capitalism

Trump is a nationalist.  He’s urging his folks to use that word.  His nationalism is a response to a notion of ‘globalism,’ or ‘globalization.’  Back in the early 2000s globalization was the enemy of the radical Left.  Globalization and the neoliberal, state-sponsored capitalism that was engulfing the globe in multinational corporate expansion.  Globalization was what every mass protest from Seattle to Miami was rallying against.  The anti-globalization movement didn’t want US companies moving production overseas to exploit the global poor.  The anti-globalization movement didn’t want predatory banks and international lenders doing the same to poor countries as the predatory lenders were doing to poor homeowners in the US before the bubble burst.  The anti-globalization movement of yesteryear wanted international solidarity, environmental regulations to stave off mining, foresting, drilling, and other Earth-destroying activities, and the end to multi-national predatory capitalism and finance.  

Now Trump is a nationalist because ‘globalism’ is bad.  Somehow the moderate and radical Right have co-opted the global economic justice movement of the Left and turned it into the momentum behind national capitalism. 

I don’t use that term lightly.  I also recognize the contradictions when the president of the US espousing an ideology of nationalism since the US (including its multinational affiliates) is the economic and political empire of the day.  How can the US power structures believe in nationalism when it’s the exploitation of the entire planet that has provided this country with so much wealth throughout the last 500 years?

The anti-globalization movement hoped for another world, a world where wealth and power were distributed equally across the globe and across local communities in order to combat the ever-increasing centralization of wealth and power in the hands of the few.  The anti-globalization movement valued the diversity of local communities and sought to empower their unique solutions to problems facing us as humans.  The anti-globalization movement recognized the contradiction that multi-national corporations had access to move capital and production centers across borders, but poor people of the world were not allowed the same freedom of movement.  But Trump and the radical Right have now co-opted the discontent with the world we live in and are offering a terrifying, authoritarian solution in the form of national capitalism.

We can identify some of the tenants of Trump’s national capitalism in a few broad strokes: 1) the vilification and inhuman treatment of migrants, 2) the deregulation of environmental policies, 3) the consistent reliance on the war manufacturing sector of the US economy, 4) the continued structuring of wealth and power in the hands of a few, and 5) the sinister motto of “profit above all else.”

Trump was a capitalist.  Now he’s a proud national capitalist.  Let’s do ourselves a favor and not call the American fascists "nazis" (national socialists), but the more apt term "national capitalists."  Once we recognize this threat facing humanity we can begin to talk about constructive and creative ways to empower democracy, ensure the dignity of all people, and redistribute wealth and power in the world.  Or at the very least resist fascism in the USA.

Bring on the End

The end of a matter is better than its beginning, and patience is better than pride (Ecclesiastes 7:8).

Years ago, I rallied around this Old Testament verse after watching HBO’s detective drama True Detectives.  After eight, hour-long episodes, I was relieved that the dark Louisiana drama was over.  It made it better.  It made it ephemeral.

Originally, corporations, limited-liability companies, were not immortal institutions able to accumulate huge amounts of wealth and power.  Municipalities or local governments would task a group of people to build a bridge or work on a specific task, and after the job was done, the corporation would be dissolved.  And in a sick twist of political maneuvering, corporations jumped on the 14^th Amendment, the Amendment passed to protect the rights of freed enslaved persons, and now, arguably, Amazon, Apple, Google, Facebook, and the like have more protections, allowances, and power under the law than the people of the United States, and in certain arenas, the United States government.

Returning to the Old Testament, comes the often overlooked portion of Leviticus that redistributes the wealth and property of Israel because private property is a delusion when everything under the sun belongs to God.  The biblical law of Jubilee requires all lands to be returned, persons (sold into servitude) to be released, and all debts to be forgiven.  The unbridled accumulation of wealth and power through generations is a terrible idea, but essentially the founding idea of this nation. 

The end of something is better than the beginning.  It allows us time to reset.  To redistribute wealth and power.  To reflect on the decisions made individually and collectively in our lives and societies. 

Yes, I’m talking about the end of capitalism.  Of the American Empire.

This requires responsibility and patience – responsibility for ourselves and our neighbors, and patience with the messy and slow-moving pace of peace, justice and equity work.  But that’s the work that needs to be done.  It’s pride and greed that drives Trump to slap his name on every hideous thing his family’s estate has built.  It’s pride and greed that drives the American war hawks and profiteers into every corner of the globe.  It’s pride and greed that created 24-hour news media with it’s endless jabbering and political catering.  It's pride and greed that motivates the Democrats and Republicans to not take any serious measure to combat the slow apocalypse of climate change.  It’s pride and greed and institutions with no end in sight. 

I’m looking to the end of capitalism for the sake of the planet.

 

The Harvest Is Coming, or No More Special Forces

Yesterday, Buzzfeed published a terrifying article describing the role of US special forces operatives being hired out by private companies to do the whims of foreign governments.  The United States is already the biggest exporter of weapons and other military technologies.  Now, as was the logical conclusion of the evil empire, the US is servicing foreign governments by providing a pool of mercenaries to do what they’re trained for: killing humans.  The United States is sowing some seriously destructive and violent seeds that will only bloom into fatal fruits.

The economy of our evil empire is supported largely by defense spending, weapons manufacturing, and technologies developed originally by research and development (R&D) grants paid for by the military.  This is what it means to be a warfare state.  This is why the United States is still at war in Afghanistan going on eighteen years (as well as to train more US Special Forces operatives).  The wars we fight today are not the wars of the past.  Unmanned drones piloted by a person hundreds or thousands  of miles away drop bombs on people who have no way of defending themselves.  If not drones, then special forces operatives – the guys they make movies about, they idolize in first person shooter video games, the guys that are so willing to serve their country that they train for years in the art of ending human life.  That gamut of training and preparing to be the most effective killing machine in the world is not a humanizing endeavor.  No one is advocating the pleasantness, goodness, or positive impact of those that work Special Forces.  At best, the argument goes that they’re defending our freedoms [sic] as Americans or that the enemy whom their killing is a depraved, soulless entity.  But the entire reason for being for a Special Forces operative is to effectively neutralize targets, or in other words: end human life.  I don’t sympathize with evil people regardless of what country they were born in, but dedicating oneself to the art, science, production, or profiting from the murder of others is a tragic and loathsome offense.

Violence and war is the option after creativity and dignity have been abandoned and that is exactly what the US is reaping with the current state of affairs.  We have abandoned dignity by allowing so many killing machines be allowed out of our borders to be used for their one intended purpose all around the world.  We have abandoned creativity by allowing the easy, deplorable, and effective solution of violence to dominate our actions in the face of conflict and problems.  We need a change of course.  We need to end the violence perpetuated, exported, and designed by our government.  We need to defund the Pentagon.  Bring the troops home.  Heal them.  Teach them and our collective sense of right and wrong that it is not honorable to pull triggers or drop bombs.  For a peaceful future we’re going to need, not only to radically transform the mechanisms and values of our society, but also suspend the atrocious nature of training and supporting troops that specialize in murder.  Conflict can escalate or de-escalate.  The former is the path to death while the latter is the path to peace.  It’s time to sow seeds of peace because the harvest is coming.

Another World is Possible

My favorite panel from Bill Watterson was refurnished as a primitive meme.  It portrays Calvin at the dinner table with his mom. On the left of the frame, Calvin's mom - eyes lowered to her plate - says, "Things could be worse, Calvin."  To the right of the frame, Calvin is leaning over his plate proclaiming loudly, "Life could be a lot better, too!"

I came out of the 2000s with a crash course in radicalism and revolutionary politics.  At the current rate of the world, I'm going to come out of the 2010s with a crash course in dystopian realities, Twitter induced anxieties, and the glitter and doom of climate change. 

"For with much wisdom comes much sorrow; the more knowledge, the more grief" (Ecclesiastes 1:18).  There is another world on its way, if we take it from Arundhati Roy, and listen very carefully we can hear her breathe on a quiet day.  But quiet days are few and far between in the current state of the world.  Quiet days are a privilege for the disconnected, the book readers, the hikers, and some city street walkers.  Turbulence is the defining atmosphere of our era.  Hot air colluding with frightened humans concerned about the state of their property and privilege, and willing to submit to the storm of too much work for too little play, too much fear for too little love, too many mechanisms for too few outlets for human creativity.

I'm a product of radical social, political, and economic criticism in the era of radical access to information.  Thank God for the journalists that are willing to tell the truth, to paint narratives of the sick realities of the world, and to incite others to realize that, left unattended, the rich and powerful resemble a conceiving beast backed into a corner by its own shadow.  But the rank-and-file realities of those living in the United States cannot escape the insidious nature of the white supremacist, capitalist patriarchy.  I'm serious.  The United States is reaping what it sowed when Columbus set foot on this land and deemed the other humans worthy of enslavement.  We didn't get a say in what Columbus or the other colonizers did, but we're feeling the effects everyday when we go to school, go to work, go to the store, go to the glowing screen.

I will never blame anyone for not paying attention unless I know them.  Paying attention to the state of the world is a buzzkill that, done incorrectly, can lead directly to the fourth stage of grief. 

But listen...to a quiet day.  Then come back and recognize that those that deny alternatives for how the world could be, and those that deem any changes to society as terrible transgressions, know that those uncreative nay-sayers are simply full of hot air and fear. 

It's not great believing authoritarianism, the climate, ignorance, and social/political/economic problems are on the rise, but it's the only world we've got.  And in this world, as a human endowed with dignity, there is that voice that echos Calvin at the dinner table - discontent with the way things are - that must remind us everyday that things could be a lot better too, that there are alternatives to life as we know it, that another world is possible. 

Meeting Chomsky (Sunday, February 11, 2018)

            I’ve never experienced such danger as when driving through freezing rain from Lansing to Detroit to see my intellectual hero, Noam Chomsky.  The windshield wiper mounts were frozen over, so there was no fluid to de-ice the windshield.  The front defroster was as high as it would go which would melt the ice on the windshield about six inches from the bottom, but then as it traveled up, it would collect on the other approximately two-thirds of the top portion of my windshield freezing into a blinding mass.  I pulled over four times on the shoulder of the highway in that first hour to scrape my windshield.  As I leaned all the way over the steering wheel to see through the visible part of my windshield I kept thinking: Noam Chomsky…Noam Chomsky…Noam Chomsky…

            Somehow, I made it to Detroit.  I had worked my way into an invitation to the social event prior to the National Lawyers Guild (NLG) Annual Dinner later that night.  I knew it was going to be a small setting and that I must have a few words with the greatest intellectual alive.  He arrived late, as his plane had arrived late the previous night.  He wore jeans rolled up at the ankles, grey slip-on tennis shoes, a blue oxford shirt covered with that blue sweater that I recognized from the last time I streamed one of his public talks.  He smiled at us and walked into the front hall of the old house that now doubled as a law office.  People circled around him and stared.  He smiled some more and slowly people began asking him questions about his flight and such.  Eventually he made a plate, which prompted me to make a plate as I hadn’t eaten anything all day.  People gathered around him in chairs, some kneeling to hear the soft-spoken man.  He could talk about anything on the drop of a dime.  I spoke briefly with a guy about his fascination with the Meyers-Briggs test, and then with a San Francisco couple that were friends of one of the lawyer honorees at the NLG dinner.  I briefly spoke with the lady honoree herself and congratulated her for her lifetime achievement award.  After the dinner, I wish I would’ve had more time and background knowledge regarding the two honorees, but my mind was set on one thing: Professor Noam Chomsky.

            I moved my way towards the most influential thinker in my life.    When the seat next to him opened up and I sat down.  “I’m going to be a high school English teacher, and I intend to bring your essays into my classroom whenever I can.” 

“Oh really!  That’s going to be hard work.” 

“That’s what I’ve been told.” 

“Does Michigan have charter schools?” 

“This is Betsy Devos’ home state, we are ground zero –“

“Noam?  Noam.  We’ve got to get going.”

“Would you sign my book quickly before you leave?”

Noam takes my copy of Chomsky on Miseducation and signs it with a note.  I say thank you.

“In high school, I remember a lot of inspiring teachers in that rotten place.”

We shake hands, and I walk away knowing what I have to do from there on out.

“To Brandon, Good luck in what lies ahead – exciting, difficult, lots of promise! Noam Chomsky”

The rest of the day I recovered from my encounter with Saint Chomsky.  I headed over to where the dinner was being held – a United Auto Workers (UAW) hall in Dearborn – and found a Starbucks nearby for coffee and WiFi (I tried to find a local coffee spot, but to no avail).  As the place filled up, a man approached me and asked to sit with me.  We began talking.  I told him I am a pre-service English teacher and he informed me he’s teaching math at a local charter school.  He’s a Yemen immigrant; his name was A---------.  He’s frustrated with secondary education.  He said the language barrier that many young immigrant children face causes the content to be neglected which compounds as they continue up through grades so that when they reach him, they are just coming into academic English but unable to handle the content of their grade.  He wanted to return to teaching at a college as he had done in Yemen.  We get talking about Noam Chomsky obviously, and he said he is a fan.  We begin talking about world affairs and this man gets it.  He has some family in Yemen and sends them money to buy food.  I tell him everything I know about US foreign policy I learned either from, or through the critical lenses, of Noam Chomsky.  We talked about how US fuel planes are fueling Saudi Arabian fighters in the air which then in turn go commit human rights abuses and acts of war in Yemen.  The conversation is spoken in solemn, hushed tones, and I realized just how important Professor Noam Chomsky’s criticism of the United States empire really is, and how I must take on another mantle other than being an inspiring teacher – I must be a radical and relentless social critic.

I was pleasantly surprised in my small talk with other members of the National Lawyer Guild, how much this organization does and has done for the anti-capitalist, pro-indigenous, anti-State state violence, and pro-environmental causes.  Looking through the event’s publication I saw just how connected the NLG was to advocating and defending alternative social orders in the US.  The UAW hall in Dearborn felt like a monumental space for labor resistance, and it all seemed very fitting.  The only thing that didn’t fit was the jackets worn by the weight staff.  My heart goes out to them for I will always be one of them.  I had a Pabst Blue Ribbon before dinner and enjoyed a plate of greens, potatoes, chicken and cold cheeses.  I had the fullest plate at my table and sort of made it a point of pride to use my dinner roll as a napkin to clean my plate entirely.  The most wasteful way to serve people is a buffet because people’s eyes are always bigger than their stomachs.  I had not eaten all day so my plate wasn’t big enough, but I was not going back for seconds because speeches were about to begin.

A lawyer pleaded for us to donate more (I had already paid the student price of $85 to get into the event) and I realized in her speech just how far to the Left this event was.  These were not the lawyers of lawyer jokes, but the epitome of bleeding heart radicals, who although came from means or acquired a great deal of student debt, had forgone the material promises of the legal profession and gone to work to empower and defend the capital P-People.  The artists showcased were a hip-hop collective dedicated to indigenous, environmental and poor people’s causes – all causes that are entirely connected to each other and marginalized by the business-as-usual of both US governments and global capitalism.  The student honorees were tireless defenders of the People in the streets.  From Standing Rock to J20 (the Trump inauguration resistance) to the confrontation that went down on March 5^th at MSU against the Neo-Nazi Richard Spencer, these young people often donned Day-Glo hats and worked as Street Lawyers hand-in-hand with the anarchists, unionists, anti-fascists, environmentalists and all the other schools of revolutionaries.  The lifetime achievement recipients were a husband and wife team.  Those two had done it all – from defending Black Panthers and the Weather Underground during the sixties, to suing every level of the State apparatus.  The woman noted that it was difficult at first to defend a citizen’s rights to blow up bombs in their backyard, “but the Constitution is the Constitution” and must be defended.  I understood from their short speeches that they knew their role in the struggle against power, inequality and State violence – they were there to use the law to hold those in power in check.  Of course they wanted another world, but they recognized the need for the legal work to protect the individual lives that are harmed by the criminal negligence of police, corporations and the State.  The husband spoke passionately against the US as an imperialist empire.  “You can’t have imperialism and democracy.  You can’t have both.”  He urged against insane defense spending and went so far as to voice support for the Vietnamese during the American invasion of Vietnam.  “Vietnam beat the US,” he said.  That tiny country fought the US every step of the way and modeled a mode of resistance against US wars of aggression.  He recognized his work as a lawyer by saying, “Sometimes, if ya can’t kick their ass, you can bite them in the ankles.” 

When it came time for Chomsky to speak, it was ten minutes to the scheduled time for closing remarks, but no one was leaving when the main event was the most cited intellectual alive.  I had an inkling at what Chomsky would talk about.  He’s been giving the same speech for awhile now, but it didn’t take away from the pain, irony and rage that it churned up in my heart and mind.  He began asking the audience if we want organized human existence to continue in the next one hundred years.  He spoke of the “terminal disaster” that the future is converging upon with insane nuclear nation states posturing and politicking all over the globe and he reaffirmed the newest research regarding the apocalyptic reality of global warming.  He called the USA a “rogue state” and didn’t let up. 

In regards to the threat of nuclear war, he cited declassified US and Soviet documents that showed just how close the world came to terminal disaster due to the stupidity of the world’s leaders and a little luck from a few soldiers.  One Soviet soldier was noted to not send a nuclear missile warning up the chain of command because it just seemed too improbable.  At the time the US was testing the missile defense systems on the border of the Soviet Union under Regan’s operation Able-Archer.  Chomsky said every school child should know that Russians name, because without him we wouldn’t be here today.

He quoted the science saying in the next one hundred years the Earth’s climate is going up 4 degrees Celsius which is twice as much as the previous suspected amount and will cause the sea levels to rise fifty feet or so, which will undoubtedly cause a majority of the world’s population to be in some deep water. 

Then he asked, exasperated, what the fuck is the news media reporting on these days?  How is the world being so complicit as the trajectory for human existence in one hundred years goes to shit at the hands of primarily US Republican party politics, but also that capitalist motto of profit over people.  “Those in power know what they’re doing, and yet they do nothing.”  Chomsky went on to say that he, the revolutionary figure in linguistics is at a loss for the word to describe this race towards extinction.  “It’s not insanity,” he said.  It’s something more serious and sinister.

After the doom and gloom, he asked another question: What would the world be like if countries followed their own law?  He cited a US law that says we cannot provide military aid to human rights violators.  Our two biggest recipients of bombs and intelligence are Israel (the apartheid state) and Saudi Arabia (the oil rich country causing famine and a cholera-epidemic in Yemen). 

Then somehow, he turned to the US invasion of the Middle East and how we’ve spent nearly $6 trillion dollars occupying the region.  He noted, oddly, that the returns for the couple of hundred dollars that the terrorists spent to commit 9/11 had the best rate of return than any investment.  He cited post-Soviet Union, US military strategy where general and policy makers agreed that a “Mad Man” strategy would be in the US’ best interest because it would make us seem unpredictable and therefore dangerous.  He gave the example that if a person robs a store with a gun but doesn’t shoot anyone they still used the gun.  The same goes for US foreign policy: if the US invades, or even bullies, a country then we are using nuclear weapons.

He then turned to a short study of what a “humanitarian intervention” really was and which past warlords had used the term.  He found that Mussolini, Japan and Hitler had all claimed their pre-WWII invasions were humanitarian in nature.  Then he cited the NATO bombing of Serbia and later the US bombing of Libya as other examples.  For both acts of war, he quoted government officials saying in more or less words that they dropped bombs because the regions were unwelcoming to western business interests.  He cited India invading West Pakistan and Vietnam invading Cambodia as actual interventions because of a greater evil, but that the US was on the wrong side of those conflicts as well.

He ended with an analysis of a 2008 Supreme Court case that he called the “Heller case.”  The question at hand, said Chomsky, was, “is it the Divine Right of citizens to be able to bring assault rifles into a Starbucks?”  He got truly originalist and questioned the purpose of the 2^nd Amendment.  “Why did the founders think men should bear arms?” he asked.  “Two reasons really, to kill Indians and keep down slaves.”  He cited Britain’s suggesting that slavery in the colonies should be abolished at that expansion into the North American continent should at the Appalachian Mountains.  Thus, the Revolutionary war.  Let me repeat, Chomsky said that the Revolutionary war was fought in order for the colonies to keep their slaves and to continue western colonial expansion.  Then he said that the USA has been engaged in arm conflict ever since our foundation. 

I stopped taking notes at this point.  He ended on the need to curb the US empire and work for a better world, but I was just as exhausted then as I am now writing this entire essay in a single, over-caffeinated sitting.

Chomsky was 89 when I met him.  It was a blessing for me to see him, but from what I can tell he’s got more years ahead of him.  His mind keeps him alive.  After all of this, I would ask him how he remains so calm, positive, and agreeable (at least in person, maybe not in ideas) when he exposes himself to so much pain and injustice in the world (apparently, he reads four or five newspapers a day). 

I owe a lot to Noam Chomsky.  When I think of critical thinking or critical lenses in my education class, I think of Noam Chomsky.  I’m afraid no person can take up the mantle of his genius or analysis.  I’m afraid he’s right in his doom and gloom.  I’m afraid I’m right in knowing that this murderous experiment in freedom in the US is coming to a close, at least the ‘freedom’ part anyways.  I’m afraid that the dehumanization of the world’s population by war profiteers, global capitalists, and technocrats is finally going to come to a head.  One of the speakers said, that all revolutionaries hope for the revolution to come in their lifetime but it never does.  My fear is not that the revolution will come, but that the fall of an Empire is going to be messy and idiotic. 

I chose education because it’s sustainable and the necessary precondition for creating another world, a new world in the shell of the old, I just hope 1) there is a world to recreate, and 2) that I can inspire future generations to take on the mantle of revolutionary ways of living like Chomsky inspired in me.

Rethinking Everything (2009)

            Last Tuesday, I read the headline of a USA Today article entitled, “Bird deaths soar at wind farms” (Sep. 22, 2009).  The article describes how wind farms are “slaughtering thousands of birds” as the birds are “sliced up by the blades of roughly 5,400 turbines” or “electrocuted by the wind farm’s power lines.”  For one wind farm, roughly 10,000 birds are being killed every year. 

            What is the response?  Interior Secretary Ken Salazar just writes it off saying that, “the fact is that some birds will be killed is a reality.”  This is typical.  An absolute acceptance in the way things are and the willingness to sacrifice life on the altar of civilization.

            Industrial civilization is killing the planet.

            Attempts to reform industrial civilization are still killing the planet. 

            I can already hear the opposition.  Denial is the loudest voice.  “No, industrial civilization is not killing the planet.”  Dead zones in the ocean.  Deforestation and the destruction of the native wilderness.  Factory farms.  Climate change.  The rapid extinction of species.  Oil spills.  Overpopulation.  Toxins in every source of water on the planet.  Escalating numbers of cancer victims.  Soil depletion.  Acid rain. Urban sprawl.  Ten thousand birds being electrocuted and sliced up by “clean” energy sources.

            Then there are those who downplay the situation and suggest we can fix it without attacking civilization.  We just need to be stewards of the Earth and live more eco-friendly lives.  These people are advocating wind farms, Toyota Priuses, LEED-certified buildings, and going green.  But honest reflection shows that wind farms murder birds.  Cars need roads and metals mined from somewhere, transported somehow, to be manufactured in factories running off some energy source.  LEED-certified buildings are still structures made of things taken from a finite planet, built with the same destructive machines producing everything else.  And going green is just what we the consumers want to satisfy our guilt from living within a culture this destructive.

            Or there are people using Ken Salazar’s defense that the fact is the Earth taking damage is a reality if we want to sustain microwaves, televisions, laptops, treadmills, dishwashers and material affluence in a techno-culture.

            All these ways of thinking are pathological and constitute a collective failure of civilized humans respect for life and ourselves.

            Anarcho-primitivist author, John Zerzan offers another way, “the voluntary abandonment of the industrial mode of existence is not self-renunciation, but a healing return.”

            Anarcho-primitivism?  Abandoning the industrial mode of existence?  Yes.

            Our existence on this planet has not always been characterized this way, and in fact, humans have lived longer and more sustainably as gatherer-hunters than as civilized humans within industrialization.  Pre-civilized life was not “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short,” but according to the American anthropologist, Marshal Sahlins, the gatherer-hunter existence was “the original affluent society.”

             Let’s start dialoguing about everything we have known our whole lives because it’s liberating and necessary.  People have already started.  And Christ-followers are speaking resistance too.  In October, I will be joining the Psalters and Theillalogical Spoon among others in Philadelphia for some “biblical explorations of nature, civilization, and feral faith” at the Gathering Around the Unhewn Stone conference. 

            We know that we cannot sustain this mode of existence forever, and the 50 Simple Things You Can do to Stay in Denial with fluorescent light bulbs and blood-splattered windmills are not a solution.  Let’s start somewhere and rethink existence.

           

An Open Letter to First van Reken (2009)

To the Creation Care Family,

At the end of the semester, I will be leaving Calvin College for Montana to join the Buffalo Field Campaign, a group working “to stop the slaughter and harassment of Yellowstone’s wild buffalo.”  Before I leave, I wanted to offer some thoughts on the floor’s question for the year:  “What further initiatives can be taken to be truly sustainable, and who can inspire us to take these steps?”

We live in the American Empire.  In history classes we are told of the trials overcame and the resulting greatness of our nation.  In regards to the formation of the country, we were told it was ordained by God for Europeans to spread across the continent because of Manifest Destiny.  This was a story that was told at the time to rationalize the destruction and slaughter of indigenous peoples and non-humans inhabiting the continent previously.  Here is another myth that is underlying our culture today with equally unsettling results: the Myth of Progress.  This myth tells us that every action taken by civilized people whether it is technological, economic, political, philosophical, or scientific in nature is a part of the ascent towards greatness and a better world.  The myth says that civilization is the pinnacle of human existence.  And most Christians believe this lie.

I’d like to suggest that the Genesis narratives offer us an alternative vision of life.  In fact, Genesis offers a story of civilization as decent, the antithesis of our delusional myth.  Life in the Garden of Eden more closely resembles the mass of Homo sapiens existence on the planet as hunter-gatherers (anthropologist Marshall Sahlins describes this as, “the original affluent society”) rather than modern society.  God, through the earth, provides for the naked vegans, and it is very good.  When we try to “be like God, knowing good and evil” and eat from the tree in the middle of the garden we fall into a life of toil through agriculture.  This also coordinates with histories of human existence from anthropologists such as Marshall Sahlins, Richard B. Lee, Stanley Diamond, and author, Jared Diamond.  Once hunter-gatherers begin to rely on agriculture and domesticated animals instead of nomadic foraging, everything changes.  From agriculture comes a surplus of food.  Ruling classes form and require armies to protect the elites and surplus.  Extensive labor is needed to work in the fields, and slavery becomes the solution.  Violence, inequality, and oppression become widespread.  We see an agriculturalist attacking a non-agriculturalist in the Cain and Abel story: Cain, the agriculturalist kills Abel, the pastoralist.  Then Cain builds a city, the defining feature of civilization, and historically the next step in humanity’s decent.  In the Tower of Babel story, we witness civilized people attempting to, “make a name for ourselves,” by developing a technology to build a “city and a tower with its top in the heavens.”   God knows, “this is only the beginning of what they will do; nothing that they propose to do will now be impossible for them,” and ends this by confusing their language.  God intervenes in the exploits of civilized people in order to stop them from becoming too powerful. 

This does not sound like civilization as ascent or the Myth of Progress.  This is civilized existence as decent and the alienation of humanity from the living world and from God.  (I refer anyone wanting a better description of this to check out Ched Myers or Jacques Ellul on Jesusradicals.com.)

With that said, what is it that we are trying to sustain?  And do we even want to sustain plastic, cancer, species extinction, unmanned drones, pavement, pollution, computers, rising suicide rates, suburbia, wage slavery, starvation, consumerism, fast food, industrial agriculture, and bananas in Michigan during the winter?  Do we want to sustain our Tower of Babel?

So who can lead us towards a new mode of existence?  God instructs Moses through a burning bush in the wilderness (Ex. 3:1-5).  Throughout 1 Kings 17, 18, and 19, the prophet Elijah travels the wilderness doing as God directs him.  John the Baptist lived out feral faith in the wilderness of Judea proclaiming the coming of the Lord (Mat. 3:1-4).  Jesus was led into the wilderness before he could start his ministry (Mat. 4:1), then commands us not to be anxious and offers the life of the birds and lilies as a way to live (Mat. 6:25-34).  There is a trend and we’ve stopped listening.  We’ve surrounded ourselves with glowing screens, multitasking, frantically doing little, and our re-created environments.  We can identify more celebrities than we can plants living outside our door.  We spend most time walled into sterile environments void of life beyond people.  Even outside, instead of the rustling of the fauna and the calls of birds we hear the distant roar of car and construction sites.  This is alienation.  All living things are groaning for us to abandon this existence.  We were not created to live this way.

“For the creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the children of God; for the creation was subjected to futility, not of its own will but by the will of the one who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to decay and will obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God.  We know that the whole creation has been groaning in labor pains until now.” (Romans 8:19-22)

Creation can care for itself, but it cannot care for this pathological civilization we have created by believing we can control and re-create this good earth.  We on the other hand cannot care for ourselves, and in believing we can, turn our back on each other, our non-human neighbors, and God. 

May we be holy and wild,

Brandon Lee

Anarchy and Absurdity (2011)

The world is in a constant state of anarchy.  Order is imposed on it in the forms of science, religion and politics, and the individual, for the most part, accepts it.  The ones that don’t are considered subversive, and while some subvert the system through violence and self-exclusion from society, the most continue on the same course as those who accept it.  The individual that accepts the pillars of society accept the power established in the anarchic nature of the world.  American democracy is the victory of white landowners establishing laws and establishing a mode of existence for the borders of America that the populations residing within these borders will accept.  This mode of existence tells the individual to fear anarchy as it is in the existence of politics’ best interest that no other contender manifests, but nonetheless it is anarchy repressed by the State.  Maybe the current State is most beneficial for the biggest number inhabitants of the American continent, but that is not the case when an ecological, spiritual, and qualitative existence are the lenses that one wears to judge.

               Judgment of something this abstract is the death of the anarchist who is destroyed by the State by repression or conformity, or is temporarily dispatched to the realm of the Absurd.  The anarchist, after finding the inherent evil in Power, Control and Authority resists as the will allows, but the individual is unable to continue resistance indefinitely and wanders away into a situation that turns the evil into a sick joke.  The Absurdist takes the sick joke as a new Cause and begins it’s dissemination among those around him or through writing.  The sick joke must be told because an anarchist devoid of the fervor that anarchy provokes is without a thought-home.  The sick joke is Power of man over anything, and an intense need for ridicule is needed to satisfy the Absurdist’s ontological dilemma.

               And what an ontological dilemma the Absurdist is faced with!  With the critique of Power internalized, the Absurdist chooses to temporarily ignore the active rejection of Power and chooses a tactic that is not considered productive in the arsenal of anarchist’s tactics: ridicule.  Rejection is still carried into the realm of the Absurd, but rejection is voiced in a new light.  But this light does not cast the shadow of productivity that the active anarchist is able to use to keep his mind out of guilt. 

Quick Friend for Cash 4/12/16

               I’ll shoot the shit with you and sympathize with you and see your side of the story and invest a minute piece of my life into the going-ons of your life, but let’s call it as it is: a friend for hire.  If you’re feeling political, or curious about all things fairy, or maybe questioning whether there is a G-d, then the contract is off.  I may be positioned between you and the half-empty bottles of fire water behind me, but there are limits to the degradation that I will subject myself to, but I won’t tell you that, I’ll just smile, pause briefly and take me leave to walk a lap around the kitchen.  I control the interaction because I am standing and pour the libations.  Tip your bartender or the next one you meet will see it on your face.

Don Gately vs. Erik Prince (4/11/16)

What attracts me to fiction is the increasing sense that there are deeper, more worthwhile characters in novels than there are on the street.  This sentiment is obviously a product of my introversion, but also an invention of my repulsion at reading the stories of say Erik Prince, Dick Devos, Martin Shkreli or Jay VanAndel.  What my fiction shall do is to spearhead the hilarity and hideousness of despicably wealthy cultures and sentiments while maintaining enough realism so that people shudder at the actuality of the absurdity. 

Teacher Disposition Essay (Fall 2017)

Another world is shaping up in the poverty of global capitalism.  To defend life, dignity and equality, a critical, well-versed populace must challenge the insidious subtleties of power structures and the influence of propaganda over their lives and communities.  To discern and disrupt authoritarian trends and the mass media that panders to power, warrior-scholars must live and teach in a state of critique (Coffey 7).  Driving this revolt against the dominant order begins with asking: to what extent are we in control of our own thoughts? Ideologies? And lives? Through examining the nature of individual socialization, students can begin to uncover the effects of the carceral state in themselves, their communities, global governing institutions and the ideologies that sustain power relations.  This is what is meant by scaffolding liberation.  In Freire-ian terms, we must model the deconstructing of the “oppressor consciousness” within ourselves while replacing it with “a critical awareness of oppression through the praxis of…struggle” (Freire Chp. 1).

               “At all times education is a political act, and schools are embedded within a sociocultural reality that benefits some at the expense of others” (Morrell and Scherff xiii).  The warrior-scholar finds a constructive niche by practicing critical literacies with young people in the halls of public education, but not without resistance from the institutions themselves.  Anne Ruggles Gere offers six purposes for education in the US: “to improve morality, prepare good workers, create an elite, produce good citizens, foster personal growth and offset inequity” (24).  These six reasons all exist to sustain or re-adjust outliers to the dominant order and any tendency towards social justice perhaps through “producing good citizens” to “offsetting inequity” can only be taken as a false solution – a quick fix for alleviating the social tensions produced by global capitalism.   

               In the Critical English classroom, this means remaining vigilant against perpetuating the ideologies of the ruling class along with the authoritarian relationship Freire refers to as the “banking concept of education” (Freire Chp. 2).    By democratically selecting multimodal texts and examining them in a critical constructivist framework, can the warrior-scholar work with students to promote the outgrowth of a critical literacy that can be applied to social, economic and political realities in the world.  To begin to scaffold liberation, an emphasis must be placed on “procedural knowledge – that is, the knowledge of how to do things,” namely, how to challenge and change oppressive structures (Smagorinsky 21).  The procedural knowledge of discerning texts, institutions, and events begins with asking: “Who benefits?” and “Who pays?” and essentially never ends.  A focus on fiction pieces will strengthen an individual’s reading stamina (a requirement for engaging the world critically as compared to the status-quo-supporting means of quick-bite social media) while expanding perspective, possibility and empathy (Alsup 183).  In approaching literature, it’s imperative to do away with traditional fixed notions of comprehension but rather construct individual meaning through purposeful sense making events (Aukerman 55-56).  In encountering the varying types of literacies, research across the socio-political spectrum will be emphasized.  To channel Aristotle through Rage Against the Machine, “the educated revolutionary mind must be able to entertain a thought without accepting it to better know one’s enemy.”  At the same time, as literacy becomes intimately tied to the technological society, the ‘message in the medium’ must be critically examined considering rampant climate change and exploitative labor practices.  Finally, “the ability to deconstruct dominant texts is not enough for critical English education; students must also develop the skills to create their own critical texts that can be used in the struggle for social justice” (Coffey 13-14).  The warrior-scholar understands the student doesn’t need to be given a voice, but rather be allowed to lead with the voice they’ve developed through their own personal experiences and analysis.

               All of this takes time and immense energy.  Dominant ideologies, institutions and propaganda mechanisms are firmly embedded in the United States, but power unchecked will continue to create inequality, violence and environmental destruction.  The warrior-scholar remains patient in creating another world in the shell of the old, a world where it is easy to be more human because when we love ourselves and our communities we are good.