Letter To The World

Early 2007

I hold Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld responsible for Criminal Negligence bordering on insanity for their misguided war policies and disregard of world climate change issues. And I am asking citizens, University professors and chancellors, senators, representatives and other heads of states to join with me in condemning this administration for practically plunging us all into irreversibly horrific world conditions. I want impeachment of this entire administration now. We don't have time to allow these idiots the reigns any longer. They stole both presidential elections. When will this farce of a democratic system be brought back to functionality? When big money is taken out of electioneering. Corporate personhood, that a corporation should have 1st amendment rights like a person, has ruined America. And the Republican party is largely responsible for the success and largess of corporate personhood. Though the Democratic party hasn't been perfect either.

The war on Iraq was illegal according to International Law. The Iraq Study Group has released its bilateral findings about the many mistakes made by the Bush administration. Yet Bush makes himself able to ignore their advice and evidence and blindly follow the fool's path he has led us down from the start. He has manipulated intelligence and the media in a concerted effort to blind the public from the facts about these important issues. Cheney and Rumsfeld are deceivers and liars and so is George Bush. In a just society they would be on trial with Scooter Libby and fearing the worst consequences. They are the same kind of person as Saddam Hussein and should answer to the same kind of justice.

War is an attention grabber away from the pressing issues of our day, specifically those related to climate change. When Steven Hawking is saying that we may face a global doomsday if we do not address climate change I think we had better listen. The inertia of a society in denial can take us over a cliff towards major catasrophe, if not extinction. Bush policy drives us straight for the cliff, while doing little Born Again genuflections to say that God will provide. The creative force in the universe clearly has set us here with the challenge of protecting the small planet we live on. Those who cannot cherish the resources of life here on Earth and work to protect and prolong life are blinded by delusions which support their claims for power. The Bush family and the other oil clans are unable to work for the good of mankind; they are in the pocket of multinational big money, who are really the people who must wake up and shake off their sense of entitlement to all that the world has to offer.

I see that the world is returning to the cold war vision of 20 years ago. The struggle for control of world petrolium resources has long been at the heart of all war; it brought down Germany when they couldn't fuel their war machine. The Reagan administration concocted the oil problems of the 80's to similarly starve the Russian economy. Russia was negotiating oil contracts with Iraq when we decided we would go in and change all that. Nobody "won the cold war", it continues to be played out. And as long as the US lies to its citizenry and steals rights to oil wealth worldwide we will continue on a certain path to destruction, a war against ourselves: the human race. There are still how many nuclear warheads in US and Russian and Chinese arsenals? The issue of terrorism by Islamists or Iran or North Korea is a joke compared to the State Terror of the big 3 countries and the corrupt "leaders" who push their weight around like schoolyard bullies.

Where is Mikhael Gorbachev? or Nelson Mandela? Where are the world leaders who truly sympathize with the common man, who can lead us out of this shit-hole?

This is a potentially beautiful world. It is so sad to see the limited vision of the same corrupt families leading us down the path to destruction.
I hear that the Gulf Stream is coming to a halt and huge storms will plunder Europe. Methane released by glacial melting may accelerate climate change and greenhouse conditions to irreversible levels. Can we really afford to wait-and-see? I think not.

We need new solutions now. And the first step is:
World Impeachment of Bush/Cheney/Wolfowitz/Perle/Nixon/Rumsfeld/Reagan/Kissenger Today.

Society of The Spectacle 1

In 1983 or 84, I walked into Revolution Books in Central Square, Cambridge, Mass and found a copy of Guy Debord's "Society of the Spectacle", which looked like the only creatively composed radical philosophy in the shop. I was a film student and noticed the chapbook cover, an office building on front and the classic b+w photo of the movie audience staring at the screen with 3-D glasses on back (this was Black & Red's 1970 edition). There are many cut-and-paste graphics interspersed with the text, which is broken into 221 short statements about the alienation of humanity in the age of industrial production. Debord took Marx to its logical next step and propelled political thinkers and artists alike to challenge the success of capitalism in new ways. His work spoke from a France of the 50's and 60's, a time when French colonial power was obviously ending, their own disasters in Algeria and then Indochina which preceded the American occupation of Viet Nam. The Situationist International, the organisation founded by Debord and others, played a significant role in the events of May 1968 in Paris, where students took over many universities. Debord's re-writing of Marx gave new life to leftist political thought in Europe, inspired numerous writers and eventually spread to the rest of the world, partly carried by cultural institutions like art galleries and museums, which buoyed the creativite impulses in the theoretical work of the SI. These were artists who gave up art in order to imagine a better world. Greil Markus has famously attributed punk rock's roots to the SI, which, while helpful in some elementary ways linking street music rebellion in England to happenings in France, it's a bit of a smokescreen I think. The radical dispersion of the right to power anticipated by Guy Debord's work in writing and in film is improperly served by offering direct lines of cultural inheritence, whether to Johnny Rotten (via Malcolm McLaren) or Mayo Thompson. The Red Crayola was conceptually much more interesting than the Sex Pistols, their affiliation with the group Art and Language creating a question mark over much of Britain's cultural life through the 70's and 80's, carrying on the self-publishing aesthetic of radical work that endures today.

In 2007, we ask again the relevance of these moments, figures, events. Books and articles abound, each contributing aspects of outreach and education and at the same time mummifying and institutionalising a current of human thought which struggles yet against institutionalisation and commodification. As the cost of living in modern society goes through the ceiling, who can afford to live a radical life? The power of the grand old institutions, banks, corporations and even universities is preserved through the increasing difficulty of existence for those who would be critical of the grand old system. Or so it seems. The cultural life of The Left has survived in spite of great attempts to write history with a sword.

The internet, while subset of the grand old institute, allows us to write our own history once again. Xeroxed pages from archive boxes can be scanned and transcribed and uploaded. Although the Society of Spectacle "collapses here" (to quote the tape Beatles), that is: the internet consumes and absorbs all media, the story of social history, or Class War, remains undecided and unfinished. The Free Market capitalists may claim the day since the fall of the Soviet Union, but so much remains to be lived and witnessed. We are not doomed to repeat it.