[Peace-discuss] When You Comin' Back, Red Ryder?

Mon Aug 24 16:02:18 CDT 2009

Nonsense, sorry.

Ricky

"Speak your mind even if your voice shakes." - Maggie Kuhn

--- On Mon, 8/24/09, E. Wayne Johnson <ewj at pigs.ag> wrote:

From: E. Wayne Johnson <ewj at pigs.ag>
Subject: Re: [Peace-discuss] When You Comin' Back, Red Ryder?
To: "Ricky Baldwin" <baldwinricky at yahoo.com>
Cc: "John W." <jbw292002 at gmail.com>, "Peace-discuss" <peace-discuss at anti-war.net>
Date: Monday, August 24, 2009, 1:02 PM

Abortion is murder, and in some ways perhaps worse than Obama's 

remote-controlled roasting of innocents in the name of the evil empire.

Abortion is also Eugenics-based Genocide, eradication of "human weeds",

as Margaret Sanger boasted.  It is never ceases to amaze me that 

the so-called (& self-styled) "compassionate liberals are so racist.

Even Urbana City Government takes our tax money and gives it to the
abortionists.  

I refer you to the City of Urbana web site and the posted budget and
expenditures.

Neither your lack of familiarity with the message nor the fact of many
abuses negates its truth.

The message is perfect, but man has made many inventions.

I even agree that we should have some government, but I really do
perceive the established government as being

quite "destructive to those ends" for which the people established it
in the first place, that is to secure

the blessings of liberty to the people.

On 8/24/2009 12:35 PM, Ricky Baldwin wrote:

        Wayne, I believe you are well-intentioned, but your black
hats need a bit of white for authenticity and vice versa.

The coercive government you can't conceive as doing any good saves
lives by the millions, not just through funding local rescue operations
and so on, but by funding programs that feed and house people, give
college assistance to a person who missed all of high school due to
drug problems but is now clean and can pass the GED and get a nursing
degree and hold down a job and raise a family as a single mom, etc. 
(No, this is not a hypothetical example.)  OSHA alone has saved tens of
thousands of lives, comparing rates of workers killed on the job before
(under less regulated capitalism) and after.  And so on.

I know it's hard for you to see it this way, but abortion is also a
great benefit to many poor families.  I agree with Carl that given the
socioeconomic pressures surrounding the issue, this does not make these
decisions stone free (hardly any decision is under our system), but
cutting off options for poor people whose options are already limited
hardly does them a favor.  But if you think our government, whatever
else we say about it, is really funding abortions all over the place,
think again.

Now, to the other issue, your faith is yours and your right to have. 
But let's not mince words.  The message you mention is open to some
interpretation, and the list of things that have been done to preserve
it in one form or another is long and egregious, as with other sorts of
faiths, including so-called "Marxist" ones.  Certainly this history
should not impugn others who share certain beliefs and reject others,
but I think the value you ascribe to this "covenant" doesn't generalize
quite so broadly.

You are free, of course, to write off my opinion as that of a
Non-Believer.  The orthodox Marxists can do the same.  But as human
beings I think we can all acknowledge that none of us has perfect and
pure answers, and we can be always be wrong - the implication being
that any belief system or institution, whatever the truth of its core,
has the potential to go off-course and we must always be there to
correct it as best we can, and organize others to help if we can.

Ricky

"Speak your mind even if your voice shakes." - Maggie Kuhn

--- On Mon, 8/24/09, E. Wayne Johnson <ewj at pigs.ag>
wrote:

From: E. Wayne Johnson <ewj at pigs.ag>

Subject: Re: [Peace-discuss] When You Comin' Back, Red Ryder?

To: "John W." <jbw292002 at gmail.com>

Cc: "Peace-discuss" <peace-discuss at anti-war.net>

Date: Monday, August 24, 2009, 11:52 AM

           It's pretty hard to imagine that one
ought to 

trust the beneficent benevolent care of the poor 

to a coercive government that promotes and funds abortion,

imperialism, endless war, corporate malfeasance, and financial fraud.

The new covenant message is that people would be internally motivated

to care for one another.  It's been effective where people dare to
apply it.

On 8/23/2009 8:52 PM, John W. wrote:

            On Sun, Aug 23, 2009 at 12:31 PM,
E. Wayne
Johnson <ewj at pigs.ag> wrote:

              The Philadelphia Liberty Bell
bears a peculiar inscription:

              Proclaim liberty throughout the land unto all the
inhabitants
thereof Lev XXV, v. X

              It should be noted that this is a fragment of
"Leviticus
25.10",
not the entire "verse".

Although it is a complete thought and the use of this verse fragment by
the Quakers who commissioned the 

Liberty Bell is appropriate and legitimate, it is useful to consider
the whole verse in the context

of that American Republic which venerates the fractured toquassen
and
shuns its message.

 Leviticus 25. 10: "And ye shall hallow the fiftieth year, and proclaim
liberty throughout all the land unto all the inhabitants thereof:

 it shall be a jubilee unto you; and ye shall return every man unto his
possession, and ye shall return every man unto his family.

Leviticus 25.10 is part of a larger section (Lev. 23 through Lev. 25)
which deals with rules of economics, production, distribution of
property and wealth, 

finance, and ethics, and it is punctuated with strong admonitions about
the divine inspiration and the practical spiritual implications.

Implicit is Leviticus 23-25 is the importance of social and economic
equality, and the recognition that left to itself, 

the game of economics and the outrageous fortunes of the business cycle
proceed to a endpoint of masters and slaves. 

This section of the Levitical law creates an enforced resetting of
property, slavery, and debt to the original default state

every 50 years, it forbids usury and exploitation, and it blows against
the creation of empires, economic classes and cumulative inequality of
opportunity.

The underlying spiritual concepts of Lev 23-25 are demonstrated under
the new covenant, every man in the Kingdom of God acting as led by the
Spirit (Jer 31.33),

those with two coats willingly giving to those with only one (Lu 3:11),
willingly trusting in Providence for their needs (Lu 9.3), sharing
freely all things

in common (Acts 2.44, Acts 4.32), and egalitarianism without coercion
or taking by force (2 Cor 8.1-15).

I was loving your discussion of Leviticus and the year of Jubilee,
Wayne, until I got to the paragraph above.  The Israel of the Old
Testament was a theocracy, essentially, so the provisions of Leviticus
had the force of law.  All of those economic things you enumerate were
mandated by law, and they took place, I presume, every 50 years as
mandated.

Now suddenly in the New Testament it's all voluntary.  And this is
precisely the argument that libertarians of today use AGAINST any sort
of governmental redistribution of wealth, similar to the Jubilee.  "I'm
damned if I'm gonna let the 'nanny state' tell ME what to do with MY
money," they whine.  "If I wanna help the poor I'll help 'em, but it
has to be voluntary!"  The trouble is that libertarians generally don't
KNOW any poor people, so to the extent that they help anyone they end
up just helping each other.  Plus the problems of the poor and
disenfranchised are too vast and institutionalized to lend themselves
to scattered individual acts of 'charity' here and there.  What we
discuss on this list, ad infinitum, is the role that GOVERNMENT should
play in the economic realm.

I'd like to see a national year of Jubilee about every 20 years.  Fifty
years is too long.  But it doesn't really matter, does it?  It's never
gonna happen.

John Wason

              But what we have is the
stupid and immoral party (the Dems) versus the
self-righteous and evil party both making

merchandise of us all and perverting progress to petty contentions. 
It's easy to see that both sides

are wrong.

On 8/22/2009 10:21 PM, C. G. Estabrook wrote: 

                John
W. wrote: 

                ...The two truly lasting
contributions
made
by the Sixties were the Civil 

Rights Movement and the Women's Movement.  Where those class struggles?
Only 

in part, I submit. 

You omit the major movement that unites the two you mention, the
anti-war movement. 

Class struggle is rarely perspicuous -- i.e., it's usually expressed
through other conflicts. But it perhaps emerges more clearly over time:

   "All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and
people are at last compelled to face with sober senses, their real
conditions of life, and their relations with their kind" (from the
aforementioned tract). 

Slavoj Zizek notes "a fundamental difference between the goals of
feminist, anti-racist, anti-sexist struggles on the one hand, and class
struggle on the other. In the first case, the goal is to translate
antagonism into difference (the peaceful coexistence of sexes,
religions, ethnic groups), but the goal of class struggle is precisely
the opposite: to aggravate class difference into class antagonism. To
set up a series of equivalences between race, gender and class is to
obscure the peculiar logic of class struggle, which aims at overcoming,
subduing, even annihilating the other – if not its physical being, then
at least its socio-political role and function. In the one case, we
have a horizontal logic involving mutual recognition among different
identities; in the other, we have the logic of struggle with an
antagonist."  ("Over the Rainbow" <http://www.lrb.co.uk/v26/n21/zize01_.html>
-- the article repays
the difficult of getting through it...) 

The goal is reconciliation on the basis of justice for races, genders,
etc.  But reconciliation is impossible between exploiter and exploited
without their giving up their roles.  --CGE 

John W. wrote: 

On Sat, Aug 22, 2009 at 3:15 PM, C. G. Estabrook
<galliher at illinois.edu <mailto:galliher at illinois.edu>>
wrote:

I'd say corporate capitalism managed to co-opt the counter-culture over
the course of a generation, roughly the late 1960s to the mid-1990s,
with the crucial change coming about half-way through, with the rise of
neo-liberalism. (David Harvey's book with that title is the best
general account I know.) 

Serious discussion of revolution as an historical phenomenon rather
quickly became ads for "Revolutionary Jeans!," etc. 

Yes.  And the factory workers, after calling hippies "faggots" in the
1960s for their long hair, started wearing their hair long themselves
sometime in the 1970s.  And watched passively, dumbly, as private
sector union membership 

 declined, factories were shuttered, and their jobs moved offshore. 

But it's certainly true that the uncomfortable questions and challenges
to the assumptions of American society that go under the collective
name of "the 

 sixties" had an unsettling effect.  That's why the sixties and its 

"excesses" are generally excoriated by bien-pensant liberals and 

conservatives alike. (For a not unimportant example, see the
condemnation of 

the sixties in "The Audacity of Hope.") 

American society suppressed but didn't answer the sixties' questions,
because 

 they were questions about human flourishing, which is necessarily
retarded 

to a greater or lesser degree by the exploitation necessary to
capitalism. 

Nevertheless American society is a good bit more civilized today than
it was in the 1960s, largely as a result of those questions. (As an
example of the poets' -- in this case TV writers -- getting there
first, see these questions 

 posed however obscurely in the current series "Mad Men.") 

I think you could argue that all real revolutionary movements need to
invent new media of communication, from the early Christian movement's
invention of the codex on. 

The new media of the 1960s were the underground newspaper and
alternative radio, now both sadly in almost complete decay. 

Let us not forget Robert Crumb and Zap Comix.  :-) 

They've gone the way of an independent labor press (and radio) of an
earlier American generation.  They've been supplanted by this box I'm
typing on; it and parallel IT will probably soon destroy hard-copy
newspapers, no bad thing. 

But where's the social revolution that should go with new media? Maybe
we'll be surprised. 

You agree with the Old Man who wrote (when he was a young man), "The
history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class
struggles." 

Yes and no.  The two truly lasting contributions made by the Sixties
were the 

 Civil Rights Movement and the Women's Movement.  Where those class 

struggles? Only in part, I submit. 

(His tract etc. are worth re-reading.)  When you comin' back, red
writer? --CGE 

John W. wrote: 

On Fri, Aug 21, 2009 at 5:15 PM, C. G. Estabrook
<galliher at illinois.edu <mailto:galliher at illinois.edu>>
wrote:

"... the Counter-Culture hung up the Out of Business sign sometime in
the Nineties, finished off by identity politics and general
self-satisfaction..." 

 --<http://www.counterpunch.org/>

Commenting weekly in those days on "the news of the week and its
coverage by 

 the media" on News from Neptune as I was, I'd say that Alex Cockburn
has 

this about right. 

I haven't read Cockburn's article; his essays are invariably too long
for my 

 limited attention span.  But I submit that in the so-called 

"counter-culture" essentially BECAME the culture.  In some ways our 

generation, that of the 60s, was absorbed into the existing culture; in

certain ways it profoundly changed the culture; and in yet other ways
the 

culture recoiled in horror and moved in the opposite direction. But
isn't 

that simply the way of the world? Thesis ---> antithesis --->
synthesis , for 

good or ill? 

What we need now, I guess, is a NEW counter-culture.  The closest thing
I've 

 seen to that in this country is the development of the independent
media movement starting in the late 1990s.  Last I looked, the U-C
Independent Media Center was still very much alive and well.  But of
course the new counter-culture needs to affect more than just the
media, important as that is. 

I further submit, though, that as long as human beings populate the
planet and compete for finite resources, there will ALWAYS be war.  I
dare to imagine that American culture could change to allow for
universal health care 

 if the political and public will was there.   We could inject a bit of
"socialism" into our "free-market capitalism" without demonstrable ill
effects.  But human nature does not change, and war will be with us
always. 

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