The War On Drugs (Revisited)

Acknowledged or not, consciously or unconsciously, the poetic state, a transcendant state of life, is fundamentally what the public seeks through love, crime, drugs, war or insurrection.

-- Antonin Artaud

When you work hard all day with your head and know you must work again the next day what else can change your ideas and make them run on a different plane like whisky?

-- Ernest Hemingway

From New York to Tehran the world is getting high, high, high. Why? That's a rhetorical question isn't it? Why can't we all just get high on life? Let's face it: if life were a drug, it would be rubbing alcohol. It may get you a little drunk sometimes but, ultimately, it's just going to make you go blind or just kill you. For most people in this world, life is about figuring out where the next meal's coming from and for most of the rest it's about drudgery. We spend our time circulating commodities -- consuming them, manufactuiring them and selling them even though some of us wake up to the painful realization that we ourselves have become mere commodities, merely means by which this absurd machine perpetuates its murderous existence. So we get tipsy, twisted and tight trying to attain that sweet perfection that eludes us when sober. We look for the sublime through the eye of a hypodermic needle or try to inhale it -- hot, dry and ethereal -- through the stem of a glass pipe. But let me tell you, I checked and double-checked, baby I've done research and nobody ever found nirvana between the folds of a glassine envelope. Nobody ever found paradise at the bottom of a brandy snifter. What drugs provide is simulation and, as with all simulacra, you have to pay. Drugs are money, they cost money, and the high you get from them is the manifestation not of creativity, not of the reality that makes us all live but of the qualitative experience of a discrete quantity of money. And as with all money, someone had to die for those drugs, someone like the people of Afghanistan and Colombia. So to escape the misery of life in the Babylon system we took drugs and by taking those drugs we only augmented our complicity in the system that creates our misery. The same system that provides those drugs to slake our appetite for the sublime while securing surplus cash-flows and circumventing insurrection. Still we get no satisfaction. Instead we have crime, drugs and war ... and with so little love left in the world, maybe it's time we tried an insurrection.

"300": The Banality of Fascist Art

Finally, American cinema has never ceased to make and remake the same fundamental movie, that is Birth of a nation-civilization, of which Griffith made the first version.
Gilles Deleuze, 1983

Fifteen years after its coronation as global leader (with the fall of the Soviet Union), America is becoming a fearful and lonely democracy in a politically antagonistic world.
Zbigniew Brzezinski, 2007

On Saturday I shelled out 18 bucks for me and my date to see "300" -- Warner Bros.' production of the Frank Miller graphic novel about the Battle of Thermopylae (480 BC). Since then I have been in a persistent state of of silent panic. No one in the audience booed as did the audience at the Berlin Film Festival last month after the screening of 300. There was intermittent laughter but no anger at such a blatantly fascist, racist and sexist spectacle. I can't believe that there could possibly be any question about the nature of this film. Here's a synopsis -- the world is being engulfed and overwhelmed by degenerate, diseased effeminate dark-skinned people from Africa and Asia and the only thing that stands in their way are 300 White Super-Men from Sparta which represents "freedom" (a word that, thanks to the U.S., now is devoid of any meaning whatsoever), masculinity and physical fitness (i.e. Whiteness as configured in the movie). Thus we are not talking about a hidden message here. Where is the outrage? D.W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation was met with significant protests all across the country upon it's release about a Century ago. Where is the protest now? After 100 years of replaying the same fascist and racist scenario to the public it would appear that the majority have finally internalized the illusion such that, as one blogger put it, "it's ok that it has a fascist aesthetic... so long as you know it's there." I would argue that this is in fact the hallmark of culture that has become rigorously fascist. When the elements that comprise fascist ideology -- denigration of life in and for itself, glorification of death in war, racism and sexism -- become banal then you can be sure that you are living under a fascist regime.

Imperialist Discourse and Neo-Fascism in Japan

Another unspoken rule of the dominant discourse: It's alright to deny one's responsibility for past crimes against humanity -- as long as the people against whom those crimes were committed were not White.

Case in point – Last week Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe publicly denied that the Japanese Government was responsible for the system of forced sexual slavery maintained in the areas of East Asia under Japanese control during World War II:

There is no evidence to prove there was coercion, nothing to support it... So, in respect to this declaration, you have to keep in mind that things have changed greatly.

The declaration Prime Minister Abe referred to was the one the Japanese Government made on August 4, 1993 in which it admitted playing an unspecified role in the maintenance of brothels – the so-called "Comfort Stations" – while denying any responsibility and denying that any war crime had been committed. This declaration came largely as a response to pressure from a movement led by some the few survivors of the Comfort Stations. The stories of these women – so-called "Comfort Women" who came from all over East Asia but mainly from Korea – are horrific. The following is the testimony of Chong Ok Sun:

I was born on 28 December 1920, in Phabal-Ri, Pungsan County, South Hamgyong Province, in the north of the Korean peninsula.

One day in June, at the age of 13, I had to prepare lunch for my parents who were working in the field and so I went to the village well to fetch water. A Japanese garrison soldier surprised me there and took me away, so that my parents never knew what had happened to their daughter. I was taken to the police station in a truck, where I was raped by several policemen. When I shouted, they put socks in my mouth and continued to rape me. The head of the police station hit me in my left eye because I was crying. That day I lost my eyesight in the left eye.

After 10 days or so, I was taken to the Japanese army garrison barracks in Heysan City. There were around 400 other Korean young girls with me and we had to serve over 5,000 Japanese soldiers as sex slaves every day - up to 40 men per day. Each time I protested, they hit me or stuffed rags in my mouth. One held a matchstick to my private parts until I obeyed him. My private parts were oozing with blood.

One Korean girl who was with us once demanded why we had to serve so many, up to 40, men per day. To punish her for her questioning, the Japanese company commander Yamamoto ordered her to be beaten with a sword. While we were watching, they took off her clothes, tied her legs and hands and rolled her over a board with nails until the nails were covered with blood and pieces of her flesh. In the end, they cut off her head. Another Japanese, Yamamoto, told us that 'it's easy to kill you all, easier than killing dogs'. He also said 'since those Korean girls are crying because they have not eaten, boil the human flesh and make them eat it'.

One Korean girl caught a venereal disease from being raped so often and, as a result, over 50 Japanese soldiers were infected. In order to stop the disease from spreading and to 'sterilize' the Korean girl, they stuck a hot iron bar in her private parts.

Once they took 40 of us on a truck far away to a pool filled with water and snakes. The soldiers beat several of the girls, shoved them into the water, heaped earth into the pool and buried them alive.

I think over half of the girls who were at the garrison barracks were killed. Twice I tried to run away, but both times we were caught after a few days. We were tortured even more and I was hit on my head so many times that all the scars still remain. They also tattooed me on the inside of my lips, my chest, my stomach and my body. I fainted. When I woke up, I was on a mountainside, presumably left for dead. Of the two girls with me, only Kuk Hae and I survived. A 50-year-old man who lived in the mountains found us, gave us clothes and something to eat. He also helped us to travel back to Korea, where I returned, scarred, barren and with difficulties in speaking, at the age of 18, after five years of serving as a sex slave for the Japanese.

The establishment of Comfort Stations in the areas of East Asia controlled by Japan began as early as 1932, became a widespread and regular practice by 1937 and continued until the Japanese surrender in 1945. Japanese Government documents, uncovered in 1992, reveal that military personnel – either directly or via middlemen – procured women for the brothels using coercion, deception and brute force. As the testimony of Chong Ok Sun and other survivors reveals, as well as the investigations of the United Nations and the International Commission of Jurists, the Comfort Stations were a system of Concentration Camps akin to the Lagers in Germany at the same time (in fact the SS also maintained "Joy Divisions" or "Womens Camps" in Auschwitz and other locations near the Eastern Front in which both Jewish and Non-Jewish women were forced into sexual slavery although the system was not as widespread as in the case of the Comfort Stations). Moreover, considering that most of these 200,000 women did not survive their enslavement, the Special Rapporteur on Violence against Women of the United Nations Commission on Human Rights stated in 1996 that the Japanese Government's establishment of the Comfort Stations should be considered an act of genocide.

Now imagine what kind of outrage would result if the Prime Minister of Germany were to declare that the German Government during World War II was not responsible for the Holocaust, that there never was a genocide and that the government was changing its position on the issue!

Remember how the news media of the core imperialist nations demonized Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad for questioning the historical veracity of the Final Solution and the Lagers? And Iran wasn't even responsible for the Lagers! Here we are talking about the very same country responsible for the forced enslavement and murder of nearly 200,000 women now denying its responsibility for the crime and denying that any crime was committed at all! Where are all the noisy reporters who were so upset about the President of Iran now?

The Finned Ones, Four-Legged Ones and Winged Ones

"What do they know - all these scholars, all these philosophers, all the leaders of the world - about such as you? They have convinced themselves that man, the worst transgressor of all the species, is the crown of creation. All other creatures were created merely to provide him with food, pelts, to be tormented, exterminated. In relation to them, all people are Nazis; for the animals it is an eternal Treblinka."

Isaac Bashevis Singer

About five years ago I went to a calf auction in the heart of New York State somewhere between Albany and Syracuse. It was early spring so the air still chilled to the bone and the sky hung dark and low. Everything was damp and muddy and a cold drizzle fell continuously from the thick dark clouds above. The auction was a compound of several wood-frame barns with muddy floors, whose red and white paint was peeling to reveal the rotten wood underneath. Trailers with rows of thin slits in the sides were parked in a muddy lot outside the barns. The calf auction was held inside the main barn through a small door in the back, past a narrow hallway in a small brightly lit room with a very low ceiling, a dirt floor and three rows of short wooden benches. On one side of the small floor space, to the left, were several very small doorways through a divider. There was a scale in front of one of the doors. The auctioneer stood on the side of the floor opposite the scale while a man in overalls took up a position near the scale. I sat in the last row of benches behind men in sports jackets who sat in the front row. From this vantage point I could see over the divider on the left. All of the doorways led into empty stalls with doors at the far ends that led out into the lot where the trailers were parked.

Inside the trailers were thousands of calves, born only the day before, waiting to be auctioned off to the dealers – the men in the sports jackets. Even before coming to the auction I knew the facts – that calves were a by-product of the dairy industry and that New York State, as one of the leading dairy-producing states in the U.S., was also one of the leading producers of calves. Dairy farmers had to fertilize their cows in order for them to produce milk and to inject them with hormones to keep them producing milk for as long as possible. But the calves had to be sold as soon as they were born so that they would not consume any of the milk. The very day following their birth, they are torn from their mothers' teats, loaded into trucks and brought to market.

The auctioneer rang a bell and the first calf was brought onto the scale and then pushed into the ring. It was a very small frail creature with bulging eyes and protruding rib cage. The hair on its body was still matted from the fluid in its mother's womb. It cringed and scurried to and fro across the ring and cried out. As I gazed into its eyes which were already yellow from malnutrition in the glaring light it occurred to me that something terrible was taking place in that room. The look in the animal's eyes was a fear so uncanny it made my guts tighten. It was the fear of an infant born only the day before whose sole experience is cold and hunger – the terror of a brand new life being ground into nothing. And while I began to panic inside as the animal cried out, the dealers in the front row began to kick and prod the creature with their mud-encrusted boots. The little beast tried in vain to avoid the blows in the tiny space but each way it turned it met another boot which pounded its hollow rib cage and sometimes knocked it off its unsure hooves. While this was happening, a string of unintelligible words streamed quickly from the auctioneer's lips until finally the man in overalls grabbed the calf by the neck, painted a number on its back and pushed it through one of the doors. This ordeal was repeated for several hours until the trailers were empty, when all the calves had been selected either for the veal farm or for slaughter. At the slaughterhouse the calves are ground into dog-food or frozen veal patties and there is no need to describe here what happens at the veal farm as enough has been written about these sordid facilities.

This is the role Civilized man has reserved for the finned, four-legged and winged ones – the animals. Animals are fair game. Man raises them for slaughter and even hunts them to extinction. And, since men are – after all – animals (we must eat, fuck and shit), one need not wonder at how men butcher entire villages, murder women and children and implement Final Solutions.

The Gringo You Love to Hate

It is good if we are attacked by the enemy, since it proves that we have drawn a clear line of demarcation between the enemy and ourselves. It is still better if the enemy attacks us wildly and paints us as utterly black and without a single virtue; it demonstrates that we have not only drawn a clear line of demarcation between the enemy and ourselves but achieved a great deal in our work.

Mao Zedong, 1939

People hate El Gringo Rumbero? Believe it! Every now and again I run a Google search on my square moniker to make sure no one is surfing the Web using my government name to cruise for jail-bait or solicit assault weapons or narcotics (since, obviously, i never do that shit). This morning I ran my regular search and, lo and behold, my birth-name comes up on the "Pro-raghead terrorist and communist filth list" posted by some responsible U.S. citizen doing his part to protect the precious homeland. Okay so maybe some drunk adolescent Internet user from Indiana enjoying his first pickup truck with a gun rack blasting Christian Rock is not exactly what Mao had in mind when he wrote about "the Enemy" but hey -- I'm an Armchair Revolutionary!

North America on ICE

It's been a long time… I shouldn't have left you… without a strong rhyme to step to

Eric B. & Rakim, 1987

A lot's gone down during my hiatus. For example: U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has been hard at work deporting hundreds of Mexican people who are in this country illegally.

You all know about ICE right?

ICE is the largest investigative arm of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). And, as ICE is charged with the enforcement of over 400 federal statutes, ICE Special Agents quite possibly possess the broadest investigative authority in the United States Government. Also ICE is the largest special weapons and tactics (SWAT) unit that has ever been mobilized!

But why is the Department of Homeland Security, whose stated mission is to prevent and deter terrorist attacks, throwing so many resources behind an agency whose activities have little or no connection to "terrorism" at all?

The answer is clear: there is no terrorist threat. Why throw money and resources at an imaginary problem?

Okay but wait… if there's no terrorist threat, then what the hell is the DHS for?! The answer to this question should be obvious but many of us are too consumed by fear (fear spread by the DHS itself) to realize it. Think of the words "Department of Homeland Security" carefully. It tells us our home is in danger and we need this state institution to protect us. But we don't need it to protect us from foreign invaders since we have the Department of Defense for that. We need it to protect us from the evil terrorists! But who are the evil terrorists?

Consider that, in immigration raids now, ICE Special Agents are using the classic "darker than a grocery bag test" to separate the illegal from the legal immigrants. Moreover, in their press releases, ICE personnel have been equating illegal immigration with crimes that are much more repulsive to the public at large and that have long been associated in the news media with people of color -- like dope peddling, murder, rape, sexually abusing children and theft. Right now the line is that they are going after criminals and illegal immigrants but, given the Patriot Act, the terrorism law and the investigative powers ICE possesses, it is likely that the definition of a "terrorist" will grow increasingly broader.

In other words, the purpose of the DHS is to continuously create and violently suppress "terrorists" whenever the need arises, in the interest of ensuring the power of the state. That is to say that the DHS is nothing less than a terrorist institution. The most obvious parallel here is with the original terrorist body, the notorious Committee of Public Safety (Comité de Salut Public) of the Jacobins which presided over the infamous Reign of Terror during the French Revolution. Both institutions use fear and violence to maintain order and, ultimately, to suppress dissent and preserve power. Another such organization that comes to mind is the Ku Klux Klan.

So when John Kerry says he "will hunt down and kill the terrorists," he is not only supporting actual terrorism abroad in the form of military interventions in the countries of Asia and elsewhere, but he is also supporting actual terrorism right here in the 50 states. It's time to recognize that the discourse of anti-terrorism in facts supports the biggest agent of terror in the U.S. and the world, the U.S. Government, which executes its reign of terror through the Departments of Defense and Homeland Security, and justifies it principally by racism.

Spread Love

Ladies say: "El Gringo Rumbero is all about the love." It's true. But most people in this town don't have time for love. We are so caught up in the rat race, the seemingly endless cycle of production and consumption, that we have forgotten about the big picture -- the broader cycle of life, death and rebirth. Love may not conquer all but it is the life experience par excellence -- through love you truly experience being in the world and you have knowledge of that which makes us all live. In love both of the fundamental ontological elements come together -- ecstasy and agony. Also in love you feel intense, strong and powerful while at the same time utterly insignificant, banal and subject to the whims of that which makes us all live. In love you bravely submit to your fate.

The other day I was riding the subway downtown when a man boarded the train with a guitar. He raised the guitar to his chest, threw his head back and began to play. And as his eyes rolled back into his head he began to sing. His songs were devotional hymns that he himself had written (I checked later and couldn't find them on the Internet) and they were love songs. They expressed the joy and suffering that is the fundamental intuition of life -- existence at its core -- the truth one finds in love. Suddenly I understood why love songs are rooted in spiritual hymns and chants. That strength that is realized only in unconditional submission that comes through in hymns is identical to love. His songs were those of the human being in its crudest most raw form, the human being at ground zero, the human being in all its wretchedness but also in all its glory since it's only then that the human is indistinguishable from the rest of the universe and closest to the sublime -- in love. When the man finished his last song he dropped his guitar, opened his eyes and looked at all of the passengers who were all holding forth crisp green bills in their hands for the musician. Looking at each one in turn he said in a slight Jamaican accent, "thank you ladies and gentlemen... I hope that my music has brought peace and love into your hearts." And, as the train came to a stop and the doors opened, he turned without taking any of the money and left the train.