The Breaking Time

Hating someone else's Congress

In every district but yours...

Interesting poll from Gallup last week confirmed something I'd suspected for awhile. Congress is unpopular. Really unpopular. Communism, lice, root canals, and Genghis Khan are more popular.

That's not news. So why aren't people actually throwing the bums out instead of talking about it?

Because people hate "Congress," the abstract legislative body, instead of their particular Congresscritter. On average 46 percent like their particular representative. That's hardly overwhelming support, but it's at least getting close to electable territory. 

Gerrymandering plays a big role in this, certainly, but this is also a classic bell the cat problem: people want great upheaval, as long as it's starting somewhere else.

Why revolutions crush rebellions

The revolutionaries already look like Cossacks.

On an unusually cold March morning 92 years ago, thousands of Red Army soldiers left solid ground and charged across five miles of heavy ice to the fortress city of Kronstadt. 

The citadel was held by the rebellious sailors of the Baltic Fleet, formerly the shock troop zealots of the revolution. During the 1917 uprisings, they'd executed their officers en masse and remained one of the Bolshevik's most reliable military forces.

But as Lenin and his crew centralized their power and became increasingly repressive, the sailors turned against them. They seized the fleet and issued their own manifestoes, declaring that "the hammer and sickle – has been replaced by the bayonet and the barred window."

The sailors were experienced fighters in a formidable position: they cut the Red Army down. Over 10,000 soldiers died during 10 days of fighting. But in the end, the government crushed the uprising. They finished devastating Kronstadt just in time to mark the 50th anniversary of the Paris Commune, destroyed by the troops of the fledgling French Third Republic.

In 1794, the leaders of the American Revolution called up their forces once again, this time to end a guerilla rebellion rather than start one. Western farmers had taken up arms rather than pay the whiskey tax that was part of Alexander Hamilton's plan to get the nascent national economy up and running without pissing off his mercantile allies too much. So President George Washington marched west at the head of 13,000 soldiers. There was no major bloodshed, but the message was completely clear: rise up and we'll destroy you.

Then there's the Irish Civil War, 13 Vendémiaire, the Satsuma Rebellion, the Hyderabad campaign, the Cultural Revolution, the 1993 shelling of Russia's parliament. It's a long, bloody list. Hell, in 1848 even Victor Hugo enthusiastically led troops to put down the same riotous Parisians who were his allies a few months before.

There's a mythology around popular revolution, one that informs what kind of politics we revere, that even determines what we consider possible in our wildest dreams.

This is its uncomfortable catalogue of heresies, an alternate timeline running parallel to the shinier canon of July 4, the storming of the Bastille, the Fall of the Iron Curtain. The same process happens across cultures, after violent revolutions and peaceful ones, perpetrated by regimes both tyrannical and democratic. Every time the troops crest the barricades, it poses a dirty little question: why do revolutions, based on the principle that rebellion is justified, end up ruthlessly ending rebellions?

The drones will wait until the stars are right

Photo by Kirsty Wigglesworth, Associated Press

So this is real:

Yes, the Argus is the world's highest resolution camera, and the system is capable of monitoring and coordinating the information it receives more effectively than ever before. If this trajectory continues, one day you'll be standing at a street corner, texting a friend, and someone in a facility will be able to read your message from orbit.

Notice the ending discussion about UAVs that will stay aloft for years at a time, paired with blithe acceptance that people will be constantly monitored. Coincidentally, I saw this video a year to the day after Tim Maly coined "argus" as the collective noun for a group of drones.

As if the skies weren't already turning into something out of an early '80s sci-fi novel, DARPA is also proposing military robots in the ocean, using the seas as a "vast area for concealment and storage" until the stars time is right.

Together, this puts some strange tools in the arsenal of an established government, any established government. Imagine a crumbling regime's leaders stockpiling hundreds of machines, sleeping in the air or the ocean, ready to avenge their masters if someone ever ousts them.

Oh well. We can always hide in our drone-proof cities.

Aaron Swartz

Aaron Swartz at an anti-SOPA protest. Photo by Daniel J. Sieradski/Creative Commons.

By now, I have no doubt my readers know about the tragic suicide of online pioneer and activist Aaron Swartz. The news felt like a punch in the gut; Swartz embodied so many of the finest strengths of our generation. There have been personal remembrances, calls to action, and deserved condemnations. There's not much more I can say.

So I'll leave it at this:

This man was facing over three fucking decades in prison for downloading academic articles. Articles paid for with the public's money but, like a huge chunk of legal cases, aren't available to the public. I have dealt with the justice system for years, and I have seen rapists, murderers, and corrupt public officials who didn't get the book thrown at them half that damn much.

This witch hunt was perpetrated in defense of a body of law that primarily protects those who do nothing, make nothing, contribute nothing, improve nothing, and are, in the end, nothing. The worst part was that it ruined someone who was the living opposite of that, before he even had the chance to defend himself in a trial.

That's wrong. It is the essence of wrong. Some things deserve to be broken, and everything that made this possible should be destined for the goddamn scrap heap.

The Rundown: Ringing in the new year

Police and protesters fight in Athens as another demonstration turns violent. Couldn't find the photo credit for this image, unfortunately.

Welcome to 2013, readers. Here's a quick parcel of "may you live in interesting times" items to start off your new year.

• Greeks feel unfolding social and humanitarian crisis "There is an anger against the national government which hasn't yet expressed itself, and it's building up like water behind a dam, waiting to break out. They're going to start smashing shop windows and grabbing things, and ultimately I wouldn't put it past the Greek society to storm parliament."

• Tea estate owner, wife killed by workers in India The article refers to what was going on as a "labor dispute," but dispute seems too mild a word for "an army of 700 workers gets together, armed with bows and poison arrows, and set the plantation owners on fire."

• Police arrest teenager for doodling Remember my fear that, because dealing with real problems was hard, Newtown's aftermath would see zero-tolerance return with a vengeance? Yeah, that's happening.

• Slavery's global comeback A brutal piece about how slavery's made a return around the globe (and in many places, never went away). A reminder that even as the future rolls in, many of the past's horrors are still very much with us.

• "Arrest us all" As the protests — some violent — in India have drawn attention to the horrific levels of rape in that country, this is not a new problem. In 2005, a mob of 200 women marched into the Nagpur district court and brutally killed a serial rapist that the police had let go scot-free for years.

Worth remembering that when a justice system fails widely enough in its duty to mete out vengeance, people will eventually start doing the job themselves. While I personally think the women in Nagpur were completely justified to kill their tormentor, vigilantism gets real nasty when it becomes increasingly endemic.

• Interfaith unions on the rise in UK Marriages between Muslims and Christians are becoming more frequent in the UK. Remember this the next time someone tells you that Muslims — apparently uniquely among all types of immigrants — are all fanatics who won't ever change in response to a secular society.

• China removing addicts' pleasure centers In the next stage in China's march towards dystopia, some doctors are "treating" drug addiction by burning out the pleasure centers of addicts and the mentally ill. As if that wasn't enough, China's also ramping up its internet censorship. Malevolent robot overseers are probably just a few months away.

Someday this will all be yours

by Damien Williams, a follow-up to Life in the so-called space age

The Last Judgment, Heironymous Bosch

Come close and I'll tell you a secret.

The Breaking Time is really just the continual state of the post-Lapsarian condition. Everything we are and everything we do is a result of the Fall of Man, and that Fall makes itself evident in everything we ourselves create. All decay, all rot, all moral failures and lawlessness, all attempts by mad to trespass into God's domain with works like artificial intelligence, artificial life, and genetic manipulation are just the side-effects of humanity's experience and expression of evil; today is God's Judgment.

This is what I would tell you if I were a fundamentalist Christian-- that we are all sinful in some basic fashion (because of some basic action), and that nature has infected everything we do. But I'm not a fundamentalist Christian, so let's try something else.

The Breaking Time is just the precursor to the coming of the Messiah, and the fulfilling of YHVH's ultimate covenant with Man. We must strive through, as best we can but also spur on progress toward the time when this Messiah will make itself known. As such, we tolerate lawlessness, immorality, and decay, as we know that it will bring us closer to the time of Messianic Fruition.

 No? Okay, how about this:

That which we call "evil" is really just the effect of the workings of evolutionary biological processes, selfishness, procreative need, tribalism, and the insular nature of the preferred size of human social groups. The only thing that exists which can rightly be called "evil" are those forces of ignorance which lead us away from inquiry and scientific understanding, and those forces must, indeed, be stamped out and shown as false, broken, harmful, and dangerous, at all costs. Only then will the true nature of the universe be able to be known, free of antiquated moralising and repression.

What about this: The return of Maitreya has meant that there will be a world-wide awakening of consciousness, and His work must be helped along by those willing to make the world over in fire, and who are willing to do whatever it takes to survive these end times.

If you don't see your particular flavor of armageddon above I could go on, if you'd like.

Institutional infection

These guys used to be liberal. Then things changed.

It's 1979, and the Southern Baptist Convention isn't that terribly different from most mainstream Christian denominations: since the '50s, it's become increasingly liberal, embracing modern scholarship and social stances while moving away from Biblical inerrancy.

That summer, in Houston, everything changes. Fundamentalists, angered by what they see as repeated betrayals of the church's founding principles, bus in supporters. Instead of a genteel administrative process, they've treated the SBC apparatus the way a political machine does; organizing relentlessly with an eye to seizing as much power as possible.

It works. The moderates and liberals are routed in an "orchestration from the sky boxes." With their victory, the fundamentalists gain access to thousands of churches to spread their views, along with control over universities, media, built-in loyalty and a budget to use for whatever else they want to do. The SBC has remained conservative to this day, and the 1979 takeover played a major role in making the religious right-wing a political force. With the SBC in their grasp, fundamentalists had a foundation to back the efforts of previously scattered fringe groups.

It's 1896, and the Democratic Party is largely a conservative organization, dominated by the "Bourbon" wing and Southern aristocrats; there hasn't really been a major liberal faction of the party since the 1830s. President Grover Cleveland is such a perfect Gilded Age fat cat that Ayn Rand will later swoon over him. 

But things are changing. The Populists have made gains throughout the Midwest, including voting friendlier Democrats into office on fusion tickets. While much of the rest of the party is divided, a young congressman, William Jennings Bryan, spends the year-and-a-half leading up to the convention getting to know the delegates and leading the populists to control the endless ground-level meetings that the party's elite assume will turn out in their favor. Instead, Bryan and his allies aimed, in his blunt words, to "organize and take charge of and control the policy" of the party. That summer, hundreds of new delegates pour into Chicago. "They are assembled now," Bryan thundered. "Not to discuss, not to debate, but to enter up the judgment rendered by the plain people of this country."

He rallies them with a hell of a speech and the left wing takes control of the Democratic institutions. The Dems don't take the presidency, but the populists still remake a major political party. While its power has waxed and waned, since 1896 the Democrats have always had to deal with a progressive faction in their midst. The Bourbons were furious — they considered the populists an illness — but the virus had already taken hold.

Then there's the NRA in 1977, the Texas Board of Education, or the founding of the Republican Party. The list goes on.

An institution is, at heart, just a name and a structure attached to resources. That's it, and it means that determined groups of people can infect them until they turn into something very different.

How radicals took over the mainstream, 1860s style

                                          

A fascinating piece in the leftist Jacobin magazine details how the formation of the Free Soil and original Republican parties were one of the more aggressively radical projects in American political history, and has some big points about basic political effectiveness:

At each stage of their project, from the Liberty Party to the Free Soil Party and finally the Republican Party, progressively broader coalitions were formed around an emerging ideology of free labor that merged antislavery principles with the economic interests of ordinary Northern whites.

The outer layers of these coalitions attracted voters and politicians who lacked the hard 
abolitionist principles of the militants, and in a racist society it was inevitable that many of 
the converts to Free Soil would vaunt theirs as the “true white man’s party.”

But the original nucleus of radicals – despite their own time-bound attitudes – lent the 
project an inner egalitarian spirit, visible in party campaigns for black suffrage and civil 
rights across the North. And when the moment of mass radicalization finally arrived in the 
wake of the Kansas-Nebraska Act, these abolitionists stood triumphantly at the heart of the networks that became the new Republican Party. “Our position is now rather enviable,” wrote Giddings in 1854. “We lead the hosts of freedom.”

Today on the radical left, there is a widespread allergy to political strategy as such. There is far more communion with the countercultural legacy of Garrison than with the political acumen of Frederick Douglass, who by 1852 had become secretary of the Free Soil Party, commenting that “what is morally right is not at all times politically possible.”

The common narrative of the pre-Civil War era focuses on the tension between Northern and Southern states over slavery, but abolition was still an unwelcome idea throughout many parts of the country. In 1844, a mob beat abolitionist John Murray Spear and left him for dead, in Maine.

But in roughly two decades, people like Douglass, Charles Sumner and Abraham Lincoln took that idea from radical to a viable part of the country's political mainstream.

They did it by wading into the muck. The 1860 Republican platform is full of planks (mail! infrastructure! tariffs! homesteading!) that don't have a huge amount to do with the radicals' original goal. Some of these were good ideas in their own right, others were sops to one constituency or another or compromises (framing anti-slavery efforts in Kansas as a belief in state's rights) intended to bring their more sweeping goals a bit closer. There's no reason radicals can't use the boil the frog approach too.

One can only imagine the frustration Douglass felt during all this. He had broken free from torture and slavery only to have to put up with the crap required to get those "outer layer" groups — many of them quite racist — on board. But he did it anyway because it built towards the day when slavery would be wiped out entirely.

So instead of leaving en masse, the radicals stayed in the coalition, and their influence is visible in things like this 1860 campaign song:

They knew exactly where they were heading.

"Incrementalism" gets a lot of flak but unless you can conjure armies or "shut down society" levels of popular support, every approach is going to be incremental.

The abolitionists in the 1840s simply didn't have the numbers or the power to end slavery, and no amount of moral protest or personal righteousness was going to change that. Reversing that situation required getting a bunch of people they didn't exactly agree with into a coalition that wasn't particularly coherent. It worked.

Culture and action: An interview with Imani Gandy

Image courtesy of Imani Gandy

While at the Democratic National Convention, I did a lot of interviews. I'm still working on a larger piece on my thoughts about the DNC in our Breaking Time, but two interviews in particular stood out — for very different reasons — enough that I felt they deserved to be featured in whole.

The first is with activist and blogger Imani Gandy, who founded the Angry Black Lady Chronicles and the Team Uterati coordinating resource for feminist action. She's advocated an aggressively pragmatic approach to politics, often clashing publicly with other progressives about President Barack Obama's actions and drawing attention to what she perceives as misogyny and racism among some leftists. We talked about divisions among liberals, different approaches to activism, and how race plays into today's politics.

How did the Angry Black Lady Chronicles start?

I started a pop culture blog with a group of women in 2008, and we were tossing around ideas of a column I would do, titled something like “Ask a black lady.” I was just kind of throwing it around, and I don't know why but I just decided my column would be called Angry Black Lady chronicles. I don't really know why, it just sort of came out of nowhere.

Then, when I stopped blogging with them, I decided to move my column onto its own blog, and it just become angryblacklady.com 

And then it got contributors, etc...

I started out blogging on my own in 2009. I went on medical leave. I had a pituitary tumor. That's sort of the cause of the anger, because I would have hormonal fluctuations. Have you ever been around a first trimester pregnant woman?

Yes.

You know how they get real irritable? Flashes of anger for no reason? I'd get that, but at the most ridiculous things, like “that light went out! Goddammit!” So that's kind of where the angry moniker comes from, but I also like to poke at people because of the stereotype of the angry black woman. Then when people meet me they're like “wait, you're not that angry,” and no, I'm very nice person, but I can be pretty strident in my writing and on Twitter. I like to juxtapose those, like a Dr. Jekyll/Mr. Hyde type thing.

I started blogging on my own in 2009, I picked up my first two contributors in 2010, right around the 2010 elections. It's right around that time that I dropped all the pop culture stuff and became fully political, because I started to get really frustrated with the way progressives on the left were hounding President Obama for stuff that I thought he shouldn't be hounded for, like the public option and “why didn't you close Gitmo?”

I felt like there were facts about how the administration had done things and facts about how he didn't have a Democratic majority for as long as people think that he did. I just began to get really frustrated.

I also began to get really frustrated at what I saw as underlying racism on the left.

Discussion Time: Occupy's first anniversary

Original Adbusters poster for Occupy Wall Street.

A year ago, the Occupy Wall Street camp began in New York. Similar protests sprang up quickly, and before long there was an Occupy [X] in spots around the globe. People marched, got maced, got arrested, argued and held assembly after assembly. The "99 percent" entered the national parlance. Reporters like myself got used to using Occupy as a noun.

The Breaking Time was on hiatus at the time, which turned out to be fortunate, as it gave me a chance to think on this topic for awhile and do some deeper analysis.

Longtime readers of my work know that I'm not particularly a fan of protest culture, feelings that I've occasionally put in harsh terms. In a nutshell, modern protest culture — especially the American variety — has become a kind of ritual theater with the powers-that-be, less focused on strategies for actual change than on demonstrating personal bravery and making insular groups feel good about themselves.

I believe that culture drastically overrates the importance of art and "making a statement" as opposed to figuring ways to get concrete goals accomplished. I believe it saps energy and resources that would be better spent elsewhere. I've seen protest culture disillusion too many good people because groups can't get better organized. I want more people of all types involved in politics, but I want them to tackle it as the fight it actually is.

That's my perspective, and is the shaker of salt you should take when assessing what I write on this topic.

However, while covering Occupy, especially Asheville's own coalition, I've found it interesting to see new activists cut their teeth. A lot of these people are — agree with them or no — genuinely committed to dealing with a host of very real social ills. A number have since moved to more local political involvement, like the clash over a Business Improvement District in downtown.

On a larger level, issues of wealth and class are a part of the discussion in a way they weren't pre-Occupy, and the backlash from law enforcement did illuminate how little respect too many police have for the right to protest.

But I think consensus structures are terrible at long-term political conflict. I've heard a number involved in Occupy say they missed a major opportunity by not coalescing around more definite demands (i.e. large-scale debt forgiveness) last year when their energy was higher and their opponents more off-guard. I've seen infighting reach absurd depths.

Part of me thinks that Occupy has simply reaffirmed the old protest culture, drawing another generation into the same vicious cycle. As I consider that dynamic a massive obstacle to positive change, I'm not happy about that. Perhaps more selfishly, I want my own generation to find a better way than those that proceeded it.

The signs are mixed, especially due to the extremely local nature of many of the movements. The DNC protests that were supposed to be a show of strength largely failed to materialize. Reports for today's marches are still coming in, but the count's about 1,000. Better than the DNC, but down from last year.

So readers, what are your thoughts? Is Occupy bullshit or a way forward? Fizzled or slowly gaining strength? Perspectives welcome below. Keep it civil and smart.