Capitalism, a New Poem by Matt Sedillo

 

Matt Sedillo

Capitalism

by Matt Sedillo

Edgar
One of seven
Third born
Parents poor
Seen two younger die
Bed ridden
Mother crying
Father’s time
Fleeting
Man has
Something to say
Has an opinion
About everything
By sick child’s bed side
Pain reads in his eyes
Yet says next to nothing
Father rendered silent
London
Is full of dying children
Sheets carry
The stench
Father’s coat
Smells of factory smoke
Of the ash
That fell upon it
Mother sings sweetly
But the truth rings in her eyes
Edgar is going to die
And they both know it
Jenny

Jenny Marx, Karl Marx' wife

Pawn shoes
Pawn rings
Pawns linen
Has already lost
Two children
To the squalor
Of the east end
Does her shopping
Stepping over
Beggars lying in sewage
Lying in shit and piss
And third child
Her only son
Her precious boy
Her sweet angel
Edgar
Is dying
Victorian England
The world’s most
Powerful nation
Is full of dying children
Streets run flooded
With the tears
Of the women
Forced to bury them
Husband

Karl Marx

Some kind of genius
Beloved
Celebrated
Studied
The toast of a town
That will do nothing
To help feed his children
Edgar is going to die
And the whole family knows it
Karl
Spends more time
In the library
Than he does
With family
There are questions
To be answered
Momentum
To be conquered
There is talk
In intellectual circles
That his
Is the most brilliant mind
In all of London
His ideas are spreading
As his child lays dying
Walks the streets
That lead
To hallowed
Halls of knowledge
That lead to ladies in parlors
That lead to lords in parliament
On the same stretch of sidewalk
Of whores and beggers
Karl immerses his mind
In political economy
Some say his ideas
Will be the ones
That will shape history
He says the point is not to simply
Interpret the world
But to change it
Because he knows
Knowledge is not power
Only power is power
And kings queens
Clergy
Industrialists
And moneyed interests
See to it their critics
Are not rewarded
For their efforts
And Karl knows
That a man with ideas alone
Right as they may be
Cannot salvage a single

Edgar Marx, son of Jenny & Karl Marx, died in 1855. "Der arme Musch ist nicht mehr. Er entschlief (im wörtlichen Sinne) in meinen Armen"(Jenny Marx)

Solitary child
Not even
His own
The industrial revolution
Is full of dying children
Edgar
One of seven
Third born
Parents poor
Seen two younger die
Will not survive
The night
And there is nothing
The boy’s father
The most brilliant political mind
In all of Germany
France or Great Britain
The specter that haunts Europe
The writer
The philosopher
The journalist
The political economist
The revolutionary
The boy’s father
History’s most famous communist
No there was not a damn thing
Karl Marx
Poor as he was
Could have done about it

In memory of Edgar Marx and all the child victims of the industrial revolution

<mailto:mattsedillo1981@gmail.com>mattsedillo1981@gmail.com

John Nichols: Adrienne Rich’s Touch Was Political — in The Nation

Blogs » John Nichols » Adrienne Rich’s Touch Was Political

John Nichols

Adrienne Rich’s Touch Was Political

John Nichols on March 28, 2012 – 10:43 PM ET

Adrienne Rich addresses dinner guests after receiving the Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters at the 2006 National Book Awards sponsored by The National Book Foundation in New York, Nov. 15, 2006. (AP Photo/Stuart Ramson, file)

Adrienne Rich was an exquisitely politically poet—and a politically exquisite poet.

Radical in word and deed, Rich did not play games with politics or poetry. She treated each seriously, displaying a genius first recognized by W.H. Auden in the early days of the McCarthy Era that so horrified them both—and that new generations of readers would recognize across the decades during which she became as definitional as the elder poet who had selected the 22-year-old Rich for the 1951 “Yale Series of Younger Poets Award.”

Dead now, at age 82, Rich will speak on—well and wisely—through her poetry and through the myriad interviews she gave about writing and radicalism. Intensely committed to the causes of civil rights, socialism, feminism, lesbian and gay rights, anti-colonialism and anti-imperialism, she wrote poems about being an observer, but she was an eternal participant. And that participation was transformational.

“We may feel bitterly how little our poems can do in the face of seemingly out-of-control technological power and seemingly limitless corporate greed,” she would write, “yet it has always been true that poetry can break isolation, show us to ourselves when we are outlawed or made invisible, remind us of beauty where no beauty seems possible, remind us of kinship where all is represented as separation.”

Committed to trade unionism, she served on the board of the National Writers Union, as arguably the most honored of its author members. Yet there were some honors she would note accept. In 1997, she famously refused a National Medal of Arts as a protest not merely against right-wing attacks on the National Endowment for the Arts but against the economic, social and political compromises of the Clinton administration. ”I could not accept such an award from President Clinton or this White House because the very meaning of art, as I understand it, is incompatible with the cynical politics of this administration,” Rich explained. “[Art] means nothing if it simply decorates the dinner table of the power which holds it hostage”

A huge fan of “Democracy Now,” and a frequent contributor to The Nation and other journals of the left, she made political media more lyrical. But she also made literary journals more political. Asked in a very fine interview a year ago with Paris Review Daily about the “overtly political” character of her 2011, Tonight No Poetry Will Serve—with its anguished reflections on “Guantánamo, waterboarding, official U.S. denials of torture, the ‘renditioning’ of presumed terrorists to countries where they would inevitably be tortured”—Rich replied:

I’m not quite sure why you see Tonight No Poetry Will Serve as more overtly political than my other books. The split in our language between “political” and “personal” has, I think, been a trap. When I was younger I was undoubtedly caught in that trap—like many women, many poets—as a mode of conceiving experience.

In 1969 I wrote, “The moment when a feeling enters the body/ is political. This touch is political” (“The Blue Ghazals,” in The Will to Change [1971]). Writing that line was a moment of discovering what I’d already begun doing. Much of my earlier poetry had been moving in that direction, though I couldn’t see it or say it so directly.

“The Blue Ghazals,” published as an homage to Mizra Ghalib—the 19th-century master of Urdu ghazals who penned a poetry that was free and beautiful in a time of oppressive and cruel British colonialism—spoke of the common ground between love and solidarity as well as any poetry of our time.

What Rich explained in “The Blue Ghazals” she practiced across more than sixty years as as poet who maintained an exceptional level of engagement with the good fights of her times.

Rich was passionate about that engagement. And her poetry challenged others to share the passion.

After the end of the Reagan presidency, she published “In Those Years,”  which always seemed to me to be a fitting extension of Auden’s “September 1, 1939.”

Rich’s poem read:

In those years, people will say, we lost track
of the meaning of we, of you
we found ourselves
reduced to I
and the whole thing became
silly, ironic, terrible:
we were trying to live a personal life
and, yes, that was the only life
we could bear witness to

But the great dark birds of history screamed and plunged
into our personal weather
They were headed somewhere else but their beaks and pinions drove
along the shore, through rages of fog
where we stood, saying I

John Nichols’s new book on protests and politics is Uprising: How Wisconsin Renewed the Politics of Protest, from Madison to Wall Street, just out from Nation Books. Follow John Nichols on Twitter @NicholsUprising.

Copyright © 2012 The Nation

Sonia Sanchez Philadelphia’s First Poet Laureate

Phila. selects Sonia Sanchez as its first poet laureate

December 28, 2011|By John Timpane, INQUIRER STAFF WRITER

• 

Sonia Sanchez, 77, will be named Philadelphia’s first poet laureate.

For years, people have called her the “unofficial poet laureate of Philadelphia.” Now it’s official.

Sonia Sanchez, 77, poet, teacher, mentor, activist, and revered Philadelphian, will be named the city’s first poet laureate by Mayor Nutter in an 11 a.m. ceremony Thursday at City Hall.

Sanchez is the author of at least 18 books of poetry, as well as plays and children’s books. She has long been one of the city’s most visible and active writers, readers, teachers, and activists for peace and social equality. Starting in January, she will serve for two years, with a stipend of $2,500 per year.

I’m New Here: How Music Helps Imagine The Past Year

Reflecting on the terrain of the last 12 months,  I’m bringing a lot of baggage and experience with me, but the terrain is really new.  I am new here.  For 20 years or so I’ve been saying something about the economic revolution taking place independently of anyone’s will.  About the new kind of automation that electronics, globalization and robotics has wrought.  About the irreconcilable conflict created between the growing number of people who cannot meet their survival needs within the system of profiteering called capitalism.  About how Wall Street bankers and politics have become intertwined into a system that requires force to maintain itself.  And then came last year, and all of these are on the agenda.  Each of the last twenty years has seemed to last 20 years;  and then, in one year, we seem to have experienced at least 20 years, things have moved so swiftly.  This mix on CD is an ode to that motion. After each selection where I could find a comparable you tube video, that selection is linked.

I’m New Here – Gil Scott-Heron (I’m New Here) – opens this mix because, as the year opened, anyone who had eyes and ears knew that, though we may have been around for over 60 years, we were on a different terrain.  And no matter how far wrong you may have gone, you can always turn around . . . (Gil Scott-Heron’s memoir, The Last Holiday, is scheduled to be released mid-January 2012).  He died May 27, 2011 and I can’t help imagining the serene smile in his voice (on his face in the video) comes from foreknowledge of this year’s events.

“I’m New Here”  — the official video is here:

Africa Must Wake Up – Nas & Damian Marley (Distant Relatives) – the “sleeping sons of Jacob,”  exhorted in this record, have in fact begun to awake.  The allusion could relate to the Jacob’s ladder theme, we are climbing Jacob’s ladder to freedom.

“Africa Must Wake Up” 

A Night in Tunisia – Charlie Parker (composed in 1942 by Dizzy Gillespie)  and it started in Tunisia.  To say that what started resulted from the self immolation of a disgruntled worker is the least insightful sense of what causality means.  In some sense, both Africa Must Wake Up (with its reference to “Yesterday we were Kings”) and this 70 year old jazz standard help us understand that the events of the last year were many years in the brewing.
“A Night In Tunisia” – Charley Parker Septet (live at Town Hall, 1945)

• The next three tunes come from the streets of the cities of northern Africa, in the midst of what we have called the “Arab Spring”:

El Général ft. Mr. Shooma – Ta7ya Tounes  (Tunisia)   http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_7npf7vO9Hs

Wa2t El Thawrageya  – Revolution Records  (Egypt) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=52Xr9OS7o48
and an Egyptian Protester singing the same song on Wall Street:

7oukouma By Lotfi double Kanon DK (Algeria)  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YdQksrlLOlU

(I wanted to put Concierto de Aranjuez – Miles Davis/Gil Evans (Sketches of Spain) in here, in this spot, as a reference to Spain and the Indignados movement.  There was no space on the disc, and I had to cut other tunes for the same reason)

“Concierto de Aranjuez,”  Miles Davis Sextet (Sketches of Spain)

 

• American enters the fray: What is wrong in America?

Who Will Survive in America -  Kanye West/Gil Scott-Heron (My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy).  This was first recorded in 1970 as Commentary #1 By Gil Scott-Heron.  It was a biting poem that challenged the “rainbow left coalition” of the SDS, Black Panthers and Young Lords.  In the original piece, Gil suggests that SDS might consider digging a tunnel to China, probably at that time a reference to the growing connections between the New Left and the Chinese revolution, rather than conditions in America.  For this recording Kanye West sampled only part of the original, eliminating the section dealing with SDS.    A first description of what is wrong with America – “America is now Blood and Tears instead of Milk and Honey” — what the rest of the world is challenging us to deal with.  Kanye/Gil says “All I want is a home, a wife and a children and some food to feed them every night.”  When he concludes with the suggestion to “build a new route to China if they’ll have you,” he could be challenging the what became known as the 1% (and the 99%): Who Will survive?

“Comment #1″ — original version (1970)

“Who Will Survive in America (Gil Scott-Heron sampled by Kanye West)

Love Me, I’m a Liberal – Phil Ochs (Phil Ochs in Concert) – This is a classic in the voice of what we now label as “Democrats.”  We’ve seen so many of them approaching the Occupiers attempting to either co-opt or to shame us.  They tell us they are really on our side; or they tell us that our real enemy is “the right.”  And yet year after year we have gotten sucker-punched by the same liberals who promise us the good life and then figure out out to take the goods.

“Love Me, I’m a Liberal,” Phil Ochs.

Rich Man’s World – Immortal Technique (The Martyr)– When the liberal is unable to convince us, then comes the voice of the 1% directly.  ‘I am the 1% . . .politicians in my pocket for a few hundred thousand G’s. . .”  If the language is explicit, the actions of the 1% are at least as explicit: there is nothing here that isn’t being done to us and around the world many times over.

“Rich Man’s World” — Immortal Technique — This video made especially for Occupy is extraordinary, one cut I actually prefer to the audio only CD.

No Pay Day – Vasti Jackson (Stimulus Man) –What is wrong with America is there is no pay day this Friday, and the bills mount up regardless.  Somebody tell me, “if there is a bailout for AT&T, why isn’t there a bailout for you and me.”  This is what has brought the many thousands into the street world wide, this feature of a system gone awry, that cannot make the pay days.

(No you tube version)

Housewife’s Prayer – Pistol Annies  (Hell on Wheels) — What brings many to the street is the end of the job, the end of money, the end of hopes and aspirations and food to feed the children, even, in this case, “my man can’t get no overtime.”  There is no other way . . . Thinking of setting my house on fire.  This could be suicide (as in “going off the deep end”), but it could also be destroying the edifice in order to build something new.

“Housewife’s Prayer” – Pistol Annies

Union Town –Tom Morello (Union Town) Morello, as “The Nightwatchman,” celebrates the battles in Wisconsin, which he locates directly in the strength of the union movement (historically as well as in Madison).  “This is a union town. . . if they come to strip our rights  away we’ll give ‘em hell every time.”  There is a history here that is important:  not that the union is the model for the future, or even the organized expression of the resistance.  The union was the organization established to fight the employer, and as such has always had to fight defensive battles.  How can we divide  “fairly” the spoils between me and “my capitalist”?  The unions of public workers are in a direct contest with the state, and consequently find themselves in a precarious position – one where the right to strike is even more grudgingly accepted by the governmental employer;  where the right to strike may even appear a political question.  And what happens when so much of the public sector is turned over to the private (here in Chicago the battleground is now education)?  How can we go beyond giving them hell every time?  This was composed for and performed in Madison and taken around the country, with Morello on the “Justice Tour.”

“Union Town” — Tom Morello   Use this one to check out some of the many other versions on youtube:

• Occupy Tunes there are so many of them, many downloadable for free and/or visible on youtube.  This is  a small sample.  Plus there are so many artists who have responded to the movement (nationally and locally) that there is no way to encompass them.  Within the last few days I’ve actually gotten Rise Like Lions, a documentary of Occupy footage from around the country that is over an hour long, and introduced by this, the last lines from  “The Mask of Anarchy,” a poem by Shelley written  after a  massacre carried out by the British government at St. Peter’s Field,   Manchester, 1819 but not published until after Shelley’s death. Some 60,000 people, protesting poor economic conditions in the wake of the end of the Napoleonic wars as well as the lack of the right to vote were attacked by the British cavalry.  15 people were killed, 4-700 were injured in what was ironically referred to as the Battle of Peterloo, a sarcastic comparison to Waterloo:

Rise like Lions after slumber

In unvanquishable number

Shake your chains to earth like dew

Which in sleep had fallen on you –

Ye are many – they are few.

#OccupyWallStreet – (celestino Anthony?)

(No youtube)

Occupy Wall Street Anthem – DJ Mackboogaloo: this is a Chicago “House Music” version with a repeating background lyric:   “Public Enemy #1:  Wall Street.”

There are so many versions of an anthem, you have a lot to choose from, none of which comes even close to the kind of “house music” of the anthem on the CD.  Here are three: (1) Doodlebug of Digable Planet – (2) DJ Mackboogaloo’s house music accompaniment to Alex Jones “911 was an inside job” “End the Fed” video (includes a little occupy wall street snippet in the title) otherwise a conspiracy fantasy promo; (3) Called a HipHop Anthem, seems to plod too much to be in that genre:

Occupy (We the 99) – Jasiri X  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oxv9kIFJh5Y

We are the 99% – La Guardia  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LIV9vTiZsCU

• Where do we go from here?

Color – Mary J Blige (Soundtrack for the film Precious) – until she was about 30, Mary J Blige said, in introducing the song, it seemed to her that she saw in black and white;  and then, with a new vision of where she had been and what was possible, she could now see in color. That experience is what she brought to the process of writing this song for the film. Hence the exclamatory “I can see in color. I never knew I could.”  The old order cannot persist when the rulers cannot rule in the same way and when the ruled begin to envision other possibilities.  Many people are beginning to see in color.  Perhaps they are pastels and not quite vivid yet.  Perhaps they are emerging from what Saramago called blindness and seeing, or even blind while seeing.  The metaphors are many, the truth is deep.

“Color” Mary J Blige: this is a live version in which she explains why the name of the song; and this, in which the sound is much better, but the visuals are nowhere nearly as compelling:

Burn It Down — Los Lobos (Tin Can Trust) “I couldn’t say a word, it’s only dignity I heard, and once I go there is no coming back . . . I’ll burn it down.”   There is only one thing you can do with a system that strips your dignity.  In the metaphoric sense, burn it all down and start anew.  There is no going back. This is finally a move to a society where people care for each other rather than a system that thrives on commodities and profits.

“Burn It Down” — Los Lobos  performed at the Santa Monica studios of KCRW for “Morning Becomes Eclectic.”

I CAN see color.  I always knew I could.

Lew Rosenbaum, December 27, 2011

_________________________________________________________________

What I wanted to put on the disc, but what I couldn’t for space reasons”

Money Craving Blues Blind Alfred Reed        (no you tube)

We Are the Workers   Fisticuffs    (You’ll Not Take Us Alive)  (no you tube)

Our Generation (The Hope Of The World)     John Legend & The Roots  (Wake Up!)

Against All Odds    The Generators  (The Last of the Pariahs)  (no you tube, but this is You Against You from the same album http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I3ijmZbx1zA
2

World Poetry Movement: A Leap Forward

                     CALL

The World Poetry Movement (WPM)/Movimiento Mundiale de

Poesia (MMP) is pleased to announce to the world its next major

event, which is called:

 

       A      LEAP      FORWARD

and will take place E V E R YW H E R E on the Leap-year Day

and Night, WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY  29, 2012. The Co-

ordinating Committee of the WPM/MMP urges all poets, groups

involved with poetry throughout the world, to begin organizing

events in their particular areas—-whether it involves cities, small

towns or villages—under the umbrella of A LEAP FORWARD.

 

It may seem only a coincidence but the Occupy Wall Street move-

ment that began of September 17. 2011 occurred within the process

of the call for 100 Thousand Poets for Change, the WPM event that

manifested on September 24 of last year. And we have seen that,

with th Occupy movement bursting out and proliferating all over,

“there’s a poem being written by the people of the world” and it is

filled with cries for justice and real democracy, with all the aspects of

life—-from the economic to the ecological—that were part of the very

formation of the WPM itself, simply because they are part of the fabric

of people’s yearnings everywhere.

Events that will be multiple leaps forward under A LEAP FORWARD

moniker—events with poets who, in the past year, (what with Tunisia,

Egypt, Wisconsin, to name but a few), have been catalyzed by dynamic

inspiration and realize their consciousness of the world has grown by

leaps and bounds, can reveal those passionate leaps as part of the great

flow of events on Leap-year Day and Night, 2012, and collectively move

the whole world forward toward the democracy that all of us are dying

for and want to attain before we die.

         Let the WPM/MMP know where your event will be held by writing:                                worldpoetrymovement@gmail.com

 

Let’s Organize The Greatest Poetry Events In The History Of The Word

                            And The World By Taking

               A LEAP FORWARD

September Issue of People’s Tribune Features Fight For Public Education

The current issue of the People’s Tribune may be read on line here.

Lew Rosenbaum has written an article summing up the fight for public education in Chicago, and the entire issue focuses on the national battles on public education, with articles from Los Angeles, Atlanta, Southern Illinois and about using the example of the Triangle Fire in the classroom.

Jack Hirschman contributes an article on the World Poetry Movement.

Jack Hirschman in Medellin, Columbia

I Have Come: Rockwell Kent, Louis Duchez

Published in the September, 1936 issue of  The Advance, the newspaper of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America (ACWA). The artist is Rockwell Kent, the poet Louis Duchez, the poem was published in An Anthology of Revolutionary Poetry.

Richard Hunt, Michael Warr Explore Creativity and Change Sept 13

Dear Friends:

This is a reminder that the Guild Literary Complex Benefit is a week from this Tuesday, on Sept 13, 2011. The complex is hoping to receive responses/reservations by Wednesday (9-8) so that they can plan properly, but given that only one week remains, the main thing is that it is not too late to reserve your place. The event will have terrific food and, more importantly, will host a conversation on creativity between acclaimed sculptor Richard Hunt and poet Michel Warr.  Richard’s spectacular and monumental work, much of it created just steps from the site of Guild Books in his studio on Lill Street, is displayed in public places around the USA.  Michael is the founding director of the Guild Complex and a poet of remarkable powers.  Their exchange promises to be one of the cultural highlights of the year!

If you don’t know about it already, the Guild Complex was born in the creative space created at Guild Books.  The Complex was the umbrella under which the Chicago Labor & Arts Festival developed.  The Complex promotes literature and sponsors readings & other literary events throughout Chicago, particularly among historically under-represented groups. I have been  on its board since its inception.

The first level of giving to attend the benefit is $75. If you can’t attend all donations are welcome. I’ve attached an invitation. Please feel free to forward it to anyone who is interested in art and literature in Chicago. The sooner the better, as the event has limited seating. Please respond online and Ilook forward to seeing  you there!

 

Global Poetic Action – 24th September/ World Poetry Movement/100,000 Poets for Change

“ Due to the nature of poetry, the World Poetry Movement supports and will always support the thoughts, actions and measures that can contribute to world peace, the defense of all life on earth, the sustainable development of a new world, the restoration of beauty, dignity and truth, in the process of a persistent strengthening of poetry’s presence in contemporary society worldwide.”

Global Poetic Action – 24th September

Fri, 08/26/2011 – 13:23 — wpm2011

Statement of the World Poetry Movement

   The World Poetry Movement was founded in the context of the World Gathering of Directors from 37 International Poetry Festivals, held in Medellin, Colombia, between July 4-8th, 2011.

   There they discussed the connection between poetry and peace, the reconstruction of the human spirit, the reconciliation and recovery of nature, the unity and cultural diversity of peoples, material poverty and poetic justice, and possible actions to take in favor of the globalization of poetry.

   A month later, the World Poetry Movement has been joined by 86 international poetry festivals and 465 poets from 98 countries from all continents.

   One of the goals is to include most of the strongest international poetry festivals, poets, schools of poetry and printed and virtual publications, to increase our mutual cooperation and thus energize the individual and collective voice of poetry in our time.

   Recently the World Poetry Movement has been joined by the “100,000 Poets for Change” project (www.100TPC.org), a bold initiative by poets Michael Rothenberg and Terri Carrión, in California, who have proposed the implementation of a worldwide poetic action, next September 24th, 2011 in 350 cities worldwide.

   Due to the nature of poetry, the World Poetry Movement supports and will always support the thoughts, actions and measures that can contribute to world peace, the defense of all life on earth, the sustainable development of a new world, the restoration of beauty, dignity and truth, in the process of a persistent strengthening of poetry’s presence in contemporary society worldwide.

   Poetry is knowledge, reflection and enlightenment, liberation, contemplation and action, lightning, creative imagination and brotherhood, spiritual unity of individuals and peoples, past, present and future of humanity.

   World Poetry Movement calls on all its members, poets and international poetry festivals, to plan, develop and spread poetic actions and Simultaneous poetry readings, across the planet, next September 24th, 2011, to consolidate our organizational process, making a formidable display of poetic power possible in the world, in hundreds of cities and villages on Earth.

   We ask you to please inform us shortly on the decisions taken regarding this proposal to the following email: worldpoetrymovement@gmail.com

WORLD POETRY MOVEMENT COORDINATING COMMITTEE

   Peter Rorvik (South Africa), Bas Kwakman (Netherlands), Jack Hirschman (United States of America), Rati Saxena (India), Alex Pausides (Cuba), Amir Or (Israel), Iryna Vikyrchak (Ukraine), Fernando Rendón (Colombia).

Read more here.

Life in an Age of Looting: Robbing with Sixgun or Fountain Pen — Phil Rockstroh on Commondreams.com

Published on Friday, August 12, 2011 by CommonDreams.org

Life in an Age of Looting: “Some Will Rob You with a Sixgun and Some with a Fountain Pen”

by Phil Rockstroh

As the poor of Britain rise in a fury of inchoate rage and stock exchanges worldwide experience manic upswings and panicked swoons, the financial elite (and their political operatives) are arrayed in a defensive posture, even as they continue their global-wide, full-spectrum offensive vis-à-vie The Shock Doctrine. Concurrently, corporate mass media types fret over the reversal of fortune and trumpet the triumphs of the self-serving agendas of Wall Street and corporate swindlers…even as they term a feller, in ill-gotten possession of a flat screen television, fleeing through the streets of North London, a mindless thug.

According to the through-the-looking-glass cosmology of mass media elitists, when a poor person commits a crime of opportunity, his actions are a threat to all we hold dear and sacred, but, when the hyper-wealthy of the entrenched looter class abscond with billions, those criminals are referred to as our financial leaders.

Regardless of the propaganda of “free market” fantasists, the great unspeakable in regard to capitalism is its wealth, by and large, is generated for a ruthless, privileged few by the creation of bubbles, and, when those bubbles burst, the resultant economic catastrophe inflicts a vastly disproportionate amount of harm upon those — the laboring and middle classes — who generate grossly inequitable amounts of capital for the elitist of the fraudster class…by having the life force drained from them by the vampiric set-up of the gamed system.

Woody Guthrie summed up the situation in these two (unfortunately) ageless stanzas:

“Yes, as through this world I’ve wandered
I’ve seen lots of funny men;
Some will rob you with a sixgun,
And some with a fountain pen.

“And as through your life you travel,
Yes, as through your life you roam,
You won’t never see an outlaw
Drive a family from their home.”
–excerpt from Pretty Boy Floyd.

Although, at present, U.S. bank vaults contain little tangible loot for a Pretty Boy Floyd-type outlaw to boost. How would it be possible for an old school bank robber such as Floyd to make-off with a haul of funneling electrons?

Here’s the lowdown: The Wall Street fraudsters of the swindler class want to refill their coffers and line their pockets (that is, offshore accounts) with Social Security and Medicare funds. That’s the nature of the unfolding scam, folks. Oligarchic rule has always been a system defined by legalized looting that leaves a wasteland of want, deprivation, and unfocused rage in its wake.

Consequently, in the U.K. (and beyond): When poor people’s hopes dry up, cities become a tinderbox of dead dreams, and we should not be stricken with shock and consternation when these degraded places are set aflame, nor should we be surprised when the bribed, debt-beholden and commercial media propaganda-bamboozled middle class (who helped create the wasteland with their arid complicity) cry out (predictably) for police state tactics to quell the fiery insurrection.

There have been incidents in which a fire has smoldered for years in an abandoned, sealed-off mineshaft, and then the fire, traveling through the tunnels of the mine, and up the roots of dead, dried trees have caused a dying forest to bloom into flames. The rage that sparks a riot can proceed in a similar manner — and the insular, sealed-off nature of a nation’s elite and the willful ignorance of its middle class will only make the explosion of pent-up rage more powerful when it reaches the surface.

We exist in a culture that, day after day, inundates its have-nots with consumerist propaganda, and then, when the social order breaks down, its wealthy and bourgeoisie alike express outrage when the poor steal consumer goods — as opposed to going out and looting an education and a good job.

Under Disaster Capitalism, the underclass have had economic violence inflicted upon them since birth, yet the corporate state mass media doesn’t seem to notice the situation, until young men burn down the night. Then media elitists wax indignant, carrying on as if these desperate acts are devoid of cultural context.

A mindset has been instilled in these young men and boys that they are nothing sans the accoutrements of consumerism. Yet when they loot an i-Phone, as opposed to creating economy-shredding derivative scams, we’re prompted by the corporate media to become indignant.

When the slow motion, elitist-manipulated mob action known as our faux democratic/consumerist culture deprives people of their basic human rights and personal dignity — then, in turn, we should not be shocked when a mob of the underclass fails to bestow those virtues upon others.

The commercial mass media’s narrative of narrowed context (emotional, anecdotal and unreflective in nature) serves as a form of corporate state propaganda, promulgated to ensure the general population continues to rage against the symptoms rather than the disease of neoliberalism. The false framing of opposing opinions — of those who state the deprivations of neoliberalism factor into the causes of uprisings, insurrections and riots as being apologists for violence and destruction is as preposterous as claiming one is an apologist for dry rot when he points out structural damage to a house due to a leaking roof.

Because of the elements of inverted totalitarianism, inherent within the structure of corporate state capitalism, and internalized within the general population by constant, commercial media re-enforcement, one should not be surprised when a sizable portion of the general populace is inclined to support police state tactics to quell social unrest among the disadvantaged of the population.

Keep in mind: When watching the BBC or the corporate media, one is receiving a limited narrative (tacitly) approved by the global power elite, created by informal arrangements among a careerist cartel comprised of business, governmental and media personality types who have a vested interest in maintaining the status quo, even if, in doing so, they serve as operatives of a burgeoning police state.

Accordingly, you can’t debate fascist thinking with reason nor empathetic imagination e.g., the self-righteous (and self-serving) pronouncements of mass media representatives nor the attendant outrage of the denizens of the corporate state in their audience — their umbrage engineered by the emotionally laden images with which they have been relentlessly pummeled and plied — because their responses will be borne of (conveniently) lazy generalizations, given impetus by fear-based animus.

Through it all, veiled by disorienting media distractions and political legerdemain, we find ourselves buffeted and bound by the predicament of paradigm lost…that constitutes the onset of the unraveling of the present order.

“The kings of the world are growing old,
and they shall have no inheritors.
Their sons died while they were boys,
and their neurasthenic daughters abandoned
the sick crown to the mob.”
–Rainer Maria Rilke, excerpt from The Kings of the World”

Yet, while there is proliferate evidence that, even as people worldwide are rising up against inequity and exploitation, the economic elite have little inclination to do so much as glimpse the plight of those from whose life blood their immense riches have been wrung, nor hear the admonition of the downtrodden…that they are weary of life on their knees and are awakening to the reality that the con of freedom of choice under corporate state oligarchy is, in fact, a life shackled to the consumerism-addicted/debt-indenturement that comprises the structure of the neoliberal, global company store.

“The rotten masks that divide one man
From another, one man from himself
They crumble
For one enormous moment and we glimpse
The unity that we lost, the desolation
…Of being man, and all its glories
Sharing bread and sun and death
The forgotten astonishment of being alive”
–Octavio Paz, excerpt from “Sunstone”

Accordingly, the most profound act of selfless devotion (commonly called love) in relationship to a society gripped by a sociopathic mode of being is creative resistance. Submission is madness. Sanity entails subversion. The heart insists on it; otherwise, life is only a slog to the graveyard; mouth, full of ashes; heart, a receptacle for dust.

Phil Rockstroh is a poet, lyricist and philosopher bard living in New York City. He may be contacted at: phil@philrockstroh.com. Visit Phil’s website or at FaceBook.

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