alias Bruce.

Is the NRA as crazy as it acts?

It sure looks that way, doesn't it? After all, in the wake of an almost-inconceivable succession of spectacular recent gun murders, what sane organization would choose to stonewall even the limpest suggestions for public gun safety when it is on the wrong side of the opinion polls on most gun control issues? How nuts does an organization have to be to publicly denounce reforms (such as widened background checks) that most of its own membership favors? How can any brain-active gun advocacy group today not understand the need to cut its losses and offer at least minor concessions to a Congress addicted to both gun money and voter poll numbers? I mean, Tucson, Aurora, Sandy Hook, the Webster NY firefighter ambush, the gun show shootings – how many neon signs for the need to yield some public ground on guns does even the cultish NRA leadership need?

It may well be that Wayne LaPierre and his fellow White Geezer Gunners at the helm of the National Rifle Association are just plain wacked: shrieking zealots who have lost touch with their own organizational interests as well as the basics of human morality.

But I think it is just as likely that the NRA's top brain trust is crazy like a fox. I see one demonstrated reason for this, and also an unproven but evilly feasible reason.

The demonstrated reason comes from the chief axiom of America's increasingly frightened White Far Right: the best strategy for a right-wing white fringe that finds itself losing both the demographics and the public debates is to become so audacious, so bloodthirstily provocative and wildly uncompromising, as to scare money-whipped politicians and terrified white voters alike into whimpering agreement with NRA ideas that are way out of whack with voters' deeper desires and interests. This has been the tactic, for instance, of the Republican Party since 2008, and while it may appear suicidal in the long run, it is actually the sensible option for a cadre that has nothing to lose. With the NRA, as with the GOP, if they hard-line it the worst that can happen to them is the kind of defeat that would happen anyway if they were to yield now to demographics and the public's better instincts. And their best-case scenario is that they secure wins for their agenda that protect their power in spite of the fact that their arguments make no actual sense. So the NRA, ruthless power broker that it is, is going for it.

And then there is the not-yet-proven but evilly feasible reason: Even if the NRA, like the Repubs, sacrifices itself on the altar of broader public opinion, it wins a victory in consolidating the fear and fury of a sector of the white electorate that will accept increased state violence against designated "others" (blacks, Latinos, Muslims, the poor) in exchange for whites' perceived "freedom" to protect their own personal stature with guns. And it so happens that this political transaction serves and pleases those who most aggressively underwrite the Republican Party and the NRA: the very meanest of the rich.

Seen this way, the NRA's ignoring broader public wishes in order to whip up the loyal fury of its relatively narrow base is one of the few practical – and profitable – gambits it has left.

The gang rape and murder of a young woman in India

is such an unspeakable act that it is hard to find words.

First there is the very obscenity of a young woman's being targeted for planned gang rape by six men, including the driver of the bus in which she was riding and several other males – her alleged attackers, now facing murder charges – and her being savagely beaten, raped, sodomized with an iron rod with such force that surgeons had to later remove her intestines in trying to save her, and thrown from the bus to ultimately die of her awful injuries.

Then there is the further horror that, while this particular case made global headlines due to its blood-curdling brutality and the relatively high class stature of the victim, India's tradition of men beating, raping, and murdering women with impunity is long, pervasive, and still widely-approved.

All of this is part and parcel of a deeply-entrenched patriarchy in which a woman (or a girl) can be promised and delivered to a man as de facto chattel for marriage and servitude, and in which women suffer one of the highest rates of rape in the world. Were it not for the explosion of pent-up outrage by Indian women in the wake of this highly-publicized torture and murder, it might have continued to be business as usual. Even after this sensationally horrific crime, Indian officials continue to respond to protestors with rapespeak. This from an Al Jazeera piece by Naomi Wolf:

It is not simply the high rate of rape in India that is driving the protests' virulence. In a passionate speech, Kavita Krishnan, Secretary of the All India Progressive Women's Association, spoke to the deeper issue behind the protests: the blame-the-victim culture in India around sex crimes. She notes that government and police officials recently insisted that most rapists cannot be prosecuted in India, because, as one official put it, they are known to the women attacked. Other officials have publicly suggested that victims themselves are "asking for it" by their use of freedom of movement.

Like other coexisting regimes of rule by repression, including those of race and sexual orientation, rule by gender is both ruthless and steadfast. We hear an avalanche of reasons why we cannot change it: It's what God wants, it's what nature wants, it's what the public wants, it's what the law says, it's what people are going to do regardless. We've heard it all before on each unique front of battle, including gender rights: Maybe it's not fair, but you people just have to accept reality.

One front of battle in the war for gender equality is, of course, that of class. Indian feminist and publisher Urvashi Butalia has some interesting things to say about this. Listen to a radio interview in which she talks about how the bitter resentment of millions of low-income Indian men left behind by global capitalism expresses itself partly through rage and violence toward women, particularly toward "uppity" upwardly-mobile women who have the gall to seek education and equality. Women like the victim in this attack, who was a 23-year-old university student. The more women gain, the greater the desire of insecure men to dominate and punish them.

The conditions faced by women in parts of the developing world, where capitalist and pre-capitalist brutalities meet, are particularly dire. But before we pretend that elemental issues of gender justice exclude the West, consider this from Wolf:

This return to pre-feminist discourse is not confined to India. Italy is having a similar debate about whether women's clothes and behaviour invite rape. Even in Sweden, activists complain, rapes in which the men know their assailants go unprosecuted, because the victims are not seen as "good girls."

And this from yesterday's Huffington Post:

WASHINGTON -- Despite a late-stage intervention by Vice President Joe Biden, House Republican leaders failed to advance the Senate's 2012 reauthorization of the Violence Against Women Act, an embattled bill that would have extended domestic violence protections to 30 million LGBT individuals, undocumented immigrants and Native American women.

"The House leadership would not bring it up, just like they wouldn't bring up funding for Sandy [hurricane damage] last night," said Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.), a key backer of the Senate version of the bill, in an interview with HuffPost. "I think they are still so kowtowing to the extreme on the right that they're not even listening to the moderates, and particularly the women, in their caucus who are saying they support this."

The good news: Obama won. The bad news: Obama won.

The good news: Because President Obama won on Tuesday, we will not have 4 years of serial liar and cold-blooded cad Mitt Romney's hand at the tiller of the corporate state. This will be good for people who, say, would rather not lose their health coverage the moment they are diagnosed with a pre-existing cancer; or who aren't fond of the idea of a federal government sympathetic to denying women contraception; or who suspect that 30 years is long enough to disprove the idea that lowering taxes on the rich creates jobs and opportunity for working people; or who think that gutting FEMA and cutting government regulation of industry might not be such a good idea in the wake of Hurricanes Katrina and Sandy and the mounting deaths from weak food and drug safety standards; or who would prefer that the White House not consort with the most wildly racist, misogynist, and homophobic constituencies in America.

The bad news: Because President Obama won on Tuesday, we will have 4 more years of crafting secret kill lists that include U.S. citizens; 4 more years of the National Defense Authorization Act and its spectacular violations of our privacy and civil and human rights; 4 more years of ducking anything like serious health care reform; 4 more years of automatic coddling of Wall Street and other corporate autocrats; 4 more years of gorgeously passionate presidential speeches followed by reliably craven inaction or betrayal; and 4 more years of kowtowing to the bullies of the Republican wing of the Corporate Party, which has already begun with Obama's I'm-so-much-nicer-than-you stance toward obstructionist Republicans in his victory speech, and his (heh-heh, it's a joke) offering to wash their cars and walk their dogs if they'll only push him around just a little bit less.

American rage at the embassy murders in Libya is

missing one thing: an understanding of the terrible ruthlessness of consequences.

Give President Obama credit for at least taking a momentary verbal swipe at the looney-tunes hate video that helped ignite this hellfire before he settled into the conventional righteous American narrative of condemning such violence as senseless, incomprehensible, unforgivable, and so on. (We can, however, safely ignore Mitt Romney's laughable snipe at Obama for supposedly "sympathizing" with the attackers.)

But lost amid the roaring American condemnation of the awful attacks and murders in Egypt and Libya is any sense that there is a pattern here, that this sort of thing has happened before, and that there is a terrible logic connecting a history of American racism and bloody American recklessness in the Arab and heavily-Muslim world with the stream of horrific hatred aimed at Americans from some in those nations. From the shocked outrage issuing from American megaphones in the past 24 hours, you'd think there had never been an American-orchestrated overthrow of Iran's democratic government in 1953; disproportionate American support for Israeli brutality and apartheid over the decades (again, a nod to Obama for his at least refusing to parrot some recent lines in the script); a succession of American invasions carried out with brazen dishonesty and racist hubris; and a tradition of American persecution and exploitation of brown-skinned non-Christians here and abroad.

The Independent's Robert Fisk provides a good moral and political accounting here.

The point is not that American diplomats deserve to die, but that we as a nation will never get out of the crosshairs until we stop engaging in willful amnesia about how we got there.

(Thanks to Tina at The Agonist.)

Love letter from Paul Ryan.

From ChooseRyanLoseChoice

A picture is worth 7 billion words.

For the world's 7 billion people, this image pretty well says it: "Capitalism" by Mark Hermitte.

The chaos now surrounding the American "deal" to release dissident Chen Guangcheng to the Chinese government

is a surprise only to the willingly blind. The accounts in today's NYT, including this one and this one, help to show why. This latest from CNN, though, also shows that Chen refuses to go quietly, and he is determined to put Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and the American government on the spot just when they thought they had sidestepped this inconvenient problem.

It is clear that the U.S. wanted to squirm out of the Chen situation as quickly as possible so as to protect its shaky relationship with its creditor and cheap-labor-supplier China. In America's China policy, human rights rank well below the needs of the corporate and financial players who underwrite and steer our foreign policy. We all know this, although polite corporate media will not explicitly say it. Moreover, this has been true for many years, despite current Republican rants about the Obama administration's cowardly rush for an excuse to ditch dissident Chen. You can bet that a Republican administration would have been equally or more eager to find a quick way to dump Chen in the interest of business and finance, since both the Dems and the G.O.P work for the same employers.

Only an American policy team desperate to avoid a business-unfriendly fight would have believed (or pretended to believe) China's lame assurances that Chen and his family would not suffer further retaliation after his release back into Chinese hands. Chen himself seems to have panicked into accepting the deal, and now that reality is setting in he is, rightly, afraid and angry. Yes, he reportedly went along with it at first. But his current claim that Americans pressured him and failed to tell him all the facts appears to have some veracity. And in any case, when a panicked, injured, persecuted dissident shows up at an American embassy after a car chase, cooler heads have an obligation to assess the situation in the interest of justice.

To give you an idea of just how bad things had gotten for Chen by the time he reached the U.S. embassy, here is a short excerpt from one of the NYT pieces:

Although there were no legal charges pending against the couple, local officials had decided to turn their home into a makeshift prison with high walls, well-paid guards and sheets of metal to cover their windows.  The local government’s goal was twofold: to prevent Mr. Chen from engaging in his legal work against coercive family-planning policies and to keep the couple cut off from the outside world. When the Chens broke the rules — by trying to sneak out messages or secretly detailing their mistreatment in a homemade video — they were viciously beaten.

For the U.S. to then turn around and concoct a flimsy deal to drop Chen like a hot potato is, tragically, business as usual. In the aftermath of the dirty deal, we see handily-choreographed stances on both sides: China demands an American apology for its temporary sheltering of Chen. And the U.S. grandly refuses to say it is sorry. Everybody gets to protect their own flank. Except Chen, that is, whose ability to generate international outrage and pressure may determine his fate.

Meanwhile, the bloody economic gears keep turning.

Racial torture, libraries, and poems.

This is National Poetry Month, a time when – like Black History Month and Earth Day – corporate culture blinks for a moment at realities it generally ignores. Still, a glimpse can reveal plenty. This month, in one of the main windows of the downtown public library in my town of Baltimore, the poem on display is "If Mamie Till Was the Mother of God" by Joseph Ross, which won the local Pratt Library system's 2012 poetry prize. The poem has to do with the 1955 torture and murder of 14-year-old Emmett Till in Mississippi for whistling at a white woman. If you're sketchy on the details, here is Ross's explanation of how Emmett's mother, Mamie, electrified the world by displaying her son in an open casket:

Mamie Till’s decision to bury her son in a casket with a glass top was a momentous one. In her words, she wanted the world “to see what they did to my boy.” In 1955, Mamie Till sent her son Emmett to live with relatives in Mississippi for the summer. One night, he was dragged from his uncle’s house, beaten to death and dumped in the Tallahatchie River, with a cotton gin fan tied around his neck with barbed wire. His body was found downriver some days later. The image of her son’s beaten and distorted body were broadcast around the world. In the view of some, this murder was seen as the beginning of the civil rights movement.

Emmett Till, as I've mentioned, was not only brutally beaten but tortured, including having one of his eyes gouged out. As it happens, a few years ago I met and interviewed Emmett Till's cousin, who was in the same bedroom with Till the night that white men burst into the house and took him away to murder him. I will never, ever forget it.

Here is a photo of how you'd see Joseph Ross's poem if you walked past the Baltimore downtown library this month:

Photo: Robert Waxman

At a time when today's American brown shirts want for government's sole job to be the killing of infidels and the punishing of scapegoats, it's good to see a public library acting like a public library. My thanks to my friend Rachel for pointing this out.

Watch this video "mockumentary" in which child actors portray adult roles in the rampant violence, corruption, and suffering that is sweeping Mexico.

The video was produced by an assemblage of groups who want to shake things up in Mexico's public discourse. From the stormy response to the vid, they appear to be succeeding.

In its final scene, a young girl faces the camera and, speaking to candidates in Mexico's upcoming presidential election, says: "If this is the future that awaits me, I don't want it. Enough of working for your political parties instead of for us. Enough of cosmetic changes."

 

Thanks to Tina at The Agonist.

Gunter Grass, Dave Eggers, Germany, Israel, Iran, and "What Must Be Said."

So Dave Eggers wins the $53,000 Gunter Grass Award for his book about American abuse of a Syrian-American humanitarian. And just before the scheduled award ceremony, Grass – who has admitted to having been in the SS in Nazi Germany – publishes a scathing poem about Israeli nuclear proliferation and aggression. Uproar ensues. Israel bans Grass from entering the country. And then Eggers announces he'll refuse to go to Germany to accept the award. He'll accept the money, though.

Here is a link to the Grass poem, titled "What Must Be Said."

And here is what must be said about this whole conflagration:

1.) Kudos to Grass. His poem is truthful, and more intellectuals of his celebrated stature need to rise up and declare in public – against the waiting accusations of anti-Semitism – that the contemporary Israeli regime has in some ways become the wickedness against which it claims to stand.

2.) It is horribly ironic but not shocking that the Israeli regime, over its lifetime, has plunged into such a long moral fall. Any psychologist who specializes in developmental trauma will tell you that awful suffering often later translates into exaggerated, delusional, or even sociopathic aggression.

3.) Grass's SS involvement as a young man hardly disqualifies him from condemning Israeli behavior. Grass has owned and rightly been culpable for his actions. One can argue, in fact, that Grass's first-hand knowledge of obedient or self-justifying groupthink informs his outrage at what he now sees in some Israeli trends. Not long ago I had a conversation with an Aryan German, who came of age during the Holocaust, who now recognizes much of what he saw in late-1930s Germany in early 21st-century America.

4.) Grass's poem is lousy as a poem. It's barely a poem, actually; it's more like a proclamation with lots of line breaks. But that's not the point anyway. Nobody cares about it as a poem. We care about what it says. Presenting it as a poem in a publication, actually, was a good move on Grass's part: it assured that his message would be disseminated intact, in its entirety. Had Grass simply called a press conference and issued the message as a statement, it would have been sound-bited and paraphrased beyond recognition.

5.) Eggers's refusing the personal tribute while accepting the money stinks to high heaven. His excuse in published reports that the controversy had become too much about Germany and Israel and Iran just doesn't hold water. A response of integrity would be to either be okay with the moral context of the award and to accept the prize and the money, or to not be okay with it and to reject the prize and the money. You can't have both. Good luck washing those dirty little hands of yours, Dave.