Back in 2010 I published a post called Tea for Two about the Tea Party and affiliated groups such as the Oath Keepers. I ended with a warning that we should be prepared for some "wild and woolly" times akin to Italy's "Years of Lead". The anni di piombo refers to the 1970's, when political violence between left and right-wing extremists was tearing Italy apart.
At the time, people castigated me for being alarmist and completely off-base. I would present the mob violence of January 6th as validation of my prediction. And today, WaPo has two articles/editorials about civil conflict in the USA. One is about a CIA analyst who applied her criteria for countries susceptible to civil war. She, and other NGO's, claim the US is a lot closer to a civil war than many of us would like to believe. Her job is to track and predict these things, so I'd assume her book How Civil Wars Start is probably an alarming read.
In a second editorial, three retired US generals warn that the military must prepare itself for civil war. They are not just referring to dealing with mob violence like we saw in January, but the possibility that Trump-supporting governors might refuse to obey the President; they cite the commander of the Oklahoma civil guard refusing to obey Biden's order that all soldiers must be vaccinated, arguing his Commander in Chief is not the President but the Governor of Oklahoma.
I don't know if he is correct or not, but these generals are genuinely concerned that some military units could choose to support Trump or a Trumpian figure if Trump is defeated in 2024. They evoke not only the possibility of civil insurrection, but of military units obeying different orders and recognizing opposing authorities. Civil war, in other words.
Maybe their fear is unwarranted, but given the number of vets and even active-duty personnel who participated in January 6th, I think we should heed their advice....
II
I've written quite a few posts about the removal of Confederate memorials, changing flags, and even city seals. In The Politics of Removal I mentioned an agency whose job is to review place names and, when appropriate update them. I think we can all agree "N-word Creek" is no longer a viable official name. At the time I learned that the word "squaw" is not a word we should use, either, as the meaning is not merely "wife" or "woman" as the old Westerns have it. It's actually quite vulgar and offensive. So I found this WaPo article interesting. It talks about changing the names and how a replacement isn't always so straightforward. Sometimes a Native American name is considered, but as the article observes, different tribes don't always agree on which word. And of course White people are often reluctant to countenance any change at all.
This process isn't limited to the US. In France a town called La Mort aux Juifswas changed in 2015, now split between the hamlets of Les Croisilles and La Dogetterie. Similar requests were made in 1992 and 2014. The reason is clear. The French translation can be translated as "The death of the Jews" but also "Death to the the Jews".
Similarly, in Spain a place once named Castrillo Motajudíos ("Jew hill camp") in 1035 was changed to Castrillo Matajudíos ("Jew-killer camp") in 1627. In 2015 the town voted to change it again, to Castrillo Mota de Judíos, something like "The hill camp of the Jews" which sounds better than "Jew hill!"
Yet we'll always have Santiago Matamoros: Saint James the Moor Slayer....
As I left work a few days ago and walked towards my car I caught the familiar whiff of decay, quite strong but not overpowering. I looked about and quickly found the culprit; a dead rabbit stretched out by the low wall formed by the down-ramp into the underground parking garage.
For some unfathomable reason the words "dead rabbit" popped into my head and a number of associations with that phrase appeared in my mind; because I can't seem to get anything else off the ground lately, I've decided to trace the arc of my thoughts in this here post.
Watership Down
Long-time LoS fanatics know that the idea of "development" as applied to exurban expansion is a bit of a hobby horse of mine. We have over several posts taken a diverse look at the definition of space and the definition and control thereof. In the most obvious form, this is basically the old land grab. New roads are a crucial part of this. Presented as a way to alleviate traffic problems, they usually just a pretext to open up more land for "development". Buy up empty land in order to re-sell it for new buildings. Raise the tax base. Keep the economic machinery oiled.
In the last ten years, the urbanization around Toulouse has undergone a rapid expansion and this process is being repeated ad infinitum. The countryside isn't being transformed from a "natural" to a suburban state. The existing environment is (becoming was) an already completely artificial, if more bucolic, agricultural landscape.
Toulouse has averaged 10,000 new residents per year recently.
So what does this have to do with rabbits? In a median along one of these newer highways, poetically known as the Milky Way, I often see a small group of rabbits and I am always cheered by the persistence of nature, even in the tiniest of vegetal interstices. Such a small place. I often wondered how so many can cram into such a small place. Much like the human population of the city.
So I wonder if the dead rabbit was once part of that band of merry survivors. And I wonder what laid him low?
Mr. Mojo Risin'
According to Wikipedia's entry on the Rabbit's foot, it was R.E. Shay who said, "Depend on the rabbit's foot if you will, but remember it didn't work for the rabbit." Indeed. Still this was the next flash in my mind. I even for a nanosecond considered going back to the dead rabbit and cutting off its feet. But like I said, this thought made me chuckle at my own in(s)anity before it was even finished.
Anyway, according to that same Wikipedia article, there are two many conditions that must be met before a rabbit's foot charm will work:
First, not any foot from a rabbit will do: it is the left hind foot of a rabbit that is useful as a charm.
Second, not any left hind foot of a rabbit will do; the rabbit must have been shot or otherwise captured in a cemetery.
Third, at least according to some sources, not any left hind foot of a rabbit shot in a cemetery will do: the phase of the moon is also important. Some authorities say that the rabbit must be taken in the full moon, while others hold instead that the rabbit must be taken in the new moon. Some sources say instead that the rabbit must be taken on a Friday, or a rainy Friday, or Friday the 13th. Some sources say that the rabbit should be shot with a silver bullet, while others say that the foot must be cut off while the rabbit is still alive.
Disembodied feet are a long-standing (hee-hee) LoS preoccupation, and you who have been following the Canadian foot mystery will recall there have been at least two hoax feet consisting of sneakers stuffed with animal paws. On a more abstract note, you may also recall that we've examined the conflation of hands and eyes and nipples, or various combinations of how the part represents the whole. The rabbit's foot legend is related to this second preoccupation:
These widely varying circumstances may share a common thread of suggestion that the true lucky rabbit's foot is actually cut from a shapeshifted witch. The suggestion that the rabbit's foot is a substitute for a body part from a witch's body is corroborated by other folklore from hoodoo....Given the traditional association between black cats and witchcraft, a black cat bone is also potentially a substitute for a human bone from a witch. Hoodoo lore also uses graveyard dust, soil from a cemetery, for various magical purposes. Dust from a good person's grave keeps away evil; dust from a sinner's grave is used for more nefarious magic. The use of graveyard dust may also be a symbolic appropriation of the parts of a corpse as a relic, and a form of sympathetic magic.
Not much different from the cult of the saints and the rage for relics among medieval Christians methinks. Medieval did I say? Contemporary examples of the phenomenon are not long in coming. to mind.
The rabbit's foot was also of some importance among the pre-Christian Irish. Which somehow relates to my next thought.
Gangs of New York
The Dead Rabbits were a street gang from Five Points and their story was fictionalized in Scorcese's Gangs of New York. Which is how I know of them and it should be obvious why the sight of a dead rabbit sparked this memory. The biggest impression I have of that film was the theme of nativist reaction against Irish Catholic immigrants which is, and I imagine Scorcese's point, a great paradox of the US. A country founded and made up of immigrants, one wave is quick to take up the nativist banner against the next. This is not a relic of the past, but we see it today. The widespread negative feeling against illegal immigrants from Latin America, the Birther controversy, etc.
This last bit is especially stupefying for me and leads me to suspect the whole idea of national identity is bullshit. The fear that Obama wasn't born in America seems more of an expression of the fear that given his parentage and upbringing, he is some how less American than his fellow citizens. I take this personally, having a mother naturalized when I was four and having lived over a quarter of my 40 years outside the US. This actually caused me some problems last time I wanted to renew my passport. Oddly, all the bother seemed forgotten when this was revealed to be a result of the fact my father had a military career.
Recall now that the rivals of the Dead Rabbits were the Bowery Boys, affiliated with the Know-Nothings. Both were anti-Irish and anti-Catholic. They favored extremely tough immigration policies and English-only policies in education and government. In many respects they are ancestors of today's Tea Party and aspects of the religious right; there is a certain cross-over between the two.
It all boils down to the fact that these people don't feel there's enough space for everyone. Like those rabbits in the median, confined to little islands of green among the burgeoning metropolis. That Watership Down reference comes in handy again. This is the tale of a group of rabbits forced to leave their warren in light of its impending destruction from "development." They thus set out to find a new place to settle. When they arrive at their destination, they come into conflict with another warren led by a tyrant. Bloody conflict ensues. Lots of dead rabbits. Bowery Bows vs. Dead Rabbits, Minutemen vs. Illegals, and so on.
The Rabbit Done Died
Finally, I thought of the popular belief that a dead rabbit somehow indicated a woman was pregnant. Not quite true. In the rabbit test for pregnancy the rabbit almost always died. In the test, rabbits were injected with a woman's pee and a few days later its ovaries were examined to determine if the woman was indeed pregnant or not. A far cry from peeing on a swizzle stick. Snopes has the dope on this one.
So the next day the rabbit was still there in the morning, but by evening it was gone. All that remained was a moist, black patch of flattened grass, crawling with small maggots. I first took that black spot to be the remains of a fire, asking myself, "What? Did they burn the rabbit?!" Of course they hadn't. But it did lead me to another thought. When I was a Boy Scout and we sat around the campfire and when the smoke blew into our eyes, we used to say "I like rabbits" as a way of making it go away. I don't know why we did this, but it was weird to be hanging out and all of a sudden some kid said it. Why rabbits, where did this little bit of folk-magic come from? I don't know.
Anyway, that's all folks. A few random thoughts sparked by the sight of dead bunny. The day after Easter no less. Just thought of that now. The Easter Bunny seems to be of German origin, which is appropriate, because there's a great word in German appropriate to my meandering thoughts. So, I'm thinking this rabbit died because instead of a field, he was navigating his way through a warren of parking lots and office space. Looks like he ran out of Lebensraum. That and luck.
Once you liken your opponent to the Nazis, any form of rational discussion becomes impossible. But Beck, it seems, has a Nazi fetish. In his first 18 months on Fox News, from early 2009 through the middle of this year, he and his guests invoked Hitler 147 times. Nazis, an additional 202 times. Fascism or fascists, 193 times. The Holocaust got 76 mentions, and Joseph Goebbels got 24. The lady doth protest too much, methinks....? Blackboard Jungle!
2. "....any form of rational discussion becomes impossible."
4. Followed by: Hogan's Heroes, guest starring Tea Party favorite Rich Iott as the lovable Reinhard Pferdmann of the 5th SS Panzer Division Wiking....
5. Saw a thing on the Washington Post where some guy from Slate talked with Todd Gitlin and whined about the Right attacking Christ Coons for his article entitled "The Making of a Bearded Marxist." He's got a point. Coons never called himself a Marxist--it was joke by friends remarking on the future divinity school student's humanitarian outlook upon his return from-- gasp--conspiracy alert--Kenya!! Maybe Beck is on to something....
Anyway, what a pussy. The Right is making hay with this because they know nobody will actually read the article and it helps them develop their narrative that America is being eaten alive from within by Socialists. Or Nazis. Catholics, Freemasons, Jews, Muslims. Whatever works.
Same reason why the Left is hammering Iott for dressing up as a member of the SS and mocking Christine O'Donnell for her confession that she had a first date on a blood-spattered Satanic altar. One spouting off about a love of freedom and the other the evils of having a wank.
Hey, one good slander deserves another!
6. Holy shit, politicians exploiting an opponent's gaffes, indiscretions and "weird" hobbies! Political partisans attacking other people with the same means they decry in their political adversaries. Hypocrisy! Distortions! Half-truths! Outright lies! Say it ain't so!
We've had a couple of recent posts and (for us) a lot of recent commentary about political figures being mistaken for gods (see Obama as Jesus and Political Saviors).
So I took note yesterday when I read about Raj Patel who is currently being (mis)taken for a god, following a recent appearance on "The Colbert Report" during which he revealed several biographical details that seemed to have been prophesied by Benjamin Creme, leader of Share International.
I immediately thought of a number of fictional "mistaken for god" situations--C3PO, Life of Brian, Capt. Kirk, Dr. Who--and realized that there must some wonderful true stories behind this meme.
A bit of digging about uncovered a few more cases.
There was Steve Cooper, who, while jobless, had the fortune of being mistaken for a Hindu goddess of fertility. He went with it, moved to India, and is worshiped as a god there to this day.
And then there was Neil Smith, a London engineer sent off to Siberia on a business trip where he was mistaken for a rock god, and wound up judging a beauty contest, appeared on the news, met Putin, and had young women faun all over him.
And lest we forget, there are the U.S. Army Rangers:
And of course Act 14:8-18 tells how Paul and Barnabus were mistaken for Roman gods after performing a miracle.
But the most amazingly pertinent story of all is the tale of Capt. Cook, who landed in Hawaii and was mistaken for a god. My god! but what a royal welcoming that fellow must've enjoyed. I believe that this was in 1776, the year that the United States declared it's independence.
And now we have, ironically, in these United States, a Hawaiian who has been heralded as a god and elected as the leader of our nation.
Capt. Cook met his poetic justice when storms crippled his departure from the Kona coast and he was forced to limp back for repairs. The locals saw through Cook's facade--and killed him. Cook's hubris, it could be argued, did him in.
You may have heard that a self-proclaimed Christian militia was raided over the weekend and nine arrested. According to the indictement, the group intended to kill a policeman and then attack (and kill) others at the funeral.
Apocalyptic thinking at its finest: "Preparing for the end time battles to keep the testimony of Jesus Christ alive."
Amazingly, the militia's website is still active. Now, you might not expect a group such as this to have a sense of humor, but you'd be wrong. Check out the "Beast Watch" section (itself inadvertently funny), which includes "The beast's number (humor)":
Examples:
670 - Approximate number of the Beast DCLXVI - Roman numeral of the Beast 1-900-666-0666 - Live Beasts! Call Now! Only $6.66/minute. (Must be over 18) $665.95 - Retail price of the Beast 666 F - Oven temperature for roast Beast 666k - Retirement plan of the Beast 666 mg - Recommended Daily Allowance of Beast 666i - BMW of the Beast 668 - Next-door neighbor of the Beast
I actually found this funny and damn curious among all the serious allegations of "the mark of the beast" etc. Which leads me to ask. Can a militia who strikes my funny bone really be out to do so many dastardly deeds? Not that one has anything to do with the other....
I'm gonna hafta read that site in more detail -- while it lasts. As much as I'd like to point my finger and say a-ha! I told you so, and as much as the videos and photos of these guys supports the feds' claim, my immediate reaction was one of caution. Let's see what facts unfold. It's a given this will be seen by many as a setup and/or psy-op, but who knows? Maybe the paranoids are right.
Epistomology is such a wonderful minefield these days!
Moore's supervillan Adrian Veidt watched one hundred TVs simultaneously to glean trends. Me? I read metafilter, a microblogging collective from which narratives arise occasionally from the chatter.
Today, for example, I learned today that the Tea Baggers, gathered to protest health care legislation, went wild today, spitting on Rep. Emanuel Cleaver (D-Mo.), shouting ni**ger at Rep. John Lewis (D-Ga.) and "faggot" at Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.), and holding a sign that read "If [Sen.] Brown Can't Stop It, A Browning [pistol] Can".
I also learned via metafilter that Idaho, South Carolina, and Georgia are making moves towards forcing the feds to take back the gold standard.
Finally, today, I learned that we're on the teetering on the edge: an information revolution may tip us toward an empathic society--if we don't kill ourselves off first.
Put this chatter together with the recent LoS conversations regarding apocalypse 2012, together with rumors that Robert Erickson totally punked those Tea Baggers into chanting "Columbus Go Home!" (see his previously madness), together with my five-year-old son announcing that god is not real (he's "legendary") ... and all I see is revolution in the air.
In a recent post which uses Hitler next to Dr. Frank n' Furter, we were trying to make the point that as a cartoon villain, Hitler has essentially become meaningless. As such, he can serve as a useful foil for any cause because he and his Nazi chums, devoid of meaning, can be recast to have whatever meaning is desired. He is like one of those boards at carnivals where you can stand and poke your head through. Someone takes photo of a strongman or a mermaid, crudely painted on wood, with your face. Ho ho! Now that's fun.
Hitler is the board, anyone's head can be popped in. He has become a caricature, the Nazis something from a zillion films and comic books. The Nazis can be used to slander anyone, from Feminazis to Boy Scouts. In the book I cited in the same post, called The Pink Swastika, the Nazis were said to have as a gang of queer thugs who originally hung out in a gay bar. Indeed, the book goes far beyond the Nazis to implicate the gay rights movement as a kind of cabal bent on infiltrating America. Easy-peasy. Want to denigrate your political opponents? Liken them to Nazis.
This is the kind of attitude that worries me about elements within the Tea Party. I believe the movement is a genuine outpouring of disaffected citizens and I must admit to sympathize with many of their concerns. But like many on the left who used the same metaphor to attack Bush, the Tea People have used the easy and essentially meaningless "Nazi" smear and laid everything at the feet of Obama. I would suggest these people are prone to believing the kind of tripe purveyed in books such as The Pink Swastika.
We want our country back! they say. Who exactly, is we?
When we see photos of the Tea Party or read accounts of those who have walked among them, we see a portrait of white, older, mainly Christian social convservatives, which is telling. These people were born into a world where Christian and white hegemony over American culture was a given.
As the demographics of our country change, these people are becoming nervous. The gays they expected to stay hidden under rocks are everywhere, on TV, in the cinema, in government. Latinos seem to be everywhere. Ominous predictions crop up every year or so: whites a minority by 2050! There's now a man in the White House with a funny name and who isn't white! They could have never envisioned such a radical transformation of the demographic and moral landscape.
Let's not be naiive. Racism, or at least race uneasiness, lies behind a lot of the anger directed towards Obama, not a disagreement over political abstractions such as "socialism." Are the Birthers really concerned over Constitutional proscriptions? Even if race is not at the heart of the matter, doesn't their near-hysterical anger at least indicate a case of xenophobia? We want our country back!
Does my foreign-born mother, who became a citizen when I was four, count as less an American than you? Does it matter that she was from England and not El Salvador? Am I less American because my wife is not, and my children have funny names?
I do not want to suggest that all Tea Partiers are bigots and conspiracy theorists. But in the articles I've previously linked to, there are serious currents of this kind of thinking within the movement. This is not a liberal elitist smear. This is not malicious condescension. And the comparison of Obama with Hitler is for real.
Take for example a part of the Tea Party coalition, called Oath Keepers, who intend to recruit soldiers and policemen into its ranks. While its goals are noble, they seem to have the impression that the US is gearing up to be a giant police state. Check out the list of orders they will not obey. Again, noble aims. But they seems to think at any moment Obama is going round up dissidents and put them into giant camps. Two of the ten points:
6. We will NOT obey any order to blockade American cities, thus turning them into giant concentration camps.
7. We will NOT obey any order to force American citizens into any form of detention camps under any pretext.
This last point is nicely illustrated by a Nazi shooting a prisoner in the head at the edge of a corpse-filled pit.
Kudos to the cops and military officers who assert these anti-fascist principles. But is it really necessary? Are people getting a little carried away with the paranoia? Does this shed some light on why we at LoS get a little pissed off at knee-jerk conspiracy theory? Are we at LoS thus deluded sheeple?
Hitler has served as a good tool for the Tea Party protesters. People jump on the "S" word in "National Socialism" and then use it to slam Obama's "socialist" agenda. Never mind that he is to the right of genuine European socialism, or that Hitler's NSDAP was merely socialist in name. It was an authoritarian, fascist movement. Control of industry remained firmly in the hands of private capitalists. Ever see Schindler's List? That factory he used for saving Jewish lives? Privately-owned, folks. Many behemoth German companies in existence today amassed large amounts of wealth during the Nazi period. They were and remain privately-owned. Naziism was no more a socialist phenomenon than is was a capitalist one. It shared elements with both, but it was its own animal.
Remember those Hitler comparisons and photos. They are instructive. First, it's so over the top to compare Obama to Hitler that it loses any sense of proportion whatsoever. Secondly, this kind of popular outpouring never happened under Bush, and the fascist qualities of his tenure were equally, if not more alarming. This period of constitutinal travesty was even kicked off by our very own version of the Reichstag Fire. Finally, we reiterate our warning (from the last post) against taking angry displays at face value. Like we said before, the Tea Party may be built to last and the heady idealism of newbie revolutionaries and tricornered would-be militiamen could signal a new phase of popular democratic engagement (if not serious social strife).
Or it could become simply another well-rehearsed and staged event which make a few empty vessels like $arah Palin into political forces to be reckoned with, without of course neglecting to collect large sums of money along the way. They call a false "grass-roots" campaign astroturfing; it is clear the Tea Party is not made of astroturf. But elements of it, such as the Republican attempt to coopt the movement, are fraudulent, and I am filled with a mixture of inquietude and wonder whenever they cross my radar.
As for Palin, you may recall her attacking government healthcare as "evil" and citing "death panels" that would threaten her baby Trig. She must be terribly worried about grandson Tripp, seeing that his healthcare is funded through the Indian Health Service. One can reasonably ask what this says about her commitment to her principle$. Does something so inherently evil become acceptable when one's own dollars are at stake?
Whatever the case, what are we to make of this guy Joeseph Stack, who recently flew his plane into the IRS building in Austin? Fox News refers to him as a "protestor" in this article, but at which point does protest become terrorism? The article reports that fan pages set up in his honor have attracted thousands of hits, with comments ranging from lauding him as a hero to portraying him as a victim. Were these the same people slamming Obama for associating with domestic terrorist Bill Ayers? Is right-wing violence protest, left-wing violence terrorism? Was the original Tea Party a terrorist act? Were the rum-runners and landed gentry we call the Founding Fathers terrorists?
I predict this guy flying his plane into the IRS building will become a rallying point for the extremists of the Tea People, and its meaning much debated. Conservatives will decry linking it with the Tea Party as a smear, and the left will hammer away at it. Remember when the Department of Homeland Security issued a report saying that the time was ripe for a rise in right-wing extremism among disaffected veterans? How it was attacked and the DHS was forced to make an apology? The left-wing Wall Street Journalreports that there is a "steady, upward trend" of threats against IRS workers. At what point does the lone nut become a movement?
The Tea Protestors will attack anything that comes out of the current administration as a reflex when fact is, militia movements are gaining numbers, as well as mainstream defenders. The anti-tax movement is on the rise. The last time so many average Joes cried for revolution was in the sixties. Trouble is, those freaky folks were more into smoking dope and fucking than fighting. The only ones who put their money where their mouths were, the Weather Underground, the SLA, the Black Panthers, are the most likely to be derided by Tea People today. Bill Ayers, terrorist. Remember him? He wanted revolution too, and for many of the same reasons as the Tea Party. Thing is, Tea Protestors are less likely to be dope-smoking group gropers than they are proficient in firearms.
Meanwhile, over at Fox, some commentators are calling posts such as this part of an "internet frenzy" to discredite the Tea Party:
We recommend Fox stop disingenuously using fucking blog comments (!) as editorial points to discredit liberals uneasy with the Tea Party and begin examining the violent rhetoric, the wearing of firearms to political rallies, the talk of revolution and secession, instead. Let's stop pretending there's not a potential for more of this kind of "protest" to be stoked by Tea Party theater. If the right can emphasizeover an over that a disturbed individual who turns a gun on her colleagues over a tenure dispute is a "far-left radical" enamored of Obama, perhaps it's not so heinous to link Joe Stack with Tea Party rhetoric and imagery.
Thing is, last time I checked, revolution and secession usually involve large amounts of terrible violence, always justifiable by those who perpetrate it. 9-11 changed America. Now we have a 9-12 Project. And their talking points are echoed in a suicide note by another guy willing to fly a plane into a building to make his point.
All apologies for being a bit lazy recently with the posts. I just got off a two-week frenzy of translation work and I still haven't recouped my energies. In that period I did come across two very good articles about the "Tea Party" movement. I'm not sure what to make of the TP crowd, but it's fascinating to watch this develop. It could either go the way of the Reform Party (oblivion) or turn out to be something more lasting and potent. It's worth keeping an eye on....
