Today's Stories

June 7 / 8, 2008

Alexander Cockburn
Obama Goes Over the Top

June 6, 2008

Frank Barat
An Interview with Ilan Pappé and Noam Chomsky on the Future of Israel / Palestine

Patrick Cockburn
U.S. Extorts Iraq to Approve Military Deal

Gary Leupp
Cheney Enrages Iraqis Over Security Deal

James Abourezk
Name That Terrorist

Peter Morici
Recession Grips the Jobs Market

Faheem Hussain
What is NATO Doing in Afghanistan?

Andy Worthington
Guantánamo's Britons Go on Hunger Strike

Ayesha Ijaz Khan
How Will Musharraf Go? Impeachment or Safe Exit?

Dave Lindorff
Congress Needs to Defend Itself

Website of the Day
Backstage with Bo Diddley

June 5, 2008

Patrick Cockburn
Bush's Secret Deal Would Ensure Permanent U.S. Occupation of Iraq

Sharon Smith
Hillary's Wreckage

Nikolas Kozloff
Obama's Electoral Dilemma: Latinos or Reagan Democrats?

Linn Washington, Jr.
Police Brutality and Cover-Up in Philly

Omar Barghouti
60 Years of Nakba, 41 Years of Occupation ...

Scott Pellegrino
Jim Crow Radio: Bob Grant's Lifetime Achievement Award

John Walsh
Obama Woos AIPAC

Dan Bacher
The Parching of California

DC Larson
Nazi Rockers ... F-Off

Robert Jensen
Masculine, Feminine or Human?

Website of the Day
Ohio Cops Attack Long Walkers

June 4, 2008

Eric Walberg
Princess Patricia and the Taliban

Gary Leupp
Iran and EFPs: Chronology of a Lie

Ralph Nader
Disenfranchised Youth

Dave Lindorff
Of Whiners and Poor Losers

George Wuerthner
Farm Economics

Victor M. Rodriguez
The Puzzle of Race and Politics

Remi Kanazi
Why a Cultural Boycott of Israel is Needed

Stephane Luçon
Renault's Romanian Fairyland Suspended

Farzana Versey
The Tablighi Jamaat Movement

Laray Polk
The Militarization of Space

Website of the Day
Red State Rebels

June 3, 2008

Paul Craig Roberts /
Lawrence M. Stratton
Legislating Tyranny

Mike Whitney
The Withering Economy

Steve Early
San Juan Showdown

Manuel Otero
Why Hillary Won Puerto Rico: the View from the Colony

George Bisharat
The Hope of a Victimized People

Nikolas Kozloff
Obama's VP Quandry

Dan Bacher
Death on the Salmon Highway

Website of the Day
Censoring Bill Knott?

June 2, 2008

Uri Avnery
The Olmert Scandal

Nikolas Kozloff
Obama's Latino Problem Getting Worse

Allan J. Lichtman
Revisionist History: Bush, Borah and Hitler

Malini Johar Schueller
The Color of Randomness: Returning to the US From Beirut Via Syria

Robert Weissman
What's Driving Skyrocketing Oil Prices?

Peter Morici
Bailing Out Wall Street

Manuel Garcia, Jr.
Don't Get Burned: How to Protect Yourself From Raytheon's Pain Gun

John Ross
Celebrating Catholic Fanaticism in Mexico

Ahmad Al-Akhras
Encounters with the Watch List

Website of the Day
Man on Earth

May 31 / June 1, 2008

Alexander Cockburn
The Worst is Yet to Come

Jeffrey St. Clair
Arkansas Bloodsuckers

Gary Leupp
How McClellan Prettifies Bush

Stan Cox
Broken Agriculture

Rannie Amiri
Lebanon: the Domino That Wouldn't Fall

P. Sainath
A Guaranteed Day's Work--in the Fields, at 110 Degrees, for $2 a Day

Binoy Kampmark
Going Bankrupt in Vallejo

Robert Fantina
Bush, Rice and McClellan

Seth Sandronsky
Will There be Water Riots, as Sacramento Goes Dry?

Corporate Crime Reporter
Death Penalty for Bush?

Anthony DiMaggio
Gaming the Ghetto: Grand Theft Auto IV, Racist Media and the Concrete Jungle

Karl Grossman
A Half-Trillion for Nukes

Matt Reichel
From Vegas to the Heartland and Back Again

Paul Myron Hillier
Of Gas and God

Andy Worthington
Suicide at Guantánamo

David Yearsley
And the Winner is ... Wayne Shorter

Daniel Cassidy
Free Lunch

Charles Thomson
If Hitler Had Been a Hippy ...

Gary Corseri
A Dream Deferred: Activism and the Arts

Wajahat Ali
Sex and the City Through a Man's Eyes

Ron Jacobs
Robins Weep

Poets' Basement
McNeill and Davies

Website of the Day
Last Charge of the Light Horse

May 30, 2008

Bassam Aramin
Here's the Truth You've Been Running From

Andrew Cockburn
Petraeus' Iran Obsession

Saul Landau
How We Got Into This Mess

Nikolas Kozloff
Meet South America's New Secessionists

Robert Sandels
Turning Back the Clock on Cuba

Dave Lindorff
Talk is Cheap

Martha Rosenberg
Raiding Big Meat; Arresting the Wrong People

Harvey Wasserman
Lieberman & McCain: Linking Internet Censorship and Atomic Reactor Terror

Doug Giebel
A Plague on Both Your Houses (of Congress)

Shaun Harkin
The Trial of the Raytheon 9

Website of the Day
The Once and Future Environmental Movement

May 29, 2008

Jeffrey St. Clair
Bill Clinton and the Rich Women

Nikolas Kozloff
Puerto Rico, Obama and the Politics of Race

Col. Dan Smith
Deceiving the Dead

Karl Grossman
The Most Lucrative Incentive for Nuclear Power in the History of the United States

William S. Lind
Inside the Washington Game

Robert Weissman
What to do About the Price of Oil

Dave Lindorff
Why Puerto Rico Won't Matter

David Macaray
A Union Fable

Chris Genovali
Fear and Loathing in the Northern Rockies

Laura Carlsen
Mexico's Battle Over Oil

Website of the Day
Support Antiwar.com

May 28, 2008

Wajahat Ali
The Libertarian Dark Horse: An Exclusive Interview with Ron Paul

Ralph Nader
What's Really Driving the High Price of Oil?

Brian McKenna
Why I Want to Teach Anthropology at the Army War College

Corporate Crime Reporter
Why Vincent Bugliosi Wants to Prosecute George W. Bush for Murder

Brian Cloughley
The Attack on Damadola

Eric Walberg
Opium for the Masses from Afghanistan

Michael Dickinson
Raytheon's Pain Ray: Coming to a Protest Near You

Ijaz Khan
Opening Windows in Pakistan

Website of the Day
Older Than America

May 27, 2008

Alexander Cockburn
In Her Mind She's Killed Before: the Plot to Assassinate Ralph Nader

Greg Kafoury
Is Obama Turning (Further) Right?

Jean Bricmont
Western Delusions

Tim Wise
Farrakhan is not the Problem

Ricardo Alarcón
Puerto Rico's Turn

Stephen Soldz
APA Supports Psychologist Engagement in Bush Regime Interrogations

Andy Worthington
The Guantánamo 16

Alan Singer
Vapid, Stupid and Insulting: Chuck Schumer Speaks to the Graduates

Richard Neville
Storm in an A-Cup

Susie Day
Gone with the W

May 26, 2008

Uri Avnery
The Syrian Option

Bill Quigley
War Immemorial Day

Col. Dan Smith
Retreating from Hell: a Different Memorial Day

Cindy Sheehan
Why Memorial Day is a Double-Whammy for Me

Marjorie Cohn
Hillary's Assassination Politics: Her Last Shot?

Fred Gardner
Does the VA Care?

Raymond J. Lawrence
Pain Pays: Getting Rich at NY Presbyterian Hospital

Harvey Wasserman
Mugging the Election System

Moncia Benderman
Truth Matters

David Rovics
In Praise of Utah Phillips

Website of the Day
Fox News Jokes About "Knocking Off" Osama and Obama

May 24 / 25, 2008

Alexander Cockburn
Death-Wish Hillary Primes Manchurian Candidate

Jeffrey St. Clair
Yellowstone: How Sununu Shrank the Ecosystem

Barbara Rose Johnston
Dam Legacies, Damned Futures

Nikolas Kozloff
U.S. Fourth Fleet in Venezuelan Waters

Adriana Kojeve
The Environment and the 2008 Elections

Robert Fantina
Justice Department's Revelations on Torture

Dave Lindorff
Bush's War on Children in Iraq

David Yearsley
The War on Kitsch

Nelson P. Valdés
The Buying of "Democracy" Agents in Cuba

Kathleen M. Barry
Celebrating Ethnic Cleansing

John Ross
Mexico's Narco Opera Reaches for High Point

Allison Kilkenny
Apathy Doesn't Live in Bronx

Fred Gardner
Orangeburg, 1968

Elizabeth Schulte
Can the Whole World be Fed?

Daniel Gross
Remembering the Wendy's Massacre: the Dangerous Side of Retail Work

Christopher Brauchli
The Search for a Token Right-winger

Richard Rhames
A Nation of Sheep

Daniel Cassidy
My Mother

Poets' Basement
Davies, Klipschutz and Willson

Website of the Weekend
Happy Birthday, Bob

May 23, 2008

Paul Craig Roberts
War Abroad, Poverty at Home

Alan Farago
The Radical Extremists of the Building Industry

Conn Hallinan
Ballots and Bullets: From Beirut to Bolivia

Mark Engler
The World After Bush

George Wuerthner
Cars and Cows: Living Large in America

Kamran Matin
The Kurds and American Neo-Imperialism

Sandy Boyer /
Shaun Harkin
The Long Incarceration of Pol Brennan

Robert Weitzel
A "Holey" Instrument of Peace in Iraq

Cindy Sheehan
An Uphill Battle

Liaquat Ali Khan
Pakistan's Futile Constitutional Amendment

Website of the Day
A Message from the Moral Compass of the McCain Campaign

May 22, 2008

Vijay Prashad
Racist Grammar

Joanne Mariner
A Military Commissions Cheat Sheet

Sharon Smith
60 Years of Apartheid

Jeff Birkenstein
Disaster Redux: Some Early Thoughts on the Earthquake in China

Brendan McQuade
From Obama to the PRTs in Iraq

Peter Morici
The Sorry State of the Banking Industry

Niranjan Ramakrishnan
Restoration Boulevard

Dave Zirin
What I Want to Ask Mary Tillman

Ron Jacobs
CPR for the Antiwar Movement

Stephen Lendman
Immoral Hazard

Website of the Day
Hagee: God Sent Hitler to Drive the Jews to Israel

May 21, 2008

Jeffrey St. Clair
The Gothic Politics of Hillary Clinton

Nikolas Kozloff
U.S. Military Bases in South America

Alan Farago
Miami, Cuba and the Presidential Campaign

Dave Lindorff
Big John and the Scary, Scary Iran Threat

David Model
Genocide in Iraq?

Eric Walberg
Afghanistan: Who is the Enemy?

Franklin Lamb
Lebanon Gets a President

Kenneth Couesbouc
Tax Against Tyranny

Website of the Day
Child Labor and War-Affected Children: a Photo Essay

May 20, 2008

Ralph Nader
A Trip Inside Google

Uri Avnery
With Friends Like These

Patrick Irelan
The Empire and the Fleet

Ray McGovern
Come Out, Admiral Fallon, Wherever You Are

David Macaray
The UAW Strike Against American Axle

Chris Genovali
Big Oil on the Water: Skating Around the Tanker Issue

Ibrahim Fawal
Birmingham, Israel and the Nakba

Christopher Ketcham
Let Us Now Praise Famous Suicides

Andy Worthington
Guantánamo Trial Delayed

Martha Rosenberg
Merck is a Repeat Offender

Website of the Day
Defend the Students Who Pied Tom Friedman

May 19, 2008

Saul Landau
Cuba Will Live

Paul Craig Roberts
The Metamorphosis of the Conservative Movement

Brian McKenna
Brotherly Love in Philly's Badlands

Patrick Cockburn
City of the Dead: Mosul on Lockdown

B. R. Gowani
The Central Problem Pakistan Needs to Tackle

Dr. Trudy Bond
Psychologists and Torture: If Not Now, When?

Cindy Sheehan
Whose War is It?

John Mohawk
The Warriors Who Turned to Peace

Remi Kanazi
When Free Speech Doesn't Come for Free

Robert Day
I Get a Horse

Website of the Day
Evolve or Die

May 17 / 18, 2008

Alexander Cockburn
The View from the Crusaders' Castle

Tim Wise
Testosterone is Not to Blame: Why Sexism isn't the Reason for Hillary's Loss

Andy Worthington
Gitmo Trials: Betrayal, Backsliding and Boycotts

Robert Fantina
The Double-Talk Express Derails

Karim Makdisi
In the Wake of the Doha Truce

Harry Browne
Only Ireland Can Vote on EU's Future

John Ross
Suicide by Taco? The Demise of Mexico's PRD

Dave Lindorff
Fear at the Pump

Robert Weissman
Pharmaceutical Payola

Laray Polk
Bush Family Appeasement

David Yearsley
Puritans in Seattle

Ron Jacobs
Riot Squads, Privatization and the National Front

Paul Quinnett
My Last Flight

Sam Bahour
Refugees are the Key

Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor
Poverty Wages

Dr. Susan Block
The Groom May Kiss the Groom

Kim Nicolini
Paranoid Park: Inside the Fractured Landscape of Male Adolescence

Jeremy Scahill
John Cusack's War

Jeffrey St. Clair
Booked Up

Poets' Basement
Dominguez, Gerard and Davies

May 16, 2008

Stephen Soldz
Involuntary Drugging of Detainees

Jonathan Cook
Police Attack Al-Nakba March

Paul Craig Roberts
Lies of Aggression

Christopher Brauchli
A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Pharmacy

James L. Secor
Olympic Torch China: the View from Shaoxing

Franklin Lamb
Did Hezbollah Thwart a Bush/Olmert Attack on Beirut?

Linn Washington, Jr.
The Price of Protecting Racist Cops

Dave Lindorff
What West Virginia Means

May 15, 2008

Stan Cox
Big Brother Close Up

Jeff Halper
Rethinking Israel After 60 Years

Greg Moses
Living for the Children of Palestine

John Ross
Why Mexican Justice is a Euphemism

Ron Jacobs
Go to Work, Go to Jail

Binoy Kampmark
Indian Jailbirds: the Case of Binayak Sen

Eve Spangler
We Should Not Celebrate Dispossession

Martha Rosenberg
Meat Wars with South Korea

Website of the Day
Idaho Wolf Killers

May 14, 2008

Ismael Hossein-Zadeh
Oil Wars

Reza Fiyouzat
Torture, a Bully's Creed

Felice Pace
California Water Politics: Of Dams and Water Buffaloes

Hamdan A. Yousuf / Dania S. Ahmed
A Generation Defined by War

Robert Weitzel
Hillary's "Final Solution" to the Persian Problem

Ralph Nader
You're Either with the American People or the Big Auto Bosses

Dave Lindorff
Hillary, McCain and the Stupid Vote

Missy Comley Beattie
White Heaven: Hillary's W. Virginia Idyll

Neve Gordon
Israel as a Site of Struggle

Dr. Susan Block
A Washington Witch Hanging

Website of the Day
Hillary's Downfall

May 13, 2008

David Rosen
Sexual Terrorism: the Sadistic Side of Bush's War on Terror

Alan Farago
Nuclear Florida: Beachfront Reactors in an Age of Rising Sea Levels?

Saul Landau
The Crisis at Home

Saree Makdisi
Forget the Two-State Solution

Paul Craig Roberts
How Empires Fall

Andy Worthington
Gitmo's Suicide Bomber

Brother Bede Vincent
The Problem with Rev. Wright--There are Too Few Like Him

Linda Mamoun
Marketing Ethnic Cleansing

David Macaray
The Myth That Won't Die

Website of the Day
Burning the Future: Coal in America

May 12, 2008

St. Clair / Frank
The Pentagon's Toxic Legacy

Ziga Vodovnik
Rebels Against Tyranny: an Interview with Howard Zinn on Anarchism

Gary Leupp
Why All of Our Efforts Won't Stop an Attack on Iran

Frankln Lamb
Choufeit's Bloody Pentacost

Suzanne Baroud
The Ambition of Hillary Clinton

Martha Rosenberg
Farmer Ernie's Chamber of Horrors

Dave Zirin
The Boss's Boycott

Carl Finamore
I Ain't Gonna Work No More

Peter Morici
Recession Watch

Richard Rhames
The Third Way to Nowhere

Website of the Day
The Untold Story of Black New Orleans

May 10 / 11, 2008

Alexander Cockburn
Real Clear Numbers: 101,000 Casualties a Year

Franklin Lamb
Hezbollah Eases Up and Beirut Opens Its Shutters

Ciara Gilmartin
A Surge in Iraqi Detainees

Diane Farsetta
Inside a Nuclear Industry Soirée

Kent Paterson
Mother's Day in Ciudad Juarez

Alan Farago
The Social Engineers

Rannie Amiri
Beirut on the Brink

Patrick Irelan
Bolivia, Morales and the Red Ponchos

Robert Fantina
The Lexicon Legacy of George W. Bush

Nikolas Kozloff
El Salvador 2009: Another Feather in the Cap of Chavez?

George Ciccariello-Maher
The Yumare Massacre, 22 Years On

David Yearsley
Bacharach at 80

Ron Jacobs
Rosa Luxemburg's Shock Doctrine

John Holt
Can Yellowstone Survive?

David Michael Green
It's So Over

Ben Terrall
Dealing Sleep

Kim Nicolini
The Best Film of the Bush Era?

Jeffrey St. Clair
Booked Up

Poets' Basement
Gibbons, Orloski, Frisella, Gladstone-Gelman

May 9, 2008

Franklin Lamb
A Wild Day in Beirut

Andy Worthington
The Afghans of Gitmo

Benjamin Dangl
Polarizing Bolivia

Mark A. Huddle
Remembering Mildred Loving, an Unsung Hero of the Civil Rights Movement

David Macaray
Hollywood Gives SAG the Brush Off

Dave Lindorff
Team Clinton: Going Down Ugly

C.G. Estabrook
The Way We Live Now

Matt Kosko
McCain, Clinton, Obama and the Wages of Lesser-Evilism

Robert Weissman
Big Business is not the Solution to Global Poverty

Michael Dickinson
Jailing the Joint

Website of the Day
The Role of Third Parties in the U.S.A.

May 8, 2008

Sharon Smith
Rockefeller Family Fables

Saul Landau
The NATO Axiom

Laura Carlsen
A Primer on Plan Mexico

Binoy Kampmark
Food Riots are Coming to the U.S.

Kenneth Couesbouc
China's Paper Feet

Liaquat Ali Khan
Pakistan's Constitutional Shenanigans

Franklin Lamb
Blindsided, Hezbollah Mulls Its Response

Sen. Russ Feingold
Government in Secret

George Wuerthner
The Problems with Conservation Easements

Richard W. Behan
A Brief Exposé of a Fraudulent War

Adam Federman
Marching for Sean Bell

Website of the Day
State of the Air

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What If It's Just Us?

The Hard Question

By DAVID KER THOMSON

Dufferin Grove Watershed, Toronto

We all like to think we’re asking ourselves the hard questions. 

I’ve never acted my age, and I’ve always thought I could get away with it because I didn’t look my age.  “I saw a gray-haired lady at yoga today,” my wife just told me, “and I thought it was you.”  So, maybe it’s time to ask some hard questions about that acting-my-age stuff.  We took over the Gardiner expressway with three hundred bike riders last Friday night here in Toronto, and I thought we were just having a little family outing.  I mean, the boys looked very cute up there on that skyway.  Even flashing police lights are kind of pretty when they’re stuck in traffic way behind you.  Someone in a sports car shook their fist at me and told me to get a job (how did they know?) but I was looking over at Eva-Lynn, who has nice little flowers in her basket.  I met a guy once in East London who was from an African country.  He was as black as the handle of my kettle and I thought we were having a nice little multi-cultural moment. “In my country,” he said, eyeing my bike skeptically, “grown men don’t ride bikes, they drive cars.”  Comments like this make it hard for me to remember which age it is I’m supposed to act.  And anyway, the age keeps changing, and no longer corresponds to shoe size.  Who can keep up?

Slavoj Zizek, the philosopher and politician, used to have a special VIP passport because he was a bigwig in his little country.  It was supposed to give him passing-lane status at international checkpoints, but it ended up slowing him down because border guards would never believe he was a VIP.  Don’t tell him I said this, but he does look sort of like a terrorist.  Well, okay, maybe he looks a little like me, now that I think of it. Which means that yoga lady might want to reconsider the hairdo.  The point about Zizek is that he comes from a country so small it only has two tourist attractions, one of which is a castle on a hill up above the principal city.  The other attraction is Zizek himself.  I once asked him how he liked the castle.  “Never visited it,” he said.

Zizek and I—it’s got a ring to it but you can only go so far with the concept—Zizek and I once had offices across from each other in the basement of a certain American institution.  I mention this to point out that I once had some cultural capital, or perhaps to suggest that at one point Zizek didn’t.  I’d also like to call attention to our varied responses to the large signs affixed to the doors of our offices:  Not Fit For Human Habitation Extreme Radon Levels.  Zizek thought radon was a Western bourgeois notion, and he just shrugged and wrote another book about Hitchcock.  You could see him in there spitting at his computer and laughing away.  He can write a book in a few weeks.  Me, I took a look at those radon signs and got the hell out of Dodge.  And I’ve never looked back, except for the many times I’ve glanced over my shoulder and wondered why I left Dodge.

Zizek and I are good friends, as close as Jesus and Brian, but I find that I still need to be critical of him when, for his part, he criticizes Simon Critchley, the Essex philosopher, for a perceived lapse in toughness, as he did last fall in the London Review of Books (15 Nov).  Zizek’s comment was directed from one esoteric philosopher to another, but its swagger is right out of American talk radio: “What would Critchley do if he were facing an adversary like Hitler?” (LRB, 15 Nov/07)  Well, WWCD?  I mean, Critchley’s a well-dressed metrosexual, unlike Jesus.  What would he do?

We should probably be clear about that word ‘Hitler’.  ‘Hitler’, like ‘rapist’, is a sort of pavlovian cue for Western males.  Just say ‘Hitler’ and we start kicking the bar stools over to make room for all the self-congratulation.  How dead would Hitler be if it were just him and me in an ally, pal?  What part of this 2 X 4 don’t you understand, Hitler (rapist, pure bad dictator, etc.)?  Is there anything easier than this “hard” line of questioning that “sees through” the problem with pacifists? 

But the hard questions about Hitler would, at the least, include hard questions about ourselves.  Why was our side so happy to go kill Germans in 1914?  Why did we choose to brutalize their side at the Treaty of Versailles?  What did we think was the plan for the world when Germans after the first war were so poor that they had to bring a wheelbarrow of money to the baker to buy a loaf of bread?

How hard is that?

What we find too hard is to criticize our biggest fetish.

Democracy is our biggest fetish.  It’s a brutal system, conceived in slave nations like Greece and 18th-century America, wonderfully synchronous with whatever form of corporate savagery is in style (right now it’s globalization), glorifies the movement of power away from the individual and the neighborhood in a process called “representation” which would be a travesty even if it worked.  Perhaps especially if it worked.  It enables people to invert the most significant dynamic in their lives, stability versus radicalism, by pretending that the radicals are the gentle folk who like to sit on their stoops and get their food locally and ride bikes and so on while the conservative and stable people are the ones who send young men and women off to torture and rape and murder in foreign adventures (or to foment such activities repeatedly, as has Barrack Obama, who comes from the only nuclear power to use nuclear bombs against large cities, and projects this brutality on to Iran).  The strongest democracies have the biggest prison systems for keeping blacks and males ‘out’ of trouble. 

Because it begins as a practice of distancing, of being elsewhere, of sending one’s proxy to faraway capital cities where no oversight is possible, democracy is good at sequestering, at hiding its savagery at a distance, so the havoc created looks like it’s someone else’s responsibility.  They’re not called ‘capital cities’ for nothing.  How clever we democratists are, to make Chinese labor for us, die from the poisons in our computers, from a poverty that causes them to destroy their environment and succumb to “natural” disasters, etc., while we reserve for ourselves the right to criticize them for lacking democracy.  How righteous we know ourselves to be, choosing a black man to run for president!  How patronizing we are to the people who will have no part of acclaiming, yet again, a brute who will slut himself out (or have I missed something in all these years of reading CounterPunch?) once again to corporate interests.  The people who resist the ballot box and its filthy distancing work, people who understand well that this process has nothing to do with them or their humanity, are scorned for “apathy,” as if the most apathetic gesture were not the most common, to once again do the nasty for the system, ratify it, tell it that it’s doing the right thing, give it one more vote of legitimacy.

I’m a vegetarian for sentimental reasons—I had a pet chicken when I was a kid and she was one of my best friends.  ‘Poultry’ was fighting words in my neighborhood.  But I’ve always sort of liked hunters, because they’re not democratic about their food.  They don’t pretend ignorance.  They don’t get a hundred poor Mexicans, dragged in a sealed trailer to an unknown spot in Florida by rich pro-democracy corporate fuckers, to rip the heads off the cows and chickens, and then pretend that all they were doing was buying it in the Winn Dixie.  They do the job themselves.  I was going to make a joke here about the Vice President of the United States and how he hunts but I see by my tears I am in an altogether different register.

Democratists wouldn’t be so bad if they’d state what they’re doing in plain English and then tell you they’re going to do it anyway.  With Obama, for example, that would be something like, “I’m going to vote for him and send him to Washington and not do stuff in my neighborhood myself but let this bureaucrat do it and if Obama does what he says he will kill lots of Iranian children, and he’ll continue spreading it extra wide for the corporate fuckers, and I don’t know why he has such a hard-on for army generals, and why he hates Iran but those people beat their wives anyway,” and so on.  Just spell it out.  And then say they’re going to do it anyway, for whatever greater good they think will come out of it.  I’d be appalled.  I wouldn’t like it.  But I’d have some kind of respect for the honesty of the admission.  They’d be like hunters in that sense.  But in real life democratists are sleazeballs who are slyly slipping their poultry into the cart with the organic tofu, like no one sees anything.

The reason it’s supposedly easy to “see through” pacifists who won’t “get it” till a rapist appears in their wife’s bedroom is the same reason that it’s so satisfying to believe that there’s some part of a 2 X 4 that philosopher softies like Critchley don’t understand.  But in fact we don’t see “through” democracy, despite its millenniums-long history of pimping for every radical brutality that comes down the pike, because it is so much a part of us.  How can we see “through” ourselves?

Well, how indeed.  That would be a hard question.  Maybe we should get cracking.

When Alexander Cockburn writes in the British newspaper The First Post [today, June 4] that Obama’s triumph is a “great achievement,” I hardly need to school him in all the shenanigans that got Obama to that place.  Indeed, the Cockburns and St. Clair have been the ones who have schooled me, and they’ve made the usual perps in the sad drama very real.  As my kids like to say about disgusting things: “too much information!”  The only thing really ‘great’ about the achievement is that Obama roundly beat his even sleazier opponent. This is the apparent bargain we’re offered on the left, of making the calculation of lesser brutality that is the term of engagement in democracy.

Do we need another lesser brute?

Here’s a hard question: what it if it’s not the big brutes and the slightly less big brutes who are going to solve something for us?  What if it’s just us?

Democracy isn’t complex.  It will have someone who represents you who can’t get elected.  It will have someone who doesn’t represent you who can.  Not much has changed since 1914, when we went to war “to make the world safe for democracy.”  Well, that’s what always stays safe—democracy—while the boys lie rotting on the battlefields.

It’s time for emancipation.  All the representatives are free to go home now.

How hard is that?  

David Ker Thomson (Ph.D. Princeton) is in the Centre for Comparative Literature at the University of Toronto, where he teaches graduate courses on cities and ethics.  A version of this article was given as the keynote address at the conference “Apocalypse” at York University in March.  His article on family and friends taking back the Gardiner Freeway last Friday appears in the Toronto tabloid Now tomorrow (June 5).  His latest article on democracy is “Emancipation,” in Lowbagger.org right now.  His article on American radicalism and democracy will appear in the academic journal SAQ in December of this year.  Prof. Thomson is finishing a book on traveling in England with his family entitled, View from a Kettle.

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