The left fears corporations and the right fears the government and the far right feareth the Lord, but the distinction between the three is nominal.
We teach our children that democracy is good because we were taught thus. We were taught by our parents to send our power away from our own neighborhoods and watersheds to distant city halls and to even more distant, violent watersheds along the Ottawa or in the Chesapeake, because we were taught not only that democracy is good but that we must never, ever, under any circumstances think about democracy. We progressives are the Margaret Thatchers of democracyland, programmed to respond to the notion of alternatives to democracy by saying, “there is no alternative.”
The propaganda we give our children is that the vote is the important feature of democracy and the corporate lobbyist an inessential that can be overcome by more strategic voting. Good luck with that.
The truth of democracyland is that the corporate vicar is the first among equals, world without end. This is a constitutive, not contingent, feature of democracy. Corporations are slavers, they thrive in slave cultures like ours?did you really not notice how many black men we have enslaved in our gulags at this very moment? Democracies arise in slave nations and their bills of rights are drafted by slave owners. Do you really think that by chanting “constitutional rights” and “the rule of law” you can get around the fact that the very warp and woof of the rule of law is the enslavement of others? Warp. Woof. Growl.
Twelve thousand police marched this week in Toronto for a fallen comrade, and the press licked and licked at the boots of the marchers, getting their tongue right in to the smallest fissures and sucking the tanning chemicals from the leather, because the press is democratic?it loves the boot, the display of power, the feeling that someone somewhere is in charge, that it isn’t just us and our hori hori knives and a few acres giving peas a chance. No such honors will be forthcoming for the victims of the police, for the same reason?the press is democratic and loves only the boot.
We tell our children this nonsense about voting, that the Franchise will save us, because we are raised so thoroughly inside a slaving nation we cannot hear our own fictions, even as they tumble from our lips onto our children. In slavocracies like ours here in N’Am, all things tend to Lockheed, but will we heed our own locks?
Just for curiosity, would you call the “Lockheed Martin tax” of $260 per American household a government tax or a corporation tax? If Lockheed Martin’s clients are the Department of Defense and the Department of Energy and the Department of Agriculture and more than two dozen other government departments and agencies, according to William Hartung’s reckoning, who is the shadow and who is the government? And since Lockheed Martin not only receives the tax but acts as the tax collector and as the spy in the bedroom who oversees both tax and collector, in what significant sense is Lockheed Martin not God?
The point is to repudiate not just gods, but God. We must do this not out of hubris but in humility, in an awareness that with anything less we fail to mature as humans. We must learn to submit to the necessity of our own freedom.
The wise woman knows that no “leader” can help us. We cannot learn independence by studying dependence. Democracy is not an answer to anything. It is the problem itself. An addiction cannot be cured with more vigorous application of the drug. Do you think that if you abdicate your responsibility to some green party “leader” who after years of kowtowing to democracy manages to reduce the Lockheed tax from $260 to $240 that you will have done something worth doing? What you will have done, then, is to own with your own blood $240 of your own binding and subjugation, and you will have squandered the years you might have spent resisting evil. Was there some part of the fact that democracies arise in slave states that you failed to understand? Do you think Lockheed Martin and its shadows are some docile beast you can placate with a vote?
The beast wants to rape your sons and marry your dotage to an imbecilic old age and divorce your reason from sense and squeeze every drop of blood from the angels of your better nature.
I am writing in the anus of a new asshole I’ve ripped in the body politic, but the hole is a loophole for white boys of a certain sort and it is closing, while you’re over there fiddling with your democracy. Spend a few moments at the shrine, USdebtclock.org in real time, watching the red pulse in the veins of the infinite beast pumped up on the blood of the martyrs, and tell me your vote is going to do anything but provide more succulent flesh for the beast.
Embedded in the midst of tar nation, we’re only ever a flash mob away from remembering we will never again need a leader. What? What? We’re the what in tar nation. Our life is right here to hand, gardening, fucking, overwintering, gleaning, parkouring, dancing, quelling tar nation with our absolute ungovernability, our skill at going to ground.
In a world where everyone loves the boot, you don’t have to make a lot of points. One good one will do. This is it:
The smaller the point, the sharper the nail. Sole food.
DAVID Ker THOMSON has a PhD in early American literature and history from Princeton. He has never voted. dave.thomson@utoronto.ca