Cannot add to the piece via PC anymore...not sure why. Substack and my Dell computer do not get along well; a total mystery to me. If I could, I would add this quote from Jeff Sharlet to the essay: "But for all its guns and Punisher skulls and actual killers, [US-Amerikaner] fascism is actually worse than a death cult: It’s an innocence cult, the belief that one might be as innocent of history – read, race – as a fetus is of the world. Perfect and pink (White), unbloody in the Dobbsian imagination of the womb. The gun, too, is made clean by the cult of innocence, born again not as a tool of aggression but of defense, as the protection of purity, inscribed by a growing number of manufacturers with Stars and Stripes and biblical verse; advertised as a form of evangelism, a means of spreading God’s goodness in the world. Like a baby. The fetus and the gun. Small wonder nobody’s yet put them together on a flag.” (Sharlet, The Undertow, p. 306).
And so now it is reported that the Allen, Texas shooter "was wearing a patch with the acronym 'RWDS' — which stands for 'Right Wing Death Squad.' The same patch was worn by a Proud Boys member who pleaded guilty to seditious conspiracy during the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol. However, NPR has not seen any evidence linking Garcia to the Proud Boys....Social media accounts that appear to belong to Garcia showcase neo-Nazi and white supremacist views. His victims were mostly people of Korean and Indian descent." https://www.npr.org/2023/05/08/1174885273/allen-texas-shooting-what-we-know-victims-far-right-gunman
I’m delighted to see that your work, “It Happened Here” is now available for reading at libraries in San Mateo, CA. I requested purchase of copies last year. I placed holds on Jeff Sharlet and Ned Blackhawk as they are cataloged as well.
"Isn’t the real problem that this sick, savagely unequal, atomizing, anomie-inducing and violence-worshipping capitalist-imperialist society and fascising political culture have produced intersecting, overlapping, and mutually reinforcing crises of over-arming and mental and moral madness"
Yes. Nailed it. I would add: nobody lives in an actual community anymore. A community being a group of people that actually care about each other and see their economic interdepency, their mutual stake in cooperation for survival together as a group. We live in income segregated fortress communities, where each nuclear family expects to protect what they got and would not conceive of helping even their next door neighbor in way that would involve any significant sacrifice of time or money to themselves. We lost the communal spirit and are living in the 'predatory' phase of existence, where others in our society are obstacles to be leveraged for profit. Anyhow, this lack of community (and mass glorification of violence) leads to these shootings. When people are utterly detached and isolated from a community, but armed, things get dangerous.
In a society where, deep down, individuals can sense that they are utterly lacking in any real political power or control over their daily lives, it makes some sense to turn to The Gun, a simple, accessible device which while not giving you political power (unless organized en masse with like-minded armed people), does immediately give you real power over people unfortunate enough to be in your immediate vicinity. A power which though brief, is appearing to be refreshing to the desperate and mentally ill. The only real way to get the elites concerned about gun ownership in this country would be if we actually did have millions of people armed and organized in communist, or otherwise revolutionary armed militias. You better belive they would start clamping down on gun ownership if a real armed threat to the power structure started to develop.
A reader of one of my recent posts about capitalism's role in the destruction of the planet commented that "long before the resources of Mother Earth are depleted we will all have been shot to death by crazy white men armed with AR-15s. I will forward this report to him as a validation that his prediction has an excellent chance of coming true.
This series is not following in the same order as I originally advertised at the start --- and, to quote Stuart Smalley, "that's okay." Part 2 was suposed to be on DeSantis and Florida but that will be Part 3 now.
The "Shining City on a Hill" has set it's next 20 year paradigm. You will have to wait 20 years. The Murican politburo have decided this public program for your enjoyment. It's already been 7 years since inception of this theme.
Just goes to show you what "they" think of the people. Just goes to show you how nasty "they" are.
Cannot add to the piece via PC anymore...not sure why. Substack and my Dell computer do not get along well; a total mystery to me. If I could, I would add this quote from Jeff Sharlet to the essay: "But for all its guns and Punisher skulls and actual killers, [US-Amerikaner] fascism is actually worse than a death cult: It’s an innocence cult, the belief that one might be as innocent of history – read, race – as a fetus is of the world. Perfect and pink (White), unbloody in the Dobbsian imagination of the womb. The gun, too, is made clean by the cult of innocence, born again not as a tool of aggression but of defense, as the protection of purity, inscribed by a growing number of manufacturers with Stars and Stripes and biblical verse; advertised as a form of evangelism, a means of spreading God’s goodness in the world. Like a baby. The fetus and the gun. Small wonder nobody’s yet put them together on a flag.” (Sharlet, The Undertow, p. 306).
And so now it is reported that the Allen, Texas shooter "was wearing a patch with the acronym 'RWDS' — which stands for 'Right Wing Death Squad.' The same patch was worn by a Proud Boys member who pleaded guilty to seditious conspiracy during the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol. However, NPR has not seen any evidence linking Garcia to the Proud Boys....Social media accounts that appear to belong to Garcia showcase neo-Nazi and white supremacist views. His victims were mostly people of Korean and Indian descent." https://www.npr.org/2023/05/08/1174885273/allen-texas-shooting-what-we-know-victims-far-right-gunman
I’m delighted to see that your work, “It Happened Here” is now available for reading at libraries in San Mateo, CA. I requested purchase of copies last year. I placed holds on Jeff Sharlet and Ned Blackhawk as they are cataloged as well.
Will review Sharlet for CounterPunch this week --- a remarkable book.
"Isn’t the real problem that this sick, savagely unequal, atomizing, anomie-inducing and violence-worshipping capitalist-imperialist society and fascising political culture have produced intersecting, overlapping, and mutually reinforcing crises of over-arming and mental and moral madness"
Yes. Nailed it. I would add: nobody lives in an actual community anymore. A community being a group of people that actually care about each other and see their economic interdepency, their mutual stake in cooperation for survival together as a group. We live in income segregated fortress communities, where each nuclear family expects to protect what they got and would not conceive of helping even their next door neighbor in way that would involve any significant sacrifice of time or money to themselves. We lost the communal spirit and are living in the 'predatory' phase of existence, where others in our society are obstacles to be leveraged for profit. Anyhow, this lack of community (and mass glorification of violence) leads to these shootings. When people are utterly detached and isolated from a community, but armed, things get dangerous.
In a society where, deep down, individuals can sense that they are utterly lacking in any real political power or control over their daily lives, it makes some sense to turn to The Gun, a simple, accessible device which while not giving you political power (unless organized en masse with like-minded armed people), does immediately give you real power over people unfortunate enough to be in your immediate vicinity. A power which though brief, is appearing to be refreshing to the desperate and mentally ill. The only real way to get the elites concerned about gun ownership in this country would be if we actually did have millions of people armed and organized in communist, or otherwise revolutionary armed militias. You better belive they would start clamping down on gun ownership if a real armed threat to the power structure started to develop.
A reader of one of my recent posts about capitalism's role in the destruction of the planet commented that "long before the resources of Mother Earth are depleted we will all have been shot to death by crazy white men armed with AR-15s. I will forward this report to him as a validation that his prediction has an excellent chance of coming true.
Yikes. Or blown up by crazy white men shooting off nukes!
This series is not following in the same order as I originally advertised at the start --- and, to quote Stuart Smalley, "that's okay." Part 2 was suposed to be on DeSantis and Florida but that will be Part 3 now.
The "Shining City on a Hill" has set it's next 20 year paradigm. You will have to wait 20 years. The Murican politburo have decided this public program for your enjoyment. It's already been 7 years since inception of this theme.
Just goes to show you what "they" think of the people. Just goes to show you how nasty "they" are.