The Unseen

from a Facebook page(the names have been changed , as you probably guessed):

Thora Larson
Do I consider myself a liberal? In the sense of being broad-minded, I do. (Of course, even the word Republican does not mean the same thing it did 100 years ago.) I do play devil's advocate, and I am an instigator of free thinking. The people who are in power (and I am talking about the Unseen, not the seen) are not Immoral so much as Amoral...they work on a whole different playing field as you or I.
2 hours ago


Guy Witherspoon and 4 others like this.

John Davenport: Well put my dear
8 hours ago ·

Doreen Cantwell: feelin' it
3 hours ago

Lori Griffith: Pretty much had this same discussion with a friend today about the Unseen as you put it. Couldn't agree
more.
3 hours ago

Natalie Stephenson: Tune in, drop out.
3 hours ago

Guy Witherspoon: So you are saying that the "Unseen" are people?
2 hours ago

Thora Larson: People who do not bring attention to themselves in the limelight as rich and powerful...not GHOSTS bwahhh!

about an hour ago

Terri Ortega: Very well said!
about 18 minutes ago

Sandy Roberts
‎"They thrive on our misery. They are the eaters of souls." In Their gestalt what happens to or with Us is inconsequential.
17 minutes ago

Vonda Washington: I want to eat their souls and thrive on their misery.
12 minutes ago

Maybe it's not cricket to post this, even with the names changed, because outside of "FB" a different audience may look at the sentiments posted uncharitably, and if the real "Thora Larson" or some other person associated with this thread saw this in this different context maybe they would regard their own words differently. In Facebook people tend to do a lot of sarcastic blathering and don't necessarily mean what they say. It's practically expected, cool distancing irony being the mode du jour on Facebook for most participants in most public contexts, at least as far as I can tell. I posted this partly because it makes me think of the perennial schism between voters saying in polls that they distrust government and have a poor impression of the congress, et al, and the tendency of incumbents to get re-elected, over and over, as well as the tendency to see 'change', whether the Obama-copyrighted variety or any other, to always be a question of replacing the D with and R or the R with a D, or the D with another D, etc. I also wonder how many of these people voted for Obama and possibly disapprove of some of the things he has actually done, and yet still support him. And don't you wonder how do they feel about all those darn Wikileaks, making so many hitherto unseen things seen?

(Incidentally, why are "the Unseen" amoral? Isn't suggesting the Unseen operate under a different moral code, or beyond a moral code altogether, in effect saying they are some kind of Randian supermen, and we should sentimentalize them and be in grudging awe of them? Can't people who do immoral things be, in fact, immoral people? Is it uncouth or unseemly to suggest this?)

Having said that, I'll admit I find the concept of the Unseen fascinating. I suspect a lot of people look at things like this, and Thora Larson is onto something. It sounds a little like a medieval incubus, that surreptitiously sneaks into a maiden's chamber at night, as opposed to the strapping young lad next door. I suppose a Tea Partier might regard, say, George Soros as a manifestation of "the Unseen", while some liberal-ish progressive who reads Talking Points Memo or Digby might see the Unseen as the Koch brothers. Does one have to be right, and the other wrong, in order to properly think about these things? What if they're both wrong, or even worse, both right? And once you've seen the Unseen, then what do you do?

The Unseen also sounds an awful like "Don't hate the player, hate the game", something some tediously hip person once said, which always sounded to me like an excuse, accepting corrupt behavior in a system without examining one's complicity, nor the complicity of others who are seen.

Finally, to me the Unseen suggests a sort of Star Chamber to which politicians must go to get their instructions, and all we can possibly do is....vote for them, time and again. After all, it's not their fault for occupying the offices they hold, and doing the things they do, they're trying their best, but the Unseen are too powerful to resist. And it's not our fault for voting for them. We did the best we could, with the choices we were offered.



"U.S. secretly backed Syrian opposition groups, cables released by WikiLeaks show"


Glenn Greenwald, "Obama's "bad negotiating" is actually shrewd negotiating"


Joseph Stiglitz, The Guardian, "Meltdown: not just a metaphor"

Irony deficiency: Yahoo vs. class consciousness

Two screenshots from Yahoo from earlier today.

The Salt Pit

[this post has been revised and expanded 3.31]

Ghairat Baheer is grateful for his freedom, the US, and Mohammed Karzai.

Is this statement true? I don’t know-- although I suspect while the first part may be, the second and third are probably not so true.Do you like how the pictures go together, with the suggestion that the man in the truck is looking approvingly at Obama, who is visiting his country this weekend? I matched them, like a low-rent, modern day Plutarch. The man on the left was imprisoned by the CIA in 202, and later released.

This is not news here in the US, in itself. By now most people here should know we imprison a lot of people in far off places. Regardless of how they may feel about it, most Americans who at least half-way pay attention to what’s going on are aware of this. But Baheer was captured and imprisoned along with a patient of his, and recently revealed documents revealed the CIA kinda killed Dr Baheer’s patient.

MSNBC/AP:"Death shed light on CIA ‘Salt Pit’ near Kabul"

[Gul Rahman] a suspected Afghan militant was brought to a dimly lit CIA compound northeast of the airport in Kabul, Afghanistan. The CIA called it the Salt Pit. Inmates knew it as the dark prison. Inside a chilly cell, the man was shackled and left half-naked. He was found dead, exposed to the cold, in the early hours of Nov. 20, 2002.
[…]
Rahman was arrested with Dr. Ghairat Baheer, a physician who is Hekmatyar's son-in-law and a leader of Hezb-e-Islami, an insurgent faction blamed for numerous bombings and violence in Afghanistan.
Baheer, who said he spent six months in the Salt Pit during six years in Afghan prisons, said in an interview in Islamabad that he never learned what happened to Rahman. Rahman's family repeatedly pressed International Red Cross officials about his fate, Baheer said.
"If he died there in interrogation or he died a natural death they should have told his family and ended their uncertainty," Baheer said.
Rahman had driven from Peshawar, Pakistan, in the northwest frontier to Islamabad for a medical checkup. He was staying with Baheer, an old friend, when U.S. agents and Pakistani security forces stormed the house and took both men, two guards and a cook into custody.
After a week, Rahman was separated from the others. "That was the last time I saw him," said Baheer, now a member of a Hezb-e-Islami delegation that met this month in Kabul, the Afghan capital, for peace talks with Afghan President Hamid Karzai.

Baheer said he was flown to Afghanistan and taken to the Salt Pit, the code name for the abandoned brick factory turned CIA prison. In small, windowless cells, detainees were subjected to harsh treatment and at least one mock execution, according to several former CIA officials.

"I was left naked, sleeping on the barren concrete," said Baheer. His toilet was a bucket. Loudspeakers blared. Guards concealed their identity with masks and carried torches.
Baheer said his American interrogators would tie him to a chair and sit on his stomach. They hung[sic] him naked, he said, for hours on end.
[…]
A CIA medic at the site concluded the Afghan[Rahman] died of hypothermia. A doctor sent later confirmed that judgment. But the detainee's body was never returned to his family, and Baheer said his friend's relatives still don't know what happened.

"The Americans have had enough time," said Baheer. "After nearly eight years, enough is enough."

The commonplace conceit on many lefty blogs is to observe, perhaps sneeringly, that Americans want to be the good guys, but don't want to face up to what their government does. Well, stereotype or not, it's true as far as I can tell. I know I want Americans to be the good guys-- I don't think wanting that is the problem, per se. As far as I can see the problem is deciding that simply asserting we are is weirdly sufficient for some people. This magic trick renders our actual actions as secondary, and easily rationalized as any given situation may require.

(It's an interesting coincidence that the Christian Science Monitor is currently running a story about the supposed resurgence of American Calvinism, because to me the problem described above approximately parallels the difference between justification by works vs. justification by faith, and for the longest time I've felt that one of the problems with our foreign policy has been a reliance on a sort of Calvinist reasoning that undergirds US exceptionalism.)

Mimi often asks how do we change things, and Rob Payne often discusses our complacency before Empire, as he did yesterday. Here I'm saying that people need to discard American predestination, or at the very least decide to make some kind of peace with it, so that it causes no more trouble for ourselves and others. Maybe when we stereotypical 'Godless liberals' tell stories like that of Rahman we need to impress upon the listener not only the sin against Rahman and his brothers but the consequent corruption of the torturer's soul. It may sound strange and even indulgent and I know that justification by works has always made more sense to me, but then again I attended Catholic school through the 4th grade. Still, if that's the key to reach some people, we need to take another cue from Christ and not be too proud to try to reach the reachable by speaking in terms that mean something to them.

*****
some additional thoughts[3.31], per the comments:



Rob, yes, I think manifest destiny is very much an extension of the concept of predestination. It's a concept that I have a hard time with on both the national and personal level.

Mimi,I guess the challenge in this context is to persuade people

"what does it profit a man if his country maintains an empire and he loses his own soul?"

I suppose that sounds a bit mawkish but I think some people think like that, and at least some of them may be persuaded by such an argument.

Maybe you need to show people how the guy in the CIA and his victim were both victims of the Bushes and Obamas of the world in order to help them accept the idea that maybe the great brown horde of 1 billion Muslims might actually be, you know, people.

As an Arab-American it occasionally frustrates me to think that might be necessary, because sometimes I just want to say, "look: if you don't want people saying bad things about the US, then you should want the US to stop doing bad things, it really is that simple."

But I guess many people need illustrations-- I think about how Reagan was supposedly persuaded to put the brakes on the arms race because he watched the TV movie "the Day After."

Ideally, from that flows the notion that the Islamic world is not an intrinsic threat to us, and that resentment towards the US is not them "hating us for our freedoms," but founded on legitimate grievances which we can correct without sacrificing security. Many Americans are already there, and I'm convinced many more are malleable on this point. Besides, it's not a question of convincing every last person who considers himself an Evangelical to no longer support imperial wars without end, just enough of "them" to form a strong bloc of American voters against Empire. (Ironically, at one time back in the day it was precisely that portion of the populace that was most isolationist.)

[Watch "Prelude to War" from Capra's 1940s Why We Fight series sometime. Some of it is blunt propaganda, but some of scenes of the pulse-taking of the US are a revelation of a bygone world.]

If anything, I suspect it's probably upper-income voters, both republicans and democrats, who are the one group least amenable to be persuaded to reject the politics of Empire.

Here Comes the New Boss

Stelios Varias,Reuters

A friend who knows my political views asked me: "you're not looking forward to tomorrow, are you?" Referring of course to the ascent of Obama to the presidential throne. Now to be honest, I don't know how I feel about Obama, expressed on a simple level of positive/negative, good/bad, what have you. Unlike Rob Payne, I'm willing to acknowledge that between Obama and McCain, Obama might be marginally preferable, notwithstanding the embarrassment evoked by the contingent who insist on treating him like he can part the sea and persuade the sun to shine.

That's not the same as saying I think he was a desirable choice for president per se, or even for the democratic nomination-- but I'll get to that. This April Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens will turn 89, later this year Ruth Bader Ginsberg will be 76, and in fact the youngest of the liberal members of the court, Stephen Breyer, will turn 70 in 2009. I would have preferred somebody like Dennis Kucinich or even John Edwards had been the president to appoint Stevens's and Ginsberg's replacements, but that was not to be. I note this because it's pretty likely they will retire soon, and with a certain unease I'll nevertheless assert that I prefer Obama rather than McCain(or Palin) be the person to appoint their replacements.

In spite of what I see as the broader reality of Obama's nature as a corporatist quisling, I imagine some modest benefits will emerge from Obama being president rather than McCain. Federal policy on stem-cell research may become sane again, and (possibly) his environmental policies will be better than McCain's would have been. But as far as foreign and economic policy go, I doubt we'll see anything that represents "hope" or "change", with or without ironic quotation marks.

I suppose the thing I find so maddening about the ascendancy of Obama is it comes along at precisely the moment that the broader public was probably readier than they have been in decades for a real liberal reformer in the white house, what with the many missteps of the second George Bush and his cronies. And instead we get Barack Obama, who seems intent on repackaging soak-the-poor and destroy-the-welfare-state politics as the new, new liberalism, the variety you didn't know you wanted until he came along and cleared things up. It seems so abundantly clear to me that he's a fraud, a speaker of pretty words that flatter the ill-informed, and that his bipartisan, "post-ideological" ethos is really just craven opportunism, the positioning of a product-- which in this case is also a person-- in the marketplace of politics so it looks its best in the available light.

And yet, on one side of our screwy political culture we have the Obamazoids who want to flash a victory sign and cheer their new messiah so they can stop thinking and just groove on a warm feeling, and on the other the talk-radio cretins who insist that he's a socialist(?!), possibly because he doesn't want to bomb Ahmedinejad without talking to him first, or because he's never hunted moose from an airplane. Or because he's black.

About that. Although the historical significance of our first black president has been over-sold, I think even people understandably leery of the hype and the cult of Obama need to allow that his election is a sign of social progress, even if you have to qualify it by also recognizing how strenuously Obama bent over backwards to reassure middle America that he was the nice, non-threatening type of black guy, the one that Hollywood leads us to believe will absolve us of our sins in the great shopping mall in the sky.

Another friend tells me to "give him a chance," as if my attitude makes the least bit of difference. While I don't think my attitude towards Obama is remotely relevant, I'm guessing my attitude towards his flock does matter. It's probably vanity to hope to personally change the political landscape for the better, at least in terms of measurable individual effort. But collective effort is the sum of the individuals who try to achieve.....thing x, whatever that thing is, whether it's through the march of a million people or the raising of a hundred million dollars for a cause.

When I saw a news story in October about the Obama organization raising 150 million dollars in 30 days, roughly concurrent with the demise of Cursor, I couldn't help but think about that, about how the flesh is willing, the collective progressive impulse is there, but the collective mind is weak, misdirected by personality-oriented politics. The people at Cursor said all they need is about 75 grand to run for a year,a sum Obama could raise in less than half an hour. And Cursor did more to wake people up to the issues of the day than a hundred celebrity-penned Huffington Post op-eds. Not in terms of audience size, unfortunately, but in terms of the quality and relevance of the content.

But-- also unfortunately-- that clearly isn't enough. I thought about that ironic disconnect again today, when I saw the images of over one million-- and possibly close to two million-- people converging at the mall in D.C. to see Obama become president-- of how the collective progressive impulse is there, but that, functionally, Obama is an agent of (the co-option of) change.

"Nobody ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American people," or so the old saying goes. It may well be true, but making fun of those millions who believe in Obama the savior of America rather than reaching out to them is willful and vain and stupid. Large numbers of them, black and white and otherwise, will experience a letdown when Obama emerges as just another politician, and to borrow from Barack himself, that will be a "teachable moment."

Remind yourself of 2003, and how unlikely George Bush's days with lower ratings than Nixon seemed when he was prancing around on that aircraft carrier. Obama undoubtedly has more sense than Bush Junior, at least as far as permitting himself such an unrestrained display of hubris, but even he has to realize that you can't get an 80 percent approval rating just for being the president-elect without an inevitable falling action being in store. And how much of his current approval is mere approval for his not-George-Bush quality? Even you and I and the cashier at Quiznos possess that same quality, and as far as I know nobody voted for us.

I could say, "naturally I hope I'm wrong about Obama...." largely out of a desire to seem like a reasonable person. Well sure, I do hope I'm wrong, but I think such a hope is insufficient, and the afore-mentioned letdown is coming. And I repeat: simply making fun of the millions who believe in him is unwise, insofar as large numbers of them WILL decide he isn't what they hoped he would be. And then what? Some of them are-- will be-- reachable.

(If anything, I'd guess that a lot of the newly politicized Obamazoids are among the more reachable, because their brains aren't as full of the accomodationist bullshit that so many regular rank-and-file democrats have crammed their craniums with, the kind of folks that Dennis Perrin regularly warns us about.)

In the meantime, liberalism is bleeding in the gutter where it was left by Reagan, and the Clintons, and Fox news, and by the democratic party leadership, and the faux-liberal putative left who eagerly swallow one "third way" capitulation after another, and by the rest of the news networks... and Obama.


cross-posted at Hugo Zoom.

Dead Horse pt 2: or, are you a domesticated goat?

From wikisource, "The Goatherd and the wild goats"

A Goatherd, driving his flock from their pasture at eventide, found some Wild Goats mingled among them, and shut them up together with his own for the night. The next day it snowed very hard, so that he could not take the herd to their usual feeding places, but was obliged to keep them in the fold. He gave his own goats just sufficient food to keep them alive, but fed the strangers more abundantly in the hope of enticing them to stay with him and of making them his own. When the thaw set in, he led them all out to feed, and the Wild Goats scampered away as fast as they could to the mountains. The Goatherd scolded them for their ingratitude in leaving him, when during the storm he had taken more care of them than of his own herd. One of them, turning about, said to him: "That is the very reason why we are so cautious; for if you yesterday treated us better than the Goats you have had so long, it is plain also that if others came after us, you would in the same manner prefer them to ourselves."

Given that I've decided to call this "Dead Horse", I probably should be careful about mixing my animal metaphors. Nevertheless I come back, time and again, to this story whenever I listen to practically anything that comes out of Obama's mouth, he of the silver tongue that makes lefty swooners swoon. I'm not so impressed with Obama myself, and I'm inclined to think his reluctance to define his politics will ultimately hurt him, even if he has more charisma than Kerry or Gore. (Of course most warm-blooded organisms have more charisma than Kerry or Gore, but that's another matter.)

All the same, even if Obama doesn't do anything for me, I recognize that millions of people do respond to him. And yet, he seems doggedly determined to squander his opportunity to help remake American politics at a time when we, the otherwise very conservative public, are more ready for meaningful liberalism and activist government, and yes, change, than we have been in a very long time. The economy appears to be teetering, government corruption and scandal, mostly republican, has soured people on incumbents and the "establishment" and we are mired in (at least one) costly and highly questionable war.

But we have Nancy Pelosi, the supposedly far left-wing democratic speaker of the house, loudly telling everybody who'll listen about her table, the one that will not allow impeachment of the most blatantly crooked president since Richard Nixon(who was pardoned 34 years ago tomorrow, on September 8th, 1974), and Obama and his running mate Joe Biden eagerly praising their opponents on Fox News and assuring anybody who'll still listen that they needn't be concerned about criminal charges being leveled against George Bush, jr.

What's wrong with this picture? Where do you even start?

This is why I'm starting "Dead Horse", which is meant to be a conversation about

1.the dysfunctional democratic party, and whether or not it can (or should) be saved.

2. our post 9-11, post-constitutional republic, a screwed up simulacrum where things are rarely as they seem, at least as far as I can see-- because

2b. It's not just the democrats "suddenly" having become dysfunctional, but a process of unraveling which seems to have been going on for a long time.

Or maybe I'm wrong(not 2b. Sorry, I can't resist...) That's why I want, from the get-go, for DH to be a group blog, for which I'm sending several invitations, both to bloggers who I feel are in approximately the same "camp" as I am, as well as a couple of others who might feel somewhat sunnier about the prospects for our future. I want to try to create the conditions and a venue for a useful conversation, not just an echo chamber. More soon, and hopefully not just from me.


cross-posted at "Hugo Zoom"