Monday, January 19, 2009

O How I Miss Vine Deloria Jr. Right Now

[This comment has been edited by its author since first posting on Glenn Greenwald's blog Unclaimed Territory at Salon.com.]

The Tools of Law vs. This Kerneling Spirit
[Read the article: Binding U.S. law requires prosecutions for those who authorize torture]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]


O how I miss Vine Deloria Jr. right now. He used to say, Indians "laugh themselves sick" when they hear about the importance of treaties and how much respect there is in Washington for the rule of law. The tools of law use law as a tool of dominance.

Everything being said about Israel's Occupied Territories applies to America's, too. We even took the precaution of slaughtering the buffalo, outlawing the languages, kidnapping the children, in every way depriving the people of their culture as a matter of public policy.

(By the way, where are the billions of dollars due to tribes from the BIA trust funds?)

So now, with the blatant disregard for the law shown by our "Holy" War Party leaders having become so flagrant that it's impossible to deny, white America is experiencing the terror of having no standing, no voice, no recognition, no redress inflicted by design, by deliberate intent of the "authorities."

Hey, you whining Liberals, you harping Conservatives: Tell it to the Indians. Tell it to those who were promised 40 acres and a mule, and got Jim Crowed instead.

Welcome to the plantation.

A terrorized, docile, self-imprisoned population is the intent of the atavistic strategy we've been using to establish "full-spectrum dominance:" namely, fear and control.

Let's define some terms. What are we? Are we sovereign, self-aware citizens who share being aware of our shared becoming? Or are we rats in Skinner Boxes, mere Newtonian automata, god-forsaken machines susceptible to malicious hacking?

Do we force our selves into being? Or do we will our intentions into realities? Examine your own habits of belief, thought, and speech. Are you an unwitting mechanical holy warrior?

We are not machines, we are organic beings. We are not forced into order from the outside by a tyrant-creator; we grow from within.

This is about white Western male dominance and the tragic failure to see that every act of oppression has an equal and opposite effect on the oppressed. The power of oppression is ultimately self-defeating.

The Cult of Power

[[[Full-spectrum dominance / "the morale of the state"///[[[{{{Protestors}}}]]]800]]]

  • Full-spectrum dominance over the morale of the state powered by the sacrificial imprisonment of 800 protestors.

Our More Perfect Union

beloved/[{Protestors}800]/Beloved

  • This should go without saying: the more we are oppressed, the stronger our resistance becomes.

1100 dead Gazans compared to 10 dead Israeli soldiers. Now that's what I call "leveraging." The difference is of two orders of magnitude; two "powers."

Israel is razing Gaza to the negative second power, aka "bombing them back to the Stone Age." The US is supplying the weaponry for Israel to exalt itself to the second power, aka deus ex machina aka "Shock & Awe."

So there stands proud Israel over prostrate Palestine, propped up and powered by machines of war made in the USA. There's no question that our actions are monstrous. The question is: Which one is Dr. Frankenstein, and which the Monster? And what makes you think you aren't either?

James Joyce would remind us that we are all implicated in causing the suffering, and the suffering itself. As an American, I am part of the cause of the war; as a human, I identify with the suffers on "both sides." Who drew the line? Isn't the drawing of lines, the saved vs. the damned, for example, the root of the problem?

By conceiving of our selves as essentially divided from our own Mother, we make of Her our shadow monster, then spend eternity running from and fighting with our very own source and destination: from the womb to the tomb, we all come out of a mother and go back into the Mother.

America has, too, waged aggressive war in the past, Iraq was not the first; we have, too, tortured in the past, we have our own atrocities for which to atone. And new ones almost every day. It's as if some of us never heard of Mark Twain and the Anti-Imperialist League.

Machining our selves, our Beloved, and our Mother into submission is the problem, not the answer.

How is this spirit kerneling through this husk of stones? As a plant grows: from within.
Permalink Sunday, January 18, 2009 09:43 AM

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