Sunday, June 25, 2006

Aspirational Preemption By Stan Goff


The arrest of seven mentally disturbed Black men in Miami by Alberto Gonzales' Justice Department, on the word of an informant who entrapped them, was charcterized by Gonzales as arrest for being "aspirational, not operational." The only aspiration I am seeing here is the kind that happens when a drunk aspirates his own vomit.... at least from the press. Any news organ that fails to note this as the latest act of media abjection in the face of rule by malevolent morons qualifies. This arrest doesn’t call for cautious skepticism; it calls for howling ridicule. I've been wondering for almost five years now, ever since September 11th, how they'd target Black folk with this terrorism shtik. I’ve been saying for over ten years now how Haitians (whose own elected governments get overthrown by the US) serve as poster children for white supremacy. Now I’m going to talk trash about Miami, because that's how this gets put into perspective. Miami is a giant eco-catastrophe that has turned the Everglades and the ocean into cesspools, a vast energy sink that serves as the doorway to selectively exploit and exclude all the people south of there whose lives have been ripped apart by the projection of US global power. It is politically embedded in a state run by one of the Bush brothers, and its local politics is run by the gusano Mafia -- long used as both political and paramiltary mercenaries by the US intelligence underground. It is the enclave of the very worst of the US lumpen-bourgeoisie, that overlapping sphere where plain thug-venality maps directly onto financial power. It’s a shithole of conspicuous consumption alongside one of the most shameful homeless problems I have seen outside the third world, and a place where that gros-bourgeois flash is always right in the face of people who can barely keep the rent paid or put food on their tables. It breeds mental disturbances out of its combinaton of profound need and its creepy fashion-runway superficiality. That's why its no surprise that the FBI and the Bush Justice Department (that must be a joke) thought to use a police informant (quite often the absolute lowest form of primate life, or someone whose life has gone so far awry that cops can use them as virtual slaves) to entrap seven Miami men on charges that will likely make the Wen Ho Lee incident look like a prima facie case. This administration has gotten so zany that even many of the most rock-ribbed of the Republican Party -- now a freakish caricature of latter-day delusion -- have begun to distance themselves from their cognitively-challenged, narcissistic commandante and his band of merry loon-lieutenants. While the rest of the country is pulling back from the abyss that this administration has careened alongside, these nimrods are advancing their design to impose fascism, the real thing, on the US. It starts with the reclamation of blood-and-soil, anti-intellectual machismo, moves into vigilantism, but then requires its scapegoats for when the pampered, endebted-to-their-eyeballs middle class finally inherits the inevitable results of running what Kenneth Boulding referred to as a madman economy. There weren't enough foreign-born Muslims in the US to constitute a respectable analog to pre-WWII European Jewry, so it was really only a matter of time before they found a way to paint the internal enemy Black. At least once they found out that scapegoating Hispano-Latinas would end in either mass deportations or a crippling pan-Latin@ strike… result the same, that film "A Day Without a Mexican" becomes reality. Go for it all, Alberto Gonzales said, and Georgy-Porgy -- encouraged no doubt by his honoorary-gusano sibling who presides over Florida -- said let's round up some Miami Negroes, and claim they wanted to blow up the Sears Building. Anyone left who defends these viscious buffoons would defend them if Shrub molested a child on national television. Meanwhile, the legal ground is being sought to practice preemptive war at home.