The US Supreme Court ruled for the Texas Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) against the Sons of Confederate Veterans (SCV) who designed an insignia with the Confederate flag for Texas speciality license plates. When the DMV refused, the SCV took them to court claiming “viewpoint discrimination” in violation of the Bill of Rights guaranteeing free speech (the 1st Amendment).

License plates are government identifications but states sell speciality plates (also called vanity plates) as a way to raise dough. Some state motor vehicle departments have allowed foolishness to preempt public safety. Some put their family names on them, others put political messages, support charitable groups, sports teams, colleges, the military, or even include obscenities & sexual innuendoes.

Many states allow controversial plates. In Texas, there’s an anti-abortion plate & one honoring the Boy Scouts. In Virginia, they have plates for the NRA, tobacco & coal industries, other commercial enterprises, & even one promoting fox hunting.

Nine states offer Sons of Confederate Veterans license plates; all of them are in the South in the same states where there are still monuments to the Confederacy (Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Maryland, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee and Virginia). In some of these states a portion of the license fee goes to the sponsoring organization. In Georgia, the local chapter of SCV gets $10 bucks a pop & the same at every license renewal.

The SCV, which claims 30,000 members (likely an exaggeration), say they are “profoundly disappointed” by the Supreme Court decision. Color the rest of us flabbergasted at the decision. Who knew there was a progressive instinct left among that lot sitting on the court!?

The SCV was founded in 1896, long after the end of the Civil War but not long after the complete reversal of Black Reconstruction in the South & at one of the worst possible moments in US history for Blacks when Jim Crow (the US form of apartheid) was legitimized & lynchings were massive. The SCV claim to be direct descendants of Confederate soldiers who fought to retain slavery. Their schtick is to use the Bill of Rights & nonsense about inclusion, diversity, & tolerance as a weapon to undo the alleged demonization & marginalization of the Confederacy.

Well let’s cut the crap! Behind some awkward diplomacy & posturing, what they want to bring back is the monstrous social hatred that brought them into existence in the first place. They haven’t been demonized–at least sufficiently–or they wouldn’t be on license plates in nine states. They haven’t been marginalized either because US school children learn nothing about this history in public schools. If it weren’t for the Civil Rights Movement & Black studies departments or books like People’s History of the US by Howard Zinn & Lies My Teacher Told Me by James Loewen, we would know nothing except the Confederate narrative & would still be reading Huckleberry Finn like it was an antiracist novel.

This is the speciality plate from South Carolina, which hoists the Confederate flag at its state capital. Coincidence that Dylann Storm Roof was reared there? We think not.

UN chief Ban Ki-moon has spoken–& not a moment too soon but with his usual equivocations–calling out Israel at the UN Security Council for murderous assaults on children in Operation Ethnic Cleansing in Gaza last summer. According to UN figures, 561 children were killed & 4,271 injured, many in disfiguring & debilitating ways, some permanently disabled & missing limbs.

It can’t be said our man was sharp in his condemnation: he was “deeply alarmed at the suffering of so many children as a result of Israeli military operations in Gaza last year.” But he cited them for bombing hospitals & schools used as UN refugee centers by those bombed out of their homes in Gaza.

All that money Israel spent commissioning corrupt lawyers & generals to testify that Israel did not deliberately target civilians is down the drain with just a tepid condemnation from Ban. Though one should give the man his due: his criticism meant going up not just against Israel but against the US backers of genocide in Gaza. And it suggests Israeli war crimes.

But Ban, as we know from his conduct throughout the entire siege of Gaza, is a man who talks out of both sides of his ass. He didn’t explain why last week he refused to include Israel in the UN’s annual list of shame for those countries that show reckless disregard or directly target children in war. For the past few months, several human rights groups hounded the UN to include Israel. An official at Human Rights Watch (HRW)–an establishment group which does not oppose wars but only wants them conducted without obvious barbarism (they’ve never attempted to elaborate how that can be done)–said “The Secretary-General can strengthen child protection in war by compiling his list based on facts, not political pressure.” Political pressure, of course, from the US, UK, & Israel.

HRW also wanted Hamas included on the list of shame for alleged rocket attacks on schools or recruiting child soldiers. Can they document that? One doesn’t have to be a supporter of Hamas’ political program to question if they have sophisticated guided missile systems. But even if they do, is Israel’s Iron Dome system not working well? Because the US is pouring millions into maintaining it & that would suggest waste from the Pentagon’s point of view. And if Hamas indeed targeted schools in Israel–& it would be unspeakable if they did–why is the Israeli death toll from Operation Ethnic Cleansing 66 soldiers & 5 civilians, with only one child? Was school in recess at the time? It was summer, after all, so why would Hamas target empty schools if they wanted to kill children? Or is HRW blowing smoke up our butts?

There’s an obvious parallel in US officials equivocating about whether the murderous assault on Black parishioners in South Carolina (which hoists the Confederate flag at its state capital) is a racist crime & the UN equivocating about condemning all of Operation Ethnic Cleansing as a war crime.

You can download a report issued by Defense for Children International Palestine called “Operation Protective Edge: A War Waged on Children” which details the targeting of children at:
https://d3n8a8pro7vhmx.cloudfront.net/…/operationprotective…

(Photo is cover of Defense for Children International Palestine report)

In the end it doesn’t matter if we label Dylann Roof, the racist murderer in Charlestown, a terrorist or not. Without for one moment exempting him from criminal culpability, we have to own up to the fact that US society is systemically rancid with social hatred. That’s hard for white people to face so we try to tune it out so that all these murders become white noise & whites aren’t put on edge or start to question supremacy.

Media orchestrates that deceit, the US government manipulates it for war, politicians & candidates flaunt & incite it. When Obama speaks casually of bombing other peoples & when governments stand silent while thousands of brown & black people drown in the sea, they feed the social pathology. When Trump says all immigrants from Mexico are drug traffickers & rapists, he feeds the social malice. And monsters like Roof are what come out of it because they’ve been bred in a diseased society. And that’s awful hard to face squarely.

Many are posting photos of those who died in Charlestown. Tis an international phenomenon of grief that those who lose people to violence create photo montages of their loved ones. There have been hundreds of young Black kids shot over the past decades & their images are just now forming a political montage. We need to view their faces to understand the enormity of the crimes against the Black community, to silence the white noise of denial, & to begin to not just question but stand with Blacks in building their political power & in ending the tyranny of white supremacy.

Some say that’s a pipe dream. But racism as an ideology, though powerful, is only a few hundred years old. Humankind lived without it for thousands of millennia. It’s only brought human misery & justified the most odious crimes. Let ours be the generations that destroy it so we can live as brothers & sisters.

Perhaps it was hasty to suggest Donald Trump brought presidential politics to new lows. Mike Huckabee, Ted Cruz, Rick Perry, Rick Santorum also have a way with words that we haven’t seen since George W. Bush.

Malapropisms are the misuse of words with unintentional hilarity & Bush was a master at that, His father was a completely inarticulate boob, so wretched with language the NY Times should have stopped publishing presidential press conferences word-for word. Their problem wasn’t just malaprops but a complete lack of cognitive function in another case of privilege makes you stupid. The dysfunction was so severe a new word was invented to accommodate it: Bushism, which appears in the dictionary as GWB’s “unconventional use of language.”

The current GOP candidates aren’t flattering GHWB or GWB by comparison but are forging new cognitive & linguistic inroads into dysfunction with the notable inclusion of Huckabee’s sexual preoccupations.

They’re a deplorable lot & whilst we have to endure them we ought at least be able to have a little fun at their expense.

The police chief in Charlestown, South Caroline said “There’s no doubt in my mind it’s a hate crime,” after a white guy shot & killed nine people in a predominantly Black church. But Fox news found a Black minister in another state to claim it was part of “a rising hostility against Christianity” because of their Biblical views & not a racist crime.

He did call for armed self-defense which is something the Black community is likely debating because they have a right to defend themselves against violence & armed assault. But it is problematic because it would invite police & military intervention against the Black community, & not in its defense.

Michelle Obama is at Milan Expo 2015 in Italy to talk about her Let’s Move initiative to combat childhood obesity. And here the rest of us thought millions of kids starving, including in the US, was the paramount issue. Obese isn’t what you get from eating too much food but from eating poor people’s food that fills you up when your family hasn’t got money for real meals.

She ought to get back here & figure out how to feed the thousands of poor kids prowling dumpsters for food because the school free lunch programs have ended for the summer.

Sometimes a meme is worth a thousand tracts about essentialism & the new phenomenon called transracialism. It makes things real again.

CBS reported tonight there are more refugees in the world than at any time since WWII, mostly from Syria & Iraq. And of course, they blamed it all on ISIS. They didn’t mention reliable reports that ISIS was “fueled” by US-UK policy.

While not having much political value, nothing could be more revealing than the endless discussions about the imposture of Rachel Dolezal. We endure outright silliness with objections to her lying—as if this was all a catechism lesson—& we watch academics use this to go after identity politics. Mostly we see long-winded tracts about gender & ethnic “essentialism.” The question of Caitlyn Jenner gets entangled & no matter how many want it excluded, that discussion is completely relevant.

This preoccupation with a case of impersonating a Black person has less to do with Dolezal than with the deep chasms of anxiety felt by those who are dominant in supremacist societies. Blackface, “playing Indian,” & men dressing as women (not necessarily transgenders) remain methods of mockery & ridicule even though the more egregious forms like minstrel shows were discredited by the civil rights struggle. Disguise & playing out of fantasies about Blacks, Indians, women may call fixed identity into question but in politics it reflects psychological strain from empowering yourself by humiliating others.

One of the most perceptive observers of this phenomenon is Philip J. Deloria in his 1998 book “Playing Indian,” where he describes how whites incorporated Indian traditions, rituals, images, language, dress into social & political life to create an American nationalist identity—including the Boston Tea Party, fraternal orders, the Boy Scouts & Camp Fire Girls, hippies, sports teams, military weaponry, Grateful Dead concerts. Talk about cultural appropriation!

Indianness & idealizing Indians in forging a national identity was fraught with anxiety & ambivalence because it derived from simultaneously exterminating the native peoples in the most barbaric ways. One of the apogees of role play was during the extermination campaigns against the Plains tribes in the central US after the Civil War.

Minstrel shows & blackface which began in the early 19th century under slavery did not idealize Blacks but infantilized & burlesqued them as stupid, lazy, & superstitious. They ridiculed slaves at the same time they portrayed them as happy under “the peculiar institution,” in accord with histories of slavery up until the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s when Black studies & historians changed all that.

The mockery of women is now so incorporated into culture that one can hardly begin to unravel its malignancies but the glorification of prostitution & pornography are key to all of that—where women & their sexuality are demeaned as objects of violence & exhibitionism. And in some circles, it’s called empowerment. Talk about infantilizing!

Judith Butlerizing the discussion around Dolezal & ethnic identify has not clarified things one iota. No matter how many prominent writers & academics say so, one cannot claim—in the era of racist wars overseas & murderous assaults on the Black community in the US—that one can choose their ethnic identity like they choose a hair style. It isn’t the lying that’s the problem but the whole damn charade of acting like you can possibly understand the profound humiliations for being Black—even if you’re uncomfortable in your own skin & fixed identity is in dispute. The entire edifice of racist oppression is institutional, political, social, cultural, emotional. If whites suffer identity problems as a result, passing is not the solution. Political action is.

Racist & gender oppression & violence are social constructs. Those who denounce identity politics (which they usually refrain from describing) want all of us to march together against capitalism as class sisters & brothers. Talk about romanticism! The civil rights, women’s, & LGBT movements erupted historically as a political response to oppression. What political action can derive from a simple-minded approach that tells women, Blacks, et al, to stop whining about their special demands & form ranks in unity against our common oppressor when the front lines of that oppression are our “class brothers”?

Do we see legions of white guys forming ranks to help stop the violence against Black teens? Are they out there by the thousands to defend abortion clinics & women’s reproductive rights? Are the white guys chock-a-block against assaults on Muslims? Or in defense of immigrants? They couldn’t even get the mostly white union leadership to oppose child labor for farmworkers in 2012. If freedom from oppression is won by working people on their own behalf, that is just as true for those who face extreme burdens of social hatred.

Truth of the matter is, for all our scientific sophistication, human beings understand very little about ourselves because our society circumscribes that so harshly. We know we’re not born to hate; we know the highest achievements of humanity are built on trying to communicate with each other. That doesn’t mean philosophical speculations about our nature, including ethnic & gender identities, should cease but that elaborating a political program of unity in action against racist & misogynist oppression is far more important.

(Photo is cover of Playing Indian by Philip Deloria)

T

This is Sana’a, Yemen where a camarilla of several feudal monarchies are bombing democracy into existence. Can you see it blooming? This is the kind of democracy you get when feudal monarchies, military juntas, psycho-states, & neoliberal military machines run the planet. This is their kind of democracy. This is Yemen, Somalia, Syria, Gaza, Afghanistan.

This is a clarion call, a red alert to gather the international forces of democracy like we saw in the Arab uprisings, including Yemen. Rebuilding the international antiwar movement has never been more urgent. Some can sniff at the call with contempt because they disdain the power of popular opposition to tyranny. Cynics never have led social change; they just stand on the sidelines saying it can’t be done.

Humanity may not learn much from history & may keep repeating the same mistakes but one irrefutable fact is that the only times tyranny has been overthrown is when working people take justice into their own hands & rise up to change things. What we haven’t yet learned is how to forge a new society & maintain it. But now we know with the certainty of too much experience that democracy in every facet of life is the sine qua non of social transformation. And bombs play no part in that.

Rebuild the international antiwar movement. No to US-NATO wars!

(Photo by Khaled Abdullah/Reuters)