The Upshot of Ferguson

Ed Crawford, Ferguson Icon

The situation in Ferguson has apparently calmed sufficiently for the authorities to reduce their obvious presence to practically nothing. Yesterday, for example, protesters shut down one section of Interstate 270 which passes through Ferguson between West Florissant Ave and New Halls Ferry Road for a few minutes (as shown in the video below) and there was only limited police response. Instead of beating, teargassing and arresting, the police essentially protected the protesters and once the demonstration was completed, they went on their way.

We saw scenes of stark terror previously, as gas and smoke grenades were lobbed at protesters and residents almost at random, violent police charges took place to snatch and grab people at random from the crowds, neighborhoods were assaulted with armored vehicles and tear gas, and many people were shot and wounded by rubber bullets. The comparison between Ferguson and Gaza or the West Bank was often made. People resisting occupation were brutalized and terrorized by police. It was a goon show.

The display of force in Ferguson shocked a good part of the nation, but many observers actually applauded the authorities, not only for their over-the-top reaction to the protests but for Darren Wilson's shooting and killing Michael Brown in the first place. Many have said it was a "good shoot." How they come to that conclusion, and what the upshot of Ferguson will be is worth considering.

One thing that puzzled me was the amount of coverage #Ferguson got compared to other comparable killings by police over the summer. There were quite a few incidents after all, and enough of them were questionable that it's surprising they didn't raise more ire than they did. The death of Eric Garner in New York caused a great deal of anguish and protest, but it didn't inspire revolt. Nor did the death of Ezell Ford in Los Angeles. Both were unarmed and both were arguably murdered by police, but there was no revolt in New York or Los Angeles because of these killings by police. And neither received the kind of wall to wall media coverage that the killing of Michael Brown in the little 'burb of Ferguson did.

We may ask why. ("Oh, don't ask why..." I love the Nina Simone version...)

For one thing, there was a revolt in Ferguson, and it was essentially spontaneous due to the murder itself and the bewildering level of nonchalance and contempt shown by the local authorities toward the -- largely black -- community. The authorities in Ferguson apparently believed they owed the community nothing but the back of their hand, and they responded to the growing outcry as if they were old-time crackers putting down a slave rebellion. Oh, that's what it looked like from my distance, that's what it felt like, and having once lived and worked in suburban St. Louis, I was quite aware of the contempt a lot of the white folks there have for the nigras. Oh my yes. It's deep-rooted and virulent. There's little or nothing to justify it but deleterious habit, old animosities and unspoken fears. Missouri was a slave state, and St. Louis was a center of the slave trade. The consequences still linger. (I've seen much the same, perhaps worse, in Maryland.)

The community had had enough and they revolted. The revolt was spontaneous and remarkably nonviolent. Few indeed set out to hurt anyone or cause damage, though there was damage and some were hurt. This led to the wide-spread belief that there was rioting by Ferguson residents, but so far as I could tell, there was not, not at any time. There was abundant rioting by police, however, and there were incidents of looting and destruction that the rioting police seemed to enable or at the very least to allow.

Though many people were injured by teargas, grenades, and rubber bullets (how many is unknown, and the authorities have bizarrely insisted "no one" at all was injured) only one man in Ferguson was shot by police after the killing of Michael Brown, and apparently he had nothing to do with the protests.

Given the constant propaganda about the violence and rioting by Ferguson residents, it's something of a wonder that more of them weren't shot to death by the massed armored authorities during the disturbances. In fact, they held fire far more than they shot their weapons, and the weapons they did use were (mostly) "less lethal." This despite the fact that they claimed, apparently falsely, that they were under constant "gunfire" by shadowy figures shooting from the darkness. They also claimed, falsely, that they were under attack by "Molotov cocktails," and that they'd been pelted with "bottles of urine." So far, there has been no evidence at all of gunfire aimed at the police, of Molotov cocktails thrown at police, nor of any pelting by bottles of urine. There have also been claims that officers were injured by bricks thrown at them by members of the crowd, and there's been no evidence of that, either. No one was arrested for any of these purported assaults despite the fact that police conducted numerous snatch and grab operations during the demonstrations. In other words, it's very likely that the police in Ferguson were not assaulted by the crowd, at least not in the manner described by the police.

In the picture at the head of this post, for example, that is not a Molotov cocktail in Ed Crawford's hand, it's a grenade that was fired at the crowd which he is throwing back at police. Many of the grenades police fired at the crowds were thrown back, and that is probably what gave rise to false claims by police of being attacked with Molotov cocktails.

An upshot of Ferguson, however, is bound to be continual propaganda and lies regarding the behavior of crowds of rebels in the face of police riots. Those riots themselves are bound to be another upshot of Ferguson.

Snatch and grab actions by police, which have been utilized extensively during National Special Security Events and were used during Occupy, particularly in New York, are likely to become routine responses to civil unrest.

Random attacks on neighborhoods bordering areas of active protest are liable to become routine as well.

Media representatives and politicians were arrested with some frequency in Ferguson, and the upshot of it is that the authorities now know -- if they didn't before -- that they can get away with it. We'll no doubt see more of it.

The police overreacted, but the upshot of that overreaction in Ferguson was the involvement of clergy and politicians in suppressing the revolt. How much of that was due to coercion may never be known, but the clergy were the ones managing the crowds after some of the worst excesses of the police state. We're liable to see more of that in the future, as "stakeholders" and community leaders are recruited to tamp down civil disobedience that arises from any cause. We're liable to see the rise of official vigilantes as well.

The case of Officer GoFuckYourself is one of the more remarkable developments from Ferguson that bears watching closely. Lt Ray Albers of the St. Ann police department (an adjacent community to Ferguson) became enraged and pointed his assault weapon at many in the crowd, threatening to kill them if they didn't "get back," though exactly where they were supposed to get back to (Africa?) wasn't entirely clear. He was forced to resign after his escapade was documented by numerous media on scene, but there were many reports of other officers behaving in essentially the same way, some of it documented on video, but none of them were disciplined, let alone fired, for their efforts -- at least none that we know of.

Albers was therefore a scapegoat at worst; he may have been a deliberate provocateur, however, and his "forced" retirement was pre-planned. We don't know.

At any rate, there are bound to be more incidents of officers seeking out opportunities to threaten civil disobeyers with immediate death.

The upshot of Ferguson by and large is the discovery by officials of what they can get away with. They are learning quickly, learning well. The crowds? Hard to say. But there will be more revolts in the future, and those revolts will be put down with calibrated levels of force, levels calibrated based on lessons learned from Ferguson and other examples of civil disobedience dating from the Battle of Seattle to the present.

And of Mike Brown? What of him and justice for him?

The likelihood is that the process will be slow-walked even more than it has been. There will probably not be an indictment of Officer Darren Wilson, and the Justice Department will probably not release a report on civil rights violations in Ferguson for years to come -- if ever. The issue will be allowed to fade into the mists of time.

Another uprising will occur somewhere else, media will focus their attention there for a time, and the cycle will repeat.

Meanwhile, the killing will go on and on and on and on. More than 100 killed by police in August alone, and the numbers of dead just keep rising.

The Storm

No Name Storm of 1991

Hurricane Sandy will be known simply as The Storm for some time to come. I haven't been able to check the news very thoroughly or very often so I don't know very much about what has been going on along the East Coast, but there are plenty of lessons for the rest of us.

The statistics of loss, damage and destruction are not really the important thing to those who are affected by these events, and hurricanes are not the only events that give rise to the lessons I'm thinking of. How many people and animals are lost and injured, how much property damage there has been, how long it takes to get things back in some kind of order... these are all matters that become abstractions at the individual and family level of people trying to adjust and survive in the midst of chaos and greater or lesser disruption.

The trauma is really what affects the people who live through these events. I remember, for example, how traumatized my mother was by the 1925 earthquake in Santa Barbara. She was a teen-ager at the time, and apparently her mother was trapped for a while in a collapsed building. My mother didn't know where her mother was, though, and she was terrified. The trauma never left her for the rest of her life. It was obvious in her eyes when she told me about it decades later.

It seems that most of those who lived through the wrath of The Storm this time did not actually suffer loss -- apart from, perhaps, some inconvenience of some sort. Many are apparently taking it in stride, in part because they are OK and everyone they know is OK. They have what they need and are able to carry on well enough in the midst of the chaos.

But there are so many others who can't. Their routine is completely disrupted. Perhaps they have no home any more. Their treasured things are gone. They've lost loved ones. They can't find their pets. Their clothes are ruined or they can't get to their jobs. They're out of food and water. On and on. The disruption and the loss from The Storm -- or from any stupendous event -- can be overwhelming.

Unfortunately, there are too many people who seek their own advantage at the expense of the victims who are overwhelmed by the disruption and loss others have experienced. These are the carrion feeders and predators who are always among us. They look forward to seeing others in such distress or so overwhelmed, they make easy prey.

We saw this horrifyingly in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina -- which doesn't seem so very long ago now. Whether we will see it in the aftermath of Sandy remains to be seen, but from a distance the mood and the spirit seems to be quite different. Well, except for a certain smirking former Massachusetts governor who decides to collect food at campaign events in Ohio -- food which none of the helping agencies want or need. The sight of it is stomach churning.

Meanwhile for those who have "lost everything and who are trying to pick up the pieces," the legacy of The Storm will last the rest of their lives. Most of that legacy is trauma and loss, but some of it-- the survival part of that legacy -- is the chance for something new. Not everyone can handle or wants that. But those who can and do may find the legacy of The Storm to be energizing.

I just hope that those who have lost loved ones, homes, livelihoods, ways of life and so on are not further victimized -- as many of the survivors of Katrina were -- by predators and carrion feeders, such as that smirking doofus. Things are tough enough for them already.

The Lessons of Nonviolent Resistance and Who They Benefit

"Not Nonviolence?" Our rulers have learned and internalized the lessons of successful nonviolent resistance campaigns; many of us have yet to learn them at all... (image: Anarchosyndicalist flag, Wikimedia Commons)

Given the fact that campaigns led by Mahatma Gandhi to liberate India from Britain and Martin Luther King to expand the liberty of basic civil rights to all Americans were successful enough to be taken as models, and both relied on the weapon of nonviolent resistance, what were the lessons of these campaigns, and perhaps as important, who learned them? Who benefits from those lessons?

Pious frauds and useful fictions abound when exploring those questions, primarily the frauds and fictions intended to control, discourage, disable, or dispute the merit of resistance campaigns that don't "look like" King's or Gandhi's.

Much of the Overclass learned plenty of lessons from the experience of being bested by a rag-clad Indian and a well-spoken preacher of the African American church. Their primary lesson learned is how to effectively thwart such campaigns by using the tools, tactics and language of nonviolence and nonviolent resistance against those who would engage in those tactics to gain advantage in the economic and political realms. In the social realm, enh, the Overclass doesn't really care so much, or at least hasn't interfered quite as much as it has in campaigns for economic justice and real political change.

And the first lesson learned by the Overclass is it is sometimes possible to thwart the objectives of nonviolent resistance campaigns by teaching nonviolence. It's a wonderful thing.

Nonviolent resistance is a complex and interwoven set of tactics that when used to advance a strategic objective (under the right circumstances) can be very effective. As pointed out in the previous installment of this series, nonviolent resistance tactics are weapons that work very well against brittle, and inherently weak authoritarian regimes that rely on violence or the constant threat of violence to maintain their power and authority.

One way to mitigate the effectiveness of a nonviolent resistance campaign against such authority is to be the teacher who determines the definitions of "violence" and "nonviolence," and who instructs in the proper forms of nonviolent resistance.

What happens, for example, when teaching the topic of nonviolent resistance campaigns is limited to "what King did" or "what Gandhi did," and is focused primarily on what those campaigns looked like? Ie: Tightly controlled marches and rallies fronted by charismatic leaders who spoke in homilies. Those who opposed those campaigns are characterized as well by what they looked like: Big Bellied Sheriffs with their dogs and their fire hoses, British Imperial functionaries with their languid disinterest in anything beyond a game of polo and holding court over the seething masses.

When it's all about appearances and hardly anything at all about the substance of nonviolent resistance tactics and campaigns the lessons learned by those are being taught about King and Gandhi are incomplete, to say the least.

It's been my experience that most people are eager to learn what nonviolent resistance really is -- for they would often love to be able to use it themselves or be part of a campaign that uses nonviolent tactics -- but they don't know squat about it and all they've been taught are pious frauds and useful fictions about marches and rallies and charismatic leaders.

Appearances, in other words.

Thus when hundreds of thousands took to the streets in the fall of 2002 to march and carry signs and attend rallies against the looming tragedy of the Iraq War, and then millions took to the streets in February of 2003 for the same cause and in the same manner, they "looked right" (well, except for the tie-dye and the giant puppets, according to the wags and purists) but they got nowhere at all. They were quite ostentatiously ignored. These hundreds of thousands and then millions of people in the streets marching and rallying against looming catastrophe simply did not matter at all to the Powers That Be.

Media ignored or mocked them, and the Regime -- which was then actually quite weak -- dismissed them with an airy wave.

Note: there was no violence against these huge marches and rallies, the state did not come down on them with full force or even minor force; the marches and rallies were huge, completely peaceful, earnest, and utterly ineffective. The total indifference of Power to the outcry of the People was stunning.

How could this be when so many people were doing exactly what they had been taught was what King and Gandhi did? How could doing the same things in essentially the same manner but now involving millions and millions of people around the country and the world be so completely ineffective?

And what were the lessons the People learned from this experience?

There would be many more similar experiences when people by the hundreds of thousands would gather in protest of something -- broadly speaking "The Regime" -- but would find themselves corralled or dismissed or ignored, or in a few cases (such as the rallies and marches that weren't allowed to march in New York during the Republican Convention in 2004) faced arbitrary arrest and a certain level of random brutality from the police.

These experiences showed that the Overclass had learned their lessons well on how to deal with nonviolent protest; meet fire with fire in a manner of speaking. Be even more "nonviolent" than the protesters. Ignore them utterly, or if attention must be paid, have the media mock them and the police corral them. It worked like a charm.

Not only was the Iraq invasion pursued with great relish, it took place without any opposition The Regime believed it had to pay attention to at all; all authoritative voices raised against it were silenced or ignored, and the People's voice mattered not at all because there was literally nothing they could do about it.

The triumph was complete when the anti-war movement essentially dissolved in despair. People gave up for they were getting nowhere at all with their protests and marches and rallies. That was the point.

Teach them the lesson that "nobody (who matters) cares what you think."

How do you nonviolently resist THAT?

In the short term, you don't. You've been checkmated.

You clear the board and you try something else.

Some of the people who were better informed about the complex nature of nonviolent resistance and who understood that rallies and marches by themselves are insufficient to force a serious change in the direction of a Regime, understood well enough how it was that these enormous events failed so utterly to move the Powers That Be.

"Looking right" isn't enough -- it isn't even necessary. But that's really all these marches and rallies had: the appearance of resistance without the substance.

Nor was there the appearance of any serious -- let alone violent -- opposition to these events. The initial anti-Iraq War marches and rallies seemed to take place in a complete vacuum.

Oh but there are more lessons learned.

One of the chief lessons the Overclass has learned is how to use nonviolent communications as a weapon -- often a very effective one -- against would-be popular opposition. They've learned to talk in airy terms of concern and consideration for the plaints of the People, and they've learned how to couch their own needs and demands in nonviolent language, to the point where outrageous actions are presented and often enough accepted as "reasonable." They've learned this lesson so well that when an official slips up and uses harsh language in dealing with opposition, they look crude and socially maladroit and are even sometimes brought up short by their own peers for being so outré.

This has become particularly true during this Endless Recession in conjunction with the imposition of more an more destructive and apparently mindless Austerity measures. Every official action which harms and impoverishes the People is couched in the language of concern and consideration, and even Scott Walker -- as stumble bum as he is -- has been able to use the language of nonviolent communication to effectively thwart the outcries of the People against his Regime. It is a wonder to behold.

Rightists became so dominant in American life in part because they were able to adopt the principles of nonviolence and the language of nonviolence to advance their own reactionary ends. The use of nonviolence tactics and language by those in power can be very disorienting and disabling to those who seek to change the exercise of power through nonviolent resistance tactics of their own.

It's difficult to know how to respond effectively. Working on it!

Meanwhile, the official response to the Occupy Movement has become more and more overtly violent in rather stark contrast to the overall nonviolence of the movement itself. More and more officials are re-defining violence and nonviolence in such a way that almost any action by Occupy is "violence" by definition. The police actions in Oakland in response to J28 may be a template for what is to come. Some of this redefinition of terms has been adopted by factions within the Movement itself in an effort to purify the Occupy Movement of any hint of "violence." Thus, for example, the constant demands from some factions within the Movement to denounce and expel "the anarchists," who are defined as "violent" due to existence of the Black Bloc.

As I've said many times, there wouldn't be an Occupy Movement at all without "the anarchists." But then, maybe that's the point of all these calls to denounce and expel them...

Next: Nonviolence in Today's Struggle

Chris Hedges Explains It All for Lawrence Lessig

Occupy the Courts -- and other things.

The hostess takes her own sweet time getting in gear for this episode of OccupyTVNY, but once the guests pick up the scattered threads, the whole turns out pretty well...



Lessig is a very nice man, but he can't seem to understand the fact that there is a Revolution going on, something that Hedges has known since seemingly forever.

Not only is a Revolution going on, it is a necessary thing.

Lessig is advocating an Article V Constitutional Convention, something that was bruited about in some of the chat rooms of the Bushevik Era but which has largely been superseded, in part because it was recognized that state legislatures are equally as captured as the national legislature, thus check-mating the idea some time ago. Nice that Lessig is picking up on the idea. I guess.

Meanwhile, Hedges is saying -- as he's been saying for years -- that civil disobedience is the only path (barring armed rebellion) remaining to the people in the face of our obdurate failed public and private institutions. He sees Occupy as perhaps the last great hope for the People -- or perhaps whatever emerges from the chrysalis of Occupy in Metamorphosis.

Or maybe it's too late.

But even if it is, you still have to stand on some kind of moral principle as you're cut down by the Tsar's Cossacks.

It's interesting that they both seem to recognize that we are very close to a February Revolution moment.

Though I don't think we'll really get there till June!

And So What Are The Lessons Learned?

An instructive video that demonstrates something of how things have devolved at UC Davis since Chancellor Katehi commenced to "dialog" with students, faculty and staff.



The speaker was Assistant Professor Nathan Brown, he who wrote the eloquent Open Letter calling on the Chancellor of UC Davis to resign -- an Open Letter that's now been signed by over 100,000.

Note: he is shouted down, "applause" is used to drown him out, and finally he leaves the microphone, resolute but unanswered.

That's basically the picture of the Occupy Movement as a whole right now. Resolute, but shouted down. Evicted. Wandering.

There was a startling scene of Antonio Villaraigosa issuing paeans for the LAPD's successful clearance of the Occupy LA encampment. It was amazing -- not what happened, but what he had to say about it, as if he were speaking from a parallel universe:

 

Are there lessons here? There should be.

From the beginning of this Uprising cum Revolution, I have said here and in just about every discussion I've had with family and friends about it, "This has to be done by the young people, and they have to learn for themselves how to do it. None of us Old Farts can tell them how." What I haven't said as much as I should is, "If we knew how, we would have done it already."

Indeed, we did do it, partially, back in Our Day, but obviously what we did was not nearly enough to prevent the Powers of Darkness from gaining a stranglehold on the present. We may be able to diagnose what's wrong, but we can't fix it. That's up to the young, and damn all, they're doing an amazing job, despite all the things that in my view have either gone wrong or have been inadequate.

I think the lessons in the two metaphorical videos posted above are striking.

Nathan Brown has been the chief rabble-rouser at UC Davis (and he's also had an effect at UC Berkeley), but you see that when he tried to present his case at a forum, a town hall, at Davis, according to The Rules set by the Administration in order to maintain full control of the event, he was shouted down and eventually -- at least metaphorically -- driven from the room by... who, exactly?

I'll get back to that.

In the other video, LA Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa practically wets himself in praise of the LAPD... and all the other agencies of civic authority that were brought to bear on a few hundred demonstrators at City Hall. What, exactly, is he praising? And why? We hear some names, but never learn quite what is being praised unless you want to count eviction as "constitutional policing."

The lesson from the first video is that even though we know we are in the right ("we" in the global sense), we are not being heard, and we won't be heard because when we try to speak and make our case, there will be plenty of people available to shout us down or drive us away. This is why, as I have said many times, there is a Revolution going on by necessity. There is no other way for the "lesser people" to affect events that concern them, or even to gain a hearing before Their Betters.

The lesson from the second video is starker -- and perhaps more illuminating. It shows that Our Rulers are 1) obsessed with their own Authority and its exercise; 2) wholly owned by a handful of Major Stakeholders and Sponsors for whom they work exclusively; 3) bone stupid and incapable of stating just what it is they are doing or why. This is another reason why there is a Revolution under way.

We are ruled by idiots.

I'm not making that up. It's the simple truth.

Oh, but there are so many more lessons.

Our Revolutionary comrades in Egypt recently learned that the forms of "democracy" are apparently more important to the Egyptian masses than the absent reality. This realization must have come as a shock to many, but surely the Egyptian men and women who have been putting together the Egyptian Revolution and taking on huge personal risks to pursue it must have had some inkling that the Revolutionary spirit could be affected or modified -- perhaps even undermined and dissipated -- through perception and experience.

Thus, for many -- perhaps most -- Egyptians, the forms of "democracy" mean more than the actuality. The Revolution, therefore, has been temporarily put on hold.

The acampada phase of the Spanish Revolution essentially concluded after a little more than a month at Puerta del Sol in Madrid and the Plaza de Catalunya in Barcelona -- with numerous offshoots throughout Spain. They were only "occupied" for part of May and part of June; a "presence" was maintained until August, when that, too, was swept away. The Indignados are still around, of course. But their camps have long been gone. During this year, too, Spain has conducted municipal and national elections, both handily won by the center-rightist People's Party (which I am led to believe is actually a neo-fascist party). It is a victory attributed to the thorough discrediting of the Socialists under Zapatero, the same Socialists that cleared the squares and did nothing at all productive on behalf of the Spanish People. In fact, like every other Socialist government in Europe, the Spanish Socialists made it a point to serve the bankster masters of their universe first and foremost. Which has strangely led to the discrediting of Socialist parties and the election of center-rightist parties wherever government elections are still being allowed. Which isn't everywhere by any means.

This is said to have made the Indignado Movement even stronger, but I'm not convinced of it yet. There's a long way to go before that can be proved, but the propaganda is nice.

The lesson here is that when those who have been elected to serve the People refuse to do so, they will be discharged, and others who will also refuse to serve the People will be put in their place.

Having demonstrated the futility of elections, what then?

That's yet to be seen.

We've learned that in this country, the Occupy Movement is treated with indifference and/or brutality or both in many of our larger cities and on certain campuses, but not everywhere. There are still many Occupations going on around the country with the more or less active support of the civic authorities. The indifference and/or brutality of the authorities seems to be relative to the size of the media market involved -- and that should be a lesson, shouldn't it?

However, the acampada phase of the Occupations doesn't have to last forever. In many cases, it's probably not wise in any case.

I've been meaning to write a piece on the nature of the intentional communities the encampments were developing but got sidetracked so many times I never completed anything. But it is the re-invention of American Community that is the key to understanding what "Occupy" is all about. Each encampment has/had the potential to demonstrate how Another World is Possible. The closer they got to the demonstration, at least in the larger media markets, the more certain became their eviction and destruction.

The destruction of these nascent communities needs to be highlighted more in my view. The level of hysteria over the Black Bloc tactics used once in Oakland has never been matched -- not even remotely -- by righteous rage over the destruction of whole communities by the casual brutality of the Authorities.

Building a Better Future through the demonstration and establishment of such intentional communities has always been the main point of the Revolution -- at least from my point of view -- and that's part of why I believe the whole argument over engaging the political system is a waste of time and energy. The political establishment is not only indifferent and unresponsive to the People, it will actively set out to undermine and crush any threatening alternative model of social and economic justice.

Some of us have known this for many years, but others are just finding it out. And from my perspective (admittedly jaded) they don't know what to do about it. Going mano a mano against Authority doesn't work in the long run, though it may get attention in the short run (or maybe not).

What does work, oddly enough, is to just do it. And keep on doing it, no matter the forces arrayed against you. Persistence is the key. The demonstration must be repeated many times before the notion of what you're doing and what your intentions are is clear.

There is a big, more or less public, debate going on about the Future of Occupy. Thanks to the numerous evictions from major cities -- or the failure to establish an Occupation at all in some places -- it's difficult to forecast whether there will even be a Future for the Movement/Revolution.

As we get deeper and deeper into winter, it's time to assess what's happened and what's been discovered. It's time to think about where to go next and how to get there. And it is always time to dance.

Those Were The Days

Was getting all nostalgic and reminiscing the other day. Going back over some of the Bartcop and Media Whores Online postings from 2002, then jumping back before that, to the '90's -- over a decade now -- when we first hooked up to the Internets on the dialup (was it $2.95 an hour? Don't remember exactly, but I do recall not leaving the computer connected if I had to go off and do something else. Even so, some of the bills were as high as some people's cell phone bills are now. Oh, and we only had one phone line, so if we were connected to the internet, we couldn't get other calls.)

The Leningrad Cowboys (from Finland) and the Red Army Choir sort of crystallize the absurdity of what once was, and in some ways, their astonishing and magnificent theatricality provides an opportunity to consider just how far we've come, how far down the cliff we've slid. And perhaps, maybe, the Soviet experience of vast pretence and imperial ambition (and horror almost without parallel in world history) brought low, yet with a people bringing the country back (under the resolute but now background leadership of KGB agent Vladimir Putin, the Beloved), maybe the Russians will be an example for us.

Those were the days alright.

Some reading