Jewish Atheist

“If ye love wealth greater than liberty, the tranquility of servitude greater than
the animating contest for freedom, go home from us in peace.
We seek not your counsel nor your arms. Crouch down
and lick the hand that feeds you. May your chains set lightly upon you and
may posterity forget that ye were our countrymen.”

Sheldon Richman

For the second time in a fortnight, understandable rage bursts into violence which I don’t condone, but with which I can definitely sympathize. First there was the lady prof denied tenure; she did what others perhaps fantasized or longed to do: she opened fire on her tormentors.

Having been through the same demeaning process, I understood her rage in a way that I’d never understand the Columbine shooters or Ed Gein. We all have different things that push our buttons.

9/11 style suicide

Now there’s been a 9/11-style suicide, by a white man, with one of the most elaborate and articulate suicide notes I’ve ever seen. I’ve never heard of anyone who’d thought it through as thoroughly as Joe Stack had, and the accumulation of his frustrations is heart-rending.

Shrinks will rush in to say he’s depressed, he needed meds, he needed therapy, it didn’t have to come to this. But this man simply chose to confront reality, and it crushed him mercilessly. He chose to challenge the reality presented by politicians, marketers, and other image-makers.

USA Theme Park

For a lot of people, life in America is a theme park — always something new to do, wear, eat, always a new toy or car to buy. There are plenty of distractions from the reality.

But the reality — and a lot of Tea Beggers see this as well — is that the government, financed by the greedy claws of the IRS, is in near-total control. Capitalism has managed to merge with government and media to exercise control over the way Americans see the world. Most recent example: the gutless, ball-less refusal by CBS to deny NORML (National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws) its Times Square Jumbotron space. CBS backed down because it didn’t want to broadcast anything that might encourage “illegal activities.” I’ll bet half of these chickenshit network execs were potheads in high school and college. Some probably stilll are. This is one piece of a broader picture of regression in drug policy, led by the corporate-owned, government regulated media.

And let us note in passing that abolition of slavery, the civil rights and women’s suffrage and labor movements all involved the peaceful advocacy of illegal activities — i.e., the opposition to immoral policies. That’s how change takes place in a free society. But not today, not in America.

First confrontation with reality

Joe Stack first confronted the reality of his situation — of OUR situation — when he and a group of others tried to unravel the arbitrary legal protections according to which religious institutions are excused from having to pay billions in otherwise legally owed taxes. Result: after much strife and expense, he came to understand the hard truths that (i) interpretation of the law, which usually favors more government, IS the law; and (ii) the IRS always wins. They are monstrously inefficient (it took months to get them to send me and my ex separate refund checks). But they are RELENTLESS.

Once you confront the reality, the question is what to do about it. Not thinking is an alternative. Marketers, clerics and politicians are always there with an answer, a new gadget, a solution to a problem you didn’t know you had. Escape is easy — work, business, drugs, sports, business, work, sports, alcohol, work. The list of socially-approved alternatives is endless!

Joe Stack had gone beyond observing. He’d already had his first clash with the system. It ended with a harsh lesson, which was to be repeated many times over many years: with rare exceptions, you cannot successfully fight City Hall. The government has all the guns, all the power, all the information (potentially). Together with business and the media, it constructs reality: you really need Obama, the Pope, the iPod; you need “Catholics Come Home” (approved: advocating a bizarre fantasy/death cult; not approved: advocating the liberty of one’s own body). AND it defeats any serious challenge to that reality.

Taxation = theft

It does so in a number of ways. Joe Stack encountered some of them. So have I, many times. We share a loathing of the IRS as an arrogant, unnecessary, possibly illegal intrusion into our lives; we are people to whom “taxation is theft” actually makes sense.

In business, the elite pull down their multimillion-dollar bonuses, regardless of their ineptitude, while the rest of us settle for crumbs, slogans, and the shitty end of the stick.

For instance, if you take a buyout from the company, you have to sign away your right to sue. When I saw the list of offenses for which I would not sue, I noted that it contained many of the very management abuses I’d suffered. I could have written that list! They hold all the cards. And I don’t mean the conspiratorial, indefinite “they.” I mean the combined power of the government, the media and the marketers that serves to keep The Matrix in place and crushes (or tries to crush) any attempts to resist.

It is totally obvious to me that religious institutions should enjoy no special tax protection, yet this very injustice is written into our laws. Any attempt to undo it is….well, crushed. The law is what the government says it is.

With each hassle, each defeat, Joe Stack’s sense of hopelessness grew. I don’t understand the details of his various legal battles, but it’s clear that he understood America’s oligarchy and the illusions it maintains. IF ONLY America were the free, fair, peace-loving country they say it is.

“Freedom”

The American myth about freedom, is, alas, part of the reality. You never hear “liberty” in political speeches any more. The 4th of July used to be about the fact that for once, after centuries of tyrants of all kinds, here at last was a country governed by the consent of the governed. Today it’s fireworks and sales, sales, sales. We’re free to travel, get pissed off (the politicians have learned that they really don’t have to change anything), buy anything we can afford (and a lot we can’t)…not bad, compared to Nicaragua or Uzbekistan. But America should do better, much bettter.

So we’ve lost a whole raft of freedoms — to educate our children, save for retirement, decide what drugs we shall ingest, and much more — in exchange for the politicians’ promises that their ever-expanding, never-ending programs would solve problems we didn’t we know we had (prime example: Social Security, which FDR was sure would weld the middle class to the government forever, which it did).

“Government is broken.”

Another piece of The Matrix is the web of shared assumptions that Americans are indoctrinated with, assumptions about the role of the government in their lives. Totally foreign to most Americans is the notion that there are limits to the government’s powers (Ninth and Tenth Amendments). This ignorance is the foundation of all the talk that government is “broken” (76 million Google hits!) because it “can’t get anything done” because of all the “partisan bickering” (1.4 million hits). The overwhelming frequency of these linguistic bits is important: if all you hear is the same thing, then that is all you will know.

Partisan bickering is the result of having career politicians who want to one-up the competition and get re-elected. It’s the contest between two government alternatives; one of the choices is NEVER “no government action.” Government is broken only in the sense that is it grosssly unconstitutional and run by incompetents who are ruining the country with debt and war.

Beware of bipartisanship

I don’t want a government that “gets things done,” because those things are wasteful, costly, inefficient, and, as Milton Friedman observed, worse than the problems they are meant to solve. I don’t want bipartisanship either. At least these two groups of idiots are a check on each other. “Bipartisanship,” as has often been noted, is simply BOTH parties agreeing on how to screw you and make government bigger.

Witnessing

Beyond observing, there is what religious people call “witnessing.” You tell others that you see through the BS. Once, at lunch with some PR colleagues, I was asked my opinion of the tobacco litigation in which the parent company was involved. I said it was none of the government’s business. That was a true conversation-stopper.

Another time, a stupefyingly conventional (skiing in Europe!) finance type accused me of wanting to go back to the 1890s. I said we could only go forward and that indeed the idea of liberty is just as relevant to the Information Age, if not more so. Or at least I should have.

The rest of the assemblage acted as if I’d started suggesting bestiality. You just don’t talk about it.

Out in a blaze

It’s enough to make you want to go out in a blaze. But sorry, Joe, your timing was bad. You chose to do it on the very eve of the day on which Tiger Woods made a public apology for his fucking around, for his prurient pursuit of pussy. And if the choice is between that and some nut who kills himself because he had some run-ins with the government…well, shit, let’s hear from the sports star and parse every word.

But what Joe did is of infinitely more importance, and the primacy given the sports star shows the shallowness and triviality to which the marketing/media culture have reduced us. When somebody as intelligent as this ends his life in such a way, isn’t it worth asking why? He can’t be completely delusional, can he? Is there any truth to what he says? What did you think of Tiger’s apology?

He was a jihadi, a striver, a struggler. And a martyr. He gave up on this world as irremediably broken and corrupt. But the key difference: Muslims blow themselves up for the sake of a religious fantasy. Joe Stack did it because he refused to stop confronting reality.

The Pitch

OK, now the close: You don’t have to blow anytrhing up. The Libertarian Party is an actual political organization that can focus all of the anger and disillusionment that Americans feel…into real political change. Throw the bums out. It’s the American Way.