Y’know that old saying about how history happens the first time as tragedy and the second time as farce? Well, what happens if it happens as farce the first time? You know, like when Obama was first running, and all the Liberals were screaming about how if you didn’t support him you were some kind of racist, even though anybody who did even the most cursory examination of his background would’ve told you that the guy was a total sham, a lightweight who pretty much skated into every office he held, a classic Clinton Democrat, a flunkie of the Pentagon and Wall Street?

So, here comes Hillary Clinton, taking another stab at it now that Obama’s warmed the seat up for her, and I can just see it now, the same old shit — if I don’t support Hillary, I’m a mean old sexist Teabagger, even though anybody who hasn’t been living in a goddamn’ cave for the past twenty years totally knows the score on this nasty old harpie. Anyone who points out her involvement on the board of Wal-Mart, her support for Israeli atrocities in Palestine, her support for the disaster in Iraq, or her support for corporate dictatorship is going to get a bunch of shrieking from geezing old ’70s dead-enders who can’t talk about anything but Roe V. Wade and the Glass Ceiling™.

So, folks, would it be safe to assume that American Feminism is pretty much dead? I mean, c’mon — Glass Ceiling? “Lean In”? Roe V. Wade? Is that all you tired old broads have got for us?

But, more importantly — who’s going to hold Hillary’s crown while she takes the oath of office?

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Y’know, I hardly know where to start with this. Perhaps I could start with this gob-smacking foto of ex-Presidents Bubba and Chimp, both smiling their most smarmy and smug smiles as they accept the position of Special Envoys in charge of the Haitian relief effort. That’s right, ex-President I Invaded Haiti In The ’90s and ex-President Heckuva Job Brownie have been placed in charge of Haitian earthquake relief, and the bastards are frickin’ smiling… and President Timberlake, there, seems just barely able to contain himself as well. What perfect cover for a little bit of that “vulture capitalism”.

Or, perhaps this amazingly soulless, brutalist David Brooks column from the New York Times might work for you. In it, he calls for the throwing away of any tolerance or respect for foreign cultures and calls for “intrusive paternalism” at least half a dozen times in a page and a half of thinly-veiled racist spewage. In spirit and letter, it’s really no different from any similar racist spewage about Haiti and the Dominican Republic published in the New York Times a century or so ago; Noam Chomsky writes in Year 501:

Times editors lauded the “unselfish and helpful” attitude that the US had always shown, now once again as it responded “in a fatherly way” as Haiti “sought help here.” Our “unselfish intervention has been moved almost exclusively by a desire to give the benefits of peace to people tormented by repeated revolutions,” with no thought of “preferential advantages, commercial or otherwise,” for ourselves. “The people of the island should realize that [the US government] is their best friend.” The US sought only to ensure that “the people were cured of the habit of insurrection and taught how to work and live”; they “would have to be reformed, guided and educated,” and this “duty was undertaken by the United States.” There is a further benefit for our “black brother”: “To wean these peoples away from their shot-gun habit of government is to safeguard them against our own exasperation,” which might lead to further intervention. “The good-will and unselfish purposes of our own government” are demonstrated by the consequences, the editors wrote in 1922, when they were all too apparent and the Marine atrocities had already aroused a storm of protest.

However, if comic relief is what you’re after, don’t despair; former US Senator John “Senator Goodhair” Edwards is going to Haiti to help out, also — with cameras conveniently present, of course.

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Yet another awake-too-early morning finds my wife once again flipping between early-morning news programs at 6:30am, and landing on CNN’s “American Morning” shitfest which, this particular morning, was running highlights of the previous evening’s Donkeycratic Party “debate”. Needless to say, of course, I emerged from my REM daze just in time to hear that chirpy, gushy college girl asking Hillary Clinton if she preferred “diamonds or pearls?” to which Her Hillaryship answered — in classic Clintonian fashion, “I like both”…

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Government (in the form of police) violence against nonviolent protesters at the Seattle WTO Meetings had many in The Movement questioning the relevance of strict Ghandian Nonviolence in modern street protest. It also changed a lot of my attitude toward Federal and State gun-control laws. I suddenly noticed that all of these laws were about disarming the People, and not the State.

Things got really awkward all of a sudden. Now, I’m really not a violent guy at all. I’ve always believed that war — and situations that drive citizens to take up arms against their government — are an indication of epic failure: ethical failure, cultural failure, moral failure, and spiritual failure. After Seattle, though, I started thinking more about people in Latin America, Asia, and Africa, who are fighting US-backed state/corporate dictatorships and are forced to literally fight the police — and often soldiers — in the streets, often just for the right to gather in the streets to voice their grievances in the first place…and they aren’t necessarily fighting by Gandhi’s rules. I started thinking about the Palestinians, engaged in their resistance against the Israeli occupation of their country… and, they weren’t exactly holding candles and singing kum-bah-yah, either.

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