Village Pillage

[Steelhead]

Diane of York, Professor of Piercy sez:

>Mr. Steelhead informs us that Hillary Clinton isn't entirely sincere--you
>could knock me over with a feather! >Acknowledging American politics to
>be a Big Lie and "outing" the Clintons as conservatives ain't exactly
>news.

Quite true. But since Alex Cockburn and I were two of the first journalists
to expose HRC's corporate links I think I deserve slightly more credit than
you dish out. We revealed, for example, HRC's seat on the board of
LaFarge-Coppee (The Nation 1993), her role in setting up the WTI
incinerator in East Liverpool, Ohio (The Nation 1993), her role in gouging
the eldery in the Beverly Nursing Home scandal (The Nation 1993), HRC's
astronomical adventures on the commodities market (1 in a billion odds of
turning $1,000 into $100,O00 without access to inside information),
Hillary's role in the scam real estate deal involving
Webb Hubbell's father Seth Ward (Counterpunch 1994), HRC's perjured
testimony before the Resolution Trust Corporation (Counterpunch and Wash
post 1995), Hillary's passionate support for the Nicaraugan Contras
(Counterpunch 1994) and on and on.

> But I doubt sincerely this is the problem the official "Right" has
>with the motto Hillary co-opted from Africa.

The official right and the official left are basically the same thing. The
official right mainly likes to use HRC as a fundraising device. The same
way
the official left makes millions off of Newt. But when push comes to shove
they agree on much more than they disagree about.

You suggest that the official right is racist. Ok. Well, do you remember
the abusive manner the Clinton's treated Lani Gunier and Jocelyn Elders,
two black women who were supposedly close friends of those in the WH? Do
you remember how Bill Clinton in the heat of the 1992 campaign rushed home
to Little Rock to execute Ricky Ray Rector, a mentally retarded, black,
impoverished man who innocently asked on the night of his execution: "I
hope we have pancakes for breakast. I love pancakes." This is, afterall,
the administration that passed the muderous welfare reform bill, targeted
mainly at young black single mothers and Mexicans of any description.

I believe there is some fused terrain where the Ultra Right and Left meet,
mainly on issues of civil liberties and challenging the ever-growing power
of the State and large abstract institutions. The Clinton administration
has doubled the number of wiretaps, severly intruded into civil rights with
its Terrorism and Telecommunications Bills. Who fought these measures the
hardest? The Ultra Right. On many issues Noam Chomsky and Pat Buchanan
aren't that far apart. Look at NAFTA, GATT, the CIA, the FBI. The strongest
critics of these incursions are often groups on what we would call the far
right.

I believe TRP to be basically libertarian in his politics. I can't think of
one instance in TRP's writings were the State has acted with benevolence.
It always seems to be one Brock Vond or another dropping out of the sky.


>Why the hell should they
>care if she is a calculating politician, or "ice princess" (now
>there's a new epithet to hurl at women. Warm up, Hil! What'r'ya?
>Frigid?)  Their fear stems from the fact that this proverb is far more
>than "pleasant," it's "profound"--and profoundly un-American.

I wasn't hurling anything at "women." I was hurling it at HRC. She's
deathlike in her lack of compassion.

It takes a Village. Hardly profound. Sounds trite to me. If you want
profound thougts from Africa, read Wole Soyinka or Ken Saro-Wiwa. The fact
is HRC coopted an African proverb and perverted its meaning. This should
piss people off. It's a con job. The same way HRC's health care plan was a
con job. When we had the momentum for National Health Care, HRC concocted
an insurance company friendly scheme called managed competition. She should
have been run out of town for blowing that one. Think of how many people
will die due to lack of basic health insurance coverage due to her
incompetence.


>If we
>continue to fetishize individuality and competition we continue to reap
>what we've sewn, vast wealth for a tiny few, paranoia, fear and hate for
>the rest of us.

It's the State that has been "fetishized" by HRC, who has euphemistically
relabelled it "the Village," as if it were a benign and comforting
institution--instead of its cold, austere and impersonal reality.

HRC is the Ice Princess of the Therapy State. She wants the probing,
mouling hand of the State to regulate nearly every aspect of human
behavior. It is really a quite chilling book. And turgidly written.

Individuality and competition are not siamese twins. You can be an advocate
of individual freedom without ascribing to notions of social Darwinism. If
the State has a role, it is to protect the individual from the predations
of corporations. But since the corporations _are_ the State (this is the
nature of fascism and an important lesson of GR), seeking more powers for
the State will only come back to haunt the individual--by individual I mean
people, families, communities, etc.

Does that mean collective action has no place in this battered Republic? Of
course not. But these alliances can't be rigid or static. If Pynchon
advocates anything, its what Levi-Strauss calls Tiny Solidarities, small
collectives, intersections of communities and families, black markets,
pairings off, love affairs, undergrounds movements.


>Whoopee.  As for the glib dismissal of species (nice work
>if you can get it) and the idea that we are the environment--have you
>checked out the sky lately? I'm naive enough to believe that the crap
>we're breathing came from somewhere and goes everywhere.  Does this really
>need saying?

Well, I've been writing about environmental politics for 12 years now. I've
been arrested twice this summer trying to keep Boise-Cascade from logging
off the oldest trees in Oregon. I've been sued (unsuccessfully) for
articles I've written exposing the noxious activities of Shell,
International Paper, and Maxxam. So I don't think I'm naive or glib on this
issue. But you have to admit that environmentalism has succombed to too
many wu-wu/new age notions; it's world view is dogmatic, elitist, and
usually quite wrong. Look at the awful Malthusian roots of contemporary
environmentalism, policies that advocate trading Norplant implants for food
in countries like Haiti and Somalia.

This smug brand of elitism is one of the principle reasons that despite
widespread popular support for the environment (upwards of 70 percent in
most polls), the corporations continue pounding the hell out of the planet.
Go re-read Vineland. It's got a lot to say on this subject.

>Forgive me, I'm teaching Marge Piercy's Woman on the Edge of
>Time this week--a utopia in which food is good, air is clean, people are
>decent, minds aren't closed, sigh.  The only thing missing is money! Diana

Are they teaching entire classes on Marge Piercy these days? Its worse than
I thought. I read Woman on the Edge of Time and it made be long for the
stolid prose of Doris Lessing and brought just how goddamn good George
Eliot actually was. Daniel Deronda...now there's a novel. Is there really a
need for another Utopian novel after Hawthornes The Blithedale Romance?

Steely