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Drunk from Rotten Fruit

America's Right Senator Peter Hoekstra uses explicit racism to push for nationalist pride and populist support.

"There is a zone of nonbeing, an extraordinarily sterile and arid region, an utterly naked declivity where an authentic upheaval can be born."

- Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks

The indulgence of capitalist exploitation passes through the periphery of a self-deprecating culture. Since the advent of global capitalism and neoliberalism, the facade of a progressive ideological Left marketed by its American-consumer populism, has morally extorted its believers. "Ethical consumption" through the means of "ethical exploitation," (i.e. Fair Trade, Sustainable Trade) white wash transitioning to green wash transitioning to the ideological fabric of a commodity fetish. The identification of a commodity is marked by the alienation of its labor. However, if the alienation of the labor is supplemented by the spectacle of the commodity, then cyclic nature of exploitation continues without a trace. Henry Ford kept the lines running by having the workers believe that they could afford the product at the end of the year. Yet the authentic horror of post-slavery comes when the worker cannot even kill himself at the factory buildings of Foxconn after working a twenty-hour shift1.

The neo-nationalist propaganda is under the farce of a competitive national market. The Left stresses the need to "buy local," while the the Right pushes a xenophobic urgency. (Yet continuing to cooperate in currency manipulation so that Americans can shop at Walmart or Target for the 'daily low prices.') As markets crash in Europe and austerity measures beacon over the horizon in the West, Asian markets flourish. While America and Europe puts hope in Keneysian Economics bailing out billionaires but stripping away everything else, state/authoritarian capitalist markets such as Singapore and China, bank on fear with single party despotism.

If there was one thing to prove from the current global financial crisis it would be that democracy has failed. It is throughout history that domination and coercion are implicit factors for an economy's prosperity. Slavery is an inherent facet of capitalist hegemony and the necessary violence inflicted to an Other is tantamount to its dominion. The Emancipation of Proclamation was only issued to the Southern Confederation and exempted many Northern states and parishes, enslaved Africans in Haiti helped broaden Charles the Fifth's expansion of the Spanish Empire, the discovery of sugar in the 16th century led to colonization and enslavement of indigenous Brazilians, not to mention modern slavery of the 21st century where 1.8 million children in West Africa are at the servitude to Westerner's sweet tooth for chocolate 2. Democracy is the idealistic wet dream of a dystopian reality; an illusion that is rendered from a false hope that humanity is capable of global equality while making a profit. More, consumers can ethically consume all that is left in the ecological infrastructure at the expense of the blood of the Other. It is the fabrication that through a democratically elected political system, people all over the world can enter a "free market" while somehow respecting cultures, land, and people.

Revolutions are the noose that will asphyxiate the masses. Populism of the Left and Right is the result of a desperate nation's reaction to a current catastrophe. Hope presents itself in the bosom of disparity but negating to realize the horror of the catastrophic Real. In Adorno's last letters to Marcuse, Adorno lamented the false idealism and actual desperation of the student Left, that a fragmented SDS could only solidify its organization through the spectacle of a seeming act of "subversion" and by doing so embodies a "leftist fascist" tendency3. Similarly, with the rise of the Arab Spring, the potential for a fascistic undercurrent of a democratic revolution only placates the haunting reality of religious hegemony in the political. Exemplified in the Egyptian Revolution of 2011, the masses gathered through Friday Prayer to accomplish a religious solidarity to topple a regime. Just as in the Iranian Revolution from 1977-79, the superego will present itself in the relics of an old regime's decay. The sheep do not and will not leave its flock. (Herrschaft und Knechtschaft tends to be more apparent under the backdrop of the religious. Nihil sine deo.)

As the masters devise the next move, the solution is not an alternative. It is with the trap of the alternative that substantiates a ideological plane of stagnation. As Peter Sloterdijk points out in Rage and Time, it is through the rage of Achilles that begins Homer's Iliad. Likewise, it is through an equally dynamic rage and antagonism that fulfills a dialectic. In response, to the irresponsible agents of capital, your fate spawns through your actions. The karmic destiny of a ceaseless reign of defilement will counter by an equally destructive force, a continual bombardment of nihilistic antagonisms, or the phase of self-destruction. Symptoms of the plague starts as an itch. Bon appetit!

  His Holiness Kyabje Dungse Thinley Norbu Rinpoche passed away to pariv 21.25h (EST) on the twenty-seventh day of the twelfth month in the year of the metal rabbit. As the eldest son of lineage holder H.H. Chabje Dudjom Rinpoche and emanation of Longchen Rabjam, His Holiness spent most of his time spreading the vajra teachings throughout the United States. Writing a half-dozen books, His Holiness introduced many teachings from the Nyingmapa lineage to a Western audience. Notably, he is the father of the great modern Nyingmapa teacher and filmmaker, Dzongsar Jamyang Khyentse Rinpoche. 




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Buddham saranam gacchāmi
Dharmam saranam gacchāmi
Sangham saranam gacchāmi

We Know Not What We Do but We Will Continue to Know How to Do It

A protestor hurls a cannister during clashes in Rome, Saturday, Oct. 15, 2011. (AP Photo/Gregorio Borgia)

“Empire does not confront us like a subject, facing us, but like an environment that is hostile to us.” - Tiqqun

An occupied territory comes with the realization of its impermanence. The space that encompasses an occupation will shrivel in the decay of paper banners and battered spirits. Transformed by the illusion of self-deprecation, a futile movement will synthesize as the decomposing stench of liberalism.

Liberation within an imminence. Diatribes invoked from the rage of neglect, neglect from hopes of a revolution, dismay of a violent non-violence. Sit-in inwardly and examine what the Left has done in a couple centuries, delusion. The poverty of class ideology transforms a coma awoken by ambiguity, social inequity marked by the deprivation of its synthesis, decomposition. The frivolous action of being the standard antagonism such as the Occupy ____ Movement continues to comprise itself as a confinement within the cyclical nature of its decay, samsara ("cycle of sufering").

Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari speak of rhizomes; a network with non-origin that interact in a state of  “inter-being.”1 Similarly, Padmasambhava brought the point of bardo, which serves an intermediary transition from one agency to another. If a movement wishes to persist, the agency of its being must be a state of transient antagonism.

Let the corneas interact with the pepper spray of an altruistically repressive force (subalternity of mace?). Domination chooses the playing field of where to fight its enemies. Locked-on like a predator to a pray, another victim of the State’s violence is the inevitable effect of the cause. Another’s pain is the voyeur’s pleasure. The masochistic tendency of the Left becomes the dukkham (suffering) of its own jouissance. The object submits to the subject to signify its own transgressed pleasure.

Nevertheless, a force to be reckoned with sets its own battlefield. An itch of insurrection becomes a rash becomes a plague. However, capitalism’s antagonism is potentially the agent of its own, as Jacques Lacan refers to, jouissance.2 A death-drive chauffeured by its desire of self-annihilation. This yearn of its death becomes a driving force of its own demise; the nightmare of the burning child is the actual burning of itself. As the currency devalues itself, so does the ideological backbone. The upadana  (“clinging”) becomes the mechanism of its own demise or at least the networks of rhizomes that encompass its own survival.

Altruism begets from a dying world and compassion comes through the deprivation of the people not the excess of them.

_______________________________
1 Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. A Thousand Alateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987.
2 Lacan, Jacques. The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 1959-1960. New York: Norton, 1997.

Sobriety without Anxiety

The effects are subtle; you have your typical impaired judgment accompanied by incoherent speech (that comes with any other fifth of Southern Comfort); however, added with two lines of Columbia’s finest, the buzz transitions into a different entity. Your impairment is heightened as your heart feels like it’s going to explode. Your muscles pour out lactic acid bringing you to convulse uncontrollably, and finally the near-death comatose.

Jimmy D. is hovered over me with his two fingers on my carotid artery and one hand on my heart. With Regan Youth blasting in the background of the dingy Erie Eastside “Punk House”, Jimmy D. hesitantly reassures the fellow punks, “He’s going to be alive, but I’m going to keep an eye on him for the rest of the night.” Jimmy D. was the local EMT that was in the Erie Punk Rock Scene, he was very distinct, a skinhead with a barbed wire tattooed all around his neck, and dark rimmed glasses. That night, I partied like it was 1999 well because it was 1999…

Being sober and drug free has now become a badge of honor. From the ages of fifteen to twenty-one, I lived a lifestyle of rebellion for I didn’t get fucked up. I think it may of came from the fact that a girl a grade below me was gang raped by fellow classmates at a party, a friend decapitated while driving drunk, countless others killed by drunk drivers, or my own near-death experience. Maybe it was also the relationships I’ve seen ruined, families destroyed, or a myriad of friends that have been raped at parties. Within the Symbolic Order of things, drinking alcohol was the norm and wasn’t some transgression transpired from teenage angst. As one gets older the methodology is the same but the location different; you go to the bar, fuck some stranger while contracting an STD or get pregnant and its love at first sight. Nevertheless, this allure that mystifies globally is a rite of passage for most. As a rite of passage, it serves as an agency of social cohesion and homogeneity, creating a social order that identifies itself as a necessity and at times creating an excess, alienating those who do not fit within that order.

Just like many others, alcohol was an escape from insecurities, anxieties, and the horrors of reality. It was a bandage for a gunshot wound. As I lay passed out on an ant-infested bathroom floor, I can feel the vomit travel through my esophagus, burning with every breath. Shortly after, with a slight bit of consciousness, my friends huddle around me urging for the next onslaught of binging.

Looking back, the punk rock lifestyle was no different than the status-quo in which it was reaction to. With similar rituals and attitudes, the escapist apathy coalesced in an existence that may seem antagonistic but in actuality reinforced its own cultural excess. Fraternity house or rental hall, the same bottle Jack Daniel gets passed around and the “great escape” continues on.

The mechanization and distance from our bodies has lead experience to embody a simulated reality. As Guy Debord put it, “Everything that was directly lived has receded into a representation.” It’s only now that representation is an abstract parallax to suppositions of our lived-experience. The comatose of intoxication is a transgression of a lived-experience plagued by the daily rituals within the Symbolic Order. The lived-experience of forgetting and escaping is the trauma of the Real. One sip becomes the journey down the rabbit hole only to be found buried alive. The white elephant plagues your living nightmare.

After many trials and tribulations I’ve found my vulnerabilities. Though my journey is still in its infant stage, I’ve found that isolation is a byproduct of cultural alienation. Nevertheless, sobriety serves as an actant to pursue further self-examination and solace in the midst of displacement. In addition, self-examination without an agency can be the hardest yet rewarding feat. By enabling one to tackle anxiety in its authentic form, the quest of self-liberation becomes more monumental and the embodiment of autonomy in the heart of darkness allows one to persevere in midst of any catastrophe. A call for mindfulness in a dying world.

Agency in the Mouth of the Dragon

"When the prison doors are opened, the real dragon will fly out."
- Ho Chi Minh

Driving through the seemingly uncoordinated districts of Vietnam, one sees the remnants of a revolutionary dystopia. A lottery ticket hustle of an adolescent, the burnt red skin of a backpack-hulling Westerner, brand new Mercedes juxtaposed by a swarm of scooters, and the myriad display of counterfeit designer clothing; this is post-revolutionary Vietnam, this an apocalypse now. However, amongst the fruits of doi moi or (renovation) lays a creature that is becoming formidable to Western liberal capitalism.

Historically speaking, Vietnam is a nation that has risen from the excrement of two colonial powers, creating an indigenous resistance that squashed its opposition through unconventional tactics. Nevertheless, with an organic revolutionary spirit, guided by the hammer and sickle, comes to what the Jacques Lacan would refer to as Vietnam’s big Other, the bureaucratization of the proletariat. Either way, the questionable reality of a dying revolution is what agency will Vietnam acquire after the rice fields have dried up, the last forest burnt down, the below poverty income is too much, and another free trade agreement disenfranchising the people?

The Dragon has flown out and the affects of doi moi has created a new a beast that emulates Singapore’s authoritarian capitalist with the extreme privatization that makes any Western liberal capitalist eyes light up like the napalm that scorched the land. On the recent trip to Ho Chi Minh City, one can’t stop but notice the renovation that’s being conducted; however, upon further investigation there seems to be something off. It seemed that the majority of the construction conducted was privatized and from foreign countries. This is something that can’t even be fathomed even in the U.S. for most road projects are run on a state-level conducted through the Department of Transportation and it would be blasphemy to have the taxpayer’s hard-earned money going to some private company (of course banks and car companies are an exception).

Nevertheless, in a somewhat paradoxical manner, the liberalization of capitalism is far more unhinged then its Western counterparts. With an estimated $600 million USD contract with France’s Vinci Construction, Vietnam is building an 11km stretch that will consist of two tunnels, three bridges, and expansion of the already built corridor connecting from Hanoi to Ho Chi Minh City1. With almost a quarter of a million multinational corporations investing2 and further privatization in the agricultural sector3, the vision of an agrarian reform isn’t quite what Uncle Ho expected (but neither was his request for the remains of his body4).

Interestingly enough, the agency in which one would seek in modern day Vietnam is one that is overshadowed by the necessity of the bourgeois or in this context, the governing few. Of course, with progress in being one of Asia’s fast growing economy5, there’s no doubt that the parasitic liberal capitalist country like the U.S. would have ulterior motives such as nuclear agreements with an old foe6.

As the materialization of socialist utopia beckons onto Vietnam, the reality of a farce is enacted on stage. The master and slave’s role are still unchanged, accumulation of wealth still exists and the tragedy of alienation comes with it. With the bourgeois construct of commodity fetishism still looming over a dying country, happiness is comfort in the material and a historical necessity is nestled into abstraction.

An Ocean Without a Tide: Dalai Lama and Dislocation of Cultural Hegemony (Part I)

June 16, 2010 - The Fourteenth Dalai Lama, Tenzin Gyatso, holds a press conference condemning any “violence” conducted by the Sea Shepherd conservation society. Shortly after, he hails his host country India, for maintaining “harmony” for over 1,000 years 1.

When did non-violence become the pervading ideology for Buddhism? Considering the history of the Fourteenth Dalai Lama’s Gelugpa (“Yellow Hat”) tradition of Vajrayana Buddhism; violence was an effective tool used to spread Buddhism throughout Asia. The title “Dalai Lama” (“Ocean of Wisdom”) itself was given to the Third Dalai Lama, Sonam Gyatso, by the former Mongolian King Altan Khan who made Buddhism Mongolia’s religion and reigned terror throughout China during the Ming Dynasty 2 (not to mention the grandfather of the Fourth Dalai Lama Yonten Gyatso 3).

Ironically enough, the Fourteenth Dalai Lama himself advocated violence with the creation of the guerrilla cadre Chushi Gangdruk during the 1959 Tibetan Uprisings to halt Chinese occupation as well as to escape his own country4. More recently, he’s made great efforts to suppress followers of the saint Dorje Shugden 5, who was used as an oracle for his own escape from Tibet.

Many in the West have looked at the current Dalai Lama with great honor and praise; a messenger of peace and a beacon towards an altruistic, non-violent world. This message is also proclaimed from a somehow non-ego 6 manner surrounded by security personnel from both exiled Tibet and the government of India, 7 in sold-out stadiums across the globe (of course there’s no ego attached when you’re giving a speech to a packed stadium) 8,9,10.

The harm seems to be his ideological persistence towards non-violence, going as far as to say that “Violence is against human nature…” (I suppose he never looked around him) and that he would resign from his position if the uprisings in Lhasa didn’t stop back in July, 2008 11.

Conversely, the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society has saved thousands of lives through direct actions campaigns (which were ambiguously labeled “violent” by the current Dalai Lama, when not one life has been lost); condemning them publicly in Japan (the country where the illegal poachers are protected), serving as a great disservice to the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society and other groups whose aim is to stop the suffering and slaughter of endangered marine life. It’s this seduction to such extremes that keeps the everlasting Wheel of Suffering and contradiction to turn. Yet the buck doesn’t stop there.

In a July, 2009 Reuters article, the Dalai Lama expressed the importance of free-market capitalism and the benefits it has on multiculturalism; negating its most implicit violent ramifications (human/non-human exploitation, ecological degradation, cultural extinction, stratification, alienation, etc), adding that “Profit is a fine aim…”12. It’s the position of ideological cohesion of non-secular moral consciousness towards capitalism is what solidifies Mao Zedong’s infamous quote that “religion is poison.” 13 However, it’s not solely religion that is the issue but the ideological construct of non-secularism in compassion towards capitalism (capitalism with a human(e) face).

Nevertheless, the discontent towards the Fourteenth Dalai Lama isn’t solely the fact of an overt moral contradiction (though it is apparent) but more so the misguided agency and location projected as a spiritual figure of Buddhism.

Within Mahayana Buddhism, the emphasis of the teacher is extremely imperative; however, when there is such an internal contradiction, there is also a lack substantial validity to the teachings. In this scenario, the location of agency has been displaced into a self-attached, self-projected ideology that has transitioned into cultural hegemony.