Regarding the Probolsky of Others (Red Emma)

[We haven't heard from Red Emma for some time, but he's back with this humdinger. Red doesn't make things easy, so I just wanted to remind you that: * Adam Probolsky was involved in Tom Fuentes' "coronation"--i.e., his ascent to the Board--back in 2000. He's one of Mike Schroeder's "lieutenants." Fleischman's another one. Think cigars, backrooms. (See Six degrees of Fuentes Nation.) * Debsy and Paco may be Socialists, but they really are cats, too--as in feline critters. Those two ate my homework.]

Item: Susan Sontag, radical iconoclastic American public intellectual is attacked by rightists for equating American “democracy” to the Soviet gulag system (see below). Item: Months later, American democracy, as practiced by the Bush Gang is revealed to be using the actual, physical, brick-and-mortar former Soviet bloc network of secret prisons (gulag) to hold detainees in “Old Europe” (Rumsfeld), as Poland, for instance, which denies it, almost like some perverse old Polish joke.

What has happened in the new, international carceral empire run by the US military goes beyond even the notorious procedures enshrined in France's Devil's Island and Soviet Russia's Gulag (sic) system, which in the case of the French penal island had, first, both trials and sentences, and in the case of the Russian prison empire a charge of some kind and a sentence for a specific number of years. Endless war permits the option of endless incarceration—without charges, without the release of prisoners' names or any access to family members and lawyers, without trials, without sentences. Those held in the extra-legal American penal empire are "detainees"; "prisoners," a newly obsolete word, might suggest that they have the rights accorded by international law and the laws of all civilized countries. This endless "war on terror" inevitably leads to the demonizing and dehumanizing of anyone declared by the Bush administration to be a possible terrorist: a definition that is not up for debate. An interminable war inevitably suggests the appropriateness of interminable detention.

You’ll note that Red doesn’t really even know how to use that whole journalistic “item” thing, but sure likes talking and writing this way to impress the two Socialist cats, Eugene Victor Debs and Paco Ignacio Taibo (“Debsy” and “Paco” to you, pal). Anyway, the Rebel Girl had been cheering herself up lately by threatening to make a bumper sticker vindicating, celebrating, lionizing the late Ms. Sontag, said proposed and hypothetical sticker to read something like (well, exactly like) “SUSAN SONTAG was RIGHT: A gulag is a gulag is a gulag,” this to both gloat uselessly (but righteously) and to evoke Ms. Gertrude Stein (pass the brownies, please), not to mention piss off, or more likely just confuse and bewilder the rest of the mini-van driving mothers and fathers who insist on pasting, no, not some hopeful opposition to our Permanent War, but instead those dumb cartoon stick-figure stickers of their emaciated kids, with names underneath—their real names, presumably—immediately adjacent the license plate so that child molesters can just look up the DMV information and track down their addresses and kidnap them. But I digress, or spin out of control, paranoically. See, I’m as security-conscious as the next citizen, which means that my mind wanders, willy-nilly, which is wrong, very wrong, considering it has to arrive one hour early just to stand in line to be searched, take its shoes off and dispose of shampoo and conditioner, all so that Jeb can be the next president. Carceral, by the way, means “belonging to a prison.” I plan to use the word frequently. Anyway, faithful husband and fellow traveler that I am, I went ahead and made the sticker up for the Rebellious One, who was too busy prepping for what would become the Most Terrible Week, and therefore unable to follow through on stickerizing for the sake of historical revisionism. I delivered my modest gift of devotion and solidarity in time for Bastille Day and Woody Guthrie’s birthday (nice bit of symmetry and serendipity, that), and reconsidered the following from Susan Sontag’s Regarding the Pain of Others, which I recommend.

"To speak of reality becoming a spectacle...universalizes the viewing habits of a small, educated population living in the rich part of the world...."

It seems to me Sontag is saying that economic privilege and political power leads to a critical misunderstanding, a too-easy misperception of the world as that endless television commercial/war which, yes, is offered to us nightly. (Read the Situationists, people, and now! Hurry! Start with Guy Debord’s The Revolution of Everyday Life). Life is indeed a spectacle, a tragic-comic self-referential construction, but only, argues Sontag, for those who have created it, or been complicit in its creation, or sort of know it but will not confront it, as in those unfailingly ironic but not very funny sitcoms which real-life people start aping in what passes for real life, “yadda, yadda, yadda.” That makes it easy for the privileged to play at life instead of actually live it. Which reminds me that after the election of Bush the first time, then the second time, the baby and the two Socialist cats and I had to listen over and over again to Rebel Girl play Dylan’s “Desolation Row” (speaking of The Spectacle), and since the lyrics to that won’t fit on a 3 x 8 inch sticker, I offer them here instead: They’re selling postcards from the hanging They’re painting the passports brown The beauty parlor is filled with sailors The circus is in town Yes, we dwell in a circus. No, this should not be an excuse to put on a red nose and leap from a ladder into a bucket of shallow water, or make jokes about how dumb Bush is (he isn’t) or complain, unceasingly about the selfish, awful people who seem to support him, but mostly just don’t know anything. To regard the pain of others is to regard the power one has. For example, the power to connect, to listen, to ask. Yes, I received your letter yesterday (About the time the door knob broke) When you asked me how I was doing Was that some kind of joke? Did I hear, for instance, that Adam Probolsky’s law firm or political consulting machine or polling outfit (see Probolsky Research) or whatever variety of spectacular (sic) firm it is was running a campaign by pissed-off property rights-loving homeowners in San Clemente? Why, yes, I did. It was on the show for airheads, with the big Air Talker himself, Mr. Larry, on KPCC (Air Talk) on the morning of Thursday, August 17, the week before the Most Terrible Week. Larry’s guests on the weekly Orange County news and analysis roundup were William Lobdell, staff writer, editor of OC LA Times; Steven Greenhut, OC Register senior editorial writer and columnist, and, finally, Gustavo (“Ask a Mexican”) Arrelano, staffer of the OC Weekly. After recounting the amusing story about the Capistrano Unified School District, whose offices were raided, documents and a computer seized, as part of an investigation of closed-session meetings, links to contractors and to see how somebody from our Board is connected (okay, I made that up, but stranger things happen, and I’ll bet you right now that somehow the former chair of the OC GOP is involved, yup, you bet), I heard one of the reporters describe the CUSD superintendent as “A strongman supported by a rubber-stamped board.” My ears perked right up when I heard that phrase—can’t imagine why. Anyway, if that wasn’t enough, the city council of San Clemente passed a law that limits or bans the further construction of more vertical development in the Shorecliffs neighborhood. I listened to the goof from the Register opine on how un-American that is, but then heard him say that “a group of residents has organized and hired Adam Probolsky, and they are going to referend the law.” All these people that you mention Yes, I know them, they’re quite lame I had to rearrange their faces And give them all another name Dissent readers will recognize Mr. P’s name as a lieutenant of the former GOP Chair and a board member of the IVC Foundation, to which he was appointed because he is, well, a lieutenant of the former GOP Chair, and so on as in one of those annoying Escher drawings. But I still hadn’t figured him out, so I followed the link from the home page to that of a “another Probolsky family company,” which turns out to be Metal Grip Fastener Distribution. I immediately ordered the Tom Fuentes Special: Zinc Carriage Bolts, Grade 5, Fully Threaded. They’re delicious. Sontag writes: “In a modern life—a life in which there is a superfluity of things to which we are invited to pay attention—it seems normal to turn away from images that simply make us feel bad.” I embrace the impulse, always eager to feel as bad as possible, and further learn that Mr. P appears on a political blog called Flashreport, run by a guy name Fleischman. I read some of the posts, which are fun, if you think tearing the wings off of insects is fun, and who doesn’t? Fleischman accuses Democratic guber candidate Angelides of being supported by “socialists,” which made the two cats very happy. —Me, too, as the site includes a helpful link to an organization I actually belong to myself (along with Barbara Ehrenreich and Cornell West) called Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), founded by the great Michael Harrington, author of The Other America. Mr. Fleischman does not approve of DSA. He thinks the local OC public television station “scandal” has been ignored by the “watchdogs” at the Register, who have not been sufficiently rigorous in barking at community efforts to save public television station KOCE. Yet Mr. P also apparently admires Gertrude Stein. See the posting “Property rights are property rights are property rights,” which alludes to his representation of the property rights-lovin’ Shorecliffs folks. Mr. P’s blog postings also include photographs of the “hottest” lobbyists in Sacramento, all female, none Socialists, lots of boilerplate for Der Governator and his own Major Donor and Independent Expenditure Committee Campaign Statement (again, no Socialists). He doesn’t like Rob Reiner or public libraries, and thinks the wealthy are overtaxed. Right now I can’t read too good Don’t send me no more letters, no Not unless you mail them From Desolation Row. I’ll admit that it might seem a long way from Sontag’s critique of the ubiquitous images of horror to the offices of a local political player, but I was pretty struck by the image garnered in that brief mention of Mr. P’s pro-development effort. Think about it. He wants to guarantee the rights of homeowners to build tall buildings so that they can rent out rooms by the sea, the view of which will then be obliterated by them and their neighbors so that nobody can see it. Sometimes you have to go out looking for the Spectacle. Sometimes it comes to you. I propose a new name for the Shorecliffs neighborhood: Barrio de Desolacion. RE