March 15, 2008 at 9:27 P.M. I noticed a new hacking into my group just now, difficulties in regaining access to it, numerous obstacles to writing and even trouble getting back to this blog. I will try tomorrow -- again the next day and the one after that -- until I can do my work. Please see "New Jersey's 'Ethical' Legal System." I will struggle to correct "errors" inserted in all vandalized essays. (See also "Deborah T. Poritz and Conduct Unbecoming to the Judiciary in New Jersey.")
Calls from 321-779-3962 on March 14, 2008 at 12:08 P.M. Also, 718-229-2517. Several anonymous calls as well as the usual "marketers" were received. At 11:26 A.M. I blocked:
http://ad.doubleclick.net/adj/N3753.msn/B271049... (NJ, AG?)
http://ad.doubleclick.net/adj/N3285.msn-dm/B171... ("Ex-Cubanaza M.D.?")
I was unable to print items from my msn group, Critique. Attempts to print from my group left me with a blank page bearing this address:
http://view.atdmt.com/iview/msnnkhac001728x90xWBCBRB00110msn/direct;wi.728;hi.90/01
Reinaldo Arenas, Before Night Falls (New York & London: Penguin, 1994).
Albert Camus, Resistance, Rebellion, and Death (New York: Vintage, 1960).
George Orwell, A Collection of Essays (New York: Harcourt, Brace & Jovanovich, 1953).
Merrill D. Peterson, ed., The Portable Thomas Jefferson (London & New York: Penguin, 1975).
After experiencing censorship and destruction of creative work, for years, as well as the horrors of psychological tortures and worse, along with forced encounters with persons -- unable to perceive the reality of other human beings' pains -- an abyss opens at my feet that can only be described by the word evil. I realize that the mystery evoked by this word "evil" may be bottomless. Pathology, sin, malice are inadequate words to get at the agony that I and so many others have known. Today the image in my MSN group has been blocked three times (so far), numerous "errors" have appeared in several essays, again. Orchestrated frustration-inducement and inserted "anxieties" combined with artificial financial pressures making use of government power. Ethics?
Ironically and very sadly, Cuban-Americans and their N.J. partners in crime are probably prominent among my cyber-tormentors. The sort of people who speak of freedom and democracy, who are quite prepared to recommend these values to others, often have very little understanding of what these words really mean. Brutality and oppression come in many forms and may be justified by any number of ideologies or causes. I am sure that all such justifications and rationalizations are bandaids on something hideous and dangerous that lurks in the human heart, something associated with the will to power, control, mastery over others. (See "What is it like to be tortured?")
There is no significant difference between Batista's thugs and Castro's jailers. There are such monsters in every human society, including the U.S., as evidenced by the images from Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo. It is most worrisome and appalling that this malignancy is subtle, hidden away behind a veneer of normality and hypocrisy, usually in unexpected places -- like churches and other religious institutions, or even in American courtrooms.
It was reported in The New York Times that $74 MILLION per year are devoted to efforts to destabilize the Cuban government. This may have something to do with the security efforts undertaken by that government. How much might be accomplished if these funds were devoted to improving the quality of life for individual Cubans? How many more friends would we have on the island? How much more cooperation could we expect from Cuban officials with our anti-terrorism efforts if this money were offered for humanitarian causes? These are your tax dollars at work. Miami's anti-Castro brigades are often the beneficiaries of these sums of money. Opposition to Fidel Castro is frequently about $74 MILLION per year in government "welfare," in a manner of speaking.
A torturer is usually someone who sees himself as a defender of virtue and the "right middle class values." Most frightening of all is a tendency to associate political brutality and violence with notions of masculinity and military power that I have found, from childhood, utterly repulsive. This is true despite my enthusiastic heterosexuality. Anyone who says such things or who feels a need to paint or write poetry, or to create literary fiction -- something as worthless and financially unrewarding as, say, short stories or essays -- will immediately be called a "queer" or "fag." This is supposed to make us cringe in horror at being described in such terms. This is especially true in macho Latino culture, I am afraid, and among the worst of these "steroid-cultures" is the Cuban-American variety, which involves an exaggeration of Cuban machista mores from the nineteen fifties transferred to the twenty-first century. Whether in the sunny splendors of South Beach or the putridness of New Jersey, macho swagger does not appeal to me. (Any more "errors" to be inserted?)
This may well shock you if you are a "Cubanoid" or Cubanazo, I don't give a shit if you call me a "fag." In fact, I think of it as a compliment even if I am not gay. Most of the great artists and many philosophers that I admire happen to be gay -- except when they're not, of course -- so calling me gay is not something that offends me. On the other hand, fascism offends me. I am also not Norwegian. If someone is under the impression that I am a visitor from Norway and speaks to me in that lovely language, I will explain that I am not (despite my Viking-like appearance) a Norwegian. I offer much the same response when it comes to accusations of "gayness." Other people's sexual proclivities or adventures are also not my business and should not be subject to the censure of any observers. Public corruption and greed should be punished regardless of the race, creed, or sexual-orientation of the offender.
This principle will be difficult for some people to grasp: "There is no sin in being gay." Furthermore, all of the world's religions contain this message if you look for it: Love, regardless of the genders of the persons involved in loving relationships, is what we are here to learn and experience. Hurting other people, physically and in other ways, is what we should seek to avoid.
The fascist temperament -- and I am sure that there is such a thing -- is offended and irritated by all complex thought, intelligence, abstract ideas, authentic art, beauty in all its forms. The goal for the fascist is uniformity. Hence, the fondness for the militarization of culture. (Susan Sontag) The idea of difference, experimentation, creativity and self-invention is profoundly distressing to such persons -- who are almost always men -- because such creativity and self-invention forces the fascist to see the arbitrariness and falsity of his own view of life and constructed identity.
For fascists, disagreement and originality are to be crushed violently. By killing or beating up someone smarter than you are or who disagrees with you, you prove that you and your beliefs are better than his, that is, in the fascistic mindset. In fact, what you establish "beyond a reasonable doubt" is your inability to defend those beliefs rationally. This does not mean that your beliefs are false or mistaken. Others may be better able to defend them. It may only mean that you are stupid. Your stupidity would also explain the attractiveness of fascism for you. At this point, letters will be deleted from (or added to) some of the words in this essay. I will have to make corrections many times.
By destroying all that challenges this cherished fascistic notion of normality or the good (goodness is rare and anything but normal), the fascist may convince himself that his own lies are true. In other words, that he is a good and normal person and that "weirdos" deserve what they get. The seductions of power are disguised behind a "responsibility" to be "adults" and "follow the rules." The rules, naturally, are only those created by and serving the fascist's interests. Every fascist supports censorship. They usually favor death penalties and are against gun control, for the excellent reason that a man can always get his gun up, even if other ... eh, "items" fail to rise.
Hannah Arendt's talk of "banality" in association with evil; Jacobo Timmerman's discussion of the torturer's curious thought processes and that human beings morally deformed by such work tend to have their own logic of self-justification, even as they desperately seek their victims' approval and legitimation, all come close to the mark. At some deep level, violence and fascist brutality are desperate attempts to destroy the complexity that baffles and frightens simple men and the women who immitate them. Fascists are persons who want everything to be clear and to inhabit a place of intellectual safety where a cherished worldview will not be questioned. There is no such place.
America is about the opposite notion. The U.S. Constitution is designed to promote dispersal and division of power on the assumption that government power is a necessary evil, at best, and that the individual must come before the state. Conscience, expression, worship are matters of autonomy that must not concern government, as long as the rights of others to the same autonomy is respected by citizens. (See "Manifesto for the Unfinished American Revolution" and my essay "Ayn Rand's Critique of Immanuel Kant's Philosophy," which was defaced by self-described advocates Randian freedom.)
These are still radical, inspiring, and endangered ideas, threatened by America's own political leaders and judges often enough, but nevertheless still holding on to viability in this dangerous time. Our freedoms are always in peril. However, American contrariness and independence is resourceful and close to indestructible. Americans do not like dictators and will react, eventually, to any attempts to limit their freedoms. I am sure that American popular opinion is undergoing such a reaction now in calling for "change" from the failed policies of the past.
Complexity and contradiction is part of what we are since they are essential to freedom. No one can tell you what is right for you, except your own reason and heart. And what you discover to be right and true, for you, will remain objectively and even absolutely right and true, no matter who approves or disapproves of those judgments, as long as you respect the same autonomy in others. With or without the freedom to say that 2 + 2 = 4, it remains the case that 2 + 2 = 4. In discovering that freedom and equality are right for you, you are also learning what is due to all other people. Treat others as you would wish to be treated. This means that loss of your freedom -- even the loss of that weird guy's freedom who is heard typing at all hours -- is the loss of every other person's freedom. Albert Camus speaks for all of us weirdos:
"Tyrants indulge in monologues over millions of solitudes. If we reject oppression and falsehood, on the other hand, this is because we reject solitude. Every insubordinate person, when he rises up against oppression, reaffirms thereby the solidarity of all men. [Even more so, of all women.] No, it is not you or a distant newspaper that you defend by resisting oppression, but the entire community that unites us over and above frontiers."
It was for this reason that Camus said that: "I love my country too much to be a nationalist." Real love for the United States of America is devotion to the Constitution, which is explicitly a universal defense of the freedom and equality of persons and their protection from the State. "No person shall be deprived of life, liberty, or property without due process of law." My freedom to speak is also yours. Geographical limitations do not enter into this promise, which should apply at Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib -- and some day, even in New Jersey.
