Cleveland, Fort Hood, Obama

(Letter)

6 November 2009

“Capitalist society is and has always been horror without end.”

—V.I. Lenin

I’ll try not to cry, Baruch Spinoza, Leon Trotsky. I’ll try not to laugh. I’ll try to understand. The occasion is that of the confirmed deaths of eleven black women in Cleveland who weren’t “missed,” quite naturally, by the powers that be. The capitalist rulers’ motto, anyway, is that the only “good black is a dead black,” unless they are helping to slaughter poor, oppressed people throughout the world.

The Commander-in-Chief of U.S. imperialism, Barack Obama, tells the world about how horrible are the killings of U.S. soldiers at a U.S. Army base by a U.S. officer who faced the prospect of going to Afghanistan and possibly not returning.

According to Obama’s bourgeois ethos, the poor black women in Cleveland (and elsewhere) were/are just a bunch of lazy, drug-crazed louts and fiends who played in the fast lane and got what was coming to them.

Remember, working people: the rulers’ gain is our pain, their tears are not ours and their rotting system comes at the expense of our lives. It needs to be eradicated through international proletarian revolution.

Well, Brother Joe Hill, I believe that we can both mourn and organize for that day, when

“…burning sticks—and crosses—is not mere child’s play.
But a madman in his most incandescent bloom
Whose loveless soul is imperfection in its most lustrous groom.
So stand fast, young old mule, soothe in contemplation
Thy burning hole and aching thigh.
Your stubbornness is of the living
And cruel anxiety is about to die.…”

—from “Freedom” by Charles Mingus

We’ll see.

Don A.