THE JORDAN GESTURE by Neville Raymond

            Out of the mouth of babes.....

            
            We’ve all heard that phrase.  It means that children have an unerring way of shining a light on the truth.  They have not yet gotten into the habit of weighing their words or filtering their thoughts, and so they retain an uncanny knack for nailing it.

            At the opposite remove are adults who have a way of obfuscating the truth.  They are trained in the use of language that is designed to mute, dull or disguise the truth in all its shocking clarity, so that it doesn’t make as powerful an impact as it should.

            I’m sure we can all come up with personal examples to drive the point home.  My epiphany occurred on the first day of a class on social justice that I was leading for half a dozen eight-year-old kids in my living room.  I wanted to find some way of expressing in kiddie language the intrinsically unfair nature of our economic and political system.   And I wanted to bring out the ways in which children respond to it. 

            The fact is that we live on an incredibly resource-rich planet.  Oil, coal, timber, gold – that’s just for openers.  Humanity is the de facto trustee of this stupendous array of wealth, which belongs to all the people.
             The kids drank a toast to that with a cup of sparkling apple cider and kicked off the class by singing along to the Woodie Guthrie song: “This land is your land – this land is my land.”

             

            And yet it is the same old dismal story.  A tiny minority grabs most of the land for itself and makes a cynical mockery of that sentiment.  It grows filthy rich from profits that come of monopolizing a universe of resources that rightfully belong to all the people.   
             The “Enclosure laws” in 18^th century England spring to mind as one of many such outrageous examples of privatization through the ages.  
             Closer to home, we see it at work in Colonial America, the cradle of modern democracy.  
             We are so flabbergasted by the latest statistics showing 1/10^th of the 1 % controlling much of the world that we forget that by the turn of the 18^th century three-fourths of the acreage in New York belonged to less than a dozen persons.  
              In the interior of Virginia, seven persons acquired a total of 1.7 million acres, almost a quarter million acres per person.  
              By 1760, fewer than 500 merchants in five colonial cities controlled most of the trade on the eastern seaboard.[1] 

           

            Sure, a middle class of farmers, tavern-keepers and shop-keepers was comfortably well off by the standards of the time.
             But the great bulk of people, amounting to 80% to 85% of the white population of the day, were poor freeholders, tenants, squatters, indentured laborers or hired hands.  Cities teemed with cobblers, weavers, bakers, blacksmiths, peddlers, clerks and domestics who worked long hours for a pittance.   
            New England dirt farmers may have seemed like princes compared to the Irish poor who labored under the heel of English oppressors, living in wretched hovels of mud and straw, clothed in rags and subsisting on potatoes.[2]  But their plight was still a pitiful one compared to our home-grown aristocracy who lolled in ornate colonial mansions and dined off fine Georgian silver.

            The result is not just disparities between parts of the world.  Third World vs. First World countries, for example.  The result is disparities within a country itself.  
             In the richest country in the world there are heartbreaking gaps between areas like Appalachia, which are reduced to a colonial status though they abound in mineral deposits like coal, and playgrounds of the wealthy, like the Hamptons.

            This is an untenable state of affairs, to say the least.  It is profoundly unjust, unfair, and fraught with every strain of resentment, envy, frustration and rage imaginable.  And it cannot exist naturally on its own.  As a matter of fact, it requires all the help that it can possibly get.  
            This is where government comes in.
            Government is the deus ex machina - the artificial god that pops out of the stage machinery to confer an aura of legitimacy on this unfair system and enshrine it as the order of the day.  

          
             So it is that under the guise of protecting private property, government is really in the business of promoting the wholesale theft of collective property.
             If there is any bank that is genuinely too big to fail, it is the universal bank of our mother earth of which we are all equal co-owners.  Emperors and oligarchs, princes and plutocrats are determined to make out like bandits by perpetually holding up this mother of all banks at gunpoint.  And government is the getaway vehicle that enables them to get away with it time after time, throughout much of history.
             The trick is for society to be engrossed in a make-believe game of cops and robbers.
             We focus all our attention on chasing down two-bit crooks whose assaults on private property yield a few measly bucks.  That way we turn a blind eye to the billions of acres of land grants to private corporations, the trillions of dollars worth of public leases for coal and oil, copper and gold, sold off for a song to monopolistic industries, and the untold earnings potential of broadcasting licenses for airwaves in the public domain, virtually given away to media conglomerates year after year.
              All these wind up in the grubby hands of a few well-connected crony capitalists who reap a staggering windfall of riches from this wholesale looting and plundering of our collective treasure.  

            It's not as though we must have an axe to grind to see how capitalism kills us with a thousand cuts.  The great Adam Smith, patron saint of free marketeers, was the first to admit it.
            “Civil authority, so far as it is instituted for the security of property, is in reality instituted for the defense of the rich against the poor, or of those who have some property against those who have none at all.” 

           

            The Founding Fathers themselves had no illusions about it.  They were not about to let the dream of freedom and equality interfere with the practical goal at the top of their agenda - to create a government that could protect the spoils of the have-it-alls from the backlash of the have-little-or-nothings.  
            They knew very well that the real job of government was not to save its citizens from natural disasters but to save a superwealthy minority from the tsunamis of envy and rage, the earthquakes of resentment and frustration, whipped up by the age-old policy of cutting the resource-rich ground from under the people and violently arrogating the right to control it.

            
             The editors of the Wall Street Journal are gung-ho to talk up any war, anywhere, any time.  The only war that they are too coy to talk about is class war.  
             The Framers of the Constitution suffered from no such inhibitions.  They agreed with James Madison that the commonest, most enduring source of conflict was class warfare arising from the unequal and undemocratic distribution of property.  
             The haves and have-nots fell into two distinct camps...and most of the founding fathers didn't hesitate to embrace a strong, central government that would guarantee the victory of their propertied interests in the warring struggle against the bankrupt rabble. 

                              *                                            *                                               *

           

            The language of the American Revolutionaries soared when it came to fighting for ideals like liberty and equality.  It was rather plodding and dry when it came to doing justice to the sordid reality of class warfare.   For that it takes a child who finds himself in the position of a have-more, impulsively using the body language of alarm and defensiveness to make a resounding statement for the ages.

            I myself was a witness to the whole thing, along with the other kids in my social justice class.  The first exercise of the day was to dole out two almonds apiece to the first five children.  
            The sixth boy, Jordan, received the munificent sum of (count them!) ten almonds. 

            Jordan was no slouch. He sensed that he was an immediate object of envy and resentment by the other kids.  He picked up how he was in imminent danger of having some part of his ten almonds snatched back and redistributed to the others.  
            And so he adopted a gesture that betrayed his insecurity at the same time that it was meant to abate it.  He bent over with his upper body and reached out his arms to form a protective circle around his store of almonds.  
             It was as if he was letting the other kids know that these ten almonds were now his sole and private property and they better not think of taking even one away. 

            Talk about Enclosure Laws!  Jordan’s whole body was a striking study in enclosure!  I can still see him with his torso bent over and arms outstretched to “enclose” his private store of wealth.  It branded itself into my brain as one of those unforgettable moments that stay with you a lifetime.  
             In one graphic pose he demonstrated what it takes political historians volumes to explain.  
             He knew that he was the wealthiest almond-owner around.  
             And he knew that his status didn’t sit well with his fellow humans.  
             And so he reacted by literally embodying the main function of government.  He used his torso and arms to form a sort of physical enclosure as a way of staking out his claim to his inordinate wealth and declaring that no one else was entitled to any part of it!                  

            One might be tempted to assume that his gesture was an artless one.   Perhaps it sprang from some natural impulse in the boy.  The evidence shows that the other children did not share it.  
            One of the kids, when it came her turn to receive ten almonds, was all for giving them away so that everyone would share and share alike.  
            Another verbalized his discomfort at being the target of negative attention, confessing that he was unwilling to have it continue.  
            The fact is that Jordan stood out from the rest.  He had a competitive edge that bordered on aggression.  He could be sweet and charming at times, especially when it came to dispensing hugs.  But some imbalance in his relationship with his dad ate away at him, and left with an overbearing streak to his personality. 

            Though Jordan’s reaction was thankfully atypical, it typifies the chief function of government from Babylonian times to the present.  Indeed, the rest of what government does can be considered as something of a footnote, as it usually is by so-called libertarians.  
             For the one function of government that overshadows the others is to elaborately flesh out the implications of the Jordan Gesture.  
             It is to reinforce the Jordan Gesture with armies and national militias, courts and bureaucracies, lobbyists and media propagandists.  
             Government takes the maldistribution of those ten almonds as its starting point and through an invidious system rife with every sort of cronyism and favoritism multiplies its effects ten million fold.  
              It bends much of society’s collective resources to the task of safeguarding what is, in the first analysis, a grossly unfair division of property.  
              And then, despite the fact that it flies in the face of our common decency and shared humanity, government keeps on building on that unjust and unjustifiable division and buttressing it, until, in the last analysis, it becomes a political philosophy and an economic way of life that is taken for granted as the most natural thing in the world. 

---

[1] Michael Parenti, Democracy for the Few [p. 51] 2^nd Edition

[2] Thomas Fleming, Liberty, The American Revolution [p. 43]

WHY WAR IS THE FINAL SOLUTION TO A DEPRESSION 

                          
                             by Neville Raymond 

              Depression, it is said, is bottled up anger turned inwards.  

          So it is conceivable that aggressively acting out that anger can pull one out of a depression.  Certainly this works in a psychological context.   

          But what about that organized form of hostility known as war?  How does it pull us out of an economic depression?          

          Therein hangs one of the most grimmest, most pernicious myths of our time.

            Count me as a former believer in that myth.   For the longest time, I actually believed that World War II brought an end to the Great Depression.  All of FDR’s vaunted social programs couldn’t do it.  But by golly, the miracle of a world war did the trick.  The outbreak of a global cataclysm finally allowed Americans to put behind them the decade-long ordeal of misery and poverty known as the Great Depression. 

             Whenever I heard this piece of conventional wisdom bandied around, I found myself buying into it with a vague sense of buyer's remorse.  Hmm.  Yet another of great unsung virtues of war.  It sets factories humming again, puts millions of people back to work and boosts the GDP.  Never mind all those soldier sent home with missing arms or legs.  War can get a country on its feet again after the most crippling depression.

            It wasn’t until I reached a ripe middle age that my eyes were opened to the truth.  And then I felt like kicking myself for my stupidity and ignorance in believing such whopper of a tale. 

           

         But first, some context.  To debunk this whole fantasy of World War II ending the Depression, we have to go back to what actually started it.  The Great Depression was not a force of nature, like an earthquake or a tsunami or a meteor strike.   No Act of God wiped out our farmlands, threw people out of work or plunged them into the economic doldrums.  Everything was working just fine going into the 1930s.  Except for one thing that was being monkeyed around with behind the scenes.  The supply of paper money.  The international bankers had decided to drain the amount of money circulating in society.  They put their hands around the throat of the economy and squeezed it until it was down to its last breath.  Now there was almost no money left to carry out the basic tasks of an industrialized society, like buying goods, building factories and hiring people.  Eventually, the drastic decrease in paper money made it impossible for the U.S. economy to function, and it more or less shut down through the course of the decade.

            FDR came galloping to the rescue by borrowing money from bankers at higher rates of interest.  The money was spent on social causes - public works, putting people to work – what we like to call stimulating the economy today.  All this helped – but clearly not enough.

           

         The Great Depression was not about to end until the banksters said that it could end.  And that meant reversing their original course.  After all, they were the ones who caused the Great Depression by choking off the amount of money in circulation.   And the only way they could end it was by doing an about-face and expanding the money supply.   Whereas before they had caused the American economy to black out and collapse by draining the lifeblood of it,  all they had to do to revive it now was open the floodgates and let it flow.

           

         And so they did.  But why did the bankers become so generous all of a sudden?  What could have possibly motivated the financial powers that be to go on a spending spree, acting like money was no longer any object?  Why, the prospect of getting the members of the human species to butcher each other like there was no tomorrow. 

           Yeah, that’s right.  Money may be the lifeblood of the economy.   When it suited their purposes, the central bankers saw nothing wrong in wringing this lifeblood out of the economy and putting it into a dead faint.  But now the prospect of war got their juices flowing.  It got them pumping all the money back into the system.           

            Whereas a decade earlier, there was no money for food or houses, now there was money in abundance for Army barracks and K-rations.  Whereas before there was no money for a nation to feed and shelter itself and live the good life, now there was money aplenty to build bombs and airplanes to spread death and destruction all over the world.  And whereas before the banksters let crops rot in the fields, because they refused to extend the credit to harvest them, now there was money and then some to ramp up industrial capacity and production to harvest the killing fields in Europe, Asia and the Soviet Union.

            Sorry to disappoint all the warmongers.  World War II did not put an end to the Great Depression.  It was the banksters’ machiavellian withdrawal of money for people to enjoy the basics of the good life that got the Great Depression going in the first place.  And it was their sadistic preference to make money freely available for a fratricidal bloodbath that apparently put an end to it. 

         Doesn’t this tell us everything we need to know about how the power structure rates welfare and warfare?  They are positive killjoys when it comes to pulling the plug on the Good Life for millions of people.  But they dance on the rooftops and jump for joy when it comes to priming the pump for the Good War where millions suffer wholesale death and destruction. 

         They are tight-fisted in the extreme when it comes to bringing the human race material comfort and security, pleasure and leisure.  But they spend money hand over fist when it comes to plunging the human race into an abyss of violence, bloodshed and destruction.

         And you wonder why mankind fares so poorly at the hands of its so-called leaders!  Their obsession with funding the technology of death and destruction is in a sense the inevitable outcome of a readiness to take away everything that makes life worth living for the majority of the human race.

         Their fanatical commitment to economic warfare demands that they take away the livelihoods, the homes, and the savings of millions of innocent people and generally drive their lifestyles into the gutter.  And their no less fanatical commitment to military warfare simply takes that agenda to its logical conclusion by marching millions of innocent human beings to a premature grave. 

VOTER STUPIDITY - THE GOOD OLD STANDBY FANTASY

   

             by Neville Raymond

Let me count the ways in which they stick it to the voter.

First they engage in this fantastic charade that the fate of presidents and the destiny of free nations hangs upon a phantom species called the 'swing voter' - that is, a voter who is a victim of the paralysis of analysis and suffers from a difficulty of Hamlet-like proportions in making up his mind.  

Then they raise tampering with computerized voting into an art form, quietly using GOP operatives to flip the official vote count in order to put unpopular candidates into office.

Then they make-believe that there is such a thing as voter fraud and go around putting up all kinds of niggling roadblocks in the path of people exercising their democratic right to vote.

And when all else fails, there is this fantasy called Voter Stupidity.   
And that is the cruelest pretense of all - the pretense that the voter is just too downright dumb to make any intelligent choices.

Enter the Howard Stern gang to make the case for the blockhead American voter. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SeJbOU4nmHQ 

I don't know if Howard Stern was crass enough to come up with this all on his own.  
Or if some well-funded dollar right wing think tank put him up to it.  
But there he is, peddling the brazen lie that the American voter does not know his rear orifice from a hole in the ground.  

And how does the Schlock Jock do it?  

By supposedly having one of his lapdogs run around collecting a series of gaffes and blunders from the proverbial man on the street.  

Is any of this for real?
For all I know, Stern could have hired actors to play the role of herculean know-nothings.  

Or his interviewer could gone through 99 voters who were relatively well-informed, or at least quite angrily articulate and crystal-clear about kitchen-table issues, in order to find that one special case who shows off to the greatest effect the efficacy of an education system that is determined to dumb down the American electorate.  

Nobody can say for sure.     

But here’s something we can be 100% sure about.

Voters by and large are not a stupid group.  

Right-wing oligarchs can pray and wish all day long that that were not true.  

It would certainly save them a heap of time and trouble.  

Come to think of it, it would save them a monumental bundle of money.  

They wouldn’t have to sink millions of millions of untraceable dollars trying to talk voters out of their unerring gut instincts. 

They wouldn’t have to mount thousands of slanted political ads trying to distort and befuddle the mind of voters until they no longer know which end is up and wind up voting against their own best interests. 

They wouldn’t have to put on an elaborate media show to get the voter to believe that he has a choice between two candidates who, to one degree or another, faithfully hew to a party line which is to strip  99% of Americans of their jobs, their homes, their right to affordable health care, a college education for their kids and a decent life, in order to boost welfare payments to a corporate state that enables the fortunate 1% to just keep on buying up more and more of the world.

No, the problem is not that the voter is stupid. 

It is that the voter is too smart for his own good.  

It is that he knows what he wants all too well.  

He knows that he wants to restore America's manufacturing base.  

He knows that he wants collective bargaining for workers.  

He knows that he wants to put the regulatory cop back on the Wall Street beat.  

He knows that he wants to stop the corruption of politics by big money. 

He knows that he doesn’t want to be bankrupted by the cost of health care and college tuition for his kids. 

He knows that he wants women to have control of their bodies.  
He knows...he knows....he knows.....

But the whole political establishment pretty much conspires against him.

The power structure engages in a massive collusion to cheat him out of what he knows he wants. 

If the truth were not so firmly embedded in the heads of American voters, the GOP spinmeisters wouldn’t have to turn on their water cannons to flood the airwaves with their lies in a vain attempt to dislodge the truths that most voters hold self-evident and sweep them down an Orwellian memory hole.  

That is why you have a Romney pollster confessing in a flash of candor, “We’re not going to let our campaign be dictated by fact-checkers.”  

That is why you have GOP operatives working behind the scenes to flip the vote numbers.  
That is why they have to trump up a non-issue like voter fraud to suppress the vote.

And that is why, when all else fails, they resort to the unkindest cut of all. 

They pretend that the voter is unfit to vote, not because he lacks an ID, but because he lacks an IQ.

STALLED REVOLUTIONS PER MINUTE

by Neville Raymond

We’ve all been there. Our blood pressure rising. Our pulse beating hard. Our tempers flaring. Wedged in by lines of cars, in front, in back, on either side. Our daily hopes, dreams, goals put on hold as we inch along by fits and starts to our destination.

Have you noticed how many of us cope with this? Better still, have you noticed how we are told to cope? What do the experts advise us to do, as our 100 mph cars sit stalled in 1 mph traffic, and our nervous systems, designed to drive in an easy-going state of calm alertness, run at full tilt on frustration, irritation, impatience, and rage?

Get comfy. Make use of that adjustable lumbar support in the driver’s seat.

Breathe slowly, deeply, inhaling and exhaling from the diaphragm.

Put on soothing piece of classic music. Be transported by the latest audio book.

 
 Well, I don’t know about you, but these new-age coping gems leave me cold in a traffic jam. “Whenever you start cursing the traffic,” says one pop psychologist, the author of Urban Mindfulness, “remember you are the traffic. You have to recognize the situation is everybody’s fault – and nobody’s fault.”

Truth is, I have to do no such thing. The traffic is not my fault – my fault is that I have to be some place in a city with a monumentally irrational and absurd system of public transportation. 

If we are going to talk fault, why don’t we start with those criminal conspirators who hijacked our national transportation policy from under us in the mid-1930s and 1940s and plotted behind our backs to buy out our then state-of-the-art system of mass transit in city after city (along with the priceless rights of way that went with it) and toss it on the junk heap? 

Am I not totally within my rights to curse a sick, ineffectual and toxically wasteful system of crony capitalism that is happy to waste billions of man-hours and billions of gallons of fuel, decade after decade after decade, as long as it adds billions of dollars to the corporate bottom-line?

After all, who doesn't know by now that mass transit did not die a natural death? It was ambushed and brutally murdered for financial gain. Big Oil and Big Auto put their heads together and conspired to rip up all the light rail systems that had already been installed in cities like Los Angeles. 

A federal jury convicted them of it in Chicago in 1949. And we are still paying the terrible price. Imagine how we would be zipping along if we had used that incredibly valuable real estate to build up a high-speed mass transit system over the years, instead of allowing General Motors and Standard Oil to reduce us to a nation of vehicular basketcases by fostering our overdependence on the internal combustion engine.

Did the city fathers who rolled over for them give a bug’s whisker about the consequences? 

According to the latest Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index, the longer your commute, the greater your risk of recurrent neck or back pain.  Not to mention high cholesterol and obesity. 

Did the city fathers who sold off our common wealth think about what a giant pain in the public back or the neck it would be, if they kowtowed to the interests of corporate America, instead of looking out for millions of their citizens?

Swedish researchers at Umea University found that a daily commute of 45 minutes or more increases the likelihood of divorce by 40%, with the highest risk during the first few years of marriage.  As the greedy oil executives ripped the heart out of mass transit, forcing us to sit in gridlock for the next half century and beyond, did they think about the strain that they would be putting on families – on marital relationships – on all the time that parents never got to spend with their children, because their could not use a swift, dependable form of transport from home to work and back again?

Of course not. They were too busy gloating over their sky-high future profits. Because of the inevitable congestion that built up over the years from smashing the nucleus of what could have turned into a high-tech world-class system of mass transit, idling California drivers waste the most gas of any state – 38 million gallons in one year alone – and put $160 million in the coffers of the oil companies.

And what about the corporate lobbyists who forced Congress to pass trade legislation allowing agribusiness to swamp Mexico with cheap exports of grain.  Maybe you don’t want to spare a dime for a homeless man. But can you spare a thought for how the forces of 'globalization' drove hundreds of thousands of Mexican farmers off their land, forcing them to declare bankruptcy and head for parts in North America to survive – and how this flood of immigration brings our freeways to a grinding halt morning, noon and night?

What about how the U.S. national security state’s appetite for tyrannical regimes in Central and South America, and Asia widens the gap between the rich and the poor and savages the livability quotient of countries around the world? Where are all these poor people supposed to go when their countries are sold out from under them? 

Not to worry. Corporate America will gladly hire these immigrants at bargain-basement prices and pack our cities and factories with cheap labor. That way the corporatocracy can drive down our living standards to Third World levels, instead of working to lift up the rest of the world to First World standards.

And finally, what about the runaway capitalism of the U.S. automobile industry. At a time when our highways are clogged to death, what do you see when you switch on your TV? A commercial for another car. A car that has the magnificent backdrop of the Grand Canyon or Niagara Falls all to itself, instead of sharing the roads with millions of tried, bored, frustrated and irritable drivers.

So here we are, choking on our own exhausts, unable to budge for all the automobiles that lay siege to our quality of life. And capitalism takes pride in ramming yet one more brand-new spanking model car down our throats with all the latest electronic gizmos! 

Is gridlock the surest sign of capitalism run amok or what? Given that there are too many cars on the road, at what point does it cross our minds that perhaps we should rein in the untrammeled mass marketing of automobiles? Or should the rest of us continue to be resigned to losing another minute, another hour, another week, another year out of our lives so that GM or Chrysler make another buck?

If these culprits don’t turn your stomach – and goad you in turning your car into a rolling command post for economic revolution - don’t bother doing any breathing exercises or listening to audio books. You are probably so brain dead or heart dead that you may as well just lie back and accept your car as your mobile coffin.

THE DAY THE MUSIC WAS KILLED by Neville Raymond

Love - music - peace - and over a million people

A dangerously heady combination.

One that leaves the Pathocrats rather jittery, I suspect.

Millions who can come together for music can just as easily come together for peace and harmony...

Have you ever wondered why America doesn’t have any honest-to-goodness Woodstocks any more? Why it has never been able to recapture the first fine careless peace-and-love rapture of the original? Are there no more young people wanting to be blissed-out by the party of their lives? Have they have all grown up and been sucked in by the daily grind?

Forty years ago there was Altamont: a few drug-crazed bikers run amok - and an entire era comes crashing down. Is that just too convenient for the Pathocrats or what!

The goods news - until now - is that Europe didn't get that memo.

There they still have Woodstocky events like the Love Parade - millions of souls, gathering for a music fest of love and togetherness.

Growing out of the euphoric days of the collapse of the Berlin Wall, the Love Parade was a celebration of peace…solidarity…and world harmony.

Now you just know that something like that was bound to set the nerves of the Pathocrats on edge.

So first they got the Love Parade chased out of Berlin....

Then they got it cancelled in the Ruhr Valley.

But obviously that wasn’t going to be the end of it.

The party-hearty spirit dies hard, and it’s going to take more than stonewalling bureaucrats for people to give up on an orgy of musical tribalism.

Obviously this sort of thing had to be stopped once and for all.

But how?

Well, the formula is a tried and true one.

First, choose the worst possible site. One that would never pass muster for a football game, let alone as a concert venue for hundreds of thousands of people. A cramped speedway at Altamont - little better than an auto junkyard - would do fine. Or an abandoned freight-train yard at Duisburg, for that matter.

Then cram it way beyond capacity. And for good measure, fence the whole thing off, instead of preserving the wide-open feel of previous venues...

And then have your goons in place to turn a shot at heaven on earth into a disaster zone.

In Altamont you hire the Hell’s Angel for security! You donate a 1000 hits of LSD laced with speed to this security force and watch them going to town busting the heads of concertgoers.....

Times change and in Duisburg you are more subtle. You strategically station the police at both ends of the tunnel - and make sure they have their marching orders to set off a stampede by exercising a chokehold at just the right moment - at the height of the concert.

All the reports seem to sing from the same playbook: “It was unclear what triggered the panic....” But then you read about people making a mad dash for the tunnel. Or how a mysterious surge in the crowd forces people to escape by climbing up a metal stairway in front of the tunnel - and then falling into the crowd where they are trampled or crushed.

All of this begs the question... why this panic surge all of a sudden?

You don’t even have to read between the lines to discover that the police triggered it. Yes, the Achilles heel of the whole venue was that tunnel - it was both an entrance into the concert and the exit. This is a big no-no as these things go. You never want hundreds of people, let alone over a million, going in and coming out the same way....

But the police used this to their advantage.

They could have stationed themselves far away from the tunnel altogether. As they made an elaborate point of fencing the area off, they could have turned people back long before they got to the bottleneck of the tunnel. In terms of crowd management and safety that was a no-brainer. There could be no possibility of a stampede in an open space.

But no, they decided to station themselves strategically at the tunnel. There it was that the cops made their disastrous stand by telling the revelers that the concert was closed. They blocked the stream of people who were already passing through the tunnel or were trying to get out. And they created a mad crush of people that surged back on itself in a narrow space, trampling those in or around the tunnel who were still trying to get in.

Even reports that those trying to escape the barricades fell turn out not to be true. According to eye-witnesses, they were forced back in - by the police. In other words, the police decided to turn the flow of the crowd back on itself at the worst possible time and place! A guaranteed crowd-crusher.

Of course, the police union screams that the cops are not to blame. The claim is that the cops actually opened a second exit before the accident. Much better that the cops should have refrained from sealing off the one exit that was fully crammed but operating fine until they decided to butt in.

You might think that this is a case of he-said, she-said. But when it comes right down to it, who are you going to believe? The cops who work for oligarchs who are made nervous by mass demonstrations of peace and harmony? Or eyewitnesses who are there simply to have a good time and who are adamant that the panic only broke out after the cops chose to block off the tunnel?

In any case, everything was fine until that riptide of ingressing and egressing crowds in the tunnel. Only the police would have the authority to set that off.

And then to add insult to injury, there are all the reports that the police just stood by on the bridge and did nothing while people were trampled underfoot below them.

20 people died gruesome deaths! And over five hundred more were injured.

It’s hard not to believe that those in charge - the city officials, the organizers and the police - did not collude to make this happen. It certainly wouldn’t be the first time.

For some observers, like the concert-manager for Shakira and Sting, the loss of life rose to the level of a crime. "This is not a tragic disaster, this is a crime", said Marek Lieberberg. Whether or not you want to believe that the powers that be were behind this crime, the clincher for me was how the event organizer jumped on it as a chance to shut down the Love Parade in perpetuity.

He didn’t vow to get to the bottom of it. He didn't promise to do everything in his power to ensure that such a disaster never repeats itself. Almost on cue, he lost no time in insisting that the era of the Love Parade was dead. Out of respect for the victims!

Have you ever heard anything more ridiculous?

People die because the organizers and police messed up - if you could call it messing up - and from now on there are no more free concerts of love and music and world harmony!

Can anyone stand up and scream Shill at the top of his lungs?

Don’t you just love the way that something like this can bring the whole communal party to a screeching halt? The oligarchs can make a big to-do about being welcomed with flowers and songs in Iraq, because they are bringing peace and freedom to the region. And after tens of thousands of dead and maimed U.S. servicemen, and hundreds of thousands of dead Iraqi men, women and children, the whole noble enterprise is still going as strong as ever! You don’t have the organizers of the whole fiasco standing up and proclaiming that it is time to cut and run: Well, that rings the curtains down on our efforts to bring peace and democracy to the world!

But here you have a wonderful open-air festival, pulsing with music and harmony, solidarity and world peace - a festival going on since the fall of the Berlin Wall. And then - either because of organizational foul-ups, in the most charitable scenario, or a deliberately orchestrated case of stampeding a crowd trapped in a tunnel - less than a couple of dozen people wind up dead. And you have the organizer standing up and piously bleating, No more Love Parades!

Come on, could you be more shockingly hypocritical?

The bad guys can mobilize to take over the world - and even in the face of hundreds of thousands of death, it is still all about staying the course for them so that those who have already died will not have died in vain.

The good guys mobilize for a world-class festival of music and love...and because less than two dozen lives are lost under decidedly suspicious circumstances, the era of world harmony and peace must be declared over and dead - and all in the name of the victims and their families, no less!

If only the urge to bomb and kill were as easily quenched as the spirit to party-hearty and have a blast! The world would be a much safer place, if not an altogether more joyous one.

And you thought that only the Taliban were down on music and dancing!

MANNING UP FOR THE MAN by Neville Raymond

“The average man is a conformist, accepting miseries and disasters with the stoicism of a cow standing in the rain.” Colin Wilson

The pressure to conform is the embalming fluid that mummifies societies. It gives humans the staying power to make sure that this cold, unfeeling world stays the same from one century to the next, no matter how desperately they may want it to change. You don't have to be a philosopher to know that. You could be a boarding school survivor. There we were, led around by the nose morning, noon and night, not a one of us dragging his heels or kicking up a fuss. Lining up for parades like clockwork. Filing in and out of classrooms and chapels. Learning whatever they wanted to teach us, when and where and how they wanted to teach it. Studying, playing, eating, sleeping, waking, showering at the strict times of their choosing.

A marvel of synchronized activity! All those callisthenic formations on Founder’s Day were a flash in the pan compared to the rigidly organized paces they put us through day after day, week after week, month after month, March through November. What mysterious mechanism could make us so docile? What pied piper had us following this hypnotic tune? Consider the odds! There we were, four or five hundred strong, miles from anywhere. They were fifteen or twenty masters, tops! David and Goliath were not so badly mismatched! Yet we remained their dutiful little robots, bobbing our heads each time we ran into them. Good morning sir! Good afternoon sir! What good little boys we must have been to let a handful of them run the show like a well-oiled machine!

Were we content by any chance with our lot? Would you be if you were dragged from home and whisked to a glorified orphanage-cum-bootcamp? The truth is we were homesick as hell. Why didn’t we put up a fight? Not necessarily with machine guns like the students in the 1964 film If, that savage satire of English public school life. A Gandhi-style revolution with sit-downs, non-violent protests, peaceful demonstrations, would have done just fine. Where was our spunk, our courage, our spirit of fair play when we really needed it? Was there nothing left in us of that rambunctious spontaneity and playful exuberance that comes so naturally to boys? Had the school regimen killed it all off?

One crisp fall morning we were massed in the quad, doing jumping jacks on the barked commands of a PE master. Feeling a tad frisky, I clowned around in the harmless way boys do when craving attention. It must have spoiled the orderly spectacle of that Hitler Youth Rally. The PE master got off his perch and headed straight for me. The crunching sound of his feet on gravel seemed to go on forever. Standing before me at last, he administered a ringing slap to my face.

Did I reel with hurt and shame? I’d have to be made of crushed rock not to. But what if I wasn’t the only one? What if every witness to that assault resonated with my pain? What if they were shocked enough to sit down en masse, refusing to go on till things changed? What if boys began boycotting classes, taking vows of silence until the masters gave in? An apology for starters - then a ban on corporal punishment. What if an outraged student body rose up and flexed its muscles for regime change? From now on we have a greater say in running our school. Optional uniforms, relaxed schedules. A choice of earlier or later meal seatings. We decide what, when and how we want to learn. We communicate with our parents when we feel like it. And so on… until a paramilitary-run orphan asylum turns into something more akin to a pleasure cruise ship.

What nipped this solidarity movement in the bud? What kept us imprisoned in our lonely shells, helpless to come together to change our corner of the world? We all know the secret of British rule. Divide and conquer. God knows, there was enough of that. The student body was divided into four Houses and pitted against each other every which way. That wasn’t the root of our failure to unite though. It was the stigma attached to feelings. Tears sprung to my eyes when I was struck. But that stiff upper lip never wavered. Just as I got a grip, everyone around me did too. I didn’t break - neither did anyone else break ranks. I held it together because there was nobody to hold me. So we all held it together and soldiered on. For the biggest taboo of all was to make a scene. If every last one of us was equally terrified of that, how could we sit down to make a mass spectacle of ourselves? If our worst fear was to be branded a sissy for raising a fuss, how could we raise a collective fuss? Solidarity as fellow feeling poses no threat if every fellow is in charge of cracking down on his feelings.

I used to cry myself to sleep the first week of the new school term. As a group we could never join hands to cry ourselves awake out of our stupor. You want an empire on which the sun never sets? Drill generations of boys to always let the sun go down on their anger and anguish and shame.