Working Class Corner/2 Parts: General Comments; & Presidential Candidates, Why now I am for Bill Richardson
by-Russell Scott Day
Prior to tax day I was thinking about money and taxes and it popped into my head that my money was being drafted even if my body wasn’t.
I had a bout of real clinical depression as a result since I became paralized and couldn’t fill out the tax forms.
It depresses me to pay people to persecute me.
Because I am simply working class and have some working class vices and can’t afford to lose my job by becoming famous or infamous, it is safer for me to be ignored.
I am aware that I am supposed to buy it that my lack of competitive wealth is all my fault.
I am also aware that as a working class person I have consistently had the cards more and more stacked against me by national and international interests that have successfully divided and conquered my class, the working class.
People like me really don’t need to be famous, and really don’t want to be famous unless it pays more than it costs.
The great historian Paul Fussel points out that writers are working class. I’ve been fired and blackballed for things I have written.
When Imus was fired for saying something I took it like I took it when I got fired or shut out for some of the things I wrote that were published or offended someone in the Corporation.
I remembered the time at Brownies, the bar I hung out in in Manhattan in the early 90’s when I used the phrase,"Nigger Rich", in a conversation with him about money and the state of my career.
He was a stockbroker or attorney and I had had many conversations on various subjects with him and regarded him as a friend.
What the situation was was that I had more money and opportunity than I had ever from work that was in areas that I loved, "And I hoped I did not become nigger rich."
The look that came over his face when I used that phrase, that I believe he knew what it meant, and also knew the spirit that I was using it in, was painful on two levels.
One level of the pain was that I discovered then and there by the look on his face that I was not allowed to say the word nigger simply because I am white.
He knew what I meant, which is that some people when they get a windfall, squander it. I really meant nothing more than that, but of course I never used the phrase again since even now writing about learning not to I feel like I’m digging myself some sort of hole.
It is true as Mensia said in a stand-up I saw on TV the other day, that white people can’t say much.
The divisions between Working Class people that revolve around race and language serve to divide them so much that they play in different playgrounds on different channels.
Certainly I wouldn’t have had a meltdown if he had said to me that he hoped he didn’t act like White Trash when he married a rich and famous white girl.
I myself was once called a bi-sexual Aryan nigger by a girl when she threw a solid glass of whiskey at me.
I don’t know what her problem was…
Part 2:
-But at anyrate I do need to get back to what I was thinking about when I started this post, and that was why I supported Bill Richardson.
I think he is the real thing.
I think from what I have heard and read that he has written and spoken aloud, that he knows what is going on and will admit it.
His competitors are rightly to be called Demagoges.
He has worked on the borders both nationally and internationally.
Obviously from his statements and laws pushed he us for an end to stupid wars and stupid policies and is not afraid of talking to friends and enemies alike.
If I was managing his campaign I would call in historians and political scientists to critique his approaches and personality, and use phrases like "Real Class", "Real Experience", "Real Integrity", "Real Concern, and Real Common Sense."
Democracy is a delicate form of government.
Certainly American United States Democracy is subject to some powerful distortions.
I think Governor Richardson has the courage and integrity to deal with the wreck the current administration has driven the US into.
He is most likely in my judgement to function internationally and domestically in a practical manner as described as needed for the US by the Philosopher William James.
From my reading and what I have heard about him, it will be a real tragedy if he is not elected.
Sure Obama and Clinton and Edwards all sound good, but I am impressed that Governor Richardson has negotiated with North Koreans and gotten results that helped people.
Governor Richardsons experiences in New Mexico give his resolutions to the issues of border security and illegial immigration real weight, are ethical and practical at the same time, and he does not shy away from calling others Demagoges for the way the issue has been handled so far.
He already has a relationship that could help us in the future with the Mexican Government, and I like the idea that he would bring this with him into the highest Executive Office.
As far as Iraq is concerned, no candidates or people with real power in the government has yet really come up with a resolution or plan fully realized.
The war in Iraq is not just our problem, and we cannot resolve it by ourselves. Reform or ReInvention of the UN is more important an issue to the US, than is commonly understood.
In the area of politics where the breakdown in the world is active general war, we simply do not have in place institutions to more perfectly deal with it.
In an ideal world what would have happened when mission accomplished, and victory over the Iraq Army, would have been that the Army left.
The institutional vacum is that there is no International, UN, Constabulary of size and training, in at the very least different uniforms to send in to "keep the peace".
Now of course all is not failure, and what I am talking about here builds on what I know of successes, even misconceptions about how the UN really works, and what it really is, that really amount to it ought to be like what I thought it was when I was a child.
When I first heard of the UN as a child, I thought the Blue Helmets, the UN Peace Keeping Forces, were a standing organization like what really it turns out the UN army ought to be.
"Look out kid. They keep it all hid.", is what our great poet Bob Dylan meant to me when he sang that.
The organizations and institutions have names and then their rules and culture and are corrupted to make keeping a job, having job security regardless of performance possible for the bureaucrats of that institution.
The fit between the institution and its bureaucrats, and its mission in an overall organization, requires that the organization has institutions, or departments for all jobs that must be done.
It is not as if the UN has not worked.
But it worked in the form it is in now for the Cold War, which was a time of BiPolar Power Balance.
The time we are in now is a Multi Polar Power Balance. To maintain the Bi Polar Power Balance I would have welcomed Statehood For Russia a the perfect win win for both the US and Russia.
They would have gotten a tradition of contract law, and the relationship between the US with Russia as a State, would have maintained the same sort of power balance in regards to China.
Intellectual Property Rights are as much abused in Russia, as they are in China and this is really no small problem for people like me.
As much as I am disappointed and hurt all around by the US, nation of my birth, the thing that would make me want to come here from somewhere else, and keeps me here, is its tradition of free speech.
In the US it is only generally the mobsters that murder, or attempt to murder journalists.
It is sad for me that Russia did not become a State of the United States since now I have to argue for increased power in the hands of the UN, which implies the invention of a World Government.
That is such a large and difficult path that I have limited my goal to a nation of airports with a uniform set of laws based on international law and its standards.
Now it is coming up that my US Passport is going to expire in 2008.
Of course this is coming up when I am most likely since I bought it to be needed for travel out of the country.
At the Post Office they told me that to renue my passport, I will have to send it in, and not have it for about 2 months.
This means then that the only Passport I will have will be the Transcendian Passport, which I know to be institutionally deficit.
Therefore I am interest in buying a UN World Citizen Passport that I expect to get from a bureaucrat. It is amazing how many bureaus have control of the freedoms we need to make a living and do otherwise for our work and destiny.
Though the World Health Organization has been a wonderful UN institution, I tell you I am intriqued by the success of the US Post Office, and other national postal services.
Sure seems like there is something wonderfully simple about delivering letters and packages that make all of the Postal Services co-operative with each other, and implies hope for mankind.
I took a great lesson from the fact that the Confederate Postal Service was the only really consistently operating institution of the Civil War for the Confederates.
Further I took great lesson that it was the head of the postal service of the Confederacy that begged Lee and the Jefferson Davis Cabinet to not go to Gettysburg, and please to defend Vicksburg.
The concept of an international wage that is needed for the working classes to maintain dignity and get ahead, as supported by Dick Gephart could well be worked out for international postal services and would likely turn out as a good example for the rest of the required mission, if us working classes are to achieve some peace.
The Post Office has a simple mission, same as the Army.
My point about a UN Constabulary is that soldiers are not Postmen, nor are they Police.
The surge will fail because it asks soldiers to be police of a civil war, and they are not policemen.
I hope I can make this case to someone like Mr. Richardson, since I think it might be possible that he would adopt it, whereas I have great doubts about the people who sound "good".