The main thing about racism is that there is nothing more elitist at its core.

I started making my own bread because it’s cheaper to make than to buy. I started making it when I was dirt poor. I was also scavenging for food in the woods – I made it my business to learn where hazelnuts, walnuts and such grew in the wild. An added bonus is that most things you can scavenge or make yourself are better quality than what you’d find in a store, regardless of cost. My sort of elitism has to do with thinking one object is better than another object.

Racists operate on a whole different level of elitism – one that says one group of people is inherently better than another group of people. Expressing that “honestly” doesn’t make it any less elitist, or any less ugly.

HeManWork involves tools, for preference big heavy tools (watchmakers and brain surgeons don’t quality, despite the nearly exclusive domination of both professions by males); it involves getting dirty, for preference smeared with fossil fuel distillates or something even more toxic (this helps to demonstrate a suitably Manly disregard for both personal safety and biotic integrity). and the most HeManly of all HeManWork involves destruction: guys who decapitate entire mountain ranges with enormous Mighty Morphin Power Shovels to get at coal seams are far more HeManly than guys who merely, say, risk their lives at sea to save sinking ships, in jungles struggling to detect and prevent poaching, or on sheer cliffs conducting audits of endangered species of plants or birds. and guys who destroy whole buildings, towns, and large numbers of people are the most HeManly of all — particularly when they do this with large, heavy power tools like tanks and bulldozers and the larger sizes of bombs and rockets, using as much fossil fuel as possible in the process. [this association of HeManWork and destruction might be, I suppose, why the extremely sheltered academics of the Chicago School of economic theory took such delight and satisfaction in destroying Argentina -- made 'em feel like Real Men?]

it’s odd, but somehow the sweaty, dirty, muscle-taxing work that women do never counts — for example cleaning the bathrooms of the world’s hotels and pubs after men have pissed and vomited (and worse) in them all through a lively Friday night, or cleaning and turning and tending the broken victims of HeManly wars in VA hospitals and private homes, or birthing and feeding and cleaning and schlepping infants and toddlers. no matter how sore the arms or back are at the end of a long day, how many pounds have been hefted or how many gruelling hours put in (or how dirty she got, or what toxic chemicals she was exposed to on the job), a woman’s dirty work is just never prestigious and “manly”, especially when (as with most of Women’s Work) it involves caring or repairing or cleaning. and men who do Real HeManWork always think that their opinions are worth so much more than those of women and girly-men who do not do Real HeManWork.

“elite” is an easy shot to throw at anyone in the industrial West, because it’s true of all of us — as compared to the majority of humanity getting by somehow on one or two dollars a day, we’re all “elite.” but so is Joe Grunt out in Baghdad elite, with his Hummer and his advanced munitions and his radio and his air support (and his laptop on which he can record stupid pseudo-MTV racist anthems), compared to Joe Iraqi Insurgent crouched in a ditch somewhere improvising land mines out of bits of baling wire and whatever variations on Semtex he can get by hook or by crook. and howzabout those senior, ranking US personnel in the Green Zone with their air conditioners, golf course, swimming pool, four star (well three at least) cuisine, and all the rest — while the grunts in the field are going out with inadequate body armour? now we’re talking “effete elite”, practically Tiberian…

for the record (sigh) the idea that girls don’t know how to handle power tools or mechanical contraptions, and therefore that anyone who doesn’t work with power tools is girly, aka effete, is getting somewhat threadbare at this point. the idea that leftists are complete strangers to manual labour and competence likewise. I know plenty of people, sad to say, who have no idea how to fix the power slaves on which they are pathetically dependent — cars, dishwashers, garbage disposals, laundry equipment, vacuum cleaner, you name it. I know plenty of people who have no idea where their food comes from, or their municipal water supply; have no idea how to tend their own injuries or illnesses; have no idea how their electricity is generated or what path it takes to their house; think a mile is “an awfully long way to walk,” and can’t find North on a sunny afternoon. but this large body of underinformed people is not ideologically unified; there are at least as many rightists as leftists in the ranks of the clueless.

despite the fact that Heinlein was a wingnut, he was right in general principle about “the things every adult human being should know how to do”… I personally know how to fix about half the things I own (the ones that really matter to me), and how to use most of the standard tools found in a machine shop, a contractor’s van, or a mechanic’s or carpenter’s bench. I know how to can food, keep bees, grow vegetables and safely compost humanure. [coming soon: cheesemaking and welding.] in my time I have had to know how to do basic maintenance/diagnostics on a diesel engine, how to troubleshoot AC and DC circuits, how to do electrical wiring (both solder and crimp), and the fundamentals of marlinspike seamanship. unlike some people whose employer tells them what to wear every morning I also know how to make and repair my own clothing. but this is nothing all that special and has nothing to do with ideological positioning. I know evangelical Christians and old-order Amish who could say the same — and more — and I am sure there are Aryan Nation nutcases who could say the same, and Sendero Luminoso Maoists, and Zapatistas, and First Nations organisers, and Republicans, and Democrats, and you name it… what the H does one’s personal SKA inventory have to do with one’s politics? a left guerrilla can field strip an AK47 just as handily as a right guerrilla. because I agree with Heinlein that any adult person should be able to make their own shirt, doesn’t mean I have to agree with the old lunatic on anything else.

btw, when I owned cars I knew how to swap a wheel, which is what most people mean by “fixing a flat” — and have done so more than once. I also ran the power tyre-change machine at an auto repair shop now and then as a young pup, which is how you *really* “fix a flat” (on a car). and of course I’ve fixed flats on my bike, what regular cyclist hasn’t? nowadays, if I need to haul 40 lbs of Stuff from A to B, I use a cargo bike or a bike plus trailer, powered by Me. in fact I consider owning and depending on a fossil-fueled car to be a bit… well, to be perfectly honest, effete

Most of the people on this blog are not liberals. I know you said leftists, but lots of people — even grownups — don’t know the difference.

Now let’s move on.

Most of the people on this blog have more and more different kinds of practical experience than that Marine, who has now spent most of his adult life in an institution that tells him what to wear each day.

De raises food in real dirt, and taught self-defense classes for women, and knows how to make a boat move without a motor.

One of the Dan’s is a field geologist; that means he breaks rocks and climbs around outdoors, and fixes equipment, anmd allsorts of other cool, manual shit.

Peggy is an academic; but Peggy did her field work living in the boonies with Tamil guerrillas, where they did one better than fixing a flat (they didn’t even have cars); they bathed out of buckets, cooked on open fires, slept on dirt floors, and shit into a hole in the ground.

The other Carlos did a stretch in prison. Does that measure up with fixing a flat?

Yolanda lives poor and Black in the South, and cares for two disabled adults.

Audrey roams the boarded up streets of Detroit, and camped with me and 200 others all along the Gulf Coast last March, and has returned there to help with reconstruction (real hammer and nails stuff, Carlos).

Elaina drives a truck, works as a union organizer, and used to care for disabled adults. She’s from East Tennessee, and will pick up a snake.

Of the leftists I know, there are furniture movers, postal workers, school teachers (you should really try that if you think it’s easy), farmers, municipal water workers, etc. For the record, I spent most of my adult life in an institution that told me how to dress, too. The Army. Gee whiz, I learned how to change tires (actually I knew that when I was 12); I can tie sheepshanks and double-bowlines; perform immediate action on an assault rifle; apply a Hare traction splint; deliver a baby; construct a ring-main; read a topographical map; and know when to deep my mouth shut when I’m being investigated.

The difference between that Marine changing a tire and one of us changing it is that we don’t compose songs about killing kids in our heads to pass the time, and we actually know more about the effect of the automobile than he does.

So take you “intellectual elites” myth to someone who’ll buy that bullshit. That would not be here.

The current war, then, not only cannot provide a real answer to Israel’s problems, but also is being carried out by the same echelon of officers that was defeated in Lebanon, and with whom the accounts for that war have yet to be settled. Books were written, a protest movement arose, an investigative commission about one massacre was conducted, a defense minister who eventually became prime minister was convicted, and even though he is lying unconscious somewhere, his consciousness is apparently serving his pale shadows – Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, Justice Minister Haim Ramon and Co. – and another generation of impassioned youngsters is growing up around us and screaming over the Internet: “Stick it to them.” Afterward, as they sit in the burning vehicles, perhaps in Syria, and the phrase “land mine” returns to the erased dictionary of the past, when they cry out “We want to go home,” they won’t have the sense to bequeath the recoiling from war to the next generation. That’s because on television there still will be the same generals, with the same conception, with the same short and limited range of strategic understanding, and they will win the same enthusiasm from the public that just wants to “stick it to them.”

The director of the American Jewish Committee’s Israel/Middle East Office, Eran Lerman, is already recommending going to war against Syria. Anyone who is listening to talk about the need to attack Syria (in the name of “strategy”) realizes that for those people, “strategy” means enlarging the circle of hostilities, including harming civilians. What Israel’s “strategists” have to offer is the destruction of yet another country. Let us set aside the generation that is growing up in front of the television. Let us set aside the horrors that are being carried out in the name of all of us. It is enough to see the destruction of Iraq and its results. The Americans do not intend to live in this region, but we do live here.

It’s Not Too Late To Say: Enough by Yitzhak Laor, Ha’aretz.

they won’t have the sense to bequeath the recoiling from war to the next generation — this is the essential task (one of ‘em) before us, one in which the human race has serially failed.

Did you notice how they sort of blurred the word “fuck” (twice!) so as not to offend anyone? For me, that just says it all.

Iraqi children are dying – I recently took part in a reading of war dead – US names paired with Iraqi names and many of the names I read were children, 5 years old, one was 7 months old, and on and on. If our children were dying here, our little toddlers and babies, not just our grown-up children on another country’s soil, then I think that would sure as shit wake us up! But I forgot, that is the whole point of this war, to keep us ‘safe’ at home so that we never have to experience the horrors of war as the people of Iraq, Palestine, Lebanon, Afghanistan et al., have to do every minute.

There can never be too much compassion and peace. There is no such thing as too much solidarity. I hope we bring these aspects more to the forefront of the anti-war movement.

Thank you Stan, you always illuminate my mind and I love to ponder what you have sparked. Courage, brother!

The “manly….fighting for freedom” CRAP perpetuated by the military industrial complex/media is so deeply instilled in the minds of Americans, the conversations on the blogs, despite the plethora of facts, have no impact on those devotees to the empire. They don’t even know they are devotees to the empire. It’s painful to know the power of the MIC/media.

The GOP are going to be using the Swift-Boat-Liars for Empire, I hear again. So, now the worst of the worst, the GOPukes along with the DIEbold machines will probably destroy the chance for the lesser of the two evils to be running the show. I can hardly believe the HELL this country has become in these last 5 and a half years. I can’t imagine he Dems would be this bad. Clinton’s sins came no where near this vampire-empire PNACzi war-profiteering criminal cabal. I don’t even have words to express my disgust and rage at what they have done to humanity, both in mind and body (as in bodies destroyed…except for the precious blastocysts.. sarcasm should be noted there). F**K them all, the Robotican assholes that allowed it, and cheered it on.

I hope the idea works, Stan. I think scrambling for life: food, water, and cover under machine gun fire, finding a doctor, etc. might be preoccupying them though.