I really really meant to write something about how sweet it is to be in Spain writing stories and reading all the things I’ve been meaning to, but I went for a coffee, opened the paper and BOOM!

Yesterday’s article in El Pais, Spain’s biggest national paper, had a rundown of the immigration debate in Arizona. Oddly, the article seemed most outraged about Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s strange demand that the prisoners in his system wear pink underwear. That quirky bit of homophobia has never really struck me as central to the debate, though it is troubling, and if not cruel, certainly unusual.

Of course, they also showed photos of the march and rally in support of the law. Signs reading ‘go home illegals’, and ‘for English press 1, for deportation press 2’ and somewhat out of place ‘an armed society is a civilized society’ and even more confusingly ‘Karl Marx was not a founding father.’

These are not things I overheard, but signs waved high for all to see.

The article made the clever choice to introduce Arpaio as ‘of Italian origin’.

The rally was in a football stadium where a majority of the workers were of Latino (which determination, ironically enough is also Italian in a sense) origin. They were the only visible attendants, according to the article, that were not white.

“Can you hear me Mexico? Can you hear me from here? You should be clear that this land is our land, not your land. We paid for it. We worked for it,” said Larry Wachs, a journalist from Atlanta.

Who are we? I don’t mean that in any national existential angst sort of way, but seriously, who is this mythic ‘we’ that ‘paid for’ and ‘worked for’ this land? The bold and industrious English, who sailed over here and set up shop in a way that is not unambiguously heroic? The Germans or Italians or Irish or Norwegians or Danes or Czechs or Poles who came for myriad reasons at different historical moments? The Africans who were dragged here, only to suffer three centuries of slavery before being released into a battle for equality that’s still underway? The Indigenous who wandered here God knows when and have suffered indignity after indignity since the establishment of the colonies? The Chinese who labored in the construction of our nation’s infrastructure and later sat in prisons for the crime of being Japanese? Who are we? And why did only the white ‘we’ show up to this battle (covered/sponsored by Fox News)?

Conservative, I mean here the word itself not the ideology or the people who ascribe to it, refers to the preservation of something, no? It means to limit change. It is tied to an ideal and static moment, an edenic past, an originary place that depends on mythology to make it more pure than the present. To conserve something is to save it as it is, which in a world subject to physical laws and the perpetual movement of time, is impossible. So, I guess my question is, what exactly is it that people are trying to conserve? Was it represented by the homogeneity of that rally’s attendants? At what moment exactly do you locate the United States that is escaping into some threatening new entity, the United States that is and can remain ‘our land’.

That type of thinking, the type that leads people to concrete imaginings of some certain, codified establishment of borders between nations and people, of the investing of nationality with a substantive reality beyond the coincidence of location and time, is to me, well, totally foreign…

And so, I want to establish a nation for people who fear those who believe fervently in nations, and to draw up a long, meandering and in places nonexistent border that can be respected or ignored by the UN and all its constituent nations at their whim. The border will probably loosely trail the equator. Which side of the equator is ‘ours’ will remain undetermined until some future congress, which shall meet at an undetermined time and which shall consist of undetermined members, convenes…

We will have passports drawn in crayon and stamped with lipstick-y kisses. Our origin myth will be that one day from the chaotic ashes of beaurocracy and hate rose a Phoenix who flew drunkenly around the planet with a crayon in its beak dividing the world roughly in two, but not indicating which side was inside of the border and which side was out. We will wander back and forth until we are certain, which may be forever. Also, in honor of the bird (Is a Phoenix a bird? or does it enter into dragon territory?), their shall be regular festivities which will include hefty amounts of drink and failed efforts to draw straight lines. We will seek that bird until we die. One day, we hope, we can all be just as free as that bird. Oh, I’ll leave you to guess as to our national anthem, ahem…

Oh, yeah, and at the suggestion of that duder from the rally’s sign, Karl Marx will be our founding father, or at least one of them, possibly the other Marx Brothers will be asked to sign our Declaration of Complete and Utter Dependence… on What We Are Not Sure.

The world shall one day wreak vengeance in retaliation for the current capitalistic blitzkrieg, just as Germany once paid dearly when its own blitzkrieg tactics proved that those tactics could conquer but not hold great quantities of territory.

The nature of power is such that, once unleashed, it automatically rushes towards suicide, unable to satisfy its bottomless desires. In just that way, capitalism will slit its wrists as its conquered territories release themselves from control.

The leader of the post-industrial anti-revolution, the United States, shall cast its gaze upon the earth that once belonged to it and wonder how it all fell apart. But “its” world could only fall apart, and it will fall apart. Until then, we must persist, survive and operate as partisan soldiers.

It would seem impossible to argue that capitalism would, as it has indeed done, produce gross inequities, which could easily have been extrapolated from capitalism’s own mechanistic definition. Yet even Wikipedia’s entry for “capitalism” cannot be agreed upon.

Often, the arguments made for capitalism are supplied by the very citizens most abused and exploited by capitalism. Why such citizens support their enemy can only be attributed to the Stockholm Syndrome. Nevertheless, when illusion and self-deception provide the basis for the post-industrial anti-revolution, everything seems disputable.

Dispute this:

That’s courtesy of a study by Dr. Emmanuel Saez. The hand of the market is anything but invisible, Mr. Adam Smith; it’s right there for all to see, a market skewed towards those who, like yourself, begin their journey to prosperity at the crossroads of prosperity and prosperity: “With the life pension he had earned in the service of the duke, Smith retired to his birthplace of Kirkcaldy to write The Wealth of Nations.“

I shall not be unfair and delete that which apparently fails to support my argument. The same source just noted further quotes Smith: “How selfish soever man may be supposed, there are evidently some principles in his nature which interest him in the fortune of others and render their happiness necessary to him though he derives nothing from it except the pleasure of seeing it.” This is known as condescension and, in a more modern sense, PR and tax deductions. Thus, capitalism, whether or not Smith foresaw the all-too-predictable widget that would roll off the factory line of his theory, capitalizes upon charity itself. Consider the corporations that support the occasional PBS program that indites the very corporation that paid for the program’s production: all PR is good PR, as they say. Perhaps PBS should be re-monikered as PRS.

Of course, wealth inequity was purposefully encouraged, accomplished and secured by President -X and Vice President -X². As Dr. Saez notes, “…while the bottom 99 percent of incomes grew at a solid pace of 2.7 percent per year from 1993-2000, these incomes grew only 1.3 percent per year from 2002-2007. As a result, in the economic expansion of 2002-2007, the top 1 percent captured two thirds of income growth.”

Well, Mr. Smith?

Communism, as understood (or, more accurately, misunderstood)  by those who temporarily had the means to accomplish what Marx intended, failed. The idea that an economic system could operate by some sort of natural law is an absurdity made all the more absurd by the utterly-unnatural industrial revolution. This “orthodox” Marxism was refuted by Marx’s own statements. For instance, consider this from The Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy (2nd ed., p. 539): “In one letter, he [Marx] specifically warns against regarding his historical account of Western capitalism as a transcendental analysis of the supposedly necessary historical development of any and all societies at a certain time” [my italics].

While Marx’s writings abound with contradictions, it’s clear that the kind of systematic totalitarianism enforced by those who pursued “orthodox” Marxism had little to nothing in common with what Marx proposed. The Soviet Union’s economic system was nothing more than a less-subtle means of exploitation than capitalism would increasingly “accomplish.” In those italicized words, one can finally not glimpse Adam Smith’s “invisible hand of the market,” now at last guiding us by manipulations so subtle that noticing a few deserves a Tothotropolis’ Lifetime Achievement Award.

Fortunately, the entropy of capitalism can be proven an unavoidable consequence of capitalism’s self-definition via  thermodynamic and information theory. In the former, ice melts…entropy as inevitable as death. According to information entropy theory, “Intuitively you can think of entropy being generalization of the number of different possibilities there are for a random variable: if there are two possibilities, there is 1 bit of entropy; if there are four possibilities, there are 2 bits of entropy, etc. Adding one more bit of entropy doubles the number of possibilities.” Thus, the information so necessary to the post-industrial age can only increase the range of possibilities until they reach the point of utter chaos. We have reached that point. We must only await the melting of the ice.

For these reasons, I state without levity that Groucho Marxism*, as defined in the glossary on my blog, Violent Contradiction, provides the basis for the most unorthodox Marxism possible. Reformed communism would, under the guidance of this definition, recognize that any system degenerates into entropy. Trusting in systems is like trusting in one’s immortality: failure is certain and tragedy the natural consequence of hubris.

*Groucho Marxism: To succeed, reinvented communism requires an injection of humor as a preventative measure; dictatorships are humorless.