art and dissent

There is quiet in Tripoli. Robert Fisk calls it a city in the shadow of death. There's little food. Pro-government forces had already fired into the crowds, killing more than a thousand, maybe a lot more. There were reports of the dead being cleared from the streets, loaded into vans, dumped in unmarked graves. Mercenaries have been brought in from other African nations, soldiers loyal only to money, paid to kill. This is what happens when evil is threatened, when a ruler is willing to do anything to hold onto power. Qaddafi blamed hallucinogenic drugs and Osama bin Laden for the violence. The nation has fallen into a civil war. The administration has used fighter jets to spray bullets at peaceful protesters.

In Wisconsin and Indiana the protesters are gathered around the state house. The Governor is trying to take away the union's right to collective bargaining.  Despite the carnage in Libya Jeffrey Cox, the deputy attorney general for Indiana, the number two law enforcement official in the state, encouraged Wisconsin police to use live ammunition on the protesters. He was promptly fired. But he's been making these kind of statements for a while now and for the past ten years he's had the power to throw people in prison. 

A protester pretending to be the billionaire conservative political activist David Koch called Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker and got right through, though the governor hasn't been accepting calls from the Democratic Senate minority leader. The protester played a caricature of a Republican, "My maid dropped my phone in the toilet. I'd fire her but I don't pay her anything anyhow." None of the state officials doubted his authenticity. The Governor said that he had considered "planting some troublemakers" among the protesters. The fake Koch suggested beating the Democrats with a baseball bat and the sitting governor said, "I have one in my office. You'd be happy with that."

So this is what happens. Power corrupts. People get famous and rich and then they think their opinion is worth more. Sometimes it's enough and the people rise and they campout and make sacrifices. Sometimes protests fail and often there is violence and throughout history bad regimes have been overthrown only to be replaced with worse regimes. Because every revolution is a role of the dice. In the best case scenario the government reforms itself before we're left to find out what happens next.