Continuing… That being handled, I leave a wakeup call for 0430 as I want a shower and a couple shower-sunrisers before we leave. It takes me about 10 minutes to pack. I call home to let Es know what’s going on. She’s not in, so I leave a message. Same for my friends Rack and Ruin of the Agency. They’re thrilled so far with my reports.
The security forces here are absolutely going to freak if they reverse-review my phone records once we leave.
Covert? Schmovert. I’m too old for playing such games.
The next morning, after a sudsy shower and a couple of vodka-infused shower-beers; I’m in the lobby with all my kit, checked-out, and waiting on the tour leader. My passport was stamp-stamp-stampity-stamped here at the hotel, which I thought was weird, but after spending time in this here country, not all that unusual.
At 0545 on the dime, the tour bus pulls into the lot. Without a word, bellhops grab near all my kit and escort it out to the waiting bus.
After tipping each extravagantly, I fire up a huge cigar, and wander around outside, loitering by the bus. I see members of my team at the front desk, checking out. Everything’s been paid for already, they just have to sign documents that they’re not secreting hotel towels or televisions or errant nationals in their luggage.
It’s a weird country.
I see them loading box breakfasts for us as well as box lunches on the bus.
Hell, they’re actually doing ‘field trip’ correctly.
If the bus us fueled up, we can go for days at this rate. There are several coolers bearing the hotel’s brand and I sidle over to see what they’re carrying.
Case after case of iced-down beer and a couple of cases of various high-octane potables; and over there? A couple of boxes of mixers…ah, soda…pop…carbonated citrusy goodness.
“OK”, I sigh, “All is as it should be. Now the field excursion may begin.”
My teammates filter outside as does their luggage. I suggest they get out and keep what is necessary for preliminary outcrop excursions; such as a backpack or knapsack, hammer, acid bottles, field notebooks, Brunton compass, lighters, cameras, personal tobacco products, and the like in the bus. That way, we don’t have to go tearing through all the luggage at every stop.
I pull out a bundle of 100
Hubco™ large geological
dual-sample bags. That’s right: ‘dual’ sample…
I distribute these to everyone on the team. I ask that they devise their own numbering system and make absolutely certain I have a copy of it when we’re done. I’ll be correlating and curating all the samples when we get back to the world.
I ask that a cooler of drinks are left on board the bus, rather than in the hold. It’s humid, sticky, and muggy today. We must expend valiant effort in remaining hydrated and this will help.
Luckily, the bus has on-board lavatory facilities.
We are seated on the bus, my 10 collective team members, myself, our 4 ‘guides’, ‘Yuk’, ‘No’, ‘Man’, and ‘Kong’; our driver, relief driver, one incredibly shy national geologist, Myung-Dae Soo, and four of the shiny suit clan.
The hotel wheels out a large cart laden with pastries and a huge coffee urn. A bit of a “
Bon Voyage” from the casino and bar crowd, as they put this together for us when they heard we were leaving.
“Hey. That’s really nice of them.” Dax notes.
Dax handed over our raw “elevator waiting” funds as we didn’t have time to run it through the casino-machine before we left. We donated over 75,000 won to our friends at the bar, casino, and massage parlor. The ones delivering our going away present assured us it would be divided equitably.
“It best be”, I laughed, “You never know when one of us might be back!”
There was a collective horrified look on their faces for the merest moments. Then they all laughed and said that they hoped we would return someday soon.
“Nice folks”, I thought, “Stupid as shit country, but nice folks.”
We had all separately left tips for the room maids, bellmen, and matrons back before we checked-out.
There was a flurry of handshaking and goodbyes. Not a bad hotel experience here in the so-called land of Best Korea.
Serious dark coffee was passed out amongst the riders, but Ivan, myself, and Dax were already giving one of my emergency flasks a workout.
Ivan smiled and said: “We drink our coffee the
Russian way. That is to say we had vodka before it and vodka afterward. HA!”
Ivan and I are cut from the same bolt.
Faux-doughnuts, pseudo-bear claws and fake-long johns all distributed; the bus is fired up, and rumbling. We are exhorted to watch our drinks as we pull away from the hotel and into the wilds of Northern Korea.
I’m humming away:
On the road again -Just can't wait to get on the road again,
The life I love is bashing rocks in the field with my friends.
And I can't wait to get on the road again
On the road again.
Goin' places that we've never been,
Seein' things that we may never see again…
--
“Rock?”, Dax inquires.
“Yes?” I reply.
“Do please shut up.”
“Music hater”, I muse and comply.
We’re rolling down the highway, as it were, headed generally north. We all have cameras of one kind or another; and rather than relieve us of them, they quietly and without much fuss, slowly darken the windows.
They claim it’s to keep the sun out and temperatures down, but just before things go all black, we’re seeing sights and scenes of the true North Korea. They’re trying to keep us from seeing that en route to the outcrops.
This new bus has some sort of electronic tint-control gizmo for the windows. However, if one has a pair of polarizing sunglasses, as all good field geologists do, you see right past that and can view the passing scenery unencumbered.
I return from a quick beer-recycling loo trip and am amused to see 10 Western scientists, sitting in a blacked-out bus, all wearing polarizing sunglasses.
It was just the surreal note this trip needed as we left the confines of the capital city.
We traveled north, and the empties pile began to grow. We had a few trash bags we had liberated from the hotel, but the shiny suits were very insistent that every empty can, bottle, and bag, yes they had beer in bags…had to be repatriated to a box in the far back of the bus.
Evidently, they either were paid a bounty on each container or were accountable for each vessel. They were soon to realize just the capacity for drink that a group of 11 seasoned very Senior Field Geologists, and one stowaway geologist-in-training can amass.
As we ply our way northward, we see the agricultural side of North Korea. The contrast between rural areas and the capital was striking. There were miles of rice paddies being harvested by people with sickles in their hands. And no cars on the highway. It was most destabilizing for this Westerner.
I think we saw a maximum of three tractors, as most of the work was done with ox power, there was very little evidence of rural electrification. Oh, hold on. We saw many more tractors, I should correct that: we saw three
running and not rusted
into oblivion tractors.
The farmers we see are using equipment that is quite literally medieval - single-share plows pulled by large, cranky bovines; sweeping sickles to bring in the harvest, and twin-engine, bilateral, botanical-fired ox-carts to transport it. It’s hard to believe that this third-world level of poverty exists in the same country that’s capable of building rockets, nuclear weapons, and tall, well-appointed hotels.
But when we stop at a motorway service station for fuel - a bizarre alien spaceship-like building squatting over the empty carriageways - we do encounter a
jangmadang, or semi-official market. Here they are selling cans of knock-off Vietnamese Red Bull and Malaysian-made King Cobra™ Cola.
It reminds me of Russia right after the wall fell. Off the Trans-Siberian Railway in Krasnoyarsk, the Gateway to Eastern Siberia. You can buy Chinese hams, Chinese sodas, Chinese knock-off liquor, and those bloody delicious little bullets of Vitamin-C, Chinese mandarins.
Here, it’s similar. You can get most anything you desire, except it isn’t of Korean manufacture. That stuff is even too shitty to pawn off on tourists.
Instead, it’s knock-off Malaysian, Chinese, or Indonesian beer, wine, or soft drinks.
“Tiger-brand energy drink. Now with 40% more real tiger.” Here? I believe them.
Vodka from everywhere not known for its vodka distilling prowess. Rural hotel shops sell nastily stale crisps, gummy gummies, filling-ripping ‘chewy’ taffy or caramel, and biscuits with a severely limited choice. Rural hotels do not have full electricity so beer is warm and often tossed on the table, waiting for tourists to arrive - as is the food. We were warned to be prepared for cold rice, cold fish, cold potato – and plenty of kimchi and tofu.
Back on the road again, we’re passing small burgs that are not on any of our maps; even the ones we traded for back in the hotel that are specially marked: “For Internal Use ONLY!”.
They were amazingly the same. Clean. Bright. Uncluttered. And attended by cadres of prim, uniform-clad, though non-military people. They were all doing a day’s work keeping everything neat and clean.
There were no cars, trucks, forklifts…only rickshaws and ox-carts. However every one of these ‘towns’ were identical, and exactly, as Ivan pointed out, ‘X’ number of minutes apart.
“Watch! Is so!”, Ivan said. We passed one of these villages, and exactly 3 minutes later, an exact copy. Three minutes later? Another one. 3 more minutes? Xerox-city.
“What the fuck?” Dax asked.
“Potemkin village.” Comrade Dr. Academician Ivan replied.
A Potemkin village is any construction, literal or figurative, whose sole purpose is to provide an external façade to a country which is faring poorly. It is for making people believe that the country is faring better, although statistics and data would suggest otherwise.
“Russia pioneered the process,” Ivan noted with no small amount of pride. “During Cold War with West, entire cities were built, moved, raised, and razed. Ever hear of Krasnoyarsk-25? Atomic Research City? Supposed place of weapons study and manufacture. Huge ‘accident’. Entire city demolished, total populace relocated supposedly, after massive nuclear calamity.”
“Is that true? Cliff asks.
“No. Not at all.” Ivan smiles, “Deliberate misinformation. At least for K-25. It was diversion for actual towns where accidents; nuclear, biological, or worse, had happened. West so concerned about K-25 because it was big, near big capital city of Krasnoyarsk and suitably located out in the taiga. Easy to spot, easy to watch. Kept Western satellites busy while real towns of I-33, U-10, and AR-13 out in the forest were quietly demolished and people relocated or mass buried after some horrible, horrible accidents...”
“You think it’s the same here?” I asked Ivan.
“No, Dr. Rock”, Ivan smiled, and helped himself to my freshly constructed, but untouched, Yorshch, “This is all fake and bluster. Make West think everything is all A-OK, is that right idiom?”
“Yep.” I reply, “Precisely.”
“Make West believe all is OK and green”, as he winks at me, “And bustling and growing. Cover up what is real case here. We all see it and we see right through. Shoddy even for Asians.”
We all had to snicker and smirk as the shiny suit squad, who sat up at the front of the bus, and were not supposed to be listening; reacted like every cell in their bodies were just hit with a drop of pure lemon juice.
“Comrade Dr. Academician. Decorum, please.” I snickered.
“Oh, fuck them!”, Ivan replied, “I am old Russian. They try and pull burlap over my eyes? St. Petersburg? Moscow? Krasnoyarsk.? I’ve been there, seen them. They think this display of tawdriness…Even goofy American and Canadian can see the fakes they are. Britisher? I’m not so sure…”
“Damn, Doctor., I said to Ivan, “You’re just making friends all over the planet today.”
We all knew it was in jest; but the shiny suit squad certainly had their feathers ruffled and either didn’t care or wanted us to know we were under their observation.
“Fuck them twice”, Ivan said, “Ask them for bottle opener. I’m too lazy to search for my field jackknife.”
I hand him my pocket Leatherman and he pries the top of another bottle of ‘Budveiser’ beer.
“They can’t even make fake the name correctly”, he smirks and drains the bottle.
‘Town’ after ‘town’ and even that parade gets uninteresting. We’re headed north and finally come to a crossroads.
The bus driver, who must be a regular paranoid-maniac because he actually stopped to look for oncoming traffic, which we have seen precisely none since leaving the capital city, made a hard right. We’re heading back and up into the hills, leaving the bright lights of the big city far behind.
After an hour or so of driving, we pull off to the left-hand side of the road.
“Rock, Ivan, Cliff…holy shit, look at this!” Dax was uncharacteristically excited.
It was an open field that leads to a series of low outcrops of polychromatic, obviously sedimentary rocks. Magentas, greens, purples, rust-reds, browns, blacks, olive greens…holy shit. A real sedimentary pile.
We filed out of the bus with our field gear. The shiny suit squad started in with a bullhorn.
“You will wait for tour guides!”
“You will listen to group leaders!”
“You will not stray from the designated paths set up…”
No one heard them as the group of 11 remaining Western geoscientists were already across the highway and hieing for the exposures like outcrop-seeking multiple-warhead re-entry vehicles.
“You must wait!” we heard from exasperated voices back at the bus. “You must stop!”
“You must piss off!” Cliff said, “This is what we’ve been waiting over two weeks to see!”
“They are very angry with us”, Myung-dae the young Korean geologist said. “I find that just too bad.”
“And you are?” I asked.
Myung-dae Soo, the young Korean geologist, introduced himself.
“Well”, I said, “Welcome aboard. I’m Dr. Rock.”
“They are very, very angry”, he repeats.
“So? Are you tagging along to give them internal reports?” I asked.
“No, Doctor”, he replied, “I too am a geologist. I want to get away from those assholes and see some real rocks.”
“Who are you with?” I ask, “What group?”
“I am 5th-year student at Pyongyang College. I am not
officially here. We were told in class that you were coming. I decided to see if I could join you. This morning, I was standing by bus and they thought I was hotel worker or orderly. I was given cooler full of beer and told to find place for it on the bus. I did and after that, just stayed in the back. I am stowaway. I am ashamed, but I had to see for myself. But, I like Western field trips so far!”
“No shit? Well, then”, I said, “Double welcome aboard. None of this ‘I am ashamed’ shit. You’re a geologist, but you haven’t even worked through your first field-evening get-together with us. But this is no pleasure cruise. It’s real work, real geology, real serious science shit. You savvy?”
“Yes, sir, Doctor Rocknocker from Sultanate in the Middle East.” Myung-dae smiled.
“And you fucking stay close to me”, I smirked.
I fired a couple of
BLAAATS! from my portable air horn.
“Field Meeting! Field Meeting! Assholes & Elbows!” I called aloud.
Everyone gathered within earshot.
“OK, guys, here’s the deal. We do not know how long we’ve got here. So, let’s split up into teams. Geophysicists, go do your structural thing. Stratigraphers? Field relations. Geologists? Let’s go talk to some ronery-rooking-rocks. No offense, Mr. Myung.”
Myung-dae was laughing up a storm. He got that reference. He later told us all around the campfire he thought ‘Team America’ was a “fucking hilarious movie.”
Oh, we are going to be a
real bad influence on this poor kid.
The groups spontaneously broke up into 4 or 5 sub-groups. They headed for areas they thought were important and they were photographing, measuring, pounding on rocks, and arguing within minutes.
“No, you idiot! It’s continental. Look at those adhesion ripples.”
“The fuck you know. It’s only a little low-level eggbeater tectonics. Where the fuck would you get continental collision-size energy around here?”
“Oh, the fuck you say. It’s non-marine. Those are mud cracks. Look at the sandy aeolian infill, fer chrissake.”
Formal? Proper? Detached Doctors of Geology?
Not when you’re in the field. It all goes out the window when different opinions collide like subducting plates.
“The music of my people!” I said to Morse.
“I thought that was the ‘Safety Dance’?” he chided.
“We’re a big family. We can have more than one.” I snickered.
We’re wandering around the site, with individual purpose.
We are looking for or looking at
items of interest.
We’re hacking at the outcrops.
We’re all looking at…
things.
It’s hard to describe. Get a load of geologists or geology students out of the office, lab, or classroom; stick them out on a bare expanse of heavily weathered rock and it’s simply…numinous.
We’re rebuilding worlds here.
This rock says this.
This rock says that.
And you’re not fluent in that dialect. Here, let me interpret for you…
We’re at each other’s throats, in the academic-metaphorical sense. Tempers have been known to run hot. There has been the occasional bloody nose or rocks sailing down an outcrop without the obligate “HEADACHE!” call. Hammers and Marsh Picks have ended up swimming without the owner’s knowledge.
But once we’re back; settled in the hotel room, tavern, or around the campfire, we’re all a Band of Brothers again. It’s an odd thing to watch; as if you’re not of the clan, you’d need an interpreter. It defies all boundaries: political, sexual, educational, geographical, linguistic, social,
et cetera.
We’re all geologists first. We share the common scientific bond of Geology.
That’s why Geology is
the First Science.
Plus we tend to drink a serious fucking whole bloody awful lot.
We’ve all been on that ‘crawlin’ home puker’.
We’ve also been to the ends of the earth: the deepest depths, the highest heights, we deal with the greatest pressures, the hottest temperatures; we’ve been to the mountain, we’ve seen the elephant, and we’ve held a bear’s nose to dogshit.
We wear the scars attained in our travels like badges of honor.
We’re God-Damned
Scientists.
Back off, man.
Geologist comin’ through. Anyways, I’m looking at the bedding-plane boundaries between the purple unit and the underlying olive-green unit. The upper unit it looks, to me, continental in origin. Fluvial, perhaps. The lower unit is much finer-grained. Marine mudstone, perhaps? But what age?
The cadged Korean Geological maps are worse than useless. They never would go down to the outcrop scale. Consulting them, they don’t even note these exposures in a field sense.
Myung-dae, who is working about 35 meters down-section from me calls out, “Doctors! Sirs! Look here! I’ve found something!”
We all wander over as he is hacking away at the dusty, eroded rock. He stands and dusts off his find.
It’s a very large, nearly 1-meter diameter, coiled fossil cephalopod.
I wander over for a closer look. Dax, Cliff, Morse, and Ivan do as well.
“Blimey! Will you look at that? Outstanding, Mr. Myung!” Cliff says.
“Well, that confirms it. This layer, at least, is marine. Look at that suture pattern”, I say, dusting off an unweathered bit.
“Look at the radius of coiling.”, Cliff joins in.
We’re slowly wresting information out of this silent witness.
“Ornamentation?”, Dr. Ivan asks. “Knobs, bosses, and excrutions?” Oh, yes.”
In unison, we declare: “
Hyphoplites!”
Morse adds, “And therefore…these rocks are middle Cretaceous. Marine. Not bad…”
“Need to get some samples for geochemical analysis. Dig deep, gentlemen, we need unweathered samples for TOC (Total Organic Carbon) content.”, Dr. Erlen Meyer notes.
With that, we have a relative age of the rock, a good idea of its depositional environment, and therefore extent, ideas of field relationships, and an indication of some of its fauna.
Could it be source rock worthy?
Samples? Best get diggin’, Beaumont.
That unit is right smack in the middle of this pile of rocks. Dax and I will work up-section and Ivan and Cliff will work down-section. We’re going to see what lies above, what lies below, what trends we can discern, and develop an idea of what happened here some 100 million years ago.
This is what happens when you get geologists out in the field with the proper amounts of field gear, outcrops, and alcohol.
Overall, the deeper down-section, and therefore, earlier in geological time you go, the more marine the rocks are. Conversely, the higher you go in the column, i.e., up-section, into younger rocks, the more continental it appears.
We find fragments of marine fish fossils, sea-crocodile scutes and teeth, heaps of mosasaur coprolites, i.e., fossil shit piles, and other indications that the lower, older rocks are Lower Cretaceous ocean basin-fill.
But up higher; we find mud cracks, rain prints, land turtle shells, land-snails (
Bellerophontid gastropods), and what may actually be a fossil feather. All indications of a more continental, i.e., fluvial (river), floodplain, lacustrine (lake), and paludal (swamp) deposition.
That’s my particular bailiwick.
I’m ‘elephant walking’ along the upper outcrops looking for fossils. You basically bend over at the waist and sweep from left to right as you take exaggerated step after step, scanning the ground looking for…well…it takes years, but once you see it, you never forget it.
“Fossil sign”.
A disjunct endemism. Something not
in situ. Something
out of place. A bit of a different, out of context color. Out of context texture. Out of context size. Out of context
context.
Something that looks like it shouldn’t ought to be there.
I’m picking up 1 cm. square hunks of what look like an ordinary rock. I taste them. Well, I stick them to my tongue. If it liquefies and runs away, it’s ordinary mudstone, shale, or the like.
If it sticks…well, it might just be fossil bone.
“PTWTWOO!”
“Damn right, Rock”, Cliff says from behind me, “Fucking North Korea tastes terrible.”
“Still, it’s the best way I know to…” I paused.
“Got something?” Cliff asked.
“Look here.” I said, “Anthill. Big, nasty buggers. Look around the edges. Pieces of flat, cream-colored rock on this gaudy purple stuff. Tongue test? They stick like cockleburs. Let’s look upslope, see if there’s a drainage…”
There it was, a nice little drainage incised about 1.5 meters deep into the nearly horizontal rocks we were walking on.
“Any float?” I asked.
“Not yet,” Cliff said.
We followed the weak, little drainage that was cut into the outcrop, up another couple of meters.
There were very scrappy, very small, very scattered pieces of that same cream-colored rock. Some were ornamented with a scroll-work or some sort of striations. Most un-geological. More biological. We followed the trail, up here, around here, over there.
Cliff noticed it first, a soccer-ball sized lump of completely out-of-place crème-colored ‘rock’ working its way out by gradual erosion of the variegated pastels of the continental rocks upon which we were treading.
I got there first and began to clear the area with my Estwing.
“Careful. Careful”, Cliff admonished.
“Yeah, yeah, yeah. Mind your Mincies. [Mince pies = eyes]”, as I’m swinging away at the reluctant, reticent, rocks.
The excavation grew, slowly. From the rounded dome, we could see small sutures that had developed…
Then condyles, fenestrae, then more ‘bone’. Then a jaw, teeth, vertebrae…
“HOLY DOUBLE-DAMN SHIT!” I tootled my air horn. We needed the group to see this.
It was a skull. A dinosaur skull. A small, non-avian dinosaur skull.
Everyone has crowded around and looked at the small quarry we had just built.
“Whatcha got, Rock? Cliff?” Joon asked.
“Fuck me, but I think we’ve got us a dinosaur skull,” I said.
Professor Doctor Academician Ivan walked over and cleared the area.
As Professor Emeritus, he had pole position priority.
“I agree.” is all he said.
I cleared the area and let others take a whack at opening up the quarry.
We may have been low on power tools, but we had a surfeit of opinions.
“OK,” I said, “Let’s look at the facts…”
- Age? Cretaceous. Probably lower to lower-middle Cretaceous.
- Continental deposits. That’s very fine sand we’re hacking away. Fluvial, without a doubt. Or, possibly aeolian; there’s no such thing as a geological certainty. Dunes? Ephemeral creeks? Low floodplain? Geo-talk… .
- Small size. Potentially a juvenile?
- Nope. Not a juvie. Sutures are closed, fused. This is, well was, an adult; perhaps a subadult, given its size.
- In situ? In place? Or washed in?
Hard to tell when all you’ve exposed is half the critter’s brain box.
“Look at that!” Myung-dae exclaimed, “Squamosal bones and the inner parietals…temporal fenestrae. It had a frill; a small one.”
“OK,”, I said, looking closely at the exposed scrappy remains, “Fucking-A Bubba. Nailed it.” I said, giving him the thumbs up.
“Ceratopsian. Look at those greens-grinder molars. There’s some small osteoderms on the skull; knobby old bastard. Early critter.” I continued.
Others looked around and confirmed my observations.
“Reminds me of
Protoceratops from when I was back in Mongolia,” I said.
Dax chimed in with, “Looks something like
Psittacosaurus from back in the Cretaceous Belly River of Canada.”
Drs. Ivan and Morse agree. “Most assuredly. It is definitely proto-ceratopsian. Young adult, as Dr. Rock notes by the cranial sutures. Do they have a record of proto-ceratopsians here?”
Myung-dae replies, “I have read reports of Korean proto-ceratopsian found in South Korea. Not long ago, 2019, it is called…ah…
Auroraceratops. It is a genus of bipedal basal neo-ceratopsian dinosaur.”
“Bipedal?” I query. “Well, there’s a fine how do you do. All the proto-ceratopsians I’ve known were obligate quadrupeds.”
“Well”, Ivan, Dax, Cliff, and Morse agree, “That should give the shiny suit squad something to report. That’ll keep them the hell out of our hair for a while.”
We photograph each step as we excavate the critter. It’s more or less
in situ, buried where it fell. Probably killed by a sand slip off a dune, or a river sandbar slip and burial. It’s not complete, but we do have the skull and a good portion of the post-cranial elements to about just before the pelvis. A good pectoral girdle, skull, jaw, frill, forelimbs, forefeet…easily half-a cute little herbivorous dinosaur. About the size of a smallish Highland Coo or large Great Dane.
We flag it with the team particulars, it’s GPS position, and carefully rebury the animal. We don’t have any of the equipment nor time to excavate it properly, but we can conserve it. Of course, we’ll be informing the proper authorities of our discovery.
I have an absolutely ancient Polaroid instant camera. Before re-internment, I take several pictures of our “
Koreasaurus”, as we’ve dubbed the animal, with items for scale; like a hammer, cigar, and oddly enough, a photographic scale. Then I get a photo of the whole crew standing around, drinking warm beers from their individual day packs, smiling about the find ‘they‘ made.
We hear the melodious tootle of the bus’s horns. We make sure to pack out all our trash and wander back to our terrestrial transport.
“You were gone too long!” the chief shiny suited character goes all ballistic on me.
“Watch yourself, Herr Mac.”, I calmly said, “You’re going to burn your nose on my cigar.”
“You left without your handlers…err…guides!” he fumed.
“Hey, Scooter. Cool out. We’re geologists. We never get lost.” I said.
It sometimes just takes us longer to get back than it took us to leave…
“Your impertinence will be reported.” He smoldered.
“Report this, Mother Chuckler”, I observed and held out the pictures of our newly discovered
Koreasaurus.
“Show those photos to
your handlers,” I said in a mocking tone. “We found a brand new species of God-damned dinosaur for you geezers. It took us less than two hours. You can spin it that it’s a new, never-before-seen species of very specialized dinosaur found right here in beautiful Korea del Norte. Be quite the scientific coup, don’t you think? Trust us. We won’t say anything.”
He immediately shut up and went into conference with the rest of the shiny suit squad.
“Doctor”, one of the clan covert asked, “This is a new dinosaur?”
I had a thunderbolt of an idea.
“Oh! Yes, it is. I’d stake my reputation on it. You’ve had no concerted search here for the beasts and well, with the normalizing of relations between your country and the world, it allowed your specialists to perform real science. In fact, on the bus is the young North Korean geoscientist who made the discovery.” I said. “Give me a minute. I’ll go and get him. I think he was off taking a shi…ah, using the lavatory. Just give me a minute.”
I did have an idea. A wonderful idea. A wonderfully evil idea.
Back on the bus, I ordered the doors closed.
“Gentlemen! Ears and eyes! Please.” I said loudly.
Continuing…
“The shiny suits have their knickers all a-twist because we don’t want to listen to them; the assholes. Fuck that. I’ve got an idea. Let’s make our young acolyte here, Mr. Myung-dae Soo, a national hero. He would probably get his ass in a crack for sneaking on board the Western bus today the way he did. Well, double fuck that. Let’s all say
he found the dinosaur. Let him take the glory for the homeland. No one else will ever need to know.” I said smiling.
“Fuck Yeah! You bet! Замечательное! Ihmeellisiä! Maravilhoso! Geweldig!”
Good to know we’re all on the same page. Geologists. You can always count on them…
“Mr. Myung-dae Soo? Front and center. Time to go and become ‘Hero of Best Korea’.” I smiled.
He was absolutely terrified.
“Doctor…I …don't…wait…no…” he stammered.
Cliff, Dax, Ivan, and I trotted him out to confront the shiny suit squad.
“Don’t worry, Myung. We’ve got your back. Trust us.” I said in a low conspiratorial tone.
The shiny suit squad turned as one and gave Mr. Myung the Stink Eye treatment.
“Here you go. The man of the hour. Mr. Myung-Dae Soo, young geologist and up and coming paleontologist.” I say loudly and with the utmost honor.
They look at him and the Korean erupts in rapid-fire staccato bursts.
Cliff just wanders in and interjects, “Yes. Righto. Top form. Found the float. Tracked down that dino like he was on safari. Highest marks. Good man!”
Dax adds more fuel to the fire. “Like he knew where to go, knew where to look. He’s a natural.”
Dr. Academician Ivan blustered forth: “Excellent scholar. Excellent field man. Banner geologist.”
I couldn’t have added more. The shiny suit squad was gobsmacked.
I asked Myung-dae what they were saying.
“They were talking about reprisals. Reporting to authorities. Then, they stopped. You have them completely confounded.” He said.
“How so?” I asked, quietly.
“Between an international incident where we don’t listen to our handlers and this potential important scientific discovery.” Mr. Myung-dae reported, trying hard to parse the evolving situation.
“Yes”, I added to Ivan’s bluster.
To the shiny suits: “I’ve worked as visiting Dinosaurian Vertebrate Paleontology Curator at all the major American museums. This is a find quite unlike anything known. It is a watershed discovery. It will help unravel the evolution and distribution of the clan
Dinosauria for the whole Korean Peninsula. Perhaps, even with international impact on the recent finds in China.”
I laid it on with a trowel.
I hit all the buzzwords.
“Yes. Yes, perhaps.”, the head shiny-suiter said. “I will report this bit of very good news to the proper authorities. Myung-dae, with us. We require more information.”
“Ah, we’d prefer him to ride in back with us if you don’t mind. Scientific courtesy, old man. He needs to be classically de-interviewed after such a find.” I insisted, making certain I stand as tall, wide, and menacing as possible while smiling like a damned Cheshire cat, one smoking a very large cigar.
“Very well. We are not far from our evening stop. We can talk later.” He agreed.
We all moseyed, laughing silently, back to the bus; literally supporting our young hero Mr. Myung-dae as he seemed to have gone all wobbly of late.
Myung-dae was ashen-white. He looked like he had just given birth to a basketball. He was visibly shaking.
We get on the bus and I whip up a stout Yorshch for the young hero of the hour.
“Here! This is for you. If you’re going to be a world-class geologist, you’d damn sure better start acting like one.” I smile broadly.
There were hoots, cheers, and cat-calls.
Beers were popped, bottles uncorked; cigars, cigarettes, and pipes lit.
“Damn Skippy!” some anonymous reveler added.
Myung-dae slurped a good half the drink. I offered him a cigar. He stopped shaking enough to accept the novel offer.
Remember “crawlin’ home puker”? He’s taken his first step into a larger world.
OK, just to recap. Here are the
dramatis personae left on the bus…
Bus driver (Kim) and his relief (Won).
My team and I. That’s 11 Western geoscientists: Morse, Cliff, Volna, Ack, Viv, Graco, Erlen, Dr. Academician Ivan, Joon, Dax, and myself.
Then there are our guides: Yuk, No, Man, and Kong.
Our stowaway hero geologist-in-training: Myung-dae Soo, aka, “Mung”.
And the four members of the shiny suit clan: Pak, Mak, Tak, and Jak. At least, that’s the names we used when we addressed them.
The bus was rumbling down the deserted highway. We were headed more or less due east, passing the occasional Potemkin Village. They knew we cracked their code long ago, so they didn’t bother with darkening the windows any longer.
We are passing a series of highway road cut outcrops. We’re only going approximately 35 or 40 miles per hour. Suddenly, Morse jumps out of his seat and runs up to the driver.
“STOP! STOP! Back up! We almost missed it!” he barks in heavily Russian inflected English.
The driver, shaken to the core, just slams on the brakes. The bus grinds to a stop. Good thing there’s no traffic out here.
Or anywhere else, for that matter.
Jak of the suit clan jumps up and asks “What is the problem?”
“How could you miss that?” Morse shouts. “Huge fault. Mineralization. I saw that from a glimpse. We must return to investigate.”
“Is not possible. We have appointment at the hotel.” Jak replies.
“Fuck that!”, Morse shouts. I guess he’s just really into faults…
I wander up and try to defuse the situation.
“OK, guys, cool out. Let’s be reasonable. Do it our way. Go back to that road cut. We spend a half-hour there then we go on to the hotel. The hotel will still be there when we arrive, won’t it? Even if we’re a bit late?” I ask.
Jak looks to Pak, who converses with Mak and Tak. They know they’re outgunned.
The driver shifts the bus into reverse and we
back down the luckily deserted highway over a mile to the outcrop in question.
We had to admit, it was a mother beautiful normal fault. In perfect, textbook cross-section.
Morse and Joon were on it like white on rice; given the mineralization along the fault plane. All sorts of implications for the thermal and geological history of the area. But with just one exposure like this, more or less just a real interesting geo-oddity.
We spent precisely 30 minutes at the exposure, and when our handlers requested we re-board and head to the motel, we complied like nice, normal sort of folks.
I believe the appropriate maxim here is: “Lull them into a false sense of security…”
Once more down the road we travel. Beers popped, bottles uncorked; you know, the usual.
Forty-five minutes later, we pull into, I kid you not, a replica US of A 1950s
Motor-Inn.
“Mr. Myung”, I ask, “What the hell is this?”
To be continued… submitted by The horrific Las Vegas massacre at the start of October and the more recent massacre at the First Baptist Church in Sutherland Springs, Texas has rekindled the debate about what can be done to prevent the nightmare of recurring mass shootings. There have been renewed calls from liberal politicians for gun control measures. Even the National Rifle Association recently agreed that there should be some limits placed on the availability of “bump stocks” which allowed Stephen Paddock to turn his weapons into killing machines spewing hundreds of rounds of ammunition over the course of a few minutes into the concert crowd across the street from the Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino.
But while mass shootings focus public attention, the truth is that they only account for a fraction of the total number of people killed by guns in the U.S. One recent report suggested that more Americans have died due to gun violence since 1968 than in all the wars engaged in by the U.S. in its entire history.
The question we posed in the document is whether the situation where society is awash in weapons in the interests of the working class. We elaborate why, as socialists, we reject both the “gun rights” narrative of the right as well as the liberal gun control narrative.
We must also note though that despite numerous horrific mass shootings, overall support for gun control measures has not grown over the last five years although there are increases in support for some measures in the wake of particularly horrific mass shootings. For example, 64% told Politico/Morning Consult in October that they support tightening gun regulation, a 3% increase. But the picture becomes much less clear when you look at specific measures
The longer term trend over the past 20 years is actually away from support for tougher gun control measures. For example, according to Gallup the support for a ban on assault rifles went down from 46% in December 2012 to 36% in October 2016. In 1996, by contrast, there was 57% support for a ban.
The gun control measure with overwhelming support is universal background checks including for private sales and sales at gun shows. There is also strong support for preventing people with mental health issues and those on government screening lists from buying weapons as well as for a centralized national database for gun sales.
Gun rights have become a key issue in the country’s deepening political polarization. It is also clear that the liberal arguments for more sweeping gun control measures have failed to convince broad swathes of the population. The NRA tragically has clearly had some success arguing in sections of the population that the way to combat gun violence in society is for the “good guys” to be armed to the teeth. This points all the more to the left needing to articulate an independent position on how to address the epidemic levels of violence in our society.
Is Gun Control the Solution to Gun Violence? A Socialist Analysis (2012)
Horror in Newtown
The massacre of 20 students and 7 adults in a Newtown, Connecticut school in December 2012 by a mentally disturbed young man has reignited the debate on gun control in the U.S. In mid-January, the Obama administration announced its support for a series of legislative measures that would among other things mandate background checks on all gun sales; ban the sale of “military style” semiautomatic weapons and limit ammunition magazines to a maximum of 10 rounds. This proposal to impose limited measures of gun control at the federal level has led to a furious response from the right, led by the National Rifle Association (NRA). However, polls indicate that there is a significant shift in popular sentiment toward supporting such measures.
Nevertheless the attempt to strengthen gun regulation at the federal level is for now dead in the water after even the background check measure which polls say is supported by nearly 90% of the public failed to get the 60 votes required to prevent a filibuster in the Senate. It should be stressed that this outcome does not mean the debate on gun control is over. Measures have been brought forward at state level and other massacres, unfortunately inevitable, will revive the issue. It is also clear that a significant section of the elite for their own reasons want to bring the gun lobby to heel.
As a Marxist organization with an increasing public profile we need to have a clear position in this public debate. We must look at the historical context of the right to bear arms and gun control both in the U.S. and internationally. We need to analyze the complex causes of the massive level of gun violence that exists in American society and put forward socialist solutions. We must look dispassionately at the real agenda of both the bourgeois forces pushing for gun control and those opposing it.
Perhaps most importantly, we must ask whether the arming of large sections of the American population in the concrete circumstances of the early 21st century and given the reactionary individualist ideology that promotes this is really in the interests of the working class. On the other hand, how do we address the ever increasing powers of the state which clearly do pose a threat to any section of American society that would resist the dictates of the ruling class? These are complex issues which cannot be summarized in a few glib phrases.
Historical Context
The Second Amendment to the Constitution reads as follows: “A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.” The context of the amendment in 1791 was the recent Revolutionary War and the belief that the struggle against the British crown was probably not over – this was confirmed by the War of 1812 when the British burned Washington DC to the ground. There was strong opposition to the idea of a standing army based on historical experience in Europe and recent experience with the British Army. Standing armies were correctly seen as the tools of tyrannical regimes.
As a result, in the early American republic, a big section of the white male population was armed for military reasons first and foremost. Of course there was no question, as far as the elite was concerned, of allowing black slaves or even free blacks to have guns. Many states required gun owners to register their weapons and prohibited carrying concealed weapons.
Broadly speaking, the Second Amendment and the Bill of Rights of which it is part, represents part of the progressive legacy of the American Revolution. But as capitalism developed, the issue of weapons and gun control became inseparable from the class struggle between labor and capital and the desire of the ruling class to maintain the subjugation of the African American population.
There have been repeated horrific massacres in U.S. history of working people fighting for their rights. In 1914 during a miners’ strike in Colorado, 21 men, women, and children were killed in Ludlow by machine gun fire from the state militia. In 1937 during a peaceful protest of striking Republic Steel workers and their families in South Chicago, the police opened fire. Ten workers were shot dead and another 40 workers were wounded by gunfire, all of them shot in the back.
On the other side, striking workers resisting attacks from company goons and/or the state during strikes have on numerous occasions armed themselves for self-defense. In the 1880s Chicago’s militant German-centered labor movement went as far as creating a workers’ militia. This is not just a question of the dim and distant past. As recently as the 1970s, some miners pickets armed themselves in self-defense during wildcat UMWA strikes.
Likewise in the mid-1960s during the civil rights movement, the armed Deacons for Defense and Justice were formed by black veterans to protect civil rights activists against attacks by the Klan and state forces. The Deacons were very effective and played an important adjunct role to the mass protests at the heart of that struggle.
The Black Panther Party for Self Defense continued this tradition although their experience also shows the life and death consequences of an “ultra-left” approach to this question. Initially some of the actions the Panthers took were effective in exposing police violence, giving people confidence to stand up and putting a check on the state. On a general political level the Panthers were correct to argue a revolutionary case, i.e. against pacifism, and for the right to self-defense, and indeed to take concrete defensive action that was understandable to broader (not yet revolutionary) layers of the black community and the working class – such as practical measures to defend against violent attacks by racist forces.
However, the brandishing of weapons, while being attractive to a minority of revolutionary black youth, was a serious mistake. It contributed to keeping the Panthers isolated from the broader black working class, which sympathized with them but was not prepared to join an explicitly armed revolutionary organization, and played into the hands of the capitalist state which succeeded in brutally crushing them.
Huey Newton, Bobby Seale, and the Panther leadership eventually recognized this. As Huey Newton says in his book Revolutionary Suicide “We soon discovered that weapons and uniforms set us apart from the community. We were looked upon as an ad hoc military group, acting outside the community fabric and too radical to be a part of it. Perhaps some of our tactics at the time were extreme; perhaps we placed too much emphasis on military action.”
Even in an actual revolutionary situation, the key issue is not military but political mobilization of the working class and the oppressed on the basis of defensive and democratic appeals to oppose and defeat any violent efforts of the small ruling elite to subvert the will of the majority. This was precisely what the Bolsheviks did in October 1917, the most democratic revolution in history in which there was extremely little violence. The Bolsheviks also made a class appeal to the ranks of the Tsarist army thereby largely neutralizing the old state forces as a weapon for the autocratic regime.
Of course history is replete with negative examples where the working class lacked a leadership sufficiently determined to face down the threat of the old order to unleash counterrevolutionary violence. Adventurist attempts by revolutionaries to prematurely “seize power” have also led to bloody defeats for working people.
The ruling class always tries to portray its opponents as violent. It is the task of Marxists to demonstrate to the mass of the population that the central source of violence in modern society is capitalism and the capitalist elite. This is particularly true in the United States whose ruling class has waged and is still waging a whole series of bloody imperialist adventures around the world to defend the rule of profit.
This is the context in which we must look at gun control. Attempts at gun control have been an ongoing feature of U.S. and other capitalist societies. In Europe, the ruling class made concerted efforts to disarm revolutionary and working class forces in the wake of the revolutionary upheavals of 1848. In general, whatever the reasons given at the time, most attempts at gun control have been at least partly motivated by the desire of the ruling class to disarm its potential opponents, first and foremost the working class. For example, the Mulford Act passed by the California legislature in 1967 which banned the public carrying of a loaded firearm was a direct response to the Black Panthers. The federal Gun Control Act of 1968 was also partly motivated by fear of an armed black population especially in the wake of the 1967 urban upheavals.
Marxists have historically opposed such attempts to try to enforce the bourgeoisie’s desire for a monopoly of force. We do not accept the idea that only the state should be armed as a “neutral” arbiter between the classes. All historical experience shows that the state’s armed bodies are not neutral but rather serve the interests of the ruling class.
How the debate on gun rights changed
For much of the 20th century, federal gun control measures had bipartisan support. In the wake of the defeat of the radical wing of the civil rights movement, the collapse of Stalinism, and the drastic weakening of the labor movement and any real internal challenges to the power of U.S. capitalism, the debate on weapons within the ruling class shifted away from trying to disarm its potential adversaries.
This shift could already be seen during the Reagan administration, with the development of the New Right which took the position that any restrictions on the “right to bear arms” were an attack on the Second Amendment. This was part of a broader process underway in the Republican Party with a turn towards populist and religious appeals. The issue of gun ownership was tied to right-wing populism which used coded racism about crime to mobilize sections of the white working and middle class. This was part of providing a broader political and electoral base for an increasingly aggressive neoliberal corporate agenda.
The NRA wielded increasing power. Despite suffering a setback in the banning of the sales of assault rifles from 1994-2004, their influence continued to grow. At state and local level, they have had a string of successful drives to remove restrictions on the “right” to carry concealed weapons. [According to David Frum, writing in The Atlantic, “Since Newtown, more than two dozen states have expanded the right to carry into previously unknown places: bars, churches, schools, college campuses, and so on” (10/3/2017)]. While we would not in general base ourselves on the argument of what the Constitutional “founders” had in mind, let us be clear that the members of Congress who voted for the Bill of Rights in 1789 would not have supported the right to carry concealed weapons into taverns!
What is behind the rise of the NRA and the drive to systematically repeal gun control measures? One part is the NRA’s role as mouthpiece for the incredibly profitable gun industry whose sales in 2012 are estimated to have been $11.7 billion and whose profits amounted to $993 million (Washington Post, 12/19/2012) [by 2015 revenue had reached $13.5 billion and profits stood at $1.5 billion]. In the wake of the Newtown massacre, it was revealed that Cerberus Capital, a major Wall Street private equity firm, owned the Freedom Group, makers of the legally owned Bushmaster AR-15 that was used by Adam Lanza. Those making big money off of the sale of guns are not just the manufacturers but retailers like Walmart which is now the biggest seller of firearms and ammunition in America (The Nation, 1/7-14/2013).
But the NRA is also driven by a right-wing libertarian ideology that promotes a particularly reactionary version of individualism. This point of view overlaps with the idea that an armed (white) citizenry is needed to defend the constitution against a new tyranny. Of course it is true that the state has significantly increased its powers in the past historical period, using first the “war on drugs” and then the “war against terrorism” as excuses for increasing surveillance and largely shredding Fourth Amendment protections against “unreasonable search and seizure.”
It is no accident that gun sales have accelerated since Obama came into office in 2008 and have reportedly skyrocketed since his announcement in the wake of Newtown that he would make gun control a priority. Obama’s reelection margin as we have noted was significant but hardly overwhelming. And within the vote for Romney there is a significant section that has been influenced by the fantasies of the far right, specifically the view that Obama is some sort of anti-American Muslim/socialist tyrant. According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, right-wing militia groups and other right wing extremist groups have been growing since 2008 although for the time being none of them has a mass audience. The Tea Party was a vehicle for this development but they were set back after 2011.
In reality one of the main right wing groups with a mass base is the NRA itself – as of 2010 it claimed 4.3 million members [5 million as of 2017]. Currently it is used in the interests of the gun industry and to mobilize for “gun rights” as one of several issues that provide cover for the right wing of corporate America to pursue its anti-working class agenda (along with opposition to abortion, immigration, etc.). But we should be clear that while the NRA and its backers currently promote the idea of individually armed citizens and not militias, at another stage a significant part of their heavily armed base could be turned into an overtly counterrevolutionary force to terrorize left-wing activists, workers in struggle, people of color, immigrants, and LGBT people as an auxiliary force to the capitalist state.
Gun violence in the U.S. today
We also need to look at the specific features and causes of the extremely high level of gun violence in U.S. society.
There are an estimated 300 million privately owned weapons in the U.S. The U.S. is far and away the most violent of the wealthy capitalist societies. In 2004, there were 5.5 homicides for every 100,000 persons, roughly three times as high as Canada (1.9) and six times as high as Germany. To quote Occupy the NRA, an OWS offshoot, “The U.S. has 5% of the world’s population but accounts for half of all firearms worldwide and 80% of gun deaths in the 23 richest countries.”
Nevertheless we also need to recognize that the homicide level declined sharply in the 1990s. As of 2009 the homicide rate was at its lowest level since 1964 and half of what it was at the start of the 1980s. While this is a significant fact, the level of violent death is still staggering. In 2010, there were 14,748 homicides. 67.5% of these killings involved a gun (“Crime in The United States 2010, FBI Statistics” ).
The homicide rate nearly doubled from the mid 1960s to the late 1970s. In 1980, it peaked at 10.2 per 100,000 population and subsequently fell off to 7.9 per 100,000 in 1984. It rose again in the late 1980’s and early 1990’s to another peak in 1991 of 9.8 per 100,000. From 1992 to 2000, the rate declined sharply. (Bureau of Justice Statistics) [in the past few years, the number of homicides has been creeping upward nationally, and dramatically in some cities like Chicago].
And while homicide levels have declined to the level of the early 1960s, violent crime overall (much of it involving guns) remains at a much higher level than it was 50 years ago (FBI Uniform Crime Reports).
While media attention has focused on massacres from Virginia Tech to Aurora, Colorado, gun violence is concentrated in poor neighborhoods in big cities and most of the victims are poor people of color. Perhaps the most extreme example is New Orleans where the 2004 homicide rate was 52 per 100,000, ten times the national average.
Chicago has recently experienced a spike in gun violence. But as The New York Times noted, more than 80 percent of the Chicago’s 500+ homicides in 2012 took place in only about half of the city’s 23 police districts, largely on the city’s South and West Sides (1/3/2013).
Opponents of gun control will argue that the sharp decline of homicides shows that the prevalence of gun ownership and lack of much regulation does not mean that violence will increase. On the other hand, proponents of gun control like New York City’s former Mayor Mike Bloomberg will cite the fact that homicides in NYC are at a 50 year low [334 in 2016 compared to a high of 2,245 in 1989] as proof of the effectiveness of aggressive policing policies and the drive to get illegal guns off the street. In reality in many big cities there is much tighter gun control than in suburbs and rural areas. Massive police presence in poor communities has undoubtedly had some effect but at the cost of creating mini-police states where the police systematically harass young men and a massive prison gulag.
But there are clearly other reasons for the decline in homicide including the end of the crack epidemic of the 1980s. A more recent factor is the improvement in emergency medicine which improves the survival chances of people who have been shot. A Wall Street Journal (12/8/12) article on this subject is worth quoting at length because of its emphasis on the key point – gun violence and overall violence remain at epidemic levels:
“The number of U.S. homicides has been falling for two decades, but America has become no less violent.
“Crime experts who attribute the drop in killings to better policing or an aging population fail to square the image of a more tranquil nation with this statistic: The reported number of people treated for gunshot attacks from 2001 to 2011 has grown by nearly half. Improved medical care doesn’t account for the entire decline in homicides but experts say it is a major factor.
“Emergency-room physicians who treat victims of gunshot and knife attacks say more people survive because of the spread of hospital trauma centers—which specialize in treating severe injuries—the increased use of helicopters to ferry patients, better training of first-responders and lessons gleaned from the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan.”
Why is American Society So Violent?
There is no single reason for the level of violence in society. Clearly, the fact that the U.S. is one of the most – if not the most – unequal of the Advanced Capitalist Countries (ACCs) is very relevant. For example the U.S. has a higher poverty rate (17.2% in late 2000s) compared with 22 other OECD countries (Economic Policy Institute, based on OECD Stat Extracts). As documented in The Spirit Level: Why Equality is Better for Everyone by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett, the level of inequality in a society contributes directly to the level of alienation. But of course massive inequality is the result of the particular development of U.S. capitalism. U.S. society has also been steeped in violence from its birth. One element of this historical legacy was that the U.S. was a frontier society where the violent campaign to wrest land from Native Americans lasted well into the 19th century. This involved the arming of a significant section of the population.
Even more important is the legacy of chattel slavery and the ongoing violent repression of African American communities to the present day. The “war on drugs” beginning in the 1970s was an attempt to criminalize and suppress black youth whom the state saw as the most radical section of society, as well as a political/electoral strategy to make a coded appeal to racism under new conditions with the end of legal segregation. This has led the U.S. to have the highest level of incarceration in the world – which in itself is a huge source of violence. Hundreds of thousands of nonviolent drug offenders enter the extremely violent prison system and come out with far fewer rights and far more alienated from society than when they entered.
In many of the most depressed communities in the U.S. there exists a toxic combination of systemic poverty, massive alienation, and ferocious state repression. Violence is the inevitable result. Does the availability of weapons contribute to the level of violence? Undoubtedly but it is not the central cause.
And while the dynamic is not the same in more affluent communities like Newtown, it is undoubtedly the case that stress because of economic uncertainty and general social alienation are pervasive in American society. It can be argued that alienation for some young people in some suburbs may be even worse due to the lack of recreation facilities, areas to socialize, etc. An author of a study of “rampage shootings” points out that “There has been only one example of a rampage school shooting in an urban setting since 1970” (The Nation, 12/19/2012).
Added to this is the severely ineffective mental health system, an inevitable result of for-profit medicine and the cuts in funding for mental health and social services. These factors have all contributed to the spate of massacres.
U.S. imperialism’s willingness to unleash massive violence around the world also directly contributes to the violence within the U.S. itself. In a direct sense it has led to a massive expansion of the state justified by the “war on terror.” Obama and other capitalist politicians repeatedly call to “end the violence” inside America while using drones and state assassination abroad and militarizing the police domestically.
But there are other indirect effects as well. As Marxists point out, cultural production inevitably reflects the dominant (ruling class) values of society. Given the commitment of the U.S. ruling class to endless violence against its perceived enemies it is not surprising to see this reflected in movies, videogames, and music which idealize a macho, gun toting cult of death. The Current Debate on Gun Control
After years in which gun control measures especially at the federal level were seen by liberals as politically unfeasible because of the strength of the NRA, the aftermath of the Newtown massacre caused the issue to return to center stage. Obama decided to make this one of the central issues of his second term alongside immigration reform, fiscal “reform,” and climate change.
The debate on gun control as played out in the capitalist media features only two sides: on the one hand high profile Democrats, big city mayors and a section of the bourgeois who have decided that it is time to take on the NRA and on the other side right wing Republicans, backed up by the NRA who are digging in to oppose almost any gun control measures.
Our starting point in formulating our position should be sympathy with the understandable desire of most ordinary people to do something about gun violence, particularly to stop the horrific string of massacres. We completely rejected the NRA’s proposal that the appropriate response to Newtown was to put an armed police officer in every school in the country – right wingers have even raised the idea of allowing teachers to carry concealed weapons in the classroom and incredibly South Dakota passed a law to allow this! Their argument that the only way to stop “bad guys with guns” is to have more “good guys with guns” on the streets is a recipe for even more violence in society not less.
While we strongly believe in the right of working people, racial minorities, and the oppressed to defend themselves against the violence of the bosses, the state or reactionary groups, the current level of gun violence in the U.S. is actually an obstacle to the development of social struggle. While defending our general theoretical position on the state – and not making any concession to liberal ideas that the state is neutral we need to examine the question concretely under the current conditions, balance of forces, and consciousness. In the situation prevailing in the U.S. today, does the current regime of widespread access to guns actually help strengthen the position of the working class?
The reality is that it does not, and in fact the past 30 years – when the tendency has been for gun control to be relaxed – has seen a major offensive by big business, an undermining of democratic rights, and the strengthening of the repressive powers of the state. The dominant forces arguing against gun control promote a right-wing, individualist, racist, and sexist ideology that weakens the working class.
Furthermore the threat of violence, ranging from the everyday threat of shootings in many communities up to and including the threat of terrorist attacks, has given the state ready-made excuses to ramp up its powers of repression. That does not mean we should adopt the position of the liberal gun-control advocates or echo the view that guns are the main problem in society. We need to put forward an independent, working-class position.
We reject the NRA argument that the type of limited gun control measures proposed by Obama are the beginning of the end of the Second Amendment or the right to bear arms. There is no serious proposal being put forward to try to disarm or partially disarm the population as a whole. The only areas where there are forcible attempts by the police to disarm people are public housing projects in the inner cities.
But opposing the attempt of the NRA to whip up collective paranoia is not sufficient. We also need to be clear that there are many legitimate reasons why people want to own guns. In rural culture, guns are widely used for hunting, dealing with predators, and entertainment. This does not inevitably lead to massive levels of violence. Likewise many suburban and urban dwellers understandably want to own a gun for protection. This is often particularly the case in areas where gun violence is endemic. It is not surprising that many women want to own a gun for self-defense. Socialists are not pacifists and we do not criticize ordinary people for owning a gun or wanting to.
But the question which most ordinary people want answered now is how to significantly reduce the violence. The elite advocates of gun control do not have a serious answer to this question. Even if all the measures proposed by the Obama administration were passed into law the history of recent gun control measures suggests that the extremely powerful gun industry will find ways around them. This is what happened to the 1994 “ban” on assault weapons.
The other fundamental reason that the ruling-class gun-control lobby can’t show a way to seriously reduce violence is that, as has already been pointed out, the central source of violence in society is capitalism itself including the capitalist state.
Serious measures to reduce violence would include ending the “war on drugs” and decriminalizing most or all drugs. (It should be stressed that decriminalization is not the same as legalization. Essentially it means trying to treat drug addiction as a public health problem first and foremost.) Releasing the hundreds of thousands of nonviolent drug offenders from prison and the dismantling of the bloated and racist criminal injustice system would do more to reduce violence than any gun control measure.
We also advocate taking serious measures against the massively profitable gun industry such as banning the sales of weapons by these companies (or the government) to various right-wing regimes around the world. We also are for ending the military adventures of U.S. imperialism abroad and massively reducing the scale of the military and the Pentagon budget. The resources freed up could be used to create jobs and improve education, health care (including mental health), and social services and thereby contribute to reducing violence abroad and at home. Finally we are for repealing the Patriot Act and other legislation that has legalized a massive security state that has done precious little to improve the safety of ordinary people but has certainly contributed to a big increase in state violence.
Simply enacting a massive jobs program, a $15 an hour federal minimum wage and other anti-poverty measures, and a single-payer, socialized health-care system which prioritizes mental health care would be huge steps forward in creating a saner, less violent society. We advocate all measures that would reduce the level of inequality in society and that would dismantle institutional racism, but we stress that only by uprooting capitalism can we create a just, egalitarian society. However, even limited reforms quite quickly come up against the limits of this diseased and decaying system.
Again it should be stressed that these measures we are proposing would be far more effective in reducing gun violence than “gun control” which is likely to be very ineffective. But in the context of our wider aim of strengthening the struggle of working people, we support some gun control measures including mandating background checks on all gun sales, banning the sale of “military style” semi-automatic weapons, and reducing the number of rounds in ammunition magazines on the basis that they would act to reduce the level of violence even if only to a limited degree.
However, we have reservations about how background checks proposals are often written. Banning anyone with a conviction from buying a gun in practice means excluding a significant section of the black working class. At the very least, there should be an appeal process built into background checks.
Again we are in no way saying that many ordinary people do not have entirely legitimate reasons for owning or wanting to own weapons but we do not see the present situation as being in the interests of the working class. Not all issues have a simple yes or no answer. Our position embodies a certain contradiction but really it is reality which is full of impossible contradictions as long as we continue to operate within a capitalist framework.
https://web.archive.org/web/20171210101637/https://www.socialistalternative.org/2017/12/05/gun-control-solution-gun-violence-socialist-analysis/ submitted by GET IN TOUCH Hotel (702)-796-7111 Reservations (866)-791-7626 Spa (702)-797-8030 9777 Las Vegas Blvd South Las Vegas, NV 89183 Open in Google Maps Reopening Information At Wrest Point, every effort is made to make guests feel comfortable. To do so, the hotel provides the best in services and amenities. While lodging at this wonderful property, guests can enjoy 24-hour room service, free Wi-Fi in all rooms, 24-hour security, daily housekeeping, gift/souvenir shop. For accommodation in an amazing location, great service and quality food and wine, look no further than Wrest Point. Choose from 4 Star Water Edge Rooms or superb 4 ½ star Room and Suites in the famous Wrest Point Tower that capture stunning views of the river, majestic Mount Wellington, Hobart city and surrounds. Wrest Point Hobart - Water Front Entertainment Complex, Accommodation, Restaurants, Bars, Casino, Live Entertainment, Conferencing and Event Facilities. Wrest Point Tasmania details section: This casino is found in Hobart, Tasmania. Wrest Point Tasmania features 739 slot machines and 25 table games for you to enjoy. WCD also books casino hotel reservations in Hobart. You can browse our images of Wrest Point Tasmania or see the latest news headlines about Wrest Point Tasmania on our site. We also have a message forum just for Wrest Point Tasmania. At Wrest Point, guests can enjoy spectacular views of the River Derwent, Mount Wellington and Hobart CBD (Central Business District). An indoor heated pool, a choice of on-site restaurants and free in-room WiFi are featured. Book a summer of fun at Wrest Point Hotel and Casino and enjoy all the experiences we have for you without spending… Find out more Special Offer Stay 2 and Save 20% Save 20% when booking two nights. Find out more Special Offer Advance Purchase Book 30 Days in advance, 10% off. Find out more At Wrest Point, guests can enjoy spectacular views of the River Derwent, Mount Wellington and Hobart CBD (Central Business District). An indoor heated pool, a choice of on-site restaurants and free in-room WiFi are featured. You can work-out in the indoor health club, which offers exercise equipment, a sauna and a spa. Wrest Point Hotel Casino main section: This casino is located in Hobart, Tasmania. Wrest Point Hotel Casino has a total of 650 slot machines and 23 table games for you to enjoy. World Casino Directory also books casino hotel reservations in Hobart. You'll also find images of Wrest Point Hotel Casino or read recent headlines about Wrest Point Hotel Casino on our site. Wrest Point: Tower room- Wrest point Casino - See 2,237 traveler reviews, 544 candid photos, and great deals for Wrest Point at Tripadvisor.
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