Ypsilanti Vampire May Day by PETER LINEBAUGH
Dracula
On May Day sometime in the 1890s, an ordinary Englishman boarded a train in Munich. His destination was a castle in Transylvania, a country wedged between the Danubian Provinces of Moldavia and Wallachia. It was a dark and stormy night when he arrived. “Do you not know that tonight, when the clock strikes midnight, all the evil things of the world will have full sway?” asked the landlady of a nearby hotel, and she implored him to reverse his course. Other commoners then warned him it was a witch’s Sabbath. Heedless, he persisted to the castle where pure terror awaited him in the personage of a bloodsucking monster. Count Dracula was at once as smooth, polite, and persuasive as President Obama, and as terrifying, shape-shifting, and diabolical as George W. Bush. He was undead - a zombie, or a werewolf - and lived only as long as he was able to suck human blood.
As for the crisis of our own lives, in 2009 Matt Taibbi assigned blame to the banks, calling Goldman Sachs “a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money.”1 Reverend Edward Pinkney of Benton Harbor, Michigan, referring to the Emergency Manager which was wrapped around the face of his city, said “he’s for the corporations that suck the life out of people.” Banks, insurance companies, and corporations belong to the total circuit of capitalism whence the sucking originates. When Alan Haber, the first president of SDS, spoke last winter at the Crazy Wisdom Book Shop and Tea Room in Ann Arbor about his experiences at Occupy Boston and Occupy Wall Street, he concluded his remarks by reminding everybody that “Capital is dead labor, which vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labor, and lives the more, the more labor it sucks.”
As May Day 2012 approaches Ypsilanti, by all means let us tell stories of flowers and fertility rituals and of the ancient festivals on the commons; and let us, for sure, commemorate the great struggle for the eight-hour workday that reached a climax in Chicago at the Haymarket in May 1886, and gave birth to the holiday of workers around the planet, east and west, north and south. As the prospect of the appointment of an Emergency Manager (EM) looms over Ypsilanti—with powers to abrogate union contracts, close schools, sell public assets, expropriate municipal lands, and whose very word is law—we must also greet the day with the realistic gloom that comes from an uncertainty about health, roof, studies, and livelihood. The tooth is at our throat!
Our green parks are turned into toxic brownfields and our common lands have been laid waste as collateral for unspecified “development.” Our eight-hour workday is lengthened by multiple part-time jobs, or by the time-consuming caretaking of elders without pensions or children without day care. Our lives now are in the grip of mysterious forces called securitization or financialization, to which we submit in dumbfounded helplessness, though the blush on our faces reminds us that these forces are but the bloodsuckers of old. Voltaire wrote that “stock jobbers, brokers, and men of business sucked the blood of the people in broad daylight … these true suckers live not in cemeteries but in very agreeable palaces.”..
Read more: http://www.counterpunch.org/2012/04/27/ypsilanti-vampire-may-day/
On May Day sometime in the 1890s, an ordinary Englishman boarded a train in Munich. His destination was a castle in Transylvania, a country wedged between the Danubian Provinces of Moldavia and Wallachia. It was a dark and stormy night when he arrived. “Do you not know that tonight, when the clock strikes midnight, all the evil things of the world will have full sway?” asked the landlady of a nearby hotel, and she implored him to reverse his course. Other commoners then warned him it was a witch’s Sabbath. Heedless, he persisted to the castle where pure terror awaited him in the personage of a bloodsucking monster. Count Dracula was at once as smooth, polite, and persuasive as President Obama, and as terrifying, shape-shifting, and diabolical as George W. Bush. He was undead - a zombie, or a werewolf - and lived only as long as he was able to suck human blood.
As for the crisis of our own lives, in 2009 Matt Taibbi assigned blame to the banks, calling Goldman Sachs “a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money.”1 Reverend Edward Pinkney of Benton Harbor, Michigan, referring to the Emergency Manager which was wrapped around the face of his city, said “he’s for the corporations that suck the life out of people.” Banks, insurance companies, and corporations belong to the total circuit of capitalism whence the sucking originates. When Alan Haber, the first president of SDS, spoke last winter at the Crazy Wisdom Book Shop and Tea Room in Ann Arbor about his experiences at Occupy Boston and Occupy Wall Street, he concluded his remarks by reminding everybody that “Capital is dead labor, which vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labor, and lives the more, the more labor it sucks.”
As May Day 2012 approaches Ypsilanti, by all means let us tell stories of flowers and fertility rituals and of the ancient festivals on the commons; and let us, for sure, commemorate the great struggle for the eight-hour workday that reached a climax in Chicago at the Haymarket in May 1886, and gave birth to the holiday of workers around the planet, east and west, north and south. As the prospect of the appointment of an Emergency Manager (EM) looms over Ypsilanti—with powers to abrogate union contracts, close schools, sell public assets, expropriate municipal lands, and whose very word is law—we must also greet the day with the realistic gloom that comes from an uncertainty about health, roof, studies, and livelihood. The tooth is at our throat!
Our green parks are turned into toxic brownfields and our common lands have been laid waste as collateral for unspecified “development.” Our eight-hour workday is lengthened by multiple part-time jobs, or by the time-consuming caretaking of elders without pensions or children without day care. Our lives now are in the grip of mysterious forces called securitization or financialization, to which we submit in dumbfounded helplessness, though the blush on our faces reminds us that these forces are but the bloodsuckers of old. Voltaire wrote that “stock jobbers, brokers, and men of business sucked the blood of the people in broad daylight … these true suckers live not in cemeteries but in very agreeable palaces.”..
Read more: http://www.counterpunch.org/2012/04/27/ypsilanti-vampire-may-day/
