Repetition. Day after day after day doing the same routines with little variation can cause brain morbidity. The office environment, like a house covered with a tarp for fumigation, is suffused with poison. What to do?
I found strength in listening to one of the greatest double albums in the annals of popular music, Minutemen's Double Nickels on the Dime (1984).
I made the decision to stream Double Nickels while sitting at my desk working on an unit income spreadsheet because in my audit of seminal SST Records albums during the Labor Day weekend I had omitted it.
I managed at the end of the day Monday to listen to the two best Meat Puppets albums, Meat Puppets II (1984) and Up on the Sun (1985).
The story of the Double Nickels is fairly well known to Minutemen devotees. In the studio to record a standard full-length LP, the boys from San Pedro, having heard that Hüsker Dü was coming out with a double album (Zen Arcade), stayed on extra days composing enough songs at Radio Tokyo to fill an additional disk. "Take that Hüsker!" I believe appeared on the back of album jacket.
Sitting there at my desk on a morning when I was feeling particularly moribund, I quickly became reanimated listening to Double Nickels. I pumped my legs up and down from the balls of my feet. I nodded my head in agreement. You will not find smarter, ballsier music. It is a statement of perfection of young California manhood. I spent a couple years of my life, probably from 1984 when it first appeared until 1987, studying Double Nickels. Listening to it again yesterday morning was like getting another shot of the super-soldier serum.
After going on a walk during my lunch break, I returned to my desk with ten minutes to spare before returning to my chores. During that time I was looking for an article I had read this past spring by Boris Kagarlitsky where he said that the best thing that could happen to Russia is if the West totally cut it off from financial markets and world trade; that way, according to Kagarlitsky, Russia would be forced to develop its eastern provinces.
In my search for that piece I stumbled across an interesting web site Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal. I printed out some articles, which I read on the train ride home. One good one was by Farooq Tariq, "Pakistan: A ‘soft’ military coup?"
I am no fan of Pakistan's pro-Saudi prime minister Nawaz Sharif. So I have been under the impression that Imran Khan’s Pakistan Tehreek Insaaf (PTI) and Mullah Tahir Qadri’s Pakistan Awami Tehreek (PAT) march and occupation of Islamabad seeking Sharif's resignation and new elections is a legitimate populist movement.
Not so according to Farooq:
In fact, a soft military coup may have taken place. The army has earned lost ground and is being presented by the media and the government as a saviour of the “system”. Thirty-four out of 65 years of Pakistan’s independence has been under military rule, the last ruler, General Pervez Musharraf, left power in 2009 after a mass campaign against him by lawyers and most political parties.
The military will be able to dictate all its terms to the PMLN government if it survives a hard military coup, a remote possibility that cannot be ruled out. The civilian government that has dared to show some independence from military domination for over year and half with its policies of peace talks with India and the trial of Musharraf may have to abandon these defiant policies.
The occupation of the main road by the PTI and the PAT has fizzled out. It has not spread all over Pakistan. The deadline set by the two parties’ leaders for the final show down has been extended over a dozen times. Imran Khan’s appeal for mass civilian disobedience was opposed by the majority of traders and businesspeople. His party has submitted the resignation of some 30 parliamentarians. However, the provincial government of Khaiber Pukhtoon Khawa, formed by Khan’s party, has not resigned, a double standard that has not gone down well with the people of Pakistan.
Khan launched his long march on August 14 to protest against the rigging of the general election last year. He is demanding that Prime Minister Mian Nawaz Sharif resign to pave the way for a fresh election. The PTI’s Azadi March (liberation march) caught the imagination of many in Pakistan in its initial stage, however the expectation that 100,000 motorcyclists would lead the “million march” were not realised. It failed miserably.
A few thousand marchers left Lahore, from the residence of Imran Khan at Zaman Park, riding in expensive cars.
The Azadi March is being complemented by the Inqlab March (revolution march) called by the PAT. The PAT is a religious political grouping active in the fields of education and health and has a worldwide network of charities. The government allowed the “Revolution March”, led by religious scholar and chief of the PAT Mullah Tahir Qadri, only after an initial bid to repress it. Tahir Qadri, a Canadian citizen, has talked about changing the system and replacing it with a more progressive set-up. The PMLN government’s strategy to arrest workers and cordon-off the provincial capital Lahore and the federal capital Islamabad with large containers worked well.
The left-wing Awami Workers Party has characterised the two marches led by rich politicians and mullahs as reactionary and appealed to the working class not to participate. Both marches had reached Islamabad separately at the time of writing. The unity of the two actions was hit hard by the big egos of Khan and Tahir Qadri, who could not agree who would lead the rallies.
In the meantime, PM Nawaz Sharif has been repeatedly asking: “Why the march and what is our fault?” He asked the question in his long-awaited nationally televised speech on August 12.
Imran Khan says that the May 2013 general election was rigged and is demanding a new mid-term election under a government of technocrats. He later made a U-turn on the issue of a technocrat-led interim government after the president of the PTI, Javed Hashmi, objected and refused to be part of the long march.
The issue of rigged elections came a “little” -- 14 months -- late. During that period, Imran Khan formed the provincial government in Khayber Pukhtoon Khawa province and the PTI is still in power there.
Imran Khan was at ease with the federal government and started negotiations with the religious fundamentalist Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP). As expected, the talks did not go very far and a military operation was launched by the federal government in June 2014.
Initially, Khan raised questions about the operation; his main objection being that he was not consulted. Later, it turned out that the interior minister Choudry Nisar, from the ruling PMLN, had not been consulted either. Khan endorsed the military operation reluctantly and offered help from his Khayber Pukhtoon Khawa provincial government.Within a month of the launch of the military operation, Khan announced that he would march to Islamabad to finish the rule of a “corrupt royalist” government. Many commentators were puzzled about the real motives of the long march.
It seems that Khan, who has always tried to please the religious fundamentalists, is again on the same path. A military operation could not be opposed publicly, so he started a campaign against the PMLN on the issue of election rigging.
It is worth noting that during the 2013 general election campaign political parties like the Pakistan People’s Party, the Awami National Party and the Mutihida Qaumi Movement were attacked by suicide bombers. They were not allowed to canvass in public by the fanatics. Both the PMLN and the PTI were not attacked. The reason was simple: both were seen as sympathetic towards extreme religious groups.
Now the conservative right-wing parties are at loggerheads on the issue of power sharing. Both are in power, one in the centre and other in Khayber Pukhtoon Khawa province. Imran Khan wants power at the centre just 14 months after the general election. It seems an untimely decision as the PMLN has not lost all the popularity it enjoyed after the Pakistan People’s Party failed miserably during its 2008-13 term.
The PAT and the PTI have presented the most serious challenge to the PMLN government in its one and half years in office. Both are using a revolutionary vocabulary to attract the masses. Azadi (independence) and Inqilab (revolution) marches are an insult to the real meaning of the two slogans. Khan’s PTI is supported by and joined by the rich of Pakistan. It has become a right-wing conservative capitalist party. The PAT is a counterrevolutionary party using revolutionary slogans. It wants religion as the dominant political force to guide the state.
These parties are gaining popularity because the Nawaz government has failed miserably to do anything to lift the poor.
The PMLN is overseeing a fast implementation of a neoliberal agenda. To fulfill the conditions of the International Monetary Fund for a US $5 billion loan, the PMLN government has doubled electricity prices and increased the prices of gas and other services. A wholesale privatisation of major public-sector institutions has been announced despite massive opposition by several political parties and trade unions.
The issue of election rigging is just a cover for Imran Khan. His real motives include covert opposition to the military operation against Tehreek-e-Taliban, opposition to the PMLN’s attempt to put Musharraf on trial and to cover-up the performance of the PTI’s Khayber Pukhtoon Khawa provincial government.Salmon Masood's report in today's paper, "Pakistani Lawmakers Support Premier," adds mainstream heft to the argument that Qadri and Khan are fronts for the military:
ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — Pakistani lawmakers met in an emergency session on Tuesday to express support for Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, after days of violent protests had appeared to bring the government to the brink of collapse.
Thousands of protesters, many armed with sticks and batons, remained camped outside Parliament, demanding the resignation of Mr. Sharif and accusing him of electoral fraud, nepotism and corruption. But after three days of clashes between protesters and security forces that left three dead and hundreds wounded, there were no reports of violence on Tuesday.
Separate but sympathetic protest movements, led by the opposition politician Imran Khan and the cleric Muhammad Tahir-ul Qadri, have paralyzed Islamabad for two weeks now.
As the demonstrations have stretched on and grown more aggressive in recent days, there have been intensifying accusations that the country’s powerful military establishment has supported, or even directed, the protests in order to weaken Mr. Sharif. Protest leaders and military officials have denied those accusations.
On Tuesday, though, there was a sense that protest leaders were cautiously slowing the pace a day after demonstrators stormed the state television headquarters, and after a meeting between the army chief of staff and Mr. Sharif initially caused alarmed speculation that the military was pushing him to step down.What is apparent, and what we should keep our eye on in Hong Kong as Occupy Central gears up for protests, is that faux-populist marches/protests/occupations are the de rigueur conservative tool. Think Sisi. Think Maidan.
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