JAUCA

Not since Simon Legree stood over the kneeling and humiliated Uncle Tom has there been an individual model that so perfectly exemplifies the essence of the relationship between the upper and lower classes. The only difference is that Legree and his victim were fictional characters; Dominique Strauss-Kahn and the woman he raped -- and I don't use the word "allegedly" because he's obviously guilty -- are real, flesh-and-blood representatives of their respective social classes.

Strauss-Kahn, a leading French politician and international banking honcho who claims to be a socialist and thus a "man of the people," has shown himself to be JAUCA -- just another upper-class asshole.

In a week during which we also witnessed the revelation of ex-Governor Schwarzenegger's unusually warm relationship with members of his household staff -- body temperature, actually -- and, at Cannes, a rambling, disjointed, but nevertheless highly offensive monologue by Danish film director Lars Van Trier, we find ourselves forced to confront our rulers' true feelings about the rest of us, whom they casually use as their footstools, garbage cans, and seminal receptacles. It's no accident that all three of these men are Europeans, and convey, consciously or unconsciously, the class attitudes and antiquated prejudices of an earlier epoch, when men of the little European peninsula straddled and buggered the rest of the world.

Here in this country, the conversion of all forms of middle- and lower-class income formerly supplied by redistributionist schemes into tax breaks for the upper class, along with the ongoing destruction of labor relationships which used to guarantee a middle-class existence for workers in some occupations, continues relentlessly. Unlike the Guinean widow and single mother raped by Dominique Strauss-Kahn, we can't call the police. The only solution is for us to become the police, get up off our knees, and fight back using any weapon that comes to hand.

I'd suggest withholding labor and money in well-organized and carefully-planned strikes and boycotts, engineered to produce maximum damage in the boardrooms and $3000-a-night hotel suites of our lords and masters. One of these days we're going to figure out, just as Nat Turner did, that we ourselves are the source of the wealth from which their illusions of social superiority germinate, and that cooperating with them in any way makes us agents of our own destruction.

--30--