Marc Estrin -- Novels and Other Texts

WHO NEEDS TEAR GAS?

2011-11-23T10:10:00.001-08:00

Nonchalantly pepper-spraying sitting students, or charging with batons swinging into non-violent crowds, or middle-of-the-night attacks with gas canisters flying in the streetlights' glare don’t seem to be increasing the popularity of protectors and servers throughout the land.

Some mayors and police chiefs, like our own in Burlington, VT, understand that they can expect to clear Occupy sites with three much more subtle, non-YouTubeable, plausibly deniable techniques, one transient, two permanent.

The first is simply to wait for winter, a time when most outdoor beasts, warm-blooded and cold-, migrate or hibernate, or somehow dig in, and abandon their normal playing fields. Landscapes of all kinds thin out naturally until the burgeoning of spring. In Vermont, that’s at least four months with very unlikely encampment. Things may be different in Florida.

But the second and third tactics are not so iffy, so geographically determined. They are easy, and cheap:

2. Provide no portapotties. This has been a longstanding tactic. Permits have long been granted for potentially large, one-day demonstrations, extra police are hired, traffic plans are made, barriers and watchtowers are imported, Free Speech Zones demarcated (!), etc. And in spite of all this planning and expense, guess what is absent?

And then consider the decision-making process of potential demonstrators with prostate problems, menstrual issues, nervous bladders, bowel disorders, of any who may not be able to hold it -- whatever "it" is -- for more than a few hours. Discourages going to the demo, doesn't it? Cuts down on the numbers. And with no propaganda, no expense. It also puts pressure on local businesses to guard their facilities, and detest the 99%. A twofer. Here, there are possible technical solutions used by pillheads and astronauts.

3. But the best, and most effective approach of all, potentially lethal to every Occupy site, and for the authorities, killing three big birds with one stone, is simply to rely on the openness, kindness, and communitarian ideologies common to the Occupiers. In Burlington, it was the suicide of a homeless man at the encampment which was the gamechanger, and brought down all the tents.

In larger cities, with far larger homeless populations, the situation is far more difficult, and is counted on as such by authorities. The homeless rightfully seek out non-judgemental soup kitchens, and communities in which they are not likely to be awakened in the middle of the night by nightsticks or racist gangs. And if they pay attention at all to the rhetoric of those around them, they know that they are not only part of the 99%, but perhaps the poster children of same. They belong there. They recognize communities that strive to make them welcome without proselytizing or judgement, that try to cross socio-economic boundaries and learn from their hard experience of life ever more common in America. The homeless wind up in Occupy sites, and they should, and they always will -- for good reason.

Not to mention that Occupy often moves into places and parks that belonged to the homeless in the first place, until they became "contested public spaces." The street people who spent their days in Burlington's City Hall Park during the hours homeless shelters are closed were quite literally overrun by the marchers that "claimed" the park. The occupation began more like the occupation of Palestine than of Burlington. But with much work, caring, and growth of tolerance, the problems were largely overcome, and the occupiers cohabited with the homeless behind our City Hall. They allowed us to occupy their space. Then came the suicide.

The fact is, and for obvious reasons, the homeless bring many problems with them that become a great burden to any intentional participatory community. There have been a lot of words about everyone being able to have their say during the remarkable people's mic, about rules being formed democratically, etc. But the fact is that some people are just not into announcing a mic check, and laying out their ideas in short, repeatable phrases. Some people are not into obeying rules at all, whatever they are, whoever made them. Some people are habitually drunk, or drugged, and wildly disinhibited around sexual behavior.

These are the people, and this the sociology, that sophisticated police departments count on to do their work for them, invisibly creating stressors in Occupy situations, and picking up the tab for feeding, housing, and caring for the city's poorest. A threefer this time, a win-win for law 'n order: break up the encampments, save money on tear-gas and overtime, and until that is achieved, relieve the strain on food shelves and homeless shelters. There were reports of police picking up drunks in other parts of the city, and chauffering them down to Zucotti Park in the days before Kristallnacht.

The switch from blameworthy military attack to invisible counter-insurgency is a smart one for cities and towns strapped for budget. "Let the buggers eat each other up" has always been the rationale for divide and conquer. Oh, and don't give them any place to pee.

UNWORTHY INNOCENTS

2011-10-30T06:24:00.000-07:00

UNWORTHY INNOCENTS

I've thought from the beginning that "1%" was an awfully generous characterization of our current economic pathology. The above graphic illustrates this well.

Given our ubiquitous 1% slogan, I'd say the unfingered 9% are getting off pretty easy, skulking innocently to the bank.

The issue is not particular folks lazing on their yachts or flying high in their corporate jets. The issue is the SYSTEM they have created, an on-going updraft for wealth and power, financial, political, military, media. It is represented not by a number -- and 1% is far too small a number -- but by a direction. And that direction leads not just toward the obvious penthouses and mansions, but to many less obvious locations. In the shadow of billionaires, are multimillionaires off the hook? Mere millionaires? Those making $440,000/year -- ten times the US median income?

It's too late to change a slogan which has become iconic. But let's at least see it as a metaphor for the actual injustices built into our system, and capitalism in general.

Marc Estrin

MANIFEST DESTINY?

2011-10-23T19:15:00.000-07:00

For the last several Sundays, there has been verbal violence, and today, almost physical violence between the Occupy Burlington crowd, and those in City Hall park before the OB crowd arrives.

People, some homeless, some drunk, some just hanging, are sitting at the chess tables, around the fountain, and on neighboring benches when several hundred OBers march into what has previously been their space -- as if they, the marchers, owned it. Any peace and quiet they had been having, any fellowship with others in situations similar to their own, is over, and now they are unwanted, unwanting guests at someone else's party.

Often there is obscene yelling in disagreement with what they are hearing at the people's mike. Signs are torn up. Someone twice tried to jump through a Bread & Puppet INSURRECTION banner, ripping it down.

Small skirmishes occur, with face offs and threats. Claims of "I am homeless, are you?" are met with invitations to go up and say "Mic check," and then to phrase their passionate observations in two-beat phrases. "You're free to speak, too." "Yeah? Fuck you!"

What I'm describing is an occupation different than what most of us think we're doing, an occupation more like that of Palestine than that of Wall Street. What are our assumptions about claiming the park whenever and however we will? What happens to the natives when the Occupy Burlington troops roll in? And how will this situation develop or devolve in the future, if City Hall Park becomes full-time occupied, and the homeless and other chronic park-dwellers become strangers in their own land?

I suggest we be aware of this issue.

THE MACHINE

2011-09-23T10:19:00.000-07:00

The government murder of Troy Davis this week -- under odd evidential circumstances -- has once again thrust capital punishment up for public discussion.

As my contribution to death penalty abolition, I recently wrote The Good Doctor Guillotin, a novel about the first use of the guillotine during the French Revolution -- an occasion sufficiently removed from current politics as to allow the issues to be seen more clearly.

Tobias Schmidt was the machine's builder, a piano maker. And Charles-Henri Sanson was the executioner of Paris.

The novel itself is intricately woven, but here's a stand-alone short chapter describing the testing of the machine before use. It may provide some food for reflection:

29. The Machine

It was fourteen feet high, its beams and posts painted blood-red—a nice touch, that. It would be called “End of the Soup,” “Old Growler,” “Sky Mother,” “the Last Mouthful.” It would be called by the feminine form of someone’s name, someone who had repudiated it. As if it were his daughter. Assemblymen called it “the Timbers of Justice.”

The victim, once attached to the plank, his head in the fatal window, would become a part of it, a cog in the machine of egalitarian justice. His blood would be shed not by the unsteady hand of his fellow man but by this lifeless, insensible, infallible instrument, a doctor’s idea become oak and iron.

The materials gathered, over the course of a week Tobias Schmidt and two hired workers constructed the frame. Two four-sided posts were grooved and chiseled as guides for the falling blade. When the seventy-pound holder and fifteen-pound blade came back from the blacksmith, they were fitted loosely between the posts and the posts joined by an upper crossbar with a hole for the rope. A lower crossbar was angle-braced to its stand for stability. Rope guides were placed.

On the back side of the device, the executioner’s side, another crossbar was attached to hold the lunette—two wooden pieces, each with a half-circular hole to contain the client’s, the patient’s, the package’s neck. The diameter was that of Pelletier’s. A smaller one for women could be substituted as needed. When fitted together, the pieces formed a lovely “little moon” whose upper half could be lifted on a hinge to permit a head to enter.

That was it. Simple. A weighted blade and its frame. Though it required two strong men to carry it, it could be loaded onto a heavy cart and transported wherever it was needed, along with its separate bench, long and strong enough to hold a giant—or an ox—and fitted with thick leather straps.

Before dawn on Tuesday, April 15, 1792, a sound of clattering wheels was heard on southern streets two miles from the center of Paris. It was a four-wheeled wagon, drawn by two horses, carrying a long object covered with heavy black cloth and tightly bound with chains. Four guardsmen with bare swords on horseback rode silently in front of the wagon, and four behind. Bringing up the rear was a smaller wagon with several sheep. If going to market, they were being taken in the wrong direction. They advanced slowly, gray and black in the pale early morning.

The procession was heading for the suburb of Bicêtre, just outside the city gate, home to the great hospital for venereal disease, its hospice for the needy poor, and its maison de correction, locked wards for hardened criminals, some awaiting execution.

When seen from a distance, Louis XIII’s building looks quite imposing. Set on the brow of a hill, from afar it retained something of its former splendor and the look of a royal residence. But now, three Louises later, the palace had in fact become a hovel. Its dilapidated eaves were shameful and its walls diseased. Not a window was glazed but only fitted with crisscrossed iron bars through which, here and there, pressed the harrowed face of a patient or a prisoner.

Already waiting in a small inner courtyard were Charles-Henri Sanson, with two assistants, Tobias Schmidt, and the doctors Antoine Louis and Joseph-Ignace Guillotin, the latter most reluctantly.

Early-morning eyes gawked from behind bars as the first sheep’s head was placed in the lunette, its neck the size of Pelletier’s. The upper half moon was locked in place. One of the assistants let loose the rope from its tie-off so Sanson could better observe.

Disaster: The heavy blade jerked stickily into motion, jolted downward between the grooves, and sliced into the animal without killing it. All mental ears were stopped against its terrifying cry. Sanson was dismayed. He had the blade wound back up and released again. It bit into the neck again but did not sever it. The victim howled. Once again the blade was raised and dropped, but the third stroke only caused a stream of blood to spurt from the sheep’s neck, without the head falling. Five times the blade rose and fell; five times it cut into the sheep, which cried five times for mercy. It remained standing on the platform, an appalling, terrifying sight. Sanson straddled it and hacked away with a butcher knife at what remained of its neck. Twenty pounds of lead shot were added to the blade-carrier, and three more sheep were neatly dispatched thereby. The march of science.

After nightfall Schmidt took the machine back to his workshop in the Cour du Commerce, Rue St.-André-des-Arts, just opposite the printing shop in number 8 where Marat’s paper was printed. He lined the grooves with brass for a smoother drop and bolted more weight to the blade assembly.

Two days later, on April 17, assisted by his son and his two brothers, Sanson repeated his experiments on the improved machine, this time with three human cadavers from a military morgue, three well-built men who had died in short illnesses that had not caused them to grow thin. Among the spectators were the two doctors concerned, along with Michel Cullerier, the chief surgeon of Bicêtre; Philippe Pinel, the resident alienist; several physician members of the National Assembly; and delegates from the Council of Hospitals of Paris. Strapped to the bench, the three corpses, good soldiers all, were successfully beheaded without protesting, to the applause of most of the onlookers.

I BET YOU DON'T KNOW WHAT A FOMITE IS

2011-09-18T11:24:00.000-07:00

Heathglyph, our glyph

A fomite is a medium capable of transmitting infectious organisms from one individual to another. So, for instance, doctors are not supposed to wear ties as they lean over one patient and then another. Stethoscopes are fomites. Door handles.

It had always struck me that books were fomites, passing the germs of an author's mind to the reading community. And didn't Tolstoy say that
the activity of art is based on the capacity of people to be infected by the feelings of others"? He did.

In the last years, I'd been to several readings at which I'd thought, "Wow, that stuff is really good. It should be published." But of course it wouldn't be published. Why? Because it wasn't good in a bottom-line way. It wasn't good in an it's-by-a-well-known-writer-with-a-pushy-agent way. It wasn't good in a sexy beach-book way. It wasn't good in a "I was raped by my priest and survived cancer" way. It was simply good --terrific -- in a literary way.

After thinking enough times "that should be published," it struck me that my wife, Donna, and I should publish it. She and I had published for six years a monthly neighborhood newspaper, The Old North End RAG, and missed doing that. We had over the years been intrigued with the new print and production technologies evolving with home computers and networks, but while I was involved at the level of "Oh man, like wow!", she, the techy, was actually reading the specs and the on-line commentaries, and had a sense of how we might actually proceed. Plus a quilter's stick-to-itive-ness and commitment to detail.

Our old RAG cohort, Ron Jacobs, gave us one of his novel manuscripts to experiment with; we did the editing, design and production work on it, and uploaded it to a print-on-demand service to see what might come back. We feared the worst: some god-awful, do-it-yourself piece of crap we'd be embarrassed to have on our shelves.

But when we opened the envelope, there was -- a book, a book that looked like a real book, a beautiful book with a striking cover, one that someone might actually want to buy. We were actually shocked.

Let me explain "print-on-demand". In the old model, a publisher does a print run -- a thousand, ten thousand, a hundred thousand books printed up -- depending on expectations and promotion budget. These books would then be stored in a warehouse, distributed to bookstores, sold to make up the money spent -- or not. The returns had to be dealt with, and were often just pulped if the book did not do as well as expected. Very expensive, and very wasteful of trees, gas, warehouse space, and therefore quite limiting as to what was published, i.e. only those books that stood a good chance of surviving the gauntlet: best-sellers, genre books of the moment. But not the kind of literary material I heard at the readings.

Print-on-demand, on the other hand, prints a book only after it is ordered and sold. No wasted trees, no warehouse rents, no truck gas. Someone orders a book, or ten, or a hundred, the file goes into the computer, and the printer prints, binds, and ships the copies. This has got to be the wave of the future on a shrinking planet, we thought.
And then there are e-books. You take a manuscript, format it correctly, upload it, and there it is, ready to be downloaded. No paper at all, everything cheap and instant.

These were the technologies with which we wanted to experiment. We thought, too, that we'd like to try another kind of "business" model, one where authors got everything and publishers just enough to survive to publish again. The old way: A paperback edition of one of my novels, for instance, sell a for $15. I get 75¢. (Bookstore pays publisher $7.50, author gets 10% of that sale.) Fomite, using volunteer labor, can give its authors 80% of net income, and take only 20% to cover costs of ISBN numbers, galleys, shipping, website rental, software, etc. If people want, they may actually make some money from their books.

It turns out we can make beautiful books and ebooks very cheaply. The problem remains: how to bring attention to them with essentially zero advertising budget. In union there is strength. A little strength. Each of Fomite's books are advertised in every other Fomite book. Every author brings his or her network to others, and can share review and reading sites. We try to keep Fomite authors in touch with one another for collective efforts, pooling resources for advertising or event participation, and utilizing each other's web skills as we enhance our own.

Donna, a quilter and photographer, is having a great time designing books and covers, and solving tech problems. She can separate Fomite work from her day job. For me, it's more difficult. My job is writing novels. And it's hard to write novels when you spend your days looking at other people's work on the screen. It's hard to say no. It's even harder to edit the work of other writers, especially good ones.

But I think we're doing a good thing, contributing to the writing community, and in some small way to the evolution of American culture. We intended to publish novels, short stories, and poetry which might not otherwise appear in the current publishing environment. Non-fiction, we thought, sells well enough without us, but I was open to something sufficiently strange, and now we've found it with a book called The Derivation of Cowboys and Indians. So I guess we now publish odd-enough non-fiction. And then we thought we'd see how graphics came out, so we are doing a volume of Bread & Puppet Kasper Komix and Tragix. That's way more than we had planned. We wanted to debut Fomite with six local authors. Now we have eighteen -- one from Bulgaria. We'll reopen for submissions at www.fomitepress.com once we catch up with ourselves.

NIEBELUNGENLIED 911

2011-09-05T14:43:00.000-07:00

In a continuing email exchange about the future strategy of any kind of 9/11 truth movement, Charles Simpson alerts us to diverging uses of the idea of "myth" in an important on-line talk by David Ray Griffin. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BXw3jJ3021o

Simpson notices that on the one hand, Griffin characterizes the official story as being intentionally raised -- by government and media -- to "mythic status", "mythic in the sense of an organizing narrative that defines collective identity, purpose and legitimacy." Such myth, both Simpson and Griffin observe, is not to be measured or refuted by empirical data, and is thus secure against any suggested investigation.

He criticizes Griffin for shifting ground from the "organizing narrative" definition of myth to a more trivial and colloquial one in which myth becomes simply "an empirically false account of events," and then proceeding in his lecture to disprove the official assertions with empirical data.

Consequently Simpson -- unlike Griffin -- concludes that the 9/11 truth movement should avoid its own version of scholasticism, "a too-narrow preoccupation with our own set of 9/11 facts", "a focus on forensic details" that "draws us in a cult-like direction away from others" -- since such details, such fact-checking, does not make sense or speak to a rhetorical/psychological public world beyond empirical analysis.

It seems to me that neither Simpson nor Griffin -- at least here -- have seized on the most important function of myth: not to hide, not to falsify, but to reveal. Any deep study of folk tales and parables show them to illuminate patterns so deeply built into experience as to be otherwise invisible.

Alberich wants to steal the gold from the bottom of the Rhine, and so do Cheney and Rubin and Obama and Geitner and Summers and...all of them, and the institutions behind them. But Wagner's Ring shows us much more than that people, politicians, and banks are greedy. In the 15-hour telling of the myth we come to perceive a web of interactions, the forswearing of love, the need to self-destruct, the relation of generations and lovers, bosses and slaves, the many questions raised by heroism... and much else. That is the difference between mere narrative and myth.

Seeing into myth involves audience awareness. Little children believe in the myth of Santa Claus, and then as bigger children, decide that the myth isn't true. But what do wiser adults make of myths, fairy- and folktales, biblical and other parables? They understand that these ancient story collections are not only not trivial, but are essential to a deeper understanding of the human and natural world. The dimensions of myth have to probed by those who understand it. That, it seems to me, is the function of the 9/11 truth movement -- not to move out beyond the "single-issue politics" of 9/11, but to responsibly explore the myth of it.

What does the 9/11 story collection, and the reactions to it, tell us about society and government, about science and Faustian striving, about individual and social psychology, about greed, love, fear, and heroism? The 9/11 mythos easily becomes a simultaneous focusing and broadening lens to see into these opacities.

But first we must understand these dimensions ourselves, master the empirical data and the rhetorical approaches, see ourselves as teachers of this story in its broadest and deepest context at levels appropriate to any given audience. Sometimes one can use empirical evidence to open well-guarded doors. Sometimes one has to start by discussing things at more personal or philosophical levels.

Right now the characters in our opera are predominantly the Alberichs of press and power, and a large population of in-the-darkness Niebelungen slaves, toiling underground and in the killing fields to fashion wealth for their dictators. By and large, Americans seem to believe much of what they're told about 9/11. Some largish percentage have been polled as not quite believing it -- but not enough to do anything other than become more cynical.

Our role is to move the Niebelungen above ground at least, cognizant of the possibilities and deeper meanings of this never-ending, no-limits story -- precisely by exploring the myth as myth, and bringing the underworlds into focus.

THE PISS OF ALTERITY

2011-08-28T10:40:00.000-07:00

In an eloquent response to my 9/11 essay below, Charles Simpson, a sociologist friend, seems to be arguing for an end to the 9/11 truth movement. His letter is not online, and is too long to be quoted in full. But let me respond here by quoting a few sections which may give you as sense of his points.

Charles points to the "roadblock" that has frustrated all 9/11 truth seekers, the "room without an echo", and calls for "the next move", a "way out", engaging instead with "broader social movements", "face-to-face localism", and "alternative ways forward in the construction of meaningful lives" which will more likely resonate with American tastes, understandings of the world, and current conditions.

The irony of his call to leave 9/11 issues behind is the pessimism behind his suggestion. Charles argues that people do not "want to go there" (9/11) because of a deep survival instinct towards optimism. According to him, most people choose to avoid "the pitfall of despondency" that might threaten should one come to a realistic understanding of power relations in the capitalist world.

I find his hypothesis, however, too deeply pessimistic. The implication is that facts don't matter to human survival, that assembling evidence about important issues, even evidence packaged in "easy-to-digest" formats, can be a socially meaningless act, readily trumped by shoddy cultural misdirection.

I am not claiming that cultivating local gardens is unimportant, given the immanence of large-scale catastrophes. What I mean is that to give up hope for the rational component of human existence, is simply to give up hope.

Jung maintained that human consciousness was capable of four distinct functions: thinking, feeling, judgement, and intuition. To flee from such truths as 9/11 research may uncover is to give up two, if not three, of those capacities. I don't see how such emptying out can advance our capacity for survival.

The 9/11 research movement (my preferred term) wants to keep insisting -- in the face of much resistance -- that facts matter, that humans can reason on the basis of evidence, can intuit further directions for investigation, and can make judgements based on what is found. It may be pissing in the current wind, but eventually, the world must begin to smell the illuminating piss of alterity.

9/11 TEN YEARS IN

2011-08-11T06:09:00.000-07:00

The U.S. is now in six overt wars, droning, bombing, killing, starving people in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia, Yemen, and Libya -- all illegal.

Obama’s justifying rhetoric turns, as did all of Bush’s, on the constantly whupped-up justification of “9/11”:

"We did not ask for this fight. On September 11, 2001, nineteen men hijacked four airplanes and used them to murder nearly 3,000 people. They struck at our military and economic nerve centers. They took the lives of innocent men, women and children without regard to their faith or race or station. Were it not for the heroic actions of the passengers on board one of those flights, they could have also struck at one of the great symbols of our democracy in Washington, and killed many more.”

And so Obama needs 10K soldiers and “contractors” to fight the “less than 100 operatives” (Gen. James L. Jones, US National Security Advisor) left in Afghanistan, and their vague sporulations blooming worldwide. 9/11. The Global War on Terror. Or Obama’s “Kinetic Overseas Contingency Operations.” Not to mention secret prisons, justified torture and expanding surveillance in "the homeland".

Aside from the absurdity of proportion, the demonstrated ineffectiveness of the approach, and the barbaric “collateral damage” -- global and domestic -- accompanying it, the entire package is based on, justified by, and pitched via a most problematic “fact” -- the "official story" of 9/11, 19 Arab hijackers with boxcutters, etc.

Absolutely every one of the major and minor elements of this tale has been shown to be inconsistent with demonstrable physical events and surrounded with impossible and suspicious behavior.

After ten years of study, thousands of serious researchers in many technical areas can confidently assert the complete falsity of the "official story", along with slightly differing alternatives, diffuse along the edges, but solidly agreeing at the core: the "official story" is completely impossible, and a new, independent, supoena-empowered investigation must be conducted to examine the contradictions, and answer the questions raised by 9/11 truth groups: Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth, Medical Professionals for..., Scholars for..., Physicists for..., Intelligence Professionals for..., Firefighters for..., Pilots for..., Political Leaders for..., Lawyers for..., Religious Leaders for..., Media Professionals for....

These are not "tin hats" "conspiracy nuts", or "crackpots" as culturally labeled. Google any of their websites, and see the facts and discussions enabled by their collective expertise. Vast amounts of material has been available online since the first explorations and organizations debuted eight or nine years ago.

And yet the same, tired, much-wounded story continues to justify the exercise of our killing machines, military and financial, around the globe -- including here at home where our own population is being starved of humane goods and services.

The 9/11-justified “war on terror” (by whatever fancy name Obama chooses to call it) remains the be-all and end-all of our secure existence -- all action based on a set of demonstrable, manipulated falsities. The media has enshrined the official story; any challenge to it -- at least in this country -- is off the table of the public mind.

PROGRESS IN RESEARCH

The earliest researchers simply noted the contradictions of story and fact:

-- Plane crashes leave wreckage. The one at the Pentagon left only a few scraps -- none related to a 757.
-- The initial hole in the outer wall of the Pentagon was not large enough to accommodate a 757; the grass leading up to the wall was unscathed; windows were unbroken, and although the official story has the wreckage "vaporizing" because of the extreme heat (including the titanium steel engines that burn the fuel), neighboring rooms contained wooden desks and paper books -- unvaporized.
-- Steel frame buildings had never before collapsed from fires burning much more fiercely and longer than those in the twin towers. The collapses were at free-fall speed, demonstrating the removal of all supporting structures.
-- Building Seven, a 47-story office block, collapsed in the late afternoon without being hit by planes or demonstrating significant fires.
-- There were no bodies and no wreckage at all found at the purported site of the "Let's roll" heroic self-sacrifice crash of the Shanksville plane.
-- Cell phone calls describing the now-mythic events on board the hijacked airliners were not possible in 2001.

Beyond these prima-facie physical contradictions, quickly and easily noticed by any open eyes were a host of behavioral oddities:

-- the apparent stand-down of the NORAD air defense system, charged with scrambling fighters and protecting US air space.
-- the scrubbing of initial reports on all TV networks concerning explosions and demolitions.
-- the odd behavior of the president and the secret service at a grade school.
-- the immediate FBI confiscation of all videotapes from cameras inside and outside the Pentagon.
-- the BBC news report -- 20 minutes before it happened -- of the collapse of Building Seven.
-- the prompt illegal removal of all evidence from the crime scenes.
-- the flight-training history of the purported hijackers.
-- the resistance of the Bush administration to an official investigation.
-- the hand-holding, secret testimony of Bush and Cheney concerning the events of the day.
-- finally, the appointment of an investigatory commission run by an administration insider who chose what evidence would be presented and what excluded from the official report.

In The New Pearl Harbor (2004), David Ray Griffin listed the contradictions, and considered the implication that our own government was complict in the events of 9/11, and not a mere victim -- either of intelligence failures or incompetence. In a nuanced discussion of complicity, Griffin distinguished eight possible levels, from simply lying about events to maximize political effects, through intentionally allowing expected attacks, to actual involvement in planning them. At the time he did not make specific accusations, or even hypothesize a "true" version of what happened. But he did challenge people to undertake unflinching investigations of all the contradictions, with clear reporting of results, and most difficult, courageous drawing of conclusions, no matter how "unthinkable" or outrageous they may appear.

Over the next seven years, research communities responded: interested individuals and the professional organizations listed above brought their expertise to the problems. Structural forces, melting points, evidence of explosives, aerodynamics, photo and video forensics, witness testimonies, and many other angles were explored in detail, and all information made public online at the various sites.

But ten years and many Bush/Obamaogenic catastrophes later, people still refuse to confront the ever more abundant evidence.

Let’s take only the single most obvious strangeness: Building Seven collapsing without planes or significant fires. Curious? But somehow not so curious as to arouse curiosity. You’d think folks might get the hint that something was up.

However, talking with many news-aware friends over the years, I’ve found that very few had even heard of Building Seven. When I mentioned it was a classical example of a controlled demolition, I would almost always get exactly the same response:

Gesture: Elbows bent, both hands up to shoulder level, palms out. Followed by
Sentence: “I’m not going there.” One woman added: “I don’t want to live in a world where such a thing is possible.”

Any further talk of details got those hands moving, flapping outward from the shoulders, go away, “I really don’t want to go there.”

All those who have put many hours into reading books and scholarly papers, exploring photos and videos -- guess what…they’re all—all— nuts, crazies, lunatic fringe not worthy of media or political discussion. Cass Sunstein, Obama's Administrator of the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, has written extensively about the need to "cognitively infiltrate" such truth groups, to interrupt and correct their false thinking. Even the prominent lefty analysist have refused to cover, much less feature, the results of so many person-hours of research, and all assume the official story to be true in their articles on blowback from the evils of American imperialism. They too just won't "go there."
What an enormous and pervasive need-not-to-know.

STUPIDY, FEAR AND GREED

Albert Einstein once noted that “Three great forces rule the world: stupidity, fear and greed.” Interesting choice of qualities. Something non-intelligent certainly seems to be ruling the world. Einstein's trio may go partway toward explaining the need of not-knowing.

Stupidity? The grand narrative of American Realpolitik? “Too complicated for me.” When you put that sort of thing together with most people not knowing much about history, or geography, or math or science, it does add up to a semi-dysfunctional stupidity endemic in the population, annually measured and bewailed.

But as Chomsky points out, this is not native stupidity, but stupidity engineered by the system. People are plenty smart on the street, he observes, or concerning the statistics of sports. But intelligence about history or politics is not encouraged. “Best to trust the experts.” (Chomsky takes no blame for being one of the engineers of 9/11 stupidity.)

Fear. The fear factor is obvious, a major tactic of all authoritarian institutions, from elementary school to Guantanamo. The more one knows, the more there is to be afraid of. Like possible administration complicity in 9/11? Best not to know.

Greed may be what drives it all. Why is America afraid? In large part because it has it and they want it. Share equitably? Forget it. The best way to avoid guilt is not to know -- not to know other languages, international dynamics, the ecological state of affairs, who the criminals are. Not to know the misery greed creates. Our need not-to-know is urgent.

Ten years later, some people know a lot more. Most don't want to.

ROOSTING WITH THE GODS

2011-06-02T05:10:00.000-07:00

I'm not sure if announcing the release of one's latest novel gets this post into the "shameless commerce division", but I do think people who like my writing may be interested.

When the Gods Come Home to Roost has just been published by Spuyten Duyvil, a wonderful small publisher that produces gorgeously made books. (They did my last one, Tsim-tsum.)

Here's the story:

When his 35-year old trophy girlfriend, Demi, dumps 65-year old George, a classicist at Berkeley, he decides to attempt to actualize some of the Greek and Roman myths he has been teaching for four decades, specifically the one in which Aphrodite transforms Phaon from an ugly old man into a beautiful youth.

He accepts the (mephistophelian) offer from a plastic surgeon in his UU congregation to turn him into a genuine 17-year old through a combination of surgery, hormonal therapy, nutritional therapy, psychotherapy and yogic practice. The rejuvenation succeeds, and for the acid test, George enrolls at The Putney School, the high school attended by Zoe, Demi’s daughter, a young woman he had raised to be the daughter he always wanted. They fall in love — as well they might, being so perfectly matched in worldview, frames of reference, and jokes.

The moral status of this relationship is challenging. George, after all, has been changed. He is really 17, not her erstwhile stepfather, but an appropriate, non-blood related, first lover. But maybe he’s not really 17. You get the issue. Lots of interesting classics and music stuff on the path. A plastic surgeon you wouldn’t want to meet in a dark alley.

Gods was born in this wise:

The first seed was planted by a Harpers magazine article quite a few years back which struck me with its beautiful and alarming illustrations. It concerned a plastic surgeon who thought that medical ethics should not exclude individual patients' desires to express themselves through bodily transformation. Faustian striving and overreach has been a continual theme in my novels, and here was a great set of possibilities for crime and punishment. I tucked it away somewhere in my subconscious.

The next poke came a few years ago, when I was reading in bed, holding up a book, and noticed the skin on my arm was wrinkled. First time I had noticed. Geez, I'm getting old.

Putting those two together a year or so later, the story emerged of a guy getting old who meets up with a plastic surgeon ethically capable of anything -- and there you have it: Faustian striving, mephistophelian manipulation, and whatever consequences might result therefrom.

The most interesting thing, as always, is that novels never work out the way you think they're going to. Plots fulfill themselves, characters enter and exit unexpectedly, and tell you what to do. I am not the only writer who has experienced this. In my case, the unexpected banana peel was the happy end. Well, maybe not entirely happy, and certainly not securely happy, but happy–ish nevertheless.

I had always been a fervent fan of Marlow's Faust, and Thomas Mann's, as opposed to Goethe's. Why the hell should Faust get off so easy? Away to hell with him. A deal's a deal. No salvation for unknown causes.

And yet, here I have my Faust (George Helmstetter was the original Dr. Faust's real name) undertaking a deal with the devil, getting his unholy goodies, and walking off with his Gretchen into the sunset. Why can't I control these things?

The other interesting switcheroo was discovering that Mephistopheles himself has quite Faustian qualities, always striving for greater agency and control, his own demon being, perhaps, the once-innocent John Stuart Mill. You just never can tell.

I do finally have to say that the last thing on earth I, Marc Estrin, would want, is to do it (or anything) all over again.

Here's the book at Amazon. If you like it (or hate it) put up an Amazon review.

Thanks,

Marc

UP, UP, AND AWAY...

2011-05-24T08:09:00.000-07:00

Though two summers away, an invitation by the mayor to discuss inviting another Burlington air show, "Wings Over Vermont", has elicited some interesting letters to the Burlington Free Press, the state's largest paper.

For those outside of Vermont who may not have seen a similar event, such an air show consists of "a blend of high-performance military jets and much more sedate civilian aircraft, such as biplanes." As the Free Press notes without comment, "The sound impact of jets, generated by the likes of the Blue Angels and other precision flying teams, probably would fill up to two hours of the five-hour program."

In practice, the show takes place down at Lake Champlain during a crowded day with a July 4th atmosphere. For those not at the event, the cross-overs and low-altitude fly-arounds of the team of "high-performance military jets" is admittedly an auditory trial. Many people leave town while others just gripe.

The virtues or sins of the show are not my subject here. Rather, what interests me is the nature of some of the commentary from the supporters of the show addressing those against.

A most common notion among them is that American freedom to publicly express opinions have been made possible by the existence of the military.

"They are the reason why we all have the freedom to meet," wrote one. And another: "Your freedoms to express freely your 'opinions' have been protected and insured by generations of men and women who proudly served in the military." (The quotations marks around "opinions" are also interesting.)

To one letter writer, the sound of the jets is "the sound of freedom," and another asserts that true patriots are "not bothered by the sounds of the people who allow them to live their dream in freedom."

It seems to me, rather, that the freedom to form and speak our opinions and to freely assemble is not a military issue, but rather a basic gift of the U.S. constitution. If the military is functioning to protect those constitutional rights, you'd never know it as they serve to support administrations in hot pursuit of those rights, dead or alive.

For all the high- and low-tech wonders of flight (it still astounds me to see a huge plane take off), there is a disturbing leitmotif of jingoist war chants among some of the comments:

"There is no better sight in the world than one of those 'fast movers' streaking into the battle delivering their payload on top of the enemy," rhapsodizes one, the enemy, of course, being anyone upon whom a payload is dropped. "Is it noisy? You bet," writes another. "Does it burn fossil fuel? It sure as heck does. Is it patriotic? You better well believe it."

Speaking against an anti-show writer, one letter predicts that "When the bad guys from across the pond attack again, he'll be grateful for our military, but it will be too late." Concerning his probable reference, 9/11, one may note that our jets -- for reasons still unclear -- were unable to scramble that day against four errant airliners clearly bent on destruction.

(This has been a week containing a rape by a power-driven, hyper-sexual world leader, and the postponed invitation by a Savior for meeting in the skies with his elect. It is hard for me to avoid sensing a relation of themes here. But I will leave such meta-interpretations to readers so disposed.")

Perhaps the most disturbing aspect of these freedom-loving comments has been the depiction of those who oppose the air show: "Moonbats," they are, "whack jobs", "tree-hugging wing nuts" (these descriptors from different letters). What to do with them? "Progressives and liberals should be MADE to watch the air show. Maybe then they will pack up and leave."

And a warning: "If you don't stand behind our troops, PLEASE feel free to stand in front of them.

The vibes are chilling.

OSAMA BIN LADEN -- WHAT WOULD KANT SAY?

2011-05-13T10:50:00.000-07:00

Now that the bipartisan jingofest around OBL’s purported killing seems to be settling down, and the kaleidoscope of changing stories seems to be solidifying into cognitively dissonant national belief, it may be time to rationally review the evidence and sequence of changes in the generally accepted narrative.

My recent little essay ("Drinking the Obamaid") was written only a day after Obama's mission accomplished announcement, before all the changes and contradictions in the official story emerged.

Many people have been following those changes -- some simply to record the "truth" developing out of the "fog of war", and some to note the suspicious nature of what looks like political manipulation.

Chief among the latter has been Steven Lendman, who has closely followed the administration's twists and turns, and analyzed the absurdity of some of its claims. Rather than repeat his cataloguing, let me just give you some links for the curious:

http://www.veteranstoday.com/2011/05/06/steve-lendman-staged-bin-laden-killing-hokum/

(Contained in this link, are links to two of his earlier assessments.)

Lendman has also noted the inconsistencies in the newly revealed tape of OBL watching himself on TV.

http://sjlendman.blogspot.com/2011_05_01_archive.html (blog for May 9)

In my earlier essay, I referred to a 2009 book by David Ray Griffin which reviewed the evidence that Osama was likely long dead. Here is a short summary of the contents of that book:

http://www.americanpendulum.com/2011/05/david-ray-griffin-on-evidence-osama-bin-laden-died-several-years-ago/

What bollixes my mind is not the flag-covered USA! USA! chanters outside the White House, or the dignified chest-thumping president within. It is the complete belief in a hard-to-believe story by the intelligent left -- who are now frothing over the ethics and legality of targeted assassination. You can practically watch the fangs grow, and the saliva drip:

http://popwatch.ew.com/2011/05/03/jon-stewart-osama-bin-laden/

We don't even know that OBL was responsible for anything on 911. At least the FBI doesn't seem to think so. After the attacks, he denied it for two weeks, and all subsequent "confession" tapes have proved to be poorly constructed fakes emerging at crucial moments in American political life. Big lies are a well-honed American tradition:
http://sjlendman.blogspot.com/2011_05_01_archive.html

(Another Lendman cataloguing: scroll to entry for May 7, a little more than halfway down.)

So what really went down on May 1st? Who knows? We have taped interviews with fifty or so neighbors that say that Osama was never living in that compound or they would have known it. We have the "family" in Pakistani military custody, and who knows what they will say? Or what the photos/videos, when and if finally released, will contain -- authentic or fabricated?

We do know that the story with all its changes smells awfully fishy, and the immediate disappearing of the body with its various rationales is fishiest of all.

We do know that as Mara Liasson announced on NPR, Obama's "Republican opponents will always have to deal with the new and enduring fact that Barack Obama is the president who got Osama bin Laden."

We do know that immediately after OBL's putative elimination, calls were going up for increased homeland security money and protection against blowback and revenge.

We do know that this event, pseudo- or not, is now being used as justification for assassination, torture and future preemptive war, and for support of the Patriot Act.

We do know that acclaim for targeted assassination has risen, and will certainly serve as a protective buffer against any possible prosecution for war crimes of the Bush or Obama administrations.

As usual, Cui Bono? is a pertinent question.

What would Kant say?

He would say "All our knowledge begins with the senses, proceeds then to the understanding, and ends with reason. There is nothing higher than reason."

He might say, too, "By a lie, a man annihilates his dignity as a man."

DRINKING THE OBAMAID

2011-05-03T05:44:00.000-07:00

With no evidence whatsoever except the changing assertions of our military spokesmen, almost the entire left, and of course all of the mainstream media, have swallowed the story of Barak Obama finally bringing in the big fish, the symbol and cause of all our woes.

The timing is convenient at the start of a chaotic election season. The burial place is unreachable, unseeable, the body now unfindable, and we claim to have "a quick DNA [DoNotArgue] match" in hand.

I love the story put out by the Associated Press:

WASHINGTON – Knowing there would be disbelievers, the U.S. says it used convincing means to confirm Osama bin Laden's identity during and after the firefight that killed him.

In the entire article, do they ever mention what those convincing means are? No. Just that whatever they are, they are convincing. They proceed to ask three questions, "Was it really him? How do we know?" Where are the pictures?", but they don't ask them as questions to be answered by investigative reporting, but only to denigrate the "conspiracy theorists" asking such question.

Then: U.S. officials are balancing that skepticism with the sensitivities that might be inflamed by showing images they say they have of the dead al-Qaida leader and video of his burial at sea.

After showing and crowing over Saddam Hussein's hanging, we are now sensitive to sensitivities. No boasters we. Keep it low key. Any evidence would only inflame.

So far, the AP continues, the U.S. has cited evidence that satisfied the Navy SEAL force, and at least most of the world, that they had the right man in Abbottabad, Pakistan. I would think the SEALs are likely an easy audience, and I haven't seen any documentation of the "rest of the world"'s satisfaction, unless "the rest of the world" means, as it usually does, our government's fellow kleptocrats and sociopaths, a group small enough for occasional photoops all together on the same stage.

There is plenty of evidence that this new official story is peculiar: the somehow secret "luxury compound", unseen over years by our satellites, the identification of our man "by appearance", the quick, untraceable burial, the so-far lack of corroborating evidence, the changing stories -- first that we buried him at sea to respect Islamic law that corpses must be buried within 24 hours, and then when Islamic scholars disagreed, that we buried him at sea to prevent there being a shrine to which worshippers would come. The broadcast "sense of relief", mission accomplished, coupled with warnings that the threat of revenge attacks may be greater than ever...

There is also plenty of evidence that Osama has been dead for many years, too great to summarize here, but well-collected in David Ray Griffin's 2009 book, Osama bin Laden: Dead or Alive?

There is also plenty of evidence that his periodic appearances -- all of which were timed to be helpful to some president, or candidate, or poll, at some crucial moment -- are transparent fakes, the physiognomy, bling, handedness, language, being that of someone other than Osama. These fake videos are well covered in Griffin's book.

There is finally plenty of evidence that Osama bin Laden -- our Osama bin Laden -- whose brother was breakfasting in Washington on the morning of 9/11/01, and whose relatives were specially and secretly flown out of the country in spite of their being a flight ban in the days immediately following the events -- that our Osama bin Laden was not, and had never been, and is still not connected by the FBI to 9/11/01.

Yet the AP warns us that "as with the birther conspiracy, there's going to be a set of people who are never going to be convinced." "If it suits extremist ends to spin a fantastical tale of survival or trickery to gullible ears, expect to hear it." "There are always conspiracy theories," he said. "There are individuals who believe that bin Laden wasn't involved in the 9/11 attacks."

You'd never know it, listening to, or reading the blogs of the left pundits, not to mention the right.

LIGHT UNTO THE NATIONS

2011-04-08T16:19:00.000-07:00

What is it? It doesn't seem to be a bird. Definitely not a plane. It's...an Israeli Defense Forces flashlight. For only 72 bucks plus shipping and handling, you can own this Agronomic [sic.] Flashlight Grip (T-GRIP) Tactile Vertical Foregrip Weapon Lights Holder.

It "comes with a 1 inch flight Adaptor with special activity trigger, and also a place to store additional batteries, AND
    * Three in one: special handgrip and a flashlight mount with a built in trigger that
    * transform tactical light into a Vertical Fore grip Weapon Light
    * This unique ergonomic fore grip will fit perfectly to your hand while holding in up to 1 .
    * diameter tactical light with Tail cap switch and allow trigger activation of the light
    * Ergonomic designed grip, comfortable and natural to use “fighting stance".
    * Designed to hold any 1" diameter flashlight and allow quick and easy operation
    * Easy to fit and secured by 2 bolts
    * Fits hand guards equipped with a Weaver or Picatinny rail system
    * No gunsmithing is required
    * Molded from reinforced polymer composite
    * Super lightweight, Eliminate the need for a ymer compositer"

Now, I don't normally use my blog entries to sell Israeli military accessories, but this piece of equipment serves up much food for thought. As does the website on which you'll find it (search "flashlight""), the Israel Military Products Israeli Army Surplus Store, http://www.israelmilitary.com/default.aspx.

I advise you to explore this site, watch the short slide show on the home page, and sift through the various gifts for sale. You don't have to be Jewish. Two of my favorite items are a sweatshirt reading " America Don't Worry. Israel Is Behind You." and a hoodie, reading "UZI DOES IT". With a nice Uzi graphic.

I was brought inadvertently to this page by my novelist's wondering about the details involved in a terse dispatch this week from the Palestinian Popular Committee Against the Wall and Settlements:

The Israeli army and police occupation forces stormed the village of Bil’in at 1:30 am on Monday 4th April, raiding the houses of Ali Ibrahim Bornat, and Khames Abo Rahma. They searched their houses and tampered with the contents under the pretext of search for solidarity foreigners.

Bil'in is a village of 1,800 people in the central West Bank, near Ramallah. It is famous for its six-plus years of weekly, non-violent protests against the illegal (International Court of Justice) wall separating it from 60% of its farmland, and its peaceful protests have been met with increasing Israeli violence, now including live ammunition, and my favorite, Israeli trucks spraying human sewage collected from Modi'in Illit, an illegal Israeli settlement of 50,000, towering on the hill above.

Now, imagine this closely. You're asleep in your bed. It's still very dark. Into your tiny town roar not one, but two heavily armed convoys -- one from the military, one from the police. Doors, as normal, are banged on, kicked in with shouts and threats, children cry in fear. Flashlights -- likely those lovely "agronomic" ones, used in "fighting stance" -- search the rooms, peer into faces, blind the eyes.

What are they looking for? Weapons? Terrorists? No. Non-violent activists, organizers of the weekly protests, and worst of all "solidarity foreigners" -- those peaceniks from abroad who come to witness, document, take part in peaceful demonstrations against the wall or home demolitions, occasionally help with harvests.

I suppose it could be worse. Rachel Corrie experienced being on the wrong end of a Military Bulldozer, and others have been blinded, brain-damaged, and killed by "non-lethal" weapons shot directly at their heads for their non-violent protest.

Nevertheless -- harboring peace activists, are you? Take that, and that, and we're really sorry about the door and that laptop. See you soon.

"I, the LORD, have called thee in righteousness, and will hold thy hand, and will keep thee, and will make you a covenant of the people, as a light unto the nations." (Isaiah 42:6)

There are extra batteries in the T-GRIP storage compartment.

KEEP YOUR EYE ON THE PEA

2011-04-03T11:28:00.000-07:00

"Keep your eye on the pea." "What pea? Where?" "The one under the shell, this shell, here. Got it?" "Yeah." "OK. Now watch carefully."

PEA OF THE MONTH:

First The Holy Trinity spoke only of imposing a no-fly zone. That -- and "all necessary measures" -- code for military action -- to protect innocent civilians against Gaddafi's forces.

It's widely understood that "a no-fly zone" is most often the first step towards broader military engagement, and adding the UN license for unlimited military escalation was crucial to getting the U.S. on board. The "all necessary measures" language also appears to be the primary reason five Security Council members abstained. For Russia, China, Germany, India and Brazil, that phrase meant giving the Pentagon and NATO a blank check backed by UN legitimacy.

Some supporters of the resolution insisted on explicitly excluding a "foreign occupation force." But any U.S., British, or French troops arriving in Libya could easily be disguised as an "assistance team" or "training mission" or any diplomatic pseudonym.

After getting support from international bodies on that understanding the Trinity immediately began to wage war against Libyan military forces, and whoever was nearby, a level of direct U.S., British, French, NATO and other international military intervention which went far beyond the "no-fly zone but no foreign intervention" that the rebels wanted, escalating the militarization of the entire region and internationalizing the military battle.

In yet another breach of international law, the president announced an “Obama doctrine” – an approach to situations where US action is not imperative but desirable, in concert with the international community.

Then, to smear the blame, he shifted command of the no fly zone over to NATO --- a front for US military control -- itself commanded by US admiral James Stavridis.
The claim is that UN Resolution 1973 "allows everything except boots on the ground."

So why are twenty-two hundred Marines and sailors from Camp Lejeune preparing to deploy off the coast of Libya? And who in Libya is gathering intelligence to call in all the air strikes? Those CIA trainers on the ground probably wear boots.

And who are the rebels we are supporting at the current cost of $100 million/day? It seems that the newly denominated rebel leader, Khalifa Hifter, has spent the last 20 years living just outside Washington, ten minutes from Langley, and with no clear means of support.

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2011/mar2011/pers-m28.shtml

NATO, btw, may order ground forces into Libya, Adm. James Stavridis admits. He recently told Congress that "while allied forces were not yet considering the deployment of troops on the ground in Libya, it was a possibility."

Some have termed this mission creep. To me, it seems more like mission bait and switch.

THE GREAT AMERICAN PASTIME

If one follows the money flow, the great American game is surely no longer baseball, but rather Bait 'n Switch. Americans, for all their smarts around sports, are mindless suckers for various shell and pea games, in which they are always the victims.
Some peas begin with Ps -- protect, preserve -- others don't -- terrorism,and defense, for example. Oh, here's a good one: petroleum. When a P-word is mentioned, we seem to shift instantly from cognitive to limbic thinking.

Jon Stewart, though of somewhat suspicious politics, ran a segment which hilariously captures this behavior. His P-word is "squirrel":(Begin at 4.00 minutes, and watch to the end (another 4 min) . Sorry, I don't know how to capture only the relevant part of a YouTube video):

http://www.thedailyshow.com/watch/mon-september-13-2010/islamophobiapalooza

What is one face of squirrel for us? The immediate equating of intervention with military intervention. We've got the biggest, most expensive hammer, so why diddle around? The UN resolution calls for an immediate ceasefire, for negotiations to reduce rather than escalate the level of bloodshed, – all sidelined or ignored as soon as direct military engagement was on the table. And for us, it would have to be on the table before we'd agree to play. "All necessary measures." And now, of course, it’s too late.

BAIT 'N SWITCH

I thought you might like to see it in action. A quite cool piece of street con. Here it is in its pure form. You might want to turn the sound off to better concentrate.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LgcrgdqqxXM

Slick, huh? What's at play here is pure technique, leaving out the most obvious dimension of baiting. Here it is in street context:

http://www.munidiaries.com/2010/04/23/shell-game-scam-caught-on-video/

You'll notice the strong possibility that there is more than one perp. Given the particular surroundings, the may even be more. The TOSSER challenges the PLAYER to bet, say $20 on guessing which shell the pea is under. The first to volunteer is the SCHILL -- and by God, he wins, and the TOSSER actually pays up, saying that one was too easy, and he will make the next one harder. "Harder?" an interested sucker in the audience thinks. "Maybe I should hold off to see what harder is." So he does, giving SCHILL #2 a chance to bet. And he also find the pea, and now the sucker PLAYER (who had guessed right, too), goes for it -- maybe is allowed to win one -- and the psychology cascades from there. The dream team may also include a LOOKOUT, depending on the place.

Want to see how the trick is done? I thought so:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o4Wr-PPct1M

THE PRESIDENT'S VERSION

The above is not simply infotainment, but will serve as an angle for analysis.

As the tosser does not invite people to be stung, the first thing Obama does not do is say "I am taking the country into yet another war." No, we are not at war. The Obama administration prefers the term "kinetic military action"" Bait 'n switch: No war? Sure, let's go. Protect the People from a dictator's terrorism.

Our goal is not "regime change", but on the other hand, we wouldn't be unhappy to see Ghadaffi go (wink, wink, nudge, nudge).

Obama: "To brush aside America's responsibility as a leader and -- more profoundly -- our responsibilities to our fellow human beings under such circumstances would have been a betrayal of who we are. Some nations may be able to turn a blind eye to atrocities in other countries. The United States of America is different. And as president, I refused to wait for the images of slaughter and mass graves before taking action."

Damn. Left out the mushroom cloud. But still, "Squirrel!" enough.

This from the Great Moral Leader who every day murders civilians in Afghanistan and Pakistan and Yemen and Somalia, and now Libya, but who turns a blind eye when "the great democracy in the Middle East," Israel, murders ever more Palestinians and our sonsa bitches exercise population control in Algeria, Tunisia, the Emirates, and above all, Saudi Arabia.

Operation Odyssey Dawn, the current name of the game in this Culture of Deception and the Strategy of Imposture. Obama the TOSSER; NATO, and arm-twisted countries of the Security Council; The European Union, the endorsing SHILLS; the mainstream media, the LOOKOUT. What an all-star cast for a heavy-duty con game.

What would a clear eye connected to a sense of history discern?

That the deadly goal of this charade is to assert Western control over the Arab rebellion, to slow them down, channel them, coopt them, confiscating their spontaneity, preventing these popular movements from changing the basic political realities in the middle east, and in the best case, restoring the statue quo ante.

If George W looked too scary, we'll give you the more user-friendly Obama to pursue and escalate the same goals. If another mideastern war seems too scary, let's identify another Hitler (cf. Saddam) and begin a kinetic military action, not to replace him, of course, but to protect the innocent uprising of democracy.

Operation (sterile, precise) Odessey (heroic, adventurous, sexy) Dawn (America brings you morning around the world!).

Who wants to bet $20?

SWEEPING THE ELEPHANT UNDER THE FIERY RUG

2011-03-18T09:07:00.000-07:00

It's hard to imagine how Japan will recover from its triple catastrophe, or what the global fallout -- radioactive, political, economic -- will be. But there is one group of people who have already recovered -- the nuclear power zealots, captained by President HopeandChange.

"This isn't Japan," they astutely observe. "We don't have tsunamis, and let's not talk about earthquakes which haven't happened yet so let's not consider them. And our nuclear plants are better designed than those dumb Russian ones, more modern, chock full of new safety devices."

Obama is still pushing nuclear energy as "clean", now with a little less emphasis on "and safe", but always asserting "clean".

The hard sell is on. Fukushima? Move on, move on, nothing to see here.

Move on? OK, then, let's move on. Cleanliness is next to Godliness.

I've always felt the emphasis on accident potential should be a lower priority for anti-nuke activists. Possible accidents are far too dismissable to the optimistic American mind.

I've thought, rather, that we should emphasize the problems with normal, daily operations, with not a tsunami in sight. The fact is, Mr. President and others, nuclear energy is not clean. It is filthy. And lethal. Even without an accident.

"Nuclear energy" is not just the power plant, of whatever "safe" design. "Nuclear energy" is bigger than that. It begins with uranium mining, and ends with decommissioning -- or doesn't end at all when we look at the need to safely store high-level radioactive waste for thousands and tens of thousands of years.

Let's take in the big picture of this energy touted as "safe".

Before we even get to the plant, there are the multiple dangers of mining and milling for workers, and for the environment, as the waste from mining operations and rainwater runoff contaminates ground and surface water with heavy metals and traces of radioactive uranium. Further uranium enrichment and fabrication of fuel rods add to the health and environmental burdens,

Then the dangerous materials have to be transported over long distances by large, protected vehicles, to fuel the individual plants. And of course the plants have to be built at great financial and environmental expense, and seated at huge water sources for cooling.

At the river or shore, heavy metals and salts build up, and the water temperature is raised as it cools the pile, threatening the local ecology and wildlife, and contaminating local land with toxic by-products, possibly forever. This, under normal operation. Nuclear power -- clean?

Then there are the 2,000 metric tons of high level waste produced by, say, our 103 US plants. At present, we store that waste on site, no adequate underground storage having been found. Beyond the spent fuel, there is all the equipment in the plant which gradually becomes contaminated with radiation, and is itself radioactive waste, which will need to be buried.

Let's think more carefully about what it means to successfully store and manage radioactive waste. Some radioactive isotopes decay quickly, in a few hours. Others, like U235, strontium 90 and cesium 137 have half-lives tens of years, meaning, say, 120 years until they are essentially "harmless". Maybe.

But the half-life of plutonium (created in reactors, and the "payoff" in "breeding fuel") is 24,300 years. Whatever plutonium is created under "normal" circumstances must be kept out of the environment for half a million years. No tsunamis. No earthquakes. Just normal.

Right.

Let's not do the half-million year dance. Too silly. Let's say only as long ago as from the birth of Jesus.

So the Romans, in a great scientific breakthrough right after the aqueducts, have discovered how to make inexhaustible energy from certain rocks in the ground. But people die when they get too close, so Roman ingenuity and lead is applied to the now-hot rocks, and they are contained.

The containment must be continuously tended to by the various barbaric tribes that follow the fall, by the churchmen of the middle ages and the warring lords of the Renaissance, by the monarchs of the 17th and 18th centuries, and the various revolutionaries of the 19th, during two world wars and several others in the twentieth century, and continue now in the current age of vying international corporations and "terrorism".

That's only 2000 years, give or take -- one tenth the half-life of plutonium, and one 200th of the time needed for it to become "safe".

So much for clean storage under normal operating conditions.

And then there is the embarrassing subject of decommissioning. Assuming the power companies -- or more likely the taxpayers -- can afford it (they probably can't), they will find that decommissioning a nuclear power plant doesn't just mean turning out the lights and walking away.

Reactors cannot do their thing forever. The intensity of continuous bombardment by high-energy sub-atomic particles weakens, strains, and fatigues the building materials, which must eventually give out. The radioactive walls of a decommissioned reactor must be cut up under water by remote control. This is not cheap. Or clean. Or safe. Just "mothball" it in cement till it cools down? the concrete would be long turned to dust before the nickle-63 or carbon-14 decay to safe levels. Different isotopes require different burial strategies. Safe decommissioning methods have yet to be found.

The rug is on fire in Japan. But the ongoing all the above is has been swept under it by the "clean" nuclear crowd.

JOB LOSS FOR EXECUTIONERS

2011-03-13T16:27:00.000-07:00

One point of light in this ghastly week of darkness has been the abolition of the death penalty in Illinois. Perhaps it's some kind of karmic balance to the election of Rahm Emannuel as mayor. Or payback for nurturing Obama, the current Grand Poobah of Extinction.

On March 9, Rod Blagojevich's successor, Gov. Pat Quinn, signed into law an abolition bill passed by state House and Senate, and Illinois joined Vermont and fourteen other states in abrogating capital punishment as a sentence for state-committed crimes.

Disaster Humanitarianism

Some of the legislators' reasons quoted by the Death Penalty Information Service were a bit lacking in moral depth:

"We have spent over $100 million of taxpayer money defending and prosecuting death row cases. The death penalty does not make our society safer, I believe. It has been an ineffective and expensive use of our scarce resources."

“I was on both sides of this issue. But then you think of the potential cost savings of this bill, and the state needs all of the savings we can get.”

This is a bit like being against racial prejudice because black people, see, aren't actually black -- they're more brown.

But, hey, if disaster capitalism or questionable reasoning must reign, let them reign here, too, to better effect.

Caveat Humanor

But Land of Lincolners, beware -- Vermont's experience bears watching:

No one had been executed in state for 33 years, and in 1987 our state legislature, too, abolished a Vermont death penalty. But fourteen years later, this was too much for the Bush administration. His Justice Department, led by Attorney General John Ashcroft, decided to do something about Vermont's raging liberalism.

A murder committed in 2000, admitted to by a remorseful 20-year old, had been plea-bargained for life without the possibility of parole. But because the victim was abducted in Vermont and the perpetrators, drunkenly fleeing, transported the victim over the border to New York State, Ashcroft demanded that his prosecutors change their agreement and go for death for the interstate crime. And on a kind of reverse-Bastille Day, 14 July 2005, a jury of twelve Vermonters delivered Vermont's first death sentence in 50 years -- another notch in Bush/Cheney's belt. And following the sentencing, there began a push to bring capital punishment back.

Now Bush/Ashcroft have become Obama/Holder, and a similar drama is unfolding. In a perfectly awful sex-murder of a 12-year old, with murderer, victim and crime entirely in-state, the new feds have once again moved in to claim jurisdiction, and thus demand another death penalty from death penalty-free Vermont.

What is their reasoning? That the internet was used in the developing story, and the internet is interstate, ergo it’s a federal offense, ergo, let's go for death. Obama's motivation? Who knows. But you have to be tough on crime to get elected in 2012.

Our Public Defender is fighting such legal travesty, but the big boys have more money. Disaster humanitarianism goes only so far.

And Our Reasoning?

The internet makes all crime these days federal crimes. Questionable reasoning. The death penalty should be abolished because it saves money to do so. Questionable reasoning, though true.

Not to be simplistic, but it seems to me that capital punishment should be abolished for moral reasons, not economic or technical ones. Call it Thou Shalt not Kill. Call it Do Unto Others. Call it Two Wrongs Don't. Call it what you want, but the state of We the People is not granted the right to kill its citizens. This is not a moonbeam hippy idea. Most comparable advanced-economy states agree.

In the midst of the 2006 cry to bring the death penalty back to Vermont, I thought I'd explore the motivations behind an extreme example in our own western culture, and researched and published a novel called The Good Doctor Guillotin. I found much involved in the French Revolution still relevant to our attitudes and times.

Here is the short first chapter as a teaser. I invite you to explore this subject with me.

Epigraph

When asked in the 1960s about the historical effect of the French Revolution, Chinese Premier Zhou En-lai replied, “Too soon to tell.”

I. Prelude

FIVE PATHS

Five paths converging at a place, and that place is the scaffold. Five roads to this engorging center, and five ways of the five men upon them.

For the Pythagoreans, five was the number of man—with his five fingers, five toes, and five senses, the creature who could be placed inside a pentagram,

with its center at his groin.

While his groin may have been near the center of the scaffold on April 25, 1792, the center of attention was his neck—the neck of Nicolas Jacques Pelletier, age thirty-six, profession “brigand,” the first of many to mate with the new machine.

Five were the number of the wounds of Christ, a truth held dear by another at the scaffold, the curé Pierre-René Grenier, spiritual adviser and companion of Pelletier’s last days.

There, too, was the builder of the machine, the “painless device”—which for a while would be known as the “louison” after Antoine Louis, the doctor who had perfected its design—one Tobias Schmidt, a German piano-maker living and working in Paris.

The machine’s attendant was also there, of course: Charles-Henri Sanson, the executioner of Paris, who nine months later would strap a king onto the plank, hold his fallen head up by the hair, and show it to the crowd. Nine pregnant months into the birth of a new world, and the death of an old one.

A fifth person was there, too, completing the pentagram, its head, perhaps, but cut off from the event, mind tortured and heart afraid—Dr. Joseph-Ignace Guillotin, professor at the Faculté de Medicine, Parisian delegate to the National Assembly, a man charged with helping to write a constitution for an unimagined world.

He was secretary to that Assembly, the good Doctor Guillotin, that singular man, a respectable clinician much in demand, a man doomed by laughing fate to immortal scorn. He wanted an egalitarian justice system, a more humane method of execution. In return he was haunted by repulsion and sniggering, by dirty pointing fingers and hands going chop-chop at the neck. His name became attached to a monster daughter, fathered by his Enlightenment hope for improving the lot of humankind. And contempt has followed him to the present day. On April 25, 1792, he could not bring himself to witness the event: He turned his back to the scaffold.

In a funeral oration for Guillotin on March, 23, 1814, a Dr. Bourru remarked, “It is difficult to benefit mankind without some unpleasantness resulting for oneself.”

Alas, too true.

Five paths to that scaffold, a pentagram of powerlessness and power. For the Freemasons, of which Guillotin was one, the pentagram inscribed in the pentagon symbolized the hermetic mystery of Solomon’s Seal, the Quintessence, a fifth essence beyond fire, water, earth, and air, the burning star of the Spirit. Walking the halls of our own pentagon, we find still the same array: would-be altruists, victims dreaming of victims, builders of efficient machines, those who use them, and those who bless them.

DROWNING THE BABY, SAVING THE BATHWATER

2011-03-04T11:35:00.000-08:00

The warships gather, as do the rationales. The table is groaning with options. A word rarely mentioned is oil.

The Wall St Journal has called for the U.S. and Europe to "help Libyans overthrow the Gadhafi regime." (Insufficiently compliant.) Obama and Hilary have expressed "outrage" in their zeal to save innocent lives.

The Senate, condemning Gadhafi's "violence against civilians" (as opposed to our own, or Israel's), with unanimous consent quickly passed a resolution which "calls on the United Nations Security Council to impose a no-fly zone over the territory of Libya."

Some pols have not been as politic. Michigan Rep. Mike Rogers, for instance, Chair of the House Intelligence Committee has noted that a no-fly zone could deter Kadafi from striking rebels with his chemical weapons and offers the U.S. a way "to project power without getting engaged on the ground."

I seem to remember something about a western Coalition of the Willing liberating the people of Iraq from Saddam, and the tribes of Afghanistan from warlords and the Taliban.

In short, you don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows, and you don't need a fisherman to smell something fishy. The details are changing hour by hour; the exact storyline is hard to predict. But that the babe of freedom is life-threatened by its bath of oil, power struggles, and violence -- that we know. Some things are transparent.

The Bread & Puppet Theater has a devastating little play called "The King Story." Peter Schumann's narrator speaks as follows:

Once there was a Good King. And the King had a Priest, and the King had a Red Man, and the King had a Blue Man and his Son, and the King had Good People.

One day, a Great Warrior came into the King's country and offered his services to the King. But the King refused to accept his services and he sent him away.

Then a terrible Dragon appeared in the King's country, and the People were afraid, and the King was afraid. And he called for the Great Warrior. But the Priest implored the King not to ask the Great Warrior for help, and the Blue Man and his Son implored the King not to ask the Great Warrior for help.

But the King was afraid and the People were afraid. And the King called for the Great Warrior, and the Great Warrior fought the Dragon. And the Great Warrior killed the Dragon.

And then the Great Warrior killed the King, and then the Great Warrior killed the Priest, and then the Great Warrior killed the Red Man, and then the Great Warrior killed the Blue Man and his Son, and then the Great Warrior killed the People.

And then the Great Warrior was alone.

And Death came.

And Death killed him.

"And Death killed him." I'll tell you how.

A smiling skull walks quietly out from behind a curtain, dressed in tux and white gloves, blowing softly on a bosun's whistle. The Great Warrior's head is huge, metallic silver, topped with lethal spikes. In each gigantic fist he holds an enormous sword which strikes mechanically, with deadly force.

A smallish Death stands face to face with Immensity.

The Great Warrior raises his right sword, and brings it fiercely down. But Death catches the sword, and slowly twists it, breaking the puppet arm. Inside, the puppeteer releases the handle, and the sword hand drops limply, flapping from its sleeve. It is an astounding moment when the integrity of the puppet is broken. For all the horror of the character, how pathetic to see the sword just dangle.

The same move is repeated with the left hand, and now, both swords swing helplessly from the Great Warrior's outstretched arms. Then, in a move of high gymnastic, the puppeteer inside slowly arcs his body backward, so that the spikes of the Great Warrior's head touch the ground behind him. He whips forward, and brings the spikes crashing down on Death.

But his head is caught and twisted, his neck snaps, and his head dangles down, knocking against limp swords.

Death walks around behind the Great Warrior, and pushes his carcass down to the ground, a mere blue mass now, with arms and head akimbo. He blows his whistle softly, and walks off stage.

***************

This, Bread & Puppet's vision of Hope and Change.

SPEAKING HALF-TRUTHS TO POWER

2011-02-28T08:36:00.000-08:00

The action

In the midst of cries for freedom in the Middle East and Africa, Ian McEwan claimed the Jerusalem Prize for Literature, in a sumptuous convention center in a city officially described as the eternal and undivided capital of Israel.

In his acceptance speech he addressed president of Israel, the minister of culture, the mayor of Jerusalem, and the "Israeli and Palestinian citizens of this beautiful city", and thanked them for honoring him with a prize which "promotes the idea of the freedom of the individual in society." He then proceeded to schmooze with the literary celebrities and political and military enforcers that gather at such events.

http://www.ianmcewan.com/

His speech was gracefully written, a short lecture on the history and purpose of the novel as an exploration of the individual, along with some ruminations concerning the political "situation", and his acceptance of the prize. Haaretz headlined the speech as courageously "slamming" Israeli policies, http://www.haaretz.com/print-edition/news/accepting-jerusalem-prize-mcewan-slams-israeli-policies-1.344695, while Britain's First Post described him as "hitting out" at Israel's "great injustice." http://www.thefirstpost.co.uk/75406,people,news,ian-mcewan-hits-out-at-israels-great-injustice-

While I acknowledge McEwan's accurate listing of major Israeli crimes, and admire his courage in enumerating them to such an audience, I found the speech on the whole to be intellectually, and perhaps psychologically dishonest, calling up many frequent zionist tropes to mask and distort the reality on the ground -- and in the hearts and minds of many of his listeners.

The words

First, in spite of his claiming disinterest in "arguments of equivalence", he repeatedly denounces "both sides", as if they were equivalent players in the ongoing tragedy.

He speaks of Hamas' "nihilism", which "has embraced the suicide bomber" -- though such appalling practices began only after intolerable Israeli provocations, and lasted for only a few years. They are not a current tactic, though McEwan describes them as if they are. Meantime, the Israelis have killed more than 3,000 Palestinians, bombing them from the skies, and shooting them from guard towers -- without committing suicide.

He goes on to speak of the nihilism of "rockets fired blindly into towns". These home-made explosives, fired in the general direction of towns over the border, land mostly in empty fields without injury to person or place -- hardly equivalent to the high-tech weaponry targeted and used against the Palestinians.

He claims that Hamas has "embraced the nihilism of an extinctionist policy toward Israel" with no nod to its many-times offered long-term truce proposals, or the clear and oft-stated purposes of the Zionists to possess the land "between the river and the sea" by dispossessing its Palestinian inhabitants.

And while he fearlessly mentions Israeli killings in the occupied territories, evictions and demolitions, the "tsunami of concrete" poured in the West Bank, the "relentless purchases of Palestinian homes in East Jerusalem, and the right of return granted to Jews but not Arabs, I stand back from these "equivalent" listings of evil, and think they are not equivalent at all -- quantitatively or qualitatively, or with regard to their motivations. One side is the oppressor, one the oppressed. Would McEwan dispute which is which?

A second common trope for Israel apologists often surfaces in their descriptions of the Israeli project. McEwan contextualizes his evaluation in the rhetoric of the occasion:

"Everybody knows this simple fact: once you've instituted a prize for philosophers and creative writers, you have embraced freedom of thought and open discourse, and I take the continued existence of the Jerusalem Prize as a tribute to the precious tradition of a democracy of ideas in Israel."
(These words, by the way, uttered in the same week as the Knesset passed a bill which calls for heavy fines to be imposed on Israeli citizens who initiate or incite boycotts against Israeli individuals, companies, factories, and organizations.)

This is shoddy, dishonest thinking, considering the history and rhetoric of zionist thought. Even McEwan recognizes this, noting that while the Jerusalem prize "recognizes writing which promotes the idea of the freedom of the individual in society", that idea "sits so awkwardly" with the situation in Jerusalem. Part for the whole, perhaps, a writer's gambit, but it sits awkwardly in the West Bank and Gaza as well, the ganze geschichte.

And again, a false equivalence: "A great and self-evident injustice hangs in the air, people have been and are being displaced. On the other hand, a valuable democracy is threatened by unfriendly neighbours, even to the point of extinction by a state that could soon possess a nuclear bomb."

Actual displacements and killings taking place as he speaks -- versus some theoretical threat "even to the point of extinction", by I suppose Iran. Does he know the real translation of Amadinejad's "threat"? Is he aware of any Iranian nuclear arms program? Would Iran use a nuclear weapon against Israel even if it had one? These are all right-wing canards, embarrassing in the mouth of an informed, presumably progressive, person.

The final, show-stopping, conversation and thought-ending zionist trope in McEwan's speech is the invocation of the, THE, Holocaust, "that industrialised cruelty which will remain always the ultimate measure of human depravity, of how far we can fall." Are there not other holocausts afoot, a main one planned and executed by the people in that very room? Are the billions spent, and the technological plans made for ever greater use of joystick drone and space warfare not a competitor on the human depravity scale?

The place

Granted, the ability to speak truth to power rides on getting access to that power. I don't know why the elite ever granted a ticket to Lewis Lapham to anything. And the politicos and their sycophant press were clearly blindsided by Stephen Colbert's still remarkable 2006 roast of George Bush at the Washington Press Club.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6MoGi4AHpn0
Once bitten, twice shy: anything like that will never happen again.

And so, by being "nice" and "balanced", Ian McEwan earned himself some reluctant ears to fleetingly assault with some nasty truths. But having been awarded the prize, would he not have had those same ears -- and more -- by turning the prize down? I understand his rationalization about art promoting freedom. But contrast his route to access, voice and freedom, with that of the people in the squares of North Africa. Is there not something more genuine about these which do not end in wine and cheese?

The effect

As McEwan traced the tradition of the novel, imagine a bulldozer audibly demolishing the building next door, the cries of the inhabitants leaking through the convention center windows. Oh, but that's on the other side of town.

This great writer admits that "whatever I believed about literature, its nobility and reach, I couldn't escape the politics of my decision. Reluctantly, sadly, I must concede that this is the case." Why reluctantly, and above all, why sadly? Is not the polis of politics a collection of those individuals he writes so sensitively about? Does collecting a prize concerned with "the freedom of the individual in society" annul its social aspects?

If there were any doubt, McEwan had only to listen to Mayor Nir Barkat's speech, asserting that while Jerusalem "has conflict, big-time," he could nevertheless boast of the city's "pluralism" and "openness," and of his conviction that the "renaissance of arts" taking place in the capital is acting to "mediate tensions."

Tell it to the Palestinians.

OUR FUNNY VALENTINES

2011-02-17T04:54:00.000-08:00

I hope you had a fine day celebrating your sweetie with non-fattening, non-aspartamic sweets, and fair-trade flowers, in honor of fourteen or so martyred saints of ancient Rome.

A legend about one of them has him restoring the sight of his jailer's daughter, and then writing her a note on the eve of his execution and signing it "From your Valentine." Hmmm. But I suppose "Be my Valentine" might be just as bad, in mytho-historical perspective.

Touching as this is, it is not as heart-warming as the message we and our British friends sent to our allies, the Russians, on February 14, 1945 -- via the thousand bomber firebombing and destruction of Dresden. Around 40,000 innocent civilians lost their lives delivering this message, and example of "killing the messenger".

I'm sure many of you have read Kurt Vonnegut's masterpiece, Slaughterhouse Five. If not, grab a copy right away. You won't forget it. It's a riot.

But even Kurt -- who was there at Dresden -- didn't really understand why all those people were getting burned and suffocated to death. He hadn't had available this excellent article backgrounding the affair: http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=17515

It seems by February, 1945 there was no military necessity for this enormous operation. Rather, the barbarous wiping out of the population was directed at our Cyrillic allies to warn them not to get too uppity with their post-war victor claims. The Russkis needed to witness this kind of air-strike by the US and Britain -- one which could just as easily be turned on them.

Seven months later, the US alone would put on a similar show at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The cover story would be the same -- we need to do this to end the war. But the real story (victims aside) was to intimidate our Soviet friends with our love-power and solidarity.

Speaking of February and ancient Rome, I'll bet not many of you know where this month gets its name. After finding out, you may not want to know, but by then it will be too late. In the really old days, there was a major Roman festival called Lupercalia. That's right: lupus = wolf. It was a party in honor of the wolf who mothered Romulus and Remus, the brothers who founded the eternal city.

At the high point of the festivities, two boys were chosen to go to the cave where R&R had been nursed. There, they were anointed with the blood of sacrificed goats, and would spend the rest of the day running through the streets whipping people with strips of goatskin. These strips were called februa, from the Latin februum, a religious purification. There was also a lot of drinking.

Hearts and flowers, hearts and minds. May our beloveds beware.

ACROMEGALY

2011-02-10T13:44:00.001-08:00

Acronyms, I think, bring out the worst in people. For example, the
USAPATRIOT act is not an act for American Patriots as it would appear,
but rather the U.S.A.P.A.T.R.I.O.T. Act — Uniting and Strengthening
America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and
Obstruct Terrorists. Act. Imagine the wordsmithing over that one.
Imagine how many taxpayer dollars went into the choice of those
acronymic wonders. And the marvellous mendacities therein — “uniting”,
“strengthening”, “appropriate”, “required” — all hidden behind the mask.
Truly a work of the devil. There are masks that hide, like that one, and
masks that reveal. It’s important to distinguish them.

Acromegaly is a disease resulting from a pituitary tumor overproducing growth hormone. In children it produces giants, and in adults, overgrown jaws, thick skulls and thick skin. You can see an acromegalic giant in action in Kurosawa's great film, Yojimbo. He wields a mean sledge hammer against his enemies.

Big jaw, thick skull, thick skin. Could this syndrome describe the US approach to the world?

Our president is about to pull a Joshua (10:8-14), to try to stop the sun from setting. During one campaign in an early Operation Cast Lead, while the children of Israel were smiting the Amorites, man, woman, and child, Joshua, in a fit of chutzpah, bade the sun stand still so smiting time might be longer and smiting more complete.

And behold,
the sun stood still,
and the moon stayed,
until the people had avenged themselves upon their enemies.
The sun stood still in the midst of heaven,
and hasted not to go down about a whole day.
And there was no day that like that before it or after it,
that the LORD hearkened unto the voice of a man:
for the LORD fought for Israel.

The 342-page USA PATRIOT ACT -- clearly already prepared and lying in wait -- was passed by Congress (357-66 in the House, and 98-1 in the Senate), and signed by George W. Bush on October 26, 2001. Many legislators admitted to not having read it through before voting. Most of the bill's provisions were due to sunset after December 31, 2005, four years after passage, and safely after the 2004 election. But by March 2006, Congress had voted to reauthorize the bill so as not to tie the president's hands in his Global War on Terror.

Sunset now 6 years late.

Though having campaigned for greater oversight, the White House is now out-republicing the Republicans by asking to further delay its sunset until December, 2013, giving the new Republican majority, and perhaps a new Republican president plenty of time to authorize permanent status. http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2011/02/obama-seeks-longer-patriot-act-extension-republicans/

The Children of Israel no doubt approve.

And it's not as if the abuses of the bill have disappeared as GWOT has aged and mellowed. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/03/13/AR2008031302277.html

Rather, the jawbone and skin continue to thicken, and the skull grows ever more dense as we Patriots resist and punish those on the side of freedom.

HELP WANTED

2011-01-22T05:24:00.000-08:00

Our front porch faces a small, but heavily travelled street in downtown Burlington, Vermont. For the last eight years we have been tracking US military, and civilian deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan using scoreboard-type signs with slots for the changing numbers.

Someone stole our first large, canvas, handpainted version of the sign -- twice. We figured it was a war of attrition we couldn’t win, so we switched over to the style above, on cardboard, then on foamboard, with computerized numbers, so all could be easily and cheaply replaced. Since then, no one has vandalized the “National Bad News Service” advertised on front porch flag.

Initially, the public information was shocking to the neighborhood. During good weather, when we were out front, many people would stop to shake their heads about and discuss with us the implications of those ever-rising numbers.

Over the years, two local newspapers have done several stories on our porch -- with photographs -- and we were surprisingly well-known to strangers as the owners of “the house with the numbers of the dead on it”.

But the shock value of the numbers had begun to fade, and even the information value was lessening: 4,436 US soldiers dead in Iraq did not seem much different (except to the families!) from 4,428, and the number of “excess” Iraqi civilian deaths was an unchanging, guesswork extrapolation from the 2007 Lancet study. Not exactly boring, but no longer the object of community discussion.

We added a paragraph from Gravity’s Rainbow below the explanation of the numbers:

Don’t forget the real business of the War is buying and selling. The murdering and the violence are self-policing, and can be entrusted to nonprofessionals. The mass nature of wartime death is useful in many ways. It serves as spectacle, as diversion from the real movements of the War. It provides raw material to be recorded into History, so that children may be taught History as sequences of violence, battle after battle, and be more prepared for the adult world. Best of all, mass death is a stimulus to just ordinary folks, little fellows, to try ’n’ grab a piece of that Pie while they’re still here to gobble it up. The true war is a celebration of markets.

This brought new readers occasionally stopping by, but now even that is getting old.

It’s time for some new use for our well-placed interface with the neighborhood, something interesting enough to be studied by passing pedestrians, but with an aspect large enough to be seen by cars going by.

We’ve taken the numbers down for now, and have put up a new, placeholder, flag of the nation of Tizofthee. The explanatory sign reads:

ABOVE, RIGHT
The national flag of the country Tizofthee, once sweet land of Liberty.

The front porch looks sadly empty. What best to do with the stage space? Suggestions welcome. Email me at mestrin@mac.com.

Thanks.

THE ETHICS OF INFILTRATION

2011-01-14T09:19:00.000-08:00

brainstuck.com

We began two weeks ago with Hallelujah in the mall, and last week contrasted that with theatrical infiltrations less in service to consumer capitalism.

When I began publishing these in various theater journals, I was met with a storm of protesting letters concerning my unethical “manipulation” of the poor bystanders. I wrote a piece in response describing what I thought to be a continuum of manipulations, from those which decreased understanding and degrees of freedom to those which increased them.

It might be good to look at such a continuum in the light of what is going on today. Let's start with the bad news:

A recent article by George Monbiot (http://www.opednews.com/populum/linkframe.php?linkid=124808) reports a training session organized by the right wing libertarian group, American Majority on "How to Manipulate the Medium":

“Here’s what I do. I get on Amazon; I type in “Liberal Books”. I go through and I say 'one star, one star, one star'. The flipside is you go to a conservative/ libertarian whatever, go to their products and give them five stars. … This is where your kids get information: Rotten Tomatoes, Flixster. These are places where you can rate movies. So when you type in “Movies on Healthcare”, I don’t want Michael Moore’s to come up, so I always give it bad ratings. I spend about 30 minutes a day, just click, click, click, click. … If there’s a place to comment, a place to rate, a place to share information, you have to do it. That’s how you control the online dialogue and give our ideas a fighting chance.”

On a wider scale, we have the current Israeli government support for a special undercover team of workers paid to surf the internet and spread positive news about Israel. http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=14465
The deputy director of the Foreign Ministry's hasbara ("public diplomacy", aka propaganda) department has admitted the team will be working undercover:

“Our people will not say: ‘Hello, I am from the hasbara department of the Israeli Foreign Ministry and I want to tell you the following.’ Nor will they necessarily identify themselves as Israelis,' he said. 'They will speak as net-surfers and as citizens, and will write responses that will look personal but will be based on a prepared list of messages that the foreign ministry developed.”

The new team is expected to increase the ministry’s close coordination with a private advocacy group, giyus.org (Give Israel Your United Support). About 50,000 activists are reported to have downloaded a programme called Megaphone that sends an alert to their computers when an article critical of Israel is published. They are then supposed to bombard the site with comments supporting Israel.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Megaphone_desktop_tool

A justification for much of this was shamefully enunciated by our own government's Cass Sunstein – Obama's Harvard Law School bud, and recently appointed Administrator of the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs. Writing in a scholarly journal, (J. Political Philosophy, 7 (2009), 202-227), Sunstein proposes the following:

"[W]e suggest a distinctive tactic for breaking up the hard core of extremists who supply conspiracy theories: cognitive infiltration of extremist groups, whereby government agents or their allies (acting either virtually or in real space, and either openly or anonymously) will undermine the crippled epistemology of believers by planting doubts about the theories and stylized facts that circulate within such groups, thereby introducing beneficial cognitive diversity."

From cognitive infiltration of websites, groups and meetings, it is a short enough step to the entrapments by agents provocateur we read about so commonly today. The missteps of suckered individuals have enormous life consequences -- for them, and for all of us -- in the age of Patriot Act paranoia and power.

If these kind of infiltrations populate one end of the continuum, what is the other end – the “good” end?

The most obvious current example lies in the operation of Wikileaks and the brave individuals that feed it sequestered material. A person working in a dishonest, destructive organization has every right to transform him or herself into an infiltrator, making available to Wikileaks or other publicity groups secret material the organization would otherwise have hidden.

As Julian Assange wrote on the Wikileaks homepage, “The goal is justice; the method is transparency.” It is paradoxical that it takes invisible infiltration to create public transparency, but there it is, and the effectiveness of this tactic can no longer be in question. Nor can the public good resulting.

While the theatrical infiltrations I described last week may be trivial compared to these larger examples, both good and bad, they do raise the question of whether all arts – Art itself – does not function as an infiltration.

One innocently goes to a bookstore to buy a book. But the contents of that book, if it be a good one, will infiltrate and infect one's heartmind. The infiltrating virus will lie within, creating biopsychical response, spiritual molecules unlabeled, unacknowledged, perhaps unknown, but potentially agents provocateur for new thinking and action.

It is with this infiltrating image in mind that my wife, Donna, and I have recently begun a new publication project called Fomite. A fomite is a medium capable of transmitting infectious organisms from one individual to another.

“The activity of art is based on the capacity of people to be infected by the feelings of others.” Tolstoy, What is Art?

Art, writing, music are the kinds of infiltrations which -- if ethically and mindfully done -- have the capacity to increase, not decrease, degrees of freedom.

INFILTRATIONS

2011-01-06T08:13:00.000-08:00

R. Crumb

Last week, I wrote about what I consider politically unearned infiltrations supporting rampant consumerism. I will not sing Hallelujah in the mall.

Infiltrations, however, do have real potential for thought-provoking events.

When I was in theater grad school in the 60s, everybody was all hot for Artaud's Theater of Cruelty, in which the audience was made to shit in its pants, and paradoxically for Brecht's teaching plays which asked the audience to think cooly and carefully about society's givens. We young directors were concerned with breaking down barriers between audience and actors -- new kinds of staging, new kinds of scripts.

But for me, the prior problem was one of "audience" itself -- that there should be people who buy (usually high-priced) tickets, sit comfortably in chairs, applaud, then go out for a meal or a drink to socialize, and perhaps, perhaps, "discuss the play".

Too compartmentalized, too boxed in, too unengaged with reality.

So I gathered a group interested in practicing Infiltrations -- theater pieces which would not be perceived as such, but which would just be reported at home as "something interesting that happened to me today."

Here are two such Infiltrations to give you an idea of what we were up to, one in an emporium, and one in a smaller store. Next week I will discuss the ethics involved.

************************************

COST PLUS AND AMERICAN IMPERIALISM

Cost Plus is a mammoth import store on the San Francisco waterfront which caters to tourists and Bay Area bobos by supplying them with hand-wrought goods from around the world – from inexpensive mass-produced trinkets to costly one-of-a-kind curiosities. It is self-help, with no sales personnel on the floor. We began to wonder about the flow of goods that went through the store, and after getting some information from one of the buyers we came up with the following piece.

Five of us, looking as straight as possible, dispersed throughout the store as customer aides. We approach people who were inspecting possible purchases. A typical dialog went like this:

US: may I help you?

CUSTOMER, generally unsuspicious: No, thank you.

US, waiting a bit, watching over customer's shoulder: Isn't it amazing how we can bring you such an intricately carved box for only $4.99?

CUSTOMER: Why, yes it is.

US: Do you know how we can do it?

CUSTOMER: No.

US: Well, the man who carves this box –he's very good at it, he can do two a day–gets 25¢ a day for his work.

CUSTOMER: Oh?

US: Yes. You see, there's a lot of famine and disease in India, and he has to work for whatever he can get.

CUSTOMER: Oh.

US: He has no choice.

CUSTOMER: Uh-huh.

US: And since we control the world economy, more or less, we can decide on the right price.

Silence.

Yes, and you have to realize that what you pay includes the markup for the buyer, the warehouse, the shipper, the import duty, and our own small overhead–so it's really an incredible bargain.

Thoughtful, nonhostile silence. This was usually a turning point: either the customer began reacting to what we were saying or else we carried it further.

I think it's right–don't you–that we in this country should be able to benefit from people's work around the world? After all, we give them a market. They'd starve without it. And we can have these really nice things. I mean Americans work really hard, right? We have to put up with so much–like the war and everything–we deserve these kind of beautiful things. People who work hard should be rewarded. Don't you think so? And the natives? They're hard workers too, but I mean 25¢ a day is a lot for them, right? Did you know that although we're only 6% of the world's population, we consume 60% of its natural resources? That just shows–were sort of 10 times ahead of everybody else because were willing to work hard and bring home the bacon.

Etc., etc. Eventually these customers drifted away with an embarrassed “Thank you.” But none of them bought the items they had been looking at.

After an agreed upon two hours, we all met outside the store to trade stories. We were never caught, and the customers, too, would have their stories to tell.

*************************

CITY LIGHTS RIPOFF

Lawrence Ferlinghetti started the City Lights Bookstore on $500 in the early fifties; it has since become one of the most complete paperback shops in the Bay Area. The store has been busted several times for selling radical or obscene material, and has an open door policy toward its customers: the police are never called. Once, City Lights was ripped off for $8,000 worth of books and went that much in the hole. This seemed to me like a typical example of Movement bullshit -- brothers undoing each other in the name of "liberation" or conflicting ideologies -- so we decided to explore our own and the customers’ attitudes toward ripping off City Lights.

During rehearsal, the group rejected playing "roles" in favor of exploring each member's own position. We lined up pretty heavily for the legitimacy of ripping-off. I was one of the few spokesmen against. But the balance worked out in performance, since most of the customers at least started off by defending the store. The piece took an hour to an hour and a half to develop (we did it three times) and was done with the cooperation of the management and, as it turned out, at their expense. It's hard to record the complexities and meanderings of the performances, but the salient points are as follows:

Beat 1

One of us, previously agreed, steals a book, and hides it in his pants. Very quietly, a young woman (one of us) goes up to him and says she doesn't think he ought to do that here. His very quiet response is "Mind your own business, lady." Totally private so far.

Beat 2

The woman retreats but keeps her eye on the guy. Some minutes later, he attempts to stash another book, and the exchange begins again, just as quietly. This time the guy is a little more pissed off, and the exchange ends with a little louder than necessary "Fuck off!" For the first time, real customers are aware of tension somewhere in the store.

Beat 3

I wander over and ask the woman what's happening. She reluctantly and quietly informs me that some guy is trying to rip off books. I approach him very quietly and ask him why doesn't he do that at Doubleday's or Brentano's. He begins to get uneasy and tries to terminate our encounter as quickly as possible, until another one of us, overhearing, supports the thief by asking me,

"Hey, what are you, a cop or something? Let the guy do his thing."

Beat 4

By now it's apparent to the thief that things aren't working out as planned. But on the other hand, he has support, so he doesn't split. For the first time I chastise the thief publicly.

"Hey man, look, why don't you go down to Doubleday's and rip off the book if you need it? Why rip off your brothers?"

"Brothers, my ass! This place is the fucking pig establishment."

This is the first theme to be taken up -- it generally called up a lot of customer support for the store. Other topics for discussion we planted among the ten to twenty customers are:

1. Who are brothers; who is the enemy?

2. Are there alternatives to a retail bookstore?

3. Are "liberals" like Ferlinghetti and City Lights just greasing the capitalist machine?

Our group, more vocal now than at first, pushes the balance way over to the thief's side. This helps justify his sticking around. He's not an outlaw but is acting within the mores of the local population -- and this brings an emotional response from the customers. Each time, someone offers to buy him the book or take up a collection. We follow their trips wherever they go.

Beat 5

I get more and more pissed off with what I consider poor analysis. I station myself on the steps so I can be heard by everyone, wait for a lull, and say to the thief,

"All right, that's all."

"What do you mean?"

"You're not taking those books."

"Oh yeah? Why not?"

“'Cause I'm going upstairs with you and tell Shig [the guy at the desk] you've got them."

A new uproar! Even the customers don't like it. (There are a few who come over to quietly tell me they agree with me and think I should do it, but no one defends my action publicly.) I am accused of being a pig, of laying my trip on other people, of exceeding my rights.

"What is this, the second grade, you're gonna tell the teacher?"

I argue briefly that when this man rips off City Lights, he's ripping me off (I need the store), and that I intend to defend myself. From that time on, I am generally silent, stubbornly waiting for the thief's exit.

Beat 6

One of us calls for a "rip-in," and tries to get customers to liberate books together. So far, only our own group has done this publicly, although it's hard to tell what walks out when we do.

Beat 7

Confrontation at the desk. The first time we did it the day clerk got completely flustered. He had been told what was happening and was asked to act in any way he wanted. He couldn't get it together, and three people walked out with books. That evening we confronted Shig who, with some kind of invisible karate approach, retrieved two books. A third was grabbed by a customer at the door. The next night we had a big argument at the desk. Shig surprised us by saying, "Take the books," and several people did so -- to a lot of customers' anger. Shig just felt that that was his prerogative. That really set off some of the people who had been defending the store for the last hour downstairs.

We still haven't resolved for ourselves the implications of our positions and actions. We know the piece is credible and sets a lot of people thinking and talking (and stealing?). But when someone in our group presented me with the complete Beethoven string quartets as a present, I had to send Shig a check before I could enjoy it.

MOB 'N MAUL

2010-12-30T07:55:00.000-08:00

We seem to be bombarded lately by “random acts of culture” both in the real world (if such a place exists) and on YouTube. Handel's Hallelujah Chorus seems to be popping up all over -- almost expected at shopping malls and food courts.

I love Messiah. I've made it a point to sing, play, or conduct it almost every year since I've been 20. The Hallelujah Chorus is an astoundingly effective work of its time–and ours–and one can well imagine King George rising in ecstasy when hearing it. I've written about Messiah in several of my books, and it is a major altar in my church of worship.

But does it belong in a shopping mall? In the midst of ongoing orgies of consumerism, here we have enthusiastic artists, most often volunteers, singing “for the Lord God omnipotent reigneth.”

In the context of the shopping mall, who is the Lord God omnipotent that reigneth? Surely more Mammon than Jehovah. The Lord God of Capitalism here reigns, “and he shall reign for ever and ever!”

While this may in fact be true, at least for the moment, is it worth putting so much energy into celebrating it? The Hallelujah Chorus is not Muzak, especially in live performance. People hear it, understand it, and receive it positively. What is it they are joyfully hearing in the context of the mall? The delight of Christmas shopping. The triumphant assertion of their own culture. The craving for that culture to reign forever and ever.

But is this the function of art? Should great music be an accomplice to great crimes? Should it enable and abet destructive capitalist madness?

In One Dimensional Man, Marcuse speaks of the Great Refusal–the protest against that which is. That is great art's function in society -- to refute, break and recreate "the modes in which man and things are made to appear.”

I have been invited several times to participate in a Hallelujah flash mob. I know the bass part well, and could easily do it. But the idea of singing such praise in a shopping mall–to a shopping mall–to the activities of a shopping mall–makes my gorge rise.

When I got my most recent invite, I suggested, as an alternative, a flash mob which would sing a neighboring chorus from Messiah–“Surely He Hath Borne Our Griefs And Carried Our Sorrows.” The music is truly harrowing, filled with dotted rhythms of the lash and dissonances of pain. The words go on to say, “He was wounded for our transgressions. He was bruisèd for our iniquities.” And was he not? What would Jesus buy at the mall? The text of “Surely” concludes, "The chastisement of our peace was upon him.”

Singing "Surely" at the mall? Now that would be a surprise event, an invasion of culture by Culture.

Of course whenever I hear the word Culture, I think of Goering and his remarkable assertion, “Whenever I hear the word Culture I reach for my gun.” I understand what he was talking about. Because real Culture is always and immensely subversive of great schemes human and inhuman.

Brecht nailed the oppositional function of art in the closing speech of his teaching play, The Exception and the Rule. Concerning the actions of the characters in the one-act, the narrator instructs the audience:

Observe the conduct of these people closely:
Find it estranging even if not very strange
Hard to explain even if it is the custom
Hard to understand even if it is the rule
Observe the smallest action, seeming simple
With mistrust
Inquire if a thing be necessary
Especially if it is common
We particularly ask you -
When a thing continually occurs -
Not on that account to find it natural
Let nothing be called natural
In an age of bloody confusion
Ordered disorder, planned caprice
And dehumanized humanity
Lest all things
Be held unalterable!

That, I think, is what random acts of Culture should be doing.

My next week's essay will discuss the healing potential of infiltrative art.

SEASON'S BLEATINGS

2010-12-23T02:40:00.000-08:00

Donna Bister: Bread & Puppet Sheep

Toward the end of Bread & Puppet's marvelous Christmas Story, after the news spreads of Jesus's birth, King Herod picks up the phone:

"Hello, Third Army? Go straight to Bethlehem and kill all the children."

In the next scene a large soldier marches in, in full battle array, and knocks on the door of a tiny puppet house.

"Good evening, Ma’am. Do you happen to have any children in the house?"
"Oh, yes, of course," the little hand-puppet says. "Hansie and Mariechen.”
“Can you bring them out, please?”
“Oh certainly, Sergeant. But...why?
"We want to kill them."
"Oh."

The mother then tells the sergeant an amazing story that he'll "never believe, but..." about how the children were just taking a bath and then -- by accident -- they were washed down the drain. The sergeant, stupefied, weeps.

"Oh, lady, that's really terrible. Allow me to extend the condolences of the entire Third Army."

He marches off to the next house where he finds that the six children happened to have just marched off six weeks ago and haven't come back yet.

"Men, King Herod isn't going to be too pleased about this."

The next house turns out to be the Bethlehem Nursery, "And we have 55 sweet, little darlings fast asleep in their sweet little beddy-byes," says the Nurse out her window, "AND YOU GORILLAS ARE WAKING THEM UP WITH YOUR SCREAMING. You better go play soldier somewhere else, or I'll call the authorities."

"Lady," says the sergeant, "we are the authorities."

The Slaughter of the Innocents is not an aspect of the Christmas story dwelt on during our consumerist, Hallmarky season. In fact, it's not dwelt on at any other time -- whether the Innocents be the Iraqi, Afghani, Pakistani, or Palestinian dead, the humanitarians aboard the Mavi Marmara or the recipients of its aid, Rachel Corrie herself, crushed by an Israeli bulldozer, or the newly oiled seabirds, fish and fishermen in the Gulf.

"I'll call the authorities," the public says, only to discover that "We" -- the perpetrators -- "ARE the authorities."

It was the authorities who set up the enrichment of the rich and the impoverishment of the rest. It is the authorities who promote the mass murders of the military industrial complex with their endless wars and genocides, who pocket the cash and power, cloak themselves in secrecy, and silence whistleblowers. It is our "best and brightest" who enable the destruction for profit of the environment, and call for economy on collapsing infrastructures, concrete and human. Is current "authority" any less than a sociopathic criminal enterprise?

The moment captured at the end of the Bread & Puppet Christmas Story provides the insouciant watchword of our time: "Lady, we are the authorities."

KICKING THE DOG

2010-12-17T05:30:00.000-08:00

So Julian Assange is now without his passport, braceleted under house arrest, waiting for the Wheels of Injustice to slowly grind. At this point, his story is not so much that of killing the messenger (though that is what many in the US are calling for), as that of kicking the dog.

The dog in question was Julian’s close ancestor, Diogenes, a contentious fanatic foolish enough to spend his life with a lantern, looking unsuccessfully for "an honest man." Some say he sought “a human being.” His writings did not survive, but there are legends.

Notorious for his provocative behavior, people called him a dog, a nickname he embraced. “Other dogs,” he said, “bite their enemies. I bite my friends to save them.”

He wasn’t kind to his enemies either. At a sumptuous dinner given by a wealthy man, a guest became so outraged by Diogenes' behavior that he began to throw bones to “the dog”. The philosopher got up, lifted his leg and toga, and took a leak on him.

Like Assange’s, Diogenes' life was a relentless campaign to promote reason and virtue, and to debunk the values and institutions of a corrupt society. In doing so he disregarded laws, customs, conventions, public opinion, reputation, honor and personal dishonor.

Political authority was a main target for both -- its folly, pretense, selfishness, vanity, self-deception, corruption, and artificiality of conduct. Diogenes said: “Those who have virtue always in their mouth, and neglect it in practice, are like a harp which emits a sound pleasing to others, while being itself deaf to the music.”

So together the dogs -- Diogenes and Assange -- challenge the false coin of human morality, sharing Socrates' belief that one can be a doctor to men’s souls, and morally improve humanity, while being contemptuous of its behavior.

Sitting alone in a Dickensian prison, or now with wi-fi in a mansion, Assange has not yet been assassinated, as many have called for. He may or may not end like Socrates, taken out by the State. But Diogenes lived a long while, and one hopes the same may be true for Julian Assange.

One legend of Diogenes' death is that, at 90, he committed suicide by holding his breath. If or when Assange does die, it will likely be because he, too, is no longer allowed to breathe, speak, or leak out his documents.

MUSIC HATH CHARMS TO SOOTHE THE STINKING BREATH

2010-12-10T07:19:00.000-08:00

A recent revelation: rehearsing the Mendelssohn Violin Concerto, I was in the cello section mentally drooling over the carpet of harmonies we were laying down under the solo violin during the gorgeous slow movement. Not much to concentrate on other then how very beautiful this moment was.

As I breathed in the slow movement of the Mendelssohn, I realized that this music, this moment, and others like it, were SPECIFIC antidotes to the poison spewing from the mouths of politicians. I realized too, that without my frequent hits from the music inhaler I would probably be dead, or at least reduced to zombiedom. My life's balance was suspended between the poison of politics and the healing of music, which interaction created a space for my writing.

I had long been aware of “the healing power of music” inasmuch as it was the arena of "music therapy" and the tool of music therapists. But I had never been so acutely aware of its specific purgative and remedial effect.

Coming up soon are Beethoven's two birthdays, December 16 and December 17. As one of the characters in my novel, Insect Dreams, says: “Extraordinary people do extraordinary things.” (Not to be coy, there are two different documents with two different birth dates. I celebrate both.) And this week, too, Donna and I begin rehearsals for a New Year's Day performance of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, which will hopefully become a tradition here in Burlington. In any case, Beethoven is often on my mind.

It's somewhat predictable, then, that the combination of Beethoven, music, and healing would find its way into my writing. I want to share with you this week a particularly ridiculous scene based on a particularly amazing piece of music–a movement of the A minor String Quartet which Aldous Huxley called “proof of the existence of God”. The movement was labeled by Beethoven “Heiliger Dankgesang eines Gesenenen an die Gottheit, in der lydischen Tonart”–a "Holy Song of Thanks from a Convalescent to the Godhead, in the Lydian Mode".

Beethoven was known to have serious stomach problems which bothered him increasingly as he aged. I put this all together and came up with the following note in my recent novel, The Annotated Nose.

The hero, Alexei Pigov, has become the Glenn Gould of the accordion. He is befriended by a fellow lab tech, William Hundwasser, who exploits and markets his strangeness, creating from him the public figure of a medieval plague doctor come to heal The Contemporary Plague. Here he is in Hundwasser's lab, experimenting with Beethoven on Hundwasser, and Herman, the tarantula:

44. Studying tarantellas and subtly applying them was my first experience of being a healer. Hundwasser kept several in a terrarium in his lab as a conversation starter for the “pretty young things in their white lab coats” he enjoyed cultivating. I began with one named Herman.

    Herman was a dancin’ fool. He (?) would jump out of hiding — or hibernating, or estivating, or whatever tarantulas do for sleep — at the first peep of the accordion, and would then stand thoughtfully, taking the music into his ganglia. Then he would begin to sway, and after a minute to dance, and to dance appropriately to whatever I was playing, almost in rhythm, but definitely fast for allegros and slowly for adagios. When I stopped, he stopped — and waited. He could outwait me. When I left, I would just leave him there, waiting.

    I figured if an insect person could react this way, with so few nerve cells, human persons must be able process such signals with far more complex consequences than simply dancing.

    As you probably know, Beethoven suffered from chronic abdominal problems and severe intestinal inflammation. Fortunately Hundwasser suffered similar symptoms. An experiment was staring me right in the face. The famous Heilige Dankgesang in the A minor quartet, the “Holy Song Of Thanks From A Convalescent To The Godhead“, was written after recovering from a serious bout with abdominal pain. Surely the tones, the great ideas of that movement, beyond being “proof of the existence of God” (Huxley), the successive integrations of disparate elements, must have something to do with disease, and with (Beethoven’s) stomach disease in particular. It was worth a try.

    I made an accordion arrangement of the three adagio sections, and played them daily to Hundwasser during lunch break. We used the animal room for privacy. He just sat and listened. I suppose the rats listened too, but I had no parameters to measure the effects on them.

    Hundwasser, however, had lots of parameters. Or, like the hedgehog, one big parameter: the number of Rolaids he popped each day. It took a week or so before R began to drop. From an average of 20 to an average of 12. On weekends, no music, R rose again. Come weekdays, it began to fall by Tuesday. In a sustained three week experiment, no days off, R fell to 3, then climbed to 12 again with a week off. We were on to something.

    Neither of us had the time for a full and lasting cure, but after we stopped the experiment, he bought a record of the Budapest playing it, and has used that routinely to calm his symptoms. Saves him money on Rolaids, and he can listen while washing the dishes during the rare moments that he washes the dishes.

    Flush with success, I looked more closely into the tarantella situation, the Antidotum Tarantulae. I would need to study the phenomenon first hand. But there aren’t a lot of tarantula bites in Manhattan. There aren’t many tarantas [women bitten by tarantulas] to whom I could offer treatment — especially if it were just an experiment by a newbie. What to do?

    Herman to the rescue! I could get him to bite me, and then, in the heroic tradition of the great doctors and medical researchers, I could try to cure myself. I admit such research is small potatoes compared to the guy who shoved a catheter into an arm vein and guided it up into his heart, or the guys from Walter Reed’s team who invited malaria mosquitoes to bite them, so they could test drugs, or even the guy who gave himself ulcers so he could prove it was bacteria that caused them. Small potatoes unless I died. But I know that though tarantula bites were toxic, they were not often fatal.

    And of course, we have to remember Dr. Curt Conners, aka, the Lizard in Spiderman Comics, who lost his arm in a war, and experimented with reptilian DNA to try and grow it back, a great example of be careful what you wish for: the therapy caused him to mutate into a creature half-human and half-reptile. He became a villain, too, and even uglier than I am. I wondered if I might turn into a tarantula person — from the saliva — but it wasn’t very likely.

    I knew this self-experimentation would be looked down upon at the Berg Institute for Experimental Physiology, Surgery and Pathology, even though experimental physiology, surgery and pathology was exactly what I was doing. So it was 1 A.M. when I let myself into Hundwasser’s lab, took Honey [his accordion] out of her case, and aroused Herman with the traditional slow, lamenting introduction to Borodin’s Polovetsian Dance #2, “The Wild Dance of the Men”. Out he came on cue, staring at me through the Adagio, and when the fast part started, gave a shiver, and went into nothing short of a frenzy, leaping high off the terrarium floor, doing 90º, 180º, 270º, and 360º spins in the air, landing on his feet, rolling over on his back, and dragging himself miraculously by hyper–extended forelegs reaching up, over and behind his head, engaging the sand. It was so amazing, I almost forgot what I had come for. He must have been a Polovetsian spider, or at least have Polovetsian blood, perhaps from the Russian steppes.

    When the both of us stopped to get our breaths, I thrust my left arm into the terrarium, and, though normally a pacifist, he leaped at it, and sunk his fangs in midway between wrist and elbow. Good Herman! I had to pull him off. Within a minute and a half, I was, as they say, possessed by the spider.

    Though being somewhat atypical myself, I was that night afflicted with all the typical tarantula bite symptoms: feelings of prostration, anguish, psychomotor agitation, clouding of my sensory apparatus, difficulty standing, stomach cramps, nausea, paresthesia, muscular pains, extraordinary itching, and best and worst of all, vastly heightened sexual desire. I took a cab home; the cabbie thought I was way-drunk.

    Lying in my bed, I felt wounded and weary, and aware of the deep tediousness of all things. Still, after a short sleep, I was able to drag Honey out of her case, and begin a medly of tarantellas I had learned.

    Somewhere toward the end of the 1490s, the great Neopolitan scholar Alessandro d’Alessandro described the treatment of stricken tarantas by the local folk musicians: “they play different dances according to the nature of the poison, in such a way that with the vicitms entranced by the harmony and fascinated by what they hear, the poison either dissolves inside the body and dissipates, or else is slowly eliminated through the veins.” And with (wouldn’t you know it?) one of the Neopolitan tarantellas, I could feel just that effect, a veritable exorcism, a return to life, possibly to love. By the next day I was weak, but feeling basically normal via my iatromusical practice.

    Plague doctoring is not so much different, though I suffer less, and my patients suffer more.

OUR BETTER ANGELS MAY HAVE FLED

2010-12-02T06:21:00.000-08:00

“In each event–in the living act, the undoubted deed–there, some unknown but still reasoning thing puts forth the molding of its features from behind the unreasoning mask.”
Capt. Ahab

So they -- Pynchon's "They", the Blue and Red Meanies, visible and undisclosed -- won't renew unemplyoment benefits, want to kill 'em all, anywhere, with drones or nukes if possible, are prepared to starve out Palestinians and Caterpillar their homes, drown low-lying peasants, and assassinate or execute any whistle blowers so they can do their deeds in secret. Who are these people?

“Greedy” and “mean-spirited” are the mildest adjectives one hears describing the attitudes and projects of heads of state, their underlings, and the CEOs that drive them. And last -- but definitely not least -- the populations that applaud them.

It might be possible to assume that Mr. (and the occasional Ms.) Big and their followers have human hearts (Cheney's contraption notwithstanding), love their children as we do, and hope to pass on to them a better world. What is it, then, that drives them to propose and cheer on such callous proposals and systems?

While differing in personal details, it's likely that each actor is driven by what the Frankfurt School called the “Authoritarian Personality,” whose fundamental trait is the urgent need for, and privileging of, order. Freud, Fromm, and Reich explained the psychodynamics of weak ego structures that underlay the Authoritarian Personality, while Adorno and Horkheimer analyzed the social repression that encourage it and leave its marks on individual souls.

When Alles in Ordnung becomes the highest value, and all else seems threatening, many things follow:

1) Powerful leaders are assumed to be needed to keep society in line, secretly if necessary, and to restrict it to conventional, middle-class values. Exaggerated assertions of toughness and strength become the norm. Trickle-down theories designed to protect the powerful are understood to be in the interest of all. Though greed and lust for power may be involved, they are justified by an appeal to the general good.

2) Democracy becomes a threat and must be limited. In The Crisis of Democracy: Report on the Governed Ability of Democracies To the Trilateral Commission, Samuel Huntington warns about the consequences of an “excess of democracy”: “The arenas where democratic procedures are appropriate are, in short, limited.… The effective operation of the democratic political system usually requires some measure of apathy and noninvolvement on the part of some individuals and groups.… Marginality on the part of some groups is inherently undemocratic, but it has also been one of the factors which has enabled democracy to function effectively.”

The need to control the unpredictability of excess democracy has guided American foreign and economic policy throughout its history. The pattern of marginalizing the general population and supporting rich or dictatorial strongmen is driven as much by a rage for order and fear of chaos as by a simple selfish need to maximize profits–profits.

3 Individualism becomes suspect, a negative value to be minimized or stamped out. Difference means unpredictability, and thus "bad". Fear of an unpredictable, uncontrollable Other spawns all the “–isms” which rampage today: racism, sexism, classism, anti-Semitism, xenophobia. Nature itself becomes an enemy Other to be conquered and subdued.

4) Rigid moralism of stereotypical values seems the most secure protection against anarchy. The psychosexual chaos at the core of an authoritarian personality simultaneously fascinates and repels. There is exaggerated concern with and (often hypocritical) denunciation of libidinal art and sexual “goings on.” God hates fags, don'tcha know. Don't ask, don't tell, don't be. At the same time, unconscious emotional impulses are projected outward, and the world is seen as a wild and dangerous place in which worst-case scenarios abound.

5) Fear and guilt about chaotic thoughts within and deeds without is so potentially threatening that psychic numbing becomes a typical response, with emotional dissociation from the consequences of deeds. Knee-jerk patriotism in response to moral questions is an effective defense mechanism. Yellow ribbons blindfold eyes against our corpses. The story of the Enola Gay or 9/11 must not be told. Control of information makes compassion difficult.

6) A culture of punishment follows hard upon. Offenders against official order must be heavily penalized. Dominance and submission become crucial. Pro-life and pro-death penalty attitudes flourish together. Sanctity of life is secondary: the important thing is to punish transgressors. Tender-mindedness is for bleeding heart liberals.

Thus, the Authoritarian Personality -- individual and social. While no “angry white male” leader or follower may display every trait, they are all on collective display in the current reactionary zeitgeist. To characterize them as simple greed or mean-spiritedness is to misunderstand their psychic origins, and to limit effective response.

Can there be an effective strategy in response?

Each of the characteristics above can be substantially addressed. In dealing with any particular individual, from talkshow caller to senator, a crucial move might be to speak to his or her insecurity and need for order:

1) Powerful Leaders. We can emphasize the collective wisdom and surprising knowledge of larger groups, and the limitations of powerful, but narrow, leadership. We can point to the possibilities of decentralized planning and decision-making. If trickle-up energy can be recognized and honored, trickle-down economics will make less sense.

2) The Threat of Democracy. We can call on any reserve goodwill for the founding ideas of this country. In their research for Habits of the Heart, Robert Bellah's group of sociologists discovered a pervasive “second language” of civic republicanism and biblical tradition flourishing alongside the seemingly dominant American language of manipulative instrumentalism. World Bank strangulation of the global poor, for example, can show up -- at least to the masses -- as profound injustice if this second language is brought forward and appealed to. Bellah's book is an important read for activists thoroughly discouraged.

3) Suspect Individualism and Dangerous Others. “New” and “different” are not negative terms in American culture. Current advertising appeals to it all the time. Ethnic music and restaurants thrive–so why not the folks that originate them? Today's xenophobia may not be an indelible characteristic of the American psyche, but a relatively superficial effect of economic hard times. Many positive sensibilities are there to be addressed, and one can try to locate blame where it belongs -- on the power structures, not on their victims.

4) Rigid Moralism. Puritanism and profligacy have always existed in dubious battle. Hawthorne's “Maypole of Marymount” teases the most rigid among us, creating chaos within control. Understanding the inner workings of self and others is a possible key to a more peaceful order. Mitch McConnel (married to an Asian-American) may be secretly fascinated with Louisville's gay pride parade, but he has no conceptual tree on which to hang it. Can we make it okay for him and his to ponder such things, if only as examples of the human condition?

5) Patriotic Psychic Numbing. Now that the information highway has invaded the world, images of Others seep daily into consciousness. For all the "good guy/bad guy" media spin, there may be a perception of common humanity lurking under the thickest hide, kept in place only by fear. Should that hide begin to melt, psychic numbing will disappear with it and blinding patriotism might be open to fascination and even generosity. “They're just dumb, greedy sonsabitches” sells short even a right-winger's capacity for wonder.

6) The Culture of Punishment. As nuclear power, once projected as “too cheap to meter,” has priced itself out of existence, so must three-strikes prison building make its idiocy felt. When the quick fix fails–as even a casual observer can see it must–Americans will have to confront the contradictions of dominance. And here our egalitarian “second language” can come into play, creaking open through cognitive dissonance. If even Dick Cheney supports his daughter in her lesbianism, can angry, punishing America be all that far behind?

All right. But as Cheney so famously said, "So?"

These approaches to the Authoritarian Personality do seem overly optimistic in the era of our once and future Congresses. And surely social and political structures of domination are firmly in place, prejudicing events and guiding their outcomes. But Melville directs our attention to the glimmer of hope, the “unknown but still reasoning thing” behind the unreasoning mask. Far better, perhaps, to organize toward that glimmer and engage that reason then to lapse into despair, and the powerless calling of names.

But can the vestigial better angels of our nature swell the chorus of a new, more humane union? Or have badder angel systems so suffocated us, for so long, that the better angels have turned their backs, taken their leave, and fled?

Lincoln's angels must by now confront Walter Benjamin's Angel:

...an angel who seems about to take leave of something, something at which he is staring. His eyes are wide, his mouth open and his wings outspread. This is what the Angel of History must look like. His face is turned toward the past. What look to us like a chain of occurrences appears to him as one great catastrophe incessantly piling wreck upon wreck and hurling it at his feet. He would very much like to stay, to waken the dead and make whole what has been shattered. But a storm is blowing so strongly from Paradise that his wings are pinned back: he can no longer close them. This storm drives him irresistibly into the future, to which his back is turned, while the pile before him grows. What we call progress -- that is the storm.

As the winds increase, I'm not betting on the outcome.

GWOT LOVE

2010-11-12T05:46:00.000-08:00

I hear on the news this Veterans Day that our thankfully exiting governor–cynically known as Governor Scissorhands for all his ribbon cutting -- will be dedicating a new memorial to our Vermont dead in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The "Vermont Global War on Terror Memorial", planned and funded by the families of "Vermont's 36 Fallen Global War on Terror Heroes,” to the tune of $350,000 is aimed at “marking both the sacrifice of those who served and the heartbreak of the loved ones left behind.”

A memorial to oneself?

The sculptor of the Memorial describes it thus:

"In front of the field memorial stands a low sarcophagus etched with the names and representing the body of Vermont’s Fallen Patriots.

Surrounding the field memorial and sarcophagus are three semi-circular bench walls.

In the center of each bench wall stands a monolith. The monolith on the left is dedicated to all those from Vermont who have served in the Global War on Terror. It has a hand tooled War on Terror Service Medal. The monolith on the right is dedicated to the families of the fallen and the great sacrifices they have made. It has a hand tooled Vermont Patriot’s Medal. The monolith in the back has a bronze dedication plaque and expresses the pride and sorrow of the citizens of Vermont.

Together the three monoliths – their family, their comrades and their fellow citizens stand as sentinels ready to guard the sacred honor of the fallen. …”

The Cemetery Advisory Board of the Vermont Veterans Memorial Cemetery has provided what they call “a reverent location at the entrance to the cemetery.” “The GWOT Memorial will be a lasting tribute to our Fallen Heroes who have made the 'ultimate sacrifice' protecting our country and defending our freedom. They will not be forgotten.”

It is hard to know where to begin reacting to all this. I cringe at the language–bathetic, maudlin, soupy, cloying, schmaltzy, large-P Patriotic–but the sentiments inscribed in this language are more problematical still.

A guy stopped by at our peace vigil last night and said, “My nephew got back from Iraq and blew his brains out. He couldn't deal with the stuff he had done–killing civilians and all that.”

This, it seems to me is a more accurate description of reality.

Our president, of course, made a typical Veterans Day pledge: “As long as I am Commander-in-Chief, I am going to do right by them [our veterans]. America will not let you down. We will take care of our own,” he said.

On the other hand, yesterday's release of the draft report from the President's Fiscal Deficit Commission has recommended establishing Veterans Administration health co-pays. From the report: “This option would increase out-of-pocket costs for veterans in Priority Group 5–those who do not have service-connected disabilities and whose income is below a VA-defined threshold. Currently, those patients pay no fees for inpatient or outpatient medical care. This option requires copayments for medical care provided by the Department of Veterans Affairs to these enrollees, saving 0.7 billion in 2014.”

This, it seems to me, is a more accurate description of reality.

And today, Obama exhorted Congress to stop shooting down the deficit proposals before they have been studied. “If people are in fact, concerned about spending, debt, deficits and the future of our country, then they're going to need to be armed with the information about the kinds of choices that are going to be involved, and we can't just engage in political rhetoric.” A new rhetorical War on Political Rhetoric?

The question of supporting troops is a vexed one. It is true they have suffered–but they have also caused much suffering. Which of the two do we support? Only the first while ignoring the second? The families too have suffered. But is part of their pain related to their own responsibility in sending their children off to kill and be killed in the interests of a governing elite? Do we support such sending off?

In any case, the language of the Vermont Global War On Terror Memorial is tired, empty, and ever less to any point. It perpetuates a sentimental, obscuring cloud-of-unknowing over the realities we currently face and must radically change.

HAVE YOU SPANKED YOUR INNER CHILD TODAY?

2010-11-06T04:15:00.000-07:00

I'm just beginning the week run of rehearsals and performances in the pit orchestra for Peter Pan. The Lyric Theater production will be extremely professional as usual, and attended by full houses of an enthusiastic community. I play in these musicals not because I think the dramatic art is great or the music profound, but because they are such wonderful examples of communities coming together–200 people working for months without pay–to produce a high-spirited event which several thousand people will enjoy.

Nevertheless, I have to admit being irritated by the very thought of Peter Pan. The unthinking enthusiasm with which his motto, “I won't grow up”, is greeted reflects the destructive childishness, and embrace of that childishness, epidemic in the American public. And here I'm not thinking of the occasional comico-pathetic gray-hair who earnestly exhorts me to honor my inner child as he or she does, and then trips blithely away in some psychic equivalent of tie dyes and bellbottoms. Rather I am concerned with the rampant embrace of the trivial and superficial.

This pattern has some innocent manifestations such as the recent adult enthusiasm for various children's books, business-suited women carrying them proudly underarm and assuring questioners that they are “really for adults, too.” The infantilization of the reading public -- bad for serious authors, but not all that sinister. Far more so is the dumbing down of news and other information, and the substitution of infotainment and celebrity.

I was reminded of this recently when Obama walked on stage, pre-election, at the Daily Show. The audience cheered and clapped–but in a way far beyond the polite, enthusiastic greetings routinely offered to even villains and semi-villains. The adulation went on and on. Obama tried four times to stop it, and finally just stood there smiling and waving occasionally.

Now remember, Jon Stewart's audience is made up mostly of lefty liberals who enjoy his satirical critique of the powers that be. Nevertheless, this very audience offered up an unstoppable standing ovation for a man who stands against everything they presumably stand for: a man who is currently answerable for the worldwide death and starvation of millions; the many domestic losses of home and job; the destruction of climate and disarmament conferences; the ever-increasing expenditures on ever-increasing wars; the now commonplace practice of torture; the undercutting of public healthcare; the shielding of executive crimes past and present; the hoarding of executive power; the resurgence of the nuclear industry; the embrace of Israel's brutal policies in Palestine; the ever-increasing inequality of wealth; and now, post-election, the inevitable strangulation and death of democratic government. For starters.

Yet the children cheered him, and cheered him, and cheered him, because he is the president and they were in the same room, behaving not unlike swooning teenage girls at early Beatles concerts. Clap if you believe in fairies. I was embarrassed for them.

****************

Burlington, Vermont, where I live, is the birthplace and main home of Ben & Jerry's ice cream. Their motto, plastered all over bumper stickers, and inside their Burlington store, is IF IT'S NOT FUN, WHY DO IT? I've often pondered this question. And I've pondered alongside it another bumper sticker common in our area: Emma Goldman's face next to the line "If I can't dance, I don't want to be part of your revolution.”

Is this a food fight between bumper stickers, or are they finally on the same side? Are they both exhorting us to honor our inner children? I decided to look further into the Goldman quote, and this is what I found–in her autobiography, Living My Life:

At the dances I was one of the most untiring and gayest. One evening a cousin of Sasha, a young boy, took me aside. With a grave face, as if he were about to announce the death of a dear comrade, he whispered to me that it did not behoove an agitator to dance. Certainly not with such reckless abandon, anyway. It was undignified for one who was on the way to become a force in the anarchist movement. My frivolity would only hurt the Cause.

I grew furious at the impudent interference of the boy. I told him to mind his own business. I was tired of having the Cause constantly thrown into my face. I did not believe that a Cause which stood for a beautiful ideal, for anarchism, for release and freedom from convention and prejudice, should demand the denial of life and joy. I insisted that are Cause could not expect me to become a nun and that the movement would not be turned into a cloister. If it meant that, I did not want it. I want freedom, the right to self-expression, everybody's right to beautiful, radiant things. Anarchism meant that to me, and I would live it in spite of the whole world–prisons, persecution, everything. Yes, even in spite of the condemnation of my own closest comrades I would live my beautiful ideal. (p.56)

This statement feels significantly different from “IF IT'S NOT FUN WHY DO IT?”, for behind the joy and exuberance, Emma embraces a larger ideal to be joyful about. The playfulness of Ben & Jerry's, its flavors, its graphics, is more about honoring one's inner child. and putting out a lot of money -- with a smile -- for an ice cream cone.

I must say that the figure of Peter Pan is more complex then his motto song “I won't grow up” might imply. In Barrie's book, and even in the musical, Peter is a semi-tragic figure, sentenced to repeated loss of the friends who do grow up to leave him, responsible for the parental pain of losing the children kidnapped, and the nostalgic regret of losing one's childhood. Peter is as much the villain of the piece as its hero. He is boastful, selfish, distructive, and unreflective. And naturally, the children abducted to Neverland give him a standing ovation at his every appearance.

While I may be a churlish old grouch, I really do think that we, the kidnapped, had better begin to honor our inner adults, and not continually embrace childishness -- usually at the expense of others, and ourselves.

Hope is not a method, nor is belief in fairies.

(This essay was also published on The Rag Blog.)

UNHALLOWED

2010-10-29T08:02:00.000-07:00

Halloween is my least favorite holiday, the one that has strayed furthest from its original intentions, and has been most overwhelmed by candy–capitalism. The worst part about it, from my point of view, is that it now involves treats with no tricks. I am on full general strike against it.

It's not so much that I want to see infantile maliciousness attack the community but that I am a great fan of the word “or”. “Trick or treat”? – the homeowner has a choice, and should he choose the former, the onus is then on the tricker to come up with punishments that fit the crime. What tricker is prepared for that these days? Our corporate criminal element cultivates both treat and trick. Should not our children practice running the world?

It's not only the loss of imagination that I mourn, but even worse, a loss of the sense of Evil as a power to be meditated upon and respected. I left a career – or rather was invited out – as a minister because my congregations were unenthusiastic about exploring the evil around us. A personal critique of my denomination can be summed up in one sentence: they want Easter without Good Friday, transfiguration without death. "The world out there is bad enough–we don't need to go through it here on Sundays." In short, they had no theology of evil. Which these days, we need more than ever.

The great seasonal gift of this past week has been the Wikileaks release of 400,000 internal documents related to our military behavior in Iraq. It was both trick and treat, an apotheosis of Halloween behavior. And of course, in a culture which refuses to acknowledge its own evil, our government's initial response has been to shoot the messenger, with the mainstream media predictably complicit.

While media worldwide - mainstream and otherwise - focused on the contents of the communications – prisoners abused, raped and murdered; the civilian death toll covered up; the shooting of men trying to surrender (“you can't surrender to a helicopter”); the abuses of our private security firms; the hundreds of civilians killed at checkpoints – the US media focused almost entirely on whether Julian Assange had the right to release such documents, whether he is a sexual offender or not, and what punishment for him is appropriate.

This refocusing is perhaps predictable in our celebrity culture: everything comes down to the actions of particular, limelighted people, and the underlying currents are ignored. Julian Assange and Wikileaks are not the abscesses that need to be opened in order to heal. Their targets are. We should thank them for reviving the true spirit of Halloween.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY, WORLD

2010-10-22T06:31:00.000-07:00

"I'm depressed." A most common comment. Depressed about what? The answers are various: our dangerous, deaf, moronic leadership, the ongoing wars, religious strife, public and private corruption, joblessness, lack of child care, housing, perverse spending priorities, the entire fate of the earth. So I thought I might bring some cheer this month by calling for a birthday celebration, a BIG birthday celebration -- the October 23rd anniversary of the birth of ... EXISTENCE.

That's right. On October 23rd, 4004 BC, at 4PM, Eastern Standard Time, or midnight in the Garden of Eden, God created the heavens and the earth. And the earth was without form and void.

Such was the conclusion of James Ussher (1581-1656), Archbishop of Armagh, Primate of All Ireland, and Vice-Chancellor of Trinity College in Dublin, after profound and exhaustive study of scriptural genealogies and Middle Eastern and Mediterranean histories. His conclusion was incorporated into an authorized version of the Bible printed in 1701, and thus came to be regarded with almost as much unquestioning reverence as the Bible itself.

Six thousand and six years old! That's a lot of years. And after all that time, what have we come to? The Decline of the West.

Way back in 1919, Oswald Spengler saw it all, the grand pattern, the "inward form of History", repeating through all recorded time, and in every major culture, including ours."For everything organic the notions of birth, death, youth, age, lifetime are fundamentals…"

He saw all cultures come into springlike being, youthful and vigorous, flower in their summery, unique ways, and then autumnally decay. Their winters were frozen into rigid, petrified forms, and these forms he called “civilization”. Our Western culture had been born around the tenth century, flowered in the gothic and the Renaissance, became “civilized” in the eighteenth century, and in the nineteenth century, with the industrial revolution, had begun the process of spiritual decline. The upcoming death of Western Culture was as certain as that of any other living organism. History was Destiny, unfolded through the cycle of human cultures, all of which shared a common rhythm and pattern. We cannot choose our destiny, we cannot alter it. We have no choice but to make the best of our historical situation.

Stark. Dramatic. No wonder it attracted so much attention. In this wintertime essay, he drove his metaphor hard. When the freezing point of a culture is reached, like water, it expands and can shatter its container. Though spiritually exhausted, it gathers the technical and material capacity for outward reach, desperately grabbing at life. And so begins what he called an Age of Caesarism. He predicted the coming of totalitarian states, not by looking at the social movements around him, but by taking the longest possible view. He predicted a coming age of imperialist wars in which nations would complete their spiritual death, and finally fall to pieces, yes, like Rome, but also like every other culture, finally succumbing to the invasion of new forces, alien, hostile to the old, full of springlike, spontaneous creativity and religious devotion. In the inevitable final battle between civilized engineers and God-inspired barbarians, the engineers would go down clutching pens and pencils. Artists would also succumb: this was not a time for soul. Art would be frustrated by society’s rejection, or corrupted by its licentiousness and power -- a spiritual vocation gone astray. The Zeitgeist is inevitable, a time of perverted men in a hopelessly perverted age, liars calling liars liars.

Spengler spoke of the endless repetition of the “already-accepted”, of standardized art, of petrified formulas which would ignore and deny history. “Events,” he said, would become “the private affairs of the oligarchs and their assassins,” and would arise from administration, not society. He foresaw professional armies operating with an entirely different morality than civilian society. In 1917, he noted, “In a few years, we have learned virtually to ignore things which before the war would have petrified the world.”

Oh well, happy 6006, anyway!

INTO THE FLAMES

2010-10-16T07:07:00.000-07:00

Late last month, Pentagon officials stood around supervising the scene as St Martin’s Press destroyed the entire first run of Anthony Schaffer's new book on spycraft and special operations in Afghanistan.

Was there a good old bonfire -- as with the Nazis, or the anti-Harry Potterites? Somewhere in the center pentagon of the Pentagon? Or was there a festive scene roped off over at Madison Square Park with folks peering down from the Flatiron Building?

I queried my editor about how publishers "pulp" books, and he, in his innocence, never having pulped one, suggested that perhaps they feed the books into a large machine which turns the shreds into packing material, new paper and jiffy bags.

I suspect publishers don't actually burn books these carbon-conscious days, but offer them up as sacrifice to the chemical companies to deal with. And for a hardback book, that's a multi-step process, tearing off the covers, and dealing with them separately, cloth, cardboard, glue, and possibly plastic.

But whatever the process, "book-burning" is a description more accurate than an anodyne "recycling of printed material", and 9,600 copies met their maker as brass looked on, checking to make sure the deed was done.

Interesting, too, was the price we taxpayers forked up for the party. The book retails at $25.99, and Amazon sells it for $14.21 plus $3.99 shipping. The Department of Defense twisted St. Martin's arm to sell them the first run -- none to bookstores or Amazon -- for only $47,000. If you do the math, that's only $4.90 a copy. What a buy we got!

Not to be accused of censorship, our Freedom Fighters allowed St. Martins to publish a heavily redacted copy of the second edition. The great Russian writers had to deal with this all the time, so who are we to complain?

I once tried to burn a book. New in grad school, I thought I could make the world a better place with a ritual burning of Kafka's The Trial. I went out and splurged on a new, hardcover, Modern Library edition, along with a hefty tin pail in which to make the fire. With the LA Times for kindling, and some good Los Angeles brush and sticks, I had a nice blaze going, said an anti-blessing, and consigned the book to the flames. Kafka smothered the blaze in billows of smoke with no significant damage to self, and unhip neighbors upstairs called the fire department -- which didn't quite get the issue. Also I melted a hole in the floor's shellac. So you see it was a good idea for our defenders to check to see that the job was done, and done right.

Why am I telling you all this? Most commentators have deplored the censorship aspect of this chapter of national-security mania. But I want to use these events to draw your attention to a story by that dark spirit of Salem, Nathaniel Hawthorne, a tale frequently left out of anthologies — "Earth's Holocaust" – an incisive cautionary to would-be reformers, radicals or revolutionaries like me, or possibly you.

Once upon a time, the inhabitants of the world determined to rid themselves of the evil accumulation of “worn-out trumpery”, by heaving it all into an enormous bonfire. Into the flames went

coats of armor, nobility
sceptres of emperors and kings
hogsheads of liquor
bank notes
enamored sonnets
diplomas
weapons and ammunition
machinery to inflict the punishment of death
marriage certificates
daybooks and ledgers
statute books and printed paper in general
priestly garments
the Bible 

Interesting list.

As the fire burns down, and the satisfied reformers leave to go to bed to wake to their new world, a little party—convivial, but despondent—is left hanging around the fire. It is the last murderer, the last thief, the last drunkard and the hangman. 

"The best counsel for all of us is," thought the hangman, was "that, as soon as we have finished the last drop of liquor, I help you, my three friends, to a comfortable end upon the nearest tree, and then hang myself on the same bough. This is no world for us any longer." 

The despair of the wicked at the new-created world.

"Poh, poh, my good fellows!" said a dark-complexioned personage, who now joined the group—his complexion was indeed truly dark, and his eyes glowed with a redder light than that of the bonfire; "be not so cast down, my dear friends; you shall see good days yet. There's one thing that these wiseacres have forgotten to throw into the fire, and with which all the rest of the conflagration is just nothing at all; yes, though they had burned the earth itself into a cinder."
 
"And what may that be?" eagerly demanded the last murderer. 

"What but the human heart itself?" said the dark-visaged stranger, with a portentous grin. "And, unless they hit upon some method of purifying that foul cavern, forth from it will reissue all the shapes of wrong and misery—the same old shapes or worse ones—which they have taken such a vast deal of trouble to consume to ashes. I have stood by this livelong night and laughed in my sleeve at the whole business. Oh, take my word for it, it will be the old world yet!" 
You can see, perhaps, why this is rarely anthologized. 

Call it depraved or misguided, but it is this "foul cavern" — foul, if often sublime—that continues to attract and orient my attention. It's why I write novels.

Oh, btw, the title of the book the DoD recently burned is Operation Dark Heart.

POTENTIAL HOLOCAUST IN AMERICA 3: IN THE HERE AND NOW

2010-10-08T06:32:00.000-07:00

[The end of last week's essay: Just in case there were any legislative objection to these judicial proceedings, Hitler pushed through the “Enabling Act” which allowed his handpicked cabinet to make laws having the same validity as any passed by the Reichstag, even ones disregarding the Constitution. The circle was closed, complete and tight. The living dead would soon become the dead -- period.]

Laws are being made here, too. And Presidential Enabling Acts, aka "signing statements". And court seats being filled.

The cast of characters is somewhat changed. Instead of Jews, we have the poor and soon-to-be-poor, the homeless, the disabled, the aged, the immigrant "Other" -- an open-ended, potentially unruly, group, getting larger with each job loss and foreclosure.

We have no Nazis, only Republicans and Democrats in Congress. Both parties agree that the foremost task is to eliminate the deficit, and both agree that the main hit will be on services to the poor, without tapping the military budget or corporate welfare. Both agree that taxes for the most part need to be cut -- it's good for getting re-elected. Asses and Pachyderms (from Gr: "thickskinned") may argue over numbers or priorities, but the fundamental assumptions -- and the potential victims -- are precisely the same. And outside the beltway is a population of Good Americans, voting their pocketbooks, not paying much attention to details evolving inside. How could they? All they know is what the government- and corporate-controlled media choose to tell them.

All the propensities of the Authoritarian Personality are still at large in this social consciousness, along with the tendency to behave as Milgram’s subjects did with respect to “legitimately constituted” authority. Weber’s analysis accurately describes what is going on today: bureaucracy, science, efficiency, and value-free thought running the show in the interest of “Progress” and “Freedom and Democracy” -- and maximization of profit.

Social forces and individual thought habits are distressingly similar to those in Nazi Germany. The poor and the "Others" are as despised as were the Jews. Helping them is as verboten. There are no cultural safeguards in place which would prevent a holocaust-like social cannibalism, a society-wide suspension of morality with regard to the designated “problem”.

There would be no help on a global level, either, since every national state claims the right to dispose of its citizens as it will, starving them, imprisoning them, executing them as it finds necessary. The United States refuses to recognize judgements of the World Court except when such judgements suit its purposes, and refuses to ratify several international treaties concerning human rights. International objectors like Amnesty International are delegitimized as “interfering in the internal affairs of sovereign nations”. The legitimacy of national sovereignty is built into the United Nations. Besides, who would take on the United States, militarily or economically for any mere human rights issue?

Thus, all the pieces are in place for another holocaust -- this time against the poor and "Other". Native racism adds to the potential, since -- no surprise -- many of the poor are immigrants and people of color, and code words overlap: “End welfare as we know it” = “Get the minorities under control.” Hence the ominous double significance of our move toward prison expansion. The U.S. already has a far greater percentage of its population behind bars than any other industrial country -- the highest in the world. The vast preponderance of prisoners are poor people of color.

A comparative check on where we are now in the six historical steps above is sobering -- and frightening.

Step 1. Defining the enemy. The poor are clearly defined as “the problem”. Not the profit-driven economy. Not the culture of violence. Not the controlled information system. Studies focus on the pathology of the “underclass”. The Poor are the problem. They are “other” to “normal Americans”. Consequently they must to be “dealt with”. Highest priority : "excess" population, a drain on the nation, unviable.

Step 2. Eliminating the enemy from the economy. By national policy, there are fewer and fewer jobs available to the poor, and fewer and fewer salaries that could raise a family out of poverty. Wall Street is bailed out, while money for public sector employment is denied, and corporate profits recover, with CEOs reaping massive benefits at taxpayer expense. Education funding is similarly squelched, so that the problem army of the poor can only swell. “Otherness” is increased as the media focus in on the predictably rising problems of crime, the inner city, and immigrant workers, ignoring problems elsewhere, and their root causes.

Step 3. Ostracism by custom and law. It is frightening to make such a list, but almost every step taken by the Third Reich has some parallel here and now -- with no built-in limits:

-- Laws passed by Congress can be overridden by executive orders, presidential “findings”, National Security directives, or simply aborted by not disbursing committed funds.

-- Courts are routinely packed with obedient federal appointees. The current composition of the Supreme Court is the biggest scandal of all. Legal rights of poor defendants are being systematically reduced, and money for good lawyers diminished.

-- The current push in Congress is for law to serve the state and its rich financiers at the expense of individuals. Corporate personhood triumphs. Eavesdropping technology and "anti-terrorism" stand guard at the gates. The government moves to limit consumer and environmental protection. These laws are being made deliberately, without even pretending to be a democratic response to the will of the people. There is increasing governmental readiness to evade constitutional law.

-- The many Nazi restrictions on employment are all replaced by the fact that -- for the poor and uneducated above all -- there are simply no jobs. Affirmative action is increasingly questioned. The situation has worsened catastrophically with jobs exported and capital flight, and its attendant dog-eat-dog resentments. With no money for private transportation, no money for parking, and increasingly expensive, inadequate public transportation, the poor are deprived of the mobility necessary to find and maintain employment -- even if there were employment to be had.

-- Municipal services are neglected or abandoned in poor neighborhoods, and the police remain an occupying army, protecting and serving the threatened rich. Consequently, living conditions and ghettos become ever more intolerable.

-- Student loans are being cut at the same time that tuitions are skyrocketing. Thus education increasingly excludes the poor as effectively as discriminatory laws did the Jews. Without an educated workforce, the vicious spiral continues downward.

-- "Economics of scale" are driving out smaller, local businesses in favor of large corporate operations -- if they even choose to locate in poorer neighborhoods.

Remember: such policies are not accidents. They are designed and signed by upper-class men and women, and approved by well-prepped voters.

Step 4. Removal from view. In addition to long-existing ghettoization, foreclosures on housing toxically mortgaged, and increasing inter-racial suspicion, many municipalities are now enacting draconian laws to “get the poor out from under our noses.” Sleeping in public spaces, panhandling, even accepting free food have been criminalized. Here in Burlington, Vermont, an ordinance was floated to make it illegal to sit in a street, or even lean against a building. When there are no more poor on the streets or in the subways, how will we know when there are no more poor at all? As the plight of the poor is made ever more intolerable, radical solutions become ever more thinkable.

Steps 5 and 6 -- slave labor and death camps have not yet been literally established. Nevertheless there is recognizable social movement in that direction. Prisons are currently the greatest growth industry, and there is increasing practice of substituting prison labor for outside workers -- at substantially smaller wages. As a co-worker once said to me, “Why should I support those criminals? Let ‘em earn their keep.” (She would also kill everyone on death row right away, so that her taxes wouldn’t be used to support murderers.)

Great for profits, terrible for labor, further incentive to put as many people behind bars as possible. And the attachment to capital punishment continues. Less legal protection for prisoners, less chance for appeal, more designated-capital crimes, destruction of habeus corpus and Miranda protections in the name of "fighting terrorism"; micro-fascism at the airport, greater surveillance, and now Obama giving himself permission to assassinate Americans without trial -- all to general public approval.

Given the above array of conditions, what can we surmise about the likely American future?

HOLOCAUST THINKING IN AMERICA

There is a scent of pre-holocaust in the air. It is a mood, a direction faced, a lingo, haze of assumptions. And look! -- there is a Jack-in-the-box with a box’s six sides: authoritarianism, consumo-conformity, efficiency, moralism, patriotism, and a penchant for punishment.

Turn the crank:

All around the mulberry bush
the monkey chased the weasel,
the monkey thought ‘twas all in fun...

Now just hold it there. What will pop out at the very next move?

We don’t really know. The mind rebels. Tens of millions of children in poverty experiencing a “greater sense of personal responsibility”? Welfare cut-offs flooding an already non-existent job market getting people "back to work”? Or giving them back their “self-esteem”?

There is discontinuity in the curve of thought here -- except for one constant -- it is definitively the poor and "Other" that are poised to fall off the line into god-knows-what abyss. And the numbers of those impoverished are growing as the middle class shrinks away into unknown territory.

The number of officially poor is now over 45 million, higher than at any time in the 51 years of counting. 2009 saw the largest increase ever. The most vulnerable families are those headed by single mothers, and among them the hardest hit are those headed by single women of color. Two-thirds are employed. But in addition to chronic low wages, many single mothers have seen their work hours cut in the recession. The number of Americans on food stamps is at an all time high, and the Republicans want to cut into those food stamps in order to "fund childhood nutrition".

One out of every seven mortgages is delinquent or in foreclosure, 10 million Americans are on unemployment, more than half of them in long-term joblessness. Bankruptcy filings have risen 20% in the last year. One out of every five children lives in poverty.

Even though there are six people applying for every available job, the new "welfare as we now know it" (Temporary Assistance to Needy Families) insists that one has to find a job in order to continue benefits. So since there are no jobs, TANF is eliminating benefits for 85,000 families a month, even as the destitute swamp welfare offices, having exhausted all other options. Obama wants his administration to "break the cycle of dependency," dontcha know.

Where have the jobs gone, the money? The current income gap is the largest its been since the late 1920s, the result of a long series of policy decisions by legislators bought and paid for by the high-class bandits making out. The race to the bottom is fueled by a race to the top. The dynamics seem irreversible.

The assault on America is a bipartisan operation. Whatever their deceitful rhetoric, neither party is willing to place serious limits on corporate speculation and profitability. Neither will question the need for public austerity and private profit, nor the enormous damage done by the military industrial complex.

The Republican's current "Pledge to America" is most importantly a call to continue the Bush tax cuts for the rich to maintain the income gap and protect its well-heeled beneficiaries. Secondarily, it is a plan to repeal even the pathetic Affordable Health Care Act, itself written by lobbyists from insurance and pharmaceutical companies. Even while in the minority, the Republicans have blocked benefits for homeless vets, health care for 911 first responders, a jobs bill that gives tax breaks to companies hiring new employees, an act to ensure women are paid the same wages as men, have tried to block unemployment benefits extension, and have succeeded in blocking stricter regulations for financial institutions. Their ultimate goal, often stated, is privatization of Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. The Democrats have put up no fight in the interest of "compromise". Is there a pattern here?

Such an immiseration project must be protected by spreading fear of "terrorism", and the use of illegal spying now openly practiced, with sweeping new regulations for the internet. Robert Mueller, director of the FBI has stated that, “There is a continuum between those who would express dissent and those who would do a terrorist act.” One spokesperson from an FBI/police "information fusion center" claimed that the protest of a war against "international terrorism" is itself "a terrorist act". The USAPATRIOT Act (Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism -- 1st prize for acronyms) stands behind him. And for good measure, Obama has come up with approved "kill lists" of suspected terrorists -- including Americans -- he claims he can exterminate with impunity. The final solution, no doubt.

HOLOCAUST AND TOTALITARIANISM

Many of the classic structures of a totalitarian state are already in place in contemporary America, Land of the Free. Many new ones, too -- modern and post-modern. Official lawlessness no longer bothers to hide itself, and is tolerated or approved by the population at large. Criminal investigations into state crimes are blocked in the interests of "national security". Checks and balances among the three branches of government have been manipulated into a seamless, self-validifying whole. Make that four, as the media becomes ever more embedded in the corporate beltway.

But while totalitarianism is almost certainly a necessary context for holocaust, genocide, nakba, shoah, it is not a sufficient condition: the cooperation of the population is necessary. And that is where the Milgram Experiments come in (see part one of this essay). When the authorities say "do it!", a population of authoritarian personalities, born and bred, will do it.

American murder, massive and limited, even if openly criminal, seems to have widespread support by a swamped population, ready to lash out at designated victims. Americans know about torture of detainees in hidden prisons. They know of American slaughter in Iraq and Afghanistan, even if they are only discovering such activities in Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia and well-supported in Palestine. Hey, freedom isn't free. They know, too, about the slave labor of prisoners, and of undocumented workers, frightened and hiding. Let the torture, war and racist attacks proceed, I guess, if USA is once again to be Number One. Gott mit uns!

Should some object, they, like Germans in the thirties, will find no levers of change in their much-vaunted political process, all of whose candidates stand behind the American project of victory, "democracy", and control of resources. As Jay Gould said back in the 1880's, "I don't care who they vote for as long as I get to pick the candidates."

And those candidates are -- with notable exceptions -- no dummies. They can see as clearly as anyone the general direction in which we are headed. Why else reduce or remove the safety net for Americans while pouring trillions into armaments , corporations, and banks? A group -- the poor and Other -- has been identifiedas the problem and the need for a “solution” given highest priority -- Step 1, above.

Now we are poised at the edge of the precipice. "Terrorism" and its attendant and well-tended-to fear, make Step 2 certain: they virtually guarantee that most people will not be able to make the transition into productive work. They further assure galloping immiseration of the poor as they are cut off from food and cash assistance, childcare and nutrition for their children. The consequent desperation will require more policing, desperate, more “final” and effective solutions, solutions which can ensure that the misery of the poor does not inflict itself on the top 10%.

Steps 1 and 2 have been taken. Steps 3 and 4 are underway. The smell of holocaust is in the air. Our civilization provides no safeguards. The Zweckrationalität dynamic described by Max Weber -- the very one that nourished the Jewish holocaust in a most civilized, advanced-industrial Germany -- still rules. Is it realistic to say “It can’t happen here”?

We have the Jewish holocaust behind us, and the words “Never Again” engraved in our collective heartminds. But our own history -- previous and subsequent to the holocaust is not reassuring. Native Americans were wiped out to make room for middle America. “Pioneers” were rewarded by the government with land deeds for expropriating Native American territory and violating treaties. It is not necessary to go over the “social suspension of morality” with respect to African Americans, or the atrocities committed during the Civil War.

In our own time, we have seen World War II with its mass firebombings and atomic attacks, then two more wars, wiping out gooks with high-tech weapons. They don’t value life like we do. Just to keep our hands in it, we buried Iraquis alive and incinerated fleeing columns of troops with gas-air explosives. And now our middle-east atrocities. I don’t have much faith in home-grown American morality resisting commands to solve a problem by slaughter. Richard Miller notes that

Most Germans did not believe the final steps would be taken. They saw each measure as a discrete event and failed to understand that each step prepared the way for the next. The SS Journal Das Schwarze Korps noted in 1938, “What is radical today is moderate tomorrow.” In 1933 the Nazis had no plan to kill all the Jews, and even militants would have shrunk in horror from such a suggestion. Gradually, over the next decade, “reasonable people” found that they had to become a little harsher. By 1943, the context of the war against Jews had escalated to the point where warriors could blandly pass bureaucratic memos back and forth about behavior that would have seemed unconscionable in 1933. “ (Nazi Justiz, p.3)

Our leaders are now passing such notes, and setting in place such laws concerning our current "Others". Proposals are being negotiated which would have horrified officials of earlier administrations. This is our 1943. Will we allow a similar denouement? It can happen here.

HOLOCAUST THINKING 2: HOW THE NAZIS DID IT

2010-10-02T04:37:00.000-07:00

I know one is not allowed to use the word "nazism" in any discussion of current practices, that the holocaust is unique, etc., etc. -- but if you don't see the similarities between the structures put into place in Germany in the mid- and late-1930s and those evolving here, now, well then, you don't see structural similarities.

National Socialist Strategy

What were the moves the Nazis evolved to “overcome animal pity” with regard to Jewish victims?

Step 1. Defining the enemy. Jewishness was clearly and legally defined as part of a problem. Thus the Jews were made “other” to the rest of the population.

Step 2. Eliminating the enemy from the economy. Jews were not allowed to work in state-affiliated institutions. Jewish stores were boycotted and vandalized. “Otherness” was thereby increased, as the Jews were forced from the normal productive economy, and were now an ever-increasing problem -- and not just by definition.

Step 3. Ostracism by custom and law. Many other discriminatory laws were put into place. No Jews allowed, here or there, this place or that.

Step 4. Removal from view. Ghettos were created to wall the problem off from the rest of the population. Jews thus became less visible. When they began to disappear, there was often little to notice. As intolerable conditions developed in the ghettos, inhuman measures were justified as humane. Jews were killed in “acts of mercy” -- in order to “spare them the agony of famine”.   In deliberately intolerable conditions, the stage was set for even more radical steps.

Step 5. Transport to slave labor camps, using these “outsiders” to support the economy.

Step 6. Transport to death camps. The “Final Solution”.

Tactics: Ostracism as a policy in Nazi Germany

To better make some later comparisons, let me provide more detail about Step 3 above: “other discriminatory laws”.

In his hair-raising book, Nazi Justiz (Praeger 1995), Richard Miller describes the gradual, multifaceted ways in which Jews were turned from productive members of society into an kind of “living dead” who were permitted to wander through society, but forbidden to take part in it. The mass killings in the camps was only a late development, the logical “final” successor of many incremental “solutions” inflicted along the way on an increasingly desperate people.

Miller concentrates on Germany in the 30s, after the rise of Hitler, but before the war, all changes affecting Jews were done “legally”, “democratically”, with support from the media and the German people. In this “time of peace”, a variety of local and national laws were passed, with due deliberation, in no way a result of military desperation. Across the country , jot by innovative jot, legal and social restrictions fell into place which sealed the victims’ fate.

The movement began with “unofficial” boycotting of Jewish businesses or professionals. Boycotts spread to those who patronized Jews in any way, thus taking goods and wages away from good German citizens.   Having a street conversation with a Jew could lead to charges of “race pollution” and “civic disloyalty”, and perhaps to being paraded through town, with a sign around one's neck. Such “unofficial” boycotts were peppered with equally “unofficial” violence, of which Kristallnacht was the most coordinated example. Naturally, there was no police protection.

Having recognized a “mandate” from the people, governments began to act. A pastiche of creatively sadistic local law and ever more inclusive national law took control of Jewish life, and eventually obviated the need for “unofficial” populist action. Place by place, Jews were not allowed in parks, theaters, libraries, museums, sports stadia, beaches, athletic and social clubs. They could not be guests in hotels, or get service at restaurants.   One profession after another banned Jews from being licensed. Jews would no longer be granted permits to open retail stores, or be allowed into blue or white collar unions or the jobs they controlled. They couldn’t be patent agents or lawyers, tax consultants or swimming instructors, lifeguards, jockeys, actors, lottery salesmen, stock brokers, antique dealers, archivists. They couldn’t rent out park chairs, or distribute motion pictures, or deal in art or literary works. They were prevented from dealing in currency, engineering construction projects, selling guns. No Jew could be a detective, private guard, accountant, or work in a credit agency. No Jew could be a tourist guide, a peddler, auctioneer, or real estate agent, or manage a factory, house, estate, or land. Needless to say, all the new business and newly opened job opportunities went to Aryans, vastly increasing the popularity of the Nazi regime. Jobs, jobs, jobs. And housing.

In areas where Jews were not yet banned, other ways were found to shut them down. Before real estate licenses were outlawed for Jews, tax authorities refused to deal with Jewish agents, leaving few property owners interested in hiring them. Sugar was cut off to Jewish bakers and candy-makers, effectively destroying their businesses. Legal Jewish newsstands would be refused newspapers; Jewish textile managers could no longer get raw materials. Jewish businesses could not put ads in commercial directories, newspapers, on billboards or the radio. Eventually all employment was restricted except particularly disagreeable tasks: cleaning public toilets and sewage plants, jobs at rag and bone works were considered possibly “suitable” for Jews. Outside of such work, Jews had to somehow fend for themselves.

How could even that be made more difficult?   Travel bans and invalidation of passports were obvious.   But how about no parking for Jews? Special license plates to identify Jewish cars for special harassment. Soon enough, prohibition of drivers licenses, and then restriction from public transportation. Impoverished Jews could not rent their homes, sublet, or sell. Retirement benefits and contracted pensions were cancelled, as were all insurance policies. Jewish students were not allowed to take finals, and so couldn’t complete their schooling. All student loans had to be repaid within 2 weeks, regardless of contractual payment schedules; those in default were subject to police action.   Jewish streets were not cleaned, nor were other municipal services available. German police, when present at all, were an occupying army, and beatings and attacks were common. Many main sections of towns became off-limits to Jews, and any remnants of Jewish culture came under attack: Jewish art and music were censored as “decadent”, and even jazz was attacked as “a barbarian invasion supported by Jews.”

Because Jews were to be restricted from so many areas, they needed to be easily identified. Rush-hour passengers were not about to tolerate checking IDs of every boarding passenger. Eventually the yellow star was required, with strict punishment for any Jew who did not wear one in public. Jews were forbidden to name their children with “Aryan sounding names”, and had to adopt the middle names “Israel” or “Sarah”, and use these names when identifying themselves.

Germany has long been known as a land of “law and order”. But Jews could not use the justice system to thwart clearly illegal onslaughts. All courts were packed with government appointees to enforce, not judge, official policy. The object of the law was to protect the state, not the individual citizen. If Jews were a menace to the state, then all laws oppressing them, were both legal and just. Furthermore, laws were seen as implying “direction”, and were not confined to their original settings. For instance the Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service spoke only of dismissing Jewish government employees. Martin Heidegger however, as rector of the University of Freiburg, ended fellowship payments to Jewish students under the guiding spirit of that decree.

Courts built rulings on Nazi party resolutions, and took their philosophical guidance from Hitler speeches. In 1934 Goering complained that defendants still had so many rights that convictions were being impeded. Naturally, Jewish defendants were at an extreme disadvantage. Jewish lawyers were barred from court; Aryan lawyers could not serve Jews. Consequently, Jews had to represent themselves against highly trained adversaries. Judges were instructed to view Jewish witnesses “with extreme caution”, and no verdict was to be passed when a sentence would have to be based entirely on Jewish testimony.

Just in case there were any legislative objection to these judicial proceedings, Hitler pushed through the “Enabling Act” which allowed his handpicked cabinet to make laws having the same validity as any passed by the Reichstag, even ones disregarding the Constitution. The circle was closed, complete and tight. The living dead would soon become the dead -- period.

Next week: You don't need a weatherman to tell which way the wind blows -- here and now in America.

HOLOCAUST THINKING IN AMERICA -- Part 1 of 3

2010-09-25T05:53:00.000-07:00

So now, in place of Newt Gigrich's 1994 Contract With America (aka Contract On America) we have the new GOP Pledge to America. Not unlike the current design, the rich are to get richer, and the poor to get sick, become homeless, starve, or shatter in endless wars.

The comparison of our American trajectory with the tactics and strategy of Germany in the late 1930s is more striking now than ever. We would do well to study this era carefully for a possible glimpse of our own future. Those targeted are no longer just our dispossessed, reviled and outcast -- our "jews" -- but much of the American (and of course world) population.

The attempt to exterminate European Jewry during the Nazi era was, in many ways, as unique as Jewish culture proclaims. Never before had an organized, industrial state targeted a population for complete annihilation, ruthlessly and efficiently pursued even within its “civil” codes and activities. But to think of the Holocaust as a completely unique act, restricted to 20th century German antisemitism, is to limit it unduly, to make it unavailable as evidence and warning about tendencies in our own place, our own time.

For it would seem that every major thought pattern, every cultural institution that fueled the Nazi holocaust is present and empowered in the United States today. Safeguards against catastrophic outcomes are few and weak. “It can’t happen here”? Maybe. But with so many elements brewing together, and no visible controls to dampen the flux, there is no predicting in what direction the reaction will run.

Half a century ago, a civilization as culturally advanced as our own experienced a society-wide suspension of morality. Jews were the target. Now, the next set of domestic victims has already been chosen: the poor and unruly. Ready... aim...

THE ONCE AND FUTURE PERPETRATORS

Much of the current political agenda is dominated by what is popularly known as the “extreme right”. Clinton and Obama have been instrumental in moving the Democratic Party in that direction. The Tea Parties and religious fundamentalism nourish the “shift to the right” within the population at large. Critics have unanimously deemed the right wing motives as “greedy” and “mean-spirited”, but such labels obscure the positive agenda involved -- an agenda described in most detail by the Frankfurt School in its attempt to analyse the roots of German fascism. Then and now; the descriptions are eerily alike.

It is reasonable to assume that Obama, the Clintons, Bush and Joe&Jane Six-Pack are nice enough folks who love their children and grandchildren, and hope to pass on to them a better world. What is it, then, that drives them to outlandish and seemingly heartless proposals concerning the poor, often themselves?

The Authoritarian Personality

In each event -- in the living act, the undoubted deed -- there, some unknown but still reasoning thing puts forth the moulding of its features from behind the unreasoning mask.
                 Captain Ahab

While differing in detail, such right-wing positions are driven by belief systems characteristic of what The Frankfurt School called “the Authoritarian Personality”, whose main characteristic is the urgent need for order. Freud, Fromm and Reich unearthed the psycho-dynamics of weak ego-structure which underlay it, while Adorno and Horkheimer analysed the social repression which left its authoritarian marks on the individual soul. When ALLES IN ORDNUNG becomes the highest value,the consequences are predictable. For the authoritarian personality:

1. Powerful leaders are needed to keep society in line and restrict it to conventional, middle-class values. Exaggerated assertions of toughness and strength become the norm. Trickle-down theories are designed to protect the powerful -- in the interest of all. Though greed and lust for power may be involved, they are rationalized by an appeal to the general good.

2. Democracy becomes a threat and must be limited. In The Crisis of Democracy: Report on the Governability of Democracies to the Trilateral Commission, Samuel Huntington warns about the consequences of an “excess of democracy”:

The arenas where democratic procedures are appropriate are, in short, limited....The effective operation of a democratic political system usually requires some measure of apathy and noninvolvement on the part of some individuals and groups....Marginality on the part of some groups is inherently undemocratic, but it has also been one of the factors which has enabled democracy to function effectively.

A need to control unpredictable “excess” democracy has guided American foreign and economic policy throughout this century. The pattern of marginalizing peasant populations and supporting dictatorial strong-men is likely driven as much by rage for order and fear of chaos as by the selfish need to maximize profits -- which profits might be even greater should the general standard of living be raised. So great is the need for predictable order that maximal profits are sacrificed.

3. Individualism becomes suspect, a negative value to be stamped out. “Difference” means unpredictability, and fear of an unpredictable, uncontrollable “Other” spawns all the “isms” which rampage today: racism, sexism, classism, anti-semitism, anti-immigrant, anti-muslim rage, xenophobia. Nature itself becomes an uncertain enemy to be conquered and subdued.

4. The psycho-sexual chaos at the core of an authoritarian personality simultaneously fascinates and repels. Rigid moralism embracing stereotypical values seems the most secure protection against anarchy and chaos.   There is exaggerated concern with and denunciation of libidinal art and sexual “goings-on”. At the same time, unconscious emotional impulses are projected outward, and the world is seen as a wild and dangerous place in which worst-case scenarios abound.

5. Fear and guilt about chaotic thoughts within and anarchy without is so potentially threatening that psychic numbing is a typical response, with emotional dissociation from the consequences of action. Knee-jerk “patriotism” in response to moral questions is an effective defense mechanism. Yellow ribbons blindfold the eyes against mass incineration and live burial. The story of the Palestinians targeted by US weapons must not be told. Such defensive control of information minimizes compassion for victims.

6. A culture of punishment follows hard upon. Offenders against order must be strictly punished. Dominance and submission becomes crucial. The very same heartmind is both pro-life and pro-death penalty. But the sanctity of life is secondary: the important thing is punishment. Tender-mindedness is for “bleeding-heart liberals”.

While no political leader or follower may display every characteristic above, they are all on fine collective display in the current reactionary Zeitgeist -- as they were in Nazi Germany.

Is it just that “people are no damn good”, or is their behavior created by social conditions surrounding them?

The Milgram Evidence

In her study of Adolf Eichmann, Hannah Arendt noted that the greatest problem the Nazis faced was “how to overcome...the animal pity by which all normal men are affected in the presence of physical suffering.” Most of the German perpetrators were “normal” people, people who would not be picked up by any questionnaire or psychiatric screen. They were by and large not sadists or moral degenerates or even political fanatics -- yet they became conscious collaborators in the process of mass murder. How was it possible to create torturers out of next door neighbors? (How could our clean-cut young boys napalm women and children?) What about that animal pity?

In the early sixties, A Yale psychologist named Stanley Milgram began a series of experiments which sought to clarify these problems. The basic question was narrowed to “if an experimenter tells a subject to act with increasing severity against another person, under what conditions will the subject comply, and under what conditions will he disobey?” Subjects were recruited from all walks of life to “help us complete a study of memory and learning.” An actor-scientist greeted pairs of volunteers, and lots were drawn to pick who would be the"teacher"and who would be the"learner". The subject would always choose the “teacher” slip (all the slips said “teacher”); the other “volunteer” was a plant who then became the “learner”/victim. The “scientist” explained that there has been some association of punishment with learning, but that there had never been any quantitative studies on how much punishment would give the best results.

After orientation, the “learner” was strapped into a chair in the next room, and an electrode glued to his wrist. The “teacher” could see and communicate with him via a glass panel and microphone. In front of the "teacher" was a bogus control panel consisting of 30 switches enabling him to deliver shocks from 15 to 450 volts in 15 volt increments. The groups of switches were marked Slight Shock, Moderate Shock, Strong Shock, Very Strong Shock, Intense Shock, Extreme Intensity Shock, Danger: Severe Shock. Two switches after this last designation were simply marked XXX.

Milgram conceived many ingenious variations to examine different parameters, but the basic design was this: the “teacher” was read groups of word pairs to the “learner”, and then ask him to correctly identify the pairing word from lists of four. If the "learner" made a mistake, the "teacher" was to administer a shock. For each mistake, the "teacher" was instructed to “move one level higher on the shock generator”.    The victim (who, of course, was feeling no shock at all) greeted the increasing “voltage levels” with a full range of response, indicating no discomfort until the 75 volt shock was administered. At 120 volts he would shout to the experimenter that the shocks were becoming painful. Painful groans at 135 volts. At 150 volts. he would cry out, “Experimenter, get me out of here! I won’t be in the experiment any more! I refuse to go on!” By 180 volts, “I can’t stand the pain”, and by 270, agonizing screams. After 300 volts he would no longer provide answers to the test questions. The “teacher” was told that no answer constituted a wrong answer, and was instructed to raise the shock level.

How far would these “teacher”/subjects go? In spite of there being no coercion or threat (as in Nazi Germany), and without any animosity toward the victim (unlike Nazi Germany), these average Americans far, far exceeded the expectations of all psychologists in their obedient compliance with instructions. Despite the fact that many questioned or even protested what they were doing, a substantial proportion continued to the last last level of shock despite the “learner’s” screams. Almost 2/3 of the subjects -- ordinary people drawn from working, managerial and professional classes -- were “obedient subjects”, willing to go to almost any length at the command of an authority. Their explanations at post-experiment interview echoed those of Adolf Eichmann -- “I was just doing my job. I was doing what I was told. I was only doing my duty.”

Milgram was profoundly disturbed by his findings, (as were many members of the scientific community who attacked him personally.)

   What is the limit of such obedience? At many points we attempted to establish a boundary. Cries from the victim were inserted: they were not good enough. The victim claimed heart trouble; subjects continued to shock him on command. The victim pleaded to be let free, and his answers no longer registered on the signal box; subjects continued to shock him. At the outset we had not conceived that such drastic procedures would be needed to generate disobedience, and each step was added only as the ineffectiveness of the earlier techniques became clear. The final effort to establish a limit was the Touch-Proximity condition [where the “learner” sat, screaming, shoulder to shoulder with the subject.] But the very first subject in this condition subdued the victim on command, and proceeded to the highest shock level. A quarter of the subjects in this condition performed similarly.
   The results, as seen and felt in the laboratory, are to this author disturbing. They raise the possibility that human nature or -- more specifically -- the kind of character produced in America democratic society, cannot be counted on to insulate its citizens from brutality and inhumane treatment at the direction of malevolent authority. A substantial proportion of people do what they are told to do, irrespective of the content of the act and without limitations of conscience, so long as they perceive that the command comes from a legitimate authority.

In spite of Milgram’s despair, the findings did have their bright side. A number of experiments were done in which the subjects were exposed to several experimenters who disagreed among themselves and argued about continuing the shocks. Another series was performed not at Yale, with its aura of authority, but in a minimal office, under the auspices of the fictitious, unknown, “Bridgeport Research Associates”. A third series was performed in which the “teachers” were not instructed to increase the shock level with each wrong answer, but could choose their own levels throughout the experiment. The outcomes of these series was illuminating: given any hint of disagreement among the authorities, subjects immediately discarded their slavish obedience, and were no longer willing to engage in behavior they found morally questionable. When authority became questionable (“Bridgeport” vs. Yale), compliance dropped significantly. And without prompting from authority, “teachers” maintained shocks well under the discomfort level of the victim.

The casting off of “animal pity” was sustainable only under seamless monolithic authority.   For all its fragility, it seems that it is not human nature per se that is malevolent, but that human malevolence, at least in part, is socially constructed. Under the right system, even here and now in the United States, obedience to authority can prevail against the “better instincts” of the population.   The trouble is that such a system is currently alive and well throughout the land.

THE SYSTEM THERE AND HERE AND THEN AND NOW

It is commonly assumed that outbreaks of bestial violence -- the Holocaust, or what we have recently seen in Rwanda, Afghanistan or Palestine -- are the result of primitive eruptions into a civilization insufficient to contain them. If people could only become “more civilized”, there would be no such behavior.   But what if our civilization itself were the problem -- not the solution? More civilization would mean more such crimes. Is such a proposition simply inappropriate self-hatred?

Again and again we have to confront the difficult fact that Nazi Germany was an advanced industrial culture quite like our own. The death machines were put into operation by people quite like us, living in comparable surroundings. Certified architects and engineers in well-lit rooms drew up plans for crematoria. Government bureaucrats, some trained in Kant and Hegel, purchased tickets for each passenger in the cattle cars. Had there been computers, there would have been excellent data bases. Nazi soldiers played Beethoven sonatas to entertain the troops, to lift their spirits and help them return to guard duty at the camps. Bayer made superb aspirin using slave labor. Out of this modern, rational society, with a history of the highest culture, the Holocaust was born.   Can we ever understand this? What can it tell us about our own situation?

One of the most crucial insights here came from a man who died well before Hitler came to power. Contemplating the industrialization of late 19th century Germany, Max Weber, “the father of sociology”, came to the conclusion that “Reason” -- the ideal of the Enlightenment -- was evolving dangerously into Zweckrationalität -- instrumental reason, reason driven by a goal. In the service of its goals, modern society was becoming efficiently bureaucratic and scientific, but was losing its sense of values. In fact, “value-free” had become a test of objectivity and scientific legitimacy, as technique replaced moral responsibility.

This century has certainly proven Weber correct. Marxists and postmodern thinkers have taken Weber many steps further, as they deconstruct the goals we have inherited, and the stories we tell ourselves. Whose goals are they? What corpses lie between the lines in our story of “Progress”? If society is a garden, who decides on who gets weeded?

The important point is that Weber’s analysis of modern society -- clearly increasingly applicable as the years push on -- in no way excludes the possibility of another Nazi state. Nothing in the rules of the reigning instrumental rationality would disqualify Holocaust methods of social engineering, nor would its actions even seem improper. After all, social problems must be solved.

Milgram, too, found Weberian mechanisms at play in his subjects. To avoid confronting the victim’s pain, his “teachers” became absorbed in the technical aspects of voltage control and memory testing. They also demonstrated a kind of “counter-anthropomorphism”, denying any human element in a human-generated situation.   “The experiment requires that you continue” was often sufficient explanation to overcome any hesitations. “Scientific truth” as defined by “authority” was a goal so persuasive that its perceived legitimacy overwhelmed humane behavior.

Outside the laboratory, for instance in the military, we find parallel mechanisms at work. Boot camp is not so much a training in military technique as it is in absolute acceptance of monolithic authority. Patriotism requires such acceptance. Once in the field, attention to technical details blinds the perpetrator to the effects of his violence. The bombing sequence in Dr. Strangelove is a brilliant satire on the efficient calm of men about to destroy the world. Violence is turned into a technique, free from emotion and purely rational, even reasonable. Similar comparisons can easily be made with the instrumental rationality of the corporate board room, where the lives of millions are part of the calculus of maximizing profit.

(To be continued next week: How the Nazis did it.)

DON'T TASE ME, BRO...

2010-09-18T03:26:00.000-07:00

Another taser-related death this past week, this time, not of an ancient great-grandmother in a wheelchair, but of a healthy young man. Those involved with toting up the corpses count more than five hundred. Google "taser deaths" for their names and ages.

Tasers don't kill people. Cops with tasers kill people. Cops with other weapons kill people too.

In contrast to the United States, British police don't routinely carry lethal arms. Only a limited number of specialist officers are permitted to use guns in special situations. Britain's Home Office said being unarmed is part of the "character of the police" in the U.K. The "character of the police" chez nous is something rather different. With our taste for arms sales and permanent warmaking throughout the world, could we expect it to be otherwise?

In looking through SKULK last week for its 9/11 resonances, I came across this chapter I had forgotten about. I present it for your bleak amusement:

EIGHTEEN
Modest Doubt Is Call'd The Beacon Of The Wise

Could they do this? Did they even approve of it being done? Violence? Large-scale, possibly lethal violence?

Teresa had never even hunted or fished with Daddy: the idea of threading a worm on a hook had always seemed too yucky. Richard had the comical habit of crushing plastic milk containers with his hands: stomping on them seemed unseemly. Now they were challenged to embrace something like...the Truth. Teresa heard Thomas Aquinas urging her from potency to act. Richard felt ripeness was all, and things were very close to ripe.

But both were now smitten by a sudden cloud of fear and abdication. And it was in this eddying cloud that they now accompanied WSU’s speaker, Rashid Khalidi, towards Levitt Arena on an otherwise cloudless early evening for his talk on “The New American Empire”.

Why book the Shockers’ home basketball court? Because Khalidi was tall in stature in the academic world? No. Because He was a Shocker (to some) himself? No. Because this was the summer session’s culminating major-speaker event? No. It was because Buildings and Grounds had for some reason denied Richard’s request for Wilner Auditorium, though its schedule seemed open. No matter, Richard thought, Levitt will be fine, if slightly less comfortable in the bleachersswirlin and folding chairs. Desmond Tutu had spoken there last year, and Khalidi would make a nice followup.

But meteorological cloudlessness was a poor predictor of the gathering storm: streaming up Hillside along with Rashid, Teresa and Richard, were tens, then hundreds of sign-carrying students and community folks. Some wore yarmulkas, most wore crosses, and a scant few sported kuffiyehs, the traditional Palestinian headscarf. Uh-oh, T&R thought, looks like a religious war. Khalid was unruffled. “My fans,” he reassured them. Au courant, though. The yarmulkas and crosses seemed to populate the same side of the path, while the kuffiyehs and assorted peaceniks lined up sparsely on the other. Law enforcement was nowhere in sight.

ISRAEL BASHERS NOT WELCOME!; TERRORISTS OFF CAMPUS!; EXTREMISTS OUT OF WICHITA!; STUDENTS WILL NOT BE INTIMIDATED!; A NAZI SPEAKER ON TISHA B’AV -- SHAME! SHAME!; NEVER FORGET!; CHRIST SHALL OVERCOME! read signs on one side of the walk.

DIVESTMENT FROM ISRAEL! TROOPS HOME NOW!; WAR IS TERRORISM!; GO SOLAR, NOT BALLISTIC!; ASSES OF EVIL (with pictures of the principals)!; ENFORCE U.N. RESOLUTIONS IN PALESTINE!’ ANYTHING WAR CAN DO, PEACE CAN DO BETTER! read signs on the other.

Both sides seemed to share a strong commitment to the exclamation point. The three of them ran the gauntlet.

The Levitt basketball court had a small stage constructed at one end, as for other large events like rained-out graduations, and Richard and Khalidi took their seats on the well-flowered platform. At 7:40, having allowed ten minutes to accomodate the late-arriving crowd, Richard stood to open the evening.

“Ladies and Gentlemen, Students and Faculty, Members of the Community,” he began, “it gives me great pleasure to introduce the final speaker of our Contemporary Issues series, a man who himself has become a contemporary issue. Rashid Khalidi is Edward Said...

Some cheers and boos from the audience. Richard admonished it gently with his famous Grocho waggling-of-eyebrows.

“...Edward Said Professor of Modern Arab Studies and Literature at Columbia University. Professor Khalidi has written more than seventy-five articles on aspects of Middle East history and politics including pieces in the New York Times [some boos], the Boston Globe [a different set of boos], the Los Angeles Times, the Chicago Tribune, and many journals. He has received fellowships and grants from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the Ford Foundation, and the Rockefeller Foundation, and is a recipient of a Fulbright research award. He has been a regular guest on radio and TV shows, including All Things Considered [applause from the liberals], Talk of the Nation, the NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, and Nightline.
“His latest book, Resurrecting Empire: Western Footprints and America’s Perilous Path in the Middle East, examines the record of Western involvement in the region and analyzes the likely outcome of our most recent Middle East incursions.
“Let’s give a warm welcome to our guest, and I’m sure that, in spite of the controversial nature of his topic, we will show him the respect and hospitality for which Kansas is so justly famous. Ladies and Gentlemen, Professor Rashid Khalidi.”
General applause, with a scattering of boos and cheers. Operation Rescue, The Mid-Continent ADL and WSU Hillel stood up in back with their signs.

Khalidi began with many thank yous for the honor of the invitation, invited questions and discussion after his talk, and launched passionately into his topic.
“Since September 11, we've heard a lot about the ‘intelligence failures’ that left the United States unprepared for the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. But these failures were not simply the result of poor espionage or bureaucratic incompetence. They reflected a deeper failure to understand a region and its historical wounds, a number of which--though not all--were inflicted by the Western powers.”

Serious pre-uproar among the audience. Khalidi remained calm, but did respond:
“I hope you will agree that the future of America's relations with the Arab and Muslim world depends a great deal on public education. Yet the very people who are in a position to perform this vital task have instead found themselves under siege from the media, from extremist pressure groups and craven politicians. Our crime? Challenging those formidable authorities on the Arab world, George W. Bush and Ariel Sharon.”

Standing and yelling from the audience:
“Anti-semite!”
“If you don’t like it here, go home!”
“Nazi Jew-killer!”
“Terrorists off campus!”
Richard stepped forward, and took the mike from the lectern.

“Ladies and Gentlemen, this kind of behavior will have reverberations country-wide. Internationally. This is an institution committed to academic freedom! Please, please, reserve your comments until after Professor Khalidi’s talk, and then keep them polite. Believe me, the whole world is watching.” He inserted the mike once again in its holder and took his seat. Khalidi, continued, apparently unflustered.

“Back in 1992, a decade before 9/11, a group of right-wing thinkers from the administration of the first George Bush created the Project for a New American Century, PNAC. I strongly suggest you google them, and study their documents closely. Their platform demanded that the United States take advantage of the fall of the Soviet Union to achieve unchallenged, unchallengable domination of the planet, and control of its dwindling resources. They called on America to substantially increase its military budget, to deny other nations the use of outer space, and to adopt a more aggressive and unilateral foreign policy that would allow it to act offensively and preemptively in the world. The elimination of states like Iraq figured prominently in this grand vision.

[Applause and a quickly abating “U-S-A! U-S-A!”]

“In a widely-circulated 1998 letter to President Clinton, the members of PNAC -- Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, Eliot Abrams, Richard Armitage, Richard Pearl, Robert Zoellick, William Kristol and Francis Fukayama among them -- challenged the president to move forcefully and militarily to remove Saddam Hussein.
[Again some applause, with annoyed shushing from the liberals.]

“And in their defining document, “Rebuilding America’ Defenses”, written in Sept 2000 -- a full year before 9/11 -- they acknowledged that the process of transformation was likely to be a long one, absent -- in their own chilling words -- ‘some catastrophic and catalyzing event like a new Pearl Harbor.’ One year later that event would arrive.”

It was time for the Blintz Brigade, a group whose motto was “Cream Pies Are For Cream Puffs!” From left and right, two nightmare gaggles of gabardined clowns invaded the platform, firing blintzes at the speaker, splattering his dark suit with crème fraiche (“For The Blessed, Nothing But The Best!”), and greasing the ground with doughish offal.

Now a blintz is no mere crêpe. The baked and semi-hardened dough raised second-degree welts and third-degree contusions on Professor Khalidi’s face -- and let loose bedlam in the audience.

Richard sprang from his seat, and Teresa ran up on stage to help battle the clowns. In the arena, folding chairs clattered as the yarmulkas attacked the kuffiyehs, and the crosses attacked them both and one another. Neutrals scattered at first, then tested out testosterone in random directions. Even women have testosterone.
Enter the campus police. Exit the campus police. This was more than they could handle.

The uproar grew from forte to fortissimo as the entropy increased. The clowns had disappeared. Poof! On stage, Richard and Teresa were madly wiping down the distinguished professor with hankie and scarf.

Sirens without, and onto the stage poured the burly Wichita police in an overly-tactical rear-entrance maneuver. With macho seriously compromised from slipping all over the spent blintz shells, they nevertheless succeeded in throwing an orange net over Teresa, Richard and Khalidi before confronting the audience. This latter they did from the edge of the platform, using academy sharpshooters to practice with the new paint-ball and itch-powder 12-gauge shotguns. The chaos on the court was enhanced by scratching and sneezing and wiping of semi-enameled eyes.
Paint transmuted into war-paint, during which the orange-net enforcers, donning ski-masks, resorted to the old-style tactics of punching, kneeing and kicking their capturees. “This is what you get when you fuck with us!” one blue-garbed protector informed Teresa.

Yet more sirens, and more again. The Kansas State Police had not had a chance to try out the $5.3 million worth of advanced tactical weapons they had amassed from the Homeland Security Gift Shop and Cafe. The gym-space echoed anew with concussion grenades; rubber bullets bounced off walls and public; bean-bags (aka FBs, or “flexible batons”) crescendoed the havoc while wooden dowels percussed from skulls to floor.

Was there reaction? You bet!

Anarchists in the crowd organized an ad-hoc protest by stripping naked and arranging themselves non-hierarchically in a peace sign, and were soon trampled by old hippies in tie-dyes and pony-tails shouting ancient slogans, and threatening to call the ACLU.

This was too much for the mid-level officers, who up till now had let the rookies rock and roll. Out came the temporarily-blinding strobe lights, and then the Tasers which, in case you haven’t been following, fire barbed darts which deliver a 50,000 volt jolt. Those hit lose muscle control (including sphincters), and collapse instantly. The gym floor became littered with bodies, clothed and un-.

Still there was resistance from the quickly-erected holding pens. Insufferable: chanting and most provocative of all, videotaping and flashbulbs. It was time for DARPA-level crowd control using weapons that had never been used, not in Wichita, not in Kansas, not in the continental United States, save possibly at the U1a Facility at the DOE's Nevada Test Site -- and maybe not even there. Semi-conductor lasers to create plasma “flash-bangs” stunning and disorienting the target; heat-compliance weapons -- directed-energy prototypes that would instantly raise body-temperature to an intolerable level. Taser-type darts variously tipped with four varieties of incapacitating, psycho-active drugs.

But alas, before any of these could be brought into play, the gym lights went out. The clowns had struck again. Several hands copped major feels on Teresa. This was not to her liking. Richard’s hammerlock was tightened through the net, and Khalidi was only just recovering from the baton-twirling routine especially for Ragheads. Then the sprinklers came on strong, dampening the mood and the firepower. And a Jewish clown laugh-track filled the room, with arena loudspeakers cranked up to max -- which is pretty loud.

Then silence. Blackness and wetness and silence. The evening seemed over. The police withdrew, fading out under cover of darkness, walkie-talkies crackling obscurely, diminuendo to nothing. The audience walked, limped, staggered, crawled, swam for freedom.

The next day, the Wichita Eagle quoted Mayor Mayans as declaring the police action “a model for homeland defense,” and noted that all officers had demonstrated “a tremendous amount of restraint,” and were thus able “to refrain from arrests.”

Of the three on the platform, one began to entertain modest doubts about remaining in his adopted country, while on a related subject, the other two harbored no more doubts whatsoever.

UNHOLY GROUND

2010-09-11T03:31:00.000-07:00

Here it is 9/11 again, and the world is all caught up in a debate on whether our "attackers" are being "insensitive" in demanding a presence at "ground zero" -- or two blocks away, or twenty, or on the island of Manhattan.

Although I'm a fiction writer, it's hard for me to get involved in this debate concerning counterfactuals, sides taking passionate sides on the ethics of a fairy tale. Though it is interesting to thrash out whether Jack was right to steal the giant's magic harp, the fact is that there was no giant; there was no harp; there was no Jack. At least not as real people in this marvellous story.

While there may have been some middle-easterners involved in some way (though the evidence is unclear), the concrete-set notion that "19 Arab highjackers with box cutters attacked us" is -- to anyone who has looked at the physical and circumstantial evidence -- perfectly silly, and certainly not grounds for an anti-Muslim crusade.

This is not the place to present the mountains of evidence against the "official story" of 9/11. For a brief fact sheet on the collapse of the three buildings, one might go here: http://ae911truth.org/news/41-articles/365-ae911truth-in-mainstream-tv-free-dvd-.html

Suffice it to say that planes do not "vaporize" upon crashing, and steel buildings do not symmetrically collapse at freefall speed from airplane strikes or fire -- or from no airplane strikes and tiny fires, as in the case of Building 7.

I began serious study of 9/11 issues back in 2004 after my reading of David Ray Griffin's first book, The New Pearl Harbor: Disturbing Questions About the Bush Administration and 9/11. Here is my review from back then: http://counterpunch.org/estrin05252004.html

In the six years since, I have read many articles, watched many videos, and had endless discussions with smart people about this issue. And I've concluded two things:

1. The official story is transparent junk.
2. It's very difficult to get anyone to question it.

And while firm conclusions are a bit evasive -- at least around the edges -- about who actually "did" 9/11, much evidence points to those with motives, materials, authority, and opportunities to pull it off. The prime suspects combining all these are personnel and agencies of the US government. But it will take an independent investigation to look into that. Nevertheless, it is very likely that "ground zero" is not only not "sacred", but is rather intensely unholy, smelling of sulfur.

Given #2 above, it's not likely that an independent investigation will happen soon -- at least in the US.

So what should a novelist do? Since the MSM will not cover it, I decided to write SKULK, a comic novel about 9/11 issues. Maybe, I thought, the material could get beyond the truther choir out into the fiction-reading public. An end-run, as it were, around let's-not-go-there-ism. Though the story is ridiculous (but rich), the websites mentioned by the schemers are real. Were a reader to be curious enough to check them out, he or she would be standing at the edge of a vast sea of real information generally out of public view.

So for this 9/11, I thought I'd share a short section of SKULK in which Skulk -- Teresa Lee Skulkington of the Connecticut Skulkingtons convinces her boyfriend, Prof. Richard Gronsky, of Kansas State University, that America needs a "teaching moment", and that 9/11 truth is it.

Our heroine was originally modeled on Ann Coulter, and this scene germinated after I was told (I cannot vouch for this) that AC was -- improbably -- a Deadhead! So here, in a chapter called "The Wheel", our dynamic duo, high on Uncle Sam acid tabs, are recovering from a complex trip. Gronsky's pet project is to get Kansas to secede from the union. I'll explain anything else that needs explaining in [square brackets].

****************

And at the seventh hour, they rested. The Dead cd had been retired. Richard lay sprawled out on the couch, eating green, green guacamole, singing to himself his favorite verse from Carmina Burana over and over like some tape loop at Kaufmann’s. [the department store where a mysterious year-round Santa Claus works]
Rex sedet in vertice
Caveat ruinam!
Mmmm, mmmm, mmm, yowsa...
Nam sub axe legimus
Hecubam reginam.
“Yes.”
She, on the other hand, was over-tired-revved, sitting in the chair, her arms around her knees, her head down, wrapped in teeming brain.
“You know that article you read me?”
“Unh unh.”
“The article about the kid and the water?”
“No. What kid? What water?”
“Hydrogen oxide or whatever.” [a conspiracy theory about the government putting di-hydrogen oxide in the water]
“Oh, yeah, yeah. What about it?”
“The Free State of Kansas is never going to happen...”
“What do you mean?” he loudly objected.
“Hold on there. Hear me out, hear me out.”
Richard closed his eyes.
“The Free State of Kansas is never going to happen -- without some kind of shock, some huge consciousness-raising about the true state of things.”
“Isn’t Dubya enough?”
“No, no, no. Read your own goddamn Frank book. [Skulk has come down to Kansas to disprove Thomas Frank's book, What's the Matter with Kansas?] Rove has got the status quo sewn up. We’ve got to break...”
“Could we talk about this tomorrow?”
“This is tomorrow. Look at the sky. And you’ve got an eight o’clock class. So perk up!”
She poured what was left of the chardonnay in his lap.
“Look,” she continued, “the American public is very sweet -- especially Kansans -- and Love is All -- and all -- but they’re...I don’t want to say ‘stupid’. Let’s just say they’re a little hidebound in what they take to be the present. The official version of the present.”
“Let’s give ‘em all some Uncle Sam...” he suggested.
“Yeah, well they’ve had too much Uncle Sam already. They need to -- what do you academics say? -- unpack him. See what’s really in there.”
“But that’s ridiculous. They won’t,” Richard observed.
“They will if they are shaken up enough. Enough to see through some of the more obvious lies.”
“Like?”
“Like all the 9/11 stuff, liberal bonehead. What could be more explosive?”
“They’ve already been shaken up by 9/11.”
“Yeah, and they’ve circled the wagons. Around Dubya and the gang.”
“That’s predictable. People always support...”
“But what if they realized that Dubya and the gang were the ones that did it? I mean in some way did it?”
“What?”
“9/11.”
“Unh unh. I’m not going there. And no one else will either.”
He rose exhaustedly to his feet and began pacing.
“Look,” she lectured, “who ordered NORAD to stand down? Have you seen the early photos of the Pentagon? It’s only a little, tiny hole. Where’s the plane? Melted? Where are the engines? Engines don’t vaporize from burning fuel. How did two giant skyscrapers…”
“Three.”
“Three -- collapse from fire when no steel buildings had ever collapsed lake that before in the history of buildings? C’mon. Weren’t you suspicious when you saw all that on TV?”
“No. I was horrified.”
“Hey, these are the guys that took us into war to stop Saddam from dropping nuclear bombs on us. And they’ve got people still swallowing it.”
“These are the guys?? These are your buddies, your father’s friends. I can’t believe you’re saying this! You! Ms. Fierce Right-wingnut.”
“Yeah. Well that was then and this is now. Post. Don’t you want to see the Free State of Kansas?”
“Yes, of course.”
“So we need to shake our dear citizens out of their lethargy. Fight the mass psychosis.”
“How?”
Teresa sat down in Richard’s place.
“I don’t know.”
“Good.”
“But I do know this: Things seem pretty benign here at home, right? -- at least for Dubya and the gang. But a haystack soaked with kerosene also looks benign. It doesn’t smell that way -- but then neither does the country. But it appears content to just sit there -- until you toss in a match.”
“And you want to be the match.”
“We want to be the match.”
“The 9/11 stuff.”
“What else? It’s the smoking gun.”
“I see.”
Richard plopped down next to her on the couch. They both sat in silence for several minutes, each concerned with conflagration.
“What was that place called with the French name that John Brown...where somebody slaughtered somebody else?” she asked out of the blue.
“Marais des Cygnes,” he answered, Swamp of the Swans. Why? You thinking of slaughtering somebody? Your once-beloved vice-president, when he comes to speak at Raytheon next week?”
“No,” she said, taking him seriously. “That would bring down a police state big time. Homeland Security über Alles. No, we need some kind of teaching moment. And it can’t be seen as a terrorist act.”
“A teaching moment.”
“You’re supposed to know about those. I just thought it was a nice name.”
“What?”
“Marais des Cygnes.”
“Oh.”
“It’s like you and me. You the swamp, and I the swan."

*******************

How much Uncle Sam will it take to get people to understand the workings of Uncle Sam?

WHAT'S A JEW TO DO (WITH YOU)

2010-09-04T05:42:00.000-07:00

you, in this case, being the arch-conservative Catholic composer, Anton Bruckner, next to Wagner, Hitler’s favorite, whose birthday it is as I write?

I knew I wasn't supposed to like Bruckner when, in my Jewish-guilt ridden, self-assigned curriculum, I decided to spend a summer listening to and learning all the Bruckner symphonies during my back and forths to Bread & Puppet. But it turns out that the orchestration is such that I often could hear only the upper half of the sound over the interstate tire noise. So I gave up that project, to fill in my Bruckner gap more slowly, as it comes.

For The Education of Arnold Hitler, my novel about a really sweet guy with a really shitty name, I knew I'd have to write a section on Bruckner, so I listened up on the Seventh, and wrote the following. Evelyn Brown, Arnold's new girlfriend, a performance artist investigating evil by playing at neo-Nazism, and Arnold, have built him a bunker under an on-ramp onto the Bruckner Expressway in the Bronx out of stolen cement blocks and plastic sheeting. They have a bunker-warming for their little love nest as follows:

“Whatcha got for music?” he asked.
“Bruckner, what else?”
“Ah.”
She switched out the light. There was only the ghostly glow of distant streetlamps through the mirror film. Arnold crawled in under the quilt.
“I brought you the slow movement from the Seventh Symphony.” She was somewhat slow herself. “Here.”
She pushed PLAY, and the small room was filled with the rich sounds of low strings and horns in C# minor, a long, sinuous phrase culminating in surprisingly masculine chords, and lapsing back into a gentle feminine ending, serene, consolatory, moving.
“Nice,” he said. “I’ve never heard Bruckner.”
“You told me that. I thought this would be a good place to start.”
“Beautiful, but so sad,” he said, as the melodies spun out of the original germ.
They lay there silent, sipping their glasses as the harmonies and textures grew ever richer, and the keys slipped by until one amazing moment when the music, with a thrilling shock, slips and falls a half-step to climax streaming out on C major, filling the dark room with light.
“Jeezuz!” Arnold muttered,.
The music quieted, and the movement ended with a transfigured major version of the opening funeral music, a majestic threnody framed by the sound of Wagner tubas. They were silent for a long time after it finished.
“The Nazis dug him too,” Evelyn finally said, “his monumental scale, grandiose, lavish, spiritual... They’d play him in Dunkelkonzerte -- lights all out, sacred space. Listening to Bruckner was like going to church.”
She snuggled in under the quilt.
“His most famous piece, that,” she murmured. “They played it on German radio after Hitler died, after he was burned to a crisp. Hey, you wake?”
She nudged him. No answer. She pulled off her clothes and lay her body against his as the kitties and bunnies watched the night.

OK, so Hitler and the Pope notwithstanding, Bruckner writes some fabulous music, even for a Jewish ear. So did Wagner, the fulminating-enough antisemite.

Which brings up the larger, long-standing, subtle, difficult question: can one detach an artist's life from his or her works? Celine is a great writer, but a murderous maniac (as was Gesualdo). Heidegger was IMO the most important philosopher of the 20th century, and ended his inaugural address as rector of Freiburg Universtiy with three "Heil Hitler"s.

What are people, Jews especially, supposed to do with this gorge-rising stuff?

One approach has been "if you can't beat 'em, recruit them" -- as in this scene from my novel, Golem Song. Alan Krieger gives his shiksa German psychiatrist girlfriend a present of Arthur Naiman's wonderful little book, Every Goy's Guide To Common Jewish Expressions, Also Recommended for Jews Who Don't Know Their Punim From Their Pupik. I'll save you some space: Open the link if you like. It's pretty funny.

(Nice little side story: when I wrote Arthur, asking for permission to quote his book in mine, he wrote back, "Permission is for goys. Fair use is for Jews," and gave me...what?... who knows? Anyway a "Sure, go ahead.")

OK, so Beethoven was Jewish, black jazz heros are Jewish, all the (Good!) antisemites were Jewish, but what about Netanyahu? Lieberman? the politics of the current state of Israel? Are THEY Jewish?

Here's what Alan Krieger's brother writes him -- interspersed in a scene from Golem
Song in which the Ursula of the link above, takes Alan out to a French restaurant (Alan is very bad at French restaurants):

So, yes, what's a Jew to do? What are any of us to do? It's worth writing novels about.

COVER UPS

2010-08-28T05:14:00.000-07:00

Photo by Donna Bister

Dionysus reigns! Our front porch is overwhelmed with grapes red and white, leaves bristling out like mad conductor's hair, fruit hanging in a wall of Eat Me.

The only trouble is that under those grapes are our signs listing the numbers of the dead -- military and civilian -- in Iraq and Afghanistan, the data output of our locally popular National Bad News Service, a neighborhood landmark, and source of urgent conversation.

Not that the autumn grapes are the only thing hiding those numbers. There is the year-round assault by language, the misdirection of "winning hearts and minds", of Operation Enduring Freedom, of "bringing democracy" and the upgrade from Bush's "War On Terror" to Obama's more Harvard-y "Enduring Struggle Of The Forces Of Moderation Against Those Of Violent Extremism." A fog of language as dense as the fog of war, year round, and thickening.

Yet rereading Thomas Pynchon's 1973 masterpiece, Gravity's Rainbow, I came across a passage that makes me think that our numbers themselves, in deep mid-winter, standing stark against red, clear and nasty as can be -- are themselves false fronts for a reality more hideous even than war. In the context of WWII, Pynchon writes:

Don’t forget the real business of the War is buying and selling. The murdering and the violence are self-policing, and can be entrusted to nonprofessionals. The mass nature of wartime death is useful in many ways. It serves as spectacle, as diversion from the real movements of the War. It provides raw material to be recorded into History, so that children may be taught History as sequences of violence, battle after battle, and be more prepared for the adult world. Best of all, mass death is a stimulus to just ordinary folks, little fellows, to try ’n’ grab a piece of that Pie while they’re still here to gobble it up. The true war is a celebration of markets. (p.105)

It's a little throwaway passage, a remark by one of the characters, not a thesis, not the point of the book, not some commie peacenik agit-prop. Just, oh, you know, the underlying truth.

I think I'll add it to the explication of the numbers posted on one of our golden-yellow porch posts.

FAITES CE QUE VOUS VOUDREZ

2010-08-21T06:38:00.000-07:00

A happier 148th if you can, Claude Debussy.

The 17th and 18th century paved his way: the motto (in the celebrated words of Kant) "dare to know." And enlightenment thinkers did just that, opening new vistas of science and a rational understanding of the universe.

The l9th century intensified the motto: "dare to master"--and the financial might of capitalist industrial revolution empowered the quest for domination of the natural and political world.

With his revolutionary message, Beethoven epitomized this vision of human creative power. Take a theme and develop it, twist it and explore it, find its inner possibilities and squeeze them out, prod its reflexive interaction with the tool of the will--the creator transformed by its history. With Beethoven the "development section" of classical sonata from grew to engulf the work, and from Beethoven sprang Wagner's manipulation of leitmotifs, and Schoenberg's permutations of the twelve-tone row. The message: man the master.

My favorite Debussy image is of the young man at a concert, whispering to a friend, "Let's go--he's beginning to develop!" What? Leave at the most exciting, revealing, genius-testing moment? What does this guy want? A little insight from his school days when he submitted a composition to his professor which flouted all rules. When asked what rules he observed, he said, "None--only my own pleasure!" "That's all very well," was the retort, "provided you're a genius." We don't know what grade he received in this battle, but we all know who won the war.

The premiere of The Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun helped initiate the birth of a certain kind of modernity--some would even say post-modernity--in which there were no grand rules applying, no agreed-upon values, no fixed forms.

As the music flows from moment to moment, mood to mood, at its own "pleasure," eschewing "development," embracing only the barest symmetrical form, so do we flow as a culture: enveloped in our private dreams, resisting "government," despairing of "solutions," heedless of what may come, going with the flow.

Twenty three centuries earlier, Chuang-Tsu wrote "Am I a man dreaming I'm a butterfly, or a butterfly dreaming I'm a man?" More than a century ago, Debussy dreamed his prophetic dream. And here we are today.Is it an accident of fate that Debussy died in agony, of cancer, in the middle of a war?

CHILD ABUSE -- HERE, THERE, AND LIKELY EVERYWHERE

2010-08-14T10:29:00.000-07:00

There have been several large studies on the effects of occupation -- bombing, physical injury, house demolitions, tear gassing, house searches, etc. -- on Palestinian children in the West Bank and Gaza (Google palestine/children/trauma/). A few studies look at the rather smaller numbers of traumatized children in the southern Israeli towns bordering Gaza who experience occasional rocket attacks. (Google israel/children/trauma/.)

All studies demonstrate what might be expected from such direct and witnessed exposure: concentration and attention deficit, memory problems, and various levels of post-traumatic stress disorder. War, as they say, and as shows up in their drawings, is not good for children.

Yet there is another area of child abuse, not generally labeled as such, both here and in the middle east, with which we must also be concerned: educating children toward paranoia and retributive violence.

Whatever your position is on the Israel/Palestine situation, I heavily recommend that you watch these two ten-minute YouTube segments by an Israeli filmmaker, documenting a state-sponsored high-school trip to Auschwitz.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f07FI-gdzBI&feature=PlayList&p=D1F5236042F4E86B&playnext=1&index=33

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sKSlp8cDC9s&feature=related

Auschwitz/Birkenau is a hair-raising experience. Hair-graying, too. My companion assured me at the time, that I had a few grey hairs afterwards -- my first -- I hadn't had before that afternoon. The key question, however, is what does one understand and take from that experience.

My own feeling is that these Israeli children were battered and reduced in emotional capacity going from the before to the after. See what you think.

It's not hard to connect such an "educational" experience with such consequences reported here:

http://maxblumenthal.com/2010/07/the-summer-camp-of-destruction-israeli-high-schoolers-join-in-the-destruction-of-a-bedouin-town/

America's children have little direct experience of war, occupation and lethally threatening violence, but their lives are full of virtual exposure via film, video, music, and electronic games. In a way, their cart precedes their horse: they are learning the response before the stimulus.

Consider this NPR piece on an Army Experience Center:
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=128875936

Your tax dollars at work, training children to deal with terrorists who -- the adults likely assure them -- hate us for our freedoms.

One Marine boot camp chant I've come across recently goes like this:

“Throw some candy in the school yard,
Watch the children gather round .
Load a belt in your M-50,
Mow them little bastards down!”
(http://www.counterpunch.org/white1023.html)

Nice. I'm sure the indoctrination in the Experience Centers is not as strong or vicious as among the Semper Fi boys, but the subtler brain-washing may be more extensive and effective.

I don't know what kind of chants they use in the IDF, or in jihadist military training, but I assume it's all similar -- child abusing "education" preparing children for the abuse of children and others.

AWESOME DAYS OF AWE

2010-08-05T18:57:00.000-07:00

August 6th: Hiroshima. August 9th: Nagasaki. Three days in between.

The days between close-set giant pillars take on special significance. Whatever the current behavior of the state of Israel, most Jews know such spaces well.

The ten days between Rosh Hashanah, the beginning of the year, and Yom Kippur, the day of atonement, are not actually holidays, but mark a special period of time -- what are called the Days of Awe. They are a kind of spring cleaning in fall, a purification of one's world and soul so that on Yom Kippur the Jew can faced the Eternal with all worldly issues in place. And what is the main strategy for this cleaning? It may surprise you. Asking and giving forgiveness.

The tradition of the shtetels -- those small eastern European Jewish communities depicted in Fiddler on the Roof -- was that in the ten days between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur people would ask forgiveness of everyone they had wronged that year. All the little, and sometimes the big, wrongs that had been done in the community were brought out into the open, confessed, made good if possible, and forgiven. The entire community felt cleansed and pure. Perhaps not everyone was that honest. Like folks everywhere, not all Jews had the courage to beg someone's pardon or, when they themselves were asked, to give pardon with a full heart. But they found it a lot easier to do than we would today. While we have much more information now than they did, we don't know as well how to say "I'm sorry." But in those simple villages, to avoid a world full of hate, people often took the ten days and went knocking on the doors of any estranged friends, and cleared their personal paths, and those of the community. The world was cleansed for Yom Kippur -- the "Day of Atonement".

And on that day the naked human being was scheduled to go mano a mano, godwrestling with the Eternal. Tradition has it that on Rosh Hashanah, God inscribed your name in either the Book of Life or the Book of Death. That's why the concern for measuring up. But the verdict on Rosh Hashanah was not final. You had the ten days in between, and especially Yom Kippur, to change the Judgement. But at the end of Yom Kippur, the Books were closed.

And so it is understandable that Yom Kippur be a full day of prayer without food. Five separate services take place during 25 hours -- like Muslim practice -- but with little or no pause between them. The idea of the fast is this: when the human body has paused from its natural acts of life, and history has suspended its normal ups and downs, the spirit can be utterly reborn. We don't really do fasts in America. We're better at pig-outs.

And sin -- or evil, for that matter -- is not a very popular concept in the contemporary American heartmind. Yet some concept of estrangement from the Truth has been common to most religious world views. The acknowledgment of sin is a crucial part of the Yom Kippur service.

"The Cloud Over The Culture" is the punning title of an extraordinary article by Paul Boyer (1985) which appeared on the fortieth anniversary of dropping the bombs. In it, he asserts, as do I, that although "Hiroshima" and "Nagasaki" are such familiar words -- banal even -- the United States "has yet to assimilate fully what those words represent in its political, cultural or moral history."

He quotes the American Catholic Bishops' 1983 Statement on Nuclear War:

After the passage of nearly four decades and a concomitant growth in our understanding of the ever-growing horror of nuclear war, we must shape the climate of opinion which will make it possible for our country to express profound sorrow over the atomic bombing in 1945. Without that sorrow, there is no possibility of finding a way to repudiate future use of nuclear weapons. (My emphasis)

Sorrow. Remorse. It sounds Days of Awe-like. How very, very strange it is that we -- as a nation -- have never done that. Not once, in now sixty-five years. Not even the teensiest bit. Un-Amerkin.

We have consistently refused -- and still, even now, refuse -- an absolute and explicit "no first use" nuclear weapons policy. One of the physicists who worked on the Manhattan Project observed that

If the memory of things is to deter, where is that memory? Hiroshima has been taken out of the American conscience, eviscerated, extirpated.

1945 seems so long ago. We were a nation in genuine and legitimate relief from a dreadful war. But what tenacity there is in the myth of American innocence, the belief that we are somehow set apart from the world, our motives higher, our methods purer.

It is this constant myth that prevents us from having any national Days of Awe, that keeps us from expressing sorrow over the event. And, as the Catholic Bishops so insightfully express, without that sorrow, we cannot go on, we cannot build a world safe -- from ourselves.

New National Holydays

Let me therefore beat the drum for some pre-Labor Day labor. Down with innocence! Up with memory, confession, sorrow, apology, healing!

I hereby propose a new national holiday, modeled on the Days of Awe, but occurring in August, between Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Like the Days of Awe, they would be bounded by two momentous events, would celebrate those events with appropriate ritual, and would feature redemptive tasks to be done in between.

"It could never happen," you say, "too serious. It runs against the American grain to do that kind of self-criticism."

Maybe, maybe not. We have our solemn holidays, in places still solemnly kept. And besides, we may be growing up as a nation. Engaged in five current wars, with Iran coming up, the peach fuzz is off our cheeks. Obama's fairytales notwithstanding, we know we're not in Kansas anymore.

The vast majority of people realize we can't go on as we are -- exporting jobs, exploiting foreign workers, making wars, eviscerating and polluting the planet. "Change" has become the buzzword to win elections.

The Christians have taught the world to acknowledge a December season of Peace. Is it too much to imagine that churches and synagogues, national organizations and neighborhood groups, schools and universities could slowly grow a late summer holiday to express the profound sorrow the Catholic Bishops recommend -- a mindful holiday to witness and grieve, to assimilate a painful part of the past, to dissipate the cloud over the culture, to ask and give forgiveness, to sing in chorus "Hiroshima, Nakasaki. Never Again", and to be able to go on, safer from ourselves?

The religious historian Mircea Eliade has made a distinction between sacred and profane time. In sacred time, historical events gradually come to partake of the permanence of myth, while in profane time they gradually lose their grip on people and become merely material for historians and the technicians at Disney World. I am calling for a holiday that would change Hiroshima and Nagasaki into universal myths, deeply grounded in sacred time, permanent stop signs on the road to destruction. Four new holydays, making things whole, healing.

Here's how it might go. On August 5th, supper is a Japanese meal, which Americans would learn to make as beautifully as we do a turkey dinner. The event would have a ritual component like a Seder, in which symbolic foods are eaten, and history is thoughtfully reviewed. Each family, each congregation, each school would develop its own texts until some key themes and treatments became solidified.

The morning and afternoon of the 6th -- Hiroshima Day -- would be a time for fasting, or some special breakfast, with a ritual observance at 8:15 AM. During the 6th, 7th and 8th -- our three days of awe and repentance -- individuals would consciously perform expiatory tasks, personal and interpersonal, as in the Jewish Days of Awe, but also social, holding teach-ins, attending peace events. If a weekend fell between Hiroshima and Nagasaki, there would be special services at churches, synagogues, mosques. Morning and afternoon of the 9th is again a special time of fasting. 11:02 is observed, and everyone gears up for a big celebration in the evening, at which international foods of all kinds would be prepared -- a huge community festival.

What I'm describing is a full-blown, big holiday. Things don't begin that way, of course. We might just start by thinking about it for a few years, by recognizing that in fact something important did occur on these days. Then, who knows what would grow -- in individual hearts, in individual families, in individual congregations and institutions. Were something like this to get underway, in ten years we'd have Good Housekeeping printing August peace recipes.

We postmoderns like to play with history. Now we can play in its real mudbath, and actually get dirty -- a death-defying vital alternative to psychic numbing. Would the New Days of Awe change anything? I can't imagine otherwise. The power of confession has been known to the Catholic Church for centuries. If anything has sustained the even older Jewish community, it has been the inspiration of the High Holy Days. The Muslims make pilgrimage to Mecca. This stuff has both a track record and the power of newness-at-large. Like an exotic virus spreading in a vulnerable population, the power of guilt could quite transform postmodern American culture. Revelation through genuine memory, then Teshuvah, turning and Tikkun, healing.

Or shall we just go on making wars?

NIMBYS OF DEATH

2010-07-31T11:29:00.000-07:00

This week the Secretary of the Air Force selected the Vermont National Air Guard as one of the top two contenders for housing "a national treasure", the new F-35 Joint Strike Fighter. Our liberal congressional delegation is jumping with joy, with Sen. Leahy enjoying the "cream rising to the top", Sen. Sanders basking in the "great national respect and admiration", and Rep. Welch crowing about "400 full-time and 700 part-time employees, military and civilian, [who] receive about $53 million annually in pay and contribute about $2 million each year in fire and rescue services from their airport base.

Wowie zowie -- sounds pretty good.

There have, of course, been some grumblers, the most cited being those airport neighbors complaining about a drop in property values and lives made noisome by unbearable decibels. While the militarized world at large understands and sympathizes with their issues and hopes to "work with them", their concerns shrink, and are dismissed in the face of the larger issues of jobs and "national security". They are labeled NIMBYs -- Not In My Backyarders. "What you're doing in OK -- just go do it elsewhere."

But what is it it the F-35s are doing, beyond being national treasures and making a hell of a noise? What is it that is OK, as long as it's elsewhere? There are those of us mean enough to point to its main task -- mass murder. That's why we don't want F-35s based in Burlington -- or anywhere else.

Burlington, Vermont -- bobo paradise, the People's Republic of, -- does love its sleek, if noisy aircraft. For several years, we enthusiastically hosted an airshow put on by the Navy's Flight Demonstration Squadron, the Blue Angels.

Although very few of us support mass murder, I had an interesting conversation with an intelligent woman, highly critical of war, who was all excited about the air show.

“I know I shouldn’t really love it — but it’s so exciting. Those planes are so beautiful, the pilots’ skill is so impressive. It triggers off some visceral reaction...”
“Would you be excited to see someone beheaded, or perhaps burned at the stake?” I asked. “No!” she averred, “But nobody gets killed at the air show.”

What was amazing to me was the screeching to a halt of thought. No, short of a crash, these planes would not kill anyone at the air show. But they are the meanest and most vicious of killing machines, designed to bring fiery death to any persons or structures in their cross-hairs. They are “smart”, these machines, and their pilots are smart, well-trained, and their bombs are “smart”, and we never intentionally kill innocent civilians. Yet somehow, there is always “collateral damage”. No one gets killed at the air show. Only everywhere else such machines perform.

At the time of the show, and in the face of F-35-like protests, a local columnist wrote a piece in the Burlington Free Press entitled “Cause It’

s Cool, Let Airshow Roar” : “C’mon guys,“ he wrote. “all you ‘waterfront zealots, anti-war movers and shakers, environmental sorts. Can’t you just get off your high horses for a day, stop being so stuffy, and, like, just have some fun watching the boys play with their toys? ‘Cause it’s cool, man. Don’t get your undies in a knot. Hey, even the Make-A-Wish Foundation loves it. [The foundation will receive a charitable donation from the proceeds.] Are you against dying kids? Meanies.“

He advised the peace-freaks to just “close their eyes and imagine that the jets torching along at 500 mph are on a peace mission promoting sustainable global tranquility.”

But these jets, and worse, the F-35, will not be promoting global tranquility. They are promoting defense profits, over-the-top military macho, and by implication approving the world-wide death and suffering it creates. They are promoting killing kids who have no Make-A-Wish foundation, and whose only wish is that the wars around them would end. And not least, they are enticing our own children to graduate from violent video games to doing the real thing when they grow up.

I know — all those Burlingtonians who are thinking such thoughts are just elitist prigs with twisted undies. Why can’t we just be cool, instead of raining on the party? Besides, think of the jobs.

HINGEPOINT OF HISTORY

2010-07-23T07:54:00.000-07:00

As I write, we are one week past the 65th anniversary of what may be the most important date in the history of the planet. The Planet of the Human Apes.

On July 16th, 1945, Fat Man, aka "the Gadget", did its early morning, Trinity Test thing, lighting up the sky over Alamogordo, New Mexico.

The US military put out this statement to calm any worried neighbors:

Several inquiries have been received concerning a heavy explosion which occurred on the Alamogordo Air Base reservation this morning. A remotely located ammunition magazine containing a considerable amount of high explosives and pyrotechnics exploded. There was no loss of life or injury to anyone, and the property damage outside of the explosives magazine itself was negligible. Weather conditions affecting the content of gas shells exploded by the blast may make it desirable for the army to evacuate temporarily a few civilians from their homes.

But the sky was not lit up by any considerable amount of high explosives and pyrotechnics. What made the light and blast was the first explosion of a nuclear weapon in planetary history.

And more important than that: what had come to pass was a human callup of forces beyond control, forces greater than could be imagined, even by the glyph of E = mc2.

They were not only unparalleled physical forces previously sequestered in the infinitesimal. They were forces of human chutzpah, of political and philosophical confusion, of a rape relationship to nature that has never been, can never be, repaired. We have lived since then, and will ever live, in the miasma of that ravishing.

There was one incident at Trinity that seems particularly revealing of the pathology of the perpetrator:

Chief Meteorologist Jack Hubbard, in consultation with every group leader, had early on drawn up a list of the best and worst conditions for the test:

Best conditions for the operation.
A. Visibility greater than 45 miles.
B. Humidity below 85% at all altitudes.
C. Clear skies.
D. Temperature lapse rate aloft slightly stable to prevent dropping of the cloud.
E. Little or no inversion between 5,000 and 25,000 feet to allow cloud to reach maximum altitude.
F. A thick surface inversion or none at all to prevent internal reflections and mirage effects.
G. Winds aloft fairly light, preferred direction from between 6 degrees south of west and 25 degrees south of west. Steady movement desirable to anticipate track of cloud. Horizontal and vertical wind shears desirable for maximum dissipation of the cloud, although such a condition increased the tracking problem.
H. Low-level winds light and preferred drift away from Base Camp and shelters.
I. No precipitation in the area within twelve hours of the operation.
J. Predawn operation desired by the photographic group, although 0930 operation considered best for thermals dissipating the lower levels of the cloud.

Conditions least favorable to the operation.
A. Haze, dust, mirage effects, precipitation, restrictions of visibility below 45 miles.
B. Humidity greater than 85% at the surface or aloft, which might result in condensation by the shock wave.
C. Thunderstorms within 35 miles at the time of operation or for 12 hours following.
D. Rain at the location within 12 hours of the operation.
E. Surface winds greater than 15 mph during and after the operation.
F. Winds aloft blowing toward Base Camp or any population center within 90 miles of the site.

Human rationality -- even if in service of the irrational.

But instead of tailoring the operation around desired weather, Hubbard was faced with a fait accompli -- Truman was in Potsdam, and weather be damned. July 16th was it. “Right in the middle of a period of thunderstorms,” he wrote, “What son-of-a-bitch could have done this?” Everything unwanted was present: rain, high humidity, inversion layer, and unstable wind. None of the optimum requirements had been met. Rain could scrub the clouds and bring down high levels of radioactivity in a small area. Unstable conditions and high humidity increased the chances that the blast could induce a thunderstorm. Still, Truman was in Potsdam, and the order was given to proceed with the test. The president needed an ace up his sleeve in his card game with Stalin. Such is the pecking order of politics, war and science.

Hamlet:
What a piece of work is a man, how noble in reason, how
infinite in faculties, in form and moving how express and
admirable, in action how like an angel, in apprehension how like
a god! the beauty of the world, the paragon of animals—and yet,
to me, what is this quintessence of dust? Man delights not me...

July 16th, 1945 at Alamogordo was the moment when the human species blew it forever, and our world will never be the same.

After the blast, the "successful" test, Oppenheimer summed it up: "Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds." He was speaking for all of us.

I tell the story of the Manhattan Project and its Trinity Test in great detail in my novel, Insect Dreams: the Half Life of Gregor Samsa. Without blushing, I highly recommend it.

BAUDRILLARD 3: BREAKAWAY AND INERTIA

2010-07-18T05:21:00.000-07:00

Before we leave him, let us follow Baudrillard's thought a bit further here for the hints it may give us about our contemporary situation. In a provocative 1987 article entitled "The Year 2000 Has Already Happened", he takes us astride some fascinating metaphors. While some of the physics may be less than strict, it is worth suspending disbelief, and being open to the poetic truth of his images.

Why has the real disappeared? Baudrillard evokes the "speed of liberation" necessary for a body to escape the gravitational force of a star or planet.

According to this image, we may suppose that the acceleration of modernity, technical, factual, mediatory, the acceleration of all economic, political and sexual exchanges -- all that we denote fundamentally under the term "liberation" -- has carried us at a speed of liberation, such that we have one day...escaped from the referential sphere of the real and of history. (35)

But since all actions have their equal and opposite reactions, at the same time, Baudrillard invokes an "inverse" hypothesis dealing with the slowing down of processes. By relativity theory, great mass slows down time.

Here then is the most important event of our modern societies, the most subtle and most profound trick of their history: the advent, in the very course of their socialization, of their mobilization, of their productive and revolutionary intensification,...the advent of a force of inertia, of an immense indifference, and of the silent power of indifference. What we call the masses. This mass, this inert material of the social, does not arise from a lack of exchange, information, and communication, but on the contrary from the multiplication and saturation of exchange, information, etc. It is born of the hyper-density of the city, of merchandise, of messages, of circuits. It is the cold star of the social and, surrounding this mass, history chills, slows down, events succeed one another and are annihilated in indifference. Neutralized, immunized by information, the masses in turn neutralize history and play(act) as a screen of absorption.(37)

Gridlock. In this view (wave, not photon), progress, history, reason, desire can no longer find their "speed of liberation".

We are already at the point where political and social events do not have sufficient autonomous energy to move us, and thus they unfold as in a silent film for which we are, not individually, but collectively, irresponsible. History ends there, and you may see how: not because of lack of character, nor of violence...nor of events, but of a slowing down, indifference, and stupefaction....[History's] effects accelerate, but its sense slackens, ineluctably. (38)

Baudrillard thinks through -- in microcosm -- the cosmological question of infinite expansion vs. cycles of expansion and contraction. Will the breakaway or the inertia prevail?

Are we, like the galaxies, caught in a definitive movement that distances us one from another at a prodigious speed, or is this dispersion to infinity destined to end, and the human molecules to approach one another according to an inverse movement of gravitation? (38)

It could be that the very energy of the liberation of the species (the demographic, technological acceleration, the acceleration of exchanges in the course of centuries) creates an excess of mass and of resistance which goes faster than the initial energy, and which would thus drag us in an unrelenting movement of contraction and inertia. (39)

Baudrillard offers a third hypotheses about the "vanishing point", the point of disappearance beyond which all ceases to be real, by evoking the technical perfection of stereo. In his listening experience, there is no more music, but rather an impression of something "viscerally secreted in the interior".

The problem of the disappearance of music is that same as that of history: it will not disappear for want of music, it will disappear in the perfection of its materiality.

It is also thus with history, there too we have gone beyond that limit where, as a result of informational sophistication, history as such has ceased to exist. [There has been a] short-circuit between cause and effect,...a radical uncertainty about the truth, about the very reality of the event.

By definition, this 'vanishing point', the point on this side of which there was history, there was music, there was a meaning to the event, to the social, to sexuality,...this point is irrecoverable. Where must we stop information?...We will never know what history was before becoming exasperated in the technical perfection of information, or before vanishing in the multiplicity of codes -- we will never know what all things were before vanishing in the realization of their model.(39)

Unlike the (sophisticated) complainers of the Frankfurt School, Baudrillard seems pleased -- or at least not unhappy -- with all this.

That we leave history in order to enter into simulation...is not at all a despairing hypothesis, unless one speaks of simulation as a higher form of alienation. Which I will certainly not do. History is precisely the place of alienation, and if we leave history, we also leave alienation (not without nostalgia, one must say, for that good old dramaturgy of subject and object.)

But we can offer the hypothesis that history itself is or was only an immense model of simulation....I speak of the time in which it unfolds, of this linear time where events supposedly succeed one another from cause to effect, even if the complexity is great. (41)

Baudrillard sees no liberating local language games, but

massive comportments of retreat, of the suspension of the historic will, including the apparent inverse obsession of historicising everything, of achieving everything, of memorizing everything of our past and that of other cultures. (43)

Wandering through underground shopping malls, he senses

societies which entomb themselves behind their prospective technologies, their stocks of information and in the immense alveolate networks of communication where time is finally annihilated by pure circulation -- these generations will never perhaps awake, but they don't know it. (43)

Nevertheless, he does not complain. His positive evaluation of America stands alone amidst the howling and jeering of other cultured Europeans:

The US is a beautiful example of this immoral energy of transformation [directed] toward and against all systems of value. Despite [Americans'] morality, their puritanism, their obsession with virtue, their pragmatic idealism, everything there changes irresistibly according to an impulse which is not at all that of progress, linear by definition -- no, the real motor is the abjection of free circulation. Asocial and still untamed today, resistant to every coherent project of society: everything is tested there, everything is paid for there, everything is made to have value there, everything fails there. Western music, various therapies, sexual "perversions", buildings in the east, the leaders, the gadgets, the artistic movements, all pass by in succession without stopping. And our [European] cultural unconscious, profoundly nourished by culture and meaning, can howl before this spectacle. Nevertheless, it is there, in the immoral promiscuity of all the forms, of all the races, in the violent spectacle of change, that resides the success of a society and the sign of its vitality.

What do we do with all this oddball stuff?, or Baudrillard's Conception of the Role of Theory

It's not a question of ideas -- there are already too many ideas!

Baudrillard calls for nothing -- and no action.

And indeed it would be hard to call for anything else since, in Baudrillard, "critical theory faces the formidable task of unveiling structures of domination when no one is dominating, nothing is being dominated and no ground exists for a principle of liberation from domination." Baudrillard's writing seems to be for him

simply an act of defiance, a game. But it seems to me to be the only enthralling game. At the same time, it's often an act of provocation. Perhaps the only thing one can do is to destabilize and provoke the world around us.

Is he modest, or what?

We shouldn't presume to produce positive solutions. In my opinion this isn't the intellectual's or the thinker's task. It's not our responsibility. It might occur, but it will only come about by reaction. I've the impression that if energy still exists, it is reactive, reactionary, repulsive. It needs to be provoked into action. One should not attempt to inaugurate positive solutions because they will immediately be condemned -- so they're virtually a waste of energy. In other words, one needs to make a kind of detour through the strategy of the worst scenario, through the paths of subversion. It's a slightly perverse calculation, perhaps. But in my opinion it's the only effective option -- it's the only way that a philosopher or thinker can, as it were, become a terrorist.

The secret of theory is that truth doesn't exist. You can't confront it in any way. The only thing you can do is play with some kind of provocative logic. Truth constitutes a space that can no longer be occupied. The whole strategy is, indeed, not to occupy it, but to work around it so that others come to occupy it. It means creating a void so that others will fall into it.

Much of Baudrillard's "perverse calculation" is a corollary of an amazing insight:

The false is resplendent with all the power of the true, that is art;...inversely the true ...is resplendent with all the power of the false, that is obscenity.

Art, the antithesis of obscenity. There's an idea for the Evangelical Right!

When one says it is the false which is resplendent with the power of the true, it means that the true, by having this kind of aura placed on it, can never be found simply by looking for it. The only strategy is the reverse one! You only reach the true, the beautiful -- supposing that that is what is wanted -- by passing directly to the inverse....Indeed, there is a radical contradiction in pretending to find the truth where one is looking for it...which is our morality. Happily, art does not partake of that self-contradiction. It knows very well that illusion is the sole route to get somewhere if something is to be found...It is very fundamental.

Herein lies the ultimate demise of socialism or any other grand theory that, however well-intended, seeks to achieve a particular goal, be it liberation or enslavement.

There is a terrible self-contradiction in the social as we envisage it -- or in socialism which proposes indeed the frontal realization of the social, and I would not say without perversion but without any intelligence -- that never do things promote themselves like that -- in a straight line which would lead from their origin to their end. Happily, things are more subtle than that.

We have already heard "That people want to be told what they want is certainly not true; it is not clear either that they really want to know what they want, or that they desire to want at all." Baudrillard continues:

The whole edifice of socialism is based on that assumption. They start from the fact that this is what people ought to want, that they are social in the sense that they are supposed to know themselves, know what they want. I think we have pressed beyond that point, beyond truth, beyond reality.

So no more Mr. Fixit. Social theory, at least

maintains absolutely no relation with anything at all; it becomes an event in and of itself. We can no longer fix the way things are going...Strictly speaking, nothing remains but a sense of dizziness, with which you can't do anything.

And thus we can understand Baudrillard's evolution from academic, Marxist sociologist to postmodern artist, playing with falsehood "resplendent with all the power of the true." Though I worry about Baudrillard being nothing but a jester, I read him with a strong sense of lurking enlightenment. The stakes are profound.

Appraising the unappraisable Baudrillard

Everything I write is deemed brilliant, intelligent, but not serious. There has never been any real discussion about it. I don't claim to be tremendously serious, but there are nevertheless some philosophically serious things in my work!

His critics are merciless, seeing his "speculative spontaneity" as "grossly undertheorized".

It is inconceivable that any collectivistic political programme can emerge from this practice.

[Baudrillard's] rhetorical 'play' and 'caprice' may well disrupt restricting intellectual ethics or conventions, but seldom suffice to inaugurate radically new alternatives to dominant practices.

Certainly, his aestheticist view of the world can be problematical. Who could have watched the Challenger explosion, and then say

It was extraordinary: a sort of symbolic victory that only the Americans could afford! That fantastic burial in the sky! They've revived our appetite for space. Offering themselves the luxury of such disasters. What a way to go! Simple endings are without interest; they're flat and linear. The really exciting thing is to discover orbital space where these other forces play.

Are we to take such a man seriously? We can grant him his "voluntary stance as a marginal oppositional figure". And we can still be inspired by his enthusiasms:

Even if things are not really at their end, well! Let's act as if they were. It's a game, a provocation. Not in order to put a full stop to everything, but, on the contrary, to make everything begin again. So you see, I'm far from being a pessimist.

But most of all, I think we have to value the extraordianry originality of his angle on the contemporary world. How remarkable his attack on what Foucault terms the "abundance of things to know: essential or terrible, marvelous or droll." As Foucault concludes, there are still "too few means to think about all that is happening."

Baudrillard adds immeasurably to those means. I would certainly agree with Nickolas Zurbrugg, a most critical critic, in saying

There is frequently something profoundly engaging and inspiring in Baudrillard's idiosyncratic attempts to grapple with those issues which he finds most challenging and most at stake. Compared with the unadventurous ways in which other cartographers of postmodern culture carefully sift elementary shifts within the familiar shallows of twentieth-century discourse, Baudrillard's finest "virtual' descents into uncharted contemporary depths offer models of passionate engagement with the most crucial developments within the postmodern condition.

As to whether hyperreality is truly the new mode of postmodernism, I can only quote my wife, Donna, who the other day called an airline, and pressed 1 to speak to a representative.

"The human I talked to this morning," Donna reported, "asked 'What did it say on the automated system?'"

INTERLUDE: FROM BAUDRILLARD TO BAUDRILLARDIAN

2010-07-10T04:55:00.000-07:00

I thought you might like to take a little pee break from this high-concept movie, go get some popcorn slathered in Olestra, and fire up the news on your iPhone. On which you might find that you have a new general to lead your Central Command (or CENTCOM), overseeing your operations in 20 countries from Egypt, across the Middle East and into South and Central Asia. This, btw, courtesy of your Defense Department. There is a lot of ours out there that may need defending.

So anyway, your new leader, appointed by your other new leader's Pentagon, one Gen. James Mattis, seems to be quite a guy. Looks nice enough to have a beer with, no? Does his own laundry. Wears intellectual-type glasses. The kind of leader we need to win hearts & minds.

"I like brawling," he is quoted. Hey, one of the guys. "You go into Afghanistan, you got guys who slap women around for five years because they didn't wear a veil, you know, guys like that ain't got no manhood left anyway. So it's a hell of a lot of fun to shoot them." A feminist, no less.

Well, ok -- for this statement, he was reprimanded. Perhaps it was for the feminism part, but reprimanded he was, your Secretary of Defense assures us, dismissing any possible concerns from hearts-and-mindists or maleists. He was reprimanded and asked to choose his words more carefully in the future.

And now, five years post, SECDEF guarantees that "the lesson was learnt." A Brig-Gen in the know tells us that the old brawler has "since proven himself a statesman, including by working with 27 nations in a NATO command position, and SECDEF agreed, saying, "Obviously in the wake of the Rolling Stone interview, we discussed this kind of thing, and I have every confidence that General Mattis will respond to questions and speak publicly about the matters for which he is responsible in an entirely appropriate way."

Without, hopefully, indulging in pedagogical overkill, let us survey the more obvious simulacra in this story:

Most obviously, there is the simulacrum of appropriateness. Now in control of his brawling essence, or at least of its mouth, Gen. Mattis has learned to say the right things and not the wrong things. This should assure us that the hearts and mind simulacrum can remain intact.

Second, consider the simulacrum of "learning", as in "the lesson was learnt" -- in the passive case. The simulacrum of metrics testifies to that via Mattis's being able to "work" with 27 (count 'em) nations, as NATO's "supreme allied commander for transformation" which "focuses on supporting current operations while shaping US forces for the future." This, no doubt, was a gruelling test of Mattis's maturation among the boys.

We proceed to the simulacrum of assurance. Of what does SECDEF assure us? His "confidence" (sharing faith with us) is that the good General will "respond to questions and speak publicly...in an entirely appropriate way. " Good doggie. How he still feels and acts, and what behavior he encourages among his troops is another thing. But we can be confident that his performance at the simulacra of briefings will no longer raise eyebrows.

Baudrillard is chortling in his grave.

OK, intermission over. Next week back to the feature film.

BAUDRILLARD 2: POSTMODERN DEMOCRACY AND THE END OF HISTORY

2010-07-03T11:12:00.000-07:00

Happy Flag-Waving Day.

"The Balance of Terror is the Terror of Balance." (60)

So what of democracy, the great Enlightenment goal? Is there now only a democratic simulacrum? What is the demos, the "fantastic silent majority characteristic of our times" thinking and doing in its silent postmodernity?

The Masses in "Advanced" Democracy

In Dostoevsky's brilliant chapter, "The Grand Inquisitor", Jesus comes back to earth during the Inquisition, and is arrested and interrogated by the Grand Inquisitor, "a man of almost ninety, tall and erect". Jesus says nothing throughout the moving and remarkable monologue of his adversary. The supposed Savior is condemned for lack of compassion:

[GRAND INQUISITOR:] Instead of seizing men's freedom, You gave them even more of it! Have You forgotten that peace, and even death, is more attractive to man than the freedom of choice that derives from the knowledge of good and evil....Instead of ridding men of their freedom, You increased their freedom, and You imposed everlasting torment on man's soul....Had you respected him less, You would have demanded less of him and that would have been more like love, for the burden You placed on him would not have been so heavy. Man is weak and despicable....We [the Church] have corrected your work.
Baudrillard meditates on the same material.

Choice is a strange imperative. Any philosophy which assigns man to the exercise of his will can only plunge him in despair. For if nothing is more flattering to consciousness than to know what it wants, on the contrary nothing is more seductive to the other consciousness (the unconscious?) than not to know what it wants, to be relieved of choice and diverted from its own objective will. It is much better to rely on some insignificant or powerful instance than to be dependent on one's own will or the necessity of choice. Beau Brummel had a servant for that purpose. Before a splendid landscape dotted with beautiful lakes, he turns toward his valet to ask him: "Which lake do I prefer?"

In the sixties, and even now, the (New) Left called for "empowering people to make the decisions that affect their lives." But that assumes people know what they want, or at least want to find out. Baudrillard demurs:

Not only do people certainly not want to be told what they wish, but they certainly do not want to know it, and it is not even sure that they want to wish at all.

But while most commentators -- Chomsky, the Frankfurt School -- would see this as the surrender of the masses to the designs of Power (Dostoevsky: "Man is weak and despicable."), Baudrillard challenges us to see things another way.

Whom does this trap close on? The mass knows that it knows nothing, and it does not want to know. The mass knows that it can do nothing, and it does not want to achieve anything. It is violently reproached with this mark of stupidity and passivity. But not at all: the mass is very snobbish; it acts as Brummel did and delegates in a sovereign manner the faculty of choice to someone else by a sort of game of irresponsibility, or ironic challenge, of sovereign lack of will, of secret ruse.

The ruse of silence: the mass's way of resisting manipulation.

About the media you can sustain two opposing hypotheses: they are the strategy of power, which finds in them the means of mystifying the masses and of imposing its own truth. Or else they are the strategic territory of the ruse of the masses, who exercise in them their concrete power of the refusal of truth, of the denial of reality.

Understanding Media...

...is crucial, for it is the media which cooks up reality stew and invites the masses to dinner.

We must think of the media as if they were...a sort of genetic code which controls the mutation of the real into the hyperreal. (55)

But the question of whether the masses eat or are eaten remains unsettled.

There is an over-circulation of ideas, of the most contradictory ideas, all in the same flux of ideas. What happens is that their specific impact is wiped out. I mean their negativity is wiped out. Mass media, and all that, are not vehicles for negativity. They carry a kind of neutralizing positivity.
Which means that even the negative is positive. It's true. Iran-Contra created the stardom of Ollie North. It was fascinating, and everyone was excused. Anita Hill accused Clarence Thomas and we are all the better now for understanding sexual harassment, and the pundits taunted us "They can't both be telling the truth," and Clarence Thomas sits on the Supreme Court. And then, OJ flees from the police in what becomes the most watched chase scene in TV history. Isn't actuality wonderful? Remember those fascinating L.A. riots? No matter how negative the event, just reporting it shows us that "The system works!"

What kind of person does this self-affirming recursiveness create? Democracy depends upon an informed public, but

Is information really information? Or on the contrary, will it produce a world of inertia? Will it produce, by its very proliferation, the inverse of what it wants to? Doesn't it lead to a world, a universe in reverse, of resistance, inertia, circulation, silence and such like....It is by information that one is supposed to bring consciousness to the world, to inform and to awaken the world, but it is this very information through its very media which produces the reverse effect.

It would seem that in this simulated postmodernity, the conditions of democracy are far from being met, and all of us are largely consigned to inconsequential states of obeying and resisting a bland hyperreality.

Our relationship to this system is an insoluble "double bind" -- exactly that of children in their relationship to the demands of the adult world. They are at the same time told to constitute themselves as autonomous subjects, responsible, free, and conscious, and to constitute themselves as submissive objects, inert, obedient, and conformist. The child resists on all levels, and to these contradictory demands he or she replies by a double strategy. When we ask the child to be object, he or she opposes all the practices of disobedience, of revolt, of emancipation; in short, the strategy of a subject. When we ask the child to be subject, he or she opposes just as obstinately and successfully a resistance as object; that is to say, exactly the opposite: infantilism, hyperconformity, total dependence, passivity, idiocy.

Does this seem an apt description of the electorate?

I don't know what people are looking for. They have been taught to look for things like happiness, but deep down that doesn't interest them, any more than producing or being produced.

The masses are playing dead...They are no longer involved in a process of subversion or revolution, but in some gigantic devolution from an unwanted liberty...

The drive to spectacle is a more powerful instinct than self-preservation.

And this suggests an explanation for a phenomenon perplexing now, and perplexing too, to an interviewer in 1989, who comments

President Reagan and his whole administration, his wife included, seem like an immense simulation: before he was a Hollywood B-grade actor, now he looks like a living cadaver. The astonishing thing is that no one really cares when he lies to the press or makes incredible gaffes. Even more, he's been involved in many suspicious or illegal activities, like the Iran-Contra scandal. But basically no one in the US seems really upset; in fact, it's as if the exposé itself, as a genre of critical or investigative reporting, had suddenly become dépassé in the eighties. Everyone knows or suspects the worst but finally remains indifferent. One might even say that the very visibility of Reagan and his suspect activities makes him invulnerable to criticism. Do you see here any confirmation of your own theories?

To which, Baudrillard replies,

Indeed. Reagan is a sort of fantastic specimen of the obscene transparence of power and politics, and of its insignificance at the same time. It's as if everyone has become aware of the indifference of power to its own decisions, which is nothing but the indifference of the people themselves to their own representation, and thus to the whole representative system. This is accompanied by a demand all the greater for the spectacle of politics, with its scandals, morality trials, mass-media and show-biz effects. There is no longer anything but the energy of spectacle and of the simulacrum....

Reagan provided one kind of spectacle, Obama provides another. There is in President Hope and Change a kind of "anti-Teflon effect", in which no matter what he does, he is seen by many as blameworthy. Why this curious transformation of public opinion from all-forgiving to merciless?

The conflicts have all the depth of a grade-B Hollywood movie:
Reagan -- old and pitiful; The Public -- magnanimous and tolerant.
Obama -- young and treacherous; The Public: fierce and righteous.
Always enough white hats to go round. Self-preservation -- and reality -- be damned!

True, there's a lot of theorizing there, in the disguise of "intellectual terrorism". But notions such as Baudrillard's are postmodern products, deep from the molten core.

Naturally, he denies it all:

I have nothing to do with postmodernism.

One should ask whether postmodernism, the postmodern, has a meaning. It doesn't as far as I am concerned. It's an expression, a word which people use but which explains nothing. It's not even a concept. It's nothing at all. It's because it's impossible to define what's going on now, grand theories are over and done with... That is, there is a sort of void, a vacuum. It's because there is nothing really to express this that an empty term has been chosen to designate what is really empty. So in a sense there is no such thing as postmodernism.

And yet Baudrillard, of all the commentators, gives the most arresting expression to this "non-existent" state. He describes a contemporary world which has burst the previous limits of Western society, a world in which all previous boundaries -- male/female, art/non-art, economics/politics, etc. -- have broken down, where religion becomes fashion, and revolution becomes style and colored shirts. What does a simulated hyperreality signify if not the "postmodern rupture"?

In fact, in Symbolic Exchange and Death, Baudrillard talks about the

second revolution of postmodernity, which is the immense process of the destruction of meaning, equal to the earlier destruction of appearances [in modernity's search for the hidden authentic.] Whoever lives by meaning dies by meaning.

A second revolution, equal to that of modernity? This is hardly nothing.

"Who lives by meaning dies by meaning." Thus Baudrillard dismisses the entire debate over the Enlightenment Project.

This intellectual, mental, metaphysical situation has through inertia managed to survive beyond its point of relevance. And it is probably from this that we get the stagnation and collapse of thought that we see today....We are dragging behind us a whole bundle of ill-digested rationalities, radicalities, that have no support, no enemies, and in which there is nothing at stake.

The old theories are irrelevant.

It is a question here of a completely new species of uncertainty, which results not from the lack of information but from information itself and even from an excess of information. It is information itself which produces uncertainty, and so this uncertainty, unlike the traditional uncertainty which could always be resolved, is irreparable.

I have the impression with postmodernism that there is an attempt to rediscover a certain pleasure in the irony of things, in the game of things. Right now one can tumble into total hopelessness -- all the definitions, everything, it's all been done. What can one do? What can one become? And postmodernity is the attempt -- perhaps it's desperate, I don't know -- to reach a point where one can live with what is left. It is more a survival among the remnants than anything else.)
The End of History

The seriousness of the postmodern rupture is attested to by Baudrillard's musings on "the end of history". In 1989, Francis Fukayama created an intellectual storm when he published an article with that title. His thesis was that with the collapse of the Soviet Union, and the worldwide triumph of liberal democracy -- at least in theory -- history, as we know it -- the struggle between opposing forces -- was over. I mention this teapot tempest in order to contrast it with Baudrillard's deeper, more mysterious probe.

Unlike Fukayama's triumphal announcement, Baudrillard's reasoning rings with affirmatory hopelessness.

A painful idea: that beyond a certain precise point in time, history was no longer real. Without being aware of it, the totality of the human race would have suddenly quit reality. all that would have happened since then would not have been at all real, but we would not be able to know it. Our task and our duty would now be to discover this point and, to the extent that we shall not stop there, we must persevere in the actual destruction.

History has been irreversibly destroyed by the virus of simulation. Although there is much "interest" in history today -- there is even a History Book of the Month Club -- a genuine return to an authentic relationship with history has become impossible.

And that is also part of the postmodern: restoration of a past culture, to bring back all past cultures, to bring back everything that one has destroyed, all that one has destroyed in joy and which one is reconstructing in sadness in order to try to live, to survive.

It's true that everywhere today (and not just in the US) there is a resurgence of history, or rather of the demand for historicity, linked no doubt to the weak registration rate of factual history (there are more and more events, and less and less history). We are caught in a sort of gigantic, historical backwards accounting, and endless retrospective bookkeeping. This historicity is speculative and maniacal, and linked to the indefinite stocking of information. We are setting up artificial memories which can take the place of natural intelligence.

But all this frenetic activity, all the research and data entry and hypertextual referencing do us little good in our attempt to connect.

We tend to forget that our reality, including the tragic events of the past, has been swallowed up by the media. That means that it is too late to verify events and to understand them historically, for what characterizes our era and our fin de siècle is precisely the disappearance of the instruments of this intelligibility. It was necessary to understand history while there was still history....Now it's too late, we're in another world. It's evident in the television production of "Holocaust" or even in "Shoah". Those things will no longer be understood because notions as fundamental as responsibility, objective cause, the meaning (or non-sense) of history have disappeared or are in the process of disappearing. Effects of moral conscience or collective conscience are now entirely the effects of the media. We are now witnessing the therapeutic of obstinacy with which some try to resuscitate this conscience, and the little breath it still has left.

History has disappeared in the ecstasy of information, the ecstasy of messages. We have disappeared in a sort of ecstasy of the media, of information circulating with acceleration across everything. And one is no longer able to put a stop to this process.

This, not Fukayama's superficial assessment, is the deeper meaning of "The End of History".

(Final installment next week.)

THE GENIUS OF JEAN BAUDRILLARD 1

2010-06-27T12:33:00.000-07:00

My last week's posting, TEA FOR TWO, led to several inquiries concerning the philosopher and social critic Jean Baudrillard, who died three years ago at the age of 77.

I was a latecomer to Baudrillard. Years after academic critics had been industriously putting him down, I discovered him by accident in a catalogue called AMOK, Fourth Dispatch: A Sourcebook of the Extremes of Information in Print. Exotica, Mayhem, Neuropolitics, Scratch 'n Sniff, Sensory Deprivation, Sleaze, Tactics -- and, under "Control", Baudrillard.

In a page of Baudrillard listings, they printed a selection from Simulations about Disneyland being "presented as imaginary in order to make us believe that the rest is real". The proverbial light bulb snapped on over my head: Reality! This contemporary craziness is not basically about Democrats and Republicans, hawks and doves, rich and poor, blacks and whites, women and men -- it's about different understandings of Reality! And about the various strategies of manipulating Reality.

This was a new thought for me, one that seemed hugely pregnant. I ran out an bought a copy of Simulations, figuring that Baudrillard might have the missing key to my key questions. He would explain things that seemed so weirdly inexplicable -- like how and why we've fallen into our postmodern insanity, and what we need to do about it.

I'm a good reader. Six hundred page book? No problem. Simulations is 4"x6", large print, big margins, 150 pages. Almost a pamphlet. I'll read it in an evening. It's now thirteen years later, and I'm still nibbling away at it. Not that it's so difficult. But the thinking of this "intellectual terrorist", "the Darth Veder of postmodernism", is so audacious that I can't read any more than a page at a time -- if that.

The last movement of Schoenberg's Second Quartet sets a poem by Stefan George which begins with the line, "Ich fühle Luft von anderen Planeten" -- I feel the air of other planets. That's how I feel when reading Baudrillard. Adding Baudrillard to any academic debate on postmodernism is like a scene from a Marx Brothers movie where two people are arguing, and Harpo comes in with a scissors and snips off their ties.

Although he himself denies being "serious", I think it pays to try to think with him, and to take his unseriousness seriously for where it may lead.

I'm going to quote him a lot. There's no sense paraphrasing a writer who, in a section on the energy of postmodern collapse, can write

We ...dream of harnessing this energy, but this is sheer madness. We might as well harness the energy of automobile accidents, or of dogs that have been run over...

Late, Early, and Middle Baudrillard

You may know that there is "early", "middle", and "late" Beethoven -- Beethoven the enthusiastic, energetic young kid ready to kick the pants off any other classical composer; Beethoven the walking tragedy, Europe's greatest composer going DEAF! -- inventing romantic music to express the deepest passions of his mighty heart; and finally, "late" Beethoven -- the stone deaf old man, a decade out of touch with any worldly sound, inventing music that had never been heard before, and would never be heard again. Well, Baudrillard underwent a similar conversion to the weird.

Late

For our purposes here, I am going to concentrate almost entirely on the language and concepts of middle Baudrillard. Late Baudrillard flies so high and crazy that it's difficult to connect with without a thorough grounding in what preceded it, and even then makes for a major challenge. His thought revolves around the notions of "seduction" and "fatal theory" in which objects take control of the universe, surpassing all attempts to conceptualize or control them.

This "obscene" (out of the scene, nothing hidden) "ecstasy of objects" creates a catastrophe for us, the exhausted subjects, and we arrive at apathy and stupefaction. Our only hope is to imitate the strategies and ruses of objects.

Baudrillard sees other social critics as proceeding by "banal strategies", thinking themselves more clever than objects, and heading for inevitable defeat from objects' greater cynicism and shrewdness.

That much said about late Baudrillard, I leave you to try to read his mysterious words, and to study the insidious plotting of your refrigerators and vases.

Early

Early Baudrillard is more understandable, and extremely interesting. Although he was never fully accepted into the starry, hierarchical skies of European academia, Baudrillard began his intellectual career with some extremely significant extensions of Marxism to contemporary reality, taking into account the emergence of mass culture and the technologies of mass reproduction.

Early on, Baudrillard was still a classical, highly imaginary, Marxist, assuming, with Marx, that economics was the major determining factor of human life and civilization. His insight, however, was that production was no longer as important a force as consumption, and that consumerism -- "a collective hysteria that takes the form of manic appropriation of an endless series of objects" -- made the behavior of consumers more important than the behavior of producers, the major actors on Marx's stage. The desire for objects had easily evolved into the desire for desire itself, and a positive feedback loop was well into driving a situation unimagined by the Marxian theory of mutually antagonistic forces.

But this extension of Marxism evolved into a devastating critique of Marx, and an attack on classical Marxism as a mirror of bourgeois society, a perpetuation of the idea of humanity as homo economicus, an excusing, legitimizing understanding of the current state of affairs.

In typical, flamboyant form, Baudrillard parodied the famous opening of the Communist Manifesto:

A spectre haunts the revolutionary imagination: the phantom of production. Everywhere it sustains an unbridled romanticism of productivity. The critical theory of the mode of production does not touch the principle of production.

Baudrillard accuses Marx of being in collusion with capitalism (!) in the Marxian analysis of the insidious power of its forms. He was looking for a more radical position, one which looks at the world through another lens -- the optic of "symbolic exchange". In symbolic exchange, Baudrillard posits an alternative organizing principle of modern society, harkening back to the practices of more "primitive" ones. In escaping the logic of production and adopting the pervasive ambiance of advertising, this new condition creates a state of affairs in which the product is no longer as important as the set of meanings arbitrarily grafted on to it. The pervasive power of advanced capitalism has created an entirely new structure of meaning. The free play of signs and codes gives consumers an illusory sense of freedom and self-determination which entirely escapes their eyes and understanding.

In his books, For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign (1972/1981), The Mirror of Production (1975), and Symbolic Exchange and Death (1976), Baudrillard attempts to work out all the contradictions between commodity exchange and symbolic exchange, and their implications for the future.

But his final break with Marxism came with his new understanding of the evolution of Reality in Western culture. Here we come to a main feeding station for digesting postmodernity -- the one I find most interesting, stimulating and profitable: middle Baudrillard, and his notions of hyperreality and simulation.

Middle

In Symbolic Exchange and Death, Baudrillard posits a definitive rupture between modern societies oriented around production and consumption, and postmodern ones "in which codes, models, and signs are the organizing principles of a new social order where simulation rules." In Simulations, he develops these ideas.

I don't think Baudrillard would like my seizing and concentrating on this stage of his work: he has gone beyond it.

"I so wish I could cast off this yoke of simulacras and simulations which, incidentally, I have never treated as the last word of history, and with which I am truly fed up. I've heard these tunes too many times." "I stopped working on simulation. I felt I was going totally nuts."

And even his readers go totally nuts. Middle Baudrillard is not logical. He rarely defines his key terms, and when he does, he will offer widely ranging anecdotal descriptions rather than definitions. So you never really know what he's talking about. The good side of this is that he stimulates the creative imagination like no other writer -- you have to fill in your own blanks.

Simulations

Let me review from last week a key section in Simulations which give a reader something to hang on to. Baudrillard, you may remember, characterizes four stages in the changing function of signs. It is worth repeating.

1. The sign is "a reflection of a basic reality", as is common in scientific or referential language.
2. The sign "masks and perverts a basic reality" - As when ideology stems from false consciousness which prevents people from seeing their true alienation or exploitation. The Frankfurt School writers have plenty to say about this.
3. The sign "masks the absence of a basic reality, as when iconoclasts fear of images of deity because they may lead people to suspect the absence of deity.
4. The sign "bears no relation to any reality whatsoever: it is its own pure simulacrum.
Here Baudrillard is thinking of the incessant contemporary production of images with no attempt to ground them in reality. Do you drive a Lexus, an Acura, an Elanta, an XL300? What does that mean??? (p11)

The transition from signs which dissimulate something to signs which dissimulate that there is nothing, marks a decisive turning point. The era of simulation begins. (12)

We look around us today. How can we account for "the interchangeability of previously contradictory or dialectically opposed terms", the interchangeability

of the beautiful and the ugly in fashion; of the right and the left in politics; of the true and false in every media message; of the useful and the useless at the level of objects; and of nature and culture at every level of meaning?

It's easy -- because

all the great humanist criteria of value, all the values of a civilization of moral, aesthetic, and practical judgment, vanish in our system of images and signs. Everything becomes undecidable.

The age of simulation ...begins with a liquidation of all referentials -- worse: by their artificial resurrection in systems of signs, a more ductile material than meaning, in that it lends itself to all systems of equivalence,... substituting signs of the real for the real itself....(4)

On the first page of Simulations, Baudrillard cites a tale by Borges in which "the cartographers of the Empire draw up a map so detailed that it ends up exactly covering the territory." (1) But these days, it is no longer a question of maps and territories. Something has disappeared: the sovereign difference between them. If there is any distinction at all, it is that it is the territory whose shards are slowly rotting across the map, and not vice versa.

So all we have now is the map, the sign, a most "ductile" environment. This is the age of simulation -- the generation by models of a "real" without origin or reality. Hyperreality. "The territory no longer precedes the map, nor survives it. Henceforth it is the map that precedes the territory." (2)

If you think it's easy to tell real from fake, Baudrillard challenges you to try staging a fake holdup.

Be sure to check that your weapons are harmless, and take the most trustworthy hostage, so that no life is in danger....Demand ransom, and arrange it so that the operation creates the greatest commotion possible -- in brief, stay close to the "truth", so as to test the reaction of the apparatus to a perfect simulation. But you won't succeed: the web of artificial signs will be inextricably mixed up with real elements (a police officer will really shoot on sight; a bank customer will faint and die of a heart attack; they will really turn the phony ransom over to you)...(39)

And here, Baudrillard elucidates the dynamic nature of the interaction of reality and simulation:

-- In brief, you will unwittingly find yourself immediately in the real, one of whose functions is precisely to devour every attempt at simulation, to reduce everything to some reality -- that's exactly how the established order is... (39)

If reality is to seek in simulation the same order of reality, then the destiny of reality is inevitably to become simulation. This dynamic would explain the "collective hysteria" of production and overproduction, consumption and overconsumption in Western culture.

What society seeks through production, and overproduction, is the restoration of the real which escapes it. That is why contemporary "material" production is itself hyperreal. (44)

It also explains the itch for fascism that we see demonstrated in the public desire for a president to "act presidential". It doesn't matter what he does: the mere assertion of power satisfies "a collective demand for signs of power -- a holy union which forms around the disappearance of power." (45)

It further explains the movement to "end welfare as we know it", and get single mothers working, even if they cannot afford to take care of their children, and even if government solutions (short of abandonment) are bound to cost more than welfare. "There is a demand for work exactly proportional to the loss of stake in the work process." (47)

How to cope with this unholy coupling of reality and sign? The answer seems to be to assume nothing about the reality of any reality. Everything is true. All realities are exchangeable and equivalent. Baudrillard gives the example of a hot topic at the time he was writing: urban bombings (presented as leftist) terrorizing Germany and Italy, but equally applicable to many "terrorist" and false-flag attacks today.

Is any given bombing in Italy the work of leftist extremists, or of extreme right-wing provocation, or staged by centrists to bring every terrorist extreme into disrepute and to shore up its own failing power, or again, is it a police-inspired scenario in order to appeal to public security? All this is equally true, and the search for proof, indeed the objectivity of the fact does not check this vertigo of interpretation. We are in a logic of simulation which has nothing to do with the logic of facts... (31)

Baudrillard next treats us to some extended examples of living "in a logic of simulation".

Disneyland

I have already referred to the much-quoted section on Disneyland, (23-26), the "perfect model of all the entangled orders of simulation." (23)

Disneyland is there to conceal the fact that it is the "real" country, all of "real" America, which is Disneyland (just as prisons are there to conceal the fact that it is the social in its entirety, in its banal omnipresence, which is carceral). Disneyland is presented as imaginary in order to make us believe that the rest is real, when in fact all of Los Angeles and the America surrounding it are no longer real, but of the order of the hyperreal and of simulation. It is not a question of a false representation of reality, but of concealing the fact that the real is no longer real, and thus of saving the reality principle. (25)

Baudrillard identifies Disneyland in this regard as a third-order simulation -- the kind which "masks the absence of a basic reality". He also opines that "the Disneyland imaginary is neither true nor false; it is a deterrence machine set up in order to rejuvenate in reverse the fiction of the real." (25) By denying the truth or falsity of Disneyland, he is underlining that it is not that Disneyland is a fake representation of America, but that there no longer is any real America. His prison reference would suffer the same logic: it is not that America is "really" a total prison from which we are distracted by literal prisons. In terms of meaning, there is no is here -- any more than there is one particular terrorist bomber -- no matter who actually did the bombing.

Can you grasp the radical, all-embracing nature of these assertions?

Baudrillard is often accused of being decadent and apolitical -- of being neutral and non-judgmental concerning these phenomena. But his section on Watergate shows that it is possible to combine these counter-intuitive views with a hard-headed understanding of power and a passionate denunciation of predatory capitalism.

Watergate is not a Scandal

It is not important who did what. "Watergate above all succeeded in imposing the idea that Watergate was a scandal -- in this sense it was an extraordinary operation of intoxication." (27)

Before, the task was to dissimulate scandal; today, the task is to conceal the fact that there is none. Watergate is not a scandal: this is what must be said at all cost, for this is what everyone is concerned to conceal, this dissimulation masking a...moral panic as we approach the primal...scene of capital: its instantaneous cruelty, its incomprehensible ferocity, its fundamental immorality -- this is what is scandalous, unaccountable for in that system of moral and economic equivalence which remains the axiom of leftist thought, from Enlightenment theory to communism. Capital doesn't give a damn about the idea of the contract which is imputed to it -- it is a monstrous unprincipled undertaking, nothing more. Rather it is "enlightened" thought which seeks to control capital by imposing rules on it. And all that recrimination which replaced revolutionary thought today comes down to reproaching capital for not following the rules of the game. "Power is unjust, its justice is a class justice, capital exploits us, etc." -- as if capital were linked by a contract to the society it rules. (28-29)

Hence Watergate was only a trap set by the system to catch its adversaries, a simulation of scandal to regenerative ends. (30)

It was not a trap designed or set by anyone, but an inevitable consequence of unanchored reality desperately clinging to its unanchored self. Just as with the terrorist bombing, anyone can do the actual work. If the Left wants to expose Watergate as a scandal of the Right, all well and good.

The work of the Right is done very well, and spontaneously, by the Left on its own. Besides, it would be naive to see an embittered good conscience at work here [Deep Throat]. For the Right itself also spontaneously does the work of the Left.....Such collusions admirably knit together...The conjunction of the system and its extreme alternative like two ends of a curved mirror, the 'vicious' curvature of a political space henceforth magnetized, circularized, reversibilised from right to left, a torsion that is like the evil demon of commutation, the whole system, the infinity of capital folded back over its own surface.... (30, 34-5)

The Gulf War Will Not Take Place

Baudrillard became more infamous than ever when -- before the '91 war -- he made the above statement. After the war, when taunted with the incorrectness of his position, he simply commented, "The Gulf War did not take place." Rather than try to understand this paradoxical statement, most critics simply threw up their hands and cried, "He's a bigger asshole than I thought."

But isn't it clear that just as Disneyland is not fake, just as Watergate was not a scandal, the Gulf War was not a war, but a misdirecting sleight-of-hand to make us think that all isn't war? If this was an ideological war to oust Saddam, why was Saddam left still in power, though the west "won"? If this was a fierce contest against a hugely threatening army, why were there so few American casualties? Some on the left have refused to call it a war, but rather, "a massacre". Some have analyzed it as a taxpayer-supported demo -- PR for the benefit of U.S. arms merchants. In any case, there is a lot of truth in Baudrillard's seemingly outrageous statements. His analysis of simulated war, however, goes deeper:

Behind the armed violence, the murderous antagonism between adversaries -- which seems a matter of life and death, and which is played as such (otherwise you could never send out people to get smashed up in this kind of trouble), behind this simulacrum of a struggle to death and of ruthless global stakes, the two adversaries are fundamentally as one against that other, unnamed, never mentioned thing, whose objective outcome in war, with equal complicity between the two adversaries, is total liquidation. It is tribal, communal, pre-capitalist structures, every form of exchange, language and symbolic organization which must be abolished. Their murder is the object of war -- and in its immense spectacular contrivance of death, war is only the medium of this process of terrorist rationalization by the social -- the murder through which sociality can be founded, no matter what allegiance, communist or capitalist. The total complicity or division of labor between two adversaries...for the very purpose of remolding and domesticating social relations. (68-69)

No wonder there are no "victories" in war, at least not those of stated objectives. If the actual objective is to repress any other emerging reality, then it's good -- and understandable -- that Saddam was left in power, that the drug war is "unsuccessful", that Russia was (and is) being destroyed and humiliated in its recycled role as ally.

What no longer exists is the adversity of adversaries, the reality of antagonistic causes, the ideological seriousness of war. (70)

Instead, there is a secret alliance of all the components of the what-is. All is simulated, necessary and equal in the Political Economy of Signs. Such thinking explains a lot.

(To be continued next week.)

TEA FOR TWO...

2010-06-20T05:10:00.000-07:00

...or Peradventures in Duopoly Capitalism

Many voices on the left complain about our “one-party” system, the Replutocrats, the entrenched and ubiquitous party of the rich. And indeed, for the media, the word “bipartisan” comes haloed in angelic light, while with the selfish and ragged “partisan” comes the stink of sulfur. “Bipartisan”, that is, both-parties-as-one, is the way of virtue in contemporary America.   Yet -- as if we still had two parties -- we continually witness a gaudy display of accusers vs. defenders, of hand-sitters vs. applauders, of gloaters vs. clobberds, and the nation seems relieved that power was balanced, that “democracy” triumphed, that the system worked. What’s going on? Do we have one party or two?

The answer is not as simple as the question, and for a subtle analysis we might best turn to Jean Baudrillard, the fabulously inventive and therefore despised postmodern French philosopher, best known for his analysis of false realities. The word “democracy” is a language-sign to be interpreted, and as with all signs, there are four Baudrillardian functions it can serve:

1. Some signs are "reflections of a basic reality" -- as is common in scientific or referential language.
2. Some signs "mask and pervert a basic reality" -- as when an MX missile is dubbed “Peacemaker”, or the current economy seen as “strong”.
3. Some signs "mask the absence of a basic reality” -- as when highly processed supermarket foods are labled “natural and delicious”.
4. Finally, some signs "bear no relation to any reality whatsoever: they are their own pure simulacrum" -- as in the incessant contemporary production of images with no attempt even to ground them in reality. Do you drive a Lexus, an Acura, an XL300...?

So then we have the word “democracy”. What of democracy, the great Enlightenment goal? Is there now only a democratic simulacrum, combining elements 2, 3 and 4 of Baudrillard’s list?

The Two Towers

As might be expected, Baudrillard takes a unique approach to this question. Democracy, finally, is a system of choice-making in which a supposedly informed electorate chooses its representatives from among a menu of ideological options. Most critics focus on the dumbing down of the electorate, the false consciousness purveyed by the media, etc. Baudrillard, however, focuses intently on the menu. He asks a strange and pregnant question: "Why were there two towers at New York's World Trade Center?"

All of Manhattan's great buildings, he says, were once happy enough to affront each other in competitive verticality, the result of which was an architectural panorama in the image of the old capitalist system -- all buildings attacking one other. But this image has changed completely in the last few decades. Buildings now rise compatibly, no longer suspicious each other. The new architecture speaks of a system in which competition has been traded in for the benefits of collegiality. The fact that there were two World Trade Center buildings symbolized the end of old-style competition, the end of all original reference. Paradoxically, if there were only one building, or competing forms, actual monopoly would not be incarnated; we see how it stabilizes on a dual form. For the sign to be pure, it has to duplicate itself.... (see “Simulations”, pp 135-6)

No more competition. Can this be true? Is this Capitalism as we know it? And how can democracy function without choices?

The Obama phenomenon bears out, and best illustrates, Baudrillard's predictions from the eighties. Is Mr. Hope and Change a Republican or a Democrat? Will his possible passing in the next election change anything? Short of small symbolic gestures, would a President Palin serve a different master? Clearly not. The government may change, but the State allows no such changes: Power is not Power for nothing.

But a buck-naked monopoly of power will never do. Wrong symbol. Not palatable to the masses. Instead, the state is run by a system which gives an illusion of choice.

"Advanced democratic" systems are stabilized on the formula of bipartisan alternation. The monopoly in fact remains that of a homogeneous political class, but it must not be exercised as such. Because a one-party totalitarian regime is an unstable form, our “democracy” is accomplished in the back-and-forth movement of the two terms which activates their equivalence, but allows -- because of their minute differences -- a public consensus to be formed and the cycle of representation to be closed.

The "free choice" of individuals which is the credo of democracy, leads, according to Baudrillard, to precisely the opposite: the vote becomes a functional toss-up, resembling Brownian movement of particles. “It is as if everyone voted by chance, or monkeys voted.” (“Simulations”, 132)

There are "polls", there is occasional alternation of power "at the top", a simulation of opposition between two parties -- nevermind the equivalence of their objectives, and the reversibility of their language. The Dems can bail out the bankers, the Repubs can claim to represent "the people". It could and should be the other way round, but...

Marx predicted that open competition would lead to the large devouring the small, up to the end result -- monopoly. Baudrillard counters that it is not monopoly which is the end stage, but duopoly, the twin towers, the "tactical doubling of monopoly." Power is absolute only if it is capable of diffraction into various equivalents, if it knows how to take off so as to put more on. The same money finances Democrats as Republicans. Whoever wins the vote, Power wins with the winner.   As Jay Gould once asserted, “I don’t care who people vote for, as long as I get to pick the candidates.”

Baudrillard's notions of duopoly seem to me to be indisputable, and a related comment of his seems both hopeful and ominous: “You need two superpowers to keep the universe under control: a single empire would crumble of itself.”

THE DEVIL CAN QUOTE SCRIPTURE

2010-06-13T07:33:00.000-07:00

I am involved in a Vermonters for a Just Peace in Palestine/Israel, a group made up of Jews, Palestinians, members of various Christian faiths, and peace groups.

Our work is to "to support the survival of the Palestinian people and to end the illegal, immoral, and brutal Israeli occupation through education, advocacy, and action. We are committed to the principles of self-determination for the Palestinian people, the right of return for Palestinian refugees, and full civil and political rights for all Palestinians in order to promote the equality and safety of both Palestinians and Israelis." (mission statement)

We host Salaam/Shalom, a weekly hour-long program on community television, and an exemplary, deep website (http://www.vtjp.org/) for all levels interest which gets upward of 30,000 hits a week. I recommend you take a look.

At the moment, we are having a discussion among us which is so interesting I thought I would share it in my weekly blogging:

At our last meeting, one of the Palestinians among us, passionately proposed that we jump on Gen. Petraeus's recent statements to the effect that America's unquestioning embrace of Israeli policy is putting our military at greater risk. In a subsequent email to the group he argued that

We should quote the general's statements because the public trusts our military leaders more than our political leaders who are responsible for putting our troops and officers in harm's way.

Several members chimed in supporting him. My response to them was:

I do not trust our military leaders, and I don't think VTJP should fly under their banner just because some may -- in this particular case -- help our cause for their own, quite different reasons.

VTJP's endorsing and trumpeting military opinion would be a very cynical, manipulative approach. Petraeus, especially, is a dubious character, toadying when it advances his career, opposing when tactical, and currently angling for a shot at the presidency. He has been a central advocate for escalating in Iraq and Afghanistan, and prepping the country for a decades-long war.

I would not support VTJP marching under his flag, and would myself not do so.

To this, others argued that we would not be flying under a military banner, only buttressing our arguments with their own. To which I responded:

What are Petraeus's and any other similar statements saying?

That our embrace of Israel threatens the success of our "getting the job done" in Afghanistan and Iraq, and perhaps the actual lives of our "brave men and women" in "harm's way".

Yes, we can extract the one part of his (correct) observations for our own uses, but that is just another -- and more ethically bankrupt -- use of quoting out of context. The critic writes "this play was the most tremendous waste of two hours I've ever spent," and the production lists "tremendous" in it's ads.

We should not be arguing "from a military standpoint". We do not embrace our, or Israel's brutal military solutions. We do not honor our, or Israel's savage military goals. We jump ship when we quote the military in support of our positions.

It's not as if we don't have plenty of other facts and arguments, and plenty of other group support (like the entire world except us, Israel, and the Marshall Islands) to use. Quoting the devil to make the case for scripture seems equally pernicious to me as its converse. We cannot use US generals for our needs without implicitly supporting the context of their statements and their goals.

Red is a beautiful color, but not when it's streaming from the face of a wounded child.

Another person chimed in with a thoughtful compromise, suggesting that we could include provisos such as "While we strongly oppose the current US wars in Iraq and Aghanistan, we recognize the value of Gen. Petraeus's opinion about the regional effects of Israel's constant occupation and aggression, and its potential danger to our soldiers."

To which I responded with a mailing headed "Take back the Swastika":

Some of us have been standing five days a week for eight and half years from 5 to 5:30 at the top of Church Street holding various signs agains various wars, foreign and domestic.

Occasionally a camo-ed counter protester stands on the other side of the street, with a "Support the Troops" type of sign, and an American flag -- which I really like, as it sets up a kind of dialectical arch of discussion over Pearl St., and raises the visibility of the issues.

Even more occasionally, we are approached by "one of us", a liberal, progressive, peace and justice oriented passer-by who passionately suggests that we, too, hold an American flag. "Why do you guys want to cede the flag over to the warmongers? It's our flag, too. We need to take it back. Peace is patriotiic." Stuff like that.

Hearing such suggestions always brings to my thought-experiment mind a parallel demand: Take back the swastika! After all, the Hakenkreuz is an ancient, multi-cultural symbol of beneficent cosmic energy and movement. Why should we cede it to the Nazis?

OK, so then let's have a peace vigil with someone holding a swastika sign, and explain its true origins and uses to those -- if any -- who question us about it. It would deepen the discussion, set the peace movement in a wider, timeless, universal context. Why not?

Why not is because certain dissociations can no longer be made. We can add all the "provisos" and footnotes we want to no avail.

In quoting the military with approval, we cannot help but appropriate its goals. And the American public, "cynical" as it may be, is aware of, and attaches those goals to the very statements we propose to tout. As the pop song says, "You cain't have one without the other." With the horse comes the horse shit.

And I'm not just talking effective, pro-Palestinian tactics. I'm talking self-pollution for VTJP. As I said before, it's not as if we have such poor soil to work with that we have to dig into the military dung heap.

Another person suggested that we could use the Petraeus material to simply "focus on security", an issue that "has some emotional and psychological legitimacy." To which I responded:

I would be equally opposed to arguing "national security" as a reason for BDS or cutting support for Israel. And for the same reasons: "National security" and fear are the trump cards of lying and manipulation. We should not be playing the same hand as Cheney, Obama and Netanyatu. In using it, we legitimize and support such arguments.

To avoid cynical tactics, our cards must be primarily ethical, appealing to Kant's difficult "moral law within." It's there in everyone, and if it isn't, we can't persuade them to become another kind of beast. It's there in most Americans and Israelis, though it's buried beneath years of brainwashing, junkshot detritus and ignorance of facts. Our job is to drill deep to get to it. Not every excavation means BP and Halliburton.

I wouldn't even be opposed to secondarily arguing on a financial level. While it is hardly "the moral law within" to want to keep what's in your pocket, one can certainly argue for more productive uses of our tax dollars than for slaughter and oppression.
I would ask the few who actually read my blogging to let me know what -- beyond the particulars of the Israel/Palestine conflict -- you think about this. Can one, should one, use an opponent's language and the arguments implicit within it, to promote an opposite cause? Do let me know what you think.

In The Lamentations of Julius Marantz, I wrote what I think of as an exquisitely nasty, satirical chapter illustrating warmongers using exact peaceworker language to the T. I won't take up the space in an already too-long blog entry, too much quoting myself, to include it here. But here's a link if you're interested:

To me, using language or tactics in this way is an example of Orwell's prophetic elucidations of Newspeak. War is Peace.

SLAUGHTER OF THE INNOCENTS

2010-06-05T10:48:00.000-07:00

Toward the end of Bread and Puppet's marvelous "Christmas Story", after the news spreads of Jesus's birth, King Herod picks up the phone:

"Hello, Third Army? Go straight to Bethlehem and kill all the children."

In the next scene a large soldier marches in, in full battle array, and knocks on the door of a tiny puppet house.

 "Good evening, Ma’am. Do you happen to have any children in the house?"

"Oh, yes, of course," the little hand-puppet says. "Hansie and Mariechen.”

“Can you bring them out, please?”

“Oh certainly, Sergeant. But...why?

"We want to kill them."

"Oh."

The mother then tells the sergeant an amazing story that he'll "never believe, but..." about how the children were just taking a bath and then -- by accident -- they were washed down the drain. The sergeant, stupefied, weeps.

"Oh, lady, that's really terrible. Allow me to extend the condolences of the entire Third Army."

He marches off to the next house where he finds that the six children happened to have just marched off six weeks ago and haven't come back yet.

"Men, King Herod isn't going to be too pleased about this."

The next house turns out to be the Bethlehem Nursery, "And we have 55 sweet, little darlings fast asleep in their sweet little beddy-byes," says the Nurse out her window, "AND YOU GORILLAS ARE WAKING THEM UP WITH YOUR SCREAMING. You better go play soldier somewhere else, or I'll call the authorities."

"Lady," says the sergeant, "we are the authorities."

The Slaughter of the Innocents is not an aspect of the Christmas story dwelt on during our consumerist, Hallmarky season. In fact, it's not dwelt on at any other time -- whether the Innocents be the Iraqi, Afghani, Pakistani, or Palestinian dead, the humanitarians aboard the Mavi Marmara or the recipients of its aid, Rachel Corrie herself, crushed by an Israeli bulldozer, or the newly oiled seabirds, fish and fishermen in the Gulf.

"I'll call the authorities," the public says, only to discover that "We" -- the perpetrators -- "ARE the authorities."

It was the authorities who set up the enrichment of the rich and the impoverishment of the rest. It is the authorities who promote the mass murders of the military industrial complex with their endless wars and genocides, and who pocket the cash and power. It is the authorities who enable the destruction for profit of the environment, and call for economy on collapsing infrastructures, concrete and human. Is current "authority" any less than a sociopathic criminal enterprise?

The moment captured at the end of the Bread and Puppet Christmas Story provides the insouciant watchword of our time: "Lady, we are the authorities."

NIGHTDREAMS OF ANOTHER LIFE

2010-05-30T04:52:00.000-07:00

Every now and then -- and again last night -- I am awakened at 3 am by the sound of a shopping cart rattling past my house. No voices. Just a lonely, ghostly, shopping cart. It has that eerie sadness Woody Guthrie used to sing about -- like “that long lonesome train a-whistlin’ down.” Except it rattles.

The sky is dark, the street lights bright outside my window. All other noise has ceased. Squad cars prowl silently, if at all. Donna is sleeping, and the cats breath quietly at our heads and feet. Wordsworth said it: “The holy time is quiet as a nun/breathless with adoration.” Except there is a shopping cart. Rattling.

Who is out there, pushing? Who is searching the recycle bins and garbage for nickel bottles and cast-off clothing? Who must be up this early in the morning to ensure his meager catch?

In daylight hours I would probably revert to my social/political thought chain: the ghastly state of current American capitalist politics, the ripping away of the safety net from under the freefall of the poor. But in the middle of the night, my thoughts often go to the amazing end of Schubert’s song cycle, Die Winterreise, the Winter Journey.

In the standard frame of nineteenth century romantic poetry, a lover, spurned by his beloved, must “get away” from his memories of her, must avoid the possibility of seeing her with her new husband. He wanders out into the winter, his tears freezing in the icy landscape. He has dreams and nightmares. He longs for mail, though he has no address. He communes with birds and beasts; he hallucinates. There are many amazing and moving images in these 24 connected songs, but none is more mysterious and compelling than that of the last song, “Der Leiermann”, the Hurdy-Gurdy man. Of all the songs, it is the quietest and simplest, a bare vocal line alternating with a little organ-grinding refrain in the piano.

After all the wildness of nature and passion -- this last strange encounter: with an old man outside a village, playing his music as best he can, his fingers numb, standing near his empty cup, barefoot, on the ice. Nobody listens to the organ-grinder, nobody pays any attention to him -- except the dogs, who come -- to bark and growl. But the old man just lets it all happen without complaint, grinding out his simple tune, never stopping. Coming upon him, our heart-weary traveller is dumb struck.

We think it is a simple little story, a narration about some striking character met along the path. The first surprise comes in the last verse. Is our sad young man repulsed by the organ grinder, frightened by his situation, thinking “there, but for the grace of God, go I”? No. “Strange old man,” he says to himself, “shall I go with you? Will you grind out music if I sing?” And the second surprise is -- that’s it. That’s the end. The hurdy-gurdy phrase runs it’s course and this incomparable masterpiece just stops -- quietly, with a question, a question leading out into infinity.

As I lie in bed listening to our local Leiermann, his shopping cart singing its sad, repetitive song, I -- this person snuggling next to his sleeping wife, nuzzled by his trusting kitties -- I want to go out there and join him. I want to experience the emptiness and beauty of the street late at night, the sense of the world stopped around me, the non-hustle and non-bustle and time of my own creation. I want to give up my deadlines and assignments, my enslavement to the little property I own. I want to simplify my life, and have the basic tasks of my cro-magnon ancestors, to live from day to day, to hunt and gather, to relate to the turning of the sky.

Not to romanticize the brutal life forced on the poor by devil-don’t-care capitalism. My late-night dream does not contain having to figure out where I can poop, or where to get a shower after two weeks without. I don’t have to scrounge for quarters for the laundromat, or worry about my things being stolen while I sleep on someone’s porch to stay dry. I don’t even have to hang on to my empty bottles and cans -- but can give them, a pathetic, inadequate gesture, to those who build their lives around them.

Still, there is freedom out there, late at night. Dream-freedom. We humans have always paid a lot for freedom. At this very moment, somewhere on earth, there is blood being spilled -- for freedom.