Claustrophobia: Part III

In Steven Weinberg's introduction to cosmology, The First Three Minutes--along with enumerating a dizzying, even ludicrous array of subatomic particles--he describes the beginning of the universe as well as speculates on the end of it. Near the end of his discussion he comments on the reality of the universe: "Flying over Wyoming en route home from San Francisco to Boston . . . below, the earth looks very soft and comfortable--fluffy clouds here and there, snow turning pink as the sun sets, roads stretching straight across the country from one town to another. It is very hard to realize that this is just a tiny part of an overwhelmingly hostile universe. It is even harder to realize that this present universe has evolved from an unspeakably unfamiliar early condition, and faces a future extinction of endless cold or intolerable heat. The more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless" (154). Earlier, in commenting on the end of the universe, when it "collapses" and atoms separate into constituent elements and particles, he asks: "Can we really carry this sad story all the way to its end, to a state of infinite temperature and density? Does time really have a stop some three minutes after the temperature reaches a thousand million degrees? Obviously, we cannot be sure. All the uncetainties . . . in trying to explore the first hundredth of a second . . . will return to perplex us as we look into the last hundredth of a second. Above all, the whole universe must be described in the language of quantum mechanics at temperatures above 100 million million million million degrees (10 32nd degreee K), and no one has any idea what happened then" (152-3). Somehow, words like "Wyoming," "San Francisco," and "Boston" seem comprehensible and tolerable, especially when juxtaposed to "infinite temperature and density." But, in the final analysis, it doesn't matter. Still, what does Robert Frost write? "They cannot scare me with their empty spaces / Between stars--on stars where no human race is. / I have it in me so much nearer home / to scare myself with my own desert places" ("Desert Places" 195).

The Universe Again

From Bill Bryson's folksy survey of scientific knowledge, A Short History of Nearly Everything: "It is natural but wrong to visualize the singularity [the dimensionless 'spot' into which all matter had been squeezed, so to speak, and from which the universe in a sense emerges] as a kind of pregnant dot hanging in a dark, boundless void. But there is no space, no darkness. The singularity has no 'around' around it. There is no space for it to occupy, no place for it to be. We can't even ask how long it has been there--whether it has just popped into being, like a good idea, or whether it has been there forever, quietly awaiting the right moment. Time doesn't exist. There is no past for it to emerge from" (10). And our universe? "Now the question that has occurred to all of us at some point is: what would happen of you traveled out to the edge of the universe and, as it were, put your head through the curtains? Where would your head be if it were no longer in the universe? What would you find beyond? The answer, disappointingly, is that you can never get to the edge of the universe. That's not because it would take too long to get there--though of course it would--but because even if you traveled outward and outward in a straight line, indefinitely and pugnaciously, you would never arrive at an outer boundary. Instead, you would come back to where you began . . . " (16-17). The curvature of time and space in the universe and all that. In such a condition, do anxieties like claustrophobia mean anything? And so I am answered (see posting on 5/31/10): we're not really in a floating cigar. Ultimately, from a cosmic perspective, we're nowhere at all.

The Cognitive Dissonance of the Fuhrerdammerung

I just finished Anthony Beevor's The Fall of Berlin 1945, his account of the final major European battles of World War II. The Russian soldiers--enraged by Nazi German atrocities in the Soviet Union, whipped into a fury by Soviet propaganda, and undoubtedly driven by the brutalization of war itself--overwhelm the hopelessly outnumbered and equipment and ammunition poor German troops and rape every woman they can get their hands on. (The German civilians attribute the attacks to Slavic bestiality, of course.) On the other side, lunatic Nazi leaders continue to believe that they will prevail. During the last days of the fight in Berlin, with the remaining German forces driven back into the city center and fighting from cellars, of course there are still military police who are executing anyone they suspect of cowardice. One might think that, at that point, they might as well join the fight against the Soviets themselves. But no. Along with Hitler and his other fanatics, there are other officers and soldiers who still believe in the cause. All of which suggests that, despite evidence otherwise, there's always someone who won't acknowledge reality. At times, our delusions don't necessarily harm us--especially if we have the assets (money, wealth) to recover from them or if they simply don't put us into a position to harm ourselves. This is especially true for the upper and, to a degree, middle-classes--or in a racialized society whatever group that designates itself as the elite. But if a true crisis hits, then even privilege can't protect us from its consequences. Any number of people oppose universal health insurance in America--and for some of them, they will never have to face the consequences of their attitudes. But there will be some. They may not recognize it--but that will be the reason.

Attention Deficit Disorder

One standard ploy of politicians is to flatter the American people by referring to their inate wisdom--this despite the fact that, time and again, the American people have been and continue to be fooled by nonsense and obfuscation, lies and fantasies. Nowadays, we have fools coming out of the walls in America, people who really have no idea what they're saying or doing--and they're running in primaries and winning. And if they get into power, they would be unable to do anything in a crisis--beyond bombing someone somewhere. That is my nightmare image: there's a crisis, and they're frozen into a Bambi pose because they simply have no idea what to do. Yet we also have the corporate politicians who remain in power by placating the rich, whose reflex action is to protect great wealth. Is this any way to run a society?

On a more local note, we have fools who run educational institutions into the ground. I read an article saying that at one fancy liberal arts college, 70 percent of its employees were non-teaching. It would be interesting to know what the percentage is at my school. This occurred incrementally--year after year--without much or any comment, so that now it seems "normal." We can't remember how it used to be--in American politics, we seem to be able to go back a few months, no more. Is it an attention deficit disorder or just some kind of historical amnesia? Is it inherent in human beings, an evolutionry necessity? Or do we have rituals that ask us to remember the wrong or pointless things? Is that the function of religion?

American Language, Time, Science

"Rip you a new one"--is an interesting American phrase. It suggests violence and pain--but also anatomy and excrement. A testament to American lingusitic creativity?

Yet my guess is that 90-95 percent of what people say, maybe even closer to 99 percent, is mundane, even pointless.

There will be human beings 2000 years from now--in some form. They'll probably look at us the same way we look at Anthony and Cleopatra--as somehow oddly ancient.

I read Patricia Fara's Science: A Four-Thousand Year History in which every male scientist is a racist imperialist who exploits women and other ordinary people and every female scientist is a unacknowledged or underacknowledged heroine. Some, even much of what she says, is undoubtedly true, yet is science so hopeless compromised?

Illness

Being ill almost compels one to focus solely on the current moment: you can't plan ahead when you're in pain. I'm now convinced that I have something called Costochondritis, "an inflammation of the junctions were the upper ribs join with the cartilage that holds them to the breastbone or sternum." The cause is unknown and it usually goes away. That has been true in the past, but this time it seems to be hanging on, making it impossible to sleep on my right side, making sleep fitful and making me tired. So far: not exactly the summer of Rog.

Definitions

Praying is actually begging.
Wisdom is resignation.
I read Sam Lipsyte's Venus Drive and Home Land. They won't last--but they have amusing parts. A writer needs to be both good and lucky: Joyce wrote about growing up in a suffocating land that was about to explode. He was good and lucky. Post-modern American mall culture just doesn't lend itself to noteworthy literature. Maybe when the oil runs out and we're going crazy trying to step on our neighbors, then we'll have a literature that both good and noteworthy.

The True Nature of History

I read Marc Bloch's relatively boring The Historian's Craft. Even though his plea for a rational historicism is utterly understandable, given that his country had been occupied by Nazi Germany, a nation not particularly interested in rational explanations of anything, and depite the fact that his basic points--history is about human beings, is about consciousness, must strive to understand, not judge--could have been made in three pages, his analysis of the nature of history is incapable of realizing the true nature of history. In his last, unfinished chapter, which discusses historical causation, Bloch asks: "What military historian would dream of ranking among the causes of a victory that gravitation which accounts for the trajectory of the shells, or the physiological organization of the human body without which the projectiles would have no fatal consequences?" This is precisely the subject of science fiction, a genre that attempts to look past the shallow aspects of human psychology to the realm of the physical universe--its laws and probabilities. It involves an almost incomprehensible perspective--one that steps away from the petty and predictable choices that human beings make and focuses on how physical forces (like gravity) and shape and function (like physiology) do determine much of what has occurred. Bloch's belief in the empirically visible simply is too small to fully understand the larger context of human history.

Ultimate Claustrophobia

From Jeremy Bernstein's Einstein: One way of understanding the universe is "as a sort of sphere in space, filled, on the average, with a small uniform density of matter. A light ray started at any point in the universe will return to its starting point . . .in about 10 billion years" (156). Talk about enclosures! A ten-billion-year wide coffin. And, of course: what's outside the sphere?

Psychoanalysis Psycho

Erik Erikson writes: "We have also indicated the significance of the choice of the buttocks as the preferred place for coporeal punishment; a safe place physiologically, but emotionally dangerous, since punishment aggravates the significance of this general area as a battlefield of parental and infantile wills. The fear that his parents and teachers might ever completely subject him by dominating this area and this gaining power over his will may have provided some of the dynamite in that delayed time bomb of Martin's rebellion, and may account for the excessiveness with which Luther, to the end, expressed an almost paranoid definace, alternating with a depressed conception of himself" (231). This from Young Man Luther. So the Reformtion--indeed, the shift to the individual conscience (and thus, according to Weber, capitalism)--is largely connected to the fact that Luther's parents spanked him? It's at moments like this when psychoanalysis becomes a parody of itself.

Freud and History

I'm reading Erik Erikson's Young Man Luther, and his thesis is apparently that every one has an identity crisis, and certain people--great men--emerge from it, translating whatever particular family oppression they experienced into a public arena: "Millions of boys," he writes, " face these problems and solve them in some way or another . . . .Now and again, however, an individual is called upon . . .to lift his individual patienthood to the level of a universal one and to try to solve for all what he could not solve for himself alone" (67). So if Dad ignores you or beats the hell out of you, and Mom is nuts or smothers you, certain people turn this conflict into everyone's problem: thus the engine of history, family dramas made into international issues. Frankly I don't know. Every once in a while he says something interesting--something that resonates--but it's all so pat, playing the same family drama over and over, occasionally replayed in the political world. Luther rebelled against his upwardly mobile Dad (and tried to be good as a monk), then transformed his rebellion into a global one against the Roman Catholic Church. But maybe the Church was a corrupt institution and he had just had it with it? Why couldn't that be a simpler explanation?

The Spanish Armada

I finished Garrett Mattingly's The Armada, his 1959 acount of the 1588 Spanish naval attack on England. If I hadn't been already familiar with some of the people he mentions, I would have been somewhat confused, yet I still found it interesting, especially the collateral impact it had on France (which essentially experienced a coup against Henry III, the last of the Valois monarchs, and then a counter coup). In a sense, the attack never had a chance--and almost everyone seemed to know it. Its goal was to hook up with the Spanish army in what is now Belgium and help guard its transfer over to England (so that it could take control of London and get rid of the heretic Queen Elizabeth), but the Parma, the army commander there, hadn't really been seriously building ships or barges to convey his soldiers--and eventually, after a week of ongoing skirmishes all along the southern English coastline, the effective Spanish tactic of forming into a giant crescent to ward off all attacks collapsed off the coast of Belgium and several Spanish ships were destroyed. The remnants sailed around the British Isles. Mattingly claims that it was in essence the first modern naval encounter--and the commanders didn't quite yet know how to fight it. They were all religious fanatics and conniving plotters.

The More Things Change: Part Deux

I finished Schlesinger's The Crisis of the Old Order. I know he's the bete noire of the left, especially with books like The Vital Center, but the last two-thirds of this book were quite impressive. He vividly describes the growing desperation of the Great Depression, especialy given the teeth-grinding stupidity of the discredited financiers and their government lackeys, and he makes me understand just how fantastic Franklin Roosevelt was--at last someone who was willing to listen to ideas and act on them.

"But the scope of planning was less important in the baffled years of 1930 and 1931 than the liberating emphasis on the idea itself, with its implication that men through government could do something to extricate themselves from their misery. It was the prevalent economic fatalism which exasperated Roosevelt as much as anything. When an orthodox economist told him that the only hope was to let the system strike bottom, he said to the man, with a look of disgust of his face, 'People aren't cattle, you know'" (393).

Sheer stupidity: The next book I'm reading--Philip Hallie's Lest Innocent Blood Be Shed: The Story of the Village of Le Chambon and How Goodness Happened There--recounts what happened in one, small village in France during World War II where they hid and saved several thousand Jewish refugees, just because it was the right thing to do. And somehow, even though the Nazis and the craven Vichy authorities were aware of what was occurring in this town, they managed to get through the war alive. In one memorable scene, the town's Protestant pastor and spiritual leader was arrested, although he's not sure of the charge. He tells some police officer it may be because he's tried to save some Jews, and the police officer responds scornfully:

"The captain's fury exploded. 'What? Jews? Oh--that's lovely. Now that doesn't surprise me. You're part of their conspiracy, eh? We all know that they're the ones who have brought France down into the abyss. Well, you're going to pay for this. You're going to pay for all the harm you've done to the marshall!'
This was a moment Trocme [the pastor] would never forget. In fact, his overnight stay in the police station in Limoges changed his view of mankind. He discovered people like the captain--patriotic, sincere, but above all, severely limited. These people were capable of repeating hate-ridden cliches without any concern for evidence or for the pain of others. Before he entered that police station in Limoges, he thought the world was a scene where two forces were struggling for power: God and the Devil. From then on, he knew that there was a third force seeking hegemony over the world: stupidity. God, the Devil, and halfwits of mind and heart were all struggling with each other to take over the reins." (30)

Compare this to a passage from Schlesinger's text:

"And so, in the fourth winter of the depression, American business seemed to plead not only financial but also intellectual bankruptcy. Richberg, in his appearance before the Senate Finance Committee, delivered a savage judgment. 'I submit that every conspicuous leader of affairs who has appeared before this committee and who has attempted to justify the continuance of the present political economic system unchanged, with its present control unreformed, is either too ignorant of facts, too stupid in comprehension, or too viciously selfish in his short-sighted philosophy, to be worthy of any attention in this time of bitter need for honest, intelligent, and public-spirited planning for the rehabilitation of our crumbling civilization.'" (458-9)

The ongoing presence of stupidity--a constant in human societies.

Democracy Again

I'm reading Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.'s The Crisis of the Old Order, the first volume of his trilogy The Age of Roosevelt. It's OK--a bit of a reader's digest version of the great men of history. Still, it recounts the 1920s, another age dominated by business that careened into a catastrophe. Government run by business, he writes, "In time it would appear that even the leaders of business could not decipher the intricate financial structures they were erecting" (68), a sentence that could have been written today. Joseph Stiglitz, in a review in the London Review of Books, says that in the past thirty years there have been 100 economic crises--this after about 50 years of relative economic stability through a regulated economy. So we are incapable of learning from the past: or should I say the financial world is incapable of learning from the past and we, like sheep, believe whatever they say. Of course, there are those who profit from each financial catastrophe: something that tossed 10 percent of the population out of work becomes part of a business strategy.

Schlesinger later discusses H.L. Mencken, no lover of democracy he: "Mencken's typical congressman? 'A knavish and preposterous nonentity, half way between a kleagle of the Ku Kulx Klan and a grand worthy of the Knights of Zoroaster. It is such vermin that make the laws of the United States.' The civil service? 'A mere refuge for prehesile morons.' Public opinion? The immemorial fears of the mob, 'piped to central factories . . . flavoured and coloured and put into cans.' Democratic morality? 'When one has written off crutelty, envy and cowardice, one had accounted for nine-tenths of it.' Bryan, the 'Fundamentalist Pope'; T.R., the 'national Barbarossa'; Wilson, 'the self-bamboozled Presbyterian, the right-thinker, the great moral statesman, the perfect model of the Christian cad.' Democracy as a theory? 'All known facts lie flatly against it.'" (148-149). Update this 90 years and this, too, could have been written yesterday. The Bushes, Cheneys, Rumfelds and their hatchetmen are the reincarnated clowns of the recent past--the Hoovers, Mellons, and other stone deaf fools who, in the face of human suffering, can suggest that prosperity is just around the corner.

Can we say that the same bureaucratic fools now run our world--an endless supply of fool managers who operate even in the very institution I have the privilege of working at.

Affirmative Action

In the larger scheme of things, Affirmative Action doesn't matter: in the academic world, it mostly meant that black studies departments were set up. They weren't hiring blacks--or women, for that matter--in engineering departments or economics departments. Not in chemistry. But they did in English departments. For me, it meant that I couldn't get a job, because, for the most part, women were hired for jobs I applied to. Does it matter? Surely, given the massive pools of applicants for jobs, those women who got hired were more than capable--many undoubtedly as good, if not better, than I. Yet the idea of imposing a wrong to right a wrong is still troubling, for the real perpetrators of discrimination got off scott-free. In a true, just affirmative action process, older, white men should have lost their jobs to make way for women, minorites, anyone in classes of people who were denied places in, say, the academic world. Why did I have to be denied an opportunity to make up for the crime of my elders? With their white, male privilege, plenty of fools got jobs: they didn't accomplish all that much, except they got to pretend to be academics. Had comfortable lives. Read books. Viewed themselves as wise mentors. There's an ecology of livelihoods: jobs are handed out for silly reasons, unjustifiable reasons. Was it Balzac who said that behind every great fortune there's a crime? Well, behind every desirable tenured position, there's a crime. But we always believe that, if we achieve something, it's because we deserve it. Deserve it? If so, we also deserve every disease that comes our way. Every failure. It has the same reality as prayer--as if some entity cares.

The More Things Change

As part of my plan to read all of the works on the Texas Unrequired Reading List, I finished Richard Hofstatler's The American Political Tradition--clearly a depressing book in that we never seem to learn from experience. Odd characters like Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson both were confronted by large corporate powers and, while they had no interest in overturning capitalism, they did favor contolling these massive corporate entities, mostly through regulation. Hofstatler then turns to Herbert Hoover and Franklin Roosevelt--the former incapable of adjusting to the the economic catastrophe caused by unregulated business and making use of differing solutions to the problem of economic downturns, the latter becoming increasingly radical in his efforts to end the cycle of business collapses. Hofstatler suggests (in a book written in 1948) that we now understood the folly of unfettered capitalism, yet here we are, in 2010, right back to the ideologies of the 1920s--or worse, the 19th century. Another banking/financial sector catastrophe has occurred. We staved off, to some degree, an overwhelming economic catastrophe with government bailouts of predatory banks--and the idiot Republicans now oppose any meaningful effort at regulating the shadow banking world. And, naturally, there are any number of fools willing to vote for them. The Democrats can hardly pick up a finger to address financial regulation: apparently they are capable of passing only one major piece of legislation at a time. At least Franklin Roosevelt was willing to try virtually anything: unlike the contemporary timid and complacent party of the people.

I also read Martin Gardner's Science: Good, Bad, and Bogus and Lewis Thomas' Lives of the Cell, neither of which is so impressive (Gardner's book anthologizes his book reviews of work by scienific cranks and crackpots, Thomas's collection of short essays suggest that we're more like ants than we might imagine and that, yes, the Earth is a cell itself).

Tea Party?

My sense about the so-called tea-party activists is that they are reacting to the reality that at one time certain white people could be fairly successful, even if they weren't very smart or highly educated: but now, with the withering reality of corporate America hoovering up every last outstanding cent, there isn't the same possibility for what they believe is their right to a comfortable life. You can't make it just by being white--that privilege no longer is as readily available. Now you need a technical education--and some ruthlessness. The world economy doesn't pull along loser whites anymore, and they're feeling it. And they're not happy about it. So they're throwing a tantrum. They see Obama as that technically educated black man who is successful--and they don't like it. Some racism is part of it. Some nostalgia. Some resentment. Some ideological idiocy. Mostly it's incoherence--because they can't admit that they were privileged before (and thus didn't deserve it). The larger question, though, is why the mainstream newsmedia gives them so much attention, the kind of attention it would never give, say, countercultural lunatics.

The Emperor's Newest Clothes

It's sad and, in a bizarre sense, amusing to see someone unmasked, especially someone in a highly paid, administrative position. At my school, the president has offered ersatz faculty consultation, and then when the inevitable crisis hit--and all decisions are made by the administrtation without any meaningful input from the "employees"--he affects a hurt sensibility: why didn't you participate in these phony sessions where I would pretend to listen to you and then ignore everything you have to say? Of course, no one is expecting that they will simply do what we want, but after a while, even the most obtuse person will realize when the fix is in. They assume that meaningful faculty consultation equals some kind of anarchistic collective. We--with our degrees and experience--would like to be heard. But as administrators now mostly come from graduate programs in college administration, they no longer have any knowledge of teaching or scholarship--just managing the "crises." So colleges have drifted into a kind of unspoken agreement: you pretend to administer the school, we'll deal with the classroom. But sooner or later, they have to intervene into the classroom (layoffs, phony accredidation processes, pointless student surveys), although somehow administrative personnel almost never seem to disappear. So a lot of faculty showed up at a meeting--and the president threw a temper tantrum. This "meeting," like most of our meetings, was really an opportunity to hand out new rules for a specific program--no discussion, no questions, no give-and-take. That's how dictatorships are run. When the mask of affability comes off, then you see the reality. We pretend that somehow we don't live under dictatorships--but we do. The corporate rules rule.

The Asshole Theory of History

It takes only one person to screw things up for a large number of other people: that's the asshole theory of history. I began to understand this idea way back when I was a grad student looking for a place to live. Apartments that had one remaining tenant were usually to be avoided because, all too often, that remaining tenant was an asshole, someone who essentially compelled everyone else to move. I extended the idea to traffic--one bad driver could make everyone else's experience on a highway miserable. And eventually it was connected to history itself: the bad tenant/driver became some individual (or even individuals) who, in some way, makes a whole lot of other people miserable. Why? Because he/they is/are an asshole. Simply an unpleasant, piece of shit human being who revels in other people's misery--or, posssibly worse, who isn't even aware of his/her impact on others yet still idiotically manages to inflict misery. Because we often have scarcity of something or another, human beings can affect each other if someone is an asshole, and usually that impact will be negative. There's little we can do about it. And that's why any change which actually improves the human lot is precious and unusual.

La vie quotidian

Sometimes I can feel the rush of time. Sometimes I am acutely aware of the pressure of time, its ever enclosing nature. Here we are, alive and then not.

Philip K. Dick says, "Today we live in a society in which spurious realities are manufactured by the media, by governments, by big corporations, by religious groups, poltiical groups--and the electronic hardware exists by which to deliver these pseudoworlds right into the heads of the reader."

La vie quotidian: one that is shaped by mass idiocy and delusion. We can only treasure those few moments when, for some mysterious reason, we feel acutely alive and conscious--moments that are, ironically as usual, insufferably painful and hopeless.

Nixonland

For my bathroom reading, I have Rick Perlstein's Nixonland. For the most part the book is awful: its idea of history is essentially to summarize what was in the newspapers at the time. And it also imagines news sources like Time and Newsweek to be objective, non-ideological venues, while it pretends that pundits of the time somehow offered mostly legitimate analyses of contemporary events. As many of the participants in the events it covers are still alive, it is incomprehensible why the author was unwilling or unable to interview them. Ultimately, like a bad student essay, it takes a self-evident thesis (the country was divided into irreconcilable right and left wings in the late 1960s and early 1970) and pretends that it is original. Its one redeeming virtue is to remind me of the psychopathic nature of Richard Nixon and his minions. For a while there, George Bush the 2nd had me pining for the good old days of Nixon, as his utter stupidity made Nixon look almost competant, even sane. Yet the moment that Nixon was ensconced in the White House, he already manifested his deep paranoia. I recall that people like Nixon--and before him Robert McNamara--were my enemies: anyone who wants to kill you is your enemy. It doesn't matter if they have a gun out pointing at you or they want to draft you and send you thousands of miles away to be killed--they're still your enemy.

Wisdom

"A man who has power and makes no use of it is a fool. Nobody gives anything away, and if your business fails your creditors give you no quarter. The only thing is to keep your nerve. Grab where and when there is anything to be grabbed. For poetic justice you must look to opera, and to the Easter Service when sermons are preached about the Resurrection of the Savior of mankind. The Church does not go away with empty hands. You cannot make dollars with the cramp of conscience in your throat. It is useless to expect dollars to rain down from the sky. No instances have occurred to justify such a hope. Dollars must be hard-earned. Many hands and brains must be exerted to the utmost before you can get your hundred dollars for a ton of mahagony. And if nobody fells the mahagony in the primeval forests of America and floats it down the forest rivers, there can be no mahagony cupboards and no mahagony cabinets. You cannot have cheap mahagony and at the same time save all those innocent Indians who perish by the thousands in the jungle to get it for you. It must be either one or the other. Either cheap mahagony or respect for the humanity of the Indian. The civilization of the present day cannot run to both, because competition, the idol of our civilization, cannot tolerate it. Pity? Yes--with joyfulness and a Christian heart. But the dollar must not be imperiled." (B. Traven, Government 228-229)

B. Traven

I'm reading Traven's Government, the first novel in his Jungle novels series. It's good to hear from someone who also understands the lies we tell ourselves to justify the idiotic regimes we impose on others. In pre-revolutionary Mexico, the craven governmental officials can easily justify sending the indigenous Mexicans into debt-peonage, essentially for the rest of their lives. It's for the good of the country, they tell themselves. So goes the moral nature of capitalism. But, then I also read Grossman's Life and Fate, which chronicles the same kind of lies in a socialist paradise. I wonder about Weber's sense of the routinization of charisma, the way a vision of humanity is changed and altered into yet another system of oppression and stupidity: the establishment of a bureaucracy to impose those reforms, no matter how many people are destroyed in the process. And then I say to those who would broadcast their ideas about humanizing humanity--think twice. Maybe we don't need another critique of deceit and self-delusion, of human exploitation--as well as another plan to establish a more just society. Didn't Bob once say to me that, if we had communism in the United States, George Bush the 1st would have been a commisar?

Community

This word, like the word "conversation" replacing discussion, has entered into the quotidian lexicon. We speaks of communities these days, as if any conglomeration of people can form or be one. So on sports talk shows it's the sports community. In colleges it's learning communities. In politics, it's the black community. And so forth. My sense of community is that it actually refers to a geographical location where actual, meaningful social interaction occurs. So a large geographical area of anonymous condos or apartments would not, in reality, constitute a community. Nor would two classes joined together. That's a bureaucratic or administrative fastasy--a delusion. We would like to think that we are part of a community of some sort--when, in reality, none exists.

Reading

I re-read Saeed, The Ill-Fated Pessimoptimist by Emile Habiby. The travails of the unaccommodated Palestinians through the narrative of an idiot. An informer who tires to please his masters. People arrested for trying to return home. Trying to retrieve their possessions. Let's face it--now, to move into a place where others live must involve colonialism. You can have a brutal version--as was done by the Nazis in the Lebensraum in Poland and Russia or in South Africa or here against the native Americans. Or you can have it less brutal but no less soul-destroying as exists in Israel. Who owns the land? What was here before we got here? In the novel, there's the small prison and then there's the large prison. They let you out of the smaller space (jail) and into the larger space (the outdoors). It's just one large prison. It's claustrophobia and agoraphobia all over again.

Getting Off the Subject: The Unaccommodated Human Being

Still, to write about contemporary politics is generally to waste time. I expect little from government--or from business. Wrapped up, as they are, in ideological fantasies, these institutions mainly exist to perpetuate themselves. Indeed, if corporations are people, then why can't they be elected to office?

For me, most importantly, it's fundamental to see past the surface--the tempting surface of our insane society. Can all this continue--indefinitely? In H.G. Wells' The War of the Worlds, the narrator, after the first, utterly unexpected Martian attack, finds himself unaccommodated (both literally and metaphorically): "It came to me that I was upon this dark common, helpless, unprotected, and alone. Suddenly, like a thing falling upon me from without, came--fear" (18). Is this not the modern condition? For thinking human beings, is this not how one must (or ought to) understand our world and our consciousness? "She would of been a good woman," the Misfit said, [in Flannery O'Connor's "A Good Man is Hard to Find"], "if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life" (388). Without that threat, we sink into obliviousness. Only as we are unaccommodated can we understand ourselves.

Politics

The two national parties are corrupt--but each one in different ways. The Republicans are ideologically corrupt, an ideology driven by privilege or ignorance or fantasy. They cannot imagine that their success has something to do with other people. The Democrats are spiritually or economically corrupt: either they have sold out to corporations or banks or they view themselves as corporate managers--or both. I can't be an independent in the sense of occupying some space between these two behemoths. But I can't identify with either political party and passively support corruption. There is no political home for me.

The Democrats are shocked by the election of a fool in Massachusetts. But why? We've elected fools before. The Democrats belatedly realize that the country is disgusted by banker bailouts and that an economy that can't provide jobs to everyone who wants one is not an economy that actually does things for people. They want to pass health care reform--such reform as it is--as if they were Human Resources managers trying to find a better health insurance plan. That's spiritual corruption. And the tyranny of the Senate filibuster allows for the most craven of Democrats to shake down the country for a bribe. That's economic corruption. On the other side are the kind of people who would walk over you if you were lying in the street in need of assistance.

So much for hope and change.

Red Germany

Germany is one screwed up place. For obvious reasons. But I watched The Baeder-Meinhof Complex last night, two and a half hours of extreme leftist idiocy. Yet I was bothered by the lack of a local context for their actions. Their commitment to world revolution--their identification with the Vietnamese communists, the Palestinians, and so forth--was made clear. But exactly what motivated them in Germany itself was less clear. For the most part, people don't become murderous just because everyone else is wrapped up in a mindless consumerism. Still, Germany was, after all, a country that had within recent memory started a war that consumed millions of people, especially in death camps and by roving bands of soldiers who mowed down hundreds of thousands. All of which was enabled (and, at times, even committed) by a compliant public. But apparently they imagined that, after such actions, everything could just go back to normal--whatever normal might be. The movie also didn't make it clear that many of the bureaucrats and judges in West Germany and many of the policemen served under the Nazis and made a seamless transition to the same positions in the new, U.S.-occupied state. The delusion of normality must have seemed farcical to those who imagined themselves as having even a small amount of social consciousness.

I was in Germany in 1974, another idiot simply travelling through the country. It was, in essence, between Venice and Holland, and so I made my way north through Salzburg, Munich, and then Frankfurt. In Frankfurt, I was sitting on the grass in a park and decided to go into the bushes to take a leak. When I emerged, two cops came up to me and asked for identification. I acted as if I didn't understand them, showed them my US pasport, and that was that. I always felt a sense of trepidation in Germany--the same sort of feeling one might feel walking across a battlefield or a massacre site. Bad things had occurred there. But I was oblivious to the sickness that pervaded the country. The guilt. The resentment. The unwillingnees to acknowledge what had happened or the fierce desire to move beyond it. The parents have a deep, dark secret, and their children are acting out. Is it so surprising?