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?