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.