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?