Deconstructing Eric, or, Little by Little

Abraham Lincoln once said that “If you’re a racist, I will attack you with the North,” and these are the principles I carry with me in the workplace.
–Michael Scott

Our Attorney General is right. We are a nation of cowards, fearing an honest discussion of race. But, unless he’s breaking utterly with rigorously observed convention, he’s dead wrong about what that discussion would look like. A newly open conversation about race and public policy is the last thing an Eric Holder wants.

In fact, Mr. Holder’s intent was to preempt just this possibility, which he reasonably fears as an unintended consequence of Barack Obama’s remarkable success. That success shatters the very assumption upon which it is most dependent–that America is inherently and uniquely racist, forever incomplete thereby. Holder finds himself tasked with performing the traditional February rite of reinforcing this assumption–as the first black attorney general serving the first black president. That’s one hell of a contradiction. It’s going to take a nation of millions to obscure it. Thus Attorney General Michael Scott’s suggestion that every day be a nation-wide Diversity Day:

…if we are to make progress in this area we must feel comfortable enough with one another, and tolerant enough of each other, to have frank conversations about the racial matters that continue to divide us.

When I saw the scare-quote screen crawl (I shall start calling them scare-crawls) on a television across a room, “Atty General Holder Says US ‘Nation of Cowards’,” I assumed Mr. Holder had renounced the fear-mongering on behalf of “security” that has overtaken the Nation since 9/11. Something about the courage required by liberty and the cowardice required by tyranny. Perhaps he even had the nerve to suggest the terrorist threat has been exaggerated by those seeking power and wealth. I imagined myself defending him to you. This is, after all, only what he should be saying. But Holder wasn’t there to calm a panicked nation; he was there to panic a calm one:

If we allow this attitude to persist in the face of the most significant demographic changes that this nation has ever confronted — and remember, there will be no majority race in America in about 50 years — the coming diversity that could be such a powerful, positive force will, instead, become a reason for stagnation and polarization. We cannot allow this to happen and one way to prevent such an unwelcome outcome is to engage one another more routinely — and to do so now.

But this is nothing new. The remarkable thing about Wednesday’s speech was that the Attorney General broadened the mandate of the U.S. Department of Justice:

But we must do more, and we in this room bear a special responsibility. Through its work and through its example this Department of Justice, as long as I am here, must — and will — lead the nation to the “new birth of freedom” so long ago promised by our greatest president. This is our duty and our solemn obligation.

Mr. Holder did not reveal any plans for how he will “lead the nation to [Lincoln’s] ‘new birth of freedom’ “; probably because he has none. Of course he may think we’re not ready for them. As if this immodest language isn’t disturbing enough, Holder combines it with an attempt not to merely prompt debate but to direct it:

I fear however, that we are taking steps that, rather than advancing us as a nation are actually dividing us even further. We still speak too much of “them” and not “us.” There can, for instance, be very legitimate debate about the question of affirmative action. This debate can, and should, be nuanced, principled and spirited. But the conversation that we now engage in as a nation on this and other racial subjects is too often simplistic and left to those on the extremes who are not hesitant to use these issues to advance nothing more than their own narrow self interest

This is a false accommodation. That there “can be” a “very legitimate debate about the question of affirmative action”; is given, and not by the Attorney General. The implication is that current debate is heading for “illegitimate” territory, deliberately reinforcing white anxiety and black resentment that holds opposition to affirmative action as racist until proven otherwise.

To limit the debate is to control it. Holder, arguing like a good (or just fair) lawyer, needs to place the status quo he defends between two arbitrary “extreme” boundaries. Thus certain opinions are “simplistic” (of course he could be talking about the stubbornly crude logic of disparate impact and quotas–his call to frankness and depth included neither) or “extreme”, serving “narrow self-interest.”

It is a monologue Holder desires, alternating between narrow, meaningless poles toward a safely predetermined end, mouthed by a multitude distracted by false choices. The product of a collective, conditioned mind. But this much is obvious. What is more interesting is the unintentional but more revealing subtext, inaccessible to the author, incapacitated as he is by status, position and, appropriately enough, chauvinism. Holder’s speech revealed the potential conflicts facing a civil rights movement-turned-industry by Barack Obama’s stunning, rapid rise.
Those who most fear the reality of a “transformation” to a “post-racial” America are those who’ve most benefited from the decidedly racial nature of recent American politics–again, embarrassingly demonstrated with Obama’s success. The end game of affirmative action and discrimination-through-litigation is revealed as long overdue. The intent of the “conversation” about race, now more than ever, is to de-legitimize that challenge by declaring it unfit for conversation.

If we should start taking seriously the “post-racial” nature of Obama’s rise, we might start asking that it mean something beyond assigning a professional and political premium to certain individuals based on Obama’s myth of “race and inheritance.” But the obvious advantage that race played for the inauthentic son of slavery and segregation contradicts the myth. The notion of a white American jackboot forever on the neck of our culturally most powerful–black Americans–was questionable before Obama’s remarkable campaign and the ecstatic reception of his inauguration. Now it is farcical.

But it isn’t only that Barack Obama renders the white/black reparations dynamic absurd. The nascent Diversity State finds itself too soon and too totally triumphant. The bogey of white oppression threatens to become no longer plausible, and those groups assigned varying stature within the hierarchy of grievance are already eyeing one another uneasily.

The order now threatened by diversity is not pre– but post-civil rights. That minority became synonymous with oppressed, and “underrepresented” synonymous with denied, once only enhanced the power of the dominant minority, which extracted concessions from a still comfortable majority (that could still afford them and held an expectation of final conciliation). Smaller minority groups were content to follow the leader and accept a subordinate position. But what happens to that dynamic in a “post-racial” (“post-white”) America where the majority of individuals have a birthright claim against the white plurality and no sense of obligation toward a black population that is culturally dominant, politically favored and stubbornly lagging in professional and scholastic achievement?
It was therefore Holder’s purpose to preclude any challenges to black America’s position atop the hierarchy of grievance. Black equality is more than simple equality. Holder is here to defend the primacy of his faction as the vanguard of a revolution now triumphant:

In addition, the other major social movements of the latter half of the 20th century — feminism, the nation’s treatment of other minority groups, even the antiwar effort — were all tied in some way to the spirit that was set free by the quest for African American equality. Those other movements may have occurred in the absence of the civil rights struggle, but the fight for black equality came first and helped to shape the way in which other groups of people came to think of themselves and to raise their desire for equal treatment. Further, many of the tactics that were used by these other groups were developed in the civil rights movement.

By more false accommodation he allows that feminism, anti-war protests and other minority rights movements “may” have happened without the black civil rights movement–insinuating that they probably would have not. When Holder goes on to assert that black history is too little studied, and that “African American history is American history”, he declares that black history is more than American history, and greater than any other group’s American history.

The line is that we must continually revisit the sins of the past to understand our present. But in reality the better things get in the present, the more the self-interested must recourse to the dismal past, and the more the present has to be compared to an ideal of race relations that has never existed and may not be possible. There is no historical precedent for America, and nothing like her at present.

The regions from where America’s “disadvantaged minorities” originate cannot compare in wealth, opportunity or liberty. Resentment of this humiliating reality feeds into that encouraged by the dishonest class of political opportunists represented by Holder. The language of civil rights has become an affront, no longer condemnatory of practice but of a people and a nation: the long history of Western civil liberties is only begun with the American civil rights movement and invalidated by the interlude of American slavery. “Simplistic”, indeed.

We are in the late decadent phase of the civil rights movement. Declaring victory and demobilizing is not an option–this would involve the voluntary surrender of power, something that does not happen. Power is only surrendered under coercion or dissipated over time. The latter threat panics Holder and friends. Pretext must be found to justify power. Enemies, if they don’t appear, must be found. First, they are said to be hiding among us. Then, the enemy hides latent within each of us. Our eternal vigilance against “hateful” thought is a population regulating itself on behalf of power.

Holder’s acknowledgement of the problematic nature of diversity reveals an internal contradiction. By unmindful incrementalism we went from the noble ideals of equality and tolerance to their near-opposite: diversity as a goal in itself. Even now one cannot suggest publicly that a policy of ethnic diversifying is no more legitimate than one of ethnic cleansing, and no more fair. And while ethnic cleansing has a long, sordid history, ethnic diversifying has none at all.

A multiracial democratic republic worthy of the name will defend equality before the law against those who equate it with equality of results. It’s too late in the game to deny that fairness in hiring and education produces racial inequality–inequality that, as we’ve seen, does not necessarily benefit the majority. Ethnic diversity and democracy are thus at odds. This was once a given; now it is heresy. But it is heresy only because we think it’s awful that it should be so. Thus far we have chosen not to reconcile a diverse population to democracy, but to reconcile democracy to a diverse population. This may be inevitable. But, as the truth is always worth knowing and no subterfuge lasts forever, we would do well to call the Attorney General’s bluff.

Criminal Boordom

A senior British diplomat faces prison term for anti-Semitic remarks:

A senior diplomat in the British Foreign Office has been arrested for inciting religious hatred after he launched into an anti-Semitic tirade at a London gym, the Daily Mail reported on Monday.

Witnesses told the British newspaper they heard diplomat Rowan Laxton shouting “f**king Israelis, f**king Jews” while watching a TV report of Israel Defense Forces operations in Gaza from the seat of an exercise bike.

He also reportedly shouted that IDF soldiers should be “wiped off the face of the Earth.”

The Daily Mail said Laxton continued the tirade even after he was approached by other gym users.

A complaint was later filed to police and Laxton was arrested and charged with inciting religious hatred, which carries a maximum seven-year prison term. He has since been released on bail [emph. added]

Seven years. Raskolnikov only got eight, for crying out loud. Britain’s laws are Britons’ business (thank God), but I marvel at how laws written as prohibitions against incitement to religious/racial hatred are broken by the mere expression of religious/racial animosity–even those which leave an individual alienated from his fellows. Laxton, married to a Muslim woman and moved to anger by the carnage taking place in Gaza, was making no friends at the time of his “offense”, and suffered not only the immediate opprobrium of those around him, but likely would have suffered professional loss in the ensuing scandal. Normal societal prohibitions–and the exceptional requirements of a public, political figure–were working as they always do in some form or fashion to regulate behavior as determined by the dominant cultural milieu. Yet still, this is not enough–and will never be enough, for some.

Prohibitions on expression, being the product of zealous paranoia, will not stay still. Once a given expression becomes a crime, privileges of place and privacy must fall away, unprotected; what one first cannot say at work (no longer merely a professional requirement) he soon cannot say in public (no longer a question of manners or moral community): at the grocery store, in an elevator, at the gym, as above; and, if this advance is not arrested, eventually at home. Certainly not in front of the children (and there will always be those who automatically assent, “but of course you can’t say that, and of course, never in front of the children!”). Once a word or phrase becomes criminal, one can only speak it if it passes unheard like the proverbial tree in the forest (but, as that riddle has no answer, some will anguish over the question, if hate speech occurs and there is no one to hear it, has a hate crime occurred?). And if the spoken word is prohibited because it’s deemed too much a menace, the same word written is immediately fair game, because it is the meaning that has been criminalized. Here too it is the communication of a thought that is prohibited. One cannot write it, because eyes might find it.

What one can never say one is forbidden from thinking–because any evidence of that thought is punished; his thoughts have no greater freedom than criminal activity that is deliberately concealed. Yes, one’s thoughts are always his own little kingdom, kept by himself, but what becomes of him, and his thoughts, when the State determines that they must remain there, kept to himself?
Criminalized speech is, by necessity, criminalized thought.

It will still surprise most Americans, but prison terms for offensive speech are much less remarkable in most of the world than they are here. The Haaretz link to the above story sighed, “One Born Every Minute” (alongside a photo of a swastika spray-painted on a wall, bundling the story in with the latest “wave of anti-Semitism” narrative to follow an Israeli military offensive). Don’t despair guys, soon there’ll be one jailed every day, until we’ve rounded them all up. What could go wrong?

…

The peep show divider comes down, the house lights come on; everything seems to be boiling beneath the surface in the acidic, garish light. The patrons, marginal characters and outright perverts, seedy sorts and vulgar youths, slumming yuppies and middle-aged men whose faces unintentionally plead for lifting the weight of years of disillusion and regret; all squint and cringe in the hostile glare. We are the uninvited of the great bacchanal, the unrecorded casualties of the revolution, homeless in the ensuing tyranny of gild and gluttony, staggering and limping about unnoticed. We all shrink and lower our gaze in the light’s exposure, seeing no one, as if to be seen by no one.

Time for you to go too, friends. Use one of the doors to the right, or go out the way you came in. No one look at another. File out in furtive silence. You pass a slotted paybox on your way out, stuffed with expired coupons, slug nickels, greasy notes and scraps of old newspaper.

The ancient doorman is as still as the stained and eroding stone-front of the building, into which he appears to be, no you’re sure he is, fading, like a mineral pocket dissipating into a greater mass. He looks at nothing and sees everything. Behind the dull, insensate eyes he records it all, like a meter mindlessly ticking through an infinite number. He’s always been and always will be there, even after the body is gone, after the building is demolished and replaced, demolished and replaced again, after nature’s reclamation of the spot; always the impression left by this blip of sentience in the cosmic mass, will remain in some form, a spectral smudge, eternally fading but never going away.

Back on the street you expand out and up as we disperse; your spirits lift. You think about someone at home or someone in the past; you stop, looking about at your fellows. Each seems to trail a bit of light behind him; you marvel a moment at this illusion of light and psychology. There is a twinge you don’t recognize, a pull inside of an icy grey hand upon a silent bass string. For a split-second you are utterly disoriented, your history and identity vanish, lost to you entirely; you don’t know who or where you are. Something is revealed, something you always knew but never considered, something overwhelming. The shudder of displacement passes so quickly you’re not sure it happened. You pull your collar up around your neck, which feels exposed and vulnerable on the street. Already you’re forgetting the queer sensation. Home beckons, comforting temporal echoes of its warmth and familiarity reassure you; someone is there now, you’re certain, waiting; before moving on you take one last look at the others, all shuffling off beneath the alternating red and white of the flashing sign that reads,
UNTETHERED

Commutation

People are afraid to merge…
—Less Than Zero, Bret Easton Ellis

There is not room enough. Not for everyone. The passage is insufficient for the mass of humanity bearing down upon it. Audacity and nerve will determine who passes ahead and who languishes behind; an instant hierarchy of the quick and the rude. Deference risks humiliation. Small gestures of civility punctuate the tedium of cautious distrust, hopelessly, heroically outnumbered like the last dwindling acts of defiance thinning away in the ascent of a new tyranny. This is a chaotic system of jangled nerves and bruised pride, man and machinery, forming and dissolving for a time here at this narrow pass. My commute begins in earnest. I enter the scrum. Time to merge.

Everyone is converging on the bottleneck, all manner of automobile, reflecting distorted fun house mirror images of each other on their shiny hard-beetle shells. Their headlamps sweep the dim before them like insect feelers. Out ahead the freeway is split into two neon rivers of white and red, streams of molten light. My head hurts.

The cars declare status and defiance. Contradictory ethos and aesthetics vie for supremacy; there goes one trumpeting his moral superiority and a higher social awareness; this one declares his ironic detachment; an insurance salesman/outdoorsman slides jauntily alongside; a celebration of pure aggression howls along on oversized tires; over there an affected bohemian cuts off a conspicuous rebel. Each is off to toil in a cubicle. Here and there are the gaudy candy-chrome rolling stock of an entire generational demographic’s bad taste, celebrating the dull greed they cannot know for their immersion in it. I love them all; I would be lost without them. Some bear slogans; the embarrassing, gauche inelegance of the literal-minded and too familiar. One squeezes in front of me rudely. What Would Jesus Do? He asks. Well, he wouldn’t have cut me off, I’m sure. Above it all are those with the smug certainty of instantly discernible superior dollar value; greater wealth demonstrated, higher status accrued, evolutionary primacy earned. Game, set, match.

Cars buck nose-down as they brake suddenly, rear up again in acceleration, baring their prowess. Some speed up to screen out others who pull alongside, an impromptu game of chicken for the receding gap; everyone is jealously defending his rolling realm of personal space. Leaving room for another to pass finds one soon overwhelmed with interlopers crowding into the open space. There is an unspoken system of rules that we’re all compelled to test endlessly. Still, somehow, the horn’s blare is only resorted to as the last break with civility and order. An impotent insult and pathetic lament. This gives me hope. The brake lights, flaring irregularly and collecting in masses, tap out our frustration like some sort of Morse code.

Within the comfortable cells of the cars are people, immobilized in their mobility. Within the people are dwindling stores of calm, alkaline slowly being consumed by the crackling acid of frustration and resignation; an energy producing chemical reaction gradually rendering them inert. Radio waves are beamed into these darkened compartments; the shrill and braying tones of affected cynicism, emitted by the most desperate and craven examples yet of humanity’s endless permutations–drive-time disc jockeys.

But I am not there yet. Should I rise on time for once? Must I lay here, waiting for the last-chance urgency of no more time to finally compel me to movement? What, after all, is appealing about the ten minutes of first-waking dread spent staring at the mystery spot on the ceiling? How I love my cell! How I love the walls that keep me in and keep you out! Ten minutes sooner, ten minutes of gumption and resolve, a mere ten minutes, and I can pass ahead of the critical mass that turns a routine merge into a predawn bloodsport of mangled vanity. It must be that I love the ten minutes of self-pity, of immobility, the futile attempt to will away reality. As for that spot, I swear it’s moved, just barely, since yesterday; what if it’s shifting, imperceptibly, like one of those boulders that creep across the plain, leaving a slug-trail behind? Does it matter? Close the eyes and open them repeatedly, vainly trying to prompt a new reality. Let’s try that. Russian roulette for a suspect consciousness.

Or just go back to sleep. And dream again.

…

Heckling the Coronation

During his first year in office, President Obama can be expected to unquestioningly acquiesce to the consensus demanding he oversee an increase in public debt twice as large, as a percentage of GDP, as any year in the Roosevelt administration. He will do this because, as any successful politician, he is congenitally incapable of recognizing, much less offering resistance to, the elite’s will to power (known to the benighted as bipartisan consensus). A fish cannot know it is wet, and a politician cannot be made aware of the recurring tendency of elite design to diverge too far from the common good, mostly because he cannot distinguish between the two.

The intent of this radical increase in public indebtedness is to somehow stave off the inevitable reckoning of the last two decades of imprudent public and (far more, of far less appreciated consequence) private borrowing, preserving the illusion that we can sustain a standard of living based on greed and the serial contrivances of speculative and, now, credit bubbles.

Even as the new president takes us to task for our irresponsibility and “cynicism,” he assures the gilded class among us that he’s quite prepared to defer onto your grandchildrens’ grandchildren the cost of propping up a system founded on irresponsibility, illusion and instant gratification. As much as it takes, apparently. Never accuse the new president of lacking nerve.

While citing the “lessons of the Great Depression”, the new administration will be taking out this mortgage on a nation no longer, as it was in the thirties, rich in the resource that was still only just becoming the key to global power and industrial might, oil; a nation poised to exploit vast stores of still unrealized industrial and human capital; a nation that would enter into a great war that would act as the ultimate stimulus program, bringing together all of these factors in one unified effort and leaving our global competition broke and broken. That nation was like a contained spring straining to expand. The spring has since sprung.

Now it is the elderly percentage of the population, the poor (whom we continue to import from abroad, lest we fall prey to “nativism” or “protectionism”) along with their attendant entitlements and social programs; now it is the cost of energy and food, that are poised for growth. Ours is a nation already drained by two unnecessary and unsustainable wars, that are weakening us relative to an increasingly resentful and disdainful world. Now it is a nation that doesn’t know how to deploy a massive stimulus, of corporations that employ as many or more abroad as they do at home and view any sense of allegiance to the nation that charters and protects them as a sacrilege; of governments and municipalities incapable of large projects due to a self-conflicted complex of regulations and patronage programs.

Since the imagined conservative rebirth of the “Reagan revolution,” we have been steadily selling off our industrial base in what Paul Craig Roberts aptly identifies as a system of labor arbitrage. This process is unguided by anything but aggregated greed, and for that reason its champions are probably correct about its inevitability. If it had a deliberate end it would be that the parceling out of our capacity to build things must be complete long before any near-equilibrium in global wages and production costs manifests a floor beneath this stomach-churning descent and thus ends its profitability. Our industrial base will end up somewhere, just not here. Perhaps at that point we will lure it back with our desperate willingness to work for starvation wages (brilliant!), provided of course our foreign friends have developed the keen distaste for “nationalism” and “protectionism” with which we are so selflessly blessed.
In conjunction with this halving of manufacturing’s share of GDP, we have doubled finance’s share of same. Like the imagined endless bounty to be found in treating a perfectly fine industrial capacity as if it’s the object of a salvage operation (akin to jumping out of a perfectly good airplane) to be parted out and liquidated, we’ve also bamboozled ourselves into believing in the infinite divisibility of money and confidence, in an inexhaustible fifth dimension of wealth to be mined moving money about–check that, the money need not move, nor even exist other than as digital 0s and 1s in our computer programs. Observing this remarkable displacement of the physical realm, one soon wonders why we don’t simply declare ourselves wealthier. Of course we’ve pretty much done just that.

But that declaration was really a loan application. The goods received for that loan abound: the exurbs were overextended and their now derelict far reaches stand shuttered, monuments to a different sort of failure of imagination–too much, not too little; the electronics still entrance us and dictate our daily lives; the massive plasma televisions still emit their comforting, hypnotizing glow, even from the humblest abodes; cinematic wonders produced by massive allocations of money, logistics and manpower–productions akin to small mercenary wars of plunder–still entrance us in theatres. Even the President makes a fetish of the dull convenience of his Blackberry, confident to the end in the transcendent efficacy of instant communications and the cool factor. Time to pay for all this stuff or default; there is no third way. Contrary to what we’re being told, deficits matter, more than ever.

The president was admirably sober in his inaugural address (prompting one acolyte to concede, “well, he’s not perfect”), calling for shared responsibility for the calamity upon us. Normally I’m all for us taking ourselves to task as a people, but it must be noted that now the powerful hector the common for doing precisely as instructed: borrowing and consuming. There has long been a consensus favoring consumption over saving, probably because those who gain access to the privileges of power by adopting the consensus, whatever it is, in the same way one once adopted the dominant religion, knew that this was the only politically feasible course of action. To be on the wrong side of this may have been far-sighted, but it was not politically advantageous or financially lucrative. Curiously, this state of affairs remains. But then that’s the problem with elite consensus, which I don’t pretend to have a substitute for, it’s a bit like a company’s management–their failure is the company’s failure. When they go, everything goes. Management does not resign en masse, and the elite doesn’t acknowledge its errors (or its existence).

Our elite has failed us. Don’t expect that to be featured in the official proclamations. Whose “dogma” (to use the phrase that President Obama, in one of his brilliant ironic turns, used to stigmatize his political opposition simultaneous with a call to unity) was it that declared profligacy a virtue and thrift a vice, after all? How sophisticated did the elite expect (or want) a forklift driver in Tennessee to be about finance or monetary policy? Has he, derided as fat and lazy and unfit for the global economy by people whose highest aspiration is to one day read from a teleprompter while presenting television audiences with an inoffensive visage, worked less for more? No; he’s worked more and gone further into debt for less.

Still, the last sanctioned form of bigotry, that against him (provided he’s white, and a he, of course) will be the redoubt sought by our desperate ruling caste. Someone will be blamed for the coming degradation in our prospects and standard of living. In another time it might have been minorities and immigrants. We always make the mistake of fighting the current war as the last, thus the endless evocations of the Great Depression now. Likewise, some will compel us to tilt at the windmill of a racial, fascist reaction. Some of them will be deluded; others will merely be resourceful.

And resourceful they have been. At some point it became something of a scandal to be too white; maybe it was when a photo of three firefighters at Ground Zero made a perfect image to be cast in bronze but for their inconvenient accuracy as a racial sampling of the fallen. The diverse racial makeup of the new first family is proclaimed the new standard, and we are cued to shudder at the thought of reverting to our dismal past.

This declaration of a new model of superiority would be more bearable if it wasn’t just (in its least destructive aspect) one more impingement on merit; but the reality that it marks out for exclusion the majority of families in this country (for being insufficiently integrated, though I’m certain we’re not about to begin calling groups to task for being uniformly non-white) seems not merely bigoted (which it very much is) but mad. I’m just retrograde enough to cling to that quaint notion of equality that has been so much bandied about during this week’s festivities, just so lacking in sophistication to get the impression the references now to color of skin and content of character mean precisely the opposite of the words expressed.

But that noble ideal, having been too long useful to the corrupt, too often resorted to by the craven, has, in a remarkably similar fashion, been as devalued through overindulgent minting as our monetary currency. It’s now as cheaply produced and disposable as those “collectible” Obama coins and plates we see advertised on television (and made in China).

But there is more than absurdity here. There is also the deliberate stoking of fear and anger; the purposeful manipulation of white neurosis and black grievance, all so a man, and his attendant factional allies, can gain power claiming an almost superstitious capacity to allay these things (to “heal”). An act (in the theatrical sense) of dubious legitimacy and responsibility. This is the sinister underside to the mass reverie (and there’s always a sinister underside to mass reverie) about President Obama’s “historic” ascension. This is the leer beneath his already iconic smile. But, if your conditioning against crimethink hasn’t already caused you to reject me out of hand for somehow wandering into the political minefield of race, this brings us to the second contradiction in the president’s inaugural address for which I will, next time we meet, offer one last lonely jeer lost amidst the adulatory crowd–his avowal to unencumber science in public policy.

Make Believe and Reality

Last summer, as Barack Obama directed the subtle intimidation of fawning European crowds (millions of charisma-intoxicated Germans can’t be wrong!) at those Americans still retaining the quaint notion presidential elections are domestic affairs not subject to global opinion, at least one of his acolytes in the media here in the formal remnant of the United States gushed that Senator Obama had thereby assumed the leadership role vacated by President Bush–by acquiring the geopolitical equivalent of an impressive TVQ score. “Power begets more power, absolutely” Mr. Rich enthused, apparently without irony.

We’ll leave aside for the moment the interlocutor’s widely shared confusion–that President Bush does, or that President Obama can be expected to, maintain a leadership role that is more substantial than ceremonial. The inverse relationship between the freedom of action afforded a president and the power vested in the executive office continues to grow, along with the complexity of the job and Congress’ by now institutional cowardice. Likewise the relationship between the caliber of man drawn from the electable and the reverential expectations we have of the office. For this we have only ourselves to blame. Remarkable leaders are possible only by astounding coincidence in this environment, and they will not be fashioned out of creative desperation (witness the fiction of President Bush’s post-9/11, thrust-upon greatness).

Of course, before Barack Obama’s world tour touched down amid the automatic adulation of the children and the childlike of Europe, he’d already performed a much smaller gig in front of a tougher crowd in Israel, where he dutifully asserted that any amount of force (or US munitions) Israel deems necessary to deter Hamas’ crude rocket attacks is justified, because he has children of his own (the children of Gaza, and how their deaths might perpetuate the cycle of violence–something the president-elect has at least feigned awareness of in the past–would not be allowed to complicate this simple calculus). Yes, he doesn’t really believe this, he was just saying–which is precisely the point. Even now, three weeks before the nation changes administrations in a state of bewildering economic and geopolitical crisis, the next president of the United States has little experience beyond just saying.

That rhetorical bet of last July is now being called, before the president-elect has even sat at the table in earnest, as sanction for a gruesomely disproportionate military response leveled upon an all but powerless adversary. The precocious senator, having grown used to posturing before people intoxicated by the imagined wisdom inherent in his mulatto moral superiority, and having his elegant vapidities received as profundities, has forgotten, or never properly learned, that words have meaning. Of course he’s not alone; we’ve all forgotten this. Barack Obama wouldn’t be possible otherwise.

More to the point, this man who’s made a religion of power (with which he has, like the born-again Christian and his savior, a close personal relationship), has ascended with such absurd ease and rapidity to its pinnacle he hasn’t had the opportunity to develop sufficient respect for its consequences. His make-believe of last summer, playing at global “leadership”, is suddenly harsh reality. Israel’s hard bargainers weren’t just looking for him to genuflect properly (this much is to be expected), but were looking for something a little more concrete. Obliterate the Gazan ghetto with America’s finest military hardware before an outraged world, burning through American soft power as rapidly as we expend her munitions? Yes we can!

So the presumption and airs of that heady summer last are nowhere to be found as the president-elect ducks questions on his way from gym to golf course, his sudden shyness papered over by embarrassing beefcake shots. “One president at a time” is how the dodge is put into words, even as Israel’s actions and Ehud Barak’s assertions, placing limitations upon the incoming administration with the complicity of the current one, reveal it for what it truly is, capitulation to a forced reality. The economic crisis warranted no such respectful inaction, but rather haste in supporting the status quo; Obama’s duck-and-cover in this instance is really the same thing after all, reassurance to the players upon which the new president’s cherished power is utterly dependent that he will not step out of line. As for that much-hyped esteem which the rest of the world so cheaply bestowed on our frail young prince, it will wear out as quickly and to the same disappointment of any cheap purchase if Mr. Obama doesn’t redeem it with real, yeah, “change”.

MoveOn.matrix

How they acquired my email in the first place isn’t hard to imagine; sign an online petition against the war in Iraq, or any of the Bush administration’s associated constitutional transgressions, and voila,you’re one more iota in a vast database of email addresses that is the centerpiece of Barack Obama’s vaunted Internet armada. You think you’re doing your modest patriotic part, and before you know it you’re swept up into the seedy vastness of–check disgust–political organization.

I’ve had a similar experience once before: feeling flush and generous, I handed what I thought was a soliciting beggar what I thought was a dollar (it was a ten), and he pressed into my palm a piece of crack cocaine. Reflecting on this later, I was impressed with the speed and ease of this unintentional transaction (a crack dealer of crack); McDonald’s has nothing on our neighborhood cocaine derivative vendors–and they would never have accepted my explanation of misunderstanding with a prompt refund. Localism proves out again!

I am tempted to embellish this history with its logical comedic-dramatic progression, my arrest and detention for possession; now that would be a story. If you witness me doing this at some point in the future, please keep it under your hat. If one can “print the legend” sometimes to keep the ennui of everyday life bearable, an occasional fabricated farce, provided it’s consistent with the general absurdity of our existence, seems almost mandatory.

But to return from the crack trade to the more distasteful subject of political action: Being naive and always a bit behind the curve I assumed that the only decent thing would be that the emails on behalf of Candidate Obama would end with the ascension of President-elect Obama. The campaign would demobilize, like a victorious army; the activist organizations would resume activism on behalf of goals, not on behalf of an administration, or a personality. Yeah, I’m a little slow that way.

I still hold out hope for the media. Sure, Chris Matthews embodied the MSM’s posture perfectly, if a little too frankly for his more subtle peers, by immediately renouncing his journalistic obligations to declare his commitment to the “success of this administration” in these desperate times–but that was no change in policy, just a shift in loyalty. This same “lead, follow or get out of the way” orientation is how he and others, flush with post-9/11 patriotic hysteria, shepherded the public along from paranoia to the present occupation of Iraq. First terrorism, now the economy: it’s one crisis after another prompting our powdered and rouged television class to repeatedly desert their journalistic posts, and surprisingly few still have made the connection between the crises and their widespread lack of professional integrity.

But no; even as Barack Obama assembles the Clinton Cabinet, the emails not only keep coming they keep praising the arrival of Change. So far, this change in government is beginning to resemble that bad old joke: An army unit has been in the field for months without hot water. The CO calls the men together and declares: “Men, our hygiene has become appalling. I hereby order each one of you to change his underwear. Jones, you change with Smith. Jackson, you change with Kowalski…” etc.

MoveOn, one of my new imaginary friends, had always existed for me as a sort of punchline. In appropriating an expression of impatience, they took for a name an appeal to expedience over the difficulties of constitutionalism, debate, compromise, thought. Surely, no one could take an organization so named seriously. It’s like calling yourself “TalkToTheHand.org”. But the joke’s on me, as usual. MoveOn moves, and emails me, on, and on.

But they have brilliantly, if inadvertently, captured the inherent corruption of the activist movement with their moniker. Things need to get done, or so a group, often standing to reap wealth or power thereby, determines, and reflection is the enemy of action (see Iraq War debate, 2003). Truth is not the point. Haste is. One cannot act on behalf of “progress” and not thereby act against popular will, legality, moderation, democratic process. These things cannot be allowed to impede “progress”, whatever it may be (and tomorrow it will be something unrecognizable as such today), in the minds of some. Curious how quickly the liberal forgets his mistress subjectivity, she who magically trumps morality as an idea or any comparative value between cultures, to shower absolute objective value upon that obscure object of desire, Progress.

None of this is to deny the legal–and cultural–degradation inflicted on us by the self-styled “conservative” still sulking about the White House as of this writing. Look to those who promoted this walking, talking absurdity if and when Barack’s legions set about dismantling that inconvenient impediment to Progress, the Constitution. There are no heroes in this piece that is the present.

The ACLU, on the other hand, seems to get it–in their emails they propose how they will hold the incoming administration to its promises to reverse constitutional degradations. The success or failure of Barack Obama’s administration, as any, is incidental to the rule of law and standards of decency; movementarians, of any stripe, will always invert this order, and always on the slim promise of small change for the better somewhere down the line (witness conservatives who’ve thrown their lot in with Bush/Rove).
Principle should trump Personality, for a change. But for the MoveOn.cyborgs and the Perpetual Campaign, it’s all about promoting the administration and the ambitious non-entity at its center onto which they project their flattering illusions and petty bigotry. Neo has penetrated the Matrix, and now come the pointless and pretentious sequels. We’re in another Matrix! All is a Matrix! Cue Rage Against the Machine, ad nauseum.

Deconstructing Barry

(And the Myth of White Racism)

She had seen May Day parades when people were still enthusiastic or did their best to feign enthusiasm…As a group approached the reviewing stand, even the most blasé faces would beam with dazzling smiles, as if trying to prove they were properly joyful, or, more precisely, in proper agreement.
(…)
Kitsch causes two tears to flow in quick succession. The first tear says: How nice to see children running on the grass! The second tear says: How nice to be moved, together with all mankind, by children running on the grass! It is the second tear that makes kitsch kitsch.
–Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

You know he talk so hip he’s twistin’ my melon man…
Don’t you know he can make you forget you’re the man?
–Happy Mondays, Step On

The appeal of Barack Obama is best understood as kitsch.

The Obama campaign, as any, is more a work of art than of argument. It is (present tense, for it continues) a narrative blend of hagiography, historical fiction, mythology and propaganda. Like any work of art it may blend various genres and themes, but it is ultimately of one specific type. All political movements rely more or less on kitsch, but the Obama campaign, stripped to its essence, is kitsch.

This phenomenon-as-political movement is a masterwork of improvisational, interactive environmental theatre, with the electorate as its participatory audience. But a political campaign is no mere work of fancy or fabrication. When power is the end for which the narrative is the means, one cannot refuse his role in the play, even in opposition. We are all players now in Barry’s melodrama.

What do I mean herein by “kitsch”? Not the common usage that has rendered the word little more than a synonym for “inferior.” Nor any of the only slightly narrower meanings of unsophisticated, anachronistic, culturally irrelevant or crude. I do not mean merely that it is sentimental; though sentiment is its active ingredient. I refer specifically to that self-conscious and obliquely self-referential aspect of kitsch; of kitsch as the celebration of a given sentiment as its own end and justification, as an ennobling thing it its own right. The quote above captures it better than I can. In that part of Kundera’s book devoted to the subject he notes how ubiquitous and permanent kitsch is, how inseparable it is from the whole of culture and human existence. The author was not only outlining kitsch’s role in the totalitarian movement that looms grey and dour over his story, but also conceding the kitsch element in that story.

Content does not make kitsch; kitsch is in the nature of our relationship to content. Kitsch is the self-indulgent celebration of one’s capacity to feel and emote, through the deliberate suppression of doubt, nuance and skepticism. Kitsch is not the artist saying “behold this truth”, but the audience prompted to declare, “behold our love of truth.” Kitsch is the saccharine film soundtrack that drops in before anything has actually occurred, cuing us to emotion. For the acolytes of the Obama campaign the kitsch element can be summed up as, “behold the depth of our feeling.”

This is kitsch’s appeal, directly to our vanity. Even as we seem to be drowning in the language of its opposite and mortal enemy, irony, kitsch is everywhere. Even our gangsta rappers indulge in kitsch; they are among the worst offenders. The unfortunate rap theme written for Barack Obama was a prime example of kitsch, by a familiar practitioner thereof.

Kitsch’s prevalence and permanence are so great that unravelling it from the totality of our experience is daunting, and most will (perhaps with more wisdom than this author) come to sigh that it is “everywhere” before moving on to more productive pursuits. This is unfortunate, because that very same prevalence is precisely why an understanding of kitsch is so important. There is no sensible “anti” kitsch position, as if we will eradicate the ineradicable. It would be unfortunate if one political faction or other were to successfully fashion it into an adjectival anchor to weigh down their adversaries, creating a new term of calumny to go with “fascist”, “communist”, “racist”, et cetera ad nauseum. But we’re well served in better understanding it, so as to better understand ourselves and that vast area of effective human behavior that is neither wholly rational nor studiously moral, but desperately and sometimes dangerously emotional.

What makes kitsch bad art, its unearned catharsis, makes it the most effective demagogy. It requires nothing of us other than acquiescence to the sentiment. Because kitsch is the willed absence of doubt, it acts as a neatly closed emotional system, impervious to skepticism and hostile to introspection–herein lies its political genius. Through propaganda, kitsch arouses revolutionary ardor and imposes totalitarian control. Kitsch fires up the rabble and cows the mass.

Those few of us left capable of viewing the Obama phenomenon with detachment will recognize its seductive offer of an easy, celebratory catharsis, its encouragement and indulgence of the individual’s sense of moral superiority. The effectiveness of this appeal is manifest in the adoring crowds, in the deliberately incurious and uncritical appreciation of the candidate and now president-elect that continues. In the candidate’s unspoken collusion with the media to equate his personal ambition with the civil rights movement itself and to subsequently equate any rejection of the candidate’s race-based appeal with a rejection of his race, holding criticism of the campaign guilty of bigotry until deemed innocent.

In the wake of electoral victory, the rhetorical purges would begin within hours. One such story in the New York Times portrayed Southern white support for John McCain not as merely as evidence of the declining influence of these voters–but assigned a reverse cause-and-effect, ascribing their declining influence (as a sort of punishment) to their resistance to Barack Obama.
They were presented with candidate brandishing his race as a value–a moral superiority–in and of itself. They rejected the race-based candidate, voting more than usual for the nationalist Republican over the liberal Democrat. The charge then follows that they’ve rejected Obama entirely because he’s black (not because he runs, almost entirely, as black; needless to say, any automatic support accruing to Obama for his race is, curiously, anti-racist); of course, this is then fed back into the system, as proof of the desperate need of the candidate, to rout once and for all this “racism”.

In the case of Obama, kitsch appeal operates at a heightened advantage, cuing a long-conditioned response in whites inclined toward critical self-examination and conspicuous expressions of tolerance. This practice has always come with an expectation of change, of eventual improvement in relations among the races generally, between blacks and whites specifically. This subconscious expectation of a final conclusion is borne of our familiarity with the cinematic arc of film.

But after decades of unprecedented state action and an opening up of the culture none would have imagined possible, the foreseen idyll of perfect racial equality and its ensuing harmony (the kitsch promise), has faded into the harsh reality of a stubborn inequality. Inequality increasingly reveals itself as the predictable result of a society unprecedented in both its fairness and ethnic diversity.

But this cannot be said. Even as blacks gain cultural influence disproportionate to their numbers but not talents, they continue to lag in the professions and business pursuits. Meanwhile, other minority groups advance disproportionately as well up through the ranks of society. The rate of change, the opening up of opportunity in a society that not long was as segregated as the rest of the world remains to this day is nothing short of revolutionary. There is no historical precedent for America; yet, the more liberal, the more meritocratic our society, the deeper the resentment of inequality–and, contrary to our hoary egalitarian assumptions, we can expect increasing material inequality as the result of increasing equal opportunity. We have the unfortunate task of reconciling a diverse and restive population to this humiliating reality. Strategies are subconsciously developed.

The historical reality and present romance of black suffering in America assigns a moral premium to blackness; not unrelated, the general appetite for and fascination with black culture assigns it a cultural premium. Routinely, a thing is dismissed as inferior or, yes, derided as kitsch, if it is deemed too “white.” All of this serves to heighten, in the projecting mind of the audience, the candidate’s natural gifts, and assign others not in evidence, such as wisdom.
Whether he understands it or not, it was in pursuit of these structural advantages that Barack Obama abandoned his origins and embarked on his anthropological excursion into the heart of African America.

Instinctively the ambitious sense the path of power. The dirty little open secret of Obama’s personal narrative is the “multicultural” candidate’s lack of curiosity in things beyond the narrow and provincial Ghetto Gatsby identity he’s crafted for himself. Quite contrary to the attempts of some to portray the man as foreign and Muslim because of his time in Indonesia, what’s truly striking about that is his apparent–or deliberate–indifference to the experience.

It was there that he and his feminist mother were exposed to a stark counter-example to the West; it was there, not in the United States, that he was bullied for being different. It was from there that he was sent home to take advantage of the vastly superior opportunities and advantages of home and, eventually, to entrance earnest white liberals relating the emotional torment induced in him by the outrages inflicted on a Black Man in America: someone asked to touch his hair, his grandmother feared an intimidating black beggar (who “could have been my brother” he narrates, impervious to the irony that this man for whom he imagines a comfortably remote brotherhood is assaulting an actual relative, for whom the young Barack apparently felt not a moment’s protectiveness). For Barack Obama, Indonesia and Hawaii look great on a resume, but their experience and contrasts aren’t of much practical use.

In light of this, his attitude toward conservative whites, his charges of narrow bigotry and provincialism, would be found laughably oblivious if not outrageous placed in their proper context, but one gets the impression he doesn’t truly understand the nature of his metamorphosis, of his ambition and rise. The language, for him as well as his acolytes, is too seductive; its effect too successful; its rewards, he has brilliantly demonstrated, only as limited as the ambition and energy that harness it.

Examining the phenomenon one is struck–and perhaps reassured–at how unexceptional, outside of ambition, is that which we know of Barack Obama. Having deliberately veiled himself in a cliche, welcoming the projection onto him of the neuroses and hopes of a restive nation, he is like the void in the eye of the storm.

In this environment the convention that structural disadvantages and white attitudes account for the lack of black success in business and the professions, for disproportionate rates of incarceration and poverty, for the whole host of ills for which each white individually is daily hectored to feel responsibility, as a feature of collective guilt, is not merely unsupportable, it’s absurd.

The more evident this becomes the more fiercely defended the taboo against questioning collective guilt as a model for race relations. The absence of comprehensive societal equality requires ever more fanciful explanations; ever greater expressions of commitment to equality of results are required of public servants; ever greater denunciations of a nation that has taken historically unprecedented actions to achieve it. This is the pathological behavior of a neurotic society. The nation yearns for a climax, a final act of absolution. It stubbornly recedes the more we strive for it. Thus Barack.

To maintain the taboo, any resentment of this must be equated with bigotry; skeptics are ostracized and deprived of status. Propagandists distinguish themselves fashioning rationales and assigning blame for a distressing reality. In America the civil rights movement has made the familiar trek from revolution to totalitarianism. Kitsch has sustained it on that journey.

Of course in this cultural milieu, adopting the collective guilt model so regularly and inelegantly expressed in such arenas as Barack Obama’s former long-time church, “whiteness” as an ineradicable sin in itself is a necessity. The candidate himself stated as much clearly when describing slavery as “America’s original sin”, as if the institution originated and continues here, rather than in Africa. He also means, more to the point, “cardinal sin”. There is no final absolution for white America, just perpetual contrition. The fact that this immodest and wildly presumptuous phrase isn’t controversial in the least, acquiesced to by silent consensus, is cultural sanction itself. The Caucasian holds second class moral status. Whiteness is the “human stain” of a stigmatized identity. This is too valuable a bludgeon for those who wield it (ironically they are mostly white elites, mobilizing minority resentment to bring their white opponents to heel) to be surrendered without a fight.

Ritual condescension of offended identity groups is a requirement of polite society and public stature. To escape a censure that grows harsher the more hollow the condescension becomes, whites individually and as a group place a premium on the achievements of prominent blacks, who must be found and promoted to assuage and take advantage of this. This is the environment Barack Obama burst upon with his 2004 speech to the Democratic national convention.

Barack Obama effortlessly assumes the mantle of grievance for the greatest sins of the nation–slavery, segregation, disenfranchisement. But, contrary to the habitual assumption, his unique personal history gives him not a greater understanding of this history, having neither the typical black American nor typical white American experience, but a lesser understanding. Barack Obama stood outside of this epic dynamic, looking on with envy. His choice of a fabricated identity on one side of it should disabuse us of the assumed inherent misery and unfairness imposed upon black America–no one is so fortunate to be born an American than an African American. There is no cachet in being white.

For Barack, American race relations is a cherished romance that became one with his considerable ambition. This romance will not be sacrificed now. Observers silently take solace in the assumed falsity of his black struggle. About the time of the election a prominent political reporter could be found on a television interview program, with perhaps unintentional frankness, trumpeting Obama as an African American without the African American experience and, more to the point, anger; touting, to put it crudely, his inauthentic blackness.

For a candidate to arrive on the scene as a sort of prefabricated historical figure, for his ascension to be defined as an act of justice and absolution; in light of the grand myth of the civil rights movement in America and the sheer power of this narrative–the wonder of Barack Obama is not that he is here, but that it has taken this long for him to arrive.

The news reports following the candidate’s triumph proclaimed the fall of a “barrier.” But the barrier had faded long ago–in fact it was over ten years ago the nation was so transfixed by an African American public figure, Colin Powell, for the very same reasons it’s now enamored of Barack Obama, that at one point it seemed he could have chosen between the presidential candidacy of either political party–this before his political affiliation was confirmed. In fact, the automatic goodwill bestowed on that man has still not dissipated, despite the fact his personal career of mediocrity in powerful positions has only been interrupted by his implication in the misinformation campaign preceding the Iraq war.
Barack Obama did not “smash a barrier”, as the headlines trumpeted. Barack Obama was carried along by a powerful force to where he is. Barack Obama was inevitable.

We’re probably fortunate it is this man, and not some other–probably because he seems decent enough, and relatively free of corruption for an ambitious politician; this of course we’ve taken on faith, as part of the deal. He may even prove capable.

It is not entirely an earnest if misguided aspiration to justice from which arises this absurdity; it is also a form of chauvinism. It comes from the cloistered sense that history begins with and is confined to America. This truncated historical context is accompanied by a shrinking of the present’s context, ignoring the example of every other nation in the world that must grapple with the challenges of diverse populations and tattered histories. The libel compares the nation to an idyll that has never existed, not to the world that is and has been; it’s a further outrage that the imagined idyll is born of a distinctly Western and Judeo-Christian concept of equality before God, regardless of race. The charge that “America is a racist country” is meaningless placed outside of its proper context: as compared with what other country? Likewise the hoary fashion and shallow conceit condemning Western culture as a whole. In America we alternate between ignorance and disdain not only for the past but for the world beyond our borders–even, or especially, those who routinely condemn America for its racism.

Contrary to the mass conceit of the Obama campaign, it is more this chauvinism and not a post-racial, global consciousness upon which Barack Obama depends. Escaping us is the irony of this moral bludgeon being wielded by a man far more likely to be descended from Kenyan (as well as European) slave traders than black American slaves. Again, there is no environmental history of blackness for Barack to call upon, only the birthright bestowed by his transitory father; only, in the end, the color of his skin and the features of his face. Barack Obama is a white liberal living out the exquisite dream of actually being black. More relevantly, he is an ambitious politician taking advantage of it.

To be successful a campaign must identify itself with and within a single, all-encompassing myth. The McCain campaign attempted to make itself one with the myth of national greatness, through the personal narrative of heroism of its candidate. The Obama campaign, more successfully, made itself one with the myth of civil rights. Ultimately the point is to present the candidate as the living human embodiment of Providence. In a post-religious age, politics and celebrity fill the evangelistic void. Personality captures power and familiar interests and factions advance behind this wedge.

By myth I do not mean illusion. Fundamental truths are revealed to us through the myths we hold dear. The fundamental truths our candidates sought to co-opt this year were the necessity of love of country in one instance, the justice of equality before the law in the other. But through the vulgarizing exploitation of the ambitious, a nation’s founding mythology becomes flattery and demagogy, mere caricature. The fundamental parent truths underlying our mythology are difficult, humbling and, perhaps most relevant to this, limiting. Through political expedience our founding myths are becoming overladen with contradiction, no longer recognizable to us.

The disappointments in store will reveal to us that a nation is not sustained by wealth, or power, or even democratic process, but the binding power of a fundamental truth that, unlike the flattery of kitsch, demands something of us and guarantees nothing. What we may be witnessing now is our degenerate end as a people that brandishes as a weapon a mythology it no longer believes.

Sunday Sermon

Post formerly in this space (of 11/22, “Deconstructing Barry”) removed by author (update 12/1: reprinted above). Thanks to the commenters here and the few over at AmCon (where it has also been deleted, by me) who got it and were intelligent and fair in either criticism or praise. To the style-critics, I’ll let you know when I tire of my usual shtick and start crafting punchy two-paragraph missives on what Blogopundit said in reaction to Instablogger’s critique of Snarkette’s refutation of Blogopundit’s…etc. I’ll have to get over my shyness and revulsion regarding circle-jerks, both real and analogous.

The blog environment is wonderful in a lot of ways; in others it is profoundly depressing. It’s beyond me how any idea, small or large, ingenious or insipid, being instantly pounced on by the glib attentions of the mob, will survive in the future. Everyone checking in with their opinion, mistaking the right to it with the need for it; as if everything is to be put to an immediate referendum, and thus quickly approved or dispensed with. My God, how we disdain doubt and cower before the merest hint of contradiction. Stray, dissident thoughts are pounced on like fumbles, disappearing beneath the desperate mass of converging egos. I’m rambling, but suffice it to say: not everything has to be neat, practical, clear-cut and promptly resolved. That first impulse is always less thoughtful than what comes in time. But we all behave now as if time is nearly out–even though, or perhaps because, technological innovation gives us more and more of it. This leisure of time and freedom is new to humanity, and we sometimes embarrass ourselves. We need to start acting like we’ve been in the end zone before.

The transitory nature of the blog post, and the rapid, coalescing migrations of the internet’s vast audience, with its here-today gone-tomorrow attentions, makes for writing both too glib and too plain. Above all it’s introduced an element of desperation into our discourse. The blogosphere resembles a depression-era dance marathon.

It’s also created a whole new reader; he who mistakes his lack of concentration for authorial incoherence, his shortened attention span for your long-windedness, his inflexible and unsubtle intellect for conviction. Do not humor him. Taunt him mercilessly until he shapes up or ships out for whatever dull, reassuring confines he may find among his like-minded.
As for the piece that was here originally, its only real flaw was in being over-edited, not overwritten; it was about half as long as it should have been. My sin was self-consciously editing it down, and cross-posting it where it didn’t fit. It will be back, longer and bellicose as ever. What can I say? If you want someone to write for you the way a military unit marches, the blogosphere is overrun with this sort of thing. Several such authors are two clicks out by way of the blogroll to the right. But if this trend keeps up we’ll all be communicating in monosyllabic grunts before long. I understand the elegance of minimalism in fiction, but there is no real place for it in the essay. That’s not to say that a piece shouldn’t be properly lean; this isn’t the same thing.

As for military drill, I’ve done it. It has a certain appeal, especially for someone who’s always felt awkward and ill-suited for society. “One big heel” our drill instructor used to enthuse, compelling us to stay in step. Sometimes we marched right up onto the sealed concrete between two barracks, and that big heel would echo off all of that cool, flat stone about us in a positively intoxicating fashion. You don’t need me to tell you how dangerous a thing that is, how much it says about us. The converse of safety in numbers is danger outside of them.

Every profession, George Bernard Shaw said, is a conspiracy against the laity. Likewise, every organization is a conspiracy against the individual. Conspiracies we engage in against our autonomy. Necessary, but no less destructive (not always necessary, and rarely as necessary as any proposal to organize shrieks). If there’s to be any benefit for you and I in this gut-wrenching levelling of culture and society that now passes for modernity, this mindless, ongoing demolition project for which respectable opinion is forever scrambling to fashion rationales and contrive pretexts, it should be that we claim our rights as individual men in relation to the State and all those quasi-states and aspiring tyrannies–“movements”, organizations, activists. If we can’t keep them from pulling the rug of tradition and custom out from under us, if we can’t keep from doing it to ourselves in our infinite capacity for greed and blindness, at least perhaps we can resist the new hierarchies and oppressions the ambitious are fashioning for us. This is a salvage operation.

Never lament the state of this or that “movement”; it’s all a farce, a ruse for organizing us rubes. I have a few colorful suggestions for your various “movements.”

Contrary to our instinct, the result of democratization is not necessarily liberating. Quite the opposite. First ideas will be given no time or room to breathe, then they will simply start expiring in the womb. There is no true or lasting wisdom in mass opinion or consensus, just coercion of one sort or another. Only in solitude and reflection can one see beneath the sometimes mesmerizing reflection on the surface, to the murk beneath. There’s no guarantee of anything but satisfaction at having had the courage to look.
“Strike me, but listen!” Thucydides is said to have cried to a general who had raised his hand in outrage at an inconvenient truth. Well, curse yourself for doing it, but look.

Like mom used to say, having two ears and only one mouth means one should listen twice as much as he speaks; we all need to read more and write less.