Too Big to Bail

Some in clandestine companies combine;
Erect new stocks to trade beyond the line;
With air and empty names beguile the town;
And raise new credits first, then cry them down;
Divide the empty nothing into shares,
And set the crowd together by the ears.
–Daniel Defoe

Shana, they bought their tickets. They knew what they were getting into. I say, let ’em crash!
–Airplane!

It’s the end of the world as we know it, and I feel fine
—REM

The best way to destroy the capitalist system is to debauch the currency.
–Lenin

Correct Vladimir Ilyich above to read “debauch capital”–and it needn’t be the subversive effort of committed revolutionaries. Those who’ve debauched capital, replacing it with purely theoretic value dependent on nothing more concrete than faith in the inexhaustibility of greed, are, or imagine themselves to be, the most fervent capitalists of all. It takes either sociopathic oblivion or absolute faith in the infallibility of our system to do it this kind of damage; anything else leaves room for those undervalued resources, doubt and modesty–room for decency to latch on. Every calamity is particular to its time, and our time is peculiar for celebrating confidence as its own justification, not to be contingent upon anything so limiting as truth or coherence. We’ve made a faith of self-confidence and a superstition of positive thinking. Odd for such irreligious times; or not so much odd as inevitable.

But don’t chalk it up to the system or society; chalk it up to human nature. These competing means of ordering societies and economies that constitute the continuum from communism to capitalism are all just strategies to harness the power and mitigate the corruptions of human nature. Even our creativity has a dark underside, revealed whenever some human endeavor goes belly-up. Of course this sounds vaguely heretical to most on the right still, like suggesting tax rates can be too low or American power can be misguided. That a system is better than another doesn’t make it perfect (or, to put it another way, an end in itself). But the belief in the perfectibility of systems–like the perfectibility of man–is a thing that will always be with us, playing out its familiar cycle of enthusiasm and folly, ruin and revolution.

Our curious system of selectively unrestrained and selectively rigged capitalism has become capitalism sans capital–degenerate, you might say. Traders (if this is an accurate term–things have gotten so involved that one can’t be sure) are shamans of a sort, impressing everyone with the intricacy of their incantations. They bear a certain resemblance to postmodern literary theorists. The more opaque and dense their constructs the more successful they are, or were.

In fact these folks aren’t so different from each other; they form a class dominant in some ideally situated corner of society or the economy, and from this privileged perch leverage their influence. They are, above all, dismissive of limits and tradition, seeing them as outrageously repressive. They each create their own closed, self-referential systems, forbidding to those uninitiated in their arcane language. They share a similar disdain for both physical reality and conceptual morality, leaving them curiously untethered, floating in the ether of their theoretic gases. They are in denial of nature, appreciating it with neither a religious nor empirical point of view.

Of course if one denies the existence of nature, he denies the existence of human nature, and comes to believe that human behavior is infinitely malleable and predictable, if one only devises a sufficiently exhaustive theory of it. Funny how right and left meet out there, around their respective bends.

Hope and Hype

(minor clarification: “the Mortician” is David Axelrod, for his dour visage, not Ms. Obama)

Ah, it had nothing to do with Kennedy. Still, all that vigor disappeared once he found out he couldn’t get anything done.
–Mad Men

Events, dear boy, events.
–Harold MacMillan

To emerge sane from the recent party conventions and the endurance test of a campaign ahead of us, one must block out most television coverage, now a carnival sideshow more useful for the revelatory subtext of elite disconnect and desperation rather than as reportage or commentary. MSNBC, once their coverage degenerated into the equivalent of a high school clique war, had me tuning in just to see if Matthews and Olbermann would finally consummate their disdain in flailing, flinching combat. Alas, our powdered and pancaked schoolyard brawlers have been separated. I will have to recourse to imagining how it might have played: the sound of their coats rustling against their microphones, their heavy breathing and curses as they grapple, in the background the chant from the convention floor, U-S-A! U-S-A! U-S-A! Jarring cut to a patriotism-themed Chevrolet commercial.

Still the antics of our television journalists were dignified in comparison to the degenerate discourse that passed for political speech-making at the Republican convention. The great democratic experiment is destroying its laboratory. Such concentrated absurdity I can take only in very small doses. So I’m left deliberately ignorant of the polls or consensus regarding the political raffle, relying on my faulty impressions, which usually fail.

Nonetheless I’m increasingly convinced that Barack Obama is doomed to disappoint despite, if not partly because of, John McCain’s crass and corrupt attempt to trump the Democrats’ race card with his own gender card. I’m not sure it matters any more. I feel like Henry Kissinger watching the Iranians and Iraqis go at it, lamenting they can’t both lose, hoping for maximum carnage. Forget about lesser evils. The path of lesser evil has led us to the hell of mediocrity and corruption. I’m taking the advice of a bumper sticker I saw long ago, when things were nowhere near as bad: don’t vote, it only encourages them. But I reserve my constitutional right to indulge in America’s true pastime, complaint.

As for Senator Obama he projects, other than mediocrity made conspicuous by the media’s studiously averted gaze, uncertainty–if one only dare look. His selection of the buffoonish but “safe” Joe Biden (holding all the cards, he checks nervously) betrays his lack of confidence. He’s gotten way out in front of his plotted career trajectory, propelled there by a force he set in motion but now under its own creepy mass-delusional momentum. The man suggests something more than the usual politician’s insincerity. It’s there beneath the condescension of phony bipartisan comity and kitschy “eloquence”; his unsuitability to the task of taking the helm of a rudderless ship of state held in the aggregated current created by multiple corrupt factions. Does he hear the falls ahead?

Not only is the miraculous feat of racial unity his acolytes expect (bless their delusional hearts) impossible, but his actual goals, to the extent he has any beyond his cobbled together, platitudinous wish-list of a platform, are beyond the means of a government holding a ballooning debt obligation in an imploding economy (not to mention ever-expanding military commitments, guided by something bearing no resemblance to national interest, in a world hardening against us). Our politicians are promising change and change is coming, just not on their, or our, terms.

It’s the fear of change that motivates us, as always, despite the quadrennial phony demands for it. The public pretends it wants change and politicians pretend they can deliver it. Despite the mantra we, naturally, fear change, no matter how necessary.
Likewise, Barack Obama’s campaign is more nostalgic than forward-looking or reformist. The Democrats have the problem of complicity in the same criminal travesty that promises to return them to power. The time has come for a fundamental reorientation of foreign policy and public indebtedness, but the Democrats are as incapable of or unwilling to address these dangerously related issues as the Republicans. Aside from their disingenuous call to reform, their partly diversionary answer to our predicament is to revisit the now corrupt and anachronistic civil rights movement. It’s their strong suit after all. They’ve produced a sequel of their biggest hit. Much of the public and the political center is lining up to see it. It’s a heck of a lot less trying than a fundamental reconsideration of our role in the world.

Barack Obama is successful not because we despair for the state of race relations–quite the opposite. He’s successful because we wish to insulate ourselves with the comforting myth of the civil rights movement–because, contrary to the Democrats’ never-ending, opportunistic appeals to racial resentment and hysteria, legal equality and civil rights we do better than anyone else in the world. We do it so well we don’t know when to stop. We’ve decided it works for all ills and injuries, here applying it like a balm on a broken back, when the patient needs to be in traction. Combine it with our other obsessive compulsions, self-congratulation and promotion, and Barack Obama is inevitable.

9-11 broke our confidence and Iraq hasn’t, as hoped, repaired it. We want to subsume the criminal horrors of the war within a narrative of “victory”; we want the easy credit bacchanal to resume; we want cheap gas and cheap thrills; we want the world to recede back into the murk beyond the electronic ether of “reality” television (what an ironic concept); we want to continue to insulate and inoculate; above all, we want to feel good about ourselves. It’s a form of kitsch.

Politicians, with their monomaniacal ambition and endless rationalizations for the corruption, rapine and bloodshed they sometimes engage in and sometimes ignore, are alien creatures to the common man, but they’re the common man’s creations. They reflect back on us; they are the living embodiment of our decadence. And this year we are enraptured by two egos in possession of corpses channelling competing narratives of personal suffering and turmoil. It’s the first election of the Oprah era.
The Economist, achieving exquisite oblivion as only the combination of sophistication and convention can, recently ran a cover of our two presidential candidates under the banner,“America at its Best”. Let’s hope not.

The Democratic Party presents its candidate as the long awaited antidote to the timeless disease of racial strife. The party has so long told the lie, and acquired so many store front preachers of the false but profitable faith that arises from it–the lie being that racial discrimination and inequality are the distinct products of white imperfection (without irony), to be corrected by the stern hand of government intervention–that it has fallen for its own con, and is no longer in a position to manage it. There is no turning back now, and the aging party members hope that somehow, some way, it will all resolve peacefully and profitably. But an inherent contradiciton ultimately has to be resolved, and if your contradiction is that your demographic is inherently evil but you are not because you recognize it and wish to atone by force of law (you are one of the good ones), you may find yourself without a chair when this music stops (see Clinton, 2008). Perhaps this explains the appeal of the “Hope” mantra, all but chanted with closed eyes and palms turned heavenward.

The very resentments and passions Obama conjures threaten to consume him, whether in electoral defeat or in executive failure. Cold comfort can be taken in the fact that there really is only so much any president can do, despite the expansive powers of the office. We should turn the Klieg lights of celebrity away from candidates and spotlight those around them.

But the man is unsuited, despite all the cloying, conspicuous gushing of a press that retains its liberal bias only where it will do the most harm, so eager to praise the intelligence and character of a black figure, any black figure who doesn’t threaten to upset things too much and take his rhetoric too seriously. If it isn’t already a Chris Rock joke it should be, this impulse.
Of course Barack Obama does take his worst rhetoric seriously (what he modestly describes as the “big heart” forever in conflict with his political “hard head”–foist such megalomaniacal characters on yourself at your peril, America), but no one, not even his political opposition, wants to be caught noticing. The man’s reliance on forty-year old political assumptions indicates not just a disturbing radicalism but an adolescent intellect. But even in counting on his lack of sincerity–as witnessed by the Wright controversy–his admirers build on his myth.

The Obama phenomenon resembles an all-night group cocaine bender, with everyone blathering away, betraying and ignoring the same desperation evident behind the dilated pupils and in the cheaply conjured, shallow fraternity; loss in the election or failure in office will be the hard comedown of the following morning, with the sickly morning light coming through the blinds, when everyone realizes it’s over, that they’re not really going to go vacationing together next summer, all the talk now a bit embarrassing…

It seems it will all resolve in recrimination for the “racism” that just wouldn’t let America finally reconcile her history of slavery and segregation. The tantrums will be entertaining at least. I’m sure some have already dim outlines of their “America’s Shame Continues” pieces.

And it is a shame, what with the neocons on the other side (or, rather, more heavily represented on the other side); why not make the Great Gesture and get it over with, one is tempted to say, the inevitable disappointment when Obama and the Mortician move into their new digs and realize the place is haunted to the rafters and the closets all filled with skeletons. Let the people and all the earnest twenty-something keyboard hotshots get their first lesson that human nature, resentment, bigotry, etc will not be vanquished by token. Used to be we realized human imperfection wasn’t the province of governance but its confounding influence.

And who knows, Barack might prove capable of wise selection from the cacophony of competing voices and jockeying hangers-on, and might manage to restore some constitutional integrity, arrest or turn back some corrupting trends, despite the fact that in Chicago’s target-rich environment he always opted on the side of the Machine. And it is depressing how consistently he did.

Governer Palin (who, by the way, I like–for governor of Alaska) may be McCain’s gamble but it’s a gamble that promises (or threatens) to pay off big; every time Obama calls attention to her lack of heft he calls attention to his own, and an apparent inversion of his ticket’s arrangement in this regard. But my favorite line comes from Politico, touting Obama/Biden’s “forty years” of foreign policy experience–36 for Joe and four (rounding upwards) for Barack. Four years spent preparing this presidential run, as Obama himself noted would be necessary when asked about a possible presidential bid about the time he took the oath as a senator. He’s rightly called on his presumption, but the real problem is with the opportunists about him. There’s a charming, callow honesty to be found in the Senator’s written and spoken record, which constitutes an epic ode to power (his first book is almost entirely a paean to power, and how it is achieved) in stark contrast to his contortionist campaign; more evidence his success has overtaken his wildest dreams.

But I suspect the Wonder Brother will lose, because he has no business being president and it’s obvious (understanding the far more qualified candidate seems the far greater evil–and all that implies for the health of our system), leaving race relations rawer than ever, with Joe Lieberman as Secretary of State and Rudy Guiliani as Attorney General, God knows who else in the cabinet; meanwhile the party goes on at AEI, AIPAC, etc. As for us, we’ve run out of blow, and it’s getting light outside.

Palin Comparison

SPIVEY
Well, it’s a well-run campaign, midget’n broom’n whatnot.
ECKARD
Devil his due.
SPIVEY
Helluva awgazation.
JUNIOR
Say, I gotten idee.
ECKARD
What sat, Junior?
JUNIOR
We could hire us a little fella even smaller’n Stokes’s.
Pappy whips at him with his hat.
PAPPY
Y’ignorant slope-shouldered sack a guts! Why we’d look like a buncha satchel-ass Johnnie Come-Latelies braggin’ on our own midget! Don’t matter how stumpy! And that’s the g**damn problem right there – people think this Stokes got fresh ideas, he’s oh coorant and we the past.
–O Brother Where Art Thou?

Wikipedia and Google are working overtime this holiday weekend. I refuse to go there, just yet (well, once to find the proper pronunciation so I can go with my own cheesy play-on-name title). It’s enough that few of us knew who this person was until a few hours ago. That seems to be the issue here, though I suspect it will quickly cycle through the weekend news programs before they settle in, running the same few video loops over, and over, and over, searing some absurd image into our brains to God-knows-what effect; parsing down to absurdity the always overestimated electoral implications, desperately trying to factor in the tangibles of hairstyle and eye wear, speaking tenor and pitch, etc.

Everyone who is anyone seems by now in agreement that the presidency and thus the vice presidency should be about personality and perception, because that’s what television media is calibrated to deliver. The resemblance of political news to celebrity news has gone beyond deliberate to become unavoidable. Soon there will be no dividing line, and the non-telegenic will be barred from public service as if bound by physical deformity. We are now into our second and third generations of television journalists who deliberately feed the public superficial pulp; they are no longer capable of making the distinction themselves. This might explain their bemusement and occasional outrage at the blogs. Journalists don’t ask tough questions of leaders because they don’t want to get the public started. We could start asking tough questions of them.

Any contrarian voice against this order of things is probably the sort of eccentric character that still talks of enumerated constitutional powers and congressional declarations of war. Cut to Chris Matthews assessing how the new gal looks cradling an AR-15. At moments coverage may resemble fetishistic soft-core guns & girls pornography. This is the zeitgeist. We really deserve whatever deprivations come at this point.

As when George H.W. Bush chose the ill-prepared Dan Quayle (doing him no real favor in the process), John McCain has demonstrated a disdain for the office he covets and disregard for what might become of it, and the nation, in his absence. The process by which a VP pick is decided upon must resemble that much-parodied one by which film producers pitch to executives (“it’s ‘The Godfather’ meets ‘Driving Miss Daisy’ “): “we need to counter the other studio’s, er, party’s historical drama…it’s The Vagina Monologues meets Deadliest Catch.” At least Chris Matthews can swoon over a woman for a change.

Whatever may come, none can say it’s either unwarranted or surprising.

And the Uncle Tim Goes to…

I used to be disgusted
now I try to be amused
–Elvis Costello, The Angels Want to Wear My Red Shoes

In Slate’s unfortunately named “Big Idea” column, Jacob Weisberg, waving about the latest NY Times/CBS poll (PDF) like Joe McCarthy brandishing his list of names, campaigns for title of this season’s most conspicuously contrite white (a la Steve Sailer’s “Uncle Tim” sweepstakes) by pointing out that Racist White America is not singing along enthusiastically or harmoniously enough with the Obama fantasia (unlike the lockstep support and vicious turn against the Clintons of Black America, which is either an allowable double-standard or a post-racial phenomenon noticed only by, presumably, Racist Whites) and the unfortunate outcome of a McCain administration will not be the result of an unqualified candidate but of an unqualified people:

What with the Bush legacy of reckless war and economic mismanagement, 2008 is a year that favors the generic Democratic candidate over the generic Republican one. Yet Barack Obama, with every natural and structural advantage in the presidential race, is running only neck-and-neck against John McCain, a sub-par Republican nominee with a list of liabilities longer than a Joe Biden monologue. Obama has built a crack political operation, raised record sums, and inspired millions with his eloquence and vision. McCain has struggled with a fractious campaign team, lacks clarity and discipline, and remains a stranger to charisma. Yet at the moment, the two of them appear to be tied. What gives?

The “natural and structural” advantages are Obama’s “charisma”, celebrity, a tight campaign organization and a busload of money. We remain unconscionably non-responsive to the superficialities, and it must be you-know-what. John McCain may very well be the greater evil in this race, but to conclude that there’s no contest here, between a junior senator of no achievement beyond leveraging a well-received, high-profile speech into a presidential nomination (assuming we’re still capable of distinguishing between political maneuvering and actual governing) and a veteran senator and former congressman who nearly captured his party’s nomination eight years ago is like being the only pothead in the room and berating everyone else for not finding your new lava lamp mesmerizing.

If Barack Obama was willing to risk power to contrast himself with our current catastrophic drift in foreign policy this “all else being equal” argument might carry some weight. A more principled campaign, if one were still possible, would. The unfortunate fact is that the American public is only too willing to forget about Iraq as long as the “surge is working” narrative can be made plausible through the two-minute drill of their brief daily encounters with the news cycle–and Obama is playing directly to that. So Weisberg’s ilk is astounded that Interventionist Lite, offered by the Racial Candidate Lite, doesn’t automatically trump the wrinkly old white guy, and the wrinkly old white folks feel more comfortable with one of their own. The harder our priestly media class has to work to uncover “racism” the shriller they get.

The real tragedy is this is all leading, somehow, to a McCain presidency. We have bigger fish to fry than the red herring of Obama’s false promise of a “post-racial” future that is precisely the opposite of what he, and his class, desire, even if they thought it possible. His is a backward-looking appeal to racial guilt and the solidification of our current racial spoils system disguised as a march forward to reconciliation. It all increasingly seems destined to leave race relations rawer than ever, as evidenced by such as Weisberg’s childlike hope resolving in a tantrum of melodramatic despair (see below).

What Obama’s campaign is managing to do is convince people, with good reason, that racial resentment will be a feature of American life for a very long time. Of course, that was precisely the gist of Obama’s grand speech on race, in the appalling presumption of an obscenely privileged man berating the nation that privileges him for its “original sin” of slavery–only in America is Barack Obama’s campaign possible, and no need to worry Black America, it will never be enough. No one will ever ask you to forgive whites for their collective, historical guilt or relinquish your cherished romance of collective suffering, much less take note of the fact that no African population has ever had the power, freedom or opportunity that has been afforded African Americans. And why would Black America give up this advantage? I ask without irony or condemnation. It is mere human nature and no people in similar circumstances can be expected to behave differently. But I would be so very proud of a nation that at least made an effort to preserve its democratic republic and traditions, by, if ever so gently, acknowledging this reality.

Only in America is Barack Obama possible, indeed; no other nation is decadent enough to indulge in such absurdities. The pessimism and resentment infusing the Obama campaign is remarkable in light of the rhetoric. But the real tragedy is that the current crisis in America is no time for it. Obama seems destined to fail, largely because he has no business being president. It simply won’t be enough to point out that the current executive has no business being president either, so therefore we must be bigots for rejecting this one.

It’s unfortunate that so many Democrats decided they needn’t take their bright, shiny new candidate for a test-drive before nominating him, but if he is capable of repairing the damage of the Bush administration it will only be by some astounding, fortuitous coincidence. No argument is offered that he is capable, just reprobation for any who dare ask.

Barack Obama wants to be president because he wants to be president. John McCain, God help us, has some more specific ideas about what he will do with the office. It’s unfortunate that the Democrats’ answer to arguably the most disastrous administration in American history is a precocious political wonder they Hope will require little Change in the way things are done. But I’ll let Weisberg sum up the fatuity of it all:

Many have discoursed on what an Obama victory could mean for America. We would finally be able to see our legacy of slavery, segregation, and racism in the rearview mirror. Our kids would grow up thinking of prejudice as a nonfactor in their lives. The rest of the world would embrace a less fearful and more open post-post-9/11 America. But does it not follow that an Obama defeat would signify the opposite? If Obama loses, our children will grow up thinking of equal opportunity as a myth. His defeat would say that when handed a perfect opportunity to put the worst part of our history behind us, we chose not to. In this event, the world’s judgment will be severe and inescapable: The United States had its day but, in the end, couldn’t put its own self-interest ahead of its crazy irrationality over race.

“Crazy irrationality over race” indeed.
The first half of that remarkable paragraph is just the sort of appalling magical thinking that brings well deserved scorn upon the Obama campaign, which can be summed up thus: “here is a black candidate; reject him and you’re a bigot.” We are further chastised that the “the whole world is watching” expectantly. This bludgeon of an argument, so clumsily and creepily brandished in the unfortunate locale of Berlin, is rightly rejected. It’s a cheap trick and a disappointing response from the Democrats to the Bush catastrophe. But then that’s the point really; this is a bipartisan tragedy, and before the neocons broke out into the open field after 9/11 they patiently ground out the short yardage through administrations Democratic and Republican alike, and they have never been without blockers from the liberal interventionist line.
Another problem with the Great Gesture thinking regarding Obama is that it is contradicted repeatedly by the candidate, again, openly stated in his much lauded and little studied speech on race. There is a thinly veiled threat beneath it all, as evidenced by Weisberg’s near panic about “the world’s judgement” and “the United States had its day”. It may very well be we’ve had our day, but I submit that the bizarre phenomenon of Barack Obama is evidence of that decline, not our only hope of escape. Of course this is what makes it so depressingly just another aspect of our masturbatory national pastime of self-flattery. Barack is here to make us feel better about ourselves without really trying to better ourselves. No wonder Oprah loves him.

Weisberg marvels at white “America’s curious sense of racial grievance”, citing the fact that twenty-six percent of white Americans answered that they have at one time or other “felt discriminated against”; presumably he will only be satisfied when the one hundred percent of them that are overtly discriminated against via a complex of federal and state law and regulation (that Barack Obama enthusiastically supports) are cowed into answering in the negative, or accepting the increasingly fanciful arguments that discrimination is not discrimination when it is codified into law and directed against the majority (how this will all work when whites constitute a plurality is anyone’s guess, but judging by the subject herein, I wouldn’t place any bets on that demographic shift bringing us into the sunlit open of a “post-racial” future where all claims are put to rest). I used to be disgusted…

Fragmentary Grenade

The democratization of society (not to be confused with the democratization of politics or governance) brings about the democratization of culture; the democratization of culture, in stigmatizing the distinction between high and low art, destroys high art. It destroys the very idea of high culture. We don’t merely disdain it; we are no longer capable of it. Ironically, the democratization of culture rigorously oppresses its highest expression–from which our democratized present sprang.

Yet the base material of humanity does not change; we are not significantly different from our near forebears of recorded history. The talents and passions remain the same; the media and conventions for their expression have changed drastically. The outlets are more numerous and the audience more vast; the barriers are fewer and less effective. But the barriers that kept out also kept in, channeling and cohering; the limitations of convention and standards refined the arts and also had the effect of remorselessly selecting and deselecting a creative elite. There is no crucible now for either creating this elite group or refining their art, even if the idea of refinement itself were not already discredited. Within the more strict limitations of a given medium and the cultural whole this system–which, by way of its severity, used the artist as a medium for an idea as much as the artist used his particular medium to express the idea–high art was created, and the Western idea became the highest expression of humanity, through painting, literature and music unmatched before or since.

Western culture refined the idea of the autonomous individual; “personality” was born here. The cinematic close-up is its ultimate expression, a study of human nature both unforgiving and worshipful, a realism that goes beyond the perfect representation attempted by pre-photography portraiture–“more real than real”. The camera is both a perfectly transparent vehicle for portraying human expression and a distillation of it into transcendence. A thing cannot be put on that great big screen and not glorified. Cinema is what’s left of high culture, but the demands of commerce and the general vulgarization of society mean that it cannot but speak the common language of low art. It’s a sort of schizophrenia.

But the Western idea of the individual was born in the sin of its fatal contradiction, of the ultimate irreconcilability of absolute personal autonomy with social harmony; between the distinctly Western individualism expressed and the punishing requirements elite standards placed on the individual.
Personality is eventually lost in the flattening, liquefacting mass of popular culture, where discernment is apostasy and even the president of the United States is an affable vulgarian. We are coming upon something representing our primitive origins, a classless, unindividuated mass of humanity that crushes the individual. An Eastern idea sagely warned us of this inevitability, popularly expressed as “what goes around comes around.” The age of high tech primitivism is upon us, replete with ritual sacrifices and mass violence–all safely subsumed within a bloodless virtual, electronic popular culture. It will be both antiseptic and gory. Our capacity for cruelty and violence, a near constant of human behavior, is both aroused and sated within the virtual realm, where it is safely contained as long as societal order is maintained. How durable societal order is, how sound its balance, is a thing we likely can only know by its loss.

We also created the idea of the Idea.Attendant upon this was the discovery of Truth, as a real and discernible thing, of a physical reality indifferent to our passions and desires. Truth beyond beauty and will. Truth will not be argued away or willed into conformance; it can only be unearthed. This is just too much for us. In our vanity we turn upon it; futilely we attempt to draw it back down, to rip it to shreds, to obliterate it. This is the nature of our self-referential, oppressively popular, anti-elitist cultural moment. Despite its hostility toward religion, postmodernism is inherently, supremely religious–in the sense that we currently understand the word. It would be more accurate to describe it as superstitious or pagan–a pre-religious and pre-ideational order, where sentiment and subjectivity ruled, and these were judged worthy by virtue of their desirability and usefulness to a dominant order, and where observations or evidence troubling that order needn’t be suppressed because the necessary idea of truth had yet to be revealed.

But of course we can’t go back–the cat’s out of the bag–we didn’t create something after all as much as we discovered something and set it loose upon the world. We cannot succeed in displacing the Western idea–it displaced us from the moment we willed it into expression. It will pass on, perhaps to the East, perhaps to some future generation, after the cataclysm and its inevitable reaction that we are now setting in motion. All of this was inevitable. What remains we cannot know.

Modes of Escape

I’m trying to find the way into your psyche. I’m looking for the passage. I’m shifting shapes and forms, trying one on after the other. I shrink myself down to a viral state, hijacking blood cells, remaking them in my own microscopic image, setting them adrift in your bloodstream to reproduce like a cancer. They’re coursing through your body. I deploy billions of homunculi, half-formed sleeping alien mutations parachuting into your loci of fear, in pre-conscious semi-awareness their eyeless and gaping faces thrash and press against the transparent, silken membranes that contain them, where they breath viscous fluid through toothless, tongueless mouths. They dash on the rocky outcroppings of your mind, squirming in their death throes like eels. I take on the form of a thousand spores drifting and alighting over and over again, seeking out purchase in the soft membrane of your conscience. They wither and die; they drift off into the ether to expire in anonymity. My prayers are dying in droves, my beliefs are becoming superstition; my notions are too numerous to have meaning.

I’m an insidious political movement, spreading lies and propaganda; I’m an insurgent campaign, sabotaging your frontal lobes, a mindless anarchic cult movement poisoning the wells of your memory; I’m an arsonist setting fires in your subconscious. I want to seize control of your cortical speech zones, to broadcast the coup to the countryside. But nothing works. I rant, I rave, I purposely offend; no use. I relent and return, now with flattery, seduction, narcotic lies as if to lull you to sleep. I slip something into your drink. No use.

I corner you, leaning in close, trying to intimidate; you laugh. I plead and prostrate myself, making ridiculous promises; you are repulsed. I sulk away, but after only a few steps I look back toward you longingly. You are captivated by the sky-screen overhead, stretching from horizon to horizon; it wraps you in a cacophony of noise and light. I scurry back, placing myself between you and the electronic ether. You stop a moment, betray slight recognition, momentary alarm then sudden boredom; the divider comes down and your eyes go blank again. I step back, considering you from a distance, then rush forward, as if to startle you. I dance like a buffoon, striking my head on something. Stop and smile sheepishly, looking all about for you; a standing, three-dimensional shadow of transparent residual light, fading, trailing off in the direction of your escape, is all that remains.

Blood is forming in my ears, they are pounding out an irregular heartbeat. I’m nauseated, my head is swimming, the cacophony is rising, becoming one overarching and unbearable hum. I grow more desperate for escape now, looking about for something with which to slit my wrists, something on which to impale myself, but nothing is solid or real; everything is mere projected light of cascading horizontal lines, like a television screen. Reaching to grab hold of something, anything, my hand passes through the false surface, disappearing within, disappearing to my sight and lost to my sense of touch. Alarmed I pull my hand back, holding it protectively. It’s cold and smooth like ceramic, giving off a faint steam.

I look around self-consciously. The electronic menagerie is spinning about overhead, blurring into one unintelligible swirling mass; individual images appear briefly, strobe-like, foreign and familiar at once, a narrative progression revealing an indecipherable logic. I realize it is my history, yet I recognize none of it. Suddenly I become ashamed, tearing at my hair and clothes. It looks so small up there, against everything else; it’s being drawn into the mass. It makes no sense; it is worse than meaningless, not a lack of meaning but a subtraction of it. It’s a black hole of meaning, an atrophy of energy without consequence or effect. I’m terrified that it will consume everything. It’s my fault; I set it in motion. I know what I must do but I’m trembling pathetically, a caricature of cowardice, teeth chattering, knees shaking so violently I’m drifting sideways.
I feel I am being drawn up into the ether; I feel the density of my mass dissipating. I imagine it is being transported up into the sky-screen. Absently I pat myself here and there, verifying my physical presence. The images are coming faster, one upon the other. I see it now; they are accusations and condemnations; they are a body of evidence of the greatest crime, of the lowest form of sin, of the only real sin in the end; a murder of sorts, not the taking of life but of not taking life, of leaving it to rot, of leaving it fallow and feral, base and stunted. I am guilty of sloth and cowardice, of dereliction of duty; the case is irrefutable. Things are not going to end well. I look about furtively. And then it stops.

Chickenhawks of the Enlightenment

I’ve just learned (tardily, as usual) from Tom Piatak at Taki’s that University of Minnesota professor and blogger of the unfortunately common uber-glib school (casual conversational tone, replete with gratuitous obscenities), PZ Myers, outraged at the reaction of a Catholic church to a student protester spiriting away (excuse the expression) and defiling the Eucharist, has taken up that hoary and delusional cliche of the self-imagined secular crusader, The Brave Battle Against Catholicism and the Coming Inquisition (and, yes, the I-word was literally deployed):

So, what to do. I have an idea. Can anyone out there score me some consecrated communion wafers? There’s no way I can personally get them — my local churches have stakes prepared for me, I’m sure — but if any of you would be willing to do what it takes to get me some, or even one, and mail it to me, I’ll show you sacrilege, gladly, and with much fanfare. I won’t be tempted to hold it hostage (no, not even if I have a choice between returning the Eucharist and watching Bill Donohue kick the pope in the balls, which would apparently be a more humane act than desecrating a g–damned cracker), but will instead treat it with profound disrespect and heinous cracker abuse, all photographed and presented here on the web. I shall do so joyfully and with laughter in my heart. If you can smuggle some out from under the armed guards and grim nuns hovering over your local communion ceremony, just write to me and I’ll send you my home address.

Get that, “there’s no way” he can breach the defenses of local churches (I imagine he fantasizes his image on a wanted poster over the holy water, right up there with Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins). Not since George Bush donned that flight suit have I witnessed such a manly display.

I suppose if the Professor deferred the instant gratification of publicly brandishing his offended intellectual superiority and treated those with whom he disagrees as if they actually have a right to their contrary beliefs, he would have to acknowledge the congregants were minding their own business engaged in worship to which they have a moral and constitutional right, entirely within the confines of the Church. The fact that the student places no value on the “cracker” gives him no right to disrupt, and thereby deny, these people this, their most fundamental right.

Myers makes much of what he sees as melodramatic language employed by the church in its defense and their demands that the Eucharist be returned. But the language and deeply held nature of the outrage expressed by the church is entirely beside the point–and any casual but competent observer will see from the start that the question is this: does the church have a right to its practices free of harassment? This did not take place in the public square. That’s what’s striking here–Myers and cohort simply do not recognize the church’s right to defend the place and circumstances of their worship; they essentially assert that their certainty regarding what they see as its delusional and silly nature empowers them to interfere with it.

This is little different from an invasion of an individual’s private sphere, or the disruption of any group’s free assembly–the petty and sordid nature of the student’s actions notwithstanding. I suppose I too will be deemed a frothing-at-the-mouth zealot if I see in this the embryo of totalitarianism, but I do. I have many things of various levels of sentimental value, that others will deem meaningless, in my home. Does Professor Myers presume the right to take them and make a show of defacing them, and does he assert that right based on his superior arguments as to the irrationality of my sentiment, and the fervor with which I defend it? And this man dares to compare this with the Inquisition–when he is the one demanding this inalienable right be surrendered to the prank of a petulant child. Irony everywhere these days, and still some don’t recognize it when it falls on their oblivious heads.

This is after all the same sort of provocateur strategy employed in the revolutionary phase of the last century’s more destructive totalitarian movements, Left and Right–and religion and religious institutions were among the first targeted and held in special contempt (a contempt Myers holds just as fiercely, if his actions are more comic than sinister), as obstructions to absolutism. In a time of increasing government power, decreasing constitutional rights, militarism and the hijacking of Born-Again Christian churches by militant millenarians–all of which are increasingly becoming part of a whole–hostility toward the Catholic Church is downright baffling. One has to conclude that, despite the attempts of these antagonists to hang the history of human folly and vanity on religion–the classic, ubiquitous misperception that human flaws arise from human institutions, rather than bedevil them–they believe their certainty is justification enough to destroy an institution that, in their eyes, competes with them for power.

I do have one suggestion for this self-styled defender of the Enlightenment: go where the battle is joined in earnest, say to a madrassa in Pakistan (or a mosque in Europe, for that matter) and have a go at the “meaningless” articles of their faith. I recommend an artist’s rendering of Muhammad, for instance. Just paper and ink! Or, if Myers’ notoriety goes beyond the local churches and is global (Carlos the Jackanape, International Man of Hysteria), he can pull the same prank he has planned already–complete with address provided on demand, and on-camera starring role. The clarion has sounded, Professor.

Truth, No Stranger Than Fiction

Okay, the epic battle of crass New York operators Guiliani and Clinton never materialized, but at least I imagined this much:

And yes, Iraq was, finally, united. The always precarious alliance between erstwhile insurgent Sunni groups and US forces had run its course, a casualty of its own success as the foreign element all but disappeared. In its absence the Sunnis, recognizing their most realistic hope was not to regain control of the nation as a whole but perhaps, over the long run, retain influence where their numbers allowed, reconciled themselves. Shi’ites, tired of the occupation and realizing accommodation with the Sunnis might be their best means of removing any pretense of its necessity, and that some sort of accord was ultimately required nonetheless, were reaching out in the sort of political reconciliation that had been so elusive since Saddam’s ouster. Equilibrium had been reached between the sects through the now complete process of ethnic cleansing and separation; things had run their course. Thus the two sides seemed to turn to the American occupation and ask in unison, why? The struggle now was between the two main Shi’ite factions for dominance in the south.

Opposition to the statement of understanding of the previous year between Prime Minister Nouri al Maliki and the United States, outlining a permanent US military presence in the country and now being offered as legislation, was nearly universal. Maliki, almost completely without allies within Iraq and thus utterly dependent on the US, attempted to enact the agreement by executive order following a walk-out of nearly half the Iraqi parliament. The opposition surprised him and the US by calling for nationwide strikes and protests until the United States agreed to the rapid withdrawal of all military forces. The Iraqi democratization project was coming along alright; Iraq had discovered organized civil disobedience.

Which sounds a bit like this. Of course Maliki, like Rudy and Hillary, isn’t cooperating either.

I really should get back on that fictional history. It’s just hard to outdo reality these days.

Art is Propaganda is Art

Correction: Confronted by an alert Disney defender, I have corrections aplenty: Disney did not make Shrek; the musical Wall-E watches in the film is Hello Dolly (not by Disney); I further must concede that there is in fact no evidence of a flatulence mandate–I was rather carelessly extrapolating from one running gag in The Lion King. And here I thought that saying “propaganda is okay” was the mildly provocative part of this post. Just goes to show you never can tell.

Intrigued by the controversy, for lack of a better word, dogging the recent Pixar release Wall-E, I did something I rarely do anymore. I paid to see a movie in a theatre. My only complaint about ticket prices concerns the arbitrary circumstance imposed by the single price standard. For those few great films I’ve had the good sense to see in a theatre before they migrated to the home format (for most nowadays that means never to return–unless they achieve cult or classic status, and then in a strictly limited run years on) the nominal ticket price is an occasion to thank one’s lucky stars to live in and benefit from modern America’s combination of a remarkable economy and a film industry that occasionally produces high art (“as of this writing” should qualify the former, which may soon prove as illusory as, if less lasting than, the latter).
But for those far more common experiences, well, I’m still smarting a dozen years later over that twenty five dollars spent to see a movie about a talking pig while eating popcorn that was almost as disagreeable gastronomically as the film was intellectually. Parents of young or recently young children may empathize. One welcome byproduct of the onset of adolescence is the release from Disney’s sinister embrace–and for me it came just in time to avoid the abominable Shrek series, the success of which is a mystery I will gladly carry to my grave, along with the inscrutable appeal of Robin Williams and the indecipherable workings of Deal or No Deal. Maybe someone else can inform me: does Disney still observe a mandated minimum one fart joke per film?

But I’m not sure the greater part of the price is printed on the ticket. I can’t help resenting the interminable “previews of coming attractions” as an opportunistic advantage taken of my temporary state of immobility. The reaction of my fellow audience members suggests that I should view them as a sort of bonus. They are the supposed good bits after all, and even I feel a twinge of sympathy for the doomed production that can’t even manage enough of these to float a five minute highlight reel. But I don’t go to the movie theatre to see commercials.

Arriving ten minutes late expressly to avoid them was no use; I still counted five that I had to endure, literally groaning at points. Wall-E being a children’s film meant that these previews would be especially excruciating. There seems to be a logic to them, too, in that they grow progressively more obnoxious; of course this may more reflect an internal psychological expenditure. I’m a tad brittle about some things. The last was a film about a chihuahua that may or may not have the power of speech; you will no doubt be delighted and surprised to learn he’s a lively little guy with a Mexican accent and a heart as grand as his stature is diminutive! This part is absolutely true: the preview’s exit line was the dog exclaiming, “let it begin!”, to which I found myself wailing plaintively, “let it end!” before slumping down in my seat in embarrassment–but end it did.

The line promulgated from corporate-line blogs is that Wall-E is “environmentalist propaganda.” This is a critique that suggests the critic doesn’t understand, or care for, the nature of art. “Propaganda” is a phrase that seems destined to follow “fascist” into the void of meaninglessness, and unfortunately so, seeing as we live in a time and place where propaganda from government, political factions and corporations has never been so widely or skillfully employed–and is more inextricable from the media whole than ever. Any work of art that isn’t completely escapist (even this is arguable) is by nature propagandistic, in that it is an assertion biased by a particular worldview and inflexibly held–often diametrically contrary to convention. Just as it should be.

To criticize a work of fictional art as “propaganda” is, by inference, to argue art must be factually comprehensive and unbiased (and how utterly hypocritical of our corporatist right-wing media-sphere to level this charge while seizing upon dissent and reporting they disagree with, often with veiled threats leveling accusations of our time’s equivalent of apostasy–insufficient patriotism); it is no less than denying the artist his point of view. They’re engaged in an attack the very idea of artistic freedom and thus art itself, replacing it with, ironically, propaganda–that is, their propaganda. None of this is to say that a deliberate misrepresentation of reality isn’t one valid criticism of a work of art, more so the more it aspires to realism and social commentary, just that it isn’t the only one and it doesn’t in itself preclude a work’s value. Many valuable works of art are essentially lies or deliberate distortions. For instance, irony, essentially dishonest as it is, can be said to be the antidote to the inevitable effect of repetition and cliche rendering a distorted view of reality or devolving into kitsch–but that’s for another time.

Oh yeah, the film. Wall-E is definitely, and somewhat clumsily, an environmentalist dystopian fantasy. I say clumsily because its chosen nemesis destroying a recalcitrant humanity’s world–excess garbage–is probably the least worrisome in reality. Nonetheless the first act of the film that envisions this lifeless earth, from which humanity has had to flee in a mammoth interstellar spacecraft (why they launch themselves into deep space and not their garbage is not explained), is woefully beautiful and worth the price of admission in itself. The film’s title character is a self-propelled automatic trash compactor, left behind on earth and toiling away obliviously in his function, collecting garbage, compressing it into neat blocks and piling those blocks up in great sky-scraping towers of trash. The machine has taken on human qualities, however, pining for love learned about by watching an old Disney musical and rummaging through the great mounds of garbage for odd interesting objects of no particular value that it saves.

Here I perhaps I indulged myself, reading into the work an aspect I found more compelling than the simple misanthropic morality tale, touched by the idea of a world of human artifacts that represent mankind’s inexhaustible capacity for creation, yet artifacts we’ve become so good at producing–literally mass producing–that they are somehow rendered valueless. I wanted the film to be about this unavoidable loss of the human element in handicraft, this entropying of craftsmanship as an aspect of civilization, lost to the efficiency and inevitability of economic pressures–and still, even these useless plastic remnants are products of that most amazing and magical of human impulses, creativity. That’s what I drew from this image of a machine imbued with human qualities engaged in a hopeless salvage operation preserving the history of human industry.

Eventually Wall-E finds his way onto a massive spacecraft that operates as an interstellar cruise ship, housing the wandering remnant of humanity generations removed from any memory of earth and running on autopilot. Pixar still hasn’t perfected animation of the human face, and the film suffers in its rendering of people and dialogue. Unfortunately the film becomes thematically as crude as it is visually here, presenting the remaining humans as obese and muscularly atrophied as a result of generations of sloth, intellectually indolent as well, moving about on hovercraft lawn chairs slurping all sustenance through straws (the image of humans losing mobility due to automation and leisure is an idea introduced in a story-within-a-story some thirty years ago by Kurt Vonnegut, and seems to have travelled from interesting idea to morbid cliche with no intervening interval of valuable interpretation). This detracts from the film more for its lack of imagination than its dismissive view of human potential. A more severe and talented misanthrope could have done much better after all. One can think of a great many more interesting ways that vanity and human sensuality might distort the species in such a novel environment.
Nonetheless this is a worthy film, delivering a few moments of undeniable beauty, sentimental without being saccharine and triumphant over its flaws. That puts it in far better, and rarer, company than the particular type of propaganda I presume our keyboard commandos (“Spaaar-taaans!”) find so much more appropriate.

Is Wall-E propaganda? Yes, to its enduring credit.