During the 1960s and 70s a literary sensibility known as “Magic Realism” emerged in Latin America. Its most illustrious practitioner was the 1982 Nobel Prize winner for literature, and author of One Hundred Years of Solitude, Gabriel Garcia Marquez. To read the Colombian author’s capital work is a literary experience like no other, especially for readers from the so-called First World where, since birth, we have been taught that there is a clear and essentially non-negotiable line between the realms of reality and fantasy in our lives. One of the keys to the success Garcia Marquez’s novel can be found in its clever use of situational irony, that is, the way in which he employs a deadpan narrative style to explain “incredible” occurrences.
When critics gather to discuss the grandeur of Garcia Marquez’s writing, they talk about many things, his descriptive might, his politics, and his keen sense of history.
What they seldom mention, however, are his readers. Without them, or perhaps more precisely, without their deeply internalized sense of what constitutes social normality, his literary project would be considerably less compelling. He delights us, or at least those of us raised in the so-called developed world, precisely because he breaks our expectation of how one should react before ostensibly abnormal events.
Over the last eight years, the Bush Administration has executed series of policies that, when viewed in the context of our nation’s core ideals, are nothing short of deviant. These include, among many other things, a belief in the government’s right to wage pre-emptive war (something that certainly exercised us greatly when Hitler and Hirohito invoked it!), imprison citizens without charge, spy widely and with virtually no oversight on American lives, kidnap and torture anyone the president deems dangerous, and withhold from the congress and the general citizenry any information the president himself considers proprietary.
Taking a page from García Márquez, the American political press, deeply indoctrinated with the belief that being “objective” means treating all claims to morality and truth as equally compelling, narrated these abridgements of liberty in wholly non-plussed tones. And their brothers and sisters in the commentariat, who had long since internalized the idea (propagated expertly by the Right in the wake of the sixties and seventies) that expressing anger and outrage are antithetical to being intellectually serious, followed suit, writing article after soberly anguished article about the competing claims of liberty and security in the “new” age of terror. (As if “security” had not been a concern in the decades when these constitutional freedoms were first hammered out, times when, for example, the White House itself was burned down by foreign "terrorists").
Faced with the clear disconnect between the gravity of these constitutional infractions and the ever-equanimous tone of the reportage, American newspaper readers, like those of the great Colombian novelist, have sat back in their easy chairs and learned to laugh and dream with the wryly ironic literature now being served up to them as news in the daily press. Right?
Well, actually, for the most part, they have not. Indeed, the prestige of institutions such as the New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and CNN remains pretty much intact, largely unaffected by their recent off-Broadway run as situational ironists. The question then becomes, Why? While one can never be sure when meditating complex issues such as these, the time may have come to confront a logical, if highly disturbing, explanation: the majority of the readership no longer has an internalized precinct of constitutional normality from which to gaze upon the crimes of the Bush administration and their poker-faced treatment by the media.
Sunday, November 16, 2008
Tuesday, October 7, 2008
The Absurdity of Media "Balance"
This morning, both NPR and the New York Times have stories about how the campaign is starting to get "rough". The information adduced to justify the assertion is the same in both places. On one hand, we learn that McCain is accusing Obama of cavorting with terrorists based on the fact that he served together on a community board with a former member of the Weathermen. On the other hand, we learn that Obama is accusing McCain of having been a member of the Keating Five.
In both cases, the reporter treats these allegations is essentially equal and thus self-canceling, stuff to be filed away under "tactics", "he said-she said", or the province of mere " strategic gambits".
It is precisely this type of reporting, devoid of context and the ability to discern the relative historical import of of a public figure's actions, that has rendered the American people civically stupid.
There is no way that serving on a community board with someone whose background involved radical politics is in any way equivalent with a Senator knowingly participating in one of the biggest influence-peddling scandals in history of the U.S. Congress. First of all, we are not able to choose the other people with whom we serve on community boards. Moreover, if this friend, Ayers, had done anything wrong, he had long since paid for it by the time Obama came along to share the occasional monthly meeting with him.
In contrast, McCain's participation in the Keating affair was completely volitional. He was very happy to help deregulate the banking industry in ways thatwere destructive for the common person, providing that he received financial help for his campaign in return. It was only after his perfidy was discovered, that he "renounced" his participation in the scheme. And only then when censure by his colleagues (or worse) was looming over his future. When we talk about the Keating Five we are talking about one of the most brazen examples of corruption in one of the biggest financial scandals ( the Savings and Loan crisis) that this country has ever known.
Reading and listening to what passes for the "liberal press" in the popular imagination, you'd never know anything about these key differences.
The Right has understood for years that the goal of "seeking balance" in news delivery (something, by the way, most intelligent adults in most other developed countries see as neither possible nor desirable), can be manipulated time and time again in their favor. They correctly see it as an effective means of making the trivialities they want to circulate significant and/or the egregious things they do, insignificant. They know that the Mara Liasson's of the world have no stomach for true "discernment". Rather, they understand that their desire to remain "in the loop" and out of trouble with the right-wing attack machine is really their paramount concern. And so it goes...
Democracy is not possible under these conditions.
In both cases, the reporter treats these allegations is essentially equal and thus self-canceling, stuff to be filed away under "tactics", "he said-she said", or the province of mere " strategic gambits".
It is precisely this type of reporting, devoid of context and the ability to discern the relative historical import of of a public figure's actions, that has rendered the American people civically stupid.
There is no way that serving on a community board with someone whose background involved radical politics is in any way equivalent with a Senator knowingly participating in one of the biggest influence-peddling scandals in history of the U.S. Congress. First of all, we are not able to choose the other people with whom we serve on community boards. Moreover, if this friend, Ayers, had done anything wrong, he had long since paid for it by the time Obama came along to share the occasional monthly meeting with him.
In contrast, McCain's participation in the Keating affair was completely volitional. He was very happy to help deregulate the banking industry in ways thatwere destructive for the common person, providing that he received financial help for his campaign in return. It was only after his perfidy was discovered, that he "renounced" his participation in the scheme. And only then when censure by his colleagues (or worse) was looming over his future. When we talk about the Keating Five we are talking about one of the most brazen examples of corruption in one of the biggest financial scandals ( the Savings and Loan crisis) that this country has ever known.
Reading and listening to what passes for the "liberal press" in the popular imagination, you'd never know anything about these key differences.
The Right has understood for years that the goal of "seeking balance" in news delivery (something, by the way, most intelligent adults in most other developed countries see as neither possible nor desirable), can be manipulated time and time again in their favor. They correctly see it as an effective means of making the trivialities they want to circulate significant and/or the egregious things they do, insignificant. They know that the Mara Liasson's of the world have no stomach for true "discernment". Rather, they understand that their desire to remain "in the loop" and out of trouble with the right-wing attack machine is really their paramount concern. And so it goes...
Democracy is not possible under these conditions.
Friday, August 22, 2008
A Better Question Might Be, “How Isn’t it Fascism?”
Have you ever spoken to someone who lived through a fascist regime? If and when you do, you might be surprised at what you hear, especially when it comes to the relatively benign remembrances of daily life in places like Mussolini’s Italy, Franco’s Spain, Salazar’s Portugal. Videla’s Argentina, Vargas’s Brazil or Bordaberry’s Uruguay.
Most Americans who’ve lived abroad have, at one time or another, had the experience of talking with a foreign friend who, though never having lived in the US, is pretty well convinced that they understand the cardinal elements of our culture. Why? Because for years, that person has consumed a non-stop diet of Hollywood movies and programs. When, after fully acknowledging cinema’s great value as a tool of cultural knowledge, you try and help them become aware of the many social realities this medium cannot or, as currently constituted, will not convey, they often become annoyed or indifferent. They have their story and they are going to stick with it.
It seems to me that our culture’s relationship to fascism has much in common with this. Over the last sixty years, Hollywood has given us constant stream of images about life under authoritarian regimes. As a result, most Americans are generally pretty confident of their ability to not only recognize the basic contours of this socio-political phenomenon, but also “do the right thing” should the authorities begin pursuing their neighbors for no good reason. Of course, this presumes that fascism almost always looks the way Hollywood, with its intense Germanic fixations and penchant for clean morally unambiguous story lines, tells us it does, you know, with armed checkpoints, draconian curfews, dimly-lit streets, grey skies and a complete absence of joy.
But of course, fascism has never consistently or even predominantly manifested itself in daily life the way Hollywood has told us it does, even in the occupied territories of the Third Reich. If you have any doubts about this, read the account of life in Nazi-occupied Paris written by Carles Fontseré. In it, we see an exiled Catalan Republican Anarchist (could there be any human profile any more apt for harassment and extermination by convinced Nazis?) earning a living in the French magazine and publishing industry, regularly interacting—often quite cordially--with German officers while partying and having regular sexual trysts in his off hours.
Am I saying occupied Paris was a carnival or that the Nazi regime was not brutal or violent? Absolutely not. Rather, I am suggesting that contrary to what Hollywood has taught us, those who run authoritarian regimes often go to great lengths to preserve most elements of complexly embroidered fabric of “dailyness” in the societies they control. The reason is obvious: to do otherwise is run the risk of provoking overt anger and rebellion from those being manipulated and oppressed.
Do you think most people were reduced to constantly skulking from back street to back alley to get to their friend’s house undetected or that they stopped going on summer vacation, drinking wine and making love during the Argentine Dirty War? On the contrary, at the very time its agents were pulling out fingernails and waterboarding people at the ESMA detention center in Buenos Aires and chucking cement-weighted bodies into the Atlantic from helicopters, the Argentine regime hosted the World Cup of Soccer, one of the world’s great tourist celebrations! As they like to say after parish spaghetti dinners, “A good time was had by all”, that is, all except the tortured and the disappeared.
Well, if Fascism seldom announces itself the way Hollywood taught us it would growing up, if the dimension of its terror and destruction is, almost by design, beyond the ken of the vast majority of the population caught up in their daily concerns, what can we do to combat it?
Most of all we must shift our thinking from the realm of the affectively or visually powerful vignette to that of analytical description.
Human beings possess an incredibly strong tendency to deny malfeasance among what they consider to be their “own” social group, be it familial or communal or national. And in their drive to deny the perfidy of their clan, they will avail themselves of WHATEVER materials they can to preserve their sense of moral intactness and/or superiority. In this context, having an institutionalized vision of authoritarian evil that located far away from one’s own place—both geographically and temporally—is extremely “useful” in psychological terms. The existence of this widely internalized “distant” vision of evil, which is seen—quite incorrectly—as representing fascism in more or less comprehensive terms, has the effect of placing an absurdly heavy burden of proof upon those wishing to open a discussion about the existence of this social tendency here and now
When critics allege the existence of a type of fascism in today’s America their interlocutors often “refute” the charge by insisting that the accuser demonstrate the existence here and now of ALL known tropes of the “distant” (that is, consensually visualizable) version of the social plague. When he cannot, they declare our society free of the disease and go back to whatever it was they were doing. “Yes Jack, I know that habeas corpus is gone, that the officer class in the military is more loyal to the own caste and the Republican party than the Constitution, that there is an incestuous alliance between big business and government, that systemic critiques of the nation’s core foreign policy goals are not tolerated within mainstream political discourse, that spying and informing on innocent citizens is rampant, that there is a small army of intelligence operatives carrying out “patriotic” missions that will never be subject to any public scrutiny never mind public sanction, that clearly illegal acts or torture and domestic espionage have been retroactively immunized by congress with the full complicity of the “opposition” party, but there are still no jackboots in the streets!
Imagine if your physician worked this way? “Yes, you have 7 of the 10 attributes associated with this dangerous syndrome, but we’re only going to concentrate on the three that you don’t have and declare you fit as a fiddle!"
For those truly interested in pursuing an analytical approach to the question, there are tools available. The historian Robert Paxton has given us a splendid start with his Anatomy of Fascism. In it, he describes fascism as “A form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation or victimhood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion.'' Lawrence Britt has also provided a useful framing device with his succinct “Fourteen Defining Characteristics Of Fascism”.
So the next time you want to bring up the subject of fascism, cut to the quick. Instead of letting your friend lead you on an intellectual scavenger hunt whose only real purpose is to rule out the possibility that the disease might be present among us, put the onus him or her. Ask instead how, in the light of Paxton’s and Britt’s definitions, the US isn’t a fascist society? If nothing else, the results of the conversation are likely to be far more instructive than the usual self-congratulatory pap we usually get on the question in these latitudes.
Most Americans who’ve lived abroad have, at one time or another, had the experience of talking with a foreign friend who, though never having lived in the US, is pretty well convinced that they understand the cardinal elements of our culture. Why? Because for years, that person has consumed a non-stop diet of Hollywood movies and programs. When, after fully acknowledging cinema’s great value as a tool of cultural knowledge, you try and help them become aware of the many social realities this medium cannot or, as currently constituted, will not convey, they often become annoyed or indifferent. They have their story and they are going to stick with it.
It seems to me that our culture’s relationship to fascism has much in common with this. Over the last sixty years, Hollywood has given us constant stream of images about life under authoritarian regimes. As a result, most Americans are generally pretty confident of their ability to not only recognize the basic contours of this socio-political phenomenon, but also “do the right thing” should the authorities begin pursuing their neighbors for no good reason. Of course, this presumes that fascism almost always looks the way Hollywood, with its intense Germanic fixations and penchant for clean morally unambiguous story lines, tells us it does, you know, with armed checkpoints, draconian curfews, dimly-lit streets, grey skies and a complete absence of joy.
But of course, fascism has never consistently or even predominantly manifested itself in daily life the way Hollywood has told us it does, even in the occupied territories of the Third Reich. If you have any doubts about this, read the account of life in Nazi-occupied Paris written by Carles Fontseré. In it, we see an exiled Catalan Republican Anarchist (could there be any human profile any more apt for harassment and extermination by convinced Nazis?) earning a living in the French magazine and publishing industry, regularly interacting—often quite cordially--with German officers while partying and having regular sexual trysts in his off hours.
Am I saying occupied Paris was a carnival or that the Nazi regime was not brutal or violent? Absolutely not. Rather, I am suggesting that contrary to what Hollywood has taught us, those who run authoritarian regimes often go to great lengths to preserve most elements of complexly embroidered fabric of “dailyness” in the societies they control. The reason is obvious: to do otherwise is run the risk of provoking overt anger and rebellion from those being manipulated and oppressed.
Do you think most people were reduced to constantly skulking from back street to back alley to get to their friend’s house undetected or that they stopped going on summer vacation, drinking wine and making love during the Argentine Dirty War? On the contrary, at the very time its agents were pulling out fingernails and waterboarding people at the ESMA detention center in Buenos Aires and chucking cement-weighted bodies into the Atlantic from helicopters, the Argentine regime hosted the World Cup of Soccer, one of the world’s great tourist celebrations! As they like to say after parish spaghetti dinners, “A good time was had by all”, that is, all except the tortured and the disappeared.
Well, if Fascism seldom announces itself the way Hollywood taught us it would growing up, if the dimension of its terror and destruction is, almost by design, beyond the ken of the vast majority of the population caught up in their daily concerns, what can we do to combat it?
Most of all we must shift our thinking from the realm of the affectively or visually powerful vignette to that of analytical description.
Human beings possess an incredibly strong tendency to deny malfeasance among what they consider to be their “own” social group, be it familial or communal or national. And in their drive to deny the perfidy of their clan, they will avail themselves of WHATEVER materials they can to preserve their sense of moral intactness and/or superiority. In this context, having an institutionalized vision of authoritarian evil that located far away from one’s own place—both geographically and temporally—is extremely “useful” in psychological terms. The existence of this widely internalized “distant” vision of evil, which is seen—quite incorrectly—as representing fascism in more or less comprehensive terms, has the effect of placing an absurdly heavy burden of proof upon those wishing to open a discussion about the existence of this social tendency here and now
When critics allege the existence of a type of fascism in today’s America their interlocutors often “refute” the charge by insisting that the accuser demonstrate the existence here and now of ALL known tropes of the “distant” (that is, consensually visualizable) version of the social plague. When he cannot, they declare our society free of the disease and go back to whatever it was they were doing. “Yes Jack, I know that habeas corpus is gone, that the officer class in the military is more loyal to the own caste and the Republican party than the Constitution, that there is an incestuous alliance between big business and government, that systemic critiques of the nation’s core foreign policy goals are not tolerated within mainstream political discourse, that spying and informing on innocent citizens is rampant, that there is a small army of intelligence operatives carrying out “patriotic” missions that will never be subject to any public scrutiny never mind public sanction, that clearly illegal acts or torture and domestic espionage have been retroactively immunized by congress with the full complicity of the “opposition” party, but there are still no jackboots in the streets!
Imagine if your physician worked this way? “Yes, you have 7 of the 10 attributes associated with this dangerous syndrome, but we’re only going to concentrate on the three that you don’t have and declare you fit as a fiddle!"
For those truly interested in pursuing an analytical approach to the question, there are tools available. The historian Robert Paxton has given us a splendid start with his Anatomy of Fascism. In it, he describes fascism as “A form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation or victimhood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion.'' Lawrence Britt has also provided a useful framing device with his succinct “Fourteen Defining Characteristics Of Fascism”.
So the next time you want to bring up the subject of fascism, cut to the quick. Instead of letting your friend lead you on an intellectual scavenger hunt whose only real purpose is to rule out the possibility that the disease might be present among us, put the onus him or her. Ask instead how, in the light of Paxton’s and Britt’s definitions, the US isn’t a fascist society? If nothing else, the results of the conversation are likely to be far more instructive than the usual self-congratulatory pap we usually get on the question in these latitudes.
Thursday, August 14, 2008
Who’s Gonna Tell the Kids?
Who is going to fill the American people in on the truth and significance of what’s going on in Georgia? From all indications, no one in the national press corps is up for the job.
The op-ed fraternity, dutifully echoing the Bush administration, is running with a narrative that goes something like this: Georgia, led by an urbane young man (Saakashvili) who seeks nothing more than peace and prosperity for his plucky little nation, has been brutally attacked by a Russian bear bent on meting out wanton destruction. The reporter class, ever attentive to their appointed task of providing evocative vignettes and images to justify the storylines dreamed up by their superiors (a group that includes the aforementioned pundits as well as “government officials” and serious-appearing right wing think-tank hacks), has gone about their task with the brainless dedication we’ve come to expect from them. Now its time for Americans to do what most of them believe (in the face of abundant statistical evidence to the contrary) they do best: provide the poor and besieged around the world with “humanitarian aid”.
In a functioning democracy with a more or less empirically-based media system, this little bedtime story would be quickly superseded by real reportage, and from there, a mainstream narrative that would go something like this.
In the wake of September 11, Cheney and the neocons at the White House decided they would use the crisis as a pretext for implanting US bases throughout the “new” republics of the Caucasus and Central Asia. The strategic intent of this move, accomplished largely through the buying off of corrupt dictators, was two-fold. a) To project US military power into a region of enormous and still relatively untapped mineral wealth. b) Continue the process, begun in the late 1990s with the rapid eastward expansion of NATO, of militarily encircling Russia so that it would never again be able to seriously challenge US hegemony in the world. An integral element of this strategy was using the CIA and other US government funded agencies to catapult US-friendly “democrats”, such as the Columbia-trained yuppie, Saakashvili, to power in the satellite Republics of the former Soviet Union. And as is the custom with this particular White House crowd, they made sure that the Israelis were deeply involved with their covert operatives at every level of this strategic effort.
Putin, it appears, was fully aware of this neo-con agenda from the beginning. And as a keen reader of human psychology, he also understood the fundamentally priapic character of its key architects. You can’t keep a hard-on forever, he reasoned, especially when you are trying to stick it in every available strategic “orifice” between Ankara and Indonesia. And so he watched and waited, playing Rope-a-Dope with the US for seven long years.
Like many members of the US neo-con fraternity that invented him, and has sustained him up until now, Saakashvili appears to be long on swagger and short on smarts. And as has occurred with many foolish CIA assets in the past, he apparently began to see himself through the hagiographic prism of the propaganda his handlers regularly churned out on his behalf. No doubt remembering how the summer timing of Israel’s rape of Lebanon two years ago helped to cushion the public relations fall-out from the event, Handler and Asset apparently decided that now was the time to poke the Russian bear in the eye. And so they planned a lightning strike to seize South Ossetia.
Putin was ready. He came off the ropes and struck back with a clean and crisp left hook to the jaw which left the Asset (and by extension, his Handlers) crumpled on the canvas. End of match.
With this single, expertly landed blow, Putin has laid bare for the world to see the enormous gap between neo-con fantasies of domination and real US power. The setback has also made manifest the almost complete bankruptcy of the current US leadership class on issues of international law and morality. When Bush, seeking to put the best face on the enormous strategic setback just handed to him by Putin, proclaimed the Russian use of force as “unacceptable” a wave of uncontrollable, if profoundly bitter, laughter swept through the chanceries and more important news rooms of the world. The only ones able to keep a straight face through it all have been the eternally-immune-to-irony-acolytes of power in the US media.
The US has just suffered a debacle that, when viewed through the lens of history, may very well be seen as a key turning point not only in its trajectory as a Great Power, but also the definitive end of its long-held image (warranted or not) as an agent of constructive change in the world.
Who’s gonna tell the kids?
The op-ed fraternity, dutifully echoing the Bush administration, is running with a narrative that goes something like this: Georgia, led by an urbane young man (Saakashvili) who seeks nothing more than peace and prosperity for his plucky little nation, has been brutally attacked by a Russian bear bent on meting out wanton destruction. The reporter class, ever attentive to their appointed task of providing evocative vignettes and images to justify the storylines dreamed up by their superiors (a group that includes the aforementioned pundits as well as “government officials” and serious-appearing right wing think-tank hacks), has gone about their task with the brainless dedication we’ve come to expect from them. Now its time for Americans to do what most of them believe (in the face of abundant statistical evidence to the contrary) they do best: provide the poor and besieged around the world with “humanitarian aid”.
In a functioning democracy with a more or less empirically-based media system, this little bedtime story would be quickly superseded by real reportage, and from there, a mainstream narrative that would go something like this.
In the wake of September 11, Cheney and the neocons at the White House decided they would use the crisis as a pretext for implanting US bases throughout the “new” republics of the Caucasus and Central Asia. The strategic intent of this move, accomplished largely through the buying off of corrupt dictators, was two-fold. a) To project US military power into a region of enormous and still relatively untapped mineral wealth. b) Continue the process, begun in the late 1990s with the rapid eastward expansion of NATO, of militarily encircling Russia so that it would never again be able to seriously challenge US hegemony in the world. An integral element of this strategy was using the CIA and other US government funded agencies to catapult US-friendly “democrats”, such as the Columbia-trained yuppie, Saakashvili, to power in the satellite Republics of the former Soviet Union. And as is the custom with this particular White House crowd, they made sure that the Israelis were deeply involved with their covert operatives at every level of this strategic effort.
Putin, it appears, was fully aware of this neo-con agenda from the beginning. And as a keen reader of human psychology, he also understood the fundamentally priapic character of its key architects. You can’t keep a hard-on forever, he reasoned, especially when you are trying to stick it in every available strategic “orifice” between Ankara and Indonesia. And so he watched and waited, playing Rope-a-Dope with the US for seven long years.
Like many members of the US neo-con fraternity that invented him, and has sustained him up until now, Saakashvili appears to be long on swagger and short on smarts. And as has occurred with many foolish CIA assets in the past, he apparently began to see himself through the hagiographic prism of the propaganda his handlers regularly churned out on his behalf. No doubt remembering how the summer timing of Israel’s rape of Lebanon two years ago helped to cushion the public relations fall-out from the event, Handler and Asset apparently decided that now was the time to poke the Russian bear in the eye. And so they planned a lightning strike to seize South Ossetia.
Putin was ready. He came off the ropes and struck back with a clean and crisp left hook to the jaw which left the Asset (and by extension, his Handlers) crumpled on the canvas. End of match.
With this single, expertly landed blow, Putin has laid bare for the world to see the enormous gap between neo-con fantasies of domination and real US power. The setback has also made manifest the almost complete bankruptcy of the current US leadership class on issues of international law and morality. When Bush, seeking to put the best face on the enormous strategic setback just handed to him by Putin, proclaimed the Russian use of force as “unacceptable” a wave of uncontrollable, if profoundly bitter, laughter swept through the chanceries and more important news rooms of the world. The only ones able to keep a straight face through it all have been the eternally-immune-to-irony-acolytes of power in the US media.
The US has just suffered a debacle that, when viewed through the lens of history, may very well be seen as a key turning point not only in its trajectory as a Great Power, but also the definitive end of its long-held image (warranted or not) as an agent of constructive change in the world.
Who’s gonna tell the kids?
Tuesday, July 29, 2008
Seeing and Not Seeing
Seeing and Not Seeing
José Ortega y Gasset, the great Spanish aphorist and journalist who masqueraded for many years in public as a serious philosopher, once said that every act of seeing is also an act of unseeing. That is, when we fix our gaze on one thing, we are deciding (consciously or unconsciously) not to direct our attention to another.
These words came to mind as I read a recent New York Times report on ¨When Spies Don´t Play Well With their Allies¨. Eyeing the story´s portentious length and its broadly constituted title, I expected a more or less complete account of the outstanding acts of disloyalty committed against the US by its supposed allies in recent years and decades, a narrative sure to include, among many other unfortunate events, the Jonathan Pollard case and the attack on the USS Liberty by the Israelis during the 1967 Six Day War. To my surprise, the report focused wholly on the perfidy of the Pakistanis during the so-called War on Terror.
A simple case of a bad match between headline and story content? Perhaps.
While they may not be as important as they were 50, or even 25 years ago, the great national newspapers (New York Times, the Guardian, the Times, Le Monde, Le Figaro, La Corriere de la Sera, Die Welt, and more recently, El País) continue to play an inordinately important role in establishing the parameters of acceptable social and political debate in the countries where they are published. Put another way, what they choose to “see” (a.k.a. the news they see as being “fit to print”) has an uncanny way of becoming confused in the minds of the vast majority of citizens, (including among a distressingly high percentage of the educated elites) with the totality of information available on a given subject. We know, moreover, that readers have an inherent desire (remember that “willing suspension of disbelief” from English class) to internalize and adapt as “real” and complete the logic of the narratives they consume.
So, when, in generating an ostensibly comprehensive account (remember the headline!) of the problem of allies that spy on the US, the NYT foregrounds the role of the Pakistanis and buries similar problems with even more closely aligned foreign powers, it is all but assuring that a large part of the media class, and from there, the general citizenry interested in political and social affairs, will tend to frame the problem in similar terms.
Every act of seeing is also an act unseeing. To analyze social thought in terms of its palpable discursive logic is good. To analyze it terms of this, and whatever one can imagine lying on the editing room floor, is even better.
José Ortega y Gasset, the great Spanish aphorist and journalist who masqueraded for many years in public as a serious philosopher, once said that every act of seeing is also an act of unseeing. That is, when we fix our gaze on one thing, we are deciding (consciously or unconsciously) not to direct our attention to another.
These words came to mind as I read a recent New York Times report on ¨When Spies Don´t Play Well With their Allies¨. Eyeing the story´s portentious length and its broadly constituted title, I expected a more or less complete account of the outstanding acts of disloyalty committed against the US by its supposed allies in recent years and decades, a narrative sure to include, among many other unfortunate events, the Jonathan Pollard case and the attack on the USS Liberty by the Israelis during the 1967 Six Day War. To my surprise, the report focused wholly on the perfidy of the Pakistanis during the so-called War on Terror.
A simple case of a bad match between headline and story content? Perhaps.
While they may not be as important as they were 50, or even 25 years ago, the great national newspapers (New York Times, the Guardian, the Times, Le Monde, Le Figaro, La Corriere de la Sera, Die Welt, and more recently, El País) continue to play an inordinately important role in establishing the parameters of acceptable social and political debate in the countries where they are published. Put another way, what they choose to “see” (a.k.a. the news they see as being “fit to print”) has an uncanny way of becoming confused in the minds of the vast majority of citizens, (including among a distressingly high percentage of the educated elites) with the totality of information available on a given subject. We know, moreover, that readers have an inherent desire (remember that “willing suspension of disbelief” from English class) to internalize and adapt as “real” and complete the logic of the narratives they consume.
So, when, in generating an ostensibly comprehensive account (remember the headline!) of the problem of allies that spy on the US, the NYT foregrounds the role of the Pakistanis and buries similar problems with even more closely aligned foreign powers, it is all but assuring that a large part of the media class, and from there, the general citizenry interested in political and social affairs, will tend to frame the problem in similar terms.
Every act of seeing is also an act unseeing. To analyze social thought in terms of its palpable discursive logic is good. To analyze it terms of this, and whatever one can imagine lying on the editing room floor, is even better.
Monday, July 28, 2008
Livin' La Vida Barroca
Livin’ la vida barroca
With a bit of foreign travel looming on the horizon, it was time to renew the passport of my youngest child. I gathered the requisite papers and brought them to the post office. A few weeks later, the coveted document arrived.
I opened it up, expecting to find what I always had found inside US passports: a dry one-page recitation of personal data followed by numerous empty pages for recording the traveler’s entries and exits from various countries.
The moment my eyes focused on the inside flap, however, I was reminded of my continuing lack of post-September 11 imagination. How foolish of me not to realize that in times like these passports can, and should be, a full-blown propaganda documents, replete with the cheesiest and most hackneyed evocations of national grandeur. Page 1: a quote from the Star-Spangled Banner in a lithograph-like image of The War of 1812. Page 2: Lincoln’s famous quote about “government of the people, by the people and for the people”. Pages 3-4: a multicolor image of an eagle and a flag towering over the image and personal information of the passport’s bearer. And on and on for 24 more pages with graphic backdrops such as Mt. Rushmore, the Liberty Bell, and yes, buffaloes roaming across the open plains.
When most Americans think of the Baroque it is probably in association with French music or Latin American architecture. It is certainly not inaccurate to do so. But it is important to remember that the Baroque was was, and is, much more than this.
The term has its roots in the Iberian Peninsula of the late 16th and 17th centuries, a time when Spanish and Portuguese empires were both hugely important and visibly decadent. In the late 15th and early 16th centuries these two relatively underpopulated and unsophisticated kingdoms had leapt to world prominence on the basis of their ferocity (honed in the centuries-long frontier struggle against the Moslem “heathen”) and their precocious understanding of naval technology. Between 1470 and 1550 they came to control much of Africa, all of Central and South America, and a substantial pieces of Europe (much of southern Italy, the Low Countries and a good part of today’s Germany and Austria). But no sooner did they establish control of these places then, as could be expected, resistance to their rule began to grow.
In the Americas, the Iberians’s relative military and naval superiority allowed them to overwhelm the opposition until the beginning of the 19th century. In Europe however, things were far more complicated. There, especially in the lands of northern and central Europe, the opposition to Iberian rule was not only military, but also ideological. The Reformation, which we now tend to think of almost wholly theological terms, was in fact a movement with an enormous geopolitical subtext. For the Dutch and for the Germans, becoming Protestant was not only a matter of talking more clearly and directly to God, but also ridding themselves of their Spanish overlords and their Italian ecclesiastical agents.
The Spaniards reacted to the challenge of the Reformation and its incipient embrace of empiricism, by instituting the Counter-Reformation, the upshot of which was an effort to re-package--but in no way fundamentally alter--the now time-worn tenets of their Church-centered philosophy of cultural hegemony. It was what we might call today a campaign of cultural “re-branding”. As such, it was largely circumscribed to the realm of the esthetic.
This might have worked had the German and Dutch complaints with the Spanish been esthetic. But, of course, they were not. Rather, they were bound up in much more essential questions of dignity and self-determination. There thus ensued what the Spanish nowadays call a “dialogue of the deaf”. On one hand, we have the Spaniards and Portuguese (the kingdoms were united between 1580 and 1640), with their ostensibly sophisticated and worldly Jesuits at the fore, inventing new ways to sell old imperial and theological wine. On the other, we have the rebel elites of Holland and numerous German kingdoms who had long-since decided that their social and commercial dreams could never realized within the framework of a Catholic empire led from Madrid.
Unable to entertain, never mind admit, the validity of the ideological or territorial claims of their unruly northern subjects, the Spanish Hapsburgs and their official creators did what all frustrated ideologues do in times of crisis: they pumped up the volume. It is in this act of historical desperation that we find the core logic of the Baroque. “If only we can say it more colorfully, more artistically, more ingeniously we will win them back.”
But of course, with the intended Northern audience long since inured to the siren song of the South, the only people left to listen to the ever more extravagant claims of cultural superiority were the captive citizens of the Iberian Peninsula itself! And so it was.
From the 1580s onward, precisely the moment when the first cracks in the façade of the omnipotent empire began to show, the Spanish political and intellectual class plied the populace with an unremitting diet of self-aggrandizement, punctuated only by the lacerating ironies of Miguel de Cervantes. This constant stream of church-state propaganda kept viceroys and their armies well-motivated for a good long time. But it did nothing to prepare Spain for the challenges of modernity. Indeed, the implied demand that even the best Spanish thinkers work and create within the ever more narrow alleys of patriotic and theological self-affirmation (as opposed to the expansive fields of free inquiry), virtually assured the country’s relegation to he dustbin of history.
There was a time in the not very distant past when the US leadership class believed the essential vitality of the US cultural political heritage. But judging from the design my child’s new passport, they no longer trust in its ability to speak for itself. It appears we too are now denizens of the Baroque, destined, like he Spaniards before us, to live out our decline in a propagandistic netherworld designed (so they tell us) for the benefit of others.
With a bit of foreign travel looming on the horizon, it was time to renew the passport of my youngest child. I gathered the requisite papers and brought them to the post office. A few weeks later, the coveted document arrived.
I opened it up, expecting to find what I always had found inside US passports: a dry one-page recitation of personal data followed by numerous empty pages for recording the traveler’s entries and exits from various countries.
The moment my eyes focused on the inside flap, however, I was reminded of my continuing lack of post-September 11 imagination. How foolish of me not to realize that in times like these passports can, and should be, a full-blown propaganda documents, replete with the cheesiest and most hackneyed evocations of national grandeur. Page 1: a quote from the Star-Spangled Banner in a lithograph-like image of The War of 1812. Page 2: Lincoln’s famous quote about “government of the people, by the people and for the people”. Pages 3-4: a multicolor image of an eagle and a flag towering over the image and personal information of the passport’s bearer. And on and on for 24 more pages with graphic backdrops such as Mt. Rushmore, the Liberty Bell, and yes, buffaloes roaming across the open plains.
When most Americans think of the Baroque it is probably in association with French music or Latin American architecture. It is certainly not inaccurate to do so. But it is important to remember that the Baroque was was, and is, much more than this.
The term has its roots in the Iberian Peninsula of the late 16th and 17th centuries, a time when Spanish and Portuguese empires were both hugely important and visibly decadent. In the late 15th and early 16th centuries these two relatively underpopulated and unsophisticated kingdoms had leapt to world prominence on the basis of their ferocity (honed in the centuries-long frontier struggle against the Moslem “heathen”) and their precocious understanding of naval technology. Between 1470 and 1550 they came to control much of Africa, all of Central and South America, and a substantial pieces of Europe (much of southern Italy, the Low Countries and a good part of today’s Germany and Austria). But no sooner did they establish control of these places then, as could be expected, resistance to their rule began to grow.
In the Americas, the Iberians’s relative military and naval superiority allowed them to overwhelm the opposition until the beginning of the 19th century. In Europe however, things were far more complicated. There, especially in the lands of northern and central Europe, the opposition to Iberian rule was not only military, but also ideological. The Reformation, which we now tend to think of almost wholly theological terms, was in fact a movement with an enormous geopolitical subtext. For the Dutch and for the Germans, becoming Protestant was not only a matter of talking more clearly and directly to God, but also ridding themselves of their Spanish overlords and their Italian ecclesiastical agents.
The Spaniards reacted to the challenge of the Reformation and its incipient embrace of empiricism, by instituting the Counter-Reformation, the upshot of which was an effort to re-package--but in no way fundamentally alter--the now time-worn tenets of their Church-centered philosophy of cultural hegemony. It was what we might call today a campaign of cultural “re-branding”. As such, it was largely circumscribed to the realm of the esthetic.
This might have worked had the German and Dutch complaints with the Spanish been esthetic. But, of course, they were not. Rather, they were bound up in much more essential questions of dignity and self-determination. There thus ensued what the Spanish nowadays call a “dialogue of the deaf”. On one hand, we have the Spaniards and Portuguese (the kingdoms were united between 1580 and 1640), with their ostensibly sophisticated and worldly Jesuits at the fore, inventing new ways to sell old imperial and theological wine. On the other, we have the rebel elites of Holland and numerous German kingdoms who had long-since decided that their social and commercial dreams could never realized within the framework of a Catholic empire led from Madrid.
Unable to entertain, never mind admit, the validity of the ideological or territorial claims of their unruly northern subjects, the Spanish Hapsburgs and their official creators did what all frustrated ideologues do in times of crisis: they pumped up the volume. It is in this act of historical desperation that we find the core logic of the Baroque. “If only we can say it more colorfully, more artistically, more ingeniously we will win them back.”
But of course, with the intended Northern audience long since inured to the siren song of the South, the only people left to listen to the ever more extravagant claims of cultural superiority were the captive citizens of the Iberian Peninsula itself! And so it was.
From the 1580s onward, precisely the moment when the first cracks in the façade of the omnipotent empire began to show, the Spanish political and intellectual class plied the populace with an unremitting diet of self-aggrandizement, punctuated only by the lacerating ironies of Miguel de Cervantes. This constant stream of church-state propaganda kept viceroys and their armies well-motivated for a good long time. But it did nothing to prepare Spain for the challenges of modernity. Indeed, the implied demand that even the best Spanish thinkers work and create within the ever more narrow alleys of patriotic and theological self-affirmation (as opposed to the expansive fields of free inquiry), virtually assured the country’s relegation to he dustbin of history.
There was a time in the not very distant past when the US leadership class believed the essential vitality of the US cultural political heritage. But judging from the design my child’s new passport, they no longer trust in its ability to speak for itself. It appears we too are now denizens of the Baroque, destined, like he Spaniards before us, to live out our decline in a propagandistic netherworld designed (so they tell us) for the benefit of others.
Friday, July 25, 2008
Obama and Structural Change
Obama was in Israel yesterday pledging his eternal devotion to Israel’s own defnition of what constitutes security for Israel. (Is there any other country in our multi-polar world that claims, and is perpetually granted by the US, the right to define completely on its own subjective terms what constitutes a reasonable level of security in relation to its neighbors?)
My liberal friends want me to believe that he will bring real change to to US foreign policy. In order for me to second their dreams I need a) to know he really doesn´t believe the pledges he made yesterday or in his equally snivelling speech to AIPAC about a month back, or b) embrace the “see no evil because I´m afraid of being called an anti-semite” idea that the Likuddite vision for securing Israel´s strategic dominance of the Mideast has had nothing to do with the execution of US foreign policy in the Mideast during the las seven years. Though I too want to believe, I can't say I see either proposition as having much basis in truth.
My liberal friends want me to believe that he will bring real change to to US foreign policy. In order for me to second their dreams I need a) to know he really doesn´t believe the pledges he made yesterday or in his equally snivelling speech to AIPAC about a month back, or b) embrace the “see no evil because I´m afraid of being called an anti-semite” idea that the Likuddite vision for securing Israel´s strategic dominance of the Mideast has had nothing to do with the execution of US foreign policy in the Mideast during the las seven years. Though I too want to believe, I can't say I see either proposition as having much basis in truth.
A Question of Audience Participation
The arrest of Karadzic has brought us back to chapter of recent “Western” culture that most of us have worked very hard to forget. Today I read of how the the former philosopher king of the Bosnian Serb Republic once invited a fellow poet, the Russian Limonov, to have lunch with him in Pale, the mountain resort overlooking the city of Sarajevo. Since the beginning of the attack on Bosnia, inspired in large measure by the ideas and policies of Karadzic, Pale had undergone a transformation of function. The cool mountain breezes, which once attracted those seeking peace from the hustle bustle of the city below during the heat of summer, now served as a stimulant for the commission of rapes upon Bosnian women and the sportive shelling and machine gunning of those in the urban valley who were slow to get with the new logic of ethnic cleansing. Before sitting down to eat, Karadzic offered Limonov the “aperitif” of taking a few potshots at the unfortunate ants below. The Russian poet accepted the gracious offer and fired off a few rounds. See video here. The two bards then went off, it is said, for a meal of roast pig followed by a solidarity-building round of slivovitz with the young soldier-rapists on watch.
Disgusting.
But is it any more disgusting then the time that George Bush, sitting before the near entirety of the Washington press corps in 2004 made jokes, complete with hide-and-seek pantomimes, about someday finding the missing weapons of mass destruction in Iraq? When the butcher of Bosnia did his schtick with his Russian brother in letters, no more than a few aides and a cameraman were there to laugh or applaud. Bush, however, was lucky enough to have an entire auditorium full of people giggling and tittering in the thrall of his self-evident charm.
I guess that’s why Karadzic will be going to the Hague for war crimes while Bush will be heading to Crawford, Texas to cut brush and ride trail bikes until such time as he is overcome by either arthritis or Alzheimer´s.
Disgusting.
But is it any more disgusting then the time that George Bush, sitting before the near entirety of the Washington press corps in 2004 made jokes, complete with hide-and-seek pantomimes, about someday finding the missing weapons of mass destruction in Iraq? When the butcher of Bosnia did his schtick with his Russian brother in letters, no more than a few aides and a cameraman were there to laugh or applaud. Bush, however, was lucky enough to have an entire auditorium full of people giggling and tittering in the thrall of his self-evident charm.
I guess that’s why Karadzic will be going to the Hague for war crimes while Bush will be heading to Crawford, Texas to cut brush and ride trail bikes until such time as he is overcome by either arthritis or Alzheimer´s.
Thursday, July 24, 2008
The Art of Strategic Forgetting
I read once again yesterday that “the West” finds Iran’s pursuit of nuclear power “unacceptable”. Indeed, every time I read the papers I receive the same message in one form or another. What I seldom, if ever, read is why this pursuit of nuclear power, which has been fully and continuously vetted by the IAEA, is “unacceptable” (and thus apparently deserving of imminent attack) when Israel, which is less than 1000 kilometers to the West, faces no opprobrium for having a large, fully-formed and completely uninspected nuclear arsenal. Search as I might (and believe me I regularly do!) in the US and Western European press, I never get an answer to this question. In fact, I never even see the question posed at press conferences, on op-ed pages or in interviews with leading politicians and so-called “strategic thinkers”.
When I ponder this situation, I am reminded of the scene at the beginning of Kundera´s Unbearable Lightness of Being when members of Czechoslovakia´s leadership class disappear a from official photos as they fall out of favor with the Communist Party. By expunging the image of the person in question, the
Party leadership sought to control the public’s perception of the past. Why? Because they understood all too well that the ability to mobilize the population for large-scale social enterprises is rooted in “the people’s” understanding of ¨history”.
This management of the past can be exercised in two basic ways. The first is to actively provide narratives which exalt the heroic solidarity of the population in the face of a real or perceived external threat. The second is to disappear, or, more effectively still, relegate to the fringe of public consciousness, elements of the collective´s past which leadership class has deemed to be either indifferent or hostile (in terms of their psychic triggering effect) to the set of “forward-looking” goals they have prepared for the society.
Perhaps the most common -and all too often justified- critique of military planners that they tend to devise strategies based their comprehension (such as it is) of “the last war” rather than a an understanding of the challenges they are likely to face in the “next” conflict.
The same might be said of those whose job it is to study and explain the wherefores and whys of social and political thought.
The totalitarian systems of the mid-20th century awakened the US and Western Europan intellectual elites to the enormous (usually destructive) power of the first type of “memory management” referred to above. Though the great sectors of the population are (as we have seen in recent years) still quite from susceptible to the appeal of this proactive, binarily-conceived chauvinism, professional cultural analysts are generally pretty good at seeing this type of stuff for what it is.
In fact, it is no exaggeration to say that the social upheavals that occurred between 1968 and 1974 in most Western nations were largely about the refusal of the rising elites to accept the rhetorical blunt instruments that had shaped their fathers’s view of the world. They understood all too well how proactive propaganda, that is, the type which openly exalts the intrinsic goodness of one tribe over the other, could make people do things they would very much regret the morning after. Imbued with this consciousness, they sent the message that they would were not willing to mimic and amplify the tropes provided their elders with a sense of ontological certainty
This resolve of the rising elites to “just say no” to the language and practice of ethnocentric dehumanization deeply alarmed the major social and political stakeholders of the Western world. Their first reaction was incredulity. (Think of the dazed and rageful countencances of both Nixon and DeGaulle at their respective nadirs).
But this this momentary punchdrunkenness soon gave way to careful long-term planning. the upshot of which was to shift the focal point of “consensus management” from a primary reliance on the active creation of memory” to the more “passive” practice of selectively eliminating factually or ideologically incompatible elements the past.
When it comes to detecting and denouncing this second type of memory management, the track record of progressive Western intellectuals has been considerably less stellar.
The success of the conservative counterattack upon the challenges posed to their hegemony--and the concommitant failure of intellectual wachdogs to detect it and defend against it—was, and is, their understanding of the essentially oedipical nature of much countercultural anger. That is, they understood that the real drive of most (though certainly not all) activists was (and is) not so much to change the relations of power in the world, but rather to have their “fathers”, survivors of the twin cataclysms of Depression and World War, challenges of a dimension they realized they would probably never face, take their ideas and their relatively frivolous lifestyles more seriously (Lest there be any doubt about the ongoing centrality of Daddy anxiety among those born between 1945 and 1965 consider just how much mileage the patently stupid and cruel Dick Cheney has gotten among the now baby boomer dominated press with his pasty impersonation mid-twentieth century gravitas)
This intuition led to a key change of tactics. We all know that one should not engage a rebellious teenager frontally. Why? Because to repeated invocation of our “adult” convictions is, to him or her, little more than an invitation to rebellious refutation. Skilled parents understand that what rebellious teenagers crave more than anything else is a sense of peer to peer dialogue. They also know that granting it to them will lead to a fateful loss of authority. The solution?
Provide them with simulacrum of peer-to-peer comity, that is, engage them in “free” dialogue, but on only after one has carefully and pre-emptively delimited parameters of the discussion. Doing so well, requires one to master the art of disuasory rhetoric, verbal codes which insistently but unobtrusively inform the interlocutor he or she is approaching the outer limits of the accepted semantic field and is thus in danger of falling into the abyss. Faced with the persistent application of this discursive method, the young person, avid to preserve his tenuous status as a burgeoning “person-in-the-culture” and the remaing reserves of parental affection, eventually begins to self-police his previously unbridled challenges to authority.
All of which brings us back to the Middle East and the strange invisibility of the Israeli nuclear program in our daily chronicles. The last thing that Israeli elites and the American political and social establishment that supports them with undying fealty want is a free and logical (in the sense of adhering to basic canons of distributive justice) discussion of the nuclear balance of power in the region. They know is that it is a discussion they cannot win. How could anyone with a minimal sense of fairness say that it is okay for one country which has repeatedly invaded its neighbors and appropriated considerable amounts of their territory to maintain a large and completely unregulated nuclear program while another in close proximity who has never invaded anyone and who has, moreover submitted their very nascent program to unstinting international scrutiny, cannot?
The solution? Engage in a putatively “free” discussion while taking great care to establish and enforce through disuasory rhetoric the parameters of “thinkable thought” on the issue. This campaign has been carried out with such efficacy and thoroughness by Israel and its US-based propaganda infrastructure that most reporters in the US and Western Europe, fearful of of losing your hard earned reputations as “culturally serious” people, no longer even engage the question. Leaving aside what this tells us about the intellectual intrepidness and collective emotional development of the press corps, this means that, for the effective purposes of public debate, Israel’s nuclear weapons do not exist!
An example of Post-‘68 consensus management at its best! Don’t engage, ignore... Ignore with a menacing passion that makes your enemies ( both real and potential) abandon the drive to affirm what they once knew to be palpably true
Depressing? Yes indeed. But if there is one thing but that Kundera’s masterful novel teaches us, or at least me, is that officially and semi-officially-induced acts of disappearance are never as final as their intellectual authors assume them to be. Though no longer the prestigious physician he once was, the book’s protagonist continues in a to make love and dream, and in his hedonistic way, seek to engender solidarity. His acts did not magically right the wrongs of his time. But they did offer the suggestion that tyrannically induced absurdities can also be worn down by those that refuse to accept the perverse “logic” that undergirds them.
We may not “see” Israeli nuclear weapons, but those living in their brutal shadow certainly do. And guess what? They could care less about being viewed as being “unserious” or “anti-semitic” by our opinion-making class. They are thus free in a way most of our pundits cannot even begin to fathom. No amount of oedipal shaming wil make Hasran Nasrallah, the leader of Hizbollah or his counterparts in Hamas, or for that matter, Hugo Chavez, go away. And this failure to cede in the face of pressure from their “elders” in the first world actively inspires millions of others with nothing left to lose to do begin doing the same.
This presents a huge problem for the US leadership class. The question now is what will they do as they realize (as the more enlightened among them already have) that “strategic forgetting”, the Plan B of the post World War II consensus management apparatus, has also apparently reached the end of its effective life cycle. Wilth no plan C in sight, what will happen? Will they go even further down the road than they already have in the last seven years with the use of raw violence?
Much will depend on the on the extent to which Obama has resolved his wn oedipal anxieties. So far, the returns are not terribly encouraging. While some of his rhetoric hs given us reason to believe he wants to break once and for all with mentality of the Post-War imperial structure, his actions say something very different. He still seems to a considerable need (so typical our generation) to seek approval of the “wise men” of the establishment, the very fools who in the last quarter century torn apart our social fabric and run the ship of state into the ground.
When I ponder this situation, I am reminded of the scene at the beginning of Kundera´s Unbearable Lightness of Being when members of Czechoslovakia´s leadership class disappear a from official photos as they fall out of favor with the Communist Party. By expunging the image of the person in question, the
Party leadership sought to control the public’s perception of the past. Why? Because they understood all too well that the ability to mobilize the population for large-scale social enterprises is rooted in “the people’s” understanding of ¨history”.
This management of the past can be exercised in two basic ways. The first is to actively provide narratives which exalt the heroic solidarity of the population in the face of a real or perceived external threat. The second is to disappear, or, more effectively still, relegate to the fringe of public consciousness, elements of the collective´s past which leadership class has deemed to be either indifferent or hostile (in terms of their psychic triggering effect) to the set of “forward-looking” goals they have prepared for the society.
Perhaps the most common -and all too often justified- critique of military planners that they tend to devise strategies based their comprehension (such as it is) of “the last war” rather than a an understanding of the challenges they are likely to face in the “next” conflict.
The same might be said of those whose job it is to study and explain the wherefores and whys of social and political thought.
The totalitarian systems of the mid-20th century awakened the US and Western Europan intellectual elites to the enormous (usually destructive) power of the first type of “memory management” referred to above. Though the great sectors of the population are (as we have seen in recent years) still quite from susceptible to the appeal of this proactive, binarily-conceived chauvinism, professional cultural analysts are generally pretty good at seeing this type of stuff for what it is.
In fact, it is no exaggeration to say that the social upheavals that occurred between 1968 and 1974 in most Western nations were largely about the refusal of the rising elites to accept the rhetorical blunt instruments that had shaped their fathers’s view of the world. They understood all too well how proactive propaganda, that is, the type which openly exalts the intrinsic goodness of one tribe over the other, could make people do things they would very much regret the morning after. Imbued with this consciousness, they sent the message that they would were not willing to mimic and amplify the tropes provided their elders with a sense of ontological certainty
This resolve of the rising elites to “just say no” to the language and practice of ethnocentric dehumanization deeply alarmed the major social and political stakeholders of the Western world. Their first reaction was incredulity. (Think of the dazed and rageful countencances of both Nixon and DeGaulle at their respective nadirs).
But this this momentary punchdrunkenness soon gave way to careful long-term planning. the upshot of which was to shift the focal point of “consensus management” from a primary reliance on the active creation of memory” to the more “passive” practice of selectively eliminating factually or ideologically incompatible elements the past.
When it comes to detecting and denouncing this second type of memory management, the track record of progressive Western intellectuals has been considerably less stellar.
The success of the conservative counterattack upon the challenges posed to their hegemony--and the concommitant failure of intellectual wachdogs to detect it and defend against it—was, and is, their understanding of the essentially oedipical nature of much countercultural anger. That is, they understood that the real drive of most (though certainly not all) activists was (and is) not so much to change the relations of power in the world, but rather to have their “fathers”, survivors of the twin cataclysms of Depression and World War, challenges of a dimension they realized they would probably never face, take their ideas and their relatively frivolous lifestyles more seriously (Lest there be any doubt about the ongoing centrality of Daddy anxiety among those born between 1945 and 1965 consider just how much mileage the patently stupid and cruel Dick Cheney has gotten among the now baby boomer dominated press with his pasty impersonation mid-twentieth century gravitas)
This intuition led to a key change of tactics. We all know that one should not engage a rebellious teenager frontally. Why? Because to repeated invocation of our “adult” convictions is, to him or her, little more than an invitation to rebellious refutation. Skilled parents understand that what rebellious teenagers crave more than anything else is a sense of peer to peer dialogue. They also know that granting it to them will lead to a fateful loss of authority. The solution?
Provide them with simulacrum of peer-to-peer comity, that is, engage them in “free” dialogue, but on only after one has carefully and pre-emptively delimited parameters of the discussion. Doing so well, requires one to master the art of disuasory rhetoric, verbal codes which insistently but unobtrusively inform the interlocutor he or she is approaching the outer limits of the accepted semantic field and is thus in danger of falling into the abyss. Faced with the persistent application of this discursive method, the young person, avid to preserve his tenuous status as a burgeoning “person-in-the-culture” and the remaing reserves of parental affection, eventually begins to self-police his previously unbridled challenges to authority.
All of which brings us back to the Middle East and the strange invisibility of the Israeli nuclear program in our daily chronicles. The last thing that Israeli elites and the American political and social establishment that supports them with undying fealty want is a free and logical (in the sense of adhering to basic canons of distributive justice) discussion of the nuclear balance of power in the region. They know is that it is a discussion they cannot win. How could anyone with a minimal sense of fairness say that it is okay for one country which has repeatedly invaded its neighbors and appropriated considerable amounts of their territory to maintain a large and completely unregulated nuclear program while another in close proximity who has never invaded anyone and who has, moreover submitted their very nascent program to unstinting international scrutiny, cannot?
The solution? Engage in a putatively “free” discussion while taking great care to establish and enforce through disuasory rhetoric the parameters of “thinkable thought” on the issue. This campaign has been carried out with such efficacy and thoroughness by Israel and its US-based propaganda infrastructure that most reporters in the US and Western Europe, fearful of of losing your hard earned reputations as “culturally serious” people, no longer even engage the question. Leaving aside what this tells us about the intellectual intrepidness and collective emotional development of the press corps, this means that, for the effective purposes of public debate, Israel’s nuclear weapons do not exist!
An example of Post-‘68 consensus management at its best! Don’t engage, ignore... Ignore with a menacing passion that makes your enemies ( both real and potential) abandon the drive to affirm what they once knew to be palpably true
Depressing? Yes indeed. But if there is one thing but that Kundera’s masterful novel teaches us, or at least me, is that officially and semi-officially-induced acts of disappearance are never as final as their intellectual authors assume them to be. Though no longer the prestigious physician he once was, the book’s protagonist continues in a to make love and dream, and in his hedonistic way, seek to engender solidarity. His acts did not magically right the wrongs of his time. But they did offer the suggestion that tyrannically induced absurdities can also be worn down by those that refuse to accept the perverse “logic” that undergirds them.
We may not “see” Israeli nuclear weapons, but those living in their brutal shadow certainly do. And guess what? They could care less about being viewed as being “unserious” or “anti-semitic” by our opinion-making class. They are thus free in a way most of our pundits cannot even begin to fathom. No amount of oedipal shaming wil make Hasran Nasrallah, the leader of Hizbollah or his counterparts in Hamas, or for that matter, Hugo Chavez, go away. And this failure to cede in the face of pressure from their “elders” in the first world actively inspires millions of others with nothing left to lose to do begin doing the same.
This presents a huge problem for the US leadership class. The question now is what will they do as they realize (as the more enlightened among them already have) that “strategic forgetting”, the Plan B of the post World War II consensus management apparatus, has also apparently reached the end of its effective life cycle. Wilth no plan C in sight, what will happen? Will they go even further down the road than they already have in the last seven years with the use of raw violence?
Much will depend on the on the extent to which Obama has resolved his wn oedipal anxieties. So far, the returns are not terribly encouraging. While some of his rhetoric hs given us reason to believe he wants to break once and for all with mentality of the Post-War imperial structure, his actions say something very different. He still seems to a considerable need (so typical our generation) to seek approval of the “wise men” of the establishment, the very fools who in the last quarter century torn apart our social fabric and run the ship of state into the ground.
The Byways of Fear and Prosperity
We were once the ones who taught anxious Europeans, plagued by endless wars and a seemingly intractable system of class privilege, to live without fear. Now we live and sell the fear and they remind us through their daily comportment (don't believe what the Wall Street Journal says, and the the rest of the US press regularly parrots about the malaise-inducing unsustainability of the European social model) of what we-or at least a good chunk of our white population- once had. Whether the US elites and their media acolytes are ready to admit it or not, social mobility, and with it the enjoyment of middle class life, in Europe is demonstrably superior to that which exists today in the US. Not a very edifying thought when we consider the centrality of the American Dream to the maintenance of social cohesion in the imperium. Maybe that's why the US media works so hard to underplay an denigrate the the very real achievements of today's Europe.
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