Today an individual calling himself Mr. Ebenezer Devotion attempted to leave a comment on the previous post. While I initially deleted the comment in a fit of pique, I believe the episode deserves a recap. Since the individual in question believes that names are interchangeable, I prefer to call him Mr. Anon E. Muss. Now, Mr. Muss's comment indicated that while he was in agreement with the substance of the previous post, he was "puzzled" to encounter a hectoring, arrogant tone in it. For the benefit of this blog's tiny readership, and most of all for our devoted Mr. Muss, I would like to note that active challenges to the conspiracy of silence, however flimsy and rhetorical, will always seem arrogant to the quiescent, the ironic, the resigned. This was overwhelmingly the case, for instance, when Andrew Mayer attempted to join rhetorical battle with John Kerry--an act of courage that I do not mean to demean by pooling it with my own narrower efforts here.
Given that Mr. Muss avowedly agrees with the content, one wonders whether he might like to review the mendicant blogger's body of work in a soothing tone of humble, dispassionate tranquility. I have reservations that such a review may be impossible, but given that the mendicant blogger's work is of far greater importance than quibbles over style in the ghetto of this blog, perhaps one should be attempted. On to you, Mr. Muss.
Tuesday, August 25, 2009
Monday, August 24, 2009
Paean to a Vanishing Visionary, Part II
(Continued from Part I)
"Nature frequently does not announce in advance her intentions to fundamentally alter the world. Men often do -- and usually such warnings are ignored."
So. We're back. Back to retrain our sights on the sum of money still languishing in e-purgatory, waiting to be claimed or forgotten, born or miscarried, redeemed, refused, or returned as undeliverable. I mentioned in the first section of this paean that the unclaimed status of my electronically given alms was of grave concern to me. And so it obviously is. But I submit and shall argue that the matter far transcends the narrow sphere of my own interests. To the extent that the sum's status indexes the continued existence or possible passing of the principled man of letters in question, it may be appropriate to class the transaction, however miserly its actual magnitude, as being of general importance to truth, decency, and--as the man himself frequently puts it--the sanctity of a single human life. A heady billing, yes, but note that I stop short of hawking tawdry nationalist notions by asserting, for instance, that the 'fate of the nation' hinges on whether the principled man is able to resume his writing. That destiny is an illusion beyond all salvation. At this late juncture, I wonder if, far from righting the handbasket's gadarene course, our only hope lies in certain of its wary passengers being able to maintain some marginal hold on moral consciousness and empirical sobriety as the rest of us stampede into the sulphurous nether reaches without thought or care.
I mentioned in the first section that this writer, this beggar, this good and principled man, was of vanishing significance. That he is. He has nothing. Nothing at all. From the vantage of the groveling hordes spreadeagled before the altarsa of power, money and fame--yes, I mean you--he is nothing. Far from earning him acclaim or accolade, his tireless work in the service of decency and the sanctity of a single human life has made him destitute. Indeed, if his work is noticed at all as he lives out his remaining days in America's pitiless margin, it is likely to elicit only scorn and ridicule from a readership presumably hoping to cozy up to power and escape personal responsibility the handbasket's course by cutting, as it were, a plea deal. And yet it is precisely his contemptible nothingness that so qualifies him to exercise his voice as a legitimate proponent of democracy and freedom as he speaks for the poor, the forgotten, the weak and the sundry other miserable victims of the ruling class's endless pursuit of total power at home and abroad. To express it somewhat differently: Although his material circumstances are deplorable--and I do not wish to glorify his penury, merely to note it with a nod to its epistemological effect--it is the collision of this very marginality with his erudition and eloquence that makes the writing so powerful and haunting. Put differently again: Precisely because he does not feed at the corporate/state trough, his voice can be trusted. Yes, this is exactly right. It is his insignificance, exquisitely alloyed with eloquence, empathy, and intelligence, then tempered by the rigor of his intellectual commitment, that makes him trustworthy, and that places his writing in a class by itself. With only the merest handful of exceptions, no voice has been raised with as much stridency and forthright persistence as his in denouncing the events that have heralded our cowardly descent into darkness. For this reason and for others to be detailed below, his is the single most important voice in modern American letters, political or otherwise.
Here is a man who has seen very clearly how matters stand for the sucker without a trough, for the unprotected individual who has surrendered neither vision nor spirit for the soporific emoluments of comfort and prestige. Everything proceeds from this untethered perspective. I intend to use this concept, that of the unprotected individual (as both object and subject), as a lens through which to focus at somewhat greater length on a representative group of the issues that keep our principled man of letters up at night.
First things first. How do things stand with the unprotected individual? Let us refer to the ominous citation at the top of this post by way of warming up to the subject. The line is his, the mendicant blogger's, penned on the occasion of the passage of the Military Commissions Act of 2006. This act, as I think bears endless repetition, annihilated all of your liberties at their conceptual root, and with them the very last traces of the hope for human happiness that accompanied the founding of our country in that long ago. In theory, your body is now the chattel of the State, to do with as it pleases. Mr. Obama or whoever succeeds him as the parasite- and murderer-in-chief may consign you or me or anyone at all to a torture chamber in perpetuity and be held to account by precisely no one. All he must do is label you an "enemy combatant", and presto! your life is over. Habeas corpus, the principle set out nearly 800 years ago in the Magna Carta as a means of protecting individuals from the depredations of the state, is in our country a thing of the past. This is the letter of the law. No longer, in theory, do you have the right to challenge your detention at the hands of the government. From this it follows that all the other rights which you thought were yours are entirely illusory. This is what you need to know. It is indeed all you need to know. Or: If we were a citizenry that cared a damn about freedom and human life, the foregoing would be all we needed to know before springing into action to overthrow the tyrannical government that made it so. But we aren't, and it isn't, and we won't. It should be noted here that one of the very first actions taken by the present administration in January 2009 was to solidify the legal ground for tyranny prepared so diligently by the one it succeeded. For the benefit of those clinging to the vain hope of striking a plea deal with leviathan, it should also be noted that when each individual is the theoretical chattel of the state, no wall is high enough to keep you safe. No amount of money or fame will be enough to secure you in your phantom liberties. Raw power is the only thing there is, which means that only the ascendant faction is safe, and only for as long as they remain in the ascendant. Everyone else is tax chattel, cannon fodder, prison meat.
You will say I am ringing the alarm bells without empirical cause, that I am ringing them irresponsibly. Have things really come to such a dire pass? Is it really time to run for the hills? The answer is a qualified no. We are not yet a dictatorship, but the path is very short. Actually, it has been paved and signposted, and a whole bunch of sheriffs have been detailed to patrol it. The intentions have been announced, and there is nothing intrinsic to you or to me or to our polity that will prevent them from being brought to term. Now you'll argue that the detention camps and mass round-ups have not yet come. But they will--though you won't be hearing much about them. Hordes of dedicated, sadistic opportunists have worked tirelessly for years to lay the conceptual groundwork for midwifing just these horrors into being. One need not be very proficient in the art of thought-experimentation to divine what a boon another real terrorist strike or war would be to the power of the state and to the pathetic dreams of domination harbored by the subhuman functionaries who serve it. With ample exceptions for our rapacious elites, all of us stand huddled on the bleak shore that the principled mendicant blogger has seen so clearly, completely vulnerable to what the tide may bring, though it should be mentioned that even those elites may easily fall from grace, briefly to adorn the sacrificial altar of state power before they, too, are merged with the main stream of din, distr(u/a)ction, and death.
Which is all to say that we have all been warned of what lies ahead. The ruling class has made its intentions perfectly clear. They told you in broad daylight; they told it to your face. But the bitter truth is that you don't really need the principled mendicant blogger to know where we stand, and you certainly don't need me. Nor is there any need to compile detailed lists of legislation, executive orders, verdicts, conclaves, policy papers or the like. Just go out and smell the air. Talk to the people. Listen. Do you feel the fear, the loathing, the trembling?
As for the fate of the unprotected individual with the misfortune to be huddled on foreign shores that have come under the scrutiny of imperial design, God help him. Suffice it to say that in order to count himself safe from American drones and death squads (your drones and death squads), he must dwell under the umbrella of a nuclear arsenal.
The blogger in question has examined the perpetual aggrandizement of the state's powers at the expense of the individual at great length over the course of several years, and with considerably greater intellectual firepower and moral seriousness than I can muster here. Of course, there are many others who have chronicled and charted our government's assault on life, liberty and dignity. What sets the mendicant blogger in question apart is the way he has managed to cut to the root--psychological, moral, and social--of why we find ourselves in this predicament. Why have we let ourselves, as individuals, become dupes in this pawn game of totalitarian intrigue? As our mendicant blogger sees it, the key to understanding how a once free people can so utterly relinquish its liberties to leviathan, can be found in our cradle-to-grave culture of obedience and deferral to authority. I mentioned in the first section that our principled mendicant blogger is a great chaser after the true meanings of words--obedience is one of the words he has loosed his hounds on. After a lengthy pursuit, he pins it down for us thus:
"Obedience is the term used to describe the demand by a person in a superior position [...] that a person in an inferior position conduct himself in a particular manner. The essence of obedience is the demand without more: A reason may be provided, but a reason is unnecessary."
To offer a very brief paraphrase of the large attendant idea that the mendicant man of letters has developed at great length, the problem is that so many of us fail to ever become fully formed adults--as defined by the capacity for independent judgment and moral autonomy--at any point in our lives. More precisely, we import into adulthood the unhealthy dynamic that characterized our emotional lives as children, when we were blackmailed into obedience by the unspoken Damocletic threat that parental love might be withdrawn as punishment for misbehavior. As we grow up and pass through the various institutions that purport to shape us into adults (while in fact sucking our blood and feeding us lies--my line), the fear and obedience originally accorded the parent give way to fear and obedience accorded the institutional authority figure, the representatives of the state, and ultimately the state itself. The being that emerges from this long apprenticeship to fear has neither the honesty and depth of feeling of a child nor the cognitive capacity and probity of a true adult; the best-educated specimens of this genus might best be compared to cowering animal with recourse to vast reserves of bad faith, disingenuousness and sophistry--a lawyer, in other words. As luck would have it, this cowering animal's very survival mechanisms are highly convenient to the state's purposes.
Now, however inapposite this account may be in individual cases, and whatever its logical flaws--flaws which are amply acknowledged by the writer himself, who advances his arguments by way of a tentative, evolving dialectic of difference and repetition, never by slinging arrows of arrogant conceit--its utility as a heuristic device is plain to see. Nor does the argument does end there. It is precisely at the point of "phobic transfer" from parent to state where the argument folds in on itself to ensure that no one is let off the hook. A child obeys because he must. Absent the parent, the child will die. Plainly, our principled man of letters argues, an adult is not in the same position of existential peril as a child. Although he may convince himself otherwise, the adult has a choice. Up to the point of being threatened by incarceration or violence, the adult's submission to the state's imperatives should actually be understood as support. Support for the political system that nominally represents us, whether material or ideological, whether active or passive, is an individual choice. This means, very significantly, that although we as individuals may be unable to halt the vast evils being committed in our name on these and other shores, we are, in a limited sense, collectively guilty of facilitating evil by omission. Even if we are inwardly opposed to the monstrous and ongoing series of war crimes that constitute the Iraqi occupation and have claimed lives numbering more than a million, even if we are inwardly opposed to the burgeoning paranoiac police state and infinite travesty of justice at home, we share in the guilt for these outrages to the extent that we do nothing to stop them. But no! you say. I was just minding my business; I had nothing to do with it. Of course: The dropping of this accessory charge, the ideological absolution, all this is a part of the plea deal sought by the fainthearted. Let someone else take the fall. As our principled mendicant blogger puts it: Why do you support?
Measure is the final signal aspect of this writer's persona that I would like to celebrate. He knows when to laugh, when to cry, when to curse and where to refrain. He knows the time for tempest and the time for anguished silence. Measure does not mean the buffoonery of "balance" or any of the other red herrings trotted out by corporate media to throw their insouciant readers off the scent of corruption. When his writing addresses grave matters of life and death, the register of his language reflects that gravity. He knows there is no humor in false levity. Nor, when dealing with these grave and pernicious matters--that is to say, when dealing with nearly every occurrence on the national political scene--does he affect the disgusting exculpatory irony deployed to such great effect by liberal intellectuals who find it expedient to distance themselves from state excesses, but inexpedient to address the issue at its root. This sense of measure derives, I would argue, from a rightness of perspective: He takes political matters seriously in terms of actual effects on actual people. He resists the soul-shriveling mendacity inherent in the apolitical, amoral "procedural reporting" spread in journalism schools. Such reporting is the kind that allows, for instance, for the authorship of breezy, witty articles on the debates between various sinecured mediocrities as they pass war spending bills without once mentioning in these articles that the debates they are covering so breezily and so wittily in fact concern the planned destruction of thousands of human lives. By which I mean that to our prescient and principled mendicant blogger, a single human life is sacred. I know, I know. This essay is peppered with references to that purported sanctity. And as mentioned in the first installment, a lifetime of brainwashed ignorance is not undone by a single cathartic assertion. No. If it is to gain any traction in our slippery minds and (not least) on our slippery tongues, the truth must be repeated incessantly. May you reread the foregoing until the bile boils over. It is my fervent hope that you do read it, over and over again.
When I come into contact with what I believe to be the truth regarding matters of fundamental importance to the sanctity of life and to the dormant dream of man as a free, enlightened and thoroughly spiritual animal, I feel a deep obligation to make what I have felt available to others, bludgeoning them if I must, that they might partake of that truth and allow it to change their lives accordingly. Truth--as opposed to myths, lies, distortions or cognitive dissonance--has this power. Above, I identified this man's marginal status as the wellspring of his intellectual freedom, and the power of his perspective. As anyone who is familiar with the real article rather than the hollow ersatz peddled by nationalist scoundrels will know, freedom's eternal correlative is risk. In order to be able to address himself to his task with the radical cognitive and stylistic freedom that made his work exceptional, this good and principled man had to shun and be shunned by institutional safe havens. As the blog's progression through time amply illustrates, this freedom from allegiance cemented his poverty and ensured his susceptibility to the grim forces against which he so nobly marshaled a mind leavened by the word. If freedom and truth are in fact any concern of ours--if we wish to actuate these concepts as forces to counter the tide of unthinking darkness that threatens to sweep us all away--I submit that when we are touched by them, as we are in the case of this ailing mendicant blogger, this good, principled and visionary man, we also incur an obligation to sustain that freedom, most obviously by showering it with money. He is not selling you a cultural product: His existence constitutes the condition for keeping culture alive.
The thanks he gets: "I have written repeatedly on certain themes for several years now. I try to present my central ideas in new ways, to offer additional historical evidence for my contentions, and to make connections between seemingly disparate phenomena that I have not addressed earlier. But no matter what I attempt to do here, I make no headway whatsoever. It seems to me that my writing has no effect at all."
As a child in kindergarten, I recall being asked by my teacher if I had a hero. No, I said. I could think of none. Now that I am 30 years old, I may finally have one. Of course, I do think that the good man in question, the national clairvoyant toiling in the service of truth and decency without thanks or recognition, this mendicant blogger of vanishing significance, would shy away from any such designation. After all, his writing has not accomplished any of what we like to call 'real change.' The pleas and exhortations to action that were the not-quite-daily hallmarks of his blog for years have not prevented a single Iraqi or Afghan or Pakistani from meeting his fate at the hands of the American death machine, nor have they restored to us the rights we thought were ours by virtue of our humanity. Nor, and this is not an index of the man's incapacity, but that of the media and of the fools for whom their product is churned out, has this good and principled man of conscience been able, notwithstanding the vast, lapidary, interlocking body of meaning and truth he has erected over these past five and a half years, to resurrect anything bearing even a chance resemblance to justice or compassion or truth in the "national debate", least of all in the liberal quarters of that debate, where questions of fundamental importance are scorned and disregarded in favor of what the writer calls "primitive tribalism". So then, you say. He is nothing, he has done nothing, he is no better than me. Why the hell should I care?
Not so fast. This good and eloquent man of principle may indeed not have caused any of the gilded parasites that hold national office to change our course toward hell in the slightest, but he is better than you and I by a country mile: On a well-nigh daily basis, he broke the conspiracy of silence surrounding America's genocidal Iraqi project; as often, he challenged the insidious power grabs by Bush, facilitated and secretly cheered by his Democratic "opposition"; his voice was among the faint few who understood and objected to the looting of the treasury and of your savings, current and potential, by the bi-partisan Wall Street clique that, in the good and principled man's own words, will make sure that "you eat shit for the rest of your life". The man was aware and gave voice to the grim fact that everything you do, whether at work or at play, is geared to the aggrandizement of state power by a labyrinthine cogwork of laws, regulations, titles, statutes, forms, schedules, rulings, ordinances, bylaws and decrees; and, conversely, that if you fail to sacrifice the allotted share of your social power for conversion into state power in every little thing you do, why, you're no better than a criminal. The man saw what there was to see and said what there was to say. And that is no mean thing in a culture that is plunging headlong into the black night of barbarism. As was to be expected, nobody listened. Here is a man whose name should be trailing reverently from the besotted lips of the world. Yet not a whisper is heard. Perhaps--damnable possibility--the truth is that we were not worthy of him. Neither the zombie politic in general, nor you nor I in particular, were worthy of him. Such are the heroes of a people who so badly need them, but deserve them so little.
I had trouble keeping my tenses straight while writing the foregoing. Forgive me, but let me explain. It's not merely a matter of deficient mental faculty. The trouble is that the ailing man of principle's invaluable blog may be a thing of the past, as may the man behind it. The last time he wrote publicly was to explain his recent dearth of production, hinting at numerous grave ailments for which he has no recourse to ongoing care. If, some months from now, the online broker tells me the money was never claimed, I shall have my answer. The seed was stillborn, and the hero we did not deserve is dead. But his injunction still stands: Wake up, be adults, and for God's sake, be serious.
I will leave off by quoting the man, whose name is Arthur Silber, at greater length. I had been toying with the idea of not revealing his name at all, on principle, but I imagine Silber himself would not want it that way.
On where we stand:
"The significant point is that the aftermath of 9/11 would not have been so devastating, and this intellectual paralysis would not have persisted until now, unless a number of factors had already existed: the constantly diminishing concern with liberty and individual rights on the part of so many Americans, the dependence on government for more benefits of all kinds, for more controls and, above all, for perfect safety, the general deterioration and extremely aggressive anti-intellectualism of our culture and the inability to conduct a serious discussion about any subject at all, the decline of our media into obsolescence and irrelevance on all matters of importance -- and then, added to all this, the determined, unrelenting efforts by the Bush administration to achieve their ignoble aims by whatever means necessary.
"In this sense, what we are now experiencing is the perfect cultural storm, and the perfect cultural nightmare: a storm which can easily destroy what remains of liberty here at home, and simultaneously lead to world war, a war which might kill a significant portion of mankind.
"For these reasons, and as I have detailed in many other essays here, I do think that we live in a uniquely and profoundly dangerous time in historic terms. This particular combination of factors has never existed in America before. When an administration is known to assault individual rights on a continuing basis, when our government seeks to place itself and all its actions beyond the reach of all law and all restraints, when the United States engages in abuse and torture across the world, when we attack another country on the basis of lies when that other nation never threatened us -- when all of this is known and is out in the open, and when the American public utters barely one word of protest and doesn't object to a degree which need concern the administration at all -- then the stage is set for the ultimate catastrophe."
On those who stand on high:
"Anyone who craves such power is irredeemably corrupt. Our history over the last hundred years demonstrates that the Democrats and Republicans are equally corrupt. They all feed off the system -- and they all feed off us. None of them wants to dismantle the system that supports and makes possible the lives to which they have become accustomed. For them, the system is life itself. In this kind of system -- in our kind of system -- there is no longer any battle over fundamental principles. The only struggles are over who controls the levers of state power. The only struggles are over who will rule. As a result, they will fight each other over derivative issues, but only to the extent they believe this will aid in their own ascension to power. The system itself is sacrosanct."
Finally, two tangentially relevant passages by other writers:
"During all the years that I have been writing I have steeled myself to the idea that I would not really be accepted, at least to my own countrymen, until after my death. Many times, in writing, I have looked over my own shoulder from beyond the grave, more alive to the reactions of those to come than to those of my contemporaries. A good part of my life has, in a way, been lived in the future. With regard to all that vitally concerns me I am really a dead man, alive only to a very few who, like myself, could not wait for the world to catch up with them. I do not say this out of pride or vanity, but with humility not untouched with sadness."
- Henry Miller in The Colossus of Maroussi (1939)
"The ablest and most acute observer among the many who came from Europe to look us over in the early part of the [19th] century was the one who is for some reason the most neglected, notwithstanding that in our present circumstances, especially, he is worth more to us than all the de Tocquevilles, Bryces, Trolloppes, and Chateaubriands put together. This was the noted St.-Simonien and political economist, Michel Chevalier. Professor Chinard, in his admirable biographical study of John Adams, has called attention to Chevalier's observation that the American people have "the morale of an army on the march." The more one thinks of this, the more clearly one sees how little there is in what our publicists are fond of calling "the American psychology" that it does not exactly account for [...].
"An army on the march has no philosophy. It views itself as a creature of the moment. It does not rationalize conduct except in terms of an immediate end. As Tennyson observed, there is a pretty strict official understanding against its doing so; "theirs not to reason why." Emotionalizing conduct is another matter, and the more of it the better; it is encouraged by a whole elaborate paraphernalia of showy etiquettes, flags, music, uniforms, decorations, and the careful cultivation of a very special sort of camaraderie. In every relation to "the reason of the thing," however -- in the ability and eagerness, as Plato puts it, "to see things as they are" -- the mentality of an army on the march is merely so much delayed adolescence; it remains persistently, incorrigibly and notoriously infantile."
- Albert Jay Nock in Our Enemy, the State (1935)
"Nature frequently does not announce in advance her intentions to fundamentally alter the world. Men often do -- and usually such warnings are ignored."
So. We're back. Back to retrain our sights on the sum of money still languishing in e-purgatory, waiting to be claimed or forgotten, born or miscarried, redeemed, refused, or returned as undeliverable. I mentioned in the first section of this paean that the unclaimed status of my electronically given alms was of grave concern to me. And so it obviously is. But I submit and shall argue that the matter far transcends the narrow sphere of my own interests. To the extent that the sum's status indexes the continued existence or possible passing of the principled man of letters in question, it may be appropriate to class the transaction, however miserly its actual magnitude, as being of general importance to truth, decency, and--as the man himself frequently puts it--the sanctity of a single human life. A heady billing, yes, but note that I stop short of hawking tawdry nationalist notions by asserting, for instance, that the 'fate of the nation' hinges on whether the principled man is able to resume his writing. That destiny is an illusion beyond all salvation. At this late juncture, I wonder if, far from righting the handbasket's gadarene course, our only hope lies in certain of its wary passengers being able to maintain some marginal hold on moral consciousness and empirical sobriety as the rest of us stampede into the sulphurous nether reaches without thought or care.
I mentioned in the first section that this writer, this beggar, this good and principled man, was of vanishing significance. That he is. He has nothing. Nothing at all. From the vantage of the groveling hordes spreadeagled before the altarsa of power, money and fame--yes, I mean you--he is nothing. Far from earning him acclaim or accolade, his tireless work in the service of decency and the sanctity of a single human life has made him destitute. Indeed, if his work is noticed at all as he lives out his remaining days in America's pitiless margin, it is likely to elicit only scorn and ridicule from a readership presumably hoping to cozy up to power and escape personal responsibility the handbasket's course by cutting, as it were, a plea deal. And yet it is precisely his contemptible nothingness that so qualifies him to exercise his voice as a legitimate proponent of democracy and freedom as he speaks for the poor, the forgotten, the weak and the sundry other miserable victims of the ruling class's endless pursuit of total power at home and abroad. To express it somewhat differently: Although his material circumstances are deplorable--and I do not wish to glorify his penury, merely to note it with a nod to its epistemological effect--it is the collision of this very marginality with his erudition and eloquence that makes the writing so powerful and haunting. Put differently again: Precisely because he does not feed at the corporate/state trough, his voice can be trusted. Yes, this is exactly right. It is his insignificance, exquisitely alloyed with eloquence, empathy, and intelligence, then tempered by the rigor of his intellectual commitment, that makes him trustworthy, and that places his writing in a class by itself. With only the merest handful of exceptions, no voice has been raised with as much stridency and forthright persistence as his in denouncing the events that have heralded our cowardly descent into darkness. For this reason and for others to be detailed below, his is the single most important voice in modern American letters, political or otherwise.
Here is a man who has seen very clearly how matters stand for the sucker without a trough, for the unprotected individual who has surrendered neither vision nor spirit for the soporific emoluments of comfort and prestige. Everything proceeds from this untethered perspective. I intend to use this concept, that of the unprotected individual (as both object and subject), as a lens through which to focus at somewhat greater length on a representative group of the issues that keep our principled man of letters up at night.
First things first. How do things stand with the unprotected individual? Let us refer to the ominous citation at the top of this post by way of warming up to the subject. The line is his, the mendicant blogger's, penned on the occasion of the passage of the Military Commissions Act of 2006. This act, as I think bears endless repetition, annihilated all of your liberties at their conceptual root, and with them the very last traces of the hope for human happiness that accompanied the founding of our country in that long ago. In theory, your body is now the chattel of the State, to do with as it pleases. Mr. Obama or whoever succeeds him as the parasite- and murderer-in-chief may consign you or me or anyone at all to a torture chamber in perpetuity and be held to account by precisely no one. All he must do is label you an "enemy combatant", and presto! your life is over. Habeas corpus, the principle set out nearly 800 years ago in the Magna Carta as a means of protecting individuals from the depredations of the state, is in our country a thing of the past. This is the letter of the law. No longer, in theory, do you have the right to challenge your detention at the hands of the government. From this it follows that all the other rights which you thought were yours are entirely illusory. This is what you need to know. It is indeed all you need to know. Or: If we were a citizenry that cared a damn about freedom and human life, the foregoing would be all we needed to know before springing into action to overthrow the tyrannical government that made it so. But we aren't, and it isn't, and we won't. It should be noted here that one of the very first actions taken by the present administration in January 2009 was to solidify the legal ground for tyranny prepared so diligently by the one it succeeded. For the benefit of those clinging to the vain hope of striking a plea deal with leviathan, it should also be noted that when each individual is the theoretical chattel of the state, no wall is high enough to keep you safe. No amount of money or fame will be enough to secure you in your phantom liberties. Raw power is the only thing there is, which means that only the ascendant faction is safe, and only for as long as they remain in the ascendant. Everyone else is tax chattel, cannon fodder, prison meat.
You will say I am ringing the alarm bells without empirical cause, that I am ringing them irresponsibly. Have things really come to such a dire pass? Is it really time to run for the hills? The answer is a qualified no. We are not yet a dictatorship, but the path is very short. Actually, it has been paved and signposted, and a whole bunch of sheriffs have been detailed to patrol it. The intentions have been announced, and there is nothing intrinsic to you or to me or to our polity that will prevent them from being brought to term. Now you'll argue that the detention camps and mass round-ups have not yet come. But they will--though you won't be hearing much about them. Hordes of dedicated, sadistic opportunists have worked tirelessly for years to lay the conceptual groundwork for midwifing just these horrors into being. One need not be very proficient in the art of thought-experimentation to divine what a boon another real terrorist strike or war would be to the power of the state and to the pathetic dreams of domination harbored by the subhuman functionaries who serve it. With ample exceptions for our rapacious elites, all of us stand huddled on the bleak shore that the principled mendicant blogger has seen so clearly, completely vulnerable to what the tide may bring, though it should be mentioned that even those elites may easily fall from grace, briefly to adorn the sacrificial altar of state power before they, too, are merged with the main stream of din, distr(u/a)ction, and death.
Which is all to say that we have all been warned of what lies ahead. The ruling class has made its intentions perfectly clear. They told you in broad daylight; they told it to your face. But the bitter truth is that you don't really need the principled mendicant blogger to know where we stand, and you certainly don't need me. Nor is there any need to compile detailed lists of legislation, executive orders, verdicts, conclaves, policy papers or the like. Just go out and smell the air. Talk to the people. Listen. Do you feel the fear, the loathing, the trembling?
As for the fate of the unprotected individual with the misfortune to be huddled on foreign shores that have come under the scrutiny of imperial design, God help him. Suffice it to say that in order to count himself safe from American drones and death squads (your drones and death squads), he must dwell under the umbrella of a nuclear arsenal.
The blogger in question has examined the perpetual aggrandizement of the state's powers at the expense of the individual at great length over the course of several years, and with considerably greater intellectual firepower and moral seriousness than I can muster here. Of course, there are many others who have chronicled and charted our government's assault on life, liberty and dignity. What sets the mendicant blogger in question apart is the way he has managed to cut to the root--psychological, moral, and social--of why we find ourselves in this predicament. Why have we let ourselves, as individuals, become dupes in this pawn game of totalitarian intrigue? As our mendicant blogger sees it, the key to understanding how a once free people can so utterly relinquish its liberties to leviathan, can be found in our cradle-to-grave culture of obedience and deferral to authority. I mentioned in the first section that our principled mendicant blogger is a great chaser after the true meanings of words--obedience is one of the words he has loosed his hounds on. After a lengthy pursuit, he pins it down for us thus:
"Obedience is the term used to describe the demand by a person in a superior position [...] that a person in an inferior position conduct himself in a particular manner. The essence of obedience is the demand without more: A reason may be provided, but a reason is unnecessary."
To offer a very brief paraphrase of the large attendant idea that the mendicant man of letters has developed at great length, the problem is that so many of us fail to ever become fully formed adults--as defined by the capacity for independent judgment and moral autonomy--at any point in our lives. More precisely, we import into adulthood the unhealthy dynamic that characterized our emotional lives as children, when we were blackmailed into obedience by the unspoken Damocletic threat that parental love might be withdrawn as punishment for misbehavior. As we grow up and pass through the various institutions that purport to shape us into adults (while in fact sucking our blood and feeding us lies--my line), the fear and obedience originally accorded the parent give way to fear and obedience accorded the institutional authority figure, the representatives of the state, and ultimately the state itself. The being that emerges from this long apprenticeship to fear has neither the honesty and depth of feeling of a child nor the cognitive capacity and probity of a true adult; the best-educated specimens of this genus might best be compared to cowering animal with recourse to vast reserves of bad faith, disingenuousness and sophistry--a lawyer, in other words. As luck would have it, this cowering animal's very survival mechanisms are highly convenient to the state's purposes.
Now, however inapposite this account may be in individual cases, and whatever its logical flaws--flaws which are amply acknowledged by the writer himself, who advances his arguments by way of a tentative, evolving dialectic of difference and repetition, never by slinging arrows of arrogant conceit--its utility as a heuristic device is plain to see. Nor does the argument does end there. It is precisely at the point of "phobic transfer" from parent to state where the argument folds in on itself to ensure that no one is let off the hook. A child obeys because he must. Absent the parent, the child will die. Plainly, our principled man of letters argues, an adult is not in the same position of existential peril as a child. Although he may convince himself otherwise, the adult has a choice. Up to the point of being threatened by incarceration or violence, the adult's submission to the state's imperatives should actually be understood as support. Support for the political system that nominally represents us, whether material or ideological, whether active or passive, is an individual choice. This means, very significantly, that although we as individuals may be unable to halt the vast evils being committed in our name on these and other shores, we are, in a limited sense, collectively guilty of facilitating evil by omission. Even if we are inwardly opposed to the monstrous and ongoing series of war crimes that constitute the Iraqi occupation and have claimed lives numbering more than a million, even if we are inwardly opposed to the burgeoning paranoiac police state and infinite travesty of justice at home, we share in the guilt for these outrages to the extent that we do nothing to stop them. But no! you say. I was just minding my business; I had nothing to do with it. Of course: The dropping of this accessory charge, the ideological absolution, all this is a part of the plea deal sought by the fainthearted. Let someone else take the fall. As our principled mendicant blogger puts it: Why do you support?
Measure is the final signal aspect of this writer's persona that I would like to celebrate. He knows when to laugh, when to cry, when to curse and where to refrain. He knows the time for tempest and the time for anguished silence. Measure does not mean the buffoonery of "balance" or any of the other red herrings trotted out by corporate media to throw their insouciant readers off the scent of corruption. When his writing addresses grave matters of life and death, the register of his language reflects that gravity. He knows there is no humor in false levity. Nor, when dealing with these grave and pernicious matters--that is to say, when dealing with nearly every occurrence on the national political scene--does he affect the disgusting exculpatory irony deployed to such great effect by liberal intellectuals who find it expedient to distance themselves from state excesses, but inexpedient to address the issue at its root. This sense of measure derives, I would argue, from a rightness of perspective: He takes political matters seriously in terms of actual effects on actual people. He resists the soul-shriveling mendacity inherent in the apolitical, amoral "procedural reporting" spread in journalism schools. Such reporting is the kind that allows, for instance, for the authorship of breezy, witty articles on the debates between various sinecured mediocrities as they pass war spending bills without once mentioning in these articles that the debates they are covering so breezily and so wittily in fact concern the planned destruction of thousands of human lives. By which I mean that to our prescient and principled mendicant blogger, a single human life is sacred. I know, I know. This essay is peppered with references to that purported sanctity. And as mentioned in the first installment, a lifetime of brainwashed ignorance is not undone by a single cathartic assertion. No. If it is to gain any traction in our slippery minds and (not least) on our slippery tongues, the truth must be repeated incessantly. May you reread the foregoing until the bile boils over. It is my fervent hope that you do read it, over and over again.
When I come into contact with what I believe to be the truth regarding matters of fundamental importance to the sanctity of life and to the dormant dream of man as a free, enlightened and thoroughly spiritual animal, I feel a deep obligation to make what I have felt available to others, bludgeoning them if I must, that they might partake of that truth and allow it to change their lives accordingly. Truth--as opposed to myths, lies, distortions or cognitive dissonance--has this power. Above, I identified this man's marginal status as the wellspring of his intellectual freedom, and the power of his perspective. As anyone who is familiar with the real article rather than the hollow ersatz peddled by nationalist scoundrels will know, freedom's eternal correlative is risk. In order to be able to address himself to his task with the radical cognitive and stylistic freedom that made his work exceptional, this good and principled man had to shun and be shunned by institutional safe havens. As the blog's progression through time amply illustrates, this freedom from allegiance cemented his poverty and ensured his susceptibility to the grim forces against which he so nobly marshaled a mind leavened by the word. If freedom and truth are in fact any concern of ours--if we wish to actuate these concepts as forces to counter the tide of unthinking darkness that threatens to sweep us all away--I submit that when we are touched by them, as we are in the case of this ailing mendicant blogger, this good, principled and visionary man, we also incur an obligation to sustain that freedom, most obviously by showering it with money. He is not selling you a cultural product: His existence constitutes the condition for keeping culture alive.
The thanks he gets: "I have written repeatedly on certain themes for several years now. I try to present my central ideas in new ways, to offer additional historical evidence for my contentions, and to make connections between seemingly disparate phenomena that I have not addressed earlier. But no matter what I attempt to do here, I make no headway whatsoever. It seems to me that my writing has no effect at all."
As a child in kindergarten, I recall being asked by my teacher if I had a hero. No, I said. I could think of none. Now that I am 30 years old, I may finally have one. Of course, I do think that the good man in question, the national clairvoyant toiling in the service of truth and decency without thanks or recognition, this mendicant blogger of vanishing significance, would shy away from any such designation. After all, his writing has not accomplished any of what we like to call 'real change.' The pleas and exhortations to action that were the not-quite-daily hallmarks of his blog for years have not prevented a single Iraqi or Afghan or Pakistani from meeting his fate at the hands of the American death machine, nor have they restored to us the rights we thought were ours by virtue of our humanity. Nor, and this is not an index of the man's incapacity, but that of the media and of the fools for whom their product is churned out, has this good and principled man of conscience been able, notwithstanding the vast, lapidary, interlocking body of meaning and truth he has erected over these past five and a half years, to resurrect anything bearing even a chance resemblance to justice or compassion or truth in the "national debate", least of all in the liberal quarters of that debate, where questions of fundamental importance are scorned and disregarded in favor of what the writer calls "primitive tribalism". So then, you say. He is nothing, he has done nothing, he is no better than me. Why the hell should I care?
Not so fast. This good and eloquent man of principle may indeed not have caused any of the gilded parasites that hold national office to change our course toward hell in the slightest, but he is better than you and I by a country mile: On a well-nigh daily basis, he broke the conspiracy of silence surrounding America's genocidal Iraqi project; as often, he challenged the insidious power grabs by Bush, facilitated and secretly cheered by his Democratic "opposition"; his voice was among the faint few who understood and objected to the looting of the treasury and of your savings, current and potential, by the bi-partisan Wall Street clique that, in the good and principled man's own words, will make sure that "you eat shit for the rest of your life". The man was aware and gave voice to the grim fact that everything you do, whether at work or at play, is geared to the aggrandizement of state power by a labyrinthine cogwork of laws, regulations, titles, statutes, forms, schedules, rulings, ordinances, bylaws and decrees; and, conversely, that if you fail to sacrifice the allotted share of your social power for conversion into state power in every little thing you do, why, you're no better than a criminal. The man saw what there was to see and said what there was to say. And that is no mean thing in a culture that is plunging headlong into the black night of barbarism. As was to be expected, nobody listened. Here is a man whose name should be trailing reverently from the besotted lips of the world. Yet not a whisper is heard. Perhaps--damnable possibility--the truth is that we were not worthy of him. Neither the zombie politic in general, nor you nor I in particular, were worthy of him. Such are the heroes of a people who so badly need them, but deserve them so little.
I had trouble keeping my tenses straight while writing the foregoing. Forgive me, but let me explain. It's not merely a matter of deficient mental faculty. The trouble is that the ailing man of principle's invaluable blog may be a thing of the past, as may the man behind it. The last time he wrote publicly was to explain his recent dearth of production, hinting at numerous grave ailments for which he has no recourse to ongoing care. If, some months from now, the online broker tells me the money was never claimed, I shall have my answer. The seed was stillborn, and the hero we did not deserve is dead. But his injunction still stands: Wake up, be adults, and for God's sake, be serious.
I will leave off by quoting the man, whose name is Arthur Silber, at greater length. I had been toying with the idea of not revealing his name at all, on principle, but I imagine Silber himself would not want it that way.
On where we stand:
"The significant point is that the aftermath of 9/11 would not have been so devastating, and this intellectual paralysis would not have persisted until now, unless a number of factors had already existed: the constantly diminishing concern with liberty and individual rights on the part of so many Americans, the dependence on government for more benefits of all kinds, for more controls and, above all, for perfect safety, the general deterioration and extremely aggressive anti-intellectualism of our culture and the inability to conduct a serious discussion about any subject at all, the decline of our media into obsolescence and irrelevance on all matters of importance -- and then, added to all this, the determined, unrelenting efforts by the Bush administration to achieve their ignoble aims by whatever means necessary.
"In this sense, what we are now experiencing is the perfect cultural storm, and the perfect cultural nightmare: a storm which can easily destroy what remains of liberty here at home, and simultaneously lead to world war, a war which might kill a significant portion of mankind.
"For these reasons, and as I have detailed in many other essays here, I do think that we live in a uniquely and profoundly dangerous time in historic terms. This particular combination of factors has never existed in America before. When an administration is known to assault individual rights on a continuing basis, when our government seeks to place itself and all its actions beyond the reach of all law and all restraints, when the United States engages in abuse and torture across the world, when we attack another country on the basis of lies when that other nation never threatened us -- when all of this is known and is out in the open, and when the American public utters barely one word of protest and doesn't object to a degree which need concern the administration at all -- then the stage is set for the ultimate catastrophe."
On those who stand on high:
"Anyone who craves such power is irredeemably corrupt. Our history over the last hundred years demonstrates that the Democrats and Republicans are equally corrupt. They all feed off the system -- and they all feed off us. None of them wants to dismantle the system that supports and makes possible the lives to which they have become accustomed. For them, the system is life itself. In this kind of system -- in our kind of system -- there is no longer any battle over fundamental principles. The only struggles are over who controls the levers of state power. The only struggles are over who will rule. As a result, they will fight each other over derivative issues, but only to the extent they believe this will aid in their own ascension to power. The system itself is sacrosanct."
Finally, two tangentially relevant passages by other writers:
"During all the years that I have been writing I have steeled myself to the idea that I would not really be accepted, at least to my own countrymen, until after my death. Many times, in writing, I have looked over my own shoulder from beyond the grave, more alive to the reactions of those to come than to those of my contemporaries. A good part of my life has, in a way, been lived in the future. With regard to all that vitally concerns me I am really a dead man, alive only to a very few who, like myself, could not wait for the world to catch up with them. I do not say this out of pride or vanity, but with humility not untouched with sadness."
- Henry Miller in The Colossus of Maroussi (1939)
"The ablest and most acute observer among the many who came from Europe to look us over in the early part of the [19th] century was the one who is for some reason the most neglected, notwithstanding that in our present circumstances, especially, he is worth more to us than all the de Tocquevilles, Bryces, Trolloppes, and Chateaubriands put together. This was the noted St.-Simonien and political economist, Michel Chevalier. Professor Chinard, in his admirable biographical study of John Adams, has called attention to Chevalier's observation that the American people have "the morale of an army on the march." The more one thinks of this, the more clearly one sees how little there is in what our publicists are fond of calling "the American psychology" that it does not exactly account for [...].
"An army on the march has no philosophy. It views itself as a creature of the moment. It does not rationalize conduct except in terms of an immediate end. As Tennyson observed, there is a pretty strict official understanding against its doing so; "theirs not to reason why." Emotionalizing conduct is another matter, and the more of it the better; it is encouraged by a whole elaborate paraphernalia of showy etiquettes, flags, music, uniforms, decorations, and the careful cultivation of a very special sort of camaraderie. In every relation to "the reason of the thing," however -- in the ability and eagerness, as Plato puts it, "to see things as they are" -- the mentality of an army on the march is merely so much delayed adolescence; it remains persistently, incorrigibly and notoriously infantile."
- Albert Jay Nock in Our Enemy, the State (1935)
Saturday, August 15, 2009
A Paean to a Vanishing Visionary, Part I
Somewhere there is a small sum of money lying in wait. Waiting to be born or miscarried, to be claimed or forgotten. Its fate is of concern to me. As usual, the money is a mask, and a means, and a seed.
It was I who forwarded it from here to that somewhere. It was I who begot the transaction. It was I who sent the sniveling sum. Why? For a man. It was for a good man, a man of principle. He was in need. A principled and good man was in need. A principled and good man was in need, do you hear? But there's more. He was a visionary. He saw farther and more keenly than the great mass of men, especially those in the habit of posing as experts or soothsayers or plain talkers, be it merely by the fact that he had not surrendered his full humanity. Indeed, he had kept his heart compassionate and his mind limber and productive into his sixties. His was an act of persistence and resistance not to be scorned in our infra-human times. This man in need, as we shall see, has set an example, both in the letter of his work and in the sum of his being, that those who would survive an era bent on the ultimate destruction of civilization and the human spirit ignore at their peril.
This good and principled man, this visionary, was ill. This good and principled man, this visionary, was a beggar. This good and principled man, this visionary beggar, was a writer. He was a writer who begged the eleemosynary assistance of would-be online patrons to hold by waning life the guttering flame of his capacity to write, to sustain the harrowed brilliance of his analytic faculty as a means of courting and transmitting truth. Nothing but the truth. Or: Grim facts leavened by a dynamic and supple understanding of the history and the habits of thought and action that bring those facts about. The man produced neither art nor science, neither entertainment nor intellectual displays of the exhibitionist or mercenary stripe. Just a long effort at simple truth, produced with a depth of eloquence and consistency of thought with very few equals in modern American letters. His web log was without advertisement or other adornment, and he, as he humbly explained when circumstance required, was without any other means at all. That he should have been reliant, in the end, on a patron as insubstantial and miserly and dilatory as I is a stunning measure of the forces that are now ranged against truth, and a damning affidavit that we modern Americans abide in hell.
This good and principled man, this beggar, this writer, was known to reside in the city of Los Angeles. I might contend that the small sum of money I forwarded is waiting somewhere there. But this would be merely as true and as false as saying that it is waiting in my heart, or halfway across the Atlantic. The sum, you see, was consigned electronically. I did not send any thing any where. What I did was to forward a sequence of electrons to a "server" where they could be accessed by this good and principled and sick man, this mendicant blogger, the alloy of whose brilliance and whose destitution beggared belief, in order that one of the world's rapine aggregations of capital might enable and authorize him, this good and visionary and lonely man in need, to shuffle to a machine where he might actuate further sequences of authorized bookkeeping that would, in the end, result in the devagination of a small sum of notes that bear the hallowed-stigmatic mark of legal tender. It would, but has not. Alas, this tango of authorizations must remain in the purgatory of the conditional.
The portion of the man's writing with which I am familiar deals, roughly speaking, with politics. More accurately, he provides deeply considered views of the degenerating political, psychological and moral landscape of the United States from the perspective of a single person of truly vanishing significance; that is to say, from the vantage of that subject who is the aptest judge of the equity or iniquity of actions enacted by the centers of power, and who is the best tool for gauging the vitality or morbidity of a democracy (whose exact measure may be taken by casting simple a glance at how it treats its weakest and most vulnerable members--I was once under the illusion that these matters were self-evident; now I know that they are not, and that they must be repeated ad nauseam as a shibboleth against evil). In large part due to his non-affiliation with any sort of institutional benefactor or other platform beyond the vanishing self, he offers commentary that is intelligent, fair, moral, logical, and which has deployed deep taproots into history, culture and the meaning of words. In short, his writing issues from a source that is free. At its kernel, the writing is addressed to an interdependent complex of themes that go to the very heart of our modern American reality: Corporate authoritarianism and its correlative brain-dead servility at home, war without end abroad, lies without limit everywhere, all of it crowned by institutionalized torture and the scornful nullification of your Constitutional rights that foreshadow the even greater evils that lie in wait.
The writing of this ailing man of principle operates dialectically, both in its selection of topic and on the level of its written analysis. The bulk of the blog posts take the form of topical commentary on current events. For instance, at one time or another, and in many cases throughout its brief but prodigious lifetime, his blog has covered the following: The criminal occupation of Iraq that has taken over a million lives; the Military Commissions Act of 2006 which made torture the law of the land and nullified all of your rights as a citizen at their very root; the previous regime's utter contempt for the laws it was sworn to uphold; and the frightening spectacle of Obama supporters acquiescing, in their teeming millions, to call the substance of Obama's electoral platform "progressive".
This more or less continuous stream of focused posts is occasionally punctuated by a torrent of an essay aimed at laying out the general framework within which his thinking and the events that come under his consideration can be understood. These essays are linked to on a sidebar called "Major Essays". Several of these engage critically with the myths and lies that poison the American consciousness from the Oval Office and the Ivory Tower to our benighted backwoods and seething gutters, and which set the rules for what is referred to as the "national debate" by those who dignify the din of mendacious irrelevancies uttered to screen acts of unforgivable evil committed in broad daylight with the term debate. Chief among these myths is that of American exceptionalism. Employing splendid moral force supported by irrefutable fact, the ailing man of principle argues that the pernicious myth of our exceptionalism has been used by elites since at least the time of the Mexican-American war, not only to indoctrinate Americans--and indeed the world entire, not least those irrelevant peoples on whom we train guns and rain bombs--that "history has an ultimate solution, and...the United States is meant to provide it" [William Pfaff], but also that any transgression, no matter how cruel or depraved, is excusable to the extent that it was committed in order to defend or to advance America's "national interest". Witness the slaughter of countless Filipinos, hunted down in the jungle like animals; the incineration of civilian populations in Germany and Japan, the latter in part by atomic bombs; the destruction of Vietnam, Laos, Iraq and Nicaragua [with apologies to those omitted here], leaving millions dead and maimed; the founding of schools to train goons and stooges in the barbaric arts of assassination, torture and murder; the encirclement and targeting of the entire globe with the spectral apparatus of American military might--all of it excused, elided, forgotten, erased. The ailing man of principle's analysis of the attitudes and ignorance that allow such a myth to be held as self-evident truth is deep, subtle, and provocative. If the world is to be saved from further destructions played out according to the deformed this myth, or even total annihilation, let Americans read this man's work.
If Americans were to concern themselves with the ailing man of principle's contribution to letters, reason, mind and hope, they would be rewarded with significant essays on significant subjects such as torture, the destruction and betrayal of New Orleans, ignorance as an abiding and "sacred" feature of our national character (with obvious correlations to the myth of our exceptionalism), a disquisition on abortion and, perhaps most significantly, the modes of child-rearing that have produced generation after generation of adults whose spirits are stunted at the root, who are incapable of questioning authority, incapable of making independent moral judgments, incapable of intellectual inquiry, capable of torture and indeed any atrocity sanctified by the holy seal of the predatory-parasitical state.
I mentioned above that the Major Essays serve as a frame through which the shorter topical posts may be read and viewed, and that these larger works can be seen as attempts at a main stream able to carry and consolidate the disparate currents that accumulate in the blog over time. It is a wide and bracing frame. Since the principled man's forum is the web, the act of framing is quite apparent: He makes a deft habit of threading facts, refrains, and conclusions from previous essays into new ones as his thinking on a given subject evolves, stumbles or meanders. As such, this is an obvious and altogether unremarkable application of the technologies at the online writer's disposal. And yet, seen in the context of the whole, it becomes apparent that this constant citation, this conscious obsession with the reiteration and mutation of previous themes, is a technique that he employs with consummate skill in an unflagging attempt to construct a coherent narrative that can be used to account for the position in which we find ourselves, to interpret the actual or deeper meanings of events that may strike us as fatuous or arbitrary at first blush, and to predict the outcomes, all too often dire, of various courses of political or military action. To online readers accustomed to using the screen to surf through information with ease--or with libidinal bribes in the form of visual stimulation and other manifestations of the vacuous din of the dominant culture--this constant linking and cross-referencing can be tiresome. Reading this blog requires patience. If you are armed with this patience, and if you are the type of reader who follows instructions and opens the links suggested for background, reading through one of his major essays quickly begins to feel like a journey through an exquisite labyrinth. Obviously, and again significantly, these links shuttle the reader back and forth in time, both in blog-time and historical time, whether from the vicious lies of Wilsonian idealism to their parallels in Bush II or from 2001 to 2009 by way of 1933, which equips the reader with the vertical-temporal axis prerequisite to comprehension. This is exactly right: Somewhere amidst all these currents, whether in the center or at the end, lies the promise and the catharsis of understanding. I maintain that this very act, this ailing writer's monumental attempt at furnishing a coherent framework by which the otherwise arbitrary events and forces that shape our lives can be understood, is itself a profound act of resistance to the abyss of callous amnesia and criminal ignorance to which nearly everyone has succumbed. With apologies for my tiresomely frequent recourse to the obvious, I should say that with respect to intellectual rigor and logical coherence, the gulf separating this man from the reputable and well-heeled vassals of the corporate commentariat could not be wider.
So. Just as his shorter, topical posts draw on and redound to the strength of the longer, load-bearing essays in his intellectual edifice, and just as the currents of earlier perspectives intermingle with and complement his evolving view, creating fruitful tension between observation and theory, between vituperation and analysis, between now and any of a variety of thens, the ailing man of principle's stylistic approach to writing, and thus also to truth, is complex, encompassing, daring and dialectical. Both within single pieces of work and across time, he dazzles his readers with a breadth of perspective and depth of register--a single one of his paragraphs is able to blend visceral polemic with utterly serious philosophical disquisition--that is rarely found in expository writing on any subject today, and which is rare enough in fiction. Without risking the blame of hyperbole, I think his style could be compared, with some justice, to Nietzsche's. Indeed, had Nietzsche been born 100 years later in a country as benighted and viciously anti-intellectual as America, who is to say that he would not have ended his days as a marginal blogger in the bleak city of Los Angeles?
(Continued in Part II)
It was I who forwarded it from here to that somewhere. It was I who begot the transaction. It was I who sent the sniveling sum. Why? For a man. It was for a good man, a man of principle. He was in need. A principled and good man was in need. A principled and good man was in need, do you hear? But there's more. He was a visionary. He saw farther and more keenly than the great mass of men, especially those in the habit of posing as experts or soothsayers or plain talkers, be it merely by the fact that he had not surrendered his full humanity. Indeed, he had kept his heart compassionate and his mind limber and productive into his sixties. His was an act of persistence and resistance not to be scorned in our infra-human times. This man in need, as we shall see, has set an example, both in the letter of his work and in the sum of his being, that those who would survive an era bent on the ultimate destruction of civilization and the human spirit ignore at their peril.
This good and principled man, this visionary, was ill. This good and principled man, this visionary, was a beggar. This good and principled man, this visionary beggar, was a writer. He was a writer who begged the eleemosynary assistance of would-be online patrons to hold by waning life the guttering flame of his capacity to write, to sustain the harrowed brilliance of his analytic faculty as a means of courting and transmitting truth. Nothing but the truth. Or: Grim facts leavened by a dynamic and supple understanding of the history and the habits of thought and action that bring those facts about. The man produced neither art nor science, neither entertainment nor intellectual displays of the exhibitionist or mercenary stripe. Just a long effort at simple truth, produced with a depth of eloquence and consistency of thought with very few equals in modern American letters. His web log was without advertisement or other adornment, and he, as he humbly explained when circumstance required, was without any other means at all. That he should have been reliant, in the end, on a patron as insubstantial and miserly and dilatory as I is a stunning measure of the forces that are now ranged against truth, and a damning affidavit that we modern Americans abide in hell.
This good and principled man, this beggar, this writer, was known to reside in the city of Los Angeles. I might contend that the small sum of money I forwarded is waiting somewhere there. But this would be merely as true and as false as saying that it is waiting in my heart, or halfway across the Atlantic. The sum, you see, was consigned electronically. I did not send any thing any where. What I did was to forward a sequence of electrons to a "server" where they could be accessed by this good and principled and sick man, this mendicant blogger, the alloy of whose brilliance and whose destitution beggared belief, in order that one of the world's rapine aggregations of capital might enable and authorize him, this good and visionary and lonely man in need, to shuffle to a machine where he might actuate further sequences of authorized bookkeeping that would, in the end, result in the devagination of a small sum of notes that bear the hallowed-stigmatic mark of legal tender. It would, but has not. Alas, this tango of authorizations must remain in the purgatory of the conditional.
The portion of the man's writing with which I am familiar deals, roughly speaking, with politics. More accurately, he provides deeply considered views of the degenerating political, psychological and moral landscape of the United States from the perspective of a single person of truly vanishing significance; that is to say, from the vantage of that subject who is the aptest judge of the equity or iniquity of actions enacted by the centers of power, and who is the best tool for gauging the vitality or morbidity of a democracy (whose exact measure may be taken by casting simple a glance at how it treats its weakest and most vulnerable members--I was once under the illusion that these matters were self-evident; now I know that they are not, and that they must be repeated ad nauseam as a shibboleth against evil). In large part due to his non-affiliation with any sort of institutional benefactor or other platform beyond the vanishing self, he offers commentary that is intelligent, fair, moral, logical, and which has deployed deep taproots into history, culture and the meaning of words. In short, his writing issues from a source that is free. At its kernel, the writing is addressed to an interdependent complex of themes that go to the very heart of our modern American reality: Corporate authoritarianism and its correlative brain-dead servility at home, war without end abroad, lies without limit everywhere, all of it crowned by institutionalized torture and the scornful nullification of your Constitutional rights that foreshadow the even greater evils that lie in wait.
The writing of this ailing man of principle operates dialectically, both in its selection of topic and on the level of its written analysis. The bulk of the blog posts take the form of topical commentary on current events. For instance, at one time or another, and in many cases throughout its brief but prodigious lifetime, his blog has covered the following: The criminal occupation of Iraq that has taken over a million lives; the Military Commissions Act of 2006 which made torture the law of the land and nullified all of your rights as a citizen at their very root; the previous regime's utter contempt for the laws it was sworn to uphold; and the frightening spectacle of Obama supporters acquiescing, in their teeming millions, to call the substance of Obama's electoral platform "progressive".
This more or less continuous stream of focused posts is occasionally punctuated by a torrent of an essay aimed at laying out the general framework within which his thinking and the events that come under his consideration can be understood. These essays are linked to on a sidebar called "Major Essays". Several of these engage critically with the myths and lies that poison the American consciousness from the Oval Office and the Ivory Tower to our benighted backwoods and seething gutters, and which set the rules for what is referred to as the "national debate" by those who dignify the din of mendacious irrelevancies uttered to screen acts of unforgivable evil committed in broad daylight with the term debate. Chief among these myths is that of American exceptionalism. Employing splendid moral force supported by irrefutable fact, the ailing man of principle argues that the pernicious myth of our exceptionalism has been used by elites since at least the time of the Mexican-American war, not only to indoctrinate Americans--and indeed the world entire, not least those irrelevant peoples on whom we train guns and rain bombs--that "history has an ultimate solution, and...the United States is meant to provide it" [William Pfaff], but also that any transgression, no matter how cruel or depraved, is excusable to the extent that it was committed in order to defend or to advance America's "national interest". Witness the slaughter of countless Filipinos, hunted down in the jungle like animals; the incineration of civilian populations in Germany and Japan, the latter in part by atomic bombs; the destruction of Vietnam, Laos, Iraq and Nicaragua [with apologies to those omitted here], leaving millions dead and maimed; the founding of schools to train goons and stooges in the barbaric arts of assassination, torture and murder; the encirclement and targeting of the entire globe with the spectral apparatus of American military might--all of it excused, elided, forgotten, erased. The ailing man of principle's analysis of the attitudes and ignorance that allow such a myth to be held as self-evident truth is deep, subtle, and provocative. If the world is to be saved from further destructions played out according to the deformed this myth, or even total annihilation, let Americans read this man's work.
If Americans were to concern themselves with the ailing man of principle's contribution to letters, reason, mind and hope, they would be rewarded with significant essays on significant subjects such as torture, the destruction and betrayal of New Orleans, ignorance as an abiding and "sacred" feature of our national character (with obvious correlations to the myth of our exceptionalism), a disquisition on abortion and, perhaps most significantly, the modes of child-rearing that have produced generation after generation of adults whose spirits are stunted at the root, who are incapable of questioning authority, incapable of making independent moral judgments, incapable of intellectual inquiry, capable of torture and indeed any atrocity sanctified by the holy seal of the predatory-parasitical state.
I mentioned above that the Major Essays serve as a frame through which the shorter topical posts may be read and viewed, and that these larger works can be seen as attempts at a main stream able to carry and consolidate the disparate currents that accumulate in the blog over time. It is a wide and bracing frame. Since the principled man's forum is the web, the act of framing is quite apparent: He makes a deft habit of threading facts, refrains, and conclusions from previous essays into new ones as his thinking on a given subject evolves, stumbles or meanders. As such, this is an obvious and altogether unremarkable application of the technologies at the online writer's disposal. And yet, seen in the context of the whole, it becomes apparent that this constant citation, this conscious obsession with the reiteration and mutation of previous themes, is a technique that he employs with consummate skill in an unflagging attempt to construct a coherent narrative that can be used to account for the position in which we find ourselves, to interpret the actual or deeper meanings of events that may strike us as fatuous or arbitrary at first blush, and to predict the outcomes, all too often dire, of various courses of political or military action. To online readers accustomed to using the screen to surf through information with ease--or with libidinal bribes in the form of visual stimulation and other manifestations of the vacuous din of the dominant culture--this constant linking and cross-referencing can be tiresome. Reading this blog requires patience. If you are armed with this patience, and if you are the type of reader who follows instructions and opens the links suggested for background, reading through one of his major essays quickly begins to feel like a journey through an exquisite labyrinth. Obviously, and again significantly, these links shuttle the reader back and forth in time, both in blog-time and historical time, whether from the vicious lies of Wilsonian idealism to their parallels in Bush II or from 2001 to 2009 by way of 1933, which equips the reader with the vertical-temporal axis prerequisite to comprehension. This is exactly right: Somewhere amidst all these currents, whether in the center or at the end, lies the promise and the catharsis of understanding. I maintain that this very act, this ailing writer's monumental attempt at furnishing a coherent framework by which the otherwise arbitrary events and forces that shape our lives can be understood, is itself a profound act of resistance to the abyss of callous amnesia and criminal ignorance to which nearly everyone has succumbed. With apologies for my tiresomely frequent recourse to the obvious, I should say that with respect to intellectual rigor and logical coherence, the gulf separating this man from the reputable and well-heeled vassals of the corporate commentariat could not be wider.
So. Just as his shorter, topical posts draw on and redound to the strength of the longer, load-bearing essays in his intellectual edifice, and just as the currents of earlier perspectives intermingle with and complement his evolving view, creating fruitful tension between observation and theory, between vituperation and analysis, between now and any of a variety of thens, the ailing man of principle's stylistic approach to writing, and thus also to truth, is complex, encompassing, daring and dialectical. Both within single pieces of work and across time, he dazzles his readers with a breadth of perspective and depth of register--a single one of his paragraphs is able to blend visceral polemic with utterly serious philosophical disquisition--that is rarely found in expository writing on any subject today, and which is rare enough in fiction. Without risking the blame of hyperbole, I think his style could be compared, with some justice, to Nietzsche's. Indeed, had Nietzsche been born 100 years later in a country as benighted and viciously anti-intellectual as America, who is to say that he would not have ended his days as a marginal blogger in the bleak city of Los Angeles?
(Continued in Part II)
Sunday, August 2, 2009
Safety Film, Part IV
"Cut. Good, Ben, good. You're not falling off any. Keep it that way. All right, let's get on camera two." The cameraman tucked the camera he had trained on my bit back into its bay and wallowed down the aisle. I realized I'd not seen him enter the building. But here he was, practically too large to clear the aisle. He was wheezing heavily, all the more so as Reddeking launched into his motivating-methodical coax and hoax with the girl. Something about visualizing her viewers, seeing them as a series of nested sleeves and skins at the bottom of which was a tiny kernel, a tiny essence, and what she needed to address herself to was that kernel. I looked beyond the fuselage and the platform at the other girls. They were huddled together for warmth and regarding the scene with glazed indifference. One of them looked up and intercepted my eye gaze with a little smile that lacked the quality of pity that had characterized earlier smiles directed my way. I looked down at my suit--the generous lapels, the ornately fraudulent buttons, the smooth expanse of pressed weave. There had to be a way to keep it. From loafer to pilot, from gaping loafers to dashing wingtips--who knew what turn things might take for me once I got back out on that road? The sky had always been the limit, but now...
"Look into the camera," said Reddeking. "There. Now what do you see? A little gleaming point, right? The background, the cameraman, the situation, the day, the wind outside, the belly of the lens, you, your mind, your past, everything inside you and behind you...all of that is a foil for this single point, this kernel. Nothing exists without the point, nor can the point exist independently of everything. The point captures your glances, your words, your movements, and makes them immortal. It's the same thing you'll find at the core of the viewer once you're done paring back the layers, the skins and shells of indifference, and it's the same thing that's at the core of you. The same but different. The point is where it all comes from, the point is where it's all going, but it's also where the two halves meet. The truth is that the point is the condition of your existence. This is seduction. The amalgamation of two wills into a single point, a tightening and contraction of space and time. Now don't worry, sweetie, I'm just about done talking, I know I'm interrupting the flow I was going on about before. And trust me, I want you to have a go at connecting the dots just as soon as you can. It's just that...well, I might have left a part of your question unanswered before, so I would just add this one little thing, a little thing I say in confidence." He arched his tamed and sculpted brows as he inclined his chin and milked his goatee for a sign.
"Jesus," said the girl. "I thought I had already signed a frigging NDA."
"That was with the production house."
"All right, don't worry. What's said in this godforsaken place stays in this godforsaken place."
"Good to hear. So here's the deal. Lorenzo's passengers have already started asking for a seduction. They're begging for it. They've been having disciplinary problems on their flights. Smoking in the bathroom, refusal to wear safety belts, food fights. More than ten passengers have had to be subdued by air marshals in the past month for small altercations. And one cross-country flight, I think it was a red-eye, even had what pretty well qualifies as a mutiny. The passengers took over the food carts, coach stormed business, and the stout marshals were powerless. There was a SWAT team waiting on the runway when the plane landed. Some of the folks are facing some pretty stiff charges. They're trying to nail them for terrorism. Rumor has it that Lorenzo's not the only outfit facing these challenges. I know what you're thinking--why haven't I read about this? Don't be naive, sweetie. The industry decides what you read about it, much more than you think.
That's why we're here, that's why we need the seduction. Lorenzo isn't prepared to free up more legroom or hand out free chips. This is the only way forward in a competitive market. Say what you want, but that's the reality as they perceive it. And they are the ones paying for this shoot. Now I feel like I've been honest with you. Are we ready?"
"We're ready, Mr. Reddeking." A solemnity had settled over the girl.
"Remember, there is no camera, no set. Only a point of seduction. You put yourself in that point, and they will come. Here we go. Three, two, one, and roll." The cameraman was wheezing heavily as she began.
"The cabin crew welcomes you aboard this Lorenzo Air flight. To help us prepare for takeoff, all carry on items should now be stored securely, either stowed in an overhead bin, or placed under the seat in front of you. All aisles, exits and bulkhead areas should-"
"Cut."
"What? I didn't even get to-"
"Honey, you have it. You've got it. But you're hitting it too soon and it'll fly right over their heads. You have to work up to it. You have to work them up to it. Here's what I suggest. Start off somewhere far away from the point, then slowly focus in on it, and pounce at maybe the third or fourth sentence. How's that sound? Can we do that?"
I reached for my beer and watched the back of her head from the cockpit on take two. This time Reddeking let her go through the whole thing.
~
The first blush of dawn had touched the cosmic void of the eastern sky. I turned back to look, huddling in my collar, trying to convince myself of the truth of day's revenant promise. A last granular grating of hoarfrost and eroded pavement underfoot, then silence. A single light twinkled on the plain I'd crossed. The steel building. I strained to make out the ridge of the roof, the parked vehicle, and the ring of wreckage which, as I now saw, radiated over the entire plain, over the breadth and depth of the stunted badlands where monuments to doomed flights would long outlive the memory of man. If there is a loss of power and cabin visibility is reduced, white emergency lights near the floor will lead you to red lights, which indicate the exits. If there is a loss of cabin pressure, which is unlikely, yellow oxygen masks will deploy automatically...I'd been walking for hours now, and the safety video been with me the whole way. That girl. I'd written off Reddeking's spiel as so much horseshit, but she'd done it in spades. I hadn't understood until Reddeking had sat us down to look at the tape, but there was no denying. She'd sold a plot of hell to the devil. Reddeking had been right about the words, too. They didn't matter, all they did was carry the voice, bracket the gaze. The message was one of inviolable security, the bliss of union. Her voice was the sea, her gaze eternity. Her expression had been that of a queen telling her subjects in a language plain and proud that the world was theirs to inhabit, to fructify and harvest. Her opal eyes filled the room, the screen, the world. She didn't blink once. No one needed to tell me that Lorenzo would not be having anymore mutinies.
After showing me the tape, Reddeking had sent me packing with a beer, a sandwich and five dollars. He'd wanted to be alone with the models. I didn't complain. I just put my old clothes on over the captain's uniform and started walking.
"Look into the camera," said Reddeking. "There. Now what do you see? A little gleaming point, right? The background, the cameraman, the situation, the day, the wind outside, the belly of the lens, you, your mind, your past, everything inside you and behind you...all of that is a foil for this single point, this kernel. Nothing exists without the point, nor can the point exist independently of everything. The point captures your glances, your words, your movements, and makes them immortal. It's the same thing you'll find at the core of the viewer once you're done paring back the layers, the skins and shells of indifference, and it's the same thing that's at the core of you. The same but different. The point is where it all comes from, the point is where it's all going, but it's also where the two halves meet. The truth is that the point is the condition of your existence. This is seduction. The amalgamation of two wills into a single point, a tightening and contraction of space and time. Now don't worry, sweetie, I'm just about done talking, I know I'm interrupting the flow I was going on about before. And trust me, I want you to have a go at connecting the dots just as soon as you can. It's just that...well, I might have left a part of your question unanswered before, so I would just add this one little thing, a little thing I say in confidence." He arched his tamed and sculpted brows as he inclined his chin and milked his goatee for a sign.
"Jesus," said the girl. "I thought I had already signed a frigging NDA."
"That was with the production house."
"All right, don't worry. What's said in this godforsaken place stays in this godforsaken place."
"Good to hear. So here's the deal. Lorenzo's passengers have already started asking for a seduction. They're begging for it. They've been having disciplinary problems on their flights. Smoking in the bathroom, refusal to wear safety belts, food fights. More than ten passengers have had to be subdued by air marshals in the past month for small altercations. And one cross-country flight, I think it was a red-eye, even had what pretty well qualifies as a mutiny. The passengers took over the food carts, coach stormed business, and the stout marshals were powerless. There was a SWAT team waiting on the runway when the plane landed. Some of the folks are facing some pretty stiff charges. They're trying to nail them for terrorism. Rumor has it that Lorenzo's not the only outfit facing these challenges. I know what you're thinking--why haven't I read about this? Don't be naive, sweetie. The industry decides what you read about it, much more than you think.
That's why we're here, that's why we need the seduction. Lorenzo isn't prepared to free up more legroom or hand out free chips. This is the only way forward in a competitive market. Say what you want, but that's the reality as they perceive it. And they are the ones paying for this shoot. Now I feel like I've been honest with you. Are we ready?"
"We're ready, Mr. Reddeking." A solemnity had settled over the girl.
"Remember, there is no camera, no set. Only a point of seduction. You put yourself in that point, and they will come. Here we go. Three, two, one, and roll." The cameraman was wheezing heavily as she began.
"The cabin crew welcomes you aboard this Lorenzo Air flight. To help us prepare for takeoff, all carry on items should now be stored securely, either stowed in an overhead bin, or placed under the seat in front of you. All aisles, exits and bulkhead areas should-"
"Cut."
"What? I didn't even get to-"
"Honey, you have it. You've got it. But you're hitting it too soon and it'll fly right over their heads. You have to work up to it. You have to work them up to it. Here's what I suggest. Start off somewhere far away from the point, then slowly focus in on it, and pounce at maybe the third or fourth sentence. How's that sound? Can we do that?"
I reached for my beer and watched the back of her head from the cockpit on take two. This time Reddeking let her go through the whole thing.
~
The first blush of dawn had touched the cosmic void of the eastern sky. I turned back to look, huddling in my collar, trying to convince myself of the truth of day's revenant promise. A last granular grating of hoarfrost and eroded pavement underfoot, then silence. A single light twinkled on the plain I'd crossed. The steel building. I strained to make out the ridge of the roof, the parked vehicle, and the ring of wreckage which, as I now saw, radiated over the entire plain, over the breadth and depth of the stunted badlands where monuments to doomed flights would long outlive the memory of man. If there is a loss of power and cabin visibility is reduced, white emergency lights near the floor will lead you to red lights, which indicate the exits. If there is a loss of cabin pressure, which is unlikely, yellow oxygen masks will deploy automatically...I'd been walking for hours now, and the safety video been with me the whole way. That girl. I'd written off Reddeking's spiel as so much horseshit, but she'd done it in spades. I hadn't understood until Reddeking had sat us down to look at the tape, but there was no denying. She'd sold a plot of hell to the devil. Reddeking had been right about the words, too. They didn't matter, all they did was carry the voice, bracket the gaze. The message was one of inviolable security, the bliss of union. Her voice was the sea, her gaze eternity. Her expression had been that of a queen telling her subjects in a language plain and proud that the world was theirs to inhabit, to fructify and harvest. Her opal eyes filled the room, the screen, the world. She didn't blink once. No one needed to tell me that Lorenzo would not be having anymore mutinies.
After showing me the tape, Reddeking had sent me packing with a beer, a sandwich and five dollars. He'd wanted to be alone with the models. I didn't complain. I just put my old clothes on over the captain's uniform and started walking.
Saturday, August 1, 2009
Safety Film, Part III
Riddeking had given me a razor and a bar of soap and told me to go clean myself up in preparation for the shoot. Go run a comb through your hair, he'd said. He had also given me a pilot's uniform. It fit perfectly. When I returned from the bathroom he was addressing the women as a rising wind sucked and sighed at the corners of the cold building.
"You've all satisfied the outward criteria we were looking for. That's why you're here. It's not just the beauty; it comes down to a particular type of beauty. Brunettes inspire greater confidence, and the greater the contrast between the eyes and the hair and skin, the better. Studies have shown. It's documented, attested, authorized. Think about the treatment you enjoy compared to blondes. So why not just pick one of you out of a lineup and be done with it? I admit it would have saved us a bunch of money to run things that way, but this isn't that kind of production. We're saving money in other ways. Just like in the seamier side of the film industry, the man's payment is in the pleasure. Now I'm sure none of you have had anything to do with that line of work and haven't the foggiest idea what I'm talking about, so I'll move along. The reason I needed to bring all of you here is that I am looking for, oh, what to call it--a certain spiritual quantity, an unquantifiable quality really, that dollop of gravitas that transfigures beauty into magic. This is the diametric opposite of the seamy side, girls. Sure, you're all beautiful girls, surpassingly so in fact, but your beauty alone is hardly sufficient. What I'm looking for now is a voice, a seriousness, a calm that passeth all understanding. I'm looking for the kind of poise that can sell a plot of hell to the devil. By God, girls. Nobody has ever made an on-board safety video with true artistry or a true spiritual dimension before. We are going to be the first. And once they've seen this thing, the folks on board are going to fall all over each other putting on those little masks when the plane goes down!"
The girls were looking down at their laps and their nails. Some were shivering with the cold.
~
The cockpit door was open, and I was sitting in the captain's chair. There was a runway etched or frosted into the glass. We'd been through the shoot a couple of times already, and I was feeling comfortable with my lines. Reddeking hadn't had any objections either. He'd given me a beer to nurse as I sat there and looked captainly, waiting to deliver them again. There was no reason to say them more than once, of course, since they could simply be spliced into whatever version Reddeking put together, but he wanted us to treat it like a performance, so we did.
Reddeking had just called up the fourth girl, having dismissed the first three as hopeless. One had trailed off into giggles while demonstrating the functionality of the oxygen mask and advising the adults on board to don theirs first. She was not given a second chance. Another had deadpanned the whole thing, showing emotion only when Reddeking sent her back to the reject pool. The third had approached her task with a seriousness he found contrived. "Bathos!" he'd yelled. "You think your audience is stupid enough they can't understand the only reason you're putting everything on the line with every word you speak is because you have nothing to give? This isn't high school Hamlet. These people are about to be taken 30,000 feet up into the sky in a creaking aluminum cage. They understand what is at stake. What I need is a woman who understands it too. And you're not the one." He was right.
And so here came the fourth girl. She was dressed and made up the same as the other girls and I had not particularly noticed her before. She may even have been a touch plainer than the rest, her features less distinct by a degree, the flesh possibly less fraudulent. But she carried herself like a dormant challenge. And her eyes, they seemed to singe whatever they touched. Quite unlike the other girls too, when called up she began by sitting down in one of the airplane seats and asking Reddeking a series of questions.
"Sir, what is the purpose of this video? I mean I understand the airline needs to cut it to comply with government regulations, but why not just use the old one. What's their angle here? What's your angle? Why did you sign up for this, and what do you hope to accomplish? Everyone who knows anything knows that the safety features are no more than a cheap psychological trick. The illuminated walkway isn't going to save any lives when the place explodes. Am I right? And if you want this thing to be a work of art or however you put it, why not go with actresses instead of models?"
"Quite an earful," said Reddeking. "Quite an earful. I'm not sure if that kind of irony rules you out from the start or if it means you have what I'm looking for. Let me answer your questions one at a time, young lady." He was long in responding substantively. The way he tugged on his goatee gave me the idea that he was trying to milk it for answers. At length he hummed, the pitch of it increasing, as if he were homing on on something; suddenly then grunted, pulling almost violently on the wiskers, and spoke:
"Look. The video has nothing to do with the safety features of the aircraft. It never has had. You're right that it we're filming it satisfy an obligation, but what no one has seen until now is that it also represents an opportunity. A twofold opportunity. The first is to put passengers at ease, to convince them that they are in safe hands and that everything has been provided for and so on. The quality of the captain's segment has a lot to do with that. But the second aspect is more important and by far the more difficult. It has to do with establishing a social contract that will see the passengers and the crew through the flight. In the air, the flight attendants' word is law. My own experience has convinced me that passengers should be done the courtesy of being invited to accept this of their own accord. Most Americans need no justification when told to accept authority. They don't have to be told. They take it for granted. On the plane and off. The point here is that I'm going to tell them. I'm going to give them that justification. This video is aimed at the doubters, at those who are still capable of thought. I am being paid to neutralize all that at the root. That's how I sold it to the board. I said, guys, I will make a video with a mythological power, a pull that no one will be able to resist.
"The words you speak will be the same as in every other onboard safety video. But once we get the tone right, the gestures, the gaze, you can do anything short of telling them the captain is going to fly the plane into the mountain and accomplish the same thing. The medium is the message, my dear. And that is gospel truth.
"A social contract is imposed by force or by seduction. Or both. Yes, flight attendants were synonymous with the promise of sex in the early years. But this has nothing to do with sex. This is about charisma, about using that to recover the allure of the machine age. The plane may be operated by a computer program, the flight attendants may be a gang of zombies, and the passengers may be flying against their will in thrall to the remorseless market, yes. But without authentic human varnish, without a social contract based on an original seduction, everything will go to hell. And I don't want to fly like that. Here's the way I look at it. Everyone from the top down knows it's a fraud. And as long as fraud is what we're giving them, they deserve to be seduced. Yes, it's window dressing, bunting hung from a rivet. And yes, it may well be dangerous, this vision of using secution to crush doubt. But if this is done right, and if audiences are still capable of perceiving spirit through the mask of the face---if that's the case, well, this video may well give rise to a response of a different order. One that would be quite beyond my ability to control. Once they land, passengers will see very clearly that they are not being seduced like this in their jobs, in their schools, in their institutions. They will see, and you have to promise not to tell anyone I said this--" The girl nodded. "They will see that the state has lost its right to govern, that it has abandoned seduction in favor of force. At long last, they will demand what we gave them here today. Tell me you see what I mean."
"That's a big if," she said tartly. "But it brings me back to my last question. Why not go with actresses?"
"Easy," he said. "They're trained in deception. People see through it. I need someone who has less experience with that. Like Ben here, Ben with his pleasing face and disarming voice. A natural."
"All right," she said. "I get it. What you want is for me to be salvation on a screen, right off the top of my head. I think I can do that."
Reddeking smiled. "Good. We'll see. Ben, why don't you start us off? On three, alright?"
I put my beer under the pilot's seat and slackened my face. "Hi. I'm Captain Henry Stark, here to welcome you aboard this Lorenzo Air flight. At Lorenzo Air, we're concerned about safety. Your safety. So I ask that you take a few moments to sit back and watch as one of our flight attendants goes through this aircraft's safety features. Feel free to reach for the on-board safety guide, located in the seat pocket in front of you, and follow along. Your attention is appreciated. I and the entire Lorenzo Air team would like to wish you a pleasant flight and a great stay wherever you're headed today. And remember: At Lorenzo, we're as excited about flying as you are."
"You've all satisfied the outward criteria we were looking for. That's why you're here. It's not just the beauty; it comes down to a particular type of beauty. Brunettes inspire greater confidence, and the greater the contrast between the eyes and the hair and skin, the better. Studies have shown. It's documented, attested, authorized. Think about the treatment you enjoy compared to blondes. So why not just pick one of you out of a lineup and be done with it? I admit it would have saved us a bunch of money to run things that way, but this isn't that kind of production. We're saving money in other ways. Just like in the seamier side of the film industry, the man's payment is in the pleasure. Now I'm sure none of you have had anything to do with that line of work and haven't the foggiest idea what I'm talking about, so I'll move along. The reason I needed to bring all of you here is that I am looking for, oh, what to call it--a certain spiritual quantity, an unquantifiable quality really, that dollop of gravitas that transfigures beauty into magic. This is the diametric opposite of the seamy side, girls. Sure, you're all beautiful girls, surpassingly so in fact, but your beauty alone is hardly sufficient. What I'm looking for now is a voice, a seriousness, a calm that passeth all understanding. I'm looking for the kind of poise that can sell a plot of hell to the devil. By God, girls. Nobody has ever made an on-board safety video with true artistry or a true spiritual dimension before. We are going to be the first. And once they've seen this thing, the folks on board are going to fall all over each other putting on those little masks when the plane goes down!"
The girls were looking down at their laps and their nails. Some were shivering with the cold.
~
The cockpit door was open, and I was sitting in the captain's chair. There was a runway etched or frosted into the glass. We'd been through the shoot a couple of times already, and I was feeling comfortable with my lines. Reddeking hadn't had any objections either. He'd given me a beer to nurse as I sat there and looked captainly, waiting to deliver them again. There was no reason to say them more than once, of course, since they could simply be spliced into whatever version Reddeking put together, but he wanted us to treat it like a performance, so we did.
Reddeking had just called up the fourth girl, having dismissed the first three as hopeless. One had trailed off into giggles while demonstrating the functionality of the oxygen mask and advising the adults on board to don theirs first. She was not given a second chance. Another had deadpanned the whole thing, showing emotion only when Reddeking sent her back to the reject pool. The third had approached her task with a seriousness he found contrived. "Bathos!" he'd yelled. "You think your audience is stupid enough they can't understand the only reason you're putting everything on the line with every word you speak is because you have nothing to give? This isn't high school Hamlet. These people are about to be taken 30,000 feet up into the sky in a creaking aluminum cage. They understand what is at stake. What I need is a woman who understands it too. And you're not the one." He was right.
And so here came the fourth girl. She was dressed and made up the same as the other girls and I had not particularly noticed her before. She may even have been a touch plainer than the rest, her features less distinct by a degree, the flesh possibly less fraudulent. But she carried herself like a dormant challenge. And her eyes, they seemed to singe whatever they touched. Quite unlike the other girls too, when called up she began by sitting down in one of the airplane seats and asking Reddeking a series of questions.
"Sir, what is the purpose of this video? I mean I understand the airline needs to cut it to comply with government regulations, but why not just use the old one. What's their angle here? What's your angle? Why did you sign up for this, and what do you hope to accomplish? Everyone who knows anything knows that the safety features are no more than a cheap psychological trick. The illuminated walkway isn't going to save any lives when the place explodes. Am I right? And if you want this thing to be a work of art or however you put it, why not go with actresses instead of models?"
"Quite an earful," said Reddeking. "Quite an earful. I'm not sure if that kind of irony rules you out from the start or if it means you have what I'm looking for. Let me answer your questions one at a time, young lady." He was long in responding substantively. The way he tugged on his goatee gave me the idea that he was trying to milk it for answers. At length he hummed, the pitch of it increasing, as if he were homing on on something; suddenly then grunted, pulling almost violently on the wiskers, and spoke:
"Look. The video has nothing to do with the safety features of the aircraft. It never has had. You're right that it we're filming it satisfy an obligation, but what no one has seen until now is that it also represents an opportunity. A twofold opportunity. The first is to put passengers at ease, to convince them that they are in safe hands and that everything has been provided for and so on. The quality of the captain's segment has a lot to do with that. But the second aspect is more important and by far the more difficult. It has to do with establishing a social contract that will see the passengers and the crew through the flight. In the air, the flight attendants' word is law. My own experience has convinced me that passengers should be done the courtesy of being invited to accept this of their own accord. Most Americans need no justification when told to accept authority. They don't have to be told. They take it for granted. On the plane and off. The point here is that I'm going to tell them. I'm going to give them that justification. This video is aimed at the doubters, at those who are still capable of thought. I am being paid to neutralize all that at the root. That's how I sold it to the board. I said, guys, I will make a video with a mythological power, a pull that no one will be able to resist.
"The words you speak will be the same as in every other onboard safety video. But once we get the tone right, the gestures, the gaze, you can do anything short of telling them the captain is going to fly the plane into the mountain and accomplish the same thing. The medium is the message, my dear. And that is gospel truth.
"A social contract is imposed by force or by seduction. Or both. Yes, flight attendants were synonymous with the promise of sex in the early years. But this has nothing to do with sex. This is about charisma, about using that to recover the allure of the machine age. The plane may be operated by a computer program, the flight attendants may be a gang of zombies, and the passengers may be flying against their will in thrall to the remorseless market, yes. But without authentic human varnish, without a social contract based on an original seduction, everything will go to hell. And I don't want to fly like that. Here's the way I look at it. Everyone from the top down knows it's a fraud. And as long as fraud is what we're giving them, they deserve to be seduced. Yes, it's window dressing, bunting hung from a rivet. And yes, it may well be dangerous, this vision of using secution to crush doubt. But if this is done right, and if audiences are still capable of perceiving spirit through the mask of the face---if that's the case, well, this video may well give rise to a response of a different order. One that would be quite beyond my ability to control. Once they land, passengers will see very clearly that they are not being seduced like this in their jobs, in their schools, in their institutions. They will see, and you have to promise not to tell anyone I said this--" The girl nodded. "They will see that the state has lost its right to govern, that it has abandoned seduction in favor of force. At long last, they will demand what we gave them here today. Tell me you see what I mean."
"That's a big if," she said tartly. "But it brings me back to my last question. Why not go with actresses?"
"Easy," he said. "They're trained in deception. People see through it. I need someone who has less experience with that. Like Ben here, Ben with his pleasing face and disarming voice. A natural."
"All right," she said. "I get it. What you want is for me to be salvation on a screen, right off the top of my head. I think I can do that."
Reddeking smiled. "Good. We'll see. Ben, why don't you start us off? On three, alright?"
I put my beer under the pilot's seat and slackened my face. "Hi. I'm Captain Henry Stark, here to welcome you aboard this Lorenzo Air flight. At Lorenzo Air, we're concerned about safety. Your safety. So I ask that you take a few moments to sit back and watch as one of our flight attendants goes through this aircraft's safety features. Feel free to reach for the on-board safety guide, located in the seat pocket in front of you, and follow along. Your attention is appreciated. I and the entire Lorenzo Air team would like to wish you a pleasant flight and a great stay wherever you're headed today. And remember: At Lorenzo, we're as excited about flying as you are."
Etesian Winds
It is the season of the Etesian winds here in the Aegean. They blow all summer long but are at their strongest now, at the abundant season's luxurious height. They blow out of Bulgaria, out of the Balkans and the Black Sea, rushing to fill the pressure void over southwest Asia. From Balkan crags they sweep over town and plain and then blow down the sea, scouring and cooling the northerly isles of Thasos, Samothrace, Limnos. Then, skirting the Turkish main, they rush down the open sea to find the beaches and valleys of northern Lesbos. Having streamed over the foreshore and the tiled rooftops of the vacation villas that punctuate it, the winds surge over dale and grove, sprinkling hilltops, radio masts and the abundant Gulf of Kaloni with distant migratory dust. On Kaloni the wind collects itself, gaining strength and mustering the Beauforts needed to scale the high Lesbian slopes before cresting our island's own Olympus. Thence the wind flows down the southern face, rustling the olive crowns in their tens of thousands, providing comfort to herd and shepherd and shepherd dog alike, before at length blowing down the roads and roofs and lightwires of the little hamlet of Plomari. Even now the wind is rustling our grapevine and reeding through shutters. Even now it is propagating in taut ripples off the town's shore, striating the water with fugitive goosebumps and the illusion of rain. Even now it is kicking up devils and dervishes on dusty lots and sundry aprons of marginal land or derelict frontage before unfolding over the southern sea and the shadowy masses of land at its limit.
These Etesians also course through the mind. Without embarking on a futile stalk for origin--though it would seem that they are born out of an imbalance between two pints on either side of the mind--it might be said with some truth that the counterpart Etesians begin their blowing in the oppressed Balkans of the mind, in the reptilian hinterland of cognition that lives in terror of diffuse horrors and turns out grim foretastes of saturnine things to come in its cerebellar sweatshop. A single jasmine-scented rustling of this wind is enough to inspire that foundry's wage-slaves to down tools. Now the winds rise up and gather strength as they tumble over conduit and plain and emerge to play on the mind's middle sea, scouring and scoring its surface until they break the iron spell of exigency and imperative that rules the waking day. Soon the winds reach the dormant isle of Amygdala. Here they soothe and cool and coax that island's craven inhabitants to exchange fear for enterprise, dull suspicion for healthy skepticism, passive shock for active understanding. Having fructified Amygdala with transformative pollen, the wind skirts the shore of oppression and tyranny until it overtakes the island of the self. There it cleaves to the local hills, the local houses, the local trees, to all the familiar memories and sentiments that can be seen and reckoned and lived by. And as it cleaves it dissolves. New and bracing vistas are born, cracked wide open. As night falls the winds pick up still more, accomplished now, beckoning the self to forsake vigilance, to unrivet itself from the local ridges and horizons of lurking past and looming future, and in that velvety windblown darkness to abandon itself without fear to the cool current of abiding renewal and there undergo secret baptism into the luxury of time, time like a gale of scents and spirits and dreams and windborne particles that flay the face until flesh falls from bone. For what are the Etesians, or any other wind, but the insistent systole and diastole of the nunc stans, the abiding now forever on the tongues of history's great mystics? Similar winds blow down the plains of America. They rustle the crowns of the Amazon and surmount the Andes. Like breezes play on the endless watery world of the Pacific, no less than on the cracked dunes and crags of the Sahara, and even the arcades and warrens of all the world's great pandemonic cities. All that is needful is that you step out onto the balcony, the precipice, the prow. If you are not wearing a scarf, your face will feel them.
These Etesians also course through the mind. Without embarking on a futile stalk for origin--though it would seem that they are born out of an imbalance between two pints on either side of the mind--it might be said with some truth that the counterpart Etesians begin their blowing in the oppressed Balkans of the mind, in the reptilian hinterland of cognition that lives in terror of diffuse horrors and turns out grim foretastes of saturnine things to come in its cerebellar sweatshop. A single jasmine-scented rustling of this wind is enough to inspire that foundry's wage-slaves to down tools. Now the winds rise up and gather strength as they tumble over conduit and plain and emerge to play on the mind's middle sea, scouring and scoring its surface until they break the iron spell of exigency and imperative that rules the waking day. Soon the winds reach the dormant isle of Amygdala. Here they soothe and cool and coax that island's craven inhabitants to exchange fear for enterprise, dull suspicion for healthy skepticism, passive shock for active understanding. Having fructified Amygdala with transformative pollen, the wind skirts the shore of oppression and tyranny until it overtakes the island of the self. There it cleaves to the local hills, the local houses, the local trees, to all the familiar memories and sentiments that can be seen and reckoned and lived by. And as it cleaves it dissolves. New and bracing vistas are born, cracked wide open. As night falls the winds pick up still more, accomplished now, beckoning the self to forsake vigilance, to unrivet itself from the local ridges and horizons of lurking past and looming future, and in that velvety windblown darkness to abandon itself without fear to the cool current of abiding renewal and there undergo secret baptism into the luxury of time, time like a gale of scents and spirits and dreams and windborne particles that flay the face until flesh falls from bone. For what are the Etesians, or any other wind, but the insistent systole and diastole of the nunc stans, the abiding now forever on the tongues of history's great mystics? Similar winds blow down the plains of America. They rustle the crowns of the Amazon and surmount the Andes. Like breezes play on the endless watery world of the Pacific, no less than on the cracked dunes and crags of the Sahara, and even the arcades and warrens of all the world's great pandemonic cities. All that is needful is that you step out onto the balcony, the precipice, the prow. If you are not wearing a scarf, your face will feel them.
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