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)