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)