Saturday, March 27, 2021

Poetry and industrial accident

 


 Muriel Rukeyser responded to the American jitters in a poetry collection published in 1938,  US1. The book is most famous for the “documentary’ poems known as the “Book of the Dead.” Like other artists at that time – I am thinking of Dorothea Lange’s pictures of Great depression miseries, or James Agee’s Let us now praise famous men - Muriel Ruykeyser saw in the Depression not only a great rebuke to capitalism, but, as well, to the modernist focus on a certain sort of subject – infinitely cultivated, infinitely melancholy – and sought to bring modernist shock tactics into the field, so to speak.

Modernist shock was out there in the tools and industry. The book of the dead is based on a typical bit of All American skunkery: a company, Dennis and Rinehart, hired miners in West Virginia to drill a tunnel under a mountain to divert a river to an electric plant. Discovering that there was a mass of silicate heavy rock under the mountain, the company – wanting to exploit the silica – had the men dry drill that rock in particular, instead of using water hydraulic drills, which were the legal standard. Dry drilling creates dust clouds of silicate, and silicate is inimical to human lung tissue.  A thousand or so died of silicosis, a peculiarly horrible condition that strangles you.

“-What was their salary?

- It started at 40 cents and dropped to 25 cents per hour.”

 Unfortunately the miners’ families, instead of being grateful that the U.S. wasn’t run by Stalin, actually stooped to lobbying to have the company investigated. Congress eventually investigated, and did nothing. The workers sued, and the courts decided a workers’ life is maybe worth a generous thousand dollars. Stalin, however, never ruled America, it should be pointed out. And Rukeyser, due to her “communist sympathies”, was duly attacked in the fifties, with the American Legion sponsoring a campaign in 1958 to get her fired as a “red influence” from Sarah Lawrence University.  

The book of the dead poems are about an industrial accident. It is interesting to look across the divides – between, say, the aesthetic and the medical – and notice that industry in America, for the greater part of the century, was designed by white men trained in a certain way, among certain institutions – military, educational, corporate - while much of the countervailing work – the work of understanding the hazards of industry – fell to women who were often outsiders in those institutions. Muriel Rukeyser wrote a review of an autobiography by one of those women – the unjustly forgotten Alice Hamilton. In the obituary of Hamilton published in the NYT, it was noted that she and her two sisters were brilliant, each in their own field. Indeed, her sister Edith Hamilton is probably better known than Alice today – millions of American students got their knowledge of Greek mythology from her book on the subject. Rukeyser, in a famous early poem, rejected “Sappho” for “Sacco” – although that early gesture was not definitive of all her work. Still, I like to think that Rukeyser, the Hamilton sisters, and Rachel Carson form a mini-tradition of American dissent that truly did rage against the machine. Alice Hamilton was the first woman, I believe, to teach at Harvard; she was a pioneer of industrial medicine, and she was unafraid to campaign politically for workplace safety; she wrote to her friend,  Gerard Swope, the president of GE, about the dangers of asphalt as early as the 1940s; and of course she was investigated as a Red by the FBI.

Rukeyser’s on the road poems, unlike Kerouac later on, did not take the road as a natural given, but as a created thing, sprung from industrial design, equipment, materials and human body tissue. In her review of Alice Hamilton’s autobiography, Rukeyser expressed an aesthetic/political credo that I like a lot: that the work place is a “testing-place of democracy.” And Rukeyser saw, as Alice Hamilton did, the explicit gender terms under which the human product was turned out in the  treadmill of production:

“It seemed natural and right that a woman should put the care of the producing workman ahead of the value of the thing he was producing; in a man it would have been thought sentimentality or radicalism,” writes Dr. Hamilton. The manager of a big plant said to her that a man would see in his own workmen only a part, and a bothersome part of the plant’s machinery; but a woman would see them as individuals, as so many fathers and husbands and brothers.”  Of course, this grossly ignores the women who worked in the factories, from seamstress to the pecan shellers of San Antonio, whose strike in 1938 was a precipitating event in Texas’s history of anti-labor union law. However, the gendering of a view of the human as a “part” is an important, and missing element in the history of the American century that is falling to pieces right in front of our nose. It deserves some more sweeping treatment.  

 

Wednesday, March 24, 2021

History of antifa

 Anti-fascist seems like a bland title, at least in the U.S. After all, the mythology of American power was based on the largest anti-fascist operation in history, called World War II. Alas, after world war II the U.S. decided to make a sort of posthumous alliance with many many Nazis, who were invited into the war against the Soviets. From the mass murdering scientists who tested poison gasses at Ausschwitz to Eichman's chief subordinate, these characters came to the U.S. and even gained cover stories via a CIA that has never released all its records on this part of American history.

There are many books about this. One of them, The Nazis next door by Eric Lichtbau, chronicles the career of America's first antifa agitator in the Cold War: guy named Chuck Allen. A wasp, a lefty, and an organizer of protests against Nazis, who were now just "anti-communists" - which, according to the FBI, which spied on him, made Allen a communist. He didn't give a fuck. His demonstrations against Lithuanian, Polish, German Hungarian and other Nazis and fascists brought out of the woodwork the ancestors of Trump's people, who would engage in counterprotests and assault. Often revealing, in the meantime, their own far right comittments.

So many reasons that a rightwing intelligence and policing cohort in the U.S. would love the fascists! Here's a story. In the fifties, the military and the state department decided that Hitler's advisor, Dr. Gustav Hilger, who had done exemplary work in the Eastern Front, was just the man to advice America on the Soviet threat. No sooner said than smuggled in, with more than a smidgeon of covering up the record.

"A decade earlier, as the Nazis’ top specialist on Moscow, Dr. Hilger had been with Hitler in the Nazis’ headquarters for the eastern front after Germany’s murderous invasion of Russia. He was He was implicated in the roundup of Jews in Italy as well. After the war he was wanted in Europe for war crimes. Yet George Kennan at the State Department and Frank Wisner at the CIA had arranged in 1948 to spirit him and his family away to safety in Washington, where he became an éminence grise on all things Russian. “We were very glad he was here because we were worried that if we didn’t [bring him over], the Soviets would get him,” Kennan said. At the CIA, Hilger met secretly with analysts every two weeks to assess the latest developments in Moscow and he could often be found at the and he could often be found at the Library of Congress, researching his memoirs as part of his CIA cover story. Raul Hilberg, a leading Holocaust researcher, would sometimes spot the ex-Hitler advisor working nearby in the federal archives, whereupon Hilberg would walk out in silent protest."

Hilberg, so anti-American! My question would be: the denunciation of Stalin in America justly puts heavy emphasis on the pact Stalin made with Hitler in 1939, which revealed the corruption of Stalin's supposed anti-fascism. All true! Yet what does one say about a country that imports genocidal Nazis after the war and gives them cushy jobs and cover stories? Here, silence is in order, some crickets, and then some talk about the free world.

Trump was, in reality, simply taking up a line urged by Edgar Hoover, Truman, Eisenhower, and a pack of other high officials during the Cold War. When antifa became uncool.


Monday, March 22, 2021

Cretinism and more cretinism: the French right and Islamoguachisme

 

I spent the 00s in a froth of indignation, and my frothing found a home on my blog. But no matter how I whipped the hypocrisy, cretinism and downright pig ignorance of Bush’s administration and the general bipartisan DC foreign policy set, I got no satisfaction – it just went on and on, through the blood and mire, until gradually the seachange came, we all agreed Iraq was a mistake, and we all agreed to forget all about it. The Obama administration letting the CIA burn its little torture tapes in order to decide that it couldn’t, like, judicially do anything about torturers (just as it couldn’t find a single bankster to prosecute in that unfortunate 2008 financial meltdown thingy) should have taught me a lesson: the plebs will never be heard. Ever ever ever.

So I am doing my best to ignore the hilarious islamo-gauchiste campaign in France, even to the extent of deciding not to finish the incredibly dumb, no good, absolutely disqualifying rant of Pierre Jourde, late of Commentaire, in the Nouvelle Obs. Why froth when spring is here? The birds have their nests, and the son of man, or at least this son of a woman, has a place to lay his head, so whistle while you work.

But I am too tempted by the devil here. For really, what France should have been talking about for, oh, say the last twenty to thirty years is Islamo-Droiteism, otherwise known as the French foreign policy. While Jourde is in such a rage at the likes of  Clémentine Autain or Emmanuel Todd that he can’t be bothered to name one instance in which they have materially helped the Islamicist cause, or Islam in general – it is very easy to put names and dates together for the material and military helping of the great wen of Islamicism, the founder, the center, the om and omega, called Saudi Arabia. From 1956, when France was part of the military team that attacked Nasser’s Egypt – Nasser’s, you will recall, was the first secularist Middle Eastern revolution – to the French military team that was dispatched to help the Saudi royals in 1979, when the great Mosque in Mecca was attacked, all the way up to France bombing Daech on behalf of a coalition consisting of a few “secularist” fronts and a lot of Islamicist fronts – including al qaeda – in Syria, France’s foreign policy has been islamicist to the core. Not one word, of course, is said about this in the French press. After all, to doubt the King’s foreign policy is to doubt royal perogative at all! But this is how it is. After Holland’s disastrous neo-con turn in the Middle East led, predictably enough, to attacks in France, did anybody ask: what was the point of that? No. Dots are not connected if they are inconvenient dots.

If you want to track the growth of Islamacism – or, simply, the Saudi approved school of Islam – in Europe, you would do much better to read the Monthly Newsletter of the Royal Embassy of Saudi Arabia in Washington DC than Olivier Todd. There you can see wonderful photo ops of various Saudi royals conferring with various European officials, like Chirac in the 90s, about affirming “cultural relationships” – or, in other words, allowing the Saudis to flood the zone in Europe with mosquebuilding money, and propaganda against any other Islamic school. It was through that money that traditional mosques in Bosnia were taken over, razed, and rebuilt with an entirely new message for their congregations. This was seen with a benevolent eye by French politicians who saw weapons sales to the Saudis as an El Dorado, and who definitely were on the petroleum mainline. No, it is not Olivier Todd who is flogging French arm sales, but, gasp, those warriors against Islamo-gauchisme at the Elysee, the government of Macron. Here’s a little precis by AmnestyInternational of who is really promoting islamicism in the world. Hint – it isnot the faculty at the Sorbonne.


I can froth all I want, I know, and it won’t make a gnat’s ass difference. Still, even a gnat has a right to a horselaugh at the moronic inferno called the “french intellectual scene” every once in a while.

The philosopher as spy: the case of Alexandre Kojeve

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