the dopamine cowboy movement

The “Literary World”, Die Welt’s book supplement, is not a place I’d generally go to find explanations for the particular warp of the American grain at the present moment. So I was surprised to find an explanation for everything, everything that has happened since Reagan was elected president, in the first two paragraphs of review article by Uwe Schmitt:

“Usually the American journal, the Archives of Neurology, only offers the layman news of the obscure impulse inherent in his bankruptcy or obituary. But this summer, when the journal reported that the drug Mirapex, which is used by Parkinson’s patience, can drive those patients to gamble, the readership increased. The study by the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota showed abrupt personality changes in a test group: eleven of thirty patients became compulsive gamblers and lost, in half a year, up to 200,000 dollars. The families and heirs of the selected patients were not amused.
Six of eleven patients could not curb their eating, drinking, sex and purchasing. After being taken off the drug, it was “like a light was switched off”, and they became as they had been. All assurances by the professors that these were at most one percent of the hundreds of thousands that have been treated successfully did not stop fantasies from spreading, in a land where, on TV, on the Internet, and in Indian casinos a dizzying intoxication of gambling reigns. You could bet that some novels and screemplays would certainly come out of this tragicomic gambling therapy.”
It is always nice and scientific to narrow the range of suspects to one. The John Birchers always suspected that fluoridating our drinking water was weakening our vital fluids. Saps! They should have been looking for the dark presences that are obviously lurking around our water supply organizations, tossing in the Mirapex. And we thought Rove was just tied up with Diebold.
So we checked on this factoid, to see if anybody else had tripped over it and discovered the key to the kingdom. The fall of the roman empire, as any middlebrow knows, was caused by lead pipes. Since the link between chemically induced dementia and the collapse of imperial borders has already become one of the things you would expect Pecuchet to bring up in conversation, we were a little surprised that nobody has brought up the obvious: the Mayo Clinic chemically concocted an exact replica of American culture.
Perhaps this was behind that plot line in this summer’s Batman. The evidence accumulates!

Actually, a long time ago I decided that, instead of postmodernism, or post structuralism, or any ism, I wanted to belong to the aesthetic and philosophical movement known as the dopamine cowboys. I was, at the time, the only member. I still am. But apparently I had unconsciously struck on something. As Walt Whitman used to say, I am large, I contain multitudes.

seeing what this looks like

For a long time I’ve meant to put little pieces of my novel on this post, and today is a good day. I’m hoping for comments. The title of this novel has gone through long and elaborate metamorphoses, from Holly’s Folly to The facts in the Sterling Case to The Favorite. I know the first title won’t fly. My latest title is Party of the Jealous God, partly because it sounds echt thriller-ish.

Those of you who have seen versions of this have not seen this version. I’m not sure how much my tinkering has changed the thing. The “thing” – my baby monster, my daydream, my spoiled child, my Holly, my fourteen chapters

The first four pages.

Chapter 1 – Party of the Jealous God

Patrol Officer Candidate Foxton liked rigging up. He liked the squeak of getting off the hot leather seat. He liked the whole ritual of the helmet - not taking it off, lifting the visor just at that spooky little angle, revealing the unprotected shaven chin and lips, a bit of dark moustache, shades on, the unmistakable bluish black of the shirt and the black belt and the pistol making the approach to the standard safety distance, peering in on another householder rolling down the window to ask how fast was I going, as if this was something you had to call out the goon squad to track down. As if the damned car wasn't equipped with a damned speedometer right in the driver's eye-space. You had to get used to the sweat - it was a hotbox job, no two ways about it. But Foxton considered himself a man inured to mere temperature. He'd drilled out there in 110 heat index weather in the Guard, to which he still had a commitment, still had time allotted. So the burn of the day is just going down. Austin summer days, when you could scan the sky for hours and not find one fault in the blue of it. The western sky is still glowing with purple closing to blackish blue and a thin flare of orange on the horizon. That window before the move to turn the car lights on becomes mandatory. Foxton jacked down the kickstand, thrust the bike back, the blue light is making the nice Dragnet background, dancing against the gravel and asphalt and the ditch and the trees, he's approaching the Lexus. There's a wire fence above the ditch, and beyond a little underbrush there's the rough dip of twig and dirt and patchy grass up to the lip of the turf surface which the wise chipper knows will carry to the seventh hole four yards in. Foxton knows this himself, although his swing is, typically, a little too forceful on these kinds of shots. He is always overstroking.

Nothing is emanating from planet Lexus.

Ten miles away, Maury Lockwood is using his police scanner. He's got it hooked up to a tape recorder. Maury is a postal employee. He's not married. He's thirty five. He weighs two hundred fifty pounds, and stands 5 foot 9. He stands, however, as little as he can, sitting on a bar stool at his window. Maury's boss has the forms his doctor filled out in his file ("Mr. Lockwood's gout makes it painful for him to stand for abnormal stretches of time. I strongly recommend an environment in which Mr. Lockwood can support himself without standing. It is recommended that Mr. Lockwood use a chair, if at all possible.") Maury’s boss has shifted his quota of unsuitables for the year, so for the moment, Maury’s position is stable. Maury has some hilarious tapes. Mostly, though, it is bureaucratic chatter, a lot of acronyming, bullshitting, old jokes, positioning. The channel between APD's Sense and Respond Unit (SRU) and sundry jarheads. Heading in, heading off.

Foxton taps on the driver's window, notices a human form lying in the back seat. The window is slightly tinted. Must be sleeping it off. He goes around.

Maury is bored with the fire at the Wildwood Apartments on Braker Lane. Another porch barbecue affair. Early twenties, they get bombed and begin gassing up the charcoal and it happens.

Foxton moves around the Lexus. Notices the license plate. F-I-S-H.

Maury tunes in to this:

AF: SRU, I have a, uh, situation here . I have apparently an unconscious sleeper here, 98 Lexus, let's see ... lying in the back, no reaction to me, I'm tapping on the window, unconscious, back seat. Possible drunk. Possible illegal substance. I'm thinking I might need a car.., over.
SRU: I'm reading you, PC 40, coordinates please, over ...
AF: Oh my god. God. A fucking wagon!
SRU: Where are you, PC40, over
AF: Get an ambulance! A fucking wagon! Lake Austin Boulevard, SRU. Fuck the SRU, this is Donna, right? You remember, Arn? Arn Foxton. You know me. Listen, you gotta help me, Donna. Do something for me. Now now now.

After Donna oriented herself (were you that guy at the rookie party?) and Foxton made some spitting noises (the damn smell, the smell), Foxton revealed a fact that soon made Lake Austin Road a media site:

AF: . Please, just get the murder [division] down here. I'm patrolling the area. Keeping the scene pristine. The plate is F-I-S-H, fish.
SRU: Where are you exactly, PC40? Over.
AF: Breathe in, breathe out. Square it off. So where in the living crap am I, Donna? You know the corner of Exposition and Lake Austin? You know, up towards the student housing? The Colorado River authority?
SRU: Down towards that Tex Mex place?
AF: You mean the Hula Hut. Yeah. Down on that stretch next to the golf course, that's where I am. Over.

Lockwood called up the manager of KXOX. He had dealt with them before, but never had anything of this quality. The manager had given him a home number. The deal was quickly made. F-I-S-H. By June 3, 1998, KXOX owned the tape. Lockwood made a couple of thousand. KXOX made a multiple of that, selling it to its national network.

AF: Jesus, I shouldn't have had that tuna salad sandwich. I can feel the mayonnaise coming up on me. Here it comes!

As soon as the murder team found Foxton and the car, the license plate became an issue. Detective Chuck Reilly left his partner with Foxton and personally made the drive back to HQ, calling Hudson at home on his cell. 'See me at the office," Reilly testified later, "something like that. That's what I told him."
When Lew Hudson got to the scene at 10:00, he'd had his talk with Reilly.

"I just told him that it was the Governor's wife's car. No sir, I didn't tell him we got a bomb on our hands. No, I never used the words bomb, explosion, any of that, to my recollection. No, I don't know why they printed that, sir. I figure they got the wrong end of the stick."
Hudson had put in a call to Greenbriar, the Police Chief, but Greenbriar was in transit to another job in Pennsylvania. It was never clear anymore if he was in town or in Pittsburgh. Greenbriar said, “shit, this is almost not on my watch.”
Hudson said, “I’ll handle it.”
“Keep in touch,” Greenbriar said. Greenbriar seemed to be bitter about something. Hudson got along with him all right. As far as police chiefs go, Hudson’s favorite was Odem, who had been the police chief when Hudson was signed on. Odem’s reign was mythologically long, forty years or something. A monument. Had a problem with the post civil rights era, though. Greenbriar had been brought in with great fanfare as Austin’s first African American police chief. He was a photo op, much liked by the politicos, disliked intensely by the Union. Well, he seemed to wear out. He began to make out of state trips. He photo opped in San Francisco. He photo opped in Seattle. Conferences, a spokesman about a new national drug policy, the name in the rolodex for the news show about the Broken window theory of policing. Just not there. Until photo opping in Pennsylvania, he got a better offer. People later agreed that the APD was in a state of unusual disorganization for this to be dropped into their lap.

Everybody at the scene by 10 p.m. was aware that this was on a Need To Know basis.

Everybody at the scene did not include Foxton, who was being debriefed at HQ. In the three months remaining of Foxton's time on the force, he expressed a few theories of his own. These theories were disregarded by the D.A. His superior called him in, once, to tell him loose lips sink ships. 'What does that mean?" Foxton asked. 'Shut up," his superior explained. His testimony at the trial was tight and short. By that time, Foxton had heard his voice on that damned transmission one hundred times. At his regular spot, The Cedar Door, the bartender never seemed to tire of asking him if he'd had a tuna salad sandwich today. Foxton ceased and desisted going there. “I’m tired of the place,” he told his girlfriend, whose office regularly TGIFed at the Cedar Door. “Give me three good reasons I have to show up to see your manager get shitfaced.” Then Foxton's troubles dominoed: he got into a fight in a bar, he got into an altercation with a neighbor, his girlfriend moved out, and his buds on the force became distinctly glacial to him. So he resigned, picked up stakes, moved elsewhere, leaving his parents' address to forward mail to.

hell and worse ahead

The NYT Mag has an admiring portrait of the ultimate horror that is Hillary. Oddly, the more hopeful article is about Buckley’s campaign for mayor in 1965. While Buckley exhibited the thinly sheathed bigot in that campaign – in one of those odd, convulsive spasms of coercive moralism to which conservatives are liable he even proposed that drug addicts be quarantined, one of those bizarre notions like tattooing people with AIDS that seem to emerge in the Buckley brain, and of course in the face of real civil morality, ie Martin Luther King, Jr, he was clueless -- he also campaigned to legalize drugs for adults. A simple measure that would have removed infinite misery in the last forty years, and probably even more in the next forty. In a strong sense, that move, if it had caught on, would have retrieved millions of black men from the clutches of the legal system, and would have put states like Alabama (where 30 percent of African American men can’t vote, due to felony convictions) and Florida (ditto) and all over the South into play for much more liberal politicians. Not only in the U.S. would the past forty years have been gentler, but all over the world – for instance, Mexico, where realistically, narco-trafficking is as it should be, an economically sound venture, the repression of which is insane, leading, naturally, to massive corruption, since the only way to produce and market drugs is outside of the law. And of course this diverts the flow of income that could be really be used by average Mexicans into the pockets of the most violent. One can’t say the same about the income flow generated by, say, viagra, which is legal due not for any moral or health reason – hell, viagra is no more safe and no more moral than a joint -- but simply because it was developed by big pharma and marketed by them. I do know that if joints gave you an automatic woody, that would be down on the black list of reasons why it must be banned. Since only in hell is rationality a product manufactured by corporations, and since rationality about drugs seems wholly manufactured by corporations, I think it is evident we live in Hell. I hope that is clear.

The other hopeful thing was Lindsay. An awful mayor, but still -- a genuine powerful liberal Republican. They once existed. They can exist again...

As for Hillary – she represents the worst instincts of the right and the worst instincts of punitive liberalism in a sort of corporate identity of all that is evil -- Newt Gingrich's feminine side. She is so bad that she seems almost destined to lead this Republic as it continues to fall apart. God’s curse is obviously on the land. Luckily, the NYT Magazine is almost always wrong about American politics. I trust my older sister, a feminist since the seventies who tells me, Hillary doesn’t feel right.

Give them stones

“In Wilhelm Meister (Part I, Chapter XV), Goethe, on the basis of his own personal experiences, describes his hero's emotions in the humble surroundings of Marianne's little room as compared with the stateliness and order of his own home. "It seemed to him when he had here to remove her stays in order to reach the harpsichord, there to lay her skirt on the bed before he could seat himself, when she herself with unembarrassed frankness would make no attempt to conceal from him many natural acts which people are accustomed to hide from others out of decency—it seemed to him, I say, that he became bound to her by invisible bands." We are told of Wordsworth (Findlay's Recollections of De Quincey, p. 36) that he read Wilhelm Meister till "he came to the scene where the hero, in his mistress's bedroom, becomes sentimental over her dirty towels, etc., which struck him with such disgust that he flung the book out of his hand, would never look at it again, and declared that surely no English lady would ever read such a work." I have, however, heard a woman of high intellectual distinction refer to the peculiar truth and beauty of this very passage.” – Havelock Ellis, Studies in the Psychology of Sex.

Reading over our last few posts, we’ve been struck – unpleasantly – by our easy usurpation of a trope that we once ridiculed in Christopher Hitchens – the use of disgust as a substitute for argument. Myself, I can’t read Wordsworth’s reaction to Goethe’s “dirty towels” without wanting to smack some intimations of mortality into the Lake Poet. The vice of wanting to leave out that between which we are born (inter fæces et urinam nascimur, as the ancient Christians liked to put it) did nothing good for English literature. And it probably does nothing good for political commentary.

On the other hand, with faeces et urinam running rampant in D.C., it would be wrong to repress the preliminary shudder before getting down to brass tackinesses.

What is a writer to do? Especially one who is basically powerless, and whose sense of the power worth having, that power vested in language, has turned cruelly against him – after all, by that standard, my powerlessness is not only a failure to achieve a position in life, it is a failure of the skill upon which I’ve staked my dignity. It is only when I raise my voice to the highest pitch that I discover that it is the reedy voice of a cockroach. I am essentially vermin.

Brecht said that humans learn as much from catastrophe as laboratory rabbits learn about biology. This phrase is rich in implications, one of which might be that just as there is a science that registers the rabbit in a certain order that is beyond the rabbit’s capacity to understand, so, too, there is a science, or at least an art, to catastrophe. Biology isn’t expressed in any one biologist, and catastrophe isn’t expressed in any one powerbroker. Rather, the artists of catastrophe exist in a community that works to make sure that the conditions of catastrophe bear down with a crushing weight on its victims. The members of that community don’t recognize themselves as artists of catastrophe at all, perhaps, but only in terms of the individual roles that, individually, seem to be about anything other than catastrophe: they are about petroleum, they are about chemicals, they are about tax policy.

So – to continue in the vein of disgust for a minute – our attacks on individuals here or there, our clever commentary on this or that political event, always seems to be just at a tangent to the real thing, to the catastrophe that is actually happening before our eyes.

Well, so much for our self-critical moment.

...
Now, to resume sniping.
Surely somebody should notice the parallel between the Bush administration’s criminal slowness to respond to the disaster in New Orleans and the Democratic Party leadership’s criminal slowness to respond to the disaster in Iraq? The two cases reveal a certain underlying attitude of D.C. contempt for the opinions of cockroaches like me, and a collective and superb deafness when we raise our reedy voices. I was particularly struck with this by reading two things this morning. One of them was the horrific description of life in Baghdad at the moment in the NYT:

“Over the past year, insurgents have come to control large swaths of western Baghdad, including Khadra, the area where Mrs. Abdul-Razzaq lives with her husband, Monkath, and their two boys, ages 9 and 12, in a spacious two-story house. Their bedroom window looks out on elevated highways that are the main arteries into the capital from the north and west, where insurgents have built up no-go zones.

Four times in recent months Mrs. Abdul-Razzaq has seen men, sometimes in masks, tramping across her outer lawn, lifting rocket-propelled grenade launchers to their shoulders. Once, several men shot at an American convoy from behind a funeral tent near her house. American troops often come to look for attackers. They have searched her house six times.

Southwest in Amariya, the area that borders the dangerous airport road, street battles between insurgents and the Iraqi police have been so intense that the two main grocery stores were badly damaged and have closed. Residents must now find food elsewhere.”

The other was this Ur-D.C. discussion on the TPM site of the “strategy’ of the Democratic party. It has that Chertoff note – detached, inhuman, complicit:

“From my talks around town I derive the impression that the current Democratic Party position on Iraq is to start saying that the Administration only has three more months within which to demonstrate that it is wise to "stay the course" in Iraq.
As I understand this position, it reflects in part the members' focus on the various appropriations packages and other bills struggling toward resolution before adjournment perhaps before Thanksgiving. They don't want to do much on Iraq this fall, or even in the winter.”

Reed’s post started the usual comment flurry: indignant readers are countered by the Chertoff-ian pragmatists, who assure them that the Democrats, having followed the triumphant path of Daschle so successfully in 2002, are going to do it again.

Adamantine hearts, these people. But not vermin – oh no, those D.C. voices will be heard. In fact, they will be shoved down our throats. as they have been for the past four years, on the principle that when your children cry out for bread, you should give them stones.

Krugman gives us a nice summary of one of the more rancid D.C. scandals currently scheduled for page A-10 in your local paper:

“Mr. Abramoff was indicted last month on charges of fraud relating to his purchase of SunCruz, a casino boat operation. Mr. Ney inserted comments in the Congressional Record attacking SunCruz's original owner, Konstantinos ''Gus'' Boulis, placing pressure on him to sell to Mr. Abramoff and his partner, Adam Kidan, and praised Mr. Kidan's character.
…
“Last week three men were arrested in connection with the gangland-style murder of Mr. Boulis. SunCruz, after it was controlled by Mr. Kidan and Mr. Abramoff, paid a company controlled by one of the men arrested, Anthony ''Big Tony'' Moscatiello, and his daughter $145,000 for catering and other work. In court documents, questions are raised about whether food and drink were ever provided. SunCruz paid $95,000 to a company in which one of the other men arrested, Anthony ''Little Tony'' Ferrari, is a principal.”

But Krugman’s facts need to be put into a certain atmosphere that has one abiding characteristic: the assumption of immunity. The violence perpetrated by any mafia type group must be exemplary. It must not only happen, but give the appearance that there are no constraints on its happening. This is why we recommend the MSNBC column about Tom Delay’s upcoming trial, written by one of Delay’s friends, Rick Scarborough, for its title: Guilty or not, DeLay will walk. Scarborough writes a column that he calls “Regular Joe.” He means the regular guy who gives his wife a bruiser if she gets out of line, whacks off at the local strip joint and rails against pornography, tosses a brick through the window of the gay couple down the street and ponders the mysteries of that merciful deity who triumphed over the grave through his mastery of the seven habits of highly successful people. Delay’s putative ability to bull his way out of a money laundering charge is celebrated by regular Joe Scarborough, who should surely have begun his article with that key Good Fellas phrase, “ever since I can remember I’ve wanted to be a gangster.”

Or, as Scarborough puts it, admiration seeping through his acids and cancers:

“Why could DeLay survive a prosecution that would destroy most other politicians? Because above all else, he is a political fighter.”

Shades of Nixon. The Bush culture gravitates to the protection racket as its natural form of governance, the wet dream of big government conservatism. We are, after all, headed by a man whose signal accomplishment, as a businessman, was to fatten on the creamy situations into which he was shoehorned by Daddy's friends. When the parasites get to the top of the food chain, the wonders that ensue delights the hearts of Scarborough's regular Joes everywhere, especially if they have had the good business sense to put a little in the Republican kitty.

PS – since we are commenting on the headlines today, we should note that the supposed “freedom of the press” issues involved in Judy Miller’s jailing are more and more absurd to invoke since Miller has mysteriously decided to knuckle under. This was not about freedom of the press, this was all about obscure maneuvers under the surface of the D.C. Court society that brought us the disastrous war. Meanwhile, neither the Washington Post nor the New York Times has bothered to headline, investigate, or even wink at a more deadly violation of freedom of the press, the U.S. decision to deny Independent’s reporter Robert Fisk entry into the country. Ah, but at least one powerhouse U.S. newspaper noticed this violation of our liberties: the New Mexican, in Santa Fe.

The delicate sensibilities at the NYT who could swallow a camel and strain at a gnat – or to be less Biblical, who could fire a reporter for filing a description of a news conference he didn’t attend but feel no compulsion to fire a woman whose stories about WMD in Iraq make Laurie Mylroie's fantasies seem serious by comparison -- haven’t yet felt that Fisk’s banning requires the kind of heated indignation that Judy’s plight inspired. Why am I not surprised?

underground

LI has been thinking about the “reality effect” since reading Underground, Haruki Murakami’s account of Aum Shinrikyo’s poison gas attack on the Tokyo Subways. Murakami’s book is divided into two sections, which were published as two separate books in Japan. In one section, he interviews victims of the attack. Some of these victims have recovered, at least physiologically, and some still deal with various degrees of injury, up to and including being permanently on life maintaining systems at a hospital. The other, smaller section is a group of interviews with Aum members. Some of the members have moved away from the group, some remain with it.

Although I’m not sure that this was Murakami’s purpose, one of the results of the book is to contrast two kinds of “reality” effect. It was, perhaps, unconsciously one of the reasons that Aum targeted a subway system, insofar as subways represent almost pure routine, that part of life in which everything exists under the sign of the minus. By which I mean that the experience is oriented exclusively to getting somewhere, and thus is ‘subtracted’ from real experience. Very few autobiographies concentrate on the phenomenology of taking a subway train to work. If one did, undoubtedly it would be one subway ride – the general subway ride, which absorbs into its general features the features shared by all particular subway rides, and is thus not a description of a specific subway ride at all. It is hard to imagine an “On the Road” devoted to riding the subway. This is why subway rides are routine –routines are experiences under the minus sign. The feel of their collective reality is unimportant. This is, I think, partly what Santayana means when he claims that we experience essences. It might be that Santayana's claim confuses description with experience, but the problem with sending a philosophical probe into experience to find out what it is in itself, beyond description, is that this restricts description to a narrow and specific verbal activity. But description is much more mixed up in experience than this, as you can tell from accounts of almost any disaster. Those accounts are full of people instructing themselves to respond to things. These instructions imply, in fact, a stream of descriptive activity that is implicated in the very stream of experience. And one effect of the mingling of those supposedly different planes, description and experience, is that experience is oriented towards the general features of a situation -- maps the present with its expectations about the present. The present, in other words, is experienced as the description of the present in many more cases than the philosopher likes to admit.

This negation of the value of the feel of reality (and yes, that’s a lot of “of” – ofs are the subway train rides of grammar) is precisely what the interviewees in the Aum section abhor. The victims all begin their accounts like “ On March 20th I wasn’t especially busy at work, but it being the end of the fiscal year there was plenty to do.” Or ‘March 20 coincides with our spring fashion sales peak, which keeps us pretty busy.” Or “So there I was, going back to work that day, after my absence, which is why I wanted to get to the office a little early, to make up for lost time.” The subways exist in the realm of busyness – the schedules are about down time between home and “plenty to do,” “making up for lost time”, etc. Busyness, of course, is both absorbing and fills the place of the feeling of reality.

The Aum people begin differently. Of course, this is partly because Murakami is not trying to pin them down to a particular day, or sequence of events. He is after what it felt like to be in the group, in a way that he is not after what it felt like to be on a subway train day after day. The closest he comes to treating the subway experience as a salient and complete thing in itself, an object for understanding, is when he interviews the subway employees. For them, the subway exists under the sign of busyness – that is, it is fully real. But the Aum people begin by saying things like “I had some sort of philosophical struggle going on in me, a period of great discontent.” Or “When I finished high school I felt like I would either renounce the world or die…” Or “I never felt any major frustration or difficulty in my life, really. It was more like something was missing.”

The disturbing thing about the Aum accounts, of course, is that the reality of life in Aum was also full of busyness. Certain people were busy being given drugs and shut in boxes. Certain people were busy building vats to hold poisonous chemicals. And, in the most astonishing account of all, to me, one of the Aum interviewees was given electroshock after she committed some trespass, and has no memory of two years of her life. The astonishing thing is not so much the electroshock as the fact that it and the vanished two years are so completely assimilated to what is normal to her:

“I underwent electroshock. I still have the scars from the electricity right here. (Raises her hair to show her neck, where a line of white scars remain). I remember things up to the time I entered the Dubbing Division [a division of the Aum Shinryko “Ministry of Communications”], but after that it is a blank. I have no idea at what point, and for what reason, my memory was erased. I asked people around me but no one would tell me. All they’d say was, “It seems you and a certain somebody were getting to a dangerous point.”

And, after another question:

“Anyway, my memory was erased, and when I came to myself it was already the beginning of the year of the gas attack [1995] I’d gone into the Dubbing Division in 1993, and the two years after that are an absolute blank. Except I suddenly got a flashback of me working in the Aum-run supermarket in Kyoto. All of a sudden this scene came back to me. It’s summer, I’m wearing a t-shirt and I’m sticking price tags on packets of ramen.”

A routine sticking price tags on packets of ramen is just the sort of objective that the subway system serves. It is interesting that the negation of this woman’s experience, the memory loss, is interesting, dramatic, frightening because of the surrounding narrative – in the same way that the subway ride on the morning of March 20, 1995, suddenly glows, suddenly reverses the minus sign above it, because of the attack. The subway ride on the morning of March 23, 1995, for example, has fallen into nothingness. It could have been erased by electroshock, for all the impression it makes upon us.

I am bringing these things up because lately, I have vowed to work more on my novel. The writing life is much like being a member of Aum, actually. It is full of what is missing in life, full of “training,” and – inevitably – full of busyness. But to continue to do this, I have to have a sense about what a novel does, or what I would like one to do. And the problem is in achieving the kind of intensity throughout that is of the same substance – that has the same attitude towards reality – as the day the woman in Aum “woke up” from her blank two years.

The woman, by the way, woke up in a sealed room, three feet by six feet, without even a peephole through the door. Aum leaders had a habit of punishing the wayward by locking them in such holes. The woman is not completely cool with being shut in a box, it turns out.

party party party

LI’s post that compared factions in Constantinople with the two parties that now bicker within D.C. court society was picked up and disseminated by Chris Floyd’s Empire Burlesque, for which we’d like to give a big shout out. Floyd is a journalist for the Moscow Times with a bigger readership than LI will ever have. And while certain of LI’s manias – for instance, about Balzac – are really… what’s the word? eccentric, the politics of movements as opposed to the politics of parties is something about which we have something to say that might be less eccentric.

Our point was not that the Democratic party is dead. Our point was, instead, that ideologies and parties are joined contingently, not organically. The Democratic party was much more conservative on social issues than the Republican party in, say, 1904. arguably the Democratic party, under Grover Cleveland, did more to shape the peculiar absence of a real leftist force in the U.S. by breaking a national strike than anything done by Harding, Coolidge or Hoover in the twenties. The Democratic party prolonged Jim Crow in the South for as long as it could. Conversely, the Republican party created anti-trust legislation, and civil service reform, and, under Hoover, greatly expanded the economic aggressiveness of the national government.

Since the sixties, the ideological character of the parties has hardened. Or, I should say, the public persona of the parties has taken on a more definite ideological cast, with Democrats being more or less identified as liberals, and the Republicans as conservatives. For anybody who is liberal, this is incredibly frustrating. Myself, in the nineties, I got into numerous arguments with friends who, about the time of the presidential elections, would be mysteriously moved to a passionate and, I felt, undeserved regard for the Democratic candidate. I would be moved, too, to different positions. In 1996, I truly felt that voting was a waste of time. But I was shamed into registering, and voted, of course, for Nader. In 2000, I felt more excited, and again voted for Nader. But I never really had a grasp of what parties are and what they do. I floundered. I thought, for a long while, that the Green party was going to do… something.

Waiting for the Green party to do something is like waiting for homeopathy to cure lung cancer. It’s going to be a long wait.

Over the last four years of shock at the Bush culture, I’ve tried to re-think, from the most rational point of view, the whole party thing. So far, I’ve come to two conclusions.

One is that passionate like or dislike of a party is the neuroses that is at the bottom of the mysterious passions that seem to move people during presidential election years. One way this plays out, on the liberal side, is a passionate contempt for the Democratic party. However, the odd thing about this contempt is that it is kept unconsciously in the magic circle around the Democratic party. The idea is that the party is conformist, that it is weak, that it accedes to the Republicans, that it isn’t liberal, or liberal enough. That idea is derived from, I think, a false notion of the history of the parties in America, one that the parties have learned to exploit.

Another way it plays out on the liberal side is the stereotypical use of Republican to mean conservative. Again, this ignores a great deal of Republican history. This stereotype is more helpful to conservatives than it is to liberals, since it predetermines the absence of any progressive politicking on the G.O.P. side, and thus makes liberals ever more dependent on Democrats. Conservatives, on the other hand, are not at all averse to politicking on the Democratic side. Astonishingly, they are then lauded by liberals for doing so – hence, the persistence of the meme of moderate Democrat so beloved of TNR, and (come presidential election time) of the Nation, etc. I can’t really remember the Nation, for instance, ever getting excited about a G.O.P. candidate. The very suggestion would, of course, cause bellylaughs at the editorial board, but it shouldn’t. Demonizing the Republicans is just the flip side of ceding a vital political struggle to certain Republicans – those of the Bush stripe. It is a defeat, and we are all paying for the consequences of the destruction of the Eastern liberal line in the Republican party.

The second thing is that neuroses don’t have “solutions.” Rather, one tries to get over them, create an emotional distance from the compulsions that pullulate within them, sublimate them, etc. To my mind, the start of that process begins by viewing the parties as dead machinery. Not as ideologically colored, but as primarily vehicles to achieve political power by politicians. Now, just as we know that goth lead singers are going to be morbid, we know that politicians and those in the inner circle of politics are mostly going to be disgusting. I mean that special level of disgusting, that level on which every act of niceness, of goodness, is actually aimed at some incredibly narrow self-interested end. Politics collects manipulators. Furthermore, it is impossible to view politicians merely in terms of their political careers. In the age of big national governments, politicians long ago learned that this is a very good way to channel upwards and make money – with an elective office merely the junket that prepares one for the bucks of lobbying, corporate board membership, or the thousand and one ways to milk the cow that have developed since 1940 in D.C. Cheney simply puts into starker terms the reality of D.C. politics – it is all about making it in the “private sector,” which is actually as connected to the public sector as the function of the dryer is connected to the function of the washer. For a liberal like me, keeping my eyes on this primary fact – thinking, for instance, that it is as important in the career of Madeleine Albright that she lobbies for the Kuwaiti government as it is that she used to work for the Clinton administration – that the switches, here, are seamless -- is one way to get out of the magic circle cast by the reputation of the Democratic and Republican parties. For more politically important people than myself – people who govern NGOs like the Sierra club, or Moveon, etc. – this is a crucial step, although somehow I doubt they will ever take it. Eventually, they all plug into D.C. court society. But if they did, if just once they freed themselves from viewing the parties as being attitudinally committed to one or another ideology, they would be on the road to figuring out how best to use them. That step, inverting the master/slave relationship between party and political action, is going to be difficult as long as the end result of political action is cast in terms of electing politicians. Something businesses have long known is that political action is about dealing with politicians. Electing them is secondary. Election is actually their vulnerability.

All of this might be self-evident to more sophisticated political operatives. But it has never been self-evident to me. If the last five years have been a disaster, they’ve also been, as kindergarten teachers like to say about particularly incorrigible brats, a learning experience.