there will be blood - reflections on the present state of the human meat grinder

Jeremy Harding’s long review essay about Angola in the LRB is a fascinating exercise in the history of the Cold war as pursued in one of its side pockets, even if Harding recounts it at a cold blooded jet fighter height, mainly. Clearly, one of the many things Obama could have congratulated Castro for in Cuba was his strong contribution to the end of apartheid. Without Cuban troops and Soviet weapons in Angola in the seventies and eighties, the South African apartheid forces and the Americans would have rolled over Namibia and Angola, and apartheid might still have its leather gloved grip on the region.
I read it with some memory of the events that it went through. However, I found it suprisingly relevant to today’s politics. Reagan’s under-secretary of state, Crocker, was the author of the doctrine of linkage and constructive engagement with South Africa, which meant, generally, supporting the racist regime.Its the same cynical, immoral and ultimately futile policy that Clinton seems to have pursued and to want to pursue with Saudi Arabia. Clinton’s pretense to have made women’s rights a presence on the world stage was undermined by the warm ties and weapons sales that she advocated while Secretary of State. More weapons were sold to the Gulf state, I believe, during the brief period of Clinton’s stay at State than have ever been sold to them before. This, in a period in which the Saudi’s imprisoned numerous immigant workers, mostly female, for sorcery, executed various “sorcerers”, and made only the most cosmetic of attempts to impress the West with civil rights. The West, in the person of a press that is tightly connected, on the corporate level, was always cooperative with the propaganda project. The New Yorker recently published a celebratory article centering on one fabulously wealthy Saudi woman who is bravely going out there and driving herself. This is treated as a blow for human rights on par with the march at Selma. Meanwhile, we pretend that our moral justification in Afghanistan is fighting for the country’s oppressed women, who are treated by the Taliban exactly how the Saudis treat women.
Clinton, like Reagan, has her eyes on the prize: the untrammeled use of American power to promote capitalism and various cherrypicked moral principles – the latter not too closely. It took Obama six years to start quietly undoing a foreign policy founded on brainless toughness and a penchant for doing ‘stupid stuff’. Clinton, by all accounts, wants to undo Obama’s undoing.
I suppose I should say that “Clinton” and “Obama” represent pieces on the chess board, functions more than personalities. Clinton stands in for the longstanding complex of money and military power that has transformed the DC metro area into a real estate agent’s wet dream. This is an old American disease.
And like any disease, there will be blood. There always is. The pundits are hungry for it. O, the wars we have missed! In Ukraine, Syria, Libya, Afghanistan, Yemen… oops, not quite Yemen. There we are still pounding the shit out of civilians, and nobody that I know of is selling any t shirt saying Je suis Yemen. No, in Brussels the death of 35 is two days of headlines, while in Aden, another bomb strike, another hundred civilian deaths is a real yawner. And so the pundits, like ticks, cheer for the opening of another jugular somewhere. It will be good for us. It will demonstrate our resolution. We will be tough.
In Angola, maybe a million died. A Cold war story with twists and turns and a nice O.Henry ending: the white apartheid soldiers who did such damage to Angola, and who were ultimately defeated by the Cubans, are now mercenaries defending the once Marxist state, and the “freedom fighters” there, so beloved by Reagan, have been tracked down with the encouragement of the Americans and Total Oil and murdered.
Such is the state of the human meat grinder on the cusp of major global climate change.

rom com imperialism

A and I set out to enjoy a fun, forgettable movie last night. The movie we chose, Whiskey Tango Foxtrot, will, eventually, be forgettable, but its not-funness was very wrapped up in memory: the memory of that corrupt and vile decade, the 00s in these here United States. The overwhelming Orientalist stereoptypes, from Gunga Din to Savage to Wise Native; the political blankness (this is a movie that locates one of its first scenes at the Bagram Airforce base in 2002, which is famous for containing a torture chamber in  which at least two Afghan civilians were tortured to death by American interrogators, without pausing to allude to it)); the ridiculous intrusion of a sort of lean-in feminism as our moral justification for being in Afghanistan (real feminism was introduced by the Communists under the PDPA in 1978, which began a revolt that was stifled by Soviet soldiers. The US then funded the mujahedin freedom fighters, as Reagan called them, who put the subordination of women at the top of their list of complaints, and, in power, quickly purged the hospitals  of women doctors and the schools of women students); and the unquestioning subordination of the press to the military and the Bush narrative (although the movie carefully never mentions George Bush), created, for me, an hour andd fifty minute time trip back to the America of that decade.

Hollywood, of course, with a small deviation in the seventies, has always kissed the ass of the Pentagon, recognizing the Defense department as another smoke and mirrors laboratory, covering itself in the rhetoric of uplift as it goes about accruing money and power.  In this movie, the soldiers are all polite as pie, the generals crusty. No rapists here. No commander as bad as Richard Myers, who missed Osama bin Laden riding away on his little pony – apparently, they could bomb the peasants around the base of Tora Bora to their hearts content, but they couldn’t bomb the paths out of Tora Bora and through the mountains because they might hurt some innocent shepherds.  The American government here, so well intentioned that it positively squeaked, could never have countenanced the airlift of Taliban leaders and fighters and ISI commandos from Kunduz  to Pakistan. No, they were much too busy doing, in their clumsy, loveable way, good to the country.  In this Afghanistan war, the Taliban are the ultimate evil. The Northern Alliance, the warlords the US teamed up with, are only obliquely mentioned in a scene that hints at what they were famous for – kidnapping and raping boys.

The end of this thing was in the same spirit as the rest of it.. A cheerful vet, his legs blown off but not at all bitter about it, expresses the view that nobody is responsible for the war in Afghanistan. Its causes are too far back in history to even think about. The unsuccessful, 14 year, trillion and a half dollar war was just one of those things, like a mountain or a bad case of diarrhea. So sweet! For if nobody is to blame, why, we can do it all over again!

Oh, and on a final note: the movie is advertised as a rom-com. Cause of the Tina Fey main character and such.

In a sense, this does express the American self image about its imperialism. Big, brutish but ulitimately sweet Uncle Sam meets demure, backwards Middle Eastern country and in a hilarious and romantic courtship, bombs the shit out of it and introduces it to the cell phone and dating! Loveable hijinx for the whole family.

My theory, which is mine, which I have, cough cough

Ever since I was knee high to a mockingbird, I’ve been reading about the lamentable state of American innumeracy. Seems like we Americans, unlike Koreans, Finns, and Albanians, just can’t find our way in even the lower mathematics. Many theories have been advanced. Many studies, at great expense, have been launched.

Well, I was sitting out at the playground today, watching Adam and other kids and parents, and it struck me that it might have something to do with the way us parents threaten.  More specifically, the way we say: I’m going to count to five and you better get in your seat, eat your dinner, get off the jungle gym, etc.

Nobody ever says, I’m going to go to “e”.

It is perhaps for this reason that the alphabet really does seem composed of friendly little mountaineers, each with its little hammer, all of them climbing up one after the other the cliff face of language. Whereas numbers always have the whiff of the disciplinarian, as if they all waved rulers at us threateningly.

To prove my theory, I’d only need a couple of million dollars from Zuckerberg or Gates or one of the other billionaires. I would raise three groups of kids, one threatened, traditionally, with numeration, one with the alphabet (I’m going to go to e, and you better be over here: a b c d e) and one raised with varied threats (I’m going to go to mo and you better get over here  -eenie meenie minee mo; or, I’m going to go to paper and you better get off that jungle gym – rock scissors paper). Then we’d overload these children with various repeititive and intrusive tests and find out whether the alphabet menaced read at a lower level than the number menaced, and so on.

I’m getting on the phone to the Ford foundation tomorrow.

It's all your fault! (and Trump is still funny)

Some genius at the AEC, which successfully suppressed its studies of the toxic effects of the radiation produced by above ground nuclear bomb tests (thus giving the lie to those conspiracy theory debunkers who claim that it can’t happen here – yes, Virginia, if you have the judicial power to seal as top secret any papers you feel like, you can mount a conspiracy at the highest levels), wrote a memo in the fifties in which, after considering the bummer of fallout, concluded hopefully that at least it was falling on the “low use segment of the population.” This phrase gives us a sort of x ray of the mindset of our betters – the governing class that extends from the plutocrats to the politicos and the high profile journalists and pundits. The low use segment of the population is regularly hauled out for public beatings whenever the governing class feels threatened, or at low ebb, or needs some sportive relief.
Yet of course all is not bleak for the low user – or loser – crowd. Since, as Jesus H. Christ said, we have them with us always, we can always make use of them by stirring up a little racism here, a little panic over welfare there. While they are riled up, you can clip entitlements, lower taxes on the top rates, and sign your fabuloso trade agreements. This process is of course a bit of hush hush – obfuscation on these things is provided free by the media, so the losers don’t get too nosey.
Sometimes, however, as in this election year, out comes the ugly.
Ugly is spelled Trump this season. There’s been a seachange in the thumbsucker community, and it has been decreed that Trump is no longer funny. My ass – Trump is still funny. Of course, all the GOP candidates were funny. Maybe not Cruz, except in that Hannibal Lector way. The thing about Trump is that, like Falstaff, he is not only funny in himself, but he brings out the funny in others.
Case in point is the latest meme among the thumbsuckers: why don’t the losers move more?
This got started with an article published by someone on the masthead of the National Review. NR has been exasperated by Trump, and finally, to much thunder, excommunicated him. It was powerful stuff, but alas, the next day the editorial staff awakened and found out that they hadn’t been elected pope. Quite the shock. They were, as Trump has show every day, mere pipsqueaks in bowties. In fact, of course, the National Review has long cultivated pipsqueak conservatism, but they also peddle a good line in homoerotic worship of tough, “masculine” leaders. Oh how they love those leaders! From Ronald Reagan to Dick Cheney, their bowties have always stood a little stiffer when saluting minor act of mass murder committed in the name of America.
So it stands in the kingdom of Rightwingia. Since the excommunication didn’t work, the next thing, of course, is to empty the vials on the low use segment – which, as they distantly perceive from the newspapers, is where the unfortunate Trumpmania is located. The lecture, given with the appropriate amount of smirking, is that these fat assed white bluecollar types would do better to rent a U Haul and move, rather than disturbing their betters. Vote for what we tell you to vote for, and get a better job! One imagines the high fives. The bowties were showing their legendary toughness once again!
Of course, what happens on the right quickly migrates to the “left”, in as much as Vox, or Mother Jones, pretends to a liberal sensibility. Of course, the smirks were taken out – this is the great White Euphemism Zone, after all – and the question was asked like some Zen puzzle with a gotcha at the end: why aren’t these low enders moving around like obedient fleas in the flea circus as we stage our wonderful globalization act? Is it some dreadful character flaw – oh surely it is – that keeps the blue collar work force from, well, renting a U Haul!
I mean, we aren’t going to reverse history. Put in the appropriate chuckles here. Haven’t the low use people realized? And truly, if you went to Harvard or any of the real institutions of higher education, if your daddy or mommy had risen above the low enders, well, globalisation has been good for you. The maids are cheaper, the flights to Bangkok exquisite, and your real estate deals get mentioned in the Washingtonian, as well as your start up parties. Etc.
Being neo-liberals, however, these thumbsuckers took the problem of residential mobility as something serious that the application of homo economicus could solve. Moving for them comes down to a transaction cost. Sure there are these costs, but generally, surely, the blue collar factory worker just needs more human capital and a move to, say, Manhattan to become a hedge funder. So surely it is some irrational fetish, like attachment to guns, preventing the intersubstitution in the human capital market to move along as efficiently as always.
Being official explainers doesn’t mean anything so vulgar as research for the thumbsucker, however. Myself, I, like millions of people, have access to JSTOR and EBSCO and can actually look up what sociologists have said about residential mobility, cause and effects. Admittedly, this isn’t as fun as sitting in your chair and imagining some lazy rational choice scenario, but there you are: even cherries have their pits.
Sociologists have long connected some dots. For instance, between residential mobility and divorce. Divorce is both a large driver of residential mobility. It was noted by Larry Long in 1974 that married men over thirty were more residentially stable, and this was often accompanied by the married woman joining the work force outside the house. Long, building on this, claimed that divorce was a driver of residential mobility – work that has been amply confirmed – and that it was also possible that divorce occurred more often among one income families that became two income families, thus showing what I dare say is a dialectical effect, which we will all blush about (dialectic is for Commies!). As for the effectss on the children of the residentially migrant, we also have plenty of sociological literature if we are energetic enough to type some letters into our computer. What has been found is that children – I’m talking of course of the losers, who should just rent a U Haul - are more likely to be negatively effected by moving out of neighborhoods they’ve grown up in. They are likely to be more often engated in violence, and dropping out of school, and if they stay in school, their grades suffer. (Castone McLahan, 1994; Tucker Marx Long, 1998;Pribesh Downey, 1999). In fact, one can speculate on the coincidence that spikes in drug taking and crime came at the same time as a higher rate of residential mobility in the sixties and seventies.
Of course, these sociological findings make it unlikely that the trip, so ardently wished for by the likes of Tyler Cowen or Kevin Drum, in which the unemployed dad and his wife and kids flee the ruins of the city for the glorious pastures of a better lifestyle through trade with our Pacific partners is really going to have that uplifting, Horatio Alger end. That’s the downer. On the other hand, if they do it, we can blame them for divorce, single parenthood, and crime! This is nice. Because the rule for our governor vis a vis the low use segment is: it's all your fault!

hypnosis and description

Flaubert once said that if you gave your full attention to any object for long enough, it would become interesting. In this, Flaubert, whether he knew it or not, was certainly breaking with the old classical vision of the world. For Plato and Aristotle, there was an inherent hierarchy of worth in the world, an ontological as well as ethical hierarchy. The philosopher was he who ignored trivial objects and plastered his attention to worthier ones. Hair, or dirt, or dogs, or the way a candlestick looks on a piano, were unworthy of noting, of memorializing.

Well, while Flaubert was opining, with a rare uplift, about the value of attention, another Frenchman was experimenting with what had once been called mesmerism, and was now being called hypnotism. Charcot was discovering that you could lull a subject into hypnosis by having them fixate their attention on a bright object until they were, as it were, captured by it – entranced, or at least tranced.

Between the attention that increases the value of an object and the fixation of attention that captures the subject lies the description in narrative.

I’ve had ample opportunity to experiment with this, since, every night, after we read to Adam from one book in French and one book, almost always about dinosaurs recently, in English, we turn out the light and tell him a story about himself. Adam generally lays down the rules for the story, like he was ordering from a menu: I want me to be playing basketball and I want X and Y (his friends) to be Ironman and Batman and I want to be Clobberman. Or along that line.

Now, the thing is, whether Adam has been lulled by the books we read him or not, generally A. and I are. Sometimes I have a hard time keeping my eyes open as I read about the stegasaurus, one of the last of the dinosaurs in Adam’s favorite book. So in telling him a story that I make up, I’ve found that by the end of it, I might be wandering far afield. But if I am thinking about the story, I usually try to throw in a lot of description, or at least names of things, in the hope that this will lull Adam to sleep. If he goes down a path in the forest, I try to enumerate all the things he’ll pass: a pine tree, a live oak, a red oak, a maple tree, a willow, a chestnut tree, an elm tree, a redwood, a bramble bush, a sweet gum tree, a beech, a birch tree, a rhododendron, etc., etc. My theory is that the longer I stretch this out, the less Adam’s attention will be fixed on the forest and the more he will be sinking into slumber.

It works, at least, for me.

So I have thought a bit about the relationship between description in a fiction, the ‘world’ that fiction, or at least certain fictions, try to create, and the hypnotic envelopment in which the narrative’s horizon is overtaken. We do feel that certain novels create a world, one that we enter: but is this entrance like discovering a world, or being entranced by a brilliant pocket watch on a chain? 

from nicaragua in 1983 to Libya in 2010 - same story

It is a shame that the Sandinista issue in the debate is proving to be just Clinton's way of calling out to old Reagan-ites and doing her shitty redbaiting, because what happened in Central America in the eighties has a lot of relevance to what is happening today. 
The eighties were the crest of a century of American interventions in Mexico, the Caribbean and Central America. Any quasi-endogenous political structure had to be vetted with the USA, or the USA would simply knock it over. Ditto with economic policy.
However, although the US took the right to intervene as it saw fit, it did not, as other imperialist systems did, take on the responsibility for governing, or for developing these areas in any way. Even the Soviets in Eastern Europe aided the development of industry. Not the US.
In consequence of a hundred years of soft imperialism, the US helped produced a perfect pocket of poor and desperate people. Many of them have, in the past two decades, decided to immigrate, one way or another, to the US. Why not? After all, they have the experience of having their own independence in their own countries overturned by the whim of American power.
This is not, as the snark-fest on twitter treats it, just an old story. It is the story of the pattern of American foreign policy.
To see what Reagan did in Central America is to see what Clinton advocated in North Africa and the Middle East. Intervention without responsibility.
The result is a sort of speeded up picture of Nicaragua, El Salvador and Guatemala. Libya is a perfect example. Intervention ruined the country, and irresponsibility didn't wait around to build it up. The Benghazi crime is not, as the GOP would have it, that Clinton abandoned Benghazi. The crime is that Obama, with CLinton urging him on, performed another immoral act of imperialism on the cheap.
Result? In Central America, the result is not only poverty, but a huge drug economy and states like El Salvador crippled by gangs. In Libya, the result is a state fractured between gangs, and providing a launching point for desperate refugees aiming for Europe.
Unfortunately, there will not be a question in this election campaign that will come close to pointing at this malign syndrome. Nobody will ask the obvious question: why, if we are unwilling to accept millions of immigrants, did we spend a trillion dollars in Afghanistan over the last fourteen years instead of Mexico or Central America? Because the answer is rooted in the same shadow side in the States that produces systematic racism: exploitation without responsibility, and a wholly unearned feeling that the fruits of that exploitation are somehow "earned".

a little monday morning theology

There are books that are planets. One lands oon them, as in some sci-fi flick, and explores the strange ruins, the fantastic phrases that lie about and that seem to have been invented for unknown uses by a mysteriously vanished mental technology.

The Bible, of course, is the most famous of those texts in the West. I like sometimes to play the astronaut among the prophets and the gospels.

Which is how I came upon one of those amazing sentences, a couple of days ago, that seemed to overturn what I thought I know about the book.

Its tucked, appropriately, in one of the books of the Apocrypha – The wisdom of Solomon. In the first chapter:

“For God made not death: neither hath he pleasure in the destruction of the living.”

Reading this sentence, I did a sort of wiley coyote thing in my head, digging in my heels even as I was sliding over the cliff.

In other religious traditions, the idea of God not making something would not be a big deal. Divine power often operates in a world that exists quite apart from the God. Among the Greeks, there were things in the world that actually encumbered divine power. How the world came to be is often a murkey preface to other stories, and it is the latter that grab the spotlight. But monotheisms are distinguished by the close tie between God and the creator function. So much so, in fact, that it is difficult for people raised in a monotheistic tradition to recognize gods in traditions where no God creates everuthing.

Now, even in monotheism, God’s creating everything does not mean that God is responsible for everuthing. There’s nature, and then there’s the moral order, where man has free will, and sins. Whatever kind of theological curlycues one draws about that fact, it is still endemic to most monotheisms that the moral order is not identical to the natural order.

So one could say, in a sense, that God did not create sin. But death?

Death is, of course, part of the natural order. Or at least the secular view of death puts it with other natural things, such as breathing, eating, sex, etc.

All those natural things are created by God – so how is it that death isn’t? Doesn’t the sentence seem to challenge the power and scope of God?

I can think of two framing interpretations of this statement. In one, death is, indeed, a fragment of the uncreated state  - a sort of emissary of what was before God created everything. I am tempted to call it a floating negation, but only in as much as negation approximates the uncreated. In reality, negation would seem to be dependent as a concept on creation, so death wouldn’t be negation so much as a hole in things, a tear.

The other interpretation, which is more orthodox, is that something besides God created death. In this view, there is a spirit of negation, of some type, that has the power to create on a cosmic scale, but subordinate to God. Thus far orthodoxy would go. Here, the story of the Fall intrudes into the picture. And takes on a Blakean cast. The unorthodox version – the gnostic, or promethean, version – would draw attention to the paradoxes in that story. After all, when God places the tree of knowledge in the Garden and warns man not to eat of its fruit on pain of suffering death, it is a warning that makes no sense if man doesn’t understand what death is. But how can man understand what death is if there is no death? The paradox seems diabolic, and the gnostic way out of it would make the God who issued this warning a demiurge of no very moral type.

The orthodox answer, here, is to ignore this paradox as a mystery, and to go ahead with the rest of the story, removing death from the natural order and inserting it into the moral order.

Augustine, in the City of God, treads this route. Death, he explains, is “good unto none.” Thus, it is a pure negation. Death isn’t even good for martyrs. But martyrs and others can go through dying as a glorious thing.

Since death is good unton none, Augustine continues, it is a punishmment. It bears the mark of punishment in its very essence. Augustine impressed a sort of conflation of the moral and the natural, or, if you like, a sublation of the natural into the moral, upon the Christian mind: existence is positive. Existence bears within it the sign of creation – of the being created. This line, actually, is suggested in the Wisdom of Solomon: “for  he created all things, that they might have their being: and the generations of the world are healthful; and there is no poison of destruction in them, nor the kingdom of death upon earth.”

In our dreamtime – which enfolds most of our waking as well as sleeping moments – this has an intuitive, fairy tale sense. Death is a punishment, and the natural order is the order of health. That’s how our stories work. They all work backwards from death in one way or another.

But I am interested in the first great framing interpretation, which has a less traceable history. I’m interested in how it tugs at the self-evidence of creation itself.