Liberaliness

Does nobody remember the election of 2010? The GOP did not run on cutting medicare - they ran on restoring the cuts Obama proposed. And running to the left of Obama, they smashed the dems, who had their hands tied behind them by the clueless prez.

With the new budger, O. has once again enacted the same strategy. As a political strategy, his idea seems to be that trading the votes of the Washington Post op ed crew (they will love the cuts to gross entitlements) for the votes of the majority of Americans (who hate the cuts to the entitlements they have earned over a generation of wage stagnation and peculation by Wall Street) is an excellent idea. It isn't that the Dem voters will vote for Republicans - they just wont vote. This is an easy dynamic to see. As a farcical sideshow, this disaster will be accompanied, in the comments sections of liberal blogs, with Dem operatives or Obama fans adopting strident and bullying tones towards those who find the strategy politically pathetic and economically noxious, to be followed by the same shills explaining the Dem losses of 2014 on "holier than thou" leftists and liberals. Such are the limits of politics in the era of the mock demoracy, as the plutocratic parties battle for the margins.
One cannot, then, see this from the point of view of seerious politics. There is no serious politics going on here - the viewpoint of the majority is going to be ignored by whoever they elect. So one has to view it as a form of entertainment, comedy on a low level. And of course the balony factory, aka the establishment press, will provide the stage directions for this farce in their own inimitable language, half high school cheerleader, half dimwit. Thus, the NYT today, in Jackie Calmes thumbsucker, presented us with this alice in wonderland analysis:

"The president’s views put him at the head of a small but growing faction of liberals and moderate Democrats who began arguing several years ago that unless the party agrees to changes in the entitlement benefit programs — which are growing unsustainably as baby boomers age and medical prices rise — the programs’ costs will overwhelm all other domestic spending to help the poor, the working class and children.

“The math on entitlements is just not sustainable,” said Senator Mark Warner of Virginia, one of the few Democrats to unequivocally endorse Mr. Obama’s budget. “And if you’re not finding ways to reform, where do you squeeze? Well, then you squeeze early-childhood programs, you squeeze Head Start, you squeeze education and veterans.”

Ah, the small but growing portion of liberals who think that unsustainable medical costs are best met by - throwinhg those costs back on the individual! Its a whole new kind of liberalism, a sort of truthiness liberalism, which simply uses a new language - for instance, it used to be that the justification for entitlements is that certain costs can't be sustained by the individual household, but now, through liberaliness, we simply and easily reverse that notion and hope nobody notices that we are speaking nonsense. The NYT, always looking for the cutting edge and always finding it a couple years after it has become the boring norm, is charmed by the fact that it is small but growing - which is usually what the doctor says before he recommends surgery. Alas, the surgery that will be performed will separate the small but growing plutocrat friendly party - defending entitlements by eviscerating them - from the large but powerless body that cannot find any defenders among a political class that has merged entirely with the gated community crowd. It is the politics of the tumor by the tumor and for the tumor.

I can't wait for the Media to find the new Dem version of Paul Ryan to represent this small but growing liberaliness faction: Obama's heir!

In one way, this doesn't come as a surprise: Obama did say, in his first debate with Romney, that he and the governor agreed completely on social security. But I was caught up in the small delusion that the election of more liberal Dems to the senate would stifle Obama's liberaliness. It didn't.

Obama's beliefs

I can't really criticize Obama for not sticking to his beliefs. After 2010, you would think that he would have changed his belief that cutting "entitlements" was a good political idea. The GOP ran to the left of Obama in that election, pointing to the cuts he was proposing to Medicaid to rally the troops. Well, Obama is doing it again, proposing a transparent cut in Social security at a time when social security should actually be raised quite a bit. So, we at least have evidence of a core belief, which Obama shared with freedom loving Thatcher and Reagan: government entitlements are the problem. I like how this comes on the heels of the inauguration speech where O. made heavy weather with inequality as a bad thing. He's apparently changed his mind, since his proposals will make it visibly worse. I actually thought the Dems had learned something in 2012, but they didnt. Instead, the same feckless turn to the right is going to be their theme in 2014. Giving the GOP an opportunity to rescue Social Security from the Dems. It is funny, this game of piggy in the middle played by the two plutocratic parties in the age of the mock democracy.

critique in the age of whatever

I went to a groovy coffee shop the other day. Prayer flags. A wall dedicated to poor children, smiling toothily (or not) in photos, serving as an advertising prop to sell accessories in which the gimmick is assuring the consumer that the merchandizer will shift some of the ready, or an inkind equivalent, to the kids. Smiley clean moral people behind the counter. So there I am, and suddenly I feel an advent of that futile senile anger that I am sure I will spend years expressing. I become, in a word, more Walter Sobjackish – so after ordering a latte and a drip, I point to a camera high on the wall behind the cashier, under which there is a smiley face and the words, smile, you’re on camera, and I ask her whether she felt the slogan was a way of making us feel actually happy about losing our basic freedom not to be surveilled or watched. These words came out of my mouth, I am sure, in good order, nary a messup in syntax, but the woman’s face (she was probably nineteen) showed utter incomprehension. Then her companion, of about the same age, decided it was just that I didn’t understand the sign, and told me that it was like we could all pretend to be movie stars. I however thought that this didn’t quite grapple with my off the cuff critique, and so pointed out that it is by such delusions that we lose our basic freedoms. And then, not wanting to be a total jerk (the spirit of senile anger leaving my shoulder, I guess), I conceded that there was nothing we could do about it, so what the hay. I got my latte and the drip, and the woman then resolutely turned to the next customer, hoping that he, at least, was not a jerk.  

Another note on Nostromo

Conrad was a logistics man before he was an author. Unlike Melville, whose sea experience, as Charles Olson notes, was in an assembly line – in as much as the whale was caught, cut up, and its oil extracted on board ship – Conrad sailed with the middle men, the truckers and dealers. This experience within a small node of the greater global market system made Conrad sensitive to both the pre-capitalist mentality – which lent its aura of romance to the seaman – that the dealer was constantly in contact with in the far places of the earth, and one of the fundamental facts of capitalism – the dominance of exchange. Everything turns into money in the system – everything is fungible. In actual fact, pre-capitalist notions pervaded, and still pervade, the system. When pure capitalism penetrates a certain a-capitalist level, the level of more complicated exchanges, it undermines itself, for capitalism is parasitic on the economies it supposedly supercedes.

The x marks the spot where the inhuman fungibility of the capitalist ideal encounters the redoubt of the  a-capitalist mentality is the treasure trove. Treasure – whether it is the miser’s hoard or the pirate’s chest – was much on the mind of Conrad’s colleagues in the later 19^th century. In the contention between Henry James and Stevenson over the art of the novel, treasure becomes – I think not accidentally – the symbol of their difference:

Mr. James refers, with singular generosity of praise, to a little book about a quest for hidden treasure; but he lets fall, by the way, some rather startling words.  In this book he misses what he calls the “immense luxury” of being able to quarrel with his author.  The luxury, to most of us, is to lay by our judgment, to be submerged by the tale as by a billow, and only to awake, and begin to distinguish and find fault, when the piece is over and the volume laid aside.  Still more remarkable is Mr. James’s reason.  He cannot criticise the author, as he goes, “because,” says he, comparing it with another work, “I have been a child, but I have never been on a quest for buried treasure.”  Here is, indeed, a wilful paradox; for if he has never been on a quest for buried treasure, it can be demonstrated that he has never been a child.  There never was a child (unless Master James) but has hunted gold, and been a pirate, and a military commander, and a bandit of the mountains; but has fought, and suffered shipwreck and prison, and imbrued its little hands in gore, and gallantly retrieved the lost battle, and triumphantly protected innocence and beauty.  Elsewhere in his essay Mr. James has protested with excellent reason against too narrow a conception of experience; for the born artist, he contends, the “faintest hints of life” are converted into revelations; and it will be found true, I believe, in a majority of cases, that the artist writes with more gusto and effect of those things which he has only wished to do, than of those which he has done.  Desire is a wonderful telescope, and Pisgah the best observatory.  Now, while it is true that neither Mr. James nor the author of the work in question has ever, in the fleshly sense, gone questing after gold, it is probable that both have ardently desired and fondly imagined the details of such a life in youthful day-dreams; and the author, counting upon that, and well aware (cunning and low-minded man!) that this class of interest, having been frequently treated, finds a readily accessible and beaten road to the sympathies of the reader, addressed himself throughout to the building up and circumstantiation of this boyish dream.  Character to the boy is a sealed book; for him, a pirate is a beard, a pair of wide trousers and a liberal complement of pistols.  The author, for the sake of circumstantiation and because he was himself more or less grown up, admitted character, within certain limits, into his design; but only within certain limits.  Had the same puppets figured in a scheme of another sort, they had been drawn to very different purpose; for in this elementary novel of adventure, the characters need to be presented with but one class of qualities—the warlike and formidable.  So as they appear insidious in deceit and fatal in the combat, they have served their end.  Danger is the matter with which this class of novel deals; fear, the passion with which it idly trifles; and the characters are portrayed only so far as they realise the sense of danger and provoke the sympathy of fear.”

In fact, James – Stevenson could have replied – certainly did write about treasure. What else are the Spoils of Poynton? What are the Aspern Papers? And what – to go into a later novel – is Adam Verver doing in The Golden Bowl, if not treasure hunting?

The treasure has certain characteristics that signal its archaic status, its connection to the economic world of the limited good – to use George Foster’s term from his article, Peasant Society and the Image of the Limited Good, which – without Foster knowing anything about George Bataille’s work – gets a crucial dynamic in the closed world preceding capitalism. This is the notion that wealth is, centrally, something taken from the common pile. It is thus already an act of violence, best sealed by keeping quiet about it. The hesitation that we still feel about “telling your business” derives from the idea that your business is obscurely wrested from someone else’s – that, at the very least, it steals from someone else’s luck. Nostromo is in a sense an x ray of the clash of different fundamental economic notions. It is a clash that is associated, by historic necessity, with colonization and decolonization. Like Kurz’s horde of ivory, the horde of silver that lies at the center of the actions around which the narrative takes shape is something wrenched out of the world system, dialectically negating the very system that gives the material worth.

George Bernard Shaw, in The Perfect Wagnerite (1883), gives another, Marxist interpretation of one of the great nineteenth century treasure narratives: the Ring of the Nibelungen. He takes Wagner’s treatment of the Nibelungen horde as a kind of Hegelian motif that organizes a gloss on the history of modern Europe. It is the history of the rise of the Plutonic kingdom. Too easily, Shaw adopts the idea of the natural economy, one of primitive communism, which effaces the intricacies of the image of the limited good, and thus the cursed sense of treasure, in the peasant economy. Balzac and Marx could have told him better. But he does capture a second aspect of treasure which is echoed, both rhetorically and thematically, in Nostromo – the mysterious power of capital, viewed as a treasure, over human life:

Let me assume for a moment that you are a young and good-looking woman. Try to imagine yourself in that character at Klondyke five years ago. The place is teeming with gold. If you are content to leave the gold alone, as the wise leave flowers without plucking them, enjoying with perfect naivete its color and glitter and preciousness, no human being will ever be the worse for your knowledge of it; and whilst you remain in that frame of mind the golden age will endure.

Now suppose a man comes along: a man who has no sense of the golden age, nor any power of living in the present: a man with common desires, cupidities, ambitions, just like most of the men you know. Suppose you reveal to that man the fact that if he will only pluck this gold up, and turn it into money, millions of men, driven by the invisible whip of hunger, will toil underground and overground night and day to pile up more and more gold for him until he is master of the world! You will find that the prospect will not tempt him so much as you might imagine, because it involves some distasteful trouble to himself to start with, and because there is something else within his reach involving no distasteful toil, which he desires more passionately; and that is yourself. So long as he is preoccupied with love of you, the gold, and all that it implies, will escape him: the golden age will endure. Not until he forswears love will he stretch out his hand to the gold, and found the Plutonic empire for himself. But the choice between love and gold may not rest altogether with him. He may be an ugly, ungracious, unamiable person, whose affections may seem merely ludicrous and despicable to you. In that case, you may repulse him, and most bitterly humiliate and disappoint him. What is left to him then but to curse the love he can never win, and turn remorselessly to the gold? With that, he will make short work of your golden age, and leave you lamenting its lost thoughtlessness and sweetness.

In this sense, Nostromo as a character is the negative image of Alberic, Wagner’s dwarf, who steals the Rhine gold from the Rhine maidens. He is, instead, handsome, brave, and notoriously generous. And yet he defies Shaw’s rather smug psychology. Once treasure is introduced into the world, it is not merely the malformed, in a transvaluation of values, who glom onto it and begin the process of inoculating society with the desire for exchange in itself. Rather it is, at least in Nostromo’s case, the well formed who, inadequately equipped with an outmoded code of honor, are captured by  the power of treasure, even as they are forced into the shadow side of capitalism. Shaw’s interpretation of the Rhine gold is, as far as it goes, revelatory; but it all too quickly dissolves the difference between treasure, in the form of gold, and capital, in the form of money. This transformation is fraught with more magic than Shaw can accommodate:

In due time the gold of Klondyke will find its way to the great cities of the world. But the old dilemma will keep continually reproducing itself. The man who will turn his back on love, and upon all the fruitful it, and will set himself single-heartedly to gather gold in an exultant dream of wielding its Plutonic powers, will find the treasure yielding quickly to his touch. But few men will make this sacrifice voluntarily. Not until the Plutonic power is so strongly set up that the higher human impulses are suppressed as rebellious, and even the mere appetites are denied, starved, and insulted when they cannot purchase their satisfaction with gold, are the energetic spirits driven to build their lives upon riches. How inevitable that course has become to us is plain enough to those who have the power of understanding what they see as they look at the plutocratic societies of our modern capitals.

Conrad was not satisfied with the character of Nostromo. He was unhappy about the last two chapters, in which Nostromo becomes more and more like Alberic. And one feels, in reading the novel, that Nostromo is a creature who is explained into being before he exists as a palpability. He is always too spurred, too … operatic. Conrad only hits upon Nostromo as a solid existence to be explained, instead of an explanation to be solidified, when, two thirds of the way through the book, Nostromo begins to confront the Plutocratic society that Costaguana, as the Republic of Occidente, has become – with himself  unconsciously aiding the process. He, in other words, experiences a genuine raising of consciousness: he becomes conscious of class as an economic fact.

R-E-S-P-E-C-T and the war

I’ve been pondering Ezra Klein’s apology for supporting the invasion of Iraq. It contains a sentence that I bump up against with incomprehension, like a goldfish trying to understand an aquarium.

“I thought that if U.S. President George W. Bush and Secretary of State Colin Powell and former President Bill Clinton and U.K. Prime Minister Tony Blair all thought it was necessary, then that was because they had intelligence proving as much.”

What I don’t understand is a personality type that actually respects our political leaders – for this sentence could only come out of such respect. There is a chasm like divide between those people who consider that, generally, anybody who has power is a scoundrel most of the time, and those people who consider that, generally, anybody who has power is a responsible and intelligent figure worthy of trust. I am in the former camp. I believe that our leaders should fear the people, and that they operate best when they fear the people. Mostly, they don’t fear the people, and they operate to maximize the interests of predators and plutocrats, and to incrementally make the lives of the masses worse. This is just SOP, in my opinion.

I take it that Klein is expressing his respect, because I can’t believe he is that dumb. The idea that there is some super secret intelligence shared by the leaders – in the wake of such vivid disproofs as 9.11 and the inability of the Bush’s keystone cops to advance step one on the anthrax caper - should have been knocked out of his head. It is as if he was incapable of grasping the events that were happening around him.  And of course one glance at Iraq’s recent history in 2002 – a history in which Saddam Hussein had essentially ceded control of a vast chunk of his territory in Northern Iraq – should have squashed the idea that, though he was unable to attack the fearsome Kurdish state, he was just about to casually nuke NYC.  There was no excuse for believing the intelligence canard.

Klein’s career afterwards is a case study in R-E-S-P-E-C-T and advancement – you don’t get to be a dealer in D.C. memes if you don’t, in your heart, believe incredible crap about politicos and presidents. You have to be a mook. This is a matter of deep character, perhaps. A real sceptic simply couldn’t believe, is constitutionally unable to believe, a fact because a world leader pronounces it on television. Facts are stupid things – they are only intelligence once they are part of a larger set – which is why even when leaders are not lying, they are lying. Clinton, Bush, Obama, who really cares – this is the sceptic’s assumption. Unmoved by state of the union speeches or Inauguration pageantry, the sceptic is looking for the black spot with which the leader damns whole peoples. The drone on the one side, prison on the other – this is American leadership in a nutshell. The Kleins, on the other hand, are actually moved by the pageantry, oratory, and leadership – by the faux history of it all. My own view of leadership comes from the gospel: he who is first shall be last. Jesus, here, is just compressing into a nifty, Dylan-esque piece of poetry an insight of folk wisdom that Machiavelli laid out more extensively in the Prince: in the moral order, the leaders are shit, and the benefits that accrue to the state from their shittiness are definitely not the result of their better qualities, their ideals. Outcomes that benefit the masses are either side effects of leadership or compromises that spring from the leader’s fear of being overthrown.

Respect your dog, respect your friends, respect your lovers, respect your children – but never respect leaders. They don’t deserve it.    

Nostromo II

“They beat me, a sick sixty six year old man. They laid me face down on the floor and beat the soles of my feet and my back with a rubber truncheon. When I was seated on a chair they used the same truncheon to beat my legs from above with great force, from my knees to the upper parts of my legs. And in the days that followed, whem my legs were bleeding from internal haemorrhaging, they used the rubber truncheon to beat me on the red, blue and yellow bruises…

Lying face down on the floor, I discovered the capacity to cringe, writhe and howl like a dog being whipped by its master.”

This is an extract from the last letter written by Vsevolod Meyerhold, who is certainly one of the most important theater directors of the twentieth century. The letter was among the documents released in 1989 from the files of the KGB. The releases of KGB files have revealed that, contrary to the romantic hopes of Western intellectuals, the writers and artists purged by Stalin all broke. It was no surprise. Meyerhold was not made to endure torture, any more than I am, or any more than any human is.

“The stupidest mind may invent a rankling phrase or brand the innocent with a cruel aspersion. A piece of string and a ramrod; a few muskets in combination with a length of hide rope; or even a simple mallet of heavy, hard wood applied with a swing to human fingers or to the joints of a human body is enough for the infliction of the most exquisite torture. The doctor had been a very stubborn prisoner, and, as a natural consequence of that "bad disposition" (so Father Beron called it), his subjugation had been very crushing and very complete. That is why the limp in his walk, the twist of his shoulders, the scars on his cheeks were so pronounced. His confessions, when they came at last, were very complete, too.” 

 The citation above is from one of the most startling passages in Nostromo – especially surprising in the context of the English novel, circa 1904, which did not discuss, with such coolness, the political uses of pain. Even though by 1904 the term “concentration camp” had been added to the English language. In the just ended Boer war, the English had used them extensively. For instance, there was Camp Irene, which housed Boer women and children, witnessing the death, it was estimated at the end of the war, of 4000 of the former and 23,000 of the latter by the time it was closed in 1902. The Africans who died there were not counted.

These things, however, were matter for Irish journalists, not novelists. Conrad’s friend, Henry James, for instance, allowed a great deal of pain into his novels, but never in the crude and childish form that results from whacking a sixty six year old man, tied down to a chair, on his open soars. This does not happen in Daisy Miller, or the Turn of the Screw, or the Ambassadors, or any of his novels: in fact, the whole force of James’ work, the faith that underlies it, is that such things are incompatible with late nineteenth century and early twentieth century civilization. Such things are over.

The reason Conrad’s novel seems so contemporary is, in part, the far reaching knowledge that such things are far from over. The brief description of the breaking of Dr. Monygham comes out of the book and bites the reader for exactly that reason. This could be the dirty war in Argentina, circa 1979. This could be the dirty war in El Salvador, circa 1983. This could be the dirty war in Iraq, circa 2004. And in Dr. Monygham, whose intelligence is, in these circumstances, his great vulnerability, Conrad briefly sweeps through the entire century. It is not simply the stupidity of the torture, but what is transmitted by torture: the deadness of the torturer. Dr. Monygham is tortured under the supervision of a priest, Father Beron, who is working for the dictator of Costaguana, Guzman Bento. After confessing to everything, Monygham is put in solitary and has great hopes of starving to death, but to his dismay, he is liberated at Bento’s death, and hobbles out of the prison using a walking stick that is a little thinner than he is. He hobbles into an afterlife in which he bears his own certainties:

“And he could not forget Father Beron with his monotonous phrase, "Will you confess now?" reaching him in an awful iteration and lucidity of meaning through the delirious incoherence of unbearable pain. He could not forget. But that was not the worst. Had he met Father Beron in the street after all these years Dr. Monygham was sure he would have quailed before him. This contingency was not to be feared now. Father Beron was dead; but the sickening certitude prevented Dr. Monygham from looking anybody in the face.”

Conrad is too wise, in the novel, to allow Dr. Monygham’s disillusionment to anchor the novel in at least some fundamental level of moral certainty. Monygham’s cynicism is as fallible an attitude as any other to predict and understand the events that unfold in the civil war/revolution that engulfs Costaguana. Torture, which gives a certain self-knowledge, does not stamp its victim with any greater perception of the order of things. It doesn’t even do that. Conrad’s restraint, here, his refusal to surrender to the romanticism of victimhood, made the novel difficult for readers as acute as Forster or Pritchett. The absence of sentimentality was too explicit, and was promptly labeled obscurity.     

Monygham is paired with another “disbeliever”: the French journalist Martin Decoud. Both are on the same side – the side of the “Gould concession”, or, in other words, the side of the liberal European and American exploiters of the silver mines. Monygham is simply concerned that Mrs. Gould not fall into the hands of the ‘democratic’ revolutionaries. Decoud, however, sees the revolution in large enough terms to disbelieve that the exploiters represent some higher stage, some kind of progress, for Costaguanans. The liberal ideals are wrapped around a core of money; without the money, the liberal idealists wouldn’t even be in Costaguana. Decoud, in other words, grasps cause and effect, which is something that is always being deflected and differed by the colonizers, even as they celebrate their ‘science’, the larger discoveries of cause and effect that have given them their technological edge.

Which is as far as I want to go today.