A Nest of Thorns

Calamities in Miami

2011-10-10T15:47:00.000-04:00

This interview ran on the website of NBC's Miami affiliate, where I'm giving a reading at Books & Books tonight, 10/10/11, at 8 PM.

Drawing God

2011-09-22T00:08:00.000-04:00

Leonardo drew things to explain them to himself . . . . That's an essential quality of any work of art, the authenticity of the need for understanding. I once told Barney [Newman] a story which he wanted to adopt as the motto for the Abstract Expressionists: A little girl is drawing and her mother asks her what are you drawing? And she says, "I'm drawing god." And the mother says, "How can you draw god when you don't know what he is?" And she says, "That's why I draw him."

-- the artist Hedda Sterne, quoted by Sarah Boxer in "The Last Irascible." New York Review of Books, December 23, 2010, 43-45.

AlterNet: The Radical Christian Right Is Built on Suburban Despair

2010-03-19T13:12:00.001-04:00

A great diagnosis by Chris Hedges, though not without some despair of its own. The religious right loved the Left Behind novel because its members correctly intuited that that's what had been done to them-- not by God but by their country's political and business elite.

AlterNet: The Radical Christian Right Is Built on Suburban Despair

ERRATUM

2010-03-14T17:39:00.000-04:00

In The Book of Calamities (p. 190), in an account of the official ceremonies marking the tenth anniversary of the Rwandan genocide on April 7, 2004, I write that among the expected guests was the writer and journalist Philip Gourevitch. I have since learned that this was incorrect. He was not officially invited to the ceremonies in Kigali and did not attend them.

Below are links to Philip Gourevitch's Amazon author page and an abstract of his recent article on post-genocide justice in Rwanda.

http://www.amazon.com/Philip-Gourevitch/e/B001H6J2IM/ref=sr_tc_2_0?qid=1268602578&sr=8-2-ent

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/05/04/090504fa_fact_gourevitch

The End of the World As We Know It

2010-03-02T23:38:00.000-05:00

New York on September 11, 2001. Aceh on December 26, 2005. New Orleans during Katrina. Mumbai on November 26-29, 2008. Haiti this past January. Chile last weekend. This is the era in which it became possible for millions of people to watch the deaths of hundreds or thousands of other people in real time. Disaster was professionalized, with corps of rescue and relief workers, trauma specialists, and "first responders" addressing the suffering of victims and corps of reporters and cameramen bringing the news of that suffering to distant audiences. (Though someone might ask what happens to that news as traditional news outlets continue to disappear.)

Is this almost instantaneous exposure to catastrophe deadening or sensitizing? Does it turn us into the brutalized spectators of history or does it-- in conjunction with new technologies for amassing and delivering aid-- allow us to respond to that suffering more swiftly and effectively than any generation before ours?

This question and its variations will be the topic of the symposium "Between Hope & History: When Disaster Strikes," sponsored by the New York Institute of the Humanities, on March 13, 2010, at the Cantor Film Center, 36 East 8th Street in New York City.

I'll be one of the panelists. Others include Leon Botstein, Philip Gourevitch, Lewis Lapham, Francine Prose, David Rieff, Kevin Rozario, and Jonathan Schell.

“And amidst these awful moments that had brought about the destruction of all of humanity’s worldly possessions, and during which all of nature threatened to be engulfed, it did indeed seem that the human spirit itself blossomed like a lovely flower. In the fields all around, as far as the eye could see, there were people of all social classes lying together, nobles and beggars, matrons of once stately households and peasant women, civil servants and day laborers, o and nuns: all commiserating with each other, helping each other, cheerfully sharing the little of life’s necessities they’d been able to salvage, as though the common calamity had joined all those who’d managed to survive it into a single harmonious family of man.

“Instead of the meaningless chatter for which the world ordinarily furnished material aplenty at teatime, people now recounted cases of inconceivable heroism; they spoke of individuals who in the past had been but little respected in society who rose to the grandeur of ancient Romans; countless examples were given of fearlessness, of cheerful recklessness in the face of danger, of self-denial and godly self-sacrifice, of the unflinching abandonment of life as though it were the most worthless possession, which one was likely to find again round the next bend. Indeed, seeing as there was not a soul to whom something stirring had not happened on that day or who had not himself performed some magnanimous deed, the bitter pain in every human heart was mixed with the sweetest sense of gratification, so much so that it was impossible to assess whether the sum total of general well-being had not increased just as much as it had diminished.”
--“The Earthquake in Chile,” Heinrich von Kleist

I Don't Know What's Good for Me

2009-12-30T14:48:00.007-05:00

If it weren’t for their characteristic shadow-infatuated cinematography, you might not recognize the first two clips as coming from the same movie, Jacques Tourneur’s Curse of the Demon (1957). The first episode represents the classic postwar Monster Movie of the kind the Japanese perfected. Except Godzilla, Mothra, and Rodan were products of the rogue technology of the atomic age, while the fire demon below is a lot older—as old as Hell, actually--and summoned with runes written on parchment.

But in both cases, the monster is the point of the movie. Everything prior to its appearance is just a buildup to that appearance, a lengthy buildup being necessary to distract viewers from the shoddiness of the actual spectacle. If not for the creepy bat-like chittering that heralds its arrival and the way it unfurls from a ball of glowing smoke like a Sea Monkey dropped into a glass of water, the fire demon might be a stuffed animal. A big stuffed animal with a mobile tongue and an upper lip that curls like Elvis’s.

The demon appears only twice in the movie, once early on and then at its climax. More than an hour passes between those moments. This isn't a lot of monster. If I’d seen Curse when I was eight, I would have been bored shitless.

And, shamefully, I would probably have been even more bored if the great Tourneur had retained control of his picture. That fire demon wasn’t his idea. The asshole producer insisted on sticking it in.

In his earlier films Cat People (1942), I Walked With a Zombie, and The Leopard Man (1943), Tourneur—then working with producer Val Lewton-- developed a style that was pure suggestion, all lurking shadow and disembodied sound. You never knew if Simone Simon really turned into a giant, man-eating cat or was just ‘neurotic’.

Tourneur originally made Curse of the Demon with the same suave ambiguity. There are plenty of indications that the film’s gloating, goateed villain traffics with real devils. But at other times he seems to be exactly the charlatan Dana Andrews’s ill-mannered scientist accuses him of being, a tournament-level mind-gamer who scares the marks to death with threats and scraps of paper.

The tension between real and pretend menace is most excruciating during the séance scene. Does evil reside in the darkness outside the house or in the (relative) light inside it? How seriously should you take a fubsy medium who frets that “the spirits sometimes resent previous knowledge”? And how can you keep a straight face when those spirits are called up by ladies singing “Cherry Ripe” at the top of their lungs? Check out the guilelessness of the singers’ mouths, which open as wide as Muppets'.

If the medium’s cry, “It’s in the trees. . . . It’s coming!” sounds familiar, it’s because Kate Bush sampled it for her 1985 hit “Hounds of Love.” And in the video below, Robb McCaffree mixes, shreds, and purees snippets of Tourneur’s film, Bush’s song and her original music video into a fantasmagoria of dread and longing that’s an object lesson in the power of what remains unseen, either because it's not there or because you don't dare turn to look at it.

You're too busy running.

You're tearing me apart!

2009-09-14T15:24:00.000-04:00

The United States is an adolescent nation. I remember feeling offended when I first read this, probably back in the 1960s in one of my parents’ news magazines, LIFE or Time or Newsweek.

But of course we’re adolescent.
We’re less than 250 years old. At 250, England didn’t even speak English yet.

And, really, what’s wrong with being adolescent? Adolescents are cool. Adolescents are vital and sexy. They can run the 100-yard in 11.5 and have an orgasm in 20 seconds and be ready to have another one 20 seconds later. They look great in Abercrombie.

They look great in mall Goth gear, even if they’re a little fat.

But adolescents are adolescent. They’re immature. They won’t do their homework. They can’t postpone gratification. They need a national health plan, they want a defensive missile system. But the missile system doesn’t work, you tell them. Fuck that, it’ll work if you mess with the carburetor.

The worst thing about adolescents is that they’re labile. Their moods zigzag. One minute they’re washing the Suburban without your even asking, the next they’ve totaled it and their blood level is .35. For all their belligerent claims of independence, they’re herd animals, their servility disguised by the way they keep jumping herds.

Between 15 and 17, I went from being a morose New York proto-punk, popping Black Beauties and listening to the Velvet Underground drone endlessly in my room

to a beatific Deadhead who went to their shows in a jean jacket that I’d hand-painted with a flaming yin-yang symbol and the motto, “I’M PEAKING AND I CAN SEE EPILEPPAPORT.” A year later, I’d deny ever listening to a Grateful Dead album. I was into glam.

The habit of herding continues in adulthood. That’s why we have niche markets.
But unlike grownups, teenagers identify with their herds. “I’m a Deadhead,” I used to chirp, in my idea of a California accent. I grew a beard that I thought made me look like Jerry Garcia, the only other fat person I could take as a role model.

Under the previous administration, America saw itself as Gary Cooper in High Noon. It identified with his embattled decency and courage, with the allegiance to principle that made him willing to risk not just his life but his marriage to a Quaker hottie thirty years his junior.

In the movie trailer, Marshall Will Kane is identified as “a man too proud to run.” That was us. It was how George Bush sold us on invading Iraq. We were too proud to run, certainly not from Sadaam. (“Have you forgotten what he is? Have you forgotten what he’s done to people? Have you forgotten that he’s crazy?”) Let the French run.

But at key moments, the country slipped role models and became more like James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause, a tormented outcast, as sensitive as an eyeball, thrashing around him for a moment of true feeling. He can’t make friends except with other outcasts. Plato (Sal Mineo) and Judy (Natalie Wood) might be early versions of the Coalition of the Willing, with the twitchy, molten-eyed Mineo a stand-in for valiant little El Salvador. Hoods taunt him, and he has to stand up to them. In that respect, he’s still like Gary Cooper. “It was a matter of honor. I had to do something. They called me chicken. You know, chicken? I had to go.”

Jim Stark is saying this to his father. Their relationship might be a prevision of the one some thirty years later between Bushes Junior and Senior, the disheveled fuckup son and the grey-coiffed father, pompously suave in a dinner jacket and homburg, who collecting the kid from the drunk tank, chuckles, “Oh, I cut loose pretty good in my day, too.”

But the relationship also suggests the lurching tug-of-war between the United States and Old Europe

during the lead-up to Iraq. One wants war, the other wants peace. One prizes realness, the other clings to convention. One is manly enough to go one-on-one in a knife fight, the other prisses around the house in his wife’s apron. In the scene in which a disgusted Jim Stark watches his father crawling on the floor to pick up a broken plate, then hoists him up by a frilled apron-strap, you see how the former president saw Jacques Chirac. Mission civilizatrice, my ass.

James Dean - Inspirational Performance in Rebel Without a Cause from bombshell mashup on Vimeo.

The power of James Dean’s performance in Rebel lies in its mercurial shifts between loathing and longing, abandon and awareness. You can see them highlighted in this homage by the aptly-named Bombshell Mashup. Oddly, the sharpest pivot occurs during an exchange between Jim Stark and a surrogate father, the no-bullshit cop who has the balls to do what Jim’s real father can’t: rough him up.

(But even real men eventually run low on testosterone. Ed Platt, who played the cop, would later appear on TV as the Chief on Get Smart, where week after week he demonstrated the impotence of common sense against a really determined idiot.)

Alone with the cop, Jim pleads, “Please lock me up, I’m gonna hit somebody, I’m gonna do something!” He reaches blindly forward, his hand grazes the other man’s leg, then, in a sudden convulsion, he flails at the desk with his feet and fists. Maybe he’s recoiling from his own desire, which he only just then recognized, a boy’s eroticized longing for a man he could stand to become.

Or maybe he has a queasy intimation of what else he might become, once he gets tired of being an anguished suburban rebel. Jim Stark was basically a good kid. He just wanted a little direction from a father who didn’t get smashed at parties and wear an apron at home. But at the time I’m speaking of, the U.S. didn’t kill one kid in a game of chicken, and it didn’t turn itself into the cops. It killed some 100,000 Iraqis and 4,000 of its own young people and it left its wounded to languish amid rats and mold in a remote ward of Walter Reed Army Medical Center. Its highest officials hinted in a hand-rubbing way about nuking Iran. A candidate for the presidency sang about it.

This isn’t Jim Stark. It’s Eric Harris, a teenager who also felt unloved—or, maybe worse, unrecognized. He used to post on the Web under the name “REB,” for Rebel.

You can find footage of the Columbine shootings on YouTube. I’d feel weird about using it, so I’ve made do with a montage from Gus Van Sant’s Elephant.

Evidently, there is such a thing as reality, and some kinds of it shouldn’t be aestheticized.

Under Barack Obama, the U.S. has reinvented itself once more and is now an upright, civic-minded youngster who gets good grades, sits on the student council, and tutors the disadvantaged on weekends.

The grownups love him. They say, okay, the kid’s finally growing up. And maybe he has. Maybe this was who we were along. On the other hand, we may not have lost our fascination for Eric Harris. Kids like that are still there, fuming in the hall beside their lockers, grumbling about birth certificates and communists. Sometimes they have guns.

James Wolcott on Democratic aphasia

2009-09-05T00:02:00.002-04:00

: vanityfair.com

Shared via AddThis

No Secrets to Conceal - Ryeberg Curated Video

2009-08-12T22:21:00.004-04:00

No Secrets to Conceal - Ryeberg Curated Video

Creeturs

2009-04-24T23:14:00.012-04:00

A few weeks ago I was leading a class discussion of Susan Griffin's disquieting masterpiece A CHORUS OF STONES and noting how many of its historical monsters-- Heinrich Himmler, Wernher Von Braun, Hugh Trenchard, the father of strategic bombing-- had in various ways also been victims.

The corollary is that many of Griffin's victims had also been monsters or, more kindly, snitches, bullies, rats, grovelers at the seats of power. A little girl curries favor with a cruel friend by pouncing on a weaker one. A Jewish woman tries to escape deportation to Auschwitz by turning in other Jews. The tortured look up to their torturers.

Sometimes they become torturers themselves.

"What you've got to understand," I told my kids-- few of them were older than 20--"Is that people are horrible."

They looked shocked. Somebody giggled.

Given all the other ways I might have put it, I thought I was being mild, but we shouldn't underestimate the degree to which Americans want to believe that they are good people. We have been told we are since childhood.

But the truth is that people are terrible. Americans are no worse than anybody else, just more cosseted and deluded.

The great project facing all human beings is the project of transcending their essential awfulness.

There are various means of achieving this:

.Human beings can create works of art that are better than they are. Some works are so dazzling that they blind us to the flaws of their creators. The productions of Shakespeare

and Bach, to name just two, seem to issue from someplace beyond personality.

Other artworks somehow incorporate their makers' flaws into their design. In the novels of Dostoevsky, you can see all his hysteria, his Jew-hatred and drunken religiosity.

Frida Kahlo's paintings pulse with narcissism. Narcissism gives them their peacock brightness.

Kurt Cobain's songs might emerge from some dedicated organ of self-loathing. They're still great, and some of that greatness comes from their nakedness-- or, say, the blatancy of the suffering from which they are distilled.

.Human beings can escape their native selfishness long enough to do something truly unselfish. Most of us can only do that for a moment or two before our moral gravity reasserts itself. A very small number succeed in being selfless for the greater part of a lifetime. When someone does this it's as if a dancer were to leap into the air and remain floating there long after the other members of the company have landed and taken their bows, and all the lights have gone up, and the audience ceased clapping and filed out of the theater, into the cold and dark. While inside, in the darkened house, one dancer still hovers, so absorbed in the leap that she doesn't realize that it has yet to end.

.Human beings can strive to raise children who will be happier than they are. Not richer or more successful. Just happier. This is what Sophocles has in mind when he has Oedipus
enjoin his daughters, "Pray that . . . your life be happier than your father's." To appreciate how humble this hope is, consider that one of those daughters will be put to death for daring to give her slain brothers a proper burial. Still, Oedipus gets his wish. In the end, Antigone is happier than he was. She gets to suffer for something she believes in.

.Teaching combines some elements of the last two enterprises. It offers selfish people the opportunity to act unselfishly and aging ones a chance to pass on the little they know to younger ones. Most students won't recognize that anything is being passed down to them at all, but some will. Some will even value it.

Traditionally people think of art and children as ways of achieving immortality. But immortality is impossible. Rather, it's unverifiable. Who can know what part of him will survive his life?

An alternative is to think of immortality as release from the other part of our condition, which is not death but brokenness. Some parts of us die before others, and we carry those dead parts with us and inflict them on our fellows.

"'Are you a weak creetur," Dickens's Mr. Bumble asks Mrs. Corney, this being his idea of a come-on. "'We are all weak creeturs,' says Mrs. Corney. And Dickens adds that she is "laying down a general principle."

Who's the boss?

2009-03-27T14:11:00.009-04:00

There was a Website called Foetry that devoted itself, in the words of its founder, to "chisel[ing] a small crack in the facade of the academic poetry industry." Mostly this meant savaging the reputations of various poets, some distinguished, some barely known outside the industry's branch-offices. Foetry had little to say about its targets’ work but spoke at length about their personal failings, their self-dealings and adulteries, their back-scratching and log-rolling .

Well, as Bill Wilson

once said in another context “We are not saints.”

For all their bile, these attacks barely registered outside the academy. In this way, they were like poems themselves. They were anti-poems, for a poem is something made from nothing, or almost nothing, and the attacks in Foetry were something reduced to nothing. More accurately, they were nothing heaped on something in an attempt to obliterate it.

The striking thing about Foetry, which shut down in May, 2007, is the disproportion between its bile and its subjects’ status in the larger world. Check out the Amazon ratings of books by Marie Ponsot , Paul Muldoon , or Philip Levine .
Take a walk outside and ask the first 10 people you meet who Jorie Graham is.

No fair if “outside” is the hall of a creative writing department.

The same phenomenon was apparent when I was an arts administrator in the 1970s. Nothing equaled the savagery with which our clients snapped and ravened for $200 grants and $50 reading fees. The scarcer the resources, the more savagely people will fight for them, and to read through the character assassinations in the Foetry archives is to envision two skeletal wretches in a freezing room in Leningrad during the Siege clawing each others’ eyes out for possession of a filthy heel of bread made from a few grams of rye flour bulked out with floor sweepings and rat dung.

But I wonder whether this savagery might also be a measure of something else. Almost 300 years ago,Shelley wrote that poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.

Maybe this is still true. Between Shelley’s time and our own, the acknowledged legislation of the world has passed from kings to presidents to bankers and hedge-fund managers, with occasional interceptions by popes, ayatollahs, and chairmen. (At the moment we are witnessing a renewed struggle between representatives of the political and economic spheres, with the same bankers who rifled the world’s pockets holding a gun to its head and threatening to pull the trigger.)

But what if, in some secret dimension folded to infinitesimal thin-ness inside our own, the poets are still in power? I’m not sure what this power consists of. It may be the power to invest words with a meaning that in all other quarters has been stripped from them. The power to shape the dreams of people who still have dreams, or maybe just enter them, appearing as a cigarette glowing in an unlit doorway, the silver bark of a crepe myrtle, a cat perched magisterially on a fence, gazing at the dreamer with its topaz gaze.

The bankers and hedge-fund managers claimed they could make something from nothing, that is, from debt. In the end, they turned something into nothing, pouring trillions of other people’s dollars down a drain whose terminal point is still unknown to us, though maybe not to them.

The poets live up to their promise, though most of them promise very little. They still make something from nothing. That's why some people hate them.

Did Barack Obama Win by Memoir?

2008-11-10T10:59:00.002-05:00

This just in from Katherine Russell Rich, a terrific writer and author of the forthcoming Dreaming in Hindi

The election sent readers running to the bookstore to buy Barack Obama's memoirs, the AP reported yesterday--it was the end of a great run for the president-elect's two books.

In a post-James Frey world, it's hard to imagine voting for a presidential candidate based on a memoir. Nevertheless, David Henry Sterry endorsed Obama at the Huffington Post, using the President-elect's memoir as his guide. His highly literary conclusion:

"I have no clue how the economic plans of either candidate will dig us out of this gaping gasping chasm. But memoir wise, Obama feels the real deal, while McCain feels a fake ... Obama, with his thoughtful, elegant prose, comes across like a man who'd rather talk than fight. A man true to his memoir.

Say It Soft and It's Almost Like Praying

2008-10-27T09:17:00.019-04:00

I don’t want to write about Sarah Palin any more, I don’t even want to talk about her, but I can’t stop. Palin may be a small-town Mean Girl plucked into a position of incongruous power – and now feverishly trying to vamp and bully her way into one of even greater power—but she turns the rest of us into Mean Girls, too,
or Mean Guys.
And if you’re a nice person, a good person, or just like to think you’re not the sneering little shit you were in high school, you don’t want to go there. But I can’t help myself. Who can resist imitating her chirping hate speech, the cheerful hiccups with which she sets up her talking points? Who can keep from snickering as she bumps down the hallway, thrusting her assets in front of her?

(Who could resist snickering at the way her decrepit running mate kept ogling her at the Republican Convention, like a dirty-minded high school principal eyeing the slutty valedictorian?)

The six colleges, the beauty pageant, the imported witch doctor, the $150,000 wardrobe bought for her by her new bee-yotches in the Republican party?
I'm sorry, not me.

Last week I was talking about Palin with my wife, who’s been writing a campaign journal for the French newspaper Liberation. An obstacle to this is the fact that she’s been in Europe since the middle of September. In the accelerated time-scheme of this election season, that makes her a long-time expat trying to keep up with trends back home.
“Is it Buchanan who called her a cancer on the Republican party or is it Brooks? And why are those assholes waving toilet plungers?”

It gives me opportunities to update her. “You want to know who Sarah Palin is?” I said. We were Skyping. “She’s the False Maria in Metropolis! That’s who she is.”

My wife hadn’t seen the movie, so I had to explain. Metropolis was made by Fritz Lang in 1926 and is set 100 years in the future, in a city of colossal Art Deco ziggurats

rearing above an underworld of insatiable, smoking machines. The upper city is the domain of serene technocrats; the lower city is a lightless proletarian hive.

In my summary of the plot, a saintly beauty named Maria moves among the workers, urging them to rise up against their masters. Alarmed, the chief technocrat has her replaced by a robot Maria built by a mad scientist. The false Maria is a debased, sexualized version of the real one, and she, or it, beguiles the masses back into their trance, a trance of ceaseless, unthinking motion.

But, as my wife later pointed out, I had the plot wrong. The good Maria doesn’t preach revolution. She tells the workers they have to wait for a “Mediator” who will be a conduit between them, the “hands” of the city, and the masters who are its “head.” It’s the false Maria who whips them into a destructive fury in which they tear apart the machines they serve. This precipitates a flood that nearly drowns the workers’ children.

Of course Metropolis’s vision of the future—which seems too close to be called the future any more—is misapprehended. Part of the charm of old science fiction is the way it gets the future wrong. We’re not ruled by technocrats; we’re ruled by oil-men and hedge-fund managers, and the machines are all in China. Our underworld is more of an outerworld of big box stores where underpaid clerks pass merchandise through beeping scanners and hand it to customers who earn as little as they do. And, actually, that future is already racing into the past, to be replaced by a present in which the stores are closing.

I hold by my argument that Sarah Palin is the false Maria. The salient question is whether she’s tranquilizing her audience or goading them to rise. In the latter case, the workers won’t be rising against their masters, but against the infuriating pipsqueaks that they and Palin insist on calling the elite.
(It hardly needs to be noted that Palin is an evangelical Christian, and that Lang’s “Mediator” suggests nothing so much as a post-Marxist Jesus—though some of the more besotted pipsqueaks might identify him with Barack Obama.)
Some of the answer depends on what suits the masters’ plans. Some of it has to do with what suits Palin’s. More and more, she seems to be going rogue.

What remains true is that in the scene in which the evil Rotwang activates the false Maria, the svelte robot turns into a woman. She slinks up to the chief technocrat and listens impassively as he orders her down into the underworld to undo what her human original has started. Then slowly, deliberately, obscenely . . . she winks.

Faces and Masks

2008-10-25T13:43:00.012-04:00

The following was written by my wife, Mary Gaitskill, and will appear in the French newspaper Liberation .

In his essay on Nikolai Gogol’s

“The Overcoat,” Vladimir Nabokov

describes the short story as “a grotesque and grim nightmare making black holes in the dim pattern of life,” a beautiful, flexible and fantastically broad phrase. “The Overcoat” is about a poor half-crazy little clerk in pre-Revolutionary Russia who, when his thin coat rots off his back one freezing winter, spends his entire savings on having a new coat made for him.
The new coat is magnificent, and it transforms his life. For the first time he is invited to a party where he drinks too much; on the way home he is robbed of his coat; the robbery breaks his heart; he sickens and dies. The story is typically read as an allegory of “the little guy” in a socially unjust world, but Nabokov sees something more terrible, a story of “whirling masks,” through which the tortured human protagonist must wander in desperate confusion, and in which the true plot, as opposed to the literal one, comes from “that secret depth of the human soul where the shadows of other worlds pass like the shadows of nameless and soundless ships.”

How garish are these masks that talk to us non-stop everyday, how huge they loom out of television and cyberspace!

What secret depths do they come from, what primitive forces are finding expression through them? John McCain, having unleashed insane Pandora, is now trying to stuff her back in the box probably because human beings are horrified at seeing his rallies turn into pre-lynch mobs. But when one of his supporters denounces Obama as “an Arab,” and McCain responds like a person (“He’s a decent family man”), he’s booed by his own. While one of his masks makes nice, the others keep putting out the misinformation. Through it all wanders the human voter—who, if he’s Republican, bought the overcoat years ago and, though it’s been stolen from him, still worships it on his knees.

The Higher-Priced Spread

2008-10-17T15:39:00.014-04:00

To listen to the gloating condescension with which John McCain kept invoking Joe the Plumber (aka the splendidly named Samuel Wurzelbacher
during Wednesday's presidential debate was to understand the Republican party's attitude toward blue-collar Americans: superficially affectionate, at times even idolatrous, but fundamentally patronizing and contemptuous. As a working stiff who aspired to clamber into the ranks of the proprietor class, Joe the Plumber was a perfect Republican prop. He was the human equivalent of the hardhat the candidate might have worn on a visit to a factory, assuming he could find a factory that was still operating.

McCain and his spokesmen couldn't say the name enough, even after it emerged that Joe or Sam didn't have a plumber's license and had a tax lien standing against him. In this Joe is also representative of the Republican party: an unqualified person impersonating a competent professional. He belongs to the same category as a flack for a horse-breeders' association who impersonates an expert at disaster-management

and a draft-dodging oilman turned sports entrepreneur who impersonates a war president.

Except that even without a license Joe the Plumber is probably better at his job than Mike the FEMA director or George the POTUS were at theirs.

Along with just saying Joe the Plumber's name, McCain likes repeating his objection to Barack Obama's tax plans, and especially to Obama's desire to "share" or "spread" the wealth. "Barack Obama wants you to 'share the wealth'", he tells cheering rallies. "I want to create wealth!" It's the candidate as slot machine.

Of course, in Republican ideology, the true creator of wealth is not government: It's business. Still, the salient idea is of wealth as something created, as if from nothing, through the alchemical marriage of executives and shareholders.
The business's workers have been PhotoShopped out of the picture. The idea of work, of effort, has been PhotoShopped out. But of course workers can't be dispensed with entirely-- even the wealth created by Bear Sterns and Wachovia, by Lehman Brothers and AIG, wealth that dissolved like dry ice, required some kind of workers.

And so Joe the Plumber is brought forth as a place-holder for the ones who have been PhotoShopped out of the picture. He's a worker who dreams of becoming one of the owners, and that makes him a convenient mascot to a party that historically has viewed workers, and particularly workers' rights, more or less the same way the States Rights Party viewed African-Americans.
If Joe had just wanted a higher wage, or a health plan, it would have been a different story. Then he could have been a Democratic mascot.

Going back to spreading the wealth. The idea, if not the precise phrase, was a standard part of liberal small-D democratic governance for more than 40 years, embraced by both big-D Democratic and Republican administrations. It's the idea that the wealth of the nation belongs in some measure to all its citizens, and that part of government's job is to move it around. It's the idea behind public works projects and public schools and hospitals and the armed forces, things that all of us pay for and that are supposed to serve all of us.

Of course nobody likes to feel beholden. Ronald Reagan came into office by vigorously denying the notion that there was such a thing as national wealth. All wealth belonged to individuals (though many of those individuals were actually corporations), and any attempt by government to redistribute it was tantamount to theft. The claim satisfied the universal desire to hold onto one's money. It satisfied the peculiarly American desire to feel that one is the sole author of one's fortune.
Under Reagan and Bush 1 and, yes, Clinton, and finally the current president, the idea metastasized, giving us an energy policy dictated by oil companies, an EPA run for the benefit of polluters, a great city abandoned to storm and flood, disintegrating bridges, and at last the mass looting of millions of mortgage holders and small investors, by lenders and investment banks that had once been subject to government supervision until people like McCain and Phil Gramm succeeded in freeing them to create more wealth.

One of the reasons why so many American institutions are now in ruins is because government abandoned the job of distributing wealth. Actually, many of its actions during the past 30 years helped concentrate wealth.
That's why the inequality between the richest one percent and the poorest 20 percent is greater than at any time since the 1920s.

And if we really reject the idea of spreading the wealth, we may as well stop building highways when they get to the poor parts of town and let our enemies know that if they just drop their bombs on Detroit and Akron, we won't lay a finger on them.

What Would It Take

2008-10-04T21:40:00.002-04:00

What would it take to charge the bankers, investors, and legislative facilitators (yoo hoo, Phil Gramm!) responsible for the bleeding wound in the American economy under the RICO act?

The advantage would be that the government could do them what it did to John Gotti and seize all their assets-- ALL OF THEM, the private planes and 30,000-square-foot houses in the Hamptons, the $10,000 suits and the $25,000 dresses for the wives and the $150,000 necklaces for the mistresses (sorry to be sexist here, but when it comes to Wall Street it's still a man's, man's world).

Scoop 'em up and sell 'em off to the highest bidder.

Who will probably be a Russian oiligarch or a Chinese dairy magnate. But that's their problem.

Lipstick

2008-09-13T22:55:00.007-04:00

Jesus comes back to earth and turns Sarah Palin into a pig . He may be punishing her for taking his name in vain. Maybe He's seen that Palin is already a receptacle for her followers' demons and has decided to make it clearer. Jesus taps Sarah on the forehead and in an instant a pig is standing in her place.

After the screaming dies down, one of her campaign spokesman angrily insists that that wasn't Jesus; it was an actor hired by the Obama campaign.

"But he turned her into a pig!"

"Stem-cell research. It was stem-cell research! That's why the Dems are all over it."

Sarah's supporters crowd the podium. The pig backs away and lets out a nervous grunt.

"Sarah, is that you?" someone asks. Another one bends down to peer up the pig's nose. "Governor, are you in there?"

"If that's you, give us a sign." The pig grunts again.

"It is her!"
"It's a sign, she gave us a sign!!"

"Well, does she still want to run for Vice President?"

McCain protests that she can't run for Vice President. He'll have to ask Joe--

"No way are you gonna drop her. You made a commitment to her."

"I can't keep a commitment to--"

"Maybe you couldn't keep a commitment to Wifey Number One, the cripple you dumped for Cindy. But let me tell you something, Mister, you're going to keep your commitment to our Sarah or you're going to have 60 million angry Christians to deal with." He turns back to the pig. "You're still in the game, aren't you, Sarah? You still want to be President-- Vice President?"

The pig grunts.

The Palinoids cry out. A few people swoon. "See, what'd I tell you? She's still wants to run! God bless you, Sarah, we're behind you. You got our votes."

McCain says something mild about the Constitution.

"Who gives a shit about the Constitution?"
"It's just a piece of paper."
"Anyway, where in the Constitution does it say a pig can't be president? As long as that pig was born in the United States?"

"But look at it!"
"Look at her!"
"Okay, her. She doesn't look good."
"Don't go talking like some sexist! You don't like the way she looks put some lipstick on her."
"Just because that Nobama said she was a pig with lipstick don't mean she won't look better with a little lipstick. That's just common sense. There, much better."

"And that's just one more way that you're wrong. Mr. Barack HUSSEIN NObama. We can too put lipstick on her."

Missing from the Party

2008-08-31T16:10:00.003-04:00

The impending catastrophic landfall of Hurricane Gustav has suddenly reminded us of Hurricane Katrina. More to the point, it's reminded the Republican and Democratic parties.

This is striking, considering that those parties' presidential conventions frame the first hurricane's anniversary, though neither actually falls on it. Three years before the Democrats left Denver, tens of thousands of people were streaming out of New Orleans (while thousands more were stubbornly, helplessly, staying put, partly because Mayor Ray Nagin had downplayed the severity of the approaching storm and partly because many of them lacked the means to get out).

The Republican convention in St. Paul is scheduled to begin three years after the evacuation of the Superdome. The anniversary of the hurricane’s landfall—of the breaching of the levees and the disappearance of the Lower Ninth Ward beneath a fetid gumbo of contaminated water lies between the two conventions like a no-man’s land between two hostile armies.

As I write this, both parties are scrambling to adapt to the probability that New Orleans will be the scene of a second disaster. John McCain has done everything short of put on a yellow Sou'wester. This is a good thing.

But is it churlish to point out that neither convention had, or is scheduled to have, among its dozens of featured guests and speakers, a survivor of Katrina? (There may have been a few on hand at the “New Orleans All Star Jam-Balaya” the Democrats threw for their delegates, and maybe the Republicans were reserving a seat for former Mississippi Senator Trent Lott. You may remember that Lott lost his beach house in the hurricane: one of President Bush’s earliest recorded responses to the disaster was his promise to build him a better one.)

The absence of such persons seems like an odd omission, given that at previous gatherings both parties made prominent use of emblematic tragedies—9/11, the Iraq war, the AIDS epidemic—and their survivors. The Republicans alone had Mary Fisher’s “Whisper of AIDS” speech in Houston in 1992 and Deena Burnett in New York in 2004, as well as along with a TV ad in which Ashley Faulkner, whose mother had died at the World Trade Center, was shown being hugged by the President and telling viewers, “He’s the most powerful man in the world, and all he wants to do is make sure I’m safe.”

Of course it makes sense that no Katrina survivors will be speaking for the Republicans. A The Republican president had no interest in keeping them safe. At the height of the crisis, Bush was seen clowning with a guitar given him by the visiting president of Mexico. (Just before that, he had been seen giving John McCain a birthday hug.)

The reason the political parties showcase certain kinds of sufferers at their conventions is to signify their compassion for victims of war or terrorism or disease, their solidarity with their suffering, their determination that others shall not suffer as they did. That pretty much rules out the GOP’s reserving a speaking slot for a former resident of Gentilly who now lives in a FEMA trailer.

But what about the Democrats? Given their reputation as the party of compassion—not to mention the advantages attendant upon reminding the viewing public of the opposition’s most glaring failure after since the invasion of Iraq—you’d think they’d have jumped at giving the podium to someone who lived through Katrina. Ideally, someone from New Orleans - , a Terence Blanchard or a Mac Rebennec - or any one of the hitherto unknown men and women interviewed in Spike Lee’s epic documentary When the Levees Broke, whose stories of loss, humiliation, and endurance burn the heart like brands. Imagine how one of those stories would sound if it were told on prime-time television, before to 50,000 rapt conventioneers and millions of Americans.

The problem lies with the stigma that clings to Katrina’s survivors—that is, to its poor, black survivors. For all the indignation their plight aroused in the American media, there are still the lingering suspicions as to why so many of New Orleans’s (African-American) residents failed to get out before the storm hit. There are the persistent slanders (the appropriate word for a story that continues to be circulated long after it’s been proved untrue) about snipers shooting at rescue helicopters and perverts raping babies in the Superdome. There are still folks who nodded approvingly when Bill O’Reilly shook a finger at African-American youth and told them that the lesson of Katrina is “if you don’t get educated, if you don’t develop a skill and force yourself to work hard, you’ll most likely be poor, and sooner or later you’ll be standing on a symbolic rooftop waiting for help. Chances are that help will not be quick in coming.”

If the victims of 9/11 were exceptional sufferers, the victims of Katrina are designated ones, designated in the sense that their suffering is to a certain degree taken for granted. This is confirmed by the lack of coverage given New Orleans before August 2005, the years in which 23 percent of its people lived below the poverty line; when more than half of its elders were disabled; when the city’s murder rate was ten times the national average, with some of the killing attributable to rogue police officers.

What made the survivors of 9/11 exceptional is that, in the popular imagination, they weren’t supposed to suffer. That is no more than most Americans think of themselves. The corollary is that a designated sufferer is supposed to suffer, his suffering being something that he brought on himself. The origins of this conceptual division are bound up with race and class, but the division itself has an almost mystical character. It is beyond the reach of empirical evidence or reason. This is simply how it is. This is simply what’s supposed to happen, and who it’s supposed to happen to.

In a year in which an African-American man stands a good chance of becoming our next president, some things still haven’t changed.

Open to Interpretation

2008-08-30T23:43:00.002-04:00

Take away the "L" from Palin and you get "Pain."

Serves Us Right

2008-08-25T08:33:00.006-04:00

One of the blights of American politics is the way it conceals considerations of utility and power behind a screen of ethics. Or, really, "ethics."

A case in point would be the invasion and occupation of Iraq, which was undertaken in the interest of
a) obtaining a cheap and reliable supply of oil, or
b) creating an artificial island of (pro-American) democracy in the Arab Middle East, or
c) resolving the 43rd president's Oedipal entanglement with the 41st

but was presented to the American public as a moral gesture on a par with the entry into World War II.

Hence Senator John McCain's characterization of that war-- Iraq not WWII-- as "transcendent."

tran·scen·dent
Pronunciation: \-dənt\
Function: adjective
Etymology: Middle English, from Latin transcendent-, transcendens, present participle of transcendere
Date: 15th century
1 a: exceeding usual limits : surpassing b: extending or lying beyond the limits of ordinary experience cin Kantian philosophy : being beyond the limits of all possible experience and knowledge
2: being beyond comprehension
3: transcending the universe or material existence — compare immanent 2
4: universally applicable or significant

The fact is that politics and ethics are two separate realms that occasionally overlap.

For the moment, I will not comment on the politics of the current presidential contest. If I start, it will take a dart from a trank-gun to shut me up.

I will talk about ethics.

From an ethical perspective, any political contest ought to be viewed in terms of its likely effects on suffering, the suffering it causes, the suffering it relieves.

At other times in American history, the ethical variations between the two competing candidates-- or between the policies which, if elected, they were likely to enact-- was fairly small. It is now great.

One of the candidates is committed to the continuing death of foreign civilians and American soldiers in a war he endorsed as "transcendent" but that most experts view as contingent to the real and unavoidable conflict with Islamic, or Islamically-inspired, terrorism. One of the war's earliest consequences was the introduction of religious terror into a country from which it had previously been absent. Prior to March 2003, there was no Al Qaeda in Iraq. This is not to say that Iraq was paradise. It was a hell with only one devil.

One of the candidates would continue giving carte blanche to an industry that has exploited American natural resources, manipulated the country's foreign policy, and degraded the global environment, the last to such an extent as to threaten the continuing existence of hundreds? -- thousands?-- of life forms and even of land masses.

One of the candidates endorses lowering taxes for the rich and raising them for the middle-class and working poor.

One wants to cut more strands of the social safety net, health care in particular.

One promotes expanding the reach of government into the private lives of American citizens. And into the bodies of American women. His justification for the latter would be to protect other, hypothetical, beings from suffering.

This is not the place to attempt to define suffering. I will simply give examples of it.

The suffering of a father who has seen his son killed while playing football in the street.

The suffering of a strong young man who comes home from a foreign war unable to sleep or hold a job or, really, do much of anything but crouch on the floor of his trailer, from where he can keep an eye on the doors and windows, and keep the TV on to drown out the clamor in his head. For this debility the VA gives him a small stipend and some pills that don't work.

The suffering of a naively devout young man who went to a foreign country to do unspecified "volunteer" work and shortly found himself seized by mercenaries, sold to an invading army, and then delivered, shackled and hooded, to a prison on the other side of the world on suspicion of being an "enemy combatant." Here he is deprived of sleep, occasionally beaten, and driven to such a state of despair that he has tried to kill himself. His captors call this "asymmetrical warfare."

The suffering of a $20-an-hour factory worker now forced to support three children as a $7.50-an-hour checker at a WalMart, the factory having closed. She lives in terror of falling ill because, of course, she has no health insurance.

The suffering of the faceless millions whose small plots will cease to support crops, from whose waters the fish will vanish, whose huts will be swept away by storms more savage than any in their memory or in the memories of the generations before them.

Hell, the After-Party

2008-08-08T11:56:00.003-04:00

Please don't think that I spend my free time dreaming up inventive punishments for others. (It's true that I did this as a boy, especially between the ages of 11 and 14, after which I discovered drugs.) In a second challenge, I invite readers to think of the punishments that they themselves might expect to undergo in hell.

St. Ignatius Loyola recommended something like this in his "Spiritual Exercises":

First prelude: This is the representation of place. Here it will be to see in imagination the length, breadth, and depth of Hell.
Second prelude: I will ask for what I desire. Here it will be to ask for a deep awareness of the pain suffered by the damned, so that if I should forget the love of the Eternal Lord, at least the fear of punishment will help me to avoid falling into sin.
First point: To see in imagination the great fires, and the souls enveloped, as it were, in bodies of fire.
Second point: To hear the wailing, the screaming, cries, and blasphemies against Christ our Lord and all His saints.
Third point: To smell the smoke, the brimstone, the corruption, and rottenness.
Fourth point: To taste bitter things, as tears, sadness, and remorse of conscience.
Fifth point: With the sense of touch to feel how the flames surround and burn souls.
Colloquy: Enter into a colloquy with Christ our Lord. Recall to mind the souls in hell. . . . Conclude with an ‘Our Father.’ (Anthony Mottola, trans. New York: Doubleday, 1964. pp. 59-60.)

Please note that the restrictions in the previous post apply.

A season in hell

2008-08-07T23:01:00.004-04:00

Going back to the impunity question, what would the opposite of impunity look like? What would the appropriate penalties for the executives of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, especially in view of reports that the latter company's CEO brushed off internal warnings that it was buying too many bad loans? (The officer who gave the warnings testified that the executive, Richard F. Syron, "said we couldn’t afford to say no to anyone.")

What penalties should be imposed on people who took out mortgages they had no realistic hope of ever paying? What should happen to the companies that not only sold such mortgages to such buyers, but shamelessly trolled for them?

What punishment would be adequate to the officials who authorized a policy of torture?

Or for the ones who ginned up the evidence justifying the invasion of Iraq?

A few years ago, I had the idea of updating the Inferno with a view to providing circles for crimes that Dante hadn't thought of-- and, to be frank, for the pleasure of depicting my enemies blistering on the devil's tanning bed.

I imagined one circle in which George Bush and Dick Cheney and all their subalterns are made to crawl eternally across a desert that might be the desert of Iraq, an infinity of white-hot sand and white-hot sky in which the only landmark were the charred carcasses of automobiles, tanks, and Humvees. They are crawling because on their backs and around their necks they are bearing corpses. They are hung or bedizened with them like ancient dowagers hung with pearls. There are the corpses of American soldiers and the corpses of Iraqi ones, the corpses of terrorists and insurgents, of unlucky motorists who drove too close to an armored vehicle or failed to stop at a checkpoint. There are the corpses of old women and children.

It's a little known fact that the corpses of children weigh much more than those of adults. At least this is true in hell.

Part of the war-makers' punishment is that the bodies that hang from them talk. Actually, they won't stop talking. This is true even of those bodies that no longer have anything recognizable as a mouth or head.

And what they say is "Why am I being hurt?" They say it over and over. Although their killers explain to them, sometimes brusquely, sometimes shamefacedly, why they had to be killed, although they offer the same explanations they once gave us, their patsies and accomplices, still the dead ask, "Why am I being hurt?"

This may be because they don't believe the killers' explanations. Or simply because they cannot hear them. Who, after all, expects the dead to hear?

Of course, this is my fantasy of punishment. In the spirit of participatory blogging, I invite guests to contribute their own ideas of appropriate punishment, for these or other crimes, public or private. In the interest of humanity-- and in accordance with the Bybee memo (see previous post) punishments that cause death, organ failure, or serious impairment of body functions are not permissable.

Metaphor of the Week

2008-07-30T14:48:00.006-04:00

On July 23 veteran conservative columnist Robert Novak was cited by Washington D.C. police after hitting a 66-year-old pedestrian with his Corvette convertible.
According to a cyclist who witnessed the accident and called 911, the victim was crossing the street on a "Walk" signal when Novak drove into him and then, apparently ignoring the figure "splayed" on his windshield, made a right turn, at which point the victim rolled off.
Novak might have driven away had the witness not blocked his path with his bicycle. Informed that he had just struck a pedestrian, Novak said, "I didn't see him there."

On July 28, Novak announced that he has a brain tumor and will be beginning treatment at Boston's Women's and Brigham Hospital. He hopes to return to his journalistic work before long.

It will be interesting to see whether in the future brain tumors will be invoked to explain the invasion of Iraq, the massacre of civilians by military contractors, the collusion between government and Big Oil, or the rigging and collapse of America's housing market . . .

. . . any instance in which someone inexplicably plowed into victims who seemed to be in plain sight.

He didn't see them there.

Serves You Right to Suffer

2008-07-17T11:08:00.016-04:00

The federal government is in the process of shoring up Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the bloated, tottering colossi that between them guaranteed approximately half the nation's mortgages. This salvage operation may cost taxpayers as much as 5 trillion dollars. Try saying that figure to yourself: Five trillion. Or writing it, a five followed by 12 zeroes.
Beside that, the government's $29 billion bailout of Bear Stearns in March is like the candied cherry on a cupcake.

The question is who gets the cupcake?

In 2007 Freddie Mac's Chairman earned 18,289,575. Fannie Mae CEO Daniel Mudd made only $13.4 million, but take into account that his company had lost $2.1 billion and its shares had fallen 33%.
Between 1993 and 2006 Bear Stearns' CEO is said to have made $236 million.
As of this writing, neither of the first two executives appears likely to suffer the indignity of a pay cut. The only reason that can't be said of Bear Stearns's James Cayne is because he managed to get out before the company went belly-up.

In the July 21 Newsweek, Stuart Taylor argues against a criminal investigation of administration officials involved in torture. It's not that Taylor approves of torture, he just feels that a trial of torturers would be too long and divisive: too partisan.
And so he recommends that President Bush "pardon any official from cabinet secretary on down who might plausibly face prosecution." This presumably would include former Attorneys General John Ashcroft and Alberto Gonzalez, former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, former Deputy Assistant Attorney General John Yoo, former Assistant Attorney General Jay Bybee, and David Addington, formerly counsel to Vice President Dick Cheney and, since 2005, his Chief of Staff.
Taylor also that it would be "unseemly" for Bush to pardon either Cheney or himself, but assures us that "the next president wouldn't allow them to be prosecuted anyway."

What these events have in common is the theme of impunity, from the Latin root punire, to punish. It's the idea that certain people are exempt from the punishments ordinarily meted out by criminal or civil law, or even the law of the marketplace, which usually dictates that the executives of a failiing company should be forced to resign in disgrace, or at least take very large pay cuts.

Impunity was a characteristic of ancient and medieval societies, and it still characterizes ones in Africa and the Middle East. In those countries it's taken for granted that the dictator's son can order that young women who catch his fancy can be snatched off the street and delivered to him to be raped.
That the Leader's ministers can plunder state companies to the floorboards.
That the State can do what it wishes to those it designates as its enemies.

We don't like to think of these things happening in the U.S.

The attorney Donald Goodrich has acquainted me with the ideas of the early 20th-century law professor Wesley Hohfeld, who illustrated the internal relationships among different fundamental legal rights by drawing up tables of jural opposites and correlatives:

JURAL OPPOSITES
Right Privilege Power Immunity
No-Right Duty Disability Liability

A privilege is the opposite of a duty; a no-right is the opposite of a right. A disability is the opposite of a power; an immunity is the opposite of a liability

JURAL CORRELATIVES

Right Privilege Power Immunity
Duty No-Right Liability Disability

"A close relatives of the term 'impunity,' Goodrich writes, "are 'immunity' and 'privilege.' Every grant of 'immunity,' whose opposite is 'liability,' creates a 'disability' - the opposite of 'power.' In the context of the government bail-out of failed/failing corporations, the jural opposites and correlatives of 'privilege' take one to the relationships between rights and duties: One has no rights vis-à-vis the privileged and they owe no duties."

Of course, going by Hohfeld's table of opposites, under this state of affairs, the rest of us are disabled.

Boo hoo

2008-07-13T20:32:00.009-04:00

On the same day that the Dow plunged 2 percent and the Nasdaq 2.6 and gas shot close to $150 a barrel, Phil Gramm, one of John McCain's economic advisors, had a message for Americans: The recession that so many of us were worried about was only a "mental recession" and Americans had become"a nation of whiners."

Gramm is a former Republican Senator and a vice-chairman of the Swiss bank UBS. In his former position, he sponsored legislation that melted through the traditional firewalls between commercial banks, investment banks, insurance companies, and securities firms, creating the conditions that led to the current mortgage crisis.

As an executive at one of the world's largest investment banks, he is better paid than all but a handful of the people he calls whiners, this even though UBS took a severe hit for its investments in subprime mortgages-- investments that Gramm, in his previous capacity, had made possible. (One of the ways in which the bank may have recouped was by selling tax-evasion services to wealthy clients. It is now the subject of a federal investigation.

Gramm, at least, is consistent in his opinions. Witness the rhetorical question he is supposed to have posed during his first Senate campaign: Has anyone ever noticed that we live in the only country in the world where all the poor people are fat?

Now it may be true that America has become a nation of whiners. I'd say it's whining when insurance salesmen feel entitled to drive vehicles designed for the use of the military or the forestry service, and are put out when it becomes too expensive for them to continue doing so. And it's probably whining to rail against illegal aliens while expecting to buy your produce on the cheap and pay less than minimum wage for landscaping. "I want my MTV!" is a whine. So is, "I want my DVR!" or "I want my Blu-Ray!"

You can use the same rule of thumb you use with children. A child who grouses because the Pizza Hut doesn't have the stuffed-crust option is in fact whining, and if the habit is not discouraged he will likely grow up to be an unpleasant human being.

A child who cries out of hunger, or cold or sickness, or because he is being beaten, is not whining.

Simone Weil writes that every time someone cries out in the depth of his being "Why am I being hurt?" we are in the presence of injustice.

By this reckoning, the cry, "I want to keep my home!" is not whining.

Whining is one of the slanders commonly leveled against suffering people by those who on investigation often turn out to be the authors of that suffering. At the very least, they are its apologists.

In Belfast in August 1971, at a time of heightened unrest in Northern Ireland, British soldiers and military police, acting on instructions emanating from the highest levels of government, rounded up a group of Catholics on suspicion of terrorism. They were held without charges and subjected to practioes that were not yet being called "coercive interrogation techniques." At the time they were known as the Five Techniques.

They were handcuffed and hooded.
Noise-- surviving prisoners describe it as sounding like a hissing pipe or a roaring engine or the whirr of helicopter blades-- was pumped into their cells unabatingly, so that it was impossible for them to sleep.
They were deprived of food and water.
They were made to stand for hours with their hands braced against a wall, a position that over time became a torment; if they lowered their hands, they were beaten.

Years after their release many of the prisoners were still traumatized.
One had become hypersensitive to the least sound, for example, that of a comb being set down on a bathroom shelf. Another was tortured by fears of illness and had to be checked into a psychiatric hospital. Physical exams found nothing wrong with him, but 4 months later he died of a heart attack at the age of 45.

When the London Sunday Times reported on these abuses, the British government denounced it for printing "the fantasies of terrorists."

And when General Harry Tuzo, the commander of the army in Northern Ireland, was interviewed about the case in 1982, he remarked that the victims had not been tortured but only suffered "acute discomfort and humiliation" and had been "very well compensated and looked after."

He concluded, "I personally would have thought that they had got over it by now."

In other words, the victims had been whining.

Correction

2008-07-06T15:13:00.003-04:00

In my previous post I suggested that the late Senator Jesse Helms is now in hell. That was incorrect, or may be. As my friend and teacher James McCourt once told me, there is no way of knowing who is in hell, or bound for it. This at least is true in Catholicism, which I think has the final word on hell. Going by another tradition, only the Buddha and a very small number of arhats or bodhisattvas are said to know the contents of their past lives, which presumably would include some lives spent in hell. I for one do not, and so I can make no assumptions as to where the personality that was Jesse Helms has gone, if it still exists.

The danger of bloging is that it encourages the author to start thinking of himself as the editorial committee of his or her favorite newspaper, The Daily Me, which, as we all know, is infallible.

But even the Times screwed up on Iraq.

He hit my fist with his face

2008-07-05T21:12:00.008-04:00

I've been following coverage of the death of the late and mostly unlamented Jesse Helms. I can't say I rejoice in his death. He was a poisonous old reptile, but age and retirement had defanged him and I doubt he posed a danger to anybody any more. Let him go to his reward (pictured at right) as we will to ours.

What's left to have an opinion about is the murmur of bystanders outside the funeral home. Think of the section in "A Christmas Carol" where Scrooge hears old aquaintances mildly discussing his death.
White House spokesman Scott Stanzel: "A great public servant and true patriot today.”
Republican Presidential candidate John McCain: "A life dedicated to serving this nation.”
Billy Graham: He had the “courage to faithfully serve God and country based on principle, not popularity or politics."

The Times' Caucus blog features the voices of humbler mourners-- most of whom are better characterized as celebrants. Some unattributed samples:
"A bigot who never did a decent thing in his long career as a Senator except fan the flames of racial hated and intolerence for the roles of minorities, women and gays."
"He was a repulsive embarrassment for our country for an appallingly long time."
And, my personal favorite, “'All the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten [his] little hand.'”

Amid the general outflowing of bitter revelry, you find the occasional protest, e.g. "This thread reveals more about the lack of humanity among the “tolerant” left than it does about Helms."

In other words, people who condemn a man who made a career out of intolerance are guilty of. . . intolerance.
Never mind that the posters' intolerance has the power to hurt no one, while Helms' hurt a great many people, from African-Americans whom he kept out of the polling booth to the uncounted men and women who died miserably of AIDS because he refused to free up research funding for a disease of the sexually immoral.

This kind of moral inversion is typical of-- I'm not going to say rightists, you see it on the left as well-- perpetrators. It's the strategy by which perpetrators take on the protective coloration of victims and the powerful masquerade as the powerless they trample.

Some other examples are white bigots who complain about African-American racism (Check out the political posts on AOL, especially anything in response to a story about Obama.)
The Rwandan genocidaire who regrets having massacred his neighbors, but a moment later insists, "Either you took part in the massacre or else you were massacred yourself. So I took weapons and I defended the members of my tribe against the Tutsi."

The highest-- or lowest-- instance of this inversion is the "secret speech" that Heinrich Himmler gave to an audience of S.S. Gruppenfuhrers on October 4, 1943.
"Most of you will know what it means when 100 bodies lie together, when 500 are there or when there are 1000," Himmler says. "And ... to have seen this through and -- with the exception of human weakness -- to have remained decent, has made us hard and is a page of glory never mentioned and never to be mentioned."
It's the equivalent of a porn movie's money shot.

Hannah Arendt writes that for the Nazis, ’The problem was how to overcome not so much their conscience as the animal pity to which all normal men are affected in the presence of physical suffering. The trick used by Himmler—who apparently was rather strongly afflicted with these instinctive reactions himself—was very simple and probably very effective; it consisted in turning these instincts around, as it were, in directing them toward the self.

So that instead of saying:‘What horrible things I did to people!,’ the murderers would be able to say: What horrible things I had to watch in the pursuance of my duties, how heavily the task weighed upon my shoulders!’

Okay, Jesse Helms's champions aren't SS-men. And Jesse Helms wasn't Himmler, though in his wet dreams he may have enjoyed some of Himmler's absolute power and absolute freedom from the leashes of law and conscience.

There's nobody here but us victims.

But Seriously

2008-06-27T16:43:00.002-04:00

I've written about Don and Sally Goodrich in my book. On September 11, 2001, their son Peter was killed on United 75, the second plane to hit the World Trade Center . Their response to that loss was to create a foundation in his name that funds a variety of social welfare projects in Afghanistan: a girls' school in Logar province; a water distribution project in a village in Kunar; more schools and an orphanage in Wardak, and, most recently, a library in Bamiyan, whose towering 13th-century Buddhas were destroyed by the Taliban in 2001.

Don and Sally's involvement with Afghanistan and its people isn't theoretical. It's deep and visceral. Both of them have traveled to that tortured country. Sally says it's the one place on earth where she feels wholly comfortable—because it's a country where everyone has suffered, and takes suffering for granted. As part of that involvement, they've arranged for nine Afghan children to receive educations at prep schools and colleges, primarily in New England and upstate New York . The children—their names are withheld in the interest of their privacy and their families' safety—live with the Goodriches or their extended family during breaks. Their academic performance has been exemplary, and their adaptation to their new lives after years of war, poverty, and displacement is a wonderful thing to witness. They are not turning into American kids—most, if not all of them, will return to their homeland. They are what Afghani kids would be like if they had the luxury of growing up in a country where the fields weren't land-mined and young girls could attend school without the fear of being murdered.

In May one of those kids, a 21-year-old boy, was diagnosed with Burkitt's lymphoma, an aggressive cancer most commonly seen in Africa and in young patients. He has spent most of the last month and a half in and out of emergency rooms and hospitals and is currently receiving a chemotherapy regimen that gives him an estimated 70 percent chance of survival. But the drugs are terrifyingly expensive: Vancomycin, a "last-resort" antibiotic, costs $1000, and the Neupogen injections he was given to stimulate the production of white blood cells were $7000.
It is a terrible thing when any sick person can't afford the treatment she needs to stay alive: It seems all the more terrible when that person was rescued from a battlefield on the other side of the world.
I urge anyone reading this to visit the Goodrich Foundation website to learn more—and to give what s/he can.

Beyond Tits Up

2008-06-23T09:15:00.004-04:00

E. Annie Proulx's story "Tits Up in a Ditch," which appears in the June 9-16 New Yorker, might be subtitled "When Bad Things Happen to Good People." Though, truthfully, you don't learn enough about the protagonist, a young woman named Dakotah, to know if she's really good. The things that happen to her, though, are really, really bad.

[SPOILER ALERT HERE]

Briefly, Dakotah is abandoned as a baby by her mother, raised on a bleak ranch in the bleak state of Wyoming by her mother's parents, a couple who make the one in American Gothic look like Mr. and Mrs. Fezziwig in "A Christmas Carol." They dress her, grudgingly, in off-brands. Nobody hugs her or kisses her. Her grandfather drowns her kitten.

It goes on: Sneering schoolmates, a feckless boy who knocks her up and then skips for the army, though at least he marries her. At her grandfather's urging, Dakotah joins the army herself, leaving her baby in his and her grandmother's care. At the story's end, Dakotah has lost an arm and the only person she ever loved, the baby has fallen out of grandpa's pickup and been crushed beneath the wheels, and her husband, who is still alive after having been essentially blown in half in Iraq, is passed into her care.

This is when Dakotah realizes that she is, in grandpa's expression, "tits up in a ditch."

Proulx has become such a specialist in writing about unfortunate events in Wyoming that you daily expect to hear that the state's board of tourism has filed a lawsuit against her.

But for her next story, she will write about a happy Wyoming-ite. In January 2009, Dick and Lynn Cheney move back to their home state, laden with official souvenirs and sacks of gold. Cheney spends his declining years running coins through his fingers and surveying the vistas out his windows: the scoured prairies, the oil pumps leaking sludge into the water table and poisoning elk and prairie dogs, the refineries pumping noxious effluents into the big sky, the ranch families dispossessed by soaring fuel prices and Eastern speculators, the families of illegals driven from town to town, the empty food banks, the overcrowded emergency rooms, and smiling grimly, seeing that it is good.

My preferred title would be "Balls Down on the Pot," but I'm open to suggestions.

Why we love war: From an article by Tony Judt

2008-06-21T16:59:00.003-04:00

". . .War—total war—has been the crucial antecedent condition for mass criminality in the modern era. The first primitive concentration camps were set up by the British during the Boer War of 1899–1902. Without World War I there would have been no Armenian genocide and it is highly unlikely that either communism or fascism would have seized hold of modern states.

Without World War II there would have been no Holocaust. Absent the forcible involvement of Cambodia in the Vietnam War, we would never have heard of Pol Pot. As for the brutalizing effect of war on ordinary soldiers themselves, this of course has been copiously documented.[3]

The United States avoided almost all of that. Americans, perhaps alone in the world, experienced the twentieth century in a far more positive light. The US was not invaded. It did not lose vast numbers of citizens, or huge swathes of territory, as a result of occupation or dismemberment. Although humiliated in distant neocolonial wars (in Vietnam and now in Iraq), the US has never suffered the full consequences of defeat.[4]

Despite their ambivalence toward its recent undertakings, most Americans still feel that the wars their country has fought were mostly "good wars." The US was greatly enriched by its role in the two world wars and by their outcome, in which respect it has nothing in common with Britain, the only other major country to emerge unambiguously victorious from those struggles but at the cost of near bankruptcy and the loss of empire. And compared with other major twentieth-century combatants, the US lost relatively few soldiers in battle and suffered hardly any civilian casualties.

This contrast merits statistical emphasis. In World War I the US suffered slightly fewer than 120,000 combat deaths. For the UK, France, and Germany the figures are respectively 885,000, 1.4 million, and over 2 million.

In World War II, when the US lost about 420,000 armed forces in combat, Japan lost 2.1 million, China 3.8 million, Germany 5.5 million, and the Soviet Union an estimated 10.7 million.

The Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C., records the deaths of 58,195 Americans over the course of a war lasting fifteen years: but the French army lost double that number in six weeks of fighting in May–June 1940.

In the US Army's costliest engagement of the century—the Ardennes offensive of December 1944–January 1945 (the "Battle of the Bulge")—19,300 American soldiers were killed. In the first twenty-four hours of the Battle of the Somme (July 1, 1916), the British army lost more than 20,000 dead. At the Battle of Stalingrad, the Red Army lost 750,000 men and the Wehrmacht almost as many.

With the exception of the generation of men who fought in World War II, the United States thus has no modern memory of combat or loss remotely comparable to that of the armed forces of other countries.

But it is civilian casualties that leave the most enduring mark on national memory and here the contrast is piquant indeed. In World War II alone the British suffered 67,000 civilian dead. In continental Europe, France lost 270,000 civilians. Yugoslavia recorded over half a million civilian deaths, Germany 1.8 million, Poland 5.5 million, and the Soviet Union an estimated 11.4 million. These aggregate figures include some 5.8 million Jewish dead.

Further afield, in China, the death count exceeded 16 million. American civilian losses (excluding the merchant navy) in both world wars amounted to less than 2,000 dead.

As a consequence, the United States today is the only advanced democracy where public figures glorify and exalt the military, a sentiment familiar in Europe before 1945 but quite unknown today. Politicians in the US surround themselves with the symbols and trappings of armed prowess; even in 2008 American commentators excoriate allies that hesitate to engage in armed conflict.

I believe it is this contrasting recollection of war and its impact, rather than any structural difference between the US and otherwise comparable countries, which accounts for their dissimilar responses to international challenges today. Indeed, the complacent neoconservative claim that war and conflict are things Americans understand—in contrast to naive Europeans with their pacifistic fantasies—seems to me exactly wrong: it is Europeans (along with Asians and Africans) who understand war all too well. Most Americans have been fortunate enough to live in blissful ignorance of its true significance."

Tony Judt, "What Have We Learned, If Anything?" --The New York Review of Books, , 55:7, May 1, 2008

September on Jessore Road

2008-06-18T15:43:00.012-04:00

At last weekend's Asia Society symposium on the Beats in India, I listened to an odd and frustrating conversation between the poet John Giorno and the journalist and novelist Gita Mehta. What made it frustrating was the way the participants kept speaking past each other, volubly, cheerfully, relentlessly, like two far-gone and slightly deaf seniors in the TV room of the senior center.

Mostly, they were talking about Allen Ginsberg, the first of the Beats to arrive in India and the one who fell most completely in love with it. For the Indian poets (and not just poets, but journalists, shopkeepers, ricksha-wallahs, and beggars) that he befriended, Ginsberg came to symbolize America. Not many Indians back then had ever met an American, and very few had ever encountered one like Ginsberg, endlessly curious, shamelessly queer, generous, tender, ecstatic. A better good-will ambassador than anyone the State Department had ever sponsored.

In 1971 Giorno came to visit Ginsberg in Calcutta. Gita Mehta was a journalist for the BBC. Just across the border, East Bengal was wrenching itself away from Pakistan preparatory to becoming the independent state of Bangladesh. Pakistan was doing everything it could to avert this, mostly by sending in its army to slaughter as many Bengalis as possible.

Tens of millions of Bengali refugees were flooding along Jessore Road toward Calcutta, with the Pakistani army at their heels. The stragglers were literally being ground under the wheels of troop carriers. Of those who managed to cross the border, thousands-- maybe millions-- starved to death.

This slow-motion holocaust drew both Mehta and Ginsberg to the border. Mehta, of course, was filming the refugees. I haven't yet read all of Deborah Baker's wonderful A Blue Hand, so I don't really know what Allen was doing there. Judging by things he did on other occasions in India, he may have just wanted to help in any way he could.

He recorded what he saw in the poem "September on Jessore Road." (See link above). It's a crude poem, written in the thudding doggerel of a nursery-rhyme:

Millions of babies watching the skies
Bellies swollen, with big round eyes
On Jessore Road-- long bamboo huts
Noplace to shit but sand channel ruts

Millions of fathers in rain
Millions of mothers in pain
Millions of brothers in woe
Millions of sisters nowhere to go

The effect is not just artless but primitive, as if what Ginsberg saw had shorted out his sophisticated poetry-making mechanism and forced him back to the most basic tools of the art, the ones used by children and the illiterate. By many standards, "September on Jessore Road" is a "bad" poem, or even a bad one, but I suspect that Ginsberg's biographer Bill Morgan may be right when he says it's among his greatest.

At the symposium, John Giorno showed some footage he'd shot of Ginsberg wandering among the refugees. It was rough and grainy, shot with a Super-8. The screen was crowded with emaciated bodies, with white eyes glowing from drawn dark faces. A potbellied child sits splayed in the sand. A man crawls brokenly forward like a corpse animated by nothing more than residual nerve impulses.

What is truly awful is the way some of the subjects smile at the camera. I don't know if they do this out of the reflex that causes most people to smile when a lens is pointed at them or because they recognized the good will of the two Americans, the one pointing his camera and the other stumbling dazedly in their midst.

The soundtrack was Ginsberg chanting or singing "September on Jessore Road." Bob Dylan is said to have played on the backup band. Ginsberg isn't much of a singer-- putting it kindly, he brays-- and the musical accompaniment is similarly crude. The instruments are muddy and out of tune, the rhythm lurches. I thought of someone trying to start a car with a busted engine, turning the ignition and stepping on the accelerator over and over. The engine coughs, gurgles and dies, coughs, gurgles, dies.

I don't mean to write a review of a lost piece of film footage. I want to know whether this artifact-- this conjunction of footage, poem, and music-- is an obscene harvest of other people's mistery or a legitimate response to it. "September on Jessore Road" doesn't read like a formed, aesthetically-poised work of art. It reads like a bystander's cry for help:
Where is America's Air Force of Light?

Below see two videos of the poem, a more polished one by Ginsberg and an interpretation by the Bengali singer Moushoumi Bhoumik:

Allen Ginsberg
Uploaded by Opti-Mystic

Somebody Does It Better

2008-06-15T17:38:00.004-04:00

I don't think there's any question that the Sichuan earthquake is a worse catastrophe than Hurricane Katrina: as many as 70,000 dead in Sichuan vs. 3,000 in New Orleans and the Gulf. So why then has the response of the Chinese government been so much faster and more efficient than that of our own government in 2005? Case in point: the speed with which army engineers dug channels to drain a temporary lake that threatened to inundate the city of Chengdu.

Is this an unanticipated benefit of dictatorship?
Judging by the recent example of Myanmar, apparently not.
Is Wen Jiabao just more competent than George W. Bush?

Speculation welcome.

Ketchup and Mustard

2008-06-06T10:29:00.006-04:00

Looking back over my earlier comments about the Revs. Wright and Hagee, I'm trying to identify what distinguishes them-- the Revs, I mean-- apart from their skin color and the fact that one of them damns America, or asks God to damn it, and the other claims that God damned the Jews or at least caused some 6 million of them to be murdered as a means of herding them to the Holy Land.
Here I must add that Mr. Hagee, like his God, is a big fan of the Jews.
As a Jew, I personally thank him.

The salient difference, I think, has to do with the reverends' use of language and the underlying thought their language reveals. Jeremiah Wright speaks metaphorically. A lot of his rhetoric derives specifically from that of his prophetic namesake, Jeremiah, which is metaphoric. So is most of the Bible's rhetoric.

John Hagee uses language literally. His explanation of the Holocaust is as literal as an instruction manual for a microwave. The hunter is not a metaphor, but a real man, with a real gun-- or, in Hitler's case, guns, plus tanks, bombs, and gas chambers. Israel must be reestablished because the Bible predicts it will be, and its final, catastrophic clash with its neighbors must be hastened for the same reason.
Hagee and other fundamentalists-- that is, other literalists-- see a one-to-one correspondence between those prophecies and contemporary referents.
Gog and Magog have to be Iran and Syria (or Russia and China). The Great Beast has to be Islam; the Whore has to be the Catholic Church. The Antichrist has to be the Secretary General of the U.N. (at least according to Tim LaHaye, though another school is now equating him with Obama and a lady who used to give massages up here thought he was the United States government).
Each dot in the Bible must be connected to a point on the contemporary horizon. Never mind if there seem to more points on one side than there are on the other, or that the lines connecting them are dotted or tangled or broken.

That kind of literal-mindedness is the thing that characterizes all fundamentalism. It's what gives it its jabbing, argumentative character. My own feeling is that all spirituality is metaphorical, has to be metaphorical.
It speaks of things that are not of this earth. When the Old Testament calls Jesus the Lamb, it doesn't mean a sweet, dullwitted creature that gambols and bleats and shits on the grass.
When the Buddha (in the Fire Sermon) says that "the eyes are ablaze," he is saying something about the volatility of the senses and the desires that arise from them and not talking about a Fire-Starter. (Hagee might use this as evidence that Buddha was an incarnation of Satan and offering his followers the power to barbecue their enemies with a strong look.)

The power of metaphor is that one word or image can be used to evoke a multiplicity of things and ideas. A metaphor, to use a metaphor, is like Jesus' mustard seed. Hagee's language-- or Osama bin Laden's-- is like a foil packet of ketchup with a picture of a tomato on it.

These posts have been criticized for being insufficiently blog-like. I promise to head my next one, "John McCain: Like Bush, only not stupid but crazy."

Terms of Service

2008-06-03T22:26:00.000-04:00

The only condition under which I'd advise Barack to take Hilary as vice is if she agrees to let him appoint Bill official White House Taster.

Dead White Men

2008-05-16T14:56:00.001-04:00

I'm trying to find a language appropriate to the subjects that I care about, ethics, spirituality, and politics, not so much the politics of Republican vs. Democrat or Hillary vs. Obama as the practices America has to adopt in order to become a more ethical, honorable, and effective nation after years of squandering its powers and treating its founding principles like toilet paper. It was our President who was heard, in a moment of unscripted exasperation, to characterize the Constitution as "a piece of paper" and I assume that toilet paper was what he had in mind, no other kind being as disposable.

When I started this blog, I hoped to steer clear of the presidential election and the candidates, partly because I'm sick of ranting about them to my wife and friends and partly because there are so many blogs that discuss them more cogently and imaginatively than I can. For all I know, Hillary Clinton might end up being a better president than Barack Obama, and John McCain may be a better human being than either of them, though one who's allied himself with some of the worst human beings in the United States, gone in hock to them up to his jowls. These are percentages I'm not interested in playing.

What I'm interested in is the reasons people are voting the way they are and what those reasons say about our national character. More and more, the current presidential election looks like it will hinge on race. This hasn't happened so blatantly since 1988, when Lee Atwater secured the presidency for George H.W. Bush by showing Americans a picture of a black man who'd raped and murdered a white woman. In 2008 a black man (only half black, really, but evidently blackness is potent enough to negate whatever else it happens to be mixed with; in Louisiana well into the last century all it took was an eighth part of black blood) is actually running for president, which makes waving a picture unnecessary. While some Obamaphobes have swallowed the fiction that he's a secret Muslim and others charge him with being the 'disciple' of the 'black nationalist' Christian reverend Jeremiah Wright-- and a few monumentally stupid ones believe he's both-- libels aren't really necessary. People are voting against Barack Obama because he's black. They're phoning in death threats to his campaign offices because he's black. When Mike Huckabee makes a joke about Barack Obama rolling out of a chair because someone has aimed a gun at him, he is joking about shooting a black man. If he had made a similar joke about George Bush, he would've been tackled by Secret Service agents, had a hood yanked over his head, and been packed on a plane for Guantanamo.

Maybe it's better that our racism be outed this way. Therapists say that the patient doesn't get better until his pathology comes out in the open, and Catholics are required to confess before they receive holy communion. The people who hate Obama the most aren't just white; they tend to be poor and poorly-educated, and while that demographic may not do too badly under a President Clinton, it's precisely the one that will suffer the most if the next president is John McCain. The factories that employ those voters will keep shutting down, and the jobs they end up in will find every way they can to screw them out of a decent wage, with no interference from the government. Those voters will keep on going without decent medical care, afraid to see a doctor if they get sick, maybe unable to find ones who'll see them. The schools where they send their children will go on not teaching them. The war those children fight in-- in the absence of other children, who have other priorities-- will go on, too, and more of the children will die in it. And maybe that will be justice, because just once those citizens were offered a clear choice between voting their prejudices and voting their interests, and they chose to vote their prejudices. There's a certain integrity in voting your prejudices. If I had the same visceral unreasoning dislike of black men I might make the same choice. I have such a dislike for other sorts of people and couldn't bring myself to vote for one of them if he were to promise me free health care and the salvation of the polar bear.

But of course it's not just the poor and uneducated who will suffer. If the last ten years have taught us anything, it's that the class that works with symbols is as disposable-- as out-sourceable-- as the one that works with its hands. I am of that class, and I imagine you are too, and I feel my disposability every day. We can no longer dissociate ourselves from the others. This is so not because Jesus instructed us to love our neighbors as or because Shantideva knows that they are ourselves. It is so because what happens to those unhappy, small-minded people will happen to us. And maybe, if you believe in a distributive justice in which good is rewarded with goodness and evil with evil, we too will deserve whatever we get:

For my people is foolish, they have not known me. . . they are wise to do evil, but to do good they have no knowledge.
I beheld the earth, and, lo, it was without form and void; and the heavens, and they had no light.
I beheld the mountains, and, lo, they trembled, and all the hills moved lightly.
I beheld, and, lo, there was no man, and all the birds of the heavens were fled.
I beheld, and, lo, the fruitful place was a wilderness, and all the cities thereof were broken down.

That's not Jeremiah Wright. That's Jeremiah.

The Whitewashed Sepulchre

2008-05-02T10:57:00.000-04:00

There was a brief period in American public discourse when white people, and not just liberals, actually acknowledged their racism. I'd say it lasted from the 1960s to 1980 and the election of Ronald Reagan. After that white people were exempt from such unpleasant exercises of introspection. Reagan himself could openly campaign against "welfare queens," a crocodilian segregationist like Strom Thurmond could be rehabilitated as a cuddly mainstream politician (and his habit of groping the clerical help passed off as 'an eye for the ladies'), but they were no longer accused of being racists. African-Americans who said otherwise were themselves charged with playing the race card.

This whitewashing coincided with a dramatic rise in the power and influence of fundamentalist, evangelical churches led by figures like Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, Ted Haggard, and John Hagee. Some of those churches, whose ministry and congregations were predominantly white, had provided segregation with much of its theological armor. Or, to slightly alter the metaphor, they had been the keep into which whites could retreat after the Episcopalians, the Methodists, and even some Baptists went over to the enemy. That was part of the reason for their popularity.

Another reason for their popularity had to do with the way they defined sin, or rather, with where they located it. Like their Puritan precursors, the old fundamentalist congregations were haunted by the presentiment of personal guilt and the prospect of personal damnation. Their ministers glared down from the pulpit and railed at the failings of the men and women sitting in the pews below. They scolded them for sloth and adultery, drinking, gambling, blasphemy, worldliness. Going to those churches was like walking into the woodshed where your father waited with a handful of switches and made you select the one he would thrash you with. It couldn't have been pleasant. And, of course, outsiders made fun of you for your masochistic scrupulosity. Think of the way the media made fun of Jimmy Carter for admitting that he had committed adultery in his heart.

But the new breed of fundamentalists were unconcerned by the sins of their congregations. The sins that galvanized them were taking place elsewhere-- in abortion clinics and college classrooms, in gay bars, in the courts. Who cared about adultery? The preachers stopped scolding their flocks. They congratulated them. And the flocks congratulated themselves. From time to time, they might be reminded that they were sinners and hang their heads. But a moment later the sermon would swing back to homosexuals and the ACLU, and everyone would be happy again.

Racism is as common as any other sin, and as ugly, and it must be owned the way other sins are before it can be rooted out or made less noxious. But this can never happen in a church that locates sin elsewhere. To the members of such a churches, the only racists are people like Al Sharpton and the Reverend Wright.

Bucky Done Gun II

2008-05-01T10:11:00.000-04:00

You can tell that a group of people has been designated to suffer when one of its members can be killed by police, not while committing crimes but while engaged in legal activities-- say, returning home from a bachelor party on the night before his wedding-- and none of the officers involved is found guilty. Try to imagine how a white community would react if one of its children was shot dead under similar circumstances, with a similar outcome. Try to imagine its reaction if such killings took place every few years and the outcome were always the same. Given the facts of the Bell case and the timing of the judge's verdict, the media finger-wagging over Jeremiah Wright is almost comically hypocritical. Never mind if the U.S. government conspired to give black people AIDS. It-- and, more demonstrably, state and local governments, including that of the most liberal city in the U.S.-- have fostered a climate in which it is permissable for cops to kill unarmed black men, if not by law then in fact. No conspiracy is necessary. All that's required is that the victims die and that there be no consequences.

In The Book of Calamities, I write that crime always entails a destruction of equality-- not social equality, necessarily, but the creaturely equality of beings who are universally subject to pain and death. "When one man kills another man, he declares that he is big and the other is small, is nothing. If the victim’s wife and children are forced to witness this, they too are made nothing. When a chemical plant discharges poison gas that wipes out a village, all its people are made nothing, and their annihilation is compounded when the officers of the chemical company are allowed to live on without consequence." (Trachtenberg, 175) This is true of judicial killings as well.

Few whites want to admit that racism still exists in this country. Part of the reason the Obama campaign inspired so much early excitement was because his victories seemed to signal that it had been definitively banished. So you can understand the shock and indignation that greeted revelations of Wright's sermons. In asserting that a racial double-standard still existed, and that African-Americans were angry about it, Wright challenged America's hopeful vision of itself. What happened next was that the black man was accused of racism, while Obama was accused of silently condoning racism because he had refused to denounce the reverend or storm out of his congregation. The candidate's ensuing speech on race was groundbreaking because it was the first time since the King era that a mainstream public figure had addressed the elephant in the living room. There are moments in history when the elephant is named, and they always raise the hope that it will then be driven outside where it belongs. But a number of individuals and organizations, beginning with the Clintons and including the Republican party and much of the news media, have made sure that the elephant remains in the living room. For the moment it is still visible in all its size and ponderousness, but already people are denying its presence or blaming that presence on cranky figures like Wright. But of course all of us are spattered with elephant shit.

See: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/04/opinion/04rich.html?hp

Bucky Done Gun

2008-04-26T22:11:00.000-04:00

The trial of three New York City police officers charged with manslaughter or reckless endangerment in the 2006 shooting death of Sean Bell ended the way those trials usually do. The only time I can remember a member of the NYPD incurring criminal penalties for his use of force on an African-American male was when Officer Justin Volpe was sentenced to 30 years for sodomizing Abner Louima with a broken toilet plunger in a bathroom of the 70th Precinct. (Another cop was found guilty of lying about the assault.)That trial's outcome probably owed something to the fact that the victim was still alive and had had his injuries certified by doctors. And while you can claim to have shot an unarmed man by accident, or without knowing that he was in fact unarmed, the same cannot be said of someone you've raped in a well-lit men's room, especially if at the time of said rape he was handcuffed.

That impunity isn't limited to NYPD, or to attacks on black men. Police officers rarely face criminal charges when they kill white men, either, as they do in more than half of all police shootings. Some of that impunity has to do with the credit that our society extends to police officers, the trust it places in their judgment as to when to use lethal force-- and against whom-- and in their veracity in accounting for the use of that force. Some of it has to do with our collective understanding that we need the police to protect us-- though given what happened to Sean Bell or Abner Louima or Amadou Diallo, who was shot 41 times while reaching for his wallet, maybe that "us" should be qualified. The police protect most of us. They perform a job that lies beyond most of our competence or courage. And knowing that we need them-- need them to use violence against people who might otherwise use violence against us-- we give them the benefit of the doubt. (Even though an NYPD study shows that in the overwhelming majority of cases in which officers fire at suspects, no one is firing back.) http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/08/nyregion/08nypd.html?hp

What complicates the Bell case is that two of the cops involved were themselves African-American. They didn't shoot Bell--even 50 times -- because they were racists. They may have shot him because they were inept, or poorly trained, or because they and their white colleague had had two drinks apiece, or because the strip club where they were holding their stakeout was reputed to be a meeting point for drug and gun dealers. They may have shot him because they were afraid. A crucial piece of defense testimony was that one of Bell's companions was heard to say that he was going to get a gun, and the fact is that there is a subculture within the African-American community that treats guns as a fashion accessory, like oversized jeans and overpriced sneakers, and their display and occasional use as components of bella figura. This is true even among good kids. If you are a cop who knows how popular gangsta attitudes and gangsta style are among many young African-American men, you might be forgiven for jumping to conclusions when you hear one such man talking, maybe jokingly, maybe not, about getting a gun. Someone who dresses and talks like a gangsta might also act like one.

For an analogy, we might look back to the old West where, judging by movies and TV, everybody wore a gun or two and any real man knew how to use one. There were fewer lawmen in those days, but I imagine that there were plenty of instances in which they shot men who, like Amadou Diallo a 110 years later, were reaching for their wallets. But those cases probably never went to trial, a lawman's word having even higher value back then than it does today. When I read about the morons agitating for the universal right to carry concealed weapons, like the ones who invited an Internet gun dealer to speak at Virginia Tech on the first anniversary of its massacre, I wonder if any of them have considered the likelihood that if their proposal ever gets off the ground and Americans are allowed to carry concealed weapons in churches, schools, and shopping malls, how many will end up being killed by police, killed perhaps while reaching for their wallets. A consolation-- maybe a dubious one-- will be that more of those victims will be white.

All its nuances aside, the verdict of the Bell trial demonstrates that African Americans still make up a class of designated sufferers-- people whose misfortune, whether in the form of poverty, crime, joblessness, derelict housing, broken schools, or brutal mistreatment by the representatives of the law is taken for granted. Of course, the killing of Sean Bell wasn't entirely taken for granted. A headline in the New York Daily News quotes his fiancee: "They Killed Sean All Over Again." But the headline of the Post was all about the defendants. It read, "In the Clear"-- the print equivalent of a sigh of relief. As far as the Post was concerned, the only victims in the Bell case were the officers who had shot him. Part of the hell of designated sufferers is that they are rarely recognized as victims.

Three Years Late and $29 Billion Short

2008-04-24T22:38:00.000-04:00

During a ceremonial appearance in New Orleans's Lower Ninth Ward today, presumptive Republican presidential candidate John McCain issued a sharp critique of the Bush administration's response to Hurricane Katrina. He characterized it as "terrible and disgraceful" and vowed that if such a catastrophe had happened on his watch, he would have landed his plane at "the nearest Air Force base and come over personally." He did not say if he would have piloted the plane himself and whether he would have brought along an inflatable life raft or a mop and a bucket.

In May 2006 McCain was one of 21 senators to vote against a bill authorizing $29 billion for post-Katrina recovery. He claimed that it contained unnecessary spending provisions. That aside, the senator was indulging in the sort of belated indignation that has been a part of the political language ever since a legislator from a southern state was heard to say something uncomplimentary about slavery, probably around 25 years ago. In the periodic table of America's historical wrongs, slavery has a longer half-life than, say, the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II. Only 46 years passed between President Roosevelt's signing of Executive Order 9066 and President Reagan's signing of a Congressional apology for same.

Indignation for past wrongs is painless, especially if it is unaccompanied by contrition. Indignation is never having to say you're sorry. The mistake was somebody else's. Someone else gazed idly out the airplane window at the drowning city. You, of course, would have gone there in person.