Category Archives: argybargy

Well now here’s a practical education

Read carefully through today’s Lincoln Steffens Show post at No Fear of the Future and just see (a) how many dots you had/hadn’t already connected, (b) how many things you vow to keep an eye upon as the Circus continues to unfold before our eyes. Some exemplary bits:

…the perfect Narcissists to star in the next generation reality show are the ones who created their own illusory documentary narrative long before Survivor and The Bachelor: the American politicians who love nothing more than to engage in on-camera histrionics designed to manipulate the emotions of the general public around a largely illusory conflict between two political parties who represent an illusion of meaningful ideological difference…

…The 20th century revelation that probably had the most lasting cultural impact was Freud’s—that people are governed by primitive animal natures and appetitive drives that are often more powerful than reason. Freud’s insights were cynically employed on the this side of the Atlantic through his nephew Edward Bernays, the father of modern public relations, who overthrew the 19th century convention of fact-based advertising in favor of subtextual appeals to the baser natures…

Kunstler again

Jim Kunstler sure knows how to turn a phrase and sharpen an aperçu, exemplified in this bit from today’s blog posting:

We’re out of cheap oil, cheap and good ores, ocean fish, good timber, and lots of other things. All the stuff we erected to live our lives in – the stupendous armature of highways, strip malls, suburban houses, skyscraper condos, sewer systems, electric grids – is beyond our power to repair now. We can only patch it, and that can only work for so long before things go dark. (Can you sharpen a saw blade?)

Hmmmm… not a carbide-tipped blade.

Well worth the time to read in toto

Tome Engelhardt’s The Urge to Surge: Washington’s 30-Year High is a fine think piece for the New Year, and puts the present moment into highly relevant context. Down towards the end is this little trip down Memory Lane:

The 23 men and two women who signed the initial PNAC [Project for the New American Century] statement urging the United States to go for the military option in the twenty-first century would, however, prove something more than your typical crew of think-tank types. After all, not so many years later, after a disputed presidential election settled by the Supreme Court, Dick Cheney would be vice president; I. Lewis (“Scooter”) Libby would be his right-hand man; Donald Rumsfeld would be Secretary of Defense, Paul Wolfowitz, Deputy Secretary of Defense; Zalmay Khalilzad, head of the Bush-Cheney transition team at the Department of Defense and then the first post- invasion U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan, as well as ambassador to Iraq and UN ambassador; Elliot Abrams, special assistant to the president with a post on the National Security Council; Paula Dobriansky, Under Secretary of State for Democracy and Global Affairs; Aaron Friedberg, Deputy Assistant for National Security Affairs and Director of Policy Planning in the office of the vice president; and Jeb Bush, governor of Florida. (Others like John Bolton, who signed on to PNAC later, would be no less well employed.)

This may, in fact, be the first example in history of a think tank coming to power and actually putting its blue-sky suggestions into operation as government policy, or perhaps it’s the only example so far of a government-in-waiting masquerading as an online think tank.

I see little hope that the present-day DC crowd will grok their own hubris and repent.

Meanwhile

Haiti is just, well, impossible to grasp, especially if the grasping tools are limited to conventional media sources, if you don’t have a lot of historical background, if you don’t speak Haitian Creole (French gets you far enough to think you might be able to understand)… Here’s a fragment from a blog (Heart of Haiti) that would be worth tracking if one could bear it (via H5N1, which I’ve been following for a few years)

So what is this stability that the foreign powers are trying to impose on Haiti? For the last five years, Préval has imagined himself to be the CEO of a corporation called Haiti. His protégé Célestin seems to understand Haiti in the same way, if his presidential campaign can be taken as an indication. Haiti is a company that you run. You appear once in a while, as do presidents of corporations, to show off your expensive suits and to remind people of what ‘success’ looks like. You expect your employees to be well behaved and to work in the interests of the country/corporation. Their efforts will assure that the CEO is well compensated. Employees/citizens who do not cooperate are fired from the body politic, ‘shut out’ in the words of good Unity employees/candidates. Haiti is a business, a branch plant of the Washington head office.

That is what Haiti looks like from the company headquarters. However, Haitians see their country as something more than that. Turned upside down, as it was on Wednesday, they show that the CEO serves at their pleasure. (From the Dominican Republic, Preval appears to agree.) And they refuse to be fired from the nation for insubordination.

(extracted from the December 9 posting: The Real Source of Power)

Grope

Tom Engelhardt makes more sense to me than just about anybody:

So you wanna be safer? I mean, actually safer? Here’s a simple formula for beginning to improve American safety and security at every level. End our trillion dollar wars in Afghanistan and Iraq; set our military to defending our own borders (and no, projecting power abroad does not normally qualify as a defense of the United States); begin to shut down our global empire of bases; stop building grotesque embassy-citadels abroad (one even has a decorative moat, for god’s sake!); end our overseas war stimulus packages and bring some of that money home. In short, stop going out of our way to tick off foreigners and then pouring our treasure into an American war machine intent on pursuing a generational global war against them.

Of course, the U.S. national security state has quite a different formula for engendering safety in America: fight the Afghan War until hell freezes over; keep the odd base or two in Iraq; dig into the Persian Gulf region; send U.S. Special Operations troops into any country where a terrorist might possibly lurk; and make sure the drones aren’t far behind. In other words, reinforce our war state by ensuring that we’re eternally in a state of war, and then scare the hell out of Americans by repeatedly insisting that we’re in imminent danger, that shoe, underwear, and someday butt bombers will destroy our country, our lives, and our civilization. Insist that a single percent of risk is 1% too much when it comes to terror and American lives, and then demand that those who feel otherwise be dealt with punitively, if they won’t shut up.

It’s a formula for leaving you naked in airports, while increasing the oppressive power of the state. And here’s the dirty, little, distinctly Orwellian secret: the national security state can’t do without those Yemeni terrorists (and vice versa), as well as our homegrown variety. All of them profit from a world of war. You don’t — and on that score, what happens in an airport line should be the least of your worries.

The national security state is eager to cop a feel. As long as Americans don’t grasp the connections between our war state and our “safety,” things will only get worse and, in the end, our world will genuinely be in danger.

The persuasive Kunstler

This certainly rings true to my jaundiced ear:

It’s really too late for both parties. They’re unreformable. They’ve squandered their legitimacy just as the US enters the fat heart of the long emergency. Neither of them have a plan, or even a single idea that isn’t a dodge or a grift. Both parties tout a “recovery” that is just a cover story for accounting chicanery and statistical lies aimed at concealing the criminally-engineered national bankruptcy that they presided over in split shifts. Both parties are overwhelmingly made up of bagmen for the companies that looted America.

Judt on Milosz

I don’t think I had read anything of Tony Judt’s writing until I revived my long-lapsed subscription to NYRB a year ago, just in time to catch his riveting last pieces. I’ve begun his Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945, and it’ll take a while to absorb its immensity. In the most recent NYRB there’s a piece on Milosz’s Captive Minds (fortunately not behind the paywall and well worth reading in its entirety) that reminds me of things I should have been paying attention to, or should at least have encountered. Judt unpacks the (originally Arabic) concept of ‘Ketman’:

The second image is that of “Ketman,” borrowed from Arthur de Gobineau’s Religions and Philosophies of Central Asia, in which the French traveler reports the Persian phenomenon of elective identities. Those who have internalized the way of being called “Ketman” can live with the contradictions of saying one thing and believing another, adapting freely to each new requirement of their rulers while believing that they have preserved somewhere within themselves the autonomy of a free thinker—or at any rate a thinker who has freely chosen to subordinate himself to the ideas and dictates of others.
Ketman, in Miłosz’s words, “brings comfort, fostering dreams of what might be, and even the enclosing fence affords the solace of reverie.” Writing for the desk drawer becomes a sign of inner liberty. At least his audience would take him seriously if only they could read him…

Judt describes his own history of teaching Milosz to American students:

And indeed, when I first taught the book in the 1970s, I spent most of my time explaining to would-be radical students just why a “captive mind” was not a good thing. Thirty years on, my young audience is simply mystified: Why would someone sell his soul to any idea, much less a repressive one? By the turn of the twenty-first century, few of my North American students had ever met a Marxist. A self-abnegating commitment to a secular faith was beyond their imaginative reach. When I started out, my challenge was to explain why people became disillusioned with Marxism; today, the insuperable hurdle one faces is explaining the illusion itself.

At this point I started to anticipate his argument, thinking “but isn’t this just what they’ve done themselves?”, but I was unprepared for the clarity with which Judt sums it up:

Today, we can still hear sputtering echoes of the attempt to reignite the cold war around a crusade against “Islamo-fascism.” But the true mental captivity of our time lies elsewhere. Our contemporary faith in “the market” rigorously tracks its radical nineteenth-century doppelgänger—the unquestioning belief in necessity, progress, and History. Just as the hapless British Labour chancellor in 1929–1931, Philip Snowden, threw up his hands in the face of the Depression and declared that there was no point opposing the ineluctable laws of capitalism, so Europe’s leaders today scuttle into budgetary austerity to appease “the markets.”
But “the market”—like “dialectical materialism”—is just an abstraction: at once ultra-rational (its argument trumps all) and the acme of unreason (it is not open to question). It has its true believers—mediocre thinkers by contrast with the founding fathers, but influential withal; its fellow travelers—who may privately doubt the claims of the dogma but see no alternative to preaching it; and its victims, many of whom in the US especially have dutifully swallowed their pill and proudly proclaim the virtues of a doctrine whose benefits they will never see.
Above all, the thrall in which an ideology holds a people is best measured by their collective inability to imagine alternatives. We know perfectly well that untrammeled faith in unregulated markets kills: the rigid application of what was until recently the “Washington consensus” in vulnerable developing countries—with its emphasis on tight fiscal policy, privatization, low tariffs, and deregulation—has destroyed millions of livelihoods. Meanwhile, the stringent “commercial terms” on which vital pharmaceuticals are made available has drastically reduced life expectancy in many places. But in Margaret Thatcher’s deathless phrase, “there is no alternative.”

Reading Dave Hickey

I take a certain (well, a considerable) pride in knowing about stuff that others don’t [yet] grok, but that means I’m occasionally blindsided by stuff I should have encountered but somehow missed. Can’t know it all, despite trying to live up to my patron saint Hugh of St-Victor’s injunction to omnia disce. So I’d never heard of Dave Hickey until I read a piece of his in NHLA. Smitten by his prose, I ordered Air Guitar: Essays on Art and Democracy (1997) and soaked it up in a few days. The title? It refers to Hickey’s comments on criticism:

…criticism is the weakest thing you can do in writing. It is the written equivalent of air guitar —flurries of silent, sympathetic gestures with nothing at their heart but the memory of the music(163)

There’s a lot of similarly fine writing in the 20-odd essays, and plenty of art-world and pop-culture stuff that I knew next to nothing about, and Robert Christgau’s review is a good entrée into what-all is included. The essay that really got to me was the penultimate: “Frivolity and Unction” (originally in Art isses, Summer 1996, but available here as a pdf), which seems to be mostly a savaging of pretense and self-delusion in “the art world” … “seems to be” I say, since he’s mostly talking about that realm:

…I found myself wondering why the music and film communities could respond to bourgeois punditry with such equanimity, while the French Academy and the contemporary art world went certifiably ga-ga. I came up with the answer. Music and movie people are not in denial about the frivolity of their endeavor, while the contemporary art world, like the French Academy, feels called upon to maintain the aura of spectacular unction that signifies public virtue, in hopes of maintaining its public patronage… (202)

What if works of art were considered to be what they actually are –frivolous objects or entities with no intrinsic value that only acquire value through a complex process of socialization during which some are empowered by an ongoing sequence of private, mercantile, journalistic, and institutional investments… (204)

…the art world is no more about art than the sports world is about sport. The sports world conducts an ongoing referendum on the manner in which we should cooperate and compete. The art world conducts an ongoing referendum on how things should look and the way we should look at things –or it would, if art were regarded as sports are, as a wasteful, privileged endeavor through which very serious issues are sorted out. (204)

“Seems to be” I say, because it struck me that he’s NOT just talking about the art world, but about the [cultural] delusions constructed around multiple worlds (politics, business, the instantiation and manipulation of consumer demand, education…) in which we bamboozle ourselves about what we are doing and why. But is this realization anything more than the familiar Emperor’s Clothes critique of the purblind and muttonish stupor of my fellow citizens, which I’ve been belaboring for far too long? My encounter with this essay got spookier when it occurred to me to try substituting ‘education’ for ‘art’ in this paragraph:

So, I have been thinking, if art is ‘good’ enough to be deserving of public patronage, just what does it do? I would suggest that since such work must be designed in compliance with extant legislation and regulatory protocols, it can only work on behalf of this legislation and those protocols. It can encourage us not just to obey the laws that we all fought so hard to pass, but to believe them, to internalize the regulatory norms of civil society into a ‘cultural belief system.’ Unfortunately, art that aspires to this goal is nothing more or less than tribal art, a steady-state hedge against change and a guarantee of oppression in the name of consensus, however benign. (208)

And if everybody did awaken to what-all is really going on, or down, what then?