Grand Hotel Abyss

If you’ll forgive me for citing a crazy right-wing Rand-quoting libertarian, here is Justin Raimondo speaking good sense:

Which is why I have to laugh when I hear criticisms from the Democrats and the growing number of antiwar Republicans in Congress who complain that we don’t belong in Iraq any longer because, you know, it’s a civil war. This is largely seen as an unintended consequence of the American invasion – but what if it was intended?

It would, after all, make perfect Bizarro “sense.” If, instead of trying to build a stable, democratic Iraq, you’re trying to wreak as much destruction as possible and turn Arab against Arab, Muslim against Muslim, and the Kurds against everyone else, then the invasion and occupation of Iraq was the right thing to do. And please don’t tell me that none of these dire consequences – blowback, for Rudy Giuliani’s benefit – were known or predicted in advance. The recent release of the much-awaited “phase two” [.pdf] of the Senate Intelligence report – detailing prewar assessments of what was likely to occur in Iraq if we invaded – shows we knew all along what would happen. Yet we went ahead and invaded anyway.

As Ayn Rand once put it, don’t bother to examine a folly – ask yourself only what it accomplishes. If we look at the public reasons for the Iraq war, it is clear that none of these have been accomplished, nor are they likely to be achieved in the near or even distant future. Iraqi “democracy” is a bizarre mutation of clerical domination, unimaginable corruption, and rule by death squads, and those “weapons of mass destruction” have returned to the netherworld of the neoconservative imagination from whence they emerged onto the front page of the New York Times.

Exactly right. I don’t think people really understand the radical nature of the neoliberal challenge to moral, legal and political norms of the past. The invasion of Iraq is to be understood in the light of Thatcher’s notorious proclamation, “There is no such thing as society.” We are talking about elites who have a deep hostility to the state understood as anything other than a private security force for the rich. The goal in Iraq is chaos. The model is not the British or Roman Empires, with their “enlightened” proconsuls and extensive collaboration with local elites. The model is gangland warfare, with the U.S. President as the godfather playing one family against another. When liberal imperialist types claim that traditional imperialism is preferable to this loosing of anarchy, they are only wrong insofar as traditional imperialism is morally repugnant, if less overtly destructive.

Speaking of liberal imperialist types, this aggressive sowing of destruction has been a bipartisan effort in the U.S. When the newly-unified German government rushed to recognize Slovenia after its secession from Yugoslavia, Bush I’s Secretary of State James Baker thought they were crazy for taking an action that would lead to a bloody civil war. The Kissingerian realist paradigm to which Baker subscribed was more traditionally imperialist: the goal was to find some local strongman (the Shah, Pinochet, etc.) to support who would funnel the profits and the resources back to his patrons. He was hard-pressed to see the wisdom of provoking a bloodbath that would be hard to control, much less of taking sides in a such a struggle. A few short years and a million words by Sontag & Son later, Clinton and Blair eagerly threw in with Iran and bin Laden to rain depleted uranium down on the unlucky heads of the “neo-Nazi” Serbs in a grisly prologue to the destruction of Iraq. The intellectual wheels greased here by a flood of post-1989 verbiage on the obsolescence of the nation-state and the great good of identity politics and so-called “respect for difference” (a philosophy that, for all its high-minded liberal-ish intentions, upholds the intellectual underpinnings of racism). The only surprising thing about Christopher Hitchens’s support of the Iraq invasion is that a hundred other prominent liberals and leftists didn’t join him. He was not wrong when he cited the precedent of Kosovo.

In this context, we should recognize the roots of this foreign policy strategy in the intelligence service’s manipulations of radical organizations in the late ’60s and ’70s, when the FBI, CIA and NATO infiltrated these groups and provoked them to commit terrorist actions (or else entirely faked such actions). For this reason, I find the Leninist left’s nominal support for groups like Hamas, Hezbollah or various Iraqi resistance groups short-sighted. It’s hard to see who in the Middle East is not working for the Man at this point. The best thing to do in terms of political action right now for citizens of the imperial center is to push the anti-war, even pacifist and isolationist line as hard as they can.

This has the added benefit of being comprehensible to most middle- and working-class people; I know, because I am one such person. People tend to look at you funny if you preach world revolution, but if you preach against blowing people up and for leaving other countries the hell alone, most people will understand where you’re coming from, even if they disagree. Here, even the latter-day conservative impulses of American culture will be helpful. Imperialism has always been a liberal project, rooted in a desire to “help” which is actually a sublimated will-to-domination for the intellectuals who want to “help” and an unsublimated fig leaf for the profit-taking of big business. There is a reason that working people find persuasive the opportunistic conservative propaganda line that liberalism is an ideology of elitist condescension and feel-good power-grabbing.

But I do not want to “help,” for instance, Africa. Africa is in the sorry shape that it’s in precisely because of all the “help” it has received over the years from Europe and the U.S. What Africa needs is to be left entirely alone: to have its debt cancelled, the IMF off its backs (and off the face of the earth) and western aid brought to an end. Our “obligation” to assist them has done enough damage. What they need is nothing more than the freedom to develop the strength and intelligence of their civilization.

(That may sound like identity politics; it isn’t because I don’t believe that cultures and civilizations are discrete. Of course, all cultures are mixtures of elements diverse in their origin and character and that’s a good thing. By contrast, western domination destroys that vital diversity by imposing one economic model on everyone. Western elites love identity politics because, by holding up such foolish ideas as Afrocentrism and Eurocentrism, this politics is hostile to the vital internal diversity of all cultures and keeps all the mental categories of racism open.)

The new imperialism of today is an attack of elites against all civilizational restraints on their power. The aim of the imperialists is to reign in hell rather than serve in heaven. History records no example of heaven on earth being achieved by means of extreme violence and domination.

The road to one America, according to Mr. Edwards:

Edwards also called Monday for spreading the burden of serving the country by mandating national service.

“One of the things we ought to be thinking about is some level of mandatory service to our country, so that everybody in America — not just the poor kids who get sent to war — are serving this country,” he said.

After the event, Edwards said he had not meant to imply that only the poor go to war, only that everyone should serve in some way.

“We have people from all walks of life in America who are serving, including Reservists and National Guard,” he said. “What we want to do is to have all Americans to have a chance to serve their country.”

If were without the grave dignity of a scholar and an artist, I would say that John Edwards could suck my cock until his phoney head caved in, and that Hillary and Obama could get in line behind him.

Not a single one of those soldiers over in Iraq is serving anything other than the bottom line of the energy and arms companies. Some of the gentle souls among us like to point out that economic circumstances compel these men and women to undertake these kinds of indefensible slaughters. In fact, according to the conservative Heritage Foundation:

By assigning each recruit the median 1999 household income for his hometown ZIP code as deter­mined from Census 2000, the mean income for 2004 recruits was $43,122 (in 1999 dollars). For 2005 recruits, it was $43,238 (in 1999 dol­lars). These are increases over the mean incomes for the 1999 cohort ($41,141) and 2003 cohort ($42,822). The national median published in Cen­sus 2000 was $41,994. This indicates that, on aver­age, the 2004 and 2005 recruit populations come from even wealthier areas than their peers who enlisted in 1999 and 2003.

When comparing these wartime recruits (2003– 2005) to the resident population ages 18–24 (as recorded in Census 2000), areas with median household income levels between $35,000 and $79,999 were overrepresented, along with income categories between $85,000 and $94,999. (See Chart 2.) Though the mainstream media continue to portray the war in Iraq as unpopular, this evi­dence suggests that the United States is not sending the poor to die for the interests of the rich.

The point these right-wing think-tankers wish to make is that the compostion-by-income of U.S. army recruits maps almost perfectly onto the income distribution of the general population. While we certainly must allow that this distribution is hideously unjust—$43000 really isn’t much considering the cost of living—we cannot claim abject desperation as the macro cause of military enlistment. I certainly did not come from a household that made much more than the median, particularly during my early childhood, yet it never occurred to me or almost anyone else I knew to “serve” in this barbaric way. The people I know who did choose to “serve” were neither poor nor particularly uneducated. For the most part, the incentives the army held out beat the alternatives—uncertain success at an overpriced university or in the job market—but the preponderance of people that I knew chose these hardships over what are, after all, in many ways the far graver hardships of military “service.”

The truth is that the United States has, without any justification, destroyed an entire society, engineered a state of chaos and slaughtered more than half a million people and counting. This is not a secret. The only barrier to understanding this is ideology. Ideology is not watertight, and the brain does not naturally take its shape. I do not support the troops. I do not think that everyone should “serve” in one way or another, because the cause, even if one were to define the cause so broadly as the continued survival of this polity in its present state, is deeply evil. Justice demands that the “service” be abolished.

Edwards’s call for universal “service” is parallel to Zizek’s call for discipline. And here is a fine time to recall Zizek’s support for the ’90s crusade of Edwards’s party: the Iraq-presaging manipulation of and lethal participation in the break-up of Yugoslavia. I used to have considerable sympathy for both the progressive resurgence in mainstream American politics and for the Leninist revivalism of the Theory class, but now I see both as dangerous charades, new masks for power. The world is plagued by gangs of men with guns. Still more gangs of men with guns will not provide a cure. And I for one will not serve.

If my (rather meager) understanding of child development is to be trusted, children between the ages of four and five learn to distinguish not only between fiction and non-fiction, but between fantastic and realistic fictional modes.

I call upon this datum because it puts into question the modernist dogma that every fictional text ought to announce in some more or less overt way its own status as a text. And not only that, but to announce the inherent inability of textuality to make any aspect of reality fully present without resorting to trickery of one sort or another.

I suppose I must cop to rather a different view. But first: what underwrites the modernist dogma is a gnostic and salvific vision of literature. Posing as the deconstruction of the very category of literature in the name of human liberation, it smuggles in an esoteric elitism according to which that text is best which eschews language’s referential function in order to attain a purity of language qua alien code uncontaminated by the muck of human intention. Literature is the apotheosis of the god language. As a writer often considered a modernist (Clarice Lispector) once had a narrator observe, there is so much God at the expense of men.

All smart writers and readers know that language always arcs pitifully to the ground before it can hit the target. But I prefer to think of literature as a game, and some players come closer to the target than others. Beyond that, I’ve ceased to have or want any grand theory of literature. If someone put the proverbial gun to my head and said I have to have one, I would say that literature is an open category that includes any deployment of language which can primarily be experienced affectively. (Oh boy, some philosophers could shoot holes in that one!)

Anyway, language generates affect by way of its referential function in combination with its capacity for more or less musical arrangement. A much older critical mode called successful literature the successful marriage of the two, that is, of sound and sense. Much of the baggage of our older critical modes has been quite rightly tossed overboard, but that one’s worth keeping.

I don’t know what that makes me. But that’s how I see it.

The Anglo-American literary/journalistic elite, apparently following their counterparts in Latin America, has generated an awful lot of hype about Roberto Bolaño, the late Chilean/international novelist and poet, so I thought I owed it to my own cultural capital to check the guy out. Bolaño’s long novel The Savage Detective has recently been translated and published, and his much longer novel 2066 is on the way. The short novel that I plucked from the library shelves, Amulet, apparently contains characters from these other works, including Arturito Belano, Bolaño’s fictional alter ego. Auxilio Lacouture, an illegal Uruguyan immigrant to Mexico City who spends all her time hanging around with the young poets of the city, narrates Amulet in a phantasmagorical interior monologue seemingly delivered from her fortnight’s captivity in a university bathroom during the Mexican government’s brutal suppression of the 1968 uprisings. Though apparently confined to these two weeks within the bathroom, Auxilio’s reflections and memories scatter over a range of years extending into the ’70s, and evoke not only various locales in and around Mexico City, but also hallucinatory plains, abysses and realms of ice, in what amounts to a brief epic about the struggle of a generation of artists, misfits and radicals to survive and find joy despite the barbarism of the times.

Indeed, at the end of the novel, in a kind of politico-moral excresence, Auxilio tells us this herself as she experiences a vision of a mass of children marching and singing across a valley toward an abyss:

And although the song that I heard was about war, about the heroic deeds of a whole generation of young Latin Americans led to sacrifice, I knew that above and beyond all, it was about courage and mirrors, desire and pleasure.

And that song is our amulet.

It’s my contention that Bolaño did not have to say this outright because it is implicit in all the best moments of this novel. Wayne Kostenbaum’s blurb on the jacket of the library copy of Amulet says: “I am addicted to the haze that floats above Bolaño’s fictions.” This is a perceptive comment: atmosphere is, as far as I can tell from this book, what he does best. He calls up a blighted urban landscape, a bohemia of passed-out writers, reclusive poets, tortured revolutionaries and self-destroying prostitutes that, let’s be frank, looks impossibly glamorous to an international intelligentsia whose last three decades of cautiously conformist politics and whimsically well-behaved fiction are beginning to look a lot less appealing in the sickening light of Iraq’s ruin (not to speak of Afghanistan’s, or Yugoslavia’s). Here is Bolaño, in the voice of Auxilio, creating atmosphere:

I could laugh at my skirts, my stovepipe trousers, my stripy tights, my white socks, my page-boy hair going whiter by the day, my eyes scanning the nights of Mexico City, my pink ears attuned to all the university gossip: the rises and falls, who got put down, who got passed over, who was sucking up to whom, the stars of the day, the inflated reputations, rickety beds that were taken apart and reassembled under the convulsive sky of Mexico City, that sky I knew so well, that restless, unattainable sky, like an Aztec cooking pot, under which I came and went, happy just to be alive, with all the poets of Mexico City and Arturito Belano, who was seventeen years old, then eighteen, I could practically see him growing. They were all growing up, under my watchful eye, not that it afforded them much protection. They were all growing up, exposed to the storms of Mexico and the storms of Latin America, which are worse, if anything, because they are more divided and more desperate. And shimmering like moonlight in those storms, my gaze came to rest on the statues, the stunned figures, the groups of shadows, the silhouettes whose sole possession was a utopia of words, and fairly miserable words at that. Am I being unfair? No, it has to be admitted, their words were fairly miserable.

But this novel, not least by its searing construction and deconstruction of Auxilio, whom I love, dismantles the mentality that would write off the doom or disappearance of any or all the poets just because of the failure of their words. In Amulet’s centerpiece, Arturo Belano, returned to Mexico City from Chile, were he was imprisoned and possibly tortured during the (U.S.-sponsored) fascist coup against Allende’s government, journeys to a dangerous part of town to free a friend from his enslavement to the King of the Rent Boys. Unbeknownst to Arturo and his friend, Auxilio follows them to bear witness. In the end, Artuto and company discover a sick young prostitute, another slave to the King, and Belano manages to use the authority he has acquired from surviving the right-wing terror to stare down the King of the Rent Boys and free the young prostitute, who recovers in their care.

And here I can’t resist quoting from the review of this novel in the odious New Republic, just to give an example of that frame of mind which Bolaño sets himself and his characters against:

This validation for the mistakes of youth must also contribute to the reverence for Bolaño among young writers. He preserves the songs produced by ill-formed, angry, or just silly ideologies, and recognizes the underlying goodness of their intentions. Auxilio and Belano are faced with a draining of purpose from their actions when they rescue a sick, weak prostitute and set him up with a job, only to encounter him later, strung out from sniffing glue and close to death. But they concur that it does not matter that the prostitute was going to die. “Our hidden purpose,” Auxilio says, “had been to stop him from being killed.” An ultimately futile campaign is not without importance, in Bolaño’s world. A poet may not be able to stop Pinochet, but he can testify to the attempt.

There’s the moral disaster that is The New Republic in a nutshell, so disappointed that these goddamn Slavs and Arabs and Africans they keep trying to liberate with their humanitarian bombs can’t get the inferiority proportion just right: they must of course be a little bit inferior so as to steady the ego of the Enlightenment missionary, but they must not be so inferior as to reject—quelle horreur!—the advice of the missionary on how to live. Fuckin’ glue-sniffing Iraqis. Last time we help anybody! Oh wait! Darfur! Never again! Bombs away!

This kind of corruption of the notion of solidarity has no place in Bolaño’s universe—as if a someone who sniffs glue has no right to live!—and he manages too to recover the concept of Enlightenment:

I know that she has seen many bad things, the ascension of the devil, the unstoppable procession of termites climbing the Tree of Life, the conflict between the Enlightenment and the Shadow or the Empire or the Kingdom of Order, which are all proper names for the irrational stain that is bent on turning us into beasts or robots, and which has been fighting the Enlightenment since the beginning of time (a conjecture of mine, which the official representatives of the Enlightenment would no doubt reject)…

But a fine conjecture, one which I deeply share, and which warms my anarch heart.

Anyway, the novel has a second set piece, a darker one beyond my comptence, when Auxilio visits the underworld in the form of the recluse artist son of another poet. He tells her the unfinished story of how Orestes, occupying his home country and carrying out a reign of terror against the remaining supporters and relatives of his mother’s lover, nevertheless falls madly in love with the daughter of Clytemnestra and Aegisthus. The coldly calculating Electra demands that this girl be dispatched, but Orestes resists and tries to plot her escape. I don’t know whether this is some sort of allegory for the various right-wing dictatorships of Latin America, but it suggests at any rate a reframing of the recovery of Enlightenment, and a taking sides against Orestes and Electra and Apollo and the deceptive reign of cold law which their actions instituted in Athens. It’s worth mentioning that Orestes only mentions the Furies once, but he refers to them as the Erinyes rather than as the Eumenides: that is, he does not call them the kindly ones. And the kindliest one, Auxilio, who calls herself “the mother of Mexican poetry,” though she is not Mexican and neither is Belano/Bolaño, might herself, as witness, be the revenge of the family of poets, that is, the family of man, on the kingdom of Order, who are men too, and have spilled the blood of men, that is, family blood.

The novel’s final set piece is Auxilio’s prophecy, delivered to a voice questioning her while she hallucinates an icebound landscape. She foretells the fates of the twentieth century’s writers:

Vladimir Mayakovsky shall come back into fashion around the year 2150. James Joyce shall be reincarnated as a Chinese boy in the year 2124. Thomas Mann shall become an Ecuadorian pharmacist in the year 2101.

It continues in this vein for another three pages, until Auxilio has to stop and explain to the confused voice that “Alice Sheldon” was the real name of James Tiptree, Jr., which (speaking of my cultural capital) I already knew.

The governing sentiment is almost too familiar to express, but despite its familiarity it has gained no purchase on a world run by the kinds of idiots who read The New Republic. Poetry, even that written by stupid poets who flatter tyrants, is a utopia, one where the Auxilios of the world and the glue-sniffers and down-at-heel visionaries will find permanent citizenship and a stipend to boot; and utopia will always return. And that’s it.

In his Nation review of DeLillo’s Falling Man, John Leonard wrote:

In this, among the 9/11 novels I have read, by Ian McEwan, Reynolds Price, Jay McInerney and Jonathan Safran Foer, it most resembles the best of them, Lynn Sharon Schwartz’s The Writing on the Wall, in which, after the divebombing of the World Trade Center, a linguist named Renata at the New York Public Library is asked to add Arabic to her other exotic languages (Bliondan, Etinoi), even as she tries to cope with a crazy mother, an importunate lover, a teenage mute, a dead twin and the child she thinks she lost on a merry-go-round. In both books, the melding of the psychological and geopolitical dreamworlds feels inevitable rather than willed, as starkly elegant and illuminated as the calligraphy of medieval monks.

Now Leonard is not a foolish man. When I was in high school, I used to set my alarm to 9:00 so I could watch his book, TV and movie reviews on the otherwise godawful CBS Sunday Morning. So, even though he did not mention William Gibson’s staggeringly beautiful novel about 9/11, Pattern Recognition, I took seriously his recommendation of The Writing on the Wall, which I’d never even heard of, and checked it out of the library.

If I hadn’t been in the mood for something thoroughly undemanding after a grueling semester in grad school, I might have thrown the book down after the first sentence:

On bright mornings, the sun sliding along her bedroom window stamps the wood floor with a dappled pattern that resembles large scattered petals.

Sliding? Not even the sunlight sliding, but the sun. That’s bad enough, but now the sliding sun also stamps, like some kind of industrial press. The confusion in imagery is followed by a confusion in number, where a pattern resembles petals—felicity if not an actual grammatical rule demands that the singular pattern resemble another singular noun—a scattering of petals, perhaps.

Now you’re thinking, “Christ almighty, what a pedant!” Well, let me tell you that these objections didn’t occur to me on the first reading of the sentence; I just felt that it clunked. I read further, however, and it turns out that, just as Leonard had written, the protoganist, gifted with a preternatural facility for language-learning, works as a linguist for the New York Public Library, and she abhors any imprecise or obfuscatory use of language. This conceit unfortunately sets Schwartz a higher bar than she can clear.

However, except in a banal sense, the primary unit of meaning in a novel is not the individual word or even the sentence. I reject the Nabokovian modernist dogma that every sentence in a novel must have all the sonic and imagistic richness of a line of poetry. The language of novels is cumulative in effect and produces, over and above any local pleasures, a global sense of character, situation and mood. (Christ, what an old-fashioned thing to write; they’re going to throw me out of grad school yet!)

Schwartz isn’t bad at this central task—if she were, I’d have stopped reading. Her problem is evidently a lack of faith in her own skill, because she ruins what could have been a fine, slim, elegant story about the intersection of one city’s catastrophe with the emotional unfolding of one its citizens with a lot of under-developed Lifetime-movie-of-the-week stuff. See, the protagonist is so emotionally stunted because her twin sister was impregnated by her uncle and then committed suicide when they were sixteen. As if that weren’t enough, the couple who adopted the sister’s baby ran off and our heroine had to raise the child…that is, until the child was snatched off a merry-go-round! So not only does our heroine have to deal with the collapse of the WTC and the vicissitudes of her budding romance with a renegade social worker, but also a final confrontation with the nefarious uncle, now dying in a Texas hospital, as well as an encounter with a mute survivor of the attack who may or may be the kidnapped child from ten years back.

There is no need for this concatenation of unlikelihoods. Stick to the emotionally inaccessible heroine, the budding romance, the terrorist attack and maybe-just-maybe the mute girl (shades of DeLillo!). In any case, the only reason that these strained events don’t overwhelm the novel is because Schwarz doesn’t seem that interested in them, as well she shouldn’t be. The sister’s character remains insubstantial, the wicked uncle is wicked and no more, and the years the heroine spent raising her niece are sketched with insufficient lightness given what their emotional consequences must have been.

Schwarz’s story ought to have been far simpler in structure: beginning: Renata meets Jack; complications: Twin Towers collapse, Renata displaces her previously blocked emotions onto mute girl, breaks up with Jack; ending: Renata and Jack get back together. There, a classic romantic comedy, except not so funny.

(What about the objection that it’s indecent to annex a mass slaughter to such a slight tale of private life? Eh, tell it to Homer. All those men died at Troy and I’m supposed to care about Achilles? And yet, and yet…I do.)

………………….

Speaking of romantic comedy, the Gilmore Girls series finale aired last night. The show had long ceased to be any good, but the final episode somehow managed to recapture the pleasantly anarchic atmosphere of the early seasons as it wended its way through the town in a valedictory salute to all of the characters. Lorelai and Luke got together, and Rory went off to be a journalist with the Barack Obama campaign. Thus ends our unconvincing recapitulation of the rise of the middle class and of its moral codes,  embodied, as in Jane Austen, by the smartest girl in the room. (The show, overtly liberal in its politics, is deeply reactionary in a number of ways and is susceptible to Marxist demolition. But save that for another day!)

Since we don’t watch enough television in this country, here’s a Youtube clip of the Luke/Lorelai reconciliation, which was satisfyingly underplayed, thus pointing up its very inevitability (a canny move). I place it here mainly to show that these two can act, especially Lauren Graham:

There now, how can we have a war czar when such romance exists?

The conservative imagination—I’m not talking just about the political right here, though most of them go in; but so do Zizek, Maoists, etc.—most abhors art, abortion and gay sex because these are three images of human freedom from purposeful activity.

If you’re writing a poem, aborting a fetus, getting it from another dude up the ass or getting eaten by another chick, then you’re not going to produce anything socially useful (or, in the case of the poem, not necessarily—the poem, I suppose, could reproduce some kind of “hegemonic discourse”).

When this topic comes up, I sometimes feel a twinge of sympathy for those eco-fascist anarcho-primitivists, who at least like to emphasize how much leisure time the hunter-gatherers enjoyed.

Anyway. Have you heard about the UK’s latest foray into Corporate Stalinism?

Britain’s most expensive state school is being built without a playground because those running it believe that pupils should be treated like company employees and do not need unstructured play time.

The authorities at the £46.4m Thomas Deacon city academy in Peterborough, Cambridgeshire, due to open this autumn, also believe that the absence of a playground will avoid the risk of “uncontrollable” numbers of children running around in breaks at the 2,200-pupil school.

“We are not intending to have any play time,” said Alan McMurdo, the head teacher. “Pupils won’t need to let off steam because they will not be bored.”

I can just about hear him say that. I know the type—though the commissar I’m imagining/remembering is a full-dress nun, an ironically-named Sister of Mercy, who was the principal of my grade school.

I dig the euphemism “unstructured time” too, for that thing which we must not enjoy at all. Will they next monitor our dreams? Can we get a little peace on the toilet, or will they now need to examine our excrements for traces of what they can’t control? What a world! And, hell, I can’t even blame this on capitalism either; communists did this kind of shit too when they were in charge of countries. The sickness that is the desire to dominate goes deeper than local economic manifestations.

So a toast to unstructured time! To fetus-killing, ass-fucking, rug-munching, poem-writing, picture-painting and generally running out of control! These pigs want to suck our souls and we’ve got to keep away from them as long as we can!

One sentence from Michiko Kakutani’s summary of the new DeLillo:

Lianne attends sessions of a writing workshop she runs with a group of Alzheimer’s patients.

Extremity is no guarantee, and this anyway is self-parody. Hang it up, Don. The future belongs to crowds.

Come now, surely this is hidden-camera comedy! This is Ashton Kutcher, not the world’s most prominent cultural critic! But no, it is Slavoj himself:

Zack Snyder’s 300, the saga of the 300 Spartan soldiers who sacrificed themselves at Thermopilae in halting the invasion of Xerxes’ Persian army, was attacked as the worst kind of patriotic militarism with clear allusions to the recent tensions with Iran and events in Iraq - are, however, things really so clear? The film should rather be thoroughly defended against these accusations.

There are two points to be made; the first concerns the story itself - it is the story a small and poor country (Greece) invaded by the army of a much larges state (Persia), at that point much more developed, and with a much more developed military technology - are the Persian elephants, giants and large fire arrows not the ancient version of high-tech arms? When the last surviving group of the Spartans and their king Leonidas are killed by the thousands of arrows, are they not in a way bombed to death by techno-soldiers operating sophisticated weapons from a safe distance, like today’s US soldiers who push the rocket buttons from the warships safely away in the Persian Gulf? Furthermore, Xerxes’s words when he attempts to convince Leonidas to accept the Persian domination, definitely do not sound as the words of a fanatic Muslim fundamentalist: he tries to seduce Leonidas into subjection by promising him peace and sensual pleasures if he rejoins the Persian global empire. All he asks from him is a formal gesture of kneeling down, of recognizing the Persian supremacy - if the Spartans do this, they will be given supreme authority over the entire Greece. Is this not the same as what President Reagan demanded from Nicaraguan Sandinista government? They should just say “Hey uncle!” to the US… And is Xerxes’s court not depicted as a kind of multiculturalist different-lifestyles paradise? Everyone participates in orgies there, different races, lesbians and gays, cripples, etc.? Are, then, Spartans, with their discipline and spirit of sacrifice, not much closer to something like the Taliban defending Afghanistan against the US occupation (or, as a matter of fact, the elite unit of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard ready to sacrifice itself in the case of an American invasion? The Greeks main arm against this overwhelming military supremacy is discipline and the spirit of sacrifice - and, to quote Alain Badiou: “We need a popular discipline. I would even say /…/ that ‘those who have nothing have only their discipline.’ The poor, those with no financial or military means, those with no power - all they have is their discipline, their capacity to act together. This discipline is already a form of organization.” In today’s era of hedonist permissivity as the ruling ideology, the time is coming for the Left to (re)appropriate discipline and the spirit of sacrifice: there is nothing inherently “Fascist” about these values.

Here’s a good rule of thumb: whenever someone starts ranting about “hedonist permissivity,” run fast and far. My only objection to hedonist permissivity is that it implies a permission-granting authority. Anyway, this is the intellectual leader of the liberal-bourgeoisie-hating academic Far Left? Jesus Christ, even Lionel Trilling would have allowed a little hedonism to penetrate his liberal imagination. I guess Uncle Joe and Fidel both outlawed queers, which just goes to show you that even in the glorious and classless future we will still inhabit the cramped, repressed and seamy brains, such as they are, of Mr. and Mrs. Church-on-Sunday, god fucking help us all.

But by far the worst thing about this essay as a piece of cultural criticism is just how wrong it is. He seems literally not to understand how this movie, a grievously and mind-numbingly simplistic allegory, signifies in American culture. The American target audience for this film is, needless to say, not made up of the European social democrats against whom a figure like Alain Badiou typically polemicizes. Americans do not congratulate themselves on pluralism, pleasure, orgies, cynicism, lesbianism, tolerance of “cripples” (nice word there, Slavoj; it’s so radical to be anti-P.C.!).

In US internal propaganda, at least since the mid-’90s canonization of “the greatest generation,” the American people are the noble, self-sacrificing Spartans warring against an overweening global empire. The Persians in the film represent not only “Asiatic” despotism and luxury as in classic Orientalism, which is actually not a very active discourse nowadays, they mainly stand in the American popular imagination conjured up by the corporations for some nightmare Eurabian empire constituted by “Arab tyranny and violence” and “French excess and decadence.” In other words, Zizek agrees with the Christian right on what we should be afraid of, and proposes much the same solution, both of them quoting from Saint Paul in unison.

Cool if you like that sort of thing. (As a permissive hedonist, I would say that.) But you should know that it’s really very stupid.