Grand Hotel Abyss

M. John Harrison (brilliant author, in case you don’t know, of The Course of the Heart and Light) wonders what comes after postmodernism. He writes in his comments section:

I’m only saying that pomo’s had its day as the Great Interrogator, time to look for the next one. Anything that opposes itself to a seamless theory is bound to look, at first, like a return to one of the many competing theories it has selected as its patsies; & pomo, like all the paradigms which preceded it, has many clever rhetorical patches for every possible kind of puncture. It’s been almost as busy in that respect as the Catholic church. At the moment it’s in its predictable Maoist phase, horror of the counter revolution–bound to happen, given that most of its adherents are in their 40s. All paradigms have a vested interest in claiming that they can’t possibly be replaced except by a return to some kind of demonised old days. That’s essentially a threat. But things move along despite it. Who knows what shape they’ll take ?

The reminds me of something Roger at Limited ,Inc. wrote a few weeks ago about people who had truly followed the examples of Foucault and Derrida. When I read that, I wondered what it must be like to be of a generation that experiences Derrida and Deleuze and Foucault as liberating. For me, I only experienced that material as a body of settled dogma to be genuflected toward and then ignored as far as possible.

But there are phases within phases. Postmodernism has been steadily ending and something has been steadily taking its place over the course of the last decade, but it’s difficult, I think, to perceive, unless we impose a somewhat artificial regime of connection among all levels of culture.

The end of postmodernism comes in the mid-to-late ’90s, when it dissolves into mysticism. Remember the ’90s? When Roma Downey was touched by an angel every week just as Mulder and Scully assiduously pursued the truth “out there”? At the same time, Grant Morrison received his communication in Nepal from the fifth-dimensional entities who unveiled the mysteries of spacetime to him while Alan Moore entertained a visit from the demon Asmodeus. And don’t think this is some merely low-culture matter: the gnostic black madonna brought the girls back to life at the end of Toni Morrison’s Paradise too, and the great novel of the decade, DeLillo’s Underworld, culminated in the visions of Sister Edgar and the miracle of Esmerelda. And academia witnessed the elevation of Walter Benjamin, the Marxist who found his revolution in a gnostic theology, to near-saint status.

After this ascension of the spirit, the turn of the millennium clapped like disapproving thunder in every realm: the swaggering macho neo-Hegeleninism of Zizek in academic philosophy, nu-metal and rap metal in pop music, the rise of Warren Ellis/Garth Ennis ultraviolence in comics, and in politics, most obviously, the phony declaration of war between the neoconservatives and their enemy-ally Islamic warriors. After the goddess-worshipping faux-pacific wisdom of the ’90s comes a masculinist stance of violence for its own sake, with or without reference to some telos which will obviously never be arrived at. And now I think people are sick of this, sick of the wars, sick of the posture.

Where do we find ourselves culturally now? Is there any text I could point to that might suggest where we’re headed next? I think there is. Going back to the ’90s, we can find something new coming in texts as disparate as Neil Gaiman’s Sandman and the (admittedly very conservative and not really to my taste) novels of Michel Houellebecq. And now we have the pop philosophy of John Gray and the artpop music of Joanna Newsom. What is it on the horizon? I think it’s a kind of neo-paganism, not in the key of goddess-worshipping boosterism, but one rather that embraces a Homerically tragic sense of life coupled with a pro-pleasure attitude. The Real is acknowledged as that which will eventually bring the darkness down over one’s eyes. In the meantime, one’s creativity is to be cultivated and ethical standards, but not necessarily global or natural ones, are to be maintained. I’m not necessarily advocating this, though I find it attractive, and I find that its crytpo-Saidian Tory Anarchism comports better than a more ideologically-frought rebellion with my own preference for socialism in economics, anarchism in politics, sex-and-gender radicalism in culture and a certain classicism in aesthetics.

Well, anyway, that’s my best guess. And go read IOZ’s post of yesterday for a good example of what this looks like as an honest-to-goodness first-rate poem: “The Defeatists”.

(Caveat: I said already my scheme was artificial, and of course, for example, Gaiman could be subsumed under pomo mysticism just as Benjamin could work his way to some kind of neo-paganism and Houellebecq could be an instance of the new millennial violence. This is just a little exercise in cultural diagnosis, not to be taken too too seriously.)

My life has only just ceased to be scored by the insectoid hum of news helicopters. I sit here typing a mere and disconcerting ten blocks from the televisual catastrophe I suppose you’ve all been enjoying.

People here in the land of “Minnesota Nice” are certainly enjoying it: I’ve never quite experienced the peculiar giddiness, the high spirits and festiveness that enters a population in a moment of public calamity. I was reporting this last night to a friend who called from Chicago to check in, and we concluded that if this was the psychological state of Minneapolis, then Baghdad must be a laugh riot. Nobody went to work today, and everyone rushed, camera in hand, to the site of the disaster, hoping to snap that perfect shot. I, unemployed, walked by but did not pause, so firm is my integrity.

The response of the liberal blogosphere and commentariat has been coordinated and strong. It’s obvious to anyone with eyes that this country is physically disintegrating, and the occurrence of this collapse in a city rightly renowned for its quality of life and public institutions ought to be a startling reminder of the price of endless foreign wars, disestablishment of the public sphere and a sick fetish for sports stadiums.

Oh yes, we have the stadium problem here in Minneapolis. It reminds me of my vanished youth in Pittsburgh PA, where the government put the prospect of two new stadiums to a referendum. The voters, looking around them at a city many parts of which were and are coming to resemble something out of the old Second World, rejected the measure. The city swiftly implemented what they called Plan B. Plan B was, “Fuck you, we’re doing it anyway.” Things are no different up here. I say, if you want to privatize something, privatize sports in all its aspects.

Speaking of privatization, we already see the old shell game being played. Tucker Carlson today advocated having all bridges sponsored by corporations! What a trick: defund public infrastructure, wait till it falls apart, when it falls apart blame government inefficiency, then hand everything over to private interests.

Where, by the way, are all of these super-efficient corporations of neoliberal mythology? Corporations are in my experience vast, grey, faceless, wasteful and arbitrary bureaucracies, dehumanizing and inefficient beyond the wildest dreams of Lenin. (Hence my preferred phrase: Corporate Stalinism.) Enough of this bullshit.

Anyway. A commenter on The Nation’s blast against defunded infrastructure accused the left of not coming to terms with the fact that one cannot have everything. I may not be public-spirited; I may not even plan to vote for Barack “Invade Pakistan” Obama or Hillary “Don’t Say You Won’t Nuke ‘Em” Clinton or any other member of that wretched party; I may want to vomit when Senator Amy Kloubachar says that bridges should not fall down in America, thus implying that it’s just fine and what you’d expect for bridges to fall down in Peru or Indonesia; I may even be some kind of anarchist. But surely, surely, we mustn’t despair so much that we cannot even imagine a collective effort to ensure that the very ground does not fall away from beneath our feet.

I saw at Rigorous Intuition the news that Theresa Duncan and her partner Jeremy Blake had evidently committed suicide. My first thought was, “Who is Theresa Duncan?” But after two minutes’ poking around her blog I learned that she wrote for Artforum a comparative piece on Kill Bill and Lost in Translation that I long ago clipped out of the magazine and taped into a notebook that I’ve been carrying around with me for the last three years.

This particular issue of Artforum was given to me by friends who lived in Portland, ME, and whom I was then visiting immediately after my graduation from college. This was around the time of the beheading of Nick Berg, an event used by the right-wing to bolster the case that “we” were at war with wicked barbarians in Iraq. However, a number of bizarre events surrounding the murder raised suspicions about its perpetrators and their motivation. At the time I recall even moderate liberals wondering aloud if Berg’s murder were not staged by agents of the US government.

While in Maine, I drunkenly opined that Berg was probably involve in the whole unfolding catastrophe, from September 11 to Iraq. On my return home, I took a newspaper article on Berg and, without reading it, cut it into its constituent paragraphs, put them in a carrying case for M&Ms, shook them up, drew them at random and taped them into the same notebook in which I had saved Duncan’s article. (This practice was based on the cut-up technique popularized by William S. Burroughs, in which a text is randomly re-arranged in order to take advantage of chance’s capacity for revealing hidden or implicate meanings.)

My reading of the re-assembled, disjointed article issued only one surprise: the frequency with which Berg was recalled by relatives as being interested in repairing electrical towers. “He was a tower guy,” one relative recalled. This means sweet fuck all, of course, and I am, on most days of the week, a rationalist and an anti-cabbalist, though I have been known to frequent occult bookstores, and my adolescent heroes were the PoMo warlocks Alan Moore and Grant Morrison. Anyway, Berg was a tower guy, and this information sat a few papers’ widths’ from Theresa Duncan’s masterful demolition of Sofia Coppolla’s hymn to the patriarchy (which, by the bye, you can read here.)

What does this have to do with the untimely demise of Ms. Duncan? Well, it seems that she was caught up in some spooky shit of her own. One blog post in particular details her and her partner’s harassment both by a certain “church” which starts with a Scient- and ends with an -ology and by persons associated with a certain rich guy connected with the mob and possibly also with higher powers than that.

There is, I would caution you, no point to my observing these tenuously connected events. I trawl conspiracy theory websites to scare and entertain myself, and only half believe what I read there. I don’t know what happened to Ms. Duncan; I will probably never know; and to be honest with you I don’t want to know. There is that famous moment in The Red and the Black when Mathilde de la Mole elects Julien Sorel to be her lover because he is the only man in the room who might plausibly do something daring enough to warrant his decollation by the powers that be. I am not Julien Sorel. My rebellion against society goes only so far as my commitment to spend as much time unemployed as possible. More and more, I lose my public-spiritedness. More and more, I come to think that revolutionaries talk as much rubbish as reformists.

Interestingly, or maybe not, the only two professors I’ve ever had who showed any interest in conspiracy type matters were quite opposed on the question.

One was a Marxist, an old-fashioned Leninist type, and though he never came out and said so, he seemed to believe that the rise of deconstruction in U.S. academe in the late ’70s/early ’80s, spearheaded by ex-Nazi de Man and inspired by the Nazi Heidegger and the proto-Nazi Nietzsche sure was suspicious. I thought I saw a twinkle in his eye when he mentioned CIA funding of abstract expressionism.

On the other hand, my other conspiracy-minded professor was himself part of the deconstruction in-crowd, BFF with JD, the Dark Lady and others. He was more or less an anti-Marxist, or anti-Hegelian anyway (”Lukacs is boring!” he once declared), and yet he would frequently mention weird goings-on in the Middle East and even once entertained us with a large excursus on Leo Ryan, George Moscone, Harvey Milk, Jim Jones etc.

As for me, I’m convinced that all the more plausible conspiracy theories are true. But this is not really what I meant to say. RIP Theresa Duncan.

He made too many enemies
Of the people who would keep us on our knees
—XTC

1. Abolish the automobile.

2. Abolish the prison system.

P.S. Also expropriate all heiresses and the like…

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.)

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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?

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.

I wrote this essay yesterday and on a whim sent it off to Counterpunch, but evidently they didn’t want it. I reproduce it here, where some 2 million fewer readers will find it than would have had I made the big time!

……………………….

“This crazed, narcissistic worst mass murderer in American history.”

That was how NBC anchor Brian Williams described…not George W. Bush, but Cho Seung-Hui, the perpetrator of the Virginia Tech massacre, on Hardball with Chris Matthews. Williams read from the “manifesto” that Cho had sent to NBC: “Generation after generation, we martyrs, like Eric and Dylan.” The press will seize on Cho’s allusion to the Columbine killers, but more fascinating is the Nietzschean locution. “We knowers,” Nietzsche would write bitterly, or “we moderns.” Is it ironic or is it only predictable that the philosopher who wrote out of an aristocratic contempt for the moralizing mediocrity of bourgeois Europe just before its wreck in World War I should provide a literary style to a student whose fury at the wealthy might have been termed by Nietzsche a sickly resentment?

Cho reportedly wrote the name “Ishmael” on the return address of the package sent to NBC. Network president Steve Capus was unable to tell Chris Matthews the provenance of the name. It comes from Genesis, where Ishmael is the first son of Abraham, borne to his servant Hagar in defiance of God’s instructions. God prophesies that Ishmael’s “hand will be against everyone, and everyone’s hand will be against him” (Genesis 16:12) Tradition holds that Ishmael’s descendants were the Arabs—thus giving early credence for the Christian and Jewish prejudices that continue to animate the violent assault on Muslims that make up the so-called “War on Terror.” Closer to Nietzsche’s time, Melville adopted the name Ishmael for the alienated narrator of Moby-Dick, who took to sea because he felt “a damp, drizzly November in [his] soul.”

Cho’s allusions—including the Hamlet-like plot of his play Richard McBeef, reproduced on thesmokinggun.com—are to a tradition of alienation and despair in Western culture that has been present since Biblical times, but was first valorized and made central in the Romantic era. The isolated, lone, potentially violent young man stalking modern society is a figure not of contemporary films or video games, but of great nineteenth-century European novels like The Red and the Black, Pére Goriot, Crime and Punishment or The Secret Agent. He is an archetype of the individualism and desperation that mark much of the modern era, when the energy of intelligent, restless young men has nowhere to go in a society that values material wealth, business and sensationalism. The image of the “violent young man with nowhere to go” is our pop-psychological cliché about Middle Eastern societies, but wave after wave of school and workplace shootings that have plagued the U.S. for the last two decades prove that this random violence and alienation come directly out of the matrix of modernity. Cho, who was an English major (as the humanities-hostile media keeps reminding us ominously), merely does us the favor of providing footnotes to his appalling activity, even if the NBC president cannot understand them.

“Why weren’t we warned about Cho’s disturbing behavior?” is the question on everyone’s lips. “What are the warning signs?” Unfortunately, there is no fool-proof method consistent with a free society to prevent individuals from committing murder in every case, and creating a culture in which “loners” or “weird people” or “outcasts” are demonized and placed under surveillance will not help. Neither will banning violent video games, movies or music, which are themselves symptoms rather than causes of an unequal and brutal war culture. In any event, as we’ve seen, Cho seems to have been as influenced by classic literature and philosophy as by Tarantino or the Wachowski Brothers. This is not because culture induces violent behavior, but because culture, whether Tarantino or Stendhal, expresses the violence and pain of a society. Cho’s actions are not singular; they fit a pattern of mass murder going back decades, and his words recall an older tradition.

Many pious commentators have admonished us that it’s too soon to begin interpreting the massacre. This anti-intellectual attitude represents a cowardly surrender to the power of chaos and hate to arrest thought. It is an outrage to the human spirit, and perfectly encapsulates the nihilism not only of Cho’s crimes, but of the society in which such crimes are so appallingly frequent. “No one deserves a tragedy,” poet and Virginia Tech professor Nikki Giovanni declaimed to students at a convocation on Wednesday. No one deserves a tragedy, but tragedies are inflicted every day by young people just like Cho. Unlike Cho, those young people are not deemed psychotic by pundits: instead they are celebrated and supported as our brave men and women in uniform. Their official targets too are mostly young men like Cho, considered just as brave and worthy by the beleaguered populations that support them in the absence of viable alternatives. Global capitalism, sweeping all traditions, cultures and institutions before it, fragmenting societies and exacerbating inequality, has brought us to this abyss, and this abyss stares back in the ubiquitous image of a gun-wielding young murderer. The nightmare of the nineteenth century is not over. The nightmare of the twenty-first is just beginning.

“People in this country,” my immigrant grandmother once said, “so stupid, you can’t believe.”

One mark of the know-nothing American tradition is ignorance of history. The pleasure and power of understanding where our things and thoughts came from escapes so many of my fellow Americans. They wouldn’t understand the joy I’ve taken in reading Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman during the ritual slaughter of the appointed racist/sexist, Mr. Imus, and the discussion over whether or not blogs ought to be regulated, controlled, monitored, self-policed, etc.

The foundational text of Euro-American feminism seethes and squirms with Wollstonecraft’s loathing of those of her gender (she uses the word “sex,” but she means “gender” very much in its contemporary sense) who pant, faint, cry and generally go about like invalids to whom the sight of a mouse is more threatening than the prospects of sin or stupidity. Wollstonecraft founded a humanist Enlightenment feminism that probably died with Andrea Dworkin. I realize that the latter is not often associated with humanism or the Enlightenment, and maybe she would have refused the terms, but her insistence on concrete legal rights and redresses coupled with an understanding that the law would never be enough to protect women if the state were patriarchal put her in a very different philosophical tradition from the group-therapy model of feminism promoted by today’s media-military-industrial complex.

Under the new regime, facts and material conditions pall before our collective feelings—and how do we know how we collectively feel? Well, some corporate or government big-wig will tell us. Luckily, we’ve got enough big-wigs to go with every consumer preference. You want “a racist blowhard”? A “black prophet”? A “concerned mother”? An “artist who keeps it real”? Oh, we’ve got all of those in the political mall. But be sure you stay in the mall! You wouldn’t like it outside! Wollstonecraft saw through this trick in 1791, but we have yet to catch up with her.

Meanwhile, Alexander Cockburn quotes Snoop Dogg, keeping it real:

It’s a completely different scenario. [Rappers] are not talking about no collegiate basketball girls who have made it to the next level in education and sports. We’re talking about ho’s that’s in the ‘hood that ain’t doing shit, that’s trying to get a nigga for his money. These are two separate things. First of all, we ain’t no old-ass white men that sit up on MSNBC going hard on black girls. We are rappers that have these songs coming from our minds and our souls that are relevant to what we feel. I will not let them muthafuckas say we in the same league as him. Kick him off the air forever. Ban him like they did ‘Pacman’ Jones. They kicked him out the [National Football] League for the whole season [for numerous violations of the NFL's personal-conduct policy, including multiple arrests], but this punk gets to get on the air and call black women ‘nappy-headed ho’s.’

So the problem is not that Don Imus, who of course has a trail of racist and sexist slime going back decades, called a group of African-American women by a degrading name, the problem is plainly that he called the wrong black women by a degrading name. There really are some wretched hos about the place, and rappers know who and where they are when they need to be dealt with, but it really does go over the line when some white interloper dares to use bad language about members of the middle class! My grandmother, who never made it to fourth grade, let alone Rutgers, would understand that one.

Oh, but “class” is such a naughty word, the ultimate one, really. It feels so much better to talk about race and gender—especially when the people doing all the talking, however black or female they may be, don’t have to wonder about their next paycheck or meal.

I would warn Snoop that if, blinded by the dollar-signs in his eyes, he accedes in the culture of group therapy, then artists like him will be out on their asses right after Imus. Because if we must feel good, then we must feel good! And nothing must disturb us, ever! Harsh language, harsh noises, harsh reminders of the people who aren’t going to school tomorrow or who got blown up by an American bomb yesterday—well, these things must be torn out, root and branch. The era of good feeling is upon us, and no one may say anything that savors of a quarrel.

Thus it is with a gale-force sigh that the right-wing media can couple their own ass-covering denunciations of Imus with the happy news of the exoneration of those poor Duke lacrosse dudes, who learned the hard way that you can’t trust the help these days. They should have vetted their strippers with Snoop, who seems to know a lyin’ ho when he sees one.

You see, the middle-managers will stoke our outrage at this or that offensive thing that Rush Limbaugh or Rosie O’Donnell has said while the swaggering white frat pigs who really run the show get on with their business, the business of which is business, remember, as the hos on Snoop’s street are never allowed to forget. And then maybe our blogs will be regulated and our airwaves overseen and naughty words will never come to our ears, even if we could hear them by then, what with the level of blood rising and rising.

Mary Wollstonecraft is spinning in her grave like a turbine. Or maybe the time and the calm of death have mellowed her, and she’s laughing. Whatever it is, she, who said that what we need is not charity but justice, well understood that a corrupt, unequal political and economic system will always produce hate, violence and stupidity. To attempt to arrest the hate, violence and stupidity at the point at which they’re disseminated is a fool’s errand when you leave untouched—and unacknowledged!—the point at which they’re produced.

So I hope we all enjoy our group therapy session while it lasts, because, no matter how good we feel, the bill is on its way.

[Edit: I did not know when I wrote the above that a gunman in Virginia had killed, so far as we know, 31 people. A radio host in Virginia just said to an MSNBC interviewer that those who have just endured the worst mass shooting in U.S. history are in “shock and awe.”

Not an innocent remark, by no means, and not unrelated to the comparatively trivial story just pushed from the headlines by this massacre. When a society and a culture are inherently unjust, that society and that culture produce death.

This is not natural, young gunmen roving around shooting people, though this is what we have seen in the U.S. in the last decade or so. It’s not natural: it’s a product of our society, as are hatred-spewing radio hosts. In our culture, people feel hopeless, restless, angry, alientated. Violence, verbal and physical, is the inevitable result.

No amount of censorship of music, TV or video games will prevent this. Music, TV and video games are ugly and violent because they too are products of our culture and its political and economic relations. We don’t therapy, we don’t need charity, we don’t need censorship. We need justice.]

The other day Alexander Cockburn was on C-Span 2’s three-hour interview show In Depth. (Watch it here.) I have my complaints about Cockburn—it seems to me that Counterpunch has veered dangerously into the territory of anti-semitism over the last few years by publishing the writings of “anti-war” conservatives like Paul Craig Roberts, Ray McGovern, Bill and Kathleen Christison and other such people who believe not that capitalism is exploiting and oppressing the majority of people in the world, but that the United States is a fundamentally good country betrayed into evil by a minority of rootless-cosmo types who exercise their power through something called “the Jewish lobby.” It used to be understood on the left that anti-semitism was the socialism of fools, and too that the socialism of fools is usually fascism waiting to happen. I don’t see why Cockburn fails to understand this, especially at a time when the right-wing is so free with the usually spurious charge of anti-semitism, directed against anyone who dares to call apartheid and ethnic cleansing by their right names when those crimes are committed—as they are every day—by the Israeli government, and excused every day in the country sponsoring these atrocities.

But anyway, I like Cockburn very much as a writer and as a personality. Everybody should get themselves a copy of his great published journal, The Golden Age is in Us: Journeys and Encounters 1987-1994. Whether he’s inveighing against Gorbachev’s reforms, Clinton’s capitulations or Oliver Stone’s conspiracy theories, he’s always fun, and occasionally moving, as when he mourns the death of his mother and of the Soviet Union. A great book.

About an hour into the show, they showed Cockburn on his farm out in Petrolia, California, talking to his horses and his dog. He wore a large-brimmed black hat with a feather in it and gave the cameras a tour of the different buildings and cars on his property. In his office, he chattered to his dog. It was so strange and refreshing to see a real human being on television. A human being is in this case someone who is indifferent to how he might appear on television, unlike the “reality” human beings with which television is now chiefly concerned. It almost makes me feel churlish for pointing out Cockburn’s obvious flaws, as I have above. Such fault-mongering perhaps bespeaks that very desire for (a suitably ironic) purity of heart and intention that television provokes and gratifies.

After their little tour of Cockburn’s property, they listed his favorite writers. I scribbled down the list out of curiosity. Here it is:

Marcel Proust
Stendhal
Nikolai Gogol
Mikhail Bulgakov
Thomas Love Peacock
Gustave Flaubert
James Joyce
Flann O’Brien
Theodor Adorno
H.J. Massingham
Edward Abbey
Ezra Pound
Jean-Paul Sartre
P.G. Wodehouse

That’s a pretty good list, even if it is all white dudes. It’s got variety of mood, mode and affect, and balances a respect for the old canon with an endearing quirkiness (I had to look up Massingham) and even local color (O’Brien and Joyce representing Cockburn’s native Ireland, Adorno and Sartre representing the political left). It’s even got one of my particular favorites on it—Stendhal. You might think me insane for copying this down and commenting on it, but the truth is that I love lists like this—people’s favorite books, movies, albums, writers, etc. These cultural monuments have colors and tones about them, and to see one person’s individual list of cherished items is to see a composite of the colors and tones that make up that nebulous thing called a self. I also like lists in general—what can I say, I was born in postmodern conditions.

Some literary critic once said that the greatest list in all of literature was Miss Flite’s list of the names of her birds in Bleak House:

Hope, Joy, Youth, Peace, Rest, Life, Dust, Ashes, Waste, Want, Ruin, Despair, Madness, Death, Cunning, Folly, Words, Wigs, Rags, Sheepskin, Plunder, Precedent, Jargon, Gammon, and Spinach.

Could be. I was reading something recently and found a list that gave that a run for its money, but now I can’t remember what the list was or what book it was in. Tristram Shandy perhaps, in which case I’ll probably never find it again.

Anyway, what the hell’s my point? I don’t know, something about variety, humor, complexity, a little self-implicating irony. Cormac McCarthy is now famous, having been plucked like an impoverished South African adolescent from obscurity and granted the imprimatur of Oprah, pope of the New Age Church of Global Corporate Stalinism. But I wax furious about the world and I meant only to complain about Mr. McCarthy, a writer of aggressive fatuities on the awful meaninglessness of it all. I base this, I grant, only a reading of one half of one of his books, the celebrated Blood Meridian. I did read that first half twice, though, in deference to McCarthy’s pre-fame adulation by the literary in-crowd (Harold Bloom, etc.), but I was twice repelled by a discomfort brought on by alternating spasms of laughter and drowsiness.

McCarthy writes like H. P. Lovecraft and on some of the same themes, but without Lovecraft’s redeeming schlock. Lovecraft, despite his haunted personal life and occasionally grotesque personal views, never stoops to somnolence. His excesses have always seemed salutary to me, a little jab in the ribs to say, “Hey, fellow white dude, we’re working through some unhealthy fantasies here, but don’t fall too deep into it.” McCarthy has fallen too deep into it, and it’s turned out to be all the pretty horseshit. Various bloggers have been commenting on the first paragraph of his Oprah-selected novel The Road. It goes like this:

When he woke in the woods in the dark and the cold of the night he’d reach out to touch the child sleeping beside him. Nights dark beyond darkness and the days more gray each one than what had gone before. Like the onset of some cold glaucoma dimming away the world. His hand rose and fell softly with each precious breath. He pushed away the plastic tarpaulin and raised himself in the stinking robes and blankets and looked toward the east for any light but there was none. In the dream from which he’d wakened he had wandered in a cave where the child led him by the hand. Their light playing over the wet flowstone walls. Like pilgrims in a fable swallowed up and lost among the inward parts of some granitic beast. Deep stone flues where the water dripped and sang. Tolling in the silence the minutes of the earth and the hours and the days of it and the years without cease. Until they stood in a great stone room where lay a black and ancient lake. And on the far shore a creature that raised its dripping mouth from the rimstone pool and stared into the light with eyes dead white and sightless as the eggs of spiders. It swung its head low over the water as if to take the scent of what it could not see. Crouching there pale and naked and translucent, its alabaster bones cast up in shadow on the rocks behind it. Its bowels, its beating heart. The brain that pulsed in a dull glass bell. It swung its head from side to side and then gave out a low moan and turned and lurched away and loped soundlessly into the dark.

Now I won’t bitch about the commalessness, because I have no a priori objection to such a defamiliarizing device. James Joyce used it, Gertrude Stein used it. McCarthy might well have done us the favor to be as amusing as Joyce and Stein, but I grant him his right to chuck the commas. I draw the line at over-emotional adjectives though: “precious breaths”?—is this a poem by Jewel? And “dark beyond darkness,” well, those are just words. How about “the inward parts of some granitic beast”? Which parts? Can one be in outward parts? And what fable features pilgrims and rock-monsters? And is a rock-monster-swallowed pilgrim’s biggest problem that he or she is lost? Finally, bypassing the affectedly affected diction (“room where lay…a lake”), those “eyes dead white and sightless as the eggs of spiders” have taken us right out of the realm of serious consideration. We might indeed be in an old episode of Mystery Science Theater 3000.

I know that novels, being the privileged artform of the era of land enclosure, commons privatization and the creation of domestic space, are meant to be read silently, but I’ve always thought that a writer ought to try his lines aloud to make sure they’re presentable. One really must read McCarthy aloud! As Harrison Ford told George Lucas, “You can write this shit, but you can’t say it.” The fame of McCarthy will, I believe, go down in the annals of American credulity—not so funny when you consider that antiquarians will behold McCarthy issuing his tough-guy messages about the rottenness of human nature in an era of extraordinary political and social reaction.

So I will just have to take the part of unusual radicals who talk to dogs and admire a bewildering variety of literary possibilities. Oprah can keep her turgid chronicler of the wasteland that Africa and increasingly America are becoming under not some gothic primordial curse but under the very real reign of the wealthy that she represents. You have to laugh.

Oh good. Joe Klein of Time magazine has posted a handy list of the characteristics of what he calls a “left-wing extremist.” This being a new blog, I thought it might not be untoward for me to provide an interlinear commentary on Klein’s list so that we can determine whether I am or am not a left-wing extremist. Who knows, perhaps I will turn out to be one of these raving fanatical moderates responsible for such historical crimes as the pounding of tons of depleted uranium into places like Serbia and Iraq. Klein’s words are in italics.

A left-wing extremist exhibits many, but not necessarily all, of the following attributes:

–believes the United States is a fundamentally negative force in the world.

Well, no, it’s only a fanatical moderate like Klein who would insist on putting the proposition this way. The fanatical moderate has swallowed hook-line-and-sinker the Romantic myth of the nation. I don’t even know what it would mean to believe that the United States is a fundamentally negative force in the world. What, American waitresses? desk clerks? schoolteachers? engineers? adjunct professors? Nonsense. The fundamentally negative threat to the world is the American ruling class and its global collaborators.

–believes that American imperialism is the primary cause of Islamic radicalism.

This is simply true. Not a matter of belief, but a fact, a piece of reality. (I will not use scare-quotes around those words on this blog.) Okay, let me back down a bit and say that right-wing political Islam wasn’t invented in the United States; it’s an indigenous tradition in Muslim cultures. But that the U.S. supported the ISI-trained Afghan mujahadeen in the ’80s, that its support for the Shah after the overthrow of Mossadegh led to the Iranian revolution, that the U.S. sold arms to the Iranian regime in the ’80s, that the U.S. collaborated both with bin Laden’s terror networks and the Iranians in the Yugoslav wars, that the U.S. ruling class continues to support the Saudi regime, all goes to show that right-wing radicalism here and right-wing radicalism there have gone hand in hand for quite a long time.

–believes that the decision to go to war in Iraq was not an individual case of monumental stupidity, but a consequence of America’s fundamental imperialistic nature.

Iraq was a centralized economy sitting on an oil reserve in a strategically crucial region. There were profits to be made and an unregulated wasteland to be created. Only a really fanatical ideologue could believe that this was some kind of “mistake.” (Though there is room to think that things have not gone according to the Bush administration’s plans. In that sense, perhaps they have over-reached or made a mistake. That remains to be seen. But the entire project: no, it was classic imperialism.)

–tends to blame America for the failures of others—i.e. the failure of our NATO allies to fulfill their responsibilities in Afghanistan.

I think he means “e.g.” rather than “i.e.”. “I.e.” perhaps works in the context, but it seems he meant merely to provide an example rather than to clarify or to elaborate a point. I.e., he doesn’t seem to be too knowledgeable. E.g., his next item:

–doesn’t believe that capitalism, carefully regulated and progressively taxed, is the best liberal idea in human history.

To apply careful regulation and progressive taxation to a capitalist economy is not a classically liberal idea; rather, it comes from the socialist tradition and was applied to capitalist economies in the twentieth century mainly because their populations were inspired by socialist ideals. Capitalists, such as corporate shareholders, CEOs, etc., in the main dislike regulation and taxation. It prevents them from seeking the cheapest labor all over the globe, and deprives them of a reason to encourage governments to blow up countries and pocket their resources.

As far as I’m concerned, the greatest liberal idea in human (well, Euro-American) history, one which I perhaps unfashionably think would need to carry over even to a socialist society, is a relatively autonomous civil society (freedom of speech, freedom of religion, etc.).

–believes American society is fundamentally unfair (as opposed to having unfair aspects that need improvement).

American society is fundamentally unfair insofar as it is sustained by a capitalist economy that is largely unregulated and without sufficiently progressive taxation.

–believes that eternal problems like crime and poverty are the primarily the fault of society.

Society is organized human life. Poverty—I mean, people starving, dying of thirst or common diseases—is the consequence of failures in human organization. Crime is a little more complex, as any given crime has multiple causes. (Klein, in the tradition of fanatical moderation, means only street-level crime, rather than such crimes committed by the corporate elite as toxic waste dumping, defrauding investors and/or the public, etc.) However, one would have to be deeply anti-social to think that our collective environment does not encourage or make inevitable such street-level crime as Klein has in mind. Well-fed, secure, hopeful people are not going to be tempted by a life of crime. Ditto people who do not grow up in cultures like ours, which aestheticize, eroticize and glamorize violence.

–believes that America isn’t really a democracy.

“Democracy” can sometimes be a hollow word, especially if it has no modifier. The United States is clearly a representative market democracy. Two things need to be said on this subject. First, representative market democracy is not the be-all and end-all of democratic theory. Some people, the present author, for instance, might think a democratic system that followed socialist principles might be more just and indeed more democratic. Representative democracy certainly beats many other options, but it can be embedded in a free market or it can function in a social democratic or an even more radically egalitarian system. The idea of participatory democracy too, which has no purchase on American public life, should not be discounted either. My second observation: even on the terms of civic republicanism itself, American representative democracy is in bad shape. The deleterious influence of private financing on elections, the consequent imbrication of government with big business, the utterly degraded public sphere all make for a “democracy” that is in fact in the grip of oligarchs. Which brings us to Klein’s next point:

–believes that corporations are fundamentally evil.

Good and evil are religious concepts which are here irrelevant. The relevant point is that, as Klein has implied above, this country is supposed to be a democracy. In a time when presidents and vice presidents of and major shareholders in multinational corporations easily enter political life and start wars which plainly enrich the corporations from whence they came, political commentators like Klein display a worrying (or is it only predictable?) obliviousness to the blatant threat they pose to democracy. The American public did not elect the CEO of Halliburton. Moreover, that CEO has no legal obligation to serve the American public or to make choices that reflect the needs of the commonweal; his only obligation is to the shareholders. Call it good or call it evil, the corporation is certainly not a democratic structure and it certainly has no business having so much influence over the public life of a democracy. Moreover, let us not forget what a corporation actually is: it is a clique of private property owners who have banded together to enjoy certain legal protections and rights. It is in their interest, then, to expand those rights and protections and to extend the domain of private property. When Joe Klein has to pay a couple bucks for every breath he draws of the common air, he will have only himself to blame.

–believes in a corporate conspiracy that controls the world.

A corporation is, as I’ve implied above, by definition a conspiracy. The increased influenced of corporations on global life, from the tin barracks in Indonesia where near-slaves make children’s toys to the war-zones of Central Africa from whence comes the constituent parts of this computer I’m typing on to the lawless violent streets of Iraq where rages a sectarian war fomented by the American state in league with the energy and arms companies, suggests to all but the fanatical moderate that the private property owners who run corporations have been pursuing their common interests ever more vigorously and successfully.

Klein needs to make this obvious observation unsayable by resorting to a word which has been taken out of polite circulation. He needs to call it a “conspiracy” to make you think that anyone who wants to see corporations strongly regulated or else dissolved because of the destruction they wreak is a “conspiracy theorist” who believes that the world is controlled by freemasons, Jews or alien lizards.

But no, like it or not, the world is increasingly controlled by small bands of private property owners. (As for the imputation of anti-Semitism that hangs about all uses of the word “conspiracy,” I should say that in the U.S., the property owners mostly seem to be WASPs!) I think—and many people think—that the world should be more democratic; that is, controlled by the people who live in it instead of those who only zip over it in private jets.

–is intolerant of good ideas when they come from conservative sources.

Strange phrase: “conservative sources.” Does he mean institutions, magazines, political parties or individuals? Well, anyway. Above, I have lamented the fact that our culture aestheticizes, eroticizes and glamorizes violence. Many conservatives would agree with me on that. We would probably disagree on what to do about it; then again, who knows, we might not!

–dismissively mocks people of faith, especially those who are opposed to abortion and gay marriage.

He might have a point here, especially when it comes to the liberal blogosphere. I have no problem with satire, I like to read Voltaire etc., but in the interests of realpolitik one might be better off trying to reach constituencies rather than going out of one’s way to alienate them. Especially since it’s not at all clear to me that people of faith would necessarily oppose some of the socialist ideals I’ve advocated above.

On the larger question, I am with old Karl Marx: we must pass from the critique of religion to the critique of politics. Change the circumstances first, and then people will change their beliefs.

–regularly uses harsh, vulgar, intolerant language to attack moderates or conservatives.

Some do and some don’t. I think it’s largely counter-productive to do so. On the other hand, it really needs to be said that most of the harsh, vulgar, intolerant language that I hear these days is coming from the right. The other day, Ann Coulter called John Edwards a “faggot.” I could be wrong, but I don’t think I’ve ever heard people like Noam Chomsky or Naomi Klein or Amy Goodman or Katha Pollitt or Tariq Ali or even Michael Moore use anything like that kind of language.

Well, it looks like this blog is written by a left-wing extremist. But then, the name does come from something that the communist Georg Lukács once said, so this exercise was probably not necessary.

Finally, I have a correction to make. It turns out that the people pictured in the photo on my inaugural post are not callous members of an aloof ruling class, but rather beleagured members of the petit bourgeoisie, just like the present writer, though to be sure he enjoys his privileges without the threat of being murdered by American-made Israeli-fired missiles. Still and all, not quite “grand hotel abyss.”