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American Life and Letters, the continuing Marin-Pearlman Dialogue...
Thanks for the long note. In general, for some reason, I think American fiction writers (tho not poets, for some reason) have no capacity/tolerance for tragedy, tho one can find it among Europeans and Latin Americans: a deep seriousness. We did have Faulkner and Hemingway and Wolfe and even Fitzgerald, and where that capacity went is beyond me. Maybe it's out there in writers we don't read. The Irish have it, tho I think maybe the British have lost it. Maybe it simply has something to do with fashion and style. I can't quite tell you WHY Pynchon seems childish to me it; it has something to do w/ tone. Even the passage you sent me, tho good, has to do w/ something so unreal when set beside, say, the events of the world -- Africa, China, AIDS, men and women and their various sufferings -- I can't see it as much but a rather monstrous (tho talented) vanity and egomania, perhaps, at bottom, a dream of constructing a private world to replace the real one, like a child w/ an imaginary friend. But that may be my own blindness. More importantly, the suggestions I make to you have very little to do with my own proper or improper solution to things, which is probably not reducible to judgements made from the outside, since those judgements are themselves limited by individual charactor traits and not a trajectory of pure and objective sight. BUT I TRY to suggest to you things based on my own (admitedly limited) impression of yr nature, and w/ Mer, I must say, you did seem ready to settle into a domesticity that was RELATIVELY untroubled by the appearance of sudden beauties. Indeed, yr great and lasting rage wld argue the fury of loss related not to Great Beauty but to Domestic Peace, which I believe you have become far more capable of than before. Even with Adele you were willing to make great compromises w/ her obvious foolishness (I almost sd stupidity) if only she wld stay the night and you cld have a warm body beside you, NOT just for fucking. I know the complexes arise, but I think NOW in yr half-dotage or near-maturity (sd w/ smiling irony) that the complex is strongest when noone real is near, and that what you miss (re Mer and Adele) is not the fictional beauty but a real companion. Whatever the failures or successes of my own solutions to life's quandaries, it does not occur to me, ever, that others should adopt them, nor do I thin that at my (or our) age, they work better than a profound companionship or a private relation to the benifisence or plenitude of the world, which remains, side by side w/ suffering, tho you cannot tell it from many of our (or your) favorite authors. In this regard, to slip away from you as a subject, what is it one gets, say, in Rilke or DHL not there in Pynchon? It is something American, which is at once quite witty and at the same time empty of some quality I can only call seriousness or gravity -- this despite the title of Pynchon's book. And somehow Rilke or DHL touch the soul of experience while Pynchon et all (I think Catch 22 the exception) touch only the surface of consciously shared experience, which makes it a consolation, not a revelation (ie, the passage you quoted). As I age I think the only bks worth reading are those that take me FURTHER than the point I have already reached, and are not about it. For the rest TV suffices, as bad as it is. Yet it seems to use only those parts of the mind Pynchon does, as good as he is. Well, that's enough. Cold and clear today. The thing is to have a way of living that brings you joy or a profundity of experience or a sense of at-homeness in the world (tho of course it shld not be at others' expense) If I sound critical of yr relational behaviors, it is mainly because they don't work for you, not from any moral highground, which I,long ago ceded to the puritans, at least in sexual matters.
Bill Pearlman <bdpearl@yahoo.com> wrote:
Peter--Thanks for yours. Yes, replacements for TV this
reading I do, but sometimes gets me stopped. Pynchon,
though certainly a puer, has the ability to create a
hip language of the wilderness of American life, not
too different from Heller his hero in Catch-22. But I
can get caught in his strange configurations of
Americana, his bad boys and weird supportive and
hateful women, his failed notions of life in the
badlands. It is at some level often slapstick, but
having known him 35 yrs back, I can sense the 70 yr.
old he is now, and sometimes a real feeling sense
comes through: 'Sometimes when he asked, one of the
newcomers would try to tell him where Stray was, but
he couldn't understand them, the words didn't fall
into any kind of sense. The town abruptly became an
unreadable map to him. Since Mexico he had been sorely
conscious of borderlands and lines crossable and
forbidden, and the day often as not seemed set to the
side of what he thought was his real life.' (p. 461,
Against the Day)...
But it's my entertainment for now, big books, what
I have, though tonight a woman is having (a jocular I
think, though painfully weird) Bush TV party, with
pizza and beer. Nice looking older woman who did a
documentary on H. Dean...Somehow often feel your take
on me does not realize your own solution would be
impossible for me and most of those I know, i.e.,
having a wife to fall back on, and the freedom to play
openly with whatever women come along. Would be for
most of us cruel and unusual, I think. So the
alternative in some sense is brief attachments, always
broken up in my case by some newcomer who looks a
certain way when my desire for my regular spouse is
weak and frayed, near death...I sometimes think Sharon
would have endured my departures and affairs, but I
couldn´t have lived with myself knowing I was
duplicitious with her. I know there is an old history
in the bourgeoisie and upper classes of mistresses,
etc., but in my lifetime what I´ve mostly seen is
serial monogamy and terrific problems with cheating,
affairs, etc. as women often don't countenance it and
men get conflicted and there is a crisis. That you
have your own solution is rare, perhaps has a good
side to it, but also what would appear a troubling
shadow as well...Not that that really has much to do
with my recurring complex that interferes with what
you call domesticity. But perhaps these recurrences
are after all not that amenable to change, though
heaven knows I would prefer to have an old lady (pun
intended) to grow old with than be like Fred or
endless other late-life bachelors (there are many down
here) resigned to a slow march toward lonely deaths.
So, in a sense, you beat the game, though perhaps that
doesn´t catch the depth of suffering involved or the
difficulties...
I like your recurring sense that there is a
response to suffering and evil that literature can
partake of, and the best of it probably will always do
so, but isn't comedy (viz Pynchon, Roth, etc., even
Bellow) somehow at the center of a concern that is
still remarkable resilient and meaningful? Not sure of
the answer, and probably Humboldt´s Gift or Malamud´s
Dubin´s Lives, both of which I love, probably don't
reach the heights of King Lear or Oedipus Rex, but
maybe that´s not the issue. I often lean toward the
idea of making a fiction that would sum up things I
care about, but somehow the effort seems
overwhelming...Somewhat hard for me to think of myself
as that bookish, to vault myself for years gathering
little elements for my big novel, etc...
Anyway, life. Sense of world here is escaping me
all the time. Yesterday, beers with Keith, listening
to his ten years in Paterson, N.J. and the life there,
'75-'85, after WCW and Ginsberg, but a good working
class town, and he had a studio for $100 a month, and
women and a working class bar scene, etc...He´s a
great talker, which is what I prize about him, and you
too, at the other end of this. Some conversations
become a kind of thickening of life, a scrambling into
and out of ideas, stories and the pleasure of
speech...Maybe that is what many of us are about,
artists of conversation, speakers who want a listener,
a small audience, interlocutors...Onward...
As ever,
Bill
--- Peter Marin wrote:
> Good you had a full day. Nice games to watch, I
> think. Drama. Class. The best, since the superbowl,
> which follows, has all that hokie hoopla. Too bad
> the season is over. Passes fast! Yes, I know there
> are a few poems of praise in yr book, and there may
> be many more, somewhere, you didn't choose. But I
> think it generally true that yr complexes, as do
> all, and everyone's, somehow slip between the self
> and the natural world, or the world of experience,
> and often interfere. Hard to bring oneself back to
> the pure pleasure(s) of Being -- those at least that
> exist in the midst of suffering and, yeah, Evil. How
> you can read Pynchon is beyond me, which is not a
> comment on his talent, but simply on the relation of
> talen, length and (reader's) effort required. Also,
> I cannot help but see him (as well as other writers)
> as an eternal boy -- strange, the extent to which
> our writers (American) remain, in yr terms, puers,
> not just in terms of endless rebellion against
> wind-mills and
> fictions, but also in terms of slapstick as a
> response to genuine suffering and evil, which is, of
> course, one among many possible responses, but which
> now seems to dominate a literature in which fewer
> men and women grow up than used to be the case. The
> disjunction, say, between Pynchon's book and your
> condition, or mine, or any human's, say, in Mexico,
> still seems to be to be immense; it is literature as
> escape from the world, which is of course not a bad
> thing at all, and sometimes works wonderfully (say
> in CATCH whatever-nine, can't remember) but in
> general seems to me a bother to read more than a
> deep experience. Of course I do not spend much time
> reading Pynchon so my opinion is admittedly founded
> on mainly ignorance. Now readin a Roddy Doyle novel,
> A Star Called Henry, the first pages of which seem
> to me quite serious, bright, witty and Good, all at
> the same time. But then I don't much read novels
> now. I find them deficient compared to life. It may
> be that the
> Pynchon tome like Proust all comes together in the
> end in the exhilaration of a profound ecstatic
> experience. But why bother w/ what isn't great?
> Well, you don't, it is true, have TV, and I must
> admit this has replaced all but first-rate
> literature, and poetry and philosophy, for me.
> Laziness, maybe, pure and simple! Will go back and
> look at the poems you mention. See that Snodgrass'
> book is up for the Critics' award. One of five.
> Think it's collected works or something. Ho hum. Not
> much vigor there. Or risk. Well, maybe you can tell
> me good things abt Pynchon. Not much else. Gonna go
> to late breakfast now. Town seems deserted. Ferry
> old Fred around, but he seems more tired each day.
> Wearing out, maybe. As are we all. Old cars. I will
> give you this: love (or its illusion) brings back
> youth, and something of the light. Be well. Enjoy
> each thing in the knowledge that someday it (or you)
> will be gone. Carpe diem. As shld we all.
>
> Bill Pearlman wrote: Peter,
> Rather full day yesterday, with the games, with
> Betsy and Marne from Boston area. Betsy totally into
> Patriots and was down as they went down. Sort of
> total
> involvement, sports fandom. Both women Jewish, Betsy
> (not Bonnie) the sleeker, but Marne an artist, both
> seem to like me, though somewhat at a distance,
> perhaps. But good company, and full of alert
> responses
> from the three of us. 40s I would think, the both.
> Yes, community is somewhat weak here for me,
> moreso
> with recent disengagements. Could think of returning
> to NM, not sure. Brought to the light. This morning
> wrote about Mexican world as I had a licuado in the
> big market, watched the Mexicans in their behaviors,
> bought a little sunmask made from coco shell.
> Theater
> may be a thing of the past for me, not seeking it
> really energetically, though occasionally get asked.
> Rode around streets of SMA early yesterday with old
> lover Becky, now Rebecca, now into AA, but sweet in
> her way. Another option//getting into AA and whether
> problem is serious or not, finding my community
> there
> as many here seem to do. Thought of asking Becky out
> again, but somehow probably best let go. Another AA
> woman, Judy, I dated some last year, with that
> squint
> about drink. I think it's either in or out, like
> Mormonism. Mixed marriage, mixed blessing. Do find
> simple things praiseworthy, and in book, there is La
> Playa, poem for Willems, Now Here, This, Roca
> Blanca,
> and I can find sweet intersections of the real world
> where I can celebrate the living elements. Think
> probably I have this life, as it is, and though
> recurrences keep me uneasy, it may be the odd
> condition of my own psyche that I must learn to live
> with...
> Anyway, another day, another round of...
>
> Hasta...BP
> --- Peter Marin wrote:
>
> > Rushed to day, since it is Sunday and the games
> are
> > on. Hope you have a good day w/ Bonnie. Here,
> > solitude will reign, w/ all its hidden and
> > interiorized connections. The odd thing abt SMA, I
> > see, is that you have very little sense of
> community
> > there, for all of your visits. I actually have no
> > idea abt how to make yrself a part of the life of
> a
> > (new) town, and for that reason I tend to stay
> here,
> > tho I do think sometimes of spending more time in
> > N.Y. -- that beside the notion of Mexico. But I
> have
> > in some ways, given my circumstances, far more
> > tolerance of solitude than you do, and all of yr
> > deepest pleasures (save sex) -- theatre, workshops
> > -- demand participants and an audience, hard to
> > build from scratch. And you are right: the
> > "blockages" have perhaps an etiology and source
> all
> > their own, buried somewhere out of reach. And yet
> > you have had, always, enough resources or recourse
> > to pleasure and hope to conterbalance them. You
> are
> > rather easily drawn back into the light:
> > not only by women, but by hope (sometimes of
> > women), by the sea, by company, by periodic senses
> > of community. There is that to remember. Yr moods
> > are various. And, yes, women are a way to attach
> > yrself to something that brings you into the
> light,
> > out of darkness. Got to add to that, somehow. In
> any
> > case, have a good day or, since you will probably
> > read this after, I hope you had a good day.
AN ONGOING DIALOGUE
Dear RRR Readers,
The following is an ongoing exchange of ideas between Peter Marin and myself about a wide range of subjects. I asked Peter to describe some of the directions he would want to take RRR and what thoughts about the current state of the world seemed important to him…We invite comments and plan to continue the dialogue…
—Bill Pearlman
Peter Marin:
That good and evil exists, of this there is no doubt. It is astonishment at their existence that strikes me as naïve, i.e: the question, How Could The Holocaust happen? It happens because every human capacity is coded into us; we are not naturally good OR evil; we are naturally Men; and this is the realm we inhabit. This does not in any way excuse Evil or make it equivalent to good. But it denies each of us the smug perch we like to inhabit. WE DO NOT KNOW how we wld have behaved as Germans, or in Vietnam. Our capacity for culpability -- until proved otherwise in extremis -- is the same as anyone else’s. We participate in evil every moment, every breath, as you know, taking advantage of conquered lands, conquered people, human suffering. Even you there, in Mexico, an American. We can't squirm out of it, nothing relieves us of the burden, we cannot -- any of us -- claim a Virtue that makes us better than others. You and I: had we, for instance, been born German, raised in their schools, etc., might we not have thought, like Gunther Grass, the SS was as normal as UCLA volleyball? I do not say this is not Evil, only that we too are capable of it. A late stage wisdom merely acquiesces to the fact that good and evil will be with us always in the endlessness of a struggle that precludes a final victory and ought not to allow us surprise. In other words: get used to it, and then do something to alleviate suffering or counteract evil -- because this is a duty the doing of which, even as we do it, makes us no better than others. Easy to pick on the Nazis, of course. But what abt you and yr pals at The Thunderbird in New Mexico on land stolen from others and covered with blood? No worse than anyone else of course. My house on stolen land, Charles in Nova Scotia (and Oklahoma) on bloodied land, etc. It is not that the Nazis are not evil -- only that we are not stain-free or so good. How do we recognize this and perhaps change it while escaping the smugness and absolutely false sense of superiority we get by saying G. Bush is a bad man? You can't. You gotta live in the world as it is and breathe deep and seek joy and, at the same time, do Good w/o ever once thinking: What A Good Boy Am I! If you can... And what works, what is expected of us, how much should we do? Ah, here is the anguish of being a man. How do you decide what is sufficient, or which acts equal to an awareness of History and Others? Who can tell us? Not a God. Not Jung. Not even poets. Hah! Here is where men should sit late into the night, talking. Here is where we must find the meaning of an "open heart." Here is where a person yearning makes sense and her conclusions and private sense of virtue become insufferable, untenable. Here is another abyss, another edge to stand on, on the edge of the moral universe, coexistent with all others. Lear does not finesse this issue. Or maybe it does. The Tempest does. Bach does not. For him the "Beyond" is the space where God is or is not, and this must perforce be in the most general way a world of meaning and morality. Indeed I would argue the greatest beauty is not aesthetic but moral. Plato thought that. Hard for artists to acknowledge. But I believe it to be so; we have to be educated away from that -- a flaw in our deep superiority. Culture doesn't mean liking Shakespeare; it means in the end a generosity of spirit that acknowledges the Other as equal to the Self. Well, maybe that IS there in Shakespeare. Enough.
Bill Pearlman:
Sounds a lot like last thoughts, in Jung, and others...Final reconciliations...We may be too young for that, but will see about getting it into a form we can use. It's editing and a kind of tough job, but maybe worth it...Tempest is truly a sort of summing up play about a guy whose 'every second thought is his own death.' Final notes before the end...Chilena poet Gabriela Mistral has a poem, Pais de la Ausencia,
(Country of Absence) where she is really talking about the ineffable or a place where she will die, beyond lovers and the earth....'un pais sin nombre'...But yeah, there you are, we are...Can't quite get there yet, have to find an everydayness not quite as undistracted as some of what I think you propose...John, (theater guy) whom you met re a Beat Festival, has lost his lead actress for a show about Joan of Arc which has been doing well, (and which I wrote a review for in Atencion) to some guy who has taken over her life, and is now threatening John, probably for knowing too much. Saw this in action yesterday, and the woman is now pregnant and her family
wants him gone, but they are now legally married...First actual glimpse of potential violence I´ve seen in suave SMA....Now there's a subject with a test of the non-duality clause...How can you think this guy is ok? Or that the Nazis were doing the Jews an historical favor by cancelling them out? (An idea somewhat popular with certain new-agers) I mean to say life has a way of interfering with the
> Kantian/Keatsian capabilities...And applying theater to Bush, what could come of such an analogy: too deadly for comedy and yet the smallness of the character hardly makes for tragedy...It's more like a farce with deadly consequences....But perhaps I have too much sympathy for the idea that there are such things as good leaders...Roosevelt? But perhaps as you practically imply, the opposites come together in old age or death or the final reckoning with 'this great
> stage of fools,' as Lear howls toward the end...Mark it, nuncle...Perhaps the greatest wisdom is foolish, after all...
Bill: Have been reviewing the parts of our exchanges I have -- not all. I mean the recent ones you thought might make a piece. Why not keep it simple, make a little intro that these were culled from a correspondence, then leave them as fragments, each in itself OR perhaps better yet as answers to questions you insert between them. Certainly in at least a couple spots -- questions about evil & holocaust, directions of religions, etc -- these already exist naturally and gracefully. Then you'd only have to doctor yr side a bit, w/ some cutting down, and edit mine, which I could do, for grammar and coherence, not content much, and leave them as something like "Thoughts (or "late-night thoughts" on certainty, virtue and truth -- or whatever... I believe it cld be done easily if we acknowledge the source of the thoughts and leave them then in their original state. Or call them "Meditations on...etc." Wouldn't take much work at all. I cld do my part on my own messages, make yr job easier, IF I have or get messages in a way that I can edit them. Otherwise I can email editing details and you can change them in yr machine. Cld then be posted w/o delay. IN FACT, you could make a little introduction saying we were discussing RRR site or what I would want to do w/ it, or what I thought sld be done, etc and introduce it as an exchange about politics, ideology, virtue and thought. I think it always best to stick close to the truth of the source and leave it informal and avoid the work that might otherwise be done. Whadya think? Cool here, autumn on the way, Albanian yng woman comes and goes (no sex there), no Charles yet (I miss him), Willems okay, back from long vacation on the road w/o excessive pain, happy w/ his existence (settled at last w/ someone who loves him, etc), troops in Oaxaca, Thanksgiving almost upon us, will include a short poem you might wanna post on RRR, only because it's so short. Hope you are well and spirits are rising. What abt apt? You shld be in it soon. Where is it? A good spot? Hang in there. There's always the beach. Maybe yr correspondence will quiet things down; don't let anger get the best of you or it. Poem:
ALEPH
The tide lifts
the ark of desire on the flood
of the blood, the shape
of an Aleph revealing
The All. Remember:
this is the world.
And the dream, of a dancer
grows wings for the heart —
higher now, over the roofs!
What you describe as "final" wisdom (tho who knows what lies beyond it?) can only be reached, MUST be reached, through experience and reflection, a transformation, as it were, of the cells themselves, and must ALWAYS be wrong if adopted wholesale from a master or as an ideology. Thought does tend in the same general direction for reasons we cannot quite fathom, though Plato, Hegel, Kant and others (including Marx) tried to explain that inevitability of direction, without, in the end, compelling success. As for our youth, ah, there we are allowed passion, conviction, intensity, even thoughtlessness and error -- remember Blake and the road to wisdom leading thry, was it, the Palace of Error? But we were never SMUG, we may have thought we knew more -- Freud, Raich, Marx, Jung, etc -- but II believe the intensity of passion, desire and adventure saved us from smugness, however much we may have been assholes. Moreover, our mode was ACTION, ie, a living out, out at least some risk, while all too often in people as they get older the pretensions to virtue remain while action dissipates, or what is natural to the young becomes, as we age, a perversion. Besides, our claim in youth was to Truth, not Virtue, about which we cared very little, and our errors were therefore both more natural and less ugly.
But my general point here is simply this: that it is experience itself, as it honey-combs the cells and deepens both our anguish and joy, than can lead us to a wisdom partaking of Bach, Shakespeare and, yeah, perhaps the sages of any discipline. But these truths of experience must be FOUND, like the truths of love, and, in the finding, they always put to shame or turn to "dirty straw" (Aquinas' phrase) the disciplines by which we reach them. For they are in a sense not ideas "learned" but both a condition of the psyche and a great interior spaciousness of thought that must be "entered" as concretely as one enters a room or a woman. Thus we tend, occasionally, to meet men and women who have BECOME what they profess -- I can think, here, of Paolo Freire, Suzuki Roshi (the SF Zen master), John Seeley and maybe (maybe!) Thomas Merton (though he remains for me suspect) as the few living creatures whose presence seemed to me redolent and communicative of a genuine wisdom identical to the self. They are the only ones I have MET. And never, God help me, writers or poets, though I have surely heard claims made for them.
This condition of being, when it occurs -- ah, does it come from thought or from something inside that guides thought? And would one call it sacred? Maybe. For surely it involves both passion and love and a recognition of the sublime that in its essence transcends the inviting distinctions inherent in thought. This does not mean that good and evil do not exist or that they are identical to one another or that they do not matter -- merely that in thought or being we can sometimes enter a realm where they are for the moment irrelevant, though that does not make them necessarily irrelevant in the world in which we live. If anything, as Plato thought, the far reaches of the journey in question may well bring us into the presence of the Good which shines as brightly as a sun, or brighter still, and illumines daily life as we live it. Plotinus wld say we are then close to God. And evil? One doesn't think of it, not for that moment, or in that space, which does not mean it is trivial or does not exist. It is, if you will, not unlike being (genuinely) in love, wherein the undoubted truths of the world are obliterated by what seems for the moment like a Greater Truth and probably is, though it ultimately vanishes, not because it ceases to exhaust, but because we are no longer in its presence. Perhaps there, in that place, is the wisdom towards which experience and contemplative thought can Lead (or MUST lead), and once having been seen -- directly, in a fashion unmediated by the advice of masters or the guidance of a text -- it stays with us when we return from it, as a living part (perhaps the heart) of the self. Who knows? But this is a journey that must be MADE, from youth to ripeness -another reason I always think, even here, of freight trains: a journey! From what is known to the unknown that lies ahead... Here we are, in transit! But how I hate disciplines and masters! The freights are open to all, the Great Democracy, what Whitman, bless him, understood. And DHL, writing abt Whitman. "The Open Road," they called it. Yeah. "The Open." And "The Road." Where else is a man supposed to dwell?
Bill Pearlman:
Peter—Quite a spiel, probably heartily felt and said. Amazing somewhat to me that the oldest mystical and spiritual traditions say similar things: that there is no judgment ultimately possible, as to the way things stand in terms of superiority; that human psyche at last is limited, unable to make final judgments as to what is good and evil. That we exist is the gist of what we know. Ram Dass had picture of Casper
Weinberger on meditation altar reminding him of what the negative looks like and to add it to his meditation on world & inner meaning...Not Hitler, mind you or even Rumsfeld, but Cap W. I think I will call these meditations 'Against The Smug Perch' because that is quite a sweeping indictment of all superiorities of position, all partisan angles...The best you can to relieve suffering, but everyone caught in limited private responsibilities. Everything finally reduced to a bunch of animals making sounds, no higher knowledge. But the sound of this to me is somewhat spiritual, not soulful, at some level. It is somewhat ascensionist (in Hillman's terms) because it asks us not to sink down into a messy argument about what is best in terms of politics or even morality. We could as easily have been killers, in fact are living out our lives on bloodied ground, all of us, etc...None does offend, Lear says, the beggar and the king are both culpable, the dog obeyed in office...Designer God and superior politics similar if I read you right, both claiming virtuous paths to a grace or knowledge we cannot assume, no matter how rationalized our motives. This becomes a little more complex when you add suicide bombers who apparently think that randomly taking other lives (and their own) is spiritually correct. But yr. Gunther Grass analogy would maybe allow that that is another form of happenstance. Grass, though an SS member, it's been pointed out, did not kill, and was very young at the time, and his ‘conscience of the German people’ writings have superseded his earlier choice, according to one piece I read lately....The Open Heart...Surely there is something there, and one feels it in those one looks to for wisdom, yourself on occasion, Ram Dass, Jim, Charles, also on occasion, myself on occasion in groups, but would this kind of late thinking not have been just as harmonious with truth when we were young and feisty, and why have to endure worlds and trials of what you now call false superiority of position when in fact these older traditions of spirituality (in yoga, Buddhism, etc) have been saying pretty much what I think you're saying, forever?...Didn't Huxley write about this somewhat in Perennial Philosophy? My question yesterday over a glass of wine with Deborah--the good looking retired dancer who lives down here with her mother, who, after a lifetime of heavy battling in several arenas in NYC (ballet, fashion photography, real estate) now wants to quiet her life, and though still attractive, seems like she can take or leave love relationships, though is not committed to celibacy as is H. in Merida; but what a quest to seek close relationship in the quietude of non-grasping, not even for sex--my question to her was when we leave these feisty combative senses of struggle behind, can we really live in a softness and care and equilibrium without that much trouble? These things somehow related, I think, but how to live them out? Is not life bound to be caught up in some kind of messy desire, struggle, forms of attachment that both attract and disturb? Surely there are ways out of struggle, out of dichotomy, out of duality, but what is the cost of that? Something close to death? Keeping still, making the heart quiet by subtle contrivance and an end to striving? Maybe so, and perhaps possible if a renaissance of potential were to become central in some quietly responsive but not embattled form...
...I will try to get these into some form when we have exhausted the topic...Or, as you said leave them in fragmented form....Hasta...BP
Peter Marin wrote:
Well, I leave it w/ you for the moment. Do what you will, let me check it out. I am not sure what I am saying is so different from what I sd in the recent past. I suspect -- I mean this as a compliment -- yr own circumstances and retrospection or reflectopn have moved you in this direction. But maybe that is wrong. I think the attitude I am describing comes naturally with, well, if not age, then "ripeness." Harold Bloom's Shakespeare is not so much Noone as Everything, that is, a psyche that contains within it all other possible psyches and that therefore can
tolerate the existence of apparently contradictory truths, allowing a fullness of Being to occur. Wasn't that Keats' "negative capability"? I vaguely remember that. Kant called these "antinomies": the ultimate questions and truths abt the universe or God or Good and evil in which contrary Notions seem equally true; if you hold them all in a single moment and let the light or the mind play among suddenly all takes on a dimensionality and depth perhaps indicative of the nature of the Sublime or the Universe itself: a vastness in which all things are held, a fecundity in which contrarieties are equally true. You are right that this not needbe tragedy; it is simply
that in Oedipus or Lear the tragic leads to the momentary and final apprehension of the truth of the Sublime (or the all) that renders trivial and unnecessary the preceding drama and suffering, which turns out to have been both necessary and
unnecessary and in some Existential way Absurd. Comedy wld be the joyous apprehension of the All and its beneficent return, a consciousness of the joyous
order of things in which conflict vanishes while we are still around to enjoy it: Pan entering with his flute, the dead restored to life, and all difference
both eliminated and made whole in the dance of life, perceived simultaneously from within it and above. The middle ground wld be The Tempest, perhaps, or this wld be a final statement, a music akin to Bach's, in which all opposition, all opposites, are revealed as passing fictions, distinctions imposed on the Wholeness of Mystery by minds and lives and languages that hold within them the almost necessary errors that limit vision and hide from us The Sublime. And our own lives? Ah, easy enough! The conscientious making whole in action and thought (as in Bach's music) all that presents itself to us as fragmented and opposed... Oh, there is a work for you! We may dream of finding it in women, where it is, no doubt, for a moment or two, but its truest state beckons from beyond evrey relationship, and it lies both inside us and outside us, waiting. Indeed, in place perhaps Jung (in his discussion of the Cross, say) is after just this, though I do not find the Sublime present in the work, only indicated -- though some of it creeps in, no?, in the final ruminations, where the theories themselves seem set aside in the aging consciousness of a mystery that calls into question all that has come before. It is there, in that ultimate Eden, we are meant to dwell, having learned there the lessons of relation, freedom, tenderness, generosity, friendship and, yeah, maybe love. Who knows? It may even be so.
Bill Pearlman:
I save everything. Here you come through with something quite strong, I think. Bach, the sublime, ´the pure poignancy of existence´ is very good. I think I see where you are...Yes, these last few statements, edited, I think would make a dialogue possible, with my questions somewhat edited, and perhaps even more extensive comment from you...I think it's there....Something outside of language. You know they say or Borges says--have been reading Borges personal anthology last few days--that Shakespeare was so many things so much of his creative career that he did not really have a self in some traditionally egoistic sense, that he was like the infinite grains of sand...Like Bach, maybe Goya, living in some kind of rapturous zone of creative power where contradiction is overcome with the integrity of the work...Was thinking of your propositions as somehow Borgesian where he cannot quite get himself out of his fiction, but is struggling for a form within a form....A classic pose for him, e.g., in the Aleph...All becomes a beautiful puzzle, an attempt at transcendent meaning, but of course there is an end to the story, sort of...I can imagine, as when Meredith's sister was dying, an endless loop of Bach playing well into eternity....I think one of the things I barely touched on with Marianela, a very soulful Chilean woman, is the seriousness of this vast potential you
come to here at the end of this note, 'a fidelity to the complexity of truth´ yes and that is what the best of it has been, poetry I mean, Neruda, WBY, WS, and apparently Marianela's favorite, Gabriela Mistral whose anthology I am going to try to read starting today, having taken it out of the library...Maybe there is a track here...I will begin editing the last few exchanges and see what we have and send them to you....But keep at it if you can...
Peter Marin:
Funny, was thinking my comments might make a preliminary piece for RRR indicating what I'd like to see in it in terms of deep reflection. When I talk abt great theatre I had in mind Kant's notion of "the sublime," which, for him, transcends beauty or representation and exists as a mystery apparently including both pleasure and pain (as one) or perhaps -- let us say -- good and evil: that is, a mystery that lies beyond all categories and out of which they come. I think you can hear it in Bach: the genuinely transcendental in the presence of which we are lifted outside of ourselves and our schematic thought and into the presence of mysteries which befuddle both reason AND myth or all attempts to concretize and manage it. It is there we swoon in awe, as it were, and where language fails us. I think Oedipus at Colonnus and Lear take us to this edge, wherein the value of even drama falls away and one is left only with the pure poignancy of existence, wherein the Nothingness to come, as we pause on its edge, renders inadequate every defence we have erected against it, including the meanings we assign to our lives and the virtues we claim. I have made this rather dense but think that is rewards a second reading. My own folly is that I expect men and women -- friends, lovers, TV commentators -- to speak out of this condition and recognition, as if they could! What a demand! And yet... What else is worth listening to? I venture to say it is yr own posture, on the edge of the Abyss, in proximity to Nothingness, that renders to Marianela’s presence and gaze the meaning you ascribe to it. Here we grow serious and demand seriousness in return -- as if we could get it! I want as I age to see it everywhere, even in pleasure and friendship: the deep gravity of a rich meaningfulness that requires of us a fidelity to the complexity of truth in all we say, even idly, and in every opinion... Hah! A modern inquisitor! The cruel Judge of Meaning. Yet here I am... Does that clarify anything. Save this, can you? I don't save all my messages. Maybe there is a piece her somewhere, or casual notes towards a consciousness that might, yes, be posted.
Shooting the Messenger
The righteous right are raving again. This time it is about the NewYork Times for revealing the government's not so secret program to monitor our financial records, which for the record is no secret, it wasproudly presented to the press in 2003 by Treasury Secretary Snow. What is so hypocritical about the right's claim that this information puts our troops at risk, is their steadfast denial of who put our troops at riskin the first place. The New York Times did not use false and manipulated data to start the wrong war with the wrong enemy. The NewYork Times did not claim we were attacked on 9/11 by Iraq. This camefrom the President and his administration. Do those who criticize theTimes think for one moment the terrorists are so ignorant theydon't automatically assume their email, phone calls, and bank records arebeing intercepted and monitored? It's high time to stop blaming themessenger for the bad news and start putting the blame for thiscatastrophic war and tragic loss of life squarely where it belongs, with George W. Bush and his rubber stamp Republican congress.
—Gary W. Priester
Ritualized Stupidity: American Schools and the Culture of Vulgarity
Allow me explain why I believe the American education system, at least in its present form, is doomed to extinction (for members of the religious fringe who believe dinosaur bones were placed in the earth to confuse scientists, you may substitute the objectionable Darwinian term “extinction” with something a little more innocuous like “hellfire”).
In his latest tome The Seven Basic Plots: Why We Tell Stories, a book that is impressive for its almost Tolstoyan length as well as its seemingly inexhaustible catalogue of plot summaries, British author and journalist Christopher Booker analyzes hundreds of novels and films and comes to the sad if obvious conclusion that American stories are lacking in themes of individual self-development and growth; the heroes of such stories fail to become fully mature adults capable of functioning in society in humane and meaningful ways and who seem to seek, as the highest prize, “the approbation of the crowd.”
In Booker’s view, and who would argue with him on this point, the prototypical American novel is Moby Dick, an epic nightmare in which the main character, Captain Ahab, develops an unhealthy obsession with a whale and enlists the help of a crew and three seasoned harpooners to hunt down the accursed beast and destroy it. If Ahab is successful, he will be lauded throughout the Seven Seas as a great hero. If not…well, for Ahab failure is not an option. Is it ever in America? Extremism comes so naturally to us.
The twist Melville gives to this otherwise typical “quest” story is this: Ahab is a dark, brooding character who has clearly come unhinged while the whale, let us not forget, is white and thus a symbol of all that is good and natural and at one with the cosmos. In a particularly vivid episode roughly midway through the book, we see Ahab pouring over his charts, trying to surmise the likely whereabouts of his nemesis based on currents and feeding grounds and so forth, and it is here that Melville describes the maelstrom of the captain’s mind:
…a chasm seemed opening in him, from which forked flames and lightnings shot up, and accursed fiends beckoned him to leap down among them; when this hell in himself yawned beneath him, a wild cry would be heard through the ship; and with glaring eyes Ahab would burst from his state room, as though escaping from a bed that was on fire.
Today the word we might use to describe Ahab is “neurotic.” It’s certainly a fitting word, and one we might use to describe Americans in general. We are a society of obsessives who yearn for the adulation of the crowd. In your mind right now go through a list of films and then think how often they end with the hero surrounded by a throng of beaming admirers. In Moby Dick, of course, there is no standing ovation for Ahab. Both the hero (if he can be called such) and his ill-fated crew are ultimately destroyed. Now, while failure of this sort is rarely treated in mainstream Hollywood movies or in mass market paperbacks and is something that Americans seem incapable of coming to terms with and shun as being needlessly pessimistic (I think the term being touted about these days is “defeatism”), the truly pivotal factor contributing to our collective neurosis is the utter futility of the mission itself. It’s infantile, is it not, for a grown man to seek revenge against a whale.
Perhaps the reason so many Americans cling to unrealistic stories in which the hero is always successful in his mission (Melville dared to do things a bit differently), is because we do not have a valid mythological perspective in this country. According to Joseph Campbell, the noted mythologist best known for his book The Hero with a Thousand Faces, in most myths and folktales we encounter men and women who undergo trials, often horrifying in nature, that change them in significant ways and help them to become productive members of society. The traditional hero is scarred in some way and this scar unlocks the creative potential within. Not so with popular American characters. They rarely change and usually contribute nothing to the betterment of society.
When we first meet Ahab he is already maimed, he paces the deck late at night with an ivory stump, and throughout the rest of story he learns little. The key word here is “learn.” Rather than learn any lessons from life’s traumatic twists and turns American heroes choose to make their injuries the focal point of their existence, turn them into self-destructive obsessions, and then demand to be worshiped as heroes for having vanquished them. Except, you see, most of us never do destroy our demons; the demons destroy us or least drive us to gobble jars of mood altering pills. The pharmaceutical industry couldn’t be happier about the current state of affairs.
Campbell insists that one of the key functions of myth is to initiate us into the sphere of adult concerns. Without a valid mythological model to help us make the difficult transition from adolescence to adulthood we’re doomed to live out the rest of our lives as dysfunctional Peter Pans. As defined by Campbell, a hero is someone who leaves home, journeys into the underworld where he faces many challenges, eventually overcoming hardships, and then returns home to share his experiences with members of his group. In this way the adolescent is initiated into the world of adult concerns, and his triumphs are largely psychological rather than physical in nature.
This motif, common to all cultures, has informed people seeking guideposts along the difficult and often treacherous road of life, but we Americans, never ones willing to accept the wisdom of the ages or the lessons of history at face value, place great importance on materialism, thus altering our concept of the hero. For us the hero is someone, preferably a man, preferably white, and preferably Ivy League educated, who escapes from humble circumstances and, once he has found what he is looking for, never returns to the place from which he came except perhaps to flaunt his newly acquired riches.
Christopher Booker, having analyzed American literature and movies at some length, takes note of this trend and argues that this is precisely where our mythology has gone totally wrong. It’s a mythology that encourages us to abandon friends and family in favor of selfish concerns, fame and fortune and the like, and doesn’t stress the psychological and societal benefits of egalitarianism, altruism, self-sacrifice and so on.
This, at long last, leads me to my first point about education and its inevitable demise. I teach English to freshman at a small private college near Cleveland, Ohio, and I find, having read hundreds of term papers (maybe it’s thousands now, god help me) that students have no concept, or perhaps no interest in, individual self-development and achievement. This is so because, at present, there is a virulent strain of anti-intellectualism running through American society. Because few people read challenging texts for pleasure and write not at all (except perhaps for the occasional angst ridden poem scribbled in a notebook) no one has the capability to think critically or analytically. This makes self-analysis a difficult if not impossible task. Instead of exploring their own individuality, students tend to adhere to and act out the stereotypes created for them by the American mass media, a mindless machine that, in the hands of the ownership class, has no intention of providing acceptable models of behavior for adolescents who are on the verge of assuming adult roles and responsibilities. Where’s the profit in that?
In a recent PBS/Frontline documentary The Merchants of Cool, the producers identified two basic stereotypes marketed to today’s teens, one for boys, the other for girls. For boys it is “the mook,” the eternal adolescent and prankster, the clown, the buffoon, the man-child lacking in adult sensibilities. He is Johnny Knoxville of Jackass fame, Peter Griffin of The Family Guy, Tom Green, Howard Stern, Jimmy Kimmel--crude, obnoxious, vulgar, loud, moronic. For females there is “the midriff,” girls who use their sexual objectification as a form of empowerment. You’ve seen them--Brittany Spears, Christina Aguilera, and the like. Many such “cultural icons” have come and gone in America, true enough, but there have never been so many at one time and never without acceptable alternatives. One might argue that the current generation of teens has passed through a cultural bottleneck in which their “heroes” have been rigorously defined as the mook and the midriff.
Real heroes do exist of course, there is a war on, but teens are unlikely to see any mention of them in the mainstream mass media. What’s more, the teens I teach express little interest in the war and prefer to show their patriotism by shopping. Well, who can argue with this logic? After all, Bush practically made it his strategy for winning the peace. Support the troops? No, support your local economy! So if kids don’t see real heroes--selfless individuals who are willing to sacrifice even their lives for a greater cause--what do they see? Noam Chomsky, the left wing firebrand, says the mass media is teeming with unsavory characters that can be labeled “anti-heroes,” people who have picked up on a trend and try to exploit it for their own benefit:
[T]hose are the kinds of “heroes” that the culture is going to set up for you--the kind who show up when there are points to be gotten and power to be gotten, and who try to exploit popular movements for their own personal power-trips, and therefore marginalize the popular movements.
Chomsky gets right to the heart and soul of the American marketing industry. Find out what kinds of things teens like, set up caricatures to pose as their heroes, and then market the final product to them for obscene profits.
You’d think kids would be savvy enough to pick up on the fact that they’re being horribly exploited, but I don’t think this is happening. From what I’ve seen, the vast majority of college kids try to live up to the stereotypes. Most dress alike and speak in maddening clichés, all of it learned behavior, yes, but these stereotypes have become so internalized that the kids now actually believe that they are true, real, cool, and as we all know if you live a lie long enough it becomes true. It’s very difficult to say one thing and think another. This is what Chomsky calls “cognitive dissonance,” and with the exception of career politicians, few people are capable of putting up a façade for very long. It’s quite unlikely, for instance, that a college freshman has the ability to strut around campus like a buffoon, acting the part of the mook, while suppressing his deep desire to study Shakespeare. This is what George Orwell’s 1984 is all about, Chomsky claims.
Winston Smith, the main character in Orwell’s novel, is suppressing his true nature and playing a part to appease the people in positions of authority, but Smith is an exceptionally rare breed of man and realizes how difficult it is to keep up the act, to control the way he walks and talks, gestures and dresses. Orwell writes:
It struck [Smith] that in moments of crisis one is never fighting against an external enemy but always against one’s own body…And it is the same in all seemingly heroic situations. On the battlefield, in the torture chamber, on a sinking ship...
A schizophrenic crackup can’t be long down the road for such a man, and anyone who has read 1984 has surely come away with an acute sense of paranoia.
Each semester I do not read papers by individual human beings but by mooks and midriffs or people who, like Winston Smith, have managed to suppress their true selves in order to “fit in.” Most essays are completely vacuous. They are lacking in sincerity, intellectual curiosity, maturity, and meaning. The papers are often trivial, stringing together a series of facts lifted from inadequate sources like Wikipedia. The papers fail to inform the reader and never say anything new about the subject matter under discussion. The diction is often informal, consisting of colloquialisms and slang. Students show no understanding of the concepts of thesis, argumentation or persuasion. And because students are incapable of thinking critically about the subjects they encounter in the college classroom odds are they are unlikely to become critical of the consumer culture that is continually manipulating them. This mentality creates a vicious feedback loop: Teens are told that being stupid is a virtue; they then build up a resistance to learning; as a consequence of their resistance, they become stupid.
This is not to say that college freshmen are entirely to blame. Some critics, like former New York City school teacher John Taylor Gatto, have likened the traditional classroom to a vast assembly line that mass produces a work force for the industrial sector. The goal is not to teach kids to think critically and independently but to make them submissive to authority. Teachers judge them not on how well they can analyze the world around them but on how well they are able to take orders and follow directions. There is a lot of truth to this. When I first started teaching six years ago I was aghast by what I saw when read the essays piling up on the corner of my desk. In a panic I turned to a colleague and said, “You know, I feel like I’m just teaching these kids how to follow simple instructions, not how to analyze complex texts.” My colleague had a sullen look in his eye as if to say, “Now he gets it.”
Maybe I do. Mooks and midriffs. A society of vulgarians. And this vulgarity stems largely from indoctrination rather than education. Literacy can help. In December 2005 NBC Nightly News reported that 69% of college seniors are unable to read complex texts. In essence they are functionally illiterate. Apparently reading is of no use to them. In the preface to his book In Praise of Darkness, Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges says that a book is merely an object like any other and until someone actually reads the book it will remain an object rather than something of aesthetic value. Unfortunately, for most college students books are objects, things to be abhorred and reviled rather than read, studied, and admired. Any so-called college level reading is purely trivial. The formula goes like this: Students read a book, memorize a portion of its contents, and then regurgitate the material during exam time. Students never actively involve themselves in what they’re reading. Noam Chomsky says:
The point is, it doesn’t matter what you read, what matters is how you read it….Just reading does you no good: you only learn if the material is integrated into your own creative processes somehow, otherwise it just passes through your mind and disappears. And there’s nothing valuable about that—it has basically the effect of learning the catechism…
For any experience to be truly meaningful, including the experience of learning, it must be internalized. Joseph Campbell writes of this in regards to mythology. In the past people lived with their myths. Stories of heroic deeds gave them a model of behavior, a sense of place within the larger society. For them a ritual was a re-enactment of and participation in a myth. But today, since we have no myths to live by, nothing really resonates in a meaningful way. What we do have is a mass media controlled by mega corporations that teach kids to behave in crass ways. When it comes right down to it, Americans have ritualized stupidity on a mass scale.
Of course kids always have the option of picking up a good book and reading about characters concerned with our common humanity, but mooks and midriffs, conditioned since their natal day to dismiss such pursuits, lack the motivation to venture into those uncharted waters, and so books remain objects, or worse, they become the white whale that must be destroyed at all costs. Regretfully, this will only hasten the destruction of the intellectually maimed heroes of the so-called Information Age, but when the drama is done we may find that a few lucky survivors have escaped to tell their tale. And perhaps the true purpose of college is to roam the incalculably vast wasteland of American culture in search of missing children in need of rescuing.
—Kevin P. Keating
Keven P. Keating teaches English at Baldwin-Wallace College near Cleveland, Ohio
REPLY TO MR. COHEN
In his recent Washington Post article, Richard Cohen laments the shallow mockery of Saddam Hussein’s trial in Baghdad, while chiding anti-war protesters for totally ignoring the “thug’s” removal as, at least, one real justification for the most recent Iraq war. I say “most recent” because Cohen completely overlooks the fact that war in earnest against Iraq began with Desert Storm in l991, and that was closely followed by severe sanctions and “coalition” bombing of Iraq’s superstructure throughout the subsequent Clinton administration, which meant that Bush’s (the most recent) moral authority was already non-existent in ‘03—particularly in light of the pre-‘war’ figure of almost 500,000 Iraqi deaths (mostly children) resulting directly and indirectly from those sanctions and bombing.
I would suggest to Mr. Cohen that no single act of Saddam’s barbarism is credited with as many deaths, excepting, perhaps, the Iran-Iraq war.
It is little wonder, when one ponders the wide-ranging pre-War publicity that revealed the ½ million figure, that Saddam’s atrocities almost pale in light of America’s.
And I would also reiterate another point: namely that it has yet to be proven it did not require a cruel strongman to hold Iraq together as a state. It would be redundant to go into the sectarian fighting, etc., all over the Sunni Triangle, and elsewhere, that currently holds sway over the sad situation that is Iraq.
The simple (and bitter) truth is that America instigated mass murder in Iraq well before G.W. began his own dirty, little war.
And when he wonders, particularly out loud, why Hussein’s trial doesn’t inspire more outrage than it does, let’s recall the fiction proposed by an earlier PR campaign describing Iraqi soldiers throwing Kuwaiti infants out of their incubators.
And before that, we had Grenada and Panama. And before that, Nicaragua and El Salvador. Before that, Chile. Vietnam. Ad nauseam.
And Mr. Cohen might well wonder why Saddam is old hat and doesn’t make a more erstwhile villain.
It is because our militarized Plutocracy, in concert with a popular culture and media dedicated to public policy amnesia and desensitization to violence via virtual reality war games, and such government prohibitions as disallowing photos of returning war dead and televisions’ proscribing grisly war violence from the idiot screen, has been making war on the globe since the end of WWII, and beyond: anything to get our two-cents worth. Or is it our 98% worth of the action?
—Bill Dodd
SPEAKING FRENCH
Recent riots among Left Bank students in Paris against proposed government changes in labor laws revealingly reflect both strong social and political undercurrents in France. They are political insofar as the intellectual youth of the country are unwilling to easily let go one of the historically hard-earned benefits of their social democracy. And while it may not appear that significant to outsiders—lowering the bar on businesses’ flexibility in the hiring and firing of young workers—it is extremely important to the French who pride themselves on having a democracy by, for and of the people—and not of Corporatism, to which business there, and everywhere, has evolved.
It is social protest in that Europeans, apparently unlike Americans, have a much more organic view of their culture, which simply means they view the corporate entity as something that roots in their society, feeding off its institutions and people, and not vice versa, and is therefore totally beholden to it. In other words, why shouldn’t a rich multi-national corporation absorb a few bad apples? Here, we’ve successfully learned not only to adapt to that but we find that they’re usually at the very top of the corporate food chain as CEO’s or CFO’s.
And, contrarily, in the U.S. we go so far as to permit corporations to assume the same legal stature as a citizen. But then, too, culture, not business, is the business of France.
As well, the two main dangers to any culture from Corporatism (government by and for corporations) are control of the political process and manipulation of the social dialogue. In the America of today, one sees the affects of their monolithic “campaign contributions” on the political scene, reducing the parties to policyless prattling at the uttermost and meaningless reaches of a government turned into a corporate vehicle. They, equally, control the social dialogue…by all but eliminating it. This is done through massive media blitzes, a “corporate” media that any longer is only about profit and not policy, and a public that is both pliant and compliant.
And, of course, increasingly among the financial corporate moguls, the lines separating nations are increasingly blurred, if not altogether gone.
In the money game, true globalization has arrived. Yes, one notes, the students in France are rioting, but what of their leaders? They are yielding, obviously, to those very anti-French forces of Corporatism much as the American Congress and Presidency yield to what are equally obvious anti-American Corporatism forces.
No “respectable” political figures will any more talk about protecting American jobs or purely local business interests as this runs counter to the forces of globalization. In a curious and contradictory vein in contemporary American politics, on the one hand we excoriate the U.N., and on the other allow the prevailing business interests that make their home here do their utmost to undermine the nation. To interpose Biblically, if well beyond the canon, the Rapture—introduced sometime, I believe, around l960—will include only the Corporate Elite, in one scenario, who have no earthly place left to go from their skyscraper perches throughout the world and who are no longer responsible to any of the sad, bereft earthlings below them.
GEORGE BUSH JOINS THE GREENS
There is a widespread assumption in America that ethanol (alcohol fuel derived from about any biomass—corn, sugar cane, potatoes, biodegradable garbage, et al) can be used only in small proportions with gasoline to power internal combustion engines. This lie has, of course, been widely promulgated by the oil industry. The truth is, as with Brazil’s “flex” cars, ethanol can be burned wholly (100%) to power them, or in various combinations with gas, automobiles that are increasingly ubiquitous there—where their reliance on ethanol was recently highlighted on the weekly Australian journal, DATELINE, featured here on LINK-TV.
This is particularly apropos the current robbery Americans experience daily at the “gas pump.” And it is in line with that quintessential oilman, George W.’s recent reflections on our “oil addiction.” He has not followed-up on those remarks, tellingly enough.
Now this week, as the NY Times reports the 30-80B government giveaway to the oil giants’ deepwater extraction programs in the Gulf, it becomes increasingly clear Americans must demand major changes in our institutions—the oil business being one of the major ones—and begin to take matters into their own hands and petition even more vigorously our government for alternative energy sources. And I fervently hope the trust apparently placed by many in hydrogen power is not a red herring…
According to the Brazilians, the “flex” car (one that runs on ethanol or gasoline or almost any combination of the two) is easily produced and, most importantly, relatively CHEAP. In fact, GM makes one of the most popular models to be found there. And ethanol, itself, is as easy to produce as a distillery is to run, and it is largely without toxic exhaust.
There is no reason, then, especially given our enormous garbage problem and gigantic agri-business empire, we couldn’t all be driving on ethanol.
It would obviously require investment, and who better to finance this fledging industry than the World Bank and IMF? We all know Wolfowitz; he’d go along. What better way to repay the American public for his cushy climb to the top. Come on! Give us a hand, people! There has to be a way to kick the oil habit, and ethanol is probably the likeliest candidate. And, of course, by far the greatest gain, for Americans as well as the rest of the world, is that there will be no need for future wars, or invasions and occupations, to secure our energy future….
LIAR, LIAR
One can forgive the liar, but not the lie…perhaps. When it(they) emanates from some fool who has learned to hypocritically parrot cracker-barrel American laissez-faire entrepreneurial success anecdotes out of the mouths of Midland, Texas airheads and exploiters, it is hard to get in a forgiving mood. Particularly from this guy just out of Methodist re-hab
repeating his heartfelt, redneck fixation on removing Saddam Hussein, at any cost, and from, as well, that witches’ brew of neocons who comprised the Likud-leaning Pentagon Office of Special Plans—Wolfowitz, Cheney, and Feith.
History is unforgiving on the War Thing. And the dead are slow, if ever, to.
Exactly why George, Jr., flew in the face of his father’s determination Iraq was too unstable to depose Hussein may forever remain a mystery. The Brits, who invented modern-day Iraq near the turn of the last century, knew they had cobbled together an aggregate of inherently unstable factions there. Now the new ‘Iraqi Constitution,’ simply sets out the ‘federalist’ terms for its dissolution. The Kurds, for example, having, under its terms, gained their own state and its Northern oil patch, form, unofficially, Kurdistan—as they loudly proclaim, except to the Turks who have sworn to destroy any such entity. The Sunnis, who presently make-up the majority of the insurrection against our occupation, are left completely out in the cold by the document. And they know it, and will violently reject these results. The Shia hopes for running a united, Iranian-style caliphate (leadership embodying both the secular and religious) is plainly a pipe-dream.
Well, Bush is, figuratively, back to the scene of his earliest political embarrassment, Midland, speaking of his present plummeting in the polls, from the public’s firm conviction they were lied to. They were lied to. New Jersey gubernatorial candidate, Forrester, who lost last week, points to Katrina as the final straw in revealing Bush’s incompetency.
I think that’s plausible.
But be warned. The battle is not over. As I write, they’re making new noise over both Syria and Iran, and I’m certain that were it not for the huge overdraft they’ve written in terms of military and money for Iraq, they’d be back today campaigning for further adventurism in the Middle East.
We have, however, won something. Kudos to all those both contemporary and who got on board this anti-War /Lie train by February 15, 2003. From Robert Scheer who fought the thing for years before a neo-fascist recently pushed him out at the L.A. Times, and now richly deserves his forced retirement, to all those nameless, but hardly soulless individuals, who’ve given of their time and talents to finally see his numbers go to 37% favorable ratings—or, correctly, unfavorable ratings. Time wounds all heels
—Bill Dodd
It’s the Economy Stupid!
That was, of course, Clinton’s famous battle cry for an economy apparently so precarious (a ‘consumer’ economy, remember) that too much tilt and it goes into a tailspin of deficits that sends every true conservative yearning for democracy with a small ‘d’ pulling their hair.
Now we learn, following Hurricane Katrina, the congressional Republicans plan a 35B cut in medicaid and food stamps—and a further 75B cut in taxes on the rich. Can we afford to continue to throw so much business (treasury notes) to a China that is despotic and censorious?
Over and above such concerns, is the racial gulf in our country that Katrina reaffirmed—a racial gulf that is in actuality an economic one.
While no one can accurately predict the outcome of interpersonal relationships, it is crystal clear that where there is economic equity the racial divide rapidly disappears almost entirely. White supremacy is an economic loop instigated two centuries ago. Break that replay and it all but vanishes. It not only goes a long way in explaining Bill Cosby’s lamented absentee fathers and unwed mothers, it’s banishment would largely eliminate these problems as they exist as matters of economic, mainly, learned practices and not, certainly, as innate social responses.
Even with the radical right hard on his heels, Bill Clinton found the means to some degree of balance, despite his eventually kowtowing to them in such matters as AFDC.
The real answer the Millions March seeks is the exercise of simple economic justice: a bit less wealth for the filthy rich and a bit more for the underprivileged. Yes, the radicals point to the poor of NO’s and declare they represent the failures of liberalism, but the truth is those poor people come from generations that were never given any real help (money) or any real hand-up.
The same people point to the European welfare states and scream ‘stagnant’ when what they actually point out is a ‘balance’ somewhat more between the rich and the poor. As Chancellor Schroeder said, preparatory to turning over his office to a right-winger (but not most of the cabinet!), “The people do not want government in their face, but rather one walking beside them.” That is America’s challenge and crying need and cure: a government/economy that walks with the people.
—Bill Dodd
Play it Again, Sam
Bush has got nowhere else to go. He’s got to resort to the BIG SCARE. Hence, his speech of 10-6. The shining democracy on the hill (Iraq) has given way to the terrorist den on the Tigris-Euphrates. I mean, his advisors (speech writers) are hard-edge. They (he) has it now comparable to the Cold War—the confrontation between America and al Quaeda. What would you do if you’d staked your fortune on a salted mine?
And hard on the heels of his speech, NY’s mayor, to underline the Prez, Bloomberg has unabashedly described an imminent threat to his subway system. The story is some captive in Baghdad (Note: Baghdad) told them. You can very imagine the intimate communications that exist between low-level insurgents and al Quaeda operatives presumably in NY.
They’re apparently going to frighten us into submission to their misbegotten policies regardless of our inclination to reason out some of the conflict. You will be scared, Mr. and Ms. America, regardless of your reasoned inclinations. If you don’t yield, you get a night with Dick Cheney and Scooter Libby from which no one ever returns the same.
Wow? We’re really getting deep into this Orwellian (‘Manufacturing Consent’) stuff. They appear to think they can call up the bogeyman of terrorism anytime to obtain the desired results—acquiescence of the public.
That’s a broad assumption. Oh, I realize many similar assumptions concerning opinion manipulation are sound and time-tested, but how long will the public actually take seriously comic figures like George Bush and Michael Bloomberg?
I don’t know. For all their brilliance, I’m not sure Madison Avenue could any longer sell this pig-in-a-poke of the continued occupation of Iraq.
No doubt, there are some terrorist figures out there, but, then, there have been for many years. And even passingly competent intelligence might have prevented 9/11. And there aren’t many avenues left for terrorists that are so ready-made as airplane missiles.
I personally think the American public is just going to have to bear this hardsell for the duration of Bush’s term in office. We’ve certainly
going to hear it replayed over and over—at least through the ’06 elections.
—Bill Dodd
Bush Unveils New Deal
By Bill Pearlman
In a surprise move, the White House announced today that the president has appointed Karl Rove to lead the effort to implement what he’s calling The New New Deal. “I’m tired of hearing how the Roosevelts saved the nation,” said Mr. Bush in a Rose Garden ceremony flanked by Homeland Security Chief Michael Chertoff, and Mr. Rove. “If we’re going to have real security in our country, we need contented folks, not looters floating down Canal St. in a plywood raft. We’ve seen the chickens come home to roost, and we’re agin’ it, Mr. Bushed drawled. “You ask me how we’re going to pay for our program? Simple: We’re going to cut the prescription drug benefit and we’re going to double taxes on citizens making more than 2 million a year. We don’t think this will be an undue hardship on our richest folks. We’re about to prove we can fight the war on terror, the war on drugs, the war on personal freedom, and the war on natural disaster at the same time. My predecessors, including Presidents Roosevelt, Stevenson, Kennedy and Johnson knew how to bring the country together, and I do not shrink from my responsibility as your commander in chief. Any questions?”
—Mr.President, are you implying that Adlai Stevenson was elected president?
—How’s that? Of course he was; my granddaddy Prescott Bush served as his minister of culture.
—Oh?
—You betcha. Any other questions?
—Mr.President, isn’t this a reversal of your tax-cutting plan?
—Let’s not start the blame game. We’ll have plenty of time to let think tanks study the world’s contradictions. My administration is dedicated to the peace, security and freedom of the entire world. We can do it. I’m a generous man; the United States is a generous nation. We owe it to ourselves to make small sacrifices for the benefit of our underprivileged citizens.
And my good friend Karl Rove, who has amassed volumes of unfair criticism, has agreed to spearhead our New New Deal. This will mean school vouchers for our poorest children, soup kitchens in every town affected by the recent hurricanes, and free mountain bikes for citizens who can’t afford cars.
Karl, would you like to say something to the press?
—No, Mr. President, you’ve about covered everything.
—Thank you, Karl. Doing a heck of a job. Mr. Chertoff?
--I’d just like to say, Mr.President, that the levees at the 19th St. Canal are holding. The Army Corps of Engineers has finally done its job, proving that government can transcend the incompetence for which it is justly infamous. And you are to be congratulated, Mr. President, for personally coming to the rescue of our great nation.
—Thanks, Mike. Doing a heck of a job. Good day, ladies and gentleman, and God Bless America.
Dumbo Gumbo
“That was a good speech, Mr. President. Not exactly your bullhorn moment in New York, but close…”
“Thanks, Carl. By the way is that with a ‘C’ or ‘K’? ‘K’ sounds awfully European and existential, I think.”
“You promised them much ado,” Mr. President.
“Yes, I promised them Habitat For Humanity; every piece of federal land that doesn’t have either a mounted statue of Old Hickory or Lafayette on it; five thousand dollar educational amounts just like ones for enlisted personnel who plan on attending either Harvard or Yale; my fondest wishes and most fervent prayers; I’d have thrown in those two-thousand dollar debit cards but they went away with FEMA’s Brownie; I don’t know what else I could have given them?”
“Kerry thought they should have gotten some of the 60B you ordered.”
“You mean Kucinich?”
“Maybe it was Kastenbaum?”
“K,K,K, that’s all I ever hear. Besides, that’s all going to infrastructure.”
“Our Contractors.”
“The agreement says half is for ‘social services.’”
“We’ll divert some of the sand bags from the levees; it’ll free up eventually. Anyway, it’s our man who’ll be ridin’ herd on the operation.
I’ll have Dick overseeing the whole thang. The most transparent man in the administration, besides myself.”
“Dick, the opaque, I call him, Mr. President.”
“Quite right, Carl.”
An analyst for CNN from Berkeley thinks the demographics of downtown New Orleans have forever changed (which polls bear out) , fortuitously for the rich, white city fathers, and the area will take on the character of another Disney World featuring the French Quarter. It’s only racist insofar as whites are completely at sea with poor, black culture and are terrified of young, black men from the ghetto. Toss in a similar sentiment concerning Hispanics, and you’ve pretty much summed up contemporary America’s political demographics. It’s separate and unequal, although abrogated to the extent minorities adapt and assimilate, and not dissimilar to what happens to poor whites in this culture, as well, of whom there is an ever increasing number. Unless they become televangelists. Scratch that, Scotty. Go to warp.
Sadly, the truth is NO’s disaster comes at a propitious time for Bush. Things could hardly be worse in Iraq—so, naturally, things will shortly get worse. His popularity ratings are so low they actually appear to be eating into his base. It’s hard to tell if he’s been personally much affected by what he has seen from Airforce 1 and on TV, but he certainly hasn’t promised the poor anything. (And those that can and do always seem to be in the process of rethinking that decision.) The AG of Mississippi, and, I hear, now Louisiana’s congress, have probably done more real good for people by challenging the insurance companies to pay-up. At least, NO has diverted the media for the past two weeks from the focus on Iraq that
Cindy Sheehan had brought to bear, and that must be a good thing for our Prez, particularly since the line separating the insurgency from general civil war is increasingly blurred. Which means if you’re an American soldier there—you’re surrounded. And the only way out is home.
Underpinning the entire problem, of course, is a lesson to be learned of what happens to a society when the highest levels of its government mirror its lowest common denominators—which is precisely what has occurred in the case of our wealthy, fundamentalist President. Get that? And it can surely be effectively argued that when its culture falters, a nation begins to fail. When a country’s predominant shared goal becomes divine revelation, there are predictably hard times ahead. We’re seeing some of it now. A close conservative friend of mine believes the canary-in-the-mine for our economy—consequently our future—is OPEC’s recent decision to diversify their monetary base, in place of reliance solely on the dollar. (As I recall, possible plans for conversion by Hussein in Iraq from the dollar to the euro, was once offered as one of the “real” reasons for deposing him.) Perhaps these are divine revelations?
—Bill Dodd
Connecting the Dots
It doesn’t make sense to blame Hurricane Katrina on the Bush Administration or even to directly or solely blame the Bush Administration for the tragic failure of government to protect New Orleans from flooding and the slow, ineffective response to Katrina.
But it does make sense to connect this failure of government to the anti-government ideology and policy of the Reagan-Bush presidencies and to the incredibly distorted way in which our Federal government uses the $1.7 trillion it spends each year.
The Bush Administration has done something which no other administration in the history of the country has done: cut taxes during wartime. That is a radical act, a full-blown attack on the ability of the Federal government to fulfill its obligations to the American people. Regardless of whether or not one believes the invasion of Iraq was warranted or wise, it is clear that making a commitment to spend one billion dollars a day on that war and, at the same time, cut taxes was foolhardy and irresponsible. It was the work of ideologues, people who don’t deal well with reality.
This administration has crippled the Federal government, essentially thrown it into bankruptcy. No problem. This administration doesn’t believe that the government is a useful institution, at least not for anything other than waging war and providing welfare to private corporations. Its attitude towards government is consistent with the thinking of Bush supporter Grover Norquist who said, "I don’t want to destroy the Federal government. I just want to make it so small we can drown it in a bathtub."
The problem with that policy is that there are certain, crucial functions that the Federal government is better able to perform than any other institution in the country. One of those functions is to finance the construction of flood control projects of the kind that could have protected New Orleans from Hurricane Katrina. The experts have known for a long time that New Orleans was vulnerable to the devastation that occurred. They also knew what could have been done to protect it. But we didn’t have the public funds or the public will to do it. So the Bush Administration cut the flood control budget for New Orleans in 2005 from 110 million to 40 million. That’s a big cut. But even the 110 million wouldn’t have protected New Orleans from Katrina.
But wait a minute. What if we could have devoted one or two billion dollars to protecting New Orleans? What if we could have built something on the order of the dykes that Holland has built to protect itself from gigantic storms? After all, two billion dollars is only 4 percent of what the United States spends each year on its war machine.
Yes folks, yours and our government spends $500 billion each year on building and maintaining its war machine. If you count all expenditures for past, present and future military purposes, including the $157 billion of interest on the national debt attributable to past wars and military spending, the Federal government spent $715 billion for military purposes in Fiscal 2004. That is 42 percent of the money which the Congress has discretion over, i.e. excluding Social Security and Medicare which are paid out of trust funds. Our government spends more on defense than the next 19 countries in the world combined – that includes Russia, Germany, Japan, China and all of Europe. Compare that with Sweden which spends about five percent of its Federal budget on the military.
No wonder we don’t provide healthcare to all of our citizens. No wonder 20 percent of our children live in poverty. Is it possible that this is a partial explanation for the fact that our murder rate is eight times as large as that of any other country in the industrialized world or that our incarceration rate is four times that of the next highest country -–Russia – and 12 times as high as that of the Scandinavian countries?
If we weren’t using 42 percent of our Federal budget to finance our war machine, is it possible we could have built a flood control system that would have protected New Orleans from the disaster that we knew was going to occur sometime or other?
Is it any wonder that an administration that doesn’t believe in the value of government would hide the Federal Emergency Management Agency in the Department of Homeland Security and appoint a Director who had no experience in emergency management? Hey, let’s find a place for Brownie. He’s a good guy. Hell, it’s only a government job. No big deal.
But, you say, it costs money to build and protect an empire. Yes it does. Lots of it. And historians are telling us that it is precisely the building and maintaining of empire that contributed to the downfall of the Roman, Spanish, French and British empires.
A hundred years from now, people will look back at this with the same kind of wonder and incredulity we have about slavery. You mean a plantation owner could sell a woman’s husband to some other plantation owner? You mean the slave women were used as breeding stock? You mean the slave children were taken care of by their older siblings, not by their mothers who were too busy working in the fields or the big house?
And in 2105 they’ll be saying? Are you kidding me? They were spending 42 percent of their Federal budget on killing people and bombing buildings? At a time when many of their citizens couldn’t afford decent healthcare and fifteen percent of their citizens lived in poverty and their infant mortality rate was higher than 35 other countries in the world? What was wrong with those people? They must have been really screwed up.
Yes they were. But they didn’t know it.
We’re all to blame for this situation – Democrats, Republicans, Christians, Muslims, southerners, westerners, bankers, teachers, cowboys, truck drivers, capitalists, tree-huggers, hawks and doves. To the extent that elections are fair – and I think they basically are - we have elected the people who have made these decisions. Many of the decisions that led to this were virtually impossible to avoid, given our ascendancy to the position of world’s only superpower.
But let’s be honest about this. Let’s take to heart M. Scott Peck’s definition of evil as "people who don’t own their imperfection." Let’s look the truth in the face. In 1989 when the Soviet Union collapsed and we no longer had any enemies capable of hurting us, we could have devoted ourselves to shoring up the United Nations and turning it into a truly effective mechanism for resolving inter-governmental conflict and for dealing with the threats of terrorism and ethnic cleansing. We would have had to give up some of our sovereignty and transferred some of those military expenditures to the UN. Had we done that we could have used the UN to track down Osama Bin Laden and bring him to justice. Of course, we can always say, "Well, no other empire ever did that before." But we could have done it. And we didn’t.
And we could have heeded President Eisenhower’s warning that we were in danger of falling prey to a coalition of the military establishment and the defense industry which would suck up funds that were needed for education, healthcare, employment programs, highways, bridges, schools and, yes, flood control. But we didn’t.
We’re not nearly in as good a shape as we think we are. We aren’t even close to being the best country in the world. As Morris Berman has written in The Twilight of American Culture, we are a country that is in decline. We meet each of his criteria of a dying culture:
- Increasing inequality of wealth and living standards.
- Diminished returns to society from investments in technology (e.g. spending 500 billion a year on the war machine instead of helping our people).
- A dumbing down of the citizenry.
- Decrease in spiritual sensibility
The first step in changing is being aware of what is true. It’s time we took the blinders off and woke up to a reality that is not all that pretty. And did something about it.
The task before us is to gracefully give up some of our relative dominance in the world, allow other countries like China to have their place in the sun and begin to use our great people and resources to help our own citizens lead better lives. That will require making sure that our corporations are free to compete effectively in the world economy. But it doesn’t require that we push other countries around as we have been doing for the past 40 years.
Al Galves
Las Cruces, NM 88011
The Battle of New Orleans
Katrina (the Storm) goes, in part, a long way in illustrating just how a cautious military foreign policy can strategically prevent a nation’s flanks being exposed in the event of domestic catastrophe. There can be no doubt expeditious life-saving national guard response was delayed in going to the aid of New Orleans due to our huge commitment in Iraq.
But particularly when one also considers the enormous pork barrel spending of the Republicans in congress recently, it is quite clear “conservatism” no longer equates with “caution.”
To further illustrate this historic(al) incongruity, I was thinking about having grown up absurd on the Plains, baptized several times in a variety of Protestant denominations, as, I suppose, God sought to get it right in a problematic case. I, naturally, heard many things in those drab, dreary cathedrals, but I never heard even one of those relatively humble ministers ever approach espousing violenc |
