Zizek describes the contemporary distance in engagement as “chocolate laxative” political activity (and not just political activity but all forms of modern life seem to fall under this rubric). Chocolate Laxative because the logic contained in this idea is that of getting the desired results without having to suffer through the unpleasantness en route to them. Other manifestations include:
Robespierre’s jab that the moderates wanted a revolution without a revolution
Starbucks’ and Tom’s Shoes’ P.R. campaigns which suggest you can serve social justice by being more of a consumer (ethos water at SB and the shoes to South America at TS, thus the more you buy the better you are as a kind of Jujutsu of the old consumer whore guilt)
The entire green movement which operates on the absurd notion that a change in the mode of consumption can avert the catastrophe promised by the system
The atrocious book by Julia Moulden, “We are the New Radicals”, and its opening thesis which states positively the dynamic Zizek is using to criticize this vapid mentality: “How we earn our living can actually become the way we give back.”
We agree with Zizek’s critique and recommend it. However, an addition needs to be made. Thus we formulate the following addition;
Zizek has made brilliant use of the “decaffeinated” logic of postmodernism in his criticisms of the two-birds-with-one-stone attempts by the new soft left to establish some kind of simultaneous activism. He shows clearly how it works in consumerism where the new ploys by Starbucks, Tom’s Shoes, and many more have created a situation in which the very act of buying simultaneously functions as a kind of social activism. Julia Moulden’s book “We are the New Radicals” is a great case in point. The book is essentially a manifesto of a decaffeinated social conscience. (Decaffeinated, like chocolate laxative, refers to the domesticated attitude toward things that allows commodities to retain their enjoyable qualities but divests them of their harmful elements) The book advises making a career out of youthful discontent; in other words it is a guide book on how to make your social concern market compatible. But this is nothing new. This is simply the extension of the logic of the entrepreneur into the realm of the consumer and activist (note the priority: activists and consumers are being entrepreneur-ized, not the reverse). Take, for instance, an entrepreneur’s attitude toward the notion of citizenship – especially in the case of taxation: while other citizens might justify the annoyance of taxation to themselves by acknowledging the incurred expenses of living in civil society (e.g. roads, infrastructure, administrative staffing, legal systems and so on) and thereby accept the downside of citizenship (taxes) with the upside (civility) – the entrepreneur does no such thing. The entrepreneur, rather, believes that his/her very actions (making money, employing workers, guiding production) – actions which require the trappings of civil society, mind you, to protect his/her property rights and to enforce contractual obligations – are (the actions themselves are) in themselves payment enough for membership in society. After all, they create jobs so why should they pay taxes? They believe full well that in creating jobs and commodities they have already paid their dues! So they assume a position beyond social contradiction – in one and the same act they have both consumed the amenities of civil society (peace of mind in the protection of their property rights and so on) and paid for it by creating jobs.
Wednesday, April 7, 2010
Wednesday, March 31, 2010
What Lesson Is Learned In “The Lesson”
In Bambara’s story, Sylvia, the proud and self-righteous narrator, recounts a time when Miss Moore – a college educated black women on a mission of enlightenment in the black community – takes the children of the neighborhood – Sylvia included – on a trip to F.A.O. Schwarz to show them the profound class disparity of American society in terms they would understand – the price of toys. The lesson intended, then, is pretty straight forward and indeed Sugar, Sylvia’s best friend, seems to get it. To Miss Moore’s delight, after the trip to the toy store, Sugar observes, “that this is not much of a democracy if you ask me…Equal chance to pursue happiness means an equal crack at the dough, don’t it?” But the real lesson for the reader is in the portrait of our narrator, the portrait which emerges from between the lines and from under the first person. It is a picture of the kind of cognitive dissonance which can result from the traumatic realization of one’s own station – an ego deeply scarred in a confrontation with its own class existence and, in the case of Sylvia, its tragic retrenchment.
The narrator’s (Sylvia’s) voice conveys two very important aspects of her perspective, namely: attitude and identity. Attitude first: This story begins and ends with a burning self-righteousness chalk full of all the adolescent elitism and snobbery of a subject well in the throws of an inferiority complex. The invective used in the descriptions of everyone around her shows the destructive nature of Sylvia’s misguided resentment and the underlying insecurity that causes it. The first line makes this clear: “Back in the days when everyone was old and stupid or young and foolish and me and Sugar were the only ones just right…” In other words: everyone but me and Sugar were worthless. When the last line of the story comes, the only thing that has changed is that Sugar has been cut out (for learning Miss Moore’s Lesson) and Sylvia values only herself: “But ain’t nobody gonna beat me at nuthin.” Sugar understood why Miss Moore took them to F.A.O. Shwarz; Sylvia didn’t. And, instead of admitting her own inability to learn the lesson she simply refused to acknowledge that there was anything to learn – just like in the final moment of the story when Sugar wants to race to Hascombs and Sylvia lets her go without any intention of racing and thereby risking a loss. “We start down the block and she gets ahead which is O.K. by me cause I’m going to the West End and then over to the Drive to think this day through. She can run if she want to and even run faster. But ain’t nobody gonna beat me at nuthin.” Thus a text book example of cognitive dissonance is substituted for class consciousness, which brings us to a consideration of the role of identity (in the malignant sense it is used by multiculturalists and pluralists) and its intrinsic link to reactive pride.
The identity conveyed through the voice also functions as an exposition. Sylvia’s poor grammar and rough edged social graces show that she is not well educated and certainly not refined. The omission and mis-conjugation of verbs is very much in the style of the self differentiated African American use of English, and Sylvia appears to put a lot of weight on this identity. Her profound misunderstanding of the lesson is entirely the product of her identity bound perspective. In a pivotal moment, she almost grasps the importance of the trip, only to regress to petty egotistic pride:
“Who are these people that spend that much for performing clowns and $1000 for toy sailboats? What kinda work they do and how they live and how come we ain’t in on it? Where we are is who we are, Miss Moore always pointing out. But it don’t necessarily have to be that way, she always adds then waits for somebody to say that poor people have to wake up and demand their share of the pie and don’t none of us know what kind of pie she talking about in the first damn place. But she ain’t so smart cause I still got her four dollars from the taxi and she sure ain’t getting it.”
- notice Miss Moore uses “poor people” not “black people”.
The petty competitiveness of the ending, the childish spite from the misinterpretation of “pie” in the line before, are products of the eager attempts to maintain an identity, a self-myth fashioned to reconcile self-love and reality. The profound importance of “Where we are is who we are” is lost on Sylvia because she doesn’t want to trouble herself with thinking about “how” she would go about demanding a bigger slice, nor does she want to be reminded of feeling “funny” and “shame” in the foyer of an upscale department store; even though she tells herself that she “got as much right to go in as anybody” she knows better and instead of facing the uncomfortable truth and fighting to undo it, she ignores it, lets resentment fester and throws spite at those around her who want change. A helpful contrast here would be a pivotal moment in Miller’s “Death of a Salesman”. The realization that Sylvia misses is the realization that Biff Loman has when he begs his father to give up his toxic American Dream, his delusional belief that he can make something of himself magically when circumstances won’t allow it:
“I am not a leader of men, Willy, and neither are you. You were never anything but a hard-working drummer who landed in the ash can like all the rest of them! I’m one dollar an hour, Willy! I tried seven states and couldn’t raise it. A buck an hour! Do you gather my meaning? I’m not bringing any prizes any more, and you’re going to stop waiting for me to bring them home!”
Here also the crucial point hinges on identity: what Biff is, his realization of what he is is the key to his enlightenment. If Sylvia were to accept the bitter pill of self-effacement, if she were to accept the fact that “Where we are is who we are” and reject her reactionary amour-propre then she wouldn’t be able to so easily laugh at Miss Moore or the junk man. Nor would she be able to so easily hate “the winos who cluttered up [their] handball court”, because to hate them would mean to hate herself since they were where she was. Sylvia’s inability to grasp what she is, is why she looks on the altruistic acts of Miss Moore with contempt and displays a clear admiration for the self serving she witnesses. So then the tepid diversion that “white folks crazy” not only mystifies reality and veils the true social relations behind amusing cultural idiosyncrasies, it also sews the seeds of an irrational envy that has nothing to do with social justice and will only result in embittered unfulfilling pantomime. For example, wearing furs in the heat of summer is no longer the exclusive privilege of crazy white folks; it is now equally accessible to the hyper-vain of any ethnicity – though this is still ‘not much of a democracy if you ask me.” At the end of the first paragraph, we get a taste of how Sylvia understands the dynamic of the world.
“[Miss Moore had] been to college and said it was only right that she should take responsibility for the young ones’ education, and she not even related by marriage or blood. So they’d go for it. Specially Aunt Gretchen. She was the main gofer in the family. You got some ole dumb shit foolishness you want somebody to go for, you send for Aunt Gretchen. She been screwed into the go-along for so long, it’s a blood-deep natural thing with her. Which is how she got saddled with me and Sugar and Junior in the first place while our mothers were in a la-de-da apartment up the block having a good ole time.”
Her animosity toward the “go-along” is clear enough and it is equally clear that she will see no difference between being taken advantage of and cooperation – hence her bewilderment at Miss Moore’s sense of community responsibility. This isn’t just a bad attitude toward life, it is essentially what the crazy white folks want because a conglomeration of self-lovers will never “wake up an demand their share” as poor people; they will always only do it for themselves which can always be written off as greed, if not completely ignored since the voice will not resound in quantity but will instead irritate with its petty resentful tone. But she doesn’t want to “wake up” because sleeping is easier. Sylvia doesn’t want to care, to be conscious of anything but herself, her own isolated identity. Her creed is her last declaration “ain’t nobody gonna beat me at nuthin”. And beneath this she is telling herself: Forget where you are; focus on your image and serve yourself because that best serves the system.
The narrator’s (Sylvia’s) voice conveys two very important aspects of her perspective, namely: attitude and identity. Attitude first: This story begins and ends with a burning self-righteousness chalk full of all the adolescent elitism and snobbery of a subject well in the throws of an inferiority complex. The invective used in the descriptions of everyone around her shows the destructive nature of Sylvia’s misguided resentment and the underlying insecurity that causes it. The first line makes this clear: “Back in the days when everyone was old and stupid or young and foolish and me and Sugar were the only ones just right…” In other words: everyone but me and Sugar were worthless. When the last line of the story comes, the only thing that has changed is that Sugar has been cut out (for learning Miss Moore’s Lesson) and Sylvia values only herself: “But ain’t nobody gonna beat me at nuthin.” Sugar understood why Miss Moore took them to F.A.O. Shwarz; Sylvia didn’t. And, instead of admitting her own inability to learn the lesson she simply refused to acknowledge that there was anything to learn – just like in the final moment of the story when Sugar wants to race to Hascombs and Sylvia lets her go without any intention of racing and thereby risking a loss. “We start down the block and she gets ahead which is O.K. by me cause I’m going to the West End and then over to the Drive to think this day through. She can run if she want to and even run faster. But ain’t nobody gonna beat me at nuthin.” Thus a text book example of cognitive dissonance is substituted for class consciousness, which brings us to a consideration of the role of identity (in the malignant sense it is used by multiculturalists and pluralists) and its intrinsic link to reactive pride.
The identity conveyed through the voice also functions as an exposition. Sylvia’s poor grammar and rough edged social graces show that she is not well educated and certainly not refined. The omission and mis-conjugation of verbs is very much in the style of the self differentiated African American use of English, and Sylvia appears to put a lot of weight on this identity. Her profound misunderstanding of the lesson is entirely the product of her identity bound perspective. In a pivotal moment, she almost grasps the importance of the trip, only to regress to petty egotistic pride:
“Who are these people that spend that much for performing clowns and $1000 for toy sailboats? What kinda work they do and how they live and how come we ain’t in on it? Where we are is who we are, Miss Moore always pointing out. But it don’t necessarily have to be that way, she always adds then waits for somebody to say that poor people have to wake up and demand their share of the pie and don’t none of us know what kind of pie she talking about in the first damn place. But she ain’t so smart cause I still got her four dollars from the taxi and she sure ain’t getting it.”
- notice Miss Moore uses “poor people” not “black people”.
The petty competitiveness of the ending, the childish spite from the misinterpretation of “pie” in the line before, are products of the eager attempts to maintain an identity, a self-myth fashioned to reconcile self-love and reality. The profound importance of “Where we are is who we are” is lost on Sylvia because she doesn’t want to trouble herself with thinking about “how” she would go about demanding a bigger slice, nor does she want to be reminded of feeling “funny” and “shame” in the foyer of an upscale department store; even though she tells herself that she “got as much right to go in as anybody” she knows better and instead of facing the uncomfortable truth and fighting to undo it, she ignores it, lets resentment fester and throws spite at those around her who want change. A helpful contrast here would be a pivotal moment in Miller’s “Death of a Salesman”. The realization that Sylvia misses is the realization that Biff Loman has when he begs his father to give up his toxic American Dream, his delusional belief that he can make something of himself magically when circumstances won’t allow it:
“I am not a leader of men, Willy, and neither are you. You were never anything but a hard-working drummer who landed in the ash can like all the rest of them! I’m one dollar an hour, Willy! I tried seven states and couldn’t raise it. A buck an hour! Do you gather my meaning? I’m not bringing any prizes any more, and you’re going to stop waiting for me to bring them home!”
Here also the crucial point hinges on identity: what Biff is, his realization of what he is is the key to his enlightenment. If Sylvia were to accept the bitter pill of self-effacement, if she were to accept the fact that “Where we are is who we are” and reject her reactionary amour-propre then she wouldn’t be able to so easily laugh at Miss Moore or the junk man. Nor would she be able to so easily hate “the winos who cluttered up [their] handball court”, because to hate them would mean to hate herself since they were where she was. Sylvia’s inability to grasp what she is, is why she looks on the altruistic acts of Miss Moore with contempt and displays a clear admiration for the self serving she witnesses. So then the tepid diversion that “white folks crazy” not only mystifies reality and veils the true social relations behind amusing cultural idiosyncrasies, it also sews the seeds of an irrational envy that has nothing to do with social justice and will only result in embittered unfulfilling pantomime. For example, wearing furs in the heat of summer is no longer the exclusive privilege of crazy white folks; it is now equally accessible to the hyper-vain of any ethnicity – though this is still ‘not much of a democracy if you ask me.” At the end of the first paragraph, we get a taste of how Sylvia understands the dynamic of the world.
“[Miss Moore had] been to college and said it was only right that she should take responsibility for the young ones’ education, and she not even related by marriage or blood. So they’d go for it. Specially Aunt Gretchen. She was the main gofer in the family. You got some ole dumb shit foolishness you want somebody to go for, you send for Aunt Gretchen. She been screwed into the go-along for so long, it’s a blood-deep natural thing with her. Which is how she got saddled with me and Sugar and Junior in the first place while our mothers were in a la-de-da apartment up the block having a good ole time.”
Her animosity toward the “go-along” is clear enough and it is equally clear that she will see no difference between being taken advantage of and cooperation – hence her bewilderment at Miss Moore’s sense of community responsibility. This isn’t just a bad attitude toward life, it is essentially what the crazy white folks want because a conglomeration of self-lovers will never “wake up an demand their share” as poor people; they will always only do it for themselves which can always be written off as greed, if not completely ignored since the voice will not resound in quantity but will instead irritate with its petty resentful tone. But she doesn’t want to “wake up” because sleeping is easier. Sylvia doesn’t want to care, to be conscious of anything but herself, her own isolated identity. Her creed is her last declaration “ain’t nobody gonna beat me at nuthin”. And beneath this she is telling herself: Forget where you are; focus on your image and serve yourself because that best serves the system.
Monday, March 29, 2010
Thugs and Taxes
Tax journalist and author David Cay Johnston has offered a pretty quaint semi-historical defense of progressive taxation which can be paraphrased as: Independent wealth is predicated on the stability and safety of the city-state (polis, community, law governed collective) therefore the proportional wealth held by one or another citizen has to be justified to the community in general and not the other way round. In ancient Greece, he says, it was recognized that without the polis only thugs would have what they want, therefore within the polis a collective claim to wealth is presupposed and scaled distribution is only tolerated so long as it is merited and not out of hand. This is fine a transient tactic, or quick sell to get people looking critically at the idea of property rights and how they function, but we also must be conscious of what arguments like this implicitly suggest. This is after all a very boiled down social contract argument and like all its far more complex predecessors – from Locke, Hobbes, Rousseau to Fourier and Proudhon – it aims at a proper upholding of the terms or a renegotiation either through discourse or discord. I don’t doubt that a large majority of the followers of these philosophies at one point or another believed a reasonable resolution was possible, but the issue isn’t their intentions but what is implied unintentionally. When you say that before the polis only thugs got what they wanted you are essentially telling thugs or people who identify themselves as such that real freedom comes with retrogression. In other words, thugs will see the polis as a check on their absolute freedom. And since most of the type-A personalities that run the tax evading companies Johnston reports on are these kind of iron will thugs of old in modern dress, or at least see them selves as such, his arguments will not bring them to the table of compromise but will instead reconfirm their efforts to dismantle the polis. The real problem, however, is that many people, not just the aggressive personalities, often are over generous to themselves in fantasy and imagine that they would be benefactors of a little bit of chaos. Hence conspiracy theories: when life doesn’t go as planned it must be a collective agreement that is curtailing your limitless potential. Too often a social contract understanding of society emboldens people to demand more, it doesn't inspire a sense of gratitude.
Sunday, March 21, 2010
An Alternative Approach To Joyce Carol Oates’ “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” ...part 2
Part II
Why can’t we admit a Biblical discussion into this analysis, since it’s assumed to permeate most western literature? It is assumed quite often that Whitehead’s famous notion – the one in which all western philosophers subsequent to Plato are more or less elaborate footnotes to him – is reflected in literature with the Bible taking the privileged seat. There is certainly some validity in this approach (Frye has done much to this end) and when concerning medieval literature it is quite appropriate; serving for inspiration the role ambient yeast filled in the bread bakeries of the time. But in this case, with Oates’ story, it is explicitly inadmissible for two reasons:
1.) Biblical contextualization is by necessity a branch of historicism – it assumes the author to be functioning to some degree under the influence of the text of the Bible. Thus the historical-cultural situation has to be considered, which we have already done in the case of this story – the late sixties was not a great awakening. Moreover, following the threads further back and trying to prove your assumption would only de-situate the text in a pointless attempt to eternalize the Bible once more (something it doesn’t need this story to do) and would make as much sense as reading Confucius or Sophocles in search of couched biblical references.
2.) The effort is precluded by the story itself: “One Sunday Connie got up at eleven – none of them bothered with church – and washed her hair so that it could dry all day long in the sun.” So regardless of the authors inspiration (which we believe is pretty easy to identify as Schmid not a biblical parable) she has subtracted its influence from the story. “[N]one of them bothered with church” does not mean that the events that befell Connie are righteous punishment for her lax faith, because the whole family doesn’t bother and Connie alone suffers. What it does mean is that all those strange moments when she notes something uncanny about Friend, gets an eerie flash of recognition in the way he dresses and talks she’s not vaguely remembering the teachings of the bible but is instead seeing the imperfectly manifested images and sentiments created in the popular culture of the time. Before the arrival of Friend we are given this description: “Connie sat with her eyes closed in the sun, dreaming and dazed with warmth about her as if this were a kind of love, the caresses of love, and her mind slipped over onto thoughts of the boy she had been with the night before and how nice he had been, how sweet it always was, not someone like June would suppose but sweet, gentle, the way it was in movies and promised in songs..”
The most overt allusion to Dylan is when Friend calls Connie his sweet blue eyed girl, which had nothing to do with her brown eyes. This is of course, “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue” the one song Oates admitted was part of the inspiration behind the story. The last Stanza is almost a direct description of the encounter between Friend and Connie:
Leave your stepping stones behind, something calls for you
Forget the dead you’ve left, they will not follow you
The vagabond who’s rapping at your door
Is standing in the clothes that you once wore
Strike another match, go start anew
And it’s all over now, Baby Blue
Friend’s imperative tone, his insistence that she leave for the sake of her family, his disheveled throwback look, his position outside her door all resonate with the image described in the song as if Connie were recognizing the signs of a love promised by the song. Earlier in the song we hear the line: “The carpet, too, is moving under you”, which approximates the description of the terror inspired vertigo Connie experiences when she attempts to use the phone to for help. The very outline of the encounter between Connie and Friend – with a stranger approaching someone at their door – is a recurrent theme in many songs by Dylan.
In “Like a Rolling Stone”
You said you’d never compromise
With the mystery tramp, but now you realize
He’s not selling any alibis
As you stare into the vacuum of his eyes
And ask him do you want to make a deal?
…and…
You used to be so amused
At Napoleon in rags and the language that he used
Go to him now, he calls you, you can’t refuse
When you got nothing, you got nothing to lose
You’re invisible now, you got no secrets to conceal
Several of the images here correlate with descriptions in the story. Related to the “vacuums of his eyes” is the description of Friend’s eyes: “He took off the sunglasses and she saw how pale the skin around his eyes was, like holes that were not in shadow but instead in light.” Early in the story we are told how Connie and her friends enjoyed judging the people around them: “they would lean together to whisper and laugh secretly if someone passed by who amused or interested them” – which fits with the amusement at the ragged Napoleon in the song. One of the host of the XYZ Sunday Jamboree is Napoleons-Son and Friend himself cuts a Napoleonic figure with his short stature and stuffed boots. And this injunction: “Go to him now, he calls you, you can’t refuse” seems to be the very command Friend is trying to get Connie to recognize. He tells her, “I’ll hold you so tight you won’t think you have to try to get away or pretend anything because you’ll know you can’t … And I’ll come inside you where it’s all secret and you’ll give in to me and you’ll love me”. Here we have a reflection of the songs reference to having no secrets to conceal, not being able to refuse Napoleon and through Connie’s response a reference to the language that he uses. She, in response to his command, yells “Shut up! You’re Crazy!... People don’t talk like that, you’re crazy.” The language that Arnold Friend uses and specifically the way he uses it, in his Pied Piper lilting way is, indeed his direct appropriation of the spiritual or ideological authority of the music. So in very much the same way that cult leaders or other rogue messiahs can use a good handle of scripture to manipulate people for whom such a text forms an ethical and spiritual bedrock, Friend is able to manipulate Connie because his injunctions seem to be emanating from the very music that was part of the structure of her understanding of the world.
The description of the music in Friend’s voice is thorough. In the course of the encounter we are told: “… he spoke in a fast, bright monotone”, “He spoke in a simple lilting voice exactly as if he were reciting the words to a song”, “[Connie] recognized … the sing-song way he talked, slightly mocking, kidding but serious and a little melancholy”, “He had the voice of the man on the radio” , “His words were not angry but only part of an incantation” and the final words he spoke in the story were “in a half-sung sigh”.
Why can’t we admit a Biblical discussion into this analysis, since it’s assumed to permeate most western literature? It is assumed quite often that Whitehead’s famous notion – the one in which all western philosophers subsequent to Plato are more or less elaborate footnotes to him – is reflected in literature with the Bible taking the privileged seat. There is certainly some validity in this approach (Frye has done much to this end) and when concerning medieval literature it is quite appropriate; serving for inspiration the role ambient yeast filled in the bread bakeries of the time. But in this case, with Oates’ story, it is explicitly inadmissible for two reasons:
1.) Biblical contextualization is by necessity a branch of historicism – it assumes the author to be functioning to some degree under the influence of the text of the Bible. Thus the historical-cultural situation has to be considered, which we have already done in the case of this story – the late sixties was not a great awakening. Moreover, following the threads further back and trying to prove your assumption would only de-situate the text in a pointless attempt to eternalize the Bible once more (something it doesn’t need this story to do) and would make as much sense as reading Confucius or Sophocles in search of couched biblical references.
2.) The effort is precluded by the story itself: “One Sunday Connie got up at eleven – none of them bothered with church – and washed her hair so that it could dry all day long in the sun.” So regardless of the authors inspiration (which we believe is pretty easy to identify as Schmid not a biblical parable) she has subtracted its influence from the story. “[N]one of them bothered with church” does not mean that the events that befell Connie are righteous punishment for her lax faith, because the whole family doesn’t bother and Connie alone suffers. What it does mean is that all those strange moments when she notes something uncanny about Friend, gets an eerie flash of recognition in the way he dresses and talks she’s not vaguely remembering the teachings of the bible but is instead seeing the imperfectly manifested images and sentiments created in the popular culture of the time. Before the arrival of Friend we are given this description: “Connie sat with her eyes closed in the sun, dreaming and dazed with warmth about her as if this were a kind of love, the caresses of love, and her mind slipped over onto thoughts of the boy she had been with the night before and how nice he had been, how sweet it always was, not someone like June would suppose but sweet, gentle, the way it was in movies and promised in songs..”
The most overt allusion to Dylan is when Friend calls Connie his sweet blue eyed girl, which had nothing to do with her brown eyes. This is of course, “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue” the one song Oates admitted was part of the inspiration behind the story. The last Stanza is almost a direct description of the encounter between Friend and Connie:
Leave your stepping stones behind, something calls for you
Forget the dead you’ve left, they will not follow you
The vagabond who’s rapping at your door
Is standing in the clothes that you once wore
Strike another match, go start anew
And it’s all over now, Baby Blue
Friend’s imperative tone, his insistence that she leave for the sake of her family, his disheveled throwback look, his position outside her door all resonate with the image described in the song as if Connie were recognizing the signs of a love promised by the song. Earlier in the song we hear the line: “The carpet, too, is moving under you”, which approximates the description of the terror inspired vertigo Connie experiences when she attempts to use the phone to for help. The very outline of the encounter between Connie and Friend – with a stranger approaching someone at their door – is a recurrent theme in many songs by Dylan.
In “Like a Rolling Stone”
You said you’d never compromise
With the mystery tramp, but now you realize
He’s not selling any alibis
As you stare into the vacuum of his eyes
And ask him do you want to make a deal?
…and…
You used to be so amused
At Napoleon in rags and the language that he used
Go to him now, he calls you, you can’t refuse
When you got nothing, you got nothing to lose
You’re invisible now, you got no secrets to conceal
Several of the images here correlate with descriptions in the story. Related to the “vacuums of his eyes” is the description of Friend’s eyes: “He took off the sunglasses and she saw how pale the skin around his eyes was, like holes that were not in shadow but instead in light.” Early in the story we are told how Connie and her friends enjoyed judging the people around them: “they would lean together to whisper and laugh secretly if someone passed by who amused or interested them” – which fits with the amusement at the ragged Napoleon in the song. One of the host of the XYZ Sunday Jamboree is Napoleons-Son and Friend himself cuts a Napoleonic figure with his short stature and stuffed boots. And this injunction: “Go to him now, he calls you, you can’t refuse” seems to be the very command Friend is trying to get Connie to recognize. He tells her, “I’ll hold you so tight you won’t think you have to try to get away or pretend anything because you’ll know you can’t … And I’ll come inside you where it’s all secret and you’ll give in to me and you’ll love me”. Here we have a reflection of the songs reference to having no secrets to conceal, not being able to refuse Napoleon and through Connie’s response a reference to the language that he uses. She, in response to his command, yells “Shut up! You’re Crazy!... People don’t talk like that, you’re crazy.” The language that Arnold Friend uses and specifically the way he uses it, in his Pied Piper lilting way is, indeed his direct appropriation of the spiritual or ideological authority of the music. So in very much the same way that cult leaders or other rogue messiahs can use a good handle of scripture to manipulate people for whom such a text forms an ethical and spiritual bedrock, Friend is able to manipulate Connie because his injunctions seem to be emanating from the very music that was part of the structure of her understanding of the world.
The description of the music in Friend’s voice is thorough. In the course of the encounter we are told: “… he spoke in a fast, bright monotone”, “He spoke in a simple lilting voice exactly as if he were reciting the words to a song”, “[Connie] recognized … the sing-song way he talked, slightly mocking, kidding but serious and a little melancholy”, “He had the voice of the man on the radio” , “His words were not angry but only part of an incantation” and the final words he spoke in the story were “in a half-sung sigh”.
Wednesday, March 17, 2010
Positive signs
For anyone interested in an intelligent, honest, approachable and most importantly effective critic of postmodern mental garbage and other attempts to use emancipatory philosophy as identity elements or resume fodder from the left, read Loren Goldner.
Sunday, March 14, 2010
An Alternative Approach To Joyce Carol Oates’ “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?”
Part I
This is an immediately fascinating short, in no small part because it encourages a good deal of reader participation. The confusing events which unfold in the story usually spark intense efforts to find an angle which will put things in perspective. The internet is soaked with variations on a biblical/numerological approach which attempt to establish the story as some kind of morality piece about inviting evil into one’s home, or the dangers of vanity or something else along those lines. For our part, we would like to take an alternative approach.
The story is about a teen-aged girl who, like many teen-aged girls, does not get along with her mother, has two different modes of existence – one for home, one for social life, and is very concerned with her appearance. She also, and this is important, is very much involved in the popular culture of her day – this we estimate to be the late 60’s early 70’s. The events of the story can be easily laid out: Connie, our heroine, who likes music and the mall, goes out one night with a friend to watch a movie. The movie, of course, is just the cover and the real intent is to flirt with boys. While in the company of a young man named Eddie she encounters a strange individual, only briefly and in passing, who proclaims to her with a wagging finger, “Gonna get you, baby.” The strange man’s description is very similar to that of Bob Dylan, to whom the story was originally dedicated. After this ominous portent, the girls are picked up by Connie’s friend’s father, and Connie has a queer sense embarrassment for having been looking at her reflection in the windows of cars before the strange boy made his proclamation. The following Sunday Connie’s whole family, save herself, heads off to a pick nick leaving Connie at home alone. After a brief stint sunning in the yard, Connie goes inside and turns on the hip music station “XYZ Sunday Jamboree” and listens to “record after record of hard, fast, shrieking songs”. Following this, the real terror begins. We are reintroduced to the strange boy, who arrives in his old jalopy with his friend, Ellie Oscar, and reveals his own name: Arnold Friend. The ensuing encounter between Arnold and Connie is a seemingly inexplicable, and admittedly semi-magical, episode of predatory seduction. With obviously nefarious intentions (the first line of the story is: “Her name was Connie” – a past tense very suggestive of the heroine’s death), Arnold Friend is able to talk the terrified girl into leaving her home and joining him in the old jalopy for a ride from which she will likely never return, without any physical force or even physical threat. The unavoidable “How” in this mysterious interaction is the motor behind all of the internet religious and occult speculation. This standard approach settles on the supernatural effect of evil to explain how Connie is persuaded, clearly against her will, to submit to demands of Arnold Friend without any more than verbal protest. Satisfied with this, these interpretations move to bolster the argument by showing (with some convenient omissions and unfounded additions) that Arnold Friend is really An Old Fiend (his name less the Rs) and that the title of the story vaguely resembles a bible passage that can be identified if the numbers on the old jalopy are manipulated properly.
What we do know about the back ground of this story is that Oates was inspired by the story of Charles Schmid, the Pied Piper of Tucson; a strange but charismatic little man who committed murder and bragged about it to his dedicated clique. The parallels with Oates’ narrative are obvious: Schmid stuffed his boots to increase his short stature – “One of [Arnold Friend’s] boots was at a strange angle, as if his foot wasn’t in it”; Schmid wore thick makeup and stretched his lip to resemble Elvis – “[Arnold Friend’s] whole face was a mask, she thought wildly, tanned down onto his throat but then running out as if he had plastered make-up on his face but had forgotten about his throat”. The inspiration for the appearance is obvious and Oates even admitted so in an interview – but this still doesn’t explain how Arnold Friend’s seduction worked because, in fact, the same mystery surrounded the magnetism of Schmid. And this is where the real analysis of Oates’ story should begin, our thesis being: the narrative of Connie and Arnold is not simply a fictional retelling of the Schmid story but is instead an attempt by Oates to explain through fiction the psychological possibility of a real but stupefying phenomenon. How, in other words, did a strange and sociopathic little man like Schmid have such a persuasive influence over his clan of followers and the women that were drawn to him? In her story, Oates rejects both the mystified evil explanation and the overly simplistic condemnation of the victim as either vain or stupid. Instead what she gives is a brilliant illustration of a form of seduction that petitions not the biological urges or base desires of the subject but rather aligns itself with the coordinates of the subject’s desire structuring fantasy.
Probably the easiest and most convenient comparison for this dynamic would be the story of Cortes and his conquest of the Aztec empire. In both the old (and increasingly out of fashion) version in which Cortes is mistaken for the white and bearded god Quetzalcoatl, and the newer, more politically correct version in which the surrendered empire was really a customary insult lost in translation (a gift in Aztec custom carrying an insulting connotation) the essential point is the same: a by-no-means exemplary soldier, with about 500 troops, was able to subdue an empire because of an opportunity presented by a fluke, a simple confusion. What exists in the animal kingdom in the form of tricking the instincts – take for example the snapping turtle or the angler fish, which use a deception of the predatory instincts of their prey to lure them to their death – is reflected here in the space of culture or the ideal. The obvious discontinuity of this analogy being that both fraud (tricking the intellect, or confidence in the case of con-men) and standard seduction (appealing to desire or rousing instincts) already exist in human interaction by their own right and are more apt analogs to this kind of predator/prey animal trickery since the mechanism at work is the same for both (i.e. a scheme built upon inclinations and tendencies already existing in the target). In the case of the Aztecs and Connie their natural instincts and or intellect (intuition or Reason) were not the key to their manipulation (indeed, Connie’s agonizing fear and confusion in the story shows just how aware and apprehensive she intuitively was). Rather: the avenue used by Cortes and Friend is precisely the ideal (the realm of custom, rite, ceremony, culture, myth, ideology or if you prefer the symbolic order). It was by happening upon a chance resemblance to an important element in their symbolic order or by adventitiously misreading the nature of their custom that Cortes was able to cause so much damage with so little effort; likewise, Friend (and following the narrative thesis presented by Oates: Schmid) cloaked himself in the insignia of the most poignant icons and themes of the current pop cultural depiction of reality - in other words, the cognitive map constructed from the music of Elvis or Bob Dylan.
Aside from the overt clue (the aforementioned dedication to Dylan) there is much more support throughout the story to suggest that Bob Dylan’s lyrics are the proper ground (as opposed to the bible) for exegesis. When the girls skip the movie to hang at the seedy restaurant we are told that, “They sat at the counter … and listened to the music that made everything so good: the music was always in the background like music at a church service; it was something to depend on.” Here the music is foundational, the coordinates used to situate oneself in the world, like the function of religion implied in the simile. Further on we are given this bit of exposition which reveals a specific function, or the content of the form fit to the base:
“She and that girl and occasionally another girl went out several times a week that way, and the rest of the time Connie spent around the house – it was summer vacation – getting in her mother’s way and thinking, dreaming, about the boys she met. But all the boys fell back and dissolved into a single face that was not even a face but an idea, a feeling, mixed up with the urgent insistent pounding of the music and the humid night air of July.”
And an even more explicit demonstration of the materialization of this constructed doxa is the description of Connie’s imbibing of the songs played during the XYZ Sunday Jamboree: “…Connie paid close attention herself, bathed in a glow of slow-pulsed joy that seemed to rise mysteriously out of the music itself and lay languidly about the airless little room, breathed in and breathed out with each gentle rise and fall of her chest.” Metaphorically the music and the popular cultural values communicated through it are the air she breaths and on an even deeper level this is a demonstration of Connie’s ritual appropriation of a basic biological imperative, instinct, into the service of the symbolic order. The actual character of the this cultural framework which directs and sustains her complex of instincts and desires, and which presented a rubric through which Friend (and by extension Schmid), by assuming its appearances, was able to seduce Connie against her animal instinct for survival, we maintain, is accessible only through an analysis of the lyrics of Bob Dylan’s popular songs of the time.
This is an immediately fascinating short, in no small part because it encourages a good deal of reader participation. The confusing events which unfold in the story usually spark intense efforts to find an angle which will put things in perspective. The internet is soaked with variations on a biblical/numerological approach which attempt to establish the story as some kind of morality piece about inviting evil into one’s home, or the dangers of vanity or something else along those lines. For our part, we would like to take an alternative approach.
The story is about a teen-aged girl who, like many teen-aged girls, does not get along with her mother, has two different modes of existence – one for home, one for social life, and is very concerned with her appearance. She also, and this is important, is very much involved in the popular culture of her day – this we estimate to be the late 60’s early 70’s. The events of the story can be easily laid out: Connie, our heroine, who likes music and the mall, goes out one night with a friend to watch a movie. The movie, of course, is just the cover and the real intent is to flirt with boys. While in the company of a young man named Eddie she encounters a strange individual, only briefly and in passing, who proclaims to her with a wagging finger, “Gonna get you, baby.” The strange man’s description is very similar to that of Bob Dylan, to whom the story was originally dedicated. After this ominous portent, the girls are picked up by Connie’s friend’s father, and Connie has a queer sense embarrassment for having been looking at her reflection in the windows of cars before the strange boy made his proclamation. The following Sunday Connie’s whole family, save herself, heads off to a pick nick leaving Connie at home alone. After a brief stint sunning in the yard, Connie goes inside and turns on the hip music station “XYZ Sunday Jamboree” and listens to “record after record of hard, fast, shrieking songs”. Following this, the real terror begins. We are reintroduced to the strange boy, who arrives in his old jalopy with his friend, Ellie Oscar, and reveals his own name: Arnold Friend. The ensuing encounter between Arnold and Connie is a seemingly inexplicable, and admittedly semi-magical, episode of predatory seduction. With obviously nefarious intentions (the first line of the story is: “Her name was Connie” – a past tense very suggestive of the heroine’s death), Arnold Friend is able to talk the terrified girl into leaving her home and joining him in the old jalopy for a ride from which she will likely never return, without any physical force or even physical threat. The unavoidable “How” in this mysterious interaction is the motor behind all of the internet religious and occult speculation. This standard approach settles on the supernatural effect of evil to explain how Connie is persuaded, clearly against her will, to submit to demands of Arnold Friend without any more than verbal protest. Satisfied with this, these interpretations move to bolster the argument by showing (with some convenient omissions and unfounded additions) that Arnold Friend is really An Old Fiend (his name less the Rs) and that the title of the story vaguely resembles a bible passage that can be identified if the numbers on the old jalopy are manipulated properly.
What we do know about the back ground of this story is that Oates was inspired by the story of Charles Schmid, the Pied Piper of Tucson; a strange but charismatic little man who committed murder and bragged about it to his dedicated clique. The parallels with Oates’ narrative are obvious: Schmid stuffed his boots to increase his short stature – “One of [Arnold Friend’s] boots was at a strange angle, as if his foot wasn’t in it”; Schmid wore thick makeup and stretched his lip to resemble Elvis – “[Arnold Friend’s] whole face was a mask, she thought wildly, tanned down onto his throat but then running out as if he had plastered make-up on his face but had forgotten about his throat”. The inspiration for the appearance is obvious and Oates even admitted so in an interview – but this still doesn’t explain how Arnold Friend’s seduction worked because, in fact, the same mystery surrounded the magnetism of Schmid. And this is where the real analysis of Oates’ story should begin, our thesis being: the narrative of Connie and Arnold is not simply a fictional retelling of the Schmid story but is instead an attempt by Oates to explain through fiction the psychological possibility of a real but stupefying phenomenon. How, in other words, did a strange and sociopathic little man like Schmid have such a persuasive influence over his clan of followers and the women that were drawn to him? In her story, Oates rejects both the mystified evil explanation and the overly simplistic condemnation of the victim as either vain or stupid. Instead what she gives is a brilliant illustration of a form of seduction that petitions not the biological urges or base desires of the subject but rather aligns itself with the coordinates of the subject’s desire structuring fantasy.
Probably the easiest and most convenient comparison for this dynamic would be the story of Cortes and his conquest of the Aztec empire. In both the old (and increasingly out of fashion) version in which Cortes is mistaken for the white and bearded god Quetzalcoatl, and the newer, more politically correct version in which the surrendered empire was really a customary insult lost in translation (a gift in Aztec custom carrying an insulting connotation) the essential point is the same: a by-no-means exemplary soldier, with about 500 troops, was able to subdue an empire because of an opportunity presented by a fluke, a simple confusion. What exists in the animal kingdom in the form of tricking the instincts – take for example the snapping turtle or the angler fish, which use a deception of the predatory instincts of their prey to lure them to their death – is reflected here in the space of culture or the ideal. The obvious discontinuity of this analogy being that both fraud (tricking the intellect, or confidence in the case of con-men) and standard seduction (appealing to desire or rousing instincts) already exist in human interaction by their own right and are more apt analogs to this kind of predator/prey animal trickery since the mechanism at work is the same for both (i.e. a scheme built upon inclinations and tendencies already existing in the target). In the case of the Aztecs and Connie their natural instincts and or intellect (intuition or Reason) were not the key to their manipulation (indeed, Connie’s agonizing fear and confusion in the story shows just how aware and apprehensive she intuitively was). Rather: the avenue used by Cortes and Friend is precisely the ideal (the realm of custom, rite, ceremony, culture, myth, ideology or if you prefer the symbolic order). It was by happening upon a chance resemblance to an important element in their symbolic order or by adventitiously misreading the nature of their custom that Cortes was able to cause so much damage with so little effort; likewise, Friend (and following the narrative thesis presented by Oates: Schmid) cloaked himself in the insignia of the most poignant icons and themes of the current pop cultural depiction of reality - in other words, the cognitive map constructed from the music of Elvis or Bob Dylan.
Aside from the overt clue (the aforementioned dedication to Dylan) there is much more support throughout the story to suggest that Bob Dylan’s lyrics are the proper ground (as opposed to the bible) for exegesis. When the girls skip the movie to hang at the seedy restaurant we are told that, “They sat at the counter … and listened to the music that made everything so good: the music was always in the background like music at a church service; it was something to depend on.” Here the music is foundational, the coordinates used to situate oneself in the world, like the function of religion implied in the simile. Further on we are given this bit of exposition which reveals a specific function, or the content of the form fit to the base:
“She and that girl and occasionally another girl went out several times a week that way, and the rest of the time Connie spent around the house – it was summer vacation – getting in her mother’s way and thinking, dreaming, about the boys she met. But all the boys fell back and dissolved into a single face that was not even a face but an idea, a feeling, mixed up with the urgent insistent pounding of the music and the humid night air of July.”
And an even more explicit demonstration of the materialization of this constructed doxa is the description of Connie’s imbibing of the songs played during the XYZ Sunday Jamboree: “…Connie paid close attention herself, bathed in a glow of slow-pulsed joy that seemed to rise mysteriously out of the music itself and lay languidly about the airless little room, breathed in and breathed out with each gentle rise and fall of her chest.” Metaphorically the music and the popular cultural values communicated through it are the air she breaths and on an even deeper level this is a demonstration of Connie’s ritual appropriation of a basic biological imperative, instinct, into the service of the symbolic order. The actual character of the this cultural framework which directs and sustains her complex of instincts and desires, and which presented a rubric through which Friend (and by extension Schmid), by assuming its appearances, was able to seduce Connie against her animal instinct for survival, we maintain, is accessible only through an analysis of the lyrics of Bob Dylan’s popular songs of the time.
Friday, March 12, 2010
Avatar and the Na’zi myth of cyber-folk-soil
It is first necessary to make clear that the formula of this movie (with both its included variables and the conscious omissions) is fundamentally a fascist one. When I suggested this to a friend, he immediately objected that a parable of liberation can’t be fascist, which in itself is untrue, but completely beside the point concerning Avatar. After all, who in the film is enslaved? The Na’vi certainly are not, and as far as I can tell they are the only ones who treat anything living as beasts of burden. Just because there is some kind of tentacle assisted mind melding between slave and master the fact still remains there is a one directional use relationship between the Na’vi and the other animals on Pandora. So if we’re being honest the closest thing to a parable of liberation comes with the destruction of Hometree and the brief scenes of a few de-harnessed bird-like creatures escaping the life long bondage with the death of the Na’vi who domesticated them.
Instead, what we have with Avatar is an expulsion parable; one in which a Natural world and its Native population are in perfect balance and the only threat to this seemingly eternal harmony is an alien intruder – and this is the core of fascist ideology. This story is pure Nationalism and will serve those ends. Imagine a European who fancies his hereditary homeland as a kind of Pandora and the onslaught of Islamic immigrants as the human invaders – greedily demanding precious recourses from the native because the land from which they come is desolate. An old church in a Paris Banlieu burns and a French Nationalist can say look they have no respect for our history or what is sacred to us. Everything would be beautiful and functioning properly if only this foreign threat was excised. Our traditions and faith, once freed from these parasites, will lead us back to perfect equilibrium. The same holds for any American small town with a close-knit, insular, community that views the threat of economic catastrophe as some how the fault of Mexican immigration. Now imagine the opposite, the submerged, dispossessed and exploited, what could this movie mean from this perspective? The mistake made by many on the left is that this film is defending the indigenous peoples struggle against exploitative Capital, but it is crucial to remember that indigenous pre-historic people do not exist in a globalized capital world, and the attempt to undo history is reaction using the cover of an anachronistic fable of freedom – the very same framework that Hitler used to promise industrial progress without the internationalizing effect; paralleled unconsciously in Avatar with the implicit assumption of a return to nature with cybernetic capacity, thereby erasing the history between the tribe and cyber café and guaranteeing the pleasures of both by birthright.
The movie is important in the sense that it demonstrates the essential reactionary nature of the green movement and all its derivatives (primitivism, ecofeminism, green libertarianism, etc.). Of course the folk-soil mindset is at the base of the story with the modern addition of the cybernetic metaphor thereby uniting all the idols of the petty-bourgeois (computers and Gaia). The Alchemy at work here is the simple minded (and non-dialectical) mélange of the two polar modes of contemporary life style – the high technocrat and deep environmentalist. This creates a convenient palliative for a troubled conscience, in that it has a ruler by which to measure the iniquities of others and a license to exempt oneself since work on a computer seems relatively innocuous to the environment. A helpful comparison here would be the poets and intellectuals (Pound, D’Annunzio, Pirandello, etc.) who despised the decadent banality of the bourgeoisie but had too much of a personal affinity with the creative entrepreneur to condemn the system that awarded him so much freedom; so instead they threw their weight behind fascism and the Cooperate state which promised a different approach; namely, the liquidation of the stolid financial parasites and listless political compromisers. In other words the part of the deal which won them over was a promise to cleanse the system of its destructive elements and make more room for the great élans that were embodied in the noble poet and entrepreneur. Is there not an obvious parallel between Pounds reaction written with all the puns and tricks of Modernism and the fantastic natural world of Pandora created by innovative state of the art technology – in other words absolutely artificially? It is this reactionary and utopian theme that is recreated in the modern trends that infest the left: western intellectuals in privileged positions cultivating a solid sense of superiority by recasting the criteria of revolution to fit their already existing proclivities and personal tastes, and trying to appropriate the tradition as grounds to wax indignant over matters of personal preference; the restless progeny of the upper classes that believe the most radical change possible is precise refinement of the culture and society which produced their position to include more room for whims, eccentricity, and nature worship so that their spiritual wealth may one day equal their material wealth. The pathological hatred of the human effect on nature should not be mistaken for anything short of an out growth of sentiments created by private property; hence we see modern reflections of aristocratic hunting preserves in the equally sized estates of our ruling class which is often praised for defending the majestic land in their care from parasite-humans with the power of the land deed. And this is the trick of nature worship: it allows the rich to see the further deprivation of human beings as a morally righteous development – so long as the human rats are caged in the favelas they’re not cutting down trees or killing majestic animals.
Instead, what we have with Avatar is an expulsion parable; one in which a Natural world and its Native population are in perfect balance and the only threat to this seemingly eternal harmony is an alien intruder – and this is the core of fascist ideology. This story is pure Nationalism and will serve those ends. Imagine a European who fancies his hereditary homeland as a kind of Pandora and the onslaught of Islamic immigrants as the human invaders – greedily demanding precious recourses from the native because the land from which they come is desolate. An old church in a Paris Banlieu burns and a French Nationalist can say look they have no respect for our history or what is sacred to us. Everything would be beautiful and functioning properly if only this foreign threat was excised. Our traditions and faith, once freed from these parasites, will lead us back to perfect equilibrium. The same holds for any American small town with a close-knit, insular, community that views the threat of economic catastrophe as some how the fault of Mexican immigration. Now imagine the opposite, the submerged, dispossessed and exploited, what could this movie mean from this perspective? The mistake made by many on the left is that this film is defending the indigenous peoples struggle against exploitative Capital, but it is crucial to remember that indigenous pre-historic people do not exist in a globalized capital world, and the attempt to undo history is reaction using the cover of an anachronistic fable of freedom – the very same framework that Hitler used to promise industrial progress without the internationalizing effect; paralleled unconsciously in Avatar with the implicit assumption of a return to nature with cybernetic capacity, thereby erasing the history between the tribe and cyber café and guaranteeing the pleasures of both by birthright.
The movie is important in the sense that it demonstrates the essential reactionary nature of the green movement and all its derivatives (primitivism, ecofeminism, green libertarianism, etc.). Of course the folk-soil mindset is at the base of the story with the modern addition of the cybernetic metaphor thereby uniting all the idols of the petty-bourgeois (computers and Gaia). The Alchemy at work here is the simple minded (and non-dialectical) mélange of the two polar modes of contemporary life style – the high technocrat and deep environmentalist. This creates a convenient palliative for a troubled conscience, in that it has a ruler by which to measure the iniquities of others and a license to exempt oneself since work on a computer seems relatively innocuous to the environment. A helpful comparison here would be the poets and intellectuals (Pound, D’Annunzio, Pirandello, etc.) who despised the decadent banality of the bourgeoisie but had too much of a personal affinity with the creative entrepreneur to condemn the system that awarded him so much freedom; so instead they threw their weight behind fascism and the Cooperate state which promised a different approach; namely, the liquidation of the stolid financial parasites and listless political compromisers. In other words the part of the deal which won them over was a promise to cleanse the system of its destructive elements and make more room for the great élans that were embodied in the noble poet and entrepreneur. Is there not an obvious parallel between Pounds reaction written with all the puns and tricks of Modernism and the fantastic natural world of Pandora created by innovative state of the art technology – in other words absolutely artificially? It is this reactionary and utopian theme that is recreated in the modern trends that infest the left: western intellectuals in privileged positions cultivating a solid sense of superiority by recasting the criteria of revolution to fit their already existing proclivities and personal tastes, and trying to appropriate the tradition as grounds to wax indignant over matters of personal preference; the restless progeny of the upper classes that believe the most radical change possible is precise refinement of the culture and society which produced their position to include more room for whims, eccentricity, and nature worship so that their spiritual wealth may one day equal their material wealth. The pathological hatred of the human effect on nature should not be mistaken for anything short of an out growth of sentiments created by private property; hence we see modern reflections of aristocratic hunting preserves in the equally sized estates of our ruling class which is often praised for defending the majestic land in their care from parasite-humans with the power of the land deed. And this is the trick of nature worship: it allows the rich to see the further deprivation of human beings as a morally righteous development – so long as the human rats are caged in the favelas they’re not cutting down trees or killing majestic animals.
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