Born into privilege, Gore Vidal lived 5 lives simultaneously. I can barely get to work everyday, raise my son and emotionally participate in my family, while Vidal was a novelist, socialite and periodic politician with an acute sense of American history and culture. Vidal published numerous novels, nearly got punched out by William F. Buckley on national television during the 1968 Democratic convention, got head butted and punched by Norman Mailer after calling him out about his misogyny, ran for office twice and was unapologetic about his promiscuous homosexuality, claiming to have had over 1000 sexual encounters. In this, he was outdone by Wilt Chamberlain, the track star and basketball player, who said that he had 10000 straight ones, but then Wilt wasn't writing all those novels and going to all those parties.

Given all this and more, it is easy to get lost in the dense forestation of Vidal's life and miss some of the obvious things that were important about him. Most importantly, Vidal was a powerful, consistent voice about the violence inherent within American capitalism, popularizing the notion of an American empire long before it became fashionable. He opposed the Vietnam War, spoke out about nuclear proliferation (with, humorously enough, Norman Mailer) and highlighted the cowboy mentality of US covert operations around the world in places like Central and South America. Just as a billboard in Idaho has angered people by stating that President Obama has killed far more people than James Holmes did in Aurora, Vidal blandly observed that Timothy McVeigh was no more of a killer than Eisenhower. In this, Vidal implicitly touched upon our unwillingness to confront the extreme violence of the representatives of the state while condemning the relatively lesser violence of individuals. There was, over the course of his life, an anarchic thread in his thought even if he was no anarchist. As you would have expected, he was an incisive critic of the war on terror in the final years of his life.

Culturally, Vidal was a rebel in the right place at the right time. While refusing to characterize himself in terms of sexual orientation, he was, in the expanding horizons of the immediate post-war era, openly gay, without, oddly enough, drawing a great deal of attention to it. So much so that he polled more votes as a Democratic candidate in a conservative, upstate New York congressional district in 1960 than any other Democratic candidate had done in 50 years. He was matter of fact about his preference for men and his promiscuity, thus demonstrating that it was no longer possible to require people to conform to a public expectation of straight monogamy regardless of how they lived privately, personally foreshadowing the sexual revolution of the 1960s and the gay rights movement of the 1970s.

Of course, Vidal's privileged background provided him with advantages in this regard, but he was still taking risks. He maintained that the New York Times nearly killed his literary career in the 1950s because of a novel that he wrote with an expressly gay protagonist, and Buckley no doubt thought that he was damaging Vidal greatly by calling him queer on national television in 1968. Buckley, perhaps confused by Vidal's evasions about his sexuality, thereafter characterized him as an evangelist for bisexuality and an advocate for the acceptability of homosexuality. Vidal was much better in taking the true measure of Buckley, as he did when asked about how he felt about Buckley's death: I thought hell is bound to be a livelier place, as he joins forever those whom he served in life, applauding their prejudices and fanning their hatred. For people like Buckley, Vidal was a provocation in all aspects of his life, public and private. May he rest in peace.

Labels: Activism, American Culture, American Empire, Gay Rights, Obituaries, Sexuality

Mel, known for the excellent Broadsnark blog, explained her evolution back in 2009. It remains well worth reading in its entirety today. Here's an excerpt that provides a provocative insight into the origins of Occupy:

. . . . . But, in the end, the nonprofit work wasn’t much better than the for profit work. We were helping people, but not as many as we should have been. We were government funded. When I calculated the percentage of tax dollars that actually went to direct services, it made me want to cry. Some of the grants went through so many agencies that, by the time each agency shaved their overhead costs off the top, there was virtually nothing left.

And even though the organization I worked for made a good pretense of listening to and caring about staff, much of it was for show. Additional funding we received went straight into raises for my boss and a fat consulting fee for a wealthy board member. Meanwhile, we were short-staffed and asking employees to start paying a portion of their rising health care costs.

Worse than the frustration, overwork, and disillusionment was how being a manager changed my relationship with all the people I worked with. Although I felt like I spent most of my day battling with my boss on behalf of the staff, in the end I was just one of the managers who was making decisions behind their backs – decisions they often did not like, decisions that were sometimes bad. It didn’t matter if I had fought the decision in those meetings. Once it was made I had to stand behind it.

I’ve worked for other nonprofits since that one. And while I have steadfastly avoided any more management positions, I have seen the same dynamic in every place I have worked. Larger nonprofits, especially here in DC, have the added issues of ivy league elitism and grotesque hierarchy (which they are in denial of). Yet somehow they think that they are going to make the world a more democratic, egalitarian, and just place from within an organization that is anything but.

It ain’t gonna happen.

In other compelling parts of this post, she relates her inability to attain fulfillment through her family and her subsequent work as a manager with a private law firm. In other words, she encountered, as many have, a world of social dead ends. Occupy is full of such individualistic, imaginative, independent minded people. And, as long as they continue to experience the hypocrisy and lack of opportunity experienced by people like Mel, social unrest in the US will intensify under a proliferation of banners.

Labels: Activism, American Culture, Anarchism, Liberals, Occupy Wall Street

An extraordinary graphic representation of police violence in the US courtesy of the Cato Institute, with detailed background information about each incident.

Labels: American Culture, Police

UPDATE 2: The implosion of firedoglake continues. TBogg, known for calling a critic of his support for drone strikes a fucking retard and telling that person to blow me without consequences, is now complaining that the conduct of others is driving people away from the site:

I’d like FDL to have a much bigger readership, but it is hard to do that when the same people keep showing with the same tired arguments, and the attendant goal post moving, which only makes regular readers run away, And, believe me, they do; I get emails from people all the time who say they won’t come back. That frustrates the crap out of me.

This, from someone who, in addition to hijacking the comment thread of a post written by someone else, frequently seizes upon the legitimate transgressions of the Catholic Church and turns them into offensive posts certain to drive even progressive Catholics away. Indeed, the anti-Catholicism of TBogg and, sometimes, Teddy Partridge, is arguably the most self-destructive feature of the site, if measured by Hamsher's aspiration to create a progressive town square.

UPDATE 1: Predictably, it didn't take long. Hamsher banned someone who made a comment in response to her post that she didn't like. There is no longer any evidence of this person associated with the site at all. Furthermore, if you inquire about it, or, even worse, post about it, you risk virtual disappearance. So much for being a town square where a fair discussion of the merits of all sides can take place. A better, more inclusive approach would have allowed members to vent in response to her post today, while firmly insisting upon future compliance with the new policy, but that would have run contrary to her reflexive need to assert control. In this instance, there was also the side benefit of expelling a strong, third party voice, and, probably, many of those who liked him, from the site as well. Hence, expect a manipulation of this standard for posts and comments to the benefit of those supporting the reelection of President Obama.

INITIAL POST: Jane Hamsher has spoken in response to intensified snark guerrilla warfare among the remaining die hards at firedoglake:

Accusing someone of having ulterior, nefarious and unacknowledged motives isn’t discussion. It’s nothing but an attempt to shut down discussion.

The rule is clearly stated. Don’t pee in the pool or you’ll be kicked out of the pool. If someone thinks their special brand of ambrosia-scented pee pee doesn’t count, and they want to give a good squirt and demand a deal in order to comply with the rules, they’re gone.

The no wee-wee policy could not be any more unambiguous. I suggest maybe zipping up and rethinking how you want to approach this conversation, rather than accusing us of an unacknowledged desire to to shut down criticism of the veal pen.

It is what it is. The rule is the rule, and it is iron-clad. If someone can’t accept that, this is the end of the road for them at FDL.

I guess that one of the privileges that comes with funding your own website is that you can say anything, no matter how ridiculous. In this instance, she has developed such an impenetrable sense of denial that she no longer recognizes that she is the one of the people that most frequently violates this rule to manipulate the content of the site, as she did in order to drive me away. Is she really so oblivious that she doesn't understand that the snark wars that have overwhelmed the site are being caused by people emulating her oftentimes arrogant, dismissive and insulting style of communication? Or, maybe, she cynically believes that the remaining members will uncritically accept anything she says. Only she knows. But, for those of us on the outside, it is becoming more and more evident that firedoglake no longer possesses any capability to motivate people to politically organize themselves. And, that, for reasons that I have previously explained, is a great loss. If she had candidly admitted her own shortcomings in relation to the current situation at the site, she might have been able to turn things around. But Hamsher isn't known for acknowledging that she makes mistakes. The reporters, Dayen, Walker and Gosztola, remain well worth reading, though.

Labels: Activism, Alternative Media, American Culture, Democrats, firedoglake

Over the years, I have been preoccupied with how radicalized people can be effectively organized in this atomized society. Hence, my interest in the demise of labor unions and their self-absorbed leadership that considers any sincerely motivated rank and file social activism as a threat. Instead of challenging the neoliberal order, they have aligned themselves with it, policing the boundaries of acceptable, innocuous protest, as they did in Wisconsin, with disasterous results. I find myself experiencing a kind of cognitive dissonance in regard to them, recognizing that they lost their historical agency decades ago, but incapable of identifying an alternative.

Similarly, I have looked to the Internet for places operated by people with a sufficiently independent turn of mind outside the progressive establishment. In 2006 or so, I discovered firedoglake, a progressive site operated by Jane Hamsher and Christy Hardin Smith, although Hardin Smith has not been involved with the site for several years, possibly for health reasons. firedoglake was interesting to me, as was the late Steve Gilliard's The News Blog, because anti-imperialists and leftists openly posted there without being moderated out of existence. Both were a marked contrast to mainstream progressive sites where the participants self-censored themselves in regard to challenging the Democratic Party and got rid of anyone who didn't do so. I posted comments on Gilliard's site frequently, he relished hard nosed political discussion, the more contentious, the better. I still remember going back and forth with him about whether US soldiers who enlisted for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan should be held morally responsible for that decision. Conversely, I declined to post comments at firedoglake because I had an intuitive sense that I wasn't going to get along well with the kool kids who ran the site, epitomized by Hamsher herself, an intuition that was confirmed earlier this year. Even so, I was a lurker because I noticed that posters and commenters had a relatively ideologically free hand. Moreover, it was evident that the people forming the firedoglake community were going through a radicalized political evolution, the kind of evolution that many of us on the left hope, against all odds, to happen in this country. As with any such evolution, it was messy, erratic, abrasive and inconsistent.

But it was an evolution experienced by people who were trying to put into practice the old adage attributed to Lenin: Be as radical as reality. Accordingly, the initial approaches were reformist, with an emphasis upon more and better Democrats and an insistence upon subjecting the malefactors of the Bush administration to the rule of law. While I was indifferent to both approaches, ridiculing the expectation that US attorney Patrick Fitzgerald would accomplish anything of political significance through his investigation of Lewis Libby, I perceived that the people involved in these efforts were going through an important educational process. By 2008, after the bitter progressive disappointment with the 2007 Democratic Congress, a disappointment intensified by the betrayals of some newly elected representatives who had benefitted from firedoglake fundraising efforts, Hamsher had the good sense to stay out of the fight between Obama and Clinton for the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination, even though most of the people who posted and commented on the campaign were Obama supporters. firedoglake participants were not immune to the euphoria associated with Obama's candidacy. Perhaps, she perceived, in light of her experience with the 2007 Congress, that there was much worse to come.

If so, Hamsher was correct. To her credit, she put her personal resources to work through the site, exposing the mendacity of those involved in the Obama administration with the same rigor that she had done in regard to the Bush one. She hired journalists like Jon Walker and David Dayen to cover almost every aspect of Obama's capitulation to capital: the conscious refusal to provide sufficient stimulus for an economic recovery, the bank bailouts, the extension of the Bush tax cuts, the refusal to stem the tidal wave of foreclosures and, of course, health care reform. While she did not personally emphasize it, journalists and posters exposed the horrific violence of Obama's variation on the war on terror. For this, she was reviled by mainstream progressives aligned with the Democrats as they called people who identified with her site firebaggers. She even embraced the effort to defend Bradley Manning when everyone other than gays and lesbians and radical leftists considered him a pariah. Along with leftists like Louis Proyect, Pham Binh and Richard Seymour, she immediately recognized the importance of Occupy, and hired Kevin Gosztola to cover it, and raised money to provide supplies for occupations.

Unfortunately for firedoglake, however, Occupy has proven to be more polarizing than unifying, partially because it emerged just prior to the 2012 campaign. It emboldened those who had rejected the US electoral process to express themselves more aggressively, while those who remained aligned with Obama responded in kind. There have therefore been a number of nasty arguments on the site that have been poorly moderated by people who support Obama and the Democrats, a conflict that exploded, curiously enough, when someone was banned for posting an anti-Zionist article. If the number of comments are any indication, site traffic dropped significantly after this episode. Meanwhile, contemporaneous with this, Hamsher became paranoid about what she perceived as efforts to disrupt the site, as most embarrassingly revealed when she characterized me as either a Department of Homeland Security or K Street operative. Or, at least, she came across as paranoid, but it could have been an instance of crazy like a fox, hiding behind the absurdity of police and lobbyist infiltration to justify running off people like me from the site, people that she understands all too well. If so, she succeeded, as demonstrated by the melancholy tone of those who remain in the firedoglake community. One even comes across references to those who have been driven away, and elliptical statements to the effect that the damage is real and major.

Indeed it is. And while firedoglake is merely one website among many, it was, until recently, a popular one, and, more importantly, one that facilitated the social and political education of many sincere, highly motivated people. I doubt that it has the capacity to do so any longer, and, for those of us who understand that the radical transformation of this country is dependent upon spaces, however imperfect, it is a great loss. In this, it prefigures Occupy and efforts that will invariably emerge in the future. As with the struggles within Occupy Oakland, it is essential that we learn from them in order to avoid making the same mistakes over and over again.

Labels: Activism, Alternative Media, American Culture, Democrats, firedoglake, Liberals, Neoliberalism, Occupy Wall Street

A few weeks ago, I was talking to a UC Davis student at KDVS 90.3 FM after I had finished my radio show. She told me about how she had lived in the Mission District in San Francisco and observed how the prostitutes down on the street by her apartment were abused by their pimps and the police. I thought about this for a moment, and recalled what I see here in Sacramento. I frequently walk along the nearby K Street Mall during my lunch break, and see encounters between the police and the homeless. Invariably, the police conduct themselves in an arrogant, conscending manner. Even in situations where the officers have no intention to arrest or cite anyone, they subject the homeless to ridicule.

Perhaps, you consider such conduct minor compared to more egregious episodes such as surveillance of Muslims, shootings of African Americans and stops and frisks of thousands of people of color, and, of course, it is. But it also provides insight into the psychological features of social control facilitated by the police. Generally, the police focus their attention upon people and behaviors that frighten the middle class. Accordingly, they subject African American males to a degree of surveillance and violence that no one else, with the possible exception of Latinos and Native Americans, experiences. Likewise, Muslims and Arabs are similarly subjected to surveillance and undercover entrapment operations. Anarchists have apparently also earned the perverse honor of such police activity as well.

Clearly, in relation to police conduct directed towards people of color, Arabs and Muslims, racism and religious bigotry are significant factors in the rationalization of it. But race and culture bias are not the only expressions of middle class anxiety requiring law enforcement intervention. Interwoven within this mosaic is a middle class contempt for people who live outside the bounds of social acceptability. Hence, the police also serve the function of ensuring that the homeless stay away from residential and commercial districts favored by middle income people, while treating them in a demeaning fashion considered suitable for others considered inferior. Prostitutes receive even worse treatment, as their visible public presence is an affront to middle class standards of sexual propriety. In both instances, the police are given the task of not only enforcing the law against them, but doing so in the most degrading way possible. As the objective is to render such people as invisible as possible, it is essential that they aggressively convey the moral message of disapproval as well.

Such an objective is necessary to preserve a middle class life of comforting appearances. For people immersed in this false sense of nostalgic security, it is unnerving for them to drive down the street away from their neighborhood and encounter vacant buildings, the homeless and prostitutes (not to mention African American males wearing hoodies) because it shatters mutually reinforced illusions about everyday life. Similarly, in the evangelical middle class context, the prospect of a mosque nearby is equally alarming. More broadly, such a suppression of the inconvenient realities of daily life finds its international expression in the refusal of many Americans to acknowledge the violence inflicted by the US military upon peoples all over the world.

Labels: American Culture, Muslims, Neoliberalism, Police, Racism

With my wife and son away to visit relatives, I decided to spend the evening watching a movie. After wandering around the local video store (yes, we still have them in Sacramento), I finally selected Spike Lee's 25th Hour from 2002. Based upon the novel of the same name by David Benioff, the film relates the story of a young Irish Catholic man, Monty Brogan, spending his last day in New York City before serving a seven year prison term for possession of heroin for sale. While otherwise purportedly faithful to the original, Lee placed the events of the narrative within the context of the city's post-9/11 malaise. Critics made much of this in their contemporaneous reviews, but, viewed nine years later, it comes across as an unnecessary extravagance, an overwrought emotional symbolism that distracts from the compelling performances of an excellent ensemble cast.

Indeed, a conversation between two of Brogan's friends in a high rise apartment overlooking Ground Zero is one of the worst compositional choices made by Lee and his cinematographer in the entire film. Apparently, they decided that judiciously distributed visual background markers of the aftermath of the attacks weren't enough, something more akin to the melodramatic intensity of Eisenstein was required. The fact that it comes across more like the campy voluptuousness of DeMille is indicative of the immensity of the error. But this is what you get with Lee, moments of daring and insight mixed with apparent amateurish gaffes. In this, Lee deserves a perverse respect for his refusal to conform to the expectations of a more disciplined formalism that accompanied his early successes, and perhaps, one discerns an aesthetic here, one centered around a conscious recognition that there is a powerful synergy that results from this erratic technique, a belief that life is, by turns, angry, passionate, comical and uncontrollable and any sincere film about it must be as well.

If so, Lee succeeds or fails based upon whether there is a transcendental quality to his films beyond the sum of their parts. In 25th Hour, there is, but it doesn't become apparent until the last thirty minutes. Before then, the actors, typical of a Lee film, provide great performances that keep the audience engaged in what would otherwise be a pedestrian story. All the way down the line, from Edward Norton as Brogan, to Philip Seymour Hoffman and Barry Pepper as his friends Jacob Elinsky and Frank Slaugherty, to Rosario Dawson as his girlfriend Naturelle Rivera to Brian Cox as his father, James, they provide uniformly nuanced, carefully developed characterizations that give the story a naturalistic feel. Lee may be a controversial director, but no one can dispute his ability to select actors for his films who invariably provide strong performances.

In these last thirty minutes, submerged threads of the narrative come to the fore: the difficulty of preserving trust in a passionate relationship, the ability of a father to pass his knowledge and experiences on to his son and the near impossibility of living anything other than an amoral life in a city as corrupted as New York City. Two sequences highlight this last theme, Brogan's internalized angry, bigoted diatribe about the city's inhabitants and a surprising ending that serves as a more profound, emotionally true repudiation of it. From the vantage point of 2012, 25th Hour is actually a powerful premonition of the social withdrawal and survivalism associated with the aftermath of the 2008 global recession, evocative of a more recent film about precisely this subject, The Girlfriend Experience. In such a world, as profiled by Lee in this film, there is no place for anyone other than those who accept the primacy of money, power and violence, and those who cannot do so are left with trying to imagine a refuge beyond their reach.

Labels: American Culture, Film Notes, Global Recession, Neoliberalism, YouTube

I posted my thoughts about her and this song, I'm a Rainbow, here on October 23, 2010.

Labels: African Americans, American Culture, Anarchism, Obituaries, YouTube

UPDATE: Hat tip to bakononist for discovering that the person who composed the poem is Daisy Zamora. According to her wikipedia entry, she is one of the most prominent figures in contemporary Latin American poetry. Her work is known for its uncompromising voice and wide-ranging subject matter that dwells on the details of daily life while encompassing human rights, politics, revolution, feminist issues, art, history and culture. Given that she resides in Managua and San Francisco, I wonder if she actually participated in the painting of the mural.

INITIAL POST: Many years ago, I biked around the Mission District in San Francisco, and stopped to examine the murals in Clarion Alley, off Valencia. Many of them present highly politicized, socially radical themes, with an emphasis upon the the transformative harshness of the migration, the paradoxically collective nomadism inherent within it and the indigenous experience.

I remembered this today as I was looking through a stack of old business cards and papers with phone numbers of guests for my KDVS radio show (I remain primarily pre-virtual in this regard). As I did so, I came across a Modern Times Bookstore receipt from December 31, 2003. For those of you who are interested, I purchased the The Sorrows of Empire by the late Chalmers Johnson, A Civilian Occupation: The Politics of Israeli Architecture, edited by Eyal Weizman, Rafi Segal and David Tartakover, and Israel/Palestine: The Black Book by Reporters Without Borders. To this day, I haven't read the last one, it's sitting in a stack somewhere in my house.

Afterwards, on this same day, I stopped to ponder the nearby murals in Clarion Alley, as, back then, Modern Times was located on Valencia Street near Clarion instead of 24th Street as it is now. I was sufficiently struck by one of them that I wrote down what appeared to be a title or introductory statement to a poem and the poem itself. Upon reading it again today, I was quite surprised:

Occupy your streets and not other countries

And, then, there was the poem itself, a romantic expression of magical realism:

When we return to our ancient land which we never knew

And talk about all those things that never happened

We will walk holding the hands of children who have never existed

We will listen to their voices and we will live that life

Which we have spoken of so often and have never lived

Was this composed by the people who painted the mural? Is is the work of a famous poet that I do not know? While I have a fondness for literature and film, I admit my ignorance when it comes to poetry.

I wish that I had a picture of it, but I don't. I wonder if the people who painted it remembered it as Occupy captured the public imagination last fall. Did they actually participate in the occupations? Did they appear and urge the importance of decolonization as an essential principle to acknowledge the imperial conquest of their lands and their cultures? Did they go to the general assembly and insist upon the inclusion of the experiences of people of color? Or had they forgotten about the mural, painted so long ago? Possibly even moved to live in other countries?

All questions without answers. With the passage of time, we can only recognize that the author(s) gave voice, in their elliptical way, to their utopian aspirations, aspirations that collectively emerged years later within Occupy. Perhaps, some day, we will fulfill them, because, as I frequently tell people these days, capitalism was also a utopian vision for many centuries, albeit a perverse one.

Labels: Activism, American Culture, American Empire, Bay Area, California, Occupy Wall Street

As someone who has unapologetically appreciated minimalism, I was pleasantly surprised to learn that Philip Glass addressed Occupy Wall Street on Thursday:

If my memory serves me correctly, Glass has lived on the Lower East Side, one of the most socially and politically radical neighborhoods in the US, for many years.

Labels: Activism, American Culture, Occupy Wall Street, Sub-Proletarianization of America, YouTube

According to Pace Lattin of Technorati, AOL is for sale after purchasing the Post. If only Rupert Murdoch would buy it and shut the Post down, that would be great. Arianna would have to come up with a new scheme for making money off the work of others.

Labels: American Culture, Liberals, Mainstream Media

After just over a month in hospice, my mother died last Wednesday. She never reconsidered her decision to enter hospice after she was diagnosed with abdominal cancer. Unlike many of the other patients, she watched very little television. Television, it seems, permits patients to seek solace in a routine that distracts them for their predicament. She also declined the spiritual support of the hospice champlain, not because she isn't Christian, but, rather, because she didn't require any special attention. She struggled to die peaceably as her body traveled through the agonizing stages of death.

There are many things that I could say about my mother, but I will merely focus upon two or three of them that have special relevance here. First, and most importantly, she was independent minded, and didn't allow others to intellectually intimidate here because she only had a high school education. She drew her own conclusions, regardless of whether they were popular or not. She often observed that people are funny, meaning that she thought that they frequently failed to recognize things that were pretty obvious and took actions contrary to their self-interest. She rightly believed that Reagan was a transparent phony, and, despite the residue of racist attitudes consistent with her upbringing in north Georgia, voted for Jesse Jackson over Michael Dukakis in 1988, although she retained a soft spot for the Clintons.

My mother was also hostile to undocumented immigrants, but understood the primacy of class, I don't ever recall her telling me that she voted for a Republican. We may live in a duopoly today, but, for her generation, the dividing line between Democrat and Republican had real meaning, it defined one's sense of class identity. Her Christianity was inclusive. While talking to one of the hospice attendants, she said that God loves everyone, and maintained communication with a gay man when others severed their relationship with him after he was outed during her childhood. Though straight, sexual orientation wasn't a big deal for her. While working in the composing room of an Atlanta newspaper, the Atlanta Journal, during the 1960s, she encountered other female employees who returned from weddings performed during their Hawaiian vacations. If I remember correctly, she said that they would even bring a cake to work for their fellow employees, which would be served on break as a wedding cake.

Beyond this, she was no American exceptionalist, she couldn't understand why many Americans consider themselves and their culture superior to others. Like her twin sister, she opposed the invasion of Iraq, and remarked upon the sophistication of Iraqi society in comparison to our own, emphasizing, probably based upon her biblical education as a child, that they have been around for thousands of years, while we have only been around for a few hundred. How could we presume to know more than them? In March or April of 2003, I decided, while standing nearby a pay phone on Durant Street and Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley, that I should call her. One of the first things that I told her was that I had been arrested for participating in the civil disobedience that erupted in San Francisco after the launching of the Iraqi invasion. She was pleasantly surprised, gently exclaiming you were there? By her standards, that was a shout, I can't remember her being so startled by something that I had done. But, then, remembering that she was my mother, she proceeded to tell me that I needed to be careful about that sort of thing in the future.

Second, although my mother was raised in Georgia, and worked at newspapers in Georgia and Tennessee, she brought me to California in my early teens, which was, as I have noted here elsewhere, a defining event in my life. Of course, it was, to a great degree, mere chance. My mother could have remarried and ended up in Minnesota or Massachusetts. But, even so, it was serendipitous. In the early 1970s, midtown Sacramento was ethnically diverse, with a fair share of radicals and cultural ties to the Bay Area. Members of the Symbionese Liberation Army successfully concealed themselves in midtown, with one of their safe houses near my dentist. In high school, I had some English teachers that enthusiastically assigned books by Joseph Heller and Kurt Vonnegut, and bluntly expressed their opinions. One of them told my class that he thought it was absurd that people cheered returning POWs like John McCain in 1973. All they did, he said, was drop bombs on peasants from 30,000 feet. At Sacramento High School in the late 1970s, it was just another day in class when your teacher channeled Tariq Ali.

Looking back, the alternative, staying in Georgia, is pretty chilling. I probably would have graduated from an all-white high school and then attended either the University of Georgia or Georgia Tech. Tech would have been the worst. Tech turns out a fair number of nimrods, with blue slacks, white shirts, tan blazers and matching ties, that advise the neoliberal institutions of the New South, institutions like Georgia Power, Suntrust Bank, Coca-Cola and Delta (CNN came later). About 10 or 11 years ago, when I served on the board of the Yolo County Housing Authority one of them came out to advise us. As I watched him deliver his presentation, I shuddered and thought, that could have been me. UGA might have been a little better, at that time, there was a counterculture in Athens, which was subsequently mass marketed into the popular culture by REM and the B-52s. When I talked to my mother about this while she was still sufficiently alert to engage in conversation, she said, with characteristic understatement, that she had understood at the time that California was more suitable for me. Perhaps, her as well. She always spoke favorably about living in Sacramento, and only left because my stepfather's emphysema necessitated a move to a drier, desert climate.

Finally, within the family, my mother was a living manifestation of an independent, self-reliant woman. In both her work and personal life, she refused to act deferentially towards men. Working in the hot type composing room in newspapers in the late 1950s and 1960s, she encountered a lot of sexism, and fought through it to get her union card. Back then, a union card was like a cab medallion, or perhaps, more accurately, a working class equivalent of a seat on the trading floor of a stock exchange, once obtained, she could work at almost any newspaper in the US, as they were nearly all unionized, the big city ones, anyway. For her, that card was her passport out of the insular world of north Georgia and the emotional conflict embedded within her fundamentalist family, as much as she loved the beautiful hill country and her relatives. She would never have described herself as a feminist, as most feminists lacked the experience and language to reach someone like her, and yet, she worked, as did my stepfather, and participated as a co-equal in all decisions. In high school, I sometimes discovered that some of my male friends professed support for gender equality while acting very differently, which was, I concluded, explainable by the fact that their parents set a disturbingly patriarchal example for them. As you might have guessed, I have consistently found myself attracted to similarly independent, blunt spoken, opinionated women, with my wife being the most delightful of them all.

Labels: American Culture, California, Obituaries, Sacramento

Preliminary, I appreciate the kind remarks that many of you have posted about my mother's decision to enter hospice. It is something that is emotionally difficult to deal with in unanticipated ways. Besides the frequent travel between Sacramento and Kingman, Arizona, where my mother lives, there are all those thorny emotional issues that come to the surface when we have to accept that one of parents is about to die. So again, thanks. At some point, I may post about the more concrete aspects of my mother's situation, because some may find it useful, but I am still ambivalent about that, because, as most of you are probably aware, I emphasize ideas over my personal life on this blog, and want to respect my mother's privacy.

In any event, I thought that I might share some of my more sociological impressions gleaned from traveling between Sacramento and Kingman, with an emphasis today upon Las Vegas. To get to Kingman, I fly to McCarron Aiport in Las Vegas, and then go there by way of shuttle or rental car to Kingman, about 100 miles southeast of the airport. McCarron is one of the most inhospitable, unpleasant airports in the United States. Perhaps, I am spoiled by the geniality of the people who work in the small, accessible airport here in Sacramento, but McCarron is bad, even when compared to an overcrowded facility like Hartsfield in Atlanta. At least in Hartsfield, the employees are friendly, even in stressful situations, displaying a self-deprecating humour about the poor performance of Delta Airlines, the airline that uses Hartsfield as a hub.

By contrast, the employees at McCarron, especially the TSA ones, are arrogant and condescending. They order passengers around the way bouncers treat undesirables at a prestigious nightclub. Food service is awful, with a poor selection at ridiculously high prices. Space is at a premium, as passengers for flights are confined in clastrophobia inducing conditions. Paradoxically, there are long distances from terminal to terminal for no apparent reason before one arrives at the absurdly cramped gates. Of course, it takes about 10 minutes to get from the rental car center to the airport.

After my second or third trip through the airport, I finally understood the purpose of subjecting passengers to such treatment. Las Vegas is a resort city, but one in which spontaneity is rigorously suppressed, and the airport, as the port of entry for many people who travel there, is operated so as to convey this to arriving tourists. One may do many things in Las Vegas, but only within the strictly controlled conditions imposed by the gaming industry. Gambling, voyeuristic entertainment, prostitution, one may partake of all of these forbidden pleasures, but only on the terms dictated by the casinos who provide them. Rarely has eroticism been exploited to such profitable effect while simultaneously being rendered so dispassionate and sterile.

Oddly enough, I came to such a conclusion while watching the movie 1984 at my mother's house on one of those few remaining channels that broadcast over the airwaves. Towards the end, there is a scene where Winston Smith, along with many others, goes to a conference room to hear a presentation. During this presentation, he learns that the scientists of Oceania have discovered a way to eliminate the orgasm, which was considered one of the primary sources of the familial bonds that the regime is intent upon eradicating because they constitute a social identity independent of the regime. Relying upon Stalinist methods, the scientists of Oceania cannot pursue methods of social control separate from the destruction of the undesirable behavior or physical attribute in question.

But the capitalists who have created and modified Las Vegas over the decades have been free to do so. For them, sexuality is not something to be erased from human consciousness, but, rather, something to be manipulated and commodified. Central to such an endeavor is the prohibition of any kind of spontaneous expression of sexuality, as everything is typecast according to commonly known stereotypes of male and female desire. For straight women there is the Thunder from Down Under, an Australian beefcake show, while, for straight men, there are numerous strip clubs and shows with busty, athletically built blonds and brunettes. For gays and lesbians, there are apparently nightclubs, but that wasn't so heavily advertised. Subjected to the billboards for these shows while traveling between the rental car center and the airport, I recalled how a middle aged executive, Mr. McGuire, told Benjamin Braddock in The Graduate that there is a great future in plastics. Clearly, although McGuire is presented as a character to be ridiculed, he knew whereof he spoke, as the transformation of human drives and desires into a profitable simulacrum has been one of the defining characteristics of our times.

For capitalists, one of the allures of this process has been that it is profitable while enhancing social control over much of the populace. And, in Las Vegas, it is not limited to sexuality, one finds much the same outcome in regards to gambling, the original reason for the development of this desert resort city. Gambling, historically associated with the challenge of trying to prevail over unequal risk in favor of the house, is now merely a form of entertainment in which the house invariably wins. Here, too, the unpredictabililty, the spontaneity that was a significant part of the psychological motivation for gamblers has been routinized away. People putting coins into slot machines for hours on end, or playing bingo in a casino restaurant, do so with a discipline evocative of a proletarian factory worker. Hence, we can say that, in 1984, Orwell presented a fundamentally flawed vision of the future, because he failed to recognize that Stalinism, with its Calvinist excesses, was already a thing of the past, and, thus, presented a threat to no one, while the commodification of human needs and desires was the real, emergent peril, for it is much easier to modify human behaviour under the guise of libertinism than it is to compel conformity through punishment.

Labels: American Culture, Neoliberalism, Sexuality

A voice from the past:

Wartime brings the ideal of the State out into very clear relief, and reveals attitudes and tendencies that were hidden..In times of peace the sense of the State flags in a republic that is not militarized.. For war is essentially the health of the State. The ideal of the State is that within its territory its power and influence should be universal. As the Church is the medium for the spiritual salvation of man, so the State is thought of as the medium for his political salvation. Its idealism is a rich blood flowing to all the members of the body politic. And it is precisely in war that the urgency for union seems greatest, and the necessity for universality seems most unquestioned. The State is the organization of the herd to act offensively or defensively against another herd similarly organized. The more terrifying the occasion for defense, the closer will become the organization and the more coercive the influence upon each member of the herd. War sends. the current of purpose and activity flowing down to the lowest level of the herd, and to its remote branches. All the activities of society are linked together as fast as possible to this central purpose of making a military offensive or a military defense, and the State becomes what in peacetimes it has vainly struggled to become-the inexorable arbiter and determinant of men's businesses and attitudes and opinions. The slack is taken up, the cross-currents fade out, and the nation moves lumberingly and slowly, but with ever accelerated speed and integration, towards the great end, towards that peacefulness of being at war, of which J.P Jacks has spoken so unforgettably.

The classes which are able to play an active and not merely a passive role in the organization for war get a tremendous liberation of activity and energy. Individuals are jolted out of their old routine, many of them are given new positions of responsibility, new techniques must be learnt. Wearing home times are broken and women who would have remained attached with infantile bonds are liberated for service overseas. A vast sense of rejuvenescence pervades the significant classes, a sense of new importance in the world. Old national ideals are taken out, readapted to the purpose and used as the universal touchstones, or molds into which all thought is poured. Every individual citizen who in peacetimes had no function to perform by which he could imagine himself an expression or living fragment of the State becomes an active amateur agent of the Govemrnent in reporting spies and disloyalists, in raising Government funds, or in propagating such measures as are considered necessary by officialdom. Minority opinion, which in times of peace was only irritating and could not be dealt with by law unless it was conjoined with actual crime, becomes with the outbreak of war, a case for outlawry. Criticism of the State, objections to war, lukewarm opinions concerning the necessity or the beauty of conscription, are made subject to ferocio'us penalties, far exceeding severity those affixed to actual pragmatic crimes. Public opinion, as expressed in the newspapers, and the pulpits and the schools, becomes one solid block. Loyalty, or rather war orthodoxy, becomes the sole test for all professions, techniques, occupations. Particularly is this true in the sphere ofthe intellectual life. There the smallest taint is held to spread over the whole soul, so that a professor of physics is ipso facto disqualified to teach physics or to hold honorable place in a university-the republic of learning-if he is at all unsound on the war. Even mere association with persons thus tainted is considered to disqualify a teacher. Anything per taining to the enemy becomes taboo. His books are suppressed wherever possible, his language is forbidden. His artistic products are considered to convey in the subtlest spiritual way taints of vast poison to the soul that permits itself to enjoy them. So enemy music is suppressed, and energetic measures of opprobrium taken against those whose artistic consciences are not ready to perform such an act of self-sacrifice. The rage for loyal conformity works impartially, and often in diametric opposition to other orthodoxies and traditional conformities or ideals. The triumphant orthodoxy of the State is shown at its apex perhaps when Christian preachers lose their pulpits for taking in more or less literal terms the Sermon on the Mount, and Christian zealots are sent to prison for twenty years for distributing tracts which argue that war is unscriptural.

If anything, the fact that similar objectives have been attained with a lesser degree of repression as occurred during and after World War I is particularly disturbing. Furthermore, unlike after World War I, the populace has become inured to a low level, perpetual state of global conflict, and the utilization of military force, or the threat of it, as one of the most common American responses to resistance of any kind. The acceptance of the primacy of vengence as a US foreign policy objective, as recently expressed in the execution style assassination of Osama Bin Laden in front of his family, is ominous.

Labels: "War on Terror", American Culture, American Empire, Anarchism, Osama Bin Laden

Peter Hartlaub has posted a number of graphic photographs from the late 1950s and early 1960s at SFGate about the still unfulfilled ambitions of the planners of BART. Of course, there is the iconic picture of an imaginary BART train going across the Golden Gate Bridge, but are some other delightful ones as well. The introductory image is an early BART fare card from 1974.

Burrito Justice has also posted images of some of the early promotional materials used by proponents, such as the firm responsible for much of the construction of BART (yes, you guessed it, General Electric), obtained through Eric Fisher. Consider this one, Progress is Our Most Important Product:

If you look at the advertisement closely, you will see a graphic photograph of an above-ground train traveling through Berkeley in the lower right corner. The city of Berkeley passed a measure to provide for additional financing in order to have the system subsequently constructed underground, as any of you familiar with the East Bay undoubtedly know.

Looking at these images and advertisements, BART evokes a kind of Keynesian nostalgia. It is almost impossible to imagine a project of this scale being constructed today, except for the military-industrial complex and utilities insistent upon the generation of electricity through the use of nuclear power. As with any modernist endeavor, however, there is a suppressed dark side to the cutting edge allure of modern transit. Concealed beneath the glamour of these images and advertisements is the disruption, and, in some instances, destruction, of communities that resulted from the construction of BART, as well as the extent to which it facilitated the segregation of the Bay Area in a new form along lines of race and class.

Labels: American Culture, Bay Area, California, Modernism

You've probably heard about it already. City University of New York planned to give playwright Tony Kushner an honorary degree, until one of its vociferous, Zionist board members, Jeffrey Wiesenfeld, condemned it:

According to a podcast of the Monday meeting and accounts from two CUNY officials who attended it, one of the 12 trustees present, Jeffrey S. Wiesenfeld, objected to John Jay College’s submission of Mr. Kushner for an honorary degree. Mr. Wiesenfeld described viewpoints and comments, which he ascribed to Mr. Kushner, that he had found on the Web site of Norman Finkelstein, a political scientist and critic of Israel.

Mr. Wiesenfeld, an investment adviser and onetime aide to former Gov. George E. Pataki and former Senator Alfonse M. D’Amato, said that Mr. Kushner had tied the founding of Israel to a policy of ethnic cleansing, criticized the Israel Defense Forces and supported a boycott of Israel.

I think it’s up to all of us to look at fairness and consider these things, Mr. Wiesenfeld said. Especially when the State of Israel, which is our sole democratic ally in the area, sits in the neighborhood which is almost universally dominated by administrations which are almost universally misogynist, antigay, anti-Christian.

Unable to approve the entire list of honorees with the inclusion of Kushner, the trustees removed his name.

Wiesenfeld then maligned the Palestinians in a subsequent public statement:

In the wake of his intervention against Kushner, he told the New York Times that he believed the Palestinians had developed a culture which is unprecedented in human history. He said: People who worship death for their children are not human.

The situation became a cause celebre in academic and entertainment circles, with some past recipients of the degrees, such as Barbara Ehrenreich and Michael Cunningham, renouncing them. Yesterday, the trustees reversed their decision and awarded the degree to Kushner. But, sadly, Kushner's defense of his political perspective merely reinforced the Zionist narrative about the creation of the state of Israel and its treatment of the Palestinians:

- My questions and reservations regarding the founding of the state of Israel are connected to my conviction, drawn from my reading of American history, that democratic government must be free of ethnic or religious affiliation, and that the solution to the problems of oppressed minorities are to be found in pluralist democracy and in legal instruments like the 14th Amendment; these solutions are, like all solutions, imperfect, but they seem to me more rational, and have had a far better record of success in terms of minorities being protected from majoritarian tyranny, than have national or tribal solutions. I am very proud of being Jewish, and discussing this issue publicly has been hard; but I believe in the absolute good of public debate, and I feel that silence on the part of Jews who have questions is injurious to the life of the Jewish people. My opinion about the wisdom of the creation of a Jewish state has never been expressed in any form without a strong statement of support for Israel’s right to exist, and my ardent wish that it continue to do so, something Mr. Weisenfeld conveniently left out of his remarks.

- I believe that the historical record shows, incontrovertibly, that the forced removal of Palestinians from their homes as part of the creation of the state of Israel was ethnic cleansing, a conclusion I reached mainly by reading the work of Benny Morris, an acclaimed and conservative Israeli historian whose political opinions are much more in accord with Mr. Weisenfeld’s than with mine; Mr. Morris differs from Mr. Weisenfeld in bringing to his examination of history a scholar’s rigor, integrity, seriousness of purpose and commitment to telling the truth.

With all due respect to Kushner, who is, by all accounts, a brilliant playwright, this makes no sense. There is no way to square his embrace of secular democratic values and institutions with the creation of Israel. From its inception, Israel has provided a privileged status to Jews to the detriment of the rest of the indigenous, non-Jewish population, and, as part of the process by which the country was founded, ethnically cleansed Palestinians, which it still does. One cannot separate the existence of Israel from Zionism, which, in its political manifestations, is centered around the forcible removal of Palestinians from Palestine and the erasure of their social and cultural experience.

Consistent with this illogical line of reasoning, Kushner concludes his support for secular democratic principles with this declaration:

My opinion about the wisdom of the creation of a Jewish state has never been expressed in any form without a strong statement of support for Israel’s right to exist, and my ardent wish that it continue to do so, something Mr. Weisenfeld conveniently left out of his remarks.

So, despite his acknowledgement that Israel came into existence through the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, Kushner not only supports Israel's right to exist, but ardently wishes that it continue to do so. One suspects that he agrees with Benny Morris, a scholar that he cites in reference to the nakhba in 1948, in regard to the suitability of it, but is unwilling to say so publicly. After admitting that the evidence established that the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians occurred, Morris has expressed the opinion that it was regrettably necessary for Israel to come into existence, and that, as a Zionist, he accepts it. Indeed, Morris has said that David Ben-Gurion did not go far enough, and that it would have been better if he had expelled the entire Arab population, although I doubt that Kushner, the good liberal that he is, would go this far. Not surprisingly, Morris is now an advocate for a first strike upon Iran.

Meanwhile, in regard to academia, there is nothing positive about the fact that CUNY reversed its decision and awarded the degree to Kushner. Kushner successfully resisted the attempt by Wiesenfeld to deprive him of it by accepting Wiesenfeld's underlying premises, that it is illegitimate to object to the existence of Israel and that support for the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement is implicitly anti-semitic. He was so sensitive on these points that he vehemently asserted that Wiesenfeld has engaged in slanderous mischaracterizations against him, while, as already noted, embracing Israel's right to exist and disassociating himself from his friends in the BDS effort:

- I am on the advisory board of Jewish Voice for Peace, and have remained there even though I disagree with the organization about a number of issues, including the boycott. I remain affiliated because the women and men of JVP are courageous, committed people who work very hard serving the interests of peace and justice and the Jewish people, and I’m honored by my association with them. I have a capacity Mr. Weisenfeld lacks, namely the ability to tolerate and even value disagreement. Furthermore, resigning from the advisory board of JVP, or any organization, to escape the noisy censure of likes of Mr. Weisenfeld is repellent to me.

Note how skillfully Kushner seeks to placate Weisenfeld by distancing himself from Jewish Voice for Peace while still empathizing with the people involved in it. If I was a participant in JVP, I'd submit a motion to kick him off the Board, but I guess that would just make me intolerant and incapable of valuing disagreement. In any event, Kushner provided Wiesenfeld with a great victory, one that is likely to resonate in similar conflicts in the future. The outcome is one in which the boundaries of acceptable public discourse are delineated by standards imposed as a result of internecine struggle between conservative and liberal Zionists.

Labels: American Culture, Boycott Divestment and Sanctions, Imperialism, Iran, Israel, Palestine, Zionism

The true extent of the hypocrisy associated with the celebration of Bin Laden's death is captured in this chart, one of several by government_employee (hat tip to the Angry Arab for directing me to it). Predictably, there are numerous comments to government_employee's post that attribute a unique propensity for violence solely to Arabs and Muslims.

9/11 memorials, such as the one yesterday, serve a clear, odious purpose: to establish a hierarchy of death whereby American ones as a result of Islamic fundamentalist violence are elevated to a quasi-religious, saint-like status, while the deaths of others around the world as a consequence of subsequent US military violence are either repressed, justified as a legitimate response to 9/11 or dismissed as the inevitable result of warfare.

No one should participate in them absent an acknowledgement of all of the victims of such violence, and the perpetrators of it. Without such an acknowledgement, they are yet another instance of the persistence of the American narrative of victimization that elites have manipulated since the country's inception to their benefit, especially in regard to Native Americans and African Americans, people characterized historically by whites with the same moral deficiencies that many Americans currently ascribe to Arabs and Muslims. To the extent that there were members of families of 9/11 victims that refused to participate in the ceremony with the President yesterday, they deserve our profound respect, regardless of their motivation, as they declined to facilitate the jingoism interwoven into it.

Labels: 9/11, American Culture, American Empire, Barack Obama, Imperialism, Osama Bin Laden, Racism

A few weeks ago, Arianna Huffington, and other investors associated with her, sold The Huffington Post to AOL. Besides receiving millions of dollars, she was appointed to some position within AOL related to news and opinion content. As most of you know, Huffington built up the Post by relying upon articles and columns submitted by people for free. In the beginning, the writers were primarily celebrities, as this was the initial cachet of the Post, the opportunity to read the opinions of high profile entertainment figures. But, over time, the Post gravitated towards the work of individuals with some sort of journalistic or political connection to the subjects that they wrote about.

Now, with Huffington pocketing a lot of money partially as a consequence of their efforts, some of these writers, as well as some journalists, have expressed anger that none of the money obtained through the sale to AOL is going to them. We have even been subjected to such nonsense as the notion that some provided their work for free because they considered the Post a political enterprise, part of a movement to challenge the ascendancy of the right in the US. Of course, it's ludicrous, and I don't have the slightest bit of sympathy for them. Huffington made it clear from the inception that the Post was a business enterprise, subsequently obtaining approximately $20 million in outside capital several years ago. She made no secret that she wanted to grow the readership for the purpose of increasing the Post's profitability, and did so by highlighting celebrity gossip on the site. Perhaps, we have an example of a particular kind of paradoxical liberal thinking among these writers whereby they really believed that they could change the world with the assistance of a self-serving Internet entrepreneur like Huffington.

Furthermore, and perhaps more insidiously, Huffington was also clear about the constraints upon content imposed by her business plan from the beginning as well. She solicited Justin Raimondo of antiwar.com to post opinion pieces on the site shortly after the Post was launched, and then quickly dropped him when he, quite predictability, expressed his hostility to Zionism. Conversely, the pro-Israel apologetics of Alan Dershowitz have been an enduring feature. She personally expressed support for Israel on the site when it attacked Lebanon in 2006. Since the election of Obama, the Post has been known, in contradistinction to a site like firedoglake, as a cheerleader for the Obama presidency.

Does Arianna do such things for profit, or does she believe them? We will never know. But the writers should have known what they were getting into. For their own reasons, they decided that they would undermine the efforts of their brethren who have been insistent upon compensation for their work, and submit their writings to the Post for free. In this, Huffington is correct, there was a deal, and the writers thought that they could promote themselves by grabbing onto her coattails. Instead of acting in solidarity with others who were attempting to prevent the Internet from becoming a place where capital expropriated the work of writers for free for its benefit, they played along in the expectation that, through their association with the Post, they were be among the few winners, some of the few writers who could actually earn a living by publishing over the Internet. Or, they were so intoxicated by the opportunity for exposure, that they were grateful just to have their work posted there. Or, maybe both. In any event, they, as the title of this post says, got exactly what they deserved.

Labels: American Culture, firedoglake, Liberals, Mainstream Media, Neoliberalism

Oh, you say that it doesn't exist? That I have become so paranoid that I see imperialist demons everywhere? Well, consider this review of the recently released film, Outside the Law, by Stephen Holden in the New York Times:

Some might describe Outside the Law as a historical revenge film.

The 138-minute movie begins with an emotional sledgehammer: an inflammatory prologue set in 1925 in which the French Code de l’Indigénat is applied to a poor Algerian family, summarily evicted from its ancestral home to make room for French colonists. This land was my father’s! I was born here! cries the patriarch (Ahmed Benaissa), who can produce no documents to prove that the land is his.

The story leaps ahead 20 years for an even more infuriating scene. As France is celebrating V-E Day and the surrender of Nazi Germany, Algerian nationalist marchers in Sétif are massacred by French soldiers stationed on balconies and rooftops, who open fire without warning. These scenes of French colonial oppression are portrayed without any background or shading.

Now, I haven't seen the film, so I have no idea whether it is worth seeing or not, but isn't it rather odd that Holden is infuriated by the visual representation of an event, the massacre of nationalist Algerians in 1945, that no one questions? Isn't it even more peculiar that Holden is infuriated by it because the filmmakers show it without background or shading? I mean, what would that entail? How does one provide background or shading to a massacre?

Of course, we have a pretty good idea what Holden really means. He is implying that the French troops may well have had good reason to fire indiscriminately upon a group of marchers, because, after all, as we all know, they had probably been fired upon, like the Pentagon has asserted, without any evidence, about the US troops who fired upon Iraqi protesters in Fallujah in late April 2003. It is essential to understand that Europeans, Americans, and Israelis are justified in responding to any act of violence by Muslims, or merely the fear of it, with excessive force against the populace, assuming one believes that there was any such violence, which is a huge, frequently unwarranted assumption. Any film that fails to acknowledge the legitimacy of this perspective, at least by having it related sympathetically through some of its characters, as part of a range of subjective experiences, is artistically and ideologically suspect.

In effect, Holden has culturally internalized the values of the war on terror and begun to retrospectively apply them to past episodes of imperialism. One wonders what he would say about Spielberg's film Amistad if he watched it today. Would he now say that the slaves' attack upon the crew of the ship transporting them to a US plantation is deficient because it has been insufficiently contextualized? Beyond that, there is Holden's covert sympathy for the Israeli settlement project in Palestine, as related in his description of the eviction of a poor Algerian family in 1925 as inflammatory. It is doubtful that Holden is suggesting that there was no French policy of property and land seizures. He can't be that ill-informed.

Instead, Holden objects to the exposure of the human consequences of the eviction, because it may cause the audience to question the legitimacy of French colonialism in Algeria, and analogize it to Israeli seizures of land in Palestine. His lack of any empathy with the victims is remarkable, but, then, they are Muslims. Such ruthlessness is better left concealed away from the general public, contained within the antiseptic debates of academics. Note his emphasis upon the father's failure to produce any documents to establish proof of ownership of the home. Here, we have a powerful echo of the notion that if indigenous people don't have any legally recorded private property interest in their land and home, it is perfectly legitimate for others to seize them and establish title, which must thereafter be respected. Combined with the belief that indigenous peoples are grossly economically inefficient, it justifies both the French seizure of the home as dramatized in the film, and Jewish seizures of Palestinian land. Not surprisingly, he characterizes the father's response as hysterical, bringing to mind a recent report in the occupied territories wherein the Israelis claimed that a young child's distraught response to being separated from his father was staged. Such human emotions are solely within the province of the colonizers, apparently.

Indeed, if one is compelled to attempt to summarize Holden's objection to Outside the Law, it is the insistence of the filmmakers upon melodramatically humanizing the lives of the people who resisted the French colonization of Algeria. He finds it aggravating, the cinematic equivalent of someone dragging their nails across a chalkboard. Post 9/11, I have had a sense that there has been a degradation of US culture and cultural criticism as it relates to things like art, literature and film. The free ranging curiosity that was such a prominent feature of the neoliberal 1990s is no longer so much in evidence. Instead, there has been a move towards only accepting works that criticize the US relationship with the world within limited boundaries, and maligning those that do not, as Michiko Kakutani did in her hatchet job on John Le Carre's 2004 novel, Absolute Friends. In the first sentence of the review, she described it as ham handed and didactic. I guess that's what happens if you write a novel, as Le Carre did, that finds redeeming qualities in the Berlin New Left of the 1960s and presents a US intelligence operation centered around a manufactured terrorist incident as plausible. Serving in the role of cultural gatekeepers, people like Holden and Kakutani try to bury works that insist upon being so impolite as to hold a mirror to the war on terror with the condescension of those who purport to appreciate the arts: inflammatory, infuriating, ham handed, didactic. But we know better.

Labels: "War on Terror", American Culture, American Empire, Israel, New York Times, Palestine

Just to show that I'm not entirely devoid of sentimentality:

And all the colors that you see, are all a part of me, in this crazy world of mine. Has anyone ever so concisely captured the personal alienation that so many of us feel from the world in which we live? Such a lightning flash of recognition can lead people to travel down many paths, including, but not necessarily, political activism. For my money, Donna Summer remains one of the most unappreciated pop musicians of my lifetime because of the racially tinged ridicule of disco. Another of my favorites, On the Radio, was a prominent feature on the soundtrack of an excellent, but now forgotten, Jodie Foster film, Foxes, where it was used to ironically comment upon the naive expectations of the teen protagonists in a jaded, late 1970s Los Angeles. Apparently, I'm a Rainbow was recorded in 1981, but not released until 1996. One of the impressive subtleties of this composition by her husband for her is the thread of self-doubt (or is it self-awareness?) that runs throughout: I'm a rainbow and sometimes I can shine.

Rarely have the personal and the political been as brilliantly fused as in this 1964 Holland-Dozier-Holland composition for Diana Ross and the Supremes. As accurately noted by wikipedia: The song seemed to strike a chord in the USA as, while on one level it can be seen as a simple tale of a failed relationship, it can also been as capturing the spirit of the time after the assassination of JFK, racial tension, deepening problems in Vietnam and foreseeing the end of the early optimism of the 1960s.

But, at the gut level, this reaction by someone over at YouTube has it exactly right:

When this song came out I was 13 yrs old and my best friend Denise and I were walking up the street listing to the radio and it just blew my mind. I started walking backwards and she and I walked up Clinton Ave and I said, "Denise, this song will last FOREVER!" And it has.

And, finally, along similar lines, there is Angie, the Rolling Stones' valedictory to the communal spirit of the late 1960s:

Angie, Angie, when will all those clouds all disappear, Angie, Angie, where will it lead us from here, with no lovin' in our soul and no money in our coat, you can say we're satisfied, Angie, Angie, you can't say we never tried . . .

Typically, the Stones gave expression to a stark pessimism, which suggested a socially Darwinian future. Being the good cultural capitalists that they are, though, they continued to flourish by highlighting the sybaritic aspect of their music to the detriment of its other, more ambivalent qualities, so as to be compatible with Reaganism. If there could be said to be a pop music representation of neoliberalism, the Rolling Stones would be a strong candidate for it.

Labels: African Americans, American Culture, Music, Neoliberalism, YouTube