totalitarianism today

Environmental policy and the banality of evil.

As I type, the Trump administration is currying favor with Koch donors by continuing to subsidize coal in counties who cannot afford the long-term costs of environmental degradation.

The funny thing about rape culture is the extent to which rapists deny it. 

When injustice is codified into law and normalized by media, citizens become entangled in an evil as ordinary as tail-gating.

Justin Nobel's "Louisiana Environmental Apocalypse Road Trip" is much more ordinary than it sounds: an example of the banality of evil as it plays out in local development policy. I know this from personal experience--from conversations with the Alabama Department of Environmental Management in which employees denied the existence of leaking deep disposal wells along the Black Warrior River, from interactions with local officials who whisper when they mention "keeping Mercedes happy," from the extent to which we subsidize Mercedes' new class of "perma-temp" employees, and from the indisputable maps that reveal how every toxic project is planned and apportioned to working-class neighborhoods and residential areas.

In Tuscaloosa, Alabama, the local NAACP has been fighting to relocate Central Elementary School only to discover that black bodies have little impact on a School Board dominated by dark money, the overwhelming majority of which issues from rich white billionaires.

Robert Taylor. (Image source: Longreads)

Taylor was born in Reserve and remembers when DuPont began neoprene production in 1969, and the unexplainable wave of sickness and death that followed. Production of neoprene—dive wetsuits, insulated lunch boxes, beer koozies—emits toxic chloroprene, and this is the only plant in America that produces it.

Taylor, in jeans and black T-shirt is well-spoken and furious. One of his main concerns is the Fifth Ward Elementary School, which borders the plant, and where just this past January chloroprene concentrations in the air were recorded at 332 times the federal guidelines. “If we can commit an act of war against another country for chemically poisoning their children,” says Taylor, “how can we stand by and do nothing when chemicals are poisoning our own children?”

There are the problems of industrial production and the problems of disposal. Every toxic byproduct, after all, cannot be mailed to Mars with a "please do not return" sticker.

Image source: Alabama Public Radio

The price of cheap goods over the short term is very expensive over the long term. Coal ash disposal is a case in point.

For the past seven years, the citizens of Uniontown, Alabama have been trying to protect their health and homes from local government's decision to render some bodies less valuable than others. Millions of tons of coal ash has been stored at Arrowhead landfill:

 “It was dumped right in a black community, right in front of their homes. That was terrifying. Esther Calhoun ‘Cause my neighbor, she lived right there and she was an older lady, she was like 72, and she would sit on that porch and she was terrified just looking at it. You know, I can’t go anywhere because this is mostly a poor residence. I can’t move, where am I gonna go?” And the Kingston spill isn’t the only possible source of coal ash that has environmentalists worried. What you’re hearing are the generators at the Gorgas Steam Plant, just north of Birmingham. It’s one of nine power plants at work across the length and breadth of the state. Nationwide, plants like these produce a reported one hundred and fifty million tons of coal ash each year.

Avner Vengosh “So what we have in the U.S. is a situation that we are protecting the sky because of preventing emission of metals and contaminants to the atmosphere. But at the same time, the level of contaminants in coal ash is being further concentrated.”

There are at least nine coal ash storage ponds located along major rivers in the state of Alabama. Alabama Public Radio was greeted with polite silence when it asked Alabama Power for commentary. But the truth wiggles out: 

Off tape, Alabama Power says other forms of pollution like storm water runoff do more harm. The utility also insists that they monitor their coal ash along with state and federal inspectors. Vengosh says there’s a hole in those policies. “Each of the coal ash ponds has what we call outfall, which is regulated by the state with respect to the volume of effluent that is allowed to be discharged from the coal ash pond into the rivers or lakes that are associated with those coal ash pond. However, the levels of contaminants in those effluents in the outfalls are not regulated.”

When we talk about Arendt's "banality of evil," we assume concentration camps and foreign languages. But the banality of evil was not limited to Nazi Germany--the banality of evil appears whenever persons are slowly dehumanized and killed through ordinary institutional means. By the Powers That Be. When the same institutions that sponsor our school playgrounds also poison our water supply with calculated impunity.

I am certain most Alabama Power employees attend a local church. I am certain they are grateful for Southern Company's reasonable health care policies. Their view of pollution and poison as a natural byproduct of doing business has been drummed into their heads for decades. And their jobs depend upon an ability to serve as a mouthpiece for these norms.

How societies cope with female sexual desire.

It's not a new book but it's a book that matters. Daniel Bergner writes:

Women’s desire — its inherent range and innate power — is an underestimated and constrained force, even in our times, when all can seem so sexually inundated, so far beyond restriction.... Despite the notions our culture continues to imbue, this force is not, for the most part, sparked or sustained by emotional intimacy and safety..... one of our most comforting assumptions, soothing perhaps above all to men but clung to by both sexes, that female eros is much better made for monogamy than the male libido, is scarcely more than a fairy tale.

In an interview with Tracy Clark-Flory, Bergner expresses the belief that females might be even less suited to monogamy than males: "I do think that men who’ve been blessed to happily think that it’s only they who are having trouble with monogamy, and that their wives or long-committed girlfriends are more or less just fine with it, they may have a lot to worry about."

Evolutionary psychology as wanking

For Bergner, a journalist, a fan of close observation, a chronicler of sub-Saharan war zones, sex research began with an interest in cross-cultural sexual extremes. He describes how writing a book on research into female desire dispelled the circular reasonings of evolutionary psychology:

I guess the first thing to say is how struck I was by the distance between reality and the fable that we’ve been taught most recently by evolutionary psychology, that is, that men are driven to spread their seed and women, by comparison, are more driven to find one good provider, and that, therefore, while men are very poorly suited to monogamy, women are much better suited to monogamy. But that just really doesn’t stand up when you look at the science.

Surprise that female monkeys objectified male monkeys in field research, Bergner concludes that "the reason we’ve ignored this is because we’ve managed to convince ourselves that one gender is all about reproduction and the other is all about sex." 

On research that reveals the polymorphous perversity of female subjects, Bergner notes that arousal and fantasy need not imply consent. 

The realm of arousal and the realm of fantasy can tell us something about ourselves psychologically without indicating that we really want to experience that thing, far from it.

Why the preponderance of "rape" or domination fantasies, whether in visual media or romance novels? Bergner leans on socialization and the subconscious:

The force of culture puts some level of shame on women’s sexuality and a fantasy of sexual assault is a fantasy that allows for sex that is completely free of blame. So that’s one reason. Another, which Meana brings up, and which I think is very compelling, is this idea that the feeling of being desired is a very powerful one, a very electrical one. And I think at least at the fantasy level, that sense of being wanted, and being wanted beyond the man’s self-control is also really powerful.

In a sense, the study of female lust and sexual desire demands a greater tolerance for perversity and diversity than our male-oriented culture permits. The pathology of sexual "deviancy", perhaps best exemplified by the DSM, socializes women to bite their lip and hold their tongue at an early age.

Women who want it all: The mind of female lust

In 2009, Bergner published two articles about female desire in the New York Times Magazine. The first, "What Do Women Want," focused on Meredith Chivers' research into bonobo pornography. 

Lisa Diamond's exploration of "sexual fluidity" and "persons-based attraction" yields insight into the "Chasing Amy" effect:

Diamond doesn’t claim that women are without innate sexual orientations. But she sees significance in the fact that many of her subjects agreed with the statement “I’m the kind of person who becomes physically attracted to the person rather than their gender.” For her participants, for the well-known women she lists at the start of her book and for women on average, she stresses that desire often emerges so compellingly from emotional closeness that innate orientations can be overridden. This may not always affect women’s behavior — the overriding may not frequently impel heterosexual women into lesbian relationships — but it can redirect erotic attraction. One reason for this phenomenon, she suggests, may be found in oxytocin, a neurotransmitter unique to mammalian brains. The chemical’s release has been shown, in humans, to facilitate feelings of trust and well-being, and in female prairie voles, a monogamous species of rodent, to connect the act of sex to the formation of faithful attachments. Judging by experiments in animals, and by the transmitter’s importance in human childbirth and breast feeding, the oxytocin system, which relies on estrogen, is much more extensive in the female brain. For Diamond, all of this helps to explain why, in women, the link between intimacy and desire is especially potent.

The second article,  "Women Who Want to Want," drew attention to Lori Brotto's research into female libido. Brotto's studies reinforce the degree to which desire's mental components are as important as its physical manifestations.

Using the Basson Sexual Response Cycle, Brotto attempts to understand and ameliorate conditions of low libido in middle-aged women:

An underlying theory is that while her patients’ genitals commonly pulse with blood in response to erotic images­ or their partners’ sexual touch, their minds are so detached — distracted by work or children or worries about the way they look unclothed, or fixated on fears that their libidos are dead — as to be oblivious to their bodies’ excitement, their bodies’ messages. The skill of fully attending to sensation is essential within Brotto’s vision of women’s desire — a vision that she imparts to her groups partly by introducing a diagram called “the Basson Sexual Response Cycle,” whose circles and arrows have lately been imprinting themselves on the field of sex therapy and helping to guide Brotto’s formulations for the next D.S.M.

In some ways, Brotto's research and the Basson model raise additional questions about the extent to which  American females are currently socialized against their natural sexual desires. Confronted with male images of desire-- and masculine representations of the lusty female-- some women find it difficult to recognize or even relate to their own desires as they are presented: 

....Basson’s lesson for women, which has been distilled by sex therapists into three words, “desire follows arousal,” is a real rearrangement of expectation and a reweighting of sexual theory. The model with swollen red lips gazing out with molten need from the billboard or the MTV dancer pumping her half-covered hips at the camera — these icons in heat embody a cultural standard. And though some women, according to Basson, do feel such craving some of the time — at the beginning of a new relationship, for example, or possibly at a certain point in the menstrual cycle — and though a few women may sense such electricity surging regularly through them, these images, she suggests, are largely illusory ideals. More likely for most women, Basson argues, the start of plenty — and maybe the great majority — of sexual encounters is defined not by heat but by slight warmth or flat neutrality. And there’s nothing wrong with this, she says, nothing disordered.

What, then, is the disorder? Brotto notes "a dim or missing sense of excitement during sex itself." Here, Bergner connects the forest to the trees and asks:

What if the lack of excitement is due to a partner’s ineptitude? What if it’s caused by a lover’s emotional disconnection? Suddenly the realm of mental disorder, which is supposed to be delineated, as the introduction to the D.S.M. puts it, by “dysfunction in the individual,” is being distorted by the role of others. Is it the patient who has the condition, or the partner, or the couple? In building on Basson’s “responsive desire,” Brotto’s criteria run repeatedly into this fundamental problem. A partner’s involvement is more or less inescapable.

And my favorite part of all-- because what is more rich and voluble than research that gives rise to a paradox:

Brotto and Basson are about to publish research demonstrating that low levels of testosterone in women do not correspond with low libido. Yet there is a paradox. Brotto explained that giving extra testosterone to women with desire problems can, it appears, spike sexual interest. For reasons unknown, the administered hormone has a unique effect. But there’s a further complication. In studies, women given a placebo report a similar result, not quite as marked but definitely not insignificant either. To add to the intrigue, the women using a placebo often report testosterone’s unwanted side effects: facial hair; acne. Speaking about all this, Brotto smiled in bewilderment — and in something close to awe at the inscrutability of the human mind, the organ that is the locus of desire.

 

More to chase:

A video that lays out the sexual response cycle, for those in need of visual excitement

Lisa M. Diamond's Sexual Fluidity, free in PDF format

A compendium of red pill research: The Men's Rights Activist Movement.

1974

Warren Farrell publishes The Liberated Man as an addition to the growing women's movement. In it, Farrell argued that gender roles wounded men as well as women by forcing them to carry the burdens of supporting a family and stifling their natural emotions. 

1988

Warren Farrell publishes Why Men Are the Way They Are, depicting a world in which women wield enormous influence and power.

Even those women who are less successful have "enormous sexual leverage over men" and "can use the power to get external rewards," he wrote. Men, on the other hand, have been reduced to "success objects," judged solely by their status and earning potential. *

1993

Warren Farrell's The Myth of Male Power: Why Men Are the Disposable Sex is published. In it, Farrell suggests that the American male is the new "nigger", and that feminism allows women to pursue their goals through charges of sexual harassment. It becomes the holy script of the MRA movement. 

2009

Paul Elam launches A Voice For Men from his laptop. It serves as "the vanguard" for a growing activism to reclaim male privilege by reducing female power. 

2011- November

Anders Breivik murders 77 children and adults at a camp in Norway. His manifesto is published online. In it, Breivik rages against political correctness and offers an engaged expression of men's rights ideology in which females use "erotic capital" to "manipulate" men, fathers become "disposable", and "using terror to wake up the masses."

2011- December

A Voice for Men launches Register.her, intended to mimic sex offender registries and claiming to track female murders, rapists, and schemers. The site's motto: "Fuck Their Shit Up."

2013

MRA's continue to refine and propagate their "doxing" techniques, which involve publicizing personal information to make someone a target of harassment. See the case of Ohio college student, Rachel Cassidy.

2014- June

Journalist Jessica Roy travels to an MRA conference and attempts to digest the ongoing sense of victimization she hears in the room. The article is published in Time, a major news outlet. 

2014- September

Anita Sarkeesian and other female game designers are targeted in the Gamergate campaign.

2015 - January

Warren Farrell does an interview in which he boasts of a forthcoming book with John Gray titled Beyond Mars and Venus.

2016- November

Donald J. Trump is elected President of the United States of America.

The far right of which Sabo is a symptom.

Sabo's "for sale" sign, an effort at billboard commemoration.

My Proud Boy acquaintances keep telling me that "Republicans are the new punk," which I take as reference to the nascent neo-fascist (politely dubbed "alt-right") fuckery jamming the airwaves and social media accounts. 

Sabo's "Unsavory Agents" is a prime route for capitalizing on the meme-driven art. Note that, unlike Banksy, Sabo's primary canvas is not the world but the wallet-- the creation of marketable product. In this, the social media marketing strategics are a solid investment. The revolution will be heavily networked. 

Sabo now says he is “cautiously optimistic” about the president. “The day I came to love Donald Trump was when I saw how hard he was kicking liberals in the teeth.”

When he isn't explaining how Obama is a Muslim that tried to destroy America, Sabo is offering pet theories on how Democrats literally engage in Satanic worship and profit from pedophile rings. The demon of Hillary is never far from his tongue. In an interview with Rory Carroll:

Challenged for evidence, Sabo cited leaked emails, which online conspiracy theorists claimed proved the accusations. “I’m a fan of logic and reason.” The fan of logic and reason also lamented America’s polarisation. “The whole climate is sick right now.” Asked if his work contributed to that sickness, Sabo shook his head. “The left are the ones who dehumanise.”

Insofar as coming to love Donald Trump involves making a virtual killing off his followers, many of whom are reeling from the loss of Duck Dynasty, Sabo joins the cash-crop minions who peddle a MAGA snake oil to line their own pockets. It's not necessarily an evil conspiracy, though it is surely a home-grown American one.

Photo-terror, Thor Halvorssen, the Pussy Riot laws, and other fun tidbits from the week.

A 2012 article about the Canadian Citizen Lab reveals the extent to which authoritarian regimes have been mobilizing the web as a potent weapon. The Hungarian government's current persecution of George Soros and the Open Society Institute can be taken in context of its original mission and the threat it poses to open societies:

In 1984, on the eve of glasnost, George Soros, the Hungarian American financier and philanthropist, struck a deal with the increasingly bankrupt Hungarian government. The country had only a dozen photocopiers, which were inaccessible and heavily monitored. Soros said he would provide hundreds of photocopiers to institutions such as libraries, on the condition that they be open and allowed to be used freely. As the wily billionaire no doubt expected, the deployment of the new copiers “helped the underground press tremendously,” a friend told BusinessWeek magazine. Five years after Soros initiated the project, the Hungarian government collapsed.

That episode underscores the relationship between political power and information technology. Copyright law traces its origins to efforts by European monarchs and states to license the printing process as a means of limiting the dissemination of seditious information. In the modern era, authoritarian regimes have always sought to tightly control the airwaves and the telecommunications networks, seeing them as both tools of repression and channels for state propaganda. Those restrictions brought a technological counter-response, sometimes in the form of journalism, sometimes propaganda. BBC's powerful radio signals transmitted information about the Allied war effort throughout Nazi-occupied Europe. During the Cold War, Radio Free Europe and Voice of America played a similar role in piercing the Iron Curtain’s information blackout.

 

Boris Falikov describes the Russian culture wars as embraced by Putin and propagated by the Russian Orthodox Church over the past five years. Just in case you were wondering why American leaders of the Christian Right keep showing up at conferences in Russia:

The natural conservatism of the ROC became part and parcel of this ideology of returning to ‘traditional values’ rooted in the glorious past of great Russia.

That’s how an informal concordat was formed between state and church in Russia. I call it ‘informal’, because the separation clause remained intact in the constitution. However, in reality the authorities did everything possible to support ROC initiatives and Orthodoxy started to function as an important source of the new state ideology. Certainly, some of the Orthodox mythologemes were secularized during this process. For example, the idea of the ‘Russian world’ first formulated by Patriarch Kirill was based on the historical fact that Kievan prince Vladimir baptized the ancient Slavs in 988. The patriarch used this to show the original unity of three Slavic nations based on their common faith and to prove the right of the Moscow Patriarchate to function in Russia, Belarus and Ukraine. But the Kremlin used this to justify the annexation of Crimea in 2014. Another example of secularized usage of Orthodox teaching by the government was its anti-abortion stand. For the church, it was a moral issue but for the authorities it was a way to solve the demographic crisis. However the ROC didn’t mind the secularization of its teaching by the government as long as it helped to strengthen its beneficial ties with the state. Besides, the ROC could always rely on the authorities if it felt threatened. Indeed, after the ‘punk prayer’ performed by the band Pussy Riot in the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour in Moscow, article 148 was amended so that offending religious feelings became a criminal offence.

Obviously, Russia is in pretty good shape given its desgination as "leader of the global Christian Right". The rest of us, however, might be tired of those friendly, clueless American evangelicals. 

 

Marta Zarzycka suggests the photography of terror creates a sense of "anxious anticipation":

Terror trades in images—it needs spectators to feed itself. It is commonplace to say that atrocities like the terrorist attacks in Manchester, London, Brussels, or Boston are “unspeakable”—whether to indicate that words are inadequate to describe such an act or that using words in this way is somehow, in itself, a form of violence. While these attacks may be unspeakable, they were most certainly not un-picturable: On the contrary, they generated a great number of images. These images mobilize shock, disbelief and repulsion, as well as gratuitous voyeurism. Becoming prime mediators in interrelationships between the targeted local communities and global audiences, they deploy a visual force that releases the impact of terror to the world at large.

Although piercing, images of terror are becoming more and more disconnected from the context in which they take place—all too often, photographs of mayhem, wounded bystanders, and destroyed buildings could have been taken almost anywhere in the world. No longer novel, photographs of terror now seem to create a sense of déjà vu or anxious anticipation.

 

Thor Halvorrsen, founder of the Oslo Freedom Forum, betrays his libertarian funding sources in a strange anti-Chavez rant that stops before touching anyone unassociated with leftist populism:

Halvorssen asks me how Norwegian journalists, ‘who defended this regime which caused so much destruction, are able to look at themselves in the mirror’. He lists journalists who defended Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot. I am keen to know where Halvorssen stands in relation to the Venezuelan opposition, who now demand a new election or the removal of President Maduro, who recently attempted to close down the national assembly through changes to the Constitution. Does Halvorssen support Julio Borges, the leader of the National assembly, or the presidential candidate for the opposition, Henrique Capriles? ‘No, I am not involved in Venezuelan politics other than in general. Otherwise, people would immediately react and say: “Oh, so you are from Venezuela, you must have money invested there!” I do not like the candidates, nor the politics of those you mention. No, my focus is on other countries such as North Korea, Ecuador and Singapore, where I cannot be accused of having investments. Instead, I am interested in explaining dictatorships.’

 

Annnnnd Cloudfare offers me the following screen when trying to access and link a great article by Andrea Callanan on poet Suzanne Buffam's post-mothering pillow book. I guess the Canadian journal, The Walrus, has become a security threat. Stretch your google muscles...

403 Forbidden

---

cloudflare-nginx

Trump and Religious Extremists: How dominionists have taken over our country.

 

I need to talk about the 81% of evangelical voters that elected Trump. I need to ask a few questions without worrying whether someone's religious heresy might take offense. In the same way that modern Islamic fundamentalism distorts and desacralizes the Muslim faith, modern Christian fundamentalism disembowels the tenets of Christianity from within. The main difference is now, our version of extremism has a nuclear-powered government backing it.

Welcome to the United States of Dominion. 

Back in 2005, John Sugg reported on the rise of dominionism in suburban Atlanta. As Sugg observes: 

Reconstruction’s major impact has been through helping to found and guide cross-denominational and secular political organ-izations. The Council for National Policy—a group that holds meetings for right-wing leaders, once dubbed “the most powerful conservative group you’ve never heard of”—was founded in 1981 as a project of top John Birch Society figures. Its members included Rushdoony, Gary North, Tim LaHaye, former Reagan aide Gary Bauer, and activist Paul Weyrich, who famously aimed to “overturn the present power structure of this country.”

Another group, the Coalition on Revival, brings together influential evangelicals to produce joint statements and theological white papers. North and DeMar are among the coalition’s most influential members; one of its founding documents is signed by 116 Christian right activists, including Rushdoony, mega-evangelist D. James Kennedy, and Roy Jones, a top staffer at the Republican Senatorial Committee.

Since limiting the franchise to Christian dominionist voters is a long-time policy goal, Reconstructionists have been particularly active in reducing voting rights and gerrymandering special districts. Their main think tank, the Chalcedon Foundation, is heavily financed by Howard Ahmanson and Nelson Bunker Hunt, both of whose families played key roles in financing electronic voting machine manufacturer Election Systems & Software. 

More recently, Frederick Clarkson tracked the influence of Dominionist extremism in the 2016 election He traces Ted Cruz's rise through extremist camps, noting other prominent politicians in this movement:

Roy Moore, the elected Chief Justice of the Alabama Supreme Court, has been a rallying figure for dominionists of all stripes for the better part of two decades. Most recently, he has led efforts to exempt Alabama from federal court ordered compliance with marriage equality, citing his view of “God’s law.” Moore’s fellow Alabaman, Justice Tom Parker, has been on the court since 2004, and has employed theocratic legal theorist John Eidsmoe as his chief of staff. Others at the top of recent American political life have included Sarah Palin, Michele Bachmann, Rick Perry, Mike Huckabee, and Newt Gingrich. Other prominent elected officials in the dominionist camp include Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick (R-TX), Gov. Sam Brownback (R-KS), Sen. James Lankford (R-OK), and Rep. Steve King (R-IA). 

As we know from other reporting, this movement has been increasingly normalized, helping to explain rising numbers of American Christians who purport a belief in creationism and young earth theology. Any young pastor that wants to attract new members and get into the pastor network will need money and support from these major groups.

Clarkson notes that "religious freedom has long been seen by dominionist strategists as a weakness of constitutional democracy that they can exploit to advance their agendas." Gary North has repeatedly, across decades and crowds and platforms and podiums, expressed his desire to fix the Constitution and create a neo-fascist Christian nation:  

North believes that the Constitution generally, and specifically the proscription against religious tests for public office included in Article 6, are “legal barrier[s] to Christian theocracy.” But he envisions a day when biblically correct Christians gain enough political power to be able to amend the Constitution to limit access to the franchise and civil offices to “communicant members of Trinitarian churches.

On the Reconstructionist view, freedom from religion is its own religion, namely, the religion of Secularism. The stand-off between a "biblical worldview" and "secular humanism" has been drilled into the mind of many young American Christians, many of whom were raised never to question its logic or probe its insane esoterica.

Make no mistake, the 2016 election was conceived as a war to "restore America". Enter David Lane, a stalwart warrior. To quote Clarkson:

David Lane, a leading Christian Right electoral organizer, declared in a 2013 essay that religious war may be on the horizon. Meanwhile he has shifted the electoral emphasis of his Mississippi-based American Renewal Project. (The group hosts all-expenses paid policy briefings for clergy and their spouses, featuring top politicians like Gov. Mike Pence (R-IN), Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL), Gingrich, Huckabee, Cruz, and often David Barton. Republican presidential contender Donald Trump addressed one such event in August 2016.) They are currently recruiting and training clergy with a dominionist vision to run for office at all levels. 

Lane shamelessly advertises his ability to influence voting. An April 2017 web article celebrates that American Renewal Project won two Pollie awards for "its evangelical turnout effort." He also authored his own pathetic Wikipedia entry. He makes no secret of his hatred for LGBTQ persons--in fact, he rests his laurels on that hatred. 

While self-proclaimed prophet Jeremiah Johnson endorsed Trump as "God's choice" for President, most American evangelicals preferred to assert their beliefs after the election, in tinny statements like "We have to trust God" or "We believe God will work through Trump" or "Do you have a new jalapeno dip because my husband is tired of the old one".  

In the same way that a Muslim fundamentalist who wishes to replace the Constitution with Sharia should not be offered a legislative seat, the Christian extremists need to be removed from the US government where they work to undermine civil society, rule of law, basic human rights, and US constitutionalism. Their mission is as clear as al Quada's--they want to destroy the secular West and replace it with a religious theocracy, ordained by God, led by men. 

And their followers? Chances are, you will find them hidden behind shopping bags and bible studies, hating Hillary with all their ever-loving hearts, but never once asking G-d to forgive them. Because this is a war. And they are the silent majority. 

Tales of American fascism.

 

WRITING THESE LITTLE FASCISMS

Scott Esposito is correct in asserting that it is the writer's duty to bear witness to history as it reveals itself in the present:

A writer’s duty is to see as much of the truth as possible of the society he or she inhabits, and often this is dangerous. Not simply dangerous in the sense of journalists like Ben Jacobs, who in May 2017 was assaulted by a candidate for Congress he was covering, or the many other journalists who have been threatened by Trump and terrorized by his supporters at his rallies—I mean dangerous in the sense of having to get close enough to the darkest sides of a society that it begins to infect your mind. This is precisely what Bolaño did, and anyone who has read his literature knows that it left a profound impact.

We are torn between our hopes, beliefs, and repugnance. As Milan Kundera notes in his essay "Emnity and Friendship," people learn to subordinate friendship and intimacy to "convictions" out of a sense of moral righteousness, a desire to be on the side of what is right. He argues that the mature position is more open to ambiguity--"the opinion we are arguing for is merely the hypothesis we favor, necessarily imperfect, probably transitory, which only very limited mins can declare to be a certainty or truth." 

And so we discover the tension between tone-policing and community-building, free speech rights and collaboration with xenophobia, speaking truth to power and consolidating alt-right racism. There are no easy answers in the Pepe morass. I think bearing witness is the best we can do--the minimum and the duty.

A KINDER, GENTLER, MORE ANTI-IMMIGRANT KLAN

Speaking of bearing witness, I don't think the rise of neo-fascism is a disputable phenomenon, and I have little patience for those that wish to say the KKK is harmless and historical.

Re-reading Rick Bragg's journalism for the NYT, I came across his reporting on the lynching murder of a black man in  Jasper, Texas in 1998, where Bragg observed the rise of a new Ku Klux Klan, a Klan espousing benign catchwords like "white pride" certainly recognizable in the current administration:

While gruesome killings may be every bit as much a part of the Klan's identity as is racial hatred, Mr. Lowe said that was the old Klan. His Klan, the one assembling in Jasper, is a Klan with a national platform.

''We believe that all immigration should be stopped in America for 10 years,'' he said, ''until there are enough jobs to support our working force in America. We do not believe in spending billions of dollars overseas to nations who do not care for us in the first place. We could be spending it on our inner cities. We do not believe that anyone should just be allowed to move plants'' out of the country. Overseas expansion is fine, he said, but ''they should not be allowed to just shut their doors here, putting Americans out of a job.''

''The Klan is not just racial,'' Mr. Lowe went on, but he said that whites in Jasper had been smeared by the crime and that the Klan rally was also in support of them.

Here we have it: in 1998, the Klan's simple anti-immigration platform. Embraced, cultivated, and elucidated by Trump and his Bannonite apostles. 

As for the response from mainstream liberals, well, I think many have failed to distinguish themselves when it comes to protecting or honoring the human rights of non-voting residents. Addressing the passage of two anti-immigration bills in the House, Sonali Kolhatkar writes:

But neither Democrats nor many progressives in the party’s base seem to care very much about these two immigration bills. A report in The Hill explained why 24 House Democrats voted for the bills—because “House Democratic leaders said they wouldn’t twist arms to get their members to oppose the legislation.” Unlike the discipline Democrats have shown on preserving the Affordable Care Act against Republican assault, the more liberal party seems willing to throw immigrant communities under the bus. Outside of immigrant rights organizations and civil rights groups, there has been little protest from major social justice groups. “It’s really disappointing,” Altman said of the lack of attention from liberals and progressives.

“This legislation goes hand-in-hand with a coordinated effort by the administration to paint all immigrants as criminal just by nature of their immigration status,” Altman said, “and that allows this administration to normalize their goal of mass detention and deportation of immigrants.”

Red State Resistance in Alabama this week. 

THE FUTURE MAY BE RED

Those who wish to conflate the rise of neo-fascism with populism would do well to consider alternative forms of resistance emerging from the left. Take Redneck Revolt, for example, "a nationwide organization of armed political activists from rural, working-class backgrounds who strive to reclaim the term “redneck” and promote active anti-racism":

It is not an exclusively white group, though it does take a special interest in the particular travails of the white poor. The organization’s principles are distinctly left-wing: against white supremacy, against capitalism and the nation-state, in support of the marginalized.

In 2009, Dave Strano, a member of the John Brown Gun Club, a firearms training project originally based in Kansas, noticed a deep "contradiction" in the burgeoning Tea Party movement:

Many Tea Party activists were fellow working-class people who had endured significant hardships as a result of the 2008 economic crisis which, in his eyes, had been caused by the very wealthy. And yet, Tea Partiers were now flocking in great numbers to rallies funded by the 1%. By supporting economically conservative politicians, Strano thought, they would only be further manipulated to benefit the already rich.

“The history of the white working class has been a history of being an exploited people,” he wrote. “However, we’ve been an exploited people that further exploits other exploited people. While we’ve been living in tenements and slums for centuries, we’ve also been used by the rich to attack our neighbors, coworkers, and friends of different colors, religions and nationalities.”

Hosted at the online Anarchist Library, Strano's philosophical ponderments are clearly anarcho-socialist in nature, though closer to post-USSR-visit Emma Goldman than Francois Fanon. He writes:

Thousands of white working people, people who rely on foodstamps, unemployment payments, and even welfare checks, fill the ranks at demonstrations calling for an end to social services. White working people, full of fear about socialism and an attack on “liberty” (in this case, an attack on the property rights of the rich) turn against their own interests and sell out their own needs to fight the new socialism.

The unpleasant reality for working class and poor people who have participated and still participate in this new movement, is that we’re being used by these rich leaders within the movement to protect their interests, not ours. But that’s nothing new.

I'm going to quote Strano more fully here because his position is an interesting resting point between neo-liberalism, Labour, and what Bernie Sanders has tried to represent. Strano goes on to elucidate a systemic critique of second-stage capitalism that straddles the tension between protectionism and globalism:

Our allegiances to these leaders, to people like Ron Paul, to people like Alex Jones, our acceptance of their white populist talk, our willingness to attack migrants, to disrupt attempts to provide healthcare to working class people, our willingness to cling to these ideas of the “other” liberty, the protection of property and not of people, are the biggest reasons that we are doomed to continue to live this way. We will continue to live paycheck to paycheck (at least those of us that have jobs) and in constant fear of eviction or foreclosure. We will continue to have to choose between new schoolbooks for our kids or dinner for the whole family. We will continue to see our retirement funds looted, our world destroyed, and our family members being killed in wars. And we will continue to not be able to do anything about it, unless we change our strategy and direction.

Dave Strano (image source)

The basis for Strano's critique is a Marxist (I say this non-pejoratively) understanding of class, one that becomes increasingly relevant as professions and careers give way to shift-work and perma-temp employment. It's difficult to argue with Strano when he draws a wide circle and focuses on intersectional social harm rather than exclusivist narratives of suffering:

Migrants and blacks are not our enemies. White rich people are not our friends. We must reverse this paradigm and start to work alongside movements of nonwhite working people against all predatory political, economic, and social systems. This means not just working against the state, but also working against capitalism. The state and capitalism are two faces of the same coin, a coin that must be thrown away.

We also must work actively against white supremacy in all its incarnations. Our future depends on this. If we as white working people want to enjoy freedom, then we must not be used by the rich to deny it to others and ourselves. The more we act as footsoldiers for the rich, the more we ensure that our freedom is also unattainable.

Historically, we as white working people have seen our allegiance become an allegiance to whiteness, to being white. We can relate to other white people, no matter how poor or rich. They’re white like us, and that’s something we can identify with, come to terms with. So of course, our natural enemies become nonwhite peoples.

The only problem with this idea is that we’ve had it wrong for centuries. We’ve been kept blind to the true nature of what is afoot here, as to what’s really going on. Look around us. Who fills the trailer parks with us? Who works in the factories or fast food restaurants with us? Who is beside us working in the fields, picking produce that we’ll never really be able to afford? Is it rich people, especially rich white people? Hell no, it isn’t. It’s brown people, black people, yellow people. It’s people who have different shades of skin than us. They are the people that are in similar situations to us, living paycheck to paycheck, suffering like we do. So why then would we view them as our enemy?

Allegiances, traditionally, are made amongst people who have common interests. In an historical sense, white skinned working people have overwhelmingly believed that our interests are based on skin color. We have to work for the betterment of the race, for our culture, for our identity. The truth, however, could never be further away. Whose interests do these beliefs really serve? White workers? In some sense, the answer may be “yes”. Working for the advancement of the white race at the cost of other races does buy us relative privileges and even some luxuries. In the end, however, we’re still poor, we’re still being used to make other people money. And those people aren’t non-white working people.

We have a stake in creating a new social paradigm and movement that goes beyond the idea of liberty being a protection for property ownership. We have a direct interest in fighting white supremacy, the state, and capitalism. Our freedom is intimately woven into the freedom of all working people. Until we are free as a working class, we will never be free as individuals, no matter what skin color we are.

 More in this interview with Strano by the Hampton Institute....

As for the tiny fascisms of the present, we must write what we see, in all its ambivalence and ambiguity. Rather than gloss over the injustices committed by friends, we should include all the gray, all the benign and practical xenophobias--and leave history to be the final judge.

Trump and terrorism: Repeating Dubya's neoconned mistakes.

 

When I see Putin and Trump, I see two burning towers and the failure of US foreign policy.

On September 11, 2001, I was working at the Cato Institute conducting research for what would become Ted Galen Carpenter’s book, Bad Neighbor Policy, a condemnation of Reagan’s drug war as expanded to include the defoliation of Colombia and destabliization of democratic regimes in Latin America. Al Quaeda had come across my screen in research of heroin and opium pipelines that meandered through the former Yugoslavia and funded religious or ethnic extremists.

The Taliban and al Qaeda had used Chechen heroin smuggling networks, which extended to Russia and Eastern Europe, to expand their control of the drug trade. High-ranking Chechen rebel leaders had sent their families to Afghanistan to escape the Russian crackdown in their homeland. In 2000, as the Taliban attempted to improve relations with China through the intercession of Pakistan, the Taliban moved the Uighur fighters from front lines outside Kabul to the north, to join up with the IMU. The Taliban then denied to the Chinese that they were enlisting Uighur militants.

[Ahmed Rashid, Descent Into Chaos, footnote 37 for Chapter Four]

Architect of Iraqi disorder: Don't miss him too much. 

In the weeks following the terrorist attack, I frequented foreign policy cocktail hours where Central Asia hands and experts congregated. It was a difficult time. One night in Adams Morgan, I remember talking to a Green Beret whose name was “David Danner”— he insisted the US had failed Masud and the Northern Alliance. On Danner’s view, it was this negligence of anti-Taliban allies and this preference for Pakistan that led to Al Quaeda’s successful legitimization. “If moderate Muslims believe the US supports terrorist regimes, anti-American sentiment grows. The US is not seen as a viable, credible solution. September 11th is the result.”

Sometimes I wonder what happened to David in the years between 2001 and now. He’d served in Bosnia and Central Asia. A google search gives me nothing. Perhaps he became a foot soldier in the war on terror. Perhaps he died and his obituary is another name on the wall of fallen Americans. Perhaps he has a new name, a new persona, a new covert operation currently underway. 

September 11th should be more than an annual outpouring of grief and flag-waving. It should be a lesson that informs US foreign policy. Since the Trump administration’s foreign policy agenda is run by disillusioned Neo-conservatives, the lessons from Dubya’s “war on terror” infiltrate the mounting policy mistakes. Starting with Russia. A review of the standing policies and alliances on September 11th (and the immediate preceding period) reveals a Republican administration determined to ignore the lessons of history.

Let's go back to 2001 when, on the morning of September 11th, I browsed the latest Strafor releases.

Two blocks away, the head of Pakistan’s ISI, Gen, Mehmood Ahmad, was meeting with Porter Goss, chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee. Ahmad was insisting that Pakistan was doing everything it could to convince the Taliban to give up Osama bin Laden to the Americans.

Like many in the Bush administration, Ahmad was a born-again fundamentalist who attributed his policies to the reigning hand of God or Allah. Ahmad’s conversion had been a coup of sorts. In 1999, he was one of the three generals who overthrew Nawaz Sharif and passed the reigns of the Pakistani government to Pervez Musharraf. The only way to repay the generals that bring you to power is a continuous litany of “In shallah”, or as God wills it. 

With all the passion of a recent fundie-convert, Ahmad supported the Taliban and other Islamic extremists fighting in Kashmir. Support of the Taliban had become part of the Pakistan’s strategic national interest, since a friendly regime in Afghanistan offered strategic depth in coming conflicts with India. By over-valuing Kashmir and Pakistan’s national greatness agenda, the ISI underestimated the threat posed by political extremism and Islamic sectarianism. The Bush administration’s wary courtship of foreign engagement left Goss with little leverage in negotiations. Ahmad demanded a “more positive US attitude toward Pakistan” in return for collaboration between ISI and CIA on bin Laden. A more positive attitude much like the one Trump offers Putin— a willingness to overlook autocracy and illiberalism in exchange for a small strategic gain. 

Specifically, the ISI demanded the US lift multiple sanctions on Pakistan and offer positive lip-service in return for Pakistan’s turning against the Taliban and offering political and military support the US needed in order to capture bin Laden. It was a simple quid pro quo with no room for manoevre. 

Ahmed Rashid traces Pakistan’s problems back to the period of state formation and insecurity over national identity. Pakistan’s founder Mohammed Ali Jinnah emphasized the secular, democratic identity of Pakistan from the start. In a 1947 speech, Jinnah stated: “You may belong to any religion or caste or creed— that has nothing to do with the business of the State.”

But the business of religious fundamentalism proved more profitable to 20th century Pakistani leaders and military officials. The army invested in promoting Islam as “state ideology” and trained soldiers to defend Pakistan’s territorial and ideological borders, including islam. Rashid notes that no state-funded school textbooks teach kids about Jinnah’s words because the founding narrative would anger mullahs and militants. As a result, the primary text focuses on the Islamic nature of Pakistan and locates its founding impetus in a religious movement.

Ethnic nationalism has only increased in the wake of this fundamentalist founding myth. Violence can be expected when nations offer some citizens a higher status than others on the basis of religious zeal or genetic background. I don’t need to source the historical evidence here— unless you live in Alabama, in which case, all the sourcing in the world won’t clear your mind of political football and stadium politics. Yes Alabama, you are so bought. 

Inside the Russia connection.

 Photos of stillbirths due to Agent Orange by Hiroko Tanaka [Photoevidence]

I take Donald Trump at his word-- the words that issue from the white nationalist podium as well as the words he whispers behind closed doors, in private chambers, across a Mar-A-Lago table, on the golf course. As a self-styled entrepreneur of the image, Trump hires the best to manage his twitter flow, ensuring the right messaging signals are transmitted in the right language, with just the perfect coding. 

Trump's mafia ties are old news.

His ties to Russian hustlers in the recent Soho deal were reported in-depth by Forbes.

His murky dealings with New Russians Felix Sager, Tevkif Arif, and Tamir Sapir are duly noted by Mike Lofgren. 

The "Trump pipeline boom" is expected to play well with steel manufacturers and industrial donor bases. Made from all-American steel and all-American carnage, 

As Steve Horn points out, however, TMK IPSCO, a massive producer of steel for U.S. oil country tubular goods (OCTG) and line pipe, and a subsidiary of TMKGroup, maintains an interesting relationship with Putin. According to DeSmog Blog:

TMK Group was incorporated in 2001, and in 2008, TMK IPSCO opened its doors as a U.S. subsidiary with a heavy focus on making oilfield pipes on behalf of companies performing hydraulic fracturing (“fracking”) techniques in the Marcellus Shale basin located in the northeast U.S. TMK IPSCO, which has said it wants to be a direct competitor of U.S. Steel Corporation in the Marcellus, also makes steel for companies doing fracking in the Bakken Shale basin, located primarily in North Dakota.

TMK IPSCO's CEO, Piotr Galitzine has not been shy about his company's recent success in the Pennsylvania pipeline market, boasting of flourishing business with Moscow in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette in 2015. The financial success is obvious. In 2013, TMK signed a deal with Orenburgneft, a Rosneft subsidiary, to provide the pipes needed to tap into that field. But the political implications of the TMK Board composition should raise all-American, populist eyebrows.

Horn hones in on two particular characters, shock-therapist Anthony Chubais and Russian industrial lobbyist Alesandr Shokhin:

The New York Times also reported in 2000 that Chubais recruited Putin to come to Moscow in 1996 to begin working in politics, and soon thereafter Putin began overseeing the presidential decree process for Yeltsin. Chubais served as part of the “brain trust,” as Bloomberg Businessweek put it, for Putin's successful 2000 presidential campaign and Putin has been described by some as “Chubais' man.”

Aleksandr Shokhin, another TMK board member, heads up the Russian Union of Industrialists and Entrepreneurs, the country's powerful business lobbying group. Shokhin formerly served on Putin's Public Chamber, an entity “tasked with personifying the public interest in supervising government, the Duma, media, and law enforcement,” as reported by the Christian Science Monitor.

A little more digging reveals that Sokhin has served as a C-SPAN "spokesman" for the Russian Embassy since 1991-- a fairly long career of representing Russian official interests in Washington. 

Pass the palinka, please.

Writing outside the mother tongue.

Surrealist artist and writer Leonora Carrington wrote with both hands, rummaged a foreign langauge to describe the feelings so foreign to her-- the traumas of the second World War. Parul Seghal's essay inspired me to consider the commitments of exophonic writers.

An exophonic writer works outside her mother tongue-- orphaned, somehow. Her first husband, Max Ernst, was sent to concentration camps.

Though the list of exophonic writers is long, reasons for exophonic writing vary by writer. For Nabokov, it was driven by trauma, dislocation, wandering. For Lahiri, it signified and enabled a rebirth. For Cioran, it served as an annihilation of the past. For Beckett, it weakened the affect and purified language. 

I tried to address the instability of exophonic language in "The Story Line", a recent piece for Mutha Magazine:

My parents defected from Ceausescu’s Romania. The defectors never stop concocting huge, impossible dreams, what they would do if they had time and money.

Somehow, they make both. You grow on sailboats and ski slopes wearing hand-me-down gloves with adult turtlenecks tucked into four pairs of leggings. In the lift line, skiers gawk at your unsportsmanlike clothing. Some point and stare.

The defectors pretend not to notice. They speak in Romanian, their hands fisting around ski poles. “It’s not polite to point,” my mother whispers. Pointing is a way to get attention; to decide who is strange and who stands out. You notice most pointers were born in America. They are free to raise a finger, free to flock and coalesce into cliques. They turn into hordes of toothy mammals, choired crowds, feathered giggle.

The girls giggle in unison.

How many times, how many places, do the girls giggle in unison?

The girls: everything they feel exists in one common, public language. Your feelings, on the other hand, are hard, kerneled secrets.

In a sense, writing in Romanian is my ongoing "coliva". I bake draft after draft, knowing the cake need not rise.

And so I return to Emma Goldman: Part 1.

Specifically, her first-person memoir of the early Soviet period, My Disillusionment in Russia, which can be read online in its entirety. I'll excerpt interesting sections from Chapters 1 through 5 (with more posts to follow). 

Excerpts from the original Preface published in Berlin, July 1922:

I found reality in Russia grotesque, totally unlike the great ideal that had borne me upon the crest of high hope to the land of promise.... Each day, each week, each month added new links to the fatal chain that pulled down my cherished edifice. I fought desperately against the disillusionment. For a long time I strove against the still voice within me which urged me to face the overpowering facts.

Emma laments the "institutionalization" of terror through the Cheka and the police. She maintains that her status as a "revolutionist" prevents her from siding with "the master class, which in Russia is called the Communist Party."

Till the end of my days my place shall be with the disinherited and the oppressed. 

She wrote this book because she could nothing to reduce the tyranny of the Soviets in Russia, and so she felt it was important to educate others against it, given the extensive agitprop of blinded fellow travelers.

The masses, like the individual, may not readily learn from the experience of others. Yet those who have gained the experience must speak out, if for no other reason than that they cannot in justice to themselves and their ideal support the great delusion revealed to them.

In the Revised Preface from August 1925, Emma speaks even more forcefully against the Russian Soviet regime, openly castigating its perpetual terror machine. Responding to a writer that defends the terror on the basis of expediency, she skewers not only the methods but the intentions of the Bolsheviks:

Nothing can be further from the desire or intention of Leninism than the "preservation of the remnants of civilization."

I grant this human prescience at a time when most intellectuals remained willingly (and structurally ignorant) of what was happening in Russia.

The Russian experiment has proven the fatality of a political party usurping the functions of the revolutionary people, of an omnipotent State seeking to impose its will upon the country, of a dictatorship attempting to "organize" the new life.

A small detail about the deportation that led Emma bad to Russia along with her partner, Alexander Berkman. In her words, of course (historical records vary here):

ON THE night of December 21, 1919, together with two hundred and forty-eight other political prisoners, I was deported from America. Although it was generally known we were to be deported, few really believed that the United States would so completely deny her past as an asylum for political refugees, some of whom had lived and worked in America for more than thirty years.

In my own case, the decision to eliminate me first became known when, in 1909, the Federal authorities went out of their way to disfranchise the man whose name gave me citizenship.

As Emma travels, she discovers a common justification seeping from the lips of those on the left who ought to question the growing police state. The notorious case of John Reed:

Another Communist I saw much of the first weeks was John Reed. I had known him in America. He was living in the Astoria, working hard and preparing for his return to the United States. He was to journey through Latvia and he seemed apprehensive of the outcome. He had been in Russia during the October days and this was his second visit. Like Shatov he also insisted that the dark sides of the Bolshevik regime were inevitable. He believed fervently that the Soviet Government would emerge from its narrow party lines and that it would presently establish the Communistic Commonwealth. We spent much time together, discussing the various phases of the situation.

She continues to question the gap between revolutionary principles and Party privileges:

LIFE went on. Each day brought new conflicting thoughts and emotions. The feature which affected me most was the inequality I witnessed in my immediate environment. I learned that the rations issued to the tenants of the First House of the Soviet (Astoria) were much superior to those received by the workers in the factories.

As she reasons through the discrepancies, Emma decides to consult Maxim Gorky in the hopes that he offer empathy and detangle her concerns.

I began to suspect that the reason for much of the evil was also within Russia, not only outside of it. But then, I argued, police officials and detectives graft everywhere. That is the common disease of the breed. In Russia, where scarcity of food and three years of starvation must needs turn most people into grafters, theft is inevitable. The Bolsheviki are trying to suppress it with an iron hand. How can they be blamed? But try as I might I could not silence my doubts. I groped for some moral support, for a dependable word, for someone to shed light on the disturbing questions.

It occurred to me to write to Maxim Gorki. He might help. I called his attention to his own dismay and disappointment while visiting America. He had come believing in her democracy and liberalism, and found bigotry and lack of hospitality instead. I felt sure Gorki would understand the struggle going on within me, though the cause was not the same.

But the interview with Gorky leaves her "depressed" when Gorky rationalizes the recent creation of prisons for "morally defective children" (think American boot camps). Emma maintains that morality bears a connection to social situation and belief in free will does not allow us to "consider morality a fixed matter," a means for imprisoning errant children. 

In Moscow, she notes an overwhelming lack of empathy and "fellow-feeling" among the Russians. 

They explained it as a result partly of the general distrust and suspicion created by the Tcheka, and partly due to the absorbing task of getting the day's food. One had neither vitality nor feeling left to think of others. Yet there did not seem to be such a scarcity of food as in Petrograd, and the people were warmer and better dressed.

The cultural shift is problematic in that it questions the legitimacy of a revolution intended to serve all citizens. There are winners and losers, Emma says, and Tsarist methods remain in the heavy-handed promulgations of prisons for children. When she brings these questions to a friend working in the Soviet education department, he tells her that coercive laws and discipline are necessary because the Russian people are not driven to meet the needs of the revolution. The masses are not educated to grasp the whole. 

Her Anarchist friends express remorse over the direction of the Bolsheviks:

I sounded my visitors on intervention. "We want none of outside interference," was the uniform sentiment. They held that it merely strengthened the hands of the Bolsheviki. They felt that they could not publicly even speak out against them so long as Russia was being attacked, much less fight their régime. "Have not their tactics and methods been imposed on the Bolsheviki by intervention and blockade?" I argued. "Only partly so," was the reply. "Most of their methods spring from their lack of understanding of the character and the needs of the Russian people and the mad obsession of dictatorship, which is not even the dictatorship of the proletariat but the dictatorship of a small group over the proletariat."

When I broached the subject of the People's Soviets and the elections my visitors smiled. "Elections! There are no such things in Russia, unless you call threats and terrorism elections. It is by these alone that the Bolsheviki secure a majority. A few Mensheviki, Social Revolutionists, or Anarchists are permitted to slip into the Soviets, but they have not the shadow of a chance to be heard."

"The picture painted looked black and dismal," Emma writes, "Still I clung to my faith." At the conference of the Moscow Anarchists, she learns for the first time of the role played by Anarchists in the Kronstadt Rebellion:

Anarchists were doing important work in the Foreign Office and in all other departments. I learned that the Anarchists had virtually helped the Bolsheviki into power. Five months later, in April, 1918, machine guns were used to destroy the Moscow Anarchist Club and to suppress their Press. That was before Mirbach arrived in Moscow. The field had to be "cleared of disturbing elements," and the Anarchists were the first to suffer. Since then the persecution of the Anarchists has never ceased.

Emma decides to organize a Russian Society for American Freedom similar to the Society of the Friends of the Russian Federation she had experienced in the United States. Lenin loves the idea but insists it must be housed "under the auspices of the Third International". Emma bristles:

Since my arrival I found scores of Anarchists in prison and their Press suppressed. I explained that I could not think of working with the Soviet Government so long as my comrades were in prison for opinion's sake. I also told him of the resolutions of the Moscow Anarchist Conference. He listened patiently and promised to bring the matter to the attention of his party. "But as to free speech," he remarked, "that is, of course, a bourgeois notion. There can be no free speech in a revolutionary period.

The conversation with Lenin compounds Emma's concerns:

Free speech, free Press, the spiritual achievements of centuries, what were they to this man? A Puritan, he was sure his scheme alone could redeem Russia. Those who served his plans were right, the others could not be tolerated.

A shrewd Asiatic, this Lenin. He knows how to play on the weak sides of men by flattery, rewards, medals. I left convinced that his approach to people was purely utilitarian, for the use he could get out of them for his scheme. And his scheme--was it the Revolution?

It is Peter Kropotkin who finally offers insight into the Leninist rise to power, and its consequent abandonment of principle, telling Emma "early in the October period the Bolsheviki began to subordinate the interests of the Revolution to the establishment of their dictatorship, which coerced and paralysed every social activity."

He spoke with much feeling of the oppression, the persecution, the hounding of every shade of opinion, and cited numerous instances of the misery and distress of the people. He emphasized that the Bolsheviki had discredited Socialism and Communism in the eyes of the Russian people.

"Why haven't you raised your voice against these evils, against this machine that is sapping the life blood of the Revolution?" I asked. He gave two reasons. As long as Russia was being attacked by the combined Imperialists, and Russian women and children were dying from the effects of the blockade, he could not join the shrieking chorus of the ex-revolutionists in the cry of "Crucify!" He preferred silence. Secondly, there was no medium of expression in Russia itself. To protest to the Government was useless. Its concern was to maintain itself in power. It could not stop at such "trifles" as human rights or human lives. Then he added: "We have always pointed out the effects of Marxism in action. Why be surprised now?"

Was Hannah heartless? Thoughts on cool reason.

Most of us are so well-lubricated in the fine art of making people good that we feign surprise when studies reveal that "students expect female professors to be nicer than male professors and judge them more harshly when they are not." We lean into our maternal laurels and fetishize emotional skills as a new form of privilege, an asset in the serve-me economy. 

It is not without a small degree of self-loathing that I express appreciation for recent paeans to "heartlessness as an intellectual style". Katie Fitzpatrick probes Deborah Nelson’s Tough Enough, an exploration of the work of women intellectuals, writers, and artists known for their stoical, even "heartless," dispositions:

Nelson’s central goal in Tough Enough is to push beyond both the public outrage and the male condescension in order to better understand what these women hoped to achieve with their (often scandalously) unsentimental attitudes. Nelson argues that their coldness was neither a mere defect of personality nor simply a way to defy stereotypes about female emotion. Instead, she describes it as a deliberate ethical, aesthetic, and political strategy. For Nelson, writers like Arendt and Sontag were members of a distinct postwar intellectual tradition, built around the core insight that the best way to reckon with any social crisis was to dwell in the cold, painful light of reality.

Arendt, McCarthy, and Didion were known for their impermeable facades, their refusal to join feminist groups, their desire to remain somehow above the fray of all things feminine. But the rise of reality television and pop-cult media positions the anti-feminist intellectuals alongside no-feminism-for-me figures like Sarah Palin and Kellyanne Conway. It's not about ideas anymore. The currency of modern media is entertainment ideology. 

And yet, when Fitzpatrick notes that "second-wave feminism, for Arendt, McCarthy, and the others, was just another form of misguided emotional politics," I can't help nodding a bit. For the life of the mind is not well-served by emotional politics. Despite our wombs, despite the rape culture, despite the consistent evolution towards kleptocracy, emotions will not devise policies that decrease the likelihood of emotional reactions. 

What is a reactionary if not a person whose primary political views are emotive? How would Trump have come to power without the emotional backlash facilitated by stadiums and ethno-driven histrionics? The Arendtian "unsentimental approach" enables thinkers to stand apart from the social demands of group identification. Fitzpatrick goes further:

 At times of crisis, intellectuals (like everyone else) are often called to relinquish their critical reflection and judgment in favor of expressions of allegiance to a particular group or cause. Those on the left will see unsentimentality as a useful strategy for resisting nationalism and tribalism — for stepping back from the demand to perform patriotic belonging (as in Sontag’s bracing critique of post-9/11 rhetoric). Meanwhile, those on the right will be — as many of these women were — similarly resistant to calls for identification with a historically victimized class. We can already see, then, how unsentimental style might attract practitioners across the political spectrum; if certain forms of affiliation already make you queasy, you will readily perceive the value of standing apart from their emotional excesses.

I disagree with the suggestion that McCarthy and Arendt were "those on the right." In fact, McCarthy's activism against the Vietnam war and Arendt's consistent defense of free speech and liberal values hardly puts them "on the right" of any political spectrum. It's important to recall that Arendt's opposition to the NAACP's fight against school segregation was not driven by a lack of empathy but rather by a privileging of pragmatism over emotional response. Obviously, Arendt was wrong about court-drive social change in the movement towards integration-- but it wasn't because she felt the wrong things so much as the fact that she failed to catch the pulse of the grassroots.

Fitzpatrick believes: 

...[Arendt's] characteristic heartless style quickly becomes inappropriate when it is not supported by any evidence of a real commitment to, or empathy for, the cause in question. f heartlessness promises to banish illusion and well-intentioned hyperbole, and to bring us face to face with "the facts," then its success as an ethical posture depends entirely on a correct judgment about what the facts are. If heartlessness comes to mistake its own piercing style for accurate perception, then it is left with neither good intentions nor good insights.

There is an argument to be made for every public intellectual wandering down from their ivory tower and participating in the grovel of street protests. Much can be understood from the ground. The power of emotions is part of that. I would argue that Arendt's failure to document and study American human emotions-- a study that would have required her to engage the emerging civil rights movement in first person-- resulted in her bad scholarship on the school integration issue. 

Arendt remains the preeminent thinker on fascism, totalitarianism, the rise of Nazism, the conditions of groupthink, and the dangers of illiberal nationalism. She was not an anti-Semite. She was not a racist. As a result, there are times when she overlooked the power of group identity to effect social change. Call her cold. Call her cerebral. But don't assume that empathy would have given her more insight into civil rights. What she lacked was the crucial information one only gets from standing as close to the fire as possible. And then telling the story. 

Reading Thomas McGrath as the Confederate statues come down.

Richard Spencer throwing a party.

 

This is a nightmare nimble in the Big House,

Where sleepers are wakeful, cuddling their terror,

In the empty acres of their rich beds, dreaming

Of bones in museums, where the black boys yawn.

 

[from Thomas McGrath's "Deep South"]

In the era of tiki-torch fascism, when our consumer appetites for ethnocentrism are easily provisioned by Wal-Mart, I read Thomas McGrath to get a sense of what is falling. And what should have fallen long ago.

A few snippets from McGrath's incredible poem, "Ordonnance", which I discovered in my notebooks lacking any reference or context. 

During a war the poets turn to war
In praise of the merit of the death of the ball-turret gunner.
It is well-arranged: each in his best manner
One bleeds, one blots-- as they say, it has happened before....

.............

They are fighting, fighting-- Oh yes. But somewhere else.
In the dark.
The poet reads by firelight as the nations burn.

The poet's community must be built to encompass all human beings. All poetry-consuming mammals.

We have no property to defend that is not ultimately shared. No borders to maintain against one another. No statues to hold sacred. 

Comes now one who has been conquered
By all he sees. And asks what—would have what—
Poor fool, frail, this man, mistake, my hero?

 

More than the hands on the lines and the back aching,
The daily wrestle with the angel in the south forty,
More than this forever lonely round
Round hunger and impotence, the prickly pair:
Banker or broker can have dreamed no fate
More bankrupt than this godlike heresy
Which asks of love more leave than extended credit,
Needs comradeship more than a psalm or surely these
Worn acres even if over them
Those trained to it see signs of they say God.

[from Thomas McGrath's "Woodcut"]

Source: Atlas Obscura

Hope unto hope, dream beyond monstrous dream

I sought the world.

Now, at the black pitch and midnight of despair,

I find it was always here.

[from Thomas McGrath's "The Progress of the Soul"]

 

And then my favorite, a poem that has kept me company through the years, through the Iraqs, through the failures of foreign policy and humanity. McGrath's "War Resister's Song":

 

Come live with me and be my love
And we will all the pleasures prove--
Or such as presidents may spare
Within the decorum of Total War.

 

A collage conversation on autofiction and writers using writers.

Good recommendations for #autofiction reading?

— alina stefanescu (@aliner) May 15, 2017

Joe Bunting: 

Autofiction is a term used in literary criticism to refer to a form of fictionalized autobiography. That’s the strict meaning of the word. It can also refer to fictionalizing a real event of the writer’s life.

Alina: 

In attempting to write the physical condition of pregnancy, I keep running into the epistemological limitations imposed by masculine bodies. Perhaps prose poetry is a form equipped to manage these epistemic challenges. 

Barbara Browning on Ben Lerner:

    We both had an approach to autofiction that drew attention to its own devices.

Barbara Browning:

I’ve found that most people like being fictionalized. More often, the anxiety they express is that after they’ve been written into a novel, I’ll somehow be “done” with them—but for me, writing someone into a novel is never about forgetting them. If anything, it’s a way for me to hold on to people I love.

Rebecca Miller:

I think perhaps the idea of the writer as someone who "uses" people is itself suspect. It makes the writer into a sort of predator—maybe even an abuser—whereas what you seem to be saying is that writing about someone or incorporating aspects of them into fiction is very often an expression of love, as it surely is when I write about you or aspects of you. But I think that a kind of love can be expressed even when the person is not painted in a totally flattering light. Under the umbrella of "love" in this case I'm including attention, focus, fascination, and the warmer aspects of the emotion. Writing is a way of connecting to people, and the writer sculpts in flesh. We only have other people, the sensual world, to clothe our ideas in.

Samuel R. Delany:

You have to remember there’s always what’s said and then there’s what happens. And there’s always a discrepancy between them.

Karl Ove Knausgaard:

…the life around me was not meaningful. I always longed to be away from it. So the life I led was not my own. I tried to make it mine, this was my struggle, because of course I wanted it, but I failed, the longing for something else undermined my efforts.

Alina:

The gap between the male body and the female body is, in many ways, unbridgeable. I understand male resentment on they front-- to bear a body that bears only possibility, reliant on permission. The performative aspect of pregnancy fascinates me-- the difference between a wanted pregnancy and an unwanted approximates the value of the female body as desired or undesired. That's why the Women's March read like an auto-fiction. There were so many male bodies standing in for pregnant female bodies, filling in the imaginative gaps, performing resistance (and-- somehow) pregnancy.

Juliet Jacques:

There’s a really long history of trans people writing memoir that goes back as far as the earliest sex-reassignment surgeries, like Lili Elbe, who died in the course of an operation in 1931. A couple of years after her death an autobiography came out, called Man into Woman. That’s quite an interesting text in itself because the central character has a male pseudonym and a female pseudonym that weren’t the names Lili Elbe used either pre- or post-transition. Then it’s edited by someone called Niels Hoyer, which is in itself a pseudonym. So you have this text that’s gone through several layers of authorship and editorship, and no-one will put their name to it.

Alina: 

Twice he asked her to cancel the gym membership because he’d read a story in which a hallway of mirrors stole a girl’s image from her body and gave it to others. He wanted her image to be something between them. He didn’t want others to imagine the wench.

Jeff Jackson:

In fiction, I believe that the only truth and reality that matter are the words on the page. Events may or may not have transpired from real life, but the words themselves represent the only authenticity. So it’s not about shame and honesty—in fact, honesty is a word whose usefulness starts to vaporize in the context of a novel. In the realm of the imagination, the facts hold no currency. 

Alina:

I don't think Christ ever mentioned a fetus. The fictionalizing of an anti-abortion Jesus is the greatest heresy of the age. A blockbuster. 

Barbara Browning:

All you have to do is walk into a bar and have somebody start telling you the story of their life to realize that everybody, to some degree, is an unreliable narrator—especially of him or herself. I try very hard to be honest in my fiction, again not because I find that morally superior but because it interests me, what that means, to try to be honest in fiction. I talk about that in this book—that is, the narrator explains to someone who’s lied to her, “Even in my fiction, if I say, ‘This really happened,’ then it’s true. It really happened.” If she tells you something that didn’t happen, she says, “This is fiction.”

Alina:

On the porch, her husband flaps his hands and mimicks bird calls as a substitute for the emoticon she might have glimpsed of him on screen. She is not allowed to see his emoticons, as a man's emoticons must remain private.

The end of Burke-- and other contemporary brevities.

 

Trump’s promises to immediately repeal and replace Obamacare, build a wall between the United States and Mexico, and dramatically restrict immigration indicates that he either doesn’t know anything about federalism or really doesn’t care.

American conservatives forged a large and powerful movement built on reverence for those checks and balances, particularly states’ rights. Yet they could not have done so if they had remained faithful to Burke’s suspicion of business and distaste for anti-establishment rhetoric.

And more about how Republicans abandoned Burke to build a Neo-fascist friendly GOP from Elizabeth Tandy Shermer. 

I think the major way ideology works today is not by convincing people that things are basically okay, that the system basically works. I think most people realize that the system does not work. Ideology is in convincing people that they are the only ones who have figured it out. It convinces people that everybody else believes in the ideological model. If all the people who think that they’ve figured out that the system is rigged, met all the other people who also believed that, they would probably change their mind.

And more on anarchy, work and bureaucracy in this interview with David Graeber.

Historical memory is a phenomenon that is entirely sui generis, autonomous and independent. Some years ago, Polish and Ukrainian researchers initiated several joint projects. Under the auspices of the KARTA Centre, they produced more than ten volumes in the series Poland–Ukraine: Difficult Questions(Polska–Ukraina: Trudne pytania). It was not the questions that were difficult, but the answers. The difficulty in speaking scholarly truth often lies not in lack of access to documents, but in the fact that we are dealing with the spheres of psychology, emotions and a mix of high ideals and proclamations. At the same time, it concerns brutal acts, involving heinous and criminal actions. Mythology and historical memory rest on lofty words and push what was shameful, inhumane and wicked into the darkness.

And more from Adam Daniel Rotfeld on systems of international security and his Polish intellectual background.

 Compliance is key to the legitimacy of any regime, and Sharp offers a handbook for how to effectively withhold it. His compendium of 198 Methods for Nonviolent Action presents a wide range of techniques—from letters and speak-outs to boycotts, strikes, sit-ins, blockades, and slowdowns—that citizens can employ to refuse an illegitimate authority. When coupled with more traditional forms of protest, these tactical disruptions of the normal functioning of the system can place immense pressure on dictators. Sharp treats authoritarian regimes as fragmented coalitions held together by a tenuous obedience to authority. Once the perception of invincibility is removed, such regimes can rapidly disintegrate.

And more from Rafael Khachaturian and Jeffrey C. Isaac on reading Gene Sharp for resistance.

Recognition is a key term in Hegel’s political philosophy. Instead of imagining a bargain being struck between society and an individual bearing various “rights” (like the right to privacy), Hegel emphasizes that the concept of rights is empty until we consider the individual in a context where there exist people and institutions capable of recognizing those rights, as well as the full humanity of the person bearing them. This is the deepest reason why Hegel does not share Marx’s or Rousseau’s view that modern history is a story of decline, much less (as Stephen Dedalus puts it in Ulysses) a “nightmare.” History for Hegel is intrinsically progressive, insofar as it is driven by a continuous negotiation between our self-understanding as individuals and the image we see reflected back to us by the people and institutions we look to for recognition. If the gap between my self-understanding and my society’s understanding of me grows too wide (if I know I am an artist, but my society does not recognize me as one), this is a cause of dissatisfaction, and therefore a stimulus either to change society or to adjust my idea of myself.

And more on social media's evolving relationship to theoretical constructions of individual rights from the editors of The Point. 

Notebook, 4-14-2017: empathy for assholes.

 

Mark Greif is writing a book about pornography. I can't wait to run my highlighter through its syntax. That's the ray of light right now as we attempt to subject the Objectivist's alternate reality. 

To stand in a gas station line in Alabama is to be confronted with a plethora of smug assholes-- in the flesh, behind the counter, in newspaper print.

Recently, I read an explication of assholes rooted in Kantian ethics and game theory. Aaron James was the author. He said things like:

Our theory is simply this: a person counts as an asshole when, and only when, he systematically allows himself to enjoy special advantages in interpersonal relations out of an entrenched sense of entitlement that immunizes him against the complaints of other people. 

The asshole "feels indignant when questions about his conduct are raised." He might rationalize or excuse the conduct but never apologize for it because he does not believe he should have acted differently. What he believes is that others should respond in a way that doesn't question his entitlement.

If reflection is for most people an important source of moral learning, the asshole puts reflection mainly in the service of assuring himself. This leaves him quite impervious to reform.

Assholes tend to be handled with the personal pronoun, "he"-- though James makes an exception for Ann Coulter. James' book was published in 2012. At the time, he made reference to multiple assholes characterized by their unrepentant sense of entitlement, including Dick Cheney, Donald Trump, and the louche formerly known as Donald Trump.

If someone treats you disrespectfully or speaks unkindly about you, remember that he or she does so from [his or her] impression that it is right to do so. It is unrealistic to expect that this person sees you as you see yourself. If another person reaches conclusions based on false impressions, he or she is the one hurt rather than you, because it is that person who is misguided.

The true asshole is culturally tone-deaf. Contra the Aspie, the asshole frequently insists on his right and rightness in tone-deaf statements. Think Jerry Falwell after September 11th or Trump about anything. It's late. We have a lousy president supported by Republican cowards. We have friends who have begun to call themselves "Western Chauvinists." Honestly, I can only consider assholes for so long before the maternal urge kicks in. As any mother knows, the maternal urge is an exercise in futility engendered by a lack of control over details. 

Zbigniew Herbert's "The Wall."

 

We are standing under the wall. Our youth has been taken off like a shirt from the condemned men. We wait. Before the fat bullet will sit down on the nape of the neck, ten, twenty years pass. The wall is high and strong. Behind the wall is a tree and a star. The tree pries at the wall with its roots. The star nibbles the stone like a mouse. In a hundred, two hundred years there will already be a small window.

[translated by John Carpenter and Bogdana Carpenter]

5-7-2017 notebooks: another dialogue between pages.

JONATHAN KAY: 

Only in a pampered, post-industrial society such as ours do we have the luxury of creating artisanal cults around labour that takes place at ankle level.

D.H. LAWRENCE:

Life and love are life and love, a bunch of violets is a bunch of violets, and to drag in the idea of a point is to ruin everything. Live and let live, love and let love, flower and fade, and follow the natural curve, which flows on, pointless.

LEONARD MICHAELS: 

At night, lying in the bunkhouse, I listened to owls. I'd never before heard that sound, the sound of darkness, blooming, opening inside you like a mouth. 

ADRIENNE RICH:

For a mass audience in the United States is not an audience for a collectively generated idea, welded together by the power of that idea and by common debates about it. Mass audiences are created by promotion, by the marketing of excitements that take the place of ideas, of real collective debate, vision, or catharsis; serve only to isolate us in the littleness of our own lives—we become incoherent to each other.

LEONARD MICHAELS:

We are actors in a pornographic movie. Nothing is at stake.

Then it returned quickly to cinematic obligations-- to suck and lick with conviction. The camera adhered to it, lucid, neutral, ubiquitous. The camera's look. Nearly like her mouth, assimilating advertisements of the male, but only in its totalitarian looking. The camera's invincible distance. The look of looking.We twisted up together in New York. Intimacy was insult; love could hate.

[The attempt to fictionalize the mechanisms of porn, its depletions, what Mark Grief will do in his book. Imagine it going digital. All of us-- going digital. All of this in one paragraph.] 

D.H. LAWRENCE:

She was happy and ready: the happy wife, the ready woman in possession.

MEG WOLITZER:

Everyone needs a wife; even wives need wives. Wives tend, they hover. Their ears are twin sensitive instruments, satellites picking up the slightest scrape of dissatisfaction. Wives bring broth, we bring paper clips, we bring ourselves and our pliant, warm bodies. We know just what to say to the men who for some reason have a great deal of trouble taking consistent care of themselves or anyone else. “Listen,” we say. “Everything will be okay.” And then, as if our lives depend on it, we make sure it is.

WILLIAM GASS: 

I may have many reasons for keeping our date, but having promised becomes the moral one.

GABY WOOD:

...in saying that the android was anxious, the reporter had projected onto the jerkily breathing machine the emotions it elicited in him.

DAVID M. CARROLL:

The species that came to invent wealth created poverty, for its own kind as well as for the natural landscape. In wealth and poverty alike the human species now impoverishes the planet.

MARGARET ATWOOD:

By now you must have guessed: I come from another planet. But I will never say to you, Take me to your leaders. Even I - unused to your ways though I am - would never make that mistake. We ourselves have such beings among us, made of cogs, pieces of paper, small disks of shiny metal, scraps of coloured cloth. I do not need to encounter more of them.

Instead I will say, Take me to your trees. Take me to your breakfasts, your sunsets, your bad dreams, your shoes, your nouns. Take me to your fingers; take me to your deaths.

These are worth it. These are what I have come for.

LEONARD COHEN:

Because you did not wrestle with your angel. Because you dare to live with G-d. Because your cowardice has led you to believe that the victor does not limp.

Notebook 4-3-17, guilt and culpability.

 

 

Chimps do see that mental states, such as purpose and knowledge, combine to produce deliberate action. They even understand deceit. 

What chimps don't seem capable of understanding is the state of false belief. They don't have a theory of mind that accounts for actions driven by beliefs in conflict with reality.

Karen Joy Fowler, We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves

 

In 2004, Jacques Derrida noted that torture damages the torturer as much as the victim. Abu Ghraib rendered the spectacle of ourselves-- our projected powers and mammalian prowess-- reprehensible. How does one maintain a sense of self-cohesion or integrity given self-disgust?

“Perception is more important than reality,” she reads. “If someone perceives something to be true, it is more important than if it is true. This doesn’t mean you should be duplicitous or deceitful, but don’t go out of your way to correct a false assumption if it plays to your advantage.”

Ivanka Trump's new audiobook

 

To the extent that we grant any measure of reality to Trumpism, are we complicit in its propagation?

 

But Trump isn’t just a purveyor of perception. He is also its captive because he has no reference beyond it. When he mocked a handicapped reporter, we thought it was yet another manifestation of Trump’s cruelty, which it was, but it may also have been a manifestation of his aesthetics and of a belief in eugenics nurtured by his father. Similarly, when he insulted women and harped on their looks, we thought it was ugly misogyny and sexism, which it was, but it may also have been another demonstration of his obsession with appearances. It may explain as well why he is so disdainful of facts. If you live a life without meaning or substance, appearance is the only thing that matters. Indeed, the only question he ever seems to ask himself is: How does he/she/it look?

Neil Gabler

The modern plague of Astroturf Christianity.

Theocratic notions of sovereignty are not simply something within archaic Islam that stands over against our Western modernity. John Milbank argues, per Carl Schmitt, that theocratic notions are specifically modern in their positivity and formality. 

In 1277, the archbishops of Paris and Canterbury issued certain edicts that essentially abandoned the "shared mystical outlook" arising from Hellenism and allegorical readings of sacred texts. Literalism rose to prominence as a form of power. The fourteenth century imported the assumption that only God's will makes things true, thus politicizing the divine as an arm of state policy.

To quote John Milbank, "the Islamic alliance of the absolute will of Caliph linked to the will of Allah, and with the right to fight holy wars, was taken over by Christian thought."

Milbank reveals how the Astroturf Christian Right in America has plagiarized for itself a divine mission rooted in misreading:

There is now a terrible symbiosis arising between Zionism and the American Protestant and un-Christian literalistic reading of the Old Testament in the Puritan tradition, which equates Anglo-Saxondom with Israel. Both ascribe to an idolatrously non typological and non eschatological reading of Go'd "free election of Israel," as if really and truly God's oneness meant that he arbitrarily prefers one lot of people to another (as opposed to working providentially for a time through one people's advanced insight-- as Maimonedes rightly understood Jewish election); and as if he really and truly appoints them, not just for a period, but for all time, one piece of land to the exclusion of others. 

This was nowhere more obvious than during the Astroturf's enamored pursuit of the Iraq war-- a muddle that continues to plague US policy and budget priorities. God's sanction of America's holy mission enabled the US to institutionalize terror at all levels of the military apparatus, thus erasing moral distinctions between the terrorists and their opponents. It is fair to say, in the aftermath of Iraq, Afghanistan, and Syria, that we are all terrorists now. 

Milbank again:

... the trouble is not "totalitarianism" pure and simple, but the emptiness of the secular as such, and its consequent disguised sacralization of violence.

I am reminded of a passage from Jorge Luis Borges' essay, "The Superstitious Ethics of the Reader":

Today, what line of poetry would dare allude to the phoenix or make itself the promenade of a centaur? None; but no poetry, however modern, is unhappy to be a nest of angels and to shine brightly with them. I always imagine them at nightfall, in the dusk of a slum or a vacant lot, in that long, quiet moment when things are gradually left alone, with their backs to the sunset, and when colors are like memories or premonitions of other colors. We must not be too prodigal with our angels; they are the last divinites we harbor, and they might fly away.

In the world of dead angels, only demons conspire to keep our attention.

 

[Addendum]

For those studying the rise in "Radical Orthodoxy", John Milbank's writings are an excellent starting point. He was an early opponent of the Iraq war and makes a case for fundamentalism as a modern illness that arose from secular politics and the de-mystification of everyday life. Although I don't agree with all of John's points, I think his position represents an increasingly popular reaction to the tension between secularism and deification. More grist for your mill:

"Orthodox paradox: An Interview with John Milbank" (The Immanent Frame)

"What liberal intellectuals get wrong about transgenderism" by John Milbank (Catholic Herald)

"The impossibility of gay marriage and the threat of bio political control" by John Milbank (ABC)

"The myth of the secular: Part 6" (Ideas with Paul Kennedy)

 

The Germanophile and the Trumptivist: A theory of radical nihilism.

Ulysses and the Sirens by Herbert Draper, 1909, Oil on canvas

"Mass audience was created by promotion, by the marketing of excitements that take the place of ideas, of real collective debate, vision, or catharsis; excitements that come and go.... which strand us in our fishbowl lives, illegible to one another."

What do we have in common as Americans? Is it our shared love for a good show, our lust for entertainment and distraction, our favorite underwear? Do we share commutes and product preferences? I stand with Audre and Adrienne in the belief that true community is not built from a shared commute. Our etymology confuses the forest for the heartwood.  

Having never known true community, many of us are willing to settle for its spectacle, the malignant grandiosity afforded by Trump. For Trump voters who kept their affinity and preference a secret prior to the election, the 45th emerged like a siren call, a ghastly temptation from espoused values, pragmatism, and hope. The empathy gap begins with my admission that I cannot for the life of me hear this siren called Trump.

Perhaps this is due to the different nature of the summons and the song itself. Ulysses was tempted by the incredible sweetness and beauty of the sirens' song which promised knowledge into all things of this world. Knowing he would not be able to resist, Ulysses  plugged his ears with wax and refused to listen. The song itself was a danger to his life. He refused to gamble. 

Trump's siren call is not that of beauty or knowledge. Unlike the Greek sirens, Trump lures us with the aesthetic horror of Stepford wives, spray-on tans, and cheap glitz. He promises not insight or understanding but power to destroy knowledge and vilify understanding. As a culture, we are tempted by certain things, and the rise of Trump makes it clear that there is little of "Western civilization" or Greco-Roman aesthetic sensibility left in these American arteries. We are clogged by consumerism, oblivious to any call that is not immediate and stadium-drenched. 

A funerary statue of a siren, 370 BCE. The Greek mythical creatures holds the soundbox of a lyre made from a tortoise shell.

We can agree to disagree on the form of a siren. Ovid described the sirens as reddish-plumed birds with virginal faces. For Appollonius of Rhodes, sirens resembled women from the waist up and birds from the waist down. For Fox News, a siren looks like cold hard cash, preferably dollars. The current siren is a 70-year-old man that traffics in white eye make-up, expensive suits, and an angry mug. 

Perhaps the fault is geographical. After all, the original sirens were thought to dwell on a western island near the Isle of Circe. There is no ancient account for the contemporary neon orange tastes known to all the world as American. But what does the vigilant, ever-loyal Trumptivist find to gratify his ardor? The siren call might be nationalism but there is something more complex and violent at stake-- a rise of the nihilist right that resembles the rise of fascism in its cult-trocity.

In 1940, Jorge Luis Borges published a magazine piece, "Definition of a Germanophile", that speaks to my emotions when speaking to loyal Trump voters. I am flummoxed, speechless, much like Borges when telling the "Germanophile" of Hitler's atrocities, only to discover the atrocities excused, rationalized, justified in the name of power and nationhood.

He laughs at my antiquated scruples and raises Jesuitical or Nietzschean arguments: the end justifies the means, necessity knows no law, there is no law other than the will of the strongest, the Reich is strong, the air forces of the Reich have destroyed Coventry, etc.

How to overlook and ignore the basic precepts of civilization? Beyond might makes right, there is little principle except nihilism to unite the church-going Americans who have pledged their honor and troth to Trump. Borges continues:

Disdaining these dry abstractions, my interlocutor begins or outlines a panegyric to Hitler: that providential man whose indefatigable discourses preach the extinction of all charlatans and demagogues, and whose incendiary bombs, unmitigated by verbose declarations of war, announce from the firmament the ruin of rapacious imperialism. Afterward, immediately afterward, a second wonder occurs. It is of a moral nature and almost unbelievable.

I always discover that my interlocutor idolizes Hitler, not in spite of the high-altitude bombs and the rumbling invasions, the machine guns, the accusations and lies, but because of those acts and instruments. He is delighted by evil and atrocity. The triumph of Germany does not matter to him,; he wants the humiliation of England and a satisfying burning of London. He admires Hitler as he once admired his precursors in the criminal underworld of Chicago. The discussion becomes impossible because the offenses I ascribe to Hitler are, for him, wonders and virtues. The apologists of Amigas, Ramirez, Quiroga, Rosas, or Urquiza pardon or gloss over their crimes; the defender of Hitler derives a special pleasure from them. The Hitlerist is always a spiteful man, and a secret and sometimes public worshiper of criminal "vivacity" and cruelty. He is, thanks to a poverty of imagination, a man who believes that the future cannot be different from the present, and that Germany, till now victorious, cannot lose. He is the cunning man who longs to be on the winning side.

It is not entirely impossible that there could be some justification for Adolf Hitler; I know there is none for the Germanophile.

And so, I conclude, there is no explanation for the persistent Trumptivist except a destructive hunger for spectacle that approximates Samuel P. Huntington's tragic, late-life conversion to white American nationalism (though I think even he would be shocked at what Americans have elected). In a comment on August 23, 1944, Borges observed of Nazis: "by behaving incoherently, they are no longer aware that incoherence need be justified."

To be a Nazi is, after all, mentally and morally impossible. Nazism suffers from unreality, like Erigena's hell. It is uninhabitable; men can only die for it, lie for it, wound and kill for it. No one, in the intimate depths of his being, can wish it to triumph.

Given the attack on the environment, working classes, veterans, blacks, women, GLTBQ persons, what is left is the ruins of America in the deification of the spectacle. Those who wish for the triumph of Trump's ideology cannot by any margin continue the lie of making American great again.

 

"The Sirens" by Gustave Moreau, b. 1872 

Links on a theme: Authenticity, semantic churn, and hypocrisy in the age of Trump.

 

Julio Cortazar:

How can [the writer] denounce something with the tools that are used by the enemy, that is … a language already used by the masters and their disciples?

Phoebe Maltz Bovy:

I fear the ‘privilege’ approach has now become ingrained in how we consume art and entertainment...It may have simply gotten to the point that all other possible responses to a work have been rendered incomprehensible.

Ira Wells:

...offensiveness and offendability have emerged as our distinctive form of cultural literacy. Never has the taking of offence (and the performance of offended-ness) enjoyed more widespread cultural legitimacy.

Theodor Haecker:

Tyrants always want language and literature that is easily understood.

Roy Edroso:

Culture war usually consists of conservatives expressing some bizarre belief related to lifestyle or the arts — that liberals are trying to wipe out Christmas, for example, or that Prince was right-wing and Law & Order left-wing, or that you can fight homosexuality by eating fast food  — and then, when people give them the Springtime for Hitler stare, insisting that they're not the freaks, you’re the freaks.

Erik Erickson:

To recap the week, a bunch of adulterers and unmarried liberals are all upset that Mike Pence and his wife are happily married.

B.D.McClay: 

By itself, hypocrisy does not test for goodness, badness, efficacy, or even purity of intention—it can only test for and demand consistency. We require a vocabulary for moral failings that is more exacting than hypocrisy or authenticity, one for which the goal is not to be true to ourselves, but to be better.

Matt Taibbi: 

I had spent a lot of time watching the campaign process and I was really interested in the idea that it was dysfunctional and that people were turned off by it. The people who did campaigning for a living, both politicians and the press, all the people who traveled “on the bus,” were wrapped up in their own little world, unable to see how disconnected they’d become from the public.

So I watched that phenomenon for a long time and saw that the campaign was just increasingly a television show and not really rooted in any political reality. Policy was increasingly irrelevant, and anybody who was smart enough to run against this process and villainize the politicians and the media and the major political parties and the donor class was going to have a really good chance of succeeding. That was one of the reasons I thought Trump had such a good chance early, because it was pretty clear that’s what he was doing.

Lucian K.Truscott IV:

Feith was giving a speech at the American Enterprise Institute in real time, running his mouth about strategic footprints and the tactical qualities of the projection of power thereof, when one of the dusty unshaven soldiers turned to me and asked, "Sir, do you have any idea who that stupid fucker is?" I explained that was Douglas Feith, one of the architects of the war. The soldier picked up a piece of toast with butter and jam and threw it against the TV screen. "Shut the fuck up, you stupid-ass piece of shit," he yelled. Soon the others were throwing toast and eggs and little plastic jam containers at the screen and yelling at Feith. Finally one of the KBR civilians came over and turned off the TV. It apparently wasn't a very good idea for one of the architects of the war to be explaining to these soldiers why, exactly, they were over there projecting tactical power with their strategic footprints in Sinjar.

Marc D. Guerra:

For the kind of scientists that Kelekian and his team of eager young researchers represent, the unique and unrepeatable human being can only be seen as a collection of mathematized parts — measurable creatinine levels, calculable lymphocyte cells, quantifiable bilirubin secretions. Seeing universally and deeply, but still only narrowly, such scientists fail to see the forest for the trees; they remain methodologically unaware of the particular named human being who is the particular human patient whom they study and treat. Efforts to inculcate in young research doctors a sense of their patients as human beings, even if only to help them “converse intelligently with the clinicians” and to improve their bedside manner, are considered by the researchers to be a waste of time.

Erik P. Hoel:

Fiction might still perish as a medium, even if it doesn’t deserve to, brought down by any number of causes. It could be made unappealing from without by minds warped by the supernormal stimuli of television, video games, virtual reality, and the constant stream of entertainment from the Internet. Or it could be finished off by an attack from within, by those who want literature dismantled for the greater good so that it can be rebuilt as a small subsidiary arm of the political left, preaching to the choir. Or the novel may die the boring death of being swallowed up by the metastasizing bureaucracies of creative writing programs, joining contemporary poetry in a twilight that lingers only because professors of writing teach students to become professors of writing. And so it goes.

But at least, if the novel falls, it won’t be because of its artistic essence. It won’t be replaced in its effects by equivalent television or video games or any other extrinsic medium. If the novel goes, it will be because we as a culture drifted away from the intrinsic world. Left without the novel our universe will be partitioned up, leaving us stranded within the unbreachable walls of our skulls. And inside, projected on the bone, the flicker of a screen.

Julio Cortazar, in refrain:

How can [the writer] denounce something with the tools that are used by the enemy, that is … a language already used by the masters and their disciples?

4-23-17 notebook.

 

 

An affidavit is a legal document of a statement made under oath before an official. Its value depends upon the reputation of the truthfulness of the person who makes the statement as well as the statement’s correspondence to reality.

*

Czeslaw Milosz’s conception of time and eternity involves everything having a double existence in both. He considered himself a realist-- a man who tried to “seize hold of fragments of reality.”

Forgiveness is complicated by the fact that he can’t undo an instant that has been stored away.

“Apokatastasis” is the idea that every occurrence is ‘stored somewhere.’ In an interview, Milosz said this concept first appeared in the Epistles and then was developed extensively by Origen. In Greek, it means ‘reinstatement’--the restoration of the state before original sin. For Milosz, it means in poetry that no moment vanishes entirely, and that it can be recreated.

The room turns brighter, then blurs, when I learn of Milosz's admiration for Alexsandr Wat. I understand how I can like Wat. But I cannot extend this understanding to include Milosz.

Thinks his poetry is “a form of incantation,” driven by daimen or “Daimonion”--the voice is key for him. But the voice breaks because it must reflect on memory-on what it can some and what it is fated to lose.

He loved Anna Swir--felt the need to translate her. Alludes to “the wormwood star.”

*

"In Bucharest, the psychological damage inflicted on a society subjected to surveillance terror is apparent everywhere when you scratch the surface, even 24 years after the fall of Ceauşescu—in the suspicion older Romanians show toward one another; in the furtiveness and compulsive cheating rampant among shopkeepers and service providers; in the resigned abjection of young people who can imagine no future options besides A.) colorless, lifelong conformity in a degrading job or B.) membership in a neo-Nazi gang; in the atmosphere of demoralized powerlessness that suffuses daily life in Bucharest as perceptibly as melancholia pervades Istanbul. No problem too small to be insoluble, no conflict unthreatening enough to resolve without trauma. And in the countryside, people say, it’s worse."

[from "Romanian Notes", previously by Gary Indiana]

*

A tweet is not an affidavit. But an affidavit might include a tweet. 

Legal process depends on the value of words and the ability to discern an agreed-upon meaning. No one can be legally guilty of murder until murder is defined. 

*

“Well that was in a newspaper. No, no, I like Ted Cruz, he’s a friend of mine. But that was in the newspaper. I wasn’t, I didn’t say that. I was referring to a newspaper. A Ted Cruz article referred to a newspaper story with, had a picture of Ted Cruz, his father, and Lee Harvey Oswald, having breakfast.”

*

"A little piece of sky, barely as big as my palm, which is also obstructed by razor wire."

*

“When we keep these men’s secrets, we allow their predatory behavior to thrive.”

When we don't keep their secrets, we are labelled good mothers. Stoics. Understanding forgivers since no man is perfect. 

The problem with forgiveness is how much it depends on contrition.

Did you say you're sorry?

Did you mean it.

"I go by what's in his heart."

4-21-17 notebook.

The citizens of Amsterdam expressed alarm, expectation, and a touch of arousal when faced with events transpiring in Washington.  

Said things like, “Now he’s gone too far—they’ll have to stop him!”

Back in DC, things grew increasingly tender.  

Tender like uncooked salmon on a bamboo slab. 

Tender like a cut after you swim in the ocean.

The bass boost is all in the mind. 

"The intellectual mistake was to fixate on Putin as the bad man who came along and suddenly undid the good work of Boris Yeltsin."

"In other words, do what you must, come what may."

California's East Area rapist murdered 12 people and raped 45 over decades. He's still out there somewhere, imbibing communion wafers. No one knows how he looks since he wore masks. And never left a fingerprint. The single identifying detail from witness statements confirms that the suspect had an unusually tiny penis. 

Susan Sontag: I write and talk in order to find out what I really think.

I think war with North Korea will exhaust us and result in strategic immobility.

I think libertarianism will never recover unless it reasserts its liberalism while challenging the Neo-liberal consensus' approach to globalization policy.

Abbot Moses: Go and sit in thy cell, and thy cell shall teach thee all things.

"Children are the orgasm of the world like hovercraft are the orgasm of the future or silence is the orgasm of the telephone, or shit is the orgasm of the lasagne."

Walker Percy: "It is a mystery which I ponder endlessly: that my life is divided into two parts, Before and After, before and after the moment I discovered that my wife had been rendered ecstatic, beside herself, by a man on top of her." [from Lancelot]

In 1957, Donald Barthelme wrote to Walker Percy to solicit a piece for Forum. He liked the way Percy's "The Man on the Train" explored existentialist themes in American landscapes.

Both Barthelme and Percy were raised Catholics, both were fascinated by Kierkegaard, both kept tabs on pop culture as sign of national health. In response to the query, Percy sumbitted "The Loss of the Creature" which probed space between perceptions and reality.

Percy sent chapter 2 of The Moviegoer to Don who cut huge chunks from last 12 pages and shaped it into a story. The excerpt titled "Carnival in Gentilly" appeared in Forum Summer 1960 issue a year before novel was published.

Donald Barthelme's City Life was published in 1970. It included two complementary stories featuring dialogues between Q and A: "The Explanation" and "Kierkegaard Unfair to Schegel". In the first, they discuss whether purity can be quantified and agree that it can't. It is abstract. In the second, discussion about Kierkegaard's attack on Schegel in The Concept of Irony, published 1841, where K. goes after S.'s book, Lucide, for its nihilism, obscenity, formal unconventional. And K. chastises himself for being witty and clever at a party.

I still cannot find a way to write Trump. 

When neoliberalism is what's left.

  

So far right did politics float that Richard Nixon is now a moderate and Pat Leahy looks like Che Guevara. The furthest-left there is to be is what conservatives call “radical liberal.” This should be an oxymoron, but given the span of the possible, it is not. With political possibility, language too is squeezed. The signature Trumpian gesture is hyperbole. But understatement is equally pernicious. White nationalism that comes to power through the electoral process—like Nazism did—is now called “illiberal democracy.” This strikes me as an obscene euphemism, like “ethnic cleansing.” 

This year a lot of white people woke up. But it is hard to stay woke. So many outrages are committed every day that outrage becomes a chore. So much violent hatred—the shooting of Indian engineers, the desecrated Jewish cemeteries—is ignored and excused that demands for condemnation feel like nagging. So regular are the deceptions that lying is a joke, so acute the anxiety that boredom would be a relief. 

The distance stretches between that horizon and the place where you are standing—between what you desire and what is on offer. Radicalism turns to fatigue, fatigue to pain. To feel less pain, sooner or later you have to feel less. What you have to feel less of is desire. 

Then, before you know it, the Wall Street Journal is an oracle of truth. You’re rooting for Cold War II. The FBI is your BFF. You’re a Democrat.

And hopes? At the moment my fantasy is Jeff Sessions blindfolded before a firing squad, about to be executed for treason. Then I remember I despise patriotism and oppose the death penalty.

[Judith Levine, "Descent into Liberalism", n+1]

 

 

If we continue to define our group's identity by what has been done to us, we will continue to be object rather than subject.

[Jessa Crispin, Why I Am Not a Feminist]

 

 

Seattle WTO protests, 1999

The press, like the Democratic Party, is an appendage of the consumer society. These institutions are not about politics or news. They are about imparting an experience. They create political personalities, marketed as celebrities, to make us feel good about candidates. These manufactured emotions, the product of the dark arts of the public relations industry, determine how we vote. Issues and policies are irrelevant. It is marketing and entertainment. Trump is a skillful marketer of his fictitious self.

[Chris Hedges, "Donald Trump's Greatest Allies Are the Liberal Elites", Truthdig]

One of the jokes at Partisan Review was “Dwight is looking for a disciple who will tell him what to think.” Even in his Marxist period, Macdonald was not a systematic or even a consistent thinker. But he was drawn to Greenberg’s scheme. He adopted the avant-garde and kitsch, or highbrow-lowbrow, distinction, and the historical account that went along with it: a story about the emergence of something called “the masses,” the destruction of folk art, and the rise of a debased commercial culture and its profit-seeking manufacturers—“the Lords of Kitsch,” as Macdonald came to call them.

Louis Menand, "Browbeaten: Dwight Macdonald's War on Midcult", The New Yorker]

 

“I never had an abortion, but my mother did. She didn’t tell me about it, but from what I pieced together after her death from a line in her F.B.I. file, which my father, the old radical, had requested along with his own, it was in 1960, so like almost all abortions back then, it was illegal.”

[Clara Jeffrey reviews Katha Pollitt's Pro for New York Times]

 

“The twenty-first century is basically defined by nonessential human beings, who do not fit into the market as consumers or producers or as laborers,” he said. “That manifests itself differently in different classes and geographic areas. For white, middle-class, male, useless people—who have just enough family context to not be crushed by poverty—they become failsons.” The “Chapo Trap House” guys are sincerely concerned with American inequality; at the same time, their most instinctive sympathies seem to fall with people whose worst-case scenario is a feeling of purposelessness. “Some of them turn into Nazis,” Christman continued. “Others become aware of the consequences of capitalism.”

[Jia Tolentino, "What Will Become of the Dirtbag Left?", The New Yorker]

 

“I support white power, black power, brown power and yellow power,” Heimbach says. “All races should be the dominant political force in their region. That is why America needs to be divided into smaller, ethnically and culturally homogenous states. In countries where races are mixed, one race will always dominate the others. That is why we need separation. Not because the white race is better than the black race. We need to stop the hate and separate.” 

Still, for all his talk about respect for other races, his politics, like most others on the far right, has a prominent streak of anti-Semitism. He firmly believes that the Jews are working diligently behind the scenes to eradicate the white race, faith and culture. “We can’t win against them by arguing,” he said at the Stormfront conference. “You can’t out-Jew the Jew. It’s like playing chess with a pigeon. No matter how good you are at chess, eventually someone’s going to knock the board over and poop on it. Let’s stop worrying about out-Jewing them or outsmarting them. Let’s just stand for what we believe in, which is faith, family and folk — the three things that make us a nation.”

[Vegas Tenold, "The Little Fuhrer: A Day in the Life of the Newest Leader of White Nationalists", Al Jazeera America]

Why I love Jessa Crispin's critique of feminism.

Confession: I did not vote for Hillary because she is a woman. I voted for Hillary because I have never seen anything dumber, less qualified, and more deplorable than Donald J. Trump. In my resistance journey, however, I discovered many friends who voted for Hillary because she was a woman. Because the election of a woman to the executive signified hope to them. Those conversations have been interesting and illuminating. 

Enter Jessa Crispin's controversial new book, Why I Am Not a Feminist (excerpted in New York Magazine): 

In order to withstand the pressure of a culture constantly telling us that women are only meat, only sex, only property, we create this idea of our specialness. We as women are naturally more compassionate, more loving, more authentic than men. This idea shores us up against the constant degradation caused simply by living in this particular time and place.

Sometimes we as women are special in our compassion. For people to be able to survive on the margins, they often must be. They must form alliances, they must look out for one another. They must develop some characteristics and attributes because they have to create networks of solidarity and mutual care to withstand the experience of marginalization. Those characteristics are developed by facing hardship and opposition. We also have to find ways of convincing our oppressors not to hurt us, not to kill us, to bother keeping us around at all. That can make us clever.

But these attributes are not innate. In fact, the idea that women are naturally more empathetic and nurturing originates with men. They used it as an excuse to keep us at home, tending to the children. They used it as an excuse to dismiss us intellectually. Don’t try to be smart, sweetheart, it’s not your strong suit. And yet we adopted this belief because it suits us to believe it about ourselves. 

“The [most common] online feminist response to being disagreed with or ‘attacked’ is, ‘We don’t have to do any work on ourselves, we are amazing, we’re perfect as is. Because of the patriarchy, we get to do whatever we want.’ It makes us special.

What should make us feel special instead is our method of survival. If we believe these skills are born into us we will lose them once they are no longer needed. We can still use the lie as a cover, as a way to avoid questioning or reckoning. “Oh, I’m a woman, so of course I’m going to be a better listener, more emotionally attuned, I am definitely not going to abandon these principles and work in my own self-interest given the first opportunity, just like everyone else.”

Currently, I see this as women line up behind female politicians, their support thrown behind them almost solely because they share a gender. Despite a long history of supporting military intervention, I watch women talk about these politicians’ natural diplomacy and how they’ll keep us out of war. Despite a long history of gutting social services, I watch women talk about these politicians’ understanding and attention to poor women and children. Despite a long history of money grabbing and corruption, I watch women talk about these politicians’ sense of fairness and economic justice. 

If the genders were reversed, that support would be withdrawn. There would be no assumption that these politicians would act more ethically and compassionately than their male counterparts unless these women had convinced themselves that these qualities are inherent in all women.

The extent to which empowerment feminism mobilizes Kellyanne-style accommodation is depressing. The extent to which Trump's victory prevents women from pushing the Democratic Party further left is a story of silence-- how we agree to keep mum if a sister is standing on the podium. How we mute ourselves for fear of "disempowering" a sister. How the myth of empowered womanhood creates problems of its own, not the first of which might be this notion of "solidarity" (quickly trotted out when a woman wonders aloud how butt implants are truly saving the world);

It’s easier to complain about the power you don’t have than to think about how you are wielding the power you do have. Simply re-creating the exclusive systems and inequities that the industry had when it was male dominated — with the only difference being that a small subsection of women are inside rather than outside — has not made the industry fairer. And because they are able to blame the creators of the system, their own actions can go unquestioned, despite their efforts to retain that exclusivity and unfairness.

Women, because they are humans, work and operate as humans, which is to say, in a clannish mode. But with the added emphasis on identity in today’s society, with identifying yourself as a woman first and a human second, this clannishness becomes entrenched. Solidarity becomes not about all womankind, but about the women in proximity to you, the women you can see yourself in.

The gender socialization continues to privilege rigid masculinity. It's that look on a boy's face when someone tells him to "stop acting like a girl". It's the glow in little girl cheeks when her daddy proudly declares her "his little princess" but also a "tomboy":

One of the reasons self-empowerment leads us to these places of dehumanization and exclusivity and narcissism is because we are still operating with patriarchal values and patriarchal definitions of what success is, what happiness is, what the meaning of life is.

Much of contemporary feminism uses the language of power. Girls need to be “empowered,” women need to fight for “self-empowerment,” “girl power,” etc. There is little conversation about what that power is to be used for, because that is supposed to be obvious: whatever the girl wants.

But growing up in a system that measures success by money, that values consumerism and competition, that devalues compassion and community, these girls and women have already been indoctrinated into what to want. Without close examination, without conversion into a different way of thinking and acting, what that girl wants is going to be money, power, and, possibly, her continued subjugation, because a feminism that does not provide an alternative to the system will still have the system’s values.

For centuries, the patriarchal system has defined happiness as having someone else subject to your will. You had someone else to hold all of your shit for you, so that you would not have to acknowledge its existence.

If women are one-upping one another in their competition to gain a seat at the patriarch's table, at what point do we sit back (stop leaning it, just STOP leaning in) and say the table sucks? Why do we only agree to say the table sucks if we're not invited? These are burning questions for feminism, and Jessica calls them. She is relentless in her interrogation.

And then there's the Jezebel interview, when it becomes clear that Jessica is everything you feared-- an unapproachable, iconoclastic bibliophile that could hardly care less about your approval:

...this is not where I insist I am not a feminist because I’m afraid of being mistaken for one of those hairy-legged, angry, man-hating feminists who are drawn up like bogeymen by men and women alike. Nor will I now reassure you of my approachability, my reasonable nature, my heteronormativity, my love of men and my sexual availability—despite the fact that this disclaimer appears to be a prerequisite for all feminist writing published in the last fifteen years.

If anything, that pose—I am harmless, I am toothless, you can fuck me—is why I find myself rejecting the feminist label. All of these bad feminists, all these Talmudic “can you be a feminist and still have a bikini wax?” discussions. All these reassurances to their (male) audience that they don’t want too much, won’t go too far—“We don’t know what Andrea Dworkin was on about either! Trust us!” All of these feminists giving blow jobs like it’s missionary work.

How could I do anything but sigh and exhale small love bubbles after reading this? I might even be tempted to say, "Amen sister", if I hadn't heard the same expression used to buttress two-for-one pedicure self-care sales at the local "look seventeen" spa. 

 

Criticisms of this book have focused on attacking the lack of "alternate strategy", but that's not the trajectory of the book. This isn't self-help for the feminist movement. She isn't offering a strategy or checklist for modern feminism. Instead, Jessica wants to know why the hell it has become so hard to talk about audre lorde and Adrienne Rich without sounding like a sexless granny.

Maybe, like me, she wants to know how the hell shitty sex became the model for sexual liberation. How porn became the picture of freedom. How golden showers became a national security dilemma. For all the toxic masculinity we've socialized, there's a huge market for toxic femininity that no one wants to address. Because calling it toxic would be a form of disempowerment. And conceding Lena Dunham's indie-chic "sex-positive" sitcom would be nothing if not for the lame, disappointing sex. The normalized disappointment of the unhappy American female sex life. 

We are so good at selling things. Have you been sold? Are you buying this app?

Why does a feminist have to insist she likes sex? Why is questioning the cum-shot-socialization considered a form of un-liberated prudish?

Sex-positive-- as a label-- is primarily defensive, a response to the slander that a feminist is one who hates men and sexuality. I regret using the word "sex-positive" to insulate myself against criticisms of prudery. And I don't regret my lack of prudery or my enormous appreciation for sexual pleasure.

Here's the rub: the "sex-positive" label has become a form of religious marketing. "Sex-positive" talk is all I heard in the halls of megachurches and evangelical marriage seminars where any sex, all sex, every sex is positive inside the cage of heterosexual marriage. Why can't we assume that feminism wants good sex for females? Is it because some feminists (especially self-styled evangelical marriage counselors) presume men are by nature wired to want rape or bad sex or aesthetically-repulsive porn? If men are wired to "want" bad sex, then porn shouldn't matter to the religious right-- boys will be boys and porn doesn't affect it. 

The boxes and false dichotomies are facile escapes; we can plug in without the burden of re-imagining an alternative. We can accept our aspirations and herd behaviors while enjoying the hubbub of the stadium. We can continue to struggle inside the system while toasting pinot to the next wave, the one we expect others to build for us. We can write a book and hope a small press will publish it. We can have these conversations and believe in the possibility of an unwritten future. 

"I don’t feel hopeless because I know how quickly things historically change. One day there’s a Berlin Wall and the next day there’s just fucking not. One day there’s a dictator and the next day there’s just fucking not. Change is possible, but we’re in a weird place where people on the left, particularly writers and artists, have lost their imagination of how things can be different."

For feminists that would take her to task for ignoring the intersectional debate, Jessa says:

I don’t feel like feminist acts are just making posters and knitting caps and marching in the street. As a writer, it’s become increasingly important to me that everything I write lines up with my value system and not make work that doesn’t or write for publications that don’t line up with my value system. I do feel like we’re in a place where even at the baseline, we don’t know where to find value. We used to get our value from religion, but that was bad so we got rid of religion. But where do we get it from now? Do we get it from the capitalist culture that values greed, competition and selfishness? 

Where do we get it from? I think that we think that we can figure that out on our own, but we can’t. Human beings are not that smart. We’re not that logical and rational. We absorb shit just from observing, so really rethinking and understanding that our values need to be recalibrated is really important—especially for feminism, which has, if anything, taken on patriarchal values. In the last 20 years, feminism has embraced competition and greed, like, “I’m making in-roads if I make six figures a year because I’m a woman.”

We can do more. We can demand more. And we can ask questions.

Why Shikha Dalmia gets paid to whine about International Women's Day is a measure of how accommodation skews the market for independent thought. After slamming the "Day Without Women" for its "cheesiness", Shikha reveals her complete disconnect from the crowds that massed Trump stadiums:

The reason a show like MadMen lampooning the sexist treatment of women in the 1960s office was even conceivable at this point was precisely because we have overcome such regressive attitudes. This progress was neither automatic nor inevitable. It required constant struggle and "consciousness raising." Nor is it over. There are plenty of "women's issues" still left to be tackled. 

No, Shikha-- the reason a show like MadMen was successful is the same reason that Lena Dunham and "The Apprentice" earned high ratings, namely, misogyny sells. Female self-loathing is a buyer's market. Breitbartian bigotry and Trumpist Christo-fascists were nurtured in the womb of the Men's Rights Activist movement, after traveling through the tubes of America's thriving neo-Nazi fallopian complex. 

Shikha can afford her convoluted complaint cycle. She can afford to nanny her menses and self-care her split ends. And she can end an opinion piece the following fluff-off that completely ignores how "the women who really need a day off" are currently living right here, in these United States, caring for toddlers, sweeping her gutters, processing dry-cleaned clothes, baking cafeteria food, and so on: 

....a Day Without A Woman that calls for a mass strike on behalf of women who have cushy jobs in plush Western offices is just plain obtuse. The women who really need a day off -- day laborers on construction sites in Inida, rice pickers in paddy fields in Bali -- can't afford to give up a day's wages. Hence, all this holiday will do is impose the Western woman's understanding of women's problems -- and their solutions -- on all women.

Single motherhood and low-wage labor is not just a Bali problem-- it's an American problem.

It's an Alabamian problem.

It's a perma-temp labor problem.

It's a Right to Work problem.

It's a facet of how much silence we can stand in our nanny-privileged echo chambers.

It's also why so few minorities will participate in the Day Without A Woman, since the working poor can't afford to risk their job for a principled statement or position. It's an absurdity that Shikha feels the need to look across borders in order to describe what is happening in the nail salon across the street. And it's a pity that her position of whoa-there-let's-not-ruffle-feathers has become a debate among women who rely on their privilege to assert their decidedly successful female voices.

Perhaps we should scrub the "feminist conceit" from our own faces before paying a Vietnamese immigrant to do it.

 

MORE TO SWALLOW:

Hadley Freeman on how "empowerment feminism" lost its meaning.

Jessa Crispin on Planned Parenthood and boredom as incubators for consciousness raising.

Maria Bustillos' semantic issues with Crispin.

Jia Tolentino on how the market for empowerment earned its niche.

Jessa Crispin on the blah of American literature and why monetizing Bookslut was not an option.

"The desire for this kind of freedom subsumed every other...."

The crime of sex was like guilt by association-- not visible to the eye of the outsider, but an act that could be rather easily conjectured. Consequences would make it manifest...

He was the concrete embodiment on my more abstract desire to be "free". By which I meant-- if I'd been pressed to admit it-- sexually free. The desire for this kind of freedom subsumed every other. 

Joyce Johnson, Minor Characters: A Beat Memoir

 

I'd learned myself by the age of sixteen that just as girls guarded their virginity, boys guarded something less tangible which they called Themselves.

Joyce Johnson, Minor Characters: A Beat Memoir

 

And "Why I Like Complicated Positions", courtesy of [b]oink.

Inside the mind's of Trump's Neo-Nazi white base.

Lovely MRA agitprop from Return of Kings.

Considered "a leader in the emerging field of masculinity studies", sociologist Michael Kimmel examines the relationship between masculinity and political extremism. On the controversial thesis that returning vets are susceptible to political extremism (a correlation borne out in the Middle East, Russia, and the former Yugoslavia), Kimmel says:

What we do know to be true is that our military exercises in Iraq and Afghanistan have left veterans coming home with serious PTSD. I mean, think of the types of terror that they’ve lived with – that any time you get into a car could be your last time on earth. That can’t help but shake you up. Couple that with racism towards your enemy – one of the ways you convince yourself to kill an enemy is to hate them; think about what we used to say about the Vietnamese, or what my father’s generation used to say about the Japanese. I think that is an equation that might make some people susceptible to far-right ideology.

Kimmel references James Gilligan's assumption that shame and humiliation underlie basically all violence: “Because I feel small, I will make you feel smaller.” Interviews with extremists confirm these groups are often bound by a shared sense of "humiliation and shame":

In his famous statement, Osama bin Laden talked about how the west had humiliated the Muslim world … that conservative Muslims have been humiliated by hyper-modern society and the cosmopolitan McDonaldization of the world. For them, restoring the seventh-century caliphate is their way of reinstating traditional masculinity. 

He calls this “aggrieved entitlement”: "If you feel entitled and you have not gotten what you expected, that is a recipe for humiliation." 

The false nature vs. nurture dichotomy does little to elucidate rigid and/or persistent masculinities. I wish my ev-psychy friends would stop trying to build a scientific case for evangelical pop psychology. As Kimmel notes, nature and nurture are "intimately linked": 

What we know is that testosterone as a hormone both drives aggression and responds to aggression. It is a really malleable hormone. And I think that you can’t understand the natural biological conditions of violence without understanding the social conditions, and I think you can’t understand the social conditions without understanding the biological conditions.

Let me give you two examples. The first: how come men use a biological argument when they are angry and they beat up someone smaller or older than they are or they beat their wives – yet they don’t beat their bosses? I mean, my boss would likely piss me off more than my wife would, right? Why don’t I beat him up? Because you have to feel like you have permission. You have to believe that the target of your violence is “legitimate”.

..............

There is a famous experiment by a primatologist at Stanford. He takes five monkeys and measures their testosterone. Then he puts the five monkeys in a cage. The monkeys immediately establish a hierarchy of violence – number one beats number two, number two beats number three, number three beats number four, number four beats number five. Of course, number one has the highest testosterone, and so on.

So the experiment is: he takes monkey three out of the cage and he shoots him up with testosterone, off the scale, and puts him back in. What do you think happens? When I tell this story my students always guess that he immediately becomes number-one monkey. But that’s not true. What happens is that when he goes back in the cage he still avoids monkeys number one and two – but he beats the shit out of numbers four and five.

So what any reasonable biological researcher would conclude is that testosterone does not cause aggression, it enables it. The target of the violence must already be seen as legitimate. You have a biological argument and a sociological argument. So the answer to your question is that it is never either/or. It is always both. Always.

More on fragile masculinity happening now at a gas station or Senate chamber near you:

Republicans attack University of Wisconsin-Madison's The Men's Project, a program intended to help males see outside the box of their socialized masculinity and into a world inhabited by fellow human beings. 

James Gilligan celebrates the 2011 USC decision in Brown v. Plata ordering the state of California to reduce its prison population by more than 30,000. But what Gilligan celebrated in 2011 is under attack by Sessions' Justice Department. 

Crown Equipment CEO James Dicke II expresses his enthusiasm for Trump's cabinet picks while complaining about how regulations stymie "the cost of production". What he fails to mention is how the US health system could absorb the costs of China's unregulated, toxic workplace environment. 

Spiked editor Brendan O'Neill gets huffy about what fascism is-- and isn't. Alas, he overlooks the extent to which the aggrieved "workers groups" were actually subsumed under the former blue-collar worker badge in this election. Perhaps Brendan ought to watch a few stadium videos for insight into how militarization of angry aggrieved workers takes place in the internet age. Trump isn't arming militaries-- he's arming and supporting a growth in militias. If you imagine a happy ending to this story, you should stop watching porn. There is no happy ending to the militarization of stupidity.

Excerpts from John Cheever's journals.

 Reading excerpts from John Cheever's 1960's Notebooks in the New Yorker, I am reminded of how quickly our diaries become fiction-- how fine the line between a story we tell ourselves and a story we tell others. A few fragments from Cheever that fumble, bridge, and blur genre boundaries..... 

Veiled by Judith Kindler, 2011

And so it is over as suddenly as it began; at four or five on an overcast afternoon, unseasonably warm for November, her step becomes light, she sings in the hall for the first time in six weeks, and I have my way.

 

Pantry Painting by Frans Snyders

It is not the facts that we can put our fingers on which concern us but the sum of these facts; it is not the data we want but the essence of the data. It is the momentary and overwhelming sense of pathos we experience when we see the congregation turn away clumsily from the chancel; the encouragement we experience when we hear the noise of a stamping mill carried over water; the disturbance we feel when we see misgiving in a child’s face. She is carrying schoolbooks and waiting for the traffic light to change. The carnal and hearty smell of bilge water, the smell of must in the cold pantries of this old house. A continent of feeling lies beyond these. We call them apprehensions, but they have more fact, truth, illumination than the wastebasket, the gunrack, and the cheese knife. Why be afraid of madness? Here is a world to win, to discover.

 

 

L'adoration du veau by Francis Picabia (1940's)

It is after dark—just. A summer night, stars and fireflies. The last night in June. My older son stands on the bridge over the brook with a Roman candle. He is a man now. His voice is deep. He is barefoot and wears chinos. It takes two or three matches to light the fuse. There is a splutter of pink fire, a loud hissing, the colored fire is reflected in the water of the brook and lights the voluminous clouds of smoke that roll off the candle. The light changes from pink to green, from green to red. It makes on the trees and in the heavy air an amphitheatre or sphere of unearthly light. In this I see his beloved face, his figure. I cannot say truthfully that I have never felt anything but love for him. We have quarrelled, he has wet his bed, he has waked strangling from nightmares in which I appeared as a hairy werewolf dripping with gore. But all of this is gone. Now there is nothing between us but love and good-natured admiration. The candle ends with a loud coughing noise and voids a spate of golden stars and a smell of brimstone. He drops the embers into the brook. Then the dark takes over, but I think that I have seen something splendid: this young man, the weird and harmless play of colored light, the dark water of the brook.

We rise from sleep all natural men, boisterous, loving, and hopeful, but the dark-faced stranger is waiting at the door, the viper is coiled in the garden, the old man whispers lewdly to the boy, and the woman sits at her table crying.

 

Between seasons.

He could separate from his red-faced and drunken wife, he could conceivably make a life without his beloved children, he could get along without the companionship of his friends, but he could not bring himself to leave his lawns and gardens, he could not part from the porch screens and storm windows that he had repaired and painted, he could not divorce himself from the serpentine brick walk he had laid between the side door and the rose beds. So for him the chains of Prometheus were forged from turf and house paint, copper screening, putty and brick, but they shackled him as sternly as iron.

 

Bedroom window, bird.

Rows and misunderstandings, and I put them down with the hope of clearing my head. “I think it’s too hot to split wood,” say I. “Well, I don’t,” says Mary. “If it’s not too hot for me to rake, it’s not too hot for you to split wood.” “You do your work,” say I, “and I’ll do mine.” But I am in a bad temper, and I think of the W.s all ordering one another around, working not so much to accomplish anything as to ingratiate themselves with the old king, who was trying, in turn, to ingratiate himself with immortality. At dinner I try to explain my leaving to work on the book. “I feel sorry for you,” says Mary, “your life is so miserable. I really feel sorry for you. I won’t miss you, of course. If you could only figure out what you want.” I cut some edges, but I am angry, and returning to the kitchen I say (at dark), “Can’t you figure out after twenty-five years what it is that I want? I want your love, I want to see the children grow and take up their lives, I want to do a piece of decent work.” I am shouting. Then she says, “I am going away. I will take a little apartment and live there with the children. You are torturing me to death. You are torturing me to death.”

Defectors from Putin's inner circle: What Andrei Illarionov has to teach us about Trump.

Meet Andrei Illarionov, a proponent of Western liberalism and democracy in Russia. From 1993 to 1994, he served as chief economic adviser to the prime minister of the Russian Federation, Viktor Chernomyrdin. He resigned in February 1994 to protest changes in the government's economic policy.

In July 1994 Illarionov founded the Institute of Economic Analysis, a platform from which Illarionov popularized his strong positions favoring free-trade and rule of law. Putin noticed. Putin needed a few erstwhile economic liberals to keep democracy-watchers off his back. He brought Illarionov into his cabinet, thus neutralizing a potential source of opposition.

Days after his inauguration, Putin's economic advisor, Andrei Illarionov, discovered that Putin had signed a decree consolidating 70 percent of the country's alcohol manufacturers into a single company to be managed by Putin's close St. Petersburg friend. None of the new liberal economic advisors had been consulted or informed. Illarionov tried to ignore what would soon become a Putin pattern-- paying lip service to his economic advisors while "consistently broadsiding them with decisions that consolidated all of the country's resources in the hands of his cronies" (See Gessen, 259). 

From 2000-2005, Illarionov served as key economic advisor to President Putin, where he regularly paid lip service to the pro-globalization agenda. To his credit, Illarionov has consistently argued for the rule of law and free global trade markets. As a senior advisor to Russian President Putin, Illarionov was outspoken against Russia's ratification of Kyoto. (In 2004, Putin ratified the Kyoto Protocol anyway.)

In 2006, Illarionov was appointed senior researcher of the Cato Institute's Center for Global Liberty and Prosperity in Washington, DC. In this position, he has lamented Russia's new corporate state in which state-owned enterprises are governed by personal interests and private corporations have become subject to arbitrary intervention to serve state interests as well as new ways in which political, economic and civil liberties are being eliminated.  Illarionov is one of the 34 first signatories of the online anti-Putin manifesto Putin must go, published on March 10, 2010.

In May 2008 Cato Unbound blog discussion, he maintained that "the resource curse" was not more extraordinary than other forms of market capture by corrupt governments and officials. He argued that "the precedent of treating a country’s natural resources as belonging to its people is the problem, not the beginning of a solution." Illarianov argued that the idea of collective national ownership of resources resulted in nationalization, a form of economic control by political elites.  His view is summarized as follows:

Illarionov argues that the trade sanctions Wenar proposes would punish innocent citizens who already suffer under corrupt rulers. The issue, he argues, is not a matter of what is stolen, but how we will treat those responsible for theft.

In 2010, Illarionov received money to speak at the Heartland Institute's anti-climate change extravaganza, the Fourth International Conference on Climate Change, a mecca for policymakers and extractivists hoping to roll back environmental regulations that hold companies responsible for their environmental footprints. He also held forth against the increasing illiberalization of Putin's Russia, who many knew to be supporting nationalist, irredentist candidates in Hungary and other European states. 

Illarionov was one of the 34 first signatories of the online anti-Putin manifesto Putin must go, published on March 10, 2010. Over the years, after Gessen's book went to press in 2012 and while Trump's son-in-law extended family business connections in Russia, Illarionov continued to warn about Putin. 

He critiqued Putin's "mafia-style" policies in a  a prescient 2015 interview:

Putin’s ultimate goal is clear – it is to change the world according to his vision. It is a vision of the Sicilian world, a world that is ruled by the mighty and the powerful. It is a world in which such documents as the Helsinki Final Act or the UN Charter do not matter or simply do not exist. In such a world, borders can be violated under any pretext or without any pretext. The economic system is based on mafia-style relations.

When pushed on Putin's popular support and masses of Russian fans, Illarionov drew a distinction that should concern students of liberty:

We need to be careful when speaking about opinion polls in hard authoritarian regimes or semi-totalitarian ones like we have in. It is difficult to trust these numbers. No semi-totalitarian regime can produce a real reflection on what people really think. Even if we believe these numbers for a moment, we need to make the distinction between the level of support for Putin before Crimea and after. Before, the level of support for Putin was around 45 per cent. After, it was 85 per cent.

 These numbers mean that around 45 per cent of the Russian society accepts the Sicilian way of rule within the country while 85 per cent express support for the imperial external policy. The Sicilian model by itself is not imperialist. It is a model based on the way people do business, but mostly within existing borders. Hence, Putin’s increase in support is not for mafia-like rule, but for imperialism and the imperial syndrome in Russia has not yet been healed.

I quote extensively because Illarionov's remarks provide insight into the rise of white nationalism across Europe as well as its current sweep of the US political system. The interviewer notes that, "especially after the war in Ukraine, many people realised that what Putin is doing is bad". Media, policy-wonks, academics, and scholars took Putin to task publicly for his repudiation of the rule and law and slide into autocracy. The interviewer wants to know why, despite the West's knowledge of Putin's corruption and increasing dictatorship, nothing was being done to stop it.

Illarionov replied:

The West is divided. The US itself is divided, the EU of course as well. There are still many allies of Putin in the West. There is a long list of “Putintern” members: Gerhard Schröder, Silvio Berlusconi, Vaclav Klaus, Marine Le Pen and others. They are also among journalists and think-tanks throughout the world. Putin has many friends. 

Unlike communism, which was rather alien to European culture even if it had some roots in European history, the Putin’s Sicilian way of rule is much more familiar to Europe and closer to the European heart. It is also a reason why it is so hard to fight it.

 The Sicilian mafia has not yet been taken down. It is very much alive in Italy. We see very similar types of behaviour in many other European states like Greece, Bulgaria or Hungary. Even in the Baltic states there are elements of this attitude. This type of behaviour is associated not only Russians or the Russian psyche. Yes, some Russians behave this way, but it is not exclusively a Russian problem. Look at Croats or Serbs. It is in fact deeply rooted in European human nature. Fortunately for Western Europe, it is already not a dominant part there. The success of Western European states was possible largely thanks to the fact that this side of their nature has been suppressed.

He insisted that economic policy alone would do nothing to halt Putin's take-over of Russian democracy:

It is definitely not enough to apply economic means in order to bring change. It is about having a long-term strategy with a final goal – to make Russia free, democratic and peaceful within internationally recognised borders. This should be now the strategic task for the international community. If one wants to secure peace in Europe and the world, we need to have a different Russia.

But as long as this regime lasts in Russia, in the Kremlin, it poses threat to everybody. As soon as it is changed, and that will not happen overnight, Russia will eventually come to mutually acceptable terms with the rest of the world.

When asked about possible opposition or liberal alternatives to Putin, Illarionov was at a loss. He ended the interview with a shrug. 

 

In late 2016, intelligence sources on Russia noted that Trump advisors met with Igor Sechin, director of Rosneftgas:  

In terms of the Substance of Their Discussions, SECHIN’s associate Said That the Rosneftgas president WAS SO Keen to lift personal and corporate western Sanctions Imposed on the Company About enterprise, That he offered PAGE / TRUMP’s associates the brokerage of up to a 19 per cent (privatised) stake in Rosneft in return. PAGE has expressed interest and confirmed that were TRUMP elected US president, then sanctions on Russia would be lifted.

On January 20, 2017, Russian media reported that Putin allowed “Rosneftegas”, whose board of directors is headed by the executive director of “Rosneft” Igor Sechin, not to disclose their financial performance. On account of the company could accumulate more than 600 billion rubles. These intelligence reports are currently in the hands of US senators and representatives. Obama's sanctions on Putin were rooted in very real and serious allegations of bribery and national security threat. Putin has unimpeachable leverage to keep an America First Trump administration silent on his invasions of neighboring states and democracies. 

Just this past week, Paul Goble referenced Illarionov's statements in an interview with Kyiv’s Apostrophe portal:

Russian commentator Andrey Illarionov says that “Belarus is candidate number one for a Russian invasion,” a conclusion that takes on added weight given that the Kremlin is likely to view anti-Lukashenka protests as a cover for such actions just as it did earlier in Ukraine...

 “No state in Europe can be completely isolated from possible aggression of an informational, corruption, propagandistic, espionage or hybrid character,” Illarionov says; but “as far as its conventional [form] is concerned, Belarus at present is candidate number one."

Goble continues:

Moreover, the likelihood that Putin will now decide on an invasion is likely increased by one aspect of the situation in Minsk that recalls Kyiv in 2013 and that is more frightening to the Kremlin leader than almost any other. The mass protest was not organized by the traditional opposition parties but was spontaneous from below and thus political in a new way.

That point has been made by two Belarusian outlets (Belarus Partisan and Naviy), and Moscow is likely to view this protest not as just the latest in a long line of Belarusian discontent but as something fundamentally new and threatening.

If that is the case, Putin is likely to move against Belarus in the coming days, especially if there are no clear signals from the West that such a move would make absolutely impossible any cooperation with Russia in the foreseeable future.

And here we are, with Putin having deflected international criticism of his Ukranian invasion.

The election of Trump has shored up Putin's image as a strong world leader-- an image threatened by the white flag protest in Russia. And what better way to ensure power than to invest in the disruption of autocracy's chief enemy, a free democratic and liberal America? How the world's greatest voice for freedom became a pawn in Putin's power politics is a story we won't tell our children. Certainly not at Thanksgiving where almost every mirror in Alabama and the red states reveals a turkey. 

Trump's election failed Americans. But it also failed struggling democracies who relied on on our moral authority and the threat of possible sanctions to restrain behavior on the international stage. 

Given the absence of competing assurances or alternatives, Russians can tell themselves autocracy is the future and their leader is in control. A major player in world events. A puppet-master behind the curtains. The only question is whether congressional Republicans and theocrats will place their commitment to the rule of law over their desperation to maintain access to the orange emperor's court. What we've seen so far is not encouraging. 

Cited: Masha Gessen, The Man Without A Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin (Riverhead Books: New York, 2012). Additional sources include this PRI podcast. 

Meditations on progress and "place-hood"... plus a petition to sign.

What we are is where we have been. That is all there is, at least from where we can see. They keep trying to convince you that there is some objective reality out there, but you know in your heart how much nonsense that is. It's their way of trying to sell you on the idea that change, being an "inevitable" part of "progress"-- being dropped on top of your head by some deus ex machine with a bad sense of timing-- can't be fought.

[Melissa Holbrook Pierson, The Place You Love Is Gone: Progress Hits Home]

 

Colonial Pipeline, making Alabama beautiful for extract-ivists.

I wonder where Colonial CEO Tim Felt will be going next....
from one pipeline to more profitable ones
in Trump's DC kleptocracy, perhaps?
Thanks for making a mess in Alabama, 
Tim. Of course we wish you the best.

 

20 years after Colonial disaster in Greenville....

The things you saw became your home. And they became your teachers. They made you an unwitting wizard, an accomplished if pint-sized engineer. Just by looking at them, you caused things to shift shape. After hours of staring at that oxidized-green copper ornament on the roofline of your grandparents' Tudor-style house, it revealed itself in certainty: it was a frozen, custard cone. Why would there be ice cream on the roof of a house? Well, to make you look at it in longing, of course.

[Melissa Holbrook Pierson, The Place You Love Is Gone: Progress Hits Home]

 

A petition against Rep. Gary Palmer's attempt
to enable outside corporate interests
to continue their displacement
of our homes and property.

If you're not a petition person,
pick up the phone and make a call
to one of Rep. Palmer's multiple
taxpayer-funded offices.

Because I'm tired of subsiding 
corporations to destroy property
value and corrode our investments.
I'm tired of the lie that says a bully
will "police himself". 

Make a call.

Birmingham: (205) 968-1290
Clanton: (205) 280-6846
Oneonta: (205) 274-2136
Washington: (202) 225-4921

Or make a family outing of it. 

 

The evangelical Right's spiritual hard-on for Trump deserves explanation.

This episode is actually a fairly decent satirical take on the rise of Moral Majority and its key players. Of course some of us can't help wondering what led all those mega-church pastors to abandon their perfect candidate, Ted Cruz, for the least conservative candidate on God's green earth, Donald Trump, at the Republican primaries. Since these sheep tend to follow their self-righteous earthly shepherds, there is probably a fair strong line between votes and what pastors preached from the pulpit. Fortunately for the Christofascists, in Trump's brave new world, churches will be able to maintain their nonprofit status while directly profiting from political candidates whom they endorse from the pulpit. Sundays will be extended political campaigns. Admit it, there's only so much Bible study to be done before the masses get bored.

The church-as-entertainment model has taken over the American mainstream. And we have decrepit culture warriors to thank for their service. In the second part of the series, Samantha Bee has an interview with Frank Schaeffer, the son of culture warrior extraordinaire, Francis Schaeffer, who devised the wedge issue of abortion from his commune in Switzerland. 

 

 We all know how much fun Liberty University has been having with Jerry Crazy-As-Hell Falwell Jr.'s appointment to a national task force on religious agitprop. Trump's courtier press, Breitbart, celebrated Falwell's political enthusiasm in early January:

“Trump is better than advertised,” said Jerry Falwell Jr., an attorney who took over the Lynchburg, Virginia college his father founded in order to educate “Champions for Christ” and send them out into the secular world.

“I could not be more pleased,” he said. “We are taking the government from a bunch of incompetents, led by a bunch of amateurs, to being led by professionals from every industry and every walk of life.”

Falwell endorsed Trump just before the Iowa caucuses, despite the fact Trump’s top rival for the GOP nomination, Texas Sen. R. Edward “Ted” Cruz, launched his own bid for the White House at the Christian school.

When Falwell made his decision, Trump had not fully articulated many of his positions and had not yet come down on what Falwell considered the right side of the issues, he said. “I just felt he had such a heart for the American people that I knew he would–and sure enough he did.

The lawyer, who was speaking to Breitbart News outside Washington’s Trump International Hotel, said Trump’s choice of Indiana Gov. Michael R. Pence was just one example of how the new president excelled expectations.

If you somehow managed to avoid reading the sixteen travesties in the Left Behind series, I urge you to read it now. Because that's the blueprint for Trump's foreign policy agenda-- how to fight Satan from the Oval Office in an epic, evangelical mini-series. As for me, I will continue to focus on reality and resist this putrid excuse for an administration. The Armageddonites have been reading these books for years and preparing for the final show-down.

I hope reality intervenes before Christofascist fantasy becomes the dominant reality. Ideas have power. Bad ideas have long benefitted from the support of moral majorities who surrender their grey matter to whatever rules the stadium.

Alabama and Trump: A natural affinity.

J.D. Crowe gives us an Oval Office-worthy portrait. 

 

Trump would probably be horrified by the extent to which his personality fits the classic Alabama-politician demagogue profile. As any aspiring public servant knows, loyalty is the only political virtue in the heart of Dixie. Loyalty and money 

Drew Pendergrass' insightful essay on the "The Alabamafication of America" (Kyle Whitmire's original term) deserves extensive quotation:

Why is Alabama, a place known for social conservatism, evangelical Christianity, and strong emphasis on family values, a hotbed for corruption and sex scandals, where removal from office serves to prove one’s conservative bona fides? To Fording, the answer lies in Alabama’s traditionalistic culture, a hierarchical system where citizens fall in line with authority and accept “an elite class entitled to power.” This results in low rates of citizen participation.

Religion is an important tenet of traditionalism. For Wayne Flynt, professor emeritus of history at Auburn University, Alabama’s traditionalistic culture is best illustrated by the popular relationship between its citizens and Christianity. Flynt explained to the HPR, “Religion is a stool with four legs: one is theology, one is social ethics, one is personal ethics, and one is ritual and practice.” In his view, Southern Protestantism makes ritual irrelevant, as “the closer religion is to everyday practice, the more [Alabamians] like it.” Strong cultural ideologies undermine social and personal ethics, as “dealing with poor immigrants is off the table” to many traditionalists. As a result, Flynt finds that “the Evangelical church is not concerned with social justice.” Personal ethics are also not important—“Southern Baptists have one of the highest divorce rates in the U.S. When it comes to premarital sex and children out of wedlock, Alabama doesn’t do well.” This leaves only theology, which Flynt sees as strict adherence to the text of the Bible.

Despite his public failures in social and personal ethics, Trump, like Moore, gives off strong traditionalist airs. He may not know the books of the bible, but his strong stance against Islam is a classic evangelical stance—traditionalist Christians stand up to those that do not accept the text of the bible, a pillar of traditionalist Christianity. This antagonistic thinking is advanced by men like Michael Flynn, Trump’s national security adviser, who claims that fear of Muslims is rational. Steve Bannon, another Trump adviser, has repeatedly talked of the civilizational struggle between Islam and Christianity.

Many of Donald Trump’s populist ideas, like a Muslim registry or immigration ban, are of questionable legality. If Donald Trump can leverage himself into a champion for Christianity or conservatism, as Moore has done with great success, the unconstitutionality of his actions will be of little consequence.

Voting rights remain key to political wrangling. Last year, when the state budget crisis unfolded, Governor Bentley did what any bought Baptist with a Viagra habit does under pressure, namely, he proved his mettle by rolling back a few voting rights.

Like most Republicrats, Bentley had run on a platform to decrease spending and balance the state budget.

Like most Republicrats, he failed miserably. The only solution left was to throw a few racist bones to white nationalists and football fascists. Bentley determined the state could no longer afford to offer "social services" like Department of Motor Vehicles offices in small rural communities. With that, he shut down DMV offices in largely poor, black, Democratic counties, curbing access to driver’s licenses just as the strict new voter ID law came into practice. 

Currently, state legislators are trying to hold Bentley's nose to the accountability flame with respect to filling Sessions' seat. US Senate candidate Ron Crumpton (D) has urged the Governor to rescind his proclamation and set the Special Election for Senate this November, instead of November 6, 2018. Brandon Moseley writes:

At this point, Ron Crumpton (D) and Senator Luther Strange (R), who was appointed by Gov. Bentley, are the only declared candidates for the US Senate seat formerly held by Jeff Sessions, who is now the US Attorney General. That could change when formal qualifying for the seat begins.

Crumpton challenged US Senator Richard Shelby (R) last year. Crumpton was the only Democrat who qualified for any statewide race, other than former Secretary of State Hillary R. Clinton (D) who ran unsuccessfully for President of the United States.

The shake-up over Sessions has stranded Bentley in an impeachment limbo that shows little sign of abating. 

And can I just add that Hannah Ford's thought-stream represents everything that makes Alabama (and the Trump administration) a perpetual flat tire of hissing hot air? Where does Alabama Political Reporter find recycled chicken soup for the white-self-help like this? 

Why Trump hasn't condemned rise in hate crimes and speech: Christofacism shall rise again.

The obvious answer: because he doesn't believe "hate speech" or "hate crimes" should exist. 

The bloodsport tangent: because Bannon and his neo-fascist team-mates rely on being able to access and fan this hate and fear to keep Trump's voters happy and connected. 

The "alt-right effect": because ignoring it enables Breitbart to continue publishing articles about crybaby snowflakes whenever a hate crime occurs. The alt-right depends in large part on this ability to challenge what it calls "political correctness" in order to reverse-victimize themselves. Look no further than the Men's Rights Movement.

How was Trump's side-step of the press conference anti-Semitism question interpreted by policymakers, citizens, activists, and Jewish communities? The responses fell pretty much as expected. It should be noted, of course, that Breitbart received front row seats at the press conference just in case any mammal was in doubt about the anointed media mouthpiece for this administration:

“I am the least anti-Semitic person you’ve ever seen in your entire life,” Trump said, in a statement that’s a top contender for the title of most ridiculous presidential statement in history. He didn’t condemn anti-Semitism, of course, because he doesn’t want to and because he’s now equipped with an exemption given him by the Israeli prime minister in a shameful fact that is probably making generations of proud right-wing Revisionists spin in their graves. [Chemi Shalev writing for Ha'aretz]

“His response was baffling,” Anti-Defamation League CEO Jonathan Greenblatt told Haaretz. The issue “is not electoral votes. It’s about the wave of hate crimes since the election and the spike in anti-Semitism across the country,” he said. “President Trump seemed uninformed about this issue and missed an opportunity to decry the rhetoric of hate that seems to be surging online and in the real world.  Intentional or not, this emboldens anti-Semites.” [Ha'aretz]

Rabbi Jill Jacobs, executive director of T’ruah: the Rabbinic Call for Human Rights, called his response “so bizarre.” “Over and over he has empowered white supremacists and he did the same thing today,”  she said. “He’s never said straight up one word that anti-Semitism is not acceptable. Even when he was straight out asked. How hard would it have been for him to say ‘I’m really disturbed about the uptick of anti-Semitism and any of my supporters should cease any anti-Semitic behavior,’" asked Jacobs. [Ha'aretz]

Mik Moore, President of the Jewish Council for Education & Research, laid out his theory on why Trump publicly discredited his son-in-law, Jared Kushner. The small Neo-fascist mitten is difficult to overlook:

When push comes to shove, and push certainly will come to shove, Jews should know that Trump doesn’t need them. That’s what he told the assembled at the Republican Jewish Coalition this past December; it’s what he told the press when he undercut his son-in-law. He needs only the mob. Jews are expendable. 

Men on white horses return to save the day...

"Expendable" is a gentle way to describe the emboldened Neo-Nazis of Alabama. This past week, nice neighborhoods in Birmingham were leafleted by the United Dixie White Knights. The White Knights are currently battling the neoliberal conspiracy to turn all boys gay, thereby further attacking the potency of white masculinity.

Who are these fellows? In their own words:

The United Dixie White Knights are honorable American Patriots, Beware what you join, we are true White Knights built upon the image of our Noble Confederate Ancestors. We dont do documentarys, hug negros or play politically correct, our security as well as yours is our top priority. We work with the 6 other true Klan organizations and many White Nationalists and Confederate organizations.

If you are an honorable man or woman over the age of 17 then join us today! We need you, your race needs you and most of all your country needs you. If your on the fence, get off it and come kneel before the fiery cross before America turns into some third world cesspool.

We are the most politically active pro White activists  in America today. We don’t sit in barns and hide our faces in the sand, we are proud White Knights whose literature is distributed regularly to awaken the white American sheep. If you wish to play Dungeons and Dragons in the dark and just want to join to get a robe, you won’t make it here long. We seek soldiers for the White race, America and God.

The UDWK is led by the elected Imperial Wizard Brent Waller and governed by a three man board. We are here for one purpose and one purpose only, to preserve a future for our children, our race, our country and the word of God. We seek only the best and brightest men and women of high moral character. You must agree to a background check, a home visit to verify you, attend meetings if physically and financially able and help put out literature meant to awaken the sleeping giant in the white Aryan race. If that’s you, then get off your ass white boy and come join us today!

It's no surprise that the UDWK trace their roots back to Georgia's Stone Mountain, a place one has to visit in order to discover the fresh faces and yuppie strollers of modern tea party style racism. The parking lot was filled with SUVs worshipping Sarah Palin. Georgia's white middle class mommies take their god with guns.

The UDWK is built upon the foundation of the original first era Klan, and reborn atop Stone Mountain GA in 1915. We practise Klancraft to the Knighthood or K Duo level. Our main priority though is not books, it’s preserving a future for our race and children,as such we are true White Knights and are the most politically active order in the business.

Our national office is located in the great southern state of Mississippi. Our state is the only state in which the stars and bars of the Confederate flag are still a part of our state flag. Mississippi has always been the battleground of resistance to tyranny. Many of the battles of the 1960s and during the second war for independence that ended in 1865 were fought here.

Out of the ashes of the great war, a noble order of White men rose to continue the resistance to tyranny, unjust Federal law, and the foreign agenda that removes God from this nation. Although General Forrest disbanded the Ku Klux Klan, our order continues on the similar path of resistance.

We no longer attach Ku Klux Klan to our name for legal reasons and Government listings. Our causes are similar, we seek to restore this nation to its original founding as a republic. To achieve this goal we are very involved in politics, getting our message out through the media, and distributing literature.

We are led by the elected Imperial Wizard Brent Waller and governed by a three man board. We still wear the sacrad robes of our ancestors, but often do things in public in suit and tie or a patched vest. We do not do public rallys, documentary’s for Johnny Jew and your security is our number one priority. We seek to restore this nation by any means necessary and believe men like Louis Beam, Bob Mathews and Sam Bowers were on the right path but got sidetracked.

Some list us as a Conservative Klan, as we won’t be limited to who we will work with, but we are not a Conservative Klan, we are the closest thing to the original that exists today. We no longer use the name Ku Klux Klan as it is listed as a Domestic Terrorist organization, this fact is something you should consider before joining any group foolish enough to put Ku Klux Klan in it’s legal name.

We have members from all walks of life. We are built for the future, not the past. Most of these groups today calling themselves Klan are far from it, don’t be fooled by slick websites, failed old groups,  Chameleons, and a leader who only wants your money while he hides his head in the sand. I can count the true Klan organizations on one hand and don’t believe these famous enemy hate map listings, they need a boogyman for their ponzie scheme.

I see so called Klans today hugging negros, making fools of themselves on documentary’s paid for by the ADL, allowing negros into Klaverns and Crosslightings. Let me speak frankly, the UDWK maintains the original intent of the Ku Klux, we are proud pro white activists. We do not play politically correct for anyone, and until the day we drive the spear of God, the American Republic and common sense through our enemies hearts, we will leave the light on for them.

Beware what you join today! My name is Brent Waller, I’m a father, husband, and American welder. I’m a former Sons of Confederate Veterans camp commander and Mississippi Division recruiter of the year and a lifelong registered Republican. I have traveled all over this nation. I do not run, I do not hide and believe strongly in taking the political fight to our enemy’s. I grew up in Laurel Mississippi and have met many of the men you heard about in movies of the civil rights era, like Sam Bowers.

Almost every friend I had in school, had a father, uncle or grandfather in the White Knights of Mississippi. I also have family ties to the original United Klans of America. From the day I was born, until today,  I have learned the lessons of men like Bowers, and the wisdom of my grandfather. In short I’m in it to win it, and believe strongly that our newly elected President should continue to swing his hammer. We must purge this land of foreign influence, regain control of our money, build a strong border wall, limit or eliminate immigration, and purge our country and Supreme Court of liberal whack jobs, Jews, homosexuals and foreign agendas.

When Brent Waller isn't heating up iron for Civil War reenactments, he is busy battling the evil "chameleon" and penning thoughtful essays about the "tyrannical Supreme Court":

I awoke today to a beautiful spring morning, the birds are chirping, bumblebees are buzzing around and new life seemed everywhere. Then I turned on the news and hear the Republicans are holding up Obamas Supreme Court nominee. Let’s take a look at the Tyrannical Supreme Court shall we?

Below is a list of Judges and their religious affiliation. By my count, there are 6 Catholics who bow down to a Pope in Rome and three Jews, one of which is a false Jew as It claims to be Gay. Not a single Protestant is to be found.

Ask yourself this, why in a country dominated by Christians does not a single one serve on the Supreme Court? Now let’s look at where they came from prior to being put forth on the Supreme Court.

Hark, a small swamp monster arises from the muck to salvage Waller's spring and make white Christian America great again. Behold Waller's heartfelt thoughts on Trump:

Donald Trump won because the liberal lefts 8 years under Obama practically drove Americans in some parts of this nation into a third world status. It takes Americans to run out of jobs and cheap beer and to awaken to our NWO wars that are bankrupting us and watch as Obama’s Muslim friends kill other Americans to get pissed off. If the polls are evidence, they are finally pissed off. Many are out of work, millions of jobs were sent overseas, our debt is through the ceiling and at the same time he opened the gates to illegal immigration while at the same time he pratically begged so called refuges from the very wars he helped create to come here. This man should have been impeached and he will go down possibly as the worst President in United States history.

Donald Trump has announced his nominee and the winner is Neil Gorsuch. A man who as you probably guessed attended one of the few colleges most Supreme Court Judges come from, Gorsuch attended Columbia University, and then earned his doctorate from Oxford.

During his childhood, Gorsuch attended Catholic School but today his religious affiliation is Protestant, he is a member of St John’s Episcopal Church in Boulder, Colorado. One would be correct to assume that any man trained in Catholic schools who later changed his religious affiliation has some type of issues with Catholicism. 

The true Klan has always had an issue with Catholicism, We only believe in God, and kiss no man called a Pontiff’s ring. We believe only Christ can absolve us of our sins as our Holy Bible teaches us. Catholics bow to a foreign pope, and as the leading proponent of America first, last and only for 151 years we dislike this point of contention with Catholics.

Eight years of a Trump Presidency will ensure more Supreme Court nominees for Trump. Kennedy is talking of retirement, and you can see the fear in the extreme lefts eyes and hear it in their voices on the liberal left propaganda machines that some American sheep think is news.

The Jews of the NWO are frightened, they are losing the grip of the show and they know it. They will be pulling the puppet masters strings hard, we can expect to see more puppets in the streets marching, burning and looting. Money being paid to these puppets will be tripled. It’s the puppetmasters strings we must cut, we must destroy them now during the Trump Presidency or we may never get another chance.

A Protestant Christian will soon sit on the Supreme Court after a hard fought defeat for the liberal left, and oh what a great day that will be. Kagan will no doubt curl up like the viper she is, when Gorsuch takes his seat.

A second Protestant nominee by Trump will be the death toll of the lefts agenda. That day should be celebrated as the day America is reborn into her relationship with God and the day Satanic influence over the highest court in our land was killed.

 

The South shall rise again... in Leakesville....

To Waller and his fellow fallen, the sun has come out and the future is bright with Trumpism. All is well in the Realm of Alabama. Not even logic is required to see that Trump's failure to address rising anti-Semitism is taken as a sign of approval by local neo-Nazis.

And so I turn back to the response of the American Jewish community, specifically, Bradley Burston's hard-left reprimand (Bradley's position on Trump has been consistently oppositional):

We largely let him get away with marking International Holocaust Remembrance Day by pointedly omitting any mention of the Jews, then choosing that very day to issue an order choking off immigration of non-Christian refugees fleeing genocide.

What is true – and as an obsessive CNN viewer he knows this – is that there have been scores of bomb threats against Jewish Community Centers, his own followers have issued rafts of threatening, Nazi-themed tweets against his Jewish critics, and he has done nothing, nothing at all, to condemn them or act against them.

On the contrary. Here is a political animal with a superhuman sense for what and whom his followers want him to say, do and attack. When he was out working the crowds, he knew in his bones that white supremacist anti-Semites saw him as their great hope. He fed them all the red meat he could dish out.

You can argue that a man disassociated from reality cannot be held accountable for the consequences of his actions, or for enabling or encouraging others to do his dirty work for him. Dirty work which works to his direct advantage. No more. A man who initiates, fuels, and fans anti-Semitism, a man who is in a direct position to combat it and does not, is, in my view, an anti-Semite.

Trump's silence speaks volumes to avowed, proud anti-Semites. Trump's silence is loud and clear: I'm with you.

And perhaps that is where I should drop the mike. The silence is deafening. The cliches are rotting on the laundry lines. Trump has left intelligent observers with nothing to express apart from disbelief and continuous disgust. 

You can't cure war and vodka: excerpts from Svetlana Alexievich's SECONDHAND TIME.

A woman describes her husband, a veteran of the Soviet war in Afghanistan:

Delusions of grandeur: We fought in a war! We're tough! The first toast is always: "The world is shit, all people are whores, the sun is just a fucking streetlight." And it goes on and on until the morning: "To resting in peace," "To health," "To medals," "Death to them all." Things haven't worked out for them.... I couldn't tell you if it's because of the vodka or the war. They're mean as wolves! They hate the Jews and all the people from the Caucasus. The Jews, because they killed Christ and ruined Lenin's plan. Home life is no fun for them anymore: Wake up, wash up, eat breakfast. It's boring! At the drop of a hat-- just call 'em up-- they'd all march straight to Chechnya. To be heroes again! There's this bitterness left over, they're mad at everybody: the politicians, the generals, and everyone who wasn't there with them. Especially the last category.... more than the rest.... Just like my husband, many of them don't have any sort of career. Or they all have the same career: walking around with a handgun. They say they drink because everyone here betrayed them..... Boo hoo! They drank when they were out there, too....

[Svetlana Alexievich, Secondhand Time, p. 411]

 

Aleksander Laskovich, soldier, entrepreneur, emigrant, interviewed periodically between the ages of 21 and 30:

Papa belonged to the Idea, he wasn't really a human. You must love the Motherland with your entire being. Unconditionally! That was all I ever heard, my entire childhood. The only reason we were alive was so we could defend the Motherland.......

While Papa served the great Idea. It was as though everyone had been lobotomized, they were all terribly proud of living without any pants on, but clutching a rifle..... We grew up... we all grew up a long time ago... Poor Papa! Life, in the meantime, changed genres.... What used to be an optimistic tragedy is now a comedy and action flick. What crawls on its belly and gnaws on pinecones?

[Svetlana Alexievich, Secondhand Time, p. 368]

 Once participants on a key battleground of the Cold War, where U.S.-backed guerrilla fighters dealt a humiliating blow to the Soviet Union and the Afghan military it trained, Afghan war vets are again taking up arms in Ukraine by the thousands—whether on the side of the separatists or for the Ukrainian government. For these men, called “Afgantsy” in Russian, the impulse to fight is almost innate—a response to what they view as another proxy war between the West, which backs Ukraine, and Russia, which openly supports the separatists.

Despite their age, for many Afgantsy, the nearly 2-year-old Ukraine conflict, which has killed almost 9,000 people and displaced at least 1.4 million, is a natural next step. It is their third war in at least 25 years, with the 1990s Chechen wars sandwiched in between. The middle-aged fighters’ hardened reserve, combined with much-needed combat experience, makes them desirable in a conflict defined by poverty and incompetence, in which recruits on both sides have been accused of robbery, drug-dealing and hard drinking.

 [Amie Ferris-Rotman, Politico]

 

Russians express their thoughts on September 3rd, The Day of Remembrance for Victims of Terrorism:

We need a war, maybe then we'll have real, upstanding people. My grandfather always said that he only ever met truly good people during the war. There's not enough kindness these days.

Every person from the Caucasus is a potential terrorist.

I hate the Chechens! If it weren't for us Russians, they'd still be up there in their mountains, living in caves. I also hate journalists who stand up for Chechens! Fucking liberals!

Today it's them, tomorrow it's going to be us. And no one says anything, everyone is okay with it. 

Terrorism: is it a good thing or a bad thing? It's what passes for good these days. 

[Svetlana Alexievich, Secondhand Time, pp. 363-365]

 

 

The field expedients the Soviets poured into their hapless bodies may have brought a degree of oblivion to their wartime misadventures. These noxious and innovative drinks were competing with the opium that was so readily available and also with such alternatives as chifir’, a punishingly strong tea that was actually used in the Gulags to induce a mild high or stave off pain and exhaustion. They also contributed to as much as 20 percent of the cases addressed by the Military-Medical Service in Afghanistan. One army doctor recounted to me a tale of having to operate on a soldier hit by shrapnel from a rebel mortar, whose innards still smelled of cheap cologne. Stalin reportedly encouraged the distribution of 100 grams of vodka — equivalent to a double shot — to soldiers before an assault.

[Mark Galeotti, War on the Rocks]

 

The aesthetics of Trumpism, mass psychosis, and those who love a good fetus.

I never thought we’d have a leader with a combover. I always thought people would sense that the combover subject was covered in shame and that his demand for our pity and tact on behalf of protecting his fantasy of self-completion would interfere with the idealizations through which democratic polities still invest leaders with a larger-than-life resonance.8 But as the current Big Sovereign intends to know nothing about governing, while bargaining and bullying from the throne of gut justice, his higher law is the lower law.9 He is unafraid of being a cartoon because cartoon characters never die, they keep going long after mere humans would be destroyed. Already an icon recognizable in silhouette, he and his larger-than-life appetite for outsized greatness can then revitalize an “America” that transcends the democracy of the ordinary that is marked by time and the attrition of life, intimacy, and labor. His energy literally gives life to the fantasy of an outsized life, so “tremendous” it can decree democracy at its scale, in its shadow. That’s key to authoritarian style. This is one thing it means to be living in an era of grotesque realism.

[Lauren Berlant, “Big Man”, Social Text]

 

It’s an insult to people who have real mental illness to be lumped with Trump. Most people with mental illness are well-meaning, well-mannered and well-behaved. And Trump is none of these. Trump is bad, not mad. And when bad people are labeled mentally ill, it stigmatizes mental illness

[Dr. Allen Frances in interview with Kelly Hayes, Truthout]

 

So why didn’t the experts see this coming? Why did the rational measurements of political probabilities fail so miserably? Perhaps because experts who work from rational premises, using empirical data, tested algorithms of calculation, and a well-grounded sense of history, are in the worst possible position to understand the dynamics of an imminent psychotic break in collective psychology. They expect people who behave rationally as individuals to behave the same way as a collective. It is very difficult for normal, reasonable people, much less highly trained experts, to predict the behavior of a psychotic, or to gauge what sort of messages will get through to someone in the grip of a delusion. That is why psychoanalysis, with its dream of a “talking cure” has generally been declared useless in treating schizophrenia. You simply cannot talk to a psychotic. There is no unconscious to be unearthed. The fantastic delusions and paranoid phobias are not suppressed, but are right out there in the open, just like the impotent caricatures of Donald Trump.

Another thing that misled the experts is the tendency of people to lie about their motives when they are feeling ashamed. One of the best things we can say about Trump supporters is that (as with Brexit) they were genuinely fooled, and didn’t foresee the consequences of their actions. If this were a case of individual madness, they could make an appeal based in a case of temporary insanity induced by a skillful psychologist who knew what buttons to press. It was notable that, despite the large crowds roaring their approval of Trump’s absurdities, and physically attacking anyone who dared to protest, when they were interviewed in private his individual supporters often became somewhat diffident about their intentions to vote for Trump. After all, the experts were all predicting that he would lose, and who wants to admit that they will be voting for a loser? But in the voices of those who were willing to say publicly that they supported the man, there was almost always the same equivocation: “I don’t agree with much of what he says, but …” “I don’t approve of his behavior with women, but …” Or: “I don’t know how much he can accomplish, but …” These “buts” are invariably followed by some cliché: “I like his policies, not his personality.” Or: “I think he will bring change, and what have we got to lose?” Or: “He speaks his mind, and is not a phoney.” Or: “I like that he is not politically correct.” Or: “He is not a politician but a businessman, and we need a businessman to bring back our jobs. Look at the mess the politicians have made.” Or: “He will keep the government’s hands off my guns.” Or: “He will stop abortions.” “He will be strong and tough.”

These utterances are classic instances of what Freud called “disavowal,” the transparent denial of what is obvious to the analyst. The most notorious version of this is the denial that one is a racist, whether it is anti-Semitism, Negrophobia, or Islamophobia. As Jean-Paul Sartre noted long ago in Anti-Semite and Jew, one always hears the same formulation: “I have nothing against the Jews, but there is just something about them.” This is often followed by “Some of my best friends are Jews, but just the same …” Trump’s great gift as a demagogue is the ability to say straight out what his followers can disavow, or to make those coded utterances known as “dog whistles.”

[W.J.T. Mitchell, "American Psychosis: Trumpism and the Nightmare of History", Los Angeles Review of Books]

 

With Trump, disgust (and its frequent companion, anger) seems to be running the control panel much of the time. His life is mostly about building big, impenetrable, tall, beautiful, powerful walls. All manner of people and ideas that seem to trigger a threat — they must be kept out, and if they are already here, well, “Get ’em out.” “Get ’em the hell out.” (Trump’s intention to jail Hillary Clinton is a shocking but not at all surprising extension of his penchant to expel; were he president, it seems totally reasonable that he would enjoy “You’re under arrest” just as he did “You’re fired.”)

But I don’t think Trump is a politician whose views color his personal life. He’s not Machiavelli. He’s a kid spitting out unfamiliar food. Banning Muslims, silencing reporters, building that beautiful wall — these follow a long-standing pattern of aversion to out groups, which, according to the psychologist Jesse Graham, are often linked to parasites, poisons, and other impurities. (Trump is a famous germophobe.) Jonathan Haidt links preoccupations with purity and disgust to conservative politics generally.

[Joshua Wolf Shenk, "Somebody That He Trusts and Likes: Inside Donald Trump's Mind", Los Angeles Review of Books]

 

Given my utter distaste for reproduced humans, I am surprised by your family values, values which force baby-hating females like myself to give birth. Since abortion has become more difficult to procure-- and since my birth control stops working when mixed with antibiotics-- I plan to handle my next pregnancy cheaply. If the line shows up blue, I will procure pain medicines and/or crack cocaine and proceed to consume copious amounts. In this way, the child I am forced to bear will be taken away from me. 

This child perhaps will be a crack baby. I've heard good things about crack babies. My sister-in-law is a yoga instructor and a former crack baby. My husband might have been a crack baby if they'd tested him. I have nothing against crack babies or the countless junkies who chase butterflies in the park. 

The American thing to do is wait for my pamphlet. In high school, the American thing to do was bubblegum-flavored lip gloss and Noxema. The pimple on my nose confirmed my classmates' suspicions. American girls grow up, but aliens only grow into bigger, less palatable aliens.

After watching late night crime shows, I realize there are multiple ways to kill a variety of innocent humans. Given such diversity in the killing arena, it strikes me as strange that there's only one way to be a true American, and that involves being born in the United States. If late night crime shows and murders remain more creative than your Committee, I foresee a dull future for the corpus Americanus. 

I wonder how long I will wait for my alien pamphlet. I wonder how many parades will pass by before I purchase a pair of bobby socks.

[Alina Stefanescu, "Dear Committee for the Socialization of Illegal Aliens", Split Lip Magazine]

 

[Bumper sticker listed at The American Christian Store, "America's #1 Online Store for American-Christian Items!"]

 

Musil believed that a Moosbrugger could not exist independent of the particular society that formed him. He is a symptom of a sick nation vomiting up its professed values. (Musil’s biographer Karl Corino has identified the Moosbrugger plot as being closely based on the carpenter Christian Voigt, whose trial for murder in 1911 was covered breathlessly by the Viennese press.) So it is with Trump, a reality television star who rode free publicity to his nomination while hardly spending a dime. A narcissist needs a mirror, and we have gladly provided it. Somehow Trump, born rich, has become the reflection of the United States’s own lumpenproletariat, casually breaking whatever barriers of hypocrisy buffeted against the blunt incursion of religious discrimination, rampant xenophobia, gleeful torture, and thuggish violence into popular discourse. Since giving voice to these tendencies produces the adulation that Trump gladly mainlines, he has no compunction in proposing ideas like the Great Wall of Mexico or the ban on Muslims, nor does he care that people are dumb enough to take those ideas seriously. When it comes to any political content, he has to be a mirror, since he possesses no content of his own.

[David Auerbach, "Make America Austria Again: How Robert Musil Predicted the Rise of Trump", Los Angeles Review of Books ]

Oral history, memory, and the salience of exculpatory narratives.

 

Pablo Picasso at the beach.

In 2014, I travelled to Russia to study Jewish life during the late Soviet period, and to collect oral histories. Most of my relatives emigrated to the US from the Russian Empire in the early 1900s to escape anti-Semitism, and this project was my attempt to piece together, if not my own family history, then what could have been my family history.

While first-hand accounts of almost any subject are prone to distortion and lapses in memory (intentional or not), the collection of oral history within a Jewish tradition presents a specific set of challenges. Oral history has become a hallmark of Jewish culture and of the attempt to come to terms with the trauma of the Holocaust. Phrases such as ‘never forget’ are ubiquitous, and form the basis for the preservation of memory. The word ‘preservation’ itself suggests an embalmment of a narrative. In a tribute to the victims of oppression and horror, we give voice to those who were silenced.

[Helen Haft, "Telling Memories", Aeon]

Part of memory, of course, is involved in the construction of identity. Who am I and how can I validate what distinguishes me from you? While the personal aspects of memory are easily grasped in a therapist's office, the collective and social nature of memory is fraught with peril. How many times has one uncle's memory of a family event threatened the integrity of the family identity?

"Looking at oneself in the mirror is a self-cancelling phenomenon. Eyes looking into eyes make a hole which spreads out and renders one invisible. I had seen more of myself in that single glimpse of a ghostly image in the pier mirror, not knowing it was I."

[Walker Percy, Lancelot]

As the mother of a child on the ASD spectrum and the daughter of political defectors, I am fascinated by the social boundaries of memory. A person who never met another person would have no reason to speak. He would remain speechless. Our social and physical environment gives us a space and means in which to define ourselves against others of the same type. To be a singular specimen needs no definition-- one grows accustomed to being foreign.

"...It says in the Kabbalah if you can't get off the ground you should stay on the ground. ... unless Adam and Eve face each other, God does not sit on his throne, and somehow the male and female parts of me refuse to encounter one another tonight-- and God does not sit on his throne."

[Leonard Cohen to an Israeli audience at an early concert]

When I jokingly told friends that the rise of Trump killed Leonard Cohen, I discovered a musical distance that sounded political. Those friends who supported Trump had never heard of Cohen-- "Who's that? Was he Jewish? Oh is that the Canadian guy?"-- whereas my liberal, freedom-hungry friends mourned the loss of freedom alongside the loss of the melancholy baritone that carried them through first kisses and break-ups and abortions.

"Why do you like depressing music? That guy needs to get a grip."

[Trump friend after listening to Cohen's "The Gypsy's Wife"]

As a liberal, my tolerance for vast degrees of uncertainty and dissatisfaction reached an apex in this election. I still can't believe the story my Trump-loving friends tell themselves about America. I can't believe how insecure they must be to heed the promise of security frothing from the lips of a rabid nut-job in a stadium. I can't believe I discounted their obsession with football teams as mere entertainment. 

Trying to trace a line from November 2016 to the present is difficult. I am limited by my liberalism and tolerance. I am sickened by my own disbelief and desire to find socioeconomic excuses for blatant racism and misogyny. As if I didn't know about the power of the red pill from my days in DC. As if there is friendly ecological co-existence between feminists and pick-up artists. As if a jerk by any other name would smell as sweet.

And yet memory has a fatalistic undercurrent. We need to know why. We need to connect points into a line and say a-ha. We narrate the past as if we had no choice except to wind up at this particular present. Haft again:

Though the Jewish community in Russia today is largely thriving, this family had frozen time for themselves at the moment of emigration. By denying the existence of potential alternatives, they were preventing a re-evaluation of memory, the past, and even the present.

While the desire to validate the tragic decision to leave can prevent a re-evaluation of the past, preclude analysis and definitively stamp out alternatives, the flipside was the re-assertion of a false power over choice, and a downplaying of anti-Semitism and the difficulty involved in making the decision to emigrate.

The tension between narratives that justify and narratives that inspire seems to be related to the power accorded pain. Much of the anti-Trump resistance right now congeals around the pain illiberal democracy brings to our friends and family in minority groups or under-privileged status. Haft observes:

...there was a dichotomy between those who, 25 years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, tailored their memories to dull the pain of their past, and those who shaped their memories to emphasise and hold on to that pain. In many narratives, there was a denial of any memory that diverged from their own, and even denials of their former selves. But while myth-making and a reworking of memory was undoubtedly taking place, that didn’t undermine the validity of what was being said and felt, nor does it mean that the interviewees were intentionally distorting history.

At the Thanksgiving turkey table, many of us were forced to reconcile our narratives of disbelief and horror with the triumphalist perspectives of Trump apologetics. Political theology has never been so complicated and alienating.

The sacredness of memory, and the taboo associated with examining it, can preclude analysis, denying a voice to those, such as Slava, Chlenov and Yelena, who have something legitimate to say that does not fit into a convenient narrative, or suggests one we might not want to hear. It also makes it uncomfortable to identify the faults in what is being spoken by those same people. While facts are not negotiable, our interpretations and experiences are never unanimous, and clashes of narratives lend insight into the deep internal conflicts that each person faced and continues to face.

Memory, by its very nature, is never fully formed. Preservation of memory is vital, but the genre of oral history does not immunise speakers or their words from questioning. Memory is not stagnant, but constantly changing and continually shaped by our present and the stories we tell ourselves. It is fallible, as are our perceptions, interpretations and the conclusions we draw from events. It is unnatural not to question or speak back to the stories we hear. Leaving memory unexamined, and granting it the status of sacred or untouchable history, does memory itself a great injustice.

I leave you to your memories that may or may not MAGA. I leave you to tiny acts of unceasing resistance. I end these thoughts with the shrapnel of a poem by Anne Sexton... the only weapon I use without regret...

And we are magic talking to itself, 
noisy and alone. I am queen of all my sins 
forgotten. Am I still lost? 
Once I was beautiful. Now I am myself.

Free associations on the shale gas crash.

 

Energy independence might be the dream that caused a nightmare. 

Given the odds that fracking fluids and baby cancer fairies will migrate soon to an acquifer near you. 

Given the power of invisible chemicals to kill us slowly but surely, we can expect health costs to go up. 

Expect pre-existing conditions (especially those related to adrenal and endocrine functions) to rise.

Expect Bible-beaters to demand coerced fetus birth with no regard to the damage accrued by mammalian fetuses under the frackinstances.

At least we know where Fred Palmer stands on cheap coal and coke. At least we know the heartland is in good hands. 

As for Putin, he is doing well. His reputation continues to climb since Marat Gelman turned Channel One into an "institution of managed democracy" for the 2003 elections.

Putin has exported his model to nearby states and his bottom is covered in lipstick marks by Viktor Orban. 

Putin keeps scoring.

Tillerson smiles and acts congenial. 

Putin scores another pipeline, this time to Georgia's detriment.

Speaking of scoring, where is Tom Holst? I miss Tom Holst.

Good ole Holst was a major player in bringing Chevron to Romania. Getting a 600,000 hectares concession in the eastern Barlad region and three concessions in the Dobroudja region.

Tom Holst said only shale gas development could achieve energy independence for the Romanians.

The peasants of Pungesti protested earthquakes and made a stink about water.

It was peasants v. Tom Holst. 

He felt misunderstood by the native, garlic-chomping masses. 

He wanted to make the world free for national energy independence. 

He never liked syllogisms or hardcore logic. 

Tom Holst was a true public-private humanitarian. 

And Tom Holst would be nothing if not for Obama.

The international frack fest might be less pervasive if not for Sec. of State Clinton's active lobbying on behalf of the fracking industry. 

In August 2010, the U.S. Department of State launched a program to promote the extraction of shale gas in other countries. It was called the “Global Shale Gas Initiative” and led by David Goldwyn, who was then State Department’s Coordinator for International Energy Affairs. [Source]

Once upon a time, Mark Gitenstein couldn't stop fracking. He sat on a horse named Corruption and rode it around the world. A true oil cowboy. 

Gitenstein has owned stock in 17 companies, including energy companies like Exxon Mobil, that has high profile operations in Romania. In March 2012, the Office of Government Ethics asked Gitenstein’s spouse, Elizabeth Gitenstein, to surrender 337 shares in Exxon Mobil after the energy giant announced the discovery of a large natural gas deposit in the Black Sea, which it will extract in partnership with Austrian OMV-owned Romanian energy group Petrom.

The former ambassador also owns nine gas leases In Oklahoma, which earned him between $35,508 and  $102,000 in 2009, according to his financial disclosure report.

In his ethics pledge, Gitenstein wrote: “I understand that a heightened prospect of a conflict of interest could exist as to companies that maintain a presence in Romania, because they may be more likely than other companies to seek official assistance from or make other contact with the Embassy. I will remain alert to the possible need for recusal where appropriate.”

“I was required by the U.S. government to advocate for Exxon. The same thing for Chevron,” said Mr. Gitenstein in a phone interview. But the former ambassador said he doesn’t know what’s in the contract. “That contract was negotiated between Chevron and the Romanian government without my involvement, certainly.”

Chevron denied that Gitenstein lobbied the Romanian Government on its behalf. “I’m aware of no role that Ambassador Gittenstein played. I’m not aware of any meeting he attended,” said Thomas Holst, Chevron’s representative, when I asked him after a conference. 

 Gitenstein, who ended his mandate as ambassador on December 2012, is now a board member in Fondul Proprietatea, a joint stock company established by the Romanian state that holds shares in all the major Romanian oil, gas and power generation companies. He also returned to Mayer Brown as “special counsel in the Government & Global Trade practice”.  “Commercial opportunities abound in Romania and throughout Central and Eastern Europe, and my experience and contacts in the region can help clients capitalize on them,” he said in an announcement on the firm’s website.

Gitenstein’s advocacy is not unusual in the context of diplomacy. The U.S. Embassy in Bucharest offers a “Commercial Diplomacy” service for U.S. companies. According to export.gov, the Embassy can help companies  “benefit from coordinated U.S. government engagement with the Romania government to protect U.S. business interests”, as well as “access U.S. government trade advocacy for your Romania government procurement bids”.

Sometimes I think about Tillerson and Gitenstein and Holst and other free-range global cowboys.

Sometimes I think there should be laws to restrain them from riding so much.

Sometimes I want a nanny to step in and prevent them from damaging private property. Mineral extraction rights are like acid on a landscape's flesh.

What's the resale value of a mined body?  

Hollywood says nada.

Female values plummet after giving birth. 

Oh... and guess who's coming back to Romania hungry for cuddles and partnerships? Ambassador George Maior extends an open and very physical invitation to Tillerson and the US Chamber of Commerce.

Thanks Obama. Thanks Clinton. Now look at what is waiting for Trump. 

Sometimes I wonder if this election was a contest between oil and gas corporations.

And I wonder why we pay taxes so rich white men can get neocolonialist in the name of a flag.

I think the methane has disrupted our synaptic firing. I think American brains are dead. And very, very red.

Carl Schmitt, sovereign exceptions, and Trump's clouded constitution.

Carl Schmitt might be to Trumptivism what Leo Strauss was to George W. Bush.

During Dubya's reign, fear revolved around the neoconservative control of foreign policy and the cafe cabals of neo-Straussians determined to reshape the Middle East.

These days, Nazi ideologue Carl Schmitt seems to be required reading for the Claremont barricades. Schmitt's theory of the “state of exception” offered the Nazis a philosophical framework to justify acting outside existing state judicial structures and laws. Making much of sovereign power, Schmitt determined that the “sovereign is he who decides on the exception.” 

Enter Michael Anton, whom the Weekly Standard describes as "a fast-talking 47-year-old intellectual who, unlike most of his colleagues, can readily quote Roman histories and Renaissance thinkers". Before his appointment as a national security official in the Trump administration, Anton had a pen-name and an intellectual passion: 

....readers knew him throughout 2016 as Publius Decius Mus, first at a now-defunct website called the Journal of American Greatness and later in the online pages of the Claremont Review of Books. As Decius, Anton insisted that electing Trump and implementing Trumpism was the best and only way to stave off American decline—making a cerebral case to make America great again.

To Jonathan Chait, Michael Anton is nothing less than "America's leading authoritarian intellectual", as he writes in a recent NY Magazine:

If there is a single passage of the essay that most succinctly summarizes its case, it is this: “I want my party to live. I want my country to live. I want my people to live.” Anton equates all these things — his party, his country, and his people, insisting that four more years of a Democratic presidency will extinguish all three. This is a textbook example of the kind of reasoning, the conviction that a single election defeat will usher in permanent destruction, that liberal theorists see as inimical to democratic government.

What does this mean for constitutional law and the USC? A few brief snippets from the keyboards of others: 

While the Bush administration may have contorted law and pushed legal and constitutional interpretations past their reasonable limit, when the courts pushed back, the administration always yielded. And while there might have been doubt as to whether the courts would assert themselves against the executive, there was never doubt that that the executive would accept the authority of the courts if and when they did so.

To say that a President ultimately accepts restraint is, obviously, not high praise. And by arguing that the Bush administration at its highest ebb of fixation on executive power never came close to Schmitt’s vision of the sovereign exception, I don’t mean to offer a defense, let alone an endorsement, of any of the policies of that period. Rather, I’m drawing a distinction between an executive branch that relied on expansive understandings of Article II of the Constitution and one that bears a real risk of paying no attention to the Constitution whatsoever—and, moreover, of denying the authority of any other institution to check it.

[Quinta Jurecic, Lawfare]

 

“It’s cronyism,” Amash told The Hill, echoing other conservative critics who have said such a deal amounts to the government picking winners and losers in violation of basic free-market principles. “We have a Constitution. The president doesn’t just get to do anything he wants. He has to work within the constitutional framework, regardless of why people elected him.

“And deals like that hurt the people of Indiana; they don’t help the people of Indiana,” Amash added. “They redistribute resources and offer benefits to one company when another company down the road doesn’t get those same benefits. Sometimes competitors don’t get those same benefits. That’s just central planning. That was tried in the Soviet Union. It didn’t work very well.”

[Scott Wong, The Hill]

 

It was because we could not reject the finding of the military authorities that it was impossible to bring about an immediate segregation of the disloyal from the loyal that we sustained the validity of the curfew order as applying to the whole group. In the instant case, temporary exclusion of the entire group was rested by the military on the same ground. The judgment that exclusion of the whole group was, for the same reason, a military imperative answers the contention that the exclusion was in the nature of group punishment based on antagonism to those of Japanese origin. That there were members of the group who retained loyalties to Japan has been confirmed by investigations made subsequent to the exclusion. Approximately five thousand American citizens of Japanese ancestry refused to swear unqualified allegiance to the United States and to renounce allegiance to the Japanese Emperor, and several thousand evacuees requested repatriation to Japan.

[Korematsu v. United States, USC 1944]

 

Trump’s ban on travelers from 7 Muslim majority countries is on a very different scale. It is a Leninist, Robespierrian, fuck you to the rule of law and I suspect it is only the beginning of things to come.

[Mark Koyama, George Mason University]

 

I leave you with orange lollipops and an interview with American Greatness this past weekend wherein Michael Anton responds to his critics:

What’s especially risible about this is that I’m a Straussian. It’s metaphysically impossible to be an anti-Semitic Straussian. My great teacher, Harry Jaffa—a man I revere more than any other I’ve ever known—was Jewish. I will go to my grave with my two greatest intellectual influences, the two people who more than any others formed my mind, being Jewish. Anti-semite? Give me a break.

But that’s the modern Left for you. They will turn that around and say, “Oh that’s just the old ‘some of my best friends are Jewish’ line.” Which in my case, happens to be true. The point is, nothing you can say is considered a valid defense. Once they have the chance to smear you, they will do it and continue the smear because it serves their interests. The human damage that they cause, the destruction of reputations—they don’t care about that. Actually, they do care, but they see it as a positive. Enemies are to be destroyed by any means necessary.

Though I cop to “nationalism,” but I do wonder what is the difference between nationalism and patriotism? I am open to being educated on that point if someone wants to make a case why “nationalism” is so awful but “patriotism” is OK. If I am a nationalist, I am an American nationalist. I am also an American patriot and I don’t see the difference.

...........

As for the “white” part, where do people get that? It’s just a convenient way to destroy and smear and not have to deal with the argument.

Actually, one of my great hopes for a Trump Administration and Trump economic policy is that he will build class solidarity among the working classes of all races. I think that would be good for the country and put salutary pressure on the political system. That sounds sort of Marxist of me, but I can live with that.

I know there are people who call themselves “white nationalists” but they strike me as a fringe. I don’t think “white nationalism” per se is actually possible or viable. The root of “nationalism” is “nation.” A race is not a nation. Nations come together and cohere in various ways. There is the French nation, the Chinese nation, the Navajo nation and so on. Nationalism exists on that basis, of “peoplehood” for lack of a better term. This goes back to the ancient distinction between friend and enemy, citizen and foreigner. This is the way humanity organizes itself and always has. Individual nations do not exist by nature but the impulse to form nations is natural. There will always be nations, but it has never been done on a racial basis—that is, by trying to unite an entire race into one nation—and I don’t think ever could be.

..............

As Strauss notes, the political community as such is closed. There is no possibility of a universal state, or certainly no possibility of one that is not a universal tyranny. He and Schmitt agree on this. Where they disagree is what gives the political—the state—its moral standing. Strauss identifies in Schmitt a kind of implicit indifference to this question. It doesn’t matter what the people agree on so long as they coalesce around something.

For Strauss—and the ancients, and the American founders—this is the vital question. What is the moral basis of the state? Only a government dedicated to just ends, to the good, is truly legitimate. The Declaration of Independence, for instance, refers to the “just powers” of government. Harry Jaffa always pointed students to the vital importance of that qualifier.  The government may not legitimately do anything it wants, for the same reason that the people cannot rightly do anything they want: because right and wrong, good and evil, just and unjust exist by nature.  And the proper role of government is promote the good and prevent, resist and mitigate the bad.

 

Clearly, Anton knows the prime ingredient to truly spooky ghost story is a sense of fluid, amorphous threat. What "the bad" might be is left to the imagination. I can't help thinking Stephen Miller, Bannon, and Anton will build up a big beautiful monster for us to battle-- a monster outside that overlooks the monster within-- an exceptional sovereign concoction.

Links on a theme: Bubbas pulling themselves up by the bootstraps.

 This is not really a Bubba. 

Yee-haw! Bibi reveals his inner Bubba.

Bubba fighting to being back the war on weed.

Resistance extends to include inferior chocolate. Bubbas are pissed.

That photo you take is a form of dissent. Bubba is watching.

The naked boy brings us democracy. Bubba likes it.

Bubba Sessions: the senator who hates amnesty.

Bubba Pryor likes his ice tea extra frosty.

Alabama's primary export: crazy, power-hungry Bubbas.