From a distance

This is a rough, first draft . . .

God knows how many times
I have stood frozen in the hot street
with rifles pointing at my crotch

& watched myself – small
& impossibly thin – in the oil-black
mirrors of their sunglasses.

They never take them off, not even
to enter a mosque. God knows
they are easy to hate.

But after the explosion when
I ran with the others to look, suddenly
I felt shame for all the things

I had thought. One howled, the other
bled in silence, eyes naked
to the sun. I bent down.

Above the smooth cheeks
such a clear, pale blue! I felt as if
I were looking down from heaven:

Here is our sky, soldier,
here is yours. Hold on.
Help will come.

Fictions, useful and otherwise

1. Disclosure

I grew my hair long so I’d have a place to hide. But soon everyone knew me by it: That Guy with the Hair.

I took up smoking to disguise my nervousness around strangers, or in a new place. But then smoking stopped being cool, and the longer I smoked, the more nervous I got. And after I stopped smoking I found it so much easier to sit still. Only my head still pivots left and right to avoid unnecessary eye contact.

These days I wear my hair short, my shoes and glasses are rarely in fashion and if I have an option, I go for unmarked t-shirts. Wearing a message simply seems too stressful. I feel as if I have to live up to whatever image it projects. And shorn of individuating details, isn’t it easiest to see who we really are?

When I stopped trying to hide, I found I could almost disappear. All I have to do is don a different hat and I’m somebody else. It’s great.

I admit, I do still keep a bit of a beard. Disclosure has its limits.

2. Enclosure

I guess it scares some people to think that personality could be so fluid, so arbitrary: nothing more or less than a collection of traits and powers in a role-playing game. They get defensive: “That’s just the way I am!” No, it isn’t.

But if we aren’t who we think we are, then what might we be? And what about the danger of total conformity, the boundaries of the self dissolving?

Perhaps the best way to talk about this is to say that what makes each of us attractive is our originality, not our novelty. Our lives are not novels with clearly defined trajectories plotted in advance, much less compositions intoned by a chorus of Fates or angels. But neither are they random – that’s the hard part to grasp. Matter is inherently self-organizing. So is mind. Sometimes, these patterns appear to converge and strange things happen.

Our selfhood isn’t something opaque and closed off; walls are there merely to define a space. Like a garden or a temple animated with lights and spirits, odors and possibilities, music from many throats. We are unique precisely in the way that every position is unique and each occasion is irreproducible. An openness to the world – which is meaningless unless the option of withdrawal exists – entails a sort of gardener’s familiarity with, and fondness for, the details of the unique positions and occasions of which we are composed. Our integrity as individuals stems directly from this sense of tenancy, of stewardship. How could it be otherwise?

3. Closure

Ah, for a sense of completeness! But whence the current passion for the word closure? It reminds me more than a little of the obsessive focus on orgasms found in most pop-culture talk about sex. The underlying message is the same: At some point in the future, we will achieve satisfaction by living in the present. And in the meantime, our sentences will become, like, more and more indecisive? Definitive pronouncements about much of anything will come to seem more and more, you know, whatever. Though I guess an increased emphasis on seeking agreement isn’t such a bad trend – knome sayin’?

The game this time, I think, is the one with three walnut shells and a little dried-up pea. Save your money.

It’s not over ’til . . .

Today, a truncated post; tomorrow, nothing. I may make a pattern of this. It turns out that reading this blog may be hazardous to your health. Specifically, “‘Toxic dust’ found on computer processors and monitors contains chemicals linked to reproductive and neurological disorders, according to a new study by several environmental groups.” There’s no known preventative action you can take – other than to minimize the time you spend in front of a computer monitor. Clearly, blog-reading, like all addictions, has harmful and possibly deadly side effects.

A couple days ago, Dale over at Vajrayana Practice wrote about another environmental consequence of the computer age – the loss of natural habitat and “open space” in places like the Seattle suburbs where he works. His post about about how it feels to go for a lunchtime walk in this strange, half-built exurban landscape reads like a chapter out of The Martian Chronicles.

I remember an article from a couple years ago on Santa Clara Valley, a.k.a. Silicon Valley – I think it might have been one of Ted Williams’ “Incite” columns in Audubon. It seems that this valley was once famous throughout California for its orchards and truck farms – a paradisiacal wonder, with some of the most fertile soil in the world. Now, it boasts the densest concentration of superfund sites in the United States. I’m reminded of the prophetic words of the mid-century California poet Robinson Jeffers: “Man would shit on the morning star if he could reach it.”

****

A memorable fancy: the solemn procession of Ivy League graduates in their caps and gowns, led by the scarlet-robed PhD candidates and followed by the black-gowned undergraduates and Masters. Phalanx after phalanx marches onto the field as the emcee announces the name of each program and college. Cheers, balloons. Finally, an almost-hush falls over the crowd as the president of the university introduces a special guest. Straight off the plane from Papua New Guinea, the commencement speaker makes his way between the columns of students like a general reviewing the troops, eyeing with an anthropologist’s detachment the bizarre accessories with which some students have chosen to decorate their mortarboards, the bird-of-paradise plumage in which the soon-to-be-doctors are bedecked. Naked save for his body paint and the penis gourd fastened circumspectly to the string around his waist, he mounts the stairs, rests his stone-tipped spear against the podium, waits for the emcee to adjust the microphone and then, in a low, deliberate voice, begins to sing.

The Cape of the End of the Earth (dream fugue)

The light, they said, the light. Don’t laugh! Someone one must bear witness to the play of things we have no words for: the way the memory flutters her figure. It has gone to my head, the flattery of aspen leaves.

In a dream we steered a car gingerly though a cobblestoned labyrinth in the transplanted medieval heart of a Middle American hometown. I was eluding our sinister pursuers, I was teaching silence to the night birds and the Lord’s Prayer to the crickets, who played everything backwards with their feet. It was nice to be able to hear where we’d been, not as if in a soundtrack to a near-death showing of the movie of our lives, but as an ascent to some snow-lined cirque in the French Pyrenees. They had a sign advising all park visitors to turn off their radios and “listen to the music of the mountains”–a sentiment we heartily endorsed, primarily because the rental car’s stereo didn’t work. We hiked for a while through the alpine meadows and watched through binoculars as the chamois clambered on the cliffs.

This was a long time ago, a one-day diversion from a pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela and Cabo Finisterre, the Cape of the End of the Earth, which was covered with blooming wildflowers when we finally got there one day in May. Franco had only recently passed; the streets of every Spanish town still belonged to the Guardia Civil in their sinister black capes. We chanced on a saint’s day celebration in one small town where the men were put in charge of peeling and chopping onions, piles and piles of large, sweet onions with the dirt still clinging to their roots. This was a task well suited for a family of pilgrims, they thought, handing my father a knife. Come weep with us, even if we share no more than fourteen words in common. Weep and be glad, since no one can ever recall anything by its proper name.

Ah, father onion! We strip off all your masks–for what? To give the stew its fundamental tone. And in my dream the car shrank and shrank until it was small enough to fold up and stick in a back pocket. We came out onto the square and strolled nonchalantly in a counterclockwise direction so we could look directly into the damp faces of all the town’s inhabitants one by one. (Remember, there was nothing on TV in those days.) “The eye doesn’t shine,” says Levinas. “It speaks.”

But I prefer the mysterious pronouncement of Vladamir Khlebnikov, who said, “Words are the living eyes of secrecy.” Sometimes even my own words strike me that way. Like right now, for instance. What am I trying to hide? Behind all masks of the onion, what remains? Nothing but the good soil it grew in–and the rain, and the medieval sun that still drops off the end of the earth and swims back each night through the labyrinths where hell used to be. Nowadays, with Franco long gone, who needs all those subterranean prisons, those sadistic inquisitors?

And Cabo Finisterre? The land has almost reached its limit, yes–and the Spanish, at least, seem well aware of the fact. They have said no to the sorcery of the backwards prayer and the blind mask, to words with their eyes put out. Last year an oil spill blackened Finisterre and much of the rest of Galicia’s verdant shoreline. This year the blood of soldiers and their victims seeps into the uranium-enriched soil of a battlefield that used to be a country. We will visit cemeteries on hills in our own country where the groundskeepers permit no real flowers, only plastic, and where the older coffins leak poisons into the groundwater. Death like an old whore must be covered in thick makeup. I will remember those who died young in the service of their country, like my friend Ben, who was born on July 4th, 1976, believe it or not, and died 20 years later from an overdose of artificial stimulation, having found nothing else worth dying for. And the teenaged alcoholic who used to pass out on my bed and piss all over the sheets–such a sweet girl, really, too much in love with life. She died looking for a bathroom, fell down a steep set of stairs in a strange house and broke her neck.

Today we will be overcome with nothing more than shouts and laughter, the high-strung preparations for a potluck supper and the giddy feeling that comes from dipping into and out of two many different conversations in too short a space. There will be no alcohol and no wallowing in maudlin sentimentality, beyond a simple mealtime invocation that we may or may not remember to have somebody say. I don’t know if we’ll visit the cemetery or not, but if we do, I am thinking that on my grandfather’s grave I’ll leave a subversive peony or two. It’s funny the things we do for the departed, the way we honor our imaginations–“s/he would have liked that,” we say, not even thinking about the literal realities of possible afterlife destinations. It’s important somehow, for a moment at least, to turn off our radios and TVs and just listen to the music that the hills are supposed to be alive with, and then to look–really look–into each others’ damp faces. Those dark tunnels, those valleys of the shadow, and the stage lights that beckon from beyond.

Ten thoughts about possession

1. People don’t actually own anything.

2. Ownership of land may seem obvious to us, but it wasn’t to American Indians. They thought they were selling usufruct rights. And given that one can own surface rights without owning subsurface rights, possession of land can become effectively mooted by the conversion of soil into “overburden” to be scraped away and dumped elsewhere.

3. Possession is inherently ephemeral – and again, the law reflects this. Eminent domain provides for the use of property for the “public good,” though that concept can mutate almost beyond recognition. Most new highways, for example, will not do the land or the public any long-term good. And in some parts of the country, it’s becoming an accepted practice for local governments to condemn private property and turn it over to real estate speculators – with the justification that, for example, private residences do not constitute the “highest and best use” of land in cases where retail or industry might be more profitable and would return higher tax revenues. In times of war, virtually any private property may be seized for any reason. Finally, the existence of inheritance and estate taxes (an indirect subsidy of real estate speculators and private contractors) suggests that the privacy of property is little more than a useful fiction; everything ultimately belongs to Uncle Sam.

4. Do we own ourselves? Clearly not. There is no constitutionally recognized right to privacy. The government can institute a draft at any time, which means it retains the ultimate power of life or death over its citizens, despite what the Bill of Rights may say. Even more tellingly, it’s a crime to kill yourself, and a crime to kill others unless you are in uniform and following orders from the government. (Very few murders by police are ever prosecuted. And the U.S. government goes to great lengths to ensure that its soldiers may not be prosecuted by any international court for crimes committed while in uniform.) We do not own our own freedom: we cannot engage in so-called victimless crimes, such as ingesting certain banned substances. Given that the main reason for banning these substances appears to be societal discomfort with the alteration of the consciousness, we must conclude that our minds are not free, either. And individual liberty of movement – what imprisonment robs ones of – seems intrinsic to self-ownership. (If imprisonment were recognized as a form of slavery, the United States would probably be the world’s second-largest slaveholding society, right after China.)

5. Are there any limits to possession? How you answer this question depends on whether you believe anything can truly be known. If even an idea can be copyrighted or trademarked, nothing is safe. Consider that access to drinking water is being privatized around the globe. In Texas, an entire underground aquifer is owned outright. And life forms can now be patented – a blasphemous notion if there ever was one! Probably only the fear of adverse publicity prevents someone like Monsanto or Microsoft from patenting the human genome.

6. Are there any historical precedents for reversing categories of ownership once they have been admitted? Yes. At one time, it was assumed that owners of land had full rights to everything on it. Then market hunters wiped out wildlife populations in large sections of the East. Now, game species are recognized as being held in common, by the citizens at large. Endangered species and migratory birds are subject to national and international regulation respectively. Under the Clean Water Act, the regulation of wetlands belongs to the federal government. The animal rights movement seeks to extend legal recognition to nonhuman species; the wildlands movement advocates recognition of the self-willed (“wild”) and self-owned qualities of the land itself.

7. What does it mean to own something? If legal titles can be revoked – or voided by the overthrow of governments – then surely we must look beyond the law. “Possession is nine tenths of the law.” This implies that if/when the concept of possession is universally recognized as illusory and absurd, the practice of law will wither. What will remain? Without ownership – which is to say, without unique and unequal privileges to the earth’s bounty and to products of human labor – what promises would still be so critical that people might need special protection against their violation? Murder, incest and rape would not stop being wrong; what would likely fade is the societal appetite for retributive justice, once these types of crimes were no longer seen as crimes against a form of property.

8. What does it mean to be possessed? I venture to suggest that possession inevitably entails abuse, to owner as well as to the thing owned. There may well have been one or two benevolent slaveholders in the Old South, but human nature being what it is, I doubt there were many more than that. Because, in the first place, what is possession? I maintain that, at one level, Possession is the power to do with another anything we wish. This definition strikes me as perhaps little more than one half of a tautology, however, because power and possession do seem to be two sides of the same coin. Can we understand possession apart from power, or power apart from possession? Only if the self/other distinction can be dissolved through various forms of ecstasy (including death).

9. Wouldn’t complete self-sufficiency also render the need for power over others obsolete? The need, perhaps, but not the reality. The reality is that we are all completely interdependent. This points to a second, more basic definition of possession: it is a human, cultural abstraction of bodily consumption. The violent assimilation of foreign matter into one’s own body for conversion into energy and waste products is unavoidable. As we consume, so shall we be consumed. In this light, Death appears as the ultimate owner. But paradoxically, in death we also sense the potential for self-transcendence. In rebelling against the authority of death, we determine to live in truth – whatever that means. Every culture, every language grapples with this problem a little differently. In the West, we have traditionally talked about grace and about love. Both concepts partake of the aura of the gift.

10. This, I would argue, is what lies at the root of human experience: the intuition of mortal being/becoming as a gift. Power and possession, I suggest, are much more recent abstractions. To become fully aware is to recognize one’s own incommensurability with that portion of life and time one has been granted. Without such an awareness, the relationship between self and Self will begin to resemble the relationship between two parties in an economic transaction. Priests assert ownership over gods, gods assert ownership (“possession”) over priests. This may be inevitable. But it is a mask; and behind that mask lies the leering death’s head. The unadorned truth seems to be that from the beginning everything shines with its own light. Beauty, like truth, is intrinsic – which is another way of saying that things or beings ultimately resist all forms of calculation or manipulation. Consumption in the beginning is an innocent act; only when we cling to forms – when we try to possess things – does life appear tragic.

In the American Dream

The sleep of the just is just as we’ve always been told. Picture with me, if you will, the bathroom slippers arranged neatly by the bedside, the dog in his customary spot curled up, as dogs will do, with his nose a few inches from his anus. Equally at bay are the sour smells of anxiety and the endless odor-free winter of despair.

The sleep of the just is peaceful as a cemetery, calm as the aftermath of a therapeutic airstrike necessary to conquer terror and quell unrest. The downed wires, the cratered streets permit no troublesome motors to mar this earful of silence. From time to time a cellphone might trill from somewhere under the rubble, a tasteful snatch of classical music as pleasing as a cricket on the hearth.

The sleep of the just is uncommonly deep. Deep as the color of the sky above Fat Poplar, New Mexico. Deep as the voice of the taiko drum at Itsukushima-Jinja, carried out on the tide through the iconographic red torii that stands across the inlet from Hiroshima.

The sleep of the just, we are meant to suppose, is profoundly settling: we sink incrementally into the bed of that sunless river. Like a well-built house that can withstand the removal of a thick seam of coal several hundred feet down. Some mornings, one might find a new crack or two in the windows, doors that need a bit of extra planing before they’ll shut. Right angles gradually go more and more off true.

Ah, for such a rest of the over-stimulated senses! To forget everything, including our own names! Folded away between fresh sheets, breaths still tasting of after-dinner mints, one heartbeat away from the spent flesh of all our fondest desiring . . .
__________

Still undergoing revision as of Tuesday morning.

Seeing no evil

I’ve been thinking a little more about how the “bounds of acceptable discourse” are perpetuated. By now I’m sure you’ve heard about the flap over the decision of the Sinclair-owned ABC stations not to air the “Nightline” segment in which the names of American soldiers killed in Iraq were solemnly intoned. (If you missed the story, this AP article contains just about everything you need to know.)

This interests me not simply because of what it suggests about the corrosive influence of media conglomeration and political corruption on the free flow of information in a democratic society. Appalling as that is, it is also utterly predictable.

To me, what this story really highlights is the untenability of our popular construct of the impartial journalist. The truth is, at one level the cynical, Bush-whacked Sinclair was correct: the decision to read those names on the air was a political decision. Every decision about what to air on a news show is guided by politics, however much the producers might like to believe that they are above the fray.

And I would go one step further and suggest that the failure to acknowledge this simple, fairly obvious fact might actually result in a more dangerous slant than if the bias were fully conscious and freely acknowledged from the start. There’s no bias like an unconscious bias.

For example, the unexamined assumption shared by maybe 95 percent of working U.S. journalists, and 100 percent of mainstream political commentators, that our government is basically well intentioned in the conduct of its foreign affairs has the effect of burying a great number of important stories. For example, how much do you remember hearing or reading about the extraordinary pressure brought to bear on the citizens of El Salvador to vote as our government wanted them to in the buildup to their “democratic” national election last month? I’m guessing that you, like me, remained blissfully unaware of it (as we do about so much that our government does, every day, to ensure its unquestioned hegemony throughout the hemisphere). Why didn’t it get more play? This story would seem to have been highly relevant to other stories that are considered worthy of coverage (“sovereignty” in Iraq; the ability/willingness of partisans to use foul means to decide elections in the U.S.). Widespread concerns about the continuing flow of immigrants into the United States and the decline in wages, etc., as well as the fairly extensive constituency that opposed the U.S. backing of El Salvador’s bloody civil war in the 1980s, would seem to have ensured a receptive audience for coverage of the Salvadoran election.

So why didn’t we hear all about it? Again, the concentration of media ownership has a huge influence, without a doubt. But you can read the headlines in any newspaper from three decades ago and you won’t see much more openness to these kinds of stories than you see now. (Indeed, the age of the Internet has initiated a new level of ready access to information scarcely conceivable only ten years ago. Anyone can go to the public library, log on to a computer and find the very blueprints for U.S. global imperialism with a few clicks of the mouse.)

Laziness and inattention are huge factors in determining coverage. For decades, the vast majority of newspapers in the United States have relied upon the New York Times to decide what the headlines for the following day should be. But does that mean that if we simply did away with the New York Times, everything would be hunky-dory? The problem is, it’s impossible to cover stories like the Salvadorean elections without challenging the bedrock assumption about American virtue I mentioned above.

It seems almost laughable that our major news organs consider it too controversial to refer to U.S. troops in Iraq as occupation forces, preferring instead the clearly pro-Bush term “coalition forces.” But thirty years after the end of our Indochina adventure, it remains impossible to refer to U.S. entrance into Vietnam as an invasion, or to “model villages” as concentration camps. Just the other day, my father mentioned his anger at a statement in Newsweek that the Vietnam War “cost 50,000 lives.” It is still difficult, if not impossible, for respectable commentators to accept the fact that we invaded another country, set up a puppet regime, and did unspeakable things to its inhabitants. (Around 1,600,000 people died on all sides in that conflict, including an estimated 340,000 civilians and 56,000 U.S. soldiers.)

I think of my recently deceased maternal grandfather, and how good he was at not seeing things that would have made him uncomfortable. Pop-pop was a strict Methodist who never had a drop of alcohol in his life, and he believed that all of his offspring and their children were just as uniquely blessed with good sense as he was. Pop-pop was a patriarch in the best sense of the word: he was extremely proud of all of us, and I remember how he sat grinning from ear to ear throughout the fairly riotous reception for my cousin Heidi’s wedding a few years back. All around him, his children and grandchildren drank wine from wineglasses and beer from the bottle. He saw – I’m convinced – nothing, other than some rather exotic forms of soda pop and iced tea!

On the other side of the coin, in every area where the conventional assumptions of mainstream commentators can be contested, the bounds of acceptable discourse inevitably expand to accommodate a more diverse selection of possible story lines. Take stories concerned with the relationship of government toward its own citizens. Imagine if we didn’t have a long tradition of suspicion toward, and agitation against, governmental authority. Would we even see stories like the AP article linked to above, freely quoting the left-liberal media reform group Free Press as an expert witness on the cozy relationship between Sinclair and the Bush regime? Would environmental and social change movements ever have gotten off the ground without this widespread presumption of an agonistic relationship between citizens and their elected representatives?

That’s not to say that this belief is unproblematic. For quite a few years now, commentators from various positions on the political spectrum have urged more harmonious, communitarian conceptions of government. I’ve been known to advocate such things myself: if we truly believed that we were the government, imagine how things might change! But I have to admit that it is at least as likely that such communitarianism would be hijacked by impulses toward conformity – another, very strong political tradition. If you think we’d be better off without conflict between grassroots pressure groups and government, take a look at Japan. The pressure to “go along to get along” in Japan is so overwhelming that almost every effort to found an independent union or an adversarial environmental group ends quickly in co-option. The one major exception to this rule, the national teacher’s union, has managed to maintain its independence over the years only through steadfast adherence to a rigid, Marxist ideology. And that’s why, every couple of years when the Ministry of Education issues new textbooks, the ever-simmering controversy about whether (for instance) Japan merely “expanded” into Manchuria, or whether it invaded it, gets a full airing in the Japanese media.

We in the U.S. are far from immune from similar pressures to muzzle dissent and “work within the system.” In our ever-more-partisan political climate, bipartisanship tends to be seen as a virtue. But all too often, a lack of serious controversy in the corridors of power simply means that the moneyed classes are united in their opposition to the popular will and/or in their determination to mold that will into a more favorable shape. We saw this especially clearly a year and a half ago, with the closing of ranks behind the “President” in his determination to invade Iraq. Bipartisanship in that case threatened the very foundation of our republic – Congress actually relinquished its own authority to declare war, quite possibly violating the Constitution in the process.

But pay close attention to the words: they want us to think that bipartisanship is identical to nonpartisanship, which it manifestly is not. Bipartisanship means that the two major parties collude, consciously or otherwise, to restrict the bounds of acceptable discourse to such an extent as to exclude the concerns of vast segments of the voting public. Single-payer health care? An end to commercial extraction on public lands? A radical downsizing of the military budget? More taxes to pay for programs that nearly everybody supports? All off the table.

The most obvious mechanism for achieving this form of bipartisanship is redistricting, as Molly Ivins pointed out in a talk at Altoona College the week before last. She noted that in Iowa, where political districts are drawn by a non-partisan panel of experts, 80 percent of all districts are competitive. That’s the exception. In every other state, nearly all districts have long ceased to be competitive. Republicans and Democrats are equally to blame for this nearly universal gerrymandering; the current ascendancy of the less-popular GOP simply testifies to its superior mastery of the process.

The result? “Representatives” elected by non-competitive districts feel themselves under little obligation to represent anyone other than the vocal minorities that elected them – much less to try and appeal to their ideological opponents, as was once the case. A shifting number of polarizing issues (flag burning, prayer in schools, abortion) become ever more prominent as the parties seek to build and mobilize ever more rabid constituencies. The impeachment of President Clinton was a watershed event in this polarizing process. And look how well it worked: Nader’s claim that the two parties had become indistinguishable was viewed by most mainstream journalists and commentators as arrant and possibly dangerous nonsense. (In addition, of course, he suffered from the decision to replace the previously nonpartisan sponsorship of televised debates – by the League of Women Voters – with a bipartisan commission.)

But the actual results of the 2000 presidential election – the one race not directly influenced by gerrymandering – bore out Nader’s claim to an extraordinary degree. Yes, Gore won the popular vote (and probably the election, had the Florida voter registration records not been purged), but by a statistically insignificant margin. Now, you can believe in the tooth fairy and Santa Claus if you want to, but it really stretches credulity to imagine that the electorate is precisely evenly divided in its party preferences. As Noam Chomsky pointed out, the only logical way to explain such an unlikely result is to assume that people voted almost entirely at random. The huge numbers of undecided voters reported by pollsters in advance of the election help bolster this hypothesis.

In other words, bipartisanship works in large part because the majority of voters don’t care about either party. Large differences in substance would threaten the real business of America – business. Let’s remember that, while the corruption and criminality of the Bush regime exceed Clinton’s by at least a factor of ten, the Clinton administration did pave the way with unprecedented levels of access and influence for business interests over policies both foreign and domestic. It’s a vicious circle. As more and more people become alienated from politics and fewer and fewer bother to vote, the influence of a few, wealthy backers becomes ever more prominent. In this way, apparently bitter, competitive partisanship becomes a mask for bipartisan collusion. The likely end of such collusion is complete rule by corporations – we’re nearly there already.

Most corporations are themsleves supremely bipartisan. They bet on all horses that can win. (Dissidents, like Diebold or the Sinclair Group, who are too flagrant in their bias toward one party, risk being outed and denounced in the mainstream media. Some have suggested that Microsoft’s original sin had been not to bribe either party. Given the effectiveness of the protection money doled out to the GOP in 2000, we can expect Microsoft to remain an enthusiastic team player from now on.) I’m willing to bet, however, that just like their counterparts in the news media, the corporate board members who engage in such legalized bribery would lay claim to objective neutrality. Because, of course, they are afflicted with the biggest blind spot of all: they are all partisans of money and power.

Power itself, in all its expressions – authority, hierarchy, monopoly, exploitation, constructs of self/other, us/them and purity/pollution – looms invisibly behind all the other misprisions and delusions that keep our imaginations in thrall. Challenging its hegemony, plowing under the “monocultures of the mind,” in Vandana Shiva’s resonant phrase, may constitute the most crucial of all the political acts we can engage in.
__________

Afterthought: In light of the pervasive self-censorship of the U.S. news media, free Arabic-language media organs such as al-Jazeera play an increasing role in shaping coverage of the Iraq war. Unless and until al-Jazeera can be bought off or shut down, the occupying powers will be forced to take the “Arab street” into consideration. The airing stateside of such hugely damaging stories as the Iraqi prisoner scandal also reflects deep divisions over the occupation among U.S. elites themselves – a division which is both substantive and nonpartisan. In fact, some of the most outspoken opponents of the invasion and occupation have been conservative Republicans. But tellingly, on this most crucial of issues, the two major-party presidential candidates are nearly united, differing only in minor nuances of packaging and expedience.

Being different, learning difference

1. Who you lookin’ at?

I don’t know how it was where you grew up, but among white working class folks in Central Pennsylvania, if you think for yourself and people don’t like you, you’re weird . . . but if they do like or at least respect you, you’re merely “differnt.” As in, “Yeah, you know, Bonta, he’s, well . . . differnt!” It’s kind of like being African American: not necessarily a bad thing, but always worth mentioning. “Yeah, you know, them fellas that came out to replace my water heater was both colored. Nice guys, though.” And ever so slowly, one sees a similar acceptance of gays and lesbians beginning to spread – at least among women and the more emotionally secure among the straight men. Although I kind of doubt that some of the more colorful terminology for people so flagrantry different will go away any time soon.

This contrasts markedly, of course, with the ethos of college-educated WASPs. Sometimes it’s comical the extent to which members of this tribe (in which I include myself) will go to avoid even drawing attention to another’s ethnicity or sexual orientation. We tend to be acutely aware of the fact that such statements as I have quoted above presume stereotyped qualities. And we have a nearly unshakeable belief in the power of correct language to enforce correct thinking.

This view has its blind spots, of course. For some reason, it’s almost always O.K. to make fun of poor or working class white folks – precisely because they are presumed to be uniformly prejudiced toward, um, *cough*, you know . . . People of Color. This supposed failing appears to give carte blanche for their “betters” to ridicule everything about them and their culture – which isn’t even afforded the dignity of authenticity, being viewed instead as a warped or immature version of our own.

This is in fact consistent with the ideology of white supremacy, which is insidious precisely because it is invisible, a blind spot. How many times have you heard folks in the media refer to white people as if they have no ethnicity? And isn’t this how many WASPS view ourselves? “Color” comes from without: poor people are almost by definition colorful, even if they’re white hillbillies or Okies. Good for entertainment. But we – we seem bland, even to ourselves. Here, the Spanish word blanco includes just the right range of meanings: White. Blank. Target: what everyone is after. We are the default setting.

What I’m saying here is that most of us supposedly better educated, middle class white folks are no more enlightened than our working class counterparts. Members of both moieties are capable of tolerance, though almost inevitably they take themselves as standards of normalcy. No, the Ku Klux Klan doesn’t win many converts from among the well-to-do: the language of open hatred and rage is, well, uncultured. Thus, the better educated prefer to talk about “reverse discrimination” (originally a Klan idea, by the way) and “cultures of poverty/dependency” (which never seems to include the imaginatively impoverished and connection-dependent scions of wealthy families, such as our current “president”). The highly educated elites of both major political parties, in a rare display of bipartisanship in the mid-90s, had little trouble convincing themselves and significant portions of their power bases that shredding the social safety net would actually do those lazy people on welfare a huge favor. Aside from then-Secretary of Labor Robert Reich, hardly any voices in mainstream political circles or in the media were willing to confront the obvious fact that very few corporations could survive a minute without massive taxpayer subsidies. That’s good welfare, necessary for the survival of the rich.

Well-educated white folk, no matter how conservative, never speak publicly in racialist terms. But simply changing the language hasn’t changed the reality for poor people in this country and around the world. Nor, I’m afraid, has it altered the fundamental mindframe. While it’s impolite to openly challenge African American claims to Culture (aside from the deformed, immature kind), a mention of “ebonics” at a white cocktail party is almost always a laugh line, except perhaps among confirmed liberals. The huge, unexamined assumption at the heart of white supremacy is that They want/need to be like Us. They are un- or underdeveloped; huge swaths of the planet are viewed as being in desperate need of something called development. (Even many liberal environmentalists, who decry the destruction caused by developers in the U.S., believe this.) Everyone envies and wishes to emulate the American Way of Life, our leaders solemnly atone – and probably sincerely believe, in company with many others.

In Manufacturing Consent and other books, Noam Chomsky has advanced a sort of loose model to try and explain how political indoctrination can happen in a free society. Ever-more-restricted ownership of the mass media is of course one key element. But just as critical, Chomsky finds, is the way the educational system tends to enforce conformity and to weed out those who are too different. For example, much of the workload required to get a PhD is needless and inhuman, unless you assume that a good part of the reason for educational hierarchies in the first place is to serve as social sorting mechanisms. In that case, it makes sense to try and guarantee that the folks at the top of the intellectual pyramid are adept at swallowing their pride, jumping through hoops, and manipulating ideas according to carefully prescribed, peer-reviewed and enforced standards. (That’s not to say this always succeeds, I hasten to point out, given that at least six regular readers, including both my brothers, have PhDs, and none seem all that brainwashed! But in fact my brothers’ descriptions of their fellow grad students and professors were not encouraging, to say the least.)

Even without the class-based analysis, it seems intuitively obvious that academia constitutes a culture largely dominated by white men, and that new aspirants to the fold must adapt themselves to that culture either by internalizing its (white, male) norms, or by finding a way to maintain ideological independence without making too many overt faux pas (at least until they get tenure). And it’s perhaps unavoidable for members of any given culture both to want to enforce such norms, and to regard themselves as the standard against which all others should be measured. In addition, it is generally unthinkable for members of any priviledged class to question the ideological basis of priviledge in the presumption of specialness. The problem becomes particularly acute, however, when that culture holds a near-monopoly on the licensing of thinkable thoughts within a larger society that views itself as egalitarian.

But aside from the egalitarianism, this is nothing new. Ever since the invention of writing systems, the folks who knew how to write made fun of those who didn’t. Humor at the expense of ignorant bumpkins can be found in the earliest cuneiform texts. Walter Ong, whose invaluable Orality and Literacy I quoted from a while back, goes so far as to suggest that much of what we measure as “intelligence” simply reflects the degree to which a given mind has internalized and learned to reproduce uniquely literate thought-patterns.

2. Who you callin’ dumb?

Bigotry can take many forms; the perception of East Asians or Jews as more intelligent can be as damaging as the still-widespread perception among whites that black people (for example) are in some way just not as smart as we are. Again, this is the sort of sentiment one hardly dares to whisper in polite society. But I sort of doubt that the book The Bell Curve became a bestseller on the strength of sales to KKK members alone. And, as I’ve suggested, the willingness of middle-class folks to believe that “poor white trash” are dumb as dirt shows that most people do indeed regard intelligence as inborn and as correlating to some extent with class, if not skin color as well.

Most public school teachers have long ago stopped wondering why so few “good” kids end up in the remedial classes, and why so few kids from poor families ever score high enough in I.Q. tests to make it into gifted or advanced placement classes. It’s easier to believe that we live in a meritocracy, and that social differences reflect measurable genetic differences, than to question the tests themselves.

It was always painfully obvious to me that my good fortune in coming from a highly literate family was the main thing that gave me both the ability and (as time went on) the confidence to ace all manner of standardized tests. But over the years I’ve also come to appreciate the apparent irony that so often those with the least facility for the kind of abstract thinking I excel at possess a superior way with words. I find myself thinking, “If only we could properly educate these people who lard their speech with proverbs and other colorful expressions and who tell stories so expressively – if only we could turn them all into writers!”

Semi-literate people are also, for lack of a better term, semi-oral. Walter Ong showcases a study by the Soviet psychologist A.R. Luria, who “did extensive fieldwork with illiterate (that is, oral) persons and somewhat literate persons in the remoter areas of Uzbekistan . . . and Kirghizia in the Soviet Union during the years 1931-2 . . .

“[Luria] identifies the persons he interviews on a scale ranging from illiteracy to various levels of moderate literacy and his data fall clearly into the classes of orally based versus chirographically based noetic processes. The contrasts that show between illiterates . . . and literates as such are marked and certainly significant . . . and they show what work reported on and cited by [J.C.] Carothers (1959) also shows: it takes only a moderate degree of literacy to make a tremendous difference in thought processes.”

The methodology was informal and relaxed, encouraging subjects to answer questions (or not) as naturally as possible. The subjects were, of course, unfamiliar with standardized tests, but that only makes the conclusions more valuable for the insights they offer into how kids from illiterate or semi-literate backgrounds perform on IQ tests. (Even in my own case, I still recall quite vividly how frightened and disoriented I felt during what I later realized was my first encounter with an intelligence test. I had not yet learned to read. Interestingly, when I took the test again a few years later, after I had become a voracious reader, my score improved by over 25 points. Had it not been for direct pressure from my parents – as intellectuals, honorary members of the local elite – I never would have been given the opportunity for a re-test.)

Ong draws attention to five main conclusions, which I’ll try to do justice to with fairly brief quotes. (For those interested in pursuing this subject, Luria’s own book, Cognitive Development: Its Cultural and Social Foundation, has apparently been translated into English.)

“(1) Illiterate (oral) subjects identified geometrical figures by assigning them the names of objects, never abstractly as circles, squares, etc. . . . ”

“(2) Subjects were presented with drawings of four objects, three belonging to one category and the fourth to another, and were asked to group together those that were similar or could be placed in one group or designated by one word. One series consisted of drawings of the objects hammer, saw, log, hatchet. Illiterate subjects consistently thought of the group not in categorical terms (three tools, the log not a tool) but in terms of practical situations – ‘situational thinking’ – without adverting at all to the classification ‘tool’ as applying to all but the log. If you are a workman with tools and see a log, you think of applying the tool to it, not of keeping the tool away from it in what it was made for – in some weird intellectual game. A 25-year-old illiterate peasant: ‘They’re all alike. The saw will saw the log and the hatchet will chop it into small pieces. If one of these has to go, I’d throw out the hatchet. It doesn’t do as good a job as the saw.’ Told that the hammer, saw and hatchet are all tools, he discounts the categorical class and persists in situational thinking: ‘Yes, but even if we have tools, we still need wood – otherwise we can’t build anything.’ Asked why another person had rejected one item in another series of four that he felt all belonged together, he replied, ‘Probably that kind of thinking runs in his blood.'”

As expected, subjects with a few years of schooling answered “correctly.” Those who were semi-literate “mingled situational grouping and categorical grouping, though the latter predominated.”

Luria also attempted to teach abstract classification to each of his illiterate subjects, but they invariably resisted learning: “They were convinced that thinking other than operational thinking, that is, categorical thinking, was not important, uninteresting, trivializing.” I have often felt that myself. Much as I love to indulge in it, the invention and proliferation of categories – mental boxes – leads one further away from reality, not closer to it. And I wonder: how does “categorical thinking” differ from what Buddhists, for example, label discriminatory thinking? To what extent might the direct intuitions of artists and mystics represent simply a return to preliteracy, an escape from thought patterns ingrained by “chirographically based noetic processes”?

Finding # 3 in Ong’s summary involves reactions to “formally syllogistic and inferential reasoning,” the alphabetically-enabled invention of the ancient Greeks. In sum: “Syllogisms relate to thought, but in practical matters no one operates in formally stated syllogisms.” Ong cites philosopher James Fernandez, who “has pointed out that a syllogism is self-contained: its conclusions are drawn from its premises only. He notes that persons not academically educated are not acquainted with this special ground rule but tend rather in their interpretation of given statements, in a syllogism as elsewhere, to go beyond the statements themselves, as one does normally in real-life situations or riddles . . . I would add the observation that a syllogism is thus like a text, fixed, boxed-off, isolated. This fact dramatizes the chirographic base of logic. The riddle belongs to the oral world. To solve a riddle, canniness is needed: one draws on knowledge, often deeply subconscious, beyond the words themselves in the riddle.”

And I would add that if in fact the category “intelligence” corresponds to anything in nature, it might well be this very canniness – a great word! A few people are prodigies, simply somehow more swift from birth onward. For most others, canniness – or wisdom – comes, if it comes at all, through life experience and through association with individuals who already possess such wisdom, especially grandparents and other elders. One trains oneself in the value of insight, the development of intuitions and the cultivation of special knacks – none likely to come through schooling as we know it.

Luria’s fourth significant finding was that non-literate people resisted even the logic behind definitions. Rather than describing concrete things, they preferred to give examples, though this didn’t seemed to reflect any lack of facility with description. “‘Say you go to a place where there are no cars. What will you tell people [a car is]?’ ‘If I go, I’ll tell them that buses have four legs, chairs in front for people to sit on, a roof for shade and an engine. But when you get right down to it, I’d say: “If you get in a car and go for a drive, you’ll find out.”‘”

“(5) Luria’s illiterates had difficulty in articulate self-analysis. Self-analysis requires a certain demolition of situational thinking. It calls for isolation of the self, around which the entire lived world swirls for each individual person, removal of the center of every situation from that situation enough to allow the center, the self, to be examined and described.” One man was asked to describe his shortcomings: “‘This year I sowed one pood of wheat, and we’re gradually fixing the shortcomings.'” (A pood is a Russian unit of weight, equivalent to 36.11 lbs.) Luria asked one of his subjects, “Well, people are different – calm, hot-tempered, or sometimes their memory is poor. What do you think of yourself?” “We behave well – if we were bad people, no one would respect us.” This exemplifies, as Ong notes, “Self-evaluation modulated into group evaluation (‘we’) and then handled in terms of expected reactions from others.

“Another man, a peasant aged 36, asked what sort of person he was, responded with touching and humane directness: ‘What can I say about my own heart? How can I talk about my character? Ask others; they can tell you about me. I myself can’t say anything.'”

Ong concludes: “It is perhaps impossible to devise a test in writing or even an oral test shaped in a literate setting that would assess accurately the native intellectual abilities of persons from a highly oral culture.” The use of examinations to sort people came into use in the West only in recent centuries; the use of written exams to create and maintain the ruling classes in East Asia is much more ancient and contains valuable lessons for those who care to look. But I’ll have to leave that for another post.

I don’t want to minimize the importance and, indeed, the many rewards of mastering what Ong calls the grapholect: the dialect of the ruling class – in our case, standard English – that becomes the repository of written culture and the key to the whole, vast garden of the text. To use an analogy, my belief in the absolutely essential importance of large tracts of wilderness does not diminish my fondness for human society. In fact, in my view, the latter quickly grows sterile and unhealthy without regular infusions from the former realm. In like manner, I see the persistence of folk culture and the oral lifeworld of felt experience as necessary for the continued vitality of literate culture.

We can argue about whether or to what extent ethnocentricity or in-group exclusivity might be “natural” or inevitable. But history and anthropology do offer abundant examples to suggest the power of ameliorating influences. Multiculturalism has been the norm for most peoples throughout history. Monolingualism such as many WASPs experience it seems quite rare – especially if we consider additional competence in a non-standard English dialect to constitute a form of bilingualism. If I’d been a little less “differnt” and a little more social back when I was in public school, I might be able to claim such bilingualism myself.

The bloody sire

On Sunday night I finally got a chance to see Bowling for Columbine. I was extremely impressed. As a gun-toting freedom-lover, I was especially pleased that Moore did not simply blame the surfeit of easily available weaponry for the astonishing levels of gun violence in this country. He went to Canada to find out why its similarly well armed citizens manage to avoid shooting each other, and discovered an astonishing fact: Canadians don’t live in fear of their neighbors. He couldn’t find anyone in Ottawa or Toronto who admitted to locking their doors – “It makes us feel like we’re imprisoning ourselves,” one explained. They were also proud of the fact that their government shies away from violence as a tool of first resort in international diplomacy. Their nightly news features long, boring analyses of tedious issues such as health care and the environment, rather than hysterical reports about the latest threats to civilization and decency. About 11 percent of Canadians belong to ethnic minorities, yet white-skinned inhabitants of the suburbs seem to lack their U.S. counterparts’ obsession with looming invasions by armies of the less-fortunate. Moore interviews some African American men from Detroit who love to spend their weekends in Windsor – “I can RELAX here. People treat me like I’m just a normal person!” My father points out that Canadians won their independence as a result of an act of the British parliament – not from a revolution.

The same thing that bothered me at the time of the Columbine shootings four years ago had also stuck in Michael Moore’s craw. Here you had the president making strong statements about the need to lessen the appeal of violence among our nation’s youth, at the same time that he was sending young people in uniform to Serbia to bomb schools, bridges and power plants. What makes the U.S. different from Great Britain, Canada and Australia? Simply put: we have a unique and unshakeable belief in the redemptive power of violence. Hollywood movies are popular everywhere, but only in the U.S.A. are we so unsophisticated to think that John Wayne and Dirty Harry have the right approach. A lone ranger, armed with a six-shooter and his own moral rectitude, can make everything right again. Call it naivete or call it idealism: over 80 percent of USians tell pollsters they believe in angels and in heaven – but not in hell. Hell is for other people.

Watching Bowling for Columbine reminded me that I too had made a collage of sorts – though my results weren’t nearly as effective as Moore’s. I stitched together sentences and phrases from issues of The Christian Science Monitor from March-April 1999. (Why not The New York Times? The Monitor is the only daily newspaper I read. Plus, it features much better writing than the Times.) I discovered a curious symmetry in descriptions of and statements from the two presidents, Milosovic and Clinton. See if you can match the phrase with the administration.

BALKANIZATION: PIECING TOGETHER THE NEWS

Will this be the end of Mortal Kombat & Street Fighter? Peace in the Balkans, says Henry Kissinger, has existed only when a superior force has imposed it from above. Public opinion is very volatile. The two sides are increasingly locked in a contest to influence what plays on television. Their instructions: create & execute a marketing campaign that will get people thinking about God. Who’s in charge of watching the watchman? The images are so overwhelming.

The Serbs are unable to compete with the slick production of Western companies & TV stations. Boy Scouts have been going into the inner cities–U.S. protectorates where peace depends on F-15Es and Humvees. It worked well, but they were always being watched by the secret police. They’ve built war rooms & use sophisticated computer programs to look for crime patterns.

Police with pistols drawn jumped the car of two foreign journalists for no apparent reason. Many minority youths complain that they are routinely frisked. When it comes to going to a concert or dance, they are afraid of getting pulled over or arrested & beaten. Many of the worst atrocities are believed to have been carried out by paramilitary groups. Men & women, including the elderly, nurse wounds from batons or rifle butts. What researchers have documented is that prolonged consumption of this kind of stuff cultivates scripts in people’s heads.

I don’t think anyone knows the endgame. The situation has simply become too polarized by bullets & bombs. Even the waiter in the only hotel packs a .45. Drivers don’t stop at red lights any more. One of the state-controlled television stations showed hard-core pornography in the middle of the day. Body parts could be seen sticking out of a massive pile of bricks & twisted metal that was littered with plastic decorative flowers, old shoes & a Rubik’s Cube. Even “good” kids were potential victims of un-structured spare time–hanging out, boredom, lack of direction & cynicism. Budget restraints & a Republican Congress forced a mini-agenda of school uniforms and V-chips.

Now we’re one, like a fist. We are at war & this is propaganda. It shows the world that we are capable of doing something generous. The administration, with public opinion on its side, seems to want the bombing to continue. Airstrikes are helping the president. Touted as a test case for the “New World Order,” it was a diabolical extension of what he’s done before. The media’s depiction of violence as a means of resolving conflict & a national culture which tends to glorify violence further condoned his thinking. And in the macho warrior culture of the Balkans, to the victor goes not only the glory & spoils but also leadership & authority.

At stake now is the administration’s credibility in the eyes of its enemy. The worst thing you can have is people standing & shooting at each other in the White House. They were given a few minutes to leave their homes, which were looted & then burned, some with the infirm left inside. The president succeeded because he understood the power of fear & knew how to use it for his own purposes. The decibel level of the debate & its content, rich with mixed messages, made it especially dangerous. He will live in a bunker & take as many people with him as he can.

The jets are a kind of high-tech insurance. The squadron cancelled a war-game exercise in Las Vegas to head to the bombings. One by one, pilots balled their fists & pumped them in a “Rocky” pose, completing a familiar air warrior salute. Gambling is exhausting, so nothing less than the best will do for the tired gambler. General Electric’s chairman John Welch Jr. pocketed $52.6 million, while Viacom head Sumner Redstone got options worth $50.5 million. “Our demands are clear & he has to accept them. If not, the bridges keep coming down, the factories keep coming down, & hunger is just over the horizon.”

Such images play to a common weakness of democracies: a reluctance to sustain a long war. The Clinton administration is famous for being “on message,” with everyone singing the same policy chorus. “We love your music, your television, everything. We hope we can work with American companies when the war is over. The video games numb our youth to the issue of violence or violent acts, like trying to hit a puddle of mercury with a hammer.” And few can remember the last time any warrior took scissors in hand, signalling that something was being built & not being destroyed.

More on compassion

Studies of giving patterns among Americans show that it is only the well-off who can afford “compassion fatigue.” In proportion to their income (and their free time), poorer folks donate much more time and money to charitable causes than the rich.

I believe this pattern is repeated around the world. I was just reading the family blog of some Palestinian-Iraqis, A Family in Baghdad, where the mother, Faiza, wrote:

Today I was driving my car to work and a convoy of American military vehicles passed to my left. We remained cautious and slowed down because we were afraid to come near them. I always pray that they return safely home because I’m a mother and I think with a mother’s heart not with a man’s cruel fighting heart.
They have another way in dealing with life and its problems.
************************

I was thinking what would happen if they got attacked right now? where will it be from? it’s a sunny day.
Just as I was thinking I saw in front of me a cloud of smoke first then a sound of explosion that remained in my ear for over an hour. The birds were frightened and flew away . . .

She is not quite so charitable toward the leaders, however.

Bosh and Sharon made a press conference in the evening; they buy and sell other people’s countries and ignoring the struggle of Palestinian people that lasted for the last fifty years.
The powerful evil always stand in front of the camera smiling, and forget that there is a god in the skies up there, who has rules and justice, that he implements it in his way, and defeats the stupid evil when he wants.
“Let them play till they face the promised day” God says in Quran.

Cue up Black Sabbath, “War Pigs.”

But if the war pigs have their way, the possibility of compassion from our side will become virtually impossible – because machines will do all the killing. Conn Hallinan wrote recently about the U.S. Department of “Defense” plan “to make one third of the military’s combat vehicles driverless by 2015.” This is part of an overarching strategy for fully mechanized warfare that would include “unmanned combat aircraft, robot tanks, submarines, and a supersonic bomber capable of delivering six tons of bombs and missiles to anyplace on the globe in two hours.”

If this plan is carried out, it will also deprive Iraqi mothers – and other kind-hearted souls among the lucky millions targeted for “liberation” – of any souls to pray for among their “liberators.” No one for her or her God to be merciful towards. No one to show mercy.

(Satan, laughing, spreads his wings.)