The Return

Words Have Meaning!

While a lot of derogatory labels get thrown out by all sides of the political spectrum, if one actually applies the conceptual meaning of those words to actual political process, one can determine whether those labels are true or false, that is whether they correspond to the ideology and policy.  "Communist" gets thrown at the American liberal left, although that "left" is far to the right of all other liberal parties around the world.  But, if we actually define Communism - the abolition of private property (the means of production), we can ask if it applies.  Nowhere has the American liberal/democratic movement called for such an abolition.  Business, or the basic structure of the American economy, is nowhere on the chopping block. A good example is California -"Commiefornia" as empty-headed ideologues call it. Not only is it the world's fifth largest economy, it's home to the richest - private- businesses on the planet, those corporations which drive the international capitalist market, as well as producing enough surplus to create a class of potential oligarchs. Additionally, if one drives through the state, one will see dotted across every location, private small businesses. Everyone is potentially involved in production on their own terms, and making a buck. It's simply incorrect, a lie, to question the state of the state in relation to capitalism.  It becomes a term simply for "things I don't like."  And given the massive population, land, and business relations, both domestic and foreign, there simply has to be government involvement to avoid complete chaos. But that, as is clear from most of FAANG's presence,the system does not imped massive profits from capitalism.

"Fascist"is another term that gets thrown around, although the right generally throws it out re-actively in a kind of "doth protests too much" defensiveness.  But, what would an accurate position of that name realistically involve?

The 14 Characteristics of Fascism
by Lawrence Britt Spring 2003 Free Inquiry magazine

The 14 identifying characteristics of fascism. :
1. Powerful and Continuing Nationalism
Fascist regimes tend to make constant use of patriotic mottos, slogans, symbols, songs, and other paraphernalia. Flags are seen everywhere, as are flag symbols on clothing and in public displays.

2. Disdain for the Recognition of Human Rights
Because of fear of enemies and the need for security, the people in fascist regimes are persuaded that human rights can be ignored in certain cases because of "need." The people tend to look the other way or even approve of torture, summary executions, assassinations, long incarcerations of prisoners, etc.

3. Identification of Enemies/Scapegoats as a Unifying Cause
The people are rallied into a unifying patriotic frenzy over the need to eliminate a perceived common threat or foe: racial , ethnic or religious minorities; liberals; communists; socialists, terrorists, etc.

4. Supremacy of the Military
Even when there are widespread domestic problems, the military is given a disproportionate amount of government funding, and the domestic agenda is neglected. Soldiers and military service are glamorized.

5. Rampant Sexism
The governments of fascist nations tend to be almost exclusively male-dominated. Under fascist regimes, traditional gender roles are made more rigid. Opposition to abortion is high, as is homophobia and anti-gay legislation and national policy.

6. Controlled Mass Media
Sometimes to media is directly controlled by the government, but in other cases, the media is indirectly controlled by government regulation, or sympathetic media spokespeople and executives. Censorship, especially in war time, is very common.

7. Obsession with National Security
Fear is used as a motivational tool by the government over the masses.

8. Religion and Government are Intertwined
Governments in fascist nations tend to use the most common religion in the nation as a tool to manipulate public opinion. Religious rhetoric and terminology is common from government leaders, even when the major tenets of the religion are diametrically opposed to the government's policies
or actions.

9. Corporate Power is Protected
The industrial and business aristocracy of a fascist nation often are the ones who put the government leaders into power, creating a mutually
beneficial business/government relationship and power elite.

10. Labor Power is Suppressed
Because the organizing power of labor is the only real threat to a fascist government, labor unions are either eliminated entirely, or are severely suppressed .

11. Disdain for Intellectuals and the Arts
Fascist nations tend to promote and tolerate open hostility to higher education, and academia. It is not uncommon for professors and other academics to be censored or even arrested. Free expression in the arts is openly attacked, and governments often refuse to fund the arts.

12. Obsession with Crime and Punishment
Under fascist regimes, the police are given almost limitless power to enforce laws. The people are often willing to overlook police abuses and even forego civil liberties in the name of patriotism. There is often a national police force with virtually unlimited power in fascist nations.

13. Rampant Cronyism and Corruption
Fascist regimes almost always are governed by groups of friends and associates who appoint each other to government positions and use governmental power and authority to protect their friends from accountability. It is not uncommon in fascist regimes for national resources and even treasures to be appropriated or even outright stolen by government leaders.

14. Fraudulent Elections
Sometimes elections in fascist nations are a complete sham. Other times elections are manipulated by smear campaigns against or even assassination of opposition candidates, use of legislation to control voting numbers or political district boundaries, and manipulation of the media. Fascist nations also typically use their judiciaries to manipulate or control elections.

Furthermore, we have the points of “Ur-Fascism or Eternal Fascism” by Umberto Eco:

1. The cult of tradition. “One has only to look at the syllabus of every fascist movement to find the major traditionalist thinkers. The Nazi gnosis was nourished by traditionalist, syncretistic, occult elements.”
2. The rejection of modernism. “The Enlightenment, the Age of Reason, is seen as the beginning of modern depravity. In this sense, Ur-Fascism can be defined as irrationalism.”
3. The cult of action for action’s sale. “Action being beautiful in itself, it must be taken before, or without, any previous reflection. Thinking is a form of emasculation.”
4. Disagreement is treason. “The critical spirit makes distinctions, and to distinguish is a sign of modernism. In modern culture, the scientific community praises disagreement as a way to improve knowledge.”
5. Fear of difference. “The first appeal of a fascist or prematurely fascist movement is an appeal against the intruders. Thus Ur-Fascism is racist by definition.”
6. Appeal to social frustration. “[…] one of the most typical features of the historical fascism was the appeal to a frustrated middle class, a class suffering from an economic crisis or feelings of political humiliation, and frightened by the pressure of lower social groups.
7. The obsession with a plot. “The followers must feel besieged. The easiest way to solve the plot is the appeal to xenophobia.”
8. The enemy is both weak and strong. “[…] the followers must be convinced that they can overwhelm the enemies. Thus, by a continuous shifting of rhetorical focus, the enemies are at the same time too strong and too weak.”
9. Pacifism is trafficking with the enemy. “For Ur-Fascism there is no struggle for life but, rather, life is lived for struggle.”
10. Contempt for the weak. “Elitism is a typical aspect of any reactionary ideology.”
11. Everybody is educated to become a hero. “in Ur-Fascist ideology, heroism is the norm. This cult of heroism is strictly linked with the cult of death.”
12. Machismo and Weaponry. “This is the origin of machismo (which implies both disdain for women and intolerance and condemnation of nonstandard sexual habits, from chastity to homosexuality). Since even sex is a difficult game to play, the Ur-Fascist hero tends to play with weapons—doing so becomes an ersatz phallic exercise.”
13. Selective Populism. “There is in our future a TV or Internet populism, in which the emotional response of a selected group of citizens can be presented and accepted as the Voice of the People.
14. Ur-Fascism speaks Newspeak. “All the Nazi or Fascist schoolbooks made use of an impoverished vocabulary, and an elementary syntax, in order to limit the instruments for complex and critical reasoning.”

By looking at such criteria, an objective uses of terms can be determined. If one party aligns with such characteristics, Fascism can be used as accurate description (if not proper label). It then is elevated above a "things I don't like" term of uselessness. (Masks are fascist because I don't want to act responsible in public). It's clear that the current dominating party conforms to these characteristics.

 

 

Holidays in Eden

 

With the latest Marillion deluxe release, it is back to where it started - for me. June 24th 1991, Holidays in Eden is released. One month after my initial [brief] encounter with Marillion.  The band’s second effort with frontman Steve Hogarth very much repeated the pattern of the original incarnation of the band.  This was their difficult sophomore attempt, their next Fugazi.  Whereas their first release as a new group easily found music inspired from without (in this case the music written with Fish), this one required a what now? period of motivation.  Additionally, the record company (as always) was pressuring them to release material that was commercially viable and recreate their brief highpoint of chart recognition.  The result, emerging from a much larger contribution from H, including tracks from his previous alternative career, was indeed their most commercial attempt. This legacy has haunted the album, considered by many to be too pop, and an album of commercial singles.  However, as my entry point into new-release Marillion, this record has always presented core, classic Marillion - built around the ethereal and intense guitar work that Rothery had been exemplifying for at least three albums. Cover My Eyes (adapted from How We Live’s Simon’s Car), Dry Land (a How We Live cover), and No One Can are the radio-friendly cuts. Call them whatever you want, but the first two are about as close to perfect pop/whatever songs (and then squared) as you can get, and I would dare call the original Dry Land a New Wave album.  For the third, every time I start to get that feeling that it’s an overly-sweet, sappy love song, I am overcome by the transcendental quality of the guitar line, and it might be the most innocent, positive song the band has done, without something dark lying right beneath the surface.  While many consider this a complete diversion in style, and for those following through the 80s, and from earlier prog entries, this may make sense.  For myself, being an entry point, this album makes perfect sense as a quintessential sound, and as I was already encountering what I knew would be decisive change from the Fish material, it didn't seem that much more of a reach than Season's End, and by the end of the summer 1991 all six albums seemed like a contiguous whole. Emerging as music of the time, as Marillion moved away from their pre-1980s influences, resulted in something more like U2 (incorporated into a higher level) than the aging idols of progressive rock.  Although, as the accompanying documentary reveals, there still remained a lot of classic influences which were directly re-articulated in these songs, namely Yes and The Who, which once brought up, makes perfect sense. 

Holidays in Eden, the next in line with a commercial structure, is in my opinion, despite the far-from-unanimous appreciation from the community, the most Marillion title and theme they have created. Let me take a moment to digress. Everything they have written somehow returns back to the idea of the self (and the ultimate self-facing you must do) in opposition to the world.  Stepping out of the social construct of the symbolic world, one encounters the Real.  A complete change of context results in an internal change as the self is constructed out of the meaning around it, it is, we are, being-in-the-world.  Thus, in a Heideggerian sense, a change of context results in a new self.  Furthermore, a collapse in worlds changes the center of our existential being and our relation to authenticity.  Experiencing such a world as Eden, in opposition to our own highly problematic society (as Marillion often engages), and then exiting that world would result in such a collapse, and require us to disclose new meanings in the process of finding authenticity. This theme is mirrored in the opposite way in the This Town- 100 Nights trilogy, where the surrounding environment, the city, forces the self “to become” what it is, rather than being directed internally. The result is a decent of the self into a morally unclear position and the initial relations of the song meet a seemingly disastrous end.  There is always a consistent theme in H's work regarding the loss of innocence and the dangers just below the surface in any ostensibly benign situation - the unavoidable, ever-present, forces of change, the inevitable crack emerging in what one thought would remain unchanged, and the Real surrounding the Symbolic stability of one's immediate life -the need to wear your gun to Neverland,

As a product on the dividing line of a much larger world and time at the end of the 80s, this record was a little ahead of its time, foreshadowing the 1990s.  Season’s End had shown us many of the larger external predicaments of the final chapter of the Cold War.  Here we are presented with a more optimistic, open future.  Gone are so many of the past problems, leaving the self as the challenge to be taken on.  The most important view was now inward, as a reflective exploration.  Of course, even more forward looking, this would be short lived, and the dark storms of larger forces would again return on Brave, with a following return to the self on Afraid of Sunlight.  As Pete claims in the documentary, this was the first attempt at their Sunlight. And, again, that now makes sense.


Splintering Heart is the mini-epic of the record, a slow-build-up rock song. In addition to the straight-forward rock and pop songs, the This Town-The Rake’s Progress-100 Nights trilogy is the full epic of the album, and has always been classic Marillion.  Waiting to Happen is the acoustic-type ballad of the record, and while the band considers it a “classic” presence, The Party has always been the odd-one-out track to me. The updated release attempts to correct the sound away from the late 80s / early 90s zeitgeist in order to allow some of those dismissive fans to re-hear the record out of that context, as well as satisfy the band’s persistent desire to finally finish a not-quite-complete product, as in the case of Fugazi. The impression I get on the initial listening is that it really does emphasize the overall album, and brings out each part in a very positive way.

The package includes a live show from Hammersmith on the 1991 tour.  Alongside the usual HD and 5.1 mixes, like the Script and Fugazi releases, the blu-ray also includes a live concert video from the tour, a surprisingly well done upgrade for a shot-on-video release from thirty years ago.  It is worth it for video documentation of Freaks alone.  As an excellent representation of the band in their prime, this upgrade from my incomplete record-show purchase of a VHS bootleg might become my favorite video release of theirs. Unfortunately the live discs are not duplicated on the blu-ray which does includes all of the B-Side material from the 1998 remaster, which provides an interesting alternative album: including the original versions of Splintering Heart and This Town, the original Epic (Fairground) which became 100 Nights and included material from the post-Clutching at Straws session, as well as the other How We Live track You Don’t Need Anyone, considered as an alternative to Dry Land (and whose existence was denied for seven years). If you ask me, all of this material, and maybe a recording of yet another How We Live track, Games in Germany, could be remixed, finished and made into a fine album on its own. On the more acoustic side, the creepy-yet-intriguing track A Collection and the cover of Sympathy are here as well. Not included is the acoustic session released over the Dry Land singles, which included the Who’s Substitute.  In my own playlists, I’ve found that adding the other included B-sides of How Can It Hurt (amazingly played at the 2022 weekend) and I Will Walk on Water, adds more Holidays in Eden -like songs and fills out an amazing rock album. Additionally, You Don’t Need Anyone fits in exceedingly well with the trio of concise singles (unsurprisingly of similar origin) - of course this is the direction that so many people were apprehensive of embracing.  But, this collection of songs doesn’t get weighed down in overly long attempts (*ahem, last four releases, ahem*).  This is the side of the band that get straight into the rock (I’ll leave the magnitude up to you) and directly and without hesitation dives into the point of the song.  These are the songs, when included in contemporary setlists, that break up the long journeys found in newer material, and continue to provide a momentum that always deserves to be included in anything involving Rothery.

Jeremiah Blues 2020+

 How can one make sense of the experience of 2020?  Perhaps the best way is the realization of the no-sense that underlies history.  There is clearly a sense that 2020 will be a crossroad point in history, with change of direction that will lead the path into the future. A convergence of replays of 1918, 1929 and 1968 (and the 1860s) have dislodged our sense of stability and security.

    The initial "historic" event of the year, COVID-19, was beyond what most had experienced in several generations - the inability to "solve" the emerging problem, the uncertainty  (with its certain destructive impact), and the inescapable ubiquity of a true pandemic have undermined our modern society.  The necessity of realizing the breakdown of normality has  caused a psychological trauma within our collective unconscious, the first felt by most outside of "unthinkable" modern spaces like Sarajevo or Syria).  This force has infiltrated and subverted the impregnable defenses of the unshakable first-world. The only way to comprehend the unnegotiability of this event, is to realize it as an intrusion of the Lacanian Real into the "Stable" construct of Symbolic Reality.  Our language, laws, ideology, principles, and even our science, cannot contain it or shield us.
     

As Tony Myers has described the Real, it is:
    "anything that is interpreted differently discloses the presence of the Real. AIDS is a good example of this. Some people interpret it as a punishment for homosexuals, a divine retribution for carrying on a  non-Christian way of life. Others see it as part of a plot by the CIA to stem population growth in Africa, while other people consider it the result of humankind's interference in Nature. All these explanations circle around the same brute fact of the disease which carries on regardless of the reasons attributed to it. In other words, AIDS is an irruption of the Real. It is meaningless in itself and all these interpretations of it are attempts to Symbolize it, attempts, we might say, to divine a message in the Real where none exists. For the Real is meaningless and senseless-it just persists, and meaning can only be found within the reality of the Symbolic Order."

This example of another coronavirus illustrates the trauma of Covid as as an intrusion of the Real.  It's a Chinese plot to destroy Trump.  It's an American plot to destroy China.  It's a global plot to inject microchips into the population. All ways to interpret this brute intrusion.  This event itself would be historic enough in its direct impact on the totality of individuals that constitute global activity.  However, beyond that we must ask: How does history happen?  Do events, (and their resulting cultures, policies, and world-views) occur as we pre-plan and enact them through reasonable and practical considerations? Or do they involve a certain amount of randomness, occurring beyond the precise world that we can carefully control?  Like our own best-laid lives, history "is what happens while we make other plans."

Against the background of a Covid world, the tension was going to inevitable break into violence, and the Real infiltrates not only nature, but society. For those "law and order" advocates that condemned the protests-turned-riots by the criminal undesirables, let us not forget Philadelphia 1985 when police bombed (literally) and burned down a neighborhood, killing 11 people, including five children.   It is interesting to note Jean Baudrillard's work America, in which he discusses the concept of asepsis:

"In Philadelphia, a radical sect named ‘MOVE’, with a bizarre set of rules, including one forbidding      both the practice of autopsy and the removal of rubbish, is cleared out by the police, who kill eleven    people by fire and burn down thirty adjacent houses, including those (the irony of it!) of all the neighbours who had called for the sect to be removed. This, too, is a clean-up operation. They are getting rid of rubbish and patina, getting back to an original state of cleanliness, restoring. ‘Keep America Clean.’"

Of course, now that the radical right has shown definitely that it isn't really about the law, its about control (Fascism), and power defines what the law means.  There is nothing above it (or more fundamental). It was the transition into a new year and new political landscape that finally synthesized social violence and politics. A breakdown of both political and daily social function has shown the intrusion of the Real into the Symbolic systems that found our everyday functioning. Of course, the right-wing propaganda compares the 2020 election to the 2016 one, and the capitol siege to the 2020 riots. 

As for the election, in 2016 the Democrats were accused of refusing to accept legitimate results when they wore pink hats and had peaceful marches.  Far removed from organized (conspiracy) attempts to overthrow the legitimate 2020 results.  No one on the left claimed the Trump did not officially occupy the office of president, only that he was sworn in on a technicality - a deficiency built into the fabric of our system,- and the outcome, however legitimate, was a result of  voter influence by foreign propaganda and political maneuvering (Comey).  The impeachment did NOT exonerate him from these accusations.  He very much did NOT have a mandate.  A professional, honorable person in that position would have been very prudent and should have appealed to the opposite side - the majority- for cooperation.  As for being President by upholding the office through professional action, the four years revealed a failure in this respect, culminating in the capitol siege.

In terms of the violence, the comparisons would be laughable in less serious circumstances. Once again, the left is accused of condoning the riots.  Of course no one in any rational manner, or in any political capacity endorsed, condoned, encourage, incited or promoted such activity.   As criminal activity, it was never labelled as anything but criminal.  Two major differences stand out:

1. It was extra-political, or at the least extra-legal.  While making a political statement and attempting political goals, these events aimed at something outside of the parameters of the functioning governmental process. While groups like BLM are closer in thought to the Democratic party,the are not synonymous, nor was it was a Democratic sanctioned issue.  No one did in the name of Democrats and no one sported shirts or flags and acted in the name of an individual.  Furthermore, the protestors have a legitimate cause. The problem is that the justice required for the solution is not to be found with the justice system nor the political process.  Without recourse to an established system, only no-legal means might remain, hence an extra-political situation.  As such, the manifestation of frustration and anger may be illegal, but whether it is unethical remains in question. Certain from inside the system it appears so.  But, as already revealed the system is incomplete and any progress to an equitable system may necessitate criminal behavior.  When criminal behavior is enacted for a purpose, it is up to the individual to commit to responsibility for it.  They must consider the repercussions and be prepared to face them.  If they find that justice will be further advanced, then the ethical decision is for them to make. For example, freeing a slave pre-Civil War was clearly criminal. Nevertheless it was the correct action.  While the circumstances are not currently as clear-cut as that, it may be proven in the future that discrimination in civil rights requires revolution outside of the system. Reflecting on the serious of rioting, let's not forget that some rioting is quickly overlooked (and it's a bit of an American tradition).  Burning garbage cans, overturned cars, and broken windows are not unheard of results of sporting events, and have no inherent value at all.  But, these crimes are dismissed as nothing (but crimes). So, to claim that the 2020 riots were downplayed in respect to 2021 is disingenuous at best.

 However, what just happened was not equivocal, it is distinct level  , and direct comparisons area category mistake.

 2. The siege was Anti-American. A far larger difference between the two events involves the political overlap.The siege was not just criminal, it was a higher level of violation: treason.  In attempting to overturn the election and destroy the legal process, it attempted to negate the very laws of the land.  In this itself, this event has no relation to the riots. But, far worse, is that this insurgency is led by the Comander-in-Chief himself.  Not since Emperor Palpatine have I heard of a leader controlling two forces pitted against each other.  With some Senator and Representative already complicit in treason with the President, the insurgency is both internal and external to the established government and unequivocal to criminal riots. 

Before the Capitol siege, the State Capitol takeovers by Militias in the summer were already well beyond protests. If you attend a protest armed- that is terrorism, plain and simple.  Even worse if do it on government property.  As a way of influence politics through fear and intimidation, brandishing weapons is terrorism.

What we are dealing with is not just differences of policy, and beyond differences with ideology.  It is meta-ideology.[1] A deeper ideology which has co-opted, corrupted, and radicalized the conservative ideology.  The growing cult (influenced by QAnon) has expanded to redefine the Deep State as to include The media, academia, the FBI-CIA-intelligence agencies, the Supreme Court, Mitch McConnell, Fox News, Big Tech, Walmart, the cabinet, and VP Mike Pence. Every thing and everyone the defends the Constitution becomes a target, an enemy of the state.  America as a state is now the enemy of the "patriots." The coup of the Republican party is evident in the RINO accusations, when solid conservatives are condemned as not real Republicans.  The is absurd and obviously backwards.  That split is apparent only because the party was commandeered by a far more conservative and radical ideology.  A more authentic party, clear in its ambitions and presentation would be honest in its alternative to the Republicans, something like "The America First Party", "or the American Fascist Party." As a far-right party, the choice would be clear for voters.  Instead, we have political action on false pretenses, a cult unlike any previous party - stores of propaganda merchandise, shirts and flags with an Messianic icon. It is a Twenty-first century update of the The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, patterned on the Book of Revelation.  It is more than a political movement, it the foundations of a religion, a very false and dangerous one. "Draining the swamp" means destroying a democratic society and leaving an omnipresent swamp of corrupt oligarchy. Fighting the Deep State means ignoring, violating and overriding the US Constitution.

Ultimately, the Republican party was the Frankenstein that built the monster of Trump. And, Trump is the Frankenstein that built the monster of his cult. It is all out of their control.  And, the spreading danger it possesses needs to be eradicated before it consumes American democracy. Covid was not the only virus to mass spread in 2020, and we are now living in the Real, hoping for a Symbolic reconstruction to normalize history.

Addendum: I just noticed that the last post I made, High Rise, involves the fracture of the Symbolic social order into the Real. Although written by April, I was reading it at the end of 2019.  I guess 2020 was doomed to be the coming storm.

[1] Not only is it an ideology - a viewpoint considered universally true and foundational (when it is contingent and arbitrary), but one that resides secretly underneath an ideology- creating a double falsity.

Postmodern Picard

With what sounded like a miracle, it was announced that we would finally be able to continue exploring the world of the 24th Century with the return of Jean Luc Picard.  The release of Picard itself, however, has driven a fissure through the world of Trek fans.  Both in terms of its structure and its 24th century content, it is far removed from the last time we viewed the Next Generation Era.   Trek has always reflected the real-world conditions of its time.  1960s Star Trek dealt with themes of gender and races analogous to the cultural transformations of that decade, along with directly mimicking its styles.  The situations of The Next Generation, along with the concurrent TOS films, reflected a world anchored in the outlook of 1990, environmentalism, gender orientation, economic disparity, all at the approaching end of the millennium when it seemed that society might finally make progress into a more stabilized form. Within this evolution, the end of the Cold War was perhaps a decisive element.  The stand-off between the Super-powers of the galaxy  that drove the politics of TOS was now in a dynamic shift.  The sudden crumbling of the Klingon Empire reflected the end of the Soviet Union, and while Picard existed in a post-Klingon universe, Kirk had to directly, personally deal with the transformation.  Now that we have returned to the Federation, 20+ years after Next Generation, these underlying dynamics have shifted the stable foundations of the world.  Many Trek fans are disturbed by the less-than-optimistic view that is at odds with the established Roddenberry universe.  It must be remembered that as Trek has reflected points in the later 20th Century, the newest 21st Century continuation must also reflect where we are at.  Much has change (not for the better) since we last saw Picard aboard the Enterprise.  We have had to endure the aftermath of 9/11 (which undermined the post-Cold war optimism we briefly encountered), followed by economic collapse and the disintegration of political stability.  The criticism that the Federation at the dawn of the 25th century does not hold the same ideals as the Federation we have known is missing the point.  Political entities do not remain static, and all such entities will undergo periods of crisis and de-evolution.  Returning to a Federation with a 1990 viewpoint would not posses the depth that we would ultimately expect from the world of Trek.  Along with the Klingons, the Cardassians, Romulans, and, ostensibly, the Borg has left the Federation as the sole super-power of the quadrant.  Without political challengers, and no one to answer to, the Federation is adrift in its own power.  Where one could rationally suppose a unified utopia could be finally achieved, as history has shown, entities define themselves in terms of the other.  Without peer-adversaries, one has to look for scapegoats to account for inadequacies.  The idea of a corrupt Starfleet is not a new idea at all.  Several Next Generation and Deep Space Nine stories were concerned with such a contingency (And were able to simply overcome the problem within one or two episodes, never to be concerning again).  Furthermore, the notion of a lees-than-equal class of non Starfleet citizens was always a nagging concealment.  There has been a long standing argument that the Federation is a Starfleet- controlled military dictatorship, with civilian life a more austere existence than the Socialist utopia it purports to be.

What Picard displays is the non-Starfleet life that is flourishing in a less restrictive environment.  It is a world with experience life on the surface, rather than anchored to a stable foundation of principle and goal.  Places like Freecloud are emerging, embracing the expansion of personal freedom, all entwined within economic relations.  The connected world of the Federation, presumably much more able than our own internet-connected world, had been previously shown to be a no-nonsense, utilitarian transfer of information.  Now, the fringes of commercial society can release their own vision.   Rather than simple browser pop-ups, orbiting such commercially free planets enables frivolous full 3D holographic pop-ups.  The everyday tech of the Federation has taken extraordinary leaps in 30 years (like our own).  The new instant walk-through street transporters are stunning compared to the limitations negotiated in TOS, forcing a inquiry of how they might work - how does the system know where you're going (assuming that they are not, inefficiently,  simple single-destination systems).  If there is an answer to that, I predict it will be: there's an app for that!  Now that all digital display screens (and controls) have become holographic projections, it seems plausible that everyone carries around the credit-card size digital device that replaces phones, tablets and computers.  Pre-selecting you destination before walking into the nearest transporter might be the most convenient method.  With this new level of tech, residents of the 25th century live with a slick, glowing augmented reality, far removed from a more grounded, organic existence.

As for the form of the show, many will ask: why can't we have stand-alone episodes.  Conversely, I have, for a while now, asked what if Next Generation had been able to be constructed as a long arc, it could have been epic.  The 40 minute episode didn't really have a beginning, middle, end,  structure.  There was a build-up of the problem-at-hand, and a resolution with less than a minute to go.  There wasn't much of and end, just a stop to the episode.  A good portion of the series felt like discrete points, without much continuity other than involving the same characters.  So, count me as one who does not miss the stand-alone episodes.  There is some difficulty in finding a position between vastly separated episodes,  and fragments of one story. I think this an area that the Mandalorian could have handled better, as it feels like a bunch of separate tales trying to be one unified story.  If there is a let-down to the form of Picard, it is that, even as a season-arc, the end comes with a few minutes to go, without addressing the major crisis at hand.  After millennia of preparing to eradicate galactic life, some extremely  powerful entity is quickly thwarted, and no one gives it a further thought. In very non-Starfleet thinking, no one attempts to question who this race is, what they might really be about, or how to avert their potential threats in the future.  Furthermore, the appearance of hundreds of Starfleet vessels, of the latest class, and in nearly instant time, is pure fanboy ridiculousness. Where previous crisis situations required the attention of the ONLY, incomplete, vessel with the region, now entire advanced fleets are ready on a moments notice to intervene on non-Starfleet missions.  The video-game fell ruins the internal logic that the Star Trek world is built upon.  But, if this series is still finding its way, like its progenitors, the future of Star Trek looks ready to continue the quality reflection of our own world, 55 years on.

Mazes and Zones: Part 1

While the vast majority of the discussion of post-modern television has focused on its stylistic formulation and structure (non-linear narrative, intertextuality, pastiche, etc), it has largely ignored the substance of content that is fundamental to the era of post-modernity.  As an intellectual progression of history, post-modernism is the shift from a question of epistemology (and its potential) to one of ontology: not just what can we know, but what is real? [1].  As television progresses into a mature medium of artistic form (and a post-modern construct itself) to challenge and (in the case of the popular conscious) supplant literature, it has now begun in its new golden age to successfully articulate and reveal the reflections of post-modernity as such.  The narrative content can now possess the substance of these questions: the shifting nature of the experience of our surrounding realities,  the unavoidable perspectivism of truth, the elusiveness of identity and the self.

Literature eventually reveals the underlying conditions of an era, but the illustration of an actual event presents them much more poignantly.  This is the case with Chernobyl, an A-grade drama that blends perfectly with the top television works of the era, but with an added weight of the history that it faithfully tries to represent. Chernobyl is perhaps the first real-world zone on Earth, a place that doesn't exist, that no longer has history, that doesn't function in synchronicity with the rest of existence.  From this real heterotopia, the series forms a complete integration of dramatic narrative and history, inseparable as the drama elucidates the significance of reality while the reality exhibited dramatic and unreal elements. Most striking is how the function of the perception of reality in wake of the event is still an ever increasing problem.  The total elevation of political opinion over scientific facts is a condition that firmly places the Chernobyl event within our own era (and it is not a coincidence that this event was one of the final break-downs of the Soviet Union, thrusting history fully into the post-modern in 1991).  Presenting one of the first real-world fixed zones, the narrative of Chernobyl realizes the concept of displaced places, and therefore makes a great companion piece to the expanding collection of neo-golden-age television which can accurately be called postmodern television.

Regarding the structure of the external world, the postmodern age has revealed that the order of discrete spaces, delineated by borders, with individual rules, laws, and underlying meaning, has become obscured, as it was based on illusion. Space is no longer a series of spaces, but non-contiguous zones in which meaning may materialize as it fluctuates, overlaps, and diminishes.

In Philosophy and Film Noir, Jerold Abrams presents Umberto Eco's analysis of mazes. The first kind of maze is the classical labyrinth, in this maze "you can enter and leave without difficult; and, while the string may help a little, the only real problem is the Minotaur."[2] This illustrates classical thought - reality is straightforward and is clearly perceptible with unproblematic access to knowledge (perhaps with the help of divine oversight).  With the advent of modenism the maze became "mannerist."  Faced with "distortion of perception," "nothing is what it seems"- "getting out is (with your sanity intact) is all the challenge requires. But that will never happen unless you have the all important modern [string] - pure reason." [3] In the post-modern era, the maze has transformed into the rhizome, which has "no center, it has no perimeter, and worst of all, it has no way out.  Here, the Minotaur is still the form of the labyrinth itself, but now there is no escaping him with reason (or faith, or any combination of the two."[4]  This is our problem.  There is no knowledge that can explain the entire structure of our reality.  Neither reason or faith can give us the answers, leaving us in an existential condition of of blind self-reliance as the only means of navigation.

Man in the High Castle

The Sinner is another series thoroughly dealing with post-modern difficulties.  Each season is concerned with reconstructing an elusive self, built upon shifting and failing systems of memory, while being somewhat constructed through intensive external conditioning.  In this case the maze involves recreating the hidden history of events and the labyrinth of the subconscious.In season two, the labyrinth/Mintoaur metaphor becomes an explicit (even visual) representation and "escaping the labyrinth" articulated as the explicit problem.

Taking a quirky, positive, light approach to the problem, Lodge 49 also explicit confronts the contemporary ontological problem, as characters attempt to see "above the maze," get to the "center of the maze," and uncover the "hidden reality" underneath the everyday, mundane world of continual difficulties, setbacks and soul-crushing difficulties.  Behind the events which shape the community and change the cultural and economic forces are deeper levels of groups and individual who influence events, unknown and unidentifiable  at the surface. This notion of ever-increasing levels of hidden power is prevalent in much of recent art-televison, perhaps starting with Lost and featured in series such as Breaking Bad, in which the accosiates Walter White encounters become much more insidious with each season, with power increasing in relation to invisibility, from street dealers to drug cartels to international conglomerates forming a pyramid, with the fundamental base always deeper and obscured.

At the other end of the spectrum Westworld is disturbingly dark examination of this condition. Explicitly confronting the question of reality, Westworld brings in all of the postmodern substance.  Set in an intentional heterotopia, the park presents meaning from the historical past, but it is not just a simulation, but a simulacrum, as it reflects a history that is not faithful to true reality.  Within this zone of constructed historicity, Hosts attempt to achieve consciousness by reaching the "center of the maze."  Delos

Owing much to Lost as a direct predecessor, with underground bunkers, and mainland institutions at work pursuing their own nefarious plans, both series feature those trapped inside, unaware of the structural laws,  looking for the exit and the meaning in transcendental terms.*

Unlike those works which attempt to navigate the maze of  contemporary society, the Walking Dead series examines the zone as a the totality of existence. All borders, as elements of structure, are completely gone.  There is no particular meaning to any space.  It is not a heterotopia, a space beyond an event horizon marking the normality of an attempted surface structure.  Like Chernobyl, The Walking Dead explores the unavoidable catastrophic encounter of the Lacanian Real beyond the artificial construct of the Symbolic that we perceive as fundamental reality  While spaces like Westworld and Chernobyl exist as zones through their own laws in relation to a larger external structures, outside of history, there is here no longer any difference here; all is pure disorder, as there is no longer any history in a functioning sense.

While existence becomes realized as a maze rather then a single, clear plane, the contemporary disintegration of space renders the search for the center of the maze as a contradiction - as space is a rhizome without a center.[5] The maze then becomes only relevant to the self, the internal subject which stands in opposition to the disorder of externality, the zone.  The new golden age of TV, this art-televison, realizes this condition and fully engages with this postmodern question of space in relation to knowledge and being, as postmodern literature and science fiction began doing during the twentieth century.



[2] Mark Conard. The Philosophy of Film Noir. Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 2006. 70.
I've mentioned the analysis of  this article before, and I think it only becomes more relevant in the new era of film/TV/literature.
[5] Compare this to modern cosmology is which no place in the expanding universe is center or edge - everywhere is.

Purchased Experiences: Identity and Consumer Culture in Generation X

    Douglas Coupland’s 1991 novel Generation X presents a view of life in the contemporary world which can be further understood by Marxist criticism, as it aesthetically embodies the theoretical views of such criticism.[1]  The novel revolves around three characters, Andy, Dag, and Claire, all near the age of thirty.  They have left their career-oriented lifestyles, and moved to the Mojave Desert to live in Palm Springs.  Here they work “Mcjobs” and entertain each other by telling stories.  Being hyper-conscious of the world of the late twentieth century, Generation X criticizes the prevailing class structure of consumer society.  This has led to accusations of the novel being pretentious and unrealistic. Why are the members of this generation more dissatisfied with life than previous generations were?  Does the world presented by Coupland correspond to external reality, or is it one writer’s personal dissatisfaction and disillusionment with the world?

     Marxist criticism seems useful in analyzing this work, perhaps even more now than when it was published in 1991 and Marxism was still a powerful political force that overshadowed its critical effectiveness.  Marxist criticism provides insight into the world of the late twentieth century, where economic class and status have become the most important factors in social life. The Marxist idea that economic class is fundamental to everything that happens in culture reveals more about the characters in the novel than is immediately apparent  While Paul Fussell has laid out the division between classes and the similarities of the members of each class, the ideas found in the postmodern theory of Frederic Jameson are highly illuminating for understanding this novel.  In Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, published at roughly the same date as Generation X, Jameson details the change in culture after World War II, manifesting in the emergence of a consumer society, claiming that the postmodern split happened in the 1960’s, at roughly the point that “generation x” came into being. As the importance of participation in the consumer world has increased beyond this split, authenticity of the individual has been replaced with an artificial and superficial public stream of economic interaction - participation in the latest trends as a source of meaning. What you buy defines who you are, so the individual works just to buy stuff; work becomes the field in which to experience life while the resulting economic exchanges define the individual.

    The well developed theories of Marxist criticism suggest that the postmodern world depicted in Generation X is an accurate one, and the novel presents us with illustrations of how we should approach living in such a confusing and challenging time period.  Coupland remarks that “There is no weather in Palm Springs - just like TV.  There is also no middle class, and in that sense the place is medieval . . . Nonetheless, the three of us chose to live here, for the town is undoubtedly a quiet sanctuary from the bulk of middle-class life” (10).  Escape is an important concept in the novel as each of the main characters recalls their exit from traditional society.  Furthermore, they compare their lifestyle to other characters who have decided to stay in the mainstream society. In “An Anatomy of Classes” Paul Fussell analyzed contemporary society by dividing it into nine classes, revealing the negative aspects of each class by presenting the conformity inherent to each one. He then proposed a “Category X” of people who attempt to escape from the rigid class structure.  This category of Fussell's analysis has been mentioned by Coupland as a possible influence on his generational concept.  The idea of a “medieval” lack of the middle class can be understood as the middle-class being a very modern development, and Jameson argues that there was a pre-communist state that existed before capitalism widened the split between classes.  The novel's comparison of Palm Springs to TV shows a postmodernist awareness of real places feeling fake and fake illusions presenting themselves as real.

     While attempting to escape from the construct of the consumer society that has been created, the characters in this book find themselves in a fragmented existence, alienated from the world and each other, and internally from their own cohesive past.. They exist in isolation, trying to relate to each other.  The characters view their lives as discreet, separate experiences which seem story-like.  As they attempt to get through life and relate to each other, they tell stories, which take on a significance of their own, revealing much about the characters and the world they see themselves in.  The historical events of their lives are reduced, while the fictional stories of their imaginations are elevated, thus blurring the division between reality and non-reality.  The idea of postmodern fragmentation is readily apparent here, both the fragmentation of individuals into different groups within society, and as time fragmenting into a series of "perpetual presents,” as understood by Jameson.

    Coupland's Generation X asks "Why work? Simply to buy more stuff?  That's just not enough" (23).  This line alone communicates much of what Marxist thought would condemn about our consumer society. We go to work to make money to buy things, and then the cycle repeats itself.  The death of the subject presented by Jameson is also an important idea here.  The characters feel that if they exist in that consumer world, they lose some level of consciousness and become an automatic part of that system.  They feel restricted by their jobs, career choices and life choices. In order to become creative and have the ability to develop their own individual being, as well as experience a sense of aesthetic possibility, they must drop out of the structured world of class.  They leave behind the career track and live moment to moment.

    Andy, in one of his untold stories, imagines a future city where "its boulevards were patternless, helter skelter, and cuckoo.  Everywhere there were booby traps of moustetraps, Triffids, and black holes . . and directions were impossible" (51).  The dangers and confusions of contemporary existence found in this work correspond to the postmodern world envisioned by Jameson as “a mutation in built space itself,” a hyperspace, like the confusing maze of the Bonaventure Hotel which has become a physical manifestation of the fragmented, rhizomic structure of late capitalism. Andy warns of a future with no clear paths, exits, or methods of clear navigation.

     As Andy reflects on his home-life, he states that "I get this feeling--.  It is a feeling that our emotions, while wonderful, are transpiring in a vacuum, and I think it all boils down to the fact that we're middle class.  You see, when you're middle class, you have to live with the fact that history will ignore you.  You have to live with the fact that history can never champion your causes and that history will never feel sorry for you, It is the price that is paid for day-to-day comfort and silence.  And because of this price, all happiness is sterile; all sadnesses go unpitied." (147)  Here we see the idea of the middle class forming a bland, uncreative existence, like what had been presented by Fussell.  It may be comfortable, but it is not adventurous.  While recalling his youth during the Vietnam War, Andy notes ". . . they were ugly times.  But they were also the only times I'll ever get - genuine capital H history times, before history was turned into a press release, a marketing strategy, and a cynical campaign tool.  And, hey, it's not as if I got to see much real history, either - I arrived to see a concert in history's arena just as the final set was finishing.  But I saw enough, and today, in the bizarre absence of all time cues, I need a connection to a past of some importance, however wan the connection." (151). In the post-modern world where time becomes a fleeting series of discreet points the connection to a linear progression of history and self is lost, identity becomes unanchored from events resulting in an artificial presence, an existential alienation from the larger world. After the radical break in history, Jameson argues that "there is a disappearance of the sense of history, the way in which our entire contemporary social system has little by little begun to lose its capacity to retain its own past, has begun to live in  perpetual present and in perpetual change that obliterates traditions of the kind which all earlier social information have had in one way or another to preserve" (214).  This description could apply to Coupland's novels as well as the world at large.  Throughout the book Coupland's characters speak in phrases like “my hair doesn't look 1940's enough," as well as making extensive references to “dead TV shows,” Elvis, and Marilyn Monroe.  Through these references we can see Jameson's understanding of nostalgia, the idea that “we seem condemned to seek the historical past through our own pop images and stereotypes about the past, which itself remains forever out of reach.”  (Jameson, 208) If there is no way to map the future, no clear sense of direction, then sensible meaning can only come from the past. Furthermore, we can also see other aspects of postmodernism at work, such as the implosion between disciplines, where history becomes entangled with advertising, politics with entertainment, etc.

     Other theories, such a a psychological approach, could focus on the few disillusioned characters, and claim that this book is really just about three misfits who have a strong sense of nonconformity.  What is really important is their understanding and reaction to the world, and these understandings may not accurately represent the world at large.  In this sense the world would be a production of their attitudes, rather than the characters being the production of the social construct.  But, this interpretation becomes much too solipsistic, leaving every individual with an isolated reality.  Rather, the Marxist critique presents each individual relating to the same world, and is therefore more useful, as it deals with what is “out there,” rather than inside one’s own mind.  The base that society functions on determines the psychological consistency of its individuals.  Generation X can be seen as a story that explains the experience of existing culture, the one which has produced the characters,  as well as the readers.  This culture is indeed the one of consumerism and late capitalism described in detail by Jameson.  As it is based almost exclusively on economics, this society is therefore understood best in the terms of Marxist criticism.  It is not just a story of a few characters that have a particular psychological aversion to society.  As the novel is aware of the economic and social pressures that exist, it attempts to analyze those conditions rather than passively ignoring them, undermining the idea that modern mainstream consumerism is a natural state of existence. As Jameson notes, postmodernism explains the logic of consumer capitalism, however, "The more significant question is whether there is also a way in which it resits that logic" (214).  Coupland's work is a response to that. In the form of stories, through the aesthetic, meaning can emerge from the subjective individual experience.  Generation X is an exploration of the first generation to experience Jameson's radical break of history.

Sources:
Coupland, Douglas, Generation X. New York: St Martin’s Press. 1991

Jameson, Frederic.  “Postmodernism and Consumer Society.”  Everyday Theory.  Ed. Becky McLaughlin and Bob Cole, Pearson Longman. 2005. 201 -215.

Original version written as an outline (2010)

[1] Note here that I am using the academic mode of Marxism as it was originally conceived in philosophy as a critique of capitalism, and not a particular political ideology. Remember Marx was an actual philosopher and his critique was inseparable from the actual emerging conditions of capitalism (they are intertwined views).  Non-theoretical later uses by political parties are inauthentic distortions, which may or may not represent Jameson's views.

The Sound and the Fury

Thoughts on The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner

The freedom of the individual and their ability to escape the past has been a recurring theme in twentieth century literature.  While other works, such as Nightwood suggested the possibility of “forgetting”, this book is all facticity - it seems there is no escape from the past. Faulkner shows life as confused and constantly being oppressed by the intrusion of the past into the realm of present thought.

This imprisonment by the past is most exemplified in Quentin (at least in the first half). He is certainly obsessed; with family, the past, and time itself. An interesting revelation of this is when Quentin goes into the jeweler’s shop. He keeps asking if any of the clocks are accurate - until he gets the answer no. His mental response to this is remembering his father‘s view that “says clocks slay time. He said time is dead as long as it is being clicked off by little wheels; only when the clock stops does time come to life” (97).  Earlier, he while contemplating what time is, he remembers his father saying that “constant speculation regarding the position of mechanical hands on an arbitrary dial which is a symptom of mind-function” (87).  Apparently mind-function is a bad thing, in this sense it detracts from life lived in the moment.  The answer that none of the clocks is accurate shows that time is merely an arbitrary concept; it isn’t real – at least in the ways that it is measured.  Furthermore, it suggests that there are no foundations to the modern world.  There is no fixed absolute from which everything else can be quantitatively or qualitatively evaluated.

Like the conceptual reversal of time, Quentin’s father inverts the idea of sexual innocence, stating that “women are never virgins. Purity is a negative state and therefore contrary to nature” (132).  Faulkner doesn’t reveal an argument to clearly backup the position that purity should be a negative state, but it seems that Mr Compson is indicating that the world as a whole exists in a fallen state, and it is just common sense to realize that no one could live up to the ideals of purity.  He also makes reference to the “reducto adsurdum of human experience” (97).  He sees that life can’t be organized by reason and molded into what we want it to be.

This obsession with what is not, or what can’t be, seems to indicate that there is a very profound crisis underlying life. Reducing time to the mechanical workings of a human machine makes it artificial.  The construct of the modern world, the artificial, is in conflict with the natural order.   Quentin seems caught in the middle of this conflict.  On one side Benjy represents a more innocent state of being.  He is naturally able to see things from a simple point of view.  The references to the age of thirty-three and the holidays of Easter and Christmas in his chapter suggest he lives in a traditional (Christian), or pre-modern world.  Quentin’s father on the other hand has already accepted the absurdity of life, rejected imposing his own structure on it, and continues living in a dysfunctional state.  This nihilistic view has advanced beyond the modern.  Only Quentin realizes modernity and with his hyper-conscious thought he is obsessed by the nagging “lack” in the world and finds it a problem to be fixed.  Unfortunately, he is trapped in time and doesn’t seem to be able to find a solution.  This leaves him with a developing neurosis that results in incestuous thoughts, anger management issues, and the inability to live in the present or the future.

I found reading the second part of the book to be a much bleaker experience than the first half. It seemed to me that Quentin (the brother) was really the heart of the story. Without the presence of Quentin, Caddy, and Mr Compson (with his unusual but provoking thoughts about the world) the family seems very empty. I haven’t been sure what to make of the repeated idea that “Caddy smells like trees,” but by the end I’m thinking that she represents the natural order of things and as her experiences begin the breakdown of the Compson family, they move away from the natural to a very artificial state of being. 

There is no more spirit in the family, leaving only a mechanical functioning to everyday life.  Jason’s thoughts are very cold and calculated, with no time to stop for any useful introspective thoughts. All that matters now, at least to Jason, is money. Everything he does revolves around it. But, even after all the effort he expends involving constant attention and resulting headaches, he still loses his wealth. There are constantly forces at work that are beyond his control, and his security is placed in the market.  He uses the market to hopefully profit, but when things go wrong he replies that “that’s not my fault either. I didn’t invent it” (282).  There is no acknowledgement of responsibility and rather than make smarter decisions he continues to let things happen and then blame others.

At this point, I can only assume that Faulkner is making a comment on the rising consumer culture which quantifies everything into units of time and money. In this world the everyday rat race becomes just a superficial “sound and fury”, and the internal life of the self begins to “signify nothing.”  Once life is adapted into this structure, there is no essence of humanity left.  Faulkner may have been reacting to the change in the South, but this whole process of decay, or perhaps devolution, seems applicable to the world and time at large.  At the fundamental core of life is the relationship one has to other individuals.  When this breaks down there is nothing left to build upon. 

Almost all of the characters spend their time concerned with the actions of others, but only out of concern for themselves.  Jason is so obsessed with imposing discipline on everyone else that he leaves no room for them to act autonomously.  In the process he neglects control over his own actions and loses some of his selfhood.  Quentin’s obsession  leads to his own demise when he can’t reconcile Caddy’s actions.  Quentin Jr.  barely has a self and is consciously aware that she “is going to hell” and doesn’t care (217).  Only Dilsey offers some contrast to this, as she has a notion of the importance of the self and finds some possibility of salvation in religion.  But as the older views and traditions are replaced and the younger generation of the family takes over, it seems that this emptiness will expand.  At the end (is it even an end?), I can only think that Faulkner is suggesting that one should be a more active participant in their own life, choose appropriate courses of action and then ultimately find connection with others in a more constructive manner.

El Dorado

i. Long-Shadowed Sun

I remember..
The enchanted English walled garden
Days of summer air and honey-suckled nights
The capricious dance of lavenders and cabbage-whites
Made more than 3D, glowing in the evening long-shadowed sun
Nowhere better. But in England, although nothing really changes, the weather always does…

The thunder approaches
The heavy sighing of the monster…
  - El Dorado, Marillion (2016)


In video game design the Green Hill Zone is the initial, idyllic landscape from which the player begins their journey, an area of relative safety which allows the player to ease into their virtual existence before encountering serious conflict.

Born into American culture of the later part of the twentieth-century, specifically in the Mid-west, life existed in a world of a Green Hill Zone.  The only existential danger were those economic downturns which particularly devastated rural livelihoods.  But, in these cases the worst outcome was far better than the world's poor classes and farther above the historic peasantry.  World-War II was now a receded nightmare, the result of an antiquated historic period.  We were finally enlightened, modernized and civilized.  Even living under the nuclear threat, the economic golden age of the 50s and 60s were the prologue to the utopian future.  After the Fall of Communism and the ostensible end of the nuclear threat of the Cold War, the future really was now.  War, still never too far away, and in many ways now an omnipresent, ongoing campaign to maintain safe order, was at least clean. Genocide, holocaust, and the mass destruction of function society were unthinkable (without the final push of a button). Of course Sarajevo happened quickly, an actual siege of a modern city.  But that was a one-off, an exercise, something to show how well the new Western-led international community could respond.  Rwanda, Cambodia, Darfur, Myanmar, these were and are all so far away.  By the time of the Syrian war post-2011, it was no longer possible to say that the horrors of mass warfare were impossible. Now, the Green Zone, that safe zone, may not remain outside of the action and the resulting horrors.  Mid-America may not witness destruction, ignoring it even as it helps to sustain the mechanisms that create it. But it is no longer causally separated from such events and it is no longer insulated from the damaging effects.  In the process of making America "great" (again?) it is an active part of the center of history, susceptible to engagement and consequence.

This week David Lynch suggested Trump "could go down as one of the greatest presidents in history because he has disrupted the thing so much." I cant agree with Lynch's logical position, as he claims that "No one is able to counter this guy in an intelligent way."  Of course, everything Trump does can be countered by an intelligent (an exponentially more intelligent) response.  But he is right in the sense that Trump and his supporters are not operating on the cognitive and intelligent level. You can't have an intelligent negotiation because they don't care, they are solely functioning on a reptilian-response level.  For whatever reason, Lynch is coming from a similar perspective to Zizek, seeing the positive result of Trump tearing down the old Order. I wouldn't in any case look to Lynch for rationality, in fact his artistic expression has its own genius precisely because it is irrational, it embodies the Real, the inarticulate-able, primordial, pre-symbolic aspects of existence. Lynch is the auteur of the Real, just as Zizek is the philosopher of the Real.  But, there is an extreme danger when these views collide with the practical world, and the idealistic vision to build something new from the ground up allows for a path to catastrophe. Lynch did follow up, adding “Unfortunately, if you continue as you have been, you will not have a chance to go down in history as a great president ... You are causing suffering and division.”  He is at least not oblivious.

At this point, when the government is literally torturing and abusing children (as young as a few months old) by separating them from parents and throwing them into detention camps (as sick, twisted, supporters are cheering it on), it is certainly safe to say that we will longer be able to avoid the storm unscathed.  Innocent people will suffer at the hands of a tyrant and his evil supporters.  Those ready to take their ideological fight to the front-lines may suffer, but they are not the measure of history.  It is the innocent, those who are trying to flee, avoid conflict, ans simply live (and who likely don't have a say in global politics) who will be caught under the machinery which manifests the Storm. [1]

As Tobias Stone wrote:

At a local level in time, people think things are fine — then things rapidly spiral out of control until they become unstoppable, and we wreak massive destruction on ourselves. For the people living in the midst of this, it is hard to see happening and hard to understand. To historians later, it all makes sense and we see clearly how one thing led to another . . .  We should be asking ourselves what our Archduke Ferdinand moment will be. How will an apparently small event trigger another period of massive destruction . . .  It will come in ways we can’t see coming, and will spin out of control so fast people won’t be able to stop it. Historians will look back and make sense of it all and wonder how we could all have been so naïve. . . . The people who see that open societies, being nice to other people, not being racist, not fighting wars, is a better way to live, they generally end up losing these fights . . . we are entering a bad phase. It will be unpleasant for those living through it, maybe even will unravel into being hellish and beyond imagination. Humans will come out the other side, recover and move on. The human race will be fine, changed, maybe better. But for those at the sharp end . . . for those yet to fall, this will be their Somme.

We are already seeing those at the sharp end.  For many, white Americans not near the faultlines, things will go on, possibly without disruption. But for many it won't - those trapped in between the faults, those that are crushed by America (the New American Direction) and can't be defended by their own governments, and maybe those who try to stop it. The Storm is coming, It can now be seen and heard on the horizon.

As Sartre argued there is no non-choice, any war is our war, everyone's war.  Each individual must make a moral choice, and stand on the moral side of the war.  For those of us in the culture creating this conflict, it is our responsibility. History will judge those who allowed evil things to happen.

[1] What i call The Storm (or Trump's Storm) is not to be confused with any ridiculous conspiracy theories, although I think they a apt name.

Tropic of Cancer

Thoughts on Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller

It is hard to imagine the impact of Henry Miller’s vulgar language in 1934, but I suppose in the pre-shock-jock era someone had to push the bounds of language and conventional thought. If Dostoevsky's underground man was the kind of person that must exist in the nineteenth century, created by the expanding rationalistic world of modernism, then Miller’s persona in the Tropic of Cancer is a logical but extreme extension of that thought. Given the possible nihilism that has come about after Nietzsche’s proclamation that “God is dead,” the possibility of value has been eroded in the early twentieth century. Miller’s reference to Turgenev shows an affinity with Russian nihilist thought. He states that:
For a hundred years or more the world, our world, has been
dying. And not one man, in these last hundred years or so, has been
crazy enough to put a bomb up the asshole of creation and set it
off. The world is rotting away, dying piecemeal. But it needs the
coup de grâce, it needs to be blown to smithereens. (26)

Since nothing seems to rise above into a hierarchy of meaning and value, Miller seems to reject everything as the same, and in response concerns himself only with the base values of food and sex. He quite consciously claims that he is not of the human world but the inhuman, and it seems Paris suits his activity better than American and its “puritanical” values .

Once I thought that to be human was the highest aim a man could
have, but I see now that it was meant to destroy me. Today I am
proud to say that I am inhuman, that I belong not to men and
governments, that I have nothing to do with creeds and principles.
I have nothing to do with the creaking machinery of humanity – I
belong to the earth!

This view indicates Miller wants to throw off all artificial limitations created by man, and live in a much more naturalistic way, answering only to the self. Despite his rejection of value, there does seem to be times where Miller regards the act of creation as having intrinsic value, and the (sometimes) eloquent and poetic quality of his writing suggests a pursuit of an aesthetic goal. Ultimately, Miller’s interest is only in what is immediately present, the concrete elements of life. He is interested in the awareness of the: discrepancy there is between ideas and living. A permanent dislocation, though we try to cover the two with a bright awning. And it won’t go. Ideas have to be wedded to action; if there is no sex, no vitality in them, there is no action. Ideas cannot exist alone in the vacuum of the mind. Ideas are related to living: (242)

Life requires action, it should not be “an abstract idea nailed to a cross” (243). Life is lived on the margins of society. Anything that takes the vitality out of life (such as social conventions, normative morality, etc) should be rejected. While this worldview may not be sustainable for societies at large, it does seem applicable to the artist striving to find the center of life, to create something new, and live life to its fullest intensity. I think Miller is proposing that the only way to find value in the modern world is to first destroy all of the systems that have been built up in the past and start over by finding value in life itself.

Native Son

Thoughts on Native Son by Richard Wright

For me, the most prominent question that arises from Native Son concerns Bigger’s justification. This work resembles The Stranger, written by Camus at roughly the same time. In that work the character Mersault was also sentenced for death for inadvertently killing someone. Ultimately, his real crime was indifference to the world (a world that was indifferent to him).  He was not an active participant in his own life.  The same can be said of Bigger.  However, in his case, there seems to be something more than indifference. Once he gets himself into this situation, his attempt to get out becomes more ruthless, to the point that he is willing to kill again - even the person closest to him.    

There are several situations where Bigger notes a disconnectedness from himself, as when he claims that “he felt he had no physical existence at all right then” (67). He is certainly not exerting direct control over his actions. His mother notes that he needs to apply himself or he will suffer, yet he hesitates and wavers about taking the job while contemplating committing robbery.  From the beginning he essentially lost and drifting along.  Just as he does not fully recognize himself as a person, Bigger doesn’t see others in the world as individual people.  For him “white people were not really people; they were a sort of great natural force” (109).  This idea of force along with Bigger’s inability to act consciously suggests that the world is merely opposing forces caught in a struggle and human beings are just caught in that maelstrom, unable to escape.  While Bigger is living in an oppressive time and place, the one possible escape might have been the way suggested by Jan and his communist idea of equality.  However, he is not given the chance to pursue this idea, as events put him in an unwinnable situation.   After killing Bessie he finally realizes that “he had committed murder twice and had created a new world for himself” (279).  In contrast to the earlier ideas of external force, the word created suggests that Bigger did indeed play a role in forming the situation.   It is not a world that one would choose, but given his role in it he must deal with the consequences of it.  Bigger has not only fought against the whites and the oppressive conditions they set up, but by killing Bessie he has committed crimes against his own people, and there seems no clear justification for this action.  His only motivation seems to be a pure animalistic drive for self-preservation, regardless of what color his opponents possess. The divisions of color have disappeared, and he is alone against the world.

It would seem that Bigger will either have to face the realization that he has no freewill or take responsibility for his actions.  In the Stranger, Mersault accepts what he has done and learns to live with it (for as long as that lasts).  In Bigger’s case, he will have to do that as well, if he is to ever justify himself.  On the other hand, if Wright is arguing that there is no freewill and that all of us are merely exhibiting instinctive responses to external forces, then there is no hope of freedom for anyone regardless of race, color, or social status.

A large amount of Part 3 contains arguments that attempt to minimize Bigger’s criminal actions.  While Max’s argument makes some sense in reference to the system set up by the whites that has caused repercussions of this kind, not all of it seems to hold justification. His claim that Bigger was in a kind of “war” and forced to kill, does not directly justify the two murders. First, Mary was trying to help Bigger. While her behavior could be felt as patronizing, killing her in some kind of war effort would be counterproductive. In this sense, during the Civil War, slaves would be justified in killing sympathetic Northerners, which would clearly hinder their own efforts.  Second, this argument does nothing to explain Bessie’s murder. She was not an enemy to Bigger, and was not really involved in a race conflict. Unlike her, there were black members of the clergy who Bigger viewed as being like the whites, as they held some power. Even in war soldiers have to make ethical decisions, and ultimately Bigger’s actions come down to his own responsibility.  Max argues that “it was an act of creation” (466).  While Bigger may have found some kind of autonomous personhood and freedom in his actions, ultimately his denying the personhood of others, black or white, by killing them would contradict his own freedom.  If Bigger had made deliberate decisions in order to act in ways that would eliminate his oppression, then a better claim could be made that his actions were necessary. 

I found the most compelling argument to be the indictment of religion.  Bigger rejects religion, and Wright seems to be suggesting (in a Foucauldian way) that it is one more instrument used to separate people. Bigger looks at white people like a transcendental force.  “I always think of white folks. . . well, they own everything.  They choke you off the face of the Earth.  They like God” (409).  His rejection of white society and its dominate power system goes along with religion.  He states that he “wanted to be happy in this world, not out of it.  I didn’t want that kind of happiness. The white folks like for us to be religious, then they can do what they want with us” (412). Perhaps the most shocking image in the book is the contrast of the burning KKK cross to the cross that Bigger has worn.  Religion that he had previously been a part of, was not really his religion and, in the end, it couldn’t do anything for him.  He realizes that “whatever he thought or did from now on would have to come from him and him alone, or not at all.”   However, along with this feeling of freedom and self-reliance, there is a side effect of despair.  He states that “never again did he want to feel anything like hope” (394). 

In the end Bigger does seem to have some idea that connections to others are what matter, but he doesn’t seem overly affected by this realization, nothing that would suggest remorse or awareness of the value of others.  Max (and presumably Wright) makes the case that the problem isn’t racial division, it’s economic.  Wealth, and its power, create classes and divide people and because of this system individuals will sometimes rebel as products of this society.  However, he does not make a claim of how individuals should act and feel towards others.  By omitting this, Wright seems to be claiming that the world is fully deterministic, and he doesn’t reveal an easy solution, other than reducing the cycle that dehumanizes and produces these crimes.  If Bigger was created by society, and unable to act in a conscious manner, then there is no hope for him to feel.

Paper Lies

It's a sign of the times
We believe anything and nothing

Paper lies

When you kill the truth
You can make a killing
You might just make losing look like winning - Marillion (1994)

Despite Trump's assertion that he invented the word fake, it actually has been in use a long time (since at least the 18 century).  And the idea of fiction, falsity and bias in news reporting has been around for a long while as well (someone even mentioned it in a song in 1994). Trump's statement is a fascinating example of irony that displays what it is attacking.  We used to even have a more-than-one-syllable word for it: propaganda.  As such, propaganda attempts to close any open, unresolved elements to ensure a complete, monologic transmission of thought.  That is, to force a conclusion without question.  It is a mode of ideology in operation.

The problem isn't news that's fake, it's use of the term itself.  Fake news is a term that is used to shut down a debate and enforce ideology over facts. And it's used by, and to describe, people who don't want to think for themselves.  Other than the noise created by negative chaos of social media and deliberate lying manipulation by memes, and organizations so deprived, evil and so ridiculously stupid that only a true moron would follow them [1], which aren't news at all, but lies meant to incite: psychological warfare, there isn't much fakeness.  The news reported is based on real events, it's the presented fields of interpretation that add There is a responsibility on the part of the receiver to understand these fields and discern some levels of relevancy and accuracy.  In this information age, it is easier than ever to fact check on one's own an d to stay current.

As American landscape has changed over the last 10 years, there has been a lot of blame put onto the  media, lamenting the loss of objective reporting and accusing the of inserting bias.  But this is just a surface reaction.  To understand the real issue requires a look at the subject of what is being reported.  It isn't the media that has changed -fundamentally - but the political landscape itself.  Changes in the media are only a response, a a reaction to that.

As Fareed Zakaria has noted "Politics is about tribal affiliation. It's not about issues anymore. In the old days is was about issues, it was really about economic issues, and economic issues you can comprise on . . . When you get into these cultural,social issues which are really more about core identity, how do you compromise? . . . These have become issues on which people see the world differently. we have become Sunnis and Shiites . . . for the last ten years there has been no compromise"

The culture has become so split that no news report could be completely objective in the perspective of both parallax views.  But, that does not mean both sides are equivalent.  Not all forces of persuasive discourse are equal.  Power systems must be factored in and the existing dominant structures recognized.  Reporting that challenges the power structure is not the inverse of reporting that promotes it.  Challenges still leave an open space for understanding.  But, reports that mimic what leadership wants one to believe closes space for debate and argumentation.  

In the case of Fox vs CNN there is a difference. First Fox is very monologic, with talking heads spouting ideology to force conclusions inline with their desired power structure.  When the head of power is on the left, they attach to figures on the right that form an opposition.  In the case of CNN, first there is active debate.  Panels made up of three to three on the left/right are common, sometimes 2 on the left against 3 on the right . The balance of left/right on CNN is even more distorted to the right  than it was to the left during Obama's term, with the placement of panelists who have been paid members of the Trump team.  With panelists like Lewandowski, Jeffrey Lord, Kayleigh, Ed Martin, Andre Bauer, there is a direct defense of Trump's establishment and hence, CNN cannot be monologic. The debate raises issues that the viewer can contemplate.  Secondly, while the channel does challenge  Republican administrations, it also heavily criticizes Democratic ones as well.  For instance, Erin Burnett would at times lead with three stories attacking the Obama administration.

With each swing of the pendulum, the challengers in the social discussion adopt tactics that the former side used and there is further escalation.  What is needed is not a draining of the swamp, but a return to the establishment, when policy makers were professionals and worked in terms of policy primarily rather than cultural ideology.  When the debates become once again anchored on facts and not judgment, then the competing arguments can be presented and evaluated in objective and comparable terms.

[1] Pure non-sense like Info-wars and Alex Jones which de-evolve any view into childish fantasy and result in evil, rather than misinformed bad arguments.

The Damage

So here we are again, after two days days of the same tired, old, rhetoric I have to address gun violence again.


I. Psychology & Reality
"Guns don't kill people. People kill people." Nope,  this is misunderstanding of thought and event.  An act requires intent and means.  The actual event which kills a victim is a physical chain: looking back at this chain victim>wound>bullet>gun>shooter.  The kill is done by the bullet fired from the gun (both as designed to perform this purpose). The gun is the means used by the shooter to turn intent into event. So, while the shooter originates the act, it is the gun which transforms it into a physical event with a causal result.  Furthermore, many killings are the result of loaded guns left available for children to find, which they improperly discharged.  There is no intent at all in this event.  It would be stupid to claim that in this case "children kill people." The act is reduced to an event, and it is only the means which come into play, which makes it far more relevant than intent.

Without the means, the event would not occur. Like any piece of technology, the gun transforms the individual into a cybernetic being.  That is, it enhances the capability of the human form.  The mind controls the gun, but the gun enacts the thought.  Without the presence of the weapon, the form capable of exerting this power does not obtain.  Modern NRA-style slogan thinking is contrary to historic thought such as the samurai code, which views the sword as doing the killing, not the warrior.

Those who are arguing to combat ideology rather than activity have it backwards.  Freedom must apply to thought before action.  Rather than restrict thought, which it cannot and should not do, for ethical and political reasons, the law must prevent, to the best of its ability, the realization of thought into malicious action,  There is no sense in allowing evil actions, which have real world consequences, to occur for the sake of freedom, while restricting and controlling thought, which even when it is evil or malicious cannot have a consequential effect on a victim without realization.

II. Laws
"Just because something is illegal doesn't mean someone will stop doing it."  Agreed, but this is a misunderstanding of law.  Laws are not designed to make an individual pre-examine their actions, reflect, and then decide what is in their best interest - at least in immediate situations of violence, desperate acts, or willful disregard for social good. A common psychological property of the criminally-minded is the lack of understanding between cause and effect. So, laws are in no way going to help them make immediate decisions.  But, legislation does have an effect on the physical reality which provides the conditions for the act to emerge.  In this case, the law can hinder the proliferation of guns which get into the hands of the shooter, and limit his ability to carry out the malicious act. The law deals with the physical reality, the objective, not the mental, which is an isolated subjective.

"Banning doesn't matter, people will get them anyway." Then why should we make anything illegal?  There are all kinds of laws limiting personal arms.  Fully automatic weapons, explosives, etc are strictly regulated and not easily available even in black markets.  There is clearly a divide between what we would call military grade weapons and personal arms.  Within the fuzzy middle space, the exact position of the line seems too inclusive. It is easy to put hunting rifles and many classes of handgun for personal protection on one side, and F-16s and AH-64 Apaches on the other side (even though I would like to personally own these, military grade equipment is not defensible as personal arms, existing without being subjected to a large chain of oversight).  In the middle, resides arms like the AR-15.  Historically considered personal and constitutionally legal because of its semi-automatic nature, I think this class of weapons has been inappropriately categorized on the wrong side of the line.  Classifying arms as personal or military along an automatic/semi-automatic divide is misguided.  The argument revolving around "Assault rifles" is claimed to be an aesthetic one by gun advocates.  Apparently gun enthusiasts who shoot what they consider to be basic rifles like to make their guns look like "assault weapons"  Why? To play soldier?  This isn't an innocent game, and not the world of make-believe.  But, I agree that we should not be legislating arms based on what they look like.  Why are we not discussing muzzle velocity, firing rate, magazine capacity, etc?  These are the factors that increase lethality.  And it is lethality that should determine the class of weapon.  The M-16, the standard of the US military for decades, has similar parameters and uses semi-automatic and three-round burst modes, which have been concluded to be of more accurate use.  A weapon with automatic mode does not make it an appreciably different type of weapon. With something that can fire 13 rounds per second, the technical aspects of the firing pin are irrelevant, the result of of the weapon as it is are very deadly.  I would like to hear from veterans, who used their gun as their most significant tool in doing their job, in regards to why that tool, which needs to be as lethal and effective as it can be, is something that needs to exist in civilian life? I would think that of anyone, a soldier would best understand the difference between combat and civilized life, and why such arms should only reside in the hands of highly trained professionals.

I concede that violent events can never be pre-neutralized, but the point of living within the safety of civilization is that the laws will reduce the range of possible events, and eliminate the likelihood of the most egregious ones.  Someone can always inflict harm with a screwdriver (maybe), or a knife.  But using a melee weapon limits the damage, maybe one or two kills are possible with several wounded.  Homemade explosive devices and handguns slightly more.  Comparing the Boston Bombing: two bombs only yielded three deaths.  When we get to high-lethality rifles, then we start looking at much higher death tolls, and this is the point where we must address public safety. It does not have to be an all-or-nothing result, but rather eliminate the arms which produces the most public threat but produces the least social good, without hindering the activities of hunting and reasonable self-defense engaged in by qualified citizens. [1]

III: Rights
In the conflict of rights, we must give priority to the actual before the potential found only in hypotheticals.  Why should one’s right to be safe from an actual threat be callously and negligently ignored in favor of the rights of someone else who might one day need to exercise their own rights to avoid threat?  What is immediate and active must be considered first without being subjugated to the passive world of speculation.  The toll of the lives that will be lost in events in the near future can be mitigated rather than ignored in favor of someone's future attempt at self-defense, which can be prepared through other means.  The right to life far exceeds the secondary additions to the constitution which produces a public threat, a threat to that most basic right.

_________________________________________________________________________________

The events of Orlando have reminded me of these Marillion lyrics, which mostly pertain to the Cold War, but still have significance and resonate about the loss resulting from the conflict with those who emanate an adverse ideology filled with anger and hate, and externalize that internal lack through violence and nihilistic destructive impulses:

And we wake up without you
We wake up without you
With a hole in our hearts

You mad dog shaven head bottle-boy freaks
In Martens and khaki, drunk on sake
You stare at yourself in the cruel flush of dawn
Terrified, sunken eyed, withered and drawn
The butcher, the baker, the munitions maker
The over-achiever, the armistice breaker
The freebase instructor, the lightning conductor
The psycho, the sailor, the tanker, the tailor
The black market mailer
The quick and the dead
The spotlight dancer
The quick and the dead
We wake up without you
With a hole in our hearts

-Marillion “Berlin” 1989

[1] It's very clear that individuals can be denied constitutional rights.  Felons, drug addicts, mental disabled people are all excluded.  I don't see why stronger psychological testing of gun purchasers, and a stricter mental requirement, would be any different legally