I had an appointment this morning to have my income taxes
done; but when I arrived at city hall the building was closed, so I drove back home
and telephoned AARP.
The woman who answered said all their offices are closed
because of the pandemic, and told me to call the IRS. I did, and the woman who answered said there’s
only one office in the county still open and doing free income tax preparation for
senior citizens, so I went there.
I drove for a couple of hours, passing few cars along the
way; so few that their drivers were ignoring traffic signals and driving through red
lights. It reminded me of the empty streets
during the race riots.
I finally found the place, a big multistoried office building
standing alone in a rural wilderness. After parking in its nearly empty lot, I entered
the building and wandered through its empty halls until I finally found someone. There seemed to be no more than four or five
people in this building which, judging from its size, probably holds well over
a thousand office workers on an ordinary day.
Rain had been
falling all morning, but it had stopped by the time I left. Only then did it occur to me to wonder why I’d
gone out on a day like this, when most people are heeding the warnings to stay
indoors. Damp and windy air is the
perfect vehicle for a virus, and I—an old man in poor health—am its perfect
target. But although I live in fear—or
would, if I allowed myself to feel anything—it’s not death I fear.
When I got back home, I was surprised to find the latest
issue of the NYRB had been delivered. So
many places are closed that I didn’t think the post office was still open.
Instead of an article about the pandemic, as I expected,
this issue contains an article about the resurgence of fascism. I seldom go anywhere or see anyone, so I have
little cause to fear I’ll be infected with the virus; but spending most of my time on the internet
makes me acutely aware that fascism’s spreading through the body politic like
a virus.
Our masters are responsible for both pandemics. By destroying the natural world, they released
a parasite from the animal host in whom it’s lived for millennia, and
it’s now infected us. By destroying the social world—those myths and
customs that enabled us to live together without killing each other—they released
our fear of each other.
Every human society, whether it still calls itself a
monarchy or a republic, as many now do, is divided into masters and
slaves. Myths that disguise and/or
justify that division enable us to live together without killing each
other; but they don’t change the fact that a divided society is weak, and always
on the brink of collapse.
Those who seek someone or something to blame for our present
collapse sometimes name capitalism, because a system that values private property more than the public welfare is obviously unhealthy; but they don’t seem able to imagine
an alternative system, much less create it.
Jameson said it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of
capitalism, because capitalism is our world.
We live in it, and accept it without thinking about it, as fish are said
not to think about the water in which they swim.
Most people are so blind to the nature of the world in which we
live that they even imagine a capitalist economic system is not just compatible
with a democratic political system, but necessary to it. Capitalism is, on the contrary, not only
compatible with slavery, but its product.
Capital is the surplus profit that a property
owner obtains beyond whatever it costs him to make his property produce enough
to satisfy his needs.
The first human societies were extended families
of nomadic hunter/foragers who owned no property other than what little they
carried, and whose needs were simple enough to be satisfied with little
effort. They hunted as a group for wild
plants and animals, and shared what they found and/or caught with other members
of their group.
The limited size of these first societies was probably
due less to the limit on how much can be got through hunting/foraging than to
the fact that it was done by an extended family. People will co-operate more readily with
family members than they will with strangers. The invention of agriculture,
which Diamond called the worst mistake in human history, made it possible to
feed more people, so most societies now consisted of several families.
Some of these larger societies consisted of sedentary farmers
who spent most of their time and effort cultivating land and domesticating
plants, making both more productive; but their society
no longer consisted of one extended family, and they were less
willing to share the land and/or its produce with others. They invented private property, and
probably slavery as well when some farmers' crops failed, and they became landless
tenant farmers working for their more fortunate neighbors.
The domestication of animals made life easier for all farmers. It made life easier for hunter/foragers as well,
most of whom became herders of animals. It made life easiest for herders of horses.
To hunter/foragers, the earth was mother of all living
things, plants and animals. To farmers, god was a divine landowner who created the earth, and
then created humans to farm it for him, as slaves farm the land for its owners. To herders, god was a shepherd and humans his sheep. But nomads on horseback were
hunters, and to them everyone else was an
animal to hunted.
The
conquest of sedentary farmers by nomadic hunters on horseback gave rise to writing, and history. The conquerors needed scribes to keep records of their property, both human and nonhuman. But masters and slaves
belonged to different ethnic groups and/or races, spoke different
languages and worshipped different gods, so the masters regarded their slaves as less than human.
The first form that property took was land, but the second was slaves, human and nonhuman. Big landowners
needed slaves to farm land they and their families couldn’t farm themselves. Today’s factory owners still need slaves to
operate their machines for them. We
pretend slavery’s been abolished because today’s masters rent workers instead
of owning them.
Our masters pretend they govern us, and we pretend to trust
them, because we think living in a society, even as a slave, is better than
living alone. But the truth that they’re parasites and we’re their hosts always
lies just beneath the skin of the body politic, ready to inflame it, as it’s
doing now.
Fascism is a product of slavery, but a late one—a disease
common to decadent societies like ours, as cancer is common to old bodies
like mine. And the USA is a decadent society,
having gone—like our president—from childhood directly to senility, bypassing
maturity.
Trump is both a womanizer and a misogynist. He’s obsessed not just with women, but with prostitutes, because he can buy them without having to pretend he loves
them. But prostitutes are traditionally
carriers of venereal disease, and Trump’s a notorious germphobe. Perhaps that’s because his mental deterioration
is due to neurosyphilis, but I doubt his misogyny or his germophobia are so easily
explained. Neither is his homophobia.
One of our society’s myths is that
homophobes are really repressed homosexuals, and womanizers like Trump are
overcompensating. But there’s nothing
real about Trump, or charlatans like him.
Of course he’s no ordinary charlatan. The ordinary charlatan fears “real”
homosexuals as much as he does “real” women and/or “real” men, because he thinks they could
unmask him as a fake. But “real”
homosexuals are just as mythical as “real” men and “real” women. We’re all actors playing roles that aren’t
entirely false, nor entirely true. Trump knows this. He’s fearless because he can’t be unmasked as
a charlatan. He doesn’t pretend to be
anything else.
Xenophobia, the fear of strangers, has infected a society that, already divided and weak, has now become terminally
ill. It usually lead to fascism, but Trump
is no demagogue, although he obviously enjoys playing one. His grandiose boasts of the wonderful things
he’s accomplished as president are so absurd that he’s obviously mocking
traditional presidents. Not even his
supporters take him seriously. They
adore him precisely because he’s a charlatan who doesn’t pretend to be anything
else, unlike the charlatans who pretend they govern us.
Participating in ritual displays of patriotism used to be
enough to allay our fears about our divided society’s weakness. Just as a virus that kills its host either
dies with that host or mutates into a milder form that only sickens it, and may
even prevent it from being infected by stronger pathogens, so has our
xenophobia mutated over the generations into a patriotism that’s only mildly sickening,
and even helps us survive as a society. But
our society’s weakness is now so obvious that our fears can no longer be allayed,
and the patriotism that once united us has now become a xenophobia that divides us. It’s no longer only strangers whom we fear, but
people who look like us and live with us but don't think as we do, and therefore aren’t really members of our
'tribe'.
In a capitalist society, the “real” man is one who owns property;
and his most valuable property is other people—women, and men without property.
A prudent man takes good care of his property, making
sure it doesn’t lose its market value. Neither
does he allow its value to him personally lead him to overestimate its market
value. He knows that women, and men without
property, even if they’re his own wife and sons, don’t have the same value to society
that men of property like himself do.
In times of crisis, when people become aware of just
how weak the society to which they belong, and on which they depend, really is, they lose faith in the myths of that society, including the myth that real men own property while women and men without property
are property. It’s then that women seek equality, and men of property become misogynists. It’s then that "real" men become homophobes,
because the bonds that unite men of property against men without property also unite them against homosexuals, aka men without women.
In times of crisis, when even a real man may lose the
property that makes him real, his natural pursuit of power over others can
become an obsession. When possessing property is the greatest virtue, pursuing
property to the exclusion of everything else is the greatest temptation.
But men can save themselves from this sin as saints do,
by renouncing what they most desire. Men
can prove themselves real men by purging themselves of all weakness, including the love
of women and other men, and use people without loving them.
Our world is diseased and dying, but everything that
lives must die eventually. When
people deny this, and seek to purge themselves of whatever disease they seem to
have contracted—to purify themselves and the body politic of all that’s
foreign—they become fascists.
Let us die, then, as fascists do. Sweet and good it is
to die for our country, especially when that country doesn’t love us as we think it should. Let us die as heroes, for a world that doesn’t
deserve to have us live in it.
