Two Hundred and Eleven

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.