Two Hundred and Thirty

We do not go like lambs to the slaughter.  We are not innocents.   

Nor are we being led there by any shepherd.  We choose to go there.

I used to think we chose to go there because we finally woke to who we are and what we do; our conscience wouldn’t let us live with that knowledge, so we chose to die.  But that’s not true.

I used to think we chose to die because we believe the wages of sin is death, and we can no longer make ourselves believe in a god who can forgive us when we can’t forgive ourselves.  But that’s not true.  We can make ourselves believe anything we choose.

We tell ourselves we no longer choose to believe in a god.  We now choose to know the truth.  But that’s not true.     

It’s true our dream has ended, but we haven’t awakened to reality.  We go to the slaughter because we’re sleepwalking, searching for another dream so we can stay asleep.

Two Hundred and Twenty Nine

I’ve been online all morning, reading about terrorism and Trump.

 

Trump was elected because he’s a businessman, not a politician, and most Americans are tired of corrupt politicians.  As president he’s put profits before people, as most businessmen do; but he’s done it so ruthlessly that most people claim he’s an anomaly—preferring to forget that violence, as Malcolm X said, is as American as apple pie (All empires are violent, but some are more violent than others).

 

Trump said he loves the poorly educated because their votes helped elect him.  He’s poorly educated himself, but he (or his handlers) knows enough to (mis)label the protesters anarchists.  He claims they use violence as anarchists did at the turn of the last century (and jihadists do now) to terrorize people and undermine the social order—ignoring the fact that most of the protestors are nonviolent.  The few exceptions have been identified as agents provocateurs—Trump supporters who use violence to discredit the protests.  Far from seeking to undermine the social order, the protesters seek to transform it into the democracy Americans used to pretend it already is.

Trump claims the protesters are being misled and manipulated by his enemies, and don’t know why they’re protesting.  Everyone knows why they’re protesting, but he only sees the protests as a challenge to him.

Not a challenge to his power—he claims he’s all-powerful—but a challenge to him to use his power to ameliorate the current crisis.  Trump does nothing, and even denies there is a crisis, because he doesn’t want to be a dictator, as some claim.  He wants to be a figurehead—not just respected, but loved—without doing anything to earn either.

Some compare Trump to Hoover.  That’s unfair to Hoover, who did nothing to ameliorate the Great Depression, while Trump actively exploits and exacerbates the Greater Depression to enrich himself. 

 

Several of the comments I’ve read online note that Trump’s more violent supporters use vehicles as weapons, driving cars or trucks into crowds of protesters.  This practice has become so common that it’s been given a name:vehicle ram attack.  

Some people claim rammers are inspired by jihadi suicide car bombers (These people don’t include Trump himself.  Formerly a rabid Islamophobe, he now seems to have forgotten the jihadis—perhaps because they target the West, but not him specifically, and he cares only about himself), but vehicle ram attacks remind me of how much Americans’ love of cars resembles their love of guns

Liberal Americans often claim inadequate men, or men who feel inadequate, love guns because to them a gun is a surrogate penis.  That’s obviously absurd.  A gun is used to kill, while a penis is, or can be, used to create life.  But I understand why those who believe the Freudian myth that men are naturally sadistic and women naturally masochistic (a myth that's used to justify not only inequality between men and women, but between powerful and powerless—and supposedly emasculated—men) might see a gun as a surrogate penis, and using it to rape and/or kill a woman (or another man) might be the only way they can achieve orgasm.

It’s equally obvious that to inadequate men a car is, or can be, a surrogate gun. 

Opponents of gun control often point out that cars kill more people than guns.  That’s why powerless men, or men who feel powerless, love their cars as much as they love their guns.  Both give them the power of life or death over others. 

When I was still taking daily walks, I frequently encountered drivers who gunned their engines and moved their cars forward as I was crossing a street, as if about to ram me.  Driving a car gives powerless men, or men who feel powerless, a sense of power—and most ordinary American men feel powerless nowadays.  No longer respected as they think they should be, they feel in control only when in their cars—or better yet, their trucks.

Every empire is founded on, and maintained by, violence.  The United States, which was founded on genocide and slavery, is now an empire in decline, so its masters are escalating the level of violence they use to control their slaves; and those slaves, unable to defend themselves, relieve their frustration by threatening strangers on the internet, or pedestrians with their cars.  

 Now Trump has escalated American violence to an unprecedented level.  His daring has emboldened his supporters to drive their vehicles into crowds of protesters.

Psychologists who’ve studied vehicle ram attacks, trying to develop a profile of the typical rammer, have given up because the typical rammer is an ordinary law-abiding citizen who suddenly goes berserk for no apparent reason.  These psychologists seem unaware that society as a whole has become more violent, so it’s precisely ordinary citizens who are most likely to become violent.  When extraordinary violence becomes the norm, only those with extraordinary self-restraint are able to avoid going berserk.

The rammer sees himself as a lone hero defending a social order threatened by a rebellious mob.  The lumpenproletariat who elected, and still support Trump no matter what he does, see this billionaire as one of them—an outsider, despised by the crowd.  Trump learned from Reagan how to present himself as an outsider, an enemy of a corrupt government, even though he heads that government.

I’m glad whites are finally joining the protests.  Perhaps it’s because they realized blacks aren’t the only victims of violence in America.  As some have pointed out, there are more poor whites than poor blacks in America, and the police gun down unarmed white men more often than they do unarmed black men, because there are more whites than blacks in America (facts which white liberals usually dismiss as true, but irrelevant—and rightly so, because those who point them out do so only because they imagine these facts somehow delegitimize the protests).  But I doubt white liberals do realize blacks aren’t the only victims of terrorism, and anyone who challenges the status quo becomes an enemy of the state.  

White middle class American liberals (Most American liberals are white, and see themselves as middle class whether or not they actually are) rally to the defense of those they recognize as victims of injustice out of a sense of noblesse oblige, not because they realize that they, too, are victims.  White American liberals see themselves as belonging to the ruling class, not only in America but in the world.

We’ve made some progress by acknowledging black Americans should have the same rights as white Americans, but we still assume middle class Americans, whether black or white, are superior to working class Americans, whether black or white.  Racial injustice complicates American injustice, but it neither limits nor defines it.  Class trumps race.

I wish racists were sincere when they counter the protesters' shouted slogan “black lives matter” with “all lives matter”, but I doubt any American will ever say “all lives matter” and mean it.    

Two Hundred and Twenty Eight

While reading the latest issue of the NYRB this morning, it occurred to me that the reason why I now read mostly magazines instead of books isn't because I’m old and my mind is failing (although that’s certainly true), so I can’t concentrate long enough to finish a book; it’s because most new books seldom have anything new to say—at least not anything that’s new to me.  Most of the new books I read merely repeat what older books say, and usually not as well. 

Most people nowadays seldom read books, so authors know they must tell them things all educated people used to know, in words of one or two syllables.  Magazine editors—at least editors of the magazines to which I subscribe— know their subscribers read regularly or they wouldn’t be subscribers, and choose their articles accordingly.

On receiving the latest copy of a magazine, I look through it not only to see which articles seem interesting, but also to see how the editor(s) organised the issue.  I understand the art of editing, having done it myself, and admire the skill with which the editor(s) of the magazines to which I subscribe do it.  I like to see how one article refers, en passant, to something that’s the subject of another, and how all the articles refer, however indirectly, to the general theme of the issue.

The general theme of the latest issue of the NYRB is decadence.  But that’s the general theme of everything people write, say and think nowadays.

Cultural survival—how artifacts prized by one generation are scorned as obsolete and abandoned by a later generation, only to be recovered by an even later generation—is the subject of several articles in this issue.  To write about the recovery of the past is also to write about decadence, because more is always lost than recovered.  But it doesn’t matter what we remember and what we forget, because each generation’s wisest people always tell us the same thing—that in order to live a good life, we must love each other—only in different words.  And we never listen, because it isn’t love we want.  It’s revenge. 

Balzac said le secret des grandes fortunes sans cause apparente est un crime oublié, parce qu'il a été proprement fait.   Every society, whatever the laws on which it’s founded, eventually divides into masters and slaves as the antisocial minority plunder the commonwealth.  In order to live together without killing each other, masters and slaves must both forget the crime which created that division and pretend, or try to pretend, they love each other.  

Idque apud imperitos humanitas vocabatur, cum pars servitutis esset.   Whether people pay homage to the laws on which their society was founded, or scorn them as obsolete doesn’t matter, because either way they don’t live by those laws.  Every society is a criminal conspiracy in which the majority resign themselves to being victimized, and the antisocial minority take their surrender as proof they deserve to be victimized.  Not love, but sadomasochism enables us to live together without killing each other.

The artifacts we save, or recover, and used to call civilisation are always ruins, so we’ve learned to love ruins.  All that we build decays, so we memorialize its decay, as in Kafka’s parable leop­ards break in­to the tem­ple and desecrate the holy ritual again and again, until their desecration becomes part of the rit­ual.

We try to build something solid and lasting, but what we used to call civilization is no more than a stage set in a théâtre du Grand Guignol, and history a play in which we’re assigned rôles by the theater’s owner/managers.  Some play their rôles so well they forget who and what they are; but sleepwalkers always wake eventually, and then all that seemed to them solid melts into air.

We all delude ourselves about who and what we are, but none more so than Americans.  This nation, which we claim was founded on the self-evident truth that all men are created equal, was in reality founded on genocide and slavery.  America is not where the dream of democracy we first dreamed in Greece finally became reality, but where we finally woke to the reality that what we used to call civilization was always founded on genocide and slavery.

Black Americans now fill the streets demanding they be finally acknowledged as real Americans, as if the American dream is real for white Americans—as if anything about America is real. 

We can no longer stay asleep, no matter how much we try.  Like Gregor Samsa, we can no longer live knowing who and what we are, so we’ve decided to die.  We have nothing to live for, so we sought something to die for; and being fascists, we found it in war.  Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori.

There were several articles in this issue on the USA’s decadence in particular, and the ruins of what we used to call democracy.  The last article I read, and the one most difficult to read, was a history of torture in Chicago.  For decades the Chicago police arrested and routinely tortured mostly, but not only, poor blacks into confessing to crimes they hadn’t committed.  They called it ‘the Vietnamese treatment’ because the commander in charge of the torture program was a Vietnam veteran.

After such knowledge, there can be no forgiveness.

Two Hundred and Twenty Seven

She once said she could always rely on me in an emergency.  I don’t remember which emergency inspired her to say that, but I do remember thinking it’s easy to rise to an emergency because we assume it will eventually end, and life will return to normal.  But life isn’t normally peaceful and uneventful.  It’s a series of emergencies, as most people eventually realize if they live long enough, and aren’t fools.  The real test of character is persevering through all of life’s emergencies, knowing they won’t cease until life ceases.

Some learn to do that when they're young, but most never learn it.  Every emergency surprises them.  Civilizations fall with monotonous regularity because people keep making the same mistakes, and are always surprised when they have the same results.

If masters are to the body politic what the brain is to the body organic, that explains why our civilizations keep falling, and always for the same reasons.  Despite what they like to think, and what their slaves like to think about them, masters are not only delusional, but more delusional than their slaves.  Slaves learn to be somewhat realistic because their lives are precarious, but wealth and power protect masters from suffering the consequences of their folly.  But what protects masters more than wealth and power is the love of their slaves.  Slaves love their masters more than they love themselves—as a mother loves her baby, hoping it will grow to love her in return—but masters never do.

Slaves and masters live together because they must, because they cannot live without each other; and they tell themselves and each other that they love each other.  But in an emergency, masters—and those fools who only think they’re masters—think only of saving themselves, and perhaps a few others.  Seldom more than a few, and never their slaves, or those they regard as slaves because they love their masters.  Not only do they hope to survive while others die, but these fools take joy in seeing others die because they think it proves they alone deserve to live.  It was therefore inevitable that if and when we faced an emergency that threatened us all, as we do now, we would not fight it together.  We would instead die together.