On the ineffability of the obscene

It is possible to live long enough to see the meaning of words change. A generation older than mine would not have associated the word "gay" with a sexual minority. The word "obscene" formerly referred to sexual misbehaviors: the charges of obscenity to which James Joyce or Allen Ginsberg or Lenny Bruce were subjected and which were dismissed in subsequent court trials now seem completely outdated. "Perversion" also seems to have lost its conceptual applicability, perhaps because child abuse is the only sexual misbehavior left that remains universally demonized by society.

Instead, "obscene" has become a kind of Schimpfwort, a term that denigrates a wide variety of unacceptable behaviors that aren't sexual. One speaks of obscene profits made by Wall Street firms, or of obscene lies made by politicians in the tradition of Watergate. You don't see child abusers accused of obscenity: the term is reserved for liars and thieves.

Either way, there is still a mysterious aura of odium attached to "obscene" which persists through its semantic transformations. I suggest it has something to do with the sensation that the word represents something offensively twisted and grotesque, something in other words outside the natural order. Take for example this well-known Fifties magazine advertisement:

There's hardly any reason to rail against sex in advertising, which no doubt will endure as long as capitalism. But the only thing that's really being projected in this ad are some dumb male adolescent phantasies about women with oversized breasts, and one recalls also all those 8mm beaver movies projected on the Bell & Howell machine when the women weren't around, a convenient subtext no doubt well-understood by the ad men.

Sabrina herself, whose principal claim to popular attention was an hourglass figure consisting of huge breasts that wobbled like traffic cones precipitously balanced on a tiny waist, was a physiological exception, like Arnold Schwarzenegger in his youth, whose physical economy was famously described once by Clive James as a "brown condom filled with walnuts."

Isn't it this combination of sexual phantasy and anatomical disfigurement that makes Sabrina's Bell & Howell ad truly obscene?

Cuteness run amok. Photo: North Coast Curmedgeon

The Doggie Diner figure on the other hand is a masterpiece of what I would like to call ineffable obscenity. Try to define why it is so repulsive, and you simply can't, and yet "obscene" sounds exactly right.

It reminds you of the marginalia in medieval manuscripts that depict grotesquely misshapen animals and fantasy creatures. A supreme example of monstrosity in advertising, the Doggie figure was a gargantuan coppery red cartoon filled with menace that lurked behind a leering grin, towering ubiquitously over the distinctly un-medieval margins of Bay Area roadways. Perhaps its inherent obscenity rested in its intention to frighten the customer into buying an equally distasteful Doggie Diner hotdog.

+

Where are the little old ladies?

Photo: Phil Maxwell

I wonder often what ever became of the little old ladies. As a social category they seem to have vanished from public view many years ago. I remember them well from my youth: walking around Boston in the afternoon hours one might encounter them shuffling down Tremont or Washington streets. They seemed to gravitate naturally to Boston Common, where they assumed ownership of every second park bench, claiming the shade under the bureaucratically-designated elm trees (Ulmus americana) as their naturally assigned habitat.

Little old ladies were recognized by their loose-fitting, full-length coats, the scarves or handkerchiefs covering their hair, and their oversized shopping bags and occasionally rolled-down stockings. Their shoes deviated far from the norm conventionally assigned to elderly women at the time, which involved black orthopedic-looking leather shoes and dark stockings. In flagrant disregard of geriatric fashion, little old ladies simply wore on their feet whatever was comfortable, anything from house-slippers to sneakers.

Photo: Phil Maxwell

I don't know if these women were really as impoverished or as socially victimized as they appeared. Certainly there does come a time in old age when you decide to chuck appearances altogether and concentrate on comfort as a survival strategy. But in my mind they seemed to me the original beatniks, "beat" in the primal sense of the word, not so much "beatified" as Kerouac conceived it, but rather as a sub-set of feminists resolved to ignore any conventionality and carve for themselves a chunk of private space in a dismissive world. In my imagination I thought they might be disguised bodhisattvas, like the ancient zen masters who lived defiantly under bridges among beggars.

Of course there is no longer a place for little old ladies in our suburban mall-culture, where if you want to desist from shopping and sit down somewhere, it's going to cost you. They do seem to enjoy a digital resonance however, as seen from a wonderful selection of photographs taken by Phil Maxwell, presently available at Spitalsfield Life.

+

You be the judge

Good fun is to be had at http://ybtj.justice.gov.uk/, where you can compete with British judges in determining the proper judgement for miscreants who have been convicted and are now up for sentencing.

As a proper medievalist, my habitual sentence for most of them would be something along the lines of toss-'em -in-the-dungeon-and-throw-away-the key, but a couple of the cases proved me a real softy, bestowing justice more leniently than the actual judges.

What surprised me that if the evil-doer says I'm sowwy, the sentence is apparently automatically mitigated--fat chance that would have in this country.

It helps to know that misdemeanors are tried in magistrates' court, and more serious matters in Crown Court, which is robed. The modern judge's costume looks ridiculously unattractive compared with the scarlet robes, white ermine cuffs, buckle shoes and long wigs which His Lordship wore in times gone by. If you're going to make a theater out of the trial system, why not really go for it.

+

International Day against DRM

Today, May 4, is the International Day Against DRM, the day in which the Free Software Foundation's "Defective By Design" campaign urges you to celebrate DRM-free media and boycott DRM.

+

Here we go again

.

Actually it seemed to me that 2011 was a crap year for the planet, considering how many hundred of thousands of persons died unnecessarily, got permanently maimed in demonstrations or open warfare in the streets, or who became or remained mired in poverty, and in some places were struck down by famine.

Logically one might hope for a measure of relief in 2012, but of course the farce of another national election, in which everyone gets to express his/her own urgent vision of a utopian America that is structurally doomed to failure, now hangs in January like a black cloud on the horizon.

Results from the Republican freak show in the Iowa state caucus yesterday demonstrate the level of political intelligence abroad in the land, and shows how much money and effort will be required to overcome it.

+

Forget Dionysus

.

Infinite City: A San Francisco Atlas by Rebecca Solnit, U.C. Press 2010, is a sort of San Francisco field guide for thinking people, the basic message being that life here is AWFULLY DIVERSE. To prove it there is a map of "queer public spaces"—we used to call them gay bars—coexisting, just to be clever, on the same page with a chart of local butterfly habitats. Three pages of euphoric prose by Aaron Shurin follow, coyly celebrating the “soul” that gays continue to bestow upon the city.

Well, whatever. What I thought uncompromisingly stupid was the relegation of  resident “whites” solely to Pacific Heights, indicated on the map entitled “Tribes of  San Francisco.”  But I won’t bother to be bothered by the absence of any mention of hippies, which happens, in the words of a UC alumni magazine reviewer, because the author “eschews the prepackaged narrative of Love and Haight.”

Regardless of its ensuing commodification / reification, the hippie experience affected the lives of tens of thousands, and helped enable all kinds of social change. What followed in the Reagan period was a sort of damnatio memoriae of the hippies. It still continues, and I suspect the present volume is more evidence of the same.

Speaking as an unrepentant hippie, I refuse to be upset. It always occurred to me that the Haight in 1967 resembled not an infinite city, but more accurately an invisible one. It descends from the skies every hundred years or so like Brigadoon, enabling the more percipient members of society to worship Dionysus with all means at our exposal before it goes away again. It’s like the movie “King of Hearts” (1966), when the doors to a French nuthouse are accidentally unlocked during WWI, and the inmates run out to play in the deserted streets of the town and enact their various phantasies.

It’s a question of grace, not merit, and the best way to ensure that Dionysus returns with his cult to our city is to forget about him completely.



+

Why Marx was wrong

Last week I powered up my Kindle and digested Why Marx Was Right by Terry Eagleton, partly because I generally find him entertaining as well as ethically concerned, and also because there still lurks within me a soft spot for Marxism, recalling the period on American college campuses in the Vietnam period when the New Left functioned as an important arena for political discussion about social change.

The book proceeds by countering a series of hypothetical arguments proposed by fictive opponents, the straw man technique, whereby non-existent critics are reduced to silence. This is a literary form often employed in academic articles: “Although scholars have argued that such-and-such is the case, my own brilliant research now proves decisively that it is not,” whereby of course the scholars in question are never cited by name or their arguments critically analyzed.

Now there are many reasonable ways to criticize Marxist thinking — take for example Brad DeLong’s Understanding Marx lecture notes — and one cogent reason why Eagleton’s book is doomed to failure is that it doesn’t consider more than a few carefully hand-chosen, severely overwrought ones. They do not include my own view for example that the Marxian analysis of social class structure is inapplicable to post-industrial capitalism.

There was a time when you could easily identify industrial workers simply from their appearance. When I studied in Germany in the early 1960’s, they wore caps and blue-colored jackets and leather shoes that were always unpolished and they carried with them leather brief-cases containing lunch and a bottle of beer. In England workers used to look like this:

Where did all the workers go?  Well, many went into the service sector due to technological advances in industrial production, and, in an astonishing betrayal of class consciousness, many of those left behind decided they were consumers and no longer workers, so in this country they consequently determined during the Reagan era that their economic interests were better served  by voting Republican.

The proletariat simply isn’t around any more. The industrial workers of America now live and work in Mexico and China, and if they ever manage to organize, it will be against those governments and not ours.

(There were two quite interesting PBS Newshour reports last night. One showed a government crackdown on workers’ wage protests in one Chinese city, while at the Party Congress in Beijing the bosses delivered the customary annual diatribe against internal corruption. This is a well-established strategy: deflect popular attention from genuine issues through institutional self-criticism, which no one could do anything about even if the will existed.)

Just as capitalism eliminated uppity San Francisco longshoremen through technological advancement—something incidentally Harry Bridges would never have disapproved of—globalization has done away with American workers as a class of potential troublemakers.

Thus the current collapse of the American labor movement, graphically demonstrated by its inability to react decisively to the events this year in Wisconsin, or the impotence of the mine workers to change the dangerous conditions in the Massey mines in West Virginia, either before or after last year’s catastrophe.

Unlike the 1930’s, when similar economic conditions prevailed, the current recession has amazingly inspired no other organized populist response except on behalf of  the right. Given the obscene circumstance that capitalist managers who created the mess continue to make out like bandits while millions suffer, this seems quite a surprise.

But it’s hardly a question of Gramscian hegemony, where the lower classes are hypnotized into advocating ruling class interests, not if you view the right in America as a coalition of the rich, their political mouthpieces, a broad base of uneducated dreamers hoping that tax-cuts and a return to the old ways will lead to a lost American utopia, or Christian fundamentalist phantasts wishing for a not-yet-revealed one.

But it is evidence of the disappearance of the workers as a transformative social force, which is why Marx was wrong.


photo "Leaving Manchester, 1938" from The Edwardians.

+

The America-is-not-broke speech

Michael Moore's great speech in Madison last weekend has been circulating like wildfire around the Internet. The official version of it, slightly edited and with the original video, appears on his own website at: http://www.michaelmoore.com/words/mike-friends-blog/america-is-not-broke.
It reminds me strongly of Thomas Paine's Common Sense, and I hope it meets with a similar reception.

+

HOW TO KILL OFF CULTURE IN SAN FRANCISCO: PART ONE

.
Shut down community radio.


2011 is off to a bumpy start with the Arizona shootings, the attempt of House Republicans to repeal health care reform, and now the elimination of KUSF FM by USF university officials, who, in a secret move obviously meant to forestall any public discussion, sold off the station’s license to KDFC on January 20th.


I won’t take time to deliver an elegy for KUSF—either you loved it as I did, or else ignored it, and that was pretty much it. And I won’t bother to heap abuse upon the bastards who simply shut down the station without a word of warning—a volunteer broadcaster was simply told to get up and leave in the middle of his broadcast—or upon the current president of USF, who in his public statement cynically suggested that he looked forward to KUSF’s glorious future as an online broadcasting station—as if an ipod could replace listening to FM radio in your car or home or workplace.


What concerns me is the effect this has on the production of culture in San Francisco. It may help to view the matter historically. When I got here in mid-sixties, KPFA was the only station that devoted several hours each week to recordings, interviews, discussions of local modern composers and musicians living and working in the Bay Area. Thanks to the efforts of Carl Stone and Charles Amirkhanian and a number of volunteers, KPFA helped establish the careers of musicians, some of whom soon enjoyed nationwide reputations —Lou Harrison, Terry Riley, the Kronos Quartet, to mention just a couple—and also brought news and periodic updates from the Mills College composing program, Stanford computer-music lab, and other local institutions that sponsored modern music performance and composition.


The KPFA Music Department—which I co-directed for a year—also pioneered brand-new musical genres not heard anywhere else in the Bay Area: early music, world music, space music, and punk. As at KUSF, most of the KPFA broadcasters were volunteers—real enthusiasts and often very knowledgeable about the material they programmed.


Unfortunately somewhere towards the end of Reagan One, all this got chucked out when it was decided to double the amount of political programming at KPFA. The traditional Morning Concert from 9-11am was scrapped. World music was now taken to mean salsa; culture gave way to politics and current affairs, interspersed with pop music from Mexican radio.


But also in the 1980’s something marvelous happened: there was a huge eruption of musical productivity in the San Francisco pop music scene, with an amazing variety of new bands and music clubs to accommodate them. They were largely punk-derived garage bands, but there were many blues bands early on, with electronic and synth bands developing in the 90’s. It was a bee-hive of experimentation and, remarkably, it was even financially self-sustaining to an extent thanks to the clubs around town.


At the top of all this chaos sat KUSF, on the air with volunteer broadcasters from midnight to 6pm Mo-Fri, covering the whole scene in exactly the way that community radio excels: savvy people sorting out and broadcasting the best of it, interviewing the musicians, sampling the product, promoting local concerts and new recordings.


Contrast this with what happened at KDFC, the local commercial classical music station. Following a horrible trend that started in the 70’s, it chose to broadcast classical music as a species of “elevator music” or Muzak, as one called it. The station became computer-automated, meaning that hundreds of hours of pre-recorded material were sorted and broadcast by computer. You really didn’t need to have a human being present at the station at all, except an engineer to fix a machine that broke down. Certainly you didn’t want anyone around who actually gave a shit about classical music, understood the difference between a good performance or a mediocre one, or who programmed modern composition that was the slightest bit dissonant.


My point here is that there are different ways that one can handle and manipulate “culture.” You can take the SF Hotel and Restaurant Tax revenues and hand them over to the “Big Seven,” the leading cultural institutions in the city, beginning with the symphony and opera, that require monster infusions of money to operate. But that’s not creating culture—it’s reproducing culture, at best spending mega-sums of resources on some highly-nuanced interpretation of cultural artifacts that arose long before any of us were even born. As marvelous as our orchestra or opera may be, the big bucks are going mainly to maintain a sort of acoustic museum, an arena where little will happen to disturb the comfort zone of the audience, (explaining incidentally the current institutional obsession with John Adams’ work).


So now KUSF FM, which has done so very much to generate and create culture in San Francisco for thirty-four years, has disappeared forever, unless the FCC unexpectedly proves responsive to community protests. Good-bye Deejay Schmeejay, Stereo Steve, Irwin Swirinoff, Terrible Ted, Natalie and Jet and all the rest of you—you were completely awesome, and long may you wave—hopefully somewhere else within earshot, if the stereo gods are favorable.


+

Shelter from the Storm

Hearing eMeg debating (hurling insults is a better term) with Jerry Brown last night reminds me how great it is to be living in a "sanctuary city" like San Francisco, whose votes and opinions obviously don't interest her.

Griffith Park Wayist gets it exactly right:

I can only imagine how it must feel to be a Republican rooting for eMeg to do well against Jerry Brown. They are obviously delighted that she hasn't fallen over. But...

They have to feel awful when she apologizes again for her previous nonexistent voting record. They have to hold their breath when she says that Jerry Brown has no experience making California better, something no Californian who actually remembers his term of office can possibly agree with. It's obvious she is a bald-faced liar, and that can't be comfortable to endure if you're cheering for her. It's obvious she's patronizing and condescending and smirks far too much. Her figures are a lot like Reagan's, foggy, distended, deliberate lies.


+

Die, Republican bastard!

I'm looking forward to reading P.J. O'Rourke's new book Don't Vote, It Just Encourages the Bastards, the title of which represents I'm sure a fundamental attitude many Americans share about their political system.

It's not a sentiment based necessarily on cynicism. Given one's powerlessness within the general scheme of things, and the inability of politics to accomplish anything constructive except in the face of absolute emergency, I think one could successfully argue in favor of abandoning politics and concentrating upon those areas of one's own life and sphere of influence where one might be able to effect something good or useful.

After I posted the poem by Archlogus last Sunday, it crossed my mind that I had written a parody of it after the Fall 2003 elections, in which the Presidential incumbent was re-elected with a substantial majority after unilaterally starting a war under false pretenses against a country which posed no security threat whatever to the U.S.

The fact that the Congress and the population at large went along with this outrage left me more depressed than I think I had ever been with the American political system -- and that's saying a lot from someone who experienced the Vietnam War and two Nixon administrations firsthand.

Writing curses is a fun way of achieving catharsis and exorcising devils, and the following was addressed to the presidential incumbent in 2004, whose name I must not utter in fear of detection by a new wave of AT&T "data mining" which might put me on a watch-list somewhere in Washington.


Struck down at the edge of the highway, your
hindquarters shattered into broken misshapen
exsanguinating stumps ground into the asphalt
by a passing truck, your mangy, blood-drenched
skin matted into ugly clumps, your teeth cracked
into white splinters embedded in the cold black
pavement, your cheek-pouches infested with
foul maggots, you lie face-down, dribbling
vomitous bile from your stinking liver.
May those assigned to dispose of your loathsome
remains slash with a thousand bright knives
the putrescent entrails clinging to your barely
recognizable neo-conservative skeleton, and may
what’s left of your shredded face break forth into
a twisted smile, just as you smiled in the last election,
when you promised peace, justice, and compassion 
to those who were dumb enough to vote for you.


+

California Nuthouse Rant

I wonder from what burning circle of Hell the current Republican candidate for California governor, whose name I’ll not dignify by repeating in my little corner of Cyberworld, has sprung forth like a grinning caricature of Nemesis?

Why would she not remain content with the sordid fortune she has garnered by converting eBay from the pleasant, community-oriented flea-market enterprise it once was back in the late 1990’s into a sterile online discount outlet?

Of course eBay used to be fun back in the days when people discovered the chance to empty their attics, and where with a little application you could come up with some good bargains offered by friendly folk all across the country. Now it functions mostly as a sort of digitized mail-order catalog, where the big increase in shipping rates––UPS doubled its rates during the gasoline crunch a couple years ago and forgot to lower them afterwards––has effectively eliminated the fun of bargain hunting, since basically there aren’t any bargains.

Herself is now poised to buy her way into governorship and, one fears, set about converting the State of California into the handmaiden of corporate capitalism, with state-funded enterprises like the state university system and welfare programs of all sorts heading the scratch list if they fail to start turning a profit.

The worst of it is that she stands every chance of winning. Jerry Brown, an honest and diligent public servant who has worked for California for decades and who could hardly qualify as a shrieking radical, is not exactly dripping with charisma, given his current age-group.

Herself will now dump a couple hundred million dollars worth of smear advertising on tv, an amount sufficient to do some noticeable good had it been spent to any worthwhile purpose. And the zombified electorate, who exist mainly to reject whatever taxation is required to run the state properly, and of course also to deny civil rights to gay people, will probably fall for it.

Really, how could have it come down to this. It makes the California growth years under Gov. Pat Brown seem like a lost utopia. It also makes one wonder why any sane person should want to be governor of a state with a 19-billion dollar deficit, a dysfunctional state legislature which isn’t worth the cost of maintaining, and a brain-dead voting public.

One prefers rather to envision Herself washed up onto Ocean Beach, in the condition described by Archlogus, a 7th-century poet of Sparta:


Swept overboard, unconscious in the breakers,
strangled with seaweed, may you wake up in a gelid
surf, your teeth, already cracked into the shingle,
now set rattling by the wind, while facedown,
helpless as a poisoned cur, on all fours you puke
brine reeking of dead fish. May those you meet,
barbarians as ugly as their souls are hateful,
treat you to the moldy wooden bread of slaves.
And may you, with your split teeth sunk in that,
smile, then, the way you did during the last election.


–– from Brooks Haxton: Dances for Flute and Thunder, Viking Press, the last line slightly modified.

Econ 101

Mutt's critique of the capitalist process / Protestant work ethic is sufficiently perceptive to compel Jeff to file a disclaimer in the last panel: Only kidding, folks!

Mutt and Jeff by Pierre S. Beaumont. 

+

Friendly skies

.
Talking about the guy who walked off his JetBlue job in a spectacular fashion this week, I heard some person this morning on NPR running on about how "societal norms" had changed the nature of commercial flying. What incredible bullshit. It is cutthroat capitalism which has transformed air travel into the perfect nightmare that it is today, including  people cramming into the overheads stuff which used to be more properly handled as luggage.

+

Incipient capitalism

.
Thanks to Gustaf Sobin’s Luminous Debris I have had to revise my understanding of the origins of capitalist oppression. I had tended to think that it originated in Europe after the introduction of wage slavery, replacing serfdom and actual slavery in Late Antiquity.

But Sobin shows that it all started in the late Iron Age, and that overproduction in the food supply is the point of origin. Looking at the south of France around 700BC, when indigenous people were overtaken by Celts coming from the north, Sobin writes:

Out of small, agropastoral, self-sustaining societies, we witness the emergence of larger and larger ‘microstates,’ with highly fortified villages –oppida—on the spurs, ridges, and rock outcrops in the hinterland above. Practicing for the first time an agrarian economy based on surplus, these societies would come to store that surplus in granaries… within the fortified oppida themselves. That surplus would be exchanged against other goods in the first verifiable market economy in Mediterranean Gaul.

Here the archaeological evidence kicks in with a vengeance: some individuals lived in larger houses than others, warranted larger burial plots, had more stuff buried in their graves, had bigger dolmens on top of them.

What happened in earlier Iron and Bronze Age societies? Law of the Jungle, you’d think, but no, the archaeological evidence suggests rather that tribespeople lived cooperatively and free of class struggle.

An interesting feature of the late Neolithic is that there aren’t any signs of warfare. After the last Ice Age, when Europeans lived like the Inuit, hunting reindeer across the icy plains of Central Europe, wandering tribes were numerically so small that they were perhaps happy to run into each over the vast icy plains, and warfare wasn’t advantageous.

This didn’t set in until land ownership and concomitantly the production of seizable assets. So from earliest history you have the two approaches in human affairs: the cooperation inherent in tribal relations, and then the outbreak of individualism and the subsequent struggle to gain control of production.

______________________________

I decided that although I read many books, I won't review them on this blog.  After all, who cares what I think about The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. (It's great.) But I will say without hesitation that the most interesting and useful book I have read so far this year is:

Gustaf Sobin. Luminous Debris. Reflecting on Vestige in Provence and Languedoc. U.C. Press: 1999.

+

California here we cum

.

One of my dear friends from hippie days sent in this video in reaction to yesterday's Proposition 8 decision. If that's the Queensborough Bridge, I think they may have a long way to go.




+

Nelson Mandela

It was great to see him at the World Cup final yesterday, being driven around the periphery of the football stadium, frail now, but still showing that beautiful smile he has.

Whenever I see him I'm immediately reminded of the many End-Apartheid demonstrations that occurred around town in the late 1980's, such as this one I photographed from the balcony of the Student Union Building at UC Berkeley:

I was working at the University intermittently in the 80's, and thus attended several demo's, which conveniently took place mainly at lunchtime. They were colorful and effective in a way that none have been since: in this case the University administration was eventually persuaded to divest its South African investments. And they were also part of larger international movement, one big highlight of which was the fabulous rock concert at Wembley Stadium in 1987.

It's painful that political demonstrations in the two decades since then have been completely ineffectual. It looked like the nation-wide End-the-War-in-Iraq campaign was finally gaining some momentum in 2007--shameful, when you think that war had been continuing for four years before a significant number of Americans finally took to the streets--but Obama's election put an end to all that.

Other international crises that you'd think any ethically-motivated individual would be horrified at--the ongoing Chinese occupation of Tibet or the active persecution of the Palestinians and the ethnic cleansing of refugees in Darfur--have passed by with hardly any public response at all.


+

Blindspots

Helen Thomas' forced "early" retirement at the age of 90 because of some absurd remarks recently urging Israel to vacate Palestine seem symbolic of the inability of most Americans to think clearly about Mideast policy.
My friend Alex Martin suggested recently that in his experience many Chinese acquaintances, generally liberal and politically progressive in most areas of concern, will automatically become irrational when Tibetan policy is discussed, as when the Dalai Lama is dismissed in anger as an insurgency leader. The fact that the DL has never advocated Tibetan independence is simply not perceived: he is simply a diabolical agent threatening Chinese sovereignty, and that is all there is to say about it.
Such blooming nonsense is typical of the way many American politicians view Palestine -- it represents a perceptual blind-spot in the minds of many, and events that are more properly viewed as morally scandalous are not even registered.

An open letter to Joe Biden

Hey Joe,
I was watching your astonishing performance on Charlie Rose last Tuesday evening, in which you stridently defended current Israeli defense policy after Monday’s raid which killed nine people on a Turkish ship bringing humanitarian aid to the people of Gaza. Your take on the situation is that Israel and Hamas are at war, and that therefore “It's legitimate for Israel to say, ‘I don't know what's on that ship. These guys are dropping 3,000 rockets on my people.’”

Despite a wave of global outrage about the commando assault, you apparently feel that there’s no harm done because Israel “had a right to know” what was aboard the vessel, even though it found itself in international waters.

But you say we must also not forget about the poor Palestinians, or as many as are left alive after the Israeli bombardments of a year and a half ago. “The one thing we have to do is not forget the plight of these Palestinians there ... they're in bad shape,” you say, shedding crocodile tears from those big blue eyes. “So we have to put as much pressure and as much cajoling on Israel as we can to allow them to get building materials in,” you generously suggest, since Israel has forbidden the import into Gaza not only of cilantro and musical instruments, but also of wood and cement for the same security reasons you find so reasonable.

Joe, I voted for you a couple years ago, partially because you’d reportedly gained much experience on the Senate foreign relations committee, even though that experience did not prevent you from voting for the Iraq War Resolution in 2002. At least you seemed more knowledgeable than Sarah Palin, your Republican counterpart. But lately I’ve begun to think that you and I may be residing on different planets.

Joe, the war on Gaza ended on January 18, 2009. In a three-week period between 1,166 and 1,417 Palestinians—less than 375 of them combatants-- and 13 Israelis were killed. In September 2009, a UN special mission headed by Justice Richard Goldstone produced a report accusing Israeli Defense Forces of war crimes and possible crimes against humanity. The UN Human Rights Council endorsed the report, criticizing Israel but not Hamas.*

Israel rejected the report earlier this year, not before inaugurating a policy of collective retribution upon the 1.5 million people living in Gaza, in hopes apparently that they will somehow rise up and oust Hamas from power. For this reason all exports from Gaza are banned, almost all factories remain closed, and almost the entire population is left dependent on food aid. The blockade is supposed to prevent arms smuggling, but the goal is rather to force an impoverished and victimized population into overthrowing Hamas.

The strategy is not only morally scandalous, but categorically stupid to begin with. Hamas is the only administrative organization that exists in Gaza – are you going to shoot the person who is keeping you from starving?

Joe, let me ask you bluntly, who exactly are you working for? Which persons, what shadowy forces have gathered and conspired to transform you into a moral coward of this magnitude? Are you speaking for the Administration when you defend the blockade of Gaza, or are you are simply having fun playing the loose cannon on Public Television?

Hilary came out on Thursday with the usual crap about how the government needs a full and complete investigation of Monday’s events before issuing a position statement – why wasn’t that good enough for you too? After all, in another week or two public attention will have moved elsewhere, and those of us not condemned to spend our lives in Gaza will move on to other concerns.

Joe, I suspect that you and I are not likely to achieve agreement on Middle East policy, so let me instead suggest an alternate proposal which articulates more general and non-partisan principles. Let us agree therefore that:

1. US policy will not support the boarding of ships in international waters without immediately obvious and reasonable grounds.
2. The US will now commit its energies to begin the economic reconstruction of Gaza, regardless of whatever power relations are currently in place there or elsewhere.
3. The US will no longer provide military and financial support to countries that damage the lives and welfare of non-combatant civilian populations anywhere in the world, either in time of peace or war.

Come on, Joe, give us a little help here. After eight years of institutionalized moral stupefaction under Bush Two, you were elected to try and improve things. What you were saying to Charlie Rose the other night is against morality, against history, and against common sense. Let’s go back to the drawing board and come up with something better, ok?



* See Wikipedia, “Gaza War.”

Spill, Baby, Spill

However agreeable it is to watch the CEO of British Petroleum squirming to regain respectability in the face of a shabby, irresponsible, preposterous, fraudulent, hopelessly botched and totally self-induced technological mega-fuckup, the suspicion remains that corporate America sees nothing more than gallons of money escaping uncontrollably into the Gulf of Mexico.

While the rest of us watch dying pelicans strangulating in the reeds and listen to sanctimonious tv reporters bleating their endless concern, no doubt Big Oil is preparing whatever Plan B's will need to be put into place to stem the flow of fugitive wealth and find some new holes to insert its relentless boring devices into, like disturbed hornets working secretly in the shadows.

Thus although Nature temporarily has the upper hand, it is clearly just a question of time till all is well and we are once again firmly on the path to "getting the economy going again," since, as Chevron soothingly assures us, "Every Day, We Invest In The Energy To Move Us All Ahead."

Those of us who prefer not to be moved ahead by Chevron might recall how capitalism, for all its vulgar materialism, in actuality despises matter, and therefore Nature as well, rejecting both in favor of satisfying its insane quest for wealth, a purely mental entity.

Terry Eagleton puts it perfectly: "It is a culture shot through with fantasy, idealist to its core, powered by a disembodied will which dreams of pounding Nature to pieces. It makes an idol out of matter, but cannot stomach the resistance it offers to its grandiose schemes" (After Theory,  p 45).