Antiwar stories

Thanks to my old buddy Tom Angotti for sending his first book of fiction; you may know his earlier works on urban studies or Latin American social struggles. 

Accidental Warriors and Battlefield Myths (Berkeley CA: Regent Press, 2011) contains ten stories, most told from the points of view of unwilling or uncomprehending combattants in wars ranging from the Nicaraguan contras to Americans and Russians in Afghanistan to the U.S. invasion of Panama to Israelis and Palestinians in the occupied territories to the aftermath of Vietnam. Angotti is mostly interested in exploring the illusions and the subsequent deep disappointments — including terrible injuries, post-traumatic stress, or other losses — resulting from actual combat experience.  In only one of these stories, about a Cuban woman returned from serving in the Cuban intervention in Angola, does the warrior seem to have any understanding of what she was fighting for, and hers is the only story that ends more or less happily, back in Havana, when she is able to use the strength she learned in the army to correct her own personal situation ("When Adria Went to Angola").

In the final, very brief story, Angotti conjures up the fantastic Land of Accidental Warriors, where men and women like the ones he has described in the other tales find refuge, peace and harmony. This short book (96 pages, with illustrations by Sofia Vigas) should be welcome reading to all those active in peace advocacy.

America, a Spark Away From Riots of Its Own

Some readers of the blog may have got the impression that I'm a pretty smart guy; if so, I'm about to disabuse you, by talking about something I don't fully understand: the great economic collapse, how and why it is happening and what to do about it. Why? Because unless I spell out my tentative and possibly mistaken perceptions, I won't have a chance to correct or develop them.

Probably the most important post-World War II development has been the freeing of finance capital from its former bonds. As long as there have been markets, even before the birth of capitalism in England in the late middle ages (E.M. Wood, The Origin of Capitalism), there has been credit — "finance" —in some form.

But even as late as Marx (who died in 1883) or even Lenin (1924), there were some constraints on finance capital, national loyalty being one of them. Thus J. P. Morgan was hailed for his "civic responsibility," demonstrated most dramatically in the Panic of 1907.

But finance capital has broken free and now dictates to its former masters: trade, state, local authorities of all kinds, traditional loyalties.  It is a collective organism, like an anthill or a beehive or a city, e.g., London today, where the impulse toward mass action overcomes whatever rationality or notion of self-preservation its individual components may possess. Finance capital no longer recognizes any nation, but acts on its own only to aggrandize itself. And since it thinks of nothing but its own appetite, it does not hesitate to consume and destroy the industrial and commercial systems on which it feeds. If left entirely uncontrolled, the parasite will destroy its host — and then even bankers and security traders will despair.

Which is why things may not go quite to this extreme, that is, to the total self-destruction of the system. But we're getting close. Some financiers are able to raise their heads above the tumult (see links to Soros below) and see the dangers and may be willing to cede some control. But the forces of destruction are so strong and states (national governments) so timorous they (states and financiers) are acting too late to prevent great devastation — high unemployment in Europe, starvation in Africa, and turmoil everwhere.

And that of course is what is stimulating other and opposite movements of mass organisms, collective movements impelled more by rage than by sense, also overwhelming the rationality of individual participants and also possibly destroying the systems that sustain them. From Somalia to Athens to London and many other places. O, if we could just channel all that furious energy into a real revolution, establishing a truly sustainable system for reproducing social life! It will happen, surely, but  — if we continue to behave as our species has over the millennia — only at the last possible moment.

(See Ford Releases Report on German Subsidiary and WWII.) These days, such operations — financing all sides in a war, for example — seem to be simpler to execute. And with the ease of moving money instantly, globally, through the Internet, patriotic concerns and the powers of states to regulate transactions have all but evaporated.

Three steps to resolving the eurozone crisis | George Soros

Germany must defend the euro | George Soros

America, a Spark Away From Riots of Its Own

Empire’s Last Gasp — A Two-Act Scenario; Charles Degelman returns to classic texts by Marx and Lenin

It is probably true, as Charlie Degelman suggests, that Marx and Lenin provide pointers, but a lot has happened since them and so we're going to have to try to figure this out without them.

For my earlier comments on "good and bad capitalism" and related issues, click on keyword "capitalism" below.

And here's something to listen to while you ponder these problems: Ry Cooder: No Banker Left Behind - YouTube

Understanding London's civil violence

Civil violence: three steps to understanding the ‘mindless criminal’ | MICROCON

You may find Jaideep Gupte's "three steps" helpful, but for me the most interesting part of his posting were these background data:

 … here are some basic statistics to help you make up your own mind: unemployment in the UK for 16-24 years olds is up from 17.90% in the early 1990s to 19.70% in 2010, while London continues to have the highest unemployment rate for this cohort at 22%.[6] Currently, 22% of 19 year old boys in England do not have a basic education, while this figure drops to 15% for girls.[7] Black young adults (16-24 years) are four times as likely to be in prison under sentence, than White young adults, and almost eight times as likely as Asian young adults.[8] Nevertheless, the number of burglaries and violent incidents with injuries have dropped significantly since the 1990s – from 1.8 million burglaries in 1995 to 0.7 million this year, and from 2.4 million incidents to 1.2 million over the same time period. 50% of adults surveyed in 2000 believed that the crime rate was increasing, this figure has dropped to 28% now. And while 24% of adults reported being very worried about being the victim of violent crime in 2000, this year the figure has dropped to 13%.[9]

Cameron’s Broken Windows - NYTimes.com

This op-ed by Richard Sennett and Saskia Sassen may help us think about this problem. Like the good sociologists they are, they offer no answers but help us frame the questions.
Cameron’s Broken Windows - NYTimes.com

Being and not-being, in Virgil and Broch

Here's a meditation-review by my friend and colleague Dirk Van Nouhuys. I confess that my acquaintance with Virgil is limited to the abridged version of the Aeneid we read in 4th year Latin back in high school — but I was impressed enough to base a skit on it, which was performed (I learned later) not just by my class but also by succeeding classes for at least a couple of years. In my version, the actors (all high school students) recited the famous Latin "purple passages" while another kid held up a sign with the supposed subtitle. For Anchises' long speech that begins "Erat Illium…" while he is mounted on his son Aeneas' back ready to leave ruined Troy, the subtitle read "Giddyup!"

The Death of Virgil by Hermann Broch narrates the last 24 hours of the poet Virgil from his point of view. There is some action: he arrives by ship at Brindisi; is carried on a litter through crowded streets to a room in Augustus’ palace; he watches some low-life violence that goes on in the courtyard; he converses with real people, with his patron the emperor, and with some friends. But at all times he is slipping into and among levels of delirium. His delirious mind struggles to comprehend nothing less than the nature of things. The succession of images reminded me at times of Burroughs' fantastic nightmare-scapes. At times it is dark, horrifying, and despairing, but at other times, convivial, lyric, exalted. The images and delving-upclambering quality reminded me also the second part of Goethe’s Faust, where Goethe and his character are exploring the roots of being.

The text is heavy with compound words that embody paradoxes like ‘delving-upclambering’. I assume this reflects the German, with its readiness to compound words. In trying to write about it such words infect my prose.

We know surprisingly little about the life of Virgil, but one tale that comes down semi officially from antiquity is that before his death he wanted to burn his great and, at one time, immensely influential poem, The Aeneid, because he had not perfectly completed it. Lines do remain here and there in The Aeneid that seem to be unfinished. Broch renders the dying writer preoccupied with the decision to burn or not to burn, though the reason Broch’s character longs to destroy his work is that art is inadequate not so much to portray life, as to embody it, to be a satisfactory response to it.

The dreadfilled imagery, a sort of dark night of being, in The Death of Virgil tends to be associated with crowds and the madness of humankind en masse. Not surprising for a Jew who lived in Austria under the Nazis and began the work in a concentration camp.

But the real struggle for Broch/Virgil is to imagine the unity of not only being, but being with non-being, time with timelessness, mortality with immortality, etc. In that way it seems to me like a deliriously imaginative amplification of Plato’s dialogue The Parmenides, in which Parmenides methodically explores the consequences of assuming on the one hand the fundamental diversity of things and on the other hand their fundamental unity.

I should say that ‘being’ here is as philosophers have conceived it, as it can be investigated by reason and imagination. It is not the world of chemistry, quantum physics or quarks and strings, which is investigated with technological hardware and abstract math. The math usually seems to the uninitiated (such as me) barely intelligible. Being in Broch tends to present itself as a moiling, contrasting, coruscating proliferation and unification, of images and concepts that make for rewarding but slow reading. George Steiner suggested that the book should be read, like Ulysses, in the 24 hours of its own time, but that the reader would have to undergo training to perform that feat. It is daunting to consider what that training might be.

Nothing I have written makes me think I’ve told you why reading this book is so rewarding, why finishing it gives such a sense of accomplishment and completion. I don’t sing, but I imagine reading this book is like successfully singing a powerful but difficult choral work.

Seeing colors - more on our tricky brains

Here's a fascinating follow-up to our discussion of the language of color —here, what happens in our brains even before we give names to hues.

Beau Lotto: Optical illusions show how we see‬‏ - YouTube

Thanks to my ever-alert old friend LouBette Herrick for suggesting this link.

The origin of life on earth: the real story

Now we know! Thanks to Ruben Varda (and Paracelsus and Giordano Bruno). 
Consultation : Cambridge Book Review

This story is from Voice from the Planet: An Anthology of Living Fiction. Edited by Charles Degelman.
Harvard Square Editions 2010  

Fact & fiction in "Sultan"

Peter de Lissovoy and I have just read each other's books, and he has now posted a very enthusiastic review of A Gift for the Sultan (it's the latest, so you have to scroll down to the bottom of the review page) — thanks, Pete. And he's asking me the same question that I asked about his Feelgood (see below, 28/7/2011):

But tell me--what is the fact/ fiction ratio in your book? To what extent is this historical novel actually history and to what percent an enthralling tale?

Thanks, Pete, for the "enthralling." Now about the fact/fiction ratio: I've tried to answer part of that question in this list of the cast of characters.

Almost everything I wrote about the historical figures (the two emperors, the sultan, his vizier Ali Pasha, Timur and his son Shah Rukh et alii) really happened, or at least is based on some chronicle by a supposed eye-witness. Of course chroniclers may willfully distort, invent or misinterpret events, and they don't always agree, but that's the best we've got. For example, Sultan Bayezid did (it is reported) really interrupt his military campaign for a day's hunt (one of his stupider acts); Timur really did play chess almost obsessively, and employed the clever strategy described in the book to defeat Bayezid — though the game where he works this out with his son Shah Rukh is a product of my imagination.

Ioannes VII's attempt to surrender the city to Bayezid, secretly, to save himself is attested by at least one contemporary chronicler, and seemed to fit with what I could learn about his character, including that as a child he had been half-blinded by his grandfather the then-emperor, and thus had no reason to love the city.

The gazis were real, but these particular gazis with their names and nicknames and particular attitudes, are imaginary, partly inspired by Turkish pre-Islamic folk tales. Their festive gathering, though, is very much like such events.  Same goes for the Varangians, Frankish knights, janissaries, and others — the chronicles rarely report individual names and never their conversations, so I had to make those up. I think they are all plausible, that is, that my characters act and speak like the real people would (except of course that they would be speaking in their own languages).

The little princess is my invention, though she or someone much like her may really have existed: We know that Manuel II did in fact have bastard children, including a daughter (whose husband, Hilarion, makes a brief appearance in the last part of my novel). 

The "True Blues" are another invention, but also plausible. From everything I could learn about the parlous state of Constantinople under this brutal siege, and from what we know about other cities under stress, it seemed to me almost inevitable that homeless or loosely supervised kids — hungry, frightened and bored by the unending bombardment and the lack of constructive outlet for their energies — would form street gangs, and that these would likely take on a pseudo-patriotic coloring. In my novel they call themselves "Blues" because in the past, when the city had been prosperous enough to hold extravagant sporting events in the Hippodrome, "Blues" had been the name of one of the major sporting factions — rowdy gangs of fans famous for street fighting. 

Race in America - The Christian Science Monitor - CSMonitor.com

This photo-sequence is a good follow-up to Peter de Lissovoy's novel-memoir about civil rights struggles in the South in the '60s. (See review below, posted 16 July.)

Race in America - The Christian Science Monitor - CSMonitor.com

Thought and language

Through the Language Glass: Why the World Looks Different in Other Languages by Guy Deutscher

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


This digressive examination of whether and, if so, how a speaker's language structures his/her thoughts contains two interesting arguments bundled with amusing anecdotes about odd languages and linguists. Some of the descriptions of non-Western languages, and even of Western languages (English among them) at earlier stages of development, show truly surprising ways of putting together information, such as numbers of tenses, whether person and time of action are included in verb or noun or in separate words (as in modern English), and even the number of sounds available to speakers. Current consensus: No language is a prison of thought; the speaker of any language can find a way to express any idea, even if s/he has to invent or borrow new vocabulary for some of it. But some languages oblige the speaker to give information that is optional in other languages. The handiest example is the English pronouns; if I'm speaking of a person, I can't say "it" visited me, I have to let you know whether the person was "he" or "she". If we're speaking Turkish (or any of many other languages with unsexed pronouns), I can leave the sex of the person ambiguous if I choose — or add something if I want to let you know.

The first of the two interesting arguments is about the language of color. As William Gladstone discovered in his monumental study of Homer, there are no color references beyond "black" (meaning dark), "white" or light, and red in the Odyssey or Iliad. (I had had no idea that the politician Gladstone, before becoming PM, had been such an important scholar). The sea or sky are never described as blue, the word sometimes translated as "green" is really much vaguer (could be yellow, or could just mean "ripe"). Later research revealed that no ancient language, or modern language of preliterate simple societies, has a developed vocabulary for all the colors that you or I would see and name and that surround them in their environment. Gladstone and generations of later linguists assumed there was something wrong with primitive and ancient people's color vision. But no: Deutscher reports all the tests that have shown that even people who have no names for many color tones can see them perfectly well if they need to. They don't think of the sky as "blue" because it does not seem to them to be an object, just a vast emptiness, and as people become more aware of different colors blue is always (so far in all the studies) the last to be named, because it just doesn't appear much in their environment (except that empty sky). We today are far more sensitive to colors than our ancestors because of all the colored objects on the market and in our household and on our computer screens etc. For people a few centuries back, distinguishing between bright and dark and red (because of blood, symbolizing life) was quite enough.

The second argument is more amusing though less important: How assigning gender to inanimate objects affects, but only slightly, they way people perceive them. The German "die Brucke" is described as female, graceful, delicate, etc., the Spanish "el puente" as male, big, sturdy, the English "bridge" is simply a thing with no preconception about its delicacy or strength. But all three words refer to the same object. The sexual connotations of dish, spoon, sea, etc. are faint and of little consequence to most speakers in ordinary life, but can add flavor to the poetry in those languages that have not (like English) lost their genders.

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