Secousse et Crainte

First we showed the Afghanis who's boss, and now Iraq. Who's next on the hit list? My sources say France.

Peut-être, after seeing what has happened to Iraq, Chirac and his minions will surrender peacefully and seek asylum in, say, the Ivory Coast. But don't count on it: France is a proud, arrogant country, and we know it possesses weapons of mass destruction. Frog-eaters, prepare for Opération Secousse et Crainte.

The reasons are obvious. For one, targetting our Tomahawks and bombs against the Quai d'Orsay, Nôtre-Dame, and other monuments of high symbolic and strategic value will demonstrate the United States' even-handedness: It's not just Muslim-majority countries that should fear to defy the U.S. Secondly, it will eliminate that country's pretensions to dominate its European neighbors and any dreams it may still have of an independent force de frappe. Third, it will open up wonderful reconstruction opportunities for Haliburton and other U.S. firms, thus boosting the U.S. economy. Fourth, by taking out France we also knock out any potential insolence from Germany, and thereby liberate the vibrant New Europe of Estonia, Bulgaria, and all those other little countries with brand-new democracies from the dead hand of Old Europe and its obsolete values of Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité. It will also be a most gracious gesture to repay Tony Blair for his support. Finally, and most importantly, is the moral imperative. The Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld junta, plus Ashford, is dedicated to stamping out the reactionary doctrine France announced more than two centuries ago and has never formally disowned: its Déclaration des Droits de l'Homme.

Remember, you read it here first.

Evil of banality

A friend forwarded this column by Jimmy Breslin, where he quotes Adolf Hitler's 1939 speech explaining why Germany was obliged to go to war on Poland. Breslin compares the banality of Hitler's phrasing (a very dull speech masking a very dramatic aggression) to the similar banality of GWB's explanation of why we have to bomb Iraq.

Therein lies the evil of banality. Combined with the banality of evil -- the readiness of the unthinking to do what they are told by those who lull them from thinking -- and you have a doubly potent weapon.

Oxymorons

The magazine I saw a man reading last night on the subway was titled History Today.

The duplicating shop across the street is called "Unique Copy."

Last night as bombs burst in Baghdad, GWB declared: "The people of the United States and their friends and allies will not live at the mercy of an outlaw regime that threatens the peace with weapons of mass murder."

"Preventive war."

Sane paranoia

A friend writes that she is scared. I can only reply:
Of course you're scared. Our government is trying to kill us, doing everything it can to provoke terrorism. If you weren't paranoid, you'd be nuts.

Maybe, though, it'll be like the last time: a remote television spectacle for the American public, mayhem only for distant foreigners. That's the optimistic view (unless you happen to be among the distant foreigners). I don't think those foreigners will let us get away with it scot free this time, though.

Messianic democracy

Bush's ultimatum to Saddam last night, followed by PBS's review of its own reports over the years on Iraq & the U.S., followed by Bill Moyer's interviews, first of Kinan Makiyah and then of Simon Schama and Walter Isaacson, was more TV than I normally watch in a month, and it was fascinating. It made me appreciate more keenly two things: the complicity of U.S. foreign policy in creating the monster Saddam (beginning back in 1963, when he was a would-be assassin), and the Messianic impulse of those in Washington who now want to eliminate him.

It was the latter that most surprised me; I'd underestimated it. Sure, there are lots of grubby, self-interested motives behind the rush to war, including control of oil fields and the promise of juicy "reconstruction" contracts for Cheney's Haliburton. But there is also a nobler, stupider principle at work: noble because it is disinterested, and stupid for that same reason -- it benefits nobody among those pursuing it, and it can't possibly work. This stupidly noble idea is imposing "democracy" on people who don't want it.

Makiya dismisses as "paternalist" the argument that the Iraqis (or any other people) aren't ready for democracy, because (he insists) all people yearn to be "free." This is ridiculous. That could be true only if we are willing to call "freedom" whatever men and women yearn for. We can say that those who answered Osama bin Laden's calls on September 11 or in Afghanistan died for a kind of freedom, and in their minds they probably did, but not a kind that has any connection to Paul Wolfowitz's vision of Arab democracy.

When they say "democracy," Americans always assume something like our own system (naturally!), with guarantees of private property and of personal liberties as well as a vote. Separation of church & state, respect for minority rights, and several other specifics are part of the mental package. But people cannot yearn for what they have never experienced nor even suspected of existing. What Makiyah and American democratic evangelists like Paul Wolfowitz assume is self-evident and innate is in fact learned behavior, learned in specific historical conditions not easy to reproduce. It takes time, patience, and each people's unique historical experience for them to reach a stability that works for them. If left to their own, I think the educated cadres among all peoples would tend toward something not exactly like, but more like, what we call democracy -- but with their own quirks growing out of each people's particular historical traditions. But the United States keeps bumbling forward blindly, forcing people with tanks, bombs and money to accept systems that make no sense to them, and thus creates more monsters.

"Pops"

All my life I've wanted to look older. Now it seems I have at last succeeded. Twice in the past week, the children who nowadays sell tickets to museums and movies have asked me if I wanted the senior citizen discount. And last night, as my companion and I were walking home from a movie ("Russian Ark," since you ask), some stranger called out, "That's right, Pops. Take care of the lady."

I don't mind the years -- experience is a growing treasure. I do though want to retard the other effects of aging, the ones that could keep me from further interesting experiences. Coloring my beard is obviously not sufficient. So I rely on two techniques: physical exercise, to keep the machinery going, and fiction. To have the most exciting experiences imaginable, all I have to do is imagine them. And while I'm doing it, it doesn't really matter what I look like to people on the outside.

But I think maybe I will try again to color my beard. No point in provoking the ignorant young whippersnappers.

Cataclysms of Consciousness

Daniel del Solar has forwarded a letter from self-described "Podunk university English teacher" Luciana Bohne, who complains that a junior said to her, without embarrassment, "I don't read." Prof. Bohne warns that "Without minds or hearts, [such students] are instrumentalized to buy whatever deadens their clamoring and frightened senses--official lies, immoral wars, Barbies, and bankrupt educations."

Prof. Bohne, what you are experiencing is a mere ripple of the Third Cataclysm of Consciousness -- the third major degradation of thinking and imagination since humans first started flaking stones for tools. We are entering what will be remembered (if anybody still remembers how to remember) as the Post-literate Age.

The First Cataclysm began around 1000 B.C. with the invention of writing -- at first, thought to be no more than a handy way for the king's minions to keep track of who owed taxes and where the grain was stored. The terrible effects of this invention have been exhaustively explored by Julian Jaynes (1977), The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. Boston, Houghton Mifflin Company. They included the loss of memory (people relied on marks on clay tablets instead of their own memories of the songs of their people) and, far more disturbing, the loss of the voice of God.

The practice of reading, Jaynes argued, creates neural connections between the left and right hemispheres of the brain, so that auditory right-brain impressions are no longer independent of left-brain analysis. In Homer, whose songs were elaborated in an oral culture long before literacy was introduced, the heroes literally [sic] hear the voices of their gods; later Greeks, infected by literacy, no longer could. I'm not doing Jaynes' brilliant book justice, but that's the main idea. For more, see his many fans' website.

Beyond Jaynes, we can see that the First Cataclysm is still continuing. Whenever literacy is introduced into a previously oral culture, the young lose their awe of the ancient traditions and their respect for their elders, and they also lose -- even when they try very hard -- the ability to improvise long heroic songs fluently. Well, Walter Ong can tell you a lot more about that problem. Cf. Ong, Walter J. (1982). Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word. London and New York, Routledge.

The Second Cataclysm is also still going on. This was the popularization of printing, which had its most immediate deleterious effects in Europe. Benedict Anderson makes a convincing case that the proliferation of cheaply printed books, pamphlets, sermons and so on in the vernacular languages spelled the end of Latin as a universal language among the tiny, international learned elite, and gave a huge boost to nationalist sentiment. From there it's been downhill all the way to Slobodan Milosevic and the unfortunate Zoran Djindjic, not to mention Israelis and Palestinians, or Timorese and Indonesians, or any of countless other bloody conflicts. Cf. Anderson, Benedict (1991). Imagined Communities. London, Verso.

Of course, in the wake of each cataclysm, new generations were born not knowing the value of a single universal language, or the even greater glories of oral culture. And there grew a class of people who actually enjoyed reading and thought they were superior because they knew how to do it. Even today, there are little groups of people trying to return to oral cultures, and larger societies struggling to preserve the ancient languages -- Sanskrit, old Greek, classical Latin, Icelandic.

And no doubt there will be many like us, the old timers, who cling to our print-literacy culture even after it has fallen completely into disuse. The new generations will have no trouble communicating with one another without reading print, but still, we Old Timers fear that they will be missing something. And we will be right.

Just as you and I have lost forever the voices of our gods and the enchantment of bowing a one-stringed fiddle and improvising heroic verses for days on end. So, the loss is inevitable. All we can do, like the bards of oral societies and the chanting monks of early literacy, is to cling to our traditions as long as we can.

Inventing, and destroying, the wheel

Speaking of consequences, as the Bush Administration and its "coalition of the willing" (Spain, Britain and the ever-powerful Bulgaria) prepare to bomb massively the cradle of civilization, do they have any idea what they will be obliterating? It all started there -- the wheel, writing, cities, empires, right there in Mesopotamia ("Between-the-Rivers," i.e., the Tigris & Euphrates that frame Baghdad). It's like killing your own mother, except worse: like killing your own mother while you're still attached at the umbilical cord. Oh, well. This is probably just sentimental nonsense. We can probably level Baghdad and obliterate every sign of our ancient heritage without feeling any loss. Except, that strange twinge, a twitch in a phantom limb. So they gave us the beginning of civilization. Fine. We've got it, we've ballooned it into a massive world-wide system, and learned to use it to destroy far more effectively than those ancient charioteers with the braided beards. And we don't need them any more. Funny, though. I think I just heard somebody say that same thing about us.

Too easy to change the world

The assassination of Zoran Djindjic confirms (it seems to me) the statement I've put up (to the left of this column) describing the premise of this weblog. Nineteen guys with boxcutters, one guy with a sniperscope, a pack of zealots who stole an election and now control the US Armed Forces, can change the world. Nobody is bothering to think about the consequences.

[The statement referred to, since removed, said something like: "The revolutionaries have only changed the world. The point, however, is to understand it." See Marx and Engels, The German Ideology.]

Readings

Woolf, Virginia (1925). Mrs. Dalloway. New York, Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc.

A mistresspiece of internal monologue. The reader gets to eavesdrop on the conversations that Clarissa Dalloway and her acquaintances imagine but dare not or know not how to speak. This is a subtler and wittier X-ray than Orwell's of the anxieties of the lower middle, middle middle and upper middle classes, groping for a new normality after the trauma of the Great European War. Septimus Warren Smith, the war hero driven mad by that war, and his obtuse but self-assured doctors symbolize a whole eddy of misunderstandings, while Clarissa submerges her doubts by organizing a party where the guests make no gesture without calculating the impression they might create on others. I thank the makers of the movie "The Hours" for getting me to engage in this delicious read.

More fiction commentary, including a recent note on Stephen Crane, is available here.