Everyone Says
Everyone says
what they do
is right,
and money is
a good thing
it can be
wonderful.
~John Giorno
Today I spent much of the day thinking of Lionel Goldbart, who died in a nursing home following a long physical incapacitation from a stroke. Lionel was a poet, a Freedom Rider, a junkie, a pain-in-the-ass, a Jeopardy champion and a first-rate mind.
Many years ago I disappointed him greatly when I refused to renounce violence. He told me it was an imperative. Violence exists everywhere, I told him. It is embedded in the fabric of the cosmos. What should I renounce? He asked me years later if I had changed my mind. I had not. I think it was for this reason that he was wary of me, even though he was very pleased when I publicly declared him to be the most concise of all the South Beach poets.
Nevertheless, thinking of him today I wondered why it is that poets, the most unwelcome of all artists, why it is that they ‘get it’ when others tend to be so myopic. It’s probably because lies are the raw material of their work. “I don’t want anybody telling me about solutions. They don’t work.” said Giorno.
What solutions do we expect to come from the political class? It is absurd to believe that ideas outside the realm of the status-quo will come from those whose job it is to protect and serve the status-quo. I say this not in a mean-spirited way, it’s just natural. When was the last time you challenged your boss, never mind challenging the corporate or government system, or the underlying justifications for that system that keep both you and your boss employed? Never; because “He who speaks the truth must keep his horse saddled.” (Andre Codrescu)
All the branches of knowledge, [in this case journalism] which continue to develop as the thought of the spectacle, have to justify a society without justification, and constitute a general science of false consciousness. This thought is completely conditioned by the fact that it cannot and will not investigate its own material basis in the spectacular system. ~ Debord Spectacle 194
“Dems sputtering on Bush tax cuts, plus Obama’s dilemma” reads the headline from the excellent blog The Reid Report. The post goes on to cite others like Mark Halperin who at least understands the President lacks “[this same] mythical leverage to stand up to the GOP.”
Later in the story Reid rightly scoffs at Michael Lerner’s Washington Post column in which he proposes saving the Obama administration “by challenging him in the 2012 presidential primaries with a candidate who would unequivocally commit to a well-defined progressive agenda and contrast it with the Obama administration’s policies”, this in a strategy designed not to win, but to move Obama to the left. Destroy the village in order to save it, right?
Frank Rich in the New York Times says Mr Obama suffers from Stockholm Syndrome, yet he believes the captors are Republicans, not the titans of industry.
Continued speculation within the spectacle about the spectacle will amount to little or nothing except more spectacular business and a strengthening of the ruling narrative. While it’s true that the Democratic and Republican parties are different, and what party is in power does matter, they constitute a ruling coalition. The global economic apparatus makes it impossible for the idealistic movements of either the socialist left or libertarian right from actually moving toward their vision.
What we will see is what we have been seeing, an increase in State control of populations because the real enemy of global capitalism is anarchy, local empowerment, and semi-autonomy as social organization, and a taste of the vast invisible Tao, a knowing of the Dharma, the integrated Buddha minds of humanity.
The State exists for the defense of the economy, and it’s the economy that’s killing us and the planet. There will be No More Stalins, No More Hitlers, not even another Roosevelt.
What is it that Mr. Obama is expected to do that we don’t do ourselves?
A Strategic Disadvantage
“Some things that work in one decade, don’t work in the next. So you mark it down as a noble idea that failed.” John Giorno
South Africa, 1990
We’re at a strategic disadvantage. There is nothing to believe in.
The Tea Party is sustained by a diet of faux Americana. It’s a simple and coherent myth that gives the group identity continuity over time.
A Common Party of the Left (CPL) would be sustained by, what? There is no simple unifying idea, only siloed groups of environmentalists, progressive humanitarians, socialists, human rights activists, animal rights activists, conservative-led labor unions and so forth, each with their own goals and, most importantly, their own vernacular.
In a story on the Maddow Blog, Senator Sanders says the goal of such a CPL would be ‘to demand that the Democratic leadership and the President fight for the middle class and for working families.’ Hardly an inspiring vision. And, of course, there is no middle class as a class in the United States. There is only an income range of often broken families that corresponds roughly to what industrial workers once made.
Surely Senator Sanders knows that the Democratic Party along with the labor unions purged the last of their ideological socialists and communists in the 50s. That is why Senator Sanders is a Socialist, not a Democrat.
What is missing in this discussion is the understanding that the Tea Party is a cultural phenomenon, not a political one. Its common culture and language is what unifies it. Its political faction, the Libertarians, will soon find themselves facing the contradictions within this group, and with the political opportunists who have already taken it over.
A cultural unification of the Common Progressive Left cannot be manufactured out of nothing. It must grow in the ground of its predecessors in art, literature, music, fashion and the radical anti-establishment actions of the 50s and 60s, and with the Situationists in Europe.
Efforts at legislative pragmatism simply will not work, as evidenced by President Obama’s attempts.
There is no point in complaining about the Democrats or the President. They’re doing what it is that they know, and what they think is right, just like everyone else. It simply won’t work.
It’s All Wrong
Here we are in Wonderland. The holiday lights are going up and the great winter festival of extravagance begins again.
As Debord said, the remnant feelings of an earlier, cyclical time are exploited through pseudo-festivals and empty rituals, much as the pointless games and spectacles in the court of the Red Queen.
Those silly courtiers and fearful subjects, though quite varied in their appearance and idiosyncrasies, had one thing in common; their thoughts, speech and behaviors were completely confined and determined by their self-image, by who they believed they were. Except of course the cat, who knew, and Alice, who wondered.
And so it is in our social discourse, our ideas remain well within our chosen brand identity; Tea Party Revolutionary, Libertarian Freedom Fighter, Party Pragmatist, Strictly Business, Progressive Social Humanitarian, to name the big ones. Of course there are the Greens and the rump of the Socialist alliance and so on, but the tendency is the same. Ideas are not created, but are ready-made and packaged, each on a different shelf, in a different isle. Product placement becomes key to sales, and sales mean more brand awareness and more cash in the coffers of the processors, the party operatives.
One interesting thing is that, perhaps with the exception of the naive Libertarians and Anarchists, neither of which is suited for actual social organization as they are basically utopian, all of the brand-name ideologies have as their basic purpose the objective of being bought within the existing economy and nation-state supermarket. And let’s be clear, nobody forces us to buy this junk, we choose to buy it because it’s quick and easy.
For instance, nearly everyone might agree that with unemployment at an official 10%, and real unemployment at 20%, and subsets of various minority unemployment at 50%, that ‘putting people back to work’ is both a noble and logical endeavor. This completely ignores the obvious fact that, at the end of the not-so-long road of industrialization, labor, nearly all labor, is superfluous. It is simply not needed. The ‘labor-saving’ appliances in our households perform the same economic function as every other machine; they ‘save’ labor. That is, they decrease labor’s value in the production of goods, services and wealth. So as the technology of basic production spreads, the question is not how to put people back to work, it is how to value people for some quality other than their labor. No more chattel slaves or wage slaves. I don’t want a job, I want a life.
Or, with worldwide financial chaos stemming from currencies based on ‘confidence’ and the natural tendency of accumulation, everyone might agree that ‘getting our economy growing again’ is a no-brainer, so to speak. But this ignores the fact that, protestations of the Party Pragmatists aside, it is this very economy of accumulation that is destroying our ability to physically live on this planet. Any economy that is based on constant growth will inevitably reach a point of environmental collapse. But an economy based on movement, on flow, on circulation is both a sustainable model and a more just model, since resources must circulate, as opposed to what they do now, accumulating in vast reservoirs of stagnant wealth. So the question becomes not so much how to create wealth, but how to use resources not based on their commodity value.
Some systems fail not because of what they can’t do, but because of what they can’t stop doing.
Obviously, these are revolutionary changes. And they must not be merely revolutionary ideas, as time for idle academic parlor talk is a leisure luxury we do not have. As Grant Peeples says, “it’s hard to make a revolution with your face 6 feet from the television.”
The natural stresses on the social and economic structures will continue to build, and they cannot be diffused. When the quake hits, those structures will fall.
Some 25 years ago, John Cage remarked that the whole edifice is so weak that “it’s no good trying to fix it here and fix it there. Everything’s all wrong.”
It is useless and futile to spend our time choosing sides, claiming superiority and calling the other names, Republican or Democrat, Tea Bagger or Socialist, in a game that is played within the same crumbling stadium.
Beyond the Thunderdome, outside of Bartertown, there is not just an empty desert. There is a tao of green grasses with streams that flow from the Lakes of Oliveros. A Cageian breeze sways the trees of Merton. There is a modern school there full of artists and monks who teach the basics of life, love, and understanding, the natural resources of the new economy.
Perhaps we should sit there a while, just to get our wits about us. We’re going to need t hem.
Pax Lupo 