signs and smmblls

Is it just me, or does it seem that the last year has seen a greater rollback of representative government in the West than any in living memory? Maybe it is me; I didn’t pay too much attention to the depredations of the Bush administration, largely because I was a teenager during most of it and therefore barely a human being, let alone a thoughtful one. But something about the year’s ‘memes’ (a real shitwad of a neologism) has really struck me as being altogether a portent of nasty things to come: there was Greece, and its absolute brutalization by Northern Europe (which is of course still in progress); there’s the recent spate of Supreme Court rulings legalizing, for example, full-body cavity searches for anyone suspected of practically anything, and throwing out the right of overseas litigants to file for damages from corporations accused of torture; the NSA has let it be known that they are constructing a data collection center recording every electronic transaction they can get their hands on (which they are now allowed to keep for five years), while those who have reported on the expansion of the agency’s purview to domestic surveillance have been illegally detained at airports and had their homes raided by the FBI; and the normalization of drone warfare continuing apace not only abroad but even here on either side of the ol’ Mason-Dixon.

Now, I am someone who is not really attached to the idea of American exceptionalism and so have no problem believing that this is all leading to what one William Binney, former NSA official and now outspoken opponent of the growing tumor of its reach into our daily lives, called “turnkey totalitarianism.” Modern Americans, I would argue, are far more socialized for authoritarianism than democracy: we cannot stand to be criticized, and we show slavish allegiance to any personality promising us the unlimited right to pursue our greatness, a state-of-mind not uncommon in the Europe of the 30′s, and indeed any region or time in which scarcity captured the hearts of the many even while the few lived the truth of abundance. We as a people lack moral restraints that would prevent us from the maximal extraction of our neighbors’ property, and our highest cultural ideal is the decadent waste of material plenty. We’re a bad culture, and bad cultures are always waiting for a bad leader whose immoral assumption of power abolishes the self-consciousness those cultures feel at their own decay.

My real question about our Brave New World is what, if anything, is actually driving the relentless attack on our expectation of civil liberties and the swelling of the sweaty and malicious bulk of the security state? You can make all the comparisons you want to past totalitarianisms, and on technical matters you’d be right: it’s undisputable that enshrined in law and precedent now are all the tools a dictatorship needs. But what the National Unity government in Hungary or the Nazi Party in Germany (a classic and overused example, I know) had that America does not as of yet is right there in their monikers: a worldview. The Nazis demanded terror as an implement of state because they had an idea for Germany that only brutality could make real. Where is the modern American equivalent to this worldview? Our liberal use of torture and the massacre of civilians in regions where we’ve waged war is indisputable; we aren’t morally above most states with Great Leaders. What terrifies me more than anything else about us is that authoritarianism might be arriving in the States simply because. Like a Kafka play, we are scared and aware that something hideous is happening all around us and yet stunned by how calmly it all appears to be happening. We look into the face of our fellows and shout My God, man, can you not see it, do you not smell it, that jaundiced rottenness everywhere in the airand in return we get blank stares and small smiles. It’s madness.

How do you fight an enemy that does not claim to be your enemy? People (Americans especially) are already bad enough at understanding snapshots of the world. Expecting them to monitor with enough care the transactional changes in their social and political lives is, if not an objectively unreasonable demand, at least one that is unlikely to be met. I am frightened that we will become citizens of a totalitarian state that grew up around us almost like a force of nature. America’s only remaining ideology is the market, which is really nothing more than a kind of economic nihilism, a charging forward without any more reason to than that one can. That same nihilism appears at work in our normalizing of security and surveillance; we don’t even seem to be aware of a threat to us of any real consequence, terrorism having receded in the public consciousness and no phantom rising to take its place. The handcuffs have simply appeared, and, duly, we’ve extended our wrists. Having thus been immaculately conceived, so too will the logic of authority be that of inevitability; and with control internalized, cruelty will find its justification within us all. God help us if I’m right.

Select passages from the Jehovah’s Witness pamphlet ‘Aware’, which is offered to me at least once a week by differing squads of Caribbean-accented women who knock on my door very early in the morning:

Should You Chew Betel Nut?

…

Betel-nut vendors, sometimes with their children, set up their tables in public markets and on the streets. Other vendors employ neon lights and scantily clad girls–”betel-nut beauties”–to attract customers.

…

What is the Bible’s View?

The Bible is not a medical textbook, and it does not specifically mention betel-nut chewing. It does, however, contain a broad range of principles that can help us to lead cleaner, healthier, and better lives. Think about the following Bible verses and the questions they prompt.

“Beloved ones, let us cleanse ourselves of every defilement of flesh and spirit, perfecting holiness in God’s fear.” (2 Corinthians 7:1) “Present your bodies … holy, acceptable to God.” (Romans 12:1) Would a person be holy, or clean, in God’s eyes if he were to pollute his body by chewing betel nut?

…

“You must love your neighbor as yourself.” (Mark 12:31) “Love cannot wrong a neighbour.” (Romans 13:10, The New English Bible) Would we be showing genuine love for others if we spit unsightly–and unhygienic–red saliva on paths, sidewalks, or other areas?

I’m going to go ahead and admit that I really don’t like Ezra Klein. He is part of a journalistic complex that generates received opinion on a wide variety of political and economics issues, and he is part of that complex because he steadfastly refuses to say anything concrete and interesting about anything. I can summarize any given Ezra Klein article like this:

How did Issue X come to unfold? While it would appear to be the work of Group Y, if you look a little closer, the evidence [Ed: unreferenced] says that in fact, Group Z, which is opposed to Group Y, was equally responsible. Group Y believes something very strongly and so does Group Z, and that’s our big problem: if only Group Y and Group Z would compromise, we could approach Issue X rationally and come up with a solution pleasing to all parties involved.

Klein is the kind of guy that will tell you that income inequality, corporate malfeasance, and money in politics are passive phenomenon accidentally promoted by various interest groups all of them essentially decent, law-abiding and good-intentioned. Not to worry, in other words: continue to love thy neighbor, no matter how high on the hill his house may be and how tall its walls.

Actually, it isn’t entirely true that we are without villain in the story of our national degeneration. Just take a look through the link I segued into and you’ll see what I mean. You see, this is a great example of the Kleinian (you could also say ‘Timesian’, since all of the ladies in gray seem to do it) method: take a problem the cause of which appears to be obvious (people with a lot of money and not very many scruples use that money in unscrupulous ways) and turn it on its head. Those lobbyists aren’t villains–quite the contrary! Do you really think that they could just hand a big ol’ bag of money to a senator with nothing more than a smile and a wink? Nobody is that bad. Think how guilty the senator would feel! No, no: the lobbyist is a bright, cheerful, and passionate guy or gal, and the senator someone who coincidentally shares that passion. So maybe the lobbyist offers the senator’s aide a job–wouldn’t you help a friend out if you had a vacancy at your firm?

Sure, here Klein is parroting Lessig, the author of the book he’s reviewing, but it’s this stuff that he clearly agrees with. His disagreement is with Lessig’s conclusion: that corporate money in politics is one of the prime drivers of political dysfunction. This, Klein thinks, is absurd, and he knows what the real culprit is: partisanship. You see, while we, as Americans, individual and corporate citizens together, may love one another, there’s a group of people who don’t feel the same way–or really, two groups, ‘X’ and ‘Y’, Democrats and Republicans. These two groups are equally committed to their ideological ends and will stop at nothing to put them into practice. Corporations may have money, but they’re just betting it on which dog is going to tear the other one to pieces first (though maybe they’ll weight their betting portfolio with some shorts on the opposing dog). If we want answers, we have to look at the dogs, and why they’re so gosh-darn angry.

I hate this relentless march to the middle, this attitude that NO problem has any clear villain, that everything is in fact caused by the systemic actions of equal but opposing forces. It’s this pseudo-analytic approach that prevents anyone with influence from actually doing anything to fix the problems they make a living out of reporting on. The problem in Congress is not two-sided: it is one, and it is the G.O.P. Democrats are feckless and they are corrupt, but their corruption has made them fat and sluggish. The Republicans are vicious. They have waged an unceasing war against all American social institutions that do not explicitly aid their vision of a highly stratified nation in which the majority is largely rendered powerless by poor education and low-wage jobs, but kept at bay by self-censorship through received religious values. There is no Democratic Rush Limbaugh, because there couldn’t be; you couldn’t be a progressive and behave like him, because, and here’s the clincher, progressives are not evil. Limbaugh, and Hannity, and DeMint, and Boehner, are evil. That their evil is based in what is no more than money-worship may make it appear banal, but, to borrow from Dr. Hannah Arendt, Eichmanns made Auchwitz. You cannot behave the way that these people behave and support the things they support without being evil, or else evil has no meaning at all. And it’s people like Klein who would have us believe that it doesn’t, and people like Klein who have made our public life as Kafkaesque as it is today.

I promise (to the empty seats arrayed around this blog) that I am hereby revivifying the this and the here, and not at all in the way that I said I would in the post prior. I have nothing whatsoever to say about politics or economics. When it comes down to it, the world is more-or-less shit, as I’m sure any sane person would agree. Little if anything in the way of sound policymaking is discernable in the public spheres of the West and elsewhere. I am waiting for the year to develop before I try to say anything interesting about the status quo–but say it I will!

I haven’t been anywhere near this blog in months, and today is the day that I aim to fix that. After all, it’s not as if things are quiet–in fact, I think it wouldn’t be misguided to call 2011 something of a maelstrom, or, better yet, the less-polished but more-evocative ‘shitstorm’. Now that the Greek domino has fallen, vulnerable states in south Europe look poised to drop next. We’re already hearing that Italian 10-year bonds have hit records highs and that French and Spanish spreads v. Germany have widened to 146 and 409 bps. What intelligent analysts predicted as early as last year would result from an incoherent EU response to Greece’s fiscal weakness is coming to pass: the disparities between intraregional institutional performance have reared their ugly heads.

And meanwhile, the federal government of the United States has entered, as much as I understand it, a period of prolonged non-functionality. I’m not interested here in taking anymore shots at Obama and his cadres, a job I think is well-handled in the press. Whether Obama is a bad politician or simply a conservative one is irrelevant. His policymaking remains unchanged in either case. Unfortunately for us, but rather fortuitously for him, the Republicans have mounted what can only loosely be termed a challenge to his incumbency. I don’t even need to dip my toes into Cain waters to illustrate this point: Romney, their straightest shooter, is about as inspiring as a stain on your tie.

So we simply don’t function politically at this moment, and we won’t, I suspect, until something sufficiently major (or distracting) disrupts the status quo. Now I need to be clear that I consider no ethical weight when I say ‘function’. A dictatorship functions just as a democracy does. And given the flaccidity of the left, I think the right, no matter how uncoordinated its offensive may be, is still better poised to sweep power. What’s missing is a charismatic frontman–and I mean charismatic in the view of his audience, with its knee-jerk loathing of an interventionist federal government and its powerful attachment to law and order (and yes, I know precisely how contradictory these two sentiments really are). You’d think that the one thing a society as impotent and angry as this one would be primed and ready to produce just such a smiling sociopath, but as of yet no one fits the bill. I suspect that the coming presidential election will put more pressure on the right to find this man, or at least to nominate someone from within its ranks to stand in his stead.

Occupy Wall Street has got to be the only bright spot in this pallid, early evening sky of an era, but I can’t quite bring myself around to trusting it completely. Its impulses are correct and its methods appear, for the most part, to be best for testing the still-unknown waters of our contemporary national conscience. It has been particularly good at demonstrating a deep fear of unrest by local authorities–Oakland and New York stand out here–though I can report anecdotely that here in my home city public sentiment has been drifting towards the OWS camp. That fact really should be unremarkable given that the vast majority of New Yorkers, and Americans generally, are jeopardized by the political oligarchy imposed on them by vested financial and non-financial business interests, but this is the age of keeping government out of your Medicare, so it’s all a big who-knows. Still, with the horizon still dim for growth, demand suppressed, and industry double-knotting its purse strings, I suspect that holdouts will be fewer, or battle lines more clearly drawn, in this America soon to be.

We sure do live in interesting times. And that’s the word.

Thought I’d throw up a link to this nice debunking of the fiscal vs. monetary policy debate at interfluidity. It seems incredible that so-called experts would be so enamored of form over function that they would be unable to see that, essentially, the Fed is a political agent just as much as the Treasury, which is to say no more than that it is an institution staffed and run by human beings.

The Zadroga Bill, passed last December by Congress to provide healthcare to first responders to the site of the World Trade Center attacks, was supposed to have been a much-needed (and criminally overdue) achievement by congressional Democrats. Well, guess what? The Republicans, who, because they are subhuman filth, have been blocking it for years, sabotaged it by requiring that it not cover the treatment of cancer. Conservatives say that there isn’t enough evidence to support claims that working in the toxic environment of Ground Zero contributed to the spectacularly high incidence rates among first responders of lung, throat, mouth, and pancreatic cancer.

I find it impossible to stomach centrism in the light of stories like these. Compromise requires some points of commonality between groups. The G.O.P. demonstrates day in and day out that the citizenry of the United States is to it no more than a calf for the bleeding. I don’t understand why we would ever behave any differently towards them. An effective political system is one able to eliminate threats to its citizens, and there is no bigger threat than the modern Republican Party. Until I see punitive legal action taken against them–the jailing of most of their leadership, the banning of their party–I won’t believe for a second any rosy narratives. And since nothing short of a violent revolution could emasculate and unseat America’s political class, I don’t really expect anything good at all.

Hot on the heels of press attention to an absolutely insane Amazonian drug called Oxi, which is literally tearing Brazil’s poor to pieces, we’ve got more evidence that this is an era of acute misery: a Russian heroin-facsimile called ‘krokodile.’ Listen to the toll it takes, if you can stomach it:

It is a drug for the poor, and its effects are horrific. It was given its reptilian name because its poisonous ingredients quickly turn the skin scaly. Worse follows. Oleg and Sasha [addicts interviewed in the article] have not been using for long, but Oleg has rotting sores on the back of his neck … Photographs of late-stage krokodil addicts are disturbing in the extreme. Flesh goes grey and peels away to leave bones exposed. People literally rot to death. [my emphasis]

It appears that the quality common to most of these modern drugs or drug-analogues is the speed at which they ruin the user physically. The Rio Times article posted above claimed that Oxi kills within a year, and the lead-up to death is a state one might not ungenerously label a living hell.

And yet the popularity of narcotics derived from what are unmistakably noxious chemicals is undeniable: just think of the methamphetamine problem that plagues almost the entirety of rural North America. Self-annihilating behavior of the skin-rotting sort is indicative of the psychological extremity to which huge swathes of the human race are at this moment being pushed. Is there any greater litmus test for economic and social emiseration than mass suicide by drug abuse? What possible reason could we have for defending our institutional arrangements knowing that Oxi and Krokodile are their result?

“According to data from Streeteasy.com,

more apartments priced at $10,000 and above per month were rented this May than in the same time period last year and the year before, and those apartments went off the market faster and without price cuts.

So says the Times, in a piece on the popularity of high-priced rentals in the city that has me saying, “Just fuck everything!” This article is so deadpan about such viscerally revolting excess that it could’ve been ripped straight off the politics page of The Onion. How do you resist making a sideways remark when

[T]he most expensive rental listed in the city [is] a mansion at 4 East 80th Street that is available, furnished or not, for $210,000 a month.

See, this is where I would have included some giggling scrap of irreverence, like, “I hope whoever rents this place has her or his water accidentally replaced with corn pesticide and spends a forty-eight hour period meeting their own internal anatomy on a bathroom floor.” Instead, the penlady (Diane Cardwell, if you want a new name to hate), caps off the piece with this little bit of cheerful whimsy:

Despite the stratospheric price tag, the rent is, in an extremely narrow sense, a bargain. The house, built for a Woolworth daughter and more recently owned by the health club entrepreneur Lucille Roberts, is also for sale at $90 million. Assuming a 20 percent down payment and 30-year-fixed loan at 5.5 percent, it would cost $408,808 a month, before insurance and taxes.

Fuck. You.

From Death and Drugs in Colombia by Daniel Wilkenson, New York Review of Books, June 23, 2011.