Between Mother And Justice

Condemning the terrorism of the FLN (National Liberation Front) in their campaign for an independent Algeria, Albert Camus outraged the anti-colonial French left by declaring: "I have to denounce blind terrorism in the streets of Algiers, which might one day strike my mother or my family. I believe in justice, but I'll defend my mother before justice." In choosing his flesh-and-blood mother over the abstract ideal of justice, Camus proved himself not just to be a good son--one of the few remaining meaningful roles left in a post-God world--but a true humanist. Sartre may have written that "Existentialism is a Humanism," but for him human beings were less important than the fashionable causes they were killed in the name of (though extreme principles necessarily lead to extreme hypocrisy, and it is certain that for Sartre some people, like himself, were less worthy of sacrifice than others). To be a good Communist party member was to put Party before all else, certainly before such a historically negligible element as one's mother. To do so would be scientifically (remember that Marxism was once seriously considered a "science") absurd--and few intellectuals besides Camus took the centrality of absurdity to life seriously. Perhaps the suspicion that most left-wing intellectuals would indeed put justice (or egalitarianism, or solidarity, or multiculturalism, or whatever the sacralized word of the moment may be) before their mothers is what makes many, including the lower classes they aim to speak for, look askance upon them. If a man can't be trusted to put his mother first, how can he be trusted at all?

If the concept of mother is expanded to motherland, we can see exactly how and why the internationalist left failed so spectacularly in the twentieth century. The concepts nationalists use in their rhetoric--blood, soil, community--are much more tangible than abstract notions of international worker solidarity. International socialism failed precisely in 1914 when the workers of the world chose their physical neighbours--their fellow citizens--over their imaginary neighbours--their fellow workers in distant lands. It was the floating threat of internationalist rape of the motherland--by communists, by Jews, by global finance--that allowed ultra-nationalists to expand conservative ideals like land and blood into counter-revolutionary sacralized abstractions of their own. The irony is that by elevating the concept of motherland to a holy signifier, ultra-nationalists were equally as guilty as the communists in putting unreachable goals before actual people. "Between my motherland and my mother, I choose my mother," would be just as much a heresy in a national socialist milieu as "Between justice and my mother, I choose my mother" was for Camus in an international socialist milieu. The autonomy of the family is a threat to any totalitarian system, and due to the primordial loyalty they inspire and the unregulated cultural and moral values they impart, perhaps mothers are the greatest anti-revolutionary threat of all.

Human beings exist in two worlds--the physical world, and the symbolic world that gives the physical world meaning. Symbols are made real through actions in the physical world. Thus communism was certainly a real phenomenon, as real people lived, killed and died for it--but it was them, not the symbols, that made it real. Thus Stalin was as much a legitimate representative of communism as Marx. Humans are symbolic animals and can no less rid ourselves of the urge to create abstractions than the urge to defecate and eat. Camus discussed the meanings of many important abstractions in his work: freedom, justice, revolt, exile. This is what makes him a philosopher and an intellectual, like his countryman Sartre. But unlike Sartre, unlike the ideologically dogmatic left, Camus was not willing to sacrifice his physical world of flesh-and-blood ties for symbols that are ultimately only as meaningful as the meaning we put into them. If the meaning we put into symbols involves the sacrifice of kin, these symbols are instrinsically anti-human. The swastika is anti-human, though surely Heidegger claimed to be deeply concerned with the human condition; the hammer and sickle is anti-human, though surely Sartre and the rest of Stalin's apologists claimed to be humanists. To be an intellectual requires an active mind, but to be a human being requires more than that. It requires, at the very least, loyalty to one's mother before any abstraction. Unlike so many intellectuals, Camus was more than the sum of his symbols: he was a true human being.

Peace Kills Again

From BBC News:

'World peace' hitcher is murdered

An Italian woman artist who was hitch-hiking to the Middle East dressed as a bride to promote world peace has been found murdered in Turkey.

The naked body of Giuseppina Pasqualino di Marineo, 33, known as Pippa Bacca, was found in bushes near the northern city of Gebze on Friday.

She had said she wanted to show that she could put her trust in the kindness of local people.

Turkish police say they have detained a man in connection with the killing.

I will not belabour the irony here. Needless to say Lennon-McCartneyism, the ideology of peace through good intention alone, has claimed another victim. The belief in the inherent goodness of man isn't only naive; it's dangerous. I'm sure the Italian woman had pure and beautiful intentions. Most Italian women do. That's why everyone loves them. But maybe the Casa Nostra knows something about human nature that peace brides don't. Peace is not the absence of force but the balance of force. The absence of force creates a vacuum and nature, as well as depraved Turkish peasants, quickly fill a vacuum. The greatest lesson of the twentieth century is the fatal distance between ideals--a classless society, peace in our time, "all you need is love"--and reality. Unfortunately no amount of naked corpses seems capable of quelling the suicide-utopian need to believe in the good in everyone. The kindness of strangers barely extends as far as one's own community, let alone the world. Good borders make good neighbours, and no better paean to failed idealism can match Vladimir Mayakovsky's final words: "The love boat has crashed against the shore of reality." Yet in each generation it is seemingly dredged up and set floating anew, while the savages on the shore lick their lips in anticipation of booty.

Love Is Not Enough: Against Lennon-McCartneyism

I am against Lennon-McCartneyism. I believe you need more than just love. Now that Paul McCartney's lack of prenuptual agreement with his one-legged ex-wife has cost him several dozen millions, perhaps he feels the same way. The Beatles have promoted every easy answer since their inception as revolutionary propagandists for hand-holding. Coming together, strawberry fields, taking a sad song and making it better: a mop-top of luscious fiction over a misshapen bald reality. I don't deny a place for love and togetherness. But I can't imagine the world of no possessions and no religion lasting for a second before implosion and civil war, despite the soothing piano melody. At least Marxism-Leninism recognized the practical need for a dictatorship of the proletariat before the arrival of the imagined paradise. The psychedelic daydream revolution of Lennon-McCartneyism jumps straight into the saccharine pipe dream. While it may be unfair to blame the Beatles for the failed legacy of sixties utopianism, they were its undoubted figureheads and their naive vapidness symbolic of the times. In his memoir The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage, Todd Gitlin recalls that at a mass meeting over a campus anti-war strike, some union activists started singing “Solidarity Forever,” but few knew the words. Only when someone else began singing “Yellow Submarine,” could the hippies and activists unite in song.

The sixties was a love boat without captain, crashing into the shores of Altamont, the Manson murders, the decline of Haight-Ashbury into a cesspool of crime and its own inherent futility. Sympathetic in other respects, Theodore Roszak called the sixties search for psychedelic meaning “Counterfeit Infinity.” Turning off your mind, relaxing and floating downstream was painted as a revolutionary act in order to forgo the need to implement actual social change. Visiting Timothy Leary's declining psychedelic commune at the Milbrook estate, Charles Slack asked the important question: “Who was going to do the dishes?” Nobody wanted to do the dishes, and that's why every sixties experiment in better living--communes, open relationships--failed. I appreciate what some of the sixties radicals did as sheer performance art--conscripting shamans in an attempt to levitate the Pentagon at a protest, nominating a sow named Pigasus for President. But the only political consequence of Jerry Rubin's call for “A new man, the Marxist acidhead, the psychedelic Bolshevik” was to create a backlash that brought Ronald Reagon into the governor's mansion in 1966 and gave Richard Nixon an overwhelming majority in 1969.

The story of Timothy Leary, whose campaign for California governorship the Beatles song “Come Together” was originally written for, embodies the rise and fall of sixties idealism. Leary was a respected psychologist at Harvard, and his experiments with LSD were originally conducted scientifically. He discussed his findings with Aldous Huxley (author of The Doors of Perception, from which Jim Morrison got the name), who warned him: “The artistic elite, the intellectual elite, the economic elite. That’s how everything of culture and beauty and philosophic freedom has been passed on.” But Leary was too much of an aspiring prophet and populist to listen, and took up Allen Ginsberg's acid-fried cry that, “I’ve come down to preach love to the world! We’re going to walk through the streets and teach people to stop hating!” He advocated that the right to seek an expanded consciousness be guaranteed in the Constitution, and in 1963 was kicked out of Harvard for sharing drugs with students. His showmanship and subsequent infamy, while making for an entertaining story, succeeded in almost single-handedly destroying the academic legitimacy of psychedelic experimentation and getting it nationally banned.

After being arrested for spurious drug charges, Leary was busted out of jail by a group of nihilistic terrorists called the Weather Underground or Weathermen (inspired by the line from Dylan's “Subterranean Homesick Blues”), whose politically mature agenda was to be “against everything that is good and decent in honky America.” They would later declare 1969 “The Year of the Fork” in honour of the utensil used in the Manson murders. Their prescribed “merger of dope and dynamite, flower and flames” made Leary a perfect spokesman, and he was recruited to deliver lines like: “Dynamite is just the white light, the external manifestation of the inner white light of the Buddha.” After an over-the-top entertaining international flight (the biography I'm basing this on, Timothy Leary: A Biography by Robert Greenfield, reads better than fiction) with stop-overs with the Black Panthers in Algeria, Leary ended up in a cell next to former aspiring songwriter and friend of the Beach Boys Charles Manson, where a legendary conversation took place.

Conversing through air shafts, Manson told Leary, “We were all your students… When I got out of jail there were millions of kids cut loose from the old lies just waiting to be told what to do. And you didn’t tell them what to do… You showed everyone how to create a new head but you never gave them the new head. Why didn’t you?” When Leary replied that his purpose was to let everyone decide their own reality, Manson told him “That was your mistake. No one wants responsibility. Everyone wants to be told what to do, what to believe, what’s really true and really real.” Manson had taken on that role himself, filling in the gap where old values had once filled his follower’s lives. His “Family” consisted mostly of young girls lost in the haze of psychedelic freedom, runaways unmoored from mainstream society and easily exploitable by a charismatic manipulator in tune with the times. Manson believed that LSD had given him powers of mental control, radically interpreting the Beatles' White Album as a New Age Testament for psychopaths and seeing himself as a sort of psychedelic acid Christ. In a dark reflection of Ken Kesey’s famous bus journey, Manson and his followers traveled the American West in a school-bus painted black, fulfilling the psychedelic dream of free sex and drugs. He may have been mad, but in his conversation with Leary, he was right.

In addition to the Manson slayings, the free Rolling Stones concert at Altamont helped bring the innocence of the psychedelic era to a brutal ending. The Hell’s Angels, who were romanticized by Allen Ginsberg and Hunter S. Thompson as heroic outlaws, served as security at what was to be the Woodstock of the West Coast, attended by countercultural figures like Leary and most of the key players in the acid rock scene. Ken Kesey had once told a group of Angels “We’re in the same business. You break people’s bones, I break people’s heads,” and the Angels had also been used as bouncers by the Grateful Dead. But the Altamont show proved to be a disaster, as the Angels used sawed-off pool cues to control the crowd. A fat Chicano kid on an acid trip took off his clothes and began dancing, and was clubbed by the disgusted Angels. More seriously, four people died at the concert: two whose car plowed into a bonfire, one who was stabbed by the Angels and the other drowning in an irrigation canal while on an acid trip. Anti-authoritarianism caused some attendants to interfere with doctors trying to help people on bad acid trips, causing Todd Gitlin to ask “If there is so much bad acid around, why doesn’t the contaminated culture, many of whose claims are based on the virtues of drugs, help its own brothers and sisters?” Greil Marcus of Rolling Stone noted that the concert was an “extraordinary complex and visceral metaphor for the way things of the Sixties ended… producing violence instead of fraternity, selfishness instead of generosity, ugliness instead of beauty, a bad trip instead of a high.”

Lenin called communism “socialism plus electricity.” I'd call the sixties ethos I've termed Lennon-McCarthyism “platitude plus LSD.” Of course the British naifs are not to blame for the failures of the sixties, but it was the valium slogans of their songs--“Let it Be,” “All You Need is Love”--that defined its dopey utopianism. The fact that John Lennon and Yoko Ono held a “bed-in for peace” is emblematic of the whole failed approach of the sixties youth movement. Holding a bed-in for peace is not a subversive act--it's what most people would like to do if they didn't have jobs they could get fired from. Real revolution takes more than acid trips and publicity stunts. Some great music and films came out of the sixties, and it does sound like it was an interesting time to be alive. But as far as actual values, actual ideals, an actual legacy--it's a vapour cloud. The fact that the Beatles' Apple label inspired the name of a major corporation is not so much ironic as it is completely predictable. Perhaps the irony of Paul McCartney divorcing his wife when he's sixty-four will do something to undo the rubber-ideology of Lennon-McCartneyism before it ensnares another foolish millionaire into marrying a beautiful younger woman without contractual stipulation. Contrary to the hummable protestations of its advocates, love was never enough.

Alternate United States

There was a foundational problem right at the very start of the United States of America, and I'm not talking about slavery. The entire name of the country is built on a lie! There are many Americas (South, North, Central, Ferrera) and many possible combinations of United States. Admittedly the other United States have not been quite as successful, but that's no reason to deny them their claim to the title. To me, U.S.A. will always stand for the United States of Africa, and that mass of bizarrely-shaped fiefdoms south of the border remain disunited and ripe for Canadian expansionism. Until that day of reverse manifest destiny comes, grab a cola and come along for a mystical ride through the world of . . . ALTERNATE UNITED STATES!


The United States of Africa

Time: Imaginal; proposed by would-be messiahs ranging from Marcus Garvey to Muammar al-Qaddafi
States: The countries of Africa and possibly Haiti and Jamaica


The United States of China

Time: Imaginal; proposed by Chen Jiongming in the early 1920s
States: The provinces of China plus Taiwan and possibly Mongolia


The United States of Colombia

Time: 1863 - 1886
States: Antioquia, Bolivar, Boyaca, Cauca, Cundinamarca, Magdalena, Panama, Santander and Tolima, and the territories of Caquetá, San Martin, Nevada and Motilones


The United States of Europe

Time: Coming soon; proposed by numerous figures including Napoleon, Hitler, faceless Eurocrats
States: The countries of Europe plus anyone who wants to join except Turkey


The United States of Greater Austria

Time: Imaginal; proposed by Aurel Popovici in 1906
States: German-Austria, German-Bohemia, German-Moravia, Bohemia, Slovakia, West Galicia, East Galicia, Hungary, Szeklerland, Transylvania, Trentino, Carniola, Croatia, Vojvodina


The United States of Islam

Time: Imaginal; proposed by sex-starved Pakistani twenty-somethings
States: Every country in the world except Israel, which will survive to the consternation of all


The United States of Latin Africa

Time: Imaginal; proposed by Central African leader Barthélemy Boganda
States: Angola, Zaire, Rwanda, Burundi, the Republic of Congo, the Central African Republic, Chad, Cameroon, Gabon, Equatorial Guinea and possibly parts of Brazil


The United States of North America

Time: Imaginal; proposed by the Bilderberg Group
States: Canada, Mexico, America, liberated Cuba, Greenland


The United States of South America

Time: Imaginal; proposed by Simón Bolivar in early 19th century
States: Gran Colombia (comprising the modern-day nations of Colombia, Ecuador, Panama, and Venezuela), Peru, the United Provinces of Central America


The United States of the West

Time: Imaginal; proposed by Régis Debray
States: Canada, Mexico, Europe, Japan, New Zealand, Australia, the Caribbean, America


The United States of Whatever

Time: Imaginal; proposed by Liam Lynch
States: Whatever

After God & Art

Some interesting excerpts from a review by Terry Eagleton of a book I'd like to pick up some time, Creation: Artists, Gods and Origins by Peter Conrad:

Most aesthetic concepts are theological ones in disguise. The Romantics saw works of art as mysteriously autonomous, conjuring themselves up from their own unfathomable depths. They were self-originating, self-determining, carrying their ends and raisons d’être within themselves. As such, art was a secular version of the Almighty. Both God and art belonged to that rare category of objects which existed entirely for their own sake, free of the vulgar taint of utility. The third member of this category was the human being. In their freedom, independence and glorious pointlessness, works of art were images of men and women – or at least of what they could become under transformed political conditions. In this sense, art was a politics all of its own, pointing to a future society in which human beings would be treated as ends in themselves. It was a foretaste of utopia in its very uselessness.

. . .

It was a pity, though, that only a few thousand individuals actually bothered about art, whereas countless millions had devoted themselves to God. This meant among other things that art, or culture, was to prove a far less potent ideological force than religion had been. However much the artist recycled himself as a secular priest, art could not hold a candle to religion. But art at least had the advantage of indubitably existing, which was more than could be said for the Supreme Being.

. . .

From Baudelaire to Yeats, the work of art was believed to reconcile the sensuous and the spiritual, or the concrete and the universal. It embodied a kind of mini-Incarnation, the point where time and eternity intersected.

. . .

What is striking about art is that this obscurity is combined with an unusually heightened degree of awareness. No doubt this is what T.S. Eliot had in mind when he said that poets were both more primitive and more sophisticated than the average run of individuals.

. . .

The dethroning of God was not only the elevation of art. It was also the invention of Man. Because God had created human beings in his own image and likeness – that is to say, fashioned them as free – they were now able to press that freedom to its limit by abolishing the source of it and installing themselves in his place. Man was now the transcendent peak of creation, owing almost as little as the Almighty had to nature and biology. As Nietzsche scornfully pointed out, surprisingly little was thereby altered. Instead, the religion of Yahweh gave way to Feuerbach’s religion of humanity. There was still a stable metaphysical centre to the world; it was just that it was now us rather than a deity. Idolatry accordingly gave way to narcissism. In Nietzsche’s view, the toppling of God, if it were to constitute a genuine revolution, would have to involve the subversion of Man as we know him as well. Otherwise God would simply live a shadowy afterlife in the form of suburban morality.

. . .

Like aesthetics, then, humanism was covertly theological all along. It had its satanic side too, as humanity came to lord it destructively over its world with all the imperiousness that had once been ascribed to God. Moreover, just as creation is a delight in itself, so can destruction be. The two are closer than the naive Romantic supposes. The devil is a fallen angel. To destroy just for the hell of it, without any purposeful end in mind, is what is traditionally known as evil.

. . .

For some postmodern thinkers, we are clay in our own hands, artist and artefact together, free to mould our bodies and psyches into whatever shapes we find most appealing. Behind a belief in the endless plasticity of the world lies a rather less congenial faith in an iron will which stamps its imprint on these shapes.

Some excellent points here, and they deal with what is probably my main intellectual interest: how, after the disablement of God, man sublimates his need for religious fervour into secular pursuits of the transcendent like utopianism and art. The modernists actually thought art could change the world. That led to some fascinating art movements--Futurism, Surrealism, Vorticism--but ultimately, art could never achieve the same popular reach as religion. Thus we have the current rather sad state of modern art, where it aims to shock a bourgeoisie who are its only remaining audience. Art is elitist but most artists are still in denial about this elitism, which brings us to Eagleton's summation of Nietzsche. Despite being "post-Christian," the cultured West and its core of secular humanists still persist in ascribing to watered-down versions of Christian morality like socialism. Nietzsche is the most relevant of philosophers because he diagnosed the problem but the solution hasn't arrived yet. God is still living a "shadowy afterlife in the form of suburban morality." Art seemed the greatest contender to take His place as the religious focus of man, but very few people are willing to die in the name of Art. They will, however, die in the name of their nation. Thus fascists answered the post-religious search for meaning with ultra-nationalism as the new aesthetic-spiritual nexus, with politics and the manipulation and orchestration of the masses as a higher art in itself. Thus we have the genetic link between postmodernism and fascism: postmodernism, or an academic rejection of all absolute values, is an elitist position. The masses need values. Thus fascism fills the gap postmodernism created by providing new absolute values for the masses as directed by elitists no longer in denial. Nietzsche was neither a fascist nor a postmodernist: he was rather a prophet of the emergence of both. The question for us now is how to create new values that rise above the nihilism of postmodernism and ultra-nationalism, the limitations of art's popular reach and the unsatisfying mediocrity of post-Christian suburban morality. Many have rejected this entire line of thought by returning to religion itself: the complete set of answers provided by Evangelical Christianity, Orthodox Judaism, absolutist Islam, etc. But if the secular world wishes to be more than a battleground for opposing forces of religious fundamentalism, it will have to come up with some new answers of its own.

Nuclear Time Capsule

I envision a time
When peace will reign supreme,
When dogs will be defanged
And cats will work in teams.

Children will run freely
Through parks that once were streets,
Watched by friendly neighbours
Employed to give out sweets.

School will be a field trip
To what was once our world,
A place of war and rape,
New Babylon unfurled.

The children's tour will end
With group sex and speeches
About the brutes who built
Sidewalks over beaches.

"Observe, the savage hates
The happiness of peers.
He stews in vice and plots
Revenge some distant year."

That's why I plant this gift,
Into the ground I load
A nuclear time capsule;
So they can all explode.

Clear The Map & Start Again

I've been uninspired of late, curiously flat. I need a cause, something to feel passionate about. Freeing the Western Sahara from Moroccan imperialism has come to mind. I like plucky little nationalist struggles no one pays much attention. Nationalism has been the greatest contender for secular religion but what nation can live up to the hype. I want some kind of transnationalist movement, but not of the rootless cosmopolitan type. Nothing as antiquated as communism and punk rock. Something true to the times, an alternative to Americanism and political Islam. Western high culture might be a nice ideal if it existed anymore. Discordianism is just too silly. No one will die in the name of postmodernism and that's why it's a paper tiger. My ideal cause would invoke the all-encompassing spirit of "Mind/Body/Light/Sound" by Swans: "throw yourself in the sea, there's nothing solid down here." It needs that vision thing. Race as identity is stupid and played out, class as identity is stupid and played out, gender as identity is stupid and played out. Religion will and has outlasted them all. There's a lesson there. The "new atheism" of Dawkins and Hitchens and other noted British assholes isn't new at all, it's just rank positivism that happens to fit the zeitgeist. We need a new mysticism more than a new atheism. I like secret societies, but their secrets usually suck. People used to be afraid of Freemasons; that's a sign of respect. It's like with poetry. Someone said that Stalin paid poets the biggest compliment they could receive by imprisoning and torturing them. Because it proved they mattered. Jews matter so people still have conspiracies about them. Freemasons are now irrelevant so people don't. Infamy is still an indication of perverse vitality, which is why the rate of conversion to Islam in America increased after 9/11. Art doesn't matter anymore, it doesn't threaten, people won't kill or die for it. The revolutionary forces of the past have been tapped out. What next? What is the next level shit, the hidden Imam we've all been waiting for? I have half a mind to start a cult because I feel I could do a better job than some of the bullshit out there. If L. Ron Hubbard and Joseph Smith can give meaning to people's lives through, respectively, science-fiction and historical fantasy, perhaps more literary genres could provide a solid ideological basis. Does the world need another religion? Yes, or possibly a more muscular Buddhism. I'd really like to see Buddhists take a more proactive approach, like sending missionaries to convert the Afghans back to their O.G. faith. The Muslims may have suicide bombers but the Buddhists have guys burning themselves to death as demonstrations of devotion. If Buddhists had perpetrated 9/11 maybe it would be the world's fastest growing religion. People would have a newfound respect for the lotus with the semi-automatic, perhaps wiping away the taint of Richard Gere and the Beastie Boys. There must be a place for the superfluous man to rest his hat. The Baaders and the Meinhofs of the world are still there, looking for an excuse. Who's going to light the fuse? I wager history isn't dead yet despite the best efforts of its zombie crypt-keepers. I don't want to be pessimistic. So freedom for the Saharawi people and may you get the independence you deserve. Clear the map and start again.

Anthem For A Perfect World

Behind all visions of utopia lies the same yearning cry: can't there be a place where everybody knows your name? And they're always glad you came? If only my friends. If only...

Where Everybody Knows Your Name

Making your way in the world today
Takes everything you've got;
Taking a break from all your worries
Sure would help a lot.
Wouldn't you like to get away?

All those night when you've got no lights,
The check is in the mail;
And your little angel
Hung the cat up by it's tail;
And your third fiance didn't show;

Sometimes you want to go
Where everybody knows your name,
And they're always glad you came;
You want to be where you can see,
Our troubles are all the same;
You want to be where everybody knows your name.

Roll out of bed, Mr. Coffee's dead;
The morning's looking bright;
And your shrink ran off to Europe,
And didn't even write;
And your husband wants to be a girl;

Be glad there's one place in the world
Where everybody knows your name,
And they're always glad you came;
You want to go where people know,
People are all the same;
You want to go where everybody knows your name.

Where everybody knows your name,
And they're always glad you came;
Where everybody knows your name,
And they're always glad you came;

(fade out)

The Stalinism Of Low Expectations

"Not all that is accessible is a work of genius, but a real work of genius is one that is accessible, and the more accessible it is to the widest masses of the people, the more clearly it is a work of genius. . . Music that is unintelligible to the people is unwanted by the people. Let them not blame the people. Let them [the composers] blame themselves. They've got to understand why they do not appeal to the people, and they've got to reform themselves accordingly."
- Andrei Zhdanov, de facto Commissar of Cultural Repression of the Soviet Union, January 1948

The above quote from Zhdanov summarizes my profound philosophical disagreement with Stalinism. Not just Stalinism though, but also socialism, Marxism, communism, capitalism and democracy. What all these 'isms have in common is the pretense of serving the will of the majority. The way they aim to serve that will differs, but their rhetorical objective is the same. The market claims to give the people what they want and so does socialism. Democracy claims to respond to the people's will and so does communism. But my problem is this: what if the majority of people are idiots? Zhadanov believed good art was synonymous with bad art, dismissing the possibility that perhaps the majority of Russians simply had bad taste in music. But can any discerning listener deny that of North Americans nowadays? And, if the majority of North Americans have bad taste in music, what else do they have bad taste in? If the answer is everything, as I would argue it is, that calls into question the very basis of democracy itself. Not just Western democracy, but every utopian alternative form, including but not limited to the Democratic People's Republic of Korea.

In the communist variety of populism, the emphasis is on working class values. The oppressed working class is the majority and so the oppressed working class deserves totalitarian power. While I entirely sympathize with the Marxist disdain for the bourgeoise, I can't help think that the working class is a poor alternative. Literally of course, but also figuratively. Do we really want a society dominated by Roseanne Barr? In the nineteenth century it's understandable that one might look for redemption in an oppressed, seemingly more hard-working and honest class. But the end-result will always be Zhdanov. The working class, as Zhdanov makes clear, likes pleasing melodies to sing along with, not dissonant experimentation. And if a minority of aesthetes prefer something more challenging, the minority of aesthetes can farm rocks beyond the Urals until they feel that working class spirit. Lenin was smart in coming up with the idea of the vanguard party, a way to be elitist while simultaneously feeling the righteousness of populism. A perpetual, ever-shifting minority has always been the harbringer of cultural and political change. Progressives seek to take on the mantle of that minority, while reactionaries seek a recognizable minority to blame. So it works out for both sides, and if communists are unavailable as an enemy there'll always be the Jews.

My problem with Lenin is the hypocrisy of his motives. He acted like he really wanted a classless society where exceptional people like himself would be useless. He acted like he only wanted to serve in the vanguard until everybody became the vanguard. But if everybody's the vanguard then it isn't the vanguard anymore. Invariably standards slip and people join the party for positions rather than principles, a fact Lenin recognized early on. Lenin died before he could witness the bureaucratization of his empire, so the question of what he would make of it remains unanswered. But I find it hard to believe that Lenin, or any revolutionary, would be happy without a revolution. Trotsky tried to account for this by coming up with the idea of the Permanent Revolution, but even then it must reach an invariable snag. When the whole world finally does embrace the Bolshevik dream, the revolution must end. Utopia must ensue. But what use does Trotsky have of utopia? His oratorical skills would be useless. He would have nothing but bureaucratic minutia to plan, no great sweeping forays of the Red Army. The fact is Lenin and Trotsky were Great Men who refused to follow that fact through to its logical conclusion. Namely that greatness is an end unto itself, and that the goal of a classless utopia would make their greatness superfluous. They wanted to conquer countries for the revolution, not break coal in the mines for it.

Communism is a dead horse. It's fun and sometimes intellectually stimulating to beat, but nonetheless even corpses can only take so much. What isn't dead is populism, the idea that the majority is always right, that the majority by virtue of being the majority deserves to dominate society. Zhdanov's assumptions live on. People tacitly accept them because they don't want to seem elitist. But life is elitist, school is elitist, the workplace is elitist, monkeys are elitist. The key is to develop the right kind of elitism. From popular high school girls to the Waffen-SS (and are they really so different?), a million different would-be vanguards have given a bad aura to the very idea of a vanguard. Elitism by itself isn't wrong, it's the values the elites carry that determine their worthiness to that air of distinction. One key measure of a worthy elitism, and one that does involve some measure of democracy, is that of meritocracy. Popular high school girls and the Waffen-SS based their elitism, at least in large part, on inherited characteristics. Spiritual elitism, intellectual elitism, even athletic elitism are democratic in the sense that anyone can enter their echelons given the requisite will and work. The difference between this form of democracy, what you might term aristocratic democracy, and popular democracy is that rights are earned rather than assumed. To return to Zhdanov, this form of elitism is "accessible," but the onus is on the majority to attain that difficult access. It is up to the plebeian majority, not the avant-garde minority, to "reform themselves accordingly." As it should be.

Beholder's Paradise

I once wrote The only possible utopia is an altered perception of the current dystopia. Here's a little example.

"Ordinary citizens also developed the ability to see things as they were becoming and ought to be, rather than as they were. An empty ditch was a canal in the making; a vacant lot where old houses or a church had been torn down, littered with rubbish and weeds, was a future park."
- Sheila Fitzpatrick, Everyday Stalinism

And yes it's Bolshevik Week at Head Wide Open.

The Execution Of Paris Hilton And Other Benefits Of Revolution

If there's one thing that would make me become a communist it's this: under a communist regime, Paris Hilton would be lined up against the wall and shot. The plight of the working class? That doesn't inspire me. The ideal of a classless and equal society? Doesn't work and if it did it'd be boring. No, the only thing that tempts me towards communism is the thought of all the rich and talentless people who would be dispossessed, sent to labour camps and/or shot. If I was a communist activist that's the point I'd emphasize. Vote for us and we will purge the debutantes and celebrities. Of course it's a short-term solution--new celebrities would just replace the old--but oh what short-term pleasures it would bring. Communism might not achieve many practical results, but it sure is a great tool for wide-scale vengeance.

Latino heartthrob Che Guevara once said "At the risk of seeming ridiculous, let me say that the true revolutionary is guided by a great feeling of love." Well you do sound ridiculous Che, and here's why. The true revolutionary is guided by resentment and a thirst for vengeance. If you were guided by love you'd volunteer at a soup kitchen. The fact that you shoot people instead is because you hate the rich more than you love the poor. If only communists would just admit that I'd have more respect for them. At least fascists make no excuses for their love of war and violence. They want revolution because revolutions make the blood run, not some silly utopian ideal. Revolution is the revolutionary's only ideal, because if utopia actually occurred he'd be out of a job. If a revolutionary was content to do his part by working a collective farm, he'd be farming in the first place.

Unfortunately fascists are just as disingenuous as communists nowadays. They'll never admit what they really want. They'll deny the Holocaust while making a thousand excuses for why it was justified. If they would just fess up and say, yes, the Holocaust happened and we want it to happen again, I'd at least respect their honesty. A true fascist should wear his fascist colours proudly. Even communists rarely deny the crimes of Stalin these days. They may try to justify them or bring up "capitalist atrocities," but they'll at least admit some bad shit happened. Yet they act like that was the exception and not the rule. Won't anyone just be honest enough to say, "Yes our revolution will be bloody and pointless, but at least it will be exciting?" Probably not.

I understand the inevitability of capitalism. I really do. But that doesn't mean I have to be its cheerleader. When libertarians and Ayn Randians praise the greatness of the capitalist system, they're equally praising Paris Hilton. I'm not opposed to the idea of some having more than others, I'm just opposed to the idea of people like Paris Hilton having more than others. If a hierarchical society is inevitable--and it is--why must people like that be at the top of the hierarchy? Of course there's nothing illegal about her success, but even Nietzsche would agree there's something immoral there. Would a totalitarian system be a price worth paying for her elimination? Probably not, but that's still not a vote for the status quo.

While the Palestinian election of Hamas and the popularity of 50 Cent may not seem to have much in common, together they prove a valuable point. That point is: lots of people are stupid. In a system where votes and dollars result in influence and power, that poses a problem. "The People" whom demagogues praise can quickly become a mob, and a mob can quickly lead to anarchy. This isn't a very optimistic viewpoint, but pessimism is a lot less dangerous than optimism. Pessimists don't believe a perfect society is possible, so they don't see the point of putting imperfect people in death camps. Of course that doesn't mean they wouldn't like to see Paris Hilton shot, but they realize that her death would not be one step closer to utopia, but merely one less idiot in the world. Maybe that's not something you can build an ideology around, but it sure would be satisfying.

Mythopoetics & The Rebirth Of The Austro-Hungarian Empire

Mythopoetic history is the future. It provides the concrete symbols the abstract modern world needs. Beyond the irony, the commercialism and the boredom of the driftless present is a desire for a grounded future. A future based on historical fact but postmodern in its recognition that what matters is what we think matters. For instance: the modern Assyrians. What matters is not whether these people are direct genetic and cultural descendants of the ancient Assyrians--they're probably not--but that they have revived an ancient symbolism to create a newly-inspired communal vitalism. Through reabsorption into thousands of years of history, they are able to gain possession of symbols powerful enough to compete with modern rivals. T.S. Eliot eludes to this idea of recontextualizing the past to dynamize the present in his epochal "The Wasteland." Jung's ideas of the collective unconscious and the role of nonrational thought also reinforce the value of remystifying existence. The mythopoetic idea can be twisted--as the following example shows--but it is nothing, literally nothing, if not potential.

Benito Mussolini often spoke of creating a New Rome, recontextualizing ancient symbols in a modern, sometimes even futurist environment. Yet his idea of a Nova Roma was flawed because his concept of empire was anachronistic. Rather than build a cultural sphere of influence, working to revive popular consciousness of a common Mediterranean civilization, he sought to conquer for the sake of conquering. True power is not renaming Ethiopia Italian East Africa--as America has long realized--but having the dynamism to influence the way East Africans think. Instead of conquering Abyssinia, a Nova Roma should have enlisted this storied and culturally dynamic kingdom as a natural ally in the battle for minds, the battle the Fascists claimed to be fighting--against spiritless internationalism. Instead of the communist or capitalist vision of a future stripped of the past, an Ethio-Italian Emperor's League--or even combined dynastic bloodline--would've offered a vision of a future fuelled by mythopoetic history. One freed of such anachronisms as the ethno-chauvinism of the past (which Mussolini obviously failed to abandon), but keeping its sense of meaning and majesty.

This is not nationalism or even romantic nationalism, but a historically-formed sense of the romantic in general. An Ethio-Italian cross-continental imperial dynasty is obviously not a historical idea, but it is rooted on the power of historical symbols. In a sense this is multiculturalism, but a multiculturalism modelled more on the multi-ethnic Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman Empires than modern Canada or England. All races, religions and creeds united under the protection of a symbolic pole of unity--an emperor, a cosmopolitan capital, a founding myth, a rallying cry. The power of an emperor is the power of an idea. It is a recognition that men in business-suits will never inspire the imagination. Carthage will always hold more mythopoetic power than the modern state of Tunisia, so why shouldn't Tunisia embrace its distant Carthaginian legacy? Why shouldn't a futurized past openly compete with the futureless present? Why shouldn't Austria and Hungary throw their lots in together? Why shouldn't Gavrilo Princep lay down his gun and bow to the Archduke? The bloodline may have dried but the idea remains.

Towards Autointoxicated Vision

We want to tap into that constant buzz. Sure ignorance is bliss, but for those to whom ignorance is denied, the way to bliss is at the other extreme: knowledge of self and world. What we seek is nothing less than autoerotic supraconsciousness. Mundanity requires a constant soundtrack from within, a spur to vitality and overcoming, a reminder that we are awake and dreaming. A reminder that: the world is the forge and we are the fire. No to passivity, stasis, lethargy and the circular thoughts of a self-consuming mind. To them I say: the very doubts that make my pen waver will only strengthen my grip. The tension they produce is but a slingshot for release. We affirm the past with a forward blow, alive with spiritual wasabi on the tips of our tongues.

The only possible utopia is an altered perception of the current dystopia. Autointoxication, permanent lucidity, upgraded sight of sound. Like a contact lens for the mind's eye, granting telescopic and microscopic vision at will. To see both the big picture and every paint stroke that it contains. The macrocosm in the microcosm and the microcosm in the macrocosm. Instead of the problems, see the solutions. Instead of the limitless unknown, see a limitless field of potential allies. All that's needed is a paradigm-shift born of the natural drug that is subjective living. Remember: the seeds of despair are the self-same seeds of a greater happiness. To nurture them properly simply provide water, sunshine, laughter, knowledge, exertion, sex, friendship, alcohol, music, sublimation, art and coffee.

Too simple? Simplicity only regains its value after a thousand complications. It is one thing to be a child, and quite another to graft the wonder and will of a child onto the adult mind. To live in the present comes naturally to some, but for former prisoners of the past and future its power is that much greater. To stay in that mode, to maintain the buzz, requires constant vital movement. Every exertion of mind and body expands the mind and body's frontiers. And with every new frontier comes the rush to find the next one. How to escape the self-consuming cycle into the autoerotic rhythm? The way out is not a door but a movement. To put it another way: the way out is not a door but movement itself.

A Paper Airplane In The Eye Of Ennui

Dogma is not my meaning of life. What I want is permanent revolution, tearing down and building up, from dawn to nightfall. Our manifesto is a blank piece of paper to write on, draw on, stick things to and make origami out of. Our manifesto, fundamentally, is a paper airplane to be thrown in the eye of ennui. I write this naked, wrapped in a blanket and eating a cracker. That is the revolutionary garb, along with spiked helmets and goggles. Crumbs now cover my blanket, as they will soon cover the countryside. Dogs will feed on them and be given control of the armed forces.

All leaders will have mustaches and wear uniforms, but will be completely powerless. Hitting someone with a pie in the face will be declared socially acceptable. Mangos will be the fruit of choice and the drinking age will be reduced to the moment of conception. Every citizen will be invited to drop off a policy proposal, and one will be selected and implemented at random every six months. We will destroy ugly cities to create beautiful ruins. To discourage car use and thereby discourage oil consumption all parking lots will be converted into Autonomous Zones where makeshift hovels, tribal drumming, roaming dogs, performance art, potluck dinners and public nudity are encouraged. The world will then be declared a parking lot.

Multiculturalism will be replaced by culturemultiplism. All citizens will be able to accumulate points for worthy acts of charity and art, and can thereby legally obtain titles like Baron, Count, Khan, Grand Duke and Funkmaster. Anyone with a utopian scheme will be able to submit a proposal to the government, which if approved gives them ownership of a small island on which to conduct social experiments. If successful similar policies will be implemented on the mainland. "Our House" by Madness will be the national anthem. The Swiss will be forced to take a stand. Rallies and parades, for whatever reason, every day!

In conclusion: Élan vital, surrealism, absurdism, sex, drugs, music, art, community, mythopoetics, poetry, writing, romance, sublimation, futurism, fantasy, cosmopolitanism, coffee, bazaars, lost cities, fabulists, Greenland, false messiahs, summertime, odes, menefreghismo, wild bursts of creativity, borderlands, automatic writing, positive nihilism, interzones, anarcho-monarchism, intoxicology, self-overcoming, late night highs, self-immolation, vitalism, obscure sects, grokking, the over-man, pax mongolica, synarchism, syncretism, spontaneity, strangers in strange lands, psychodynamics, orgasms, absinthe, pueblos, playing in the ruins, secret societies, palingenesis, terra incognito, wandering, next level shit, honesty, warrior poets, victimless war and guns that shoot flowers.