Anarchy and Culture

Fear of a Bug Planet: Political Satire in Paul Verhoeven's Starship Troopers

2012-01-29T11:06:00.000-08:00

By Michael Gillham

Susan Sontag’s monumental Notes on Camp sketches some rules that describe what satire in the form of camp constitutes, and what it does not. One of her rules is that the “pure examples of camp are unintentional: they are dead serious. . . One doesn’t need to know the artist’s private intentions. The work tells all.”

The 1997 film Starship Troopers produced disappointing box office receipts and withering critical reviews upon its release. Roger Ebert called it “the most violent kiddie movie ever made.”The film has more recently attracted scholarly attention as a work of satire. Richard Schickel, for example, suggests that a key "unexplored premise" of the film is the way that it simply depicts without question "a happily fascist world." Similarly, Mike Clark describes the seductive lure of the film's "army of sweet-tempered, fresh-faced fascists." There is no doubt that Paul Verhoeven had a satirical vision in mind for the film, but it is his refusal to reveal his true intentions, his sincerity in depicting this happily fascist world, his insistence that the film is nothing more than a popcorn sci-fi actioner that makes his work ultimately successful as camp and as satire of 20th century fascism, military autocracy, dystopian fiction, and action films themselves.

The film begins with a propaganda newsreel reminiscent of American or German propaganda films of the 1940’s. Here we learn that the humans are planning an attack on the planet Klendathu, the homeworld of a species of giant arachnid creatures, colloquially referred to as “bugs.” We see the human starfleet amassing over Klendathu and a reporter on the planet’s surface describes the battle shortly before he is torn in half by one of the creatures. A young soldier grabs the reporters camera and tells everyone to retreat. He is then impaled by one of the bug’s claws and the newsfeed is terminated. We flash back to the young man’s life on earth as an earnest, if scholastically unimpressive, high school student. Johnny Rico wants nothing more than to win the big game, go all the way with his best girl, and defend Earth from the evil arachnid invaders.

It is noteworthy that Johnny is situated as the film’s protagonist. The common feature that canonical dystopian texts share is the presence of the dissenter within the narrative. 1984 has its Winston Smith, Brave New World has its John the Savage. These characters gradually wake up to the truth regarding the State’s machinations and initiate the quest of rebellion against the regime. Starship Troopers is completely devoid of a dissenting protagonist who acts, actively or passively, against the mandates of the authoritarian State. Johnny and his coterie of supermodel athlete friends never dissent or step out of line. They take every opportunity to wave the flag and march selflessly and stupidly off to fight a war for a government that denies its populace citizenship unless they perform military service, has a centralized legal system that televises executions, and actively brainwashes its people to fulfill its multifarious designs.

This is a tactic of Verhoeven’s that separates the film from the canon of dystopian science fiction and situates it in the territory of satirical camp. The nightmare in this film is a world where the social engineering performed by the State’s technocrats that reduces the people into brainless automatons has been so successful, it is impossible to find a dissenter among them. There is never a moment in Starship Troopers where the filmmakers wink at the audience or point to the grievous circumstances that produced this tyranny. In a way, the film acts as a kind of propaganda on behalf of the fictional world that it depicts. It effectively conceals the barbarous historical circumstances that have produced this oligarchy and perpetuates its own fictional regime. Starship Troopers creates a world that we cannot believe in, because we have been trained by dystopian fiction to believe that there will always be a dissenter within the dystopian order. By portraying the government’s system of brainwashing as so successful that not a single dissenter is visible within the order, the film mocks our rather naive belief that we will be rescued by a dissenting protagonist who will prove that the autocratic hell depicted in any these texts is all just a bad dream.

The sincere tone of the film’s mock-documentary style in the spirit of 20th century propaganda combines with the satirization of the action-adventure genre to produce very sophisticated camp. Everything, from Johnny’s brainy friend Carl’s mock SS uniform to the clichéd final words from every one of the bugs’ victims, camps on action films and dystopian fiction. The dialogue is a symphony of clichés. When one soldier wounds a bug he approaches the creature with his rifle in hand and finishes it off while spewing a stream of words that are little more than euphemisms for actual curses. When Johnny and the other recruits at bootcamp learn of an attack on the city of Buenos Aires by the bugs, one of the female characters actually says through stagy sobs, “Goddamn bugs whacked us, Johnny.” Audiences need not cringe from these clichés. They are purposefully, and I believe masterfully, written statements that interrogate the stale, warmed over dialogue of propaganda and action films. Action films are, essentially, propaganda promoting a central class that has the ability to remove an exterior threat. The genre itself assumes that the world is divided into classes. One, the target class, is helpless in the face of external terrorism and the other, the protectorate class, is always virtuous and altruistic in its efforts to protect the target class. Rarely does the action film portray the target class as the victim of terrorism from the protectorate class. To do so would be to produce a cultural work of a different genre, that of dystopian fiction.

Pedagogy plays a primary role in the film. The kids implicitly trust their history teacher, Mr. Radchek, marvelously overacted by Michael Ironside. Mr. Radchek never teaches them history and instead gives them a lively lesson in civic obedience and how to accept State imposed indentured servitude for the sake of citizenship. Mr. Radchek is so devoted to his role as Kool-Aid dispenser to the youth of Earth that he follows them into combat against the bugs, fulfilling his dream of dying honorably in the service of the dictatorship. The primary role of the teacher as the State sponsored brainwasher of the young is important here. Mr. Radchek goes to war because he is a true believer in the benevolence of the State’s machinations. Tyranny cannot exist without the complete devotion of a corps of pedagogical technocrats. What better acolytes of State dogma than the young? They must live apart from the market where their labor is rewarded with a wage and are instead managed by the State, making them the perfect candidates for social engineering. The pedagogical reprogramming in Verhoeven’s autocracy of the Federation has been extremely effective. Johnny and his friends push their way to the front of the recruitment line immediately after their graduation, despite the preponderance of older war veterans, including Mr. Radchek, who have had their limbs blasted off in previous wars.

One can easily say, as critics initially did, that Starship Troopers is merely an entertainment, a summer action movie that all but inadequately investigates the more complex social and political themes that it seems to introduce. That this film is empty-headed entertainment at its most philistine cannot be ignored, but it should not be rejected entirely for insufficient elaboration on its more complex themes. Doing so would undermine the film’s strategies as a satire and transform it into yet another popcorn movie with intellectual pretensions. In this era of wanton literalness, satire has become a forgotten art. Postmodern cultural productions like Starship Troopers act as a unique way of recovering the satire form as political commentary and the success of this film’s satirical depictions of fascism, autocracy, and military adventurism as unconscionable to the point of buffoonery cannot be denied. The State itself is as laughable as a lumbering bully or a bombastic shoot-em-up action film. By covertly reversing the meanings of State classes and citizen classes in the context of action-adventure films, Starship Troopers speaks to a thoughtful minority within its audience who can discern its biting satire.

Editor's Note: Hollywood, with its poverty of ideas, is apparently remaking the film. Can we expect the new version to retain the satirical tone of the first? I doubt it.

A Note on Trash Culture and the Necessity of Theory

2011-10-15T15:07:00.000-07:00

Perhaps due to the season, I've been thinking about the horror genre lately, particualrly in film. I've just finished an impressive book, Annalee Newitz's Pretend We're Dead: Capitalist Monsters in American Pop Culture, which gives a Marxist reading of a wide variety of horror stories, in film and literature, as allegories of the "monstrous" identities and relations produced by capitalism. As a market anarchist, I am neither a supporter of capitalism nor a Marxist, so can never fully assent to Marxist criticism. (Marxism is a pretty plastic category these days. Usually "Marxist" simply refers to a generally leftish approach, since Marx is still assumed by the majority of critics as the only game in town when it comes to economics. But the use of Marx is actually rather slight in this book, relegated to one chapter on the serial killer as an allegory for the alienated worker.) However, I found this economic reading of horror to be quite original and ingeneous, since the critical rubric for horror tends to be gender. Whatever quibbles I have about some of its ideas, this book is really a wonderful example of how to critically analyse pop culture using sophisticated cultural theory while avoiding jargon and presenting an all-around great read for the intellectually curious layman.

The other thing that I've been doing is going through the archives of Brad Jones' Cinema Snob, which reviews, through a "snob" persona flimsier than Stephen Colbert's "conservative" blowhard, the lowest of low culture, so-called "exploitation films." Most of these are horror films. Cinema Snob is certainly entertaining, but it's this episode of Radiodrome, in which Jones & co. "give a rebuttal to a near 30 year old Siskel & Ebert episode," which inspired this post. The episode was on what S&E called "Women in Danger" movies, which we now call the "slasher" genre, then in full steam in the early 80's. S&E excoriate the whole genre as simply a misogynist reaction to the women's movement of the 1960's & 70's. Now, I find their arguments to be lazy and hypocritical, as well as alarmist and pandering to middle-brow tastes. However, I find the response to this critique to be completely inadequate. I was moved to the conclusion that you cannot really understand what is going on in popular culture without some critical analysis of the form itself, its language, motifs, symbols. You need a theoretical apparatus neither the fanboy nor the reviewer bothers to use, and so they are left with superficial reactions to images. You should listen to the episode yourself, but here are some points I'd like to make:

1. While Jones is right to point out that men are quite often victims in these movies as well as women (which S&E refuse to acknowledge at all), there's no getting around the fact that women are more central than men. They are more frequently the main victims, and are featured on covers and posters almost exclusively. This doesn't by itself prove the accusation of misogyny either way.

2. While it is true that the Woman-in-Danger is drawn from real life, do we really want to view this genre as merely reflective of social circumstances? It seems clear to me that all horror movies, indeed all culture which appeals to a mass audience, must negotiate between fantasy and reality. How each particular film does this should be the focus of criticism.

3. S&E claim that these movies invite the audience to identify with the killer, while Jones reacts that the psycho-killer is clearly the bad guy. (He also points out the hypocrisy of decrying the use of 1st-person POV in Friday the 13th, while praising Halloween, which not only did the same, but in fact pioneered this genre staple.) But like the fantasy/realism dichotomy, is it ever really this simple? The audience can be invited to sympathise, at various times, with both killer and victim. Or perhaps neither. Again, to analyse how each particular film does this, and what the overall effect and meaning of this, is he point of criticism. In order to do this, one needs a critical vocabulary to describe the techniques of film, and neither side bothers to do this. It's all, "A does X to B, and isn't that horrible," or "A does X to B, big deal, it doesn't mean anything." Interpretation is all about context.

4. The slasher (and by extension the whole exploitation genre) film is defended by implying that prurience equals ideological innocence. "We're not trying to keep women down, we just want to see some tits," is obviously a problematic claim, but that's just the beginning. The slasher film is notoriously conservative in the way it tends to punish teens who have sex, while the virginal are allowed to live through the night. Not even the lowest piece of pure exploitation is free from assumptions about social relations (in fact the very directness of "low" culture can be more illuminating than art of better quality). In other words, everything has a political dimension (though this does not mean that everything is political in essence). The problem with middlebrow critics like Siskel and Ebert is not that they overanalyze these films, but rather the opposite.

5. A related point: The Snob argues that slasher flicks exist, not because of a political agenda, but merely because they are popular. Ignoring the fact that these are far from mutually exclusive categories, I'd have to say, yes and no. The audience for Friday the 13th is quite large; the audience for Siskel & Ebert's jeramiad is even larger- and likely the two overlap somewhat (middlebrow outrage has its own "exploitation" genre). But the audience for Blood-Sucking Freaks is rather small, as small as the audience for, say, Un Chien Andalou (restricting it to people who don't just like it because they think they are supposed to)- and likely the two overlap somewhat. Why is this so? This is where criticism begins.

6. Just as cheap exploitation film are not innocent of politics, "art" films are not free of prurience. It is indeed hypocritical to praise Psycho and Halloween, while dismissing films which are certainly lesser works of art, but deal with precisely the same material (and very likely for the same reasons). It's particularly surprising for the very intelligent Roger Ebert, who includes Peeping Tom in his list of "Great Movies," which was greeted with the very same critical reaction on display here. Ebert was also an early defender of the new level of violence that emerged in films of the late-60's, like The Wild Bunch and Bonnie and Clyde. Critics were horrified by those films at first, and panned them. Now they are canonical. Of course, just because Peeping Tom is now regarded as a masterpiece does not mean that I Spit on Your Grave will ever be. But it does mean that showing violence against women per se proves little. Good lord, the impulse to degrade and abuse women (as well as an analysis and critique of that impulse) is everywhere in the sainted Hitchock's oeuvre! And The Wild Bunch is about as sexist as anything you can find reviewed on Cinema Snob.

I have argued for the necessity of theory, but this does not mean that I subscribe to any particular theory out there. I belong none of the various Freudo-Marxian sects. Nor have I seen enough of these films to develop my own theory. The charge of misogyny ought, in my mind, be evaluated on a case-by-case basis. I am personally disturbed by the recent phenomenon of so-called "torture porn," but I haven't seen a lot of these movies, so I know better than to speak from ignorance. Maybe they're terrible, maybe they're just not my taste. I do know that there is at least one book defending the slasher genre from a feminist perspective, Carol Clover's Men, Women and Chainsaws, though I haven't read it yet.

The Roar Against the Masses Could Be Farts

2011-10-07T21:20:00.000-07:00

Nothing gets on my nerves more than sneering dismissals of libertarianism by conservatives or liberals who have at best a superficial understanding of libertarianism. Lately, though, I've become equally annoyed by the equally sneering, equally ignorant dismissals of leftists by libertarians.

My classes have lately kept me engrossed in Shakespeare, Darwin, and the English Romantics, so I've not had too much chance to keep up on the news. However, I am keenly interested in the Occupy Wall Street movement. From what I've heard, it is an ideologically mixed reaction, fueled by completely justified anger at how our country's financial elite have ripped the rest of us off. What a perfect moment for libertarians to offer an explanation of how we got into this mess through an interlocking power structure composed of both "public" and "private" branches of the corporatist state! A good list of talking points can found in Sheldon Richman's article in The Freeman.

But no, rather than building bridges with potential comrades, citizens with good instincts unfortunately misled by the idea that we can only fight power on Wall Street by strenghening power in Washington (and I think it yet to be proven that this is the dominant view of protestors), some libertarians would rather dismiss the protestors as a bunch of spoiled kids with Molotovs in one pocket and paperbacks by Marx in the other. Mass movements of a leftist or populist flavor often bring out all the vulgar instincts of some libertarians. Ayn Rand, for instance, dismissed the 1960s student movement (while Rothbard, on the other hand, that intransigent old-rightist, saw the promise in it and worked with the SDS!). I wish they would stop, because it makes libertarianism seem like the rich-man's rebellion the popular media likes to portray it as.

Exhibit A: David Harsanyi's portrayal of the protests in Reason, which barely deserves the dignity of being called a straw-man (I know he's trying to be satirical, and there can be a fine line, but let's just say the guy aint no Swift). I know, I'm embarrassed to say I even still read Reason from time to time. Only Jesse Walker and Radley Balko write consistently good articles there, and they still pale in comparison once you've read Kevin Carson and Will Grigg. Anyway, here's what Harsanyi thinks the protests are all about:

First, we are imbued with as many inalienable rights as a few thousand college kids and a gaggle of borderline celebrities can concoct, among them a guaranteed living wage income regardless of employment and immediate across-the-board debt forgiveness—even if that debt was acquired taking on a mortgage with a 4.1 percent interest rate and no money down, which, we admit, is a pretty sweet deal in historical context...

...but down with the modern gilded age!

We demand that a Master of Fine Arts in musical theater writing, with a minor in German, become an immutable human right, because education is crucial and rich people can afford to fund unemployment checks until we find jobs or in perpetuity, whichever comes first.

Well, as a college kid myself, staring down the barrell of student loan debt and no job prospects when I graduate, I take some exception. College students have as much right to be angry about our economic mess as anyone. Do I blame anyone but myself for my debts? No. Am I still angry my fate in the marketplace has been so affected by a bunch of short-sighted privateers who have suffered nearly zero consequences (if they haven't actually received a raise for shitting bed so spectacularly) for their actions? You bet your ass I do. Harsanyi wants to equate this rather dire situation of current college students and recent graduates with the limosuine liberalism of Hollywood types like Susan Sarandon. That just won't wash.

He rather sarcastically calls our current era "the modern gilded age." Well, this strikes me as perfectly apt, considering that, rather than a result of "laissez-faire," the first guilded age was a fully planned and directed corporate-state economy, the result of Hamilton/Lincoln/Henry Clay economic nationalism. I forgive Harsanyi for not being aware of the Gabriel Kolko theory of American economic history, but does he really not believe our current financial establishment fundamentally rotten?

We demand the end to a corrupt Wall Street ("Apple" "your 401(k)") because banks hold too much power. We demand that government consolidate authority so that elected officials can make prudent choices for us. All that cash in banks was printed by the war god Mars and has nothing to do with the voluntary deposits by ordinary Americans, so we do not consider this theft.

Well, isn't "banks hold too much power" like a major plank of the Ron Paul campaign, and even the freakin' Tea Party? Are they Marxists now, or coddled whippersnappers that want stuff for free when they should just get a job already? Jesus, isn't "banks hold too much power" the most obvious fucking thing in the world? (Of course, one doesn't get the full picture if one doesn't also go on to say that the White House, Pentagon, and your friendly neighborhood nanny-state has too much power, too.) But I forgot, this is Reason, and there the point of libertarianism isn't fighting the power so much as being anti-anti-capitalist. (To be fair, they also published a more nuanced account.)

Finally, he puts a real nice cherry on top:

We demand these rights because of the mass injustice of being able to freely protest against racism and corporatism without any real fear of imprisonment in the most diverse city on earth. And to the wiseguy who walked by the other day and claimed that I'd be writing this manifesto with a quill pen on parchment paper if it weren't for capitalism, we have two words for you: Koch brothers. Think about it.

Does anyone without their head all the way up their ass really believe that in this era of "free speech zones," we have the right to protest "without any real fear of imprisonment"? Holy fuck, Harsanyi makes Glenn Beck sound like Howard Zinn! And if the protesters really don't have to worry about getting their skulls cracked and thrown in the pokey, so what? Should the cops and city government get like a fucking medal for fulfilling the minimum requirement of a free society? Or is the idea that we should have rights, but it's just bad form to exercise them?

I won't really address the Koch bros. reference, except to say that if the left has places too much blame solely on these guys, libertarians haven't done enough to distance themselves from the Kochtopus.

As for the "if it weren't for capitalism" canard, it is best dealt with under Exhibit B: David Kramer's post on the Lew Rockwell Blog, "Down With Left-Wing Hypocrites of OWS." Kramer compares them to "Marxist Millionaire supporters like Michael Moore and Susan Sarandon." Look, I don't really know what Susan Sarandon believes. I never thought it important to find out, honestly. But I doubt she's gotten through a page of Marx. As for Michael Moore, he's no more a Marxist than my Dad. He's a progressive. Now there are a ton of things wrong with progressivism. Since I oppose progressivism, I think it's important to know the difference between it an Marxism, which I also oppose. I think that Kevin Carson pretty much nails the problem with progressivism in his C4SS paper, The Thermidor of the Progressives. In his analysis, progressivism is a sort of liberal compromise with state-subsidized oligopoly capitalism. Far from seeking the death of capitalism, progressivism helps to prop it up by mitigating its most brutal effects (the kind that tend to lead to revolutions):

The ideal “progressive” model for industrial organization, for twentieth century liberalism, was a

bureaucratic behemoth like General Motors which, in return for guaranteed profits, provided a sort of employer-based welfare state, with high wages and guaranteed lifetime employment. It was just fine or GM to own half the manufacturing economy, so long as it guaranteed the American Dream to Michael Moore's dad and his generation. In broadcast media it was the Big Three gatekeeper networks, governed by a Lippmannian professional ethos of “journalistic objectivity,” and with the Fairness Doctrine as backup.

For liberals the American Golden Age was the “Consensus Capitalism” of the New Deal and the

first post-WWII generation, dominated by just such giant, bureaucratic organizations.

Left-wing radicals, Marxists, anarchists, and other socialists, actually provide some of the best critiques of progressivism. A good example is Ronald Radosh's socialist critique of that most sacred of liberal cows in "The Myth of the New Deal," in A New History of Leviathan, co-edited with Murray Rothbard.

Kramer also thinks he's really got a good dig against these "Marxists" by crowing that they use products, particularly technology, made by corporations- hence the hypocrisy. Let me nip this shit in the bud right now: this is a terrible argument. It is structurally similar to one of the most oft-used accusations leveled at libertarians, and as such it is equally question-begging. To whit: libertarians are hypocrites because we drive on state-built roads, accept social security benefits (I think the revelation that Ayn Rand was on medicare was the happiest moment liberals have had since Obama's inauguration), rely on police protection and the use of government courts, don't just leave the country, etc. Well, we hardly have a choice, do we? None of this proves that the state is legitimate, or that corporations are virtuous. And using technology as proving the case for hypocrisy is particularly ironic, since every libertarian has heard someone use "but the government created the internet" argument to score ponts against us. Most libertarians will use the "yeah, but it took the market to make it what it is today," tactic, but I prefer shrugging my shoulders and saying, "Yes, and it was their greatest gift to their enemies- they unwittingly created the technology that will help undermine their authority and ultimately make them irrelevant."

If libertarians want to stop seeing ridiculous things said about them (Robert Nozick wanted your children to work in coal-mines! Ayn Rand would've smothered your grandmother if she only had half a chance. Hayek personally owned and operated a sweatshop!), they should stop using the same stupid caricatures of other ideological positions. Ultimately, everyone opposed to power is on our side. But if you are committed to being a reactionary, be smarter about it, please!

What I Do: A guest post by Michael Gillham

2011-08-19T16:29:00.000-07:00

Preface by Ray: Michael is a longtime friend of mine. I asked him to write something about work, which has probably been on everyone's mind a lot lately, as the employment rate seems to be in a permanent slump. I won't say much about the essay he gave me, which says enough for itself without my commentary, except for this: as libertarians we are always debating the best way to achieve political liberty, which certainly a laudable goal, but it can be quite discordant with our own lives as we actually experience them. This is where the conception of freedom that Mike invokes becomes relevant. Whether you conceive of it as "liberty" and "freedom," as he does here, or as "inner" and "outer" freedom, the distinction is an important one to make. Those interested in the philosophy of inner freedom might want to look at the different ways the problem has been approached by Stoics, Taoists, and Existentialists. As someone who tends to become obsessed with abstract ideas, I have myself primarily in mind when I say that it does not suffice to have a conception of the Good Society: we must have a personal ethos; we must be skepical toward our society, yet we must still create a meaningful role for ourselves within it; we must continually evaluate the work that is our life; we must at every moment choose what to do with ourselves; we must realize that we have no choice in this matter- we are free.

I work at a local hospital in the medical records department. Our department’s name is officially Health Information, but calling it Medical Records would do just fine. I’m a clerk on the swing shift at night. I answer phones, fax medical records to doctors, and pull patients’ charts. I also, strangely enough, manage the intake and outtake of dead bodies in the hospital’s morgue. For all this I make $12.83 an hour plus I get a quarter more an hour after six o’clock, and then fifty cents more an hour after ten o’clock. Weekends I get another quarter more on top of that.

What do I buy with that kind of pay? Well, I pay rent on a one-bedroom basement apartment that I share with my girlfriend and our newborn baby. I make a car payment and pay for gas and insurance on a decent car with 83,000 miles on it. My sweetheart picks up the utilities, which leaves me with credit card payments, Netflix, and a cell-phone that I can’t get reception on at my apartment or at the office. After groceries and diapers there’s not much left for fun. We avoid eating out and like to take walks in the park. At midnight when I come home from my shift I hold my baby daughter and down a couple of Buds while I watch TV or a movie. I can’t remember the last time that I went to a mall.

I’m twenty-eight years old. When I first started out I worked as a bag-boy at the market up the street from my house. Back then, I made $5.15 an hour which was the minimum wage at the time. I would take long smoke breaks and drink expired beer that was going to be thrown away back in the dairy freezer. When you’re a kid you don’t think about how important a job is, or how much money you make. When you’re sixteen years old you don’t come home to a crummy apartment at 12:00 at night and find your girl cradling your little baby and think, “how the hell am I ever going to take care of these people?

I moved into my first apartment when I was twenty. That place was in a basement and the rent was about the same that I’m paying now. In eight years of work the only thing I have to show for it is a degree in English. Which is basically a piece of paper that says that I read a lot of books and wrote a lot of papers for four years. Most employers could care less about a bachelor’s degree and they care a lot less if you studied something like literature which the world doesn’t seem to ever want or need.

I’m a writer. I write poems, short stories, essays, you name it. I’m going to night school for a Master’s in English right now. On my days off I drive upstate to a little college about 40 miles away and take classes. I got one more year of that. After that, I can either go for a PhD or get a teaching license and teach school. At that point I’ll be making a starting teacher’s salary and I’ll be staring down the barrel of a student loan debt that I’ve been racking up since I was twenty. Does any of this sound familiar to you?

According to a poll conducted by the marketing and research firm Twentysomething Inc. 85% of college grads move back in with their parents after they graduate. The average student who graduates from a four-year college has about $20,000 in student loan debt and is making an average income of $27,000 - $37,000 annually. Last year, nearly 2 million college graduates were working two or more jobs that do not require college degrees. Roughly half of all college graduates in the country are working in jobs that do not require a college degree.

I have a friend who works the same position that I have at the hospital, making about the same amount of hourly pay. He has an MBA from the most prestigious private college in the state. He knows more than anyone that he could send out his résumé a hundred times to every company in the area, and he wouldn’t get so much as a call back. His situation is not unique. While colleges are churning out record amounts of business school grads each year, the top companies are shedding thousands of upper-level management positions to stay afloat. Earlier this month, financial giant HSBC Holding Plc. announced plans to eliminate 30,000 positions by 2013.

My father is in his early sixties. He got a degree from a four-year state college in the early 1970’s. He recently told me that when he was in college tuition went up every year, but he never paid more than $200 a semester in tuition. After he graduated he quickly found employment related to his field of study. He then moved out of his parents’ home and purchased a house for only $30,000 and a new car for $600. There is no way that my generation will experience that level of financial security in our lifetimes. We will remain working well into our golden years, and our children will tell their children how very hard grandma and grandpa had to work just to put food on the table. There is much more at play here than just a higher education bubble. The US dollar has been so irretrievably inflated by foreign debt, endless wars of aggression, and government sponsored corporate cronyism that any effort made by the greed-heads on Wall St. and Pennsylvania Ave. to regain economic growth will amount to little more than rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.

My working situation is like so many others who live from job to job in this economy. But do you want to know the honest truth about this hospital gig? I love it. I’m going broke working there, but I love it just the same. I’m good at it. When I’m on a phone call at the office I’m all business. I get the customer to where they need to be within what’s allowed by company policy and then I move them out the door to help the next one. I’d say 50% of the job is about managing work-flow. If you’ve got that down then everything else becomes easy. I’ve been here for four years, so I’m more knowledgeable than most, and way more knowledgeable than some. I’ve worked a few different positions within the department, so I know how the place ticks. If I had to I could run that whole department by myself. Sometimes I do.

Not that it’s a hard job by any means. By now, I could do the job in my sleep. Most days I clock in at three and pull charts for a half an hour. Then, I get on the customer service desk to take phone calls and help patients out. After five, we don’t take any patient walk-ins so I pull some more charts for about three hours. There aren’t a lot of phone calls after six, so I have plenty of time to do this. I also have to help doctors who need to finish up their part of the patients’ records, but there’s not that many of them after hours. Let me just say that everything that you’ve thought about doctors is totally true. These are uptight folks who are pathologically addicted to work and personal achievement. Many of them have these raging messianic egos that have to massaged and catered to before I can forget about them and get on with my work.

There are no bosses, which is huge for me. All of the people who say they’re in charge of me are out the door by five, which leaves me to work how I want and when I want without some geek in a tie fogging up my computer monitor every five minutes. The work I do is solid and my yearly evaluations reflect that. I don’t need any more guidance than what I’ve already received. So why worry about bosses?

Typically, I get my work done early and have a couple of hours free after that. That’s when the writing and any homework I have gets done. And it’s all on the clock. Late at night and on the weekends I don’t have much to do. The main reason they have people working after hours is so someone is available to fax records and take phone calls in case our patients are getting medical care somewhere else. Readiness is all the department really wants from me. If they gave me more to do, they’d have to pay me more. I know that.

Times are hard, but I really can’t complain too much. Money’s tight, but I know how to make it work. I pack my lunches and take public transit. I only use the credit card for emergencies. Also, I love these night classes that I’m taking. I love meeting new people. I’ve always got something new that I’m writing. I always feel like I’m on to something. The older I get, the more I feel that way. So, am I happy? Who knows. I know I’m not angry, or disappointed, or disgusted with everything. I know I still have hopes and dreams. I get by pretty well on that and that’s good enough for me.

The philosopher Butler Shaffer has said that liberty is a social condition. It’s a state of existence determined by such things as a free press, the right to keep and bear arms, the right to civil redress of one’s grievances, and so on. But freedom is an internal state cultivated by individuals alone. Freedom is a choice. When you choose not to aggress against the property or persons of those around you, and you choose not to allow yourself to be enslaved, physically or mentally by an outside authority, you have become free. You may lack liberty in some instances, but the moment that you recognize aggressive authoritarianism around you and you withdraw your consent to be made a party to their greedy and violent intentions you have liberated yourself. No amount of imprisonment and torture by the state can take that liberated way of being away from you.

Hopes and dreams may be all that I have, but it’s more than enough to help me endure. Some day I’ll tunnel out of this depression and make myself successful. Some day I’ll have enough money to put a ring on my girl’s finger and ask her to be my wife. Some day I’ll buy my daughter a wedding dress and walk her down the aisle. I will, someday.

The Thin Blue Party Line, Pt. 3

2011-08-04T13:18:00.000-07:00

III. The “War on Cops”

If police are convinced that they are soldiers on the front lines of a war across the country, any resistance or retaliation might be easily interpreted as part of a coordinated attack against the police as an institution. In other words, police are primed to see war everywhere. Such an attitude fueled a media campaign by police earlier this year.

Radley Balko described the affair in a piece for Reason magazine, “Between January 20 and January 25, 13 police officers were shot in the U.S., five of them fatally.” The incidents occurred in different parts of the country, in different circumstances, and nobody claimed to find any actual causal link between them. Nevertheless, “Some police advocates have drawn unsupported conclusions from this rash of attacks, claiming that they are tied to rising anti-police sentiment, anti-government protest, or a lack of adequate gun control laws. Media outlets also have been quick to draw connections between these unrelated shootings.” A response which was as characteristic of police advocates as it was hyperbolic and alarmist was International Union of Police Associations spokesman Richard Roberts: "It's not a fluke. . . . There's a perception among officers in the field that there’s a war on cops going on" (qtd in Balko). The Sheriff of Smith County, Texas, claimed that “it's a hundred times more likely today that an officer will be assaulted compared to twenty, thirty years ago” and that policing “has become one of the most hazardous jobs in the United States, undoubtedly – in the top five" (qtd in Grigg). Blogger and police critic Will Grigg responded by pointing to a Bureau of Labor Statistics report in which law enforcement didn’t even make the top ten most dangerous occupations, lagging behind such unheralded and unromanticised professions as roofers and groundskeepers. Grigg also linked to a Wired magazine article which revealed “The grim but statistically inescapable fact is that the average American is much more likely to be killed by a cop than by a terrorist.”

Kristian Williams, in his book on policing in America, Our Enemies in Blue, examined the statistics on both violence done to police and violence done by them, concluding, “If we do the math, we see that the police kill almost five times as often as they are killed” (22). Williams points out that policing is far less dangerous work than logging and mining, and yet, “Where are the headlines, the memorials, and sorrowful renderings of taps for these workers?” (21) The reason is that those industries have less reason to propagandize in order to win legitimacy. “Policing,” Williams writes, “is the only industry that both exaggerates and advertises its dangers” (21). The result is that “the overblown image of police heroism and the ‘obsession’ with officer safety” serves “to justify police violence after the fact; by providing such justification, they legitimize violence, and thus make it more likely” (Williams 22). Williams is extremely skeptical of what he calls the “hero defense,” which is derived from the idea that the police serves as the “thin blue line” between the comfort and safety of civilization and the violent criminals who threaten public order. But as we have seen, police increasingly see the whole public as being on the outside of that line. Williams’ book documents the long history of the police as agents of white supremacy, state capitalist class rule, and suppression of political dissent, which he argues continues to this day. He sees the hero defense as serving a propagandistic function:

The danger of the job is a constant theme in the defense of police violence. . . . By pointing to the dangers of the job, the excuse-makers don’t only defend police actions in particular circumstances (which might actually been dangerous), but as often as not take the opportunity to mount a general defense of the police. This is a clever bit of sophistry, as cynical as a Memorial Day speech during wartime. It’s one thing to make a banner of the bloody uniform when discussing a case where the cops actually were in danger, but quite another when they might have been in danger or only thought that they were. (19-20)

The “War on Cops” served as a useful rhetorical tool for a variety of political causes. What precisely was to blame for this admittedly unrelated rash of shootings depended on whether one leaned to the right or left of the police state center. Raven Clabough of the New American, for instance, blamed Hispanic gangs, illegal immigrants, and hip-hop music, which “often maligns police officers as villainous and encourages violent acts against law enforcement agents.” Considering that young men of color have been the most frequent victims of police brutality, and have themselves been the subject of criminal stereotyping in popular media, perhaps we can consider anti-cop sentiment an expression of frustration rather than an incitement to violence. As for gangs, Clabough intimated a connection, conspiracy-style, with no evidence whatsoever: “Whether the recent wave of police shootings is related to gang initiations or anti-police rhetoric is unknown.” Liberal commentators predictably used the opportunity to call for tightening restrictions on guns or decry “anti-government” sentiment among Tea Party-types on the Right.

Perhaps the most remarkable piece of police propaganda in the wake of the “war on cops” was an interview former Newark PD captain Jon Shane gave to NPR’s Michael Martin. Shane claimed “it follows some bit of a larger trend in the United States, that there's this overriding sense of entitlement and don't tread on me.” The whole sentence is a non-sequitir, which Shane does not bother to explain. “Don’t tread on me,” presumably refers to the slogan on the Gadsden flag, recently adopted as a symbol by the Tea Party. The flag is a traditional symbol of American patriotism, and has been in the past adopted as a symbol for U.S. Marine Corps. The police and the U.S. military, to who anybody who has been paying attention, are practically the only parts of government which have been exempt from the Tea Party’s “anti-government” rhetoric. Shane continues: “And law enforcement stands between the law-abiding people and this chaos that's going to erupt, that these would-be criminals would have if they get their way.”

Here he invokes the thin blue line, which, if Balko and other critics’ claims are taken seriously, should be question-begging at this point. Speaking of which, the NPR host asked a pertinent question, to which Shane had a revealing response:

Martin: Can I ask you about one other issue? This is a piece that was written by a police sergeant in Las Vegas. And he was referencing an earlier piece that talked about fighting a war, with regards to public perception. And he says that this is not a war. That by definition, you know, there is a difference between being a soldier and being a law enforcement, being a civilian who's entrusted with protecting the community.

Prof. Shane: Well, I clearly agree with the fact that you cannot characterize the war on crime the same as any given war. That's clear. In fact, I've published an article about that. Because when you do that, everybody becomes your enemy, and you can't discern the enemy from the law-abiding and you get enmeshed in this downward spiral where everybody gets treated the same. So that's clear, and I agree with that sergeant's take on the perception of war.

Note that the sergeant, in Martin’s interpretation at least, said that it was not a war. Shane insists on characterizing it as a “war on crime,” though willing to admit that it is not like other wars. The difference? Apparently, according to Shane, the war on crime requires sympathy for the cop’s plight. He continues:

Police departments also are not doing enough to outreach to all types of communities. There's not a good understanding about police tactics and why police officers do certain things and how police officers need to keep themselves safe. And on the same token, communities don't understand what it's like to be a police officer and to be the one who is at a complete disadvantage almost all the time. When you stop a car, you're at a disadvantage. When you show up at someone's house for a domestic dispute, you're at a disadvantage. When you answer a burglar alarm or panic alarm or a robbery call, you're at a complete disadvantage.

So this power, which is increasingly subscribing to the doctrine of overwhelming force against an ill-defined, potentially all-encompassing “enemy,” becomes transformed in Shane’s story into a “disadvantaged” position. (The disadvantag of dealing with a squad of cops as an unarmed person without a license to kill does not merit consideration.) Shane elaborates on what he means by “outreach”:

. . . placing members of the community in the officer's shoes ahead of time and giving them a real good education about what it's like to be a police officer can stave off some of those problems. We did that in Newark, through something called the Citizen's Police Academy, and then we had a clergy academy where we took appointed leaders of the community, civic leaders in the clergy and neighborhood association groups and brought them through a 12-week course in the Newark Police Department about how the operation goes.

What Shane is describing is generally known as “community policing,” a strategy which is usually contrasted with paramilitary tactics. However, Kristian Williams points out that militarism and community policing are by no means alternative strategies, but rather compliments, a kind of “good cop/ bad cop” approach that has been used (not surprisingly) by the military as a counterinsurgency strategy abroad, which, unlike other types of military objectives “requires that the authorities make nice with the local populace, creating in the community a sense that their rule is stable and legitimate” (255). “In military terms, the sweeps work to secure territory and community organizing efforts constitute a battle for the hearts and minds of populace” (Williams 257). Community policing has in the past been sold in inner city communities as a response to complaints of brutality and bureaucratic impersonality. Citizen surveys and community meetings have been conducted, offering the citizen a chance to participate in the policing process. However, Williams contends that “mechanisms through which the community is supposed to voice its concerns often become forums for the police to promote their own agenda. . . . turning an atmosphere of inclusiveness and participation to propagandistic ends” (240). This is quite transparent in Shane’s version of “community outreach,” which has nothing to do with addressing citizen concerns and everything to do with generating sympathy for the cop.

In the final analysis, there simply was no “war on cops.” The website CopBlock.org reported:

If we don’t just look at a snapshot of a few years, but instead at the last 25 years [roughly the same time period Balko indentifies as the era of paramilitary policing], we see that officer deaths have been on a slow trend downward with a few outlier years in both directions. Deaths specifically due to violence directed at an officer have followed the same downward trend as the total number of deaths.

Balko’s Reason article concluded that police and gun-control advocates cobbled together “an anomalous series of terrible shootings as evidence of a nonexistent anti-police trend.” But police have for years been trained as soldiers, and encouraged by what counts these days as the “civil authority” into thinking that there is a serious war going on in America against an army of nebulous and abstract foes. The warrior mentality such propaganda creates has made an encounter with a cop as dangerous to the average citizen as an encounter with a criminal.*

* Submitting this paper for a grade must have made me timid in my conclusion. I actually believe that the organized firepower combined with propaganda that is American policing is far more to be feared than your typical random psychopath, particularly if you "fit the profile" (that is, propaganda's profile) in some way, such being a racial undesirable (Mexicans and Arabs are special targets of fear and loathing these days) or political dissident (this very paper may be used against me one day if I find myself in the clutches of the Law).

The Thin Blue Party Line, Pt. 2

2011-07-27T12:33:00.000-07:00

II. Warrior Cops

Civil liberties and procedural issues aside, the effects of militarization upon police officers themselves are most remarkable. They have come to adopt what Weber calls “the warrior mentality of our military’s special forces” (9). “The so-called war on drugs and other martial metaphors,” she writes “are turning high-crime areas into ‘war zones,’ citizens into potential enemies, and police officers into soldiers” (10). Such a mentality is a direct result of federal provision of equipment and training from the U.S. armed forces. Weber quotes one of the very few police chiefs, Nick Pastore of New Haven, Connecticut, to have turned down federal provisions: “I was offered tanks, bazookas, anything I wanted. . . . I turned it all down because it feeds a mind-set that you’re not a police officer serving a community, you’re a soldier at war” (7). The difference between a serving a community and fighting a war is the difference between minimum and maximum force, and between viewing people as citizens with rights or (as police jargon now has it) “civilians” who are mere obstacles in the way of military objectives, if not targets themselves. A quote from an officer on paramilitary training in Weber’s study illustrates the difficulty cops now have not imaging themselves as soldiers:

We’ve had special forces folks who have come right out of the jungles of Central and South America. . . . All branches of military service are involved in providing training to law enforcement. U.S. Marshals act as liaisons between the police and military to set up the training—our go-between. They have an arrangement with the military through JTF-6 [Joint Task Force 6]. . . . I just received a piece of paper from a four-star general who tells us he’s concerned about the type of training we’re getting. We’ve had teams of Navy Seals and Army Rangers come here and teach us everything. We just have to use our judgment and exclude the information like: “at this point we bring in the mortars and blow the place up.” (9)

A whole culture has arisen around PPU’s, full of militaristic imagery, rhetoric, and paraphernalia. David Kopel of the Independence Institute says that the weapon industry’s ads aimed at police “deliberately blur the line between warfare and law enforcement” (qtd in Balko 14). The ad copy for the preferred gun of the Navy SEALs and SWAT, Heckler and Koch’s MP5, is instructive: “From the Gulf War to the Drug War—Battle Proven” (Balko 14). Adam Parfrey, who attended an informal SWAT seminar, filled with games and exhibitions, observed that drawings and t-shirts were sold which “reflect an almost mythic adoration of domestic paramilitary forces” (268). He sums up the way the officers see themselves in relation to the public at large: “Cops are the forgotten heroes, taking the heat while the coddled millions snooze away in front of the television sets” (272). One officer, Al Baker, delivers a remarkable speech, reminiscent of a Travis Bickle monologue from Taxi Driver, describing how cops witness the degeneration of society, proclaiming that “Cops are the only real people left,” and finally lamenting that the public fails to recognize that “Cops are very sensitive.”

As for the psychological effect of militarism on those who are policed, it can be inferred from blogger Kevin Carson’s rhetorical question, “does anyone remember the days before local police forces adopted black uniforms, when the friendly policeman on the corner didn't feel the need to dress like an SS stormtrooper?” We might be well advised to consider that when it comes to police militarization, the medium is the message. Balko quotes from the “Demand Reduction Section” of the National Guard: “the rapid growth of this drug scourge has shown that military force must be used to change the attitudes and activities of Americans who are dealing and using drugs” (15). Force here serves as propaganda, as Jacques Ellul defines it: “a set of methods employed by an organized group that wants to bring about the active or passive participation in its actions of a mass of individuals, psychologically unified through psychological manipulations and incorporated in an organization” (61).*

Police militarization is hardly limited to drug raids on private homes, but is as pervasive on the streets in some American cities as Baghdad or Mogadishu. For example, Fresno, California’s Violent Crime Suppression Unit, which “was given carte blanche to enter residences and apprehend and search occupants in high-crime, mostly minority neighborhoods” (Balko 11). Balko reports that “The unit routinely stopped pedestrians without probable cause, searched them, interrogated them, and entered their personal information into a computer” (11). A SWAT soldier (er, officer) justified such tactics to the Nation with admirable succinctness: “It’s a war,” he said (qtd in Balko 11).

* This is the only time I invoke Ellul, and even this statement I must admit is badly incorporated into my essay. My point is that the War on Drugs, like the War on Terror, is not just a matter of who has the most guns, but a "hearts and minds" battle consisting of signs and symbols. Overwhelming displays of force are not mere exercises in coercion, in which case the State would only resort to them as a last resort, but are calculated to inspire emotions useful to the State, such as awe, fear, reverence, exultation, a vicarious experience of domination, etc. I could have utilized Ellul's ideas in this area much more than I did. For instance, he writes, "Propaganda tries first of all to create conditioned reflexes in the individual by training him so that certain words, signs, or symbols, even certain persons or facts, provoke unfailing reactions." The word "reaction" is key. The virtue of spectacular violence for propaganda is that it provokes emotional responses which tend to override reason. The American public's reaction to Osama bin Laden's murder is as good example as any of the kind of "unfailing reaction" the State desires. Of course, it can go the other way as well. The L.A. riots in the wake of the acquittal of the cops who beat Rodney King, for instance. But this was not the result of propaganda; rather a failure to propagandize. The Waco conflagration would be an example of an failed attempt of propaganda. Even in these examples, propaganda did its job in some sectors: conservative law-and-order types (and racists, of course) undoubtedly became more sympathetic to the LAPD, and less to their victims, as a result of the riots. Even now you find liberals who defend the BATF and buy into the government/media narrative about the Branch Davidians. When propaganda has sufficiently prepared the ideological ground, the State can benefit even from its failures ("The surge worked!"). One might think that this is a matter of managing opinion, but in fact it is a matter of myth activating belief. Ellul is very articulate here, and introduces the concept of "orthopraxy" or conformity of action, over "orthodoxy" or conformity of opinion:

The aim of modern propaganda is no longer to modify ideas, but to provoke action. It is no longer to change adherence to a doctrine, but to make the individual cling irrationally ro a process of action. It is no longer to transform an opinion, but to arouse an active and mythical belief.

I would add to this that inaction, or failure to resist, can also be a form of orthopraxy.
Note: I'll post the third and final section of this paper next week.

The Thin Blue Party Line, Pt. 1

2011-07-22T11:29:00.000-07:00

This Spring I took a class in Propaganda. We focused, interestingly, not on the Golden Age of Propaganda, the days of Goebbels and Bernays, but on the contemporary landscape. Our primary texts were Jacques Ellul's wonderful 1965 study Propaganda, and G. William Domhoff's Who Rules America? While I thought it was great that we studied propaganda in contemporary life, the professor unfortunately had an obsessive focus on corporations.

For the record, I think the modern corporation is an irrational, ineffiecient, and wasteful organization. The products of the corporation range from the bland to the shoddy to the poisonous. To work for a corporation is to slowly erode your soul and body.

I also believe that a genuine free market would swallow corporations and explode them like so many pop-rocks.

Anyway, I decided to write my final paper for the class on what I feel is the most destructive organization, bar none. It is one few people question: the police. Here it is:

The Thin Blue Party Line: Police and Propaganda in America

He has kept among us, in Times of Peace, Standing Armies, without the consent of our Legislatures. He has affected to render the Military independent of and superior to the Civil Power. - The Declaration of Independence of the United States of America

This has got to cease/ ‘cause we be getting hyped to the sound of da police. - KRS-One

Discourse on policing in America is governed by a single overarching metaphor: war. We have in this country, as our politicians never tire of informing us, a War on Drugs, a War on Terror, and a War on Crime. Of course these are not “real” wars, the kind with formal declarations and limited objectives, and which may end in a foreseeable if distant future. Wars, as we generally imagine them, are carried out against identifiable enemies with flags and uniforms, and not against abstractions. If such abstract wars as these were formally declared, we might feel uncomfortable about them being carried out on our own soil against potentially any and every American citizen. But wars do not remain metaphorical for long: police across the country have armed themselves like the military and adopted their tactics, weapons, and mindset, creating what Diane Cecilia Weber has called “Warrior Cops.” Radley Balko reports, “Over the last 25 years, America has seen a disturbing militarization of its civilian law enforcement, along with a dramatic and unsettling rise in the use of paramilitary police units (most commonly called Special Weapons and Tactics, or SWAT) for routine police work” (1). This militarization has had a corrosive effect not only on our civil liberties, but our basic safety in dealings with police. As police have come to view themselves as soldiers on dangerous ground, the citizen is viewed as a potential enemy combatant, who must submit to every command of an officer, no matter how intrusive or humiliating. As criticism has increased over police paramilitary tactics, pro-police propaganda has increased as well. Growing directly out of the war metaphor, it cultivates the hero-soldier image and exaggerates the dangers actually faced by police. The police response to their critics recalls Kipling’s poem “Tommy,” about a beleaguered and unappreciated soldier: “Yes, making mock of uniforms that guard you while you sleep/ Is cheaper than them uniforms, an’ they’re starvation cheap.” But with their new high-tech gear and high-powered weapons, police are nowhere near chap anymore, and there’s good reason to view this thin blue line of heroes as more like “plaster saints” than heroes.

I. A Brief History of Paramilitary Policing

It’s widely agreed that the first PPU (for “police paramilitary unit”) was created by Los Angeles Metro Squad commander (and later LAPD chief) Daryl Gates in 1968. The outspoken Gates became notorious for his hard-line stance on drugs, telling the Senate judiciary committee, “The casual drug user should be taken out and shot” (qtd in Williams 234). He was later asked by a reporter if he was being hyperbolic, but he reiterated and elaborated his point. He meant what he said “because if this is a war on drugs, they [the casual drug user] are giving aid and comfort to the enemy” (qtd in Williams 234). The founding father of American police militarism took the war on drugs quite literally.

PPUs were not, however, created for fighting drugs, but in response to the mass civil unrest that characterized the period, such as the 1965 Watts riots. Balko claims that Gates’ SWAT was modeled on “a specialized force in Delano, California, made up of crowd control officers, riot police, and snipers, assembled to counter the farm worker uprisings led by Cesar Chavez ” (6). Gates originally named the unit “Special Weapons Attack Team,” but city officials changed it to the more politic “Special Weapons and Tactics.” (Balko 6). SWAT and other PPUs are characterized not only by military training and discipline, but military-grade weapons. Gates’ new squad trained with the Marines. Around the same time Gates was forming SWAT, the NYPD was writing the Pentagon and Strategic Air Command Headquarters for inspiration in designing its Command and Control Center. (Williams 230) Local PPUs across the country would later be directly equipped and funded by the Department of Defense.

From the beginning, SWAT was characterized by both an unprecedented level of violence and media presence. Their first major deployment was a 1969 confrontation with the Black Panthers in a barricaded house in South-Central L.A., which was blown up with a grenade launcher by Gates’ squad. As Balko reports, Gates was well aware of the PR aspect of the event, telling NPR years later, “It was the first time we got to show off” (qtd in Balko 6). Another well-publicized event was a 1974 standoff with the Symbionese Liberation Army, which had kidnapped heiress Patty Hearst. The SLA house was burned to the ground, killing six people and damaging surrounding houses as well. Gates later recalled that “my main concern was that Patty Hearst had been inside. I didn’t give a shit about the others.” (qtd in Williams 231) This destructive pattern is recurrent in the history of PPU confrontations, including the bombing of the black separatist group MOVE in Philadelphia in 1985, which killed 11 and destroyed 65 homes. Police tactics were defended by Mayor W. Wilson Goode, saying, “What we have out there is war” (qtd in Williams 196).

Despite (or perhaps because of*) a marked penchant for using overwhelming and arguably reckless force, a SWAT has exerted a fascination upon the popular imagination, described by Radley Balko:

"Gates’s experiment soon became a celebrated part of American pop culture. A SWAT-themed television show debuted in 1975, and the show’s theme song hit the Billboard Top Forty. In 1995, Gates launched a SWAT video game franchise with Sierra Entertainment. The SWAT series spawned several award winning 'first-person' style shooter games, the most recent version of which was released in early 2005. In January 2006, cable television channel A&E debuted a new reality television show called Dallas SWAT, which follows the lives of the members of a Dallas, Texas, SWAT team. Court TV now carries the show Texas SWAT, in which seasoned war journalist Jeff Chagrin tags along with several SWAT teams across the state." (6)

Journalist and publisher Adam Parfrey also notes that “In keeping with SWAT’s mythic reputation, Gates’ men trained for several years in Universal Studios’ backlot” (273).

The problem with police militarization would be small if raids were only against fringe radical groups. During the Reagan Administration, PPU’s became the front line in the war on drugs, as the federal government began subsidizing the formation paramilitary units across the country. Balko explains that “with prodding from the White House, Congress paved the way to widespread military-style policing by carving yawning drug war exceptions to the Posse Comitatus Act, the Civil War–era law prohibiting the use of the military for civilian policing.” (7) Balko’s Overkill: The Rise of Paramilitary Police Raids in America and Diane Cecilia Weber’s Cato Institute article “Warrior Cops: The Ominous Growth of Paramilitarism in American Police Departments” each document and critique the increasing use of PPUs for serving drug warrants in “no knock raids,” (40,000 per year, according to Balko) which, they argue, increase the likelihood for violence in such situations. Such raids, Balko writes, “bring unnecessary violence and provocation to nonviolent drug offenders . . . terrorize innocents when police mistakenly target the wrong residence” and “have resulted in dozens of needless deaths and injuries . . .” (1)

* This juvenile cult of the "bad-ass", aka worship of the jackbooted thug, has reached a spectacular new height since I wrote this paper, in the wake of Osama bin Laden's assassination by Seal Team 6.

In America's Green and Pleasant Land

2011-07-19T15:36:00.000-07:00

My review of Ernest Callenbach's 1975 novel of an ecological utopia, named (what else) Ecotopia, is now posted at Prometheus Unbound. Is it an inspiring vision of oneness with nature, or a mere exercise in green make-believe, an environmental fairy-tale? I don't really come down on either side in my review. What I am sure of is that the book is an attempt to find a way out of the the general catastrophe (a much more accurate term than"malaise") that was the 1970's. Thus, it is a good time to revisit the book (even though it is rather weak as a novel), because we are living in a similarly catastrophic period.

This is a book in which a leftist argues the validity of secession. Think about it.

A Terrible Blogger is Born!: The Greatest Hits

2011-06-23T09:22:00.000-07:00

I mentioned in the last post that I had a previous blog. I neglected to mention the title, A Terrible Blogger is Born! Like the title of this blog, it's a literary reference: a play on a line from Yeats' poem "Easter, 1916," about the Irish Republican insurrection of that year.

Reviewing my old blog, I find it to be something of a mess. Unfocused, and too much under the influence of other blogs I was reading which shall remain nameless. (Visually it leaves something to be desired also, but that's largely because I never quite mastered editing Wordpress.) But it was fun to do, and I don't regret it. I developed certain ideas spontaneously, and some posts I still like. Here are a few:

"Anarchism and Patriotism": My version of the "dissent is the highest form of patriotism" argument. I hate the state, not my country. Though my country really gets on my fucking nerves sometimes. The 4th of July's coming up, so check it out.

"A Critique of Cultural Keynesianism" and "Postscript on Cultural Keynesianism": Cultural Keynesianism doesn't really exist as an articulated philosophy, i.e. as the varieties of cultural Marxism do, but I think it does exist as a set of unconscious assumptions. Some day I'd like to write more on the parallels between money and language. Nobody should have a monopoly on either, is all I can say for now.

"Modern Procrustes or, Consumerism is Too Important to Be Left to the Consumers": Kevin Carson's epoch-making book Organization Theory: A Libertarian Perspective got me thinking about consumerism and the corporate state, and I was reminded of nothing so much as Huxley's Brave New World. Keynesianism looks much different viewed through this perspective. Called "essential."

"Confessions of a Liberal Anarchist": Basically a longer version of my first post on this blog. The first post that won me a bit of notoriety.

Anarchy, State, & Utopia in Joyce's Ulysses pt. 2

2011-06-20T11:46:00.000-07:00

Before describing the creed and construction of the new Bloomusalem, we might pause to consider Joyce’s own political sympathies. We know that he admired the home-rule advocate Parnell, that he despised British imperialism, and that he was a lifelong pacifist. Otherwise he adhered to no specific political system, or at least proclaimed none. Pacifism by itself, as we shall see, would have been enough to make Joyce an antiBloomite, but Dominic Manganiello’s book Joyce’s Politics reveals sympathy for another perspective by which we might critique Bloom’s kingdom: anarchism. Anarchism’s heyday coincided with Joyce’s youth, and Manganiello claims that “Joyce’s knowledge of anarchist literature was extensive” (72). “The anarchists, like Bakunin,” writes Manganiello, “fascinated Joyce because, whereas Marx dictated an impersonal class warfare, they sought to liberate the individual from those forces that smothered human potentialities” (71). Because of a wave of assassinations of political figures in the last decade of the 19^th century, in what was known as “propaganda of the deed,” anarchism has been since
associated with terrorist violence, but this has never been a central tenet of anarchism, and many if not most anarchist thinkers rejected it specifically, including the writer and activist Manganiello claims as Joyce’s “principal political authority,” (74) the American individualist anarchist Benjamin Tucker. Tucker feuded with German immigrant Johann Most, the chief advocate of propaganda of the deed, over this issue specifically. (Most appears in the “brood of mockers” in the “Scylla and Charybdis” episode.) While Manganiello acknowledges the prevalence of nonviolence in anarchist thought, he still comments that in the works of Tolstoy “the improbable combination of anarchism and pacifism was realized” (73). The combination is far from improbable. While passive resistance in an individual may do little against the state, and may arguably help perpetuate it, passive resistance by a whole community would directly achieve anarchy. Manganiello quotes a short piece by Tucker on “The Irish Situation in 1881,” with which Joyce surely agreed, praising the Land League as a quasi-anarchistic organization and stated that the Irish people had been “ground into the dust beneath the weight of two despotisms, one religious, the other political” (74). But Manganiello does not go on to quote the final paragraph, in which Tucker recommends “passive but stubborn resistance” to the police and military, along with “utter disregard of the British parliament and its so-called laws” (Tucker).

Anarchism seeks equality and liberty by means of voluntary and spontaneous organization of social forces, rather than by means of parliamentary democracy, “dictatorship of the proletariat” or any other statist measures. Individualist anarchism seeks to free the individual from the dictates of the collective. Manganiello writes that “both Tucker and Joyce believed that the individual should not sacrifice himself for the community” (78) Stephen Dedalus, in particular, with his creed of “non serviam,” seems to be informed by the ideas of another individualist anarchist, the German philosopher Max Stirner (whom Tucker translated). At the very least, “His demand for absolute freedom to realize his artistic aims implies anarchistic or libertarian thought” (100). With this perspective in mind, we can see what is missing from the reformist schemes of the new Bloomusalem.

Joyce sees that the establishment of socialism via the State entails the destruction of traditional society. As the “colossal edifice” is constructed “several buildings and monuments are demolished” and “numerous houses are razed to the ground” (Joyce 395). It is destructive of individual liberty as well, as “The inhabitants are lodged in barrels and boxes, all marked in red with the letters: L.B” (Joyce 395). That is, Leopold Bloom. The citizen is entirely the property of the state, which means in practice whoever happens to control the state at any given time. Stephen’s egoist assertion, on the other hand, is, “Let my country die for me,” (Joyce 482) and “Ireland must be important because it belongs to me” (Joyce 527). Neither can the state tolerate dissenters. In keeping with the nightmare logic throughout “Circe,” no sooner is Bloom’s colossal edifice complete than it begins to be undermined. The mysterious Man in the Macintosh “springs up through a trapdoor” to accuse Bloom of being a fraud. Now Bloom becomes the executioner: “Shoot him! Dog of a Christian! So much for M’Intosh!” (Joyce 396). The scene seems prophetic of the political liquidations that marked so much of the middle of twentieth century, as if Joyce can see already the gulag or the Night of the Long Knives. Macintosh is the first against the wall, but more follow: “A cannonshot. The man in the macintosh disappears. Bloom with his scepter strikes down poppies. The instantaneous deaths of many powerful enemies, graziers, members of parliament, members of standing committees, are reported” (Joyce 396). Remember that both Stephen and Bloom had categorically rejected force, even retaliatory force, as being opposed to life. Bloom: “But it’s no use, says he. Force, hatred, history, all that. That’s not life for men and women, insult and hatred” (Joyce 273). Stephen, when physically confronted by a soldier in the street, declares, “Personally, I detest action” (Joyce 480). But Stephen’s “non serviam” is no less absolute for rejecting physical resistance. Like Blake, his fight is a mental one. Tapping his brow, Stephen says, “in here it is I must kill the priest and the king” (Joyce 481).

Joyce himself, as Manganiello notes, was a pacifist. A youthful essay, “Force,” written while he was still a student at University College, Dublin, presents a rather sophisticated analysis of violence, rejecting it not just on moral but practical grounds as being counterproductive to whatever aim it intends to achieve: “all subjugation by force, if carried out and prosecuted by force is only so far successful in breaking men’s spirits and aspirations. Also that it is, in the extreme, productive of ill-will and rebellion, that it is, again, from its beginning in unholy war, stamped with the stamp of ultimate conflict” (17). If violence inevitably generates conflict, no utopia can ever be erected upon the rock of force. As if to illustrate the point, not long after “year 1 of the Paradisiacal Era” is declared and the Bloomian doctrine expounded, the public divides itself into rabid supporters who proclaim him as a “hero god” (women begin mass suicides “by stabbing, drowning, drinking prussic acid,” etc.) and “antiBloomites” who slander him.

But what of the Bloomian doctrine itself? Does it justify the means? It is worth quoting at length:

I stand for the reform of municipal morals and the plain ten commandments. New worlds for old Union of all, jew, moslem and gentile. Three acres and a cow for all children of nature. Saloon motor hearses. Compulsory labour for all. All parks open to the public day and night. Electric dishscrubbers. Tuberculosis, lunacy, war and mendicancy must now cease. General amnesty, weekly carnival with masked license, bonuses for all, Esperanto the universal language with universal brotherhood. No more patriotism of barspongers and dropsical impostors. Free money, free rent, free love and a free lay church in a free lay state. (399)

Unlike the pomposity of the rest of the episode, this is a fairly straightforward declaration of Bloom’s actual political ideals, a vision which is touching, if slightly ridiculous. It is rife with contradictions, alternating wildly between the “free” and the “compulsory,” the provided and the prohibited, “license” and taboo. Pervasive and persistent social problems (and even non-social problems like disease) are disestablished by fiat. Manganiello calls it “a mixture of freemasonry and of some of the Utopian Socialist visionary programmes at the turn of the century, with peculiar Bloomite twists. Political independence is not at all Bloom’s prime concern, but radical social reform” (111). But Manganiello also finds traces of anarchism in here as well, and notes the some similarities in Bloom’s speech to the claims of Kropotkin, the leading anarcho-communist, who argued in The Conquest of Bread that “all private property would eventually become common property” (qtd in Manganiello 111). But this is the common aim of all forms of communism, and the difference in means (the state in Marxism, voluntary associations in anarchism) should not be ignored. Interestingly, he thinks the reference to the electric dishscrubber “may owe its inclusion to a passage in which Kropotkin argues that woman also claims her share in the emancipation of humanity. . . . He was therefore delighted when a Mrs. Cochrane in Illinois invented a dishwashing machine which would ease the burden of domestic labour” (112). But instead of Kropotkin’s free-for-all in consumption, Manganiello says “Bloom seems to favour Bakunin’s position by insisting on ‘compulsory manual labour for all’” (112). Collectivists such as Bakunin wanted to remunerate according to labor performed, a position Kropotkin argued against in “The Collectivist Wages System.” However, it does not necessarily follow that labor in autonomous collectives would therefore be “compulsory,” or that Bloom’s decree of compulsory labor has anything to do with anarchism (which after all, became the practice of state socialists, which adopted their slogan from II Thessalonians, 3:10, “if any would not work, neither should he eat”).

If anarchism is here, it is a small ingredient, and Manganiello finds a much better touchstone in H.G. Wells. “‘New Worlds for Old’ is an unknowingly anachronistic allusion to the title of H.G. Wells’s book, not published until 1908, in which he set out to define present the socialist position as a practical policy in solving contemporary social conditions.” (Manganiello 111) Wells was a member of the Fabian Society, the leading advocates of reformist socialism in the progressive era. Wells had a nearly unbounded faith in rational, scientific central planning, and little more than contempt for liberty as a political value. Wells’ utopias became the direct inspiration and indirect target of all of the classic dystopian novels: Zamyatin’s We, Huxley’s Brave New World, and Orwell’s 1984, as well as one of the earliest modern dystopias, E.M. Forster’s 1909 short story “The Machine Stops.” Robert S. Baker describes Wells’ vision in terms which could fit the Bloomian creed as well: “Wells’s ‘scientific state’ . . . is a perplexing fusion of liberal, progressivist, socialist, Marxist, and even anarchist notions that Wells specifically disassociates from Marxist-Leninist ideology, or what he refers to as ‘Bolshevism’” (34). Mechanically-minded Bloom would almost certainly find in Wells a congenial intellect.

Bloom’s advocacy of Esperanto, a planned or constructed language, is also emblematic of the engineering mentality applied to social problems. As laudable as its goals may be (removing the linguistic barriers which separate people and thus engendering peace and equality), it errs by putting the cart before the horse: humanity will not be at one because it speaks one language, but it will speak one language because it is at one. In “Ithaca,” a sober Bloom has a different assessment of the possibility of improving the human condition, but he admits only of “natural,” not “human” barriers. (Of course the classic failure of those with a social engineering mentality, such as Wells or Francis Bacon, is that they think the human order operates on the same principles as the natural.) Bloom’s ruminations in “Ithaca” also offer a more plausible version of the new Bloomusalem, as he contemplates retiring to the country in a place he calls “Flowerville.”

Another aspect of the new Bloomusalem that Joyce could not fail to include is the aesthetic. Quite unlike his friend and fellow modernist Ezra Pound, Joyce clearly did not think that a new cultural renaissance was a mere matter of bringing back the tyrant patrons of the Italian city-states. Bloom distributes “cheap reprints of the World’s Twelve Worst Books” (Joyce 396). The museum contains naked plaster figures “representing the nine new muses,” each of them derived from one of Bloom’s personal enthusiasms, such as “Private Hygiene,” and “Painless Obstetrics and Astronomy for the People” (Joyce 400).

Political freedom is indeed one of the ends of the new Bloomusalem, summed up as, “Free money, free rent, free love and a free lay church in a free lay state” (Joyce 399). But the libertarian tradition teaches an important lesson missing from all utopias: that freedom is an essential means as well as an end, without which history can only remain a nightmare. In “Ithaca” we are told that Bloom and Stephen represent “two temperaments,” the scientific and artistic, respectively. Joyce clearly means them to complement each other in a spiritual whole (jokingly called “Stoom” or “Blephen”). In the political realm as well, utopian or messianic Bloom must be complimented by libertarian Stephen.

Anarchy, State, & Utopia in Joyce's Ulysses pt. 1

2011-06-16T10:07:00.000-07:00

This following is the first half of my final paper for my Joyce class this Spring. I analyze part of the "Circe" episode, and consider how it might be informed by Joyce's anarchist leanings.

Anarchy, State, and Utopia in Ulysses: The Politics of the New Bloomusalem

And was Jerusalem builded here/Among these dark Satanic mills? – Blake

-Are you talking about the new Jerusalem? says the citizen. -I'm talking about injustice, says Bloom.

In the long, phantasmagorical “Circe” episode of Ulysses, Leopold Bloom undergoes an ordeal in the form of a nightmare or hallucination while in Nighttown, Dublin’s brothel district. Bloom’s desires and fears are enacted upon him before (and sometimes by) a public audience. Everything in the fantasy has its roots in some part of Bloom’s psyche. His domination by Bella/Bello Cohen, for instance, reveals his latent masochism. One of the most remarkable incidents is Bloom’s delivery of a speech denouncing capitalist society, his subsequent coronation as “emperor-president and king-chairman” Leopold the First, and the construction of a new Irish State, “the new Bloomusalem in the Nova Hibernia of the future” (Joyce 395). This “golden city” is nothing less than the establishment of peace and equality on earth, and it has the virtue of simultaneously fulfilling Bloom’s political and personal ambitions. Harry Blamires praises an earlier incident, in which Bloom is apprehended and accused by police, apparently for no specific crime, which he says equals “in power and relevance the ‘trial’ passages in King Lear and those in Kafka” (166). The “new Bloomusalem” section, however, takes the political nightmare further, becoming more absurd, both hilarious and horrifying. Despite the fact that Bloom’s pronunciations include a number of agendas Joyce supported, I argue that the new Bloomusalem constitutes a dystopian satire which uncannily predicts the totalitarian regimes that lay in the near future when Ulysses was written, and belongs along with the works Orwell and Huxley as a warning of how political power deforms idealistic intentions.

Throughout Ulysses, we have a chance to become familiar many of with Bloom’s political ideas and sympathies, though what to call his political philosophy is unclear. Words like “socialist” and “reformist” are applicable, though they are too vague, and it’s unlikely that Bloom follows any particular thinker or school of thought. When confronted with anti-Semitism by Irish chauvinists in the “Cyclops” episode, he includes Karl Marx on his list of great Jews, though he professes no specifically Marxian ideas nor uses Marxian terms. But like Marx, he tends to see economics as the basic driving force of history and social conflict, as evidenced by his ruminations on the commercial interests of the Catholic church in “Lestrygonians” (“And don’t they rake in the money too?”), (Joyce 68) and his declaration to Stephen in “Eumaeus” that “All those wretched quarrels . . . were very largely a question of the money question which was at the back of everything greed and jealousy, people never knowing when to stop” (Joyce 526). Broadly speaking, he is secular, universalist, and egalitarian. He sympathizes with women and the poor. We learn that “a recurrent frustration” is that “he desired to amend many social conditions, the product of inequality and avarice and international animosity” (Joyce 571). He has the progressive’s love of reforming everything, from public works (“I can’t make out why the corporation doesn’t run a tramline from the parkgate to the quays”) (Joyce 81) to public hygiene (prostitutes should be “licensed and medically inspected by the proper authorities”) (Joyce 517). This is perhaps related to his general love of cleanliness and order. Gazing at his bookshelf in the “Ithaca” episode, he thinks of “The necessity of order, a place for everything and everything in its place” (Joyce 583). We should note that on Bloom’s shelves are novels, histories, and books on science, but no political philosophy. Bloom has a tendency, common in intellectuals of the progressive era, to an engineering mentality which conceives of social problems as equations to be solved by the state. His personal ambitions and career as an advertiser, however, are thoroughly bourgeois. He is, unlike Stephen, no fiery radical, though the “Cyclops” episode proves that he is unafraid to express unpopular opinions.

Mocking his penchant for reform, the grandiose farce of the new Bloomusalem begins with Bloom chiding the whore Zoe for the “childish device” of smoking, to which she responds, “Go on. Make a stump speech out of it” (Joyce 390). He thereupon launches into a stump speech to end all stump speeches. Dressed “in workman’s corduroy overalls,” thereby demonstrating his solidarity with the working class, he denounces the “weed” brought back from America by Sir Walter Raleigh, blaming it for corruption of society: “Suicide! Lies. All our habits. Why, look at our public life!” (Joyce 390) A crowd now forming to praise him, distant chimes declaring him “Lord Mayor of Dublin,” Bloom now calls for the implementation of his plan for a tramline discussed in the “Hades” episode. “That’s the music of the future. That’s my programme” (Joyce 390). The crowd cheers him on, while the former mayor announces that Bloom’s speech will be “printed at the expense of the ratepayers,” the house of his birth “ornamented with a commemorative tablet” and a street will be named “Boulevard Bloom” (Joyce 391).

With all of this praise spurring him on, Bloom launches into a denunciation of capitalist exploitation. Here we should pause to consider that in both “Aeolus” and “Sirens,” Joyce equates political rhetoric and farting, but also that the speech of John F. Taylor which Joyce reproduces, and is discussed by the men in the newspaper office, demonstrates that he thought it could be a beautiful and powerful art as well. Much of Bloom’s rhetoric here should be considered “jocoserious,” that is, as serious and at the same time a joke. Bloom castigates “These flying Dutchmen, or lying Dutchmen as they recline in their upholstered poop, casting dice, what reck they?” (Joyce 391) This perhaps alludes to St. Peter’s prophetic intrusion into Milton’s pastoral elegy “Lycidas,” where he decries clergymen who should be taking care of their flocks, but instead have become “blind mouths” exploiting them: “What recks it them? What need they? They are sped.”

The capitalist class is denounced for introducing machinery: “Machines is their cry, their chimera, their panacea. Laboursaving apparatuses, supplanters, bugbears, manufactured monsters for mutual murder, hideous hobgoblins produced by a horde of capitalistic lusts upon our prostituted labour” (Joyce 391). The robber barons, meanwhile, live in pastoral bliss: “The poor man starves while they are grassing their royal mountain stags or shooting peasants and phartridges in their purblind pomp of pelf and power” (Joyce 391). The denunciation of machines as a “panacea” is hypocritical, considering Bloom’s enthusiastic introduction of “Saloon motor hearses” and “Electric dishscrubbers” into his utopia several pages later (Joyce 399). As we must’ve learned by this point, Bloom is a most mechanically-minded person. In the “Hades” episode in particular, Bloom has a number of mildly blasphemous ideas on the disposal of corpses, such as putting alarms and telephones in coffins or piercing the hearts of corpses to insure against premature burial. Hearts are, Bloom thinks, nothing more than machines, “Old rusty pumps” (Joyce 87). Later in “Circe” Bloom will be hilariously accused by Mr. Purefoy: “He employs a mechanical device to frustrate the sacred ends of nature” (Joyce 401). In the “Hades” episode as well, Bloom had uncovered the basic fallacy inherent in the Luddite fear of labor-saving machinery: “Couldn’t they invent something automatic so that the wheel itself much handier? Well but that fellow would lose his job then? Well but then another fellow would get a job making the new invention?” (Joyce 76) New technologies often make certain jobs obsolete, but they create new jobs to replace them at the same time they create a general increase in utility. The question marks indicate that Bloom himself is not quite so sure about his position. This reflects the historical split within socialism itself regarding technology. Its concern for the working class has sometimes led socialists to adopt a Luddite position (note in Bloom’s example a working class job is replaced by a middle class one) but perhaps more frequently technological progress has inspired fantasies about the end of the division of labor- utopia by way of the electric dishscrubber.

What follows is a great procession, a spectacle which is itself full of “pomp of pelf and power,” in which Bloom appears “under an arch of triumph” like a military leader and decked out in royal garb (Joyce 392).. He is coronated “Leopold the First” and an archbishop declares “Habemus carneficem” (Joyce 393). This parodies the announcement upon the election of a new pope, “Habemus Papem,” or “We have a pope.” Habemus carneficem is, roughly, “We have an executioner.” This is the key message of the new Bloomusalem episode, in which Bloom the progressive humanist is transformed into Bloom the tyrant and totalitarian. Bloom’s political ideas in the rest of Ulysses are motivated by sympathy and idealism. Bloom’s political actions in “Circe” are motivated by a desire for power, glory, and fame. As “Circe” is an exploration of unconscious drives, Joyce may be indicating that at that level there is a connection between our more basic lusts and what manifests as “ideals” in our conscious mind. What “Circe” makes clear, however, are the consequences of giving absolute authority to a middle-class reformer who otherwise serves as an everyman figure. Bloom becomes what the American libertarian writer Isabel Paterson called “the humanitarian with the guillotine,” who begins with the desire to help others and end by restricting their freedom entirely in order to retain their importance as a helper:

The humanitarian wishes to be a prime mover in the lives of others. He cannot admit either the divine or the natural order, by which men have the power to help themselves. The humanitarian puts himself in the place of God. . . . What kind of world does the humanitarian contemplate as affording him full scope? It could only be a world filled with breadlines and hospitals, in which nobody retained the natural power of a human being to help himself or to resist having things done to him. (33)

In addition to recognition as “the world’s greatest reformer,” (Joyce 392) Bloom seeks legitimation as an Irishman and a patriot. In “Cyclops” he was accused of being a wandering Jew, not only of not having a nation, but of not understanding the concept. Asked what his nation is, Bloom replies, imploringly, “Ireland . . . I was born here. Ireland” (Joyce 272). He is ignored. In “Circe,” he is proclaimed by John Howard Parnell as “Successor to my famous brother!” (Joyce 394) (The great Irish nationalist Charles Stewart Parnell was one of Joyce’s early heroes.) He also “shows all that he is wearing green socks” (Joyce 394). He recalls a national military victory, something he had explicitly rejected in “Cyclops.” But no fulfilled wish in “Circe” is allowed to stand for long without the rug being pulled out from under it, and he is soon accused by Paddy Leonard of being a “Stage Irishman” (Joyce 401).

The Beginning

2011-06-14T19:58:00.000-07:00

Welcome, friends. However you found your way here, I assume that you are interested at least one of the two subjects in the title of this blog. Perhaps one, but not so much the other. If so, stick around: I might win you over.

My title is taken from a 19th-century poet and critic named Matthew Arnold, only he had the order reversed. He was not an anarchist, but I am. Non-anarchists will shrug their shoulders and move on, or stand by in idle curiosity, wondering if this fool has anything interesting to say. Anarchists will wonder what kind of anarchist I am; for them this is always the vital question. It may be better if I explain where I'm coming from instead. So, some personal history:

I was raised in a Right-wing Christian family environment (Mormon, actually, which may or may not be Christian in a strict theological sense, but amounts to the same thing politically in contemporary America), but I imbibed much of the liberal-progressive civic religion preached by public school everywhere. Thankfully, I was poorly educated in both faiths, and nourished myself on dreams. By high-school I was a skeptic about my own faith, and by my early 20's a skeptic of all of the others. Atheism seems the most reasonable perspective, though I am decidedly non-militant about it. Like Harold Bloom, I like to think of God as a literary character. Religion aside, I am interested in what has been called "The Two Cultures" problem, that is, the war between the humanities and the sciences, which I regard as a great cultural (I am tempted to say, "spiritual,") disaster of our era. Blessed are the unifiers and synthesizers.

At any rate, my waning belief in religion coincided with my burgeoning interest in literature and art. For a long time I had no coherent political beliefs, though I retained both the antigovernment paranoia I learned from home, and the yearning for the gradual amelioration of social ills that is the seed of all branches of liberalism. My early adult reading habits reinforced, or perhaps developed, this mindset. I read dystopian science fiction alongside the novels and poetry of the Beat writers, which shared an anti-authoritarian bent. Other authors which attracted me had a similar libertarian strain: William Blake, Franz Kafka, James Joyce (Stephen Dedalus was for a time my hero), Orwell and Huxley. One could not derive from these books (except negatively) a specific political ideology, but you could say that I was an unconscious left-libertarian with a slight mystic streak.

Still with me?

This mindset changed somewhat when I began seriously investigating, only about 5 or 6 years ago, what in America (and increasingly in England and elsewhere, I understand) goes by the name "libertariansim," a philosophy widely regarded as an extreme branch of the American Right. For many reasons, this is incorrect, though I won't adress that here. A radical by nature, I went very quickly from Randian minarchism to Rothbardian anarcho-capitalism (understood by many on the Left as a contradiction in terms, which is partially a right and partially a wrong way to understand it). As a consequence, I became more of a rationalist than I was hitherto disposed to be, and something of a reactionary anti-leftist (though never, I must stress, actively conservative or authoritarian). I was not entirely satisfied with this stance, but found no better one until I discovered a handful of writers self-identified as "Left-Libertarian," in particular Roderick T. Long, who inherits the Austro-libertarian tradition, but combines it with a left-liberal social stance, and Kevin Carson, a political economist in the Mutualist/Individualist Anarchist tradition who incorporates concepts from the Austrians and is one of the few Leftists who sees (most) anarcho-capitalists as fellow travelers. (See also Sheldon Richman's excellent summary of this position in, ironically enough, The American Conservative) In particular, Carson's writings re-oriented my thinking about libertarianism, as he drove a wedge between the "free market" as it exists in libertarian theory and "Capitalism" as a historical reality (Carson calls himself a "free market anti-captialist"). Under these and other influences, I have moved Leftward in the last couple of years.

Broadly speaking, I am such a Left-Libertarian (though interested in all forms of anarchism and non-Marxist socialism- currently I am reading a recently-published translation of Proudhon), even if it frequently seems to me a too-programmatic combination of left-liberal social impulses and Right-libertarian political axioms. Still, this is far better the proudly reactionary stance espoused by, for instance, Hans-Hermann Hoppe. Hoppe has his virtues as a critic of democracy and "national defense" as a rationale for the state, but his conservatism is frankly creepy. This is also superior, I must say, to the so-called "plumb-line" or "thin libertarian" position of someone like Walter Block, who I often find to be obtuse and counterproductive as a polemicist, though his economic work on roads is useful. I've taken to privately referring to Block as "Rothbard's Rottweiler," as he clings to the Rothbardian letter while losing much of the spirit. Block maintains that libertarianism is neither Left nor Right, a position I am not unsympathetic to, but in practice he seems to generally side with the Right.

I also find that the deontological basis of libertarian thinking leads to a narrow apprehension of culture, especially the specific political culture (often more cultural than political) we find around us. This culture is not libertarian, and libertarians cannot understand why. My view is that libertarianism needs to become more sophisticated in how it views society and analyzes culture. Some concepts proposed by Left-Libertarians, such as Charles Johnson's "Thick Libertarianism," Arthur Silber's "Contextual Libertarianism," and Chris Matthew Sciabarra's "Dialectical Libertarianism" are a good start in that direction, as antidotes to what Carson has called "vulgar libertarianism," though this has yet to lead (with the exception of Sciabarra's revisionist account of dialectical thought in the history of philosophy, which unfortunately leads him to reject anarchism) to any major scholarly investigations in the arts and human sciences. I do not expect, let me be clear, to make any major step forward with this blog. Everything here will be, at best, prolegomena or prelude. More likely I will simply be throwing light on a few hitherto unknown intersections and cul de sacs in this dark world and wide.

The merits of libertarianism per se will not be defended here. They must be taken as a given, though I hope to provide stimulating material for curious non-libertarians. Nor will I, except as a peripheral concern related to other projects, engage in the debate between the varieties of anarchism, particularly whether the libertarian tradition I mostly follow is anarchism properly speaking. For a vigorous rejection of such a claim, see here; for a more ecumenical view, see here; for the obligatory Wikipedian take on the debate, see here. For myself, I think Carson's rehabilitation of mutualism in light of Austrian economics makes the Infoshop critique of laissez-faire capitalism as a form of anarchism superannuated, since laissez-faire is not even a form of capitalism. Furthermore, anti-statist solidarity across the board is a political necessity. But I said I would not argue the point . . .

This is not my first blog. With my previous blog, I covered some of the same territory I want to here, but I also blogged about whatever was on my mind, and felt obliged, given the short attention-span of the internet, to comment on current events and what was going on elsewhere in the blogosphere. I don't intend to do that here, or at least will only infrequently, when the spirit compels me. I'm not seeking as much attention I had previously. I expect any audience I get to be fit though few. Posts here will be less frequent, but of greater substance. I'll begin by posting, not whole but in small chunks, some relevant essays I've written for college (oh, did I mention I'm a student of literature, and something of an aspiring critc?), starting with one on Joyce's Ulysses, just in time for Bloomsday.