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Not long ago, President George Bush the Second did Senate and House leaders Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi the biggest favor of their Congressional lives by vetoing the Democrat Iraq War funding proposal – first, in pretending to differ significantly with the Democrats, and, second, in preventing any War funding going forth, for the moment.  

The President’s main complaint was that the plan provided a poor set of teeth to keep biting into Iraq and sucking out the rest of its oil.  

In vetoing the Pelosi-Reid-Obama-Clinton-establishment Iraq War Plan, the President announced, “I am not accustomed to being at a loss for fangs.”  

He seemed concerned that the mere regular full set of teeth offered to him by Congress would not be enough to satisfy his thirst, bottomless as it is. 

No matter. Pelosi and Reid readily returned to the rest of their plan for controlling Iraq – popularly known as the PR Plan.  

They vowed, “We will work with the President in whatever way we can.” They meant the statement to be totally ambiguous, but unfortunately for them, upon uttering it, the official pair instantly collapsed to the ground, apparently for lack of some vital measure of blood and bone, as well as some bizarre overabundance of scales, claws, and oozing oil. 

“Defunding the war immediately is totally impossible,” uttered Pelosi and Reid in unison while slithering across the ground, sliming their way back to their Gang of Democrats. The Republican Gang applauded silently from the side.  

 “It seems clear now,” one observer remarked, “that the Democrat and Republican parties are gone – if parties they ever were – and are replaced by gangs. Official suite gangs.” Oddly, no one was heard to contradict him. Within hours, a person we can only identify as Deep Source delivered to us the following rather striking internal document. We have rarely seen a government document quite as internal as this, and we must confess, as good members of the press, we hope to see very few more like it. “The 10 Point PR Plan (For Internal Consumption Only)”: 

First, Pretend that you intend to end the War against Iraq. Second, Propose a full War budget with deceptive clauses so that it seems like you may soon end the occupation that you in no real way will, at all. Third, Write the plan so that the President will veto it, so that it looks like the Dems and Reps actually disagree on something substantial. Fourth, After the President’s veto, pretend again to throw sand in the gears of the War Machine when in fact you are keeping it fully oiled, fully fueled, and fully going. Fifth, Once again, submit a proposal to fully fund the War. Of course, pretend the opposite. Claim you are managing the War better, toward withdrawal, and speak often of a deep appreciation for “the troops” as they are sent to kill and be killed. Sixth, Scarcely ever refer to the corporate contractors who are making a killing in Iraq. And never mind that these are not really “private” contractors but corporate contractors operating in the public domain by way of huge amounts of public money, operating outside of much if any direct public control and oversight – the better for Congress to throw the money and will of the people at corporate command. Pretend to voters that this is “the best of all possible worlds” no matter what the facts and your conscience may or may not tell you – or might tell you if you had one. Best to believe in what you are doing, after all, if possible, regardless. Seventh, As the years pass, carry Right along with the War under the new President(s) of the United States, all the while claiming to be in the process of ending it – just a few more benchmarks, slaughters, necessary bribes and expropriations – repeat indefinitely. Eighth, Continue on and on. Rotate US forces, large and small, in and out of various other regions ripe for ordering and extraction, all around the world – as investors desire, or public relations demand. Continue to internally strip mine the US and the people of whatever wealth can be found and had, per tradition, any rhetoric to the contrary. Ninth, Explain that you do what you do on behalf of “the troops” in the interests of “America” – and the world. Lie when necessary – it’s your job we’re talking here – if at all unconvinced of the grand necessity of what is going on. Tenth, Live in infamy. Like it or not, this goes with the territory. It’s an unfair world for everyone, but we may take comfort in knowing that things are the best they can possibly be, at this point and time in our careers. 

There it is. The Pelosi-Reid Plan, the internal face at least. Like we said, we hope never to see another document like it, and we continue to take steps to ensure that we don’t. We are rededicating all our employees, no matter their personal views, toward this end – Deep Source or no Deep Source. 

Meanwhile, 20,000,000 human rights groups have come out against the PR plan. Every indication, however, is that the Pelosi-Reid Gang intends to fight for their right to dictate the funds and shape of the War, rather than continue to allow President Bush and the Republicans to take all the credit.  

Pelosi and Reid responded to the groups: “We believe in human rights, but who is going to pay for our next round of campaign ads? We speak to human rights concerns, so we expect to be left alone to act on our needs. Oh – and the troops. Unlike some people, we don’t forget them, of course. They do as they are told in dying for our right of re-election, which is far more than can be said for the human rights community – far more. So lighten up. Line up with us behind the flag. There’s a War on. Get used to it. We have. It’s the very least we can do. The very least. Thank you all.” 

Pelosi and Reid were last seen slithering through D.C. 

Thus far, there has been scant further response from the 20,000,000 human rights groups. Conventional wisdom believes they have been rendered speechless. Others suggest they are mobilizing to act. Meanwhile, one group notes, “The PR Plan feeds the flames. Thanks to the fire lit by half a trillion US tax dollars – Iraq burns.”

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[This “Plan to Abolish America” series of satires consists of slightly revised pieces posted in advance of the coming “Petraeus Report” on Iraq. The series began with The Petraeus Plan to Abolish Iraq, and will likely end with the same Plan.]

General David Petraeus, current commander of the US occupation of Iraq, reported today, in what he terms a “nuanced” account, that exactly one half of Iraq is “shot to hell” but that the other half is “just fine and dandy” — give or take a few disagreeable conditions which Iraqis will just have to get used to, like massive truck bombs, car bombs, Air Force assaults, general firefights, and other slaughter.

Apparently given the “no go” is the remarkably popular suggestion of US troops that members of Congress and the Bush Administration (who have caused, allowed, or funded even a single day of the war) be required during every government recess and half of all other work days to drive bright yellow Volkswagen Bugs around the most dangerous roads in Iraq to find and defuse Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs). Reportedly General Petraeus initially considered the plan, then shelved it, for now, as being too dependent on government employees for work that could otherwise, PR considerations aside, be outsourced to the tens of thousands of lucky corporate hires currently overruning Iraq. Petraeus again characterized his decision as “nuanced.” He foolly believes he is doing the right thing. Thus far, it must be said, there has been no independent confirmation of the “nuance” that Petraeus is executing in Iraq — but the real situation seems clear. As Petraeus noted, “Iraq is going to have to learn…to live with…sensational attacks.” To the General, “living” is apparently a rather unsensational, “nuanced” thing.

The Pentagon and major media confirm the much desired “nuance” of the Petraeus account and efforts, and say Petraeus would know how to win Iraq if anyone does (which, off the record, sources deep in the Pentagon are said to doubt, utterly, actually), and that Petraeus is just the man for the job, having survived full frontal live-fire gunshot during training in 1991, before being operated on by former surgeon and current warhawk Senator Bill Frist. “Petraeus is the man” the Pentagon says — after all, here is a guy who survived a parachute malfunction a mere few years ago, suffering only a broken pelvis. If this guy doesn’t know how to survive disaster, who does? (Well, of course, there’s that plucky 78 year-old Texas lawyer who the (full of) Vice President Dick Cheney shot in the heart and face while drinking beer and hunting little fowl in Texas last year — but that’s another story.)

Former embedded reporters confirm, Petraeus is the man who repeatedly asked them before and after the 2003 thunder run into Baghdad, “Tell me where this ends.” At the moment, it seems clear, it ends where it all began with President Bush, Congress, the Military Industrial Complex, and now General Petraeus – all of whom claim to be directed by “the troops” who, it is said, keep asking for more funds than the current half a trillion US tax dollars so they can keep going on “Living the Dream!” — slaughtering and being slaughtered in balmy Iraq.

Meanwhile, reportedly, chants of “General Betraeus, General Betraeus” have been heard echoing from all across Iraq and the US, apparently by US soldiers and citizens alike who have yet to see the wisdom in the General’s “nuance.”

Military Families Against The War and other dissident groups, it is reported, have drawn a line in the sand. They claim, “Rearranging Generalships in Iraq is like rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic – after it sunk.” Anti-militancy groups have been heard to wonder, even while marching forth, “When in the hell is everyone going to get a grip and do what ought to be done? Out now. Reparations. Slash the military budget. Praise the sane and take a pass on the ‘nuance’.”

“‘Resign’ is not in my vocabulary,” General Petraeus has been heard to remark, categorically. Though in the future, ”book deal” may be. Whatever the future. If.

At last word, General Petraeus has not recently been shot in the chest, nor broken his hip, nor been blown into bloody little pieces by an IED, and, by all nuanced accounts, is still alive – as is the United States’ little ”Forever War” in Iraq, and elsewhere.

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[This “Plan to Abolish America” series of satires consists of slightly revised pieces and will run in advance of the coming “Petraeus Report” on Iraq. The series begins here with The Petraeus Plan to Abolish America and Iraq, and will likely end with the same Plan.]

by Margalit Fox 

A self-described ‘somewhat combative pacifist and cooperative anarchist,’ Ms. Paley was a lifelong advocate of liberal social causes. During Vietnam, she was jailed several times for antiwar protests; in later years, she lobbied for women’s rights, against nuclear proliferation and, most recently, against the war in Iraq. For decades, she was a familiar presence on lower Sixth Avenue, near her Greenwich Village home, smiling broadly, gum cracking, leaflets in hand.

from Environmental Crisis and Despair, by Bill Fletcher

When Rosa Luxemburg suggested that the future was one of “socialism or barbarism” there was a tendency by many people-even in the midst of World War I-to view this as hyperbole. As it turns out, it was rather prescient. This warning through juxtaposition is critical but not enough. Understanding that we must turn away from barbarism-in whatever form-and toward socialism and the end of capitalist exploitation is a critical awareness but it must be translated into organization and action…. 

…it is important to dream. By dreaming I mean to suggest that we consider possibilities for the future that improve the human condition. Being a science fiction fan and a Star Trek devotee I always remember a scene from the film Star Trek: First Contact. Captain Piccard, having traveled back (from the 24th century) to the middle of the 21st century, is speaking with a scientist from that era. She asks how much the starship Enterprise cost to build. His response was quite interesting. In effect he said, the economics of the 24th century are quite different from yours. For us the acquisition of wealth is no longer the driving force of our existence. We seek to better ourselves. It is that notion that must work itself into our everyday realities and serve as the inspiration for action.

From a ZNet sustainer commentary:  http://www.zmag.org

by Megan Lane:

“Crime fiction can show you something about a society and a character that’s incredibly deep, whereas so-called literary fiction is about linguistic pyrotechnics. That’s why I’ve always been a fan of this type of writing.”

Publishers, too, believe there is a lot more mileage in the genre. “Like a Greek myth, there’s an awful lot writers can do with good crime stories,” says Ms Wisdom.

“We like harmony and shape, and that’s what a good crime novel gives you – a lovely story arc with a beginning, middle and end – and a morally acceptable outcome, which a lot of post-modern literature will not give you. It can also give you humour, absolute horror, romance, a puzzle. Crime fiction is only going to get bigger.”

For good crime fiction, see Mainstay Press.

Mike Collett-White (Reuters):

Two movies about the Iraq war and its impact on Americans back home are among 22 competition entries at the Venice Film Festival this year, lending political weight to a cinema showcase laden with Hollywood productions.

Paul Haggis’ “In the Valley of Elah”, starring Tommy Lee Jones, Charlize Theron and Susan Sarandon, is the eagerly anticipated film based on the real-life murder of a young soldier who returned to the United States from Iraq.

It is up against Brian De Palma’s “Redacted”, which tells the story of a U.S. army unit that persecutes an Iraqi family and also examines the way media cover the conflict.

…

Reads like a novel though is sheerly the facts on the ground. Laden with irony, tells it like it is: “The Iraqis don’t deserve us. So we betray them…”

Life Sentences  The US Tour of Gunter Grass

by David Streitfield

Streitfield’s article doesn’t seem to me to be a very sympathetic or understanding portrait but holds some interest.

What about the war novel in which the road to Hell is paved with bad intentions? 

Frank James wonders why would Bush cite The Quiet American?

In his speech at the Veterans of Foreign Wars convention in Kansas City, President Bush summoned up the Alden Pyle CIA agent character of Graham Greene’s classic Vietnam novel “The Quiet American” which is essentially a contemplation on the road to hell being paved with good intentions.

I’m not sure he really wanted to go there or why his speechwriters would take him there.

…

What the Pols Should Read – Ken Emerson 

When asked by the Associated Press to name the last novel they had read, many of our umpteen presidential candidates responded predictably with thrillers by the likes of Grisham or Patterson (James or Richard North). Sen. John McCain’s choice of bedside reading was the most intriguing. Did Hemingway’s “A Farewell to Arms” give him second thoughts about the war in Iraq?

If it were up to me to assign the pols summer reading, I’d put “Phineas Finn” at the head of the list. The second of Anthony Trollope’s six “Palliser” novels chronicling political life in Victorian England, “Phineas Finn” is the outstanding volume in an outstanding series and can be enjoyed independently of its companions. Weighing in at more than 700 pages, it can’t be polished off during a quick flight from D.C. to Des Moines, but England’s greatest 19th-century political novel is instructive and illuminating to this day.

…

excerpted review by John Freeman:

…in Turkey…according to 35-year-old writer Elif Shafak, a new generation of writers is using the novel – a form that came to them from the West – to reimagine their society from within.

“Novelists have played a very, very critical role as the engineers of social and cultural transformation in Turkey,” says Shafak, when we meet in a New York hotel. “Maybe in that regard we are closer to the Russian tradition than the Western tradition.”

The debate over what these novels say about Turkish society, and how they say it, lurched to the forefront of life in Istanbul in recent years, as the Turkish Government began prosecuting writers for “offending Turkishness”.

Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk and several dozen other writers were tried under this code of Turkish law. Shafak, too, was put on trial because of passages from her new novel, The Bastard of Istanbul, which referenced the long fallout of what many call the Armenian Genocide, when up to one million Armenians were forcibly removed from Turkey and killed.

The book has become a best-seller in Turkey, selling more than 60,000 copies, but not without fallout for Shafak. Writing in the Washington Post, Shafak explained how critics within Turkey claimed she “had taken the Armenians’ side by having an Armenian character call the Turks ‘butchers’ in a reference to the Ottoman Empires deportation and massacre of Armenians during World War I.”

While Shafak was acquitted, others were not so lucky. In January, her “dear friend”, journalist Hrant Dink, the Armenian editor-in-chief of a Turkish newspaper, was murdered on a street in Istanbul, allegedly by an ultra-nationalist teenager.

“The debate on literature and art is very much politicised,” she says, her voice revealing palpable anguish, “sometimes very much polarised. I think my work attracted it because I combined elements people like to see separate.”

[satire]

There is nothing like apocalyptic chaos in Iraq now.

The US presence if peaceful. The US presence sustains the peace.

The US presence is warmly embraced by Iraqis, as proven by the fact that a mere 80 percent of attacks by Iraqis are directed against US forces, and by the fact that at least a small percentage of the population wish for the US to have not left years ago.

The current 4 million Iraqi refugees caused by the US invasion and occupation, a million per year, are people who actually enjoy travel in the dead of night a step ahead of death and destruction.

The US bombings, patrols, and presence otherwise provide an unspeakable degree of security.

US forces do not exactly carry out the unprecedented level of ethnic cleansing; they merely oversee it.

Who would remain to control the oil? Surely the Iraqis have no responsible idea what to do with it.

The hundreds of thousands of US soldiers and private contractors upon threat of joblessness would riot in the streets. Best to let them go on bombing and shooting in orderly fashion.

Oil control is “stability”. Massive violence is a mere inconvenience. Loss of oil control is increased chaos. But we repeat.

A couple hours of electricity per day and a few ounces of water on occasion during the week is enough for a person to get by on during this current, years-long, unprecedented and worsening social collapse. The US is on the right track. It’s on the right track all right.

Something for which we are collectively responsible, in literary realms not least.

John Pilger:

“These days, you see Good Ol’ Bill [Clinton], or the Comeback Kid, as he is variously known, wiggling his head on the TV news, campaigning for his wife, Hillary, among Americans who, terminally naive, still believe the Democratic Party is theirs and that “it’s time to vote a woman into the White House”. Together, the Clintons are known as “Billary” and rightly so. Like Good Ol’ Bill, his wife has no plans to address the divisions of a society that allows 130,000 Americans to claim the wealth of millions of their fellow citizens. Like GOB, she wants to continue Iraq’s torment for perhaps a decade. And she has “not ruled out” attacking Iran.”

http://www.zmag.org/sustainers/content/2007-08/08pilger.cfm

from John Pilger’s ZNet Commentary “Good Ol’ Bill, The Liberal Hero” – Commentaries are a premium sent to Sustainer Donors of Z/ZNet – to learn more consult ZNet at http://www.zmag.org.

books linked here

Key books by V. F. Calverton, Upton Sinclair and Bernard Smith explore the tendency (or tradition and lack thereof) of liberation literature far better – more thoroughly, incisively and in greater context despite flaws – than any other group of texts of their time period (add a number of essays from Kenneth Burke’s book below), and they remain unusually valuable, and buried.  

Continue reading Liberation Lit Criticism: The Buried US History

I couldn’t wait to get to Iraq – after all, that’s where all the action is (not to mention the oil). So much to write about. (And yes, deep down, I did harbor vainglorious notions of returning with enough material to write a Great American Novel, should I survive, but I don’t know what it is about writing novels – they seem so damn hard to put together, I can’t quite figure out why, can’t figure out what makes it work. Is it my style? Maybe my mode, or linguistic orientation or something. I start writing about the novel bravery of our troops and the interminable perfidy of the enemy and everything starts sounding like cardboard, even to my own tin ear. All I can say is there must be some extra sense to writing a novel that I have as not yet developed. I don’t mind really since I know being a reporter and pamphleteer is a noble and great thing when performed in service to the mighty state – of, to, by and for the state. Besides, who’s not to say our work is not more powerful, more important, more moving, and – dare dream it – even more artistic in its own bare bones and muscular way than any novel can hope to be? And so I continue to write reports with conviction and daring-do, if I must say so myself. I continue to spread the good word about the great US invasion and occupation of Iraq, and the US conquest of the oil-endowed bulk of western Asia in general, that is, the Middle East.

No I am no novelist, for it is far too difficult for me to get away from facts – and facts galore you shall have! facts we all need, and the world too. I feel that the vital facts of the world are far too crucial, far too staggering for me to much care if I have any difficulty mustering a novel or much of any novelistic psychological insight – nice but essentially superfluous – or special profundity of atmosphere, or virtuosity of setting, or mastery of plot details and events, or any extraordinary capacity for arranging the panorama and thrust of the world in any compelling narrative sweep, in any arc of explosive insight and delight. The overrated overblown novel! And so we shall have none of that fancy business here but instead engage in something equally momentous – the crucial facts of the main matters at hand facing all the world as expressed in sheer actual telling detail. And so I gladly rise to the occasion of settling for reporting as best I can about the world it is my great privilege to know and encounter by way of the most relevant and matter-of-fact details of our day, as borne out in the myriad crises and happy challenges of our time. The novel has nothing on me but what I lack, which, in any case, is of no real concern to anyone but myself. And possibly my employer.

So off to Iraq I went to embed as deep as I possibly could into everything Iraq related. I took off in that great and honorable tradition of an independent journalist embedding with an invading and occupying military force of unparalleled power blasting through an impoverished and stricken land. We blew up the country and thus conquered it, subdued it, destroyed it – no matter that they started blowing us up right back. We can handle it. We’re survivors – most of us.

Iraq may not make it, frankly, but we will. Most of us. Probably. There’s a real possibility.

I am the Official US Pamphleteer – Stan D. Garde. 

In effect, due to the global reach of our most powerful country, the one and only US of A, the functional stature of my office means I am pamphleteer to far more than solely the US itself, but also to the whole world.

While affiliated with the office of the US Poet Laureate and others such national offices, I am formally housed in the office of the official national US Historian, Dr. Hiredgunne, the recent successor, for the foreseeable future, to the generation-long stint of his immediate predecessor, the forever-great historian, Dr. Totalie.

I am proud beyond words to have been selected for the office of US Pamphleteer following the runaway success of Youthtopia, my humble Parents’ Handbook for Rockview Terminal School District. I am indeed a typical product of the traditionally great schooling enterprise of this mighty land, though the schools of course are now more commonly known as Terminals, as I document in Youthtopia.

In any event, the nature and purpose of this current book, Tropetopia, is to present the newstopian news of our times, with flair where useful, and with some private or otherwise personal touch where topical.

In other words, I have been encouraged by my superiors to put together a hefty selection of my greatest pamphlets. Thus – Tropetopia; or, The Life and Times of Stan D. Garde – In Defense of the Right to PR.

 

 

On Responsibility, War Guilt and Intellectuals

Noam Chomsky:

Let’s take the Iraq war. There’s libraries of material arguing about the war, debating it, asking ‘What should we do?’, this and that, and the other thing. Now, try to find a sentence somewhere that says that ‘carrying out a war of aggression is the supreme international crime, which differs from other war crimes in that it encompasses all the evil that follows’ (paraphrasing from Nuremberg). Try to find that somewhere. I mean, you can find it. I’ve written about it, and you can find a couple other dozen people who have written about it in the world. But, is it part of the intellectual culture? Can you find it in a newspaper, or in a journal; in Congress; any public discourse; anything that’s part of the general exchange of knowledge and ideas? I mean, do students study it in school? Do they have courses where they teach students that ‘to carry out a war of aggression is the supreme international crime which encompasses all the evil that follows’?

So, for example, if sectarian warfare is a horrible atrocity, as it is, who’s responsible? By the principles of Nuremberg, Bush, Rumsfeld, Cheney, Wolfowitz, Rice — they’re responsible for sectarian warfare because they carried out the supreme international crime which encompasses all the evil that follows. Try and find somebody who points that out. You can’t. Because, our dominant intellectual culture accepts as legitimate our crushing anybody we like.Let’s take the Iraq war. There’s libraries of material arguing about the war, debating it, asking ‘What should we do?’, this and that, and the other thing. Now, try to find a sentence somewhere that says that ‘carrying out a war of aggression is the supreme international crime, which differs from other war crimes in that it encompasses all the evil that follows’ (paraphrasing from Nuremberg). Try to find that somewhere. I mean, you can find it. I’ve written about it, and you can find a couple other dozen people who have written about it in the world. But, is it part of the intellectual culture? Can you find it in a newspaper, or in a journal; in Congress; any public discourse; anything that’s part of the general exchange of knowledge and ideas? I mean, do students study it in school? Do they have courses where they teach students that ‘to carry out a war of aggression is the supreme international crime which encompasses all the evil that follows’?So, for example, if sectarian warfare is a horrible atrocity, as it is, who’s responsible? By the principles of Nuremberg, Bush, Rumsfeld, Cheney, Wolfowitz, Rice — they’re responsible for sectarian warfare because they carried out the supreme international crime which encompasses all the evil that follows. Try and find somebody who points that out. You can’t. Because, our dominant intellectual culture accepts as legitimate our crushing anybody we like.

Thus, no use of an investigative anti Iraq War novel like Homefront in the universitites and schools – or even such novels being conceived and written in the first place – let alone reviews in the media, or publication by the literary establishment – let alone the proliferation of many such works. [-TC]

 Teach them to buy and be sold.

from ZNet

“There is no such thing as a value neutral educational process.”
 – Richard Shaull, Foreword to Pedagogy of the Oppressed

After the initial attempts by a section of Christian-bourgeois souls (Dickens, Carlyle, Chadwick, Mayhew, Mrs.Gaskell, even the honourable, although not Christian, Benjamin Disraeli who first enunciated the thesis that England was infact not one nation but two—the rich and the poor), to seek reformative state interventions on behalf of the new urban poor  who now swamped the industrial towns, towards the middle of the nineteenth century the inevitable exhaustion of goodwill followed

Where a Dickens had made visits to Yorkshire schools ( captured unforgettably in Nicholas Nickleby) in the thirtees and returned to raise a cry for amelioration, such  sentiment expressed from outside the lived experience of the suffering classes, was to wear thin in a growing fright  at the spread of what was to be christened “mass culture.” 

Dickens of course had repudiated the Chartists who had erroneously hoped he would go over to their side  (a story rather less often recited about him). Some flavour of that history may be savoured in what G.M.Reynolds was to write in the Weekly Newspaper of june 8, 1851:

This wretched sycophant of Aristocracy—this vulgar flatterer of the precious hereditary peerage—is impudent enough to consider himself the people’s friend!  A precious friend indeed when he ridicules universal suffrage (the elementary principle of Chartism) and proclaims himself a thick and thin supporter of Lord John Russell’s reform bill, even before he has seen it!”(1) 

Suddenly, as industrial England entered the fraught social contentions of the sixties, a whole falange of opinion-makers closed ranks to argue that writers, poets, “creative” individuals of all description had best wash their hands off this fruitless business of meddling with social matters.  It was best that they devoted themselves to their precious private visions of abiding truths above and beyond the piss and mire of this thing called history.

The ringing thesis here was to come from Matthew Arnold, who, in his perniciously influential Culture and Anarchy(1865)  drew the first distinctions between “high culture”  and the culture of the “populace”—the latter in his view constituting “anarchy.”  Pleading for an intellectual aristocracy, a return to the classics was advocated.  The aesthetics of Liberalism was thus inaugurated; and specially endowed individuals were henceforth to seek for eternal verities and universal truths outside the concrete processes of social and political  contention.(2)  

A great discomfort with the equalizing philosophies (chiefly of Marx and Engles) had of course been steadily growing.  Siezing the moment that Arnold articulated, Pareto, Mosca, Burckhardt were to float the new concepts of an “elite” and a “political class” that comprised individuals endowed by nature to be rulers of men.  Elements of Darwin, and Carlyle’s notion of the “hero” were thus drawn into the stipulation that not equality but inequality was the true order of “nature”.  Needless to remind ourselves that Nietzsche was to put all that together famously to tell us how the chief business of history—and women– was to give us the “superman.” (3)
 
Thus educational processes had to be those that absorbed and disseminated the ideas of the ruling class.  England’s first Education Act of 1870 was to be the first pusillanimous policy decision towards consolidating inequality eventhough, don’t you know, it was all about furnishing a sound education on the best principles of  English “humanism.”

As the manufacturers and the colonizers busied themselves in profit-making, education came formally to be regarded not as a rational aid to understanding how society came to be thus constituted, but in a forked programme to equip, on the one hand, the labouring classes with the minimal skills that industry needed from time to time (more profoundly, as Marx was to point out and Althusser in our time was to nail, inorder to keep in place the “reserve army of labour” or inorder to ensure the “reproduction of the relations of production”), and, on the other, to make available to the leisured classes the delectable riches of speculation.

Not for nothing was Arnold to argue that poetry would be the religion of the future. That injunction  was devotedly to be pursued by “modernists” like T.S.Eliot for whom, beginning with the twenties of the last century, the world was indubitably a “wasteland”. As you would expect,   the cure for the unvarying “human condition” was to be found in the Church. All that just when a revolution had happened in the  then czarist Russia, and when Gandhi, the Congress, and the revolutionaries in India were making big strides to alter the “human condition” in the colony—and, as a fallout, in some two-thirds of the colonized world.

(It is another matter that when “free” India came to establish its first Education Commission, its recommendations duly reflected the same ruling dichotomy: skills for the masses and the Humanities at tertiary levels inorder to keep ruling  spirits within the bounds of  “sensitivity.”)

Thus, when the American, John Dewey, wrote in 1920 that the true aim and purpose of education is education, he was articulating a seeming abstraction (what education?) that had behind it a whole  concrete history of class  interests.

III

International Corporate Capital has since made killing strides.   It no longer needs the pretence about poetry (read “poetry” as a metaphor for the Humanities, the Social Sciences, the Arts, and for critical thought generally). The more it gobbles up the globe, the greedier it gets. In education also, therefore,  it is to be push-pin all the way.  The least monies spent on “poetry” seem unconscionably unwarranted according to  the  most advanced principles of that despicable thing called Commerce.  What used to be commerce between human beings—remember those “pointless” hours spent in the coffee house?—is thus superceded by commerce between computers which make the world a “global village”  even as they draw oceans between human being and human being.  Since you can email, where is the need to meet face to face? 

The captains of “utility” who move the levers of “knowledge” at the WTO, think that there is no more need to think.  Since all the thinking that the world needs is done in the board room, educational processes ipso facto invite to be geared to proliferate armies of the new conformism who in turn may be trusted to function as untroublesome engines of profit-maximisation.  When the GDP grows, the stock market booms, the middle class expands and fattens and comes into possession of commodities which advertising can then fetishise as the newage gods, pray where then is there any more need to think and speculate?

How many of us know that education (it must still be called that, per necessity) is today, globally, the third most lucrative trade worldwide, after drugs and armaments?  That being the case, teaching shops that come from far-off lands come necessarily inorder to set up franchises at zero levels of investment that the “market” may lap-up at hundred percent profit.  And those comprise utility items, not “poetry.”

IV

Alas, whatever is picked-up at school/college/university/institute had better equip young people to earn a keep.  But would it not be nice if we should also have learnt (and not picked-up) that which makes of those of us destined to become appendages of the ruling hippopotamus “warm and tender as can be”? And if that seems like a hopeless reversion to the class-based “humanist” argument, so it is.  Paulo Freire was to write, after Satre, that education must rid us of the “fear of freedom.”  Alas, only in Latin America do we now seem to have regimes that may encourage the “populace” to do so through their systems of schooling.  For the rest, it is still Cuba. Where are the movements elsewhere that have the least object or likelihood of making   education coterminous with that recovery of our humanness which the world craves?

Again I reflect how the Bard, as always, knew a great deal about such matters.  Recall that when Macbeth’s masculine nerve rather wobbles at the last minute, his neocon consort dares him: “thou wouldst be a man if thou durst do it” (that is, kill the king, inter alia, invade iraq, kill Saddam and so on).  And how telling, although pathetic, a riposte Macbeth delivers unto her: “I dare do all that may become a man;/ who dares do more is none.”

How that thought nails the monetary economist, the corporates he spawns, and the Neanderthal neocons (and they are not just in the United States of America) piercingly in the belly button.  But of course, as Henry Fielding would have said, shame is the first meal these kinds eat before they go for breakfast! They leave the business of being human to the rampaging Evangelist/Mullah/Mahant, who in turn teach  that being human means being victorious in battles of various kinds.  God has no room for “losers” they say. Blessed no longer are the meek but the mighty, for their’s is the oil and the uranium.  It is a weak prophet who says turn the other cheek.

V

Indeed, what does it mean to be human (and no ontological debate is intended here)?Recall the days not too long ago when walking down the pavement and noticing a self-contained person some distance away, you remarked to your companion “such a good man; she/he thinks of everybody.”

But as the world advances, Capital has taught us the truth about that  person—a “waster, shun him.”  Good is the human being who minds his own business at all costs.  He does not stop to look at the fellow just come under the wheels of the latest Chrysler; he does not let his mind waver from the shady deal to be signed at the golf club.  He if anything formulates the most efficient plan yet not for the alleviation of suffering but for the eradication of those who are no- good sufferers.  Ah, the fruits of education!  The least mongrel on the hobo street has lessons we could learn inorder to become human.  But we are on the road to progress and have ears only for the next announcement at the stock market, eyes only for the next piece of lucrative real-estate, and dreams only about the next career promotion or marvel of household technology. Where we once counted children, we count remotes to sundry gadgets.  And when a gadget goes Hawai, we curse the service fellow whose dying wife keeps him from attending our need!

And the evangelists and the godmen, they teach us to mind our own salvation through greater physical fitness so that we tire less in attending to profit-making.  Health services for all, community education, shared labour, shared partaking—these are the things that must be avoided like the plague. When you hear such sounds, say “the reds are coming.” And education that teaches respect for the other, for difference, or, god forbid, begins to examine the roots of our own rottenness, that indeed is the devil’s work.  That is when you forget the priest and call out the troops.

Thus, if Plato threw the poets out of his republic, we must add to those the humanists, the social scientists, the philosophers, the political activists, the  artists, the rebels without “cause”, the “wasters” who strangely do not value profit-making, the disabled, the old, the needlessly sick, the children who only make demands but add nothing to GDP. And we must make education available only to those who can pay.  To the rest we say, god prepares a heaven for you, so why need you the earth.

And WTO will say endorse only those authors, those academies, those entrepreneurs, those middle-men, those commission agents, those publishers, and those governments,  who can conjointly make of education not the third-most but the most lucrative global “service.” In Brahminical parlance, dethrone Saraswati, install Laxmi as the reigning goddess of learning– which she already is, de facto.

Make of your education a billion-pound note; and then go ask for the Presidential vote.  With that note in one hand and the evangelist/godman in the other, you cannot go wrong.  You may only end up destroying the world, a small price to pay for success.

As to the world,  may be the time for it to end  has come anyway.
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1. See my Dickens and the Dialectic of Growth, univ., of Wisconsin Press, 1986, p.145

2. See Raymond Williams, Culture and Society, for a penetrating analysis of these ideological conjunctions.

3. See T.B.Bottomore, Elites and Society, Penguin, 1964 for a lucid account of these histories.

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badri.raina@gmail.com

from ZNet 

Transformers – a film about robots from space that can change into cars and trucks – was released just prior to the July 4^th.  The storyline is that evil robots have come to destroy earth.  Good robots team up with the U.S. military to defeat the evil robots.

On the face of it, Transformers would appear to be a film directed at the pre-teen male audience, but I’d like to examine some of its underlying assumptions.  The story starts with American military forces in Qatar under attack from an unknown enemy – which is, as it turns out, an evil robot.  Indeed, in real life, Camp As Sayliyah in Qatar serves as the forward headquarters for Central Command – from which the U.S. military conducts its current wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.  We see a platoon survive the initial attack to defend Arab villagers from another evil robot.  So, the first assumption is that the U.S. has an unquestioned right to project its military in other people’s lands – and that it is there for the benefit of those other people…. 

In the end, it turn out that both the good and bad robots are aliens from outer space – but powerful weapons are manufactured by “our side” aren’t labeled WMDs. Perhaps it is useful to view Transformers as a parable about the role of militarism and the weapons industry in our present-day mythology.  The evil robots are akin to WMDs in the hands of rogue (Axis of Evil) nations.  The good robots are akin to “our” high-tech weaponry.  Transfomers serves as a morality play for the next generation to be taught the lies of our times. 

…

Contrary to the Andrew Gumbel’s recent article “Hollywood Goes to War,” Hollywood essentially plays one side of the political fence, that of the status quo, as John Pilger makes clear in “Hollywood Hurrah” excerpted below. Are the coming films likely to break the mold? Probably not; we’ll see.

Pilger:

Following the Vietnam war, in which around five million Vietnamese were killed during the American invasion, and their land was destroyed and poisoned by American weapons of mass destruction, Hollywood came to the rescue with a string of Rambo-and-angst films that invited the audience to pity the invader. These films provided a cultural purgative that helped clear the way for America to mount other Vietnams – in El Salvador, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Panama, Somalia and elsewhere. The current “war on terrorism” is underpinned by the same Hollywood caricatures. Films like Black Hawk Down, which promotes a mendacious version of America’s killing spree in Somalia, act as cultural “softeners” before the bombing starts again for real.

Even in finely crafted films like The Deer Hunter and Platoon that look as if they might break ranks, there is an implicit oath of loyalty to imperial culture. This was true of Three Kings, a movie that seemed to take issue with the Gulf war, but instead produced a familiar “bad apple” tale, exonerating the militarism that is now rampant. So dominant is Hollywood in our lives, and so collusive are its camp-following critics, that the films that ought to have been made are unmentionable. Name the mainstream movies that have shone light on to the vast shadow thrown by the American secret state, and the mayhem for which it is responsible. I can think of only a few: Costa-Gavras’s Missing, which was about the destruction of the elected government in Chile by General Pinochet’s puppet masters in Washington, and Oliver Stone’s Salvador, which made the connection between Reagan’s Washington and El Salvador’s death squads. Both these films were quirks of the system, funded with great difficulty and, in the case of Missing, dogged by vengeful court actions.

The slaughter of up to 8,000 urban poor in George Bush Sr’s attack on Panama in 1990 would make a fine action movie. And why not a sequel to Black Hawk Down, this time with the 8,000-10,000 Somali dead (a CIA estimate) who were airbrushed from the original? Or how about a David and Goliath epic set in modern Palestine, with young Palestinians facing down American tanks and warplanes operated by Israelis?