A Practical Policy

Kyle Boggs:

Stephanie McMillan is the author of Minimum Security, a radical comic strip that approaches some of the most pressing issues of our time: the global environmental crisis, rampant consumerism, U.S. imperialism, and institutionalized gender and class inequalities. Much of McMillan’s work challenges readers to look beyond a system that does not serve the needs of people or the natural world. She says, “Beliefs are extremely tenacious and we’re trained from birth to believe in this system—that it’s the only possible way to live.”

See her graphic novel: “As the World Burns: 50 Simple Things You Can Do to Stay in Denial,” created with writer Derrick Jensen, 2007, Seven Stories Press.

From The Vassals Handbook – Lesson fourteen – in the banks we trust

I pledge allegiance to the banks of the Incorporated Estates of Earth and to the Rulers, whom they enrich, one Command throughout the land – obedience – with conformity and subservience for all.

Good vassals learn the Bank Pledge by heart when still wet from the womb. And with good reason. The Bank Pledge can take a vassal far in the Incorporated Estates of Earth. The banks are divine, and vassals mere mortals who owe their breath to the going rate of exchange. Few vassals would rather defy banks and starve than obey banks and have a chance. All is fair in love and banks. Continue reading Lesson fourteen: in the banks we trust

Lesson twelve – the economy is fundamentally sound

What we mean when we say the economy is fundamentally sound is that the Incorporated Estates of Earth are fundamentally sound.  No rogue nation are we, no failed state, no terrorist sect. What we mean when we say the IEE is fundamentally sound is that this is the best system ever. Ever was, ever is, ever will be. History has ended, nature has decreed, the universe declares: vassalism is perfect. As perfect as can be. As close to perfect as one can possibly imagine.

Look, Great Depressions, let alone recessions, are unavoidable, like unemployment, a fact of life, a law of nature, a boon to the economy in the end. It serves the common good to keep wages down, expectations in check. Full employment? The pipedream of children.

Even during Great Depressions and myriad wars the economy is always and everywhere fundamentally sound. That is, ultimately. You know this. Temporary glitches or catastrophes, mass layoffs, environmental wipeouts, ongoing battles over scarce resources, the arms race – these phenomena are all part and parcel of the fundamentally sound nature of capitalism cum vassalism. In this we trust and believe. With the lords of commerce. Let it be. Amen.

Dahr Jamail, “The Ongoing Occupation of Iraqi Artists“:

When Art, a crucial component that sustains the socio-cultural fabric of a society, and the Artist, who weaves this fabric, are both under assault, society tends to get frayed and fractious. As my sculptor friend Alawchi stated most succinctly, “It is dangerous for people to leave the arts. It’s dangerous, because art is the front face of the community. We now have the desertification of the art world in Iraq.”

And not only in Iraq. 500 years of imperialism has its effect on the culture.

[“Lessons” are temporary posts. These early drafts may come down after a few days. Any surviving or revised remnants and expanded passages can be found at The Vassals Handbook page – also subject to revision.]

Lesson eleven – we mean well

The great thing about being a vassal is that you always know you mean well. We mean well, we do. Isn’t it obvious? We mean well, always. No matter what others might say about us. No matter what silly arguments they might raise.

Take for example universal health care. We don’t have it. And for that we are thankful. Lack of universal health care is a sign of our inherent fairness, generosity of spirit, economic thrift. We mean well because we are well.

Do not speak of the supposed virtues of equality of condition, wherein everyone has a right to health care. Preposterous. The United Nation’s Declaration of Human Rights is not worth the paper it is written on. Useful only for starting fires. Unlike the laws of the Incorporated Estates of Earth, the laws of the old United Nations do not mean well. The UDHR remains a document of illness, if not raving lunacy, signed long ago in some sick spasm of internationality.

What could be more generous than allowing everyone the equal opportunity to fend for themselves? Poor health and death take the hindmost. Time to face reality, vassals. Life is a race from the wolf at the door. If you mean well, if you really do, you will run for your life, like good vassals everywhere.

The same holds for international affairs. The Incorporated Estates of Earth owns the world, as it should, because it means well, always and everywhere.

Thus we intervene constantly against people of color the world over. We garrison the earth, and every year we spend over half our money on all matters militant.

It’s easy to find people of color to smash. There are so many of them, whether in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Palestine, Grenada, Panama, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Africa, South America – even in the heart and soul of the IEE, the USA, where the prison population – chock full of people of color, not to mention people of no money – leads all Earth. More prisoners per capita, more prisoners period. Hey, we’re number one!

Those who we don’t smash, we threaten. Because we mean well. The order and security of the Incorporated Estates of Earth demands it. The IEE likes to, needs to, aims to extract oil like blood from these people. Just blow them up and the oil comes splurting out into our waiting pipes, tankers, pockets. So what if millions upon millions of innocents are slaughtered in the process of IEE invasions, occupations, sanctions? We mean well. The wars of the IEE grease the gears of the economy so we know we are doing well. Business is booming. We are far to the right in meaning well. We mean it. We mean well. Continue reading Lesson eleven: we mean well

[“Lessons” are temporary posts. These early drafts may come down after a few days. Any surviving or revised remnants and expanded passages may be found at The Vassals Handbook page – also subject to revision.]

Lesson nine – the treason of the credit unions

Let no one speak of turning to credit unions, which are owned and operated by the depositors. Credit unions ought cease and desist their attempts to undermine by their very presence the fiscal authority of the IEE. So what if credit unions are democratically controlled, one person, one vote – and banks are not? So what if credit unions have lower fees and better rates than banks? So what if credit unions have stronger community ties and involvement than banks? So what if credit unions return revenues to their depositors rather than operate for profit like banks? So what if they remain solvent? Such feel good tripe misses every point that matters. And how can it last? Why would good vassals anywhere want credit unions to persist in this golden era of vassalism? Continue reading Lesson nine: the treason of the credit unions

Q: Anthony, why is the fiction of Jonathan Littell and Roberto Bolaño currently all the rage in educated circles?
A: Once more to the liberal cesspool. Once more to the conservative craphouse. Clear enough?

Q: Could you expand?
A: As widely reported and discussed, Littell’s prize-winning mammoth novel, The Kindly Ones, which publishers are paying hundreds of thousands of dollars for the rights to publish (and market), tells the fictive story of a “former Nazi SS officer, who in addition to taking part in the mass extermination of the Jews, commits incest with his sister, sodomizes himself with a sausage and most likely kills his mother and stepfather.” It’s a novel about atrocity featuring a sociopathic psychopath conveniently far removed from the sociopathic atrocities being perpetrated today by the respectable, by the more or less normal individuals and officials of the sociopathic corporate-state.

Q: And Bolaño?
A: He was instantly canonized. In the US, at least, Bolaño was instantly exalted once translated. Pervasive through his fiction is a deeply amoral pose. Established “taste” finds this deeply appealing. He strikes the pose purposefully as the centerpiece of his work. It provides a certain suspension, levity, tension – striking an amoral pose in extremely morally fraught situations. Though there are some exceptions to this general Bolaño rule, amorality pervades character and plot and setting. It is the dynamo – more alive than character and plot and setting. Similarly, the weightless is also rendered amoral. For example, early in his long novel 2666 (Time magazine’s “Best Book of 2008”), Bolaño essentially guts the writing of moral and intellectual freight and poses the characters (scholars) as perceiving weight and meaning where there is none. The narrative view remains amoral, clinical, for there is precious little apparent consequence of any kind, of anything. Bolaño’s writing is not entirely sterile, as one can see the ironies tweaked and played and driven. Bolaño has a lot of experience of the world and he shares it. And there is some value in that. He is an experienced guy building experienced worlds of, well, experience – especially as compared with much of the fluff and pap published otherwise. He has been around and he takes readers around with him in a very nonthreatening (if unpromising) amoral way. So the establishment loves him. He is no threat to anybody’s wealth. He may in passing amorally illuminate a bit of the status quo. He will not cross examine it but skips off like a spaceship approaching the atmosphere of earth at too shallow an angle. He just skips off, back into space, away from the density and the most compelling gravity. Some people like that; more have been trained to it; many others merely tolerate it, or ideologically laud the style and effect, for various reasons including those heretofore noted. Bolaño sketches scenes with play and pathos and goes relatively easy on the satire. He alludes to matters of great weight but even in Nazi Literature in the Americas draws little more than what he intends to, comic blood. Even when overviewing mass murder in gory detail in 2666, the notes, as they feel, scarcely leave the state of the clinical. This is a strategy one might plausibly adopt when writing for money. Apparently, Bolaño wrote the bulk of his fiction for money and with some desperation given the illness he died of age 50. Continue reading Q&A w/ Anthony Asc: Littell and Bolaño

Guardian Books: “’No better mind has gone to work on where we are post-9/11,’ author and judge Lee Abbott told the Washington Post,” about Joseph O’Neill and his PEN/Faulkner award winning novel Netherland. It “made the longlist for the Booker prize and was the bookies’ favourite to win before it was snubbed for the shortlist….” “It was described by the New York Times as ‘the wittiest, angriest, most exacting and most desolate work of fiction we’ve yet had about life in New York and London after the World Trade Centre fell’, while James Wood in the New Yorker called it ‘one of the most remarkable post-colonial books I have ever read’.”

Meanwhile, Shelly Ettinger at Read Red comments, O’Neill  

“means well, no doubt, and he is it seems trying to get at several complexities about identity and immigration and friendship and history with the novel’s title, but it strikes me that what he’s cooked up is more like Neverland, one more postcolonial fantasy of what life is like for those driven across the world by the crimes of colonialism – as told by the inheritor of the riches stolen from their forebears. There’s a liberal smugness to it, or at least that’s how it sits with me.”

Discussion of the notion of the post-9/11 novel and literature in general leaves out the question of whether or not 9/11 is much of an appropriate touchstone, given the great catastrophe that was kicked off in the March 2003 ground invasion of Iraq, an extension of the murderous US-UN sanctions era kicked off by invasion more than a decade prior…. Our suffering defines a literary era but the far more massive suffering we inflict on others does not.

That’s retrograde, it seems to me, even though much of the “post-9/11″ lit conceit may be of liberal or progressive intention. The unthinkable has been filtered out prior to the discussion. Along these lines, other significant moments or era shifts – the various US invasions, the shift to a finance based economy in recent decades, the rise of the PR industry beginning about a century ago, the fall and rise of widespread activist movements – seem like far more meaningful markers of changing sociopolitical and cultural eras that would most insightfully and most dramatically inform literature.

Of course, 9/11/01 is in its own right a “novel event” – as Noam Chomsky notes: Continue reading Netherland and The Notion of the Post-9/11 Novel

Cross posted from the comments at Blographia Literaria:

Too often the literature establishment produces (I’ve noted elsewhere) “almost meaningless skirmishes between the so-called ‘hysterical realists’ and Flaubertian intimatists, between the free-wheeling fabulists and the empathetic realists, and other establishment fronts and alignments.” This is a narrow formalism dominant. Continue reading Gender, Race, and Class…Culture, Power, and Control in Lit

“Anti-war ‘Trial’ worth revisiting” – by Jeff Favre:

Famed novelist Gore Vidal and peace activist Ron Kovic spoke opening night at the Actors’ Gang revival of “The Trial of the Catonsville Nine,” an indication that this seminal 1971 play still holds significance with those who protested the Vietnam War…. Though big news in 1968, the action of nine Catholics burning draft files in a Maryland town would be forgotten by nearly everyone if participant Daniel Berrigan hadn’t written a play based on the protestors’ trial….

Much of the text is taken from the actual trial. The defendants admitted to burning nearly 400 draft files with homemade napalm. The argument for their action is that stopping an immoral and possibly illegal activity – such as the Vietnam War – through nonviolent means is justified. Each draft file burned, they believe, may have saved a life. Berrigan, his brother Philip (Scott Harris), who also is a priest, and the seven others provide passionate pleas for peace, but much of their time on the stand is spent explaining how America’s involvement in Guatemala, the Dominican Republic and parts of Africa establish a pattern of behavior that “forced” the Catonsville Nine to act in such a bold manner.

 Via ZNet: “These are extraordinary times. Vicious colonial wars and political, economic and environmental corruption cry out for a place on the big screen. Yet, try to name one recent film that has dealt with these, honestly and powerfully, let alone satirically. Censorship by omission is virulent. We need another Wall Street, another Last Hurrah, another Dr. Strangelove. The partisans who tunnel out of their prison in Gaza, bringing in food, clothes, medicines and weapons with which to defend themselves, are no less heroic than the celluloid-honoured POWs and partisans of the 1940s. They and the rest of us deserve the respect of the greatest popular medium.”
 

Once More to the Orthodox 

The literature establishment is constantly grasping for some standout voice or another to cover up its too often eviscerated and eviscerating core. In his recent New Yorker commentary “Zadie Smith Reports from Dream City,” Hendrick Hertzberg urges: “Please, I beg you: drop whatever you’re doing and read Zadie Smith’s brilliant meditation on Barack Obama…” ‘Speaking In Tongues,’ in the New York Review of Books “….a wonderful essay” of “sparkling words” that is “so absorbring…an exhilarating slalom” that shows “how well [President] Obama is positioned…to summon us so thrillingly to a vision of ‘the United States of America’ and a belief, as he said in his Inaugural, ‘that the old hatreds shall someday pass; that the lines of tribe shall soon dissolve’….” Apparently, the master state(s) will remain.

Smith’s lecture gives grand voice to the establishment, for it is a voice rich and eloquent, however antique, not least in its ideological orthodoxy. Per usual, the speech borders on parody at its most ideological moments in familiar guise of aestheticism denouncing ideology, a would be post-ideological stance.

Ms. Smith acknowledges that she has been well trained. She states her “regret” at losing her Willesden voice the voice of her youth that “was a big, colorful, working-class sea” for her college voice, her Cambridge voice, acquired in:

“a smaller, posher pond, and almost univocal; the literary world is a puddle. This voice I picked up along the way is no longer an exotic garment I put on like a college gown whenever I choose—now it is my only voice, whether I want it or not. I regret it; I should have kept both voices alive in my mouth. They were both a part of me. But how the culture warns against it!”

Despite Smith’s being trained into a “puddle,” and her stated regret, she finds that all is not lost, and of course it is not. Unfortunately, the intellectual or literary recompense she hails is her adoption or assumption of the standard line of the status quo that not only declaims it prizes no ideology at all but (equally false) that ideology in literature functions as a lesser thing, a devaluation of literature, a betrayer of literary ideals and life. She believes literature can be ideology free – a belief that only the privileged puddle can afford to float (and even then only in the short term). Dream City indeed. It is the dream of a both servile and ruling status quo ideology: Continue reading Zadie Antoinette?

Rebecca Solnit at TomDispatch:

Argentina is big in land, resources, and population with a very different culture and history than Iceland. Where Iceland goes from [bankruptcy] is hard to foresee. But as Icelandic writer Haukar Már Helgason put it in the London Review of Books last November:

“There is an enormous sense of relief. After a claustrophobic decade, anger and resentment are possible again. It’s official: capitalism is monstrous. Try talking about the benefits of free markets and you will be treated like someone promoting the benefits of rape. Honest resentment opens a space for the hope that one day language might regain some of its critical capacity, that it could even begin to describe social realities again.”

 The big question may be whether the rest of us, in our own potential Argentinas and Icelands, picking up the check for decades of recklessness by the captains of industry, will be resentful enough and hopeful enough to say that unfettered capitalism has been monstrous, not just when it failed, but when it succeeded. Let’s hope that we’re imaginative enough to concoct real alternatives.

Paul Craig Roberts at Counterpunch:

The unreality in which the US government operates is beyond belief.  A  bankrupt government  that cannot pay its bills without printing money is rushing headlong into wars in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Iran.  According to the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Analysis, the cost to the US taxpayers of sending a single soldier to fight in Afghanistan or Iraq is $775,000 per year!  

Obama’s war in Afghanistan is the Mad Hatter’s Tea Party.  After seven years of conflict, there is still no defined mission or endgame scenario for US forces in Afghanistan.  When asked about the mission, a US military official told NBC News, “Frankly, we don’t have one.”  NBC reports: “they’re working on it.” 

Speaking to House Democrats on February 5, President Obama admitted that the US government does not know what its mission is in Afghanistan and that to avoid “mission creep without clear parameters,” the US “needs a clear mission.”

How would you like to be sent to a war, the point of which no one knows, including the commander-in-chief who sent you to kill or be killed?  How, fellow taxpayers, do you like paying the enormous cost of sending soldiers on an undefined mission while the economy collapses?