Category: Current Affairs

What Double Standard Are You For?

One can find over at Lance Mannion http://lancemannion.typepad.com/ some of the most trenchant writing about the decadent anti-feminist and racist symbolism that’s being employed by McCain-Palin as this presidential campaign enters the home stretch.

Decadence as a  literary term means the adoption of old ideas and manners—the trotting out of tired material. Writers who do this hope to God that their readers   will be sufficiently uninformed about literary history that they’ll fail to notice the mediocrity of the enterprise.

Lance Mannion, being a literary writer, sees how the McCain-Palin crew is working the engines of decadence for all their worth. I particularly like Lance’s observation that by associating Obama with the Weathermen—a radical group that most Americans probably can’t remember, the McCain campaign hopes to implant the idea that Obama is a direct descendant of one of those other “hard to remember” groups from the 60’s—the Black Panthers. You see the drift. If you’re using decadence and your audience likes it well you can just employ as much phoney symbolism as you like. There’s no bottom to that ditch.

Lance’s most recent posts are the best things I’ve seen on this nauseating and dangerous enterprise.

In the meantime I find myself growing more alarmed and humorless by the day. Last night I watched with horror as Minnesota Republican RepresentativeMichelle Bachmann asserted on the Chris Matthews Show that liberals in Congress should all be investigated to determine whether they are supporters of

America

. See: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/3036697/

Fascism relies on decadence both in art and in its symbolism. In turn I’d like to suggest the re-application  of the dunking stool for Rep. Bachmann.

S.K.

 

What does it mean to witness if you’re an artist? IN the 1980’s the poet Carolyn Forche associated the craft of poetry with the political act of becoming a moral witness. Forche’s work in the arts of poetry and political witnessing lead her to edit an important anthology of political poetry which remains the standard volume on the matter.

I remain troubled by the absence of moral conversation in our current presidential campaign. IN fact it’s possible I think to view the antics of Alaska Governor Sarah Palin as a kind of anti-witnessing. She has recently been attacking Senator Barack Obama for having raised the issue of our military’s frequent involvement in incidents that have led to civilian deaths in Afghanistan. Obama was citing the U.S. military’s own findings that suggest that a lack of troops on the ground in Afghanistan has caused the U.S. to rely on air strikes against suspected Taliban and al Qaeda strongholds. In turn more civilians are killed than might otherwise be the case.

Senator Obama’s assertion was not unpatriotic or "anti-military" as Sarah Palin has loudly claimed, but rather an assessment drawn from our own top military leaders. It is fair I think to remind ourselves that in general terms the U.S. military does not like to kill innocent people. If you are on the left you may well laugh at my assertion; if you’re on the right you will quite possibly sneer at anything the military has to say—after all, that’s what the past 8 years have been about eh bien?

And so in this instance I am a witness to a mealy mouthed and unethical attack by Sarah Palin on the decency of our own military. And as seems to be the case so often, she is willing to confuse the messenger and the message for political gain while ignoring the real human rights issues.

And that’s my point of course: there have been no human rights issues in this campaign. I’m not holding my breath that we’ll hear about human dignity and freedom tonight.

S.K.

Just moments after the R.M.S. Titanic struck an iceberg Captain Edward Smith told first officer Murdoch to "note it in the log"—a command that presumably linked the idea of posterity alongside the written word. & of course the Titanic’s log went down with the ship.

"Note it in the log" is such a serious tip of the hat to faith. Write a sonnet. Someone will be around ages hence to read it.

Where do sonnets reside? In books. & books live in the libraries. & libraries depend on funding. & funding depends on the global economy.

Note it in the log

& I saw no difference between the right wing of the GOP as its membership sought to derail the bailout of Wall Street & their disdain for books. They’re all so busy imagining the rapture they don’t have time for sonnets or your child’s education or anything that might look like the future. Of course they’ll say they don’t think the government should save private capital. But that’s not their real objection to the emergency legislation being debated now in Washington. The ultra ultra right wingers of the Republican party believe this world is mostly toast. They also think they can take their money with them to heaven which of course looks like Dubai.

Note it in the log, Mr. Murdoch.

S.K. .

Samuel Taylor Coleridge wrote that: "many a man, who has contrived to hide his ruling passion or predominant defect from himself, will betray the same to dispassionate observers, bu his proneness on all occasions to suspect or accuse

others of it. …"

Lately the air waves in America have been echoing Senator McCain’s assertion that Senator Obama has injected race into the presidential campaign. Enter Coleridge: you don’t have to look too deeply at McCain’s protestations to see a latent and pejorative utilization of racial figuration. The image of Paris Hilton and Britney Spears, two young white women, presaging the appearance of a larger than life black man is a carefully constructed semiotic reenforcement of old fashioned white fear. Has anyone forgotten Harper Lee’s novel To Kill a Mockingbird for god’s sake?

By pretending that the Hilton-Spears ad is just a simple "celebrity" alarm about Obama the McCain campaign can divert attention from the haunting and racially motivated visual symbolism in their phony commercial.

I hope that Senator Obama can survive this ugly Karl Rove sponsored attack and that the American people will listen to what he has to say with keen attention.

But in a nation where some 40 million people can’t read I imagine that visual literacy—the ability to analyze imagery—is even less in evidence. Karl Rove and company know this full well.

Obama’s best strategy is to use his warmth and his sense of humor whenever possible. Ronald Reagan and JFK were witty in the face of adversarial attacks.

No one will sensibly suggest that John McCain is witty.

S.K.

                                    –after the Finnish of Pentti Saarikoski

God said to Satan:

“Bow down in remembrance of me.”

Satan said: “But you are

a mathematical proposition

Or else you’re nothing

& either way—just for the sake of argument,

Abstractions are graven images.”

God punished Satan by making him the commandant of Gitmo.

Pages turned on calendars of mankind.

The wicked prospered beyond their wildest dreams.

& Satan climbed in and out of human eyes

& his footprints felt like nothing more than sand. 

S.K.

My father used to say that the trouble with the Republican party was its generalized contempt for the labor movement. He was not original with this but today, thinking of him and of the current flap over George W. Bush’s characterization that recent economic problems in the U.S. occurred because "Wall Street got drunk", I’m mindful of how intellectually bankrupt the G.O.P. has become. Now that there’s no labor movement to kick around, and now that the middle class has been damaged beyond recognition, now that most of the wealth has been sucked out of the republic by the top 3 per cent of the nation’s wealthiest citizens, now that this money has been transferred to Dubai or the Caymen Islands, well, it’s clear to me that the final insult to America is that the plutocrats will trivialize the entire collapse of the financial infrastructure of the middle class. I’m glad my father isn’t alive to see this. I really am. Wall Street got drunk and now it’s having a hangover. What a simpering, cynical ass you are, Mr. President!

S.K.

You are a good person who lives among good people and therefore when you are no longer here you will go to Valhalla.

Once you arrive you discover the folks in Valhalla weren’t really all that good before they got there.

"Oh well," you think, "they have fine cutlery and a seemingly endless supply of beef."

They tell marvelous, heroic sagas that make you forget all about time.

No one seems to care much about the sad affairs of humankind. Why, they’ve even forgotten their former existences altogether—imagining they were always in Valhalla.

The whole operation is pre-Christian so ideas like "forgiveness" or "lovingkindness" are nowhere in evidence.

When the long dinner is over and the sybaritic poets have declaimed satisfactorily, everyone stands and in the custom of honorific eternity, they retain their personalized forks.

Etc.

S.K.

The New Yorker’s cover depicting Michelle and Barack Obama as militant haters of the United States is a joke. Like all jokes it is likely going to offend someone. And like all offensive humor the people it offends may not be the people who most ought to be offended. I call this principle "Joke Displacement" and you may call it something else, but here’s the point: Baby Boomers have mastered the surgically displaced joke because, well, they haven’t mastered much else.

I first knew my generation was in trouble when Arlo Guthrie got on stage at Woodstock and said with evident satisfaction that the throngs of hippies trying to make their way to the music festival had "shut down the Thruway" and everyone applauded wildly. People were cheering because they’d created a vast traffic jam which meant, in the collective mind set of that moment that something of great significance had happened.

This was like the toddler who was proud of his deposit in the potty. Alas, those are your Boomers, then and now.

"Look what I did!"

The people who should be offended by the New Yorker are instead quite happy with the whole business.

"Look what I made!"

Joke displacement is a form of conceptual art and the great master of the idea was Marcel Duchamp who created art from the commodified junk of the Industrial Revolution—a bicycle wheel protruding from a bar stool, a urinal tipped on its side with a sign declaring "water Fountain" etc.

The idea was that such displays would offend someone and in turn those offended people might have a Zen flash of insight about their existences.

But the problem is that the leisure classes who might have enough disposable income to be edified in this way are not interested in the joke. Only those who are uncomfortable with being middle class will be bothered by the humor and the fact is that Baby Boomers are not sufficiently uncomfortable with their accumulated wealth to feel much of anything.

So the Boomers laugh at the working classes and the working classes know it.

And so Joke Displacement becomes easy decadence and you can take this to the bank.

S.K.