Reflections: Divide and Conquer - Two Game Plans

Over at my home-away-from-home, Ragged Thots, in the comments section under the title: Government at work (6/18/08 edition), a strange bird named Golub mused thusly:

Lastly, I am always baffled by the fact that Red States should be Blue States and Blue should be Red - in terms of taxation and in the support for more government spending.

NY absolutely should be AGAINST taxes and FOR localized government and rural states should be FOR more taxes and FOR more government spending.

Edited to fit this post, my response to that was, in part, as follows:

[W}here the logic of that fails is that rural folk tend to vote on cultural issues, rather than on economic ones. Therefore, the GOP is able to keep them Red based on issues loosely defined and lumped together as "gays, guns, and God."

[Below are some excerpts from George] Orwell's “The Road to Wigan Pier"… that describe these political forces as they pertained to middle- vs. working-class Brits in the years prior to WWII. The issue that was analogous to Red vs. Blue (rural vs. urban) in contemporary America, was Socialism vs. Fascism (working-class vs. middle-class) in pre-war Great Britain. In both cases, the negative pressure [giving rise to these opposing impulses] is applied by capitalism. But the antagonism between the two social groupings keeps them seeing each other as the enemy, rather than seeing the real enemy, who successfully divides and conquers.

So, Orwell:

Obviously the Socialist movement has got to capture the exploited middle class before it is too late; above all it must capture the office workers, who are so numerous and, if they knew how to combine, so powerful. …The people who have got to act together are all those who cringe to the boss and all those who shudder when they think of the rent. This means the small-holder has got to ally himself with the factory-hand, the typist with the coal-miner, the schoolmaster with the garage mechanic. There is some hope of getting them to do so if they can be made to understand where their interest lies. But this will not happen if their social prejudices, which in some of them are at least as strong as any economic consideration, are needlessly irritated.

…Economically, I am in the same boat with the miner, the navvy and the farm-hand; remind me of that I will fight at their side. But culturally I am different from the miner, the navvy and the farm-hand; lay the emphasis on that and you may arm me against them. [i.e., “turn me into a Fascist”]

…The weakness of the middle class hitherto has lain in the fact that they have never learned to combine; but if you frighten them into combining against you, you may find that you have raised up a devil.

[To stave off Fascism] all that is needed is to hammer two facts home into the public consciousness. One, that the interests of all exploited people are the same; the other, that Socialism is compatible with common decency.

The historical situations change superficially; but the mechanisms and machinations of politics and human nature remain virtually identical.

Reflections: Let Me Count the Ways

When fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying the cross. - Sinclair Lewis, It Can’t Happen Here

I have been pleasantly surprised to find that when one assiduously seeks information and knowledge, in the service of wisdom, knowledge and information will often meet one half-way. This kind of convergence of knowledge and mind, which I take to be a form of synchronicity, occurred for me just the other day.

I had been in the stacks of the university library, looking for a book that turned out not to be on the shelf. As I made my way through the maze of shelves toward the elevator bank, empty-handed, the book American Fascists by Chris Hedges, practically leapt off the shelf, into my hand.

This event partook of the kind of synchronicity I mentioned above, because it promised to provide some answers to a challenge thrown down by skeptical reader, William R. Barker, in the comments section of my post of December 30, 2007. In response to my conjectures concerning a cabal of right-wingers, determined to subvert the freedoms guaranteed by the constitution, in order to take power in America, Mr. Barker wrote: “I wait with baited (sic) breath for you to unmask the conspirators!”

This is easier said than done. As Hedges shows in his book, the conspirators are veritable “wolves in sheep’s clothing,” subverting the national thought patterns in ways which are both subtle and seemingly harmless, if not positive, at the surface level. In expounding upon this theme, Hedges quotes Hitler’s propaganda chief: “As Joseph Goebbels wrote: “The best propaganda is that which, as it were, works invisibly, penetrates the whole of life without the public having any knowledge of the propagandistic initiative.” (American Fascists, p.17)

Hedges prefaces his book with an excerpt from the writer and essayist, Umberto Eco, entitled Fourteen Ways of Looking at a Blackshirt. In this piece, Eco examines 14 items, some of which, in various combinations, will be fundamental to every fascist movement. I have reconfigured Eco’s list slightly in order to include it here:

Common Elements of Eternal Fascism:

1. The cult of tradition
2. The rejection of modernism
3. The cult of action for action’s sake
4. Making distinctions is a sign of modernism; disagreement is treason
5. Disagreement is a sign of diversity, diversity is evil (racism)
6. Fascism derives from individual or social frustration
7. The only privilege is that of being born in the same country
8. Humiliation at the power and material privileges of their enemies
9. Life is lived for struggle
10. Elitist contempt for the weak
11. Everybody is educated to become a hero
12. Transference of the will to power to sexual matters (patriarchal machismo)
13. Selective populism
14. Fascism speaks Newspeak

Eco’s original piece, which expands upon these items, can be read here. Eco’s title is a play on the title of a famous poem by Wallace Stevens, Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird. Another interesting example of convergence is that sometime between 1991 and 1994, I used the title and format of the same Stevens poem as the basis of a poem of my own entitled Thirteen Ways of Looking at an Oligarch, the content of which can be seen as a bridge between Stevens and Eco.

Hedges’ book focuses on a fundamentalist, evangelical, right-wing religious movement called Dominionism. In Hedges’ words:

Dominionism, born out of a theology known as Christian reconstructionism, seeks to politicize faith. It has, like all fascist movements, a belief in magic along with leadership adoration and a strident call for moral and physical supremacy of a master race, in this case American Christians. (Ibid., p.11)

In general terms:

Dominionists and their wealthy, right-wing sponsors speak in terms and phrases that are familiar and comforting to most Americans, but they no longer use words to mean what they meant in the past. (Ibid., p.14)

Among those comforting words whose meaning Hedges shows being subverted in this way are: Truth, wisdom, death, liberty, life, love…

Some of these “wealthy, right-wing sponsors” include:

Corporations such as Tyson Foods—which has placed 128 part-time chaplains, nearly all evangelicals or fundamentalists, in 78 plants across the country—along with Purdue, Wal-Mart, and Sam’s Wholesale, to name a few, are huge financial backers of the movement. (Ibid., p.22)

So, there you have it, Mr. Barker. This should provide you with enough of a road-map to find some answers to your own challenge, if you want to take the time to do a little digging of your own. To close, I might suggest that you spend some time lurking here, in order to observe the prediction of Sinclair Lewis at work in real-time today.

Readings: Apocalypse When?

Taking center stage in my current reading regimen is the novel Tree of Smoke, by Denis Johnson. Johnson has long been one of my favorite contemporary writers of fiction, and ToS is his biggest, and, imho, most important, effort to-date. Johnson has also published some very good poetry. Those who read non-fiction exclusively might be interested in looking into Seek, a selection of essays and magazine articles, which I thoroughly enjoyed. I have also read a couple of his dramas, and, quite frankly, was not blown away by them. But the rest of it, I vouch for.

Tree of Smoke is primarily about the war in Vietnam and the role of the CIA in Southeast Asia. It contains several interwoven subplots, between which Johnson vacillates, a structure which has annoyed some reviewers. Personally, I find his pacing very effective. The novel is over 600 pages, and I find that moving the focus from one character to another, in fairly short segments, keeps it from ever becoming tedious. I am currently approaching page 400 and already regretting that the saga will too soon end.

But I’m not here to write a review, as such.

Having recently had my interest in reading Spinoza piqued by a fictional character in a novel by Rebecca Goldstein, I found myself in the same situation with regard to one of the characters in Tree of Smoke. The character is “Skip,” a young, idealistic and patriotic CIA operative, perhaps a generic Christian, who has been drawn into the Agency by hero-worship of his legendary uncle, also CIA, who is known to the world primarily as “the Colonel.” Without going too deeply into the plot, it is enough for my purposes here to say that Skip finds himself in Vietnam, carrying out duties which, to him, as well as to us, seem both meaningless and mysterious. The Colonel, he believes, knows all, but discloses little. Both Skip and the Colonel are attached to a Psy-Ops unit. But what the “Ops” consist of is a mystery. Skip is billeted in the house a deceased French colonial, a physician, who somehow has managed to blow himself to pieces underground, in what may, or may not, have been a Viet Cong tunnel. (These tunnels seem to play an important symbolic role in the novel.) The dead physician’s effects and possessions are all still in the house, and Skip begins the task of boxing them up for subsequent removal by the next-of-kin. In the course of this, Skip becomes engrossed in both the physician’s library and his journals. When, finally, a relative comes for the physician’s things, Skip keeps (steals) a couple of items. Long story short: the physician has been a reader of the Romanian writer/philosopher, Emil Cioran, whose writings lay an egg in Skip’s brain.

As a reader of Tree of Smoke, having become convinced that an understanding of where Cioran was coming from must be important to understanding what happens to Skip, and, thus, to at least one essential element of what Johnson is driving at in writing the novel, I decided to read some Cioran. Searching the Cioran listings of the university library, I came across the title Tears and Saints. Since Johnson’s writings nearly always contain a religious subtext in which something resembling the Holy Spirit nags at the peace of mind of his protagonists, I decided to try this title first.

In the translator’s introduction, Ilinca Zarifopol-Johnston writes:

“Cioran explicitly focuses on the political element in the saints’ lives, but in his view their charitable deeds represent the least interesting aspect of their lives. What fascinates him are their tears, their thirst for pain and their capacity to endure it: in short, the pathology or, as he puts it, the ‘voluptuousness of suffering,’ for ‘suffering is man’s only biography.’ Behind this suffering, and their uncanny ability to renounce everything through ascetic practices. Cioran detects the saints’ fanatical will to power.”

And later:

“In mysticism, redemption and the saints’ will to possess God are in fact one and the same thing. That is why the formula for redemption need not remain confined to the spiritual domain and can easily be translated into political terms: the mystic’s spiritual union with God becomes a (small) nation’s fulfillment of a greater destiny: ‘Our entire political and spiritual mission must concentrate on the determination to will a transfiguration, on the desperate and dramatic experience of transforming our whole way of life.’ [Cioran, Romania’s Transfiguration, 47]”

Finally, Zarifopol-Johnston quotes Cioran again from Romania’sTransfiguration:

“All means are legitimate when a people opens a road for itself in the world. Terror, crime, bestiality and perfidy are base and immoral only in decadence, when they defend a vacuum of content; if, on the other hand, they help in the ascension of a people, they are virtues. All triumphs are moral…”

So, Johnson has one of his central protagonists, a CIA operative assigned to a Psychological Operations unit, under the command of his uncle, a Kurtz-like figure, becoming obsessed with the ideas of a Romanian fascist, who is himself obsessed with saints as the embodiment of suffering as will-to-power in an otherwise meaningless existence. The enemy is “the Void.” The danger is falling into decadence and nihilism, and Skip seems--two-thirds of the way through the book--to be teetering on the brink. He has passively rejected, through his inability to empathize, the love of a truly suffering woman named Kathy; the widow of a murdered Seventh Day Adventist missionary, who continues her charitable work among the Vietnamese war orphans, despite apparently having lost her faith and entered into a Dark Night of the Soul (Mother Teresa, anyone?). And Skip is lost in a mission, the goals of which are as invisible as are their moral foundations.

What does Johnson have in mind for Skip? As a symbol of patriotic, casually Christian America, will Skip become even more the fascist than he already de facto is? Or will he veer off in the direction of sainthood, persevering, but suffering, in his new-found acknowledgement of the agony of existence in a fallen world? As a symbol of America, where will Skip find his will-to-power?

Cioran, for his part, says:

“We would have been better off without saints. Then each of us would have minded our own business and we would have rejoiced in our imperfection. Their presence among us brings about useless inferiority complexes, envy, spite. The world of saints is a heavenly poison that grows ever more virulent as our loneliness increases. They have corrupted us by providing a model that shows suffering attaining its goal.” [Tears and Saints, p.14]

(Simone Weil, anyone?)