Posting a three to five thousand word column each day is the aim here, but starting up again after a week off with computer woes seems difficult. In that week much has happened in the world of national events and geopolitics – the usual beat here, but for a few excursions in healthcare issues and macroeconomics, and a few side trips into the arts and sciences – and so many have said so much and so well. One can of course round up the most interesting observations, comment on them, and try to synthesize it all into one big “what it all might mean.” There might be a real point in pulling it all together, but sometimes there’s nothing to add. Should one more voice point out the obvious? We’re in a war we decided to wage but we cannot possibly win, because we don’t know what constitutes victory. We hardly know who we’re fighting any longer, or why, although everyone seems to have an opinion on those matters. It’s too bad no one can agree on any of it. And the cost of packing it in is far too high. Should we leave, the region could disintegrate into far greater chaos, and when the oil stops flowing, the world economy collapse. And we stand alone – Blair is gone and Gordon Brown is probably going to announce the British will rapidly withdraw from the south of Iraq. Ah well. Everyone makes mistakes.
It’s easy to agree with Digby –
The Bush administration and its neocon muses have long said that the most dangerous thing the US could do would be to give the terrorists a victory by “proving” that we don’t have the ballocks to stand and fight. They firmly believe that a failure to kick ass and take names, going all the way back to Reagan and the bombing of the marine barracks in Beirut, is what caused the Islamofascists to think they could attack us. They know this because bin Laden has trash talked this line on various tapes and missives over the years so it must be true. (He wouldn’t lie, would he?)
And when they hear him saying “bring it” like big dumb bulls they see red and immediately start snorting and stomping the ground and rush headlong into some half baked scheme designed to prove that we can’t be intimidated. But what if the Islamoboogeymen are actually waving their capes in front of the big, dumb United States in order to get them to do exactly that?
Well, yes. And there’s this –
Basing your decisions upon your stated enemy’s threats and taunts and holding fast so they can’t yell “psych!” is not a foreign policy - it’s a WWF advertising campaign. It isn’t real and it doesn’t address any real problem. The US is the most powerful country on earth and the Islamoboogeymen are not going to take over our government and make us all wear burkas and pray to Mecca. Really. Sophisticated thinkers would find solutions to the real problems of Islamic fundamentalism and energy dependence and Israel and all the rest rather than launch invasions as PR exercises, but this is what we are dealing with. Marketing is the only thing the Mayberry Machiavelli’s know.
This isn’t some scripted TV “throw-down.” It’s a serious and complicated challenge and we desperately need to get some people in power who don’t depend on “Jack Baur” for their policy prescriptions. Every single day these jokers continue with their little playground game, they make things worse.
Yep. Well put, but that’s only a report of something someone else said.
While offline the Republicans had their debate for the ten presidential hopefuls, each talking tough and each but McCain suggesting torture should be our policy. Romney wants to double the size of Guantanamo and make sure no one accused of terrorism ever gets a lawyer, and so on. That’s who we are now. And add the online poll the Military Times, as Andrew Sullivan summarizes –
With over 5,000 responses from readers, over 50 percent believe torture is legitimate simply “to gather vital information.” Another 20 percent support it to save troops’ lives. Those two categories basically make torture an option for all soldiers in a dangerous war-zone. Six years after Bush’s approval, 70 percent of Military Times readers endorse torture - not even the newspeak “enhanced interrogation techniques” - as a routine military option. Congratulations, Mr President.
What does one add to that? Sullivan, an old-fashioned conservative himself, adds this –
The Republican Party has not been very keen on reason these past few years. What matters is faith in a leader and unremitting violence in accomplishing goals. Whatever else this is, it isn’t conservatism as I have come to understand it.
So? Things change. We’ve got that authoritarian personality cult thing going now. It is much like Germany in the thirties. Everyone knows it. Everyone sees it. What more is there to add to what was posted on September 5, 2004, in these pages - Low-Rent Crystalnacht - “And here in the Hollywood Hills I thought I just saw the Von Trapp family climbing out over the hills headed for Vermont.” (For a giggle, see the Jonathan Kirsch review of “Weimar on the Pacific” by Ehrhard Bahr - on the Los Angeles legacy of Thomas Mann, Bertolt Brecht and the other German exiles who found a haven here during World War II – Brecht loathed Santa Monica but Mann was happy in Los Feliz - “Nach Westwood zum Haarschneiden” - “Gone to Westwood for a haircut.”)
Everything is running in its groove. There may be not much to add. And that leads to this –
“Many a man fails as an original thinker simply because his memory is too good.” - Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human
There are no original thoughts on these matters. You remember enough, or read enough history, you’ve seen it all before, and what you can say about it has been said before.
And that leads to Erik Campbell, in the Spring 2007 issue of Virginia Quarterly Review, with The Accidental Plagiarist: The Trouble with Originality.
There’s a problem with originality? Well, yes –
I recall the day when I finally understood one of Nietzsche’s statements which had previously baffled me, one which Harold Bloom is fond of quoting. To wit: “There is always a kind of contempt in the act of speaking.” What happened was, I was talking one evening to a co-worker about the war in Iraq and, after explaining why I think we should get out of there fast, he suggested the following: “We should just nuke the whole goddamn country. What’s Iraq? Desert. We nuke the whole goddamn country and turn the desert to glass. Then our troops just have to look down and find the oil. Easy. It’s all about easy extraction.” Then he laughed and slapped my back in solidarity. That laugh, I thought, is the sound of hope losing its feathers.
Times such as these, I like to play a little existential game with myself, one that I think Nietzsche would appreciate. The idea is to see if I can “will myself dead,” to, say, conjure up a myocardial infarction or a brain aneurysm by an act of sheer concentrated will. It never works. Instead of unbecoming I usually end up nodding, renouncing articulation for gesticulation (my co-workers always accept the gracious indefiniteness of the nod). Soon the talk turns to women anyway (we’re usually in a bar), which amounts to the only esoteric art most of my colleagues are interested in pursuing.
No hope, no original thoughts, and you have to keep living. Bummer. But Campbell is a writer –
I am constantly trying to come up with, if not an original idea, then at least an original rendering of one. But this pursuit is a difficult and quixotic one, since poetry and essays (and, outside of certain genres, most fiction) now fall under the canopy of “specialist” reader - and authorship, and the hundreds of literary journals and magazines that publish such esoterica are read by a small, select few. And we few, we hapless few readers are also, more often than not, the authors. Thus, not only are we readers and writers oftentimes taking out one another’s laundry, but also we periodically end up, as it were, wearing one another’s pants.
Yep, one ends up saying what others said, even if unconsciously (or pre-consciously, or something). He cites the legendary case in pop music –
One of the most famous cases of contemporary subconscious plagiarism doesn’t involve a “writer” in the strictest sense, but a Beatle. The late and great George Harrison (”the quiet one,” my favorite) was sued in 1971 for copyright infringement for what Harrison later dubbed “subconscious plagiarism.” To make an over-twenty-year case short, various fellows in designer suits and (we can safely assume) unfortunate seventies hair accused Harrison of plagiarizing the Chiffons’ 1963 hit “He’s So Fine,” maintaining that Harrison’s song “My Sweet Lord,” from his album All Things Must Pass (1970), was effectively the same song. Ultimately musicologists on the prosecution’s payroll found that “He’s So Fine” consisted of two basic musical “phrases” (motif “a” and motif “b”), the former consisting of four repetitions of the notes G–E–D and the latter of G–A–C–A–C, and then found that “My Sweet Lord” shared the same harmonic genetic code. Harrison paid a lot of money to the suits; the case was retried, and so on until the nineties. He finally resolved the matter by buying the rights to “He’s So Fine.”
But the fascinating thing for me was Harrison’s defense. In effect, he claimed that no one should be penalized for subconscious plagiarism because such regrettable mishaps do not involve any deliberation or premeditation. Read (in a Liverpudlian accent): “You gits can’t sue me for the conscious output of my subconscious mind. Hare Krishna, Krishna Krishna.” Had his judge been Carl Jung, Harrison’s argument might have had a chance but, as Charles Baxter wrote, “Fuck and alas.”
It occurs to me now that Harrison could have saved a little face and avoided the whole Freudian angle had he invoked the words attributed to his former bandmate John Lennon for his defense: “There’s only so many notes, you know.”
And there are so many things to say about the current state of affairs, or about anything much, as Campbell notes –
I recently reread Thoreau’s Walden and his essay “On the Duty of Civil Disobedience” and was shocked to find that a great many of the epigrammatic wisdoms that I spouted to my classes in the past were in fact Thoreau’s. It made me feel sad and like a charlatan….
Then I started thinking about funny people. By “funny people” I don’t mean crazy people, and I’m not employing the 1950s euphemism for “homosexual,” and I’m not thinking of those people who tell funny stories or view life as an exercise in sarcasm. I’m referring to those people who have a whole repertoire of jokes and are perennial hits at parties. I wondered: Do I know a single soul who has ever actually made up a joke?
Then I started thinking about Victor Hugo and what he would think of Disney’s The Hunchback of Notre Dame or the “opera” Les Misérables. I wondered how irritated he would be if he knew Disney had made Quasimodo “cute.” Then I pondered how huge his royalty checks would be were he alive, and if he’d feel right cashing them.
Then I went to sleep and dreamed about a small, blank sheet of paper hanging out of a gargantuan typewriter like a limp, wan, mocking tongue. It was a ridiculously symbolic dream.
Lamentable Truth: You know you’re in a desperate situation when even your dreams are clichés that would bore Freud stupid.
Well, no dreams here of some small, blank sheet of paper hanging out of a gargantuan typewriter like a limp, wan, mocking tongue. Here the dreams are of a blank document page in MS Word – a glowing computer screen asking the simple question. Is there anything new to say?
Can it all be wrapped up in a master thesis, or masterful synthesis? Maybe. Maybe not.
Then there’s this –
I am no prophet - and here’s no great matter;
I have seen the moment of my greatness flicker,
I have seen the eternal Footman hold my coat, and snicker,
And in short, I was afraid.
And would it have been worth it, after all,
After the cups, the marmalade, the tea,
Among the porcelain, among some talk of you and me,
Would it have been worthwhile,
To have bitten off the matter with a smile,
To have squeezed the universe into a ball,
To roll it towards some overwhelming question,
To say, “I am Lazarus, come from the dead,
Come back to tell you all, I shall tell you all,” –
If one, settling a pillow by her head,
Should say, “That is not what I meant, at all.”
”That is not it, at all.”
Ah well.
