Democracy Haters

Millions mobilized over three weeks' time, check. Standing ground without provoking those with guns, check. Effective use of flag to avoid charges of foreign interference, check. Decentralized collective actions in Suez and Alexandria, check. No violence (except for Mubarak's thugs), check. Appointment of a military council to appease the clucking of imperial overlords, check. Wow, something for everybody! Even Charles Krauthammer had to sputter a new position during a Friday afternoon panel on Fox News. This is one victory that everyone, left to right, can celebrate.

Not so fast. Rush Limbaugh called the Cairo crowds a "rent-a-mob of leftists", while Glenn Beck is sure that Obama was engaged with a secret socialist cabal that managed to bring down Mubarak even after the buzzard's Feb. 10 midnight hysterics. Something tells me this might be too much even for Roger Ailes. After all, Fox wants to preserve the illusion that its faux-populists are grassroots libertarians. The mask is slipping. Critics have known all along that Limbaugh, Malkin, Beck, Hannity, et al., take their cues, not from the populist right, but from the proto-fascist movements like SA Brownshirts and Patria y Libertad. These little observations from the Egypt days of struggle show where our friends really come down on the line - not with conservative or liberal protesters, but with forces of oppression.

Meanwhile, I'll leave you with Dr. Amir Fassad's warning of the task still ahead in the Maghreb:

Violent Depravity as a National Pastime

At the time of the Tucson atrocities Jan. 8, I was busy reading Evan Thomas's fascinating book on Teddy Roosevelt, Henry Cabot Lodge, and William Randolph Hearst, and their manufacturing of the Spanish-American War, The War Lovers. What surprised me was the degree to which Roosevelt really came across as a profoundly disturbed individual. I'm not talking about pedestrian-level machismo like the formation of The Rough Riders for the charge up San Juan Hill. That level of nonsense is commonplace in U.S. history. I'm talking about Roosevelt's belief that all diplomats were "hermaphrodites", because it was evil and homosexual to aim for peaceful negotiations to solve problems, when the only "virile" way to build a nation was to go to war whenever possible. I'm talking about his belief that it was necessary to instill both hunting and fighting in a child at a young age, because the more gore one encountered, the better. Sure, he tried to shmooze up to the Progressives by 1904, but TR could never escape his Neanderthal, violent, and proto-fascist beliefs he expressed as a member of Congress and Assistant Secretary of the Navy.

It's fair to point out that in the late Victorian Era in which Roosevelt came of age, virtually everyone in the developed industrial world was pretty messed up. Colonialism had gone into hyperdrive in Africa, obsessive adherence to Social Darwinism and eugenics was considered cool, and Sigmund Freud could develop some rather odd theories about dream interpretation, female "hysterics", etc. etc., because everyone in the era Freud lived in was pretty wacked out in their day-to-day lives. Hmm, sound familiar?

When I posted a brief observation about TR on Facebook last weekend, a lot of people were wondering about the definition of 'mentally disturbed.' How could TR be so popular if he was so different? I explained that I don't define psychological abnormality by majority vote. If a person believes in theories that would be self-destructive or lead inevitably to large numbers of deaths, that individual is disturbed. If the nation/tribe/society/race/culture buys into that belief, then the group itself is collectively mentally disturbed. Germans certainly fit that description in the era between Bismarck and Hitler, Southerners in the antebellum era all the way up to mid-20th century, Islamic cultures in which a Wahhabist tendency is in the majority, etc. Yes, a society itself can be mentally disturbed.

Which is why pointing the finger at Sarah Palin or Glenn Beck for the crimes of Jared Lee Loughner is only partially correct. The strident and vocal standard bearers in the various Tea Party movements, exemplified in Arizona by the likes of Russell Pearce and Jack Harper, could not develop such a big fan base were they not enablers for a much larger group of people who take the Roosevelt way of looking at the world to heart. Using crosshairs in a gun sight to identify political opponents would not seem that strange to them, because they see politics as a zero-sum game in which one's opponent should be stuffed and hung on the wall next to the deer heads Sarah shows off on her Alaska show. Many progressives want to say that the lumpen proletariat would not be so wacko without a Fox News or Rush Limbaugh or Sarah Palin to stir them up. I say we can assign a certain amount of blame to the chefs in the kitchen, but we also have to identify the problem at its source.

The Western industrial world and its former Soviet counterpart have lived through conquest and a Sparta-like culture since the Victorian era morphed into World War I, the Russian Revolution, and all that came after. The Asian and Islamic cultures that soon will be assuming planetary dominance from the Westerners are just as dependent on bloodlust. Yes, modern media reinforce these messages of killing and dominance, but those messages are also reinforced by the totality of myths and cultural determinants in all these societies. The peace-loving members of the Enlightenment movement (always a minority, even within the Enlightenment) never stood a chance.

In fact, that definition I gave for mental pathology earlier on, depended on rather unique circumstances - a rationalist, cortex-driven view of culture had to pass judgment on a mind that used its emotional limbic-cerebellar roots ahead of its cortex, maybe without even applying reason to the problem. But cortical rationalism has only been consciously favored since the beginning of the Enlightenment and the formalizing of the scientific method. For millenia before that time, the limbic system won, hands down. So violent depravity is bound to win out, it's got a long and proven history behind it.

You no doubt have seen the sci-fi films and books that talk about the creation of a rationalist clerical order that hides, like the monks in Lindisfarne, to preserve intellectual pursuit from the ravaging of the dogs of war. We're near that point in the preservation of rationalism and the scientific method, let alone the preservation of peaceful discourse. Now, in order to pretend that our society still protects diversity and multiculturalism, "proper" Republicans and Democrats may agree to criminalize a large part of the violent crazy movement. At first, rationalists may applaud, until the efforts turn into a generalized Palmer Raid, and we're living in a hyper-controlled state of the pseudo-rationalists, seeking to suppress our instinctual violence. The problem is, all such states live with violence at their cores, so their efforts to contain crazies are bound to fail. If the contradictions don't come to the surface in Afghanistan or Somalia or Cote d'Ivoire, they'll come to the surface in running gun battles between Tea Party cells and the forces of order.

Yeah, the vast majority of people in the Victorian Era were mentally disturbed. Majorities in many 21st-century cultures are mentally disturbed. And it's hard to envision an easy way to keep the crazies from winning.

Honor Among Witches

Here are two poems from late August I have been remiss at posting:

Restoring Honor and Yellow Pinstripes

(for a rodeo clown)

Some weekends restore more honor than others.

Languorous nickel cones, for example,
Plump eggplant A’s and T’s sighing searchlight pinstripes
in Fisher-Price choo choo rows
before McAllister pocket windows
flex valor in buckets
but won’t turn over for curse or blessing.

Or the ’57 Chevys overflowing from Rosie’s
Honorable keepers of keys left snoring in the lot
as an officer searches catacombs for an off-switch to alarms.
Restoration at a price, always a price.

If I still owned a timing light,
If I still cared for honor
Michigan’s loveliest pinstriper
could accessorize medal upon medal upon medal.

But I misplaced the dueling pistol,
sold off the rapier,
told the half-brothers that sisters aren’t strangled
for infidelities on my watch.
Honor leaves silvery tastes of beef tongue, dust motes
I wait instead for the instrumental moment.

Loring Wirbel
Aug. 30, 2010

*******


In a Land of No Witches


Goodwill trembles in the thistle-choked ditch
Fruit fly proboscis in each tear duct
Afraid to look at the aid administrator declaring
“Witchcraft has been banished since Lugard
bullwhipped the Niger.”

Emilohi weeps behind a battered door
Clothes with buttons
Only-thing-greater-is-God
dictate the separation of cups – Six of Cups? –
terror of spells, child abuse

Abby asks if the expansion of scientific inquiry drove miracles away
I tell her Lives of the Saints is a bullshit Bunyan tale
Goodwill begs there be no witches

The clinical saints march in cadence,
Forbidding clitorodectomal horrors here, there
eye of a newt, a purple flurp
a large, one-eyed, no-nosed nothing
The clerical saints panic, torn between exorcisms of choice
and a temporal alliance with the ancient ones,
living outside the law of Newton
Pagan priest, pederast saint, both in the last band
Of armed ‘Ndrangheta
Hawking hollers, “Come on out with your hands up!”

And as our rationalist gang plays Whack-A-Mole
We miss the hairline cracks seeping spells
Even still, even still
Goodwill trembles.

Loring Wirbel
August 27, 2010

Atttention Robert Gibbs: Desperately Seeking Coherent White House Press Strategy

In April, when the independent right began holding their local tea-party affairs to a news furor across the nation, Robert Gibbs asked, "What's a tea party?"

On Sept. 12, when the Tea Party Express hit Washington, the White House press office tried to pretend it didn't know where these protesters were coming from or what they represented. I find the tea-partiers insufferably annoying due to their lack of knowledge of history and their tendency to use the Glenn Beck definition of words, but at least they are colorful characters in the right-wing nut-o-sphere. The Democrats have been hyper-analyzing the potential turnout, as witnessed by the furor over the "millions" document. Thus, the White House response can only be interpreted two ways:

1. Ignorance. Due to a bevy of media micro-analyzers in the White House Press Office and a daily national intelligence briefing, we can dismiss this option as ridiculous.

2. Belief that they can sound tempered and cool and logical by feigning ignorance. Oh, please. With daily media coverage of the Tea Party Express, Fox News, Glenn Beck, etc., this dog doesn't hunt, this stance is asinine. Gibbs could take his lead from Examiner.com blogger Ryan Witt, who points out that grassroots political expression is fine, but Fox News' role as sponsor and cheerleader is a clear conflict of interest. Mr. Gibbs, such a position takes the high road, without making the White House look like it's trying to play the ignorance game, and playing it very badly indeed. Are you listening?

Doha and Dolts

No, I'm not making pro- or anti-WTO commentary here, just pointing out that the lack of media coverage or comprehension of the final collapse of Doha July 29 was astonishing in its ignorance. The attitude of western developed nations had all but guaranteed a failure for the Doha round anyway, but the participants got tantalizingly close to a partial compromise, only to see everything fall apart. And only the obvious NY Times and Wall Street Journal noticed. As WTO director-general Peter Lamy said, this is a "massive blow to confidence in the global economy," and will have far more lasting effect on citizens in every nations than 5.4 earthquakes in Los Angeles or kidnapped babies in Florida. But duh sells.

After all, we can't expect US media to pay attention as the Turkish constitutional court narrowly decides against throwing out the government, despite the massive impact this will have on the EU and on secular-Islamic relations. We only saw the Serbian nationalist protests covered because of blood, tear gas, bandanas, and fire. Cheer up! We'll always have plenty of takes of Amy Winehouse vs. Duffy on the soulful singer-stringer front, we'll always have Nancy Grace picking apart the latest blood crime signifying nothing, we'll always have Glenn Beck warning us that the wily Mexicans are out to gun us down with their poison jalapenos. We have a right to be uninformed. As Walking Wounded would say, I'm "saddled by idiots."