This is No Way to Live

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Every glimpse of the Stars and Stripes has me lurching between love and loathing - emotionally torn between the romantic and the rational.  I fell in love with the idea of America at a young age in a distant and dismal land. Much later, when my cognitive, analytical brain kicked in, that pure and chivalrous adoration was deeply compromised by both historical knowledge and lived experience.

Earlier this month, in extraordinary circumstances, the nation experienced the most potent date on the American calendar – July 4th. It is a day that inevitably prompts some reflection on the nature of the American experience – a highly heterogenous set of phenomena which is nevertheless somehow reflected in the vivid graphic design of Old Glory.

For me, it all began with a miniature, die-cast, Matchbox model of the 1959 Chevy Impala. It was clear that a thing of such outlandish beauty could only exist, at full-scale, in a world entirely removed from the one that I inhabited. Its existence must rely, I reasoned, on a distant, fabled world, the shadowy outlines of which had already appeared to me when I first heard “Jail House Rock” by Elvis Presley a year or so earlier. Later, my brain was awash in the music of the Beatles and the Rolling Stones. But when I heard “River Deep – Mountain High,” by Ike and Tina Turner and produced by Phil Spector, that music was eclipsed, and my vision of America was fully restored - based on the musical stylings of Los Angeles and the curvature of Detroit sheet metal. It was this vision which shaped my emotional, adolescent brain and rendered it immune to the realities of the Watts Rebellion in the summer of 1965, the Detroit Riots of 1967, and America’s annus horribilis of 1968.

Now, having lived in California for forty years, I remain riven between this country’s still powerful romantic allure and its gruesome historical reality. I recognize that the one greatly depends on the other – the pain and sometimes joy of the African American experience, for instance, provided the foundation for the Blues, out of which sprang all the music to which I have referred, and which continue to inform culture more generally. The creative energies that once burned brightly in Detroit, and may now reside in Silicon Valley, continue to arise out of an economy based on freedom and opportunity, but are deeply shadowed by its ubiquitous practices of extraction and exploitation.

From the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights arose a  political infrastructure that papered over the most egregious injustices of the nation, and was bathed in a powerful mystique that, even today, retains much of its emotional resonance. The founding ideas of our politics, based on the philosophies of the European Enlightenment which established the classic liberalism of civil society, as well as its home-grown mechanics - the whole business of voting, the campaigns, the passage of legislation, and the defining of the country’s laws by reference to the U.S. Constitution – remain key to our emotional well-being. We rely, it seems to me, on the presumed justice of a governmental framework to counterbalance the lived inequities of a capitalist society bound up with notions of private property – which Rousseau correctly identified as the source of all inequality. Whatever balance might be achieved is, however, further roiled by historic notions of caste – defined, at least in part, by skin color.

Within this intrinsically contentious framework, we have established broad categories of philosophical opinion – liberal and conservative; donkey and elephant; blue and red; Democrat and Republican. So it is that we live in a highly polarized nation where about half of the country is disappointed with the tenor of whichever party holds sway in local, state and federal elections. This half of the country is then lacking in equanimity, instead harboring feelings of aggression, fear and even hatred towards the other half, but especially towards their representatives who, for the moment, collectively hold a majority, or individually, hold an office, in this or that notionally democratic institution.

This is no way to live. This year, we have been exposed to a number of realities that entirely transcend the pettiness of our politics and have a far greater impact on our lives than do our moribund democratic institutions. I’m talking about issues of sickness and health, work or no work, plenty or precarity, pleasure or pain, care or neglect, life and death - and the continued viability of our planet as a nurturing environment to humans and non-humans alike. These are transcendent issues which politicians can only impact at the margins. Yet, many of us mortgage our sense of personal well-being and the fate of a threatened planet to the results of elections – those profoundly flawed, state-sanctioned enactments of ideological struggle.

Notwithstanding the apparent impotency of our politicians to actually do anything substantive - from the personal to the planetary - our mood is nevertheless impacted by the tenor of Washington. The 2020 federal election will be a measure of how that mood translates into votes and those votes into the balance of power between the parties. Ideally, it will be a measure of whether we, as voters, despite being partially disenfranchised by way of gerrymandering and the archaic electoral college, wish to vote for the future or for the past; whether we see in our history greater pride and passion than dishonor and revulsion; whether we believe that our history needs eulogizing or exposing; or whether we believe it deserves mythic reconstruction or eviscerating deconstruction. Our president has clearly articulated arguments for the former. It appears doubtful, at this moment, whether arguments for the latter, if they are made at all, will be characterized by coherence, passion or robust intellectual argument. Incarnate, as it now stands, in two septuagenarian party figureheads, it is the vainglorious fabrication of America’s past that may yet triumph over a nebulous future sketchily presented by the opposition: neither vision is remotely equipped to withstand the reality checks imposed by a pandemic, economic turmoil, civil unrest and environmental degradation.

The president has emerged from a horrendous period of political turmoil – articles of impeachment, Ukrainegate, Russiagate, Covid and the Black Lives Matter protests - with speeches given in the shadow of the Mount Rushmore National Memorial, and, a day later, at the Lincoln Memorial on July 4th, that will define his particular brand of populist conservatism. While his is a presidency that has been defined more by rhetoric than action, more by symbolism than facticity, the pain and suffering he has caused many Americans and those who desire to be American – or at least to live here -  is very real. At the same time, his right-wing populism, made manifest in scapegoating, demonization, and petty acts of tyranny, has disaffected vast swathes of the electorate to whom his very persona is a daily rebuke. But he remains the master of his base - lionized by its members - and it was to them that these speeches were directed. The deeply disaffected are unlikely to be swayed by his rhetoric. These were speeches, not of persuasion, but of confirmation of his ideology.

Backgrounded by the Lincoln Memorial, our president summarily summoned the character of all Americans when he declaimed,

“America’s fearless resolve has inspired heroes who defined our national character … It has willed our warriors up mountains and across minefields.  It has liberated continents, split the atom, and brought tyrants and empires to their knees.”

What that ‘fearless resolve’ has not done is fully validate the idea of America for all of its inhabitants; what it has not done is ensure that those who dream the dreams this country offers, if not entirely fulfilled, are at least recognized; and what it has not done is correlate the country’s remarkable achievements in the arts, popular culture, technology, science, and design with social justice, equitable opportunity and liveability for all its people. In our name, apparently, this country has ‘brought tyrants and empires to their knees’ – but its social failures have now inspired its own inhabitants to take-a-knee, in wordless supplication for inclusive social equity.

On a personal level, I remain deeply in love with this country – but I want to change it.  The change I want to see will not come this November, the change I want to see has already begun, and is already manifest in a fearless resolve that, quite simply: This is No Way to Live!

Our History is Our Future

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We can be sure that the public grandiloquence of Barack Obama grated mightily on at least half of the country during his eight years in the Oval Office. Now, we Libtards find every Trump tweet excruciatingly inane - or horrifyingly inflammatory. As ever, it is the style, not the content, of American political leadership that is in question. For Its neoliberal ideology has been unwavering for four decades and is but the contemporary version of an implicitly racist dedication to the well-being of the wealthy that was fundamental to the founding of the Republic. Committed to the economization of all facets of public and private life, we citizens are remade as human capital: mini entrepreneurs whose only civic duty is towards pumping up the GDP. This is what our government demands of us, and we would be foolish to expect more from it than further destruction of the public realm and further trivialization of the democratic process. Having relinquished our individual roles as a necessary part of the Republic’s sovereignty, our vote is rendered superfluous at a time of a viral pandemic, unprecedented unemployment and expectations of further economic dislocation likely to eclipse the melt-down of 2008.

On a weekend when the nation’s streets exploded in violent protest against racialized police brutality, the President and the Vice President chose to attend a manned rocket launch contracted by SpaceX, a private corporation.  Politics have been dethroned, the public realm abandoned and the public good forsaken. Trump is ascendant, his sun-bronzed, narcissistic gaze reflected in the ruddy glow of burning streets.  His military, on high alert, awaits its orders.

Our smoldering streets may no longer be safe for Trump’s ‘warriors’ attempting, around the country, to fully re-open the American economy. Many will doubtless now enlist as his Law and Order ‘vigilantes’. Neoliberalism demands the appearance of vibrant, life-sustaining markets. Trump has seen the financial indices decline as the epidemic curve has arced skyward, but his focus has always been on economic rather than public health. He, and his ‘warriors’, are quite prepared to sacrifice ‘flattening the curve’ for the sake of a rising Dow but his calculus must now include appeasing his newly enrolled ‘vigilantes’ while not entirely disaffecting African Americans.

Neoliberalism, as the SARS-CoV-2 viral pandemic and the uprising demonstrate, is this country’s comorbidity – a precondition making it extremely susceptible to both viral disease and to the recapitulation of long-ago racial injustice.  In, The Road to Serfdom, 1944, Friedrich Hayek, the Anglo-Austrian economist, explicitly equates the freedom of the individual with the unfettered workings of the market. By way of contrast, he identifies the centralized economic planning evidenced in National Socialism, Communism and Social Democracies as inevitably trending towards totalitarianism. He suggests that governments restrict all attempts to establish social objectives and by extension, any encouragement of the citizen’s role in shaping these objectives. In other words, he recommends abandoning both the social and the political realm in favor of the invisible hand of the market, a goal that continues to inform neoliberalism as it is practiced across Europe and the Americas, and is the ruling ideology that has shaped the United States since the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980. Hayek’s ideas, developed out of his deeply felt reaction to German and Soviet totalitarianism, have had disastrous consequences in the United States where the gross injustices of its past continue to haunt its present, and where its best moments have been enshrined in exactly the kind of social objectives, such as FDR’s New Deal and LBJ’s Great Society, that Hayek spurns.

In the 1830’s, the two signature, home-grown horrors that have shaped American history, the genocidal eradication of indigenous peoples and slavery, coalesced in President Andrew Jackson’s ‘Indian Removals’ which aimed to deport a number of surviving Indian tribes to west of the Mississippi to make way for the establishment of further industrial cotton plantations.  This expansion of slavery was partly funded by securitized bonds, sold in New York, London, Paris, and other finance capitals, in a process that involved the financialization of human flesh. The violence necessary to convert slaves into a fungible commodity had existed for over two centuries, practiced in their initial capture in Africa, in their transportation, and in their work. The stain of slavery was then embedded in the capital generated by the cotton crop which went on to be invested in the Industrial Revolution and formed the basis for this country’s extravagant wealth. It is a wealth that has not been shared by most of its citizens.

The highly visible murders of Ahmaud Arbery and George Floyd, performed on the street and reprised endlessly as viral videos on social media, go to the heart of this country’s racialized hierarchies established in 1492 and then compounded in 1619, with the arrival of the first shipment of African slaves introduced to this country as stolen human capital. Neoliberalism has made human capital of us all, but has vastly accentuated the wealth divide because, as Piketty has shown, it is from investment and inherited wealth that the rich are made – not from an honest day’s work. The majority of the U.S. population, and certainly most African Americans, rely not on wealth from inheritance or investments, but on the mythology of the equitable rule of law and equal economic opportunity. As the looting component of the uprising suggests, egregious racialized murder exposes an awareness of this country’s endemic economic injustice.

Nick Estes writes in, Our History is the Future, 2019, “Indigenous elimination, in all its orientations, is the organizing principle of settler society.” In documenting the Lakota tribes’ struggles to prevent the Dakota Access Pipeline passing under, and across sacred indigenous lands, Estes lauds the ongoing struggles of native peoples to resist a colonizing civilization that possesses an overbearing commercial ethic which leaves little room for the recognition of other, non-material values. Across the continent, indigenous peoples regarded the native soil, along with its flora and fauna, as co-creators of their lives, and the concept of its individual ownership was unthinkable. Genocide after genocide has still not entirely eliminated their awareness of belonging to the land - ever in conflict with those who so clearly prize the value of individual ownership, property rights and, of course, the strange notion that the land belongs to them. 

It is in this country’s varied civilizational currents that the supreme value of the almighty dollar emerged. As a nation, we have bought and sold people, bought and sold the land’s natural beneficences, and now we have sold our sovereign right to vote to corporations that exist only to give succor to their owners and shareholders. The neoliberalism that was created out of a fear of totalitarianism has now made societies beholden to a totalized economy in which all is subsumed. Its values are those of the market, entirely blind to the human concerns of a richly diverse population many of whom it makes vulnerable to an ever increasing precarity in their livelihood, housing and health care. The current pandemic, natural disasters, debt crises, and recessions expose the venal character of this prevailing ideology, while emergency relief and bailouts are leveraged by the wealthy to expand capital in readiness for the next ‘recovery’ - widening the corrosive gulf between the rich and everybody else.

As a Native American academic, Estes celebrates his peoples’ ongoing resistance to the dominant culture, established shortly after 1492. By declaring that “Our History is Our Future”, he is committing to a continuance of this struggle. White members of the dominant culture can find no such guidance in their past. We see our history reenacted in violence and racial injustice entirely too often to wish it to be our future. We suppress our past and fear our future for good reason.

Neoliberalism has obliterated the conditions for democracy by concentrating wealth, eschewing the public good and causing civility to be drowned out by over-amplified, profit-seeking media. The democracy that now struggles to exist in this country, does so only as a fully financialized product fertilized by corporate money featuring a roster of politicians pitifully beholden to the special interests that support their reelection campaigns. Estes is right to reaffirm his peoples’ history. Our salvation might be in confronting ours.