“The Obama Administration Is At The Charity Of The Powers That Be:” Jonathan Schell

“The Obama administration exhibited its overall signature flaw in caricature: It is embedded with (let’s say this straight: in bed with) the powers that be. Well meaning, it begins by taking those powers –the commanding heights of society- as given, immovable. Then it starts to bargain. (On healthcare, it begins with Big Pharma, o finance with Wall Street, on war with the top generals –above all David Petrraeus.) Then when the administration is duly handed its half- or quarter-loaf – the stripped-down healthcare plan, the eviscerated financial regulations, the soft date for withdrawal from Afghanistan bought with the surge in troop levels- it’s at the charity of these powers.”

Jonathan Schell. The Revolutionary Moment. In The Nation, 21 February 2011

“Choose From A Selection Of Lavishly Advertised And Colorfully Marketed Candidates:” John Michael Greer.

“[M]ost people in North America made the consumer economy their model for political participation. A consumer’s role in the economic process is limited to choosing from a selection of lavishly advertised and colorfully marketed products provided by industry. In the same way, most people in the industrial world embraced political systems in which all they had to do was choose from a selection of lavishly advertised and colorfully marketed candidates provided by the major parties.”

John Michael Greer: The Long Descent (Gabriola Island, British Columbia: New Society, 2008).

Pp 149

A place belongs forever to whoever claims it hardest, remembers it most obsessively, wrenches it from itself, shapes it, renders it, loves it so radically that he remakes it in his own image

Joan Didion (b. 1934), U.S. essayist. “In the Islands,” The White Album (1979).)

INTRODUCTION

The work of adolescent imagination is play, and the play of teens is work. As with children, the growing and shaping and forming of identity takes place in places of the imagination. Kids and teens try on identities as they explore who they are and who they might become. Personhood is imagined into being, in places that are invented.

SYMBOLIC PAST

Children signify the past and future, desired or undesirable, savage or idyllic, sylvan or polluted. Childhood symbolizes a desirable future, imagined both collectively and individually by each of us. Each childhood is symbolic of each of our cherished individual pasts. They present and represent childhoods in a past sacral space in which each of us had an infinitude of imagined, remembered, desired futures. Our childhoods

Kids experiment with imagined selves. They impersonate. They im-person themselves. They try on identities like costumes, theatrical figures or heroic and romantic archetypes.

The secret places of imaginary play, of a childhood or a (re)-remembered childhood of two generations ago, may be in the fantastic and figurative space of children’s literature. Children can imagine being bad, or free of the socialization of childhood like Robin Hood or Peter Pan.

Kids on the internet can seamlessly experiment with being mean, or older, with romantic archetypes, or they can adopt entirely new invented identities. Yet the imaginary play of the internet and of contemporary childhood in the urban wild is both occupied and surveilled in a way that is completely unlike any library or secret glades, burrows, forts.

CARTESIAN CHILDHOOD

A part of adolescent work is learning and feeling a place, a community, a home, a belonging among a known people and place. Growing up is learning geography- the geography of knowing of where one is in the world.

Childhood and The Child, in a Piagetian, Cartesian/modernistic conception, are socially invented. (Cite). Children so conceived are a discrete category of persons, and childhood an ordinal sequence of categorical events. These milestones must be mediated and titrated by adults, so that events are not experienced too early or out of order (cite). It is a series that cannot be disordered or cross-contaminated or The Child will be polluted. Today what falls within the taxonomic categories of acceptable children and acceptable childhoods are socially negotiated and continually refigured.

In this modernistic conception, the child is assembled. Like a card game or a book, it is nonsensical if it is out of order. There are places that children must not see out of order. These are sites of contamination. Children seen in these places are seen as deviant or illicit. Their parents are seen as derelict. They are out of place.

DISCREDITING THE MODERN

This conceit of Childhood as a category or as an ordered sequence has not survived postmodernity in any sensible, unproblematic way. (Cite).

Many adults have shared and personal memories of fantasy play that took place unseen in burrows and forts and glades, in unclaimed and wild, undiscovered, abandoned places, and in cherished children’s literature. Our imagined, remembered and re-remembered childhoods of two generations ago are rendered fantastic by contemporary experience.  (Cite Goodenough)

The cyber-reality and urban wild of contemporary teens are fantastic to many adults. Childhood is sexualized, consumerized, digitized, kidnapped, unmoored from categories and the ordinal. Childhood has volatized into the hyper-real.

Childhood is compressed and disordered in space and time. It is curiously uncoupled from places. There is no longer a familiar, expected geography, a distribution of places like playgrounds where the presence of children is an expected familiarity. Rather, the appearance of children may more frequently mark places in which they are (un)expected.

DERACINATED REALITY

Desirable affluent homes these days have suites for each child, and each suite has a comprehensive complement of electronic computing, gaming and entertainment equipment. Much of teen self-construction is within these surrounded, solitary spaces, through magic portals into an undisciplined, unsurveilled cyberspace. It is like Alice’s rabbit hole into a space of imagination, but it also a wormhole into an entire streaming, hyper-real atomic world that is altogether too real in a new, unimaginable way.

Electronic and online games have become so complex and interactive that they are encompassing, subsuming game-worlds. Much of self-construction takes place through the looking glass of a video monitor. It is a space of imagination. Some games are shockingly brutal. Some are online, reproducing death after death of the player, killed again and again by adversaries in other rooms and suites.

Kids experiment in unprecedented ways in the hall of mirrors of the internet. They explore being anonymously mean. They distort their ages as markers of status as children or teens, or they literally impersonate radical assumed identities. This is a routine of total self-invention that took place in only the most romantic of children’s literature.

Peter Pan. The Boxcar Children. Tom Sawyer. The Secret Garden.

Teens share their social self-invention in the illusion that facebook.com and myspace.com. and texting are secret places of play. Secrets become ominous, and the dangers become electronically charged. Teens disclose their experiments in ignorance that they are not protected as children. They enact and disclose acts that, when made visible, will render them deviant and criminal because they are out-or-place and out-of-order. Social display takes place in a harsh, unmediated virtual and (post-public) space where we no longer have presumptive civil commitments to children, or to one another. People are not what they seem and children are not tacitly safe.

KIDS OUT OF PLACE

Some kids play baseball and do theatre. These are social practices that are adult-sanctioned and adult-mediated. They are legitimate, because they not out-of-order. They are (in order).

Children who are at risk lead to teens who are threats. (Cite). Children that are out of order are children who threaten, who have given the slip, who have slipped the noose of category. Kids in trouble become young men charged as adults. (Cite)

Kids without sanction are kids at risk. Without adults to sanction them, they are illicit. They have been let down and developmentally abandoned. They don’t have adults mediating or modeling for them. Where adult legitimation is literally absent, they need and find (or make) illegitimate places in which to construct themselves.

The ‘space’ of childhood no longer includes as safe a family and community, and there is virtually no space outside of the body of the child from which threats to the child cannot come. There is no ‘safe space’ of childhood. There are literally no safe children. (Cite Stephens). Are the streets of the late-industrial city and suburb simply categorically unsuitable for children? Is the domesticity of child and family evaporating? (Cite.)

TEEN BODIES

The invention of the idealized persona may take place as a molding of the physical body. Young bodies are sites of adornment. They can be rubbery and plastic, Like Barbie and Ken. Teen bodies are malleable. They can be written upon with piercings and tattoos. They are modeled with cosmetic plastic surgery so they are invented as (mimetic) duplicate celebrity figures. Conversely they are altered and marked and imprinted by injuries and defacements. Or they are invaded by cosmetic distortion- the introduction of alien substance into the body and the erasure of distinctive personhood.

Today this subjugation of the rampant body makes possible significations of belonging and difference, of inclusion and exclusion that are remarkable. Continually refigured technologies of body alteration produce a startling range of markings and costumes.

Teens expertly critiques the nuanced signification of subtler emblems: a wallet chain, a golf cap, the relative elevation of a beltline, elements of goth costuming. An anxiously and continuously compared, examined and recrafted ‘look’ is carried around as a reminder of subject-permanence like a blanket or doll. Belonging is tried on and skinned off, often at the mall. Different species of teen are seen watering at the same hole and foraging for fetishes at malls and at stores like Urban Outfitters.

Teen bodies and persons are ferociously contended, mobilized and eroticized. They are both more than and less than archetypes. They are highly sexualized and frantically turgid sites of post-modern cultural production and reproduction. (Insert Text about advertising?)

Access to money and influence over spending has made teens an unprecedented and fertile ground for formative rhetoric, commercial speech and advertising in the social reproduction of consumer identity, money and politics. Children and teens are branded through an unbelievably intense storm of media content to render them compliant consumers. Much of the content of advertising and commercial media projects models of ideal teens. It re-presents a commercially invented material culture of youth as desirable to all consumers: They signify your youth, your idyllic past, your possible futures. (Cite Kalle Lassen)

Here is the sharpest edge of the media/consumer/product/ identity nexus. Just think- were these figures and differences racial, spiritual, ethnic or linguistic, such violent, visible appropriation and colonizing of bodies and selves would be unconscionable. This argument posits the voices of ageism with the discourse of post-colonial resistance.

•    ●  ◊  ▪  ◊  ▪  ◊  ●    •

Teens Are:

Unformed

Plastic, like modeling clay

Unconstructed- like legos

Self-assembling

Undisciplined

Imagined into being

Invisible

Where sticky terms in a discourse of power and identity attract such varied and fervently contentious social claims, they become both dangerous and vacuous. Symbols of desirable and undesirable futures become glued together in a noisy mass that cannot signify shared meaning.  Such terms only have utility as rhetorical blunt instruments, and only have real interest as artifacts that can be deconstructed.

Teens are subject to uniquely forceful categorical expulsion. There may be no persons that are so subject as adolescents to being violently and instantaneously ejected, flung from insider to outsider, and exiled from places. They can snap from category to category with the perplexing immateriality of Schrodinger’s cat.

Is your categorization of teens problematic? Interfering? Evict. Expunge the offending object. Pass it across the boundary of the category. Teens are (not)children and they are (not)adults.

•    ●  ◊  ▪  ◊  ▪  ◊  ●    •

Teens Are/are not:

Children

Adults

Political

People

Agents

Outsiders

Insiders

Accountable

Sacred

Profane

Attractive

Repulsive

Ideal/real

Deviant

Innocent

Primitive

Domestic

Our future

My past

•    ●  ◊  ▪  ◊  ▪  ◊  ●    •

Teens Are:

Teens are highly charged symbols. Most of all they are slippery. They, like the category of “the family,” are especially stubbornly resistant to dismantling into constituent elements or units of analysis.

Stretchy

Sticky

Spongy

Rubbery

Cloaking

Magnetic

Convenient

Pliant

Visible

Kids don’t know the difference between

help and manipulation. 

Undergraduate College Student

The teen communications network is a marvel. Their dexterity with text and instant messaging and cell phones have made email archaic and primitive. Today’s youth-oriented technologies for instantaneously communicated data and access to cars enable facile access to fertile opportunities for misdeeds and risks. Many kids simply don’t believe that their problems and risks can be shared with adults, and this puts them at an especial risk. This lead to a teen perception (and reality) that the worlds of teens are so removed from the adult world that most adults would be unable to handle knowing what really happens. In the movie Traffic, affluent drug abusing teens are so sure of the ignorance and ineffectiveness of their absent parents that they have no better idea of what to do with an overdosing boy than roll him out of a car at an emergency room. If kids are to perceive that adults are even in the game, or determined to be, adult pursuit must be at least as tenacious and as exhausting as chasing a toddler.

GEOGRAPHY OF BELONGING

It’s easy to not see teens. If you are not looking you might not see them or their particular physical culture. If you are looking you will. They are seen/not seen. Ours is a world of hybridity and disappearance, of the collapse of space and time in which social differentiation among us is deranged. Where there is no sensible adult geography and domesticity disappears, teens have to invent their own terrain. Like the Boxcar kids, they have no stable adult geography into which to grow.

I am certain this can go wrong. When I was an adolescent, I began to bond into the community where I lived. I began to know adults as the substance of the community, and value my relationships to them. I came to believe that these people were coming to value me. This took place in a landscape in which I knew where I was. I knew my way around.

An inseparable part of finding my way in this community was knowing (and learning) the community as a place. Knowing place names, back roads, magical places and local history, even the weather, was the material of shared meaning with people. People came to and knew and loved the place and the community, because of where and how and who it was. The reflection and reinforcement of my coalescing self among these people gave a beginning to my adult personhood.

Part of knowing and being accepted there is the cachet of being local, of having been there before and during and back then. People there now know each other as (figures) here, by place. Knowing and recognizing and being is through native knowledge. I went away, and my adolescent bonding was interrupted. The valley has seen lots of changes in the past decades. Seeing the physical transformations of the place over decades of occasional visits has sometimes been physically shocking. My relationships with the people there were interrupted. I know who some were, but that is not who they now are, and they don’t know me. I have relationships with very few of them. I am not acquainted with the ones who have come since. I am not local, I am not a part of this place, and I am not a part of their knowledge of native geology. It is not my community, and I cannot discover if I know how to make one or find one or cultivate one now. Maybe I don’t trust that I can, or believe that a place can be stable and trusted. Maybe this is a part of development that, like language acquisition, is timely and its interruption can dislocate a life. Anyway it is somehow insensible to think about identity without place.

TEEN GEOGRAPHY

Teens are no longer known by geography, their where, to us, but they are to one another. They are known to one another by place.

Teen geography is populated by kids who are or want to be unsurveilled, unsocialized, unregulated and unimprinted by the disciplined adult world. It also serves as a place of contention about police control and power and authority. The presence and visibility of teens is the locus of social conflict about the presence and visbility of power, resistance, and the wild.  A geographical place serves as an icon and pole star for derelicts and runaways. Theirs is a wild of utter defiance and escape from the discipline of publicly constructed space where desirable future citizens are formed or found. 

FORTRESS

Seen through another oculus of geography, Childhood takes place in a contemporary place that is disciplined: surveilled, structured, and regulated: socially contested territory. It is overlaid and etched with claims and counter-claims of power, money and identity. Each claim makes a unique valorization of what is unique and special, and each reflects the stakes, turfs and imagined futures of developers, merchants, bankers.

Each commodifies the edginess and grit of those parts that are made and shaped the most radically. Each would in its own way make it into something else, a frangible and fungible commercial pastiche of life/style, an illusory difference. Place becomes a life/style commodity that can be “skinned off”  and skinned on to a consumer like a Patagonia jacket, and urban space is a deposition of places so overlaid with the politics of money and identity that its character is suffocated by contestation. Cultural and specifically economic claims are made in space, on space, of space.

•    ●  ◊  ▪  ◊  ▪  ◊  ●    •

Contemporary Urban Space Is:

Disciplined

Colonized

Surveilled

Structured

Appropriated

Contested

Regulated

•    ●  ◊  ▪  ◊  ▪  ◊  ●    •

TEEN RECLAMATION

Wild, uncolonized places subsist in the alleys and vagrant seams and on the rooftops. The etching of teen identities gives what remains of its edginess and difference. It appears in seams, interstices, boundaries, edges and cleavages. Abandoned, unwanted, forgotten, vacant, underground, uncategorized, imaginary and empty, these are invisible like the place of raves.

Sometimes this work leaves the visible artifacts of tagging and graffiti: signing, naming. It takes place at the edges of the downtown, at the edge of transient rental neighborhoods, on rooftops and in unseen alleys. It is outside of the contended borderlines of the territorial powers of the political. These places are like the raw, unsanded edges stage set-pieces. They are unfinished and un-marked and un-remarked because they are irrelevant to the illusion of the stage-craft illusion of the magic of the temple. They are criminalized, categorically suspect places of vagrancy. If a teen is seen here, she is vagrant and “out of place.”

THIS TAKING PLACE:

It is not a sterile, fluorescent (re)construction of the disciplined, carceral space of the school or the hospital. It is not a place of detention. It is not assembled by adults. It is a physical place where teens can disclose a succession of experimental identities. But it is safe. It is safe because it is a physical place. They inhabit it. They occupy it. They populate it.

It is an incubator, a perfect vessel in which the culture can find purchase and begin to grow. It is a physical redoubt that is neutral, because it is uncolonized, unclaimed and uncontested.

Where is it? It is a node in the underground network of teen circulation. It is interconnected with the material web of teen places by the railroad right-of-way, by bus lines and by an encryption of occult markings like the signs used by hobos to identify places of sodality.

It is in a place that is just outside and beside enough that it doesn’t lap up against too many legitimate claims. It is close enough and alongside enough that it isn’t patently unsupervised or unregulated. It doesn’t attract police attention. It isn’t proper enough to become a nuisance, and it isn’t suspect enough to be troublesome. It isn’t really inside your town, but it isn’t outside either. It is astride an edge and adjoins the seam of the railroad and the counter-weave of the conduits of teen pedestrians. 

HOW TO FIND THIS TAKING PLACE

 It appears in seams, interstices, boundaries, edges and cleavages. Abandoned, unwanted, forgotten, vacant, underground, uncategorized, imaginary and empty, these are invisible.

Look along the railways and threads that interconnect the underground, the vacant, the unclaimed and empty. Relax the focus of your eyes so that you can see the invisible. Just look. Follow along those edges and ridges where the material culture of teens is visible. This Zone will be a widening in the stream, an eddy or backwater. The countercultures and counter-territories and underground circulations that flow in interstices and seams and margins will intersect here, at the edges of the wanted and the claimed and the categorized.

It won’t be an exile. It won’t be in the pathological space of the forsaken or the overtly dangerous or the obviously contaminated. It won’t be an apparent place of abandonment or forsaking.

Ironically, there is often competition for unfound places: artist’s cooperatives, dance studios, and repertory theatres. Now, upscale redevelopments for the gentry are appropriating such places.

MAKE THIS TAKING PLACE

It works because it is not mediated by adults. It is a neutral vacuum. It can only be filled with the imagination of teens because it can resist relentless pressure like an evacuated hull, and sustain a neutral vacuum.

It is adults who defend a remembered past, an imagined childhood, a vision of a positive future, who assail the territory of the Place. But the imagined past and the envisioned future are not here.  It is neutral and insulated from the claims and presence and the imagined presents of adults.

Adults simply cannot see the naked material claims and presence of the teens that are there.

The Places Of Imagination Are:

Plastic

Formless

Unassembled

Unconstructed

Undesignated

Unpopulated

Invented

Neutral 

•    ●  ◊  ▪  ◊  ▪  ◊  ●    •

INSIDE

Inside, this Place is most intensely a place of music and poetry. It is a substantial place where young men and women of substance are born and celebrated.

 The rhythm and spirit that can take place here, the guts and heart and sheer creative horsepower that riot inside the space are astounding and unsuspected by many adults. The stage of the theatrical invention of personhood is conjured. It is pulled into being and held open by the embrace and affirmation of teens and complicit adults. Bodies are liberated and voices are amplified. Bodies are amplified and voices are liberated.

OUTSIDE

(OUTSIDE) it is quiet and veiled from the outside. It is…  not/seen.

A geographical or physical connection with the geography of other underground, illicit places would be a problem if visible.

CONCLUSION

This Place is so fully and ardently claimed, appropriated, written in, written on, imprinted, marked, signed, tagged, and imagined that it is impregnable, impenetrable. It cannot be endowed, or bestowed, or conferred. It is where the work of play and the play of work take place. It is continually imagined into being.

It may be that for most of us, the best way to make a place like this is to go away. The developmental task of adolescents, like toddlers, is to learn to say no.

This Place makes itself. It is self-assembling. It takes hold and grows as a culture within the labrum of the sanitary, uncolonized space of the abandoned.

We are gradually outsiders in the lives of our kids and our teens until we can no longer assemble, form and imagine them into being. When their work takes place, they are the inventors and we are no longer magicians.

You are gradually outsiders in the lives of your kids and your teens until you can no longer assemble, form and imagine them into being. When their work takes place, they are the inventors and you are no longer magicians.

(end)

“The Money-changers Have Fled From The Temple Of Our Civilization:” F.D. Roosevelt Inaugural Address

“Many of the of the most sensational exposures of the Pecora investigation would come later, but by early March, 1933, enough had been revealed for the American people to recoil indignantly from the evidence of chicanery, greed and simplemindedness among the nation’s largest bankers. And the failure of the banks, which had wiped out untold millions in life savings, seemed a final indictment on the private banking system. Roosevelt himself had declared in his inaugural address that

“…the rulers of the exchange of mankind’s goods have failed through their own stubbornness and their own incompetence, have admitted their failure, and have abdicated… The money-changers have fled from their high seats in the temple of our civilization.”"

F.D. Roosevelt, Inaugural address, cited in Goldston. March 04, 1933.

Cited in Robert Goldston, The Great Depression: The United States In The Thirties (New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1968) Pp 114

Drawing by Heinrich Kley. The Drawings Of Heinrich Kley, Dover Publications Inc. (New York: 1969) pp. 92

“As In The Twenties, Voices Of Protest Were Attacked As “Subversive,” or “Un-American.”” Robert Goldston

“The New Deal reached a stalemate in 1938 and was drowned by the war. Unfortunately, also drowned was the spirit which had supported it. The years following World War II were to see a dreary repetition of the hysteria, public apathy, and return to overweening private greed which marked the years after World War I. There was to be another and even more damaging “red scare” presided over by Wisconsin’ Senator Joe McCarthy (and supported by a large segment of the American people). There was to be a return to business ethics and private morality in place of the public ethics of the thirties. Bruce Barton’s revelation of Christ as a businessman was hardly more indicative of the spirit of the twenties than General Motors President Charles Wilson’s brusque “What’s-Good-For-General-Motors-Is-Good-For-America” was of the fifties. While the newfound prosperity of America was poured into goods, services and hardware, into ever bigger and more vulgar automobiles, ever flashier kitchens, ever more clever gadgets, it was to be withheld from the public sector of the economy. The shiny new cars cluttered poorly paved city streets. The flashy kitchens were often found in crumbling public housing. Well-dressed children attended public schools whose buildings were a national disgrace; they were taught by teachers whose salaries were a national shame. And once again, as in the twenties, voices of protest against the decay of public community were attacked as “subversive,” or “un-American.””

Robert Goldston, The Great Depression: The United States In The Thirties (New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1968).

“These Clothes Were Both Splendid And Invisible:” Eric Hobsbawm

“As always, it was not the sophisticated intelligences which were prepared to recognize that the emperor wore no clothes; they spent their time inventing theories to explain why these clothes were both splendid and invisible.”

Eric Hobsbawm: The Age Of Empire. Weidenfeld and Nicolson, London: 1987. Pp 250

This is a long Essay: 3000 words. Only required for graduate-level credit.

PART 1

A CLOUD OF ARROWS DARKENS THE SKY.

We are all hypocrites. We are all immature. Some of us are more intellectually and ethically honest about it than others. There is no dishonor in honesty.

Gentle, self-deprecatory fun, made of oneself, is funny. We gently mock our own grandiosity. We play upon our inability to perceive ourselves accurately. We are knowingly hypocritical. This kind of hypocrisy is funny. And goodness knows, We are Funny.

Startling, unexpected, disjunctive and incongruous juxtapositions often make us laugh. Admittedly, sometimes that laughter is a bit jittery. In humor most often there is a victim of some kind. In some of best, the victim is oneself. The opportunities for comic timing with this kind of humor are endless.

So hypocrisy can be funny.  John Stewart, Keith Olberman and Rachel Maddow think hypocrisy is funny, and we think they are very funny. In these times, we all get a scream out of outing bald self-contradictions on the part of the reactionaries. At times, though, things have been getting decidedly unfunny. After all, we, the Editor, thought George W. Bush was a clown and buffoon. He is, but we badly failed to recognize the harm that his cadre of carnies could do.  Our laughter has become a bit strained at times. I mean, what the fuck is Tom DeLay doing on MSNBC on election night? Granted, he was a victim of funny satire, but the damage he has done is deadly serious.

The voluble among the righteous right are mostly shrill, overwrought nincompoops. Especially because they are so serious. This is not self-aware irony with a wink. It is eye-popping, vein-pulsing hostility, anger and hysteria. Even the more soft-spoken among them, like Pat “Buck-Dick” Buchanan and Karl “Crap-Stack” Rove, strain civility.

Serious, commercial-grade hypocrites are not funny. They do not see themselves as funny and they are not trying to be funny. They are not having fun. We are sure they are going to be having less and less fun in whatever manner of New World Order will emerge for this generation. They will not respond to “I told you so,” so we will be poking them with sticks to make them snarl, for our own amusement.

We are unhinged and drifting away from a region of social stability that has allowed doctrinaire fundamentalists to disdainfully dismiss the real contradictions, complexities and puzzles that we find in the real world. In a future Essay we will prepare a quick compendium of interesting references on the subject of the periods of profound change, unpredictable positive feedback, instability and chaos that punctuate periods of dynamic stability in natural systems. Our Friend and Collaborator in the Northwest elegantly refers to these as “fibrillations.”

It is going to be much harder to defend the kind of righteous ignorance that allows one to be smug in a Ford Expedition with a McCain sticker on it, when that person is out of a job and the Expedition is surrounded by earnest community organizers in Priuses and  glorious, gleaming public-works projects. It will be an Expedition of another kind.  It is going to be an increasingly sour vocation to be a conservative television pundit/operative. Lusty progressive voices are beginning to heard in he wilderness again. Good night, Irene.

A complex social reality in which we are more accountable for ourselves and to one another will not so well insulate the simplifying, narrow and selfish doctrines of right fundamentalists in all of their stripes. The repressive, selfish, atomizing and harsh ontologies of the simple will be overwhelmed by the undeniably social and cultural nature of our changed and changing societies.

The simple, dismissive, aphoristic and totalizing bumper-sticker beliefs of the so-called “conservatives” are already much harder to support. The presence of Olberman and Maddow on the cable-waves is in itself a discomfiting breach in the monolith.

And the spreading realization that Senator Obama is our President-Elect must elicit a sinking feeling. The kind of sinking feeling we get when we have that electric flash of comprehension that our construct of reality is suddenly and completely uncoupled from the world around us. This is the kind of thing that keeps heavy pot-smokers and acid heads from going to the mall impulsively. We do not suggest that heavy drug use is unequivocally bad, mind you. Chemically induced, world-view-shattering epiphanies can be our greatest teachers. We take a moment to acknowledge our Friend, great teacher and fearless Warrior, Hunter S. Thompson, at this giddy political crux. Hunter hated and fought hypocrisy with an unmatched fervor. We needed him, and he was true. Today, he might have had Fun. We miss you, Doc.

Hypocrisies are fundamental contradictions, juxtapositions of elements that are irreconcilable. Sometimes they are so comprehensively contradictory that they are nonsensical and indescribable. They come from such different worlds that the very power of language to bridge across them is defeated, numbed and silenced. There can be –literally- no SINCERE common language that allows them to be illuminated in terms of one another. At these times, hypocrisy is very dangerous and we must go to war to recover our language. Ah, well.

PART 2

Do you Know the Universe? Generations of Enlightenment Realists, Positivists, Determinists and modernists of all colors and stripes craved a single, finite and terminable Cartesian model in which no things can simultaneously be true, and inherently contradict one another. Knowing the universe requires a bus terminus, a final destination, a punched ticket, of some kind. A knowable and predictable clockwork universe runs on time.

We may want to POSSESS explanatory models that are capsular: both sufficiently encompassing and internally sufficient to shape a cosmology in which no things that one knows contradict one another. Those who are unable to contain contradiction and uncertainty require continually new, hastily erected cosmologies. And totalizing ideologies.

Such a universe must be a hull with sufficient internal pressure to expel the intrusion of any observations or perspectives which are not assimilable. In fact, we are encouraged to call these categorical expulsions “externalities.” At times, we, the progressive-voices-of resistance Editors, think of our voices, our perspectives, our humanity and our very selves as marginal, social “externalities.” Let’s think theoretically of social, cultural externalities, and remind ourselves that we are the objects of a declared “culture war”.

(Thomas Kuhn, by the way, sought a sufficient, self-contained and modernist theory to explain scientific “progress.” He is thoroughly sructuralist and for our purposes here, insufficiently cognizant of the social.)

There may be some startling, illuminating value in looking at this usage of language of “externalities” and “internalities” through the model or construct of feminism. Karsten Harries described a (gendered) world polarized into the horizontal and the vertical. (Find and include a Citation).

We offer here the plurality and polarity of a world of  “internalities” and “externalities.” In fact, another day we might like to explore the idea of “submissive paradigms” to complement your “Dominant Paradigm.” Startling, unexpected, provocative and funny. Read “Seduction” by Baudrillard, and ingest it with some well-aged cheeses and good, strong fortified feminism. And Viagra. But this, dear Word Warrior, is a subject for another venture where we may boldly go, in another time.

But wait. How do we really Know the Universe? We, the editors, do not know a universe free of contradiction and complexity.

We live in a universe that is not –ever- free of contradiction, or even one in which two things that contradict one another cannot both be true. Or valid, or meaningful, or simply useful for deepening understanding- or just communicating.

We have little enthusiasm to encompass, to contain, to encapsule, to expel and repulse contradiction. We lose interest in internal and inherent consistency. We offer –ready?- for your consideration, the initial proposition that all things are true and contradict one another.
“Rules For Axioms: I. Not to omit any necessary principle without asking whether it is admitted, however clear and evident it may be. II. Not to demand, in axioms, any but things that are perfectly evident in themselves.”

Blaise Pascal: Thoughts, Letters and Minor Works: Part 48 Harvard Classics. Blaise Pascal and Charles W. Eliot. F.F.  Collier New York: 1910,

The initial distinction between what we know –about the world we live in- and how we know it, is significant. This is an elementary, first-order question of ontology and epistemology.

Obviously, two things can be inherently contradictory and true. Duh. This is the nature of truth. At least the kind of truth of which we are most fond -our kind of truth: the endeavor of knowing and understanding and striving for shared meaning. Not one, but two or twenty glorious, fantastic towers made of the twigs of metaphor and contrast can hardly be anything but true. Do you know of a monolithic truth that can contain both Babel and Burning Man?

PART 3

Cosmologies that preceded the inhuman and unfathomable one-god, relished this gritty, raucous truth. We pine for a rabble of rowdy, hypocritical gods. We long for multi-party politics. We are in love with the way the jealous, fickle and most human Greek gods coalesced and dissolved a coalition government. (One party politics is like the one-god. Two-party politics asks us to choose a one-god from among two one-gods.)

We relish an intellectual territory in which the questions are more important than the answers, and in which the best answer is actually often a question. In which the rules are ambiguous and the star maps incomplete at least, and rich in constellations of gods and myths and metaphor at best. A night sky, filled with imagination and meaning. A firmament clouded with deepening, multi-dimensional structures of knowing that grow and divide, extensively and intensively: externally and internally.

We are reminded of the brilliant book The Educated Mind: How Cognitive Tools Shape Our Understanding by Keiran Egan. Within Egan’s thought, what we describe here is the Ironic way of knowing.  This would be nicely complemented by Merlin Donald’s Origins Of The Modern Mind: Three Stages in the Evolution of Culture and Cognition. This is an important and rewarding line of inquiry and could well be taken with cold vegetables. It so happens that we have some cold vegetables down here at the GOP headquarters.

The best models for understanding multiply in an interminable synthetic process. We knock one against another and a new particle of truth springs into existence. Together, the two allow the generation of further dimensions and their corresponding perspectives that startle and bewilder. New territories of wildness appear, that astonish, stun and sometimes terrify. In through the cleavages and seams and interstices flow meaning and collective understanding. These new terrains can be seen between the blades of multiple models that we sharpen one against another. We will post a Definition For a New World Order here, among our Features, of the Assertino: the smallest, indivisible known unit of Truth. Now this… is fun. Stardate: Sometimes models explain. For some, models must explain. But at their richest, they throw open vast terrains of the unknown. Always, they entertain.

When we encounter the unexplained, we sometimes abandon explanation and embrace exploring. Then we can embrace and endure inexplication. For your amusement, our Definition For A New World Order: INEXPLAINISM.

It is not so much that we tolerate the admissibility of the inexplicable. We need only suspend the inadmissibility of contradiction for this magic to work.

We admit, welcome, enfold and cherish the possibility and practice of (not)explaining. Could you inexplain that, please, Mr. Professor sir?  We offer… Inexplication as Method. As Doctrine. Maybe we are the Inexplainists. We offer, for your consideration, Post-Explainism, an -ism with an -ist to call it’s own.

But. Back to the social, and why Hypocrisy is Bad. Earnest statements that are hypocritical can be honed and sharpened against one another too, until they are so keen that when they are laid against one another they shatter. Occasionally they shoot brilliant beams of clarity and insight off into space. This is what Stewart and Olberman and Maddow can achieve. They do a great public service. We need the light of these beams to see the truth, and they are very, very funny. Hunter did this with bonfires and ammunition. On still nights in Woody Creek we can still hear the merry crackle…

PART 4

Hypocrisies become (not)lies when they are normalized, and this is bad. So when is hypocrisy really, really bad?

We embrace, we worship uncertainty and ambiguity. We practice tolerance of multiple perspectives and points of view. Competing interests and contesting paradigms. This is not hypocrisy. Let a hundred flowers bloom.

Irreconcilable contradiction by those who cannot tolerate complexity and contradiction is hypocrisy. It is hypocrites who are unable to tolerate ambiguity, uncertainty and multiple perspectives. They cannot tolerate the kind of ironic thinking that allows seeming contradictions to be integrated into synthetic, higher knowing.

They compulsively aver the certainty of self-contained, self-referential answers, self-completing, free of unchained flights of uncertainty or incompleteness or even of speculation. They admit no antithesis and synthesis. There is no integrative, productive and creative assimilation into ideas, or deepened understanding or shared meaning. There is no… wisdom.

They require willful blindness: the elision or eclipsing or erasure of whole regions of the obvious and the true. One crude truism can exist: Another must wink out of existence: become false, unsupportable or simply invisible. There is no… tolerance.

When these contradict, they are simply… wrong. We argue that totalizing statements can only be… wrong. Worse, they are anti-democratic and anathematic to common understanding

“It is time we realized that to presume knowledge where one has only pious hope is a species of evil.”

Harris, Sam: The End Of Faith. 2004: W.W. Norton, New York. pp. 225

When these people contradict themselves, that is hypocrisy. When they earnestly and insistently expound assertions about the nature of the world that are patently contradictory, then this is true hypocrisy.

When these people make accusations about the inconsistencies, contradictions, hypocrisies, mistakes and even lies of others, this is Hyper-hypocrisy. It is hyper-hypocrisy because it is actually created, synthesized, by those who cannot tolerate contradictory assertions. For you and we, these things may be complex, or nuanced, or slippery, or deep, or whatever. But to those who cannot tolerate so-called hypocrisy, they are nothing but inconsistency. This excites the most fervid of condemnations and attacks from the intolerant.

Where there is room, there is room for error. Where there is give, there is tolerance. Tolerance for assembly, for error, for future expansion.

Inconsistency. We, The editors, will die, we are sure, lamenting that we have not been more consistent. And that we have not been more cautious and less impulsive and adventurous. We will surely regret that trip to Asia.

Our critics who analyze, criticize and challenge the flood of fundamentalist hypocrisies have been systematically dismissed as marginal, non-normative, shrill, immature and distracting. When challenging lies elicits contemptuous dismissal, and this is normalized, we have acute hyper-double-meta-hypocrisy. We are in trouble. We think that this is one of the most crass and hypocritical  tactics from the right-reactionary play-book that has done so much damage to the public discourse.

We think this is especially insidious and dangerous. It is a deliberate, unremitting flurry of body blows. Think of it as relentless self-contradiction as Political Method. Like the sinister clown-suits that came out around the time of the Republican National Convention in this past (whatever month that was). Relentless, absurd, psychotic nonsense.

This hypocrisy is wrong. Dishonest. Disingenuous. Deceptive. But it is also manipulation and outright plundering of our civil discourse. It is a massive hijacking of our language. Bullshit is seemingly normative, no longer remarkable. Like the normalization of desolation by the third pages of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road or Remarque’s All Quiet On The Western Front. It becomes so constant and relentless an irritant, a foreign body, that we cease to sense it.

PART 5

A CLOUD OF ARROWS DARKENS THE SKY.

Imagine that you suddenly awake in a bombardment. An assaultive, unrelenting, pervading shit-storm of hypocrisy.

Hypocrisy is like a neutron bomb. It destroys the thinking brain and leaves the Zombie body standing. Zombies. It is like a local anaesthetic of the public conscience. It destroys our capacity for illuminating and deconstructing lies.

It erases, like an Etch-a-Sketch, our native resistance to dishonesty, our innate recognition of lies and deceit and perfidy. It has the power to actually erase much of the truth. Not just to cloud and obscure and erase specific truths, but to dumb, to benumb and to cleave off whole limbs of possible truths.

The bandwidth of our collective communicative nervous system can only handle so much over-amperage of sheer bullshit noise. Like the computer HAL2000 in Arthur Clark and Staley Kubrick’s realizations of 2001: A Space Odyssey, we will be reduced to a simple, irrelevant sing-song. Daisy, Daisy…. True. Something about true…

A healthy public discourse mobilizes, identifies, encircles and destroys bullshit. It is like an immune system. But it can only handle so much assaultive violence. No wonder our public life begins to look like it has a wasting disease. (We strongly urge the reading of Emily Martin’s book Flexible Bodies: The Role of Immunity in American Culture from the Age of Polio to the Age of Aids. This is a compelling anthropological examination of the discourse of conflict, aggression and “global flexibility-” (the negation of the “social body”)- internalized: taken –literally- within the individual body. We might suggest that you digest this with Foucault’s piquant The Birth Of The Clinic.)

We are inured not to wounding but to feeling, and then to hearing. We develop tolerance and not resistance. It is like a traumatic injury to stretch receptors.  A proprioceptive trauma. The nerves persist in calling our attention to the problem for just so long, and then they just give up. They succumb to Polemical Shock and Awe. We may sometimes only hope for a a complete erasure- a merciful absence of phantom limbs. (We are thinking of Naomi Klein’s book The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Global Capitalism. This is shock doctrine at it’s most internalized, most inwardly destructive. We might pair this with Bradshaw’s The Enemy Within.)

The outrageous becomes prosaic. We know it has become really bad when we are just too tired, and too jaded, and too inured to resist. We cannot muster the attention to raise our heads to laugh, or cry, or protest, or even remark what is happening.

But painful, laborious physical therapy can restore the functioning of injured joints. Satire and forced laughter, repetitive exercises of the small muscles and hard tissue that make up the citizen, can heal. We can inoculate our young with the dead cells of dishonesty, and reduce inflammation with steroidal truth.

We may need the help and encouragement of dedicated rehabilitative therapists. John Stewart and Al Franken will be there for us. We acknowledge our honorable fallen Warriors, such as George Carlin, Richard Pryor and Lenny Bruce. Getting up in the morning and willing ourselves to go to one more rehabilitation appointment may require the more insistent alarums of Noam Chomsky and Ralph Nader.

So. Hypocrisy is bad. We know, in these cases where outrageous abuses of intellectual honesty and crushing blows to sheer credulity are made in the pursuit of public power, that it is much, much more destructive and dangerous than dumb-ass lying.

We know it to be especially dishonest when it is done by the intolerant, in order to persuade and inflame the intolerant. These are not people who are gently amused by ironic, self-deprecatory and self-contradictory humor. These are people who are deadly serious about lying to get power.

Anyway, it is honorable to acknowledge and honor one’s inherent contradictions, conflicts and immaturities. There is no dishonor in honesty. And there is no hypocrisy in acknowledging the wrongs and injuries we do to our fellows and our planet. If done in a gentle, self-deprecating way, and with a wink (and excellent comedic timing), it can be very funny.

Hah! (End)