In an interesting
New Yorker article, Keeanga Yamahtta Taylor argued out that “[t]he quest to transform cannot be limited to challenging its brutal police. She reviewed the failed policies of the last 30 years and pointed out that “There is a palpable poverty of intellect, a lack of imagination, and a banality of ideas pervading mainstream politics today. Old and failed propositions are recycled, but proclaimed as new, reviving cynicism and dismay.” That is spot on. But although Yamahtta-Taylor made the point three times in her article, she herself did not provide a new worldview.
Neither will I, at least not here. I would, instead, add to the point that the country is at that same point an individual reaches when his/her bad qualities lead to a total breakdown in a dead end. At that point -- in the
Rubble of Self -- the individual has two choices: die or renounce the entire construct of values, habits and desires that brought him to the catastrophic end. Only then can a rebirth begin. (St Augustine discusses this actually..... I think it's in the chapter on pears.)
Americans will get nowhere until they turn in disgust at their sense of national self and repudiate every value and ideal they thought they stood for. People will recoil at hearing this very proposition and respond with an angry
love it or leave it remark. Others will say that I go too far. They will indignantly insist that “not everything” was bad; that we've had our good points and heroic moments. One should, it will be said in a tone of sage moderation, get rid of the bad things and build on the good ones. “At bottom, America is a good country still capable of great things.....”
Hear me laugh. That is not the way crisis works. Ask the Germans. Ask Augustine.
What brings a person or nation to the crisis point is not just the bad qualities he has. He is brought to the crisis point by
all the qualities he has -- good, bad, indifferent --
dysfunctioning together. A terminal breakdown does not occur because some components don't work, but because the whole doesn't work. The French cynic
La Rochefoucault came close to describing what happens in his
epigram on
amour propre.
On ne peut sonder la profondeur, ni percer les ténèbres de ses abîmes. Là il est à couvert des yeux les plus pénétrants ; il y fait mille insensibles tours et retours. Là il est souvent invisible à lui-même, il y conçoit, il y nourrit, et il y élève, sans le savoir, un grand nombre d'affections et de haines ; il en forme de si monstrueuses que, lorsqu'il les a mises au jour, il les méconnaît, ou il ne peut se résoudre à les avouer
One cannot probe the depth, nor pierce the darkness of self-love's abysses. There the love of self remains covered to the most penetrating eyes; there it makes a thousand insensbile twists and turns. In those abysses, self-love is often imperceptible to itself, it conceives, it nourishes, and brings forth, without knowing it, a great number of affections and hatreds which are so monstrous that when they come to light it ignores them or refuses to avow them as its own.
St. Augustine had his crisis moment when a pear fell on his head causing him to fall to pieces. It was not just that he had been reminded of a stupid, wasteful transgression when, as a boy, he stole some pears just for the fun of stealing them. It was how that act was the first step on the path of what was his life and that implicated everything he was and was not, did or fail to do. As in any tapestry, the whole unravels at the pull of a thread. “I am become,” Augustine said in exhausted despair, “a vexation to myself.”
And that is where we, as a nation, are now -- a confused, panicked, clueless, a vexation to ourselves. The United States has reached its crisis moment when what are called its “endemic” and “structural” failures reveal a country that exists only in name and only under the panoply of a mawkish and belligerent patriotism, aided and abetted by football. For decades, all the metrics have pointed to a country headed for disintegration. But we have ignored the signs, We have willed away the symptoms. We have appealed to excuses.
In this respect, lulling charmers like the Flawless Obama are like physicians that feed you more of a drug you don't need and that is killing you. Obama's latest nostrums are classic high-toned aspirational blather mixed in with a dash of down home folksiness.
"We have seen in the last several weeks, last few months, the kinds of epic changes in events in our country that are as profound as anything that I've seen in my lifetime,"
We have? What “epic changes” ? A raging virus that is killing thousands and decimating the economy while the ruling class is at odd and at a loss as to what to do? What the fuck are you talking about O'Bambi?
"When sometimes I feel despair, I just see what's happening with young people all across the country, and the talent and the voice and the sophistication that they're displaying,"
Why should you feel despair if, as you've just said, we've seen epic, once-in-a-lifetime changes? And no... young people are not displaying talent and sophistication. They are displaying brute rage. Outrage at a system you, O Flawless One, presided over for eight years.
And now for the dash of down-hominess
"And it makes me feel optimistic. It makes me feel as if, you know, this country's gonna get better."
Just so y'all know he didn't totally loose his heart at Harvard.
And he concludes with
"To bring about real change, we both have to highlight a problem and make people in power uncomfortable."
My God. Behold, a Second Rienzi! One is left to wonder if Obama means that what he did for eight years was “make people in power uncomfortable.” Y'all know... like when he told the “Banking Community” in February 2009 that he “had their backs.”
The man is such a nauseating hypocritical piece of work that it makes one yearn for the honesty of George W. Bush.
But more than just a display of sanctimonious-down-home hypocrisy, Obama's bullshit actually reveals the fatal first step that has led to the forbidden end.
"Just remember,” he intones, “this country was founded on protest: It is called the American Revolution, and every step of progress in this country, every expansion of freedom, every expression of our deepest ideals has been won through efforts that made the status quo uncomfortable. And we should all be thankful for folks who are willing, in a peaceful, disciplined way, to be out there making a difference."
The way we “peacefully” started firing on British troops?
I find it astonishing and appalling that educated people could ever fall for this historical nonsense. But historical nonsense is what Obama has been about from the very beginning when he delivered his Trademark Treacle that “Hope is on the Way!” speech back at the 2004 Democratic convention. Ah yes. Hope but never
Help. The
Pilgrims' Progress view of American history. We'll get there by George; we'll get there! Jerusalem is just around the corner. Mine eyes have seen...... blah, blah, blah.
We have written before about Obama's off-the-rack, Neo-Lincolnesque cant. [
link]. Ten score years ago, a new hope, a new dream, issued forth from these shores, a light unto the Gentiles ....
2004:
“Tonight, we gather to affirm the greatness of our nation not because of [our power and wealth but because] "
We hold these truths to be self evident, that all men are created equal... that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. ...
2008:
What makes us exceptional – what makes us American – is our allegiance to an idea, articulated in a declaration made more than two centuries ago:
“We hold these truths ...
These eternal, exceptional, American truths are then sentimentally linked to “the dreams of little girls as they go to bed at night,” and to that sunny day when “ our daughters can earn a living equal to their efforts;” when “no citizen is forced to wait for hours to exercise the right to vote;” when “our gay brothers and sisters are treated like anyone else under the law;” until all our children, are always safe from harm.... Yes!! Mine eyes have seen, the Coming! Yea, my eyes are gonna be seeing! Oh yes, I know; I know, deep in my heart, I know.... And so, armed with Our Truth, we beat of Path of Righteousness through the wilderness ....toward (always just “toward” never “to”) a fuller, more perfecter realization of the Promise of America. This, PBS tells us, is the “
American Experience.”
Gag.
My ninth grade English history book described Jefferson as a “young country squire” with a "certain flare for words" in whose “magical words” the Colonists had found justification for their insurrection. (England 1688 - 1815 ch. "Loss of the American Colonies.")
Among the justifications offered was the claim that King George was “abolishing the free System of English Laws in a neighbouring Province” and inciting “the merciless Indian Savages” to prey upon our frontier inhabitants. What this referred to was the fact that the Crown was protecting Indian and French (Catholic) subjects in an extended Province of Quebec, allowing them to live according to their own laws and limiting the Colonists from invading, plundering and settling in the greater Ohio Valley. The Crown was seeking to balance and regulate the rights of the various peoples in the Continent. The Colonists felt it was their Manifest Destiny to have it all for themselves. ... in pursuit of their happiness.
No one was fooled by Jefferson's blather.
In 1783, the Count of Aranda wrote a famous Memorandum to King Charles II of Spain,
"The American colonies have achieved independence; this is my sorrow and misgiving. ... This Federated Republic is born, shall we say, a pygmy ... But tomorrow, as it consolidates its constitution, it will be a giant; and after that it will become an irresistible colossus in those regions. ...[I]t will call forth laborers and artisans from all nations, ... Thus fortified, we should apprehend that the Anglo-American power will cast its first sights on the full acquisition of the Floridas from whence it will seek to extend its dominion into the heart of Mexico. Not only will it interdict our commerce with Mexico at will but it will aspire to conquer those vast imperial regions, which we will not be able to defend from European shores...."
The Colonists were enraged that they were not allowed to venture into the wilderness of Quebec, slaugher the French and Indians and take and subdivide their land. They wanted to expand their trade, unimpeded by any government regulation, into the rest of the hemisphere. The continent lay before them for the taking, God's Gift to their avarice. Virtually the first thing the new Republic did was fight a war with Spain for control of the Mississsippi River. The magical words of the Declaration were but the clarion call for expansion, extraction, exploitation and extermination
No. Our exceptional, Foundational Truth, established in those immortal words, was simply Randian egoism, in the rhetorical style of the 18th century. Does anyone seriously believe that by “pursuit of happiness” Jefferson had Aristotle's Nichomachean Ethics in mind? If they do they might disabuse themselves by reading Madion's Federalist Paper No. 10 in which he explains with candour how the checks and balances of the Constitution were established to protect the oligarchical minority in their pursuit of wealth. (And yes, he does say it explicitly if one understands English.)
Their wealth was pursued not only at the expense of foreigners, the savage natives and millions on millions of animals slaughtered and forests demolished, but at the expense of their own hoodwinked fellow citizens. Hardscrabble poverty has been endemic throughout our history. Our cities, half teeming with slums of half employed young men selling their sweat in a gig economy always moving from one place to another “in search of a better life.”
When the oligarchy needed more labour resources, they opened the country to Europe's “wrteched refuse” so that they could scrounge and huddle on our squalid teeming shores. Anyone can go on line and look -- just look -- at the pictures of the the Lower East side or of company towns. There is nothing pious, nothing Acadian, nothing ennobling in these scenes of industrial and agricultural squalor.
The problem with Obama's rhetorical fluff is not simply that it is in sentimental bad taste. It is a narcotic that lulls people to sleep; that puts a brief moment of Lidocain numbness on a festering wound that with every jab of pain is telling us that something serious is seriously wrong. It is the narcosis of a national religion, and the Flawless Obama is its high priest.
In this respect, Obama is worse than Trump. Obama obscures the situation; Trump is open rawness. Trump is the gaping wound, the festering boil, the din of ignorance, avarice and violence; and just as the boil is truthful and honest about what it is and what it symptomizes so too is Trump. But a man, like Obama who tells us just to get rid the symptom, is far more dangerous. He lulls us into a curious indignant complacency that vents outrage against Trump but rests assured that without Trump all will be well. Not.
And the reason not is that to be rid of Trump we have to make a fully burnt sacrifice of the Trumpism than inheres in the American psyche and that flows from those very “exceptional” words the great O'Bambi loves to intone.
The genius of American democracy is how it turned government into the obedient steppinfechit of the rich and then coated the whole sordid enterprise with pseudo religious nonsense which perpetuated a Delusion of Self. The whole American misconception of self is based on narcissistic self-love; a collective case of Trumpian Ego.
America's original sin was not slavery but individualism. An individualism that was alienated and infused with a selfish self-righteousness. The man who first and best understood this was de Tocqueville who coined the word
"Individualism is of democratic origin, and it threatens to spread in the same ratio as the equality of conditions. ... As social conditions become more equal, the number of persons increases who, although they are neither rich enough nor powerful enough to exercise any great influence over their fellow-creatures, have nevertheless acquired or retained sufficient education and fortune to satisfy their own wants. They owe nothing to any man, they expect nothing from any man; they acquire the habit of always considering themselves as standing alone, and they are apt to imagine that their whole destiny is in their own hands. Thus not only does democracy make every man forget his ancestors, but it hides his descendants, and separates his contemporaries from him; it throws him back forever upon himself alone, and threatens in the end to confine him entirely within the solitude of his own heart."
In so saying, de Tocqueville saw and pierced straight to the heart of those foundational magical words that have so intoxicated Americans with themselves. The price of your “god given” pursuit of individual happiness is to be ever thrown back upon yourself alone and confined within your amour-propre.
No song more incarnates this self-righteous, selfish alienation than Amazing Grace. It is an insipid, treacly tune that revolts me on every level,
Amazing Grace! How sweet a sound
That saved a wretch like me.
I once was lost but now I'm found
Was blind but now I see.
"But now I am saved..." Who says? Really, who says? Moi! And Le Moi says that I am righteous unlike those (point finger) who remain lost. The hymn is a paradigmatic expression of the psychological phenomenon of creating an “external locus of control” out of one's own desires. The nauseating fact of Amazing Grace is that the composer of its lyrics, John Newton, was a slaver and he continued to peddle his brutal cargo even after his eyes were opened.
It was no accident that Newton continued to profit from human bondage while being himself released in the spirit. The tune most precisely echoes the heretical spirit of Calvinism that infuses the American psyche -- (yes, “heretical;” heresies do matter) -- that spirit of acquisitive triumphalism that assuages its conscience by disparaging the blind wretchedness of “the less fortunate.”
Amazing Grace distills the hydra of selfish-righteousness that is so quintessentially American. The continent was viewed as a gift from God to us the deserving whose Manifest Destiny it was to simply pick the fruit. It was another Frenchman, Talleyrand who immediately perceived the matter, in his trenchant passage on The Woodsman.
"The American woodsman is interested in nothing. He has no memories... His only thought is for the number of axe strokes required to cut down a tree. Destruction is what keeps him alive. Destruction is everywhere, hence, every place suits him."
It is the wondrous nature of the French mind, that it can tomes into an epigram! In so writing, Talleyrand, an aristocrat, saw and foresaw exactly the destructive plundering nature of the American economy where the only thing that mattered is the cost of extraction, exploitation, extermination. Go and look at the photographs of literal mountains of dead bear and buffalo. Go and look at Californian yahoo's destrying 1000 year old trees just for the fun of the competition. Then go and compare Europe's cultivated fields with the garish, monotonous, unsurpassable ugliness of the American city and landscape.
When Obama intoned his belief in American exceptionalism – its superior, righteous, uniqueness and exemption from the laws of history – he was simply articulating
Amazing Grace and in secular terms and exalting the cult of the woodsman, what Marx derisively called the
Robinsonnade of capitalism.
Me, ma'h axe and m'ah Bible, contra mundum.
"Pursuit of Happiness" is the doxology that sanctifies the socially indifferent pursuit of wealth by the rich and justifies the exploited poor man's ornery indifference to the consequences of his behaviour. In either case, it is the mantra of social irresponsibility.
Most everyone else in the world gets it. De Tocqueville got it. Talleyrand got it. Aranda got it. Native Americans, Mexicans, Canadians, South Americans, Philipinos... anyone who ever felt the squeeze of American hegemony got it; but Americans do not.
America's “educated” class lives in a world of historical illusions equivalent to Versailles. A year ago, Paul Krugman, of the
Slime, wrote a
political appraisal which referred to America has the “birthplace of Democracy” Uproar in the House of Commons. This is not a question of fair opinion; it is simple, plain historical fact that, in the modern era, representative democracy began in England with the 1688
Glorious Revolution. Krugman was not lapsing into poetic license. He repeated the assertion in another article several months later.
Krugman's Krap is noteworthy because it reflected a typically fundamental self-misconception that pervades our ruling intelligentsia. During the most recent impeachment hearings in the Senate a gaggle of renown legal scholars took to the stand to assert that America had been the first to apply the principle that no one (not even Trump!) was above the law. Really? The supremacy of the law is a principle that dates at least to Greco-Roman times. Augustus himself was scrupulous to follow the law. The Crown's subjection to
due process de ley was the bone of contention behind
Magna Carta. (1215.) In more recent times, Lord Coke provoked King James I to assault when he asserted that the sovereign was subject to law. Several years later he went further and asserted the supremacy in law of Parliament. (1611.) To say that America exceptionally invented this maxim is ludicrous to the point of contempt. What this cream of American legal scholarship confused was the removal of the sovereign with his or her subjection to law. But after all, the best propaganda is the one that is credulously believed by the propagandists themselves.
America is a deranged Saturnian colossus that actually sees itself as a pious saint. Or as Clemenceau put it. "Wilson talks like Jesus Christ but acts like Lloyd George." At this point the We-Saved-Europe-From-Itself mantra is trucked out and, along with it, a veritable legion of heroic and bathetic war movies.
No we didn't. Wilson himself is on record as stating that “every child” knows that the causes of war are economic. There is a direct line between Wilson's “making the world save for [American] democracy” and the NeoCon doctrine of “expanding zones of democratic freedom.” As Maj. Gen. Smedly Butler (USMC) put it
"I spent 33 years and four months in active military service and during that period I spent most of my time as a high class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer; a gangster for capitalism. I helped make Mexico and especially Tampico safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street. I helped purify Nicaragua for the International Banking House of Brown Brothers in 1902–1912. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for the American sugar interests in 1916. I helped make Honduras right for the American fruit companies in 1903. In China in 1927 I helped see to it that Standard Oil went on its way unmolested. Looking back on it, I might have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was to operate his racket in three districts. I operated on three continents.. (War is a Racket, 1935.)
But it is a racket that America has pursued under one excuse or another since that day, over 200 years ago, in that declaration which proclaimed....
I do not for one second believe that the Second World War was fought to save civilization. I am convinced of A.J.P. Taylor's thesis that the causes of that was the pursuit of economic hegemony; and it bears emphasizing that the worst of the economic hegemony is exercised at home against so-called fellow citizens. It is par for the course that empires plunder lands they have conquered. But what is forgotten here is that what is called “the United States” is the land that has been conquered and our ruling class treats Americans, native and otherwise, as conquered people.
Back in 1947, Walther Reuther led an auto workers strike against General Motors. One of his key demands was labour representation on the Board of Directors. The company resisted with all its might. It offered one benefit after another, annual raises based on productivity advances, cost-of-living increases, supplementary unemployment benefits, early-retirement options, and health and welfare benefits -- anything but a voice in management of the company. Eventually the basket of benefits was simply too plentiful to refuse.
But why? Why such resistance? Because to do so would be to ennoble the worker. It would make him an economic citizen; and that, in a slave-based economy, would be intolerable! Yes indeed, a well paid slave is a happy slave, but at the end of the day just hired labour nonetheless. And being just hired labour nonetheless, at the end of two decades when the benefits were withdrawn, the worker had no say in the matter.
It is that same slave owning mentality that finds expression in Senawhore Lindsay Graham's statement that a $1,200 “benefit” check might disincentivize people from working. Better to dangle a piece of bread before him on a stick as he pushes the plow.
Graham's remark is one of those lapses into truth when a crisis, such as the one we are in, reveals all the insidious twists and deceits of collective amour propre. On the whole, the United States has been exceptionally good at varnishing avarice with a colourful alluring veneer. We have fooled many and certainly ourselves. It was an act of artful deception that not even Goebbels could have achieved to get the American working class to enthusiastically and belligerently bellow
And I'm proud to be an American because at least I know I'm free
even as his unions were being destroyed, his benefits trashed and his sorry ass was thrown out into the cold of a gig economy. The only thing more pathetic was the rare, isolated waif who believed that Le Roi looked out for him.
But now, a ruthless police force daily demonstrates what Le Roi really thinks of us at that same time as a heartless virus has killed thousands, decimated the economy and revealed the avaricious inadequacy of ... of well just about everything. The collapse of a diseased system that long gave up seeking the slightest remedial cures has left us in the rubble of our delusions. I do not regret the denouement. I welcome it. It is time for Americans to face where this false heroic individualism has brought us. It is time for Americans to stop singing Amazing Grace and start singing an anthem of collective responsibility and endeavour.
Post Script.
There are those who will take exception to my broad brush condemnation. They will point to their aunt Tillie, who is a good person and who bakes cookies for the homeless. They will protest that they themselves don't believe they earned or deserved their good fortune. They complain that you can't tarnish everyone. But in so saying they betray and lapse into the very individualism that is the problem. The whole is always greater than the some of its parts. The synthesis of parts that forms a nation has its own nature which is drawn from the parts but with which the parts then draw from and become infused with. It is simply not the case that one good apple saves the rotten bunch.
©barfo, 2020
