800 Words: Monotheism and the Grand Chessboard

If the world is a chessboard, then Israel is the exact centerpiece which does not exist on any game yet played except in reality. Countries like America, Russia, China, are in the proper position to bestride the board like dominant colossi, but the ultimate goal is who controls Israel. For reasons many attribute to mystical properties, the dominant civilizations of the Western (and now Global) world have thus far almost always been those whose policies most favored the advancement of Jews.

The reason for this is not mystical at all, it is simple geography. America, Brazil, Russia, India, and China may be dominant players in the grand chess game. But Israel is the spiritual father to them all because Israel stands at the world’s exact crossroad - this tiny land is the closest thing to a central meeting point for Europe, Asia, and Africa. More than any other culture, it stands in the optimal place for its ideas to spread to many cultures which otherwise have nothing in common. If the larger world was eventually going to evolve from regional pagan superstitions, Israel was the only region with enough fluency for travel that the ideas could spread. And amazingly, as the Western World expanded into the Global World to include China and India to the Far East and the Americas to the Far West, Israel still seems to stand in the world’s precise center.

There may have been many other places where monotheism was thought of before Israel, but Israel is where it took root, and Israel is the center point from which it began to proliferate. Before the development of what eventually became the Jewish people, binding legal codes certainly existed, but such laws could never spread past the immediate city-state or Empire in which they were upheld because they could not take on the weight of immutable Divine Law. The Gods of one region might disavow the laws of another region. Only an invisible and indivisible God; omniscient, omnipresent, and omnipotent, could spread his law past the reach of any army. Only an eternal kingdom requires eternal vigilance, and such an idea could only spread were it to take root in the most fertile area for ideas to extend their reach.

Legal evolution is unthinkable without monotheism. The fact that laws took on the weight of Holy Word is what gave law the power to conquer entire civilizations. Monotheism may have enabled slaughter upon a scale yet unseen (though that’s debateable), but it also enabled feats of organization thus far impossible in eras when values were more relative (and that isn’t). With the quick rise and quicker decline of the Empire of David and Solomon, Israel displayed a rough draft for all the civilizations which came after it. The Kingdom of Israel was a kingdom of bedouin refugees whom in their wanderings absorbed many different influences from the empires of Egypt and Mesapotamia, and that was what allowed it to rise so quickly, and because it was encircled on all sides by those two empires was what made it fall even more quickly. The Israeli Kingdom was so short-lived that its subjects never completely forgot how to live as refugees, and once the reign of Solomon was over and the Kingdom of Israel divided, its subjects had to learn almost immediately following their inception how to live in a world where the influence of others could once again dominate life.

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800 Words: Assimilation - Part 1 - Jews Among Jews

I never feel like a Jew unless I’m around goyim. Jewish values have done me little but ill in my life. They are the values of a scared old man who is convinced that all things new will lead him to the grave. Jewish values are the ultimate values of conservatism, conservation, and conventionality. It is a binding set of laws so profuse, so extraordinarily constricting, that there is almost no chance for a Jew who grows up Jewish to live a life undefined by his view of it. Ultimately, a Jew either accepts Jewish law, or he rebels, and Judaism’s greatest revenge upon Jews who rebel against their upbringing is that there is no freedom from such a choice. “Recovering Christians” can’t help living a life with a gnawing fear that their rebellion will lead them to eternal fire - but, of course, there is probably no such fire waiting for them, so they can ultimately absolve themselves of regret. But “recovering Jews” live life merely with the gnawing fear that they’ve lived their life completely wrongly, but since there’s well-nigh indisputable proof that life as we perceive it exists, ‘recovering Jews’ can never absolve themselves of regret, and only fear that their lives have been wasted. In this way as so many others, Judaism makes more modest claims to its adherents than other religions, and those modest claims bind the religion to those born into it so much more effectively than any adherent is bound to more popular religions.

If you’re naturally a rule-bender living within such a hidebound community, you’re shit out of luck. So long as you live within a community of Jews, you are destined to be nothing more than a Jew among Jews - watching from a dungeon shut as firmly as Joseph’s while the well-behaved among your sect are anointed to ascend like the angels of Jacob’s Ladder to levels of glory beyond anything to which you could ever aspire. But should you ‘leave the nest’, are the circumstances any better? You are a speck in a wider world, adrift among a people you don’t understand, with uncommon frames of reference, values, culture, and worldview. So many times, one looks at this world of ‘them’, full of debased corruption on one hand and deranged fanaticism on the other, and one sees precisely why Judaism was so adamant about doing everything to shield its practitioners from the wider world. Is the wider world any better?

Judaism is the religion of displacement. It is a religion designed to build a home for people in countries where home does not exist. 65 years after Israel’s founding and 46 years Jerusalem’s reunification, Israel and Jerusalem are still immaterial concepts - perfect places of the mind and spirit, whose physical reality cannot help but pale next to the perfect kingdom of our imaginings. Unlike Christianity and Islam, home is an imagined concept for Jews. All homes are temporary ones until the coming of the Moshiach (Messiah), who has tarried for more than two thousand years. Home for Christianity and Islam is firstly the next world, and secondly in any place where a person’s particular brand of Christendom or Islam rules unchallenged. But home for Jews is the Torah, we have and shall always be a people of The Book, and therefore, home can only exist in our state of mind - a state of mind which is trained more acutely more often than in any other religion because we are the only religion to which a book is more important than any physical space.

Perhaps the ‘secret’ to ‘Jewish success’ is found within that state of mind. Because the ‘Torah’ is our chiefest ‘joy’ and ‘consolation’ and ‘glory’, we are a ‘defeated’ people. Between Vespasian and Ben-Gurion, we inhabited no physical space to call our own. And therefore, we had to settle for a temporary home whose circumstances inevitably disappointed us. Because whenever we ‘settle’ for a home to which we do not aspire, it is no longer our home. And whenever Jews settle for a home we don’t want, they escaped into the ‘glorious’ world of teaching, doctrine, instruction, custom, theory, guidance, and system which Judaism entails. So long as the home of Judaism only exists within the mind, it can never be corrupted or blemished - and this spiritual home without physical form has lasted virtually unchanged for two-thousand years as material civilizations Islamic and Christian, Pagan and Secular, died their material deaths. The home of Judaism is immortal, and is therefore that much more disappointing a home for millions and millions of Jews throughout the eons.

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800 Words: A Rare Word in Praise of Ignorance

Homeless guy sees rich man on the street. He asks for some change.

The rich man says “Neither a borrower nor a lender be. - William Shakespeare”

The homeless man replies “Fuck you. - David Mamet”

William Shakespeare’s plays were written by William Shakespeare. Edmund DeVere didn’t write them, neither did Christopher Marlowe, neither did Francis Bacon, neither did Queen Elizabeth, neither did Elvis.

People like to allege that William Shakespeare, a middle class tradesman with barely a grammar school education, could not have written the Shakespeare plays, but the truth is that only a middle class tradesman with barely a grammar school education could have written them. No member of the ruling class would ever be let within any offstage proximity to a troop of tradesmen/players like those in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, nor would any nobleman but a rapscallion as great as Prince Hal have any cause to come within any distance of the vagabond posse of Sir John Falstaff's in Henry IV. Furthermore, an aristocrat would have been well-traveled enough to have better knowledge of geography than Shakespeare, in The Winter’s Tale a character states that Bohemia has a ‘coast-line’, and in two plays separated by twenty years he has characters sail from Milan.

But most importantly, Shakespeare’s frame of literary reference, while reasonably impressive, was clearly a bit limited by the standards of his day. Shakespeare, the world class plagiarizer who pilfered from so many earlier sources, would surely telegraph any scrap of material he read which left any impression on him. And clearly there are eminent writers of former generations who influenced certain works: Chaucer in A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Trolius & Cressida, Montaigne in The Tempest, Plutarch in the plays about Classical Rome (Antony and Cleopatra, Coriolanus, Julius Caesar), Boccaccio in All’s Well that Ends Well, Plautus in The Comedy of Errors. Julius Caesar and Titus Andronicus show that he might have read some Seneca and Cicero, and clearly there is no way he’d have written the sonnets without reading Petrarch. But where does Homer show up? Or Aeschylus? Or Sophocles? Or Herodotus? Or Plato and Aristotle? Or Livy? Or Virgil? Or Tacitus? Or Dante? Or Ariosto? Or Erasmus? Or Tasso? Or any other number of eminent writers which any educated aristocrat would be expected to read and quote liberally in Shakespeare’s time. Had Shakespeare read Homer, or Dante, or Sophocles, then surely there be a lot more evidence of his reading in the text. Wouldn’t there?

In any event, Shakespeare showed precisely what he thought of such extensive learning with Polonius, who demonstrates extremely well what an idiot a well-educated man can be. Meanwhile, Shakespeare is at great pains to show that his ‘fool’ characters are often the most sensible people in the show: the Fool in King Lear, Feste in Twelfth Night, the First Gravedigger in Hamlet. If such characters were main characters, there would be no play because they would lead lives too sensible to be remarkable. There are plenty of lower-class characters (far too many frankly) on which Shakespeare heaps contempt. But Shakespeare clearly has as much contempt for over-education as ignorance.

Perhaps if Shakespeare knew better the work of writers like Homer and Dante, they would have overpowered his imagination. No writer too familiar with truly extraordinary imaginations would ever be able to equal their imaginative flights unless he were conscious of trying to do outdo them. In the way that Wagner tried to outdo Beethoven, or Milton tried to outdo Shakespeare, or Caravaggio tried to outdo Michelangelo (or Dante tried to outdo Virgil), we see imaginative works which are almost fried by overstimulation. In order to surpass the genius whose shadow treads so heavily on them, every moment, every emotion, every expression of these ‘later geniuses’ has to be outsized to the point that its epic scale obliterates the influence of what came before. But there is little evidence of such gigantism in Shakespeare - the stakes are rarely ever apocalyptic. Even Macbeth and Iago never killed more than a handful. A sense of momentous tragedy is present in many Shakespearean plays, but rarely if ever does such tragedy obscure the human expression, and in no play does an impersonal sense of ‘world events’ obscure the human tragedy. Shakespeare created a language of human expression, a language upon which human beings chewed for half a millenium. But now that the world has moved past written language, perhaps the world has moved past Shakespeare as well.

For at least two centuries, Shakespeare has been the very center of humanist education. Contrary to popular belief, the list of books which must be read grew ever longer until quite recently. In former centuries, the ‘polymath’ or ‘universal man’ who seemingly achieves all the knowledge of the world was also expected to be a man of action. Aristotle counseled Alexander the Great, Leonardo was a military advisor to Cesare Borgia, Franklin and Jefferson were instrumental in forming the United States.  But by the early 1900’s, the list of ‘Great Books’ was so long that an ‘educated man’ could only be a man who devoted his entire life to his education. How could the world possibly add to the store of great learning in a world where no one who achieved universal knowledge could add to it? It is simply not feasible to make education the highest priority in a world with so much knowledge that no one can possibly accumulate it in one lifetime.

We all live in ignorance of a large majority of what the world has to offer, and as such, the world is a smaller place for us all than it is. In a world where a basic level of knowledge is a given, the world begins anew in deciding what to learn is worthwhile. The twentieth century began a process which we might as well call ‘The Great Relearning” (Tom Wolfe’s term), in which everything began with basics.

If any century before ours took so much pride in exhibiting the same level of ignorance in so many areas of endeavor, in the basics of math and science, of literacy, of the humanities and the arts, civilization itself would have collapsed and we’d still be travelling during the day by horse and wagon so we could huddle around the fire at night. But whether or not we want to ignore them, the achievements of past centuries are here to stay - we are so beset by history, so imprisoned by it, so utterly calcified by maintaining it, that we can’t possibly view it as anything but a burden. We live in a society so sophisticated that we dream of little but a primitive resurgence. None of us consider ourselves whole unless we find a way to go back into nature. We listen to simple primitive music with symmetrical beats and a thousand-word vocabulary on technology which goes from our computer to us via space and its the music we call ‘genius,’ we watch stories of the most basic outline on film that produces twenty-four photographs per second and it’s the films we call ‘brilliant,‘ we go camping and bring with us lights which generate their own energy and we think we’re returning to the primitive. The more sophisticated technology grows, the more we yearn for it to express something more primal. Does technology accomplish that primal emotion for us? Can it?

I don’t think we yet know, or can know, the answer to that question. Life’s rules have been completely rewritten. In the computer, mankind leaped arithmetically, and experienced the most revolutionary invention since the printing press. But in the Internet, mankind leaped exponentially, experiencing the most revolutionary invention since books themselves. Or perhaps the internet may prove still more influential, being the most important invention since the invention of writing. Or perhaps the internet is the most historic innovation in history since the invention of history itself. If human nature changes, it changes so gradually that we can’t possibly be aware of change in the span of a lifetime. But there is an enormous probability that life after the invention of the internet is so exponentially different that life after it will be as different as life was for agrarian societies after the invention of recorded information - with exponential improvements in quality of life simultaneous to exponential improvements in the capacity of destruction. Mankind has entered into a new era with undreamt of rewards and risks. No endeavor without risk is worth undertaking, but a risk is a risk because the endeavor runs the risk of failure.

In this brave new world, we are yet again children - adrift in a world we are only beginning to understand. It is in childhood that the learning curve is fastest, and the rules are rewritten which hopefully carry us into adulthood with a mature understanding of the world. In the meantime, there is still potential for disaster unseen. Steven Pinker may argue that the world is safer than ever before, but he doesn’t account for geological and ecological disaster, multi-drug resistant bacteria, loose nuclear and biological weapons, and finite natural resources. The world always seems to be safest right before undreamt of disaster, but it is unfortunately from such undreamt of disasters that the world learns its new lessons which make it safe again. The relative stability and prosperity of today’s world was forged from two world wars, a great depression, and a half-century cold war-by-proxy. The lessons of the Great Depression have staved off a depression which could have dwarfed it, the lessons of two world wars have thus far prevented a single nuclear weapon from being dropped on civilians, and the lessons of the proxy wars have thus far prevented more than half-a-dozen regional conflicts from turning hot. These lessons were learned at a terrible price, but the lessons learned have thus far prevented the worst mistakes from repeating themselves. Whether in the cultural lessons of Shakespeare, or the political lessons of Roosevelt, or the scientific lessons of Galileo, or the internet lessons of Al Gore, or a baby hitting his head on the floor after his first attempt to stand up, it is only by blindly groping around in ignorance that we gain any chance of doing better.  

...This was originally supposed to be a post about Breaking Bad….

Note: I of course forgot the Player King's speeches about Priam and Hecuba, which are taken liberally from Virgil's Aeneid. Even so, if Shakespeare were better acquainted with a work as monumental as The Aeneid, wouldn't we get a play about some stories from it? Or given his opinion of the Players in the 'Oh what a rogue and peasant slave am I' speech, maybe he read Virgil and simply didn't like it. I don't blame him...

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800 Words: The American Utopia: Part 1 - The American Soul

Over and over again, we hear that America is a country without a history - that America’s still making and writing its history books. The experiment isn’t over or conclusive, how can we learn anything about a history we don’t yet know or understand? So who cares if we’re 17th in global education?

But look at us - the declining power with declining cities, declining law enforcement, declining industry, declining political systems, declining schools, and declining press (yes, I based that list on the seasons of The Wire...). How do we now look so close to the edge of a permanent fall? And if we’re at the edge of such a fall, then how did we rise so high? Perhaps America won’t fall at all, but if we don’t, it’s because there will be reforms in place which completely change the nature of this country, and if the nature of this country is completely changed, then there is quite a bit of history to study and understand.

If there’s one country in the last two hundred years that has a lot of history to study... maybe it’s Germany or Russia, but after them it’s us. Some of us do pay attention to little bits of that history. Anybody who can quote Bob Dylan lyrics or lines from The Godfather has their little bits of history which shape their knowledge of the human heart. Some people even know enough of American history (though not enough..) that their souls feel tired of an American culture that’s clearly not working, and therefore fill their cultural life to the brim with the Europe of critical theory, or the East Asia of action movies and anime and video games. But I can’t help thinking that they latch onto such things because they need an explanation of the exhausted culture from which they hail in which they can no longer believe. Critical theory gives them the required armament to explain why we can no longer believe in our institutions. Meanwhile, the stupefyingly complex technology of Asian culture is still very young, with pyrotechnics that well exceed its emotional maturity so far (with a number of obvious exceptions... for just one, rent Grave of the Fireflies...) But unlike so much prominent American content (never mind the underground stuff), Asian culture is exciting - it’s young, it’s exuberant, and it feels completely new. The recent past belongs to America, but the future clearly belongs to Asia.

But when you stay with American content long enough to get past the current tiredness, you see its entire history laid out before you as it never could be in the past - there is a lifetime of soul-sustenance for those willing to find it: classic rock and R&B and country and bluegrass and jazz, classic Hollywood movies and classic TV, classic theater and classic musicals, classic poetry and novels, classic art and classic architecture, even some classic sports games and classical music. At this point, America has its classical canon - every educated American knows what it is, and every American has to either have experienced it or want to experience it in order to be considered an educated American. Once upon a time, Americans were blank slates onto which education from older cultures formed their awareness of their souls. But there should be no doubt, there is now a fully American Soul - educated and seasoned almost exclusively (much too exclusively) by American culture, and possessed of a wisdom that comes from America having grown a culture so large that it obliterated whole swaths of other cultures from around the world.

Furthermore, American comfort is so widespread, and for the moment its responsibilities for earning this comfort so minimal in comparison to most of the world, that there is ample time to immerse ourselves in this culture, to appreciate and love it, to to discuss and debate it, and to cultivate it still further. The ability of Americans to accrue debt may end tomorrow, but until it does, we are at the point of grand summation - the time to understand what it means to be an American at the zenith of world power is right now, because it can’t last forever, and it’s already amazing that it’s lasted this long. Americans are highly motivated people no longer, and if any of us remain highly motivated, we’re fighting an uphill battle to achieve anything that resembles our dreams. So in the meantime, what else is there to do but amble through this glorious museum of the recent past?

The most important year in American history was, of course, 1945 - when we officially ended the Second World War with the Atomic Bomb. It was the defining American triumph, the defining American achievement, and will perhaps become the defining American tragedy. But I think most people would agree that the most important cultural year was 1968. It was the summit of all the American energy generated by the Allies’ triumph. During the Cold War’s height, education and motivation to learn was considered paramount to the species’ survival. The GI Bill made education widespread, and federal grants made education cheap. But all children develop minds of their own, and by the time the GIs' kids went to college, they demanded to follow the paths on which their minds set them. They not only questioned the foundation of America’s moral triumph, they also questioned the foundation of America’s intellectual triumph. They no longer wanted to read ‘great books’ or set themselves up for scientific careers that would advance human knowledge. Instead, they went that most American of ways - they did their own thing, and did so on a scale never seen before. Before the Baby Boomers, Americans upheld a very particular (and slightly authoritarian) social contract based on the continual enforcement of a community’s shared values of tolerance. The contradiction there should be completely obvious - previous generations may have believed in tolerance, but the community obligation was at very least as important as the individual right. If a community felt that the individual right had stretched too far and negated its responsibility to the community, the community felt completely justified in repressing those ‘deviants.’ The result of this was the unity of purpose which saw us through reconstruction after the Civil War and overcame the Great Depression, but it also looked the other way at racial violence and discrimination, economic exploitation, and imperial subjugation abroad. It was not until the Baby Boom generation that the idea of individual rights as more important than community obligation became widespread. In doing so, they caused enormous, and long overdue, gains in freedom for minorities. And yet they may have simultaneously undone the social contract (hardly a beneficent one) which enabled America’s rise. It was a Faustian pact. We are now a freer country than ever before. We’re also a more stymied, dysfunctional one than we’ve been since The Great Depression. The Baby Boomers changed the definition of American culture into the most American possible conceit - the greatest amount of freedom for the greatest number of people. And by changing it, they probably defined the meaning of American culture for all time.

Just a few years before 1968, Cold War-era universities were places of highly disciplined learning and bastions of what used to be called ‘value-free scholarship’ (scholarship for its own sake). The idea of value-free scholarship is probably a myth - the US government would never have funded it if it hadn’t felt the need for top-quality scientists in the Cold War so direly. But it was the rebellion against the University, not the University itself, that gave America it’s identity.

Just briefly look at the most eminent figures in American culture. No novelist has had anything like the impact on America which Tolstoy and Dostoevsky have had on the Russians. We have a national poet in Walt Whitman, but does he count as our National Writer the way Shakespeare does for the English or Goethe does for the Germans? We probably don’t have a National Writer. Hell, we probably don’t even have a National Book unless you count The Constitution. But if we don’t have a National Writer, we certainly have a National Songwriter. I think a much better case could be made that Bob Dylan already had a larger impact on American society in a half-century than even Walt Whitman has in a century-and-a-half. We have great artists, but no National Artist. However, we have a National Photographer in Ansel Adams, and the impact which Steven Spielberg and Orson Welles have on America dwarves any other visual artist in any medium. We have a number of good playwrights, but not a single one among them ever had the impact of musical theater creators like Rodgers and Hammerstein or Stephen Sondheim.

The most important American art, of nearly all genres, was made in recent generations; created to be consumed by either the WWII generation or the Baby Boomers. We have national poets, but we have no national novelist, or artist, or composer, or playwright. Except Whitman, our national cultural figures are all very recent. And even Whitman seems almost completely contemporary in the way that he insisted on a colloquial, simple language. Had he lived a century later, you could easily see him learning the guitar to travel the open road with Woody Guthrie or headlining a Beatnik poetry slam with Allen Ginsberg.

But it is this colloquial, simple language, which defines our cultural contribution. We’re like small children playing with enormous toys. On this new continent, we have created technology which so outstrips anything that comes before it that we barely know how to use it. There is 4,000 years of written poetry and roughly 1,000 years of written music, but there are roughly 110 years of movies and only a bit more of sound recording and photography. Education in math and science and medicine is defined by its exclusivity. If you want to study these subjects meaningfully, you have to learn at an extraordinary level over a period of a decade. But the arts are currently defined by their populism. Anybody can write or sing a song, anybody can make a movie, anybody can write a story. No extraordinary ability is asked of our cultural figures, and it’s possible that the most extraordinary thing about American culture is the technology with which it’s transmitted. Don't misunderstand, simplicity is not a byword for mediocrity, but the fact that there is no reward for craftsmanship in the arts in the manner there is for the sciences necessarily means that nearly half of the artistic glories we’re capable of producing go unrealized.

And it’s not just the artistic culture that suffers from this lack of critical complexity. It’s the civic culture too. Since about 1968, so many of us have come to assume automatically that the nation’s founding was cynical, based on economic interests, the exploitation of Africans, and the murder of Indians. Never mind that America is a country with one of the longest democratic traditions in human history, with freedoms that have never stopped growing (however incrementally), and done because of a founding constitutional document which is so simple that anybody can understand and interpret it for themselves. Furthermore, not a single movement which attempted to move the country away from republican democracy ever gained significant traction in the country’s entire history. American democracy is extremely imperfect, but thus far, it’s always been well-supported by its citizens, continually expanded its freedoms, and demonstrated the feasibility of democracy for the modern age. Any person who does not reflect on these facts in awe shouldn’t be taken seriously when they criticize anything about this country.

American values, such as they are, are no longer commonly shared. We no longer agree about what’s good and evil, and virtually all quarters of America are despondent over the fact that this disagreement exists. Half the country seems to hold to traditional definitions of the sacred, and the other half searches for a new definition on which no two members seem to agree. The American Soul is divided, with one half clinging to past - old world - models, and one half searching uncomfortably since 1968 for a new model which no American has definitively found. One side prizes unity, the other, individual expression. In a conflict between the two sides, do the individuals have a 1% chance of winning?

And because no American has established a commonly accepted new model, the half of America which sees the need for one is adrift. Its members are discontent without realizing the basis of their dissatisfaction. Their native intelligence is enough to show them that something has become deeply rotten in the American Soul, but they don’t have the tools to understand why. More than ever before, America is a nation of individuals. No two people critical of America share the same values, and because they lack the same values, they can’t pool their critical thinking together to effectively criticize the country - incompetent in defining the country’s problems, and ineffectual in creating change.

America needs new definitions. New definitions of good and evil, new definitions of the sacred and the sublime which demonstrate the struggle between the two ethical poles, and new arguments for why it’s important to choose between them. The old values of what is good and what is evil, tied up with old notions of God and retribution, clearly don’t have much hold on Americans anymore. Such notions predate America by thousands of years, and even if they were invented in America, they are un-American in every sense. If we don’t provide a new set of values, if good and evil simply no longer exist, what then is worth fighting for?

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800 Words: Pity the Dictator...

It is said that no matter what other works of art he banned, Stalin never missed a performance of Boris Godunov. You would think that The Great Russian Opera would be the first to be censured by the Soviet Union - an opera about Russian tyrant who murdered his way to the throne, causes untold suffering to his people, and lives in perpetual terror of being held to account for his crimes. Even if this opera was about Czarist Russia, nobody could mistake the parallels to the Stalinist era. But at every performance, there was Stalin in his box, apparently listening quite intently. Even the stoniest heart of the century was moved to pity by the sight of his own soul’s reflection. So invested was he in Boris Godunov that he barred the Bolshoi’s music director, Nikolai Golovanov, from ever conducting again because Golovanov preferred a different bass for the role than Stalin’s favorite.

Brecht (rarely...) summed it up quite well: “How exhausting it is to be evil.” It is difficult to imagine that Stalin, the former seminary student who nearly became an Orthodox priest, could shed every last vestige of his former religious belief. Perhaps his psychopathy was untroubled, but it’s also possible to imagine him in his private gloom, awaiting the tumultuous hellfire which he knew was his ripe desert.

But historical figures like Stalin and Mao, as they existed in the twentieth century, are no longer possible. For the moment, there’s simply too much information and not enough means to collate it to gather useable dossier files after the manner of 20th century totalitarian states. In place of the totalitarian leader returns a creature both less and more lethal than the absolute monarch/dictator - the warlord. The warlord has no true power over his subjects in life, he only has power over them in death; and should the apparatus of war fall to pieces, so will he. Such is the lot of Bashar al-Assad, who has ceased to be an authoritarian dictator, he is now a warlord whose power is only demonstrable by the number of people he can kill.

Those of us who supported the Arab Spring have little to show for our beliefs thus far but an endless list of war crimes which will probably grow far more endless before the war ends. In the Syrian Civil War, there are as many as 120,000 dead, 130,000 missing, 1,500 foreign civilians killed, 1.2 million refugees, and 3 million internally displaced. The Syrian dictatorship as it existed before The Arab Spring exists no longer, nor could it ever. Syria is not an authoritarian state, it is chaos. And into that chaos was thrown a fifth of that country’s people, and who knows how many more millions will be thrown in before the chaos subsides?

Meanwhile, Egypt continues its dance upon an even deadlier volcano. Egypt’s elected president, Mohammed Morsi, was worse than a dictator, he was an incompetent would-be-dictator who attempted power seizures in the clumsiest possible manner. Even if he was elected, only way in which he could not be deposed by the Egyptian military was to entice the liberals to remain on his side - and yet he insisted on near-absolute constitutional power, and secular liberals left the Constituent Assembly (charged with drafting the new constitution) in disgust. No doubt, Morsi saw the example of Ayatollah Khomeini and thought that liberals could be casually brushed aside with a simple declaration the way Khomeini did in Iran. But the Egyptian revolution was built on far less solid ground than the Iranian one. The Iranian protests against the Shah involved as many as nine million people, whereas the protests against Mubarak were 2 million strong. Such was the hold of Khomeini’s charisma that upon his return to Iran, he was greeted by more than five million followers. Khomeini inspired so much devotion in his following that he could brush a liberal government aside with a wave of his hand, and no other Iranian had anything like the power to stop him.

Mohammed Morsi was never supposed to be president. He only became a candidate because the Egyptian military banned the candidacy of the Muslim Brotherhood’s deputy chairman - Khairad El-Shater. No one knows how any Islamist in Egypt could believe that an Islamic president could get away with giving himself dictatorial powers, but there should be no doubt that any Islamist President would have done the same. There are still more extreme Islamic parties in Egypt, powerful ones like the Salafist al-Nour party which got 28% of the vote. As much pressure as there was on Morsi to stay within the limits of constitutional law, there may have been still more pressure on him to become an Islamic dictator.

Meanwhile, the protests in Turkey have become so common that, in comparison to Egypt, the media has barely reported on them - seeing little difference in what’s happening in Turkey to what happened all over the Arab world. But what’s happened in Turkey is, in some ways, even more dramatic. Turkey’s protests against Prime Minister Erdogan have attracted at least 640,000 people. And when Erdogan definitively took violent action against the protests, it was the reverse of Mubarak. When Mubarak took action, it showed that he was a dictator no longer in control of the country he ruled with an iron fist. But when Erdogan took violent action against those who protested him, he officially was no longer a mere democratically elected leader - he became a would-be-dictator who rules by force. Mubarak is the authoritarianism of the past, Erdogan is the authoritarianism of the future. He was once the great hope for all of us who believed that political Islam needn’t be compatible with tyranny, but there can be no mistaking that Erdogan has opted for despotism. Over Erdogan’s time, Turkey has censored over a million websites, the country’s imprisoned over a hundred journalists, has bomed Iran and Iraq in violation of international law and continually threatens to bomb Syria, and killed as many as 60,000 Kurds (though probably half that). It’s possible, however unlikely, that Erdogan has plans to exploit the instability of the Islamic world to be its imperial overseer. No one has more to gain from the Arab Spring’s plunge into chaos than Erdogan. But how can Erdogan rule over all Islam he can’t even control his own country?

And finally, there’s the Israel/Palestine conflict. The third and definitive piece in the tic-tac-toe board of regional war. Where this perennial cause celebre goes, there will the world go. Syria is already in catastrophic Civil War, Egypt seems on the verge of it. All that’s required to become a regional conflict is for Civil War to occur in Israel/Palestine. One day, hopefully sooner rather than later, I’ll go into all the reasons why war between Israelis and Palestinians, or even war between Palestinian factions, remains the most lethal danger for the entire area - the difference between contained conflicts, or a war that could metastasize to literally any corner of the globe.

But even if it doesn’t, barely lower levels of instability circle the governments of Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Libya, Tunisia, and Bahrain. The entire Middle East is operating at a simmer, waiting for a match to strike the powder keg that will ignite it into the twenty-first century’s first grand conflict. If the rest of the world is wise, it won’t get too entangled. It’s the twenty-first century, but The Middle East looks very much like the beginning of the Thirty Years’ War, because no matter how militant and extreme a warlord gets, there is always someone whispering in his ear that he must become still more extreme, still more violent - or risk violence being done to him.

(The Grand Inquisitor Scene from Verdi's Don Carlo)

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800 Words: If Only We'd Listened to President Wilson... Part 1

*Note - Much of this, over and above my usual dollop of plagiarism, is shamelessly pilfered from Richard Hofstadter’s indispensible book - The American Political Tradition. I would not feel comfortable posting this without acknowledging that debt of a completely unknown pygmy to a deservedly venerated master.

In these years of political gridlock and economic paralysis, it’s become all too common to look to old presidents who would have known better how to get us out of this mess. If only Lyndon Johnson were here to stare down Mitch McConnell, if only Teddy Roosevelt were around to hold Paul Ryan up to the oratorical shaming he deserves, if only Bill Clinton were still there to charm the pants off Lindsey Graham.

Johnson, TR, Clinton, virtuous presidents all of them, but none of them were great. Yeah, that’s right, none of them. I know it’s fashionable these days to hold up Theodore Rex as one of the true giants of the Presidency - Barack Obama himself does it from time to time, no doubt with a surfeit of cynicism. But Obama’s professed admiration for #26 is especially ironic considering that most liberal admirers of Teddy Rexpin use him as a Damoclean sword to drop into Barack Obama’s back. The fact remains that John McCain understands Teddy better than any liberal admirer ever did. At least relative to his reputation, Theodore Roosevelt was an oddly ineffectual president, nor was he a liberal after any manner of the word. His charisma and bluster belied the fact that he was inadequate when compared to the greatness a world on the brink of global warfare required of him, and moved in the direction of reform largely because he saw the prospect of organized labor as no different than a giant anarchist mob. His presidency contained major accomplishments, but its setbacks are rarely ever talked about.

Furthermore, it was only after his presidency was completed that Roosevelt ‘saw the light’ and switched his rhetoric to a truly radical mode in an effort to recapture the office he regretted relinquishing. Many of the forward-thinking positions Roosevelt was best known for - like his veneration of labor unions, direct primaries, workman’s compensation, inheritance tax, national limits on labor hours, government supervision of interstate commerce -  were positions he only took after he left office and saw a rising tide of progressivism he could navigate back to the center of the arena. And because he insisted on a platform to advocate for these very positions which he disavowed only four years earlier, he divided the Republican party, and delayed any chance of their passage by twenty years until his cousin Franklin had licence to enact more progressive legislation due to the Great Depression’s devastation - a devastation Teddy might have brought on the country much sooner due to his unbounded eagerness to join World War I against Germany by 1915, even though in 1914 he initially supported the German cause.

He was the sort of man who could not abide the thought that others would not constantly feel the weight of his imposition, and his daughter once commented that her father always felt the need to be ‘the bride at every wedding, the corpse at every funeral.’ And were another man like TR, with such a compulsive need for center stage, able to situate himself equally well in political life, he would never be able to restrain himself from political stances that would maximize the intensity of his limelight. He was, in every sense, a 19th century personality cultist and militarist who admired the heroism of soldiers and pioneers above all, and did what he could to move America to the course of a grand imperial project which rivaled the Great European Powers in scope. In some ways, the later president who most resembles his worldview and accomplishments is George W. Bush.

The previous war which The Iraq War most resembled, at least in inception, was the Spanish-American War. It was a war which took place for no better reason than America could make war and win its spoils, sold to the public as a humanitarian intervention. And like the Iraq War, the propaganda for it was managed by three distinct strands of the Republican party, some of whom believed very fervently in the war’s humanitarian side - one strand was the proto-Cheney businessmen like William Randolph Hearst who saw in Cuba the chance to sell newspapers and invest into major industrial development, another strand was proto-Wolfowitz conservatives obsessed with national greatness and virtue like Henry Cabot Lodge who saw a chance in this war to help Cuban Freedom Fighters and thereby rejuvenate America’s sense of moral purpose, the last by proto-Rumsfeld ‘visionaries’ like Teddy Roosevelt who carried within them massive dreams of proving America’s invincibility in the battlefield. Here’s a quote from Teddy at the Naval War College which he made as Assistant Secretary of the Navy in 1897:

“No triumph of peace is quite so great as the supreme triumphs of war... We of the United States have passed most of our few years of national life in peace. We honor the architects of our wonderful material prosperity... But we feel, after all, that the men who have dared greatly in war, or the work which is akin to war, are those who deserve best of the country.”

(Charles Foster Kane - a Teddy Roosevelt Republican to the marrow)

As a New York assemblyman, Roosevelt was hardly a friend of the working man - opposing raises in the salaries of New York policemen and firemen, fighting against a bill to limit horse-car workers to twelve-hour work days, and denouncing a measure to require payment of two dollars a day to public employees as ‘demagogic.’ In 1895, his feelings against organized labor were so strenuous that he was quoted in the Evening Post:

“We shall guard as zealously the rights of the striker as those of the employer. But when riot is menaced it is different. The mob takes its own chance. Order will be kept at whatever cost. If it comes to shooting we shall shoot to hit. No blank cartridges or firing over the head of anybody.”

Even at this stage, Roosevelt was not completely indifferent to the working class’s plight. He toured the slums of New York City and managed to get a number of tenement buildings condemned. And when he became governor he managed to get on labor’s good side with a law against sweatshops and quickly switched sides on a number of issues he spent years inveighing against like the eight-hour-a-day limit for workers on government contracts. Nevertheless, Roosevelt was authoritarian to the bone. He believed in benevolent, enlightened autocracy in which the overclass bestows merciful governance upon the lower class as a reward earned by good behavior. To his mind, the working class was not deserving of rights so much as rewards. This is the aristocratic conservatism of duty and service - the conservatism of Hamilton, Disraeli, Churchill, and McCain. It’s preferable to many kinds of conservatism, but it’s still conservatism, and has a hugely destructive side for all its benefits. When general strikes hit an economically depressed New York in the middle of 1896, Roosevelt was quoted as saying:

“The sentiment now animating a large proportion of our people can only be suppressed as the Commune in Paris was suppressed, by taking ten or a dozen of their leaders out, standing... them against a wall, and shooting them dead. I believe it will come to that. These leaders are plotting a social revolution and the subversion of the American Republic.”

And like all great imperialists, Roosevelt had an undercurrent of racism going through his soul as long as the Northern Securities Railroads. In 1899 he made a speech in which he declared:

“In every instance the expansion has taken place because the race was a great race. It was a sign and proof of greatness in the expanding nation, and moreover bear in mind that in each instance it was of incalculable benefit to mankind . . . . When great nations fear to expand, shrink from expansion, it is because their greatness is coming to an end. Are we still in the prime of our lusty youth, still at the beginning of our glorious manhood, to sit down among the outworn people, to take our place with the weak and craven? A thousand times no!”

Woodrow Wilson wrote venerated the Ku Klux Klan in print, but he never said anything nearly so gargantuanly fascist as that. And lest you think this speech merely glorification of America and not necessarily indicative of racism directed at a particular ethnic group, let’s examine this whopper he wrote about Native Americans while tending to his Western ranch in 1886:

“I don’t go so far as to think that the only good Indians are the dead Indians, but I believe nine out of every ten are, and I shouldn’t like to inquire too closely into the case of the tenth. The most vicious cowboy has more moral principle than the average Indian.”

These are just a few of many quotes Teddy Roosevelt made which would drop our jaws. To acknowledge his dark side is not to say that he was racist or imperialist or authoritarian over the average bigotry of his time, to acknowledge it is only to demand that he be treated with the same question marks as are bestowed to others among American History’s ‘greatest’ figures like George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, James Monroe, Andrew Jackson, and Woodrow Wilson.

In a sense, Roosevelt did form a vital center direction between unfettered capitalism and unorganized socialism, but it was a center that favored upper-class capitalism in every distinction. He held little belief in raising men up from the lower class, rather, he believed that the oligarchical Anglo-Saxon Protestant class from which he hailed had to be saved from itself if it was to remain prosperous - and therefore had to share as little of their spoils as possible so as to prevent an outright insurrection of the workers - a fact that was proven by the fact that his 1904 re-election campaign was virtually bankrolled by Morgan, Rockefeller, and their minority partners. In a passage that could have come straight from Clinton or Obama themselves, Roosevelt declared in a 1902 speech to congress:

“Our aim is not to do away with corporations; on the contrary, these big aggregations are an inevitable development of modern industrialism, and the effort to destroy them would be futile unless accomplished in ways that would work the utmost mischief to the entire body politic... We draw the line against misconduct, not against wealth.”

Roosevelt’s most celebrated lawsuit against a trust was against the Northern Securities Company in 1902 for their violation of the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890, a suit which he won in the Supreme Court by a 5-4 majority. But The Northern Securities Company was a much-hated railroad monopoly that connected the Northern Midwest to the Northwest, within which the trustees feuded among each other in manners that constantly made headlines in the newspaper. J P Morgan was heavily involved in this trust, but it was hardly central to his banking interests. Meanwhile, Rockefeller’s Standard Oil and J B Duke’s American Tobacco never had so much as a single case brought against them during Roosevelt’s time in office. During its seven-and-a-half years, the Roosevelt administration prosecuted 54 trust cases, during which time trusts grew more quickly than ever. Compare that to the four years of William Howard Taft, during which his administration prosecuted 90 cases.

For all his belligerence, the real President Roosevelt was a leader of relentless compromise. If there is a modern president to whom he can be safely compared, it is probably not George W. Bush but Bill Clinton - a similarly narcissistic egoist who painted himself as a friend to the average American with total mastery, but enacted gains for liberalism only incrementally, and found himself able to do so only by relentless concessions to big business interests. For all the political posturing of both figures, it mattered not a whit for their policies - which were enacted purely through the kind of incremental progress it takes to enact a successful policy over a period of many decades. They were both decent presidents, but the office deserves better, and, admittedly, usually gets worse.

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800 Words: What is the Internet - Parts III - VI

III.

Within our lifetimes, it will never be possible to read and listen to the communications of hundreds of millions of people. We simply don't know how to do it, and there are some goals which not even the current speed of technological development will accommodate. It took nearly half-a-millenium to go from the chaos which the printing press unleashed to mastering its capabilities to the point that a totalitarian state could be created. We master new technology quicker than ever before, but we create new technology just as quickly, and those who would foil government control will remain steps ahead of those in government who control it for a long while yet.

A few days ago, we discovered precisely what we already knew. Verizon monitors who's calling us and whom we call, and is ordered to share that information with the government so that they can use it for anti-terrorism investigations. So, in all probability, is every major phone company in the world, and we also learned definitively that internet companies do something quite similar. It doesn't mean that they have the technology or the manpower to listen in on the things we say, we're probably hundreds of years away from anyone developing that level of technological competence. Everyone from former Defense Secretary Robert Gates to former NSA chief Michael Hayden has complained that there’s simply too much data to effectively use the information they have for investigations. But when you call on a cell phone, you're using government-developed technology with satellites which the government helped to install. When you’re on the internet, you’re using a technology which until twenty-five years ago was the nearly exclusive purview of the US Department of Defense. Did we really expect that the US government would rescind those privileges for nothing in return?

What we learned is neither a good nor bad development; it's simply inevitable. And in an era when online companies can aggregate your emails to create personalized advertisements, when satellites can watch the goings on of any street corner from any vantage point on earth, when airport security can look at x-rays of your person, when credit card companies can sell your personal information to the highest bidder, this is the least of our privacy violations.

The United States of America is coming out of a pointlessly war-torn era in which an incompetent president and his nefarious handlers exploited our post-9/11 fears to create a massive security apparatus which was utterly pointless to combat terrorism. It was a 20th century authoritarian reaction to a 21st century problem. To point that out is not the same as saying that there’s no existential threat from terror, because there certainly is, it is only to point out that we overreacted gigantically. We invaded two countries, one utterly without justification. Bombings we conducted in sovereign states like Pakistan and Yemen may have been justified, but they were carried out by remote and shrouded in secrecy. But most importantly, there are 850,000 (!) people working in the United States government with top secret security clearances. What is secret from us is not that secret. It will never be possible within our lifetimes to cull information from hundreds of millions of people, but that doesn’t mean that the government won’t do its damndest to try. But it will fail every time.

IV.

Twenty-six seconds of film - that is the surveillance tape which Abraham Zapruder took of the JFK assassination. Had Zapruder left his camera at home, there would be no Kennedy assassination footage, and every sane person would agree that Lee Harvey Oswald was the sole killer of John F. Kennedy. Will computer surveillance increase certainty in people’s minds about what happens, or will it provoke more doubt? Will surveillance be more beneficial evidence to the prosecution, or to the defense?

V.

Information is power. But like all power, there are those who want to keep it for themselves. The world's entire scientific and cultural heritage, published over centuries in books and journals, is increasingly being digitized and locked up by a handful of private corporations.

- Aaron Swartz

Ironically, the reason that information will not be in the hands of an exclusive club is because of people like Aaron Swartz - deeply flawed, narcissistic idealists who do ballsy things which are not quite heroic, neither good nor evil, just fanatical. Julian Assange, Aaron Swartz, Bradley Manning, Edward Snowden; these men (and they’re all men so far) have changed the world we live in because of a dogmatic, intellectually limited insistence upon transparency in everything which governments and corporations do. They’ve democratized knowledge, but they haven't liberalized it. They've saved us from many kinds of corporate and government malfeasance, but they’ve opened up entirely new areas for powerful people to practice exactly that. When knowledge becomes opened up, there will be whole new opportunities for advertisement. If we’re being equally paranoid about transparency as Julian Assange is to secrecy, we might infer an extreme example of the dangers of openness. Corporations will be present regardless of whether they are open or secret, and as such we may have to go back to the patronage system, for which every academic paper or artistic project or schoolbook doubles as a press release for the corporation, the government, the university, or the private benefactor, who funds it; and must include adulatory comments about the benefactors who fund their donations and defend those benefactors' most controversial actions. This is precisely what happens on wikipedia, and unpaid editors cannot compete with the onslaught of paid press people who rewrite wikipedia entries to better fit the facts which moneyed people want the world to see. Like any marketplace, it is especially within the free exchange of ideas that those with money can control. Men like Edward Snowden act as though corrupt governments or corporations would think twice about committing acts of evil in broad daylight. If these evil people have enough money, they can simply brainwash the public into thinking their evil acts never happened.

VI.

The Patriot Act had many stupid items in it. But was it really bad to let the FBI wiretap terror suspects in a manner no different than they do the Mafia and drug traffic? Was it truly wrong to require banks and security brokers to file suspicious activity reports about money laundering (especially now that they’ll have to write about themselves?)? Was it wrong to remove the firewall between the FBI and the CIA so they can pool resources and information about terror suspects?

Let’s pause on that third question for a moment. The firewall between not only the FBI and the CIA, but also between law enforcement and intelligence gathering generally, existed because of the roughshod abuses of J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI: hundreds, perhaps thousands, of unauthorized wiretappings, breaking and enterings into private residences, blackmail on a massive scale, and intimidation of all kinds to anyone who questioned his authority. It had the added benefit of limiting the CIA’s involvement in “black ops”, the third world operations by which the CIA replaced governments which they viewed as ‘Soviet-friendly’ with governments more susceptible to US interests.

The raising of such a firewall in 1978 was considered a major liberal victory at the time. And yet, a quarter-century later, liberals were the first to argue for such a firewall’s destruction - seeing the ending of such a firewall as far preferable to a massive Homeland Security bureaucracy.

It’s much too late to avoid the Homeland Security bureaucracy, but the elimination of the FBI/CIA firewall was probably the wise thing to do, because nobody can possibly cull that much information. But if there is any chance at all for a government to control us after the manner of the 20th century totalitarians, it will be because the intelligence of the world’s most powerful government is pooled together by a Hoover-like figure.

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