On Gore Vidal

Although many characterize the late Gore Vidal as an insatiable curmudgeon, whose only satisfactions were an unyielding dissatisfaction, the tenor of his own voice, and the aristocratic regality of his finely textured public persona, he represented to me the quintessential bitch goddess, sassy yet eloquent, fierce yet composed. If Paradise exists then I'm certain the Gods have bought back his damned soul from the Underworld so as to get a lecture on where They went wrong.   

Among other qualities, his gift for gab, his pointed wit, his fashion, and his diction positioned him in that rarest category of American intellectual that breaches deeply entrenched social and class divides. Yes, Gore was born a child of enormous privilege. He grew up and maintained an aristocratic mien which at first glance is easily resented, and were we to fall solely for the form and miss the content it would be understandable to presume him another one-percenter groomed like a dressage horse for attention, waste and wealth.  But we'd be mistaken, because Madame Vidal (I say Madame, as Genet might, only as a result of his grandeur) had another quality, which doubtlessly must seem strange to most Americans- he had empathy, and while I believe the cold slush in his veins made weeping for us nearly impossible, it didn't stop him from heatedly leveling his Apollonian brass down on the masters of hypocrisy, deceit, power, rape, plunder and murder.

That he did so dramatically also must seem strange to most of us raised in the company of the television or computer without table manners, Shakespeare or whole foods. Of the upper class, Vidal was nevertheless more working class than the majority of American laborers.  He knew what he was and he did a fine job of helping us discover who we were. What good is the working class if it can't identify, or refuses to identify itself as such? Minus the ability to articulate our place in this swamp, we're liable to delusions of grandeur, the most common of which is the belief that each one of us enjoys an equal share in that most coveted and mythical American middle class.  The fantasy that is the American Dream has the uncanny capacity for making what could be is. In the tradition of Arthur Miller, Vidal illustrated its deficiencies. It wasn't always a pretty picture, but it was rational.

It must also be said that for those under fifty who didn't take the humanities seriously old man Gore was something of an anachronism; that or an outlandish cartoon-like snide, snotty and snooty buffoon- according to this estimation circa 2012, the former is doubtlessly true, and the latter, based on the solipsistic consumer-driven diarrhea we swallow as culture, understandable. What's sad about Vidal's death is not necessarily that few remain from his generation that matured in a time when there was room, even in the bustlingly industrious anti-red, infantile America, for intellectual figures to loom sage and sometimes notorious in your living room or kitchen on a Saturday night (after all, people die). Christopher Hitchens, while much younger, caught the tail-end of this phase in popular culture (sadly, he's gone too). It's that there's no room left, not popularly anyhow, for new figures to emerge. As we market ourselves like sneakers and appraise the apparel that is our peers, the demand for this space is absent from our catalogue of retail desires. People like Gore never look good in window displays (unless in print) or on a shelf next to other shoes or on racks in a mix of various suits. There's more to Gore's book than a face.

That is, except for our new line of charlatans, otherwise known as pundits, each one customized to fit the precise network that floods their pockets full of snot to mislead us in the rotten ways we want to be misled. The Glenn Becks, E.J. Dionnes, Rachel Maddows, Ezra Kleins, and Chris Hayes' (pardon my emphasis on the liberals, but I have a special distaste for those who so well feign the progressive appearance of sincerity and reason until election season arrives) and whoever else feels no shame in unconditionally towing some pseudo-party corporate line, these soulless and sexless ultra-chic twits today people our intellectual landscape.

In his old age there was something lecherous in Vidal's glare and that creeping, cynical smile of his. I genuinely got a kick out of seeing him as a guest on major news networks. Were it not for his cultural capital, of which until not long ago an abundance remained, these same stations would have called on security to pepper spray his face for that look of his. But they had to have him, because somehow, though our collective mind has blistered in the microwave of the self, many of us still longed to enjoy his pageantry, to listen to what he had to say, whether to condemn, approve, or learn from.

After I'd heard of his death I took a day to read The City and the Pillar, Vidal's 1948 novel about the social politics of sex and identity during the formative years of the generation Tom Brokaw has termed "The Greatest." The hero, Jim Willard, maneuvers cautiously throughout his many adventures on his journey toward self-realization, avoiding as best he can the stock classifications we keep on hand for understanding each other, particularly with regard to his sexuality: Gay, straight, soldier, actor, athlete, black, white, etc.

After the publication of his most recent memoir, Vidal pointedly explains during an interview what to the novel's young man was little more than an inclination: "Anybody who's dumb enough to think anyone else's personality is governed entirely by his sexual taste is insane. There's no such thing as a gay person. There's a gay act, we know what that is, or can be. That's it. Once you allow yourself to be categorized Adolf Hitler's gonna come along and say I don't like your category. I think we better remove you, you types."

Imagine for a moment the type of country America may have been if not for the caveman way we go about assessing and containing the Other: for/against, us/ them, Muslim/Christian, black/white, gay/straight, good/evil, ad absurdum.

Gore Vidal was a genuine personality and a man of fertile intellect and imagination. America is a little grimmer without him.

Reading Kafka for a Way Out (kinda unfinished)

The Provocative and the Instructive

            Powerful literature reflects the world for the world. Whether we ground its conception in Aristotlean mimesis or the romantic ideal of subjective expression, what we see are versions of the world with human beings at the center. Sometimes in the literary reflection we see commemorated the best in our possibilities, and other times those aspects of ourselves that conscience recommends we avoid. The work of Franz Kafka, while curious, entertaining and masterful, impresses most readers with a general feeling of dread. His is seen as a literature of entrapment, one that defines our personal limits while apotheosizing from material to essence the forces that set them.

            It's in this capacity that Kafka's work today is a valued tool in the labs of our leftist punditry.  Whereas it could be used for learning, the left employs Kafka in order to compare and contrast his world with our own. Using his texts as a litmus test for the Horrible in the United States has its purposes. The work so keenly reflects what is happening today that it's not difficult to slip into the supernatural belief that Kafka was writing specifically for us. The correspondence between the stories and contemporary reality stoke fear, disbelief, and anger in concerned citizens. Kafka's short story "Before the Law" can be seen as less analogy than prophecy in the age of the PATRIOT and National Defense Authorization Acts, and the malignancies that have metastasized outward from the lump in the breast of the United States circa the War on Terror render the prophetic plain. 

            The story describes one man's futile attempt to gain access into what is presumably his country's symbolic and functioning judiciary. He arrives one day from the country to find a single doorkeeper standing at the entrance. Requesting admittance, "the doorkeeper says that he can't grant him admittance now," perhaps later, "'but not now.'"  The man then waits unsuccessfully. At times, driven by anger and desperation, he tries to bribe his way in. As the years stretch on his frustrated curses thin into quiet grumblings, and in hindsight it must have seemed a singular stroke of luck that the whole while he was given a stool to sit on. At the end of his life the man asks the doorkeeper why nobody else has tried to access the Law. So the old, feeble man can hear him, the doorkeeper leans over and roars, "No one could gain admittance here, because this entrance was meant solely for you. I'm going to go and shut it now."

            Chris Hedges is one voice on the left who has used the story comparatively in order to demonstrate that the Kafkaesque has become a matter of American domestic policy. With regard to the current trend of Islamophobia, Hedges writes:

                Justice has become as unattainable for Muslim activists in the United States as it was for Kafka’s                 frustrated petitioner. The draconian legal mechanisms that condemn Muslim Americans who speak out            publicly about the outrages we commit in the Middle East have left many, including Syed Fahad Hashmi,    wasting away in supermax prisons. These citizens posed no security threat. But they dared to speak a truth        about the sordid conduct of our nation that the state found unpalatable. And in the bipartisan war on terror,     waged by Republicans and Democrats, this ugly truth in America is branded seditious.

Linking US domestic and foreign policy and Kafka's nightmare fiction requires no stretch of the imagination. If we recognize the three major tropes found in the writer's work, we see just how easy it is:1) intricate networks of authority; 2) individuals ensnared in the networks; 3) the inability of individuals to respond to them in meaningful ways. With the sanctioned revocation of the almost-sacred writ of Habeas Corpus to citizens and non-citizens suspected of terrorism, the comparison is one that a child could make. However justified Hedges is in drawing the connection, and however effective it is in sounding the fascism alarums in his readers, the deeper significance of the story is undercut when we see it only as an illustration of state tyranny.

            Part of the problem with using old literature to explain our present moment is we tend to cherry-pick for examination only those things that we find expedient to our cause. Hedge's use of "Before the Law" is a good example of this on multiple levels, not the least because the story is not a story at all in and of itself, but is actually cherry-picked from Kafka's novel The Trial. Those who have not read the novel are probably unaware of this, as the story is a staple in collections of his shorter works. Though whoever has read the novel will immediately recognize the story as the parable told to Josef K. by the priest in the dark of the cathedral toward the novel's end during a conversation between the two. A brief summary of the novel will be helpful here.

            Josef K. is a young, respectable and successful bank official who, "one morning, without having done anything truly wrong," is arrested. Perhaps he was the victim of "slander," or perhaps, while not committing a truly wrong offense, he did in fact commit a wrong worthy of prosecution. Whatever the case may be, we never discover precisely why Josef K. is arrested and put on trial. The matter is irrelevant as the novel's primary subject is following K. during the year his trial takes place, his absurd, convoluted pursuit of justice, and the final verdict which takes his life by way of a knife "thrust in his heart." As for how the legal system works in The Trial, the court assumes anyone accused of a crime guilty. Defendant's find themselves in a battle that cannot be won. The only presumable chance a defendant has of success is if the court loses his file or his lawyers are able to defer final judgment for, ideally, the remaining years of his natural life. Note how neither scenario results in acquittals. In a sense, everyone in The Trial is guilty, but only some are unlucky enough to be prosecuted for their guilt.

            Taken by itself, "Before the Law" does indeed have two feet to stand on, but it's in the context of the novel, and more specifically the conversation between K. and the priest that its meaning for a reader can reach its zenith. First of all, the parable is only delivered because K. finds the priest friendly and "an exception among those who belong to the court. I trust you," he confides, "more than I do any of them I've met so far. I can speak openly with you." In turn the priest warns K. not to deceive himself. K. wonders how he might be doing this, and the priest replies, "You're deceiving yourself about the court," and then tells K. the parable that is written in the "introductory texts to the Law."

            The parable that Hedge's cites, then, is originally told in the context of deception, in particular the Accused Josef K.'s alleged self-deception either in regard to his distrust of the court or the trust he places in the solemn priest. In fact, the parable itself is classified in the introductory texts to the Law as pertaining directly to a deception of faith or suspicion. Which one is uncertain, but for a reader the parable is restricted when taken without the subsequent conversation and outside the context of the travail of Josef K..

            K.'s immediate reading is similar to the one Hedges implies by juxtaposing it with the real-life story of Mr. Hashmi: Although we are provided the illusion that the Law is accessible and that it serves us, in practice it is a closed system which results in the denial of justice to the individual who seeks it. Now this reading indeed deals with deception, but it assumes that the supplicant in "Before the Law" is the one deceived by the doorkeeper, and Mr. Hashmi and the American public in Hedges' article by the United States' government.

            In each case, K. and Hedges neglect the possibility that the supplicant, Mr. Hashmi and, by extension, the public are deceiving themselves. On the one hand, the doorkeeper does not necessarily lie when he tells the supplicant that admission is possible- it simply doesn't happen during his lifetime. On the other hand, old and recent laws specifying the treatment of citizens and non-citizens, or enemy combatants and non-combatants suspected of terrorism are very clear: if you find yourself suspected of such activity, your life is effectively over, for the rudiments of the traditional courts, such as a right to a fair trial, or any trial at all, are no longer available to you. While the Military Commissions Act of 2006 was bad, the National Defense Authorization Act of 2012 carries with it a uniquely grim weight. Under this law Americans suspected of activities of or related to terrorism can be subject to indefinite detention without the assistance of legal representation. In other words, like the pitiful character waiting a lifetime before the Law, the person unlucky enough to be trapped in this nightmare will inhabit a special place outside the legal sphere - in a society whose binding glue is law, this person is effectively vaporized.

            I do not know every motivation that went into the signing of this law. What I do know is that its passage followed three plus months of Occupy Wall Street activity, which, if you crunch the numbers, implies that the law in part may have been motivated by political factors. When collectives of people demand the downfall of the corporatist state whose rules and standards are the norm of contemporary American society, you tell me the odds that any big shot holding the keys to the kingdom might not interpret this as a terrorist threat. 

            Hedges displays himself as a responsible citizen journalist by pointing out what is draconian in the American legal system, and happily well-cultured at that by using Kafka to accent his point. His outrage is genuine and morally, perhaps legally, justified that men like Hashmi are "wasting away in supermax prisons" for daring to "speak a truth about the sordid conduct of our nation." But Hedges' very outrage hops, skips and jumps on the assumption that the American judiciary, in seeking justice, should operate justly. His comparison is a clarion call to the true believers in American democracy, the disaffected youth and unemployed idealists who have somehow maintained faith in the grand experiment.

            Occupy Wall Street, for which Hedges' ideas have become a guiding light, is an outgrowth of this selfsame outrage. The movement does not merely imply, but religiously embodies the Spirit of '76, much like the Tea Party believes it does. Its members consider the OWS a corrective to an unhealthy diet of corporate greed, war, surveillance, and rankly rugged kill-or-be-killed individualism. They see themselves as the modern day Jeffersons, Adamses and Paines who will burn the corrupted fat from the nation's corpulent diabetic body driven on by the assumption that somewhere under the varicose veins, cheese-fried arteries, and mayonnaise-dipped jellyrolls Columbia's trim figure cuts a fiery burning light. Hedges points out the madness, and in demanding that people do something about it, implies something can be done. He believes that if only 'the people' were awoken to the principles of their democratic legacy in order to reign in the obscenities of the Larry Summers and Loyd Blankfeins and Barack Obamas and Robert Rubins and Jeff Imeltses and John Ashcrofts and Condoleeza Rices and George Bushes and Bill Clintons and Ronald Reagans and Richard Nixons and Gordon Geckos (J), etc., then the global market wouldn't … and GITMO might … and the coming Iran war couldn't  … and Palestinians could … and Social Security would … along with social spending … organized labor … universal healthcare … right?

            Wrong.

            Before returning to The Trial to explain precisely how and why Hedges is wrong, let's point out a few circumstances that directly concern the United States: interminable recession and doggedly high unemployment, militant partisan obstructionism, the downgrading of US credit, the financial destabilization of the Euro zone, the formidable rise of market-savvy China, domestic resistance to corporate pet projects like the Keystone XL pipeline, the militarization of domestic police forces, drone surveillance for the home front, a presidential campaign, and the triple XXX ménage-a-deux in the Strait of Hormuz, a rancorous tangle of bruising love which reads like a prelude to war with Iran. Of course this is but a partial list of circumstances, each one connected in some integral way, all of which increasing the anxiety of the Empire. 

            And with this anxiety in mind, let's now remember that Mr. Hashmi is "wasting away in a supermax prison" for, according to Hedges, critiquing the United States' foreign policy. Next, we should recall that Bradley Manning, unless he cuts a deal that directly implicates Julian Assange in encouraging his leaking of classified documents, will never again see the light of day, which should remind us of the broader context of Obama's war on whistleblowers of all stripes. Finally, it's worth our while to recognize the timing of the National Defense Authorization Act and consider it in the context of the ongoing political upheavals of 2011, beginning with what has come to be called the Arab Spring (add to this the protests in Wisconsin) and ending with the American Autumn, inaugurated by the OWS movement, which I might add promises a spring offensive. For good reasons anxious, the Empire that many say is in decline is arguably more powerful than ever, because within its weaknesses materializes the fear that makes it a serious danger to any person or organization that threatens it. 

            Chris Hedges tells us that we are morally obligated to resist the Empire. His deficiency of hope for meaningful change does not subtract from his conviction that to save our democracy and our planet we must be ready to put our bodies on the line, to endure prison sentences, ostracism, possibly death. I for one am convinced that those of us who participate in serious movements to affect change in this country will be granted one or more of these miserable rewards. And perhaps it would be worth it, in the end, if the change we imagine and dream of was possible in our lifetime or our children's lifetimes or their children's, but our civilization is on a collision course with straight Hell and the major players, the politicos, the bankers, the institutions, are replaceable instruments in an implacable system of paranoia, power and greed that even they, had they the will, are impotent to change. I am a great admirer of Chris Hedges. When I read his words my blood quickens and in me the feeling is revitalized that good people who are willing to do the right thing exist. But Hedges is out of his league here, not because his passion and vitriol are small, but because his heart is great. And although it pains me to say, participants in Occupy Wall Street are out of theirs, and Kafka can tell us why. 

            "Before the Law" read side-by-side examples of US power terrifies and outrages readers. If a writer like Hedges wants the piece to function as propaganda, it fulfills its role gainfully by way of providing a hyperbolically banal view of the opacity and inaccessibility of American state power. Although the story used in this way is provocative, it is not instructive. We sympathize with the supplicant because since 9/11 it's become clear that we can relate to him. We ridicule the doorkeeper because we recognize a dumb bureaucratic slave when we see one. And we condemn the Law itself, because the manner in which it functions contradicts all that we believed it stood for. In short, we are enraged that big power crushes the weak, so we sympathize with the weak, and accept as a given their weakness in the face of the Law's, or the corporate government's unconscionable strength. Makes us want to organize, level the playing field, take the power back.

            But are we as individuals so weak? Are collective movements like Occupy Wall Street so strong? Can engagement with "the system," whether individually or collectively, bear fruit?

The Irony of the Weak Individual

           

            Whatever the reason, Kafka's parable never explains why the man desires to enter the Law. We are told that he arrives from the country, not that he was summoned to arrive. The distinction is important. It means that he does not have to spend his life before the Law. On the contrary, he chooses to spend his time there. Unlike the doorkeeper, the priest reminds K. that the supplicant is "a free man: he can go wherever he wishes, the entrance to the Law alone is denied to him, and this only by one person, the doorkeeper. If he sits on the stool at the side of the door and spends the rest of his life there, he does so of his own free will; the story mentions no element of force." If the supplicant is free to come and go as he pleases, the doorkeeper is not. He "is bound to his post by his office; he is not permitted to go elsewhere outside, but to all appearances he is not permitted to go inside either, even if he wishes to. Moreover he is in the service of the Law but serves only at this entrance, and thus serves only this man, for whom the entrance is solely meant. For this reason as well he is subordinate to him." Considering these factors, the supplicant is bound to the Law only by his desire, whereas the doorkeeper is bound by his role.

            In fact, the doorkeeper is doubly bound. He must fulfill the function of his office and stand attention at the gate. He must also serve the man for whom the gate was solely designed, for whose "entreaties" he is "wearied," for whose "bribes" he "accepts," and for whom he offers a stool to sit on. When the man dies, what then will be the doorkeeper's role? We cannot presume that the doorkeeper will continue to serve the Law, for the Law, in association with the doorkeeper, is there merely to serve the supplicant, and the supplicant will be dead. Without the supplicant, there is no need for the doorkeeper, and if logic follows, no need for the Law. Doubtlessly there are other doorkeepers as well as other supplicants, so the Law will continue to exist. But the critical point here is not whether the Law exists, but why it continues to, a question the priest, perhaps unsettlingly, responds to: "The [Law] wants nothing from you. It receives you when you come and dismisses you when you go."

            The supplicant in Kafka's parable ruins himself on a single assumption: the Law has something to offer him. Extend the assumption a little further and we begin to glimpse like a slab of ice on the surface of a pond the supplicant's belief in the Law, his faith. It's a reasonable inference for us to make. For what other reason would the man spend a lifetime trying to access the Law if not for the belief that he could get something out of it? And from this first assumption follow others, such as if he waits it out he will gain access at some point in the future. The problem is the Law appears not to have been designed for the purpose of providing people like the supplicant what they aim to get out of it. Whatever way you look at it, it was designed to either keep people out or draw them near through the half-spoken promise of exclusion. The Law in Kafka's parable does not pursue those who have no wish to get in.

           

The Fallacy of Collective Strength in the Age of Digital Capitalism

           

            For the first couple months, Occupy Wall Street was for me a glimmer of water in the desert. Loud, energetic, unwieldy and just, by awakening in participants, curious observers and sympathizers a vision of shared exploitation and misery, it inspired a genuine feeling of hope in people that they could change the system. The Arab Spring served as hard evidence the assumption that History was on its side, because History, in the end, is just, and every fascist eventually falls.  Success depended on ever-growing numbers and the courage of persistence, and in order to cultivate its needs the truth would need to be spoken loud enough for even the most cynical and dismissive of listeners to hear. And many people did hear. Occupy demonstrations cropped up all over the country, and as a result, the demonstrations and demonstrators made statements loud enough to be heard by the banks and Capitol Hill. Bank of America nixed plans to charge a monthly debit card fee, and the Obama administration rejected the Keystone XL pipeline. 60 Minutes ran a pair of decent stories on the SEC's failure to monitor and pursue high-end financial crimes and congress's insider-trading schemes. Songs were written. Bumper stickers made.

            The people finally had a name woven into the vernacular around which ties were made between the personal, the political, the cultural and the social. With a designation, a title, a signifier, a name, great hope abounded that, with a sudden awareness of collective self, the 99% could begin to function as one, developing meaningful strategies and effective tactics for not merely rattling the system, but overhauling it entirely. Wordsworth's lines on living in France in the era of the revolution came to mind: "Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive/ But to be young was very Heaven!" Youth was the buzz word for me, for the advent of the people as a People under the unifying banner of the 99% was both a birth of consciousness and of functionality and purpose.

            As of now, folks who looked with some degree of intrigue on the movement in its infancy assume that it's just about over. These are the people who perhaps sympathized with the movement's sentiments while likely frowning on its tactics as they were understood through the news; in other words, the very people OWS needed and need if it is to affect the changes it desires. Without headline-worthy tangible evidence like an occupation of the Brooklyn Bridge or the pepper spraying of passive student protesters, it's difficult for these types to imagine that Occupy was anything more than a passing fad.  It will be interesting to see the manner in which the movement decides to mobilize this spring. Only a demonstration the likes of an electrical surge through the nerve endings of the nation can validate last autumn's efforts and vindicate last autumn's losses. And validate and vindicate it must. Were the spring to come and go without a show of compelling mass action, the birth of Occupy Wall Street will have accomplished only the creation of a sense of collective self among those poised precariously on the middle to lower rungs of the socioeconomic ladder. While this is a tremendous accomplishment in itself, the price for it is exorbitant.

            Whether we view Occupy today as diminished, or as undergoing a period of quiet gestation, its effects are unsettling. I believe that the provision in the National Defense Authorization Act regarding the indefinite detention sans legal counsel for citizens suspected of terrorist activities would have come, if not on the last day of the past year, then some time in the near future. However, Occupy gave the corporatists something to respond to, and the NDAA was that response. Notwithstanding the battered heads, arrests, and evictions, OWS has strengthened the state against agitation.

            It is an unintended consequence of sociopolitical movements with a real ax to grind the augmentation of the forces they seek to destroy. OWS was and is, for the time being, an educative moment in time. But who reaps the benefit of this lesson in manifested social unrest is not the 99%. It is the 1%, the plutocrats and oligarchs who have learned most significantly. Mayor Mike Bloomberg learned, for example, the extent to which the NYPD was his own private army. Wall Street learned that, indeed, the surging torrents of the masses turn to shallow puddles at its door; it learned that no assembly of the disaffected, however large, however righteous, needs enter and disrupt its halls of commerce. And the president is about to learn that 50% of the 99% are still willing to tow the line this fall by voting for him out of the misunderstood quadrennial fear that the Republican alternative will be worse, even after committing himself to the democratic atrocity that any thinking human being will remember the NDAA to signify. Based on this kind of electoral calculus, whether the 99% are capable of thinking at all is dubious.

            The belief that Occupy-style collective action translates into strength is a fallacy. It signifies a consumerist archetypal behavior in the mind of the capitalistic god. In lay terms, it is one mode of expression among a catalogue of others. As an analogy, it is to the system what the violin is to the orchestra, a familiar and relied upon instrument that plays a part in the whole. It is also an expression of nostalgia for a past rendered and understood at the drive-in. It feeds our narcissism by allowing us to participate in reproductions of bygone moments of collective glory. It tells us that now is our time to do what our fathers did, and provides us the opportunity to inhabit a romanticized role churned out from the ad-man's factory of dreams.

            And this fallacy will be fleshed out when the story of Occupy Wall Street is made into an HBO film. Already there are books that have recorded the boots-on-the-ground eye-witness history of the movement, which are essential movers in the fetishization and objectification into a commodified consumer product of what was imagined to be a genuine people's movement. Worst of all, the spirit itself which made OWS compelling is really no more than a consumer choice; whether you conform to the system or stand against it, both positions are contained in its very structure. The difference between becoming an activist and a hedge fund manager is tantamount to purchasing the red dress or the blue jeans in the cosmos of early digital capitalism. By seeking to destroy the system, movements like OWS today strengthen it, and prove time and time again that the price of denouncing capitalism is total liquidation within it.

            Collective movements do not subvert the system. As a contemporary mode of expression, as a choice from within, they confirm it.

            Sad

                        & strange

            & sad again

                        these days

                                    are indeed

Kafka's Way Out

            The Trial concludes when two "half-mute, insensitive" men arrive at Josef K.'s apartment to escort him to his execution. After K. asks the men why they of all people were sent for him, they are "apparently at a loss for an answer." As if debased by the sheer mindlessness of his captors, K. decides that he will go no further. He reasons that he won't need his strength for much longer, so he might as well expend it now. Silently the men struggle to move him, as though trying to fit a couch through a narrow doorway. And then K.'s effort relents, as he realizes there "would be nothing heroic in resistance, in making trouble for these men, in trying to enjoy a final vestige of life by fighting back."

            The predicament K. finds himself in is the result of a rational reflex to fight back against a system that he perceived to be threatening his very being. When K. was arrested in the beginning of the book, which marked the commencement of his trial, who's to say that K. had to cooperate? Yet cooperate he does. Throughout the novel, as K.'s worry and paranoia increase, his resistance - to say participation - in his trial intensifies, and the hopelessness of a positive outcome settles. He seems to find the court, or the Law, in the strangest of places, as though no matter where he looks, whether in the loft of a tenement or under his bed, he would find the court's judgment and the executioner's blade. The very act of being accused, of being placed on trial, activates in K.'s imagination the sordid nightmare which in turn activates the court. Paradoxically, the court's aloofness to K. makes it for him that much closer. Like Bentham's panoptican, whether the court observes his every move is irrelevant, for K.'s guilty imagination ensures it's presence, hence ensuring, more gravely, it's reality to exert its will upon him. As the priest tells us in the parable, "The [Law] wants nothing from you. It receives you when you come and dismisses you when you go." Likewise, as the supplicant in the parable is not forced to remain before the law, neither must K. endure the mortal absurdity of his trial. Like the supplicant, he chooses to.

            There is ample evidence in the last pages of The Trial that demonstrates the significant responsibility K. bears for the trial and its outcome. If we return to the manner in which the two men escort K. to his demise, we immediately note peculiarities which, on close inspection, force us to question who is in charge of the situation. At first glance it seems obvious that the escorts wield the power, if by number alone. But as is the case with the parable, or "Before the Law," the situation is not as it appears. For one, on the way to the place of execution, Kafka makes a point of telling us that the three men walked "in total accord," the escorts "yielding willingly to K.'s slightest move." That the escorts yield suggests a degree of compliance with K., as though they are only along for the ride, and willingly at that. Next, the three men as a whole are described as "of the sort seldom formed except by lifeless matter." Again, since the men yield to K., it's fair to infer that he is what imbues the unit with any sort of vitality, however clumsy, when he stops and when he struggles, when he walks this way or that. In fact, after one such pause, K. tells the men that he "didn't really want to stop," to which the men respond with shame for their "ready compliance." They are so compliant, so docile, that when K. eventually starts to run, the two men "run with him, gasping for breath." It's important to notice how they don't chase after him, run him down, or try to catch him, but in line with courtesy and with a trace of propriety, they run with him.  And where do they run but to a "small stone quarry, abandoned and desolate," where the men "halted, either because this spot had been their goal from the beginning, or because they were too tired to go any farther." Buried within this achievement in absurdity is the feeling that the men are making it all up as they go along responding to K.. Yet if they are docile bodies that compliment K.'s whim, we must ask the question as to who the actual artist is behind this dreadful conclusion.

            If there is any doubt as to K.'s agency in the ordeal at this point, Kafka continues to give us more peculiarities to chew on. But from this point on, they are of a different sort than the walk there. Now, rather than the men willfully yielding to K., the opposite occurs. At the quarry K. is promptly undressed by the two men. Kafka tells us that he begins to shiver "involuntarily." The use of this adverb is odd in its redundancy, since by definition shivering is an involuntary process. Yet it could be necessary if Kafka intended to emphasize something else, which I propose to be K.'s voluntary acceptance of his disrobement. Although K. doesn't encourage the men to disrobe him, he doesn't resist either- he volunteers himself to what he presumes to be the protocols of the court. Offering his full "cooperation," he is moved around like a lifeless dummy, a puppet, a breathing corpse. He is "sat down on the ground," "propped … against a stone," and his head is "laid … down on it." He watches the "nauseating courtesies" as "one of them passed the knife across to [him] to the other, who passed it back over [him]." Most startlingly of all, K. thinks for a moment that it is "his duty to seize the knife as it floated from hand to hand above him," not to use against his assailants, but to "plunge … into himself; But he didn't do so … instead he twisted his still-free neck and looked about him," and as the knife is "thrust" "into his heart," he says of his verdict as the two men look on, "Like a dog!"

            There is no reason for our lives to parallel the doomed fortunes of Kafka's personae. The American Empire is at its best when it has something to lean against, a shadow against which it can measure its own, an antagonism out of which it can discover what it is by way of what it is not. While we have little power in this nation, we have the choice of determining to what degree we are going to participate in it. We can choose to lay down our bodies, as Hedges would have it, and provide the empire another easy snack, or scurrying into the woods, out of sight, making its feeding slightly more difficult by forcing it to search more desperately for its next kill.  And kill it will, because killing is what empires do, and killing is what this empire in particular is very good at.

CECILY MCMILLAN AND TACTICAL DISHONESTY

If you want to know what Occupy Wall Street has in store for the spring and summer months, a good place to look is the case of Cecily McMillan.

Look out Saint Patrick. The Occupy movement's praying in pious overdrive to beatify a new saint for the 17^th of March.  McMillan, a 23 year old Northeast regional organizer for the Young Democratic Socialists and a graduate student at the New School in NYC, this last week has enjoyed the sympathy and celebrity that police misconduct affords the victimized. Arrested on felony charges of assaulting a police officer and obstruction of governmental administration, the very white girl clad in colors befitting the holiday was captured on video suffering either a seizure or a panic attack while police passively looked on, refusing to immediately remove her handcuffs or provide prompt medical care. The incident is the latest in a series of police brutality cases since the movement's birth last September. However, unlike the others, there's a blemish in what otherwise appears a perfect complexion of documented police misconduct: the "Other Video," which plainly shows McMillan delivering a whooping spur-of-the-moment elbow blast to the face of her arresting officer.

In an exclusive interview Friday with Amy Goodman on Democracy Now, McMillan, accompanied by her lawyer, described her injuries. Bruises spot her body, including a yellowish blue handprint above her right breast, she is said to walk with a limp, she has scratches, her back is in pain, she had a concussion, and her ribs are bruised. On this last point, media outlets, including Democracy Now, have been reporting that they are broken or cracked, but McMillan repeated a couple of times they are only bruised. After she cleared this up, Goodman continued to use the word "cracked."

Aside from the bodily harm she sustained, McMillan discussed the length of time she was in police custody in a way that made her look unable to grasp the idea that when you're under arrest you're no longer the one calling the shots. She was arrested on a Saturday and arraigned on Sunday. Somehow, however, McMillan comes up with 40 hours. This, of course, would mean the graduate student and activist was arrested around 8 AM on Saturday and released just before midnight on Sunday. In other words, 40 hours is exaggerated. During this time, McMillian was moved around from hospitals to jails in "various police cars," unable to contact a lawyer, unaware of the charges she faced. 

As an interviewer, Goodman seemed to me grasping for anything solid to hold onto that would suggest Cecily McMillan was brutalized by police, like implying that staying overnight in prison following an arrest is anything out of the ordinary in even the smallest of American towns. This is uncharacteristic of Amy Goodman, whose credibility as a journalist is based on a level of commitment to the truth on authentically substantive issues virtually unseen in today's corporate media-scape. Just like the length of time McMillan was in custody wasn't out of the ordinary, neither were her injuries. Or rather, her injuries were out of the ordinary. Very out of the ordinary. Exquisitely out of the ordinary. Usually when someone assaults a police officer the way Ms. McMillan did, they don't escape the cops' treatment with mild bruises.

In the absence of anything serious to discuss, Goodman leads McMillan along to her hospital visits:

AMY GOODMAN: You went back to the hospital yesterday?

CECILY McMILLAN: Oh, I’ve been to the hospital every day.

AMY GOODMAN: And what did they say yesterday?

CECILY McMILLAN: They finally cleared me of a concussion, so that I can be prescribed sleep aids, because up until last night I had been waking up every 15 minutes to half-an-hour sweating and with night terrors. So, it was very maddening.

AMY GOODMAN: We’ve also turned off the monitors, because you said you couldn’t see the footage. Why?

CECILY McMILLAN: The footage?

AMY GOODMAN: Any kind of footage, you didn’t want to see.

CECILY McMILLAN: Well, my friends had told me that I might want to refrain from watching it, because some of them had cried or even gotten sick when watching it. And my therapist has said that if I were to watch any of the footage, it might trigger further psychological damage.

McMillan's concern for her psychological health here is important to understanding this case on two levels. For one, it is clear that minus serious, tangible injury, intangibles become valuable tools in garnering sympathy from observers and the courts. Second, McMillan's focus on her psychological well being smacks of a level of privilege unknown to the lower echelons of the 99%, who often have neither the time nor the education to abstract a personalized psychological profile of themselves from the tedium and struggle of day to day living.

Saint Cecily has options that those communities of people she presumably believes she speaks for do not: she has the means to seek the aid of a therapist in times of mental distress; she can spend much of her time on the streets protesting the system instead of waiting in a line all day to have her application for food stamps approved at the Department of Social Services; when she has run-ins with the law she can have her voice heard on Democracy Now and have profiles written of her in Rolling Stone;  instead of changing the diapers of the four children she never had the education nor money to abort, she can pursue a graduate degree from a prestigious university in New York; after elbowing a member of the NYPD in the face she can still walk.

At the end of the interview, Cecily McMillan had this to say:

Cecily McMillan: I have been an activist, for at least some time now. I’ve been active since my first—the first anti-Bush protest in Atlanta my senior year, with Student Political Action Club. And I’ve always had a longstanding commitment to peaceful protest. And I released a statement yesterday reiterating my commitment to nonviolent civil disobedience and affirming my innocence. And I really have cautioned people to remain nonviolent, and not only that, but for activists to undergo nonviolent trainings, such was done in the civil rights movement, not because anybody at Occupy is violent, but because I think it’s very easy to manipulate circumstances to make you seem so. And I think that it’s—if we’re going to continue to garner the strength of the public, as we saw with the Million Hoodie March—that night was, I mean, phenomenal—then we’re going to have to remain nonviolent, because that’s the only way that we have unity.

The free pass Goodman gave her guest is in no other place more glaring than it is here. McMillan violently assaulted a police officer, and Goodman knows it. For what reason, then, would Goodman fail to invoke here the footage of McMillan aggressively elbowing the cop in the face? Did she want to mitigate the psychological trauma Saint Cecily has already endured? Amy Goodman's too exceptional a journalist to worry about her guests' feelings.

My theory's that Saint Cecily's assault on the cop is inexpedient to Occupy's cause. My theory's that Democracy Now was doing a bit of politicking on Friday morning, throwing OWS a bone in its time of need. My theory's that OWS is in need of another corps of UC Davis students to non-violently hold the line while some neandrelithic cop fat on In and Out burgers sprays their faces pointblank with high-concentrate pepper juice. My theory's that OWS needs another honorable veteran like Scott Olsen to take a gas can to the skull, or another young veteran to get clubbed so severely by cops high on rage and adrenal pus that his spleen is ruptured and he nearly bleeds out waiting for medical care in a holding cell. My theory's that police brutality caught on film does more good than the back room swindles of Bank of America does in print to galvanize support and mobilize forces for this war that the 99% is losing. My theory's that OWS is in such disarray that it's confusing its target audience, which isn't the cops, but the CORPORATE STATE. My theory's that OWS saw their chance to gain much needed steam this spring in a young college student white, educated and hygienic enough to outrage huge swathes of the American public when seen convulsing on the ground at the feet of our nation's finest.

The Occupy movement sees Saint Cecily as an opportunity, a tool, and the holy crusader herself is narcissistic enough to play along.  Supporting this young woman, however, will prove an EPIC FAIL for the Occupy movement. It will be a disaster. Occupy has enough legitimate cases of unprovoked police brutality in its stockpile to have to resort to using the case of Saint Cecily McMillan, which only works when you omit the video preceding her bodily fit. Furthermore, a case can probably be made for the video's uselessness even with the omission: by Rodney King standards, what happened to McMillan doesn't amount to much. And besides, most people who have ever had a speeding ticket know cops aren't always the most pleasant or fair-minded people to deal with. The great irony, of course, is that Occupy Wall Street doesn't.

Kafkaesque #1: About Face Values

"Droll thing life is-" says Marlowe, the narrator of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, "that mysterious arrangement of merciless logic for a futile purpose."  Such intentionally profound observations on shared experiences like life and death sometime seem too grandiose to be taken seriously in this era of habitual irony and fashion-driven snark. From a cultural perspective, the clever, solipsistic work of Jonathon Ames is for understandable reasons more digestible to 21^st century readers than the gloomy poignancy of Toni Morrison or the dead-serious prophesying of Don DeLillo, as is for moviegoers the characteristic jouissance of Woody Allen's Midnight in Paris over the darker Dostoyevskean preoccupations of Match Point. Lars Von Trier's Melancholia, a masterpiece of deep brooding, speaks from too deeply underground to be heard by most of us, just as Wagner's Die Walkure is today more of an achievement in grand Camp than style (as is opera in general). As the time stretches further outward from 9/11 it seems clear that what is lost in the absence of The Serious in our cultural lives is lost equally in our social and political lives. However, as the following piece attempts to illustrate, we are at a turning point in America's history, when old leases on definitions regarding our values and our place in the world are up for renewal. At this historic juncture, whether you are publicly or privately engaged or wholly disengaged, the "merciless logic" of our time demands nothing less than seriousness …

            … because what happens to the lining of the cheek when there's always a tongue shoved in it? It gets turned into an orifice. Consider the handful of America's finest urinating on Taliban corpses last week.

            The search for the proverbial rotten apple is never as intense as when accumulated evidence tells of a rotten bunch. ABC news reported last week that the soldiers in question should have known better for all the training they received in how to treat the enemy dead, which plainly suggests that despite the stainless ethos of Hooah, the Corps is vulnerable to the unflattering sportsmanship of losers within its rank. In an immaculate show of grace, Rick Perry chimed in that it was just kids being kids. "Unless you have been shot at by the Taliban," says Tea Party frosh congressman Allen West, "shut your mouth, war is hell."  Interestingly enough, the Corps itself appears to have taken a different, wiser approach to the incident, launching an investigation predicated on the question, "What happened in the Marine Corps that this happened?" With its whiff of Sartrean musings, this sounds somewhat unrealistic coming from as old a guard as the USMC. According to a spokesperson, the investigation will take a "holistic look at everything surrounding the issue." So what does the Corps take everything to mean?

            Not much, apparently. Commandant Gen. Jim Amos was the first to announce publicly the pending investigation. What YouTubers saw, he suggests, was behavior "wholly inconsistent with the high standards of conduct and warrior ethos that we have demonstrated throughout our history," which agrees with what the New York Times quoted Pentagon Spokesman George Little as saying: “The conduct depicted in the footage is utterly deplorable and … it does not reflect the standards or values American troops are sworn to uphold." Representing the State Department, Hillary Clinton echoed the sentiment, stating the act was "absolutely inconsistent with American values and the standards we expect from our military personnel," adding grimly that the perpetrators “must be held fully accountable.” Like Kurtz's perceived apostasy, wherein he traded the bounty of his European privilege for the uncivilized wilds of "darkest Africa," these comments pose the issue as a betrayal by the few of the values of the many. So everything, yeah, with the doublespeak caveat that the USMC's idea of the word has serious limitations: in this case four men, one cameraman, and one, distressingly stupid up-loader.

            But is it as simple as Amos, Little, and Clinton would like to suggest, that these marines were anomalies in an order reliably held upright by virtue of deeply ingrained democratic values and military discipline? Was their act so anathema to the consistency of the honorable "warrior ethos" that they'd drop the "holistic look" so soon, disappointing the faith dead French existentialists for a moment thoroughly and doubtlessly enjoyed ("What happened in the Marine Corp that this happened?" Why this, why anything?). Or simpler still, as Representative West and Governor Perry intimate?

            Intentional memory is helpful in a moment such as this. I say intentional, because in the blur of nationalistic noise, it’s an arduous process cutting through historical overdubs. Incidents like the Mai Lai massacre in Vietnam spring to mind, as do the psycho-sexual abuse in Iraq at Abu Ghraib, the shooting stateside by the unraveled soldier at Fort Hood, and the "kill squad" made up of the eleven soldiers recently convicted before a military tribunal of war crimes for the murder and mutilation of three unarmed Afghan civilians. If these acts are not deemed by the top political and military brass as "consistent with American values and the standards we expect from our military personnel," then they too are exceptions to the rule.  Were it just a phenomenon of low-level troops desensitized by the machinations of war, that would be one thing, but the behavior has been modeled from the highest reaches of American power, clearly seen in the previous administration's use of torture and the current one's campaign of targeted extrajudicial assassinations.

            With so many challenges to American values in the conduct of our military personnel (and executives) at home and abroad, is there a point at which what our leaders term exceptions become the rule, in that by both frequency and content they are genuinely reflective of a very real glitch in our proclaimed values at this point in history? The inquiry returns us to Kurtz: if we assume for a moment that his continental betrayal was the peculiarity of a megalomaniacal individual of weak moral fiber, we must conclude that he was, like the marines in question, just another anomaly in his own family tree. But this 'bad apple' or 'lone wolf' explanation is too easy and smacks of an unacceptable level of laziness and moral cowardice.   

            After all, it's not just one man's dark heart that Conrad indicates in his multilayered title. It suggests also the malady of decency and soul palpitating beneath the thickest, most radiant of exterior balms. His work was based in large part on the Caligulean feats of King Leopold's unsavory record of sadism and greed in the Congo. Singular as he was in his ubermensch qualities, to dismiss Kurtz as a 'good boy gone bad' is to ignore the possibility that his betrayal of so-called civilized values was the logical conclusion in a trajectory of Occidental beastliness. His personal crimes reflected the value system of a nation in particular and a continent at large. By superficially stepping outside the system, Kurtz becomes a mirror to the grand colonialists of the 19^th and 20^th centuries. Any failure to recognize this awards Europe a free pass to disown its prodigal son and disassociate itself from the brutality which renders historically conceivable its majesty. And free passes, which translate here into the inability to look inward, are what a nation like the United States has relied upon to uphold its notions of exceptionalism, authority, and grace.  Without these kinds of passes handed out at every recital of the dominant narrative of our nation, historical figures like King Leopold and Andrew Jackson remain an ocean apart, and the young nation's religious embracement of Manifest Destiny and Human Bondage are to this day diagnosed as symptoms of ignominious growing pains rather than a pervasive cancer of the skeletal structure, or, continuing Conrad's metaphor, whispers of a heart murmur instead of cries of full-fledged disease.

            In Apocalypse Now, the adaptation of Conrad's book to the silver screen, Coppola makes it his business to burn dissociative free passes like draft cards. Complete with a ragtag crew of cowboy militants who add romantic soundtracks to their kills and 'hang ten' off the shallows of blood soaked beaches, Coppola's soldiers represent nothing less than American cultural exports minus a fair trade agreement with the country doomed to receive them. Captain Willard, depicted by Martin Sheen, is a deeply flawed military hit man; by taking Kurtz's life, he attempted not only to reckon with the beast within himself, but the more comprehensive, snarling, paranoid, id-driven monster that manufactured the Gulf of Tonkin incident and sent America Commie hunting in Southeast Asia. It's hard not to notice in Coppola's film a grand indictment of the flipside of heralded American values, the dark underbelly which, while not officially recognized by storied Defense Department secretaries like McNamara, Rumsfeld, or Panetta, is essential, and therefore sacred enough from the filmmaker's perspective to the core of American values for its death to be dramatized alongside the slaughter of an ox. In this adaptation, the individuals are far too human to be held singularly accountable for the moral recklessness of their behavior, for whether placed in the malarial waters and dyspeptic jungles of Vietnam, or the backseat of dad's Bonneville at the drive-in theater with Sit-Down Sally Sweetheart, they are undeniably products of the same cultural assembly line whose moral vision and technological efficiency manufactured the likes of Charles Manson and Richard Nixon.

            But there's an alternative reading to Kurtz's story, one that locates as the source of his conversion the fever of the Congo rather than the disease of the Western heart. In his acerbic essay, "An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad's Heart of Darkness," Chinua Achebe grounds his argument in his view of Joseph Conrad as "a thoroughgoing racist."  It's not an alternative reading in the sense that he would disagree with Coppola's filmic treatment of the story described above. Rather, he deduces from the author's characterizations of the place and the people Conrad's personal interpretation of Kurtz's turnaround.

            For Conrad, the Things Fall Apart author writes, "Tragedy begins when things leave their accustomed place, like Europe leaving its safe stronghold between policeman and the baker to take a peep into the heart of darkness." This interpretation suggests that Kurtz's European values were obliterated by the visceral animal seductiveness of a place that is "the antithesis of Europe and therefore civilization, a place where man's vaunted intelligence and refinement are finally mocked by triumphant bestiality." At first glance, you might assume that Conrad's work was informed by a deep resentment of the West, and Kurtz's fall was an artistic fulfillment of his private wishes. After all, how great could Leopold's legions be when his archangels succumb so easily?  If it looks like Conrad was settling a score, look again. By identifying the Achilles Heel of high civilization, Conrad observes how close we always are to the edge where civilization falls back into the abyss of primeval screams. In other words, civilization's as indomitable as the madman's mind is sound, and it's in the region of this fragility that you find civilization's greatest triumph over barbarism. From this point of view, which Achebe argues is Conrad's, Kurtz's disintegration is cathartic to the European mind- rather than creating new anxieties, it eases the persistence of old ones, allowing in this "place of negations at once remote and vaguely familiar … Europe's own state of spiritual grace [to be] manifest." If Achebe is right about Conrad, it is to the latter's credit that he recognized his way of life as something other than full-proof, credit that can be extended to neither America's leaders nor the majority of its people.

            While the beast according to Coppola and Achebe has deeper roots than the whimsy of the individual, folks as disparate as Congressman Allen West and Chris Hedges are in agreement that war is hell, the obvious implication  being that during war, bad shit goes down, and we're all prone to behaving badly. It would be naive to disagree with this view. My grandfather was a marine who was gunned down during the bloody campaign at Iwo Jima. The trauma the man suffered as a result of his experiences during that war stayed with him a lifetime. While he rarely discussed the details of his experience, in my presence anyway, I recall distinctly a visit he and my grandmother made to my parents' house after seeing Spielberg's Saving Private Ryan. Over a plate of pizza my grandfather uncharacteristically placed his face in a single hand and wept. He wept, probably for his dead friends and his youth, for the whole goddamned war and everything that went in and came out of it, including an older brother who had the special distinction of being killed in the Pacific aboard the USS Bullhead when the submarine was destroyed sometime between August 6 and 12, 1945, only days before Japan's unequivocal surrender. My grandfather was 73 years old and the war was still happening.

            From West's point of view, the fact that war is hell does not make its exercise less palatable; it simply makes what happens during war invariably beyond anyone's reach to critique. That is unless you have fought in a war yourself (tellingly, he has yet to properly discuss those soldiers within the Corps who see the urination as a disgrace and another potential danger they'll have to reckon with). It is a simpleton's perspective with a formula that reads as follows: war exists; we fight wars; war is hell; anything goes.

            The utter stupidity and evasive cowardice involved in this intellectually flimsy, morally vacuous view is in no way better displayed than when West and his ilk invoke the atrocities committed by enemy forces in order to excuse those carried out by our own. West:

I have sat back and assessed the incident with the video of our Marines urinating on Taliban corpses. I do not recall any self-righteous indignation when our Delta snipers Shugart and Gordon had their bodies dragged through Mogadishu. Neither do I recall media outrage and condemnation of our Blackwater security contractors being killed, their bodies burned, and hung from a bridge in Fallujah. All these over-emotional pundits and armchair quarterbacks need to chill. Does anyone remember the two Soldiers from the 101st Airborne Division who were beheaded and gutted in Iraq?

Bad enough is West's rank need to put the marines' debacle in the context of enemy misconduct, but his suggestion that there was no media outrage over the mutilation of Americans is dishonest. While the corporate media, which plays the stenographer to  Tea Partiers and Democrats alike, can be faulted for much (the Iraq War included), it bears zero fault in this.

              Rick Perry sang the righteous hymn as well, to great fanfare at a recent Republican debate. Like West, he argues that the behavior of the troops is presaged by the volatility of their enemy and environment:

They — they made a — a mistake that the military needs to deal with. And they need to be punished. But the fact of the matter — the fact of the matter is this, when the Secretary of Defense calls that a despicable act, when he calls that utterly despicable. Let me tell you what’s utterly despicable, cutting Danny Pearl’s head off and showing the video of it. Hanging our contractors from bridges. That’s utterly despicable. For our president for the Secretary of State, for the Department of Defense secretary to make those kinds of statements about those young Marines — yes, they need to be punished, but when you see this president with that type of disdain for our country, taking a trillion dollars out of our defense budget, 100,000 of our military off of our front lines, and a reduction of forces, I lived through a reduction of force once and I saw the result of it in the sands of Iran in 1979. Never again.

Keep in mind these are the same folks who trumpet the song of American Exceptionalism from whatever soapbox is in their nearest vicinity all the way to political appointments, corporate cash, and ultimately the bank. Somehow, according to Perry, by pissing on corpses we prevent existential threats to our democratic principles and freedoms- in a word, to civilization as we know it. If Conrad did see Europe's superiority in its unrelenting grip on order, then in Rick Perry we see a man whose tenuous grasp points to an inevitable slip. Just remember the number of people Perry has executed in his godly state, some of whom were demonstrably innocent, others demonstrably retarded, others demonstrably juvenile, and still others with demonstrably incompetent legal counsel. Pissing on corpses understandably fails to register as a big deal when in eleven years the man's Christian American values led him to sign off on the murder of 234 people.

            Chris Hedges, a former war correspondent with the New York Times, who, among other events, chronicled firsthand the genocide in Bosnia, has a more complex view on the matter. Yes, war is hell, and yes, it can bring about unsparingly and without surprise the worst in otherwise decent people. From here, however, Hedges' and West's views diverge sharply. The realities of war have taught Hedges that it should be waged only when every other alternative has been exhausted. War is Hell does not suggest to Hedges that all is permissible. After all, the proposition is absurd in its terrible reach. With its long arm, West's principle would sympathize, at least in principle, with the Serbs and Nazis of genocide, as well as the United States of the ultimate war crime, the unprovoked invasion, seizure and occupation of a sovereign nation.

            Like Coppola, Hedges looks for causality. While under the Geneva Conventions the desecration of enemy dead is a war crime, Hedges seeks the larger, comprehensive picture. For years he has asked why America is in countries like Afghanistan and Iraq in the first place. Undoubtedly, geopolitical and economic interests played their part in the decision of the nation to send the troops and the contractors out, so Hedges, like a good journalist, has looked to understand exactly who these interests represented and whom they made good for gain. But there's another dimension to these empirical threads - the human one: what kind of a society made up of what kind of culture would allow in the first place wars of this nature and consequently, reflexively, justify the inevitable losses in every sense of the word on the grounds of a childishly simplistic War is Hell principle?

            What's of paramount interest here is how far removed thinkers like Hedges are from the nexus where hardline right wingers like Perry merge with staunch bastions of the liberal front like Clinton and Obama. While the former will indeed stoop so low as unconditionally defend the depraved actions of military personnel, liberals commit themselves to the same position by making scapegoats of dysfunctional cogs in their ideologically blessed machine, defending most successfully time after time the myth of American righteousness. In the War on Terror anything goes, and the executive overreach of the prior and present administrations asks the citizens of the United States to simply trust them with the horrifying scope of their newfound, unconstitutional powers. And we do trust them, because we've been indoctrinated to believe the old banter on American values that our leaders have always peddled, that our cultural programs reinforce. We believe it because, with every crisis of contradiction, the problem is diagnosed, isolated, radiated, and removed. In both extremes, from Perry to Clinton, the assumption that American values themselves are beyond reproach is made, no matter the evidence brought before them or committed by them. Obama's signing into law of the National Defense Authorization Act of 2012 serves here as ample proof.

            We have another proof in the case of Rod Blagojevich. When the disgraced governor attempted to sell the newly elected president's vacated senate seat, his crime was getting caught at an otherwise typical practice in modern plutocracy. What is the result of Citizens United, after all, but the creation and murder of political aspirants via massive sums of hard cash? Blagojevich's arrest and recent sentencing erased whatever meaningful connections people may have made from his actual crime to the larger picture of 21^st century money-takes-all politics. Branded a criminal, a jailbird, a man about to 'do time,' Blagojevich is now another archetype in the American characterscape that makes deep pondering of his situation by ordinary citizens unlikely. In the end his downfall didn't expose the weaknesses that have crippled the republic, but confirmed the strength of the correctives that we consistently attribute to it. Weakness exposed, problem eradicated, it's another example of how the system works, especially in times of peril. In this sense, the great pissing debacle of 2012 will likely serve public perception as a foil to the selfless heroism of the Few and the Proud.

            What happened in Afghanistan's the most recent example of a challenge to American values as they are traditionally propagated and understood. As such, it was predictably a polarizing event, sparking outrage as well as overwhelming streams of support from across the country. In both cases, however, and for reasons we have discussed, the reactions indicate serious problems for the empire.

            The superficial reason for the outrage is articulated in the official statements catalogued early in this essay from the USMC, the Pentagon, and the State Department. Its dominant theme is that the marines are guilty of betraying unquestionable American values. That the Corps, supported by the Pentagon and the State Department, will apparently direct the attention of its investigation onto the particular marines in question instead of the culture of the Corps itself speaks to a refusal or inability to look inward at the belief-system and subsequent policy that renders possible this behavior. It signals the extraordinary confidence in our leadership of the American way as it expresses itself through military engagements. Ultimately, the compartmentalization of blame signals a dangerous blind spot in our moral vision, and the condemnation of the particular marines along with attempts to isolate the incident, heighten our hubristic sense of national self.

            Conversely, the support, while it may appear otherwise, is less of detriment to the empire than the outrage. Pure Stupid is not a disorder that's hard to figure out. The Rick Perrys of the country who explain away the conduct of these marines are less guilty of hubris than simplemindedness. Clearly, they haven't read the Greeks and don't realize there's a price to pay for the desecration of the dead. Of course, their unconditional support of the troops is unsavory, but, unlike the rhetoric of outrage, it is at bottom an honest portrayal of crass American hypocrisy. In the end, the slick outrage and the dumb support work hand in hand to reify further notions of American values: we are tough, but we are fair, a persistent illusion in our moribund slide toward the end.

            I began by invoking the words of Marlowe, who said that life is a droll affair. I'd be remiss to suggest that evidence doesn't point in this direction. But it's more than that, it's Kafkaesque, a kaleidoscope of relative truths and well-constructed illusions, with America its foremost exemplar. Just think that the starting point for this piece was marines urinating on the corpses of Taliban fighters. Last week we had at presidential debates the word 'urinating' bobbing in the verbal toilet like a turd, as well as politicians and pundits solemnly explaining away a video we all saw showing our finest sprinkling their salt and performing last shakes over once-human life, laughing as though someone had just farted. We might imagine that the clown who uploaded the video had the same hopes for the thing going viral as every other schmuck who for their own hit-count vanity posts Highlights of Dumb for the week.  Incredibly, it inspired an op-ed in the Seattle-Post Intelligencer titled, "You Pee for Me, Marine …"  Seriously. For some, it rehashed memory of past enemy atrocities in the name of excusing our own, while for others, it spoke to the need to stand closer to our 'real' American values in this protracted attempt to impose at gunpoint what we think they are on others. For both reasons, it became a clarion call from coast to coast for why we fight.

            After Kurtz's death, Marlowe has reason to believe that his life is mortally threatened. His respect for Kurtz was embedded in his observation that the man "had something to say," but it wasn't expressed in the mutability of words, but in the act of having "stepped over the edge" of Western civilization- a single, irrevocable, true step. When the time comes for Marlowe to make his final pronouncements, he's surprised to find he's speechless. Afterwards and still alive, he half-ironically reflects on how "The most you can hope from [life] is some knowledge of yourself," before adding, in complete seriousness, that "it comes too late - a crop of unextinguishable regrets."

            What are the truths of American values, and are we as a society culturally educated enough to do anything but blindly trust the definitions we were raised with? The pissing incident is important because no matter how we dignify it, no matter how we interpret its causes and its meaning, it remains just four representatives of the United States abroad emptying their bladders in the crudest of possible ways on dead human beings. Does reality even matter to most Americans if all we take from it is what we wish to see?