Cyrano’s Journal /•\ ||| Placebo ART

Overpaid, arrogant, terminally ignorant, malignant scumbags rule the earth thanks to the ascension to the pinnacle of power of corporations…whose global stronghold remains the United States of Manufactured Imbecility.

Let’s start with this….(part one of two parts….both available at the Socialist Project)
http://www.socialistproject.ca/bullet/bullet102.html
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Since it’s well into planting season here in Poland, I found this piece particularly compelling. I have been growing white carrots (old European kind) and purple (from Pakistan) and white beets and lots of collards and kale and spinach and several kinds of lettuce, as well as fava beans and pole beans and two kinds of onions and black Aztec corn and six varieties of tomatos as well as a white short season watermelon and three winter squash (from Greece and Japan). All this in a small garden in my backyard. Also in containers are two varities of peppers (one hot, one not).

What strikes one in this article is not just the obvious agribusiness hegemony over world agriculture. It’s the naked greed and rather clear destruction these corporate ghouls express. In Iraq today there is a tomato that is all but extinct — although heirloom seed companies in the US will send some to you. This is typical, for Monsanto, Archer Daniels Midland, and Dupont need control, and this is the recurring lesson of advanced capital today. Total domination. The world in which we live is so mediated by waste capital, so compromised in terms of quality of life, that most people have forgotten there are alternatives. These alternatives take the form of community gardening, they take the form of resistance to institutional culture and to the rampant militarising of everything. Read more

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Krugman in the Times today writes about peak oil, essentially. The dwindling global supply of hydro-carbons in the ground. We may surmount the problem via some remarkable new technology (cold fusion?), but few are speaking publically about the consequences if we don’t. The adjustment will be difficult across the board. Every aspect of the social sphere will be affected. And every problem will be amplified many times by the fact that nothing brings out the beast in man like a little scarcity.

Los Angeles, this endless traffic jam posing as a city, will be impacted hugely. Los Angeles will “re-densify.” I’m curious to watch how this process unfolds in the public imagination. Currently, the urban core is viewed as a wasteland and a locus of dysfunction. And, well, that’s pretty accurate as any trip South along Alameda will illustrate. Los Angeles, it strikes me, was the first American city that was NOT a city in the traditional sense. Los Angeles was born on the promise of providing everyone with a suburban existence, and Los Angeles could do this because of cheap, abundant energy in the form of oil. That’s all over with now, despite the fact that the public imagination is fully occupied by fantasies of endless abundance.

I agree with the general take on Cyrano that whatever happens in 2008 is unlikely to seriously slow America’s descent into fascism. American delusions have accumulated too much momentum at this point (largely due to the turbo-charge effect of abundant oil). And the corporate plutocracy includes elements that understand fully and with clarity how to control the behemoth of public opinion to innoculate the system against change. The one aspect of Obama’s candidacy that I do find intriguing is the infrastructure he’s building via the web. The GOP has long understood that its long term interests required a radical tightening over who is allowed to cast a vote, and Obama’s internet efforts represent the first signs of awareness among the brain-dead Dems that their interests lie in the opposite direction. At times I think Obama’s bland rhetoric exists in order to distract our corporate masters from the fact that he is attempting to circumvent their tighetning grip on the money spigot. Other times I think Obama will fold as quick as the next politician should he defeat McSame.

The other aspect of the 2008 election I find interesting are the signs that the so called “Southern strategy” that has been a keystone in three decades of Republican dominance seems to have lost its mojo. Hapless Hillary Clinton has been beating that drum hard and I think the Obama people are feeling a growing confidence that, while it will shave off some of the working white folks, it will no longer be a trump card for the plutocrats to play whenever they feel threatened. Obviously, this is a prognosis I might have to retract, but…

Assuming Obama wins it will be illuminating to watch what happens to some of the major malefactors of the Bush era. Addington, Rove, Feith, Gonzo - if the creep toward overt fascism is to be arrested, these figures will need to be stripped bare in the public arena. It’s impossible to imagine Obama doing this…but it’s not impossible to imagine an energized Congress doing so, assuming the Dems can increase their margins substantially on Obama’s coattails. Then again…no…it’s impossible to imagine…The Bush-istas will simply melt into the shadows of the ICU and sharpen their scalpels for another go at the patient on life support…

GuyZi

I think your points about Iron Man are right, and it’s worth taking note, again, of the Orientalism implicit in these projects. Simply by virtue of having a colonial occupation in Afghanistan presented in a completely de-contextualized way, one creates the knee-jerk reactions about Islam and terrorism that the FOX news channel likes to peddle. The mysterious east has always been presented in the west as timeless and mysterious –and the motives of its people indecipherable and shrouded in veils of ancient tribal rights the progressive west can’t (and doesn’t want to) fathom.

The terrorists in this film are ALL dirty and bearded and ruthless — and somehow made to seem sadistic even while being blowtorched by Bob Downey. The western soldiers are smiling and clean and friendly — and the deaths of the US soldiers is awash in genuine suffering and pain, while the death of the *terrorists*(sic) is simply there to demonstrate how cool Downey’s newest weapons are.

The world of Marvel comics and DC comics is a world of compensatory gratification for a powerless populace; its obvious fantasies are those of pimple-faced lumpen teens who would love to grab a cape each night (or a suit of iron) and go beat the shit out of someone ….and who better these days than those lousy A-rabs. This brings me, in a roundabout fashion, to the London mayoral election. Boris Johnson wins convincingly, over Ken Livingstone. What to make of this? Johnson is an Eton educated toff, a rich Torrie prick, and one of those self consciously rumpled ruling class assholes that England is so good at turning out. What was his appeal? Well, first, and maybe most importantly, he was a regular on the satirical news show Have I Got News for You, which made him a comfortable iconic figure for most Londoners. Even those council [projects] welfare underclass poor he was attacking seemed somehow to prefer his blond bloated image to that of Red Ken. That he often used openly racist language (picaninnie etc) seems not to have mattered. But this is also about the demise of New Labour. Now, what are the implications in all this …..in terms of the psychology of London voters? I think that it speaks most directly to the emptiness at the heart of electoral politics in the west … or at least in the major western countries (the US, England, Germany, and France). The meaningless theatre of these popularity contests cannot be clearer at this point. Boris Johnson is an asshole — a rich conceited prig, and in a sense he is a bit like George Bush; an empty mouthpiece with a genial smile and happy go lucky attitude. In the US the Obama/Hillary show staggers forward with appearences on FOX news. What the fuck? Interviews with Bill *lufa* O’Reilly? Ok, in a sense, this is a satirical news show, too. But why do it? The answer is because it matters not, because none of these candidates has anything to say. Because the Spectacle neutralizes real opposition and replaces it with kitsch faux opposition. Do you like waffles or pancakes? I like pancakes damnit, and I’m voting for pancakes. From Reagan to Arnold to Boris to Bush — from Blair to Berlusconi to Merkel to Sarko. Assholes top to bottom.

Boris Johnson, the ludicrous nonentity replacing “Red Ken” as London’s mayor. That such clowns could fill the top social positions in supposedly “modern” democracies like Britain, France or the US underscores the meaninglessness of bourgeois rituals, such as elections.

This brings me one final observation. The asshole quality of people like Sarkozy and Boris Johnson and Bush and Cheney is part of the unconscious self-loathing of the populace. It’s the outward projection of the increasingly putrid inner lives (what there is of them) of the people of western advanced capitalist societies. School shootings, addiction to useless anti depressants (and drugs and booze of all kinds) and to TV and video distraction is all part of the same fabric. Who better to represent a nation of alcoholics than Boris Johnson? It’s why I fear McCain will probably win the election next year. His snarky rictus of a smile, his near pyschotic glare and his rigid and robotic body movements all reflect the collective malaise of the nation. Scalia is a demonic psycho, so is Cheney, so is Boris, so is Condi and so is McCain and Clinton (both of them). These are all dark repugnant people bereft of compassion. They are the projections of our dark Id.

One last note; the Pope (the Panzer Pope) travels to South America. With my man Lugo now elected in Paraguay, coupled to Correa and Chavez and Morales, one expects a rough trip for the Pontiff — a man who once was the Vatican enforcer against Liberation Theology. Nobody in South America has forgotten Oscar Romero. Certainly Lugo hasn’t, since he’s a Catholic bishop himself. I ask people to look at Chavez, or Morales; or Lugo — and see if you can’t detect the spark of life in these men, men who are still human. There is no spark in Boris Johnson, nor in Bush. There is no spark in Scalia or Rupert Murdoch for that matter. The blank insect-like asexuality of Iron Man (etc) is the direction of the advanced west. Shiny, hard, and compassionless — self righteous and ruthless. I think also of Chigurh in No Country for Old Men, and Daniel Plainview in There Will Be Blood – somehow also capturing something of this new pathology. To vote for those who hate you, who want to take more from you, who openly insult you, is a sign of madness. And this is a culture of almost total madness.

—John Steppling

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I watched a video clip of Antonin Scalia the other day. He was talking to Leslie Stahl about torture and he made the distinction that torture is not “cruel and unusual punishment” because, you see, it really isn’t punishment. You don’t torture someone to punish them, do you? No, you torture them because they have information that you need. How do you know they have this information? Well, you just do. And if you get it wrong and kill the sucker…nobody’s perfect…the means justify the ends…you can’t make an omelette, etc. In this blithe fashion, lovable Uncle Antonin casually dispensed with 700 plus years of Anglo-American jurisprudence, batting back Stahl’s mosquito-esque protestations with the bland observation that “it’s simply my opinion…but I’m right.” And that’s when you could see the reptile emerge in Antonin’s small dark eyes. One of the pleasures of the internet where video is concerned is the ability to replay footage. I did that with the closing beats of this remarkable interview. For a split second Scalia let his grumpy uncle act drop away and you could see the unrepentant fascist intent on his covert mission, which is to undermine whatever there is in American law that protects the weak against the dictates of the powerful.

At its roots, the authoritarian temperament is defined by cowardice and shame. The authoritarian projects his or her own inner weakness - which cannot be tolerated even for a moment - onto someone vulnerable and then seeks to eradicate that weakness by proxy. In this the authoritarian fails dismally, but the failure is always interpreted as the failure to go “far enough.” The victim must be tormented and destroyed. Depradations snowball toward atrocity and multitudes can fall before some outside force intervenes and halts the dynamic. These men are at the mercy of their own infantile projections. It’s a very dark and disturbing capacity, our ability to wander in violent unreality, but there you have it. At root, the pornography of domination is compensatory, and the game must always be rigged so that victory is guaranteed. Authoritarians come to the fore when a culture begins to tip into decline.

There have always been authoritarians in American political life, but Nixon is where one sees the this temperament in full bloom. Scalia, Bush, Cheney - these are all Nixon men, and they have made it their solemn duty to undermine American political traditions to the degree that they embody democratic principles. Since America is a mercantile, corporatist entity, the authoritarian temperament expresses itself in the mode of fascism, but a man like Scalia doesn’t really care what form of authority he uses to justify his assault on the powerless. His membership in Opus Dei indicates his willingness to support the Grand Inquisitor should America suddenly transform into a culture of obedient Catholics, for example.

On a purely academic level it’ll be interesting to see how American political culture fares if the population is able to shuck off the Republican yoke this year. The global crises of capitalism and environmental collapse is a much larger issue, of course, and in that context no doubt the US will remain a malefactor regardless of who wins the White House. Still, to me, any Democrat would be better than any Republican.

Back to Iron Man…The authoritarian temperament…the Apollonian thread in Western History that is currently embodied in the “military-industrial” technocracy…the age old conflict with the “Oriental Other…” these are most usefully viewed as entailments and correlates of the reified self. The tendency to view ourselves (and others) as a thing with solidity and permanence, clearly defined…the attempt to remake the world so that these aspirations at least seem to be true…this is what has driven Civilization in general, and Western Civilization in particular. The belief at work here is a belief in “progress,” progress defined as any development that increases our ability to view ourselves in this favorite way - as things with soldity and permanence, etc. Existence at the expense of Being is how Lacan would put it. Alienation and the compensatory dream life it fuels.

From The Killing onward, Stanley Kubrik made all his films about this ongoing dynamic and its many horrific contradictions. Paths of Glory, Lolita, 2001, Clockwork Orange, Barry Lyndon, The Shining, Full Metal Jacket, Eyes Wide Shut…all are examinations of Civilization and Its Discontents, in Freud’s formulation. My own sense is that environmental issues will prevent this dark dynamic to continue unabated, but Kubrik’s 2001 is a vision of how this same dynamic could continue into the colonization of space. But is that a future we should want?

GuyZi

Lets start with this: (and if link doesnt work its over at Global Research….by Michael Chossudovsky…)

www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=8837

Now, I happened to send this to a friend of mine who works as a private contractor in the middle east. He’s conservative, thinks of himself as a *patriot*, and is pretty gung ho on military matters. He is, however, a very decent guy and one who reads and is trying to sort out the contradictions in his life….among them the war in Iraq. He was deeply offended by this piece, for reasons different than mine, but still with overlap. He then showed it to another soldier he knew who had the following comments, which I think worth quoting in some length:
Read more

En route to your local cineplex is a two hour tour of the current American psyche. Iron Man, I’m talking about. Robert Downey as a “maverick” CEO who made his fortune in the arms biz transforms himself into a human F16. We know the world hates us…but we also know that everything we do is done with good intentions…and so we have no choice but to double down and encase ourselves in steel.

It would be easy to view this as yet another symptom of our current dementia as a culture, but I think this particular demi-god resonates back through the annals of the Western cultural imagination to its inception in Greece. The ultimate in Apollonian dominance, the figure of the geniuis weapons designer is as old as Dedaelus and as distinctively Western, and the motif of armor, the hard shell of the male ego in conquering hero mode, gets a full airing in Arthurian lore. But the extremity of this current variation, where the Capitalist victor transforms himself into an armored weapons system, really does suggest a new level of hysteria. Human heroes can no longer do the trick, given all the blow back coming our way.

I lob this plush volley ball up there for Mr. Steppling to spike…

GuyZi

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Stephanopoulos doing his assassin’s job for Hillary, and converging with conservative henchman Roger Aisles’ larger designs. When the going gets tough, there is no real way two separate liberals from hard-core establishmentarians.

A strange week for news. Or couple of weeks. The free Tibet blather seems to be losing traction, to be replaced with the political theatre of the elections (in the US anyway). Prescott in the UK admits (confesses) to bulemia ….and more and more evidence is accumulated regarding climate change. One senses somewhere in all this a kind of intellectual vertigo — the media cant spin it anymore. What is there to spin? The ABC debate debacle has been analysed, but always with the assumption that other debates were different. Were they? Not really. This one was just so crass and nakedly a product of Murdoch and Ailes that it was cringe inducing. Read more

Well, I agree with you about knee-jerk American support for Columbia and how that relates to the growing threat of Chavez and a defiant, oil-rich Venezuela. With food riots breaking out across the 3rd world we are only now getting a real taste of what peak oil portends. The hegemecists at the Pentagon and in Langley are burning some midnight oil of their own to figure out how to snatch those deposits from Chavez and company, you can be sure. Peak oil has driven poor old Dick Cheney around the bend (well, he was probably born around the bend), scarcity being the phenomenon that reliably sends the insect-mind surging to the fore.

I actually wish I knew more about what is happening in Latin American politics today. One of the problems of being an American in this new century is enduring the steady assault of the plutocrats, this revolution from above that is now entering its eighth year (at least). It can be hard to see above the event horizon, the edge of the crater. At best, American democracy is an 18th century affair…but currently the plutocrats have so mastered the arts of disinformation and cultural manipulation - “perception management” being their most chilling phrase - that we exist in a state of near-total tyranny. The housing crises is a sign that the truth of this cannot remain hidden for much longer. The underlying conflict will be extruded into the open. We’ll see then how well basic American fuck-you-ness stacks up against the power of the few who have been steering this ship into the ice bergs.

Interesting to speculate about what might move the world closer toward a state resembling balance, with sustainable use or development of what remains of the earth’s resources. A new state of affairs would resemble Socialism, perhaps, with a heavy bias toward the green end of the spectrum, and using renewable energy. The legal system would certainly need to be over-hauled such that the modern corporation - with its ability to blithely ignore the actual costs of its actions - becomes anathema. It’s almost too much to even consider here in the bunker. These men make one despise the species. Which is an error.

Moving on.

American film in the late 40s? I’ve never heard the “golden age” defined so rigorously, but I’m ready to believe it. A brief open space created by the end of the war and the sudden influx of new blood from Europe and the mushrooming post-war audience. Perhaps the nation’s shadow side, which is deeply stained by slavery and the genocide against indigenous people, was temporarily in abeyance, and the “military-industrial complex” had yet to reach for the reins.

Val Lewton is especially interesting, I agree. His films and their popularity indicate just how myopic mid-century American culture really was. People were hungry for the interiority of that work…but only if it were labeled “horror.” That this term applied to a film as lyrical as Return of the Cat People makes one chuckle the same way Kinsey’s bowtied statisticians of kinkiness make one chuckle.

Fifty years later the quality of Lewton’s films is still oddly comforting. The people who worked on them really really wanted to say something personal and true about experience, and they understood how hard that is to accomplish and took pains to get it right despite miniscule budgets. The self-image of being an artist never got in the way. They were making movies, that’s all. Which is why Lewton’s films engender such loyalty and affection.

GuyZi

I agree that it would be nice to somehow find the motive works that would stimulate cultural discussion again. There isn’t much. However, I want to speak to two things. The first has little to do with culture, and the second has everything to do with it, and also with your comments on that mid century surge of energy in the arts….in this case film.

First a quick note on the latest round of liberal (and of course right wing) attacks on FARC. This comes at the same moment we are endlessly having to endure the Free Tibet mantra, and the attacks from the left on the Irainian state. FARC was born of a reaction to the fascist ruling class of Colombia — the people the US, of course, supports and continues to fund and help train. The US was in Colombia under Clinton to train forces for the *war on drugs*. Something over 1 billion dollars was thrown at the right wing in Colombia — an abusrd amount to combat coca farming. Today, after a couple decades of relentless propaganda, FARC is synonomous with *evil dooers* or *terrorists*. Its important to note that the record for civilian deaths is heavily in favor or FARC — meaning the right wing paramilitaries of Colombia have murdered and tortured far far far more people in this endless conflict. The Colombians have lied, betrayed truces, and assasinated FARC members since the 1980s …. and yet the picture one gets in the western press is of a Colombian military bravely fighting these narco terrorists (often referred to, as, gasp, Marxists). The Colombian president Uribe is the real drug trafficker in this region, and the real cause of the endless suffering of the Colombian people.

What the current situation is with regard to FARC is hard to evaluate. But if Chavez supports them, and the US hates them, then they probably deserve support. The same liberals and leftists who launch attacks on Iran — in the name of workers rights or some global revolution or just because they don’t like theocracies, are engaging in the same propaganda as the State Dept. The default setting for these lap top western do-gooders is always to wring their hands and demand *change* or support for the people. Then, when a poll shows the Iranian people are actually quite favorably disposed to the current government, the quiet racist and implied Colonial value system sneaks into play. Those dumb ass towel heads just cant get it right. Give ‘em time, maybe they will …. but for now *we* better go and straighten this shit out.

The liberal bias is about a tacit belief in western values and the western *way of life*. This creeps into the knee jerk defense of Israel as it does with regard to all third world countries. Is it too much to ask the people in these countries………Iran, Iraq, Afganistan, Colombia, Haiti, et al, what it is *they* want? And even then the power of corpoate news outlets can be felt. One cannot trust reporting on FARC anymore than one can on Iraq, Iran or Zimbabwe….or Tibet. History is constantly being refashioned to explain the virtues of US domination.

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At the film school this last month Ive shown a number of post world war two American crime films…..film noir. Its intersting to look at Preminger, Siodmak, Wilder, Lang, and remember the exodus from Germany for this Jewish directors (Lang was half Jewish). The atmosphere of menace, the distrust of state authority, the clear cynicism regards police and almost any other institution. Siodmak’s Criss Cross seems better than it once did, while Preminger, perhaps, seems less than he was. The French critics loved Preminger, and one can see why. His mise en scene is elegant and controlled, but his penchant for melodrama can be tiresome, although perhaps one might see in him a precursor to the lurid expressionism of Douglas Sirk a decade later. Wilder looks better and better, and really so does Lang ….and the films produced by Val Lewton (directed by mostly either Jacques Tourneur or Mark Robson) seem almost small miracles. We havent yet caught up with Lewton I don’t think. Sirk’s melodrama (which so influenced Fassbinder) was all about a visionary look at the growing emtional deadness in 1950s America. In that sense he is the quintessential HUAC artist …operating below the radar. Sirk returned to Germany as did Siodmak. Wilder and Lang stayed. Preminger became essentially a producer who happened to also direct his productions. But beyond film noir, one sees in that brief window from the end of WW2 to , say, 1951, a golden age for American film. Take just 1947…….Out of the Past, Treasure of Sierra Madre, I Walked with a Zombie,,Dark Passage, Lady in the Lake, Lady from Shanghai, The Big Sleep,Nightmare Alley, Brute Force,… … . And this is just 1947 and Im sure Im leaving some out.Compare, say, the films of 1987, or 1997, or 2007. It speaks directly to the errosion of culture.

We show Written on the Wind this week, then Fassbinder, then Wilder’s Ace in the Hole. Finally, Syberborg’s Our Hitler. The Syberborg like the Fassbinder serves as a summation of the rise of fascism and global capital in the form of both industrial slaughter and individual aggression and cruelty. The age of classic noir saw the writing on the wall; these were films that expressed the modern alienated state more clearly and elequently than anything has since.

John Steppling