Review- Mishima, “Runaway Horses”

April 23, 2018April 23, 2018 Peter BerardLeave a comment

Yukio Mishima, “Runaway Horses” (1969) (translated from the Japanese by Michael Gallagher) – The details of Yukio Mishima’s life and especially his death have a tendency to bleed over into evaluations of his work. Killing yourself after a quixotic fascist coup attempt will do that. Mishima has some advantages in terms of posthumous reputation that the other great fascist writer of the twentieth century, Louis-Ferdinand Celine, lacked. Most notably he had no record of public racist statements. Though lord knows Koreans, Chinese et al probably didn’t find his emperor-worship to be the harmless or merely psychologically tragic affectation as it’s depicted, say, in the “about the author” in the Vintage edition I have of this book, or in the film “Mishima: a Life in Four Chapters.”

The Mishima-biography quicksand is especially grabby in the case of “Runaway Horses.” It’s the second book in the “Sea of Fertility” tertralogy, the last works Mishima ever wrote- he finished the last volume and then set out on his last trip. Moreover, it primarily concerns a young man attempting to mount a quixotic right-wing coup against a corrupt and feckless Japanese government, in this case in the early 1930s, just before Japan took its big leap into war.

You’d assume that what amounted to an extended suicide note by a fascist depicting something like what he planned on doing before dying would basically be a Mary Sue story of strength and violence. Probably the greatest living American fascist artist (which isn’t saying much) is Frank Miller (see?). Imagine how over the top his last comic would be if he had a year to work on it before putting his money where his mouth is?

Funny thing is, that’s not how “Runaway Horses,” or any of Mishima’s work as far as I can tell, reads. For one thing, the main viewpoint character isn’t the young imperialist rebel but a somewhat anhedonic middle class lawyer, Honda. He becomes convinced that Isao, a young kendo student, is the reincarnation of his childhood best friend, who died due a failed romance in the previous chapter. Isao, it turns out, is obsessed with a failed samurai rebellion against the Meiji restoration and organizes some of his high school buddies (with disingenuous help from some army officers) to reproduce the same sort of quixotic uprising. At age nineteen, the only worthwhile thing he can think to do with his life is to die for the Emperor, in a gesture the actual existing Emperor would probably fail to appreciate it. The second clause of that sentence is why I’d earn Isao’s scorn, as do most adults in his world.

There’s a lot of generational repetition and a lot of longing after death. There’s a certain amount of dwelling on violence, but less than you’d think. One funny thing Mishima does is reproduce an entire pamphlet on the historical doomed samurai uprising and have everyone praise it to the skies, despite it being much duller and more didactic prose. Almost everything surrounding Isao’s big move threatens to compromise the purity of gesture he envisions- putting the vision into words lessens it; the planning seems futile and cheap; his inevitable capture and the light sentence he receives for being a good boy overwhelmed by patriotic fervor renders his experience humiliating. Even nobler moments — the support of the other boys and a sort of-girlfriend figure, Honda’s sympathetic quasi-mystical understanding of Isao’s character and fate — become liabilities tying him to earth.

Mishima’s delicate psychological realism meets up with his ideology in the registers of disgust, frustration, and desire for the perfect gesture. The only way out for Isao is to eschew not just his family and social norms — that’s a given — but even his friends and his political goals, if he’s going to get that big perfect gesture/death. Subtler than most fascists, Mishima sees the impediment to beauty and purity of gesture as impersonal forces — time, society, human frailty — rather than a given group. But he shares with them the enshrining of aesthetics — specifically, an aesthetics of death and bloodshed — over morals and norms.

I’ll admit- there’s little more alien to me than the idea of substituting aesthetics for norms anywhere in “real life,” troublesome though that distinction is. I haven’t even really got an aesthetic to plug in there if I wanted to. But it’s a pretty important part of modernist literature (and of fascism), and Mishima lays one way that can go with unusual clarity. ****’

From “Suits and Boots” to “Suits and Shoots” on the Altright

April 22, 2018 Peter BerardLeave a comment

https://www.splcenter.org/…/class-conflict-dividing-america…

A few observations prompted by this article:

– it’s pretty good but basically accepts the altright’s premises about class on face value, undoubtedly without meaning to. They look at class like liberals do- as a set of cultural markers. There’s little structural difference between the TWP people moaning about how altright psuedo-intellectualism turns off the white working class people the TWP seeks (and fails) to organize, and tumblr liberals tsk tsking about the “classism” of serving quinoa at functions.

If you understand class more substantively, as a structural relationship to production, then the whole argument about the issue within altright circles becomes ludicrous. Neither side are working class, either structurally or “culturally” if that means anything — the TWP leadership is all lifestylist voluntarily downwardly-mobile children of petty bourgeoisie — and few of their supporters are, either. The argument is, as the article does manage to get across, all about optics and narcissism. That narcissism does have a real-world effect in terms of what strategies people pursue with the little power they have, and who will work with whom, but…

– it’ll be interesting to see where the street-fighting element of the altright, the “boots” in the “boots and suits” dichotomy, will go in the wake of all of this. My guess will be some of them will continue on, especially the Proud Boys and similar groups, who can bridge the optics divide somewhat- they brawl, but don’t wear swastikas. But for the most part I think the violence level will bifurcate. Groups like Identity Europa and other “suit” groups will attempt to channel their violence through influencing the political and corporate power structures. On the other end, individuals or loose groups like Atomwaffen will occasionally spin out a gun or bomb attack. Instead of “suits and boots” it could be “suits and shoots.”

What should the left make of this? The relatively clear thing is to continue to expose and disrupt the suits (and what “boots” are still around). Keep them off balance. Make them continually adjust. At present, there’s little we can do about the aleatoric violence of the “shoots.” I have some ideas but they’d take a degree of effort and risk we can’t presently afford, especially given the whole “trying to advance socialism” thing we’re trying to do at the same time.

– Horseshoe theory is bullshit. BUT… I have to say the way these people tear into each other over optics, valuations of long-dead historical figures, situations over which they have no influence (the civil war in Syria, for instance), what they WOULD do had they the people/money/power, organizational strategies they are nowhere near implementing even remotely successfully… kinda familiar. It’s sad.

Review- Herf, “Reactionary Modernism”

April 21, 2018April 21, 2018 Peter BerardLeave a comment

Jeffrey Herf, “Reactionary Modernism: Technology, Culture, and Politics in Weimar and the Third Reich” (1984) – Sometimes a book succeeds so well in getting its ideas across that in subsequent decades it doesn’t hold the fascination it might once have had. Historian Jeffrey Herf coined the phrase “reactionary modernism” to describe the combination of disdain for rationalism, yearning for the past, fascination with technology, and future-oriented vision that you saw in Nazi ideology. Arguably, he did so well that this is no longer really that odd-seeming to us. The idea that ideology can bend itself to include these seemingly paradoxical elements — like thinking that science disenchants the world but technology re-enchants it — doesn’t really seem that mind-blowing, especially when applied to people like the Nazis.

Herf was writing in the 1980s in a tradition of historical sociology steeped in functionalism. Functionalist history and sociology seemingly en bloc decided that the Nazis were a revolt against modernity, and that’s much of the reason they failed- their form (this whacked out mythologized racial imperialism) failed to correspond with functions (running a modern state). There was (is) much truth to this, but it was more complicated than that, as functionalists like Franz Neumann tried to illustrate. But functionalism came out of root-sociology: Weber, Durkheim, Simmel et all trying to figure out capital-M Modernity. Anti-modern modernism threw their inheritors for a loop.

Herf remains loyal to his roots, sticking with his framework for all its flaws and piously averring Marxist and Frankfurt School explanations, which, truth be told, don’t always get to the heart of the matter either. Needless to say, his methodological conservatism doesn’t get him anywhere close to post-structuralism or anything else that might break down the ideology-structure-function relationship. You have to figure the propagation of other ways of looking at the relationship between ideas and power probably helped get the meme of “reactionary modernism” across in the thirty years since this book came out, but Herf wasn’t having any of it.

But he does pretty good anyway. He methodically goes through a number of German intellectuals of the Weimar period — Ernst Junger, Werner Sombart, Carl Schmitt, Oswald Spengler, various others — and examines their attitudes towards different aspects of modernity. The rough lineaments of the “reactionary modernist” attitude he draws from them are like this: German “kultur” is about the superior truth of Life and Will against the technical but lame truth of facts and reason. “Real” worthwhile science (and politics and literature) etc engages this sense of life and defies rationality. The other, lame kind explains away and demystifies thing. The former is associated with Germans, the latter with Americans, French, and above all, you guessed it, the Jews. This creates a dyad of good, German aspects of modernity — technology (a lot of rhapsodizing the power of engines, the clean lines of skyscrapers etc), “productive” entrepreneurship, mechanized warfare — with their bad, vaguely Jewish opposites: abstract science, mere “circulatory” capitalism, parliamentary politics, and so on.

This scheme became widely popular in right-leaning circles in Germany during the Weimar period. It caught on especially well with engineers, who started feeling their political muscle at the time. It got more or less officially interwoven into the ideology of the Third Reich. Among its more famous results was the rejection of the “Jewish physics” of general and special relativity, which would come back to bite the Nazi regime pretty hard.

Sometimes you still get people — people who write about these things, people who should know better — scratching their heads at how avowed despisers of modernity embrace certain aspects of it, especially technology, so hard. This isn’t just the Nazis- the Confederacy, for all of its maudlin rural nostalgia, was very interested in modern capitalism and technological improvement. ISIS fighters may refuse to use toothbrushes, preferring the chewing twig the Prophet and his followers supposedly used, but nothing in their peculiar reading of the holy books says anything about not using social media to recruit more jihadis.

So this stuff shouldn’t surprise us, and Herf’s book has been an important part of helping us all get that. Ironically, people have probably taken it further than Herf himself would like. He got pretty close to being able to say that the relationship between ideology and social function maybe isn’t as tight as his school of historical sociology would have it, and maybe new methods of investigating these things are called for… but no such luck. Herf tried to dunk on both Marxists and the totalitarianism school by insisting that reactionary modernism was a purely German thing, and that proves that the German case of fascism was truly unique, etc. Well, the obvious applicability of the phrase to the contemporary altright, especially in the US, sort of gives the lie to that. Herf went on to become a liberal hawk, Iraq War booster, and his historical work has an increasingly rabid Zionist bent. But now the world has his concept, and we can use it how we like. ****

Review- C.L.R. James, “Beyond a Boundary”

April 19, 2018 Peter BerardLeave a comment

C.L.R. James, “Beyond a Boundary” (1963) – God help me, I do not understand cricket. People have explained the rules to me numerous times and they just don’t seem to stick in my brain. It sounds like a combination of bowling and that baseball training game “pickle” (which honestly is a lot more fun than baseball itself, especially played with a larger bouncy ball) with some extras… but the devil, as they say, is in the details.

Why then, you may be forgiven for asking, did I read a whole book about cricket? Because it turned up on a library free pile and was written by one of the great intellectuals of the twentieth century: the Trinidadian historian, novelist, and radical C.L.R. James. James had one of those crazy twentieth century lives that just seemed to be everywhere and do everything, even though he wasn’t especially long-lived. Migrating between Britain, the US, and the West Indies, he was one of the intellectual godfathers of post-Garvey pan-africanism, started and led one of the major Trotskyite tendencies in the US, and was a major figure in the Trinidadian independence struggle. He launched the historiographical reappraisal of the Haitian Revolution. He wrote one of the definitive interpretations of Moby-Dick while sitting in a detention center within sight of the Statue of Liberty, waiting to be deported from the US. He was the first black Caribbean novelist published in the UK.

He was also a fan of and writer about cricket. “Beyond a Boundary,” one of James’s last books and published posthumously, is partially a memoirs of his own experience with the game and partially an informal history of the game in the West Indies. It’s one of those books that could be called “belle lettres,” i.e. respectable but unclassifiable literary productions. We hear about James’s struggles between the aspirations put on him by his status-conscious lower-middle-class family in Trinidad and the young Cyril’s desire to play cricket and read novels rather than bother with placement exams. Trinidad being small and at the same time one of the great producers of cricket talent, James (and seemingly any interested Trinidadian) could get to know some of the great cricketers of the world.

And that’s a problem, because I do not know the name of any cricket players other than Tendulkar, a contemporary Indian cricketer who is at least half-seriously regarded by some Hindus as a worthy addition to their pantheon, and C.L.R. James, who played fairly seriously at the amateur level. James is enough of a great writer to get me to care about these people who are just new names to me. But he also assumes the reader knows who they are, who are the points of comparison in terms of cricketers past, and most of all, cricket terms. Even to the extent I understand the rules, I don’t know the terms for the plays and techniques etc, and naturally, in a finely-grained discussion of the game, that’s going to come up a lot. It was pretty confusing even as I could tell James was writing about it masterfully.

Of course, being a political figure and a radical, James tied cricket back into politics, and I somewhat got that. Cricket was the game of the imperialists, still mostly played in the old Empire. Even when imperial possessions — first white dominions like Australia, then out and out colonies like India and the West Indies — started beating England, it was still beating them at literally their own game.

The game brought with it a value system — roughly, the variant on stoic sportsmanship common in English public schools at the time — that James feels serious ambivalence towards. On the one hand, as a radical he rebukes England, the empire, the bourgeoisie, the racial politics that warped the West Indian cricket world for some time. On the other, James can’t lose — doesn’t want to — his attachment to aspects of the code that came with a space of conflict that is as hard-fought as the tooth and nail of class struggle but without rancor, granting honor to the other side and respecting adjudication from referees. The struggles he lived for — the overthrow of capitalism, black liberation — couldn’t be that way. But there’s something beyond escape to another, nicer plane that the code has to offer. I just wish I could parse more of his cricket examples so I could tell what he thinks they are. ****

Review- Mayer, “The Dark Side”

April 12, 2018April 12, 2018 Peter BerardLeave a comment

Jane Mayer, “The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned Into a War on American Ideals” (2008) – This is a respectably thorough and relatively early accounting of how the Bush administration embraced torture and indefinite detention after 9/11. Journalist Jane Mayer gets a lot of access and it’s pretty much all damning. The Bush people jumped to torture at the first chance they got, didn’t seem to care whether it worked or not, and did a lot of covering up.

Mayer does a good job weaving the story into a narrative, with a mixture of interviews from natsec people and from detainees. The contrast between the anodyne bureaucratic wrangling — the Bush people (well, Cheney mostly) handing over the war on terror and its associated interrogations almost entirely to tough-talking CIA and Defense people and cuffing out State and Justice almost entirely — and the depictions of what goes on in black sites are appropriately unsettling. She illuminates the complicity of doctors and psychologists, the whole massive underground infrastructure of the rendition program, the sheer micromanaged sadism based on third-rate psych research and bad orientalist cultural analysis.

Reading it at almost a decade remove, long after most of the stories in it are well-known, a few things stand out. One is what Corey Robin and others have noted about the prominence of lawyers in the story. Executive branch lawyers like John Yoo and especially the loathsome David Addington are the animating figures in the story, more than any politician or general. Lawyers oversaw much of the actual torture in Guantanamo and elsewhere, playing this weird dungeonmaster role, telling the interrogators exactly how hard they could hit, how long to do stress positions or water-boarding.

You have to wonder why- why the pretense of legality when they were just going to cover it up anyway? The answer is probably something boring like “insurance.” But I can’t help but connect it to the faith — against evidence and against testimony of veteran interrogators — that torture doesn’t produce good information for their purposes. Addington and his patron Dick Cheney were only two of the more powerful votaries of the cult of the executive that gathered around the Bush Jr administration. They believed in the exaltation of the leaders prerogative to do what he thought best in an almost religious sense; complete with gethsemane moment post-Watergate, when for a minute the American people looked sick of overreaching federal power. In this tableau, the lawyers look less like functional cogs in the torture machine, and more like officiants at a ceremony hailing the return of the power that should rightfully have been theirs all along- and which, for all the coverups, could only fully actualize if public. People needed to feel and see the executive’s sovereign power. They did this stuff because they wanted to do it.

The major flaw in this book is Mayer’s inability to connect this story to America’s political culture and role in the world. She doesn’t lean too hard on the bit from the subtitle about “American ideals” but it’s clashingly wrong when she does. It’s true the US law codes have generally made fulsome statements about disallowing torture. But American authority did it all the time anyway, especially to people seen as outside of the national community: Native Americans, slaves, people in occupied countries like the Philippines, etc.

Mayer has that annoying liberal habit of trying to find the “good” natsec guys, especially in the FBI, including our friends from the news James Comey and Robert Mueller. The FBI may be less torture and rendition happy than the CIA, but they’re perfectly happy to surveil, entrap, occasionally assassinate, etc. Where these habits most interfere with the story is ultimately making torture in the Bush years seem like a pervasive but exorciseable instance of “bad apples.” We’ve seen where that logic gets us without thinking critically about the structures from which these practices emerge. ****

Review- Slobodian, “Globalists”

April 9, 2018 Peter BerardLeave a comment

Quinn Slobodian, “Globalists: the End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism” (2018) – Speaking as someone who has confronted “anarcho-capitalists” on the other side of the line at counter-fascist demonstrations (including one where these supposed anarchists came out to support ICE), the idea that neoliberalism and empire might have some elective affinities was not a new one to me. But historian Quinn Slobodian opens up some new angles by looking at the “Geneva School,” a circle of mostly German-speaking economists and lawyers and a counterpoint to the much more celebrated “Chicago School” of neoliberal economics and governance.

The Geneva neoliberals — figures like Wilhelm Ropke, Joachim-Ernst Mestmayer, and, Slobodian argues, Friedrich Hayek deserves to be seen in their company as well — come off as a gloomier, more philosophical, continental counterpart to their sunnier, gladhanding fellow travelers based at U Chicago. No PBS specials for them, like you got with Friedman! There’s a certain degree to which the Chicago School got over by sleight of hand- math proves the market, and we don’t need to think that much about the institutions that make it happen (or don’t). The Genevans didn’t think that much of math — Hayek was no friend of modeling — and thought a great deal about institutions. Emerging out of the collapse of the Hapsburg Empire and witnessing the rise (and bloody suppression) of Red Vienna, literally out of their office windows in many cases, European neoliberals thought deeply for decades about what could protect the market from those two persistent enemies: states and peoples.

Slobodian depicts the Geneva School as persistently fascinated with two empires: the Hapsburg empire that ran Central Europe when many of them were young, and the British Empire at its height in the nineteenth century. They saw both (pretty ahistorically, fwiw) as benign supranational referees and guarantors of market order, lowering barriers to the free movement of goods, capital, and people. As they and other empires collapsed, and more (and browner) nations began asserting themselves, the Geneva School came to concern themselves less with liberating markets and more with casting about for ways to replace empire in its supranational governance role.

In the interwar period, many looked to the League of Nations; thereafter, they fought amongst themselves as to whether European integration could be turned to their purposes (spoilers: it could), and set up GATT and WTO to play the role empire could not anymore. These were/are all institutions encased from democratic pressure, even the indirect pressure of legislation or diplomacy. More than economics, the Geneva School pit many of its chits on law, especially constitutional law. For Hayek and Ropke as for Schmitt and Machiavelli, the moment of decision — of staking a value claim — was the foundational moment of a given order that determines all else that comes after.

This neoliberalism was generated by fear. First it was fear of the masses in Europe and the industrialized countries, then of the nation-states who might undermine the market to appease them. Finally, and this is what gave them their opening to international influence in the 1970s, fear of the rising decolonized nations, demanding what was due them and attempting to rewrite the rules of the game. Not that the scraggly bearded ancap teens I’ve seen waving the black and gold for ICE would know or care, but in many ways neoliberalism really is about setting up walls against people, so that people don’t set up walls against capital. This includes racial barriers, as shown by the neoliberal activists who condemned South African apartheid for its market distorting aspects only to propose replacing it with various intricate racially-weighted franchise schemes to protect against majority rule.

Along with illuminating neglected corners of the history of neoliberalism, “Globalists” also presents some new angles on the twentieth century more generally. Most of the Geneva School thought the Cold War an irrelevance waste of time- Hayek wrote somewhere about the US and the USSR bidding to fund the socialist experiments of ex-colonies, and if you see any kind of government developing aid as “socialism,” it makes sense. The Cold War US cared less about “free” markets than it did about markets open to itself, attached to states who were amenable to its Cold War goals. Neoliberalism only really came into its own when developing world self-assertion (and developed world reaction) forced the elites of the US and elsewhere to abandon more robust development strategies and find ways to simply contain and discipline developing countries rather than entice them.

Moreover, this work reveals neoliberalism as an art of governance, and as one in a long old European tradition. Rather than the sunny (if clinical) rationalism of the Chicago School, the Genevan neoliberals insisted on a murky, turbulent world. To them, really comprehending the market — or any complex cybernetic system — was both impossible and vaguely wrong to attempt. What created order and allowed for (some version of) progress was continual adjustment under pain of severe negative circumstances, and the key figure of this process — the decisionmaker taking the role of Schmitt’s dictator or Machiavelli’s prince — is the entrepreneur, attuned to the ineffable flows of supply and demand and taking risks on value propositions. This is a strongly philosophical and moral vision, and the neoliberals sought — seek, in many cases — to create constitutional orders to bring that moral vision in to reality (or remove the artificial impediments “special interests” put up against it, in their telling). This doesn’t mean small government or non-intervention- far from it. It’s not hypocrisy, then, for “free market” fundamentalists to support calling out the troops to break up strikes, or force countries to lower tariffs, or separate asylum seekers from their children. That’s what the free market order is. *****

Review- Du Bois, “Black Reconstruction in America”

March 29, 2018 Peter BerardLeave a comment

reconstruction

W.E.B. Du Bois, “Black Reconstruction in America” (1935) – The way historians looked at the Reconstruction period after the U.S. Civil War saw a sea change over the course of the twentieth century. From being seen – and taught to children – as a minor period in American history, a blemish soon erased, things started shifting more and more until today, Reconstruction is broadly understood as one of the pivots of American history (though given how much politics there is around pre-collegiate history teaching, one wonders how broad the understanding really is). The first wave to land from this tsunami was Du Bois’s “Black Reconstruction.” Published in 1935, it pre-dated the widespread reappraisals of the period encouraged by New Left-inflected historiography by three decades. The openly reactionary Dunning School, which taught that not only was Reconstruction a failure, but its failure showed the unfitness of black people for self-governance, was still very much a going concern in the 1930s. The Dunning School’s main competition at that time was “progressive” history from people like Charles and Mary Beard, who refused to look at the racial questions, or even most political questions, involved with the Civil War and Reconstruction at all, consumed as they were with subjecting everything to an analysis that boiled down to clashes of economic interest.

So in 1935, “Black Reconstruction” was a gauntlet thrown at the feet of nearly the entire American historical profession. Du Bois sought to prove that Reconstruction was the key moment of American history and that it was nearly transformative of American democracy in large part due to the action of southern black people. Doing that involved both recreating the social history of the country and examining the war, its immediate aftermath, and the individual states that underwent Reconstruction in detail. As such, the book clocks in a little over 700 pages. It includes sociological analysis, detailed accounting of military and political maneuvers, political and historiographical polemics, excerpts from song and poetry, impassioned rhetorical passages on humanity and the arc of history, and many many block quotes from politicians, historians, and other actors. In terms of history, the closest work I can think of to it is Trotsky’s history of the Russian Revolution. In terms of reading experience, I would compare it to “Moby-Dick.”

Du Bois’s central thesis is that black people won the Civil War for the North – largely by mounting a “general strike” i.e. mass slave escapes – and that black communities, largely composed of the recently-enslaved, built the first true worker’s democracies in the United States within the Reconstruction-era South. These were always fragile, and were ultimately destroyed by a combination of white Southern revanchist terror and the fecklessness of the Northern capitalist power structure. Not only did this doom the democratic experiment in the South, in Du Bois’s telling; it also doomed real democracy in the United States and the world as a whole, possibly for good, by robbing the world of a multiracial democracy in a world power-center that would oppose both capitalism and white supremacy at once. Instead, we got the world after 1876, when Reconstruction was foreclosed upon- imperialism, inequality, spiraling racism and class struggle, resulting in one world war and well on its way to a second by the time Du Bois finished the work.

This is a heady thesis. It’s a heady work. In the portions where Du Bois lays out his theses, the excitement is palpable. I don’t want to say things drag in the portions where he sees to proving, year by year and state by state, the genuine democratic potential of the largely black-led Reconstruction governments, and the lies that previous historiography had told about them. “Exhaustive” is the word. He leaves nothing to chance, and doesn’t claim false victories. The Gilded Age was a bad era for political corruption, and the Reconstruction governments shared in it- but not any more than any other part of American government, and probably less than white-dominated ones. Du Bois busts through generations of lies, exposing them as having been brittle from the start- my favorite is how anti-Reconstruction historians bitterly rang their hands over the debts incurred by the Reconstruction governments… as though they weren’t in charge of rebuilding a war-ravaged country and often starting the first public schools and other basic functions of governance in their respective states. This is why the antebellum (and post-Reconstruction) South was such a beaux ideal to libertarians like Ludwig von Mises and Murray Rothbard- a lack of public spending meant no public infrastructure which meant the rich were the only ones with education and the poor (and black) stayed downtrodden.

Most interesting to me are the parts where Du Bois explores the stark dynamic between the intransigence of the problems of racism and oppression, and the radicalness of the solutions brought forth. Lincoln would have been fine uniting the country without freeing the slaves, even if he ultimately wanted slavery to end- most of the Northern public felt the same way. But winning the war was impossible without freeing the slaves. Moreover, as Du Bois and other historians of Atlantic slave abolition point out, there were numerous ways to end a given slave system in ways that minimized inconvenience to the white elite. The British experimented with a number of programs involving apprenticeship, property qualifications for voting, etc. to manage the black masses in their Caribbean colonies- that endless generativity of forms that liberalism displays when presented with a population to manage. None of this would go forward in the American South. The planter class was adamant about reestablish slavery under another name, with no franchise or social escape valve for black people. Between Northern disinclination to have the results of the war overturned, and black and working class organizing, they went the only other route available- civil rights and the franchise, without the sort of hemming in you see elsewhere, and which Du Bois argues many of the freedmen probably would have accepted if it meant moving forward peacefully. Revanchism created revolution, and vice-versa, a familiar dialectic.

“Black Reconstruction” is many things. It’s a reimagining of a given era. It’s a challenge to the historians of its day (and ours!). It’s an impassioned polemic. It’s a monument- along with providing the weight of evidence needed to take on an entrenched historical belief, all of Du Bois’s accountings of the various Reconstruction governments were efforts to give due homage to honorable people and movements for democracy, ignored or defamed by history. It’s an integration of one of the most American of American stories – the Civil War, the great American myth, and Reconstruction, the great American lost hope – into a broader global history of revolution and counterrevolution. It’s something of a slog, admittedly, but well worth it for anyone who really wants to know American history. *****

Review- Wolfe, “Radical Chic and Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers”

March 17, 2018March 17, 2018 Peter BerardLeave a comment

radicalchic

Tom Wolfe, “Radical Chic and Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers” (1970) – Like a lot of cultural movements of the second half of the twentieth century, “the New Journalism” or “gonzo journalism” did much to break up ossified patterns in a given field, raised up one or two genius figures… and for every genius, launched the careers of a half-dozen cheap hacks who could superficially copy them and who seemingly never, ever go away. So gonzo journalism gave us Hunter S. Thompson, one of the great American writers of his time. It also gave us Tom Wolfe, alas.

You start to sympathize more with literary traditionalists when you realize what letting people experiment means when undertaken by rubes. Thompson could make gonzo work because no matter how far he went out on a limb or how high he got on the job, he had real discipline and craft as a writer. Wolfe… does not. He apes some of the middling-unreadable aspects of modernist literature: lists, imagistic passages meant to be disorienting but mostly just boring, various distending techniques that don’t come across. But while his literary mugging frequently gets in the way, it never truly obscures his main point: name-dropping, talk about interior décor and clothes, posturing of the notables, and miscellaneous class-signifier bullshit. It was truly dispiriting reading his many lists of New York socialites in “Radical Chic;” I recognized few of the names (Leonard Bernstein; Barbara Walters) as crusty old-people favorites, but most of them meant nothing to me. Something tells me they didn’t mean all that much back then, either. But Wolfe is breathlessly taken with them, even as he despises them- kind of like Gollum. It’s even worse with the black radicals in both “Radical Chic” and “Flak Catchers.” Wolfe’s combination of contempt, stabs at hip (not unlike the white liberals he lampoons), and seething jealousy for their charisma comes through loud and clear, but precious little else about the people he’s talking about does.

Presented with two of the broadest targets someone looking to punch liberals could want – upper-crust types playing at radical, and a mutually-parasitic relationship between welfare recipients and social services bureaucrats – he doesn’t even really land that hard. I gotta say, I was expecting something more coruscating (should’ve known better- I tried reading “Bonfire of the Vanities”). “Radical Chic” is a bit better than “Mau Mauing the Flak Catchers” in this regard. If you want an instant low-grade nausea/headache, faithful reader, give Wolfe’s account of a shouted exchange between a Black Panther leader, Leonard Bernstein, Otto Preminger, and Barbara Walters at a party Bernstein threw for some Panther leaders a read. It’s about as bad as you’d expect. “Flak Catchers” is considerably less effective on this score, because it relies on the reader being stunned by the idea that mid-level bureaucrats – the titular “flak catchers” – exist to deal with annoyances their higher-ups want to avoid. Why is this considered a fresh observation? Why did it merit a whole essay, other than for the obvious reason of gawking at the multi-ethnic gangs of youth and their leaders flamboyantly hassling said flak-catchers?

The thing tying the two essays together… well, realistically, it’s Wolfe playing to the desire to gawk and to feel “in the know” on the part of white middle class audiences stuck with the expectation to be “progressive” but looking for the door. But thematically, it’s the kayfabe aspects of sixties radicalism. The “beautiful people” in Bernstein’s Upper East Side apartment don’t really know what the Panthers are about and don’t want to- they’re just a fashion accessory. The bureaucratic flak-catchers in the Great Society welfare program offices of San Francisco exist in tacit agreement with the radical hustlers getting gangs of “The Warriors”-dressed kids to yell at him and threaten riots- without both, nobody, bureaucrat or community organizer, gets their funding, according to the piece. It’s all kayfabe, all fake, all hustle.

There’s an element of truth to this. But the stupid thing is, Wolfe is on the same side of the hustle. He needs it to be a hustle or else he has nothing to write about. If there was anything going on – which he concedes there was with the Panthers, if nothing else their propensity to get assassinated by the police kind of implies they had some contact with reality – he wouldn’t know what to do with it, and clearly doesn’t with the Panthers. He can’t write about the reality of anything, like Thompson did, because he hasn’t got the insight, the talent, or the motivation. He can’t even get at the reality of a given hustle, what’s actually happening behind the posturing- one of Thompson’s specialties. Wolfe has the contemptuous sneer of someone who’s figured it all out without having figured anything out other than convincing other rubes he’s figured something out.

This goes a long way towards explaining Wolfe’s staying power. Bourgeois audiences needed the means to sneer away the upheaval of the 1960s. Simply proclaiming it immoral, anathema, might work for the masses of rubes but it won’t work for people who fancy themselves smart. That’s too panicky, low-class, and besides, they like some of the loosened lifestyle restrictions. So when someone comes along telling them the whole thing was really about something they know about – class signifiers, fashion, posturing – and on top of that, that’s what things in general are all about, no need to interrogate any further, obviously people are going to jump on it. Thompson is dead, in part, because his society drove itself into a ditch rather than learn any lessons from his times. Wolfe continues to swan around in his dumbass white suits because he helped people actively unlearn. *’

Review- Wright, “Black Boy”

March 14, 2018March 14, 2018 Peter BerardLeave a comment

Richard Wright, “Black Boy” (1945) – In many respects, Richard Wright’s memoir is about the myriad obstacles in the way of its own creation. The sort of closely-observed, passionately-conveyed depictions of the inner life of black people, himself included, was the sort of thing many of the circumstances of Wright’s early life conspired to make impossible. Wright was born in 1908 in Mississippi, to a poor black family that held to a stern, unforgiving version of Seventh Day Adventism. Wright depicts his child self as sensitive, inquisitive, and given to impulsive behavior.

These were difficult traits for a poor, beaten-down family to encourage, dangerous ones for a black child in the Jim Crow south, and often seen as outrageous by his abusive, religious obscurantist grandmother and aunts. The child Wright takes blow after blow, literally and figuratively. Wright spares us little of the terror he lived through- of his family, of poverty and hunger, of white violence, of his own awareness of the damage that oppression was doing to his consciousness and those of the people around him. The story of his white coworkers setting him up to stab another black boy (whose coworkers in turn were trying to set him up to stab Wright) was the most effecting to me, in its multiple levels of sadism, but there are numerous others.

In Wright’s self-depiction, if he succeeded — became one of the great American writers of his time, before bad luck and ill health helped derail his career and prematurely end his life — it wasn’t because of any special qualities on his part beyond, perhaps, a persistence in engaging with the written word despite all kinds of discouragement. Racism, on top of everything else it deranges in society, renders the lives and fortunes of black people (and whites) largely illegible. If hard work and talent can be ignored because of race, or simply terrorized into submission or killed with impunity, then what kind of cause and effect can you trace between people and their fate? Beyond a cruel pragmatism — avoid white attention and concentrate on the present — Wright sees the community he grew up in as lacking in any answer for dilemmas such as these. These dilemmas don’t simply frame black life; in many respects, Wright shows us that they are the human condition. Wright was instrumental in making black American life, like Goethe’s Germany, a universal mirror to show humanity itself.

We also hear Wright’s account of his time trying out one of the answers to the human condition: Communism. In Chicago at the height of the depression, Wright joined the party through some of its cultural institutions as he began his writing career. Much has been written about Wright’s politics: his embrace and break with the communists, his self-imposed exile in France, his feud with James Baldwin and writers embracing a different type of black radicalism, and perhaps most troubling of all, his collaboration with anti-communist propagandists up to and including secretly informing on anticolonial movements to American officialdom. I’m not going to come up with all the answers here, most of which concerns stuff that happened well after the publication of “Black Boy.” The bulletpoint version appears to be that he was drawn to communism, like a lot of people, by the fact they were the only organized, multiracial group taking the fight against racism seriously at that time and place.

And it wasn’t hypocrisy on that score (which existed, but less so than one might think) that drove Wright to break with the party. In his telling, it was the endless paranoia and insistence on defining reality for its members that led the party to treat him sufficiently poorly that he had to leave. Whether this excuses anything that came after is another question. But even taking into account anti-communist exaggeration, and the ways in which state repression bolstered the worst behaviors, the evidence is pretty overwhelming that the party lacked a healthy democratic culture, to say the least. Its lack of effective power over much except for the lives of its members meant that its exercise of power in that arena was all the more intense and arbitrary. I disagree with Wright’s contention that true art is always unconcerned with politics and the social- that seems like overreaction to disappointment, to me. But the insistence on reordering the whole world according to an overarching vision — and Stalin-era communism was far from the only such vision — and a sensibility attuned to the world’s complexities are always going to be at odds, and Wright, in “Black Boy” and elsewhere, doesn’t fall easily into any given box. *****

Review- Ludlum, “The Bourne Identity”

March 12, 2018May 6, 2018 Peter BerardLeave a comment

Robert Ludlum, “The Bourne Identity” (1980) – Calling the campy and kitschy things we enjoy “guilty pleasures” is an example of cultural inertia at work. Among reasonably cool, educated twenty- and thirty-something’s, there’s no guilt associated with camp, kitsch, and silliness. I get the sense many of them regard a preference for serious fare as vaguely reactionary.

Consider: at this point, what do you think will get you scoffed at more- liking pro wrestling, or liking Oscar-bait biopics? Self-seriousness, especially in situations where there’s no moral edification to be gained (I.e. the self-seriousness of the male, the white, the rich, etc), is much more frowned-upon than camp, in my experience. It’s my luck that my particular tastes don’t run to the sort of “serious” twentieth century literary writers that whole schools of pop-criticism have grown up around denouncing: Hemingway, Roth, Wallace, writers “literary” enough to count but accessible enough to be on the syllabi of the sort of lit courses that form the basis of a poppist bloggers’ understanding of these things. Those are guilty pleasures; guilty as in “seen as vaguely sinful” along with being uncool.

My middlebrow guilty pleasure is the self-serious action movie. I also like the acceptable kind of action movie, too, campy blockbusters, cool low-budget foreign actioners, etc. But I like the kind you can’t really laugh through and enjoy the same way, too. Michael Mann is my favorite director, warts and all. Naturally, I loved all three of the “Bourne” film trilogy. You might be able to scrape something to chuckle at out of them, if you tried — Matt Damon’s alternating befuddlement and serious-man-ness, the now-massively-overused shaky-cam action scenes — but it’s a job. The movies are meant for earnest engagement, and the filmmakers empty a reasonably capacious bag of competently-executed tricks to get it. Either you accept them on their own terms, more or less, or you don’t. I do. I get why people wouldn’t, but I do.

So, when the novel upon which the first Bourne movie was (loosely) based turned up on a library fifty-cent pile, I picked it up. You can generally find a lot of Robert Ludlum in free piles- he was a reliable bestseller and arguably the father of the “airport thriller.” Take the basic spy-fi framework you see in Ian Fleming, Frederick Forsythe, or whoever else; one ultra-competent man (all the women want him all the men want to know his drink order etc) versus a giant evil global world-ending conspiracy. Scrub away residual layers of open camp or weirdness (jokes, sci-fi, etc) and then dump “realism” on it, mostly by taking time out to discuss “real” techniques, gear (weapons, cars, surveillance stuff), institutions, etc. Et voila- a genre for the busy bourgeois man on the go!

This is the literary equivalent of the “crackpot realism” we all know from dealing with centrist politicians- absurd scenarios slathered in spurious facticity. It makes for some interesting literary devices. For one thing, “The Bourne Identity” the novel is, essentially, fan-fiction about someone who lived while the book was being written, and lives still: Ilich “Carlos the Jackal” Ramirez Sanchez. He’s the villain, by name, in the book! I guess he was hardly in a position to sue for defamation. If anything, Ludlum compliments him by depicting him as much more competent and powerful than he actually was.

What’s more, Ludlum was canny enough to realize the sort of effortlessly competent violence Bourne dishes out doesn’t read as that exciting on the page. It’s there, him fighting and shooting and fleeing from Carlos’s various goons, but it’s not as emphasized as you’d expect. Instead, you get a lot of Bourne (and his lady-friend Marie) basically socially-engineering various exclusive institutions — Swiss banks, fancy hotels, high-end clothiers, airlines, assorted bureaucracies — tricking them to get what they need and evading their surveillance. On the one hand, it’s an admirable adjustment to the realities of prose and the needs of the target audience- these days you’d have to imagine Bourne somehow using his ultra-competence to get the Comcast people to show up on time.

On the other hand, it’s honestly pretty tedious. Much of the time the book replicates the experience of dealing with bureaucracies, in this instance the analog kind, from the seventies. Even his admirers admit Ludlum was no prose stylist. The movie stripped it down admirably- Bourne vs the security state that made him. In the book, there’s Bourne vs the people who made him vs Carlos and his supposedly infallible network. One problem with the enemy being everyone, as in some of these paranoid thrillers, is that the enemy loses any definition, fades into the background. When the background is high-end Zurich and Paris at the end of the seventies, it’s not exactly exciting.

Most of what a modern reader/viewer can relate to in the movie isn’t there in the book. The Frankenstein element — the security state brainwashing and playing god with its sleeper agents, and one of them accidentally breaking out and trying to stay out — isn’t really there. The security state isn’t good in the novel, as such, but the real bad guy is Carlos and his improbable network. Moreover, whatever poignance you can get out of the relationship in the movie between Matt Damon’s befuddled Bourne and Franka Potente’s vaguely alternative drifter Marie isn’t there in the book either. In the book, Bourne basically kidnaps Canadian economist Marie, who’s alternately prissy and swoony. It’s much more Steve McQueen than Matt Damon, and while that’s a decent trade much of the time, I don’t think it works as well for this story. To the extent Bourne works at all — that it’s not just Bond but self-serious — it’s because Bourne’s alienation tempers, and arguably justifies, the power fantasy. The movies do a better job with that balance than the books. **’