So, as I continued to think this past week about the article for Lignes, I came up with the title, “From Terror to Crisis,” which I promptly inserted in the old c.v. under “work in progress. But “from … to” doesn’t quite articulate the two terms correctly: we’ve never really left our state of terror. We’ve only internalized it further, much the same way that spontaneously naming “Ground Zero” proved how inadmissible the truth of our own propagation of terror is to the collective unconscious.
But we are in a state of crisis, while the effects of terror – the propensity of which everyone by now should know were imposed and maintained primarily by agents of the State and not by al-Qaeda – have not left us. So where does that leave us? I think it leave us in a position that is worse than the present crisis of capitalism in that it includes not only all of the fallout of that crisis in the lives of working-class and middle-class people – not to speak of other precariously employed (if employed) people – but it is compounded by our unwillingness (and, hence, incapacity) to face the twin cancers of undereducation and ethical degradation and the atavistic consequences thereof. In short, a lumpen mentality is infinitely susceptible to the fiction of terror and the reality of crisis. The result is everything aberrant: racism, delusion (in the form of rampant “conspiracy theories”), and generalized fundamentalism.
In the meanwhile, it appears to me, as I write, that the Obama administration has rather suddenly come to lack all the conviction and fortitude necessary to push through the elements of a progressive agenda. That entity appears (appearances, once again) to be willing to compromise on a whole range of issues, from the domestic (e.g. universal health care) to international (war, human rights, the Geneva Convention, etc.) in order to stockpile victories to rattle off at Obama’s first State of the Union address.
Here’s what I responded one day this past week to one blogger on Organizing for America – the current avatar of the Obama campaign’s website. The individual – presumably an Obama supporter and not a “troll” – is convinced, nevertheless, that rendition, torture, indefinite detention, that whole syllabus of the Bush Doctrine, was (and is) the reason why the U.S. has not been attacked again on its soil since 11 September 2001. I begin by quoting this “true believer” in Barack Obama:
"'Thousands of U.S. lives were saved' by torture and other illegal interrogation techniques only in the twisted imagination of Dick Cheney, John Woo & Co. The day of reckoning has hopefully come. Will the U.S. now rejoin the community of civilized nations that adhere to the Geneva Conventions and *not* laws of exception (whose theoretician was the Nazi, Carl Schmitt)? We hopefully will soon find out. This is a moral question of far greater consequence even than health care reform (which I hope will move forward as well ... gotta work on all of it)."
There are many well-thinking individuals who blog on OFA, but many remind me of Clamence, the “penitent judge” in Albert Camus’ The Fall: some strange, ineffable, unfathomable guilt seems to move them to reject any deviation from cheerleading for the candidate for HOPE now ensconced all too comfortably (seems to me) in the White House. This fundamentalism for Obama (I’ll refrain from the temptation of forging a portmanteau word) has the effect of giving the nod to or, still worse, feigning to ignore the worst of the horrific crimes committed in our name under Bush-Cheney.
In sum, the front section of Tuesday’s New York Times presented me with an anthology of items that sum up the composite effects of terror + crisis + ethical bankruptcy. The front page announces that finally an “Investigation Is Ordered Into C.I.A. Abuse Charges” and shows a page of the egregiously redacted document that the prosecutor, John H. Durham, is now charged to work from. I wish him good luck in finding out what’s under the blacked out portions, that appear to be more than 50% of the document. HOPE: those interrogated publicly (without waterboarding, I presume) will “name name’s” way further up the chain of command. One can always hope, right?
Then, on the penultimate page, there’s good old Bob Herbert’s “The Ultimate Burden,” in which he points out to mostly deaf ears that the bottom 1% of the able-bodied economic population is fighting these two totally foundationless wars. And that a draft would change that pronto. We can always hope for change, right?
Finally, back to the front page, there’s a fine article on how “China [is] Racing Ahead of U.S. in Drive to Go Solar,” which is a bit of misspoken understatement because, in fact, the purport of the article is how China is racing ahead of the U.S. in the drive to help the U.S. go solar! Yes, folks, while lunatics spin their lunacy, OFA bloggers wring their hands, and the Obama White House becomes more befuddled, the People’s Republic of China (whose capital [Capital, people!] has propped up this economy) is setting up factories on U.S. territory to sell us the solar panels we so desperately need. Vive le communisme capitaliste!
