Insult to Injury

The Kurds have suffered greatly in Iraq. There, as in Turkey, they have suffered depredation and abuse for a hundred years. They have been poisoned, they have been shot, they have been kidnapped, they have been raped. They have been beaten, they have been robbed, they have been chiseled, imprisoned, and invaded. They have been rounded up and driven out. They have had their villages assaulted, seized, burned, and brought to the ground.

They have suffered greatly, the Iraqi Kurds.

And they have been supported by a foreign army. They have earned a new autonomy, made powerful friends with their newfound wealth; the earth of Kurdistan, so long saturated with blood, is also rich in oil. It would seem that the people (or at least the majority people) of Kurdistan face a further injustice; the fate that follows when the foreign army leaves. It would seem so but for one, far greater outrage: the simple fact that it was never about them.

Bringing a Tank to a Cockfight

Robert McNamara, The Fog of War:

Proportionality should be a guideline in war.

If war is merely the use of violence (usually by a party or group) in order to effect a desired political end, then what is law enforcement but domestic war? We don't need to debate long on this; a look at any SWAT team's garage will do. Or you can ask real life lawman Steven Seagal.

At the time, the use of several armored vehicles, dozens of law enforcement officers, and, of course, Steve Seagal riding in a tank to raid an unarmed chicken farm, level a surrounding wall, and smash out the windows of Llovera’s home was immediately derided as gross misuse of force and funds, all authorized by self-styled celebrity Sheriff Joe Arpaio in order to play up to the reality TV cameras—an argument that Llovera’s subsequent minor arrest for “suspicion of cockfighting” did little to quell. Llovera is now finally fighting back, filing the notice of claim as the first step toward a lawsuit that his lawyer says will seek $100,000 in damages and “a formal written apology” from Seagal to Llovera’s children for killing their puppy. Here’s hoping that Steven Seagal, puppy-killer, never meets Steven Seagal, guy from Out For Justice, because that dude would be pissed.

Tangible Examples

Freedom and authority are ideals, and they serve us well when we're having a certain kind of discussion. That said, we don't live in a world of ideals; we live in a world of practice, material, policy, and routine. So what do freedom and authority look like in this world?

One of the most pleasing analogies for the defender of authority is that of the orchestra. Of course, like all apparent hierarchy, this authority is often misunderstood by the layperson. The performers in the orchestra are each well-trained and well-versed in the material, and their abilities are greater than an unknowing observer might guess. That said, the orchestra conductor does play a vital role.

Does this defend authority, direction, and hierarchy?

If it does, then what are we consider when we see a group of musicians with no apparent leader? What when we perceive a different tradition of musical performance, one in which there is no program--this is thoroughgoing anarchism, not just absent a personal authority but a textual authority, as well! Improvisation in groups is a remarkable example of freedom, order in chaos, the kind of anarchism we might hope to achieve elsewhere.

You can see this heavily throughout the arts. Consider improvised theater, sometimes clumsy but often improved with practice, consider both the authorities of the director and of the text. When can these be checked by the talents of those who do the work, of those who build the set, design new blocking, those who perform, those who assert new interpretations. Consider those who develop new lines on stage, consider their multiple motivations--to ease another's lapse of memory, to play up material that works for the crowd. This is distribution of power! This is real politics, and you can learn from watching it and learn from taking part in it. What if an audience put on a show of its own?

And what if mental health patients, or those who have experienced trauma, or those who are sick from addiction or terminal disease--what if these people conducted their own therapy? This happens all the time. It should probably happen more often, but when you find it you realize that freedom doesn't have to wait until we topple all the top-down psychologizing, the asinine positing of meaning for and about others, or the imperial science of dictation and predetermination. With each display of improvisation, devolution of power, and individual ownership, there is a meaningful example of what I or you or we want to create.

If I talk about freedom, I believe I have a duty to find tangible examples of liberation, increased freedom, and seizure of power and generalize these examples.

Political Education

You want real fucking power? You want to feel something that Bonapartes and Kings and Mussolinis felt? You want to be Lenin, leaning conversationally from that hazily painted platform? You want to make men weep and women nod in agreement?

Then talk to people.

Can you find a group of people that wouldn't normally listen? Sure you can; the world's hostile. Go out and find them. Go, find them, and talk to them.

The more pathetic, the better. Don't go speak truth to power. Chomsky's right: the powerful know the truth! They just don't care. So go speak truth to powerless. See how you do.

Go to the parts of town where your friend of a friend buys weed. Go down to the bus station. Go down to the jail, or the detox center. Ask to speak at a local church.

Maybe you'll want to do your research first. Check it out for some time. See what the school board actually talks about. Maybe your dream isn't suited to their brains just yet. Maybe you'll realize that what you want to say, that your brilliant speech, your amazing insight into What Really Is... Just ain't interesting to a bunch of mosquito-bitten alcoholics meeting in an AC-less shack, joking about the rat who's running the walls. Maybe you'll listen first, if you're smart, and figure out how to bridge what you want to have heard and what they want to hear. I can't imagine a terrific talker who's not skilled in listening.

So go find that tough crowd. Go find that unforgiving audience. And try out your material. Maybe you'll learn that the material ain't the biggest deal. Maybe you'll learn that people really want a tone and a face that say "I'm not full of myself" and "I'm not trying to sell you the moon." Maybe you'll learn something about most people.

Maybe you'll be challenged, and you'll either fold or you'll roll with it. And they feel good; the former because it won't be as bad as you feared and the latter because you'll taste, if only momentarily, real human power. But you'd better remember the feeling. That's all power is when you're working from the bottom. The taste of recognition, the sight of nodding in a crowd, the feeling that you're not telling these people how to be but that you are reminding them of what they already are. We cannot afford any messiahs. Much less can we tolerate any more tin-eared, would-be saviors.

I may not be a messiah but I can teach a messiah all the same. Practice your material. Drown your babies. If your cure doesn't sell to the sick, then maybe you're not the healer you thought you were.

Real Jerks

For no reason other than masochism I decided to roll over to one of the big Islamophobe sites. I can read Daniel Pipes in respectable news outlets if I want to, but that's so easy for me to dismiss. The polished, the media-friendly... That shit is obviously spectacle. Talk radio and blogs (and I know there's really no equivalence to draw between the two in terms of popularity and access) are silly and rough, but they are marginally more popular, their absurdity harder for me to accept. And this blog always sticks in my mind because it's part of the history of some of my people, too. It's nice to remember that, for a thousand years, my ancestors were the Bad Guy. Luther called Turks the "people of the wrath of God," and that doesn't go away too easily. And with the Armenians and the Kurds, we even get on the anarcho/liberal/leftist Rolodex of Horrible People to Invoke When Discussing Atrocities*, doing double duty as an example of both The Evil of the State and The Necessity of Liberal Intervention to Defend Defenseless Minorities.

* This is the cultural historical equivalent to the LGBTQQIABBQWTFLOL incantation. The longer you can go on naming, say, genocides or massacres or persecuted peoples, and the harder to pronounce their names are, and the more obscure, the more points you collect. Try it, but I warn you: bringing up the Albigensian Crusade always gets you blank stares because the Cathars aren't well represented in the indie metal scene.

Anyway, all this post is for is to say that I have my disagreements with people. I get angry at people, really fucking mad. Sometimes it helps me, then, to look at senators and presidents who kill thousands with a shrug and a signature. It helps me to look at little fevered something-phobes writing under the name of mass murderers like Vlad Tepes, hungry to re-enact the age of real, live, not-merely-rhetorical Crusade and Jihad. Because while I run the risk of demonizing those people--and I don't want to, because they're human, too, trying to make sense of a crazy world--those people are fucking crazy, miles away from the crazy of the people I know and with whom I really can get along with some effort. There are millions of people in this world to whom I really can't build a meaningful connection. Our languages are too different. The games we're trying to play are too much at odds. There can be no conversion. There can be no effective translation.

So that's the good I'm going to try to take from raising my blood pressure. I represent and belong to no faiths. I am proud to come from many tribes and several nations. But by virtue of being a half breed, by virtue of seeing the split not between Muslim and Jew or Christian and unbeliever, by feeling some romantic appreciation for both church bells and the muezzin, I know I can never live in the world those people would make, in the world they have interpreted around them. I need to remind myself that the splits that occur in my life and on its minute social stage seem vast--and indeed may be to me--but that they are nothing compared to the rifts that divide us from the great tyrants of our world, and even from fellow subjects who nevertheless belong to and support philosophies under which we do not or cannot exist.

Meeting Needs

Your mouth is for expressing the extent of your reason. Except it's also a tool for eating. So its purpose is consumption and expression of reason. Just reason? Okay, well you can use it to attack and cow others, to mislead them and batter them with nothing but breath and sound, but let's say that's not its purpose. Let's say that the mouth is intended for eating and speaking truth.

And kissing. And breathing. Eating, reasonable expression, kissing, breathing.... Anything else?

Well no. You're not supposed to put in on that. That's supposed to be used in that part of hers. Oh, and taking a leak. All other uses are unauthorized, no matter how entertaining. You'll void the warranty.

I cannot remember when I stopped looking for purpose around me. Utility is a simple thing; it evokes adoption, improvisation, application of purpose rather than discovery. Means to me are things to be debated. What you use for something may be used differently by someone else.

There is one major caveat to this. My anarchy-leaning friends may jump in and say "But the state cannot be used to satisfy [purpose] when it is not in its nature blah blah blah!"

And I will say to you that the State, or the Government, or Military/Economic/Political Power, is not a thing. It is a dynamic made into a thing. A culture that is more arrogant even than "a People." It is not a tool. It is a social arrangement, a collection of mutually reinforcing individuals, codes, and organizations. We may break it down into constituent pieces, to which I will apply my notion of inessentialism. A man, the ability to deal out violence, the doctrines that one or many may believe in, and so on--these things may be used differently by other individuals or groups. I never say that I know the whole of another human being, even as I know how I must relate to them. I try to never say that I know the endpoint of this idea or that culture, because the story of each may well be taken up and rewritten to suit the purpose of another narrator.

Back to the point. Means are significant and important, but they are changeable, for what is your means to a certain point will be another's path elsewhere. So where, at this moment, do I fix my gaze?

On ends, which are often enough if not usually the satisfaction of needs. For the purpose of this statement, needs can be considered interchangeable with desires. I do not care to get into the debate over which appetites are essential and which are acquired or socialized, at least not right now.

The architects and reformers of the modern state know these needs well, for even the most tyrannical states seek ways to institutionalize these needs. This is not simply about sustenance, shelter, and security. Who can doubt that, in their terrible way, even the totalitarians offered, and made a point of offering, senses of belonging, identity, and purpose? Our stereotype of barbaric and civilized states, serving basal and vaunted needs respectively, is foolish and wrong. Even the most tyrannical society can be sophisticated, and perhaps needs to be sophisticated in its appeals if it wants to survive for long. Consider the despotisms of the old religions; they expanded their appeals to serve so many needs that their psychological resonance long outlived the states among which they emerged and they long existed as ghosts while, in terms of material politics, they were utterly dead.

And so the social reformer also considers needs, for all around her she sees perversion and channeling of urges to serve the needs of the ruler and merely leave the ruled momentarily soothed. Sex is co-opted by commerce. Violence finds furtive expression in war fever, professional sports, and pornography of one sort or another.

And if I might wade into the ongoing KFO/JC feud, I must say I quibble with Mr. Crow's wording. It is true that fascists obsessed over the softness of modern life, but to assert that man has gone soft in some ways is not in itself fascistic. It is objectively true that in the empire, men and women have taken to internalizing their ambitions and urges, if they can so afford. We overeat, we drink too much, we use drink and other substances to give us excuses to say what we otherwise fear voicing, we play violent video games to get our heart rates up. We exercise in air conditioned rooms if we exercise at all.

And yet to say that humanity is going soft is not the same as to say that hardship is ennobling and that pain brings strength, as fascists argued. One can see an ape in captivity, masturbating compulsively, eating to excess, riddled with self-inflicted bites, and wonder if the fat, balding creature would not do better in the wild without necessarily desiring all the hardship that comes from a free life. (And of course, many an anarchist would argue that all pain and suffering comes from the zoological garden and simply cannot exist in the wild, but we will forgive them their hasty enthusiasm.)

And so we have an order that has insinuated itself between us and what we want. Where does that leave us? If we are moral nihilists (and I happen to be, in the sense that I believe there is no morality but what we create), that means that we must find some way to differentiate the means of satisfaction currently indulged by millions and the way we would prefer they feed their needs. Because this isn't a trap that one, or a handful, can escape. It is a prison of human bodies and the only way I suspect we may break out is to liberate the walls themselves.

Reduction

I've been thinking a lot about what Karl recently said. It wasn't written to me, or so I assume, but it's the type of thing I heard. A girl I liked for the wrong reasons told me that, or rather lectured me on it, as we walked the streets of Budapest alone, two Americans looking for a bar that felt comfortable. (That's a sentence with elements so overwrought that I hope you'll recognize it to be true.)

It stung then and it shut me up for a decent while. I've found myself fluctuating between silence and near-word-salad levels of verbosity. I don't say I'm eloquent, just as I don't say I'm strong. I'm capable of both poetry and strength, but I never guarantee them.

Anyway, the reason I write now is to express that I find my view narrowing. It unsettles me for one reason and one reason only--for it is comfortable. I leave before dawn, get home a little before dusk. Tend to my children. Put them to sleep. Cultivate intoxication. Sleep early. Get back to it. And I'm lucky. Very, very lucky. It's good work, shit I believe in. I like my co-workers. My bosses are the right mix of hands-off and "let me actually show you the shit I'm going to expect." It's the type of job I leave behind very easily. I come home and I feel clean, except for the actual, real, material filth. I ditch my clothes, wash my forearms, dress again, and I feel newborn. I sleep like a baby.

I'm waiting for the dissonance. I'm waiting for the maladaptation and the righteous indignation both, since my relationship with the world is both symptom of my virtue and my deep sickness. But it's not hitting me yet. Maybe the movement to a night shift will change that. I took on the job because I knew I'd work with people who were suffering.

But in the meantime, I feel so little. My mind has quieted. I feel drugged, and maybe I am, drugged on the return to lower-middle class, drugged on the promise of standing on my own for a little bit... Maybe I know why Hillary Clintons exist, because there is a deep part of me that wants to rush the technocracy. I watched my children, I depended on my spouse, I was devalued by the women and men who interacted with me. Mothers could not see me as providing some essentially feminine something to my children. Fathers could not see me as anything other than kept or lazy or submissive or scamming or faggy or something. Fuck them all, I want to say. Fuck every single one of you. I'll use the way I look and the court language I speak fluently and denied for so many years and I'll nestle up deeply to the side of the beast and I'll out-earn you all if I have the chance!

And yet I know how pathetic it is, for those of us who escaped or are descended from those who escaped from the working class. I've got it on both sides in a few countries. I'm made of emigres and exiles. And the thing is that I can't run too far into this mess because the power others had to make me feel pain isn't real power. It isn't war power. It isn't industrial power. It's the soft, brutal, social power, sure. But fuck. I'll actually let myself feel pity for some people rather than hate.

I don't know how much of this makes sense. What motivated my writing is reading so much brilliant prose regarding Libya and our state's continued abuses here and everywhere else. I've been in a bubble for a few weeks. All I've got to deconstruct is myself. I'm back inside the machine, and what people don't realize, what so many who "bought in" and tried to change things from the inside fail to understand, is that you're essentially blind. It is confusing and a little scary and the rope that is offered is a social one backed by economic power. You make friends or you don't. You accept new norms or you don't. You get indoctrinated, socialized, educated, whatever you want to call it 'cause it's all the same. Somehow I forgot what this was like.