I am compelled today to ponder the subject of “community” mobilization, institutional/establishment chicanery and potential crisis in American middle class ideology.
“I cannot accept the facile comfort that this catastrophe [in a few words elsewhere, “barbarism in modern Europe”] was a purely German phenomenon or some calamitous mishap rooted in the persona of one or another totalitarian order. Ten years after the Gestapo quit Paris, the countrymen of Voltaire were torturing Algerians[....]” [ George Steiner, Language and Silence, 1967]
“In the twentieth century it is not easy for an honest man to be a literary critic. There are so many urgent things to be done....” [Steiner]
While it is not suggested here that an Nationalist Socialist path is inevitable for the United States, there are some foreboding circumstances. Firstly, the middle class are quite literally right in the middle of it all. In the United states that is. I also believe certain elements of “community based” and grass-root organizing are perhaps more than partnered with commercial groups―but rather expose a more institutional origin for their supposed environmental concerns and “activism.” Could not this presumed mobilization be postured, virtually imposed upon communities and truthfully be Establishment masquerading as a social movement from the bottom up.
{A rant: Such posturing would be expected of Tacoma Housing Authority, building contractors such as Quadrant, industry (Weyerhauser, for example), real estate bankers and investors (at the expense of the buyers, especially the low-income families) which have everything to gain by slicing up the parcels on the east side of Tacoma into smaller units; in order to preserve the hoped for property value of said “communities” surely they would insist residents volunteer to keep it clean and tidy--that is, work for no pay out in the public domain. We could assume that this was because the tax base was expected to increase only imperceptibly at first and would not support public property landscaping or street maintenance; or should we recognize that a powerful organization of specialized groups fronted by a “neighborhood Association” as a thin guise has deemed this area a kind of third solution for the impoverished and therefore it means to hover over it as if it were an untrustworthy child, or worse, has engraved forever the stigma of “projects” onto the polished surface of Salishan! This is what we do with our enlisted soldiers and their families. Nor should we be fooled when Tacoma’s public schools for example become partners in this by enlisting children and families through shallow “ecology projects” and neighborhood events to cleanup the east-side and the gulch. Even labeling wooded areas as “sensitive habitat areas” is insulting to the intelligence of these residents!}
Cloaking cost saving institutional strategies as an environmental movement is a sham and we should be wary of this device. It occurs to me too, remembering that recently a community member from the east-side said to me that these were times when it didn't suffice to be thinking of oneself, that it was selfish to even desire solitude, that others came first. That "community" is supreme seems a suspiciously familiar theme: Dostoevsky’s “pan-humanism” is just one that comes to mind; and our tendency to become rigid as we mobilize for “causes” is another. But let us ask why this question of “community” and ideological crisis should come up whilst reading a novel.
"These are perilous times for free spirits." [Bao Ninh, The Sorrow of War]
These words are spoken by the father of the main character of the novel by Bao Dinh. The father is an artist whose style and subjects were "completely out of step with the times, which required artists to accede to certain socialist ethics, to display material understandable to the working class." He could "never have been successful in that era[...]" writes Bao Ninh, [and it should be noted that the act of writing is in the forefront in Ninh’s narrative] and he became "regarded as a suspicious malcontent" by the Party. I am reminded here of the real artist, George Grosz, and others like him who were labelled "degenerates" by the Nazis in the first half 20th century Germany. I can't help but note that authors, artists are particularly sensitive to these issues of aesthetics, literature and social criticism―as some of these inheritors of intuition, whether they aspire to, or not, offer us in fact a kind of window looking out upon society in general; they are its conscience as it were, and it should not be surprising that they and their ‘creations’ expose a dread of the potential threat of encroaching institutions, what-ever they might be driven by―commercial, religious or political doctrines―to throw rocks at the spot lights coming through the frame or the page. Sadly even presumed well-meaning social movements to save community or the environment could be hijacked and undermined for such institutional re-establishments of power by those who wield it and wish to maintain it.
“After the inroads made by Volkish thought, a large segment of German youth associated hikes through the countryside with revolution, and identifying with nature was thought equivalent to subverting the existing order. And here alone it functioned as a vital part of an ideology that was conservative as contrasted with the progress of the times [....] the direction it took immersed youth in a romanticism based upon the native landscape, elemental vitality and awareness of the German past.” [George Mosse. The Crisis of German Ideology, 1981]
I make reference here not to associate with any political development or party myself, nor to suggest America has outright become a Fascist regime, though it's pretty darn close (and I'll deal with that later)―as is heralded by some in the extreme media; but rather to point out an apparent proclivity amongst the powerful for duping the rest of polity with the skin of the same natural aspiration that gilds all classes of society, a desire for scouts’ honor order on a planet whose inhabitability is likely in jeopardy. (Note, too, that Ninh refers to a Youth Union and its patriotic campaigns in his novel.) (And, yes, even the holocaust had part origin in what purported to be a benign soil-loving movement, which then proceeded to collide with the ‘diaspora’ of another movement.)
The taxis of humankind has this in common with pan-germanic insecurity, and pan-slavic tribalism as well with the cold war aspirations of the American Empire. The cold war was more a cold front than a wall, for it moves and tosses like a cyclone, the breath of the land itself, the primal vagrant. And within it, this torrent pan-episode, we will forever be forced upward or cast all else asunder. Perhaps such a force is that which George Steiner meant to convey when he said:
“The history of taste is rather like a spiral. Ideas which are at first considered outrageous or avaunt-garde become the reactionary and sanctified beliefs of the succeeding generation,” and “[t]hus a modern critic finds himself in double-jeopardy. Criticism has about it something of a more leisured age. It is difficult on moral grounds, to resist the fierce solicitations of economic, social, and political issues.... ”
Bao Ninh’s protagonists should cause one to shudder, in the midst of our “Western” leisure, to see that while we in the ‘West’ have so little understanding of SE Asia, its bioregions, its cultures, walls and its proclivities; we are yet caught in the same basic struggle of loyalties between the many and the few, between desires and fears, longing for thrills or serenity; but perhaps as loci are merely out of sync. Whether it is Imperialist expansion, or street-gang territorial murder, we are all slumping toward some fourth dimensional shoreline, the ‘final-solution’ which sends the ultra-predatory few of us into the sea―embarking upon a floating city or walking a plank for the sake and punishment for their thoroughly abused tribal longings. Ultimately, vying for land, its borders and its bounty, has led us over and over to the inhumanity of war, however genocidal.
Today, what have we learned but how to disguise the acquisitive motivation more stealthily, more insidiously and just beneath the prickling hairs of our alarum. We are still telling each other what to do, when, where to stand and that akimbo should do just as well as caressing for our arms, for respite. So, this is all far more than to simply ask should a home owner be harassed because their landscaping aesthetics don’t match everybody else’s in the neighborhood. This nation boasts its diversity. Oddly enough, though, just as diversity is as much the problem inherent in diversity, Democracy has as well been proclaimed to be what “ails democracy.” [can’t remember the source for this phrase].
Perhaps we need to recognize that all beliefs are laden with contingents, provisions and the like. So it’s not a question of ‘believing’ in the ‘American Dream.’ It’s more that we’ve finally recognized that dreams are morphing everywhere, and that 'here' is just another place to call home to bigotry, greed and enslavement behind rows of prefabricated picket white fences manufactured 'who knows where,' in just another place called come ‘home.’ Perhaps a gated concrete wall around all neighborhoods would be a boon―the barbarians and predatory animals after all were outside the village, weren't they? But wait, wouldn't this just be another level of marginalization!?
end of review, part 1
