Madmen Across the Water Thursday, August 05, 2004

A brilliant summation, from a quarterly called the Claremont Review of Books:

The Democratic Party therefore has a foreign policy problem this election year. The problem may be stated as follows: A transnational network of murderous Islamofascists seeks to kill innocent men, women and children, and to terrorize and humiliate the United States and its allies. Do the Democrats grasp the seriousness of this threat? The impression they give is that they would rather talk about anything else. By contrast, the current president, whatever his flaws, communicates a visceral readiness to hunt down the terrorists, and to do whatever it takes to keep Americans safe. Are we supposed to believe that those whose hearts are not in this fight will do any better?

@ 3:28:00 PM, ,

Traps for Troubadours

...is what I should've called at least one of the posts below. Ah well. I spotted this at a favorite horrible imperialist site and thought it made an old argument a lot more elegantly than I did. By Mark Goldblatt, teacher and novelist:

Bush bashers invariably point to his family's business dealings with the oil-rich Saudi royal family, or to Dick Cheney's former job as head of the oil company Halliburton, and therefore assume that the administration's policies toward Iraq are dictated primarily by the fact that the country sits on billions of gallons of oil. But playing connect-the-dots in order to prove someone's motives is always tricky, and often absurd. For example: Noam Chomsky's book sales have skyrocketed since the invasion of Iraq; Chomsky teaches at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; MIT is a major contractor for the Department of Defense; the Iraqi war strengthens the Defense Department requests for budget increases.... Therefore, Noam Chomsky conspired with the Defense Department to convince President Bush to invade Iraq.

What's lacking in every basher argument against Bush's preemptive war in Iraq is a grasp of who bears the burden of proof. The casus belli, according to Bush, was that Saddam was in violation of the cease-fire agreement that left him in power after the first Gulf War — and, following September 11, such defiance could no longer be tolerated. Bush's claim might be written off as mere flimflam — except that Saddam actually was in violation of the cease-fire agreement, and September 11 actually did alter many Americans' perceptions of tolerable risks. Moreover, we now know that Bush had learned of secret meetings between al Qaeda and Iraqi officials, that he'd learned of Saddam's attempts to acquire uranium from Niger, and that he'd been warned by Russian President Vladimir Putin that Saddam was planning terrorist strikes against the United States.

Yet Bush's stated rationale for going to war is universally sneered at by Bush bashers. On what basis? Typically, the basher will simply insist on his own ability to peer into Bush's soul to discern the "true" motive — dismissing as irrelevant Bush's specific justifications. And the "true" motive is always the same: Bush invaded Iraq to line the pockets of his corporate capitalist cronies.

To suppose this, however, is to suppose that President Bush, Vice President Cheney, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, Secretary of State Colin Powell, National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice, et. al., were willing, in effect, to commit mass murder in order to enrich themselves and their friends. Here's where the burden of proof comes in. Believing such a thing entails a burden of proof so astronomically high that nothing short of a videotape of the parties actually plotting it — or at least a signed memo detailing that plot — would even begin to surmount any rational observer's doubt.

To be sure, nothing I've just said proves that President Bush was right to invade Iraq. It was a tough call, and reasonable people can disagree on its wisdom. But reasonable people do not base their arguments on name-calling or mind-reading.

@ 10:03:00 AM, ,

The Usual Suspects

A thought occurred to me after deadline. In the Stanley Crouch quote, he talks about America "coming through" on progressive causes like unions, labor laws, etc. Meanwhile, in my Springsteen spiel I make mock of those kinds of causes. The difference is, the ideas and movements Crouch was talking about were worthy and appropriate in their era. Certainly we needed trust-busting and child-labor restrictions; certainly we needed desegregation and the Civil Rights Act. But the Ghost of Tom Joad crowd never, as they say, moved on from that era. They romanticized the fight for those causes and stopped asking whether or not the fight had been won or not.

Case in point, Steve Earle:

It's Christmastime in Washington
The Democrats rehearsed
Gettin' into gear for four more years
Things not gettin' worse
The Republicans drink whiskey neat
And thanked their lucky stars
They said, 'He cannot seek another term
There'll be no more FDRs'

I sat home in Tennessee
Staring at the screen
With an uneasy feeling in my chest
And I'm wonderin' what it means

Chorus:
So come back Woody Guthrie
Come back to us now
Tear your eyes from paradise
And rise again somehow
If you run into Jesus
Maybe he can help you out
Come back Woody Guthrie to us now

I followed in your footsteps once
Back in my travelin' days
Somewhere I failed to find your trail
Now I'm stumblin' through the haze
But there's killers on the highway now
And a man can't get around
So I sold my soul for wheels that roll
Now I'm stuck here in this town

Chorus

There's foxes in the henhouse
Cows out in the corn
The unions have been busted
Their proud red banners torn
To listen to the radio
You'd think that all was well
But you and me and cisco know
It's going straight to hell

So come back, Emma Goldman
Rise up, old Joe Hill
The barracades are goin' up
They cannot break our will
Come back to us, Malcolm X
And Martin Luther King
We’re marching into Selma
As the bells of freedom ring

I first heard that song in concert in NYC--and the crowd went positively apeshit. The vibe I got was that they were stunned that a big fat redneck like Steve (this was before his big political coming-out party) could be so...sophisticated. In retrospect, if this isn't the dumbest goddamn statement ever, I'm hard pressed to think of another. It makes Toby Keith sound like Alexis de Tocqueville.

This written during, and about, the Clinton administration. The idea that we are perpetually battling top-hatted capitalist adventurers, or marching on Selma, is ludicrous and dangerous--but obviously profitable. If we're always in danger, we'll always need prophets of doom.

I realize, too, that we are perpetually in danger (for the bible tells me so!). And, yes, there are still social threats on the level of Bull Connor and Uncle Moneybags to contend with--but in new forms, requiring novel responses. To frame the present in outdated terms masks the moral dilemmas we face now and, maybe more important, ignores the progress we've made. The unions have been busted? Excuse me, who are the largest and most powerful donors to the Democratic party? A more imaginative radical might make the case that, with their corruption and forcing of memberships into voting blocs, the unions are as needful of reform as the old workhouses were. Their proud red banners torn? Yeah, there's an image for the world post-1989. (Forced famines, anyone?) And let's get a few more bomb-throwers like Emma Goldman back on the scene while we're at it...

This is of course to ignore the fact that "social" threats at this point are not the biggest issues we face. e.g., terrorism, geopolitcs, those little issues. I'm thinking Steve's--and Bruce's--thinking on all that stuff froze somewhere around the Fourteen Points. (If not the Port Huron statement.)

"Art isn't about beauty; it's about truth," a friend of mine told me once before never speaking to me again. By truth he meant the kind outlined above--i.e., another place's, another time's. I'm all for "truth-telling" in art; but for Chrissakes check the calendar before you do.

@ 7:15:00 AM, ,

P.S. Wednesday, August 04, 2004

I should apologize in advance to my Springsteen-fanatic friends. Underneath it all, I still love the music; it's just him that's starting to grate.

@ 10:38:00 PM, ,

Meeting Across the River

News story on AOL: Boss has had enough of Bush.

Don't reach for that Lady Remington, Ms. Scialfa! Bruce elaborates:

"We're trying to put forward a group of progressive ideals and change the administration in the White House," Springsteen told The Associated Press in the most overtly political statements of his 30-year career. "That's the success or failure, very clear cut and very simple."

Progressive ideals...testicles retreat into body cavity...am flooded with visions of Henry Fonda, overloaded dust-bowl jalopies and guitars with This Machine Kills Fascists written on them. (And Supports Stalin left off in the interest of brevity.)

Progressive ideals...OK, Tom Joad, explain please which of those will remove the threat of, say, Pakistani madrassas or of Iran developing a nuclear weapon? Maybe the far-sighted notion a Kerry adviser proposed in an interview the other day: "calling Iran's bluff" by supplying the mullahs with nuclear fuel. As in: You say you just want fuel to feed a reactor? Fine, here's fuel. Feed your reactor. Just think about how stupid you'll look in front of a Congressional committee if we catch you building a bomb with it!

I know, I know. Bruce wrote "Thunder Road" and he's a friend to the hard-workin' fucked-over man and when he drives down the Turnpike the Carmena Burena starts playing and trees begin to blossom.

But I'm getting tired of his schtick: the "Brando mumbles," the furrowed forehead, the concern he gives off like gamma rays. And I resent that he reduced 9/11, on that much-grammied record of his, into another goddamn story about feelin' real bad cause you can't be with your baby. That's part of it, sure; but it's not all of it, and not realizing that is a tremendous failure of imagination. It's hard to get around the notion that he doesn't recognize the world is bigger than Wendy and the Magic Rat--and the Ghost of Tom Joad. That's his progressive ideal: GWB is just another mean ol' daddy keepin' his daughter locked up at night.

Of course, maybe I'm being unfair. Maybe he's got a detailed policy platform stashed at the manse (similar to the "secret plan" Kerry mentioned the other day for withdrawing from Iraq; any day now, he's going to be drawing up an Enemies List and bombing Cambodia). But I doubt the hell out of it. To all appearances, it looks like Bruce is coasting on the virtue vibe and "outrage." It's tiring, it's humorless and grim--as sentimental and stupid as a soccer hooligan.

I'm very fond of this quote from Stanley Crouch, in a Salon interview years ago:

We would be better off if we didn't always sentimentalize everything and everyone. We sentimentalize the great figures of our past, and then we find out that they were human beings who did both things that were exceptional and other things that perhaps weren't savory at all. Then people want to reject the whole deal. That's the adolescent morality that you find in rock 'n' roll. We have to be able to see both the good and the bad. That's what being grown-up is all about. We have to strive toward what I call an unsentimental patriotism, one that faces 200 years of slavery, the decimation of the Indians, the second-class citizenship of women, child exploitation and terrible labor conditions, but one that also recognizes that we came through with the unions, that women and minorities moved themselves into the center of the dialogue and therefore took the country closer to being the thing that it was originally conceived as.


What can I say? Rock on.

@ 9:14:00 PM, ,

A Brief Self-Deprecatory Note Sunday, August 01, 2004

The last few posts haven't been among my faves--looking back, they're not as polished as I'd like and they rely on secondhand sources. Blogging has become an insomniac pastime for me, and so the results are on the disjointed side. I'll try to be more original and coherent in the future.

@ 7:14:00 PM, ,