Loss

This is a terribly sad post with which to end the year ... I have been avoiding finishing it for days. But it has been a hell of year ... a year of enormous loss. So with that ...

I spent the day wandering today ... I wanted to spend some time thinking about the film that my oldest friend, Ian Mackenzie, showed us last night. The film is called The Last of the Nomads, and it is part of a CBC (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation) series called The Adventurers. (Bizarrely, the full version of the film is only available in Canada; if you are in Canada, see it here.) The film won the Grand Prize at the Banff Mountain Film Festival.

The film is about Ian's 15-year work with the Penan people of Sarawak; Ian has some further material on the Penan and his work here.

The essence of the film is about loss ... in this case, the loss of language, heritage, and way of life of a people who practiced harmony in a land of plenty for countless generations. The loss is cruel, and heartless, the result of the immoral greed of the ruling caste of Malaysia that enables the rape of the primeval rain forest which is the ancestral home of the Penan. They tried to stop the bulldozers in the 80s with their bodies, but they were carted away. The film documents the moment when Ian discovers that the last of the nomadic Penan have settled and sowed crops.

There is no doubt that this was "inevitable" in the sense of the conflict between industrial power and greed against a people armed with sticks and time. Social structures morph and change, and they can come to an end. Countless nomadic societies have settled ... not only now but for thousands of years. But the inevitable aspect of this cannot mask that it did not have to be such a guillotining ... that a rational approach to forest resources could have allowed sustainable extraction and continued forest-living for the peoples who, by any standard of dispassionate justice, "own" that forest.

But this film is about loss ... about an execution ... about the terminal act in the assault of a government on one of its people who were in the way of greed.


So I took a large part of the day to think about loss both in the broad, historical context of what Ian showed us about the Penan and in a more personal sense. I went to Three Wells in Mill Valley, a place where a seasonal stream cascades through a forested gully. My old friend June grew up in Mill Valley and played there as a child in the 30s long before Mill Valley became the preserve of a rich liberal caste who seem to shun you as you walk the back roads ... perhaps a projection of my imagination since I have long observed how the rich look askance at those who invade their preserves without invitation. June showed Three Wells to our mutual friend Kurt, who was a mentor and best friend, and who perished of the plague in 1992. Kurt and I went to Three wells on several occasions to sit by its cascading waters and examine the Universe, as he would call our discussions.

Loss is everywhere in human existence ... it is the sine qua non of progress and change and both personal and social development. That is not praise for loss, nor does it equate one loss with another. We cannot hold back the hands of time, as it were, and the hands of time are driven by loss. My education in loss, as I have addressed from time to time in these scribblings, was AIDS ... "the Deaths", I have called it ever since ... and I had to come to grips with the unendurable. Not unique ... and I not so much comforted myself as assuaged my fears by thinking of other more horrible losses that at least someone survives.

Remember the 2004 tsunami. Ian was in San Francisco when it happened, and together we consumed the news insatiably. We had traveled together in Aceh, and knew some of the scenes. Watching the footage was addictive, not only because of the sheer horror or it, but also because of the vicarious participation in loss ... trying to fathom the unimaginable, trying to settle your mind on top of something that cannot be endured.

But, of course, it is endured. As one reads history, that is the remarkable thing about our species, that we endure against all odds. The results, let alone the causes, are not always pretty ... and there is endurance against that which cannot be controlled and endurance against that which ought never to have been.

There is also the less panoramic but more personal loss. Three local institutions emblematic of an earlier period in the history of the Castro (the San Francisco neighborhood where I live and where the defining early events of gay liberation occurred) ... Welcome Home, a hippyish greasy spoon that was a haven for gay clones in the 70s and 80s; All American Boy, a long-time clothier who supplied the clones with plaid shirts and jeans back in the day; and Gay Cleaners, the Chinese laundry run by the strangely cinematic and curiously named Gay family, apparently kicked out with a month's notice after 30 years by a greedy landlord who evidently does not read the Wall Street Journal. I am cranky about these losses because they signal the yuppification of our gentrified neighborhood, and I loathe all the cell-phone toting yuppies with their dumb-struck boyfriends in tow. I fear the loss of my neighborhood.

What sort of a loss is that by comparison with a people who lose their homeland or their way of life. Our society turns over at a furious pace ... an unsustainable pace, one might argue, but we still wait for the final proof on that. One has to be careful to balance one's sense of outrage at loss against the greater losses that we witness daily in the New York Times.

Loss. No future without it. Indeed, there is not past without it. One cannot address lass without thinking of one of my guiding aphorisms ... to whit, that there is no such thing as a zero sum game.

I won't spend a lot of time thinking of a loss from which greater gain was had ... do we have modern Europe without the guillotine, Napoleon, the Franco-Prussian War, the two great wars? Probably not, although that is not to say that all the horrors were the sine qua non. Could it not have gone another way? It turns out that there is not a lot of support in history for a flower child notion that history would have been much better if only everyone just got along.

But that is never a justification for the horrors of the moment. It is no argument that we cannot "at this moment, at this time" (paraphrasing Obama) apply reason and find ways for all sides to benefit. I think of Gaza in that sense.

And I think of those poor last nomads, Ian's friends, living in a forest hut yards from their more settled cousins, wistfully and sadly, if not bitterly, contemplating a loss whose contours even they cannot fully measure. There is no good reason for it; only greed ... a well-known historical reason. I quibble with Ian about how he records the oral texts of this people before they disappear. But I admire his courage in being willing to witness up close the agony of people unjustly stripped of their heritage, and to be willing to bear witness so that people in the future may remember these last nomads.


As I thought about this and watched the water in Three Wells, I remembered old Kurt, dead these 15 years. I remembered talking with him about issues just like this as we together watched the water swirl at Three Wells. Loss, and the future, and the unimaginable that comes true no matter what.

Photos by Arod of Three Wells, Mill Valley, California.

Ideologues and Gay Freedom

To follow up on yesterday's post ... I think I based much of what I argued on three insufficiently answered questions ... leastwise unanswered in the current thread. I think I address subjects like this a lot since they represent core questions in the core ideas that I think about.

1. Why is gay liberation about sex first?

Homo-association is common in all societies. Armies, the workplace, sports, play, the church. Erotic male association occurs in all societies, too, but it often is either unnamed or misnamed. The difference between two guys hanging out and two guys living together as a married couple is that the latter two guys have sex. It is the sex that matters.

The virulent homophobia of the present day is the invention of monotheistic religions. In the case of christianity, the homophobia derived from a struggle in the early church which the sexual liberationist party lost. But the real repression only started in the 11th century, and it relates to the rise in the state side of the church/state dialectic. It is important always to keep that in mind ... both church and state attack homosexuals when it is useful to them ... in this sense, as I have argued before, gays are more like Jews in Western history than we are like women or Blacks. In the case of islam, its founder was a homophobe, and death is the punishment. Like everything in their holy book, there are contradictions and ways of reading different things from different passages ... holy books are like that, as they must be if they are to be holy. State and religious persecution of gays was also sporadic during the muslim centuries, but the key repressive feature was in the "protestant", flat, and family-centric society. It is true that muslim societies have generally tolerated old guys screwing pre-pubescent guys, but it is the tolerance of looking the other way. Their loathing of gay sex among equals parallels the christian world.

Gay people living together in the past might have drawn attention to them, but they were punished for having sex, or for being imagined to have sex. Repression against gay people has always been sporadic and selective. The key to understanding the repression of gay people, though, is to understand the silence. The love that dare no t speak its name. Virtually every lie told about us relies on the fact that we have been silenced for two millennia.

2. What was the impact of 70s feminism's hostility to gay liberation?

I believe that the key impact of feminism's hostility to gay liberation came to fruition only once the AIDS crisis forced feminism to back off ... or more to the point, to join up and garner a cut of the fruits, as it were .. the funding and recognition that started to flow towards AIDS-oriented organizations and the political clubs in the early 80s. (Parenthetically, I note again that I always distinguish between the social movement of women for freedom and equality as against the ideological superstructure built around it. The former I prefer to call women's liberation”; the latter "feminism.")

That impact was to undercut the primacy of the sex question. Feminism sought to domesticate gay liberation, to deprive it of the creativity and radicalism that challenged notions of prudery, dominant mores, monogamy, and centrally regulated morality. The notion that "gay is good" cannot be separated from a notion that sex is good ... that sex is the most profound creative force in human life, and that liberating from domination by religion and the state would lead to free people immune from lies and ideology. Feminism has, with only a very few exceptions, viewed free male sexuality as threat. Andrea Dworkin was vastly more iconic than Gayle Rubin.

Those kooky gay guys with our Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, our predilection for cruising, our hyper-masculine affectations ... the so-called "clones" ... and our fierce determination to defend the right for people to love whomever and however they damned well pleased ... well, it just did not make for tight control. Feminism was and is prescriptive ... it is ideological, starting not from life but from first principles. A band of heroic lovers was not susceptible to the control of a committee of school marms. They didn't like us and we didn't like them. We didn't trust them. But things changed as they are wont to do.

When those feminists who had boycotted the movement in the 70s finally showed up, they brought with them a loathing of what one of them once called, spitting the words in my face at a conference at UCLA in 1981, "your penis politics." That conference was a crazy attempt to build a national gay organization on the left and was like some uranium isotope with a half life of a half a weekend. One of my best friends at the time did manage to find a boyfriend ... in a bathroom ... so it wasn't a total loss. The most hilarious moment was when a women dressed head to tow in expensive Western wear ... you know, the boots, the hat, the shirt, the chaps, the whole nine yards ... rose to vehemently attack drag queens for mocking women.

So with those furious days as precursor, the impact of feminism on the gay movement has been to de-sex it. And that has given pride of place to those who make ludicrous distinctions between gay sex and gay relationships.

3. What is wrong with the notion of the invention of [the discourse of] homosexuality?

Silence.

The notion of the invention of homosexuality relies upon positing the first outspoken gays of the late 19th century as saying something new. No. They were saying aloud what could not be said. No doubt, saying it aloud changed it. But it did not invent it. Saying it aloud made it available for others to modify it, attack us, redefine us, be repelled by us. Finally all their allegations against us made without naming us were open for examination. Of course, it took century for us to rise to our own defense, and in that time they slaughtered us and jailed us and beat us up and drove us from our homes in numbers that the bigots of earlier centuries could only have dreamed about. But that is true of all repression in the 20th century. The means at hand allowed for industrial slaughter. You cannot blame that on us for breaking the silence. You cannot blame that on the Enlightenment. You cannot blame that on people fighting for their rights. You have to blame the slaughter on the slaughterers.

Homosexuality is often blamed on foreigners ... it always something imposed on an innocent population by the evil other. I enjoyed Tim Blanning's recounting in his The Pursuit of Glory of the attitude of the 17th-century Dutch:

In the Dutch Republic, it was asserted that sodomy had been completely unknown until introduced by the Spanish and French envoys attending the negotiations that led to the Peace of Utrecht in 1713. Henceforth it was known as the 'Catholic vice', part of the great conspiracy by the Antichrist whose headquarters at Rome was also 'catamitorum mater'.

Catamitorum mater would be mother of all catamites.

Dr. Massad might take a lesson from all this. He should blame the political stagnation of Arab societies not on European gays but on the rulers of Arab societies, and on the strange lassitude of their subject populations in developing some different approach, notwithstanding the amply models available just for the watching.

The wholesome working class guys whom Massad apparently favors and who are screwing their pre-pubescent cousins and nephews ... they are gay, Massad. So are the allegedly Euro-influenced middle class guys who screw each other. The job of freedom loving people is to defend their right to do what consenting people want to do, and to oppose the bigots and authoritarians who want to kill them irrespective of what a ideologue on foreign shores thinks of their allegiances.

Massad, like the church, like the prophet, like the high-feminist ideologues, supports the silence. Silence kills. Freedom shouts.

I have illustrated this post again with the work of Fred Holle. Check him out. I saw his paintings at an exhibition at American Conservatory Theater, and they impressed me with his mastery of the simultaneity of madness and the quotidian. His web site says that one can use his images for non-commercial purposes ... and gawd noze I ain't making a nickel off my scribblings.

The Tiny Mind of the Ideologue

My somewhat tormented perorations on impostors in my last post came to rest in the notion of the neo-con as impostor. That is a subset of the notion that all ideologues are impostors in that they pretend that thought follows fact when their method is to force fact to follow their idealist impositions. It is true of left and right, and so soon after my little attack of dry heaves at the conceit of Michael Burleigh's Earthly Powers, by chance and the efforts of a friend I have run into a classic case of a left wing ideologue whose mouth has got well ahead of any reasoned thought.

My upstairs neighbor and old friend, Tony, pushed an article through the mail slot that he suggested I read. It is from a gay rag called The Guide which features thoughtful articles among many many salacious and lovely pix of ill-clad men. The piece is called Desiring Arabs and it concerns a new book by a controversial Columbia University academic, one Joseph Massad. The reviewer, Bll Andriette, writes:

Massad's overarching theme is that Europe's encroachment on the Middle East -- Napoleon's aborted invasion of Egypt in 1798 is the opening salvo -- poured acid rain on the Arabs' literary legacy of same-sex eros. Western conquest has had that unsavory effect, Massad contends, whether the interlopers were Victorian-era colonial administrators, European scholars unearthing and systematizing ancient Arabic texts, gay tourists on sexcapades, or Western human-rights groups and the gay campaigners that he contemptuously dubs the "Gay International." Indeed, these latter Massad accuses of being a sometimes witting tool of Western imperialism. Moreover, he says, they do no favors for erotic freedom in the Middle East.

Later he writes:

Massad does not dispute that some Arabs embrace gay identity. But he contends they hail from the increasingly westernized elites. "They remain a minuscule minority among those men who engage in same-sex relations and who do not identify as 'gay' nor express a need for gay politics," Massad argues. The evidence, he suggests, includes Zakharia's care in distinguishing "gay love" from "gay sex," pointing to a world where same-sex activity is a commonplace without name or label.

It is noteworthy that he prefaces the previous comment with this:

"Since the concept of same-sex relations does not exist in the Arab world, being 'gay' is still considered to be sexual behavior," asserts Ramzi Zakharia, GLAS's outreach director. "Just because you sleep with a member of the same sex does not mean you are gay. Once a relationship develops beyond sex (i.e., love), this is when the term 'gay' applies."

GLAS refers to "The Gay and Lesbian Arabic Society (Glas.org), for example, was established in 1988 and claims chapters in New York, Los Angeles, Beirut, and Cairo."

Let's start here ... the notion propounded that "the concept of same-sex relations does not exist in the Arab world" is complete piffle ... idiocy ... one of those commonplaces that develop among people talking in closed rooms that are repeated so often that they start to sound true just so long as you do not compare them to reality. Folks, being gay IS a sexual behavior. When some straight Arab guy, or Afghan where the practice is quite common and roundly tsk-tsked by assorted campaigners of one type or another, screws some straight youth, what they are doing is gay. It is gay by any definition.

Now it may not be a "gay relationship" in the sense of gay marriage or commitment ceremonies or two queers gathering their nickels and quarters and buying a million dollar condo just outside the Castro. But it is gay. Gay equals homosexual, and vice versa. The terms are interchangeable.

The confusion here started, frankly, in the refusal of politically correct feminists to accept the fundamental arguments of gay liberation in the 70s ... and it was much abetted by the partial thinking of poor M. Foucault who had the misfortune of dying before he could complete, and correct, his thought. Let me explain.

The feminists of the 70s loathed and openly opposed gay liberation. They were motivated by two bad theories ... firstly that they had to counter the broadly propounded notion that feminists were frustrated dykes who just needed a good fuck by a proper man and they'd see the light; and, secondly, that all penetrative sex was male supremacist and since gay men are distincly penetrative, if you get my drift, they were the most supremacist of all. Those among my readers chary of hard thought may think I exaggerate, but I assure you that this is not hyperbole ... rather it is stated as fact from repeated direct personal experiences.

Gay liberation was founded on the notion that gay is good, by which we meant that "though some seek to deny it, homosexuality is normal and natural and not a threat to society or the individual." The quote is a paraphrase form memory of the opening sentence in the Gay Alliance Toward Equality (GATE) Vancouver statement of principles. Frobisher will no doubt correct any inessential inaccuracies. I believe that he wrote the line. By "gay is good", we meant gay sex, gay life, gay community, gay individuals, gay lovers, gay people. We did not create some inane separation between the joy of versus sex and gay relationships. Such an distinction is pandering to our enemies, and chiefly our religious enemies.

An aside on poor M. Foucault at whose doorstep we must lay blame for the truncated notion of discourse ... in this case, the ideational underpinning of the silly notion that the homosexual "discourse" was invented in the 19th century. The truth is that the long history of both Islam and Christianity in regard to homosexuality is a history of silencing in literate or reported form of the oral and obvious discourse of homosexuality. I find some support for this in Tim Blanning's excellent The Pursuit of Glory: Europe 1648-1815, my current reading material, who has an thorough review of gay life ... including sex ... on pages 80-85. Again and again, he notes the silencing. For example, he quotes a 1709 report by the "raffish journalist" Ned Ward "who in his account of the clubs of London and Westminster" uses the phrasing "that they may tempt each other to commit those odious Bestialities, that ought for ever to be without a Name." It is not that there is no discourse for homosexuality, but rather that it is impolitic or blasphemous or what have you to give the discourse a name. Everybody knew what it was.

Notwithstanding our current standing on the left ... to whit that we have after much struggle been accepted as a struggle ... we remain the poor sisters of liberation struggles. What leftoid is willing to credit Mayor Newsom for his courage in standing up for gay liberation ... certainly not current poster-man (smirk) Barrack. (Here's an article article along with an alluring photo of the good mayor in a recent speech in which he avers that politicians are too risk-averse.) But even today, the struggle for gays is against silence and for civil rights.

Against silence.

That is what the would-be liberal Joseph Massad completely does not understand ... I believe he willfully misunderstands it in favor of a pre-figured ideology, to whit the "not quite as popular as it was a decade or two ago" anti-colonialism. His argument has this structure. Arab men used to fuck with gay abandon and repression was rare. Then the Euros arrived with their discourses of sodomy, and the elites adopted these homophobic notions. So all homosexual repression is the result of colonialism. Therefore, to oppose it is to be a colonialist since the removal of colonialism would result in a return to the status quo ante.

Return ... if I might refer to my argument about Lev Nussimbaum and his love of monarchy ... return to that which cannot be re-accessed is the essence of the fantasy of monarchism. If I commit to that which cannot be, then I cannot gird myself against commitment to, or more importantly against, that which actually is. Parenthetically, this is the allure of religion. In the current case, it is that which immunizes a would-be thinker like Massad against taking a stand FOR gay sex ... for the right of free individuals to do what they want in free association with other free individuals. And by consequence, a man who poses as a liberal can find himself defending the brutal repression not only of Arab dictators but also of their fascist Islamist opponents. The fall guys are a bunch of gay boys who just want to fuck. Who the hell cares ... people have sex! Let them be. Leave them alone.

This is precisely the deadly game of ideology. By convoluted paths, it argues that the non-existence of a discourse of homosexuality in the past allowed people to have gay sex, but now the imposition of gay discourse by colonialists means that gay people cannot have sex, therefore gay liberationists should shut up and then everything would return to the situation of silence in which gay guys could fuck. Applied to a context such as cooking or bibliography, such idiocy would get you kicked out of the club. On the left, you get a book published and a professorship. What foolishness ... it would be funny if lives were not at issue ... if victims of this logic were not languishing in Egyptian prisons and at the end of Iranian nooses.

What we really have here is the fact that Massad is a reactionary, a homophobe. Not a liberal. He supports the repression of gays and he opposes free speech. His convoluted thinking ... I am too sane to call it logic ... amounts to supporting the repression of gays by the Egyptian regime and the Iranian murderers.

I will return to the depredations of ideologues against gays tomorrow.

I have read a lot of this to my sainted roommate and bartender, RL, who notes that his arguments reek of perversions and subjections of logic. Perfect.

I am writing this post to the stylings of the inimitable Noel Coward in his 1950 Las Vegas performance at the Desert Inn ... and I am spurred by the equally inimitable RL's production of a Gin Buck, a fine dinner of tortelloni and salad, and soon another cocktail whose identity is yet to be determined ... it is a Hearst with Punta Mes.

Check out this additional good article from the horny Guide.

Photos from the work of Fred Holle.

Rambling

I'm watching the fourth quarter of the Cal-USC game. Not really much of a football fan, but being a spurts junkie means watching women's bowling if there's nothing else on when you need a fix. Certainly college football is a damned sight better than any form of bowling ... and when the noble California Golden Bears have a shot at crushing the profoundly evil USC Parthians or Persians or some ancient non-Greeks ... can't remember which ones just now ... well, just gotta watch. Of course, I have three degrees from Cal. Currently tied 17-17 with ten and a half to go in the fourth quarter.

I feel kind of guilty about my Pakistan post ... how can I say that any nation is "worst". Plenty of folks around the world would quickly chime in that the good ole U.S. of A. is the worst for various reasons. What I mean by worst is that a place is horrible to live in, contributing essentially nothing, and causing or at least threatening tremendous harm.

USC just had a big pass play wiped out by a holding penalty. Such is the lot of those in league with the devil. I smile. Some people take the devil seriously, and I daresay there are plenty of the religious in Pakistan who count themselves among that number. I consider the notion of the devil as a longstanding and hilarious, albeit rather cruel, joke. It is a notion that readily serves as handbag for assorted complaints and fears and disappointments and hurts ... like this one ... USC, in league with the devil, scores a touchdown after a 95+ yard drive.

So back to Pakistan. It was founded on an idea, or at least it had ideology at the forefront of a founding that certainly had plenty of other interests at work. I decided I should review Pakistan's history given my post and shortly I shall re-read Owen Bennett Jones' comprehensive survey of Pakistan's history, Pakistan: Eye of the Storm ... sort of a drag, because I have been enjoying a fabulous tour of the middle period of the middle part of Asia ... the Turkic, Mongol, Tatar invasions and conquests. But there is a relationship between those middle-middle-middle events, and the historical impasse in which middle-middle-middle Asia finds iitself.

Put briefly, I refer to the notion of the third rule of history ... that any force given long enough turns into its opposite. (You can see my three rules of history at the top of this blog.) Modern Western historians like to emphasize how backward Europe was in the middle periods of human history, and how advanced and spectacular and populated were China and the Middle East and the vast stretch of steppe between them. But in those long millennia where the nomads on horseback repeatedly beat back civilization either capturing it or destroying, they bequeathed historical predilections that continue to haunt that vast middle even when the power of horsemen is now confined to that most backward corner of human life, the Sudan.

In other words, the successes of Genghis Khan and Tamurlane and the Seljuk and late Ottoman Turks and the Mamluks had the effect of freezing political and social innovation. How that worked I do not yet have words to describe ... but it is that which motivates me in my current re-reading of middle-middle-middle Asian history. And I write out this predilection here to challenge myself to come up with some of those words.

[Nate Longshore, Cal QB, just threw another fourth-quarter interception, and the game is essentially gone. Cal's failure this year has hung on his bad right ankle, but you have to begin to wonder if he is the guy who can take us there. He is still a junior, but we have a keeper in young Kevin Riley ... we just might have to go with him next year.]

So the "worstness" of Pakistan the nation, as I see it, along with the seemingly permanent fracturing of Afghanistan not so much as a nation as in terms of its being a cultural zone, is the playing out of historical dymanics that are several millennia old combined with the peculiar horrors of 20th-century ideology. To counter the straw-man notion raised above that the U.S. is the "worst" nation, we have only to point to the fact that its dynamics are of much more recent genesis, and so the possibility of re-working them seems closer to the surface. And we can consider that the basic ideas of American democracy are 18th- and 19th-century, where the driving ideas of the founding of Pakistan are a hellish brew that conflates the superstitions of the 7th century with the worst megalomanias of the 20th.

USC just made a first down with a minute to go. We're dead. Woe.

No first downs in Pakistan. It has been fourth and long since 1947.

Burma

“As a neighbor, China is extremely concerned about the situation in Myanmar,” the Foreign Ministry spokeswoman, Jiang Yu, said at a news briefing in Beijing. “China hopes that all parties in Myanmar exercise restraint and properly handle the current issue so as to ensure the situation there does not escalate and get complicated.”

From the New York Times which, in a upwelling of common sense that seems so out of touch with our current epoch, has opened almost its entire archives for free viewing.

So, two points here ... ah, the joys of the "Chinese century" ... lest things "get complicated" indeed. The lovely thing about debased totalitarianists is that they blithely operate under the pretense, as if no one could possibly contradict them, that nothing has to make sense because all sense is nothing more than the debased totalitarianism itself. We ex-leftoid neo-liberal/humanist/seculars increasingly have no difficulty in noting that China is truly the most nightmarish place on the face of the planet. Certainly the good ole USA continues to suck down the earthly patrimony with a level of greed unmatched by any civilization ever. But for sheer self-destructive nihilistic depradation, nothing matches China today. There was a piece in the Times today about how the water table in more or less the entire north of China (that covers a lot of territory, folks) is more or less depleted. Their cities are sewers, the country is surrounded by dead oceans, the air that they not only breathe but pass on to the rest of us is more toxic than anything ever experienced in LA. And they court any thug in a presidential palace who has a quart of oil to his name, be that name Kabila or Ahmadinejad or the tinpots of the Burmese junta whose names are completely irrelevant and will not long be remembered once they are trash-binned, to use a little Marxian poetics.

So why, for gawds' sakes, does the Chinese junta give a flying crap about propping up a tiny coterie of desperate tin men in Burma who don't even have the elementary cojones to show their faces in what used to be and still is in fact their own capital, Rangoon. [BTW, I am not much into this crypto-PC changing of the English name of places ... it's Burma, it's Rangoon ... call me cranky, see if I care.] But the habit of committee-crats, the collective form of autocrats if you will, means that their scrawny knees jerk long before any latent brainpower kicks in. See a committee, love a committee, even if it is a bunch of Burmese generals whose passage from the world stage will elicit not one single tear anywhere.

The second point, if I can be an ex-leftoid for a moment, derives from Lenin and Trotsky. The key to a revolution in Burma is to turn the troops. Not the cops, but rather the rank and file troops. The soldiers, as the old Bolsheviks pointed out, are cut from the same cloth as the protesters. They just have to come to consciousness that by switching sides the situation will flip. In this regard, the abbots of the assorted monasteries have played a truly reactionary role ... surprise, surprise, the high mucky-mucks of religion jerk their knees to the current order no matter what that order may be. When the abbots call on the troops to flip, the generals will be cooked.

As in so many affairs in history, it comes down to a couple of religious figures actually following their own rhetoric. Trotsky famously averred something to the effect that the crisis in world history came down to a crisis in the leadership of the proletariat. Can't quite agree with that. But the crisis in Burmese history right now does come down to a crisis in the leadership of the sangha, the monkhood. Once they rise to their duty, the Chinese committee-crats can be damned ... though you can be sure they will adjust quickly and lose nothing they care about in the bargain.

The Chinese century. Beware what you ask for, post-post-colonialist brethren and sistern ... you just might get it.

Photo by Arod of a window on Grant Street, North Beach, San Francisco.

Ahmadinejad and Rumsfeldt

Two controversies about academic freedom, each centering on individuals who are most assuredly enemies of freedom in one way or another. Rumsfeldt's appointment as a fellow at the Hoover Institute has generated a teapot tempest of protest at Stanford, and I am proud of the righteous outrage at Columbia's inviting the disgusting Ahmadinejad to speak today.

That said, I have to go with letting them speak. What do liberals gain by arguing for the censorship of conservatives who are going to be heard anyway. Now we certainly don't have to play a low-bore neo-con as Scott Pelley did last night in his 60 Minute's interview in the tin-pot's garden in Tehran. The questions were hectoring, and had no more content than the current dubya-ite campaign to pin something ... anything ... on Iran as a diversion for the military and political failure in Iraq. Where were the questions about democracy, about personal freedom, about the wave of brutal executions, the repression of minorities? No. Like this question, which Ahmadinejad interrupted: "At the moment, our two countries may very well be walking down the road to war. How do you convince President Bush, how do you convince other nations in the West . . . . " What the hell does "walking down the road to war" mean? This sort of pandering to the Bushies actually hands the high ground to the fascist.

I thought Pelley caved to Bushism when he had an opportunity to expose the depth of Iranian depravity.

Now if I were Columbia University, no way would I invite that tiny tin-pot to speak. But that doesn't mean that they do not have the right to do so. And, sure enough Columbia President Lee Bollinger had the guts to call Ahmadinejad a "cruel dictator" to his face. Maybe that's why they did it ... to show the Scott Pelley's of the world how you confront evil from the vantage point of truth. The appearance gave protesters a focus that undermined the Iranian regime's purposes in sending their stringer to New York. It gave Ahmadinejad an opportunity to lie out loud about homosexuals ... that they do not have them in Iran ... a lie that has been told about us time and again to justify killing or imprisoning us. (I remember a good friend of mine in high school sagely averring that there were no Jewish homosexuals ... that was 1970, and I am sure she does not remember it, so I have thoroughly forgiven her.) If there are none, you slimy bastard, who the hell is that you are hanging from the end of crane in your glorious capital city. Check out the the Iranian Queer Organization for a brutal story or a young gay male couple flogged for holding a private party.

Yes, it is galling to have to look at that creep. But opposing his speaking plays to his conceits.

And it certainly will be galling to know that Rumsfeldt will be padding around an office in the Hoover Tower. That said, let him defend himself ... expose him to the questioners and the protesters. Liberals have no stake in censorship other than to end it. This guy is the proximate author of the worst military disaster in American history. I think it is amazing that he has the khutzpah to show his face in public. Let him show it. We got the facts.

Addendum: I just watched Lee Bollinger, President of Columbia, on Anderson Cooper's 360 ... a quiet, solid defense of free speech. This man is a hero! If you're going to believe in free speech, you can't pick which speech will be more free. You have to answer the free speech of bigots and murderers with the free speech of truth and liberty.

Postpostcolonialism

Sitting outside at the Cafe Flore, my long-time haunt, with only intermittent Internet access. Beautiful windy Sunday afternoon in the old town ... totally sexy young gay guy holding forth beside me on some sort of enthusiastic self-discovery theme. Like old times at the Flore in the early 80s when I sat here afternoon after afternoon consuming the battles of Napoleon, drinking too much coffee, arguing with passing fellow gay libbers, taking the sun in considerably less clothing than I prefer nowadays.

That's not why I am writing. I have been having a little trouble settling on a book to read ... sometimes these little interludes in reading can get protracted when you work for a living because the stretches necessary to devour a book do not present themselves daily.

[Overheard conversations are both alluring and annoying ... in a discussion of acting and life, the cute one is trying to defend the notion that notwithstanding artifice, there is a baseline of honesty which one cannot breach. His interlocutor is trying to defend the notion that a certain level of dishonety is necessary and not be bothered about. I'm with the cute guy. As this develops, I am more and more intrigued.]

So I tried mowing through Karen Armstrong's The Great Transformation: The Beginning of Our Religious Traditions, but it is all a little obvious and vastly too vast ... when an author disposes of the first three dynasties of Chinese history in 10 pages, and when I learn nothing from it ... well, it was just too boring. So I thought I would take a detour through Thomas Cahill's How the Irish Saved Civilization as a post script to having read Justin Pollard's richly rewarding biography of Alfred the Great: the Man who Made England. I heard Cahill speak last year at MRU (where I work) and he gave a riveting and entertaining off-the-cuff lecture about death. I subsequently read his Mysteries of the Middle Ages: The Rise of Feminism, Science, and Art from the Cults of Catholic Europe. He's great fun ... like being a culture-vulture tourist in history. But it slowly dawns on his reader that this is a great, long-winded, undeniably fascinating and well-written but nevertheless revanchist defence of Catholicism. It gets a little nettlesome, and evidently his craftiness was somewhat less subtle when he wrote the Irish book.

I am no fan of Augustine ... this will not surprise. I like to argue that two of the most disastrous lives in religious thought are Paul and Augustine who between them managed to muck up any possibility that Christianity might be liberation with their death-obsessed loathing of the senses. This is what Cahill writes concerning Augustine's flirtation with Manicheism:

For a while, [Manicheism] let Augustine off the hook ... it absolved him from any responsibility for his raging lusts ... it was a made-to-order religion for a smart young provincial who needed to explore every dark corner of the the boiling city and experience every dark pleasure it had to offer and at the same time think himself above the herd. But it couldn't keep up with Augustine's fearlessly inquiring mind. Like Jehovah's Witnesses or Mormonism, it was full of assertions, but could yield no intellectual system to nourish a great intellect. [my italics]

Ah, the conceit of the Catholics. Sublime. To paraphrase the Mohammedans, there is no system but the one system ... the Catholic system. Everything else is sterile. (I would certainly agree that Jehovah's Witness-ism and Mormonism are sterile, but that is a subset of the sterility of religion.) Then there is the knowing nodding about dark pleasures. What is so bloody dark about pleasure? Why do intellect and system and genius have to start with the rejection of the senses? This is an obscene conceit whose only proof is its own infinite repetition. And it is a little rich to imply that the "system" was in place when Augustine more or less invented the bulk of Catholic doctrine out of thin air and his own self-loathing. Christians in those days were a fractious lot who barely agreed on anything including, and especially, the nature of Jesus.

There is a lot of this sort of religious conceit about its own exclusive depth these days, and more intensely in the last little while. The obvious deadliness of religion in the current era is such that even the supine press has to note the rise in atheistic or secular revulsion at all of it. After each new atheist tome, there are various backhanded ... Cahillesque, if you will ... defenses of religion ... to whit, that morality is only possible with religion, that atheism is sterile, the poetry of the spheres kind of lunacy. And then there is the argument, which is at the core of Cahill's unadmitted defense of Catholicism, that European civilization is founded on Catholicism or Christianity, that there is no Europe without it, and by implication that we should be worshipful towards it.

I'll get back to this in a moment. But this rising debate between consistent atheists and secularized apologists for religion takes place in the context of a political period that I like to call post-post-colonialism. Among humanists ... terminology for delineating who we are talking about in these zones tends to be vexatious, but secondary, I think, to the argument ... among humanists, I think there is a rising but embarassing understanding that colonialism was a multivalent as opposed to a monolithic phenomenon. Colonialism was not an exclusively moral impulse, but rather the moral reflux that followed upon the history. That is to say that the long progress of European civilization put it in a position of rising power and military and technological superiority at a time when many of the places it conquered were in political torpor and all of them were technologically weaker. This historical judgment is not moral, but that is not to say that a morality did not flow from the circumstances, and that we can readily reject that morality after the fact ... that is, now.

But how do we explain the political, military, and technological superiority of Europe at the moment when colonialism's rather short reign began? Is it Catholicism, or Christianity, or the Protestant Reformation? Is it climate? Is it the millennium and a half of competing micro-states? Is it the Enlightenment?

An a propos review appeared today in the New York Times, "The Political and the Divine", a review of The Stillborn God: Religion, Politics, and the Modern West, by Mark Lilla ... you will have to read this right away, as the Times shoves everything into its vault after only seven days ... I know they are trying to make money, and I subscribe online precisely in order to have access to their vault, but it is a sad drag on the national conversation that everything in this flagship publication disappears in a week. Rebecca Newberger Goldstein starts by writing that "Some of us have been taking the European Enlightenment a little bit for granted." And she goes on to note, not without some sympathy, that Lilla argues that "Hobbes's thinking on the religious impulse [i.e., that it arises because man is a frightened ignoramus] [is] both historically pivotal and psychologically simplistic ... The religious impulse isn't merely a matter of man's cringing self-protective fear; it can also be an expansive response toward the universe, morality and freedom, and a strain of post-Enlightenment thinking, featuring thinkers of the caliber of Kant, struggled to do justice to religion's expansive aspects."

According to Goldstein, Lilla argues that the Enlightenment occurred only because of "Christianity’s own fundamental ambiguities — torn between a picture of God as both present and absent from the temporal realm, an ambivalence powerfully represented by the paradoxes of the Trinity — that made it 'uniquely unstable,' subject to a plurality of interpretations that became institutionalized in sectarianism, and hence to several centuries’ worth of devastating upheaval.” Goldstein has a lovely turn of phrase. In reference to this, she writes: "Or as I would less soberly paraphrase his point: Christian political theology encouraged the development of Enlightenment progressiveness the way that runaway mitosis encourages the discovery of cancer cures."

There's something here, of course. The Europe we know ... and the larger European civilization which through its bastard child, The United States, dominates the world, arose through, or leastwise in the company of, Christianity. But Christianity proved susceptible to science and rationality in a way that, straightforwardly, Islam has not proven itself, notwithstanding the monotonously reiterated fact that it once was more scientific than its contemporary Christ-lovers.

Here is where we return to Cahill. The fact that seculars ... the children of the Enlightenment ... need to contemplate the role of religion is not an entrée to a revisited Catholicism. It did happen the way it did, and we need to know and understand it. But that is not, ipso facto, an argument for a return to a church which, every day these days, proves what a decrepit wheezing old biddy it is.

[Alas, the fascinating discussion next to me ultimately foundered on the shallow shores of multiculturalism ... identity and background and colonialism and all that. The cute guy ended up being silent for quite a stretch as the studly other guy lectured him on how he should think. All the vitality of the discussion drains away ... cutey tries to start it up again by returning to his favorite word ... liminal. I want to chime in, but I am twice their age and cranky as hell. It eventually resurrected itself ... they are quite a vital pair. ... omigawd, cutey has an iPhone. The other guy is actually quite a stud, Brazilian, I think. It feels like they are cruising each other, but are lost in this by reason of the deep discussion. I've had that experience where the intellectual nature of the conversation makes it impossible to leap back to the sensual ... a bit like having Augustine sitting in on your moves. ... Eventually they part, but not before being certain that each of them plans to end up at Martini's at Valencia and Market. If I weren't such an ole fart, I'd go just to watch what ends up happening.]