Give the Devil his Due…for now

 “A little learning is a dangerous thing;
drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring:
there shallow draughts intoxicate the brain,
and drinking largely sobers us again”

These are possibly the most quoted lines of Alexander Pope’s long poem, the “Essay on Man,” and they came to mind in reflecting on the responses to my thesis of two days ago on this blog, posted on Facebook. Basically I said that if we are concerned for the fate of Ukraine and its people, the sooner the better for negotiations, which I backed up with analysis of the situation. It is a theory, is not right or wrong as is a personal opinion but has some claim to predictive power, and so depends on future events for confirmation.

A woman whose grandfather was a native Ukrainian and who had visited there had the most impact for me, for her blood ties were the source of her feelings: she said that it is a horrible tragedy, and it’s time for it to be over. Besides a few others supportive, the rest were intoxicated with fear and aggression based on “a little learning.” They had read sources that support their feelings, for when I asked for facts backing them up it was clear they had not been exposed to sources that would have made them hesitate. They did not “drink deep,” which is to study the situation, motivated by both the desire to get to the bottom of things and the knowledge of one’s own feelings. I might have been the same had I not been jolted awake five years ago to the realization that the NYTimes, which I had relied on for decades, was not reliable, and I began evaluating all sources of information.

My feeling is a commitment to peace, and has been since the mid-sixties when I opposed the Vietnam War and demonstrated against it. To say, as my critics do, that in order to have peace there must be more war does sometimes make sense, but that depends on judgment of the situation based on knowledge. I would fight in a struggle that makes sense to me, and have faced that. In ’67 I was classified 1A and slated to be drafted; I saw a counselor who urged me to declare myself a conscientious objector (CO) but I said I couldn’t, since I would have agreed to fight in WWII, which would disqualify me for CO status. I could have lied, but I couldn’t live with that. It turned out that I wasn’t drafted, but it was a close call. My risk is not virtue on my part; we all have our conditions of what lies we can tolerate and those that would be too great a sacrifice of the self to bear.

To support a war means to agree to kill at the risk of your own life, to have blood on your hands and your own blood. You must be ready to enlist, or imagine that if victory requires your service, whatever your age or capability, you would give your life for the cause. The principle is that you have no right to ask others to die for you, only at their side. This is something we all must face as humans—what is our life worth to us. OK, just my opinion.

I come to the current situation after a lifetime of opposition to the bipartisan American policy of expansion of the empire, war and interference in other country’s politics to achieve it. I would be surprised if my critics were for that policy before Trump opposed it, since I assume they are liberals, who have generally been opposed to war, compared to conservatives. So the pertinent question would be: Had Harris won the election and taken the step that Trump has taken toward immediate negotiations, would they have decried the action and said no, we must keep the fight going, and then opposed the Democratic Party for doing that? I seriously doubt it.

Apparently my critics believe that to oppose anything Trump does is more important than peace and the lives of Ukrainians, and that to support this move toward peace would only contradict that effort. What precisely is that effort? To eventually defeat the Republican congressional majority in the 2026 elections? Is that the thinking or is there thinking behind this, a strategy. This brings up the meaning of partisanship. Correctly understood a partisan would seek the best strategy to win in elections, assessing whether a pro-war position is helpful to win support. If not, people who think they’re rallying for the team by joining the saber-rattlers could be defeating their purpose, continuing what some internal critics of the party have been saying, that the Dems have been their own worst enemy. My critics are then not true partisans, they are instead concerned about their personal feelings and standing firm on the right to express them, which is: This Should Not Be.

Is Trump sincere about caring about Ukrainian lives? No; if he did, then what about his Israel policy; is it just racism, or the way to keep his Republicans in line (my guess)? At any rate it doesn’t matter, for he is through and through a political animal and has a winning strategy—he has the Dems over a barrel. He knows they will oppose him out of blind hatred (which he enjoys immensely, fuel to his fire, keep it coming…). That will weaken them, or at least not help, since ultimately the conscience of ordinary Dems cannot sustain a pro-war position; even the Biden-Harris leadership was embarrassed about it, apologetic. Moreover their hate led them to open doors they never would have done otherwise—lawfare, “any means necessary” to defeat Trump, lying about Biden, contradicting themselves constantly, even openly admitting it. They didn’t give a thought to consequences of setting precedences, but that’s the door Trump is walking right through now.

Trump is manipulating the Dems, including my critics, prisoners of their feelings. He appears out of control, as Nixon did on purpose, knowing the effect—like Zelensky, he’s an actor, and using postmodernity against its class of defenders. For the Dems to think Trump is all spontaneous, narcissistic emotion, a low-educated dummy, and themselves the high-educated adults in the room—that’s just what he wants them to think. He’s laughing up his sleeve. He has turned those whose ego is “the high-educated intellectual class, credentialed as reasonable people” into anti-intellectuals, afraid of free speech, in denial of their most own basic principles, such as justice and rule of law. He found their weak spot and hit it hard: moral superiority.

He has outsmarted the opposition…so far. But there’s a bunch of stuff that could trip him up if the Dems put on their thinking caps. No evidence of that yet, but they should at least not be pawns in his game.

Desire heats us up, and our official culture wants us like that, “subjects of the empire,” as I say in my latest book project. The new generation of academics laid the foundation for this subject since at least the eighties, which has led to the current view that knowledge is only capable of reflecting desire, and that is how to understand partisanship. We live to satisfy our subjectivity because that’s what our enemies do; there’s no other way–that is the notion. We cannot be enemies of ourselves, cannot betray our desires, for we are a solid phalanx, and the enemy is coming at us with guns drawn. We’ve gotta “get the drop on them” and attack them first, as in the old Westerns—yes, romantic fantasy. So we’re for peace, but we can’t be not the problem, cause we’re the good guys.

The model citizen subject makes political judgments by trying to determine their true collective interest, and then the policy that achieves that. Especially for the high-educated, that model has been replaced by the empire subject as morally superior. That subject has been made powerless to affect decisions and so is encouraged to run on pure feeling—the global citizen who cares for the world. He and she can make no decision, but as a substitute they can express their feeling, so in political matters they do that first, then find the facts to support it. Critical thinking would come up with stronger arguments but would conflict with feeling, for it inevitably raises questions, opinions that could not be manipulated, as emotions can. In the current case, clear thinking would ask, does support for the war help or hurt Trump politically, or should we sit this one out and wait for a better opportunity?

The crux of the problem is that the empire subject sees politics as a moral battle, and of a classic Manichean, metaphysical kind, the struggle of absolute good vs. absolute evil. That was the battleground of political correctness, wokeness, Me Too, etc. and those inside the liberal camp have not done so because it would bring a morals charge against them, the behavior of a cult. Moral goodness has launched every war of the American empire, bringing death to millions, but has ended with its tail between its legs. Was Nixon evil for capitulating to Communism by withdrawing from Vietnam? Was Biden capitulating to the Taliban he had called evil when he pulled out the troops? If we’re going to be on the side of Goodness let’s have a bit of consistency here! (One of the charges against me was that peace negotiations now would be “capitulation to the oligarchs.” On that logic any peace would be capitulation–what does that position value, the Ukrainians or the sense of oneself as a good person?)

What is attractive to the empire subject—led to feel responsible for the world while deprived of any say in it–is to see themselves and be seen as doing the Right Thing. The romantic-heroic act is to feel that one is sacrificing one’s self-interest, which the citizen-subject is not willing to do. Hence the moral superiority of the former at the expense of political superiority of the latter. (Self-pity mops up the mess…) The public posture of the good person, an ethic the EU and most of the national governments have been sold on, is now finally running into trouble, since it has finally come time to put their money where their mouth is. It has boxed in the EU and the Dems who sold it to them, the chickens came home to roost, which could have been foreseen some time ago, as well as Trump’s victory.

If Putin and Trump are Nazis, i.e. evil incarnate, then anyone who calls for peace now is consorting with the devil. That hands over all the chips to Trump. For when push comes to shove, and you do finally negotiate, then how are you not the devil? That cannot be escaped on the feeling level of the EU and Dems; no matter what they might say to excuse themselves, they have been played, hoist on their own petard, and that’s humiliating. So give the Devil his Due now, cut your losses, swallow your pride, break up that romantic silliness of Good vs. Evil, and get as smart as your enemy. Good luck with that, but I do wish you well, for Trump has lots of flaws and needs a decent opposition, so put your energy into creating it.

For me the political is not an end in itself but has the best chance to open us to imagine the kind of world and life we want for ourselves, and to begin moving towards a new future. What we have now is far from what we could create for ourselves.

The Geopolitical Shift

No one I’ve read is mentioning that if European governments were to order their country’s troops to Ukraine, and not just money (which goes down the drain), that will not just lead to Russia declaring all-out war on Ukraine and committing their full army, but will make those countries vulnerable to direct missile attack. It is the UK (Starmer) and France (Macron) hinting this; I doubt the Germans, Poles or any others close to Russia will send regular troops (already some “advisors,’ but Russia has not attacked the countries for that). Russian high-tech missiles are a serious threat to France and the UK, and are proven unstoppable, esp. since those countries have no adequate anti-missile defense system, and Russia’s are advanced. Moreover, even combined, European troops cannot beat the battle-ready Russians in a conventional ground war. US troops now in Europe (84k) and nuclear weapons, which it controls, can no longer be counted on to come to the assist.

It’s one thing to rattle the sabers and gain popular support politically, but first, that’s a symbolic act; they don’t have the sabers, and secondly popular support is doubtful. The German populist party, the AfD, has grown partly for its opposition to the government’s support for Ukraine, which has pressured that gov’t to pull back in its support (the AfD has only supported the recovery of Ukraine after the war’s end). So it’s hard to see anything coming of the European leadership plans of support for Yelensky other than the further stripping of wealth from their countries, cutting back on their welfare state (which affects a mass of livelihoods, and thus voters), and loss of support for current leadership at the expense of populist gains, their true existential fear. Thus it seems that the current over-the-top support coming from EU (Brussels) leadership and national governments is face-saving for the leaders themselves.

You and me are not the US government. For us to change our political views might cost us some friends but is much easier than those whose power, and therefore ambition and ego, rests on the optics of standing firm.

As I see it, the primary geopolitical conflict all along has been US (i.e. the government establishment) vs. Russia and its governments, ever since Russia joined the rest of the industrialized nations in earnest (the Communist Revolution). Before that, Russia was barely part of the modern world, even defeated by the Japanese in 1905, the first shock to European assumption of racial superiority, and proof that it was no threat to early US expansion and conquest abroad. This US vs. Russia conflict has held true through the Cold War and beyond, and it is the US that has been the antagonist, with Russia acting in response. Even the Communists recognized the American Revolution as a progressive step, only that they represented a step beyond. Though erroneous, the Communist “conspiracy” was the notion that America would eventually catch up with the Communist countries, to fulfill the universal dream of humanity.

Russia has historically been ambivalent about the West, with its rulers attracted to it ever since Peter the Great (“the Westernizer”), while the nationalist Slavophiles (and peasant narodniki) resisted Western influence. In the Cold War the threat of Communism spreading to the Third World was the potential loss to capital of markets and investment–did the US government honestly care about saving the “hearts and minds” of the S/E Asians they saw as gooks, for whom “life is cheap”?

Post-soviet Russia, still the bipartisan US gov’t nemesis, is why Nato began the project to encircle Russia almost as soon as the ink was dry on pledges not to do so. 

Initially one of the Westernizers, Putin naively asked for Russia to be included in Nato and not its enemy. However, when faced with encroachment from the US, which replaced Nazi Germany as the military power in Europe, Putin, like Stalin before him facing the German aggressor, turned to Slavophile nationalism to defeat it, but combined with a modernized industry and technology. The US-initiated threat to Russia was the cornerstone to the previous government’s policy (Bill Clinton through Biden, though bipartisan) aimed at making Europe dependent on the US as a vassal. (Whether this benefited us as Americans is doubtful; the case was not even made; but taxes for the military budget paid for it.) An instance of that former policy was to cripple the supply of Russian gas through the Nordstream pipeline, which Biden said the gov’t would do “one way or another.” The EU, dependent on the US gov’t, had no option but to treat Russia as Europe’s natural enemy.

Remove that threat from the US government, as Trump has done, and Russia becomes Europe’s natural most trade partner, mostly energy for manufactured goods. Besides that, Europe would cease being the vassal of the empire and can restore its pride of independence, a political selling point. In addition, with peaceful relations with Russia it would not need to cut its welfare spending for the sake of military buildup now being proposed.

However, with few exceptions the entire EU and national political leadership appears anxious to continue its dependence on the US and animosity to Russia, with lies to the press that they know are lies, and punishment for opposition. They face the difficult task of reversing course.

Britain’s Starmer is aware of this, in my opinion. What he wants is tricky; it’s for European leaders to come up with a plan and present it to the US for its participation, for he knows Europe has no means to fight Russia alone. Trump asked him that bluntly, which made him visibly uneasy, a humiliation that aimed to achieve realism. And Starmer knows that Trump will refuse, since the deal would be to continue the war. However, that plan will be the excuse for the European leaders to back down. It will appear as just a suggestion, an attempt to persuade, and thereby will maintain some kind of positive, productive relation of Europe with the US. It’s an acknowledgement that Europe has no bargaining chips, they’ve been vassals to the US gov’t and need to go away from all this with some appearance of self-respect.

This might be hard to see today, but despite their rhetoric I think the European leaders are, beneath it all, pleased that Trump is doing what needed to be done. Reality is back on the table, the lies can be forgotten, the humiliation, and negotiations will begin. They can express dismay all they want, but it’s not something they could do, since the war, like the Color Revolutions of which Ukraine was one in 2014, were the acts of the then-US policy. Ukraine will be kept out of the EU and Nato, and those leaders won’t have the onus of appearing to have reversed course. By Trump taking the initiative he is giving them a chance to save face, rattling sabers they don’t have but not actually biting the hand that has been feeding them.

Don’t Even Think It

No one seems to notice that the big question of AI is the nature of knowledge it is based on. For AI and its advocates it is the academic version, the description of evidence and results of experiments on the natural-science model, known as positivism. The security that social order institutions need to rule us is to hold the keys to knowledge, understood as that which can be absolutely and exclusively affirmed as the range of the possible. What was once the bête noire of humanists and philosophers is now the holy faith.

AI is the latest weapon against criticism, the nature of which is to negate, to see what is not immediately presented, an infinite regress of the modern intellect, generation after generation. If asked for criticism, all it can do is describe the criticism that has been made and make something up based on that limit. It cannot negate itself, because like any tool it lacks the intelligence that would enable it to stand outside itself. Just like the monopoly on discourse held by academia, the media, and the technocracy in general, outside the box is only to be found inside the box. The meaning it knows of “criticize” is to oppose a dominant power, in the finite game of winners and losers; when you win, the other is the critic, back and forth til the end of time. Any conversation that transcends this play of power is irrelevant.

AI is the social order’s triumph, prepared by neoliberalism and by postmodernist and poststructuralist academics, whom bureaucrats hired for that purpose. It has snuffed out any interest among our overlords in free thinking, which alone can take us to some new place, genuinely outside. It is the sequel to the death of sixties dream of ending the technocratization of existence, the countercultural utopia of transforming social relations, and the flowering of life Marcuse and others imagined. The final nails in the coffin were the gradual unification of all social order institutions as branches of the technocratic whole and the world monopoly of pure capitalism following the 1989 collapse of Communism. Quite appropriately, technology, created by machine-like mental activity, will be handling the burial.

The notion that life could be collectively interesting, and not just individuals finding “stuff” on their screens to keep them occupied until the arrival of death, has been buried along with the capacity for free thinking to resonate in the world. The celebration of freedom of expression rings hollow in this situation, where any emancipating signal is lost to the ears filled with noise. Where can “I think therefore I am” go when this is the only world to relate to…

The Situation

The toppling of the regime at the hands of the populace, now celebrating its victory; the deep despond, confusion, and self-blame of the defeated regime loyalists; Trump’s drunk-with-power insane demands of the empire’s enemies and its presumed friends; meanwhile the trillions of debt beckoning Nemesis to do its dirty work; all in the midst of further escalations, new war zones, and murderous ethnic cleansing—these are the signs of a collective psyche experiencing the infinite as the abyss.

The psyche is unleashed; the cat is out of the bag. It is the end of the fantasy that reason is in charge—the world cannot reason its way out of something it did not reason its way into, and we, mere peasants, are in no position to come to the rescue.

Yet without contributing to the unfolding violence, or alternatively withdrawing and refusing to follow the Event, there is something attractive about it all, submitting to it, enjoying the turmoil. “Oh, how could you!” is the voice that has succumbed to panic and still hopes reason will return. But that’s what the Event is all about–after all that has happened, who can we trust to restore order? The “rules-based order” Dems and their media? Academia’s experts, or even the rational-sounding dissenters? The tech giants? The billionaires backing it all?

Come to think of it, has any power in human history been ruled by reason? Modernity and Progress claimed to be the embodiment of reason, the first time in history it was put in the driver seat and shoved out all other contenders. So how has that worked out? Aren’t we up shit’s creek without a paddle?

Maybe not. Maybe we’re on the brink of something we can’t quite imagine. Maybe the crisis of subjectivity at the postwar beginning of the empire (the Bomb, followed by abstract expressionism, the beats, “the sixties”) is returning at its end. Something is happening and you don’t know what it is, do you, Mr. Jones.

What to do? Well, what about art? The last time around it was crazy and irreverent. Lately, the only art that has gotten approval has played the success game ruled by moral politics, and that’s now in shambles. Yet all this time a handful of musicians, those indulging in free playing and ignoring the game, have been paddling up that very creek the world calls shit, gleefully singing their song. They’re the only artists experienced in chaos, know the ropes, so to speak, and they’re inviting everyone to join in!

That door is now open; we’re all the deplorable populace now! Chaos beckons; start howling and making a racket! Sounds irresponsible, fiddling while Rome burns, but what other options are on the table, “business as usual”?

In a land of truth-tellers and liars, how do you know…

Early in the Ukraine War the government told the news media that it has been supplying false information to it to achieve a political aim. NBC April 6, 2022 There is no indication that this is temporary, so it is not an admission of wrongdoing; to do this is policy. If it occasionally does tell the truth, this implies, it is only because it fits with government policy. The decision to tell this to the American public also implies that the government is confident that we’d believe anything they tell us. Why would they lie in telling us they are lying?

It doesn’t take much to figure that each lie works on us because it confirms previous lies. This is called “the narrative,” which has displaced the truth, as the previous journalistic standard (even if it was not always upheld). The government is not just boasting of its ability to get us to swallow whatever it says. It is telling us we enjoy being fooled and that we prefer lies over the truth, obedience to an absolute authority rather than using our brains.

For those who do think when they read the news, the proper way to do that is not with the intent of learning what is happening in the world but to know the shifts in policy—what the government wants us to think. Also, as in the famous conundrum of the land of truthtellers and liars, once we know we’re dealing with liars we have reason to think that the truth is the opposite of what they say.

Is the Government Losing its War?

This post is public, yet the link is sent to an email group of those who have shown interest in my recently published Shaky Ground. Anyone who wishes to join that group can respond to this post with a comment (below) and an email address:

Last March I attended a meeting in my small town that included many I recognized as liberal artist friends, most of them middle-aged and older. They were cheering for a speaker who identified Putin as the new genocidal Hitler and demanded greater US military involvement. My fear of being ostracized kept me from raising objections, making me complicit, as if I agreed with the crowd.

Now the war fever has died down on the popular level, the rumble of resistance is being heard, following the growing opposition to wokeness and covid regulation. What was officially denounced as Russian-sourced disinformation and censored is now in process of being officially approved. This diminishes my fear of isolation, yet I’m quite aware that I flowed with the tide out of fear. How do I avoid that next time, especially as the drumbeats for war with China get louder, and another world war seems to be the plan?

A recent article by Darran Anderson on Christopher Lasch’s 1979 book, The Culture of Narcissism, is pertinent: “The news cycle becomes continuous in an ever-cascading present that, rather than leaving us hyper-aware, overwhelms and numbs us, dislocating us from the passage of time and our place in it.”

True, but simply knowing this, and that nothing stands between us and a world war, might only numb us further. It does not give us the confidence—the subjectivity—or the reason to articulate our resistance to it. We have been prepared by this culture of narcissism to retreat, to cultivate our private gardens, to seek shelter, all the while knowing that reality will break through. In the past people turned to the left for opposition to war; that is no longer possible.

The above is to preface the following probe into one of many recent reversals:

On Thurs. Feb. 23 the New York Times presented its readers with an article basically telling them that the major current foreign policy is doomed–the decades-long NATO expansion to the East, leading to the Ukraine proxy-war: “The U.S. Tried to Isolate Russia. It Didn’t Work.“ Note the past tense, which implies hopelessness for the continued effort.

The article is an in-depth, collective effort of investigative journalism; what it lacks is an admission that the NY Times is reversing itself in its judgment of this foreign policy objective, which it defended until now.

What comes to mind is SNL’s Emily Litella’s classic “Never mind” when she is corrected after a long rant. It’s no joke, but a humiliating position to be in for a government, or for a source of news and analysis that expects to be trusted. A parallel “Never Mind” was a NYT-sanctioned opinion piece, “The Mask Mandates Did Nothing. Will Any Lessons Be Learned?” Also, the Times is no longer caving in to wokeness, at least in the area of trans issues. None of this would not have appeared even six months ago.

The NYT readership is the high-educated class the paper depends on for support–revenue, and its’ very existence. It is saying “We were wrong” to those who believe themselves to be the rightful leadership of the country, and who have been enthusiastic supporters of the government and the paper’s claims. Without the authority and respect for quality journalism that paper has achieved (which it used to have for me), those readers might conclude they were fools to believe it in the first place. They probably will not, and that is a matter of subjectivity, as I will examine shortly.

The questions the article raises are many. First, did the Times truly believe the strategy would work or was it publishing propaganda for the government?

Either one is an indictment of the paper. If the former, then why trust its news and analysis in the future? Since many outside the mainstream media saw the flaws in the strategy long ago, it would seem that esteem for them would be raised over the NYT journalists—they would get the Pulitzers. If on the other hand, the paper was thinking that rallying people behind the war was more important than uncovering the truth of the situation, then it was not doing journalism in the first place, and should not be trusted on that basis either.

A related question is, why reverse itself now—did the NYT suddenly wake up to reality? Or is it broadcasting a signal from the government itself, that it is preparing for a retreat, under the cover of constant declarations and promises to the contrary? That would make sense, for the government needs to change its policy on Ukraine if it is to shift the focus to war against China. (Another sign of this change is an article telling us European governments lack operable tanks to fulfill the promise to Ukraine. Yet European governments, as Nato, have committed themselves to fighting China, presumably without the military equipment to do so.)

Modern governments justify themselves in the name of practical reason–their policies are expected to be effective and bring success. The assumption is that in a democracy, failure has consequences and the government will be replaced. And reason would tell us that policies will be effective, for the government has resources for intelligence gathering and analysis far beyond those of private analysts and think tanks, and should be far better at predicting outcomes. This is what government analysts are seemingly paid to do—reason and evidence carefully sifted to give elected officials the basis for successful policy.

It would not be hard to predict, however, as many outside the present government did, that current policy would only push Russia and China closer together. Moreover, it should have been obvious that that alliance would attract the countries of the Global South, who have been looking for a way to escape the coercive hold of the American financial empire. Evidence of hostility to American power, culture, and commercial influence is not hard to come by—all of this is in the NYT article.

So given the support of the government bureaucracies (State, Defense, CIA, etc.) for a foredoomed policy, we might conclude that those in charge of predicting the outcome of different policies were merely telling the politicians what they wanted to hear. More shocking is that they–the top echelons of our two-party duopoly–were driven not by the consideration of the odds that the policy would actually work but by irrational needs.

The material, and therefore rational argument has often been made, that motivating the government policy is the submission of Europe and especially Germany to American economic interests (which would explain blowing up the Russian gas pipeline). That goal may justify the policy to its creators (privately of course), but the gain shrinks in comparison with the weakening of American world power and influence, which the Times article has detailed.

It is not some revisionist history that would show this to be the latest in the long history of postwar military/foreign policy failure. It began with the ousting of China experts from the State Department in the late forties, followed by the domino theory, Vietnam, and the Middle East; Europe fits the pattern. (For a brief history see Shaky Ground, p. 158ff.)

As for the press, we might assume they are in a position to caution the politicians by raising questions about the long-term policy of Nato expansion, etc. What motivates the mainstream press’s willingness to risk their credibility? Perhaps the NYT feels secure in its grasp on its readership, fearful of questioning the wisdom of their most trusted news source. The repercussion of such doubt would be to isolate them from their class and risk being branded as defectors to the right, which would even threaten the livelihood of some. And if the government is lanning to retreat from the Ukraine war, they can view the Times as helping to correct the course, as if no one could have foreseen the failure of current policy.

Needs that cloud our and others’ thinking and lead to disaster are crucial for us to understand, for we too are easily misled—including myself, as I readily admit. The need common to Americans is to be the good guys fighting evil (I discuss this in Shaky Ground ### as fundamental to the wokeness phenomenon).

To cast the other as evil is a successful strategy to rally Americans, especially today, but it is easily deluded about the strength of the opponent, enjoying instead the self-image of being strong and superior. In the good/evil fight, if the good fail in their mission they have the option of considering themselves suffering as martyrs and underdogs, thus exonerated and rewarded even in defeat. (This has been historically common on the left.) To be able to survive defeat without admitting you were mistaken is one of the great strengths of that appeal to goodness, an encouragement to ignore the consequences.

Furthermore, the narcissism that usually accompanies power has led the politicians to assume that Americans would fall in line and would sustain them in power despite setbacks and even policy reversals. This ignores the long history of blowback—most recently the Trump presidency, which came on the heels of government failure in the financial disaster after 2008. Today’s blowback is for the revelations about government covid policy, deeply affecting the political scene, while resistance for Ukraine expenditures is growing.

Either the policy makers and political bosses knew the Ukraine policy would contribute to the decline of the American Empire or they were led by fantasy, which they preferred to assessing the situation. Those caught up in the fantasy would include not only the Times, the Washington Post, CNN, and NPR, but the mass of people cheering on that policy and wanting to censor any sign of dissent as disinformation and conspiracy theory. You only censor those voices you hear that might persuade or seduce you, the conservative position in the past.

Traditional American optimism, the secular version of “God on our side,” proved fruitful historically, but it has encouraged people to think that “we”–the government out front leading us–can pull off anything we set our minds to. If we recognize that pitfall then the next question is, why is a fantasy so satisfying to the psyche when it has led to failure time and again (America’s wars since Vietnam)?

The problem with the challenge to fantasy is that to act politically in any way involves some form of expectation that is not yet reality, that is hoped for, and that could easily be called fantasy. Without that we are merely critics on the sidelines, effectively cynics, with no imagination of how things could change and what part we might play in that change.

To get out of this dilemma, the question to ask of any fantasy is, what is the aim? The aim involves the fantasy of achievement. For many on social media the aim is to be well liked; for those pursuing a professional career it is advancement—status, respect, and income. For the main body of the woke it is likely the cleansing of all feelings of guilt and fragility—purification, innocence. For the present government it is world power, or more specifically to halt the decline. To learn the fantasy behind a policy is to ask ourselves whether it is something we share or not.

It is reasonable to ask, what is my aim in writing this analysis? As with Shaky Ground, it is first of all personal, and not really a fantasy. It is to overcome my alienation from the world during this period, the most massive upheaval since the time of my birth, the beginning of the last world war. More figuratively, I experience it as enjoyment–learning how to dance on this shifting ground, and I invite others to do the same.

My aim in posting this is related, and the political fantasy is moderate. It is to have something concrete to communicate with others to whom I send it, a private network that will help us to find our way collectively and overcome our isolation and intimidation.

the past and present of free playing

Listening now to the tape of a 1986 performance at the large dance space of Links Hall in Chicago. Dennis Palmer of Chattanooga is playing his keyboard synth with (probably) Michael Zerang, one of many sets that night . Similar to other events at the time, it was a collective event with improvisers living there. I would call the groups, usually duos and trios, and often everyone came together at the end for a finale; we all got roughly an equal chance to play. The groupings were called “ad hoc,” familiar to improvisation at the time.

The idea was that anyone who wanted to improvise freely could play with anyone else who wants to play freely, from anywhere in the world, as if this was the first universal language. This was a new concept; it originated in the UK in the sixties and came naturally to the fresh, egalitarian spirit then, a radical step away from every form of music and musician up to that time. It would have been considered an innovation if the music world had recognized its existence, but by the mid-eighties it was underground—known only by word of mouth.

That was fine, though we didn’t know why the culture was closing its doors. The institutions of the music world were by then committed to postmodernism and neoliberalism–the suppression of anything outside the marketplace and the building of careers. Our raucous, fun-loving stuff was both brand new and out of date.

The playing itself could not be mistaken for jazz or sixties Free Jazz; those footsteps set the pace, but our step was into the void–the next step. We abandoned the jazz form, a tune to get things off the ground; also we weren’t professional musicians, expecting to be judged as to our musical worth and with hopes of a career from it.

Performances of this sort depended on the fact that few were bold enough to do it, and so we could all fit in a performance. It was a situation where you had no idea or direction what to do, just join in the melee.  People would come up after a show and say “This is what I want to do,” and then maybe we’d play privately a bit, and they’d be in the next show. No one was showing their stuff or judging, since there was nowhere to go “higher” than this, no one to impress.

This was not a “headliner” and “locals” arrangement; it was a solidarity of music-makers with no need to compromise with the entertainment format. Without being advertised as a genre, it attracted a small audience of curiosity-seekers and committed adventurers, people for whom the sixties spirit still lived.

The musician enthusiasm for improv died out, but there was something of a resurgence from the late 90s to the mid-00s. A flood of new people began doing this, many outside traditional musician training via electronics. As before, if you came to a show you might get the urge to do it yourself. The collective performance of the eighties was gone, replaced by sets of different musicians, yet things were informal enough for on-the-spot collaborations.

One of my efforts at the time was to organize a series of large group ensembles, 2000-2006, leading to No Net in Philly, weekend workshops that ended in a public performance.

What we had in Chicago back in the day is what I experienced briefly in Jackson MS last summer, where I was on tour with Wrest. It was older musicians, veterans of that world when free improv was living the dream of a world very different from the present. Neither that kind of audience for free improv nor that musician relationship exists today. But the great thing about free playing in this country is that it has no known existence, no history, no baggage, so it can be anyone’s fresh discovery at any time.

By the way, this post is a taste of what you’ll find in The Free Musics; my new book, Shaky Ground, might interest you as well, both to be found at Spring Garden Editions.

The Displacement of Freedom

Academic freedom = cloistered freedom of speech and therefore thought. Academia, institutionalized as higher Education, is the singular, prime, and symbolic location of freedom in its most concrete, explicit form. As the requirement for modernity to justify itself as Progress, it is provided a space where thought is expected to be protected from political and social incursions. At the same time, following the medieval heritage, it embodies the fundamental and binary social division of labor of mind over matter. Namely, the aim is to give those symbolically representing the mind the power of officialdom to make consequential judgments about those representing the matter of society–ourselves.

The sign that capital and its social order are in serious trouble is that the cloister has now been stripped of its freedom, or rather, beginning in the 70s, it has abandoned its autonomy by an internal revolution. This anticipated its service to the changing social order, deeply in need of ideological support. The sixties showed that the center of revolt would henceforth be this bastion of free thinking. At the same time it was clear that capital needed precisely what it alone could supply, a trained, postindustrial working class, which meant that the academy would have to expand beyond the elite professional-managerial class that had a stake in power. This would require bringing in some of the common herd, those outside the tradition of class privilege, who had previously fueled the antiwar movement, and that was a risky situation.

The convergence of revolt potential and new blood required a radical transformation, and the academy, endowed with the task of reproducing the social order through Education, adapted to it, begining in the late sixties. The new generation of academics came up with a way of thinking, inspired by French thinkers, which would eventually be called simply Theory. It would turn academics, regarded socially as intellectuals (the free mind and Reason) into univocal and explicit ideological defenders of the social order, despite their appearance as critics. Instead of attacking the social order they would aim in a direction the liberal establishment was already committed to, targeting racism, sexism and homophobia. These were certainly contradictions to the equality ideal of democracy, but did not touch the social order per se. When decades later, the summer of 2020, Theory burst its academic hothouse confinement and appeared in street protests and riots, it found an echo in political power –the achievement of Foucault’s “knowledge is power,” one of its prime tenets. As a result, the advance of capitalist social relations, although still shaky, is more secure than it would have been otherwise.

An amazing reversal has taken place over the past fifty years: the term Critical Theory, which Marxists originated who were opposed to both Stalinism and advanced capitalism. This has become the title (along with Critical Race Theory) for an ideology not only useful for the survival of capitalism but as doctrinaire and intolerant as Stalinism ever was.

The other result of the ideological realignment of academia is that public acts of authentic freedom, independent of any reward or credentialing, have been put outside the door, hidden and detached from the system of social legitimation. This applies to any art or expressed thought that lacks career motivation, for career orientation is the first step to legitimation. Previously the social order institutions allowed a space for freedom within official culture, a prime example of which was Jazz and then sixties Free Jazz); this was not noblesse oblige but necessary so that “freedom” could be co-opted ideologically during the Cold War period. At least by the eighties, such freedom was being denied cultural recognition and replaced by a simulacrum–free jazz, classic jazz, and the rest of managed art. Now that the process is complete, it is impossible for the institutions (media, venues, etc.) to turn around and welcome those playing freely outside the door. They have continued to explore beyond sixties music and its imitators, and for them to be publicly acknowledged would destabilize the established musician hierarchy. This would not happen anyway, since instead of waiting for the flattery and bribes of cultural significance, the free players have been enjoying their freedom and have a stake in it. Their freedom is doubled; not only are they free to make whatever noise they’re inclined to, as were the sixties musicians, but they’re also socially free of institutional management and the role of entertainer-producer of consumed articles.

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Apart from its output, academia has all along been the officially-designated simulacrum of freedom, a fake version of absolutely free inquiry. It has always followed trends internal to its membership and useful for personal advancement. Now under political censorship it is no longer even a fake. Despite many works of inspired critique, its freedom was already conditional. Academics have been in the business of producing statements of Knowledge under the sign of scientific principles, which over time were extended from the natural sciences to the humanities. Science calls for verification by peers, which has worked well for the empirical, natural sciences, where meritocratic credentialing can be calculated and objective. New theories can be proven to advance over older ones.

In the humanities, however, Theory considered the need for academics to relate their findings to empirical material a mistake, replacing focus on the material with theories about Theory. The central issue of credentialing became the individual’s political orientation, as if they were applying for membership in a political organization. This made the validation of academic knowledge circular and hermetic, and removed its knowledge statements from any possible verification, use or comprehension by outsiders. Free inquiry is then constrained by conditions, which is an obvious contradiction in terms, which makes its statements of dubious value. Yet as before, what comes from outside the cloister (extra ecclesiam) is not sanctioned as knowledge but untrustworthy lay opinion, which originates in the demos–ourselves.

This situation has a history. In a few sentences, beginning in the postwar fifties, independent intellectuals, who wrote for anyone curious and literate (ourselves, the public), were being deprived of a political audience and therefore their livelihood by anticommunism and the shift away from critical thinking in the midst of prosperity. Later called “public intellectuals,” they were forced indoors, confined to academia and given the role of discoverers and educators of Knowledge rather than stimulators of Thinking.

The split and antagonism between the free-floating, inquiring mind and the social order is potential and risky for any social order. In this case was warded off by a reward structure–prestige of the professoriat hierarchy, and later public celebrity status as pundits and high salaries for the winners. The potential friction between free inquiry and the social order has now been eliminated by the “soft” merger of the university-based woke movement, directly derived from Theory, and the political and institutional order (the Democratic Party, social media, corporations, billionaire philanthropy, and compulsory education). The social order, through its political and institutional elite, now owns “freedom,” but since freedom always finds a way—it is the very principle of modernity, the need for a “new” that is “different”—it is only displaced, outside the system of social control, hierarchy, and bribery of its former professional class.

Besides free inquiry, for the academy to become politicized it had to abandon its other birthright claim, Reason, which by definition is free to come to its own conclusions and is available to us all. Thus wokeness is free to ignore arguments against it, having the circularity of religious belief and now the authority of Power. The postmdern left’s attack on the Enlightenment tradition, in which fact and value are distinguished in order to validate truths, is not surprisingly also central to fundamentalist Christianity of the political right. This is a regression to premodern thinking and an advance at the same time. The modernist notion of linear progress has been replaced by a spiral, whereby the old recurs (the merger of fact and value, as in pre-Enlightenment religious cultures) but clothed as the new (dismissal of opponents as obsolete).

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These notes are inspired by Baudrillard, The Mirror of Production, p. 147-8, which is his immanent critique of Marxism. I first read this when it came out in translation in 1975 and am rereading it now with renewed interest for its contemporary applicability. Although the book mentions some of his more familiar themes, it has been buried under his works on simulation and hyperreality, which have been interpreted in a way that supports postmodern relativism and contemporary art, much to his chagrin. Also of value was Theory’s Empire, ed. Daphne Patai and Will Corral, 2004, an essay by Stephen Adam Schwartz, “Everyman as Ubermensch, the Culture of Cultural Studies,” p. 360

Otherwise, the writing is a brief summary of conclusions I reached over a summer of research, under the impact of the predominant-left movement and its mainstream absorption. It reflects earlier projects of mine, one of which is the transformation of late-modernist art music (sixties Free Jazz) into its postmodern simulacrum (today’s free jazz) and the survival underground in the US of free playing. That study (which includes other topics) is to be found in my book of 2017 The Free Musics (which I now offer to mail you at my cost plus postage). The second project has been the evolution of postmodern Theory as the extension of a branch of sixties New Left radicalism into a political movement in defense of the social order.

I was on the academic path to professorship until 1972, engaged in political activism, and then as a musician saw myself as expanding upon sixties Free Jazz. This has made me personally involved in these historical patterns and working to understand their relationship. My forthcoming book, Shaky Ground, besides being a re-writing of a private journal from the mid-90s, will include the results of this study and expand on it. Tentative publication Jan. 2021, and hopefully resuming touring soon thereafter.

What’s Problematic is to be Safe

Any time you open your mouth with some spontaneous insight outside the norm, someone will surely pipe up and accuse you of being “problematic.” That’s especially true today, when the culture has set people free of earlier civic restraint, and the ethic is not to tolerate things that bother you about others. Immersed in that culture, most of those educated to be “critical” attempt to be as unproblematic as possible when talking, acting, and even thinking. Risk-averse, they will surround themselves with a wall of others they’ve tested as safe, who nod in suport to their expression of needs, providing a guard against the displeasure of being accused, should that happen. They are then free to be critical of others, denigrate and dehumanize them, so long as the criticism promises to be echoed by the walls of the group surrounding them.

This is the contemporary version of conformism, based on the hope that one can slide through life as free of ugly disturbance as possible, even come out on top. Indeed the world has gotten rougher for many reasons, and the encouragement to denigrate others from behind the wall is part of that trend. Away from their group the tiniest “microaggression” will remind them of past trauma, and they are encouraged to think avoidance is the way to go. For them the self is a fragile vase they carry around out of sight, being careful nobody bumps into them–“I hurts me to hear it…”

When “problematic” is a person it is someone who is either ignorant of standard thinking, which is rare, or knows they are transgressing it. But for me the most interesting ones are in some way problematic to me, to others, and to themselves. They can be trouble-makers, as I am at times. They tilt me off balance a bit, say things that prompt me to think; I’ll have to adjust in some way, maybe rethink something. There’s one guy very “problematic,” who has periodically attacked me since the seventies, distorts what I’ve said and done and has a serious axe to grind, but he apparently gives me something I need, even if I tip over and fall down. Against conformist logic I’ve concluded that, in the long run, the wounds he and others have given me are a blessing not a curse. So this little essay is by no means a complaint.

I know about “problematic” because I grew up in the late forties and fifties, a culture of group-think widely discussed as “conformity” and “adjustment,” society was ironing the wrinkles out of the sheets. It was enforced by shaming and intimidation, but also a hint of envy, like, “Weren’t you afraid to say that; what’s it like out there?” I was one of those who fit the strait jacket, I did my best, but had some things inside that were irksome. I hid them pretty well; no one suspected a thing. Long story. Then in 1969, under the impact of storms greater than those today, I struggled to get out of my bonds. It took me a while; I almost didn’t make it. It was like Tony Curtis in the Houdini movie I saw in 1953; that scene where he gets free of the strait jacket by contorting himself out of his normal shape . That figure stuck in my mind before I knew why, as if Houdini was whispering to me– you too can do this. 

We are social beings; we can’t get completely free of wanting to be what others need us to be. To our dying day we’re not free of fearing that the world will form a circle around us, spitting at us and demanding that we confirm others’ image of us. We can’t control what the world will do to us and the image it needs to create  of us, but the world’s needs are not our needs. I still get intimidated and sent to the isolation tank, where I stare at my death. I get rudely jostled and my fragile vase of a self is about to smash, and I look around and see the ground littered with the smashed vases of others. Yes, there is comfort in that, compassion for others’ brokenness reflects back to us.

The first time it happened I was sixteen. I froze, as if the slightest movement would bring more pain, as if I could disappear. I reacted badly, but that wasn’t the end of it. At least I knew better than to ask the world to love me; that is to be enfolded in its arms and have the life crushed out of me.

When it happens now, after a time I begin to thaw out, I find a dance that restores my balance. If I can obey the contract that says, “Don’t return hate for hate,” then the reward starts pouring in; I’m even more free to be what I am, and to let others think whatever they need to think of me. And maybe, like in that earlier era, the other will feel a little envy of my freedom from others’ judgment; that hint of their freedom will be my gift to them. For this is all symbolic exchange, though others might never imagine how their hate did not cripple us but was their gift.

P.S. I’ve described a certain common situation these days but it’s misleading; as a template for responding to an assault it is limited. What if the accusation is true? This takes a moment of “as if” thinking, trying to see how it could be true, which is quite possible, even if expressed with full venom. The “where there’s smoke there’s fire” approach. In that case, once past the shock I need to treasure it, an insight from outside my self-image. Sure, I will apologize and thank them, without getting into an argument, but that criticism probably has roots and branches that would be interesting to explore. It’s good to remember it in that way, though it will always arouse the shame of having violated some goodness I think I possess.

But what if it’s factually wrong, or more likely I’ve been wildly and irretrievably misinterpreted, and any evidence I see confirms me and not the other? Am I to doubt myself to the extent that I believe what I know isn’t true? I might sink into that hole, but that is true craziness; a limit of bending the truth to appease the other is reached. When I go through this process, am able to recover from the surprise blow, and can escape the desire for revenge, then my focus shifts to the accuser, and what I see is suffering I can do nothing to alleviate. It’s like hearing of a friend who drowned and you weren’t there to save them. I don’t need to know why he or she has projected on me, what their “real” problem is; it’s just clear this person is suffering more than me and could use the kind of stability and self-assurance I have (and not always had!). They were fragile and felt unsafe long before they met me, and if there is anyone to weep for it is them.

With God on Their Side

The news is so chock full of interesting stuff to comment on I’m tempted to do just that all day long. F’r instance. this one on the “meat industry” feeds a thought I’ve been dwelling on. There’s of course no statistics on the percentage of virus deaths that are Trump Republicans, but I’ll bet they’re very low. They and Trump know it, and it figures into Trump’s decisions. How many Trump voters would you find in the categories that have been dying at the highest rate–prisoners, people in nursing homes, poor blacks, and people with medical conditions who have been heavily dependent on gov’t supported health care? And how many flag-waving Republicans would be found working in meat-packing plants? And of course none at all in Mexican manufacturing plants that Trump is pressuring to stay open, where the virus is spreading and the Mexican gov’t is working to close them. Who is most likely to suffer from the openings of businesses, Trump Republicans or those spending the most time working with customers?

That’s where tribal loyalty fits in–a tribe protects its own against all who don’t belong. (It’s a pretend tribe at that, not based on a kinship or skin color tie; after all a majority of those the virus is taking down are still white-skinned, and somehow they’re not in the tribe.) To think of us all as just ordinary human beings is no liberal idealism; it takes some twisted reasoning to think otherwise—“elitist” would apply quite well. That twist is provided by good old American Exceptionalism boosted by fake Christianity, whose original texts preach universality against tribalism. It’s a deadly mix. I just listened to Dylan’s early “With God on Their Side,” a stinging rebuke to the War Against Vietnam. Today it speaks directly to the fundamentalist and tribalist denial that the human condition is all of us or none of us.