Monthly Archives: July 2007

Clichés

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It is remarkable the kind of vitriol you encounter when you ask people to think about the clichés to which they have committed themselves. I am grateful to those who understood what I was trying to get across, whether they agree with me about the war & the moral responsibility of those fighting it or not; as for the majority of those who posted comments, they speak for themselves. Truly. I did want to take time to respond to a few individuals, however:

E.C. Hopkins: I take your point. My very angry language is directed as much against the clichés of compliance as against individual soldiers.

SJ: What was that you were saying about crude language & the left?

Brendan: You say a “representative democracy . . . decided to send troops to Iraq.” No. A small anti-democratic clique within the US government “decided.” Democracy’s got nothing to do with it & that’s my beef. As for paying my taxes, don’t you know that liberals love taxes? So, sure, I’m a moral coward for not becoming a tax protester. How about you? Anything you dislike about the government enough to withhold your taxes? As for my NEA & NEH grants, I’m surprised you didn’t turn up my Fulbright to Vietnam. By the way, are you also outraged by the corrupt no-bid contracts to politically connected corporations that have cost us all billions of dollars?

JA: Thank you for this information about military law. It does make a difference to my argument. Obviously, I do hold the morally corrupt political leadership, along with its military & civilian bureaucracy, responsible. My post was intended to penetrate the hard shell of cliché that surrounds all discussions of the military in Iraq.

Mark Jaeger: You & “die hippie die” would like to beat me up or see me beaten up or killed. What the fuck sort of moral universe do you live in?

Rob: I think we ought to love & respect those young people enough to treat them like adults with serious moral responsibilities, not like recruits for a children’s crusade.

Finally, to those who thanked me for coming clean & admitting what opponents of the war have supposedly always thought, thanks. But even a cursory reading of my post reveals that I have not hoped for the “defeat” of “the troops.” I would like to have them all tucked safely into their beds at home after a careful withdrawal from Iraq combined with a massive diplomatic & international effort to mitigate the effects of the Bush administration’s disastrous intervention. Such an effort would no doubt cost the US as much as the war. So, no, Jon, I don’t wish for your personal defeat. But defeat was written into the DNA of this war from day one. Those who determined your “defeat” are those who conceived the war & the subsequent occupation of Iraq.

Update: The post below has garnered more comment than anything I’ve written online — all the way from a Free Republic Moonbat Alert, complete with threats of violence accompanied by my photograph, to the Chronicle of Higher Education, which couldn’t bring itself to print my final phrase.

Further reading: Digby at Hullabaloo has a full discussion of the right wing celebration of atrocity in war & the way in which the militarist mind turns on those soldiers it deems to have betrayed them. Remember, it was American Legion members who really spit on returning Vietnam vets, not the dirty hippies of the myth.

Perfect Day

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Dog walk at 7:30 this morning under a clear, cool sky. Did some chores around the house. Watched the final round of the British Open, which ended dramatically in a playoff. Read some of my Patrick O’Brian novel, then tried to take a nap but couldn’t because the dogs kept barking at this & that. Tended bonsai. Made an omelet for dinner: potatoes, snap peas, bit of left over corn, cheese, herbs from the garden. Ate on the deck with Carole, the dogs hanging out at our feet. Beer. Sunlight. A light breeze.

I am completely comfortable with Rorty’s claim that we human animals make rather than discover the world. At least, if by “world” one understands something like “a network of meanings that make our experience intelligible.” If you read Rorty as denying the existence of the physical world, you misread him, though it is an easy mistake, given Rorty’s refusal to use the vocabulary of metaphysics:

Some philosophers have remained faithful to the Enlightenment and have continued to identify themselves with the cause of science. They see the old struggle between science and religion, reason and unreason, as still going on . . . These philosophers take science as the paradigmatic activity, and insist that natural science discovers truth rather than makes it. They regard ‘making truth’ as a merely metaphorical, and thoroughly misleading, phrase.

The quotation is from Contingency, Irony and Solidarity (3), which was published in 1989, but the same sentiment can be found in the introductory chapter of Philosophy and Social Hope, which expands on the distinction between “finding and making” and which explicitly answers the charge of “relativism” often leveled against Rorty and other “postmodernists.” Stephen Prickett, from whose book Narrative, Religion and Science, I’ve taken the quotation above, understands Rorty to be denying that language mediates between human consciousness & the (physical) world, offering this further quotation from Contingency, Irony and Solidarity (11) as evidence:

If we avoid this assumption, we shall not be tempted to ask questions like ‘What is the place of consciousness in a world of molecules?’ . . . ‘What is the place of value in a world of fact?’ . . . ‘What is the relation between the solid table of common sense and the unsolid table of microphysics?’ We should not try to answer such questions . . . We should restrict ourselves to questions like ‘Does our use of these words get in the way of our use of those other words?’ This is a question about whether our use of tools is inefficient, not a question about whether our philosophical beliefs are contradictory.

I am suspicious of Prickett’s use of ellipses, but don’t have Rorty’s text to check. It’s better, though, in a sense, because Prickett is so clearly building a case against Rorty’s radical distinction between finding and making. Prickett goes on to accuse Rorty of misreading Thomas Kuhn, whose work I know, and Donald Davidson, whom I’ve never read. To be honest, I am new to Rorty’s work as well, but the way I’m reading him, he is bracketing the whole of metaphysics, starting with Plato & “ending” with Hegel. Rorty is not denying the existence of the physical world, as Prickett seems to think, but making the point that all we humans can do is tell stories about the way things appear to us. Rorty would never deny that some of those stories are better & more useful than other stories; but he refuses to get involved with questions that fail to serve human needs. Scientistic philosopher, many scientists, & a great number of the backlash atheists / rationalists now posting on the internet misread “postmodernism” (& Rorty & Foucault, etc. usually without having read them) as making claims about (physical) reality when in fact no such claims are being made. The whole point being that such claims are ungrounded & so cannot be made, except as poetry. It is understandable, of course, that scientists, given the amount of cultural & even epistemological capital that has accrued to them these last couple of hundred years, would find it tough to be reduced to the level of poets, or even historians.

Now, back to my perfect day. Richard Rorty, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida & the rest of them do not want to deny me the beauty of the afternoon, the light falling through the pines, or even the texture of the rosemary’s bark against my skin. Even if I want to contemplate the physiology of skin & bark, reality is preserved. The new philosophy, if we can call it that for convenience, means to call attention to the poetry of perception, the beauty of our tools.

I Do Not “Support the Troops”

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The phrase is a cliché & buried in the cliché are a pair of pernicious ideas: 1) That individual soldiers are without moral, existential, responsibility for their acts; 2) that to argue the Iraq war is wrong, misguided, ill-conceived, badly managed, stupid, indecent, horrifying, & damaging to US interests is to somehow wish harm to “the troops.” Each “troop” is a moral agent & though we make certain allowances for individuals acting under military orders, one of the benchmarks of civilization is that we hold soldiers to a moral standard of responsibility. (Unless we secretly wish the “troops” to carry out our atavistic fantasies of violence, in which case we will exempt them from morality; that is, we will turn them into beasts.) I hate the war & I understand those fighting it to be participating in an immoral undertaking; that does not mean I wish them harmed. On the contrary, I wish that they would come to their moral senses. The cliché “support the troops” is simply the most obvious node in a self-congratulatory web of patriotic discourse threatening what the patriots claim to believe in. And it is a very successful discourse, since even opponents of the war must kneel at the alter of the sanctified “troops.” So, neighbor, take your magnetized Support the Troops ribbon & shove it up your ass. I hear that magnetism has magical properties. Maybe that will do some good against the cancer growing on your conscience.

Update: “Send a boy to war and he comes home talking dirty,” wrote Tim O’Brien in “How to Tell a True War Story.” O’Brien’s war was Vietnam; here are some examples from the current war.

One-Dimensional Man

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Via Wood s Lot, I came across this cogent essay in CTheory by Carol Vanderveer Hamilton in which that flickering sensation you get when watching George W. Bush on television is explained. The most effective critical writing reveals the known as newly informed insight. Hamilton’s dispassionate prose is devastating in its directness:

Kosinski’s Chance is unable to read or write. “I do not read any newspapers,” said Chance. “I watch TV.” In an October 17, 2003, interview on Fox, George W. Bush volunteered that he did not read newspapers. The emptiness of both George W. Bush and Chance the Gardener is on display yet remains invisible to their admirers. This emptiness in turn is a product of their illiteracy. Those who are proposing Chance for the vice-presidency significantly praise him as a “blank page,” a man with no personal history.

Bush is the blank page onto which we have written our desires. It is fascinating, in a way, to see many of those who supported the Iraq adventure now pulling back, bailing out, reversing course & etc. — without every acknowledging what anyone who could read the news papers knew before the war began. That the whole thing was based on a shallow fantasy of American power, which they misrepresented as American virtue. And the administration’s reliable enablers continue to assert that those who oppose the war are traitors.And when the president speakes these days, he doesn’t even try to disguise the shit that flows out of his mouth.

Indentured Workers in the Mariana Islands

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From Dover Bitch, writing at Hullabaloo:

Why is this hearing important? After all, it’s not on the evening news. It’s not even scheduled to be broadcast live on C-SPAN. The truth is, this hearing is only important to people who believe that America shouldn’t be a place like this:

Using its immigration authority, the Commonwealth has created an economy that relies upon the wholesale importation of low-paid, short-term indentured workers. Foreign workers pay up to $7,000 to employers or middlemen for the right to a job in the CNMI. When they finally reach the Commonwealth, they are assigned to tedious, low paying work for long hours with little or no time off. At night they are locked in prison-like barracks. If they complain, they are subject to immediate deportation at the whim of their employer. Some arrive in the islands only to find that they were victims of an employment scam. There are no jobs waiting for them, and no way to work off their bondage debt.

The piece goes on to describe how a bill to rectify this situation, passed unanimously by the Senate in 2000, was derailed by the radical corporatists in the House. Neither of my Senators is on the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, so, having lived in Washington State for many years, I wrote to Maria Cantwell:

Dear Ms. Cantwell, I write to you as a former Washingtonian (UW 1978) because I do not have a senator on the Energy and Natural Resources Committee. In any case, the issue I want to address transcends state politics. I refer to the issues covered in the provisions of Senate Bill 1634, specifically the treatment of workers in the Mariana Islands. The documented cases of fraud, indentured servitude, physical abuse, and sexual exploitation of legal immigrants on US soil must be addressed and such actions stopped. The Senate unanimously passed such a bill in 2000, but it was derailed by the right-wing radicals in the House, led by the now-discredited Tom DeLay using the illegal special interest money paid by convicted political corrupter Jack Abramoff. We as a country con now begin to heal this moral wound in the body politic. Please, Senator, don’t just support S. 1634, become its champion. This is not an issue the news media is likely to pay attention to and you will be unlikely to receive the thanks of a grateful public, but you will receive my thanks, and, more important, the thanks of the suffering and exploited indentured workers of the Mariana Islands.

Take a couple of minutes this morning & write to a member of the committee. If a senator from your state sits on the Committee, so much the better, but this is not a local issue. There are plenty of horrors in the world & this is only one horror — one to which very few people are paying attention — but you have to start somewhere. Use what’s left of our representative government to make a positive difference, however small, in the world.