This Machine Kills Fascists, Too

At the risk of drifting even further away from my stated goals for this blog...

The Monthly Review article from my last post reminded me of another article I first read a long time ago, but many times since.

Sometime in high school I was digging around in my parents' attic (I hung out up there a lot) when I stumbled upon a ratty old book (now out-of-print) called The Age of Paranoia: How the Sixties Ended. It was a collection of articles from the first few years of Rolling Stone magazine, organized into various sections, e.g.

--"Dope, Hair, and the Gentle Oppressors"

--"Other Alternatives in Action"

--"Keeping Up with the Mansons"

et cetera.

Some stuff was better than others; a long-winded investigative piece on the struggles of the underground press, for example, kinda gave the impression that every 17 year old in America started a newspaper in 1968 in order to explore the various psychosocial consequences of printing the word "motherfucker." On the other hand, a piece called "The Trial of the New Culture," by Gene Marine, told the heartbreaking farce of the Chicago 7 and was impossible to put down.

The very last piece in the book was a column by Ralph J. Gleason that first appeared in Rolling Stone in May, 1970. (It's naturally impossible to find this or any of the old RS stuff online, since why would anyone want to read articles from back in the day when Rolling Stone was a good magazine? I mean, that would be crazy.)

It was called "Fighting Fire with Fire: An End to Logic."

If you zip around the TV channels...you are bound to encounter Rev. Oral Roberts and Dr. Fred Schwartz. It is startling (not to say frightening) how much these men resemble Nixon and Agnew. Because Oral Roberts is a faith healer, it has been impossible for liberals, as an example, to look at him with objectivity and to analyze him. Because Fred Schwartz surfaced at the end of the McCarthy era (and spoke in an Australian accent as he tied his kangaroo down, Jack) it was possible for them also to regard him with objectivity. Both are instantly seen as religious extremists hallucinating a Communist devil against which to conduct their holy crusade and without which their babblings would have no reference point at all.

But Nixon and Agnew came from what is ordinarily considered respectable America (as opposed to faith healing, holy rollers or snake cults), and it has simply been impossible to get even the brightest of the TV commentators, no matter how opposed he may be to the deadly duo, to see either of them in that light.

But Nixon and Agnew, like Welch and the rest of the right-wingers, make what they say sound rational and they say it in a rational tone of voice (i.e. in ostensible calm and quiet) simply because they do not in any real way deal with American society in a rational manner. They do it by hallucination, with a kind of surrealism and with a religious commitment to angels and devils.

...

Goebbels' Big Lie caper was as cool as a freight train and as subtle as a crutch compared to the Catch-22 functioning of the American society. We are not invading Cambodia, Nixon/Agnew said as the troops marched in. We are not going to occupy Cambodia. In fact, we aren't even there! It's like Jimmy Durante in Jumbo, leading the elephant off the lot; when the cop yells "Where are you going with that elephant?" Durante asks, "What elephant?"

The pure purveyors of the new religion--Nixon, Agnew, Reagan, the Sacred Trinity of their hagiography--simply turn it all inside out, twist logic around, deny everything and go straight ahead doing what they say they are not doing. So-called decent people are in general too decent to make the challenge to them more than a formality.

What has been as irritating as the TV news people with Daley and Agnew and Reagan? No one even gave Ronnie Baby a bad time when he said of his own remark (that it made no difference where the bullet came from which killed the Santa Barbara student) that it was a "figure of speech."

Reagan was asked mildly didn't he think it contradictory for him to dismiss his own statement about the possible necessity of a bloodbath to quell student disturbances as a "figure of speech" while condemning [Black Panther spokesman] David Hilliard's dismissal of HIS statement about offing Nixon as a figure of speech?

No, Reagan didn't see the contradiction. And nobody pursued the point.

They never do. Because if you pursue the point, you get to be a nut like Lenny [Bruce] or [Eldridge] Cleaver or a conspirator or whatever it is that they want to label you as.

Now what all of this has meant to me for some time is the true bankruptcy of radical movements and politics, their utter inability to accomplish anything positive at all; because every time they are dealing with an insane situation and trying to deal with it logically. I do not think it can be dealt with by logic. History proves that, I believe. I do think that it can be dealt with--to what extent I don't know but to the extent it can be dealt with at all--by intuitive kinds of things. By poetry. By music. By art.

There is no effective way logically to react to the Presidential horror show of Cambodia any more than there was to the horror show of Vietnam. We send the telegrams and sign the petitions because we don't know what else to do. But the logical steps are useless and we know it.

...

If there is no way to change this world (always supposing we can live on it long enough to enjoy the change) without killing half of us, then fuck it. I'll do my best to have a ball and go out swinging. No violent revolution is worth it, no matter how you have to break eggs to make omelets and no matter where power comes out of. It also comes out of the mouths of poets and musicians and babes. ...

When I first read this, I thought here's a guy who's describing my mind. I felt that shock of recognition you get from accidentally walking past a mirror. It hit me.

Today, though, I'm not so sure. I mean, there is a real mood, a kind of hopeless hilarity here that is undeniably real for anyone who spends any time reading newspapers or watching television or otherwise attempting to become an informed citizen. But I also think Gleason might have been too caught up in his moment to realize that there really were amazing changes happening around him. I mean, I don't want to tick off a laundry list of differences between 1969 and 2009, but a black guy just got elected President. Important changes have happened in peoples lives in the last 40 years even if they weren't structural or fundamental in nature.

Now I won't dare argue that electing Obama--even in the abstract, much less his actual performance thus far as president--represented some kind of fundamental change. Obviously the kind of real change Gleason was talking about is an end to capitalism. And even in his moment, with all the revolutionary talk going on around him in 1970, it was painfully obvious that that was not going to happen.

I don't think it's going to happen today either--but this isn't a cause for despair.

The history of progressive change in this country is a series of moments when businessmen realized (or were made to realize) that they could still make money without necessarily doing things that happened to be morally repugnant. The end of slavery, women's emancipation, the Civil Rights movement, the child labor movement etc. were all battles where entrenched interests fought and often killed people in order to keep the status quo--and when they lost, they went back to making just as much money as they did before. Or maybe a little less. Even so, the extension of rights and votes and political protection to formerly disenfranchised groups often provided business with more opportunities to extend their reach than they had before. Again and again throughout history, the vested interests do everything in their power to protect their profits--even though they were never seriously threatened by the battle in the first place.

(Of course, this is what makes the astroturfers like Dick Armey so insane--they're whipping up mobs of hysteria and hate...in order to protect the astronomical profits of health insurance companies which are not at all threatened by the health care bills under consideration. If the bill (whatever bill, some bill) gets passed, it won't do anything to harm their profits. And if it does, by some incredible luck or chance, then the insurance companies will always find new ways to make money. They always do. So what are we going to do about it?)

I guess my point is that it's silly to get all bent out of shape by the fact that American capitalism wasn't defeated in 1970, when it was never even remotely threatened. Of course it's insane, and rapacious, and we're fucking Iraq and Afghanistan just like we fucked Vietnam; Catch-22 is no less applicable today than it was then. Milo Minderbinder is still buying eggs for 7 cents and selling for 5 and still making a profit. But understanding all this, difficult and disillusioning as it is, is not the end. It's the beginning.

***

On the other hand, Gleason's riff on the importance and function of art is wonderful. I suppose everything I'm trying to say can be expressed more clearly and forcefully in a Bob Dylan lyric. I'm thinking either:

While them that defend what they cannot see
With a killer's pride, security
It blows the minds most bitterly
For them that think death's honesty
Won't fall upon them naturally
Life sometimes
Must get lonely.

Or else maybe,

Well, John the Baptist after torturing a thief

Looks up at his hero the Commander-in-Chief

Saying, "Tell me great hero, but please make it brief

Is there a hole for me to get sick in?"

The Commander-in-Chief answers him while chasing a fly

Saying, "Death to all those who would whimper and cry!"

And dropping a bar bell he points to the sky

Saying, "The sun's not yellow it's chicken!"

Yeah, that one hits the spot.