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Monday, February 04, 2008
FIVE SCENES PERIPHERAL TO A WAR
BOMBS ON THE WAY
Promute
Dark Moving
Blondena Music : 2006
[Buy It]
I. Yesterday morning, I sat outside a cute coffee shop in an ugly strip mall. North Carolina starts to thaw in February, and it felt good to sit outside. Even though I was essentially sitting in a parking lot, I had a little table and a fresh cup of coffee, and my first cigarette of the day smoldered in my hand, and the sun felt good on my face. At a table next to me, three teenagers conversed heatedly - high school aged, roughneckish in a preppyway - kids who are familiar to me, from this coffee shop, whose conversations are impossible not to overhear, and usually revolve around boastful war stories of bodily damage and degradation through excessive substance and alcohol abuse. But yesterday, they were talking about the U.S. military's arsenal, with a mix of nihilism, apathy, belligerence and pride that perfectly expressed their social milieu. I know kids like this intimately, can usually spot them on sight, because I was one of them. I recognized their haughtiness, their love for transgression, their prodigious efforts to suppress any sign of their keen suburban-bred intellects beneath a veneer of malevolence. "We have seven hundred missles," one of them was saying, with a no-nonsense, brass tacks sort of tone. They discussed how many times over we could blow up various things; they discussed the merits of just blowing up everything, because we're Americans, and we can. I saw some adults passing by, catching snippets of their conversation, grimacing or wincing or frowning disapprovingly; I saw the kids soaking up this disapproval as if it were lifeblood, blowing out ostentatious streams of Marlboro Red smoke they hadn't inhaled, only let puff out their cheeks. I felt a great empathy for them. I understood their fascination with the idea of blowing up everything, which seems like just another kick in youth (when one feels certain that one feels more of the world than adults, only to discover, usually sometime in one's twenties, that one was only feeling one's self, and that the world was still waiting). I thought about how that obliterative desire - which sometimes, in whatever phase of adulthood I'm in, still haunts me - turns darker, more feasible, more ideological, more utterly sensible. I thought about trees in windy places, how their branches twist and distort, shaped by exterior pressures. I saw the corridor stretching out ahead of these kids, looking over my shoulder, and I thought about all the disillusions they'd have to overcome, all the escape hatches into wider pastures of self-hood they'd hopefully not overlook along the way. "We could blow up the freaking moon!" one of them exclaimed, eyes wide and shining.
INDUSTRY FOR THE BLIND
Milemarker
Frigid Forms Sell
Jade Tree : 2002
[Buy It]
II. I recently had lunch with a friend of mine who's a capitalist. I don't mean in a practical sense, because in a practical sense, we are all of us capitalists. I mean he's an avowed capitalist, who believes in capitalism as a viable system for social organization that is conducive to the widespread public weal. Our conversations often revolve around politics, me aware of his, him aware of mine - a sort of embattled anarchism that does not completely disallow capitalism but absolutely disallows our grotesquely mutated late-capitalism; a confused anarchism that craves obliteration but is less handy for replacement. And here an unsourced quote floats into my mind, something about a dragon marauding a kingdom, and you want to know, after I slay the dragon, what I want to replace it with? My friend and I don't quite tiptoe around each other's politics, but neither do they clash head on - we don't see each other that often, and when we do, there's always a sense of feeling out the contours of our interface, me wondering if he's skewed too far right for us to see eye to eye, him wondering if I've slid too far in the other direction. But in fact, we always do meet in a spirit of accord, because my friend is the best kind of capitalist - one's who's deeply involved in the mechanations of the world, from development to public policy to politics (my friend was a speechwriter for Mayor Nagin before the flood), and who detests corruption and venality and excessive self-regard, and who is frighteningly intelligent and full of conviction, and who's motivated by the quest for the greater good through capitalism rather than cynical personal gain, and who genuinely believes that capitalism can be tailored to uplift the poor and sustain the constructed world. I think that if there were more capitalists like my friend, we wouldn't be in such a sorry state today. I find his enthusiam refreshing, I who spend so much time with political eschatologists; I feed off of his conviction, I who struggle with the ephermera of belief. Our political discussions aren't combative, because we seem to believe the same things in different ways; in fact, they're quite lively and enlightening, especially for me, who knows more of theory than hard policy. But there's always this intractable lump in the middle of them - we're friends who respond to each other in spirit, but have a tacit knowledge that, were ideology an actual war, we might one day have to take up arms against each other. Eventually, we talked ourselves into a corner. He bought me a burrito, and we talked about music instead.
NOCARSGO
Tam
Tam
Ecstatic Peace : 2006
[Buy It]
III. North Carolina is a red state, but the Chapel Hill/Carrboro area, where I live, is a splotch of the most lurid blue in that sea of blood. The cars all have multiple bumper stickers, expressing belief: No Blood for Oil, Impeach Bush, Invade Iraq? No! They crawl over the streets with their didactic payloads, going back and forth, up and down, exhaust shining like mirages in the air. This world is not built for belief. Sometimes I dream of a white state amid the red and blue, completing the flag - a state of nothingness and absence.
TO ABSENT VOTERS
The Lucksmiths
Spring a Leak
Matinee : 2007
[Buy It]
IV. I have a another friend who sells pot for a living. He hasn't participated in the taxable economy for years, spends his days playing complicated online war games on a computer that grows more powerful and sprawling every day. "Who are you voting for?" he asked me abruptly, when I saw him last week. He likes politics, he said, gets caught up in it, although he said it in the same way one might describe a relationship with sports, or reality television. I told him what I've been telling everyone who asks me lately, when I feel brave enough: for the first time in my adult life, I'm not sure if I'm going to vote. I tell him I'm no longer sure I care which rat is king of the maze. I tell him that whether I choose Coke or Pepsi in the blind taste test, I'm still getting bloated with brown bubbly sugar-water. At this point I'm rehearsing my speech but my mind has turned inward, into that unsolveable maze where it always goes when I think about voting lately - would not voting be a valid form of dissent, or would it be the sort of apathy and exhaustion that indicates a win for the oligarchs and tyrants? If I were to not vote, would this be a narrative of resistance, or submission? If I do vote, because I can't make a solid case to myself for not voting, will I be complicit in perpetuating the myth of representative democracy in America? And wouldn't not voting be the easiest, stupidest way to ease myself out of complicity, when almost every aspect of my life - most of them more difficult to change than my voting habits - screams of this complicity? If I'm not going to vote, then what am I going to do? Negation seems insufficient, action elusive. "Dude," he told me, apalled, "you've got to vote." And so we turned to the familiar discussion of candidates. It felt like taking a favorite walking route, familiar and well-worn, although instead of a leafy idyll, the scenery was more ravaged and dystopian. It would thrill me to see a female president, if only so that the sexist assholes in the press would stop calling her "Hillary," as if everyone can be on a first-name basis with this formidable politician because she has a vagina. But Clinton is a hardcore dynast, and dynasts frighten me. It would thrill me to see a black president, too, but Obama's message of "hope" and "change" is uncomfortably nebulous - change is coming regardless; I need to know a little more about what kind. On the level of policy, Clinton and Obama are nearly identical. Truth be told, I liked Edwards best for the Democrats, liked the transparent utility of his rhetoric and how he tended to resist political gamesmanship even when the press would try to coax him into it. But Edwards is just another white guy with a fancy-boy haircut (another friend of mine made a joke along these lines that infuriated me, as it so heedlessly emulated the pundits who spend all their time telling voters what superficial concerns - Edwards's hair, Clinton's perceived "coldness" - will decide the election for them, seldom mentioning policy or platform, in a self-perpetuating politics of pure surface). And white guys with good hair are not what this election is about. I told my friend that I'm more concerned with the Republican primary, since to vote Democratic is NC is to throw your vote away; that I'm less concerned with who gets into office than who doesn't. In this regard I like McCain, who is hawkish but also intelligent and apparently sane, and who is not an evangelical (evangelicals scare me more than hawks, and are mostly hawkish anyway). Romney is a pod person, and Huckabee is completley mad; at least McCain is a verifiable sentience, who knows as much of war's horrors as its glories. My friend and I traded the usual insights recylced from NPR and the New Yorker, as if they were baseball cards, made the usual stern proclamations, talked about how high national health care is on our list of priorities. Then I bought a bag and went home to read. On the way home, a snippet of speech on NPR caught my ear and somehow lifted my spirits: "Get your heart out of that tree, Reverend, and sing!"
DISSOLVE YOURSELF
Lucky Dragons
Widows
States Rights : 2006
[Buy It]
V. Stephen Millhauser is a writer of consistent obsessions: artificers, miniaturists, mechanical representations so subtle they blur the lines between machinery and life, mimetic slippages, the endless corridors of desire, gamesmanship at royal court...and most of all, castles. No one writes castles like Millhauser. He knows that every word is a magic word, every sentence an incantation (I say your name, and your head turns as if of its own accord; I say "hyacinth" and a purple bloom rushes into your mind; what is a spell if not a word that alters reality? and what word does not?). His castles are micro-cosmologies, circumscribed fields of play that contain the entire world in miniature (although sometimes, they aren't literal castles - the castle in Enchanted Night, for instance, is a suburban neighborhood at night, while the castle in his story "A Change in Fashion" is a woman's dress). Reading Millhauser is a confused sort of escapism - his worlds run precisely parallel to our own, but seem wholly remote from it, self-contained, at the same time. Last night, re-reading "Cathay," a glitteringly strange series of tableuax that seems like a warm-up for his more recent "King in the Tree," I felt myself submerging slowly, languidly, into Millhauser's world, which feels like sinking into a dark mirror, slowly, inexorably. "Cathay," like all of Millhauser's best work, admits nothing outside of its feverishly lucid walls. I read, and the world slipped away, another one, somehow realer and less substantial at once, growing up aroud me like an untended garden. But then I read the entry for "Dragons":
The dragons of Cathay dwell in caves in the mountains of the North and in the depths of the Eastern sea. The dragons rarely show themselves, but we are always aware of them, for the motions are responsible for storms at sea, great waves, hurricanes, tornadoes, and earthquakes. A sea dragon rising from the waves can sink an entire fleet with one lash of its terrible tail. Sometimes a northern dragon will leave its cave and fly through the air, covering whole cities with its immense shadow. Those who have stood in the shadow of the dragon say it is accompanied by an icy wind. The tail of a dragon, glittering in the light of the sun, is said to be covered with blue and yellow scales. The head of a dragon is emerald and gold, its tongue scarlet, its eyes pits of fire. It is said that the venom which drips from its terrible jaws is hotter than boiling pitch. It is said that to see a dragon is to be changed forever. Some do not believe in dragons, because they have not seen them; it is like not believing in one's own death, because one has not yet died. I put the book down, because the spell was broken. I was thinking about the war again.
Labels: brian, war
posted by Brian
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