Fin Keegan

A striking aspect of the Cold War at its deepest was the phenomenon of McCarthyism, which, through Congressional committee and media hysteria, sought to extirpate elements deemed subversive. Our paranoia necessarily paled in comparison to Stalin’s purges, but both shared the impulse to “cleanse” the body politic of heterogeneous elements.

(Similarly, the defense posture of the post-war Superpowers was symmetrical, to the point of producing Mutually Assured Destruction, an acronym to savour).

Although our current struggle against Islamo-fascism is assymetrical, Pat Robertson’s ungentle suggestion that the President of Venezuela be assasinated produced another likeness worth noting. One of the few words in Arabic that Westerners know is fatwa: an opinion or injunction promulgated by a religious authority. We first heard the term when the Ayatollah Khomeni attempted to murder a peaceful man, Salman Rushdie, whose only crime was storytelling. Subsequent clerical directives have spiritually underwritten murder the world over, from New York to Bali. And now comes the moral test for us that McCarthyism once posed and which, until decency re-emerged, we failed: an influential religious authority in our own society has issued a call for murder.

In effect, the McCarthys and the Robertsons suggest to our opponents that we are, essentially, their equal in amorality. And, in forfeiting principle, they comfort the Enemy, who relishes moral weakness more than any other.

Such a proposition therefore must be roundly refuted, especially by leaders in those communities (mostly Republicans) to whom Robertson, a tele-evanglist, appeals.

There must be no equivocation: we may kill, but we don’t murder.

Backstory: Pat Robertson calls for assassination of Hugo Chavez

Posted: August 22nd, 2005

Last week, Francis Spufford gave an interesting talk on the notion of “Plenty”–what does it mean “to have or not to have enough”?

Some highlights:

I propose a rule: if you aren’t sure whether you really live in plenty, you do.

…

From our cornucopias…pour houses that keep out the weather, clean water to bathe in daily, medicines to prolong life, clothes no-one wore before us — and then stuff, oh a torrent of stuff of unimaginable profusion and variety, stuff to tempt us, stuff to entertain us, stuff to decorate ourselves with, stuff to transport us from place to place, stuff to store other stuff in.

…

We are still running as hard as we can, with apparently undiminished urgency, and our desires still feel to us as if they are thwarted and fulfilled in the proportions you’d expect from a resistant universe.

…

[If] we all did decide, one at a time or all together, on some mark that represented adequate plenty, and stopped buying at it, our plenty wouldn’t glide calmly to a halt. It would collapse, because the system depends on striving, and whatever no longer strives to rise in our system doesn’t just stop rising, it immediately and inexorably sinks.

That’s why in our age of plenty everyone who can is still working frantically hard

Full Transcript: BBC Radio 3 - Twenty Minutes: Plenty: The Land of Cockaigne

Image: povertycodes, by thane via flickr.

In Nevada, Nature is held in a sort of stasis: little grows or moves: there is not the tumbling profusion of life one finds in wetter climates.

But the stillness here is constant and resounding–echo of some inhumanely large, climactic chord.

In any story the audience is the animating force behind the fate meted out to the characters. What plot produces, audiences (through their proxy, the author) ratify to the point of Necessity. No wonder then that Hamlet is so obsessed with audiences. And what audience is to Hamlet, God once was to us: an ends-shaping Divinity.

Now, after Ford and Marx and Adam Smith, our individual destinies are determined by social systems–which is why Joseph K., hardly prone to cosmic introspection, stands as the modern counterpart to Hamlet. Like the Dane, Kafka’s hero battles against a crushing destiny. But now the audience are not only the animating force, they are also in the very same predicament as the protagonist, condemned to a meaningless life and death: a terrible shift has occured.

We are puny, Kafka suggests, in the face of what we have created.

The American solution to the Kafkaesque: foster the mythic illusion that the system is other than it is, that life is like a Game Show, in which any citizen can become, at any moment, wealthy and beautiful, immune to external forces, rather than let us digest the truth, that Western society is a Pyramid System with an inexorably expanding base and relatively contracting peak, which more or less squeezes the life out of all but those at or near the pinnacle (who themselves, sometimes to their horror, find that money alone cannot even buy them a good night’s sleep, let alone immortality).

Who perpetuates this shoddy simulacram? The Bush Dynasty? Hollywood? Madison Avenue? Of course not. We all do, all of us in the Pyramid, because of our difficulty in reconciling the following two perceptions:

1. That I am a special being, a universe unto myself, godlike in my consciousness: without, before, and after me, an infinitude is lost.
2. That the world is effectively oblivious to me. It consistently refuses to bend to my Will. As with others I have known, I will die and soon be forgotten. Somehow, though I grew up believing the opposite, I am nothing more than a speck, existential flotsam, the flicker of a firefly.

These are hard truths. Everyone, at some level, is familiar with them. Hence, to name only a few of our responses: Reproduction, Conquest, Religion, Exploration, Neurosis, Medicine, Murder, Art, and War.

Image: Pyramid, by jef at flickr

Gerry Adams on an Irish banknote: photoshop today, reality tomorrow? Stranger things have happened…

Image: 10, originally uploaded to Flickr by bartmaguire.