NEW YEARING

“Writing is saying to no one and to everyone the things it is not possible to say to someone.”—Rebecca Solnit

Writing should be that, at least. The idea I find in Solnit’s statement is the one that has been the driving force behind all the journal writing I have ever done. It’s saying to no one and, I would say, “anyone” things not meant for any particular someone. Not that I’m writing suppressed secrets or anything like that. For me, at the start, it was a case of needing writing to say anything at all. Most conversations aren’t aimed for much purpose apart from exercising the vocal chords or simply making time with some particular person. Argument is generally an airing of griefs rather than of views. Conversation has its place, but rare are its occasions, in my experience. Chat is much more prevalent and, in my youth, I had a knack for that only in very limited contexts. And I wasn’t particularly skilled at introducing a topic and developing it. That came much later, with teaching. In the days when I first began keeping a journal—19—I wrote because no one was listening and, even if they were, I didn’t have much to say, aloud.

It’s that “not possible” that we might spend some time discussing. What makes saying something “possible” or “not possible”? Some might think: censors, internal or external. But censors insist that something is forbidden to be said or maybe, in a sense, unthinkable and thus unsayable. But “not possible to say to someone” is the full phrase. The key idea it seems to me is that there is no “someone” poised to receive these intelligences. It’s “not possible” to think of a single individual. No valued listener or friend. More, perhaps: what one wants to write, needs to write, doesn’t necessarily need to be heard. It must be read, or forget it. This is what I took Solnit to mean because it addresses my own quandary about writing to be read. I have no problem with writing something I’m expected to write—the terms are, as it were, provided by the occasion. But writing what no one asked one to write, writing that isn’t simply—as in a notebook—for one’s eyes only or primarily, such writing demands a reader who is not oneself, and yet who could that person be? All “someones” in one’s life are foreclosed by that phrase “not possible to say to someone.” If there were someone one could address, one would write a personal letter, pick up the phone, send an email or text.

Perhaps tweets function in the way Solnit means. They certainly have a gang’s-all-here quality that means they’re for everyone, whoever, wherever. And they seem to be, rhetorically, a gesture more than anything, something that, if addressed to only one someone, would have personal meaning, but when flung into the internet become bits of observable phenomena, to be made of as who so will. But I don’t have much to say about that. Though, arguably, a blog post, and I’ve written a few of those, is just an overly long tweet. If so, then, yes, let’s just say that in this online format one is speaking to no one and anyone all the time. But is that what one is always doing in writing anyway? Perhaps, but to me the difference between online writing and a journal is that “anyone” factor. In time, should a notebook survive, anyone might come across it and read it, true, but it wasn’t written for that eventuality. A post already presumes an environment in which, potentially, anyone’s eyes might fall upon something, for reasons which remain obscure. So, while I feel that journal writing is for “no one” (except me), blog posts are for “anyone,” deliberately.

Then again, I think of Nietzsche’s subtitle for Thus Spoke Zarathustra: “a book for everyone and no one.” If Solnit is correct, every book could bear that subtitle, as any act of writing could. But Nietzsche meant it in a particular way, as though the contents of the book, while there for everyone to glean, had no immediate audience. No one was quite ready to receive it or read it. And yet it was written for them, for us, all.

That aspect of Nietzsche’s writing appealed to me greatly in my teens. That sense that “no one,” perhaps, had ever quite gotten it, so that “everyone” was missing the point. I have that sensation a lot. Most things I read, however perspicacious they may be, usually suggest to me some aspect of the question that the writer is not addressing, is missing. It was Nietzsche who first exposed me, repeatedly, to how prevalent is the fact that, in making a point, one misses a point. It’s not simply that there are two sides to the point and one is stressing one and ignoring the other, no, it’s more dialectical than that. It’s the fact that, in saying something, one creates a shadowy negative of what one is saying in the reader’s mind. A reader well-informed on the topic will have other facts and points already raised, mentally. But even someone just reading along will see the gaps in the logic and, sometimes fatally, the rhetorical sleights that create a sense of authority where there is only opinion or, worse, received opinion. We all drop the ball in writing and even more so in speaking. In fact, a lot of writing seems to exist for no other purpose than to sound the horn, saying “look out, I’m speaking here.” Some people have so much to say.

In our Trumped-up times, speech, as any kind of measured rhetoric, has taken a big hit. Public discourse may not survive the blow. Already it was weak in the knees. Obama, who speaks with a judicious weighing easy to parody, was a true anomaly in U.S. politics. It’s all banter, bluster and balderdash now, and one tweets to everyone and anyone what may not be reasonable to say to “someone.”

Which, I suppose, might be a way of saying—to anyone!—that one reason to keep writing, much as I hate to say it, is to stop one’s ears to all the worthless verbiage. If I’m writing I can’t be listening, or reading. And there’s only so much of the latter two acts I feel willing to engage in, at this time. Sure, it’s always possible to read writing from some other time, to engage the mind with more knowledge that, while not strictly useful, helps to offset the sense of wallowing in the worst excesses of the American public so far endured. To the extent that we Americans are all some portion of the body politic, we are all now numbered among the Unfortunate Stooges of America, played for patsies by a Clown Prince of Crime, à la The Joker.

During the election, I happened to see episodes of the old TV series Batman, starring Adam West, in which The Penguin runs for mayor and he’s kicking the incumbent’s ass, so they ask Batman to run, and he does, much in the measured tones of our outgoing Prez, which gets him nowhere in the climate of the Penguin’s sideshow razzle-dazzle. The Penguin’s rhetoric’s resemblance to Trump’s empty promises is uncanny, or would be except that the blueprint for how to say nothing and mean it has long been engraved into the national psyche, so much so that Trump on the stump was always the bad Reality TV version of what a scripted bullshit-slinger would sound like, trumpeting the message that the only people stupider than his listeners are the people who have been elected or hired to do the jobs they do. I’ve heard this “everyone’s an idiot but me” line my entire life, and it usually comes from someone who hates the higher-ups but who doesn’t want their tasks. Wants to snipe, not lead. Trumpy, however, sniped his way into a job. It’s a job he doesn’t really want—in the sense of its job description—unless he can do it his way. He was elected president, but he ran for monarch. So I guess we’ll see how that plays out. What else is there to watch?

Meanwhile, it’s a new year. I’d like to say it’s time, for me, for a return to writing, the kind of writing I don’t engage in often enough, to go back to whatever it was that got me interested in doing it and to find out if it’s possible to say what I wanted to say. I never had enough faith in big abstract things like “the American people” or “God” or “my fellow man” to be bitterly disappointed by the crap that comes down. In the Batman episode, ultimately, the people don’t elect The Penguin, showing that there was still an electorate capable of distinguishing between a snake-oil salesman and a person with at least a few commitments to something other than himself and his own will to power. But that was in 1968, which is when everything got broken and pretty much stayed that way. When I was in high school, in the mid-Seventies, I read this passage by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. It seemed to say it all then.

I remembered The Fourteenth Book of Bokonon, which I had read in its entirety the night before. The Fourteenth Book is entitled, "What Can a Thoughtful Man Hope for Mankind on Earth, Given the Experience of the Past Million Years?"
It doesn't take long to read The Fourteenth Book. It consists of one word and a period.
This is it:
"Nothing."

At the time, that suited my view, as a teen without much connection to my times or my contemporaries. Later, when I was much better educated, I would try to qualify that passage. The “past million years” is too sweeping a generality. I still think so, but I would apply the formula to “the past 50 years,” easily. So it goes.

DB's Song of the Day (day 308): "YOU HAVEN'T DONE NOTHIN'" (1974) Stevie Wonder

It’s Election Day in America. A midterm election, which generally doesn’t generate much interest in the general populace. Here in CT, the various political organizations are trying to shame voters by sending them “report cards” on their voting record in the state. It’s rather obnoxious and, if one were swayed by such things, such mailings would make me more likely to stay at home. I don’t respond well to Big Brother or Sister telling me what’s what.

Today’s song by Stevie Wonder seems appropriate for the day, since the cry that usually gets people into the polls is some form of “you haven’t done nothing.” Which means a vote is often a vote against whoever’s been in office, doing nothing. The phrase also can apply, though, to deadbeat non-voters who, in complaining about our politicians and our political system, can be met with the riposte “you haven’t done nothing”—if you can’t even be bothered to help vote someone out or in.

Here in CT the big focus is on the gubernatorial race—“perhaps the closest in the country”—between Dan Malloy, the Democrat in office (and the first Democrat in that office since 1986), and Tom Foley, who Malloy beat four years ago by just 0.5 percent. Yeah, it’s a close one.

I think those who will try to vote Malloy out will use some variation of today’s song’s title as their rallying cry.

When Wonder released the song, on LP in July of 1974 and as a single that topped the pop and R&B charts in August, President Richard Nixon was in the midst of resigning from office rather than being ousted by any margin of votes. In fact, Wonder released the song the day before Nixon announced he would resign. Great timing! The cry about doing nothing didn’t seem all that applicable, though. Nixon had ended the war in Vietnam, and he’d signed some things into law—like the Federal Election Campaign Act which protected elections from the kind of “corporations are people too” logic and no limits to campaign finance that are now rampant. We were in a very Republican country then, and it was certainly fashionable, to anyone vaguely to say nothing of virulently left, to blame the “do nothing for the underclass” outlook of the sitting pretty Repubs. Nothing much has changed in that regard. It’s simply worse, because the end of the Republican mandate—which I guess can be seen by Malloy getting elected at all—has left the GOP very, very hamstrung, highstrung and extreme in their efforts to take back the country. Eight years of W. wasn’t damage enough. Well, damage to regular folks. It was quite a feast for those who got used to levels of abuse of the system that ol’ Tricky Dicky could only fantasize about.

Anyway, Wonder’s Fulfillingness’s First Finale LP, containing today’s song, was released in a midterm year too. It just happened to be, as fate would have it, the year of the end of Nixon’s administration. The outcome of today’s races won’t oust Obama but it could leave him even more shackled to the will of party politics than his second term has been already. Washington has shown itself unworkable with a degree of vigor that is remarkable. Remarkable even if you remember the days of Nixon—a president undergoing a legitimate investigation of his administration’s practices and facing impeachment proceedings. Even then, dysfunction didn’t seem to be as rife, or as rank.

What Wonder’s song gets at, wonderfully, is the bitter “we’ve had it with this shit” feel of the times: We’re sick and tired of hearing your song / Tellin’ how you’re gonna change right from wrong / ’Cause if you really want to hear our views / You haven’t done nothin’

Two things about that: sometimes a politician should follow the Hippocratic (rather than Hypocritic) Oath: “first, do no harm.” I’d rather an elected official do nothing than do wrong and harmful things, or things that only benefit a favored few. I’d rather he or she not undertake to “fix” things with rather questionable means, or sign away things that can’t be gotten back. So I don’t know that the cry of this song is what gets me into the voting booth. It’s more an effort to hold back the harmful rather than reward vision and leadership. I’m not big on believing in vision and leadership, but then I was around when “vision and leadership” got its head blown off in Dallas, Texas. And when vision and leadership has mostly had to court bedfellows you’d rather see tarred and feathered, well, it leaves a bad taste. So I’m more about voting as trying—albeit lamely—to keep a finger in the dyke, or is that shut the barn after the horse is gone?

Anyway, Wonder also—with the help of the Jackson Five (yes, they were still extant then)—gets a nice little groove going with that “doo, doo, wop.” This is the Seventies, after all, and doing nothing is kinda the order of the day. “Much concerned but not involved / With decisions that are made by you.” That really sums it up well. To be political then was not to put much faith in the electoral process. I mean, Nixon—NIXON—had a huge landslide victory in 1972. The Democratic party was a shambles—talk about those who “haven’t done nothing,” other than lose their grip on the reins of the war they started and antagonize the party’s entire Southern white electorate with civil rights policies—and so “politics by other means” was all the rage. But of course that’s just a recipe for letting power-mad bureaucrats run rampant. Or sleaziod bankers and investors. Or a revisionist Supreme Court.

Well, so it goes. As Woody Allen used to say, “Yes, I believe in democracy—and I also think the American system can work too.” It does, after a fashion. Or did. These days, it seems, the most rabid reactionaries among us are the ones who are most willing to go into politics. I was amused (to counter Stevie’s “we’re amazed but not amused / By all the things you say you’ll do”—though that line should land at Tom Foley’s door, I think) to read a quotation from, of all people, Barry Goldwater who said, when he backed Ford against Reagan in 1976, that the people who want Reagan to oust the sitting president are the people who voted for Goldwater in 1964, and “they are some of the most vicious people I have ever known.”

We would not care to wake up to the nightmare / That’s becoming real life / But when mislead who knows a person’s mind / Can turn as cold as ice.

Wonder sings all this in that hepped-up voice he uses that really gets your hackles up and makes you pay attention. The song has a sound—with the clavinet and the horns—that reminds of Superstition, another of my favorites from Wonder. It is a pissed-off song, Seventies style. As, you know, superstition and electoral politics aren't such poles (or polls?) apart. “Doo, doo, wop, stand up be counted, say doo, doo, wop.” Yeah, let's make a difference, America! But can we ever say that any electorate in the history of U.S. politics would jump on this bandwagon:

We want the truth and nothing else.         

TORTUROUS THOUGHT

I happened to be reading Nobel Prize winner J. M. Coetzee's excellent and bracing and clarifying novel Diary of a Bad Year (2007) just as news stories began to arrive about the 'torture memos.' What struck me so forcefully about Coetzee’s novel, in which a writer produces a series of 'opinions' about the modern world, while also becoming infatuated with a young woman in his building whom he hires to do secretarial work, and subsequently having an effect on the woman and her relation to her boyfriend, was the evenness of the essayistic opinions. Matters such as terrorism and democracy and the slaughter of animals are the stuff of Op-Ed writing and blogs, and Coetzee enters this territory, within the freedom provided by an authorial voice, without the kinds of cant and breast- or brow-beating so common in the press.

So consider how applicable, two years after their publication, such comments, under "On Machiavelli," are:

"The modern state appeals to morality, to religion, and to natural law as the ideological foundation of its existence. At the same time it is prepared to infringe any or all of these in the interest of self-preservation.

"Machiavelli does not deny that the claims morality makes on us are absolute. At the same time he asserts that in the interest of the state the ruler is 'often obliged [necessitato] to act without loyalty, without mercy, without humanity, and without religion.'"

The pointedness of this quotation from Machiavelli is obvious. Torture is the very sort of practice that rulers may undertake 'in the interest of the state,' and be sanctioned in doing so by Machiavelli’s logic about what ruling entails and requires. Coetzee gives us food for thought by citing Machiavelli because the clarity of the latter’s approach to power has never been equaled and because it is a statement that comes to us from so far in the past that it can’t smack of any kind of partisanship. What Machiavelli assumes is that any ruler, once in power, becomes the state, and thus will make use of whatever means necessary to maintain that power.

But Coetzee doesn’t want to leave it there; he’s after the kind of support such 'abuse of power' may often find in the general populace.

"The typical reaction of liberal intellectuals is to seize on the contradiction here: how can something be both wrong and right, or at least both wrong and OK, at the same time? What liberal intellectuals fail to see is that this so-called contradiction expresses the quintessence of the Machiavellian and therefore the modern, a quintessence that has been thoroughly absorbed by the man in the street. The world is ruled by necessity, says the man in the street, not by some abstract moral code. We have to do what we have to do.

"If you wish to counter the man in the street," Coetzee’s author continues, "it cannot be by appeal to moral principles, much less by demanding that people should run their lives in such a way that there are no contradictions . . . . Rather, you must attack the metaphysical, supra-empirical status of necessità and show that to be fradulent."

Fair enough, but it seems to me that the argument here, in becoming ‘metaphysical, supra-empirical,’ moves away from the tangible world of power. The necessity is not an over-arching concept that can be shown to be fraudulent, I would argue; it is in the very nature of power itself: to be exerted. Upon whom? Whichever subjects are deemed to be its proper targets. Because power says 'this is so, therefore I am obliged to do such and such,' there is no recourse to a demonstration that 'this is not so,' for power has already decreed it to be so. This was nakedly the manner of rule of the Bush administration, and what is mind-boggling to me, personally, is that anyone could seriously think there would be some other result from the fact of giving power to Bush and his crew. But even if the enormity was unthinkable when he first ran for office, it should’ve been abundantly clear when he seized power in the 2000 election. The intentions of the administration to wield the power it had taken I would say were manifest -- which would’ve included an invasion of Iraq and whatever means were deemed necessary to wage that war. The attack on 9/11 was the outrage that allowed the ends of the Bush administration to be pursued with more or less the sanction and backing of anyone who might have been able to object in a more than negligible way.

Coetzee’s author, in discussing democracy, also makes some salient points: however a ruler is chosen or determined, it "is not a formula for identifying the best ruler, it is a formula for conferring legitimacy on someone or other and thus forestalling civil conflict." In that sense, and in that sense only, the legitimacy of Bush’s initial election could not be contested. But those who -- like a blogger on OpenSalon, Dennis Loo, who brings serious charges against Obama’s administration -- expect some momentous redress of the situation that pertained under Bush might consider a few other grim points Coetzee’s author offers:

"Democracy does not allow for politics outside the democratic system. In this sense, democracy is totalitarian." In other words, whoever becomes the ruler of the U.S., by whatever means, becomes legitimate so long as civil conflict is prevented, and, what’s more, will prevent all such conflicts by whatever means deemed necessary. In this sense, if you like, power corrupts, but, from another point of view, power simply protects its claim to power, and demonstrates power through its exercise.

"If you take issue with democracy in times when everyone claims to be heart and soul a democrat, you run the risk of losing touch with reality. To regain touch, you must at every moment remind yourself of what it is like to come face to face with the state -- the democratic state or any other -- in the person of the state official. Then ask yourself: Who serves whom? Who is the servant, who the master?"

Ask the naked guy tasered at the Coachella Festival.