Update: Via The Tavern Wench...
When I finally set Nathan Singer's newest joint in the light of you down, I was confused. What had started out as the story of alienation of an American teenager in the 1990's morphed into a kind West Side Story, only with hip hop and oi as its soundtrack. Then, something completely different emerges from the intertext, nebulae of association and symbols from which we draw our understanding of everything.
Singer, who, unlike many of his contemporaries, does not hide behind the kind of cold ironic pose that has characterized the last thirty years or so of American Letters; Singer is a writer with heart, invested in his characters to such a degree that it implodes the certainty of authorial detachment. It is in the virtuosity of his prose that you find Singer, living each and every character as though it is him, and so, each of his characters walk and talk and feel with a vividness that renders them tactile in every way-almost too real and intense and confrontational to be merely in dead print. They live…
…and act in Singer's conception of a Theater of Cruelty, Artaud's soul lacerating ground zero for the bounds of "text", in which the fiction and the fact become one in the same, and through the brutality of revealed truth, do we ultimately find salvation and redemption, a la Oedipus Rex. The question which has been in my mind since reading his first joint A Prayer For Dawn is to what degree Singer's Cruel Theater is for us, and how much is reserved for Singer? Who's catharsis is this? Is there a catharsis? What is it?
The Cruel Theater of Singer is howling again, but in a disturbingly conventional form. If Chasing The Wolf was all Legbah trickster time travel and uncertain agency, the story of Mikal Fanon, our young and pissed off white boy, confronting the crumbling dream and its crippled working class avatars, is reaching back to an older tradition, Bildungsroman. This bildungsroman, however, not moral in the religious sense, like, say The Confessions of St. Augustine, but moral in the political sense, starting with Fanon's awareness of race and its tensions in his working class neighborhood, already blighted by the time he hit puberty by the wholesale exodus of manufacturing jobs that has turned much of this country above the Ohio river into the Rust Belt. In short, Fanon, a white kid caught, a slave to any number of socioeconomic forces in the street and in his own alcoholic home, is the frequent pray of neighborhood bullies, and, as victims do, he festers a great hatred towards the world. One of his tormentors, Jack Curry, a white guy himself, is able to negotiate the racial complexities, despite being the ostensible antithesis of his black neighbors: a pasty metalhead. Curry's tormenting of Fanon is constant, but not always physical, or even confrontational in the traditional sense. His ease with his integrated surroundings only underscore Fanons ill-ease, and so, Curry remains a ghost that haunts Fanon, present, in some cases, in his absence.
Fanon, like all alienated youth, search for purpose and belonging, desperately trying to fill the void, and his salvation comes in the form of Richard Lovecraft, the intellectual leader of a group of White Supremacist skinheads who intervene on the behalf of Fanon. Fanon, ever the hateful victim, soon falls in with the skins, and finds himself a soldier in RaHoWa (Racial Holy War), the central tenet of the White Supremacist Movement, immersed in the Hitler inspired Oi bands, stomping homosexuals, and other fun things like this. Fanon finds his purpose in hatred, violence, punk style nihilism and, occasionally, National Socialist ideology.
For Fanon, his devotion has little to do with the ideology, but rather man himself. Lovecraft, one imagines, is a bit like the charismatic prophet of RaHoWa Derek Vinyard, played to chilling effect by Edward Norton, in Tony Kaye's celluloid morality play American History X. Like the most of the young and disillusioned in the film, who are seemingly skinheads only to belong to something, one gets the sense that Fanon might have become a Hari Krishna if Lovecraft, the one person who seemed to give a damn, the one person who he belonged with, decided to become one. A cult of personality such as Lovecraft tend to draw the lost like bats to a streetlight.
Sure, Fanon undergoes the appropriate physical transformation, shaved head, bomber jacket, boots and, of course, swastika tattoo, but it is all ostensible, designed for Lovecraft's approval. He can't even make it through Mein Kampf.
Lovecraft himself is no card board cut out, and certainly no Vinyard clone: Though Lovecraft is definitely a true believer, he owns Bad Brains records (Bad Brains are an all black Rasta inspired Hardcore band, and perhaps, the inventors of the style that came to be most closely indentified with Black Flag). He speaks enthusiastically about Hitler's "ecological iniatives". Unlike his knucklehead sycophants, who are all "burn it down and start again", he is politically aware in the conventional sense as well in as in the reactionary sense. He pays attention to the American political scene, and notes the country's swing to the right, which he surmises may be the catalyst in coming race war. "Old Glory is the New Swastika" Lovecraft proclaims.
Mikal notes this, particularly, in a movement of anti government sentiments (it is revolutionary, so they say), Lovecraft's "devotion to the Republican Party…'You alienate yourselves from the new rising power at your own peril…'Lovecraft tells his gang.
It is at this moment the novel finds its apotheosis from the bildungsroman of Mikal Fanon from confused knucklehead to committed eco activist, from Fascist to Leftist (the completion of his political moral journey) and all that entails to something else entirely. It was, while witnessing Singer's cruel play, that, perhaps our protagonist is the focal point, he exists almost as distraction from the real intent here: The bildungsroman of America, from the age of 218 years to the present, or, rather this country's political moral journey.
Re-enter Lovecraft's absolute opposite, and Fanon tormentor, Jack Curry, committed Leftist agitator, he of ropey dreadlocks, black clothing, and abstract body art. His revolution is in opposition to everything Lovecraft works for: Racial Equality, Economic Justice, Human Rights, yet, because of the unflinching devotion to his particular ideology, he is more like Lovecraft than he would ever admit. Curry embodies opposition to Lovecraft, and, even before their ultimate showdown, they exist as the trace of the other, particularly in the mind of Fanon, and exist as such forever after, even after a bloody showdown which is the transformation of all concerned.
Singer's theater, in this regard, is arch, because he inhabits the characters so fully, that one would be tempted to overlook the ideological concerns, because there is not a character he who exists as a kind of Sartrian philosophic platitude, but as real beings inhabiting the ideological minefield that became the nineties, and continues today. These aren't cutouts, so who, as readers are we to identify with? Fanon? Lovecraft? Curry?
The political/moral journey of this country is incomplete, and, from history, we know, as Singer is all too aware, the ideological extremes end in oppression and murder, evidenced in micro by the bloody showdown between the skins and the Curry's crew, the Right and the Left, in pitched battle in the front lawn of the republic. In this light, Fanon is perhaps the United States, a petulant, sometimes violent teenager among the nations of the world, who will find inner peace with age, if it doesn't self destruct and take the rest of the world with it. Singer, cruel as ever, provides no answers, only questions.
We meet back up with Mikal Fanon, years later, a fairly conventional lefty green activist who goes back to his old neighborhood and finds his former tormentors. It is the sight of Jack Curry, who was once so powerful as to inspire murderous hatred, as broken down cripple, faded tattoos and all, that perhaps is the most telling. All the hardcoreness, the almost Stalinist devotion to an ideology, is gone, and Fanon feels no rancor, nor do his tormentors, who speak of it almost wistfully, as a young thing. Everybody mellowed out, and had a drink.
I can't help but wonder that, as we close on the an Administration as ideological and imperial as this one has been, where we have become the aggressors, where even the right to due process has vanished and we torture, a Republican administration that would seem to be the fulfillment of Lovecraft's "Old Glory" conception of the rising Right, if, like the Confessions of St. Augustine, we are to find inspiration in this journey, and like Augustine, have faith, and take comfort in the fact that all things pass, and we, as a people, may too grow up. Perhaps Singer, ever the trickster, has written us a hope letter, and is telling us to just hang in there. He'll be gone soon enough.
"The bitterest pill is mine to take/ If I took it for a hundred years, I couldn't feel any more ill" (The Jam "The Bitterest Pill").
Okay, Hillary McSame are no indignant, no, positively livid that the elitist Barack Obama would insult the salt of the earth in such a way as pointing out they are pretty pissed off about their economic situation and that they privilege single issues, such as "morals" issues, and guns.
It, as the Senator from Illinois pointed out, "laughable" that two millionaires would call someone who just got his student loans paid off "elitist", but, okay, since Butthead Scarborough (ever notice that he kind of does look like Beavis's "smarter" half?) and everybody else finds an enormous amount of hilarity in this, I guess it bears typing some on it.
As someone who was born in Cincinnati at Good Samaritan Hospital, and moved out to the sticks because of CPS (not that SE Indiana High Schools were an academic picnic, either) I can say, without equivocation: FUCKIN A people are bitter. And FUCKIN A, then cling to religion and guns. How do I know?
Easy. Everybody bitches about taxes, and if you are among the dinosaurs of the working class, those who are old enough to still have mortgages, old enough to put kids through school, old enough to have something of a pension (and certainly, their younger, and less secure, brethren) you are pissed about taxes. You pay them, and your roads suck. Your kid's High School football team has state of the art athletic facilities, and your kid's text book is old. Or Art Classes are cancelled. Property taxes go up yet your road has claimed a couple of tires this year. Yeah, people are fucking bitter.
The primary reason that so-called conservatives have held power for so long is that they were able to convince a lot of people whose best interests were not served by the conservative policy, but that said policy was bathed in the rhetoric of "Small Government". The Reagan joke "I've from the Federal Government, and I'm here to help" rings true for the Small Town, not because they do not need help, but that every time the government shows up, it costs them, and they get nothing in return. What they hate is waste, not taxes, and all we get is waste. The corporatist oligarchy gets our taxes, and we pick up the tab.
By appealing to this "anti-tax" rhetoric, you are, in fact, acknowledging that a vast number of Americans are, in fact, bitter about the role of government in their life. In fact, the patriots these folks pander to are bitter about the prospect of democracy in their lives. They are almost born knowing that taxes are theft and that the government never ever helps anything-only robs, and forces us to like it. If you pay taxes, and your roads are excellent, kids aren't going without coats, and so on, people tend to not feel robbed.
Like most unheard and impotent social groups, they tend to put more faith in the divine in an attempt to find purpose in their suffering, with all attended conditions of true believe, wishing it away, deferring their righteous anger to the next world, yet feel that the control of their destiny resides in weapons. I would argue that, in some ways, these things are so totemic to some of us as to constitute the last sembelance of personal control many people have in their lives: That the Gun and the Bible, like John Brown, are the instruments of liberation when, in the ideologically constructed 21 century, they are precisely the opposite. These are articles of oppression. People put so much stock the ostensible symbols of freedom that the underlying politics of their all powerful totem keep them enslaved. The Real Army of God, Blackwater, could give a hot fuck about your Glock. They got tanks. Might makes right. Shut up.
Both of these, like immigration, are distractions from the truth. Certainly, we don't really want the voice of working Americans heard, because even as they knee jerkedly cheer Hillary McSame for calling that Barack Obama an "elitist", we all know that both of the candidates, like Blackwater, couldn't give a hot fuck about working Americans. Indeed, at the end of the day, Hillary McSame is an end proposition: Might Makes Right, and the money is Might. At least the Republican from Arizona makes no bones about his allegiance. His mortgage plan is for Americans to "walk it off". We-you and me- will be helping Bears Stern make the house payment for a while. Bitter? FUCKIN A.
Understanding that all the "anti tax" rhetoric, the libertarian position, is all about the notion that Americans are bitter about government, is crucial, and, since Reagan, has to be considered absolutely doctrinaire. Rush and his callers are, in their particular brand of "small government" are bitter about government. Shit, some could argue that the Bush-Cheney doctrine of aggressive capitalism is an attempt to destroy the government due to this very bitterness.
If you repeat that government is ineffective and corrupt, a certain bitterness builds up about its continued existence. Bitterness, even.
Acknowledging this fact isn't unpatriotic: It's most people's lives.
When the mighty fall they tend not to fall at all, so much as stumble and resign one of their several posts, retreating humbled into relative exhile for some time. Nixon died before he could ever really emerge again, but alas, Mark Penn has many miles to go.
So will we ever see his smug, monster-like face again? Perhaps my fear of losing such a nemesis makes me doubt the possibility that Penn is Really Gone. After all, his polling firm will continue to work for Clinton. Penn himself is merely no longer in charge of "the message."
Will this mean a reduction in the politics of race? Will Clinton surrogates suddenly stop uttering hateful and crazy nonsense, apologizing with fingers crossed the following day? Has Operation Stupid been aborted?
It's hard to believe such a thing would be possible. A train hurtling along at 300 mph doesn't derail this quietly. Imagine Penn as a conductor hoisted from the train for reasons unrelated to his driving ability. Naturally, someone else will take the controls. But will that really change anything?
No! The train is on tracks, after all, and so the Mark Penn Directive will still hurtle toward the same inevitable conclusion. The question is, which is more terrifying: an unstoppable campaign exercise in bad taste with a puppetmaster in full view, or the very same show with no clear Man Behind the Curtain? When there is no one to blame, who do you blame?"
"Western Civilization has a wonderful tradition of killing monsters: David slew Goliath, Beowulf slew Grendel, Al Gore slew a world without the Internet, and so on. But when the Winners close the books on Mark Penn, they will have to conclude that this was not merely a continuation of the Great Tradition, no. Mark Penn took himself out-- for playing both sides of the same game is the height of arrogance.
It has always been a mystery to me whether Penn's arrogance stemmed from his ignorance, or if his ignorance was merely the outward projection of his arrogance. Unfortunately it seems to be the former. So how do you explain how this pug-ugly beast has slouched along for so long?
Simply put-- he was lucky. The American People are Dumb too, and for a while the song-and-dance payed sweeping dividends, but the groundlings are only dumb for so long. When the News Cycle that Wouldn't End really doesn't End, those of us in the cheap seats start to become more and more aware. We learn the buzzwords, and then a cheap sword-fight isn't enough to hold our attention any longer.
The Clinton Camp's strategy of racism and misinformation was already running out of steam as the populace started to get sharper. Clearly, these were not isolated incidents: Geraldine Ferraro, Ed Rendell, Bill Clinton Himself-- the American People smelled blood.
It's only fitting now that some freak accident should take Penn out of the scene rather than his actual misdeeds. This Columbia deal was like Kenneth Lay dying before we ever got a shot at him. Hitler in the Bunker. Right when we wise up and try to make things right, Karma comes along to correct the injustice and deny us our retribution at the same time. It's totally unfair, and yet completely fair.
Another paragraph has ended in the New American Century, but this is still the prelude. Pericles's funeral oration hasn't concluded yet; what plague may yet come our way? These events have yet to amount to much of anything, but perhaps we can get a sense in the coming weeks and months as to where This Thing of Ours is headed.
We have to hope so, because the only thing worse than seeing the mountain you're about to crash into is NOT seeing it, and doing it anyway. Res Ipsa Loquitor."
Update: It does speak for itself, and it says delectatio morosa!
the poor children are bled in the fertile crescent in a premature toilet stillbirth
crying screaming for mother and god and country and now silent amidst the
cacophony of guns the last screams of a thousand ancient tongues and bits
of the human detritus encircle the blast field the only signifiers of retroactive abortion
while the fathers drink and talk and drink and talk talk talk talk up to heaven for an answer a confession of guilt for their infanticide necessary for the fulfillment of
the unknowable truth they claim as ideology and justify the further suffering of the
people of the earth who now come as only sound bites and placards whose voice is heresy for the manifest destiny but if we listen it is a prophesy the whisper of the slave to the master in his revels the whisper of the inevitability the death of the country and all
the countries for the birth in vistas of new dawn when fathers will not eat their children for ideology golden idolatry idolatry that has resurrected a hellish Lazarus screaming ugly nationalisms and rears up monstrous war machine and drinks the blood of international youth where up there in the air bombs the human being lawnmower tends to the battlefield while the lush country clubs continue to lament the market and scream for the
head of a tyrant while their children prepare for the future in the club house but sacrifice
nothing to the mechanized death trip pick the bones of the poor children dying in the sun dying in the moonlight dying for the ideology not their's but someone else's confirmation of the tyrant 's more perfect union with history and its judgments
where statues celebrate the murder of poor children to keep the heart of Malthus beating in every American's chest and the statues of ancient birthright the reclamation of a golden age which moves temporally between archetype and insanity the code of Hammurabi burned from a malicious solipsism
do you hear me?
the young are being murdered now the old just talk say prayers of ideology keep the home fires burning kill the ideas of youth the forward progress of humanity halted in a spray of gunfire our ideology your ideology their ideology don't give me any of that bullshit about right and wrong black and white today the day is gray getting grayer the light of the earth muted and funereal and the mother fuckers just keep shoving their humanity into the human being lawnmower and hearts fly like clippings
the ides of march and then some the old plot in secret to burn down the future and spend the inheritance of their children on gas guzzling comfort with satellite tv in the tourist traps of the world oblivious to the carnage in their name their name is ideology and they manufacture the doom of us all the blood we spill so they can continue to tell the poor homeless junkies to get a job and admonish them for the pain of the human condition or have the street musicians rousted because they are afraid of the young black man the young white man the young Chicano yeah yeah the army would do thee all well to respect
the elders who would have thee murdered for cheaper gasoline
die for their piece of mind die for peace in their time and yours after the parade and gun salute such a funny thing to be honored by the instrument of your murder with only a flag and weeping widows and a bloodlust tribute to the stupidity of man and his ideologies
flowers for the grave die for the ideologies of history as judgment
and the greatness of your leaders though the children have no such pretensions other than to see more history
die for petroleum which feeds the human being lawnmower into perpetuity
die for the bankers who steal yer home while you bleed slowly for iron heart of Malthus
stamped with the presidential seal
die for nationalism die for racism die for the god of abraham who weeps eternal and shudders painful at his image which kills and maims its reflection a suicidal narcissism
die for the future so that the future will have to die for the future
die for the past so that it may bear out the greatness of the arrogant moneyed few cloaked in the banners of ancestral empires
die so that you may live eternal as a hero and explain that to the parents who reel from the inverted natural order
die so that all isms will prevail in the end a monopoly on truth the frame of the big picture
die today die tomorrow die in a week a month a year a millenia backwards and forwards in time our governments feed on death young death a vast orgy of death and the ghouls who feed on the supple flesh of youth and pour the blood and the oil in the human being lawnmower chopping everything to bits hasten a return to earth our origination where we plant our youth to mortify the ground with rot and consecrate murder with the blessings of policy the world turns in on it self and devours its children on a sand swept killing floor the cradle of civilization a coffin the benediction an anthem the fertile crescent births a mad blood beast which turns on itself and throws its entrails at eternity with a placenta full of napalm and serin gas and the mother only moans moans moans on into
a night which never lifts and the din of the machines which never ceases.
Coda:
Who whispers the words that makes the beast sleep again?
and transforms its napalm blood into wine and its engines hum om
who sees the human being lawnmower chop chop chop until its
run its course sanctifying the holy land with murder
what bold courage is uttered that while the machine runs we will run
until the earth is drained of either oil or people
who applauds a tragedy actualized in narrow theocracy
a prayer moaned in chains
Church liturgy intoned from the wall st. journal
From an ATM pulpit, a conversation with god only
To confirm sufficient funds
Who would stop this insolence and who did try
To be hung as another lefty kike
The lamb sacrificed to a flickering television preacher
God wants you to be rich, a seduction of forked tongues
And jewelry
Who is Pharisee and who is fair
Give a man a fish, and he eats for a day
Teach a landlocked man to fish, and he starves
A gambit of boots and bootstraps
Who lies with the mouth of Yehweh, Jehovah, Allah, Jah
Kills over the word without exalting the Word
What machine belches fire into heaven carries children into
Weeping arms and a sobbing book?
Who redeems Mohammed, who redeemed Joshua Ben Joseph who redeemed Melchedek who redeems peace?
What truth told with a silver tongue and mercury?
Lies told by apostates who know not the book and raise hell
In Babylon
Sees not the blind man who saw, nor delivered the man from
Emptiness
Who is Pharisee and who is fair?
I and I no lie, only cry, it is nigh.
On high.
