Theology: Bowie, Barthes and Blackstar

Joe Coscarelli wrote in the New York Times four days after Bowie's death:

"Like most children of the 1950s, David Bowie considered Elvis a mythic figure. The pair, who would go on to share a record label, RCA, in the 1970s, also happened to be born on the same day. 'I couldn’t believe it,' Mr. Bowie said.  'He was a major hero of mine. And I was probably stupid enough to believe that having the same birthday as him actually meant something.'

Following Mr. Bowie’s death on Sunday, the search for meaning in his own final works — the album 'Blackstar,' which arrived on Friday, his 69th birthday, and the musical 'Lazarus' — has led back to Elvis. On this week’s New York Times Popcast, the philosopher Simon Critchley, whose book 'Bowie' was released in 2014, points to the rare Elvis song “Black Star,” an alternate version of 'Flaming Star' from the 1960 Western of the same name.

The lyrics speak for themselves:

Every man has a black star/A black star over his shoulder/And when a man sees his black star/He knows his time, his time has come/Black star don’t shine on me, black star/Black star keep behind me, black star/There’s a lot of livin’ I gotta do/Give me time to make a few dreams come true, black star

'It must be a clue,' Mr. Critchley said. 'At the very least, it’s a fitting cosmic coincidence.'"

There is little to say or write about David Bowie that hasn't already been said or written, including this:  I am still processing a world without David Bowie.  I listened to *Blackstar* in its entirety only after Bowie left this world, though the provocative long video "Blackstar", with its Kenneth Anger imagery and eerie jazz--something music very much haunted my psyche:  I was not sure what I had just seen or heard, but I was enthralled.  I couldn't stop thinking about it.  The melody is utterly possessive.

A few days later, I found the above Coscarelli piece, and found myself utterly fascinated, turning the connection over and over again.  A relatively obscure Elvis song about Death chasing a Cowboy, the "Black Star over his shoulder" becomes a reference to the Bhagavad Gita "I am a *Blackstar*" as "I become Death".  But Bowie, who apparently recorded this thinking he had beat the cancer (some have interpreted the title as a reference to Bowie's own cancer lesion), must have been the Cowboy as well, with "a lot of living to do".

I remember reading somewhere that Bowie had written "Golden Years" for Elvis, so there's that.

The other day, while continuing to ponder these things--Bowie, Death, Elvis, Death, Bowie, Elvis, Death--I thought about the unknowable nature of both Bowie and Elvis.  Elvis became unknowable because the man receded, and then succumbed, to the celebrity. What ever Elvis thought or felt authentically, even as we feel connected to him, through is music, is not there for us to access and understand, and likely, had not been there for the man for too many years.  All we have, he had, was E-L-V-I-S.

Bowie seemed to grasp intuitively at first, and later compulsively, the illusory and elusive nature of celebrity and stardom, creating himself as an enigma, leaving fans and writers flummoxed, grasping for something authentic.  Bowie wasn't interested in being "authentic" in any way aside from a compelling, challenging artist.  He once said in an interview that there is no "real" David Bowie.  Certainly, someone as well read as he understood that his authorship was negated through the interpretation of his music by his fans.  Roland Barthes, in his "The Death of the Author", denies the personhood of the Author as a knowable, asserting instead that the idea of the Author is a historical construct.   Bowie knew that who he was is who his fans thought he was, and his various personae were zeitgeist, performance and meaning making on the part of his fans, attempting to grasp a "theological meaning" that simply did not exist.   Bowie, as fan of music, also knew how important the illusion of "knowability" is because music is so profound in changing moods, changing lives, that we need it, and the artists who produce it, to be "real".  Perhaps the teenaged David Jones felt this, as so many did, with Elvis.  To quote Barthes:

To give a text an Author is to impose a limit on that text, to furnish it with a final signified, to close the writing [...] [However] by refusing to assign a 'secret,' an ultimate meaning, to the text (and the world as text), liberates what may be called an anti-theological activity, an activity that is truly revolutionary since to refuse to fix meaning is, in the end, to refuse God and his hypostases--reason, science, law...

*Blackstar* is...a summation of a career?  A self-conscious last word. Self-Eulogy? Finnegans Wake?  A limitless text, refusing neat meaning.  All of the above/None of the above...

David Bowie must have died a long, a long long time ago.  Now, I understand that was the point...

Suck it Haters!!!: "Friendly" Fascists and American Authoritarians

                                               Doctored to protect the stupid, with minor commentary.



I was an undergraduate back when Grunge was King, and by the end of my Sophomore year (1995 ish), my disappointment in Bill Clinton as a craven opportunist had festered into a betrayal of the ideals I had voted him in for in the first place.  Certainly, I was naïve when I cast that first vote, thinking that the good guys had defeated the nightmare of the Reagan years, and surely, sanity and fair play would follow--of course, I was not prepared for the move from betrayal to the utter disillusionment that made me leave the Democratic Party, returning only provisionally, and usually holding my nose--first voting Libertarian in 1996, and then, finally finding  (for me, anyway) the Democratic Socialist Green Party in 2000.  And yes, I kind of regretted that vote in hindsight, because what happened next-- but I voted in Indiana,me and the other 18 grand Greens would not have made a goddamned bit of difference--was an utter disaster, but may only be the prelude.  But enough with the preamble.

Anyway, I was fully engrossed in critical and political philosophy, reading Marx and Bakunin, pivoting from the malaise of teenage nihilism to a journey of Existentialist (ah Simone!) discovery, and generally trying to make sense of a world that seemed fucked up.  I need a hermeneutic for the world.  One that I discovered was Bertram Gross's Friendly Fascism: The New Face of Power in America (excerpted here).  Gross argues--in 1980-- essentially that Fascism becomes inevitable as Capitalism becomes more unfettered, concentrating wealth at the top, it will necessarily adapt to the people and times.  Consider the following:

Despite the sharp differences from classic fascism, there are also some basic similarities. In each, a powerful oligarchy operates outside of, as well as through, the state. Each subverts constitutional government. Each suppresses rising demands for wider participation in decision making, the enforcement and enlargement of human rights, and genuine democracy. Each uses informational control and ideological flimflam to get lower and middle-class support for plans to expand the capital and power of the oligarchy and provide suitable rewards for political, professional, scientific, and cultural supporters. . .

A major difference is that under friendly fascism Big Government would do less pillaging of, and more pillaging for, Big Business. With much more integration than ever before among transnational corporations, Big Business would run less risk of control by any one state and enjoy more subservience by many states. In turn, stronger government support of transnational corporations, such as the large group of American companies with major holdings in South Africa, requires the active fostering of all latent conflicts among those segments of the American population that may object to this kind of foreign venture. It requires an Establishment with lower levels so extensive that few people or groups can attain significant power outside it, so flexible that many (perhaps most) dissenters and would-be revolutionaries can be incorporated within it. Above all, friendly fascism in any First World country today would \ use sophisticated control technologies far beyond the ken of the classic fascists.

In 1995, 1996 I was able to see this in action on TV, newspapers and radio, and was always alarmed by the "meh" attitudes of so many.   Of course, I knew while people were getting some drippings from the lords' table, they'd be satisfied until their ship came in. 

At that time, the Internet was just emerging on a mass scale, and I was excited for the future; surely, the democratization of information was an obvious good, and certainly, a new world was coming.

I was expecting Star Trek;  I got Star Wars instead...


*********************************************************************************


The hangover of yesterday's Trump victories, and my ever increasing fear and dread for the future occupies my mind, leadening my heart with the feeling that Gross's text may have been prophecy, or even the blue print for the cagey motherfucker to more effectively and efficiently shill the rubes.  Bad tidings from the Louisville Trump Rally involving avowed White Supremacists assaulting people has only depressed me more.

I find comfort in knowledge, and ideas.  Amanda Taub's report "The Rise of American Authoritarianism" does little to assuage, but much to explain.   Citing Heathrington and Weiler, she asserts:

Their book concluded that the GOP, by positioning itself as the party of traditional values and law and order, had unknowingly attracted what would turn out to be a vast and previously bipartisan population of Americans with authoritarian tendencies.

This trend had been accelerated in recent years by demographic and economic changes such as immigration, which "activated" authoritarian tendencies, leading many Americans to seek out a strongman leader who would preserve a status quo they feel is under threat and impose order on a world they perceive as increasingly alien.

These Americans with authoritarian views, they found, were sorting into the GOP, driving polarization. But they were also creating a divide within the party, at first latent, between traditional Republican voters and this group whose views were simultaneously less orthodox and, often, more extreme. . . eventually, authoritarians would gain enough power within the GOP to make themselves heard.

At the time, even Hetherington and Weiler did not realize the explosive implications...looking back now, the ramifications of their research seem disturbingly clear.

Authoritarians are thought to express much deeper fears than the rest of the electorate, to seek the imposition of order where they perceive dangerous change, and to desire a strong leader who will defeat those fears with force. They would thus seek a candidate who promised these things. And the extreme nature of authoritarians' fears, and of their desire to challenge threats with force, would lead them toward a candidate whose temperament was totally unlike anything we usually see in American politics — and whose policies went far beyond the acceptable norms.

A candidate like Donald Trump.

The Bush-Cheney years were characterized by dog whistle jingoistic atavism built upon a sand castle shining city on the hill as the foolish lack of national self awareness.  What changed after 9/11 was not Bush and Cheney--they'd already stole the election and had the opportunity to ignore critical intelligence--but our willingness to sacrifice civil liberties under the illusion of security, despite the warnings of our earliest and greatest citizens (who we either ignore, or misappropriate, to suit our ideologies).   To say that George Bush, or even Darth Cheney, were Fascists, is hyperbolic.   To say that some Americans were "activated" into becoming Authoritarians cannot be disputed, and to say that these Authoritarians were more often than not Republicans or became Republicans as a result of 9/11.  

The same is undoubtedly true in the wake of the Obama presidency, for the same reason: Humans cannot stand ambiguity, cannot tolerate deviation from a perceived norm; that is inertia.  However, most humans can critically think, understand, and find their way to tolerance difference.  Authoritarians cannot, and feel these things more deeply.  The threats become more real, more immediate, and somebody has to do something.

Like Donald Trump.

The "Moran" above is searching, and finding, the aspirational candidate in Trump, like many of us were in Obama--somebody who is ideologically coherent, and thus, the guarantee of a country set to right.  The difference is she grew up uncritically among authoritarians in an in an emerging  (emergent?) crypto-fascist society where mass media is social media.  For many, demography determines identity and, this person, like so many others, a complex of empty signifiers of what one consumes, whether it is slogans or cola.  Capitalist ideology, taken to its logical conclusion, must become Fascist for its own survival, because Fascism is the only way to the eliminate contradictions which threatened its hegemony.   The "Moran", like so many others supporting Trump, are inseparable from that ideology, and become perfect, unquestioning Fascists, living vicariously through the wealth and privilege of someone like Trump, and applauding policies which are self-negating.

It is important to remember that this is a mis-led person, and that minds and hearts can be changed through self-reflection and critical awareness that ones humanity can, and should be separated from ideology, that we are more than empty signifiers of consumption.  I fervently hope this person experiences such a satori.

Unfortunately, it is also important to remember that this person is also a authoritarian partisan, and is actively supporting a candidate who will suppress the process by which ideologues become humans.  While she is treated as a means to an end, she understands this--all of it--as the way of the world. She is now eliminating contradictions from her view, objectifying the rest of us as enemies to be disposed of, a process of dehumanization in service of safe, coherent worldview.

In the Fascist-Authoritarian World View, even under the American Flag, it is a short hop from "Suck it Haters" to "Up Against The Wall, Mother Fucker".

Of Hippie Punching and Grave Dancing

El TrumPig... lo vamos a dejar ser Presidente?
Posted by Jorge Mújica Murias on Saturday, February 27, 2016

Back to _Wizarding ways?  Back to "Long Division".

The intense dread I feel today has nothing to do with the candidate I am supporting, or the Democratic Party for that matter, despite my long and contentious relationship with the machine that belched up Hillary Clinton--AGAIN!--for  the "I Love the '90s"  Neo Liberal Nostalgia ( Yesterday's Back, Yesterday's Back) coronation and a little more of the "sit down, shut the fuck up hippie" that broke my little first time voter heart within a year or so of the 1992 election.

No...we'll have plenty of time to unpack this shit--again.

The intense dread I feel today has to do with the two party system, and the fate of our democracy.

Okay, so the two party system is itself un-democratic because some voices will still be silenced (DO Stop Thinking About Tomorrow). If we are to have a two party system, and for that system to be as democratic as it can be, each party must necessarily have big tents, and critical voices must be present.  For all the hippie punching from the DNC,  the fact that there are still liberals in the party speaks to the inclusiveness of the party despite itself, and chiefly, why a New New Deal Democrat like Bernie Sanders could be the 45th President of the United States.

The knock on Hippies is that Hippies are touchy-feely, and all about feelings, where as serious people use reason, pragmatism and a kind of paternalism that reminds us wild eyed commies that we have to live in the real world, not some Aquarian Idyll.  The world is a dangerous place, and we need sober solutions, son.

On the other hand, the GOP's version of hippie punching concluded, really, with the election of George W. Bush, and wasn't really about punching "hippies" in the usual sense, because "Republican Hippie" is oxymoronic to the point of cognitive-dissonant meltdown--or stoner comedy hilarity. What ensued was not so much comedy as irony, and then irony gave way to dread as it became the new normal.

When the Bush Administration derisively referred to the "reality based community", it seemed the culmination of the disastrous "from the gut" leadership from a man that had shit for brains, and after that was shown to be disastrous, I certainly hoped that it was an outlier, a historical "whoops" and sanity would resume as soon as an adult was elected.

Noper.

The GOP hippie punching was not directed at social justice idealists, but rather from radical ideologues toward the kind of reason based, "Dad" governance that had been the GOP brand for forty years.  The Far-Right, the Dick Armey (named for the astroturf "Tea Party" the former Texas Representative and Far Right Bastard created to co-opt the grassroots) rabble rabbled the Conservatives into punching the Moderates, who in turn beat the crap out of Liberal Republicans--all cheered on by Drudge, Breitbart, RedState, Limbaugh, FAUX News and the assortment of bitter, angry dittoheads as getting the RINOS (Republicans In Name Only) the fuck out of the party.  The problem is that once the liberals were out of the party, the purge was on like Donkey Kong, and the moderates were the new liberals, the new RINOS, and they had to be punched out of the party--all to the screaming delight of the dittoheads and the right wing bloggers, who love nothing more than "kicking ass".  Rinse. Repeat.

The result of all this punching is a party that rejects reason  and pragmatism a priori, and that has managed to be both reactionary and radical at the same time.  Quite a feat, really, until you consider utter illogical, zero sum  rage of the angry white men who make up this party's base, and now, its candidates.  

Sure, they have a lot to be angry about--lost jobs, lost homes, an American Dream slipping away-- but after years of the GOP convincing people that single Black mothers, or Guatemalan immigrants, or lefty college professors or any of the other host of Straw Bogey Men are the true oppressors, aren't "real" Americans, and the crypto fascist "blood and soil" rhetoric of the "Heartland" and the anti-intellectual, anti-reason, anti-reality "gut feeling" governance of Bush, the GOP has devolved into a roiling beserker projection of all embedded white male supremacy, Social Darwinism, Know-Nothingness and unfettered greed and power lust that fester below the lofty words of our creed.  What you see and hear at a Trump rally is the naked Id of Old Evil America foaming at words that are a rich ingrate's approximation of Mussolini by way of Morton Downey Jr.

Trump will win tonight not because his policies make sense--he doesn't have any.  Yet, he will win by shilling the dittoheads, who are long past thinking too deeply about any of this, and just be the  avatar for their free-floating bitterness and hostility toward everything they have been acculturated to hate, which is now, apparently, everything but the promise of restoring America.  Of course, this will accomplish nothing but the upward transfer of wealth, because that part has not changed.

And then, voters willing, he will lose, and then GOP will collapse utterly, and that will be that.  The party of Lincoln will have come to thoroughly self inflicted end, and unlike my friends who consider the Democrats "their team" and would applaud total victory.  I won't.

As a small "d" democrat first, and a capital "D" Democrat out of shared interest and a sense of responsibility to elect people who are more or less competent at government, rather than the proudly anti-competent on the right, the idea of single national party scares the fucking shit out of me...

Actually,  I suppose the dread I feel is about the Democratic Party,  because I know the history of the party's when hubris when it perceives its hegenomy and, from working for NKY for Obama in '08, the craven nature of its machine politics.  If Team Blue absorbs the moderates, as it did with most of the Liberal Republicans, then the Neo Liberal right turn will continue, the hippie punching will ramp up.

And what the fuck will we do then?

Update: The ignoble end to the party of Lincoln is nigh, taken over by racists.  There is nothing defensible here, no way to explain away Trump as the party's nominee, no justification in voting for him.  None.  You are, or will be, complicit.