Welcome! A Bridge of Magpies is a blog about culture and politics. Comments are welcome. Also, prophesies, curses, symbolic executions. Presuming I survive, I will always respond.

Tuesday, August 30, 2011

August 30th--Fragments


Each of us is likely capable of living any number of possible lives. Against this background of un-lived multiplicities, the actual singular life that we do live seems rather impoverished.
Each of us is likely capable of writing any number of books in any number of possible styles.
Each of us is likely capable of thinking any number of possible thoughts with no regard for contradiction.
And yet what I most fear is the possibility of incoherence, the possibility that no one single life, or book, or prose style, or thought will ever accrete from this cloud of possibility. A life of zero events, of zero moments, and I cannot decide, even now, whether this would be a life in paradise, or a life in hell, or neither.

This August has been the deadliest month for American troops in the Afghan war since the war began 10 years ago. The wire services are not reporting the number of Afghan deaths in August. The inevitable conclusion of this war has already been broadcast, analyzed, and consigned to history, but the war goes on. Oddly, it is the antiwar candidate who has become trapped by the rhetoric of war. Death makes us less true, less politically brave, death due to error makes us somehow less careful of life, else we would have stopped the war machine and silenced the puppets long ago.

Wednesday, August 24, 2011

Three Theories


Three theories recommend themselves regarding the current weakness of the American Left.

The first theory: The Left has succumbed to Woody Allen’s Zelig syndrome, that is, it organismically responds to social expectations. Especially hostile expectations. It becomes what its expected to be.  And as the Right has become the active dominant political force, the Left finds itself cringingly changing to meet the Right’s expectation: it becomes weak, disloyal, neurotic, smarmy. This theory depends upon the idea that the left possesses an inherent super-sensitivity to its surroundings. It is something like a chameleon, but far more introspective and perplexed than the typical amphibian. If the Farcical right is impervious to others and shameless in its aggressive pursuit of self-interest, the Left is as permeable as a wet blanket, as resilient as a hummingbird, as constant as the shifting wind. This affliction is not a question of will or self-discipline. As in Mr. Allen’s film, it is the affliction of an essentially polymorphic body, a body lacking the memory for what it truly is.

The 2nd theory:  the Left bears the full burden of guilt for all of America’s catastrophes while the Right remains curiously immune to remorse. The Left in particular bears the burden for the creation of modernity, for the great modern techno-state, for the perverse castration of the great American white patriarchy, in short for an entire list of real and imaginary crimes to which the Left pleads reflexively, guilty as charged. There is an odd displacement here. One might typically suspect that the Right, at least the religious Right, would be predisposed to the doctrine of original sin. And so would be susceptible equally to guilt, though the guilt of the Right would be by comparison more archaic, more mythopoetic, and more given to fatalism about the future. Curiously, Friedman’s capitalism does not begin with the confession: we will always be violent, we will always be venal, and we will never redeem ourselves by the freedom of our markets alone.

The 3rd theory concerning the weakness of the left: the age of humanism is drawing to a close. We are already witnessing the beginnings of a schizoid future: humanity multiplies  beyond all limits in slavish adherence to the ideology of production, careening toward a future that is either tragic or absurd, or both. At the same time the networks of information flow, capital, artificial intelligence secretly construct their ziggurat. In this scenario the Left is little more than the canary in the mineshaft.

Tuesday, August 23, 2011

Farce of the Western Sunset



Since Ronald Reagan the Right has continuously re-animated itself by reference to frontier mythology.  Of course there is no more frontier, only the memory of an ethic that was false from the beginning, an ethic of theft and domination, and sanctimony.  This is a model for empire, so it’s not surprising that it’s relevant today.  But the turn westward is inevitably a Hollywood re-staging of the frontier as a means of preserving and obscuring the model of empire.  Crucial to this are politicians who move adroitly between the real of politics and the Disnefied fantasy of the right.  They must either be cynics or children, though the media and its political festival are particularly critical of the appearance of cynicism, perhaps because cynicism is the master value, and must be kept from sight at all costs. So the right is dominated by the infant terrible type: Rick Perry, Sarah Palin, et al.  The resemblance between politics and comic book narrative seems to matter not as the spectacle of America translates every discourse into entertainment.  The primal sin for a politician now is to fail to entertain.  If we are entertained, we feel represented.  Bored, we seem to disappear.
The farce of the Western sunset sheds its light on the sunset of American memory.  Without memory, history is quickly lost.  Without history, time begins to precess within itself and becomes an unrecognizable eddy.  Cinema repopulates and reanimates the past.  Vietnam re-invented by Norris and Stallone. 9/11 reinvented in real time, closing memory entirely out of the loop.
The shame of this spectacle seem to be successfully displaced upon the Left.  The Left has become the impotent repository of guilt and conscience.  It is the Left that hesitates, that doubts itself, that suffers the pains of bad conscience. It is the Left that cannot find entertainment in its mythology.  It is the Left that is eternally anxious.  It’s the Left that’s held hostage.  Regarded as weak, it enacts the pathos of weakness.