R. Joseph Hoffmann's Blog: Khartoum, page 22

Communism, China Style

China now describes its communist system as "socialism with Chinese characteristics."

It will be hard for my American friends to understand this slogan.

China's upwardly awesome financial future depends entirely on a shop till you drop philosophy of action which has totally supplanted traditional Marxist principles: Shopping reinforces the industries that exploit the workers and keep the bosses in high-paying jobs.

It would be truer to say, the U.S. Democratic party is socialism with American characteristics.

Who could have imagined (Noam Chomsky is one) that opening up means spreading your legs and letting it happen?

The only possible analogy for what China thinks it is is this: a "whorehouse run by Presbyterians."

Corina Goes a-Slaying

Hey Derry Down Derry
What bliss Open Carry --
Corina has gone to the city.
Sing derry down dee
With company three,
And in halter and jeans, Oh so pretty.
But as the lass passed
And a swain at her glanced
Her mates opened fire and did kill him.
And as the swain bled
Corie laughed, then she said,
‘Serves him right that he’s dead
With that hole in his head.
Derry down derry dee
twas the gun and not thee!'
‘Goddam right’ said her chums
‘Shit a man without guns
Ain't no man a-tall, it’s a pity.’
Derry down down down
And they pranced through the town
And Corina she did look so pretty!

The Goatherd Bible

Atheists have been admonishing us for the last six years to realize that religion is a default position for people who don't know or won't learn science.

They point to the fact the the Bible is full of historical, scientific and political nonsense.

It's the work of first millennium BC nomads who swapped stories and drafted a pile of laws when they weren't herding their goats. Think of the Sons of the Pioneers under the stars of a Montana sky singing cowboy songs when they weren't bringing law n'order to unruly towns across the prairie? That's the image you need to remember.

If you ask me, the atheist discovery of tribes of literate, leisured, goat-herding, law-writing, visionary nomads exceeds in anthropological sophistication anything that traditional social science has yet uncovered. This is why we should leave history to professional atheists. We should not trust traditional scholars who tell us that nomads don't produce literature because the Bible is in your face proof that they do.

As to the fact that the Genesis creation story isn't scientific, my solution would be to require every Bible to insert, in red, before the beginning of chapter one, "Please be advised; the story you are about to read is not scientific. You are wasting your time if you think it is, and you would be better off doing something else, like playing Cluedo."

The contribution of atheism to the understanding of history doesn't stop with biblical studies however. It is a sweeping master-narrative of how things got to be how they are.

For example, religion caused the Inquisition. It condemned Galileo. This is pretty shocking, since of course there are so many other institutions in the late Middle Ages and early Renaissance that might have started inquisitions and didn't, or who could have educated scientists, as the Church educated Galileo at Pisa (and Copernicus and Mendel, etc.)but didn't. And why? Because they didn't, that's why. And you can only blame religion for that.

The atheists have recently brought to light that the Church burned witches and killed atheists. Maybe it didn't kill Socrates (because he wasn't an atheist?) but it killed Hypatia and Giordano Bruno who weren't atheists either, but who were, in fact, killed. I think you can easily see the pattern here.

The point is, from the Inquisition to the...well, later, religion has been beastly to smart people who would have gone to MIT if the Church had let them. It is not clear why the Church did not kill Darwin: for some reason the atheists don't answer that question. It can't be that the church and religion changed in unison along with everything else that was changing after the renaissance and Reformation. Or that science and the faith grew up as two modes of learning. That answer is too easy: there must be a more sinister reason.

One way or the other, religion is still with us for a little while. So I think atheists and believers can strike a bargain based on the superb model of history new atheism has proposed.

So here is my proposal for a new discussion: Atheists should not mention the Inquisition, or book-writing goat-herders, or Galileo, or the Library at Alexandria or heroic monks condemned to death for hiding important scientific discoveries in their robes. Mentioning these things will just cause religion to feel sorry for itself and perhaps start a new inquisition.

In return, religious folks will not mention barber surgeons, the hobgoblin theory of disease, astrology and alchemy, bleeding, spontaneous combustion, the humours, the four elements, and Aristotle's theory of the rational virile seed.

That way, both sides can begin from where we are and not where we've come from.

But I do want to hear more about those psalm-writing goatherds. Eye-opening stuff.

America

I am often accused of being anti-American. It's a ridiculous notion. I am as American as apple pie, and I leave it for the gallery to decide whether that means British or German since both are represented equally in my DNA.

I feel nothing but compassion for my country.

It is the most open nation on earth. It is now suspected of being the most intrusive. Oddly the former seemed to justify measures that resulted in the latter--a meaningless semantic game of differentiation as between aggression and defense. But for the record, intrusive doesn't mean restrictive, and there's an important difference there.

It is the most self-critical, but naively confident that its version of democracy is suitable for everyone, even those nations with different histories and different definitions of majority rule--hence of what democracy might mean: What was the Arab spring, if not a short-lived Islamic resurgence that left America in a stammering state of confusion given its famous good guys n' bad guys calculus--the souvenirs of which are Syria, Egypt, and Libya, which it can add to a slate of botched or dubious liberation efforts that include Iraq and Afghanistan.

It is, by far, the most pluralistic country in the world, but blind to the reality that we still live in a world of Asian, African and Middle Eastern mono-cultures--nations that see multiculturalism as a threat, and ethnic, religious or linguistic superiority as a norm.

It has the greatest freedom of the press, a true fourth estate, but it sacrifices itself on an altar of self-criticism, in effect stoking the envy, petulance, and anti-Americanism of competitors who willfully turn its self-criticism into their own condemnation.

American democracy has no rivals, but also no cures--no alternatives. The effects were planted as seeds at the time of the Revolution and despite the ravages of time, have grown pretty much as nature intended.

Every debate in America is the magnum version of a debate happening somewhere else on a different scale, in a different state of gestation: privacy, violence, poverty, charity, religion, equality, human rights, war and peace. It cannot help being referred to. It cannot help getting things wrong or enduring the wagging tongues of opponents who said, We told you so when it gets them wrong.

It has been to a moon that some countries still regard as a point on God's compass, fought disastrous, bloody useless wars, and seems, at times, to be run by clones of Al Capp's porkine Senator Jack S. Phogbound. A country divided between failing schools and soaring universities, Nobel laureates and science-deniers, the latest communications technology and the most insipid media.

There is a standard 'British question' that surfaced after the War and has since become a staple of every Brit's quiet but persistent critique of American culture. Its basic form is, Given your infatuation with guns and violence, your insoluble social problems, the conspicuous failure of your political system, and the marked indifference of your people towards solving any of these issues, how is that America continues to be strong? Over the years (and depending my mood) I have responded to this question sundry ways--with a shrug, with a chuckle, with a cynical riposte. But the best answer is the least responsive: Incredible, isn't it?

Bloody Murder

It is not the right of a modern free state to deprive people of life by capital punishment. It is as cruel and primitive a punishment as the Old Testament lex talionis on which it is based.

A country that has the arrogance to lecture Islam for being "medieval" but can't see its own tribalism is not a country that should expect to be taken as a moral guide. Why should any man, woman, race or nation listen to its edicts. Didn't Jesus say something about men worrying about the motes in other people's eyes but who don't see the camel in front of them?

And what justifies America's confidence that capital punishment is what Nature's God intended? Because its supreme sharia court in Washington decrees that execution is "natural."

We all die--sometime, somewhere. The only relevant question therefore is how comfortable the state can make the death it is demanding as payment for sins.

This concession, it is reckoned, makes modern America better than modern Iran, or modern China, or modern Nigeria: three countries it criticizes for human rights abuses.

It makes it better than the Medieval Catholic Church, which used to execute people by fire, or Reformation England, which did it by the axe, or revolutionary France, which did it by the guillotine.

The problem, is, of course, these analogies from history and geography aren't good analogies at all. Most countries have forsaken capital punishment long since. And the modern examples are of states the United States regards as moral outlaws in almost every other regard when it comes to matters of penal justice.

America, however, counts itself humane, with the blessing of its supreme sharia Court, by saying that death is natural, or more specifically, not "cruel and unusual" (the language of the Constitution). That the taking of the life of a healthy 48 year old African-American male seems, to common sense, cruel and unusual, is not supposed to be considered.

But logic affords that any means of taking life is natural: stoning, and so is hanging, and so is any other device we use to deprive another human being of life. A good case can be made that death by stoning is more 'natural' than death by lethal injection or cyanide gas. What precisely determines whether the eye we seek is a real eye or a glass eye, a real tooth or its porcelain equivalent? In the end, a lifeless body remains, the dead product of a process whereby the state decrees justice (vengeance) has been served.

The question is not whether death is natural. It is certainly not the risible notion that there are "humane" methods of killing, unless we are really Nazis or veterinarians.

It is whether the state wishes to be involved in the eye-for-eye, tooth-for-tooth, life for-life cycle of violence that college freshman reading the Oresteia recognize the Greeks were questioning in the Eumenides.

But it is doubtful the current justices have ever read it, or if they did,that they understood it.

The resolution of the plot is to banish the Eumenides, the furies who perpetuate the requirements of cyclical violence in the state, to a hypothetical underworld (where all phobias and neuroses dwell) while establishing Athena--wisdom--as the new principle of justice: the principle that ensures the state will not simply reinforce the endless cycle of retribution and viciousness that has existed since the days of the tribe.

It is important, as I always tell my students, that retribution is not banned because it is inhumane. It is banned in the name of justice.

It is banned because the conduct of the state is meant to be higher, nobler and more exemplary than the conduct of a feckless and violent individual. In promoting vengeance, the state behaves like the criminal. In acting with wisdom and justice, the state behaves like the ideal citizen.

The Best Religion

The Hindu who will not kill a fly
will rape a girl if she walks by.

And what of Buddhists, are they harmless?
They've left so many children armless.

Turning to the Hebrew Bible
you will find carnage indescribable.

Christians say they've got good news:
War is for the multitudes.

The Muslim dons a lethal vest
to kill his co-religionist.

They say the cure is atheism
Mao, Stalin, Idi Amin...

I am perplexed, and highly skeptic
is all belief so--well--so septic?

The best religion if there's one
might simply be the rising sun.

And no, dear Asia, not your cue:
I mean the sun above, not you.

The German Army

Poor Leo, he could not understand
they don’t serve beer at Howard Johnsons.
He would always say, Der Tank muss trocken sein.
But I would say, No--Opa they don’t have it.
But if they did it would not come from a tank
It would come from a bottle or a can.
And he would say, Next time they will have it.
Then he would finger the menu, red ribbed
and plastic to protect the heavy paper from
ice water and crayons. I will have he would say
this: ground beef on a bun. You mean a burger,
the waitress would say, and he would look at her
and smile a little cruelly, No: it is ground beef on a bun.
And I hated him at that moment, proud of something
he thought he knew that she didn’t, this girl
in a blue uniform, young and fresh who smelled
like oranges but was tapping her pencil against
the green pad and wanted to get to the next table
because life is tips. On a bun, he repeated, and be sure
the bun is crisp, not too crisp. And mustard in a slav cup.
(A slav cup-- my God what is that?)
She frowned, looked at me and I shook my head a little.
Pfffft, I went. Her eyes were green. I loved her with all my heart
He means on the side, you know cole slaw. Oh slaw she said
So one burger, mustard on the side and a coke…
That be it? That was it. Every Sunday that was it.

Boats

You pull them fore on the wet muck--
the water rushes towards the rear.
They are old: they have bait wells.
The paint holds them together.
They were afloat on Florida lakes
when Roosevelt was in and
old Mr. Melvin charged a dollar a day.
Now they go for two.

The fishermen rent them out,
half a day, a day. They buy worms
and minnows and jew you to a price.
You say, Fifty worms in every box
but you know half are dead and dried
and you know the crackers
will shake the box at you and call
you names and say they can buy
their bait someplace else.
You smile and say, Go ahead.

You recommend crickets instead:
They are hopping in the cricket bin
you have just waxed to keep them in,
or from breaking out. You hate dipping into
the rusty cans they crawl on, because
they stink, and bite a little. You shake
the rusty cans into a glass jar,
an old olive jar, and then you plunk
the crickets from the jar into the cricket box
you have just sold them
for too much money, Lord, so much.

But now you are at the boats.
Yesterday a hundred fishermen
impaled minnows on their hooks
and crickets and fat, writhing worms.
Now it’s all bilge; the bait wells are swollen with
what they didn’t use. It is 5 AM
and cars stretch like a thin fog along the road,
along the canal, headlights dimmed
to reverence the car ahead or the
hungry four year-old asleep
in the back seat of the car.
They come from different places;
the crackers from Eloise; the blacks
from Florence Villa in a pre-dawn showdown
for the ascendancy of colour.

The morning is cool and you can smell
orange blossoms and a trench
full of turtles and alligator eggs.
It becomes the hidden part of you,
the banana trees, the drunken motorless oarsmen.

Soon you have to cut grass and it will be hot then-
90 at least, and when you take your shirt off
the woman in the red and white trailer will
bring you lemonade and smile at you from her patio.
Between cane poles and cheap rods, dark men
scurrying to get Mr Raymond's attention.
It is 1965. The boats need cleaning.

Political Science 2014

I lack the skills to make this a cartoon, but it is a cartoon.

In my cartoon there is a generic Chinese face surrounded by smaller faces.

The next biggest face is an American sort-of face.

And the balloon above it reads, How do we defeat Obama? How do I elect Hillary? How can I afford health care? What do I do when they take my gun away? How can I cure the insanity of gun violence? How do I afford a college education?

The Russian face’s balloon says, What went wrong? Europe or China? Probably not China. They will swallow us.

Then there is an African face. The balloon above it says, How can I feed my family? How can I divert more funds from the EU donation without getting caught? Should I get on a boat and get the hell out of here? Should I tell my fiancée I am HIV positive?

The EU balloon is complicated: Who are we? Who are our friends? Enough of austerity; let’s call it a draw. Are we old and wise pretending to be young and energetic. or young claiming to be old and wise?

There are a dozen lesser heads with lesser thoughts blooming.

But above the Chinese face there is only one sentence: We have the answer.

Edward Snowden

It is said that America loves an underdog. That's nonsense of course. Like all countries, America worships success and probably worships the visible signs of success--cars, money, power, and fame--more avidly than other countries.

We are (after all) the heirs of successive waves of frugal Calvinists, thrifty Scots and Germans, stingy Jews and impoverished Irish immigrants (to mention only the most conspicuous players)who expected a payoff for their labour and got it.

To quote the poet laureate of muscular America, "Nothing like us ever was."

The other side of success is failure. And just as America loves a winner, it also gloats over losers, especially if the loser is a former winner.

This is nothing special to America; it seems to have been hardwired into human consciousness in antiquity--it's the essence of Greek tragedy and Biblical kingship: Lo, how the mighty are fallen. Every great city shall be brought low.

So when a nobody, for no reason, at no particular time, can challenge the World's Greatest Democracy and embarrass it in front of its adversaries, and friends, a certain kind of Granny Comeuppance will say "Well done."

When it can be done with the cameras rolling to humiliate the President of the United States just as he is about to lecture the President of China on cyber-spying and human rights, it a David and Goliath moment, sort of. When the world's most durable alliance can be thrown off track for a week (to the applause of the orchestra) by the "revelation" that the espionage services of the United States have tracked the mobile phone of Germany's Chancellor, who does not chortle, who does not crow? Bloody Us, we liberals say. Bloody Americans say the others.

I know I am not alone in feeling a little weary about the whole Snowden debate. I confess I cannot begin to understand the definition being used by those who see him as a hero--a man who deliberately went to work for a spy agency, took an oath not to betray its secrets (after all, lives are at risk all over the world), violates that oath in a manner that can only be seen as conspiratorial and designed to do harm; sells his government's secrets [sic] to the highest bidder, and flees the country like a common thief only to proclaim a victory for democracy in a country that is unrivaled for enforcing the kinds of fascist policies towards freedom of expression that he is supposed to be opposing in his own country.

This totally irrational scenario then concludes with the two newspapers who bought the pilfered jewels (and presumably keep him flush and with Russian girl-friends) touting a victory for free speech and press and winning a Pulitzer Prize for--public service. The irrational now crowned with the incredible. The mighty have fallen; the humble have been exalted.

This whole mess has severely dented my liberal credentials.

Like almost everyone else of my university generation, I cheered when Daniel Ellsberg did what he did to expose the strategies of a war in Vietnam, a war that cost almost 60,000 American lives--and countless Vietnamese. At last we had confirmation that our worst suspicions were grounded in a kind of nightmarish reality. Our leaders were lying to us: there was no way out, no victory, no way forward, and a "planned withdrawal" that was little more than a trail of carnage and death that the United States could not afford to call defeat.

VietNam was not about spying. It was about war. But unless I radically misunderstand the purposes of the NSA, one of their primary missions is to reduce the risk of civilian casualties by keeping track of violent men (and women) who never tire of plotting against "the West". That is not a paranoid delusion; it is a reality. There is simply no good analogy between Vietnam and NSA spying, a very basic fact that Snowden's fans, who seem desperate to fix on a new progressive anti-establishment hero-- routinely miss or dismiss. -Why let logic and truth interrupt the quest for a new David?

It is a shame, of course,indeed an outrage, that the former US president exploited paranoia for political purposes by invading and fighting a war in a bystander country. But that piece of lunacy has to be kept separate from the question of Edward Snowden: what Edward Snowden did, with malice aforethought and personal gain and harm in view, was treacherous. I happen to think his revelations were unimpressive. But I also think that if he had had more to sell, he would have sold it. Most of his revelations were pimples that the media tried to turn into festering sores. Flash: The NSA gathers data.

Not all whistle blowers are created equal. The human love for a new David bringing down the muscle-bound Philistine was forgivable before we had a clear sense of the man behind the newspaper story. But with each day that passes, the new story is Snowden himself: his self-serving smirk, his delusions of rectitude, his stage-managed persona. His call-in to the Putin Show last week was, for many people, the revelation of a man who is barely there at all, a hollow man with straw purposes. He looks intellectually thin, weak, petulant and self-serving.

And yet, and yet: as we await the second coming, there is something about Edward Snowden's new brand of heroism that is perfectly representative of our age. Nathan Hale, the American spy hanged by the British in 1776 is said to have said "I regret I have but one life to give for my country." What, in his secluded and protected penthouse outside Moscow, does Edward Snowden regret?