ABlog

In a recent issue of The New Yorker, Frank Bidart has a remarkable short poem entitled "To the Republic." The poem's speaker relates a dream in which a massed multitude of Union and Confederate dead appear, traveling upon a noiseless railroad. "Disconsolate that we now ruin the great work of time," they seem to reproach the speaker/witness, who tries to evade their silent accusation: "Assaulted by the impotent dead, I say, 'It's their misfortune and none of my own.'"

Reading Bidart's poem, I thought of Walt Whitman's Specimen Days, with its passionate conviction that the Civil War, however terrible, was a great experience in democracy-building. There is an amazing line in Bidart's poem (I wish I'd memorized it, but can only paraphrase) that refers to the state "as if" it were an entity to which one crawled "through blood...."

The day after I happened upon the poem, I read about a proposal to increase voter turnout in the state of Arizona by making those who go to the polls eligible for lottery winnings. Questions, unanswerable questions....If all empires behave as the U.S. is behaving (I invite a counter-example), i.e. rampaging across the world in countless acts of naked self-interest, displaying utter indifference to the needs and rights of those they trample upon--if all that is par for the course, then is it still the fault of America's citizens that we are allowing our nation's flawed but not inconsiderable democratic achievements to be wantonly destroyed? Or are we simply bowing to the inevitable? (Put another way, were those putatively democratic armies of the 19th century simply "fortunate" to inhabit a less power-drunk polity?)

Another recent experience that merits mention in the same breath: a visit to the large Dada exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art. I didn't take notes, just stupidly bathed in the sea of it all, so I can't pretend to say anything coherent about the experience. But I was very much surprised and inspired by what the display reveals was the political seriousness of the movement, characterized by vast variety, by the joy (as well as the rage) of its inventions, and the fierceness of vision implied by its content--not merely its deliberate outrages to form. Knowing little of the topic in general, I hadn't realized how directly and explicitly Dada was linked to the First World War. This was attested to, for instance, by a description of performance art consisting of the public reading of a nonsensical document in the three principal languages of the conflict (done all at once, producing cacophony); by the constant visual references to mutilated bodies; by images fusing the human body and mechanical structures.

I had vaguely supposed that Dada meant absurdity for absurdity's sake, an almost juvenile set of tactics to epater le bourgeois. No doubt there was some of that, but what struck me at MoMA was playful absurdity as a creative response to the deep-seated irrationality of the "rational" order. Here is a willful and highly inventive destructiveness based not on distaste for content and meaning, but on outrage at the betrayal of meaning by the upholders of "civilization."

I keep coming back to the fact that this impulse was so strong in so many European artists just at THAT particular generative moment in the developmental history of our human capacity for physical destruction. Atomic weaponry was still decades in the future, yet the Dadaists grasped something that subsequent generations have often not seen so clearly: the flowering of humanity's aggressive, ultimately self-immolating capacities demanded a new, no-holds-barred type of artistic response. Only if there really were a "private" life, a "civilian" existence, would it have been legitimate to go on making art-as-usual. In fact, there is no such thing. Art had to change not out of a duty to civic engagement, not out of a desire to "comment" or "protest," but because art is nothing unless it works on and out of WHAT REALLY IS. Total war, machine war, war whose normal M.O. is the savaging of"non-combatants" (was there ever truly any other kind?)--these are not regrettable ASPECTS of our world; they CONSTITUTE our world, and in doing so demand new artistic procedures, not simply new subject matter.

Where has this conviction gone? A good deal of it, obviously, has been filtered and diffused through subsequent artistic movements; from time to time it resurfaces, for instance in the Situationist International ofthe 1960's. But much of it would appear to have dissipated as we've grown habituated to incessant carnage (especially of the "living room war" variety).

Which brings me to the Middle East. "It would be so much better," X said to me, "if we could just talk honestly in this country about what we really think of Israel's behavior." X is a leftist, Black intellectual who imagines it would be disastrous to speak his mind when a liberal Jewish colleague, cautiously critical of current Israeli policy but a passionate supporter of Israel overall, mentions his loyalties. X, for his part, feels a visceral identification with the situation of dispossessed, occupied, ethnically cleansed, economically immiserated, functionally imprisoned Palestinians. "I don't even blame Jews who were in a desperate situation at the end of World War II," he says. "But it's unconscionable that Europe could get out of its historical obligations by allowing the State of Israel to be founded on the backs of Palestinians." In his heart, he feels himself a Palestinian, being shat upon in the sight of the whole indifferent world.

Yesterday I listened to Democracy Now, which featured interviews with former New York Times correspondent Chris Hedges and Lebanese political scientist As'ad Abukhalil. Hedges wanted the U.S. to do something about Israel's ongoing rampage; he lamented the unlikelihood of this given the predilections of the Bush administration. Abukhalil exploded, insisting that what's happening right now is simply a continuation of longstanding U.S. policy: the U.S. could not intervene in the situation because the U.S. is the situation. I noticed that Hedges' position appeared to be a slightly more "progressive" version of what Hillary Clinton said last week: at least the "peace process" kept the lid on. Abukhalil rightly pointed out that Americans' definitions of that lid quite comfortably encompass the ongoing killing of ordinary Arabs in both Lebanon and Palestine. We only think the situation is "exploding," "spiraling out of control," when episodes occur that appear to threaten us.

Chris Hedges sees the world from the concerned yet clearly somewhat detached position of a regional "expert," one whose consciousness has another place to stand. As'ad Abukhalil, though he teaches in California, sees things from the point of view of his family on the ground in southern Lebanon. He remarked that his 14-year-old nephew, raised by secular leftists, has become a passionate Hezbollah supporter. He reminded Amy Goodman that the word to describe Israeli troop movements into Lebanon is not "enter" but "invade." He spoke of those most directly affected now, who will, he says, want revenge in the future.

From what standpoint do you experience these events?