nationalism, rampant crony-capitalism, and liars

Patriotism transmutes individual selfishness into national egoism. Loyalty to a nation is a high form of altruism when compared with lesser loyalties and more parochial interests. It therefore becomes the vehicle of all the altruistic impulses and expresses itself, on occasion, with such fervour that the critical attitude of the individual toward the nation and its enterprises is almost completely destroyed. The unqualified character of this devotion is the very basis of the nation's power and of the freedom to use the power without moral restraint. Thus the unselfishness of individuals makes for the selfishness of nations.
Reinhold Niebuhr Moral Man and Immoral Society 1932

How can you be a republican and absolutely abhor nationalism as I do? Just like that mate, just like that. I disagree that it becomes the vehicle of all the altruistic impulses. I would argue instead that non-altruistic impulses become transformed by regular association rather. Niebuhr calls this vicarious selfishness. This lunch I was also reading an essay about James K. Galbraith's The predator state: how conservatives abandoned the free market and why liberals should too which argues that the counterbalancing forces of big labour, big business and big government have collapsed. They have, he argues, been replaced by a new class

"endowed with vast personal income, freed from the corporation [who] set out to take over the state and run it - not for any ideological project but simply in the way that would bring to them, individually and as a group, the most money, the least disturbed power and the greatest chance of rescue should something go wrong".

And to distinguish why I find this more persuasive than Naomi Klein's Disaster capitalism by analogy: he distinguishes between Cheney and Wolfowitz. Wolfie is a fool. A mad fool and a powerful one, but no more than a fool. An ideologue. He claims to have been SDS (I've never seen him mentioned in histories of the SDS, but whatever) so he was a party line man from the beginning. Whatever the party. And committed to ideological purity. Someone like, ****** for example in Ireland, who went from being a trotskyite official IRA loyalist all the way out to a pathetic apologist for a corrupt taoiseach at the end of his career (and got rewarded with a seat in the second chamber by the morally compromised man himself). Cheney couldn't care less. Rumsfeld could lie unblinkingly on TV about how al queda had massive underground caverns with air conditioning, entertainment centres, libraries, swimming pools etc. on air because he didn't. really. care. At all. About you. About what was best for the world. Cheney's unbridled and unhidden cynicism is breathtaking. And it is they, rather than their ideologue stooges who rule the world. Galbraith's argument that corruption and cronyism (of the state and its interventions in markets) are central to the way capitalism is working now are, no doubt, horrifyingly persuasive to the majority of people in the West. Klein's examination of the disaster capitalism / shock treatment ideologically driven imperative seems now only to be a special case of a greater truth. One needs only to look at the building industry in Ireland if one seeks examples and confirmation closer to home. Look at the financial industry that lived off it. Look at Anglo-Irish bank and their threats to the government of disaster prior to their generous underwriting. The state paid for their risk taking. This is not the "free market" nor is it "capitalism" it is the tools of socialism used for the ultra-rich, the very powerful. And pay great heed to Anglo-Irish's imprecations to the ordinary people that they had better tighten their belts and not seek pay rises in the future. And that public services would have to be cut.

What needs to be cut is the umbilical chord from the state feeding vampires the taxes of the people.

* I am honour bound, by the way - next time I meet him - to bitchslap this macho runt. He wrote after Susan Sontag died that his one regret was that when they met in Sarajevo he didn't put her over his knee and spank her. I believe Sontag was a monster to deal with. But she was a great intellectual and essayist rather than an intellectually stunted hack and apologist in search of power.

She would have kicked his sorry short arse for him too.

David Foster Wallace

A mate asked about him in an email and this is my reply:


I'm still seriously depressed, no disappointed the way that life does disappoint you, about DFW.

Somebody quoted from American Psycho to me recently when I said something about music and I was just thinking "that is the kind of "ironic" hip, self regarding, smug, empty, vapid, self conciously clever, consumer as creator, dead end of literature and culture that David Foster Wallace demonstrated is the nadir of civilisation. A rallying point, a line to make in the sand and anathema to reject. And now he's dead". I read Infinite Jest and A supposedly fun thing I'll never do again as well as various journalism. He's infuriating, Razor sharp yet obfusticating, earnest, sincere and elusive. Difficult and brilliant to read. I wanted to edit his books with a hammer.

McSweeney's doesn't do it for me, I feel like I'm not part of the joke, not part of the scene. DFW had a terribly self destructive streak, an inability to not analyse, to enjoy, to deliver straight. It's the thread that joins Harvey Pekar to Curb Your Enthusiasm but allied to a fierce and ferociously learned intellect and a genuine and sincere quest to understand modern society, happiness, sadness, horror, television, literature, advertisement, debasement, entertainment, infantilism, addiction, autoeroticism, intoxication, and again and again, sadness and living.

I can't honestly recommend that you read him however.

Lars and the Real Fantasy

So last night's film Lars and the Real Girl - in contrast to last week's properly creepy the Orphanage -was cute, life affirming and touching. Perhaps not a little twee. We went to it as fans of Six Feet Under (one of the many series that makes me say that current US TV is the golden age. The best in the world. Ever.) I'm sure you know the set up, painfully shy (or actually mentally ill and terrified of contact) young man brings home one of those Real Doll sex toys and it gets integrated into the community when everyone plays along with his delusion that she is real (Brazilian half Danish missionary - the Danish is important, this is a Danish community he lives in). The film had to work hard not to creep me out - I'd just come across the book Still Lovers in work the other week. This is a book of men and their real dolls. Even the shots that weren't creepy were creepy. Really creepy. I mean those shots that didn't look like the aftermath of rape looked like creepy mental illness...

The first big thing they did to avoid the ick factor was they made Lars a serious churchgoer and in his fantasy Bianca (the realdoll) was a missionary so she slept in his brothers house. I'm glad to say that his brother didn't appear to take advantage of her. Leave out the psychobabble gloss they put in - that rubbish appears in all american movies and is no more or less serious than the magic that would be used to explain this in a fairy tale - and we have an incongrous, perhaps surreal device or plot element to make us consider the ordinary surroundings as if they were new. And now we see where the real fantasy is: the community he went to, his church, his work, the local GP who is also a psychiatrist and has hours of time a week to spend chatting to him (who's paying?). Hell the Emergency Room springs into action when he says Bianca is ill. Did he bring her to the local Kaiser Permanente ER? Did they perform a wallet autopsy on a sex doll? How did the insurance underwriters classify the treatment? Was it perhaps experimental and will Lars get a Real Bill be doing a long sequel of overtime to pay for it?
The fantasy is not that a man can love a doll, or that his community will accept it. The fantasy is that the community exists in the first place. Sure, you may think that your church is that community, leeching and tithing your money out of you: but try actually bringing in a sex doll to church.

Klaus Nomi is cold

I was trying to post this somewhere else, but I couldn't. So I'm putting it here.



I bought the rather fabulous Harmonia Mundi Masterworks - fifty milestones of Western music. I'm not really qualified to make judgments on classical music but I think anyone can spot this is a bargain. And the performances are exellent and the choices have sent me down various avenues (though there is too much baroque for my taste). I loved Purcell's opera King Arthur from which this is from.
It appears to be going for £70 (over 100 yoyos) on Amazon.cock. I bought mine for €40 on Presto - Amazon never delivered so I cancelled. So maybe not such good value any more:)

Addendum: it seems not to be too readily available any more, but Harmonia Mundi have it for £29 English pounds. So that's less than a quid a disc which is alright.

Previews

I really meant to write something serious here yesterday. It was to do with sentencing policy and drugs and stuff. But I didn't. I did write some previews of DVDs that arrived in here yesterday so I'll post them instead.

Don't look back (classic DA Pennebaker Bob doc)

Into great silence (god botherers being quiet for once - most popular film in the IFI last year)

20 to life: the life and times of John Sinclair (doc on life of MC5 manager and White Panthers chairman who got 20 years for two joints)

Gram Parsons Fallen Angel (biopic of dilletante heir and musician whose sweethearts of the rodeo, Burrito deluxe, grievous angel etc. are the palimpset for ALL country rock)

South (Shackleton, antartic, in glorious white and white)

Life and debt (mandatory viewing apparently)

Sicko (Moore)

Early cinema primitives and pioneers (you've read about all the films here in media studies books. Now you can watch them too. You lucky lucky people)

Two disc version of Nosferatu (we have the BFI one. I challenge you to find a film this old which still works as well as a film and not just as a historical document)

Lenny - (biopic. Swearing is $$^$ing great. It's big AND it's clever)

Nil by mount (nil by eyes after watching this)

Control (Ian Curtis biopic - for the fans)

Britannia Hospital (was Lyndsey Anderson a ruined genius or just a prick who couldn't be bothered getting on with other people - transpose your opinions on Roy Keane)

Network (it's studied for the script - but there's much more going on. Inchoate rage. The only sensible emotion)

1984 (original poster tag - will ecstasy be a crime? prescient)

Animal farm (the CIA funded one unfortunately - not the famous video nasty)

Deathproof (Tarantino's entry in the torture porn genre)

What have I done to deserve this (perhaps Almadovar's most misanthropic film - a must see)

Coming home (Vietnam film I bought under the mistaken belief that it won the best film O$€£r the year that Apocalypse now and Deer Hunter were out - it didn't. But Hal Ashby is still the forgotten great of 70s US film)

Exiles (Cannes winner 2004)

Chinese Odyssey 2002 (Chinese spoof on Crouching homo hidden hamster)

Myra Beckinridge (legendary "they didn't do that? Did they?" version of Gore Vidal shock sex satire with Racquel Welsh)

Rio Grande (Wayne, O'Hara, River, Big)

Phil Mulloy extreme animation (he tattoos the animations on his schlong, lasers them out, starts again. Looks like a rasher in the microwave for 10 hours.)

Atonement (utter and complete SHITE. waste of two hours. By turns opaque and infuriatingly facile. Keira Knightley isn't even the most annoying thing in it.)

The wire (don't bother - I have it first)

Jury's still out on The Wire - I've watched two episodes and it doesn't strike me as being a radical departure from the genre. Maybe incremental rather than revolutionary.

St. John's Passion

Seeing as how my living circumstances have changed this year I only went to one performance in the Living Music festival. I went to none last year but it was John Adams and after having to sit through the RTE Concert Orchestra while they dragged their lazy arses through a soporific rendition of short ride in a fast machine I didn't feel like putting myself through it. Part should have been different and I would have gone to lot more if Back of Head wasn't in my life. I chose to go to the Passio on Saturday night in Christchurch and brought my mother as a Christmas present. I am vaguely familiar with the piece - I have the Naxos rather than the Hilliard ensemble recording and the presence of the Hilliard Ensemble was part of the reason to choose this rather than one of the other performances.

Hmmm.... they play it considerably slower. Glacially paced. Sure nothing much goes on in the music anyway but the pace, for me, exposed it's thinness. I love devotional music but rarely pay attention to the words. I often find myself walking down the road singing "chant down Babylon" but when I think of Babylon I think of Gilgamesh and rather appreciate its impact on world culture (apart from chunks of the bible being nicked from old Babylonian poetry. That's not so cool.). I digress. I had much time to pay attention to the words of this passion. The text comes from the latin version of St. Paul. It's a rum choice for a passion. The authorial interventions by The Evangelist (in the role of Basil Exposition) are many. And frequently elongated and monotonic. Jesus in this version is not a sympathetic character: he is aloof, a grudging participant in fate. And a smart arse "are you the king of the jews?" asks Pilate, "you say I am" Jesus replies. No Jesus, he didn't, he asked you a question, now tell him the answer and get out of there. The only attractive character, and played by the tenor who gets the liveliest musical line, is Pilate. He doesn't want to kill Jesus. He is forced into doing so by "the jews". This passion is a deeply anti-jewish text written as an apologia for Roman imperialism. Jesus was doing his job, so was Pilate: it was the nasty jews who weren't. It's quite obviously written for a Roman audience.

Most of these flaws are within the text itself. It does not lend itself to a sympathetic narrative of the passion. Its racism is out of tune with the modern world (if it was anti-roman we wouldn't really mind...) Its Jesus is almost old testament in his aloof disregard for creation, with only an almost modern Bart Simpson smartarse personality lending him humanity.
Po faced and solemn rather than moving and contemplative. I shifted on my wooden chair for the duration.

I don't care what Giovanni says - Arvo really does look like a hunched up Salman Rushdie.

I also wasted two hours watching Atonement at the weekend. If it wins an award for best supporting actor or something it should be the house that does it. The house was the best dressed, most interesting character in the film. The film was a strange mix of difficult and facile. The child was a proxy for the author in a crass way - her atonement was anything but. The exposition was sometimes so subtle as to make you feel a scene had been cut. Which it probably had.

Despair, hope, Repuberlick, and the Trap

As I have said many times before - it's not the despair. It's the hope that kills you.

Might I be allowed to watch republic playing a match without peeking through my fingers shaking my head groaning numbing myself with drugs and alcohol beseeching the elder ones in syllables beyond language?

I can see it all: I turn up. Spruce. Alert. Hopeful. Watchful.

My spirit gets dashed against a pebbledash wall and rubbed repeatedly while raw down to a stump.

Or:

He doesn't turn up as manager. Even Venerables decides he's too cool for us (and in fairness, too cool for the repuberlick is not too hard: the most high profile toupee wearer in English football is too cool for us) and we get somebody else who once coached Scunthorpe reserves through their bad patch before the current renaissance.

Adam Curtis' the trap pitched a world of theoretical people: hard hearted criminals the lot of them upon which the political / economical elite / establishment based its calculations for control. If only we were those people. The prisoner's dilemma would be simple: always assume the worst about Irish football. Always assume failure. We are trapped not by failure but by hope.