Cassandra Voices

Tag: great

  • Make Greenland Great

    In his last great novel The Plot Against America (2004) Philp Roth posited plausible circumstances where President Franklin D. Roosevelt, the great social democrat, could be dislodged by the proto-fascist Charles Lindbergh.

    Sadly, a failure to understand history bedevils our time. We have sleepwalked into a similar scenario after the last U.S. Presidential election. Now I fear it is too late. A fascist leader appears to have been re-elected President.

    In 1935, as much of Europe was succumbing to fascism, Upton Sinclair penned his dystopian novel It Can’t Happen Here in which Senator Berzelius “Buzz” Windrip enters the presidential election campaign on a populist platform. He promises to restore the country to prosperity and greatness, offering each citizen $5,000 per year. Portraying himself as a champion of ‘the forgotten man’ and ‘traditional’ American values, Windrip defeats incumbent President Franklin D. Roosevelt for the Democratic nomination, and then goes on to beat his Republican opponent.

    It can happen here and now. Trump is emblematic of how, worldwide, a new form of corporate fascism, or corporate communism, has become dominant. So let us examine the initial pronouncements.

    Inauguration Day

    What did his flurry of executive orders mean, apart from braggadocio and sabre rattling? This is quite apart from the caveat that executive decrees short-circuiting the legislative process are the hallmarks of fascism, as Carl Schmidt the legendary jurist argued. American democracy appears to be in tatters.

    In an inaugural address that was remarkably coherent and lucid in conceptual terms, Trump invoked President McKinley (1897-1901). The implications are clear. McKinley colonised Hawaii, Puerto Rico, Guam, the Philippines and Cuba, and was also hostile to global cooperation.

    So, resignations from the admittedly corrupt WHO and the revocation of the Paris Climate Change Agreement are the first two steps. Now, all directly or indirectly funded citadels of world governance are under siege if they oppose or sanction American interests.

    Danish author Peter Høeg penned a famous bestselling book Miss Smilla’s Feeling for Snow (1982) about Greenland and more precisely the Danish government’s treatment of the indigenous Inuit community The engine of the plot is the concealment of a state secret: a lethal meteorite and a parasitic worm that serves as an existential threat. The ruling Danes are not portrayed sympathetically with respect to Greenlanders. Indeed, according to a recent poll Greenlanders aspire for autonomy, but not another external coloniser.

    Yet Donal Trump wants Greenland and seems prepared to invade. Thus, he sent his son to a resort in the island’s most populous town Neuk armed with the slogans about making Greenland great. The thought did occur that Inviting homeless people into a 4-star hotel, albeit accidentally, is a policy he could replicate in his domestic policies, though I doubt he will.  The whole staged visit was of course bellicose posturing, and the shape of things to come.

    Why then the sudden interest? Well, it’s not so sudden frankly, but it’s most revealing. The interest stems from what is apparent in the Trump regime’s agenda: a zero-sum game of competition between nation states, leading to a global competition for diminishing resources. Texan and indeed Arabian oil supply may run dry and is certainly being exhausted at current consumption rates.

    Greenland is terra nullius or virgin territory, unspoiled in one crucial respect. It is among the last outposts where the riches of the earth can be extracted – to enrich the few and destroy the planet. More to the point, it will soon be exploitable given that climate change is overwhelmingly likely to cause the glaciers to melt.

    Black Gold

    Oil! (1927) is the title of Upton Sinclair’s epic novel about American greed, which was adapted into the film There Will Be Blood (2007). Today, American capitalist colonialism wants not just Greenland, but the Northern Territories of Canada. Drill Baby Drill.

    The Northern Territories of Canada are also an Arctic landmass of untapped resources. In his speech, he specifically mentioned tariffs – incidentally also a Mckinley policy – and tariffs were only just averted from coming into force against Canada and Mexico. China was also hit with retaliatory measures. Yet, it is the plain people of America who voted for him who will pay the bill, only after he has fired half the federal government.

    Thus, invocation of McKinley in his speech is also the invocation of a solid hard currency President that is for the few, not the many.

    The concept in international law of domestic jurisdiction is to respect national sovereignty, and only where there have been systematic human rights abuses to interfere in the domain reserve of a state. The justification of a breach of an obligation ergo omnes or a Crime Against Humanity is, ideally, filtered and ratified by the U.N.. This has often occurred in a bogus fashion, such as the dodgy dossier that led to the Bush-Blair war on Iraq. Trump also wants oil, but is going about it in a different way.

    So, he will not accept any international sanction or control, and will move with autocratic impunity. Play ball or we will invade, or refuse to recognise the UN, or perhaps force it to decamp from New York. Should the General Assembly object to any of this it may simply be liquidated. The statement above might seem alarmist but there are few checks and balances left.

    That seems to me to be what is happening is with the division of the world into trading blocs or sectors. Trump does not want to spend hard dollars on wasteful wars in the Ukraine or Gaza but that is not to say he gives a rat’s arse about human rights. Instead, he aims to establish a profit-driven North American confederation, to include Canada and Greenland, and, of course, reclaim the revenue of American businesses.

    Hi ally, or puppet master, Elon Musk, also has limited respect for national sovereignty, but a different mechanism of attack. He destabilizes through funding political actors such as the ADF in Germany and agitates online against the Starmer administration.

    America wants pliant co-operative regimes, with Musk acting as a modern-day Kissinger-without-portfolio. Trump has no doubt suspended the ban on Tik Tok to allow his bestie to buy it up and pollute the minds of an entire generation. This is Freedom of Expression if we will tell you what to say.

    ICE and Department of Homeland Security agents detaining a man.

    Ethnic Cleansing

    We will also see de facto ethnic cleansing, as in his proposal that two million Gazans should vacate their land to make way for a new Riviera. Also, the removal of undesirable aliens, even those for whom America is a birthright, and the development of a Mexican Iron Curtain.

    The new form of cleansing is akin to the McCarthyite Red Scare, given the removal of employment rights of those who are opposed to his interests and thus by definition seditious. Most of this action will be upheld by a compliant and docile judiciary. In short federal employees with even a trace of Red will be summarily dismissed.

    And what of Ireland? The extension of American trade will surely lead to the decamping of multinational corporations. American hedge funds already enjoy a dominant interest in our domestic housing market. Nevertheless, I predict tariffs will be employed against Ireland and Europe if regimes are less than favourable towards the United States.

    Further, the entire liberal WOKE agenda, which in my view has been deeply troublesome and counterproductive, is being dismantled. ‘His Christians’, as he calls them, form the Bible Belt will see a return to very traditional female and male roles. This is of course after his Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade. His Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth also has very extreme views on homosexuality, so watch this space.

    There were also pardons for far-right protestors after he lost the last election, and a promised investment in more lethal injections and an escalation of the death penalty. The previous few years have seen the US Supreme Court block off appeals for ineffective assistance of Counsel. One senses that his emergency powers remit of executive action will not be confined to the Mexican border, but the legislative remit will be much wider and internal, and will be upheld by SCOTUS.

    It is apparent that the worldwide human rights post-Second World War consensus is over save for a few enclaves. State authoritarianism – with his acolytes in Argentina and Italy present at the inauguration – will now increase at a rapid pace.

    More fundamentally, if American democracy doesn’t survive this then all democracies are threatened. We all contract pneumonia, politically speaking, when they catch a cold.

    Karl Kraus

    The legendary Austrian journalist Karl Kraus died in 1936 after editing Die Fackel for thirty-seven years, shortly after Hitlers ascension to power in Germany. At the height of collapse, and after a self-enforced interregnum of nine months he published one last edition that included the extended essay ‘The Third Walpurgis Night’.

    The essential argument is that with their devotion to palaver and tactics, the Social Democrats facilitated Hitlers rise. He despaired at their belief that ‘they could break [the] magic circle [of Nazism] by means of the Constitutional Court.’ Consequently, the essay supports the Austrian Christian-Democratic Chancellor Dollfuss as anything other than Hitler was needed. Well, the lunacy of liberal political correctness and their failure to focus on real issues facilitated misguided Populism.

    The opening paragraph of the extended essay is devastating in its implications for today:

    As to Hitler, I have nothing to say. I am aware that as the upshot of extended reflection, of repeated efforts to grasp the phenomenon and the forces driving it, this falls far short of expectations. They were, after all, pitched higher than ever before at a polemicist who is popularly—but mistakenly—expected to take a stand; and who, when confronted by any evil that appeals to his temperament, has indeed been prepared to “stick his neck out”. But there are evils which not only make the neck cease to be a metaphor…

    The best reading of Walpurgis Nacht, as Patrick Healy has suggested, is that satire should point not only in the direction of rhetorical agility – use of mockery, insult, indignation etc. – but also to its fusion with the voice of the moralist, employing the skill of a standup comic. The word has also a meaning of stew bringing all ingredients together. However, just as with Hitler, so with Trump, we are now beyond satire. At one level we must remain silent, or use words sparingly.

    Kraus, in his masterly analysis of Goebbels (a precursor to Musk), accepts that so deeply clever and embedded is the propaganda – and the appearance of culture and progress – that we forget that they intend to do what they are going to do.

    The reaction to the camp fascist Nazi salute by Musk is a clear indication that seriously cultivated people should not take these barbarians seriously, but they ought to be taken seriously, as globally, in a state of collective hysteria, people are voting for them into office. So, is it that we, the civilised, are no longer to be taken seriously?

    Watching this shit show unfold is like being the Isherwood figure in the film Cabaret at the German been garden as he hears a version of the Horst Wessel being sung.

    Trump, unlike nativistic Greenlanders, wants ownership of land and people’s minds, but in a very unstable situation there is an alternative. Remember what happened to President Mckinley.

  • Lessons from the Great Depression III

    Don’t you ever read the papers? Roderick Spode is the founder and head of the Saviours of Britain, a Fascist organization better known as the Black Shorts. His general idea, if he doesn’t get knocked on the head with a bottle in one of the frequent brawls in which he and his followers indulge, is to make himself a Dictator.’ ‘Well, I’m blowed!’ I was astounded at my keenness of perception. The moment I had set eyes on Spode, if you remember, I had said to myself ‘What Ho! A Dictator!’ and a Dictator he had proved to be. I could not have made a better shot, if I had been one of those detectives who see a chap walking along the street and deduce that he is a retired manufacturer of poppet valves named Robinson with rheumatism in one arm, living at Clapham. ‘Well, I’m dashed! I thought he was something of that sort. That chin…Those eyes…And, for the matter of that, that moustache. When you say “shorts,” you mean “shirts,” of course.’ ‘No. By the time Spode formed his association, there were no shirts left. He and his adherents wear black shorts.’ ‘Footer bags, you mean?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘How perfectly foul.
    P.G. Wodehouse, The Code of the Woosters (1938).

    The above quote may offer a certain hope for those of us who see in each crisis a foretaste of worse to come; that hope is that Fascism can be undermined by ridicule – even while it is gaining traction – as long as a Dworkinian right to freedom of speech abides.

    But I next turn to a writer not noted for his sense of humour, George Orwell, who is central to our understanding the Great Depression, at least from a British vantage. His 1946 essay ‘How the Poor Die’ is a also crucial text for this austerity period, when social supports are being steadily withdrawn and a public health crisis looms large. Such are the consequences, unintended or otherwise, of an awful ideology that has put the NHS into freefall, and the Irish health service into near collapse.

    Animal Farm and 1984, with their simplification of language and distortion of truth from 2 =2 =5 to Newspeak – or in present parlance News International – are curiously prescient for our age. The Communist dystopia Orwell envisaged is not what we have now. Our own is of a different character altogether.

    Lowry, Laurence Stephen; Coming from the Mill; The L. S. Lowry Collection; http://www.artuk.org/artworks/coming-from-the-mill-162324

    Army of Managers

    The great painter of the Depression-era L.S. Lowry once remarked:

    A really efficient totalitarian state would be one in which the all-powerful executive of political bosses and their army of managers control a population of slaves who do not have to be coerced, because they love their servitude.

    This is the kind of Stockholm Syndrome that we have witnessed throughout the pandemic, when even left wing parties previously noted for their resistance to corporate authority, rolled over to have their bellies tickled, as the one percent almost doubled their wealth.

    Lowry, as much as Grosz and Dix, chronicled working-class existences in painting, but as a prose artist he also captured the era beautifully in Coming From the Mill (1930). ‘As I left [Pendlebury] station I saw the Acme Spinning Company’s mill,’ Lowry would later recall. Describing:

    The huge black framework of rows of yellow-lit windows standing up against the sad, damp charged afternoon sky. The mill was turning out hundreds of little pinched, black figures, heads bent down. I watched this scene – which I’d looked at many times without seeing – with rapture.

    His matchstick men and women are best seen in the Lowry Gallery in Salford near Manchester, an area much gentrified now but still recognisably working class. And if you turn away from the main paintings, one still finds the bitter fruits of economic depressions: drunken brawls and young children in virtual rags.

    Brave New World!

    Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932) is a core text of our time. The soma-induced compliance replicates our non-critical consensus of disinformation. Bernard the anti-hero wishes to leave for Iceland, a psychological state many of us wish to flee to now. Like Wittgenstein, I have a preference for a good Fjord.

    In mainland Europe the contradictions of the European Depression are well etched by the greatest of all American writers, F. Scott Fitzgerald. He was an incurable alcoholic by the time he penned his second masterpiece Tender Is the Night, to mixed reviews, in 1934. The lead character Diver is redolent of a lost parvenu generation, a parable for how many of a certain class lose their way on the French Riviera.

    It is cautionary tale of a loss of relevance, context and credibility. In a way, we all must resist a decadent urge to act like Tory grandees on the fiddle amidst the booze at Number 10.

    And what about other European literature for those who want us to “stay safe by staying apart”? Well, the antisemitic Louis-Ferdinand Céline is responsible for at least two prose masterpieces of the Great Depression that lay bay his own hypocrisy.

    His 1932 Journey to The End of Night is a phantasmatic horror story chronicling the Great Depression. It contains a piquant quote that goes some way towards explaining his own moral descent: ‘I warn you that when the princes of this world start loving you it means they are going to grind you up into battle sausage.’ We ought to be wary of artists that achieve great success in their own time, or journalists for that matter.

    He also refers to the “necessary” distance the rich must develop from the sufferings of the poor:

    I hadn’t found out, yet that humankind consists of two quite different races, the rich and the poor. It took me … and plenty of other people . . . twenty years and the war to learn to stick to my class and ask the price of things before touching them, let alone setting my heart on them.

    Jean Renoir

    More than Céline, along with Albert Camus, the greatest French intellectual artist of that period was the film director Jean Renoir. His most significant film ‘La Règle du jeu’ is situated at the precipice of collapse.

    Set in an aristocratic milieu just before the outbreak of the Second World War, it is decidedly jittery, with a real sense of fin de siècle. We find attractive though silly people on the brink of a calamity. It seems now quite relevant as we face unprecedented times, where chaos and uncertainty rule.

    Renoir views the characters sympathetically with Octavia – the voice of moderation – central to the film. Renoir was acutely conscious of being on the brink of disaster, and expressed  an objective humanism with the famous line ‘that everyone has his reasons.’

    In the subjectivity of our time that quote remains a clarion call for a heightened perception of danger, especially as moral relativism gains traction.

    Renoir elaborated in commentary on the film that all cultures are cliquish and have their own rules and protocols of dealing with those who do not observe the rules of the game, or the rule of law. But that is prior to seismic change where brute force supersedes civility.

    Renoir touched a raw nerve. When it opened a right-wing French audience went berserk, in a way similar to the reception in the Abbey Theatre in Dublin to J.M. Synge’s The Playboy of The Western World in 1907.

    Renoir’s acid comment was in effect that these people were doomed, and that the audience reaction showed that ‘people who commit suicide do not do so in front of witnesses.’

    The film has an astute sense that class or poverty more than race or ethnicity is the ultimate determinant of social division. That idea remains vitally important in these absurd politically correct times, and indeed victimhood or assumed victimhood as it is now. Our priorities should be to maintain access to housing, health care and legal representation.

    Welles and Buñuel

    Another of the greatest creative artist of the twentieth century toured around Ireland at the end of the Depression, before taking a job at The Gate Theatre. Later, in ‘The Third Man’ (1949) he made a guest appearance as Harry Lime. One, less celebrated speech. captures the existential dilemma of our time

    If I offered you twenty thousand pounds for every dot that stopped, would you really, old man, tell me to keep my money, or would you calculate how many dots you could afford to spare? Free of income tax, old man. Free of income tax – the only way you can save money nowadays.

    This is a logic that appears to have been adopted by pharmaceutical companies in recent times.

     

    The great surrealist film maker Luis Buñuel was another of the great anti-fascist artist of the Depression-era.  He attacked the prevailing mores of clerics, sexual repression and state authoritarianism with utter clarity and savage wit. This led, unsurprisingly, to periods of exile from Spain and a final hideaway for eighteen years in Mexico.

    The stunning and very brave 1950 film about poverty and child criminality in Mexico ‘Los Olvidados’ (the Forgotten Ones) caused a sensation at the time. Its theme reflects a drift into criminality among the youth in many parts of London and Dublin. Today’s child poverty, exploitation, crime and even slavery were also a feature of the Great Depression era.

    Tell Me Why?

    How does Fascism come about? Well it’s a product of inequality and poverty. You could say: “It’s the economy dummy!” In the period we can find evidence of this emerging among the workers in Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, or the disenfranchised on the streets of Weimar, or the representations of Orwell and Céline who suffer most due to the naked expropriation “adults in the room.”

    Economic depressions create conditions for fascism, or even the new-fangled corporate fascism of our age which represents a triumph of demagoguery and disinformation. So be wary of manipulation and stay flexible, if not unsafe. Facebook and the mass media augment Orwellian tendencies and a campaign of compliance and of induced consent is creating serf capitalism and a potential Malthusian population cull.

    Alas, there is no New Deal or Marshall Plan on the horizon. World leadership is lacking and often far from benign and corporate-led. Apart from resisting manipulation, what all of us at the sharp end of the stick can do is protest to avoid obliteration and not be participants in our own self-abnegation.

    Resist decadence if you can. Survive the new depression: this Great Reset Depression. It will require optimum coping skills not to be culled. And if all else fails, poke fun at the fascists and observe how uncomfortable they become.

  • Lessons from the Great Depression (II)

    Ger-mania…

    Extraordinarily, Germany appears on the brink of following the lead of Austria in mandating a vaccination against COVID-19, as segregation of the unvaccinated continues. We seem to have entered what Gore Vidal described as the United States of Amnesia, as all history is forgotten. So let us cast our mind back.

    I maintain the German Weimar Republic (1919-1933), more than even the U.S. Great Depression, remains the emblem of our age. The comparison is not exact of course, as all analogies break down through the shifting sands of time, but it is useful to review the literature of that period and draw parallels.

    After World War I, when misguided reparations, and a war guilt clause, were inflicted by the victors – with the French and Clemenceau in particular in the driving seat – Germany was crippled with war debts, but crept along until the banking collapse. The period up to 1929 and shortly afterwards was a triumph against great odds of a fledgling social democracy: the Weimar Republic.

    The period is associated with great creativity, and indeed became a synonym for decadence and sexual libertarianism, which made it a soft target for Nazi thuggery. The bonfire of the vanities and the burning of the books was the fascist exhalation of degenerate art.

    Likewise our own Age of Austerity in the wake of the Financial Crisis of 08 has destablised the social and economic structures. We also have had a period of relative freedom, despite the economic pain, but now operate in most countries under a grinding authoritarianism in the face of collapsing health care systems corroded by decades of neoliberalism.

    A begging disabled WW I veteran (Berlin, 1923).

    Tomorrow Belongs to Me

    The Bob Fosse film ‘Cabaret’ (1972) has the fictionally represented Christopher Isherwood in Weimar times represented as leaving Berlin after he hears the Nazi youth sing ‘Tomorrow Belongs to Me’, one of the most chilling songs in a popular film ever recorded; an even more sinister version of the Horst Wessel Song.

    In fact, in the book Goodbye to Berlin (1939) nothing quite as dramatic as that epiphany occurs, just the sense of the persecution of the Jewish community, Communists, dissidents and degenerate races in a sedulous and incremental fashion. This was a fascist authoritarian creep as economic destruction creates victims, but also the externalisation of hatred. The demonisation and demonetisation of the other, crucial also in our own age of unfettered rage and lack of moderation.

    Bertolt Brecht

    The Aesthetics of Resistance

    Peter Weiss made a similar point in his after the event masterpiece, The Aesthetics of Resistance, where in cold retrospect he saw how those with idealism were destroyed.  His masterpiece of memory ends with the execution of his comrades in the Frankfurt Trials; executed and left to hang on fishhooks.

    Bertolt Brecht also saw in genesis and with mystical precision the bloodletting to come in The Threepenny Opera:

    When the shark bites with his teeth dear
    Scarlet billows start to spread
    Fancy gloves though wears Macbeth dear
    So there is not a trace of red

    Now again many want no trace of red. Just bright blue colours. No shades of grey just sanctimonious conservatism.

    The sense of unfolding chaos at the effects of the Great Depression in Germany is well documented in Victor Klemperer’s diary Let Us Bear Witness dating from 1933. He was peculiarly well placed with a protected Christian wife and a Jewish convert to Christianity. Dismissed from his job; furloughed but not sent to a Concentration Camp.

    The rise of fascism was a consequence, then and now, of economic collapse and that is the difference between the American Depression and the German equivalent, but it was a narrow escape for America.

    Roosevelt as a social democrat saved America. but as Philip Roth’s excursus in counter-factual history amply demonstrates there was no shortage of fascist demagogues who could have unseated him, including the folk hero Charles Lindberg. Such is The Plot Against America, where a fascist becomes President. Not then of course, but now?

    But that is getting ahead of ourselves to the endgame. Let us at least anticipate and make plans in the light of a project endgame called The Great Reset, a phrase unerring close to the great leap forward as we enter Chinese corporate feudal times.

    The sense of impending chaos in the Weimar Republic is also well documented by caricaturists such as George Grosz, Otto Dix, and others, many of whose greatest paintings hang as a reminder in Berlin.

    If you look at Grosz’s inelegantly titled Pillars of Society (1926), with the subtitle Shit for Brains, you will see one of the paragons of virtue. It anticipates disaster as the economy collapsed, and the Nazi judges and commissars who would work hand in glove with their jackboot associates.

    Ripe for Collapse

    On its current trajectory, the EU, as Varoufakis recently indicated, is likely to collapse, sooner rather than later, with a pan-Germanic latter day Hanseatic League altready taking its place. Few should mourn it in Ireland and Greece where the social structure has been destroyed through the impoverishment of large cohorts of the population who have falled into homelessness. Ireland is now controlled by hedge funds as a kind of sub-Indonesian corporate client state.

    And what do corporate judges, bankers, lawyers, and politicians do? Well, enforce further austerity in the shape of lockdowns on a docile and far too accepting population. Socially distanced and self-isolated for the near future without a prospect of stability, a sustainable living structure, or affordable rent or housing.

    And what does Weimar art reveal about intellectuals? That they are useless panderers. The paintings of Otto Dix perfectly captures bohemian delirium and ineffectiveness.

    In effect our contemporary consensus neoliberal spouters are spectators on a society falling apart; the collective fiddling as Rome burns. McWilliams in his wine bar.

    So, hand in glove with economic collapse we witness the destruction of the very concept of human rights. The seepage of emergency powers and executive action, documented in the eariler period by the great jurist Carl Schmidt, with disproportionate and excessive measures. Just as the Reichstag fire was used to end democracy in Germany.

    As far as social and economic rights and Weimar was a disaster. Banknote were printed in billion increments with which you could barely buy a loaf of bread.

    Berlin Alexanderplatz

    Perhaps the greatest German novel of the Depression era is Berlin Alexanderplatz by Alfred Döblin, although his neglected earlier novel Mountains Oceans Giants also presages our times, with its harbingers of environmental collapse.

    Döblin also utilises other 1920s anxieties — Malthus, Suffragettes, miscegenation, decolonization — onto the 27th century where Europe is under siege from “hordes” of migrants “flooding” from the Global South. “India-China-Japan” rises as a rival bloc to the New York-London “Anglo-Saxon Imperium,” while fierce clans of women find success in an “unending struggle against patriarchy,” even preferring “taboo” relationships with the alien migrants.

    Science fiction then but becoming recognisable today. The demonisation and demonetisation of others and the migrant. Not one of us.

    Berlin Alexanderplatz was dramatized by Werner Fassbinder in the peritectic chronicle of its everyman German Franz Bide Kopf, convict, pimp, worker; through the swathes of the Weimar republic.

    It is at one level a chronicle of our own time. Dubious associations, flirting with fascism and in passages most relevant and redolent, a panegyric against erstwhile Communist friends, which shows how the everyman is seduced by Utopian ideals:

    We’ve got to have order, order, I’m telling you, order—and put that in your pipes and smoke it, order and nothing else . . . and if anybody comes and starts a revolution now and don’t leave us in peace, they ought to be strung up all along the street . . . then they’ll get theirs, when they swing, yes, sir. You might remember that whatever you do, you criminals.

    Law and Order the totalitarian clarion call. The most important passages are the slaughterhouse and abattoir scenes, which are most unsettling and relevant to our times. Equating the costing of microscopic slaughter of the animals with human slaughter. The expiration of man and beast, or cost-benefit analysis of life. Compulsory vaccination for the herd.

    The Weimar Republic echoes through the ages. and Germany is reverting primitively and Gothically. Atavistic tendencies can be seen with the arrival of compulsory vaccination and vaccine segregation. Austerity unleased dark forces, and there is no genuine social democratic corrective in sight. The Weimar republic ripples through the ages.

    Feature Image: Joseph Goebbels views the Degenerate Art Exhibition.

  • Lessons From the Great Depression (I)

    This is the first instalment of a three part essay on the legacy of the Great Depression..

    The Great Depression began in 1929, leading Wall Street bankers literally to throw themselves from windows. I was shown one such exit site on 45th Street 5th Avenue in Manhattan. Lives were destroyed as a favourable market collapsed. The fundamental point then, and now, about a favourable or unfavourable market is it is always an illusion. Smoke and mirrors.

    Bull leads to Bear and back, and that cycle since 2008 is certainly where we are again, as confidence is lost in markets and neo-liberal non-interventionism. The effect in 1929 emphasised how when America catches a cold Europe contracts pneumonia. In the 1930s, the fragile, well-intentioned experiment in Wilsonian democracy collapsed virtually overnight. Now the effect is global.

    We are now seeing unmistakable signs of stagflation and even hyperinflation, accentuated by the additional disease burden of the virus on health systems subjected to decades of sneaking privatisation; while health inequalities widen, as transnational organisations and Big Pharma – using so-called philanthro-capitalism as a front – collude at the expense of the population at large.

    The prospect looms of fuel and food shortages, decreased life expectancies – already evident before the pandemic – repossessions, and evictions, with limited support in countries without social democratic support structures.

    In terms of civil liberties, we are entering dangerous territory too, with compulsory vaccination and quarantines. A long winter is coming. And what are we to make of most non-essential court cases in the UK being adjourned until September of next year?

    The New Deal

    In 1932 at the height of its destitution, America elected its greatest ever leader the aristocratic bon vivant socialist Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR), who brought in the New Deal to save the country from ruin.

    In contemporary America, no such leadership exists. Biden is no Roosevelt. He is unwilling to develop a true social market. All too many in America are ‘Bowling Alone’ as communities fall apart in a digitally mediated age of social atomisation.

    The Great Depression represented a failure of the American idea of government. Apart from a few dissenters, such as the legendary Supreme Court judge Oliver Wendell Holmes, the business of America has always been business, until it goes bust.

    In a tremendous refutation of free market economics in Lochner v. New York (1903) Holmes said: ‘The third amendment does not enact Mr Herbert spencer’s social statics’

    Holmes was at least a quasi-socialist, who corresponded with Harold Laski. But neither an intellect like him or a proper social democratic deal maker and integrator like Roosevelt is evident in American politics today.

    Obama received money and recruited Goldman Sachs alumni to his cabinet which is a bit like inviting a cuckoo into the nest.

    Studs Terkel

    Hard Times

    Another Chicago native and reporter of the last century, Studs Terkel chronicled American life in his book Hard Times, which is an oral history of the Depression era. Terkel argued that ‘the worst day-to-day operators of businesses are bankers,’ and quotes one source who has fallen on hard times:

    We thought of the poor, at that time, as quite divorced from us, who were not poor. By the exercise of one’s charity, life could be made all right. You would always have the poor with you, they were the unfortunate, and you made donations. You could handle them. It was mildly unpleasant, but not fundamentally upsetting. Now, for the first time, we face the dreadful reality that we are not separated. They are us.

    And another describes a scene of acute desperation:

    They would just walk all over and kill each other. They got more than they ever need that they would just step on anybody to keep it. They got cars, they got houses, they got this and that. It is more than they need, but they think they need it, so they want to keep it. Human life isn’t as important as what they got.

    Image (c) Daniele Idini

    Worse Still?

    I fear that this collapse will be on a greater scale. Indeed, despite deprivation, life expectancies actually increased in America over the course of the 1930s, but since the turn of this century epidemiologists have been predicing a decline.

    The successful application of the ideas of the master J. M. Keynes generated a worldwide social democratic model in the wake of the Great Depression, which became the consensus before the resurgence of neo-liberalism. This has undermined humanity since the late 1970s, and its effect now appear irreversible, given the absence of an alternative Communist model that compelled even governments devoted to capitalism to maintain a basic standard of living and healthcare.

    In contrast, the neo-liberal model of marketisation of human activity has intruded into all sectors of life. This has denuded and in some cases destroyed what Habermas describes as the public sphere.

    A set of unworkable ideas have spiralled out of control, and are generating a disaster. Liberal democracy is failing and becoming unworkable. In effect, the End Of History is the acceptance of discredited ideas, which have led us to this impasse.

    Capitalism is not working because capitalism is not allowing people to work. Joseph Stieglitz, a former economist for the World Bank remarked: ‘Socialism for the rich capitalism for the poor.’ And increasingly basic liberties are being sacrificed at the altar of security.

    Artistic Response

    More than statisticians or economists, artists convey the individual effects of world historical events such as the Great Depression.

    Although written in 1906, Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle is one of the core texts of the Depression, demonstrating the appalling work conditions in the Chicago meat packing industry. Many of his works including Oil, which became the film with Daniel Day Lewis ‘There Will be Blood’ attack unbridled capitalism and its depressing effects on the human spirit.

    Two crucial quotes from The Jungle are as follows:

    The rich people not only had all the money, they had all the chance to get more; they had all the knowledge and the power, and so the poor man was down, and he had to stay down.

    And

    Into this wild beast tangle these men had been born without their consent, they had taken part in it because they could not help it; that they were in jail was no disgrace to them, for the game had never been fair, the dice were loaded. They were swindlers and thieves of pennies and dimes, and they had been trapped and put out of the way by the swindlers and thieves of millions of dollars.

    Sinclair paints a familiar scene, now throw in the disinformation of our post-truth universe and you have a neo-liberal Molotov cocktail. At least at that time there was vibrant social commentary, and a less captured media.

    All little lives need protecting as Sinclair and above all John Steinbeck in his portrayals of the Okies in dustbowl America clearly recognised. His great novel The Grapes Of Wrath depicts a migration from the dustbowls of Oklahoma to California, which turns out to be no Promised Land, as any unionization or collective action is supressed, just as has been the case over the last thirty years.

     

    More relevant than even Sinclair or Steinbeck as an evocation of the Depression-era in America is a book by James Agee, and photographer Walker Evans called Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, first published in 1941. The phrase originates in the Jewish religion. The complete sentence is: ‘Let Us Now Praise Famous Men and the fathers that beget them.’

    The book, partially governmentally funded, chronicles dustbowl America. Evans adds the pictorial record of the devastation wreaked by the great economic depression in the dustbowl.

    From the pictures of Walker Evans it is noticeable how grim the faces are. The anguished expressions on children is particularly harrowing. Lives lost by neglect and the degradation of poverty.

    It’s A Wonderful Life

    Austerity

    It is well documented how austerity in our present age has killed people by stealth through the gradual removal of social supports. Lawyers and NHS workers might share the same fate. Whatever ramparts of social protection that previously existed are being whittled away by Covid. And

    Any yet we cannot give up. Produced and directed by Frank Capra in the wake of World War II, ‘It’s a Wonderful life’ is about a good banker memorably played by Jimmy Stewart, who helps people to build new homes.

    Capra, made many great films, but ‘It Happened One Night,’ which came out at the height of the Depression captures a spirit a popular spirit of defiance. So there is cause for optimism in poor folk.

    Featured Image: Lunch atop a Skyscraper, Charlie C. Ebbets, 1932.

  • The Other Great Troubadour

    Unlike Bob Dylan who is still actively making music, Leonard Cohen has not released a new song from beyond the grave. Cohen is dead. Of course he was from an older generation than Dylan.

    If Dylan represents the Baby Boomers then the Canadian national poet and songster represents the preceding Beat or Beatnik generation of Kerouac and Ginsberg, which he, and Dylan, reference frequently.

    Cohen and Dylan are the two central figures of a movement in popular, or folk, music, which morphed into cultural commentary and public intellectualism. Thus, the troubadour or bardic poet jumped the tramlines from pop musician into serious art. Dylan was rewarded with a Nobel Prize, but many thought it should have gone to Cohen. While Dylan is a poet in a minor key dedicated to the craft of songwriting, Cohen was a major poet, who learned his trade, and novelist – Beautiful Losers (1965) is a hidden treasure – and that poetic sensibility is reflected in his measured songwriting.

    With Cohen a poem such as the stunning ‘Going Home,’

    I love to speak with Leonard
    He’s a sportsman and a shepherd
    He’s a lazy bastard
    Living in a suit

    Becomes ‘Old Ideas’ (2012) a song.

    This genre hopping perhaps explains why Cohen’s style is less prolix or baroque than Dylan’s, although both arrive at a point of brief severity, and a compression of language which is to be admired. There are other similarities, such as both mining the political protest genre.

    The Influence of Lorca and Spain

    As an aspiring young poet, and through much of his career, Cohen was influenced by Federico García Lorca and the sense borrowed from Lorca of Duende, a Spanish term for a heightened state of emotion, expression and authenticity, often connected with Flamenco music. In fact the famous song ‘Take This Waltz’ is a translation of a Lorca poem. As he put it in an acceptance speech for the Prince of Asturias Award in 2011:

    Now, you know of my deep association and confraternity with the poet Federico Garcia Lorca. I could say that when I was a young man, an adolescent, and I hungered for a voice, I studied the English poets and I knew their work well, and I copied their styles, but I could not find a voice. It was only when — when I read, even in translation, the works of Lorca that I understood that there was a voice. It is not that I copied his voice; I would not dare. But he gave me permission to find a voice, to locate a voice; that is, to locate a self, a self that that is not fixed, a self that struggles for its own existence.

    The speech is a beautifully crafted admixture of jokes and seriousness, reflecting an interior monologue of his love of Lorca and Spain, but acutely conscious of shall we say some of the sensitivities of his audience.

    He also reveals how a Spanish guitar teacher in the space of three lessons taught him the rudiments of Flamenco that proved crucial to his style:

    He said “Let me show you some chords.” And he took the guitar and he produced a sound from that guitar that I’d never heard. And he — he played a sequence of chords with a tremolo, and he said, “Now you do it.” I said, “It’s out of the question. I can’t possibly do it.” He said, “Let me put your fingers on the frets.” And he — he put my fingers on the frets. And he said, “Now, now play.” It — It was a mess. He said, “I’ll come back tomorrow.”

    As he put it: ‘It was those six chords — it was that guitar pattern that has been the basis of all my songs and all my music.’

    Sadly after completing this initiation Cohen discovered that his mysterious teacher had taken his own life:

    I knew nothing about the man. I — I did not know what part of Spain he came from. I did not know why he came to Montreal. I did not know why he stayed there. I did not know why he he appeared there in that tennis court. I did not know why he took his life. I — I was deeply saddened, of course.

    Early Songs

    The initial albums stemming from his poetry are a chronicle of loners, romantic love, beautiful losers – to use the title of his defining 1966 book – and are decidedly non-political. They are a kind of erotic tablet and backdrop to a very different age.

    The songs are a soundtrack to Robert Altman’s masterful revisionist Western ‘McCabe and Mrs. Miller’ (1971) in which the doomed love of the interloping property baron (played impeccably by Warren Beatty) and the hooker with a heart (played by Julie Christie).

    It is a film of stunning autumnal clarity and candour but wistful nevertheless. We meet a bygone age, though strangely redolent of our age of boom and bust. Gentleman outsider capitalists should be wary of their surroundings. Will of the wisp behaviour. As we will see Cohen saw these hard times coming.

    Those songs of romantic disappointment such as ‘So Long Marianne’ and ‘Suzanne’ are often hymns to ex-lovers. Cohen was a ladies’ man which probably brought some reputational damage. Although thankfully he was Canadian rather than Irish, otherwise this sensuality would have been crucified.

    He seems to have required muses in orbit to function creatively. The well of inspiration was often carnal or at least he needed the mother lode to function.

    In his famous comeback tours, after being liquidated by a dodgy business partner, he was surrounded on stage by a bevy of ex-lovers and chanteuses, at least when I saw him in Kilmainham in Dublin. He collaborated with some and slept with others. Surprisingly these ex-lovers did not seem to resent him. By all accounts he was a charming man and curiously self-reflexive about his predilection for the other sex, best captured in ‘Death of a Ladies Man’.

    By all accounts, including the way he treated his children, he was in general a lovely man. Yet those earlier songs have almost become caricatures. It is the later songs, particularly those after he came back from the Buddhist retreat that gain the most traction.

    Hallelujah and Politics Protest Songs

    Perhaps the defining song of that pre-retreat period was ‘Hallelujah’ (1984), memorably covered by Jeff Buckley, the suicidal chanteuse of incompletion. The blending of the spiritual and the erotic are well captured in the opening stanza.

    I heard there was a secret chord
    that David played and it pleased the Lord
    But you don’t really care for music, do you?

    And then God and faith but faith in romance and carnality:

    Well your faith was strong but you needed proof
    You saw her bathing on the roof
    her beauty and the moonlight overthrew you

    And an intense religious ambiguity:

    Maybe there’s a God above
    but, all I’ve ever learned from love
    was how to shoot somebody who outdrew you?

    It is a spiritual odyssey and not for the last time a conversation between Cohen and God, although in the case of Cohen a belief in the divine was Buddhist, hence the ill-advised decampment to a Buddhist monastery ostensibly to see out his end of days. His work tells of a spiritual journey evoking a divine disapproval that might be traced to the Jewish tradition.

    I saw Jesus on the cross on a hill called Calvary
    “Do you hate mankind for what they done to you?”
    He said, “Talk of love not hate, things to do – it’s getting late.
    I’ve so little time and I’m only passing through.”

    I sense that Cohen believed that God, if he exists, thinks of him as a naughty boy and recalcitrant artist. It is vastly different to Dylan’s political engagement or indeed Dylan’s much more fearful and eschatological sense of God. So Cohen was spiritual, but not a defined believer. A fence sitter.

    The political songs come later and are as angry as Dylan’s. ‘Democracy’ (1992) sounds an initially optimistic note:

    It’s coming through a hole in the air
    From those nights in Tiananmen Square
    It’s coming from the feel
    That this ain’t exactly real
    Or it’s real, but it ain’t exactly there
    From the wars against disorder
    From the sirens night and day
    From the fires of the homeless
    From the ashes of the gay
    Democracy is coming to the USA

    But this move to utter despair in the apocalyptic warnings of ‘The Future’ (1992).

    Things are going to slide, slide in all directions
    Won’t be nothing
    Nothing you can measure anymore
    The blizzard, the blizzard of the world
    Has crossed the threshold
    And it has overturned
    The order of the soul
    When they said (they said) repent (repent), repent (repent)
    I wonder what they meant
    When they said (they said) repent (repent), repent (repent)
    I wonder what they meant
    When they said (they said) repent (repent), repent (repent)
    I wonder what they meant
    You don’t know me from the wind
    You never will, you never did
    I’m the little Jew
    Who wrote the Bible
    I’ve seen the nations rise and fall
    I’ve heard their stories, heard them all
    But love’s the only engine of survival
    Your servant here, he has been told
    To say it clear, to say it cold
    It’s over, it ain’t going
    Any further
    And now the wheels of heaven stop
    You feel the devil’s riding crop
    Get ready for the future
    It is murder

    It’s a dirge worth quoting in full that is redolent of doom, and a world disorder upon us. God is more readily embraced, but as in Dylan’s album Slow Train Coming (1980) we have met the God of retribution and vengeance. The God of the Old Testament.

    The only song of equivalent outrage in Dylan’s oeuvre are possibly ‘Hurricane’ (1975), and certainly the recent song about bankers ‘Early Roman Kings’ on Tempest (2012).

    Cohen’s ‘Closing Time’ (1992) also senses the end of days and that the shooting match is over.

    loved you when our love was blessed
    I love you now there’s nothing left
    But Closing Time.

    However, my favourite song and to my mind his greatest work is ‘Dance Me To The End Of Love’ (1996). I listen to it regularly and I find it most apt for our times.

    Today we seem like shadow dancers, ghosts, marionettes spinning towards oblivion. It is most relevant to our plague-driven times.

    Dance me to the children who are asking to be born
    Dance me through the curtains that our kisses have outworn
    Raise a tent of shelter now, though every thread is torn
    Dance me to the end of love

    So Cohen still has much to say from beyond the grave, and his death left popular song without one of its titans. Dylan now almost has the stage to himself as a probing popular commentator in this genre.