Shit Hole Country: thoughts

I watched "Panic in Needle Park," about New York addicts, and I thought, this is not a great work of art because it doesn't adequately call into question what to me is obvious. I have the privilege of having seen, a bit through living there, and quite a bit through my acquaintance with cinematic representations, something of Europe and other parts of the world, that I can instantly see what is wrong with the social world of addicts and street hustlers in this film: These people are not unusual at all, their lives are just a more painfully, dangerously, and miserably (misery in the sense of poverty) instance of a paradigm.

A paradigm is an example that is revealing about the larger set of possibilities it is an example and extract of. It is exemplary, it is telling. Not a representation, which refers to what it exemplifies as an object and so might be called true or false (show us the evidence, or we'll think you'll lying, or just expressing your own, irrelevant, opinion), nor an allegory, in which a situation is figured by something in a different medium or form, but something that is part of a whole from which it stands out as more pronounced than the rest but otherwise revealing something of its character. Like a neighborhood in a city. Junkies in New York are not so very different from business people in any other place in this country, including places that look and feel very different at least superficially.

Hustlers? Every man for himself? I was thinking the film could have been called "Shit Hole Country," leaving it ambiguous and for the viewer to wonder about just what is the domain represented by the concept "country," which could be a bunch of farmlands or (as in the film) a park bench on a major street, or whatever.

I admit I've also been looking at the films of Frederick Wiseman. I'm sure he loves people and their milieus like every documentarian and has the patience of the kind of artist or activist who was maybe outraged momentarily in their adolescence and then grew up and went to hard work doing good things for people the rest of their working lives. I think of those doctors with Médecins sans Frontières who go to war zones like Gaza to try, often in vain, to save lives at great risk to their own, while myself and other people I know and respect get angry, rant in bars or on FB, or maybe do a few things (I translated one piece on the war). There's plenty to be outraged about, so now go to work, and that's your new normal. I admit I never entirely got over the outrage. At least I cannot see films like Wiseman's about America without feeling what is not just an outrage but a despair, knowing that what to me is so ugly about much of the society I grew up in and still have to deal with, most Americans don't find it so bad. As the people I grew up with did not. How could they, is there some alternative? What the hell would that be? Maybe that only means getting off completely; any expression of total dissatisfaction would be that of a will to suicide, so the social workers can come rushing in to protect you from becoming a teenage dissident. I think total dissatisfaction of the kind that might have no "individual solution" other than a purely destructive one may also be the starting point of meaningful art, especially in our time.

There are of course places where entire political parties that once might capture close to half the vote will at least say that they are for something else, but we don't have that here. And if we did? Who knows. But we don't.

Do you like Bernie Sanders? He, or some of his young aides working on his books, suggested that angry young people who don't want to become democratic socialists (would you like to find a barricade under some other name, left wing, right wing, who cares?) should be locked up because they are a danger to society. But capitalism is a danger to society, not disaffected workers; his aide should reread some of the supposed founding texts. Was punk a danger to society? Isn't there some "socially useful" way in which art can and should be?

Yes, Virginia, it has a name: capitalism. In capitalism, it is normal to live for yourself and your own success (and maybe that of your family). That's what people work for. "The American dream." The good life in our society is success. Sometimes when I used to hear people, including other students at my college (supposedly a great university, about which claim I can attest that at any rate there were some great profs teaching interesting courses and we were high in the rankings), say this, I would want to ask, "success at what?" "Huh?" is the reply I'd expect. Why at whatever you want. Do what you like, it's a free country, says the cop, as he moves his hand down to his gun.

The drug dealers in this film are small time crooks whose real ambition is not much beyond basically coping. If they're in the business, it's to make enough to pay the bills, and the habit. And what's the about? It's a consumer good, it satisfies a promise of happiness.

Capitalism in its colonialist phase popularized sugar and spice and other things nice. Coffee and sugar and other mood-affecting drugs became big business, and the trade in them helped drive the system, along with plantations, those in Europe employing people who were treated a little better than the slaves their ancestors on those same plantations might have been, and others who were actual slaves and treated a lot worse. We live in a country where many people are still angry about the latter, or at least they say and believe that's what they're angry about. I imagine some of them were, like me, products of dysfunctional families in conditions that were poor enough that buying a record was a very big deal and no one bought books. My mother and stepfather were teachers, but they didn't read much or buy books, and there were no good bookstores or libraries, or if there were, I didn't hear about them. When I went to live with my Dad when I was 14 because I didn't take well to my stepfather's violence, he had me spend a summer in a library. He didn't want to pay a babysitter, and professors unlike school teachers don't get the summers off. He bought me a book on baseball when I was little, so I dutifully learned all the rules and thought what the fuck, and after college when I worked at all these shitty jobs in these offices, he kept sending me books about what I was supposed to think and do: power-of-positive-thinking protestant tracts on how to be successful and happy, and middlebrow manifestos by right-wing political pundits he liked. My parents were wonderful in some ways but though they knew their son was smart, they mainly wanted me to do what I was told and get gold stars and work for a statue. I learned a lot from them that was positive as role models, but when were trying to tell me what to do...well, I don't believe a good father or mother is a kind of boss. Parents could also be teachers, but most are bosses. Since my father wanted me to do things with my life that weren't me, he was a bad boss and worse, a tyrant, a second stepfather, which was, as it if often is definitionally, a tyrant. When you are a bit of an orphan, you are very sensitive to how people treat you and you may never quite get over that. If like many Americans you have this hatred of tyranny, that is, unjust authority, you will find that you often feel like, and if you analyze the situation you see that you were, fucked over. That's common in America because the society is in fact one of authoritarianism where everyone is supposed to obey not just the boss of the team but the expectations of the other team players, and our ideologies are mostly psychology and rhetorical, or sales-oriented, so that most Americans are clueless about what is wrong with our society. Though I do believe I have this sense in common with many black people: the dysfunctional family leaving you a bit of an orphan, or feeling like one, and a keen sense of injustice, a hatred of tyranny. Most black people I have not been able to get along with, because they usually haven't liked me. But see there is something we have in common and it actually goes beyond race, racial ideas just add to the mix, they are not totally the cause. Though the history of slavery partly is because it underlies the authoritarianism of American family and work life. American uses of religion also play a role in that, and they were rendered far more extremely authoritarian by slavery and we're still living with that, which is why the anti-abortion and anti-sexuality (thus also anti-gay) tendencies of American Christianity, including its Catholic variants which wound up being often not that different, are rooted in the South. Now we have a society that is basically a Boss's State and people are often expected to just want some form of sugar, spice, or coffee: something to make you feel good. Happiness in little commodifies that promise satisfaction, enjoyment, a getting on or off, interesting metaphors if you think about it. Related to this is another big business (because of course the drug trade is big capitalism, and is run by mafiosi who launder their money in and are otherwise totally integrated into the very same billionaire corporate apparatus that sells you everything else you might want). That is the health care system. People are sold what they need to feel happy, and what they need to stay alive or maximum the health of their bodies and minds so that they can do their jobs and pay for the goods. Bobbie and Helen are little victims of this who don't matter very much to anyone except maybe each other and maybe the viewers of this film, and tomorrow they'll be gone and maybe not even mourned at all, and if so they won't be mourned in grand museums erected to celebrate the victory of the good guys in the last great war that was driven in fact by the question of which companies in which country and which system organized by what political principles would organize the trade in sugar and coffee and their modern equivalents, but we saved the Jews, which was a wonderful afterthought, along with some Gypsies and others who don't count so much because they don't have a lot of money and social power and aren't an excuse to operate some war in a foreign country, though if they had an army there that was situated to help manage oil resources then maybe they would count more. (For the record, I am for and not against Holocaust remembrance; I just want us to be talking about some other things too, including what we are not thinking or asking about when we're going on about that, and proudly, I might add).

There is a domain of thought today that enables writers and artists to talk quite readily and easily about what is problematic about American society and, not as if we were opposing to it something else, but as people who are enough in it that we can think about what its problems are in very deep ways. That domain of thought is a theoretical tradition, now fairly ample and with quite a bit on offer to study and think about and use in the critical toolkit, and it, for better and worse, seems to have a specific historical location: Europe. This theory is European. What I try to do when I think about film is work within this tradition, even when I am discussing American films. The personal affects of doing this include making me feel further alienated from American society and most of the other Americans that I have met and do meet, even in the art world. There seems to me to be a fundamental common sense that we don't share. I don't always share it with other people who work in France or elsewhere in Europe, or were educated there, as I partly was, but I sometimes do. And yet since cultural nationalism, which is what the insistence on any cultural specificity ultimately is, is a dead end, so I don't want to wind up making some stupid plea for being from this place rather than that, which is not that much better than, nor different from perhaps, the identity-political ways of thinking about such things in American discourse that are often about race, gender, sexuality, or some other identity, including religion and whatever else is the identifier, for American Jews, whom I often like being around but who also don't share this European left intellectual common sense, let's call it that. And I don't know what to do about this except recognize that I will always have some friends, and some people will like what I write, though in social interactions of any kind with people in America, even in the heart of New York City, I have gotten used to feeling a certain disenchantment. That itself might be comic and surely doesn't mean much, but it begins to become more than that if it's a basis of your work in an art or study. But you'll still wonder how to deal with other Americans. I am hopeful about the fact that the critical theory tradition has taken on big in fact in the American art and film world, at least among people who study it. But it's not a native tradition at all. We don't have much of a native intellectual tradition, and we don't have one that is constitutively socially critical. Not in philosophy, certainly, though in Europe philosophy is constitutively socially critical, and has been so increasingly after the French revolution and Hegel, and in the 20th after the two major wars. In America, sociology was a constitutively socially critical tradition; I think its significance is much diminished now, and from what I have seen, those who study that kind of social criticism usually wind up being professional political activists. But it's in the art world that most interesting things are said. In the world of activism, interesting statements are made every few years and they express what is then taken to be the main idea, like a thesis statement in an essay, of what political sociology calls a social movement. We've got that sometimes, we need it, but I think the most interesting things are said in art. But I am still stuck always with this sense: We live in a society that is ugly in its essence, unless we buy a premise of neoliberalism that capitalism is good for us since it allows freedom of expression and then you get some good films sometimes, though they are made for money and soda and most people see them only to "like" them (not as props for thinking about the world, which for me as a critic is the proper use of art, but no one but other critics and some artists likes that idea, so they're you go, you talk about, people won't agree, and anyway what would you talk about?). So the society that is otherwise awful allows us to criticize it on its terms that succeed because they are not read as criticism but only as a way of getting off on a piece of the system that basically shits on people. So I conclude that what I like about American culture is when it functions as a way of criticizing a society I don't like. I realize that isn't nice. Sorry. You can have your soda, it's ok. I'll go back to my writing.

Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness: these are your sacred "rights" as an American. I never figured out how it is any of these are worth much unless of course you use the liberty to pursue your happiness by making money, which sustains your life, in a higher degree of happiness, or at least enjoyments, comfort, and maybe power, which most people like to have some of because they sense that if you're not able to call the shots someone else will be calling yours, and Americans don't like feeling slaves in any sense. That's a truth about us, have you noticed? White and black Americans are not very different in that respect, but only in how this plays out in particular ways with different people and sometimes how they think about this general situation in terms of the distribution of opportunities and goods and so who should be hated because they have what you want or feared because they might think you have what they want. Many left-liberals have this idea that there is this great unfairness of distribution of goods and that these are locatable in social identities that are recognizable in lifestyles, attitudes, and the native hues of complexion that can be attributed to some geographical or historical sociology, perhaps with its handy narratives of what to think and say that seem to justify the bill of annoyances you might draw up in your mind's eye. So we had Affirmative Action and all the politics of moral redistribution driven by resentments that it encouraged, and now we don't, and while some of us might wish that the progressive lefties would come up with some smarter ideas than their musical chairs political thing, it's probably not worth either holding your breath on this or expecting much progress in whatever new direction that might be (transform public school funding away from local property tax to a federal expenditure based on income tax on the principle, which all Republicans will laugh at, that every schoolchild in the nation should get the same education? That's my preference, but I don't expect that to happen soon).

The United States is a business society. I used to blame Protestantism, but to be fair to all the political radicals who took up that banner, as well as this rebel with his theses who quickly realized that God wants people to obey authority and never rebel, and so not only hated women and Jews but sided with the bosses who massacred the rebellious peasants, it's also about what a business society did to Protestantism. Slavery was part of it, but it was capitalism already and after that. I'm not against the God idea, but I do not like what happened to it in America. Talk about God here is talk about obeying the boss. It always was and still is. Liberation and other things can be cooked into it but it's still always about that. I realize there's no arguing with religious people about their religion, not in America, where that's everyone's private property. Catholics and Jews don't get off the hook necessarily. Protestants like them when do the God thing, and that's because it's about obedience. That was always part of Catholicism too unless you're a radical follower of St. Francis or something, and that kind of radicalism often doesn't go very far because soon there's a little cult to the leader, and they tortured people, not a few of them in fact. The psychiatrist in the mental hospital is not there to help the "crazy" person in any way that any person thinking well and clearly about the matter and knowing what these places are about. He's a jailer. He probably doesn't do the torturing, there's a better division of labor now. In the Inquisition, a priest might do the torturing, and their questions are totally intertwined with that, so that it is not possible to understand the intelligibility of that kind of questioning without it. Scholastic philosophy is in part refuted in the material practice of the torture of Jews and heretics. Now we have our torture victims.

America is not Nazi Germany; we're better than that. Isn't that the most marvelous commendation of a society you have ever come upon? We should be proud. We are not presently exterminating eleven million persons, and can be especially proud that we are the very antithesis of this in so many ways. First, we won the war. We didn't fight it to liberate the Jews, and when some of the camps were liberated by American (and Soviet) armies, that was at the end of the war, and did and does serve as a wonderful publicity op and honestly I am not one to knock all advertising. I even believe it is possible to do business in an honest way.

Let me restate that because I consider it important: I believe it is possible to do business in an honest way. I find it remarkable to say this only because I also have noticed that Americans are rarely honest. Americans are rarely honest because our culture is about buying and selling, and that's because it is about succeeding and enjoying. Did you come yet? Oh, that's nice, she said. I mean, that's very nice. It's kind of a relief after all this time. I'm glad you had some satisfaction. I remember that funny song where this man sings that nothing satisfies.

My first quarter at Berkeley I was still living in the homeless shelter. I was doing the mandatory bed sign up routing one evening when I remember a black lady in charge ordered me to sit down. Black people are usually like that, I found, when they are in charge. You have to obey them. I even once was about to buy a motor scooter from a nice young man who told me I had to arrange it with his parents. The mom, who was black, did not appreciate one bit that I thought I could negotiate on the price. She said I wasn't following the rules and what is wrong with you? She really thought something must be wrong with me. I got a lot of that in California then. It wasn't just a black thing, and though it is certainly true that when they are in charge you have to obey them. Or, in fact, they might hurt you. You'll be arrested if they are working in some organization, and God knows what in some informal context. This is not a problem of black people in America, after all they were once slaves, it's a problem of America. So the lady says, excuse me, we HAVE a television. What's your problem. I had a book on my hand for my philosophy class and was hoping to go off to some cafe to read for a while.

But see, poor people are to be given things they need and managed. They must have a problem, they are a problem. Otherwise, why would you be here, or why would I be? I'm here to manage you, that's my job, which means give you orders, and you're the loser, that's your assigned role.

What, did you not read what is written in the text of the menu that was handed to you, I saw you, when you walked in to the joint? The menu of America, Incorporated, and in each paragraph, according to whichever type of thing you want or have or get or give or see or hear or buy or pay for or are paid to do or simply are, because you've read Wallace Stevens, so you know that things merely are. You don't ask questions, things are the way they are and that's just because they are. What could be plainer than that? Here I am my tower my flower the power it's staring right at you man, where they fuck have you been?

So basically the thing to understand about America is everyone is working as part of the team and we all make sure everyone stays in line. And you do what you're told and that's it. Or do you have some kind of fucking problem.

I know maybe you really want pussy. Or dick. Or candy. Or sugar. Or pop. Or a gun to your head. A quick death trip that you can enjoy all the way.

Did you know by the way that this is Buddha. Oh God it's holy. Oh yes. The Tibetan Book of the Dead and these are all the beautiful images that you will see go by the screen of your mind while you're dying and that's, well, it's God. God when you see God, then it's the beautiful stream of images of your life and then you know.

The Inquisitor asks, well don't you want to know? Don't you want to see? You will see it all, you'll know. You'll see God. And pretty much then it's over. But this is also your true self and we know that's what you wanted all along, to see the total and realest image of your own true occulted self finally revealed. What more do you want?

What does anyone want? What could anyone want?

What, you say, maybe it's not for sale? Well, in that case it must be something private and we won't talk about it.

I have an image of a society of business men and women. They are in a business to make money. It offers people anything and everything, provided only that it can be imagined, invented, constructed, packaged, realized, advertised, sold, and if available for free distributed under a profitable surveillance.

It's good in America if you believe in God, because then you might (if you're Catholic) or automatically are (if you're a Protestant who believes, you bought a ticket, right?), a good person, and now you can do your job, and it doesn't much matter then what we do in the business, just do your job, and mind your own business otherwise.

My friends are people who have the moral courage to admit that they live in a society that in its basic structure offers nothing to make a life worth living. The only thing that makes this not a personal moral catastrophe is we try to do something about it, maybe just say something about it. As for being a social catastrophe, I believe it is that, and by definition. I don't wish it were more of one, I do wish that were more recognized, and I must admit I find it a trifle irritating today to recognize that in the main our progressive liberal democrats do not recognize this while only our "extreme" right wingers do. One does doubt that they will do much good and not much that's terrible, simply because while the people, rightly, complaining, are mostly relatively poor, the people who have taken the reigns of government in their name are a bunch of billionaires, some of whom are crooks and mafiosi.

I am invited to realize that if I live in a society now that only honors the mafia way of thinking and living and doing business, one must go along with the way things are. I find that more than distasteful.

Liberals have been saying for decades now that angry people are to blame for the world's problems. Hitler was just an angry psychotic, and that explains Auschwitz. Fascism was something bad people did to good people; Nazism something Germans who didn't think like good liberal Anglo-Americans did to the Jews. (Actually, German culture was different from Anglo-American culture and in ways that French culture also is, and that don’t have Nazism as their own only possible formation). Europeans think about and understand the Holocaust more deeply than Americans, even American Jews. For Europeans, it happened here and is a scandal that calls for thought, while for Americans it happened there and is a crime that can only call for war and policing. For Americans, history is a nightmare from which they awakened when they disembarked from the boat that took them from Europe. The Americans moralize, the Europeans in art problematize. For Americans, one people are victims of some other people who are or were bad, or might be, as they must have a criminal tendency latent in them. I have had good liberal friends in America who think that way; it's laughable. Angry people are a priori criminals? That way of thinking I call right-wing liberalism. I know some nice people who think that way. They aren’t ugly fascists, but nice American liberals. If there were an American Auschwitz, the people who send others there have a smile and are nice, and they may even have in their personal shrine a claim ticket to an ancestral connection to horrifying forms of oppression, killing indeed, and now… Well, they are nice people, and, wishing them well, I said my adieux.

Good corporate executives and other professionals who love God and have nice manners and good intentions did and do have more to do with fascism and the Holocaust, causing it and sustaining it, than angry extremists of the left or the right.

The film I just saw does not show that the society these characters live in is damned beyond redemption, only that maybe they are. The viewer is free to imagine that in an off-screen space he or she might live a very different life, like the Malibu that the screenwriters, the late John Didion and John Gregory Dunne, lived in. They died long before much of it burned down. But that is a different kind of catastrophe. Very different, because it is one you could buy an insurance against and hope to avoid. You could even build a career and life trying to avoid it. That won't keep you from dying. It might mean dying less young than if you were an addict, especially today.

I visited Malibu once, taking the bus to the museum there. I also visited Los Angeles. I remember being shoved around by a waiter from one table to another because I was a smoker then, and in 1976 Southern California was full of self-righteous upper middle class people who certainly knew they had a right to have their breakfast in peace away from something as nasty as cigarette smoke (even from the designated section). I remember other things about this paradise. It was not one. It is not one. It is true that life in nice houses in California and elsewhere is nicer than the life of an addict in New York, and it's also true that the life of a worker in a nice job in a nice company with a good salary is better than the life of an office temp, which is what I became, after graduating with highest honors at the nation's premier public university.

I first got a glimpse of the manner and extent of American society’s being at war against rebellious people like the young person I was when I encountered the lady offering to listen to me talk about what was on my mind at my father’s financée’s church. Only I fear that mention of religious affiliations is a distraction, because they do not name properly either the problem or the solution. The problem I encountered was that social disaffection as might be manifest in rebellious attitudes is considered an illness that must be cured (punished) or managed (policed). Before that I only thought what I did not like was tyrannical persons, like my stepfather, or perhaps institutions if he could be identified with some, and certainly we have theories that are helpful there. But I eventually concluded something that’s even harder to deal with and thus to take: American society is an extreme form of capitalism, and it operates through an apparatus of enforcement that is not only almost impossible to oppose, it probably is the case that it’s even difficult to think clearly about what we might do about it. This surely is a necessary truth. It is embittering to me recognizing that what would be a broad political “left” if it had a deep grounding institutionally in the society not only does not exist, but that whoever and whatever you could have some confidence in at one time did and likely will become doubtful later on. I think that’s why we have art, and why it is so important. Otherwise it would be a pleasant decorative distraction.

America is a police society. My mother and father were nice, they taught me valuable lessons, and I have wonderful memories of them, but much of the time they were thinking and acting like police. (That’s too bad, she says. Yes, I know, everyone should have family who were Nice and that is Good.). The teachers were good sometimes and taught me things but they were also like police. So were my classmates at the schools. The jobs were ok sometimes and the people too, but we were there to do what they told us and otherwise not much and above all we were policed. Most Americans want to be policed, and their social life is based on that. But that too may be nice and somehow part of the good, isn’t everything.

This is a big reason why I have not gotten along with most Black people, who seem to me conservative in this respect, but it’s a crucial. They talk differently when it’s about race, but too often for my tastes that means they aren’t critical of the society except when what’s wrong with them is about them, and then, of course, I either don’t count or we’re back in the realm of policing, aren’t we? And feminism all too often did the same thing: liberation, meaning empowerment, for us, not for you. Jewish conservatives weaponize this identity politics annihilating poor neighbors while nightmaring about something that happened in Europe, fighting people imaged in the media as being like the young men in our ghettos but in the name of some freedom fighter who died in some prison camp in Poland and is celebrated in some other media image as well in some movies and textbooks, and I’m not ambivalent about that. Maybe oppression and liberation are not the concepts we need any more. Is there some other? Philosophy, some say, develops concepts, that can be used to try to make sense of our experience. As art can also do.

There are grand palaces in shit hole countries. I'm sorry, ladies, that I sometimes feel that way. Say that I was just taking the piss. But don't you like the hotel, mister? Yes sir it's fine.