Chronicle of a Journey to the Dark Side of the Earth: Part 6

Habeas Corpus

A crowded bus with its suspension askew rattles by on its way to the factory, the air inside rank with sweat and cigarette smoke and garlic‑ginger farts.  Faces peer out through the fogged and dirty windows, each lost in solitude, reflecting perhaps on fickle generosity, or with anticipation for pungent, steaming dumplings dipped in vinegar for lunch, or the exuberant madness of the New Year's pyrotechnics, or sad little sister's second husband, who beats her when he drinks.

            Transcendence is no longer possible outside the privacy of the mind.  Privacy is no longer possible outside of dreams.  The process of experiencing aliveness has been anaesthetized.  Sensation is numb.  Uniqueness is anomaly.  Solitude and a sense that all is fate, anxiety, joy that lacks laughter, sorrow that lacks tears, depression, pain, despair and cruelty; these are the themes.  Every anonymous death has left a lingering echo.

            The neat lines dividing the periods of history are but an illusion.  There are ox ghosts afoot on the remote, dusty, yellow earth.  Mythical monsters incarnate, their fangs and lips are bloody from having gorged on children.  Spiritual culture is as bleak as an endless sea of dry grass that undulates and ripples under a perpetual wind that howls to the horizon in all directions.  People are adrift in a void of ignorance with nothing left to believe in.  Humiliation and degradation are the constant and inescapable facts of existence.

            In the absence of either rules or common sense, individual functionaries have been reduced to doing only what is expected by those above them in the highly centralized structure, to whom it has become absolutely clear that political power flows from the barrel of a gun.  Social justice is subject to the semi‑coherent whims of aging strongmen, who are hooked to infusions of rhinoceros horn and ginseng and little brown balls of opium, and herbal medicines that taste like a dank basement, enhanced by doses of calcium and crushed pearls, arsenic, saffron and musk, and applications of lion and bear fat, castor oil and carbolic acid, mustard oil and oil of cloves and a diet including turtle eggs and the testicles of goats, to abet the rape of illiterate village girls with pretty faces.

            In excess of thirty million people starved to death. The half‑completed, then abandoned, blocks of inadequately conceived industrial enterprises covered with soot and coal dust remain as a legacy.  The grotesque chunks of frozen masonry are like a fantasy of the post‑nuclear landscape.  Mighty rivers spring to life in the high mountains, only to reach the sea, covered in a black, oily scum, putrid with sewage and tossing up green, orange, yellow, frothy, chemical foam.

            In the grey deep‑freeze of a spiritual winter, old slogans and empty rhetoric recycle endlessly in the editorials.  The evening news announcer begins his broadcast by addressing his audience as "comrade viewers."  The current ideological task, says the television, is to convince the youth that communism is superior to capitalism.  There is only one right idea.  Superiors will dictate and inferiors will do what they are told.  Those who brought habeas corpus cases on behalf of people who had disappeared have all themselves disappeared.


To be continued...

Stones of a Prescribed Weight

As the plane banks for its final approach to Tehran’s Mehrabad Airport, the women aboard transform themselves.  Every trace of makeup has been carefully wiped away during visits to the toilet. Head scarves are tightened along with seat belts. While they may have boarded as Asian beauties, each and every one is a picture of Muslim modesty in the line for the passport check to enter the Islamic Republic.

            Of all the changes that have swept Iran during the more than three decades since the fall of the shah, those that have affected women are the most visible symbols of the regime that came to power. The transformation was both complete and abrupt, considering that the tradition of hejab – Islamic covering for women – had all but died out in Iran, at least for the urban majority, at the time of the revolution.

            A glance through almost any middle class family photo album reveals all the familiar snaps. There are wedding days with brides in white, girls in bathing suits at the beach and lovers holding hands.  Women appear in sun dresses, tennis shorts and the full range of female hair styles.

            Leaf further back in time and it is obvious that the ‘60s hit Iran with many of the same phenomena that Europe and North America experienced. Adolescent boys sported long hair and bell-bottoms. Girls wore mini-dresses. It is only when one gets back to the faded, yellow photographs of grandparents and great-grandparents that one begins to see head coverings on the women.

            The effects of rapid industrialization and urbanization on the country, together with a 1934 ban on the chador by Reza Shah, the last shah’s father, had removed the custom from all but the most traditional sectors of society. Indeed, through most of the ‘60s and ‘70s, particularly in the middle-class areas of Tehran, while women covered to attend the mosque, it was the prostitutes who habitually wore the chador, not for religious reasons, but to cover the skimpy costumes of their trade.

            During the final days of the monarchy, however, wearing a head scarf became a symbol of political protest. Because there was such widespread discontent and because Ayatollah Khomeini, a religious man, was able to focus this discontent, women took to wearing the scarf during the street demonstrations out of respect for the perceived spiritual aspects of the uprising.

            While a sizable minority of women embraced this return to traditional values with enthusiasm, many soon found themselves trapped unwillingly behind the veil. As radical fundamentalists hijacked what had started as essentially a middle class revolution, patrols of Revolutionary Guards appeared on the streets, meting out instant justice to those who failed to comply with the new moral order.

            Although enforcement is extremely haphazard, the penalties for transgression are severe. From time to time, newspapers publish a menu of torments – 70 lashes for lipstick, 40 lashes for eye makeup or nail polish.

            Those caught in more serious violations of the moral code, prostitutes, for example, or even just unlucky lovers, are in deep trouble. They are buried up to the neck in sand with their head covered. A hundred local people, marshaled by the religious authorities, are then gathered in a circle around them and throw stones of a prescribed weight.

The Smart Money

How can anyone take free trade seriously? Clearly no one in any government or the global corporate world does. The parts of the world economy that are able to compete internationally are primarily the state-subsidized ones: resource extraction, capital-intensive agriculture, high-tech industry, weapons, etc. The irony is that research and development is paid for with taxes, while anything marketable is taken over by the private sector. This combination of public subsidy and private profit is called free enterprise. It’s a sad state of affairs when the best investment advice urges oil futures, and shares in weapons manufacturers and privatized water. But that’s where the smart money seems to be going.

After All

The false prosperity that the West has enjoyed since it began its rise to world dominance at the end of the medieval period was fueled initially by plunder. Think of the Spanish in Mexico and Peru. Think of the British in Bengal and North America.

            Once this dominance began to stabilize in the face of colonialism and the emergence of capitalism, the system ran on exploitation.  Think of the slave trade.  Think of Indian cotton, woven in Manchester and sold back to the Indians.

            Most recently, the system has been powered by unprecedented amounts of debt.

            Initially, this debt was relatively easy to come to terms with, partly by virtue of the fact that its relative size diminished in relation to that of the expanding economy, and partly through inflation, which reduced the significance of the actual amount of the debt in relation to the amount of money in circulation.

            The problem is, of course, that debt, even when created out of thin air, like a Treasury bill, is effectively a promise tied to some sort of resource.  It is based on the idea that something will eventually be produced and sold by someone in order to generate the capital required to pay the debt.

            Unfortunately there are now non-negotiable constraints on economic expansion.  Even the desperate optimism of the political and financial classes will not save the situation. After all, there is no law that the exceptional rise of the West and the asymmetrical distribution of global resources must continue.

Chronicle of a Journey to the Dark Side of the Earth: Part 5

Too Gruesome to Run

There are mobs of lepers, blind people, the maimed and the crippled.  In addition to whiffs of burning, a close approximation to whatever brimstone smells like, the sharp stink of festering shit and stale urine hangs over these slums of gobbed and spittled pavements and knotted, sooty, noisy, honking traffic, drought, then flooding, disease then hopelessness.

            Confronted by a gruesome, thrusting, leprous stump, a nightmarishly eroded face, pleading, streaming eyes, we shake off the beggar children clinging like tenacious burrs, their filthy fingers in our pockets. The only sanctuary for meditation is a stinking latrine, the noises outside coming from the traffic of whores and soldiers and dogs fighting in the dusty street, and the grinding wheels of the carts, piled high with swaying people and baggage and dirty bedrolls and lolling children, pulled by desperate, frightened, wide-eyed, wild horses and donkeys with toast-rack ribs, the flies swarming over the sores in their hides made by the constant rubbing of the harness, all fleeing for their lives.

            We are having documentaries instead of dreams. Each night the same images: people weeping, others bleeding, eruptions of cruelty and savagery, enduring injustices and callousness, bewilderment, shame, sorrow and pointlessness.

            A man was arrested for riding a train without a ticket.  He spent the next thirty years in jail awaiting trial because his case papers had been misplaced.

            There are thousands of refugees pouring into the city in advance of the invading army. Armed squatters are stealing other people’s homes. A new and more malevolent breed of gunmen is emerging onto the streets. Hundreds of civilians are dying in the bombing raids, more than half of them women and children who are not, and can not be, criminals or terrorists or any other kind of enemy.

            Reporters speak from their hotel balconies, the smoke from the burning slums nicely framed against the clear blue sky in the background.

            “As political alternatives have been eliminated,” they say, “the difficulty of deciding has been compounded by the difficulty of living with what has already been decided. The stagnation of the state has given rise to an alienated politics which oppresses rather than liberates.”

            Thus the stage is set for an epic catastrophe. All the elements of farce and tragedy, from hubris and delusion to final calamity are in place. Officers dine at high table in their ambassador’s ruined residence, their red wine served by liveried waiters, their table graced by attractive women.

            A glad-handing politician in the face of a full-scale legitimacy crisis passes through a hostile crowd followed by a camera. People can smell his sweat.

            “This is your land. These are your houses, your meadows and gardens, your memories,” he tells them. “The nation is glorious, its people steadfast.”

            From which direction will death explode in on him? Will it be a smiling, handshaking, garlanded suicide bomber like with Rajiv? Chopped down by rifle fire from her bodyguards, like Rajiv’s mom? A cool sniper, with or without a conspiracy, as with JFK and King? Strung up in the marketplace like Najibula? Cut down in a cold rain of hot angry lead like Mr. and Mrs. Ceausescu? Bazooka-ed in exile in his Mercedes, like Somoza? Loneliness and pneumonia in a filthy, freezing, concrete cell like Liu Shao Chi?  Whichever, there’s anticipation that unpredictably, one day the crowd will turn like a pack of dogs.

            The photographs show severed heads and dismembered corpses, amid the rubble of ruined villages, each a Golgotha, a Guernica, some with dead cows and horses, most too gruesome to run, even in the back pages.


To be continued...

Thinking the Unthinkable

The era of ever-increasing rates of resource extraction, manufacturing and consumption is over, done, finished, for good.  Only charlatans, fools and the willfully blind, claim to believe otherwise.

            So too is the exponential growth of technology which is running up against the finite amount of wisdom so far accumulated by the sciences.  There will be further refinements, no doubt, as the last few pieces of the puzzle of the material universe fall into place, but no more big game-changing great leaps, as there were, for example, with the harnessing of fire, the invention of moveable type, the development of steam power, or even, most recently, the emergence of the digital.

            Both phenomena are only blips on the timeline of human history in any case.  We have spent countless millennia living in static economic environments, making little or no technical progress.  The past three hundred years or so have been an anomaly.

            Thomas Malthus was right.  Economic growth in the long term is now out of the question. In a world in which the human population grows faster than the economy there will always be a looser for every winner.  Moreover, the losers will naturally suspect the winners of taking unfair advantage, if not of outright racketeering, and in most cases they will be right.  As world population peaks about midway through the present century, in the face of the inevitable competition for food, water and fuel, the losers will also be largely dead.

            The economic order is neither just nor sustainable.  Everywhere the globalizing free market squeezes the middle class, enriches small elites and broadens the membership of the excluded.  At current rates of consumption and population growth, global economic collapse is imminent.  Do the math.  It’s time to begin thinking the hitherto unthinkable.

High Art and Low

Consider this music called jazz. With its social and cultural origins among the illiterate and more or less despised and dispossessed African diasporas of the southern American states: brothel pianists, nomadic cotton pickers, watchers of passing trains and steamboats, street-corner guitar players, out-casts and strumpets, it has expanded and evolved to include a cultural community that today cuts across boundaries of age, sex, economic status, vocation, ethnicity and the state. The most vital in the abundance of contemporary music, jazz has become established world-wide as the mother vernacular of urban popular music.

Globally, jazz complements each individual cultural musical tradition by offering a universality that has not become lost in vulgarity and self-reference. More importantly, the value that jazz musicians attach to innovation leads most to hold a view of composition and music history that is truly global in scope. Just as jazz was born in America in an amalgam of African and European Diasporas, it has continued the practice of absorbing different musical influences and has remained capable of absorbing new traits without sacrificing either its dignity or identity.

In a global cultural landscape in which popular music has become increasingly strident, aggressive and barren, jazz continues to exalt the simple charm of existence without much demand for reflection on the part of the listener. With the music of contemporary high culture becoming progressively rarefied, abstract and minimal, leaving room for only highly sublimated emotions, jazz, by its raw exuberance, brings an element of balance. It is at once both high art and low; the true classical music of the global, post-modern age and also its genuine folk expression; through its various fusions the living, growing, musical incarnation of the global cultural personality, its once oral traditions of generational transmission now accomplished electronically.

If jazz has any purpose, it is a way to discover, to create, and to define a missing part within human beings related to what it means to be human. In this sense, jazz could be called an existentialist art. Jazz musicians create their essence by playing jazz, as both the global classical music of post-modernity and as its folk music.

Tracking the Changes

The pace of change began to pick up after the soldiers in Little Rock, after Elvis appeared in black and white from the waist up on the Ed Sullivan Show, (white-bread America missing the point that the point was those thrusting hips), and those changes continued and accelerated and gathered momentum as part of the rights of cultural passage from Eisenhower through the sacrificial Kennedy to Nixon, when Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters displaced Dale Carnegie as the arbiters of the ethos.

We all thought the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution actually had something to do with culture, and we were vaguely in favor of that. We downed quantities of peyote and mescaline and LSD and wrestled with insight while watching the dark clouds of enlightenment hanging over angry orange sunrises through bloodshot eyes. There were black and red posters of Che in his beret, and one that said Electric Circus in day-glo letters that shone in the dark.

Beatles, Doors, topless, bottomless, Nixon, Cambodia, Kent State. Coltrane died in sixty-seven. We let a wispy-haired, blue-jeaned, cowboy-booted, Yankee draft-dodger sleep on our floor for a week that summer. He never once took off his leather jacket, even though it was hot. Experience was something that could be occupied, taken possession of, known in its moment-to-moment quality, its texture, its delight and its terror.

Were there any of us of that generation who were not skewed and exhilarated and disillusioned by the simple awareness of ourselves against the backdrop of 1968? Doctor King’s dream moved us deeply, and we felt an enthusiastic agreement when Maharishi Mahesh Yogi said, with one of those distinctively Indian waggles of his head, “If we are blessed with the ability to have desires, why should we not also have the right to try and realize them?”

But the very pretence of revolutionary solidarity itself vanished, as the Woodstock nation mutated into Altamont amid phosphorescent parodies of pop paintings inspired by the mindless minimalismof modern art. It was the end of May, 1969, when the self-consciously and perhaps arrogantly named Art Ensemble of Chicago, having come to the conclusion that the American mid-west was exhausted of creative possibilities, left for Europe.

The beliefs that we might have clung to had been cancelled by the advances of science. We were metaphysical vagabonds, lost souls in a state of confusion. God was well and truly dead. What passed for spirituality was simply an outpouring of words and style; a mixture of pop psychology, recycled hippie philosophy, scraps of Hindu claptrap,* cultural-specific nonsense and Judeo-Christian contradictions.

*Jagganath means lord of the universe. It is one of the names of Krishna in his incarnation as Vishnu. He’s a democratic socialist. All castes are equal before him. And he crushes them, every one.

The Distant Past

I can still remember how it ended. The twentieth century, I mean. We were free to make whatever moves the constraints of physics and chemistry permitted. Amid dreams and visions, signs and wonders, everything was relative, value neutral. All behaviour was culturally relative and socially constructed.

We all knew, after all, that social reality is a kind of collective evolving fiction, constructed and maintained by the processes of socialization, institutionalization, tradition and everyday social interaction, all through the medium of language, the jostling world-views of different social classes, religions, cultures, media exposures, and so on, to be escaped only through drugs and alcohol, religious transcendence, psychotherapy perhaps, schizophrenia or love. Only then do our hallucinations and fantasies become real, and metaphors become literal.

Thus everyone's actions were morally equivalent to everyone else's actions. Heroes acted out of self-interest, just as criminals did. The guy who risked his life racing into the burning building to save the child was no better than the arsonist who had set the blaze. There were almost no taboos left to transgress. After Tito died, the Croatian authorities renamed the streets after Fascist leaders.

Some of us aspired to a refined hedonism, a celebration of luxury, of the pleasure of satisfying desires in the most refined way, with no expense spared. Others of us scrounged in litter bins, hoping to find the remnants of a Big Mack or a sweet-and-sour takeaway that the flies and rats had not already commandeered. There was the texture of plastic and new-age philosophy, the re-release of Star Wars and the re-appearance of flared trousers, all parts of a kind of nostalgia industry for the increasingly recent past, to fill the void that lay at the heart of experience.

How Things Stand

The current thinking is that at the center of stars, the primordial stuff is squeezed so tightly that it fuses; becoming stuff that’s slightly less primordial and that weighs an infinitesimal bit less than the original primordial stuff. This tiny difference in mass is released as radiant energy. We sense the heat. We see the light. We feel the beat.

         Among the people who think about these things, most seem to believe that the universe will continue to expand forever. That is to say, no big crunch; that the possible future or futures stretch much farther ahead than the fourteen billion or so years of the past that have so far accumulated, notwithstanding the idea that there might be no theoretical limit to the size of a hydrogen bomb, or a reactor meltdown, these being fuelled by the most plentiful element in the universe.

We can even go as far as to say that hydrogen has a single proton with one electron orbiting it.

No. But wait. We shouldn't say orbiting anymore. That would be seeing things through the frame of the outdated and discredited Rutherford model. It seems we would be much closer to the truth if we said, more or less hovering around it, or associated with it, in a fuzzy and indistinct sort of way. But even so, we can still feel an exhilarating certainty that hydrogen has one proton with an electron more or less hanging around with it.

Things were once much simpler. The trees of Eden bore both fruits and flowers in the same season. The first realization of Adam and Eve, after eating the forbidden fruit, was that they were naked. They found themselves harvesting the fig tree, for its leaves, not for the figs.