On Wednesday we’ll see whether or not we’re in the same league as Runnersworld.com, Parenting.com, and Backpacker.com, our competitors in the general excellence online category, along with MotherJones.com (which is also oriented around service, though service of a decidedly less commodifiable variety). Start phoning the American Society of Magazine Editors now.
http://www.magazine.org/asme/magazine_awards/index.aspx
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Now I’ve done radio. Specifically, ABC Radio Australia’s “The Book Show,” with the indomitable Ramona Koval. Flailing and attempting to recover, repeatedly:
http://www.abc.net.au/rn/bookshow/stories/2009/2505953.htm
Where does the myth about Franz Kafka’s life meet up with the reality?
The term Kafkaesque refers to perplexing, frustrating, almost absurd experience of bureaucracy and Kafkology has contributed to what some describe as the Kafka industry.
He’s remembered as an emotionally tortured writer whose father was a brute, but his diaries reveal he was prone to exaggeration about his personal misery.
What does any of this have to do with the appreciation of his writing?
Alexander Provan
Founding editor of US online magazine, Triple Canopy.
An Alienation Artist: Franz Kafka and his critics
For The Nation magazine, American writer Alexander Provan explores the line between Franz Kafka’s fiction and his life.
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An Alienation Artist: Kafka and His Critics
By Alexander Provan
February 11, 2009
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20090302/provan
To write aphorisms is to partake of “a minor art of the intellectual asthma,” Austrian author Thomas Bernhard once wrote, “from which certain people, above all in France, have lived and still live, so-called half philosophers for nurses’ night tables…whose sayings eventually find their way onto the walls of every dentist’s waiting room.” The most common complaint among revisionist biographers and doting critics of Franz Kafka is that, in the eighty-odd years since his death, the deification of the writer has reduced his work to the level of the aphorism. If Kafka has not yet found his way onto the walls of every dentist’s waiting room, the photograph of his stony countenance and doleful eyes, so frequently invoked as a stand-in for his vision of the world, sometimes seems to be everywhere else, including the cover of novelist Louis Begley’s recent book-length biographical essay on Kafka, The Tremendous World I Have Inside My Head. His stories are still read widely–less so his novels–but have in the popular imagination been subsumed by a one-word slogan: Kafkaesque. That grainy likeness is its logo.
What is the Kafkaesque? It is the scene described in Kafka’s story “A Report to an Academy,” in which an eloquent ape candidly recounts his arduous path toward civilization: “There is an excellent idiom: to fight one’s way through the thick of things; that is what I have done.” It is, Begley suggests, that familiar existential predicament so often played out by Kafka’s characters, who “struggle in a maze that sometimes seems to have been designed on purpose to thwart and defeat them. More often, the opposite appears to be true: there is no purpose; the maze simply exists.” It is the explosion of the international market for mortgage-backed securities and derivatives, in which value is not attached to the thing itself but to speculation on an invented product tangentially related to (but not really tied to) that thing. It is FEMA’s process for granting housing assistance after Hurricane Katrina: victims were routinely informed of their applications’ rejection by letters offering not actual explanations but “reason codes.” It is the Bush administration’s declaration that certain Guantánamo Bay detainees who had wasted away for years without trial were “no longer enemy combatants” and its simultaneous refusal to release them or clarify whether they had ever been such. It is, as Walter Benjamin wrote, “the form which things assume in oblivion.” “Kafkaesque,” in other words, is a phrase that has come to represent very much about modern life while signifying very little.For some, the haze of the Kafkaesque has become so dense–if not Kafkaesque–as to prevent readers from seeing the real Kafka. In his “definitive biography” Kafka: The Decisive Years, which was translated from the German in 2005, Reiner Stach assembles the available bits of information about the writer’s life between 1910 and 1915 as if they were puzzle pieces, but he finds he has no key, or too many; loath to impose his interpretation of the various facts and accounts (though he must do so occasionally) or to indulge purveyors of the Kafka myth, he leaves the reader with a 600-page buildup to a titular punch line. In Testaments Betrayed, Milan Kundera’s book on various pre-eminent Modernists, the fellow Czech blames Max Brod, Kafka’s friend, biographer and literary executor, for the consecration of Kafka’s body of work. Brod hawked Kafka’s manuscripts as revelation, going so far as to produce a statement during Hitler’s rise to power–signed by Martin Buber, Hermann Hesse and Thomas Mann, among others–imploring publishers to issue Kafka’s collected works as “a spiritual act of unusual dimensions, especially now, during times of chaos.” The rest is history: “Through innumerable prefaces, postfaces, notes, biographies and monographs, university lectures and dissertations,” Kundera writes, “Kafkology produces and sustains its own image of Kafka, to the point where the author whom readers know by the name Kafka is no longer Kafka but the Kafkologized Kafka.” Readers should be up in arms, and perhaps the purest among them will storm the local university, where doctoral students are even now producing narrow interpretations of Kafka’s work that fixate on middling details of his biography and blow them wildly out of proportion. For Kundera, such blasphemy has turned Kafka into “the patron saint of the neurotic, the depressive, the anorexic, the feeble; the patron saint of the twisted, the précieuses ridicules, and the hysterical.”
There is comparatively little fodder for Kafkologists in The Office Writings, a collection of legal and policy papers penned by Kafka during the fourteen years he labored at the Austrian Workmen’s Accident Insurance Institute in Prague. His position at this public company was made possible by what counts, in bureaucracy, as a revolution: the empire-wide compilation of industrial-accident statistics. In a critical essay included in The Office Writings, Benno Wagner suggests that the institute was at the crux of a dramatic shift in legal paradigms. Industrial society required that liability and compensation for increasingly regular workplace injuries be standardized, and devising a system to quantify these occurrences meant substituting “the principle of risk” for “the principle of guilt.” A certain number of accidents would happen regardless, and it no longer made sense to search out the individuals culpable for each shredded limb or paralyzed breadwinner. Instead of adjudicating each incident, the government distributed risk by collecting insurance premiums from employers. When a worker was mutilated or killed, a trained expert compensated him or his family by referring to an actuarial table of payments.
Working in “the Manchester of the Empire,” Kafka proved himself a legal innovator, developing and implementing safety measures and methods of oversight that saved the lives and livelihoods of countless workers. He appealed for the improvement of conditions in quarries, advocated for public assistance to disabled veterans and filed lawsuits against business owners who illegally withheld insurance premiums. And while he complained that the “real hell is there in the office” and, in his epistolary exchanges with friends and lovers, fretted constantly about the obstruction to writing posed by his day job, he also admitted the existence of “the deep-seated bureaucrat” inside him. In technical papers like “On the Examination of Firms by Trade Inspectors” and “Measures for Preventing Accidents From Wood-Planing Machines,” he surveyed the strange terrain his literary work would excavate.
At the fin de siècle, the state bureaucracy already held considerable sway over people’s lives and selves, and Kafka wrote from the center of the age’s contradictions and anxieties. When he assumed his position at the Insurance Institute in 1908, after having spent a dismal year in the employ of Assicurazioni Generali, an Italian insurer, the Dual Monarchy was groaning under a superabundance of paperwork. Legislation enacted in the 1880s had ushered in the European welfare state, and its administration required a massive expansion and modernization of the notoriously sclerotic royal bureaucracy. By the turn of the century, district authorities were processing four times more paperwork than they had been twenty years earlier; the empire was “being suffocated by files and drowning in ink,” wrote the governor of Lower Austria. Meanwhile, the arcane official idiom had become so divorced from vernacular German that the bureaucrats and their charges could hardly communicate. One imagines a cadre of clerks madly dashing off reports and edicts, which would be inevitably eclipsed by newer documents before they arrived at the appropriate filing facility. In Kafka’s last, unfinished novel, The Castle, this flood of imperial documents has so overwhelmed the citadel that the living rooms of village homes have been turned into storage annexes.
The principal subject of Kafka’s novels is not the mess of bureaucracy as such but rather alienation in the age of office jobs, assembly lines and advanced nation-states. Though Begley characterizes Kafka as reliant on fickle inspiration, which only occasionally allowed him unfettered access to what he called his “dreamlike inner life,” his best literary creations, like all dreams, are clearly rooted in the everyday. Drawing primarily on Kafka’s diary and epistolary exchanges with friends and lovers, Begley arrives at the thesis that his life and work are dominated by dichotomies in his psychological makeup: “between strach (‘fear’ in Czech) and toucha (‘longing’)”; between his Jewishness and his German education and literary influences; between the banality of the working day and the inner maelstrom he set out to harness each night. The Office Writings, however, convincingly suggests that his job was also integral to his writing, and that his literary production was not an escape from the alienation of daily life to that “dreamlike inner life” but a striving to reconcile the two.
Of all Kafka’s major works, Amerika: The Missing Person, his first attempt at a novel, bears the least resemblance to the author’s life and contains the least evidence of the personal turmoil Begley takes to be the thread suturing Kafka’s biography and books. Kafka started Amerika in 1911, only to abandon it in 1914. (Max Brod published an edited version of the incomplete manuscript in 1927, three years after Kafka’s death; Mark Harman’s adroit new translation is based on the restored text.) The novel chronicles the misadventures of the exiled German teenager Karl Rossmann, cast off across the Atlantic by his parents after a housemaid who seduced him becomes pregnant and bears his child. It is by turns a picaresque narrative, an archetypal immigrant’s tale, an epic road story, a bleak vision of city life and a sneering take on the “land of plenty.” But though it tracks Karl as he stumbles from job to job, town to town, Amerika is not a coming-of-age novel; if anything, it is a parody of the European Bildungsroman, with a series of mishaps preventing Karl from becoming anything at all, no matter how he tries. (The nameless protagonist of Invisible Man would face similar travails, with comparable results, four decades later.) In this respect Karl is a prototype for Kafka’s later protagonists, whose actions never produce the desired results but rather reveal the gulf between intentions and outcomes.
The book opens with a steamer inching toward New York harbor and Karl standing on its deck gazing at the Statue of Liberty: “The arm with the sword now reached aloft, and about her figure blew the free winds.” Begley unceremoniously dismisses this substitution of Liberty’s torch for a blade as “almost surely” a “slip of the pen.” But given that Kafka declined to alter the sentence in the story’s second printing, Harman’s conjecture in the preface to his translation of Amerika is more credible: the sword provides a deliberate alienation effect, immediately placing the promise of America in quotation marks and situating the reader in a slightly disfigured reality, where metaphorical figures become as palpable and unyielding as concrete and steel.
As the ship docks, Karl becomes involved in a dispute between its stoker and his superior. This, in turn, leads him to his long-lost Uncle Jakob, who fled Germany many years ago as a pauper but has since remade himself as a shipping magnate. Jakob takes Karl in, furnishing him with a piano, a new set of clothes, a tutor, riding lessons and a fine desk “such as his father had wanted for years”; the immigrant boy determines that “one could not hope for pity” in America, but for a short while it seems to him that the fortuitous patterning of life unique to the country might elevate him to the ranks of the wealthy few who “seemed to enjoy their good fortune amid the indifferent faces on all sides.” In this ambivalent state, Karl regards downtown Manhattan from the balcony of his uncle’s elegant apartment, which looks down on a street that is
filled with constantly bustling traffic, which seen from above seemed like a continually self-replenishing mixture of distorted human figures and of the roofs of all sorts of vehicles, constantly scattered by new arrivals, out of which there arose a new, stronger, wilder mixture of noise, dust, and smells, and, catching and penetrating it all, a powerful light that was continually dispersed, carried away, and avidly refracted by the mass of objects that made such a physical impression on one’s dazzled eye that it seemed as if a glass pane, hanging over the street and covering everything, were being smashed again and again with the utmost force.
Before Kafka focused his writing on a specific, native aspect of modernity–the bureaucracy he inhabited–he zeroed in on the Manhattan street scene, where life had been transformed into a blur of speeding machines and spectral selves. Karl is stymied by his first attempt to fathom the city: instead of the boy looking at the skyline as his ship approaches Manhattan, it is the skyline that gazes at Karl “with the hundred thousand windows of its skyscrapers.”
It isn’t long until Karl is down among the masses, having been abruptly banished by his uncle for a trifling transgression. From that point on, his position in life declines precipitously. He rambles north for a while, joining two immigrants named Delamarche and Robinson until their abuse becomes intolerable; he flees and finds work as an elevator boy in a suburban luxury hotel but is eventually fired and stripped of his dignity on account of a drunken visit by Robinson; he soon finds himself running through an array of tenement towers with the police in pursuit, only to be saved by Delamarche–who immediately imprisons him in an apartment that he and Robinson share with an abominable obese singer named Brunelda, so that Karl may become their servant. The text trails off, picking up again at a putative final chapter in which Karl is seeking employment with the chimerical Nature Theater of Oklahama. By this point he is so abraded by his months in America that he refuses to give his real name, instead identifying himself as “Negro,” pleading with the circus’s bureaucrats to cart him off to the country’s unspoiled, unknown interior.
After a few hundred pages, one gets the sense that Karl’s epic journey through the gears of the capitalist machine was perfectly crystallized twenty years later, in Charlie Chaplin’s actual journey through the gears of the capitalist machine in Modern Times. “It was my intention, as I now see,” Kafka wrote in his diary three years after he had stopped working on the book, “to write a Dickens novel, but enhanced by the sharper lights I should have taken from the times and the duller ones I should have gotten from myself.” If London was the epicenter of modernity during Dickens’s lifetime, the incarnation of its most improbable fantasies and lurid failings, by the turn of the century that place was America. Kafka learned about the country through newspaper accounts, travelogues, lectures, silent films and perhaps, as Harman notes, the autobiography of Benjamin Franklin; accordingly, his description of the country is a sometimes inconsistent, if imaginative, assortment of secondhand details glommed onto Dickensian urban tableaus. Nevertheless, Amerika holds within it the basic element of Kafka’s greatness, the ability to project the tremendous world inside his head onto the one we know, as if it were a screen fabricated expressly for that purpose. Within that palimpsest the contours of inner exile emerge: the general alienation that was a byproduct of the industrial age; the particular isolation felt by a Goethe-worshiping Jewish writer at a time when Jews were considered incapable of producing great literature in German; and the angst felt by the first generation of cosmopolitan Jewish intellectuals, for whom, Hannah Arendt observed, “all traditions and cultures as well as all ‘belonging’ had become equally questionable.”
Kafka’s singular insight was that the “rationalization” of society, with the bureaucracy as its engine, was increasingly shaping individuals and relations between them. His genius was to make this observation into something more than a trope or a theme in his writing, to give this new social force a literary form. Whereas Dickens fought a war against the system–the jaundiced High Court of Chancery in Bleak House being the chief battleground–Kafka, knowing there is no other salvation, strove to turn the system on its head, lay bare its operations and have a good laugh at its expense. (Amerika is his most Dickensian novel and, as such, suffers from a paucity of good jokes.) Kafka’s success in this venture has made his name into an emblem of the confounding, dehumanizing logic of modernity, and plenty of ink has been spilled over why this presents a hazard for his readers.
The preponderance of Begley’s book is devoted to a measured account of Kafka’s plodding daily life, neurotic tendencies and manic epistolary exchanges, which are by turns monotonous and excruciating, with the reader always left pitying the women on the receiving end. Begley augments his narrative with humble insights, such as, “The claustrophobia of the world portrayed in his fiction mirrors that of his own existence.” The point seems to be to satisfy the reader’s (and Begley’s) natural curiosity but also to quarantine it. This puts Begley in the odd position of writing a biography partly to prove that, when reading Kafka, one should not rely too heavily on biography. If there is a general argument to be gleaned, it is that this grandson of a kosher butcher from the southern Bohemian village of Wossek embodied the anxieties of the age, while his masterful writing universalized them. Kafka’s image of the world has persisted because he identified a quintessential quality of society and branded it–with a trial, a castle, a bug, a hunger artist, a penal colony. It would be impolitic to fault Kafka, and thus his readers, for the popularity of his conceits; so Begley dutifully chides the Kafkologists for reading The Trial “as a cabalistic parable” and distorting it to fit their “formal literary theory concerns,” and for their “near-total disregard of the aesthetic aspect of [Kafka's] work.” He then concludes, rather lamely, “Some things cannot be explained.”
* * *
James Hawes, in his fatuous polemic Why You Should Read Kafka Before You Waste Your Life, contends that “the less you know about Kafka’s alleged life the greater chance you have of enjoying his superb writing.” All the Kafka you need is in the pages of his books (where Hawes spent many years of his life as a German literature PhD); to look elsewhere only muddles the formal brilliance and psychological acuity of Kafka’s work by placing his writing in the service of what Hawes refers to as “the gatekeepers.” The “adoring biographers” and “theorizing academics” are all “in the same game as the sellers of tourist knickknacks in Prague.”
That resolved, Hawes commences re-education camp, plowing through 200 pages of biography to show us that no details of Kafka’s life are so important as to influence our reading of his books, and because, “being human, we want to find out who made things we admire.” He reveals that Kafka subscribed to highbrow erotic magazines, was a lifelong vegetarian and adhered to the dietary dictates of the “great masticator” Horace Fletcher, who advised his acolytes to chew each bite until it had been turned to a sort of saliva bisque. Kafka also practiced the calisthenics regime of Jens Peter Müller, “the most beautiful man of the new century,” standing nearly naked by his window swinging his arms and legs for ten minutes each day. Hawes seems to think of himself as the Ernest Renan of Kafka studies, undermining the myth machine with a portrait of “the real Franz Kafka, warts, porn, whores, and all,” the one that scholars “don’t want you, dear Reader, to know.”
The myths Hawes aims to debunk include: “Kafka takes us into bizarre worlds”; “Kafka was poor and lonely, or free, and thereby lost”; and “Kafka’s works uncannily predict Auschwitz.” Our actual world is indeed bizarre enough, and Kafka was probably more uncomfortable in his own skin and surroundings than most, if only because he was so acutely sensitive to them. As for Hawes’s last claim, it’s necessary to distinguish between work “predicting” and being “predictive of” the Holocaust, and Kafka’s writing definitely falls into the latter category. In a late-life letter, Kafka expressed wonder at the bureaucracy’s capacity for “the taking of things to a higher level,” of enhancements “springing straight out of the origins of human nature, to which, measured by my case, the bureaucracy is closer than any other social institution.” To achieve the productivity and expansion necessary to industrial capitalism, individuals were absorbed into massive hierarchies without glimpsing their form or limning their purpose. It was this fusion of bureaucracy, technology and power, mobilized to sinister ends, that laid the tracks, built the camps, circulated the propaganda and processed the paperwork of the Third Reich. In this sense, the Holocaust, too, is Kafkaesque.
Ultimately, the bureaucratization of society establishes order without rationality, speeding the satisfaction of the state’s appetites without benefiting the individual. Though Kafka’s later protagonists rarely escape with their lives, Amerika’s “Negro” (né Karl) is an exception: he ends up on a train headed toward “Oklahama,” where he expects a position as a technical worker with the Nature Theater. Only when he is two days removed from the deprivations and indignities of the city, nearing some dimly imagined frontier, does he content himself with gazing out his window at “the vastness of America.” He no longer dwells on his prospects or even his destination but rather on the majesty of the land, with its “bluish-black masses of rock” and its “broad mountain rivers” sweeping “forward in great waves.” As the distance between him and Gotham grows, and as his contemplation of the erosion and sedimentation of ages sweeps away the memories of tenement towers and luxury hotels, Karl appears to become himself again, the child who approached America and was greeted with Liberty’s sword.
__
Alexander Provan, a writer living in Brooklyn, is a founding editor of Triple Canopy.
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Issue 5: Idol Traffic |
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| Flash Yr Idols by Bidisha Banerjee with George Collins From Kolkata and the universe within Krishna’s mouth to Vermont and the pleasures of virtual prayer. A memoir and a video game. Between Scans Horror Film 1: Shanghai Blue The Matter of Past-Loving London Tacky Souvenirs of Pre-Inaugural America Television for the People The Dominican Game Mightiest in the Land Thinking Through Images #2 New Black |
Upcoming event: More Talks About Buildings: An Evening with Triple Canopy The Kitchen, 512 West 19th Street, New York, NY April 7, 7 pm, free and open to the public For this event, expanding on an issue devoted to new and old forms of urbanism, Triple Canopy excavates real, unrealized, and potential spaces: a planned mega-eco-city in the desert Southwest, a grand Utahan suburb nurtured by the tailings from nearby coal mines, lost visions of New York, lessons from Sarajevan city life, and more. for Triple Canopy Triple Canopy works collectively with writers, artists, researchers and other collaborators on projects that deal critically with culture and politics, and the ways people engage them, both online and in the world at large. These investigations are realized in an online magazine as well as in public programs and print publications encompassing various fields and locales. We aim to present work and advance ideas informed by a multitude of disciplines and perspectives, and to disseminate them among a broad and diverse audience. Triple Canopy was founded and launched in late 2007. |
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But the plan required money—ten million dollars—and the best way to get it would be to hold the government hostage. Malvo and his partner, a forty-two-year-old Gulf War veteran named John Allen Muhammad, would kill six people at random each day for one month, sowing panic with random shootings in Washington, DC, and its affluent suburbs. Allen put a mattress in the back of his 1990 Chevy Caprice and carved a hole in the trunk, following the instructions for creating a “sniper’s nest” he had found in an old Irish Republican Army manual. If the money was not forthcoming, they would move on to Baltimore, where they would plant improvised explosive devices loaded with ball bearings among crowds of children. The government would pay them to stop; they would take the money, flee to Canada, and buy a plot of land. They would mold orphaned children into militants, providing weapons training and a revolutionary education, and when those children had become soldiers, they would be dispatched throughout the world to fight the enemies of black people and of Islam.
Over three weeks in October 2002, Malvo and Muhammad put the plan into action, killing ten people, critically injuring three others, and paralyzed the swath of strip malls and highway intersections that encompass the nation’s capital, before being caught asleep in their car at a rest stop near Myersville, Maryland. Malvo was supposed to have been acting as lookout but had nodded off.
“We had a strategy from the beginning,” Malvo said in his initial confession. “You keep your enemy fortified. You stretch them out and make them weak.” If the police didn’t catch them and the government refused to pay them, they would keep killing until the authorities were forced to declare martial law. “Bringing the military in,” Malvo said, “would tear this side of the country up with the economy, tear this whole faction up. Tear this whole section of the country up.”
Later, he changed his story. Malvo said that he cried after Muhammad laid out the plan and demanded his compliance. He sat alone in a bathroom playing Russian roulette with a 22-caliber revolver. “I loaded one round, spun it, put it to my head, fired,” he said. Nothing happened. “I broke down and couldn’t do it.”
***
Malvo learned to be obedient at a young age. He was born in the slums of Kingston in February 1985, the son of Leslie Malvo, a construction worker, and Una James, a seamstress. Leslie worked off-island and, according to Carmeta Albarus-Lindo, the psychologist who examined Malvo after his arrest, the boy was “inconsolable” during his father’s long absences. But his mother suspected Leslie of having an affair, and one morning in the spring of 1990, James woke her son and told him to pack some bags. By the afternoon, they were on a bus to Endeavor, a small mountain town near the west coast of the island. James didn’t tell Leslie where they had gone, and he didn’t come after them.
In Endeavor, James left her son with friends and neighbors for weeks on end while she searched for odd jobs in nearby towns, though she never seemed to return with much money. When she did come home, she would spend what little she had on booze and install herself in front of the television; Malvo would wander in circles around their modest home and scream for his father until she came out and lashed his bare back with a belt. James would become enraged if she asked Malvo to bring her a basket and he brought it too slowly, throwing shoes at him and pulling his hair. The boy gradually retreated inward, speaking less and less. Diane Schetky, a psychiatrist who also served as an expert witness on his behalf, considered this a pivotal moment: “Lee responded to the abuse by being compliant. He learned that if he put himself in a trance, the punishment didn’t hurt as much.”
Things were tough in Endeavor, and when Malvo was twelve, James moved them again, this time to Antigua, where they lived in a shack without electricity or running water. James began leaving her son for months at a time; when she came back, he would sometimes threaten to kill himself, and she would whip him in response. (Later, Leslie Malvo called her “a good mother sometimes and a bad mother at other times.”) Eventually he stopped making threats. Once, James disappeared for eight months without sending money or telling her son when or if she planned to return. Malvo supported himself by begging and scavenging for scraps of metal and salvaging electronics, which he would sell on the street.
Before his trial, Malvo told Albarus-Lindo about something that had happened when he was in Kingston. While walking to school one day, he saw a man shot to death on the other side of the street. One of the gunmen caught Malvo’s eye and waved the boy away with his pistol, while his partner searched the dead man’s body. Malvo walked away as directed.
In prison and in the courtroom, Malvo made drawings and penned political tracts on pieces of paper torn from the legal pads provided by his counsel. Nearly a hundred of these pages were found in his cell between January and March of 2003. The pages are populated by characters ranging from Tupac to Hannibal, Osama Bin Laden to Charlie Brown, Trent Lott to Marcus Garvey. They reflect two years of indoctrination from Muhammad and a mind abraded by a lifetime of hardship and deprivation, but they also reveal the stirrings of an imagination much like that of any teenager living in America in the first years of the twenty-first century.
During the trial, Malvo could often be seen in a baggy crewneck sweater, slumped over the defense table, sketching satirical tableaux of the proceedings that depicted all participants as detached, disinterested, or preoccupied with wayward thoughts. In one picture, a lawyer tries to convince the jury of Malvo’s innocence, while reflecting, “On the other hand, he is a lunatic.” Another lawyer looks on, thinking, “I can’t believe this crazy boy wants to die! Not on my watch.”
Meanwhile, Malvo’s avatar whistles and dreams of basketball. “GOOD GRIEF! I gotta sit here and look pretty,” reads one thought bubble. Next to it, a comically inflated Malvo palms a basketball and glides toward the rim in a Michael Jordan pose, his cumbrous sneakers dusting another player’s bald head. A second thought bubble emerges from that scene, a line from a revolutionary ballad by the Steve Miller Band: “Time keeps on slipping into… future. I’m gonna flyyy! Oh yeah!” Three lines dominate the page:
PRETEND COURT
WHACK ME GET IT OVER WITH
GOSH!
In another drawing, a retinue of lawyers confer before the judge, one draping his arm over another’s shoulder. Above their heads, Malvo has identified them as “the guys who wanna save my life. Ha! Ha!” Beneath the scene, seemingly as an afterthought: “Allah is the disposer of my affairs!”
***
In Antigua, Una James was selling cold drinks outside a bus station, and a friend recommended she see Muhammad about procuring fake documents that would allow her to emigrate. Muhammad had recently moved to the island with his own three children after divorcing his second wife. He and James became friendly, and he immediately took an interest in Malvo, who would often stay at his house. Muhammad taught him about Islam and the oppression of black people; the fifteen-year-old adopted the man’s American accent and began calling him “father.” The two lifted weights and played basketball together.
When James went to find work in Florida, she left Malvo with Muhammad. The two snuck into Miami to join her briefly in 2001, but then took a bus across the country to Bellingham, Washington, where they registered at the Lighthouse Mission shelter as father and son. They got a family membership at the YMCA, and Malvo enrolled in a local high school. Lee’s classmates later claimed that he did well in school, though he didn’t make any friends.
Muhammad had Malvo steal a 223-caliber Bushmaster AR15 rifle from a local gun shop and began subjecting the boy to a rigorous training program: leopard-crawls across the forest floor, calisthenics, revolutionary literature, target practice, and military theory. Each night before he went to bed, Malvo was made to memorize passages from Sun Tzu’s The Art of War. Often the pair would drive deep into the stands of white oak and Douglas-fir to practice marksmanship, using makeshift targets with paper plates for heads. Other times Muhammad would tie Malvo up for hours in the brumous foothills of Mount Baker, where he would go without food, water, or sleep until the older man came back to free him.
There were also video games, predominantly first-person shooters; Malvo’s lawyers later suggested that these inured him to senseless killing and to the prospect of his own death. “If you get hit, you bleed and you die, unless you hit a particular code,” said one attorney, Craig Cooley. “Most of these games have a code where you become invincible, where you become immortal. Game players call it the God mode. When you punch that in on some of those games, it says, ‘I am God.’” Cooley went on to compare the boy to the American soldiers brainwashed by the Chinese during the Korean War.
At his own trial, Muhammad refused representation. When it was time to cross-examine Malvo, Muhammad stood shackled behind the defense table, clutching several sheets of lined yellow paper in his left hand.
“The last time we played basketball, who won?”
“You won.”
“The last time we ran a mile, who ran faster?”
“You.”
“And the last time we ran five miles, who ran faster?”
“You did.”
On December 8, 2003, Malvo’s lawyers showed jurors a particularly violent ten-minute clip of The Matrix. The jurors were informed that Malvo had watched the film over a hundred times, “to prepare his mind for what was going to lie ahead.” Malvo identified with the hero, Neo. Muhammad was his Morpheus—a father figure who chooses a young man to “lead a revolution against an evil government that has people oppressed to the point where they don’t even know they’re oppressed.” The goal of their mission had been to foster “massive societal change.”
“The Matrix is interesting,” CNN reported, “because they think that all of reality is a lie, and that there was no right and wrong, that the government—because the government is a lie, and maybe he seemed to be living in that world, and was searching for a way out of it.”
One of Malvo’s drawings depicts him in handcuffs, the word “bondage” etched across the baroque musculature of his chest. “The outside force has arrived, free yourself of the Matrix ‘control,’” the text reads. “Free first your mind. Trust me!! The body will follow.” Malvo’s prison drawings inspired his interpreter, Albarus-Lindo, to this conjecture:
When Lee began to think that he was destined to remain a child forever, that he could never do without protection against strange powers, he lent those powers the features belonging to the figure of his father. He created for himself the gods whom he dreaded, whom he sought to propitiate, and whom he nevertheless entrusted with his own protection. It seems to me that his longing for a father is a motive identical with his need for protection against the consequences of his human weakness.
Malvo put it more simply. “I was desperate to fill a void in my life, and I was ready to give my life for him.”
***
In one picture, Lee drew a gallant lion with a heavy, wind-swept mane. It appears to be striding from the right side of the page to the left, its snout leading the way. The lion occupies the bottom third of the page, and above it Lee wrote the following:
Lee Root: Leander
Origin: Greek
Meaning: brave as a lion
Majestic: hears a different drummer.
Personality: a person who is fresh as a daisy.
Genuine: a life worthy of praise (needs no admonition, give to Allah.)
Style: his mind is at peace
Ability: possesses many gifts.
Character: willing to make long-term commitment
Sentiment: a shield for those in need.
Physical: will never get in over his head.
Alongside the lion, Lee copied some verses of a traditional folk song made famous by Recep Tayyip Erdogan, now Turkey’s prime minister, who had been arrested for uttering them in public in 1999. “Our minarets are our bayonets / Our mosques are our barracks / Our believers are our soldiers.”
***
“I planned to shoot him in the head,” said the voice on the tape. “Circumstances didn’t allow me to shoot him in the head. He was bobbing.” The voice was casually frustrated, as if recounting a trip to the beach that had been marred by inclement weather. What it was actually describing was a man standing in the pale suburban light of a Ponderosa Steakhouse parking lot as his would-be assassin waited for his shot from the trunk of a Chevy Caprice.
In the courtroom, Lee listened to the voice play back. His voice. He quit drawing, pushed his legal pad aside. His eyes winced with recognition, and he arched his back and lowered his head with the mechanical slowness of a twenty-ton crane until his temple touched the counsel’s table. The arc of prayer, one commentator noticed.
It was the evening of October 19, 2002. As Stephanie Hooper testified, she and her husband Jeffrey had just finished “a very nice dinner” at one of the many Ponderosa Steakhouse locations that cling to the length of I-95 connecting Washington, DC, and Richmond, Virginia. They were on their way home to Melbourne, Florida, after visiting family in Pennsylvania. On account of the snipers, they had circumvented DC as best they could. Now, just north of Richmond, they had finally managed to forget about the news reports and enjoy “some wonderful conversation.” She remembered arguing with her husband as they exited the restaurant—about “who loved each other more.” They held hands on the way to the curb. Before they went to their separate sides of the car, Jeffrey pulled Stephanie close and pressed his lips against hers, and then a bullet tore through his skin and tunneled into his gut.
“I thought it important to lie down,” he remembered, “so I lied down on the pavement there.” He told Stephanie he loved her, and they prayed together, with Stephanie still holding two cookies left over from dessert.
***
In one drawing, Hannibal Barca, the legendary military commander who led the Carthaginians over the Pyrenees in the Second Punic War, plunges a sword into the chest of a felled “white man/devil”; in another, he bares his rock-hard chest and stares straight ahead. Below his figure, the slogan “We will either find a way, or make one.”
In another, Malvo is crouching close to the ground, arms wrapped around an oversize rifle, eyes trained on an unseen target, the words “Jihad” and “none innocent” and “No peace!” hanging above him. On one corner of the page there are eight games of tic-tac-toe he must have played to pass time during the trial.
Elsewhere, there is a self-portrait: Lee as an ancient African king, decked out in beads and chains, steering a chariot. There are figures from comics and video games, including one with drills for hands and a crescent emblazoned across his chest. There is a character from Street Fighter and an elfin archer straight out of The Lord of the Rings. There is a portrait of Tupac with his right hand gripping a pistol and his left fist extended toward the viewer, anticipating a bump. Inscribed above, “Inshallah, Tupak lives. I see no changes.” The left half of one page is crowded with images of American aircraft carriers, tanks, and helicopters, alongside a list of the country’s traits: “White state of mind. Imperialism. Colonialism. Americanism. Zionism. Sadism. Bullishness. Loutishness and God damned people.” At the bottom of the page, a naked black man stands manacled to a whipping post, Uncle Sam lashing him with one hand and hoisting a sack of money with the other. (“The world is diverse for a reason, people will forever have their own morals and opinions…. If you the majority would travel and do more research, then you would see the affect of American foreign policy…”) On the right half are sketches of Bin Laden, a mushroom cloud, the World Trade Center attacks, a McDonald’s with a Star of David on its facade; “Jihad, Justice, PEACE.”
“You’ve Willie Lynchized us,” he scrawled on another page, moving from cursive to script and back again. “Black people must stand up as one, must be kings”; “Stop begging, get your own, take it”; “Think of the whole, Unite or we will die!”; “Stand Up! Stand Up! (Islam!)”; “Free your mind!”; “Tupak calls them punch ass police. Me too! (Police–>poor-leash).” And: “Failure means death. Sorry dad.”
“Hey and just to let you know even if you read this I know you won’t change, because change is complete not partial, and time doesn’t change a thing, time hasn’t changed you. You are the same white man, you have just toned down your opinions, but your actions speak loudly—same old ideology (Trent Lott). (We should separate.)” “Lee, weren’t they innocent?” “An object (the rich whites) at rest stays at rest until moved by an outside force.” “‘Many more will have to suffer many more will have to die, don’t ask me why’ Natural mystic (Prophet Bob Marley).” “We must be like nature… when she unleashes a force it is complete, impartial and constant.”
Also, a five-panel cartoon titled “What dogs do when you go to work.”
***
The Malvo case was a shock, a sensation, not an event that altered the life of the country, nor one that had much to say about it. As the effect wore off, as the plot was revealed to be the work of a deranged man and a screwed-up kid, our flitting attention moved elsewhere. Now, there are the Michelle Malkin blog entries preserved as if caked in ash, the increasingly dutiful Court TV reports, the images of the victims’ faces arranged in a perfect grid courtesy of the Washington Post.
And the journals. The first thing I thought of when I saw Malvo’s letters and drawings in news reports were my own high-school journals. As a teenager in Tucson, Arizona, I had carried around a couple of beat-up leather-bound notebooks as a point of pride, casually deploying them in coffee shops, at shows, and between classes. I filled them with what are surely some of the most contrived attempts at poetry ever committed to paper; caricatures of disciplinarian teachers and loathsome politicians (I reserved particular opprobrium for Tipper Gore and a school administrator named Ms Shackman, who had suspended me for throwing a seatbelt buckle out the bus window, hitting a pedestrian); the logos and lyrics of punk and hardcore bands and lines from Beat poets; paeans to whichever dissident I had pledged allegiance to that month.
My sophomore year, every student in Writing in Society class was required to make a “commonplace book,” which the teacher described as “a place for your thoughts and dreams and frustrations and reflections, a place where your mind can live free.” I remember one girl presenting her book two weeks later: it was already full, an accordion of Polaroids, dried flowers, movie tickets, magazine clippings, feathers, locks of hair, friendship bracelets, notes passed in class. I remember asking during her presentation if there was anything from the previous two weeks that she had not put in her commonplace book, and relishing the laughter that ensued.
For my part, I cut out pages from skateboarding magazines, pasted in photocopied fliers, excised slogans from pamphlets distributed at meetings of the University of Arizona’s Young Marxists club, which I had been attending with considerable pride and overwhelming confusion. (I quit after I learned that the leaders were planning on dropping out of school to get factory jobs and “agitate from the inside.” That was too much for me.) After the school day ended, my Spanish teacher, an old Marxist, donned a skullcap woven by an indigenous community in the Bolivian Andes and opened his library of radical literature to about fifteen of us who were hoping to find some set of data or gestures or symbols—anything, really—with which to identify ourselves before high school passed us by and we were marooned. The day before, we had chosen an acronym for ourselves and gathered for a two-hour lecture on The Communist Manifesto. I remember our class “free write” that day, and the mess that came out of it: the workers having nothing to lose but their chains, the I-Ching having everything to teach us; choice lines from dead prez, the Dead Kennedys, Leonard Peltier, and Jack Kerouac, all alloyed with my own substantial sexual and social frustrations. The pages teemed with vague feelings of injustice perpetrated by everyone from my parents to the school’s principal to Newt Gingrich, such that an upside-down American flag and a Bad Brains lyric somehow qualified as a response to one of the teacher’s prompts: in Richard Wright’s Native Son (which we had just finished reading) what led Bigger Thomas to kill Mary Dalton?
Malvo’s letters and drawings didn’t seem crazy to me. They still don’t. The more I look at them, the more typical they appear: the teenager’s attempt to work through complex questions about the way the world is and the way it should be. This, before one has the proper tools to find sufficient answers, at a time when parental authority is anathema but guidance is essential; perhaps most importantly, before such questions become so familiar as to no longer seem insistent, or even to register. Malvo, I thought, was enchanted by the world and battered by it, as I was, as most teenagers are.
Albarus-Lindo said of Lee, “I recognized something was amiss with this Jamaican boy who had not been in this country three years and is speaking as if he had lived here his whole life and suffered years of social injustice.” But this is life as a teenager. The world seems infinitely strange, seems to be constantly eluding your grasp, thwarting your attempts to comprehend it, much less inhabit it. For Malvo, circumstances turned these more or less natural feelings into something deeply pathological; the outside world became a mere projection of his inner life, with Muhammad as its architect, creating order and purpose where there had been none.
Malvo is currently serving a life term in Virginia’s Red Onion State Prison, a maximum-security facility where he spends twenty-three hours a day in his cell. Shortly before being sentenced, he wrote a note anticipating the death penalty: “I think I’ve said enough… to fill a tiring ear so! Long! But The Change begins with you!… I’ll be back and next time whatsoever my endeavor is ‘I will not fail.’ You control your environment don’t let it control you…. Change! You have a CHOICE! You CHOOSE TO BE CONTROLLED! FREE YOUR MIND!” But after four years in prison, a world more fixed and, in many ways, less perplexing than any Lee had experienced, he had resigned himself to that control, put his mind—and his pen—to rest.
On October 2, 2007, he made a phone call to Cheryll Witz. He and Muhammad had killed Cheryll’s father, Jerry, on March 19, 2002, as he hit chip shots on the practice green at the Fred Enke Golf Course in Tucson. It had been a test run for the shootings in DC. Cheryll, a large woman in her mid-forties with sheer curls of blond hair, was shopping for a birthday cake at Costco with her best friend at the time, and she picked up her cellphone after three rings. Lee introduced himself and told her he wanted to apologize. “I tried to write a letter,” he told her, fighting back tears. “But I couldn’t. I didn’t know what to say.”
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Issue 4: War Money Magic http://canopycanopycanopy.com |
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Star Wars: A New Heap by John Powers Was George Lucas a minimalist? Was Donald Judd a Jedi? The coincidences of Star Wars, minimalism, modernist architecture and urban planning. Milestones: The Noble Lie by Adam Helms An artist project examining the symbiotic relationship between the works and lives of Sayyid Qutb and Leo Strauss, and the visions they have spawned. Programming by Seth Erickson. Reconstruction by Rachel Owens “Human beings are human beings are human beings.” Collages with enemies exsected to the point of embrace, and an interview with Desmond Tutu. The Stalin by Picasso Case by Lene Berg, with Sam Frank Has a 1953 portrait of Stalin been censored by Cooper Union in 2008? A dossier of evidence, for and against. Bullion with a Mission by Barry Harbaugh Bernard von NotHaus’s crusade to establish an alternative to the dollar and challenge the supremacy of the Federal Reserve. Photography by Julia Sherman. No Other Home by Maria Sonevytsky, with photography by Alison Cartwright The stories and songs of Crimean Tatars who have returned to their homeland after fifty years in exile. Homemade Memorials by Sonya Blesofsky The second installment of an ongoing project memorializing desecrated, destroyed, and forgotten buildings, with sculptures constructed from images submitted by readers. Heraclitus Series by Amir Mogharabi Currents in logic made ancient, for OS 9. An artist project bringing together the fragments of Heraclitus and the calculus of truth tables. Flash Yr Idols by Bidisha Banerjee, with George Collins From Kolkata and the universe within Krishna’s mouth to Vermont and the pleasures of virtual prayer. A rumination and a Flash game. Original Ideas in Magic by Tim Davis “Think of a number between thunder and money.” Poems and proliferating visions of a magician’s lair without a magician. With photocollages by Hannah Whitaker. |
This Friday, November 14: New Black Triple Canopy issue 4 launch party and performance by New Humans With Orphan and DJ sets by curator/writer Bob Nickas and musician Mark Ibold (Sonic Youth, ex-Pavement). Starr Space, 108–110 Starr Street, Brooklyn $7 donation, $3 drinks; doors at 8pm Directions: Take the L train to Jefferson Street. Head southeast on Wyckoff Avenue toward Troutman Street and turn right at Starr Street. for Triple Canopy Rachel Aviv, Taylor Baldwin, Colby Chamberlain, Adam Florin, Hannah Frank, Sam Frank, Kimmy Eliot Fung, Adam Helms, Sarah Kessler, Molly Kleiman, Laurence Lowe, Alexander Provan, Tom Roberge, Kathleen Ross, Peter J. Russo, Genevieve Smith, William Smith, Caleb Waldorf, Hannah Whitaker, and Jane Yakowitz Triple Canopy works collectively with writers, artists, researchers and other collaborators on projects that deal critically with culture and politics, and the ways people engage them, both online and in the world at large. These investigations are realized in an online magazine as well as in public programs and print publications encompassing various fields and locales. We aim to present work and advance ideas informed by a multitude of disciplines and perspectives, and to disseminate them among a broad and diverse audience. Our first issue was published on March 17, 2008. |
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http://www.thenation.com/doc/20081117/provan
Last year a CNN headline announced, “Internet Gives Voice to Unseen Actors.” The article detailed how websites advertising the services of voice actors are allowing thousands of people to find work broadcasting their disembodied voices across the globe, often for corporate instructional tapes. It’s a typical story of the Internet flattening the world, of opportunities materializing where there were few before. But the headline is what struck me: it may as well be the slogan of Web 2.0, or participatory online culture, or whatever pundits, boosters, sociologists, adolescent-development experts and privacy watchdogs are calling the dominant paradigm this week. One longtime voice actor recalls how difficult it was to get work in 1985, when “no one had a Web site. Today I regularly voice a podcast for a high-tech client, which they share on their Web site as a value-added service.”
There are countless articles and book-length studies telling the stories of millions of people who have been “allowed” or “freed” to do one thing or another by the Internet–as if the “network of networks” were a deus ex machina descended to solve problems related to the economy, creativity and democracy. “The possibilities are endless,” one story reads, “if you have enough engaging executions and manage to keep the user’s attention.”
Many of these articles and books also consider what the Internet has made people less capable of doing: immersing oneself in a 600-page novel, using coffee shops as meeting houses rather than ersatz open cubicles, maintaining the distinction between a social interaction and the projection of a persona or replicating the levels of productivity common before the factory line was replaced by the information economy and its attendant distractions.
But more important: how are the kids doing? The sons and daughters raised suckling at the nodes of cyberspace, variously called Digital Natives, First Globals and the “Look at Me” generation, have been encouraged, if not compelled, to express themselves uninhibitedly, and frequently. Sometimes people get paid to do so. Mostly, they do not. Whether or not they’re profiting, “They have come to have a degree of control over their cultural environment that is unprecedented,” and that is something to be applauded, assert John Palfrey and Urs Gasser in Born Digital (Basic Books, $25.95), their recent study of the Internet’s impact on (mostly) well-off white kids. “These young people are not passive consumers of media that is broadcast to them, but rather active participants in the making of meaning in their culture. Their art form of the remix, where digital files are combined to create a new video or audio file, is already having an effect on cultural understanding around the world.”
Unlike so many reckonings with the Internet’s seeming degradation of society and culture, Palfrey and Gasser’s argument is enthusiastic about the possibility for new, compelling forms of culture to emerge from the information cesspool. They even dedicate a chapter–”Creators”–to it. But their conclusion, that the rise of user-generated content has empowered young people to take part in a conversation formerly controlled by the mandarin classes, is premised on a pivotal mistake: the confusion of self-expression with art.
Web 2.0 provides something books do not. It “moves us away from a world of largely passive consumers of content produced by a few powerful professionals,” the authors write, “toward communities of increasingly active users.” In other words, it moves us away from educating and entertaining ourselves by reading and viewing works of confirmed cultural value–and this trend is empowering. Books, they suggest, fail to provide the Total Stimulus Environment demanded by today’s youth: “the activity level usually doesn’t go beyond the sensorial, cognitive, and other neuropsychological processes that are necessary to perceive and process its content (what we call ‘reading’).” In other words, it is no longer sufficient to read something that someone has written and take time to reflect upon and interpret it, nor should it be. We need more.
So we arrive at the remix, “one of the most alluring, and often very creative, contributions of Digital Native.” Here, Palfrey and Gasser mistake the technology employed to produce the remix–”young people variously call it ripping, chopping, blending, mashing, or just manipulating it”–with the form itself, which was once called collage or montage and is not unique to any generation. (Granted, YouTube and other websites are incredible forums for those wishing to parody the latest Sarah Palin speech, lip-sync along to “I Want It That Way” or tell the world how difficult it is to be a precocious high schooler living in a small town, “the kind of place that kills you slowly.”) In addition to remixes and YouTube videos, Palfrey and Gasser cite fan fiction (in fact an invention of the analog age) and tagging (“through which Digital Natives are adding context to online content”) as evidence that young people are changing “who gets to control the shaping of culture, the making of ‘meaning.’”
Here’s how it works. Information is organized into content, something irrelevant transformed into something self-evident that nevertheless offers a small surprise, a moment of self-acknowledgment. Content is a placeholder for nothing, referring to other instances of nothing; organized as content, information does not want to be free, but wants to achieve the quality of air. The creations of Digital Natives sometimes undermine this pernicious logic, but just as often they confirm it, mimicking and circulating content and occasionally awarding it with the Total Stimulus Environment Gold Medal: “going viral.” Do these creations qualify as culture? And if everyone gets to decide what’s meaningful, won’t “meaning” no longer mean very much? If the old hierarchy is being dispossessed and sources of authority are disappearing, what will be left to remix (besides last week’s remixes)? Will the multitude of chattering users prevail in consigning those more considered voices to virtual oblivion?
One case study provided by Palfrey and Gasser is Stevie Ryan, who is now a YouTube celebrity. Ryan became famous for making short videos in which she plays the starring role, a plucky 18-year-old Hispanic woman from East LA named Cynthia (a k a Little Loca), who delivers parodic monologues in which she feigns poor cellphone reception or complains about a bad haircut. She never would have reached “an audience of 25,000 viewers per week if she had to rely on Hollywood studios to get her there,” Palfrey and Gasser argue–proof that the dynasties of Murdoch and Newhouse are largely irrelevant in today’s media landscape. Then again, she might never have won such a large audience if she had to rely on Hollywood studios because no one would pay to watch her videos. While they are “creations,” they are almost completely devoid of value; they do nothing but express the self, with a minimum of artifice. It’s hard to imagine anyone forking over hard-earned cash to watch them. The way we tend to use the Internet seems antithetical to such transactions (money for content), which would compel us to consider any investment of time and attention; instead, what we have is a sort of perpetual detour, with Stevie Ryan and friends marking the miles traveled on a road to nowhere.
In books exalting or criticizing the way we use the Internet, and the way it has rewired us, there is little talk of developing aesthetic and literary forms specific to this new technology. The concern is mostly with identity and interaction and much less with culture and interpretation. Palfrey and Gasser at least hazard some insight into this area, but they ultimately can’t convince themselves of the value of YouTube videos and social networking sites. So, suddenly, they take a page out of the neoliberal playbook, in which all news is somehow hitched to the cause of global democracy: “The primary benefit of moving to a global online culture that is more participatory and that requires higher digital literacy skills is that it may lead to stronger democracies.”
Such narrow-sightedness–it’s as if Pop Art never happened, much less Fluxus, or Dada, or Duchamp–stems from a common tendency to treat the Internet in a historical vacuum, and from an obliviousness to the various artistic and literary endeavors (beyond the remix) thriving online, using the Internet as a medium of sorts, aiming to create novel experiences for users, viewers and readers alike. These enterprises have their own historical lineage and concerns, but they are part of a century-long struggle to free the page from its binding, the reader from the hold of linearity and the image from its position within the frame. This is not new. Even for Mallarmé, the “artificial unity that used to be based on the square measurements of the book” had become outdated; he called instead for a format that embraced “hesitation, disposition of parts, their alterations and relationships.”
In failing to recognize other currents of online culture, Palfrey and Gasser contradict their argument that the Internet is enabling people to create and consume as they wish, outside the AOL-Time-Warner-Murdoch-Disney-Clear-Channel ghetto. (What is YouTube becoming if not a new iteration of the mainstream?) The Internet offers new experiences of duration and space. But the most interesting of those experiences are created by exploiting and working against the tendencies toward speed and inattentiveness often described as intrinsic to the Internet, rather than to the economies it has spawned.
Alexander Provan, a writer living in Brooklyn, is a founding editor of Triple Canopy.
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Stop Smiling #37, the DC issue, has been published and must be consumed immediately.
www.stopsmilingonline.com
Nonfiction Chronicle
By Alexander Provan
It’s a particularly bounteous season for binding and distributing our discontents. As the November election emerges from the horizon, the catalogue of complaints issued by publishers has grown to Brobdingnagian proportions. There are the requisite memoirs by disgruntled administration officials looking to restore their reputations by tarnishing those of the would-be war criminals stranded in office; the liberal jeremiads bemoaning the diminution of America’s global standing and the creeping sense that things will get worse before they get better (if they get better); the supercilious cover letters by would-be advisers offering a prognosis and a remedy for the coming president—how to restore true conservatism; how to adapt true liberalism.
The general impression is that whoever claims victory on November 4 will two months later find himself the steward of a rotting vessel, a skeleton crew flying a tattered standard more likely to invite scorn and ridicule than awe, and the replacement of whatever treasure once existed with a ten-trillion dollar debt. By February, he might be inclined to steer toward the nearest port, drop anchor, and drink himself into a stupor.
But if John McCain is elected, he might be inclined to merrily go about the hollowing out of government. So suggests Thomas Frank in The Wrecking Crew: How Conservatives Rule (Metropolitan Books), a polemical account of the successful mission Karl Rove, Jack Abramoff, Grover Norquist, Lee Atwater and company embarked on as leaders of the College Republicans in the 1980s: dismantle government and hand over its charges to private enterprise. If government is not only viewed as inefficient, but is actually made incapable of acting on behalf of the public, they reasoned, Democrats would be deprived of the main justification for their rule (and with each Democratic Congressional seat lost the pockets of Republicans would grow fatter). In bullying Washington, D.C., a wholly unsympathetic agonist, conservatives popularized the notion that “the market is an organic institution,” while “the state is an artificial construct, a kind of weapon used by the various elements of society to steal from one another.”
As a slogan meant to propel the Republicans to power and prosperity, this worked wondrously. As a philosophy of government, it has failed completely, the most salient evidence being Hurricane Katrina, Iraq reconstruction, the deterioration of the country’s infrastructure, the collapse of its financial system, a looming environmental catastrophe, and a nascent oil crisis. As much as the market is a natural force, in an oil economy it is largely captive to the greater and older natural forces at work beneath the earth’s crust, and what they have wrought: namely, peaking oil production, a situation exacerbated by the location of the world’s largest reserves squarely in Saudi Arabia’s backyard (and front yard, and under the landing strip of Prince Alwaleed bin Talal’s customized $300 million Airbus A380).
For all their sanctimonious bluster, even the GOP elites who comprise Frank’s wrecking crew are still servants to the House of Saud, which can be expected to resist the allure of the free market so long as it’s reaping windfall profits. In The King’s Messenger (Walker & Company), David Ottaway, a longtime Washington Post correspondent, deconstructs the “special relationship” that has existed between the U.S. (as played by the Bush family and its cronies) and Saudi Arabia since the end of WWII. Ottaway’s focus is Prince Bandar bin Sultan (also called “the Arab Gatsby” and “Bandar Bush”), who, over the course of a quarter century as ambassador, was keeper of the U.S. pledge to protect the Sunni royal family from its enemies as long as Saudi Arabia kept oil prices low. Ottaway’s meticulous account describes how this mutually beneficial relationship has unraveled under the current President Bush. On one side, Saudi Arabia has become increasingly unable (and at times unwilling) to control oil prices; on the other, the war in Iraq has created a Shiite sphere of influence encircling the kingdom and bolstering its nemesis, Iran, a situation aggravated by “Bush’s basic instinct to do nothing” about the Israel-Palestine conflict. Toward the end of the book, a dejected Prince Bandar flees D.C. without warning, failing even to return for his farewell party.
The Bush administration’s Manichean approach to pretty much everything is best understood as a failure to adapt the strategic framework of the Cold War to a radically altered political landscape, argues Jonathan Stevenson, a professor of strategic studies at the Naval War College, in Thinking Beyond the Unthinkable: Harnessing Doom from the Cold War to the Age of Terror (Viking). In the 1950s and 60s, sundry civilian think tanks set themselves to the task of analyzing every facet of national security, with the aim of preventing nuclear conflict—and it worked. “However esoteric all of those meditations on first and second strike, on counterforce and countervalue, seem now,” Stevenson writes, “they engendered a way of thinking that is worth preserving.” Of course, under Bush such thinking—any real thinking—has been absent. Rather than measuring force and politics, Bush has faced the challenges of a post-9/11 world with “abrasive and parochial idealism and puerile faith in military technology.” We are in a sort of strategic limbo: the Cold War model no longer makes sense, and we are still awaiting a new generation of scholars to weigh the cultural and anthropological aspects of radical Islam with the precision and rigor that Herman Kahn employed in his 1962 evaluation of nuclear deterrence, Thinking About the Unthinkable—and a president who might heed their counsel.
Should Barack Obama assume that besmirched mantle, he might find a copy of James Traub’s The Freedom Agenda: Why America Must Spread Democracy (Just Not the Way George Bush Did) (FSG) waiting on his desk. While Stevenson advocates the development of a cadre of intellectuals to stew over the Bush gang’s failings, Traub is already putting forth a program. After scrupulously cataloguing the administration’s misadventures in exporting a one-size-fits-all democracy, he attempts to recuperate the notion that liberty at home depends on liberty abroad; at the very least, each is fortified by the other. To those tempted to propose non-interventionism in reaction to Bush’s National-Lampoon’s-Middle-Eastern-Vacation-style foreign policy, Traub raises the specter of unfettered autocracies buoyed by Chinese largesse. The very name of democracy has been sullied, he admits, so why not “spread the free market, the rule of law, human rights” instead? His vision of a “post-post-9/11” foreign policy, it turns out, has already been perfectly formulated by Obama, who pointed out in a campaign speech last year that our ability to promote our own values abroad depends on how children in Third World countries feel when they see American helicopters hovering above them. We have an ethical and political responsibility to promote democracy, Traub argues, but it must be accompanied by aid packages that convince those children that (per Obama) “their well-being matter[s] to us.”
Might America begin to practice a soft imperialism rather than none at all? Philosopher, journalist, and activist Bernard-Henri Levy suggests so from his Parisian pulpit in Left in Dark Times: A Stand Against the New Barbarism (Random House). In the face of serious challenges to the well-deserved political and cultural dominance of the western democracies, Levy suggests their guardians close ranks around a common set of ethics and a rejection of inherited religious truths. America and Europe must challenge “fascislamism” as it must challenge the Chinese model, which has allowed the slaughter in Darfur to continue: the children cowering beneath the American helicopters must be saved. As for those children who eventually find their way to the source of that beneficence? “Drop all the customs you no longer need, but drop the radicalism as well,” he commands. “Drop those deadly ideologies that partly belong to us as well and that are the worst of our legacy, and take the Enlightenment instead! Take freedom of conscience! Take Voltaire!”
If there is any better creed more bankrupt than Bush’s Freedom Agenda, it is certainly “Take Voltaire!”
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Issue 3: NOLA
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| Featuring: Tours and Detours: Walking the Ninth Ward by Brian Rosa A self-guided tour through the built and natural environment of New Orleans’s Ninth Ward. I Knew Then It Was All on Me Way of the Righteous: The Art of Roy Ferdinand A World of Bad Taste: The Art of Rudolph Radlinger Landfall: A Portfolio Homemade Memorials Upcoming events:
November 5, Light Industry: panel on the genesis of the new-media magazine November 14, Starr Space: New Humans and Orphan with DJ sets by Bob Nickas and Mark Ibold for Triple Canopy Rachel Aviv, Taylor Baldwin, Colby Chamberlain, Adam Florin, Hannah Frank, Sam Frank, Kimmy Eliot Fung, Adam Helms, Sarah Kessler, Molly Kleiman, Laurence Lowe, Alexander Provan, Tom Roberge, Kathleen Ross, Peter J. Russo, Genevieve Smith, William Smith, Caleb Waldorf, Hannah Whitaker, and Jane Yakowitz
Triple Canopy works collectively with writers, artists, researchers and other collaborators on projects that deal critically with culture and politics, and the ways people engage them, both online and in the world at large. These investigations are realized in an online magazine as well as in public programs and print publications encompassing various fields and locales. We aim to present work and advance ideas informed by a multitude of disciplines and perspectives, and to disseminate them among a broad and diverse audience. Our first issue was published on March 17, 2008.
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http://www.thenation.com/doc/20080915/provan
In August 2003, at the behest of The American Enterprise, John Zogby deployed a team of surveyors across Iraq to conduct the “first scientific poll” of its citizens. On September 10 the magazine’s editor in chief, Karl Zinsmeister, summarized the findings in the Wall Street Journal, under the unfortunate headline What Iraqis Really Think. He described the situation as “manageable,” noting that seven out of ten Iraqis expected their country and their lives to improve within five years. A plurality of respondents also chose the United States as a model for Iraq’s fledgling democracy, rather than Syria, Iran, Egypt or Saudi Arabia. “The mass of citizens living along the Tigris-Euphrates Valley are likely to make reasonably sensible use of their new freedom,” Zinsmeister exulted. “We’re making headway in a benighted part of the world. Hang in there, America.”
The same day, Zogby discussed the poll in the Financial Times, drawing the opposite conclusion: with Saddam Hussein overthrown, Iraqis were eager to “control their own destiny” and to “move forward but not as a colony.” A majority of respondents were pessimistic about democracy in Iraq, wanted the United States and Britain to let Iraqis set up their own government, and believed the United States would hurt rather than help the country in the next five years.
It took four days for Dick Cheney to go on television and tout Zogby’s data as proof that the Administration’s strategy was sound. “There are problems” in Iraq, Cheney beneficently admitted on Meet the Press, but the proof was in the polls: “To suggest somehow that…the Iraqi people are opposed to what we’ve done in Iraq or are actively and aggressively trying to undermine it, I just think that’s not true.”
Facts, it has been said, can be used to prove anything that’s even remotely true; what a poll delivers is the impression of fact, momentary preferences and affinities packaged for a buyer who hopes the information will help sell a product or an idea. If the numbers seem unlikely to lead the buyer to greater profits or more votes, they can be distorted or dismissed until “better” data come into being. The market for public-opinion research is a dynamic one–which is to say that people are always changing their minds.
Zogby is one of the pre-eminent figures in this quintessentially American industry, and his new book, The Way We’ll Be, draws on his decades of polling to illuminate the changing nature of American values and lives. The Iraq episode goes unmentioned, perhaps because it is an outlier: since the 1930s, polling has aimed to narrow the distance between politicians and their constituents, creating what George Gallup, the profession’s forefather, called “a town meeting on a national scale.” And yet it is a powerful example of how little this Administration cares to consider the voices of those affected by its decisions; it also implies that polling does not benefit the people but rather those who stand to profit from their answers.
In the coming months, news networks will refashion themselves into clearinghouses for polling data, registering each minute change in people’s feelings about a given issue or candidate, and inviting a cavalcade of commentators to divine the will of the public, a ritual sanctioned by the glow of graphic headlines that readBehind the Numbers and What Americans Are Saying. Despite the ubiquity of polls, politicians are as out of touch with the values of the public as they’ve ever been, Zogby laments. It was not meant to be this way. Gallup claimed that, in the age of mass politics, polls were necessary to discern the will of the people and keep power beholden to it. He often quoted James Bryce, who, in The American Commonwealth (1888), argued that a form of government more advanced and desirable than our own “would be reached if the will of the majority of the citizens were to become ascertainable at all times, and without the need of its passing through a body of representatives, possibly even without the need of voting machinery at all.” Social data were heralded not just as a way to inform decision-making but as its possible replacement–the harbinger of pure democracy.
As Sarah Igo notes in The Averaged American, a masterly history of the rise of public-opinion research, it was not until the 1940s that the amount and quality of data on American citizens began to rival the data on the country’s livestock. The hunger for knowledge of “the mass mind” fed a polling craze in the middle of the century, a constant search for what Newsweek called the “American Majority Man.” Gallup became a national celebrity, with 8 million people turning to his syndicated column, “America Speaks!,” for insights into the citizenry’s life and thoughts.
Zogby’s complete faith in the ability of people to make good decisions and adapt to changing social currents while their leaders are clinging to the outmoded ideas that delivered them to Capitol Hill is an inheritance from Gallup. But if politicians don’t listen to the public, isn’t this partly a failure of polling? The Way We’ll Be is at once an acknowledgment that Washington has become unmoored from Everytown USA and an attempt to redeem polling as a populist instrument, relevant beyond election-year news cycles and corporate marketing schemes. Zogby finds that, although politicians are mired in the culture wars and refuse to accept that we live in an age of finite natural resources and a decline in the United States’ global primacy, there has been “a fundamental reorientation of the American character.” Life today is “smaller, leaner, more personal, and personalized, and Americans seem to be adjusting to it just fine.” Should our representatives fail to heed new demographic groups such as the Secular Spiritualists, Investors Next Door, Deferred Dreamers and the all-important First Globals–”inner-directed, network connected” people ages 18 to 29–and fail to recognize that Americans are “living with limits, embracing diversity, looking inward, and demanding authenticity,” it will be at their own peril.
According to Zogby, popular discontent with partisan bickering crystallized in 2005 with the imbroglio over Terri Schiavo’s body, which persuaded Americans “it was time to find another way.” From here, the narrative takes the tone of a fable. It started in low: “there was too much noise coming from both sides, and too much wasn’t working.” Then it started to grow: disgust over the government’s handling of Hurricane Katrina. And before long “the vital center began to reassert itself,” giving birth to “a new American consensus.” If these trends continue, Zogby intimates, we’ll soon have our multiracial, multilateral, borderless utopia. But it remains unclear how popular frustration with Washington might translate into a change in the political order, or how, for example, a general feeling of disenchantment with NAFTA–in a recent poll, a plurality of respondents said free-trade agreements have been “a bad thing” for the country–might translate into coherent policy, especially since more than 80 percent of respondents in a Zogby poll agreed that “free trade is good for America.” Such simplifications and contradictions are hardly explained by Zogby, who blithely admits that much of his analysis amounts to “a pyramid of assumptions and assertions,” before venturing a qualification: “Without suppositions, inquiry doesn’t get started, and without inquiry, all we know is the same old thing.”
It’s equally unclear how much the values professed in Zogby’s polls correspond to what people do, what they buy and how they vote. Nearly all Americans say they consider “environmental friendliness,” human rights or the use of child labor when making decisions as consumers; nonetheless, 90 percent of Americans shop at Wal-Mart, where most of the inventory is made in China. Zogby notes that Americans now agree the United States is too reliant on nonrenewable fuels, uses too much energy and should reduce energy use even if it affects quality of life, but there is scant evidence they’re ready to take the bus to work and trade central heat for sweaters. Is this acceptance of reality grounds for commendation, or does it merely demonstrate that most Americans know better than to answer otherwise? And is it significant to anyone besides Zogby that twenty-four out of twenty-five members of the “investor class” don’t agree with the statement “He who dies with the most stuff wins”?
An interview is, after all, a performance of an ideal self. It can also be marred by an unwillingness to say something that is socially undesirable. This is the premise of the so-called Bradley effect, a term sure to dominate discussions of this year’s election polls. It describes the propensity of white voters to state their preference for a black candidate and then choose a white one, either because that was their intention all along or because they couldn’t bring themselves to break with their prejudices. Similarly, Zogby’s findings could mean we are witnessing the germinal phase of a green revolution or just a yawning rift between what Americans are willing to do and what they know to be right–a rift that makes “green” all the more marketable.
The singular achievement of polling has not been to “get at the ultimate meaning of life,” as Zogby fatuously suggests, but to organize a welter of data into impressions of demographic trends that can be sold to and exploited by marketers. A majority of respondents could never be wrong, because in marketing desire matters above truth. If the “transformation of the American dream” is convincing, it’s as good as money in the bank. The same calculation applies in the world of politics. In the early days of polling, corporations hired men like Gallup to help them engineer products that would appeal to the broadest swath of Americans. Though Gallup found little difference in how people think “from politics to toothpaste,” his election-year surveys mainly served to test and advertise sampling methods that would garner profits in the corporate world. (Zogby outdoes him, calling voting and shopping “parallel expressions of the same mind-set,” and envisioning a world in which red states and blue states have been replaced by Wal-Mart and Filene’s.) But politicians understood that opinion research enabled them to craft targeted messages that could be sold just like canned soup or washing machines. As television sets became commonplace in American homes and the country eased into “life in the grid of two hundred million,” as George W.S. Trow put it, the language of marketing and the language of politics merged. “No one, now, minds a con man,” Trow concluded. “But no one likes a con man who doesn’t know what we think we want.”
The Way We’ll Be offers a seductive image of what we want, however fanciful, and it could indeed be a blueprint for marketing in the twenty-first century. Zogby even ends every chapter with a guide, and in one he offers the following helpful advice for those trying to corner the market on authenticity: “Reality doesn’t bite. It’s real, and people are demanding it,” and “In a world dominated by sizzle, it’s all about the steak. Sell the steak.” But here Zogby’s vision devolves into kitsch, a collection of slogans and anecdotes meant to buttress global capitalism (with a human face) and encourage its profiteers. For instance, Zogby tells a story meant to epitomize the perfect synergy between popular values and corporate America. IBM hires Zogby to track down a cast of “new global citizens” and gather them for a meeting with its executives, so that the company can use them as a sounding board for its vision of “globally integrated enterprise.” Over a few months, Zogby and his team pick five people who best reflect the archetype from a pool of 2,000 candidates, then bring them to Washington for “the first great global corporate-citizen symposium of the twenty-first century,” which Zogby hails as “pure excitement.” The implication is clear: IBM is already learning from the First Globals. Is your company?
Statistics speak, but after reading The Way We’ll Be one is left wondering if they say anything worthwhile. Zogby must resent that the current Administration publicly disdains the polls, claiming “decider” status, and yet has sustained itself by pandering to a set of values and preferences limned by men like himself; other times, it has been buoyed by a willingness to brazenly misinterpret such data, as in The American Enterprise’s Iraq report. This behavior is not an anomaly but is common to both parties, which publicly dismiss the vagaries of “the mass mind” while privately paying pollsters millions of dollars to construct myriad messages that will appeal to as many demographic niches.
Did polling ever deserve its status as a boon to democracy? The early twentieth century was characterized by the increasing complexity of governance vis-à-vis the average citizen’s sphere of knowledge and expertise, Walter Lippmann observed in Public Opinion (1922)–a trend that has intensified since. It may be a stretch to conclude, as Lippmann did, that large segments of the population lack sufficient knowledge to form, much less express, political opinions, but current conditions (such as a growing wealth gap and the deterioration of public education) don’t bode well. In Gallup’s day, Lindsay Rogers blasted pollsters for propagating “the mistaken belief that modern law is a product of a common will.” It’s a claim that bears repeating.
Zogby, however, remains steadfast. “While individuals make mistakes in judgment,” he writes, “America as a whole rarely does. A collective wisdom emerges from a poll or vote that is far greater than the sum of its parts.” This inspirational mantra was, to Zogby’s delight, printed on Starbucks coffee cups across the nation. For Zogby, platitudes marshal a catholic force, and the truest brand of politics is one that can be winnowed down to a milligram of ink adorning a cup of soy latte–a paper container likely to be purchased by a well-meaning First Global, drained of its contents, then added to the 250 million tons of trash Americans continue to produce each year.
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